How To Build Brand Trust Before The Sale

It's not uncommon at our marketing agency and in my experience in marketing to put a lot of emphasis and focus on the bottom of the funnel and getting purchasers, buyers, customers today from all of our advertising and marketing. And we see this on both the Google side as well as the advertising mechanisms on social media. And the premise becomes flawed when all we want to do with our ads is spend a little bit of money, whether it's hundreds for your business or whether it's tens of thousands for your business, and go immediately to getting a perfect stranger to buy a product or service when they weren't already in the journey. So we're going to focus in this dialogue here around the opportunity in social media specifically and why ads go wrong. Let's talk about 3 things that go absolutely wrong. Number 1 is not using the platform the way it was set up to help your business grow. Last I checked, and you can Google this, you can be sure that Meta, for example, we'll stay with Meta, Facebook, Instagram, and the Threads platform, they earn 90+ percent of their revenue from ads. So let me be clear, you think it's a social media platform, you go on there and you post and you like things and you comment and you watch reels, but yet Meta makes money from ads. So the platform must perform from an advertising perspective, otherwise they wouldn't be making money hand over fist. Check their financial reports in their publicly traded company. So something is not working in your ads that's working for everybody else. We're going to dig into that a little bit deeper, but number one, you're not using the platform the right way from an advertising standpoint. We're going to get into that in just a minute. Number two, you aren't patient intelligent enough with the process. Because one thing you have to understand with ads, especially on social media— and this works on Google, you could apply it across all the channels because all paid media channels work similarly— and what that means is your job as an advertiser on a platform is to provide a credible signal to the platform so that the platform can find your people. Let me say it again: your job as an advertiser, marketer, business owner, whoever's in there running the ad— your job is to provide a signal. What is a signal? It using the words, the phrases that would show up in an ad that 3 billion people— you're not advertising to 3 billion people, but that your people would be able to recognize. And if Meta is being assigned the job to go throughout its 3 billion people and find those people for your budget— $100 a day, $500 a day, $1,000 a day, whatever that looks like— your job is to provide as clear a signal as you can as to who you want them to go find. So platform is part one. Part of that is setup. Part of that is structure. Part two is not thinking about the signals that are required. Now let's go one step deeper. The third thing is, and most importantly, is failing to build brand awareness and credibility with the right person in advance of the time that they actually need to purchase. For years and years and years, I've been an entrepreneur for 35 years, multiple businesses, and now an agency for 15 years with well over 600 case studies and accounts that we've run. And inevitably the same problem materializes, and that is everyone says they want to do things so they can get their name out there. They, they want to do some brand awareness. They want to become more visible. And in the end, all of what they say they want to do is actually not what they really want to do. What they really want to do is get their name out there, get more visible so that they can get more customers. But what they fail to realize is that without a proper brand visibility, brand awareness strategy that puts that brand visibility in alignment with the customer acquisition process, things tend to break. Let me throw you an example. When I first started in digital advertising specifically, and when I got offline and got away from print, I didn't do much television, I didn't do much radio, but I did print and newspaper, things of that nature, direct mail. When I got into digital, I realized a couple of things, and I thought about the very first commercial that was run on television, and it was by the watch company Bulova. So I want you to get something about what Bulova did and then extrapolate that out to today's terms. In 1941, they run a 9-second video for about $9. That's about a dollar per second. Sit with that for just a second. In today's dollars, if you extrapolate that out, that same— based on inflation, that same ad is going to probably run $20 to $25 per second. Let's bring it a little bit more forward in real time. The number one watched television event of the year, year after year, is the Big Game in February. Advertisers spend $7 to $8 million for the ad spot for a 30-second ad buy, and then they have to do the production, which estimates somewhere between $3 and $5 more million. Let's extrapolate that cost. So they're running a 30-second commercial for about $7 to $8 million $15 million is what most of it will cost. Look, do the math. Just at the raw cost of the ad buy, you're probably talking something like $233,000 per second. But why did Bulova run the ad in 1941? And why do brands run the commercial during the big game? It's for brand visibility and brand awareness, but they don't expect someone to stop and go buy in that very moment. You get it? They're trying to get brand awareness with a whole bunch of eyeballs for brand building in the future, but they're not expecting people to buy today. Now let's zoom back to Meta, for example, and