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Leverage Data in B2B Digital Marketing Patrick Schwerdtfeger

How to Leverage Data in B2B Digital Marketing

How to Leverage Data in B2B Digital Marketing

In this episode of the B2B Digital Marketer Podcast, Patrick Schwerdtfeger shares his insights on how businesses can leverage data to improve their marketing campaigns. Patrick shares strategies and tactics using exclusion-based marketing, omni-channel opportunities, display ads, and PPC advertising. Listen to the episode and learn more how you can take advantage of the technology trends today to propel your business towards the future.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, and is the youngest of 4 kids: 2 older sisters and 1 brother. Parents together throughout, but both have already passed away.

As a young child, Patrick can be found exploring and talking to as many different people as possible, always looking to find a new perspective and a new treasure he had found before okay.

Patrick was never very good at school in grade school and high school meanwhile his sisters and brother were very smart in winning lots of scholarships and awards Patrick always wanted to learn from the real world and real people operating within the real world he only did well in school during his college years and was very happy to be finished with that when it was over.

Patrick’s degree is in finance and spent his early career in that field ranging from banking to real estate. But he became self-employed in 2002 and learned about marketing, and it was that learning process that led him to start teaching others write books and eventually develop a career as a professional speaker.

Patrick is the author of Anarchy, Inc.: Profiting in a Decentralized World with Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain (2018, Authority Publishing) as well as the award-winning Keynote Mastery: The Personal Journey of a Professional Speaker (2016, Authority Publishing), Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed (2011, John Wiley & Sons), Webify Your Business: Internet Marketing Secrets for the Self-Employed (2009), and Make Yourself Useful: Marketing in the 21st Century (2008). He has been featured by the New York Times, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN Money, Reader’s Digest, Fortune, Bloomberg Businessweek, the Associated Press, MONEY Magazine, and Forbes, among others.

Patrick currently lives in Newport Beach, CA, with his girlfriend, Nadia, and her son Luke.

Timestamps/Outline

01:25 – Patrick’s experience with B2B Digital Marketing

02:47 – The impact of paid ads and SEO to small organizations

05:37 – Why business plans are a complete waste of time

07:20 – Learning SEO for Amazon

09:11 – Hype in paid advertising, SEO, and the influencer market

11:01 – Virtual influencers

12:02 – 9 trends that exist and are accelerating – Pandemic, Inc. and SALVAGED

15:18 – Leveraging data in B2B digital marketing

16:49 – Exclusion-based marketing

18:36 – Omni-channel opportunities

20:44 – Investing in the right keywords for PPC advertising.

23:36 – Running display ads at scale

28:03 – Where is the conversion the best?

31:56 – Connect with Patrick

Key Takeaways

“The road to being is through doing.”

“As far as B2B advertising goes, analytics is the opportunity.”

“Analyze the data like crazy.”

“There is value in taking small steps and iterating.”

Links and Resources

More Episodes on data: Deep Insights on Customer Experience and Technology

Patrick’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/g8patrick

Patrick’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/schwerdtfeger

Patrick’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/g8patrick/

Patrick’s website: https://www.patrickschwerdtfeger.com/

Anarchy, Inc.: https://amzn.to/3gwIOOi

Pandemic, Inc.: https://amzn.to/3gwMobd

Show Transcript

Click to access unedited transcript

Unedited Transcript

Jim Rembach (00:00):

Okay, B2B DM gang. I have somebody on the show who I actually had on my other podcast, the fast leader show, and we had such a great discussion about marketing and digital marketing. Then I had to ask him to become, to come on this show. And Patrick Schwerdtfeger is actually the author of anarchy, inc. And pandemic inc. And both of these books address some of the overall just chaos that is going on, that is going to continue to happen throughout our world. And that’s one reason why it’s so important to really tap into the mind of a person like Patrick and learn about his background and experience in B2B digital marketing and just the overall marketing and impact. So Patrick, if you could tell us a little bit about your experience with B2B digital marketing and the passions that you have for it.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (00:49):

