Advertising Secrets You Wish You Knew Sooner: Hacks to Increase Conversions

[00:00:00] Ralph: Hello, and welcome to the perpetual traffic podcast. This is your host, Ralph burns. And this is the show where we share cutting edge strategies and acquiring leads and sales to acquire more customers. So you as a business can achieve your vision. And if you don't listen to what this guy has to say every year at the best conference on the planet for digital marketing, and I go to a lot of these conferences.

[00:00:26] Ralph: This is still the best, and it's probably because, and I know, yeah, me and Qasim tend to suck up to this guy a lot, but it's because we love him because we think he's a genius and he's also one of the guys that got us both into digital marketing, certainly big reason why we have the professional traffic podcast.

[00:00:44] Ralph: So, Ryan Dice's speech at TNC is a can't miss event. When I go and speak at this event, it is the one thing I make sure I never ever miss because I always pick up something, even though I know Ryan, we're friends, comes on the show. We give each other a hard time. You see, he buys strange things with the advertising dollars that he's made.

[00:01:09] Ralph: He says, I buy strange things with the advertising dollars we make on perpetual traffic. It's good. But the point is, is like when he gets up on stage and talks about the future of digital marketing. You as a marketer have to listen. And so today we're going to get into where he thinks all of this is going.

[00:01:27] Ralph: And this isn't yet another podcast on AI. Yeah. You can listen to a lot of podcasts out there that talk about AI. We talk about AI quite a bit. AI is a part of it for sure. It definitely is part of the future of digital marketing, but, no one knows this stuff better than he does. And no one has better perspective than he does, I think on the planet.

[00:01:46] Ralph: And we're going to get into the future of digital marketing in 2023 and 2024 and beyond, Right after this quick break,

[00:01:55] Ralph:

[00:02:06] Ralph: All right. We are back. we are going to get into the thing that you probably came here to listen to.

[00:02:12] Ralph: It's definitely the thing that You can't miss

[00:02:15] Ralph: this at T N C

[00:02:17] Kasim: I've said every

[00:02:18] Kasim: year, I swear to God, I've said this on

[00:02:20] Ralph: every single year. And this, I know. Yeah. And I know we're doing a lot of sucking up here, but you know, you know, we could give you a lot of crap, but like, you know, it's actually, it is what it is and this is the stuff I think you think about all year.

[00:02:35] Ralph: You're great at sort of observing what's going on and then boiling it down to, in this case, the T N C ideal customer profile is the marketer. Like, how am I gonna use this in order to grow and scale my business, whether I'm a C M O, A digital mar, you know, just a guide doing it day in and day out, or a gal who's running her own business.

[00:02:55] Ralph: Where do you sort of see everything going? Everyone's talking about ai. I get that. We've talked about it a ton here, but where do you see it all going in the next year or so?

[00:03:06] Ralph: And what

[00:03:06] Ralph: can marketers expect?

[00:03:08] Ryan: and

[00:03:08] Ryan: and I'll tell you, it's wild because my last teen seat,keynote was in T N c, I guess was in October

[00:03:15] Ryan: of last year, October, November, maybe it was September, I don't know. It was basically in the fourth quarter of, 2022. I'm really excited.

[00:03:22] Ryan: Trafficking Conversion Summit is getting back into the first quarter. It was always a Q one event.

[00:03:27] Ryan: it.

[00:03:27] Ryan: was always a Q one event and then Covid happened and there was all the shuffling around of spaces and it got moved into September, October, which I don't like. There's too many other events,

[00:03:36] Ryan: around that same period of time.

[00:03:37] Ryan: And I always loved Traffic and Conversion Summit being that event that sort of kicked off the year. I always loved that. That's why I loved it being in kind of January, February. There were some times where we were later March. Even to me, that was too long. I loved it being that event that that kicked things off.

[00:03:52] Ryan: And yeah, I always saw it as my job for the opening keynote to try to set the tone for what I felt like was gonna matter in marketing, digital marketing for that next year. And you know, when I think about my keynote last year, there were plenty of things that were just dead on bullseye. Right. But one thing that was not featured at all in my keynote was ai. I mean, I barely, I mean, I mentioned it, I absolutely mentioned it 'cause people were starting to talk about it. But this was pre-chat, G P T, I think Chad G B T came out maybe three or four weeks was when the announcement was after T N C. And so when I think about all that has happened since that last keynote, it's safe to say it's been a lot, It's all safe to say it kinda hasn't

[00:04:30] Ryan: been that much, right? And I'm not trying to underplay AI and the importance of ai. And again, I don't, I also don't wanna conflate, like a lot of people do chat, g p t with ai. They act as though they're, one and the same. But no, there's lots of different ai, platforms and how it's gonna impact what we're doing. But gonna tell you right now, there's not gonna be a ton of AI in my opening keynote and Traffic and Conversion Summit. and we're gonna have plenty of sessions on AI at T N C,

[00:04:56] Ryan: like you go AI tastic, there's a whole track on it and it's gonna be amazing.

