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Feb. 19, 2025

Exploring the Impact of AI and Marketing Strategies with Benjamin Hoehn

The discussion touches on the complex business strategies and the evolution of AI.

Ben Hoehn is a fractional CMO with a personal brand named Mojo Mogul, explains his passion for working with early-stage startups and his unique approach to 'strategic-cution.'

The conversation delves deeply into the AI landscape, discussing its impact on jobs, workforce, and business operations.

Key topics include the role of webinars, digital content creation, the importance of quick response times for lead follow-up, and strategies for optimizing PPC campaigns.

We explore how the pandemic has altered business practices and the evolving importance of digital marketing techniques, including video content creation and SEO.

We conclude with insights into the future of targeted advertising and suggestions for optimizing business strategies in a digitally-dominated world.

Today's episode touches on the complex business strategies needed to succeed today and the rapid evolution of AI.

Ben Hoehn is a fractional CMO (fCMO) whose personal brand is Mojo Mogul.

Ben explains why he has a great passion for working with early-stage startups and his unique approach to 'strategic-cution.'

The conversation dives deep into the AI landscape, discussing its impact on jobs, workforce, and business operations.

Key discussion points include the role of business webinars (along with pet peeves), digital content creation, the importance of quick response times for lead follow-up, and strategies for optimizing PPC campaigns.

Jim and Ben also talk about how the pandemic has altered business practices and the evolving importance of digital marketing techniques, including video content creation and SEO.

They close with insights into the future of targeted advertising and suggestions for optimizing business strategies in a digitally-dominated world.

Well worth a listen.

 

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Important Notes

This is Digital Marketing Stories on Bad Decisions with Jim Banks, the weekly podcast for digital marketers who want to learn from the best.

New episodes are released every Wednesday at 2PM GMT where you'll get digital marketing stories and anecdotes along with bad decisions and success stories from digital marketing guests who've been there and done that in many of the disciplines that make up the discipline of digital marketing.

The podcast is powered by Captivate and all the ums, and ers have been removed using Descript to make your listening more enjoyable.

Some of the snappy titles, introductions, transcripts were created using AI Magic via Castmagic

Disclaimer: some of the links on the show notes of my podcast are affiliate links.

If you click and buy from any of these links, I may receive a commission as a result of your action.

Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

00:48 - Impact of AI

02:37 - Mojo Mogul Elevator Pitch

03:34 - Challenges and Joys of Startups

06:33 - Pandemic's Influence on B2B Marketing

09:29 - Rise of Ghostwriting and AI in Content Creation

19:38 - Faceless YouTube Channels and Content Outsourcing

22:35 - Optimizing Content for Modern Consumption

24:58 - Importance of Audio and Video in Podcasts

27:30 - Webinar Pet Peeves

28:18 - Improving Webinar Show Rates

29:52 - Effective PPC Strategies

31:52 - Optimizing Google Ads

34:19 - Speed of Response in Lead Generation

42:42 - Lead Enrichment and Validation

47:52 - Future of Targeted Advertising

49:13 - Conclusion

Transcript

[00:00:00] 


Introduction
---

Jim Banks: So my guest today is Ben Hoehn, who is coming to us from the Sunny Bay area in California. We were just talking in the green Room about the difference between the weather in California and the weather where we, where I am in the UK. The weather here is pretty dire. Ben, it's great to meet you.

Benjamin Hoehn: Great to be on. Thanks so much for having me here. This is just really cool. This is my first podcast of 2025 and so much to discuss.


Jim Banks: Yeah, it's it's a I think I think when you look at all that's going on in the world, it's been a really kind of wacky last six months has been insane in some regards with some of

Jim Banks: the in the world.


Benjamin Hoehn: Completely. You know, not just digitally, but, you know, off of the business side too. So many things are shifting, so many places you know, especially in the States. People were prepared for any kind of outcome of the election, but there was like a big pause, it seemed, at the end of 2024, waiting for results, and now we're kind of seeing how things are shifting, so everyone's reacting to it.


Discussing the Impact of AI
---

Benjamin Hoehn: But you know, especially on the digital side, the platform side, Things like AI are continuing to go on. I, I've been talking about that extensively and we're getting some surprises, right? With things like [00:01:00] DeepSeek, but I believe that the AI market will continue to evolve over the course of this year.

Jim Banks: Yeah, I mean, it's funny, I've been talking to a lot of guests in the last sort of several episodes that I've had, and the topic of AI really kind of bubbles its way to the top and you know, again, when I look at kind of like how I use it in my own business on a day to day basis and some of the things that I do.

Jim Banks: You know and everyone that I've spoken to is kind of like excited about what AI is kind of bringing to the table for them, right? And yes, I mean, there's always going to be some some kind of skeptics that will be, oh, you know, it's going to take people's jobs. And I always say it's not going to take people's jobs, it's going to, you know, the people that use it well will be the ones that take the jobs away from the people that don't use it, right?

Jim Banks: So, what are 

Benjamin Hoehn: That is, that's 100 percent what we're saying. I recently did a webinar where I think it was a, a quote from the SASTRA research where they said that a lot of different companies expected to change their workforce or reduce their workforce by 30 to 50 percent with AI. That was beginning of [00:02:00] 2024.

Benjamin Hoehn: Has that happened? Maybe cuts have been made, but not to that extent across the line. And now that they're finding, like, oh, wow, if I cut all these folks, there's still a lot of work to be done, and AI isn't the fix all that we thought it was going to be, right? You can't now just completely outsource marketing, sales, and success departments.

Benjamin Hoehn: Just by leveraging AI. Some people have tried it and that's kind of the mess that you get on email and LinkedIn that you're like, Yeah, this is AI generated. I'm not looking at that. So now people are kind of scrambling back and saying, All right, we need people that know how to really use AI to make it not seem like it's AI generated to do the 


Mojo Mogul Elevator Pitch
---

Jim Banks: your business is called Mojo Mogul, is that right? That's correct. So if, again, if we, if you and I were sort of like standing waiting to get into an elevator going up to the penthouse for a cocktail party would you describe the business to me on that journey up in the elevator?

Benjamin Hoehn: All right. Classic elevator pitch. Thanks for framing it up here. So elevator pitch for Mojo Mogul. That's just my personal brand. I've had it forever. I'm, I'm a fractional CMO but I'm [00:03:00] different than other fractional CMOs in that I specialize in what I've been told is strategic-cution. What that really means is unlike a lot of other fractionals, I don't just come in and throw the grenade of action on your team and run out of the building.

Benjamin Hoehn: I actually lay out the strategy. And then I can execute it down to the individual contributor level or all the way up to, okay, I'll advise and help you hire the person that should replace me doing this after I've kind of built everything out. I specialize in working with early stage startups going from zero to one.

Benjamin Hoehn: That seems to be my sweet spot and I just love startups. So I like working with those. But I also do kind of


Challenges and Joys of Startups
---

Jim Banks: What is you like about start ups? Because I'm actually the opposite. I hate working with them, because I find that they're too entitled, right? And And and it tends to be, I just don't vibe with the people because they've probably worked at senior levels in, in kind of big companies before, right?

