How to Scale Your Business to 7-8+ Figures with Laser-Targeted 3D YouTube Ads with Aleric Heck: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:00John Lee Dumas:Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down how to scale your business to seven to eight figures with laser-targeted 3D YouTube ads. To drop these value bombs, I brought Aleric Heck and EO Fire Studios. Aleric is a YouTube ad expert and founder of Ad Outreach. Alaric helped his clients generate over 200 million plus in sales and scaled his own business to over eight figures. And today we talk about how you either succeed or gain lessons to bring you closer to success next time and how to be the king of your own castle, even a small one, rather than a knight in someone else's and oh, so much more.

0:41John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Alaric and our sponsors. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 50-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by. The only question is, will you have something to show for it? I created a free YouTube series called 50 Days to Something, a step-by-step path to build a real product, service, or offer in just 50 focused days.

1:24John Lee Dumas:Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube. Alrick, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? And thank you so much again for having me on, JLD. I'm excited to be on here. And what I would say some people are going to disagree with, but I really believe strongly is that you are in complete control as to whether you succeed or fail. And the reason for that is there's really only two true types of failure, the failure to give up, right, which is the ultimate failure, or the failure to learn.

2:05And if you listen to both of those, you're in complete control. And that doesn't mean that mistakes won't happen and things will always go the way that you want them to go. But what you should be looking for is in life, always succeeding or learning from mistakes that you can use to grow. But ultimately, whether you succeed or fail is fully in your control.

2:27John Lee Dumas:Now, Alrick, I want to dive right in to your story because a lot of our listeners, Fire Nation, are solopreneurs. They're the beginning stages of what they're building. And you went from solopreneur to an eight-figure business owner. How the heck did you do it? Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. So it's definitely a really exciting, exciting time as I was been able to scale up the business. And I started out actually 13 years ago as a solopreneur recording videos on the iPhone. It just came out. So I was recording videos, teaching people how to use their iPhone, the best mobile apps, tech tutorials.

3:04was my original business was AppFind. So YouTube channel grew it to about half a million subscribers, was really building it out myself. And I remember going to college and I actually was making enough money from the YouTube channel, sponsorships, ad revenue to pay for college, help pay for college. And when I was there, I started to really think about, okay, what can I build that's bigger? And when I read that, it really opened my whole mind to this kind of whole world of going beyond that solopreneur that you're talking about and actually building out a team and starting to automate some of the processes that I was already doing.

3:44So within my YouTube channel, I was able to hire other college students, video editors, script writers, teach people how to do the business development, the sponsorship sales. And when I was able to do that, all of a sudden I had my time back and my YouTube channel was actually, it wasn't the four hour work week. All of a sudden it was the hour work week, which, you know, I'm sure, I'm sure, you know, that was originally was meant to be the title of the book, but it wasn't, wouldn't be believable enough. Right. I know, you know, Tim Ferriss talked about that. So I was able to do that with my YouTube channel.

4:18So all of a sudden I had some time on my hands, but it wasn't my goal just to create, you know, a four hour workweek business and then, you know, kind of be more enjoy the lifestyle or kind of sit back. I wanted to do that so I could build the next business. And so one day when I was in college, I had a particular app. It was a social media networking app and I had done a video on YouTube for the app. They got a bunch of downloads. This is great. can you post the video again? And I'd explain it's not really how it works. You can't just post the same video the next day and expect to double the results on an organic channel.

4:54It's like posting the same podcast two times in a row. People have already heard it. People have already watched the video. And so what I said was, well, what if we try YouTube ads? This is about eight years ago. And I ran YouTube ads for that video. And in one week for$500, we get 11 ,000 users to sign up for their app. So they're blown away. And I realized that I have something. And this is the point that I think a lot of entrepreneurs face where the company that had hired me to do that, they gave me a job offer opportunity. They wanted me to fly out to Silicon Valley. I was still a college student at the time.

