SPEAKER_00
What's up? I'm Cody Schneider. That's an industrial fan in the background. Welcome to the in the pig podcast today.
We're talking with my friend Tim. Tim is going to talk to us about out of home marketing, which basically think billboards. And he's going to talk to me about how he's gaming YouTube shorts, the growth podcast and how he's building a media company, just a one man media company in the out of home marketing space entirely off this podcast.
This episode is brought to you by swell AI. Swell AI is a content repurposing tool that helps marketing teams make content for all the channels that they're trying to do distribution through go to swell AI.com to get started for free.
All right, let's get started with today's show. Yeah, it's fun, right? Cheers. I'm stoked to have you here.
SPEAKER_01
Okay, I'm stoked to be here.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. Okay, so we, right before I hit record, you were telling me you're like, out of the podcasting entirely. And then you were just like figured out kind of these workflows to do it and this, you know, kind of automated the content production process.
What did that look like talking through that?
SPEAKER_01
Totally. Because when I started this podcast, we actually just hit four years and anytime I use we it's the figurative we and that it's just me. I'm just one person.
So just a man. I'm just a man. And with a podcast about billboards nonetheless.
So it's not like there was ever this Joe Rogan ask available mass audience. I knew that it was always going to be a small audience. But what I didn't know was one just how hard it is to do a podcast, right, like doing a podcast and learning how to do a podcast.
That's its own skill set in itself. And then on top of that, if you want to grow said podcast, you also have to learn how to become like a growth marketer and be able to put all of that together to unlock the value from the podcast from your guests from.
SPEAKER_00
All the conversations that are going on. So yeah, it was probably this classic content marketing, like, challenges like people like, Oh, I just made content. And it's just my content like that's like, that's, you know, 50% of this right.
50% of the times I, I don't know, I always like, I always advocate for this, but like, it's better to make like, you know, hacky shitty content and have good distribution than to have really good polished content. And like have no distribution because like it's going to make zero impacts and like you see this all the time right it's just like some kid that is like recording on his iPhone and it's a tick tock right and it gets it does more business impact than you know anybody that's does production or like gets in a studio etc. So anyway, for me to exist.
I mean we've talked on Twitter and stuff but we haven't talked in IRL yet so tell me tell me a little bit about like what you do so you're in the you're in.
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you do billboards you're in the space. It's called it out of out of home marketing or it's a terrible category right it's it's OOH if you ever see that acronym flying around that's what it is. OOH stands for out of home.
Anytime you see OOH in your head just say out of home no one says OOH. So there's like the friendly community pro tip now everyone's a pro. You just say out of home anytime you see the acronym, but it is it's anything.
It's a billboard it's a rap bus it's a bus shelter it's a sign above a urinal it's anything you come into contact with in the physical world.
SPEAKER_00
Amazing amazing. Okay, so that makes total sense. The thing that I'm curious about is like is it mainly just billboards or like what is that what does that look like it what's kind of the landscape of this and I know we have a ton of questions from Twitter I'll probably get into that.
So I want to get it kind of my roadmap on this is like I want to learn a little bit about billboards. I know shit right like my background is digital. That's all I really have a deep understanding of the physical stuff is the only thing I really done is like direct mail.
But I want to learn about like what you know your world is and then from there I want to hear about how you are basically like growth hacking YouTube shorts because that will just get into the meat of that content. And then from after that we have all these questions that people have about this world in the space and I think I think going in that direction might be super interesting. That's not good.
That sounds awesome. Awesome. Hell yeah.
Okay so so it's billboards. Is there any other kind of like big like you know what are the other the physical spaces that people are buying through like doing these
SPEAKER_01
advice through billboards is going to be the most largely recognizable no pun and all pun intended take that however you want. That's most of the money that's spent on out of home is on traditional large format roadside billboards. And it's actually it's interesting because out of home has a long tail more similar to Facebook in that 80% of the revenue comes from outside of the top 100 advertisers it's small local businesses that make up the lion's share of out of home spending that's Joe's pizza that's the nail salon downtown.
It's onesie twosie billboards for small local businesses make up the backbone of out of home inventory wise it's mostly billboards but then when you get into the big cities and metropolitan areas it's it becomes a really an exercise in understanding people understanding attention understanding movement how do people move through physical spaces and then how can I dominate their attention when they're there so if that's inside of a subway could be subway and then the real world is now more deterministic than the internet because with privacy laws with iOS 14.5 when when those things went into place out of home had been using data sets from commercial real estate and retail intelligence. What's interesting is the data collected for those use cases isn't impacted by privacy laws for data collecting information about ad targeting online.
So now you can sit down with an advertiser and say very confidently. Oh you're chewing you want to target pet smart customers in the Chicago DMA. Here's exactly what roads they take to get to and from PetSmart.
Here's where they spend time during their day. Here's where the other places that they're going. So now you can create a campaign that's really targeted.
Combine billboards combine some place based media kiosks at the mall etc. Direct mail in certain zip codes. Now you've got a full funnel approach that makes a lot of sense and you are super efficient doing it.
