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Ralph Burns
Do you feel like you could have done so much better in 2024? Do you feel like you left so much money on the table? Or maybe your internal team or your agency just wasn't getting it done for you? You were maybe the one that was coming up with all the ideas and then they were doing the implementation. That is not how it's supposed to work. If you're the boss, your internal team or your agency is supposed to direct you and tell you what to do to scale and grow your brand, let me tell you, you are not alone. This is the number one complaint we hear from potential prospect clients who want to work with us potentially. They say their agency or their internal teams have run out of steam and they're the ones who are giving them all the ideas. Well, that's the reason why we put together a very special offer for you for 11 lucky businesses. And quite honestly, ever since we announced this promotion just or four days ago, we've already filled up five of them. We have six of these left. And the reason we're only giving away 11 with 6 left is because my internal team, I have to give them some time off in December and we want to get this done for you before the end of the year. So much so, in fact, my sales team has actually opened up more time to book these calls with you, the business owner, with you, the director of marketing, you, the person that's frustrated with the results that you got in 2024 and you feel like you can do better in the coming year. Well, we are offering 11. Well, now six, because we've already given away five of them. Free business audits for six lucky businesses. And this is not an audit that's done by AI. It is done by actual humans, where they go in and they actually look at your entire business, not just your ad accounts. They look at your tracking, they look at your after the click, they analyze your emails, they analyze all of your ad accounts, everything that you're doing within your business. And we figure out where the holes are. And usually there are plenty of holes and areas of improvement. Yeah, you need an unbiased, unprejudiced viewpoint on how you're going to hit your goals in 2025. And that's what this business audit is for. So if you are interested in being one of the lucky six remaining, there was 11. Now there's six remaining businesses who qualify for this business audit. Head on over to tier11.com2025, fill out the application and we'd love to see how we can help you scale and grow. And oh by the way, you will also get first mover access to the Tier 11 data suite, which we haven't even launched to the world yet and we'll be doing so in January. So you'll get early access to that. One of the greatest things about the Tier 11 data suite is you know, all those unattributeds, all those unknowns, all those directs inside your Google Analytics, or if you're using Triple Whale or if you're using Hiros, well, this lifts the veil on all of those. Up to 99% of your unattributed and your unknowns in your direct are now going to be known in the knowns that are going into individual channels. Your Google, your meta, your organic, your email. Those are more accurate. That's how great datasuite is. It lifts the veil finally, for data tracking unlike anything we've ever seen because it uses three Martech tools pieced together with an integration that we wrote here at tier 11. And you will get early bird access to that as well. When you fill out the application over at tier11.com forward/2025. Make 2025 the best year yet. Start by planning it right now. Book a call with our team today, fill out the application and let us help you scale smarter, not harder, in the coming year. Hey folks, Ralph here with something that could seriously upgrade your Top of Funnel ad game. If you've been a PT listener for any period of time, you know that we talk about Top of Funnel all the time and how challenging it is for you to get quality Top of Funnel clients or leads or customers and then convert them typically at bottom of Funnel. Well, TV advertising is one of those areas that we haven't discussed here on PT all that much. But our friends over at Ad Critter have figured this stuff out. They do connected TV ads so you can be everywhere without spend spending millions on super bowl ads. But they pair it with display retargeting so you're hitting the audiences with a complete approach. You reach them, then you remind them and then you collect the revenue. It's a strategy designed to deliver and let me tell you, it really works. We're testing this at tier 11 and so far the results have been very impressive. Now with AdCritter, creating custom audiences are so easy. You don't need to reformat files, you don't need to mess around with complex spreadsheets. You just upload any file in any format and you're ready to go. And the match rate is awesome. They make it easy to connect with the right people, the actual people that have interacted with your ads in the past and then allow them to naturally flow through your funnel so you can convert them at bottom of funnel. Now, the folks at Adcrator, we twisted their arm to get us a great deal for you, the PT listener. They are offering a special deal for y'all, and that is you can get a $500 campaign credit, meaning $500 in free money to test out the plaque platform or dollar for dollar matching on any TV campaign up to five grand. Imagine the impact of that match. Spend five grand, they'll add another five grand in display. That's a huge opportunity here. Now it's only offered to you, the PT listener. Head over to AdCritter.com PT and check it out. You're listening to Perpetual Traffic. Hello and welcome to the Perpetual Traffic Podcast. This is your host, Ralph Burns, and the founder and CEO of