031: The Inside Story of Marketing the World's Top-Selling Financial Book with Shane Hackett

In this episode, I am thrilled to have a fellow book marketing expert on the show. Shane Hackett is here to share his insights and strategies that have helped generate millions of dollars in assets under management for his clients.

With a profound understanding of integrated marketing and a consistent track record of success, Shane has repeatedly demonstrated the power of leveraging multiple channels to reach and engage the right audience. Get ready to learn from one of the best in the business.

Shane's background in marketing
- Began in the radio industry, where he worked as a DJ and producer for news talk and sports programs.
- As an owner of radio stations, he gained experience in integrated marketing and advertising.
- Shane's partnership with Mark Miller of Hilton Tax and Wealth Advisors led to their collaborative work in promoting Charles Givens' book "Wealth Without Risk," which became the second most sold non-fiction book globally. Shane discusses the success of the book.

Shane's Evolution in Marketing
- Shane explains how his early career in radio allowed him to develop his marketing skills and explore various mediums.
- He highlights the transition from traditional marketing to digital marketing and the importance of staying updated with new technologies and platforms.
- Shane also emphasizes the significance of integrated marketing and targeting specific audiences through different channels.

The Success of "Wealth Without Risk"
- Shane shares his involvement in marketing Charles Givens' book, which became a bestseller and helped generate $300 million of AUM annually for the company. 
- He discusses the strategies used to promote the book, including direct mail and television advertising. 
- Shane also emphasizes the educational aspect of the book and how it served as a catalyst for implementing the financial strategies outlined by Givens.

Insights on Social Media Marketing
- Shane provides an overview of different social media platforms and their unique benefits for businesses. 
- He discusses the importance of being active on multiple channels and tailoring the content to each platform. 
- Shane also touches upon the growing popularity of podcasting as a marketing tool and the benefits of being a podcast guest or host.

Collaboration with Hilton Tax and Wealth Advisors
- Shane discusses his relationship with the Hilton family and his collaboration with Mark Miller of Hilton Tax and Wealth Advisors. 
- He explains how their partnership combines different expertise to provide comprehensive marketing solutions for clients. 
- Shane emphasizes the value of collaboration in marketing and the importance of focusing on specific channels to maximize ROI.

X and Future Marketing Strategies
- Shane briefly discusses the potential of the X platform (formerly known as Twitter) and its impact on organic reach and advertising. 
- He also mentions the opportunities presented by TikTok and the importance of being open to new platforms and technologies. 

About Our Guest:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanehackettus/
Website: https://marketleverage.com/

About Your Host:  Paul G. McManus is an accomplished author and expert in helping financial professionals grow their businesses. With over eight years of experience working exclusively with financial professionals, Paul has helped his clients generate tens of millions of dollars in fees and commissions.

Claim your free audiobook copy at: www.theshortbookformula.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:31

Welcome to another episode of the Million Dollar Producer Show. I'm your host, paul G McManus. Today, I'm honored to welcome Shane Hackett to the show. I've had the pleasure of knowing Shane for about two years now, thanks to our shared association with Mark Miller, who is the president of Hilton Tax and Wealth Advisors. Our complementary roles in supporting Mark's vision have fostered mutual respect and collaboration. One of Shane's accomplishments that I'm super interested in exploring on today's episode is with the book Wealth Without Risk, authored by Charles Givens. According to Shane, this is the second most sold non-fiction book globally, second only to the Bible, and this book helped them bring in a staggering $300 million of AUM annually. We'll also dive into Shane's insights when it comes to social media marketing and other strategies that top advisors should be thinking about. Welcome.

Speaker 2: 1:29

Shane. Thanks, paul, it's great to be here with you.

Speaker 1: 1:31

Tell us about your story. So how did you get into marketing back in the day and what's been that evolution from when you started to where you are today?

