The 5 Biggest Marketing Opportunities For 2024

Foreign. On today's show, we are talking about saving money on your paid marketing spend. We're giving you the most underrated and overrated ad units on the Google platform, the meta platform. And we're talking about how creators could be an untapped advertising channel for your business. This is marketing against the grain. Let's get into today's show. I'm your host, Kip Bodnar, Chief marketing officer at HubSpot. Unfortunately, my co host, Kieran Flanagan couldn't join us today, but I am joined by two amazing guests, Ralph and Kossum, who are the co hosts of the Perpetual Traffic podcast. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising across Google, across meta, and they are here to give us the secret sauce of how to get more out of your paid marketing. Welcome to the show, guys.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us, Kip.

Thanks.

It's the most wonderful time of the year. It's the marketing budgeting time of the year, you know, and everybody's thinking about what they're spending money on next year. So given that people are already probably, if they're watching the show, they're spending money on Google and Meta, like, maybe it's a little, maybe it's a lot, but they're probably spending money there. Those are the two dominant players in digital marketing. I love to start on the meta side of things. What are some of the most undervalued inventory kind of ad units, strategies on meta right now that people should consider as they're planning for next year? I want the secrets, all right? I want the, like, oh, people are stupid for not doing this. It is very obvious to me that there's more opportunity there and nobody's doing it for you.

I will give you the real good ones, just FYI, I would expect no less.

I feel honored.

One, I think one of the most overvalued assets on meta, especially right now, is website conversion campaigns. Everyone is continuing to do them. CPMs continue to rise, especially right now when we're sort of right between the holidays. We just came through Black Friday, Cyber Monday, as of this recording, everybody was using it.

Can you break down for everybody who might not be familiar with that particular ad unit, like, what that actually does, what it, what it is, like, give us the, the 32nd, like, baseline.

So when you log into your meta account, your meta ad account, they basically give you a choice as to what your objective is. And so it can be a number of different objectives. And one of the objectives that as a performance marketing agency owner that we typically will use and most of our ads are done this way is the conversion objective or website conversion objective, meaning we either want to get a lead or we want to get a sale. So those are the two types of things that folks typically will hire us for. Like I want it as fast as I possibly can, which is great because there is a specific market, you know, within the meta platform that will allow you to go after that particular audience who is maybe not in market, but has the propensity to buy at that particular point in time. And those people are lumped into a website conversion sort of circle within the larger circle of your audience. Let's say you've got a 2 million person audience, maybe within that 2 million person audience that you're targeting, maybe 200,000 or a hundred thousand or maybe in market for your particular product or service. So what website conversion objective does is it focuses your advertising dollars on that small little circle within the larger audience. And that website conversion objective is the one that most performance marketers use.

And you're like, it is overused and people are doing it too much.

A lot of people use it almost exclusively and which is fine, I think when you're first starting. What we've seen is that with a lot of businesses, they can get to a very great level of success depending on how big their market is and who they're targeting. Obviously, the smaller niche markets, the harder it is to scale with that particular objective because there's only a finite number of people that are in market at that particular point in time when you're showing them the ad on meta, whether it's on Instagram, whether it's on Facebook, whether it's on reels, it doesn't matter where it is, but within the meta platform. So that objective is overused, but it's the logical place for folks to go because they want to put a dollar in and get a dollar back or maybe two or $3 back out. And the website conversion objective allows them to do that relatively quickly. What happens is that everyone in your space, especially if you have, say, have a product in the health and wellness space, you'll have all of your competitors competing against those same people, that same subset of in market, sort of at the zero moment of truth, I'm ready to make a purchase, or maybe I've shown some kind of purchase behavior, maybe my web browsing behavior or maybe the pages that I like or my previous behaviors on the meta platform will put me into that small subset of category. And the website conversion objective will focus my ad dollars on Those individuals. So as a result of that, your competitors are competing against the same thing and your CPM start going up, your.

Price is going up, up and up is what you're saying. And I think this is a great kind of. The one point I'd like to emphasize around this before we talk about some of the opportunities, is if you're looking for trends, if you're out there and you're like, how do I find opportunities? I will always tell you the most expensive stuff and the least opportunities is gonna be the things that are the most measurable and the closest to the actual purchase. Right. Because, oh, there's this very clear ROI formula that we can get. It's fairly obvious, like I don't have to go convince my CFO or anybody else that that makes sense. It just kind of works. And the further you get away from that, the more possible opportunity there may be because there's more kind of like judgment strategy, like real point of view necessary to make those decisions.

