236 - How to Easily Automate Your Marketing with Brad Smith

0:00Are you actually listening to people's conversations when their phones are off? We are. Apple, for every single app that you use, says, would you like to track across different apps? And I say no. How is it still listening? If somebody is super strict on their phone, you shut off Siri completely, you shut off the listening on every single app, then no, that won't work. But there's a lot of ways it bypasses. If you have the Google app on your phone, there's all kinds of different ways it bypasses there. And obviously it's legal. It's legal. 99 % of people I have to believe when they hear that are like, that can't be legal.

0:28Is it just in the terms of service? Mind-blowing, guess who's selling all their data to Apple right now?

0:36All right, Brad. I mainly had you on here because I'm the most curious. You seem like the most interesting man in the world. You just got like hands in different things, but you've got a ton of experience. You offer your expertise. What is your business and how do you make money? Well, it's funny you say that because I'm only a 50 % of that pie. There's a wife that's a co-owner with me. I'm behind the camera. so there's like double of me. So that's super hectic, but I would say she's 60%. I'm 40. Okay. That sounds about right. I got lucky. We all got lucky. That's for darn sure. I got, I got super lucky with my wife.

1:15So there you go. What's your business? So automation links is our primary business right now, lifelong entrepreneur. And this one helps businesses automate their marketing. So a lot of people have a business, but everything's not puzzle. The puzzle's not together. You got a CRM over here. You want to do some emails over there. Maybe you think you should do social media here, but everything's random. You don't have a system. So we go in there and we build a system so you can just let it run while you build. When did you start this business? 10 years ago. Okay. 10 years. And how big is it now? Yeah.

1:48So I've helped over 2 ,500 businesses 10 years later, 150 active clients with us every month. Just a small lean team of six. We're actually hiring two more right now, but it's been a lot of fun. 10 years, a lot of pivots as well. So be ready to pivot. Especially in your space, you know, marketing. Can you give me an idea of revenue? So you have 150 clients. What does that mean? Top line? Yeah, we're right at around a hundred K a month, 80 % margins. Wow, man. That's fantastic. Yeah. We automate it. Have margins always been like that? always yep geez louise that is fantastic when was your aha moment when were you like holy crap this is a money printing machine when somebody asked what my margins were like six years ago and i told them and they're like what how long have you been this size we're going we've actually doubled almost every year started off really small for a few years part-time which we'll we'll probably dive into but last four years we've been about this size i've always thought i wanted to grow it, but I haven't just because I'm enjoying life right now.

2:53And I have a few other investments. So technically we could just stay here. We're going to grow it a little bit more over this next year by getting an office and hiring two more, but that's about it. It's interesting with really high margin businesses like this. Like I always look at it from my perspective. In order for me to have had a business, my main background is in healthcare. In order for me to have had a business in healthcare that was doing, let's just say 100 ,000 a month, 1.2 million a year, 80 % net margins is going to be, what is that? that. Holy crap. One, like a little over a million dollars a year in profit.

3:22Okay. In order for me to have had a million dollar a year profit business, I would have had to have had a 10 to$15 million top line revenue business, which in healthcare, it's, it's big. That's, that's at least 250 employees that you have that you've got to manage a ton of just operational overhead and infrastructure. So many times you're chasing that top line because you know, it's going to translate to bottom line but yeah if i was in your position it's almost like at that point why would you push to grow exactly and so the nice part is we're getting presented investment opportunities just like you know alex and lila hermosi do they invest in businesses without having to do much but because of our systems that we have i can easily go and invest in a business i know will be profitable and just kind of do that on the side that's a really interesting analogy so do you know much about Alex?

4:16Have you ever done any of his courses or read up on him? I haven't, but a lot of people say we're like them. My wife and I, we came up from a fitness business before this business. So it's a pretty funny story, pretty similar. Well, before we get into the fitness business, I thought what you said was interesting because what Alex's kind of philosophy is right now is they'll invest in businesses, but really he's focused on systematizing sales. It sounds like what you're saying is you'll invest in businesses, but you're also bringing your own systems. We bring in our whole team and we systemize their ads.

