Aleric Heck 11:07
We do these, these hackathons, and innovation days. And what we’d like to do, and we do these a couple times, few times a year, always at the end of each year, right going into the next year. And sometimes, depending on if we want to add new innovation, or we have a certain either thing that we’re looking to solve or opportunity we’re looking to, to uncover, we might do it before a quarter, we basically do it before a big planning session that we’re going to have as executives in the company, either to plan for a new year, always do it before the year.
Or if there’s a particular quarter where we know that we want to add some extra innovation here. Sometimes going into quarters, we already kind of have a game plan built out just depends. But essentially, what we do is we run these hackathons. And essentially, they’re innovation days. And I originally got this idea from something that a HubSpot actually does. They run these hackathons and innovation days. And what we ended up doing is we created our own flavor of it, where essentially, we take a half day, and we like to, we like to do it on a Friday. So people have kind of, and we encourage everybody to wrap up all their tasks, you know that morning, and we basically take that full session from the afternoon all the way to the end of the day. And sometimes we go longer, you know it, we really just dive deep into it. But essentially, we take that half a day.
And we create a hackathon around ideas. And so essentially what we want to do is nothing’s off the table, everybody has ideas to share, we bring the whole team together. And this is everybody. This is, you know, our client success team. These are our internal marketing teams and our media buyers and our ad strategists. And also our sales team, right as well. Like they’re on the frontlines talking with people. We bring in, like all of the different team members from AdOutreach. We bring them all together. And there’s two ways we do it. One, sometimes we have a prompt, so if there’s actually a challenge or an opportunity that we’re looking to solve or create, then we’ll say, Hey, this is the prompt, or we’ll just say the prompt is innovation.
And usually at the end of the year, we’ll do more general innovation, like, what is a way that we can innovate what we’re doing that we can build something new, or solve a challenge or whatever it happens to be. And so what we want to do is have everybody present ideas. So we go around, everybody has a minute to share any idea they have. It could be, you know, a totally wild idea. nothing’s off limits, right? There’s, there’s, there’s no, no, it’s just Yes. And right now. And so what we want to do, is we want to go in, and it’s like, you know, if you look at like Duncan Wartell and like Disney, like they talk, they you know, talk about some of that as well like the yes and write, really incubating ideas. And so essentially, we go around the room, everybody shares their ideas, that, that they have, and there’s different ideas, like people have ideas for whole new initiatives, or how to change something that already exists.
And so they all share ideas in a minute. And then what we do is we like to break it up into teams of three to four, to work on ideas. So we have everybody vote for a few ideas that they could potentially see themselves joining as a team, their own, and then a few others. And we make it very clear, this isn’t to say that, you know, we’re not trying to discourage ideas that maybe don’t get as many votes, but we’re looking at which ones we want to, you know, potentially move forward with this Innovation Day. So every idea is really good. But what we want to do is we want to find the ones that we want to work on. And so we find the top ideas, maybe there’s 810 12 ideas, we break them out into teams, you know, three to four, whatever happens speak, and then those teams will go off and we have a hybrid. So we’ve got an office here in Austin, but we also have the majority of our team spread out and remote.
And so what they’ll do is they’ll speak Write out either here in the office and then virtually, and they’ll work on these different ideas. And they’ll spend at least three hours really crafting. Okay? What does this idea look like? Let’s map it out, let’s build it out, and then some way to present it. So whether that be some people will share a doc, some people will do a slide deck, some people will just actually mock something up or, you know, design something.
And then we do a presentation at the end, where each team has, you know, five minutes to present five minutes for questions. And that’s when they can present everything that they’ve done to us. But here’s the great thing, people that wouldn’t normally work together, they’ll work together. So somebody from our operations team will work with somebody from our sales team and our marketing team. And they’ll come together and solve a problem or create a new idea. And it’s also the idea that they wanted to do because these teams are formed based on, you know, who wants to go where, and so we’ve had, you know, really good ideas and really great ideas that have come out of it.
