Transcription
Hey my friend, Adam here. Have you ever noticed that some businesses seem to grow effortlessly while others struggle no matter how hard they try? The truth is most businesses fail not because they lack good ideas, but because they use outdated, random marketing tactics that don't actually move the needle. Kind of like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks. But in business, hope isn't a strategy.
For over 10 years, I've worked with businesses of all sizes, from solopreneurs to billion-dollar brands like Google, Meta, and Amazon, helping them implement marketing strategies that consistently drive more customers, more sales, and profit. So, today I'm handing you my proven playbook. In this video, I'm going to walk you through 10 powerful marketing strategies that not only work, but are battle-tested, scalable, and insanely profitable. Whether you're looking to get more leads, or launch a new offer, or simply stop wasting money on things that don't work, this is going to be your go-to framework. And trust me, once you learn this, marketing will never again feel like a guessing game. So, let's dive in.
Most people focus on tactics first, thinking ads or social media or which platform they're going to post on, and they completely ignore probably the single most important element to all of your marketing success, which is the offer. In fact, just to show you how important the offer is, and of course, how that offer aligns with your target market, which we're going to talk about in just a second, there's even a rule for this that's been known for decades, if not centuries, known as the 40/40/20 rule. Here's how it works.
40% of the success of your marketing, of your promotion, of all that comes down to the market that you choose. Now, we're going to go into this in more detail in just a minute, but essentially, this just makes sure that we're selling the right things to the right people, that we've got alignment between whatever it is that you're selling and obviously the people that you're trying to sell it to. Doesn't make sense to be trying to sell steak to vegans, for example.
The second 40% comes down to your offer. This is essentially what it is that you're selling and all the details that go into it. What's the price? What's the packaging? What's the promise? What does it deliver? What are the benefits? Again, the key to a good offer is making sure that it is relevant and irresistible to that target market. We don't need to make an offer that's irresistible to everyone. Not possible, not even plausible, not something we'd even want to consider. But how relevant, how irresistible is our offer to that market?
And then the final 20% comes down to what we call copy. So this is copywriting. This is the words. This is the messaging. This is the actual images, the video, the presentation of it. How pretty does it look? How pretty does it sound? 20%. Right? And yet this is where most people start. They think about how am I going to say this? How am I going to sell it? What kind of video am I going to make? What kind of images am I going to choose? What platform am I going to put on? All of these things. But that's just the final piece of the puzzle.
The fact is, if you get your market right, you figure out exactly who you want to sell it to, you get your offer right, making sure that it truly is irresistible, it alleviates pains, it provides quick wins, it's something they actually want, well then how you dress it all up, I don't want to say is irrelevant, 'cause 20% is still a pretty decent number, but it's just such an inconsequential number compared to the other 80%. So, this is where we really have to focus.
Now, before we talk about the target market or the ICA, the ideal client avatar, there's something we have to talk about first, which is setting clear, measurable goals, making sure that we're measuring the right things. After all, we can't just take our marketing and do a bunch of random stuff and hope that it pans out and makes a fortune when we don't know what we're actually tracking. So, we'll talk about metrics now.
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Now, there's an old expression that I'm probably going to butcher here, but if you don't know where you're going, then any road will take you there. But the fact is, if we don't have a clear destination, a clear goal in mind of where we're trying to go, then it doesn't really matter what marketing we're going to be doing. And more often than not, the biggest mistake that I see when it comes to setting goals and assigning metrics to them is businesses, entrepreneurs, marketers setting the wrong goals, measuring the wrong kind of metrics.
Easiest example to explain here are something that I call vanity metrics. So these are things like likes and comments and shares. Things that are perceived as good-looking. They make you feel good because your post got some likes and got some views and got some shares and got some comments. But if that doesn't directly relate to revenue, to profit, to growth for the business, you're just wasting your time.
This is why the holy grail of pretty much all marketing metrics is always going to be ROI. This is return on investment. How much did we spend? How much did we make back? Now, if you're running ads, sort of the complimentary cousin to that one is called ROAS, which stands for return on ad spend. Essentially, how much are we making back after the amount of money that we spend? These are always going to be the primary metrics that you want to focus on on any marketing campaign.
Of course, these are those really top-level, high-level metrics. So, we're going to probably want to break it down just a little bit more to make it more tactical, more actionable as we go through these. And this is where things like LTV come into play. This is lifetime value of a customer to your business. So, take a look at just how much are they worth to your business over their entire lifetime. Normally, this is measured in profit. Some people measure it in revenue. I prefer profit.
