Speaker 1: 0:00

it's hard when you're not winning at all and you jump it into meta and meta is not working, to then invest more into google, right like you're getting in this spot where you're like we don't have the money to spend and so sometimes you can nab up some of that lower. I hate using the word low hanging fruit, but I think everyone understands it yeah, it's not low hanging in the sense that it's easy, right, it's just.

Speaker 2: 0:17

It's just there's demand yeah exactly so capture the demand that's already there. Where when social ads is great at creating demand, but sometimes your problem solution type products.

Speaker 1: 0:27

Yeah, there's so much demand already there you don't need to create it, so just jump in, nab it up and then start creating more. Yo, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to the Unstop. Yo, what's going on, everybody. Welcome to the Unstoppable Marketer Podcast. What was that Wish? With me, as always, is Mark Goldhart, my lovely co-host, who's growing his hair back out. It looks like Unintentionally.

Speaker 2: 0:58

Yeah, it's unintentional, but it's happening, I guess. Unintentional, but it's happening, I guess.

Speaker 1: 1:05

We missed last week. It's Black Friday week prep and we just were crazy and traveling.

Speaker 2: 1:13

It was a no-go.

Speaker 1: 1:14

Los Santos. Very sorry, how are you? We made it. You're listening to this post-Black Friday. We did it.

Speaker 2: 1:23

It's over, finally.

Speaker 1: 1:24

Yeah, I think that is my eighth black friday in the industry and it was by far the most interesting yeah, I don't know how many it's been for me. It's probably been seven six. Maybe you're maybe like one or two behind.

Speaker 2: 1:50

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:54

So a grand total of, call it, you know, 15. 15 together, so no not that much. Yeah, it was crazy. How did? How was Black Friday Like? What's your take on black friday?

Speaker 2: 2:07

um, interesting take. I guess my hot take is that meta actually worked pretty well, despite rising cpms, despite you know the narrative online that everything's getting worse. Right, we saw across the board meta perform pretty similar year over year, if not slightly better, from a conversion rate standpoint okay, that's what I was gonna say, define what you mean.

Speaker 1: 2:38

So you're saying well, just like efficiency, yeah, like just overall efficiency of of meta traffic.

Speaker 2: 2:44

Meta ads was was pretty solid, but we did see some interesting trends and we've been spotting these trends for a couple of weeks, months but and those trends are concerning going into the q1 yeah so that's.

Speaker 2: 3:03

That's why it was an interesting week Like I think we probably hoped for better for some and it didn't pan out Like others did way better than expected or projected. Sure, but overall it wasn't this huge negative month Like, oh, this didn't work. Yeah, you got the vibe that a lot of people it felt like some people were kind of thudding, as they say Doomsday, like meta's broken, it's not working. But there is something broken in meta, but I don't think it's the ads.

Speaker 1: 3:39

Yeah, my big takeaway was it was your dollars did not go as far from a traffic perspective, but the behavior was exactly what you hoped it to be once you got it.

Speaker 2: 3:56

Well, and the behavior was often better.

Speaker 1: 3:58

Yeah, exactly, it was better.

Speaker 2: 4:00

So like the conversion rate, that we saw conversion rates. Yeah, buying was up traffic slightly.

Speaker 1: 4:08

so I mean, when I say down, I'm saying like the cost per to get click yeah was higher yes, which meant that a thousand dollars normally would get you x amount, only got you, but 20 conversion rates were higher, less.

Speaker 2: 4:22

Yeah across the board conversion rates were higher, yeah, so yeah, I thought the same thing. So for the accounts that were slightly down or maybe make missed projections, like we, we looked into it and maybe this is you, I don't know, out there to our listeners, to our loyal listeners. Maybe you were down, maybe you weren't as good as expected. What we saw in accounts was direct traffic. It is very influenced by ads, but direct traffic was down.

Speaker 2: 4:52

Referral traffic was down yeah and that's what is interesting about what's broken in meta is it's. I think a lot of people lean on saying it's the ads, because that's the Shiny object, right like that's the thing that grows you the fastest.

Speaker 1: 5:08

It's the right thing. You can control on a daily basis traffic yeah but Across the board.

Speaker 2: 5:14

We know that most clients are experiencing a huge decrease this year in organic reach. Yeah, yeah, they're just not reaching their followers the way they could in past Black Fridays, and so You're having to make some of that up through ads.