Tier 11. And today I am not with Lauren E. Petrulo. I'm doing this one solo. It's been a while since I've actually done a solo episode here on Perpetual Traffic, but I felt it was important for you, the Listener, because right now you're probably tied up with a whole lot of Black Friday Cyber Monday stuff, which you should be. If you're not, well, that means your life is that much simpler. But probably you've got a year end or maybe even a beginning of 2025 planning that you're now doing to maybe shift the course and the trajectory of your business or your department. If you're a CMO or director of marketing, you're listening to this show or you're an agency or you're a business owner. And that's what today's show is about, is making those types of decisions. Because right now is a planning period for a lot of folks. And what we found last year when we talked about just about the same time in 2023 as we're talking about it right now in 2024, is that if you're going to make a shift, if you're going to make a change, maybe a change in your department, maybe a change in your vendor, maybe a change in your agency, you should be thinking about that and planning for that right now, because if you wait until after the first of the year, you're then going to lose most of the quarter. So for us, when we have someone who comes in and wants to work with us, it might take a month or so for us to go through everything that's needed one of the things that we're going to be talking about here today in order to set that business up for success. So if you wait until after the first of the year, I think you'll be missing out on nearly a quarter of growth that you could otherwise plan for and get in for now. So today's show is going to be all about the questions that I've actually fielded. I actually asked our CSO department, which is our client success division, about what are the biggest customer questions that we get. What are the biggest client questions that we get, the frequently asked questions, the common issues like once they're actually on board with us, what do they expect? And this is, I think, a really important thing for you to keep in mind and to also quiz your team on if you are making a change or if you do have a new initiative that you're planning on deploying in Q5 of 2024, which is the month of December. A lot of people call that Q5 and, or Q1 in 2025. So I'm going to go through some of these questions here today, sort of see how this goes, let us know what you think. And of course, if you do have questions that you want us to answer, we do have our Telegram group, professionaltraffic.com telegram. We found some of the better ways to connect with folks that listen to this show is actually through LinkedIn as well. Posting on LinkedIn, then tagging myself and Lauren because we check that every single day. And it's a big platform for both of us because we're both pretty active on it. So let's get right into the questions here. It's obviously it's myself asking these questions to myself. So it's sort of a new thing here a bit. One of the big questions that we get from clients, and this is probably something that if you're, you know, making a shift, making any sort of change is how quickly can we expect results? Very, very common question. And of course the logical answer is it depends. But I'm going to break that down a little bit more on what it actually means when an agency or an internal team say it depends, it depends where you're at right now and it depends on where you want to go. So let me give you one example of a client that we are starting with in December of this year, which is great because we're going to set them up for success. This is sort of an ideal scenario, a very large brand, large national brand, that one of their biggest issues was that they're in a very, very crowded market, extremely crowded, with a lot of competitors. They're probably the 9th or 10th largest in the market. But the two or three biggest competitors are absolutely. They're backed by venture capital. In some cases they're even publicly traded. They have lots of cash, they have funds to spend on marketing, whereas the company that we're now representing and working with a little bit less. So they're a bit more bootstrapped. They're using the resources that they have for their marketing budget and their marketing strategy for 20, 25 and beyond out of their retained earnings, which is the way that we've always worked things here at tier 11. We have never taken on any debt, we've never taken on any outside private equity, and never taken on any even, you know, individual accredited investor money, which I know a lot of my friends in the agency world have done. So a very different type of market. So they want to be able to spend, but not spend extravagantly. They want to be able to spend in the right ways. And what they found is that to answer this question, how quickly can we expect results? We really feel that this is probably within one to three months they're going to see results of this fashion. And the problem that they have is that they are 9th or 10th in the market and they need to share a voice. They need an individual, specific way in which they position their product in the market. And then after that, once that's done, once we actually go through the strategy, which we refer to as the creative strategy framework of how to differentiate, do all the research, go through all the competitors, look at how their products are positioned right now, what's their potential advantages over their competitors? What are their competitors that are doing that maybe do something that's slightly different than what they do? How can we put a different spin on how they position themselves in the market? And usually that takes