#308 – How To Use Social Media To Absolutely Crush It ($50 mil+) On Amazon
In episode 308 of the AM/PM Podcast, Kevin and Manuel discuss:
- 02:00 – How Kevin And Manuel Met Each Other
- 03:50 – What Does Manuel Actually Do?
- 06:25 – A Specific Example And Strategy From Manuel
- 08:04 – Working With Dr. Eric Berg
- 10:45 – Talking About TikTok And Musical.ly
- 12:10 – The Beautiful Thing About Creating Content
- 13:30 – Manuel’s Case Study That Earned $4 Million
- 14:30 – A Strategy Not Depending On Advertising Alone
- 16:00 – Growing A TikTok Account From 0 To 650K In 5 Months
- 18:00 – The Snap-Pop Strategy For TikTok
- 20:45 – The Formula Is “Edu-tainment”
- 21:30 – 4 Social Media Platforms You Should Pay Attention To
- 23:00 – The Long Game In Attention
- 25:00 – It’s All About Placements And Opportunities
- 25:45 – Instagram Reels, TikTok Feed, And YouTube Shorts
- 30:30 – What Is Happening On The Pay To Play Side Of Social Media?
- 31:48 – Facebook Is No Longer The Dominating Platform For Advertising
- 33:15 – TikTok Advertising May Be The Next Big Thing
- 36:50 – Google Has Improved Their Advertising Capabilities
- 39:00 – True Branding Versus Selling Products
- 42:00 – How To Get In Touch With Manuel Suárez
- 44:30 – The Ninja Lifehack Tip Of The Week
Transcript
Kevin King:
Welcome to episode 308 of the AM/PM Podcast. I know some of you are maybe at sale and scale right now, or you’re just leaving or have just left. Hopefully, it’s been a great event for you. Gotten a lot of good value, learned a lot, and met a lot of good people. These events are always great to go to. This week, I’ve gotten Manuel Suarez as on the podcast, and Manuel is an old-school guy. I’ve known him for probably six, or seven years now. He is amazing at what he does, especially when it comes to building brands and doing stuff outside of Amazon, he’s doing like 75 million a year on one of his brands. Another one’s just crushing it and it’s not just Amazon. I think 25% of his business is on Amazon, but he’s doing some really amazing stuff with four different social media platforms. And it’s not Facebook that you need to pay attention to. And he’s gonna talk you through some of what he’s doing and give you some really good insights. I think this is gonna be an episode that you really enjoy. Manuel Suarez, it’s so great to have you here on the AM/PM Podcast. How are you doing man?
Manuel:
Mr. Kevin King is an absolute pleasure to be here. I’m excited about today for sure. I’m doing great, man. How about you?
Kevin King:
I’m doing awesome. You know what? I’m always super stoked to talk to you because there’s always just so much value every time when we talk to you, you’ve come on the freedom ticket. So those of you that know the Freedom Ticket, Manuel’s done some of the coursework in there and done some of the training. He’s been on the Helium 10 Elite. He’s spoken you know, all over the place. This guy is just full of knowledge. He’s one of those people that doesn’t just teach it. He actually does it. There’s a difference. There are a lot of people out there that teach that don’t do this. Guy’s doing both. And I think I actually met you. I’m trying to remember. Yeah, I think it was in Orlando, as you’re based in Florida.
Manuel:
It was a click-funnels event. And I remember it as if it was yesterday, but it’s crazy, but I think it’s either four or five years ago by now, Kevin, it’s been a while and we got together in this mansion this big house and it was a lot of us, a lot of power players in that place. And yeah, it was Athena Severi that put that together and she brought us in, and then I was able to meet you. I met Manny. It was a lot of great people in that particular house and a couple of days of like genius brainstorming. And it was great times and everybody was scratching in the couches or in the beds across the board, everybody well behaved. There was nothing happening out of place, but it was definitely a great time with a lot of great minds that we spent in that house.
Kevin King:
And this is one of the points I always tell, try to make people, they say, why should I go to events? And some people are like, ah, I’m not gonna learn anything. These presenters, I’ve seen ’em on a podcast. I’ve heard ’em here or there they’re boring. And sometimes that’s the case. Sometimes you get some actually good presenters, but a lot of times it’s exactly what we just said is where the value is. It was like a brain trust in this place. And we’re just hanging out and talking and developing relationships that you would never make anywhere else. And I remember you, I think it was like 2017. You and one of your, your employees, I think was there y’all were talking about–
Manuel:
Yeah, our chief marketing officer Jorge was there. He’s still with us.
