Framework for B2B Advertising with Silvio Perez

[00:00:00] Silvio Perez: I always say the best advertisers, they think like investors and they execute like scientists.

[00:00:10] Jess: Welcome to a special episode of Marketers Talking Marketing.

[00:00:14] Jess: We are joined with, I'm going to say friend of the show at this point, Sylvio Perez.

[00:00:19] Jess: And we are getting an insider sneak peek at something very exciting coming soon.

[00:00:24] Jess: So of you with that introduction.

[00:00:26] Jess: Take us away.

[00:00:27] Jess: Who are you?

[00:00:28] Jess: What are you doing?

[00:00:29] Jess: Why are you here?

[00:00:30] Silvio Perez: Thank you for having me.

[00:00:31] Silvio Perez: Jess, friend of the show, friend in real life, all the friends and a little bit about me.

[00:00:35] Silvio Perez: Before, I was the head of performance and product innovation at a company called Metadata, where you and I worked together briefly.

[00:00:42] Silvio Perez: And then before that, I was a consultant working with different B, two B SaaS companies.

[00:00:46] Silvio Perez: I have a YouTube channel where I create content on run ads online.

[00:00:50] Silvio Perez: I think I have like over 50 plus video tutorials.

[00:00:53] Jess: Oh, my God.

[00:00:54] Silvio Perez: It's accumulated over the years.

[00:00:56] Silvio Perez: I wrote a book called Google Ads Profits, teaching people how to generate the first thousand leads without blowing their budget.

[00:01:02] Silvio Perez: So create content all the time on ads.

[00:01:04] Silvio Perez: And now I'm working with a handful of clients in the meantime that I'm starting up my new venture.

[00:01:09] Jess: New venture.

[00:01:12] Jess: So we are going to talk today a lot more about advertising.

[00:01:16] Silvio Perez’s SCALE Framework: A Comprehensive Strategy for Scaling Advertising Campaigns

[00:01:16] Jess: We both love advertising, right?

[00:01:17] Jess: It's our bread and butter.

[00:01:19] Jess: It's been our lives for a long time.

[00:01:23] Jess: And specifically, anyone can build a campaign.

[00:01:26] Jess: It's not that hard.

[00:01:28] Jess: Anyone can build a campaign.

[00:01:29] Jess: Optimizing your campaign for performance and scaling a campaign is not always easy.

[00:01:36] Jess: So today we want to dive into scaling campaigns.

[00:01:39] Jess: Sylvia, I hear a little birdie told me that you have a framework you're developing.

[00:01:45] Jess: Drop it on us.

[00:01:46] Jess: What do we need to know?

[00:01:47] Silvio Perez: Absolutely.

[00:01:48] Silvio Perez: So, basically, a couple of things.

[00:01:52] Silvio Perez: So, first and foremost, most advertisers are too myopic in their focus.

[00:01:57] Silvio Perez: They just think in terms of LinkedIn.

[00:01:59] Silvio Perez: They just think in terms of Google or Facebook, et cetera.

[00:02:02] Silvio Perez: Or they'll just think at the campaign level in terms of, like, scaling Google, scaling LinkedIn.

[00:02:06] Silvio Perez: But they don't know how to build a holistic program in which everything kind of rolls up and feeds into.

[00:02:11] Silvio Perez: So in terms of the framework, and this is part of my first course that I'm releasing.

[00:02:15] Silvio Perez: So the new venture that I'm launching is an academy that teaches B, two B marketers how to scale paid ads for free, regardless of skill level and a lot of exciting stuff there.

[00:02:23] Silvio Perez: And this first course that I'm launching is all about building your paid media program.

[00:02:27] Silvio Perez: And the framework that that whole course is built around and kind of what I run clients through is called the scale framework.

[00:02:32] Silvio Perez: And the scale framework stands for strategize, configure, assemble, learn, and expand.

[00:02:37] Silvio Perez: Those are the five stages that you have to go through to go from no paid program at all to fully scaled and flying high at 1000ft in the sky and 10,000 miles an hour.

[00:02:51] Silvio Perez: So essentially, first Strategize, this is all about how do you choose the right channels to advertise on.

[00:02:56] Silvio Perez: How do you make sure you have the right budget in place, how do you plan your campaign for the different stages that you want to have an impact on?

[00:03:04] Silvio Perez: So just really 10,000 foot view configure is when you get more into the reporting and measurement side of things.

[00:03:10] Silvio Perez: You need a way to measure your program success, right?

