This episode of the Grow Fast Podcast featuring Ralph Burns, the Founder & CEO of Tier 11, the world’s leading client-centric digital marketing agency, author of Virtual Boss: A Practical Guide for Masterfully Leading and Managing Remote Teams, and a sought-after speaker and authority in the marketing and business community, also co-host of the Perpetual Traffic Podcast, delved into innovative strategies for maximizing digital marketing impact. Ralph introduced the "conversion engine," a comprehensive framework integrating traffic, creative strategies, and post-click optimization, all seamlessly linked by a robust data system to ensure near-perfect ad visibility. He discussed the alarming statistic that 76% of digital ad budgets are wasted and explained how Tier 11's data-driven methods help businesses eliminate inefficiencies and achieve scalable success. Ralph underscored the critical role of new customer acquisition (NCAC) as a key performance metric, cautioning against over-reliance on recycled warm traffic, which many agencies prioritize at the expense of growth.
Another major focus was the adoption of cutting-edge tools and technologies to counteract challenges posed by evolving privacy laws and data restrictions. Ralph highlighted the BlotOut platform, an edge server technology that captures user behavior and builds first-party data pools to fill gaps left by cookie blockers and privacy compliance. He shared compelling success stories of clients who achieved significant growth through optimized campaigns and reduced ad costs using such innovations. The discussion concluded with insights into Tier 11's unique long-form content strategy, which leverages podcasts and videos to deliver value, build trust, and create meaningful connections with their ideal customer profile (ICP), ultimately driving long-term business relationships and sustained growth.
You can find the whole episode of the Grow Fast Podcast with Ralph Burns here:
Tier Eleven
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This is the transcript for this episode:
Mark Shriner [00:00]
Welcome to The Grow Fast Podcast where we talk with leading sales, marketing and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing, and grow their businesses fast. Let's go. Hey Ralph, how are you?
Ralph Burns [00:17]
I'm great. How are you, Mark?
Mark Shriner [00:18]
Good. After we solve those technical difficulties. It's like we're here. Hey, I'm over on the left coast, the West Coast, over in the Seattle area. We're about you located?
Ralph Burns [00:30]
I am in Boston. Technically, I'm in Brookline, but a half a mile away from Fenway Park if you're a baseball fan.
Mark Shriner [00:39]
So yeah, nice. I actually went to an event there a few years ago. I think it was like 2018 and drove into Boston, it was beautiful, and then woke up in the morning, and it was just a massive snowstorm, but that evening, about 100 of us had to kind of trek over to Fenway Park through the snow because we weren't going to miss the event, right? Yeah, it was a great event. A lot of history there. Amazing city, actually. But you guys do get some pretty serious winter storms, don't you?
Ralph Burns [01:09]
Well, you were here in 2018 that's probably about the last storm we had. I mean, we really don't know anymore. I mean, it's kind of insane. I mean, if it does snow it immediately melts. So, it's, I don't know, it's almost sort of Seattle-ish right now, although you guys get a lot of snow in Seattle.
Mark Shriner [01:30]
We get a little snow, and then the whole city shuts down because we've got a lot of hills. That's our excuse that we have a lot of hills. I would say that also people just don't know how to drive in the snow, because you just get it once in a while, and everybody freaks out. I mean, one time a couple years ago, it was coming home, and what should have been a 20-minute drive was four and a half hours, you know, just stuck in the snow. Like, what's wrong with these people, calm down.
Ralph Burns [01:59]
Well, nobody really knows how to drive around here, just in general, but when it snows it's even worse. But, yeah, I mean, when I grew up, there was tons of snow. I mean, I lived through like, all kinds of blizzards, and now it's, I mean, it's rare that you get a big snowstorm. So, I'm serious, like, in 2018 that was probably the last one that we've had here.
Mark Shriner [02:21]
Well, I'll avoid Boston's just so I don't bring any more snow with me.
Ralph Burns [02:24]
Yeah, but we like it though.
Mark Shriner [02:26]
Hey, so, yeah, no, it's good, especially, you know Christmas time, White Christmas. Hey, Ralph. I'm really looking forward to talking to you about you know what you do with tier one, and you know how you help companies optimize their digital spend. But before we jump into that, maybe you can just give a, you know, 30 second overview of what tier eleven does.
Ralph Burns [02:52]
Yeah. I mean I hate to say it's a full-service agency, but we do something called a conversion engine, which is basically, which is an engine that has traffic creative after the click as it as its core. And those are the three big components of anything when you're when you're doing anything additional marketing. And if you sort of think about those as three big gears, and then the timing belt that sort of attaches to all of those and connects them together as a data component. So, we have a tool called tier 11 data suite that allows us near 100% visibility and what's going on all these platforms. So, it allows our media buyers, our creative folks, or after the click people, the ability to be able to see what's going on, and that gives us this X ray vision into what's happening inside all the platforms, which is pretty rare now because there's a lot of obfuscation of data now with privacy laws and, you know, Cookie blockers and ad blockers, you know, upwards of 50, 55% so, you know, sort of overlaid on that, if you just continue to use the engine analogy, the oil that kind of greases all the skids there and all the gears, is strategy. So, people come to us with a problem, which is, hey, you know, I'm flat in 2024 and I want to grow in 2025 and here's my goal. And so we do a full analysis of what they've been doing, and then we prescribe a solution, like we diagnose, then we prescribe, and then we implement, and then after we implement, we iterate over and over again using more and more strategy, and the data component feeds, all the tools that we use, whether it's meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, email, SMS, you name it, and it all works really, really well to get performance where typically there's been frustration in the past, and I think agencies, just in general, are more in it for themselves and just making themselves look good. Our goal is to move the business forward and always drive towards the specific goal the business has, as opposed to just making ourselves look good and say, hey, look at all these cool marketing tactics we don't really care about that. We care about is, achieving the vision of the customer, and that's what we do at tier 11.
Mark Shriner [05:22]
Awesome, man. Hey, I would want to kind of walk through a real life use case in a second here. But before we do that, let me ask you a couple of questions. I saw on your website that you make the claim that 70 76% of digital advertising budgets are wasted. What is, what are the biggest kind of wasteful activities or actions that you see related to digital advertising?