[00:05:00] Ryan: but it's not where I'm focusing right now because as far as I'm concerned in my experience, AI is a tool. And to think about ai, the analogy that I use and when I'm talking to all the marketers on our different teams, I'm saying, look, AI is not gonna put you out of business. It's not going to render the work that you do meaningless any less than Photoshop rendered photographers meaningless. Right? What it did is it made the great photographers even better, and what it also did is it kind of made it to where everybody could produce something decent. If you learned the tool right now, you, you move that all the way forward into like filters in Instagram and stuff like that. And now I could take kind of a crappy photo on my, iPhone slaps some filters on it.

[00:05:44] Ryan: And what do you know? I'm a freaking photographer. I do believe that AI is turning everybody into a marketer. The thing is, it's turning everybody into kind of a crappy marketer. And so when everybody's doing marketing and when everybody thinks they can do marketing, I. Is the edge gonna come from mastering the tool? I don't actually think so. I think that a basic understanding of the tool is going to be essential, but I don't believe the edge any longer is gonna come. I think if you ignore the tools and don't use 'em, you'll be left behind. I'm not saying that, okay, I'm not saying that, but I don't believe that mastery of all the tools is going to be the thing that gives you an edge. Because I think at the end of the day, that's gonna be a rush to the bottom. Everybody's gonna have this, the tools will get better and you'll get, you'll be good at 'em, just sort of outta the box. In the same way that you know everybody and their dog is good at Instagram, you select your thing, it's fine.

[00:06:36] Ryan: You don't have to know how to what the contrast and the shadows and the filters and all that. You don't have to know that it does it for you. AI is gonna be the same way. It's gonna be built into all the tools that we're using. Tool Mastery is gonna give you some slight edges now, and I think you need to do it and your team needs to do it, but I don't believe that that's where it's gonna come from.

[00:06:53] Ryan: So, When the world gets more complicated, I think there's two types of people. there's one type of person who sees complexity and fleas towards it, and they want to seek to understand and unravel the complexity. And in doing so, they tend to make things more complicated. And these are the people who are always the first on all of the trends. And then there's people who see complexity and they flee to simplicity. in my experience, I've known a lot of people over the past couple of decades of working in marketing and working with business owners. And in my experience, the people that flee to simplicity are the people who build great companies.

[00:07:29] Ryan: They're the people who do big things. The people that flee to understanding all of the complexity and creating their own complexity. They're the ones that get a slight edge and look really smart for a season, and then they sort of blow out. to me, the ultimate example of this is Jeff Bezos. he did an interview and he said the question that we're always asking at Amazon is not what's going to change. The question we're always asking is, what won't change? And how do we get better at the things that won't change? And so as I'm thinking about marketing and as I'm talking and advising the marketers across all of our different portfolio companies, I'm inviting them to ask that question and saying, let's double down on those things. And so a lot of what we talked about at the beginning, what, what were we saying? Like kind of getting back to some basics, reevaluating the things that used to work. 'cause as big as AI is, I think an even bigger change that's taking place right now is the macroeconomic change. People have been doing marketing for the last 10 years.

[00:08:20] Ryan: You've literally never, only the last 10 years, you've literally only ever marketed during a

[00:08:23] Ryan: bull cycle.

[00:08:24] Kasim: Hmm.

[00:08:25] Kasim: It's such an important point that all of us are gonna get such a rude awakening, so very soon.

[00:08:31] Ryan: It helps to be old. 'cause I, you know, I started in, I launched my first business in 1999. The first. two recessions ago, the.com bust, right? 1999 was when I launched my first business, and I saw that happen, and I watched the Runup until 2008, 2009, the great financial crisis, right? I watched it all come back down again. And so to me, looking at what's happening right now, it's not the same as those. It rhymes a bit. but I think that's the bigger impact than ai. And I think marketers understanding how to market during this time, it's going to come down to not mastering the latest tools. It's gonna come down to getting the basics really, really right.

[00:09:09] Ryan: So that's the question I ask is like, okay, let's get it down to first principles. What is marketing? And to me, ultimately marketing is two things, it is messaging and it is amplification. That's all marketing ever is. It's I need to have a message that I'm putting out to the market, and I need to amplify that market. Every aspect of marketing is going to filter into one of those two categories is this messaging. So messaging is obviously copywriting,

[00:09:36] Ryan: but it's also offer structure. Pricing is messaging. Funnel design to a large extent is messaging. What is the sequence of offers that I'm going to make, the sequence of messages that I'm going to make, and then how do I amplify those things? I would submit to you guys that prior to, and, and really for the last 15 years, most of the gains and most of the wins happen through am through being really, really good at amplification.

[00:10:03] Ryan: And the reason I can say that is think about the title of the show. What are we talking about? Perpetual traffic, COUM, what are you amazing at Google Ads like Traffic, Ralph, same Facebook.

[00:10:12] Ryan: You're talking about Facebook ads like, and I'm not saying like you guys have grown as complete marketers and you get the messaging in the funnel side of it as well too. That's why you built companies, 'cause you got all of that. But there are a lot of marketers who the only thing they understand is amplification.

[00:10:29] Ryan: And I'm here to tell you, if you amplify a turd, it's still a turd, But there was a lot of money to be made all cases from just the pure amplification side.

