983: AdOutreach: Grow and Scale Your Business Through YouTube Ads with Aleric Heck

Robert Plank 00:06 Hey and welcome back to the podcast. We're here with return guest Allah Rick heck from ad outreach.com. Allah Rick is a YouTube ads expert. He's a founder of ad outreach. And for the last seven years, Elric has taught 1000s of entrepreneurs and business owners how to grow and scale their business using laser targeted YouTube ads. So we're gonna find out today about AI ad targeting software, omnipresence, and so much more. So Allard, glad to have you back.

Aleric Heck 00:34 Thanks so much for having me on, Robert. It's exciting to be back.

Robert Plank 00:37 And I'm excited to see what you have accomplished. I can't even follow it all you. You talk about like Ink Magazine rankings and all kinds of like numbers of employees and income goals. But yet, you're like humbled and likeable, too. And you and Newton Zane from your mastermind. I see both of you like all the time, you're just you're up to so much crazy stuff. So like, what's your secret? Like, there's some people that they kind of get to a certain level, they're at a certain pace, and there's people like you that just keep on growing and expanding? Like, how do we tap into that energy?

Aleric Heck 01:08 Oh, well, thank you so much, I really appreciate that. And I think for me, it's really just getting connected with there's two sides, there's the tactical side, right? And being omnipresent, growing, really dialing in your marketing your systems, having a great operator too. So I'm the face people see me, you know, really marketing going out there. But I also have an amazing team behind me, got an amazing COO, Julia on my team, got a got a great, great team that really builds everything up. So I can't take full credit for all that. So there's the tactical and that side of it. And also the innovation, we'll talk about, you know, I released my AI software, we've been growing the company faster on the software fast that, you know, really a powers AI ad targeting with YouTube ads, we'll talk a little bit about that. But there's also the deeper connection to which is really connecting with the reason why you're doing things. And for me, what gives me rocket fuel, I've got this like rocket behind me, or rocket poster behind me. But what gives me rocket fuel is just connecting with the impact that we can create for clients, and the ripple effect that we can have. So and I think a lot of people, you know, obviously, we're talking about marketing. And what I love about marketing is you have a special power, right? It's a superpower of being able to connect businesses, entrepreneurs, people who have something unique to share a service, or product, something of value, with the ideal clients who are looking for that value their lives or businesses can benefit from, and then work connecting the two. And that creates really positive ripple effects. So when we go out, and we help a business owner, let's take for instance, we've got one of our clients, Jared Ernie, that goes and helps local businesses with their Google profiles, right, the Google review profiles, when we help him reach his ideal clients, then he's going in helping local businesses that they have their own employees, they have their own teams. And that just creates a really positive ripple effect. And I've had this conversation with a variety of marketers is we have a superpower and we have a gift. And when we use that gift for good, you know, we don't even get to see the impact of all of what our marketing is able to do, especially when we're working with clients. And so that's something that really lights me up, gets me excited. And then on the tactical side, having a great team, having a great strategy, having great marketing strategies, practicing what we preach. All those are things that helped us

Robert Plank 03:35 grow amazing, great ideas, to think about that idea of having your team and having the operations, having the tactics, do those things. And then being seeking that passion, which comes in the form of people talk about, like, think about the people who you're saying, think about the people in your clients, but then also the clients that they help. And then by helping those those clients, then they help other customers. And then there's just like this whole, like you said, the ripple effect. And so tell me about this AI tool. I think even when we last spoke, there was a little bit of a discussion about how like YouTube, they have their own kind of built in AI and they like to kind of be more of like, set the ads, give us the money, let us figure it out. But then we all know like, we all want to have that extra advantage, right? We will then there's so many tools nowadays, it's hard to even keep track of what exists and what we can use to get a leg up from the competition or YouTube ads. So what is this AI tool that you have for YouTube? And how does it work? What does it do? Why does it give us this huge advantage?