that ideology, that ideating of ideas, that takes anywhere between three to four weeks at minimum, and then I would say 12 weeks maximum. So in this case with the brand, the way that they're spending and they're looking to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, as opposed to millions per month on their marketing. Our answer to them on how quickly can we expect results was between one to three months. And the results that they would see is that they would start seeing more engagement with their social media. We're doing all their social media management. We're also doing all their paid advertising. We're repositioning them versus the competition. We're trying to make so that their brand is very distinct right now. It's sort of a mixture of some offline retail with some online marketing and usually that branding, that engagement with the brand tapping into what they currently have for an audience will take anywhere from one to three months. So those results are usually in the form of engagement with ads, maybe some conversions to a certain degree. But most importantly, you're building a foundation for future results. So that's just one example of how varied this whole thing is. Now let me give you an example of another client which we've worked with, which we've done a lot of case studies here. We've actually done a few podcasts and a lot of tier 11 lives on. This is they came to us about four months ago and they're in the hospitality space and their needs were very, very different. They were doing just Google as their primary mechanism, as their primary platform, and really no other social media, but going after high value, high intent based keywords and they were having a real trouble scaling. So what we felt to answer that question for them is how quickly can we expect results? We said probably one to two months, maybe even within the first month because all we needed to do is implement some of the strategies that we've talked about here on this show. In this particular case it was the Google two step strategy which John Moran's talked about many times. Go back and listen to those previous episodes. We certainly will leave them in the show. Notes@perpetualtraffic.com we felt that we could deliver significant results for them within the first two months. What we found is that by about the first month we started to deliver significant results and in their particular case it was a actual lowering of ad spend by 27% if I recall correctly, but an increase in sales of about 47% because their solution was far more tactical as opposed to brand. Now phase two for them will be once we have all of that dialed in, once we grab as much as we possibly can in the Google market in the high value, high intent based keywords as well as brand search keywords, then we will branch out with strategies that include maybe some of the ones that I initially talked about in that other example, more brand. Obviously they are in a very competitive space, this hospitality business. They have four or five competitors. They're not number one in their space, but they're all vying for the same keywords on Google. Very different initial strategy than the other brand that's in the highly competitive space where they're in the top 10 in the 8 or 9 range. Different answer based upon a different strategy and most of what we do, and your marketing team, your agency should start with a strategy. What is our strategy going to be to begin with? And that's quite honestly what we sell for the most part is that's what people come to us for, that expertise. What's the strategy for me to get to $100 million in sales? What's. What's the strategy for me to get to 50 million in sales and maybe be in the top five in this highly competitive niche? The answers to that question are as varied as there are many businesses in the world. So how quickly can we expect results is always going to be a question of if there is a solid strategy in place, but also what are going to be the tactics. But more importantly, if it's more tactics than strategy, typically that timeframe for results is a less period of time, maybe a one to three month, one to two month range, as opposed to if you're trying to rebuild a brand, it might be a longer timeframe in which to expect results, maybe two to three months to start seeing some initial traction and then obviously the real traction comes between months three and six and beyond. Another example of how quickly we can expect results, Another question that was asked for a current customer of ours, which we've actually talked about here on the show a few times. They're actually in the case niche and they had a very specific goal which was to reach 6 million in revenue in their first year. And they were very, very far from that when they came to us. And the question was, how quickly can we expect results? And quite honestly, this was sort of a combination of the two examples that I used previously is there was a tactical approach. We looked inside their meta account. They're primarily advertising on meta, they're doing a lot of brand search. They were focused on specific demographics, a lot of which were not actually purchasing from them. So we could make immediate changes within the meta accounts. We also knew that they needed a level of creative input and creative strategy to make their brand come more alive. So there was a branding element to it, probably less so than the first example that I used. And last but not least was the most important part was doing the research on their best, most avid avatar for their product. And in this particular case it was people who owned firearms. So we focused on those three things. We focused on demographics. We cut out the demographics in their meta campaigns that were