where Meta gives us an advantage over brand broad communication on television, radio, TV, or billboards. What we figured out back in 2014 was that Meta, if we put the right words in the ad, Meta, every 1,000 people that the ad would go to, if 2 or 3 people interacted with that ad, then Meta would figure out what was common about those people and kind of set them aside this way. And then 997 didn't interact with the ad, so Meta was like, oh, we're not sure if that's for them. Then the next 1,000 videos goes out, and those next 1,000 videos might get 12 people to interact with the ad. So now there was 3 from this first 1,000 batch, and then there's 12 from the next 1,000 batch, and now it's 15. And for every 1,000 impressions, Meta is getting smarter about who's interacting with that ad. So different than the big game ads, different than what Bulova was doing when they were advertising on TV during the baseball game— by the way, I'm a Dodgers fan, it was a Dodgers-Philly game— is today, when you think about brand awareness the right way, you're going to put words and phrases in your ad campaign on a social media platform like Meta. And here's the good news. You can test every angle of your messaging for just $1 per day. I'm not suggesting that's where everybody starts, but for those who are just getting started, who have never had good success, we almost always come back to do we understand who we're supposed to be talking to? Do we understand the problems that are keeping them up at night? And how can we build a campaign now where we can put in multiple ads and let Meta do the sifting and sorting? So most of you watching this video can't just do $10 or $15 million on a campaign for the big game. I get that. I hear you. Most of you here are not going to do TV, radio, billboards, and these other old school mechanisms. I hear you. But where you're missing the boat is understanding that when done properly, and yes, you can start with just $1 a day per ad to test when you put the right words in front of the right people in this particular campaign. By the way, this is not a lead generation or purchase sales campaign. Don't get it twisted. This is only 5 to 15% of your monthly budget that's used to get the signals that Meta needs to find your person. But so often many of you just jump in with your $200 a day or your $300 a day, and all you want is to take a perfect stranger who is sitting on their cell phone, their smartphone, browsing Facebook, Instagram, Threads— and by the way, you can move these platforms out to TikTok, you can move it out to YouTube, LinkedIn— but the person was sitting there having their social experience, which is exactly what they do when they watch TV. They're watching TV to be entertained. When they're on social media, they're they're there for their own personal entertainment, and you expect that because you put up $100 a day, $200 a day, whatever it is, that you're going to get perfect strangers to just stop what they're doing and buy if you haven't provided the adequate signals. If any of this has resonated, I want to invite you to consider the possibility that you just haven't structured your ads right. I want you to consider the possibility that you don't understand the platform and you haven't even tried. Yeah, I'm coming at you like that. You haven't even tried to understand the platform. You know why? And I get it. You're good at lawn care, you're good at being a doctor, you're good at being an attorney, you're good at being a kiosk manufacturer. You're good at manufacturing widgets. You're good at developing products. You're good at your software. I get it. But we can't blame platforms for performance on ads and not take some accountability for not having spent the right amount of time or work with the right type of partner who would take care of this for you. And that's what I'm inviting you to consider today. This campaign structure that I'm describing in this video, which you can start with a dollar a day— in our world, we call it our brand visibility, our dollar a day strategy, our visibility strategy— it is there to reach a lot of people the same way that the big game ads would do, TV, radio, billboard would do, but do so in a much more targeted way, in a way that sends the signal to Meta that if this person interacts with our ad, it might be our right person. But if people skip the ad, we'll let them go for now. This is what the invitation would be. If you want to learn how this setup works, I would invite you to click on the video that might be popping up here or here, or it might be linked down below. You can check that video out for free. And I hope you would come back to this video or comment on that video and let me know if it helped change your mind about how you think about brand visibility in a very competitive advertising world. And we all know right now what's going on with search. We all know that it's changing with AI. We all know that people are spread out with chatbots and all of these other things. All of us right now are having to change how we approach customer acquisition on all of these channels. And when we go to a channel where the average person spends about 45 minutes a day— Facebook, Instagram, Threads— and we can't figure out how to get into their world and meet them where they are, then that's not a platform problem when their whole platform makes most of their money from ads. That's a problem that we have to fix. And I'd invite you to take that journey with us. Click the link down below, or maybe showing up over here, and learn a little bit more about what I'm talking about right here. I hope this has helped, and we'll see you in the next video. Take care.