[00:10:40] Ryan: The gains happen from like learning the new channels, figuring out the algorithms, all the gains were from the messaging. what's the world we're in right now? Targeting, I'm not saying it's dead, but man, come on. Like compared to what we used to be able to do, gimme a

[00:10:53] Ryan: fricking break,

[00:10:54] Ryan: right?

[00:10:55] Ryan: Ss, e o. I mean, I'm not, again, I'm not saying you can't do it, you can, but like I remember when SS e o was just stuffing a bunch of keywords in the bottom of the webpage.

[00:11:04] Ryan: The same background

[00:11:05] Ryan: color, same color as

[00:11:05] Ryan: the background,

[00:11:06] Ryan: right? Yeah. Like

[00:11:09] Ryan: it's changed.

[00:11:11] Ryan: So if that's not where the gains happen, I think the gains are gonna happen. On the messaging side. kind of to unpack that a little bit more, if we are really gonna split out the messaging component, I think there's, the messaging is in the actual words, but I think there's also the funnel. So now, if I were to think about what is marketing today and what is the job of marketers, the job of marketers, get buyers, buyers from scratch, that's your job as a marketer. Go out and get some frigging buyers, whether you call those buyers, customers, clients, patients, get the buyers even, you know, I might say, oh, I, I need to get leads. Okay, but you're getting leads maybe to hand off to a sales team. So you're getting buyers. They're just an extra step there, So if we're gonna say that like, as marketers, we need to get buyers. Okay, what do we need to master? What are the three things we need? You gotta have channel mastery still, although I don't think that's where the gains are. You gotta have message mastery. You gotta have funnel mastery. And if you got those three things then I believe you win. And I think in the past we've had people geeking out about channels. I think we've had people geeking out about funnels. You look at all the stuff that Russell's done, to really own that concept, which I think is still critical.

[00:12:18] Ryan: That's the, economic side of how does marketing work is the funnel. The one that has been ignored is messaging. And it's the one that's continuing to get ignored because now people believe they don't have to do that anymore. 'cause AI's gonna do it for me. They're taking the one advantage that we actually have, and they're abdicating the responsibility of what I believe is the one advantage of marketing to a computer that has been trained on all the knowledge of the internet

[00:12:46] Ryan: and the collective knowledge, the collective abilities of the internet when it comes to copywriting is pretty freaking crappy.

[00:12:54] Ryan: Think about it, it's been trained.

[00:12:56] Ryan: On all the websites on the internet, which we know most copy

[00:13:00] Ryan: Fox.

[00:13:01] Ralph: suck.

[00:13:02] Ryan: And so if we're gonna say that channels, while critical isn't the advantage, if we're gonna say that funnels while essential, we kind of generally know what works and what doesn't. there's sort of a, in the trenches blocking and tackling and testing that needs to happen to get that right. Where's the area of opportunity? What's the thing that won't change? I think it's messaging, and it's the one thing that all marketers wanna abdicate to ai. And I think it's the biggest mistake, and I think the winners moving forward are gonna be those that, that remaster, messaging use the tools, yes.

[00:13:31] Ryan: But don't abdicate. So there's my rant.

[00:13:33] Ralph: I think that surprises a lot of people.

[00:13:38] Ryan: And I'm, I'm still unpacking the tactics of how to do that, but it's why, going back to the initial thing, going back to the initial, say?

[00:13:44] Ryan: Nugget. Like

[00:13:45] Ryan: let's go test problem

[00:13:46] Ryan: statements.

[00:13:46] Ryan: let's go do some of this stuff. what's the messaging?

[00:13:49] Ralph: Yeah, I often say this, it's like aside from tracking and attribution and all that sort of stuff, making sure all your pixels are in place and you get your conversions a p I and your Google Analytics for, and you know, whatever third tracking software that you want to use. Like all that is like plumbing.

[00:14:06] Ralph: That's like the base level. 'cause otherwise you can't track any of the signals that you're getting from your top end marketing all the way to the purchase. so that's like the unsexy portion of like digital marketing in general, which I still believe, like that's the base foundation without that.

[00:14:22] Ralph: But then the next level up, it's like the sill plate that you put on before you start hammering in like the two by fours for the walls. If you're building yourself a house in digital marketing is messaging. And a lot of that goes back to. Just the work. Just doing the work, which it sounds so unsexy. It's like, do the research on what your customers are saying.

[00:14:45] Ralph: Going back to our original, nugget in the beginning of the show, but also doing research on what your competitors are doing. Do your deep dive, understand, the three pillars of the emotional side of like how people buy, how people come into your world, what their pain points are, what their desires are.

[00:15:02] Ralph: Really understanding that market, synthesizing that all into generalized messaging concepts. And then from that, Which can be done with some AI tools to speed up the process, which is helpful. But I think the AI tools that everyone's relying on now are starting to use makes an okay marketer, kind of a mediocre marketer and a mediocre marketer, a good marketer.

[00:15:27] Ralph: But it could potentially make a really good marketer into a great marketer. And then if you use the right types of tools, it could make a

[00:15:34] Ralph: great marketer, like a world

[00:15:35] Kasim: Dude, that was a Russian doll that you just built

[00:15:37] Ralph: that stuff,

[00:15:38] Kasim: There were a lot of layers in there.