Yeah. I mean, Jim, it’s great to be back. So thank you so much for the invite. Um, you know, my, my experience, uh, with, with paid digital ads came because I was promoting myself. Uh, but, but I learned a lot, uh, you know, along the way and, and paid advertising has completely changed my career. So I’m a huge, a huge fan of it. So along the way, I kind of became a student of, of some of the different techniques that people were using. And, and, and now, you know, I studied technology trends. That’s what I do. So I’m always looking at trends and of course data, you know, data’s the new oil, and then we’ve all heard these axioms now a million times. But, uh, but the reality is the data’s playing a bigger and bigger role and the whole, you know, follow the customer journey, the user experience, all of these other keyword phrases, which are popular as well are all being driven by data. So it’s, it’s, it’s turned into a game where some people are leveraging data that most are not. I mean, it’s incredible. I would say the vast majority of the economy is not effectively using data in their advertising, but some are, and they have a huge advantage going forward. So I’m trying to learn from their experience and incorporate some of those strategies into my own

Jim Rembach (02:00):

Well, but I think you and I, and this is one of the things that I have to be careful about with you. My friend is that you and I have such great discussion that we don’t get recorded. That for me, I’m trying to pull it back in. Right? So you and I about SEO, we talked about paid ads and you said something that was extremely profound in regards to maybe the maturity of an organization, as well as the size and spend capabilities and organization. So if you could please share, you know, really the impact of paid ads and SEO and how that plays out.

Speaker 3 (02:31):

Yeah.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (02:31):

Well, you know, we’ve talked about a lot of things before we clicked record today, so I’m not even exactly sure what you’re

Jim Rembach (02:37):

Well, you, you said something like when an organization is small and growing the whole.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (02:41):

Okay. Got it. Now. Perfect. Thank you. Um, you know what I was saying before? So, you know, when you start out in business, if you’re self employed or if you’re just starting out as an individual to get started at the beginning, you’ve got no money, but you have time. Uh, and so you can use time. There’s a lot of things you can say. In other words, what’s the best use. What’s the best strategy? Well, it depends on what stage of your business you’re in. If you’re just getting started, you have no money. There’s no point trying to blow what little money you have on paid ads, because you can get a lot more bang for your buck, just doing things that are free, like SEO and optimizing your website. And you can optimize your position on the different social media platforms like Instagram and saw this all kinds of things you can do to even on Amazon.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (03:25):

There’s incredible things you can do to position your book or your other product for free. It doesn’t cost anything, but you’re playing with the keywords, but then later on that’s when you have money, but you no longer have time. Cause now your business has evolved. You’ve got a lot of stuff going on. And so at that point, doing the free stuff is kind of a waste of time. Cause you can buy your way in. You can, you can spend money and get there a lot faster and still have your time available to do all the other things that are required to keep the business going. So the best use the best marketing strategy or advertising strategy really depends on whether it’s kind of those two groups. If you’re an early stage, just getting started, where you have time, that’s one thing. But once you get past that, then it’s an entirely different ball game.

Jim Rembach (04:11):

Well, even when you say that, I start thinking of, you know, a lot of, uh, you know, tech, startups, you know, and a tech startup can last for a couple of years, right? Yeah, that’s for sure. Uh, and so, you know, they have, you know, some of those constraints and they may or may not have some of the money because they’re in between rounds or whatever the case may be. You also may even have a part of an organization that’s maybe more mature. Maybe they have some cash in other parts of the business, you know, and it hasn’t been allocated to you. So you still have to focus in that, Oh, while I may have a brig big brand behind me, I don’t have, you know, the budget behind me. Um, and so you, I think we often find ourselves, um, doing something that you said where it was critically important. And I wrote it, wrote it down is that you iterate, you navigate and you pivot. Tell us a little bit about,

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (05:00):