Jim Banks: And then they start, they start up and they assume that they're the same company. And it's like, no, you're, you're kind of like not that company at all. So what is it you 

Benjamin Hoehn: need to find some new people. I've had the opposite experience. What I love about startups are, [00:04:00] you know, a lot of those senior people from other large companies either had a really cool idea or knew a friend that had a really cool idea and they've sat down and said, Hey, what if we, you know, started this thing, let's run it lean, let's run it flat.

Benjamin Hoehn: Again, early stage going from zero to. To one. So getting to that first 10, 20 million in ARR, that's just fun. I describe it as the ascent being more fun than the summit for me. So I'm kind of, I enjoy the climb. I enjoy, you know, that rush when you're wearing a few different hats and you're starting to add new people, you know, Oh, I'm interviewing in the morning.

Benjamin Hoehn: I'm doing sales calls in the afternoon and in the evening. We're doing all this execution work and kind of building things out and then getting those kind of team wins together. I've been involved in a few different startups at that era, and that's where I found kind of the most joy. So I, I really love it.

Benjamin Hoehn: I haven't had the experience. It sounds like you did, but, 

Jim Banks: Yeah, I just,

Jim Banks: maybe I'll revisit it after this conversation, but yeah, but it's just historically that's what it's been, but yeah, I'm, I'm kind of, I'm, again, I'm really [00:05:00] interested to understand. Understand in, in kind of a little bit more detail. So, you know, you mentioned there, you, you kind of, you like the ascent rather than the sort of the summit itself.

Jim Banks: You know, why, why is that? Why, why'd you kind of feel that, that, that, you know, there's more excitement in that than the actual achievement at the end of it. 

Benjamin Hoehn: I don't know. I think that there's a little bit of a masochism involved. 

Jim Banks: What 

Benjamin Hoehn: to be honest, I like being busy. I like challenging work. I kind of get turned off after, you know, I I've helped lead a couple of different startups to exit and. I found that that end part where it's just a lot of people kind of fighting over the IP and, you know, who wants to stay on the bus and get off the bus after this thing is kind of sold?

Benjamin Hoehn: Super boring for me. However, I've run across people that are like, that's what I love to do. I like the needle and get into all that paperwork. That doesn't sound fun for me because I'm not creating anything new. I'm not thinking about, you know, a new way to solve a problem or go to market. As a marketer, we, we all like to try and blend the, you know, the art of classic advertising, where it's some commerce and some art and some creativity and distinctiveness, [00:06:00] and these problems are not easy to solve.

Benjamin Hoehn: Especially now with most of B2B marketing, right? It's kind of veering more toward B2C. Eyeballs are getting harder to reach. Everyone is on two or three devices. It's, you know, you're marketing through the ADD and everyone else trying to or ADHD, I should say, and everyone else is trying to You know, do the same thing that you are.

Benjamin Hoehn: So coming up with creative ways to solve that problem, that's what it really is for me. It's just kind of doing that at a really high speed and getting to market before anyone else. I really enjoy it.

Jim Banks: I mean, 


Pandemic's Influence on B2B Marketing
---

Jim Banks: again, like, in the same way that I, like, most of the guests I've had, we talk about AI at some point, you know, we usually talk about the pandemic as well. And, you know, again, I don't know if that's just, I keep bringing it up because it's stuck in the back of my mind. But you know, I, I've, I've.

Jim Banks: Found that in the B2B space, the pandemic kind of like really kind of shook the apple cart immensely in terms of the way in which business is done, right, the way in which, you know, sort of companies [00:07:00] operate  you know, how they, again, a lot of them, are probably trying to still do some of the historically old school sort of marketing methods rather than some of the newer stuff.

Jim Banks: And I, the businesses I'm seeing that are adopting, you know, they're adopting the kind of video content creation and, and that type of method are having greater success than the ones that are sort of still dyed in the wool with the, you know, let's get on a webinar and, you know, all that sort of stuff. I mean, what are your kind of views on that?


Benjamin Hoehn: Yeah, webinars are certainly interesting. So I think there's been gains and losses during the pandemic. We lost one thing that I loved when I was in office which was management and networking. By walking around and for those of you that have only been remote, this used to be a whole culture and a whole kind of business management technique.

Benjamin Hoehn: You'd literally just block off your calendar for 30 minutes or whatever, walk around, go to engineering. If you're in marketing, go to product. If you're, you know, in sales and just say like, Hey, what are you guys working on? What are you guys doing? And anyone that, you know, had a second to talk to you, they tell [00:08:00] you what's going on and you might come up with a new idea or you might see the product that you're selling from a different perspective and, you know, come up with campaigns on the spot for marketers or come up with an idea.

Benjamin Hoehn: You say, Oh, Hey, you know, someone else come get over here. Look at what this person is working on. What if we, and so many cool ideas used to come up just that way by kind of walking around that's gone now. 'cause what are you gonna do Slack bomb someone and just say like, what are you working on? And then they're gonna read that the wrong way and they're gonna be like, why are you on my back?

Benjamin Hoehn: Who are you? What is this? So that's gone, that's a loss. But what we did gain. Was more attention on screen. So now, as you said webinars and video and all these things have kind of risen that stuff really, I don't, I don't think would work if we didn't go through that pandemic where people are just used to seeing what, what is everyone doing on video now?

Benjamin Hoehn: Right. Before the pandemic, I don't think I cared to see LinkedIn do short form video and like have a Tik TOK channel. I was like, [00:09:00] no, that's not a brand I want to see do this stuff. Now it's expected. Now it's expected for kind of every seller to have some form of online presence and be like a LinkedIn rock star, or at least have some kind of channel marketers, especially, you know, all of us having these conversations like this, displaying our knowledge and telling people, Hey, we're out here.

Benjamin Hoehn: This is what we're working on, and we're happy to kind of be a person behind the screen. And we're just so used to having these conversations now. I don't think it would have been possible without the pandemic, right?


The Rise of Ghostwriting and AI in Content Creation
---

Jim Banks: Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting that, you know, I think one of the two of the biggest kind of you know, growth areas in terms of, you know, skills that are in demand, ghostwriting on LinkedIn, and also content creation, I think, again, that there's, you know, so much demand for, you know, people that can kind of chop up videos and put them into kind of like the sort of four second videos.

Jim Banks: You know, there's such a great demand for that type of activity, and certainly on the ghostwriting side of things, again, I think a lot of people will probably lean into AI, and I think, again, so much of that will be, it's so easy to kind of see when it's been, AI's been used, right, that I think in some respects, I think, you know, AI needs to be an [00:10:00] assistance, rather than sort of, Actually doing it all for you, right?

Jim Banks: So but yeah, like the whole ghostwriting thing, there are people making so much money now just by basically ghostwriting on behalf of, you know, CEOs of big companies that, you know, probably don't have the skill or expertise or the time to kind of do that, but they, they want to get the message out. So, yeah.