The other thing that you'll want to take a look at is CAC, which stands for customer acquisition cost, or the cost to acquire a customer. How much do we need to spend? For example, if we're spending, say, for easy math, $100 on Facebook ads and it gets us two new customers or two new clients, our CAC is $50 per customer. So, we take $100, we divide it by two, now we've got $50 per CAC for our Facebook ads. Same thing if we spend $100 on Instagram ads and it gets us one client. Well, now we know that our CAC there is $100.
Where this is important is as long as our lifetime value is higher than $100 for Instagram or $50 for Facebook ads, well, we're going to have a positive ROAS or a positive ROI on our marketing, which means that we can now allocate more resources to those platforms knowing that every time we put in a dollar, we're getting at least a dollar, or ideally more, back out.
Now, other perhaps easier metrics to track that are in alignment with this, certainly if you're just getting started and you're not really sure about what these numbers are yet, is you could track leads per month. You could track conversion rates if you're running either ads or even organic traffic. You could track even website visitors. But the closer you are to a metric that is in alignment with monetary value, revenue, money, things like that, the more valuable it's going to be. So, we pretty much always want to focus there. And then we can reverse engineer if we need to.
All right. So this next strategy is more of a principle, more of a fundamental. And it is perhaps one of the most important things that I could ever hope to tell you, which is customers don't buy when they understand. They buy when they feel understood. And the only way to make them feel understood is to actually understand them. Do a little bit of market research. Have some conversations with your customers. Really get to know what I call their miracles and their miseries.
So, let's start with miseries, or let's start with miracles over here. Miracles are all of the good things that they want in their life. These are their hopes, their dreams, their wants, their aspirations, everything that they're trying to get to. Their miseries, on the other hand, all the bad stuff, these are all of their fears, their nightmares, their pains, their problems, their frustrations, all the things that they're trying to get away from.
Marketing is about connecting this. It's about creating a bridge. Let's use purple. It's about creating a bridge that helps customers walk away from miseries towards miracles. This is the goal of your marketing message. Right in the middle here. Everything we do is designed. There we go. Little sketchy, but it works. Everything we do is designed to help show our target market, our ideal clients, our ideal customers, that we understand where they're coming from. We get their pains and problems and we have a solution. We have an offer. We have a product. We have a service. We have something that can help. And then our job is to simply help them connect the dots and move away from one side to the other.
So, we need to understand where they are right now and where they want to go so that we can frame our message and our offer and our positioning and all of our marketing in a way that clearly communicates that. But simply knowing what your customers' miracles and miseries are isn't enough if we don't manage to get in front of them, which is what this next part is all about.
Here's the deal. Your audience, your ideal customers, clients, patients, members, whoever it is that's going to buy from your business, they're already online in different areas. It's your job to go out there and to find them and then to put your stuff in front of them. And this is where I see again so many business owners go so wrong is they'll hear about TikTok taking off, or Instagram Reels getting new kind of reach, or YouTube as a dominant platform, or Google search, or whatever it is, and they'll just go massively in that direction without any thought about, "Well, maybe my customers aren't there. Maybe they're actually on Snapchat, or Pinterest, or Twitter, or LinkedIn, or whatever it is."
The fact is, there's a lot of people everywhere, but there's going to be one or two, or maybe three at most, platforms where the vast majority of your ideal clients are present and active. So your job is to identify where that is and then go all in there and pretty much ignore everything else because it doesn't make sense to go fishing in a swimming pool when all the fish are over there in the lake or in the ocean or anything like that. Unless you're fishing for people, but that's just weird.
Now, the big players right now are still the same ones that have been here for quite some time. I'm talking about Facebook, I'm talking about Instagram, I'm talking about YouTube, possibly LinkedIn if you're more into B2B, but you really can't go wrong with Facebook, with Instagram, and with YouTube. TikTok is still getting some decent traction and getting decent impressions and views, but as a straight-up sales-generating tool, still not my first choice. We're going to talk about that more in just a minute when I'm going to break down some of the short-form strategies that we're seeing working well right now. But for now, let's write them up. Let's go. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Your audience is on one or two or all three of these platforms pretty much guaranteed. Doesn't matter who you're trying to go after.
If you're going after a younger demographic, we can focus on say Instagram. Slightly older demographic, let's use the age of 35 to 40 as our kind of dividing range. So, if we're like under 35, we'll say minus 35, we can go Instagram. If we're 35 plus, we'll go Facebook. YouTube really does span everything. So, we're talking 18 to 65 plus, and you can kind of do all things there. Obviously, the barrier to entry with YouTube is the fact that it does require video. However, as we'll talk about in just a minute as well, video is probably worth paying some decent attention to. Again, I don't want to spoil the rest of this, but we'll get to that in a second.