Speaker 1: 5:32

Yeah, I mean. Well, I'm sure a lot of people Realize this, but just in case you don't, when you're Driving organic traffic, that is a pool that you Can tap into from a paid ads perspective, and that pool is becoming less and less and less, so you're having to manufacture that pool through paid ads, whereas in the previous years that pool was just naturally higher.

Speaker 2: 6:02

And so the question is yeah, and ads could retarget engaged audiences exactly right, so the more reach and engagement you got. Obviously your ads are gonna look, quote better, yep, and perform better.

Speaker 1: 6:17

But and the brands that have a good organic presence that we worked with. Those were the brands that were up. Those are the brands that were that one. Yeah, yeah, like a much higher ratio this year.

Speaker 2: 6:32

Yeah, like we have a few clients that were up a couple hundred percentages, you know, yeah, so, yeah, so those kinds of clients have some virality to their organic game. Yeah, right now that others don't, and but that's I mean, that's just like a. I mean we're not going to give you guys a good solution to that. We talk about it a lot. Yeah, because it is concerning to see why your people's reachers is just so down, I mean across the board.

Speaker 1: 7:07

Do you think it's the platforms fault or do you think it's how people create content? I mean, obviously there's both. I think the end, like you, get the safe answers both.

Speaker 2: 7:15

But well, my hot take is it's not the platform's fault. Um, it's not. Yeah, it's not the platform's fault and it's not? Yeah, it's not the platform's fault and it's not the business's fault, it's the consumer's fault.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Elaborate consumers.

Speaker 2: 7:34

So there's a little hint in your ads account.

Speaker 2: 7:38

So if if you have access to your ads account, go look up your over the last little while, especially over like Black Friday and like maybe October November time period, if you want to go back further, and you can even go back even further than that but go look at your CPMs by placement and go look at how much CPMs just in Instagram feed have gone up and go look at how much cpms just an instagram feed have gone up. Now, what people don't, may not realize about a cpm metric is that that is just a supply demand metric, right, that is how many the demand of advertising dollars going into it and the supply of eyeballs, yep. Well, reels and stories across the board, especially reels have had a much, much, much cheaper CPM. Yes, behavior has been in the past, buying behavior was a little less or a lot less in reels, but I'm seeing that starting to shift towards reels, yeah, and so a hypothesis that we're going to be testing out is I think that consumers are just spending way more time on reels.

Speaker 2: 8:54

I don't think people are scrolling the feed anymore, even though that's where all the money's going yeah so I think we're seeing a change in dynamic of and that's also why you don't get reach right like you're't get reach right, like you're not getting reach because there's not as many people spending time on feed Right Scrolling through their who they're following yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2: 9:14

They're jumping into reels or maybe they're going through stories. Yeah, so the consumer like I don't I don't think this is necessarily like meta conspiring against advertisers, I just think it's I don't you would think that their platform would catch up with that and realize that, hey, maybe we should distribute, especially if you're using, like automatic placements, cause for a long time automatic placements at least in the last year, they've been great, but we played around depending on the account, and if we saw these trends in an account, we use some manual placements and those worked great.

Speaker 1: 9:56

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 9:57

After we realized that, oh, in some accounts reels was far out performing. Yeah, feed and cpms were so high in feed that not only was, were you getting a better cost per result in a reels placement, you were also getting more clicks, yeah.

Speaker 2: 10:15

So if you're getting more clicks, better cost pers, then that helps you down funnel too right so whether this is just a glitch because of black friday in october in the election or whether this is a trend will probably pan out in the next two months I mean I, I, to me everything signs.

Speaker 1: 10:38

Why I say that it's not a glitch, because we've been seeing it with accounts for a while yeah, oh yeah. I mean we saw like we have some brands whose best cpa months were spring and they were the worst cpa months they've had, and the biggest thing that we can pull back and look at is that was like roughly right around when their organic reach just took the biggest nosed dive, yep, so, which is a bummer? Yeah, I mean the point, the point, I think that.