Well, this, this is a, you know, I have a lot of opinions that might be unique to me, but I think for example, a business client business plans are largely just a complete waste of time. Uh, because you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re mapping out step one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. But the truth is you’ve no idea what step two is going to really be until you finish step one, because your, your, your perception of the marketplace changes every time you do something. So there’s an Axiom I live by, which is the road to being is through doing, you have to do anything, even small things, just take action in the direction of your goals. Because if you take that first step, now you’ve got new insights, right? And so step two reveals itself to you. Step two becomes obvious once you’re finished step one.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (05:46):

And once he finished step two, step three becomes obvious. So you kind of have to, it’s an organic thing. You just have to go on the direction of your goals and then yeah, well, exactly what you said, iterate, pivot, iterate, pivot over and over and over again. And I see this happen in my own life, my own business. I mean, you know, I do think there’s value in kind of taking a long view and maybe putting a tree on the horizon and saying, okay, I want to go towards that tree. But, but aside from that, you got to look down and look at your feet in the ground, right in front of you. And just start taking steps. You as literally, if you’re taking a hike, you take three steps and there’s a big tree or a rock. You gotta go around it. The same thing happens in business, right?

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (06:26):

You, you take steps and all of a sudden you realize, Oh my gosh, that didn’t work the way I expected it to work. And so now I got to change and I got to pivot, but you know, just recently, so my, my recent book, pandemic, ink, it literally went live on Amazon today. So it’s right in the middle of this, but you get, so I’ve, I’ve tried to learn about, you know, essentially SEO, right? Search engine optimization, but not search engine, it’s Amazon optimization. And how do you optimize your listing on Amazon? And I bought a little software for it, and I paid a membership to like a program that was teaching me about it. And I also went to YouTube and just search for videos on how to optimize a product on Amazon. I couldn’t believe that there was a video. I watched gym and they were, it was a guy who was putting a yoga mat.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (07:15):

Imagine how many yoga mats are on Amazon. I mean, there’s probably thousands, right? And he was putting on, on Amazon and he did all this keyword research and picked out which keywords had the largest potential, but the least competition and this information is all available. And he did it. He did the whole thing. And by the end of the video, I think it was a seven minute video. He showed that the end result and how this, this yoga mat was now ranking organically. It wasn’t paid, there was no pay. So even, you know, I’m going to go back and make a caveat to what I said earlier. Cause even when you you’re right, even when you do have money and maybe you don’t have any time, it probably makes sense to hire somebody. You don’t have to pay a lot of money who knows what they’re doing to do that optimization on your behalf. So maybe you’re too busy to do it yourself, but there are such amazing. My own business has literally been driven by SEO, which took an enormous amount of time years ago. But you know, like eight years ago, in 2012, I started trying to optimize my website and those listings that I created back then, those pages, those landing pages continue to bring me business today in 20, 20 that’s eight years later, I never would have imagined that they’d be active and effective for that long.

Jim Rembach (08:34):

Oh, and when you’re saying that, I mean, I start thinking about a lot of the things that we do have come out that says, Whoa, Hey, you need to do this now, Hey, you need to do this now, Hey, you need to do this now. Or, you know, all these things have changed and now you need to do that. And so there’s a lot of hype that just happens. Right. Um, so when I start thinking about B2B digital marketing, what do you think is just like really loaded with hype?

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (08:57):

Well, I mean, I guess if I had to say anything I’d, I mean, we can go back to what I said before that, that, you know, if you’re, if you’re, if you have no money and you have time, then paid advertising is, is overblown. Uh, but meanwhile, if you’re, if you’ve got a lot of money, but no time, then maybe the SEO stuff is a little bit overblown, but I’ll throw one more in the mix, which might be controversial, but it’s, it’s a landscape that’s changed dramatically, literally within the last month. And that’s the influencer market. Uh, and in particular micro influencers, uh, you know, if you have the large influencers, there’s, there’s some opportunity there, but you got to play by their terms and you never know what’s going to come out of their mouth. And it’s a very tricky thing. And now, you know, Joe Rogan just got a hundred million bucks to move this stuff to Spotify.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (09:43):