Speaker 2: 1:39

I appreciate the opportunity to be able to tell it. I actually, right out of college I was already working in radio. I think I had grand visions of becoming a big-time DJ. That did not happen. While I did start as a DJ, I quickly got into news talk and sports and produced a lot of talk radio. But on the sports side I became the executive producer for the Kansas City Chiefs. I worked on the Kansas City Royals radio network my early years and then migrated from that to becoming an owner. We had United Syndications USA radio network where we did baseball Sunday with Joe Gargiola. We did an NFL Sunday and NBA Sunday. It was really with that got me into becoming one of the youngest owners of radio stations in the country In my late 20s. At this time, with a group of investors, they had purchased KGU radio in Honolulu, which was the big 50,000 watt news talk station. We added KTSSFM there. Then I had WTIX, the 50,000 watt news talk station in New Orleans.

Speaker 2: 2:52

The reason I brought up where I started in radio is, if you think about, you've got the programming side of radio that brings in the listeners, but then all of your money is made through advertising. I consider myself a marketing person I was always. You're meeting with clients, you're meeting with business owners and you're trying to work with them on their objectives to be able to bring in new clients, and whether they're promoting a business in that local market or they've got a brand. You're really looking at what's the needs and how can radio be able to do that conversion. My roots started on that side, specifically on radio. I'm dating myself a little bit, but this is the early 90s to mid 90s and I saw cable TV coming in and it was hey, you're going to have 800 TV stations in your local market with cable TV. I was like oh, how are we going to compete against that? Right behind that, of course, was the advent of the internet. I actually got heavily involved in a lot of educational seminars and business seminars on how to do marketing. It's funny to think about it now, but in the mid 90s I would go through and talk about radio, television, advertising, newspaper was still very vibrant and, of course, direct mail.

Speaker 2: 4:14

From that you had the internet. These were the first thing. We have this thing called the internet. It's the worldwide web. You can have an electronic brochure online and that's what it started as. Then the next piece was hey, now you got bolt-on e-commerce Somebody can actually buy your product online on your website. We've obviously come a long way since then, but that was really my background of what I call integrated marketing, where we started working with clients on all these various various mediums. Then, when you look at it from that perspective, then it's okay. Now you've got the internet and that just became one channel. Then, of course, here comes social media behind that and then mobile.

Speaker 2: 4:59

Paul and you and I do this for working with a client together that you had mentioned with Hilton, tax and Wealth. You're working in multiple channels to reach different clients. In this case it's business owners. You're trying to choose the select market and the channels for them where they can get the best return on investment and ROI for those clients. That's really my background and I was lucky enough to. Over the years I partnered with and then invested in market leverage and market leverages and has been recognized as an Inc 100 advertising firm, but it's a digital marketing company. It was a big cost per acquisition advertising network but essentially now does integrated marketing for a lot of different clients of different sizes and businesses, just trying to help them grow. Very cool.

Speaker 1: 5:47

I got started in online marketing and marketing by extension in 2015,. Really, I'm fascinated to hear your story, and you obviously have been doing this for a much longer time and you've seen the evolutions of this over time. You have a much more holistic perspective when it comes to these different things. Thank you for sharing that. I'd love to deep dive in this because this is something that you and I were going to call the other day.

Speaker 1: 6:11

You had mentioned this and, as our audience probably knows and is, one of the things that I do for financial advisors is to help them write, publish and market books. The other day, when you and I were on a call, you had said or mentioned that you helped Charles Givens, the author of a book called Wealth Without Risk, essentially market, promote that book. That book became and tell me if I have this correct the second most sold nonfiction book globally, second only to the Bible, and it helped Charles Givens organization bring in up to 300 million of AUM annually. So, first, do I have those facts correct and, second, tell us the story there?

Speaker 2: 6:55

Yeah, behind the Bible. It's the number two best-selling nonfiction book. When I look back on it now and this has been many years ago. Unfortunately, chuck passed away from prostate cancer at a very young age of 53. And it's a man that I really loved, got to know on a personal basis and have a great admiration for him. But he was the very beginning of financial education. Now it's the stuff he's teaching. Back then and we're talking about the late 80s and 90s was his common financial knowledge. Now he was a pioneer. He also took a lot of arrows because he was going against the grain on a lot of things, but it's the same things that Suzy Orman and Dale Ramsey teach now.

