Counterintuitive YouTube ads strategy, Google's 7-11-4 rule, AI for content multiplication & more

Speaking of the AI stuff, what's been working for you guys? You know what? You guys have been— so Ralph, Kassem, you guys were in War Room before, right?

Yeah. Yeah, for years.

So, okay, we should do a Wicked Smart section for this towards the end. Neil, you probably remember what that is. Neil's been to War Room before too. But on the AI stuff that's going on, like what's been working for you guys? You guys share a lot of stuff there too. So let's start with you, Kassem.

Oh, what's my wicked smart? Oh dude, I've got a couple of really good ones. So long form. I'm actually, you know what's so funny? I'm stealing this. So this is a wicked smart presentation that just happened at Driven, which is the new war room.

That means he's never done it, but he's just stealing it from somebody else.

Yeah. No, I'm stealing it from. This is Dimitri, my buddy Dimitri Smirnov. Big Life Marketing. Wicked smart cat. You guys should have him on the podcast. Dimitri presented a wicked smart that I loved, and I've actually done. He's taking long form YouTube ads. Here's what's really interesting about YouTube ads. The watch times on YouTube ads are inordinately higher than all other media platforms. So if your watch time on like, you know, Meta ad is, I don't know what, 15, 20 seconds or whatever, your watch time on YouTube ads can be minutes long. And the average time on site for YouTube is 20 minutes, which is insane. The average time on site across all websites is sub-60 seconds. So like average time on site on YouTube is unfreaking believable. And if you have long-form ads, we have one of our highest performing ads across. We spend $150,000 to $200,000 a month just in YouTube. One of our highest performing ads is an hour long. It's a 1-hour-long video of John Moran explaining media efficiency ratio.

And these— John Moran, the basketball player?

No, John Moran. I didn't know there was a John Moran.

You guys didn't know he was a media buyer too? An NBA star, John Moran.

That's funny. Yeah, he moonlights. So we have this hour-long YouTube video, but the point that Dimitri makes is if you've got these watch times, especially if your watch time is getting close to 60%, 70%, 80%, whatever, why would you stop? Like, people are watching, allow them to continue to watch. And then the other thing that can be really interesting too within YouTube following that kind of same ethos is run ads to other YouTube videos. Which is counterintuitive. Everybody thinks, you know, the click should go to the website, the funnel, the offer, the whatever. But there's— Google has the 7-11-4 rule. Have you all heard this?

You— no, I haven't. It sounds familiar. Go ahead.

It's interesting. Google did this multivariate study across basically all purchasing behavior, but the 7-11-4 rule states that a customer needs to spend 7 hours— engage with 7 hours of content, across 11 different moments in 4 locations before they're ready to engage with you.

Uh, hi, Emma, don't be shy.

Say hi.

Don't be shy. Say hi.

Emma, say hi.

She doesn't want to. So what this does is it gives you the opportunity to kind of really boost those numbers. And instead of going straight for the throat and, you know, the jugular of buy now, Using high-end content to have them engage with more high-end content. It's a way to invest in your customers, give value first, and it's showing quite a bit in the way of results for us.

I love that. Was that a Wicked Smart winner?

He placed in the top 3. The winner was actually Rachel Miller this year.

That name sounds familiar too.

Dude, Rachel's maybe one of the smartest people in the whole wide world. You guys should have her on too. She just launched an AI product called Busy.ai. That's insane. Shout out to my friend Rachel.

What does it— what does it do? Tell us what it does.

You get a double look at Spark. It creates the product, the funnel, the list, the follow-up for everything that you'd need to launch an info business in a fraction of a second. It's like a business in a box creator. It's unbelievable.

So if you want to create products—

That's for you, Emma.

You can launch a business, Emma.

Yeah, it will be Emma's business we could do in 15 minutes about together. It's pretty cool.

I love it. All right, Ralph, hit us.