That completely changed the landscape for him, influencers. And now influencers are going to be charging a lot more money because they think they have more value to bring some of them do some of them do. But you know, like for example, on Instagram, I have like maybe seven or 800 followers on Instagram, nothing, a very small audience. And I get these emails like inviting me to represent some product and try and help sell that product. I think that kind of micro influencer campaign for the most part is not going to deliver much. I might be wrong because I haven’t tested it. But my perception looking in from the outside is that it’s probably overblown. I might add by the way that there is a new trend and I can’t think of the names, but there are virtual influencers now, uh, there’s a number of them that have done quite well, like in it, like having millions of followers, uh, there’s a, uh, a model, a beautiful black model, very dark skin, a model, a woman.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (10:45):

I forget her name. And there’s another one that’s out of Asia. I think out of Japan, that’s done extremely well, but we’re going to see in the years to come, we’re going to see a proliferation of virtual influencers and you’re gonna have an entire team running these influencers, including like a comedic writer, like a humor writer, you know, to, to have personality. It’s all about character development. They have to be funny and clever and entertaining, but you can, you can completely map out. So you, you, you don’t have the risk of having Elon Musk smoke a joint on Joe Rogan’s podcast. And now you’ve got a huge problem on your hands. Like you don’t have that with virtual influencers. So we’re seeing that market pivot as well.

Jim Rembach (11:26):

That’s a very good point. Okay. So now the book that you talked about that was just released is called pandemic ink. And just like many of your other things, there’s always a, an acronym that kind of drives it. And so you talk about salvaged. What is South?

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (11:40):

This whole thing started. I had a client asked me to do a webinar discussing, you know, the, the, the, the pandemic and the quarantine and how businesses could survive. So I started doing the research and I kind of ended up with, uh, nine trends, like ended these trends existed before. Okay. But that they’re accelerating as a result of this. So it’s not like this is anything new. In fact, a lot of the trends I even discussed in my previous book called anarchy. So there’s some overlap in that content, but the point is that they’re, that they’re accelerating as a result of the pandemic. And so I took the first letter of each trend and put it into one of those Scrabble sheet engines that you get online and just to see what it came up with. And it came up eight of the letters, uh, fit into the word salvaged.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (12:23):

And I was like, wow, that’s incredible. So I combined two into one and that’s the acronym. So the assets, these are, I’ll just run through them. But again, these are trends that existed before, but they’re accelerating. So the first one is self-sufficiency, uh, these are the off the grid, survival people. There’s more of them today than there were before. Number two analytics, that’s the, a data analytics is everything. And certainly here in advertising, what we’re talking about today, the Al liquidity priority. Number one right now is liquidity, just survival. Uh, what’s your cash position. For example, we’re going to see an increase in cash balances on company balance sheets, for example, uh, what’s the next one V is virtualization, which is obvious even just these zoom calls. It’s a good example of that. The second day is automation. So robotics and automation, uh, the G is a government.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (13:15):

And whether you like government or hate government, I’m, I’m fine either way, but they’re spending money. They got budgets and they’re spending money. So if you can sell something to support a government program, that could be a growth opportunity. Uh, the E has exponential thinking. Uh, so I mean, we’re living it for the first time. The population truly understands exponential progressions and that’s becoming more important. And then the last one is D for decentralization, which is kind of like the big trend that encompasses all the others, because we’re really going towards a more and more decentralized in so many ways. Open source is probably the best example, but we’re really going from centralized structures to more decentralized structures. The media is a great example. Like you’ve got these channels. We used to have a dozen primary media outlets today. There’s literally millions of blogs and podcasts and so on. So that’s again, centralized to decentralized, tapping into the power industry. We start these centralized power plants. Now we’ve got solar panels on millions of roofs around the entire world. That’s a decentralized power generation mechanism. So we see this all over the place.