Kevin King:
Yeah. Y’all were talking about YouTube and you’re like, Kevin, you gotta look into YouTube. Youtube is gonna be where it’s at. They’re gonna be doing this. And this “I’m like, Nah, this YouTube, like, no, they’re starting this other little–” I forgot what it was. It was like their own little sub, something about YouTube. And then that thing just blew up. You like told me, like I was on the insides, like inside stock information kind of like, and it just blew up. I was like, all right, this guy knows his stuff. So for those that don’t know, what the heck do you actually do? Well,
Manuel:
I have two companies. One of them is a supplement company, which is where it all started. It’s a company called NaturalSlim, and we have been servicing American communities across the world. Our biggest market is the USA. Some people still don’t realize that the minority of Latin American people in the US is massive. We’re 60 million Latin American people. And that’s more people in this country than in most Latin American countries out there. So it’s a big, big audience. So we started paying attention to them because we had a great content creator, which was my father, which as I told you before Kevin, he passed away. But he was a great educator in the Latin community. And on the back of his incredible content, we built an incredible company that today, this year 2022, we’re gonna probably break 50 million in revenue as at the time of this recording we’re on track to do so.
Manuel:
And we build an incredible company just in the US. Worldwide we’re gonna do 75 million in revenue around, around the world. Again, when you think about a company that has no outside investors, there’s literally no funding, no venture capitalists, nothing, just bootstrap by definition. As they say, it’s been quite amazing. And I have a lot of value to give to people on that subject. And on the back of making that company successful, we took off, we grew like crazy over the years, and a lot of people were asking me what I was doing for that brand. And that led towards me, servicing people. And I built a company called AGM Marketing. AGM stands for Attention-Grabbing Media. And I specialize in teaching people and helping people implement strategies that are gonna help them capture attention with the power of these social media platforms.
Manuel:
So we built a company that has over a hundred staff now and we specialize in helping incredible people. I get to work with some of the brightest minds in the world every single day, helping them spread their message. And we also help a lot of e-commerce brands. We do a lot of Amazon brands and we help them grow. And a lot of strategies we’re obsessed with the process of helping brands capture attention. So, Kevin, the way it works for me is that because I have a brand, which I own, which is a pretty big brand at this point, and we do a lot of great things. I usually test things out with this brand. I strategize with it. I implement things in this brand and then the things that work I export and I show people what I’m doing. I talk about it on my social media channels. And then I service my clients with these strategies.
Kevin King:
So what’s the recent thing? Let’s give the audience an example there, something recently that you did in the supplement business that actually you tested and you’re like, holy cow, this is like working like magic and you’ve then actually been able to lift that out and apply it to all your other clients somewhere else. And it’s also working like magic. Can you give us a specific example of something?
Manuel:
So I know this podcast is full of amazing Amazon sellers and amazing brand owners. And they’re always looking for the next level strategies and how to scale their brands. I can tell you the one thing that is the most successful thing that you could ever do for your brand. That is gonna be the thing that is gonna help you build a legacy. That’s gonna go beyond just one body, one CEO, one founder. The thing that you can actually do that lives on forever in the internet world is becoming a content machine. And what I mean by that is that any single product, any single brand, any single service, most of you guys here have brands, have products. They actually have a problem that they’re solving for people. You are making people better with your products. If you’re not making people better, then you don’t really have a brand because that’s what we’re doing.
Manuel:
Selling our products. We’re helping people solve their problems, whether that’s gardening or that’s like beauty or weight loss, or it doesn’t matter what your market is, you’re solving people’s problems. So the best longer-term strategy that you can incorporate for your brand is becoming a content creator, either yourself or having somebody that becomes that face for your brand. And I’m talking from experience. I have built some of the biggest content creators in the world, and I can tell you a lot of people say that, and then there are a few of us that actually do it. In my case, if you think about keto, a subject that went super exclusively viral over the last several years, a diet that went from nobody knows who it is. Nobody knows what it is now it’s a mainstream diet and technology for losing weight, for energy, et cetera. The keto king, the one that actually, maybe you could say is the one most responsible for this massive trend becoming so widespread, not only in the USA, but across the world is my client. And this individual has built an incredible business around his content. He’s a great educator. His name is Dr. Eric Berg. And a lot of you guys have heard about him. Some of you guys have seen his content. We have a YouTube channel that generates 300,000 subscribers every single 28 days, we’re gonna break 9 million–
Kevin King:
300,000 new subscribers?
Manuel:
New subscribers. We’re gonna break 9 million in the next couple of weeks, 9 million subscribers. And if you try to find somebody bigger than him, you’re gonna have a tough time. Like not Oprah, not Trump, not Dr. Us, none of these guys are bigger than Dr. Berg. Like they all wanna be like Dr. Berg. So on his content, he’s become so widespread that people are looking for his products nonstop. And now we have a brand that generates 75 million a year in revenue. And you guys are ninjas on Amazon yourself. So you can probably look it up yourself and check it out. If you search for Dr. Berg on Amazon, you’ll see what the brand is. It’s a big freaking deal. So I can tell you that for Dr. Berg for my brand NaturalSlim, because of our content strategies.