Speaker 1: 11:09

But you have to, we have to evolve yeah, and I think we, we I know you said you didn't want to do this and we won't dive deep into it, but the point it, like mark and I talk about this quite a bit um, like we obviously run paid ads, like we, we are paid ad experts, that's what our agency does Um, so paid ads isn't going anywhere. It's still, critically, the best way to grow and scale. But I just think today there was the like final straw or this weekend was the final straw to me that for most people, paid ads, loans, paid ads alone just won't cut it. There's definitely some brands out there that it can and will. So don't come after me, cause there's some brands out there who's like that's all we do and we were right. If you're a, if you are a problem solution product, you know yeah, I guess that kind kind of stuff.

Speaker 2: 12:03

I guess my only pushback on that is it's not that paid ads won't cut it, it's, I think media buying is becoming a little bit harder. So I think the first six months of this year it was like the easiest thing ever yeah, yeah, because that's when broad started to become yeah, like I mean you had 12 months, like maybe end of last year going into this year, where it became easier, like broad worked yeah but something happened over the last six months and I think it has more to do with user behavior than it has to do with like meta changing something algorithms or whatever, yeah,

Speaker 2: 12:41

and so, yes, but cause again, like we have brands that it's basically paid ads does everything for, yeah, yeah, and they and they're killing it. But it's going to take a lot more nuance in how you are running ads.

Speaker 1: 12:56

Like you can't like if you're just using broad, if you're just doing these things and just expecting it all to work all the time without testing new to new funnel and flows, yeah then you're probably going to be in trouble yeah and another example of that is like hey, ads are going to work for you, but sometimes social ads aren't the best thing for you yeah, yeah, we've moved a lot of people not completely out of meta, but we've pulled a lot of people's meta budget and dumped it over into the google side of things yeah depending on what your industry you're in.

Speaker 2: 13:31

Yeah, I've seen a lot of really good success that way or your product positioning yeah, so like these are kind of newer clients that that we've had, where sometimes you go, it's just it. It's not that social ads can't work for you, but it's just. It's like people are searching for this. Like this is a, this is a product, problem solution product. That's kind of more of a niche community. Like, yeah, like social ads may or may not work in the in the long run, but they've've always struggled. Like they've gone through five agencies, yeah, struggling. So it's like well, google ads is going to be right and you look at their google account, you can and you're like dissect it and say oh actually, why aren't you just running google?

Speaker 2: 14:14

yeah, you can actually grow on google. There's still tons of lift, but you're just bidding on brand terms right now.

Speaker 1: 14:21

That's why there's no incrementality and you can maximize what's happening over in Google. And as soon as you start to get that engine flowing, you can start to reinvest to create more demand. On the meta side of things, right, whereas it's hard when you're not winning at all and you jump it into meta and meta is not working. To then invest more into Google Right, like you're, you're getting in this spot where you're like we don't have the money to spend and so sometimes you can nab up some of that lower I hate using the word low-hanging fruit, but I think everyone understands it like that the search terms there people are like if I'm searching for.

Speaker 2: 14:55

Yeah, it's not low-hanging in the sense that it's easy, right, it's just, it's just there's demand yeah exactly so capture the demand that's already there. Yeah, where social ads is great at creating demand, but sometimes your your problem solution.

Speaker 1: 15:09

Type product so, yeah, there's so much demand already there, you don't need to create it, so just jump in, nab it up and then start creating more yeah, because you're kind of, you're trying to compete and a lot of times these have low aovs too right, that's the problem.

Speaker 2: 15:20

It's like you got low aov, you got a lot of one-time purchasers or you know, whatever the situation might be, it's like, yeah, maybe meta ads isn't going to cut it for you yeah unless you have the creative potential or the virality of organic. And yeah you know, multipliers force, multipliers is what we call them yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 15:42

But nonetheless, like, like you said, with the on the meta side of things, I think, um, I think investing in an organic strategy is is just critical. Like I said, we talk about it all the time. It's not just going to be helpful because it's going to help you retarget, but it's also a great way to test creative right, like, where does the majority of your wasted budget go in meta? Oftentimes, for brands, it's testing that creative, you know, which is a good thing. Right, you want to test the right stuff to then double down on it. But when you find winners in the organic side, yeah, those generally become winners on the paid side, so you can kind of cut through some of that yeah, I don't want to call it wasted spend, because that spend oftentimes is very important.

Speaker 1: 16:26

You know you got to figure out which ones win.

