The Exact Formula We’ve Used to Generate $5M in Revenue in the Last 3 Years – Ezra Firestone

0:09You guys are probably interested in business content. I imagine. Uh so this cat right here has nothing to do with my presentation, but I mean look at how badass that cat is. Would you not like your business and life to be just about like that? Because I certainly would. Um yeah, so I'll just I'm actually you know, Joanna would never ask you to get

0:31up, but I would. So go ahead, get up. Everyone get up, put your hands on your hips just like this. Do me a favor. Come on, do it. It's only going to take a second. All right. Now you got there? Now just kind of rub elbows with the person next to you. There you go.

0:45All right. Now you can sit back down. Uh yeah, my my viewpoint is that beyond like when I come to these things I think that the real value in life comes from relationships and intimacy and connection with other people and I think that beyond the content that you will get at this event, that's probably what you should focus on is try to make one really good relationship. Now I'm going to give you a few slides about who I am so you know, you know, that I'm you know, so I'm just some dude, but I'll also tell you some

1:14stuff about me. I will give you some statistics, some high-level overview stuff that is going to frame what I'm going to talk about and then I'm going to give you some very tactical Facebook advertising stuff, some very tactical email stuff and then I'll end with kind of an overview. Does that sound good to you?

1:31No. This guy literally shook his head. You can leave, sir. Okay, so I'll get started now. My name is Ezra, I'm an e-commerce expert. Um I've been doing this a while. Uh in 2016 one of my e-commerce brands, check that out. Bang! A thing just dropped. Uh one of my e-commerce brands did 17 million in revenue. This year we're at uh 5 million already and then I have several different um e-commerce brands and I have an information publishing and software as a service company. Uh this is just to show you the 2016 revenue. So, this is just to show you like I actually know what I'm doing, you know, I'm kind of a

2:08goofball, but I I really I love this stuff. I've got a team of 45 people. I've been doing it for 12 years and I'm really really into it. Um also, we've sold $5 million worth of software in the last 3 years and our current software as a service company uh is at 120 grand a month right now and growing and we've only been at it for 12 months. Uh I imagine that it will um continue to grow. And so, what I'm going to show you is how we That was kind of cool. Was that a little bit of a Just give me a little more. If

2:38you um got to have a song that played for you as you walked into a room full of people, what would it be? This guy. Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden. Oh, damn. This guy is like full on just metal right here. Uh yeah, I I thought you'd go with something like We Will Rock You, you know, or something. Uh all right, I'm going to give you guys some

2:59statistics. Here we go. So, I'll give you some stats that'll kind of frame the conversation that we're going to have. Um I mean, this is just a room full of business athletes right here. Check you guys out. Looking good. Uh you're a good-looking crowd. So, touch has taken over. So, basically, the way that people consume the digital

3:20medium has fundamentally changed. Touch-based consumption of the internet has now eclipsed traditional desktop and laptop consumption of the internet. And so, it used to be that we had laptops and desktop computers. And so, when we sat down, we spent more time consuming the digital medium in one given period and we didn't do it as much. And now that we're carrying these devices around with us all day, we're consuming in shorter periods of time, but more frequently throughout the day and we end up with more consumption overall. Like, people are in line at the bank, they're on the toilet. uh Uh I'm looking at you, uh guy. Uh

3:57I don't know why, but but you know, that guy. So, the way that people consume the internet has fundamentally changed, which changes the way that we need to market our software as a service. So, I'll give you some stats that'll frame this conversation. 33% of people who show interest on a mobile advertisement convert on a desktop. That's going to become important later for those of you who are on a budget. 33% of people who show interest on a mobile ad convert on a desktop. 67% of consumers start shopping on one device and continue on another. How many people here have more

4:30than one device? Basically everyone, right? 2/3 of your consumers are starting the experience of potentially engaging with your software on one device and finishing it on another. People are moving to bigger devices to make purchase decisions, and this mobile world that we live in comes with fragmentation. The average person has 194 channels that they're consuming from. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, AOL, Google, iTunes, YouTube. There's 194 channels on average that you consume content from. More than 60% and these stats will end soon of adults in America have two devices and a quarter of those people have three. Anyone in here have

5:08more than three devices? Four? More than four? More than five? One guy? Wow, that's a lot of of uh technology. I'd be curious how you, you know, what you're doing with all that. Um so, one and this will become uh important, too. One in five minutes that people spend on mobile devices in the United States are on Facebook and Instagram. So, those are kind of like the the the king and queen of of where people are spending their time. And four out of five people in America carry a smartphone with them every day. So, what does this actually mean for you? Why are those stats important to you as someone who has a

5:46software as a service business that you are trying to engage people with. And by the way, that last presentation was amazing because at the end of the day, I'm going to give you a bunch of tactics and strategies for selling stuff, but like if you're not able to effectively communicate the value that you have to offer and engage someone in a conversation, you got nothing. Like in life, it comes down to your ability to communicate in your relationships and your business. If you focus on becoming a good communicator, you will be a more effective person in your world. So, the big idea here is that you're going

