Why great creative is the engine behind performance marketing

This is the first official guest that we have on this podcast, so welcome. It's an honour to be here. Thanks. Thank you for coming out. And I'm actually really excited to to to to hear your side of the story because I'm, I'm a nerd for marketing at the moment.

I don't know how, how and when it happened. And and having you as one of the first guests, the company is actually really cool because you've been doing some of our marketing, especially on the Google side of things, and seeing the results come in makes you really think about like, why am I not putting some more money behind this, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm honoured to be here because I think we work really well together. You know, you do a lot of the video, A lot of the creative.

And when you look at performance marketing these days, it's paramount to getting a good result online. You know, I think gone are the days where you can just run ads with basic graphics and just tell people what you do. I think nowadays, more and more, as we're saying, with people spending more on ads and seeing more ads, the storytelling pace is so important and getting people to build an affinity with your brand. And I think you guys do an excellent job of that. So when you work together on partner deals and working on campaigns together, the content that you supply us works.

You know significantly better than prior. I'm excited. About that. I'm flattered. Definitely.

Uh, well, let's let's let's let's go there. I love that you mentioned that you definitely need the creative to, to get a really good ROI for for PPC, for any sort of marketing. Right. What's the landscape looking like at the moment thinking about, you know, um, you know, the use of AI, the use of videos like static posters seem to be working with that much anymore. Tell me about it.

Great question. So I think, um, if you look at performance, marketing is like a spectrum. Yeah. Some of the key elements to getting an outcome online, particularly for like lead based businesses or service based, but even product as well these days you've got like a website and then you've got all of these different channels that you can drive people to that website to take an action. So one of the big ones is obviously social media.

Google ads, you've got YouTube, Spotify and a whole plethora. There's like 22 different things online that you can do. The ones that work the best for us as an agency and with the clients that we work with. Obviously everybody's different, but meta is fantastic. And so with Meta at Facebook and Instagram, you know, ten, 15 years ago, you could run ads with a graphic post, talk more like 5 or 10 years ago, I should say.

Um, but that's been so saturated now. Yeah. Super saturated. And I think you can't even go down the route of doing the hard sell anymore if you haven't put the hours and the work in, in creating really good content. So that's one side in terms of getting the traffic to come to your website and the importance of having really good creatives and video content especially.

But even when they do land on their website, how do you take a website that converts traffic at 5% to 10%? Because you're not going to have to do anything with your marketing. If you just optimise the landing page experience, you can significantly get a better outcome. Well, I'll actually give you a testament for this one because you did that for me. You're like, nothing's happening at the moment.

We're sending traffic to your website. No one's actually looking to do anything with it. And at the moment, and I'm going to looking directly at the camera here because this, this is something that I actually saw myself the moment that you guys implemented a landing page, something that was very specific to, you know, a specific to what people wanted. Instantly we saw the leads coming in. So that was actually quite fascinating for me, because one of the things that I and I'm sure that a lot of businesses that have never done any marketing have seen as well is that they are so reluctant to put like a huge budget behind marketing.

Right, because they don't know what that lead generation looks like they don't know what a tap of lead coming to your business looks like. Yeah. What's your thought? I think a lot of people are in the same boat, especially if you haven't done it before. But I always suggest, particularly for those businesses that haven't done marketing before, like Google ads or Facebook ads, start small, you know, figure out what works, what small.

It varies from different to business to business. So I won't throw out a number. But generally you do need around 2 to 3000 a month on meta to drive enough traffic to the website to get a meaningful outcome. Yeah. Um, but the number that I'd rather share with you is, um, depending on your business size, you should be investing between 5 to 15% of your revenue into marketing.

And that encompasses everything. That's top. Line. Top line. Okay.

Yeah. So 5 to 15%, 5%. If you're conservative and you're kind of happy with where you're at, and then 15% if you're actively trying to grow and expand. So it does vary between business to business. But a general rule of thumb, between 5 to 15% of all their revenue should be allocated towards marketing.

I mean, I don't mind talking about my numbers because this is something that people want to see. Like if you talk and if you actually say, you know, it depends on this, depends on that, it's hard for, for for you to actually get people to be invested in what you say. Right. Cool. So if I was to share my numbers right, I spend about $2,000 a month.

And this this is very conservative, right? And I'm only looking for about 2 to 3, uh, high quality leads. And I'm getting that right. Yeah. When I say 2 to 3 high quality leads, it really depends.