Speaker 2: 16:31

Yeah, it's tough sledding out there, man. I mean on the organic side especially, which then parlays over into oh, like my ads aren't doing as good. It's like, well, you know, once you hit a certain point, like your ads are just not going to perform the same because you don't have a pool of this organic people that have engaged with you once or twice. Right, that you're essentially retargeting, yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:56

And organic isn't just like you creating yourself organic content. Organic is also other people talking about you too. You can look at it that way, more borrowed, I guess, like sometimes we call that borrowed distribution. Yeah, collaborations which you can user, generated content yeah, and you can.

Speaker 2: 17:13

You can you turn that engine on from selling more products too? Yeah, right, I mean, a lot, of, a lot of people have a ton of tagged content that they never even look at. Yeah, yeah, or touch, or notice. Like they don't even know that they have like five Bigger people that have posted about them. Sometimes you know totally. Yeah, so go look at who's tagging you.

Speaker 1: 17:37

Yeah, Make sure you have somebody's monitoring that there's a there's a good app that monitors, that monitors that for you. That there's a good, there's a good app that monitors that monitors that for you.

Speaker 2: 17:45

So like, obviously it's really easy in like on instagram to see who tags you in just by in a feed that tag just going over to the tag section.

Speaker 1: 17:51

But there's been a big like a decrease in people tagging in posts and people tagging stories, and so there's an a shopify app called archive and there's a freemium version of it and the paid version, I think, is super cheap. It's probably like totally less than like $60 a month, but that's a great way you can. You can get access to stories even after they've they've ended, like right, stories are only 24 hours, but archive will hold those things and archive them for forever and then you can just reach out to those people and work with them, use that content in ads, but go try that app out. It's a good one. Bada bing, bada boom. Like that Archive you should sponsor the podcast At.

Speaker 2: 18:37

Archive.

Speaker 1: 18:39

Is that what it is?

Speaker 2: 18:39

I don't know, I was trying to, though.

Speaker 1: 18:41

Oh yeah, just go to the Shopify app store and type in archive and you'll find it. This episode is brought to you today by Bestie. If you are an e-commerce store on Shopify, stop and listen up. Are you surveying your customers? Do you know how they get to your website? Do you know what marketing channel introduced them to you? Do you know what motivated them to buy? What motivated them to buy? Do you know what your MPS score is, if people actually like and love your products?

Speaker 1: 19:06

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Speaker 2: 20:01

Like make sure you're looking at those, because those posts and if you're tagged, you can always reach out to them. That's ad content. If they're getting better engagement, you might be able to analyze hey, what are they doing?

Speaker 1: 20:12

send them more yeah, yeah, send them more product. Send more people product too. Guys like what a great like, what like when we run surveys for people, uh, generally, if you have a good product, one of the top three marketing channels. When we run surveys for people generally, if you have a good product, one of the top three marketing channels, when we ask the question how did you hear about us? How did you first hear about us? You know your product's really good. If the you know top two to three responses is like someone referred me, you know, friend or family member. So what Mark was saying is like hey, the way you can sell more is when you sell more, when you give out content, that is, advertising dollars. That's a great way to spend money. If you're like hey, I only have $25,000 or $50,000 a month, take $5,000 or $10,000 of that and give it away. Give it away, give it away.

Speaker 2: 21:03

Give it away now. Need it away. Give it away. Give it away now we're not chili peppers.

Speaker 1: 21:07

Yeah so yeah, I like that.

Speaker 2: 21:10

They are red hot.

Speaker 1: 21:11

Yeah, what else? Anything else learnings from Black Friday? Anything you want to just vent about in the e-commerce space right now? Get off your chest, no.

Speaker 2: 21:26

Not really yeah I'm not much of a venter, you know yeah doesn't change the situation, yeah, but I think, knowing that, what can you do? Okay, so maybe your organic isn't going to pick up in the next one or two months, probably won't right and I think that's the problem. Right, like organic is a vitamin pill, it's going to take a while to see benefits. Like it's a, it's a nutritional regimen term it's a long term.

Speaker 2: 22:00

You'll feel the benefits after you keep a schedule right, like for a while. Yeah, very unlikely. You're going to just like start turning up your organic engine and seeing the engagement and the reach that you want yeah, even if you hired somebody tomorrow. So what can you do? Well, it's really time to start thinking about just clicks and engagement and top funnel metrics that a lot of people forget in the e-comm world. Like everyone's looking for direct attribution, I want a click and purchase within seven days or whatever.

