446 John Horn

Jeffrey Feldberg: [00:00:00] What does it take to really dominate the digital advertising game in today's highly competitive landscape? How does some brands scale to new heights while others burn through the budgets with nothing to show for it? Enter John Horn, the CEO of Stub Group, a leading performance driven digital advertising agency that's helped businesses generate millions in revenue.

Through expert PPC strategy, data driven insights, and relentless optimization. Recognize as a premier Google ads partner and a trusted force in paid media. John and his team specialize in crafting ad campaigns that don't just drive clicks. They drive real results. With years of hands on experience navigating the ever evolving world of digital advertising.

John has worked with brands of all sizes from startups looking for their breakthrough moment to industry giants, scaling to the next level. His expertise goes beyond the technical. He understands the psychology of what makes people click, convert and stay engaged. But John's journey isn't just about [00:01:00] ad campaigns and algorithms.

It's about building a business facing challenges head on and constantly adapting in an industry that never stays the same. His insights into what works and what doesn't in digital advertising have made him a sought after expert for businesses looking to maximize their marketing investments. Today, we're going to dive into the strategies, the mistakes, and the behind the scenes lesson John has learned on his journey.

If you're looking to scale your business, get smarter with your ad spend and understand where digital marketing is heading next, you won't want to miss this conversation. 

And before we start the episode, a quick word from our sponsor, Deep Wealth and the Deep Wealth Mastery Program. Here's Sanjay, a graduate of Deep Wealth Mastery, and he says, the investment I made in the Deep Wealth Mastery Program, it's a rounding error compared to the value created today and the future value I'll receive.

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John. I know there's always a story behind the story so what's your story? What got you from where you were? to where you are today.

John Horn: Thank you so much, Jeff, for having me on. I really appreciate it. Been looking forward to the conversation here. yeah, If we go back to my story, I'll largely start the story really with Stub Group, which is the company that I'm currently CEO [00:04:00] of. So prior to Stub Group, I did various, blue collar, white collar jobs, things like that, but really got into the world that I'm in now.

Which is in a digital advertising, digital marketing back. What is it? So I think we're coming up on around 12 years somewhere in that range ago. And so this thing called stud group, where did it come from? It didn't actually come from my brain. It came from the brain of my brother and a long term friend of his.

And they were looking at the market and saying, Hey, there are all of these businesses who are making this move from traditional advertising, things like TV and radio and newspapers over to this digital world of Google and Facebook and things like that, and many of these businesses. Just don't really know what they're doing.

They don't know how to effectively manage this shift. They don't know how to measure the ROI of their advertising campaigns, how to grow, how to scale cost effectively, et cetera. And so they saw this opportunity to help [00:05:00] businesses with that and created Stub Group as an agency At that point, focus primarily on Google ads and other pay per click channels.

And they brought me on as essentially employee number one and said, Hey let's figure this out. Let's grow this business and let's provide, really good service and results to our clients. And so we got to start the journey in that way.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Love that. And so you've seen a lot of changes, I'd suspect. So where we sit today, I mean, as I look at the marketplace, we have this little thing called, I don't know if people have heard of it, artificial intelligence, AI. So we have AI front and center. More people are online than ever before. I constantly hear fellow entrepreneurs and business owners saying, Jeffrey, it is so noisy out there.

It's really hard to differentiate ourselves and get people to pay attention. So what's going on today? As you take a 50, 000 foot in the air overview, what are some of the biggest challenges as entrepreneurs? We're just showing up and perhaps not passing the grade.

John Horn: As entrepreneurs, as business [00:06:00] owners, the way that we grow our businesses obviously is we need to find customers and it is an ever loud world. There are so many different things, different companies, different platforms that are trying to grab the attention of potential consumers.

And so a big part of the challenge right now in business is simply. How do we cut through clutter, cut through that noise, and reach the people who are our target audience in a cost effective way in a way that doesn't involve, spending billions and billions of dollars in advertising, or whatever the case may be, but how do we find where our Customers are spending their time, and how do we get in front of them with our message and ultimately make that connection?

And there are so many different channels to do that online. You have paid advertising, things like Google, meta ads, TikTok, etc. You have, organic, quote unquote free channels, like Google search Instagram and Facebook organically, TikTok, And now you have thrown into all of that AI, like you mentioned.[00:07:00]

AI is, fascinating because when I say AI in this context, really, I'm talking about things like chat, GPT, Google Gemini places where consumers can now go and engage and look for answers, look for solutions to their needs. And we're still in the early days of exactly how consumers are figuring out.

