Counterintuitive YouTube ads strategy, Google's 7-11-4 rule, Multiplying content using AI, Amazon's excellent operations & more

0:00Speaking of the AI stuff, what's been working for you guys? You know what? You guys have been – so Ralph, Qasim, you guys were in War Room before, right? Yeah, for years. Okay. We should do a Wicked Smart section for this towards the end. Neil, you probably remember what that is. Neil has been in War Room before too. But on the AI stuff that's going on, like what's been working for you guys? You guys share a lot of stuff there too. So let's start with you, Qasim. He doesn't actually do any work. What's my Wicked Smart? Yeah, he has to think of something. Oh, dude, I've got a couple of really good ones.

0:28So long form – I'm actually – you know what's so funny? I'm stealing this. This is a Wicked Smart presentation that just happened at Driven, which is the new world. That means he's never done it. Quick plug to a mess. But he's just stealing it from somebody else. Yeah. No, I'm stealing it from – this is Dimitri, my buddy Dimitri Smirnoff. Big Life Marketing. Wicked Smart Cat. You guys should have him on the podcast. Dimitri presented a Wicked Smart that I loved and I've actually done. He's taking long-form YouTube ads. Here's what's really interesting about YouTube ads. the watch times on youtube ads are inordinately higher than all other media platforms so if your watch time on like you know meta ad is i don't know what 15 20 seconds or whatever your watch time on youtube ads can be minutes long and the average time on site for youtube is 20 minutes which is insane the average time on site across all websites is sub 60 seconds so like average time on site on youtube is unfreaking believable and if you have long form ads we have one of our highest performing ads across, we spend$150 ,000 to$200 ,000 a month just in YouTube.

1:27One of our highest performing ads is an hour long. It's a one hour long video of John Moran explaining media efficiency ratio. John Moran, a basketball player? No, John Moran, my business partner. I didn't know there was a John Moran. You guys didn't know he was a media buyer too. Yeah. An NBA star, John Moran. That's funny. Yeah, he moonlights. So we have this hour long YouTube video. But the point that Dimitri makes is if you've got these watch times, especially if your watch time is getting close to 60, 70, 80%, whatever, why would you stop? Like people are watching, allow them to continue to watch.

2:04And then the other thing that can be really interesting too, within YouTube following that kind of same ethos is run ads to other YouTube videos, which is counterintuitive. Everybody thinks, you know, the clicks should go to the website, the funnel, the offer, the whatever, but there's Google has the 7-11-4 rule. Have you all heard this? You know, I haven't. It sounds familiar. Go ahead. It's, it's interesting. Google did this multivariant study across basically all purchasing behavior, but the 7-Eleven Four Rules states that a customer needs to spend seven hours, engage with seven hours of content across 11 different moments in four locations before they're ready to engage with you.

2:46Hi. Emma, don't be shy say hi don't be shy say hi emma say hi hi emma she doesn't want it so what this does is it gives you the opportunity to kind of really boost those numbers and instead of going straight for the throat and you know the jugular of buy now uh using high-end content to have them engage with more high-end content um it's a way to invest in your customers give value first and it's showing quite a bit in the way of results for us i love that was that a wicked smart winner uh he he placed in the top three the winner was actually rachel miller this year that that name sounds familiar too um dude rachel's maybe one of the smartest people in the whole wide world you guys should have her on too she just launched a an ai product called busy.ai that's insane shout out to my friend what does it what does it do tell us what it does you get a double it creates um the the the product the funnel the list the follow-up for everything that you need to launch an info business in a fraction of a second.

3:46It's like a business in a box creator. It's unbelievable. So if you want to create different products - You can launch a business, Emma. Yeah. It will be Emma's business we could do in 15 minutes about together. It's pretty cool. I love it. All right, Ralph, hit us. I'm far more like see the ball, hit the ball here. I look at AI right now as just a force multiplier for people that I already have on staff as opposed to replacing them. But I have to replace some content writers with some of the AI tools. I mean, one of the biggest video tools that we use, like talk about content, just to top a funnel.