Manuel:
Let me give you an example of how powerful this is, Kevin. In the month of August, we just had a great month on natural slim for every $4 and 95 cents. I spent on advertising, I generated a hundred dollars in sales. Please find somebody else that is gonna have similar numbers to this. A lot of people talk about in e-commerce just not Amazon necessarily, right on the e-commerce side of things on, let’s say a Shopify store. If you’re able to put a dollar in advertising and bring 2 or 3 dollars back, you’re winning, well, I put a dollar and I get 30-35 dollars back. And that is not because I’m a magician, but because I believe in this particular strategy of putting your content in front of people and making it omnipresent. So I have a leverage opportunity. So just to be specific about something that we did recently, so TikTok is a trend, Kevin, you know, all about it. It’s taken off, right? Like it’s a couple of years ago, it was for kids. It was for dancing. It was for stupidities. It was for fun. It was a waste of time.
Kevin King:
Well, it used to be called Musically or something and then they rebranded, right?
Manuel:
That was the original name. I remember going back to maybe 2017 or 2018. My daughter was super into it. It was called Musically. They figured out that that was actually too limited of a niche. They called it to and they started taking off. And the demographic now for you and for your brand, is there, like the demographic has been invading the platform.
Kevin King:
It’s not just kids, it’s not just kids. I mean, there are 60-year-old people that are addicted to it. It’s the whole range. Well,
Manuel:
It’s crazy because in the internet world right now, if you look at the broad internet world there are 8 billion people on the planet, and not even 4 billion people have access to the internet, right? So we’re looking at 3.7 I think the number is people that have access to the internet. Like we don’t pay attention to the number of people that don’t have internet places with a lot of poverty, et cetera. But out of that 3.7 billion people, you can pretty much guarantee now that one out of every free has a TikTok account. It’s crazy. So, so you have a massive audience in there. That’s growing. If you look at all the social media platforms, historically, nobody has been able to grow faster than TikTok has grown. Like they cross a billion users, active users in a matter of just a few years and they have taken off.
Manuel:
So one thing that we did recently was that I took my father’s content. I told you, he passed away in February. Well, here’s the beautiful thing about creating content. It is permanent, and it can be used over and over again. And if it is valuable to your brand and to your message and who you are, there is an unlimited way of using this content on these platforms. For a couple of reasons, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, these platforms are feeds or reels or stories, which means that they disappear into the platform. Once you post something and if somebody didn’t see it, it’s gone. Different to YouTube, right on YouTube. You have a library of content. People can keep on finding you over and over again. That’s why YouTube is so important. But on these other platforms, you can keep on reusing content over and over again.
Manuel:
So I take something that my dad did two years ago before he passed away, and that content can be used over and over and over and over and over again, he made 2,400 videos. So I took his content, which was content that was horizontal full length, six-minute videos, 10-minute videos, 12-minute videos. And I made a lot of different, small vertical clips from that content. I find the beginning point and I find an ending to that video and I cut it and I make it vertical. And that becomes my TikTok content. So we took a channel. You guys are welcome to go and check it out, just go to TikTok and search for @us.naturalslim. So my particular recent case study is incredible. So we had a record-breaking month. Last month, the month of August, August was a record-breaking month.
Manuel:
We generated a little bit over $4 million in revenue for this is just for the supplement brand. By the way, our Amazon is about 25% of it. And we have a call center, we got Shopify, we got other sales channels, but it’s an ecosystem. Everything feeds off of each other. What we did with TikTok, and again, TikTok is just one small part of the entire world of what we do. Like we do many different things. Like I have explosive Facebook profiles. I got big YouTube channels. If you guys wanna check out my YouTube channel, it’s called MetabolismoTV. And we generate somewhere around 30 to 40 million views every single month. And we bring in 150,000 new subscribers every single month continuously. Our channel is about to break 6 million subscribers any day now. So it is an ecosystem, right?
Manuel:
Like, so I have this content machine rolling that helps me generate an enormous volume of sales without having to spend too much money on advertising, and again, don’t get me wrong. I’m a big fan of advertising. Like I really believe in spending advertising dollars and not spending, but investing advertising dollars. So you can grow your brand PPC, and social media. It’s very important. It’s never, never a waste to put dollars behind trying to get your brand to get more attention. But in my case, I prefer to not depend on advertising. I prefer to if one day Facebook doesn’t like me, TikTok doesn’t like me, or YouTube shuts me down, which believe it or not, has happened in the past. I can keep on having a business because I built an ecosystem full of value for people going back to my case study. So about five months ago, I created a TikTok channel from scratch just from the bottom up, literally created the account is called @us.naturalslim.
Manuel:
Why did I call that @us.naturalslim? Because we have an international brand. And also because my website for e-commerce is called us.naturalslim.com. You guys are more than welcome to check it out. I always invite you guys. If you wanna compete in the Amazon community, Kevin, historically, people have not liked to share their brands. I’m an open book, man. I tell you exactly what I’m doing and I invite you to compete. I think competition is really, really healthy for sure. But I can tell you that our TikTok channel went from zero to almost 600,000 followers, and as of today in a matter of five months.
