How Digital Marketing Works and How to Become More Effective At It, Q & A with Ryan Deiss

You're listening to Freedom Fast lane presented by capitalism.com. this is the show about building businesses and investing profits so that you can live life on your terms. And now your host, the future owner of the Cleveland Indians, Brian Daniel Moran.

I have to look fancy with my Perrier.

You have a brand too.

I have an image to uphold.

That's right. Yeah.

I was sort of hoping you'd bring me wine.

Is it weird that it's before 10am on time? I think that's actually you get put in gym. My friend calls it purple coffee. That's how he justifies drinking it before noon. Like I don't think that's how it works.

So Ryan, that was great, but now we gotta talk about your 350 million dollar real estate empire.

Yeah.

I don't know anything about that.

So I'm curious. I want to hear about after we have collected the Pixel and now we're targeting them again. The way that I was interpreting it is like it's a second list in that way.

It's a great way to look at it.

I've heard that phrase before, but it was always. It sounded silly and hypey to me because it wasn't a warm list. It was like, okay, cool, let's just shit all over the world and have pixels everywhere is how most people think about it. I have a great story about poop and Travis Sagal. I'll have to tell all of you.

Sometimes it's important to stay committed to.

A theme where you just gave me an aha moment was the fact that it's a warm list. If they have found something that's just that gives them a shift and then you follow up with them with the ask.

It's like anything else, right? I mean if you just go and buy a bunch of email addresses off of ebay, which presumably you can still do. I don't know. Has anybody done that lately? Please don't raise your hand if you did. It used to be you just go on ebay and like buy a list of 10 million email addresses, right? And people mail them and in addition to losing their account and you getting all kinds of bad stuff, they get no clicks. Because there's no relationship, right? In any of these things, in any type of marketing, any type of media. It's not about really and this is certainly good for me. It's not the size that matters, right? It's the impact of the relationship that you have. And these big brands are seeing this, right? The big brands are getting toppled by up and comers because they have no soul, they have no heart. It's the reason that Apple is still really, really strong even after the death of Steve Jobs. Right. They were able to project and to shift his character traits and his character diamond over to the brand. Whereas you think about Microsoft and it's not lovable, it's the opposite of lovable. They never made us laugh, they made us cry. When the blue screen came up, that wasn't like thank you Micro, it was like, screw you Microsoft. So I think it always comes down to the relationship. And if you're building that media while at the same time making the deposits of relational equity, then the media is worth something. If you're not, then you're spamming.

I want to ask about the follow up process. After we've set them up and we have asked them, we've collected now the lead. What was going through my head was there might be a shift away from email because there's different ways to follow up with our customers. Now you still go for the email address.

Yeah, I mean all of this is.

I'm curious what the follow up process is then.

It's in addition to, not in lieu of. I think that's a big mistake that a lot of people make with media. Big mistake that a lot of people made with social when it came on. Oh, this is going to replace this. Media rarely replaces other media.

You told me that like five years ago and it gave me a big shift because we like to hear about what's hot and what's moving. But really media doesn't go away very often.

Yeah, some market share will be taken. I mean you'll have different types of media. I mean obviously like DVD replace laserdisc but I mean it's still the same fundamental type of type of thing. So. But radio is still here. I mean you have printed media, it changes, it augments, market share, gets taken. So it should always be in addition to. But. So yeah, so email and retargeting is dead on. And what you can actually do in Facebook and in Google is you can build out a retargeting campaign where you say, okay, on this day, show them this ad. On this day, show them this ad. So that you can align the emails that are going out with the ads they're seeing. And now it becomes this is nothing new. Right. It used to be you'd be driving down the road listening to an ad on the radio as you went past a billboard. Advertising companies have known this. It's not a single point. It's when I start seeing you everywhere that I guess you're a big deal. The beautiful thing today is it's cheap to do that. It's cheap to be a big deal, because you're only gonna be a big deal to your thousand true fans. You're only gonna be a big deal to those people who showed up and consumed some of your content. To the people who don't know you. You're not talking to them. And that's why people who get. Who want to crap on, like, Facebook and Google for being mean and all this stuff. We need to be thankful for these platforms that have aggregated, like, every man, woman, and child on planet earth and are willing to give us access to that in a meaningful way. I think we need to switch some of our positioning, how we think about that. And I'm like, oh, screw them. They need me more than I. No, they don't need you at all.