I say it depends, but it really depends on what, uh, ticket items you have. So if you like a e-com company, for example, who have a ticket item of like 20 bucks, it you want to have a massive amount of leads. Yeah. Whereas a company like mine, I deal in a four figure kind of kind of products. So I want to have 2 to 3 leads which, which can potentially generate about 15 to $20,000 a month kind of thing.

Right. Yeah. So it's obviously dependent on the business itself. Yeah. Um, but just to loop back, we're spending two grand a month on Google ads for Aim visuals.

Yep. Prior to the landing page, prior to the design, which used video effectively across that page, we got 2 to 3 leads. And I remember the first two months I was sweating. You were sweating every call. I was like, man, what am I going to say next?

Well. I was getting ready to pick up the phone. Like, I don't want to work with you anymore. There you go. So we're all back at the drawing board thinking, you know, what are we going to do to to fix this?

And one of the most interesting things we sort of learned from that exercise was the traffic's being driven. We're making every optimisation under the sun to get a good outcome. But when they land on the page, they're not converting. So we had gone from two leads to 13 from our last catch up. Yeah.

Um, cheaper cost per acquisition are better quality leads because of all of those optimisations now coming to fruition. But that's the power of getting a really good creative and tailored messaging to your audience to land on your website and convert. Is there a is there a rule of thumb when, uh, when you think about, okay, well, how how often, how long do I need to stay with a, with a marketing company before I call it quits? On this question, I get like every single new customer we work with. How long is it going to take before you get me results?

And generally again, rule of thumb. So a couple factors like how much are we spending. Which means how quickly can we test. Have you done this before. Is there any historical data that we can leverage to guesstimate where we're going to be?

Um, but the general rule of thumb is 90 days. Okay. And the reason I say 90 days is three months gives us enough time to see what traffic's coming in. What are they doing? Which keywords are they coming from?

Which avenues are they coming from? Come back to you and go. What are the quality of these? Are they converting? Are they not converting?

Are they the wrong size type client? Are there different industry that we need to focus on and then make those optimisations, and generally by 90 days, if you've got a budget and everything sort of teed up, you should be getting a result. I think there's a missing piece to that as well. It's like, do you. Hear me with.

It? Okay. I think it's definitely a mindset as well. The mindset of like, I am willing to put money out there just to test things out. Yeah.

You know what I mean? I think many businesses, especially small ones, forget that. Forget that you have to. And if you stay still, nothing's going to happen. If you're refusing to spend money and testing, like hire the right person or testing out like a different company or different new strategy for, for for your marketing, you're never going to get anywhere.

And I think having a mindset of like, okay, cool, I am willing to lose this money. And I'm confident that despite this, something is going to happen. Even if I don't learn anything, I know that this is not going to be for me. Yeah, you're going to test whether or not it works. So you can go to iteration B iteration.

See if one can ask you a question. Am I allowed to do this? Yeah. Send it man. Okay cool.

So open forum. Yeah. Cool. So, um, we do a lot of ads, right? Mhm.

Um, we spend share numbers, you know, 80 to 100 k a month on meta across a bunch of different accounts. And I've got my views on what I think is working well from like a video perspective and creatives. But I'm keen to learn from you being the, the chief and videographer here. Okay. What are you seeing to be more effective these days?

What's changed or. Yeah, what are you what are you seeing that's working really well? There is um, there is a book framework and the book is called they Ask You answer. And I think this is one of the, um, frameworks I actually learned from one of my clients. Right.

Doing a lot of the podcasts, understanding what marketing is like, what to do with video. Right. One of the questions that Drummond I had when we first started this company together was the fact that we asked this question, like, what do we do with videos? How do we measure the ROI, right? If we shoot this video and make it look pretty, make it look sexy, like have all these different trends transition in it, have a model in it.

Like how do you actually measure the the ROI behind that? How do we get leads? How do we get sales? And the book they ask you to answer is a framework that we use here at visuals to create content for people, because we know that this framework works in terms of content. And this content can then be used with you guys in PPC, because we know that the content works, people want to know about it.

So it's so much easier to to to put some money behind it and spread it to, to like minded people. Anyways, the, the framework that um, this framework is actually one of the things that you want to do as a business, um, for videos, for video content specifically, it's actually asking asking the questions to your clients. What do they want to know? Right. It's usually what are the costs?

What's your problem with your products? What are the benefits of your products? Right. Who's who's used it? What are the comparison.

