Exploring the Impact of AI and Marketing Strategies with Benjamin Hoehn

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 I am in the UK.

The weather here is pretty dire.

Ben, it's great to meet you.

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.

Yeah, when you look at all that's going on in the world, it's been a

really wacky last six months has been insane in some regards with some of

the in the world.

Completely.

not just digitally, but, off of the business side too.

So many things are shifting, so many places 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 seeing how things are shifting, so everyone's reacting to it.

But you know, especially on the digital side, the platform side,

Things like AI are continuing to go on.

I've been talking about that extensively and we're getting some surprises, right?

With things like DeepSeek, but I believe that the AI market will continue to

evolve over the course of this year.

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 bubbles its way to

the top and when I look at like how I use it in my own business on a day to day

basis and some of the things that I do.

and everyone that I've spoken to is like excited about what AI is

bringing to the table for them, right?

And yes, I mean, there's always going to be some 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, the people that use it

well will be the ones that take the jobs away from the people that don't use it,

That is, that's 100 percent what we're saying.

I recently did a webinar where I think it was 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 2024.

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.

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

your business is called Mojo Mogul, if you and I were 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?

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 a fractional CMO but I'm 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.

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.

That seems to be my sweet spot and I just love startups.

So I like working with those.

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 kind of big companies before, right?

And then they start up and they assume that they're the same company.

And it's like, no, you're not that company at all.

So what is it you

need to find some new people.

I've had the opposite experience.

What I love about startups are, 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.

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.

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.

I haven't had the experience.

It sounds like you did, but,

Yeah, I just,

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 kind of, I'm, again,

I'm really interested to understand.

Understand kind of a little bit more detail.

So, you know, you mentioned there, you kind of, you like the ascent rather

than the sort of the summit itself.

You know, why is that?

why'd you kind of feel that, you know, there's more excitement in that than

the actual achievement at the end of it.

I don't know.

I think that there's a little bit of a masochism involved.

What

to be honest, I like being busy.

I like challenging work.

I kind of get turned off after, you know, I've helped lead a couple

of different startups to exit and.

I found 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?

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 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, and these problems are not easy to solve.

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.

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.

I mean, 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've.

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 operate a lot of them, are

probably trying to still do some of the historically old school marketing methods

rather than some of the newer stuff.

And I, the businesses I'm seeing that are adopting, you know, they're adopting

the kind of video content creation and that method are having greater success

than the ones that are still dyed in the wool with the, let's get on a

webinar and, all that sort of stuff.

what are your views on that?

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.

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 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.

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?

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 think would work if we didn't go through that pandemic

where people are just used to seeing what is everyone doing on video now?

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, 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.

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?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting that, two of the biggest

growth areas in terms of, skills that are in demand, ghostwriting on LinkedIn,

and content creation, I think, again, that there's, so much demand for, people

that can chop up videos 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 so much of that will be, it's so easy to see

when it's been, AI's been used, that I think in some respects, I think, AI

needs to be an assistance, rather than Actually doing it all for you, right?

the whole ghostwriting thing, there are people making so much money now

just by basically ghostwriting on behalf of, CEOs of big companies

that, probably don't have the skill or expertise or the time to do that,

but they want to get the message out.

So, yeah.

for

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.

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.

I'm mostly seeing this kind of on the selling side.

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.

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

I've been blown away by, by some of the AI solutions that have been

put out there that are so close.

They're really 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 kind of the agents

kind of look like and sound like, right.

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 you're, you know, if you're trying to go.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

But then also inject the prompt that says don't use these filler words

or don't use these popular AI words.

Next

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.

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.

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.

Otherwise, as we know, it's going to sound like just AI generated

stuff and no one has time for that.

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 the kind of concept in one of the business, businesses that he has is

basically it's called the 90 minute book.

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?

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.

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, but that sort of concept sounds great to me,

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?

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'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.

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.

I think Amazon is wise to that.

And they're trying to reduce that AI gen book content.

Yeah, I was talking to 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?

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 book is available, right?

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 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.

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, portraying an interest

in it based on just the title of the book and 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

Oh, my goodness.

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

Well, Well, there it is.

I'm not saying that's the way every

yeah,

kind of pick gets picked up, but I'm sure that there's probably a few people

that have, they're kinda winging it so.

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 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.

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.

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.

That means it's only a matter of time, right?

Before we see a series or a film

Yeah.

done in that way, because now you can do these things on AI as well.

But, you know, I mean, again, I'm, I always kind of, like, go deep in the weeds

on, like, new things that I've not heard.

I mean, 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.

And, you know, one of the things I've been kind of, you know, I mean, 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 super young kids.

That have got the right cameras, the right microphones, they look

confident on camera, the white t shirts, right, and 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.

So somebody will kind of create like cartoons and things like that,

and they can turn a video into, you know, a monetized channel.

really quickly, right?

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 editors and kind of creators in the Philippines and India, you know, all those

sort of places where those, you know, Other people are outsourcing stuff too.

You can get a fair amount of output with not particularly a

lot of money kind of input, so.

So,

Yeah.

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.

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?

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.

Right.

So people would cite Wikipedia and all of the 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.

snake eating its tail.

yeah.

getting dangerous.

