Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?

[00:05.6]
Welcome back to "Is Anything Real? in Paid Advertising?" the show where agency founders unpack what's real and what's just noise. I'm your host, Adam W. Barney, and today we've got someone who's not just cutting through the noise. He's writing a new playbook. Ziv Rev is the powerhouse behind Daily Cookie, host of Beyond Six Figures, the podcast Beyond Six Figures, and the author of the Fully Booked Coach.

[00:31.3]
Ziv, Welcome In It's great to be here. Hello, Adam. How are you? I'm so thankful for the opportunity to share some ideas with your listeners and the tribe. Let's jump right in. All right, perfect.

[00:47.2]
I'll queue up first, gut check: Is anything real in paid advertising? I really lost a lot of sleep over this. Like, oh, my God, is anything real? Because I'm using advertising with my clients and spend so much time convincing them to use it.

[01:08.6]
So I, really hope it's real. But, it has changed so dramatically that it's very easy to see advertising as dead or as not working as it used to. And is it real?

[01:24.2]
You know, there are some things in advertising that are so complicated and so, inefficient, for some business owners that for them it's not real. But I can say that, you know, being a data, A data nerd and a numbers geek and like a seeker of, the truth, where I always am willing to adapt and learn and kind of readjust my views, paid advertising is real, but it's definitely not for everyone and the details matter.

[02:06.0]
And that's why we're here to talk about, like, when is it a good idea and when is it really bad. Right. And it's also probably an aspect of it is social media. It's not really dead for small businesses, but it's maybe we're just using it wrong.

[02:21.2]
Right? It's a big topic that, a lot of my, clients actually are really surprised when I share this with them. Like, I talk to them before we start to work together for like six or 12 months, and I tell them what's my priorities with advertising and with marketing.

[02:40.4]
And when they hear how low of a priority it is for me to actually spend, and invest money and energy and time decision, making time into social media, they're quite shocked that, I tell them that, social media in general is one of the worst way to generate leads for a big, big chunk of businesses.

[03:08.1]
Of course if you are a coach and your audience are your clients and your friends on Facebook and whatnot, but by all means be active on Facebook, if you want to. But in general the rules of the algorithms have changed over the last few years since something like, 2020 or so.

[03:30.4]
And these days, you need social media to prove that you're real, but you don't need it to be your main source of lead gen. And if it is your main source of lead gen, there's a really good chance that you're missing out on an opportunity, to figure out another way.

[03:49.8]
So you know, it's really different. Like if you are listening to this as an agency owner or you're listening to this as a coach, as a business coach maybe, or if you're listening to this as a business owner and in all of these three situations you might say, oh, but I really get to grow with social media.

[04:10.5]
I'm not saying it's dead like for everyone. I'm saying that there's a really good chance that your clients, the actual people that will use your services as a coach or as an agency, that they actually are not going to get their leads, easily from social media.

[04:30.8]
Yes, there are unicorns in every type of advertising. There are unicorns that will get, become very successful, but imitating them is close to impossible. It's not predictable and it will give you a trickle of hot lids, a trickle of hot leads over time if you're really good at it.

[04:51.1]
And a trickle is nice because it's better than nothing, but it's not what the workers are doing. I love that you frame it like that of it's not something, it's a trickle and it takes time to get even that trickle moving.

[05:06.9]
So you've, you know, to kind of go back though and tie this to the coaches and solopreneurs that you've worked with where you've identified social media as kind of just burning time with limited if0roi. You've built a 600k business without the hustle every day.

[05:26.9]
Content grind. What did you do differently and what do you teach now that contradicts that constant, posting pressure? Constant poaching would be great if we were having breakfast right now, but constant posting is a pressure I think that we feel as solopreneurs and founders and coaches all the time.

[05:47.2]
So, you know, it's not that I'm against content, I'm just against the content Grind and the expectations that it creates. From my standpoint, you cannot, avoid figuring out your audience, figuring out your niche.

[06:06.1]
Who are you trying to serve and how are you going to get noticed? It is just all these questions that are so important. And it's not enough to just say, oh, I will be very, very active. I'll post five times a day. I will do the Twitter game and Instagram and TikTok, and I will dance and I will know the trend and I will edit all these videos.