4:48Yep. So pretty cool stuff. I'm an idiot. So will you explain to me, first of all, what's the name of your business? Automation links. What does that do? What does your business do? How does it work? Yep. So, and real quick, can I touch on the thing? A hundred K a month, a lot of people watching and listening, we are oversold the million a month. Oh, we should be making a million dollars or all of this. Well, coming from me doing it 10 years, you'd rather stay small and profitable, such a much better quality of life, and then it allows you to just invest in other things. So just wanted to touch on that.

5:24Like the goal isn't for me to be that huge. So I feel the same exact way because you get to a certain point where I say, I don't want to be a billionaire. I know some people are like, Oh, I'd want a billion dollars, but I don't want to be a billionaire because I know what it would take to get to be a billionaire. It's a lot of sacrifice. It's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of time missed with your family or with your friends or doing things that you want to do. Maybe you get really lucky and you inherit it. Maybe you get really lucky, you win the lottery or you invent an app and you don't actually have to work that hard.

5:50But for most people, it's a very difficult thing to do. And they don't understand as you get to a certain point. So like for you, if you're to grow, your margin is probably going to go down because you need to invest in a team. You need to expand. There'd be a lot more operational complexity to the business. And at that point, it's like, for what? My life's already great. Exactly. Have you ever heard the Mexican fisherman? Not an analogy, but what's it called? Parable? No. Okay. So there's this Mexican fisherman and this American businessman. And the American businessman is down there and he's vacationing and he's watching this Mexican fisherman.

6:24And every day the Mexican fisherman goes out for two or three hours, fishes, catches his fish, comes back, sells them at the market. And the American businessman sees this a couple days in a row. And he's like, man, this guy actually does a really good job. He's really efficient. He can make more money. So he goes and talks to the Mexican fisherman. He's like, hey, right now you're working two hours a day. It's like, yeah, if you worked eight hours a day, you could triple your output and you could go to market. It's like, okay. It's like, and then when you triple your output, you could bring on some other people and you could buy more boats and you could have a larger fishing enterprise and you continue to scale that you continue to scale that and all of a sudden you've got a you've got a pretty big business and the Mexican fisherman is like okay well and then what do I do he's like and then you just sit on the beach all day hang out with your friends and play music he's like well that's already what I do I fish for a couple hours a day and and I hang out with my friends so it's like I like that parable because many times like you're chasing you're chasing just to get to the thing that you're already doing.

7:22So I like you calling that out. A hundred percent. Yep. That's a great parable. I'm going to use that. I'm stealing it. All right. So tell me, how does it work? Automated links. I love doing like analogies and explaining it. Cause I could say I automate people's businesses and that's just boring. But have you ever said something? And this happened to me last summer. We were out on our boat, Nick. And I sit, my wife said something about an energy drink out on the boat, not on her phone, phone sitting next to her. And all of a sudden we go, she goes on Instagram and there's the energy drink as an ad in her feed.

7:57Huh? No, that's never happened to me. No, absolutely. Yeah. It happens all the time. Yeah. So some call it stalking. Cause some call it brilliant. That's what we do. So we enable a business to show their ads and retarget people everywhere. So they never forget. And nowadays, back in the day, you remember when they said you had to sales call someone seven times and they become a customer? Well, now the stats come out where it's, they got to see you 24 times on four different channels. And then they trust you. Hold on a second. 24 different times on four different channels. Is that what you said?

8:32Yep. And that's where we're at now, which we'll touch on. How much aggregate time is that? That usually is a right on two week, two to four week process where they see you that many times. Okay. So the first question I have is, wait, are you actually listening to people's conversations when their phones are off? We are really well now, but I know, I know you're not, I would love to, but how does that work? Cause I thought app, so I'm an Apple user, Apple for every single app that you use says, would you like to track across, you know, different apps? And I say, no, how is it still listening. So if somebody is super strict on their phone, you shut off Siri completely, you shut off the listening on every single app, then no, that won't work.

9:14But there's a lot of ways that bypasses. If you have the Google app on your phone, if you don't shut off Siri, there's all kinds of different ways that bypasses there. And obviously it's legal. It's legal. I mean, when you sign up for Facebook, you say, Hey, sell all my info. Well, next month, it'll be a year since I started this podcast. I've had over a hundred interviews. It's been a ton of fun, but I promised my wife at some point I would decide whether or not this was going to be a business or we would just continue to pay for it out of our pocket. And I'm exploring monetization, to be honest with you.