just being wasted, getting a lot of clicks but no conversions. In this particular case, it was for the case company, oddly enough, was 65 and older. And then we redid a lot of their creatives to start focusing in on identifying that avatar, identifying that individual who owned firearms. But also brought in UGC Creative, which we had our team create. And then last but not least is write ad copy and messaging that was specific to that avatar. An example would be so the next time you're heading to the range, you want to put your favorite prized possessions with a picture of the case with weapons, you know, obviously handguns actually inside the case itself. And that called out that avatar very specifically. As opposed to their previous ads which were just sort of boiled chicken, where, you know, nothing wrong with boiled chicken. Big fan of boiled chicken. However, it's kind of bland and it doesn't taste like much. And that's what most of their ads were. They were just sort of hey here's our product, go buy it type of thing. So those three things allowed us to create results for them within three to four months. So in most cases it's anywhere between one and six months as to how quickly you can expect results. If it's like I said, if it's highly tactical and it's just a tactic that we need to deploy very quickly a la the John Moran two step process, for example, or the two step strategy for Google by using Mac clicks that feed into Troas campaigns. Those tend to be a shorter timeframe and those are like the one to two month range. But most other brands are a combination of tactics plus larger brand strategy which does involve a fair amount of research, a fair amount of testing so you can finally capture your voice and ultimately differentiate yourself versus all the other competitors that are in the market. Okay. One of the other questions that we get a lot from clients of ours is how often should we be doing iterations and optimization optimizations of our campaigns? So this is a tricky one because oftentimes on the one hand you want the algorithms to do the work and to do the optimizations, but on the other hand you don't want to give the algorithms too much freedom. And we're talking specifically about campaigns. This is. I know who actually sent us this question because all we're really doing is just doing mostly management of the media buying and then with secondary to that is strategy and then production on creative. So this is mostly media buying and creative obviously with the data component that's entered into it as well. So the question of how often should you be doing iterations optimizations of your campaign is directly related to how much you're spending and how large your market is. So the larger the market and the more spend, the more iterations and optimizations you should be making for your campaign. As a general rule, the smaller the market, the less iterations and optimizations you should be doing for your campaigns. But all things being equal, there's never a one size fits all to this. So if we look at optimizations by channel, there's going to be far more optimizations and iterations done in a typical meta campaign or a TikTok campaign or even a LinkedIn campaign, as there might be in a Google Ads campaign. Because Google Ads is largely text written copy. There are obviously some images, especially if you're using performance max, but in most cases we're not using performance max because performance max usually just sort of scoops up all the retargeting. So there's a less of a creative element to it. So when you're doing Google Ads, oftentimes it is really letting the algorithm do the work. And in the two step strategy that John's talked about here many, many times here on the show, a lot of the optimizations are just sort of watching and seeing what's working. And in the case of that hospitality brand that we've been working on for quite some time, they have lots of individual geographies and each individual geography, like let's say the state of California versus the state of Massachusetts. Very different populations, very different seasonalities. So it's going to depend on like, are your campaigns regional, are they national, are they international? Obviously the smaller they are on the regional side or even on the local side. And if you have more of them, the more optimizations that you're going to make and the more complexity there is in the campaign. So what we typically will do is we'll do an 8020 on regional campaigns and pick maybe the top 10 or maybe the top 20 out of 100 campaigns. Focus on those because those are the most profitable, those are the most lucrative, and maybe those are the most, for that particular time of year, the best. From a seasonality perspective, there's a lot of different factors that play into these types of decisions. So how often you should be doing iterations and optimizations of your campaign is largely determined, determined by your data. And having solid data is the key to everything here. Without those facts, without that individual information coming back to your media buyers and your creative team and your CRO team, you're not going to be able to make group decisions. You're not going to be able to make decisions on the fly that are informed. And without that data suite layer and we haven't really even talked about the Tier 11 data suite, which does allow for a huge amount of the unknowns or the unattributed that you're so used to seeing in all those third party data platforms. This eliminates 90% of those unattributeds and those unknowns or even the direct that's maybe attributed to SEO that you know is probably coming from some other channel. So the point is your data is never going to be 100% accurate, but you can get it to at least 