Jim Rembach (14:25):

Well, and when you’re talking, I start thinking about that and pulling it back in the hole, you know, B2B, digital marketing world. And to say that, how, how can I take advantage of salvaged and all those elements and really become a disruptor myself?

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (14:39):

Well, you know, so, you know, I love the paid, the paid advertising. Okay. And, and the paid advertising is a, so let me give you an example. And I, I like, I like clothing. I like nice jackets and boots and things like that. That’s something that I like. And of course the, you know, the data shows that. So, um, you know, whoever’s selling marketing like on Instagram, for example, I see these photographs on, on Instagram, these incredible leather jackets, and I just immediately loved them. And I go, I go, I click on it. So that’s the original, the first engagement. And then you end up in this kind of labyrinth and, and this is where the data really comes into play. And this, if you want to talk about B2B advertising, I mean, here it is right here. So you have an initial campaign, which is just designed to figure out who is interested in this space.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (15:29):

You’re not trying to make a sale. You’re not trying to make a sale on that first engagement. You’re trying to get that person to a landing page and then they either engage with it or they don’t. So the original group splits into two. Okay. So now you’ve got two advertising campaigns, one that targets the group that engaged and another campaign that targets the people that didn’t engage. Okay. And so then you’re, you have different offers. So the one goes to two, and then in each case, those people either engage or they don’t. So that splits into four. Okay. And then eight and 16 and 32. And, and the people, you know, we’ve got all these niche, fashion designers now that are thriving and doing well because they’re leveraging this type of exclusion based marketing. So you’ve got your original campaign, you’d get them to a landing page and, you know, group engaged in group B did.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (16:19):

So you exclude B and you do a new campaign to a, and then you do another one to B and you exclude a, so you’ve, it’s an exclusion. Okay. So you’ve segmented that the marketing from one to two, and then you segment further and further and further. So I have a friend of mine who actually called me today. I have to return his call and he is the voice, like the host of a quite successful, a video program. You pay for it. It’s not free. You pay for it, but it’s a video program about medicinal marijuana. And that’s not really a field that I’m passionate about, but he is. And it’s very like, you know, doctors and it’s very medicine oriented. It’s not at all like, you know, the more, you know, different types of genres within that space. But, but the bottom line is he goes into the studio here in Los Angeles from time to time.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (17:08):

And he records dozens and dozens of little short video clips designed for these little segments. Right? And so you ended up for one campaign, you can end up with 60 or 70 different paths. So what, when, when people say follow the customer journey, when people say user experience, this is what they’re talking about, right? They’re the people who engage with that advertising. They feel like they’re being held by the hand and walked through. And at every stage they’re getting a message, which is specifically tailored to what they’ve done so far. And the more intuitive you can make that process, the more trust you’re going to build and trust is an essential precursor to the purchase. So for the sale. So if you, if you want to sell stuff, you gotta use these exclusion based marketing channel and marketing opportunities. And the one last thing I’ll throw in there before just you’ll respond obviously, but is the omni-channel opportunity where, you know, the first advertising can take place on YouTube.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (18:10):

Okay. For example, and then you can send them, send them to a landing page. And now you’ve got a pixel, you’ve got a Facebook pixel on that landing page. So now you can target the same person on Facebook. And of course they own Instagram. So you can tag them there as well. And then you can do remarketing on the Google display network. So they see something on cnn.com or weather.com or something. And it creates this impression that you’re huge. You’re a big player, even though it could be a small team, right? Like I do this myself. I’m a speaker. I earned my living by speaking at conferences. If people go to my website, it puts a pic, it puts a cookie on their machine. I follow them around for 30 days and they see my ad on different websites. And so they’re like, man, and I’ll tell you where this happened, by the way, because my fourth book, uh, I wa I wanted to get a cover quote from, uh, Brian, Tracy, the speaker.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (19:02):

