142. Budgeting Your Marketing With Bosco Anthony

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You know the other part about this conversation? It's not just a channel, it's where the audience hangs out. So I'll give you a great example. Builders. If we were advertising to builders, I would pick meta over LinkedIn. And here's why. More builders are more engaged on Meta than LinkedIn. Sometimes I'll message a builder on LinkedIn and Meta just to see how they're doing. And typically I'll get a response first on meta, then LinkedIn.

Welcome to Professional Builders Secrets, the podcast for building company owners wanting to grow safely and securely. Will, I'm your host, Will Blunt, and today I'm joined by Bosco Anthony, the Chief Brand Officer at Global Revgen.

Bosco, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me. Will, it's been a while, but we're here now.

Yeah, you are the Chief Brand Officer.

At Global Revgen, but you're also the former host of Professional Builder's Secrets. So very privileged to have you on.

Oh, it's come full circle, my man. I'm actually really thrilled to be here and it's so weird being on the other side of the interview side of things where I actually have to answer questions for a change.

Quite funny I was looking at before, I think you were host for 84 episodes and it feels like I've been doing this for a lifetime and I haven't got anywhere near 84 episodes yet. So.

Yep, it's, I think it's addicting, I think after a while. But, you know, I definitely fondly miss the, the times that I've had with you guys and, you know, hanging out with, with a lot of the common faces on the podcast. But it's, it's so great to see how much it's grown over the last few years and to see some of your episodes as well. You're just absolutely smashing it.

Well, thanks, Bosco, but you're very much still a part of the Family speaking at our Professional Builders Summit two years running and also involved in our rewards program. So very much excited to have you on and glad to have you a part of the ecosystem still.

Cheers, mate.

Cool. So do you want to kick start.

By just giving everyone a bit of a background that's not familiar with who you are, how you got into the advertising industry?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to date myself. I was in the industry when we used to call it Internet marketing about 20 years ago, which is a very long time. And I got into this space, you know, started off in sales and then moved into online marketing. And I used to run affiliate programs. And for anyone who doesn't know what an affiliate program is, we used to advertise through partnerships, through databases and lists, and do email marketing. And then I moved into the agency world. I owned and operated an agency out of Vancouver, Canada, before I moved to Australia, sold the agency and came to Australia and worked for a few agencies here. And my journey sort of took me through three paths. Speaking, storytelling and strategy, which is where my core focuses are. And I have really focused on bringing brand stories to life. That's really what I do. And I think my time at APB doing the podcast was one of those moments where I was asked to bring the APB story to life through the podcast.

Yeah, very good. Quite a similar background to me, actually, in terms of the affiliate marketing and being back in the old Internet marketing days. I do remember those.

Look, they used to call it Internet marketing, and then that evolved to digital marketing, and now I think we've gone full circle and just call it marketing. So that's really where the evolution is. And I'm sure with the introduction of AI, we'll have some other sexy names for it, but at the end of the day, I think it's all about creating influence.

Yeah, very good. Well, do you want to just give a brief overview of Global Revgen, where you're currently at?

Yeah. So Global Revgen has been in business for about 15 years, and we are a trusted, fully integrated marketing agency collectively. So we work across both national international brands and campaigns, and we're across all the different facets, everything from digital asset creation, content, creative copywriting, but we actually carved our teeth in digital advertising and performance media. We, we started off in the education sector. We currently are engaged with 70% of the universities in Australia, and then that moved to a global, you know, brand, and we started to work with a lot of the emerging sectors. So we actually got into the residential construction space a few years ago. Have taken off. We launched a, a new sort of world's first technology around AI shaping intelligence when it comes to putting creatives in the advertising space. And that really took off in the last few years. So our, our value proposition is data driven marketing.

Yeah, Very interested to dive into that a bit more. But for the, the builders listening out there, basically, if you need leads so that you can grow your business, Global Revgen is going to help you out.

Yeah. In a very intelligent way.

Yes, absolutely. So let's get into the meats and the bones of digital advertising then marketing, whatever we want to call it. What are the most important things to consider when planning an advertising strategy for residential builders?