[00:15:40] Ralph: well, it takes it sort of to that next level. And I think AI isn't the solution for it. It's an additive component to do a lot of that work, which ends up being like, what's going on in the mind of the consumer that you're trying to

[00:15:53] Ralph: target to

[00:15:54] Ralph: get them to engage with your

[00:15:56] Ralph: brand. How can I hit 'em

[00:15:57] Ralph: right between the

[00:15:58] Ryan: Yeah, it's a team member. if you treat it like an intern or a marketing coordinator or a researcher, what I used to do, so we had a business, as you guys know, that was kind of in the survival outdoor space.

[00:16:06] Ryan: And when I was writing copy and coming up with things for that, I would actually go to, outdoor retail stores. We owned one, we actually acquired one at one point, and I would go to that company and I would sit in that building with the customer swirling around me, and I would write copy listening to what they were saying, being in their environment. I'd go to Bass Pro Shop and I would shop, but buy nothing, but basically just listen to the conversations that people were having.

[00:16:29] Ryan: what are the terms they're using? The phrases like that took

[00:16:32] Ryan: work. It took work to get out there in the field and listen to people. And I think marketers stopped listening and we started telling

[00:16:42] Ryan: the world what they were going to do. And when the world was flush with, crypto cash and government STEMIs and 4 0 1 Ks and stock portfolios that are ballooning to the moon, they were happy just to be told where to put all this pesky money.

[00:16:58] Ryan: They were happy to listen to marketers say, what should I do with all this pesky money? I don't know what to do with it. It's coming up

[00:17:01] Ryan: me faster than I can get rid of it. And marketers obliged and they told people what they should do and it worked. And I don't think it was a bad strategy

[00:17:10] Ryan: then, but if you think that that is the strategy that's going to work the next cycle that we're heading into, or that what works in normal times you will fail as a marketer.

[00:17:21] Ryan: Marketer's job is to listen and to repeat back what they heard. That is the core job of a marketer. You listen and you repeat back what you heard. You engage in the conversations your audience is having. You don't butt in and try to start a new conversation about your thing. You engage and perhaps when the timing is right, you redirect and you offer a solution.

[00:17:42] Ryan: Marketers at their core are listeners. They're not tellers and we get away from that. so I think leveraging AI as a tool to help with listening is a great idea. Leveraging it to help you do more. Telling is a recipe for failure and it's what everybody's gonna do. And it's why, if that's what you don't do, you're about to experience some significant boom times. You're about to gobble up some market share. it's gonna hurt a little bit ' cause the market itself will likely compress. But when you grab a larger piece of that market share and then the market re-expand, which it will do 'cause it only always does, you will own a bigger slice of what is now a bigger

[00:18:17] Ryan: pie.

[00:18:17] Kasim: That's another fun framework. Are you listening or are you telling. You know what's sad is I think for a lot of us that have been so acclimated at telling, it's hard to tell the difference. ' cause we think that we're listening, but we're not really, we're listening to ourselves, stakeholders, shareholders, customers meaning the agency client, not the end customer. so you have to like rework that atrophied muscle.

[00:18:38] Ryan: that's why again, to me it's first like how do I distill it down to its core essence? What if our ad is just the words of our customers?

[00:18:46] Ryan: Obviously I'm listening 'cause it's not even my words. Look, it's their words in quotes.

[00:18:50] Ryan: So how much of what you're saying in your messaging as a marketer is repeating the things that you've heard and how much is it you talking about your brand, your products? That's how you can tell 'em I listening or am I. telling now there's a time for leadership and there's a time for direction. There's a time to make a call to action. But that time comes when you've earned the attention and we want to move that well ahead. we wanna start with the call to action, We don't want to earn the attention 'cause the attention was abundant because everything was abundant.

[00:19:20] Ryan: but in times when people are thinking about how do we spend less, how do we do less? How do we tighten our belts a little bit more? not saying that we're not saluting in amazingly abundant times 'cause we are the best times that have ever been. but the mindset of people is not that they want to be told. The mindset of people now is they wanna be heard. and they want to surround themselves with people who are listening to them.

[00:19:40] Ralph: Hmm And ultimately buy from them because it's the logical next step. It's the logical solution of the resolution

[00:19:47] Ralph: of my problem

[00:19:48] Ralph: If you positioned it in the right

[00:19:49] Ryan: Yeah. It's not that people don't wanna buy the mistake that people make. we do move into, and I don't wanna call it a recessionary cycle 'cause I don't even know what that word means anymore, but the mistake that people make when we move into cycles where things are getting a bit more constrained, where they are tightening up a little

[00:20:05] Ryan: bit is they think that people stop buying.

[00:20:07] Ryan: They don't, what they start doing is making slightly more considered purchases. And one of the ways that they do that is they make more smaller betts. So many of us got away from this weird thing that we popularized called the Tripwire, The entry point offer, the

[00:20:22] Ryan: loss leader, everybody got away from that.

