How to Run a Full-Funnel Playbook for Repeat Revenue

Hey, what's going on everyone? Welcome back to Mastering Tech Growth. Every week we chat with industry leaders to bring you big ideas on how to grow. I'm Mike Sirius and today we're asking big question: is PPC, pay-per-click, Is a blog plus landing page enough, or do you need a full funnel to build a predictable revenue engine? Joining me is Samir El-Kamouni, a founder of Fetch and Funnel, a performance-driven growth agency that scales brands with full funnel strategy, paid media, conversion optimization, and AI-driven advertising. Samir, welcome.

Thanks for having me, Mike. Excited to be here.

So we had some tech glitches to kick this off, saying sorry to everyone tuning in live. So we love to kick off with this one, Samir. When I say mastering tech growth, what comes to mind?

Well, how are you utilizing technology to accomplish growth, I suppose? And can you master that or not? I don't think any of us could truly master it. So, well, maybe a few.

Right. Let me rephrase this, right? So effectively what I'm asking here is like from all the things that influence growth for any tech venture or tech business, let's take Fetch Funnels, which is yours, from all the things, right? So you can do marketing. I mean, you can squeeze on sales, maybe you can optimize internal processes, maybe you can buy ads, you know, maybe you can hire a great talent or change the board and, you know, all of the many, many things you can do that directly influences that, that growth trajectory. What do you think, or what is your point of view, is the most important one?

Hmm. Well, I would, so we're gonna definitely try to use this time and make this podcast as practical as possible, but unfortunately the answer is always going to be, it depends.

It depends.

And so for every business it's different. And so I would say if you're going to master it, or if you're going to find something that helps you grow the most, it's where you need to find where the biggest bottleneck is. And depending where the biggest bottleneck is, there's usually something. It could be a tech stack. It could be a piece of creative. It could be a person. You never know. And inserting that. Into that one area could potentially have the largest increase on your business, right? Sort of the 80/20 rule, if you will. Oh, that would—

I love the 80/20 rule.

That would be my argument, I guess.

Okay. So I, I love you saying, uh, I love you saying it depends, cuz it absolutely is. It depends on where the business is in its maturity cycle. You know, maybe it's just a startup with 2 people, you know, maybe it's 10, maybe it's 20, maybe it's, you know, 100. It really, Does depend. So we saying concentrate, not concentrate, but find the bottleneck, be aware of the bottlenecks and effectively understand why you're having them, remove them, which just basically allows the throughput to take place, right?

Exactly. Yeah. Which I know is a topic we'll probably talk about, but it's analyzing your funnel. So your funnel is going to be this large, you know, online, offline set of events and looking at every section of that, you're trying to find where you're leaking, where, where are your leads falling out? Where are you not producing leads? Where are— right, where are you not closing deals? Where are you losing people? At the end of the day is the most important thing. Where are you losing them and how do we get them back? Or how do we convince them to be interested? Or etc. And so definitely when you— and when you can unlock those areas it can transcend to other areas of the funnel as well. Maybe you find out that there's one bottleneck here, you know, it's, it's, it's once someone books a demo and then they don't show. Okay. That's a huge bottleneck. But then you find out you solve that and then it actually adds, you know, other opportunities along the funnel to optimize that. And so that's really all you're ever doing is just optimizing each aspect, trying to look at it almost as its own function, and then measuring and testing at the end of the day. And if you're not measuring and you're not testing, then you really don't know whether it's going to work or not, or whether that's going to help or not. And so that's another really important aspect of mastering that growth, right? Of being able to measure it. Because I think we're all going to argue at the bottom line is it's profit. Yeah, hey, we just want to increase profit.

Exactly right.

And so Buying expensive technology sometimes may not even be that answer because it could be very expensive and then hurt the profit. And exactly like you said, it just depends on the stage of the business, you know, of where the business is at and what you're trying to accomplish.

I love how you put that pretty much the whole, the whole episode. It's just like the context for the whole episode, but this is what we're going after today. It's, uh, we're going after understanding, you know, how things look if you don't have the funnel, you know, how they look. With the funnel and why it's so important to really have the measurements and the data so you can actually understand what you're doing. Otherwise it's just a guess game. So give me, I'll give you this context, right? It's a very real context. I had this conversation last week and I thought like it's perfect for this. So there's a business and they're fairly, you know, like 20 to 40 people business. They're doing like a training and coaching. It's a very, very noble what they're doing 'cause they're teaching effectively nurses to care for people with dementia and other mental diseases, right? So they're coaching how to actually deal with people like this. So they spending £500 in UK on PPC. So they're buying Google Ads and they have their website, right? And they have one dedicated landing page, right? And basically what they're saying is, look, we kept our lead generation capabilities. I don't think you can offer anything With that budget, which would do better, right? So my, my, my, it's a two-part question, Samir. So one is that, can they say that, you know, can, can it be right? And the second, how would you flip that belief? Like what evidence and what would be the process to prove them that they're actually wrong?

Hmm. But you said they're only running Google.

Just PPC ads, just Google. Yep.

Okay. I would probably argue that I can't think of a single business that would hit a ceiling at $500, £500, €500, doesn't matter. Mm-hmm. $500 a month. I can't think of a single business. Maybe you're very, very, very niche. Very, very, very local.

Right?

You're a local gas station or something like that. And you, it's like a half a mile, one kilometer type of parameter. Okay. Maybe then. But otherwise, I really can't think of a business that would cap out at, at $500.

Yep.

You can cap out usually at a few hundred thousand sometimes, and then you gotta do a lot of work to break through those ceilings. And so, right. And, and the other thing is that they're only on one channel. Now, mm-hmm. If you tell me, well, we tested all the other channels and none of them worked, I'd still ask a lot of questions.

Yeah.

What did the creative look like? What were the audience targeting look like? What were the parameters? Did you have the right tracking setup? Did you use the algorithm? Algorithms to your favor. There's so many aspects. You said they do coaching, like some kind of a coaching program, info product, something like that?

Yeah. So effectively they would bring people into their, I wanna say place, but it's a dedicated coaching place, right? So it's not like university, but they would invite people there and they would, you know, do a couple of days with them, really coaching them on how to, you know, sort of deal with people like that, which has you know, mental diseases.

So it's in person.

It's in person. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. And then as, and who is their ideal customer profile? Do you know?

Well, here you go.

Kind of person that are they trying to attract?

So this is a great question, right? And so to set up the ICP, so, so their ideal customer profile has been set up and I think it's quite good. But here's my question, you know, back to you as well is like, how do you think about multi-touch nonlinear ICPs, right? Because we know that when you're trying to sell something which is a higher ticket, there's going to be multiple stakeholders involved in making decisions. We're probably talking about 6 to 8 people, right? They will do some discoveries, looking at the products, you know, making some choices, maybe have some conversations, maybe demos, and only then they will make a purchase, right? So I feel like their setup of ICP, which is effectively a person who owns the nursing home, You know, the, a budget mover of a nursing home is their ICP. I feel like that's a mistake.