Ralph Burns [05:49]
Yeah, the biggest is spending more money on attracting the same customers over and over again. And you can manipulate any data you want. You can manipulate what you show to a client, if you're an agency, by just really targeting their current clients, or their current the current people that customers and or folks that have engaged with the brand in the past. It's an easy thing to do, and you can show great air quote results, but it doesn't move the business forward. So, whether it's 76% or whether it's 15% or that's 50% is a whole lot of waste that's out there. And what we find is that a lot of agencies just don't know any better. They don't have the data that actually gives them the visibility to be able to make what we refer to as data derived decisions. I mean, everyone says they have data driven decisions, that's great, but what data are you actually acting upon? Is it the actual data, the user data itself, or is it modeled data, or is it just hidden data? And that's where a lot of the wastage happens. And I think some agencies do it on purpose, just to kind of make sure that they don't get fired, and some just do it because they don't know any better. So, we see a lot of that waste when we do audits on businesses and ad accounts, and we try and fix that.
Mark Shriner [07:12]
So, what kind of results should customers, or should businesses be looking for from their ad spend. Because for me, where I sit, I want to see new business. I want to see you know customers, you know conversions. And on your website, you mentioned that metrics like return on ad spend and CPA, these are kind of outdated. So, what are the results that your customers should be looking for.
Ralph Burns [07:43]
Yeah, I mean, people hire us for basically three things, which is, acquire new customers. That's the number one thing, get more customers to buy more frequently from you, and then the third thing is to buy more of your stuff when they're buying. So, the last two are really repeat purchases, and that's easy, in my opinion. The hardest part is getting new customers, finding new customers with a message that resonates with the market and differentiates your product versus the competition, and it doesn't necessarily need to be earth shattering, or it doesn't need to be the cure for cancer. The cure for cancer still has to be marketed. I see pharmaceutical commercials all the time. The point is that if you can get the first one right, that first one is what most businesses want, because at the end of the day, they're not really there to look at how good a job you're doing by return on ad spend. Like I said, it can be manipulated very easily inside all the platforms, whether it's meta, Google, TikTok, you name it, they want to see more money in their bank account at the end of the week, at the end of the month, and we want to see profitable growth. So, when we work with clients, the biggest thing that we try to do, first and foremost, is, okay, what's your goal? Like, let's talk about that. Forget about all these other things. All these other things are just means to an end.
Mark Shriner [09:11]
What are those other things? Because you mentioned that the other agencies are oftentimes agencies will show results that look impressive but really aren't that meaningful in terms of what the client or customer's goals are. So, what are those other things that they get kind of confused with?
Ralph Burns [09:28]
Yeah, what they get confused with is they, they confuse all traffic with warm traffic. What we try to do is the platforms like, let's say meta and Google specifically, are very skewed towards recycling all the people who are familiar with your brand or have bought from you before.
Mark Shriner [09:48]
Because they have that content bubble on the search results, basically. So, if I had gone to the echo shoe store once, guess what? Every time I type anything related to shoes, I'm going to get results for Echo or something like that, right? Yeah!
Ralph Burns [10:00]
Because Google knows what your search history has been, they know where you've been. Meta knows the same thing, and so they purposely target.
Mark Shriner [10:09]
Are you telling me that they're watching us? Is that what you’re saying?
Ralph Burns [10:12]
Absolutely, the greatest trick for marketers from the history of mankind is the reason why I got into this business is because the data is so good. The data was great 10 years ago. Then all of a sudden, all this privacy stuff broke out 2020 and 2021 which screwed everything up. But our data was great back then. The targeting was it was easy to do this job, quite honestly, up until like 20 or 2021.
Mark Shriner [10:37]
Well, somebody's still doing it pretty effectively, because I can go on one platform, click on something, and then three platforms over, immediately I get served up an ad for that thing. And I'm like, Whoa. Sometimes I you know, and I'm sure you've heard stories of even like, with voice recognition, you can be having a conversation with your wife about, hey, you know, I think we need a new big screen TV. And guess what? Then I go sit down at the computer, and, boom, Costco is having a sale on big screen TVs. And I'm like, coincidence, I don't know.
Ralph Burns [11:03]
Isn't that great though? Like as a marketer, I mean that means that, so that's retargeting. That's easy to do, that's simple, really, that's the easiest thing to do in digital advertising. Like we could do that in our sleep. When that came out. It was fantastic, but that was 10 years ago. So, what I'm saying is that those are easy pickings. Those are people who know who your brand is, and an agency can very easily target those people without really even knowing it, and then not really move your business forward. Just get do the number two and number three, which is get them to buy more often, and maybe get them to buy more stuff when they actually do buy. That's more of a like upsell, increasing average order value factor. But the hardest thing is new customer acquisition. So, if you can identify audiences that don't know who you are and convert them, that's the key to online marketing, and then that's when all of a sudden, the bank account balance gets bigger. Hopefully, you can do it at a cost that makes sense for the business, and that's why the most important metric, from our standpoint, is new customer acquisition cost, or NCAC, and that's not CPA. That's not cost per acquisition. We used to talk about CPA cost per acquisition. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a new customer. It's just meaning you're acquiring somebody they might be a repeat customer. Why would you pay to sell a customer again who you already know, who you can retarget, or you can email to, or you can SMS to, and so that's where the manipulation happens, and that's why we say in app metrics like return on ad spend or ROAs are very deceptive. The metrics that we look at are what we call marketing performance indicators, and the biggest one is new customer acquisition. And to keep that new customer acquisition cost at a cost that makes sense for the business, and it varies in every single business, that's the number one thing that we try to do. And sometimes it takes a bit of time to get the right messaging, to get the right bidding, to do all the strategies that we do tactically. But when most businesses hire us, they're looking to do that. They want new customers. They don't want to sell the old guys. They can do that on their own.