[00:20:25] Ryan: They're like, you don't need to do that anymore. You don't need to have all of these other product services. Just sell high ticket. Just go to the top. Just do that. You don't need all these pesky little things out here distracting people. Well, that may have been kind of, sort of right at the time. Guess what?

[00:20:42] Ryan: It ain't gonna be right in this next cycle.

[00:20:44] Ryan: Now, I'm not saying that you can't still give people an opportunity to skip the line and to buy your most expensive thing first at any given time. There's three to 5% of the people who are ready now in any market, three to 5%, they're ready to buy now. And so part of the funnel is figuring out how do we get those people who are ready to buy now to raise their hand and then indicate that, but it's three to 5%.

[00:21:03] Ryan: Everybody else, we're gonna need to nurture 'em, we're gonna need to romance 'em, we're gonna need to offer 'em something small, offer 'em something a little bigger, So it's not that one works and the other doesn't anymore. It's that you need to get better at both. and that's when we get into, and I did talk about this at T N C, I'll be sharing more about some tests that we've done.

[00:21:18] Ryan: But we now across all of our companies execute, we call a ready now funnel. And so when a new lead comes into one of our funnels, we're always assessing for number one qualification. So on just about every single lead magnet that you see across all of my different companies, there's gonna be some kind of dropdown that is gonna indicate is this a qualified lead and all.

[00:21:39] Ryan: We don't mean qualified to be our customer at all. We mean are they qualified for our most expensive, highest end program. So it's scalable. You gotta be doing a million dollars or more in revenue. Like you said, Ralph, it's not for startups, it's not for companies that are in the early stages. We're rooting for 'em.

[00:21:54] Ryan: We wanna help 'em. They don't qualify for a higher level programs at Digital Marketer. It's actually agencies and consultants. cause we've got our certified partner program. So it doesn't mean that we don't wanna help marketers of all shapes and sizes. It just means our highest level program is for agencies and consultants.

[00:22:10] Ryan: So we're gonna ask

[00:22:11] Ryan: that qualifying question.

[00:22:13] Ryan: That's gonna let us know, okay. If they're not qualified. Then let's serve 'em with some lower ticket stuff. Let's let them graze.

[00:22:20] Ryan: let's introduce some trip wires and those kind of things. let's let 'em do their thing. Maybe they'll become qualified later on,

[00:22:26] Ryan: we'll look to monetize that. just so you know, right now, across all of our funnels, on average, we are returning between 45% and 75% of our acquisition cost through the monetization of unqualified leads. I'm throwing up the air quotes. If you're

[00:22:40] Ryan: listening,

[00:22:41] Ryan: the rest of it is coming from the qualified leads. Now, we don't just say, Hey, you're qualified. You should buy our most expensive thing. Now what we wanna do is the next step is do a readiness test. We want them to take some kind of micro action to indicate that they're perhaps ready to hear a higher ticket, ready to do what Ralph Burns did. Hey, I can't help but notice that you know, you got this 43 split test. Are you an agent consultant? Yeah, I am. Cool. Hey, one of the things we do is we help agencies and consultants. we got a program that we do this, it starts at around 10 grand a year. interested in learning more about it. Here's how we think it can

[00:23:14] Ryan: help. Yeah. I am. Okay. So you're not just qualified, but you're also ready. Qualification plus ready means that we can go ahead and move you to the top of the line. We call that a ready now funnel. This is something talked about last year, been testing it all year. When you think about funnels that are working for us right now, that one continues to work because what it acknowledges is that the old, old ways of doing things where you start people at the bottom of old value ladder and you walk 'em up, it still works.

[00:23:42] Ryan: It also acknowledges that. Yeah. But today, odd prices are too dang high. We can't afford to march most slowly. We've gotta go high ticket

[00:23:50] Ryan: first. We gotta flip the

[00:23:52] Ryan: funnel. Well, how

[00:23:53] Ryan: do we do both? We're gonna test for qualification and we're gonna test for readiness. all of these things again though, that's a tactical thing that people should just do and test.

[00:24:00] Ryan: that's a way to kind of get some funnel mastery. the problem statement ads, that kind of speaks to a little aspect of messaging mastery, I submit to, if you get those things figured out, just go to the traffic store and buy it.

[00:24:10] Ryan: hire a cost and hire Ralph. Like, have them buy your ads.

[00:24:13] Ryan: Because I think it's safe to say, if you got an ad that's generating a, two to one row ads within the first, 30 days, you're probably gonna be able to scale that.

[00:24:20] Ryan: that's the game. But it's all the stuff that used to work, nothing's really

[00:24:24] Ryan: changed. Work on the stuff that

[00:24:25] Ryan: doesn't.

[00:24:26] Kasim: I remember the very first time I heard you say, go to the traffic store. And I was so offended. ' cause I was like, I do so much more than that. I, and then, but it was an existential crisis for me man. cause the next day I'm like, he's right. it's just attention arbitrage. And you know what was funny, Ryan is until I wrapped my head around that I couldn't scale my agency. Because I was convinced that like, this is magic and I'm a magician and nobody else can do this. And the minute I started treating it like it's the traffic store, we're gonna, the traffic store, we're gonna buy some traffic.