[00:03:14] Silvio Perez: Do you have the necessary dashboards, the reporting in place?

[00:03:17] Silvio Perez: And then I have this whole infrastructure in terms of auditing your systems.

[00:03:20] Silvio Perez: I call it facing reality, because if you don't have the necessary visibility in place, then how do you know if you can scale a campaign, let alone a program?

[00:03:31] Silvio Perez: It's massive.

[00:03:33] Silvio Perez: So really getting that infrastructure, the A is assemble.

[00:03:36] Silvio Perez: So this is all around like, how do I actually plan my campaigns?

[00:03:39] Silvio Perez: So this is where it gets into campaign planning.

[00:03:41] Silvio Perez: How do you make sure that you plan yourself so you're in a position to succeed, right?

[00:03:45] Silvio Perez: So when you actually deploy all these campaigns and then L is for learn.

[00:03:48] Silvio Perez: So this is how do you build your experimentation engine so that way you can build on your learnings and not repeat the same mistakes.

[00:03:56] Silvio Perez: A lot of people miss that one.

[00:03:57] Silvio Perez: And then the final one is expand, which is all about like, okay, I have this infrastructure in place.

[00:04:02] Silvio Perez: How do I secure budget from stakeholders?

[00:04:04] Silvio Perez: And then how do I start to scale, whether that's horizontally or vertically, whether that's like, in existing channels, new channels, et cetera, to really take it to the next level.

[00:04:13] Silvio Perez: So that's kind of what the whole framework is at a 10,000 foot view.

[00:04:16] Jess: I love it because it also feels very intuitive, as you say it.

[00:04:19] The Importance of Proper Reporting and Attribution in Paid Advertising

[00:04:19] Jess: But I know when you're going through that list, I can tell you which one I think is the biggest pain point for a lot of companies.

[00:04:25] Jess: Which spot do you think people get the most kind of stuck on in there?

[00:04:30] Silvio Perez: I think it's a combination, but if I had to choose one I think most people think they do well on the first stage strategize, but they don't really, if I'm being honest.

[00:04:43] Silvio Perez: They think they have a good strategy, but they haven't thought through it as well as they probably thought.

[00:04:50] Silvio Perez: But the one that everyone gets wrong for sure is the second one.

[00:04:53] Silvio Perez: Configure, like nine times out of ten, especially the new clients that I've been working with, they're scaling in reverse.

[00:05:01] Silvio Perez: The way I explain it is software companies, they have tech debt and they have to fix all this bad code.

[00:05:06] Silvio Perez: And as they grow, they have to address that because it doesn't let them grow even further.

[00:05:11] Silvio Perez: The same is true, but from a paid perspective, they have this reporting debt, this tracking debt that they don't have all that enabled.

[00:05:19] Silvio Perez: So that they have that baseline foundation.

[00:05:21] Silvio Perez: I almost think of it as like plumbing the infrastructure so that everything else is easier from here.

[00:05:26] Jess: Yeah, 100,000% agree.

[00:05:31] Jess: I see the same thing with my clients all the time, where they want to get started in paid advertising.

[00:05:35] Jess: So they get super excited.

[00:05:37] Jess: They put their card in Meta and they're going to go run a campaign.

[00:05:39] Jess: And then they're like, how do we get our leads out?

[00:05:41] Jess: It's like, well, hold on, let's get our plumbing in order.

[00:05:45] Jess: Let's get our stuff moving between or my handle on most social still put a pixel on it.

[00:05:51] Jess: Like put a pixel on it.

[00:05:52] Jess: Are you measuring it?

[00:05:53] Jess: You tell me you want to do retargeting.

[00:05:55] Jess: Do you have a retargeting audience and why are we doing retargeting and what are we retargeting them with and what are we doing here?

[00:06:02] Jess: I think a lot of people get excited about using paid advertising as a way to expand what they're doing on their marketing efforts.

[00:06:09] Jess: Get some demand capture, demand generation in play and they'll just start doing it.

[00:06:14] Jess: But then they're not asking why they're not setting their systems up, they're not going after it, and then they're upset that doesn't work.

[00:06:21] Jess: Or they can't measure their performance.

[00:06:23] Silvio Perez: It's the vicious loop.

[00:06:25] Silvio Perez: And it just keeps repeating.

[00:06:27] Silvio Perez: Repeating.

[00:06:27] Silvio Perez: I always say the best advertisers, they think like investors and they execute like scientists.