Speaker 2: 7:42

And I was lucky enough to in my radio days. I was lucky enough to actually hire Chuck to do a radio show. He was a phenomenal stage speaker and was a great communicator. One of the reasons his book was so good is because he wrote at a level that everybody understood and so you had people trying to we're living paycheck to paycheck that needed to be able to save a little bit of money I would probably say higher level educated people that were trying to do more estate planning and save money, protect money. There's different levels of financial planning that happen at different spots of our life.

Speaker 2: 8:18

I actually got involved with Chuck on the radio side Chuck and the investment group that actually bought the radio stations that I managed and then. So my relationship with him was on the radio station side first and we were successful with that. I got to see an inside look on my trips there to see what they were doing on the financial education. The reason I met him in the first place was I had bought wealth with that risk and in my 20s I was using it to invest in no-load mutual funds and make sure I wasn't overpaying on the wrong insurances using the right credit cards. It was all the basic strategies. So when I talked to him, I'm like, hey, I love your book. I got to see what he was doing with this company and I basically went to him and said, hey, listen, one of your insurance strategies is buy term life and invest the rest. And so I was like, when you refer everybody out for all of these insurance products, are you getting paid on that? And the answer was no. He just wrote an educational book. So let's get this set up on the insurance side. You're making all of these recommendations on no-load mutual funds. Are you getting paid on this? Okay, you're licensed, so let's set up this with a registered investment advisory firm where people can actually have their money managed based off the strategies that you're teaching. Those grew into hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars of money being put under management on the broker dealer registered investment advisory side, as well as insurance products, credit cards. All of the above because he taught multiple different strategies and multiple financial silos.

Speaker 2: 9:59

I wish I could take credit for the success of his book. It was Simon and Schuster published it. It was an excellent book. The second part is that the company did financial education seminars and that business grew and even though they weren't promoting the book, it was an entry level into kind of basic financial education and we were spending a lot of money on the direct mail and it did a little bit of radio, but mostly television, and it became it had a big effect on the number of sales on that. But in a lot of the work that you do, paul, it's how can business owners capsulize the educational side of their business and be able to communicate that through a book? And that was the catalyst for Chuck's success. Right, he was able to take these strategies, put them in a book, get the book out. The people that would read it some of them.

Speaker 2: 10:52

It was actually what I call a DIY. It's a do it yourself. You can go do this, do this. And some people go I'm gonna, I'd like somebody else to do that. And I heard a great phrase once. They would say hey, if you can teach a man to fish, he'll never be hungry. And that is one side. There's a certain number of people that wanna do that. This is one of the funniest quotes I've ever heard there. And then there's another group of people that just wanna fish sandwich. In that sense, he was able to offer services to people who didn't wanna do the DIY. They just said hey, your strategies are great. Do you have anybody that can just implement this for me? And in that sense, we started delivering fish sandwiches and it was super, super successful. And obviously the marketing side in the book was the catalyst for that.

Speaker 1: 11:38

I'm gonna have to steal that quote. You can either teach a fish or some people just wanna fish sandwich. How true is that? Especially, we'll get into this as we talk more just about integrated marketing there's. I think one of the reasons that we both work together as marketers and very collaboratively with Mark Miller is because there's so many different ways to market and you can go deep in different levels of expertise in marketing, and so maybe let's shift the conversation over to Mark Miller and just to set this up properly, I've personally now known Mark and say roughly three years, maybe a little bit longer, and what stood out to me immediately was his association with the Hilton family, and that's the same Hilton's whose hotels we've all stayed at. I know, by extension, you have your own relationship with them, to the extent that you can share. I'd love to know a little bit more about what your relationship is with the Hilton family, what Mark's is and how that whole thing came about, cause that seems pretty cool.