And all these type of questions are usually what people would ask if they're ready to buy from you, or they want to actually find out about your products, right? So if you really think about that and you create content in that fashion, nine times out of ten, it's going to work for you. And we've actually tested tested this out on four of our clients. Wow. Right.

So so basically answering people's questions around a particular product or service. So very educational information. Exactly. Yeah. Just to give you an example.

So the last um, and we did this for free and for our great good client at uh, at DeLonghi, we did this for free. We got them to do an event here at our office just to teach people about coffee. Yeah, right. Just so that we can actually create some content for them. And this is one particular post, 32nd post talking about the pressure of tamping coffee, right.

You know, when you're pressing the coffee down and you see, like, how much force do you actually need to press down? Is that is that why these coffees taste so good? I learned exactly from that post. Thanks, DeLonghi. Thanks, Cheryl.

I'm going to share on this one. Uh, but that particular post got two over 200,000 views. 200,000 200,000 AD spend behind that. No, that was organically organic. Right.

There you. Go. And it's because he created some tension. For people. Because some people have different opinions about it.

Right. But because she was so sure of herself, she knew. She's a big she's a she's been a barista for, like, what, ten, ten, 15 years or something like that. She knew that this is right because the coffee that she makes comes out great every single time. So why would you not be?

Why would she not be confident of herself and actually put that out there? Now imagine if you put some PPC behind that like some some budget behind that. If you put it behind paid ads across meta or even used it to convert people that landed. I think it goes a really long way. Yeah, I find that really interesting.

So educational and informative content are some of the two things that you're finding to work the best to to get an outcome online. Yeah, there's a, there's a new format that's called um, edutainment. And you're actually doing this. You actually if you, if you go check out the page or e-commerce page, you're actually doing this as well. They did a post recently where, uh, the character.

His name is Alex, right? The character has forgotten who he was, so he had to go see the doctor who is Nabeel to remind him what he what what, uh, what was it again? What was the. Whole skit behind it was? He's going crazy because he's not getting his marketing down pat.

And so I sit there in a doctor's office with him and just remind him, this is who you are. This is what you've done. Yeah. And at the end, we put a call to action at the end of it. And I find that edutainment thing to work really well in our industry because of our target audience.

You know, and, and, and our competitors, I should say, when you think digital marketing agency, I think two things come to people's mind. A cowboy, they don't really know what they're talking about. They're going to. Generate and. What high churn rate just churn and burn.

And the second is a hard sell. We got this client 50,000 results. We're going to do the exact same for you. We're going to yeah. People are sick and tired of it and people don't respond to it.

Um, and so what we're trying to do now is almost double barrel the content, firstly in the sense of how do we get people to just like us, right? To trust us, to build an affinity to us. I think you're pretty likeable with the bill. Yeah, you're doing all right. And then the second part is how do we encourage them to actually get in contact?

And you did a video about this recently where you're like, everyone's going insane trying to go viral. But viral doesn't actually move the needle in your business. But I think if you can couple those together, get people to watch the video. So you've got a really high engagement rate. You're not spending too much in terms of getting views, and you're driving people to your website or your page from that content, but also giving them a clear course on how they're going to get in contact with you and an action at the end that's so much more valuable.

I'd rather a thousand of those people watch my video, then get 100,000 people that are considered ghost followers, or people that have just viewed the video, because we're not going to get an outcome out of it. Yeah. So the edutainment piece is is really interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think it's super important.

I think there's a there's a stat out there where I think 10% of your buyers are ready to go, but 90% of them are like, you're missing the mark, right? So if you're not sort of educating them through your content, through your blogs, through. Through whatever means of content that you can actually do, uh, to, to put it out there, it's going to be hard to, to tap into that 90% of your customer base, right? 100%. Yeah.

You don't get everybody that's hot to trot and ready to go. You might even speak with someone that says, I like what you're saying, but we're just not ready for it. And you've got probably yeah, 90, 95% of your followers or people that watch your content that might be considered a customer, but not today. Yeah. So you've got to like continuously churn them.

And so that content piece, when you're thinking about, you know, what type of content do we need. And we talk about this all the time. And customers will be like and this is before we flick them over to you. But clients will generally say, you know, what type of content do we post? What type of content is going to get us an outcome on Facebook and Instagram?