5:29I fly out there, join their company, six-figure job offer, vested stock options. But I turned it down because I think like a lot of people listening, I wanted to be the king of my own castle, even if it's a smaller one to start than the knight in somebody else's. And so from there, I started doing YouTube ads originally for mobile apps, drove many downloads and scaled up to where it is today. We're helping out businesses with YouTube ads and learning that I really had a skill set that a lot of people needed and helping people train companies on how to use YouTube ads in their business.

6:02John Lee Dumas:The king of my castle instead of a knight in someone else's. I love that phrase. I love that visual. And let's get down to brass tacks here because listen, you grew your business over 6 ,052 % to be precise over the past three years. So let's fast forward a little bit. How did you accomplish that feat of arms? Yeah, it's been an incredible, incredible growth journey. And what ended up happening as I started to get into the world of YouTube ads is originally I was working with mobile apps and I was doing more of an agency model. And then it was the same thing as I started to discover the world of business.

6:40What happened was I went to, it was actually almost exactly six years ago now, I went to the HubSpot Inbound Conference and I'm in Austin, Texas now, but I was originally from Massachusetts. So, you know, I went to the HubSpot Inbound Conference out there in Cambridge. And I remember not only being exposed to the whole world of HubSpot and inbound marketing and, you know, in that world, but I also saw the ClickFunnels booth. And that's when I signed up for ClickFunnels for the first time. And I remember actually meeting Dave Woodward there. He was working that booth and hearing all about how I could build funnels and actually run ads for funnels.

7:15And so that brought me more into the world of online entrepreneurs, marketing, you know, this whole world that we know. And that's when I realized that it wasn't just powerful for apps. I could also work with companies. And so I started to do more of an agency approach early on where I was working with businesses to run YouTube ads for them. But where I really hit some hyper growth was realizing that there was almost this challenge with the agency model, which was it wasn't the best for the businesses or the best for the agencies, the way a lot of agencies are set up. Now, I'm not saying that it's not, you know, obviously there's great agencies out there.

7:51But the challenge as you grow is it's always really important to me that people get the best results, have the best experience. And on the agency side, it's very hard as you continue to grow and scale to maintain the ability to help clients at the level that they need and also work close enough with them. Because what we were starting to realize was a lot of clients were like, hey, here, take everything and just go and figure something out for us versus working together. And what we found is there's almost this better way to do things, which is what we created, which is a done together hybrid process.

8:26So instead of being a traditional agency where people hand all of their reins over to us, or instead of trying to do courses and do it yourself, we take a hybrid approach where we work hands-on with businesses. So we work with the marketing department. We work with the entrepreneur for smaller businesses. You know, we'll even recruit media buyers for somebody else's team so they can have somebody on their team focused on their marketing that we can then train in YouTube ads, video marketing, omnipresent retargeting. Those are some of the things that we've gotten really good at. And so we're essentially building an asset in other people's businesses so that they have a marketing powerhouse on their team.

9:07and that's just when we saw explosive growth because businesses started to realize, hey, that's what we actually need. Like our mission is to empower businesses to amplify their impact. That's what we're looking to do.

9:19John Lee Dumas:So many lessons learned here, Fire Nation. Some of the big ones at the beginning that Alrick shared that I love is, you know, he invested in himself. He went to HubSpot. He invested in himself. He got to see what was happening in real time, which is absolutely fantastic. And then guess what? He bumped into Dave Woodward of ClickFunnels And you guys know me and Russell have been friends for a long time. I'm actually the number one affiliate for ClickFunnels. So you know how much we believe in ClickFunnels. I mean, it's such a great product that we've been promoting since 2014. So it's just a great example of what happens when you believe in yourself, you invest in yourself, and you want to be the king of your own castle.

9:57John Lee Dumas:And we'll be talking about some specific ad strategy within YouTube when we get back from thanking our sponsors. There are two things I know about you for sure. You're an action taker and you love to learn. Otherwise, you wouldn't be listening to this podcast. So I'm excited to share another source of inspiration I know you're going to love, Blinkist. Blinkist is an app that takes the world's best nonfiction books and breaks them down into 15-minute reads or listens. So whether you're commuting, working out, or in between calls, Blinkist delivers insights you can apply immediately without the week it takes to read a full book.