[00:06:33] Silvio Perez: So first you need to start from the very highest of level.

[00:06:35] Silvio Perez: When you're setting your strategy, you're calculating your budget, you're thinking like an investor in terms of what is my budget allocation, what are my targets that I'm going after based on the stage that I want to impact?

[00:06:47] Silvio Perez: What are my leading indicators, my lagging indicators?

[00:06:50] Silvio Perez: Kind of thinking through that, taking it even another step further.

[00:06:54] Silvio Perez: When you start to build your experimentation program later in the framework, thinking through, what are your rules of testing engagement?

[00:07:01] Silvio Perez: How do we make decisions on whether we keep an ad live or we pause it?

[00:07:06] Silvio Perez: So just writing that down is super helpful.

[00:07:08] Silvio Perez: So that you're not making decisions out of emotion and you're driving decisions based on logic.

[00:07:14] Silvio Perez: Right?

[00:07:14] Silvio Perez: And then if you can factor that decision based on revenue, even better.

[00:07:18] Silvio Perez: So you figure out your break even cost per click, your break even cost per lead, and now you have some sort of conditions based in reality on whether this ad should keep running.

[00:07:26] Silvio Perez: So it's like it's all that 100%.

[00:07:28] Jess: Well, I think the reason metadata exists right in the first place also is because testing on social can be hard if you're not setting it up correctly.

[00:07:37] Jess: Facebook LinkedIn will both try and optimize your performance.

[00:07:40] Jess: They're going to serve your top performing ad to the audience that's responding to the best.

[00:07:45] Jess: Sometimes you have an ad that doesn't do as well, but it's not getting any attention.

[00:07:48] Jess: It doesn't have that chance to take over.

[00:07:51] Jess: Facebook especially is really aggressive with optimizing.

[00:07:53] Jess: So if you want to have an A B test and you're not controlling your audience and segmenting, you don't really have statistical significance.

[00:08:01] Jess: I think a lot of people also don't have they don't think about what defines success.

[00:08:09] Jess: I'm not hearing a lot of people talk about, we need to see a certain number of impressions to have the right confidence interval between our performances.

[00:08:17] Jess: I'm not saying that eloquently, but thinking about your test before you do it is such a misstep for a lot of people, is where I'm going with that statement.

[00:08:26] Silvio Perez: Say it louder.

[00:08:26] Silvio Perez: For the people in the back.

[00:08:27] Jess: You need statistical significance people.

[00:08:30] Silvio Perez: So I will say a couple of things.

[00:08:33] Silvio Perez: One, most people just don't have enough data for statistical significance if they're running enough experiments.

[00:08:39] Silvio Perez: And they almost let that be like a crutch where they're like, oh, we can't get statistical significance, so we're not going to do anything of significance we.

[00:08:47] Jess: Don'T need to measure.

[00:08:48] Silvio Perez: Yeah, exactly.

[00:08:49] Silvio Perez: It's like one extreme or the other.

[00:08:51] Jess: We're flashing to the new anti attribution stance that some people are taking of none of it's right?

[00:09:00] Jess: So just put a field on your farm, asking someone where they came from, and don't measure anything.

[00:09:04] Silvio Perez: Extremes of any kind are usually not the right way to go it's in life.

[00:09:08] Silvio Perez: So everything is a dichotomy, right?

[00:09:12] Silvio Perez: Like if you go too far into one way where it's like no attribution at all, no measurement, that's not going to be very good.

[00:09:18] Silvio Perez: But if you go too extreme where it cripples you and you're not able to make decisions and have flexibility, that's also going to hurt you.

[00:09:24] Silvio Perez: So it's always finding that little sweet spot in the middle.

[00:09:28] Designing Ad Campaigns with Intent

[00:09:28] Silvio Perez: And to that point, just for everyone listening, there's a lot that we're talking about and it can sound very overwhelming.

[00:09:35] Silvio Perez: So at the very beginning, just ask yourself, what are the questions that I want to answer?

[00:09:41] Silvio Perez: And then from there start to formulate, how can I structure my campaign?

[00:09:45] Silvio Perez: In a way, name my campaigns, name my ads, so that it is easy for me to find those insights and get those learnings.

[00:09:53] Silvio Perez: Another example is like Google Analytics.

[00:09:55] Silvio Perez: A lot of people are setting up their Google Analytics instances.

[00:09:57] Silvio Perez: And I see people all the time saying like, what goals do you have that I should have?

[00:10:01] Silvio Perez: What am I missing?