Okay. So I believe in the value of niching down, niching down, and how much that can positively impact your business. Okay. Mm-hmm. So I've got a really good friend, runs an incredible SEO agency, literally SEO for personal injury attorneys, nothing else. Does well over $20 million a year. Okay. One target customer. He does one thing for one type of customer. And when you do that, it allows you to specialize. It allows you to create more value. It allows you to speak even that much more specific to who your ideal customer profile is. And at the end of the day, just win business and grow. And so when you say something like, okay, hey, are these guys capped out? And how would you encourage them to get out of that? It's, it's sort of like, I'm, I'm asking about the ideal customer profile, one, from like a targeting perspective and who are we trying to serve and what that looks like. I'm also bridging that to a bigger analysis of what the TAM is, right? What's the total addressable market? Oh, hey, so if we have a yoga studio and we're trying to fill 2 more students every month and that's all we're trying to do, okay, then $500 a month is probably totally fine because our goal is to just get 2 more students. Right. 500 might be too much and that's our goal. And so then that's fine. They, like, there's nothing wrong with having a goal and then accomplishing that goal with a set budget. But when we're talking about growth, if their goal is that, then there are so many other opportunities where maybe they are having conversations like this. Uh, I have a friend that runs an agency that only specializes in that, like nursing homes and, and, uh, you know, 55+ year old communities and helping those owners market. He's got a podcast, he's speaking out, out around, you know, all around so many aspects to attract that ideal customer to him. And so they could be doing similar things, right? Um, now with Google, you're going to get usually that further in the decision-making process type of customer, someone going to Google directly searching for their services. Yeah. Okay. Then that's going to be the greatest. That's going to be a great lead. That's going to be the highest quality, but sometimes it could be the most expensive. There still are other people who are in their ideal customer profile, in their TAM, that are right, that are in their TAM that fit the ICP, but they are not actively searching on Google for their service or product, but they could still be getting in front of them and nurturing them. And maybe the time's not right. Maybe it takes a couple of months.

Mm-hmm.

But they could still be doing that most likely cost-effectively to getting a positive ROI and continuing to grow that. Uh, I mean, at the end of the day, if they haven't tried it, they don't know. So that would be the biggest argument is, yeah, right. If they haven't tried it, how would you know? And then, and then, and test it, like, let's see what happens. And, uh, you know, and if they're not open to it, then either they just don't want to grow or they don't have a high enough risk tolerance for for what that looks like. And you know, that's another thing that's a totally different objection to handle.

So let's go into that ICP because effectively if you're setting up a funnel and you're trying to help someone or even, you know, if you're listening to this episode and you go like, I don't have a funnel, I just built like a website, I think like, you know, I'm gonna go do business now. So when you start with the funnel, you will start with ICP, right? Like you will need to understand exactly who you're targeting and why, like that's gonna be your step zero.

Yeah. So two, two, two important points. So one, let's just super fast, 2 seconds, identify what we mean by a funnel. 'Cause I wanna be really careful. A lot of people think of a funnel, right? Like as, oh, I have a ClickFunnels or, you know, I listen to Russell Brunson and I know, right? I love the guy. Love ClickFunnels.

Everybody loves Russell.

I love a bunch of his over there. Yeah. Right. But, but that doesn't, that's not necessarily what we're talking about. When I, when we're talking about funnel, that means everything that you have going on from the first touchpoint of attracting someone to the endpoint. That could be—

Exactly that.

That could be a demo, that could be, you know, that could be an in-person event, whatever it is. And that's what we're identifying as the funnel. And that's where I said earlier, it could be online only, it could be online and offline, et cetera. And so, and so every aspect, your website is a funnel. The question is, is your website funneling people to where we want them to do? Right? And so To answer the question, you wanna make sure that you are, you, you're doing exactly that. And so the better you can understand your ideal customer profile, the better you can speak to who that is, the more people you will move through your funnel, the faster you will move them through your funnel. Hmm. And again, your funnel just means we're getting that action at the end of what we want. We want them to do a demo or sign up for our software, come to our event, buy our product, whatever, buy our service, whatever it is. And so let's, that's the conversion point. And so we're just trying to optimize for as many conversions as possible. Now, to understand who your ideal customer profile is, there's a lot of aspects to that. A lot of people will think about demographics, right? Or maybe socioeconomic behaviors where those are all fine. That's okay. But sometimes you could have demographics all over the place and your ideal customer profile has really nothing to do with demographics or socioeconomic behaviors. But more so a business type or a problem that you're solving or whatever it is. And, but the more specific you can get on that, again, that is what is going to help you increase the most conversions. And it is one of the most important things that you can possibly do for your business. I don't care what size it's at. I don't care if you're just starting out or you're doing a billion dollars a year. Usually you could still be improving this. If you do a billion dollars a year, you already understand your ICP and you're just optimizing and testing and, and iterating probably.

Mm-hmm.

Um, but for everybody else, right, there's probably room for improvement. And rarely do I come across a website that doesn't have areas of opportunity to improve just that. Um, and so if you're just starting out, like let's talk about maybe 2 or 3 really small scenarios really fast. So if you're just starting out, you're like, I don't have a single customer, no idea who my ideal customer profile is. Your goal is to try to identify the problem that everyone is having. So go on Reddit, try to find people talking about it, try to find areas of pain that your product or service solves so you can at least talk through that. Now, ideally go and talk to some friends or other people, you know, friends and family will probably tell you what you want to hear. Oh, your website's beautiful. Mike, don't, you know, it's a great, it's excellent. So be a little careful there, but try to ask for feedback. Try to ask people for that information and try to get in that psyche. But once you do have customers, then start sending surveys. And one of the best survey questions you can ever ask is, how would, in one or two sentences, how would you recommend our product or service to a friend or family member? There's usually pure gold in that answer, even if you get a couple of them. And, and so you start identifying more and more what the problems are that you solve, who loves your product, who's raving about your product or service. And that really becomes that, that sort of ideal customer, right? Who sticks with you the longest. And, and the more you can understand that, the more you can cater your messaging to it, your creative to it, your targeting. Everything you're doing. And it's literally the first thing that we do at Fetch and Funnel is if we can understand your ideal customer profile better than you, then we're doing our job really well.

Okay.

And, and there's a massive sticky factor. And, you know, of course I want to teach you who that ideal customer profile is, but you'd be surprised how many people, like even big brands, they just don't know, you know, they don't know who it is. And yeah, it's very interesting.

So do you, do you have your, um, framework or process of how you go about this, or is it just as simple as what are the problems they're having, you know, how are we solving this? And that's the number one. And then second is like, you know, how old are they? Can they pay? You know, where they live and all these other questions which affect you, like ChatGPT could help you to do that. Or is it something more like, you know, unique of how you guys go about ICPs?

We definitely go about it in a very unique way because this is something that we do professionally and we obsess over every single day, right? And I literally pulled up our SOP so I don't like mess it up. So, because there's a lot of million steps, but just high level is, okay, your dream buyer's desires is a big one. Okay. So trying to identify what their desires are.

Okay.

You could think of hopes and dreams, pains and fears, barriers and uncertainties, unexpected insights, um, a lot more, right? And so again, I think Reddit is an amazing place for that. When you just, right, you sell, you sell, I don't know, you sell some product and you sell hard drives and you're like, okay, what's everyone's problem with hard drives? And so go to Reddit and be like, look up bad reviews on SanDisk and look up bad reviews on all these brands and, and try to identify why are people, what are people upset about? And what are the problems that they're having and what are their hopes and dreams that they're having and, and what's happening there? Right. So then once you have that kind of desires, uh, then you want to identify the, if you can identify some of those demographics, great. Yeah, sure. Yeah. If there's a job or, uh, occupation or education or any of that stuff, okay, sure. That's cool. Um, that can help. right? Just understand the level that they're at or the psyche that they're at. You know, yeah, sure. Where do they hang out? Where do they congregate? Where do they live? Where do they get their information? What are the biggest frustrations and challenges? Kind of going back to the pains and fears. What are their hopes, dreams, and desires is always gonna be a big one, right? Because if you think about it, I wanna lose 10 kilograms before my wedding day. Okay, well our exercise program specifically is designed to help you get shredded, Fast and drop 10 to 15 kilograms in 60 days guaranteed. You're speaking directly to me, right? I want to have my website ranked higher on Google. That's my, that's my desired outcome. Oh, we guarantee Google rankings in 90 days or we work for free. Okay. You're speaking directly to me, right? I'm worried someone will break into my house and steal all my possessions that I've worked so hard to get. Well, our 24/7 security service makes your home almost impenetrable by crooks, thieves, and robbers. Keeping your belongings and family safe. Again, you're speaking directly to my, my pains, my desired outcome, and the benefits, uh, which is always a big one, right? And so what are their biggest fears? Uh, what are their preferred forms of communication? That's a big one because that can identify the channels that you talk to them in. Okay, if you're attracting really young people, they don't, they don't really like to be on the phone. They want to text. If you're trying to go after a much older person, they probably want to be on the phone, probably don't want to text.