6:17to need multiple touch points with a prospect before you get a conversion. It didn't used to be that way or this way. Used to be like search, find, buy. Search for something, they see it, they like it, take a picture of it, buy it. It was much easier to sell. Now, with the way that people are consuming the digital medium, we need to sort of structure our sales funnels to have multiple touch points. I call this multi-touch point marketing. Look at those flames. I got my uh this is my chief platform officer here, Dutch Danger. Raise your hand

6:48there, Pepa. And he's responsible for those. If you would like to shake his hand, he made that happen. We'll just do it one more time. Check this out. Bam! Dutch Danger. So, the the thing that I'm trying to get this is still the overview part. What I'm trying to communicate here is that the idea of the single campaign is dead. I spend about $5 million a year on advertising and when I what I see is that when it comes to

7:11advertising, people quit far too early. They say, "Oh, this campaign didn't work." And then they shut it down. But we have to look at advertising a little differently in today's environment. So, the frame that I'd like you to take is that your core platform and any sales funnel that you create is simply a collection of conversion assets working in concert with one another to achieve a specific result. And I'm actually going to break this down for you and give you sort of actionable, usable tidbits here,

7:37but I'm still giving you the context. So, basically, a prospect-to-customer journey has three phases. Phases. You have before, during, and after. Or what I like to call awareness, retargeting, and loyalty, as we'll get into in just a moment. So, the big shift is now understanding that all of your ad campaigns, everything that you do to amplify your brand with advertising, and all my businesses are ad model businesses. I really like businesses that are driven by advertising cuz it's measurable. You can go to the traffic store and buy traffic. It's like really a nice way to build a business. And um

8:11anyone in here run ads? Okay, cool. Well, for those of you That's a good like half the room. For those of you who don't run ads, I'm going to What I'm about to show you about Facebook will give you the ability to run ads profitably on a small budget. And for those of you who are running ads, it'll give you the ability to spend more effectively. So, the way that we look at advertising is every single campaign, and I'm actually going to give you the the touch points here,

8:35are looked at in three phases. Awareness, retargeting, and loyalty. Awareness is getting your brand or your offer in front of people who don't know about you yet. Retargeting is re-engaging people based on how they've consumed or engaged with your product or your sales funnel. And then loyalty is like after someone is already a customer, like Russ was talking about, amplifying content or amplifying cross-sell stuff to those people. So, I'm going to show you kind of how this works. But if we know that retargeting and loyalty is where the bulk of your conversions are going to happen, we know that people are moving from small devices to big devices to make

9:16purchases. We know that people need multiple touch points or multiple engagements before they convert these days because they're spending shorter amounts of time on the digital medium. So, we know that most of our actual trials of people trying our software or people buying our software are going to happen on the second and third touch point. So, if we know that, then that begs the question, what's the best top of funnel conversion asset? How do we set our sales funnel up so that it's optimized for this sort of new way that people are engaging with the digital

9:49medium. And the answer is an article. Simply put, a article that engages someone in a conversation about a topic that they are interested in that also alludes to a solution, which is your product. This is my strategy for business. Our My businesses in 2016 did $22.5 million. Russ was talking about one of them, just one article. Basically, every offer that

10:12I have has one article that I amplify. And I test it, I do some other stuff, but I'm going to talk to you about that article and and how it needs to look and how specifically you should amplify it. Is this stuff any kind of exciting to you guys? Okay. Sweet. Yeah. You guys are uh You guys are chilling hard. This guy This guy This guy just threw the the old hang loose gesture at me. Uh my wife was out of town and and when my wife goes out of town, my brother like moves in. Um and he I have many guest rooms, but he moves into the couch I think because

10:42it's like bro- bro-ier that way. Um and I was telling someone about about the bro-down. I was giving them the lowdown on the bro-down. And uh I I told them that like had I seen them during that time period, I probably would have thrown them a hang loose gesture. Just to give you a sense of how bro-y it had gotten. And and this guy and I I think cuz the man bun and beard

11:00thing, we just have a connection. Uh hang loose. It's the It's the universal man bun sign. You just bang. Okay. Why do you want to amplify content? So So, the reason you want to amplify content is because new advertising is contextual. It used to be that that when I got into the game, we only had query-based advertising. Someone would type in a query on Google, on Bing, or on Yahoo, and we'd be able to advertise to them based on what they were searching for. And contextual targeting

11:29existed, but we only had Did my mic go? We only had one data point. We had we knew what website they were on. So we knew they were on a website about cats, we could advertise them something about cats. Now we have what's called multi-data point contextual targeting. We are we are able to have thousands of data points on any given user. We know how old they are and then we know where they live, we know what they're interested in, we know what they've bought. So we can leverage those data points to build a group of people who we think are going to be interested in our stuff and then target them. And

12:00the reason why we must amplify content today is because when someone wasn't searching for something, we need to first engage them in a conversation and add some value to their life before we start being like, "Hey, try our stuff. Are you filming me? What's up? Are you Snapchatting me?" I don't know if that's cool. You got to ask Robin Mike, dude. This guy's over here just trying to be sly. He's got like a like this pose like he's chilling, but he's