And so I went to his website and I contacted him. He never even returned my email. That’s fine. But for the next two, three, four weeks, I started seeing ads for him all over the place on all these different websites. And I was like, you son of a gun, look what you’re doing. You’re remarketing meat. He looked like a rockstar. And now he kind of is a rockstar. I’m not right. I’m a small player, but now I’m doing the same thing. And people who interact with my website, they see my, my, my ads come up all over the place for the next 30 days. And by the time they, they, they actually connect with me. They’re like, wow, you’re, you’re a big deal. That’s the opportunity. You can be big when you’re small, that’s the opportunity and digital advertising this paves the way.

Jim Rembach (19:47):

Alright. So when I start thinking about, uh, you know, all of the, what you’re talking about, and, and even going back to the whole salvage piece and the way things that are accelerating at an ever increasing pace, the pivot that iterate, I mean, all of these elements, I started looking at what I currently have in front of me and what I have to work with.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (20:05):

Yeah.

Jim Rembach (20:06):

Legit. So if I am in a B to B digital marketing role, and I have to work within the same budget, what would I take away from and put into,

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (20:15):

Um, you know, I would just say that, that, you know, the beauty of the online world is you can throw 500 bucks at something or a thousand bucks at something and get a pretty good data of whether or not it’s going to, and by the way, I never even fully answered your previous question. It’s the first a and salvaged analytics, right? Analytics is the opportunity is as far as B2B advertising goes, leveraging data is the opportunity. And you can present yourself to be huge. But yeah, if you’re, if you’ve got a limited budget, like I’m doing this right now, Amazon, and so I’ve thrown a campaign, I think I’ve spent $600. And I already know that, you know, certain things are working. Like I’ve got one category, uh, where I’ve made five sales in that category. And it’s the most sales I’ve had in any one category, but they’re expensive sales.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (21:07):

I’ve got a whole bunch of other categories where I’m not making as many, but they’re cheaper. And so like right now on Amazon, I’m targeting like over 50,000 keyword phrases. I mean, it’s just an enormous amount of keyword phrases. And so immediately $600. Like that’s what I’ve spent so far. And I’ve already, you know, like I targeted, for example, uh, you know, Tim Ferris, okay. Or Daniel pink or some of these well known authors, Malcolm Gladwell, like you can target the keyword phrase, Malcolm Gladwell, or Tim Ferriss, or the titles of their books, for example. So, and they’ve all written many books, so you can get a lot of keyword phrases very, very quickly. Well, it turns out that everyone’s targeting Tim Ferris’s books. So the clicks are like $3, $3 a click, just so you’re never going to make money selling a book. I’ve only got, you know, four or $5 profit in a book period.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (21:58):

So, but meanwhile, I can target 50,000 other keyword phrases, which are quirky, weird period phrases they’re hardly ever get hit, but when they do, no one else is targeting them and I can get those clicks for 20, 25 cents. So it’s, you know, I can get the same traffic. So the beauty of this is by the way that, uh, that if other people are trying to like reverse engineer, what I’m doing or replicate what I’m doing, it’s highly unlikely that they’re even going to know what I’m doing because the keyword phrases I’m targeting are really like long tail keyword phrases. So, so my, my advice is test like just put $500 towards something, a thousand dollars towards something, and then analyze the data like crazy and figure out what’s the most. Then your step two becomes obvious. So it’s not that you take away from, from Facebook and give it to YouTube. I don’t have that answer. Cause I think they each target different audiences, but there’s, there’s value again in taking small steps and iterating small steps, iterating small steps. Right.

Jim Rembach (22:59):

Well then that leads me to ask the question because I mean, you a big guy thinker, uh, I I’m like, okay, no constraints on you, Patrick. You know, I give you all the money that you, you need, you know, where are you going to invest it as a B2B digital marker?

