Why Your Social Media Strategy From The Last Decade Is USELESS | 4Ds Consultation - PART 1

0:00You do know that you could go from 2 to 8 million in sales in a year based on one organic TikTok post As I scroll to my TikTok, this video right here got 1.9 million views. Here's the most remarkable part. The next post, which crushed for me on Instagram, different content, different platform, big part of the thesis, 5 ,834 views. So the social media I grew up with, that you all grew up with, was as many followers you've had, was an indicator to the general range every post would get. All those best practices got completely annihilated when TikTok hit the scene and made it about the individual piece of content.

0:35And I think it's going to continue to get more extreme because it benefits the platforms. Look, TikTok has the most virality chance. I wasn't kidding what I said about 8 million for them. It doesn't fit everyone here. Good news, every platform is going through the TikTok thing. LinkedIn, same thing. One video I have, 4 ,000. Next one, 400 ,000. YouTube short, same shit. First video, 1 ,000. Next one, 250 ,000. So they're all about to go through it because it's the right thing for all of us. It's the right for the platform. It's right for us. This is why I wrote the book. This is why I'm yelling from the loudest way I can that organic social is important, but you have to get good at the craft, like the first three seconds, the thumbnail, all of it.

1:12Until you're great at the craft of the video or the picture or the written words in social, everything will be hard. I promise you. Because everything else is getting more expensive because they're all losing market share to this machine. Newspaper ads are more expensive than they were five years ago. The number one goal you should all care about is views achieved organically. There's people on my team that are fast, there's people on my team that are slower. But if player one got me three videos a day and those three videos got me 100 ,000 views, the player two was slower, but she fucking made badass shit and only made me one and that video got four million views, which one do I like better?

1:50But when people play, well, but Gary, my shit's good. I'm like, no, it's not. You took a day and your video got 8 ,000 views. And over here, they got me three videos at 8 ,000 apiece and that got me 24 ,000 views. When you make views achieved gross and per post as a North Star, it's going to help you answer a lot of these tough questions. The first question I think is how to balance personal branding versus business branding, especially from a social media perspective. And then also across multiple brands if you're trying to do more than one company like you did. There's so much to that. First of all, I think that we out-academia ourselves a lot of times.

2:35So we sit in this room and think about the strategy of personal brand versus the business versus multiple businesses when the consumer on the other side doesn't care about what we're doing in a boardroom. That's always been the case. It's now been compounded by how social media now works. The reason I wrote the latest book is social media has really changed. in the last two, three years. So best practices on how many handles do you need? What's personal, like all those best practices got completely annihilated when TikTok hit the scene and made it about the individual piece of content. And I think it's gonna continue to get more extreme because it benefits the platforms.

3:15The more we stay on it, the more money they make. The more you see things you wanna see, the more you will stay, the more you see things you don't wanna see. A lot of you follow me, but you may not want the wine content or the crying about the Jets content. You might want the business content. You might want the silly content. I don't know, but as you all know, I do a lot of different stuff compared to most people. I would say good news, my friend. It doesn't fucking matter. That's right. So if you decide to go one platform under your name and do half of the content about the business and half yours and another business, that individual piece of content is going to find the audience.

3:52If you want to have seven different accounts, I'm like even thinking about new strategies for clients like if they're a cereal brand let's just use Cheerios they're not a client if we get Cheerios should I create another account called at morning breakfast so that I can just post on it with Cheerios content just so they don't have to deal with the policy like it's so crazy what happened and all of you should take advantage of this you should no longer be paralyzed by any of the ridiculous things we think about for strategy including even the name of the handle It's like all out the window. It's now the individual piece of content.

4:28Whether you post it on your account, your account, or the company's account, the individual piece of T-Porn content is gonna be the punchline. We have this a T-shirt, T-Porn. There you go. So that's the answer to that, Christian. I don't think you need to cripple yourselves, the three of you, on this issue. One account, five accounts, one for each of you. what you need to do is be fucking psychotic about the individual piece of content. So my question's maybe really specific to financial companies. Is there anything you're seeing either good, bad, or otherwise that companies like ours are focused on helping people better their financial lives?