Yep.

Uh, you're right. And that's when people ask me, what channels should we be on? Well, is your, is your ideal customer profile on Snapchat? If not, we shouldn't be running ads on Snapchat, right? And, and it's very common on, you know, a lot of channels whether or not they're there. Uh, and so the more you can understand those aspects, um, yeah, the, the, the the more specific you can cater all of your messaging to speak directly to those pains. And that is one of the, I mean, right, if you're just in sales gap analysis, you're trying to find the pain and you're trying to solve that pain, right? And that's really all you're trying to do even with your website and your ads and everything else.

Okay. So effectively we have this core understanding that people will be moving away from pain. Towards the pleasure or desire. And pretty much that's what we are targeting. We are either helping them to move away from the pleasure or we're helping them to move closer to the desire they want. I really love to understand where they actually spend their time. I feel like that's exactly where you want to run your ads, right? It's like if my ICP is in Facebook, I'm gonna run the ads over there. If my ICP is in live events, I'm gonna go to these live events, the form of communication is excellent as well. You want to talk in a way they are used to talking or being talked to, so then it just lands better. Okay, so we established this and I have this follow-up, Samir. It's like in the business, in a B2B environment, right? So I'm going to have layers of people, right? So the pains I'm going to potentially try to solve or offer my solutions, will be an employee, right? In that hierarchy of a bigger business, but the budgets will be not with that employee, right? The budget will be likely with their managers or couple managers above. So these managers probably don't have the same pains. So I'm sort of like selling to a person, but he doesn't really move the budgets to actually buy from me. How do you like navigate that?

Yeah, it's a great question. So you always need a champion no matter who it is. So the champion could be the person who's directly purchasing the product or service, or it could be that employee who then goes and has to go and convince their boss. Okay. Now we talked about the pains and now I'm solving their pains. So yeah. Okay. Maybe I'm a, maybe I'm an accountant. Inside of a big company and this, this software solves a massive pain of mine. Okay. Mm-hmm. But I go to my boss and they go, well, it just costs a lot of money and I pay you a lot, so no, I don't wanna buy it. Just go, go, go, go do the thing. You know, that's what I pay you to do.

Do it manually.

Exactly. Right. And so what you, you bring up a really, really, really great point. That you have to make sure everything you do highlights the benefits. This is one of the most important things that you could do. If you get one takeaway from this podcast or this livestream or this video, whatever you have, however you're consuming this, is that you focus on your benefits. Because time and time again, I see everyone talking about features, not benefits. If you don't know what the benefits of your product or service are, Just throw up a spreadsheet and make two columns and make one features and make one benefits. I bet you can list 100 features or 20 features really easily. Then write how that translates from a feature to a benefit. What does this feature benefit me at the end of the day? So if you tell me it's got 10 hours of battery life, okay, don't really care. Don't know what that does. Or 4,000 milliamp battery. Okay.

Yeah.

What does that mean? Oh, that equals all-day battery life. That means you are at the party at 9 PM and you're still taking photos and videos and your phone is still alive. Oh, wow. That's a big benefit to me. Don't care about 4,000 milliamps, right? So that's a feature translating to a benefit. And so if you can highlight big picture benefits well enough, hopefully your champion has the set of resources that they need to then go to their boss and go, hey boss, This is gonna cost $2,000, but it's gonna make us $50,000 and it's gonna save me 20% of my workload so I can reuse that for X, Y, and Z. And you know, and it's a tricky thing because certainly, you know, it's a very difficult thing, right? It's just, you know, I think of the Friends episode where Phoebe's selling toner and she becomes a salesperson and she's not a salesperson. And so it's like, why do you buy my toner? Well, it's cheap. Okay, whatever.

Yeah.

Okay. Now I gotta go to my boss and pitch him. Let's switch toner providers, saves us a few dollars. So is it— it is a tricky thing. Um, and so ideally you're setting them up. If you know that this is going to happen time and time and time again, then you need to supply them with the right materials and messaging to be able to turn around and go to their boss and say, hey, I need this software, I need this application, I need this program, here it is, uh, and here's the benefits that it's going to provide to the to our entire company or to our department or whatever it is. And then if you can do that, you know, hopefully it becomes a little bit more of a slam dunk.

Would you continue nurturing that relationship? So let's say, you know, you get in the funnel, you have a phone call somewhere, or maybe it's an email, but you actually have now a reach to the person and they go like, oh my God, I would buy whatever you're selling tomorrow. 'But now I need to go back, you know, to my manager and actually convince to get a budget for that.' Would you go like, 'Hey, let me help you,' or 'Here's the materials so you can use them and forward that to them,' or would you go like, 'Can you just intro us and, you know, I'll try to get a phone call with them.' So, so you would effectively as a salesperson almost like, you know, it's probably not even a funnel piece, but would you sort of like nurture this up and try to go to the budget mover yourself? Like, would that be part?

Yeah, I would do the first two for sure. So if you sell anything over $1,000, you probably need some kind of personal touch. You probably need to talk to someone on the phone.

Yeah.

You know, we have an electric skateboard client sells like $1,600 skateboards. They don't talk to anybody. They don't, they don't, they don't pick up the phone or anything necessarily. But they go out and do demos and they go to shows and they go to events and they are getting out there and talking to customers and doing things still. So, you know, it's still encouraged to do that. You sell a $20 widget, okay, you're not gonna be on the sales, you're not gonna have sales calls and talk to people. If you sell any kind of service, any kind of expensive SaaS product, any kind of AI widget these days, right? You really do wanna be talking to people. Of course you want feedback, you wanna understand, you wanna be able to sell to them. And so yeah, to your point, yes, I would absolutely be trying to supply them with materials or messaging or whatever it is so that they can champion it to their boss. And secondly, yes, I would try to get on the phone with their boss and them. I wouldn't try to go above them, right? You want to make them look good. Yeah, right. And so you want to say like, hey Bobby, Bobby brought this to your attention and, you know, and, and he did a great job for doing it because here's all the benefits that we're going to provide to you.

Okay.

And so at the end of the day, you're just— you, you definitely want to do that. You know, and I mean, it becomes pretty easy as long as you are providing enough value, obviously, and you just need to be able to showcase that.

So now here's a question. We build this landing page and so we build that ICP and let's imagine we build some ads which, you know, draw our person to the landing page. It was dedicated for that person, right? So he became our champion. And now we, you know, in a circle. So now we're just trying to go up and close the deal. Would you create a different campaign, a different landing page for that person's manager? See what I mean? It's like you don't go after the person who has the problem, but you go and have a campaign and landing pages dedicated to that person's budget mover.

You definitely could. Um, at the end of the day, like we said, you gotta test it. You gotta do both. So I would go, I would have a landing page. So in that, in that, uh, you know, arbitrary example, I would have a landing page for the accountant and speak directly to their pains and hey, the software solves all the problems that you have.

Yeah.

And then I would make another one that says, you know, for the boss, is your accounting team inefficient? Is your, are you looking for ways to streamline your accounting team's efficiencies? Well, that's what we do. And, and we could save you a lot of money and your team can manage more accounts and whatever it is, right? Whatever that is. And, uh, yeah, 100%, you know, be able to do that. But you're, you're still going to be speaking more to the person who's going to be using it because of course the boss can say, hey, I bought this really cool thing. It's going to save us a bunch of money. And if the accountant doesn't want to use it or implement it, you know, it doesn't really help.

But that often happens though, Samir, like even in the businesses I work and I always hear these stories where management just buys a tool. Without consulting people who will need to consume the tool and use the tool. And everybody's like, if they only would have asked, this is shit.

