Mastering Funnels | How To Scale Your Digital Agency With Proof & Predictable Growth

Learn more about TikTok Ads, TikTok UTM Tracking and Advanced Ad Tracking with Weberlo. Watch our recent Livestream on YouTube or you may also listen to our podcast on Spotify.

In this live, we covered a few important and timely topics, including:

1) What clients are no longer buying

2) BANT (Needs Analysis)

3) Website backend adjustments

4) Conversions (The Proof)

5) Which Ads and Platforms should I use?

6) Scaling with Results and Communication

7) Your Questions

Listen to Mastering Funnels on Spotify Now

[TRANSCRIPTION]

"Okay. And we are live. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Mastering Funnels podcast. My name is Jason Wilmot. Today is episode 13 and we are coming live. This is September 20th, 2022. It is a beautiful day, the last day of summer here in Nebraska, and I'm excited to be talking to you all today.

So typically on this podcast, we talk about several different things. We talk about running ads, copy marketing, growth, and all of those important things that are unique to businesses and really the ingredients for scaling up. But for today's podcast, I want to specifically talk to those who are in the digital marketing agency space. So today's podcast is all about how to scale your digital agency with proof and predictable growth for your clients. So if you are not an agency though, like, this podcast is still for you because it's going to go through the framework that we use here when I'm connecting with clients, when I'm thinking about clients, when I'm thinking about partnerships.

So if you're interested in starting your own digital marketing agency, this will work for you if you're a freelancer or you're a marketing team member, if you're looking to scale up your agent podcast of where I want to help you. So we've got a lot to dive into today. So that's it. I'm going to get started. But at any point, go ahead and drop a comment in the chat if you have questions if you need clarification on something.

But really what I'd love to do in this is just really make this simple for you and what it would look like to go talk to a client, sort of what you're proposing to this client. And that really just brings us to this first point. So let's start off with this. Let's start off with what clients are no longer buying. Let's kill this.

And we're going to frame up this conversation with this idea here. So this is going to be applicable for agencies who are servicing SaaS companies or eCommerce companies, or local-based businesses. But here's kind of the problem that I ran into early on. And I think the majority of agencies have run into or are currently running into, or this is a problem that they're going to face in the future. That's simply this.

Of course brands and businesses care about brand awareness, like getting their name out there. But at the end of the day, what folks, what companies and businesses are no longer buying our clicks, views, and visits to your website, these vanity metrics that don't really move the needle for businesses. And the difference here that I'm going to talk about today, is how to take you from where you are currently. Because if that's you, you're either making creative or you're doing social posts, but then you post them or you run ads, but you don't really know how to connect that to the results that a business wants. Well, what does a business want?

Well, they want sales. They want phone calls, they want downloads, they want quotes, they want people coming to their website to take action. And you as an agency need to be able to prove that if you're going to tame them as a client or if you're doing performance-based marketing. I mean, if you're not doing performance-based marketing well, if you are trying to do performance-based marketing, then you're not going to get paid because you can't prove what you're doing. So what I want to do in this is sort of demystifying the process of what I would do and my suggestions to you on what you should do if you want to continue to grow your own business, but not just your business, the only way that your business is going to grow as an agency is by providing results for your clients.

Real, tangible results, so that you can have conversations around ROI. And the best way that we're going to accomplish this are things that we talk about here before we're going to be talking about tracking conversions, which ad platforms to use, and sort of this whole process. So. Again. I want to frame this up by saying there's nothing wrong with selling views and clicks and website visits.

But what you're going to find out is you're either going to leave money on the table as an agency because you're not going to be able to prove results or you're just going to be stuck in this rut of not being able to actually provide what a client wants. So is this applicable to you? I don't know. Is this applicable to everybody? I don't know.

This is up to you in where you're at, as in your current agency. So, again, we need to get away from this idea of we're just putting content online for clients. What we ultimately want to do, what's going to help them, and you and the customer for that fact are ultimately bringing results to them that you can track, that you can prove that is predictable and that is scalable. So that sort of lays the context for where we're going today. So let's talk about this.

Let's talk about first, this is sort of client, you know, 101. But this is sort of the Band method. So when you're on a call with a client, really, before we get into what you're offering, this is a really good way to figure out what you're doing. This is called the band method. I don't know where this came from.