9:44There's not a ton of costs, but I do want to figure out a way to cover the editing and the packaging and the promotion costs of putting this podcast together. So I am looking for sponsors. I don't know what that looks like. If you've enjoyed this podcast and you've ever found some value and you want to sponsor, reach out to me, nickatcofounders.com, and let's get back into it. 99 % of people I have to believe when they hear that are like, that can't be legal. Is it just in the terms of service? Well, mind blowing right now, guess who's selling all their data to Apple right now? ChatGPT. Really?

10:17So whatever you put into ChatGPT, they're selling that data to Apple right now. Why wouldn't they be selling it to Microsoft? I thought they were in a partnership with Microsoft. I don't know. Maybe they're selling it to everyone. So is that a core piece of your business? Or is that just like, hey, this is something we do along with all of these other targeting marketing strategies? That's the core piece. Now, we used to help people with their Google ads and set up their CRM, but that was still just putting puzzle pieces together. Now we strictly just say, we know you're not, your puzzle's not put together.

10:51So we're just going to go do your CRM, your emails, show your ads everywhere, just make you omnipresent. I want to set the table. and I'm going to explain what I think I understand and then you tell me where I'm wrong. When it comes to digital marketing, from what I understand, there are a couple of different channels that you can utilize. The first thing is not a channel, but you mentioned CRM, that's your client or customer relationship management system. So that's going to be Salesforce, HubSpot, Jobber, any of these systems where you track customers. You can market to people through SEO, which is search engine optimizations.

11:25You can optimize your website, you can have keywords and backlinks and all these other things that you're optimizing for the web to find you. You can have paid ads. So you can pay Google and Meta to actually run ads and put them in front of your target demographic. You can have your Google business profile that you optimize to make sure that when you're searching on maps in particular, your business pops up. And then you can have organic social content, right? So you build a social media team and you put out content about your business, who you are, what you offer, et cetera. it's called organic.

11:58I mean, it's still marketing, but you're not necessarily paying ads to get that in front of people. You're, you're trying to rely on. You can boost your, you can boost your organic social, but for the most part, it's not the same as, as necessarily paid ads. Did I miss anything? Are those sort of the channels with digital marketing? But wait, there's more. Oh, I didn't miss some. Okay. I don't, I really, I don't think you missed them, but there's so many and that's where it gets really frustrating and overwhelming for business owners. It takes you 60 seconds just to name all the channels a business owner should be doing.

12:30I mean, it's so hard to nail one of those. Oh, you're supposed to be doing SEO all these years, but SEO takes a year to get results. But now you don't have to do SEO now because everyone's using chat GPT. So I just wasted all that time. I mean, it's just very overwhelming for business owners. And if, you know, small business owners, you can just focus on maybe one of those and get minimal results. But we work with businesses that truly want to scale. So our average business is making over 20 ,000 a month. They want to make it to 300 ,000 a month. We build that system for them because it's so overwhelming.

13:03Well, and the other overwhelming thing is even if you know all of those channels, which channel is the best for your business, right? Is it paid ads? Is it organic? Like you don't even know most of the time and you got to go do a bunch of research and become an expert in that. So it's, it's really difficult. Where does the stocking come in? Like which, which line does the stocking that you guys do fall under? Yeah. So I'll go back to that. Nope. That stat I gave you. I like people seeing me 24 times over four channels. And then when I get on that sales call, they're like, I'm ready to sign up.

13:37I see you everywhere. Like they already know and trust you. So you got to find those four channels your customers are at. Email automation is one. You can email market and remind people through that way. Let's just say you're a B2B business. They're on X or LinkedIn. You can market there. The stalking comes in is, Hey, you see me, you come to my website once, or maybe you follow me on Facebook, right? Stalking comes in where you, then you see me the next day. Then you see a different version of me the day after. And we do this through the ads. You see my email, Then you see my Facebook posts. Then you see my YouTube ad and you just start seeing me everywhere.