So we’ve had new elements of, of different things in our business and different changes that we’ve made, that have come from these hackathons. Because they’ll present it, and then we, as our executive team will hear that, and we’ll go through and again, similarly, we do, you know, we have an innovative, you know, kind of prize that we add to a couple, you know, top teams. But at the same time, all the ideas we want to encourage and let them notice just having an idea, just sharing an idea going through it is really valuable to keep that innovation culture.
But what I found is those ideas tend to continue after the Innovation Day in the hackathon, because what they’ll do is people will now have in their heads, two things, one, that idea, so maybe they’ll keep champion that championing that, that could become a team that we create internally to actually push that forward, which we’ve done several times. But in addition to that, it makes people realize, I can come up with an idea. And I can actually innovate, and my ideas can be heard, and it gives an opportunity for that. But it also creates more innovation consistently as well. So I highly recommend it. I know that was pretty detailed. But
Jeremy Weisz 17:12
no, that’s fantastic. And it becomes ingrained in the culture and the mindset that they can keep and continue to innovate. I want to talk about some of the few things that have come out of it. And actually, you know, you did some of this in college, even some of the hackathons, right. So what do you have when you look back over the innovation, hackathons, what has come out of it, remember? Yeah, so So
Aleric Heck 17:41
There have been a few really, and there’s actually been a lot of a lot of things. It’s funny, because some of the many of the things we’ve actually implemented, so it’s, you could trace back and, and and one is one of the ways that we work with clients. And in like a, it kind of an iteration of how we’ve done things is a concept around a fractional media buyer. Or essentially, it’s a little bit different than, you know, what you would think of with a classic, you know, kind of agency where we essentially have, there’s this concept, and I was introduced to it, because we have, you know, our accountants have a fractional CFO service, right, where it’s kind of like you have the CFO that comes in, there’s also services that do fractional CMO, like marketing. And that’s not necessarily what this is.
But a fractional media buyer is a little bit different than an agency in that you can actually have somebody that is more interconnected with your existing team. But they’re a part of, you know, our company, for instance, right. And so essentially, one of the things is one of the problems that a lot of agencies face is kind of the silo effect, where it’s like, hey, you know, we’re the company, you’re like an agency over here, and they’re not really a lot of meshing between the two. And so the idea with the fractional media buyers, can you get somebody that like, can assimilate with elements of their team and actually work with them, and still be employed by us and working on, you know, several different accounts, but also working closer with that company.
And so that’s an idea that really kind of got innovated from one of these hackathons, you know, other ideas is, is events and office days. So the way that, you know, we build some of our office days where we have clients come out to our offices here in Austin, and there’s, there’s certain, you know, as many businesses do, we have different tiers. And so we have a tier of clients that can come out here to our offices in Austin. And we essentially have a full Office day where we work on their business that day, not just with ads, but also in other elements too.
Like let’s bring our top funnel designers out here. Let’s go and see what we can do to help them with their funnel with their copywriting. Let’s actually dive into their ads in person which is a totally different experience, you know, and go over okay, here’s what we’re seeing. And really working closely with them here and creating this environment that’s not like in we were running Before it kind of these bigger events,
Jeremy Weisz 20:03
Right that you kept 100 people out what was that Cancun was an example, you didn’t want
Aleric Heck 20:07
to Yeah, so Cancun is an example of when we actually did more of this style, the office stays out. But we had some bigger events, mostly here in Austin, where we’d get like, 100, 150 people, you know, so, and with that, it’s harder to dive deeper with individual clients. And so one thing that we were able to do at these office days is we’ll get more, you know, anywhere, and it depends on at the which one, but anywhere from a dozen with, you know, to like two or three dozen clients in a room, which is a more intimate feeling, we have our team come out here, and even the remote team members, and we work hands on with them, to help them see those breakthroughs, they get to interact with people that they usually just talk with on Zoom.
And they also get to have our whole kind of team here, essentially working with them. And same thing we do each year, we do a destination, mastermind version of that, and essentially, we do these these office days. But that’s more of a remote destination day, right. And so we dive in, and we go there, and we’re actually working on their business and then also in, in, in paradise, so we enjoy that as well. And so those are, those are a few of the things, but there’s also other things that maybe don’t come to mind immediately, like on the spot, but they’re things that just get integrated in, right.
