Hosts Jesse and Rich talk to Matt and Joe from the Hustle and Flowchart Podcast to uncover ways to get visitors to your new store.
Transcript
Jesse: Richie, howās it going man?
Richard: Whatās happening? Living the dream, itās the Friday happy hour again. Weāre ready.
Jesse: You know, when we started this podcast, we always said that the idea of it would be like Hey, if we could meet our friends at happy hour and talk about what they should do for their business. Thatās what we want to do. So we did that today.
Richard: Yeah, we left a little early. We shouldāve taken the mobile unit (laughing) but we got to make sure we still get the thought process through. So these people actually understand and get help.
Jesse: So, letās bring in our guests. This is Matt and Joe from the Hustle and Flowchart Podcast. Howās it going, guys?
Joe: Awesome. Thanks for having us.
Jesse: Absolutely, yes.
Richard: Youāve been in the game for a while, right?
Joe: We have. Whatās the year, Matt?
Matt: 2007 is when we actually served together.
Jesse: He said heās the guy with the facts.
Richard: He being Matt since weāre not on a video right now. And Joeās like me, weāre more of the creatives. I say youāve been in it for a while but most of the 51ŹÓʵ listeners are
Joe: Matt and I have worked together in a variety of different ways online. So many different business models, we say weāve tested it all. I know thatās not possible but we tested a lot of different styles of offers, ways that we drive traffic, ways that we just upsell folks into getting a higher LTV. We take all that now. We just chose personally to go to the info route and also a lot of affiliate marketing and some other stuff. But either way, same stuff applies to what weāre doing.
Matt: You still need traffic.
Joe: Exactly. If you canāt control eyeballs and the attention and actually can direct that attention to something thatās relevant to them and something that you control, then you can pretty much do anything you want. You could sell anything online.
Richard: Correct me if Iām wrong but it seems like youāve kind of dove in on the two most important ways to make that happen, which is organic content creation and then paid. Is this the two main⦠because you do a podcast and if I remember correctly I think when we talked a little before you actually are one of the few people that drive heavy traffic to your podcast. I thought about that for a while. Thirteen years of television and film. I was like If youāre a media company, you drive paid traffic, you donāt just walk in the Star Wars, right. Youāve seen 17 rap buses, 32 commercials, radio commercial.
Joe: You can make an amazing film. My wife and I met with the big Hollywood producer for films on Monday, and they said straight up like there are so many people that hire them hundreds of thousands of dollars and donāt have any marketing plan behind it. And it drives him nuts because weāll spend half a year making this thing and it gets like 5000 views, or some blow up to millions because thereās actually some marketing thought behind it. That goes with any business. Itās just crazy to not think of the strategy, OK, how do we get relevant eyeballs as much as any eyeballs but ones that want to take an action based off of what Iām putting out to the world.
Richard: So when you start the process, whatās step one? Step one is just an awareness campaign or what?
Matt: Step one would really be research. We use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush, SEO tools to figure out what keywords people are searching for, that relate to the business that weāre in, the products that weāre going to sell. So, weāll find keywords and figure out: okay, these are keywords that are buyer intent keywords. These are keywords that people would search for that are clearly interested in our niche, in the products that we would potentially sell. So thatās really phase one, it is really spending a lot of time doing research into what your customers would be searching for. And I think thatās a step that so many businesses just want to skip over, they just want to take a product, throw it online, and if we build it, they will come, but we all know thatās not the case you need to do some marketing. And the first step of marketing is really good research on keywords.
Richard: Okay. When youāre saying⦠the tools you mentioned, thereās like free version you could probably type in stuff before 51ŹÓʵ users for the most part getting started, ramping up. You guys have been in the game for a while. So even one of the comments earlier when you were talking about LTV, lifetime value of a customer, for those out there wondering whether LTV was. So you start with research. Are you kind of reverse engineering based on a goal, how do you⦠letās just pick one of your products you have.
Joe: It could be our traffic course, itās a $300 product. With that, we know what the value of a lead is for our list. So then we can back that and thatās obviously historical data. But with that number in mind, we know what we can spend to acquire traffic of new people into our ecosystem. This kind of like a moat that we built around our content or course, all of our offers.
Richard: So you know like our course is this much, so weāre willing to spend up to this much. Now you start doing research on words that you think have buyers intent.