14:13Always following up omnipresent those 24 times. That's where the stalking comes in. How do you get my information? Is it, is it, I go to your website once and then all of a sudden it's like, I'm tracking you now everywhere that you go or like, what's the initial point of contact that you come into a potential customer? Now I want to drill this in because this is an action item I want your audience to take today is setting up your pixels on every channel, even if you're not ready to do ads yet. So a lot of times a business owner doesn't even have pixels on their website or I don't even know what that means.

14:46There you go. I'm an idiot. Okay. What is, I don't know what that means. Yeah. So Facebook has it. Every platform has a pixel, a code, HTML code that you put in the bottom of your website for tracking purposes. And so what you have to do is you go to Google, you get a pixel, put it in your website, go to Facebook, grab their pixel, put it in your site. Every single channel. I have one for X, one for LinkedIn, one for YouTube. And so what happens is you can start collecting all that data. So when you're ready to run ads, you can just say, show my ads to anyone that's been on my website. Okay. So if I go to LinkedIn, I go to YouTube, I go to X, whatever I get the pixel and I put it on my website.

15:24I don't know how to do that, but I'm assuming it's fairly easy to add to your website. I could probably Google it. What does that do? Someone visits your website and now you'll get their LinkedIn, you'll get their Twitter, you'll get their Facebook. So you don't get that. You can just go back to Facebook and you can say, here's an ad show my ad to anyone that's been on my website in the last 60 days. Does that person have like a unique identifier that Facebook knows who they are? They do. Each channel has its own identifier through the pixel. What? Okay. So do you blow my mind here? Another step forward is...

16:00Wait, wait, wait. No, no, no. Don't go another step. I need to understand this. I'm so sorry. It's awesome. I go to your website. I'm just Nick Kalufsky. I come to your website. Bloop, bloop. And you have this pixel thing set up, right? What information do you take to then go to Facebook and say, hey, target this? Like, did I show up to your website? Because I've already opted into Facebook's notification, whatever, terms of service. and I'm bringing my personal Facebook ID with me and then it leaves it on your website and now you take my personal Facebook ID and you go back to Facebook and you're like, target this person?

16:34Yes. I love the fact that you are just saying yes and no and you're not hedging and you're not like, well, it doesn't exactly work like that. This is gold. Thank you so much. We don't need to explain it, but it works. Yeah. Oh my God. It's a lot. this is why tech companies are so valuable this is why the social platforms instagram linkedin facebook tech talk they're so valuable because they have the user information that is this why this was such a big deal a couple years ago when apple said hey look facebook we're not going to allow you to track across multiple apps because then all of a sudden facebook facebook lost the ability to see where else these people were going huge deal but now there's ways we can get around that.

17:17So we get around it now, but that was a huge deal. But that goes into my next point, which is you can actually pixel people on platform. They don't have to go to your website as well. What does that mean? Sorry. I don't know what that means. Pixel them on platform. Yep. So I'll break it down. You see one of my posts on X on Twitter. And if you stop and read my posts for three seconds or more, this is on YouTube, meta, every channel. If you stop for at least three seconds, that platform grabs your pixel and I can retarget you now. I can say, Hey, a hundred people have stopped on this post in the last 30 days, show my next ad and say, Hey, I saw you were just reading my post yesterday.

17:59This is an ad go click on my website now. So if I'm scrolling through the feed on my phone and you stop for three seconds, I just stopped for three seconds. It will know that I'm looking at your post. Do I have to set that up? Or is that something that Twitter just does or X does automatically? You got to enable that pixel. And that's where I wanted everyone to take action today. So let's say I'm on Twitter. How would I enable the pixel on Twitter? You go to Twitter ads. There's a, you click on more in the bottom left and you'll see a button that says ads. And you basically just create your ad account.

18:33You don't have to turn on your ad, just create the account. And you're going to do this on every channel. set up, turn on the ad, the pixel and take that code and go put it in your website. And you can just leave it for now, but that's going to start collecting data. So in a few months, when you're running, ready to run ads, you've got thousands of people that have already seen you. You can show your ad to, I would go back to Twitter and I would, I would say, Hey, these are all the people that stopped on my post for three seconds or more over the last month. Yep. I want you to target them. only them because they already know like they already know me like me and trust me at some they've seen me at least once so twitter in particular if i get let's say i like last two weeks ago i had a post that had a 1.5 million impressions on it do you know if that's 1.5 million people or if that's just like 500 000 people that saw on average three separate times i think that's 1.5 million holy crap dude so i could set that up and have said go target these 1.5 million people who saw my post and thought it was interesting.