50 or 60% accurate by benchmarking each individual channel, especially when things are going well and then making data driven decisions based upon media efficiency ratio as to what you're seeing by cross referencing your spend in particular channels with what you're seeing in sales inside the CRM or inside your e commerce platform like Shopify. All right, one of the last questions here that we get from our current clients which unless you actually have a solution for this in house, a lot of you are probably listening. You might not have a strategy for this. You might not have a resource where you can actually have UGC content created for you. This is one of the questions that when I was at a conference last week, I got quite a few of these types of questions from e commerce businesses at the Smart Marketer conference in Denver. So it's particularly relevant here what are the best ways to capture UGC from customers? So there's a number of different ways in which to do it, there's tools to capture it, but most importantly is this strategy is to sub segment out your email list. And Lauren talks about this all the time on the show is to segment out your email list based upon your best customers, who are your best customers. And there's a very easy way of doing this inside Shopify. If you're an E commerce brand, if you have a backend CRM, who are the ones that have bought from you the most bought from you, meaning how many products they've actually bought, who have bought your best sellers and also who has bought from a dollar volume perspective, what are your highest volume customers by both physical product volume as well as dollar volume and force rank all of those individuals maybe going back a year or maybe six months, it depends on how big your business is. And then force rank those individuals and create sub lists within your CRM to email them specifically, especially if you are the cmo, if you are the CEO, coming directly from from you is very, very impactful. Is emailing those folks and asking them specifically to create ugc content for you. And there's a number of different ways in which to do this. You can incentivize them. And one of the things that I spoke to this group about just last week was incentivize them with free product. Hey, I'm going to send you $100 worth of free product in exchange for you doing a testimonial or a what we refer to as user generated content testimonial about our individual product. And then what I usually will do is I'll have a video that will show people specifically how to do it, how to use your phone, how to actually, you know, click the little semicircle of how to actually do a selfie. A lot of people actually don't know this. This is one of the questions that we had from this particular person that I met at this conference is that, hey, we deal with women that are over 55. They're not really even sure how to do a selfie. So I said, well, send them a video on how to do it, make it really easy for them, get a service like Loom, which shows videos and then capture that exactly how to do it on your phone. There's also services that do do this as well. Rave Capture is one, Video wise is another one. Yotpo is another one. These are all tools that we've used in the past to capture UGC content. The biggest thing is that you're not going to get 100% of those people to do UGC content for you. But if you incentivize them and send them product and actually say, hey, would you be interested in shooting some videos for us if we sent you $100 worth of free product and it just respond back to this email, yes or no and we will send it out to you. And we have obviously your name, we obviously have your address because we've sent you product before, that's a really low tech way of doing it. It's highly manual. But however, even if you get 10 videos, you sent, you email, 100 people, 100 of your best customers, and you only get 10, that is 10 pieces of content that you can use on your social media and your advertising. Give it to your agency, give it to your marketing team, which is going to be absolutely transformative for you and your business. We use UGC content at the very top of the funnel. We use it in the middle of the funnel, we use in the bottom of the funnel. We use it in all ways. Just sort of depends on what the product is, what the price point is. But UGC Content right now, especially content that's not super well produced. I mean, we're talking about what Meta calls Lo Fi content. Those are actually the best types of content. You don't have to have a video studio. You don't have to make it look like you're spending thousands of dollars on hiring an influencer. You can actually get your Nano influencers, your micro influencers who are on your list to do this for free and or for free product. And it's the best way to get UGC content because I know it's a challenge for a lot of businesses that are out there. So that's a really easy way of doing it. That's just going to cost you time. If you want to spend money on it, there's always ways to do that. And there's a lot of different solutions that we've used in the past. We've used Billo in the past B I L L O. We'll leave links in the show notes for that. And of course, you could always hire an agency that has creator content as a part of its service solution. And we just so happen to have that, which is extremely helpful. We've got a list of thousands of people that we pull from. Usually we pull from about 50 to 70 of them that have specific demographics. Male, female, obviously, different age ranges, what they've done in the past, what kinds of products that they sold in the past. And we tap into those 70 or so influencers and they're Nano influencers. These are small influencers, but we pay them and then they produce UGC content for our clients and then we use those in our ads. So one of the other things that I was asked at this conference, and we're asked a lot by our clients, is how do I get influencers to market my product? Well, there's four answers, actually. Yes, no, and maybe. Then there's a hard no. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. So there's really four different levels of influencers. There's Nano, there's micro, there's macro, and then there's Mega. Mega is the rocks of the world, the Kardashians of the world. We're just going to take those out for right now because I'm going to assume you can't afford to hire them. Neither can we. And the interesting part of that is that unless it's their personal brand, you're not really going to get as good a return on the dollars that you spend in hiring those influencers as you will with the Nano and the micro influencers. So the macro influencers, those are folks that are just sort of below that level of a Kim Kardashian or the Rock or anyone of that stature. So those folks, you can certainly get a lot of appeal, but they've also gone to their list, they've gone to their fans before with probably lots of different products. And just because they're popular doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to sell your product well. That's why I would focus in on the nano influencer market, which is usually less than 1000 followers. These are tiny marketers, but they are very hungry. They're really interested in, in moving the needle for you. They want to do well so that they make money and they're not going to charge you a whole lot. So these types of influencers are far more cost effective than anybody in the macro and, or the mega influencer market. So find people that are within your niche. Let's say you sell health and beauty products, maybe like search on TikTok, search on Instagram for health and beauty and then go to their individual pages and you can reach out to them, you can DM them on Instagram, you can do the same thing over on TikTok. Really good way of making that one to one contact. Have maybe somebody in your marketing department do that. The next level up is the micro influencers. We've seen really, really good traction with micro influencers. These are people that are between 10,000 and 100,000 as far as followers. Their pricing is a little bit higher. You don't get quite as great of a bang for the buck as you do in the nano influencer market. But you will get a wider appeal if you're trying to make a splash in the market. Specifically. One of the examples I used before is that they really needed to make a splash in the market and differentiate themselves because they're in a highly competitive niche and they were eighth or ninth in that market. So nano influencers might not move the needle quite as much there. So micro influencers, anywhere between 10,000, you know, maybe a couple of thousand and 100,000 followers are in the ideal range. And you can negotiate with these folks in many cases and oftentimes they haven't burned out their list, they haven't burned out their audience with too many products. And that's one of the best things about nano influences and micro influence. You can get the best return on investment on it. And also you're going to have longevity with the products because they're really going to want to become brand advocates. For you, especially if you develop relationships with them. So a lot of different ways to get UGC content sort of mix like the UGC with the influencer stuff here a bit. But I think a lot of it is there's a fair amount of overlap. And of course, like I said, if you have the money to be able to do it, you can hire an agency who can tackle, tap into their individual network and then pull out and screen all these people for you. So you wouldn't have to do it. But obviously you have to make a little bit more of an investment there. And that's what we tend to do, is we tend to go back to the influencers that we've used in the past and hire them because they're really good, they know exactly what they're doing, they've done it before. And that tends to be some of the best UGC content that we've created for clients. So let me know how you like this week's show. This is obviously, this is just me, no Lauren, I'm sure she would have lots, lots to say about lots of these questions here, but these are straight from our client success division here, right from the horse's mouth, so to speak. And these are the types of things that you're probably thinking of if you're thinking about making a switch, whether it's an agency or rethinking your strategy for 2025. Those are some of the biggest questions that we get right now. And we're seeing that still with our clients and doing our best to provide solutions for them to ultimately help them achieve their vision and their goals. So let me know what you think of this week's episode. We'll do more of these FAQs and common issues as well as a lot of the questions and a lot of the problems that I'd love to do, actually a show on what our prospects are saying when we go onto a discovery call and then what we propose as solutions, which are probably the same sorts of things that are bothering you right now in your business as you come to the end of 2024 and want to make 2025 the best year yet. So I really appreciate you all listening here today. Make sure that you do leave a review and a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We'll leave links to all the resources over@perpetualtraffic.com to make sure that you can get all the goodies that we've left there we've mentioned here on today's show. So on behalf of my awesome co host, Lauren e Petrulo who is not here today. Until next show. See ya. You've been listening to Perpetual Traffic.