Jim Banks: for

Benjamin Hoehn: completely. And another role that I'm seeing kind of pop up in parallel to that is internally, there are now like prompt engineers or prompt like curators. And so what these people do is in addition to the ghost writing, right, they might sit down and have their own instance of ChatGPT or Gemini or something trained on.

Benjamin Hoehn: So they're ghostwriting for their CEO, but they have fed in all of the previous content they've done, all of the other speeches they've given, and now they've curated that and trained it in such a way that they can write prompts to, you know, churn out content in that person's voice, but also all the voices of the other C suite, the other team members, and all of that.

Benjamin Hoehn: I'm mostly seeing this kind of on the selling side. [00:11:00] Like the BDR and AD side, you'll have kind of one you know, prompt y kind of BDR that might just be writing all of the sales enablement pieces, working with marketing and doing that, but they have everything trained. If you're hearing this and you're like, what a great idea, or you don't have that person in your org, you probably do.

Benjamin Hoehn: They're just using it and you don't know it, so ask. 

Jim Banks: Yeah, yeah, I think it's again, I've been sort of blown away by, by some of the, the sort of AI solutions that have been put out there that are so close. They're really so, so, so close. Right. And I think, again, I think the piece that's missing is they're not using their own data to kind of like, you know, formulate what the, the kind of the agents kind of look like and sound like, right.

Jim Banks: Again, you need to have the right tone and the right sort of you know, everything kind of, if you feed it your data, right. And say, right, this is my style, right. I need you to kind of have everything that is produced from this point forward in that style. And as you say, if, if you're, you know, if you're trying to go.

Jim Banks: The CEO has a different style than you have, right? And the head of sales may have a different style than you have. But again, I think so much of it now is, you know, [00:12:00] I've always kind of maintained that every meeting you do should be recorded. You know, there should be some sort of note taker in there to kind of make sure that there's the summary.

Jim Banks: Yeah, there's the whole thing of, right, your job is to take the notes in this meeting and somebody would sit there and take all the notes and then kind of write them all up. Send them out and it kind of, you know, and I think we're way past that, right? I mean you can kind of use something like an Otter.

Jim Banks: ai to kind of like, you know, sit there in the background, do everything, write the notes, you know, send out the distribution and say, right, this is, this is what was discussed, this is what was agreed you know, this is your job and that's what you've got to do.


Benjamin Hoehn: completely. So the two things on that, the first that you mentioned, you know, going back to writing in different people's voices and styles, one major thing that I'm seeing now that is super effective is if you are kind of that person writing for multiple people in the C suite, not only train everything as you're saying, so take all, you know, you need to get that old content in, train it on that content before you produce anything.

Benjamin Hoehn: But then also inject the prompt that says don't use these filler words or don't use these popular AI words. [00:13:00] 

Jim Banks: Next 

Benjamin Hoehn: curate it. And then if you're also finding that you're recording these C suite people, one thing that I've done with one of my students is Fractional clients was we'd record all of these meetings exactly as you're saying.

Benjamin Hoehn: So, you know, we would find that one person would have an immense amount of knowledge about like one go to market function. And instead of sitting there and taking notes and doing it the old way that I used to, I would just say, Hey, just jump on a call with me. I'm going to record it. I'm going to transcribe it.

Benjamin Hoehn: I'll listen for the repeated words that they use in terms of phrase that they use. And then I can replicate that. Using AI. And so we just scale that one piece into like six or seven forms of content. So content repurposing, right, is the name of the game, especially with AI. But you have to start with some human based content first.

Benjamin Hoehn: Otherwise, as we know, it's going to sound like just AI generated stuff and no one has time for that.

Jim Banks: think one of the really super smart marketers I'm a huge fan of is Dean Jackson who, I think he's, I think he's still put, he put out content he came up with [00:14:00] the kind of concept in one of the business, businesses that he has is basically it's, it's called the 90 minute book.

Jim Banks: So what he will do is he will basically get one of his team to interview somebody for 90 minutes. And then on the basis of that interview, Basically produce a book that then, you know, can be sort of published and sort of sent out. And you know, if you think about it, if you think, if you have a 90 minute conversation with somebody where they're just unloading everything that's in their mind about, you know, a particular topic, right?

Jim Banks: They can put the framework for the book, all that sort of stuff, the title, the cover, you know, all that sort of stuff. And then all of a sudden you can become potentially you know, a best selling author. You know, and I know a lot of people that want to get onto the speaker circuit. So very much.

Jim Banks: Quite often the route to market for, you know, a keynote at an event is you know, by being, you know, a published author, right? And again, I've always aspired to kind of write a book, but I wouldn't, I haven't got the patience to even read a book, never mind write one, right? So, [00:15:00] but that sort of concept sounds great to me,


Benjamin Hoehn: sounds amazing. Yeah. In terms of publishing a book, it sounds like you, you really could using that same method there. So yeah. Block off 90 minutes and do that, but I haven't heard of that yet, but that's amazing. I know that a lot of these recent published authors they do leverage ghostwriters, right?

Benjamin Hoehn: And it begins with kind of an interview and they outline it from there. And then there's a whole team that kind of goes from there. But if now AI can do that, that's, that's amazing. I did hear about one case where There was a company or a person that was just churning out tons of like books by just putting into AI.

Benjamin Hoehn: Hey, write a book on, you know, a children's book, a YA book, whatever. And they're just spamming Amazon with these eBooks. And hey, if you get a million of those at 99 cents each, there you go. But I think that Amazon is starting to flag for it. So if you're hearing that and you know, you want to become a publisher overnight, beware.

Benjamin Hoehn: I think Amazon is wise to that. And they're trying to reduce that AI gen book content.

Jim Banks: Yeah, I was talking, I was talking to [00:16:00] to, I think one of my previous guests, and I was talking about a friend who he went through the process. He went through So he was going through the process of becoming a published author, right, and he kind of, it was like really laborious to write his book, so he got the book finished, and then what he wanted to do is he wanted to help other people write books, right, and you know, and he interviewed somebody and this person basically said, I've got a really good idea for a book, you know, and he said, well, why do you want to write the book, and he basically said, I want to get keynote presentations, so what they did was they basically said, do you know the title of the book, and the guy goes, yeah, I know what the title of the book is, so He kind of took the title of the book and, you know, like, what's the basic premise of it?

Jim Banks: It's this, you know, this is what I want to kind of be in the book. Great. So he took that, he sent it to, I think, Upwork or Fiverr. He got a kind of cover for the book, designed it with the title of the book on it, registered the domain name for the book, right? Put up a website to basically say, you know, this, this book is available, [00:17:00] right?

Jim Banks: So people click on it, you know, you ran a few ads to Facebook and Google, have you ran some ads to it, right? When they got to the, to the you know, to the effectively the place where they would get hold of the book, there was a, you know, like, there's a waitlist sign up to kind of join the waitlist. And what he was doing is a demand for it, right, in advance of, you know, actually writing the book.

