The RIGHT Way to Run Ads and Build Funnels with Jason How

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody, and welcome to Episode 234 of How I Built It, the podcast that offers actionable tech tips for small business owners. Today’s sponsors are TextExpander and Nexcess. You’ll hear about them later in the show.

But before we get started, I do want to tell you about my free weekly newsletter called Build Something Weekly. In it you’ll get a rundown of every episode, all of the content I wrote over the last week, insights and recommendations all for free. You can sign up over at buildsomething.email. That’s buildsomething.email.

Intro: Okay, now let me tell you about this week’s guest. Jason How knows a thing or two about ads. And the first piece of advice he gives us, don’t start with ads. Jason gives us a couple of important aspects of running ads and for you to think about before you actually run them. Like how to get your offer to a place that will compel people to actually click on them.

I think this is so important because I think people just say, “I’ll advertise on Facebook and Instagram, I’ll drive a ton of traffic, and voila, I’ll make money.” But if your messaging and your offer don’t align with the promise of the ad and you’re not delivering, then the ads are just a giant waste of money. So this was a fantastic conversation with Jason.

If you are listening to build something more or you’re interested in getting ad-free extended episodes for just five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year, in build something more, we’ll be talking about some lesser-known ad platforms like Tik Tok. Tik Tok has been coming up on this show a lot lately, and Jason makes yet another argument for it.

So you can sign up for the build something club, again, just five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year, along with all of the show notes over at streamlined.fm/234. Okay, let’s get on with the show.

Joe Casabona: Hello, everybody. And welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that offers actionable tech tips for small business owners. It’s Episode 234. And today, my guest is Jason How. He is the owner of Agency J. Now, they help people right in my wheelhouse, as it turns out, educators, course creators, education business owners, and coaches grow their businesses to six-figure months, which sounds very exciting to me. So I’m very excited to talk to him. Jason, how are you doing today?

Jason How: I’m good. Thanks for having me here, Joe. How are you?

Joe Casabona: I’m doing very well. Thank you. Thanks for coming on the show. I’m excited to talk to you because the topic that we’re focusing on here is how to dominate your market by out-innovating the competition with ads and funnels.

Paid ads are something I’ve only experimented with a little bit by myself, like through Facebook, so I had no idea what I was doing. And then more recently I’ve tried doing some of the in podcast app ads, where they just kind of show your podcast to entice people to subscribe. So I’m excited to talk about this. I don’t know a lot about ads, my funnels definitely need work. But before we get to that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?

Jason How: Yeah, sure. So my name is Jason. And as you can hear from my accent I’m not from the States. I’m actually living here in Singapore. I’ve been doing this for… I’m in my ninth year. I basically run a remote team, you know, helping people grow their business. So my whole entire team is off-timing.

My team basically, you know, large majority of them live over here in the Asia Pacific Time Zone. So Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Philippines. We also have two members, one in Canada, and one in United States. The ones in Australia and not in America are our copywriters—people who need to write in order to appeal to those markets.

But our clients, I would say 80% of them are in the States. The remaining of them are basically like non-Americans who have moved overseas. So kind of like you have a Canadian client who was living in Israel because she married an Israeli and she’s living there. We have European clients, we have Australian clients, New Zealand clients, and all that. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Wow. That’s fantastic. So being primarily in the Asia Pacific Time Zone, what’s it like having most of your clients in the United States? I know there’s a pretty significant time difference there.

Jason How: Yeah, it is pretty significant, but I think it has worked out really nicely. The first thing is that our week start earlier. And that gives us a head start. Usually Fridays, we end up earlier, but like nothing much usually happens on Fridays. So that doesn’t become an issue.

So I think it becomes a situation where we have kind of like half a day or a day more than our clients. And that really allows us to respond and just work on anything ahead of time. So our clients are usually the ones that are kind of like being chased by us. Instead of the clients chasing us, we are often the ones choosing our clients and letting them know, “Hey, we got this done. Do you have this ready? Can we go? Can we go?” So we’re on top of these things all the time.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Actually, you know, it’s not as significant a difference. But I feel that edge when I work with somebody on the west coast of the US, because I’m on the east coast of the US. So I have about three hours difference. And then I start my day earlier than most people. My kids wake up early so I start my day at like 7:30. So, yeah, I definitely feel that.