And the way that I like to think about it is touching your point. The educational piece, the informative piece, a piece I like to include around the brand. So to actually let people understand the differences between yourselves and competitors and then also generally and again differs from business to business, but case studies, how did you work with somebody else that a customer or potential customer can look at it and go, they had the same challenge as me and this company solved it. That relatability, relatability goes a long way. And I include the one thing at the end that's kind of dumb, but the miscellaneous entertainment style stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you can do all of those really well, you're positioning the business in the from a lens where people are going to follow you, they're going to stay engaged with your account. They're not going to bounce and leave. And when you get to the point that you're ready to start putting some paid media behind it, you've got audiences that are warm. No.

You know, here's the problem I see. You can tell them what to do. All these contacts. Right. But one of the biggest, uh, barriers to content is people being shy in front of a camera.

How do you overcome that phone? Well, I was actually I wanted to ask you these these questions, like, have you had this this problem with your with your with your clients at all. Um, I think it comes up from time to time again. Difference between industry, the personality behind the business owner. If they're big enough, they'll generally just offload it to some of their staff to get behind the camera.

Yeah. And you know, they get shy and all the rest of it. And it becomes a difficult conversation to encourage them to do it. But then you've got results. People go, oh, if it works, it works like I've got to do it.

I actually hate being behind the camera. It gets me nervous. I get a bit jittery beforehand. Yeah, yeah, I get OCD when I'm looking at the content. I don't want to see it.

And then my team would just post it and get it out of the way. But when I see that we're getting, you know, 19 leads or 20 leads this week from meta ads because of the video content that I've produced. Mhm. Start rolling again. Like it's all about confidence man.

It's all about confidence. And I think confidence is something that you can't control. Mhm. Right. The sense of, of of confidence that you get from actually filming yourself and talking in front of a camera.

It comes from repetition. Yeah. Right. It's about, uh, doing the work. It's about, like, finding the stuff that you actually really want to talk about.

Right. So think about your business. You know, everything there is to know about, uh, marketing. Yeah, I know everything there is. There is to know about, like, content marketing.

Right. So it's about like, okay, this is the stuff that I want to talk about. So this is the stuff that you will only see on my social media channel. Right. I don't talk about my family.

I don't talk about, you know, what I did yesterday? I didn't have something I, I didn't talk about anything I had for dinner, for example, I'm talking about content marketing, right. Business and content marketing. So it's all about frameworks again, right. So it's a it's about communication framework.

And I feel like if you want to do some content have a have a look at a guy called Vince Yang. Right. Vin. Do you know Vin. Is he the guy with, like the semi spiky hair?

Yeah. You're the magician, right? Yeah. Oh, man. If you watch his content on, uh, on YouTube and watch his content on Instagram, it's all about like, how do you show up in front of a camera?

How do you show up in front of people? Right. You don't you don't just just talk straight off the bat. You really want to know who you want to talk to? Yeah.

Do you know what I mean? So that's that's one of the first tips I would actually have for people is that if you want to create content, have in mind who you want to talk to first. Right. And if you don't have someone in mind, talk to you. Someone talk to yourself.

Ten years ago. Right. What did Foong want to do ten years ago? He wanted to start a business. Right.

And how do you start a business? Well, you need to know your products. You need to know to do some marketing. You need to learn how to film with a camera. That's the type of content I'm going to create from ten years ago.

Right. I love that. Yeah, I love it. Just I want to can I do something that's kind of unorthodox? Yeah.

You know how you said that stuff around repetition. Mhm. I just want to show the camera something because nowadays I just pick up the camera, put it in selfie mode and then just start recording. But that repetition pace is kind of going to pick this up. Oh man.

Yeah. That's how many. Times. Yeah. Like this.

This is how many takes it took before I was happy with. I want to show you anything inappropriate here. But all of this. I just kept filming and filming and filming, and that's what I mean. Again, I got that OCD nature, but the first iteration looks so different to the last iteration, and that's very much like marketing the sentence.

Just repetition, repetition. And do that. Like, I love the fact that you showed that because there's one there's probably one, uh, framework that I want to share to people. If you really think about creating content and you could use this over and over and over again, it's called the hive framework, right? Hive hive H.i.v.e.

okay. All right. So if you think about content, you start off with the hook, right? To draw people in. Right?

Then you have introduction. What are you going to be talking about? Yeah, right. V is what was what was V again I know the last one is the end screen. So value v is value v is value.

So what is the value that you want people to walk away from this piece of content. And then lastly the call to action which is the end screen. Right. So the call to action could be hey, if you wanted to check out more content like this, come check out my channel or if you are interested in this product, come check out my website. Right, right.