Mark Shriner [13:18]
Yeah, so let's I would like to hear a little bit about the strategies related to number two and three, you know, selling to repeat customers and selling more to existing customers. But let's put that in the parking lot, and if we focus on the NCAC, the new customer acquisition costs. And let me ask you this, are you doing most of your customers or clients? Are they in the B2B space or B2C space?
Ralph Burns [13:44]
We probably have, I would say, a quarter in B2B, the rest are in B2C.
Mark Shriner [13:50]
Okay, that's interesting. I could be because I would think, and you can tell me, if I'm wrong, that the platforms you use and some of the strategies use, might be different for B2B versus B2C.
Ralph Burns [14:02]
Not necessarily. I mean, we do a fair amount in the franchise space, for example, and we use the same platforms as we use in the B2C space, which is basically is Google and meta, LinkedIn is really good for B2B, but it's very expensive and it's hard to scale those same clients, those same people are actually on the other platforms as well. So, if you've got meta and Google, I mean, that's pretty much you're covering 80% of the internet. When people hire us, we try not to say, all right, we're going to do every single channel. What we're going to do is we're going to do an interruption channel, which is usually meta, which is Facebook, Instagram, and then there is a non-interruption, or a search-based channel, which is Google, quite possibly, YouTube does a little bit of both. There is a search element to YouTube, there's also a discovery part to YouTube. So, in most cases, we try and focus on one or the other or both at the same time, depending on what their previous agency or their previous team has done. If. You're at the best strategy. And every industry is different, for sure, so, but it's just, it comes back to the big strategy. The big strategy is, what's your goal? How can we get you there? Like, we spend $200 million a year on ads, like, that's not an insignificant amount. Probably in our lifetime, having it added it up, it's billions at this point. So, we kind of know what we're doing. We're not a small agency, but we're not the biggest agency, but we're not some kid who just started last year in his basement because he said, Well, I don't want to work in the corporate world, and I've got a laptop, and I know a little bit about meta ads, and I listened to that guy, Ralph burns his podcast. You know that that's not what we are. So, what we try to do is separate out the marketing stuff from the business stuff, and when you do that, you become a partner. And it's overused and it's cliched, but it's actually the way to really work in this world. And I really feel strongly about that, because I feel that our podcast, which is very popular, it's one of the most popular marketing podcasts, 1000s of agency owners and listened to it, and then started little agencies, and a lot of them aren't that good, you know. And they did it just because, I mean, to a few episodes when they went out their own.
Mark Shriner [16:13]
Let me just jump in, because you did say some things that do sound kind of cliches, like, you know we really want to be a partner with our customers, and we want to help them, really, to achieve their objectives. But let's get into the specifics. If I could pronounce that word correctly, let's get into the details, you know, you know, walk me through a use case of and maybe you can talk about a customer that you've worked with in the past, they were they were at one agency. They weren't getting the results. They were focused on some of these non-meaningful kind of metrics. And then how are you able to change what they were doing and maybe give some specifics? I'm struggling with that one today. Yeah, go ahead.
Ralph Burns [17:00]
Yeah. I mean, a great example as a client that's in the hospitality space that they're going to appear on our show soon enough, but I won't reveal who they are, but they're basically in the hospitality space. But different than a hotel is different than Airbnb. So anyway, they have a really robust business, and they're in Canada, and they're in the US, and what they found is that they want to eventually go brand, sort of high level, but they realize that the market, their share of voice in the market, is very small, and you can figure this out through Google. It's basically 10 to 15 to 20% they just couldn't grab more of that search based high intent market. And they've got really, really frustrated. They got to a certain level of scale, and then they would add more ad spend, and all of a sudden they would spend double, and they would get maybe only 20% more. That doesn't make sense. It's not scalable. So, they realized that in this particular conditioning returns.
Mark Shriner [17:58]
Diminishing returns.
Ralph Burns [17:59]
This is a very bad return. So, they were using Google, and they're like, how do we max out the Google channel first and then branch out and partner with somebody or figure out sort of our next level strategy? So, they came to us, they saw a couple of videos that we had done, and we do have a strategy that enables us to be able to sort of create our own market. It's like a two-step, like they click on an ad and then we hit them with a conversion ad, sort of a simple strategy, but the point is, is that all of a sudden, that allows them to get lower cost per acquisition. It allows them to create their own market. And what they did is they were able to decrease their ad spend by 27% but increased their revenue by 46% so we actually spent less to get them more. And that's counter intuitive in a lot of agencies.
Mark Shriner [18:52]
What I'm hearing you say is before they were running ads that were just kind of one and done, you click on it and then hopefully, you know, fingers crossed that you they, whoever clicked on the ad, would turn into a customer. But what you did was put together something a little bit more comprehensive, where if somebody did click, you didn't just, you know, leave it up to them, you actually then went in and served them up another ad. It's kind of like doing a sequence. Instead of doing an email sequence, you're doing an ad sequence, for example.
Ralph Burns [19:23]
Absolutely. I mean, not everybody is going to click once and buy. So, we realized that not everyone's going to click once and then buy and then click or click again and buy. I mean, there might be multiple clicks in there in many cases, but this sort of two step strategy is, is one that our, our chief traffic strategist, figured out, just by testing and, you know, working with hundreds of millions of dollars and spend and figured out this is actually the way around, sort of this Google penalty that's placed on so many businesses. So now explain that. Yeah, the Google penalty is, basically, is, as you reach a certain amount of spend, Google says, all right, you've had enough. We need to spread it out to everybody else who's in the market, and you only get a certain amount. But if you want more, we're going to pay, you're going to have to pay double or triple.
Mark Shriner [20:16]
Back to what you said before, those kind of, diminishing returns?
Ralph Burns [20:20]
Yeah, it's a diminishing return thing. It's total price fixing, I get it.
Mark Shriner [20:23]
Do you? Let's just kind of switch tracks for a second here, because there's obviously, you know, the US government Fair Trade Commission and other agencies are looking at Google and other large tech companies, as, you know, potential monopolies. They are pressuring Google now to sell off Chrome, yeah, which I'm sure you've heard about, which is a big part of this kind of search monopoly that they have, right? But it's not, you know, because the whole AdWords and that the ad platform monopoly, it is a legit monopoly, right? I mean, you agree, yeah, yeah. So, are you in favor? Are you in favor of breaking it up.
