Hernan Vazquez is the Founder and CEO of Scale Driven, a digital marketing and advertising agency dedicated to helping clients increase revenue through advanced digital paid advertising strategies. A seasoned marketer and ads guru, Hernan’s impressive portfolio includes industry leaders like Frank Kern, Grant Cardone, and Agora Publishing. Recognized as a strategic thinker, he offers deep insights into the ecosystem of online advertising and sales funnels.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [9:17] Hernan Vazquez’s insights on maximizing advertising campaigns
- [12:37] The evolution of acquisition funnel strategies
- [16:59] Methods for transitioning low-value clients into high-value customers
- [19:03] Strategies to effectively scale advertising efforts and maximize ROI
- [21:46] The impact of iOS 14 updates on ad tracking metrics and how to navigate it
- [25:30] Why broader targeting might be beneficial in today’s ad landscape
- [26:47] The significance of creative input in setting apart your ad campaigns
- [28:32] The distinction between bad, good, and golden ads in ad campaigns
In this episode…
What makes online ads not just good, but golden, pulling in the desired audience and driving substantial revenue? With countless platforms, ever-evolving algorithms, and fierce competition for consumer attention, finding the right strategy can be daunting. What if there was a strategy to scale your ads effectively?
Marketing expert Hernan Vazquez delves into the intricacies of direct response advertising, sharing his wealth of knowledge from a career that has seen over $70 million in ad spend management. Hernan tackles the challenges and changes in the digital marketing landscape, and the increasing importance of creative content over granular targeting. With practical insights and anecdotes from running campaigns for industry heavyweights, he uncovers the shifting trends towards acquisition funnels and the art of converting low-ticket buyers into high-value clients.
In this episode of the Timeless Marketing Podcast, Brian Kurtz hosts Hernan Vazquez to discuss scaling advertising efforts and the evolution of marketing funnels. Hernan explains what defines successful ad creation and how to achieve long-term profitability in campaigns. He sheds light on lesser-known industry tactics that can lead to breakthroughs in direct response marketing, emphasizing the importance of ongoing optimization and creativity.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Quotable moments:
- “Acquisition funnels are about the sustainability of your advertising efforts.”
- “What works sticks, so always be ready to iterate and adapt your campaigns.”
- “We need to be refreshing creatives weekly; Meta is really creative-hungry.”
- “Tracking is key, and after iOS 14, it’s pivotal for running ads effectively.”
- “Creatives are your actual target audience — what compels someone to click on your ad is the content.”
Action Steps:
- Establish acquisition funnels to liquidate ad costs quickly: Effective acquisition funnels ensure sustainability by making new leads cost-neutral.
- Implement third-party tracking software: This enhances ad campaign attribution accuracy in the post-iOS 14 privacy landscape.
- Run broad targeting campaigns, allowing platform algorithms to pinpoint responsive segments: Harnessing the platform’s machine learning helps you reach receptive audiences without granular targeting.
- Continually refresh ad creatives to maintain engagement: Regular creative updates counteract ad fatigue, sustaining campaign performance.
- Use short VSL funnels for high-ticket backend offers: These encapsulate and deliver your value proposition quickly to busy audiences.
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Titans Xcelerator.
Titans Xcelerator is a private mentorship program for direct response marketers.
It is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business.
And you don’t need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars either.
Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind.
And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed.
As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one.
The bottom line: you don’t have to grow your business alone.
If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to BrianKurtz.net/help
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz, your connection to insights from some of the top direct response marketing minds on the planet.
Brian Kurtz 0:16
Hey, it’s Brian Kurtz here, host of the Timeless Marketing Podcast. Today’s episode is a clip from one of the two-hour calls inside Titans Xcelerator, my private mentorship program for direct response marketers. Before we get to that, I have one question for you. Do you have a marketing insurance policy? If you don’t, you need one. And that’s why I created Titans Xcelerator, which is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business. The bottom line, you don’t have to grow your business alone. And you don’t need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars either. Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind. I know because I hosted a group that was over $20,000 a year. If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to briankurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [slash] help. And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed. As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one. Again, if you want to see if Titans Xcelerators are fit for you with no obligation. Go to Briankurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N-K-U-R-T-Z [dot] net [slash] help. And feel free to email me directly. I respond to every email with questions about this episode or just to say hi at brian@briankurtz.net. Now, onto today’s episode. So let’s switch gears to the other Venn diagram circle. So that was the personal development circle. Now we’re going to go to the marketing circle. Of course, they’re already combined with a shared area and Hernan Vasquez, I believe he’s hopefully on the call. I saw him there before.