Jim Banks: He hadn't written a single item in the book at all, right, but he got such a great demand for, you know, people, it, it, portraying an interest in it based on just the, the title of the book and the, the brief summary of what the premise was, what the book was going to be about, and he also picked up two keynote gigs on the back of And 

Benjamin Hoehn: Oh, my goodness. 

Jim Banks: title and a fine dollar book cover, which to me is like insane.

Benjamin Hoehn: Well, Well, there it is. 

Jim Banks: I'm, I'm not saying that that's the way every 

Benjamin Hoehn: yeah, 

Jim Banks: kind of pick gets picked up, but I'm sure that there's probably a few people that have, they, they're kinda winging it so.


Benjamin Hoehn: that's the power of marketing. I mean, that entire strategy used to be the early odds app strategy. Kind of the fake it till you make it [00:18:00] vaporware strategy. And now, like, knowledge has become vaporware. We could do a whole separate podcast on that. But literally, that's it, right? You build a few screens, you get a UX designer to build them out, you don't even need to put it on the App Store yet, just get a clever domain, throw it up there, throw out the features, you know, target the demographic, you're paying under a buck CPC.

Benjamin Hoehn: On a modest budget on Facebook or Insta, and then you're kind of building demand for the waitlist. And then those waitlisted folks, you know, if you have them fill out a survey which you could get, you know, a paid one like on SurveyMonkey or something, and you have them go a little bit deeper and you find some really good people, they kind of become your testers and they build the app with you.

Benjamin Hoehn: But a lot of early apps, right, were kind of developed that way where When you look under the hood, there's actually nothing there. But then they're kind of figuring out what to build along the way. Now, a lot of those things that have been used up, but it's interesting to hear that now you can do that with content with a book.

Benjamin Hoehn: That means it's only a matter of time, right? Before we see a series or a film 

Jim Banks: Yeah. 

Benjamin Hoehn: done in that way, because now you can [00:19:00] do these things on AI as well.

Jim Banks: But, you know, I mean, again, I, I, I'm, I, I always kind of, like, go deep in the weeds on, like, new things that I, I've not heard. I mean, I, I always say to people, for me, this podcast journey has been such a joy for me, because I'm kind of unlocking bits of my brain that I've not really been tapping into for such a long time.

Jim Banks: And, you know, one of the things I've been kind of, you know, I mean, I'm, I'm kind of, I'm sort of calling bullshit because I think some of the kind of people that are doing it, I'm thinking, but if you kind of really dug into the weeds here on this model, it's not as good as they say it is. Right. But I'm going to go, okay, I'll just give them the benefit of the doubt, you know, but there's like a whole bunch of really, really super, super young kids.


Faceless YouTube Channels and Content Outsourcing
---

Jim Banks: That have got the right cameras, the right microphones, they look confident on camera, the white t shirts, right, and they're, they're creating faceless YouTube channels. I don't know if you've heard of the concept of a faceless YouTube channel, but it's basically where people can take a, you know, like a Wikipedia page and turn it into a YouTube video.

Jim Banks: So somebody will kind of create like cartoons and things like that, and they [00:20:00] can turn a video into, you know, a monetized channel. Really, really quickly, right? And, and, and ultimately, you never see the person, you know, it's not like you and I sitting here talking where we got to get dressed and we got to, you know, shave and whatever else, literally, you can kind of sit there and just do this all day, every day, and leverage the, you know, the opportunity that exists for, you know, cheap, cheap editors and kind of creators in the Philippines and India, you know, all those sort of places where, where those, you know, Other people are outsourcing stuff too.

Jim Banks: You can get a fair amount of output with not particularly a lot of money kind of input, so. 

Benjamin Hoehn: So, 

Jim Banks: [00:21:00] Yeah.

Benjamin Hoehn: that you don't have a lot of time to read either. And I think that's a common problem because we're so screen heavy.

Benjamin Hoehn: Thank you, Pandemic. This is, I think, endless. I think people are going to be reading less and consuming content and even educational materials this way. So the question is, who's vetting all this stuff? How do you know what's factual and what's not? If, you know, like I said, knowledge is vaporware. If we're kind of using this model, To approach building demand for, you know, any learnings, how do we know it's authentic?

Benjamin Hoehn: How do we know the source? Critical thinking is at an all time low at this point. So it's tough to vet that this stuff is legit. And if enough views happen, people are just taking it as a fact, right? You remember, You probably remember this. Back when I went to school, people would actually, you know, you'd have to write a paper and then in the bibliography, obviously, cite your sources.

Benjamin Hoehn: Right. So people would cite Wikipedia and all of the [00:22:00] professors would lose their mind because they're like, you can't cite Wikipedia. You have to go one layer deeper. Right. But there's, I think, a whole generation of people that think Wikipedia really is an encyclopedia that are citing Wikipedia. And then now, if that's Producing a YouTube video where people are like learning that subject from Wikipedia. 

Jim Banks: Yeah, 

Benjamin Hoehn: snake eating its tail. 

Jim Banks: yeah. 

Benjamin Hoehn: getting dangerous. So I don't know what the next level is there, but 

Jim Banks: Again, I think that's where a like a notebook LM, you can kind of like pull multiple

Benjamin Hoehn: Oh yeah.

Jim Banks: sources of information on the same topic into one place and kind of again, you kind of throw a kind of podcast out. 


Optimizing Content for Modern Consumption
---

Jim Banks: I mean, like you mentioned there about the, You know, I don't have the time to read. I mean, one of the things that I've started to do, you know, I enjoy going out walking.

Jim Banks: And although I do listen to a lot of podcasts, one of the things I also like to do is I like to try and, you know, and kind of keep up to date with, you know, blog posts and things like that. And one of the things I've kind of like started to do is I've started to use 11 labs, right? Because what it will do is it will [00:23:00] read a blog post to me, right?

Jim Banks: So, you know, again, there's so many uses for, you know, people with you know, like that maybe kind of can't read like they're kind of visually blind or what have you they can actually listen to a blog post in in the sort of the way it's written they can have it in the the kind of the gender that they want male or female they can have it you know in a particular accent or what have you um you know and again I think so much of that is is where I think a lot of people will will start to sort of um you know take advantage of that type of technology that exists today.

Jim Banks: Yeah.

Jim Banks: You 

Benjamin Hoehn: that their virtual AI service. So in the States, and I'm not sure if it was just Bay Area or not but you could literally, you know, go to Google Maps, click on a new restaurant, and it would call and make reservations for you and call and coordinate simple things.

Benjamin Hoehn: This was an early instance. [00:24:00] Pre Gemini, right? It was back when it was like Google Brain. 

Jim Banks: Yeah. 

Benjamin Hoehn: Google or Siri, read me this article instead of actually reading a blog post. And I don't know about you, but I do that in the car all the time.