So they might not even be the biggest, you know, idea like some of those, but there are things that actually just get added in and then then there’s other things too, or there’s just add angles, there’s you know, there’s ways that we can improve different things like elements of of a sales process, or a client process. And another one was seamless Client Onboarding, right. So essentially bringing, bringing clients in, having our, you know, account managers and client success team members recording a video, when the new client comes in responding to an email. So the email from the adviser, the person that enrolls them, they send an email with a video loom intro with a certain timeframe, they send and it’s this better handoff experience.
And it’s the type of thing that’s maybe not a groundbreaking thing, but it can actually create a really big impact is the idea of actually sending a loom video, same day as somebody enrolling in the program to let them know, Hey, I’m so excited to speak with you. I’m your, you know, client success manager, I’m going to be working with you, um, you know, I heard X, Y and Z from your so it’s a seamless handoff instead of this kind of weird two to three day window or whatever it is between enrolling and getting on that, you know, initial call, whenever that calendars line up for that. It just helps put a you know face to the name, and it’s a seamless transition.
Jeremy Weisz 22:52
You know, I want to hit on that for a second, which is what are the things you’ve discovered from a seamless onboarding? I do have to say that, you know, John, my business partner is interacting with your team. He said your team is amazing with follow up, and not in like an overbearing way, you know, from email to phone to text. So I imagine, you know, the onboarding process you’ve dialed in over the years, what is that look like?
Aleric Heck 23:25
Yeah, so that’s a great, that’s a great question. And there’s different ways that we work with clients. As I mentioned, the fractional media buyer, we also have a consulting element. And in terms of what we do, it’s a less traditional agency for the bulk of our clients, because we’re helping train people in YouTube ads, we’re working typically with the business owners and, or like at smaller companies, right? So entrepreneurs, or their marketing director, or their media buyers, just depending on the size of the company, right. So like smaller companies, we might work with them or their operator, medium sized companies, maybe we’re working with their marketing director, or marketing person. And then at larger companies, we’re working kind of directly with their media buyers.
And then we have our fractional media buyer offer as well, which is kind of more like an agency where we can come in and, you know, essentially work at a higher level, running the ads for our clients and having our person come in. And that’s kind of the evolution, like I mentioned that that came out of one of these, these hackathons. But essentially, the way that and that’s just just to explain that it’s slightly might be slightly different than some people listening who are purely an agency. You know, we kind of shifted over to more mostly consulting, but then also having some of these other elements. You know, actually, or five years ago, so the first couple years was more of a classic agency. And then we realized that we would really be able to consult and work with, you know, more clients with our expertise on YouTube.
And so our onboarding, the way that it works is we have it down to a science. So I think you kind of alluded to that when somebody is able to enroll. What we want to do is make it very clear on that enrollment call. Okay, here are the nine Steps, I’m going to send an email I’m going to connect you with, let’s say, Levi, who’s going to be your, your client success manager, he’s gonna be able to hop on a call and walk through everything, you know, go through your onboarding, make sure that we have everything we need to get started. And then after that, and by the way, we’re also seeing what the next call it after that, and after that you’re going to be getting on your script writing call with, and then whoever, let’s say, Angie with Angie, who’s going to be able to help you write your YouTube ad script. And that’s what kind of what we talked about earlier is that’s a really important part of the process before we get your ads launched.
And so and so now, we’re actually not just talking about the next step, we’re talking about the next two steps, then we have our adviser send an email as soon as possible to that person, including who their, their, their client success manager is going to be, and also who their copywriter is going to be as well. And so we include those two on there. So it’s kind of the next two steps. And that email will include an introduction, it’ll also and this is really important, include details about that client, because here’s the thing, right? I, like we have at our company, we deeply care about our clients, like a client success is instilled in, in everything that we do. You also have to show that to clients, right? Because they don’t necessarily, yes, they made an enrollment decision.