Ralph Burns [21:01]
You know, I think of Standard Oil oftentimes when I think of breaking up a monopoly. I, you know, Rockefeller became like, I don't know how many times richer, but all the different companies from Standard Oil became some of the largest companies in the world, ones that we still buy gas from. I have a Tesla. I also have a gas car, and good old fossil fuels.
Mark Shriner [21:22]
It's funny you said that.
Ralph Burns [21:24]
By doing it, like, doing it that way.
Mark Shriner [21:28]
I read his biography and then fascinating. And then I tracked all the company. It is fascinating. And the guy was, I mean, I think to be that successful, you kind of have to be borderline wacko. But, like, he was so frugal. He would make his 11-year-old son where his daughters hand me down. So, I mean, it was just like he was rich. He had more money than God, but he's like, no, we're not going to spend it. It's a waste, right? He, he didn't drink any alcohol. He was just super focused. But, you know, but I thought, like Standard Oil, there's, you know, what happened? What happened to Standard Oil? Oh, my God. If you look at basically any gas station out there, it all, they can trace their roots back to, you know, arco, you know, all these companies, they all trace their roots back to Standard Oil. It's amazing what that guy was able in his family, was able to accomplish. It's insane. Yeah, it was, yeah. So, so your point is, your point is, I guess, back to Google.
Ralph Burns [22:25]
If they have to sell off Chrome, like, literally sell it, that's the question. But if they have to split up Google into different companies, like, that's basically what happened to Standard Oil. So, we'll see what happens there. They have to sell it off, like we do a lot with TikTok right now, TikTok is supposed to have to sell off, you know, their, you know, TikTok to the to an American company, whether or not
Mark Shriner [22:49]
Because the data concerns.
Ralph Burns [22:51]
Data concern, etc., by the way, the data there is great. It's a marketer, fabulous.
Mark Shriner [22:56]
I need the algorithm is crazy. I put it on my phone for, I don't know, maybe a month, just because everybody's talking about TikTok. TikTok. I personally see it as more of a B2C channel. You mentioned franchises, franchise oftentimes you're looking for individuals as well. So, you could argue that that's B2B or B2C but I see it from where I sit. It's a B2C thing, but it's, anyway, regardless of what you classified. It's obviously an amazingly powerful tool. And I wanted to see what all the hype was about. Oh my god, the algorithm, man. You know, you put something in there and then it just, it's, it's hyper addictive, dude. And what they give you,
Ralph Burns [23:34]
I don't go on it, I really don't, but I understand the power of it and how effective it is. Yeah, on the franchise side, we do franchise to other franchisees, but we also do franchise selling to actual B2C. So that's sort of a duality for all those franchises that we work with. But anyway, B2B plus B2C. But yeah. So anyway, getting back to your original question, your original question was, how we partner? So, anyway, we figured out this thing on Google, and then we met with them two, three weeks ago, and I'm like, Well, what's your big goal? Like, what do you what do you guys really want to do? Like, what's your next step? And they have this idea about another product. And so, we talked about that product for three hours, how to strategize, how to actually test it, how to put it into play. And then I talked about, listen like you're doing really well right now. How can we expand your market outside of just the Google realm? In step two, and so we laid out an entire plan that, you know, our team is going to implement through QBRs quarterly business reviews, as well as sort of their annual plan in 2025 that's partnering. They don't look at us as like a vendor, somebody who sells them Google ads. They're like, listen, everybody we've ever talked to and everybody we've ever used, all they just did exactly what Google told them to do. And you guys, don't you actually realize it is a monopoly. It is price fixing, you know, legal at this point, but you know, they did create it. They created a better mousetrap. Let's not forget. Here. So, they sort of have the right to do it. We're on we run our whole business on Google. Like, I know they have 72 million data points on every living human being, but I'm okay with that. They're not stealing my credit card information or my checking account number. They just know that I like Metallica, and my son is 24 years old. My other one is 22 years old, and I'm married to Jennifer Serenti. It's like, that's the kind of stuff that they know. And am I being used for their advertising? Sure, but it's incredibly powerful as a marketer. What it allows me to do as a marketer is serve up relevant ads at the right time to the right customer, and it does the same for me when you're talking about your retargeting ads. Before I clicked on an ad, I added a bunch to cart, and then, I they kept retargeting me all last week, and I just bought $600 worth. It is like this, these shirts for my son. And that was great. I'm like, thank you for remembering me. Add to Cart and for all.
Mark Shriner [25:54]
$600 shirt for your son. You're a much nicer dad than I am.
Ralph Burns [25:58]
He just got his first job, and he's like, Dad, I need shirts.
Mark Shriner [26:02
Okay? Fair enough.
Ralph Burns [26:05]
I know my wife added most of them to cart. I'll be okay, like, couple 100 bucks. But the point is, like, that was a helpful and useful adaptation of digital marketing for a brand I'd never bought anything from.
Mark Shriner [26:20]
So, let's go down a little bit further down the path of Google AdWords. First off, before I do that, let me ask you, you know, there's an argument of because being, being ads are much more affordable, cost effective, budget, however you want to call it. And so, there's an argument that maybe you can use Bing Ads to test your campaign. And before you start spending the big bucks on Google, do you have any experience with that?
Ralph Burns [26:50]
We haven't done that in that order. We usually add them in after. But I think it's good if you have a bespoke product that speaks to an older demographic. Bing Ads are great. I mean, they really are. When I was an affiliate, before I started this whole thing, Bing Ads and Yahoo ads were my jam. I would spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars of my own money to make, you know, to sell affiliate products or leads, or all that sort of stuff, hopefully more than hundreds of 1000s, and did well with it, and then realized that, hey, I wanted to do this for actual legitimate businesses, as opposed to sort of scammy products or lead gen or insurance companies, and that's how I started. But Bing ads were just sort of on the cusp, and there was a tremendous amount of traffic over there. And is it cheaper than Google? Yeah, it is. I would say it's a, you know, somebody's starting and they, they fill in that, you know, that kind of profile for a product. I would certainly start there. We just haven't seen it as a starting point, because most of the clients that come to us are already on Google a bit. And it's really, it's us refining, like that's the internet, like there's so much traffic that's on Google, so we start there, and we add the other platforms in most cases.