So I don't know what the next level is there, but

Again, I think that's where a like a notebook LM, you can

kind of like pull multiple

Oh yeah.

sources of information on the same topic into one place and kind of again, you

kind of throw a kind of podcast out.

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.

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 read a blog post to me, right?

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 the sort of the way it's written they

can have it in 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 and again I think so much

of that is where I think a lot of people will start to you know take advantage of

that type of technology that exists today.

Yeah.

You

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.

This was an early instance.

Pre Gemini, right?

It was back when it was like Google Brain.

Yeah.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, it's a bit, it's a bit like, you know, with 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.

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 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?

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 video enhances the experience, but you

know, the audio is just as good, right?

I mean, we can still kind of get the message across.

I mean, I've seen some podcasters who are making the mistake

of their Shooting video.

And then they're 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 almost like a, you know, you put a hood over my head

and trying to describe things to me.

So, you know, it, the video can enhance things 'cause people can look and go.

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.

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.

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 on that.

So if you're a content creator and you're thinking about, you know, Making this

book online 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.

It's probably sitting there on their device and, you know,

they're doing something else.

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.

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.

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, right?

what do you, what's the kind of, what's your big, biggest pet peeve

and what's your thoughts on that?

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.

Because the main thing that you wanted in a webinar, you're

trying to prove ROI, right?

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.

I'm going to watch that recording.

here with me.

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.

And then that ends up being in the recording.

You looking, you know, 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.

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.

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

Yep.

more people with webinars are starting to get that now because

they're seeing these metrics too.

Less people are showing up because of that.

And I think they're going to get a lot shorter.

Yeah, because I was always, I, whenever I talk to people, you know, I mean,

primarily I run paid ads for clients.

And generally speaking, 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?

It's just getting in the way of people being able to do

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 sign up for your newsletter, you want

them to kind of, you know Follow you on LinkedIn or whatever it might be, right?

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.

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 fair enough, if that's organically great, 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 messenger bot.

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

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?

Your homepage is like this massive pitch for like the entire company, all the

products and features and everything.

they're lost in the analytics at that point.

So 100 percent on dedicated landing pages.

But three things about this, the number one thing that I always advise people,

you know, beyond the landing page is looking, especially if you're like in.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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%.

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 going to click off to a

chat bot or click somewhere else.

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 don't have the time to optimize for quality

score and impression share and all these other little hidden metrics.

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 get the results that they really came for.

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.

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 I also think that whole thing with the feedback loop, I think, you know, as

much as yes, with Google, and Facebook, you know, you're generating leads, right.

But ultimately, you don't want 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?

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?

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.

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 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

you tell Google,

do that stuff the right way to get it to

work.

Yeah.

a page view is a conversion, right, they're going to go, guess what?

They're going to like flood you with conversions, right?

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

So you can, but once it works great, I mean, 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.

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,

the thing.

I always think it's like, although Facebook, Google

all say our AI is amazing.

And it's 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.

Everything 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, your own data

is, again, to me, that's crazy.

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.

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, 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.

there's kind of two aspects to 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.

You have to implement some safeguards.

You can't blindly trust it.

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.

Impressions or never exceed a CPC or CPA of this just in case somehow

something runs wild, make sure 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 mentioned, is giving that feedback.

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.

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

Yeah.

enhance your targeting.

So

Yeah, I mean

to save money,

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 my

shit before, you know, so there's no point in showing them any more ads, right?

Because they're not going to buy it again, if it's a kind of, you know, if

they're 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.

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.

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.

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 better, and you'll save money.

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.

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.

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 it was an email, right, and we had a phone number, what

we did was we sent this batch file to the Philippines overnight.

They would then process 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 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?

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.

So,

100%. Yeah, I, that is kind of early lead enrichment, right?

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.

Talking earlier about, hey, 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.

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 do all these different things.

those lead enrichment pieces, I think pay for themselves over time because

then you're not having bad data come in.

And it just obviously increases the quality and therefore

everything down the line.

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 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?

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?

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.

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 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.

that's not what we did, right?

We, you asked us to provide you leads.

We've done it.

So.

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?

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?

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 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?

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.

But that completely kind of contradicts, I mean, again, if you're gonna run

Facebook ads, they go, you need to let our algorithm run on a very broad audience.

It's like,

Yeah.

3000 people and 3000 is all I want.

Right?

. And they're like, no, too small has to be bigger, you know?

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.

I'm always amazed, like, I mean, we do we, I worked with at DSP for.

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?

They have all the credit card spending and, you know, whether they're a Democrat

or Republican and how much, you 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.

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, you know, instead

of paying 40, 50 CPMs for, you know, impressions to allow Facebook to 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.

Yeah.

I agree.

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 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.

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

Hi.

and streaming

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

hey,

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.

hey, that's great.

That's like that old fridge that everyone has in their garage.

It's like, you know what?

We're going to just let that thing keep the soda cold until it

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

like, you know, beaten to,

wheels fall off.

keeps going.

300, 000 miles on the clock, but, you know.

So Ben, thank you so much for being 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 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?

Preferred method?

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.

It's a

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.

Yeah, same.

Take care.

Bye for now.