I'm far more like see the ball, hit the ball here. Like, you know, I look at AI right now as just a force multiplier for people that I already have on staff as opposed to replacing them. But I have replaced some content writers with some of the AI tools. I mean, one of the biggest video tools that we use, like talk about content just at top of funnel, like we're really talking about the more content you can get out there, as much as possible from an organic perspective. And you guys know this, and obviously, you know, you guys rank for lots of keywords, but it's not even that. It's just being out there and multiplying your content and taking what you've already done. In our case, we use a lot of video. I know you guys do as well. But I think one of the best tools, and I was surprised that people actually at our mastermind didn't know about this one because I thought everybody did, which is Opus. Opus.pro. And we use Opus all the time. It's like, it's, it's absolutely fantastic. So you just, so for people that don't know what it is, let's say you have a video, like this is a video podcast here. You basically throw it into Opus.pro and it pulls out the segments for the small short-form videos with the most relevant content. Maybe it's, you know, in, in our case, it might be, you know, something, well, probably not something that Qasim said, probably something that I said. I'm sure it pulls out like the most relevant chunks and then recreates that in a short-form video with some slight editing. And then you have your person go in there and do the refinements. And then we can multiply stuff like so quickly, so fast. I think it's, it's getting to be known a little bit too much because some of the short-form videos are done in sort of that Hormozi style, which Hormozi is now sort of changing his style to, which is kind of cool. He's going more long-form. The point is, is it's a great way for you to take one piece of content, multiply it, especially in the video side, and syndicate it. We do the same thing with blog posts with another tool that we use, contentatscale.ai. It's been a sponsor of Perpetual Traffic for years and years. I think any of those tools, if you Google AI tools for content multiplication, like it is, or for syndication, it's a great way of being able to do what we've been talking about here for the last hour or so. On, you know, very small budgets with tiny teams. I literally have one video editor and he pumps out like 20 videos a day and they're high quality. So we don't know which ones are going to hit, which ones are going to get, you know, engagement. But the point is, is the more we put out, the more leads we see, the more visibility, the more opportunity we have to scale.

Yeah, I see that all as like a— I told Neil this, we see social media as like a slot machine now. You just keep— the more you put out, the more chances you have to hit the triple 7s. That's all it is at the end of the day. On my end, And then I'll let Neil go next. So we've been doing with this podcast specifically, so we're going to go 90 minutes here, right? So Riverside's going to give us an AI transcript here and it's called AI-assisted content, right? And now I think from this experiment, now it's driving like up to 500, 600 clicks per day and it's starting to really ramp up, right? And so what we're doing is this podcast is daily and we are just taking the trending topics and then taking the transcript, making it into a blog post using AI. But then you have a human in a loop that's going to add context to it. It's going to add links. It's going to add pictures to it. And then we're also cross-linking to other recent new publications, but our costs come down a lot. We're able to put the content out a lot faster. Now, what we're doing too is we're using the XML sitemaps of marketing news websites too to get trending topics. And then we might get a quick overview and then our writers will just go in and start writing. That way, we might not necessarily need to ideate every single time, right? This is a way for us to build more top of the funnel content while we use programmatic SEO to build more content around more bottom of the funnel stuff, right? So, for example, if you're TripAdvisor, they get 127 million visits per month from organic, all SEO. They rank for 20 million keywords, right? And they rank for everything under fun things to do in Rome, things to eat in Japan, fun things, fun attractions, right? All these things.

Okay.

Anybody can do that now, right? And so, it just depends, like not anybody, but if your business has a lot of these different permutations, there's a lot of different demands, there's locations and things like that, you can do programmatic SEO that's more bottom of funnel. You add in these 2 combos, you're going to be really hard to beat because most people, 99% of people are not doing this right now.

So, one thing that we're doing right now, which has been creating a massive ROAS, is selling on the platform. So if you look at most ads, whether they're brand awareness or performance-based ads, the intention is, is people try to drive people to a website and get them to convert. What we're seeing is right now, if you just keep people on the platforms, it's way cheaper. So for example, if you're running ads and stories on Instagram, don't have one story, have multiple stories that gives the pitch, gives all the copy that they would get on the landing page from your website, but keep them on Instagram longer and let them stay in the native platform that they're used to. And they're consuming everything that they need to know. And then when they go to your website, they go to buy, right? And some of these platforms are making it where they can just buy on that platform. But what we're finding that is working extremely well right now is take what marketing material you would put on your website And don't think of your ads as just an ad to drive people back to your website. How can you have an ad that engages them and give them the information on the platform that they're on so they don't have to go to your website other than to make the purchase? And we find that to convert really well and be much more cost effective, especially in a time where Kassem gave the example of it used to be you spend $10 and you make $30 sale and you make $10 in profit. And then you're breaking even and then you're losing money on the front end and then you're really losing money on the front end and hoping to make it back on the LTV. But we're seeing this make the numbers more favorable to the advertisers again.

