David:

[0:00] Well, it's my pleasure to have Ben Jones with me today from Titan Marketer. He has multiple businesses, including this one and also one called Youth in Business. And he's also starting a mining company, if you can believe that. It's kind of neat. And so there's various online marketing strategies today, and he knows a lot about them. But today we're going to talk a little bit about YouTube marketing, why that is different and a good way to go today. So Ben, welcome to Redeeming Business Today podcast. I'm glad you're with us.

Ben:

[0:30] Cool. Thank you, David, for having me. And I appreciate all the listeners at Redeem Business today. And hopefully we're able to deliver some value to you for your time and attention. And, yeah, excited to be here, I guess.

David:

[0:44] Yeah, thank you. And Ben comes all the way from Australia to visit with us today. So, Ben, what is one way that you believe that we can honor God in our business that other people may not know about?

Ben:

[0:58] That other people may not know about. I mean, so I guess I'm just going to talk from the Christian perspective because that's my particular faith. God is obviously a bigger topic than that. But I think other people may not know about, I think, is a harder one. I can just talk from my own personal experience. I think, look, if we can probably two parts. One, center it on some form of Christ-like actions. I think that's probably a massive thing to look at. And the other thing is be willing and open to receive inspiration daily if you can. So I have like a little journal that I write my things in each day, like bigger ideas that I want to achieve. And one of them is always like receive inspiration daily. And that might be like something to do with one of your staff, like, hey, this particular staff, something's not quite right. You know, book call with them or whatever it might be.

Ben:

[1:56] And you'll be surprised. But when you put that forward in, say, prayer or like, hey, can I receive some inspiration today? And you don't have to be a set faith to pray and ask for that. I don't think like you don't have to go to church every Sunday or read the Bible or whatever it might be. But I think just the prayer and the asking for some sort of inspiration daily, you'll be surprised at the opportunities and things that will come up and might be like oh you should ring this person or do that or solve problems and opportunities will arrive well i find anyway in my personal day-to-day yeah.

David:

[2:31] Absolutely and like so many things you find what you look for you know if you look for bad you're going to find it if you look for good you're going to find that too yes absolutely

Ben:

[2:42] Yeah no good so um so i see i mean that's something little that i do but works really well.

David:

[2:50] Good. Thank you. Thank you, Ben. Take five, seven minutes to give us a little background of your journey and how you started into business and where you are today.

Ben:

[3:01] Yeah, look, I grew up on a farm, very humble beginnings. I certainly didn't come with a silver spring or anything like that. And yeah, look, my mom and dad had a rule. It was like, you get a degree or you go to college, university, or you get a trade or you don't leave home.

Ben:

[3:21] And so for me, I was quite entrepreneurial as a kid, you know, like I'd go out door knocking and sell things and, you know, grow things and take them to market and whatever. But business was deemed as risky back then, you know, it wasn't really a path that someone took at a young age. So I actually, you know, me in school didn't agree on too much, too many things by the time I was, you know, in the later part of school. So I left there and basically decided to become an electrician. And I did that for a good, I don't know, decade or more.

Ben:

[3:53] But then I had to unlearn all the things about becoming an employee to becoming a business owner. Like there's a lot to unlearn and unpack there. And to be honest, I stayed in my job way longer than I should have in the fear of like not taking that leap because, you know, it was just a pretty scary thing. And from there, I went and bought a whole bunch of online businesses. That's how I really got started in the online marketing space. And that was really fun. And then we sold. Got to a point, my brother and I did that together. He wanted to go traveling and sell everything and cash out. And he did that. And then I kind of got to the point in my life where I'm like, well, what do I do now? Like, what's the next step? And my son wanted pocket money and we ended up helping him start a little business where he sold herbs out of the backyard. And then we had heaps of parents ask us how they could do that too. And that's where Youth in Business kind of grew from. It went from my son selling herbs to a massive thing. Yeah.

Ben:

[4:58] So that was the beginning there of Youth in Business. That ended up being a massive business, you know, speaking on stages, 800 people in most capital cities in Australia and the UK. And we sort of wound it down to just an online thing over COVID.

Ben:

[5:15] But, yeah, so, I mean, that was cool. We had kids literally, you know, become mariners, buy houses before they were 18. And one of our kids wrote a book on how he made more money in these principles. So I got to write the foreword for it. So I think that was really cool and that was probably one of the more rewarding things that we did.