Speaker 2: 12:45

The Hilton family is one of the most iconic business success stories in American history. I've also seen just in the last couple of years on some surveys that rank the Hilton brand in the top three most trusted brands worldwide. It's not just obviously it's an American company. Conrad Hilton was the founder extremely successful, great stories. My entrainment to that was a founder of a private equity firm. I do a lot of investments. I've always done a lot of investments. I have a private equity firm called Legion Capital and when we were doing one of our first rounds of fundraising through hedge funds I got the opportunity to meet Jay Bradley. Hilton Now Jay Bradley, I call him Brad was the son of Eric Hilton, whose conred son, and Brad has a venture fund and his venture fund was one of our first larger investments to come in.

Speaker 2: 13:47

We do primarily real estate investing and I was just fascinated with the legacy of the Hilton family.

Speaker 2: 13:57

I call Brad a little bit of a visionary and he's ridiculously smart, likes a lot of forward looking things and he comes from a tech background. When he was on the IT team at Hilton he actually was part of building the first reservation system that Hilton ever had. And Brad and I have a tech, because what we do Paul is almost everything we do is digital. So there's different levels of tech. We're all immersed in it every single day. Even this where we're doing I mean we'll probably have a continent apart, but we're doing a technical broadcast today but Brad's got a real good vision for that and we started to look at what are the other things, what are the other business sides that the Hilton family wants to be involved in, and that really led to some of the things we do at Legion Capital. And then Brad and Mark Miller with his tax and wealth business actually put everything, merged the company and put everything into the Hilton family brand, and so they specifically market with Hilton and under Hilton.

Speaker 1: 15:10

Yeah, that is very cool. Thank you for sharing that as we talking a little bit more about Mark and just the work that we do together helping him grow that brand as you. So, just for our listeners, what I do specifically on my end is that I helped Mark write a book I want to say two, three years ago now and the book itself. It's called the tax free business owner and it lays out how business owners who are paying or feel that they're paying too much in taxes can potentially reduce their taxes to zero. So it has this really, I would say, enticing promise. It's a short book, which is part of our short book formula, and we use this both as lead magnet, mostly on LinkedIn. We also I would call it use it as a sales conversion tool, meaning that we attract the right people to the book. And then it's the filtration, meaning that there are some requirements to qualify to meet with Mark.

Speaker 1: 16:17

And in talking to Mark over the year and years, one of the things I've heard him say repeatedly is that when someone reads the book and these are complete strangers right, these are people that are met on LinkedIn they don't know how much of them have been connected, they don't really know him and they've been enticed to get the book.

Speaker 1: 16:36

They read the book, they schedule a call and when they read the book, he's able to essentially close these people at around 80%, assuming that they're qualified, which to me and I've been doing online marketing for a long time, helping advisors is astronomical. It's the for everything that the internet promises in terms of access and markets and all these different things. The flip side of that is that, well, it's easy to reach people and to reach out to people, it's also hard to get them to commit right Because, at the end of the day, there's what I would call a trust barrier. It's like how do you get someone to actually believe and trust you to take those next steps, especially when it comes to something such as your money right? And so we've been working with them on the book and now we do LinkedIn, some email marketing for him. But then you and I have this really nice collaborative relationship and I'd love to have you expand on how, what it is that you do for Mark and how you help him, through your integrated marketing strategies, grow his practice.

Speaker 2: 17:39

I want to real quick. Before I answer that, paul, I want to emphasize it specifically about how the book creates credibility for a person or a business owner. I mentioned Legion Capital earlier and Legion started as a direct to investor. When Obama passed the Crowdfunding Act, it changed the rules for working with investors to where businesses can go direct to. That's called crowdfunding right, so you can go direct to. You have to register with the SEC and basically what it did was, instead of going where I spent a lot of my time in my career and still do, by the way working with broker dealers to raise money as a company, you can actually go direct to the investor.

Speaker 2: 18:27

First of all, I didn't believe the SEC was really going to pass this. I thought, oh, there's too many fraudsters out there, everything else. I don't see how this is going to come together. But I had people calling me going Shane, if this happens, this is going to be incredible. You're going to be able to use your marketing and an advertiser. You're going to go directly to it. Now, it ended up getting passed. I ended up building campaigns out. We ended up getting thousands and thousands of people that want investment information. Nobody should, and nobody did get an email or something else logged onto a website and wire $25,000 out as investment. It doesn't exist, by the way. It shouldn't exist. Nobody should ever send $5,000, $10,000, $15,000.