I think it's from IBM, but I'm not quite sure on that. But Band is acronym if you will, and I want to kind of talk about each one of these pieces. So the B stands for Budget. Do these businesses have a budget to run ads? Do they have the budget for you?

You need to determine that before you're going to go out and pitch them results when it comes to funnels or paid ads. Right? They have to have a budget in order to go. When I say budget, we're talking a minimum $500. For the clients that I work with, we're spending either $1,000 minimum $1,000 or $1500 minimum $20,000 on up.

Right. There are different levels for all of this. And the reason why the money part is important is because the money is the budget that can be scaled, if you can find results for $1,000 or $1,000 or $10,000 or $20,000, you can continue to walk those numbers up and up. A great use case or a great example of this would be a client that I started working with years ago and we were spending $5,000 a month. And now the business is spending over $300,000 every single month on paid ads.

Why? It's because what we laid, the framework and the foundation that we laid of trackable, predictable, scalable growth is right there. So the budget is obviously important because you can't move the needle if you're going to be running ads for $250 or something like that, it's just not going to be enough probably to move the needle. So you have to have a budget. And then the A stands for authority. 

It's just are you talking to the right person. Are you talking to the person who is going to make the decision? I'm not going to spend too much time on that. But don't pitch the gatekeeper. You're trying to talk to the business owner and then the N stands for need.

Is there an actual need? Right. Don't just go out and try to sell your services to somebody who doesn't need them because that's going to be bad. And on that need side, it's kind of like, can they perform with the growth? Can they scale with the growth that you're going to bring them?

And then the last piece is this, the T is the timeliness. Do they need this solution now? So before you try to go out and close more clients or scale up their flow, what you're going to try to do is just try to identify first if this client is a good fit. And typically I like to use the band method as sort of the needs analysis. Do they need your help or not? 

And it's a good way to flush this out on the phone call. And it's a good thing to flush us out on the first phone call because you don't want to get on three or four or five different phone calls with them in the follow-ups and just understand, oh, hey, this is what we need in the future, or the budget that we have allocated for this is only $250. That's not going to be to your benefit. Now. And I should say this, I know that it is hard getting started with the first client. 

So if you have to just take that $250 budget or $500 budget, if you have to work for free, if you have to say, hey, I'm willing to work for free until I get results for you, then you can start painting. That is up to you. I cover a lot more of that in Mastering Funnels than our six-figure funnel, a freedom sort of accelerator for businesses, for agencies starting off. But I don't want to spend too much time on that today because what I want to do is dive into the meat here. All right, you get this client right or you're fleshing out if this client is a good fit for you.

This is kind of the process that I use to go through that. And that is I understand that they have to have this website or landing page because ideally what we're going to be doing is we're going to be using the content or we're going to be using ads to drive them to this landing page. It could be a landing page, it could be a website. But ultimately you need to be able to inject things on the back end of this website, namely Google Tag Manager, and Google Analytics. You're going to be putting in your Facebook Pixels, your TikTok Pixels, your Google Remarketing Tag, sort of all of the behind-the-scenes things that you need to do in order to train your AI or your artificial intelligence in order to kind of maximize the conversion 

So let's dive into that. So what we're talking about when we're talking about what adjustments a client need on their website, the first glaring thing is this do they have a call to action? Is there something that the visitor can do on their website? Right? Because if they can't do anything, then you're going to end up selling, hey, we're going to get so many visits to your website. 

We're going to get you so many views, right? And that might be good, but that's not all the way. If you're running ads for a local business or whoever it is, wouldn't you much rather say, hey, we're going to get you all these views and clicks and everything like that, but we're also going to get you phone calls from your website, we're also going to get you downloads? We're also going to have booked appointments or booked phone calls from your website. Those are the things that I'm talking about when we're discussing the call to action.

So typically the call to action is to request a quote, book a phone call, fill out a form, download something, start a free trial, and then if it's e-commerce, it's by. That part is very easy. You're an e-commerce company. If you're working with an eCommerce company and they don't have a call to action, there's something obviously wrong. So that's what I mean by a call to action.

And if they don't have one, you can make a suggestion to them. If they want more phone calls, then let's move that call button to the hero section or the very top of their website so that when somebody comes to that website, they know exactly what to do. I don't mean this in a bad way, but when we're thinking through marketing, you just have to assume people don't know anything, they don't know what to do. And we're trying to make this journey absolutely easy for them. So if you're spending your client's money on these ads, but then you're putting them onto a website with no real call to action or this unclear or fuzzy thing or this really friction-based call to action when you're probably going to lose results.