Benjamin Hoehn: If I'm running out to go pick up the kids or doing something. And it, you know, a news alert pops up, I'll just ask it to read it to me. And then I feel informed, you know, going from one place to another. It's a quick thing that I was going to read, don't have to. So if people aren't optimizing for that, especially on the digital side, we're looking at SEO and taking into account this new form of search.

Benjamin Hoehn: You, you must do it. That's why the snippets are more important than ever. Graphing is more important than ever, adding at the bottom of your blog posts, frequently asked questions, knowledge based stuff, and formatting it in the right way is more important than ever. Because now everyone's just summarizing stuff and having it read to them from their AI tool of choice.


The Importance of Audio and Video in Podcasts
---

Jim Banks: Yeah, it's a bit, it's a bit like, you know, with, with [00:25:00] every podcast episode that I have, Right, in addition to obviously the kind of the audio that I put out on to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else, I also do video. I include chapters in there. Right, I try and make sure that I've got, you know, jumping off points, because again, people may want to be, they may want to listen to the whole thing.

Jim Banks: Great, fantastic, I would love it if everyone listened to every single minute of every podcast episode I've ever made. Right, the reality of it is, is I know they're busy people, I want to appreciate and respect their time. Right, so. I always encourage people to listen to it at one and a half or two times speed, right?

Jim Banks: Because You know, some people talk slowly and that's fine. Some people talk quickly, right? But it's like you'll find a cadence that kind of suits your listening style. But equally again, I always kind of say the, the video enhances the experience, but you know, the audio is just as good, right? I mean, we can, we can still kind of get the message across.

Jim Banks: I mean, I've seen some podcasters who are making the mistake of their Shooting video. And then they're, they're [00:26:00] doing screen shares and I'm like, whoa, hang on. This is a podcast. Right? You shouldn't be sharing screens and saying, well, what I'm showing you here is I'm, you know, it's, it's almost like a, you know, you put a, put a hood over my head and, and trying to describe things to me.

Jim Banks: So, you know, it, the, the, the, the video can enhance things 'cause people can look and go. I like, I like the the kind of the background that Ben's got there. I like the kind of, the colors that Jim's got there, but it's not really, you know, it's just enhancement rather than it's, you know, without it, it doesn't work.


Benjamin Hoehn: Completely agree. I think You know, going back to like learning via video, when I'm listening to those, even if it's just an article covering maybe an entertainment piece that I'm into, I don't really get mad, but it is less effective when they make the assumption that I'm sitting there watching the whole thing.

Benjamin Hoehn: Right. And I think the best channels do optimize for audio with video as a supplement, as you said, where they understand, okay, you know, maybe these people are driving from one place to another and listening to this, even if I'm showing something on screen, that's relevant to it. I can't rely [00:27:00] on that. So if you're a content creator and you're thinking about, you know, Making this book online or, or all of these suggestions that we've been talking about I would say don't assume that the audience is watching, even if it is video.

Benjamin Hoehn: It's probably sitting there on their device and, you know, they're doing something else. 

Jim Banks: So, so one of my pet peeves about the way in which business is conducted is when people do run webinars, right, so let's say I get invited to a webinar and it starts at like two o'clock in the afternoon. Afternoon. Right. 


Webinar Pet Peeves
---

Jim Banks: And I log on. a minute or so beforehand and I get there at two o'clock and then the person comes on and says well we're just going to wait three or four minutes to kind of give people time Like, I hate that.

Jim Banks: I don't know about you, like, I've, I think I've probably, 75 percent of the webinars that I go on to, I'll leave it before I've even heard a single word that they, that I've gone to listen to, because I think, to me, it's just a completely disrespectful way of conducting business, [00:28:00] right? What do you, what do you, what's the kind of, what's your big, biggest pet peeve and what's your thoughts on that?

Benjamin Hoehn: Well, on that in particular, I have separate pet peeves about webinars, but on that in particular, we have seen. Having been through a million webinars and done that, I'm guilty of doing it. I get why it's done. And it sucks if you're doing the webinar. 


Improving Webinar Show Rates
---

Benjamin Hoehn: Because the main thing that you wanted in a webinar, you're trying to prove ROI, right?

Benjamin Hoehn: When you're doing these things. And what you're really looking for is show rate. So you'll get 100 registrants. You want 80 to show up. A good show rate, right? That's, oh, 80 percent is awesome. Post pandemic, 50 percent is good, just because there's too many webinars now. Right now, I'm actually missing a webinar that I really wanted to see, but I wanted to do this with you instead.

Benjamin Hoehn: I'm going to watch that recording. 

Jim Banks: here with me.


Benjamin Hoehn: You're one. But I've been there on the other side and you're literally sitting there watching people trickle in and you're like, Oh, I don't know if I should start or not. And I'm looking at my show rate and I'm looking at all my metrics and I know that half these people are just going to watch the recording anyway.

Benjamin Hoehn: And then that ends up being in the recording. You looking, you know, [00:29:00] like an idiot grinning there for five minutes, like, let's just wait for one more person. It just happens. But. You know what? People can just stop doing that because of the show rate. It is one of those things where it's just like, everyone's going to watch the recording.

Benjamin Hoehn: Just send me the snippets, send me the gist. I don't need anything else. My pet peeve on webinars is waiting to get into the content. What I've often seen, what I really hate is when like the first probably six slides are just these laborious intros before you even get to the meat of it. It's like, Hey, we're going to get into, you know, six ways to make a billion dollars selling Bitcoin.

Benjamin Hoehn: And they're like, but first 20 minutes of intro and blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, no man, get to the six. Let me get in, get out. I'll watch the recording. I'll do whatever I need to. I'm here for the info. Let's get on with our lives. And 

Jim Banks: Yep. 

Benjamin Hoehn: more people with webinars are starting to get that now because they're seeing these metrics too.

Benjamin Hoehn: Less people are showing up because of that. And I think they're going to get a lot shorter.


Effective PPC Strategies
---

Jim Banks: Yeah, because I was, I was always, I, I, whenever I talk to people, you know, I mean, primarily I, I, I run paid ads for, for clients. And generally speaking, [00:30:00] one of the first things I always say to them is like, you know, you need to run dedicated landing pages specifically for PPC, right? And they go, well, why? And I'm like, because, you know, if you're trying to rank organically, you know, you're going to have a whole bunch of stuff on there that really is, it's just noise, right?

Jim Banks: It's just getting in the way of people being able to do what, what they want to do, right? So, you know, I've kind of said if, you know, yes, you want people to engage with you socially, you want them to kind of like sign up for your newsletter, you want them to kind of, you know Follow you on LinkedIn or whatever it might be, right?

Jim Banks: But ultimately, if you're trying to get them to kind of register for a webinar or, you know, download an ebook, then you need to make that the only thing that they can do, right, on that experience. So don't have any jump off points, because again, people have got the attention span of goldfish, they will jump off wherever they see a shiny object kind of like, You know, like the kind of the messenger chat at the bottom.

