EP:53 How To Crush Facebook Ads - Dennis Yu

SPEAKER_02 0:31

What's happening everybody? Hey, welcome to the show. Maybe it's your first time. Maybe you're returning. Either way, thanks so much for taking time out of your day to hang out with me. I really hope you learn at least two or three things that you didn't know before you hit play on this episode. My guest this week, data nerd, and probably one of the sharpest, smartest guys I know, Dennis Yu, owns an agency called Blitzmetrics, works with large brands on their ad campaigns and their data analysis. But the real differentiator with Dennis and his brand is that he works with universities to acquire younger talent, young adults to be able to teach exactly what he does within his agency and have them duplicate the efforts for the agency clients. Really love what Dennis has going on. I loved uh hearing him speak a few years back at a gig IMC'd for digital marketer at traffic and conversion. So I was excited to reconnect with him and better understand what's happening in his world, where he really feels the attention should be with brands and content and data and ads. So I'm not going to try to explain what he does. That was the purpose of the episode. So, friends, if you could please help me, welcome to the show. Dennis U, what's happening, brother? What's up, Sebastian? Everything's great here in the lovely, very rainy Miami, Florida.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Where are you based out of? California? Oh, I technically have a place in Phoenix, but I spend more time in LA, San Francisco, and New York. I was gonna say, where does your mail go?

SPEAKER_02 2:00

Let's start there. That's a whole but the mail goes to San Francisco. Yeah, yeah, you're you're you're the wrong guy to ask how's where are you based out of, right? I've got a friend that's a travel blogger and is home probably 14 days a month, or excuse me, a year, and uh everyone always asks him where he's based from. He goes, Well, my mail goes to my sister's house in Fort Lauderdale. I said, Man, talk about living the dream. So uh fresh off a uh a big leg over to uh Europe, we were just chatting about a couple minutes ago. Um, what brought you over there? Was that uh, I'm assuming all work, but by default you get a little a little fun and play in?

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Well, it's a vacation that's paid for. I taught a full day at a digital marketer in London on agency training, keynoted in Romania, had a client in Budapest for four days, that's in Hungary, did the battles there. And the cool thing, Sebastian, is you know, because you go to a lot of these cities and speak and MC, is that the conference organizer has an obligation to take you to the nicest restaurant in town, right? Even though we're all tired, we all just want to go to the hotel and sleep. But that's the best way to see a city because you've got a tour guide who has no limit on what they want to do because they have to. That's just the common courtesy. When we have events, we do the same thing. We take people out for the nicest thing, just like you do, and people visit you in town. So I can work and play at the same time, and I always bring along one or two people. A to help me, and B, it's more fun that way.

SPEAKER_02 3:27

Oh, 100%. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I like to do that too. A lot of times if I've got, you know, if the gig's not in the middle of the week, or sometimes if it's closer to the end of the week and I can stay over a couple of days. Um, I I absolutely love doing that. This is true. It is a paid, you know, a paid vacation. Nothing better than that in the wonderful world of entrepreneurship, huh? Well, you have to work too.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

That's the thing, right? A lot of people on Instagram, they'll see that we're in the nicest restaurants and going to the cool places, but when the camera's not on, guess what? We're working. Sure. We're on the laptop. We're still managing clients, we're on the road and all this, but I'm still working four, maybe even five hours per day.

SPEAKER_02 4:07

Yeah, and I definitely know that. Well, with technology these days, it doesn't make it that difficult. My goodness, what in the world did we do 15 years ago when we couldn't just pop in somewhere where there was Wi-Fi and we could just set up and run an agency from literally anywhere in the world. So exciting time to beat alive, uh, to say the least. So for our ins for our for my listeners that may have never heard of Dennis Yu before, let's back up a little bit. Uh, you and I connected probably two or three years back uh on Facebook, putt intended. And then I had the unique opportunity of being able to introduce you on stage at uh uh the traffic and conversion summit that our friends at digitalmarketer.com put on uh every year. So we got to meet uh hashtag IRL in real life here. But let's back up a little bit and talk a little bit about your background, your history, and how you've gotten to exactly where you're at today with really being the Facebook ad ninja. I don't know if that's an appropriate term, but I wasn't gonna call you a guru.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

You know why they're why people are called guru, right? Why is that? You can't spell charlatan.

SPEAKER_02 5:08

I love that. That's outstanding. No, I always say don't call me names when people say a guru.