4:18Like we're really talking about the more content you can get out there as much as possible from an organic perspective. And you guys know this and obviously, you know, you guys rank for lots of keywords, but it's not even that it's just being out there and multiplying your content and taking what you've already done. In our case, we use a lot of video. I know you guys do as well. But I think one of the best tools, and I'm surprised that people actually at our mastermind didn't know about this one because I thought everybody did, which is Opus.pro. And we use Opus all the time. It's absolutely fantastic.

4:56So for people that don't know what it is, let's say you have a video. This is a video podcast here. you basically throw it into opus.pro and it pulls out the segments for the small short form videos with the most relevant content. Maybe it's, you know, in our case, it might be, you know, something, well, probably not something that Kasim said, probably something that I said, I'm sure. It pulls out like the most relevant chunks and then recreates that in a short form video with some slight editing and then you have your person go in there and do the refinements and then we can multiply stuff like so quickly so fast I think it's it's getting to be known a little bit too much because the some of the short form videos are done in sort of that Harmozy style which Harmozy is now sort of changing his style too which is kind of cool he's going more long form the point is is it's a great way for you to take one piece of content multiply it especially in the video side and syndicate it.

5:56We do the same thing with blog posts with another tool that we use content at scale.ai. It's been a sponsor of Perpetual Traffic for years and years. I think any of those tools, if you Google AI tools for content multiplication, like it is, or for syndication, it's a great way of being able to do what we've been talking about here for the last hour or so on very small budgets with tiny teams. I literally have one video editor and he pumps out like 20 videos a day and they're high quality. So we don't know which ones are going to hit, which ones are going to get, you know, engagement. But the point is, is the more we put out, the more leads we see, the more visibility, the more opportunity we have to scale.

6:37Yeah. I see that all as like, uh, I told Neil this, we see social media as like a slot machine. Now you just keep, the more you put out, the more chances you had to hit the triple sevens. That's all it is at the end of the day. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. Once again, it's marketingschool.io slash agency to learn more. And now back to the show. On my end, and I'll let Neil go next. So we've been doing with this podcast specifically, so we're going to go 90 minutes here, right?

7:10So Riverside is going to give us an AI transcript here and it's called AI assisted content, right? And now I think from this experiment, Now it's driving like up to five, 600 clicks per day and it's starting to really ramp up. Right. And so what we're doing is this podcast is daily and we are just taking the trending topics and then taking the transcript, making it into a blog post using AI. But then you have a human in a loop that's going to add context to it. It's going to add links. It's going to add pictures to it. And then we're also cross-linking to other recent, you know, new publications, but our costs come down a lot.

7:42We're able to put the content out a lot faster. now what we're doing too is we're using the xml sitemaps of marketing news websites too to get trending topics and then we might get like a quick overview and then our writers will just go in and start writing that way we might not necessarily need to ideate every single time right so that this is a way for us to build more top of the funnel content while we use programmatic seo to build more content around more bottom the funnel stuff right so like for example if you're TripAdvisor, they get 127 million visits per month from Organic, all SEO. They rank for like 20 million keywords, right?

8:17And they rank for everything under fun things to do in Rome, things to eat in Japan, fun things, fun attractions, right? All these things. And anybody can do that now, right? And so it just depends, like not anybody, but if your business has a lot of these different permutations, there's a lot of different demands, there's locations and things like that. You can do programmatic SEO. That's more bottom funnel. You add in these two combos, you're going to be really hard to beat because most people, 99 % of people are not doing this right now, is selling on the platform. So if you look at most ads, whether they're brand awareness or performance-based ads, the intention is, is people try to drive people to a website and get them to convert.

8:57What we're seeing is right now, if you just keep people on the platforms, it's way cheaper. So for example, if you're running ads and stories on Instagram, don't have one story, have multiple stories that gives the pitch, gives all the copy that they would get on the landing page from your website, but keep them on Instagram longer and let them stay in the native platform that they're used to. And they're consuming everything that they need to know. And then when they go to your website, they go to buy, right? And some of these platforms are making it where they can just buy on that platform. But what we're finding that is working extremely well right now is take what marketing material you would put on your website and don't think of your ads as just an ad to drive people back to your website.