12:23actually filming. Okay. Nobody seems to care, bro. You're cool. Um Only I only me. Am I the only guy who cares? I don't care, man. You can film me. So So this is uh So the point here is that what we want to do is engage people in a conversation about a topic that they are interested in that then alludes to a solution which is our product. So we have to amplify content. So step one for an offer is visibility. We're going to get back to this content amplification and how to do it effectively. Step one is visibility. You really have four main places you can buy visibility: Facebook,

12:55Instagram, Google, Pinterest. You know, that's pretty much it. There's some other places, but mainly this is where you're going to be buying visibility for your brand. And I would recommend starting on Facebook and Instagram as software as a service providers. You could do LinkedIn too. LinkedIn's advertising network, Twitter's advertising network are getting a little smarter, but they're still kind of clunky and expensive. So I would start on Facebook. So the first thing that I want to cover is the most common ad mistakes that I see people who are starting out advertising making. So mistake number one, people target too

13:25broadly. The success of your advertising hinges on your targeting. It absolutely one If you put the message in front of the wrong person, then they're not going to be interested in it. Like, for example, you know, we have a pretty volatile political climate in our country. So, if you've got like a Donald Trump supporter and then you put like a Hillary Clinton message in front of them, they're not going to like it. Or you got a Hillary Clinton, or I guess that's previous now that the election has happened. But, during the election, had you done that, had you targeted the wrong people with

13:54messaging, it's just not going to work. So, how do we start targeting properly initially? Well, the first thing is that you want to start with look-alike audiences. So, you want to upload your email list, you want to upload your buyer list, you want to upload, you know, your Facebook fans. Your Facebook fans are already on there. Facebook gives you the ability to create look-alikes based on any engagement. So, you can you can have a retargeting pixel on your website, and I've got free training on my blog that I'll give you at the end of this that teaches you this stuff. But, um you can put a retargeting

14:23pixel on your website and then all your website visitors build this audience group of people, and then you can say, "Give me more people who look like this." You can do it for your Facebook fans. And if you don't have subscribers, fans, buyers, people visiting your website yet, and you can't start with look-alike audiences, and by the way, what I do is once I have a look-alike audience, it's like 2 million people, I then filter it and say, "Only people in this audience who also are fans of Marketo." And then I get the people who are most similar to people who visit my website who are also

14:51Marketo fans. So, it's a layer filtered down. So, if you don't have a any kind of community at this point, you can do what's called interest and behavior stacking. And this is the most effective type of targeting in the awareness pillar. So, we're trying to get new people who don't yet know about us. The most effective type of targeting in the awareness pillar for your brand is to create groups of people with stacked interest. And so, what that looks like is I want people who have shown purchase behavior of cosmetics and have purchased fitness products. So, they must fall into both categories. I want people who are fans of Marquetto and

15:28fans of Basecamp. So, they must fit into both categories. So, this specific style of building an audience will give you the best opportunity of putting your message in front of the people who are most relevant. Now, let's take it a level deeper. Use the best placements, right? What you will find is that certain placements do better than other placements. So, for example, I'm going to give you this tip in a second, but I'll just give it to you

15:53now. We know that people move from smaller to bigger devices to make purchase decisions, right? Like that is a fact. That is statistical data right from Facebook. I go to Facebook quite a lot cuz I'm one of their bigger spenders for e-commerce. So, basically, what you can do is you can set up your awareness pillar advertising in front of new people to only run on iPhones, to only be running to a stacked audience, to

16:15only run in the top five states, right? New York, California, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Florida. New York, California, Pennsylvania. How do you say that? Pennsylvania? Pennsylvania? Pennsylvania. I got my my neighbors from Pennsylvania and he changed the way I say it now. Uh New York, California, Texas, Pennsylvania, Utah, Florida. Run in those six states. That is where you are most likely to make a sale. So, so now you have only on iPhones, in those six states, with the stacked behavior. And then, when you retarget, retarget only on desktop and and and iPad. So, get people's attention on the mobile device, but then you know that the second and third touch point

16:56they're most likely to buy on a desktop or iPad. So, don't retarget people on mobile. Are you with me? This is the technical part of it. Is this too much? Okay. The other thing that you can do is on your mobile awareness ad sets is enable Wi-Fi. So, only run this ad to people who have Wi-Fi enabled. Because they're more sedentary. They're sitting down with Wi-Fi. They're not walking

17:17around New York City like me, right? They're chilling somewhere in a lounge with a beer, hanging loose with this dude over here. You know what I mean? So, so you can really get specific about who you're targeting. And if in the awareness pillar, if you're on a budget, it makes sense to give yourself the best opportunity to engage with someone who's the most interest or most interested. So, stacked beha- stacked interests only mobile devices like only iPhones, for example. For us, Uh-oh. For us, iPads are our best placement um on every one of our ad sets. So, if you're really really on a budget, you can only run on iPads. It'll work pretty

