Episode #549 - Leveraging the Dollar-a-Day Ads Strategy with Dennis Yu

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. I'm here with Dennis, you, chief technology.

Officer of Blizz Metrics. How are you doing, Dennis?

What's up, Larry?

And speaking of blitz, have you guys got your first snow storm blitz out in Boulder yet?

Well, I'm actually in Miami where it's nice and warm and then I'm going to be in Vegas tomorrow. I lived in Boulder, they said the.

Company was in Boulder, so we started.

It in Boulder back then.

Oh, okay. But you're not in Boulder now.

No, I'm not like a vagabond.

Oh, well, right.

Different city every day. I was in PAX two weeks ago.

Really?

Yeah.

Well, you're right down the road from me right now because I'm in Palm beach, so.

Oh, yeah, okay. I flew in the Fort Lauderdale last night.

Oh, did you? And so what are you doing in Miami? Business.

We're here at the Seven figure Agency conference where we're coaching a bunch of agencies how to get the seven figures and beyond. These are digital agencies that serve lawn care, real estate, personal injury, mortgage, all these other sorts of areas. It's a huge area. I think it's the largest area in online marketing. Local businesses.

And where did they do that? That convention?

We have a whole process. Yeah, there's, there's a bunch of folks here. Josh Nelson is one who founded it. And it's teaching agency owners the process on how do you run your agency, how do you handle your clients, how do you staff up, how do you run ad campaigns, how do you build websites, how do you sell, how do you market, how do you build a brand, how do you publish a book in your name, all kinds of things necessary to start growing scale a digital agency.

And how did you, what is your, what will you be speaking about or talking about while you're there?

I talk about the content factory. The idea of the content factory is that relationships are built through lightweight touches. And video is the most powerful kind of content. Especially if you want to share your expertise, you want to build trust. So when you produce content on your cell phone like this, it can be chopped up by the people in the factory. So virtual assistants, other people on your marketing team. So that powers your YouTube, your website, your Twitter, your Facebook, your TikTok, your Instagram, your Snapchat, your blog, all these other channels so that people can learn about you and interact in the channel that they want. And then we also do dollar a day, which is our strategy for putting content out there so you can reach your customers. So we teach this whole process on how to build your own content factory.

Well, fantastic, now that you're going to be covering that. But that's an expansion, it sounds like, of what you put in your book, which was the marketing and TikTok and how to.

Well, TikTok right now is the hot sexy thing that everyone cares about because you know, Facebook's like the utility company, you know, Google's like the utility company where it's, it's big, it's established, it's where your parents are, but it's not really the cool thing that's growing and it's trendy. But the thing that we teach in TikTok, for example, how to do Dollar Day ads, how to create short form video, is the same thing that we've taught for the last 15 years. Because people want to get to know who you are. They want to get a sense of who you're with, they want to get a sense of your why and your expertise and the kinds of people that you're with. What's it like working with you? So if you're a mortgage broker, then there's thousands of other mortgage brokers that could technically do the same thing. There's tons of other accountants or life insurance agents or chiropractors. But the key is to be able to get your brand out there. So we've, we've taken what we've known over the last 30 years about building relationships which has translated into digital and said, how does that fit for things like TikTok and Instagram and Snapchat and you know, Facebook stories and these other sorts of channels?

Yeah. Now you've been with BlizzMetrics for 16 years, is that right? Is that fair?

Who's counting? Yeah, 15 years, who knows?

Why have you stayed there? I mean, are you. Does that company, does that. I don't know if did you found the company?

I founded the company, but I'm also involved in a lot of other companies and we make more money in our rev shares and partnerships with all these other companies. So BlitzMetrics is really just more my personal brand and it's something that we use for enterprise clients for consulting or something special. But I own a little piece of a lot of agencies and I just love seeing these other folks grow.

Yeah. And so how did you get into this position? For example, there's a quote that this is a kind of quote by the way, between me and you that you would pay someone, someone to say about you if you only knew to come up with it. It's so good. But it's something about like I can't find it right now but you know, like five minutes with Dennis is better than, you know, whatever, but obviously you know, than anybody else you could, you could talk to. Where is it?

Right there.

Dennis is one of the greatest marketing minds in the world. I've had an incredible opportunity to learn from Dennis for many years and without question he has the impact of my growth as a digital marketer is worthy of mention. You know, 15 minutes with Dennis is worth more than reading or listening to many self proclaimed gurus. Hey, and we're approaching end of the 15 minute mark here in a little while here.

So time's up.

So. So anyway, what a nice thing for someone to say about you, Dennis.

I'm honored. Yeah.

And how did you get to be that knowledgeable in the marketing arena?