Jim Banks: Can I help you with anything? It's like, Whoa, hang on a minute. Right. Cause that's not what you want to happen, right? You want, if [00:31:00] fair enough, if that's organically great, that's, that's a good sort of sales magnet, but you know, ultimately, if you're trying to, like I said, if you're trying to get people to fill in a form, right, don't offer them a kind of a option B is, you know, chat to somebody on a, on a messenger bot.

Jim Banks: Right. Because. not, if they're doing it at like 10 o'clock at night and you don't have anyone there to talk to them, it's a complete waste of time, right? So very

Benjamin Hoehn: with you on that too much. I still have friends at drift and some of these companies, but I've done a lot of testing here. I actually had some clients that used to pay for PPC ads, keywords, non branded keywords, and send them to the homepage and then they'd be like, why aren't we getting conversions?

Benjamin Hoehn: Your homepage is like this massive pitch for like the entire company, all the products and features and everything. They're, they're lost in the analytics at that point. So 100 percent on dedicated landing pages. 


Optimizing Google Ads
---

Benjamin Hoehn: But three things about this, the number one thing that I always advise people, you know, beyond the landing page is [00:32:00] looking, especially if you're like in.

Benjamin Hoehn: Google Ads, right? Looking at a few different metrics that a lot of people don't think about. Everyone knows click through rate, conversion rate, all that stuff. You need to look at quality score. It is still a healthy metric and that is the metric that basically tells you, Hey, the keyword that I have aligns with the ad.

Benjamin Hoehn: which aligns with the experiences you're saying. So you don't want to optimize for a keyword for, you know, podcasts for digital marketing. And then the ad headline is this is the best digital marketing podcast register now. And then they go to the landing page and it's about me and all your other services.

Benjamin Hoehn: And they're like, where's the podcast stuff, right? You're going to bounce. So Google's obviously taking all of that into account. You're going to get a low quality score from there. So many people that I talk to that new clients, customers, everyone I go in, I add that column to Google ads and I'm like, let me just see the quality score.

Benjamin Hoehn: If it's three, you're not doing that alignment right. The first thing I do is optimize quality score because you're going to get cheaper CPC that way. The second is optimizing for search [00:33:00] impression share. It's a newer metric. It used to be, you know, more of kind of an engagement rate metric, but Google is also leveraging that.

Benjamin Hoehn: to change your CPC. So if you can optimize for an impression share based on those keywords, it's going to tell you the competition for those keywords. And you can implement rules to kind of dynamically increase and decrease your bid when your search impression share hits a certain threshold. Usually they go for 85%.

Benjamin Hoehn: If I'm there and above, I'm gold, branded keywords kind of start there. But once you get your quality score fixed, optimize for search IS. And then finally, it's just, you know, Fix your conversions. You know what you're talking about, where you're sending people to, you know, a page that has non alignment or they're, they're going to click off to a chat bot or click somewhere else.

Benjamin Hoehn: How are you tracking that conversion? You want someone to do one thing on one landing page or the same thing repeatedly and make sure those conversions work because guess what? All these ad platforms optimize on that conversion. They need to know that it's coming through so it can dynamically. We bid better for you if you [00:34:00] don't have the time to optimize for quality score and impression share and all these other little hidden metrics.

Benjamin Hoehn: But so many people don't do that the right way. It's kind of crazy. I would say most of my digital clients, 30 first 30 days, I'm fixing those three things and then we're piling on more capital, right? To get kind of more conversions and, and get the results that they really came for.


Speed of Response in Lead Generation
---

Jim Banks: Yeah, the thing that always amazes me is how slow some businesses are actually getting in touch with the leads that have kind of reached out to them in the first place, right? The speed of response is like so crucial, right? Again, if somebody is trying to solve a problem, right? And you're one of three companies that can solve the problem.

Jim Banks: Right, there's every likelihood, whoever gets to them first and they're happy with, right, the second and third isn't even going to get a look in, right. So, you know, the speed of response is like really important, right. And, and I also think that whole thing with the feedback loop, I think, you know, as much as yes, with Google, and even even Facebook, you know, you're generating leads, right.

Jim Banks: But ultimately, you don't want [00:35:00] leads, you want converting these, right, you want these to convert into the next. Logical thing, whether that's a sale or whatever it might be, right? But you need to feed back to them to say, That lead was good and all the others were not good, right? So, you know, again, I'm under how many brands just don't send that data back to Google to say, this Google Click ID generated a 25, 000 order, right?

Jim Banks: And then that way, Google can go, okay, I'll take that into account when it comes to who else I'm going to show ads to, right? That might be a suitable prospect for you, right? 

Benjamin Hoehn: I've, I've been there. I've made it work before. The problem is a lot of people don't do that because their CRM is misconfigured. You need to implement, you know, CRM, a two way CRM discussion with your ad platform. Now, if you're a large enterprise company and you're using a DSP to do this, that stuff is built in.

Benjamin Hoehn: You're paying an agency to fix that stuff. If you're smaller and even a startup just doing stuff on platform, you got to dig in and do it yourself. But then it [00:36:00] exposes like if you're using your CR in the wrong way, if everything is a lead, if you're not using opportunities or it's just a mess in there, guess what you need to stop, change your 

Jim Banks: you tell Google, 

Benjamin Hoehn: do that stuff the right way to get it to

Benjamin Hoehn: work.

Benjamin Hoehn: Yeah. 

Jim Banks: a page view is a conversion, right, they're going to go, guess what? They're going to like flood you with conversions, right? 

Benjamin Hoehn: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Benjamin Hoehn: So you can, but once it works great, I mean, I, I've had it optimized for, you know, deep funnel conversions where it's like, this was an actual meeting with a seller, which was a super qualified lead that led to an opportunity. And Google will say, got it. I'm going to send you more of those.

Benjamin Hoehn: That stuff works flawlessly. It's just, you got to do that work to get it to, you know, communicate two way, as you've said. Well,

Jim Banks: the thing. I always think it's like, although Facebook, Google all say our AI is amazing. And it's kind of like learning all the time. And it is, it has access to data points that we would never in a million years be able to get on our own, right? Our first party data will not carry the rich data of Google.[00:37:00] 

Jim Banks: Everything that that person has done before they got to, you know, view an ad that they potentially could click on this month. So, you know, like just saying, well, I'm not going to rely on their AI at all is crazy, right? But relying on it without kind of inputting, you know, like you know, your own data is, again, to me, that's crazy.

Jim Banks: You need to sort of you know, augment the data that they have with your data, right? And feedback as much as, like I said, as much as you can. As quickly as you can, right? So again, if you have a lead that is not good, right, you need to feed again. I always kind of say in the same way that people are, you know, Facebook, if you're optimizing https: otter.

Jim Banks: ai You know, a target cost per lead, right you know, 20 bucks, right, and they go, yeah, we're delivering leads at 20 bucks, but, you know, half the leads that they generate for you are not valid and, and, you know, out of area or whatever it might be, right. If you don't feed that back to them by sort of effectively backing them out of the system, right, they're going to assume that the leads are good until you tell them to the contrary.