It's a great question. I think before you do anything, you need to understand what is your objective and what is the brief that you're trying to accomplish. I think this is where a lot of people overcomplicate it. And I think, you know, being in the space, we have to really simplify what those objectives are because what we have learned about advertising is that consumers are at different levels of the marketing funnel. Some are yet to be aware of your brand, some need to consider the brand, some are actually ready to convert and take action, while others could be advocates of your brand and have nothing to do with your direct impact of the sales funnel. So the problem with a lot of entities is that they try to combine all these objectives into one core campaign. And that's really where I would, I would say, you know, it's really important to simplify it and keep it simple. So that's the first thing that you. I would recommend that we need to consider the next thing. I would probably look at, and I can say this confidently now because we actually have a product that does this, but it's really understanding what your top creatives are telling you about advertising. Now, you know, if I go to a build and I say, look, you have two choices. The first is to spend a lot of money and then optimize and recraft your campaigns based on the lessons you've learned. And in some cases you're burning that advertising spend. Or the second option is to work on the intelligence we can give you before you spend your first advertising dollar. Most people will go with that option. So I think market intelligence is something that's really important and we now have the ability to provide that through Global Revgen. But once you understand those two areas and objectives and the stages of the marketing funnel, the next step really would be going through a media plan, understanding the channels, the strategy, the budgets, the duration and then typically your benchmarks of what you're trying to accomplish. What we have learned, for example, in Australia is that the demographic isn't necessarily a large one. You know, Australia has a smaller population in comparison to the US and if you're a builder that's really specialized in a certain geographical region, it's less about the quantity and it's really more focused on the quality of fleets.

Yeah. And I think all builders would deal with that in some respect in terms of being restricted with their market sizes, which can make advertising more challenging.

Yeah, absolutely, you're right. And, you know, it's not about a. It's not about sometimes a national approach. It could even be a local approach. It could also be that you have different buckets of users. There's some people that are considering moving. Let's say if we use, you know, the state of Queensland, you might have other states that, you know, you have people moving to the state of Queensland, you may have the immigration market, you may have people that already own a home and they're looking to upscale, you may have people that are getting into the home space. So, you know, all of these different demand entities come in different market buckets. And the challenge that you have with most builders is if you're speaking to all of these buckets with one message, you tend to miss out on the actual quality of those leads and the timing.

Just wanted to go back to some. Something you touched on a moment ago around market analysis and intelligence, rather, and understanding what type of creatives you can use in advertising to get the best results without spending a lot of money yourself. Just. Just to clarify, for builders out there, listening, creatives refer to images, videos, Right. They're using your ads, correct?

Yeah. So creatives could be animation, it could be banners, it could be imagery, it could be photography, it could be videos. There are different formats with the platforms. In Instagram, you have things like stories, TikTok, you have reels. But essentially any sort of digital creative, whether it's static or animated or movement, those are the types of things that you also want to understand that the science behind that before you invest a whole lot of money into it.

Because traditionally you'd have to just test a whole bunch of stuff, Right. And then see what works, and that can really soak up your budget.

Yeah. So post Covid, a lot of media agencies were wanting clients to spend more money, and we went in the different direction. So we spent about $3 million in grant money and built this amazing world's first technology where we could Empower a builder to really not not invest, but invest the right way. Right. So we are all for sophisticated, creative, sophisticated websites, sophisticated photography. I'm a big fan of storytelling. But you need to know what's working in marketing. You need to know what to put out there because if you don't then you're going to spend all this money only to find out, you know, 500,000 or a million dollars later in advertising that it wasn't the right creative. So what we have done is we've eliminated the guesswork through our intelligence reports because our AI technology can scan through the market and not only tell you what the top performing ads are, we can tell you all the creative elements within a ad. So I know, you know, let's use the residential home building for example. I know in Australia which room in a house is the most pop popular room when it comes to the top performing ads. I know what are the skin tonalities and the, the people that should go into an ad and the quantity of people. I know what position has the highest performing optimal view rate when it comes to the, the house. You know, I can tell you what a hero image should look like in, in a creative. All of that data has been, you know, pulled out and extracted by AI for different countries. New Zealand, Canada, uk And we can see that the data is very different in different perspectives for different countries. But we're also learning new things like you know, builders have to start getting ready for a new look to a consumer. Immigration is going to play a big role in some countries like Australia or in, in the US you're going to have multiple, multiple cultures that you're, you're dealing with or if you go to Canada, you know, it's such a diverse group of buyers and that one size fits all for marketing doesn't work anymore.

Yeah, I mean that sounds like really powerful information that you can get which you didn't have access to before. Like to your point though, how do you do you fall into the trap of making assumptions around just because this is the best performing asset, it's going to perform well for my company.