That's the that's the call to action. It doesn't always have to be buy from me. It could be go check out this page, go do some homework. And then if you want to know more, come back to me. I've got some more.

I'm not really focusing too much on the strong sell. Yeah, but creating a customer, a follower, if you will, where you can nurture them down the track. That's right. So it's all about value. And one of my, uh, things that I say to people is like value, value, value like what is the value that you want to provide to people right now?

And that's all what content marketing and marketing in general is like. You want people to get value first before they come in and get some more value from you. So give them a little bit of value. Yeah, yeah. And then when they come for the full service suite, then you can give them the whole enchilada.

What was it. What was it. Alex. Said. He says give people so much value that it makes them feel stupid not to buy from you or something like that.

Oh, beautifully. So yeah. I love that. You know, I did this experiment. I'm not sure if you've heard of it, but they did this like 20 years ago where they went to everybody on the street and they said, hey, can you put this massive sign in front of your house?

It was for an upcoming election or something like that. Yeah. And they had every single person on the street say no. It was a massive sign in the front yard. Everyone was like, no, get lost.

They came back the following week and they offered to put a really small sign in front of the house and everyone said, yeah, it's a small sign, I'll put it there. A week after that, they come back and go, hey, can we now put the big sign? And everybody or a large percentage of those people had said yes to the big sign. So the idea is if you give someone a little bit or you get confirmation and yes, from a little bit, it's much easier to get the yes for the bigger thing. So it's very much to say what you're saying around creating value, where you're giving out bits and pieces almost like, hey, here's just a thank you for watching me and then doing it so much that it just makes sense to me.

It's a courtship, man. It's a courtship. That's what it is. At the end of the day, you know what I mean? Yeah.

Um, let's Let's take it to the next level. I want to talk about funnel. Oh, okay. I want to talk about funnel because like my understanding of funnel. Right.

Like and this is something I've literally just started diving into about six months ago. Mhm. Uh what's your views on funnel and what's are some of the most simplest funnel you can actually do for your business right now to get leads. Great question. I want to talk about two things if that's what I think.

First the most simplest funnel, just to give you a quick answer to that, is building a web page, running some form of ads, whether it be Google Meta, once you get them in using some form of a CRM to nurture them until they close. Getting a salesperson involved. But taking it one step further, I'll talk to a lot of businesses about this, particularly if they haven't engaged with us before, but it's around where do you put your budget? You know, sometimes clients go, hey, I've got ten k a month. What do I do with this budget?

And I like to employ this thinking about apples, Write has a professor named Mark Ritson. I did my MBA in marketing and my MBA in brand management with him. And he also the thinking that when you're looking at your marketing budget, you've got branding, which is all of the stuff we're talking about today, and you've also got lead generation or sales or you're wanting people to take an action and you look at that as your ROI channel. And his perspective was you meant to invest 60% into the branding and 40% into the marketing? A lot of what we've talked about today around getting people to engage with you, not doing the hard sell or really talks to the importance of the branding piece.

So what I mean by the branding piece is things that talk about your values, what you stand for, um, what differentiates you from competitors, your story, people behind the business, all of these things where people can understand more about who you guys are and what you do, and only allocating 40%, 40% of your total marketing budget to lead generation and sales based activity. So that should be your Google ads, your Facebook ads, your cold callers, people that are jumping on the phones and and things like that. Right. There we go. Back to that point.

Mark Ritson goes pull 60% into brand and 40% into Legion. I think people missed that whole picture when it comes to to the branding side, because it's not sexy. It's not something that you can turn on today and get a quantifiable number in terms of ROI the next month. It's a slow exercise. It's not just a logo, it's there's like more Twitter.

Yeah. And like with Powermove Digital, for example, we spent the first two years just producing content. It wasn't the sexiest content within a budget for someone like yourself, for an amazing videographer, you know, like it's come in and do this stuff for us. So a lot of that stuff was just, you know, our guys behind on a Canva or a Figma file, just organise, hey, we did this great job. Or we'd go to a client that was doing a shoot and we just do a ten second snippet before I say, hey, here's what we're doing.

Or showing a client testimonial in terms of like a Google review or something, and just building a bank of content that when you do spend the budget to get somebody to interact with you, you're set up for success. And that's like having a page that's good. That's like having a website that operates well, that loads quickly, that's got all the information there to get people to convert and most importantly, has got the branded content. So when someone jumps on it and they're looking between you and competitor B, you've got that brand based on you're looking human, you're looking approachable, you're looking easy to convert that these guys, they're not part of the picture anymore. And that part is so important.