Mark Shriner [28:08]
Okay, so, when you talk about refining their Google ad campaigns, talk about some of the key things that you look at immediately, because they'll come in and they'll probably, I mean, you can, you can get access to their, what's that, Campaign manager, Google Ads console, I forget all the terminology, basically, right? Yep. Okay. And then you go in there, and what are some of the key things that go like, oh, here's a flag, here's a flag, here's something that needs to be adjusted. Is it the ads that they're buying? Is it long tail search? Is it the price they're paying? Is it the geographies? I mean, what are the things you're looking at.
Ralph Burns [28:42]
I mean, I would say, I mean, my Google team is much better when it comes to the specifics of it, but I can give you some high level stuff here is that the biggest thing that we see is that most of the accounts that we look at are overly reliant upon campaign types that target warm traffic kind of like what, what was saying before. I mean to come back to that, it's the biggest mistake we see. And they're overly reliant upon the in-app metrics that say, oh, look at that campaign. It's got a 600% return on ad spend, and Google wants to make you feel good about what you're doing when you go in. But we realize that once we sift all this through our own data tool, we realize that the majority of that traffic is warm traffic, and it's not people that are really good. We're not going out and getting new people. What we need to do is we need to go out and find new people and create new markets. So that's the biggest thing that we see, without a doubt, and it's usually the end.
Mark Shriner [29:45]
And how do you do that? You know? Because I would say, well, you're going to go and buy different words or what I mean, you know, I don't know. Like, how do you, how do you kind of separate the, you know, the warm traffic, from completely brand-new traffic?
Ralph Burns [30:00]
Well, I mean, search is, like intent based in most cases. So, like, if you just start there, that's a good place to start. Those are markets that in most cases, when clients come to us, they're fairly advanced. They've done some initial success. They've had initial success, like the one that I just referred to. And so we need to sort of figure out a better way in which to attract new customers, because they're just sort of recycling the old ones, or they're getting the ones that are they're paying a whole lot more for and not getting a great amount of return, because their cost per click is so high. So, in most cases, it's about campaign restructuring, and a lot of times we'll see older style campaigns where they're using, you know, broad phrase and exact match in the wrong ways, the way that they were done, like three or four or five years ago, whereas now everything has changed. A broad match, if you know much about Google ads, has completely changed. It's more like, you know, anything related to the term that's being searched, and then phrase match is somewhat related to the certain term that's being searched. And then exact is kind of what phrase used to be. It's not the exact, exact thing that somebody's putting in. So, what we what we do is we typically will flip that on its head and start with broad match and then do that two-step strategy to try and expand the market with click campaigns and then convert them with what's referred to as a T row as campaign or a target ROAs. So, it's sort of a basic tip. It's, I'm simplifying it a lot here, but in most cases, there's quick fixes that we can make, quick wins that we can get in. But like I said, in most cases, we're not really starting from scratch. Those folks are, are usually sort of more on the startup side of the equation, but yeah, we following what Google says is not necessarily the path to success, and that's why we have, you know, in my opinion, the best Google team on planet earth that does what they do, and very fortunate.
Mark Shriner [32:00]
Bold statement, but let me, let me ask you, this is so for the did you call it broad search, broad term?
Ralph Burns [32:10]
So, it's broad phrase and exact match when you're looking at broad phrase search terms.
Mark Shriner [32:12]
So in the in the rationale from kind of putting your weight behind the broad phrase is that you know people who already know your product, those warm leads, they would be more exact in terms of what they're searching for, but people who are just they have this intent, but they, you know, I don't know exactly what this tool is called or what this service is called, so I'm going to type something that someone's related Google is saying, hey, what they probably are looking for is what you're selling, right? And therefore, so, yeah, that that, that rationale, makes a lot of sense to me. What do you know, what about in terms of geographic focus? Is it important to hit one region at a time and kind of, you know, kind of repeat that message. Or do you just want to go, you know, shotgun approach and go for the whole country, North America, Canada. I mean, you know, what's your advice in terms of that?
Ralph Burns [33:08]
I think, you know, using the example that we used before, not to keep using the same one, but we might as well. I mean, it's, it's because it's a good one is that they're broken up into very different territories. Like, it's a seasonal product. So, the weather in California, it's a warm weather product. So, the weather in California and certain parts of California is very different than certain parts of Michigan and Minnesota and Massachusetts and Maine. Florida is a different market, obviously, than Illinois. The point is, is that, yes, in that particular case, we break everything up by region, if not state. Sometimes we go down to the individual region. With a lot of our franchises, it will go down to the individual, you know, DMA, that they have specifically for their territory. So, and those friends of DMA stand for, it's, well, it's a term to show, like a specific demographic market. The point is that, yeah, it's a in this case, with all these individual franchises, they have sort of territories. So, we will target that specific geography, that territory that that franchise has bought, you know, unlike some franchises, which, you know, have the franchisees sort of compete against each other. So yeah, so in those cases, we'll go super specific into those territories, whereas in some cases, we'll go regional. If you have a national campaign, if you have a national product, like how you focus in on regional areas is you look on you look at the data, you can figure out very quickly, like, where your big population centers, where the areas are that are buying the most of the stuff that you want, like we have a company that sells outdoor umbrellas. Well, you can guess that right now, in Florida, they're probably selling in Texas, selling more in Arizona, a little bit more than they probably in the northern states. So, you look at all of that, you look there's seasonal very. Creations, but in most cases, like, let's take the seasonal part of it out of it, you can look at individual geographies and spend more in like the Los Angeles area and bid higher, for example, there, than you might in the Albuquerque area or, you know, so it depends on what the data is showing you, but oftentimes that's a fine balance between letting the algorithm pick and choose and also you sort of directionally pushing them into a specific region. So, there's a lot of variability there, but the big variation, I would say, is seasonality. Seasonality is really pretty straightforward. Like, you know, if you know, if you have a cold weather product versus a warm weather product, or you have a product that you know is specific to one region or one specific demographic, then you can slice and dice your targeted audiences however you choose.