Yeah. It makes me think of, of, I worked at WordStream for 2 years. WordStream was like one of the biggest software PPC companies back in the day. And it needed to be that bottom up because to your point, if some, if someone went and bought the soft, if a boss went, oh, this looks so cool. It's going to save us a bunch of time and money. And they bought the software because the software was literally just intended to help you run your Google Ads more effectively for a higher return in less time. So for an individual running one account or their own personal, you know, inside the business, it's, it's to optimize the account and get better results. For an agency, it's to save time, manage more accounts, etc. And so if the boss bought it and brought it to the team and said, hey, you're going to use this software, it was so difficult to get the team to actually adopt it, and then we're trying to hold their hand, and it's just, it's much more painful. Now, on the other hand, when we really get the person to champion it and then bring it to the boss, then of course that's when they are super excited to implement it and, and utilize it, and then they stay on board the longest. And so all the messaging, I mean, WordStream became probably one of the, the largest content creation houses in the country, you know, in the country, in the world at the time. And there pretty much wasn't anything related to Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or anything that you could search and not come across one of their blog articles. And they're still, they were catering it to that ideal customer profile, right? Not the boss. And so really just solving the pains and issues that you have, and then you keep coming across this thought leader. Wow, everything I come across, WordStream is great. They taught me this, they taught me that. What does their software do again? And then boom, right? You're— it's a great way to acquire customers and, and attract more people. And yeah, I mean, I don't care how big or small you are, you should be, you know, trying to educate people in, in any way, shape, or form, you know, on whether it's social media, content, blogging, doesn't matter, you know, you gotta do it.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

So, I think we established very strongly that ICP and going as deep as you can in an ICP will really, really help for your funnel to do just better, right? Like we have that zero step, let's get that done. So now the second would be like, what do you do then, right? Like now I'm building a website, I would imagine like landing page would be my normal expected step too. Right.

Yeah.

After I do ACP.

So, well, everything now, now you're pushing into the messaging, right? Of, of how am I going to message things? Um, how am I going to position the business? As a part of that, I would put together the brand's messaging overall, what that looks like. You could even be, have campaign-specific messaging like we just identified. Maybe you run different campaigns to different types of customers. I would do a competitive analysis. I would look at your top competitors. I would look at their website. I would look at their landing pages, try to identify who their target audience is. Is it different than yours? Is it similar to yours? What's the focus that they're looking at? What are the hooks that they're going with?

Mm-hmm.

Is the number one thing you could do, right? If you're trying to hack social media algorithms organically, You just go, you find your top, your top creators, your top people in your industry, right? You just search your industry in the search bar. You find the top creators. There's cool tools where you can filter and sort by all their top performing videos, identify what hooks they're using, right? The hooks is one of the most important things you can identify because not only is that messaging gonna be important for the videos you create, for the ads you create, mm-hmm, also for your website, for your hero section, for your banner, all of those things. Right. And then identify like what their primary marketing promise is, right? Are they— each brand is going to have a different, a different marketing promise. Is it similar to yours? Is it different than yours? Do you want to change yours because of it? What are their primary call to actions? This sometimes sounds a little silly, but it's actually very important because, you know, for example, on our agency's website, everything was get a free proposal, get a free proposal, get a free marketing audit. Get a free this, get a free that. Right now, if you think about if someone comes to our website and they're actively interested in potentially working with us, what's the number one question that they have? It's pricing. And so I was quickly able to identify, hey, if we change the call to action to get pricing, maybe that will positively increase. And our like conversions, you know, tripled.

Mm-hmm.

Right. Right. By just changing the call to action, the text and the call to action buttons. Right. So. What's, what are the call to actions that, that your competitors are using? Um, unique mechanisms that they're pulling, selling propositions that they're doing. Uh, are they making any marketing claims? Are you making similar marketing claims? Are they generic? Are they specific?

Mm-hmm.

Proof points, guarantees, uh, benefit statements. Again, very, very important. Uh, and lots of other stuff, right? Pricing, what you get. There's a lot of aspects to that.

Mm-hmm.

Competitive analysis. But I would look at every aspect of what your top competitors are doing. And they might be specific, they might have a different ideal customer profile, but still be like a similar type of business, right? Like Amazon versus Wayfair. They both sell furniture on their website, but they're appealing to completely different types of customers, right? So you'd want to be careful to, to, to not go, whoa, I'm just going to go in the direction of Wayfair because they're super successful, but they might have a completely different customer than, than your, you know, you sell furniture still, but you could it still could be completely different, right?

Mm-hmm.

Uh, and then I do the same with their ads. I'd look at all their ads. Facebook Ads Library is a great tool. You can go look at everybody's ads, look at their ads, look at what hooks they're doing, the messaging they're doing, everything there. Uh, do the features and benefits example that I mentioned, and out of that you should get your positioning, right? And your, and, and your how you wanna position your business. And specifically, how are you going to separate yourself from the noise and from the market? Because that's something if you don't, if you, if you cannot identify your unique selling point and showcase that, your prospect certainly is not going to figure it out. And so if you just say, we've got the softest mattress in the world, like, okay, that's what everybody, everybody says they have soft mattresses. Purchase this. That doesn't help me, right? Oh, we have the most eco-friendly mattress. Oh, I'm a very eco-conscious customer. That's what I'm looking for. How are you eco-conscious? Oh, here's the million reasons we are. Okay, I'm really interested now in your product, right? Because that's my, that's my problem that I'm trying to solve. I need a new mattress and I, I don't want it, you know, I'm worried about it going in the landfill 10 years from now.

Okay, so we're basically saying, uh, you don't need to sit in a dark room and come up with all of these things. Actually, it's a lot better and you have to go and do competitive analysis because that will give you a map. You will see what your competition is doing, how they're doing. You will get good examples. You know what works, what doesn't, but at the same time, what you will be able to find is how you need to position yourself. So you have an element of differentiation. Differenti— Goddamn, my tongue is giving up on me.

Point of differentiation.

Exactly that, right? So you will go like, look, I know that my 5 main competition is doing A, B, C, D, so I'm gonna be doing F. And my now messaging, my website and every— and the ads will be about that. 'Cause I want to be different, right? Like that's the outcome of doing that analysis in the first place. And that's an outcome we should be looking for, right?

Yeah. And it could go either way. Maybe that F thing is too outlandish and it doesn't work. But it's, it's worth a test. It's worth trying, right? And especially when you run ads, like, look at the comments, look at what people are saying, look at, right? And, and that— those are the things a lot of people will ignore and not pay attention to. But try, try to find that out. I mean, it, it— don't be afraid to pick up the phone, all right? Call, call your best customer. Like, just call them. Just, hey Bobby, I'm the founder, I'm the CEO of, of this business. You're my best customer. Yeah, do you mind if I talk to you for a couple minutes, ask you a couple questions, it's usually not going to be a bad, you know, a bad thing. I want to give you 20% off your next order for, for taking the time with me. Okay, you know I'm gonna buy off of you anyways. You're— I'm your best customer, right? And so you can, you can obtain so much information from that. And, you know, like I said, surveys, all those types of things. I know people are like, oh, no one fills out surveys. You'd be surprised. You could— there's— and there's cool ways that you can do it. Yeah.

And you can—

and I also think in the age of AI, like, we have all these incredible tools now Right? I mean, gosh, our life, right? It's, it's so much easier to do these types of analyses and things like that now. Right? But, but don't just like rely on AI alone, but still use your brain, still identify who your competitors are yourself first. Then maybe ask AI, hey, you know my brand and here's who I think the top 3 competitors are. Do you think there are other competitors out there? Like have a lot of people I see, you know, use AI, they'll kind of just plug in a prompt and ask for an outcome without trying to have a little bit of a dialect. I think if you, if you have a little bit of that dialect, you can get, you can get much more fruitful responses and, and outcomes, right? But, you know, so I would attempt to do a lot of this yourself. You want to do that research yourself. Like, don't just rely on Grok or ChatGPT to go and do that research. Like, go and look on Reddit yourself and spend some time. But, but you'd be surprised. I mean, we're, you know, we're bringing on a, uh, you know, a furniture client right now, for example, and, uh, You know, they, they have a lot of negative reviews. And so that identified a huge bottleneck of theirs for us right away, right? It's just, hey, there's a massive problem here with this return policy and the delivery process. And can we solve this? Right. And then that again is not really even part of their funnel, if you will. Right. Cause that's post-purchase problems, but it is now that these negative reviews exist, it is affecting everything else. Conversion-wise that they're doing. And you can see when these reviews came out, you can literally see the drop in profit and revenue from that.