So we have to be able to have a call to action on the website for that person to do something. And then if they do that something, this is where that thank you page or events come into play. And what I mean by thank you page is this. If they book a phone call, if they purchase, if they download, if they take this action, then they are redirected to this thing called the thank you page because that is the end result. That's where you're trying to get these people. 

That's where you're trying to create this endpoint. And it's on this endpoint that is so vital because if somebody reaches this endpoint or fires this event, we feed that information back to the ad platforms, we feed that information into our analytics. And that's going to do two main things. The first is it's going to give you your ROI, which is very important because if you're spending people's money if you were steward of somebody's ad spend, then what we're trying to do is say, hey, with this ad spend, we had X. And ideally, your math works out so that these people over here are making more money on this endpoint than they are on the budget. 

And so that allows you and the client to have this awesome conversation about, hey, things are working. Should we spend more money? And ideally, you've had this conversation with the client that they can scale and they will say yes. Now you're going to run into situations where either they can't scale or they can't just handle it. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

That's a good thing for you in the business. And normally that's just going to like, in some cases, they might have to work on their back end or maybe they have some sort of pieces that they need to figure out first before you can continue to scale, but never a bad thing. So ideally though, they have this call to action because what you need is something measurable, we need to identify if we're spending money and we have this acquisition system. If they hit that endpoint, how much does it cost for one person to hit that end point? How much does it cost for two people? 

And we're going to start working the math in that direction. So the very first thing that we have to have is a website with a clear call to action. But on that website, you have to have these things in the background. And that's where Google Analytics and Tag Manager and these pixels all come into place. Because the second thing that I said so this endpoint does two things.

The first thing is that it provides you with the ROI. The second thing that this endpoint does is it trains the AI, the ad platforms, to repeat that behavior. So I'll say that one more time. So if we're running ads on TikTok or YouTube or wherever Google search, what we're trying to do is we're trying to train this platform to get these people to that endpoint. That's called the conversion.

So if these people convert, then we feed that information back to the ad platforms so that we can tell the ad platforms, hey, ad platform, go out and find more people who look similar to this or who behave similar to this, so that we can go ahead and train the AI to just go out and scale for us. That's really the ultimate goal. So if you are selling videos, if you're selling content, if you're selling social media to people, that's a fine foot in the door. But if you want to really scale up your own income and scale the results for your clients, then what you can do is determine that call to action, determine that end point. What's the point of this video?

What are we trying to do with this video online? And if you can follow it all the way through to that end point, then that is the magic sauce right there. What you're allowed to do is have a conversation with your clients and have a conversation with their team members or whoever about scaling up and continuing to move on. So I do see some questions coming in. Let me do this.

Let me talk about how to prove this right, and how to prove the results, and then I'll get your questions. So the proof, the proof, it's not in the pudding, folks. It's in the conversion. So what are conversions? Well, it's that action that somebody took.

It's a clear call to action. Somebody did this thing, and that is called a conversion. Now, there are really two ways to build these mechanisms of proof. The first is you have to have those pieces injected on the back end. You just have to you have to determine what the end point is of the funnel.

No, the funnel just keeps on going and going and going and going. You have to have this acquisition funnel. And we could have a further conversation about referrals and upselling and all of that, but we're not going to do that. This will be purely as far as acquiring customers to this one call to action. So you have these conversions in place.

You have a LinkedIn Insight tag on your website. You have this Twitter universal tag. You've got the TikTok Pixel or the Facebook Pixel the Google remarketing tag, you have this ability to then pass back the information to your ad platforms, which is great, but this is where I'm going to back up to. The first part of we want to understand where this data is coming in. And the way that we do that is through these things called UTM.

And this is something that I talk about quite often because this is the thing that really allowed me to kind of break free from what I was doing in content creation and allowed me to rather than just create content and then make it again and again. What I was able to do is make content for the client. But then put it into the ads and then run that ad and then connect that ad all the way to their bottom line. And that is something called UTM. It's called an urgent tracking module.

Don't need to know that not being tested. But if you want to look it up, that's fine. But what it is, is this. It's just one simple ingredient that you need to connect your click all the way to the analytics. It connects this click all the way down to that conversion.