These tools and how to leverage these tools, but I do see a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs. For those of us who can kind of, capture this opportunity, just like the early days of the Internet, people who got on who were able to figure out and kind of capture that arbitrage opportunity were able to build massive businesses out of that.

And in the same way in this AI world, people who are Figuring out how to leverage these tools both operationally to improve efficiencies in their businesses and then also on the consumer facing side of things, how do we be the solutions that a chat GPT, for example, brings up when someone [00:08:00] searches for Hey, what's the best whatever?

Or Hey, how do I find this information? It's kind of a wild rest West right now of opportunity.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And so as you're talking about that, and you look at more of the traditional, although it's not so traditional because it's not all that old, the more people I speak to, every day that goes by, more people are saying, I'm not doing a search in my favorite search engine anymore. I'm doing it through AI and, pick your services, a whole number of them.

And so now doing the search in AI, I would imagine that's changing the game of how you get the word out to people, how you make people more aware about you, how are you responding to that as a team for not just you, but also your clients.

John Horn: The numbers here are fascinating. And actually just this morning, I was looking at some new numbers that were released about how many people are starting their searches and something like chat GPT, as opposed to Google. And. It's interesting because it's kind of a tale of two worlds at the moment, in that a lot of people like you and like me who are maybe more, technologically oriented, more early adopters of things, we're going into these [00:09:00] things like chat QPT perplexity, etc.

And starting a lot of our searches having a lot of conversational search experience there. But then the majority of the world really hasn't adopted that yet. The majority of the world, at least according to the numbers It's still, they have habits that have been built over time. You need information, you go to Google, you search and it's integrated in everything.

It's kind of what you do. And so at the moment, chat GPT, for example, has, just a smidgen of the kind of the search market search impression share that Google does. But what is fascinating is the trajectory of which that is growing and is growing, quickly as people are spending more and more time as more and more people.

Introduced it to it and so the existential question for Google is can they through their own leverage of AI and their things like AI overviews that are now a big part of the search engine results? Can they provide? Results to people in the way that people want now in a way to keep them coming to Google or are they going to [00:10:00] lose that essentially monopoly they have right now and lose it to things like chat.

You could hear perplexity and I think very much still out there. We don't know what's going to happen. Google is The answer is. Investing a tremendous amount of resources into making sure they keep their monopoly and everyone else is investing a tremendous amount of resources in trying to crack into that monopoly.

And so, in terms of entrepreneurs, as they look at things, I think very important to be spending time in the various platforms and seeing how those various platforms are generating results. So, screenshot from perplexity of a question they'd asked a perplexity. And one of the top results that it gave was a video actually that we created on our own YouTube channel.

And so that was very insightful to say, Oh, interesting. So this content is being pulled by this service. Great. how can we reverse engineer that and see what was unique about that content that got pulled as the answer and how can we create more of it? Just like historically people would do that with, quote [00:11:00] unquote, traditional SEO on Google.

Jeffrey Feldberg: John, it's interesting as you talk about that, and actually as we're conversing about traditional search versus AI search, I'm actually going into our 9 Day Mastery program, Step 2 in the DeepWealth 9 Step Roadmap. And Step 2, it's X Factors, and then Step 1 is the big picture. And so when we go to Step 1, the big picture, where we start, one of the things we're asking ourselves, What is just starting out right now that if left unchecked, potentially could either hurt my business or put me out of business.

And once we identify that, we then answer that with, okay, how am I going to address that and how can I make that in step two X factor something uniquely successful for me that. Other people, it's going to be hard to replicate. And if I can just use a crazy example, back in the day when everyone was going in a horse and buggy and this new thing called the automobile came around, I'm sure people look at that, said, yeah, well, look, they're slow.

They're expensive. Not a lot of people are going to have it. I'm going to continue to make buggy carriages and I'm going to continue selling horses. And we all know where that [00:12:00] went. As we look back at that. I just wonder as we're really on the precipice of AI and a even bigger adoption from where we sit today, how that's going to rattle things up.

And with that in mind, it's a great segue for your secret sauce. So John, I come to you. Hey, I heard you on the DeepWealth podcast. Here's my company. Here's what we're doing. Here's what we're not doing. Help us get from here to there. What's your process like? What are you doing exactly that's really going to make a difference for me?

John Horn: A lot of it comes back to really the fundamentals. So what I see a lot of people focusing on is always chasing the latest buzzwords. And, once AI came out, everyone's like, Oh, okay. Everything we do is, is AI and AI power. a lot of advertisers I've seen kind of give, let's say agencies or software a pass.