[06:29.6]
It's like, it's all very nice. But I've been working with so many workers and I've been interviewing them in so many podcasts, and every single time they tell me, yeah, the leads are not really coming from that, they're coming from other things. And then when I start to compare the numbers, like, of people that I interview and people that I.

[06:48.2]
And I'm starting to realize, oh, I don't know if you can say the S word, but it's not, I'll avoid it. But, it's not social media that is getting them those leads. The successful business owners that are, workers that are actually generating like the top 10% of the income in that industry.

[07:10.7]
It's not that. So if you ask me to put it into, one world, I would say what's really working right now from my standpoint is micro niching. I consider that one word. I hope that's okay. Micro niching is, how I grew from, teaching marketing on an online course to, a group of 10 people and making my first 20k for a launch and starting to grow into, an agency where I coach people and then we also do their marketing.

[07:50.2]
And I would just go and do that again and again. I would go into a micro niche, a different micro niche every single time. I would ask myself these three questions about the micro niche before going into it so that I will know that it's the right one. And I would establish myself through real relationships, actually solving problems, actually, building up my reputation there as a solution provider, as someone that cares about the problems of people in the micro niche and eventually, just grow with it and continue to make my name in another one and another one.

[08:29.0]
I call this micro niching sideways. As soon as you're good at one micro niche, micro niching sideways is actually easier because you already have the proof. So one of the ways where I could actually establish higher fees and have a minimum criteria where people have to work for a Full year With me.

[08:58.2]
If they want to work with me, they have to commit for a full year and stuff like that. I didn't start that way. I got to that point because I was able to micro niche sideways a few times and each time leverage all the proof that I was able to collect with me as trophies, and over time, get to the point where I work with bigger businesses that could afford the commitment.

[09:27.0]
So that's a case study. in that micro niching sideways. Exactly. That's fantastic. And I love all the sort of threads through I think a lot of solopreneurs, coaches, founders get into this daily drama of social media.

[09:44.3]
Right. So let's talk a little bit more about Daily Cookie, your perspective there. You send daily emails and people absolutely love them. That's the opposite of what most marketers fear, I believe. But what's the secret sauce, from your perspective, behind daily emails that convert instead of annoy?

[10:04.8]
Well, first of all, I want to emphasize for anyone listening to this, that we actually, don't do this for all of our clients, and we don't. We qualify our clients and we only recommend daily emails for very specific type of businesses.

[10:22.9]
And it's not for everyone. Gotcha. we actually do not want to, mislead, anyone. We love email, marketing. I love copywriting. I'm a copywriter myself. I've been dabbling in this skill and industry, I would say, of newsletters and daily emails and whatnot.

[10:46.2]
And I'm not claiming that this is for every single business. That's the solution. It's not actually. Not, but it is one of four foundations of marketing and business that are significant.

[11:02.7]
Which is, it's not even about the platform like emails. It's about staying in touch with past clients and leads, staying in touch with your audience, with your tribe. And that can be done in many ways, even on social media, if that's your thing and they're, engaging with you, emails are way stronger than social media Some people will say that 100 followers or even 1000 followers sometimes are equal to one email subscriber in terms of buying power.

[11:40.0]
I've heard that before. And I tend to agree that emails are more powerful than that. But email strength can vary dramatically between different businesses. And it's one of the four foundations, and it's not the only one.

[11:59.3]
So these days, if you Ask me for

[12:07.2]
a solution that fits one size fits all, which is never real, there's never a one size fits all. But if you have to start somewhere with email marketing, I would say start with a weekly email. Way safer. Don't burn your energy because even just writing an email daily that is actually good.

[12:28.8]
I'm not talking about AI stuff. I wanted to say the S word again, but I stopped myself because it takes seven seconds to get an AI of any sort to write you an Email. And it will read nice, but it won't have a soul in it.

[12:47.6]
It won't have your soul. So if you actually want your emails to be read to a level where six months later you actually meet someone and they tell you, "oh yeah, what happened with that?" They remember the stories which happened to me and my clients so many times, you have to put in some soul.

[13:08.0]
Do we use ChatGPT and other tools? Of course we do. But we use it in a way where there's a process where we never take the first option. We always come in with an agenda of "what are we actually trying to do?" Our prompts are smart and so on.