And I feel like. 100%. A lot of people try to when it leads, when it sells and it leads. Yeah. Do do the hard part first and the second part becomes significantly easier.

100%. Like, I've got a good client of mine, uh, called Parker's Blinds and Curtains. Right? Yep. And we worked with them for six months, producing an insane amount of content on his Instagram right to the point where he was.

He started off really shy in front of a camera, but like he ended up being like just the. Super casual. Super casual with it. The expert in content. He talks.

He talks nothing but content. Now, when he talks to me and when he. And he actually even made a separate, uh, Instagram page just for to document his own story throughout the day. So it's not not just about like his, his business anymore. It becomes then becomes personal branding as well.

And those two, those two actually come hand in hand. But the point I'm trying to make is with this is that he's got so much content that now when he invests some, some money into the marketing side of things, leads are just pouring through the door. Like he's got so much leads that he doesn't know what to do with. Right. And that's a great problem to have.

But that comes from actually branding yourself, putting yourself out there, doing some content, some valuable content that people want to consume from your business if they want, if you want them to, to to interact with your product and services. Couldn't agree more. Focus on developing a good brand and the marketing becomes significantly easier if you're looking to get sales revenue leads out of it. Um, yeah. It's as simple as that.

So coming back to the to the final thing, that's for me, that's the top of the final, right? Yeah. Right. So doing the branding, doing the content and whatnot. What's the middle of the funnel and what's the end of the funnel in your eyes?

Yeah. Great question. So like obviously within your marketing team your top middle and bottom of funnel. Tofu. Tofu.

Both. No tofu. There you go. Yeah. So I don't understand.

Top of funnel. Bottom of funnel. Um, middle of funnel. Bottom of funnel. Um, it's a really broad question.

And every single platform has got different ways of targeting those people. Um, but generally like top of funnel is awareness stuff. So things like, you know, branding ads, basically getting your name out there to people that you think are going to be audiences or potential customers. So let's say, for example, we're talking about a home builder or some of that, you know, is a is a builder. Sorry, I should say.

Then they want to target people that have got enough disposable income, or are in the market to purchase a new property and build it. Like, those are the people that they're going to go after. They have to be a homeowner. There might be aged between 25 to 34. They might live in a certain geography that you want a ring fence.

Um, so awareness adds you charm to those people. That looks like Facebook meta, YouTube back in the day, like billboards, TV, radio and newspapers. Obviously things are changing. Middle of funnel is somebody that's interested in your service but hasn't yet connected. So they might have searched for home builder near me.

Home builder Sydney. Those people are hotter obviously, and closer towards the bottom of funnel than converting. So utilising retargeting, utilising Google ads, meta ads those are all perfect platforms for for that stage of the funnel and at the very bottom you've got bottom of funnel. Those are the sexiest audiences. Those are the guys that.

Are 10% right. The 10% they've gone top of funnel. They know who you are. They've been on your page. They might have gone into the contact Us page, but not yet pulled the trigger on it.

And what are you doing with those guys to really get them over the line to become a paying customer? And so retargeting is a big one. But also Google ads, because if somebody is in the position to buy, they don't go on Facebook generally to look for the plumber, look for the builder, they're going to search and they want to find that. And that's a whole can of worms in and of its own. You know, with the ChatGPT people utilising AI, people using search, the AI overview and Google, that place is changing a lot.

But then you'll do that for the bottom of funnel. And there's one piece that ways and agencies started to sort of come around to when actually Covid was coming around, it was really hard to find new customers online for our customers. People weren't spending as much, okay. And everyone was in a very restrictive state, you know, very conservative. And so we introduced something after that called loyalty.

How do you keep your existing customers coming back? Okay. And so what we did for a lot of the E-com based businesses, let's say you're selling, you know, microphones, I'll say, hey, you know, two weeks after they've purchased, we'll target them. Whether it be through emails, texts or Facebook and Instagram ads saying, we hope you're enjoying your new beautiful black microphone. Okay.

Oh, sorry. Sorry. For the next two days, refer a friend and both of you can get X percent off. So messaging like that to get those people to come back and like keep them at that buying stage. That's what I think a whole funnel should be.

