Ben Jones on Effective YouTube Ad Strategies

[00:00:00] 

Jim Banks: So joining me on today's episode, I've got Ben Jones, who's coming to us from the west coast of Australia in Perth. Good to see you, Ben. How are you?

Ben Jones: Yeah. Very, very good. yeah, great to be here. Thank you. Thank you, Jim. Super excited to be here and share some cool stories and thank you everyone for your time and hopefully we can deliver some value on the podcast today.

Overview of Titan Marketer
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Jim Banks: you're the CEO of, a business called Titan Marketer,specialized heavily on YouTube ads. So tell us a little bit about your business. 

Ben Jones: Yeah. Look, we're, we obviously specialize in YouTube advertising. We're a done for you agency, so, we do do that. We did used to do a whole bunch of consulting and training and things, but we just had a look at the clients who were getting results and they were the ones that we actually worked on. So, but we used to run events and I've done speaking from stages and I'm actually heading to Social Media Marketing World to speak there.

This weekend. so all of that kind of stuff. So I think I'd be pretty globally recognized on YouTube advertising. We do run ads on the other platforms, however, we find that, we take a client who stay spending [00:01:00] 30 50 K on ads or more after about three or four months, I'll end up with about 80% of their budget in YouTube ads instead of Facebook Ads.

So, and so we, we work with a lot of that and I think YouTube ads is just really well primed at the moment. but what we do basically is we, we kind of work with service-based businesses, lead gen predominantly. anyone that's got a, a lifetime barrier of a client like 5K and up, works really, really well for, for YouTube advertising.

So that's kind of who we work with. Look, we've generated millions of dollars in sales across just about every industry you could think of, from go-karting to coaches and consultants to service-based businesses like roofers and builders, and. Through to high ticket coaching and people running massive events.

so it really doesn't matter who, who you are. If you're running some sort of, marketing or paid advertising for lead generation, and you've got, you're not selling a $20 product, YouTube ads are gonna be your friend. So.

Jim Banks: So, I mean, I, as this is [00:02:00] kind of like right up my wheelhouse. It's, obviously you, you, you're talking my language. 

Challenges with YouTube and Google Ads
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Jim Banks: the, the thing, the thing I found with, with, with YouTube ads, I mean, I've been doing YouTube ads since they, they sort of first had the opportunity to kind of do it. and what, what, what I found was that, that a lot of advertisers would try, try it, get absolutely slaughtered, and then just go, oh, I can't do that anymore. Isn't, it's not working. Same with Google Display Network. They would always try GDN, get crucified and then go, oh, it just doesn't work. Right. And I think the reality of it is, is it clearly does work, as, and I think probably we're both testimony to the fact that that's, that's the case.

but I think what, what what's happened more recently is, Google have introduced Performance Max, right. 

Performance Max Campaigns Discussion
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Jim Banks: As a way of helping those people that maybe struggled with, with YouTube Ads and Display Network to kind of do better with it by just going, let us take control of everything. Right. And I just wonder what your thoughts were on sort of p max as far as

Ben Jones: I've, I've banned it in my agency completely. one condition is, and the reason for that is [00:03:00] yes, you'll get cheap leads if you want cheap leads for underperformance of banks campaigns, but the quality of the leads are rubbish. Right? So like if, well, I don't know. In my experience, you are two or so, Darren, but the. You agree? Okay, cool. So we're on the same page, but so, and like if you want to actually, like, we work with a lot of people who have sales teams, for example. And half the battle we paid advertising is crap leads. So then the worst thing is you pay for a bad lead and then a sales person is a waste of their time ringing the bad lead, right?

and not all leads are created equal. And I think for Performance Max campaigns, if you actually run them against YouTube campaigns or search campaigns or any type of intent campaign, or even like half decent Facebook Ads and you actually have a look at like, what is that lead to sale ratio? I can tell you right now that in no universe, well Performance Max match, there's only been one exception to that rule where we've seen and we test obviously like everyone else, Performance Max work.

Well, [00:04:00] and that's where like we've got a client that's got, like thousands of thousands of conversion data points they're spending of heaps and heaps and heaps on ads. And then you can bring them in. and even then it needs super tight guide rails and it's just not worth the drama. however, I have seen if that work for a software as a service company offer.

again, they'd spent millions of dollars in ads and we just come in and they were already running it and we were like,and then we ended up with most of their budget and YouTube after a little while anyway, because after working with their sales teams, even though they were like, let's say $10 leads, the $30 leads were getting on YouTube, cost per sale were just way better.

Like by the time you add up all the crap leads and it just, it, it, while it looked good on the front end, it looked horrible on the back end. So, and that was the best case, the best case I've ever seen. The rest of it has just been rubbish every time. And if I ever, if we have a media buyer in our team who even mentions the word, they have to have a very good argument.

They haven't had one that's changed my [00:05:00] mind in the last six months. So,

Jim Banks: yeah, it's funny, I, I do a lot of, judging for search awards and things like that and, what's, what really kind of amazes me is how many people submit an entry for, to win an award. And it's like, we ran a performance Max campaign. I'm like, then you've done nothing. Right? Because, 'cause ultimately Google are in complete control then of everything about it, right?

I mean, I know that they're slowly, slowly unlocking. Elements of, of data that, most advertisers say they're desperate to have. Right. Google have always used this. Oh, it's 'cause of privacy. We can't give you that information. And I go, well, that's complete crap. Right? I, I don't, I don't accept that for one second.

They just don't want to give it to you. Right. Because if they give it to you, then you'll see the things that they're doing that, that perhaps you would not want them to do. Right. And you'd be saying, right. I don't want to have that. Right. I think that's the, that was always the thing I, I found when I was set up a YouTube ad ads campaign.

Or to see somebody if did an audit, they would, they would be running YouTube ads. When you actually look at the placements, right, you, again, you can kind of, you can almost see, like I've always maintained [00:06:00] nobody that, that,gets a, a lead or a click from a.cc or a dot, like some weird random TLD will never ever get a lead from that domain, right?

So, so for me, again, I, I used to sort of spend all my time building kind of exclusion lists. It seemed, to me, it seemed a bit like sort of whack-a-mole, right? You kind of just keep, keep hitting the ones that don't work, don't work, don't work, don't work until you eventually land on the ones that do. but as, as you say, like the, the challenge with, with leads is like, yes, it's a, it's a ones and zeros thing to Google, right?

This either a lead was generated and if it's, if it is right in the absence of any feedback to, to the country to say that that actually progressed to a decent value sale, right? The, the, the kind of Google will just continue to try and find. The same sort of thing, right? And if it's a poor quality lead without that feedback loop, then they're gonna send you more poor quality leads, right?

