I was scrolling Instagram and I saw Cannon Hotep reacting to a video from Kid Rock. He says, “Grandpa’s feeling frisky today…” He looks down and makes a pulling motion with his hand. What he’s pulling is out of frame.
The camera pans as he raises an MP5 submachine gun and aims at several cases of Bud Light downrange. He then proceeds to empty the entire magazine on full auto, shredding the beer cans.
Weapon spent, he turns to the camera and yells, “F*** Bud Light and f*** Anheuser Busch.” Apparently, he published this video to protest Bud Light signing Dylan Mulvaney as an official spokesperson.
But here I was thinking, “Is this an ad for Bud Light?”
And this was a reaction video, not the original. I imagine there were hundreds more reaction videos. Add up all the views–original and reactions–and you end up with a ton of free advertising.
But that’s the social graph for one person. Now add up all the other impressions from all the content created about this news. Hundreds of millions? Billions?
100,000,000 impressions at a $100 cost per mil is the equivalent of $10,000,000 of earned media. Bud Light got it for free. And while this might turn out to be a money-loser long term–look at Gillette–the marketer in me is jealous.
Here’s the number one marketing problem all brands deal with:
“How do we get people to notice us?”
The UK spends over £20 billion/year on advertising. Of this, 4% is remembered positively, 7% is remembered negatively and 89% is not remembered at all. That means, in the UK alone, £18 billion per year of advertising is not noticed by consumers. At All.
If you have enough traffic you can sell anything
You can suck at converting people into customers but if you have a non-stop firehose of them seeing your products, they’re gonna buy. Through sheer force of will you’ll even convert your haters ’cause they wanna see what the fuss is about.
The problem is, traffic is expensive. $10m for 100m impressions if you’re buying ads. That’s why businesses spend so much time on Conversion Rate Optimization, offer design, product-market fit, improving Marketing Efficiency Ratio and so on. We’re trying to do more with less.
What if you could get those impressions for free or pay a fraction of that $10m? That’s what people like Alex Hormozi, Iman Gadhzi, Andrew Tate, Sneako and many others have been doing.
Alex Hormozi said he spends $70,000/month on content marketing, and to get the same results via advertising he’d have to spend millions per month. And last I checked, Andrew Tate’s “The Real World” membership community has over 150,000-200,000 members paying $49 month.
Build your own media company
But you don’t have to be internet-famous to do this. You can replicate this model on a smaller scale, like we did with Mike Mark and Joel Erway.
In its most basic form, all you need is a copywriter, a social media manager, and a video editor. They can be contractors or full-time. And depending on experience, you’ll be investing $5,000 to $10,000/month.
And now that short-form vertical video is ubiquitous, the publishing workflow is simpler than it was before. This is why short-form content agencies are sprouting like weeds. You’ll need more than short-form, though that depends on your niche and product.
Now here’s some more good news.
When you start taking content marketing seriously, your advertising becomes more effective. This is obvious, because people who know you are more likely to engage with your ads. We helped Mike Mark triple his ROAS and Joel Erway turned several of our successful organic posts into ads that ran.
If you’d like exact details on how to build your own in-house media company, check out my course Daily Content Machine.
Or if you prefer, Dropkick Copy can do it all for you. We can take on two new clients this month. Reply to this email if you’re interested.
Sincerely,
Nabeel