Kevin King:
So how did you do that? So you started from scratch, but what did you do to feed that? Was it a matter of tagging? What was the strategy actually to do
Manuel:
That? The main component is reusing old content that my father had made in the past six minute, 10-minute, 12-minute videos.
Kevin King:
How did you get people to actually watch that? So you didn’t have to create new stuff, which is cool. How did you just get to start that flywheel start going? So
Manuel:
To provide extra value to the audience for you guys that are listening. I welcome you guys to look at how we edit our content. You gotta look at how we edit and you gotta try to create your own template around there. There is a formula that works and obviously us.naturalslim profile, which you guys can go and check it out whenever you feel like it, it’s all gonna be in Spanish content. If you wanted to see one in English, so you can understand how we make the cuts and how we edit video, because this is something that you guys can hire anybody to do. You can check out Dr. Eric Berg TikTok channel, and you can see how we get it edited. Another channel that took off when exclusively viral, what we do is that we find a minute of content that has a great beginning and has an end, and we cut it and we make it vertical.
Manuel:
And then we add an attention-grabbing two-second card at the front of it, because a TikTok platform is gonna be something that people move very fast in. So as they scroll to the next piece of content on that feed, you have two seconds or less to capture their attention. So what I wanna do in that first two seconds is I wanna make it clear what the user will get if they stick around and watch that whole video. Those two seconds are crucial. As soon as those two seconds are done, I take that it’s almost like a slide or that label. I take it off the TikTok screen from that person. And then I let the content creator deliver the message in a snap-pop way. You cannot have a video on TikTok that has a lot of like “yeah, well you know, I think that what you gotta do”, no people are gonna slide to the next one.
Manuel:
They’re gone. So you gotta be really snap pop. So the editors can take whatever content you have. Like Kevin, you have a lot of great content. You snap pop it. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And you got a one-minute video that gives people value. Now, a lot of you guys are gonna be saying, yeah, no, of course, but what I wanna do is I wanna sell products. I just wanna get revenue. Here’s what you might not understand. The game of revenue is gonna be in direct proportion to the amount of value that you deliver to an audience. Back in the day, right? So you have Amazon brands. And as long as you have abilities to rank products, abilities to produce reviews, abilities to create great listings with images and copy, et cetera, people will find you, but here’s the thing.
Manuel:
The rules have changed quite a bit. And now launching a brand is more of a challenge than it was maybe five years ago when we didn’t have the same amount of competition. So you wanna make sure that you do things that are different. And let me tell you what the content game is different because most people don’t do it. Most people are consuming content. When you go around a park, when you go around a party, when you go around a building, people are doing one thing, they are consuming content. They’re not creating it. The ones that are creating it like Kevin and I were here, greeting content. We are few and far between. So you wanna leverage the fact that you are a minority and you wanna get that content out there. Because once you get attention, people are gonna wanna buy whatever you have to sell. And this is how I build brands. We are on track to do $85 million in revenue this year on our Amazon brands. And the way that we have done it is by positioning ourselves in social media, as people, as brands, as companies that really have a desire to help people and influence them.
Kevin King:
So if I’m a product seller and I do, like you said, I got a video that pops that I got something at first two seconds that grab their attention. Content’s just, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, nothing boring. Then what do I do at the end? Actually, get them to actually go buy my product. How do I get them from TikTok? You can’t really put a link right there. I mean, how do you get them to actually go and search on Amazon or to do whatever you want them to do as the next step, or go to your Shopify and buy your supplements or whatever it may be, or are you just hoping that they just do that? Just you’re planting a seed and you’re just hoping they go out there. And like that looked interesting. Let me go type this into Google or what’s the process?
Manuel:
I answered that question in a second, but just to complete what I was saying about the basics of it, right? So those two seconds, you want to add one sentence that explains what the video is about on the captions. And you want to add two to three hashtags. That’s pretty much, it doesn’t matter, right? So you don’t have to add 27 hashtags or none of that stuff. And the most important variable to the success of a TikTok content piece is gonna be the value of that content. How good is it? How attention-grabbing is? Ideally, we have a formula here that I’m gonna give you guys a word. That word is edutainment. You wanna make sure that you’re educating somebody while giving them some entertainment. That is a combination that’s gonna make TikTok profiles blow up. If you have those things going, you’re gonna take off.
Manuel:
So how do you make them go to your site? My approach Kevin is revenue and sales will happen if you stop focusing on revenue and sales and just focus on driving attention. So if you look at our content, every 10 videos or so every 12 videos, we’re trying to post three to four, a day, three or four a day, different schedules because people use TikTok. Again, what I’m telling you about TikTok is exactly the same formula on another hot placement, which is called Instagram Reel, and the exact same formula on another hot placement called Facebook Reels. And in the exact same formula on another hard placement called YouTube shorts. These are the four things that you guys need to be paying attention to right now, if you wanna grow organically and try to get someone that incredible snowball effect of people buying your stuff, just because they’re getting value from you.