[00:10:03] Silvio Perez: And I'm like, wait, you're operating from the wrong perspective.

[00:10:06] Silvio Perez: First ask yourself, what are the things that I want to measure?

[00:10:09] Silvio Perez: What matters to me?

[00:10:10] Silvio Perez: And then you go into Google Analytics and you set up your goals or your event tracking so that you can get those insights 100%.

[00:10:15] Jess: It's designing with intent.

[00:10:19] Jess: I remember back when I was a wee baby and paid advertising in the late, early 2000s, like 2007.

[00:10:29] Jess: Nothing makes me feel as old as talking about back in the day on Twitter.

[00:10:34] Jess: But when I first campaigns, remember going in and looking and I was like, I don't remember what any of this shit is.

[00:10:38] Jess: I was like, I need to start giving my ad names things that are discernible, not just a date and a number, like what is ad one, what is ad two?

[00:10:46] Jess: And setting it up to answer those questions, what do we want to see?

[00:10:50] Jess: And not everything has to be revenue.

[00:10:52] Jess: Not everything has to be revenue.

[00:10:54] Jess: There's other things that matter, especially if you're, in my opinion, if you're running ABM campaigns.

[00:10:59] Jess: Can you report on penetration into your target accounts?

[00:11:03] Jess: Can you report on a lift in engagement in your target accounts?

[00:11:07] Jess: Ideally, yes, let's tie it to revenue.

[00:11:09] Jess: But there's also a ton of value that comes from those other activities.

[00:11:13] Jess: But if you're not setting it up to measure it, you're not going to be able to measure it.

[00:11:16] Silvio Perez: Yeah.

[00:11:16] Silvio Perez: And just even taking a step back, one of the things that I learned from the product world is the concept of proxy metrics.

[00:11:23] Silvio Perez: So being able to build a great product is tough.

[00:11:27] Silvio Perez: Right.

[00:11:27] Silvio Perez: You always have conflicting priorities, you have limited time.

[00:11:31] Silvio Perez: Everyone has their own bias on what they think is the best way forward.

[00:11:36] Silvio Perez: So it's really hard to influence a lagging indicator on the product side, like retention, right?

[00:11:41] Silvio Perez: That comes three, six months down the line, et cetera, depending on what's your average timeline for users.

[00:11:48] Silvio Perez: So what product teams do is they define leading indicators, which is what they call proxy metrics that they try to optimize towards so that it can impact that lagging indicator, which is like month over month, user retention, et cetera.

[00:12:03] Silvio Perez: So taking that concept and applying it to the marketing lens, the way I kind of how I define it from a paid perspective is I call them your optimization signals.

[00:12:13] Silvio Perez: Right?

[00:12:13] Silvio Perez: So you need to define your leading and your lagging signals.

[00:12:16] Silvio Perez: So depending on the stage and the primary goal, right?

[00:12:19] Silvio Perez: If I'm doing demand creation and I'm focusing on that stage, then my leading indicators are going to look a little bit different versus if I'm doing capture campaigns and I'm trying to drive direct response form fills.

[00:12:30] Silvio Perez: So for on the leading side, for create, it's probably going to be something looser but relevant, such as click through rate.

[00:12:38] Silvio Perez: Because if my ad is not being engaged, well, then people are obviously not interested in my content, which is typically the primary offer on that stage, and then also the engagement rate.

[00:12:47] Silvio Perez: Right.

[00:12:47] Silvio Perez: If I'm driving people to my website, are they actually engaged?

[00:12:50] Silvio Perez: Are they enjoying the content?

[00:12:51] Silvio Perez: Are they not?

[00:12:52] Silvio Perez: Who's commenting?

[00:12:53] Silvio Perez: Who's liking?

[00:12:54] Silvio Perez: Right?

[00:12:54] Silvio Perez: So there's going to be a different leading indicator versus on the capture side.

[00:12:58] Silvio Perez: I could probably just use something as simple as like cost per lead, especially if I understand what my break even cost per lead is and I back factor that from revenue.

[00:13:06] Jess: Yeah, I love it.

[00:13:08] Silvio Perez discusses data analysis and learning to build SaaS tools

[00:13:08] Jess: Do you have tools that you're using for kind of helping pull that together or are you just in the platform seeing what's happening?

[00:13:16] Silvio Perez: I wish I had a tool.

[00:13:20] Silvio Perez: I'm actually in the process right now.