So people just Google that.

It's a massive bottleneck that now if we can solve, boom, right?

Conversion come back. Okay, so let's go back a little bit to that page. So we got ICPs, we're building the page, we talked about effectively copying that, not copying, but getting influenced by doing competition analysis. And then let's say now you have this version 1, right? So you build this and you go like, this aligns very well with my ICP, which I constructed. I think the messaging is right. What goes after that? I got the page. Now I need to buy the ads. How I'm thinking about this?

However you're driving traffic, that could be paid, that could be organic, that could be social media, that could be whatever it is.

What's your take on this? I mean, like, how do you decide which channel to go after? Is that purely based on ICP, or do you do some type of like ICP market discovery to see where they chill? If, if so, how do you, you know, how do you find that?

I mean, Meta and Google are the two largest, obviously.

Yeah.

Now I, there's not many businesses that I can think of that Meta and Google both do not work for. Very, very, very rare. TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, all those. Okay, maybe there's a place, maybe there isn't. It's more dependent on the creative than the customer and who you're trying to target, I would argue. Actually making sure that you have the right creative for TikTok, way more important than is your customer on TikTok, because they are, um, meta. I would argue has the best algorithms out there. Google's are also incredible. And, you know, and, and so that would be the first— Meta would be the easiest place, I would argue, to just start testing because you can test messaging very easily. Sometimes we literally run ads that is just text, just literally an ad that just has text, and we'll run a couple of them as an engagement campaign and try to get engagement on it. And identify which text is resonating the most with people. And then, well, guess what? We just identified our hook. Or we'll break up a video right into little— into, into different aspects of the video and the hook being the first, the call to action being the last. And we'll come up with 10 different hooks and then break the video up. So now we're testing 10 different hooks. The middle doesn't change and 5 different calls to actions. We're identifying what the hook, you know, fall-off rate is, right? What the hook rate looks like, how many people are falling off. And then how many people are clicking at the end, right? And then identifying which hook gets the, gets the most engagement, which call to action gets the most clicks, and, and truncating and breaking things up like that. And so you're still able to continuously test that message, uh, who I'm talking to, how I'm talking to them, and identify what's working and what's not. And maybe you identify some hook that's so good you put it on the hero section of your website. Makes me think of, we, we, we had this client for many years that is CME credits. If you're like a nurse or a doctor, you need to always continue your, your CME credits. And so, you know, you go online, you watch tutorials on their website and like, you know, on whatever, whatever, you know, medical thing you're trying to learn. And we surveyed a bunch of customers and asked that question, right? What I said earlier, how would in 1 or 2 sentences you describe this product to a friend? And someone said, it's like Netflix for medical lectures. And we immediately ran with that line. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

And it like doubled our click-through rates on all the creative. We put it on the website, it increased our conversion rate, right? Like that's a kind of silly but perfect example of that process working really, really well.

Mm-hmm.

And then entering that text and then immediately seeing the, the the outcome of the improvement. And so, right. And so that, like, that's kind of the next stage. And, you know, whatever your budget aligns with, if you can just run images, just run images. If you can run videos, run videos. You know, we want— you want to test as many things as you can, obviously.

So all of these hypotheses, Samir, we effectively— it's not even a hypothesis. I mean, we literally just testing different variations. And we, you know, we're looking for that best performing one. Are we adjusting landing pages for these creative changes or is the landing page still the same?

Man, oh man, I would make as many as you can, right? Because I would argue the more specific you can be, the better. It's one of the biggest levers you can pull to effectively decrease the costs of Google.

Mm-hmm.

Especially search. And it's also one of the biggest levers you can pull into increasing, uh, conversion rates. And so let me give you two really great examples. So, uh, for Google, if you are, if I'm looking for, um, what was I, I was just looking for junk removal for my mom. Okay. To, to get a couch out. So if I search junk removal in the town and I search the town, And it comes up, hey, we do junk removal in this town. And then that's what the ad says. And then I click the ad and the landing page says, we do junk removal in this town. Okay. I'm way more likely to convert when I, but of course the 1-800 one pops up, super generic ad, super generic landing page. Right. I'm like, I don't know if they serve my town or not.

You just have questions still in your mind. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry to jump in, but I know exactly that feeling. I had multiple times you go on a website and you go like, I'm like, I still have questions and I'm getting agitated that I need to look for answers on this page. Where a good page, you go there and you're like, decision.

Yep.

In my mind, it's a decision.

And that's why FAQs are one of the most important things you can have on your website to handle those objections and to answer those questions. Now, another great example is is, uh, we have this client that sells sleeves. Like, uh, it's not compression sleeves, but they're, you know, it's a sleeve that you wear on your elbow, your knee, you know, pain relief. And, uh, we went and developed dozens of landing pages for every single, uh, sport and activity that we knew their customers do that purchase this product. So basketball, hiking, running, pickleball, et cetera. And the landing page really didn't change much, right? It was, it was the same landing page that we had already built and tested and identified. It worked really well. The product selection, the social proof, the reviews, the, the FAQs, all of the things. But that top section changed, right? From if, and, and then we're running on Meta. We're targeting people who love to run with ads of people running. They land on the landing page, there's runners, and then we're like, the best products for runners. And then we recommend all the same products. And the same thing for basketball. We target people who we know like and watch and play basketball. Same thing with the creative, basketball, landing page, basketball, best pain relief for people, you know, trying to play basketball. And so massively increased conversion rate because now I'm like, okay, this is, I know that this is, this is my problem, right? And then you can, you could go and build a million of those, right? We're like, hey, skateboarders is a small niche that they're not a lot of them buy the product, but it's enough. Okay, let's build a skateboarding landing page, right? And just, you're just identifying those opportunities. And so, you know, it's, it's easy to let just kind of go, hey, our website works, let's leave it alone, whatever. Just send everybody to the homepage. But it's a big mistake, right? You could, you could massively positively impact your conversion rate, your profitability by getting specific with the messaging. And, and that's what we're talking about, right? The more specific you can get, and that's where like, I love the idea of just making it as specific as possible and almost launching like these little mini campaigns within every campaign, because then you really can measure the impact of each of those. And you can get as specific as possible. I mean, I love this for YouTube, for example. YouTube's one of my favorite channels.

Mm-hmm.

And I love getting really specific with videos and targeting on the video because it's like, I know someone is searching this thing. I know they're about to watch a video on this thing.

Mm-hmm.

And I get the opportunity to get right in front of them.

Yeah.

Right. With my ad. Great. I'm gonna speak specifically to what they're about to watch, to what they searched, and now I'm getting so specific. That I could probably get you to skip the video you were about to watch and come to my website instead.

You can convince them with your ad to not watch the video they're just about to watch and go like, nah, nah, come here.

Exactly.

This is a good one, right? Yeah, just hook and sort of fish them. That's Russell Brunson's situation, isn't it? I remember in his book about funnels, he basically was like that. He was like, get the message right. Find where they spend their time and then just hook them in and fish them out into your own channels.

Oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

And he's, I mean, he's the king of it. Right. And I think one of the things that he does so, so, so well that we all forget is he never tries to sell anybody ClickFunnels. Like none of their funnels, none of their ads are very rarely actually selling you the thing that they want you to buy. They're getting you to buy some other thing and then ClickFunnels becomes the upsell. And I love that.