SPEAKER_00
I never thought about it like that like full stuff also it makes total sense. I mean everybody's talking about this right now but like third party cookies and like I think everybody's trying to figure out like how the hell do I track. Anything I'm doing right like coming you know it'll all kind of change in 2024 but it's super interesting to me that it's like this thing that's been here for forever.
It's going to stay there for forever and it's actually going to be maybe even more accurate like the ROI is less measurable but the accuracy of like knowing that media buys happening or like that data is more more accurate which is crazy. So I had a quick question actually like I'm seeing people or like brands do this more and more now where they almost say like. Like they're thinking about the digital media attention that they can get from this billboard.
So they're trying to say something like ridiculous so that like basically some people take it and they post the social right. And so then they get all that impression reach. I feel like the Super Bowl has turned into that as well where it's like what's the most ridiculous thing we can say.
But you know the smaller scale this is this billboard. I know you know an example off the top of my head that I can think about is like some of these work from home companies and they put the billboards up when you're when you're for Apple employees when they were like driving to Apple and it's like like tired of the commute like work you know work from home or you know they had something basically that was like specifically targeting them. Are you seeing campaigns like that happen more often.
Like could you talk to me about that.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah it's funny actually how that kind of work from home worked with a brand called Robin. Good. Okay. I'll just reset there. It's funny but the work from home theme I worked with a company called Robin and they have an app that helps employees know hey which teams are coming into the office today who's got which conference room booked out.
They did a billboard campaign in Boston and we picked high traffic like really dense sitting traffic bumper to bumper roads that poured in from the burbs into downtown. And what was funny was on one of the morning news updates the helicopter was hovering next to the billboard and that was the backdrop for the person reading the traffic report. Was the billboard campaign targeting work from home input.
So like there's the earned media factor where the campaign is the content and whether that's virtual or whether that's you know doing a billboard where there's lots of people sitting in traffic it's becoming more of a tactic and how do I how do I take this content from my real world campaign and parlay that into my best performing content in my other proven tactics. That's super resting.
SPEAKER_00
It's almost like real a marketing is like flowing over into it like what you traditionally would do where it's like they you know I'm just thinking about like a D this and they're projecting up like their logo on something you right yeah that that was like this whole way to kind of get this attention but now in this age of social media and like how quickly we can basically create this this media content and it's so abundant it's like how do I do this thing that like people will share. I feel like that is going to become more and more of like a creative role is like what is this thing that gets that that share to happen that earned media to happen so anyways super interesting I just I remember reading about that and so wanted to get kind of your take on it but. Okay, change change of pace talk to me about YouTube I know you've been just like gaming YouTube shorts and I want to hear what's not working so yeah, I hate the people man lay it out.
SPEAKER_01
Alright, I'm gonna I'm gonna. So, and this is to kind of tie off on the question that you'd asked where in the open about potentially walking away from podcasting. There's not a huge huge audience that's like salivating over out of home billboard related content though I think it's very interesting and the conversations are similar to this.
It was mid summer and Cody Schneider hits my feed on Twitter and I'm like who is this guy talking all these things. And as I started to follow along with your journey I think that you just launched draft horse and swell was on the way and you really really early on and. I like to consider myself someone who's beta tolerant so as soon as it was available, I jumped into swell because one of the big challenges that I've had in growing a podcast is back to this there's two two early things you got to learn how to do a podcast and then you got to learn how to grow it.
Well, doing all of like the written stuff is actually it's a total conflict of being a podcaster, right we communicate one of two ways we either were writers or we're speakers like this. These are just two accepted facts so that's that was really hard for me to sit down be like okay I'm going to write show notes and.
SPEAKER_00
I mean that's where the night yeah man it's I mean so like where this all came from originally was like I was doing some consulting for an early stage startup and like the best way to build brand when you just like raised a seed round and nobody knows who you are is you make a podcast and you get in in front of your entire target audience right and that's so easy night so like we took the founders and like the founder one of the founders was a host right and so we took them from like nobody knows who they are and 12 months later like people are recognizing her at conferences. And like trying to come talk to her because like the whole industry listens to this podcast right there was like 30,000 people on their email list. I mean it's just this incredibly impactful way to like get brand from zero to one right.
But anyways yeah it's like what we saw is really the like the post production sucks all of the good like that's where all the value comes from though like terrible show notes like you just don't get downloads like it's just like a part of it from like a podcast SEO standpoint. And there's a lot of argument around that from what the data I've seen it's it's valuable right. No kidding.
That's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah it's funny a lot of people yeah we don't go deep on that but the repurposing is like that's the magic right it's like I can do a one long form piece of content and then I can shop it up for into my whole weeks worth of stuff. And it's like I mean we and we see people do this all the time where it's like okay cool like I record a fire side chat we're going to do it with this this exact thing right it's like I'm going to record a fire side chat or talk to an industry expert.
