Business Growth Summit
Max Bidner breaks down the HAWK growth framework: Awareness through paid ads and influencers, Nurturing with email and SMS, and Trust through customer service and brand reputation. He warns against common mistakes like misreading daily ROAS and over-scaling without accounting for a typical one-month purchase cycle.
Chapters
Max, one second.
I don't see that live. Oh shoot, I don't see the— we're live.
All right, we're live and we're recording again.
And we are recording again.
All right, welcome to our next session. Uh, Jill, thank you very much. That was packed with ideas business owners can apply right away to get more visibility without waiting for permission. Now we're going to move on to practical growth marketing that can move revenue for you. So our next speaker is my friend Max Bidner. Max is known for turning underperforming funnels into revenue engines and for finding simple growth wins that most businesses overlook. He's gonna talk today about growth hacking revenue, 5 simple growth marketing hacks to grow revenue today. Max is gonna walk you through specific tactics you can plug into your existing marketing so you can see more revenue without needing a bigger team or a bigger ad budget. So Max, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you guys so much for having me and happy Monday. Good way to start the week. I'm going to share my screen if this will let me here. Boom. All right, can you guys see my screen?
You got it, man.
Yes.
You just got to make it full screen and then we're all set.
Let me figure out how to do that.
You do tools and then presentation mode.
I can do There you go.
Perfect.
Technology, right?
Beautiful.
All the fun stuff.
All right.
Again, thank you so much for having me. I am a serial entrepreneur, helped more than 400+ companies with their marketing funnel in some way, shape, or form. And the number one question I get is like, hey, you know, what are the few things that I can do to really increase revenue immediately without spending a ton of money? How can I actually capture more of the people who are looking for my product or service today? And then how can I also build trust with people who are maybe not necessarily looking to buy my product or service today, but eventually might do that? And so I put together a list of 5 of my most epic, most impactful, and easiest to implement marketing strategies and growth hacks that can help you generate revenue right now, ASAP, ASAP, ASAP, ASAP. So most founders hate marketing because it's extremely overwhelming. Should I run Facebook ads? Should I run TikTok ads? Should I be posting every day on TikTok with a dance, cute video? How do I make that relating to my product or service? Should I send cold emails? Should I be posting on LinkedIn? There's so many different things you can possibly do to grow your revenue. It makes sense that it's extremely overwhelming. Lucky for you guys, my name is Marketing Max, and I have personally worked with more than 400 brands on all things growth, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. I've engineered growth marketing funnels to acquire customers, clients, users, members, whatever it is that you're looking for. I've helped a bunch of companies do the same. I've driven more than $100 million in attributable revenue for my clients. If you look at the non-attributable, it's probably way more, but actually inside of the Facebook Ads Manager, Google Ads Manager, lead forms, I've generated quite a bit of revenue. And I bootstrapped an award-winning ad agency to 7 figures in revenue, sold it to a private equity fund before starting to build the Marketing Max brand. A little bit more about me. I'm an angel investor as well. I have the cutest dog in the entire world named Junior. He's a 60-pound Labradoodle, so he's not so junior. But Junior is my best friend. And then I have more than 350,000 followers across all of my social channels and my newsletters as Marketing Max. And forgive me, this is not like a light filter. I converted my garage into an office and we have this cool skylight. And around this time every day, I get this interesting Hollywood effect. So that's a little bit about me and why you might want to tune in or why you might want to listen to a couple of these growth hacks. Today I'm gonna share with you 5 growth hacks that any company in any industry of any size can use to grow your business faster. So with that said, let's start with the first growth hack with a simple question. If you needed car insurance today, what is the first website you are most likely to visit? Is it gonna be Geico or is it gonna be Erie Erie, Pennsylvania car insurance company. I think there's a chat here. For those of you that are on chat, go ahead and answer the question. If you were going to get car insurance today, where are you most likely to visit? Which, which website, Geico or Erie, Pennsylvania car insurance company?
Geico.
Geico. All right. So, yes, the obvious answer is Geico. Why would you choose Geico? Well, it's because Geico spends more than $1.6 billion a year on marketing to make sure that they stay top of mind so that when you are ready to buy car insurance, you think of Geico first. Erie, Pennsylvania car insurance company spends less than $20 $1 million a year on marketing. So staying top of mind is everything, right? An old study said only 2% of your market, only 2% of anyone who could ever potentially buy your product or service is actually waking up today going, I need this product or service. I'm ready to spend time and money to solve this problem by using this product or service that you sell. The other 98% of the market still needs to be warmed up. Right. And so you need to stay top of mind with people. GEICO spends $1.6 billion a year to make sure that when you are ready to buy insurance, you think of them first. So the question becomes, how do you— whoopsies, go back. The question becomes, how do you stay top of mind with your target customers without spending $1.6 billion a year? Well, the easiest, easiest, easiest way to do that is a $5 a day Facebook ad retargeting campaign. So literally just spending $5 a day on what's now called Meta ads, right? Running ads on Facebook and Instagram targeting everyone who has visited your website in the last 30 or 60 days is the fastest way to use the strategy that GEICO is using to help stay top of mind with your target buyers. When you set up this campaign inside of Facebook Ads, you want to set the objective to reach, and you want the creative, the actual ads themselves, to be testimonials from people who have used your product or service saying, holy crap, excuse my French, I was skeptical about using this product or service for these reasons, but once I started using this product or service, it helped me achieve XYZ results, right? Or you can create a how it works video because once someone's visited your website, they already know about you. It's your job to educate them on how you actually can deliver the results or the outcome that you want. All right. It's a very well-known fact in marketing that someone needs to see or hear your brand at least 5 times before they decide if they're going to purchase your product or not. And so what I see a lot of times with clients is they're running Facebook ads, they're posting on LinkedIn, and people have heard of them maybe once and maybe they see one more ad or maybe they see one of their LinkedIn posts, but they're not doing everything they possibly can to stay top of mind and make sure that you're getting someone to that 5th or even 10th touchpoint. GEICO has hundreds of touchpoints with me at this point. They advertise in every single sporting event and every single commercial break. There's GEICO. I watch tons of sports, right? Every single billboard in most major cities, Geico, they have hundreds of touchpoints. You can achieve the same result on a smaller scale simply by retargeting everyone who's been on your website in the last 30 or 60 days with a very simple $5 a day retargeting campaign. Staying top of mind is everything because people actually spend days deciding if they're going to hire you for your services or buy your product, no matter what it is. And the truth is, if they see your ad once or they see your LinkedIn post once, they might forget about you. They might be seeing your competitors' ads more or your competitors' posts more. So running a $5 a day simple retargeting campaign is the best way to stay top of mind and convert more people who know you exist but just haven't purchased yet. They're window shoppers into actually coming in and purchasing from you. The $5 a day retargeting campaign is how you can be like Geico. All right, the second growth hack is A/B testing. Most people, they create their website and then they never update it ever again, but the truth is your website is your 24/7 salesperson, and it's the most forgotten about part of your entire marketing strategy, motion, stack, the entire marketing engine that you've built. However big or small it is, showing up at conferences or webinars or summits, posting on LinkedIn, running Facebook ads, lead gen affiliation, whatever it is, the website is the most forgotten part of your entire marketing strategy. It is not set it and forget it. It is not ever completely perfect, so you need to run an A/B test or many A/B tests to split test how to get people who visit your website to actually convert into a lead or a purchase from your website, right? This is how the math works out. Say that 1,000 people were to visit your website today. The average website converts 2% of all website visitors into whatever the action is that they're going to take. So if it's an e-commerce store, on average, 1,000 people who visit the website will convert, or sorry, 2%, so 20 out of every 1,000 people who visit your website will purchase the product. If you run a marketing agency, roughly 20 people out of every 1,000 people who visit your website will fill out the form to get in touch, right? Out of that 20, or sorry, out of that 2%, 20% of those people will end up purchasing on average. So out of every 1,000 people that visit your website today, you might get on average, right? This is across many industries, big or small, no matter the product or service. On average, 1,000 people visit your website, you should expect roughly 4 customers, right? This is how the basic general math works for every single business, all right? Now let's say 1,000 people visit your website today and 2% fill out the form, as we just said, right? If 20% out of all the 2% that fill out the form become a customer, you have 4 customers. But let's say we're able to double this 2% number into 4%, right? Let's say 4% out of every 1,000 people that visit the website fill out the form and get in touch. And let's say we hold that 20% number the same. We now have 8 customers, 8 customers instead of 4. We've literally 2x'd our revenue, all right? Literally 2x'ing our revenue simply by figuring out how to take our website conversion rate from 2% to 4%. A lot of people say at this point when I give this presentation, but Max, it's not easy. To 2x my conversion rate. Check this out. Using my favorite A/B testing tool called Unbounce, unbounce.com, I'm not an investor, I'm not an affiliate, I don't get commission for recommending them, I'm a big-time customer there, but unbounce.com, using Unbounce, I was able to 2x my client's revenue by simply changing 2 things on their website. I moved their logo bar, you know, a lot of companies that are services, they have a logo bar of companies that have worked with them, right? It was in the middle of the website, middle of the homepage. I moved it to the top, right below the main tagline, right? And then I also changed the button from Get in Touch to Get My Reel. They were a demo reel production company, all right? So I changed those two things, and as you can see, I took their conversion rate to more than double. All right. I literally 2x the amount of people that filled out the form out of the 100 people that visited this page. 3 people filled out the form on the original, original version of the page. But when I moved the logo bar from the bottom to the middle, and when I changed the button, the text on the button from Get in Touch to Get My Reel, now 9 out of roughly 158, but the conversion rate double. And so this is my point. If you can double your conversion rate, you can literally double your revenue. So why is A/B testing an afterthought? The honest answer is I don't know why it's an afterthought. I spend tons of money with Unbounce for all of my clients, and you should be too. So help me help you for showing up today by doing the following. I want you to rebuild your homepage on Unbounce. Again, I'm not affiliated with them. I just think it's the greatest tool and the fastest way to grow your revenue. Rebuild your homepage in Unbounce with multiple different variations and send traffic to the new landing page. So just to show you guys, this is a screenshot literally from Unbounce. This is variation E, this is variation B. You can duplicate a variation and change a tagline, change a button color, change a picture, change anything you want. You have one URL, so you send everyone to that one URL. right? And then Unbounce does the work of splitting the traffic, the amount of people that click on that URL into visiting variant 1, variant 2, variant 3, in this case, case variant E, variant B, right? So rebuild your homepage in Unbounce with multiple variations and send all the traffic to the new page. All right. Then a little pro tip is you can install this tool called Crazy Egg. It's like $30 a month, and you can change one simple thing on your existing site. All right, Crazy Egg is a less expensive way to accomplish the same goal without Unbounce. So if you don't wanna spend $150 a month on Unbounce, Crazy Egg, you can change and manipulate a single thing on your existing website without having to create a brand new landing page. But whether you choose Unbounce or whether you choose Crazy Egg, it is the fastest way to increase your revenue, period, end of story. All right, A/B testing, doubling your website conversion rate is not as hard as you think. You just have to get a little creative, a little clever. You can even ask ChatGPT, take a picture of your landing page, upload it to ChatGPT and say, what is a normal thing that a conversion rate optimization specialist would A/B test here? And again, 2x-ing the leads generated from a landing page or website could literally 2x your revenue. That simple. and this test literally took a week. Like that's how fast it was, literally a week. So you could literally 2X your revenue in a week. That's how marketing works as you look through the whole funnel. All right, number 3, this is my second favorite growth hack of all time, and it's how you can take on your bigger competitors, or as I like to say it, how you can take on Goliath. Let's say you sell a CRM for marketing agencies. Lucky for you, 165,000 people in the United States Google CRM every single month. But if you were to go to Google Ads and bid on the term CRM for marketing agencies, you're gonna be spending upwards of $26 a click. $26. We just learned the average website converts at 2%. So you're gonna be spending thousands of dollars to get someone to fill out the form if you're spending $26 a click. So it's not, feasible for you to bid on the term CRM for marketing agencies if you're a medium to small business that's not venture-backed. So how can you still tap into the demand that Google captures without