Ben:

[5:33] But being an entrepreneur, I started other businesses as well while that was running and that's really where the online marketing side of things came from. So we know Titan Marketer really started out of the necessity of Facebook ads sucking for us and if you're running any sort of meta or Facebook ads, there's going to be a time where you either lose your ad account or your ads get banned or you just can't grow on scale anymore because it won't let you and and for me that time came we were actually um i was heading to china to do some business over there and that was a time before vpns existed so when you went to china back then there really was no google and there was no facebook or you couldn't check in on anything and and what ended up happening was we had a couple of rooms to fill and you know we wanted to spend say 40 to 60 000 on marketing and we'd already bought these rooms like you know rooms to for people to come and listen to you through business and, we couldn't we couldn't fill them because facebook shut all our accounts down for some ridiculous reason um which i think is quite common for a lot of people and my knee-jerk reaction as most business owners do is it's like well we need to fill these rooms so you know figure out google we hired an agency uh it was google and youtube and let's see how we go and.

Ben:

[6:56] And internally we run our own ads too and i got home and the cool thing was we actually did better than the agency so i was like well you're supposed to be the experts here and yeah and and from there we we basically just you know people are asking me to speak on stages about it and the whole thing you know and i was doing that but we didn't really have a company around it i was just sort of showing people what was working for us and um fast forward a year or two from there you know we we formed a consulting company around how to do youtube and google ads and today we have an agency and a whole bunch of things but um you know these days you know we work with all sorts of different businesses you know generated millions of dollars online across just about every industry you could think of and um yeah i speak at international events people flying around to speak and a whole bunch of other things so it's it's definitely you know growing to a point where we we have got a lot of social proof and we get a lot of really cool results um but i think that's kind of the journey you know like that that was the journey going through the mining stuff also happened during covid that was another fun fact um you know it was we couldn't fly or do anything so i got into gold prospecting started a higher company and acquiring mining leases so you know these are the things that happen when you've got massive add and you're a um serial entrepreneur.

David:

[8:15] You want to dig into something else, literally.

Ben:

[8:18] Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of, I guess, the quick overview story. Now, it sounds really great when you put it together in a sentence, you know, or like a five-minute reel. But realistically, there was a lot of drama and things that went wrong along the way and, you know, a lot of prayer and a lot of drama to make it all happen. And I guess, yeah, it's been a really rewarding journey.

David:

[8:44] Yeah, it's not always. Sometimes you see like these flower gardens around people's homes. Oh, that's so pretty. I'll go get some flowers. You know, it took a lot of work for that to get there. And that's the same way with business. It's like, I love what you have. I want what you have. I'm going to go do that. And it's like, oh, it's not the same for every person. Just like every house is different. You know, it's every person's different. Every business is different. And what worked for you may not work for me and whatever, you know. So it's yeah it's trial and error

Ben:

[9:15] Yeah a lot of people will say oh man you're so lucky to you know so i think you make your own luck a little bit you know so um yeah so so anyway that's uh, that was an interesting point but um,

Ben:

[9:32] yeah okay.

David:

[9:34] So tell us about youtube marketing why why is that better than facebook ads right now

Ben:

[9:40] Yeah look i think the big difference between youtube and facebook marketing is is the targeting in particular and you know how and being able to scale so you know if you're if you're wanting better quality leads youtube is really the place to go they're they're the same size facebook and youtube relatively like facebook maybe a little bit bigger during covet youtube is bigger in terms of daily users the fun fact is that less than 10 percent of marketers in the u.s at the moment are actually using youtube whereas over 90 percent of marketers in the u.s are using facebook or meta ads right now they're a similar size so the cool thing is youtube ads of google ads will literally give you five hundred dollars when you spend your first five hundred dollars with google youtube ads um and i think they want people to come on their platform right so so that's the difference i think the maturity of the of the platform is different um now if we go back maybe 12 years facebook was handing out 75 dollars to to come and join facebook ads right um when was the last time facebook ever gave or mitigated anyone 70 dollars to to come advertise on that platform like.

Ben:

[10:48] It's just this is not a happening thing and i think the main thing is you know all these things are on an adoption curve so in 10 years 10 12 years ago facebook was like the easiest thing to grow your business with you go back 10 years before that like google search ads or ppc ads were super cheap you know like cents for a click and now they're the most expensive platform out there 10 years prior to that you know we're in the 90s email marketing was the big thing hardly anyone was doing it and i think like the analogy i use is that's where youtube is today and it's not going to stay there forever but it is a massive opportunity at the moment but you know you go fast forward 10 years and maybe tiktok's figured out it's targeting and all the rest of it and now YouTube ads are super expensive and that's the new thing right so I'm certainly not loyal to YouTube ads in any way it's just the thing that's the big opportunity and working really well at the moment I mean that's one difference the other big difference is you know the targeting is so much better if you were to compare the targeting of YouTube and Facebook, Man, it'd be like Godzilla versus Bambi and, you know, Facebook is not the Godzilla.