5:12Is there anything you're seeing out there? Yeah, of course. But let's bring this down a little bit. So what would you like them to do after they've been affected by your good content to make their financial lives better? Like a nonprofit would just like it to be good. A profit, like what do you want them to do? What is your business KPI? What would you like them to buy from you? Oh, mostly we sell life insurance. Just like sophisticated life insurance-based strategies. How much LinkedIn content do you put out a day? One post a day. What kind? Mostly video. Mostly video. A clip from the podcast?

5:51Sometimes. And other times original. Sometimes it's just like a short that I've done. We have had like outside FMOs, third party FMOs doing most of it for the last couple years. And so we've mostly done what they said until more recently where I'm like, I got to own this more. That part's good. How has it been going? Slow. Not very well. Not very well, I would say. Because it's challenging to get views on it or because you're challenged to come up with ideas to make content for? I think more challenging to get views. I mean, like, you know, when I put out a short, I get like, you know, sometimes a short as in like a YouTube short.

6:29What about LinkedIn? Okay, sorry. Back to LinkedIn. Please. I would say every once in a while I'll get like a good post that has like, you know, 10 ,000 views. But for the most part, it's, you know, I'm getting like a few hundred impressions on it. And that's per day, one a day. Yes, or you're being kind, or that's what we're doing. Five a week. Five a week. We are dedicated at least to that at this point. Understood. Have you thought about, where are you based? Salt Lake. But we are totally virtual. Understood. So we, yeah. And the consumers that you're trying to reach can be national? Yep. That's been a huge advantage for us because we started doing that 10 years ago.

7:08I think, a couple things. If I was to join the business, the first thing I would do is pitch the idea of hosting a dinner within Salt Lake, running ads on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn on a 10 to 15 mile radius of our office where the video was an invitation to fill out a form to join this dinner in a private room in one of Salt Lake's nice restaurants. where you would send them to a Google form to fill out who they are. What you're going to talk about is overall entrepreneurship and business, a little bit of like Salt Lake, local entrepreneur and business and Salt Lake life, because that's obviously such a tight-knit community.

7:56I know it pretty well. And for this lovely dinner, we're all going to have, you're going to have to bear with us. We have a five-minute halftime show, commercial for what we do for a living. But the general thing is, I Christian we would like to be more part of the community and the business community and the growth of the city and the energy of everything that's going on we have a hockey team now yep we do we would like you know again I don't know like you know whether it's steak dinner whether it's alcohol no alcohol whatever the dynamics are we're gonna do this nice dinner there's only 12 seats what we're just running this ad within 20 months like this is literally the video we are running this ad for like-minded ambitious people footnote we're also doing this for our social media content so this dinner is going to be filmed you don't need to be in it it's for my content so your face can be blurred it can be back of your head by the way you can be in it and can get a nice little plug for your local business I believe what you're doing in that scenario is a couple things one I think it would explode your local business I think scaling this is for everyone I think scaling the unscalable is the move right now in a world of AI so like a monthly dinner with 12 to 20 prospects who don't forget filled out a form that you're gonna ask the questions you wanna no answers to are you happy with your insurance provider yes okay you're not invited you know like like you could you could do whatever the hell you want in that form but you will create an engine for your content my team as John may know like yeah the other literally yes as many of you may know if you follow me closely yesterday I did Tea with Gary V I brought it back it was a show I did a lot during COVID.

9:37I did it for two reasons. One, it's one of my best format shows. People like it the most for me because I'm providing real depth. It's what this is at some level. And two, I really believe in social media shopping and I wanted to do it on whatnot to show people that you can do it on these platforms. I'll definitely get into it with them. But here's the punchline why I'm telling you that story. Because I put myself in my best position to make good content. We made a piece of content. I made a piece of content in reaction to the question. My team clipped it yesterday. We normally go into testing.

10:12We test under different accounts how well the content does and then do it on my main channel. I felt so good about it intuitively. We ran it last night. It was the one where I ranted about like, nobody gives a fuck about you, humility's the key. Right, that video, that is the first video that wasn't tested that got over a million views in years. and the reason I think it did that because the other 50 I've done that way I thought were going to hit but this morning when I woke up I was like it's I put myself in a position to make that video right like I'm putting myself for an hour in my best spot I get most excited when I talk to a human and I'm just trying to break through to them and that gets me to a different place I think you in that setting has the chance to make better content yeah so you're gonna get local and by the way you're gonna run ads on meta and LinkedIn to the tune of about $200 in media spend because when you're in a very confined area of a 10 mile radius you don't need a lot of dollars yeah that's what I would do very cool thank you I think you'll get the right kind of content and by the way your production day is gonna be a sales pitch you see what's happening for the low low cost of like listen I don't underestimate me covering 12 people's dinner.