So, your job is to figure out where they are, and then we can focus on creating content specifically for them on these platforms that speak directly to their pains, problems, fears, frustrations, helping them bridge the gap over to their miracles, where they want to get to.
All right, let's talk about short-form video content. It's a topic that has been brought up countless times over the past couple years, especially as sort of TikTok came onto the scene. Their algorithm was dialed in better than pretty much every other platform. People saw massive amounts of growth. There was a lot of questions over sketchy business practices and data sharing, things like that. Things that conversations that we're going to set aside for another day. Right now, we're focused strictly on the ROI-generating capability of these platforms.
One thing cannot be argued and that is that short-form video content still gets more reach, more engagement, more likes, comments, shares, vanity metrics than pretty much any other platform out there. It is incredibly valuable. It is an important part of a strategy, but there's a caveat and that is certainly in my own experience with the clients that I've worked with, with my students and friends and colleagues, and that we've not seen it as a viable replacement to long-form content.
So, let's break that down real quick. On the left, we've got short-form. So, these are things like TikTok. These are things like Instagram Reels. These are things like YouTube Shorts. We'll just leave it there for now. Long-form, on the other hand, are I don't want to call them YouTube longs. We'll just call them YouTube videos. So, YouTube videos, the main things that you think of when we're thinking of horizontal longer videos, videos that are longer than a few minutes. We've got podcasts, and those are kind of the main players right now when it comes to this. YouTube videos or podcasts.
Now, YouTube has some significant advantages over podcasts. The main one being discoverability. So, a podcast is an absolutely incredible way to build just a whole another level of trust with your audience. The problem is they don't have discoverability baked into podcasts really well at all. Which means if you want to grow a podcast, you kind of need another platform to drive traffic to that podcast. Whereas YouTube has the search and the discoverability and the suggested videos on the homepage. All of that set in, which is why we're seeing so many people that are doing podcasting also doing video podcasts because now they can actually get discovered. They can build an audience there.
Now, the thing is, I want you to think of short-form content like gasoline. There we go. That's my best interpretation of a gas can. Short-form content is gasoline. It burns fast. It burns hot. Then it kind of disappears. The engagement that you get may be really, really good and it may look really good, but does this translate into sales? Not so sure. We're not quite seeing it as much.
Long-form content on the other hand, more like a piece of wood. There we go. This will be our wood campfire stuff. Oo, that's sketchy sketchy wood. We're going to go with it, too. Long-form like wood. So, we can use gasoline to pour on the long-form content in order to spark that fire to get it going and to get it burning hot. But we're going to need something with substance, something with material in order to keep that audience engaged and invested and in order to build that relationship, establish that authority, show off your expertise, actually help somebody with it.
And this is where something called Google's 7/11/4 rule comes into play. So, let's map that out on a new piece of paper. This one's getting crowded. Google, or old buddies at the search engine giant there, they did a little bit of research. They've got access to a good few billion people and the research and the touch points behind them. And what they found is that in order for someone to make a purchase, a few different things need to happen.
The first of which is that person typically needs around 7 hours of content consumption, which I appreciate is an absolute ton of content, especially if you're just starting from scratch. But they found that for people to make a buying decision, this is the amount of stuff that they're going to need. 7 hours of content. Now, the beauty is, if we're sticking with something like long-form content, say you have a podcast and it's an hour-long episode, seven episodes. On the other hand, if we're sticking with strictly short-form content, oh, it's going to take some time. We're talking 700, 7,000 different pieces of content. Certainly something we want to get to eventually, but maybe not something we want to start with there.
Next, we need this 11 different touch points. What this means is that simply sitting down and binging for 7 hours may not be enough. They need to be hit a couple different times. So maybe these touch points take place all in a single day. Totally can happen. Someone wakes up in the morning and they start hitting all these different things and watching this video and going to that podcast and going over there and doing all these things. But we're going to need to hit them in multiple different spots. There's a ton of psychology behind this. Not the least of which is called the mere exposure effect, which is a fancy psychological term that says the more we see something, the more we like it.