Manuel:
So what I do on NaturalSlim is that every single 10 series of videos, eight, 10 videos, I have one ending graphic that shows our website and gives our phone number. Like if you don’t have a call center, you can just put your website link and put it on the end slide. But here’s what I noticed with this. Just so you guys can watch out for it. It’s crazy how a lot of people, shy away from your content. When you have a call to action, they push it away. And when they push it away, the algorithm recognizes that and they suppress your reach. So from our experience, having a call to action on every single video on these platforms takes away from the potential virality of the content itself. So I would just focus on attention-grabbing the question is, are you building cash flow or are you building a business?
Manuel:
If you’re building a business, then you know that the long game is attention. So if you can get people to pay attention to your brand, then your brand will grow with time. Instead of focusing on too much, like an overnight success. Now that’s the organic social media content route, right? Right now, there’s like people have been talking about like, or organic content is dead and all these other things. And it is dead in a lot of different areas. Like if you want to put content on Facebook pages organically on a regular feed, or if you wanna put content on your Instagram feed, the reach is terrible right now.
Kevin King:
Yeah. It’s horrible right now.
Manuel:
Absolutely terrible. Yeah. Like if you have 20,000 followers, you’ll get 12 likes or something. It’s terrible.
Kevin King:
Yeah. It’s all like right now, if I can post, I have 5,000 followers on my, I think 5,000 friends, I guess. And I don’t know what the number of followers is, but I can post something in some posts, it’ll give you that little number, even in groups, you know, like the Billion Dollar Seller Summit group has 400 or some odd people in there that have been to Billion Dollar Seller Summit. I could post something in there and they’ll tell me 37 people saw this. I’m like, what the hell? That doesn’t mean 37 people saw it. That means it went through 37 feeds. You know, it might have been two people that actually stopped and looked at it. And I’m like, what the heck? These are people who are in this group and then you’ll have another one.
Kevin King:
And it’ll be, you know, three-fourths of the group saw it. It all depends on interactions on likes, on shares, there’s an algorithm that works, and a lot of people don’t understand where Facebook and those guys are, they show it to a small subset. And if those people don’t interact, cuz you post it at the wrong time or it had a hot link in the description or whatever. The thing is that they think it might have been spammy. If there are no reactions, it just dies. It goes to never, never land. If those people react, then it’ll, they’ll show it to a few more. And if those people react, then they’ll show it to a few more. And so a lot of stuff just organically just never goes anywhere.
Manuel:
Absolutely. And it’s not about, you cannot take into account organic as a whole. It can’t be just organic. It has to be, you gotta look at the individual opportunities, Kevin, and again, you feel free to interrupt me at any time. I actually don’t breathe a lot and I just keep on talking. So that’s okay. You already know me, Kevin. That’s how I roll. The one thing to keep in mind is that opportunities they change throughout time. And if you, as an entrepreneur, as a business owner are not consistently looking for existing opportunities, you are missing out on what these things are. That’s why continuous education is essential. That’s why going to Kevin’s masterminds and going to the Billion Dollars Sellers Summit, and that’s why listening to podcasts and watching videos and getting yourself consistently trained is so vital because it’s moving so fast. I can tell you right now, organic is very different from placement to placement, forget about the platform to platform it’s different, massively different from placement to placement.
Kevin King:
Can you explain what that means? So someone doesn’t understand what placement means. Can you explain
Manuel:
That? Yeah. So Instagram, for example, is not Instagram. Only Instagram is Instagram Stories, Instagram Feed, and Instagram Reels. They recently did away with Instagram TV, but those are the main Instagram placements. So Instagram Stories, they’re still important, especially for your followers, not for discovery for your followers. You can still get some attention there. Instagram Reels is absolutely on freaking fire. It is absolutely the one place on Instagram where you can take off right now in a big way. But the one thing that pays off on Instagram and on Instagram Reels specifically is repetition doing the same thing over and over again, hoping that a few of those take off along the way, I can tell you that I get one video to take off out of every baby, 8 to 15, they take off and you never know which one it is. There are some elements that you can see that repeat themselves.
Manuel:
Like the value has to be given fast. It needs to be attention-grabbing. It needs to be educational, but at the same time have entertainment and it needs to be like fast snap, pop, boom, boom, boom. Those elements do repeat themselves. But the opportunity to grow organically right now has not been this strong since maybe 2013 on Facebook pages. It hasn’t been this powerful and it’s dependent on placements and opportunities. And the reason why this opportunity right now is so big. It’s because of competition, right? So TikTok came about, they started taking a lot of the attention out of these other platforms. A major demographic stopped using Instagram and Facebook and went to TikTok. Facebook and Instagram were feeling the pain. So they had to come up with their own thing and they copied them. They literally copied the exact thing that they had going on and they created Instagram Reels.