Yeah. So, so what the data does, it tells you three narratives. It tells you what's working in market, it tells you what isn't being tested in market and it tells you what the opportunities that you need to split, test or create in market. Right. So when it comes to data, the other side of data is if you're spending too much time following every single data point, you know the, the home builders reports might give you 30 or 40 different elements. Now, if you bake 40 elements into one photograph, you're going to have, you know, what we call food poisoning or heartburn in the advertising industry, right? So essentially what you need to do is you need to split test, you need to try different things. But I'll give you a great example, right? So in Australia in the university sector, Caucasians were very favored in the split testing of hero images because students made the fabric of an advertising cycle. So as an analyst, I was like, okay, let me try multicultural looks and see how well they perform. And what I found was that in certain countries, those multicultural looks outperformed the Caucasian look. And so I dug a little deeper and I went, hang on a minute, is AI telling me that, you know, we should favor one skin tonality over the other? But when we dug deeper, what we found was that the universities didn't invest in international talent. So the top performing ads came from a Caucasian look, not because they didn't want to test the multicultural looks, but because they were limited to the creatives that they had. So I think that's the beauty about this type of data is it not only tells you what you should be working on, but it should also tell you about areas that you could explore. And one of the biggest opportunities in the residential space in a lot of our tier one countries, like, you know, Canada and the US is preparing for a multicultural look.

Interesting. I think you've kind of answered this already, but I'll ask it anyway for builders out there that have a restricted budget. You know, say they've got $2,000, a $4,000 a month to spend on digital advertising. How can they get the biggest bang for their buck?

So that's a great question. And I think the, the first thing we need to understand is who owns the market space. So I'll give you a great example. In Australia, 97% of the market share of advertising dollars was dominated by seven building companies. And out of those seven, only three were custom home builders. So what that tells you is that there were seven building companies that literally monopolized the advertising spending. Right? So the first thing you need to do in that scenario is you're never going to win on volume, and most builders won't win on advertising volume. So you have to look at things differently. So the first thing you need to do is Blue Ocean. Strategize the approach on other platforms. If everyone is on Meta, I'd be looking at display. I'd be looking at the other platforms as well, not just Meta. I'd look at search as well, because at the end of the day you're trying to capitalize where there's a blue ocean as opposed to the red ocean, which has a lot of competition. The second thing is you're never going to win on duration or ad spend. So you have to look at split testing, various messaging, call to actions. You're playing the quality game, not the quantity game. The other part about this is even though the monopoly of advertising comes from those seven top performers, most of them have a one size fits all marketing. So if you start to geographically target different audience sets, or start looking at postal targeting, postal code targeting, you're going to start to get different types of results. Results, but also sophisticated looks still do really well in the residential industry for almost every country out there. So when it comes to getting the best bang for your buck, it's really understanding the different layers of where your demand is and having different types of ads to target those ads. Now the other part about all of this is what we call a retargeting strategy, which is when you start to go back to those people that have seen your ads and they might be at the top of the funnel or in the middle of the funnel, at the end of the funnel and, and have more ads going to those people so that they can see the repetitiveness in different formats that then creates that consideration and that conversion phase of marketing where eventually they'll come to you as well. So there's different ways of doing this, but the biggest way is not to set and forget your campaigns. You have to optimize your campaigns often. And a lot of agencies don't do that.

What would you say to the other builders out there who have been advertising for a while and they've got maybe a bigger budget, 10, 20, $30,000 a month and they're looking to just improve their results, improve those, the conversions from those results.

Well, there's different things you need to look at, right? I think you have to look at your metrics and you've got to see if your current advertising is delivering on metrics as well. So, you know, I'm going to give you a very unorthodox and unconventional response to this, to this question, because a lot of people would say, oh, look at your reach and look at your impressions and look at your call to action conversions. I'm going to give you some terminologies that most people don't talk about. First thing I look at is image fatigue and saturation. So what does that mean? Is that is your creative, your photography Your video, is it being overviewed, is it being seen so much that people aren't responding to it? I look at conversions on a landing page or a website because that tells me the economics of scale. If my conversion is above the industry standard, and usually the industry standard is between 1 to 4%, it's doing really well. If it's under 1%, it's not doing so well. I would also then look at the split testing and what are the insights telling me about the different things that I'm testing? I'd look at geographical zoning and targeting, but the most important thing I would look at is what is the offering that you're having and are people responding to that offering. So if you've got an ebook or a cheat sheet or a giveaway, is that one size fits all work for every single person that's landing on your landing page? Should you have a live chat, should you have a click to call phone number, should you have the ability for people to put in inquiries, should you be qualifying those people to see if they're the right demographics? Right. So the biggest mistake you can ever make is assume that everyone's going to follow one type of call to action on a landing page.

Yeah. And I guess what you're saying there is, in order to discover all that stuff you're talking about, you need to run little micro tests and everything to figure it out.