Speaker 2: 22:37

But now it's time to say, okay, let's take a step back, and this is my prediction for quarter one in 2025. The good ones are going to take a step back and say, hey, costs have risen in meta and meta's still performing, but we also have a bigger approach here. We just mean we just need more touch points with people and introductions. Yeah, how do we get those introductions? Is it going to be through a platform like x? Is it? Is tiktok going to start being better for that kind of content where, hey, we're going to get better cost pur, like TikTok has been kind of fluky.

Speaker 1: 23:24

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 23:24

Has not been consistent in the way meta has, which is why and we've especially seen a little dip recently. Yeah, yeah. And so where are you going to get those views, those clicks, that engagement to bolster up your, your mid funnel, the bottom funnel, right, right, because I think a lot of people get stuck on just like mid funnel, bottom funnel, and meta is kind of leaning towards that right now and so, and then again that might be top funnel campaigns and meta, sure but just, but just carefully monitoring, because I mean a lot of agencies will be like you just need clicks, then you get a million clicks and no one ever buys.

Speaker 1: 24:06

Right, and it's just because they're not monitoring. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 24:09

Because they're optimizing off of link clicks Right, but sometimes it's video engagement campaigns, sometimes it's link click campaigns, sometimes it's awareness campaigns. There's a few options for top funnel campaigns and a lot of people fail at them and the reason being is sometimes it doesn't work, like sometimes your buy your. Your buyer consideration is just not that long.

Speaker 1: 24:31

Right, so it doesn't make sense to do that.

Speaker 2: 24:33

It doesn't make sense to to spend a lot of money there, but most times, most of the time, if you fail at that, it's generally like you're not monitoring it and measuring success in the right ways. Are these people engaged when they come in contact with your brand? Yeah, Are they moving down funnel, so to speak? I know some people like to say that the funnel doesn't exist anymore and that's fine. I think that's just semantic differences.

Speaker 2: 25:01

Whether it's a funnel or a journey yeah, or a cycle, or a journey yeah, or yeah, a cycle, or whatever they call it.

Speaker 1: 25:05

Every brand has a journey of some sort, so yeah, we could beef about that.

Speaker 2: 25:13

Yeah, that's something that annoys me People reinventing semantic yeah Meanings Right, and trying to like spin it into like a new one. Yeah, that always, that always irks me.

Speaker 1: 25:27

What are your thoughts about? In d2c twitter right now app loving you're seeing people talk about new programmatic advertising opportunities.

Speaker 2: 25:42

I'm not saying anybody's out there lying Sure.

Speaker 1: 25:48

But it'd be interesting to understand what their incentive to talk about it would be yeah.

Speaker 2: 25:54

Less less about that, it's more, it's more. Look my best. This is the same kind of advice I give to new parents, like when, when somebody has a kid, I say I'm not going to give you any advice because the best advice I can give you is like you're just gonna have to figure it all out as you go. But my one piece of advice is is bit like for dads, for example, like I'll tell dads, my one piece of advice for you is to really try to cherish the time that the baby will sleep in your arms, because, like they'll stop doing that for you before they do it for mom.

Speaker 2: 26:31

For mom, yeah, generally, sure, I know it's, you know, I know case by case yeah but like generally, they like they start wanting to play with dad snuggle with mom and they get more comfort from mom generally, and uh. So like my only advice is like hey, take advantage of when they'll actually, yeah, just fall asleep on you, because, like, once it's over, it's over right so it's, it's more of just like just enjoy the moment. You know, yeah, but like I don't have like techniques right I'm not going to tell them all these little things, yeah.

Speaker 1: 27:05

So tying that back into.

Speaker 2: 27:06

Tying that back into brands. You're going to jump onto Twitter and it's like getting advice from a parent with kids that are completely different than you.

Speaker 1: 27:14

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:15

Like it might work, might not, but app loving is programmatic ad placements in apps. Is it working really well for some brands? I'm sure it is. What kind of brands are they? Are they seven-figure brands? Are they eight-figure brands? Are they nine-figure brands? Right, right, what's their total attainable market? You know, there's just different measurements for each industry and for each brand. And look, maybe app loving is the next best thing.