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11:53John Lee Dumas:Visit HighLevelFire.com and start building your something today. Okay, Alrick, we are back, my friend, and I want to get into some specifics because you have an advanced 3D targeting YouTube ads strategy that has generated over$200 million for your clients. What the heck is this all about? Thank you so much, and I'm happy to dive in, and I want to give two big frameworks that you can use. So I want to talk about the targeting, which you alluded to, the 3D targeting strategy, and also talk about the video as well. So on the video side, you want to make sure that you have a YouTube ad that what we call is a value ad.

12:32You're providing value inside of the video because people are on YouTube. They're in the learner's mindset, right? They're on YouTube to learn, to figure out how to solve a problem that they have that you can solve. And what you want to do is you want to create an ad that has a hook. It draws people in so it captures their attention. Then educates, provides real value. I call those golden nuggets. You want to give golden nuggets inside of the ad so that people can walk away even from that ad feeling that they gained and knowing that they gained additional value. And then you have a clear, concise call to action at the end to get them to take that next step wherever you'd like them to go, whether it's a webinar, signing up for your mailing list, a training, purchasing a product right off the bat, whatever it happens to be.

13:15And so hook, educate, call to action. And usually you want to have that be about a three-minute long ad. You might do 30 seconds for the hook, you know, a couple minutes for the educate section and 30 to 60 seconds for that call to action. And so that's the ad itself. So once you have the ad, the next step is getting it in front of the right people on YouTube. And this is actually really great, too, because one of the big things is we really look at the different dimensions of targeting your ads. And the first is making sure that you're reaching the right person. Right. So you want to make sure you reach the right person.

13:48We'll talk about how you can do that in a second. Okay. Reaching the right person with the ability to invest. So you want to make sure you have the right demographics, the targeting in place so that you know they're in the right geographic region, that they have the household income, that they have the demographics in place that they're going to be able to invest. And then layering that with the right message, the right video that we talked about. So making sure you have that hook, educate, call to action. So the right person with the ability to invest with the right message, and that's the key.

14:17But you might be thinking, well, how can I make sure that I reach that right person? Because you can kind of picture, maybe visualize the Venn diagram, but you might be missing, like, how do I actually reach that correct person? Well, the way to do that is what we call our alpha AI targeting strategy. And YouTube's actually been shifting a lot recently towards more artificial intelligence and machine learning. And what you want to do is create these audience segments. So the audience segments allow you to go into YouTube and the Google Ads platform and put in specific keywords based on who your ideal client is.

14:53So you can actually create keywords. There's a few different ways to do it. One is putting in keywords based on what Google knows about the person, about their purchase intent, what they're in the market for, what they're interested in, what their affinities are. And then the other is you can actually create audiences based on searches people have done on Google, websites, similar websites that they've browsed on. A lot of people don't know that. You can put in the websites of either your competitors or complimentary products or services that you know that people who are on those websites would be interested in yours.

15:25And the reason you can do this is because Google is everywhere. They have Google search, they have YouTube, they have Gmail, you know, they have Google Chrome, they have Google Analytics on most websites. And so because they have such a big footprint, they're collecting millions and millions of different data points about every single user. And what you can do is use those and tap into those in those audience segments that you create.

15:49John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, we're just really cracking into the beginning of the potential with what you can do. You can see Alrick's excitement, his enthusiasm. He's seen this work for himself, for his clients. It's really exciting stuff. And I want to talk about bullseye optimization. What exactly is this? So that is a great question. I love that too, because it actually loops back to what I said at the beginning, which was kind of that controversial statement that I believe to be true about success, which it actually originally came from the marketing side of everything that I've done. So bullseye optimization is if you picture a big target board, right, and you have all these darts.