spending a fortune? The answer is bidding on your competitors. It costs $26 a click to bid on that term CRM for marketing agencies, but it costs half of that to bid on a competitor like Pipedrive, or let's say you're selling running shoes. It costs $1.25 to bid on the term running shoe, but it's only $0.19 to bid on Nike. Conquesting is what this is called in the Google Ads world. Bidding on your competitors' names is one of the best growth hacks of all time. I did this myself to grow my agency before I sold it. My first agency was called Hells Creative. And bidding on the term Facebook Ads Agency was literally $10 cost per click. So at 2%, I'm spending like $200, $300 just to get someone to fill out the form. But our biggest competitor was actually at the time Hawk Media, the gentleman who's speaking next, the founder, I believe Eric Huberman speaking next. And so what we did is we bid on the term Hawk Media and we ran this ad. This is an exact screenshot. Other agencies equal expensive. Hells Creative equals 4x ROI. Back then, we generated a 4x average return on ad spend for our clients. They were spending a ton of money. They, meaning Hawk Media, were spending a ton of money on Facebook ads. And I knew as a marketer that when brands spend a ton of money on Facebook ads, lots of people actually don't wanna click the ad itself. They wanna open up Google and see the Google listings or see some reviews or see other things that Google might populate about the brand name. So I knew that there was a ton of people Googling Hawk Media, and so I started bidding on Hawk Media at $3 a click instead of Facebook ad agency, quote unquote, at $10 a click. And this one ad took my agency from a measly $20,000 a month to more than double at $45,000 a month in just 60 or 90 days. I forget the exact number. This was like 8 or 9 years ago. So forgive me, but this strategy, Bidding on your competitors absolutely 110% works, all right? It prints money for small businesses who are trying to take on their competitors. And one of the cool things that I don't mention on the slide is if someone's Googling your competitor, unless they're looking for a job at that company, they're probably in what we call the lower part of the funnel. They're probably looking at your competitor because they're considering working with your competitor or hiring your competitor or purchasing from your competitor, whatever it might be. And so you're meeting people who are more in demand or who have more of a demand for your product or service than just running Facebook ads or just running LinkedIn ads, hoping that someone who happens to stumble upon your ad in the feed is actually waking up going, you know what? I need your product or service, right? Facebook ads, the best, fastest way to capture existing hot, steaming hot demand. All right. We're going through this pretty fast. I know we started early, but let's jump to number 4. We're gonna get in front of your target customers for just $19. All right, so remember I just mentioned Google Ads is the best way to get in front of people who are actively searching for your product or service and people who are waking up going, I need this, right? But Facebook— sorry, Google Ads could be quite expensive, right? Even at $10 a click or $3 a click, you know, you gotta spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars, right, a month. Well, here's a way to do that for $19 a month, all right? Let's say you sold a CRM for a marketing agency, like we just said, your CRM for marketing agencies. Wouldn't it be nice to know every time an agency was actually in the market for a new CRM without having to give Google thousands of dollars? Well, You can do that with this thing called social listening. I use a tool called Siftin. Again, I'm not affiliated with it. I'm actually a paying customer, $79 a month on their more expensive plan. But what Siftin does is it monitors all of these websites for keywords that you give it, and then it'll send you a Slack message saying, hey, someone just tweeted out, what's the best CRM for marketing agencies? Or someone just posted on Facebook, What is the best PR agency I can work with in the tech industry? So on and so forth, right? So social listening is the way to capture existing demand without, without spending tons of money on Google Ads. And literally $19 a month on Siftin, it'll monitor all of these websites, I believe, except Twitter. That's what I pay like $79 a month for. but it'll monitor all of these websites. That way, when someone says, I'm looking for what you have to sell, all you have to do is see the Slack message and then respond to someone in a comment on Reddit or Hacker News or Product Hunt, or I think it's Y Combinator's news, or Facebook or Upwork or whatever. All you have to do is respond, right? All you need to do is literally listen for people saying, I'm looking for what you're selling. It's one of the best, simplest growth hacks to find customers quickly.
All right.
Now we're coming around to the fifth and final growth hack. This is the greatest growth hack of all time. I believe it because I've built many businesses now on the back of it. All right. And it has to do with CAC, this marketing term called CAC, cost to acquire a customer. What if I told you that you could acquire a customer for negative CAC? Meaning instead of you paying Google or you paying Siftin or you paying Meta or you paying an agency or whoever to go out and acquire that customer, right? So CAC generally is if you spend $10,000 a month on Facebook ads and that's all of your marketing expenses, right? And you acquired 2 clients or 2 customers that month, then your cost to acquire a customer is $5,000, right? You have to spend money to make money. That's totally normal. That's business, right? But what if there was a way to actually acquire customers for negative money, meaning you got a customer and you also got paid? Well, that's right. You actually don't have to spend a penny on marketing if you implement this growth hack, all right? You build, a profitable media business in your niche. So again, sticking with that analogy or that example, let's say you sell a CRM for marketing agencies. What if you built a weekly newsletter where every week you featured one big tip for agencies, how to grow your agency faster, how to close more clients, how to generate more leads, how to hire really good talent. You share one tip. And then in the bottom of that newsletter, you put a very simple ad in a nonchalant way for your CRM, right? Every week people are gonna be getting a tip from you. They're gonna be learning how they can grow their business faster, how they can implement different strategies to increase their profit, increase their revenue, streamline their workflows, get more time back in the day, whatever it is. You are building trust with them every single week with that tip specifically for your target audience.
right?
And then in the middle or the bottom of the newsletter or both, you're putting an ad for the CRM. Naturally, people are gonna be like, oh, this, this company or this person's pretty smart. They know what they're talking about. I trust them. Maybe I should give their product a try. All right. But Max, how do I grow the newsletter? Don't I have to pay to grow the newsletter? Well, yes, but you can spend money to acquire subscribers and you can make your ad money back, the money you spend on ads, in the newsletter with ads alongside the ad for your CRM. All right, and it's very simple math. Let's say the cost to acquire 10,000 subscribers is $30,000. You spend $3 on average to acquire one subscriber. All right, your ad revenue per newsletter could be $1,000. You could sell an ad in your newsletter to other people who also wanna reach the people who are on your email list, to the 10,000 people, you can sell an ad in the newsletter for $1,000. So your revenue is $4,000 a month, right? If you spend $30K in a couple months and then you turn it off and you have 10,000 subscribers, your payback period is 8 months. And if you wanna add a few extra cents each week, right, this $4,000 could go up to $8,000 or $10,000 pretty quickly, all right? And you have not only your revenue from the ad sales that you will break even on in 8 months if you do a weekly newsletter, but you will also have ad spots to promote your own CRM, bringing you negative cost to acquire a customer. All right, some examples of this working are HubSpot. HubSpot bought a newsletter that had millions of its target customers for roughly $80 million called The Hustle. Pilot House is a marketing agency outside of, not Toronto, I think they're in Canada. They specialize in e-com brands. They run marketing for e-com brands and they launched the DTC newsletter as a separate media branded company. The DTC newsletter, and they now have a podcast, does a little over $1 million a year in revenue simply from ads, and it's very profitable. But when they have an unsold ad, which is natural, you can't sell out every ad spot, they promote Pilot House, and that's how they were able to grow from 5 or 10 employees all the way up to 150 employees. It was because they had negative cost to acquire a customer because the DTC newsletter generated enough revenue profitably for them to make some profit on it. And then the unsold inventory went to promoting their agency called Pilot House. Penn Entertainment is another great example of it. All right. Penn Entertainment is a publicly traded company. They bought Barstool Sports because they needed distribution. They needed to get their product, a sports gambling app, in front of an audience.
Right.
That's all marketing is, getting in front of eyeballs and convincing those eyeballs to give you money to buy your product or service or whatever it is. Right. Penn Entertainment didn't have a distribution channel. They did not have the eyeballs that The Hustle had. So HubSpot bought them. Pilot House didn't have the eyeballs of their target customer, so they built it with their newsletter, right? Penn Entertainment didn't have the eyeballs of their target customers, so they bought Barstool. The future of marketing is not a marketing department, it's a media department. We need to think of marketing departments as media departments, and especially if you can get it ad-supported, you can turn your marketing department and your marketing spend, which most people think is like the biggest suck on your budget possible or on your expenses possible, you can turn it into a profit center, not just a revenue-generating center, but a profit center, right? If you still don't believe me that this is the greatest growth hack of all time, I do this. This is how I've built my businesses now. This is the funnel that I run. I run an ad saying, don't be left-brained. Everyone in marketing asks these questions that I've mentioned at the beginning, right? Should I be posting on TikTok? What are the newest tools? And I read Growth Daily every single day, right? Growth Daily is one of my 3 newsletters. This is an old screenshot of a landing page when I have a couple hundred thousand subscribers, but back in the day, we'd run them to a landing page. It said, join 60,000 world-class CEOs and marketers right now. and we will send you a growth marketing tip every single day. The moment they give me their email, I then drop them off on a Typeform where I ask a couple questions. Where are you located? What job title do you have? What company do you work for? What's your biggest marketing strata, uh, struggle at the moment? And then if they are struggling with, let's say SEO, my last question is, we've partnered with Breezy SEO, the most effective and affordable SEO agency on the planet. Are you interested in a free 7-day trial of their SEO services? And if they say, yes, I'm interested, Breezy SEO pays me money, right? So I'm able to recoup the investment that I spend on Facebook ads or Twitter ads. There's actually a Twitter ad to grow the newsletter, but I spend on Facebook and Twitter. You're able to recoup that investment quickly because I took this email and all of the details they gave me about who they are and what their company is and what their budget is and what they're struggling with. And I immediately ask them, are you interested in this product or service? Once they say yes, I sell their information as a lead to someone else. Right. And then Breezy SEO also advertises in my newsletters. And when I have an unsold spot, I promote my own businesses, right? I've been doing this for the last 3 years, investing my own money and recouping the investment back from advertisers. Like Monday.com, Notion, HubSpot. Tony Robbins is one of my biggest advertisers and a lot of small businesses as well who want to reach the marketing max audience. And I have 200,000 daily active subscribers now. Most importantly, not only has the ad business been profitable, but my other businesses have grown like crazy solely using the strategy. I have not had to spend a penny on marketing or PR or advertising elsewhere or influencers because I have my own distribution. I have my own eyeballs. That's why this strategy works so well. All right. And if you're asking what my businesses are that I promote inside of my newsletters, that I literally have a negative cost to acquire a customer on, well, you know those 5 growth hacks that I just mentioned to you guys and that we just walked through? The $5 a day retargeting ads, the A/B testing with Unbounce, the Google Ads lead gen, the Siftin social listening strategy, and the newsletter lead gen strategy, right? These are the 5 growth hacks that you should be implementing today no matter what. Well, my business is that me and my team implement 2 of these for you. My team is currently running Google Ads as a lead gen service and writing weekly newsletters and running Facebook ads to grow the list and selling ads in the newsletters for 60+ businesses actively right now. This is a screenshot of our homepage, but yes, we build your company a revenue-generating newsletter that delivers 10x more qualified leads or MQLs, marketing qualified leads, than any other channel. We do it for large companies like SmartAsset and Serps and Back at You, and then some more niche businesses like Birdie Houses and Scalable and NaviSavvy and Better Bookkeeping, right? No matter the product or service, staying in front of your target audience every single week Building trust with them, building value, right? Earning their trust that when they are ready to buy, they come to you first is the best strategy of all time, especially if you can get your newsletter big enough to sell ads in it because you can recoup the cost it takes to hire my team to do it for you, right? So if you want me and my team to stand up and optimize Google Ads to capture your lowest-hanging fruit demand, or if you want me and my team to write and grow your company's trust-building weekly newsletter, or you want both, you can go ahead and scan this QR code to get in touch with my team and learn more about how we can help you do all of this. Thank you guys so much for listening to me. I'm happy to answer any questions. And if you're maybe not ready to work with my team yet, no problem at all. If you wanna see what my newsletters are all about, every single day I send one marketing tip and some marketing industry news to 200,000+ people. You can scan this big, purple QR code here to sign up completely free, and you can go through that funnel that I just walked you through on the back end of the signup of the newsletter. Thank you so much for having me. Any questions? Yes.