17:56well. I mean, for some reason people who have iPads are like really down. They're just like super down to engage with stuff they're chilling. They got this big iPad and they're just like scrolling around, you know? I don't know what it is, but anyone here got an iPad? Sell to those people. Go round them up in the back. Mimic user

18:13behavior like I was telling you. Awareness and acquisition, you run your ads on mobile. Uh retargeting and loyalty, you run your ads on uh desktop and iPad computers. So, those are some ad specific stuff. I only got 45 minutes. I'm trying to give you the best tips at each little pillar to um have you have the best chance of success with your advertising. Mistake number two, you want to get a picture of You can get my slides at the end of this. Mistake number two, selling the click. Man, I see these ads and they're like super

18:39boring, right? They blend right in. They're just like of some random stock image. And it's like, man, if you want to get people's attention in the awareness pillar, Oh, damn. There it was again, Dutch danger in the house, Pepijn Heuvelink. Uh he is also known as the wooden shoe wonder. Um we got a lot of names for him, but he's a good dude. Uh so, you want flashy attention-grabbing ads, which means that you should use lower thirds. So, every one of your ads should have a headline that's on the actual ad that's like, you know, these aren't actually on the lower

19:13third, but you can see what I'm saying. I A headline that tells the value proposition of that particular ad using cartoons we found to be very effective with getting people to click. We also find that ads with people's faces in them also work. So, here's an example of my software as a service ads. Start making more money on your Shopify orders. Person space cartoon. And it's a blog post or a case study about how we were able to grow our Shopify average

19:37order value. Have a better sales funnel. And it shows the stuff in the back and it's got a lower third on it, right? So, that type This type of ad, and we have tested literally hundreds and hundreds of different types of ads, this like this little setup with the cartoon and the lower third and the imagery is what is working the best from a conversion standpoint. Here's another example of that for our software as a service

20:01businesses. Your ads must be congruent to your landing page. So, you can't have like an a person, you know, people were doing lips a while back. Everyone's ads had lips in them because lips get clicks for some reason. But like, you can't have your ad has to be relevant to the content that you're amplifying. And here's the interesting thing about the flashy and attention-grabbing ads, only in the awareness pillar. This isn't in my slide deck. Once you get to the second touch point and beyond, all the advertising

20:28becomes brand-oriented. Because now you want to start building relationship, talking about, you know, having brand ethos, communicating brand values, displaying your logo and colors and stuff. Just to get people's attention, you get a little buck wild. You're in Vegas, you know what I mean? That's why you start at 10:00 a.m. Cuz people weren't showing up at 9:00 a.m. I

20:48assume. You know what I mean? Uh maybe not. Nobody does know what I mean. All right, keeping on. Uh no response to that one. Uh So, here we go. Mistake number three. Post-click engagement and post-engagement selling. This is a kind of what Joanna was talking about. You need to engage your prospects in a conversation about topics that they are actually interested in, problems that are relevant to them. Anyone in here a super sweater? Is that what it was

21:16called? Super sweater? You want to admit to it? Okay. I actually uh I don't know if I'm a super sweater, but I definitely always have the armpit stains and um somehow Facebook knows this. You know what it is cuz I speak on stage a lot and and I do a lot of presentation. I get the I sweat through the shirts and apparently there's like these um these strap-on pads you can get and I was like, "Nah, I'm not doing that. I'm not going strap-on with the pads." Um but anyone who's in that spot, you don't have to admit it, you know what I mean, but if you're sweating through your

21:43shirt, they got pads for that. Um All right. So, you need to engage them in your prospects in a conversation. You need to get them to say yes to consuming your sales message. They've got to read that headline and actually be interested and it starts with one core front-end acquisition funnel. Every business literally just needs one funnel that works and I'm going to give you the one that we use and I'm going to show you examples across multiple offerings. This is our funnel. We call it the dipsy doodle and the Don

22:13Dallaber. Can anyone say that? Doodle? Now, you got to go doodle. There it is. This guy in the front row who was who is He's got a crazy mic. Dude, are you filming me on a camera, too? Show hold that hold that big camera up. Show him what you're doing. All right. He's been outed. This guy. So, this is our sales funnel. Basically, we go from our traffic sources to a pre-sell engagement article to our offer page to our checkout sequence. That's essentially what it is. I'm going to break this down for you uh showing you a software as a service example with a webinar and then a software as a service

22:46example without a webinar and then another software as a service example. I can't even say it, but I'm going to show you that stuff, okay? Um So, we don't chase our prospects. We don't come out and say buy our stuff. That's how it used to be. When someone was searching for a product back where I came from, I came from the days of of of search engine optimization, of Google AdWords. You know, I I was in the game back in 2005 using AdWords as my traffic source. And back then it was like, "Yeah, I mean, you can sell something directly from when someone searches for it cuz you know what they were looking

23:16for." Now, we let them chase us. We amplify a piece of content that is designed to engage them in a conversation that then alludes to a solution, which is our product. They click through from the article to the solution because they're interested. So, they're chasing the offer rather than us chasing them with the offer. Do you Does that make sense? We have re- We've