We’ve gotten to that point, they’re now trusting us. But that’s also the point. And as you know, I’m sure because what probably why you asked, where you could potentially lose people, if you don’t have a seamless process is in those first few days, if people have buyer’s remorse, especially if you’re a growing company, and maybe you don’t have like a saint like, and we don’t have a same day onboarding, right, it can take usually it’s between one and three days, it’s just that, you know, we try to keep it as short as possible. But it depends on calendars, right? And so essentially, what we want to do is make that handoff as simple as possible. So we sent that email.
And, and we include, and this is really important details about their business. So I’m so excited to work with us, because they are, you know, they’re a nutrition coach, and they have a business here. And they’ve helped so many different people. And they’re creating, they’re looking to create an impact. And right now they’re here, but they’re looking to go here. And that’s what you know, we’re excited to help them with. And, and it’s just a couple paragraphs about who they are. But what that does is it shows two things. One, it shows the client that the advisor that brought them in really cares, which is true, like we really care, like, shows that we care, even though yes, they’re being handed off, because now the advisor has other people to talk to, you know, new potential people.
So that shows that they care and they’re transitioning, and it shows them that they’re the onboarding call is going to start, you’re gonna hit the ground running. Because some people, they’re like, Okay, why I’m hopping on this onboarding call to just go over the exact same thing I did before. What we did in the past is we would just transfer everything in HubSpot right in our CRM. But clients didn’t see that. Right? So we want to
Jeremy Weisz 28:01
do our conversation about them. But they don’t see that. Yes,
Aleric Heck 28:05
exactly, exactly. And so basically what we do is they’ll send a whole, like, they’ll take all the notes, they’ll depend on your client, exactly. They might even have like an hour, you know, conversation about like, Okay, here’s what the strategy is for this person from that, that advisor to the person. But they won’t necessarily know that. And so just having that couple paragraphs, and usually what we’ll do, and it depends on different advisors having different kinds of flavors of how they’ll do it. But sometimes what they’ll say is I sent more details to leave and /or I had a call with Levi or whatever it is that you know, the details for this client. So he has all the information for your call or before your call. And then from there, what we do is Levi in this case would respond with an email and a video.
And the email is relatively simple, you know, so great that we’re looking forward to meeting you. And I’m excited to help you achieve those goals with XYZ Company recording a quick loom video for you looking forward to our call this time, then the loom video is just simply here. And it’s not something fancy, like a webcam or an iPhone or whatever. And it’s talking to the neighbor who says, Hey, I am so excited to work with you. And you know, so and so advisor has told me all about some of the different details. And I’m looking forward to helping you with this XYZ business, achieving these goals with your YouTube ads, and and on our onboarding call, we’re gonna hit the ground running, go over some of the key things and get you ready for your script writing call. So now we’re also seeing the next step.
And so then on that onboarding call, then we get them on the script branding call, but then we’re also seeing the step after that. And so essentially, we’re always letting them know not just what the next step is, but also what’s on deck and making it very clear and then making the handoff seamless from the advisor to their account. Don’t manager or client success manager to their copywriter than to their ad strategist and so on down the
Jeremy Weisz 30:06
line. Love it a lot to unpack. There are a couple things I want to hit on. You mentioned HubSpot. You also mentioned the script writing piece. So I want to talk about how I know you have a lot of videos out there. And we could point them to your YouTube channel about the anatomy of the ad. But I have to have you talk about it a little bit. And then you mentioned HubSpot. You know, and this was in my mind. And I was thinking when you’re talking about the hackathons.
How do you keep track of all this stuff? So I’d love to hear of your tech stack. You mentioned HubSpot as a CRM, what are some things you use as a company, either communication or keeping track of things project management support? Obviously, you do an amazing job, just making sure things are in place. And things are followed up on what does your tech stack look like? Yeah, so I think the
Aleric Heck 30:59
four biggest that we have, and I’ll talk about the ones other than because obviously, we have to include zoom in it. But that’s kind of a default for a lot of companies these days. So zoom, of course, but then the three main ones that we really use is HubSpot. And that’s for the client management, CRM, the handoff of everything that’s also for our you know, all of our stats on you know, from from the very first time they touch things with marketing all the way into a client and any ascension that they have everywhere in between the wholesale process all that’s in HubSpot. So that’s kind of more of the way that we interact with our clients. Our communication is slack.