Speaker 1: 19:14

You have no idea who these people are, unless they let you know that they're a Nigerian king and they've lost their kingdom and only you could help them. That's the one exception to the rule.

Speaker 2: 19:27

The one exception yes, you should actually wire that money today To your point in any type of real transaction. That's going to be a meaningful transaction there has to be. We would get literally thousands of people that were interested in investing, in particular investments. We had to then send that information out. We had to cultivate that information. We had to you and I refer to. We had to build a funnel. We had to educate. In almost every case we had to have multiple conversations with. That was our funnel. That's what our sales cycle looked like.

Speaker 2: 20:07

The reason I wanted to bring that specific example up is that's exactly what you do, paul in the bookside is by delivering a book. Somebody can take it and on their own timeframe, they read it. When they read it, they can judge it and they can say, oh, this makes sense for me. It doesn't make sense for me, which is exactly why somebody like Mark Miller and Hilton Tax of Wealth has an 80% client close rate because that book. It takes care of that credibility piece. I know from other people in the industry when their team gets on the phone with people, they're like talking to somebody who hasn't read a book versus somebody who has read a book is night and day right, Because you've got to explain it all At that point.

Speaker 2: 20:57

You're trying to sell it versus they've already read it, they're educated. Now you're having a constructive conversation with about how can you save or make that person money. Those are two completely different conversations. I wanted to validate what you were talking about with how you work with Mark and how the book plays the credibility One. It plays credibility too. It also is the educational piece that I use the word strategies. This is going back to the given states, because Chuck wrote strategies. It's like they tell the story and they tell the strategies of whatever this could be. And then it's more about talking about that, talking to that potential client about how that could be implemented for them. It doesn't even fit them right. Do they qualify? Is this a good strategy In the case of Hilton Tax and Wealth?

Speaker 2: 21:50

You've got the book and then you do one channel extremely well, one social channel right, which is LinkedIn. And if you think, let's take a broader holistic discussion on this, for any business, if you've got a website, google dominates everything. You don't need to even do anything for being in Yahoo. It's Google's 90, 90, somewhat percent of search traffic. You obviously make sure that it's mobile. You've got Facebook. Facebook has its own demographics. It tends to be older people like me that are on it. Excuse that my kids aren't on Facebook. I've got five. They're not on there. Then, of course, under the same ownership with Metta with Facebook, is Instagram. We mentioned LinkedIn. You've got Google, my business, which is a very important strategy on Google, and then you've got the video side. You've got YouTube, which is behind Google. Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world, which, when you think about that, both from a content provider as well. Then you've got TikTok. Now I'm doing these off my head, paul, so if I missed one, you can chime in.

Speaker 1: 23:05

I was going to ask you and we can either answer or hold off until later. The ones that stand up to me and I find it funny, old people are on Facebook now because 15, 20 years ago, when it came out, it was like no, this is the cutting edge thing. So it's funny to hear that TikTok to me is a younger person medium and I guess one question I have is that where, say, take Mark, for example? Is that where the affluent clients are, and is there a reason to be on channels such as TikTok? And another one I wanted to ask you about as well is X, formerly known as Twitter, and what happening there. I know personally I'm on X daily, just as a personal consumer.

Speaker 1: 23:48

I'm personally excited about what Elon Musk is doing with it. I know that's probably a controversial thing. Probably large number of people are. I think he's ruining it. A large number of people think he's turning it into a trillion dollar company. So I'd love to. And another category is podcasting. I know from personal experience, both in hosting my own podcasts, which I'm doing now, as well as guest podcasting, I'm seeing a significant flow of my leads and appointments and clients are coming through a combination of the book and podcasting. So there's a lot of stuff out there, but feel free to jump in where it makes sense. No, that's great.

