Murtaza Bambot: I actually think the first thing that I wanted to touch on was just you talked a little bit about, getting your first customers and even just giving it away for free to the first few in exchange for a testimonial.
At what point do you feel like, Hey, I've done enough to validate the offer and now I wanna start investing in marketing? When does that switch flip?
Drew Donaldson: We're gonna get into this in a a little bit later in, in the presentation. But just to give a little bit of a preview, I'm a big fan of paid media.
That's how I grew my agency. It's how I grow most of my clients' businesses. The thing with paid media is you have to have the stomach for it, right? You have to be willing to say, you know what? I'm gonna spend $50 a day on this. I'm gonna try it for 10 days. I'm gonna see if it works. If it works, great.
Awesome. If we know the offer or offer's valid, we get the discovery calls on our calendar. We're booking people into the community. Great. If it doesn't, you've, you have spent a good amount of money, but you've saved a lot of time. And so when we look at like this idea of organic marketing, if you spend all of your time trying to trying to make it big through organic marketing, it's a little bit like playing basketball.
But why? And hoping you're gonna get drafted by the Lakers. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. Yeah, you could get drafted by the Lakers. Maybe it's, the Laker coach will happen to stop by your local gym. Chances are that's not gonna happen though. So if you really want if you are looking to validate an offer, there's no quicker way than paid media.
And so instead of burying that, three months down into your marketing plan, I would do it. Day one, I would craft an offer, which is conveniently what we're gonna talk about next. And push it out there as soon as possible, because, At the end of the day, there's a lot of people that follow this methodology.
They launch and then they realize that their offer just isn't valid. It just, it doesn't have the traction and they need to go back and re rework it. Much better to spend $500 now and find that out than pay thousands of dollars in ancillary marketing expenses, only to find out six months down the road when now you don't get that time back.
Murtaza Bambot: Super, super helpful. And then we had a second question that came in from Shelton, which was if you can talk a little bit about, more about what you mean by
Drew Donaldson: paid media. And paid media. Personally, I'm a big investor in TikTok in terms of their ad platform. It currently, that is the one that has the highest r o i from all the ones we tested.
We used to be big into pay-per-click. Pay-per-click worked all right, but it just it relied too heavily on having a great landing page and having all of that stuff perfect. And when you're paying in the marketing space, $8 a click that burns through a budget pretty quickly. Facebook it's, it's where everybody starts.
'cause it's the cheapest, it's also the lowest quality leads that you'll ever get in your life. I was a big proponent of Facebook. I grew my business pretty well on Facebook initially, but over the past year or so the performance on those platforms for coaches, consultants specifically, it's just in the tank.
Whereas TikTok really does a good job, but paid media could be anything. If you're trying to run a big national campaign, that could be buying spots on Hulu, it could be buying local airtime during the football game. Paid media is just anything that you pay for to get exposure versus your organic stuff, which is just you posting on social and hoping that it goes viral or that people see it naturally in their feet.
Caitie Gehlhausen: And I have a question myself too, drew. You said that, with paid media, you need to be able to have the stomach for testing things out. And at what point do you do you see if something's working or not working as opposed to you just need to test it for a longer period of time, or maybe you haven't tested all like marketing to all the right niches,
Drew Donaldson: so I used to be a big proponent of you need to do 30 to 60 days, because that's what Facebook would always say. And if you ask their ad experts, they'll say, oh, 30 to 60 days and you need to spend, x $20 a day or whatever. But what I've found is you actually can find out whether stuff works or not much, much quicker.
So we're right now on a 10 day sprint where when we launch an ad, we do $50 a day for 10 days. It's a $500 ad spend. At the end of 10 days, you're gonna know if it works. Hands down, like it's there's no there, there will not be a question in your mind about whether or not the ad work. Now, depending on if you're doing lead ads versus conversion ads, that might show up, that might show other issues in your funnel, right?
If you're running an online store, you're trying to convert people for a web class or something like that, and you're getting tons and tons of clicks, and then they get to the page and then there's no one converting that points to a problem with the page, right? There's something about that.
The ad that's really compelling and then they get to the page and it's not so hot. So depending on what your target is, I tend to go for leads and meetings. I would assume most people on here are probably either going for leads and meetings or conversions. So you know, really if you're spending $50 a day, you should be able to test your ads in a 10 day period and have plenty of data to know Okay, do I need to fix the landing page?
Do I need to fix the ad? Is there something else broken in it? If you're doing lead gen, it's a good enough time to see are people interested enough to give you their email for a white paper a free class, that kind of thing. So that's how I would approach it.
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