If they say we're using AI, then it's like, Oh, okay. It just kind of works magically. It's this black box and it's, automatically better than something else. And a lot of people I think are just kind of taking [00:13:00] advantage of that label and that's not. Not just specific to AI. That's kind of always been the case.

There's always that latest and greatest thing. Great. We'll use this buzzword and then we kind of get a pass in terms of the results that we drive to our clients because we can just blame it all or attribute it all to this new buzzword. What we try to do here at stub group, we've been in this business for a long time.

And so there's always this balance of yes. What is new? How do we leverage the best of that? But also not forgetting that at the end of the day. We're in business and there's some very simple fundamentals that apply. You need to have an offer that is compelling to people, whether it be a product you're selling, a service you're selling, it actually needs to have product market fit and no amount of AI buzzwords or something else is going to change that people either need slash want what you sell or they don't.

And then there's the fundamentals of how do you message and communicate about it? You need to build credibility, show people you're a legitimate website company. You need to be very aware of your presence online in terms of [00:14:00] reviews, how people are talking about you and making sure that you are, first of all, treating your customers well, and then making sure that's getting back online and that your reputation is building.

And then when it comes to like, very specifically running campaigns. There's a lot of fundamentals involved, which is okay. What are your numbers? What can you afford to pay to acquire new business? What are the different kinds of categories of traffic categories of audiences we can go after and that we can reach in a cost effective way to actually achieve those numbers.

Some of those audiences, might be relevant to you, but it's so expensive to reach them that it's not worth going after them or not right now. Maybe not until you. Develop a different product or service. That's a better fit for them. And so it's a lot of conversations about those fundamentals and making sure that we've tried, got those fundamentals in place and then leveraging our experience with the platforms like Google and meta and so forth to, to build on that and to use, the different bidding strategies and campaign types and ad types that exist to [00:15:00] communicate that messaging, meet those client pain points, establish that credibility and ultimately drive those.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Okay. So I'm hearing the fundamentals, which I agree best practices or best practices, regardless of where the technology is or what the latest flavor of the marketplace is, Hey, you have to have a compelling offer. You need to have a really strong narrative when you're looking at different clients or prospective clients and.

John, the question I'm about to ask, if you were to say Jeffrey, wow, that's really a general question that you're asking me, but everyone's journey is different and it's going to be specific to them, but that said, generally speaking, what would be some other areas that again, as business owners, entrepreneurs, we're just missing the boat in terms of having some of the fundamentals down, regardless of the technology.

John Horn: I think a lot of businesses look at advertising as a magic bullet, and so they'll focus everything on, their ads. And if things aren't going well, it's the ad's fault, et cetera. Things are going well, it's the ad's fault, et cetera. But [00:16:00] some of the fundamentals, like the most common things I see missed are simple things like.

Your landing page, where are you sending traffic to when people are engaging with your brand a lot and coming to your website and I'll see brand spend, a ton of money on advertising and creating ads and whatnot, and then send people to a subpar experience on their website that doesn't clearly communicate who they are.

Why people should, purchase whatever it is they're trying to sell. What that clear call to action is. What's the next step? Is it buy a product? Is it place a phone call for a free demo? Is it come to our physical location? Whatever that call to action is. So those things I would say just, not thinking through their website, their landing page experience is a very common mistake.

Another I would say area of opportunity. For a lot of businesses is with video. A lot of businesses still just don't really want to touch video. Part of it is because they have this feeling that it's really hard and expensive to make good video. And depending on what you want your output to be, that [00:17:00] can be true.

You can go to a studio and spend thousands of dollars in video and so forth, but. Most consumers nowadays also kind of recognize that, they like some authenticity and you can grab your iPhone and go make a really good video that is going to connect with customers and is going to be more powerful than any amount of written text that you create or images you put on your page.

And that's going to connect with people, whether you have that video on your website, whether you're pushing it out through channels like YouTube so forth. and it's just an incredible opportunity to build a connection with customers and potential customers. So that's one of the things we talk a lot about with our clients is, Hey, how can we just leverage video better to build your brand and make those connections?

Jeffrey Feldberg: And so, John, as you're talking about that, here's a question for you that I've often wondered, because it seems, and you can, again, Jeffrey, you're on base, off base, particularly post pandemic, and thankfully that's well behind us in the rear view mirror, post pandemic, video, people want to see what you're really all about, but it's also as though [00:18:00] I can have a video, it's not professionally done, like you said, I did it with my own phone, and it's going to be a little bit shaky, it's still very presentable and very watchable, That in some ways, people almost prefer that over a high cost, high production shoot with a professional company that's going to do all the recording.