Let's talk about the buildup process, because this sounds really cool. When you have a big list and a lot of people that are already pixeled. It sounds to me like you could put a piece of content out there. And now we have. It's like throwing fish to sharks. It can get out, maybe. That was a terrible example. Let's try again.

It will get eaten quickly and then be disposed of.

They're back to poop, everybody.

You're right. The analogy does break down. I get what you're saying. I mean, so starting with. And I think the point that you made there is critical. You can start with one amazing piece of content. This is not blogging five times a day as a strategy. This is having one amazing piece of content and sending people to it and then understanding that, okay, if they clicked on an ad. So let's look at it in the same way you would segment a list. You can segment your retargeting audiences. We can look at it and say, okay, we've got products and things around blogging. We got products and things around Facebook ads. So I can say, hey, are you interested in learning more about Facebook ads? Here's a great blog post that we wrote about it. Everyone that clicks on the ad and the ad, by the way, would be a little more compelling than that. But everyone who clicks on the ad to go read it, we know at a base level, they have some interest in Facebook advertising at a base level. So now with the retargeting, we match the retargeting with the topic that originally brought them there. So the example I showed up on the board was about blogging. So if you Want to learn how.

To start a blog?

We'll drive. Hey, you want to learn how to start a blog? Here's how we started our blog. Go read this article on how we started our blog. The people that go there now, they're going to start seeing retargeting ads around blogging. Not about Facebook marketing. We don't know if they're interested in that yet. So their intent, they've raised their hand and said, yeah, I like this topic. And so we're talking to them about the thing that they said they're interested in.

Do you test the pieces of content before you decide which ones are going to get pushed out there? And you look at. Travis calls it popcorn popping. You look at some results coming in before you give it a lift and push it out there.

They begin life as a blog post. They begin life as content, ungated content going out to our existing subscribers. So in delivering value to our existing audience, we're also creating new entry points for future audiences. Does that make sense?

Yes. So the process then is you have the audience, you're continuing to build relationships and value to that audience in advance with future content, with other pieces of content that is going out to the existing audience and the ones that take, you're starting to give a push to, to new audiences to bring them in as well.

Yeah. And it also is a good way of resetting the relationship with your existing list. I'll give you an example. If we come out with a brand new blog post and we go out to our list saying, hey, we just got have a new blog post now about this new Gmail advertising thing, right? So this new ad template that Google released that allows you to run the ads at Gmail, Right. So somebody looks at it and says, really care about that. Somebody else who's on our list sees that email announcement about this new piece of content, they click on it, they go and read it. Well, now we're talking to them as well. So the retargeting is not just reserved for the unwashed masses. It's a good way of resetting and reconstimating the relationship with the leads that you have. Because they were in there, they were all involved, they were excited, maybe they bought something and now they're just kind of kicking it, they're hanging around. So it's a good time to call them up and be like, hey, you want to go hang out later? We do this in our personal lives. You know, I got Thursday night for my wife and I, it's date night, Right. I wouldn't just say, oh, now that I'm married, I don't ever have to take my wife on a date anymore. That would be terrible for the relationship. But we do that to our subscribers all the time. Oh, now that they're on the list, I'll just sling stuff at them. No, hey, go check this thing out that we got. Cool. They signed up for it. Okay. They're interested in this. Let's talk to them about that for a little bit, both in our ads and in our emails.

Cool. I want to make this super relevant for this audience. So we are going to take some questions. So if you got them, put your hand up for the mic runners. In the meantime, a lot of business owners are dependent and addicted to a certain source for sales, customers and leads. Whether they have a YouTube audience, they're taking sales on Amazon, they just blog and they're. They're addicted to one form of getting those leads and customers. If somebody is addicted to one form, how can they start to work in this type of an approach of setting up the audience so that they're now in control of the audience and they're moving the conversation from a platform where YouTube is, for example, sending all of the traffic to now having it in our control to where we can start to scale our own business?

Yeah. Well, the first thing that everybody needs to do is if you don't have a Facebook ad account and you don't have a Google Ad account, go and get them. If you got them, go in there and get your retargeting pixel. Okay? It's just a simple line of code. And if you don't know how to get it, Google how to get my Google retargeting pixel and how to get my Facebook retargeting. So, like, when you. If somebody's invariably gonna be like, so how do I do this? Where do I go get the pixel? I don't freaking know. But someone on YouTube does, and they already shot a video for it, okay? And it's ranking high in the Googles. That part's really, really, really simple. But go and put that on your webpage and they got videos showing you how to do it.