Okay, thank you, Max. That was a masterclass in ways to get more of the ideal people in the door and uncover revenue sitting in your business or that you could bring in. So we're gonna— I'm gonna have, because obviously we've got some time now between now and our next session, after we do Q&A with Max, we've got time left, I'm gonna throw in a bonus session. Max, this is absolutely incredible. I greatly appreciate you sharing it with us. What do you think the big mistake business owners and entrepreneurs are making when it comes to these types of things is?
I think the biggest mistake brands are making is the first growth hack, right? It's this one, the $5 day retargeting. Most people think they can just run an ad or get in front of someone once and and expect them to buy, and that's just not how people buy, right? You need to get in front of people multiple times. And so a couple of these solve that, right? The $5 a day retargeting ad solves that. The newsletter solves that. Even the Google ads, right? That can be a step in getting you closer to the 5th or 10th touchpoint. But I think most people are always like, ooh, how do I get in front of new potential customers once? Not how do I get in front of them multiple times and educate them that they actually need to buy what I'm selling, product or service. I think everyone needs, everyone needs a 5 to 10 touchpoint strategy.
That's awesome. I love that. And there's stuff on there that we're not doing that we will soon be implementing. So, um, greatly appreciate that. Adrian, do we have any comments from chatter?
Hello, ChatterSocial friends. Any of you like to unmike and either say thank you or share a question?
Sure, I will. Hi, my name is Sean. Hey, Adrian, first of all, shout out to you for bringing this amazing content over to Chatter. Thank you so much. Um, this is absolutely amazing. I am just blown away. I mean, this is like just a bunch of power-packed information that was easily digestible, didn't go too much over my head. I understood it. So thank you so much. Um, and just so many things that anybody can just pick up today and just kind of run with and have, like, probably an immediate difference in their business. I have a million and two questions, but I'll only ask one. And really, the question is, is in the subscriber acquisition strategies that you suggested, the first one was, well, you spoke about HubSpot, you know, purchasing a newsletter. And I know you didn't do that personally, perhaps, I'm just kind of curious on what's the strategy behind that? Like, you want to purchase a domain name, you kind of understand how to go about that process, but like if you really want to purchase like a newsletter or, you know, maybe even like a Facebook group, like how do you actually approach that and what are the logistics behind it? And then you talked about acquiring subscribers and, you know, as an effective cost strategy to sell products. So is acquiring subscribers really just about pushing ads and kind of promoting your newsletter, and that way you're gaining more subscribers. So I just wanted to take a deeper dive on those two things.
Yeah, happy to answer both of those. So there's two ways to get attention when it comes to any sort of asset, right? You can either start from scratch like I did, and you could start posting on your social channels. Hey, every week I send a growth marketing tip, or every week I send a tip on fashion or beauty or art or cooking or whatever your niche is, right? I have a newsletter and you should sign up. That is, you know, the kind of easier way to go about it, or in some ways easier because it's less expensive. If you just want to start with a large group, you can buy a newsletter like the Hustle or like HubSpot did. You could buy a Facebook group. I have a friend that bought a Facebook group in the financial services industry. He went on Facebook and he typed in stock trading, and he went to Facebook groups, and he went to all of the admins of all the groups and said, I'm interested in buying your group. Would you ever sell? What's the number you would sell at? And he struck a deal. He bought a group for, I think it was $15,000 or $20,000. And the next day he immediately changed it to group name by his company. And every week he would post freebies inside of the group to get people to book a call with his sales team. And I think he recouped his money back in a couple weeks because he was able to just really start shilling his product or service to that kind of siloed group of people, to that siloed attention pocket, if you will. So it's literally just a matter of going to an influencer, going to a Instagram theme pages, like I'm in the marketing space, marketing agency space. There's a theme page called Agency Problems that has like 50 or 100,000 followers. And the memes are super, super, super niche. But you know, if you've never worked in an ad agency, you would never understand any of the jokes. But if you sell to people that work in advertising agencies, like large advertising agencies, you know, that attention, that those eyeballs might be worth, tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to you depending on the LTV of your product or service. So, anything is an asset and if you're interested in buying a Facebook group or a newsletter, simply just reach out and say, would you ever be interested in selling or joint venturing or partnering in some way, shape, or form? And then yeah, on the other side, if you don't have necessarily the budget to get started with that right away, or if you wanna just start a little bit more organically, you start posting on social and you gotta give people a reason to subscribe. It's not, hey, every week I send a tip, right? You gotta say, Well, right now I'm giving away my 5 best growth marketing hacks, and then every week I'll send you a growth marketing hack. That's what I do, right? Those are all the ads that I run say, you're about to get my 5 best growth marketing hacks. The landing page says, you're about to get my 5 best growth marketing hacks, right? And once you subscribe, I'll have your email, so I'll send you one every week that you can unsubscribe from, right? So you gotta give people something right away to incentivize them to give you their email, and then I have a little automation set that the moment they give me their email, I just send them an email with an ebook with 5 growth hacks. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Does that answer your question?
Exactly.
Okay, awesome. Sounds good.
I love it.
Thank you so much.
You got it.
Thanks, Vishan. I've missed your voice. Oh, Anna Lee, let me bring you up. Any, anyone else want to unmute to at least ask a question or say thank you to Max? He's not probably familiar with ChatterSocial. So let him hear a little couple of voices. So he's curious.
It's Nuala. That was absolutely fabulous. A masterclass.
Thank you.
Thank you, Nuala. Anyone else? All right, then I guess we've got Max. By the way, I'm Adrienne. It's really nice meeting you. Thank you so much for all your information. I really enjoyed it, and, uh, we're excited. I'm excited to— Seth, I'm excited to see what these presentations— like, I'll be able to read them in the book. So really excited to see what all turns out. I think we're all going to be really happy and surprised. But if nobody has any more questions, Max, Thank you so much. You wanna stay on stage? You want— should I let you go? What would you like to do, Max? Should I tuck you away?
Thank you for having me. I feel like that is going to— oh, we got a question.
Oh, go ahead. No. Nuala. Nuala's always, like, a little bit later. Go ahead, Nuala.
I'm sorry.
I'm bouncing about doing other things. Sorry. But I'm listening.
Yeah. I have—
right. So say what you do is free. It's funded, right? Um, so that's kind of hard to sell, right? Um, but you do want growth and you do want to build a community. Maybe, um, you know, maybe, um, paid-for monthly community. Um, well, how would you, how would you kind of use you one of your growth marketing strategies for that. This is free, but we want you to join our community where you will get a whole load of advice from all these experts every week or whatever.
Yeah, I think, I think the fifth strategy, the newsletter growth strategy is the right one because you get people onto the free newsletter. Like I was just answering the other question, you know, offering a free piece of advice or a free weekly newsletter or whatever it might be, um, is an easy way to then say, hey, if you want more, you can pay for it. If you want to unlock the best strategies, you can pay for it. If you want to unlock interviews with the most exclusive people, you can then pay for it. So I think it's, it's like anything else.
Oh, I love that.
You have a free newsletter or a free Instagram or a free whatever, you provide the value, you show that you know what you're talking about, and then people want more naturally, right? It's like, you know, you go to a concert and you're sitting up top and you love the artist, you're sitting in the nosebleeds, and then the artist blows you away. And the next time they come to town, you're like, I'm gonna sit closer because that's gonna be an even better experience. I'm willing to pay more for a better experience that has more value to me, or, or is going to be more memorable, or just a better overall experience. It's the same thing. So I would start that with a newsletter.
I love that. Thank you very much.
Of course.
Thank you, everyone on ChatterSensei.
All right, thank you very much, Max. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks for having me. Enjoy.
Our pleasure. All right, so, um, before— we're gonna slip in a bonus presentation before our next presenter at 2 o'clock Eastern, so I got about 25 minutes. And I'm going to teach you the 5 principles of magical marketing to attract new clients, customers, or prospects like magic. So grab a fresh sheet of paper, you're going to need it. These are the 5 principles that any business can use to attract new clients, customers, or patients like magic. So number 1, the most important principle, and this informs 50% of the success or failure of any marketing that you do, Number 1, the most important factor is who. Write down the word who. Who is your target market? So the more tighter you define who your target market is, the better chance you have of succeeding. So for example, we do a lot of work with professional practices and we have a lot of clients who are financial advisors. And I'll say in my first question in any marketing consultation, which you all can take advantage of at bookwithseph.com, the first question is who is your target market? Who's your ideal client? And a lot of financial advisors will just say baby boomers with money. I'll say that's great, but it's not narrow enough. You don't have enough money to reach every baby boomer with money in your town, and they don't have anything in common. So your marketing message is going to be really generic and have a really low response rate. But if, for example, like, this is an actual client— had a client dentist come into the office, meet with me Who's your ideal patient? Anybody with teeth. Doc, you can't afford to reach everybody with teeth, and not all of them can afford to pay you. And we did a laser-focused deep dive. It took a month to interview his staff, go through his CRM, his database, uh, talk to patients, and figure out who his ideal patient really was. And it turned out, in this particular case for this dentist, his ideal patient was a 45 to 55 year old suburban woman who had got— who was affluent, who had gotten divorced in the last 6 months. She was starting to date again. She was terrified of competing against younger women, but she wanted to do something to improve, make her feel more confident in her appearance, but she didn't want plastic surgery. That is a laser-focused micro-niche target market. It is a very defined list. It is a very small list. And because of that, it was— he was able to easily, affordably dominate that marketplace and become the divorce smile makeover expert in his city. He literally quadrupled his business and cut his work hours to— he was working 7 days a week. He went to working 4 and quadrupled his business because he was only serving these women, this specific target market. And he was no longer taking insurance. He was charging premium prices, cash only. That is the power of narrowing down your target market. So most important factor: who is your target market? The second most important target— important factor, excuse me— who's your target market? Where are you going to find them? So you have to be able to reach them affordably, and you have to be able to reach them where they're hanging out. If you use a fishing analogy, you have to fish where the fish are. So if I wanted 80-year-old arthritic widows. If those were my target market who quilt, right, I would not be running ads on TikTok because they're probably not on TikTok yet. I would— if they've got arthritis and they quilt, my best— and they're over 80— my best target might be an ad in Quilting Magazine, an ad in Arthritis Today magazine, Or you can do what's called a merge purge, and you can rent the lists, the subscriber lists of both magazines in your area, and you can then see who's on each magazine. So if there's a subscriber to Arthritis Today and they also subscribe to Quilter Magazine, they are probably a quilter with arthritis, and there is our micro-defined target market. So Who is our target market? Number 2, where can we afford to reach them? And then 3, what are we going to do that's different? So it doesn't matter if what you physically do is different, but it has to be perceived as different, which can be solved by marketing. So if I am— I'll keep going with my dentist example. 6 months after rebranding as the cosmetic smile makeover king, he, uh, the divorce smile makeover expert— literally every other dentist in town was yelling from the rooftops, we do smile makeovers too, we do cosmetic dentistry too. But it didn't matter because he had planted a flag and claimed ownership of the target market. So what he did— the actual dentistry was the exact same as every other cosmetic dentist in his town, but what was different was both the marketing and the experience we built around it. So if you went and got a cosmetic dentistry, a smile makeover, any other dentist, you drove to the clinic, you had the makeover, you went home. His experience You got picked up at your house in a Rolls-Royce limousine. Your best friend locally had to come over to your house and meet you there. The limo drove you to the office. The office did not look like a dental office. It looked like a med spa. You sat in— he had chairs made. They weren't dental at the end of his dental. They weren't just regular dental chairs. They had massagers built in, so you're getting a little massage. They had mani-pedi extensions put in, so you were getting a mani-pedi while you were getting your teeth done. Getting massaged, they're playing— they're putting aromatherapy, they're playing soft music. Um, your friend is sitting next to you in a chair not getting her teeth done but having the whole rest of the experience, getting the mani-pedi, drinking champagne while you get your teeth done. When your teeth are done, the limo takes you to a high-end women's clothing store where a personal stylist meets you and picks out 3 outfits for you. Then you, your friend, and the outfits get taken to a salon where you get your hair and makeup done. Then you, your friend, the outfits, and your new hair and makeup get taken to a photography studio where you get professional photos taken for the dating sites for your new profiles. Then the limo takes you home. Completely different experience. Same dentistry, same basic dentistry, completely different experience. Which is why he was able to charge twice as much and have a waiting list 3 months long. Because every woman getting divorced knows someone else getting divorced, or shortly after she gets divorced, if she's the first one in her friend circle, eventually somebody else gets divorced and they see her new pictures that she puts all over social media, right? Fancy outfit, hair, makeup, teeth, looking amazing. They want the same thing. So who is your target market? Where can you reach them? What are you going to do that's different?