What's going on with that in terms of some of the market shifts of what people really want to see?

John Horn: It's very true. There's very much of this desire on the part of many consumers for, authenticity. And that can mean different things to different people. But at the end of the day. A lot of people kind of, understand maybe how things work a little bit better than they did historically. So historically, it was the quality of your video, having this amazing studio, crazy experience, et cetera.

Fancy cameras with super high quality, resolution, et cetera, that kind of went hand in hand with, okay, that's a really, Legitimate brand. And if you don't have that, maybe that brand is not legitimate. But now people I think are so used also [00:19:00] to, creating video themselves, everyone's videoing themselves for Tik whatever.

And so they just kind of understand, Oh, okay. This is just kind of how it works. Also phones, cameras, et cetera, are just way higher quality than they used to be. So it's not nearly as distracting, even if you just pull out your phone to record a video as 10 years ago or whatever. And so they have this idea of, Hey.

If someone is communicating something in an authentic matter through video, the lights don't have to be perfect. You don't have to have this amazing studio background. And sometimes for some brands in particular, those things actually hurt you. Like we'll see more, authentic videos, user generated content, things like that actually perform better for some brands than the really slick professional pieces of content because people just.

Like that more human connection and some of those flaws that exist.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Okay, so people like the human connection. I suppose in some ways, just As people, if we come off as too perfect to someone that we're meeting there, Hey, I can't relate to that guy. He just, or she just [00:20:00] walks on water. Can't Oh, look at this. I see. Jeffrey has a few thoughts. Yeah, I can relate to that. I know I've been there.

I've done that. So it sounds like it's the same kind of thing that's now going on. With what people want to see. And so with all that said, John, what are you and the team doing to really help differentiate your customers from a, what they're doing before B from the competition and C most importantly, to really get those results and what do those results look like and mean to you and the team?

John Horn: That is the many million dollar question. A lot of it comes down to trying to get into the shoes of the customers and potential customers of our clients. It's a lot of businesses, though, They spend all of their time in their business I'm sure I make this mistake myself and I'm spending my time in my business and I'm thinking about the back end side of things.

I know what's going on. I know, you know what words we use internally to describe things. I know the challenges. I know how the operation works, et cetera, but that's not how. So, my, customers think about [00:21:00] things per se, they use different words to describe things. They maybe don't have the quote unquote, right words to describe things because, this isn't their world.

They don't need to know what the difference is between PPC and SEO and GBP, et cetera. They just know, Hey, I want. More customers through Google or whatever the case may be. And so with our team, it, a lot of it comes down to helping our clients think through and understand both through research and anecdotes and so forth.

What is it that their customers care about? What messaging are they using to describe what they're looking for? What messaging are they responding to most? And that comes through obviously testing different ads, different approaches, different messaging, et cetera. And then continuing to build on that saying, okay, this isn't working.

Let's not spend more money on this. This is working. Let's double down on that. Let's, reallocate investment and really focus on what the data is showing us is working to drive sales, to build your brand, and then keep scaling that over time.

Jeffrey Feldberg: It's interesting as you're going through [00:22:00] that, then perhaps a little bit of a loaded question, but I'll throw it out there anyways, knowing what you now know, John. So if you were going to be starting a business and resources were limited people maybe it's just you, perhaps one other person, but we're talking startup mode, or maybe just out of startup mode, you're bootstrapping it every not even dollar every nickel counts.

What would you be doing to grow the business in terms of that outreach? If you could do a very limited number of things, maybe one, maybe two at most that you could be doing on the marketing side, what would that look like? And it doesn't necessarily have to be in your wheelhouse either. John, knowing what, you know, Hey, maybe I would just start with this or that, and then grow the business and then come to a group like ours.

What would that look like?

John Horn: When you are very resource strapped and you're looking for, okay, what can I get kind of exponential return on for my time and investment? The first thing I would go to generally speaking these days. I'm going to call content marketing and especially video as a part of that, which we already talked about, a little bit earlier, as an entrepreneur, you can film videos [00:23:00] of yourself essentially for free.

You can edit those yourself if you have to you can. put those out for free on YouTube, on TikTok, et cetera. And the amount of return that you can get from that content, especially if you invest the time and the energy into, of course, providing, creating really good, helpful content and doing that consistently, building that over time can have tremendous ROI on the investment and doesn't require, any ad spend.