23:37reframed it to use NLP terminology. We've made it so that they're now chasing us because we added value to their lives through a piece of content that we knew they would be interested in because it was related to a problem that they are facing that our prod- product solves. Here's an example of what it

23:52looks like for our e-commerce business. Now, to go one level sort of higher for you. And then, this isn't what this this presentation really isn't about Facebook advertising. It's about um it's about software as a service using content. But, we use video ads sometimes on Facebook because the beauty of a native video is people can consume it on Facebook. And then, you can do audiences of people who consume 25%, 50%, 75% and

24:19didn't click through. And then, you can run ads to those people. So, what The point that I want to communicate to you is that what you are doing is you're tracking funnel engagement. So, they clicked the ad, they made it to the article, they didn't click to the sales page. Okay, you need to re-advertise another piece of content to them or the same piece of content because they didn't consume it the first time. So, you're tracking how they engage with your sales funnel and you're communicating with them based on what they've done. And then, when we get into the email segmentation part of this, it's going to make a lot more sense

24:50because people under- people are willing to adopt this technology within email. It makes more sense. But, what I want you to do is think of Think of your brand as a group of people and multiple communication mediums. The group of people is whoever you have gotten to be interested, and the communication mediums are email, advertising, Facebook

25:11Messenger, mobile push notifications. There's a whole bunch of other channels, but the main channels that you're going to focus on as a new business owner are going to be ads and emails. So, everything you're doing in email, you should be doing in ads. It's just another communication channel. Now, this pre-sell engagement article here, by the

25:27way, they gave me a laser pointer. Would you look at that? That was not smart, cuz I could just play with this thing, you know what I mean? Anyone ever get one of Remember when these things first came out in high school and like people had them and you didn't yet know that you weren't supposed to shine them

25:39in people's faces? That definitely happened to me. Um yeah, I then found that out. But, uh all right, we'll we'll we'll we'll uh stop playing with the laser pointer. Although, this guy is going to get a laser pointer on his chest. He's filming me here. Uh pre-sell needs to relate to the problem that your product solves. The pre-sell engagement article must

26:01No? Somebody? There you go. Relate to You guys, come on, man. Give me something here. Relate to the problem that your product solves. If if it doesn't, it's not going to work, right? So, this article that you're amplifying can like every product solves a problem, right? Every software as a service is designed to solve a problem. So, the best kinds of pre-sell engagement articles to amplify for software as a service brands are case studies. They work really, really well. Everyone's familiar with case study marketing like it's software as a service 101, you know, white papers. Remember those

26:36things? You guys remember those, right? Who's been in the game a while? Remember white paper marketing was real big couple years ago? This is This is just white paper marketing, basically. We did not invent anything here. So, behavioral automated response. Responding to people based on the behavior that they have taken. I'm now going to frame this for you. Same concept, same thing, but I'm going to frame it for you through the

26:58communication medium of emails. Okay? This is a software as a service product we had for Amazon business owners. It was 600 bucks every um every 3 months or something like that. It was pretty expensive. Uh and for us, for our more expensive software as a service, we go for longer form sales messaging because we need more time to hold someone in a sales cycle before they're willing to say yes. The more expensive your product is, the longer the sales cycle will be, right? I used to sell $100,000 lots of land in Uruguay, which was a whole wild experience, but the sales cycle was a year from the point we generated a

27:36lead to the point we made a sale. Now, the sales cycle with like uh you know, I sell also um courses and stuff on how to do Facebook ads and things like that. I have an information publishing company. Most of our tickets there like 1,500 bucks. So, that sales cycle's usually a couple months before someone's willing

27:51to pay $1,500 for a training program. For my software as a service that's like $37 a month, I don't need a really long sales cycle. As I'm going to show you, this particular software as a service did need a long sales cycle because it was like 600 bucks every quarter. So, this is what that looks like. I'm going to break it down for you. So, the first thing is we have an advertisement that goes to a pre-sell engagement article, right? That's the first step is we're amplifying to everyone's filming up in here. We're amplifying uh con- We're amplifying a pre-sell engagement article. This is what that

28:23pre-sell article looked like. It was like, "Hey, here's how we boosted our Amazon sales and here's how you can do the same." Basically, right? It was a case study about how to grow your Amazon brand because the software was about how to grow an Amazon brand. And it was pretty long. It broke down this whole sales funnel, you know? And then at the end of it uh-oh. At the end of it it was like, "Hey, if you liked this and you'd like even more training about how to grow your Amazon business, opt-in for

28:47our webinar, right? So, it was an article that then led to a webinar opt-in. Again, cuz it was high ticket. If they didn't opt-in, we run ads to them that lead them directly to the long-form content. So, we have advertising that retargets them. If they do opt-in, we then try to get them to consume the webinar. So, we have three emails that go out that are designed to say, "Hey, move to the next step of the sequence." You know, your webinar is happening. Hey, the webinar is going away. Hey, here's a PDF of the webinar because multi- different people prefer

