Blake Beus  0:00  All right, so you were talking to me about all sorts of things. You tell me what you wanted to go over today? Because like you've got a better plan on today. Yeah. And what I do?

Greg Marshall  0:10  Well, I listened to a podcast yesterday, I want to give credit to the guys names. I think it's onic or UNeek. I can't remember exactly how to say it. But he had a podcast with a gentleman that was on there. And he was talking about data, and how he uses this software or this thing that he created, you know, 11 years ago, on how to predict buyer behavior. Okay. And he says, what he he worked on the Donald Trump campaign. Oh, what other political campaign

Blake Beus  0:38  in the 2016 20 2016? Yep. Interesting. And so

Greg Marshall  0:43  he kind of shared what he does, to help people win the elections, he had, like, over 1000 wins, really, in politics. So sounds like he knows what he's doing?

Blake Beus  0:57  Well, I mean, I will say, politics is where you get some of the most sophisticated advertising especial, especially presidential politics in America. And so even though you may not like a particular candidate, or you may prefer whatever all of that aside from an advertising perspective, there's a lot of interesting strategies that can be learned by looking at how they're doing their online ads, because they have massive budgets, they have huge incentives to do a really good job, they have access to some of the most intelligent advertisers and creative advertisers out there. And so it's a good place to learn, oh, great strategies,

Greg Marshall  1:36  what he shared was, basically, what they would do is figure out, they come up based on the research data that he had 10 to 12 different messages that most likely would work based off the data. And then they would test those 10 or 12, to then figure out which one or to resonate the most, okay, and then from those one or two, have 100 Something variations of those one or two messages. So

Blake Beus  2:05  when you say one or two messages, not talking specific wording, but you're talking like angles, right, but I believe, a message angle, and then you just find a bunch of different ways to say that exact same thing. Correct that, okay, that's what it sounded like. If I were to sum up American politics, advertising and the messages they're getting out there, I would put it kind of in that realm, and that there was a handful of messages. And they just say that over and over and over again, but in different ways. Yeah, they say it in, in debates, they say it on commercials, they say it in interviews, they say it in press conferences. But if you notice, it's almost always the same small set of messages set in a different

Greg Marshall  2:45  way. Well, and the interesting part about what he said was applying it to business, he says what you would do is, you have to figure out first what platforms your customer is actually on. And then know their customer, you know, know your customers very deep. And so he used an example of a chair company that was running, I guess most of their ad spend on Facebook, to sell chairs. But then he asked them why. And they said, We don't know, we just started on Facebook. And so he said, alright, and he uploaded their data on who buys chairs, and found out that Facebook was number four, as far as traffic sources, where that buyer was okay. And number one was Pinterest. So he said, if you're putting on your dollars at the number four platform, versus putting it the number one, you're not going to be as efficient. So he talked about how most businesses do this, they don't actually know exactly where their customers at, and dedicate their budgets to the right message and where they're actually at in the platform. And my question to you was, I've noticed, like in the E commerce world, Facebook, Facebook ads works extremely well. Right. And I always found that the placements newsfeed like the newsfeed is where all the conversions come from. Yeah, but Facebook always pushes you to do automatic placements. Now, obviously, they want you to spend money everywhere. But I always do notice that the cost like the CPM traffic for that for the newsfeed placement is cheaper when it's under automatic, than if you just say I only want the news feed. What are your theories on that? And would you say it's a good or a bad idea to only put it on the news feed.

Blake Beus  4:41  So I think it all kind of really boils down to how efficient you're trying to be with your budget and everything along those lines and how big your budget is. I don't think they're wrong by saying that putting it as automatic placements is a good move. But I think that information comes from From massive accounts with massive amounts of budget, because if you if you do that, you need to reach a much, much larger audience. If you have a smaller budget, though, you need to be very efficient with that budget. So one of the things I think about everybody's seen, like the typical bell curve, right, like the graph of that bell curve, where you have the slope that comes up really high in the middle, and then it goes down kind of at the edges, yep. And you have these, if you look at it in in quarters, like so this quarter down here are outliers, this quarter right here is leading up to the main group, this quarter, whatever. When you're running ads, your audience looks a lot like that you have a product or a service. And there are a group of people, it's a smaller group of people that this is the exact thing they've been looking for. It's perfect for them in every way. If you have a smaller budget, you can just mark it to Val, those people. And you've got a big enough audience, that you can make sales and be profitable. Yep. Now, as you start getting over into the larger part of the population, you're going into a group of people where it's maybe not an exact fit, but it's a good fit. It's something that's helpful, something that's useful, but it's not perfectly exactly what they need, because they have some slightly different circumstances. And that's going to be the largest percentage of the audience. And so if you have a big budget, you can burn through that smaller, perfect audience, and perfect group of people much faster. And then you have to start marketing to this larger group of people. And when you do that, having lower CPMs. So you can reach a much, much, much larger audience can still be extremely profitable. Yep. Because you couldn't you just couldn't spend that amount of money on that small group of people got it. And so that's how I kind of look at it and think about it. The other thing I look at too, is like, what, what are the incentives? Have we talked about this before? What are the incentives of Facebook? Right, like, advertisers are Facebook's customers? And