11:32I view that a couple hundred. I think you're going to win. I think it's going to work. I like this non-scalable, local, physical to film to then scale. Got it? All of you have to put yourself in a position to make the best possible content. Good stuff. Thank you. You got it. I think we're here because we are growing really, really fast. We want to make sure we have the right plan. so is it all direct to consumer? yes Shopify? yeah all Shopify and I'd say like 75 % through Shopify 25 % through Instagram and Facebook okay direct buying direct within it right? like you're doing it by hand or you're using shop or what's happening?

12:16yes is it like DM if you want to buy and you're like kind of hand holding it? also just through the meta ads we're running like meta will give them the option to either buy through our website or buy just in platform right so they're buying in platform it's passing on to your Shopify yeah exactly And they're taking a rake. Yeah. And so we basically, just for context, like we did 250 ,000 in sales last year. And I think we're on track to do 2 million in November. Amazing. And we're growing 30 to 50 % month over month. And most of it is on just meta ad spend. Of course. And increasing that meta ad spend.

12:50And it's been really profitable too. So that's good. That means you have a product that's fit the market against the attention. Yes, exactly. Who's running those ads? You? Yes. All me. And how good do you feel about your capability in that? Well... Like if you had to self-guess, because you probably don't have a lot of... I have a thousand social media buyers literally in this company, so I can assess like Ronnie versus Sally. I'm aware that you don't have a context point, but what's your gut tell you? So I'm 100 % self-taught. Which is good. Yeah. I think Advantage Plus ads have made me feel a lot smarter this year than in the past.

13:26So like basically all we're doing is we're testing a bunch of creatives, but we're like 100 % of our ad spend is Advantage Plus campaigns, which has been working for us. How much organic social are you doing? Probably two posts a day on Instagram. Just Instagram? On TikTok, but TikTok's just not going very well, but we're still. Well, it's not going well because you look at all of this as like conversion funnels, right? Yes. So you live in CAC and LTV life and that's your rendering. back to what I just showed you. You do know that you could go from two to eight million in sales in a year based on one organic TikTok post.

14:07So that's a good thing for everyone to hear. Like you notice, if you follow it along of how we were just talking, where they'll eventually go is eventually the math won't work. That's what happens to everybody. That might be six million, that might be 11 million. I don't know, right? I'd have to like look under the hood. But by the way, if they're destined to do 20 million before the math doesn't work out, people are gonna watch them and figure it out and do the same thing. And then it's gonna slow that, like the copycat thing will happen very fast. And what I was gonna say is that's kind of where we're getting to the point where when I said 2 million in November, I mean the month of November, we think we'll do 2 million.

14:45And so we think like next year we could hit 20 million. Okay, I see. That's staggering. So you're not going from 250 ,000 to 2 million. You think you're going from$250 to$20 million. Yes. So a couple things real quick for the rest of the room. This is what's happening in social media when you do it right. Just like so everybody wraps their head around it. It's that real. But keep going. Yes. So I'm just getting kind of nervous that like, okay, we've been riding this wave all year. I feel like we were pretty early on like the Advantage Plus ads, Power Bay AI, like getting really good targeting.

15:21but now I feel like we kind of have experience with a couple other small businesses where we've run them up to maybe five, three to five million in annual sales. Getting to this point where we're like - Did you come from that angle? Were you servicing other businesses and then started? When you say that, why did that happen? So I owned a business with my dad and my brother selling really niche horse-related products. Awesome. And so we've grown that business. It'll probably do about five or six million this year but that's kind of like the biggest business we've ever been involved with. And this one, just the products hitting and the nature of how social is, right, the addressable market's bigger just given the nature of all women are in play but then just the way women are shopping, like just the reality of the business, okay?

16:06So basically I'm coming to like, okay, we're on track to do two million in November. I think it's really realistic. We'll do 20 million. So let's go backwards. Instead of like what you're going to do in November because I've been through that rodeo. Let's talk about what you did do in August. So, like sales-wise, I think we hit close to$600 ,000. And you're anticipating by just putting more dollars into the machine because you're reinvesting what you're making, that's how you see it, right? Yes. Because for everybody, like the reason, when I said this is how it works, the reason not everyone does it is if your first$100 ,000 doesn't work because you weren't good at it, then you're out.