9:41How can you have an ad that engages them and give them the information on the platform that they're on so they don't have to go to your website other than to make the purchase? And we find that to convert really well and be much more cost effective, especially in a time where Kasim gave the example of it used to be you spend$10 and you make$30 sale and you make tenant profit and then you're breaking even and then you're losing money on the front end and then you're really losing money on the front end hoping to make it back on the LTV but we're seeing this make the numbers more favorable to the advertisers again.

10:25Cool. Love it. Kasem Ralf, rate that one through 10. Dude, that in-app, Do y 'all know Depeche Mandelia? No. He's a smart guy. I heard him talking about staying in an app a year ago. And at the time, I thought, like, how lazy. But since then, I've seen it move more and more in that direction. And to the point that Neil's making, everything gets better. Engagement is better and higher. You keep people where they want to be. And what's nice is your tracking. You know, it's their lead indicator, so it's vanity metrics. But that's better than nothing, which is what I feel like we're getting. And so those vanity metrics become meaningful because if somebody's watched a myopic ad, well, who cares?

11:05But if somebody's watched something that constitutes the majority of your funnel, that's really meaningful data. So I think it's a brilliant note. Yeah, I would agree with that. I think we've used that with video ad sequences on YouTube ads, and it works really, really well. Sometimes it's seven, eight, nine individual videos, and they may or may not, and there's a way in which you can actually track it. Am I watching the first one, the fifth one, the seventh one? Then back to the third one. The point is, is like people just, I still don't think people get the fact that people just don't look at a video, click to a landing page and then see a retargeting ad and buy.

11:45And that's three in three days, you know, within a 30 day sequence. It's like people are chaotic and there's, there's just, it's chaos out there. You have no idea what people are doing, but if you actually try to set up, and this is where the smart marketers are really going to thrive in the next few years with AI and into the future is thinking it through. Like if I was going to buy this thing, you know, this, uh, whatever this thing, like, you know, my ear earbuds, like what would I need to know in order for me to finally make that buying decision? Not like there's anybody in the world that doesn't know what AirPods are.

12:28The point is, is like, what is that thing that will engage them to start? We're going back to basics here. We're going back to like David Ogilvie. Like talk about their pain points and their desires in your ads. Dice talked about this at Trafficking Conversion Summit. Actually call out in your ads to your avatar and their problem and then pull them through on a sequence of events. And it's not linear. Expect them to go all over the place. And I think, you know, what Neil's talking about with videos and social, same kind of thing, because you have to sort of think in reverse. People don't click, click, and then buy.

13:04It's like they watch, they click, they click again, they watch here or here. It's chaos. And if you just don't expect people to do exactly what you want them to do at all times when it comes to performance marketing, I think you're going to be in a better place. but if you think it through logically especially through sequences i think you're going to be that much closer to success ralph you showed an example of the airpods that you were holding up we got one more thing over here so go ahead my first ever set of airpods was saw them on the internet read some articles saw them on the apple website didn't want to spend the money and you know time goes on you see people wearing um was at the airport there was a little kiosk thing and i literally swiped credit card and I bought AirPods right then and there.

13:55How are they going to track that I bought that in the kiosk at the airport because I saw it all previously, you know, online. Like that's how buying works these days. And you guys are spot on, but it's funny. Some of this stuff is really hard to track.

14:16Yeah. So here's the last question for everyone here. uh what's something really interesting that you learned recently and costume you get to go first oh goodness um what was that what was that thing ralph that perry marshall was talking about it's based off of uh new york stage plays and actors would sit around saying how long do you think this play is going to run and if it's ran for a week then we'll give it another week if it's ran for 30 years, we'll give it another 30 years. It's an economic principle that says the amount of time that something's been around is the amount of time it will continue.