Joe: For going all the way back to the very very basics like somebody whoās a beginner youāre probably not going to really know what the lifetime value of a customer is from day one. So the best you can really do is kind of start to figure out what things people are searching for that relate to your product. Thereās going to be some trial and error in the beginning. What we do is I donāt want to get too into the weeds but we have sort of like algorithms and numbers that we look at to figure out: Okay, this gets a lot of searches but thereās also very low competition in Google so this is probably a good keyword to go after. And then we find a whole bunch of those keywords, go after them, create content around them, and thatās sort of the first entry point to them discovering our business.
Jesse: I think what you said there about the knowing the LTV the product or the customer maybe for a lot of
Joe: So thatās super important because in our courses we train on this a lot. Thatās like our number one question when it comes to
Jesse: If you sell a boat and itās $25,000, you have several thousand dollars to play. If you sell a toy boat, thatās
Joe: Shipped from AliExpress.
Jesse: They might have four dollars to play with. You can only spend four dollars to acquire that customer.
Matt:
Jesse: I agree. I think people should pull over and write that one down. You should probably be willing to spend up to the profit margin on your first sale because yes, generally that product is, there on your email list you can sell it to them again. Iām sure there are a few products where itās one time, I donāt know butā¦
Richard: Generally, weāve been in this game long enough to know, I donāt know Brian Dyes, Dan Kennedy, probably prior to Dan Kennedy, he whoās willing and able to spend the most, to acquire the customer, and wait the longest to acquire the check is going to win. Thatās why ExxonMobil is going to dwarf everybody for a long time. Any new players and you need infrastructures built out, they can wait years and years and years and years to collect that check and theyāre willing to spend way more than everyone else. Doesnāt mean they want to. I didnāt say they did, but theyāre willing and able to.
Joe: Right. And I think a lot of folks, I donāt know if thatās the case in all business. From what weāve noticed, from our experience, most people are concerned on that front end product like that is where theyāre going to make their big money. Thatās how the business is made but thatās total B.S. You know itās everything on the back end. So any kind of upsells or maybe a new bundle you can give them or a special offer. Itās way cheaper, stats have shown all throughout the test of time like you said that itās way more expensive to acquire new customer rather than just LTE the ones you already got on your list.
Richard: You already got their trust, you got the credit card once. I mean isnāt there a little company out there called Amazon.
Matt: I was literally going to bring up Amazon. Didnāt they just become profitable like a year ago? Thatās like 20 years or something.
Richard: But now they own the infrastructure of almost everything.
Jesse: And they are going to be extremely profitable in the next few years. So they took their time but theyāre going to make their money and much like
Matt: For us our biggest KPI or best Key Performance Indicator is our leads, our list growth because weāve done the math and it will take some time to figure out this math but weāve done the math and we know that somebody joining our list is worth
Richard: 33 and under here you go, hope for the $1 ones. But youāre okay with even the $30 one whatever as long as you as you know.
Matt: I mean if we find one where we can get $1 leads unless weāre going to try to pump as much money into that as possible and probably a little less on the ones that are giving us $30 leads, but yeah.
Richard: Letās go back now. Say someone starting and weāre talking to you mostly about traffic and weāre going to go a little bit into the conversion. But weāve already discerned that thereās content creation, organic, ongoing and paid kind of prime the pump right and need the little windshield here. So is there some sort of ratio that you would recommend for someone in the beginning? Where itās like a certain percentage of the products profit margin that you put towards this or would you recommend starting with content creation? Itās kind of
Joe: I think it depends. Itās a total itās on what you have to spend. So whatās your budget? Do you have some runway before you can make that initial sell, so you can have more extra time to test? I mean thatās what Amazon essentially did for however many years. They had a lot of runway investors obviously but if you are scrounging for cash and you want to get something working quickly, figure out how to probably pony up a couple hundred bucks and you can get some decent testing to figure out what people are searching for on Google and then pair that up with some strategic content and then give them an offer.
Matt: So you can start running paid ads for as little as five bucks a day and if youāre not willing to spend five bucks a day to get your business up and running then you know keep work of the day job for a little bit till you get some funds to do it, because you know no risk, no reward, but five bucks a day you should be able to do that or you donāt really have much of a business.
Richard: Well, that in and of itself is good to know. Iām sure thereās a lot of people that donāt realize you can set up the parameters. OK, Facebook, Google, whatever, it may or may not work. We donāt know that part yet but only spend this much. And so thatās good for these people, Jesse and I know that.