And ultimately they'll optimize towards that. And then you end up with the scale, right? People go, wow, I've got a thousand leads. And, and, and they go, how great are we? Pat [00:07:00] themselves on the back. But that's not the reality of it. The reality of it is, is that there might only be 10 or 15 leads at that thousand that are actually of any value whatsoever.

Ben Jones: Well, the, the other problem to it is, as an, as an agency, it's a disservice to your clients, right? So then I think this is where a lot of new or beginner agencies who start running Performance Max go look how, how clever are we? We're getting new heaps of good leads. And then, two or three months after that.

But the, there's, if you're working with the sales team or someone who's actually dealing with the leads, they're literally gonna be like, these leads are crap. I can't deal with them. we're paying you to give us stuff that doesn't work. and that'll be the end of it, like if you're a churn and burn agency and you only wanna keep your clients for two or three months and then repeat the whole process again.

Which horrible model by the way. But there's heaps of people who love to do that in that agency space. And,it's a great, it's a great tool for that. But if you, if you wanna keep your clients like, for a long time, that's, it's a Oracle setup. So, yeah. And I think more of those,more of those [00:08:00] algorithm based, ad platforms are gonna come.

I mean, look at Facebook and over their lead gen stuff. If you don't put pre-qualifies before the form, you're gonna have the same sort of problem. and even if you look at,what they're doing with YouTube at the moment, and they're moving to, they're forcing everyone into the demand gen in a couple of months.

whether you, for all your video action campaigns, it's kind of a similar vibe, but I feel that one's a bit, got a bit more meat behind it. But, yeah, I think going forward that the whole goal of these platforms are to remove agencies and just try and make the algorithm run all the ads for people.

But I think it's, they're not clever enough to do it yet, basically. So.

Jim Banks: I think they, again, I think, Google have been trying to get rid of agencies for forever, right? And, and as you say, the, the, the good agencies, the ones that, that kind of actually add value to their clients. Like, they're, they're, they're incredibly valuable to them. But I think, there are definitely a lot of fly by night, Agencies that sort of set up rip clients off, and [00:09:00] then they lose the client. And then I, I think that the, the thing I've always found is sometimes when I talk to somebody who's a prospective new client, right, I always kind of ask the question of, who's doing it before? And if they say, well, we've had three agencies doing it before, you're on a hiding to nothing.

Right? Because you absolutely know they're gonna hold your feet to the fire for all of the bad work that the people that came before you have done. Right. And, and sometimes, I mean, I, I always remember I, I'd sort of take over a new account. You start doing it and they go, well, the previous agencies didn't do that.

And I'm like, well, you fired them, right? You, you got rid of them as an agency, so why would I do the same thing that they've been doing? Right. And I think sometimes that's, that's when, you have that sort of challenge. 

Effective YouTube Ad Strategies
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Jim Banks: So what, what, what I, I guess I'd be, it'd be remiss me to have, not have a YouTube expert like yourself on, on the show and not talk about what's, what do you see as being the secret sauce for success with YouTube advertising?

Ben Jones: look, I think there's probably two parts to it. One of it's definitely targeting, there's a whole bunch of like cool targeting you can do with YouTube, but I think the other part of it is, [00:10:00] is the creative and the ads that you run. which again, you've got a lot of freedom with YouTube advertising.

It's video based ads, so you can do a lot of cool stuff, with it. But I think that I'll just come back to the first one. I think the targeting's a big one. like, I literally, we just went back through the agency and just read through a presentation like what are the top targeting, methods in YouTube advertis now.

When I mean top, I mean after spending, millions of dollars on ad spend, we actually went through all our accounts and had a look at like, which ones are the most profitable by return on ad spend across multiple industries. So not just like one industry. And I pretty much broke down the following.

Like the, the best targeting is gonna be the warm audience targeting. I don't care what platform you write on, YouTube, Facebook, whatever it is. so anyone who knows, likes and Trust Union on your email list, anyone who's a customer, if you've got your CRM hooked up to your ad, platform, making sure that that's automatic.

And then the next thing after that, that [00:11:00] everyone misses with Google and YouTube ads, like if every single client we get doesn't do this, and it's just ridiculous. And that is to actually, if, if you've got a YouTube channel, for example. So first up, connect a YouTube channel to Google Ads account. But anyone who's a subscriber or watches your videos or likes or comments. Visits are YouTube paid. Those people are like the highest return on ad spend that you're gonna run YouTube ads to. it's absolute particular subscribers. It's absolutely ridiculous. We've had clients come with thousands and thousands of subscribers that I've never shown ads to, which just boggles my brain, right?

So, so yeah, look, that's the big one there. You warm audiences, start there. and then when it gets into the cold audiences, if you had have asked me this time last year, the answer was different, but this year it surprised me. It was different. Like obviously with the release of Demand Gen campaigns, last year, we had greater access to that and we were playing around with it and, and I was like, Hey [00:12:00] guys, this is something you gotta get into and what you can do with the Demand Gen Ads is, is run lookalike audiences.

now my opinion of demand gen ads is basically, I. It's, it's, Facebook Ads for YouTube is what I've coined it as. 'cause I've just tried to make it.

Jim Banks: I almost think that that's what they've, they set it up for, right? They thought we are missing out on all this, because a lot of people say, I start on Facebook and warm the audience up there, and then I close them on, on Google or YouTube and, and people go, go, Google must have sat there and gone.

We are missing out on all this, this mileage we could have keep getting on our platform completely. Right? So.

Ben Jones: yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. And, and looking at it like, if you look at how much ad spend spent in Facebook Ads, I think it's over 150 billion. I know this gonna story press on it. And then in Google, the whole of Google Ads is only like 30 billion. So Facebook is just, it is, I don't know if it's 10 times or whatever it is, seven or eight times larger in terms of ad spend.

Now if you look at the Google platform, particularly YouTube ads. You look at the things that they've tried, they've tried [00:13:00] to make it a better product. Like the, the view duration on your ads is 30 seconds. You only pay when they click. they, they, they don't have all the same, they don't ban your accounts and then all these problems that Facebook has, and they say, oh, we'll have a better product.

But then anyone who tries to run YouTube ads or your Google Ads, particularly YouTube ads, the actual platforms are quite hard to deal with. and then they've got a new interface. And if you make that transition, it's quite hard to do. and I think that's a problem. So I think this time round Google sat down and gone.

Well, if we just make it the same as Facebook Ads, why don't we resurrect the dead similar audience as we killed back in 23? We'll call them lookalike audience 'cause everyone understands what that is. And we'll even give them a breakdown by percentages. They'll set up conversion banks campaigns that are pretty similar to how you would do it in Facebook Ads.