29:18to consume content in different formats. Every landing page Joanna was saying sometimes she doesn't put, you know, imagery and stuff. I am a fan of using every available media format because I find that some people will watch the webinar and some people will read the PDF. Some people will look at the imagery and some people will look at the text. And so, I like to have every available media format on my landing pages. And so, when we started sending out the PDF of the webinar, we saw a 12% boost in sales because people who would not watch the video and I think this might be to her point would read the

29:51article, right? So, transcribe your video content into PDFs, make it readable, and send that to people. So, we have our get them to consume campaign. As soon as they click to the webinar and they've consumed part of the webinar. By the way, this is what the webinar looks like. It's just a real simple page. Hey, here it is. Hey, check out our software, right? Cuz the call to action is to get them to check out our software. So, as soon as they consume the webinar we then have an engagement campaign. We want them to visit the sales page, right? So, they made it to the webinar

30:21page. So, we've gotten them effectively with our onboarding email sequence after they opted in from the pre-sell article to visit the webinar. Now, we want them to view the sales page. But, what if they don't click through? What if they go to the webinar page and they don't actually click through to the sales page? Well, what we're doing is we're retargeting them via email with behavioral response content based on how

30:42much of the webinar they consumed. Wistia does this with every CRM. It will pass the data of how much of the video they watched into your CRM. You can have that trigger an automation to communicate with them based on what they consumed or didn't consume. So, what we have is emails for 25% of the webinar, 50% of the webinar, 90% of the webinar. Here's

31:03what you missed. You know what I mean? So, first one First one goes out like summarizes what they saw and what they didn't see, directs them back to the webinar to consume more. Right? That's email number one. Then, we continue Are you Is this like too much for you guys? No, you're digging it? Okay. We continue to engage with them by following up with relevant content and unless they buy from us. So, the next thing that goes out is a webinar PDF. Hey, we hope this helps. Please watch this PDF of the

31:31webinar. This is another day has passed. They didn't click through to the sales page yet. Soon as they click through to the sales page, we're going to change what we're doing, but until we get them to see the actual sales message, we're still following up with content. Then we say, "Hey, this PDF is going away. It's your last chance to get it." So, we want to communicate urgency. Deadlines are huge in email and and ads. So, we communicate urgency. Say, "Hey, come back and consume more content before you

31:54lose the opportunity to do so." Then we start going into content that's specific to the product and the the product that we have for sale. So, it's like, "Hey, we have some ads training in here for how to grow your Amazon business with ads. Come back and watch it. Hey, here's an FAQ of what our product you know, what our product is about." So, we kind of try to make an a last-ditch effort to try to sell them the product. Now, then what we do is if anyone who's consumed 90% or more of the webinar, we straight start pitching. They've consumed 90%, which means they've seen a

32:26pitch for the product. They maybe have never made it to the sales page, but they've seen a pitch. So, we say, "Hey, you should buy our stuff." And then finally, we say, "Hey, maybe do you want a trial of our stuff?" Like you seem interested. You stayed on a webinar for at least 90 minutes. Why don't you trial the product? And then we say, "Hey, it's your last chance for a trial. You should take advantage of it." As soon as they visit the sales page, by the way, these are still people who never visited the sales page, we start them on a whole new sequence of behavioral emails. The point

32:53here is whatever the communication medium, what you must be doing is tracking funnel engagement and communicating based on consumption. This will revolutionize your business. It will change the ROI. It will give you the ability to actually advertise effectively. Is that like cool? Yeah, okay. I think so. I mean, I'm I'm into this kind of stuff. So, so basically then, once they actually visit the sales page, we then have a long-form sales page video and long-form copy

33:22about what the product will do for you. It's a little bit longer than that, but I didn't want to show um the whole thing cuz it's pretty long. Uh so, you know, we pay special attention to our most engaged prospects, right? And of course, if someone adds the product to the cart and doesn't buy, you should be retargeting them with ads. So, you're doing in advertising everything that you're doing in email. But, anyone in here have a sales funnel for their offering that's that long-form and that

33:46dynamic based on segmentation? Probably like a couple, right? So, there's always room for improvement. And you frankly owe it to yourself to do good marketing. Like, if you actually believe that you have the best solution in your marketplace. And if you don't believe that, then you shouldn't do any of this stuff. You know what I mean? You

34:02should just go home. Like, you got you go home and work on the product cuz, you know, product you got to have a good product. But, I'm assuming that if you're here, you've got a good product. So, if you market effectively, you then have more revenue to invest in creating a better product, to invest in having better support, to invest in doing better marketing. So, like the better you market, the better you serve your customers is how it ends up working. So, we also retarget at every step. We retarget people who visit the pre-sell page but not the webinar. We retarget people who visit the webinar but not the

34:30sales page. We retarget people who visit the sales page and not the cart. We retarget people who visit the cart and not the buyers. And all of our ads mimic these emails. And then once someone buys, we're amplifying onboarding and consumption content. We're amplifying cross-sell content for different offerings that we have. So, the sales