Do you agree with that? 100%. Yeah.

I mean it's.

Those are the people that are most desirable for your business. So it stands to reason that if you started a meta campaign today and you were selling, you know, your health and wellness product, you would go out, you would choose that objective and you would pick as your objective sales. I want to get sales of my product right now. So as a result of that, everyone else is doing the same thing. What, what we're seeing, especially right now, is at this time of year, CPMs for those types of campaigns are astronomical. They just double, oftentimes triple because there's so much competition. You have all this dumb money, which is maybe larger brands that are using that objective, that are just spending as much as they possibly can for Cyber Monday and Black Friday and into the holidays. So that's where everyone is going. What we've found is that at a certain point you achieve a level of scale. And this actually goes over to the Google side, which Kasim will talk about. That would be like the high intent based keywords in Google search. Everyone's searching. If I have a health and wellness process, everybody's searching for those. And everyone, my competition is bidding on them. So they're pure website conversion. In the case of Google, they're in market, like they're ready to buy, they're actively searching. Remember on meta, they might be in market, but they're not actively searching. It's still interruption marketing. So what we have found is that to tap into a different subset of individuals, like I said, before, if you're choosing a 2 million person audience website conversion, the objective will focus on maybe 200,000 of those people. Maybe a hundred thousand. How do you expand that? And how do you actually get lower CPMs and tap into people who are maybe not right, ready to buy now, but might be if you just engaged with them, with your brand and how can you do it affordably? And what we found is putting a layer ahead of that, which we call the consideration layer, and then even a layer above that, which is the awareness layer. And those are different objectives, much less CPM, sometimes.

How much cheaper?

10 to 20 times less.

10 to 20 times less. This is what I'm talking about. If you move even just a little bit away from that direct purchase, the costs just start dropping, dropping.

And consideration might be, maybe not a purchase in this case, Kip might be just a lead for, you know, 20% coupon, something like that. So those are a little bit more competitive. Maybe those are, you know, five to 10 times less because you're not getting the sale right then and there, you're not competing against everybody else for the sale. But then as soon as you go into the awareness phase, which is the reach objective, video view objective, all of a sudden you're in a blue ocean. And we talk about this all the time on the podcast, is sort of the red ocean of marketing. And there's a blue ocean of marketing. What we found is that businesses can reach a certain level of scale depending on how big the market is by swimming in that red ocean. But at a certain point, it's a point of diminishing returns. No matter how much you spend, you can't spend any more.

The red, blue ocean metaphor comes from a book called the Blue Ocean Strategy, one of the seminal books of the founding of many companies, HubSpot, where I work. It was one of, one of the first, I think literally in the very, very first real HubSpot office, we named conference rooms after important people to the company. I think we had 10 conference rooms and two of them were named after the co authors of the Blue Ocean Strategy. That's how seminal this book is. But inherently it's like if the ocean's red, it means it's highly competitive, right? And if the ocean's blue, it's wide open. There's not a ton of competition. And you know what? It's easier to catch fish in a blue ocean than in a red ocean. Which is kind of the extended metaphor here. And what you're saying is the, the further you go away from that actual transaction the bluer the ocean. Right. And which means things get cheaper and you have, and things get cheaper because you have much less competition and it might be easier to stand out if your messaging is clear and you know your targeting is correct and all that kind of stuff.

Absolutely. That's the whole point of it. So if you go just a little bit higher in the conversion ladder, instead of just going for the sale like we always will, start with the website conversion objective, obviously like that's, that's the quickest way to get revenue and return on ad spend and hit your KPIs and all those sorts of things. But if you can just set aside a small portion for these other areas, what we see is that you then start to create and we've noticed this especially maybe in the personal injury law niche and the service based niche. Like we love a lot of customers that come out with a lead, a phone call and then ultimately a booked appointment and a sale. And the sale might be tens of thousands of dollars, it might be millions of dollars in many cases. Sure, you're not going to get them on the first touch, so you have to have multiple touches. But the point is, is you might start with that first touch to get the conversion or try to get the conversion. But as you scale, you realize that, all right, that's just a losing proposition. You really need to go up the ladder a bit and create your own audiences. So in that example that I used before, the health and wellness space, let's say you've got an audience of 2 million people. Website conversion is converging on those a hundred thousand people. But then there's 1.8 million in that audience that we know is interested in health and wellness. They're just not ready yet. What reach campaigns and video view campaigns at the awareness or even a consideration level, they expand your audience and then you retarget them with maybe one to two to three steps and you can lower your cost per acquisition in doing so. And that's what we've seen for a lot of brands that want to get to that next level of scale and have struggled to do it. And we oftentimes do it, you know, in concert with the Google Ads platform as well.