[00:13:22] Silvio Perez: Kind of side note, I'm learning how to build SaaS tools right now because with the Academy, I'm going to build my own LMS and that's kind of like the long term vision.

[00:13:30] Silvio Perez: And I have so many ideas for tools, but no, I'm doing it all myself, which takes forever.

[00:13:35] Jess: Have you taught yourself SQL?

[00:13:37] Jess: Are you learning SQL and building your own databases too?

[00:13:40] Silvio Perez: I'm not there yet.

[00:13:42] Silvio Perez: I'm going to hire a development team.

[00:13:44] Silvio Perez: But I'm a big believer in as an entrepreneur, as a leader, you should know enough about everything to know whether or not it's being successfully delegated.

[00:13:52] Silvio Perez: So I'm not going to necessarily code the platform myself, but I do want to know enough where I can speak to engineers, I can look at the code base, et cetera.

[00:14:00] Silvio Perez: So I'm like literally starting from the ground zero, like HTML, CSS, Java, and I'm going up.

[00:14:09] Jess: For those who don't want to do it by hand, but it's also doing a little by hand.

[00:14:13] Jess: I'm a huge fan of Google Data studio.

[00:14:15] Jess: I moved away from it for a while, but I've recently come back and using it with a tool like Supermetrics that allows you to plug in all those ad platforms to it.

[00:14:24] Jess: That has recently been my go to because also it's free.

[00:14:29] Silvio Perez: Interpreted the question.

[00:14:31] Silvio Perez: Yes.

[00:14:31] Silvio Perez: So I do use reporting tools.

[00:14:33] Silvio Perez: I'm not in the Stone Age.

[00:14:35] Silvio Perez: I thought you meant like, am I doing the calculations of figuring out the break even cost per lead and all that?

[00:14:42] Jess: No.

[00:14:43] Silvio Perez: Yeah, no, absolutely not.

[00:14:44] Silvio Perez: Oh my God.

[00:14:45] Silvio Perez: So what I usually use is Google Sheets.

[00:14:48] Jess: We're leaving this in.

[00:14:50] Silvio Perez: Yeah, for sure.

[00:14:51] Silvio Perez: I usually use Google Sheets and then I use Data Slayer, which is basically the same thing as Supermetric.

[00:14:56] Silvio Perez: Okay.

[00:14:57] Silvio Perez: Yeah, but it's just cheaper.

[00:14:59] Jess: It sounds cooler.

[00:15:00] Silvio Perez: It is pretty cool.

[00:15:01] Jess: I picture like a wizard and your data is the dragon and it's coming into like because dragons hoard things and data hoards numbers.

[00:15:12] Silvio Perez: I did not know dragons hoard things.

[00:15:16] Jess: Obviously you're a dragon of paid advertising.

[00:15:19] Jess: You just hoard knowledge, but you're going to share it with the world.

[00:15:22] Jess: You're going to share your gold with the world.

[00:15:29] Jess: Yeah.

[00:15:29] Jess: Getting tools helps quite a bit with it.

[00:15:32] Jess: Yeah.

[00:15:34] Mid-Year Update: Favorite Advertising Platforms

[00:15:34] Jess: So nowadays, I think last time we talked, you were starting to do some on TikTok, you were on Twitter.

[00:15:40] Jess: Do you have a current like, this is mid year Sylvio now.

[00:15:44] Jess: Do you have a current favorite advertising platform?

[00:15:47] Silvio Perez: It's always so tough for me to answer who's your favorite child.

[00:15:52] Silvio Perez: That's what it feels like sometimes, but I kind of see them all as tools and it just depends on what tool is going to get the job done, depending on what I'm focusing on.

[00:16:02] Silvio Perez: So I'll tell you right now, mid year Sylvio, especially like launching the Academy later this year.

[00:16:07] Silvio Perez: Kind of where my head's at with Paid for us is very much short form content.

[00:16:14] Silvio Perez: So TikTok YouTube Shorts is monetized now so you can run YouTube shorts ads.

[00:16:19] Silvio Perez: So that's really where my head is at right now in terms of leverage and I think YouTube is still so underrated.

[00:16:26] Silvio Perez: So if I had to choose one right now, I would say YouTube because of the ability to tap into intent audiences from search and then now the fact that you have the ability to run ads through YouTube shorts is ridiculous and just for some context, like six cent CPMs right now.

[00:16:43] Jess: Oh, my God.

[00:16:44] Silvio Perez: Insanely cheap.

[00:16:46] Jess: I love it.