You know, I don't consider myself super knowledgeable. I've just made more mistakes in the last 30 years than just about anyone in digital marketing. Yeah, I was there in the beginning building websites when they're, I was just lucky to be there. And I was also at Yahoo as one of the initial people there and I built the analytics at Yahoo and I retired 20 years ago. It was a lot of fun and I learned about search engines. I got to hang out with, play Frisbee, have dinner with a lot of the people that built the guts of the Internet. I wasn't any smarter or better. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and got to meet a lot of these people.

And when you talk about building that with Yahoo, what does that involve? Is that a team? Is that, how's that process go? Obviously they, you know, the thing is metrics grow. In business you're going to grow or die. In life you're growing or die and you've got to identify there's 24 hours of the day you got limit always have limited resources and limited personnel, limited funds. So what is your target that's going to get you where you want to go and how, what can, what will drive me to cause those tumblers to turn faster? You know, that's numbers. And so watching the numbers and responding to the numbers, you know, not coming up with some brand new theory. You come down from the mountain with a new theory, it's you keep your eyes on the numbers and, and do the adjustments that they tell you to do. But you can't do that if you don't have the numbers, and you can't do that if you're not looking at the right spot. And so how, how have you refined that?

Well, Larry, let me tell you something. It's a little secret of mine, but it's public, and it works super, super well. There's a lot of data. With 13 terabytes of data per day, that's so much data, you couldn't even open it if I gave you a file. So we had to build our own operating system to be able to query it, to analyze it and figure out what people were searching on. So one of the first things I want to know is what are people searching on? On Yahoo. And I found that ebay was the number one term that people typed in the Yahoo.com as a search engine. And eBay.com was, I think, the number 10th or number 12th most popular term. And people type in, eventually they type in Google, they type in bank of America, they type in, you know, other sorts of places. But the thing I learned over the last 20 some years after looking at the analytics at all these other companies is that Most people spend 90% of the time just trying to gather the data when really they're not analyzing the data. So the most popular reporting tool is Google Analytics, right? People use Google Analytics to see what's going on on their website, what's driving sales. Let me tell you a secret. There's no analytics inside Google Analytics, because analytics is the interpretation of the data to figure out what's actually working. So I came up with this concept, very simple. It's called metrics analysis and action. Most people are in the metrics space. So if you're in Excel, if you're using sas, if you're doing like, you know, statistics, most of that is just processing data. That's metrics. But analysis is the interpretation. It's like, why did sales go up? Why is a competitor beating us? Why is this product outselling this other product? Why are people feeling this way? What are the. It's. It's a lot of, you know, understanding a lot of sleuthing and Sherlock Holmes against it. So that analysis, the metrics, lead to analysis. Analysis is 10 times more important than metrics. And then from the analysis, which is understanding why something happened, we then take action. So think about Larry, if you or I had to go to the emergency room for some reason, you know, maybe we went skiing and, you know, I broke my collarbone. And we go into the emergency room. What's the first thing they're going to do?

Just they're going to put you through the process. You know, they're going to.

Yeah, so they're going to get their check.

They've got their checklist to make sure, you know, they've got, you know, they start with the basics. Blood pressure, this. The other. The X ray. They're going to, you know.

But, Larry.

Well, the one. One thing they're going to say is, you know, the short course is they're going to say, where does it hurt?

You know, so they're gathering metrics to. Then they'll take the X ray and the blood and all that, do a diagnosis against that and say, well, because of that, we're going to have to do this kind of surgery, this other kind of procedure. You're going to take these kinds of pills. Now, Larry, let's say that you're the head surgeon in the emergency room. And I come in and I'm grasping my chest and I'm like, Dr. Larry, I'm in such pain. I think I'm having a heart attack. We need to have heart surgery right now. What would you say? Yeah, and then you look at me. You had some spicy Mexican food and you have heartburn, but you don't have a heart attack.

Right.

So the trouble when there's so much data, especially on the Internet, is that people think that they can diagnose. They go straight to diagnosis without any analysis. And so prescription. Yeah, prescription before diagnosis is malpractice. Yeah. So when I look at businesses, I see that they have a complete lack of analytics. They might have a great founder, they might have a great salesperson, they might have a fantastic product. But I look at this and say, there's analysis that's missing. There's a lot of data being captured. There's lots of tools. Every tool I know has lots of data. It captures, and there's a lot of action being taken. But there's. Without analysis in the middle, the action that's being taken is not connected to the data. It's random. So that's why most entrepreneurs are taking random action. And sometimes they get lucky and they hit the jackpot, but they don't know why. They have a quarter where sales goes up. They have some kind of win, but they don't know why it's not repeatable.