[00:24:54] Kasim: And it really is just kind of that simple. And, you know, this is the aisle that you go for this demographic, and, and as soon as you kind of, you get there, it becomes so much easier, so much more approachable. so that's a really healthy paradigm to have. But it was a tough pill to swallow.

[00:25:07] Ryan: sorry, I didn't mean that to minimize

[00:25:09] Ryan: the

[00:25:09] Ryan: efforts

[00:25:10] Ryan: of

[00:25:10] Ryan: those,

[00:25:10] Kasim: you were, you were absolutely right, is what I'm saying. I'm not, I'm

[00:25:14] Kasim: not defending myself at all. I just,

[00:25:16] Kasim: I had the same kind of like visceral knee jerk reaction to it. So.

[00:25:19] Ryan: so anyway, guys, I guess that's my, I mean, happy to, dive into it a little bit more, but, I think about it, all of our focus is on those three areas. What are the things that won't change? there hasn't really been a, new channel introduced in a very long time.

[00:25:31] Ryan: We kind of got it with TikTok ads a, you know, a little bit, but there's not new channels emerging like, it was back in the mid two thousands where it was a late two thousands where it was a new channel every other week.

[00:25:40] Ryan: so channels really aren't changing. funnel architecture, the economics, there's not like massive innovations. I mean, I like to think, I kind of gave you a quick innovation there with the ready now funnel.

[00:25:50] Ryan: not a lot of change there. And in messaging, I think the biggest change that's taking place is everybody's going to rely on crappy copywriters that they've hired in the form of their AI tool of choice.

[00:26:03] Ryan: And that's what they're gonna expect to win the day and ain't gonna happen,

[00:26:05] Ryan: and they're gonna wonder

[00:26:06] Ryan: why. So I'd focus on messaging.

[00:26:08] Ralph: the interesting part of this, and we've discussed it a couple of times here on the show, is that, you know, we're both in the agency space and we've fundamentally shifted from advertising first model to marketing model, which includes traffic is just a component of all that. And there's lots of other things that are usually more important than the traffic component.

[00:26:29] Ralph: Like, all the world, you know, one of your quotes is like, I love the turd quote, but the one that we quote here quite a bit is all the traffic in the world isn't gonna cure a crappy offer problem. A lot of it is the offer itself, which is a whole other thing. But then there's all the messaging on the front end, which isn't necessarily, Hey, let's just use laser focused targeting some whizzbang campaign hack.

[00:26:53] Ralph: it is about speaking to that, I. Ideal customer for your business in the way in which, you know, it's the conversation that's going on inside of their head, which is something that probably was, that phrase was coined 40, 50 years ago, but it still is true for today. What I do see, and it'd be interesting to take, get your take on this, especially because digital markers so focused on agencies.

[00:27:15] Ralph: I think there's so many agencies and probably a lot who are listening to this show here. by one count, by one study, there's 42,100 agencies in the us, 42,100, and I think 2020 in the pandemic itself probably took that figure from there were maybe 10 or 15 to 20 to doubling it. In a very short period of time.

[00:27:39] Ralph: And to your initial point, none of these folks have ever actually done this in a recessionary period, whatever that actually looks like. So how do you sort of envision like the agency side of the equation is their shakeout consolidation is obviously is a big thing. We meet with meta all the time 'cause they talk about this quite, quite often.

[00:28:01] Ralph: But what's your take on the agency space, just for the agency listeners here on perpetual traffic and

[00:28:05] Ralph: how they should pivot

[00:28:07] Ralph: to ultimately survive and

[00:28:08] Ryan: I think it's, as an agency today, and we talked to lots of 'em and they're hurting. You're absolutely right. I mean, agencies are, are hurt and hurting and hurting. just 'cause in many cases they knew how to do one thing and that one thing doesn't work anymore.

[00:28:18] Ryan: I mean, really it's as simple as that.

[00:28:20] Ryan: also, there's, you know, less budget. I mean, I love the quote, when times are good, you should advertise. When times are bad, you must

[00:28:27] Ryan: advertise. That's reality. We know that there's data to back up that the companies that advertise, and especially during times of retraction, they do better than the ones that stop by. Many orders of magnitude. And yet, what does everybody do? The first thing they cut it's marketing. It's the marketing budget, it's the ad spend, it's the exact wrong decision, yet everybody does it. So even though it's wrong, it does impact agency. So now I've been saying for a couple of years now, as an agency, I think you have two choices. you need to build an agency or a consultancy that takes ownership of the entirety of the customer journey for your client, So you need to own all aspects of it. You need to own the awareness stage. So that traffic component, you need to own the funnel design component of that. So what happens after the lead comes in, you need to take some ownership, you know, over that.

[00:29:15] Ryan: And you need to own the overall messaging at each and every point along the way. Because if you don't, if you only own a single component of it, there's too many other places where it can and will almost certainly fail. You'll get blamed for it

[00:29:29] Ryan: or just it'll stop working and so you'll lose that client anyway.