Greg Marshall  7:06  let me also interject? Because this also goes into YouTube ads, and performance Max. Yeah. How they? I don't know if you do this, but you to me, it forces us to now use it on Google Display. Oh, can you can you can know this? I think this applies to Facebook. I think they're all going to this? Yeah. Yeah. Like you have to advertise and write to me these lower profitable channels.

Blake Beus  7:34  Yes, yeah. Okay, so I'm gonna go on a little bit of a tangent here. This, this is I start, I look at things in, I try to look at things in a very holistic way and try to look at what what, why everything's happening. And I also am a nerd when it comes to behavioral economics, which is essentially matching psychology of why people buy to buying an economics and things in it's it's nerdy, but that's why. So you have these companies that are publicly traded Facebook, Google, they're big companies, their incentives are to show profit, not only show profit, but show an increase in profit. At at the end of every quarter. Yep. And so even though they dominate these markets, their incentives are to prove to their show shareholders that not only are they profitable, they're increasing in profitability. So they have this constant pressure to come up with new ways to increase their margins and improve their bottom line. And, and the ratio of their expenses to their revenue. And so, so constantly, you see this with Netflix, they're constantly raising their prices. I'm like, You guys dominate everything. You've been profitable for 10 years? Why can't you just chill and be profitable, maybe even discount every day? But no, they keep raising their prices, because their incentives are to show to the shareholders, that they're continuing to increase in profits. So when you understand that principle, you start understanding why some of these things can happen and why these companies have this, this pressure to continue to do that. Now. If you have Facebook has last I looked at 1.251 Point 5 billion people that use it every single day. That's just under a quarter of the entire population of the planet. Every day. Yeah, logs into Facebook. Yep. That is market saturation, right? Like that is so how to be how do you become more profitable if you already have all of the eyeball inventory that you can possibly get? And you already have hundreds of 1000s of advertisers spending money with you know, how do you become more profitable, you're already profitable, but how do you become more profitable? You have to start coming up with new channels. So you have the Display Network, you have these new things like for formance Max with YouTube where, where you have to, if you're gonna run ads on YouTube, you have to also run ads on some of these other channels that that that never worked that don't work with you, they, they require you to spend money on those channels, right. And the same thing is with Facebook, Facebook keeps coming up, they have their audience network, which is like Google's display ads they have in stream video ads. So they can say, hey, we have this new inventory up. But and and they might even start shifting over to, you know, forcing people to do that. And so when you take all of that into consideration, these this is why they're doing some of those things, and to advertisers were thinking, well, that's stupid, that's not helping us make money. They don't, they don't care. They're trying to increase their profitability. Now, I'm not saying this is a terrible thing. And they're evil for doing all this stuff. I'm just saying understanding the incentives is what helps you understand why some of this is happening. And when you understand why some of this is happening, you can kind of start to predict and see moves and be a leader and and a front runner and some of these new strategies as an advertiser, because I can't I can't call up Zuckerberg and say, Hey, why are you doing this? This is stupid. Yeah, this is affecting my agency. He doesn't care. But if so you don't you can't really change that direction. But what you can do is be one of the early adopters and early understandings of a lot of these things. And that will make you stand out to the crowd instead of being reactionary to everything. Yep.