Yeah, Ralph, in a minute I'm going to come back to you with a question on specific ad units for those other strategies. But what I want to frame for everybody watching and listening is because the economics are so drastically different, you can get a cheaper net cost of customer acquisition by spending, spreading your money out more diverse across those Three categories of ad units, right? Awareness ad units, consideration ad units versus direct, like kind of direct conversion ad units. The website conversion ad unit that Ralph, you gave as an example, because the other two are so much cheaper. You can take your direct conversion down by 50% of the, but only spend half of that, half of that money on those, those other parts and end up with a, with the same number of customers for less money because you're playing that blue ocean game. But to your point, Ralph, it's a sequence game. You have to be have multiple touch points with that potential buyer through those different advertising units. You can't just have one awareness ad out there and then some website conversion. You're like, all right, here's my couple of awareness ad units. Here's my, here's my handful of consideration ad units. I understand how they're mapping together. It's logical for the customer as to what that experience is. Like, that would move them closer and closer into buying.

Yeah, yeah. And you don't have to do it all at once. Like, people think, oh, well, I don't want to do branding ads. I'm a performance marketer. You know, I want a sale right now. Well, that's great. You can get that. But I'm not saying shift 90% of your budget all of a sudden into awareness and consideration campaign. What we will typically do. We have a case study that we have right now that, you know, we're, we've presented a number of times where we have the website conversion side for both Google and Facebook working quite well, but then shifted just small amounts of the Facebook or the meta budget over to more consideration campaigns. And what happened is that the Google spend stayed the same. The meta spend went from $7,000 a month to $70,000 a month, but their cost per acquiring a Customer dropped by 60% and their Google spend stayed exactly the same. So to your point, if you start to sort of slowly mix in these other objectives, you'll see the net effect on all of your different channels. And in most cases, most of our clients are working with lots of different channels. We actually share some clients as well, like in the Google and the meta side. This is why the podcast kind of works pretty well. The point is, is that exactly what you're saying. You have to take it maybe just one step at a time. I'm not saying wholesale strategy change here, but what we're starting to do is just, all right, 10% of your budget, let's just push it over here and then maybe 20% and then maybe 30% where you get to ultimately the sweet spot is really a sort of a 60, 40. And we have a number of customers who are there right now, but a lot of them don't want to make the shift. So it's, it's harder for them to realize, oh, I don't want to spend money on things that aren't making me money. Well, they actually are. You just have to sort of look at it a little bit differently and do it gradually.

If you are, if you're watching today's show and you're of the mind of like, oh, I completely disagree. I'm, I don't do any of this brand stuff. I just want this performance stuff. I'm going to tell you about what I call a magical slide. I think we have, I feel like internally and the work I do at HubSpot, we have a handful of slides that I think are magical. They just click in a point that's really important and we have a slide that is all the regions we serve. So North America, Latin America, France, Germany, et cetera and our aided and unaided awareness in those markets and then our return on our direct response ad spend in those markets. And I will tell you, there's an exceptionally high correlation between the higher your awareness, the lower the cost of your direct response ad spend. The higher the roi, the lower your awareness, the way, way worse the roi you're talking, you're talking like multiple exponents here. You're not talking like 10% difference, you're talking 3 to 7x difference depending on your awareness. And that to me it's a magical slide because it just validates that, oh, brand marketing is performance marketing. Right. It's like it's all connected together and if you are not doing this kind of diverse approach, then you're not going to be successful. Right. And so that's what I would hammer home for everybody watching today. That being said, we're about to go over the Google stuff. But Ralph, on that brand and consideration side, what are some of the ad units that you feel like and you have seen through the work you're doing that are undervalued, that if people are buying what you're selling, what I'm selling, you're like, oh, I'm going to get to get off that like 100% direct response drug and I'm going to spend 10% of my money over here. What should they do?

I mean, I think the easiest one is lead ads. And we've done a number of shows just recently with a couple of guests on our show on this is that lead ads, which typically in the past, when they came out five, six years ago, were really kind of garbage. You would get really cheap leads.