SPEAKER_00 5:12

Yeah. Some people call me ninjas, but you know, ninjas are, I guess, well, I used to be a ninja, I guess. I was athletic and I did martial arts, but now I'm fat and old, so I wouldn't make a very good ninja. I've always been a math guy and a numbers, analytics, data guy, and I killed it at math. I had a perfect SAT minus a couple questions, perfect math. And I loved math. I loved the finality of knowing that if the answer is five, that's that's the number. And when computers came around in the late 70s, I was starting to play with them. And I got some of the first computers in the 80s. I did spreadsheets. Like I was a paperboy. You ever do that when you were younger? And I would track in my spreadsheet in Lotus 1, 2, 3, this is before Windows, how much people would tit me based on my strategy of just throwing the newspaper at them or putting it squarely on their door or other things. I sold candy when I was in elementary school and I kept tabs on when people owed me money. Oh, I didn't I don't get my allowance until Monday. Okay, that's okay. You owe me two dollars, right? Right. And that's how I learned English too. I didn't speak English until I was six. And so I used math and data and numbers to learn how to communicate with people. In the world of commerce, where you give me you give me a dollar and I give you three Kit Kats made a lot of sense to me. And of course, there's more data when it comes to search engines and social networks. I built analytics for Yahoo almost 20 years ago, which is really cool. Absolutely. You know, it's social media data, it's a way of scaling relationships, and I find it's like going to the casino, except you're able to cheat and it's not illegal because you know roughly what's going to happen if you have the data. And by teaching lots of people how to use the data, I feel like we are kind of the Plato's allegory of the cave, leading people out of this dark cave to the outside where it's bright, they can see, but their eyes are like, ah, you're shining the light on me. I've been used to sitting in the dark, right? And people can see what is actually there and not be confused by what they think is like charts and data and boring math class to actually what's fun. And we make math and data fun. We teach a lot of young adults how to do this, but we teach, and when I say young, I mean young and in in mind, not like young as in discriminatory, a certain age millennial kind of thing. Young is like, I'm 44, I consider myself a young adult, right? Right. And it's applying math and logic and process and frameworks to what is otherwise witchcraft and voodoo and hearsay.

unknown 7:55

Right?

SPEAKER_00 7:55

It's in the world of digital marketing. You think it should be data driven, but there's a lot of witchcraft going on. A lot of people don't really know what they're doing. Well, most people don't. Right.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

So uh this story reminds me short of the I love math. Um, I was really good at math in school. Um, uh a story from that Gary Vee talks about a lot, uh, which was him strategically placing his lemonade stands um uh signs based on how people would look at the signs when they came up to the stop sign, and then also delegating out his paper boy duties to other people and just going around and collecting. Um so I was really I immediately had thought of that. I'm not sure if you've heard that story before. Um uh but uh no number one, number two, uh the another reason I thought about Gary was because he constantly preaches the fact that Facebook ads and and social media advertising in general is just grossly underpriced right now, and that and that brands um really are not looking at this opportunity and capitalizing on it. It's more of like a disrespect towards the platform versus uh an opportunity to really get in um at an age where before everybody's doing it. You know, we think Google AdWords 2001 um versus where it was at five, six, seven years after that. Um can can you speak to that a little bit or what your opinion on that on that comment?

SPEAKER_00 9:17

That has been true for the last 20 years until this year. If you take a look, for example, at Mary Meeker's State of the Internet report, which is the report that everyone looks at every year with all the stats, it's shown that there's a disproportionate balance between attention and how much money is allocated towards it. For example, the yellow pages up until four or five years ago had more revenue than Google. Can you imagine that, right? But how many people are using the yellow pages versus Google? So that created an arbitrage opportunity because there is a proportionally more attention spent in digital than there was were dollars chasing it. And I remember on Facebook, even five or six years ago, it was the the average price of traffic, no matter what you bid, was about 25 cents per thousand impressions. And as of maybe three years ago, $3, $4. Last year was six dollars, this year it's closer to eight dollars. So eight dollars to show an ad a thousand times, no matter what your objective is. And it's actually so expensive. With traffic prices doubling almost every year, Larry Kim, who's the largest spender on Google and Facebook ever, he's a good buddy of mine. He spends that two percent of Google's ad spend. He's two billion dollars with Wordstream, he just sold it. He's been remarking the same thing. I don't think that this ARB opportunity of the traffic being cheap is there anymore. I see a lot of small guys because they have smaller budgets and therefore they have smaller targets, usually, because it's geo, right? Attorneys or dentists or whatever, they're paying $30 or $40. My buddy Travis, who runs a video marketing firm, he's he's seeing $25 to $30 per thousand impressions. Now, if the cost of traffic is a hundred times of what it was seven years ago, you can't be as willy-nilly about it. You have to be very careful with that limited inventory, right? I'm talking about Travis Chambers of Chambers Media. Same thing as Harman Brothers. Those strategies aren't working anymore.

SPEAKER_02 11:24

Well, that's the exciting part, I think, of the time that we're living in right now. Number one, you know, the the semi-downside, things are constantly changing. Well, what does it, right? The upside, we're c I love it because it keeps marketers in check and all the clowns out there that are selling another ebook or course or mastermind that have absolutely no idea what they're doing. Every time the algorithm changes or that the masses start to come to where the attention's at, marketers and creators are forced to get very creative and re-invent. It's a constant game of re-invent and reinventing ourselves. I I believe.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

You know, Facebook is nearly a trillion dollars in market cap. Same thing with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Those guys are worth a trillion dollars, and it's because the price of the inventory has gone up.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:11

Right. Facebook used to do, I remember I think two years ago, they were less than a billion a quarter. Last quarter they were over two billion dollars in revenue. Or no, there's seven billion, sorry. Seven billion in revenue. You can go Google it and see. Ah, it's funny. When I worked at Yahoo, people would say you should Google something, and I said, You're kidding. You know what company you work at?