And and that's what they've done. And. And in all fairness, I think it's working. the, the, that the, the, the fact that it's Facebook Ads on YouTube with the YouTube [00:14:00] targeting just gives you so much more freedom. And what we're finding is the highest return on ad spend at the moment is the 2.5% lookalike audiences of all your warm audiences, which is exactly what you would do on Facebook, Brad, we've just haven't had the opportunity to do that on YouTube until 12 months ago.

So, yeah, that's the next one. So really, really simple. You're starting with YouTube. Run the run your, your warm audiences, then create look a lax. And then from there, you want to steal your competitors' traffic, which is basically custom URL domains. Go get your competitors' URLs, basically anyone who's visiting sites that site or sites like it think a little bit deeper, like their landing pages or their checkout pages.

And, that's your next one. And then you can get into customer affinities or whatever you want. But that's gonna give you way, that's gonna give you heaps of scope to get started. So

Jim Banks: Yeah. And this, and, and again, I, I always, I'm always amazed at just how much volume like they have, right? I mean, huge, huge amount of volume.

Ben Jones: it's just [00:15:00] soapy.

yeah. yeah, I don't know. Sorry, I kind of went on a tangent there for a second, but

Jim Banks: No, no, no. Like I said, the whole, the whole beauty of, of these podcasts is they go where they go, right? I mean, I,we just kind of strap a strap, a strap, a saddle on and just go for a ride, right? And, and, where wherever we end up, this is where we end up. so yeah, I, I, I remember, I, I had a guest on previously and I basically said the Performance Max was introduced to could kind of dumb down the YouTube experience for the people that struggled with it.

Right. And it, it penalized if you like, the people that did well with YouTube independently. Right. So again, it sounds like your, your, although you, you kind of adopted Performance Max, do you still do anything kind of like, that's not P max or will be demand gen. 

Ben Jones: well, P Max and demand gen are different, so, so PP max is just rubbish. We, we've tried it like so many times and we just can't get it. We can get cheap leads like everyone else, but, it's just absolute crap, so I wouldn't recommend it. demand Gen on the other [00:16:00] hand for video placements on YouTube, are massive and to, to the point where I think that YouTube, Google Ads has figured this out.

So, come April, this 2020 fives, they're actually getting rid of all our video action campaigns. They just won't exist anymore. All. And then they're forcing everyone to use demand gen, which are for YouTube sizing, which I don't feel is actually too bad of a bad move anyway, so you can still have all your video view campaigns for engagement and traffic and all that stuff.

but yeah, you're gonna have to, you actually don't have a choice. You have to move to demand gen when you like it or not. Performance Max, I still think is the, is, yeah. I've said it before. I, I wouldn't rate it, but yeah. Demand gen from video creatives. Yeah. All day long.

Creative Challenges in YouTube Ads
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Jim Banks: So one of the, one of the biggest challenges I always found sort of before, I mean, I think with the onset of ai it's got much better, but one of the biggest challenges was always clients never had decent creative. Right? They might, [00:17:00] if they, if they're advertising on tv, they go, here's my TV ad, like, run that right?

And it's just like. No, that's not, that's not gonna work really. Because, if you think about like a TV ad, it's typically the, the kind of, the big reveal is at the end of the, the kind of the vi the video ad, the TV spot, rather than, again, like, as you say, in, in a lot of cases, you've got a 32nd window, you've got five seconds they can skip, right?

So you need to have something powerful in that first five seconds, right? If they don't skip, then you wanna make sure that you get 'em on the hook by the 28th, 29th, second, right? And then that way you are effectively getting that view for nothing, right? So, but I, again, I'm, I'm always amazed at how many advertisers just again, just don't, don't have creative to enable them to be competitive.

So how, how do you kind of deal with that?

Ben Jones: Yeah, look, you, you're a hundred percent right. You gotta have good creative like it, there's just no two ways about it, particularly on YouTube ads. And I feel like, a lot can go wrong in a video. you can have bad audio, bad learning, bad, all sorts of [00:18:00] things, and. At the end of the day, the, the most profitable YouTube ads that we've seen run are all face to camera, right?

So people have to sit down, face to camera, and that's a huge problem for a lot of business owners who just do not want to be, create video of themself in it, right? and then they have to follow a script, but most of them aren't very natural on camera. So then you end up with, like you say, rubbish creative.

And I think the way we get around it is, obviously we write scripts. So we'd sit down and have a script meeting, they'd write it, and then we kind of give them a bit of a, a brief on how to do it. and if they're not, if they've got a face for radio or a personality for, images, what we, what we kind of say to them is like, look who in your team, if you put a camera in front of them, would, would, would present.

Well, and they usually have someone, and sometimes it's the secretary or the accounts lady, or.it's some random person that's not even the leader of the company. And [00:19:00] then I would say to them, look, sit down with that person in your company. You are there to help them film it. And I would say nine, my phone is not here, but I'd say 90% of all the ads we shoot are just shot on your phone.

The phones these days are amazing and they're talking, they're talking head type. So I think that's a good one. The other one that we've done for businesses who just will not shoot creative, no matter and oh, we'll shoot it, we'll shoot it and they don't massive problem, is we just take that away from 'em and we'll just go to Father and you can actually find people who shoot ads for you with a green screen.

and, and I've tested this myself even with ads that we ran to America last year. it was my me in the ad and I'm actually okay in a video ad, versus, a really attractive lady, doing exactly the same ad and her ads converted better than mine. So, so I mean, at the end of the day, like, I think if you don't want to be in the ad themselves or you'd like to get an attractive [00:20:00] lady on five would do it for you, it's gonna cost you maybe a hundred dollars or $200 to give them a couple of ads.

They can shoot the green screen and then it's just post edit. Then you just send it off to your video team or, if you're good with a video creative or you creating YouTube videos or whatever, hopefully figure you how the videos. But that's, that's, doesn't have to be hard. You just need to have a really good script structured in the right way.

And if you don't wanna do it, find someone on the team. You could probably hire a local actor to do it for you if you really want it. Again, it would probably only cost you a hundred dollars and you'd be able to shoot,10 ads in the morning or something, So as long as you've got the scripts, you're good.

So yeah, that's how we get around it.

Jim Banks: Yeah, because I, I always, I always think that, that, again, that that whole recording process, right? I mean, you, you probably should shoot like five to 10, hooks to begin with, right? So then you can kind of like top and tail like, and five to five to 10 calls to action at the end with the actual meat of the video in between, right?

So you could shoot one or two versions of the in-between bit with five or 10 [00:21:00] kind of hooks and five or 10 calls to action, and then you can mix and match them and get kind of the best results from that. And then that becomes your, your baseline. You can. Then sort of try to beat that with the next iterations of hooks and everything else.