Doesn't necessarily require any employees or team members. You can't obviously scale over time those things, if you're kind of a one man show saying, Hey, How do I maximize my marketing my effort, I would say, create some really helpful, compelling content, start doing that consistently and getting that out into the world.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Love that consistency, small steps done really daily they can add up to some big results and really make all the difference that's out there. And now from startup or perhaps early stages, I'm now a well entrenched company. I've been around for a while. I have a [00:24:00] nice business and I want to take the business to the next level.

I do have some budgets. I have some profits. I can do some experimentation. What does that look like now?

John Horn: It looks like, okay well, where are the opportunities? Where are the markets of people that I'm not really tapping into or not effectively capturing? And let's start, Capturing those areas. And generally once you're really established and you've got kind of a lot of the low hanging fruit stuff done ads is often the kind of obvious next place to scale into because that's fuel on the fire of what you have.

That's working. If you have good product market fit, you've got your. This is in place. people you are getting in front of are finding what you're doing helpful. Then advertising helps you get in front of a lot more people and continue to create that scale. And so, that usually is gonna look like a variety of platforms.

So if you are selling something that people are searching for, or they're searching for solutions to a problem and you have that solution, search engines, Google, obviously being the primary one is a great place to be. And then outside of search, if you're identifying, okay, this is the [00:25:00] characteristics of my audience.

These are people who are likely to want to purchase what I'm selling, doing what I would call push, push marketing into platforms like Facebook, Instagram YouTube, definitely YouTube, advertising, Tik TOK, and so forth. It allows you to just spread the word, get more of that top of funnel traffic that's going to then work its way down the funnel and ultimately turn into dollars in the door for you.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And so when we talk about doing that, that at that point, and again, John, you can say Jeffrey on base or off base, my advice, deep automation, don't take that onto yourself. It's like saying I'm going to file my tax returns, but I know nothing about taxes. So I'm going to become a self professed accountant.

Maybe you can. But it's going to take a lot of time and effort. You're probably going to be making some mistakes along the way that we don't want to do. So when we're looking to bring on a marketing partner, a digital ad agency, John, what would be three to five things? And it could go either way. Hey, Jeffrey, if you're seeing this, check that box.

That's definitely one thing that you want to see when you're speaking to an ad agency or Hey, Jeffrey, [00:26:00] if you're seeing that run, my friend run the opposite direction as fast as you can, because that's a huge red flag. What would you want us to know?

John Horn: First thing I would look at is very much the reputation of the agency. There are lots and lots of agencies out there and there's not a high barrier of entry to go create an agency. Anybody can go do it. And so I'd look for, okay, how long have they been around? what's their reviews like online?

They have any kinds of accreditations like for example, Google has a program where they have Google partners, premier Google partners, step group is a part of that premier Google partner program, things like that, that can help you understand. Okay. They know what they're doing.

They've been doing it for a while. People have had good experiences. that's the first thing. Second thing is when you're communicating with them, trying to understand if they just kind of have a cookie cutter approach to things, or if they really tailor the strategies, because every business is different.

Every business is unique and a lot of agencies, for understandable reasons, they try to kind of take a cookie cutter approach to things because it's cheaper to [00:27:00] have, okay, these are the. Campaigns. This is a structure we always run for this type of business, but your business, may have different needs, different pain points.

Your market is going to be different than the market of somebody else. Even in the same industry, an HVAC company in San Antonio has a different thing than HVAC company in Colorado, the seasons are different. The market's different, et cetera. And so. You, as you talk and interview with that agency partner, you want to, see, are they asking good questions of you about what your goals are, what sets you apart, what your market is, and as they're putting together, ideas, strategies, projections, whatever that is.

Are those nuanced to try to understand your business or are they just very cookie cutter or something they provide to everybody? The third thing I would say is really talk through with the agency, how they measure the success of advertising. You don't want to be, generally speaking, you don't want to be getting with an agency that's really focused on what I call vanity metrics of, Hey, we got you.

Tons of impressions [00:28:00] or tons of clicks to your website or whatever. It's no, I have a bottom line. I want to make money. And there are ways I make money. If I'm an e commerce company, it's through selling products. If I'm a service business, it's through getting quality leads, turning those into customers.

So forth and so on. And so I want to understand. Hey, how is that agency going as best as possible? it'll never be perfect. Tracking is not perfect, but as best as possible, how are they going to track the success of the campaigns and how are they going to report that information to me so that I can understand how they're doing, how my business overall is doing.