And then as far as the kind of services you offer, you know, I know that… Well, I guess it’s a grab bag now. But for a while I know people preferred to have kind of in-person meetings… not in person, but face-to-face synchronous meetings. Has been something you’ve been able to manage? Or do you manage those expectations right upfront?

Jason How: Yeah. I mean, I’m the one who do all of the sales calls. So naturally, they would have to jump on the Zoom or Skype in order to have a conversation with me. I think apart from two particular scenarios where I’ve had to wake up in the wee hours to speak with them. But apart from that, I think a lot of the clients we work with, especially in the coaching, course creation space, a lot of people are used to online communication tools kind of like environment.

I would say the only two I came across both were from the traditional education space. One was actually a president of a college and then another was a head of a private school. And both of them didn’t have prior experience of working with anyone out of state, let alone another country.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Jason How: So that was huge for them. But I think we managed to gain their trust through the professionalism of our work and of course, our references and things like that. But I think over time, they have just gotten used to it. They were like, “You know, you guys are handling everything.”

Because honestly, I don’t think any company wants to be talking to their vendors all the time. They would rather have these people take things off my plate without me telling them what to do. And that’s what we try to do most of the time. Our clients usually contact us only if they have a very specific idea of motion they want to run. But beyond that, we are basically like a bank. We basically generate net cash for them every month. They don’t really need to tell us what to do.

We basically send things for them to review on a weekly basis or even every two to three days. So basically that’s pretty much it. I think a lot of it comes down to having really streamlined operations and handling the expectations upfront.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, I think that’s great. As long as you’re showing results, I mean, you’re right, I don’t think people want to be talking to their vendors all the time. I had a full-time job in higher ed for a while and I know how much they love meetings to the point where I was always the annoying guy that was like, “Do we need to have this meeting?” Or I would like protest and “you got to go.”

And I’m like, “All right, well, when the project I’m working on is not delivered on time, I’m going to tell you it’s because I had to go to these meetings today.” So changing that corporate culture can be tough. But again, if you have the results to back it up, I think it’s an easier sell. So-

Jason How: Sorry. I was just going to say that I think it’s been [inaudible 00:09:02]. A lot of our clients are corporate. So we help a lot of our clients usually who are already doing about half a million to get into that million-dollar mark, maybe up to 3, 4 million.

We do have several clients in that $10, $20 million mark, but I would say majority of people we help, where we see the most impacting growth is really when you’re at the half-million mark, you kind of stop, just kind of you’re working 16 hours or even the little 12 to 16 hours a day and then they’re like, “I have enough of this. I need to get to a stage where I don’t need to be pushing so hard anymore.” So that’s where we find our wheelhouse really is.

But I think I can completely understand where you’re coming from. If you’re working with a corporate, man, I think that’s going to be tough.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Before we get into the actionable advice stuff, what exactly are the services that you offer? It sounds like copywriting, running ads, maybe. Tell us a little bit about it.

Jason How: I like to think of ourselves more like a vertically integrated marketing agency. I think a lot of these agencies, where they are is they simply run ads. Maybe they do a little bit of copy creatives and then they charge a percentage of that spend.

We see ourselves more as an outsourced marketing department for a lot of these, you know, half a million, a million-dollar kind of company. And we basically professionalize their entire marketing capability in the company.

So our offering starts from ads. So, for us, we cover everything from copywriting, graphic design, video editing. We don’t do the actual video shoot, but we occasionally write video scripts for them. But it will be best if they can record the video and we will just play around with it because we have a professional video editor who will just take care of those things. That’s on the ad side of things.

But there’s basically traffic. We’re sending traffic to somewhere where we want them to convert and we want them to buy our products, we want them to sign up for offers and things like that. So we actually take care of the entire funnel, copywriting, design, and things like that as well.