Yeah.

Because you just, it increases your TAM by so much, but you still get to speak to the pains that, you know, your ICP has with another product. And then maybe they're not ready for your product or service, but now you get to nurture them for free for as long as you want because they're on your email list. You've got their phone number, you've got all these things. Yeah, right. And so you continue nurturing them until they are ready, or maybe they are ready to actually buy your product or service. And, and, ah, I love that. I love the idea of that. I wish more businesses did it. You know, it's something we bring up all the time, especially for brands that sell lots of products, right? Like, what is that lead-in product? What is the one that gets you to, you know, get someone to purchase more? And if you can understand that, like, Huckberry Uh, incredible brand. I'm friends with the head of digital there. Like he says, uh, what was it? It's jeans for Huckberry. If you go to Huckberry and you buy a shirt or whatever, great. But if you buy jeans, you become this like multi-thousand dollar customer over the next few years because that's their perfect lead-in product. So now their goal is always to just get a guy to buy jeans because then they know, okay, if you buy our jeans, boom. right? There's all this other opportunity, but you buy a shirt, maybe you come back, maybe you never come back. And so understanding your data and then leveraging that huge, huge benefit.

Well, let's talk about the data, Samir, because I feel like that's the must-have third one, right? ICP number 1, landing page, messaging number 2, and then the number 3 of the must-haves is the data. You need to really understand how things flow. What is the easiest way to get it done? Are we talking like Google Analytics and simple, you know, click events capture, or is there something more you would recommend?

Yeah, at the surface level, you're trying to look at everything that you have. Google Analytics will tell you a good amount depending on the size of the business. There's more advanced analytics platforms that may or may not make sense for you, more enterprise level. If you're doing fair amounts of revenue, you know, you should look into them. I consider sort of first-party, third-party data that I think about a lot. Third-party data is going to be, you know, data you can get from other providers. First-party data is going to be your data, right? Your surveys, your customer info, etc. There's lots of ways for you to analyze that data. Now, there's— there are some really cool AI apps that you can literally just connect your, you know, QuickBooks or Shopify or whatever it is to it, and it'll identify, hey, hey Mike, all your top competitors are in Texas. I mean, all your top customers are in Texas, uh, right? And they're this company size and they're in this industry and identify that for you. Those technologies already exist and they're only, you know, increasing. So I think it's, it's easier than it ever has been before to take your data and actually turn it into digestible snippets to actually take action on, which I think is usually one of the most difficult things. But yeah, at the end of the day, like, yeah, easiest way is to just look at analytics, to look at, um, the customer data that you have, run some surveys, try to get some data there. That's gonna be the easiest and, and, and most permanent data, you know, permanent data to help you, uh, identify certain, you know, the, what a lot of the bottlenecks and the things that we're talking about to increase your profitability. But then, you know, there are third-party data providers as well that you can go and find out, right? Where you can, you can purchase data from these third-party data providers and, you know, and even do like audience targeting and stuff like that. Like programmatic advertising uses your first-party data and their third-party data to be able to target as many, you know, all of your customers, right? You go, hey, I, I sell a robot pool cleaner. I want to target everybody that has a pool, but I don't know who has a pool. Well, third-party data will help you, right? And you can plug that in and then just target everybody that has a pool.

Would you run like a catch-all campaign? You know, I did that a couple of times myself and I've, you know, seen people recommending to understand, you know, more about your customers. So it's effectively, you don't limit too much, you allow, you know, a broader pool of people to engage with your creatives and then you basically see, you know, who goes into your funnel deeper and you go like, oh, okay, well now I got some analytics, which potentially I didn't know before. Here's a new demographic which opened up, or maybe here's a new keyword which opened up. But like, is that a wise use of budget or actually no, you want always to really target niche down and campaigns as much as you can?

Great question. I would say the more The more specific your creative is, the wider you can cast that net. The more generic your creative is, the more narrow you should probably cast that net.

Okay, I see.

So if we're, if we are mechanic, okay, we're a car mechanic, and I just say, you know, hey, need your car fixed? Come to us. Eh, okay. Then I say, and then I blast it to everybody on the internet, but I really only work on German cars. Okay. Not great.

Yeah.

Right? I'm gonna attract a bunch of people who have American cars and European, it doesn't matter. Right? And so then I, now I'm attracting a bunch of the wrong, the wrong customer. But if I, but if my ad says we are the number one, you know, German car fixer in the country or in this area. Right, and I'm getting really specific, right? If you got a Mercedes, we're the ones to help you. Uh, then you can start to cast that wider net. That's a really shitty example. I'm sorry, but I get it. Yeah, the, the broad— so, and then it enables you to get a lot more broad. Um, maybe an example is I'm, I'm going after musicians right now, and, uh, and in that, in that funnel, I'm speak— I don't know. I'm trying to identify the biggest problems that these musicians have. I know I'm going after musicians, but I'm not entirely sure what those top problems are.

Yeah.

So all my ads are like, hey, musicians, you know, this is what's going on. This is where you're losing money. This is where you could make more money. And this is, you know, and see if it resonates with them. And I'm testing kind of different messaging on these different ads.

Yeah.

But I'm casting a very, very wide net, not trying to be specific on just guitar players or just professionals or just sound engineers, etc.

Yeah.

And then that opened up to— then I found a lot of guys that make beats are interested in the program. People who are choir singers are interested in the program, right? And so it enabled me to then find all these little niches, even though I still was specific enough right, to attract, to attract that person. Now with Meta specifically, if you call them out, Meta will do the targeting for you. So if you literally just in your ad copy say, are you a small business owner in Minnesota? Like, it's just gonna, it's just gonna do the targeting for you.

It's getting to a point where, where it's like, take my money, this is what I want, and they will do everything else.

Yeah, no, it— and it's— that's literally where it's going. And that's why creative becomes the most important piece. And that's why— that's why we're talking about this stuff, right? Is, is, is those are the bigger levers you can pull.

Yeah.

Audience targeting, your bid strategy, your campaign structure. Does that stuff matter? Yeah. Does it matter as much as the creative? No.

No, I do not think so.

You can have the best creative in the entire world. I tell, I'm telling you right now, your targeting doesn't matter. Just go broad. It doesn't matter. But if you have horrible creative and then you go broad, you're just going to waste a bunch of money.

Yeah. You're going to lose a lot of money. Okay. Well, that's a, that's a great advice. I have a couple more. So one is about heat maps, right? So I feel like, hey, if you want to be very scientific about what we want to capture on landing page to understand what works, what doesn't. Bunch of events needs to be captured. Did someone click on the calendar? Did they select a slot in the calendar? What they did before they did this and that, whatever is the outcome, like it becomes quite complex in the setup perspective where a heat map is like boom, you add one line of code and it captures the whole session and it shows where the mouse move and what they do. And I feel like for mortals like me, that's a great help to really look at your landing page and go like, okay, well no one's looking at this message at all. So, so it doesn't matter at this point in time. So from your perspective, like, is it worth it? And as well as anything else outside of heatmaps, would you sort of like recommend as another easy to get some data out tooling?