Aleric Heck 04:33 Yeah, so I'll talk about what it does now. And then I'll give you kind of the backstory from when we last spoke. So what it does is keyword search and keyword search.com. It's our AI audience building tool for YouTube and Google ads. And so all you need to do is just describe your business, put a URL of your website, put in a few details about your business, click Generate and take you less than a minute to fill out all those details really 30 seconds, click generate an insect hence, you will have a complete set of audience targeting options for your YouTube ads with all the different types of audience based keywords, Google intent, keywords, URL, keywords, and more. All of it is displayed. And all you have to do is select which ones you want. And then you can sync them directly to Google ads in just one click Yeah, so you can see a little bit of what it looks like, I see you're pulling up pulling up that keyword search site, you can see here, this is the AI audience builder. And if you go forward just a little bit in that video, you'll be able to see how it actually works. So you just described, so see keyword search, keyword search.com. You know, here's what it does. Keyword Search helps businesses target with YouTube ads. And what this allows you to do is it'll give you all of the different keywords that you could target in terms of interests. Now, these interests, these are actually allowing you to go in and reach people that Google knows is interest in advertising, online advertising, YouTube creators, Google Ad users, and then you can sync those to Google ads. But then it also gives you related Google search terms that are all categorized. So you can see here AI marketing, so it took that one line of text it read your entire website, and it is now giving you all of this information for what to target with your YouTube ads in what are called audience segments on YouTube. Since we last spoke, YouTube's really shifted from keyword based targeting and content targeting maybe placements in front of videos, it shifted over to audience based targeting, we actually talked about that three years ago, we were on the cutting edge, we were talking about how that shift was happening. So you heard it here first, you know, that's why I got to listen right to the market or the day like this, this, we're gonna hear it first. But today, what Google has done is they've shifted over and now now it's all audience segment targeting and this will show you how to build the audience segments. And if you scroll forward, just even a little bit more, it'll actually show you. You also have not only all these different keywords that you can sync, and those will sync them to Google ads. But you also have URLs, and also different YouTube channels and apps. And you can essentially sync all of those directly to your YouTube ads. And that is how our keyword search works. Yeah, I think it's right around there. So you can see, it'll sync it as a full custom segment, you just click sync to Google ads, and it'll show up inside of Google. So we ran a study, we've had over 15,000 users already sign up for keyword search. You know, we're used by big name, you know, companies. And we ran a study the average time it takes but before I give you this number in the past are research and do you know audience targeting for ads or ad platforms to actually build out? A audience campaign based on Alright, here are all the different keywords people might be searching for, that could take hours of research in the past, with keyword search, we ran into the average time to go from a search to a synced audience in Google Ads ready to run 2.6 minutes. So

Robert Plank 07:56 amazing. you're onto something super cool here. And and I think that this is always like, I know, you've worked with like some of these big companies and people with these huge YouTube channels already. But it's it seems like, like, from any size, or any any amount, there's, there's always this problem of just saying like, well, I need to like make another YouTube video, or how do I be consistent, or you see some of these channels where like, they put out something new every day, and there's like 50,000 views within a day or two. And all these videos are always like incredible. And they have like good ideas and the keywords are filled in and it somehow seems to be like exactly the right length to like, as soon as I'm kind of getting bored with the video, then they're done. And I'm off. And now I want to watch the next one. And so like what do you think? The there's like the haves and the have nots, right? There's people that they don't know what they're doing with YouTube and those that really have it dialed in. So what are some of those like success factors? What are the people who are really crushing it killing it with YouTube? What are they doing correctly?