And again, there's, so the, the technology is so good now, as you say, like Fiverr, that there's thousands, tens of thousands of people that do that, and, again, I'm, I'm stunned at how many people sort of trip over because they feel that they need to be using like a Madison Avenue agency to shoot the videos.

And it's like really, as you say. Mobile phone, on my mobile, I can shoot eight k 24 frames per second, which is as cinematic as it gets. Right? And, and with audio, again, like there's so many great tools out now that, that can, tidy up really kind of janky audio, so well right. Cut out all the background noise and everything else.

It's just amazing how, how easy it is to do, right? So the, as you say, there is really no excuse. I've always kind of said if you are, I mean, I used to work for a travel company. we identified that certain locations, like we were, we [00:22:00] were, lots, lots of, one of the, the kind of target demographics we had was backpackers going to travel around Asia, right?

So what we did was we kinda said, okay, well what, what sort of things are people looking for? And it'd be, if it's a young 21, 20 2-year-old guy going to Asia backpacking, he wants to see videos with young, 21, 20 2-year-old women. Right? That's what he wanted to see. So we would, again, we would kind of choose, choose the, the, actors based on that.

Right? Similarly, there'd be other places where, if they're going to Zurich, more often than not, people were going to Zurich for business. So we would shoot video of somebody dressed up in a suit, probably like mid forties or whatever it might be. that would be a, a better way of kind of doing that.

And we would, we would obviously shoot the videos, but we would also then be able to have all the steals for other types of, of creative that we may want to use. Right. I'm always said with YouTube, the companion banner is probably the biggest opportunity you've got. 'cause even if people skip the ad, the companion stays on the screen until [00:23:00] they've finished kind of watching when it is.

Right. It's kind of there in the sidebar or on the screen itself. They, again, you can get, get this companion banner,impressions for nothing, right? So, I just think people kind of miss out so much on, on that as a result. And,but it, YouTube have made it much easier for you to get.

Decent creative out there,to run YouTube ads. And again, I'm surprised at how many, how few people kind of, actually do much to try and sort of optimize for that. Right. Hence, I guess people like yourself have got a kind of healthy living as a YouTube agency, so.

Ben Jones: Yeah. Look that and that, and you're a hundred percent right. Getting, getting people to shoot video is a big problem. But you just, if you can make it as easy as possible for them, then that's, that's the key. Like don't expect them to come up with a script. The more you, you expect them to do that, the harder it will be.

but yeah, I think all the suggestions you said there are fantastic. So, but, and having it to that demographic, it's, it's not an expensive thing to figure out. Right. And you just, you just [00:24:00] gotta get a shot. And the thing is, even if your first round of ads suck and it took you half a day to shoot them, and you did that once a month, you'd actually get really good ad creative.

And the other cool thing that you can now do with YouTube ads, which you couldn't do before, particularly with demand gen campaigns, is you can actually run Image Creative now. And so what you can actually do is you can run just image creative ads just for YouTube, which is cool. And if, and this is the big thing, like a lot of people are already spending money on Facebook Ads and they need to add that second channel to.

Their thing, just to de-risk their business from just every, all their eggs being in one basket. So now you can actually grab your winning image creative that you've got on Facebook and start running it in YouTube ads with better targeting. And I think that's a massive underlooked opportunity as well.

combine that with, now that you can, you've got, YouTube short ads and things like that, you can actually start to run these Facebook Ads inside of YouTube where you just couldn't do that a year or two ago, like a year or two ago. YouTube ads [00:25:00] were long ad format that had to be two minutes or more.

Now we've found that, that that ad times come down to a minute and a half or even under a minute in a lot of cases. so they are really trying to align it with Facebook as much as possible. obviously you've gotta keep up with all the changes, but I think there's some pretty big scope before you, you've already got something working already in Facebook to be now being able to transition pretty seamlessly into YouTube.

Jim Banks: That's always the thing. I, I think, I, I talk to a lot of, agency owners and they are specialists. Google Ads agencies or specialists, Facebook Ads agencies, and, You know, you're, you're right. I think a lot of people will get value from, the, the stuff that they've, done well with on Google.

They could take some of that across to Facebook and do well with it there and vice versa. Right. 

Expanding Ad Strategies Across Platforms
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Jim Banks: Similarly and, and equally, we've, we've seen the, the, I think probably because of the pandemic, the audiences on, places like. TikTok and Snapchat and Pinterest have changed dramatically, right?

I mean, the days of, you could only go to this platform to get [00:26:00] this,this type of audience, B2B is only LinkedIn. That's the only place that people that do B2B go. It's like, nope, that's not the case anymore. They go everywhere. Right? Hence, the, the reason that, B2B on,on YouTube is so, so popular, as you say, like, I think a lot of people watch shorts.

Now, again, I'm, I'm curious to know what your, success rate has been with shorts, right? Because, I mean, I've, I've got a, a YouTube premium account, so I never see the ads, right? So I always feel, feel, feel, I'm, I'm missing out because I don't get the ads anymore.

Ben Jones: Yeah. Yeah, I had a medium, one of my media buyers told me the other day that I've just up upgraded his premium and I was like, turn that off right now. So,because we actually want to be looking at the ads as advertisers and, sometimes I get more out of the ads and I do outta the content I wanna watch.

So I'm, that's just a bit sad 'cause I like to get out on that. But I think the, the, the cool thing with. The cool thing with that, with YouTube shorts in particular, running, they, they're not your bread and butter at this point. I don't feel they're, [00:27:00] you can run ads on it. Probably particularly remarketing ads is where I would start there.

we are having some success to, like, we, we have success to warm audiences. They're always the easiest, right? But colder audiences are a bit trickier. We YouTube short ads. We haven't quite, we haven't. We've got it working, but not at scale, if that makes sense. So,I would, if you're gonna do it, I'd still stick to the traditional,pre-roll ads.

you can pick multiple, multiple formats if you want. I, you can still do your vertical, your horizontal ads, all that stuff. But I'd, like just YouTube short ads, I think we've only really had the ability to do them well in the last six months. Prior to that, you could really select it that well. So when you've only got like six months worth of data comparing that to what's been working on YouTube for the past three or four years, it's, it's not the same data set, if that makes sense. So, but yeah, you can, you can do it. I feel like you need a shorter ad. you'd want to be dirty, you has to be under a [00:28:00] minute anyway, but, you wanna get to the point much quicker, so,

Jim Banks: Yeah. I think it's quite interesting that YouTube, I'm not sure when they did it, but they, they've changed it so that shorts are now, you can have them up to three minutes long. And again, I, I mean, that was always the, the challenge I had. I do a lot of,take the podcast episodes and turn it into short form content. 

and I always struggled to try and get the, the excerpt to be under a minute, right? So I would, sometimes I would speed it up and make it one and a half times speed. So I'm sort of sounding more like an auctioneer than, than,than me. and now obviously with three minutes you can kind of do the same thing and, and I just think it's sort of, the principles don't change, right?

