YEAR VLOG CHALLENGE DAY 15 | TikTok Shop

¡Hola! Welcome to another day of the vlog. If you're seeing this for the first time, um, my name is Tanner Smith. I'm the CEO of Syndicate Marketing, and, uh, the sun is right in my eyes today, so I got this visor coming down, which is helpful. But I have made a commitment to record a vlog every single day for a year, Monday through Friday. For every single day that I don't record or vlog, I actually have to owe my business partner $1,000 cash. So there's technically $365,000 on the table, give or take. Cause I mean, I guess Saturdays and Sundays don't count, so not, not quite, but I've put the pressure on myself to do this because I talk to business owners every single day that are struggling with their marketing, that are struggling with growing their businesses. And I've dedicated my life to learning how to sell stuff online, both info products and e-commerce products. And so really everything that we do at our agency revolves around that. Everything that I am passionate about revolves around that. And I honestly love what I do. I'm a nerd that way, but I feel like I struck the gold mine. I feel like I struck gold essentially, because I know a lot of people struggle with with what they do. And I honestly wake up every day, I feel excited and energized about getting to the office, getting to work, which is lucky for me. Now, on my way to work this morning, I got some thoughts. I got some marketing thoughts that I wanna kind of get off my chest. And hey, listen, I'm probably gonna piss a lot of people off by saying this, but branding, branding honestly is, something that just irks me a little bit. And I've, and the reason why is because I've been working with some people recently that have invested tens of thousands of dollars into quote unquote branding packages with other agencies. And not that branding isn't important, but I think branding is just a vague, you know, term and thing, and it's never going to be directly correlated and tied with you generating revenue and income for your business. I mean, if you were to say, you know, Apple, and, you know, think of Apple, what makes Apple Apple is the fact that they have such incredible products. The way that they fulfill for their customers has nothing to do with their logo or their name. It just has nothing to do with that. Google, I mean, sounds so elementary, but Google is Google because of their products, because of what they've brought to the marketplace and brought to their consumers in the world. So I'm not saying that branding's not important. And yes, if you have the cash, you have the revenue, and you have the ability to invest in a, you know, $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 branding package and revamping your logo and everything with an agency to do that, then great. Go waste your money there. Go spend your money how you want to spend it. I'm not here to tell you where to spend or how to spend your money, but The best branding is actually fulfilling for your customers, doing a quality job with, you know, with your products and services. When you sell them something, actually fulfill and do an incredible job. And if you do that enough over time, your name is going to mean something. Your business's, uh, logo will mean something. I mean, Amazon. The heck does that mean? It's because they do an incredible job. They bring an incredible service to their customers. So what's the, what's the solution then? Well, I'm not saying not to have a decent logo. Maybe go spend $1,000 on a logo. Okay. Go to, go to 99designs, start a logo contest. I think all in, you go with the silver package and you do a guaranteed contest. You know, you go there, hustle. It's going to cost you like $800 for a decent logo. Get a decent logo. Come up with a name that you like. I still believe in getting a .com. It just makes your business look more reputable. So try to find a domain and a, and a, and a, and a business name and a decent logo. Invest in getting a decent website and bam, you're off to the races. All in. It should be probably around $10,000. Not, you know, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 for logos and typeface and fonts and colors and gradient packages and all this stuff that you don't need. You should be investing your money as a small business owner into only the things that are going to bring you direct tangible return. Once you have dialed that process and that system in and you are tracking your cost per lead, your cost per sale, your customer acquisition costs, and you're able to scale there and create excess cash, then go invest it however you want to. That's, that's all I'm saying. And, you know, it just kind of, ah, it just pains me to see These business owners come to me and say, hey, you know, we, uh, invested $50 grand in a, in a branding package and we got a, a good logo, but now what? How do we get customers? Like, imagine if you could have done, you know, spent a fraction of that, like $5,000 to $10,000 to kind of get all of your assets built and ready to go. And now you can go invest $40,000 to $45,000 on your marketing, getting data, understanding, what those baseline KPIs are with your funnel and how to acquire a customer. Just imagine if you guys could— if they could have done that, they'd be way, way ahead of where they're currently at right now. So anyways, there's a lot of great people out there, a lot of great branding agencies. I know I follow a lot of them on social media saying you got to do this, you got to do that, you got to reskin, you got to repackage your services. I'm not saying it's not important, but It has to come at the right time and it's gotta be the right cost. There's nothing more important than investing in your marketing, in your client acquisition costs, and understanding and predicting that and building a predictable client acquisition system. Okay. Um, yeah, other than that, let's freaking go be productive. Let's finish the week strong. Let's get it. All right. Uh, been a freaking amazing day. Feel fired up. We've got awesome things going right now at the agency and, uh, just been a really good week in general. And I'm really, really pumped with some of the things that we're working on and building out. Now, up until this point in time, TikTok has been something that we've been experimenting with. Have we ran ads? Yes. Have we spent significant amount of money? Yes. Have we found the exact kind of copy and paste strategy where we can confidently go to any type of a business and say, we can get you a result with TikTok ads? No. And that's been the challenge with TikTok ads, at least from our perspective, up until this date and point in time. And the reason for that is because it's been so volatile. It's up and down, up and down. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. It works for some products, not others. And it's tough for us as an agency to build out a kind of a standardized approach or methodology that can be apply to a wide range of businesses and get results with. Now, when it comes to Google, when it comes to Facebook and Instagram, really Meta in general, I mean, the strategies work for the majority of businesses. Now, that doesn't mean it's all copy and paste, exactly this, exactly that. No, but you have a framework that you can work with it. And then there are some, you know, customizations and tweakings and testing to do to be able to really optimize. But The approach is basically the same with Meta and with Google, but TikTok hasn't been that way. But recently, and especially today, we've been taking a massive deep dive into TikTok, especially with the shop ads, TikTok shop ads. And what I really think TikTok shop is going to become is the next Amazon FBA, the next Amazon FBA, um, opportunity where the right creators that have the right processes and have the right ability to generate content that is strategic in nature for the right types of products that are being sold there, it's gonna be an absolute cash cow. Now, the one caveat to this whole deal is that TikTok, as it currently sits, is undergoing major scrutiny and is at risk of getting, you know, banned in the United States. So we'll see what happens with lawmakers. We'll see what happens with this app in general. Um, a lot of interesting updates, a lot of interesting things to be looking out for. But man, as I'm wrapping up for the weekend, the thing that I'm most bullish on, the thing that I'm most excited about at this given point in time is TikTok. Shop and learning how to leverage and use it as an affiliate and as a brand, both for your own products and services, but also to take other people's products and services and become an affiliate there. And with the right strategy, approach, and creative, sell it in massive numbers, leveraging TikTok as a platform. So anyways, really gonna be awesome here in the next couple of weeks. Overall, Been a really positive, uh, um, day. And if you are interested in leveraging and learning more about making money online, anything that relates to e-commerce, info products, and leveraging new technologies to be able to really accelerate your time invested and stop trading your time for money, this is the right channel for you. So I invite you to like, subscribe, uh, hit that bell notification for more content. We're sending out videos every single day. It's going to be awesome. And I can't wait to see you guys in the next video.