How Gen Z Is Monopolizing Attention... (Organic Content Vs. Paid Ads)

Welcome back to the Brand Builders Podcast. Today we're talking about a very, very concerning topic that comes up very often whenever I talk to clients, customers, and people just in this space, which is organic versus paid ads. This is the type of content that you put out, organic being you don't pay for any— anything, and paid ads being you are paying the platform for views. I think this is the cheat code and the secret that Gen Z has been able to utilize and take over markets within like days utilizing this content because they know how to get attention, they know how to get in front of people. And that's one thing that if you have no idea what you're doing on social media, I want you to pay close attention to this episode. Brand Builders Podcast. Okay, so paid ads. I have mixed feelings on paid ads personally because I built my entire business off of organic content and organic being pretty much posting on Facebook, posting on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok alone. This is where I get 90% of my lead generation. And if it's not word of mouth, if I haven't worked with them before and it's not a referral, then it's coming off of social media. As of right now. I'm always open to figuring out new ways and new things to get new clients and new leads. But up to this point, social media has been the main tool and the main vehicle that I have used to get this thing off the ground. And so whenever I am talking to people who are in the business space and they bring up that they don't use social media for anything but to post family photos, on Facebook so that their cousins two states away can see them. It makes me very concerned and, and makes me wonder how in the world do they actually get leads? And there's all sorts of traditional things. And this is definitely just me being a Gen Z mindset person who grew up with social media. And so I understand that I might be a little bit biased and not to say the other things don't work at all, It's just social media has such a higher leverage point and it's so much further and the amount of people that you can reach is so much higher that it's a no-brainer to me. And it's like, why would you not spend more time trying to figure out how social media works? Because that's where the people are. And so often you hear about Facebook ads and people paying Facebook to get their name out there, get their face out there, put a Canva graphic out there. While there is a time and place to do this, I think the majority of your time, probably 90 to 95% of your time, needs to be making video content specifically. Back in 2020, we got to fast forward as to why this even happened. TikTok came out in 2020 amidst COVID, amidst a pandemic, and they honestly pulled a crazy smart move in the way that they set up their platform. And it was video first with a feed that gives the user content that they're interested in. Infinite content. Like, that's why people doom scroll, and that's why Instagram added the Instagram Reels feature. That's why Facebook and YouTube followed suit and had YouTube Shorts, Facebook Reels, all of this, what we call short-form content. Uh, this is video, so short clips that are usually under a minute and a half. Uh, sometimes way shorter, down to like 1 or 2 seconds if people are trying to manipulate the algorithms or whatever. Um, but people pay for these Facebook ads. And what do you think that tells Facebook whenever you post something and immediately put money behind it? I want you to think from Facebook's perspective on this and all the platforms. How do they make money from you paying to advertise to their audience. And so the better Facebook is at putting your content, your paid content, in front of people who might buy, the better their system is, the more likely you're going to come back and buy more. Um, it sends Facebook— and I, I have people who I have personal connections who talk to Facebook all the time, people at Facebook— and to them they recognize an account that pays them money as soon as they post pretty much every time as somebody that they want to keep around and keep spending more money. And so if you post something, say you post a garbage piece of content, you put $100 behind it, you might get 5,000 views. If they can get you even one client from that, they're going to try their best to do it. But the caveat is the next post that you make, it's going to be garbage and you're going to be used to just getting these high views because you paid for it. And the next post is not going to do nearly as well. So say you get 5,000 views with a paid post and you get 100 views with the organic post that you post right after, it's going to make you feel like you have to go out and buy more ads. Um, in reality, If you do the content thing right, if you study what type of content is out there and what type of value you're actually bringing to the social media platform and your viewers, that is where you're going to unlock, um, the true leverage and trust building that social media can bring. Before we get too much into the weeds, that is paid advertising. That is paid content. The other hand is organic content, which is distributed to the platforms, to the people, to the masses without having to pay anything. It is free 99 to go and post a YouTube video for anybody. If you have an account, you can go and start making content right now for free and getting views if you do it correctly. So these are the two differences and I want to talk about some of the pros and cons of each one. And talk about why I want to go through some examples of what organic content actually looks like, because I can sit here and say organic all day long. But if you don't know what that actually looks like, and you can go look at my profile and my Instagram, my TikTok, my YouTube, and this is all organic content. The video that you're watching right now is organic content that I'm not having to pay a single dime to produce because I'm filming it myself. If you're a business