[00:16:48] Silvio Perez: I'm so sure that that is not going to be the same six months from now, a year from now.

[00:16:53] Silvio Perez: But I love channels that are so underutilized and they're so cheap because it's such an opportunity to just acquire so many first touches for a fraction of a cost.

[00:17:05] Silvio Perez: Get those people into your retargeting layer and then from there you can just further nurture them across channels.

[00:17:11] Jess: Yeah, we are all into short form content here on the podcast.

[00:17:15] Jess: We're all into it.

[00:17:16] Jess: TikTok YouTube shorts, instagram reels.

[00:17:19] Jess: We're here for it.

[00:17:20] Jess: We are here.

[00:17:21] Jess: So much for it.

[00:17:22] Silvio Perez: It's crazy.

[00:17:23] Silvio Perez: And just on the organic side with my YouTube channel, I've been posting two videos a week now, which has been amazing on the channel but it's slow, you know what I mean?

[00:17:33] Silvio Perez: It takes time for videos to rank, then they get indexed.

[00:17:36] Silvio Perez: That's just the way it goes with YouTube.

[00:17:37] Silvio Perez: Like one of my top videos ever on my channel, I remember I posted it and it was like crickets.

[00:17:43] Silvio Perez: Nobody watched it for six months.

[00:17:44] Silvio Perez: This was even before I had even fewer subscribers.

[00:17:46] Silvio Perez: But then all of a sudden YouTube picked it up and it took off and that's kind of how long form works on YouTube.

[00:17:51] Silvio Perez: But with YouTube Shorts right now, the way it works is you post a YouTube shorts and you'll get a ridiculous amount of views within the first day, especially within the first hour and then it just kind of flatlines and then like 48 hours later it spikes up a little bit again and then it just flatlines again.

[00:18:09] Silvio Perez: It's interesting how YouTube shorts is definitely what the algorithm is favoring.

[00:18:14] Silvio Perez: So I'm actually about to run an experiment of posting YouTube shorts content and then the ones that do best organically are the ones that will leverage as an ad.

[00:18:26] Jess: Yes, I think people one of the biggest ways that people fuck up is they take their worst performing content, they go oh my God, I didn't get enough views, let me boost it and get more.

[00:18:36] Jess: No, stop it.

[00:18:38] Jess: It's a bad idea.

[00:18:40] Jess: Take your top performing content organically, your top performing organic content.

[00:18:45] Jess: Use that as advertisement.

[00:18:46] Jess: Use it that way.

[00:18:48] Jess: People I think often start testing on Paid because you can get more reach, you can get more volume with it.

[00:18:54] Jess: Test on organic test.

[00:18:56] Jess: Take your best organic we used to do this for Time Inc.

[00:18:58] Jess: All the time.

[00:18:59] Jess: I don't know if this is like an NDA violation, but whatever, I'm sharing it.

[00:19:02] Jess: We used to do this for Time Inc.

[00:19:03] Jess: Where we would take their top performing organic posts and they had like 200 and 4250 Facebook pages at the time.

[00:19:11] Jess: We would take their top performing organic post and we would boost that and we would put an advertiser's image on top of it.

[00:19:16] Jess: That was their content every day.

[00:19:18] Jess: Whatever was top the day before, take that.

[00:19:21] Jess: Boost it for like 10,000 impressions.

[00:19:23] Jess: Put the advertiser logo on it.

[00:19:25] Jess: That was the entire campaign that we ran for like a year and a half.

[00:19:30] Silvio Perez: At the end of the day, that's your warmest, most loving audience.

[00:19:35] Silvio Perez: And if it doesn't work for your best audience, chances are it's not going to work on your worst.

[00:19:39] Silvio Perez: That have no brand affinity, no trust, right?

[00:19:42] Focus on Top Customer Personas and Segmentation for Effective Marketing

[00:19:42] Silvio Perez: And on that note of really doubling down on the things that are working when it comes to your audience segmentation, right now, people's budgets are getting cut.

[00:19:53] Silvio Perez: So a lot of the clients that I've been speaking to and people I've been advising, I'm like, really?

[00:19:58] Silvio Perez: This is a time to triple down.

[00:20:00] Silvio Perez: So instead of using an analogy of like, don't be a shotgun, be a sniper, really focus in, hone in on let's say you have five personas, okay?

[00:20:08] Silvio Perez: Can you focus on the top two that are the most effective in terms of revenue contribution?

[00:20:12] Silvio Perez: Instead of covering 3000 accounts?