SPEAKER_02 12:30

Yeah. So and so, so speaking of Facebook, how much involvement have you had with them like indirect? Like, do you work with them directly? Like going on.

SPEAKER_00 12:38

I was just there at headquarters last week in Menlo Park, did a full day training with their people. I taught some, and then we brought people in from other groups across Facebook to talk about what's changing in the agency space and in retail. Quick summary one-minute videos and 15-second videos that are organized by objective for remarketing. And people don't understand that. Right? What percent of the videos do you see, for example, are vertical from brands? Zero. Well, that's your that's the opportunity. What percent of podcasters or public figures or entrepreneurs have a public figure page, not a user profile, but a a public figure page that they are putting out vertical videos? Um I haven't seen any. I mean, we make our clients do it. Okay. And how many of them are testing methodically via the dollar a day methodology? A lot of them.

SPEAKER_02 13:31

And I in fact I encourage them.

SPEAKER_00 13:33

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 13:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Because you're teaching them.

SPEAKER_02 13:36

Right. Not because they know, no, exactly. No, they're I'm in fact, I just got back from Nashville uh with a client and we were shooting his next uh series of videos, and he said, um, in fact, he owns a health insurance company, but only wants to create content on behalf of him himself. So we just created Doug the healthcare dude, and all Doug talks about is health coverage and healthcare for businesses and individuals, and he just constant, consistently, but on Mondays, before he gets in the office, when he gets out of his car, he pulls out his phone, holds it vertically, goes live on Facebook, and talks about a topic on whatever's fresh on his mind and heart about what he wants to talk about that has nothing to do with Facebook. He told me on Thursday, or Friday, rather, dude, people are going bananas over the Facebook Live. Mind you, we're creating content, branding it, putting an intro on it, making it all look pretty, and no one gives a rip. But they love when he's good, he's going on a rant fresh out of his car on a Monday morning.

SPEAKER_00 14:28

Because it's real, it doesn't look like an ad. So the things that work now are doing exactly the opposite of what looks like an ad. What looks like an ad, it's got a bumper, it looks the the lighting and video are too good. It's you can just tell what an ad looks like. So people crave authenticity, right? And if you want to market out there, I don't even call it advertising. I mean, technically we do a lot of advertising. We spent a billion dollars on Facebook and Google, but we don't call it advertising, we call it social postage. It's like UPS or FedEx. We're using it to deliver high quality content. The minute you say advertising, it implies that what's inside the box is garbage. It's gonna be a glitter bomb or something, right? You don't want that. We're not spending money, we're giving money to Facebook so that certain people in our custom audiences or in our community or whoever we want to target, certain people can see our educational and entertainment videos. I don't say advertising.

SPEAKER_02 15:27

Entertainment videos. Well, that's this is true. This is true, because what do people want most to be entertained, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:33

Well, on Facebook, they're goofing off by definition, right? You know, well, unless you're a Facebook marketer, you know, professionally, which is uh you know, kind of weird like we are, but even I'm addicted to Facebook and I'm trying to limit the amount of time I'm on there. I'm there for business. Right. Right.

SPEAKER_02 15:51

So uh you got an agency called Blitzmetrics, and um I don't know a ton about it, but I did read up a little bit about that. You've partnered with schools to be able to acquire um student talent to be able to work uh within the agency, and then in turn you go and get out there and find the the business with large brands. So when did this all start?