We're going to then chop it up into like five different LinkedIn posts, like, you know, make 21 different tweets, and I'll do clips across all of my social media channels will do a blog post and suddenly it's like I have all the content. And as a founder, all I had to do was sit down for 45 minutes, and maybe, you know, have an hour of mental energy to create that out like the output the actual content repurposing now using these AI tools like swell so anyways just brain jumping this thing but it's crazy to me that like this is now possible like I used to have to have like 10 people on a content team. When I was you know, like 100% way we could do this and it would take hours like hours.
Yeah. And now it's like, you know, I have a scheduling app and I met AI is doing all the repurposing. I touched up with some human elements maybe.
And like that's that's it. That's my whole process and the rest of it is like spent on other things right.
SPEAKER_01
So, I think that's where people people lose it is is there they're focused on I've got to make this perfect output and this perfect process. And you're viewing it through the lens as as yourself. Once you can detach from that reality and understand that wait, the bar should be for yourself is this content that I would listen to.
Would I watch this podcast listen to this conversation, set that bar for yourself and then for the content detach yourself from reality. And and and that was the big unlock was understanding that wait, this is a distribution game. I've got at that point almost four years now four years of content about a topic that no one else has gone this deep on.
Like kid that it's the Stanford MBA of out of home. A Stanford MBA takes 85 hours. There's like 200 plus hours of content about out of home advertising from not not Tim row.
It's not me blabbering. It's people that are way smarter than me. They've been doing it for way longer time.
So for my own growth curve, like the learning curve within the industry was so accelerated. I don't even know how to like compute that. The story that you shared about the founder and being kind of recognized that industry events and things like that.
I'm relative to my industry legacy folks 20 30 40 year careers with the same companies getting the gold Rolex, getting recognized as the big industry trade shows. I've been in here for four years and that whole time I've been doing a podcast out of home because like you I was a digital marketer and then I saw the impact of out of home show up in Google analytics. I'm like more people need to know about this stuff.
So specifically my workflow. This is this is what I do. I record an episode.
I have a little bit of a different workflow today than I had, you know, a few years ago and just recording an episode. But generally I do like a meet and greet before the episode and we come come up with a vibe check a vibe check. Yes, this is going to be good because sometimes it's not.
And you know, like there's there is some there's value to. Going through the struggle right there's value to going through those really really hard ones. But once you get to the point where you can say no to people, learn how to say no to people because that's maybe been one of the best things for this kind of next chapter growth for me is turning people away because you do get to a level where you have critical mass.
And now other people want to be in your shit. They just want to be near you and you have to become very protective of that. You still have to be a platform that enables growth community and do all of those things but just the same now you have an obligation to the community to protect from outsiders.
That might be trying to get in for whatever their self serving purposes are so it becomes this this balancing act but in terms of creating the finished product. Record an episode it's generally about 35 minutes we do that inside a riverside. I export the episode from Riverside and then I do two things I upload it to YouTube just to get that like I use YouTube as it is free storage really.
Yeah, for part of my workflows. I'm not a man of independent wealth or you know, means anything like that so I'm trying to find any arbitrage that I can. YouTube is my is my storage center so I download it from Riverside I upload it right away to YouTube from YouTube.
I copy paste that link into swell and I copy paste that link into opus and then I wait for swell to render. So I've timed this before actually if you go to the OH insider.com forward slash workflow I you can go there and steal this whole workflow completely for free all the resources are there.
Copy paste the link from YouTube to swell to opus. Once swell does its job and and and all of that great content is there I go in and I grab those keywords. And it wasn't doing this initially but I was like how can I get better clips out of opus.
So then I went in and grabbed the keywords out of swell. I copy paste the keywords from swell into opus. So now opus knows what to look for inside of that 35 minute episode or so from that there will be about 15 to 20 clips.
I just go through I think you use the word sound check just go through sound check them. Make sure that they sound opus is good too because it gives you like a score. So if it's below a certain score I'm like I'm not going to 62 I'm like that is still failing even if that was my average through high school.
So I'm looking for the best clips I generally get like 10 to 15. All the hard work is done for me right the show notes key time stamps moments quotes all that stuff swell is done. Now I've got 15 clips to kind of edit.
I don't do a lot of post production for my podcast itself. I add an intro. I line up the music bed.
Done. That's it.
SPEAKER_00
That's the finished product episode right like I have a hook at the beginning and then it's like who we're talking to today brought to you by and then I just you know jump right into it. I die for me it's like the big we just saw consumption like piece where it's like I want I want them in the content and under 60 seconds right. Yes, like everything like I have them hooked in the first 15 seconds.
I have 15 seconds of like who we're going to be hearing from like 15 seconds CTA and that that like CTA and then at that point it's like right into the content because like we've just we've just found like you have that is the window basically to get somebody like hooked into the podcast and then of course you got to get you know bring bangers like throughout the whole thing. But anyways just so you have these clips now and you take them and talk to me so I mean you just I think you. You know I was like DM me it was like two weeks ago and you're like yo I'm getting just ridiculous views on YouTube shorts right now talk to me about that and like what you've done there because that's just like I think everybody's trying to figure this out right now so everybody's trying to figure it out I was trying to figure it out to.