Cool. Love it. Awesome. Ralph, rate that 1 through 10.

Dude, that in-app. Do y'all know Dipesh Mandelia?

No.

He's, he's a smart guy. I've heard him talking about stay in-app a year ago. And at the time I thought like, how lazy.

Yeah.

But since then I've seen it move more and more in that direction. And to the point that Neil's making, everything gets better. Engagement is better and higher. You keep people where they want to be. And what's nice is you're tracking, you know, it's their lead indicators. So it's vanity metrics, but that's better than nothing, which is what I feel like we're getting. And so those vanity metrics become meaningful because if somebody's watched a myopic ad, well, who cares? But if somebody's watched something that constitutes the majority of your funnel, that's really meaningful data. So I think it's a brilliant note. I'd go 10.

Yeah, I would agree with that. I think we've used that with video ad sequences on YouTube, on YouTube ads, and it works really, really well. Sometimes it's 7, 8, 9 individual videos and they may or may not— and there's a way in which you can actually track it. Am I watching the first one, the fifth one, the seventh one, then back to the third one? The point is, is like, people just, I still don't think people get the fact that people just don't look at a video, click to a landing page, and then see a retargeting ad and buy. And that's 3—

In 30 days.

In 3 days, you know, within a 30-day sequence. It's like, people are chaotic. And there's, there's just, it's chaos out there. You have no idea what people are doing. But if you actually try to set up, and this is where the smart marketers are really going to thrive in the next few years with AI and into the future is thinking it through. Like if I was going to buy this thing, you know, this, whatever this thing, like, you know, my earbuds, like what would I need to know in order for me to finally make that buying decision? Not like there's anybody in the world that doesn't know what AirPods are. The point is, is like, what is that thing that will engage them to start You know, we're going back to basics here. We're going back to like David Ogilvy, like talk about their pain points and their desires in your ads. Dice talked about this at Traffic and Conversion Summit. Actually call out in your ads to your avatar and their problem and then pull them through on a sequence of events. And it's not linear. Expect them to go all over the place. And I think, you know, what Neil's talking about with videos and social, same kind of thing because you have to sort of Think in reverse. People don't click, click, and then buy. It's like they watch, they click, they click again, they watch here or here. It's chaos. And if you just don't expect people to do exactly what you want them to do at all times when it comes to performance marketing, I think you're going to be in a better place. But if you think through logically, especially through sequences, I think you're going to be that much closer to success.

Love it. All right, we got one more thing over here. So go ahead, Neil, finish your thought, then we're going to wrap it up.

So Ralph, you showed an example of the AirPods that you were holding up. The way I bought AirPods back in the day, my first ever set of AirPods was saw them on the internet, read some articles, saw them on the Apple website, didn't want to spend the money. And, you know, time goes on, you see people wearing them, was at the airport, There was a little kiosk thing and I literally swiped a credit card and I bought AirPods right then and there. How are they going to track that I bought that in the kiosk at the airport? Because I saw it all previously, you know, online. Like that's how buying works these days and you guys are spot on. But it's funny, some of this stuff is really hard to track. Yeah.

So here's the last question for everyone here. What's something really interesting that you learned recently? And Qasim, you get to go first.

Oh, goodness. What was that? What was that thing, Ralph, that Perry Marshall was talking about? It's based off of New York stage plays, and actors would sit around saying, how long do you think this play is going to run? And if it's ran for a week, then we'll give it another week. If it's ran for 30 years, we'll give it another 30 years. It's a it's an economic principle that says the amount of time that something's been around is the amount of time it will continue to be around.

The Lindy effect. Lindy effect.