[13:27.0]
The prompts are designed specifically for the client. They go through an evolution phase where they evolve into something more mature and so on and so forth. And even then, we always have a human, double check everything and see if it's in alignment.

[13:43.5]
So I would say, Daily Cookie is an example for something that was born before ChatGPT became such a handy tool. The olden days, right? The olden days of the world that has evolved in the past handful of years.

[13:59.9]
Yeah. And we still love it. But we as a company, I'm running like Kivi Media as an agency, as a marketing agency in the coaching business, we have matured as well with the changes of time.

[14:17.0]
And we understand that some of our clients do not need that many emails, even if we love writing them and love polishing them and coming up with special content plans, that are really unique and really smart.

[14:32.3]
But still, you have to think about, testing and seeing the results and learning from the results. don't believe all the things that you read out there about daily emails.

[14:50.5]
We called ourselves Daily Cookie. At some point we told all of our clients at Daily Cookie dot co we told them the cookie is the fact that we are in touch with you every single day and give you an update every single day. we're an integral part of your day.

[15:07.6]
You show up to work, there's a cookie waiting for you from us. So it was actually about the daily email that we wrote as an update about yesterday. We wrote this funnel, we created this design, this website page and so on.

[15:25.5]
I mean, who doesn't need a daily cookie in their life, right? So there we go. Kind of cut it back, back up a little bit. So from your perspective, if a coach is just starting out, say at $0-$100k/year, where should they focus their limited energy and should they even use ad budget to build traction?

[15:47.4]
Where should they begin? That's a great question. I actually think that I wouldn't use budget for page traffic at the beginning. not until I would, get to a good $50k or $80k with proven results and so on.

[16:06.6]
I would actually avoid it, even though it's fun. If you have the money to spend, by all means, It's not a business decision to actually have a hobby. Right? And if your hobby is advertising and marketing, I love it. Have fun and go and spend your money that your well earned money that you made in some other way.

[16:28.7]
But if you're, as a business coach, as a business advisor, I would stay away from spending anything like that because you're actually in a research and validation phase. You're trying to make sure you found your people.

[16:44.6]
And it's something that you can do in a predictable way, in a repeatable way where you go in again and again and people pick up your phone and people answer to your nudges and they value you enough to engage with you.

[17:06.8]
So until you found that, advertising will help you to put more oil into the fire, but if the fire is so flaky, then putting in more oil is not the right time, from my standpoint.

[17:24.9]
I look at it Ziv, as you're proving out your micro niche that you mentioned, and you have to prove out that micro niche before you can micro niche sideways. It's that building process that comes into play there. Can I tell you an example of a failure?

[17:44.6]
Sometimes, where you succeed is interesting. Where you fail is also interesting. I believe in that wholeheartedly, that when you fail leads you to your success. I'll give you two, quick examples.

[18:01.5]
I micro niched, at some point into the niche of helping Men at around the age of 35-45, they go through the same patterns in their marriage. So a lot of them, I mean that's like, that was the, that was the idea.

[18:19.3]
So we created a platform called GenerousMarriage.com and we started to collaborate with thinkers that actually could give good advice to this tribe of men. And I had a co-host that is a registered psychotherapist and really smart guy and a friend And we started to jam on these topics and we created online courses specifically solving problems for that micro niche.

[18:48.2]
And we went into advertising, into meta, and started to spend money in finding clients for the online courses. We were already profitable as a business because we were able to actually help and create relationships with interviewees and help them in their businesses.

[19:11.4]
So we had like a two-tier approach where we will serve as a marketing agency for the interviewees in some situations and also help the audience that we chose, the tribe, with solving certain problems. Well, one thing led to another and technology changed.

[19:30.6]
The algorithm changed on advertising and I don't know if you remember the big security update on iOS 14. And when that happened, Facebook meta had to change so many parts of their algorithm and lo and behold, the cost of a sale quadrupled overnight.

[19:53.5]
So we had a situation where we could continue to pay to get people to buy our courses. But now we are not growing our email list and keeping a smaller profit. We're now losing our pants and our shoes and we're burning through money too fast.

[20:12.7]
And we decided to put that on hold and freeze it and just focus on the next thing in our lives. that was one example where the the numbers didn't add up.