19:38Exactly. That's where a lot of people are missing out because they don't have those pixels set up. So you have a 1.5 million post probably don't have your pixel set up. So now you can't just go run an ad to those specific people. Right. So let's say you have an event or maybe you just don't know what you're going to do yet. Just so set up those pixels now. So let's say you have an event in a month. You can say, Hey, everyone that already knows me sign up for the event and they're all going to sign up for the event because they already know you. If you try doing that to people that never seen you before, you're going to get really low results.

20:05Does that work on Instagram too? If let's say I post an Instagram video. Yep. Same thing. I love your brevity. Even YouTube. So my magic sauce is YouTube. Okay. So here's what this is. I wanted to ask you this. Okay. I have started a YouTube channel. I have like 1700, I think subscribers has taken me nine months to get that. Chris, my business partner, he started his YouTube channel. He's up to like 120 ,000 subscribers. It's taken him nine. Like he's just, he's very gifted at that. But as you're growing on these social platforms, like Twitter, for example, I've noticed this is more anecdotally, but I've noticed people and I've spoken to people who have run ads.

20:45They've said the second I ran ads, my organic reach tanked. Like the posts that I was posting, like no longer reached the people that I was hoping to reach. And it took a while for me to get my organic reach back on youtube i know that you like you can't monetize you can't get to the number of hours that you need in order to make money from adsense by doing paid ads so there's obviously some component there where they don't like ads be to drive growth is that a thing like on twitter like if i all of a sudden i started using paid ads is that limit your organic reach It used to be. It's not anymore.

21:22It still is for YouTube. Okay. But let me, you're thinking about it wrong. And most people are thinking about it wrong. You're thinking I'm going to run ads to build on my channel, right? But you want to build your channel up organically and then use ads to remind people to take an action. That's a very good framework. Continue building organically. 1.5 million views on an organic post. and then use an ad to say, hey, remember me? You like my post. Now go click on my website. So if I'm using ads to grow, that's when I might see the negative side effects from growth. But if I'm using an ad just to say, hey, please take this action, it's not necessarily the same thing.

22:05That is freaking fascinating. So here's the cool part. YouTube, and I just heard this yesterday, actually. Wealthy people pay 20 bucks a month to not be shown ads on YouTube now. Mm-hmm. This is what we do. You watch my organic YouTube video. You learn something from me, right? I don't tell you to go click on anything, but I pixel you. And now you see my ad because you watch my YouTube video on all of Google's networks. You'll see my ad in your Gmail. You'll see it on other people's websites. You'll see it on Google search. You'll see it on the Google app. All because you watch my YouTube video.

22:46Even if you have YouTube ads turned off, you'll see me on all of other Google's networks. What kind of businesses are best for this? Because as I'm listening, it's like, okay, if you have an audience on these social platforms, then this pixel tracking is fantastic because you can see all the people who have come in and out and then you can target them. But if I'm a small business and I don't necessarily have a social presence, does this work for me? Yes, at a small scale. one channel, one ad, not four channels, every single, you know, try to be everywhere. Either way, they've got to have a social channel.

23:24At least one. Would email count? Like, let's just say they have an email list. How are they getting email subscribers? Plus, they have a website. I don't know. Google business profile that drives to the website. That's a good point. Yeah, yeah. Good. Well, Google business profile, that means they're doing SEO. So that's our one channel. They're focused on Google SEO, getting someone to Google my business. They get to the website and then they follow up with those emails, 24 emails. Just keep following up with them. So if it's coming to your website from Google, because you've got the Google pixel, you're able to go to Google and say, I want to target these people.

23:58And that's when you're able to go into Gmail. You're able to go into maps. You're able to go into search and target them with ads. Let's use a couple of business examples. All right. Now's the part of the show where I feel the most uncomfortable, but my therapist says I need to face my fears. So here we are. I've started a newsletter and I want you to subscribe. And what you're going to get every single week are the aggregated conversations from that week that I have on this podcast with an overview of what their business actually looks like. I'm also going to throw in a review of one or two businesses that are listed for sale.