Mark Shriner [35:54]
It makes a lot of sense. And I'm just thinking like, I'm sure there's a tool out there, but can you, you know, some type of forecasting tool that ties into weather patterns and with products that are seasonal or, you know, Cold Weather Gloves, you know, hand warmers, or whatever it is, and then, oh, guess what, there's a big cold front coming into Boston. Let's bump up the ads immediately, right? And, you know, I'm sure some, I'm sure people are doing that, but that's like, I never thought about it before, but it totally makes sense. Yeah, the umbrella example, for example. Let me ask you, you know, because now you got me excited about some of the tools and analytics and things. I love trying some of these new tools. And you know, we do, for example, some of our, some of our prospecting and sales enablement we're using what Apollo IO. I'm using otter AI for to do, to do some like transcripts and summaries and stuff, or, you know, automated transcripts of podcasts. We have a for Airbnb owners. There is a tool called Air DNA, which allows you to look at any place in the US, and it will give you, depending on the house size, you say is, oh, it's a three bedroom, two bath, or it's an apartment, whatever it is. You put in the metrics of the house or property that you're looking to buy, it will give you the average daily rate and the occupancy rate month by month, and an annual projected income and a bunch of other metrics. So, before you even buy that place, you can figure out, hey, does it pencil how, what's our mortgage going to be versus what's the what's the revenue going to be? And then, of course, you've got your operating costs that you can factor it. It's a super cool tool, man. And so, so what are some of the cooler tools in your space that you use, or that you've seen, or that are that are new on the market.
Ralph Burns [37:46]
I mean, I think probably the best tool, going back to data, is for any brand who, like, we use this with a combination of tools, but it's sort of three tools in one, and we wrote the integration between these three tools, but at the top of it is a tool that that's called BlotOut. I would say it's for any brand. It's a game changer, because what it allows you to do is it allows you to use Edge Server technology to capture user behavior before it hits your origin server. And if you look at sort of like if you click on an ad and you go to the origin server, the origin server is where all the cookie blockers and where all the ATT prompts and the privacy stuff and your you know your all that obfuscation of data happens on the origin server, if you can actually serve up the same web site on a net, which is what most DNS servers do, they they're allowing, there's 17,000 of them in the world right now. They allow you to basically speeds up the internet. And for, you know, for anything that you need, like you're I drive a Tesla like that thing uploads like brand new stuff as you're driving. It's like, not only are you seeing it as it comes in, but it's almost like, you know, within milliseconds of something happening that does not happen by accident, that is using edge servers, which are closer to where I'm driving as appeals to me, going to the origin server a Tesla's headquarters or wherever they house them. The point is this technology has existed for years and years, and it's sped up the internet. So, a whole host of reasons as to why it's there. This company BlotOut figured out a way to use this by capturing user visitor data before it gets blocked, and then the brand can then create sort of a data pool, or a first party data warehouse, capture that data and then pipe it back into their CRM so it gives them visibility, which is tremendous. So even Shopify, for example, the. Probably a lot of people that listen to this, that have Shopify stores. It's like, Shopify only shows 55% of total user behavior. This basically fills in that gap, which is an incredible technology, because it's like, once it's first party data, it's actually yours. And what BlotOut does is it's HIPAA compliant. It's a tremendous tool. What we do is, we integrate it with a third-party data interface. We pipe it through our own data warehouse, and then we wrote the integration between our data warehouse BlotOut and interface, or third party attribution software called wicked reports, and that enables us to be able to see all the channels all at once through that interface, using all of our specific MPIs or marketing performance indicators and CAC. You asked about that. How do you actually see that effective cost per new visit? You really want to know that. You want to know what the mix is of new and returning visitors. You asked what that was before it's all shown in there. It's because that data is captured prior to it being blocked. So, BlotOut's the first step in it. We wrote the rest of the integration. We have an exclusivity on it, which we're very excited about. We're launching it on the first of the year. We've already tried it on a lot of clients. Amazing results so far. It's like it just lifts the veil on all this data obfuscation that has been happening ever since. You know, Apple went on their privacy hunt, you know, 2021 which screwed up a lot of agencies and a lot of marketers, but blackout can be bought by, you know, any brand. And I think it's probably one of the best tools that's out there right now.
Mark Shriner [41:36]
And is it just a code that sits on the site and then, and then clicks, collects user behavior analytics.
Ralph Burns [41:44]
It's not on the site. Remember, like, as soon as you go to the if you look at somebody clicks on.
Mark Shriner [41:49]
It's on the Edge Server.
Ralph Burns [41:50]
Yeah, it's on the Edge Server. Yeah, exactly. So, it sits on that edge server. And so, the Edge Server has been around forever, you know, I mean, they use, I forget which DNS server they use, but anyway, it's the largest one. The point is, is that it captures the user's behaviors. Think about it this way. So if you're all the stuff that we've been talking about, about data tracking, if you could capture a user's data like you have a store, let's say you have a physical store marks, you know Mark's grocery store, so as soon as I walk into Mark's grocery store, I am blocked in the online world. But what if you could capture my user behavior when I enter the parking lot before I enter the store and then know exactly what I do when I go into your store, like that's really what edge technology does. And it's one of the biggest breakthroughs, I think, and it's one of the most unknowns, for bigger brands. And this is not an inexpensive tool, but I'm saying that it will return a tremendous amount, because you can now see what your users are actually doing, and then you can take advantage of that. You can target them with the perfect ad at the perfect time so that they have the perfect experience to buy your perfect product. So for a marketer, it's a way of figuring out, you know, a fully HIPAA compliant, a fully privacy compliance, compliant with 42% of Americans, I believe, are going to be covered by some kind of privacy law in 2025 I think it's upwards of 50% 2025 2024 it's an enormous amount like that's a huge amount of data that you're not getting, and you need to be able to, as a marketer, be able to make decisions, because this is your money, this is your business. And for us, we treat our clients' money like it's our own.