Jesse: Yeah, I think thatās helpful. I think a lot of times at 51ŹÓʵ when people cancel, we see the reasons for the downgrade. Weād read every single one of them and a lot of times itās thereās a concern with cost or I donāt have money to run ads. Well, if you donāt have money to run ads like itās going to be tough. That is sort of an I donāt know if Iād call it a requirement but practically a requirement, if you donāt have $5 a day, what did you expect? There are many other ways. Thereās like 10 percent of the people out there that might be able to find a way but letās be honest. Usually, you should spend five dollars a day at least figuring out your business.
Joe: People feel like now with a lot of products you see Instagram and you have these influencers and you are like Oh, Iām just going to pair up with an influencer and theyāre going to make me rich. I mean it can. Itās possible. So I would love to have control over my outcome, my life, and my income. And you could do that with paid ads.
Jesse: If your only chance of making it is that some famous person is going to⦠Thatās not really a plan, thatās a hope.
Joe: Youāre still paying them.
Matt: Thereāre really two sorts of philosophies behind traffic. There is that you can go free but itās kind of more of a marathon. You can go paid and itās kind of more of a sprint. All right. So you can go the content route and just focus purely on content and go after SEO and get Google to rank you and create YouTube videos and get those ranking but thatās going to be a slow long road. I would so much rather invest five dollars a day and just kickstart things. And SEO will happen too. That marathon element will still happen over time. But you can sort of jumpstart it and start getting into profitability within your first 30 days business if you are willing to spend a little money to get going.
Richard: And youāve got a bigger sample set to your point right. Youāve got to wait a long time to get the sample set up the other way. Whereas now you can say: OK, we all think weāre really smart and we can make educated guesses but that data is going to tell us when we put that $5 out there be like Oh, no, I guess itās not a good ad or That is a good ad. So do you break it down in layers? Do you have like an awareness campaign? I know you said it varies a little bit but in your particular case do you⦠in this world where people are trying to get rid of friction like Ubers and all this stuff Iāve found in certain circumstances adding layers of the funnel works. And we started to talk about it when we were having lunch but didnāt really totally get into it. Do you see a benefit in breaking that in the different segments and segmenting your audience and how could someone on 51ŹÓʵ learn from that lesson in this podcast?
Matt:
Yes. We have three buckets that we put leads and weāve got top of the funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of the funnel. The top of funnel leads, those are the people that donāt know who we are. These are the completely cold audiences, people who have never discovered us. Weāre showing our top of funnel ads to them. Middle of funnel ads or people that have done some sort of engagement with us, maybe they viewed one of our blog posts, maybe they watched 25 percent or more of our videos on Facebook. Theyāve interacted like something on our fan page, some sort of interaction. Thatās our middle of the funnel. And the bottom of the funnel is weāre driving these people straight to the offer because theyāve interacted with us multiple times now, and weāve found that to be sort of the most effective sort of advertising funnel. I guess you can call it.
Jesse: Thatās interesting. And Iām familiar with funnels but I think to break it down, to be more specific to people that maybe just heard cold traffic and top of the funnel for the first time. So the top of the funnel is what does the ad say, right?
Matt: Hereās the thing, when we build this kind of stuff, we actually build it from the bottom of the funnel up. So if youāre just starting this is day 1 trying to drive traffic for you, what you would do is you go create
Jesse:
And for
Matt: So
Jesse: Maybe they buy and you really want them to buy but youāre not pushing that necessarily.
Joe: Hint. Itās like theyāre going to constantly see these calls to action, these offers that are available to them.
Jesse: More education. OK.
Matt: And then if weāre going over the top of the funnel, this is where youāre driving completely cold audiences to your advertising. This would be if youāve already got some customers, you can do whatās called a Lookalike audience on Facebook. Basically tell Facebook: These are what my customers look like, go find people that have a lot of similarities to these people. Put my ads in front of them. If you have your gurus in your industry or you have really popular software products in your industry, you can target people who are fans of those gurus or those software products. There are people that havenāt quite discovered you yet and those ones youāre driving to straight content. Youāre driving those people just to Hereās just something educational, thatās in the realm of where youāre trying to lead them down the funnel two.
Jesse: Got it. So you might lead them to a blog post that you wrote. Super informative video on Facebook or YouTube. You know basically very educational, really no call to action necessarily.
Richard: Or a podcast.
Matt: Without getting too much in the weeds, weād like to keep people on Facebook for that type of funnel so that cold traffic we like, you just put content videos in front of them because Facebook really wants to get people watching videos on Facebook. They really want people to stay on Facebook, so we can go and get 3 cent video views. And so for three cents weāre adding people to our middle of funnel audience. So every time somebody watches a video for 10 seconds or 25 percent or whatever we set our criteria at, we may play three seconds for that person and now weāve just essentially pixel somebody into our middle of the funnel for three cents a person.