Correct will correct. And look, what we're hearing on the front lines, because we have campaigns in market and we're working with builders, is that the challenge isn't necessarily the advertising or getting the leads. The challenge is the quality of those leads and the timing of those leads. Right. And so it's really important to understand, you know, when your, your important periods are. When I was a host of the, the podcast, I learned something called construction slots. And, and so understanding the timing of when you need to fill up your construction slots, how far out do you need to plan for those things? There's a lot of different considerations. So, you know, it goes beyond media marketing or advertising. It's really understanding the nuances of your business and then building a strategy that's customized specifically for your business.

That's a great point. Actually, a lot of builders, they'll start working with an agency of some sort and the agency will turn on the ads. And obviously if they follow best practice from a conversion perspective on a landing page, etc. Leads will flow in. But most of the time the challenge they run into is they feel like these leads are tire kickers or they're wasting their time, they're not high quality. So what can you do to try and get better quality leads?

Yeah. So look, I think for me it's understanding where the audience is in their journey. Right. I think that's some of the biggest advice that I can give people is really understanding your core audience and understanding, understanding what stage that particular person is on. Right. So there are different demands and drivers for different sense of, of people. So I'm currently right now on my second property, moving to my third. I'm in what you call an investment market. So for me, when I'm making a buying decision, I need to have a conversation with someone. I need to understand costings before I can move to a sales process. Now, someone who's getting into this for the first time might have a lot of questions. Right. The other thing is some people have budgets based on equity and cash flow. So if someone has, let's say, a value of 500,000, but you're a builder that only operates with bills that are over a million, then that person's not your qualified person. So the key here is to not only have different entry points and exit points, but the key here is to qualify them when they land on your landing page or also qualify them in the copywriting on that initial ad. Right. So you know, if you're selling a sophisticated luxury home, you want to make sure that you're saying that this is a luxury custom home build on your ad, not on your landing page. Right. Because everyone might be looking for different things. I've got investors that only want to buy or build townhouses and that's all they're looking for. So if that's the case, then that ad should reflect on that particular area. So the three ways you could qualify an audience is in your copywriting and imagery in your landing page and your qualification forms.

Yeah, that's great advice. And one problem you can run into if you, I guess, a lot of get a lot of low quality leads because you haven't done what you say in terms of qualifying them with copywriting and imagery and everything like that. You're basically telling Facebook and other platforms that that's the type of lead you want and therefore it'll keep delivering the ads to those people.

Yeah. I don't know if people know this, but platforms like Meta now, they already are using AI, so they like, if you use the strategy of Advantage plus, it's already spinning out creatives and ads based on the placement of whether the user is on a cell phone, iPad or desktop. So what ends up happening is it will continue to spit those same ads to people expecting the same results. Right. So it's so important to qualify in your ad copy right away because you're educating your, your AI intelligence to study better patterns and human behavior as opposed the cookie cutter templates.

Yeah, I love that advice. So a builder comes to you and they're in a bit of a tight squeeze. They need leads right now, they need results right now. A lot of what we're talking about here is a longer term strategy around optimization, testing, et cetera. What, what kind of advice would you give them?

Yeah, so look, the first thing we like to do is we get a brief and understand what stages of the marketing funnel they're trying to fill up. Is it the, you know, awareness phase? Is it the consideration, is it the conversion model? And we like to test it because a builder might say, I need leads, but chances are no one knows anything about them. Right. So the first thing I like to do is I'd like to actually do a litmus test to see if these guys are a known brand and they're actually getting traction. The second thing I like to do is I like to pair up my channels based on the marketing funnels. So, for example, TikTok videos are great for brand awareness. They're not necessarily the first platform I'd go for for conversion. Same with print and media. Like, you know, there's certain billboards. Think of a billboard, right? A billboard. I recently ran into a lawyer that ran a billboard close to where I live and I went to that lawyer and I said, hey, you're doing so well digitally, why are you paying for this billboard? And he goes, look, to be honest with you, I picked this billboard because it's on a traffic intersection where most people see this billboard every time they stop on their way home from work. Not because I'm trying to convert them, but because I'm trying to remind them of who I am.

Right.

And so that was an interesting concept for me, is that you have to have different avenues of marketing for different intentions. So your intention might be legion, but we may have to start with building an awareness first because no one knows who you are in that specific area. So for me, when a builder comes to me in a bind, in a tight spot, the first thing we need to do is we actually need to have a plan where we are actually making sure that people recognize the brand, they understand the brand. We have to go through a hygiene phase. We need to make sure that where the traffic is landing is actually Converting and leading to results. Some people's websites haven't been updated in years. Some people's landing pages need a lot of love. Right. So you want to think about this analogy. Advertising is the person at the, at the front of the house bringing people into your house. But the minute they get into the house, it's a showroom, and you have to look after the showroom. If the showroom does not get a lot of love, you're going to lose a lot of traffic. So the challenge is it's not really the problem of creating traffic or advertising. It's really what you do when the traffic comes into the showroom.