Mark Shriner [43:51]
Awesome man. Hey, you are a clear subject matter expert and, but you also have a podcast, and talk a little bit about your podcast, and you know the history, how many episodes you've done, and what kind of guests you have on, etc.
Ralph Burns [44:07]
Yeah, it's perpetual traffic, and it's, we're considering changing the name, because there's so much more than just traffic. But anyway, it's one of the top 25 marketing podcasts on iTunes. We've had it for about eight years. We've got 600-some-odd episodes. We just recorded a couple of today, so I've lost track, quite honestly. And I do it twice weekly with my co-host, Lauren Petrulo, who is super sharp, super funny, and we have a great time doing it. And we try to have real conversations about this kind of stuff. And there's a lot of BS that's out there in the marketing world, and we try and sort of sift through that, cut through that, get to the stuff that really matters. So, yeah, perpetualtraffic.com
Mark Shriner [44:52]
That's awesome. Well, you've just gained another listener. I'll be tuning in because, I mean, it's really. Important stuff. And I have spent most of my career on sales, sales leadership, you know. And I've run businesses, you know, CEO Asia Pacific, for example. But even then, I would spend most of my time on growing the business right out, you know, face to face meetings with customers these days, you know, the line between sales and marketing is, depending on the business you're in, is really blurred in a lot of situations. Because, you know, cold calling does is it, can you even do it? And depending on your space and the demographic of the people you're talking to, it could be possible or impossible, and but what is possible is, you know, this cold outreach from all these different marketing channels, you know, and then, which would allow you at some point to make contact. But it's really difficult. Maybe you can talk a little bit about how, you know, how some of the traditional sales rules in terms of the cold outreach, you know, forget about cold calling, and, you know, even, even LinkedIn outreach, because everybody's inundated. I get, I don't know, maybe 25, 30, 40, messages a day, like, hey, you know, we, we can give you, you know, all the leads in the world for, you know, etc. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how some of the marketing tools are augmenting, or some in some types of places, replacing some traditional sales activities?
Ralph Burns [46:26]
Yeah. I mean, my, my background is in sales and sales management, so, I mean, I've always enjoyed just the art of influence, and I find it fascinating human psychology, just in general. That's why I got into the space. So, I got into sales. I wasn't a particularly great salesman, but I outworked everybody, and did really well and believed in my products. I always sold products up until the last company that I worked for, which were total dog crap, but they fired me, had to start this thing after that. But the point is sales right now, you're inundated with those LinkedIn messages. I mean, yeah, I, I mean, if I'm a sales guy, you know, selling that, doing outbound without any inbound, it's really challenging. So, what we try to do is the inbound side is, really, is they're coming to you, right? As opposed to outbound, you're going out and getting them. Now, I find that if you have any kind of outbound strategy, you have to have content. You have to have a lot of content that's helpful and useful, that talks specifically to your ICP, your ideal customer profile. So, I think, the only way to do it outbound is with a combination of outbound and inbound. And we're actually in 2025 we have a rock to master the outbound side, because we do a lot of inbound. We do a fair amount of social you follow all the tier 11, socials, professional traffic, obviously, it all sort of funnels in. But I've got a sales team. I want these guys creating leads for me. And the only way that you do that is you do it in a combination of those two things with a soft sell. Because what we found is that somebody listens to, you know, 100 episodes of your podcast. Chances are they're probably eventually going to say, hey, you know, why not? I'll fill out an application and I might become a client. Because you've built up that reserve of trust. You've built up credibility. Hey, these guys actually know what they're talking about. If I listen to 100 episodes, you got to figure that, you know, there's something in there that's of interest to you. So that's how we approach it. We are very, very heavily on the inbound side. But I think the outbound side, in combination with it, there is a key to it. I just haven't seen that many businesses crack it. I have seen sort of the brute force approach on LinkedIn, and I think most of it is pretty awful. Yeah. So yeah.
Mark Shriner [49:01]
So, it's amazing, even the last couple years, yeah, last couple years, LinkedIn has really become so much more challenging. I've had, I had some amazing wins off of LinkedIn, you know, I would send 10 messages a day, and I would get one or two responses, you know. And out of those responses, I've closed deals. I closed one deal on LinkedIn. It was $170,000 coaching. Engagement off of a link, a cold LinkedIn message, a follow up face to face meeting and then some negotiation back and forth, you know, hard as that now, but that was in 2000 in 16. That's eight years ago, and now, I mean, God, that the traffic everybody's just flooded his shed. Hey, I got to ask one more question, and then we can wrap this up. You know, you mentioned you got to have some quality content that that is helpful for your ICP, there's an argument that when it comes to content marketing and SEO, which are different, but there's an argument there, on the SEO side that says, you know what, just get a bunch of content on your site. It doesn't all have to be, you know, five stars or home runs. It just posts something all the time. Because really, what you're who you're posting for, is Google. Google wants to see that you're posting, and they want to start crawling your site, and they give you higher rankings, right? There's another argument. There's probably more on the content marketing size that you could spend money to generate super high quality, helpful content for your ICP, and then maybe you can use it as lead gen, where you know you get an email address if they do a download or something like that, how do you balance the two? Or do you balance the two in which way would you lean the SEO, more content side, we're just doing this for Google, versus the content marketing, where we're doing it for the ICP.