And that's really the proof, right? So when I said earlier that there are really two things involved in these endpoints, the first was ROI and the second was training the ad platforms. Well, if you create these custom conversions on your website, the ad platforms will learn. But that's not enough. You need to be able to have a conversation with your client about the proof.

And that is where UTM comes involved. So what UTMs are, are the string of characters that are attached to any click. And you find these in your Google Analytics. So you send in a click with this UTM information. And what Google Analytics kind of does is there are five layers of information that are in there and it sort of takes those information and pulls it into the analytics.

It's called source medium campaign ad, content, and term. And from there you can kind of dial in. Well, what is moving the needle for you? Is it TikTok? Is it YouTube?

Is it Facebook? Because we know the source inside of our analytics, which gives you marketer the freedom to experiment and the freedom to put ads in different places. Because all of a sudden you are not guessing. You know exactly the behavior of these clicks. So if somebody sees your ad or your client's ad on Facebook, they see it on TikTok, they see it on YouTube. 

You'll be able to follow that click all the way through to see, hey, which one actually led to the conversion? And then we get into the fun part, we get into the data. So then you can start thinking to yourself, well, how much do we spend on Facebook? How much do we spend on TikTok? How much do we spend on YouTube? 

Well, let's say that you're spending $100 on each of these. Well, when you use UTMs, you're going to understand the conversions per year ad spend, and that gives you the freedom to know your ROI. So if people are coming in and they're converting on all the platforms, that is a good problem to have. But the next step would be, well, where are they converting the best? Now, I should pause.

Just because they're leads doesn't mean they're qualified leads. So if you're going to go out and just sell leads to people, you might have another problem. At the end of the day, I could go out and get any business leads with Facebook lead forms. I'm assuming, though, that they're going to be mostly garbage. So keep that in mind.

You can't just go sell leads and get people here and just look at the lowest cost per lead, right? There's a big difference between the quality of leads and the quantity of leads. We want both, ideally, but we want qualified leads. How would you know what is qualified? Right?

Well, this is where hopefully your client is using the CRM because these UTMs that you're using to pass data into your analytics can also pass into their CRM. So if you're using Salesforce or HubSpot or something along those lines. You're able to connect those UTMs to that client. Right onto that lead information. So that as that lead is going through the pipeline.

You can see or you can have a conversation. I guess. With your client about. Hey. I'm getting you a lot of leads on TikTok. 

Or I'm getting you a lot of leads on Facebook. Is one better than the other? Should we be spending more money on this versus that? So that's where the UTM really comes involved. It gives you clarity. 

It is the worst feeling.

It's the worst conversation to have with a client when you're just doing so many different things and you don't know what's working and you don't know what is not working and what you're trying to do is you're just throwing things against the wall. Now, I get that sometimes you have to do that. If a client is in a very, very early stage of, hey, I have no marketing plan, I don't know what platform I should be using, then one, I would say maybe they're not ready for scaling up. Right. Because if you are in the business of Mastering Funnels, if you're in the business of really growing businesses, this business needs to do the due diligence and make sure that they know what their offer is, their language is, and the clarity around that. 

So you have these UTMs. Let's back up. You have these UTMs. You're passing those into your analytics, so you have the proof. You're passing them into the CRM so that you know the quality of these leads. 

This is where you as a marketer get very, very dangerous because you can track everything. So if you have found it, hey, it's TikTok ads. It's TikTok ads all the way. So what you can do is you can know your ROI because you're spending $100 a day on TikTok. You're getting five leads.

That means $20 per lead. You know that 80% of the leads are qualified. So then from there on, you can just go ahead and you can spend more money, and you can work the math. And math is very important in all of this, obviously. So if you need help with the spreadsheet or two, obviously Mastering Funnels, our coaching program can do that.

But at the same time, it really does come down to you doing due diligence and looking at the numbers. So conversions, right? Conversions are the metric that we are really trying to create here. And the way that you connect the conversions to your ads is through things like Google Tag Manager and using Pixels. But the way that you attach these conversions to your actual clients and leads and customers is through UTM.

So I want to stress that it's not just for tracking your ROI. It is also for tracking and having discussions about the quality and quantity. So all right, so I talked about conversions there for a second. What I will do now is go to the chat. Oh, this is it, Jason, my man.