I would attest to that. They did not work for us for quite a while.

We tried them, but what we found is that that next sort of stage of that's a consideration ad, so that's getting the lead as opposed to just going for the sale. What we found is that if they're done right now with the form fields that are being used, there's lots of different parameters that you can actually enter in and make a higher quality lead and make sure that the email address is a legit email. It's not just the one that they use to create their Facebook account. Like back in 2009, there's ways in which you can actually screen those people coming in so that those leads are lower cost and as good, if not better quality than typical, like website conversion leads that are being sent off channel. So I would say that right unto itself is something that if you have any amount of experience with meta, Facebook specifically revisit lead ads. And they really are. They're transformative. They've transformed a number of our customers because we have added additional fields to qualify them. And especially if that lead is being sent to a sales team, being sent into HubSpot integrates with HubSpot perfectly into Salesforce. Like, it's perfect for leads coming in and then salespeople really being able to make that next level of sale. So you get. You still do get conversions. You're just one step removed from it.

In many cases, that is a great signal of arbitrage and opportunity. When you have a product or an ad unit that maybe doesn't have the hottest start, like lead ads was a little wonky. It was new, People weren't really sure. And so it like never took off and was this obvious thing when it started years ago and that like, it matters. Like the growth curve is decelerated. Even now that it's a good product, less people are using it because of that initial perception. And that is often a good signal of like, oh, there is probably real opportunity.

I would say that anything that meta and or Google introduces initially usually stinks. I mean, it just doesn't work.

Right. Because it's a test. They're trying to figure it out. Right.

I mean, there was a time, Kip, when we thought Instagram ads didn't work. Like just.

I remember that time like that now.

It'S like half our ad spend. I mean, imagine if we had just said Instagram, that's wild. So it's the same sort of thing with lead ads. Go back and you know, there's instant forms, there's all kinds of ways you can qualify. You can almost turn it into a quiz funnel. I mean they're really good.

Yeah.

So I would say that ad unit is a good one.

Give us one more.

The other one at the top of funnel is really, is just brand awareness video without any call to action.

Oh, okay, tell me more.

So you might take your best highest converting website conversion video ad and then just plunk it in a brand awareness campaign. And first off, your CPMs, your cost per thousand is going to be probably 10 times less into a video view campaign or a brand awareness campaign where you're basically, you're going out, you're just, you're going to those other people that aren't in market yet but maybe are interested potentially in your product but aren't ready to buy right now. So you need to introduce them to your brand. So what we found is that brand awareness reach campaigns, video view campaigns with just video itself. And remember in app, in the meta app, if somebody watches a percentage of those videos, they can then be captured in app and retargeted with more of a website conversion ad or maybe a consideration ad.

That's a big point here.

And then sort of take them down that line, take them down that path. So multiple steps here and we always argue about this on the show is like how many steps does it take to, to get somebody to convert? Is it 7 like traditional marketing? Is it 5?

There's no number. It's as few as you can make happen.

You can make it happen. It's like, you know, you know what got you drunk? Was it your first beer or your ninth beer? You know, somewhere in between there is probably the answer. The point is they all contributed. So I don't know what the number really is. And this is what I do. But the point is, is that I know it's more than one. So just that's human nature. And especially if you're actually, you know, your ask, your conversion is a high value purchase. You really do need to think in terms of what is that customer journey and how do I do it in the more natural way in which people buy.

So this is the last kind of thing I'll say on the meta arbitrage side of things, the video ad without a call to action. The reason that is so good is because of that retargeting motion that you talked about. Right. What you're essentially saying is you're paying 10x less to capture that person watching that video, but then you can retarget them with the same type of website conversion ad that you would pay 10 times as much for. And like, that's exceptionally powerful just because you're willing to do one extra step to do a little bit more legwork that a lot of people aren't often willing to do or don't understand how to do or aren't willing to take the risk to try to do. Right. And so that, when we are talking about opportunities is how you want to think about these things. Okay. Kossim has been sitting here, he's been patient, he's been chilling. You know, he's, he's ready to roll. We got to talk about Google. You are our resident Google expert on the show. And I want to talk, I would love if you just did the same thing. What's the most overrated, overvalued thing on, on Google, on the Google Ad platform right now? And then give us the, some of the dirt, some of the real opportunities.