Ralph Burns [50:54]
Yeah, one of the reasons why I got out of the SEO game when I first started doing this is because it's just takes so long and for very long tail keywords, you can absolutely create. I think doing both is the smartest thing, is having an intention on the types of keyword phrases and the types of subjects that your ICP is potentially googling for. Don't discount that because we rank for a bunch of really long tail keywords. We didn't do it intentionally, but what we did do is we created content that we knew was important to our ICP, and then we put that out, obviously on our site. We're redoing our blog. We have focused more on our socials than we have on our blog, and it's great because it's like, it's the cobbler. You know, those kids have no shoes because we're a marketing agency. We literally only had a marketing department for the last year, so when we got it, it's great, but we realized, all right, to get to the next level, we need to actually do marketing for ourselves. The funny thing was, is that when we really were doing most of our marketing, it was not paid. It was mostly from podcasting, mostly from blogging. It was mostly just from talking about stuff that we knew our clients were talking about and was important to them. We sort of have an inside scoop. We do work for our clients, and we ask them, and we see what they want and what frustrates them. And then we talk about that on our socials, and we do that on our blog posts, we do that on our YouTube channel, and we're running paid advertising right now on our YouTube channel, but we're not a call to action is to watch another video. It's not actually to book a call. And, you know, have tier 11, higher tier 11, because we realize it's a long journey so that, you know, will produce leads, it is producing leads, but it didn't at first, so it's much more of the long game. So, we're mostly paid advertising, and the stuff that we do, we do do SEO, of course, but most ways in which we get results are through paid media. But that's not how we market our business. We sort of, go old school. Really hit up that ICP on all of our socials make a very consistent message sort of be everywhere all at once. And then we use video content as our sort of content of choice, plus our podcast to be able to get through, get the word out.
Mark Shriner [53:21]
Your video, I guess you tell me, but like, for example, on YouTube or any of the other platforms, are you doing short form or because a podcast? I mean, unless you're Joe Rogan, Lex Friedman, some of the other, you know, big names out there, I kind of find it hard to believe that people are going to sit down and watch a one hour podcast related to, you know, but then I could be wrong. I find like when it comes to marketing, it's more like instructional videos. Here's Top 10 ticks or trips, ticks, tricks, excuse me, to get higher ranking or, you know, but are you doing short form or long form?
Ralph Burns [53:55]
Well, let me ask you this, how many clients do you want like on a monthly basis?
Mark Shriner [54:00]
As many as possible, but our target right now is 20.
Ralph Burns [54:07]
So if you get 20 in a month, that's a good month? Yeah, okay, so if you do the math backwards on that, like if you have a video that gets 1000 views, yeah, there's probably 100 people, maybe, or maybe a little bit less, who are really interested in your stuff, and they'll watch it all the way through. So, I would not be afraid of long form content like our podcasts are 45 minutes, plus we do videos along with them. We do an hour every single Friday for a Tier 11 live. That's an hour in length. People come to that thing every single week. It's like long form.
Mark Shriner [54:50]
But I get for the audio, but you're saying that you're also, you're also getting traction with the videos, the video of the podcast, okay, awesome.
Ralph Burns [54:59]
Correct, did you, just to answer your question, is that for a while we tested this. We would do the full-length podcast, which is 45 minutes to an hour, usually about 45 minutes or so. And then we spliced it up into shorts, four shorts, which is basically YouTube shorts, you know, all the other channels. And then we did two mids, which is like five to seven minutes thereabouts, and we disseminated that throughout all of our socials. What we're finding is that we're getting most of our leads from the long form stuff.
Mark Shriner [55:33]
Interesting. Okay.
Ralph Burns [55:34]
So we stopped doing our shorts, and now what we do is we refocused our video editor to do basically our two episodes for the podcast per week, the long form, no shorts, no bids, and now we focus all of our effort on tier 11 content that's specifically targeting our ICP for mids, shorts and long form content, which is our tier 11 lives that we do every Friday. So, we do perpetual traffic is basically video and audio, but then our marketing is mostly video and some blog posts and a lot of short form stuff, so we mix and match it.
Mark Shriner [56:14]
Do you have a call to action in the video, so during the podcast you say hey, by the way, everybody you know, you should you give us a call tier 11, if you're you know, have questions about this. Or do you wrap your video? Do you have some kind of links in the video description? Or do you place ads you mentioned earlier? You do an ad so that they will watch more videos. But like, what's the call to action? Where is it placed?
Ralph Burns [56:35]
Call to Action, for me is, usually, is, is no call to action, because the call to action is implied. If I'm talking about a whole episode of a client who did this and that at Tier 11, I am selling tier 11 without really selling tier 11. And that's that has been a very effective strategy, believe it or not. I mean, I'm a sales guy at heart, like this took me a while to get this because I always wanted to close, you know, yeah. Because do the trial close, or, like, the CTA, or whatever it happens to be, yeah. Do we do call to action throughout the show? Sure, like, you know, we have downloads that we do whenever it's appropriate. We just did a show today like, how to plan your next year. Like, you know, contact us if you don't know what you're doing. We're going to do a promotion in the next couple of weeks through the end of the year, where we basically have an ad spot on the podcast for Tier 11. So, we don't not do it, but most of the time, it's just building up credibility. It's building up influence. It's building up, like, helpful, useful stuff, where people are like, oh, my God, I should hire these guys. I don't want to do it myself. And that's been a very useful way in which we've marketed ourselves in the last seven, eight years.
Mark Shriner [57:46]
Awesome. Well, hey, Ralph. I mean, I think we will probably keep going here for another couple of hours. I mean, you know so much about this, and you're very passionate about it, and I you know, maybe a few months down the road, we'll circle back and have a have another conversation. But first off, I want to say thank you for coming on The Grow Fast Podcast before you say goodbye. Though, I noticed that you have a guitar. I don't think that's a virtual background. I think it's a blurred-out background. I could be wrong though.
Ralph Burns [58:11]
That’s a legit Martin or Eric Clapton back there. So nice. It's one of my favorites. I've got 17 more in my other place.
Mark Shriner [58:19]
Oh, and you have a very understanding wife then,
Ralph Burns [58:23]
She does, she has very good earplugs.
Mark Shriner [58:27]
We've got a few guitars around my house as well. But it's always so it's, it's funny to see what's in people's background, because you kind of get an idea of what their interests are and so on. Well, hey again, thank you so much for coming on The Grow Fast Podcast and wish you a great holiday season coming up here.
Ralph Burns [58:46]
Thanks Mark. It's great being on, thanks for having me.
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