Why?
Number 4 is why. Why should you do business? Why should they do business with you as opposed to anybody else who does what you do? The answer to that question is called a magical marketing proposition, or as Dan Kennedy calls it, a unique selling proposition. So that's the answer to the question. Why should I do business with you as opposed to anyone else who does what you do, including doing nothing? Because we as entrepreneurs, as business owners, forget that doing nothing is our competition. People have to be disturbed enough to change. If your prospect isn't in enough pain, they will not do anything to change, right? So I was slipping through the channels the other day, uh, trying to find the show I was looking for, and on one of the channels there was a thing that said the name of the show was called My 600-lb Life. And I just said, what the heck is that? And I flipped it on, and it was this reality show following these people around who weighed 600 pounds. And you see their life. And if it was really disturbing, but if you weighed 600 pounds and you're happy about it, you don't have a problem, you don't think there's anything wrong, you're never going to go on a diet, you're not going to get bariatric surgery, you're not going to do anything. You're just going to enjoy being 600 pounds. Now, the people on this show obviously weren't happy about the fact that they were 600 pounds and were trying to do something to change that. And that was the whole show, was documenting their journey. Just like if you watch like The Biggest Loser, um, I don't know if it's still on, but it was on for many seasons where you watch the people, you know, diet and exercise and train and lose weight. So your prospects have to be disturbed enough to change, even if what you do is a good thing. Like marketing, right? We help grow your business. But if you're happy with where your business is at and you have no desire to grow past where you're at right now, you're never gonna call us. You're only gonna call us if there's another level you want to get to. You can be upset about where your business is, you can be happy about where your business is, but you have to want to go higher. Otherwise you would never do any marketing if you didn't want to grow. So why should they do business with you? As opposed to doing nothing. And it can't be because I give good customer service or because I've been in business for 20 years or because I really like my clients, right? They can't tell us apart. So most of you have competition. Whatever it is that you do, you have competition. If you're a financial advisor, there might be 200 other— 200 or 2,000 financial advisors in your county. And if you line up 100 of them in a room and say, who here gives good customer service? They will all raise their hand. Who here loves what they do? They will all raise their hand. Who here believes that they're taking good care of their clients? Everybody will raise their hand. Who here thinks they do a good job? Everybody will raise their hand. No one's ever going to say, I'm terrible, no one should hire me, right? So if you got 100 of what you do— 100 chiropractors, 100 financial advisors, 100 accountants— all saying the same thing, how is your prospect supposed to tell you apart? The answer is they can't. Your marketing has to differentiate you because it can't just be, I'm good at what I do. Good is table stakes. Good is what they expect, right? If you just do everything you're supposed to do, your prospect, your client will never refer you to anyone else because you met their expectations, right? When was the last time you went to a restaurant, the server took care of you that they thought you should have, right? The host sat you down, they took your order, they brought you your food, your food was what you expected, and you left, right? Did you tell anybody about the experience? No. Did you post about it on social media? Did you tell your friends? No, of course not, because that's what was supposed to happen, right? But if they exceed your expectations, if there's surprise, if there's delight, if there's going above and beyond, Then all of a sudden you tell people, because now you have an interruption of expectation in a positive way, which results in testimonials and referrals. So who are you going after? Where are you going to find them? What are you going to do that's different? Why should they do business with you? And then how is the last one. How are you going to communicate What you, what you do that's different and why they should hire you, to who you want to go after, where they are. How are you going to communicate all of that in an automated way and build what's called a marketing system, an automated marketing system that will communicate your message to your marketplace where they are in such a way that they raise their hand and say, yes, I'm interested in that. I want to talk to someone at this company about that. How is how you combine the first 4 together to build an automated perpetual marketing system that fills your calendar or your, uh, with prospective clients who want to talk to you. And they're— they know who you are, they know what you do, they know why you do it, they know what you charge, and they want to talk. So they should be pre-qualified, pre-interested, and predisposed to doing business with you. How is how you fill your calendar or your bank account with people hiring you. So what often is— was what was addressed earlier, I thought, brilliant. I thought Stephen said it brilliantly. He said we got stuck in, as entrepreneurs, as business owners, thinking of all these different things, right? Every— chasing every shiny object. Oh, there's a new network, I got to be on ChatterSocial now, right? I haven't been— I, you know, the last audio platform I was on was Clubhouse. I don't know what happened to Clubhouse. I don't know if they're still around.
I—
Clubhouse took off during COVID and then when you couldn't go anywhere and there were no events anymore and everything was online, and people love the idea of, hey, I get to talk to this guru on chat on, on Clubhouse. I don't know if they're still around. Chatter appears, from what I know. Maybe Chatter has taken over, which is awesome. So I gotta get back. I gotta check out Chatter. So pick— don't get seduced by every shiny object. Pick one target market. This is the rule of one. Pick one target market. Pick one location, one form of media you're going to use to reach them. So you don't need to be everywhere all the time, all at once, right? We're live streaming this to a dozen different places, I think. But who's your target market? Where is one place you can reach them affordably? What are you going to show them that's different? Why should they do business with you? And how are you going to do that? Go after one target market with one message, one offer. Make money helping people and keep doing that until you've helped everybody in that target market that you can reach in that method, and then you can start branching out. Too many times business owners, entrepreneurs come to us and we see they're doing 10% of their effort in 10 different places, right? Oh, I did one Facebook post a month, I did one Twitter, I did one YouTube video, I did one podcast, I did one of everything. Well, which is going to work better? Doing 10% of the work 10 different times in 10 different places, or picking— doing 100% of the work all in one place all the time, right?
I talked—
it's funny, I have marketing coaches, I have marketing consultants who help us, right? Because I don't have the monopoly on good ideas. I want to always learn and stay on the cutting edge, as Stephen said. I wanna learn from people like Max, as we just talked about, and Eric, who's coming up next. And I said, oh, I wanna do this, I got this great idea. And one of those coaches told me, Seth, why are you doing that? Have you finished doing the first thing? Have you finished mining all the gold out of that hill? I said, no. He said, well then you shouldn't be digging another hill. You shouldn't be digging another mine when you haven't finished mining the first one. So we're gonna give you a lot of different ideas today. You've had a bunch already. Some about your mindset and your psychology, some about specific marketing tactics. And we got a whole lot more coming, but I don't want you to get overwhelmed with 8 different— 8 or 9 different sessions. At the end of today, when I take notes, I take notes in 2 different columns. One is what I'm learning, the other side is the action items. And then at the end of the day, I'm going to take my notes and rank them all in order of priority. I'm going to say I'm going to rank them on a spreadsheet, and they each have a different factor, 0 to 10. And I'm going to rank them by ease of implementation— how easy would it be to implement this idea? Speed of implementation— how fast can we do it? Profitability— how much money do we think it can make us, right? Is it— how much work is it going to take? How fast can we get it done? How much money is going to make us? How much is it going to cost us? And each category gets a score, 0 to 10. You total them all up. And then I rank them and I go through, I sort my Excel spreadsheet by— if I have a dozen ideas from today, action items from today, it's now going to sort them and tell me this is the order in which you should do them. I'm going to do one at a time and I'm not going to do item number 2 until I finish item number 1. And that's how you stay organized. And that's how you do one thing really well at a time and not get overwhelmed. Hopefully that makes sense. Any comments or questions about the 5 principles of magical marketing before we bring up Eric in the next 9 minutes?
Wow. Wow. Can you hear me, Seth?
Just make sure you can hear you. I can't see you yet.
Yeah, you don't need to see me. I, I'm blown away. I'm blown away. Especially thank you for the organizational tip. I love that. That is why you're so brilliant. And I'm shouting. See, I told you one day I would shout it out of the mountains, but, you know, we'll just make believe these are mountaintops. To my friends on ChatterSocial, anyone have any questions, thoughts? Got some marketing people in here. Just give it a second to see. I can't tell if someone unclicked. All right, anyone want a mic and say thank you to Seth? I do.
Yay!
I've been here since the beginning. I love your, um, your energy, and I love your matter-of-factness, and I love just that you're such a strong speaker and things like that. And I was serious this morning whenever I said I hope you'll come back or tell us where you're doing it, whether it's here or not, and do the AI podcast thing with more details.
I'm very excited to coordinate you about doing it for all of Chatter.
All right, I love it. And I'm just gonna take one second, Leah, to just say that Chatter Social founder is Nelson Apega. Nelson ran a big room across the hall, and Nelson realized everything that was missing with Chatter Social, and one of it is that it's the video streaming. So it's a live streaming platform too. Honestly, Seth, it's where my family is, many of them. I, you know, I feel I'm at home here and it's just always a lovely place and everyone is a business professional and they are all incredible. So thank you all so, so much.
Awesome.
Well, thank you for introducing me to it. I didn't know about it before you told me, so I can't wait to, after today is over, go, go dive in.
Okay. Um, there's some fun rooms at night. Okay. You can find me at Debate the News.
Now.
Is Eric here? He is. Maybe I'm missing him on my screen. Annalie does have a hand up if you have more time. Yes, of course. Annalie, Annalie from— Annalie, introduce yourself and let Seth know where you are calling from.
I'm calling from Ecuador.
Oh wow.
On my own digital marketing journey, and at the moment I'm really exploring all facets of branding. And the one that I've just been exploring has been positioning in the market, and what you just covered totally crystallized so much of what I've been learning for me. So thank you for for that. And yeah, we'd love to see more of you on, on Chatter. And yeah, it's always so interesting to get— I love the examples you gave because that triggered some ideas for me, not just for myself but also for a charity that I work for because We want to make use of the Google Ads grant, which is notoriously difficult to spend apparently. So I've been looking at our website and how we can make that better before we even try to start using this Google Ads grant. And it's also given me so many ideas because as a charity, Even though we're not a business, we still have to position ourselves in the market. Why support us? Why, why do we give you a better donor experience? And even for corporate donors, why would you want to partner with us as opposed to another charity? So thank you so much for that. It's so useful.
You are very welcome. Thank you for the kind words and the support. We have experience managing Google Ad Grants for nonprofits as well, so I feel your pain. Happy to have a conversation about that if you would like.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Annalee. Appreciate you all the time. So I just want to confirm next. Did I— is Derek with— or do you see our next speaker? And I may be—
I can't see anybody. So in the studio chat, I saw Jill and Mary Beth commenting, but I don't have the ability to see people.