Lindy effect.

That's my notes.

So Perry Marshall spent an hour going on and on and on about the Lindy effect, and I can't stop thinking about it now because it's so. And then when you when you Google it, there's a bunch of rabbit holes you can dive down. But I found this video, the Lindy effect explained in one minute from this One Minute Economics YouTube channel. And it's, it's fun, especially given where we are now with like the way the world is changing, to play Lindy Effect with shit. You know what I mean? Like, it's just— forgive me, Neil. I realize your kid is there.

No, no, she's gone. You're good. And even if she was here, she wouldn't be—

Sure. Neil's never said bad words. What I learned ever.

Yeah. Got it. Love that. Love it, Cosmo. You know what? I'll go next on this one. So I'm reading a book right now called Working Backwards. Have you guys read this book before? Okay. So, one guy was the chief of staff for Jeff Bezos. So, these are 2 Amazon guys. One guy followed Jeff Bezos for 2 to 3 years. He shadowed him everywhere. The other guy, he worked at Amazon for 15 years. He ran like— he started Prime. He started video and all that. And, these guys were just going through the entire frameworks, all the secrets behind how Amazon operates. And, there's all these things, right? You hear about these 2-pizza teams. You don't think much of it. It's like, oh, yeah, teams shouldn't be larger than 2 pizzas. It actually goes way further than that and it keeps evolving.

Yeah.

And it goes into this thing called single-threaded leadership. I'll give a takeaway for everyone and I'll just move this on. There's so many things in there, but one thing is they talk about the 6-page narrative, right? And they don't allow PowerPoints at Amazon. And the reason for that is because PowerPoints are for lazy people, right? It allows the presenter to be lazy and it puts more of the onus on the audience. Their whole thing is you got to write a 6-page narrative if you want to push a thing through. And if we approve it, great. If not, then like, you know, too bad, you're shit out of luck, right? So just, you see how they evolve over time. It's like everything's chaotic, but they slowly methodically get to something that makes a lot of sense. And that's why they're the machine that they are. And I highly recommend it. It doesn't matter if you're a startup or if you're a scale-up, it's a good book. But let's go with you, Ralph, you're next.

There was a book that I read recently, I think, that just changed my whole thinking on what it is that we do as a business. And I think any business that I run after this, because obviously, I mean, At a certain point, I'm going to get tired of doing this and probably we are looking at some point to obviously exit and do a transaction. But the idea of how to make a brand legendary, I've always sort of thought like it's this black box. Like, how did Steve Jobs actually do it? How does Chick-fil-A do it? How does Volvo do it? How does Lego do it? And a book that I read is Make Your Brand Legendary by Scott Wozniak. Not a very well-known author, but we've patterned our whole business around this whole idea that every great business has 4 components to it. And the component, number one component is operational excellence. The next one is memorable moments that your customers and clients talk about and like they get this great feeling about you. The next part is deep customer insights, which is he refers to as sort of flash surveys, like every now and then, just out of the blue, not like an NPS score that you send once a year or whatever it happens to be, but just deep customer insights. It's all layered by this whole sort of track all the way around it, which is your leadership team, which enables all of this to come together. And one of his best examples of this is how Chick-fil-A operates. Chick-fil-A operates not because, you know, they are the largest. McDonald's is obviously the largest. But why does Chick-fil-A on an individual franchise gross revenue double the average revenue of McDonald's? It's because they have these raving fans because they have a customer experience engine. They have, you know, the person who comes out with the iPad and takes your order. Every time you say thank you, they say, my pleasure. You know, every part of it, they actually measure on their videos instead of like how much order, how much your average order value is, how many smiles they have per hour. It's this complete and utter focus on the client and the customer itself. And that's what makes a company like Chick-fil-A so great. And our whole process right now is like our whole leadership team read this book and we're like, We want to become this in the agency space. And it's just, it's somewhat obvious, but it's taking us away from where the agency space has been in the past. And for me, it's a book that I highly recommend. I think it can be applied to any business. And it just blew me away how simple it is. Not easy to implement. The operational excellence part is just all about just making sure that what you deliver is consistently great. Not sometimes great, sometimes not so great. But the whole idea of it is probably one of the best ideas I've read in the last year or so in business.