Manuel:
And you know, that’s the way that these companies actually pushed themselves to get better and stronger. So Instagram Reels and Facebook Reels are Facebook’s response to what TikTok did to their attention. And they are giving them the opportunity by them, I mean the content creators to reach audiences that they were not possible to reach just two years ago, you couldn’t reach these people. So for the first time, in almost a decade, we have the ability to create organic audiences at scale, just because of the competition created by TikTok, and now Facebook and Instagram now, and also YouTube Shorts happen to be this major opportunity for you to get discovered by people that otherwise would not know who the heck you are unless you pay to play. That’s the way that it’s been for several years. You had to advertise if you wanted to get attention, now you got this advantage.
Manuel:
And I urge people to take advantage of it because it’s gonna go away. At some point, YouTube actually followed on Instagram and Facebook’s steps and they created something called YouTube Shorts because they were losing too much attention. So the way that you grow a YouTube channel right now has to be, if you’re growing a YouTube channel from scratch, your main focus should be YouTube Shorts because it’s easier to get people to subscribe. If you guys just look at it for yourself, spend a few minutes on your phone, on the YouTube app, and see when you search for something, go ahead and search for example, for Dr. Burke or whatever you wanna search for. And you’ll see that there’s like horizontal videos showing up a lot of them. And there’s a recent Dr. Burke shorts. And if you can keep on going down, there’s another section that says Shorts Feed, and you can see there, you just start browsing through these videos.
Manuel:
There is a big red button at the bottom of every vertical video that says subscribe. So they’re making it very easy to grow subscribers with this content. Not only that, if you are doing great content, if you have good editors and you have great vertical content, you can promote your brand. You can actually now run advertising to your vertical YouTube Shorts and spend a little bit of money. And again, that’s a whole different conversation, but I am spending more money now for the first time, Kevin, to your surprise, probably I am spending more money on Google and YouTube than I’m spending on Facebook. And I’m talking about dramatically more money advertising on these platforms than I’m spending on Facebook and Instagram right now, finally, after many years of Facebook being cheaper, being more effective to reach more people. The playing field has been leveled out and the cause is very similar and the quality of the audience is better. And you can target people more effectively if you focus on doing YouTube advertising and Google advertising right now. But again, as I said, that’s a different conversation that I would recommend that you guys look into because it’s gonna help you get more attention.
Kevin King:
That whole advertising area is changing. I mean, it used to be one of your agencies. Y’all were really good at Facebook advertising at once, you should probably still be. But I mean, at one point that was like a big focus and you could go in there on Facebook and you could really just target the hell out of people with all the pixels and with all the audiences that you could do. A lot of that stuff is because of apple and Android and privacy reasons and the EU is going away. I mean, there are other things that are coming to replace them that may not be quite as effective, but you know that the big companies are working for ways to track you still, you know, even though that stuff is going away, some people know these as cookies but it goes beyond just cookies. But so what do you think is happening there on that, on the pay-to-play side that people need to be aware of, and that need to start focusing on
Manuel:
Good question, Kevin now, by the way, you’ve known me long enough that you know, that I used to call myself the Facebook ninja. Remember that?
Kevin King:
Oh yeah. I remember you had a course, everything.
Manuel:
Correct. So I took that thing out of my branding and actually a couple of years ago because I saw this shift coming. I have a podcast that used to be called the Facebook Marketing Ninja, and I took away the word Facebook. And now I’m just the marketing ninja. You’ll see ninjas floating all across my building and my headquarters over here. And I’m still the ninja. I’m still the marketing guy that’s focused on grabbing attention, ninja just strategies. But I took away the whole branding with Facebook because Facebook is no longer the dominating opportunity for advertising, as simple as that. And that comes from somebody that is spending many, many millions of dollars in advertising every single year. So I have a lot of data and I have a lot of adjustments going on. And last month I spent six times more on Google to do record-breaking numbers in revenue, and also record-breaking numbers in return on investment across any of these platforms.
Manuel:
So I’m paying a lot of attention to the outside world outside of Facebook. I can tell you that when it comes to Facebook advertising, I am making a big focus on Facebook to try to generate lists of people instead of just driving them to my stores, to purchase products. Instead of driving them to my Amazon listings, I am bringing them into my world to get their prospect’s identity, phone numbers, and emails, and I’m growing my list because I believe in my ability through my email marketing, through my SMS marketing, which is my favorite platform right now to bring them into our life, into our brand, to purchase products from us. So I’m making a big focus on Facebook and Instagram right now as our major, major sources for us of lead generation, not as major for revenue, and generation.