And then also be able to see over time, how do we improve? Cause if I don't know what's working, what's not working right now, I can't cut waste and I can't double down on what's working. I'm still just kind of throwing money out there and. hopefully it's working and, hopefully I keep getting a return.

So those are probably the three first things that come to mind that I would, ask about when interviewing an agency.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And John, as you're talking about that, you're now talking about one of my favorite topics, key performance indicators, or KPIs. And when it [00:29:00] comes to KPIs, you're absolutely right. I can come to you and say, Hey, John, check this out. We had over a million views and on the surface, it sounds good, but perhaps the real question is, how many sales did you get and what's your cost per sale? And so I agree, Hey, be careful with the old bait and switch of these KPIs that sound great on paper that really don't mean anything. What would be the top KPIs that I should be looking for when it comes to my marketing, regardless of what that marketing is?

John Horn: So I will differentiate between what I'll call in channel and out of channel KPIs. So in channel KPIs are going to be Things that you can actually track within, let's say your Google ads account or your meta ads account, where those platforms can track, Hey, here's how many orders or leads or whatever came from our ads.

And so many businesses will have targets. What's our cost per lead target within Google ads or our target return on ad spend, et cetera. And those things are good and important, but it's also important to remember that. Tracking isn't perfect, and [00:30:00] there are, benefits and realities and things that come from that ad spend that you can't directly track back and see within your Google ads account or within your meta ads account what's going on.

And so it's also important to look at out of channel benchmarks and KPIs, things like media efficiency ratio, for example, which is looking at. How much revenue am I generating? How much am I spending in marketing to acquire that? And just dividing revenue by marketing spend, new cost is my media efficiency ratio.

And how does that change over time? So for example, let's say we go and we decide, Hey, I want to start a new channel. I want to start investing into meta ads. And I'm going to spend whatever 10, 000 a month in meta ads. Obviously that's going to increase our media cost by 10, 000, or probably more if you're paying an agency to manage that for you.

And so. We want to look at our revenue and see, Hey, is our revenue, increasing, is there a correlation or Hey, is our revenue just basically flat and now we're just spending more money in marketing and so our efficiency ratio has come down and so it's important to be looking at those, high level kind [00:31:00] of, bottom line numbers to see how your business is doing over time and how efficient it is as well as looking inside KPIs for what you can track like, bro ads and cost per lead and things like that.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Okay. So something to think about DeepOakNation as you're looking at your marketing. Where's it really at? And the net of it is sure what's your cost per sale, regardless of how many clicks you're getting or how many likes, which is one of the questions, John, have for you with the advent of social media, that's not come on board.

Myself being an old school marketer, having my e learning company just before social media came on strong so that that didn't exist for us. And we were doing everything from yes, online kinds of ads, but we're also doing. Emails, the good old fashioned letter in the mail and sending it out to potential prospects.

How have things changed from your view from a marketing side? Because from a social media side to me, and again, Jeffrey on base off base, if we're pursuing strictly [00:32:00] social media, to me, it just seems like we're likely spending more money and taking more time to get to where we want to get to. And. We'd love to hear why you agree or disagree with that or if there's something to that.

Where are you on that? 

John Horn: Yeah,

Social media is certainly one tool in the tool belt, but it's not the be all end all. At the end of the day, the goal should be to get as close a connection to your customers, to your leads as possible. So you mentioned email, for example, I would far rather have. People on my email list, then social media followers, because I have much more control over communicating with them.

I am much less at the whims and mercy of the algorithms as they decide, okay, you know what Facebook's I'm just not going to show, I'm going to show most of your followers, your post, and there's really nothing you can do about that. So having as direct a connection as possible is ideal.

And you can kind of look at things as a funnel, which is okay. So social media. It's good up to a certain point, but it's really the goal of social media is not just to have followers on there. It's to move them to the next step in my funnel, [00:33:00] which often will be email. So it's okay. How can I get people who are my social media followers to then get onto my email list?

What great content can I provide to them? What great reasons can I give to them for that trade? And then I've got a closer relationship with them. Which I'm going to keep nurturing. And obviously the ultimate goal is going to be to turn them into customers over time. And so, yeah, social is, you know, higher funnel approach and a place that has more.

reach than most other platforms, you can reach so many people through social and you can push out and do that. You can have people share your content, you can use advertising to boost your content, etc. it's not the end goal. The end goal is how do you leverage that to then, turn into customer relationships, which turn into dollars in the door.