Speaker 2: 27:47

Programmatic ad placements have been around for 10 years oh, much longer, even you know so like a little in apps, sure, and I mean, is it really the next best thing? Everyone was talking about tiktok shops really the next best thing. Everyone was talking about TikTok shops being the next best thing.

Speaker 1: 28:03

Those people are now saying, and for some brands it is.

Speaker 2: 28:06

And for some again, for some brands, it is TikTok shops is everything I just I'm, you know, I'm not superstitious, I'm just a little stitious.

Speaker 1: 28:19

A little stitious yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:20

Of claims that, like there's the new thing on the block. But again, like I just said, that can sound hypocritical because I just said, hey, we're gonna have to figure out what the top funnel is, whether it's in meta or whether it's app loving or whether it's twitter or whether it's, uh, youtube. You know, like, where the where the user, where's the user behavior going, basically, like, where is the user behavior going basically? Where is your audience? How can you meet your audience where they are? I'm agnostic, I'm not like a meta maximalist. I don't think you have to be in meta 100% of the time, but it has been the most consistent over time. It's not as bad as some people say.

Speaker 2: 28:57

And then the other thing with the app Levin is sometimes I wonder if people are misusing meta in a way or expecting meta to be things that it's not and so maybe it's underperforming yeah but yeah, but they're not doing it right right yeah, but nonetheless, like I'm sure the people who say they're seeing success on app loving are yeah, I'm not claiming anybody's a liar, um, but the people who I have seen praise app 11 generally tend to be a kind of company that most our audience probably isn't in. Sure, yeah, just from a revenue perspective, just from a size perspective, just from, like you know, most companies should probably just focus on two advertising channels until they hit 20 million a year.

Speaker 2: 29:46

You know, like you don't have to diversify now and and again. Maybe we do, cause we have to figure out if you're not getting organic reach the way you used to and if meta continues to evolve, if CPMs rise like if you know, these are a lot of ifs. That's why you have to test, but um, you're gonna have to make up those clicks and those engagement and those eyeballs in in another avenue yeah that's not organic right so what is that?

Speaker 2: 30:14

other avenue like that's the, that's the big question going into 2025 where everybody lost this year was less traffic.

Speaker 1: 30:21

Yes, yeah, I mean there was. There were some times with economy stuff and and and uh, the election that I think just goofed with a lot of things, but for the most part, when we can go back right, the big four like the big four. Hey, why is my store up or why is my store down? It's traffic, it's conversion rate, it's aov and it's returning customers. 90 of the time it was traffic for most people. So that's what Mark means when he's like we got to find a way to. You have to find a way to make it up.

Speaker 2: 30:49

And if it is what it is for your brand, like hey, the only way to grow is through paid then your job over the next three months is to really look at your economies of scale and your business and your operational costs and to try to figure out hey, if we're not going to get the same reach on organic like this isn't 2016,.

Speaker 2: 31:10

you're not posting and your followers see it anymore yeah. So if you're going to have to get that engagement back through paid means, yeah. Then where are you going to make up the margin?

Speaker 1: 31:26

there's definitely a way to do it for sure, right, like if you, if you understand your economics, what, for example, your variable costs and opex are down to, like the, the penny, then sometimes all you need to do, right, if you saw your AMER or MER, whatever you, whatever metric you ROI row as whatever you want to call it, whatever metric you're looking at to understand how efficient things have been for you. Let's say you were sitting at a three and now you're at a two. Your profitability just shrunk by what is that? 30%, right? So big, significant dip. That doesn't necessarily mean that paid still can't work. You just might have to double your spend to get the same profits that you may have, right? So, as long as you know those numbers, right, you understand what your contribution margin is. You understand what your overall costs of the business are. Like. We have some brands that we talk to right now. It's like hey, I know performance sucks.

Speaker 2: 32:32

Spend more If you're not willing to. Yeah, well, yeah, it's usually. It's usually hey, performance feels like it sucks Right. Here's the big picture of why you feel this way. Right, so you have two options either you play the efficiency game or you play the volume game. Yeah and it's not. And this is always the. This is the problem that, um, a lot of brands face. It's a mentality problem, not necessarily a math problem, sure, yeah, the math works it's well.