Do a mock client interview for us. Okay? That would be interesting I'm not going to do it now, but that's actually a really good idea. And I think a lot of people struggle with that, knowing what questions to ask, knowing what things to surface. But I think the thing is this.

I think when it comes down to I'll just show this in the comments. 

I think what it comes down to is just having an honest conversation. I think one of the things that marketing agencies just let me back up. I think every business has had an experience with a marketer, a marketing agency that they just have had a bad experience with. I'll be completely honest. I have probably been part of that for some of our clients early on because I didn't really know what I was doing, and I was more interested in selling. I was more interested in just making money than I would be willing to do anything and everything.

And so when it says. Do a mock client interview for us. I think the most important thing here is listening to the customer. Listening to this person. And understanding if this is going to be a good fit for them. 

If it's going to be a good fit for you. If they don't have enough budget. If they haven't figured out their offer. If they haven't figured out their messaging. If they don't have a website where somebody can perform an action. 

It's probably not going to be worth your time. And you might need that money. You might need this client. And so I don't know maybe you have one of these where you just kind of cut your teeth. But again, as you progress, you're going to find out like, hey, this client isn't going to be really a good fit.

So thank you for the comment. I think that's absolutely awesome. But I think what it comes down to is I think it also comes down to knowing your own offer, knowing what you are selling and what I am selling. What our team is selling is typically trackable, predictable growth.

We have a brand omnipresence. We're working with some clients. We just put them everywhere. But we're not just putting them everywhere to be everywhere. We're driving traffic in and we want to measure that.

So ultimately, before you go out and try to find this client or do this band exercise, what you should really be doing is understanding what you are offering and do not offer something that you can't deliver on. I would rather take a smaller retainer, a smaller piece, and deliver on something that I know I can right away and then continue to upsell them. Get that trust from that client, get that feedback, get that dialogue to happen where it's like we're getting a ton of leads. This is great. Can we just that is really what you want?

You don't want to be doing anything and everything for people. But I say that now, but I totally was doing anything and everything for people. But at the same time, I'm also going to disagree with myself. If you're an early-stage agency, it is not a bad idea at all to do anything and everything within a certain amount of reason. Let me do that.

Yeah, I think it's good to cut your teeth and I think it's good to be just well versed in everything. I think the days of, hey, we're just a Facebook agency. Hey, we're just like an Instagram agency. I don't think that that's necessarily bad. I like the idea of niche down.

But are you confident in Facebook's ability to stay relevant over the next few years? Are you confident in TikTok? Are you confident in YouTube? I think they are all necessary. And the way that I look at this is like, you need all of the platforms.

Different audiences are on different platforms. That's really not what you're selling. What you're selling is growth. And you can only show growth by measuring it, and you can only measure it through the process that I'm telling you here. So I would just start with something simple.

Right? But that kind of leads me into our next component here of what ads and what platform should I be using. So typically when you're on this phone call with a client, you're really trying to figure out who's the target demographic, who's buying from this. Is it males? Are the females?

Is it people in their 20s? Is it people in their teens? Is it people in their 50s? If somebody comes. To me and they said, hey, well, my target client is like a 50-year-old woman.

Then immediately my brain goes to, well, Facebook and Instagram are going to be a great spot. Obviously, it's not YouTube, obviously, it's not TikTok, and of course, there's caveats and all of that. Maybe it could be Jason. But really what you're trying to do is you're trying to understand where is this demographic, where is this perfect consumer or user for this client? And then you're going to go find which ad platform they're at.

But I think the thing that you think about though, before you go down that angle of which ad platform it is, is what type of marketing needs to occur. Is this disruptive marketing where you're putting an ad in front of them on their feed? Or is this intent-based marketing, hey, I'm locked out of my house, I need a locksmith right now. Right? So it's understanding the demographic. 

If this is a plumber, then if somebody is needing help with their water heater, that's probably not a Facebook ad sort of situation. That is somebody who needs help right now. And so what I would be doing, in that case, is I would be doing two things. One, I would be running Google Search ads to get people typing in plumber near me, best plumber, hot water fix, whatever the queries would be. And you're really trying to capture people that way.

And then on that ad, you can even put their phone number. So somebody sees it, they punch that phone number, and the phone call gets made immediately to that plumber. And then you know that you can track it all the way through. Another secondary thing that you could be doing, in that case, would be something like retargeting. And that would be done on Facebook or Instagram most likely, perhaps YouTube.