What we don’t do however is we don’t create offers from scratch. Instead, we take existing products that have some kind of validation with our clients and we make them better or we make them different. But we don’t take something from scratch and say… if someone were to come to us and say, “I am a coach helped me sell my services,” I’m like, “You got to figure it out on your own, you have to really understand your market, find a fit first before we come in and really help you amplify the whole thing.”

So that’s really where we shine. So we help with the funnel design, copywriting as well. We also do email copywriting. So it’s vertically integrated in the sense that we take care of not just the ads but also the funnel and the follow-up emails. So the front end and back end pretty much.

I would say a lot of agencies where they are as well is they tend to focus a lot on just spreading themselves across multiple channels. So they could have the breadth of like, you know, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google ads, Tik Tok, Snapchat, a lot of other platforms, Pinterest and all that. But we do only Facebook, Instagram for the most part, then we dive deep.

We do some of Google ads and YouTube ads for some of our existing clients, just more of a favor and as an add-on, but not really as a core service that we offer kind of like new clients.

Joe Casabona: Got you. I think if you’re okay with this, in build something more, I’d like to talk to you about some of these other ad platforms. Because, I mean, I know that Tik Tok has to monetize somehow, but it never occurred to me that Tik Tok could be an ad platform as well. Maybe because I’m not on it. So I don’t see anything. But yeah, I would love to talk to you about maybe these lesser-known platforms if you’re okay with that.

Jason How: Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. And if you are not a member, you can sign up over at buildsomething.club for $5 a month and hear our conversation and all the other member conversations. So this sounds really interesting. I like your focus.

A lot of people I talked to on this show always talk about niche, niche, niche, or niche, niche, niche, whatever. But a lot of freelancers I talked to are like, “I can’t…” They’re afraid to niche down because they don’t want to turn work away. But you are a well-oiled machine that handles the things he just talked about. I’ve talked to people who specialize in market validation, where they reach out to customers to get feedback, to hone the offering, to talk about the problem. That’s a whole other job that you’re not prepared to do.

Jason How: Exactly. So I think in terms of talking about niche, a lot of people see it as niching into specific industries. But how I see it is kind of two-dimensional. You have the niche into industries, but you also have a niche to a problem that you’re solving. Of course, the problem has to be big enough for you to build a business on. But you ultimately you need to niche to a problem.

Because otherwise I once experienced this my younger days where I was basically doing so many things. I was working with clients from all kinds of industries, solving all kinds of problems related to marketing, lead generation, and sales and audit. But you know, those are huge problem to solve, too big for a person to build a standardized process for it.

So I found myself every week building new processes and systems and strategies for these new clients, and it became just untenable, it became unsustainable for myself. So I think it’s really important to niche to a problem that you can kind of standardize a fulfillment in order for your team to kind of learn. Because the thing is you’re going to probably be one of the smartest people in your business until you get to a certain size where you can hire even smarter people than you.

So what’s going to happen is when you first bring on a first couple of team members, you’re not going to be able to kind of work on 10 different industries like you do. So niching down really helps not just you but helps them out of all, helps with the morale over time. Because I think the big part is not just about finding clients, is about fulfilling, keeping them, retaining them, and making sure that your team is happy and being able to pay and grow your team as well.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Again, I’ve said this. I was in the web development space exclusively for a long time. And I would tell people like, “Pick an industry,” like you said, “pick an industry because you’ll have domain knowledge there. But also pick a set of tools that you know really well.” We do a lot of WordPress work. Don’t change the theme framework every project. How are you possibly going to get good at any of them?

And then it’s for products and productized services or the WordPress freelance developer, pick a problem you’re solving. Do you help nonprofits increase their donations? Maybe the number of recurring donations? Do you help construction companies land bigger jobs by building beautiful portfolios or whatever? Pick that, solve that problem. Because then you’re talking directly to a specific client, that customer avatar that people talk about.