Greg Marshall  11:26  And I think, you know, one of the things that I've been using for years is, even though this goes against what they tell you to do, I've been using only the newsfeeds placements, like my E commerce clients, all the ones that only do that have higher prop profitability than the ones where we use automatic placements. I've tested it over and over and over like, I mean, I don't know how many tests every single time only having the DSP placements, although the CPMs are higher conversions are better. Yeah. And your cost per purchase or cost per leads are better. Yeah. And so that's something where I just found interesting that he mentioned, because it almost feels like the advertising platforms are trying to go away from optimizations. And this gentleman was talking about optimizing more, right? And I've always thought, Well, how do you do that? If the advertising platforms are essentially trying to get away from that? Even though, to me, it makes the most sense. If you look at data, no matter what it is, if you want to get the best results, focus on the part that's getting the best results. Yeah. And get rid of the rest. Yeah. So one of the challenges that I feel moving forward, especially when you're executing certain placements, is to try to get that control of where it should show. Yeah, because those are always the best, highest converting channels. Yeah. So I don't know what some of my thoughts on that are. The CPMs go, it almost feels like maybe they try to penalize you when you do that. But you're still getting the cost per result that you want. So it doesn't matter. But it just seems like the CPM goes higher. No matter what platform, you're when you try to isolate the placement.

Blake Beus  13:19  Yeah. And I think this just goes to show that it's really important to look at your actual numbers. Yep. And maybe not trust the numbers, the ad platform is reporting to you not because they're lying to you. But because it's very difficult for an ads platform to be completely accurate. But then you look at the your actual numbers, we spent just your high level numbers, we spent this much in ads, we made this much revenue, we know this revenue came from our email list and not from ads. And we know this part of our revenue maybe came from organic, but this came from ads, and then run those numbers and be like, alright, we're doing good, we should keep doing more. Plus, spending more on ads built up our email list, our email list is almost pure profit when we sell off the email list, right? And so just looking at those high level numbers, and then constantly testing, you know, that you've probably heard the saying, you know, you know, what, the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting a different result? Well, that's not really true for marketers. Yeah. Because you're not testing even if I run the exact same test in two months, you know, Audience Network and and all the placement, automatic placements versus feed placements. Even if we run the exact same test in two months, so many things would have changed out behind the scenes with Facebook's algorithm and Google's algorithm or whatever and how they handle ads, that you're not running the same test. And so you need to run those exact same tests to see, are my conclusions still valid? Because there's been all these other things that change that? I don't know. They don't publish all their changes, we don't know. So we need to kind of constantly run that and that's one of the things I really like about you, Greg. You're like, well, I'll tested again. Yeah. And you tested again, you're still the same. Yep. And and but as soon as that changes, you'll know, oh, whereas all of the other advertisers and marketers and media buyers or whatever, they will get burned. Yeah. It'd be like, Oh, this used to work what's going on? Yep. And

Greg Marshall  15:16  so you have to constantly constantly test and question what's going on at the current state. That's, uh, that's what I'm constantly doing is looking at, well, it looks like this is what's going on right now. And making those adjustments and other things that I noticed is when you're running the ads, suck with with attribution. So we're doing this test with shutting off a certain channel with our ads to see how much it's actually impacting them. And the attribution and all of our data shows that it wasn't that impactful. But as soon as we've shut it off, we have seen a massive impact. Yeah, a big drop in app purchases. And so that's another thing is to try to figure out like, where are the app platforms missing? The results? Like not giving themselves credit? Yeah, right. Because this channel is, as soon as we turned it off, we've already seen like, literally like a 70%. Drop. Oh, wow. But that's not what it shows when it's turned on. Yeah. And so that's like, an interesting thing is it's almost like you have to test turning on turning off. Yeah. To figure out what's impacting the bottom line? Yeah.

Blake Beus  16:33  Well, I think we're constantly kind of will and we'll never get to kind of where this was, but we're constantly kind of moving towards getting creative with how you detect the success of an ad, like you used to have to do with direct mail marketing, and with billboard advertising, or whatever. It's, you got to put it up and kind of see and then look at your high level numbers, you don't have the direct feedback we got. There was that sweet spot for about 10 years where none of the ad platforms cared about privacy. So marketers could have really accurate data. Yeah, well, now there's a lot of privacy concerns with iOS 1415, and upcoming 16. Those are going to have a lot of changes. Google has announced their advertiser sandbox, which, which on Android is going to,

Greg Marshall  17:23  which is always good news for marketers, yeah, more changes.

Blake Beus  17:28  And that's going to impact some things as well. And so you got to look at those those high level numbers. And you got to, you got to think differently about things like one of the things you were talking about earlier, I want to circle back to was, was Pinterest. I mean, how many advertisers that listen to this, you know, podcasts out here

Greg Marshall  17:46  have even spent $1 on Pinterest. I know not I mean, I have but not many know, Matt, and full disclosure, probably maybe maximum $1,000. Man, yeah, pictures.