Okay, so sorry about that. So right now I do not see— Uh, Partif had come in early, which is quite lovely. And there's a Derek Presti, but he may have been with—
oh no, Derek isn't a presenter. I know. Oh, I can't see the people. That'd be super cool if I could see the people. Um, but I'll call StreamYard.
Who's Derek with?
Derek is a viewer, not a presenter.
Oh, okay, Derek.
Okay, we're waiting for Eric Huberman, who should be here, and then confirmed that he was coming today, so he should be here in the next 3 minutes.
Awesome, awesome.
So I'm thinking to myself, Seth, what actually— if you like, what do you— you've had so many interviews. If I'm correct, did you hit your 4,000 on Sharkpreneur?
No, um, no, we've— Shark, let me— I'll go tell you how many we've had on Shark. I know I've done over 1,000. Um, on Shark. Let me see where we are. Give me 2 seconds to pull that up. Uh, let's see, we are booked until March, and as of right now, I will have conducted 1,268 interviews.
That is incredible, you guys. Isn't that amazing? And Seth is doing— you're what, about 2 a week, Seth?
3.
3 a week. Wow. And you, you really have it down to a science with some great guests. So definitely, guys, Sharkpreneur, find that podcast. And, uh, I produce the Grow Your Business and Grow Your Wealth with the amazing Gary Helt, who is just fabulous. And I know everyone wants to be on Gary's show. And also, I have so much pleasure in producing Whiny Palooza podcast, W-H-I-N-Y P-A-L-U-Z-A. Just so you spell it correctly, with Seth's wife Rebecca Green, which is really an amazing podcast. And it's been nice. We've had— oh, I see Eric's here. We've had Katya and we've had, um, we've had, uh, Marcella on the stage. Okay, we're gonna add Eric to the stage right now. You guys share the room, please. Eric is amazing. And let me just unhighlight Seth. And there we go.
Awesome. All right, thank you everybody. Thank you, Eric. Now, um, thank you, Max, our previous speaker. We're going to zoom out and look at marketing And a, from a higher level, how to scale smarter, not just faster. Um, our next speaker is my friend Eric Huberman. Eric is the founder of Hawk Media and has led thousands of growth campaigns for brands you recognize. He understands what it takes to build marketing that actually supports the business instead of overwhelming it. Hawk Media is one of the fastest growing marketing agencies in the country, um, and one of the bigger ones. Um, he's talking today to us about scaling smarter, building sustainable growth in modern marketing. He's gonna show you how to build a marketing engine. Like we talked about that 5-step, that marketing platform, that marketing system that performs in the real world and how to use data intelligently to grow without burning out your team. Eric, thank you so much for joining us, my friend.
Of course. Thank you for having me.
My pleasure.
Should I kick it off?
Let's go.
All right. Yeah. So, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. It was Seth mentioned a little background. I built and sold 2 e-commerce agencies and then about 12 years ago, started advising and consulting for a bunch of brands and just saw that the marketing ecosystem's broken. You know, 99% of agencies out there have no idea what they're doing. A few that are any good are really expensive, want long contracts, or just very opaque. And so just thought that it is crazy that there's not a marketing company out there that's the best at what they do, but also easy to work with. And that's what, that was the nascent of Hawk Media. And so now fast forward, we've grown over 6,000 companies successfully. Currently we're running marketing for about 600 brands, a little more, about 250 full-time people. Just got rated the fastest growing company in LA in our 12th year. So a lot of fun things. And so to break it down, we really, after years and years of doing this, we started to identify that there's really a succinct marketing strategy and a way to sort of look at the marketing landscape. That makes it really digestible, easy, et cetera. And we actually wrote a book about it called The Hawk Method. Um, and it's how we analyze all the companies we're going in to work with and over time how we decide where should we be focusing? How do we identify the holes in their marketing strategy and how do we know where to attack? And over time we also then built our AI tool called Hawk AI that's doing this in an automated way that's analyzing about 6,000, 7,000 companies' marketing media and revenue data in real time. And then we're able to plug that an individual company and analyze it and know exactly what's working. And this all goes back to this basic marketing thesis. And what's fun is like the perfect rating we got on the book, which the guy deleted it and it was really, I was bummed cause I didn't screen grab it before he did. But basically he said, I don't get it. This is just modern marketing 101. And the fun thing is that's exactly it. This is modern marketing 101 and it is the basics. But what I see with it is for a CEO, for a marketer to try to just distill things down, like, you know, the KISS methodology, keep it simple, stupid. Uh, I think this is the best way to look at marketing. I think people overcomplicate it and get, you know, lost in the weeds because of how complicated they make it. And so I like to keep things simple. And so when we talk about the HAWK method, we talk about the three pillars of marketing: awareness, nurturing, and trust. Awareness is what you do to let people know you exist. It's advertising, it's PR, it's what most people think of as marketing. And so what we talk about is in awareness, uh, you, you have to have that piece of the, that pillar, that piece of the tripod, because if you're not introducing yourself to new people constantly, you will shrink, you know, your retention will never be 100%, you know, and the simple example of that is people do die and I hate to be morbid about it, but that is the easiest example of like, you're going to lose customers. They're going to move. They're going to change their habits. They're going to change their lifestyle. They're going to change their economic situation, whatever it is, you're going to lose customers. And that's a certainty. So if that's a certainty, then you need to find new customers always just to maintain, let alone grow. And so continuing to bring in new people into the funnel is a necessity of any business. And some people sort of rest on their laurels or wait for word of mouth. People love to brag about, oh, we've done no outbound marketing, no sales. It's just word of mouth. And while that's great, it, because obviously you can save a cost there, you don't really control your destiny then. And I have a great company that we're an investor in called Telly, uh, free televisions. Um, it's, they literally give you a free television and they, it's powered by advertising. So for this group, it's actually a really cool thing. I'd recommend checking it out. Telly, T-E-L-L-Y.com. Um, the great example there, Ilya, the founder also started Pluto TV. He's a brilliant entrepreneur. And when we were talking about a year and a half ago about the business, they ended up at about over a million customers, over a million people on their waitlist to get a TV without any marketing. It was PR and word of mouth. And every time they send someone a TV, 8 people are referred by that. They have an average 8K factor, which is crazy. So they get constant viral inbound. With all of that, he still is running some basic performance marketing to see how he can, what his CAC will be so that when it's time for him to control his own destiny and scale this faster than maybe word of mouth will, he can just turn it on. And so to me, that's, that is that, you know, awareness piece is having a methodology and a scalable methodology that you know that when you're ready to grow, you can turn it on versus just being the victim of however fast people talk about you. And don't get me wrong, again, sometimes that will be fast enough that you can't even keep up. So you're not going to like overdo it and try to like even get more over your skis, but having that done is important. So getting more into awareness, a lot of people have trouble figuring out where to go. So I'd say number one, word of mouth is still the biggest driver of business. Back to Telly, 8 people come in for every one they sell, which is crazy. Like again, that's hyper-viral. That's what they've seen. It's one of the fastest growing companies in the country. Like that is a crazy great business. Um, that's not always the case, but word of mouth is really important. So the best way, and from what I've experienced, to drive word of mouth, there's two. One is to create a very concise way that you explain what you do. You know, we call it the value statement. So not an elevator pitch. No one has 30 seconds. Not a value proposition, not a pitch, but more just like when people ask me what Hawk Media is, we're your outsourced CMO and marketing team. So people immediately go, okay, I understand what you do. You're, you know, fractional CMO. You have this marketing team, you do marketing for people. Got it. Um, usually these days I'll even explain the scale. I'll be like, we're an outsourced CMO and marketing team to over 600 brands currently. And people go, okay, so it's a big company. You're premium cuz you're doing the chief marketing officer work and you've got the team. Like there's a lot that I say right there, but what that does, it's not just about me talking to people. I do have time to give an elevator pitch. I can take minutes usually. To explain someone what we do. The issue is if first off attention span, they might not pay attention to it, but more, even more so when they go to explain it to someone else, you have to give them something really easy to rearticulate so that when they tell someone else about you, they feel really comfortable doing so. And that person receives it well. So it, you know, if I tell someone we're your outsourced CMO marketing team, when they hear, oh yeah, I need help. They hear from another entrepreneur. I need help with marketing. Oh, you should talk to Hawk Media. They're like your outsourced CMO. That makes them feel good. I know how to articulate and pitch you. I'm gonna go tell people about you. People love to be helpful. That's easy. If I didn't articulate it so well and they went, yeah, you should go work with Hawk. They're like a CMO thing with a marketing, like they're like an agency or something. The first time they feel that awkwardness of like, I don't know how to explain that is the last time they go tell someone about me. And so that kills word of mouth. So that's number one with word of mouth. Number two. Is, uh, content. We'll talk a lot about content today, but people don't generally share a product or a service as often unless it's right up the fairway. Like someone's like, I am desperately in need of marketing. They're like, oh, actually I know someone. That can happen. But generally they're not just like out of the blue sharing it, but what they will share is your content. So if I go publish, you know, great ways to build your marketing strategy for the holidays, That a bunch of brands will probably share. They're not gonna share, go work with Hawk Media. They're just gonna share, hey, Hawk put out this thing. They're knowledgeable. You should check out the content they're putting out. And so that also can increase the word of mouth cuz people love to share content with each other. We've all sat on Instagram and sent our friends memes and reels. Same thing goes with business too. People are sharing content and great articles and great pieces. That being said, it has to be great. I see a lot of people talking about replacing their content team with ChatGPT and Sounds like your content is very mediocre. Like it's just not a thing right now. It can be helpful, but the idea that people are replacing all these things with AI is not a thing. As someone that's fully bought into AI, built our own AI tools, invested in AI tools, I'm not anti-AI, but I think people are really over-indexing in it and basically are sacrificing quality for the sake of automation. And that's not gonna work out very well. It's a competitive landscape. You'll lose.
So that's.