owner and you know that you need to be putting out content and videos, but you don't have the time or the strategy to do it well, well, that's exactly what we help with here at Howdy Media. We offer content strategy, turnkey podcast production, monthly professional video and content services, and access to our state-of-the-art content studio right here in Abilene, Texas. More importantly, We help you create content that gets actual views, builds real trust, and turns attention into clients and customers. Because at the end of the day, that's why we make the content. So if you're ready to stop guessing and start using content to actually grow your business, go to www.howdy-media.com or send us a DM. Hope to talk to you soon. I'm uploading it myself to these platforms and people are seeing it right away without having to pay a single dime. And so organic content being vlog-style videos, you hold the camera, walk around, and just show your life. Tell a story about what it is that you're doing in life. Are you building a business? Are you building a chicken coop? Are you going on a trip? Are you traveling? Are you raising kids? Just record it. Send it to an editor or learn how to edit yourself and put together a story, and that is a good example of a vlog. People have built entire companies off of vlogs. Casey Neistat, if you've never heard of him as a creator, go look him up on YouTube. He just tells stories about his life, about what he's doing. He did it every day for like 2 years, I believe, maybe longer than that, and he will never have to work again if he doesn't want to because of the brand that he has built just off of vlogs. So that's one way. Podcasting. This is a huge way to do it. Obviously I'm a big fan of podcasting because this is a good amount of time, 30 minutes, an hour, 2 hours sometimes of nonstop talking with very, very little cuts and edits. And so the trust that that builds is huge. That's organic. Another thing that you can do is just make funny content. Find a couple videos that you think is hilarious that have performed well on these platforms and see if you can recreate it in your situation, your scenario, especially at the beginning. This is going to skyrocket your engagement, your views, and your reach at the very beginning. And then you're off to the races after you do this for a while. Then pivot once you have a good idea of what content works and what content doesn't work. And you can start leveraging these ideas and tactics within your personal brand. And therefore more people are going to see your personal brand, what you have to offer, what you have to do. The whole idea of it is to create content that is valuable to the viewer and make sure that when the viewers are watching, they have this urge to either save the video, send it to a friend, send it via DMs on Instagram to a group chat. The more that these things occur, the more the platforms are going to be pushing your content out organically. So if you put out something that's very selfish, it's like, oh, look at me, I'm doing this, I'm selling this, you should buy a house from me, me, me, me. Then the viewers are not going to be getting any value out of what you're saying and doing. So I need you to flip it, and it's like, if you were the viewer, what would you want to be seeing? Depending on your industry, that can look different, but you want to create value, whether that's through education or entertainment. Uh, if you can merge the both together, even better. Um, but create value because this is going to show the algorithms that, hey, these people are sharing it, these people are watching to the end, because they do measure all of these analytics. If you've never seen the analytics on your stuff, there's a thing on Instagram on your post, it says View Insights. Facebook, same thing, View Insights. YouTube, you go to Analytics and you can see everything all the way down to how long they watched, when did they click away, what was the click-through rate every time somebody saw it, what was the skip rate. All these things add up. And a good video has high numbers. So like high retention rates, um, they stay to watch most of the video. That's why people are posting 2-second reels, because by the time 2 seconds passed, it shows that they've already watched the reel one whole time. And so if they're trying to read some text in your caption and you write a long caption but the video is playing in the background on Instagram reels, you're basically manipulating and hacking the algorithm, showing that the retention rate is very, very high, which means it's good content to the platform. So if you boil it down to these two things, organic and paid, the organic is free, free 99, and people can leverage it. People have grown massive businesses and brands just using organic, especially within the Gen Z community. They have figured out how to monopolize attention, and the person who has all the attention wins at the end of the day. You can do this on a local level, uh, depending on what city you live in. Unless you live like in a Metroplex, like a big area, you can monopolize the attention by posting good content, a lot of content, and content that catches people's attention. It— you don't have to have 2 million subscribers or 2 million followers to monopolize the attention in your market. Um, I feel like that's one of our goals here, uh, with Howdy Media and the company that I'm running, the media company, is we are trying to be in front of people every single day more than everybody else in the city. So I want people to know who we are because we post more. They see us on Facebook, they see us on Instagram, they see us on YouTube more than every single other person because we're posting more. And the more we do it, the better our content gets. And the more things that I realize, oh, this works locally in our market. Okay, so with the organic side of things, I want to talk about something very important. This is what's called the content funnel. And so you're basically— there's 4 different steps. You're going