Yeah, that's a nice metaphor to use.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, what you're saying is there's no quick fix. You can't just turn on a tap and get quality leads and start filling up your construction slots tomorrow. Marketing's an ongoing journey which you need to be investing in all the time.

You're absolutely right, Will. So what we have learned is that most platforms take about two to four weeks to go through a learning phase. If you ever start an ad with Meta or Google, you'll hear the word. The ads are in learning phase because that's the algorithm, understanding the logic of your audience with what you're trying to spit up. But the sweet spot is typically about three to six to 12 months. I have builders today that have a presence specifically for search engine optimization. And so they run ads so that they rank higher on the search engines and that's something that they have to do to maintain their brand presence. But there's so many different intentions when it comes to advertising. So really, you know, the best step to start off is to work with, with a group like us or any other marketing provider that can really understand your intentions and your objectives and then really customize and cater something to you. Now, can you get quick results? Absolutely, you could. However, it really comes down to the stage in the lifecycle of that consumer. You know, I may be in the market for another house today. Six months from now, I may not be.

Yeah, it's a great point in terms of like working with a marketing partner as well, really vetting them to make sure they understand the residential construction industry, because any cookie cutter marketing agency out there could turn on ads and get you leads and everything like that. But it's quite unique. The sales cycle, the way you need to warm leads up, and the geographical restrictions as well. So, like, I mean, you've demonstrated today that you've got a great knowledge about that Bosco, but Not every agency does.

Yeah. Look, the best qualifying question for any builder out there that's looking to work with a marketing partner is, tell me a little bit about your optimization and advertising package process. And if you find line items that say ad setup, ad reporting and ad, you know, ad advertising deployment, those are just steps in a marketing process. What I'm looking for is what exactly is that agency doing to do split testing? What is that agency looking at doing as far as market intelligence? What are they doing when there's, you know, creative fatigue? How are they going to work with me when the data tells me that my performance isn't the greatest? You know, those are the elements that I'm looking for is. Is the ability to slow down sometimes, because a lot of builders want to rush to get results, and sometimes you've got to slow down before you can ramp or scale up, too.

Yeah, yeah, Great advice. Just slipping back on the billboard example you gave about the lawyers. 1. Builders essentially have their own billboards. They've got their. Their sites, their work sites, and they've also got their cars, their vehicles as well. Using signage like that in your local area can be a great way just to keep that awareness up. Right?

Absolutely. You know, and this is coming from a digital advertiser. It was only when I was being an APB host interviewing successful builders that APB had that I realized the value of signage. You know, there was a builder in the US that got most of his business from referrals and from guerilla marketing, and the placement and the quality of those billboards were just amazing. And, you know, 10 years ago, I would have gone. Now everything's moving towards the digital world. But you cannot underestimate the value of human connection. And human connection can come through so many different formats. So I'm a big believer of having an integrated marketing approach, not just a digital or physical marketing approach. And an integrated marketing approach allows you to use different levers. Because you think about marketing like all the different spokes in a bicycle wheel. You require all the different spokes for. For the world to go around.

It's a good time to ask this then. How do builders figure out what channels they should advertise on and where. Where they should spend their budget?

Yeah. So look, you know, every country, believe it or not, every country has different platforms and has different. So, for example, if you live in Vietnam, their Facebook version of a social platform is called Zalo. In Japan, it's called Lime. In China, you have Baidu, Duyen, Weibo. And the reason why we Know, this is because we do a lot of international marketing. So if we use, you know, the North American crowd or the UK or Canada or New Zealand or the APAC region, you typically have your metas and your searches, which is where most of the competition is hanging out. But you have other platforms like display advertising, YouTube, Snapchat or TikTok. You also have platforms that are, you know, email based or email advertising through these primary platforms. And then you have things like, you know, meta, Instagram and then you have, you know, your influencers as well. But then you have a retargeting approach. So there's typically about four or five platforms at each stage of the marketing consideration. And so there's different platforms for different objectives. And then the retargeting strategy really brings people from one part of the bucket to the other to finally the conversion phase. And that's really where you can really do, do more. But the best way is really to talk to people like us. I can safely say I'm a nerd and I can say that I can spend not only a lot of time talking to builders about the advertising industry, but I've also spent a lot of time being an ambassador of app to really understand the value of timing, construction, slots, pre planning and just also understanding the, you know, the key elements like a WIPA calculator and how important that is when you're, when you're planning your marketing budget too.