The initial part of awareness, then you get into advertising and picking where to run ads is actually not as intuitive as people think it is once you understand it. But in the beginning, people love to say, for example, I'm B2B, I'm gonna advertise on LinkedIn because LinkedIn's a bunch of people in business. And that's not, I mean, everyone, people on Instagram, like I'm on Instagram too. I run a business. Why not reach me on Instagram than LinkedIn? Why do you want to reach me on LinkedIn? And what people are forgetting is you have to reach people within the context of what they're actually using the platform for. Um, the example again here, let's just use LinkedIn. I go on LinkedIn to answer messages and maybe post, but I don't like sit there scrolling aimlessly through the newsfeed. Some people do, but not many. It's a much more lean forward platform, which is why the advertisements traditionally don't work very well. And I'm speaking in hyperbole. I'm sure there's specific examples where an ad has worked. but in a general, you know, scalable basis, LinkedIn also changes their CPMs a little too often that it's really hard to build something predictable and scalable back to like, you want to be able to turn it on when it's right, when you're ready. Now, the best comparison here I have is Meta versus Google. So with Meta, you're basically reaching people at a time when they're just scrolling through reels or newsfeed. There's almost nothing productive people are doing on Meta. They're bored. And so whether it's Instagram or Facebook. You're reaching people when they're bored. You can be very targeted and you can say, hey, we exist. So Meta is my opinion, still the best place to create new demand for a product or service. So you're going to reach people when again, they're totally bored saying, show me something, give me something. I want to see something. And you can serve that up at a time when they have nothing better to do. And so it's a great way to again, create new demand. And why I say create new demand, because if they already have a demand for something, that's really hard to attain. Obtain because there isn't a search bar. You don't know what they're actually into. So if it's something like, I need a DUI attorney, I just got in trouble, Meta is not a great place to advertise for a DUI attorney because like, what are you gonna do, target people that are fans of Mercedes and Jack Daniel's? Like, it's not built for that. It's not built for the timing aspect of it and the answering existing demand. It's built for things that you can impulse buy, that you can create demand for. They can be like, hey, I know you haven't thought about this, but you check this out. That's where Meta comes in. Google answers the other problem, answering existing demand. So again, DUI attorney, I got a DUI, I need an attorney. Perfect. Show up. The other side of that though is it's not great at creating new demand. For example, if I'm searching for running shoes, Nike, Asics, Hoka, like the big brands are going to take most of that traffic and most of that conversion. People might click your ad to check you out because they're doing research, but you're probably going to have a really bad conversion on that when you're a smaller brand. And so when you're answering existing demand of, you know, someone has a need and you have the way to solve that need, Google's really great. But if you're trying to build a brand and you're trying to like reach new customers, create new demand, let them know you even exist, Google's not going to be as good. So thinking through this now, if we get into the other ones, TikTok, I actually think is going to be, continue to be better and better and better than Meta. It's starting to get parity. It's not quite there, but, uh, They just have, they're way behind on the ad product because it's just a newer company, but the way they've educated people to use TikTok, it's way more based on your interest graph than your social graph. Like Meta has always been based on who you follow, who you like, and tried to show you stuff from your friends and who you follow. And then stuff like that. TikTok came out and said, I don't care who follow you follow, who you like. We're just going to show you stuff that you seem to be interested in the moment. It's like, I get tons of snowboard videos, some business and marketing stuff, a lot of standup comedy. Comedy, like these are the kind of things that show up in my TikTok because that's stuff that I've engaged with, not necessarily that I've followed. Um, vice versa, Reels is now trying to do that. And so they're getting closer and closer, but Reels, it's this funny thing where they're still kind of stuck in how Meta was originally built, where TikTok is just native interest graph. They're just about what you're interested in, don't care who you follow. And the example I'll give there is I have around 200,000 TikTok followers. I can post a video that gets like 300 views because if it doesn't serve my following, it's not something based on why they followed me. People don't care. And so that's TikTok. I think it'll continue because of that interest-based graph. People are then way more, they're way more open to receiving random content because that's how it's built out. The idea is like you, uh, it's based on again what you're interested in. So basically your experience on TikTok is seeing content from random accounts constantly. And so when you end up seeing an ad, it's just another random account. Doesn't matter. And so versus on, again, Meta, Facebook, Instagram, you're used to seeing stuff from people you know. And so when you get disrupted with, or interrupted, excuse me, with someone advertising to you, it's a little bit jarring. It's a little different. Obviously still works. It's best advertising platform out there, but I think TikTok has a chance of being better. Snapchat. Really built themselves on sending, you know, one to few messages and being in touch with a small group or individual. And so it's a little too lean forward. That's why advertising struggled. Twitter, same thing. You're not really just scrolling your feed generally. You're, they're trying to change that, but usually it's been used more to like go read specific people's tweets, follow specific people, have communication. So those advertisements are actually just interrupting you and they're annoying. YouTube, same idea. I do think YouTube influencer work works really well. Integrating within the content is great. But mid-roll and pre-roll, that's just annoying. And as annoyed as you are as most people, and I know, again, these all can work, but it's not the best. And so these are all things to think about on the, the, the awareness side. And then you get into nurturing. So awareness, again, we've talked about like, how do I let people know I exist? You know, and some of the things I missed is like, there's also PR. There's a lot of other ways to get out there. Influencer marketing can help. Like there's other ways to reach, but you guys get the idea. Then you get into nurturing. And so the biggest thing I see people miss, especially in e-commerce and anything digital where you can actually track, like I spent this much and I made this much, is the idea of a consideration period or what's called a purchase cycle, a sales cycle. There's a lot of different terms for it. And it's really that time between the, when they become aware you exist to when they actually become a customer. And from what we've seen. for e-commerce specifically, the average sales cycle for a $50 purchase is around 3 weeks, for $100 is around 5 weeks, $200 around 6 weeks, and then it trails off between 2 and 3 months. So let's just say broad strokes, the average sales cycle is a month. What that means is if I spend money today on advertising, I don't see the half-life of the returns of that, meaning half of my returns on that for an entire month. So let's start with the tracking piece of this first. If I spend $10,000 today and then I go look at how much I made today, does that make any sense? Because people love to look at this. Look at my daily ROAS. It's the dumbest thing. It immediately tells me that person doesn't know what they're doing and they're a bad marketer. And most marketers are that way. So what happens is, let's say, let's take it down a notch. Let's say I'm spending $1,000 a day, $30,000 a month. On advertising and I spend it for a little while and I quote, am optimizing it. So I'm convincing myself that I'm doing things to make it better. And then after about a month, my sales cycle, all of a sudden I'm making $5,000 a day. So now I'm still spending $1,000, I'm making $5,000 and it's happening. It looks like I'm making 5 times ROAS. That's acceptable. We're doing great. We keep going. Then I go, I wanna scale this. And this happens all the time. I put a, you know, I take that $1,000 and I move it. I'm feeling bullish, I move it to $5,000. So I 5x my spend. And so I expect, you know, I'm making— spending $1,000, making $5,000. If I spend $5,000, I'll make $25,000, right? Great. I spend $5,000, and over the next week I still make $5,000. So there's no additional returns. I'm making $5,000, $5,000, $5,000. I'm spending $5,000. Like, all I'm doing is wasting from all the data I'm looking at because I forget that it's gonna take the average person a month to convert. And then I see a ramp from 5 to 7 and I go, this isn't working. I'm spending 5 and making 7 now. Like, I'm gonna turn this off. And then I turn it off, I bring it back down to 1,000, and then like 2 weeks later I'm spending 1 and now I'm making 9. I'm like, whew, glad I didn't waste all that money. I'm making 9 now. And then it goes up to 15 and I'm like, whew, there we go. Spending 1, making 15. My ROAS is 1500%. This is amazing. We're crushing it. We're the best marketers ever. And then like a month later, I go back down to 5 and I'm spending 1, I'm making 5, and I can't figure it out. What happened? We didn't change anything. Like, why did we— People forget that it's not all in this fucking Excel vacuum that you just, you know, that things just happen because, you know, oh, well, we must have messed up the ads. And I watch as people start scrambling and trying to make better creative. And get back to that 15x ROAS, that becomes a new benchmark. And what they did was they just looked at the wrong window. So really understand your own sales cycle and look at the window on that. And so this gets into nurturing because then what you do is you figure out all the strategies to get people to convert at a higher rate and convert faster during that. Things like email marketing and SMS. And by the way, content, because people are trying to decide, do I trust you? Do I feel good about this purchase? And frankly, sometimes they just forget. Most people are scrolling through, you know, if you're advertising them on Google or Facebook, they're sitting on the toilet watching stuff. They get up, they leave, they don't remember what they were looking at. So just staying in touch with people and nurturing them can really accelerate that purchase cycle as well as increase that conversion rate and help them come back. And then once they purchase, bringing them back is the most important thing. This we've seen with a lot of brands that have been high flyers that then don't end up succeeding. Because once they hit that lifetime value mark, their projections go out the window. The, the best example of this recently is Casper. You sell these $1,000 mattresses and then their second product was dog beds. Like, that didn't really increase their lifetime value of a customer by much at all. Because even if 100% of people bought those, it would have been like a 10% increase. So you end up with, you know, no ongoing purchases. It is really hard to acquire customers. If you have nothing else to sell to them, no continued outreach, no continued sales motion, you can go run through your money really quick. And so you have to figure out merchandising and that's not necessarily a marketing function, but a lot of times collaborates with it in a big way. And listen, it's really easy to market great products and impossible to market shitty products. So if you're selling one thing and that's it, and there's no repeat purchase, you're gonna have a really hard time. With marketing. Um, and that's a nurturing piece. So between that sales cycle of what do I do when I bring people, uh, I've now made people aware I exist. Now I know that it's gonna take again, an average a month for them to buy from me. What do I do during that period? And then post that period. So I keep 'em coming back. How do I treat them? Even things like customer service, et cetera, that help people want to come back. The last pillar is trust. And by the way, I'm gonna leave about half of this for Q&A. I don't know where I find the Q&A, but I'll, definitely ask you guys to come back in. Um, trust is synonymous with brand, but as an early company, before you've established a great brand, trust comes from third-party validation. What I mean by that is testimonials, reviews, uh, what do you call it, um, endorsement deals, celebrities, uh, influencer marketing, any way you can borrow someone else's trust. And here's a fascinating whittles anecdote about that. Um, trust doesn't necessarily have to be from a trusted source. People are just looking for third-party validation. And there's two fun examples of that. Number one, if you have seen the show How I Met Your Mother— anyway, actually, I should say, if you haven't, it's about the main protagonist Ted is telling his kids in the future how he met their mother. And it's all these stories, cute stories about how he dated. It's always sitcom, uh, and how he's met different girls and da da da. And he has His best friend Barney, who's this wealthy kind of womanizer guy that's, you know, always clever and hitting on girls, et cetera. And Barney's always trying to help Ted meet girls. And so his favorite thing to do is to go up to random girls in the bar when Ted's standing there and go, hey, have you met Ted? And these girls don't know Barney, but this confidence in this, just, hey, have you met Ted? In the show always works. They're like, no, hi Ted. And that strikes up a conversation, breaks the ice. I've talked about this for years. And then about 3 years ago, I ended up at a lunch sitting across from a woman and We're talking, I'm like, so what do you do? And she goes, I'm a showrunner for a show called How I Met Your Mother. Like, oh, I've, we've gotta talk about this. I've talked about this at a lot of marketing as an example of like how you can build trust even without that existing trust. She goes, oh yeah, we used to go after, after set all the time. We'd go to the bars and we'd do that all the time. It works every time. So human nature, you wanna see some third-party validation, go like, can I trust this person? Even if it's from someone else that you don't know who they are. It's this weird human tick and probably somewhere in our biology it came true of like just watching how other people interact. That, and another fun example of this that I do this all the time when I speak in person publicly, uh, I do a show of hands, who here shops on Amazon? And I'm sure a lot of you listening, most of you shop on Amazon. And then I go show of hands, who here reads the reviews on products they're looking to buy, or at least looks at what the rating is or the review? Most hands go up. Most people check out the reviews. Okay, cool. And show of hands, who here believes that most of the reviews on Amazon are bots and bullshit? Most of the hands go up. And then I just pause for a second. It's like, and I'm guilty of it too. It's like, isn't that funny? We know that the reviews on Amazon are BS. We know that they don't mean much, and yet we still like to look at them and make it— makes us feel more comfortable making a purchase. So it's, it's a funny thing. Trust in that sense. And, you know, you don't want to abuse that, but the idea is you can build trust in a way that's, you know, people do it all the time. I watch, there's a lot of marketing companies that'll build like a publication to like give them their own awards and stuff. Now, if you get caught just completely lying, there goes your trust for the rest of the business. So like, you don't want to completely abuse this, but there are ways to understand that like having a testimonial from someone, they don't necessarily need to be the CEO of Amazon. To actually be a great, you know, credible customer. People just want to see that other people have had a good time with you. And so that's an important thing to keep in mind is not to— you don't need to over-index it. The other piece of trust, again, this kind of plays in a brand, is your brand is basically what you deliver consistently over time, good and bad. So examples of this, I always ask people, shout out your, uh, a brand that is the worst at customer service. 'And it is always 100% of the time either a cell company, Verizon, AT&T, or a cable company, you know, Spectrum, Cox, Comcast. Always, every crowd, it's one of those.' And it's amazing that they've all built a brand for customer service that's horrible. And then I go, 'Okay, what's a great customer service company?' And I generally hear Nordstrom's or, uh, Zappos. And so Zappos is my favorite example. Obviously it's not as relevant these days. I'm sure they're doing fine, but they're not You know, there was a day where they're, you know, the darling of the tech industry, but with Zappos, they leaned into customer service and the stories of like spending 8, 12 hours on phone with a customer. They wrote a book called Delivering Happiness, uh, all about, you know, giving great customer service. And so what becomes interesting about this is two things. I'll start with confirmation bias. Now that I believe Zappos has great customer service and Verizon has horrible, if I call Zappos. And I have a bad experience, my thought goes to, eh, that person must have had a bad day. Zappos is great. If I have a good customer service experience, you go, see, they're amazing, love these guys. Vice versa, if I call Verizon, I have a bad customer service experience, I go, see, Verizon are a bunch of assholes, they're horrible customer service, I hate these guys. But if I call them and I have a good customer service experience, I go, wow, at least they have one. And that is the brilliance and the craziness of confirmation bias. We see it in politics, We see it in a lot of things. People are so stuck on their existing beliefs, they will shape the world around them in the exact same situation differently based on those. And so that, knowing that there's a way to play with that, and that's what Zappos did. They wrote a book called Delivering Happiness talking about how great they are at customer service. And so now when someone calls them, if they have a bad experience, they give them the benefit of the doubt. Versus if they have a good experience, it just reinforces that. And I'm sure that also has pushed their culture to emphasize customer service, and they actually are good at customer service. But it's amazing how much further that can go with your brand when you talk about it and deliver it. Another good example is like McDonald's. You know, they're fast, consistent, you know what they taste like, and synonymous with the obesity epidemic in the United States too. So you sometimes can't control all of this stuff. Other people will do it for you and you'll start to err that way. But leaning into the things that you find important, that you think your customers will find important, and being that. For Hawk Media, our mission is be the best at what we do and easy to work with. Super simple. We know that what matters to us and our customers is that we're really good at marketing, but we're also flexible, cost-effective, easy, nimble, all these things. Like that is what's important to our customers. We emphasize that's what we care about, but we also manage to that too, because you can't just talk about it and not do it. Cause what will happen there is you'll attract people that that is important to them. You won't deliver on it for long enough. And as much as you talk about it, they'll be like, oh, now you're just full of shit. And so you have to deliver on it to an extent, but you also get some grace if you push that. And so as you over time deliver consistently, if you're really good, again, McDonald's delivers unhealthy food. So you get obesity. Verizon delivers horrible customer service. That's what they get known for. They also might, I don't, I actually don't know this, but say Verizon has the best coverage maybe. So they get known for that too. So then again, people might hit a dead spot for Verizon and be like, wow, I guess this is, we're remote. Verizon doesn't even have service here. Like there's a lot of things that go into that consistency that help you and hurt you. And so being really intentional with how you build that brand. Over time is really a huge part of how people will convert because back to this being a part of trust, whether it's third-party validation or building a known brand, 75% of people won't buy from a company they don't inherently trust. The 25% are what are called the early adopters. They're people that'll take a chance, take a risk. And those, it isn't a type, it is a type of person in some ways, but it also depends on the vertical. It depends on what you're selling. There's different people that will take risks on different types of products. So there's that piece of people, and that's really what you're going for with that initial awareness because you wanna convert those early adopters to then create word of mouth to build that trust to then get everyone else to come. So these are the ways you think about building this. So back to give a quick synopsis. Awareness. How do you let people know your company exists? How do you just get out there and let them know? And you need to be constantly introducing yourself to new people to maintain, let alone grow. Then once they know you exist, you've got nurturing. What do you do to convert that? What do you do to bring them back? What do you do to stay in front of them while they're considering buying? And what do you do to keep them coming back once they buy to keep a customer and keep frankly getting more share of wallet? And then the last piece, trust or brand. How do you build that trust so that all those people that are not early adopters continue to buy? And so with that, that's the HAWK method. Anyone wants to shoot me an email, it's just e@hawkmedia.com.