Jeffrey Feldberg: interesting with that. And as we're talking about other platforms, John, I know one of the things that you and the team deal a lot with, if I don't know what I'm doing, essentially I'm a guest in someone else's house and you can pick your platform. We don't have to name the platforms, but any social media platform, I'm [00:34:00] simply a guest.

And if I violate their terms or they perceive me to be doing something that I shouldn't be doing. They can just shut me down and if that's my only access to my revenue, my sales, my customers, wow, that's going to be an issue. So talk a little bit about some of the risks that are there when we're relying on these social media platforms as our sole source of really identifying the prospects who hopefully become customers.

John Horn: We see this happen often, especially in the Google space, we have a, an area of kind of a focus on helping businesses who've had account suspensions, ad disapprovals, and things that are preventing them from being able to run advertising on Google. And it can be devastating to businesses. We've had many businesses who've reached out and said, Hey, if we can't fix this problem.

And oh, by the way, Google is not helping us at all to fix this problem, then we're either going to have to, lay off a lot of people or sometimes go out of business entirely because so much of their business is coming from these platforms. And, the kind of obvious thing is to say, okay [00:35:00] diversify, try to have as many platforms as possible, that is a good thing to say, and it is a good goal to have but there is also the reality that.

There are just a couple of platforms out there where the majority of people spend their time and find solutions, so it can be extremely hard to say to a business. Just diversify beyond Google. They're like Google is where everyone goes to find a solution. If I'm not there, they're not going to find me.

And so, it's a little bit, it can be a catch 22 for some businesses where they're so dialed into a particular platform and their business very much is at the whim of that platform. But that's because that's where people are spending their time and finding solutions.

So, a couple of things you can do. First of all, Obviously do everything you can to not to not violate or fall afoul of the policies on those platforms. We do a lot of work on the Google ads side of things and trying to educate businesses of what to do, what not to do, to make sure they don't accidentally get into trouble with Google.

And then if you do get into trouble with any platform. I'm always going to recommend go to the experts because common [00:36:00] sense doesn't really apply for a lot of the platforms like Google, for example, you would think, Oh, I did something. Google says I created a problem. They'll just tell me what I did wrong so I can fix it and keep paying the money because Google wants more money, right?

At the end of the day, Google is so big, so powerful, and there's so much automation that's a part of their systems that if you do get flagged for some reason, you're essentially guilty until proven innocent, and Google won't tell you exactly what you did wrong or how to fix it. And so you want to find, experts who have been through this many times before and can bring the expertise to bear and say, okay these are the things that may have gone wrong.

These are the things you need to fix. This is the process of appealing and working through things. and try to kind of help you along that process. And then lastly, yes, diversify as much as you can, as much as possible. Don't have your business be reliant upon one single platform for all of your incoming business, but, certainly double down on what's working and, milk it as much as you can, but also [00:37:00] keep exploring, keep testing, keep looking for other opportunities to diversify your lead generation.

Jeffrey Feldberg: And John, all the more reason as you're talking about that, why it's so important that I probably shouldn't be doing this on my own. On the one hand, who I work with, who I'm going to bring on as my digital ad agency is so important because I want to stay out of the penalty box. I don't want to get flagged.

I don't want to get shut down. I always want to be open for business 24 seven in game, the message out there. And with that said, John, before we go into wrap up mode. Is there a specific question that I didn't have yet a chance to ask that you want to address, or even a message or topic that we haven't yet covered that you want to get out there to Deep Wealth Nation?

John Horn: I think we covered a lot of great, territory here. A lot of great questions. I think maybe the one thing I'll just reemphasize that we chatted about a little bit earlier is this idea of. Understand what success looks like for you and how you're going to measure success before you go into a new platform or new channel.

If you're like, Hey, I'm going to test some Google ads. There will be an aspect of throwing things at the wall [00:38:00] to see what sticks, but you don't want that to be your whole strategy. Think through. In order to be successful, here's what I need to see. I need to see this number of leads or business or orders or whatever coming from this ad spend, or I need to see this trajectory over time.

Here's my timeframe for analyzing my results. And here's specifically how I'm going to track that success is track those results. And that'll save you a lot of angst and put you in a better place than a lot of businesses, which kind of. Do something for a while and then regroup and they say, Oh, did that work?

I don't know. Don't really know. Should we do more? Should we do less? Don't really know. And it's kind of wander from thing to thing and never really know where their money is being well spent.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Okay, fair enough. And Deep Wealth Nation, I hope you're listening to some terrific advice out there. John, that said, and speaking of advice, it's a perfect segue for our wrap up mode. And it's really my privilege. It's a tradition here on the Deep Wealth Podcast where every guest, I have the privilege of asking the same question.