Hernan Vazquez 2:49
Here, I’m here.
Brian Kurtz 2:50
How are you?
Hernan Vazquez 2:51
Yes, sir. Hey, man, I’m great. I’m excited. Thank you for the invite. I’m super, super excited.
Brian Kurtz 2:57
So Hernan came to me through David Bayer. And those of you who know David, when David tells you something, you listen. David is very wise. He chooses the best of the best to work with, to recommend, you know when he finds somebody, he interviews them, he sometimes works with them, and he recommends them. And that’s the sign of a great, not a networker, I hate the word networking, as you all know, but it’s a great way to contribute, to connect. So he is contributing to all of us today by connecting Hernan Vasquez with Titans Xcelerator. Hernan has a, he’ll tell you about his history and how he got to where he is today. He’s obviously an old man. So if you can see him, he’s an old time grizzled veteran, not but he’s wise beyond his years, which I love. A true NG – a new gangster and Hernan, welcome to Titans Xcelerator. Have you been on the whole call?
Hernan Vazquez 4:10
Yes, I’ve been on it, and I’ve been soaking everything, and there’s so much, so much value and so much wisdom in this call. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me and thank you for letting me –
Brian Kurtz 4:22
Oh, no problem. And now it’s your turn to add to that wisdom. So you’re on Hernan.
Hernan Vazquez 4:28
Awesome. Thank you. Well, thank you again. Once again, I’m honored to be here. So yeah, so I guess I’ll jump right into it. I just want to extend my appreciation to Brian. We connected a couple months ago, and he’s always been such an amazing person, and such a generous person with me and even, you know, knowing me, after a couple calls and whatnot, and you could see that he’s a generous person by nature. So I think that, you know, I want to thank him for inviting me. And you know, I’m honored to be in such an amazing group here. I see a lot of people that have a lot of experience, way, way, way more experience than I have in the market. But you know, I’m going to try to basically tell you a little bit about my experience. I like to document a lot of the things that I am doing on a daily basis, and some of those things work, many of those things don’t work, but what works sticks. So I just want to, I just want to share with you what does work, and what did work, especially on the advertising side of things, and what type of marketing campaigns we are running right now. What’s working for us on ads? I know that, you know, ads were mentioned briefly during the call, and they don’t work. They don’t work for everyone, but when they do work, they can be really, really powerful. So, you know, I’m an ads guy, so that’s kind of my professional title, if you would, technical term. So I want to share with you what we’re doing to make things work. So let me actually share my screen. I have a little presentation. I have this amount of stuff to go through, so I’ll try to be succinct and quick so that we can go through everything. So I’m assuming you guys can see my screen. Everything is good, right? Yes, I’m sure. All right. Perfect. Cool. So, yeah. So I’m going to share with you again some of the things that I learned after working with some of the biggest names in the industry over the past decade and a half in the and you know, we sold this amount of stuff with ads, mostly on the information, coaching, consulting space. We have generated well over $200 million in revenue from the ads attributed to our own campaigns. So yeah, so I want to share with you some of the things that I learned from you know, stepping on the shoulders of of giants, if you would. So I’m going to move right along and we’ll see if we have some time for questions at the end of the presentation. So that’s me. I’m gonna do a mercifully short introduction here. Again, I’ve been writing ads full-time since 2012. In 2011- 2012, I managed, personally, over $70 million in paid direct response ads. Right? That’s where 99% of our spend goes towards the direct response campaigns. And as I mentioned, we have over $200 million in attribute itself for the campaigns that will run for some people. I’ve also built several digital marketing agencies. I’ve hired, trained, managed over 120 people, ranging from media buyers to designers to some copywriters as well, and it’s been a blast. And I consider myself a lucky guy, mostly because throughout my career, I was able to work with people like Frank Kern. I was Frank Kern’s CMO for three and a half years. I work with Grant Cardone as well as his marketing director. I consulted with the Tony Robbins ads team. We ran some ads for Dean Graciosi. We also ran some ads for Agora publishing for a couple of their divisions. I ran ads for Patrick, David and whatnot. So kind of want to tell you how these people operate so, and what I’ve learned so that hopefully, you know, we can actually kind of see behind the curtains, or under the hood, if you would, of these