Jason How: You’re exactly right. So we work really closely for clients. And one of them specifically serves a lot of clients in a real estate construction and all these home modeling kind of space. And we go to their clients’ websites all the time. And these are clients doing at least half a million to $10 million dollars. And all their websites look really similar. It does from a structural point of view. So, yeah, I’m pretty sure there is someone out there niching down, who built all their websites altogether. So you’re absolutely right.

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Joe Casabona: As a web developer, as somebody with a programming background, I was like, “I don’t want all of my websites to look the same.” But you know what, client A and client B, most of the time, unless they’re in the design industry, they just want a website that works, that gets people to fill out their contact form.

Jason How: Exactly. And if they’re from different states, what’s the chances of them actually meeting and knowing one another. It’s not huge.

Joe Casabona: Right. Right. I mean, construction companies in my experience, they haven’t cared at all about what their website looks like, as long as the form works and they can upload pictures. So that’s great.

I’m really glad we talked about this, because I assume that part of our conversation informs our main topic, how to dominate your market by innovating the competition with ads and funnels. You offer both of these services.

Let’s talk about the ads a little bit first. You said that those are designed to get website traffic, that people converting is where the magic happens. But how do we use ads to get people to our website? I’ve tried ads and nobody has clicked on them. So what am I doing wrong? You obviously haven’t seen any of my ads so you don’t have to talk specifically about me. But what are the common problems that you see?

Jason How: I think the most fundamental one of all is something that really took many, many years to master. I would say even at this stage, I’m still working on it. I would say that the biggest part of it is that people misunderstand advertising and in fact, the fundamentals of advertising.

When you’re trying to advertise online, you have three things that are more important that you need to take care of. I kind of call them the OMA. This is offer followed by the message, followed by the ads. So these three things kind of like form the fundamental layer of it.

So the offer is fundamentally what exactly are you giving in return for what you’re charging? So this includes things like the deliverables, the features, the benefits, you’re looking at things like the premiums, the bonuses, the prices, payment terms. Payment terms are separate from pricing as well. It is part of the offer. And we’re looking at risk, but also items like guarantees. We are also looking at things like proof. We’re also looking at things like reason to buy now or act now and scarcity and all that kind of stuff.

So all these are just elements of the offer. And you have to test different elements, different packages, and get customer feedback until you get straight yeses and you get people who actually pull out their wallet and say, “Take my money. This is what I want.”

One of my mentors Todd Brown from the states, he has this framework called the S.I.N. offer, the S.I.N. offer, S-I-N, basically stands for superior offer, irresistible offer, and a no brainer offer. Of course, the words were kind of rearranged in a way for them to make sense, but we start off with irresistible offers.

The irresistible offer is essentially an offer where you’re presented with it, you’re like, “I want this.” That is your reaction. And that’s exactly going to come from the list of all the elements I mentioned earlier. So if you kind of missed it, make sure you just hit back on the podcast and just listen to it again.

The second part of it is just making a no-brainer. The part about offer that makes it a no-brainer usually comes from the price element, the payment term element, or the guarantee element. So the point like, “Try this out for 30 days, and if it doesn’t work out for you, I’ll refund you for free.” That way this is a no-brainer offer. That makes it a no-brainer.

Now the third one is what we call superior. So superior as you know comes from a bit of comparison. So essentially, it needs to be superior to what your customers have in terms of alternatives. So if someone is already kind of offering like a seven-day free trial, you got to be like one up, we’ve got to be like at least two up in fact. Go for a 30-day free trial, go for a 60-day free trial, go for a guided onboarding process, so on and so forth.

So a lot of things you can actually play with. But just make sure that it’s superior, it’s irresistible and it is really a no-brainer offer.

So for those of you who want to know a little bit more about the mentor I talked about, his name is T-O-D-D B-R-O-W-N, Todd Brown. He’s like the gurus or the gurus in the marketing space. He’s the one who taught everyone, but he’s not the most famous one out there. So he’s really the person doing all the dirty work. So that’s the offer layer.

