NFT Bundles and Positive Signals for Explosive Growth EP 016

Modern Marketers with Blake Beus and Greg Marshall

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Greg Marshall 0:00 Let's talk about right before we always we almost get our topics from our pre talk, basically before we hit record, so they were talking about algorithms and bundles, and you know, just kind of do things differently. So let's kind of first start off with, let's actually talk about the bundles that you're telling him with Gary Vee. Oh, okay. Let's actually start with that. Okay. I think that that's super important, because there's a huge lesson and what he did, which was, he made an unbelievable unique, exclusive offer to accomplish a certain goal. Now go ahead and share with us. Yeah, that was

Blake Beus 0:40 Yeah, so so if you don't know who Gary Vee is, you're living under a rock, but that's okay. It's fine. He's He's a social media guy. He's got a bunch of books and things like that. He's got a new book launching that I honestly don't even know the name of the book. It's like 1212 and a half something. Yeah, and has something to do with business and marketing. But I've seen a lot of news articles talking about how Gary Vee sold a million dollars worth of his books book in 24 hours, because he offered an NFT to two people that that bought the book. And if you're not familiar with an NFT, not to go to off in the deep end, but it's basically a digital asset. It could be a video or an image or something like that, and your ownership is is granted through blockchain technology. And there's several different marketplaces out there. And I don't want to dive in deep to the technicalities of that, but that's essentially what it is. But it's a digital good. And so what how he structured his offer is if you you bought 12 books, you he would give you one of his new NF T's, which I think is literally just an image. Yeah, I mean, I think I think that's all it is. NFT is you would get one of these NF T's for free and your ownership would be verified through again the blockchain. So it's like an image plus this like blockchain thing. And it's a buzz buzz phrase. So but I've seen a ton of people just gush over Gary Vee for for using a new way to use NF T's and yada yada, yada, yada, but, but for me, I don't feel like that was the magic of the offer. And I feel like the magic of the offer was, he sat down and thought, I want to sell more books. But people usually only buy one book at a time. Like how many how many times? Have you bought more than one of the exact same book Greg like never I never do. I never never I mean, maybe maybe I'll buy an extra a year later and give it to someone

Greg Marshall 2:34 as a gift. Or I'll do maybe an audio that yeah, full extent. That's the full

Blake Beus 2:39 extent, right. And that's what that's how most people consume books because their books, Gary Vee came up with a plan to get the same person to buy not one or two or three books, but 12 at a time, by giving them something, this digital asset that literally costs him nothing to give them. Yep. That's the magic to me. And I feel like that magic can happen to many, many, many other businesses without having to dive into the NFT space, because that can be kind of overwhelming for some people or whatever. But I thought that was fascinating. Like, yeah, I

Greg Marshall 3:16 think, kind of the uniqueness of that offer is it's obviously well thought, as far as wanting to hit the number one book selling lists, right, knowing the knowing the rules of the game. Yeah, right. That's what I think he's very good at is dissecting the rules of the game, and then maximizing his opportunities within those rules, right. So number one, he's gonna sell even more books, because not only did he do pre order of 12 books at a time, right, which gets him a million copies. But those numbers will also impact his, you know, near Times bestseller list, which will place him number one, in all the categories that, you know, he's looking to be in front of which gives them even better distribution. So that selling of 12 books, is not only 12 books, but it's also premium placements. Yeah. On all of the distribution centers to buy more of his book. Yeah. And grow his following even bigger. And so it's, it's a genius move genius. And it's something that I think what Gary Vee does better than I believe anyone on the planet is, he has the guts to do things that people won't do, right, like most people will not even think about. Let me go ahead and offer 12 books. Right. So to one customer, right?

Blake Beus 4:41 I mean, many, many e commerce companies when they think of bundling offers, they think of Alright, if someone's buying a t shirt or a mug or something, let's get them to buy maybe a pair of shorts or something else with it. When something like this, Gary said, what kind of get him to buy 12 Yep, right 12 have the exact same thing. Is that Is that doable? And now I'm thinking, Okay, so for any e commerce clients or whatever, I'm thinking, why why have we been thinking so small? Why not think way bigger? And say, Yes, you bought this t shirt for 25 bucks. Do you want 10 of them?

Greg Marshall 5:18 Yeah, why not?