14:55The Lindy effect. Lindy effect. That's it. So Perry Marshall spent an hour going on and on and on about the Lindy effect. And I can't stop thinking about it now because it's so, and then when you, when you Google it, there's a bunch of rabbit holes you can dive down. But I found this video, the Lindy effect explained in one minute uh from this one minute economics youtube channel um and it's it's fun especially given where no no she's gone you're good even if she was here she would have been to play lindy effect with shit you know what i mean like it's just oh forgive me neil i realize your kid is there i'm trying to teach her yeah sure neil's never said bad lindy effect is what i learned yeah got it love that love it costume you know what's um i'll go next on this one so i'm reading a book right now called working backwards have you guys read this book before no okay so one guy was the chief of staff for jeff bezos so these are two amazon guys one guy followed jeff bezos for two to three years he shadowed him everywhere the other guy he worked at amazon for 15 years he ran like um he started prime he started you know video and all that um and these guys were just going through the the it's the entire framework it's like all the secrets behind how amazon operates and there's all these things right like you hear about these two pizza teams like you don't think much of it's like, oh yeah, no team shouldn't be larger than two pizzas.

16:11It actually goes way further than that. And it keeps evolving. And it goes into like this thing called single threaded leadership. I'll give a takeaway for everyone and I'll just move this on. There's like so many things in there, but one thing is they talk about the six page narrative, right? And they don't allow PowerPoints at Amazon. And the reason for that is because they PowerPoints are for lazy people, right? It doesn't, it, it allows the presenter to be lazy and it puts more of the onus on the audience. Their whole thing is you got to write a six page narrative if you want to push a thing through.

16:41And if we approve it, great. If not, then like, you know, too bad. You're shit out of luck. Right. So just you see how they evolve over time. It's like everything's chaotic, but they slowly methodically get to something that makes a lot of sense. And that's why they're the machine that they are. And I highly recommend it doesn't matter if you're a startup or if you're a scale up, it's a good book. But let's go with you, Ralph. You're next. There was a book that I read recently i think that just changed my whole thinking on what it is that we do as a business and i think any business that i run after this because obviously i mean at a certain point i'm gonna get tired of doing this and probably we are looking at some point to to obviously exit and do a transaction but uh the idea of how to make a brand legendary i've always sort of thought like it's this black box like how did steve jobs actually do it how does chick-fil-a do it how How does like Volvo do it?

17:32How does Lego do it? And a book that I read is Make Your Brand Legendary by Scott Wozniak. Not a very well-known author, but we've patterned our whole business around this whole idea that every great business has four components to it. Number one component is operational excellence. The next one is memorable moments that your customers and clients talk about. and they get this great feeling about you. The next part is deep customer insights, which he refers to as sort of flash surveys, like every now and then, just out of the blue. Not like an NPS score that you send once a year or whatever it happens to be, but just deep customer insights.

18:19It's all layered by this whole sort of track all the way around it, which is your leadership team, which enables all of this to come together. And one of his best examples of this is how Chick-fil-A operates. Chick-fil-A operates not because they are the largest. McDonald's obviously is the largest. But why does Chick-fil-A on an individual franchise gross revenue double the average revenue of McDonald's? It's because they have these raving fans because they have a customer experience engine. They have, you know, the person who comes out with the iPad and takes your order. Every time you say thank you, they say, my pleasure.

19:05You know, every part of it, they actually measure on their videos instead of like how much your average order value is, how many smiles they have per hour. It's this complete and utter focus on the client and the customer itself. And that's what makes a company like Chick-fil-A so great. And our whole process right now is like our whole leadership team read this book and we're like, we want to become this in the agency space. And it's just, it's somewhat obvious, but it's taking us away from where the agency space has been in the past. And for me, it's a book that I highly recommend. I think it can be applied to any business.

19:44And it just blew me away how simple it is. Not easy to implement. The operational excellence part is just all about just making sure that what you deliver is consistently great. Not sometimes great, sometimes not so great. But the whole idea of it is probably one of the best ideas I've read in the last year. Yeah, so one of the hardest lessons I learned as an entrepreneur is leadership really is everything in the organization. Like if you're trying to solve a problem and grow your company, there's someone that's probably already done it in your space. And I thought, you know, years and years ago, I raised venture capital and the VCs would tell me your only job is to hire amazing talent.