multimillion-dollar campaigns, and how they’re able to make them work with the stuff that they’re doing. Okay? So we’re going to talk about ads. We’re going to talk about marketing, some of the things I am sure that you guys already know, so it’s going to be a refresher. So we’re going to do a kind of a 30,000 foot overview of what I’ve seen working so far, especially with advertising on social media, and then we’re going to go a little bit deeper into the weeds, so we’re going to get a little bit more technical as to what’s working right now. Because having an advertising agency, we have access to a lot of data, we have access to a lot of verticals, so I can distill that into what’s working right now with our advertising campaigns. So what I’ve seen something that works really well, and what I’ve seen most of these big names or top dogs do, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, is this type of architecture on their advertising campaigns or on their marketing funnels, that is basically divided into two big groups, right? We have what we like to call acquisition funnels, which are funnels that are there, which are products, combination of products, promotions and upsells and downsells and those types of things that their sole purpose is to liquidate the ad cost as fast as possible, right? So that every lead or every buyer that comes our way, they become virtually free, right? So that’s where we like to point at to especially for ice cold traffic, right? People that do not know who we are, or they haven’t heard about us. We should send them there, and that’s where we are able to scale. So I’m going to share with you some benchmarks that we like to go after, especially, again, from media ads, which is kind of our wheelhouse, and how we’re able to scale those ads, what we have in mind, and at the end of the day, what we’re looking at acquisition funnels is again, liquidate most of our advertising costs so that everything that happens on the other end of the spectrum, which are what we call maximization funnels or monetization funnels, or high ticket funnels, or high ticket campaigns, happens after somebody becomes a buyer, right? Right now we’ve been running ads for people that sell information, people that sell courses for probably, like, eight or nine years now, and right now this second we’re seeing a shift in the trends, especially after the pandemic, because the truth is that running advertising on Meta has become easier in some regards which we’re going to go into, but it’s also become more challenging because of the growth or the the increase in costs, right? Especially for the past 3, 4, 5, years, we’ve noticed that the only time that advertising costs actually went down on places like Meta and Google was during the pandemic, and we saw a boom of businesses that were pandemic childs, right? Were born and raised and grew a lot during the pandemic, because they kind of used this dip, this decrease in cost to advertising CPMs during that season and, you know, they grew a lot. I actually was able to work with with a company that they grew from zero to $100 million in valuation in just two years, because we’re able to ride that wave, right? But since then, especially right now, because this is an election years you know that the elections kind of make at least on the advertising space, they make everything more expensive, we’re seeing our cost to acquire customers go up. So there is a shift between just running ads directly to a long form BSL, or a long form webinar that leads to book an appointment to closer to talk to somebody on the phone, to try to close them into 3, 5, 7, 10k, worth of a coaching program into the acquisition funnel model, which is something that we’ve been running for quite a while. Right? So you know, as you probably know, marketing and marketing strategies and marketing techniques, they kind of recycle themselves. It’s like fashion, right? Things that work maybe a couple years ago, they tend to be in fashion again, or maybe 10 years ago, they tend to be in vogue again. So this is the two model, or the two step model, that I’ve seen people work with, especially big, big names, people that spend several million dollars per month or per year on advertising that works really well. Now I want to dive into this a little bit deeper. The first funnels, and these are the funnels that we like to and the marketing campaigns that we like to put together for ourselves, for our clients, are towards acquisition funnels. We will rarely run ads other than warm traffic ads to a maximization funnel, which I’m going to go into in a second. Most of our ad spend, I would say, 80 to 90% of our ad spend nowadays, goes towards liquidating ad costs and getting buyers as fast as possible. But you know, they’ve been around for a while. I remember this promotion right here that is a Sports Illustrated you will get a free football phone when you get a subscription, it was really famous. This is something that I’d like to go back and study.