[00:20:15] Silvio Perez: What if you segmented that list right, based on your top 100 and then your top 600 and then your top 400 as an example, and then now you can allocate more budget towards the ones that are going to have a bigger impact to the bottom line.

[00:20:28] Silvio Perez: So at the end of the day, it's like triple down on what best is for you.

[00:20:33] Silvio Perez: Because chances are if it's not going to work for the best, then it's definitely not going to work on the worst.

[00:20:38] Jess: Yes, that's a much nicer way of putting it.

[00:20:42] Silvio Perez: We compliment each other.

[00:20:44] Jess: Yeah.

[00:20:44] Jess: Then don't be a fucking idiot.

[00:20:47] Silvio Perez: The PG version.

[00:20:51] Jess: I am your anger translator.

[00:20:54] Silvio Perez: We should totally do like a segment doing that.

[00:20:57] Silvio Perez: That would be so funny.

[00:20:58] Jess: Yeah.

[00:20:58] Jess: Hey, perhaps you should think about leading indicators.

[00:21:02] Jess: Fucking look at your impressions.

[00:21:04] Jess: It's not impressions, but yeah, that would be hilarious.

[00:21:07] Jess: That would be good content.

[00:21:09] Silvio Perez: That would be yeah.

[00:21:10] Jess: Let us know in the comments below if you want to see more of that.

[00:21:13] Silvio Perez: You're going to blow us up.

[00:21:16] Disrupting the Online Education Model: Silvio Perez on His Mission to Maximize Impact

[00:21:16] Jess: So we're coming up on time here, but the podcast closing episode is always what's favorite part of your tech stack?

[00:21:24] Jess: Do you have a new favorite part of your tech stack?

[00:21:26] Jess: I mean, I feel like your academy is the favorite part of your tech stack right now and I'm going to put it in there because it can be part of your tech stack.

[00:21:32] Jess: Listeners at home cost of something.

[00:21:38] Silvio Perez: What excites me about building an academy is not that I'm building an academy, it's the way we're building it.

[00:21:43] Silvio Perez: So the whole premise is like, I'm trying to pivot away against the normal online education model where they create a course, they make it as relevant to as many people as possible, they sell it to as many people as possible so they can maximize profits and not impact.

[00:21:59] Silvio Perez: And then you end up with like hundreds of courses, terrible course completion rates, students left with like, surface level learnings and it's just this vicious trap.

[00:22:08] Silvio Perez: I'm like, no, we're not doing that.

[00:22:09] Silvio Perez: I'm like, when we create a course, it's relevant to one specific niche only.

[00:22:13] Silvio Perez: So for us, it's all about B.

[00:22:15] Silvio Perez: Two B.

[00:22:15] Silvio Perez: Then from there, we're not selling it, we're giving it away for free to maximize all the courses on demand are free, right?

[00:22:25] Silvio Perez: To maximize impact.

[00:22:26] Silvio Perez: Because our mission is to scale ideas profitably into the world of paid ads.

[00:22:29] Silvio Perez: And I truly believe it's a superpower that can help somebody, whether that's improving their career, landing a new position, or me.

[00:22:37] Silvio Perez: When I first started out making money for my DJ business, I was a broke college student.

[00:22:42] Silvio Perez: It's such a powerful tool and that is definitely my obsession right now.

[00:22:47] Silvio Perez: There's so much more to come in terms of SaaS embedding and learning experiences.

[00:22:52] Silvio Perez: And that's really like our whole focus is learning experiences, not just courses.

[00:22:56] Silvio Perez: It's actually in the web copy.

[00:22:59] Silvio Perez: If I can give you all the knowledge you need about Google Ads in 30 minutes, I would, you know what I mean?

[00:23:04] Silvio Perez: We're very big on impact over quantity, which is another one of our rules.

[00:23:09] Silvio Perez: It's like no lesson is longer than ten minutes.

[00:23:11] Silvio Perez: And it's by design to force myself and future instructors to really think about what matters most.

[00:23:17] Silvio Perez: But yeah, so much more to go.

[00:23:19] Jess: I think that's why we're kindred spirits.

[00:23:21] Jess: Obviously.

[00:23:22] Jess: I used to back in that I'm going to age myself again with a statement, but Blab used to be a platform back in the day in like the you could have up to four people live on video and then a bunch of people in the room.

[00:23:33] Jess: And so my friend Afton and I would literally we would have a room and it was just Facebook advertising questions and her and I would sit on there for six 8 hours on the weekend.