SPEAKER_01
And that's getting back all of the time getting back all of the time from not having to do all the mundane tasks we just talked about it's given me new capacity to. Realign and shift focus so I sit in my living room my desk is in my living room and the living room TV is right next to me I have a 10 year old son who watches a lot of YouTube shorts on the living room TV. So I'm sitting here and I'm watching him and I'm watching him watch the YouTube shorts and I'm watching the ones that he skips through.
And then I'm watching the ones that he watches and then he'll watch a loop who watch them on the three four times over and over again. And there's there's commonalities between all of them sometimes it's clearly AI generated content it's just AI reading a description about what's happening in a scene. So I started asking him I'm like what why do you keep watching these clips are like what is it that's interesting about these clips so I'm using my 10 year old for market research on YouTube shorts.
And what I noticed was that there was a common structure to them.
SPEAKER_00
I'm trying to give you one of those but we're not having luck.
SPEAKER_01
You could bar you know I might just rent mine out just son as a service there's the new SAS. You can you could ask him questions about YouTube him and his friends market research. But the thing that I started to realize was it's all it's the jump cuts it's the zoom in zoom out it's the funny gifts.
So I thought OK if I can make this workflow work for me. I am going to reinvest my time into the clips. So now my entire focus of the podcast production is getting to the clips.
And I spend about five minutes finishing each clip inside inside a V. I. O. And I don't go crazy. I use the same music.
If you you can check out my content on any socials. It's the same music in every single video right because you watch TicToc and it's like why is this same stupid song trending on every video. I don't know like you don't give a shit as a consumer.
Why do I give a shit as a producer. My goal is consumption right. My goal is distribution for the sake of consumption.
So I stopped overthinking those things. Same music bed in every single one same bumper outro in every single one. Interesting thing about adding the bumper outro.
I'm not saying it's only because of this since I started adding it direct traffic up 150 percent.
SPEAKER_00
And say just adding that outro like like what is it just like a go here.
SPEAKER_01
It's it's it's like a three second animated typewriter effect that goes the OOH insider dot com. At the end with a black background. So you watch to the end.
You get my URL just just absolutely water torture drip drip drip right into your face.
SPEAKER_00
And they because the goal is to make the link they're actually going and like googling the brand name. Correct.
SPEAKER_01
I'm training them. I'm training them to remember the URL the way that I need them to remember it. Holy shit.
Cody like I like I'm not trying to like pump you up like yourself. You want I can I can go back to go back to in growth we trust episode one that whatever week that was that culmination of what was happening in the universe for me. I was about to get out of podcasting.
Right. I've seen you could follow my Twitter and see some of the clips and tweets that I share about the YouTube growth. It's been explosive like every single day I think for the last week and a half I've been averaging 25,000 plus views a day.
And it's not just solely on my B2B content but it's it's on things that I'm recognizing don't have a means of distribution otherwise. There's a lot of CGI generated kind of virtual out of home you know a dragon or a jersey hanging over the London Bridge and things like this. I realize these clips are getting shared kind of like around the out of home industry circles and I'm sure for the brands there.
They're resonating with their base but where else are these things being distributed so I'm just adding those to my distribution flow as well. And guess what I've added 90 new subscribers in the last three weeks. Are they going to come back to you.
SPEAKER_00
I'm just looking at it right now like oh yeah yeah yeah it's like a beat I mean you're you're in a B2B. Billboards billboard space and some of the videos are 132,000 views 25,000 views 17,000 views I mean that's crazy right and like if you close one of these deals from an inbound for this I mean the customer lifetime value is probably stupid like it so it's I think that's the thing that people don't realize. Yeah it's like yeah I got a thousand views right but like if the ad buy is 1.
5 million you're going to take a 10% rate it's like cool like one of those pays for your whole that you know the whole thing existing. So it's like I make 10 of those happen in a year and it's funny I've been talking to people about this more and more of like if I if I was 22 right now and I had no idea like what to do with my life and I was like how do I make money on the Internet. The first thing I would do is I would go start an agency that's powered by I would do like filmmaking or something right where it's like and then I would cold email and cold DM every podcast in the US that's published something in the last you know 30 days right there's like 300,000 of them.
And I get to 10k like MRR and then what I would do is then I would go make a podcast about something like the content marketing podcast or whatever right and I would go and I blow that up and then I build these media brands because like I'm thinking about your industry is so I was just talking to a friend. She's in the supply chain management space and she built a network basically so she started her own thing and then she built a network and she's now selling ads on this like network that she basically is administering to the entire supply chain software industry. And I'm like, how are you doing with this and she's like Cody the money is stupid and like you know last time I saw her was not like a conference right and she's just like I'm talking just laced up with like goals like just like jewelry like I'm like something has changed right and what I'm realizing is like these.
Are there competitors in the space and she's like it's just me they like they have one option to buy audio ads on right the software companies but I have the whole industry listening to this so like where of course they're going to come here. And so what I'm trying to say is like, you can build these multi million dollar media companies right now, like as just a solo creator. And Nish has money and doesn't like isn't super competitive like even if it's just like I mean, on this thing we're just talking about like marketing stuff right, but there's totally 100% an opportunity where it's like, I'm focusing on founders and I'm focusing on marketing people.