But there's one thing that I really want to talk about, because I think you could benefit so many businesses, particularly the SMEs, when it comes to planning your budget. A lot of businesses that I speak to will say, we spent this last year. This is what we're spending this year. And I think that's such a flawed way of looking at where to allocate your marketing funds. As in, as in, they've spent a certain amount last year and they want to decrease the amount.

They just want to keep the exact same amount. Like this is what we did last year. These are the channels that we used last year. Let's do it again this year. Okay.

And when end of financial year came around July, I was having so many of these conversations where or even if they were coming from another agency or they were managing their marketing in-house, where they'll say, oh yeah, we've done SEO, Google ads on Facebook, and can you guys just look after it? Yeah, I took one step back and I'm like, why are you doing these channels? And there's a concept called zero based budgeting, where you effectively remove everything you've done before and you build it from the ground up again. You've got yours and you build it up from the ground up. You look at exactly what each channel is doing for you, where it fits into the bigger picture, and why you should be investing X amount per channel whether you look into the budget results.

So what you're saying is that people were thinking that, oh, this is working. I'm just going to keep going and going with it. Well, so but I can see why they want to keep going because it's working right. Why would I want to like, knock everything down and rebuild everything back up? I'm not saying to remove those channels when I say about knock it down rebuilds it is.

You have to take one step back and go. Oracle, we're not spending anything on marketing. What did we do last year that we're going to do again? Now, how much budget should go to each platform and what is each platform giving us. So we strategize is what you're saying.

Yeah. We strategize. Start from the ground and go, ah, cool. Um, you know, we invested X amount into Google last year. What did we get out of Google asked you?

Do we have to increase or decrease that we spent X amount on video. Oh we actually got a really good outcome. Do we move some budget around to include more marketing budget to video? Um, oh, we're doing a bunch of idioms, but that didn't really work out. Well, why are we doing it again if we then get the outcome we wanted last year?

Okay, so just what I mean by zero based budgeting is you start at zero and you include every single channel or exercise that you're doing from a marketing perspective intentionally. I can see why this this could be complicated though. Yeah, I can see why people wouldn't want to do it, because, I mean, it requires a lot of effort. I think I mean, just to listen to to that, like what I, what I would want to do just thinking from from a strategic perspective here I would want to look at is there any new office that I can actually redo this? The marketing side of it.

Right. So I would I mean, this is what I would suggest is if maybe every three months, every six months, look at your office, maybe rebuild the office, or add a new office just to test it out to see if this is. When you say office, the email like the businesses offer to the prospect. Yeah. So and like new products, new services that that kind of thing.

That's that's how I would look at it because like that's the same problem that I had. Right. I was relying too much on on word of mouth and reactive quoting. So. All right.

This is what you want. Okay I think I can I can work it out for you as opposed to. All right. I think I've got this offer that could target this this kind of people. I'm going to build it out.

I'm going to do some marketing behind it and then see if it's going to work. Right. I might just ask you, what's been the best sort of offering or the most revised one? Is that where you offer a free consult is a way you'll give them a game plan in terms of like a six month content shoot. Um, what's been the most successful thing today?

I'm in the middle of it right now. Actually, to be very frank with you. And one of the offerings that we've we've been, uh, neglecting, per se. It's actually the podcast, mate. Just we've been doing this for five years, but now everyone's sort of catching up and we haven't really like, uh.

Focussed. Focussed on it over the, over the years because we thought, oh, this is probably low level. Nobody wants to do podcasts. It's going to be too expensive for people. But now everyone's sort of in it.

So we've got to look at, okay, well, how we can actually elevate the game, how we can actually create content at scale, which is still valuable for, for, for the customers. So when I think about podcasting, it's not something that is a product in itself, but it's a part of something bigger. So gotcha. Podcasting could mean, all right, it's regular content. Okay.

Well what's regular content. Okay. Well let's let's put the whole, uh, they ask you answer framework behind it. Then you can grab all the content from the, the product and services that you have, which would create like a bank of content for that product and services, and then we can use that to market and see if that's going to work for, for your brand. So that that's what I would actually, um, suggest to, to some of our customers to think about, like, how do we strategically use all these services that you can actually use to create content nowadays?

I love that. Yeah. They ask, you answer. Yeah, I love it. Cool.

Um, got another question for you. Can I ask. It? Yeah. Yeah.

Sorry, sorry. Yes, yes, you can ask. Um, we talked a little bit about how, um, you know, content creation is changing what people are wanting more of. And you spoke to me about that. They ask, you answer.