How do you then?

I mean, you've spoken about the optimal situation being a multi channel approach where you can invest in multiple channels, get, you know, depending on the stage of the funnel and everything like that. But if you are limited with budget, could you just spread yourself too thin by going into too many channels?

Or you could, yes you could. And also, you know, the other part about this conversation is not just a channel, it's where the audience hangs out. So I'll give you a great example. Builders. If we were advertising to builders, I would pick meta over LinkedIn. And here's why. More builders are more engaged on Meta than LinkedIn. Sometimes I'll message a builder on LinkedIn and Meta just to see how they're doing. And typically I'll get a response first on meta, then LinkedIn. And so that might change six months from now. It might be a seasonal thing but you know, the audiences hang out in different parts and also it also depends on age ranges. You'll find them very younger audience on TikTok or Snapchat. You won't necessarily find your ideal audience who's in that 30 to 50 range. That's a homeowner on those platforms. So I think there are some safe bets. And you know, if we look at Australia or New Zealand, Meta and search are probably the two foundational platforms for advertising. But as I say this, I also know that the world is changing so rapidly that tomorrow we'll have another platform that no one's ever heard of because that's the world we live in. It.

Yeah, that's exactly right. I don't know when this will go live, but Google just released, I think in the United States the AI portion of their search, which basically gives you the responses right in search rather than sending you to a website, which is a huge change for SEO.

But anyway, it's going to be a completely different change right now. So I was one of the be there users that was informed of the changes and I could see the differences of placement and Google favorite its AI results over organic results, which basically means the whole foundation of everything we tell people about how to optimize a website will change.

Yeah, anyway, that's a lot.

That's a whole different episode.

We don't want to get too distracted with that.

Talk to me about your testing process.

You've mentioned it a couple of times. But how do you go about testing ad creative and performance and all this kind of stuff to make sure that you're getting good results?

Yeah, look, that's a really good question. So I think when it comes to split testing, first of all, split testing empowers data driven results and eliminates the human bias. Right? So you could invest all your marketing on a flashy website, an ebook, a CRM video, photo content, all of that stuff. And that could mean absolutely nothing if you aren't getting the right conversions or the quality of leads. So an effective marketing person will really focus on split testing things as often as possible and then go really scale up when it comes to creatives and everything else that goes with it. So most agencies won't tell you this because they to try thrive on that set and forget scenario. With grg. One of the things that we love to do is we love to look at different core areas that you can split test. So some of the key things that you can split test is geographical targeting and audience targeting. The other thing you can split test is messaging and copywriting. You can split test different call to actions. You can split test landing pages and where they land. Some might be a long tail website, some might be a very short tail. You can split video creators versus static images. So I'll Give you a great example, just because we just finished this campaign and I'm going to use a marathon example here. Right. So we ran a Quant plus report for Brisbane based marathon and what they learned from that report is that the runners that go to marathons are runners that love two things. They love competitiveness, competitiveness of running and they love communities. Right. So we were like, okay, let's split test ads around these two key themes, you know, the competition and the community. So we ran similar videos in December. We created the, you know, I went through multiple different trails, got mosquito bitten in the summer, don't advise it. And we ran these 30 second commercials. One really focused on the core competition, the music, the backdrop, everything was about intensity and we had Brisbane in the backdrop and the second one was around the community feeling. Now what was interesting was that both ads worked and outperformed every other ad we've ever done before, but they worked at different levels. So the intensity ad did so well for people that had never been to the marathon. So when we were targeting Sydney runners, when we were targeting Melbourne runners, they were really driven by the Brisbane backdrop, they were driven by the competitive competition, the intensity. And that converted a lot of registrations for that market. And the community ad did really well for the existing runners that were existing clients. So what does that tell you about split testing? We had two creatives that worked for two different markets. We just had the intelligence to try both.

Yeah, interesting. Just to clarify split testing, just dumb it down a little bit and just give an overview of exactly what it is.

Yeah, so for anyone that doesn't understand split testing, it's when you are testing, testing multiple ad variants on the same platform. So you could have different elements where one ad speaks to one message or the other. You could have one ad speaks to a different call to action or different theme. So you're running typically two to three ads at the same time on the same platform, targeting different groups of the same group with the same budget and you're trying to understand which ad will outperform the other.