David:

[11:53] Okay.

Ben:

[11:54] And the real reason for that is you can target people based on income. So let's say, you know, Google knows everything about you, right? Let's be real. It knows, you know, what you watch on YouTube. It knows what you're searching on Google. It knows your location from your phone. It knows all the emails that are in your Gmail, you know, all your browser history. Like it knows more about you than probably your wife or your spouse right so for it to say we think you're in a certain income band it's actually pretty accurate so the cool thing is you can be like well i want to target my stuff to the top 30 percent income owners which is great because it takes away the biggest objection in the sales process is like hey i love your stuff but i just can't afford it so the quality of lead is better from that perspective and the other side is instead of just having like general interest targeting like you have on Facebook where and and that's amazing like on Facebook you can target people who let's say you want to target a mom with I don't know two or three kids who um really likes surfing chocolate and cats and really wants to have a cake for her birthday that has uh you know a chocolate surfboard with a cat on it you could literally target people just on that right now that's amazing now the other thing like you could do the same thing on YouTube, but you can now target people who have, let's say a cake costs $500.

Ben:

[13:14] The top 10 or 20% of income owners, because you know that they're the only person buying a $500 cake, but you can also target people who are searching for, you know, chocolate cat surfboard cakes, for example. So that's another big difference of YouTube ads versus Facebook ads. The targeting and the quality of the traffic is way better. So...

David:

[13:38] Okay. So what does marketing on YouTube look like? Is that all the little ads, video ads you see, or are there other things there too?

Ben:

[13:46] Man, there's so many things you can do advertising on YouTube. So I think that, you know, there's probably a couple of different camps. So one is what we would call like long form ads. They might go for like a minute or a couple of minutes, usually under three minutes is kind of the cap. And they're the ads that we call them pre-roll ads. When you're watching YouTube, you know, you've got the five seconds to skip.

David:

[14:10] Yeah, five seconds to get your point across, don't you?

Ben:

[14:14] Yeah, yeah. So you've got like the hook, what you say in those first five seconds is super important. And so they're kind of your longer form video ads and they work really, really well. Traditionally, they were kind of like the gold standard of YouTube advertising. This year, however, with the, you know, they brought out in demand, sorry, demand gen campaigns. And YouTube Shorts and all of that, the shorter ads can work really well too, okay? Bear in mind that you're going to have to get to the point. But I think the cool thing is you have to deliver some value in the ad or help people in some way because there's a big difference between Facebook and YouTube ads. Facebook ads have to be interruptive and salesy. YouTube ads, you know, because they're doing that. People are looking through, looking at like what people had for breakfast and whatever, you know, like you need to interrupt that. Whereas on on youtube people are at youtube for a different thing they're there to be entertained or educated right so you need to have an ad that delivers value that's not so salesy.

Ben:

[15:15] Anyway and so the cool thing you can now do is you can now do image ads on youtube and you can do uh you know so you don't have to create videos which is amazing and the other thing you do is like the shorter form ads because people who are flipping through youtube shorts are used to shorter content right whereas people who are watching a 10 minute long form youtube videos that they want they used to longer format so there's kind of two um yeah two sides of youtube advertising now whereas maybe you know 12 to 18 months ago there really wasn't the short

Ben:

[15:48] form when the image started to really play too much so okay.

David:

[15:53] So if i wanted to advertise on youtube what would be my first steps of doing that

Ben:

[16:01] First steps so we actually had a look at the most like what is the most uh profitable in terms of return on ad spend so if you're going to spend a dollar what's the most profitable targeting to do on youtube um and what sort of ad would you need so the the most profitable one is to go and target your competitors urls or websites which is pretty cool so let's say you pick your top five um competitors you just go grab their basically their exact website address put it into youtube ads and then anyone who visits your competitors website you show ads to um so you basically we call it ethically stealing your competitors traffic i did like some training on it whatever had on my whiteboard and my you know my son comes at the bottom he's like not keeping the commandments and i was like no no it's ethically stealing that's just a play on words you guys you shouldn't be stealing things i'm like i'm not stealing so anyway you're not actually stealing for those listening it's just a clever way of targeting um so that that works really well um because the people who are going there are already you know looking for a service like yours right they're already in that shopping mindset um so we find that and not a lot of people know about it so it works really well so that's that was my pro tip if you were to target things like softwares, like let's say you want to go against people who use HubSpot or ClickFunnels.