You still need to have a, a fairly decent kind of catchy hook to begin with to get people into it, right? I think the thumbnail is not so much, a, an issue on, YouTube shorts, right? But, but I still think that people should spend a bit of time and, and have some form of, like a caption overlay on, on it.

I think the biggest mistake I see a lot of people make is when they have things like captions, they put them in the wrong place. [00:29:00] So when you have all the real estate that comes up on the shorts, you've got the sort of like buttons down the side and down the bottom and, and everything else, and all of a sudden all of the, the, the captions just get lost in, in the mess, right?

It just becomes this big ugly mess of, of text on the screen, which, makes it more difficult for people to kind of enjoy it.

Effective YouTube Ad Strategies
---

Ben Jones: Yeah, you really gotta have the formatting figured out in the video to be like, just for that. Right. I think the, the other thing that's cool though, like, I don't know if you do it, but for. Growing podcast channels or just your YouTube channels and things like that. I get a lot of heat on this. Like, should you run ads to grow your channel?

and ah, there's people who fully hate on me for saying it, but yes, you can if you do it the right way. And, and a lot of people do it the wrong way. They'll just go, to the back of their YouTube studio and they'll be like, Hey, I want to promote this, which is dumb. Don't do it. Right? Or, they'll go, oh, I wanna, I'm just gonna run YouTube ads, and they might pick some tithing or whatever, and they'll run pre-roll ads.

They [00:30:00] interrupted in the middle of the stuff. And, and the time is so, so small. And, and that's the big problem is, YouTube channel for growth. Their, their main metric is watch time. So when you start. 

Common Mistakes in YouTube Advertising
---

Ben Jones: Showing ads that aren't related to what people are watching or pre-roll, of course it's gonna hurt the channel, right?

and then they leave their, they leave their ads as public videos on their YouTube channel, which again, is gonna hurt their, their watch tap, which will hurt their channel. And in a lot of cases where people tell me, Hey, log, we, we should run YouTube ads on our channel. one or or three of those things have been true and they, they miss the whole point.

And, and the answer is, if there's a wrong way of doing it, there kind of has to be a right way of doing it, right? And what we've found that that works well is to run, the, oh, sorry. It's having mental blank run the ads that pop up in search, right? So when people are searching you, they can actually see those ads come up.

oh, just fully hundred mental blank is, one second. [00:31:00] It, it works. I wanna say TrueView campaigns, but I know that's not it. one, one moment. Oh, that's the wrong one.yeah, so basically they come up in search campaigns. T

Optimizing In-Feed Ads for Growth
---

Ben Jones: hey, they're only, they only come up in the same spaces where your organic reach infe, that's what I'm trying to say, in V ads.

Okay. So they've only come up in the organic placements. So they come up on the side, as a suggested video or they'll come up in search results. And where they work really well is if you run search campaigns around your video. So we'll usually tell our clients who don't have a channel yet, or the channel's a bit abandoned, or even some of the guys with bigger channels that just dunno what content works well, is what you can do is you just pick out your top, Your top five videos, or you create five videos that are really value based and you run them around the keywords of that video. So what was the problem that was solved in that video? You run that and it shows up in all the search results, like in feed, basically, [00:32:00] and that's why they're called in feed ads.

And then, the, it's a natural thing and each channel can grow really, really well doing in feed ads. And what's really exciting when you do that, if you're running new ads, is you can remarket to everyone who watches your video or subscribes. So it's kind of a, it's a double-edged coin for marketing and the cost of them.

Like if you're spending,5 cents, five, 10 cents of your on a normal YouTube pre-roll ad, they're about 80% the price. So an in feed ad, for example, is gonna be like, two to 3 cents max. We're getting a whole bunch of clients who have views for under a cent, that are super engaged around keywords that relates to that video.

and. They're all unlisted, right? So you normally do that with an unlisted video. It doesn't hurt any of your watch time on your channel. But what you do at the end of that content piece is you'll say, Hey, check out this video. And then that next video is a, of course a, a public video

Jim Banks: that, yeah.

Ben Jones: a and view, right?

So it, it [00:33:00] works really, really well. And so you compare the two strategies of how to grow your channel with YouTube ads and they're just chop and cheese, so

Jim Banks: Yeah. I think unlisted is definitely an advertiser's friend, as you say, like you don't want to completely wreck your, your

Ben Jones: do, they do, yeah. And like I'll be speaking at an event and someone else will be speaking like the complete opposite. Do not do it. You'll destroy your channel. And we'll get clients that are like, I can't even deal if you broke my channel so that you'll set all your ads up on a different channel.

and I think it's, the paranoia around it is just based off it, where you just dunno what they're doing. So.

Jim Banks: That was always the thing that used to get me when,because obviously YouTube were bought by Google back in the day, a long time ago. They also bought Double Click and that became the Display Network and they, they sort of still ran their own sort of code base, right. And it took them forever to get the code base all aligned.

So it always used to be that if you wanted to kind of run search campaigns and YouTube campaigns at the same time, you needed to have two accounts set up, one for your YouTube and one for your Google search. Right? [00:34:00] Because if you ran a YouTube campaign, the YouTube campaign would get no credit for the conversions that it was involved with.

Right. Because search would always get sort of like the, the credit for it. So, you, you'd up, like with this double reporting it, it would report the conversion twice just to make sure that YouTube got credit for it. Right. But I know that they've, they've sort of fixed that. A few years back and it's, it, but again, there's still people that will say, that's what you need to do.

You need to have two accounts, or five accounts, or whatever it might be. And I'm like, whoa, you don't, you really don't need to kind of go down that route. Keep it as simple as you can because you say the, the ability of being able to create an audience of, people that, that subscribe, people that comment, people that, get involved.

People that watch a percentage of a video. So if you've got a, let's say you've got a 58 second video on, On YouTube, that's an ad. You can create an audience of people that have seen 50% of that. So you know that they've seen 29 seconds of the video. They're not likely to have watched 29 seconds if they weren't interested.

Right? I think a lot of people go, I think [00:35:00] certainly I see it on Facebook. People go, I'm gonna create an audience. Of all the people that saw three seconds of the video, it's like, why? Right? They've seen three seconds. Let's, there's nothing in that three seconds. Right. To kind of make them make you think that they're a decent prospect.