16:32Let's say you have 10 different darts. If you start throwing these darts at the board, and again, you're making an educated guess. You know where you want it to go. You know where the bullseye is. But sometimes the first few times that you throw a dart, you might not hit it perfectly because you're getting the rhythm of it. You're learning, OK, how far away is this bullseye? How fast do I need to throw it? What's the angle? And so as you throw more darts, what you're learning is some of them, they may land on the outer rim and those might not work as well. Right. But then you'll have some that are going to get closer and closer to the bullseye.

17:03And each time you can make additional adjustments to get closer and closer to the result result that you want. And so what you're looking to do is get real-time feedback. And a lot of people would look at it, let's say you throw all these darts at the board, and some of them early on don't hit exactly where you want them to, and then you get closer and closer. Some people might look at that and say, well, you failed on some of these dart throws, on some of these individual things. Well, that's not actually true, because you gained something that sometimes is even more valuable than a blind success because you gained a learning lesson of what doesn't work.

17:39So if you're running different campaigns, we talked about these audience segments. If there's an audience segment that's not performing, then what you can do is just trim the fat and not focus on that one and focus on the ones that are working. And so then the next time you keep throwing darts, you're getting better and better and you're improving more and more. And it's the exact same thing in business and in life as well, which is just really amazing when you think about it. I kind of call it the entrepreneur's mindset, is you are either going to succeed or you're going to gain a learning lesson that's going to get you closer to success the next time with every test.

18:10It's the same thing with your ads. Get closer and closer and closer to that bullseye.

18:14John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, are you minimizing lead costs? Are you maximizing conversions? These are the key things that we need to talk about. So we've talked about a lot with bullseye optimization, advanced 3D targeting for YouTube ads. What do you really want Fire Nation to get from our entire conversation today? Like, what's the single big takeaway, Alrick? Yeah, I would say the big takeaway is just the power of video marketing, specifically YouTube ads being the best video platform. But there's so much power within video marketing, because if you think about it, right, video itself is second only to meeting somebody in person and having a conversation with them, right?

18:53You have a high level of connection on video. They can see you. They can hear you. They're watching you as you're on video. And so because it's essentially this great way to connect with people, it's also the most scalable way because unlike meeting somebody in person or going to an event, you can't duplicate that millions of times. but you can duplicate a video millions of times. And so the way I would look at it is if a picture's worth a thousand words, a video's worth a million. And so I would highly encourage anybody listening to this to include video marketing, specifically YouTube ads, but video marketing in general into your advertising because it's a deeper way to connect with your ideal clients.

19:31You're gonna build that relationship faster and you can also reach those right people on a platform like YouTube with all the targeting availability that's out there.

19:40John Lee Dumas:If Fire Nation wants to connect with you to learn more directly, What is your call to action for our listeners today? Absolutely. I actually have multiple free gifts. All you have to do is go to adoutreach.com slash gift. That's A-D-O-U-T-R-E-A-C-H dot com slash gift, adoutreach.com slash gift. I actually got several different gifts that are there on YouTube ads, omnipresent retargeting, and a bunch of the things we talked about here. Fire Nation, how are you not going to this? I've already typed it in. I'm there right now. Adoutreach.com slash gift. because you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with.

20:15John Lee Dumas:And you've been hanging out with AH and JLD today. So keep up the heat. If you have any direct questions for Alrick, find this episode on the podcast app Podopolo. Post a comment. Post a question. Alrick, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute your brother and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors. and Alrick for sponsoring today's episode. Fire Nation. Successful entrepreneurs are great at three things. Productivity, discipline, and focus. That's why I created the Mastery Journal so that you can master these three things in 100 days.

20:54John Lee Dumas:And we're talking step-by-step. Visit themasteryjournal.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform. plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 50-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by. The only question is, will you have something to show for it?

21:30John Lee Dumas:I created a free YouTube series called 50 Days to Something, a step-by-step path to build a real product, service, or offer in just 50 focused days. Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube.