Dylan (02:08):

Hell yeah, man, you met this guy. We could go at the geek-out conference and he knows this.

Zach (02:14):

Yeah, man, he done it only makes it rain, but he makes it snow. Uh it's uh, it's next level. These guys manage upwards of 60 million a year in media. We met at geek out mastermind, which is, I'd say pretty much, uh, where all the top world's media buyers hang out, um, which is pretty awesome place to meet folks. And, um, they're killing it in direct to consumer uh e-commerce and uh, they're beefing up their creative game. So we're going to get into it today. Let's get Daniel Snell on the show and welcome to the show. Daniel.

Daniel (02:49):

Thank you. I, I love the tagline making it's now

Zach (02:56):

We definitely make it rain. We make it snow. I love it. So tell everybody a little bit about what you're up to these days.

Daniel (03:03):

Yeah, so, um, right now I'm focused on building our, uh, our agency. There's no agency, um, we're full service agency. At this point, we would be focused primarily on direct consumer brands. Um, whether it be helping them on paid social search, creative web design, landing pages, et cetera. Um, we, we have, you know, deep expertise in all, all areas that essentially go into the return ad spend and scale that everyone wants. So yeah. How big is y'all's team over there? We have, um, I believe almost 75 employees now.

Dylan (03:38):

Okay. Oh yeah.

Zach (03:41):

That's great, man. So tell everybody what is working now? What is this rich ed that is absolutely slaying it for you or one of your accounts?

Daniel (03:50):

I would say the rich ad for us has been, um, I mean it's more so like a series of rich ads that like, if that's okay and I will maybe just like take you, take it through the sequence of like how we structure that or do you want just one ad? So is the sequence dude a cool, a cool thing that we did with one of our own internal brands, um, that w that led to probably are today, even still like our, our, our largest, um, amount we were spending for an account, um, or, you know, time period, what was, was for our brand perfect skull. And essentially what we were selling at the time was, was, uh, was, was bras push-up bras that were strapless, backless, et cetera. And when we started, we, we launched it with, with the primary focus of just, you know, w when you think, uh, you know, aspirational, like we've got models, we got beautiful women, this, that, although I quote unquote Instagram girls, right.

Daniel (04:49):

And what we found was that a lot of the feedback we pay attention to customer feedback. And a lot of them were saying that like they had, you know, this can never fit for a woman with huge boobs, just couldn't fit for women with small boobs. This, this, this only works with women with plastic moves, it doesn't work. So like we deconstructed that and then literally just follow the customer feedback and then essentially broke our entire marketing strategy from content to landing pages and everything in between to match each customer persona, and simply doing that allowed us to go for, I think, spending like a thousand dollars a day to spending $50,000 a day at like a three X return on ad, spend it in just a 30 day time period, um, million and a half dollars a month at one point or a million dollars a month, depending on which month

Zach (05:39):

She basically went from Victoria secret to Haynes, like in less than 30 days.

Daniel (05:44):

Yeah. Yeah, no, Pretoria is secret and now is doing, is kind of going that model like that they got rid of their,

Zach (05:50):

You know, they should not do that right now. They're

Daniel (05:55):

Doing more plus sized women, et cetera. So it gets out to the point, like people want products that they can see are designed for them. If you're, you know, most women are not the aspirational, you know, five foot 11 super insanely slender. Like, and if you can't imagine that product on you, because that's, who's in the video, how are you supposed to buy it? Um, and the same thing can be applied to every single product category. If you're not creating content for that specific target persona, whether it be how they look, how they talk, how they, you know, their age, gender, everything that goes into that, um, it's going to be tough to get the return ad spend you want. So we kind of took that same process now, and we apply it to, to, uh, all of our clients, no matter what, what they're selling, it doesn't have to be just a bra, you know? Um, so, so, yeah, that was, that was a really, really interesting thing. We, we took away from that

Dylan (06:51):

Nancy you're essentially having, you know, custom creative, custom Landers for the different personas essentially, and kind of just ramping all those babies up independently.

Daniel (06:58):

Exactly. So we, you know, we, we, we, we found, you know, a bunch of women with small breasts w with the bras, then on the, on the, on the, on the landing page, we wrote, you know, this is why it works for women with small breasts. This is the problem. And solves, did that regular breaths, large breasts, super large breasts, like, et cetera, et cetera, um, and made, you know, the content cut to landing page cohesive in that manner and describe how it works for them. You know, then on the targeting side, you can target those different, um, kind of, uh, what people are in the market to buy based on a lot of those features can use, look like, so people with their purchasing per size of the bra or which landing page they bought it from, which obviously means, you know, different things. So that's kind of our targeting process behind that as well, to kind of go along with the content,

Dylan (07:45):

I'll go super-intense with like interests and like lookalikes to kind of make it as relevant as possible, or is it more of let the ad optimize and show it to whoever Facebook thinks that good fit is? Because I would imagine you maybe have it set up by campaigns and each one just hitting a different pocket within the same angle. So I'm kind of curious how y'all approach that side of things. And what's the most scalable from what you see.