Joe Casabona: Real quick, I will link that. I found the page. I’ll link it in the show notes.

Jason How: Awesome.

Joe Casabona: I just want to reinforce here. This offers the first thing you mentioned. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on ads if your offer is crappy, right?

Jason How: Exactly, yeah. It really doesn’t matter. For example, I think just to go back to what we talked about, a big part of the offer is really the benefit as well or the niche as well, how you craft it. So in your case, you talked about a web designer who helps nonprofits increase the donation amount. I thought that was really good. That really encapsulated something really specific, something as tangible, something you can relate to, something that to me, if I was running a nonprofit organization takes exactly the outcome they want. Your offers speaks to me. That’s exactly the heart of it.

The second part of it is the message. From a really strict point of view, the offer is actually part of the message, but a big part of the message is also about the hook. Exactly what are you saying or doing to get people’s attention?

Airbnb have great list of hooks that they had done in the past. Go look it up. Things like what if travel was something more kind of like living elsewhere, kind of experiencing how locals actually live? That kind of stuff. Right? So that’s how they kind of differentiated themselves as compared to let’s say the hotels.

Then we also have the marketing lead, which is essentially the bridge that goes from the hook into the actual… all the list of claims and things you’re going to make in your message. But that is basically a big part of the message. So that we have the hook, you have the lead and then you have the claims, the proof, the benefits, and so on and so forth.

How your offer, or how you kind of like… yeah, basically how your offer or how your product is better, is different, is makes things easier for them, is less risky, is safer. Basically, all the things that just makes it different and better than other products out there.

But the last one we talked about is essentially the ads. The ads side of things that’s where as long as you’re alive, your ads in terms of the copy creative, in terms of the offer and a message, if you just align all of them, and the offer is the one converts, it will carry your ad campaign.

So your ad is nothing more than just an amplification tool to expose your offer to more people knowing that it already works. So of course, yeah, like trickery and things you can do to increase things like [inaudible 00:25:23] rate, and all that stuff, but ultimately, the offer needs to convert first. So once the offer converts, then go to ads.

Joe Casabona: That is, I think, such great advice. Because this should prevent people from jumping the gun, right? Because I think people are like, “I want to grow my business quick. I’m going to do ads.” But really, you should…

For example, I’ve offered a Done for You Podcasting Service for about a year and a half now. And I’m not telling a whole lot of people about it yet there’s a landing page. But I’m not really amplifying that message outside of my core audience because I want to test it and I want to make sure that I’m solving the right problems, that my offer is good both for the client and for me. I don’t want to undercharge and then open the floodgates. So it doesn’t make any sense for me to do ads right now because I don’t know the best positioning for the offer yet.

Jason How: Exactly. Yeah, absolutely right. So there are people who will insist of going with ads first, but they are not exactly wrong if the ad fulfill two criteria. Number one, they have money. And number two, they have the marketing knowledge to learn and fail quickly.

One of my mentors also use and prefers using ads, because that’s going to be the most scalable, the least painful way to entrepreneurship. But he comes from a really strong marketing background, and he spent years building up his cash reserves. In fact, he ran I think an agency and trading service for I think close to three years and they amassed about a million dollars in cash before they went into the whole eCommerce market. And today, just three years into eCommerce, they’re doing about $60 million a year.

So that kind of like a lot of times we look at people like that, they have succeeded in three years and we are like, “I can do it too.” But we are comparing with different fundamentals. We only see the tip of the iceberg, we don’t see the part that’s submerged under the water. So we end up getting ourselves burned because we have all these false expectations of what it is like.

But if you don’t have any advertising, marketing experience, especially in the area of online advertising, please just go with the normal model validate the offers, sell to people organically, join groups, join forums, do whatever you need to to sell it. And then once you validate it, you might see a sufficiently kind of cash buffer and cash flow, then go into ads. Because you do need a fair bit of testing and knowledge and commitment to make it work.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. You know, a common motif when this show first launched, because we were experiencing the Summer Olympics then, was the Olympic gold medalist. We would see them gold medal at their event, but we didn’t see the 20 years of sacrifice that they gave to practice their craft. And so with the Olympics, as we record this coming up again, I’m reminded of that. You have the people on the couch who were like, “I could do that.” But you can’t. You can’t do that.