Blake Beus 5:19 Why not is no rule 10 of them. And And here's 10 of them. And you get this free thing. I think the other magic was, the only way to get that free thing was to buy the bundle as well. You couldn't buy the NFT in the marketplace or anything. You had to get 12 books

Greg Marshall 5:41 and to get it not only that, it's not only a unique offer, but by doing it that way, it also creates urgency. Yeah. Because then, you know, this is a scarce deal. And it could be going away soon. Yeah, therefore, I must do it now, which is every marketers goal and dream is to get you to buy now. Right? Not next week. Right buy right now. And so it's a great way to position an offer to be extremely impulsive. And to create a buying frenzy. Yeah. Is to make that offer that unique so that I'm happy brought that up this morning about because that that can you can learn a lot from that. Right and your own business. Yeah. Well,

Blake Beus 6:22 and I think I think I mean, let's talk about some specifics on how a non Gary Vee business because let's be honest, like, yeah, I don't think Gary Vee listens to this podcast. But for your for your business. You know, you you the listener? Well, there's lots of different ways you could apply this, Greg, Greg, what are you thinking like for maybe an E commerce business? And maybe even a service base? Sure. digital product business? What do you think?

Greg Marshall 6:48 I mean, I think you could probably just pack is like, whatever it is that you have it? I mean, it kind of makes sense, right? I mean, I think of my own purchases, there is a specific type of shirt that I have that I actually do own 12 or 13. No, yeah. And if if and it's it's actually a workout shirt. It's like a very specific kind that I like, it's the same color is the same people probably think I'm wearing the same shirt every day. But it's if this company were to offer me buy 15 shirts for this price. And it's the same exact shirt. I would do it. Yeah. Right. And so I can even give you like

Blake Beus 7:24 a since it's a workout shirt that can give you something for free. Yeah. As part of that that's related to working out. Yeah. And whatever that whether that's I don't know, a headband, or hat or some shorts. Yeah. Or socks or something. Or maybe even something crazy. Like some earbuds. Yeah.

Greg Marshall 7:43 I mean, but that would first that would solidify the deal. Yeah, that would be like, I have to buy it now. Yeah. But that's what I'm thinking like, you know, if you got like E commerce, business, e commerce stores sell T shirts, or maybe jewelry products. I'm like that, really thinking about? Well, how could you get? How could you create the messaging that the person when they go to purchase? Feels like, I feel so strongly about this. I like this product so much that not only will I buy one for myself, but even possibly for all my friends and family. Yeah, right. That's a great way to package it. And there's no better way to authority interested in the product, then they might be interested in more of that same product. Yeah.

Blake Beus 8:24 Right. Yeah. And I think I think the incentive needs to be unique, probably even something that the buyer has not heard of. Yeah. Because everybody's heard of, you know, free shipping on orders, or by one guy, like everybody's heard of those things. And so you want it to be something that's, that's different and unique.

Greg Marshall 8:44 I actually, you know, what, sorry to cut you off. Because I don't want to forget, when you ask this, I actually did give a client an idea of this, he sells. He has a hip hop community. Okay. And most of the hip hop music, not all but most of it is like retro, right? Like 90s, who, like kind of the older rappers and that culture. And he sells a he sells a book. Right? And his goal is he wants to get this book out to as many viewers so I told him to create a better offer. Instead of just selling the book say if you purchase the book, you can actually he does a zoom podcast, okay with the with the actual artists. I said, for the first 50 people who buy or whatever you position where if you get the book, you get access to q&a directly with the hip hop artists themselves. Right? And I said make that the bonus. And it'll make people buy more of the books and it's worth and that's just a kind of a similar angle of like purchase something that is available and people will see before a billion times but offer something else that's unique that they haven't been offered before to increase conversion.

Blake Beus 10:00 Yeah, now now make that an offer to buy 10 of his book exam. But

Greg Marshall 10:03 I didn't even think of that. Yes. Next level

Blake Beus 10:06 that is next level. Yeah, I think that's amazing. I should actually send that client the link, you have yet to say, try to mimic this. Yeah. 10. So like, 10 of those, and then you get direct q&a, we have a hip hop artist, because that is a cool, that's a really unique offer. And that's definitely gonna resonate with people.