16:43If you only had$100 ,000 or$50 ,000 or$10 ,000. Like these are small bit, like, right? If you got 10 ,000 and you go and spend 10 ,000 on social ads and you don't convert, then the game's over. On the flip side, if it does convert, you see what's happening, right? If your 10 ,000 makes you 40 ,000, you take 20 ,000, like, and then all of a sudden you just, like, see what he's doing, he's stacking. Got it? But this is why I want to talk about, this is why I wrote the book. This is why I'm yelling from the loudest way I can that organic social is important when people don't think it's important because they're in one, two places.

17:16One, they're advanced and paid. And so like, why guess? He's just fucking running it, right? You can see, think about being at 600 ,000 in August and sitting here and having confidence that I believe him, by the way, that he's gonna do 2 million in November. That's just like, okay, I know what works. But then things change too. And so that's why creative is the whole variable. The targeting's there. The people are on social. Keep going. So I guess my question is like, going into next year and thinking like okay we could take this business to 20 million dollars it's just so open ended I feel dumb almost asking it but like how would you be thinking about yeah no I don't think I don't think it's dumb I think you're first of all you need to reconcile something you're in the sales business not in the brand and marketing business right notice what's happening it's all math so he's selling so the biggest fear I have brother Lexi is are you building a brand because if you're not you're going to get copied out.

18:15Somebody's going to buy something close enough from China and start pounding against your own, the same audience for half the price. We see it happening. Already. That's right. Because people are watching everything. Got it? So, my number one recommendation in the way I hear everything is don't worry about 20 or 30 or 18. Worry that you're in trouble unless you build a brand. Do you know how many people have social media agencies and want to be Gary Vee? Half the people on social media. But the brand is what allows me, I gotta back it up by being good and I gotta show up in this room and bring, it's all brand.

18:58Everything is a commodity besides brand. Everything. So by far what's obvious to me is brand, brand, brand. What does that mean? First off, I think the biggest asset you have is Lexi and her sister. so like to me that's not replicatable there's only like what's your sister's name? T 'Kel T 'Kel and Lexi or T 'Kel and Lexi there could be other sisters doing like but like they're them you know I don't know you like that Lex but if you and T 'Kel are willing to go out in front I think that is a very important part of the next step you know joint podcast original content showing them in the field like you're gonna what's the name of the brand?

19:40O 'Clem O 'Clementine O 'Clementine you've got to make people give a fuck about that that like jingle like this is some madman shit like what's the like oh Clementine like there's like a song you should make I'm being serious like I think you should make a jingle and that jingle should be an organic post and maybe the first three seconds of every video or at the end of every video the jingle should play you know 1-877-CAR for kids like if you're from the Jersey New York area like PC Richards the whistle like everything is a commodity except brand. So I think the biggest thing that's obvious to me is for you to go all in on organic and all in on ownable shit.

20:22But like I would give up a lot of money. If I ran the business, I would give up, instead of pouring, like what you're just gonna do is pouring it back in, pouring it back in. I would take some of that money and bring it to zero. I would level out your CAC. I'd pay more. I'd take 100K of it to be awesome at organic. to be awesome at brand building. Mostly investing that in like basically a team to help us do more. That's right. External or internal building at the best cost association against the results to get as many views organically with a complete lens on brand. The other thing you're going to fall in love with and as great as the AI is for meta it's the same AI that gets an organic post to a lot of views and then that one, that one on organic will outperform the AI generated testing.

21:13So there's double benefit from organic social. The organic ad, the organic post that gets 3 million views when you bring it back and slightly tweak it to make it a conversion ad. So just a video of the two gals walking down the street talking about something and just hit. You taking that video back and at the bottom put, you know, maybe they just tell a story about their pet, I'm literally making shit up right now, their pet dog, Carol, in the video. It gets 14 million views, four million. Now you run it again as an ad, but at the bottom, you take the bottom of the video and you put used, at checkout, put code Carol to get free shipping because you know it's going to emotionally hit.

21:54It may end up being your best cack ad. The thing that fucks up all the mathematicians in the game that I play is when I get an organic thing going viral and I convert it into performance, it outperforms all their best shit. And they're like, how the fuck did this happen? Because it's the fucking creative. Got it? Awesome. Thank you.