Richard: Which kind of goes back to the earlier conversation. Youāre willing and able to spend more and youāre willing to wait longer. You are saying an interpretation and correct me if Iām wrong, you pay three cents and you didnāt even give them the opportunity to buy anything. You didnāt send them anywhere, you didnāt do anything. Your three cents for that. Letās just go back in time and pretend our grandpa is talking like this 5 to 10 touch points. Back then youād send snail mail and go knock on the door and cold call and do all those stuff but instead, youāre saying because you know, I canāt remember exactly
Matt: On average when we look at our numbers, on average it cost us four dollars to get somebody on our list, we make on average 34 dollars per person whoās on our list. So thatās kind of where stats are at right now.
Joe: And itās so difficult to get that mentality straight when youāre at least when youāre starting out even just the first time it adds. You might be in business for a while but youāve done something else that might have been quicker. Yeah. So for us, it takes about 14 days or so to get that first conversion. For some companies, it might take three months. But you have to figure out what that kind of average is and then stick to it. Itās boring and it can be very scary sometimes. Like putting out this money and not seeing a return.
Jesse: You have to make these videos that you like Man! A lot of people watch these, we paid three cents apiece for them but nobody bought it. Well, you got to move to your middle of the funnel video.
Matt: At the end of the month, we just look at the aggregate data. We go: OK, how much do we spend on advertising? How many leads did we get off of all of this spend and how much money did we make off of all of this spend? And at the end of the day, all that matters is how much we spend is less than how much we made the number.
Richard: Yeah, and I totally joke to your point when you said itās hard to get past that mentality. Sometimes youāve got to make something almost exaggerate the other way to make sense. Would the restaurant we just went to for lunch, would they have paid three cents to get to talk to us for a few seconds to tell us about whatās gone on inside the restaurant? I guess so. But it just seems so counterintuitive that weāre going to wait. Weāre going to do this thing and weāre not going to let them. Weāre not going to confuse them.
Matt: Well, think about the sign holders thatās just an awareness thing. Iām just thinking of literally looking at the restaurant right back down. But think of a sign holder, itās an awareness thing. All youāre doing is just like you have the sea of people that are kind of targeted because theyāre in your geographic area. So theyāre interested. I mean maybe not interested. At least theyāre kind of relevant.
Joe: And thatās all youāre dealing with keywords and all these.
Matt: Think about other things like billboards when youāre driving down the freeway. I have no clue how many eyeballs see a specific billboard when youāre driving down the freeway but I guarantee that the people that are driving down the freeway looking at that billboard 100 percent of them arenāt entrepreneurs between the ages of 25 and 45 that like Success magazine. With Facebook and advertising and Google and all of these platforms you have that ability to say Look, Iām going to put out this brand awareness campaign but Iām only going to show it to these people that meet these criteria. And you donāt get that with almost any other sort of traditional branding strategy in the real world outside of Internet marketing.
Jesse: Facebook is amazing for that if you know your product pretty well and you know if youāre new you might not know your customers exactly but you can kind of have a good idea. If you sell dog treats, organic dog treats you can start to develop the persona of your person out there and you can target them very specifically.
Matt: I can leverage other brands that are doing it well and then put something similar or an alternative. We do that all the time with affiliate products but thatās a kind of a shortcut to get in front of an audience thatās pretty damn relevant.
Jesse: We like the shortcuts, feel free. But we do the hard way here.
Richard: Speaking of shortcuts when someoneās doing an ad like this and itās just an awareness one, should they be super concerned with picking the exact right audience in this custom audience? Or should they just leave it wide open and let Facebook do the do the work?
Matt: I would say early on you donāt really want to trust too much on Facebook to do the work for you because the way it works. Youāre going to put whatās called a conversion pixel on your success page. So when somebody buys it sends data back to Facebook and says Look, this person just bought.
Jesse: By the way, let me jump in here. So this is I want all the 51ŹÓʵ users to know this is super easy, ask support, go to a live chat. There is a place where you just grab your pixel when you pop it in one place in Eciwid and it populates all the right places. Do not be afraid of like They said pixel, I donāt do what to do. No. So itās very easy. And not enough people do it. You must put that pixel in there.
Matt: It blows my mind whenever thereās no pixel because we have all these pixel helper things, and they are not even pixeling people. Oh my God!
Jesse: I didnāt want to interrupt you guys, get your pixel on there.