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (23:14):

Yeah. I mean, this is, this is a great question, actually. So do you know by chance, do you know, Joel Olsteen Reacher is based in Texas. So that guy is on TV for a half hour, every Sunday with no commercials. Do you know what that costs? That’s expensive. I don’t know what it costs, but who pays for it? Joel, Olsteen pays for that. Okay. He pays for that. So, and then he knows, or by experience, he knows that he’s going to get enough in donations to pay for that and have some leftover, which goes to his ministry. Right. And Tony Robbins was on TV in the nineties, right. Who paid for that? Tony Robbins did Susie Orman. She did PBS specials, cost about 120 grand to be a, to do a PBS special Susie. Orman’s done that a couple of times. Wayne Dyer did that too.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (24:03):

So in, in my business, there’s a guy who I follow. Who’s a competitor of mine. His name is Jeremy Gucci’s from candidates. Great guy does an outstanding job as a speaker and as a futurist. But he has a video on YouTube, which is well optimized. And I also have well optimized videos on YouTube and it’s called like innovation, keynote speaker or something like that. And I’ve done that too. I’ve got a lot of videos. I’ve got 700 videos on YouTube. So I know roughly what kind of viewership you’re going to get just from an organic listing. Okay. And he might get 10, 20, 30,000 views, maybe 40,000 views of a video like that. Meanwhile, he has like six or 7 million views. Okay. On that. He bought those views. And I know he did cause I’ve seen the ads myself. So I’ve, I, I do ads on YouTube.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (24:50):

And for any kind of targeting here in the United States, you’re going to pay about 79 cents per view, roughly. Right. So you do the math. If he’s got 7 million views at 8 cents a piece, he spent $560,000 promoting the heck out of that video. So here’s the answer to the question, right? You never, you need to have a business model, which is good enough to pay for what you spent. Right. If you’re just throwing money away, there’s no point is no point in doing that. Okay. But like for example, a what’s that guy’s name grant Cardone, the 10 X rule, right? He has his book on the, on the very front table, in the Hudson bookstores of the airport that costs $70,000 a month to have your book there. Right. Good to great. Jim Collins. His book was there too. Why? Because both of them have big backends that can pay for it.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (25:44):

Right? So you have to find a business model where your conversion rate is enough to pay for the advertising you’re doing and then scale up as far and as fast as you possibly can. So a lot of people fantasize about how much money they want to make. Um, I fantasize about how much money I want to spend. Like I would love to spend a hundred thousand dollars a month profitably. I would love to do that right now. And what would I pick? Well, you just gotta test until you find one where you can scale up higher. So, and that’s what I’m trying to do on Amazon right now. I know a guy who’s spending thousands like five to 10,000 a month on Amazon and it’s not profitable, but it’s breakeven. It’s roughly break even. And his book is selling like crazy. It’s a book about gambling and horse racing and he he’s, he’s absolutely doing spectacularly well and it’s breakeven.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (26:36):

So he’s going to scale up as far as he can, until they won’t, there’s no more clicks left to buy. So that’s, that’s what I fantasize about is to have an advertising campaign that I could just scale and scale and scale. And if I had to pick one, just to answer your question, I would pick display ads, display ads on other websites. Cause you get implied credibility. If you’re running display ads on cnn.com or whatever Fox news or whatever it is, people, they, it creates a certain effect. I’ve heard this so many times in my career that people think it’s a big deal. Little, do they know that you can pay to be there, but to be running display ads at scale? Uh, I think that’s a huge opportunity. That’s what I do.

Jim Rembach (27:25):

Okay. So you, I mean, in order to kind of bring this all back home, because we talked about a lot of different things. I, I have to S I have to say, okay, if self reflection, time talking about it for a B to B digital marker, what is one vitally important question they need to be asking themselves?