Speaker 2: 24:27

I completely forgot about X, which I shouldn't have. I look at all of those channels and I call them integrated marketing and, in my all things being equal, as a business owner, if you have the time or can make the time or you can get all of those channels going, you should Quite frankly, because there's two components to them. There's organic and there's paid, and I'm not, and I don't think either one of us are suggesting that you're doing paid campaigns on any of those. It's get this integrated marketing channel set up. There's, there is, there's going to be a channel that's going to perform better for your business, but you can do all of these on a low cost, relatively low cost basis. So I there's there's always times with all of these platforms and I call them social platforms to where, when they're implementing their business plan and they've got their audience, they become the best performing ROI.

Speaker 2: 25:36

Back in the day when Google started you know, really coming in and competing I spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars a month Probably more. Maybe we've added up clients spends and everything else because I could get relatively inexpensive clicks in search. They were very specific. Then that channel starts to mature a little bit. Google raises its rates and then what becomes the next best thing? Facebook. Facebook opens up an unbelievable advertiser demographic section where you can go in and you can slice and dice demographics, geographics where people live, what their interests are, and they by far then were creating the lowest cost per click, cost per conversion, and they give a lot of tools. So it was in my mind, it was Google. Youtube's always been there, and then Facebook became like the marketers paradise for a little bit. Their rates, their everything they've been doing starts to go up.

Speaker 2: 26:45

Doesn't mean get rid of it, because you still got the organic side of that. You know what you were talking about, paul. X is now it's turning to be that and I will do a TikTok as well. But I'm going to address X first. Right now, in terms of being able to reach audience and segmentation and cost per click, because that's what matters somebody's going to click and go through. X is delivering really good numbers. How long will that last, who knows? It also depends on what your product services and everything else. But X is first of all of us, from a marketing standpoint, should be marketing agnostic, meaning we shouldn't care whether it's Google, youtube, x, facebook, tiktok, linkedin. If you have a bias. You're saying I don't like Zuckerberg, I don't like Google because it controls really the online world. I don't like Elon.

Speaker 2: 27:47

I love how, 20 years ago, google's slogan was don't be evil, I can tell you a lot of people think they're evil, but from a market or standpoint, it should not matter. Don't let your politics or whatever get involved with. Find what your business is telling and try to figure out what medium is going to deliver the right audience for you, because there's millions and millions of people on each one of those and right now with TikTok is they're growing like crazy, truly growing like crazy. Their advertiser, their console, is getting better and better and they do deliver all kinds of. Do they have a lot of kids on there? Yes, do they have a lot of business owners on there? Yes, they have a lot of everything. But you can segment who you're trying to reach. Now take that in comparison to LinkedIn. There aren't a bunch of kids on LinkedIn, right? Linkedin is a very specific business-oriented connection piece and so there are very specific people that can benefit from LinkedIn. In somebody we've been doing a quasi-case study on Hilton Tax of Wealth with Mark Miller, mark's best client base is business owners that he's going to be able to save money for on the taxes they're paying on their profits. So LinkedIn is, in my estimation, is by far the best vertical. Does that mean he shouldn't be in every other vertical. No, he should. In my estimation, he should be in all of those verticals, and right now we're in a.

Speaker 2: 29:22

I'm just talking globally, but there's a lot of opportunity with apps and there's a lot of opportunity with TikTok. By the way, if you're making a TikTok video, the same video that you make with TikTok can be on Facebook, instagram, linkedin, tiktok and YouTube. It isn't like you have to produce a different piece of content. And part of my philosophy around video and, by the way, I'm somebody who has spent over $600,000 producing one 30-minute infomercial back in the day and I've done a bunch of infomercials that you don't need high production video and incredible editing. Really, what people want to know now is they just want you to be authentic. Some of the best pieces I've seen and I have a doctor who uses his own camera and he films little pieces in his doctor's office and he posts on Instagram and TikTok and he's got a multi-million dollar business. It's all from those type of connections where you get to know that professional and the services that they provide. So it's quite amazing.