Matt: Definitely. So youāve got your conversion page which if you have your pixel installed, you can tell Facebook: Look, if somebody lands on this particular page that means a sale just happened. So Google and Facebook theyāre not going to really be able to optimize towards that conversion until it has a lot of data to work off. So when youāre kind of early on and letās say you make maybe a sale or two a day or even like a sale a day or a sale every other day thatās not really enough data for Google or Facebook to work off to optimize towards so you are going to want to start with Hereās some cold audiences that Iām going to target and Iām going to go after these first. That will help build out the data on the pixel as Facebook learns more off of the sales that are happening, then you can back off the targeting a little bit. And Facebook will start to figure it out for you.
Richard: Got to end or if you have had a bunch of sales and your upload your client list and say: Does it look like the audience?
Matt: You could. Google basically just set a new rule where you canāt do that unless youāre doing a minimum of fifty thousand dollars in sales a month or 50000 on ad spending. They put some severe limits on it to smaller businesses on Google. I think you can still do it on Facebook but I think Facebook is even sort of backing away from it with all security privacy issues theyāve been running into. Theyāre kind of shying away from letting people upload their list and then targeting them a little bit more.
Jesse: It is tougher on the uploading but if you can match a page that they visited then youāre in business. So itās really the same thing. But Facebook and Google are more open to if you say they visited this page than you can do lookalikes against a page. So thatās sort of the tweak there Iāve actually had to redo some things because of that itās annoying. But be aware. I think the key though is once you start selling, maybe itās 50 a month, 100 a month. Thatās usually somewhere along there is the kind of the I donāt know the golden number. You need to get there to let the algorithms do their magic. Getting there, you know.
Joe: We have some strategies of ways to figure out what keywords people are searching for, and you got to invest in that but if you could figure out a data from Google, for instance, thatās kind of a good starting point that we like to go for instead of Facebook because itās very intent on a solution rather than Facebook just browsing, checking out what friends or family are doing.
Jesse: Totally agree, particularly for
Matt: Thatās why we lead with Google actually, for that exact reason is that you canāt go for those buyer intent keywords. Weāve kind of spent a lot of time talking about Facebook but weāre actually bigger fan boys of Google Advertising. Basically because of that whole buyer intent element of it, weāre going after people that are searching for the keywords that are clearly⦠Theyāre looking to buy products and then once they visit our website now we retarget them on Google and because of how we build all audiences on Facebook theyāre going to see us on Facebook.
Jesse: So using Google you know that the person is definitely interested, they get to your page, and this applies for all types of websites, they get to your page and of course with carts and that we know actually like
Joe: I thought it wasnāt that high, thought it was like eighty.
Jesse: Super high. You probably are paid to get them there, now they didnāt buy but that the bottom now, they are interested in that product, they probably typed in those particular keywords now you should be showing them things on Facebook. Itās definitely an important thing to be aware of.
Joe: I think the big realization that most people donāt think about is they need to either be Facebook or Google, or Instagram, or Pinterest, or whatever the platform theyāre on. If you can figure out how to combine these things into you being the hub for Google, thatās the first step for us. We donāt know that, thatās the strategic way we could put content and an ad, pair those two together to a very targeted eyeball, and then pull them into, guide them into our ecosystem, where weāre targeting with Google ad banners on blogs, on Facebook, on Twitter.
Richard: So speaking of bringing them to your ecosystems itās about that time, and you said you had some form of a gift or something, so they can get two things, they can get this gift, and then they can watch the process of being retargeted.
Joe: It is a learning in progress.
Jesse: Do I get
Richard: So we only got a little bit here, where should we go?
Matt: Evergreenprofits.com/ecwid. Evergreenprofits.com is our bigger umbrella brand, thatās where you can find our podcasts, all that sort of thing. If you go to Evergreenprofits.com/ecwid, will give you a free copy of our traffic book that cells in stores right now.
Joe: Thereās a lot of stuff and detail.
Jesse: And if they like listening to your voices, where they can go to hear more from you?
Joe: Evergreenprofits.com or HustleandFlowchart.com, thatās the name of our podcast.
Jesse: Youāll be in the ecosystem, you could be targeted, youāre to see top funnel, bottom funnel.
Joe: Ideally, the bottom funnel. Itās just learning thing. Itās been fun.
Jesse: well guys, itās been great having you, Rich, any last thoughts?
Richard: No, Iāve just been wondering if we got finished soon enough that we would be able to get back over to the restaurant.
Jesse: Friday happy hour guys, thatās why weāre doing it. Make it happen!