to go from awareness to interest, to desire, to then action. And this is a common theme in the marketing world. But when it comes to content specifically, you can use it the exact same way. So the top of the funnel is the awareness section. Awareness being you are getting as many eyeballs on it as possible on your brand. Since I started posting every single day on Instagram, Um, every 90 days I'm averaging about 600,000 to 700,000 views on my channels. Obviously it can be way higher than that, and I'm, I'm working to go farther than that, but a lot of these views are local. And so whenever you think of it in that context, my city that I live in is at about 100,000, I think 50,000 people. That's a lot of views locally that I am able to get. And a lot of people know about us now because we have been able to monopolize all the attention in our market. And so if even if you get 10,000 views per month organically, this is going to be tremendous for your business because that's 10,000 eyeballs and people that maybe did not know about you before, and you didn't have to spend a single dollar on it doing it organically. So that's awareness. So that's the top of the funnel. Then we move to the interest. So they see your content, they follow you, they are aware of your brand, which it's your responsibility, by the way, as the business owner, as the brand, to put yourself in a position for your potential clients to discover you. That's your responsibility because there's already people out there who want to buy what you have to offer. They just don't know you exist. And so then they move to interest and they start becoming interested in your content and what you have to offer. And they're like, man, maybe this will help me. And then you put out more content, more educational stuff, more case studies, and they show like, oh, this is what it would look like if you worked with us. This creates a desire because they're like, man, I really need this for my business. In our example, content. We are a content agency, content studio. We produce content that converts into clients and builds brands and we go viral and all the things. And the more people watch our stuff, the more it's going to create that desire because they're like, man, what if my brand had an extra 200,000 views this month? Would that change things? And I didn't have to pay for those 200,000 views. Would that change things? So that creates a desire. And then you put out what's called call to action type of posts, whether it's through a free event and you do an offer at the end, or you put out, um, a lead magnet where they take up an offer through an ad or a form. Um, or you just put out a post saying, hey, we have 2 client spots available this month. Who wants them? This shows that, hey, it's actually, there's scarcity involved. And you could even put a date that we're closing applications. And then that puts a little bit of pressure and rush on them taking action. So all these things combined, they become aware, they become interested, the desire is developed. And these are just stages of the customer process. And then they take action whenever you finally give a CTA post or a call to action post and they take up an offer. So that's the journey from start to finish when it comes to content, to organic content specifically. Paid content is a little bit different. Let's talk about paid content for a minute. Paid content is great for speed, for targeting, for testing, for launching things, some lead generation. And retargeting. So let's, let's go over each one of those. Speed. So you can reach a lot more people a lot quicker, guaranteed. So if you're like, hey, I have $10,000 this month that I want to spend on Facebook ads, you can pretty much guarantee that you're going to be reaching 800,000 people or whatever the Facebook metrics are for that within a week. And so So if you are trying to reach a large amount of people very quickly, this is whenever you would use paid ads. Targeting, that's the second way that you can leverage paid ads. So targeting is when you're like, okay, I want to target a specific type of group who is interested in a very specific type of thing or product. So say you have, you have a new fishing rod, that you're trying to get out there and trying to promote. You can target people who are into fishing because Facebook already knows, hey, they're into fishing because it gives them fishing content. And you can target specific types of people. You can target, hey, I want to target people who are fishing, who are into fishing in Texas, in a specific state, in a specific city. You can get down to the county. You can get down to the neighborhoods, the gender, the age, all the things. You can target specific people. Organic is a little bit different and harder to do that with. Uh, testing. If you want to get a bunch of sample data, if you want to put out, um, surveys, if you want to see what the market is wanting and needing, this is a great way to do it. Uh, if you're launching a new product, obviously you want to get as many eyeballs as you can. That I would combine organic marketing and paid marketing. Paid advertising for that specific thing. Lead gen, obviously, and retargeting. Retargeting is something that it's, it's not as dialed whenever you use organic content, because if somebody clicks on your website, if somebody clicks on your account, the way this works is Facebook will track what they do on your account and your website. And if they add something to the cart, for example, it adds what's called a pixel ID to their Facebook account. And so now they know, hey, this person has visited this website before, therefore we need to send them this type of ad, this retargeting ad that you have set up in the back. Um, often you have to have somebody who knows what they're doing with the paid ads. That's also another barrier to entry, uh, because unless you spend the time to learn how to run paid ads correctly, you're going to be wasting money. And if you do want to use paid ads, you're probably gonna have to pay somebody