Greg Marshall 10:22 Yeah, I think, you know, and we, and before this, we were even talking about, you know, you got to have powerful offers. But another thing to think about just to do things a lot differently, then your competitors, right, that's the one way that you can learn from that is to try to do everything differently than competitors. And we were talking about algorithms and one of the gentlemen that, you know, I think he has very good information. I think I don't want to mess his name up, but Dipesh a Deepesh. Yes. deepish men, men baleia men deal. Yeah, I think he's, he's great. Super good. super intelligent, always has great insight. And he had mentioned something on a video that he ran an ad towards to me. So hopefully, if he does hear this, your ad is working. That sent from Facebook directly to a YouTube link, which I always thought Facebook would squeeze that even if you're paying for it, I always thought they would almost like give you a negative relevance score because of that. But I watched the content that he had in the video, and he talked a lot about

Blake Beus 11:26 just just for clarification, why why would you think that Facebook would give you negative, like a negative relevance going over relevant score, if you're linking off to a YouTube video in a Facebook app,

Greg Marshall 11:37 specifically the YouTube just because YouTube's their competitor, gotcha. And so that's why I would think they, you know, they don't want you to go there. But obviously, it must be working because the ad was served too. And in the video, he talked a lot about positive signals, and optimizing for ads and the importance of doing things more than just like optimizing for purchase. And sending more positive signals inside of your ad account to get actually better results. And it's a different way of thinking which I was telling you. Before we hit record, I've accidentally done some of these things just as like thoughts of like, why can't you optimize in this fashion, where it would actually help your conversions. And in my past experience it has, but I've never been able to actually explain why I just saw that it worked. So I would just keep doing it. But he actually went more in depth with you know that it's it's okay to actually optimize for Add to Cart versus purchases, if you don't get a lot of purchases. Yeah. Because that actually, that conversion rate information is getting fed back into your ad account. And that could have a less, it could be less impactful than if you were doing Add to Cart. And I always had the I guess false assumption that if you're not optimizing for purchase, and just only add to carts, that somehow you're targeting, like a less quality user. But you you mentioned something that I really liked to say. But that would be we would be assuming that we're giving the algorithm too much credit. Right,

Blake Beus 13:16 right. And I feel like a lot of people do do that. I know I've kind of fallen in that camp. And a lot of it definitely has, I even think a lot of gurus out there people teaching others how to run Facebook ads fall into this camp of the algorithm being super smart. It's, it's great, but it's not all intelligent. It's not it can't predict who's going to purchase it can guess, who might be likely to purchase. But one of the things that people bump into is they say, Okay, well, if I'm targeting add to carts, I'll get I'll get a ton of add to carts and no purchases. But here. And that comes from place of assuming that the algorithm knows who are the people that will just add to cart? And who are the people that will just purchase. But the thing is, is those groups are the same people because anybody that purchases needs to add to cart first. Yeah. They have to add to view content. And all of those things. And so when we take a step back and look at how algorithms actually work, you you they're not smart, they're not these intelligent, we say AI they are not artificial intelligence. The correct term is machine learning and you have to train the machine to do what you want it to do. And these are really really sophisticated machine learning things. But But where I started going when you started talking with me about this and when you were saying that Depeche was talking about positive signals. I think that kind of really resonated with me and got me thinking about okay, so, positive signals are identity buyers that you send into the ad platform, the machine learning platform to train it saying these are the types of people that I want. So anybody that view content, they have to view content before they can add to cart. Yep. So I want I definitely want these people, this is a positive signal. When I send, hey, you know, the objective is Add to Cart, these are the people adding to cart, that's another positive signal. I'm training the algorithm. And Facebook knows that view content is a lower priority than add to cart, they know that already. You just need to get the data in there, the types of people and then the purchases when you're sending the purchase data back into the Facebook algorithm or any ad platform algorithm. That's another positive signal. So you're sending positive signals at each layer of the conversion funnel. Yep, yep. And it's not surprising that you're seeing better results that way.