But what you're trying to do is maybe if there's a longer sales cycle there, what you're trying to do ultimately is you're going to try to get this lead. Maybe this person hasn't quite figured out if they want to go with you. And that's where you would retarget with things like testimonials or education to kind of earn their trust along the way. Now, if this is an eCommerce, again, I would start with probably intent-based marketing. Are people typing in what they're looking to buy on Google, on Google Shopping, and Google Search?

Right? But that's typically where I'd start. Nonetheless, if this is a new product or the sort of a new offer, a niche offers something a little bit different that might not work on Google, you might have to go to the disruptive sort of place. And if it's a product and people want to see it, if it's a T-shirt, if it's something that people can hold, if it's a toy, you're probably going to want to use disruptive marketing. And then you would say, okay, well, who is this for? 

Well, this is for kids. Well, obviously kids probably aren't buying this. So who is buying this? Well, it's probably Mom's. It's probably Dad's.

Maybe it's for specific teens. Okay, well if I'm targeting teens, I'm most likely going to use TikTok first. I'm going to be using YouTube, maybe Instagram. But you're understanding, where do I need to go? What is the offer?

Where are these demographics hanging out now? Where they're hanging out is important. The next thing is, do they have intent? And most of the time what you're probably going to do is it's going to be a mixture of disruptive versus intent-based marketing. It's just sort of where you want to be.

You want to be identifying what is the language that people are using to find this product. But you're also going to be using your ads because if you can identify those queries if you can identify those keywords and the language that people are using, that is a secret sauce for going in and upgrading or upselling your client to SEO because then you're going to go optimize around that keyword because you've already found that it's worked. And we could go down that rabbit hole. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, listen to podcast number twelve last week because we talked all about I'm not going to go into it. Actually, I think that might have been podcast number eleven.

And there's a free SEO calculator in there too. So go ahead and pick that up. I think it is episode eleven in that case. Okay, so this is where I think we kind of get to. So we've talked a little bit about search versus disruptive.

This is where in the ads, this is where we do layer in the UTMs. It's very important. And one thing that I should note is if you are running ads on Facebook or if this is a TikTok campaign or YouTube campaign, we're always, almost always. So I will say always. We're typical, I can't say always.

We are typically running conversion-based campaigns. I would say that's 95% of all of the campaigns that we run, we're trying to train that algorithm to do the work for us. The algorithm is going to be way better than you and I and all of our powers combined and trying to make this work. So really what we're trying to do when we're setting up these ads is we're driving traffic in and we're teaching it to hit that conversion. Because that conversion is going to want to give your ROI.

But two, it's going to train the ad platform to do all of the work for you. And that is the goal. And that is why you're a marketing agency because you want to do automated things. You want to use automation to scale the results for your clients. And hopefully, all that you have to do after you find that success is just increase the budget to more and more and more.

That's ideally what we're going after. So if you are a performance-based marketer, if you're only getting paid on the leads that you bring or the sales that you bring, this is where you absolutely need to use UTM. So you add Utms into that link URL in your ads. And if you want to further training on Utms, I've got a podcast on that as well. Or you can watch a free training or hop into the Mastering Funnels course as well because that's what we live and breathe, is tracking and conversions.

Because ultimately, as a marketing agency let me just back up. What you're trying to do is you're trying to get results here. Your clients don't care how many hours you're putting in if you are just crushing it for them, right? If their pipeline is absolutely full of leads, they're not going to say, hey, did you put in all of these hours this week? They're going to say, no, Jason, can you spend more money for us?

Because this is absolutely crushing. That is ultimately what you want, and that is why you want to live in the land of ads. That is why you want to live in the land of this digital marketing game so that you can track the results, you can put your energy into what is working, and kind of avoid what is not. So there we go. All right.

Now, I think the last thing is this. This is the most important part, and I also think that this is the hardest part. And I think this is where a lot of people fail. And this is where I've definitely failed in the past. And that is simply scaling with results and communicating clearly with your clients.

Ultimately, what this comes down to is communication. But the type of communication that you don't want to be having starts with the words I think or we believe, right? What we want to be saying in our communication is, I know or we know, and we can prove this because of X. So if you follow the process that we use in Mastering Funnels if you follow the process that I've talked about earlier, you've set up these conversions, you've set up these call to action. You've set up these things that allow you to know your ROI.