If you don't have heatmapping on your website right now, when this episode is over, go and add it onto your website. The easiest is Microsoft Clarity because it's free. So you could just install it right on your website. Very easy to do. It doesn't cost you anything. You can add it in Google Tag Manager or directly to the header of your website, or find someone on Fiverr to do it. Doesn't matter. Add it to your website. Then there's plenty of others— Hotjar, Crazy Egg, et cetera. They're all great. Uh, that is very crucial, crucial information. And You, you brought up very good points. And so you get, you get the heat mapping. So you get to see where are most of the button, you know, where is the most of the scrolling happening? Where are most of the buttons being clicked? What's happening? You're able to identify how far down the page people go. Are they getting to the section I want them to? What happens if I move this section up? I mean, it, it, it's pure data into how can I increase my conversion rate on my website? And what are, what are the bottlenecks that are on my website, right? And so, but with, with that, uh, you, you know, it also does screen recordings, so then you can also see each individual, what they're doing, how far down the page they're going, where are they scrolling to, are they watching my video, what are they doing? And all of that becomes really, really, really great information. Now don't take the one outlier, that one person who spent 20 minutes on your website and just did a million things. Oh, this is like one person, Right. You want to sort of take all the data and make some assumptions of it, but yeah, it's pure gold. And then, and then a lot of these tools allow you to do a lot of the stuff that we were talking about. Hotjar allows you to do abandoned cart surveys and all sorts of really cool other things that become really, really important for you to run, right? Why? Why? You have a little pop-up pops up on desktop and like they're about to leave the website. Like, whoa, why, why are you leaving? Is it price? Is it, is it we didn't solve the problem? Is it because we don't have free shipping? Is it blah, blah, blah? You can ask them some questions and you'll get a That's really incredible data to get back to then go, no one's buying because we don't offer free shipping. Shoot. What happens if we offer free shipping and change that? Right. And if you're listening to this and you don't offer free shipping, that's one of the biggest levers you can pull. But yeah. And so you gotta do it. I don't— and even if you get 5 visitors a day, still do it. Yeah.

It's just something you can work with, right? It's like If we come back to this context we said at the beginning of the show, which is like a business which is operating for years and they have a certain budget and one landing page and buying PPC and they're like, oh, I think we're done. Like there's no more clients to get. How do you know? Like, you know, just put in heatmaps. At least you'll know what your ads bring and how people react to your page, you know? So yeah, that's an easy win. So we had a funny one.

We had Ivanka Trump as a client way before the Trumps became president.

Okay.

And before, you know, Trump became president. And, uh, so we thought it was this amazing brand, Ivanka Trump, right? Amazing brand. We sold her purses and jewelry and all her stuff, right? And built her website, did a bunch of great stuff for her. So we had her logo on our website along with all bunch of the brands we work with, right? No harm, no foul.

Yeah.

Until he became president.

Oh, then it's a problem.

Then on the heat mapping, you could see everyone circling the Ivanka Trump logo.

Click, click, click, click.

All the time. And we were like, is this good or is this bad? Is this helping us or hurting us? So we identified the, the, that there's something happening, an outlier. And then we measured, okay, what's the current click rate and all of the things. And then we removed the logo to then also identify, does it help or does it hurt? Funny enough, it hurt. It used to help, later it hurt. So we removed that logo, right? And so there's silly things sometimes that you even find that again, help increase the conversion rate. But without that data, I wouldn't have known that.

Hmm. 100%. So I, I got a question and then sort of like a context, right? So we had a CEO of a company called Omneky a couple of episodes back, and effectively they do AI creatives, right? And they integrate with Google and Meta and I think some other platforms. And basically what they do is like, hey, you want to run some hypothesis on creatives, different messaging, you know, different style of ads with AI now, especially around the images and text, you know, you just prompt, prompt, prompt, enter 20 different versions, push them out as different campaigns, see what wins, right? So now that iteration of that experimentation just went to another level compared to that all being built by hand manually, you know, by creative people. So I'm just very curious, what's your take on this, Samir? Does that, you know, does that work? Do you utilize it? You know, what's your opinion on that?

You have to still use your brain and you still have to look at and make assumptions yourself. I am all for speed and and, and testing as much as humanly possible. I'm obsessed with that. So if it's, if it enables me to test faster and to have more iterations and increase the speed to, you know, more data, more outcomes, more everything, I'm all for it. But if you provide a very generic prompt, you're gonna get a very generic response.

Yeah.

And this kind of goes back to that point I made earlier. So making sure that you take every— if you do what we just talked about earlier and you do that research and you put together those documents and you understand your brand really, really well, your unique selling points, your benefits, your ideal customer profile, your dream buyer's desires, your dream buyer's problems, and you all have all of that information. And then you do the prompt, you probably will get some pretty, pretty damn good gold.

Right.

And so, but still use your brain, like, because sometimes it's still going to come up with something and I'm going to go, no, no, that's not it. Right. And so just don't blindly say, you know, set it and forget it. Just still review everything and make sure, you know, it stands out. And I think the other thing is like, it depends on how small or big your brand is. I can't stand when a small brand is almost like a startup and they're trying to pretend like they're Apple.

Hmm.

Dude, you're not Apple. Like, chill out. Right? We don't want a discount. Why don't you want a discount? Well, Apple doesn't discount. Well, Apple does discount, first of all.

Mm-hmm.

And second of all, you're not Apple.

Right. Right.

And so you gotta be willing to just just, you know, break the mold and test. But then, yeah, if you're this big, big, big brand, you got to be more careful. You can't just blindly pump anything out there. One bad ad— I can give you 100 examples of how one bad ad severely hurt a brand. And we know all these, right? We've seen the Peloton, recent Pelotons and all these different campaigns.

Yeah.

And so you got to be careful because if you just blindly set and forget it, maybe you get some, you know, you get some blowback, so you gotta be careful.

That's a good shout. I remember at least two copies I've seen on 9GAG where people just shared it as a, like a terrible advertisement. You know, one was something with diversity and cars. I can't remember the brand, but I think it was General Motors where they just overdid it and people were like, what is this? I mean, you make cars. And then there was these jeans with this female actor where it was a little bit too, You know, too up there. So there was a lot of backlash from this one as well. So definitely a bad creative, well, not necessarily bad, but mistargeted creative can cause a lot more harm than good. So your hypothesis, they cannot be just in the air, right? You have to have some—

Yeah, I wouldn't just go, okay, build me 100 ads and set them live. I'd manually review everything. Yeah.

Okay.

100%. What, you know, test it. Got to test it. Yeah.

All right. Let's go into rapid questions. So 60 seconds a minute. So for, for, for an answer, if someone has £500 to spend this month, where should it go and why?

Personal development. This is not that much. So it may or may not be enough for ads. So I would say, what's the thing that can impact you the most?

Yeah.

And so maybe that could be doubling down on the brand. Maybe that could be doubling down on getting some better videos made. Maybe that could be getting an AI tool, whatever it is. But I would argue, yeah. And if it's specifically for ads, I'd try Meta first.

It's specific. Okay. Meta. Got it. Do Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube, or potentially some other social medias, differ in their roles in the funnel? So we're talking about top of funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel. Do you think these social platforms play differently into the way they sit in the funnel?

They definitely can. They definitely can. Meta is probably a great example of being able to perform well across all aspects of the funnel. Usually Google is going to be further down the funnel. YouTube a lot of times will be upper funnel, but of course you can run retargeting on YouTube and then that can be more of bottom funnel.

Mm-hmm.

So you, and, and you gotta be multi-channel because if you're not diversifying, you're missing out. Yeah. And, and you, you could be completely wasting budget, but you have to have different messaging on different platform and make sure you're, you're taking a truly omnichannel approach, not a multi-channel approach.

Okay, excellent. Native lead forms which exist on Facebook and LinkedIn compared to a lead form on your landing page, which one when it comes to quality, and let's define quality by show up rate, you know, so you capture that and people show up to a call.

If you asked me this 4 days ago, I would've answered it differently.

Okay.

Traditionally, the landing page is always gonna be higher quality. A lot of times when you do a lead form, lead ad form, A lot of times people go, I did what? Who are you?

Yeah.

So you have to be careful.

Mm-hmm.

Now there's some really incredible AI bots that you can have call them immediately after they fill out the form to not only qualify them, but book the appointment and make sure that they show up. And it's good.

Yeah.

So you can get, you can get more leads, you can get quantity over quality with the lead forms. And then if you utilize something like that, I think you're gonna get an even better quality than you would if they just went to the landing page and did it there.

Okay.

Of course, the landing page, you can identify more information, you can ask more questions, you know? Mm-hmm. And with lead forms, maybe just ask one question so it's not just like a one-click autofill and I don't even know what I just did. Mm.