You know, people look at Google and meta as though they're massively disparate and they're not at all. They function the exact same way. And what we've been talking about here is just the sales funnel. And if you picture, if you're listening to this and you picture a sales funnel in your mind's eye, split it into, into three distinct segments. @ the extreme bottom of the funnel is intent. I am going to buy this. I need to get from Los Angeles to New York and I'm either gonna do a plane ticket or I'm gonna rent a car or I'm gonna do a bus, but I'm going to go, you know, I'm, I'm moving. If you move up one standard deviation, that's consideration. If you move up one standard deviation, that'S awareness. And meta and Google both function the same way. And what we're talking about here is a time money matrix at the bottom of the funnel. It's the fastest and the most expensive when you move up the funnel. And this is, I think, more true inside of Google than meta because Google does maybe a better job from bottom to middle delineation, moving from intent to consideration. So moving up the funnel, you know, maybe it's half as much, but it takes three times as long. And what that matrix looks like is going to be dependent upon your industry. And when you move up to awareness, you know, it's a tenth as much. But it takes a hundred times longer, whatever. So it's always a time money matrix. Trade off to, to speak to arbitrage specifically though, and hopefully nobody thinks I'm pulling a parlor trick.

Cool, I hope that you are. I don't, I'm, I'm. Parlor tricks are what?

Well, we'll see. We'll see whether or not there fits.

I think parlor, parlor trip. Parlor tricks are entertaining.

Hey, feel free to pop my bubble, Kip.

I will.

I don't think the arbitrage between awareness, consideration and intent, it's not the sexiest narrative. Because markets are so efficient, especially when it comes to AI driven media buying that time money matrix is actually relatively easy for us to identify. That's why, like, you know, in the H Vac industry, for instance, five years ago h vac key phrases were two to three dollars a click. Two years ago they were 20 to $30 a click. Today they're 50 to 60. Now here's what's crazy. It takes. The average h vac customer is worth about $250 for the first service. So if you're paying $50 for a click and you're not closing one out of five leads and how many, how many businesses out there are closing one out of five leads, you're not, you're not self liquidating, you're not profitable on the front end. Which means that businesses are either massively inefficient and spending horribly, which I don't actually think is the case, or you have organizations that are so efficient they know I'm going to get four services out of my average customer. I can afford to pay three services worth. And there are, there are industries. The SaaS world is notorious for this. Not to slander our collective environment.

And that's as a SaaS person, we are notorious.

Well, because SaaS is so reliable, you know, it's a reliable form of monetization. And so you want to lift yourself out of this commodity. Here's my recommendation for arbitrage. Speaking to directly what it is you're talking about. Like where's the secret pockets of traffic that people don't think about? It's out of the funnel. The minute you're in the funnel, it's now commoditizable and all and everybody can see it.

Some private equity spreadsheet is figuring this out. This is the point you're making. That's what you're saying.

Goldman Sachs cheated.

It's like you can't out spreadsheet the spreadsheet.

You're exactly right. The Minute they're funnel, it's spreadsheetable. So we have awareness, consideration, intent. I propose a new phase of the funnel I'm going to call it and we're coining this on this podcast. Okay. We're about to make history, please. Somebody's probably already said this by the way, but it's the best.

Drum roll please.

Pre awareness.

Pre awareness. I like this. I haven't said that before, so you heard it here first. Pre awareness.

Hashtag copyright, trademark Pre awareness. Yeah, exactly.

The costume as an awesome with the coin.

The thing about pre awareness is, and it's not the first time this has ever been done from an advertising perspect perspective, but I think it's, it's not something that people think of often, especially traditional media buyers. You're not targeting somebody who is problem aware, solution aware, that's irrelevant. Instead you're targeting people based off of who you know they are. So intrinsic qualifications of intent and how who they are allows you to serve them on, on a. An adequate timeline. So three examples that I wrote down here while we were talking. If you buy raw land, I know for a fact I can sell you numismatic coins. If you are looking for a doula, I know you're crunchy granola, slightly leftist hip D and I can sell you Montessori schools. If you're a vegan bodybuilder, I know I can sell you pea protein. You know what I mean? A vegan bodybuilder is not in the funnel for pea protein, but when you start searching for content, engaging with articles, watching videos, doing again. Intrinsic qualifications of, of avatar assignment. You know, I'm a pseudo libertarian wannabe intellectual avid reader. And now I just said those things and, and you. There's a hundred thousand. And I'm not even being hyperbolic, I really mean this. There are a hundred thousand catalytic events that could take place from a purchase perspective based off of what did I give you five data points? You know, you know, you can sell me Ron Paul books, you can probably send me a tinfoil hat, you can definitely sell me guns and ammo. And so when you start to, when you start to advertise to people from a pre awareness perspective, the thing about that traffic is it's not even on the time money matrix. It's effectively free. We're talking pennies of you because you're going to meta and going to Google and saying hey, it's not even blue ocean anymore. It's like nobody wants this water at all.