I like the point you made here too: if you have money and you can learn and fail quickly. Because it’s not that the person is wasting money, they’re using the money, they have to accelerate their learning. They know what to look for. They know maybe to AB test their offer, their landing page. And so they can run a couple of days worth of ads to get the traffic and say, “All right, well, this doesn’t work. So let’s try this. Okay, this one works. And now we’ve sped up our timeline from maybe two years to two weeks or something like that.”

Jason How: Exactly, exactly. And I would say the people who really know these things, and are testing, testing things like two or $3,000 a day, it’s not a small amount to play with.

Joe Casabona: Right, right. Again, they know what to test, right?

Jason How: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: You know, I’ve heard people like, “Oh, you got to test like the color of the call to action button.” If your headline is bad, I don’t think the color is going to matter that much.

Jason How: Yeah. I think a lot of times people mistake and tend to take these crazy-sounding tests out of context. There is a sequence of making things. Of course, if everything is optimized and your color of the button just discourages people to click, it’s of course could create a huge jump in results when you eventually test it.

I think, you know, looking at advice, and even the advice I’m giving or you’re giving, if you’re listening to it right now, really take it with a pinch of salt and really try to understand the context every applying it in before you kind of apply it in your own kind of space as well.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Understand the context and the hierarchy. Because again, if your headline is perfect, because you’ve tested it, then maybe the next thing to test is the button color or whatever. If you’ve tested everything and that’s the only thing left, then yeah, fine test that.

Jason How: Yeah, go for it.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, awesome. All right. So let’s say we’ve got our offer, we have our message, the ads are bringing the people to the website, what should our call to action look like? I guess that has a lot to do with the offer. What should our funnel look like?

Jason How: I think with funnels, we tend to play around with it quite a lot. Because I think a lot of people are, by this time, we’re used to the conventional funnels. For example, in the online education space, you often see webinars. They are used a lot. So, people have played around with shorter videos or what we call video sales letters. People also play a lot with kind of like a long form sales letter. But people also may have played a lot by just compelling… you know, we used to have a four-page sequence and a funnel.

So you would go to a page, you get to opt-in, get you to watch a video, and the second page gets you to schedule a call, and the third page get you onto the thank you page. Just kind of like a standard four-page either webinar or video funnel. Where we have seen innovation recently is really compressing that out of three, two, or even one page.

So, for example, we had a video [inaudible 00:31:32] top, huge claim, followed by proof, followed by schedule a call. Kind of like everything is done in one page. No more jumping around, no more update. I don’t need your email if you’re not interested in offer. So there is quite a lot of innovation.

But I would say if you’re just getting started, stick to the standard four-step process but really be open to testing and innovating your funnels. Any if you’re kind of like web development agency be open to helping your clients create variations as well. That’s going to help a lot when you put in those offers as part of your… But I guess features is part of your offer to working with clients.

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And now let’s get back to it.

Joe Casabona: So standard four-step funnel, can we run through that again?

Jason How: Sure.

Joe Casabona: It’s like the click to opt-in…

Jason How: The opt in page. It’s the opt in page followed by the second page which is the watch… internally we call it a watch page because you could either be watching a webinar or watching video sales letter. So below that, there’s usually a button for them to kind of schedule a call, just an invitation.

Then on the third page is where you have the calendar, you have some proof of the work that you’ve done and methodology behind it, things like that. And then you kind of like once they have scheduled call, you send into a confirmation page.