Daniel (08:04):

Um, I, I like to do both. I don't think there's any reason to do one or the other. Um, I'm always, you know, someone who's big on testing. Um, I also don't think that unless you're, you're spending a mass amount of money, like overlap doesn't matter tremendously, right. If you're spending a thousand dollars a day, so it was like, oh, I don't want to do a, you know, a 1% lookalike and this other random audience is we're going to have overlap. Like it's, you know, that doesn't take into consideration when you have very large audiences. So, um, yeah, I'm always down, down to test in some of our best audiences have been for sustained periods of time have been some of those like interest based audiences, um, that represented like what, who, who essentially represented the people in the content. So, yeah,

Dylan (08:51):

Judge, a qualified test here. Do y'all have a, kind of a set sand, Hey, we're spending 30 K a month probably going to put three K to, you know, these kinds of tests, more or less to kind of gauge if they work or you have any kind of framework on how you are kind of testing that to gauge, okay, this is relevant, this ramp it up. Um, or is it kind of case by case by account

Daniel (09:08):

Case by case? Just because everyone, the amount of content everyone has predicated on how much we can test. So if we set that rule, like, yeah, it's set 20% of your budget to testing and they don't have enough content to test and meet the criteria, or they might have more, you know, it's, it's a lot of it is predicated just on how much, how much content we have to test. Because like, as you know, like testing audiences, isn't like all that much. If you don't have the right content testing audiences, isn't going to take a dead ad and turn it into a winning ad. So, um, a lot of that testing is predicated based on how much content we have available to us. One

Dylan (09:44):

Final question on the rich outside when it comes to these kinds of creative tests, do you do kind of do what they were mentioned at the geek out conference? You know, just a solo ad set ABO just kind of feed one specific ad in there to kind of make sure Facebook doesn't allocate that budget like crazy. Is that kind of what y'all do to see what works best? Yeah.

Daniel (10:01):

That's exactly what I do. Um, or what I tell our team to do. Um, yeah, I mean, it's just, it's just very simple. Like, you know, I've seen it many, many times, you have the best ad in the world. If you do put into a, you know, an ad set that that's having success has three to five ads or whatever, like it's probably not going to spend. And then you can just say, you know, the ad might just never do anything simply because you didn't get enough ad spend to it. So it's all ad spent. I mean, ad buying in general is all about like speed and learning from that. Um, and the best way to learn is to, is to dedicate, spend towards that at, so doing that process, which was the single ad set budget, um, is, is, is, is, is, is my opinion the way to

Dylan (10:45):

Go, oh, hell yeah, a little nugs getting dropped into here, man. I'm loving this. So we'll add sequencing definitely works, especially with what y'all are doing with something you thought would have killed that absolutely flopped let's dive into this poor ad segment here.

Speaker 5 (11:02):

[inaudible]

Daniel (11:03):

So this is something that I think just in general, um, I feel like, I mean, at least for our clients, the like super high produced ads have never gotten that return that a lot of people want, you know, when we were running our own brands, they were, the return ad spend was a lot lower than just the user generated content. Um, a client whores recently spent $75,000 on one of the, you know, the viral video of like agencies that you guys see. Um, and I'm still wanting to get into names and whatnot. They spent $75,000 on it, which is an insane amount of money. I mean, you think about all the things you could do with that, you know, all the celebrities, you could have gotten all the influencers, all the content you had got all that and like this at the same time, a lot of people go with these like crazy videos, um, that are super high end. And I feel like more often than not these videos just flop and it's tough to even do anything with it because that raw content, like it's tough to, you know, maybe you could splice it in with some videos, but it just like, you know, the way video doesn't work, there's not much you can do. Um, versus like, at least if you're doing something with, let's say influencers for that budget, at least you're getting some likeness or some type of awareness. So like we

Zach (12:22):

Could have, if we had a dollar for every time we heard on the show premium, like overproduced creative, like doesn't work, I'd have $10 at least. Yeah. And then I would say seven,

Dylan (12:38):

I'm just kidding. Killer example, dude. They had a pretty, you know, hot sauce versus like, you know, a 1520 K video and man that the free hot sauce tests and killed that little festival. So it's kind of interesting there for sure. Yeah.

Zach (12:51):

It's like it coincides with, uh, know your metrics and know your numbers, right. That's that's number two. So, uh, Danielle glad he didn't say that as

Daniel (13:02):

A, I would say also, especially because this was a newer brand doing it. Like if you're a new brand doing it and you might, you might have some money now, you think you'd do it like that doesn't make sense. Like if you're a new brand, you should be focusing on who's buying your product for all the reasons I said initially on, um, on like what we learned, right. If I made a a hundred thousand dollars video with the wrong person in the video video, doesn't work. Even if I'm saying all the right things, video does not work. So, especially when you're launching a brand, you need to be focused, focused and honing in on who's really the customer buying your product, what resonates with them, which are unique value propositions, which problems, et cetera, et cetera. So then maybe you can consider investing in a video like that. If you don't have all that information dialed in, you know, the like, like the like likelihood of that type of video working is like very low. So for, especially for new brands, they should solely be focused on like demographics on other stuff. I mentioned before they think about getting into videos like that,

Dylan (14:07):

That was juicy. I couldn't agree more, man. The amount of brands you see to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, it's pretty fricking unreal these days now, final piece of the pie, man, the name of the podcast, we'd love to kind of meet the crossroads between marketing and the financial side of things. So what kind of, you know, financial tips or principles, can you kind of share with the audience based off your expertise? I know y'all are launching, you know, the creative side hardcore. So I mean, I'd love to get some kind of feedback on what kind of tips you kind of bring out there. I would

Daniel (14:35):

Say that the number one tip I would say is to just know your numbers. I mean, it sounds like there's a few that I know, but like we work with so many clients and they're just, they like, you know, I mean the first part we do now in our onboarding is to develop or attempt to develop real KPIs for return on ad spend about your business, that our database, a lot of people just make up numbers. And you know, I want a two X because I want a five X because this guy's getting a five X, I want an eight X here's, some clients I want an eight X, um, uh, rule for business. If you want to grow, you don't, you do not want any decks. Right? If you have an eight X, like it's, it's a problem you should strive for a lot less, you know, because I, in my opinion, getting an eight X, like you can't, you know, you're probably not spending enough money. If you're getting a need X, you should be spending a lot more money. Um, so that that's the number one tip is to really understand your numbers, to develop real KPIs that are backed by data and not backed by just, you know, your intuition, really just your, I want to

Zach (15:34):

Push back on you. I'm just, I hear this all the time, know your numbers. I do think like the best part of what you said though, is like, you can't just want numbers because somebody else has them. Right. Cause like everybody says, know your numbers, but I think that there's really like why does somebody go about picking a number to, as a KPI is some gold. Um, and just cause you know, somebody who's getting a cost, you know, CPA of X is completely not related to your business, uh, in the, in

Dylan (16:06):

The, like the near term, right? Oh yeah. I'd even be curious to kind of bring up. I mean, when you have a bad-ass client you're dying to work with and they're like, Hey, we're looking for, you know, five to six acts or something kind of out of the norm when it's out of reach or just unrealistic, how do you kind of get them back on those kinds of train tracks to kind of set expectations. So what's being realistic if they're really trying to drive growth versus just like a bad-ass return.

Daniel (16:29):

So it's, uh, so the question was, what do we do if they don't want to scale

Dylan (16:34):

Or say you have a really bad account you've been dying to work with? So, I mean, you're kind of pulling a little strings there, but of course they want, you know, an eight to 10 X just because that's what they see online. How do you kind of realign those expectations to be more realistic and really help them focus on growth versus a bad-ass row? As you know,

Daniel (16:51):

Uh, some, I mean, we, we, we come to, you know, end up coming to conclusion that like some clients, not everyone wants to grow, that's really, it can't force everyone to grow. Cause growing isn't just on the ad buying side, right. We have to do our there's. You also have to operate the business. So not everyone wants to grow, uh, and grow aggressively as you know, um, for some entrepreneurs like us, like, you know, might, might be hard to, uh, fully, fully, uh, see that, but that's kind of like a, um, conclusion that we make in certain scenarios. Um, because, you know, in order to, you might not have, you know, you're, you're manufacturing dialed in, which means you have to now work a lot harder. Like there's a lot of instances like that w we've seen that, um, allows people to just want to stay super high margin instead of acquiring tons of customers.

Daniel (17:45):

Um, but the other, the other thing I want to talk about was just on the creative was that really just honing in on, you know, a lot of people talk about like, oh, the return ads and this, that, but for us, it's, it's the number one metrics we're looking at. Our click-through rate is probably the number one, uh, most indicative metric that we look at for, for performance. Um, and how that, you know, how that impacts the cost per click. And then obviously when you compare it to your earnings per click, you can then see kind of like the return on ad spend. You're getting. So it's a very, very simple re like ratio to see. And a lot of people say like, oh, you know, why aren't I getting a positive return on ad spend? Well, it's probably because one of those reasons you're paying too much for click your ads are probably not engaging enough. Um, or your CPMs are probably too high. Not all the times you can change your CPMs, which is tough. But, um, at the end of the day, if you typically increase your click through rates, CPCs tend to tend to come down. Um, and that's where a lot of our focus. So yeah,