Manuel:
YouTube right now and Google are my number one go-to place for revenue generation. So that’s what I’m focusing on right now. I can tell you one thing that we’re diving into right now, which I’m very, very excited about is TikTok advertising. And you heard me, right? I said, TikTok ads. It’s a big deal. So if you’re an Amazon seller, which I’m assuming a lot of you guys are pretty much all of you guys, you need to look into that because here’s what’s happening right now. Tiktok advertising is becoming now what Facebook advertising was in 2014, and 2015. It was so new people were like, it was a pot of gold guys, a pot of gold. You were able to advertise for peanuts. Recently, we ran a test just because I love doing tests. And because I like to talk about the results from the test, we documented the whole test.
Manuel:
We created one single vertical piece of content to promote a product that we sell on our NaturalSlim brand. And we targeted the exact same demographic on TikTok and the exact same demographic on Facebook and Instagram and 35 to 44-year-old Latin females in the US that speak Spanish were the exact same demographic on both sides. And we ran it on TikTok and we ran it on Facebook. The cost of advertising was half what it was to accomplish triple the impressions that we were getting and to accomplish triple the prospects that we were getting. And we ended up getting RoAS to return advertising. That was something that I haven’t gotten in a few years. So I can tell you right now that TikTok advertising is something that you need to pay attention to. What TikTok has done to our advantage to Facebook’s demise is that they have literally plagiarized the Facebook business manager, which is great for us because when you go into the TikTok business manager, it all looks familiar.
Manuel:
The naming conventions of the business manager are what Facebook had on the Facebook business manager, which is now called the Meta Suite. So they use objectives. They use ad sets. They use ad sets, and ad creatives. They use audiences. The same language is it’s across the board. What TikTok has done in their business manager, but there are still baby steps on the platform. So you can see, for example, last month, they launched the ability for the first time to be able to connect an existing TikTok profile with your business manager. So you can now advertise using that profile, and not only that you can now retarget people consuming the content being seen on that TikTok profile. So this is just something that again, you gotta look at opportunities, guys. My obsession has not been to create opportunities. I’m not obsessed with the next big platform. I’m obsessed with the platform right now that is presenting me an opportunity to capture attention at scale.
Manuel:
That’s my obsession. If you ask me, how have I grown so much bootstrapped every single step of the way I have obsessively looked for opportunities, and this is one of those. So TikTok advertising right now is something to pay attention to. Youtube advertising is something to pay attention to. And to answer your question, Kevin, about the changes on the pixels and the access to data as we used to have and all the microdata that was so awesome for us to have for so long, the game has changed. So now the targeting, the way you go about it is less micro and broader. And then you let the algorithm help you find people that are gonna convert better and they feed off of that. So instead of going after interest or specific core data, you wanna just go broader. And then the system’s algorithms on Facebook, on Instagram, also on Google, have come up with something called Performance Max on Google. Google targeting right now is better than ever.
Manuel:
Like right now the king of targeting across digital platforms is once again, Google. So again, they’re helping you find audiences that are qualified. They’re using a lot of data right now guys. So I don’t wanna overwhelm you guys with data, but again, hopefully, listen to this podcast again and write down some of these opportunities that I just mentioned right now. And don’t try to do them all at once. Just pick one and get it done. On Google right now, they have dramatically improved its advertising capabilities, because, for example, I’ll give you one specific or something that you can do. Let’s say that you have a toy brand. All right, let’s say that you are selling toys on Amazon, and you’re doing really well on Amazon selling toys. And you wanna scale that with outside traffic, well, have one of your VAs or yourself, spend some time on YouTube, looking at some of the YouTubers that have great toy channels that they’re doing unboxings, and they’re showing other kids about their products and slime channels and all these things that have a gazillion subscribers make a list of some of these subscriber channels.
Manuel:
And do you know that you can actually create a piece of content and target exactly those videos and those subscribers? So you can actually put your videos in front of people that are subscribed to these channels, or you can actually put your videos, promoting your sales, flash sales, Amazon products, or whatever, as a pre-roll ad in front of the people that are watching videos on that channel. And not only that, because Facebook does not have the access that Google has, Google has access to the entire world of the internet at a large scale, much larger than Facebook, and all the data of Google searches. They’re still the number one search engine because of that enormous amount of data that Google has, they’re helping you, they allow you to get access to that data. So you can target people that are searching for stuff already. So it’s a gold my man out there like I always see people complaining about situations and the government and what’s happening with the economy and COVID and whatever. And I’m like, I just laugh at it because man, the world is full of opportunities, but only for those that pay attention only for those that actually decide to look for these opportunities.
Kevin King:
One quick thing, just so people understand what you’re doing is true branding. What’s the difference between branding and selling products?
Manuel:
So what I’m doing is branding, did you say the word true branding, Kevin?
Kevin King:
True branding.