And usually a confirmation page is a page where magic happens. It’s actually a page that we put a lot of attention on to get people to show up on a call, we get them prepared and get them to do some homework, get them to know more about you guys. So when you jump on a call, you’re not like, “I don’t know about you guys. Can I have three references?” Never that. You don’t want to clients to be doing that. You want to show them an overwhelming amount of proof such that your credibility is irrefutable.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Man, this really speaks to me, because again, with the Done For You page, I recently added “buy buttons,” but I didn’t think anybody would just stumble upon them and use them. And somebody did recently and I’m like, “Geez, I’m not prepared for this at all.” I mean, I have a Google form, but I had to send it to them manually. This here is extremely helpful to me.

The question I want to ask is, is this like… Again, it should be context-specific. Is this going to be the same for like a $50 Offer versus like a $5,000 offer? Can I just ask for the money on a $50 offer?

Jason How: Exactly. I think with a $50 offer is usually just a sales page like you would do on an eCommerce company or a product page. So you can have eCommerce product page, send them there to buy. Or you have a proper sales page just to sell and position a product.

Joe Casabona: Got you.

Jason How: So for $50, in fact, anything below $1,000, you can probably just sell it off. Probably after we just… we weren’t there because I know with certain niche they usually sell a lot of these mid ticket products that’s ranging from $500 to $1,000 off webinars. But I’ve also seen some of my clients they have been selling $1,000 products off like a sales pitch. That’s completely possible as well.

Joe Casabona: Got you. That’s really interesting. I think it probably goes back to the S.I.N offer, right? Maybe like a $50 three video course is a no-brainer for a lot of people if they need that.

Jason How: Exactly.

Joe Casabona: Cool. So this is the funnel to get them to sign up, to prepare them for the call. And you mentioned video right off the bat with webinars. You know, I’ve seen it done a few ways where you have those evergreen webinars that people scheduled to attend. Heavy quotes for people who can’t see me. Do you recommend like show the webinar right away, make it super obvious that it’s not live? Or do you go with “join at this time” or whatever?

Jason How: I think the timing really depends on the industry and how exposed they are to the idea of webinars. I would say that you’ve got to test it. We have tested a couple of options generally and we find the best option is to just give them an opportunity or ability to just watch yesterday’s replay immediately. Also an option for them to schedule a live just for them to come into it.

I think I’ve seen a lot of people who say that at this point when I’m signing up on webinars, I’m expecting to get a replay. So I think people have gone through such things enough to know the trickery behind it. But I guess the whole idea behind it is just how can you make it as convenient as possible for the people who you are trying to reach.

Joe Casabona: I love that. I mean, I think you’re dead on. I think a lot of people probably know. I went to a webinar recently where someone was like, “Hey, Natalie, hey, Jim, thanks for being here.” And I’m like, “Natalie and Jim aren’t here. I feel like you’re just saying names.” Which kind of makes it feel disingenuous to me. Again, I’m on the web all the time, though.

So it depends on the industry but optimized for convenience. If I’m trying to learn something now, why make me wait until tomorrow at 1 p.m. or something?

Jason How: Exactly.

Joe Casabona: From a tech side, that makes the tech stack a little bit easier too, right? You don’t need to sign up for some expensive webinar software that charges for the replays or whatever. You can just have unlisted video on YouTube and embed it on a page.

Jason How: Yeah, absolutely.

Joe Casabona: Now, I will ask this. Based on your experience, do you see people engage in chat? Because I’ve also seen it where the webinar is pre-recorded, but somebody, either the person giving the webinar or someone pretending to be the person giving the webinar is engaging in the chat answering questions.

Jason How: We have seen that but I don’t think that’s really something that I would recommend anyone to do because it just takes so much of time. And generally for scheduling a webinar to happen on demand, it’s going to be hard to catch these people. But yeah, I do agree that there are several clients that we have who have pre-recorded webinars, they have a lot of engagement, and they simply just upload everything, just rerun it as a webinar. Sometimes you see them greeting people in a webinar and all that. It’s actually real. It was like a recorded version of it.

Joe Casabona: Right, right.

Jason How: What we do these days on our end sometimes is that we just make it clear to people that we just recorded a private training and you’re getting a recording of it.

Joe Casabona: Got you

Jason How: It’s kind of like genuine upfront.