Love it. Thank you, Ralph. All right, Neil. Neil, go for it. I know you talked to a lot of people. Yeah.

So one of the hardest lessons I learned as an entrepreneur is leadership really is everything in the organization. Like, if you're trying to solve a problem and grow your company, There's someone that's probably already done it in your space. And I thought, you know, years and years ago I raised venture capital and the VCs would tell me, your only job is to hire amazing talent, right? And it took me a long time for it to click. And then I had the model of let me just go find people who work for my competitors and they continually got promotions because everyone says they're amazing, but people who got continual promotions, it showed that the company felt they were valuable, at least in most cases. And then if they work for a few of your competitors and they kept getting promotions, there's a good chance they really are valuable. And if they're a cultural fit for you, they can do wonders. And that's what's caused my organization to grow nicely over the last 6 years. But what I learned in more recent times is as you scale organization to 500, 1,000+ employees, you know, we're getting close to hitting 1,000 soon, or we'll be there, I think, in a few months is my guess. within 3, 4 months. When you start looking at numbers like that, you know, what I learned from some of my friends who've sold their companies to really large organizations like Mastercard and like people who have like 50,000 employees, 100,000 employees, you know, I had a friend who sold to Accenture, et cetera. You're not going to actually get all rock stars. You don't need amazing— you don't need an amazing team of 100,000 people to build a big organization. What you need is amazing leaders at the top that can train and instill values and create systems and processes that bring up your C players and turn them into B players and turn your B players into A players, et cetera. That's how you build a big organization. You're never going to have an organization filled with all amazing people. Your leaders should be people who know how to solve problems and have already done it in your industry before because there's less chance that they'll make less mistakes and they'll be more successful in your organization, but they also need to be able to create systems and processes to bring up the D players and make them C players and make the C players B players and make your B players A players. And that's how you create a big company.

Neil, we talked about this before, but there's a— you're really lucky at the end of the day. Like, people think, oh, we can have like 80% A players. No, it's like, if you're really good, you're maybe like 20% A players. Like, most of the time you're like 10, 15%. Um, so yeah.

And there's nothing nothing wrong with the C, D, or D, C, and B players because a lot of time the D players are new graduates from college and they're just learning. They're not going to be a rock star that knows how to add $10 million in revenue when they just graduated college and they've never had a job. D is not a bad mark. It's just where they are in their career. And it's more so you need leaders in the organization to bring all of those people up. and make sure they're heard and you're there for them versus just like, oh, whatever, they'll figure out they're another cog in the wheel, right? That model of they're just another cog in the wheel doesn't work. You need people to bring others up.

I'll tell you what, we're going to clip that moment and throw it on your LinkedIn. Let's see what reactions you get.

I open that looking for deep links.

Newsflash.

Look, I think that's a good place for us to wrap. But guys, this collab's been really good. I definitely would like to do more in the future. Hopefully we can do them in person. Ralph, what's the best way for people to find you online? Same for you, Kasim. You go first, Ralph.

Yeah, you could probably follow me on LinkedIn. I guess that's probably the best place to follow me. But of course, tier11.com, T-I-E-R, spell out 11. The guy who has the Tier 11 with the number is holding me ransom for hundreds of thousands of dollars for that URL. So anyway, so tier11.com, Ralph Burns, you can find me there or LinkedIn.

All right, Kasim.

I read an article from Neil why he paid $500 grand for one domain that redirects to him. You see, you know, Ralph.

I know. I realized who I was talking to here. It's like no price is high enough.

Yeah, I was about to say you're talking to the wrong guys. They can find me socially at Kasim Aslam, all socials. The one that I engage with the most is Facebook because I'm old. Oh, and I don't care. And then my agency is Solutions8, sol8.com. How about you guys?

My social handles are all Neil Patel and my agency is NP Digital.

All right, so my social handles are all Eric Osiu, so Eric Osiu. Agency is Single Grain and everyone go subscribe To Marketing School listeners, go subscribe to Perpetual Traffic. And Perpetual Traffic listeners—

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