And then of course, they want this four locations. Now, this is the only point that I've got a little bit of objection to simply because of qualitative experience from what we've seen firsthand. We can actually normally achieve this in one, maybe two different locations. But what Google is saying is they've seen, they want people to engage with content, or people need to engage with content at four different places. So maybe they need to read a blog, watch a video, listen to a podcast, see a couple social media posts, maybe get an email from you, whatever it is, they want it in a few different spots. We found that provided that we've got a good enough piece of long-form content, we can get this down to like one or two pieces of, one or two touch points at max.
Best example, highest converting channels that we've seen right now, if you're trying to keep this limited as possible and most effective as possible, is we will run YouTube videos that then go to email, and that's it. It's like a two-step funnel. Run a long-form video on YouTube, ideally multiple. We still want to hit seven hours if we can, 11 different touch points over time, but haven't seen the need necessarily for four different locations because a YouTube video allows you to just provide so much value and help them so much in such a condensed short amount of time. And then of course, we'll take them over to an email list, which is just one more touch point typically where the selling will take place. So you can use YouTube as like that top-of-funnel strategy in order to get traffic, get attention, start getting clicks. Then we can transition them over to an email list, which further allows you to nurture them and to close them and to start making offers to help them further and to also grow your business.
Okay, one more point about short-form video, and we'll move on to the next one, and that is probably the single biggest addition that we've made to our strategy internally for our agency and our clients, and that has been this comment-to-lead automation that we've set up with our short-form video. So, here's how this works. And it took our lead gen from say 500 to 1,000 leads a day up to 5,000, 6,000 leads a day strictly from organic social media content. No ads, not spending a dime, generating 5,000 to 6,000 new leads a day, which, even for me, was like, "We haven't seen an increase like that in forever." Like it was massive. And I'm attributing most of it to this automation that we've set up, which is very simple to do. I'll show you exactly how to get it done.
Basically, what ends up happening is we will post on social media. Typically, this is going to be done through Instagram and Facebook, which have the greatest ability to not only tie in the software that allows us to go from comment to lead, but also just the most massive reach. And again, then we can hit our audience depending if we're going for under 35 or age 35 and older. So, we'll make a post. That post will have a CTA, a call to action, and it will say, "Comment some word below." So, let's just say, "Comment 'start' below." Then what happens when somebody down in the comments below that post comments 'start', it triggers an automation which automatically responds to that comment saying, "Hey, awesome. Thanks so much." Or, "I just sent you a DM." We can use AI to automatically populate these responses, or we can just pre-fill them with a whole bunch of different random responses like, "Thanks so much. Check your DMs. This is great." Whatever it is.
So, what ends up happening is we comment. So the AI comments, I should say. We don't do anything. AI comments, and AI sends a DM. And in the DM, the direct message, we're able to start a conversation, we're able to send an opt-in form, we're able to encourage a sale, we're able to nurture, we're able to connect it with a sales team or a setter or a calendar, or pretty much anything. And this, like I said, I know the word "game-changing" gets thrown around far too often, especially in the world of online and marketing and stuff, but this has really been a game-changer. You can see it in action in most of my Instagram posts and Reels that "Comment 'start' below. We'll send you a free guide or this thing or that thing." Someone will make the comment. The AI will respond. We'll send them the DM. This all takes place, and the software takes over. It's all done through HighLevel. HighLevel is a paid software, but I've got a link down in the descriptions below that'll get you access to an extended 30-day free trial for it. Also, I believe in that, actually, I'll make sure it happens, but we've got a copy of this exact comment-to-lead automation as well. So, you just have to copy and paste it, and it'll be instantly installed in your account. And like I said, took our leads up to 5 to 6,000 a day consistently just by using this. So, like I said, "game-changer" is a bit of an overly hyped word, but it's been pretty powerful. So, worth checking out.
Okay, next we got to talk about the death of SEO and the death of Google. Now, again, speaking of things that get tossed around far too often, the death of this, the death of that, the death of video, the death, these things are often blown out of proportion and used for simple marketing headlines in order to get people to click. This is one of those times though where it's not the death of SEO, it's the transition of SEO and how search engine optimization is done and performed.
So, let me break this down. Essentially, forever, we've had Google, and Google was the main search engine that everybody knew and everybody loved and everybody used. This was the way up until relatively recently when other platforms have started to take away some of that search traffic. Not intentionally by going out there and saying, "We're going to steal from Google," but just by the nature of consumer behavior, user behavior, how people interact with different platforms.