SPEAKER_00 16:14

Oh man, 20 plus years ago at Yahoo, I was the analytics guy, and there were a lot of groups within Yahoo that needed analytics. So you know, Yahoo, shopping, personals, finance, travel, mail, small business, horoscopes. Each of these groups wanted to know who their users were, how they could grow the number of subscriptions they had. You know, small business wanted to sell more domains and websites and things like that. And I built an internal agency inside Yahoo, hired a bunch of people from Stanford, or people that I dragged along from other companies and trained them up and how to do analytics. Was there a textbook on how to do this? No. So I had to put together training. We built our own systems inside Yahoo. So therefore, we had to build our own training. And I found that generally, and I don't want to say, you know, 100% black or white, but generally it was easier to take young adults and teach them something new than it was to teach people who had, you know, 10 years of experience because that experience didn't apply directly to what we were trying to do, and it was harder for them to change. And that was a light bulb in my head on, huh? What about all the other friends of mine? Because let's say I was, you know, 24 or 25 then, you know, five years out of school. What what are the other well, how about other people in my situation where they've graduated, they have a I guess a receipt in their hand called a diploma, and they think that that receipt equals a job. No, it's just a receipt. You you have a nice meal, you know, you throw away the receipt, right, Sebastian? Right. So what if we what if we bridge it wasn't that you know, right now it's popular the hate on college. You know, it's not worth it, it's a scam, you don't have to go to college, be an entrepreneur, you should hustle. No, that's popular to say that. I think that that's short-sighted. I think that if we bring together the private sector and the universities so that a degree comes with that basic training on how to be mature and work experience, then we have the best of both worlds. Yes, absolutely. A mature young adult sounds like an oxymoron. It's not my job. Look, if somebody comes in with 80 grand of college debt, it shouldn't be my responsibility to train them, right? Because then I train them up and they're gonna leave after a year or two. You know, just like my co-founder did that to me after I train him up from a pizza boy at nine bucks an hour, no experience, to then you know, a high power job that he has. But when you're able to do that, you realize the that the problem isn't with the private sector or with the education system directly, it's the linkage, it's the gap that's between them. So I've built a school inside that's not a nonprofit that doesn't charge tuition, but is funded by the clients that want results. Right? So if the Golden State Warriors, they want to sell more tickets. If Ashley Home Store wants to sell more furniture, Carl Jr. wants to get more people buying hamburgers, the local orthodontist, or the podcaster, or the Italian restaurant, or all these people want to drive more sales, then they want people who are certified that can follow a process that can drive the results, and don't even care whether that person's got two months of experience or two years of experience, right? They want the result. They don't want flair and flamboyance and creativity and all this. I mean, sure, all is equal. Do you want creativity? Yes, you do. But you want the result if you're a small business owner. Have you been to the doctor at all recently or had a friend go to the doctor? My buddy Mark, he he just got LASIK, right? That scares the heck out of me. The idea that like a laser would be messing with your eyeball. But the the doctor done the procedure 4,000 times. Do you want that doctor to be creative? Do you want that doctor to try something new? Do you want no, you want your you want it to be done properly, routine, not not even thinking, right? Sure. And that's what we create is through following the process. What matters is the process and the checklist done by people who are certified and trained. We found that we can take young adults and put them through this training, and they can learn how to operate to drive real measurable results. So there's a lot of things that we don't do as part of this process. We don't do creative brainstorming, we don't do a lot of the video stuff that you do, because it can't be driven to a directly objective, measurable result, just like a math test. That's why I love math. The answer is five, right? We said that's the answer. It's not subjective. And thus, when businesses want that kind of result, they pay for packages, it's very predictable, and it creates jobs for young adults. So therefore, we bring together supply and demand. And even though we're starting with young adults, and we've had thousands go through the program, we hope over the next few years that we'll be able to extend it to stay-at-home moms to people that are in their 40s and 50s that are starting agencies because they're good at at the relationship side, but maybe they suck at Google Tag Manager and Pixels and running ads and reports and optimizing and building websites and things, you know, and Fusion Soft campaigns, that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_02 21:38

Right. No, that's a geni uh genius model. I mean, I used to think, and I didn't go to college, so I I I used to come from the school of I don't need some I could stay in school when it was free. I'm not gonna pay to go. That was always my thought process, right? So I was like, well, I'll become an entrepreneur and have a kid at twenty one instead. I got lucky, it worked out. But in retrospect, I would have gone to school. In fact, I'm I'm I'm in the process of Getting ready to get my daughter settled in to college out in Phoenix. And a thought never entered my mind one time to say, hey, honey, have you ever thought about just saying, screw college? I already got it figured out. I'm going to go do this. And she looked at me like I had 10 heads and boogers. Like, are you crazy? Listen, dad, I commend you and your hustle and what you've done and how you've provided for me, but I don't want any of it. I don't want anything to do with this. The roller coaster, the up and down, the uncertainty. I go, I know, but the payoff. She goes, Listen, the payoff is knowing that I got a paycheck because I showed up and went to work. And I go, you know what? She's a worker. And I'm never going to change that. Maybe she'll become an entrepreneur later on in life. But for right now, I couldn't even fathom going, hey, you know what? You don't have to go to school if you don't want to. It just seems like it there is no other option. Most importantly, Dennis, not because of the education part that's going to provide her a job. Sure, that's the goal. But I really feel at 18, she's still a young 18. And me throwing her into the into the real world under a superized environment. They like to call college for me, lets me sleep a little bit better at night. Number one. Number two, she's a little bit more excited about having to leave the nest. So that was just my two.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Yeah, you learn how to grow up. I called it extended high school or babysitting, but it's necessary. Your frontal cortex isn't fully developed until you're 25. The ability to reason and plan and think logically. It's a fact. It is biology. Right. So people need that nurturing period. And I think the combination of learning how to grow up and organize your time and live away from home, plus getting real-world experience and a job is killer. One of our friends is Karen Sutherland, and she teaches at the University of the Sunshine Coast, and she has 200 plus students that are learning social media marketing, not by reading a textbook, but by actually opening their own agency and taking on clients. And so that's 200 plus agency clients going through the Blitz training program, right? But every one of them is just a student with no experience, but under the guidance of the university and us, following a process where we do the plumbing with all the tracking, we collect their goals, content, and targeting, which is the strategy. We film one-minute videos with the store owner or the nonprofit or whatever business that they've adopted. They choose one that they like, right? They put those videos out there on Facebook, on the website, on LinkedIn, on YouTube. They boost the ones that are working better. They have a framework on how they produce and edit and post these videos. And then they report back on the results and they go through several cycles and show what's working and not working. And we believe that is the best entry point for students that are in business or marketing is to actually do it, not just read this essay, you know, read read this article and write an essay or answer this quiz. Who cares? There's nothing better than having a client as the one who's grading you, not the teacher, right? Because you know that client, they own a business. They absolutely are watching what's going on with the money. You have to be able to explain to them what the process is and what they need to do and what the results mean and all this. What what better way to learn than to have someone you have to talk to? What better way to learn communication skills? Otherwise, you put it all on the teacher. The teacher doesn't want to grade 200-something papers. How about have the client rate you one to five stars? How about that for keeping it real? Yeah.