Aleric Heck 08:54 Yeah, so I think that's a really good question. I think there's two different things to two ways to answer that there's the YouTube channel side, right? And so what are they doing on the channel side to be able to grow, see that success? Then there's also the ads, I'll answer the ad side quickly. And then we'll talk about the channel which I know you asked about as well, people posting different videos. And I agree, you could be of any size, you don't have to be a big company to be able to see success, whether it be with YouTube ads, or with a YouTube channel. In terms of ads, it really is making sure that you have the right ad in front of the right person at the right time. And the way to do that is the right ad you want to have a hook draws people in educate and provide real value in the ad and they have a clear and concise called actually get them to take action. Now. That's kind of a recap. If you want the more in depth, the ad side of things hasn't changed since the last episode we did. I think it's episode 752. So you can go back into the the archives and listen if you want more in depth on that. But once you have that particular video, the next step is targeting from the right people and that's where a tool like keyword search.com comes in. But what regardless of what you do, whether you use my tool or not, you want to make sure that you are targeting based on intent. So you could just use Google's pre built audiences and say, oh, I want to go and target people who are in the market for marketing and advertising. But it's such a big bucket that you're just going to get the baseline results, what we like is what we call alpha AI targeting using AI to get better results than the average than the baseline that you would get if you just kind of set up a campaign. And the way you do that is by training the AI and who you're looking to reach by going in and saying, I want to reach people who have recently searched for YouTube ads, or how to grow my business, try to scale my business, let's have a weight loss offer, people have looked up how to lose weight, best exercises at home, things along those lines. And even though YouTube has gone away from keyword targeting on YouTube, you can still do what's called a custom intent audience, somebody who has recently searched on Google or YouTube, a particular keyword, and then you could target that person with an ad shortly after they've searched. And so that's one of the ways that you can go in and target and that's an X factor. On the channel side, one big X factor that you need to have is knowing how to create trending content that's unique to you, right. And so there's two sides, you make something, it's kind of like finding that sweet spot. If you create something that's too unique, and it's not really trending, or something that a lot of people are searching for, you're not gonna get as much traction, if you create the same thing everybody else is creating, and it's trending. But everybody else is creating videos, it's also not gonna get a lot of traction, you need to capitalize on trends and have your own unique spin. That's also why with keyword search, the software actually rolling out an AI trend search to find all of the latest trends before anybody else with your YouTube videos, whether you're doing that for how to create channel content, or you're looking to create ads, you want to be on top of the latest trends, and have your unique style to attract address that. So that's what I recommend that I recommend on the organic side as well. And how

Robert Plank 11:54 do we drill down on some of that, like, as far as like finding those trends? I mean, is that built into your tool? And then as far as like, the other side of it, like expressing our personality? Do you recommend like we have like a swipe file or write this down? Or like how do we like tap into both of these lists?

Aleric Heck 12:11 Yeah, so in terms of really connecting with your personality and finding your style, it's really going out and creating content and then seeing okay, what is resonating with people? And so it's you know, what type of content is unique to you, that's resonating, what's a certain style. So my original YouTube channel app fine is scaled up, you know, over half a million subscribers. That's how I got my start. Can we talk a little bit about that on the last last podcast we did. And so we found that one of our styles is a complete Beginner's Guide to technology, right? So iPhone 15 comes out iPhone 15 complete beginners guide, right. So it's a full hour long guide. And not a lot of people are doing that there's, there's everyone in their uncle's reviewing the latest iPhone, but only a few channels and really pioneered by our channel is doing this complete guide A to Z hour long video. But it's a trending topic because the iPhone just came out. And I still have a team that manages you know, my, my YouTube by my original YouTube channel app fine. And so I was actually on a meeting with them earlier. Earlier today, actually, because the iPhones coming out tomorrow about hey, here's the content game plan for that. And it's really great, I got a team that just, you know, manages this channel in the background. But I was meeting with our lead reviewer, Justin. And the whole idea is we're capitalizing on the trend, the iPhone just came out, people are gonna be searching for it. But we're doing our unique style, we're not doing an iPhone 15 review, because it makes sense for us to do that. It's just gonna get lost in the millions of not millions, but 1000s and 1000s of reviews, there's really very few people that create a full Beginner's Guide, hour long that release it, same day that the iPhone comes out. And so we're that first person, then those videos historically on that channel get millions of views. With the previous ones, I think the the iPhone seven one that I had done back when I was running the channel, you're the kind of reviewing on the channel has over 7 million views now. And the reason for that is it's trending. And it's also unique. And so you can think about that in terms of where to find the trends. This is a you heard it here. First, we are going to be adding in an AI trend search into keyword search.com. That's coming out likely next month. I do want to say though, that software sometimes things get delayed, but it is coming very soon, I was playing around with a beta that our CTO and our devs have been working on and it is really exciting. I always I get really excited, it's going to also roll out to all keyword search people so it's not you know, an extra or anything like that. And it can be really exciting there. And the cool thing is it finds trends so there's a couple of different trends happening right now that we looked up for instance, you know, the as an example for a potential client that might be selling exercise or something related to weight loss, you look it up you can see it's found surging, you know, weight loss ozempic And some of these other things that are surging, and so it may imagine if you if you found out, okay, this is coming up here, this is getting really popular, a lot of people are talking about it, but you create a video with your spin, here's why you should do this instead, or do this exercise instead, you know, that's better than you know this. And then that's going to actually rank because people are searching for it, right. And so there's an opportunity to capture trends, but create your own style video