34:47process does not end with the purchase. The sales process begins at the purchase. We want to be talking about lifetime customer value, average order value, cross-selling, right? Like you got to have multiple offerings. You got to be upselling to yearly packages and stuff like that. Here's an example of a $37 product. It's literally just a pre-sell engagement

35:06article right to a long-form sales page. Super simple, super basic, low-dollar product, doesn't need a whole lot other than a nice article and a nice sales page. You can pair this sales funnel down and you when you look at the slides, you'll be able to kind of break down a little bit. You can pair this sales funnel down if your um you know, product is lower dollar. Here's an example of a video ad uh that leads It's like a 7-minute video ad that leads to a webinar opt-in page for our Facebook video ads training that then leads to Actually, this one's for Zipify Pages for our our Shopify landing

35:38page builder. So, the key here is that every offer that you have needs to have multiple conversion assets. Pre-sell engagement article, long-form sales page, customer reviews, short-form content, long-form content, video content, reviews in video format, in text format, email automations, pre-sell pages, like your business is a collection of conversion assets that work in concert with one another across multiple communication channels. Therefore, step one is create the conversion assets. Get a webinar, get a long-form sales page, get your cousin to give you a review if you don't got anyone else, you know what

36:17I mean? Get You get Papaya right here. Come up to Dutch Dangle and be like, "Man, I need a review." And he's charming and he'll he'll give it to you. Um So, you got to have multiple conversion assets first. Then you need to leverage those conversion assets through multiple communication mediums to in take a prospect from awareness to retargeting to loyalty. And there will be very few people who will see your ad, consume your stuff, and buy it. Most people are going to have four, five, six touch points before they actually make a purchase. And so, you need to be deliberate about what those touch points

36:53are. And that's the main sort of ethos of what I want you to get out of this presentation. I don't really care what your sales funnel looks like as long as you understand that what we're doing now is we're looking at our advertising as the aggregate cost per acquisition from awareness, retargeting, and loyalty. That gives you the ability to scale because now you can say, "After 3 months, when I generate a click and I have all these different ad sets running, and I've got a loyalty campaign that's cross-selling people who bought once, now you have

37:23the opportunity." Does that make sense? Like it gives you more freedom because you're no longer just trying to make the first engagement work. Another thing that I want you to remember is that repetition creates mastery. The skill set that you want to acquire as a human being is the skill set of mastery, which is simply the willingness to put your attention in one area consistently over time. You pick up the instrument for 30 minutes a day, you're going to get better at it. Direct response advertising, behavioral automated response, email marketing, it's just another skill set. I'm pretty good at it because I've been doing it a

37:54while. Put 30 minutes a day in the getting better at advertising, and you will get better at it. And the other thing is it's not about how much you work, it's about what you produce. The number one thing I get the opportunity to engage with thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs on a yearly basis. We've got over 100,000 folks in our community of e-commerce business owners, and the number one thing I see is that people burn out. They're just like constantly cranking on their business, they never have time for their hobbies, for for passions, for their relationships, and it's like work will fill the amount of time you give it. So,

38:25set hard boundaries and you'll actually end up being more productive and more effective. You don't actually need 14 hours in a day, you know? Seven, eight, that's plenty. And then go out and have a good time, spend some time with your friends. Be, you know, have some kind of hobby. Hang loose with somebody, you know? Um it's really not about how much you work and uh and you actually owe it to yourself to have it be a marathon because you don't want to burn out. If you burn out, then you're a wreck. If you've If you've worked to the point where you're a stress ball and then you're you're not

38:54very nice to anyone, nobody wants to hang out with you, your body's a wreck, it's like, "Well, what are you doing? What is the point of all this in the first place?" So, you only give from your own surplus. So, you've got to create surplus so that you can be available and for the people in your life, right? So, take care of yourself uh is my point. Uh you can get my slides at uh

39:15smartmarketer.com/microconf. Conf. Uh you can email me at ezra@smartmarketer.com. My business, smartmarketer.com. Our tagline, serve the world unselfishly and profit. I got like 6 minutes if you got questions. Thank you very much.

39:33Thanks so much for that, Ezra. I just want to say I've been following your work for several years and you're sense, dude. Look at your hair. Uh you you do really well at You do really well at making people feel like they know you. Like I've seen you on video. I feel like I know you even though it's like the first time seeing you in person. Uh just want to want to see if you could speak to um uh live webinar or versus recorded webinar. Obviously, with a recorded one, you know, things like PlusThis, integrating Wistia with Infusionsoft, being able to tell how far people have

40:09gone through. I mean, I think you should Sure. I think you should really Whoa. You should have both. You You have all I mean, live webinars work really well because people know that you're live, but obviously you can't be live all the time, you know? So, I think that like what we try to do is we try to run one live webinar a month. It's a lot to put on a live event, you know? And then obviously we've got pre-recorded webinars that are in our ongoing evergreen automated sales funnels, but what happens is you end up generating a lot of leads who fall out of the automated sales funnel, who then