Greg Marshall 15:48 Well, I've seen so a couple of examples that I have. And this typically tends to work really well with lower budget clients, meaning like, they don't have a ton of money to spend, right, somewhere around the 20 to $50 day range. And what I found is, there was a, in fact, this happened a couple times, where someone's only spending 2030 bucks a day, you would optimize for purchase, the purchases don't come in, as well as if you optimize for add to carts, you actually I was actually getting more volume, and less cost. And the cost of purchase was lower on the Add to Cart than the actual going direct to purchase. Which that started to make me wonder, like, interesting. So I'm going after, quote, unquote, less valuable part of the funnel Add to Cart. And this even happened with view content. I showed I think I showed you my ad account one time, one of my customers where I showed you, I'm actually optimizing for view content, but my costs per purchase are actually lower. Yes. And the purchase was right. And my theory is, well, it's more important to get more data into the account, because I found that if you do optimize for like, let's say purchase, it seems like it does tend to lower your view content, add to carts, and other kind of top end funnel data. Yeah. Which I believe slows down learning of your ad account. Yeah, right. And some of the best ad accounts that I've grown. I actually started with, which is, which is kind of funny, because it's not, I don't know if it's ever been recommended this way. But I started with view content first, and then move to the next objective Add to Cart. After we got 1000s of view content. And then built up the add to cart and Informatica cart, then moved to purchase. Yeah. And it seemed like the results are way more stable. Yeah. And you still get purchase off view content or add to cart?

Blake Beus 17:52 Did you leave the view content that add cart objective? campaigns running?

Greg Marshall 17:57 I did not. You did? No. And that's actually something you brought up earlier this morning, where I was like, I wonder if you were to actually just do all of them in a row, if that actually would improve and keep them all running. Keep them all running. Yeah, like when you were talking about this? And I'd like I did, like you said, I

Blake Beus 18:13 did bring it up before we hopped on here. I've never actually done that. And I'm definitely gonna go try that. Well, you know, see what's gonna happen. Because if, if that does work, I can see that being a much more reliable and stable way to get results. Because one of the problems everybody runs into with their ad accounts is you, you have a week where you're just crushing it. I mean, you, you and I were together. When I was thinking of one week that you're probably talking, I had one week where we're doing $5,000 a day on my digital product. And I was like, This is amazing. Yeah. And then the results completely fizzled out into a bunch of different things. But, um, everybody has physical problems. Everybody has Phil's a problem. But I wonder if you run an ad campaign with the objective of you content, a campaign with the objective of an decarnin campaign with the objective of purchase? It would make sense because you're giving all these positive signals, it would make sense that you're going to have much more stable results long term because having a really great week is fantastic. But having a good we're having a good week for 52 weeks in a row is way better

Greg Marshall 19:23 is way better. Yeah. And versus a great week, and then a non existent we finally got a great, it puts you on the bipolar rollercoaster ride away. Oh, man. But I think here's something that you just reminded. You asked me if I had done that simultaneously, what there there was, you can't do this anymore. Which which makes me think there is merit to this, okay. Where I was running a campaign for a specific customer and they they spend about, I don't know, $10,000 a month, and we were running a conversion campaign. We started it at view content, kept the cat everything the same. And then after we built up a whole bunch of data, then I switched the delivery optimization and the conversion event to that add to cart. And then I switched it again to purchase, then I didn't even

Blake Beus 20:20 like launch new campaigns, You're just swapping Yep, the objective.

Greg Marshall 20:24 Now you can't do that anymore. They changed it. But when I did it that way, everything stayed 100% stable. It never like we didn't have any dips. And so then the final one was the optimization for value, because ad learned from the ad set. And we've been running that for six months with no changes, no change the ad, no change that set nothing. The only change is where we were changing the conversion events, and the delivery optimizations within the ad set that whole time. Interesting. So my theory was, well, if I can get this ad set to just build so much data, that it would be learning just from all the past data, regardless of if I change the conversion event. And it says you're going back into learning limited, because it's not really because it still has all the previous day that that I built into it. Which makes me think there's merit to maybe if you just have those types of campaigns running at all times, the way you said, to view content, add to cart, initiate checkouts purchase, that it would serve that same purpose of building up data and continuously feeding more into it.

Blake Beus 21:35 Yeah, and I think so. So the old school way of doing this would would be to have like a top of funnel ad and then you have an Add to Cart objective ad ad campaign and you exclude people that are you do a lot of these exclusions. I correct me if I'm wrong, but in my experience recently, having these different buckets where you're including and excluding people has not worked as well. No, I mean, it's actually were terribly terrible. So what I'm thinking is you run these ads in parallel, and you just let them overlap. Yep. And see what happens.