I'm, I'm actually that guy, which you just mentioned. I, I sometimes get calls, uh, in the M&A space of, you know, buying businesses and, and they go like, you know, we are broker this and that. And I'm like, who are you again? It's like, where did you get my details from? It's like, I forget where I leave my email. I should get more, I should get more follow-ups.

And lead to like follow-up time, right?

It's like, oh, it's fast, man.

That's kind of the beautiful thing about that AI is it's going to call you within seconds.

I love that. I took a note of this the moment you mentioned, I actually have this as a follow-up question, which is what is your speed to lead rule and why And why that number should, you know, like why that number should be as zero as possible. Right. So I think you just sort of answered that.

It's just, oh, it's so important. Yeah. The one I'm testing right now is called Your Atlas, I think.

Uh, so is it AI who actually, uh, talks as well? So it makes a call, makes sense. I can, you know, I can imagine automation of that quite easily and you can make AI talk, but. Do people actually go like, you know, like, you know, cool. Yeah. I just filled it. You know, I know I'm talking with the AI, but I will still answer the questions. Yeah. Okay.

And it's really good.

Right. So, so, so it's—

I just sent it to call someone and they didn't know it was AI. They thought they were talking to a real person.

Right. I need to get someone on the show about this. That seems like a very up there tool, right? It's a great shout. Thanks, Samir. All right. Back to the questions. What is the smallest proof asset that moves buyer from I'm interested to saying yes, and how would you create it in 24 hours?

The strongest asset, probably a video. Okay. And ideally a person talking on the video.

A client, your customer, someone is happy with your services?

Ideally both, sort of like someone talking from the team, doesn't need to be the founder or anybody like that, but just someone talking from the team and yeah, inserting like a, you know, some kind of customer review or something, some kind of social proof definitely can help. Um, for example, you fill out the form on our website, on the thank you page there's a short 2-minute video of me just saying thanks for filling out the form, and if you're interested in talking to us, fill out a book— you know, here's the calendar, fill out a booking. When I added that video, it increased the conversion rate by like 80%, you know, went, went from like 20% booking rate to like 80%. Booking made, right? And so, uh, people love videos. We're all looking for videos. So I would argue that that's one of the biggest levers that you can pull because you can insert it in so many different places.

Okay. So your video played after they made the booking? How did that work?

So they fill out the form, which isn't the calendar booking, right? Just like, hey, I'm raising my hand. I want pricing or whatever it does, you know, whatever it is. And then they fill out the form and they get on the thank you page that then has the calendar. Booking.

That's nice. That's a good funnel, right? You don't want to then have a landing page which has a calendar. You just want to go landing page, a simple form, couple of fields, very easy, low friction. Just give us your name and email, something like that. If they do that, then on that page you go like, hey, how about you actually book a call with us and you make a video for that?

Yep. And then literally today I'm building out that call chatbot to then if you don't book a calendar, it's going to call you.

It's going to, yeah, answer the phone.

Exactly.

Come talk with us. Such a nice time we live in, right? Everything's automated. AI just doing our job.

Amazing and terrifying all at the same time. We could have a whole nother episode about it. I could talk all day about that.

That's why it's so exciting though. It's like, you know, you don't even know, you should be scared, should be happy. Like, is life better? It's just exciting nonetheless, right? So if we talk about the same top, middle, and bottom of funnel, when it comes to like carousels, short video, single images, or text. Do you think these different creatives play into different parts of a funnel?

Definitely. Every business is different. I would test everything across everything. I've seen some brands' images outperform everything. For some other brands, videos outperform everything. So they've got to have image across the entire funnel, or the other one's got to have videos across the entire funnel. Okay. If you're asking me which one usually will perform the best, Yeah, I'd argue video for top of funnel because that's important for brand awareness. It's important to, you know, handle more objections, brand, you know, getting, just getting your messaging out there more. Middle of funnel would be more of a carousel because now I can maybe highlight customer reviews or testimonials or show them different products or showcase them, you know, the catalog, product catalog, whatever it is. And then single image for bottom of funnel because really at this point, hopefully they know the brand, they know the product, they know the service. I'm just trying to get them to click back and finally convert. And so maybe that image is just showcasing 20% off or my, you know, number one review or whatever it is to just try to get them across the finish line.

Okay, excellent. Did you ever combine a direct message outreach with any of the ad campaigns you're running? And if so, what's the thinking? What's the strategy behind that?

Oh yeah, all the time, 100%. Physical mail, direct mail, you name it. And it's multi-touchpoint, right? Because you have to think about how many touchpoints do they need to know who this brand is? I've never heard of this brand before. How many touchpoints do I need? So the more touchpoints that I can have, 100%, the better, the better, you know, the better responses you're going to get, the more likely they're going to go, oh yeah, oh, I subconsciously Hey, now remember this brand? Oh, interesting that you're, that you're doing that. And we'll do some really creepy stuff when we're, when we have enough budget to do that stuff, because we'll send a physical mailer, we'll target you on Instagram. Yeah, we'll run TV ads to you, get in your Gmail, get in your Gmail. Yeah, on a YouTube ad, right? So now everywhere you go, and you think, and now in your eyes We're this really big brand that blankets the internet, but actually we just targeted like 5,000 addresses only and we're just going after those 5,000 individual homes. We're just doing an omnichannel approach across the board and they're like, wow, this is a really big brand.

Yeah, it's—

yeah, I gotta do business with them.

I love that. Okay. And the messaging in those direct messages effectively is the same what we're saying in an ad. So we just aligning the messaging across, but then The question is like, okay, well, if you're doing some type of A/B testing, how do you do that with an actual physical mail?

Physical mail, you could do interesting things because you can call out different things. Obviously, you can have QR codes, phone numbers, different things. You could cater, you know, especially now if you're going to have an AI bot or something like that for the phone number, right? You can identify different phone numbers to go to different neighborhoods and identify the conversion rates of those. And you can measure it even though it's offline. There's still really cool tactics you can measure. And if you want like a specific use case your business, you know, feel free to hit me up and I can, I can give you a strategy for it. But as it relates to messaging, like on social media or something like that, I would, I would always try to make it more conversational. I wouldn't make it about just trying to blast someone and, hey, we have this awesome product, you should buy it, or, oh, we have this offer service, you know, do you want this service? I try to actually genuinely open up conversations with people to figure out, like, you know, are they even in the market? Do they even have this pain? You know, don't go for the sale right away. And the best brands in the world add value first.

Yeah.

Right. Like you think of some of the really big brands, like they're just providing value. So if you can actually provide value to them first, that'll only benefit everything you're doing.

Excellent. Well, all of this was pure gold. Learned many things, Amir. Thank you for that. People listening, they go like, oh my God, I just want to learn more from him. Where they find you?

I'm the only Samer El-Kamouni in the world. So really easy to find me.

So are you literally telling me right now, I put your name in Google, there's going to be another person with the same name. If I put you in Facebook, you're telling me there's not going to be a couple results coming back?

Mike, I'm the only Samer El-Kamouni in the whole world.

I will, I will test this. I will test this.

I'll bet you $1,000 right now.

I'll take that. No, I don't know. I don't want to take that bet. That's a lot of money.

Right.

But I will put that in the search. I'll see, because anytime I put anything in Facebook, there's like, you know, 105 people coming back. So you're telling me it's going to be just that. Okay.

So, so what we're saying, just put your name, you can find me, you message me on LinkedIn. You can email me samir@fetchfunnel.com. Yeah. Happy, happy to help anybody. You know, not going to try to sell you anything. Yeah, happy to just, I'm only here to help people.

So that's, I love that and I can vouch for that. We had multiple chats with Samir. He's all of, all about providing value to everyone tuning in today. I appreciate your time. Drop your growth questions in the comments and head to masteringtechgrowth.com to check our community out. And as always, guys, until the next time, stay safe and see you online.