They typically have budgets. So you want to like, it gets to a place where I can sell ad spend on this and it basically subsidize itself I hire a producer it does the whole thing right. Imagine you're thinking about the same thing but anyways just brain dumping these things that I'm seeing right now where it's like yes, you couldn't do this two years ago in the same way there's 0% chance and like now is the opportunity for it if you're if you're building these agencies and then building these media companies on top of it as well so.
SPEAKER_01
And those rules like like you said two years ago, right, I have a four year old podcast four years ago, I was selling billboards in eastern Pennsylvania. I thought my audience was the 11 other people sitting in the sales room on Monday morning. Honest to God's truth that's that's who I thought I was helping.
I thought what better way to synthesize myself than to record conversations with other people smarter than me and share them with my colleagues. The podcast is now listened to in over 100 countries. It consistently cracks this to me makes no sense consistently cracks the top 100 US business news on Apple podcast.
It's about billboards. Right consistently. The number of advising opportunities that have popped up.
I'm moderating a panel at advertising week. All because of this podcast four years ago selling billboards in eastern Pennsylvania. It is completely changed my life.
I think David Senra from the founders podcast refers to podcasting as the modern printing press and those rules are being written right now. I didn't know four years ago there was no there was no one talking about hey grow a podcast because it could change your life or change your business. Today, everyone's like yes start a podcast.
Right. But the the barrier to entry has never been lower. The bar, I think from a from a expectation standpoint from your audience has never been higher.
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it's not necessarily mean quality or go buy the most expensive my car content and people get good content drives me insane man. Yes, like you can have shit audio. But if I drop how to basically game YouTube shorts and show you Oh, I did a little paid ad spend that goes to my channel and suddenly all my shorts are going viral.
Right. And we're going to talk about at some point. But like that that is what people like it doesn't matter if it sounds like it was recorded on a potato.
If the content is good, people will be there.
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely. And that I can't say that this is the reason why but I can say very confidently since adding a small amount of paid budget behind YouTube. It is accelerated everything that I do.
And what I mean by small I mean $2 and 50 cents a day a day. I'm a solo creator. I don't have a budget.
Right. So and this I Cody also stole this from you you had tweeted something about a targeting strategy on YouTube. And I was like, Oh, you know what, I'm going to take my best performing organic shorts.
I'm going to retarget everyone who's watched any of my YouTube content in the last year. I'm going to retarget anyone who's been to my website. And I'm going to retarget anyone who's on my email list.
And there's a lot of there's a lot of cold emails in that email list. That was something else that I picked up through this through this last you know three four months is that way I can grow these things in lots of little ways. And those lots of little ways create that compound stacking right.
And then when you do when you step back 3045 days later I've been doing a podcast again for almost four years. It's only been the last 45 to 60 days that I've seen the growth and it's because of the intentional focus the things that we're talking about right now. And that workflow that enabled workflow.
I'm so stuck. I'm so like it is here. Here's some relative context and I'll break down the economics on this because I think about these things too.
I was at a startup and they helped me out. They subsidized support for the podcast and we had a social media agency and a production team. And the startup was spending $5500 a month so that I could have my time back to talk to customers and make the company money.
But $5500 a month was the nut to produce the podcast that was the clips the copywriting the distribution all the stuff. What I do today. All in the meet and greet the recording the podcast post production distribution email all my socials.
It's five hours per episode. So here's how it breaks down. It takes me five hours to create a 35 minute piece of finished content for every seven minutes of content that I create.
It generates a day and a half worth of consumption. Every seven minutes of new content I create generates 36 hours of consumption. The way I think about creating and distributing content has completely changed.
I only think about distribution and consumption. So when I finish a clip and I upload it to YouTube, I never touch it again. I write all my YouTube descriptions to look and feel like social posts.
And then I use another AI tool to distribute on custom schedules to all of my social channels. That's it. That's the that's the magic.
And I like talking about billboards.
SPEAKER_00
It's amazing. Okay, so two things I want to I want to come back to the billboard thing but first. So these ads you're running, you're there locally on YouTube.
So you're remarketing two people on YouTube. So I want to break this down a little bit because I'm starting to do testing on this. I'm going to I'm going to start talking about public.
Basically, I'm just going to I'm going to blow up a YouTube channel in public and just like record. Yes, but the strategy is basically what we've seen and I'm seeing this more and more with anything that is for you page content. So content that's being just kind of distributed when you don't know the origin or the source like you're not connected through a social graph.
But what happens is that you basically when you do paid you're introducing somebody to a profile. Okay. And depending on the algorithm, it's going to distribute content to you if you engaged with that profile. So again, I'm going to talk first, let's talk YouTube and then I'm going to talk what I've just seen on Instagram and this is going to apply in some way to every every algorithm.