We also have communication slack with clients too, which is a total game changer. You know, if you’re doing email communication, or you know, at one point, or if you’re doing a community in a Facebook group, you can get rid of like you can really eliminate all that and just go straight to Slack. Slack is great for communication and great for the community . It is really awesome. So slack for our communication. And more recently, over the course of this year, we’ve rolled that out for communication with clients as well.
And not just communication, you can also build community there too, because you can have shared channels, and you can have those channels where people can kind of collide. Because if you’re at this point, like entrepreneurship, right is one of those things where you thrive by being around like minded people. And one of the benefits of consulting, or an agency or a program, whatever it is, is you’re surrounded by other people. And so creating that community has an opportunity to so that’s another thing, but that slack and then the other one and this is one that we absolutely swear by for all of our internal keeping track everything things like the you know, the hackathons is notion we use notion all the time, we built out a full company dashboard in notion.
Our operations team loves the notion we have all of our SOPs and notion looms I would give a shout out to as well can we just record quick loom videos, those go into notion. But essentially, in terms of running the company with obviously we have zoom, we were on Zoom a lot, but like basically it’s a slack for communication, HubSpot for all the stuff with with clients and kind of like tracking the journey and and marketing and sales and then notion for all of our SOPs, documentation, kind of operating the business. And that’s where we would keep all the things that came out of these hackathons. That would be its own notion, you know, kind of dock or project. And, that’s been a big part of it as well as we also use notion for all the task management stuff.
We actually recently switched over from Asana, which I do really like. But we wanted to streamline. So we moved that over to Notion of adding a lot more project management features. They have projects, tabs. So we found this notion really valuable.
Jeremy Weisz 33:45
Interesting. Yeah, we used to be on Asana as well. And we kind of felt like we kind of hit our upper limit, and we switched to ClickUp. But I didn’t realize the Notion does a bunch of project management stuff as well.
Aleric Heck 33:59
Yeah. And they’ve been adding that more recently. And that’s been a recent shift away from Asana over the course of this year. But could we have used the notion for SOPs? I do think what I would say is I think I can know other people use clickup. And so it’s actually interesting because Julia’s in a few different masterminds around with like, CEOs as Julie as our CEO, oh, she’s in a few different of these masterminds and programs. And it seems like the really popular ones are Asana, but now a lot of people are going over to either click up or notion, and it’s kind of this back and forth. And what I think is click up is going to be better for task management.
And that’s, we’ll just say that, you know, hopefully the notion will continue to grow that way. But that said, it might not be as good for dogs. I don’t really know I haven’t used click up as much but that’s my understanding. Whereas notion is gonna really be amazing for Docs and SOPs and all that side of things. And then they’re building out more of a robust project management suite which has been over the course of This year, they rolled out more project management. They have had tasks for a long time. But when they rolled out project management is when we decided to make the shift away from Asana,
Jeremy Weisz 35:08
I do know a number of companies. Yeah, they use Notion for Docs. And we use more of a sweet process for SOPs and things, centralized SOPs. But I’ve heard good things about Notion in general, like, for a lot of uses. So thanks for sharing some of the tech stack. I love that. Let’s talk about some of the anatomy, the anatomy of an ad, because you mentioned, there’s so many moving pieces when it comes to YouTube ads. And each one if they’re missed, it doesn’t work, right, including the first step, which is the actual script in the video, right, and you have a certain format that you recommend people do. So I’d love for you to talk about how they could check out more, they can go to add outreach.com and check out your blog, and they can also check out your YouTube channel. But um, talk about the anatomy of the ad itself. Absolutely.
Aleric Heck 36:05
So what we found is a value driven video ad converts the best. And the reason for that is on YouTube, people are in one of two mindsets, right? They’re one of two modes, they’re an entertainment mode. And those aren’t necessarily people that we want to reach. Or they’re in the learners mindset, right, they’re looking to learn on YouTube. And so what we want to do is reach those people that they’re in that learning state, they’re watching videos to learn, and we want to get in front of them. And so what we want to do is create a video that provides value.