Poc—
has an E on the end— and I'm happy to shoot you a digital copy. And yeah, happy to open it to questions. Seth, if you're here—
yes, I am here.
Awesome. Uh, so thank you so much, Eric, for sharing. That was absolutely a fire hose of awesome, awesome content. So what do you see are some of the biggest mistakes that we as business owners are making when it comes to trying to get those 3 things?
Yeah, it really goes back. I think the biggest is that it is really scary to wait the sales cycle when you're scaling marketing. And I think just knowing that, knowing that there's a return, like a time period return is critical because yeah, it's really easy to get scared, get gun-shy and spend for a couple of weeks and go, you know, we, I've heard it with, I run into so many founders that are like, yeah, we haven't been able to scale our ad spend. I'm like, why? They're like, well, the moment we ramp it up, our ROAS goes through the floor. I'm like. 'Cause you're looking at it on a daily or weekly basis. Your sales cycle is not a week. Like it is that simple, but just, it's, this isn't intuitive to everybody. And when you're managing a business and you're worried about losing money and you're being precious with cash, which you should be, this can be something really scary to step into. So still incrementally stepping into it, you know, depending on how aggressive the business wants to be anywhere with between growing your budget 20% month over month or growing or doubling it. Like I'd say that's the range. Any less than that and you've got, you know, sort of a, the problem is you've got less than a standard deviation of like, you don't even know if that was just seasonality or it actually scaled it. I would spend at least 20% more to really see the bump, but 20 to 100%, somewhere in there, depending on how aggressive you wanna get, and then give it time to play out.
I think it's really fascinating because I've interviewed over in, in done over, let's say, I think we're at 1,200 interviews. Of Sharkpreneur, at least 100 of them, if not more, have been other marketing agency owners, thought leaders in the space. We have some of those, some, some different folks talking about different areas of marketing today, obviously. And not a single person has ever mentioned to me ROAS in combination with time in terms of, wait a second, even we've even told clients that, hey, you can't just double your ad spend overnight and expect your numbers to stay consistent. But we never mentioned, I never thought to mention, you need to think about how long your sales cycle is. And if you really wanted to chart the difference, you got to do it over time. I think that is really, really fascinating and something I haven't heard anybody else talk about.
And it's to me, because we've been in it for so long, it's, you know, it's crazy to me. It's just like, this is a very obvious thing. When you talk to people, everyone's like, of course I have a sales cycle. It's like, do you think everyone sees your ad and buys instantly? Like, No, definitely not. But when we talk about marketing, nobody looks at that number.
You have grown a very, very large agency. Um, can you tell me a little bit about some of the lessons you've learned managing a large, diverse, and sometimes remote workforce?
Yep. Um, number one, I think people can work remote at senior levels and once they've been trained. But bringing onboarding people remote is incredibly difficult compared to in-person. And we've really started to err towards in-person. Um, most of our, almost all new hires now are in-person in office in LA. Um, and we saw the difference, like prior to COVID, we were not remote. Post-COVID, we, you know, we have slowly gotten back into it. The difference in productivity and training and ability to ramp people up in office is just night and day. Um, the biggest thing I think I've learned Managing a ton of people is building the culture I wanna build. I tend to be, you know, really try to emphasize integrity, taking care of people. I want this to be a place people love to work. We've had a bunch of awards over the years for that kind of stuff. And you realize it when you start to placate to what everyone else wants and try to be the play, like, you know, you put, if you put the mission as I want this to be a place that everyone wants to work. There's two ways to go about that. One is listen to all the complaints, listen to all the problems, listen to everything that people don't like, and try to change the organization to make it so they like it. Or two, be who you are and be really transparent about who you are as an organization, and then find the people that want that. And I learned that lesson, you know, took a while, but I learned that lesson later, and it has been one of the one of the best lessons I learned is be very clear on what you're trying to build as the founder, and then be really articulate about that in your interviews. When you're onboarding people, scare them off, tell them all the reasons they're gonna hate it here. And then people that make it through that, you end up— and I'm dealing with this now in a good way— you end up with a team of people that it's like, there's no misconception. And they— and now you can be you, you can build the thing you want to build, everyone's loving it. Because they knew what they were getting into versus people that are like, wait, I didn't sign up for this. Like, why am I doing this? Why? You know, this company's example, like we are pushing hard. There's a reason we've grown fast. It doesn't happen on accident. And that, you know, I always articulate when we're interviewing, like, I want to, you know, I want to dominate the marketing world. I want to really— marketing domination. Love it. Um, but, uh, we— I want to dominate the marketing world is what I tell people all the time. And And when I say that, I'm like, and now if you're gonna join this team, understand that that doesn't, again, it doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't happen working normally. It's like, that means we're gonna be pushing and grinding and working our asses off. But if that's exciting to you, it's gonna be great. If it's not, you're gonna be miserable here. You're gonna burn out. You're gonna hate it. Don't come here. And so we've had many people walk out of interviews, renege on their acceptance, like within a week, like do all sorts of stuff. That my team would come to me when we really got focused on this. My team at first was like, we might wanna tone this down a little bit. Like we've had, this was like 6 months ago, I think we had 7 people in 2 months renege on their acceptance, be like, nevermind, which we had never had before. And I thought about it for a second. I'm like, well, no, that's perfect because those people would've hated it here anyways. And we got 'em out before they even started. Like, don't get me wrong, it's annoying. We gotta go find people, but we're take, we're, you know, it's the age old Cliché, hire slow, fire fast. Our way of hiring slow now is scare everyone off until someone actually is nuts enough to want to take this job, and then they're stoked. And so why that all fits in, why I think that's important, is there's two reasons businesses fail. Number one, they get underwater financially. They get underwater on debt. They raise too much money and can't ever pay it back. They do things that financially they can't overcome. That's number one. So how do you avoid that? Don't do that. Don't take, you know, don't overvalue your company in a hype cycle, raise too much money that you'll never pay back. We've seen that happen, you know, with a bunch of companies recently in the past few years. So don't do that. Don't take on a bunch of debt that you can't service. Like, you know, nominal debt, fine. Using debt as a tool, fine, but don't get, you know, too aggressive here. And then on the, uh, the other side, so that's one reason they fail. Financial. The other one, leadership gives up. That's it. Because if you're not underwater financially and leadership sticks with it, you can shrink, you can contract. But if you're— if your leadership really sticks with it, your business will always survive because the only other reason it'll fail is financially. So if that's the case, that the survival of my business is based on two simple things— don't get underwater financially and don't burn out, basically— then I'm going to build the company that I want to build, that I want to run, that I enjoy, 'Cause then we can go forever and, and I'm just gonna be careful about my finances and I'm gonna be careful about, uh, personal retention. And so I've learned to really build the thing I have fun, to really hire, take things off my plate I really don't want to do. You know, if I need a break, take it. If I want a vacation, take it. Like this is a marathon, not a sprint to me. And so again, to building the team, I'm gonna build the team I want to work with that I'm excited about, that I, I can sleep at night because I know I've got a great team around me. Like, that's super important to me. And thankfully I have that. So I've been able to run through a wall.
Awesome. On a personal note, I believe you were just at Art Basel. Tell us a little bit about that experience.