But so on the YouTube side, when you when you're doing this remarketing ad like you're talking about when they touch your profile and you consume any of that video, basically YouTube is saying, hey, this person likes this type of content. The next time they come into the app, look at what gets shown for you on your for you page, right? It's going to be stuff that's relate like it's going to be videos that are from that channel that you just engaged with. So when you're paying that 250, what you're really doing is you're getting top of funnel introduction to the channel.
And then they're basically going to like read they're going to they're going to bubble up more of that content to people the next time they come back. All right, so that same idea let's apply to Instagram. And this is the what the data I'm seeing.
The music space. And so my friends a country music artist and we grew up together and stuff. So I'm sorry short, but we basically we grow his Instagram.
Like that's like one of our strategies. So we do engagement ads with the call to action to go and follow his account. So it's like literally an at symbol, right? And then a certain percentage of people click that they go to the Instagram and they follow.
Okay. So at one point we were getting like 30 cent I don't know what the data is right now, but at one point we were getting like 30 cents followers on Instagram. So it's like cool, like I take a grand and that turns into 3000 followers, right? So the byproduct of this is we started to see the graph go like logarithmic right so it started like it went exponential.
And I was like, how is this doesn't make any sense. But the epiphany that hit me when we started talking about this YouTube thing is that basically the people are getting introduced to his profile. And suddenly now reels and the explore page.
It's taking his stuff that he's posting organically and it's starting to push it to them. The next time that they come back to the platform because they're trying to get more engagement right. And so they're just constantly testing that.
So again, top of funnel, touch a profile and then you get into this flywheel of that of that channel or sorry of that of that user profile. Basically like distributing it through the algorithm. And I'm starting to see this across every every social like I think Twitter is the same thing that's happening.
So it's like they come they touch your profile and then they start like and people have told me this it's like I engage with one of your tweets and then every time I log into Twitter now like it's on my for you page. It's a Cody Schneider tweet right. I'm like, okay, well that only makes sense if they're tough like they're touching my profile and then it basically is great.
And then they're like, well, I'm just gonna go back to the flywheel. So anyways, just brain dumping these things that we're seeing and how I'm thinking about growing these social accounts right now.
SPEAKER_01
It's super interesting because we mentioned you a lot a little bit earlier but running a Twitter strategy right now that's just dumping dumping dumping cheap traffic onto the website. And my goal is to create those viral loops of I just you liked this here's more would you like more would you like more of the thing that you already ate right here's more ripping ripping ripping free basically free traffic I think the CPM broke out to like.0001 it's it's almost practically free the clicks are one tenth of one penny right now one tenth of one like there's nothing that today is literally yone talking about this he's getting one cent sign ups for his new app it's called the end.
SPEAKER_00
It's literally like I'm a dude I so he he's doing these ads that are like global and foreign pressions, but he's getting like one point zero zero one cent clicks. Yes, and he. So it's getting getting a 10% conversion sign up.
And he's basically not letting the ad leave the learning phase. So on Twitter right now there's this glitch where basically it's like, if you have that you run the ad there's like this four to five day learning phase where it gives you all this free impressions that try to learn the person that's most likely to click. So in or like most likely like the right right audience right so he's layering these ads so that it's like four to five days and then it stops and then four to five days and it stops and it four to five days and so.
He just told me he's like now he's layering multiples of the simultaneously so imagine I'm spending 10 or I spent up 10 different campaigns. They run for four to five days and then I stopped them immediately after I spent 10 to 10 different campaigns running for five days he's spending one again a dollar a day on this and he's getting 100 sign ups like literally the podcast talks about like the one that just went live today talks about this. I'm over here and I'm like this is ridiculous right.
Imagine that same thing I'm talking about by growing a profile growing a channel etc so.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah and I don't it's it's interesting to see it come out in the wash right because I don't care right I've spent $4 and 50 cents and I've got like 3500 clicks or something insane it doesn't even make sense. It's all going into my retargeting funnel right so if they are real and they want to engage then then you know YouTube's going to figure all that out for me I don't have to worry about it the traffic so damn cheap I don't care. Totally keep going going going.
Well what's interesting is all of mine is pointing back to the podcast website I can see. So I don't I just the over complication of these things I was talking with a friend at a conference last week and he is an executive at one company advises a few others is like what are you up to these days. I told him I said you know what I realized is that it's me doing this for other people that that this is where I can add a lot of value for the folks in our space.
He goes wait you don't have a team doing that for you. I said you think I've got a budget for a team man I'm eating ramen like what are you like.
SPEAKER_00
How do you know it was interesting. Talk to me about this. Yeah so I mean I imagine that's on roadmap now it sounds like the last three to four months have just been stupid like on growth side so.
SPEAKER_01
Totally growth focused last four months in the monetization has been interesting right so when you have a product behind it if you work at a company if you are a founder if you if you have a direct product behind it in the B2B space I think it's you know it's an easy understanding. The traditional creator playbook for niche B2B podcasting doesn't necessarily apply I'm just gonna run an affiliate deal or I'm gonna. Yeah. So figuring out those economics is certainly challenging. I'll give you I'll give you kind of the direct application when I was at high growth startup.