Robert Plank 15:19 that has so much to think about, and so many good ideas. And I mean, some of the lessons that I'm getting from that is how important it is to just have someone always be be thinking about your marketing platforms, right. If you have a YouTube channel and you want to maintain it, you want to grow it, you want it to always be expanding its reach, have that team that's always thinking about it. Because if you're if you're only switching gears and thinking about it once every two weeks, that's not just constant thought about it. And then it's amazing to get that little insight about just the them having a plan and being like, you know, iPhone 15 comes out, let's have all this stuff ready to go. And it gives me flashbacks to like, like 25 years ago, when I used to know guys that would do just all kinds of like, setting up tons of content, like back when, when Google was was new ish. And you could just be like, I'm gonna set up a 50 Sites and Google would be like, Okay, well, we'll rank it all number one. And these dudes would like have Halloween content ready to go like in the summer, like they would have things like ready like far far in advance, he wouldn't just make it up as they go along. And so this is just like so much cool stuff to think about as far as keyword search.com. As far as the things to be doing with our content, that blend of the trends plus our personality, and keeping in mind, the audience and the intent. And that super cool feature that YouTube has now where when someone is searching on YouTube or Google then later they'll be show they'll show them YouTube videos kind of like a spooky like quasi retargeting now that's so cool. And then so in these last few minutes, or we're speaking here, Alec, do you feel like sharing any, like, sort of like personal stuff? Like when you've been growing your company? Have there been any like, like, failures, stress on the way to the Success Path?