One of the biggest mistakes people make with YouTube ads is they’ll just create a really short ad, like a lot of branded ads, and think that that’s going to drive the conversions that they want. But the problem with that is if you just have an ad that says hey, do you have this problem, okay, go get my thing, or they’re just talking a little bit about what they have. And it’s short and doesn’t provide value, you will get some people to click off and some people to click, you know, click on your ad and some people to opt in. But it’s not going to be the rate that you want.
And that’s because you’re not meeting people where they’re at, they’re looking for value. And so you want to create a value driven video ad that actually educates and provides value, it’s a little bit longer, usually two to three minutes long, sometimes can be a little bit longer than what Google does recommend less than three minutes. That said, we found that even though you might get slightly higher CPMs over three minutes. Sometimes that actually outweighs that by having more education and creating like a four or five minute ad. So it depends, I want to add that little asterisk there. But essentially, you want to create an ad that provides real value and education so there’s three elements: there’s a hook, educate, call to action, the hook draws people in, captures their attention and brings them in to educate when you’re providing real value.
And this is what makes our style of ads different from a lot of what’s out there. And something that I really believe in and we’ve seen just produced the best results is providing value on the ads, right, talking about ways that they can solve their problem how, what your business does, talking about myths that they might have things that they don’t actually need to do tips, strategies, actually teaching them and then leading to the call to action at the end. So hook educate call to action. There’s a few different ways to do hooks, you could do question hooks.
So one that worked really well for us in the past is what if you can ethically hijack your competitors traffic, send it directly into your own funnel, we’ll show you exactly how to do that with YouTube ads, running your ads, you know, for the videos, then you can have kind of these polarizing like statement hooks, right, so one that we’ve used, that’s probably one of our top performing hooks is YouTube ads beat Facebook ads every time let’s face it, you know, Facebook ad costs going through if you don’t have a great ad, they’re most possible scale. But what we found is you can use YouTube ads to get consistent leads and sales and more predictable scalability. We’ll walk you through this in this video. As you can see there that it just polarizes it gets people to pay attention, then we talk about what our thesis is, then we educate.
So we go from those different hooks, there’s a few different types of hooks, I’m gonna give a free resource at the end that will walk through some of that to you. But then from there, you know, the Educate section, the Educate is where you actually want to provide value. So you want to teach, okay, why is this but if you may, especially to make a claim that you can solve a problem or you know, something’s better than something else, or something that people didn’t know that they could do, you need to provide value and educate. And there’s a few different ways to do it. If what you’re doing is more information based or expert based, then that’s pretty simple.
You’re just teaching a little bit of like, what you would be teaching in whatever it is you’re selling. If you have more of a product or you have a service or you have a software, maybe that’s a demo or that’s walking through like what this does, and showing how it solves the problem and actually illustrating what it is that you that that you’re gonna be able to get out of either the product service or or software and then the call to action at the end is to get is very simple. You just want to get them off of the video and click off but you want to have multiple calls to actions. And you want to make it very simple and clear what’s next.
And so one of the biggest things, this is a golden nugget right here, we have found, you can actually get a multiple percentage increase in conversions, if you show the page, the landing page, at the end of the video that they’re going to go to. It’s so simple, it seems so obvious, but you can get and it’s, and again, it’s not gonna be a crazy increase, but you can increase like one to 3% by having a just overlaying at the end, you say click the link that here’s the phrase that we use, click the link right here on the screen, and you’ll get to a page that looks just like this, all you have to do is fill out your name, and email and phone number and then click submit and you’re gonna get full access to my 19 page, YouTube ads, strategy PDFs, gonna walk you through everything, you’re showing the page, you’re telling them, they’re gonna get there, you’re telling them what they need to do, you’re telling them when they click it, they’re gonna get the thing.