unknown 25:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 25:33

And our in our day, and I say our day, I'm 40. We're so we came up in the around the same generation. You know, it was OJT, you know, on-the-job training. That's right. That's where we got our best experience from. We we learn the most on here. So yeah, why commend you on these efforts? This is a brilliant model, and I look forward to seeing this continue to unfold and grow and and really be, you know, become the norm. Because I really think that just like you said, if that bridge is gapped in between the private sector um and and and schools, um it's a it's an absolute no-brainer and really an opportunity. I think, especially as as as generations are continuing to grow up, my kids are way smarter than I am. Uh so these generations, and they're, you know, they grow up with a device in their hand, right? So it, you know, to be able to, you know, to have some hand holding, but still have the independence of being able to get some real uh hands-on experience is is awesome. So um something you're famous for, dollar a day uh on Facebook ads um seems like an extremely simple concept. I do it on a lot of my content. It's like a set it and forget it type deal. I do it for my MC Reel, for my new videos, et cetera. Um how'd you come out? How'd you come up with that and what's it all about? I know you have a I know you have a course on it too.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

The dollar a day methodology, a lot of people think it's magic because it works so well. It's if you look at the techniques behind it, it is simply testing and optimization. The idea of optimization or amplification is whatever's good, make it better. So let's say that you're practicing free throws and you suck. Well, you're gonna keep practicing, but there's all there's very little risk unless you take no free throws at all. So many shots on goal is a dollar a day. You might have 50 pieces of content. I'm not saying produce 50 pieces of crap, right? But your friend maybe who's the attorney, he produces a live video every Monday, right? That that every one of those is a shot on goal. And we might think, in a Dunning Kruger-like way, what pieces of content is are going to be better, but we don't know. So we let the data tell and we put a dollar a day against it for a week, because that's how much the system usually needs to be able to generally tell. So it costs us $7 per shot on goal. And the more shots on goal we take, when we find ones that win, we put more money on them. But here's the rub: what percent of the time do we have a winner, do you think? On average, we've done this thousands of times. It doesn't matter what the industry is, we see the same percentage. What percent of the time do we have a winner? No clue. Ten at best. So one in ten of your half-court shots go in, or whatever analogy you want to use for sports or setting goals or what have you. So if you know that one in ten of your videos are going to perform, whether it's to sell or to collect an email address or get people into your store or to buy your product or to sign up for your thing, one in ten. What if you only make three or four things? Then you might just give up and say, oh, this Facebook thing sucked. I tried this, this, and this, and it didn't work. Um, yeah, about one in ten work. So you probably need like 20 or 30 shots on goal. And maybe if you're decent, you'll get two or three of those. And of the ones that are decent, what do you do? You extend them. So initially you put a dollar at A against them. Now you might put another $100 for another 100 days, or put another $500 for another 30 days, and you keep going. When it's good, you keep adding money to it. What percent of the time, Sebastian, for your clients? Do you know you do some testing, put some money on it? And when it's something's good, you go back and you extend it, you put more money on it.

SPEAKER_03 29:09

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 29:10

Almost nobody does that.

SPEAKER_02 29:13

Yeah. So this is good. This post is performing way better than other posts. Maybe you could throw another 35 bucks at it. Uh they're good, they're good at reminding you.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

And you can clone it into another ad set, and you can uh into another target, right? You into editing that video, into editing the copy that you have, into editing these other components, and take a good thing and make it better. So we call that amplification. So you start like we see big brands that will say, Well, we're a big like a Nike. We've done a lot of work with them. Oh, this dollar a day thing's not for us. That's a small business thing because we have this budget. Oh, you do really? Okay. Well, if you've got thousands of athletes and thousands of products and campaigns and Nike stores and what have you, and each of them are starting at a dollar a day and you're starting to increase, you can easily get two million dollars a day, as we have with Rosetta Stone. We were spending a million dollars a day on Facebook and Google. Wow. Actually, we spent $1.3 million for one day on Black Friday just on Facebook. Add in Google is two million dollars, right? Well, that not every day, just certain days. Using the same technique where we're testing, testing, testing, finding a winner, and then when you have your big Black Friday sale, do you want to leave it up to chance, or do you want to find something that you know is going to work and put a million dollars behind it? Right? So it works for small biz too, it works for anybody.