Right. Just, there's just no point in that. Right. Which is one of the reasons why when people say, talk about Instagram and they go, the, the, the Instagram's or Good Facebook's best practices Instagram video should be 15 seconds or less. And I'm like, no. 'cause like literally, I mean, like, again, I don't know what sort of script writer you'd need to kind of write a 15 second script to make it, intro, content call to action in 15 seconds just doesn't happen.

So,

Ben Jones: No.yeah, look, I couldn't agree with you more on, on all those front, and yes, I was, I've definitely been in the space long enough to, to, to have lived through the pain of search and YouTube fighting each other for conversions and, having to install third party software just to figure it all out.

so yeah, I'm glad that, that, that ship has pretty much sorted itself [00:36:00] out these days, which is good. but yeah, it's. I mean, even if even the 15 second ads on Facebook and Instagram, like I, I'm not a fan, because it's just, it's not engaging enough. like realistically, 30 seconds is kind of, you need the minimum of that just to get your point across, I feel, and deliver any sort of value.

And I think unless you're doing like an very salesy ad, like to a remarketing audience, like, Hey, you've seen my stuff. Just go and buy. You can do that in 15 seconds, but you're not gonna, you're not gonna give anyone any. And I think that's another thing when YouTube ads that people miss is people go to YouTube ads to,to, to be educated or entertained in some way educated if you liked, if you integrate ads.

But I think the, the important part is your ad actually has to sell help or serve, or, give overwhelming credibility on the thing. Right? And if your ad doesn't do that, if you just come at YouTube with a very 15 second salesy Insta ad, it just doesn't [00:37:00] align with. What's happening on the platform and, and why people are there.

So, and what I've found is those super salesy ads that come from Facebook and Insta do not work on YouTube, but if you take a value based ad from YouTube, you can plug that in and run it as a Facebook ad.right. Yeah.

Jim Banks: So I, I always kind of try and talk to, to my guests and talk about the future. Right. 

Leveraging AI in Video Marketing
---

Jim Banks: Because, I think we're, we're in the sort of this, this year and probably most of last year was all about ai. What do you see the kind of future for, for YouTube and YouTube ads in particular?

Ben Jones: in terms of like running the campaigns or in terms of the

Jim Banks: Yeah. Just, like, are you worried about the, the impact of AI on like your abilities to continue to run an agency successfully?

Ben Jones: Oh, not at all. I think it's, I think it's actually amazing. So I am on the, I'm on the pro AI camp, and I know that there's two sides of that camp, but I think I. At the end of the day, it's AI is coming whether we like it or not. So [00:38:00] sitting here and whinging about it is not going to help anyone. I think we've actually heavily started to use it in the video creative side, and also in the, the script writing.

So we use it in the script writing to a point and to the point where, we had three or four copywriters, that we would need and we were all copywriters and now we have one copywriter overlooking what we're doing in ai. And we had a guy in our team that spent like four or five months on that scriptwriting process, just full time AI geeking out with a copywriter or two or three copywriters to get it right.

And the copywriters that did leave the, the company, we gave all of that IP to them so they could then use it in their copywriting about very right. So it all, it all worked out and I think, AI is fantastic, but it's only as good as the directions that you give it. Right. So for example, if I said to someone, go clean the staff room kitchen, and that was all I gave them, it wouldn't be [00:39:00] as good as if I gave the staff direction that was like, I need you to clean the fridge, wipe it down, do this, do that, whatever.

You gotta have a completely different thing. And AI has the same thing. If you go to AI and say, write me a YouTube ad script, it's gonna suck balls. Like, it's just gonna be crap as, and you're gonna know that it came from ai, right? And,like our, our page, our prompt page was copy and paste prompts.

There's 30 pages long,of I think, I don't know how many prompts there are, but there must be,at least 15 or 20 prompts to just even get you to a half decent ad and then you've gotta refine it. Do you know what I mean? So I think, I think it is quicker than a copywriter.but you have to give it all the right data.

So I think that's exciting. and I think like what's happening with like the deep fake stuff is pretty cool. but I think the video side of the ads creative is just not there. Like people creating like, hey, gen videos of themself and trying to use [00:40:00] ads. They're lip lips don't move the right way. Like, I think we can still, at this point, we can still tell it's not real.

but that, that line is getting blurred. I think we'll get to a point where you can't tell that it's real and then it'll be, it'll be great for agencies because then creating video creative to run ads will be amazing and it will just come down to who's the better marketing. With the messaging and the targeting and the script writing, I just think it'll be great.

And companies don't wanna shoot ads. Like one of the big problems we had before is trying to get, we talked about it, like how do we get companies to shoot ads? And if we can get AI to create really good video creative, like talking head ads, we're not there yet. I don't feel, but we will be very soon.

And I think it's just gonna open a massive possibility. And if you are not, if you're not caught up in it, you're just going to get smashed by everyone who is so,

Jim Banks: Yeah. I, I, I mean, I think there's, there's, again, there's so many tools out there that will enable you to do [00:41:00] so much. I mean, I, you don't need to go and invest money in a. Expensive teleprompter. Most of the apps now have a teleprompter kind of built in, right? So literally you can put your phone down on a tripod and actually have a, a teleprompter on screen.

So, if you don't lack, if you lack the confidence to kind of know what to say, right? One, you can do as many takes as you like. and two, like I said, these teleprompters are so good now at, at helping you to kind of get there. I, I've always been amazed that, that people don't utilize the resource pool that they have.

So if they've been in business for a long time, they probably have five really amazing LinkedIn posts that they put over the years that just knocked it out the park for them, right? And what they should be doing is to say, put, take those five, say, I'm gonna give you some, some examples of, of content that we've written that worked really well.

Can you analyze why you thought it worked really well? And give me some more examples on these particular topics. And it would be so easy for then people to, to have 5, 10, 15, 20,video ideas so, so quickly, right? [00:42:00] Because everyone thinks they're coming up with something brand new and there's really nothing brand new, right?

I mean, if you look at most of the videos that are really successful online, right? They all plagiarize and take some, some other person's idea and just do it in their niche, right? I mean, I use a, a tool called Vid iq, right? And,they have a, a a button where you can just click remix and it will ba basically create a, a successful copy of a successful video that, let's say I, I had a Missed the Beast video.

I thought, wow, that's really cool. I can press remix and it will basically rewrite the whole thing, right? But in my vertical, right? So I don't need to kind of come up with the idea because the idea has already been proved to, to be successful, right? It's amazing how many people just don't think they have to kind of sort of reinvent the wheel right from the beginning.

And there's so many shortcuts that people can take before they need to kind of get to that point.

Ben Jones: That it is really cool and I think like AI is obviously gonna be changing the face of everything that we do. particularly, who knows? Like, [00:43:00] maybe we'll get to a point where you know that you need an AI to come in and run your ads for you and I. Work that part of it out. And, and that could definitely happen.