For example, one of the top other search engines is actually Amazon. Amazon gets an absolute ton of search traffic. Not only does it get search traffic, it gets search traffic from people with buying intent. People rarely go onto Amazon to just browse for things or learn things. They're there to buy something. So, this is incredibly powerful. Not only that, Facebook, Instagram, let's put IG here. Those guys, they're starting to get a ton of search traffic. People looking for different keywords, different terms, different topics. And back in the day, back in the day, hashtags were more relevant. We kind of needed them in order to navigate different terms. Now that's not so relevant. The algorithms are so good at crawling through the content. They can figure out what something is about, what someone is searching for. They know more about you than you know about yourself, which is creepy, but that's another topic for another day. But all of these other platforms are starting to take away search share.
There's another one though that's even more powerful: ChatGPT. If you've not done this yet, I encourage you to give it a try. It's a little bit scary. I started doing this almost as a bit of a test, and now it's quickly become a habit and like the core part of a lot of my search strategies depending on what I'm looking for. Back in the day, as in a few months ago, we would go to Google and like, let's say you're looking up for something like, "What is the fastest way to learn how to play a C chord on the guitar?" and you'd go to Google and you type in "learn C chord for guitar for beginners," and it would give you a whole list of different ideas. It would give you ads for guitar courses. It would give you Google Maps listings with all the local guitar teachers and music stores. Then it would give you all of the organic listings below, and there'd be say, 10 on the first page. There'd be 10 on the second page, and 10 on the third and the fourth, and it would go on forever. And you could click through different tabs, and if you're anything like me, you might have 47 different tabs open trying to figure out where to go and what to figure out and what to learn, and it's overwhelming and it's exhausting.
Now, what you can do is you can go to ChatGPT and you can say, "What's the best way to learn a C chord as a beginner?" and it'll just tell you. It'll go scrape all the data. It has access to everything. It'll put together what it thinks is the best. If you don't quite like it, you can talk back and be like, "Yeah, I'm actually looking for something a little more complicated," or "What about C7th?" or "What about C minor?" Whatever it is, and it'll give you more instructions and more ideas. You can ask it for sources and for references, and it just gives you the answer. Now, the quality of that so far has been really good. It's only getting better, and it's sort of making things a whole lot easier for people to find information.
The takeaway point is this: SEO, search engine optimization, is not dead, but Google's market share has decreased massively, whereas like Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube (which is owned by Google, but we'll talk about that in a second), specifically ChatGPT is going up massively. So there is a huge opportunity for you to start making sure that you're using the right keywords, the right terms, the right topics, the right ideas for your market and for your industry in order to make sure that you're ranking for these terms.
Again, what does this come down to? Comes down to knowing your target market, knowing your ideal customer, knowing their pains and problems and fears and frustrations, knowing what words they use, knowing the things that keep them up at night, because then you're able to bake that into your content. So when they have a problem and they're going out there looking for a solution, it's you and your content and your business that shows up first.
Now, I know we talked about YouTube before. I'm going to talk about it a little bit more in just a minute as well, but it is important to understand that YouTube, its algorithm works in a couple of different very cool ways. The first of which is search. So you can actually go out there and search for something and appear for it. The second of which is discovery, meaning it's got a pretty sophisticated algorithm to start showing you things that it thinks you would be interested in.
The takeaway point when it comes to YouTube is that yes, despite the barrier to entry, it is still a very viable, incredibly valuable platform to be creating content on for any business owner. In fact, there are very few exceptions that I can think of where I wouldn't want to have a YouTube strategy. And I can think of basically no exceptions where I've ever had a client and we've adopted a very heavy YouTube strategy where it has not provided just the highest ROI of anything else that they've done. That and email. I think if I had to pick the two, it would be like YouTube and email are still two of the highest return on investment generating marketing tools that we have available. They have been for years. I don't see that going away anytime soon. But let's move on.
Okay, next let's talk about the elephant in the room, which is how much time is this going to take? How much money is this going to take? What am I going to have to do? This sounds like an absolute ton of work. And the short answer to that is, yeah, it's a bit of work. But the longer answer, or the more valuable answer, is that what we're looking for are things that offer disproportionate returns. So, we want to find something that allows us to put in like a 2x effort, but get a 10x return. And most businesses right now are simply not doing enough to come close to that.
So I want to walk you through something called minimum effective dose and diminishing returns. Imagine for a second we've got a bell curve here. What ends up happening is there's going to be a certain minimum level of content and investment and marketing and budget that you're going to have to put in in order to get this ball moving. Imagine a giant boulder, a giant stone, and you've got to start to push it. Pushing a car. At first, it's stagnant. It ain't moving. So, you're going to have to apply just an incredible amount of force to it. But once it starts rolling, it becomes easier. Well, to get it to move is the minimum effective dose.