And ultimately, if you're using Utms, that is the way. Because at the end of this month, right at the end of this campaign, or whatever this is, you're going to look at your data and you're going to say, okay, we're on Facebook, we're on TikTok, we're on YouTube. We spend $100 on each of these. You're probably going to be spending more money than that. But for this example, you're going to look at your data, and then what you're going to do is you're going to hold yourself.

Now, this is important. You're going to have a conversation with your clients, you're going to talk to them, and you're not going to be afraid of talking to your clients because you're going to have results for them. And hey, sometimes those results don't come in quickly. And I think that's very important to address when you are having this initial conversation. When I typically have a conversation with a client, I'm like, hey, we might be in discovery mode for three months.

We're going to try different things. And when we find it, we're going to start spinning in and digging into it. This is not a panacea where you can just say, hey, give us our money, and you're going to get immediate results. That doesn't happen. It doesn't happen sometimes.

And sometimes you have to fire yourself from a client and say, hey, I'm looking at what we're doing compared to what you're doing, or some other type of marketing is like, we're not moving the needle for you. I think you need to do this because this is clearly what the data says. Now, hopefully, that's not the case for you, but know that it could happen. So when you're having these conversations with the clients, what you're really doing is you're looking into those analytics because you have the results from TikTok and from YouTube and from Facebook, and you're presenting these to the client. You're saying, hey, we got this many leads or this many buyers or this many downloads, whatever your KPI is, and you're presenting those to the clients.

And then the next thing that you're kind of talking about is, this is what we tried. Now, this is the part where you can say, I think because this worked, I believe, or I think that we're going to try to do this next experiment. What do you think about that client? And they would probably say, yes, if you're getting the results because you're getting results and you're handing them that proof so you can have that conversation around it. But then the next conversation about leads, if you're kind of in that camp would be, well, how are the leads?

What is the quality of these leads? Sure, we can look at the conversion rate, and I can get you 200 Facebook leads on a lead form. But if they're all garbage, then it doesn't matter to that client. So you need to have this conversation with your clients about the proof and the results that you're bringing to them. But you have to have this back and forth of like, hey, what is working and what is not?

And I think this is where you as an agency owner, can kind of be that guy or that gal who's like, hey, we got you so many leads, pay up. Or hey, we got you this many leads. But remember, it's not about the quantity of leads. It's about quality. It's about sales.

And so that's ultimately what we're trying to get. If you want to ruin your agency right away, you can just be that person and just say that you all of this stuff, you throw it at them. I don't know. I am. Call me crazy, but I like having a relationship with our clients and having clear communication and actually enjoying them and enjoying their product and enjoying the process that we're using to get more customers.

Yeah, call me crazy, but I think like good communication and honesty and understanding that you are a steward of their ad spend, actually helps when it comes to being an agency, and providing that clear communication ultimately build this major thing called trust. If somebody doesn't trust you, they're not going to give you money. And so if you're hiding behind these vanity metrics, if you're hiding behind these BS leads, they're not going to want to spend more money with you. They're going to go find somebody else who can get them leads or get them customers or get them buyers and prove it. And that is coming.

If you can't prove it, there are going to be other marketers who can. That's the thing that you have to be very well aware of, are very well aware of. If you're this agency is just thinking, we're just going to do this one thing and we're not going to really deliver results. We're just going to make your videos and we're going to post your stuff everywhere. That's great.

That's great for you. That might work for the next three to six months. But when we're entering into this a bearish economy, people are going to start pinching their pennies. And if they can't see the results from that, then that's on you. I don't know, I kind of feel a little bit heated up with that.

I don't mind that. Okay, let's do this. One last question and then I'll put this at the end where I'll bring it into this. So this is a very good question and I don't know if I'm going to give you a very good answer. So the question for those who are listening on the podcast, this is a question from someone on Facebook.

What is an example of performance-based marketing? How do you determine if it should be performance or a retainer?

If you're at an early stage, I think this really comes down to cash flow. If you need cash as an agency, as a business, which every business does, then a retainer is a very safe way to go. If you're running ads for people and you say, hey, my retainer is $600, there's $2,000, there's $5,000, there's $10,000 depending on your output, then the retainer route is really a good way to identify and get your cash flow coming in. So I would always recommend if money is important, which it should be to you as your own business owner, then I would recommend going out the retainer route because the retainer route at least you're going to know your MRR. You're going to have this availability of like, okay, I know I've got this client for six months or whatever a year and I know they're going to be paying this much. 