And I think, when AI first came out, everyone in the marketing space was, oh, well it's sort of game over. And everyone in the, in the copywriting space and the, the creative side was like, oh, they'll never take our jobs. And I think it's actually gone the other way. like a lot of the, a lot of that side of it is, is easy to do with ai, but the, the strategic thinking and planning and mapping and, and dealing with the client.

And I think, I think another thing is clients wanna talk to a human, so like a business owner today and it made a different in 10 years or something like that. But, I think as, as business owners, we need to be the gatekeepers of the AI for the, for the service based or for the whatever client that you've got.

the client doesn't wanna run their business and deal with what's going on with AI and run their ads and all of that. And that's why that hiring agency, 'cause they just want the thing to work, right. So,I think. Be [00:44:00] more, there'll be more of an opportunity to be the person that's got all that stuff running.

And as an agency, it may be great because maybe you don't need the 15 or 20 staff and all the dramas that they bring, you'll be able to have AI people, or ai,whatever you wanna call them, be able to do a lot of those functions coming forward. So I think the relationship with the client's gonna be key.

I think that's gonna be person facing. But you know, staff wise, I think we'll be able to actually replace staff with AI as it gets better. So.

The Future of In-Person Events
---

Jim Banks: I mean, it's funny you mentioned about your, your speaking at, social media marketing world. I mean the,There. I, I found that so many people have not gone back to in-person events the way they were prior to kind of covid. Right? And, I'm probably one of those people, I'm, I'm not traveling anywhere near as much as I used to, right?

Because I've got comfortable not going to, to kind of these events. But I do miss the, the ability to kind of like, again, watch somebody present in person. Yes, you can watch the YouTube videos and [00:45:00] everything else, but I just don't think you get the same thing, right? There's something about grabbing a drink, sitting down at the bar, having a kind of shooting the breeze, right?

Meeting people that you, you've, you've admired on YouTube videos, but you've never actually sort of met them in person, to kind of do that. but, but I think, yes, I, I definitely think that the, the ability to kind of cut down on the number of people. Using AI agen AI to kind of give you the ability to fill in some of that repetitive work that can be done by machines, right?

But you still need to kind of give the machines the right instructions to begin with, right? Because if you don't, then you'll end up with like probably 10 times as bad output, right? Because the input's just so poor to begin with.

Ben Jones: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. and I think in-person events is interesting. Like prior to Covid we used to do a lot of events. we would do a lot of speaking events and that sort of thing. Obviously. During Covid Australia, particularly where I live, like you just couldn't, there was just no way you could even think about doing anything like that 'cause of the government control that we had [00:46:00] here.

and that kind of, we had the pride of that. My businesses were very much event based, like we would fill rooms full of people and we would speak and, and sell people at the back of the room and that whole thing, right? And,everything from coaching. So we had a few different businesses in that space anyway, and then Covid come and basically stopped all of that on its head and everyone was back to just, creating leads online and selling and all of that kind of stuff.

And the, and the whole event space actually change, whether it was for the better or not, it depends on your perspective, but I mean, that's no different a disrupt to the way AI's coming in now. And I think we've just gotta, as business owners, and I know this podcast is a lot about making mistakes, but, sometimes those.

Those big things that happen, a blessing in disguise. You just don't dunno it yet. You gotta wait two or three years to go, oh, that was so good that happened. Figured thing you. And, I think that's gonna be the case with ai.

Jim Banks: Yeah, it's funny, I I, I found when, before sort of the pandemic, [00:47:00] Because I was traveling so much, my lifestyle was just dreadful. Right. Really, really horrible. I'd eat too much, drink too much, spend all my time at hotels and traveling and everything else. and I really wasn't focusing on my health.

And I ended up like, to the point where, had covid not happened, I don't know, don't really know what would've happened to me. I mean, I lost a bunch of weight, right? 'cause I needed to, took, took control of my life by walking every day. and it cha like I said, I I, it changed the way I did it.

I mean, I actually was on site with a client in Florida, right. And that's when I started the walking. And, I didn't realize that walking along the beach in Florida would, would be so cathartic. But, when I got back, I'd be walking along sort of the roads where I lived and there'd be all these cars passing and, and everything else.

And then we obviously had the pandemic. And I would walk along the, the sort of pavements and there'd be no cars at all. And it was eerie. Really, really eerie. Right? But I've, I've taken control of my, my sort of personal health, right? As a result of. The pandemic and what happened before then. and that, [00:48:00] I think that's probably one of the reasons why I'm a little bit reluctant to just go and dive straight back in.

I think again, I I also think the, the days of, presenting on stage, going to the back of the room and having a line of people that want to work with you, I think those days are gone. Right? I think a lot of the people that go to shows now, they're there to learn because they're in-house people or something like that, rather than the decision makers and budget holders.

So, they want to, they want to learn what you've got to tell, right. But they don't necessarily want to hire you to kind of do the work. Right? Not, not always. I mean, that, that's not to say that there aren't people that do Right. But I just think it's a lot less now, and I, and I'm amazed at how many people have started to, to kind of get onto that speaker circuit.

Ben Jones: They travel all over the world. Right. And I, again, I can see some of them will probably struggle with their health because of it, because, they're spending a lot of time away from home eating junk all the time, not getting as much sleep as they should do. I've lived that life. so yes, I fully, I fully know what you're talking about. The one good thing about Covid is, we were doing, prior [00:49:00] to Covid, we were doing events every couple of months or something like that, different cities and the Holy Island was just away a lot. And then Covid happened and I was home for a lot and I was like, Hey, this city's better.

And then, after Covid, we did like two or three events a year. And then last January I set a goal to just not do any events. I'd already agreed Social media world last year, so I was like, fine. And then for a whole year I knocked back every speaking opportunity for a year and also didn't do any of my own events.

Jim Banks: And, I was like, this is actually really cool. And then so this, this, I've just come up to the year, like in February, so, and yeah, my life was better for it. I was like, that was actually cool. Your business is no worse off. Yes, I mean that, that's what I found. Even though I sort of stopped traveling.

Ben Jones: Yeah, we, we've got, we, and we usually have a wait list, so I'm not really too, like, I don't need, I don't need to do it.

Right. And I think that's, that's another thing. I think sometimes [00:50:00] we get caught up in the prestige of it all. then, then actually the importance of what you're trying to achieve as a business. And I think, yeah, I think, I think events are cool, are cool in terms of filling rooms and, and still selling like high ticket things.

The only reason I know that is 'cause we have a bunch of clients that we do that for. and while the numbers aren't the same, so like prior to Covid you could run free events and people would come, right? Whereas these days, you need to have it almost ticketed, like a minimum $27 a ticket with some sort of upsell.