And that just makes it a lot easier for that person to visualize themselves doing it, they click the page, now the page is familiar to them. So they click the link. And you’ve already told them what they’re going to need to fill out what they’re going to get and shown them what the page looks like, that can actually increase conversions. So hook, educate, call to action, that’s the framework for YouTube ad, typically, we recommend between two and three minutes, it can be a little bit longer, your CPMs might be slightly higher over three minutes is what YouTube says. That being said, sometimes that can actually pay off. Because if you can provide extra value in four to five minutes, and actually get higher conversion rates, you can actually get better results. So even though YouTube will warn you over three minutes, sometimes we have a bunch of clients that run and even some of our own ads, four or five minute long ads outperform shorter ones.
Jeremy Weisz 41:46
And that’s what we recommend. Like I love it. Um, you know, I have heard that I forgot who said it on the podcast before, but actually, what helps sell more books is showing the book, which is a similar concept to joining the landing page, right? And it’s that familiarity. So we talk about the hook, educate, call to action, what are some of the different calls, at calls to action, you see that people test and work? Because I can see I’ve seen people do you know, like you said, a PDF, some kind of information, I’ve seen people to actually call. And I’ve seen people do a webinar, which is for further education. And I’m probably missing a bunch there. But what have you found that people should think about when creating that call to action? So we found
Aleric Heck 42:34
that? That’s a really great question. What we found is usually a VSL, we call it also a video convert, we have our own kind of variation, like a video conversion funnel, essentially a VSL style funnel that has some kind of video sales letter, video that provides extra value that shows them what they’re going to get, especially if you’re selling something more educational information based. But even if you’re selling, you know, higher end products or services, running from a video to a video is really powerful. So YouTube video to video. Now, what we’ve also found is that lead magnets are almost staging a comeback right now. And I think you’ll find this really interesting because it’s one of those things where a few years ago, if I was on, you know, the podcast, I would have said like, hey, definitely do do these VSL. But what we’re seeing is sometimes what’s old is new again.
And we’re seeing that people love the PDF. And actually you say holding it is the value of the book, I have this PDF I am literally flipping through it like in one of my one of my videos where I’m advertising PDF, and I have other ones where I talked about our video training, right? But when I’m advertising the PDF, and I’m saying like a 90 page PDF walks you through step by step, how are you to add strategy works, there’s no fluff, take a look here, you know, here’s our exact strategy, and I want to give it to you for free. We’re finding that that works really well when it’s paired with what I call the Trojan horse PDF, because what do I want to get people to do? I actually want to get them to watch a video because I know I’m compelling on video.
And I also know they’re in the video consumption mindset. That said, what we’re seeing right now is you can sometimes get cheaper cost per lead to offer a tangible, you know, PDF, right then maybe getting the video sign up directly. So what we’re doing in but still the video sign up directly is performing quite well. So I don’t want to dissuade anybody from doing that. But sometimes the PDFs, it’s just kind of this, their cycles, right? And right now, people seem to be really excited about getting something tangible and something you know, kind of easy to consume.
And so if we can get that lower lower cost lead to get that PDF, but still, you know, maintaining quality and targeting the right people. Well, once they get it, what we can do is we can say great, your PDF is on its way to your email inbox. And we do set up a five minute delay which will be sent pretty quickly, but we do five minutes. And the reason for that is we say well, you wait, here’s the video version of our PDF, and then it’s just our exact same In video training, and, and again, what we find is the majority of the people will start playing that video. And then of course, there’s a good amount of people that stick until the end and then that video converts them.
But here’s the reason I think this works so well is we have three elements is we opt in for the PDF, which after five minutes will be sent to their email. So they have the PDF waiting for them, they immediately get access to watch the training. And we have their phone number. So our team is also going to be texting them if they don’t do anything within 30 minutes or an hour. We actually found that waiting. And you talked about like how our team is good at follow up, we’re also not overbearing, you want to wait for people to go through a funnel, you don’t want to touch so some some some people, Bill Bill, they’ll text right as the opt in I know some people are teaching that I’ll actually go counter to that. But we tried it, we tried all the different things. And for some businesses, if you’re more, I think maybe for like a service based business, maybe this makes more sense is like speed, the lead.