To put this into specific tactics wise, this would be like one YouTube video every two weeks. It would be like an Instagram Reel once every two to three days. Anything less than that and you're simply going to fail to get traction because we're not going to show up enough in the algorithms.
Actually, better example, email marketing. Something I see a problem with all the time. One of the biggest arguments I get when I'm talking with anyone about marketing is that my desire is for them to increase their emailing frequency. A lot of businesses are emailing once a week or once every two weeks. That is way below the minimum effective dose to maintain any kind of sale. Let's use the easy math again. Let's say you have a 25% open rate. Well, if you email once a week and you have a 25% open rate, that means that it could be an entire month before someone sees an email from you. Do you know what happens when you get an email from a business or a person or anything that you haven't heard from in a month? You forget why you signed up. You forget who they are. You unsubscribe. You mark as spam. You move on. You certainly don't buy.
So, we need to be emailing two to three times a week minimum. I used to say daily. There's certain businesses where we're still pushing that where it's still incredibly effective. There's some industries where we're emailing twice a day. Still incredibly positive ROI, but you need a very hungry, rabid market for that to happen. So, let's settle on two to three times a week. That's the minimum effective dose. Anything less than that, and you're kind of just wasting your money.
On the other side of that, you have this thing over here, which is diminishing returns. Diminishing returns. Now, this is where you're emailing five times a day. This is where you're posting 60 Instagram Reels, three YouTube videos a day on the same channel. We can spread this out, by the way, over multiple different channels and platforms and satellite accounts and all kinds of other fancy stuff. But if you're sticking with one platform and you're creating this massive volume of content, it's simply too much for your audience to consume all at once. Again, there's ways around this. We can expand the audience. We can create satellite platforms. But in the context of one, say you have one main YouTube channel or one main Instagram, we're going to have diminishing returns. We're simply not going to get the same bang for the buck by doing all of that.
Now, the percentage of businesses that hit this point of diminishing returns, it is less than 1%. Basically, I'm going to hazard a guess and say you're not there yet. Not many people are. It takes a lot of time and money and energy and a massive budget to hit this area. I'd say like 80%. Probably more. We're going to say 80% are in this minimum effective dose and below area, meaning we just need more content.
So what happens in the middle? Well, we got the sweet spot. This is where things are good. I see this rarely, but I do see it when I see someone in the sweet spot. So let's say this is you, in which case, congratulations. You're creating an ideal amount of content. Your emails are getting open and clicked. Your social media posts are getting clicked on and viewed. People are buying. Everything is good. What do you do when you're in the sweet spot? You do more. That's it. Quite frankly, we don't change the strategy. We don't change the offer. We don't change our market. We don't change our messaging. We simply increase the volume until we start to edge closer to that diminishing returns. And how do you know when you're there? Well, you'll see. You'll be putting in more effort, and the sales and all of that won't directly equate to it. In which case, we can either scale back or we can start talking about some of the more advanced strategies. But for now, keep this in mind. Let's increase it a little bit. Can almost guarantee sales will go up with it.
All right. So, that moves us on to something that I've just recently come to the conclusion of, which is content repurposing, as we used to know it. I'd like to re-label it now as content re-recording. I appreciate that's not a very sexy, good name, but it's all I got for now. So, we're going to go with it.
Now, in back in the day again, what we used to do is we would record one piece of long-form content, say a YouTube video, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour perhaps, and then we would go looking through that video for different clips that we could extract from it. 15 seconds here, 30 seconds there, a minute there. We could then take that content, we could post it on different social media as short-form video content, and everything was great. And hey, look, no extra work on your part at all. You just send it off to a social media manager or a video editor. They do all that for you. That was okay. But I found something better. Something, and this is again the 2x versus 10x concept, something that is going to take you twice as long. Sorry, but it's going to give you 10 times the results. So, not sorry, 'cause you're going to make a whole lot more money with just a little bit more effort.
So, I'm calling this content re-recording. So, for example, what I want you to do now, or what we used to do, is we used to have our script like this. And then what we would do is we would just cut and splice these out directly. So, there's a cut, there's a cut, there's a cut, there's a cut. This is simply content repurposing. What I want you to do now, take that original piece of content, still identify those top-performing clips, sections. If you're just riffing off the top of your head, you can have this transcribed thanks to AI and all kinds of different online pieces of software. Get the text parts, maybe polish them a little bit, make them a little more clear, make them specific for short-form media, and then re-record them from scratch, ideally in a vertical format so that they are ideally suited for TikTok, for Instagram Reels, for YouTube Shorts, for things like that.