Blake Beus  17:58  And it's Pinterest feels. It's been a while since I've run some ads in there. But it feels kind of old school. It's kind of clunky. It's probably improved since I've used it. But that might be kind of a turnoff to people. But it's if your audience is there. Pinterest has a lot of ad inventory. A lot of eyeballs look at Pinterest every day. And the people that are browsing Pinterest have different buying behaviors than the people that are browsing Facebook. Oftentimes people that are browsing Pinterest are looking to do something. Yep. Whereas if you're on Facebook, you're looking to kill some time. Yep. Or argue with someone about

Greg Marshall  18:35  politics. Yep. Most likely.

Blake Beus  18:39  It but if you're on Pinterest, you are in your typical Pinterest user is in a creative, I'm going to make something I'm gonna create something. I'm looking for ideas, I'm looking for a product concept or whatever. And that's a way different buying mindset. And a good buying mindset if you're an advertised. Exactly.

Greg Marshall  19:00  So I think you know, so So going back to even channels. So here's like the next thought process. What would you do? And the case where, let's say most of your customers are on Instagram. Okay, right. But when you advertise only on Instagram, the cost for that placement is much higher. What, to me logically makes sense to disregard that? Because already there Yeah. So you just have to like make that work. Yeah. versus saying, we'll target audience everywhere like Instagram audience everywhere. That's a question I have because to me, sometimes when I'm working with clients, they will believe that their audience is on one channel, but it's actually on another And then they almost want to force you to go where they want, where they wish it were, versus where it's at. Right? So what are your thoughts on isolating channel? For example, if all your customers are on Instagram, would you just advertise on Instagram? Or would you take the Instagram audience and advertise everywhere? What are your thoughts on that?

Blake Beus  20:27  I mean, it all just boils down to testing, right and budget, if I have a smaller budget, I would just I would just advertise just on Instagram, and then find ways to make that offer more profitable to cover the cost of the, you know, the increased cost of that traffic, the increased CPMs of that traffic. And some ways you could do that would be bundling or a special offer or upsell or, or maybe you have a freebie and then you do most of your actual selling via email or text messaging or something like that something that's a little cheaper, the more impactful if I had a bigger budget, then I would definitely be doing some testing to try to find that Instagram audience or I would maybe use the Instagram budget and I would lose money audience to build retargeting traffic and other places. Yeah. And then I'd be uploading customer lists and things to other platforms, and then try to follow them around a different places. Understanding that the cold traffic would probably not necessarily be profitable yet. But you'd make 5x 6x 10x row as return on your ad spend on your retargeting and your email efforts after that initial cold kind of introduction.

Greg Marshall  21:36  So here's my thought. So I'm thinking of a customer right now. Most of their purchases happen on Facebook, right? Would you my theory or thought would be to put more budget? They're spending 100 hours of their

Blake Beus  21:56  time? Is it a product like an E commerce type thing? Okay,

Greg Marshall  22:01  okay. They love what they're in this situation. They're one of those where they wish or want the audience to be on Instagram? Do they

Blake Beus  22:11  want it because they feel like they have a better representation of their brand on their Instagram, social media, or I think

Greg Marshall  22:16  it's mostly because they feel more comfortable, okay, with using it with using Instagram, okay. And so they believe that they're honest as air, but most of their purchases, like 85 90% happen on Facebook. And so in my mind, if you if you just like, eliminate advertising platforms, and you would say, if one channel got you x and another underperform by, like 80%, yeah, I will get rid of the underperforming, put all the money into the top performer. Yeah. Now one of the challenges that you see with ad platforms is, at what point? How much? How far can you go? Before you can no longer do that?

Blake Beus  23:03  Yeah. Because I would say $100 a day, that's still a small budget. I mean, to some people, they might think, Oh, my gosh, that's all that's a big budget. But in the grand scheme of things, that's a that's a teeny, that's a teeny budget. Yep. And so as far as scaling that up, you might, you might blow through that. Tiny, perfect audience. Pretty quick. If you were to go to say, $300 a day or $500 a day. Yep. So yeah, I don't know, either, then you have to get a little bit more creative. But if you're scaling up, and you're still profitable, then you have additional revenue to, to put put money in other places, right like that. And that's how that works. You got to get a little bit more sophisticated as you scale up.