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (27:42):

Mmm. I mean, conversion rate. I mean, it’s your conversion? Like where is the conversion the best. I mean, that that’s to, you know, I know that that’s just what I’m telling you is it’s not a question, that’s a destination. It’s a question. That’s the beginning of a journey, right? Because, and that’s always the way it is. Like, I, I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s responsible for someone to say, Hey, this is the answer to the problem, because it’s going to be literally different for every single product or service you try to sell. But if you always just look at that conversion rate, like what’s the conversion rate, and if you’re doing it at a loss, like you, you talk about the lifetime value of a customer. That’s another, uh, question that, that really cause, I mean, if you have a long life, so when you need is you need a series of products.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (28:29):

Like you got the front product that you’re selling, which is like your trip wire. It’s like, you’re in your lead magnet. Right. So it’s really good value. It’s cheap. And because the bottom line is like, if someone spends anything with you, $2, $1, $8, they’re eight times more likely to spend a second time than someone who’s never interacted with you at the beginning. So this, they call it a trip wire. So to have some sort of a trip wire where you’ve got a really good, you know, pretty good value, you might be selling it at a loss potentially, but it gets them in the funnel. And now you’ve got other things on the back end where you can get that you get more money from that same customer on average. I mean, not every single one, but on average, you’re going to get more money.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (29:10):

What does that allow you to do? It allows you to spend more for the initial interaction and still be breakeven or profitable, which means you can kill your competition. Like if your competition can spend $55 on a new per, on a new customer, but you can spend $85 on a new customer and still be breakeven or profitable, you’re going to rule the table. Right? So it’s always a question of like how much value can you get out of a customer? And in many times, if you’re, if you’re coming into the space with just one product or one service to sell, stop, don’t start there. Make sure you have at least three right. Three products where you’ve got a menu. You’ve got like, okay, there’s an always pick something more, more, more expensive. You know, like the most expensive gym, this is crazy. The most expensive iPhone that you can, or the Apple phone that you can buy is $114,000.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (30:04):

And it’s like encrusted with diamonds and all this crazy stuff always have a more expensive product. Like in the nineties, I studied marketing and finance when I went to university and that there was a very famous case history from the nineties, it’s in most marketing textbooks. And it talked about the grocery stores that had wine up until the nineties generally had wine in the $10 range and the $25 range in the mid nineties, early to mid nineties, they started carrying the $45 bottles. Nobody buys the $45 bottles, but it dramatically increases the sale of the $25 bottles. Okay. So you get a more expensive product not to sell it, but to have it available because it’s going to increase the sales of the ones lower down on the menu. So you have a menu of products, three, four, or five products in a, in a sliding scale from very cheap to very expensive. Then you go in right and start calculating that lifetime value, follow the data, make sure you maximize your conversion rate. And then you start to see, okay, I can spend $80, $200, a thousand dollars for a new customer, depending on what it is you’re selling. And then you can, you can make decisions that other people don’t even have access to.

Jim Rembach (31:18):

Oh, so Patrick, I’ll tell you your massive information. So his new book is pandemic inc, which was a written after the anarchy ink, and both of them are well worth your rate. So Patrick, I’ve enjoyed my time as usual. So how do B2B DM gang get in touch with you?

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (31:36):

You know, I mean, my website is, you know, I’m a speaker, so I, my website is geared towards that, but, but it’s a great way to get ahold of me if anyone has questions or they want to connect somehow the emails that get sent through the contact form. But my website, they literally come into my own email box and I still can get to most of them. Sometimes I offload a couple if it gets heavy, but for the most part, I reply to all the messages. So if anyone wants to get ahold of me, you know, it’s PatrickSchwerdtfeger.com. I know that’s a disaster, but it will get to me. You can even go to book patrick.com, which is a shorter version, which should forward a, but sometimes that’s glitchy. But yeah, my full name.com. If anyone’s interested, I’d love to connect

Jim Rembach (32:16):

Patrick Schwerdtfeger Thanks for sharing your knowledge and wisdom. And we wish you the very best.

Patrick Schwerdtfeger (32:20):

Thanks so much, Jim. I appreciate it.