Speaker 2: 33:03

I'm used to seeing especially brands that had the five, six, seven, x, yeah numbers in 2016 17, 18, 19, right, yeah, but you're not going to see those kinds of quote returns and, by the way, those returns were all inflated because of what we're talking about. You used to get organic reach, yeah, yeah. So the returns you were getting on ads were never, never that high that high, yeah, which is why a lot of people would spend a lot more money and never see growth.

Speaker 2: 33:30

Yeah back then yeah, it's because never mind. Well, I digress the point being um.

Speaker 1: 33:38

Your performance might be fine, it's just it. It's just different.

Speaker 2: 33:42

What do you care about Profit volume or profit efficiency?

Speaker 1: 33:46

Yeah, do you care about profit margin, or do you care about profit margin dollar?

Speaker 2: 33:49

Yeah Cause. Guess what Walmart cares about volume, yeah the profit margin. And guess what? That's how companies get big too. I think a lot of these brands in e-commerce fall into this mindset trap of we can't grow because we're not hitting certain efficiencies and it's okay. Well, either you got to figure out a way to cut costs in your business so that you can make up that margin organic or if you're still profitable, then you just need more volume yeah and, yes, there's an efficiency metric that comes into play with more volume to however, that's.

Speaker 2: 34:27

That's the biggest mindset jump I think that a lot of brands might have to make is like yeah, guys, like most, most industries don't have a lot of margin. Actually, you know, big companies don't have big margins. They generally have huge volumes.

Speaker 1: 34:47

Yeah, you have to ask yourself the question. Let's say you want to make $50,000 in overall profit Right After I've paid everything. Ads agencies employees I want to make $50,000 in profit. Mm-hmm, ads agencies employees I want to make $50,000 in profit. Does it matter if you spent $50,000 to make 50,000 in profit or $200,000 to make $50,000 in profit?

Speaker 2: 35:16

Because at the end of the day, you're getting that money all back. Exactly. And if you went to any investor like this, this is the mindset right. If you went to any investor like this, this is the mindset right. If you went to any investor on wall street and said, hey, I have this machine that if you put two hundred thousand dollars into you'll get two hundred fifty thousand dollars back yeah, they would say yes, all the time of course they'd say yes, even if they, even if you said $205,000 and it was a guarantee, they would say yes, within seven days.

Speaker 2: 35:44

Yeah, Within seven days, you're going to get $205,000 back.

Speaker 1: 35:48

I mean that seems crazy, but sure, let's do it yeah.

Speaker 2: 35:51

So, yeah, my point being and your point being is yes, you're spending more money, but at some point, if you're playing the volume game, the volume works. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 36:04

The big question is do you have the credit, do you have the? How high are your credit card limits, or how high is your line of credit from the bank, or how much cash flow do you?

Speaker 2: 36:15

have. Sure, you have to build up to that for sure.

Speaker 1: 36:17

There's those things obviously, but just know, let's say you've got it, that's, that's a really yeah, not an easy way to scale, but a very logical, mathematic way to scale. You just have to get out of the mind f, that is, which is I used to get this you're too focused on efficiency. I used to get this who cares if it's not a four anymore and it's a 1.8? I'm just gonna quadruple my spend and get the same or more profitability.

Speaker 2: 36:44

Yes, now, I'm not saying forego all profitability metrics, but and neither you, yeah, but this idea of this efficiency. I think a lot of smaller brands would be very surprised to peek into big companies ad accounts and see what kind of quote row as they get. Yeah, yeah, I think so too, which is not great. Yeah, according to what you think, it should be sure, like the row as doesn't get better.

Speaker 1: 37:16

No, especially as you spend more it.

Speaker 2: 37:21

It plateaus, though, yeah, right, like the efficiency will decrease over time, because, again, we're talking about and and this is the mindset that I hope a lot of people are understanding, and this is a lot of the reason why people have a hard time with this. Jump is, the blind spot in e-commerce has always been the last couple of years, especially this year. Oh, my ads aren't performing as well as they used to, and it's it's actually my hot take. If that's not true, it's just you don't have the easy organic you used to, yeah, yeah, and I'm not blaming anybody for that, it's just that's what's changed. Like you don't have the reach, like and if and if you do have the reach, reach out to us. And if your ads are still performing worse, yeah then that's interesting.