[00:23:42] Jess: On Saturday, we sit there six 8 hours and we would just answer people's advertising questions.

[00:23:47] Jess: That's all we did.

[00:23:48] Jess: And I built like a Pinterest course back in the day that I sold and then the next one I gave away because why do we need to gatekeep knowledge?

[00:23:55] Jess: If we can all have better advertising campaigns and help uplift the entire industry as a whole, why would we not do that.

[00:24:05] Silvio Perez: And it's such a need.

[00:24:08] Silvio Perez: I create a lot of content on ads.

[00:24:10] Silvio Perez: I'm always helping people and they always ask me like, hey, I want to get into advertising.

[00:24:14] Silvio Perez: Where do you recommend that I go?

[00:24:16] Silvio Perez: And I'm like, okay, you're going to have to go to this YouTube channel and then these blog articles and it's like, it's very disparate and there's this.

[00:24:22] Jess: Membership that you have to pay for, right?

[00:24:24] Jess: And it's this other thing you have to again, pay for and it's all fragmented.

[00:24:28] Silvio Perez: You know what I mean?

[00:24:29] Silvio Perez: So much of my learning curve could have been cut if I had a path laid out.

[00:24:35] Silvio Perez: And that's really, ultimately what I want to solve for is I want to give the world a place that they can go to, where they have trusted information that's taught by people that actually know what they're talking about.

[00:24:48] Silvio Perez: And laid out in a way that they can consume that knowledge in the shortest amount of time possible and actually get hands on experience, because that's really where the learnings come from.

[00:24:57] Silvio Perez: Which is kind of why I'm so against courses.

[00:24:59] Silvio Perez: Just for courses, the real application is what separates you.

[00:25:03] Silvio Perez: But yeah, lot to come.

[00:25:05] Silvio Perez: And on the revenue side, we have bets in terms of monetization, but the goal is to put as much knowledge out there.

[00:25:13] Discussing the Performance Marketing Academy with Silvio Perez

[00:25:13] Jess: Yeah, I think something else that I would anticipate that is going to be different, it's not to plug you too much, but something that I also anticipate being different is a lot of what you see out there for courses on advertising is really surface level.

[00:25:26] Jess: It's saying like, run one to three ad variants to make sure that you have stuff to optimize.

[00:25:31] Jess: It doesn't really get into the nitty gritty.

[00:25:34] Jess: And so what I've seen as someone who hires performance marketers throughout the course of my career is you have a bucket of people who are good, but they're not great.

[00:25:47] Jess: And there isn't information for people who want to get great at it.

[00:25:50] Jess: There's not a lot out there that really dives into like how do you actually go through and optimize?

[00:25:54] Jess: How do you actually when you're running a campaign on Facebook and you have a limited budget and so you're going to have limited data, how do you make intelligent decisions with limited data that will never, ever reach significance?

[00:26:05] Jess: How do you still use your data?

[00:26:07] Jess: How do you still follow through on that?

[00:26:09] Jess: And I would anticipate just because you and I both worked in that environment and had conversations with that, I would be shocked if you didn't go down that path.

[00:26:16] Jess: So I'm going to assume that you assume that you're great people who want to get great at it too.

[00:26:21] Jess: And it's definitely a tangible market failure of something that's missing in the world right now.

[00:26:27] Silvio Perez: Yeah, so many exciting things.

[00:26:30] Silvio Perez: We're going to have like a public feedback area, so like a public facing roadmap.

[00:26:35] Silvio Perez: So when students have ideas of courses that they want us to cover or topics, they can submit it there and then meme for now, but eventually product team can prioritize those requests if they have instructors that they would love us for, to work for.

[00:26:49] Silvio Perez: So I'm very much going to build it in public and really build for the need that is there.

[00:26:55] Jess: That's exciting.

[00:26:56] Jess: Well, we will link to everything in the show notes below.

[00:26:59] Jess: If you are listening to this, prior to the academy launching, we'll link to Sylvio's site and news letter where you can sign up to get notified.

[00:27:06] Jess: If you're listening, after it launches, we'll make sure those are updated with all the relevant links.

[00:27:11] Jess: And I'm sure that you'll be hearing more about it on our socials in general, because we are really excited to cheer you on as you build this academy, too.

[00:27:20] Silvio Perez: Thank you.

[00:27:20] Silvio Perez: I'm so grateful.

[00:27:22] Jess: All right, well, we'll see everyone on the next episode.