SPEAKER_02 30:30

So so define work real quick. Is this so we've got 10 pieces of content that we crank out? One out of ten is going to air quotes work. And I would assume work means it's engaged, people like it, people are sharing it, it's it's it's the the value is being perceived based on the engagement. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Sometimes it depends on so you know we've got our three-stage funnel, and Google and Facebook use the exact same words, so that should be a clue that we should be using this same model from awareness, top of the funnel, consideration, in the middle, and conversion, which is the bottom, people are buying stuff. And we also rename that into why, how, and what, like we talk about at TNC or social media marketing world. So if you've got the objective to drive conversion, right? Buy my stuff or become a client or sign up for my thing or lead magnet or tripwire, whatever it is, buy my course, then of course that objective is conversion, right? It there's many possible objectives. The main one is going to be when you're boosting posts and you're looking for engagement. You're looking for your cost per video view, you're looking for the cost per engagement, or maybe it's an offer and you want to know what's your cost per offer, or what's your cost per email collection, or what's your cost per messaging in in your chat bot, right? I'm on the board of mobile monkey, so I use them. It's whatever your business objective is. We recommend that people choose three, one at each stage of the funnel. So I like to go for video views at the top, I go for post engagement or email collection in the middle, and I go for some kind of monetary conversion at the bottom. But if you are in professional services or B2B, then your lead is your conversion because you have to talk to them, right? Right. And one in ten of those pieces of content that you have for whatever objective is going to be a winner. So if you have three objectives, then you need to produce at least ten pieces of content for each objective.

SPEAKER_02 32:23

Got it. So 30 pieces of content, so you're able to test and optimize.

SPEAKER_00 32:26

Yeah, but don't stop there. Because if you know that on average, and not everyone's gonna be one in ten, but if on average it's one in ten and you produce only ten, that's still risky. You're not guaranteed a winner if you do ten, but on average one in ten. So why not do twenty or thirty? Why not do so? If you do thirty, one at each stage in the funnel, now you're looking at 90 pieces of content. That's pretty significant. Sure. That's the necessary investment in marketing. So it's not a software or a tools or a hire an expert model. It requires that you've got to actually produce content in a full range across your business, not just with you talking. I mean, they're fine, you can do the car cell phone video stuff as long as it's legal. You can interview customers, you can interview other people, you can start a podcast, you can take UGC. I mean, there's all different ways of collecting this content. You can meet people at conferences and do a 15-minute interview each with these different people with your iPhone and then chop out one-minute pieces from there. Right? Well, I find that great interviews, I can often take 10 pieces, 10 one-minute video clips out of just one interview. Because I've got to get lots of little snippets, feed them into the machine, put a dollar a day against them, and then let the machine tell me, even though I think I know what the winner is, I'm always wrong. And you are too. Right. I love it. And the small business is wrong. The client's wrong too. They think they know, but they're wrong.

SPEAKER_02 33:52

Sure. So I'd say the number one, and I've I speak from personal experience, my own content, my personal brand client stuff, boosting stuff, outside of being able to create an audience of you know, if general stuff. Okay, cool, I want to target marketers in San Francisco and in San Diego. Cool, I could totally do that. But I also, until recently, I had a tough time putting my finger on who exactly is my ideal audience to sell a podcast to? I finally came to the conclusion on my own that it's marketers and entrepreneurs. But before that, I was confused. I thought, if I'm confused, what in the world does the average business owner think when it goes, I'm gonna go boost the post? What happens? They just boost the post, take Facebook's word for it for recommendations that go on there, or is there a way to be able to say, hey, here's my ideal target to be able to choose these audiences? Always a big mystery to me.

SPEAKER_00 34:42

Yeah. Well, this that's the thing, is that everyone wants to be a personal brand. Everyone wants to have a book, which is the new business card, and a podcast, and the speak on stage. But even though there's a lot of people that want it, you have to ask why are you doing this? Now, if you're a personal injury attorney and you have a podcast and you're doing it because you want to use it to drive more, you know, maybe you're you're in Atlanta, you're like Ali Owad, and you're one of the top personal injury attorneys, and you want to use that to grow your stature, to speak on more stages, so that you know, better than uh better call Saul, right? Eventually leave more clients so people respect you, then that's a legitimate business reason. If you're doing it because you want to check a box of like I get a lot of people that want me on their podcast because I'm one of the boxes to check when it comes to digital marketing for whatever reason, right? Like they need to interview Gary and me or Richard Branson if they can get him, you know, these other people, like I'm one of the boxes to check for digital marketing. Sure. But are they doing it out of ego or are they doing it because they have some kind of funnel that leads to some kind of mission that's grounded in monetization? What percent of these podcast people have businesses to monetize? If they don't, then why would they have a podcast? And what is going to fund this thing unless they're doing it just for fun, like a hobby? Oh, 100%. I mean, I'm not sure if you're a position, and then they have a direction on how to frame the content in their podcast, right?