Ben:

[17:26] Put the login page instead of the sales page so you get the users of that particular thing that's another pro tip um so i'd probably start there like if i had to build one campaign it would be that um and then i would create an ad around you know what it is that they're looking for that delivers some value um whether it's a longer one and some shorter one and some image ads and you pretty much be good to go so so.

David:

[17:52] When you when you say they click their url is there like a place to say if whoever's searching this that's who the ads are going to is that the point of that

Ben:

[18:02] So they're probably two things so like if you're searching a particular keyword like how to thing you offer um that sort of targeting would be someone who's searching those keywords on google you want when the next time they go on to youtube you want to show them your youtube ad okay so a lot of people will be running like ppc ads or google search ads for example um and then they come over to youtube and find that you know the cost per lead is like half you know or at least 80 better and the cool thing is um they're a better quality lead because i've watched a video so that's one form of targeting the other one is if people are looking for a particular url um but most of the websites out there have google analytics on it plus they have you know the chrome browser so which google has all that information so they know who's going where now they can't google doesn't say or youtube ads doesn't say every single person who's visiting this landing page you're going to see they kind of put in a bit of some mysterious language like people users who visit sites like this you know but pretty much it's pretty accurate and um and we know that because we actually like for the lead gen that come in we actually get a lot of people who like we record all their sales calls and we'll literally get like hey i was looking for this particular company but you know i'm you know saw you and you popped up so like we know that it definitely works right um we.

David:

[19:28] Knew that you're looking for them we just thanks for confirming yeah

Ben:

[19:32] Yeah so if you'd like to you know literally ethically just take the traffic straight from there and put it over to you it's a really cool way of doing it so i super suggest that one um But that's how it kind of works, if that makes sense to it.

David:

[19:45] Hmm. Interesting. It looks like there's a lot of, I can see your brain in just, there's a lot of, a lot of cool things to, to work with.

Ben:

[19:54] So, yeah.

David:

[19:55] But, uh, how can my audience find out more about you or take steps to work with you if they so chose?

Ben:

[20:01] Yeah, cool. So, I mean, we have a lot of free training and things. If that's something that you wanted to have a play around with first, just check out TitanMarketer.com. Like it's TitanMarketer ER, it's not Titan Marketing, So Titan Marketer. And so if you head over there, there's some cool training and things. If you wanted to book a call where someone can walk you through if your ads would be profitable on YouTube, that's something that we do. Other than that, if you wanted to reach out to me on, say, LinkedIn or Instagram, you may need to look up Benjamin Jones instead of Ben Jones. It's a very common name, Ben Jones. There's like a bajillion of us out there. But yeah, so Titan Marketer might be your best bet. Or if you find me on, you know, Insta or LinkedIn, that's a great place. Other than that, like, I think, you know, wish you guys all the best. And, yeah, it's been fun being here.

David:

[20:51] All right. Very good. And one more thing before we close.

David:

[20:55] You've talked a lot about marketing with YouTube. What is one thing you'd like our audience to take away from this and take action on?

Ben:

[21:04] I think we'll just give YouTube ads a go. Like, literally, like, probably two things. One, you can get started and they'll literally give you $500 on your first $1,000 to get started. So just get started like you've got nothing to lose, you know, for getting out there and giving it a shot. So definitely, particularly if you're running Facebook ads and you're dealing with, you know, the revenue rollercoaster over there, you know, it's a fun place to be in terms of targeting and the things that you could do, you know, it's what you could do on Facebook a decade ago plus heaps of other cool, fun things you can play around with. So go check that out. And I think the other one, David, if I can, just at the end, is coming back to the thing that we talked about before, of like maybe seeking to receive inspiration daily on your business and maybe asking for the things that you require, and putting a bit more faith into your business and seeing where that will take you.

David:

[21:58] Sounds good. Very good. Well, I know you talked a bit about youth and business, and it would be fun to talk to you a little bit more about that, but not today. We've kind of run out of time. Thank you for your time sharing your expertise and knowledge Ben appreciate it and friends that's all for now I hope you've been in trust you've been inspired to redeem your business and your time and use it to basically use your time and business to glorify God in what you do and remember that time has limits you can't do everything and so choose wisely