When you do it this way, the performance of that content goes up tenfold. For example, we were splicing and dicing this method for years. At a point where I was convinced that we were able to make short-form content work for all of our clients and students and people like that, but we could just never do it ourselves. It just wasn't working. And it was because I was taking this top approach of just trying to find these little nuggets. When we switched down to this one, we went from a couple hundred views to over a million views, over 2 million views, 3 million views for some pieces of content, like averaging a million views a week, then a million views a day. Just obscene numbers, simply by taking the content that we already had, spending a little bit more time to then either record with a phone or the camera and make sure that it was properly vertically aligned so that we had better spacing and pacing and all of that for short-form, which is a different beast. And the results went through the roof. So, highly encouraged, highly suggested.
Bonus points if you can then pair this with the comment-to-lead automation, the one that we're using GoHighLevel for. So then what happens is someone will comment 'start', they'll get a reply, they'll get a DM. All of this is done. Again, I'll make sure to put the link down in the descriptions below this video that get you the free trial and the whole exact copy of this exact framework we use. But has been just incredibly powerful, which again enabled us to get to those 5 to 6,000 leads per day.
All right, let's put a little bit of gas on the fire though on that topic and talk about algorithm hacking. How do we take the social media algorithms, really understand them so that the content that you create, the marketing that you create goes even further, gets even better results? So, let's break down what the algorithms are looking for. And this is pretty much universal across Instagram, across Facebook, across YouTube, across TikTok. So once you understand how this works, you can apply this to pretty much anything that you create, and it's unlikely to change because it's based on keeping people on the platforms for as long as possible.
So here are the three elements. The first of which is recency. We have interest. We have engagement. With recency, it's important to understand that newer content does get prioritized. There are platforms like YouTube, for example, where a video will continue to rank for weeks, for months, for even years down the road. But there's no argument that newer content of similar or higher quality is going to be preferred. So, new content is good. How do we do that? We post frequently. Therefore, giving the algorithm new content in order to continue showing it to new people that has a higher likelihood of ranking higher and therefore being shown to more people.
Next, interest. There's a lot of talk about not having a niche or being uniquely you or talking about all kinds of different things. So, for example, I'm sure you're a multifaceted person with a ton of different interests, as am I. A lot of different things going on. Got four kids, got a dog, play guitar, into swimming and running and biking and hiking and photography and art stuff, all kinds of random weird things. But the channel has to stay focused on business and marketing because if I started talking about all of those random things, well, someone might tune in, but the second that they see something on a topic that they're not interested in, they're going to tune out. And that is a powerful negative indicator to the algorithms that this content, this channel, this creator is not valuable or relevant to that person. And if that starts happening enough, it gets confused and it doesn't know who to show your content to.
This does not mean that you cannot bake in little elements of your personality. It does not mean that you should be inauthentic and deny everything that's who you are, but you need to stay niched. You need to stay focused on a topic. Ideally, this is the one key thing that your business is about, that you serve, that you're able to offer someone a solution to, and you keep the vast majority, like 80-90%, of the content around that topic, because then the algorithms are able to position you in a certain bucket, and they're like, "Oh, people that like digital photography, they go for this person. People that like making money with digital photography, they go for this person or that. People that like learning just random tips on how to take pictures with their iPhone, they go over here." So the more that you're able to narrow that down, the better that your content is going to do and the faster that you're going to have success. Then once you have that, then you can start experimenting with larger buckets and playing outside the lines.
Okay. Then we've got engagement. This is important. We need interactions with your content because these are powerful indicators to the algorithms. So I'm talking about DMs, shares, likes, comments. Now, it's funny. At the very beginning of this video, I started talking about vanity metrics and how these things don't matter from a revenue perspective, and I stand by that. They don't. If you're trying to make money by getting likes and comments and shares, you're going to be in for a world of hurt. However, if you're trying to make sure that your content gets seen by as many people as possible, which can then lead to the revenue, especially when we're starting to incorporate things like comment-to-lead and all the automations we just talked about a minute ago, then we're on to something.
We need to have engagement because this shows the algorithms that people like what they're seeing. So, your goal is to encourage comments and shares and likes and saves and all of those things. Of course, this is why I love having that comment-to-lead automation as well. "Comment 'start' below," "Comment 'let's go' below," "Comment 'free' below," whatever it is, because this is basically two birds, one stone. Terrible analogy. I like birds. But it allows us to not only get engagement on our post, but we can also generate a lead from that.