Greg Marshall  23:46  So I think, you know, that case, when they want to squeeze out as much profit, you think we'll just keep an eye on one platform focused on that. And that's gonna give you your highest return on adspend. Yeah, for that type of a budget. Right? Obviously, when you start spending $500,000, a day or more, yeah, you have to expand the where are these can go? Because like you said, there's only so many perfect customer. Yep. In one channel. Yeah. And so that's something that I'm thinking about how to best serve the lower spending customer, right? Yeah, how to get them the highest return maybe would be just to focus on one channel, and only do that one channel. But it was just interesting what this guy was saying, because what I thought what I thought was interesting about the the information he was stating is when you're talking about political campaigns, and you're talking about one message, he literally said he only focused on one message once he figured that out. Yeah. And that is it. And I thought that's interesting because of because of the size of the budget. Yeah. I thought, well, how do they do that? Well, I think and he was saying, Facebook. So he mentioned they were doing this on Facebook, and you know, they're spending? Oh, yeah, millions and millions? Well,

Blake Beus  25:12  I mean, I looked at it, I looked at it, I haven't looked at the 2016 numbers, but I looked at the 2020 numbers. And off the top of my head, Donald Trump on Facebook alone spent about $120 million in ADS. And that was just in that, like that year, like that wasn't, I don't think I even think that was total over a couple of years, I think it was just that year. And Joe Biden spent, I think, just a little bit more like five, 5 million more or something like that, so that they're spending some serious dollars. I think the one difference you got to understand, though, is they don't care about profitability. That's sure they're not trying to make sales. Yep. Right. And so they have a stack of cash, and it's gonna get spent. Yep. And so when this guy's talking about, you know, we're focusing on that one message. It's, it's about saturation of the entire population. And it's not about making sales. So their success metrics are different. Yep, then, you know, a company that's trying to sell a product. Yeah, I think there's a lot of good principles we can use, we've got to understand, they can be a little more wasteful, they can because because it's an all donor money, it's not their money. And it's an all or nothing thing. And all of that needs to be spent by voting day. Right. And so, but the singular message does apply in other areas, other businesses, it's just easier for, for us as humans to make a purchase, purchase decision. If our message isn't all over the place. It's very singular. And that's hard to do. And that's why you got to know your customer and everything. But in politics, it's easy, it's even easier. And and if we start if we start diving back into politics, the easiest message that will have the biggest impact with the least amount of effort, as far as coming up with a message in politics is the other side sucks. In practice, I'm great. But that person sucks. I don't need to tell you how great I am. Because that's common knowledge. But let me tell you all the way that other guys, right. And so you'll I hate that that's what works. But that's what works. And it's very easy. It's much harder in a business to come up with, you know, reasons why someone should buy, if you have a clear competitor that has a little bit of bad PR out there, then the that that company sucks, and so it can work. And I've seen that on on Facebook, I keep seeing this ad and it says something. Cancel, Click Funnels this is the really rare you've probably seen. I'm sure that's working because I've seen that same ad for six months. And I'm sure it's performing them. And click funnels has, you know, a very polarizing brand, brand reputation, right. And and, and so this, this person is capitalizing on that. Right?

Greg Marshall  28:10  So it's interesting, because as we were talking about messaging, all I could think about was, how do you spend $100 million on Facebook? And that burn through literally every single person that would be in that? You know, political class? Yeah. But it's just,

Blake Beus  28:31  I think that's the point. I think they want to burn through everybody. They want everybody to see that message. Yeah, they don't care if they get ad fatigue at all, because they want every single person that's on Facebook to see see that. See that message. And here's the funny thing, though. Even in 2020, I don't think I saw very many Trump or Biden ads. Yeah. Myself, it was weird, but they were blowing a lot of money, which makes me think maybe they're targeting a different age demographic or something like that. Or while the

Greg Marshall  29:06  places here's where I saw they were using Google discovery ads heavily. That's where I saw a lot of the, the advertisements. Yeah. And when I say a lot, I'm talking a lot Hmm. So but but only in a short span. So I didn't see anything. And then like that final month. Yeah. It was like, I could not go anywhere on YouTube. Without see. Yeah. Like it was above every meal. I was watching on the side. And I was like, Man, I wonder how much is spent on this campaign? Because a lot Oh, I can't I literally can't go anywhere else seeing it? Yeah, it's

Blake Beus  29:45  it's interesting. I mean, here we're here. We're having local elections here in Utah. And I've seen quite a few local YouTube ads. Okay for for a couple of candidates. There's, there's one party To the candidate in Utah, that there is a clear effort to get that person not reelected.