Yeah, perfect. So basically in the example you gave, you were testing to see which one may work better in the end they both work better, worked well in their own ways. With the idea being that at some point you would choose a winning variation and continue investing in that one. Maybe then you could test something else with that.

Well, you worked in marketing before, you get it.

Couple of years. Couple of years. Okay, so based on you're running split tests, you're doing all this stuff, but how do you determine results. When you're talking to builders about their advertising campaigns, what are the metrics that they need to, to check on?

Great question. Yeah. So for me, I'm not only just looking at, you know, how far my ads going and you know, how many people have seen the ad. They call this terminology reach or impressions. I'm looking at things like click through rates. So a click through rate is how effective is that ad? I'm looking at engagement rates on the landing page. When they land on the landing page, how long are they on the website? I'm looking at heat maps to see if, you know, people are actually scrolling and reading the content. You know, here's a statistic that most people won't tell you. In today's day and age, our attention span has decreased so much that many people do not scroll and scroll all the way down to a whole landing page. Most of the time they will decide in the first 30 seconds whether they're going to read your content just based on that front fold off a website. So I'm looking at metrics that are not necessarily the most logical metrics. I'm looking at things that most other people aren't looking for. I'm looking at where the eyeballs go going. I'm looking at how well are they responding to the ads, the offerings. I'm looking at, you know, is your offering strong enough? In some cases, you know, we'd see ads where we're like, you need to put a live chat button. Because most of the inquiries coming in are questions, you know, and if that's the case, then you probably want to respond to those questions in real time as opposed to waiting 24 to 48 hours to respond to those questions. So there's different behaviors that we're looking for. And when it comes to metrics, the platform gives you all the safe metrics. How many people called you, how many people responded to your ads? But when you start to look at human behavior, you start to optimize for better results.

Yeah, interesting. I guess all those things that you're looking at from a technical perspective for how you drive results and how you improve campaigns from a builder's perspective, I mean, they only really care about leads, right. They don't care about all those other metrics that you're talking about.

Well, you know, and I would challenge that because now builders are starting to get, get ready for a different type of future. Right. So I'll give you a great example. We have a builder that actually was part of the elite program and one of the things we found out was that, you know, we're looking at the Australia Quant plus report and it was talking about different types of tonalities and skin tonalities and different demographics. And the builder said, I really resonate with this because five years ago or 10 years ago, most of my clients were strictly Australian or Caucasian descent. Now I'm having a lot of immigrants coming in as part of my inquiries, but they have to speak English for me to work with them because it'd be really hard for me to, to work with them otherwise. And so he's already preparing to have different types of testimonials. He's, he's now going to, you know, families that have come from India and Asia and Africa and he's going to have that as part of his collateral because he wants to create a migrant friendly business because his community has changed quite a bit in his postal geographical code. Six, ten years ago we may not have paid attention to these things, but now the builders are getting even more sophisticated because the market is changing and it's even becoming more sophisticated as well.

So talk to me about the future, Bosco. What are some trends that will impact the way builders are advertising and marketing and what do they need to prepare?

It's funny because I've had a few builders actually not attend the summit, but they watched my keynote that I gave last year on the Gold Coast. One of the builders actually was in Adelaide and they reached out to me recently. They're like, oh, we really found your, your, your insights interesting, but I've got a bubble that I want to burst. The first bubble I want to burst is that the future isn't the future. The future is already here in the sense that these trends that I'm about to talk about or have already hit the market. So the first trend that we need to be ready for and be prepared for is the technology uplift in how we communicate and advertise. Obviously Google's moving towards becoming a dominant media publisher. It's going to change the landscape of advertising. We about talk, talk briefly about the SEO going to change drastically. But AI is embedded into our culture and you know, one of the takeaways that I talked to the builders about last year is that a workforce not using AI will be replaced by a workforce using AI. We're seeing AI in pretty much everything, copywriting, creative, you know, today even with our intelligence reports, it's powered by AI. So, you know, I'm not here to say that AI is going to take jobs, but it's going to definitely empower builders to do more. And I'm already hearing more and more builders now using AI in lines of work. The next thing that's a big trend that you'll start to see is MetaQuest 3 and Apple Vision Pro. They're sold out right now, but there is a high rate of adoption for these two utilities which allow for us to see things in virtual reality. And if you ever go to an OPSM or shop, you'll see Spectacles by Ray Bans that have been powered up with meta. So you'll hear the word spatial computing, which basically means you have a computer in front of your eyes. Eyes. And so what, what's that going to do for builders? It's going to change how they present content. We're already seeing builders right now doing showrooms in virtual reality. We're already seeing builders that are in other parts of the world that are using virtual reality headsets to sell those potential homes. And the infrastructure, the architecture, as well as the home design in their homes, we already have with Vision Pro, builders able to work out of a work site in immersive reality. I wouldn't recommend that if it's allowing you to move because you may fall into a hole, but that's different. Safety conversation. But immersive reality is going to take, take off, and it already is. So I would say, you know, the three most possible trends that aren't now just possible, but are current would be an immersive reality, artificial intelligence. And I would say the third one would be robotics. We're already seeing robotics when it comes to speeds for building homes, paint jobs, carpentry, etc. So these are three areas that I would say that are really going to change how things are going to be, you know, looking for the construction landscape as a whole. But to sum this up, I would say we're moving from artificial intelligence to actual human intelligence because anyone using these trends will become even more empowered human beings.