SPEAKER_02 36:02

Sure. I spend more time talking people out of um a podcast than I do uh actually starting one, just for that simple reason. Well, I had an idea that maybe, or no, listen, does this fit into your the goals of your business, the goals of your storytelling, your content structure? Because if it doesn't, I would love to sell you a podcast, but not if it's not a fit. And and it kind of stops people on their tracks for a second here, like you don't want my money. And I actually don't. I'm not doing this for the monetizing. I'm I'm I do this to see the show launched, to be able to put another show in our catalog to go, here's what we're doing at the podcast launch lab, not to be able to say we're making a bunch of money selling. That that happens, you know, by by by default, but I complete agreance with you um on that. So um dollar a day, uh, it's a it's a course you guys have actually created, right? I'll have a link in the sh I'll have a link in the show notes for those of you listening who want to go and check it out. Um highly recommend it. I mean, a dollar a day. The the concept seems simple enough, and Dennis just started to elaborate extensively on how to do that. So take these tips and run with them, people. So um I my next question was where does a novice business owner start with Facebook ads? But I I mean I might have answered my own question with you know probably a dollar a day strategy.

SPEAKER_00 37:13

Yeah, one minute videos, vertical, dollar a day. Put it out there, don't overthink it, interview other people, don't make it just about you, right? Unless it unless the product is you as a motivational speaker selling courses to other people on how to make courses or whatever. You know, don't be like that, right? If it as long as your business is not about your ego and it's about helping other people, then you're there to interview other people who have knowledge in an area, right? And you're there to collect the knowledge, not to try to directly build your brand. And then you're gonna come off as a great human being who's trying to share and help, and people naturally will gravitate towards that instead of advertising. The problem is always in the content collection and not in the techniques of how to run the Facebook ads. If you don't give me good videos, let's say if you came to me, you couldn't afford me anyway. But if you came to me, I'd say, look, I can't help you because your content's not framed correctly. You can't make chicken salad out of chicken shiitake, right? Right. Come to me with garbage, I'm not gonna be able to create a five-star meal. Sorry. I need quality ingredients. Oh, but I thought you're the best at Facebook ads and all this. I'm pretty good, but I'm not a magician, okay? You're not a miracle worker. Yeah, exactly. You need to give it, give me these ingredients. Well, I'm paying you for that. Well, uh, last night checked AI and plastic surgery is not to the point where I can be your face and I can have your voice. And I'll you know, you have to make the content, I'm sorry. You I hired an agency for that. Um, what are they, actors? Come on. We need your customers, we need your knowledge, we need your expertise, we need your business, right? Your employees, all that.

SPEAKER_02 38:53

Yeah. I get asked all the time, can you what can you host my show? Can you do our videos? I probably could, but the days of spokespeople, I mean, again, it it's still there and it happens. It's commercial. Exactly. Exactly. And just I tried it once. I did one video for an insurance client, and uh it just felt weird. I'm like, I don't sell insurance. So uh this is all great content, and uh wow, my my brain's exploding here with and I knew I knew that it would be a uh plethora of information uh in a short amount of time here because again, this stuff is somewhat complicated, but it's it's it's really simple at the same time. I think a majority of it is actually just doing it. Just like you said, the clients don't want to create the content. That's why I have an agency. Yeah, they just don't. I said, listen, you have a everyone has a camera. It's called your smartphone. It's in your pocket. We are digitally addicted to it. I show you how to launch a podcast. I got a course, I got a free training, I got everything. I up uh unlock Pandora's box and show you everything. Same thing with what we do with the videos. The only difference is you're never gonna do it. Why? Because you got time and excuses and this and that and other. When you get some skin in the game, some accountability for what you do, and that's what you say. When you push your ego aside, that took me a long time to figure out as an entrepreneur. In fact, probably a good solid 24 months. I went to a personal development course in 2016 that rattled my cage, and I took a uh, you know, an unscheduled hiatus uh to become who I need to be and to shift my mindset uh and really get that ego shedding out of the way so that I understand what it's like to have a service-based brand where you're just here to see the end result of what you're contributing to the world by helping people know what they don't know that they don't know about all this. And I actually feel negligent by not doing something. The agency work, not my favorite. I'm good at it. I enjoy it, I enjoy the clients, but I want to be on stage everywhere. But you know, I I honestly but at the same time, in order to get on stage, maybe you've got to be providing enough value so that people see it and perceive it. Because you're right. They the egos people their their ego uh uh radar is is is is on ultra sensitive these days. I think people can smell it come a mile away.