Manuel:
Yeah. So selling products is more like the good old days of marketing, the 1980s, 1990s, in which you had an infomercial style and you felt entitled to have people buy your products because your products were developed in the mountains of the Himalayans and who knows where, and you feel your products are so special that people would feel lucky or would be lucky to run into your ad. That’s selling you feeling that your product is better than anybody else because your formula is very unique. And you know, you’re lucky that you found our type of thing. Branding is basically being dedicated to providing value to the audience because you already understand that there are a lot of choices out there that people could make about your brand. And there are for example, toy brands. And there’s an endless amount of toy brands out there that the fact that they actually chose you over all these other brands is something that you don’t take for.
Manuel:
Granted is something that you actually appreciate and you’re grateful for. So you are branding your company. You are not putting yourself in front of them to sell them stuff. You’re putting yourself in front of them consistently trying to earn their trust so they can eventually open up their wallets and give you their money. The brands that can actually position themselves in front of people the most, and for the longest amount of time are the brands that are gonna win in the long run and are the brands that are actually building a legacy that doesn’t depend on just that one platform, but just on Amazon are just on eBay or just on whatever you are, building something that is gonna go beyond just one advertising or one media company or one, whatever you might be using at that point. And that is the power of branding.
Manuel:
It’s just a repetition of that message, knowing that you should take your money and give it to these platforms so they can help you get attention and not feel entitlement or an obsession over revenue, but more development, obsession over the value given away value. Even some of you guys here listening to this podcast, my business, my marketing company is built on this exact same formula. I have an Inc 5,000 company, one of the fastest growing marketing companies in the country, and we are really good at what we do. And I don’t really sell, I don’t do any advertising to sell my services. And when I say any, I mean, literally, $0 is spent by my organization to sell or promote my products and services. All I do is that I provide value. I educate, I inspire, I try to show people exactly how to do things, show people what I’m doing. That’s working try to open up their eyes and present their opportunities. And I know that some of you guys in the future are gonna reach out to me and you’re gonna wanna be a part of my organization somehow, because I have given you so much value. So this formula at a product level at a brand level is something very powerful that you guys can utilize to really build something that goes beyond just one platform. And it’s something that I highly suggest to you.
Kevin King:
Very well said. Manuel, I really appreciate you coming on today and so if people wanna reach out or find out more or follow or reverse engineer, some of what you’re doing where would they go to do that?
Manuel:
Well, my favorite place in the world is my YouTube channel. I’m growing. And I’m putting a lot of attention there. If you search for Manuel Suarez you should be able to find me there. S U A R E Z. I’m also obviously on Instagram and I’m on Facebook and I’m omnipresent. I walk my own talk and I’m always creating content and trying to get people inspired to do better. If anybody wants to contact our company, agmagency.com is our website. AGM sends for Attention-Grabbing Media, and you can send a message there and we can see how we can help you or somehow give you some guidance. We’re always doing workshops, we’re doing free workshops. We’re doing in which we don’t sell you anything I’m telling you every, every other Tuesday, we just had one this last Tuesday to show you the basics of setting up on Amazon.
Manuel:
We talk about everything. We talk about Omnipresent. We talk about Facebook ads. We talk about TikTok and how to get that going. So we open up the doors of our headquarters and we show people how to do it. And we stream it. Anybody that wants to find out how we do that and, and what we’re teaching people. You can go to moneymakingworkshops.com. I’ll say that again, moneymakingworkshops.com. Again, I really walk the talk. I’m not interested in selling you something I’m interested in giving you value and having you guys leverage these opportunities so you can find out what we’re doing.
Kevin King:
Awesome. Thanks, man, for coming on and I’m looking forward to seeing you the next time in real life.
Manuel:
Appreciate it, Kevin. Thanks for having me, man. It’s been great.
Kevin King:
So Manuel just laid it out for you. If you’re not paying attention to those four social media channels, he specifically named then you’re missing the boat. If you’re doing stuff the same old way, still using a ManyChat, and still trying to run Facebook ads and do the stuff the same old way, it’s just not gonna be effective for you. That was a great episode. Some really good insights from someone who really knows what they’re doing, he’s actually doing it and he’s teaching it. That’s rare in this industry. So hopefully you’ve learned a lot from this episode. Next week, we’re gonna have an awesome episode. You know, one of the most popular episodes we did last month was the hacks from the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. If you miss that, be sure to go back and check that out. We’re doing it again next week.
Kevin King:
We’ve got more ninja hacks, but this time from the Helium 10 Elite conference that happened at Sell and Scale just recently. So you don’t wanna miss next week’s episode. It’s gonna be a lot of amazing good short, and to-the-point, actionable tactics and tips that you’re gonna be able to use to implement and do better in your business. Before we wrap up today, I’ve got the ninja life hack for you. You know, the little tip that I do at the end of every single episode. So here it is, “if you never fail, you’re only trying things that are too easy and you’re playing far below your level.” Just remember that “if you’ve never failed, you’re only trying things that are just too easy for you and you’re playing far below your level.” We’ll see you again next week. Take care.
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