40:36show up to a live webinar and actually buy from the live webinar. Some people will watch webinars a couple times before they buy. The other thing I'll say about presenting is that everyone is so focused on their performance. They've got so much attention on themselves that they then are a mess. Like everywhere you go in society, you're running into messaging about how you're flawed, you're too fat, you're not the right color, you don't smell right. Like everyone is selling you about how wrong you are. So, everyone's running around with like playing defense and super worried about how they're performing in relationship to any given subject, and

41:07then are therefore not available to actually play. So, the more you can get out of paying attention to your own performance, and the more you can just be present and have fun, the better your presentations will be. I don't know if that was your question, but So, how do you know if um so, you talked about uh running emails and uh ads at the same

41:28time? Yeah. So, uh specifically, how do you know if your uh ad is cannibalizing a sale you were going to get for free from an email? And sort of more generally, can you talk about attribution models? Yeah, so multi-touchpoint attribution is um it's it's tough, man. It's like there's there's uh tools out there,

41:48segment.com, 10.io, attribution app. There's a bunch of them. And I think that basically, unless you are engaging with a third-party service provider for attribution, then you um are probably going to be at 80% between like Google Analytics and Facebook and Infusionsoft or whatever you're using, Stripe. Like you're going to end up not having true attribution. But my point is that it doesn't matter. Who cares where the sale came from? Some people are going to buy from ads, some people are going to buy from emails. I want to be visible on all channels and I've got a certain ad budget and I'm going to spend it because

42:18if I don't, I'm going to end up with a smaller business than if I did. Um and yeah, you could get real crazy about attribution and we actually do, but it's relevant to the technology stack, so it's not actually an applicable conversation for a room of 250 people cuz it's about your particular technology stack, whatever attribution you know, software that you engage with, but my point would be set all this stuff up and don't worry about it and then once you've got data coming in, start to

42:41worry about attribution. Yeah. What's up, dude? What's your name? Uh Jeremy. How's it going? Uh great talk, by the way. Um a lot of people talking about the specificity in the ads and trying to get specific to uh the person the prospect. So, how are you running like dozen different campaigns to try and target all these different people in

43:05different ways? that's budget specific, right? So, I would recommend starting with look-alikes of who your most common that website visitors or Facebook fans or buyers are and stacking that with a particular interest. People who look like these people and are also interested in Marketo. Um yes, we are obviously always testing different groups of people to target, but basically, I would say you need to spend $50 a day for 3 days on one group of people before you know whether or not they're relevant. I think 150 bucks on one specific group before you can actually tell over the course of a couple days whether or not that group is

43:39going to be um you know, interested. And and and and if you go to a Where's my slide back? Can you put my slide back up here? My uh closing slide. No, okay. Can't do it. Anyways, uh I've got a I don't know, maybe it wasn't cool to offer slides. Um I did not know that. I apologize. Um Anyways, so never mind. Don't go to my

43:57blog. Any other questions? Oh, over here.

44:08Hi Ezra. Great really great talk, thanks. Um you you talked about the the big four and and your examples from Facebook where there's a lot of data and and ability to target an audience. Yeah. Um how much or if any experience or thoughts on using, you know, placing your ads in a more domain specific podcast or other places where they might not have that sort of data, but your audience is better

44:32targeted? Totally. I think podcasting is a really awesome channel of advertising for software as a service providers. I sponsor podcasts for my software. Um it's not sort of uh easy to necessarily track that. It's not easy There's no easy way to go to the podcast store and buy those ads. So, I was just giving examples of of where I thought people could start. But, one of the things that I will say is that Google is actually has more uh capacity and more ad space than Facebook when you look at Google AdWords, Google Display Network, YouTube, Google Shopping. And what I would do is I would start with

45:05running all your awareness ads on Facebook, right? So, all your new awareness, where you're getting new people into the funnel, run that on Facebook and Instagram. Those are like the same platform. Then, when you're retargeting people in that second and third touch point, do that across channels. Retarget them on YouTube, retarget them on Google Display Network, retarget them on Google AdWords. So, leverage these other channels beyond the first touch point after you've generated

45:28that awareness if that makes sense. Yeah, it's really effective uh cross-channel remarketing. All right, dude right here. What's up, dude? Dude, man. Hey man, dude here. Uh on the promoted article, you said that you were going to go into some of the uh key points of it. Uh uh so, how does when you get people there, what's

45:46the call to action from it? Um so, basically like I think that article should be between 500 and 1,000 words. It should be very I I actually had a slide. I don't know where it went, but I thought there was a slide in there that broke down how we write those articles. But, basically the in the article, you're talking about this problem that a user is facing that your solution, you know, happens to provide. And I like to do case studies cuz then I can be like, "And these people had this experience and they use this thing." And and and then this other thing happened. Oh, and they use this

46:14tool and I keep just referencing back to the thing that provided this result that the case study is about that you can then click through to then end up on the sales page or end up on a webinar about. So, it's always sort of framed that the good thing that happened that we're talking about in this article, the solution to the problem that this person was facing that this article was talking about was caused by X. And we're referencing it after we've put some content out there. I think I'm I'm out

46:38of time, guys. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ashray.