Aleric Heck 16:59 Yeah, that's a great question. I love that you're asking that too. So, you know, we've been really growing, we've been seeing seeing a lot of a lot of growth, which is exciting. We, we got, you know, Inc 5000, number 60, fastest growing and 6,052% growth. But with that, you know, there's there's always a lot of really exciting things, there's also challenges that come to when you grow that fast, there's definitely challenges that happen. And, you know, one thing that we needed to do is really build out an operating system. And we've got mentors that are helping us with that now, you know, very lucky to have an amazing CEO on our team. And, yeah, and so I think that there are times of stress and times of, of challenge like that, I think that, you know, one thing that really comes to mind is we pivoted and moved around a little bit of some of our model in terms of, you know, pricing, and the way that we work with clients to make it better for clients make it better for us, there was a time when we were selling more bigger packages all upfront. And we found that that actually, you know, over time wasn't always the best for clients wasn't the best for us. And it's better, you know, we've made a shift over to more of a recurring revenue model, which clients love, because they can pay us over time as they work with us. And we love because it creates more dependability and consistency within the business. So it's really exciting to see, you know, a lot of, you know, sales all in one month. But if you're only selling, you know, one off packages, or you know, having people prepay for six months in advance, it's great when that check comes in, but then you have to just keep doing that. So it kind of creates a cycle. And so there were some challenges that came with that with kind of measuring out okay, what does this look like to be able to build something that doesn't feel like it goes up and down? Based on how many sales do you get, right? So if a salesperson has, you know, a bad day or a bad week, that can really change things versus when it comes to more of a recurring revenue model. It smooths out the curves, and it's more actually treating it like software, but it's not software, this is you know, more of a consulting, you know, approach, right, where it's more consistently having consistent, recurring revenue clients longer term. And so that was definitely a big learning lesson that I had, I think that there were some challenges with having more of a model of selling one off, and, you know, especially put a lot of pressure on the sales team, when it's better to be able just to enroll individual packages and have that be more of a recurring model so that the company is kind of Alright, this is what our recurring is, you know, here's if there's a churn and then here's all the new people and then here's how it grows from there, as opposed to okay, this month, we did this many sales this month, we did this many sell this many sales, and then Oh no, this month, we did this many sales, but it's like, you know, and so it's different than recurring revenue. Yeah, you might have a slightly down month, but it won't be the same as if you have more of a dip in sales or even if you go into a month like December, right when maybe less People are signing up new deals, things like that. If you have recurring revenue, sure there might be some people that drop off. But in general, you're going to still make a roughly similar, greater or just slightly less recurring revenue amount in the previous month, it's more dependable revenue, you're starting each month, with a floor already set, instead of having to build up from nothing, right. And that's the I think that was something that really did were on our team a little bit after all of that growth is, you know, once you scale up, and you start hitting these very big months, if you're starting at zero every month, because there's not really zero because there's some residuals and things. But if it's not a recurring model, where it's more consistent, and you're selling only big packages, then it puts a lot of pressure on that, that side of the sales team. So I think that is something that was a big learning lesson for me is it's very enticing to have people pay up front. And there are challenges with that model, especially at scale. And especially as you grow all of your overheads and all of that as well.

Robert Plank 21:00 Interesting insights, more long term thinking and a different sort of mindset. And that was always the joke with like Apple and with Microsoft, right? Like, remember, like, a bunch of years ago, they were saying that, like a huge chunk of Microsoft's income came from Windows, but back before they finally like sort of own like Bing, and Facebook and all those other things. And then the joke was like, well, now they had to just keep like inventing a new version of Windows come up with Windows XP, or Windows Vista, just almost for the heck of it. Whereas now like with Microsoft, with Adobe, there's like this monthly fee. So they can kind of just like, be more careful about the innovating and like work on the bugs and work on the UI instead of like trying to be like revolutionary, every couple of years, they can just have people that like pay the subscription. And then they're, they're used to it, there's training for it, there's the piece of it in the budget, there's definitely a lot of upside to that kind of more like long term thinking and growth. And so so man, we we've covered so much ground today from catching up and just thinking about your, your thought process and what you've built, and we should be paying attention to, and as far as what you've created here as far as like keyword search.com. And as far as ad outreach, like what's the right size company or agency? Like how does someone know if they're the right fit? If they're ready for you?