20:30Right. And it took me a long time for it to click. And then I had the model of let me just go find people who work for my competitors and they continually got promotions because everyone says they're amazing. But people who got continual promotions, it showed that the company felt they were valuable, at least in most cases. And then if they worked for a few of your competitors and they kept getting promotions, there's a good chance they really are valuable. And if they're a cultural fit for you, they can do wonders. And that's what's caused my organization to grow nicely over the last six years.

21:03but what I learned in more recent times is as you scale organization to 500 ,000 plus employees, you know, we're getting close to hitting a thousand soon or we'll be there, I think, in a few months is my guess, like within three, four months. When you start looking at numbers like that, you know, what I learned from some of my friends who've sold their companies to really large organizations like MasterCard and like people who have like 50 ,000 employees, 100 ,000 employees, I had a friend who sold to Accenture, et cetera, you're not going to actually get all rock stars. You don't need amazing team of 100 ,000 people to build a big organization.

21:46What you need is amazing leaders at the top that can train and instill values and create systems and processes that bring up your C players and turn them into B players and turn your B players into A players, et cetera. That's how you build a big organization. You're never gonna have an organization filled with all amazing people. Your leaders should be people who know how to solve problems and have already done it in your industry before because there's less chance that they'll make less mistakes and they'll be more successful in your organization. But they also need to be able to create systems and processes to bring up the D players and make them C players and make the C players B players and make your B players A players.

22:29and that's how you create a big company. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design first no code website builder that lets anyone ship a production ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours, animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code. It was easy to use and the end result was polished enough to look like a developer spent days on it. One of my favorite things is that Framer's AI handles translations with a single click.

23:02So your site can be up and running in multiple languages almost instantly. And with real-time collaboration, your whole team can jump in and work together. No issues with versions or miscommunication. Whether you're starting from scratch or using one of their templates, Framer lets you focus on design while handling the technical side for you. Animations, responsive layouts, search optimization, and all the things that matter. Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded without hiring a developer? launch your site for free at framer.com and use code MS to get your first month of pro on the house.

23:33That's framer.com, promo code MS, framer.com, promo code MS, rules and restrictions may apply. When I first started my business, the overwhelm was real. I didn't have the tools to help me scale. If only I had Shopify from the start to handle all the behind the scenes work. Shopify is the platform behind millions of businesses globally from huge names like Mattel and Gymshark to the smallest brands just getting started. The best part about it, it has everything you could need. Say you're ready to launch your own design studio. Shopify has hundreds of templates to create a beautiful store that matches your brand style.

24:05Or if you need help with content creation, Shopify's got AI tools that write your product descriptions, craft page headlines, and even enhance your product photos. Shopify lets you easily create email and social media campaigns to reach customers wherever they are, whether they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into a deal with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school.

24:46Neil we talked about this before but there's uh you're really lucky at the end of the day like people think oh we can have like 80 percent a players yeah and there's really good you're maybe like 20 percent a players like most of the time you're like 10 15 percent because a lot of time the d players are new graduates from college and they're just learning they're not going to be a rockstar that knows how to add 10 million in revenue when they just graduated college and they've never had a job. D is not a bad mark. It's just where they are in their career. And it's more so you need leaders in the organization to bring all of those people up and make sure they're heard and you're there for them versus just like, oh, whatever, they'll figure out they're another cog in the wheel, right?

25:27That model of they're just another cog in the wheel doesn't work. You need people to bring others up.

25:39I'll tell you what, we're going to clip that moment and throw it on your LinkedIn. Let's see what reactions you get.

25:46Newsflash. Well, look, I think that's a good place for us to wrap. But guys, this collab has been really good. I definitely would like to do more in the future. Hopefully we can do them in person. But Ralph, what's the best way for people to find you online? Same for you, Kossum. You go first, Ralph. Yeah, you can probably follow me on LinkedIn. I guess that's probably the best place to follow me. But of course, tier11.com, T-I-E-R, spell out 11. The guy who has the tier 11 with the number is holding me ransom for hundreds of thousands of dollars for that URL. So anyway, so tier11.com, Ralph Burns, you can find me there on LinkedIn.