[00:29:32] Ryan: So I think either you need to build. An agency that takes ownership of the entirety of the customer journey, which doesn't mean you have to do everything, but you need to take ownership of it. From a client perspective, exactly what you described, Ralph. We're not just gonna do traffic, although we'll do that, but we're also gonna understand your funnel and we're gonna understand the messaging. You either need to make that decision or you need to hyper specialize in one piece of the customer journey and align yourself with the agencies that wanna own all of it,

[00:29:59] Ryan: because again, they're gonna own all of it from a client perspective, but they can't do all of it.

[00:30:03] Ryan: So they're gonna need people like, you. and so to me, this is the Hollywood model. If you understand how movies get made and Hollywood, is different people coming together who are experts in their own little areas, and there's a, producer and director that ultimately brings all of these constituencies together, Actors and their agents. gonna have lighting people and special effects and, you know, all those things. They're gonna bring all these people together to produce this

[00:30:29] Ryan: movie. I think you've gotta decide, are you the producer or are you a key

[00:30:33] Ryan: grip? And look, key grip is

[00:30:35] Ryan: important. We gotta make sure the light's right and chords aren't in the way, but like, know your role and be really, really clear on that.

[00:30:40] Ryan: And don't get caught in the middle. 'cause if you're caught in the middle, claiming to be able to do it all, but you're not, you're screwed. if you're a specialist who is not aligned yourself with people who do own it, and you're essentially, I don't wanna say contracting some of your services out to them, but that kind of is a lot of times what it winds up looking like. Maybe it's a strategic partnership. If you're not doing that again, you're gonna lose clients really, really quickly. So

[00:31:02] Ryan: now's the time for agencies to figure out which are you of those two

[00:31:06] Ryan: and agencies need to be talking and networking and hanging out a lot more than they do. Everybody's so scared and panicky 'cause they're like, they're holding onto their clients so tight that they don't want to connect with other 'cause.

[00:31:15] Ryan: They might take my

[00:31:15] Ryan: clients

[00:31:16] Ryan: is typical, you should be doing the exact opposite of your initial impulse. You should be networking with more and you should be deciding, am I gonna go broad and be more consultative or am I gonna go more narrow and be more specialized? One or the other, there's no room in the middle.

[00:31:30] Ralph: Yeah, and I think you've got a, platform for that pretty well. I mean, not always. I mean, here you are on the show, obviously we're gonna be talking about your stuff, but I mean, I think, the agency focus of Digital marketer is a smart one and it can't be, I find. When agencies get together there, now there's a much different vibe than it was four or five years ago.

[00:31:53] Ralph: It's like, oh, well we're all competitors now. It's much more. I just had, you know, three people from Metaly out to Boston a couple of weeks ago and talk about like 10 other agencies that are looking for strategic partnerships that never would've happened six months ago. You know, we've got private equity groups that contact us every single week, say, Hey, you know, plug into, you know, this larger platform organization.

[00:32:14] Ralph: There's a tremendous amount of consolidation, especially in smaller agencies that might be able to be purchased for cash, not necessarily for debt because of the way the debt is right now with interest rates. I think there's gonna be a lot of consolidation here. Not only are agencies looking for just partnerships and ways to work with other organizations.

[00:32:33] Ralph: We get hit up probably five times a week for white label arrangements. So like, Hey, can we just plug your stuff into what we're doing? That has completely changed from just a year ago, and I think the market started to sort of feel this and act this way and they realized in order to survive, either I figure this out or I don't make it.

[00:32:54] Ralph: And I think some are probably not gonna make it. If you still say, all right, I'm gonna be just this one stop shop and this one really, really good thing, you can continue to survive. And I, I think solutions say it's actually a really, really good example of this. Like Google, that's the only thing that they do and like that's scalable.

[00:33:11] Ralph: But also, you know, cosms made a very strategic decision to say, okay, maybe it might not work in the long haul because the models have changed so, If you're an agency owner, that's still stuck in that mindset of like, I've gotta go it alone. It's like, join a community, like what you guys have, reach out to other agency owners.

[00:33:31] Ralph: There's plenty of business that's out there right now, but I think together, I think agencies are stronger. And with 42,000 of them, it's probably too fragmented to stay that way too much longer. Anyway, it's ripe for

[00:33:45] Ralph: consolidation.

[00:33:46] Kasim: You guys, I'm so sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to raise the alarm that Ryan still needs to eat,

[00:33:51] Kasim: And

[00:33:51] Kasim: we promised him that this wouldn't

[00:33:53] Ralph: And that was where I was gonna end it.

[00:33:55] Kasim: Uh,

[00:33:56] Ralph: Yeah. See, this is what happens. We go on these subjects and we don't wanna stop.

[00:34:00] Ralph: So, I mean, this has been amazing to have you on Perpetual Traffic. I promise it will be more, invites

[00:34:06] Ralph: now that you're

[00:34:07] Ryan: What, and maybe if you have me on more often, we won't talk for as long.

[00:34:13] Ralph: That's true. We're trying to put it all in together. What a novel concept. All right, so where can people find you? We mentioned scalable, obviously traffic and conversion. There's a lot of stuff that you're doing right now. So where's the best place they can find

[00:34:26] Ralph: Ryan Dys

[00:34:27] Ralph: and or some of the things that we talked about here

[00:34:28] Ryan: yeah, look, I mean, every marketer should be at Traffic and Conversion Summit. I mean, just period, end of story. I mean, it's gonna be in Las Vegas. We're back in Q one. We got Richard Branson coming back. the lineup of speakers, including the two of you, is gonna be phenomenal, at T N C. so everybody should be there.