Benjamin Hoehn: there's,  there's kind of two aspects to [00:38:00] this, but it goes back to the one thing that I tell all of my new clients and even everyone in house. These ad platforms. Or just systems built to spend your money. They are providing a service. Let's not get that wrong. But, you know, if you blindly go in and trust their AI and that they're learning, and even if you follow all of their, like, automated advice and literally just go down the Primrose path of doing everything it tells you, It's going to blow through your cash and you're not really going to get what you want.

Benjamin Hoehn: You have to implement some safeguards. You can't blindly trust it. There's, there's two things I always advise. I did mention earlier, you know, building out automation around optimizing for quality score and impression share and things like that. I highly recommend, you know, you build in like a simple set of rule rules that says never exceed, you know, this number of.

Benjamin Hoehn: Impressions or never exceed a CPC or CPA of this just in case, just in case somehow something runs wild, make sure you've, you've set these capped rules inside. And I always kind of set the same ones because it's just a safeguard that kind of overrides the system. Right. And the second thing I always do, as you [00:39:00] mentioned, is giving that feedback.

Benjamin Hoehn: If you're not going in and configuring your CRM to, you know, optimize for like a funnel conversion. Right. Actually go in and suppress all of the bad audiences. And what that looks like is, you know, going into your CRM or your MAP and building legitimate audiences of churned leads bad leads, you know, on calls, all that stuff.

Benjamin Hoehn: Keep those lists propagating. If you can't do it every week, do it every month at least. And then just add those to your negative audiences list. That will just continue to refine the targeting and it will tell the system, all right, don't look at these people. And if you have enough of those, you can actually build lookalikes to make sure you're not targeting them 

Jim Banks: Yeah. 

Benjamin Hoehn: enhance your targeting.

Benjamin Hoehn: So 

Jim Banks: Yeah, I mean I 

Benjamin Hoehn: to save money,

Jim Banks: I've worked in affiliate marketing a lot over the years, and I always kind of say that the suppression files are probably the best thing that an affiliate can have, right? Because, you know, basically says, these are all the people that have bought, bought my shit before, you know, so there's no point in showing them any more ads, right?

Jim Banks: Because they're not going to buy it again, if it's a kind of, you know, if they're [00:40:00] doing lead gen, it's like, I'm going to fill in another form, right? They just, it's a waste of money, right? So I'd much rather take them out of the equation and say, let's not show ads to them at all. 

Benjamin Hoehn: or they're in your database already. And now you can just target them on your own, right? Or there are, you know, Or you can just upload some of their names and get super segmented. Now you have all their information. You know what size their company is, you know what vertical they're in. Now you can get really surgical on building these little kind of middle of funnel and bottom of funnel segments and campaigns and go after them one to one.

Benjamin Hoehn: Build out some ABM campaigns, go after them that way. Everything is just all about, you know, doing that initial capture. But one tip I always tell anyone new is, you know, separate your campaigns and top of funnel. So net new names being added, suppress them in your middle of funnel campaigns. People that maybe came through, you want to enrich a bit more, get more intent out of, and then bottom of funnel.

Benjamin Hoehn: We bought them or returned whatever, just keep those audiences separate. And then one should kind of block from the other. You'll see that your targeting will get better. Your conversion and click through rates will get [00:41:00] better, and you'll save money.

Jim Banks: Yeah, it's funny, I always remember a story when I was working with a company, we're doing like lead generation for. for, you know, some of the offers that this particular affiliate network had. And you know, one of the things we found was that a lot of the leads were getting declined. And when we kind of looked into some of the leads that were being submitted, right, it was because, again, I mean, like, you know, people can sit there and type stuff on the keyboard, and sometimes they'll just You know, mistype things.

Jim Banks: So they may mistype, you know, gmail. com and leave out a dot or something like that. So, you know, what we did was every single day, right, we would have a batch file. It was like a sort of CSV that we would produce of all the leads that couldn't be processed, right, because, you know, again, ones and zeros.

Jim Banks: It's like, it's a confirmed lead, you get paid. It's not a confirmed lead because the email's wrong or the phone Wrong or whatever it might be. It doesn't mean they haven't put in phone numbers, just it's not right. So what if, if it was an email, right, and we had a phone number, what we did was we sent this batch file to the Philippines overnight.

Jim Banks: They [00:42:00] would then process the, the file that would come in. They would, if they had a phone number and an email that was wrong, they would phone the person up, ask them what the, the correct email address is, put it in, submit it the next day, and those could be processed. Similarly, if they had a. You can get a valid email address, but the phone number was wrong, they would send them an email and say, What's your phone number?

Jim Banks: You know, just basically fill in the blank and get it done, get it processed. And they were doing something like 15, 000 a month in, you know, effectively ancillary revenue that would otherwise not have been paid out, right? And that's good for the advertiser, because they're getting leads that, you know, their sales people can process, good for the network, good for the people in the Philippines, and obviously good for us.

Jim Banks: So,


Benjamin Hoehn: 100%. Yeah,


Lead Enrichment and Validation
---

Benjamin Hoehn: I, that is kind of early lead enrichment, right? I think, I think that's still going on today. Because you'll see lead enrichment companies, right, kind of do that in real time, because they've built these massive databases by using those practices before. But now, lead enrichment is also done just by scraping online.

Benjamin Hoehn: Talking earlier about, [00:43:00] hey, what, what things are going to go AI that a hundred percent even, you know, that person or operating a company in the Philippines or offshore somewhere doing all that stuff, they can now just run scraping tools and say, all right, show me all the instances of this email address or variations of it and all the phone numbers associated with it.

Benjamin Hoehn: And they'll validate and fetch it and kind of push it back in. If that stuff is now done in real time while you're there entering your own phone number, it might spit back and say, did you actually mean this? Or it might validate the domain, or, or do all these different things. Those, those lead enrichment pieces, I think pay for themselves over time because then you're not having bad data come in.

Benjamin Hoehn: And it just obviously increases the quality and, and therefore everything down the line.

Jim Banks: Yeah, because I mean, in some verticals, they have like a, you know, an underwriting process, right? So, you know, again, like, if you're doing like loans or something like that, right? I mean, you know, there's going to be criteria that, you know. Anyone could say, well, if, if you're 17 and you've never had a kind of like a job in your life, and you go into the bank and say, I want to borrow 50 grand, they're going to go, not happening, right?

Jim Banks: [00:44:00] You don't need it. You don't need a kind of an agent to process that application because you know it's going to be declined, right? So, you know, again, I think so many people could kind of do that. They could help the agency, the kind of the client to waste money, you know, because every single application has to be processed and every single application costs money to process, right?