Speaker 2: 38:14

Yeah, but in most of the accounts, if not all all that we deal with, ads are actually performing great. It's just hey, if you don't have the organic reach. Like with this one brand we deal with, they have a great product, they're in a semi-niche, they're not in a niche industry, but they have a niche message to that market. It's a pretty big, obtainable market though. Sure, their organic reach has gone down 90% over the last year and a half. Yeah, so naturally, ad costs appear to be a lot more. Yeah, but when you look at all these metrics, like, hey, look at your engagement rates and your conversion rates in analytics.

Speaker 2: 39:03

Google analytics and Shopify yeah, like everything's still working. It's just your traffic is all paid now, yeah, and they're still profitable. And once we got to that point of them saying, okay, we just got to do more volume, everything's been working out for him, right? Yeah, for sure, but that's, that's not to. That's not to say. Your first point is invalid because the best way to increase your efficiency is to have better organic reach on social media platforms.

Speaker 1: 39:38

Yeah, I agree. So organic important, more so traffic is just important. You just need more traffic. So whether that's organic or whether that's other paid channels that can help hopefully get you.

Speaker 2: 39:56

And the right kind of traffic. Yeah, exactly, not just traffic.

Speaker 1: 39:59

Better traffic.

Speaker 2: 40:01

And I just want to reiterate that's a trap that you might fall into totally as a brand owner or if you're using an agency, or if you're a media buyer. Yeah, they'll get you a lot of traffic and you'll be pumping traffic if you're a media buyer.

Speaker 1: 40:13

But if you don't realize oh, these are all grandmas and it's not converting, then we sell skateboards like yeah, like that's the other thing that I just want to add that we haven't talked about is like I think 2025 is just a place for that. Every brand can go clean up their opex. I think that that's sometimes a big killer in what you can spend and how you can well, you got possible trump tariffs too.

Speaker 2: 40:39

Yeah, exactly, so you're gonna want to spend a lot of good operational time thinking about totally possible and that's probably a whole new podcast, like we should probably go through like a.

Speaker 1: 40:51

That could be a very interesting pot. But yeah, just just jump into your opex. Try not to make it. Try not to make it. So your OPEX is much more than like.

Speaker 2: 41:05

We should bring in an operation guy, yeah, or girl or gal or woman.

Speaker 1: 41:09

Human.

Speaker 2: 41:10

Boy.

Speaker 1: 41:10

Just an operation individual? Yeah, yeah, dig into OPEX. What are you spending on rent? How many employees do you have? Could one person do the job of two? You know there's a lot. You'd be shocked with how much most people are spending on things that they don't necessarily need to spend on.

Speaker 2: 41:37

Yeah, the Pareto principle is undefeated and is alive and well in your organization right now.

Speaker 1: 41:44

I heard somebody, uh, on Twitter, actually say something that I really liked is that your OPEC should not be any higher than your contract, your return, your returning customer contribution margin, as a good rule of thumb that is a good rule of thumb because then everything else you're bringing in from a new customer acquisition is profitability yes I like that actually that is a really good rule of thumb yeah, so all

Speaker 1: 42:14

right something like that ladies and gentlemen, I think that's good enough, yeah yeah, it is but yeah, I like the idea of doing like a deep dive. Operationally. We can talk tariffs, we can talk how to look into ops, how to break down contribution margin, because I'm sure we're using that word and there are people who have maybe heard the word but aren't exactly sure how to dive deeper into that.

Speaker 2: 42:39

Yeah, yeah, let's do it.

Speaker 1: 42:41

Yeah, we even talked about we have a really cool contribution margin, doc. We talked about that. Maybe that could be like a good little lead magnet we can give to people so we can start communicating.

Speaker 2: 42:53

Yeah, a little magnetism yeah.

Speaker 1: 42:57

Make you guys give us your email addresses for our secrets.

Speaker 2: 43:00

Putting it out in the universe, drawing those with similar energies exactly all right everybody.

Speaker 1: 43:10

Thank you so much retrograde, they say thank you so much for joining us. Um hope you had a good black Friday and we will uh see you guys next week.

Speaker 2: 43:20

Yes, sir.

Speaker 1: 43:24

Thank you so much for listening to the unstoppable marketer podcast. Please go rate and subscribe the podcast, whether it's good or bad. We want to hear from you because we always want to make this podcast better. If you want to get in touch with me or give me any direct feedback, please go follow me and get in touch with me. I am at the Trevor Crump on both Instagram and TikTok. Thank you, and we will see you next week.