Put.

Put it on your site. It doesn't cost you anything to set that retargeting pixel so you can begin building your pixel audiences today with the traffic you already have coming in. Setting those pixels cost you nothing. It only costs you something if you decide that you want to advertise to them. Don't wait until you get this all figured out and get the campaigns Done. You can start doing that now. So that's the first thing. Then what you want to do is you want to look at. Okay, currently, let's say that you only have one source of traffic, right? It's all YouTube, for example. I get it. It's really, really hard when you've got a source of traffic and it's working and you have limited funds to want to redirect any of those funds to any other source of traffic. But you have to. You have to do it for the sake of. The worst thing in the world is to wake up one morning and find out that you lost an account and then you also lost your business, right? So much of scaling business is to limit the number of surprises that come your way. And one way to do that is to diversify. So diversifying your traffic source is a biggie. So what I would say is, again, hypothetically, YouTube is where all your traffic's coming from. Take 20% of what you're currently spending. Okay, 20%. If this doesn't work at all, maybe see a 20% reduction in sales, and I'm gonna kill you. Take 20% of that and put that towards this strategy. And wait. Start to build your pixeled audience. Okay? And as you see it working, and as you see that, wow, this is making everything better, this is making all of our advertising more effective, then direct a little bit more of your budget to it. 25%, 30%. Right now, today, we spend 60% of our ad budget on setting pixels. 60%, which, depending on the company, is, you know, many hundreds of thousands of dollars a month.

Can I throw a different perspective at it, where. Let's take an example like podcasting, where you don't. I have tens of thousands of subscribers, but I don't get their data because Apple owns all of it. Or if you sell on Amazon, you can have hundreds of thousands of customers. You get very limited data. You've got to extract that. And we work with a lot of that in our workshops on what that process looks like, but you don't get that automatically. So if you're dependent on a channel where you don't get the data, we've gone out then and used Facebook as the source to get in front of some of them and then starting to scale from there.

And you have to. You have to. Okay, so how many of you guys are face, or, I'm sorry, Amazon sellers, primarily? Okay, this is probably going to piss you off, but just understand, you are right now wholesalers. Okay? You don't have any customers unless you're doing some of the stuff that. Because I know you talk about, you got to get the leads off of Amazon. You got to build that relationship. This is no different than I've got my cool fishing lure that I'm so excited because Walmart's going to start stocking my fishing lure. Right. You have one customer today. That one customer is Amazon. Just like if you're. If you got a fishing lure and you're selling to Walmart, you got one customer. That one customer is Walmart. And Walmart could decide tomorrow. You know what, there's this other dude over here who's getting this fishing lure for $0.12 more. So, you know, Ryan seems like a nice guy, but, hey, it's business, buddy. So sorry you're out of business. And that's happened to Walmart sellers. Like, it's legendary how many people they put out of business by consolidating it. It's happened to Amazon sellers, too. Don't let it happen to you. I would argue you don't have a relationship with your customers. You don't have a business. You're a wholesaler. Okay. You're a wholesaler. And a wholesale business can be good, but at least wholesalers have a diversification of retailers that they work with. So if you're saying, yeah, cool, no, I'm a wholesaler, we sell on Amazon, we sell on Sears, we sell on all these different other channels, and we're well diversified, so we're good. If we lost Amazon, would it hurt? Yep. But we've got to be out of business. Nope. So one way or another, you have gotten. And the best way to do it is to have a relationship with the end customer, the people actually making the purchase.

What did we say yesterday? Two functions of business. Get customers and keep customers. Which one are you doing if you're taking a sale from somebody else's channel? Neither of them. You're just getting a sale. We have to work on building the.

Customer base and long term. In business, there's only three things that have value. Brands have value long term, Media has value long term.

And by that you mean eyeballs.

Yeah. Media is anything that aggregates attention. So a podcast could be media. Now, the thing that would make me nervous about a podcast is, again, it's media through an intermediary. So should you do it? Absolutely. Should it be the only media you own? No.

God, no.

Own other media. That's why you see all these podcast people building lists. New podcast. Fantastic. I think a podcast is a great way for you to, you know, to get access to them. But as soon as you got them, you got to be getting them into.