[20:27.9]
So is paid advertising, real? Well, it used to be something that was good for trip wires of sorts and now it's good for only some of the tripwires. And so you have to be careful to actually have something that will get people a result fast enough.

[20:47.4]
So the second example I just want to give really quick, We went into the plumbing world. me as a coach and the marketing agency and all of my years of experience of knowing how to help small businesses. And I know what they need, those plumbers.

[21:03.2]
I know how to help them build their businesses. So I went in and we tried to produce a podcast for them and we started to contact a lot of plumbers, successful, plumbers, workers of all sorts.

[21:20.5]
All over the place, throughout the bigger cities. It's very easy to find a plumber. The hard part is to find a plumber that is, not too busy actually anyway, or not a good plumber. I've experienced that as well.

[21:38.4]
So eventually we did the math of how many people do we contact and how many actually say yes to be on a show. we realized, oh my God, that's not our tribe. They're not engaging with us. The promise that we are bringing them, I will feature you on a show and will basically give you an SEO backlink or whatever.

[22:03.6]
All of the promises that comes from being on a show, on a technical level, they did not want that, they did not value that. They didn't want to go back to their clients and say, I was interviewed on this podcast. They just didn't matter for them that much. So you have to be willing to fail in this and find the niche that works for you.

[22:27.3]
I love it. Those are two fantastic stories about the resilience there. Ziv, where can folks follow your work, Grab the Fully Booked Coach, and sign up with updates from you if they're curious what real connection looks like in such a noisy market.

[22:45.6]
Thank you for asking, Adam. The Fully Booked Coach, is a complete blueprint, that is available on Amazon. You just buy it. It's a book. You buy it and you read it. And it teaches the entire framework.

[23:04.7]
A lot of the tools in there will sound familiar. You can skip a few words. If you already know what's a webinar, then you can skip a few words if you know what's an online course, if you know what's like I don't know what's a Facebook group, and so on. It does give a very thorough

[23:23.0]
review of all of the components that you might use to micro niche to establish your name and all of the things that you can do to make some money and all of the ways to actually Recruit clients. The entire part about how to actually conduct a strategy session that gets people to want to work with you as an agency or as a coach, is really something I'm very proud of with a lot of practical tips.

[23:53.1]
So that's one way to learn more about what I do. And I'm also always available on zivraviv.com and KEVIMedia.co If people want to see just like, what, what are the micro niches that we are into and, just, stay in touch.

[24:11.0]
Perfect. Awesome. Let me end one last big question. This one might cause you to pause for a second. You only have one tool available to you in building your businesses. What stays in your stack?

[24:29.4]
It's really an interesting question because that actually changed over the years. I used to say SEO, and then I would say a few years later I would say podcasting. And these days, I think, it's not really about the tool, it's about the process.

[24:50.0]
I'm zooming into this big sign that is standing behind me that says, trust the process. So really, what's working right now? Is it emails? Is it advertising? Is it branding?

[25:08.9]
being on an offense and being in touch with people? It's all of them together, right? So I would say if I only can do one tool, I would say my tool is relationships. You have to be actually creating real, meaningful, mutually beneficial relationships.

[25:26.5]
I like to call this the win, win, win approach. You need to win. The other person in the relationship needs to win. and the audience or someone else in this world also needs to win from the engagement. If you create relationships that are, win, win, win relationships, you'll be able to succeed no matter what the technology situation is.

[25:46.2]
I love it. I hear that in so many of these conversations, as much as we have these AI tools and all these tools in the world that we rely upon, the human, it always comes back to the human. Every business on this world is run by a human, which is one of the few things that level sets every human on this planet So keep that in mind through anything that you're building.

[26:10.6]
Well, thank you, Ziv. I really appreciated the conversation today. That's a wrap on this episode of "Is Anything Real in paid Advertising?" huge Thanks again to Ziv for keeping it honest, sharp, and actionable. If you got value from this conversation, make sure you hit follow wherever you're listening and leave a quick review if you're feeling generous.

[26:28.5]
It helps more folks find the real ones in this paid advertising space that's incredibly crowded and busy. Thank you, Ziv. Thank you, everyone. All right, cheers. Cheers.

[26:50.4]
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[27:14.6]
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