Once you have that comfort, though, you can start taking on this risk. So an example of performance-based marketing would be something where we've got a couple of performance-based marketing clients where we're not paid at all unless they close the deal. So that would be the best way of performance-based marketing. So let me give you an example of that. We've got a client who has a call booking funnel.

This client has a high ticket offer where he is bringing them through a process that really helps. And I won't say what the offer is. So what we do is we had a negotiation of, hey, we're not going to charge you at all to run your ads. This person is running their own ad spend though. And as we get results for this client, they pay us a percentage of the final gross revenue, right?

So if they have, let's just say a $5,000 offer. So if they have a $5,000 offer, you could have a conversation around whether is it 5%, is it 10%, is it 20%? Whatever that would be. So that is sort of a performance-based marketing as far as a call booking funnel would be concerned. But again, here is the important part.

Good luck having a performance-based payout if you can't prove what you were doing. So I'll repeat all of this one more time. I think it's best if you're starting out as an agency to go ahead I think it's best if you're starting out as an agency to go ahead and use a retainer route because I think that's the safest way to cash flow and I think it's the safest for MRI. Once you have that, if you have this comfort level that then you can take on a little more risk, then the performance-based marketing makes a little bit more sense. But again, you have to be able to prove that those leads came from you. 

You have to be able to pass that information into their CRM. So when this person, this client of ours, closes a deal, we look at the UTMs on which they came through. And the UTM, if it says TikTok or if it's Facebook or whatever, right? And if it says ads in there in the medium, we know that we brought that person to the client and then we can charge according to that another way I'll finish with this one other way that you could do this and this is a little bit harder and this is a little bit trickier, but you can have a percentage of new revenue growth. So if you're working with somebody and they're just really stuck and what you can do is come in and provide growth for them, perhaps you can take a piece of that growth because it is you ultimately who are bringing the growth to them because you can prove it in their analytics and you can prove everything else that because the growth is coming from you. 

Perhaps the arrangement there is if I bring you new leads, sorry, if I bring you new buyers or just ultimately grow your revenue, then we would share that. And I love that because what that is, is a shared incentive. It gives us a harder reason to work and it gives them this kind of reassurance that, hey, we're in this together. We're not over here as an agency trying to gouge you or anything like that, hey, we're not going to make a penny off of you unless we move the needle for you. So great question there, phenomenal.

I don't think that there's an easy answer to that question and I think that's always a situational thing. But again, it does come down to risk tolerance on your behalf. If you want to be able to take that risk early, good for you. That might be a major win. But if you're dipping your toe into this, think that that would be necessarily the best way to go if you're starting off.

So thank you for the question. That was a phenomenal question. And thank you to everybody else who's been dropping questions as well. So let's wrap this up. Thank you to those who've been watching Live Today. 

Truly appreciate it. I really love the engagement. It makes this so much more fun. Thank you to those, though, who are watching this after the fact that's most people. Thank you to those people who are listening to the podcast.

If you haven't listened, it's on Spotify. Don't have it anywhere else at the moment, but go ahead and give it a listen or share it with somebody. Share it with an agency owner that you need to know who is starting out. Hopefully, this gives them a lot of advice on where to go. If you're looking to scale up your own agency, if you are looking to grow your own funnel with Proof and Predictability, you should definitely check out our offer called Mastering Funnels, which is an online course in the community to help you scale with, again, proof and predictability. 

And then, yeah, if you want to learn more, visit hacktix.com. Otherwise, guys, I just thank you for tuning in today. Thank you for listening. I do truly appreciate it. If you have a question about this, go ahead and throw it anywhere that you're seeing this, if you've seen it on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whoever, throw a question in the comments, and then we can address it in the next life.

There were a couple of questions, really good questions the past few weeks that we actually dedicated entire podcasts to where we walked people through like the exact how to always be happy to just get feedback from you and happy to, I don't know, bring you value. So your comments bring value to us and to myself, and I am very thankful for that. So with that said, have a terrific rest of the week. Be kind to one another, be good to one another, and yeah, we'll see you next week. Alright, adios, guys.

Bye."