Greg Marshall  30:10  I actually think I think I know what ad you're told. Yeah. And and is it an industry man? Payroll? Or is it was a pre roll on YouTube as

Blake Beus  30:19  the ones I've been seeing. I see this on Facebook, but I've seen it on YouTube quite a bit. And so that that's been pretty interesting. But I think, you know, as, as advertisers get a little bit more sophisticated, you're gonna see just more and more digital ads for local local stuff, because it's not as hard. It's I mean, it's more approachable now for for someone than it used to be. Yep. So yeah,

Greg Marshall  30:46  yeah. And I think YouTube is, it's like TV. Yeah. Right. I mean, they literally have YouTube TV. So when you're trying to mimic maybe TV campaigns, YouTube is a great example. This other gentleman also brought up. I'm glad that we said that, because he said the new thing that they're actually focusing on is, and I can't remember how he described it, but it's TV advertising. But not like the traditional TV advertising, like streaming TV advertising. I think so because he was saying right now, the, the tracking and all that with IP addresses is the wild wild west. And he referred to it as just like Facebook was years ago. And he's like, so that's where we're actually focusing most of our efforts. Right now. Interesting is a place that's not as controlled, basically. Curious,

Blake Beus  31:38  I'll have a look at that a little bit.

Greg Marshall  31:39  Yeah, it was an interesting, when he brought it up. I was like, wow, you can even see the interviewer was like, really? What's that? Yeah. So that'll probably be the next thing. And then they'll put the clamp down on that eventually, when they figured out that use? Yeah, with too much information. But yeah, I just thought the interview was interesting, just because of talking about optimizations and what you can do. And I've always felt like, I've I mean, I wouldn't consider myself Ultra data. But maybe I am, because even back when I saw personal training in person, I actually did segmentation without realizing that's what I was doing. Yeah, I would figure out while my buyers are basically like this, so I'm just not gonna talk to anyone unless they look like this. And what it did was it made my efforts very efficient. Yeah. And I would exceed my goals every month. Yeah. And I with less effort, because I just only focused on that group of you that group of people. And if they didn't match that, I just not that I would like, ignore them. I just didn't put much effort into that. That group.

Blake Beus  32:49  Yeah, one quick story from my sales days, I used to sell office equipment. Online, it was like an e commerce Store. But it was that it was early enough that a lot of people still weren't comfortable. Okay, punching in a credit card number on a website. So they would call and then we would take their orders over the phone. Now I'm like, I would never get my now.

Greg Marshall  33:12  Reverse. I trust the internet more than college. So

Blake Beus  33:17  it's funny. But anyway, so I worked at this company for a while. And I was always kind of in the bottom third. As far as sales goes, I just, it's not something that comes naturally. Yeah, just. And then we have this guy come in that I end up being really good friends with. And he instantly in his, like, second month became number one, number two, and he was constantly number one, even even above people that were had been there for a long time. And so I was friends with him. And I was like, Man, why, you know, why are you doing better? And, and he kind of couldn't really pinpoint what he was doing different. Yeah. So just in talking with him, because essentially, it was kind of natural to him, whatever. He was doing different. But what I boiled it down to was, we would get enough calls in the day that you could spend your entire time on the phone. Yep, whatever. And I was like, well, that's how you get the sales. He was really, really good at determining very early on in a phone call that this person was not going to make the sale. Yeah, pre qualifying. Pretty good, right? So just based on on the phone call, if he knew they weren't going to make the call or weren't going to buy something and they were all over the place. He will work pretty quickly to get them off the phone. And sometimes it'd be sometimes his strategy would be, you know what, let me check you check on that. And I'll get back to you and you just wouldn't

Greg Marshall  34:43  waste my time.

Blake Beus  34:46  And I'm not saying that wasn't necessarily the best, but I had I felt like I had an obligation to help everybody as best as possible. And so he was spending his time filtering people out and then focusing on those that made the good sale. Had the big sale. And then those people that were interested, if they needed a little bit of effort or a follow up phone call, those were the people he would call, and I would try to follow up with everybody. Yep, then he was only following up with the good prospects. And then after I put a little system in place for me, that worked for me to identify and filter out those people, that would be good prospects versus not, I started getting up to number two, number three, constantly. But I was terrible until I did that.