Jim Banks: It costs time of the person to kind of process it, even if you know it's going to be declined. So, I'd much rather Find ways in which you can enrich the data, fill in the blanks, right, know that you can kind of do a little bit of sort of pre validation to say, well, yeah, this is going to be, You know, at MQL, 100 percent because all of the ticks are there, you know, I'm looking for companies that are, you know, this size of company, this sort of level of revenue, you know, and then you can go, right, that's good.

Jim Banks: I can put it forward for the next sort of stage, right, rather than it goes into the system. You know, because again, Google don't care. Facebook don't care. They just have your money regardless, right? So, you know, yes, if it's a lead, great, it's [00:45:00] a lead. They're filled in a form. The fact that they're not big enough or not, you know, small enough or whatever, that's not our fault.

Jim Banks: That's, that's not what we did, right? We, you asked us to provide you leads. We've done it. So. 

Benjamin Hoehn: And that's where the enrichment comes in, right? To ensure that those fields work. And then what you're talking about is validation, right? Okay, it filled in all these forms, but it's the company size, right? Do we have enough people? You know, is all the data looking good and checking the boxes for my ideal customer profile and who I want to sell to?

Benjamin Hoehn: Now, There's kind of two schools of thought. One school is go after the largest target account market that you can and then refine it through lead enrichment and validation. Just let anything come in and then we'll sort it out. That's a little expensive. The other school of thought is get really narrow targeting, like decrease the size of your TAM to a total relevant market, right?

Benjamin Hoehn: Instead, so instead of targeting a million accounts, you manually go through and say, let's just target 3000 accounts. These are the only people that we want to do business with anyway. We're only going to spend money on those folks somehow. Each has its own merits. Obviously [00:46:00] you'll get more busy if you have like a larger team to work through all the stuff you might find one offs outside of your ICP, right?

Benjamin Hoehn: That could turn into amazing customers. On the other side, if you're running lean and you want to start small obviously go with the smaller TRM. 

Jim Banks: But that completely kind of contradicts, I mean, again, if you're gonna run Facebook ads, they go, you need to let, let our, our algorithm run on a very, very broad audience. It's like, 

Benjamin Hoehn: Yeah. 

Jim Banks: 3000 people and 3000 is all I want. Right? . And they're like, no, too small has to be bigger, you know? 

Benjamin Hoehn: And that's why people leverage DSPs at this point, because then you could just kind of go through a platform like that and it will syndicate across Facebook and Meta.

Jim Banks: I'm,  I'm always amazed, like, I mean, we, we do we, I worked with at DSP for. Many, many years, you know, and all the great data that Facebook used to get access to, right? And everyone thought Facebook was phenomenal. All of that data is still there, right? All of the the kind of, the partners that have that data still has it, right?

Jim Banks: They have all the credit card spending and, you know, whether they're a Democrat or Republican and how much, you [00:47:00] know, their net worth is and all that sort of stuff who they work for, you know, so there's, Tons of B2B companies with huge amounts of rich data that you can create an audience, you know, send it to your DSP and either build an audience there to send to Facebook.

Jim Banks: So you can kind of go right, I'm going to filter that data, get them to my website, and then retarget them on Facebook. Or you can get that audience and send it to Facebook through a sort of like a part, a place like Magenta Marketing Platform, right? And then that way, You can actually send the audience directly to it, right, and it's kind of, you know, you pay a sort of small sort of CPM bump in terms of the cost for it, right, but you've done all the sort of the, the, the, you know, instead of paying 40, 50 CPMs for, you know, impressions to allow Facebook to kind of like work out who they should be showing the ads to, you can go, I know who to show the ads to, these people, right, and much better.

Jim Banks: Yeah.

Benjamin Hoehn: I agree. 


The Future of Targeted Advertising
---

Benjamin Hoehn: I think that's also the future because we're just exhausted. You know, we were talking about the pandemic earlier and just screen time, I think, in [00:48:00] general, went up during then and it stayed that way for the most part. So we're being inundated with ads, pitches. Podcasts, all this stuff. And if everyone's doing this broad targeting, you can kind of see it.

Benjamin Hoehn: It's like, Hey, it's not personalized. I'm not even in this demographic. I get where you're doing. It's kind of a spray and play situation here, but most things can be ultra targeted now, even TV, right? Connected TV now. I don't think anyone has a dumb TV anymore. Really. Most people either have a 

Jim Banks: Hi. 

Benjamin Hoehn: and streaming 

Jim Banks: Hi. I keep saying to my wife, we bought a TV in 2006, and at the time it was like a really expensive TV, and I've said to her every single year since then, when this breaks we're going to get a smart TV, but it just, this bloody thing just doesn't break, right, it's going 

Benjamin Hoehn: hey, 

Jim Banks: and on and on, I keep thinking, I keep inviting the grandkids around, hoping that one of them will kind of bump into it and smash the screen or something, But it's like, it's literally, you just won't give up. 

Benjamin Hoehn: hey, that's great. That's like that old fridge that everyone has in their garage. It's like, you know what? We're [00:49:00] going to just let that thing keep the soda cold until it

Jim Banks: Or it's like a 2007 Honda that people drive around in, just

Jim Banks: like, you know, beaten to, beaten to, 

Benjamin Hoehn: wheels fall off.

Jim Banks: keeps going. 300, 000 miles on the clock, but, you know. So Ben, thank you so much


Conclusion
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Jim Banks: for, for being on, on the show. I've loved the the conversation. It's been really great to meet you. You know, obviously if all of your contact details will be available in the show notes is, is there one particular thing that you would kind of like to leave the audience with in terms of, you know, whether it's a tip or suggestion or how they can kind of get in touch with you?

Jim Banks: Preferred method? 

Benjamin Hoehn: Let's see. Yeah. Get in touch with me at MojoMogul. com. I will be posting some blog series and some other videos that I've just started to work on with some really cool partners throughout 2025. So in Feb, I'm just starting my kind of podcast circuit again. So it's been an honor for me to be on your podcast, and this is my first one at 25.

Benjamin Hoehn: It's a

Jim Banks: Well, well, it's been great to have you on and hopefully you have many more podcasts like this. You've been a great guest and love to have, love talking to you.

Benjamin Hoehn: Yeah, [00:50:00] same. 

Jim Banks: Take care. Bye for now.

 

Jim Banks Profile Photo

Jim Banks

Podcast Host

Jim is the host of Bad Decisions with Jim Banks, the leading digital marketing podcast for aspiring digital marketers.

Benjamin Hoehn Profile Photo

Benjamin Hoehn

fCMO

Ben Hoehn is a fractional marketing leader with 20+ years of experience empowering businesses to achieve remarkable outcomes.

He specializes in crafting winning GTM strategies, optimizing demand generation & ABM initiatives, and guiding performance marketing teams towards successful SaaS startup exits.

Ben has a proven track record of scaling demand, exceeding ROI goals, and turning underdog stories into success stories.

With two successful startup exits, Ben brings targeted expertise and a data-driven approach to solving marketing challenges.

He's passionate about helping businesses of all sizes – early-stage startups, mid-market companies, enterprises, and venture capital firms – achieve sustainable growth.