[00:34:44] Ryan: Again, I, I say this, I'm still passionate about this event. I'm still involved in this event, even though we sold that event. still believe it's the place I want all my marketers there. I still believe it's the place. So if you're gonna do one thing and only one thing, I would get yourself a ticket to Traffic and Conversion Summit. if you're gonna do two things, you're an agency owner and you know, you're, you're looking for that community. Feel free to just email me directly, ryan@digitalmarketer.com. happy to point anything out. Same if you're an entrepreneur. Like one of the things that I'm really trying to get better at is having direct real conversations with folks talked about this before, so rather than sending you to a site or a form, you got any questions about any of this stuff, hit me up.

[00:35:19] Ryan: Drop me an

[00:35:19] Ryan: email that really does go to me. My assistant's in there. She'll make sure that I actually see it. but, uh, yeah, ryan@digitalmarketer.com. If you're an agency and you're looking for something, if you're an entrepreneur, if you just don't even know, but you think, Hey, that guy seems like not a total jackass, I'm here to

[00:35:33] Ryan: help.

[00:35:33] Ryan: So I'll just, I'll leave it

[00:35:34] Ryan: at

[00:35:35] Kasim: Well, a plug for you, Ryan, the Digital Marketer Certified Partner Program, which I joined in 2016. I think what ultimately set me along the path of being able to. Build a scalable agency and then sell that agency. And I'm not pandering 'cause I've said that before. I've got a YouTube video that's an hour long that talks specifically about the D M C P program.

[00:35:52] Kasim: So if you're an agency listening to this and you don't have a home, that was, an unbelievable incubator for me. Great community, great content, great groups of people. So if you are gonna email Ryan, make sure to ask them about partner program

[00:36:03] Kasim: For sure.

[00:36:03] Ryan: Nice. Thanks man. I appreciate.

[00:36:05] Ralph: that's quite a call to action, Ryan. That's personal email here on Perpetual Traffic. awesome to have you on. Like I said, we'll have you on a whole lot more, so we won't go like over an hour, but a ton of value here. make sure that you do go over to perpetual traffic.com and look up all the links that we left in the show notes.

[00:36:22] Ralph: We'll leave links obviously to Traffic and Conversion Summit, as well as get Scalable Live. That's October

[00:36:27] Ralph: 2nd and fourth. Guys, I can't tell you like it's coming up fast. So grab your ticket to that. It's totally worth it. I went a couple years ago, like I said before, it was absolutely amazing. And obviously Traffic and Conversion Summit in Vegas, you guys are so big, you gotta go to Vegas.

[00:36:44] Ralph: So perfect time of the year for that. so much going on here. hopefully you found in this week's episode useful. If so, make sure that you first off subscribe, leave a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. Tell us what we can do better as well in either that review or over@perpetualtraffic.com slash better.

[00:37:04] Ralph: We still look at that every single week. Make sure that you check out, what we're doing on the socials for LinkedIn for me, and then casa all over his socials and go back and listen to previous episodes and we'll leave links in the show notes for that. Make sure you check out our YouTube channel.

[00:37:19] Ralph: Gotta plug the YouTube channel, perpetual traffic.com/youtube all resources and show notes@perpetualtraffic.com. So thank you so much Ryan Deis for coming on here on today's show. On behalf of my awesome co-host Casa Mala, until next show.

[00:37:36] Ralph: See ya.

[00:37:37] Ralph:

[00:37:43] Ralph: So thank you for listening and make sure that you subscribe and leave a rating wherever you listen to this podcast. We are on every platform known to mankind. A lot of you are on Spotify. A lot of you are on Apple podcasts, but we're on everywhere else too. I guess we're on iHeartRadio. We're all over the planet.

[00:38:00] Ralph: Thanks to our distribution team here. And also let us know what we can do better over at perpetual traffic. com forward slash better. Follow me on LinkedIn. That's Ralph Burns at LinkedIn and Qasim at Qasim Aslam on all the socials. Make sure you go back and listen to previous episodes. We'll leave the links to previous episodes with Ryan.

[00:38:21] Ralph: This is actually only his. Third time on the show with 500 plus episodes out there, even though he started the damn thing with me seven years ago and check out our YouTube channel over at perpetual traffic. com forward slash YouTube, all resources and show notes are available at perpetual traffic. com.

[00:38:42] Ralph: Don't forget to get your ticket to traffic and conversion summit and

[00:38:46] Ralph: Make sure you also attend get scalable live 2023. That's over at get scalable live. com. Make sure you grab your ticket. You can get a double dose of Ryan there between traffic and conversion summit. You can get a double dose of Ryan there between conversion summit.

[00:39:02] Ralph: you can get a double dose of Ryan dice between traffic and conversion summit and get scalable lives to make sure you get tickets for that. We'll leave those links in the show notes for my awesome co host to Kassim Aslam.

[00:39:16] Ralph: Until next show. See ya.