24 months we went zero to $10 million and 60 cents on the dollar went to somebody within the podcast ecosystem. A partner agency media publisher. So it was very you could see it you could see very directly like oh here's the money flow from this podcast.
Now in this chapter for myself I'm understanding that there's there's different strategies right so one of the things that I'm working on right now through partnerships is is through a fintech partnership so if you run a bunch of ads online and you need like I need a bunch of virtual cards to sign each of my accounts I need $100,000 spending limits or I'm a media publisher I've got aged receivables that are 180 days. Working with some fintech partners to help you know alleviate pains in those areas so.
SPEAKER_00
They got cash to which is awesome like.
SPEAKER_01
Right. So partnerships has been one of the ways who are the people that I'm already making an introductions for. And can they give me money.
Because for a long time I was making a lot of free introductions. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
So understanding that point with all this right like they're happy to have you know I was talking about like oh build an agency and then do this thing because it's yeah you still need cash and like you still like. Have to have you know rent I was like rent paid food like food. You can do that like it cool like you're you're basically you're ramen profitable.
Ramen profit. Yeah. Don't do this thing right there like unless you're you already have that locked in because if you just are it doesn't make sense otherwise. What you just said perfectly segues ways into these questions that people have about your.
Oh yeah yeah yeah questions let's do the questions talk to me talk to me about ads. Quick. What's your what's your take on it.
SPEAKER_01
I like ad quick. I like the team at ad quick the startup that I mentioned there there was some competitive juices between ourselves and ad quick but I think that ad quick is a great platform for folks who've bought a lot of traditional media. Maybe they're buying a lot of TV a lot of radio they're buying broadcast media and they need to be more targeted.
Need to have some level of feedback and measurement. I think that their business model is restrictive for performance marketers where where cost controls are lever for cack right so where you need to be scrappy and smart and have control over those things. I think that their economics are limiting.
But overall I think for the use case of a broadcast media buyer that needs to be more targeted with a better feedback loop. I like ad quick.
SPEAKER_00
Cool. Cool. No. Great take. I was curious like somebody that's in the industry if you add like you know do you think it's legit or like and again I know nothing about this so I'm trying to get I'm trying to get educated like everybody else.
All right next one is why why do lawyers and like have billboards all over towns. Like why is that just like something that they buy.
SPEAKER_01
Why does Capital One send you so much mail.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah it fucking works. It works. That's so crazy.
So people are actually calling lawyers off these billboards. Hundred percent traffic.
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah and it's not that it's not that there's you know a plethora of people sitting in traffic every day they're like oh I'm going to call what eight hundred got hurt. But it's I saw it every day for the last five years and then I got hurt.
SPEAKER_01
And when you're in those moments right you're thinking about that like who do I trust the most. It's someone that I've seen a thousand times right it's not probably going to be the person that I Google right away. I'm you know I need to get familiarized.
So there's there's a lot of like very you know biological if you will.
SPEAKER_00
Something that is equal to like especially with that like doctors like anything that's like very traditional white collar I would probably say it's like oh like you know John. You know John has bought this billboard for five years. I don't know who John is but if you can buy that billboard that physical thing that I perceive as being very expensive.
SPEAKER_01
I think that perceived difficulty by like the people who are mostly going to be your customers. Hey they did something that's hard. I could do a Facebook ad right.
Anyone think I could do a Facebook ad. But I don't know how to do a billboard. So they must be.
I don't know how to write a book. I don't know how to do a podcast. Therefore the person who did it I will assign authority to.
SPEAKER_00
OK so next question I got for you is when do you like when do you even think like start to consider traditional advertising. Like when is it worth it for a company to even think about it.
SPEAKER_01
I think if you're spending if you're spending $100,000 a month on advertising. Not just all like marketing and you know the expenses but if you're spending a if you have a hundred thousand dollars a month on advertising. You know the expensive but if you're spending a if you have a hundred thousand dollar ad budget.
It's probably time to start thinking about channel diversification if nothing else. And out of home could be one of those options. It doesn't always have to be expensive.
So that's the things you can do that are scrappy and low cost and gorilla. And I think that yeah if you're spending a hundred thousand dollars a month start thinking about spending offline. But out of home is good at any budget because you can do scrappy things.
SPEAKER_00
Awesome awesome. And then two more and then we'll I want to hear this monetization thing you're talking about so. ROI everybody always ask that with anything physical.
How are you thinking about it. How do you qualify it and then I think for a lot of people they're like does this even actually work. Like if I you know Monday dot com has a ton of billboards up in my neighborhood right now.
Like is that working for Monday. Like what is the what is the value of that. How are they actually measuring that.
SPEAKER_01
So a little inside baseball on Monday with without giving you know kind of a secret sauce away for them. But they very much believe in out of home. They know it works and they have used Monday to create their own internal workflows for managing all of their out of home.
So Monday has like a whole out of home team and they're really really smart about the way that they do it. Traditionally measuring out of home has been super hard though unless you have a data science team and quants that can sit down and figure out all the mixed media modeling etc. But I think what's kind of beautiful about the last three four years privacy restrictions things getting harder to measure kind of overall is that.