Yeah. So I've gone a few years. This is the funny thing about what I do because we're working with so many— well, we're a middle market company, so many entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, it turns out that going to this circuit of like the next hype event actually opens a lot of doors on the marketing side. And so while from an ego perspective, I have a really hard time reconciling that I should be at like F1 or Super Bowl or Art Basel or whatever it is, every time I go, I'm like, yeah, that was incredibly productive use of my— an incredibly productive use of my time to meet great founders, great entrepreneurs, investors, et cetera. So Yeah, I went to Art Basel, which kicked off with an event called Chapter X that was for post-exited founders. So I've sold a couple of companies too, but I got to be in a room of 200, 250 founders that have all sold businesses and are building their next thing. So very high quality room. Spent 3 days with them. And then, I mean, every day was another thing and another dinner and another event and another family office event and a tech event and an entrepreneur event. I went to one art gallery for 5 minutes to meet up with someone because we're planning a marketing summit down in Mexico with them. And he said, hey, I'm at this art gallery, want to just come and see me in person? It was like 2 blocks from where I was, so I went. I generally try to like, because I'm there, because I do go almost every year, I try to go like spend, you know, a few hours looking at art just because I'm there for a week. But this trip was that— I think the past 8 days was the most packed I've been in a very long time. And side note, like, I don't drink, I don't party. Uh, thankfully had plenty of fun in my 20s and kind of over it, but I was still out till 3:00 AM every night, up again at like 9:00 AM, you know, 8:00, 9:00 AM to go do something else. So like you're talking maybe 4 to 5 hours of solid sleep a night, which I need my 7 or 8. So full transparency, I am tired today. I also have a daughter with that decided to— I took her to a movie yesterday, got home yesterday morning. Stayed, you know, slept 4 hours Saturday night, jumped on an early flight to get home to my family, took her to the movie theater, and she immediately threw up on me and has the flu. So, uh, stayed up all night with her now. So tired. But that's the thing is like you can sense the energy even though I would love to go to bed right now because this stuff's fun and like I've built it in a way that I enjoy it. So like, I, you know, power through today. I'll, I'm probably ducking out at like 5 today instead and gonna get some rest, but it's that the stuff like Art Basel where I, again, I probably met people that, and I'm really good about follow-up. I'll probably have 30, 40 follow-up meetings from that week with companies that we can partner with, that we can build with, et cetera. I've already got 5 or 6 done as of yesterday. So it's a really, this is something I try to teach our sales team. Like once you get good at converting and turning these fun things into business, And understand that like everyone there is out and about because they wanna build something and they, they're living and there's energy. And that to be to that note, like Miami has a lot of energy right now. There's also a lot of hustlers and people trying to just get any money outta you. That's just part of the ethos, but it's a lot of energy. Then you can have a lot of fun leading a company like this because like every year, one of the most productive things I do is I go to the south of France to Cannes Lions, the marketing conference, and I run around in France for a week, which is, again, feels like the douchiest thing I could possibly do, but it is super productive. So like my calendar is blocked every year in June to go to France, like, and it's a great thing to do. And I would, it's unlikely I won't do that ever as long as I'm running this company. And so things like that, that become a really fun part and a perk of running something like this, I think is also important.
That is awesome. Well, we greatly appreciate you spending some time with us. I know Obviously you could have begged off and said you needed to sleep. I would have totally understood that as a dad of young kids. Adrian, before we let Eric go, any questions on chatter?
And first of all, Eric, I want to say hello. My name is in Business Girls Summit, so I'm Adrian Barker. Nice to meet you. I love everything you said and I love the Zappos story. And it made me think that that's also like our own personal brand too. You know, how we get back to someone, how we answer the phone, how we respond. Absolutely love that. So thank you so much. And we are live on Chatter Social, which is a fairly new app that is out there, a live streaming visual community-based app. And so we have many people in the room actually. Let's see, does anyone have any questions or would you like to unmute and at least thank Eric? Hi, Adrienne, it's Leah.
Hi, Eric.
It's Leah Rosenberry. I'm the head of community here on Chatter. I have to say, my, one of my favorite parts of everything you said was that you take those 2 weeks and do work, but you're having way more fun than that, it seems like.
Oh, to be clear, it's not a 2 weeks.
So I love that.
I always— It is a good portion. We talk about work-life harmony. Like, how do I make, like, I do 2 heli snowboarding trips a year with entrepreneurs and get business out of it, but go jump out of a helicopter on a snowboard. Like, I'm big on finding fun things to do with entrepreneurs.
I love that so much. Great, great attitude and a great way to live.
Thank you.
And does anyone else have anything that they want to add, share, say thank you? Well, I have a big thank you. That was great, Eric. Thank you. Thank you for communicating with me so nicely. I really appreciate that. I don't take that lightly, and I don't— let me just look at the chatter box here.
All right.
No, great room. Just getting a lot of messages how great the room is and your, uh, your presentation was fantastic. How can people, how can they follow you? Are we just Googling Hawk Media?
Yeah, you can go hawkmedia.com or I'm just @erikuberman on every social. I'm pretty reachable. Um, I'd say the only time I don't respond to messages is when it's just some random pitch that's obviously automated. Other than that, I'm a pretty accessible one. Reasonable about getting back.
Wait, I can't have my AI agent call you? I can't have my—
that's not a thing for me.
All right, thank you, Eric. We greatly appreciate your time. Thank you, my friend.
Yeah, thank you guys. Talk soon.
All right, uh, let's see here. I believe, uh, Partiv is here early, so we're just gonna start early if that's okay with you, Mr. Shaw. Okay, um, before we start, I want to say thank you for giving us your very valuable time on your birthday. Happy birthday! Well, we're not all— I'm not gonna get everybody to sing to you, but happy birthday, and thank you for spending some of it with us. We're gonna talk today, we're gonna talk now. Partiv is, uh, one of my nearest and dearest friends. And the founder and president of eLaunchers. He's internationally recognized for his work in direct response marketing, CRM optimization, and lifecycle campaigns. For more than two decades, he has helped small business and professional practices build high-converting follow-up systems that turn leads into long-term profitable clients. Today he's going to be sharing with you how to design a marketing and follow-up system that never leaks revenue, how to personalize your outreach at scale, and how to use automation to deepen relationships rather than weaken them Partiv, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you very much, and I'm grateful to be here, Seth. Uh, my intro that you read, do you think you can read it again with an Indian accent?
Yes, I can. Our next speaker today is Partiv Shah.
All right, wait, what happened to Seth?
Um, I'm still here, I'm just off camera so everyone can focus on you.
Okay then. So there are a couple of ways we can do it. I'm supposed to be— first of all, I'm here. I'm your 3 o'clock speaker. I'm a little early.
Yes, we've been ahead of schedule, which is rare.
So I was thinking, how about we just do some improv or a random Q&A and just get to know each other with the audience and let them just ask some questions before I get into my presentation. Do you think it's okay if we can spend 5-10 minutes where people who already know me, have heard of me, bought one of my books, are doing something, um, and they want to ask me a question, ask a question about Kennedy, ask a question about accept, or—
I, I think that's a great idea. However, I'm gonna say let's do it after your presentation when they will have more questions.
Okay then.
All right, so there are— I can— there is a way for me to share my screen, right?
Yes, there is a— the thing that has a monitor with a plus sign in the middle of it is your share button.
Okay.
Doesn't it feel great to be providing tech support to an Indian.
I wasn't gonna say anything.
Okay, share screen.
You're allowed to say that. I am.
I know, I know, I can get away with everything. Am I sharing my screen or not yet?
Not yet.
Okay, share screen.
Then you gotta pick the window.
Entire screen.
Allow.
Am I now sharing my screen?
Yes, but now we're seeing your web browser. Okay, I want you to go to PowerPoint, go to slideshow, make it a slideshow, and then share that—
share that window.
Okay, I'll show you my—
okay, folks, my PowerPoint.
Now can you see my PowerPoint presentation?
Yes, perfect.
Awesome.
So I would like to play this video, but I don't know how to. Can you play this little video?
We can't play it for you because it's your PowerPoint on your desktop. Hit play, we'll see what— oh, it didn't— nothing happened. Um, you could hit play there and we'll see if it shares the sound.
Okay, does it share a sound or no?
No.
Fine.
So we are going to skip that part. If you guys want to watch a little 1-2 minute fun video about me, go to www.meetparthiv.com. Okay, it's a— it has about a couple of minute introduction of bunch of people saying good things about me. But if you keep letting the video play beyond like first 1 minute 50 seconds, it gets into a heartwarming story, a case study of what I did during COVID to help one clinic. And we did it several dozen times during COVID So I'm really proud of that story. So Enjoy the show.
Awesome.
Okay, so the topic that was assigned to me by Seth and the webinar god, this Business Kama Sutra: Building Relationships That Convert to Revenue. I have a large, deep presentation that I am willing to share. If you want to interrupt me, ask questions, and make me start talking tech, you can do that. Just Seth will either drive me somewhere else, or you guys can just go ahead and ask questions and I will skip the rest of it. If you want to talk to me one-on-one about either technology, web, data, graphic, strategy, concept, all of it, I am here. X marks the spot on 15th August 2025. And 15th August is the Indian Independence Day. So 15th August of every year, I gather with my gang and we have a celebration of success and declaration of independence. And I always remind myself of the X. Seth, you know the X, right? The Tukoma Club X Award. All right, Seth, can you hear me? And, uh, are you still going to stay on stage with me, or am I just—
I can hear you. Um, I'm not sure which X you're referring to, and if you were—
if we're supposed to be looking at your screen right now, you're not I'm sharing my PowerPoint.
Why is it not sharing?
You hit a different button.
Okay, so I'm supposed to go and share my screen again. Thank you. So if I am not sharing a screen, please tell me that you cannot see anything because that's a problem. All right. I am now going to go back in my PowerPoint. And I said, this is what we— now can you guys see my screen?
Yes.
Great.
Instant. And, and, and, uh, uh, Seth, please stay with me because I cannot see what you guys can see.
Okay, got it.
All right, thank you. And I wouldn't know if you can stop hearing me, so once in a while just keep, uh, keep talking to Okay, awesome. All right, so the X marks the spot. This is the X I'm talking about, the Two Comma Club X Award. Uh, Seth, people in your audience, are they familiar with ClickFunnels and Russell Brunson and Two Comma Club and Two Comma Club X and all?
Let's just— well, there's a lot of people also streaming this on ChatterSocial, so let's assume they're not.
Can you introduce me and Russell and, uh, the 2 Comma Club thingy? I'm kind of shy talking about me.
Sure. So, um, Dan Kennedy and Russell Brunson are two of the modern godfathers of direct response marketing. Russell Brunson is the founder of ClickFunnels, which is the largest, fastest-growing software-as-a-service startup in history. Which went from $0 to $100 million in 3 years, and which Partiv and I are both developers on. And the Two Comma Club Award is very, very rare and given away— given— it's like a platinum record given to entrepreneurs who have driven over $10 million in revenue through one single marketing funnel, which Partiv has received.
But these are my two 2 comma Club Awards. You can see the 8 on my— behind me, right? And what about the X Award that's behind me? You want to talk about the X?
Why don't you talk about it?
Let me talk about it.
Fine.
X is what you get if you can make $10 million from one funnel. Now look, here's the problem. No, not a problem. Here's what I found to be true. A funnel is an income-producing asset. It will make you money. A funnel will make you more money when it behaves like the human that you are, but you will make most money when you begin behaving like your funnel. Today I'm going to talk about— let's see, share screen again. I want to share my entire screen and bring you back to PowerPoint. Seth, can you see my screen and am I back on PowerPoint?
Yes and yes.
All right.
So I am a man on one mission, and that mission involves you. We are here to grow your brand. I want to show you how we grow so you can grow and keep growth going. Right. This is me and my wife Deepa, and we are posing with my 2 Comma Club X, the $10 million, um, trophy that was, uh, received in 2024. Um, I took my lifetime of work. I'm a business growth strategist. Um, I built a system and method for developing a business growth strategy that is less likely Succeed or fail. We filed the patent, got the patent, got a second patent on it, and now I'm willing to share that intellectual property with anyone who is interested in reading all about it. So let's talk about agriculture versus horticulture. Seth, have you ever been to a farm, Seth, or no? No, I did spend a long time You know what, you know what this is? This is a rice farm. You know how rice farm works?
No.
You flood the field with water, and then there is rows of grains, and then every grain takes as much water it needs to grow the plant. It becomes a rice plant, and the rest of the water goes to make the ground fertile. This is how a branding campaign works. This is a vegetable garden. When you don't have enough money to spend on marketing, if you're looking to cut back on budget, you go from agriculture to horticulture, you go from branding to direct response marketing. I'm not a branding guy. I'm a direct response marketing guy. I do direct mail marketing. So unlike some of the people that we met today, especially Mr. Hawk, the speaker before me, brilliant guy, but I don't do what you do. I don't do Google, Facebook, SEO, PPC, etc. If someone wants it, I just refer them out percent. Okay, here's what I do. I wrote a book called— by the way, all— do you see all the books that are, that are behind me?
Yes.
Okay, I wrote them all. I wrote 37 books. I even have a program called Direct Response Books. I'll talk about that in a minute.