Greg Marshall  35:24  Well, that's, that's the key. And that's almost if you bring it back to marketing advertising. It's almost like what you're doing when you're segmenting customer list or placement or whatever, you're basically just saying, I'm only gonna spend my time where I know, I want to get the biggest return. Yep. And just ignore everything else. That's honestly, I'll never forget this, because I was always told in the sales world have as many appointments as possible, you need to be calling all day you need to do you know, all this activity. And when I did it, that way, I would generate a lot more sales. But I would also be spending a lot more time a lot more time. And then I remember I literally cut like my work day by like, 80 90%, when I was like, you know, the only people who really buy are people that kind of fit this mold. And so if they don't fit this mold, I'd rather have no appointments. If I can't find that person than 10 appointments of unqualified because you're just wasting your time. I'm just like burning energy versus can feel busy look busy. I feel that way about meetings a lot of times. Yeah. So meetings, we don't really need to do that. And I just find that. How can we apply that same thought process to our advertising and our marketing? Right? So can we find a channel where basically most of the stuff happens? And what? What would happen? If you just said, I could get more units of sales or more volume, if I was on all channels, but I would also be spending more money and energy without getting an exponential return. Right? Versus what if he just went to one channel knew I could get more by expanding channel, but more is not always better? How do I get more efficient? Yep. And just focus on that. That's, that's constantly what I'm thinking about? Yeah, how do we be?

Blake Beus  37:27  I think we're gonna make fish. And that's what makes you stand out, right? Because if you go talk to a typical traditional agency, they're gonna say, We're gonna let you on all these channels, you'll be in front of millions of people. Yeah. And, and they're kind of incentivized to do that. Because they kind of want the advertising process to be complicated. So you feel like you need the agency. And I think when people come to you, they're like, we're just going to advertise on one place. Yeah. When you're like, Well, yeah, if that's working for you, why why would we expand until we blow through it? And you know, that all of that, but if it continually works, and we can scale up with the budget you guys have? Why do we need to do something more complicated? We don't you guys don't want to do that? We'd like Yeah, I mean,

Greg Marshall  38:09  I think and that's always, that's always the challenge is, in general, the overall message that I feel like you're told most of the time, is to do more, without an explanation of why and what the trade offs are. Right, right, like, so if you do more, you can get more. But like the ratio of effort versus return is not like, it's like scaling ads, right? You get your best returns, lower spans. But when you start spending an unbelievable money that you start to get, what do they say there's diminishing returns diminishing? It's

Blake Beus  38:49  a point of diminishing returns? Yeah, I can't

Greg Marshall  38:51  think of that word. But basically, that's what happens, right? How do you view other ad platforms and more activity, you have to look at as that can also be a form of diminishing returns because you only have so much time, energy resources to get the returns you want? Yeah. You see, I'm saying like, so if you want high returns focus on the area that could get you high returns, and stay focused on that.

Blake Beus  39:21  And if you must have all sorts of other channels, maybe just do some low dollar retargeting? Yep. Right? That's, that's kind of a set and forget type of a thing. Yep. Right. Even if it's five $10 a day, whatever. So you're still showing up? You'll probably be profitable on that traffic. Yep. But you don't have to put a ton of effort into it. Yeah, that's fine. And I feel

Greg Marshall  39:40  like that's probably the best use because every time I analyze accounts and see what works the best it what it really is, is focus on like the most profitable things that are doing and how do we just do more of that? And discipline yourself to not do anything

Blake Beus  39:59  when You got to understand, we got to wrap this up because it's getting old but you got to understand to Facebook's a big place. Yep. So if your most profitable traffic is on Facebook Yep, newsfeed. You mean you've got hundreds of 1000s of people and most, most clients unless they're selling something selling something low dollar, most clients, 1000 customers is a big deal. And 1000 people is not very big of an audience. Yeah. On Facebook, right. And so you've got quite a bit you don't need to expand to all these other channels if you don't want to right Facebook, Google, whatever, whatever channel it is, but so anyway, let's wrap this up. Right. How do people get in touch with

Greg Marshall  40:39  you? Greg marshall.co. You can book a free strategy session

Blake Beus  40:43  and Blake beus.com/sm. Three is probably the best place to catch me right now. So

Greg Marshall  40:46  until next time,

Blake Beus  40:48  Kay, we'll catch you guys later. Bye, right