SPEAKER_00 40:56

Yeah, you know, this this year I've given three keynotes at $20,000, right? So I could do one of these every month and not have to do anything else, but I don't because it creates the wrong view, right? And a lot of people will come to me saying, because I have a blue check mark on Facebook and Twitter, they think I'm famous or something. I get thousands of requests. And there are people that will say, Hey, can you can you get me on stage? Well, I probably could, but why, right? You and I, we've got a good network of people. We don't want to disrupt the the quality and the trust in that network. Oh, yeah, but I I heard from so-and-so that you teach people how to speak on stage to make money as professional speakers. No, that's not what we teach. That's what so-and-so teaches, right? Yeah. There's so many people out there saying you can make money as a with your podcast or by speaking on stage or by writing a book. Um, yeah, for the 0.0001% of people. That's like saying if you go buy a basketball at Walmart, you can be LeBron James by next month. Six figures, right? Um, I don't think it works like that. And so anytime people say that they want to speak or they want to have a podcast or a website or personal brand or whatever, because they think it's a quick way to get rich, I say, I'm sorry, I'm not the right person for you. Right? Because it's not gonna work.

SPEAKER_02 42:16

Yeah, I always ask them why. I want to well, I want to I want to I want to start my own personal brand. I want to do what you do. Why? Exactly. That's all the world needs. Another Sebastian running around. Um yeah, though the the the why uh is uh is definitely huge. Well, listeners, uh, this has been some incredible information, and I'm sure you're gonna want to be able to uh to follow and connect with Dennis online. Uh check out his website, it's Dennis.u. That's why you. Dennis U. Excuse me. Dash. No, dash you. Yeah, there we go. We'll go to LinkedIn. Google me on LinkedIn. Yeah, there you go. There we go. Uh so you'll be able to uh follow them. You know, 12 years ago, if you said you were following me, I'd call the police. It's pretty standard practice now uh these days. Um I've for my uh limited amount of time that I've spent with you, Dennis. I've learned a ton uh both from your keynote and following you on your post on there. So I thoroughly enjoy um your content and what you're doing. It's extremely clear you're not working from ego, you're working from the love of the game. Um, and uh people see that and they resonate with it. Plus, you're wicked smart, and I you know you can't argue with smart, right?

SPEAKER_00 43:19

We're around a bunch of smart people. I saw you at Caleb Williams on the show a couple weeks ago. He's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 43:24

Yeah, my goodness, holy cow, that kid was. I don't know if I told him, I go, You're on the show today. I blame Dennis for this episode because he posted and said, This kid will blow your mind. And I thought, from a guy like Dennis to say, this guy will blow your mind, I'm in. Yeah. Yeah, that was a great interview. And uh he was uh he was just so amped and stoked to be on the show and grateful. And again, it's as you know, just such a joy to do business uh and connect with people that uh that are just so grateful for opportunities to talk about what they do and and have some additional exposure on here. Uh well we're we're uh we're about out of time here. I know you're uh you're a you're a busy guy, so I really appreciate you uh finding time on your calendar uh to come hang out with me uh for a few minutes. Hopefully it won't be the last time. Hopefully you come back again.

SPEAKER_00 44:07

I'm a Miami often.

SPEAKER_02 44:08

We'll have to hang out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:09

I'm doing training with digital marketer, we'll have to hang out in Miami.

SPEAKER_02 44:12

Yeah, let's definitely do that. 100%. I didn't catch you last time you were here, but again, I love doing that. I love seeing uh when I've got online friends and and offline friends uh that come to town because Miami's a big city, uh, we get a chance to connect. So I look forward to doing that. Well, I like to wrap up every show with one non-business related question. Uh, you and I do a lot of uh traveling through our business and speaking adventures. Let's just hypothetically say we ended up in the same city at the same event. I was the MC, you were keynote in the event. We got done, we went to dinner, everybody's kind of hanging out after party here, and I quickly realized that across the hotel from the hotel bar is a karaoke bar. And our group of people seem to think the karaoke is going to be a good idea at 11 p.m. uh that evening. You think it's a good idea, I think it's a good idea, and I propose singing a duet. What song would we sing, Dennis?

SPEAKER_00 45:01

We'd sing the Backstreet Boys. I want it that way.

SPEAKER_02 45:06

If we're drunk enough, it'll be fun. Well, we'd also record it on vertical video or maybe even go live on Facebook.

SPEAKER_00 45:13

Yeah, then people will uh blackmail us.

SPEAKER_02 45:17

This is true. Well, hey, Dennis, thanks again for your time, brother. I really appreciate it, man. It's just I learned a ton just in this little bit, and I I know our listeners uh did as well too. And I'm sure that uh you and I will connect uh in person sometime soon. I look forward to it. Fantastic. Thanks, Sebastian. Thanks, Dennis. Hey friend, Sebastian here. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. I sure do appreciate it. Hey, if you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. Uh, if you feel so inclined, please do reveal leave us a review. Five stars is obviously preferred. Say something nice about us if you don't mind. And also make sure you're subscribed this way, you're getting future updates of episodes as they become available. I'm signing off from our studio here in beautiful Coral Gables, Florida. Talk to you next time.