'cause otherwise the attendance rates are just horrible, And that's been, that's been a big difference. We were up with a lot of past, like I said, figure speakers and things like that. So, yeah, it does work, but you gotta have 'em paid ticket. So it is, it is, it is probably the biggest change from Covid that I've seen in the speaking space.

So.

Jim Banks: It's funny you mentioned about events. I mean, I worked with a couple of clients that ran events and one hats off kudos to them for doing it because it's such a stressful thing. But you know, even though [00:51:00] Covid sort of finished right, all the queues of hotels that, like if you had a particular slot, particular hotel that used to go to, they gave first dibs to the bigger shows.

Right? So the CSS of this world, they would get first dibs of when they wanted to kind of do it once it all opened up again. Right. And I don't think a lot of the shows that were small either went outta business Right. Or they couldn't get the slots at the times that they had previously. Right. 'cause they, they got taken by sort of another event organizer.

Right. And they would. Set, set up a different, different location, different time of year. And a lot of the people, what you tend to find certainly in search, right? What you tend to find is that it's almost like the Q4 is almost like every single day there seems to be a search conference of some Descript, right?

I was, I was in, Vegas and people are saying, right, I'm going from here to Portland and then here to here and, and and I'm thinking again, how can you kind of do that? Why, why would you put yourself through the pain of having five presentations to do in five different places? Right. [00:52:00] just to me it seemed crazy to do that.

Ben Jones: Yeah. I think, look, I think it's a lifestyle thing. Like some people really like it. and speaking from stage is cool. Like obviously there's the, where everyone's, oh wow, that was cool and you are the speaker. And I, I think, I don't know, I feel a lot of people feed off that little, it's like the, I'm famous sort of vibe a bit.

so yeah, I, but I just, yeah, I'm over that. So, but yeah, so I think, I think some people enjoy that side of it. But yeah, I think at the end of the day you need to come back to like, what's the business goal here? Like, we wanna grow by X percent this corner. What needs to happen? is me speaking, going to get us closer or further away from that?

And look, if that's where all your leads and your whole business is built around that, it may be that that is your thing, right? But there definitely are other ways to do it. So.

Jim Banks: Yeah, I, I found, I was saying to somebody that, I, I used to do a lot of speaking and then I just. Withdrew myself from the speaking circuit, right? And, people said, why don't you [00:53:00] speak anymore? And I'd say, I'm too old, I'm too white, and I'm too male. Right? Because what you found was a lot of event organizers, they wanted to have, that that diversity, equality, inclusion, they wanted to make sure they had a certain kind of number of people that were women, certain number of people of color.

And it just became like, panels, I, I, I remember talking to a, a friend of mine who's, Australian lady, really successful business owner. and she had been invited to speak at a conference and she said, I've been to look at the,the, the speaker sessions and it's virtually all old, my old white men, right?

And I said. So you saying, I'm not gonna go and speak at that. That's probably why it's all old white men. Right? You, you kind of should absolutely get in there and say, look, not only can I come and talk at your show, I can bring two other women, three other women that might kind of come along. 'cause as you say, a lot of people, they wanna put it on their resume that they're a public speaker.

Right. And,again, I, I know if I was paying, I dunno how much a ticket to Social Media Marketing World is, but let's call it 1500 bucks, right? If I was paying [00:54:00] 1500 bucks for a ticket to a show, I wouldn't want to go and, and listen to people. If, 50% of them had never spoken before at a conference, or 50% of them were there because of the color of their skin or the, the gender that they were.

Right. I'd want 'em to be subject matter experts. Right. And,sometimes I've watched people present and I'm like. That wasn't a good presentation, right? It's very salesy and again, if, if you want to sell me, great, do, do good stuff on stage, and then I'll come and talk to you afterwards, right?

Because I'll know that you actually know your stuff, right? Don't just pitch from the stage. 'cause that's not what, what I paid the $1,500 for the ticket for.

Ben Jones: Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent And a day definitely exists and I think it's still a place for it. I mean, I, I don't really get involved in the, the politics of it all, but it definitely exists and I think at, at the end of the day, I. If you're good at what you do, great. and again, I've been to a few events where I've been like, I didn't really learn anything that last [00:55:00] hour.

I've listen to that person. 

Networking and Building Relationships
---

Ben Jones: but I think more than the speakers themselves, I think the thing that events are cool for is networking. and, you get to actually chat with some cool people. you get to meet, especially on the speaker circuit thing, you get to meet some cool people in amongst a and I think it's like anything, you are always gonna have your 80 20, of there's 20% or awesome people in any group.

Just find them and, and, whatever the group is, even if you had a, they were all awesome, 20% of them will be next level. Awesome. So, so yeah, so I think that's really been my key is like, how do you, connect and, chat with people who may have the issues that you are trying to solve.

Right. and.

Jim Banks: I, I found,quite, quite often, as you say, there would be people that you would kind of be drawn to. and I, most of, most of the biggest deals I've ever done. Took place at like one or two in the morning in a bar when we're drinking cocktails or whatever it might be. Right? And, there was no pitches, proposals, customers,testimonials, reviews, none of that mattered, right?

I [00:56:00] think, ultimately people want to work with people that they know, like, and trust, right? And I think sometimes seeing people in that sort of social environment in the bar at a conference is probably the best way of doing that, right? So I know a lot of people go to conferences, they go watch the speakers and then they go back to their room and they order room service and they get, food delivered to the room and they don't come out until the next day.

And I think you are missing completely what the big opportunity is in this conference for, for being there.

Ben Jones: Yeah, I.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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Jim Banks: So, Ben, it's been fantastic to have you on. I'm sure we could sit and jam for another hour or two hours. Right. But, I'm not Joe Rogan. I I will probably need to go for a pee at some point in time soon. so it's been fantastic to have you on as a guest. all of all of your contact details will be available in the show notes after we put the, the episode up.

It only reminds me to say thanks again for being such a fantastic guest.

Ben Jones: Hello brand. Thank, thank you so much for having me. I super appreciate it. And if anyone's listening, thank, thank you so much as well for, for your time and, and effort and yeah, it's been, it's been heaps of fun. And yeah, feel free [00:57:00] to send the links wherever you need to. We, we'll obviously link back to it as well so we can, just tell us where the social handles are.

Most of the ones, the reasons I do these, these interviews is basically 'cause I'm crap at creating content. I'm really good at running ads and my team knows if they put me in for podcasts, I'm gonna actually rock up and deliver some value. So, but yeah, it's been my pleasure. Thank you Jim, so much for having me.

And,wish everyone all the best with whatever type of marketing that they're running.

Jim Banks: Cheers. Thank you.