to set them up for you. Whereas organic, you take out your iPhone, you go live on Instagram, it's free, people get to know you, and that's it. To wrap things up on this episode, I hope this made some sense and it wasn't too confusing. Organic, paid ads, all the different things. There's some stats that I want to bring up because I'm a numbers guy, I'm a stats guy, obviously. Also, you've been seeing Taco Via on my shirt the entire time. We are not sponsored by Taco Via. I just like this shirt. So just thought I saw it in the monitor. I was like, wow, that looks great. So these stats, 91% of businesses use video as a marketing tool and 93% of marketers say video is a very important part of their strategy. I wonder what those 7% who didn't say that are doing probably billboards and wasting money. Short-form video is the most used and highest ROI content format among marketers. That's a big statement and it goes along with everything that I talk about on this channel. It is your highest and best use case for your time. Your ROI is going to be tremendously higher if you spend money on marketing and content as opposed to spending money on traditional advertising. This is why you see channels like MrBeast as an example. If you've never watched MrBeast or seen his videos, he has mastered retention. He has mastered the click-through rate, all the things that make a good video and keeping you hooked as a viewer. And he invests basically everything back into his videos, which is just organic. And so he'll spend a million dollars on a YouTube video. To get it produced and get it out, uh, because he's always trying to make it bigger and better. And the platforms, because he's putting so much time, money, and energy into this organic market, it rewards him because it is great content. And so just because you are posting organic content doesn't mean you— it's completely free the whole time, but the trust that you build from organic content way outweighs the trust that you build from paid ads. And it's going to give you what's called loyal fans, which is what you want. If you have 20 loyal fans, that will completely change your life and your business forever because they will always be referring you out. They will always be sending you business and potential clients. And so you don't have to have a million followers. Again, back to that stat earlier. Okay, 60%. Of consumers trust what a creator says about a brand more than what the brand says about itself. Do you ever catch yourself on Amazon and you're going to buy a product and you're like, man, this looks great, but I wonder if it's actually as good as they're saying? And you go to the review section, and this is like a whole career path that people do, but then the— these creators make a review video in the format of all the other social media platforms. Like, you could put on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram and get good results as well, but you trust that person because they are giving their personal take, their personal, uh, opinion on this product. Then they get paid because you watch the video. They get paid a commission. And so Amazon's going all in, all the platforms. That's why they pay creators because people trust creators because of that trust and relationship they've built with their audience, which is huge when it comes to this. And aver— as a business owner, this is how you leverage it because you have something for sale. If you're in business, you have something for sale, whether that's a product or a service, um, whatever it is, you have something to sell. And so if you can get in front of as many people as possible and create these relationships with as many people as possible, the opportunities that come your way are going to be exponentially higher and often at times can seem like infinite opportunities come your way with business, with your personal life, with everything. Like there's been so many cool moments and opportunities that I have had because I posted videos, even this podcast. And I don't get the most views ever on this podcast. Like, I have a smaller audience. I have a mainly local audience. But the views that I do get, I feel like are very impactful. And the people who watch my stuff, which thank you for watching, by the way, have become fans of the brand, fans of the businesses that I'm a part of, anything that I do, because I've built my personal brand and spent the time. I've been posting pretty much every day for the last 2 years straight. 2024, I think in April is whenever I was like, okay, I'm going to start posting every single day. And now we're here. And so it's going to have a compounding effect. The longer you do it, the more people see, the more the platforms trust that you're going to be putting out good content. So it automatically just shoots it out there, shoots it out there. So if you have any questions on any of this stuff, make sure to send me a DM, leave a comment. I would love to make more videos answering questions just like this one. I feel like I am not the smartest person in the world, but I definitely have experience being the Gen Z type person who grew up with social media. I've been making videos for over 10 years. On YouTube, Instagram, and throwback to Vine. I was a creator on Vine whenever I was in junior high. I know, I know, that's a throwback. But I've been making videos for 10+ years at this point, probably more. I probably did the math wrong on that. But leave a comment down below. This is what I'm here for. I want to provide value for you. If I don't have a guest on sharing their wisdom and knowledge, then I'm going to share my experiences and what I've seen work. And so make sure to stick around, watch the other episodes that we put out. There's some great stories, great examples of people who have built brands and what they did and what they did wrong, um, what they did right to build what they have built up to this point. So make sure to check those out, make sure to hit subscribe button, and we'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.