It's a really fun question. Let me set this up for you. When you think of the movie back to the future, you have that magical DeLorean car that will take [00:39:00] you to any point in time. So John, imagine is tomorrow morning. This is the fun part. You look outside your window. Not only is the DeLorean car curbside, the door is open.

It's waiting for you to hop on in what you do, and you're now going to go to any point in time. John, as a young child, a teenager, whatever point in time it would be. What would you tell your younger self, John, in terms of life lessons or life wisdom, or hey, John, do this, but don't do that. What would that sound like?

John Horn: That is a fun question. I think I'd go back earlier, John, I don't know exactly what age I would pick. But. Advice that I've been given over time and that's been really helpful to me that I wish I knew earlier or kind of grasped earlier was this idea of whatever you're facing right now, whatever problems and challenges you're facing right now in a year from now are going to be easy, probably.

So there's always this thing of right now what's in front of me. Like I don't know how I'm going to do this. This is stressing me out. This is what's preventing me so forth. And then a year from now, I wake up and realize. Oh, that's what I was stressed out [00:40:00] about? I've grown from there.

I've figured those things out. I've solved those things. Those, that wasn't so bad. Now I've got a new set of challenges that's stressing me out and preventing sleep, etc. But when you kind of have that perspective and take a step back and realize, Look, the world's not going to end because of these challenges I'm dealing with.

Yes, it's frustrating, annoying, whatever it is I'm dealing with right now. But we're going to get through this. And we're going to look back at this in the future and realize, Eh, it wasn't probably as, nearly as big a deal as it seemed in the current time. And I think that would have, helped through some seasons in life of giving me a little more peace that we will get through certain challenges and issues.

Jeffrey Feldberg: It's a terrific narrative. And John, if you had to take that narrative and put it into a sentence or so, what would that sound like?

John Horn: I would say something like today's insurmountable obstacles. Our tomorrow's lessons learned

Jeffrey Feldberg: Love that.

John Horn: something like that.

Jeffrey Feldberg: so much there. And if you think about it uh, thinking back to my own entrepreneurial journey, and I know it's the same for many entrepreneurs. [00:41:00] What we think is really a not such a great place, a dark place, a challenging spot. When we figure it out, it makes us stronger. We look back and say, Yeah, you know what?

I could not go from where I was to where I am today had I not done that. And it's terrific advice in Deep Health Nation. Please listen to that. What seems insurmountable today, it's lessons learned for tomorrow. Absolutely love that. And before we go into the wrap up mode and officially call it a day, John, somebody has a question.

They want to speak with you. They want to speak with the team. They want to learn more about what you can do for them. Where's the best place online to reach you?

John Horn: Best place to reach us is through our website, stub group. com. And then also we put a lot of free content out through our YouTube channel to search stub group on there. And you'll see a lot of that content marketing that we talked about earlier.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Love that. DeepWealth Nation, The easy thing about this, it's a point and click, it just go to the show notes. Everything is there. And with that said, John, congratulations. It's official. This is a wrap. And as we love to say here at deep wealth, may you continue to [00:42:00] thrive and prosper while you remain healthy and safe.

Thank you so much.

John Horn: Thank you so much for having me, Jeffrey. 

Jeffrey Feldberg: So there you have it, Deep Wealth Nation. What did you think? 

So with all that said and as we wrap it up, I have another question for you.

Actually, it's more of a personal favor. 

Did you find this episode helpful? 

Have you found other episodes of the Deep Wealth Podcast empowering and a game changer for your journey? 

And if you said yes, and I really hope you did, I have a small but really meaningful way that you can actually help us out and keep these episodes coming to you.

Are you ready for it? 

The dramatic pause. I'll just wait a moment. Drumroll, please. Subscribe. Please subscribe to the Deep Wealth podcast on your favorite podcast channel. When you subscribe to the Deep Wealth Podcast, you're saving yourself time. Every episode automatically comes to you, and I want you to know that we meticulously craft Every one of our episodes to have impactful strategies, stories, expert insights that are designed to help you grow your profits, increase the value of your business, and yes, even optimize your post exit life and your life right now, [00:43:00] whatever you want that to look like.

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So all that said. Thank you so much for listening. And remember your wealth isn't just about the money in the bank. It's about the depth of your journey and the impact that you're creating. So let's [00:44:00] continue this journey together. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for listening to this episode.

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God bless.