Um, and one of the other things you spoke about earlier was when you're looking at things like, what are we actually getting out of this video? Have you got any good case studies outside of the one you've shared, where they were doing content their way before you implemented some of this framework or this thinking behind that framework and they're getting a great outcome. Like you spoke about DeLonghi. I think that's a fantastic case study. Have you got any others that were maybe service based businesses?

Um, even product based? Anything like that that you can share with us? I think we've been fortunate and fortunate to deal with people who actually haven't really looked at content before. They just thought, oh, we're just like, yeah, so we're just going to put some money behind like static ads and stuff like that. Which, by the way, surprised me when I started looking into this.

And I've met some marketing agencies who don't even do video content. And I'm thinking to myself, really? Are you sure you want to do this? Like, how is how is this, um, static content being working out for you? And I'm very curious because I don't know.

Right. So I've been fortunate enough that the clients that we've been dealing with have been pretty receptive to to to video. Right. And the way that I like to approach some of my clients is that one, I vet you, so I want to know who you are as a person. Like for you.

Like you seem to be opinionated. You know what you talk about. You've got ten. How long you've been in the game? We're doing it for about ten years now.

Ten years in a game. So have you got some industry knowledge? You've got some experience behind it. And because of that you are opinionated. Opinionated, which means that the content that you're going to put out is going to be very, uh, focussed and very targeted to what you want to talk about.

Right? So that's the type of people that we want to talk about, to talk to. Right. If you don't know how, if you don't know what you don't know, then I'll probably think about, you know, start documenting your journey. Right.

Because you never know where you're going to end up, uh, end up. Yeah. Have you got nothing to talk about? Show the process of you learning what to talk about. Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to have that conversation.

I'll be like, okay, well, this is a strategy you need to implement. You need to start doing this now. Because if you just if you get straight into the ads, you kind of waste your money. Yeah, I love that. Build your content house first.

Build your brand and then start ads because it makes it a lot easier. 100% mate. So I'm keen to understand. Have you got any case studies where you're working with the business, where they were running an older strategy when it came to content and the visuals plugged in, and then what the like before and afterwards. So there is actually a cool case study that we've we've been working on, and the clients are called parkas, blinds and curtains.

Great. Great blinds and curtains. Company. By the way, if you need something like that I would highly recommend them. But the cool thing that we, we've, we've found with them was the fact that we've actually worked on one account for them, which is the pocket blinds and curtains business.

Those are two. Yeah, two businesses. So we're working for, for for 6 or 7 months. And we build like a huge library of content, which meant that they could use those content on using putting some budget behind it with their marketing, get some pretty substantial, substantial, substantial lead. That's okay.

Leave that in substantial lead. Can't talk some time. Right. And he's got another another business down the coast where we couldn't actually get there physically because, you know, it is quite far away, so we weren't able to create as much content down there. Right.

And the great thing is, because we have these two accounts, we could see the performance between the two of them. Right. And one account, the one with like the the huge amount of content in the library to to do all this, to do all this marketing managed to get like ten times more leads than the other. Ten. X ten x more leads than than the other accounts.

Right. And it's because they have this amount of content that they can use to nurture their, you know, the interaction with their customers before these customers are ready to buy. I love it. So they focussed on what we're saying, building a house of content and then doing ads to. It's building like a solid foundation before you do all this marketing.

And like you said, it's what is 60% branding and then 40% on Legion. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, very great case study. We talk extensively on this man. Is there anything else like you'd like to add to to to this podcast?

I think we wrapped it up pretty well man. We spoke about the importance of good creatives to get a good outcome online. I spoke about a few different case studies. We spoke about how much should invest into the brand versus Legion. Yeah.

Um, it's been a pleasure to be here, man. I think we can do this again sometimes. Man, I love that you enjoyed it. And I do have one more question for you. Sure.

Why, pal? Love. I think people should work with us. I know why I'm choosing now, but why? Why would I should people choose power?

I make the million dollar question. Um, I think we just do digital marketing really well. We're a small team. We've got 15 staff, but all about performance we don't fuss about with, like, vanity metrics. We put digital into layman's terms, and we've been doing it for a really long time.

We know our shit. So yeah, we're good. We're honest. We work really well with our businesses that we work with, and we like to position ourselves as almost like an extension of their marketing team. We're very hands on and we want to get to the bottom of things.

Thanks, man. Thanks for all. Pleasure to be here, mate. Cheers.