It's the Arctic Ocean. There ain't no boats up there.

You're saying, hey, nobody wants this. Nobody's using it. Give me this traffic as long as people fit in these massively broad bubbles. And it's up to you as the advertiser, and this is the dangerous part, and it's easier said than done. It's up to you as the advertiser to decide, oh, this equals this. You went to Arizona State University. You have a low iq. Just kidding. But you know what I mean, like there are, there are these, these tendrils that are tied to things and it, it requires you to make assumptions and stereotype people and, and do all the things that we're not supposed to do. But the truth is that when you do it well, it works. And I'll give you one very specific example that actually works in my business. I had the highest performing real estate investment campaign on The Planet for seven years. I sold that agency in 2019. Before we sold, we were going up against companies like HomeVestors, which are the big, big, big, big dogs in the space that we buy ugly houses, people. The HomeVestors average cost per lead in the city of Phoenix was $550. My average cost per lead was 70. Now here's the problem. Homevestors was carpet bombing the industry with we'll buy your house fast for cash. What we did is we ended up identifying there's about 15 reasons that people sell their house. Generally speaking, sell their house at a discount. And there are things like job loss, relocation, divorce, sickness in a family, death of a family member, probate, et cetera. So we started and this sounds predatory and I guess it was in certain.

Ways you're like, if it sounds like it, it was exactly right.

I now sell my house fast for cash was, you know, a couple hundred dollars a click. But divorce attorney In Arizona was 30. So it's a pre awareness. You don't even know you're going to sell your house yet. But I know if you're shopping for a divorce attorney that at some point you're going to have to have a property conversation. Especially if I can further buttress that demographically. So you really want to talk arbitrage, man. I think, I think the opportunity is in the pre awareness phase.

Nobody ever just makes one buying decision, right? They make a series of buying decisions, right? And there's a normally an order of operations to those buying decisions. And if you know that you are not the first one, right? If you're not the number one in the order of operations and buying decisions, then you have Some opportunity to figure out, hey, where am I? So let's use your home sales example. It's like, oh, well, if somebody's getting divorced and they're selling their house, well, they've got to first decide they're getting a divorce, which means they're probably looking at counseling, then they're looking at lawyers, then they're looking at like, if they have children, they're looking at child, like, you know, everything around like child law and all that kind of stuff. And then they're getting to the point where they have to sell their house. And you're basically saying like, oh, in this example, all of those other segments, they could be. The economics there could be much cheaper to target people looking for those things than for the thing that I'm selling, even though I know that they're going to come and buy the thing that I'm selling eventually. Right? And that's where the arbitrage is. And I think this is a brilliant point because we too often are self involved and we look at, we looked at just one buying thing. Oh, you're going to buy my thing versus, oh, I know all the things you're going to buy. And I know how I fit in to that, that, that universe of what you're going to buy. And I would say if you're watching the show, the other point I would make is this strategy would be especially valuable if you're in what I'd call a green field. You know, if we're gonna get out of the ocean onto the land where you're in a market where it's a newer market, maybe there's you, maybe you're the only person in that market or category or there's only a very few people. And actually the problem is people just don't know much about your category. Right? It's not like if you're in a market where like, everybody knows about you, it's very saturated, then this strategy is going to work, but it's not going to work as well if you're in a market where like the vegan bodybuilder is a good example. It's like, oh, there's like a handful of pea protein companies, right? There's not like a thousand, there's like probably 20. And that's a niche of the market. It's a newer market in the grand scheme of things. And so that's an interesting place I can go and actually target those people across different buying journeys. Whereas if you're talking about a much more established market, it might be harder or, but there's still going to be opportunity. Your H Vac example is a good example of that, right? Like, that's a very established market, but you still can find real opportunity. So I love, I love that as a practice. Now tell me if you're going to do that on the Google or YouTube or anywhere on the platform, like, how would you go about doing that? Because everybody is like, all right, I'm kind of interested in this. I might, I might spend a little bit of money to test this out. What would you go?