Joe Casabona: Got you. I got it. So run a webinar at the beginning of the quarter and just run that webinar for the whole quarter or whatever.

Jason How: Exactly.

Joe Casabona: Cool. I like that. I’m definitely going to steal that idea. So this has been fantastic. We’re coming up on time. I always ask about tips for the listeners, and you’ve given us a lot about ads, webinars. I like to ask about tools. Are there any that you, I’m not going to say necessarily recommend, but that you use and like if someone’s in the market?

Jason How: I would 100% recommend Hyros, H-Y-R-O-S. It’s a relatively new addition to the market, but it allows you to track and really look at where your spend is going. Like for example, we spend between $30,000 to $100,000 a month for most of our clients, and we see how that span is turning into calls, appointments scheduled, and also into sales as well. Because it really integrates your payment processes, your CRM systems and Facebook, Google, and all your traffic sources. So you’re able to see where you’re getting the most ROI. It really helps us to optimize that a lot. So highly recommend checking out Hyros, H-Y-R-O-S.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. I will link that in the show notes. And to validate everything Jason has just said, if you go to hyros.com and you click on “Get the demo,” it brings me right to a scheduling page. So the funnel here is in action for a company that focuses on ads. That’s fantastic.

I’ll also throw in one tool that I really like. We talked about meetings and communication. I’ve been using ZipMessage a lot, which is like asynchronous video chats, essentially. It’s super great. I’m using it with my students, my members, and my coaching clients. So I’ll link that in the show notes as well. This is how much I like it. It’s not even going to be an affiliate link. I just really like that tool. I think it’s fantastic.

Jason How: That’s awesome.

Joe Casabona: Great. This has been fantastic. Jason, I really appreciate it. I do have one more question for you before we get going. And that is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Jason How: Well, in terms of trade secret, I think one of the things I learned several years ago that has really helped me see consistent progress in the last two years, in fact, I’ll maybe split it into one and a half year, one is the sequence in which you solve problems is really important. The sequence in which you solve problems is really important.

And number two, growth always creates chaos. So when things fail, when things break down, it’s part of the growth process. Don’t get frustrated by it. Just embrace it, work on it. You know, growth happens when you look back six months later, and you’re like, “Wow, I’ve grown this much.”

Recently I spoke with my team, you know, their morale was hit because we lost I think one or two clients in the month of May. And I looked back and I told them, “Guys, this is part of the growth process. We are learning what kind of clients we shouldn’t be working with, what kinds of clients we should work with.”

And the fact is when we look back for last two years, our clients have grown tremendously. I was telling my team that we have grown two times compared to last year, we have grown three times compared to two years ago. So that is often hard to see when you are just in the grind every single day. But when you look back, zoom out kind of back six months, 12 months, 24 months, you can really see the growth.

Joe Casabona: That’s great. I love that. So the sequence in which you solve problems is important and growth always causes chaos. I mean, there’s a reason they call it growing pains, right? You are learning to solve newer, bigger problems. Cooking for yourself is different than cooking for a family of five for example.

Jason How: Exactly.

Joe Casabona: Especially when one of those children does not like whatever you make them for dinner. Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything, but I’m speaking from experience.

Jason, this has been great. I appreciate all of the advice that you’ve given us. Be sure if you are a member to stick around. After the sign-off, for build something more, we’ll be talking about some lesser-known or maybe lesser thought about ad platforms, because Tik Tok is pretty well known at this point. And if you do want to sign up, head over to buildsomething.club and sign up.

Jason, if people want to know more about you, where can they find you?

Jason How: The best place to find us is our agencyj.co. That’s our company’s website. Then when it comes to my own writing, and some of the tips that I give to, you know, just in general, marketers, agencies, and business owners, it would be Jasonhjh.com.

Joe Casabona: All right. I will link to all of that and more in the show notes over at streamlined.fm/234. Jason, thanks so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

Jason How: Thank you so much, Joe, and thanks, everyone.

Joe Casabona: Thanks, everyone for listening. And until next time, get out there and build something.

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