So, these are the factors that we got to focus on. We need content. We need it new. We need it frequently. Ideally, remember back to our graph of minimum effective dose. We need to make sure that we stay focused on a niche and on a specific topic. One of the biggest culprits of stalled, stagnant marketing, certainly social media growth, is if I'll look at someone's profile and it's just all over the map and I don't know what they do, I don't know who they do it for, it's unclear, and there's just a million different things going on. We got to get selective. And then of course, engagement. I think we've beaten that one up enough. So, let's move on to the next point.
All right, video. It's funny that I still have to talk about this one and still have to drill it home, especially this many years down. Video has been taking over the internet for the last 7-8 years. It's had this massive dominant curve where basically all of the different social media platforms have prioritized video. Video gets the most engagement. It's the most engaged form of content on the internet, and it provides the greatest potential to build a connection with someone, to establish trust and authority and expertise, to make a sale, to spread your message, to do all of the things that you should want to be doing as a business, as a marketer, as an entrepreneur. So, video, we have to use it.
Now, there's a lot of talk about, "Well, can I be faceless? Can I do it this way? Can I just use audio?" The answer to that is yes, but they're going to be sacrifices that you're going to
be making. So first of all video, let's spell this out just a little bit so that you can make whatever decision you feel is best for your business, but you have to understand the risks and the rewards that are going to come along with that.
Now when it comes to different kinds of content, we typically have text, we have audio, and we have video. Text, obviously, blog, social media posts, things like that. Audio, primarily a podcast. Video, essentially we're breaking it into two different buckets of short form and long form video. We talked about that before. Time and time again, video has the highest conversion rates for it. That does not mean that there's not room for other pieces of this content further down the funnel. But if we're looking at our marketing funnel, there we go. I like video to be a full-funnel strategy. I like text kind of mid to bottom funnel, and I like audio to be mid and bottom funnel.
Uh, let's get weird here for a second. Typically, just a bit of a side note, top of funnel is called tofu. Middle is mofu, bottom is bofu, bottom funnel, middle funnel, top of funnel. Marketing's weird. Anyway, we can't get away from it.
Uh, can we do faceless video? Yes. But the problem with faceless video is people don't like doing business with businesses. They like doing business with people. We trust people. We don't trust faceless large corporations. Not to mention, there's this proliferation of AI generated video, fake video, video done by bots, video done with all kinds of different fancy software. Looks very cool, but it still does not convert as high as video done by people. Again, we like people. Uh, we're distrustful of AI and of bots and of things like that. We're also, we really value expertise and authenticity. So, if you're able to show up on camera in any way, shape, or form, you're going to do well. And it's that first small step that leads to the next one that leads to the progress.
So here's my advice for getting started with video. First of all, use your phone. Okay, ideally the rear-facing camera because it's typically a higher resolution. Uh, you're going to want to shoot at 4K, which just gives you higher resolution. You'll probably want to use a tripod so you can lock it off. Audio is the most important element of video. People will watch a low-quality video, but they will not settle for hard to hear audio or things that are just crackly or echoey or things like that. So, you can get a microphone for like 20 bucks, 10 bucks, 30 bucks, like 100 bucks if you really splurge for a for a good one. Like, these things do not cost a lot of money.
The second thing is lighting. If you instantly want to improve your video quality, lighting, it is going to be your best plan. You can stand near a window. You can record outside, or you can get a very simple light to help to illuminate yourself so that you, um, you're well lit. That's it. That's the big one.
Final thing on video. If there's anything that I'm going to suggest, it's going to be to script/outline. One of the fastest ways to make video the most painful and awful thing you ever do in your business is to sit down in front of a camera with a basic idea of what you're going to do, hit record, and then just start riffing. It's very hard. It's not any fun. You're going to go off on all kinds of random tangents. Even for this video, and I've, I've been doing this for many, many years now, and over thousands and thousands of videos, even now, I have an outline of the points that I want to cover and talk about to make sure that I don't go too far down some rabbit trail. You need to make sure that you identify what you're going to talk about. You need to make sure that you, if you're going to practice anything, it's going to be the introduction in order to make sure that you clearly hook someone. And then, of course, make sure that you have a call to action at the end. If we're talking about short-form video, it's going to be to comment below in order to get XYZ free resources. This is time well spent, and it'll make sure that your video creation just becomes infinitely more effective and more fun and valuable.
Now, if you want to go even deeper, I've linked up a video right here that's going to introduce you to some of my most proven and profitable marketing strategies that are guaranteed to grow pretty much any business. So, feel free to tap or click that now.