Your channel or YouTube.

Amazon. That's like Walmart coming up and saying, hey, you want to sell barbecue sauce? Cool. Why don't you set up shop in front of our Walmart today and sell to the people? If it goes well, we'll put you in the stands right on our shelves. Fantastic. If that works, great. But don't stop selling your barbecue sauce and your hot sauce in other places too.

Yeah, there was a third piece that.

I Media, brands and channels. So a channel like Amazon is a channel, Facebook is a channel, Google is a channel. It's the hardest thing in the world to produce. It costs billions of dollars and takes decades.

I'm glad you said that because there's a great Reddit hate thread about me saying channel way too much on the podcast. So now we can include Ryan Dice in my hate thread on Reddit. So thank you for that.

Yeah. I tell you, I don't know if I can live another day if I know people are gonna bash me on Reddit.

It's a tough life. Let's take some questions from the audience. Let's go back here.

Hey Brian, My name is Matt Lovell. I am from the Atlanta, Georgia area. I am launching a membership site to serve independent restaurant owners and it's a brand new concept. So thank you for all of this information. It's making a huge impact on the way I'm going to move that forward. One specific question is, would the delivery of the pixel be impacted by an ad blocker plugin or something of that? And if that is relevant, what's the work or should I even worry about it?

So right now the ad blockers aren't blocking pixels. Here's my take on a lot of that stuff. Google and Facebook, they're sold out on the retargeting stuff. Like their ad platform is dependent upon it. They've got some pretty decent lobbyists and I'm sure they know people who can kill other people and hide the body. Well, I don't think it's going anywhere. Right. There was a lot of like a do not pixel kind of thing that was presented at one point. I just don't think it's going to go and I especially don't think it's going to go anywhere if we're retargeting people in a way that's super cool. Because I don't know about you, I would much rather see ads for stuff I'm interested in than random ads. So retargeting done well is better for everyone. And I think as long as you can look at it and say, no, this truly is a better way, if done right, then it will always exist. They'll just find a way to force you to do it. Right. I'm down with that. That's the only way I'm interested in doing it. Screw black hat.

Name is Jake Russell from Waco, Texas.

I sell farms and ranches mainly.

So I hope to sell a person one or two times in their whole life.

Does the brand building or the retargeting.

Change if I'm hoping to do business with them once in 20 years?

Yeah, because they know other people who might like to buy ranches and stuff like that. Right. I think it's also just good to do. People will. They'll buy it and then they'll decide they want a different one. They'll tell other people the beautiful thing about this. So where it would be a conflict is if it was incredibly expensive to do. But let's say that you manage to retarget because what's your total audience of people that you're going to be selling ranches and farms to? Like nine.

Right. I mean it's so inexpensive because you're marketing to such a tiny little segment.

Of the population and no competitors are doing no real.

Yeah, I bet there's not a lot of other people in your space who are just here right now. Right. Or anywhere like it. So I think you got a pretty. And you should be willing to spend a lot because you got a pretty high average transaction value. You have to be patient. Like all branding, it takes a while to see it pay off, but when it does, it doesn't stop paying off. It hockey sticks.

I want to add to that. When you think of Back to the future first name.

When you think of Cleveland Indians first name.

Thank you. I know I always wanted to be associated with the Cleveland Indians.

This strategy of staying fresh in mind can put you in that position. First time you think of buying a ranch, your name. So this is a way of staying fresh in mind to build up that type of a relationship. I'd also add if you don't have other things that you can sell to those customers, spend some time thinking about that. Yeah.

Some attractor or something. Surely to God they need a tractor.

Or boots or something.

Yeah, boots and tractors. You're welcome.

We just diversified your business by.

I'd think on that long and hard about what else to add to that.

I want to royalty on the tractor.

Idea way Back in the corner.

Hey, Ryan. Sean McCabe from San Antonio, Texas. I have a hand lettering course@learnlettering.com and it's grossed half a million in the past 18 months. I've got three tiers for this course. The lowest tier I decided to do for free because most artists, they only pay about $29 in this space. But my higher level courses are 299 and 699, which is why there's more revenue. But I'm curious, you said don't throw away the old media. Everything is just in lieu of, in.

Addition to, not in lieu of.