Aleric Heck 22:22 Yeah, great question. That's actually something that we've gotten a lot of clarity on. So we work with a wide variety of different businesses. And, you know, I think that the best way to look at it is if you already have a business that's doing at least six figures, then that's the type of client that we're able to work with. So we don't take people necessarily from that zero to one, you know, so essentially, that to zero to $100,000 a year, just because you need to have some kind of budget on adspend, even if you're a solo operation, you're a smaller business. But beyond that, those are companies that we work with, we have a wide variety of companies from 100,000 to a million dollars a year, and then we've got a lot from a million to 10 million, and then we have some as well, you know, in excess of that, and then also a few, you know, 100 million dollar plus companies as well, that we've worked with. And so ultimately, we span the range, I would say kind of the average is probably in that, you know, maybe 500,000 to, you know, five to 10 million range is typically, but we also of course, have a lot of clients that are smaller, and a lot of clients that are bigger as well. But what I would say is you do need to have some degree of, you know, revenue within the business, if you're a smaller business to have, it makes sense to start running those ads. And so typically, we recommend allocating at least $5,000 a month, to your overall kind of advertising strategy. And, and that's when we would recommend, you know, diving in with us, but also just in general, right, making sure that you have some some money set aside, if you're going to approach it at a higher caliber, if you know you're dipping your toes in the water, then we've got a lot of free resources that you could check out terms of working with somebody like us, that's what we would recommend is, you know, at least you know, over $10,000 a month in revenue if you're a smaller business, and of course, you know, bigger, bigger businesses, you know, there's, there's, there's that already baked in,

Robert Plank 24:16 I love it. So six figure range and then allocate $5,000 a month or so to your YouTube ads and so that we can grow in that way you can recycle your your your profits and your successes and you can kind of make things more predictable and on that uphill climb. And so keyword search.com For to access that AI YouTube tool, and then ad outreach.com Are there any other calls to actions or like logical next steps after our conversation today?

Aleric Heck 24:46 Yeah, so I've got a free gift for everybody who is listening. I've got our 19 page YouTube ads strategy PDF walks you through step by step exactly how the process works. You can go to ad outreach.com/gift at outreach.com/ Gift you'll get the full 90 Page YouTube ad strategy PDF.

Robert Plank 25:03 Fantastic ad outreach.com/gift to move see you there. And as we wrap up and wind down our conversation here, Allard, do you have a favorite like, quote lesson or moral something? They really leave us with something profound in our conversation, quote, listener, Morell, what do you have?

Aleric Heck 25:20 Yeah. Okay, awesome. So what I would love to say is, I love this book here. This has really gotten me thinking about everything related to building a business for the long term, the recurring revenue model, it's the infinite game by Simon Sinek. Now, if you're familiar with Simon Sinek, you're probably familiar with start with why, right, that's his most popular book. But I've actually been a fan of every book that he's written. But this is my favorite, and probably one of my favorite books. Today, it's the infinite game. And it actually details talks a lot about Apple talks a lot about companies, you know, like Microsoft companies that are going and looking to play the long game. But not just the long game, they even talked about playing the infinite game, right? How can you build a business that is designed to play that infinite game, and I think through reading this book, I really realized that, you know, a lot of the stuff I was doing to build my business was getting us to where we were, and it wasn't also setting it up to be to have that consistency, dependability, scalability, long term, even without, you know, me kind of driving forward, the whole business, you know, myself, and of course, our amazing team. And so really reading this very impactful. And just to kind of distill it down, it's really thinking about in business, there's finite games, and there's infinite games, and people who are finite, thinking, they play a game to win, right? And they they say, Okay, how do I win? Or how do I get this outcome? Or how do I do this? Or how do I beat this competitor, but to try to win acknowledges that you can lose, and also acknowledges that there's an end goal, and there's an end game? What this book talks about is how do you set yourself up so that there isn't an end goal and an end game other than the infinite continuation of your business idea services, whatever it happens to be? And again, this isn't for everybody, right? Depends on the type of business you want to build. But for me, this this business, I think, is in this book, it has been incredibly impactful.

Robert Plank 27:17 Inspiring Well, it's a wonderful recommendation, the infinite game by Simon Sinek. But then also what's even more important is add outreach.com forward slash gifts and we will see you there and thank you Elric for just keeping us up to date and for your your happiness, your positivity, your energy, your your your insights, your advisor. Really appreciate it and thanks for coming back.

Aleric Heck 27:38 Thanks so much, Robert.

Robert Plank 27:43 Thank you for tuning in to the marketer of the day podcast. marketer of the day is managed by dF why podcast claim your 12 podcast boosters at Def Why podcast.com/free