Speaker 6 (18:48):

This episode is brought to you by funnel Dash's add card, the only charge card exclusively for your digital ad spend in partnership with MasterCard. And if you are an aggressive affiliate filling with dozens of ad accounts, or you are in gray hat or black hat verticals, such as drop shipping CVD or other verticals where you're dealing with ad accounts, getting shut down business managers, getting shut down, or even deep platform from platforms like Facebook and Google, then you absolutely need to check out funnel dash as ad card. We give you unlimited free virtual debit and credit card. So you can have a dedicated card for every single ad account campaign, and you can attach any name and address and the U S you have complete anonymous entity on a card and at the card level, plus one of my favorite features is that you don't have to pre fund or even top off like most typical virtual card solutions today. So if this is you and you're operating these verticals, whether you're an agency or an advertiser, then checkout add card@funneldash.com. All right. I want

Zach (19:52):

To know about your creative creation process. You guys have been investing quite a bit into your creative studio at the snow agency. Give us a little bit of insight as to how you're scaling content.

Daniel (20:03):

Yeah. We're, we're scaling content, um, and our, in our creative studio, all. So, uh, number one, the interesting thing that we're doing there for, for clients that are spending enough money is we're now doing a creative leasing program essentially, where like they don't have to pay money upfront. It's just strictly based on, um, the ad spend, we take a piece of that on, on that end. So that's

Zach (20:27):

Amazing creatively. Like, I love

Daniel (20:31):

That. Yeah. So that's something really interesting that we're, we've started rolling out that

Zach (20:36):

If I want like a video, what, what percentage of spend will you charge me for, for like a range to license that creative

Daniel (20:44):

10 to 15% based on how much you're spending?

Zach (20:47):

Oh, the so it's like, it's no different than your management fee or is it

Daniel (20:51):

Yeah, so it's essentially, you know, cause obviously creative creating creative has a lot of costs involved of a lot of like the one I mentioned, you know, many people don't want to bite the bullet upfront. So essentially we're willing to, to bet on our creative. Um, and you only pay if you're, if it's obviously performing. So that's something pretty, pretty, uh, unique that, that we've been pushing out. Um, and it removes any kind of makes it a no-brainer for the brands, right? Because typically creative is the bottleneck and why don't they do creative because they have to pay so much, well, if you don't have to pay that money upfront, like, you know, this is something that, you know, potentially be interested in. So yeah,

Zach (21:36):

I love it. I mean, it's a totally different way of selling agency services. I mean, you're still priced similarly to a lot of other folks in the media buying agency shop, but you can lead with creative and have a great guarantee and risk reversal and positioning. It is licensing creative as a way sexier, Hey, we're a full service agency. That's going to charge 10 to 15% of your spend. Um, and we'll, you know, and we'll create creative that may or

Dylan (22:11):

May not be good, but may or may not work. That's cool, man. Yeah. I've never heard that. Now go back to something you kind of mentioned on the click through rate, when, what y'all look at, is it just the generic click through rate or link click-through rate

Daniel (22:26):

W when click through rate is what I'm typically looking at

Dylan (22:29):

And do y'all just push above 2%. Is that typically a good KPI? There are

Daniel (22:34):

Definitely 2% is definitely a good goal. If you're over 1%, we typically say it's healthy. Um, but to first, if you're, if you're above 2%, that's like very ideal, you know? Yeah.

Zach (22:48):

Danny, you've been amazing guests, man, by far the most efficient guests that we've had for sure. And most productive, I feel like you've been able to accomplish so much in the last 30 minutes. Well, just sharing knowledge bumps I got for you. I love it. So tell everybody, uh, how we can support you and how folks can get in touch.

Daniel (23:07):

Yeah. So if anyone wants, w you know, if anyone I guess is, is interested in, in content, we are in our studio, does a lot of branded content, photo content, video content, um, obviously direct response content like we discussed. Um, yeah. And if you want to get in touch, you can follow me on social media. My Instagram is Deford DAPP ER, Twitters. I am dance now. Um, and if you would email me dan@thisnewagency.com, so yeah.

Dylan (23:37):

Oh yeah, man. Well much appreciated, man. Thanks for jumping on.

Daniel (23:41):

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 5 (23:48):

[inaudible]

Speaker 6 (23:49):

For listening to another episode of the rich ed or ed podcast, if you're like me and listen to podcasts on the go, go ahead and subscribe on apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and rich dad, poor dad.com/podcast. And if you absolutely love the show, go ahead and leave a review and a comment share with a friend. If you do take a copy screenshot of it, email me zach@funneldash.com. Show me you left a review and I'll give you a free copy of the rich add or add book. Learn more about the book, go to rich ed parra.com to leave a review that a rich ed or ed.com/review. Thanks again.

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