Yeah, really some really cool and exciting things happening right there in terms of AI and new technology. And to your point, it's not about being frightened or scared that that's going to take your job, but you need to be aware of it. You need to be on top of, have your finger on the pulse, basically these new things coming out.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and look, it's, it's, it can be scary, but if you eliminate the human fears and you're curious, curiosity is the best feeling in the world today. And you know, I think APB is a, is a leader when it comes to Feeding curiosity. You know, I've talked to so many builders out there that have said to me, I'm a successful builder because I'm knowledgeable and knowledge is power. And so the advice that I give to any builder out there listening to this episode is that, you know, empower yourself, be curious, don't be fearful, and more importantly, ask people questions. Because when you have that knowledge and you decide to empower yourself, it is a very, very strong place to be in.

Well, it's interesting you mentioned before about the. The migrant conversation around a different language. ChatGPT just released GPT4O, I think it was yesterday, and one of the videos I was, I was in a bit of a. An X vortex or Twitter vortex, if people aren't familiar with the name change. The other night, watching some of the videos of how GPT4O is being used, and one example is it can translate in real time and actually playback. So you could speak in English and say, can you please translate this into Spanish? Like as I'm talking? And it was like, bang, straight on like that. Like, it's pretty amazing, some of these technologies coming through.

Yeah, look, I don't know if I should be saying this, but I actually saw a video of Russ speaking French and it took me a while to realize that it was the AI doing the French work, but I actually saw that and I was like, look, we're in a different realm right now where anything is possible. But look, it's a very, you know, like anything, AI, robotics technology, it doesn't need a master, it needs a mother. And what, what I mean by that is we really need to train it to do good. Right? And they're going to be errors, they're going to be issues. But if you think about the typewriter, you think about the days when we used to rent out DVDs, you think about, you know, how much human evolution has changed in the last few years. This is just another era for us. We're moving from, you know, a digital era to a regenerative, regenerative era. And I think we just have to be part of that journey. So I think in our lifetime, we're definitely going to see, and we already are seeing this innovation hit us. And the residential industry is no stranger to this. You know, they already have driverless construction vehicles out there, so things are, things are not going in the wrong direction. If anything, they're moving with or without us.

Very good, Bosco. Well, thank you so much for coming on Professional Builder Secrets. Today. A pleasure to interview a former host.

Thank you for having me, Will. It's been a absolute pleasure and a long time coming. And like I said, I definitely am a big fan of what you guys are doing and it's great to be on the other side of the seat.

Perfect. And for anyone that wants to find out more about GRG or Global Revgen and you also mentioned Quant Plus a few times. Quant plus is the market analysis product that you guys do which actually generates the insights into to how to best create ads and everything like that. Is that right?

Yeah. So Quant plus is the world's first technology that it gives you creative performance advertising intelligence. We have reports for most of the countries. We have them for us, New Zealand, Australia, uk, Canada, and any countries out there that do residential building advertising. As long as this performance data we are able to penetrate it. And we just came up with another product that allows you to see the top performing ads in your industry.

Yeah, perfect. Well that sounds amazing. But if anyone wants to check that out, if you're an APB member, GRG or Global Revgen has a rewards listing. So go and check that out and get yourself a cash rebate when you start working with Bosco and the team. If not, the web address for Global.

Revgen, yeah, it's www.globalrevgen.com or you can even just look for me BOSCO Anthony on LinkedIn. Depending on what your platform of choice for poison is.

Perfect. And if you're in Australia, get to the Professional Builders Summit because Bosco will be speaking there later this year or when this releases. Probably around about now. But also. Yeah, so thanks Bosco. Really appreciated you having on and some amazing tidbits in there for advertising building companies.

My pleasure. Will look forward to seeing you again.

Also, a big thank you to our.

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