Oh, okay. In addition to. What I'm curious about is on all of these free course students, there's actually 12,000 of them since August, I have all of their physical addresses as well. Would you recommend doing anything with that or just doing all like automation stuff?

So the beautiful thing about both Facebook and Google is if you have email addresses of existing people, you can upload those to both Facebook and Google, create a custom audience and only target them.

Do retargeting, don't worry about the physical addresses.

Well, you can use the physical address to do matching. So Google can match. You realize they know everything, right? So they can match and find you based on an email address, based on a phone number and based on on a physical address. So you could start doing follow up advertising to those 12,000 people without having to go back and re pixel them. Just upload them as a custom audience and they'll match them.

So what I've been doing for those people is basically just upselling them to the 299 or 699. But I know you're a big fan of the Tripwire. Would you recommend doing something lower price?

Yes, because especially online there is a danger. Have you ever heard the expression, you know. Well, there's no harm in asking? Of course there's harm in asking. Of course there's harm in asking. Single guys go to a bar tonight. Hi, nice to meet you. You want to go back to my place and get freaky? You don't get to. Oh, just kidding. Can I buy you a drink? It's done. You're crazy. Was out. You're a weirdo. So the danger of coming out too soon and saying, I've got this course for $297. If they say no, then the chance of them changing their mind later is less. So I want to ask them the tough question again. It's like my wife, if I'm going to ask her for a favor or ask her like, hey, is it cool? Like if me and the guys take a golf trip? I'm not going to do that when she's in a bad mood. I'm going to do it when she's in a good mood. Same thing. Right? So that's the benefit of a lower ticket entry point offer. You get them to buy something smaller, they're in a good mood, they're liking you, they're in the buying mode now. You can ask them to buy the big. If you ask them to buy the big too soon, they say no chance of them changing their mind is about as often as them admitting they were wrong.

I'm going to add to that that I think the physical addresses to send, if you want to build up goodwill or get their attention, I think it's a. I absolutely. I think that you should.

You can also print emails out and put them in these things called envelopes, attach stamps to them, and it's a physical email.

You could try that as well.

That sounds archaic. You're from the 1980s.

Weird, but I've heard about it. Thanks.

Right. All right, let's do one more.

Hey, Ryan and Ryan Hkh from New Jersey. Quick question about the cost per pixel about that. If you haven't found what your message, what you want it to be, is there a way to leverage that until you do? So you're saying you guys need to be in this, you need to be doing it. Is there something I can start building an audience without having my final message yet?

Yeah, I mean, I think you just start giving content. Right. So I think you need to go and you need to write some stuff. You need to do what? Let's get out of hypothetical land and talk about real stuff. What do you do?

I'm in real estate.

Real estate investing? Yeah. Who you sell them to?

Well, my clients are people who are in debt and financial problem and then getting them to the people who rehab them. So I'm a wholesaler right now.

Okay, so you're doing wholesaling. So you want to target. All this stuff begins with an audience, right? Audience centric marketing. So you want people who are in debt that want to sell their home.

And he also wants buyers because he needs a pool of buyers that it can turn around and get it out to.

Yeah. So you've got two different markets, which is fine. Two different avatars. Great. So what I would do is produce the most amazing piece of content that just hits them square between the eyes of the thing that they most wanted at that. Now, where people Screw this up is they write a book and they want to give them everything.

No.

Answer their number one question that they have. What's a big question that they would have? Answer it in an astoundingly amazing piece of content and buy advertising to it. See, what do they say? Do you start getting comments? You start getting feedback? What are they talking about? You're building your pixel audience, and then you can go and you can ask them and advertise other things to them as you're figuring it out. I would budget, you know, personally, how much you want to spend to do this?

Anything it takes. But what if I'm more?

Well, that's not. I mean, you don't have all the money in the world. Yeah, I know, but I'm saying, like, because, like, specifically, would you put a thousand dollars a month? Would you risk a thousand dollars a month?

Yes.

Would you risk two?

Yes.

Okay, let's do a thousand, because it sound like you got a little nervous when I went to two. So start with a thousand.

Okay.

And write a piece of content for each one of those avatars. Throw 500 bucks at 1, 500 bucks at the other, and see what happens. My guess is you spend a whole lot more on a whole lot less, and you're doing something. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Ryan. Thank you for being here. Let's give it up for Ryan Dice.

Thanks, guys.