It's funny is people, people are so interesting as to where they're willing to spend money. And I'll give you maybe more specificities of what I mean, take the H Vac company as an example. 50 to 60 a click. If somebody says, like, oh, my AC blew up and I need emergency repair right now, right? And that 50 to 60 is averaged nationwide. If you're in a major metro, you could be paying easy a couple hundred dollars per click. It's unbelievable because these companies are so efficient and they know on a long enough timeline they're going to profit. But we continue to whittle down on the profit. So what if somebody goes to YouTube, which is where the world goes to learn. The average time on site across the Internet is 90 seconds. The average time on YouTube is almost 20 minutes. So YouTube is an undiscovered mecca of traffic. It is an amazing repository. Somebody goes to YouTube and says, how do I change the filter on my acu? And what if, and this is where we're going to talk about expenditure. What if you don't just run an ad? Because teaching people how to change the filter on the AC unit are really going to earn, you know, earn their hearts and minds. What if you actually offer to come down and do a free service in their AC unit and you think to yourself, like, dude, I can't offer, I can't go and do a free service on everybody's AC unit in this one zip code. And in my mind I'm like, all right, well what does that cost you? You know, your tech is making 35 bucks an hour. And then there's the call time, then there's the gas. And so you're going to spend, let's say it's, you know, 90 to $100 in total, plus the, whatever the cost per acquisition on the customer is going to be. But because it's YouTube pre awareness, it's going to be very, very little. So you just spent a hundred bucks, but you got somebody in somebody's home belly to belly, shook their hands, gave them something of immense value. And you're able to take your little sticker and slap it on the front of the race unit that says the next time you need help, call this number and you service the race unit and you're like, hey, you know what? You got to do this, this, this, this and this in six months, nine months, 12, 18 months, whatever. I've, I've, I've earned your love and respect. And I did it for less than the 250 to 300 cost per appointment that I would have spent at the extreme bottom of the funnel. So that would be the pre awareness pivot is. And you know who does this really well and they don't even do it with paid ads, but Discount Tire. I went to Discount Tire yesterday and in Arizona it gets really, really hot. I live in Scottsdale, Arizona, and when it gets really, really hot, it's gotta be real hot. Yeah, things melt. You can bake cookies in your car and Discount Tire will check your tire pressure for free. And they've got a line, dude, how hard is it to check your tire pressure? You know what I mean? It takes four seconds with a 90 cent little pin thing that you can get it. But I don't do it myself. I sat in line for 45 minutes and I let the kid at Discount do my tire pressure for me. And now that he's done that, I will forever buy my tires at Discount Tire because they've, they've earned my love in a way that was value first, give first, and you can do that exact same thing digitally. So whatever the equivalent is in your business where somebody's like, how do I change the filters on my AC unit? There's not an H VAC company in the world that wants that work because it's easy to do. But that's what I want as the consumer. I need to know how to change my filters. I never think I'm doing it right. I don't even know which way they're supposed to face. And if they're backwards, the filter doesn't work properly and I don't know when it's supposed to be serviced, et cetera, et cetera, you could do that. It would cost you less than the traffic would cost you otherwise. And you'd actually have earned a customer for life.

Perfect. Okay, I love that. So that we talk, we talk pre awareness, we talked about the power of YouTube, we talked about the power of loyalty. Lots of things that you all can go and do right away to Close out the show. I'll give you, I'll give you my take on the thing that's probably working most interestingly for us right now and that is taking some of our money and going out of the big networks. So we're gonna leave Google and Facebook. We still, we do a lot with those folks, but there are other things you can do outside of Google and Facebook. Just reminding everybody who does ads out there and what we're doing is we're doing a lot of direct with creator partnerships. And so like you said, YouTube is this untapped potential of a community and of a network. And we'll go directly to YouTube creators and what we'll do is we'll identify what we have found is that kind of the mid tier of a creator are best. So that's kind of people who have like on YouTube, you're talking like 100,000 subscribers to maybe like a million, million and a half subscribers, not the below 100,000 and not the kind of mega YouTubers. And we'll go to those folks and in different areas, like we released some AI products, so we went to some AI YouTubers and everything, for example, and we'll partner with them to do some custom videos and have like this deeply kind of like integrated call to action and add in there. And we'll do that for kind of a fixed cost basis. And what we'll see is we'll see our cost per sign up for our free product or cost per lead be really somewhere between 4 to 8x cheaper on average than a lot of the big platforms because we can negotiate a much better price. It is a much more native, organic experience. The con is you got to do the legwork, you got to do the identification, the outreach, the management. It's not just like, hey, I'm going to put some money in a platform and five minutes later my ads are up and running and doing all the things. So that's the challenge. So it would be hard to spend 100% of your ad dollars that way, but can you spend 20, 30, 40% of them that way? I think you can if you can build a really good program. And that's what we have been able to do. And so if you're out there and you're like, oh gosh, I just gotta, I need to go and get some leverage somewhere in my ad spend. Even just picking three to five creators with a really healthy audience in your market and partnering with them is a potential really great opportunity to do that. If you can nail the execution of the Kind of the, the, the ad, the call to action offer as part of the video experience and make.