If you understand directional feedback and how to identify and how to control for it. Out of home is typically it's localized it's in a couple of zip codes so if you start seeing new user traffic if you start seeing conversion rates go up more phone calls more. Foot traffic.
Hey that could be a good sign that something's changed right we're looking at these things year over year month over month. You can do really deterministic pixel measurement with exposed visitation groups. Hey who saw my billboard think of like a cone projecting out of a middle of a billboard we create a view shed.
Try to get grab as many exposed devices as possible across the vice match do all of those things so you can really have pretty deterministic measurement. But I think what's most valuable is understanding the directional feedback of which markets are working best. Where is the biggest opportunity for me to get more new customers gain market share relative to the media cost.
And then which formats are working hardest is it billboards is it buses is it maybe cinema media right which which formats right for you so you can do. Really really deterministic measurement or you can just say hey localize zip code lift conversion rate all signs are go hammer down let's do more.
SPEAKER_00
I didn't even think about the zip code thing like in relationship to the website like I'm just thinking about I did I did this in the past where we like we map the zip code attribution like it is a totally different world but it's like B2B. There was a B2B manufacturing company there and like in the windows bath so you know like that type of stuff. But what you just said was super interesting is like OK we put a billboard here and suddenly we started to see more traffic from that zip code where the billboard is.
And you could basically graph that traffic of that zip code month over month or week over week within Google Tag Manager through Google Analytics right. And that would basically show you like the actual you know here's. I think that's the thing that I always would get hung up on is like I'm trying to follow them all the way from leaving platform to conversion events.
Sure. But if third party cookies go away which is like the inevitability like we're all going to be blind again. I feel like it's going to turn into just traditional marketing again like you're working with you know fuzzy data that you're making a ton of assumptions on but that's just going to have to be good enough right.
And like I think for a lot of people especially my generation that came up in like digital first right like where it's like you know they they don't even have any knowledge of it not existing where you can't see everything.
SPEAKER_00
I. It's a good point. It's like very uncomfortable for them to think about that but like that's how this happened for the last you know whatever 100 years of this this industry existing so that's interesting.
I got a couple more minutes. Talk to me about this monetization thing the other thing you were thinking about.
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah it was it was actually a strategy brought up by a friend who is in the trucking space like truck drivers. He says are you charging people to come on your podcast. I said what charging people to come on my podcast like no way that's that's crazy.
Why would I do that. He goes because I just paid 30 grand to be on this podcast. And that's excuse me.
And he shared the rate card with everything. Hey I'll come to you and do a podcast. You come to me and do a podcast.
You know a live read.
SPEAKER_00
There is an industry that's like super expensive or just cash flush or whatever.
SPEAKER_01
It's kind of like your friend described it's a small industry where there's not a lot of platforms that does that is that is rich with cash.
SPEAKER_00
And say I'm like my CEO on this podcast where. Holy shit. We're so doing some work with a friend in the biotech space and we're starting to get this inbound where it's like.
It's ridiculous right like I'm talking huge. Yes. Multi-billion dollar fortune you know like large companies and they're like hey we want to come on the podcast because they want the industry like the. Now that the industry is listening to it.
It's a social signal of like influence when you're on this thing. And then suddenly it's like you become this connector and again I'm just thinking about like from an ad spend like you know if you want to go. Again this is why I think this media thing is so powerful like pick a niche that looks ridiculous is unsexy is uncool but it has a ton of cash.
Go and build a media thing there and like create any type of like content that it just relative like it can just be relatively interesting right. Like you're talking about billboards but it's working because there's a lot of hundred percent a segment of people that are really obsessed with billboards and all the things around billboards right and they want to hear industry insiders talk about that. If you go do that and then just sell ads to that that same audience like whether it's like go to like you said like software companies etc.
I think that there's such a huge marketing opportunity and you don't need a team you can do this now just by yourself with like again five hours of your time basically to build this whole thing out. I mean it's crazy and that's my rant.
SPEAKER_01
That's my maybe you if you work in that unsexy business and you're like I need a side hustle or maybe like you're trying to build something on the side. Maybe that's not it. Maybe it's maybe it's doing this.
I was I was a digital media guy who ended up working at a billboard company selling billboards in eastern Pennsylvania who one day decided I'm going to start a podcast. I have zero qualifications to start a podcast. None. So but I did it and now here we are four years later and it's the most listened to still fastest growing podcast and I have I have an impassable mode. I am on the inside of an impassable mode.
No one can catch up ever.
SPEAKER_00
100% 100% I think that's the perfect way to end it. Tim dude I'm so stoked we got to connect. Thank you.
valuable time today and coming on and sharing everything that you've been learning and I again I got my gears turning just thinking about all this. So I'm super awesome. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01
Same Cody. Thank you so much. It's been great to great to follow your work and finally connect.
SPEAKER_00
Stoke brother. We'll talk to you soon.
SPEAKER_01
Definitely. See you. Thank you.