Yeah. And the analysis, how do you put your microscope on the analysis piece? How do you approach that to make it go right where most people make it go wrong?

So first we Gather metrics as close to the actual business goal as possible. One of my friends, Darrell Isaacs, I'm staying at his house tonight. He is a personal injury attorney who's done $2 billion in car accidents and truck wrecks and motorcycles. Personal injury. And he's got all kinds of marketing. He's got billboards everywhere. He's super well known in the state of Kentucky. But unless there's. Unless we can track where the calls are coming from, unless we can track through, like, vanity phone numbers, you know, like 512-222-2222 to track that it came from this TV ad or it came from this billboard or came from this radio spot, we have no way of determining what's actually winning. So most people, when they do marketing or they do any kind of activity, they're doing a bunch of random things. It goes into a black box. You can't see what's going on. And then out here you have these outcomes. So. So you can't really correlate what actions drove what kind of result. So what we do is we put analytics in place. We like to look at businesses where there's some kind of CRM, some kind of digital measurement, something that we can put on the website. And we tie all that together. So now this black box becomes a clear box. We can see inside.

And so give me an example of that.

So let's say that I'll go back to Darrell Isaacs, who's my. My example. He's got a website. We win. And people will go to his website and contact him because they got in a car accident, you know, and then you gotta, you know, fight the insurance company and all that. And before we started doing our digital plumbing, which is tracking everything, we had no idea where people were coming from, right? People might search Darrell Isaacs. People might, you know, type in car accident attorney. People might come in from social media. People maybe were talking to a friend who said, you know, hey, Darrell Isaacs is the hammer, right? Because his big motto is, he's holding a hammer and he's tough and that kind of thing. But unless we have all this tracking in place, we can't balance where the media is. So he spends $12 million a year on advertising. But unless we have analytics in place, it's really just kind of a random guess every year on how much money to allocate between these different channels. So we have something called digital plumbing, which starts with the website. And we use something called Google Analytics 4, which is a new version of Google Analytics. And we Tie a lot of these things that are called tracking pixels. So the tracking from Facebook, the tracking from Twitter, tracking from email, tracking from any of these other kinds of sources that bring people to the website so we can identify where people came from and we have a whole process, we have a whole course around that on how we actually set up that tracking.

Now for someone to bring that into their business, are they going probably outsource it, have it done for them by some outside company, wouldn't you think?

If they're a bigger company like a Nike or a Starbucks, they probably have an in house analytics team. But if they're a smaller business and they're say less than $50 million a year, then probably hire someone just to implement that, two or three days to get that done. And then that person who just specializes in data goes on to the next person because it doesn't make sense to have someone on the team to do something that really is like a one time thing.

And so if you're hiring someone like that and you're bringing them in, what do you say to them for that two or three days? Number one, what do you look for and what, what marching orders do you give them?

You say, look, here's where I'm having pain. Here's what my business goal is. You figure out exactly what this and I want to know before I let you operate on me that you're actually qualified to do this. Right. I want to see that you have a certification from us on digital plumbing. I want to see that you've implemented Google Analytics and these other components 10/plus times so that I'm not your first one. I want to know that you have a clear understanding of my business goal because there's people that know how to implement things like Google Tag Manager and UTM parameters and all this technical stuff for tracking data. There's a lot of people who know how to use these different tools, but unless they understand what my business goal is and what my strategy is, then it really doesn't matter how much data you can gather because I need someone who can interpret the data.

So let's just say you're googling for this person.

Yeah.

You're typing in what into the search line?

I'm typing in Darrell Isaacs. I'm typing in the hammer or I'm typing in something that typically someone to.

Put someone to come in and do this.

Oh, to do it. Oh yeah. I would type in digital plumbing. Yeah. But really we have courses all over the place. So if you go to HubSpot or Infusionsoft or, you know, we have a webinar tomorrow with Fiverr, which is the world's largest freelancing community. All these guys were training on how to do this and we've spent years building this training and we want everyone to like, I, I was in Pakistan two weeks ago and we're training up 30,000 people on how to do this because that's crazy.

And so they would, they can find, actually can find you and by typing in digital plumbing.

Yep. Type in digital plumbing. That's the term that I made up. It's been out there for years. They can look anywhere, any of the freelancing sites. You're going to see whether It's Upwork, Fiverr onlinejobs.ph. you can find people to implement the things that we teach. It's like a recipe, right? If you want Mrs. Fields chocolate chip cookies, then you do the rest. You do the search on, you know, who can, who has the recipe and who can bake Mrs. Field's chocolate chip cookies following the recipe.

Very, very cool.

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