Are you going direct to the creators? Are you using creator marketplaces or a.

Little of both going, we're going direct to the creators. So reaching out, you know, emailing DMing the creators and being like, hey, we'd love to work with you, or and sometimes it's like, oh, we saw you working with XYZ company. That's cool. We have an idea to do something even better than that. Let's talk.

And this isn't meant to sound combative at all. I hope it doesn't come across that.

Way, but I'm very argumentative. It's welcome.

So here's my question, though. You have the HubSpot pedigree. You get to go to creator and be like, hey, I'm from HubSpot, you're welcome. You know, like, aren't you lucky that.

We'Re paying the money?

Well, we're paying them, but even if I had the money, I wonder, and this is an honest question, do you think that there's a way to increase the receptivity of creators to smaller brands.

That they never heard of? I actually don't think it's about.

Okay, that's good to know.

That was my question, I think. I think. So what costume is basically putting on is like, oh, HubSpot's like a pretty well known brand. I bet creators are like comfortable partnering with you. All the best creators that I've ever worked with and known, they don't care about the brand partnership. They care about the offer. Alignment to the audience is the thing that you're willing to offer that audience good and valuable to that audience and really align with what their audience needs. And if so, they will do it. And if they don't, they probably won't. Even if you have a great brand. Right. And we've seen that through a bunch of conversation. There's some partnerships that just didn't work out because there was just like, just enough misalignment that it wasn't going to work. Right. And it was probably a good thing it didn't work out. But I think if your offer is really good, that creator is like, oh, great, I'm, I'm, I'm monetizing, which is great. But I'm also providing a ton of value for my audience, which is really great. And so that's a win win, and I'm going to do that.

I think that the essential component of what you're talking about here is the fact that you're going not to the small creators, not to the large ones, the Kardashians or the, you know, the rocks. But you're going that middle area where they care about their audience so much, they're looking for the right product match to engage their audience because it's their reputation online. I think that's really, really important if you find that sort of middle ground. Because what we found is if you go to the smaller ones, they'll just do anything. They'll just whore out money for whatever. And then the big ones are just too expensive. So it's that middle ground. And we found a great area. We don't do this specifically, but we will recommend this for a lot of our clients is Creator Marketplace, where you can actually go and find them and we'll send you a link if you want, but basically Creator Marketplace, meta, just look that up and you can actually go find creators that match your brand and you get a sort of an idea as to what their following is. So you might be able to do what you're doing, but you're seeing your normal ad spend. And then the secondary part to that is that once they actually create that ad, you can then use that in your website conversion, your brand awareness, your consideration ads as well, with their permission. So. Or you can advertise it on their site. There's an advertising component to it, but yeah, I think it's super, super important. So you don't necessarily have to be a HubSpot per se to be able to do it. I've seen any business maybe doesn't have the brand awareness that you guys do be able to do it very successfully. It's super smart.

I love that. Okay, we've gone long, but we went long for really good reasons because we got into the weeds of a really important topic, which is how do you get more out of the paid marketing spend that you're spending? Whether you're a small consumer company, big B2B company, anywhere in between, it does not matter. We broke down Google, Google Meta, we talked pre awareness, we talked creator marketing. We did it all. It was awesome. I really want to thank Qassim and Ralph for joining us. Check out the perpetual traffic podcast and if you liked what we said, drop us a comment on YouTube. Hit that subscribe button and subscribe. And we're back with you real soon on marketing. It's the grain. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, Kip.

Thanks, Kip. This data is wrong every freaking time.

Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated.

Whoa. I can see the client's whole history. Calls, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago. I totally missed HubSpot.

Grow better.