But what we’ve found is in more education style, or agency style, or consulting style, or program or coaching, you want to give people some time to consume the thing that they signed up for before, almost distracting them with a text or a call. But you do want to do the texting call as soon as possible after what we call the like, you know the possible window for them to take action on their own. So if it’s a 15 minute training video, and they get a PDF, we might have a 30 minute or an hour delay. I think our delays are between 30 minutes and two hours, we have a webinar that we run to and that’s that’s a little longer of a delay before we actually start texting and calling people.
Jeremy Weisz 46:39
Hello, I have one last question. First of all, thank you. There’s so much more we didn’t cover but there’s so much that you did cover. So I want to encourage people to check out AdOutreach.com and KeywordSearch.com. To learn more. And I know you have some URLs people can check out for special gifts. I want you to talk about that. But the last thing, the last question I had was on mentors. And I know we got to run in a minute. But I know that there were a couple of things that have created big pivotal moments in your business.
And one of them has been mentorship and masterminds. And you mentioned ClickFunnels, I’d love for you to just talk about a few mentors that could be personal mentors or distant mentors, just people you’ve learned from that helped you get to where you’re at. And then I’d love for you to share where people can learn more.
Aleric Heck 47:33
Oh, yeah, that’s really great. And I think that I’ll talk about three main mentors that I’ve had. And I’ve had way more than that. So it’d be kind of, you know, it’d be too long to talk about everybody. And so I’m very appreciative and grateful to all the different mentors, mentors were so valuable. An early mentor that I had or a couple of mentors that I had were Chris and Taylor, they had a business tracking post. And that was kinda one of the first mastermind mentorship programs that I enrolled in and joined. And they really helped open my eyes to the world of you know, of businesses, services consulting agencies and this whole area. I remember when I first signed up for Clickfunnels.
Right, and I went to HubSpot inbound. Right. So I was in the HubSpot ecosystem originally from Massachusetts from Boston, the Boston area. And so HubSpot is really big over there. So I remember going to HubSpot inbound in Boston in 2016. I discovered ClickFunnels, I was trying to figure out okay, how do I do Click Funnels for it, you know, it really an agency or services business. And that’s when I found them, you know, Chris and Taylor. So they mentored me kind of early on in that area, then I’ve gotten some great mentorship from Roland Frasier. He’s fantastic. He actually helped inspire what I ended up doing with Keyword Search. So originally, and he’s really big, and mergers and acquisitions and things like that he was originally originally helping me potentially acquire one of these, you know, keyword research tools for YouTube.
That said, when that didn’t end up working out, you know, I was able to talk with him. And there’s a concept of building a bolt on business, and making Keyword Search actually a separate business, but actually powered and empowered by what we’re doing at outreach. And then more recently, I’ve been working really closely with Alec Scharffen. He’s here in Austin, and he’s the mentor probably working most closely with right now as I really build out more of the the operational components of what we’re doing here and making sure that we’re really building a business that is designed to last and designed to really grow and has all the right SOPs, all the right pieces, all the right elements in place to not just be a business that you know, just kind of grows very quickly but a business that can also build in all the pieces to continue to ensure that all of the boxes get checked and our team is doing everything and you know, making sure that we have all the right pieces in place and and really kind of taking it to that next level of business.
Yeah, that can really set up that long term sustainable growth and, and, and, and without kind of sometimes with entrepreneurial businesses, there’s like, Oh, I’m gonna go over here, I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna launch this. There has to be systems in place. And that’s what Alex is really helped with as well. So those are just a few of the mentors. I’ve had a lot of mentors along the way.
Jeremy Weisz 50:21
Oh, thanks for sharing your journey for your knowledge. Where should we point people towards? I know there was a special place you wanted to mention?
Aleric Heck 50:29
Yes, so I have a gift for anybody who’s listening or watching I’m going to add outreach.com/gift and what that will do is you’ll be able to get the full 19 Page YouTube ads strategy PDF completely for free, walks you through step by step all the different ways to actually script out an ad how to set up the ads the different types of audiences the targeting the whole thing, you can go to AdOutreach.com/gift and you can get that free gift with the PDF.
Jeremy Weisz 51:03
Awesome. Thanks. And thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next time. Thank you.