Greg Marshall 22:11 Yeah, so I think, I think what, what, based off this episode, what you should take from it is we're really trying to feed as much data as possible

Blake Beus 22:23 in a good positive indicator. Yeah, positive indicators like positive he calls them signals, you patch that yes, signals, positive signals,

Greg Marshall 22:31 but you want to you want to, like send those good signals, like, oh, yeah, they did this good thing, they had a constant thing. And you're like educating almost like your own computer. You're teaching it, how to get the results that you want. But the phrase I said before we had record was viewing it almost like nutrition and a healthy body. Were like purchases are like protein. But you can't just only live off protein, like you have to have other nutrients like vitamins and minerals, and carbohydrates and fats. And so I'm viewing the rest of those conversion events as you still need to protein carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and you need to feed that into the body, in order for you to get the best results possible.

Blake Beus 23:21 Part of a healthy, healthy, balanced diet. I've heard people say, I've heard people say, you've got to feed the machine talk about the algorithm. And this, this is like a different way of visually, yeah, which I really love your it's like, literally, I want to feed the machine good, healthy. Yeah, I want to just a vegan strong,

Greg Marshall 23:36 I don't want it to be a competition cutting face with only eating protein. So this, this has been interesting for me to have captured that information off, you know, off that piece of confidence. So with that being said, I think our next episode, we can go into more depth on this kind of case study. In fact, there's a couple clients that I know would be interested in being involved in testing this this area out. So maybe what we do is follow up with some actual data or at least follow up and with some of your clients or maybe when your products. Let's run a week's worth of different objectives. Yeah. And then let's come back and talk about our learnings and see see what happened.

Blake Beus 24:25 Absolutely, absolutely. I want to this whole conversation reminded me of something we didn't talk about before. And it got me thinking about positive signals. So uh, want to get your thoughts on this. So I have a subscription product where people are billed every month, month after month. I'm gathering that the purchase data into my own internal systems. But I realized I'm not actually sending the lifetime value purchases back into my ad platforms, which I can Yes, I wonder if sending that back into Those recurring monthly purchases back into the ads platform saying, hey, this this person purchased again. Yeah, they purchased again, they purchased again, I wonder if that would have an overtime positive impact on the quality of the targeting that Facebook does. And Google does behind the scene. Yeah. What do you think

Greg Marshall 25:18 about I think 100%. And in fact, that one client, I tell you spent attend, I also left that part out, they do feedback, data, offline, uploaded data back into their ad account, so that they can constantly see what's actually coming in. And I think it makes a huge impact. And in fact, some of the some of the accounts that I have found that done the best, which is this is actually kind of a unique finding, right now have followed that procedure, continuously feeding back into their ad accounts, even the offline conversions. Right. And even if like Facebook isn't, you know, deduplicating perfectly my mind, I don't really care. Because it they're still getting the data. Yeah. So it's like, I mean, I'm looking at just my revenue, right? Like, did the money come in? Through my store? That's what I'm based off of. But if Facebook can get data that's 95% accurate, so that they can help my targeting? I'd much rather do that. Yeah.

Blake Beus 26:19 And and I think that's a strategy that's going to lead to better results. Long term. And when I'm talking long term, I'm not talking like three months. Yeah, I'm talking years. Yes, Facebook ads as a as a platform is not going away. Google ads as a platform is not going away, they're only going to get better. And MT better is maybe not the right word. They're going to get bigger over time there. Yeah, there's there's going to be different channels and avenues and everything. And if you have a good ad account with years, literally years worth of positive signal data, I can't imagine that you're going to be better off every time there's a new change or a new regulation or something that comes through, you're probably going to not have a dip or a hiccup in your ads as much if you have this long term of production

Greg Marshall 27:08 data. So So yeah, so I think we should we should circle back with some testing. In fact, I'm going to I'm going to do a call with a client right now, that I believe will be very interested in testing this out because she's very open minded and looking for ways to always improve. Yeah, so she would be a great account to test. Yeah, so absolutely.

Blake Beus 27:34 All right. Well, you know, everybody go try this out for yourself. Yes. Know what you think.

Greg Marshall 27:39 Yes. And until next week, you guys have a good one and talk to you guys later. All right.