Speaker 2: 30:44

And then I'll finish the last question that you asked there, paul, which is podcasting. So I'm going to and I think I've admitted this to you. I didn't see, I thought podcasting was stupid. I'm a radio guy, I went to school in communications, I have been at some of the best radio production facilities in the world and I thought, well, podcasting is so dumb. Everybody's going to have a microphone and nobody's ever going to listen to it. And people are going to be doing this and they're underwearing their basement. And, by the way, I was right about all that.

Speaker 2: 31:25

What I completely missed because there are a bunch of people doing that what I completely missed is that you can there are more and more people listen to podcasts.

Speaker 2: 31:37

I listen to multiple podcasts all the time and you can do very niche podcasts and you can reach very specific audiences and, to your point, that's what you do, right. With your podcast, paul, you're reaching business owners and people that are looking to market either a brand, a person, a business and you're reaching that very specific marketing where you can talk about the strategies that you use to be able to increase those businesses and you're living proof of that. But I missed it. I'm happy that it exists now and I only see podcasts as becoming more and more relevant and it doesn't take. When I had United Syndications Radio Network and then the stations that I had multi-million dollar facilities for broadcasting. It doesn't take that anymore. You can set up and do a podcast relatively and expensively. And also to contrast that, how does it work with a book? If people are interested in doing a book, is that it becomes a companion piece to it right 100%.

Speaker 1: 32:46

To touch on the last piece there about podcasts, I think it's the perfect book and podcasting whether it's hosting or guesting is the perfect companion piece, because if you're looking to guest podcast, the host needs to vet you and see you as someone that they want to have on their podcast. Especially as you're reaching out and trying to get on maybe higher level podcasts or broaden at your reach to strangers, that's one of the best ways to get them to say yes. At the same time, it just makes it so easy in terms of the message, because I do two to four guest podcasts per month and I'm saying the same thing over in just different iterations depending on the host and their personality and whatnot, but it makes it just super easy to prepare for it. Then, ultimately, the ROI is significant. It's literally the best ROI marketing I've done, probably in my life, and it's because you have a clear call to action right, it's not hey, it's very specific, we're talking about the book. We're saying, hey, this is where you can get the book, et cetera. So there's just a very clear path for people, for listener, to go from oh, I'm interested in that. And then you also have this like warm referral effect because if they're listening to a podcast, they have some level of trust in the host and if you're a guest on that podcast, even if they don't explicitly say go work with someone, it's a soft endorsement because they're promoting you on their podcast. You got the speaking, you're demonstrating your competence, you're benefiting from that COI slash referral relationship to some degree. And then to the educational piece. I find a lot of people come to me directly from the podcast and they don't necessarily get the book first, they just come direct. Some get the book as well, but it's because they feel that they know enough, because I'm just talking about the book and they've had a chance to listen and they're interested in it. I'm converting those very high quality prospects and they're converting extremely well. Just that mix of the book and the podcasting to me is the magic spot. And, of course, if you're doing your own podcasting and anyone listened to this, once it's produced we'll find this is that this is where advertising comes in. So the first thing you're going to hear when you listen to this podcast with Shane and me is a pitch for my buck, right, so it's going to be included in there.

Speaker 1: 34:50

A couple more topics while I have you here. X is fascinating to me. I just use it as a consumer at this point. I like to, as they call it, shitpost all the time. It's where I relieve my stress. I go in under assumed name, I have zero accountability, which is nice, and it's on the cusp of.

Speaker 1: 35:09

I'm excited about what Elon Musk is doing. I see his vision and I believe that this can become the everything app in that trillion dollar company. That in a couple years, I think from Elon himself. When he bought it and it's been a year now their advertising platform sucked and it was really meant for brands, not so much for direct response. So I don't have enough knowledge. I think you have more knowledge about it than I do at this point, and so what fascinates about me is just the organic reach.

Speaker 1: 35:33

Right, obviously, if you have a lot of connections and whatnot, but people put it in the right way, but not.

Speaker 1: 35:35

But people post dumb little things and suddenly they get a million, two million, three million views. Same thing with video and podcasting. People like Tucker Carlson, who left Fox News and now arguably has a significantly bigger audience, doing his show on and just publishing it on X and I'm not a presidential candidate, vivek Ramaswamy, who I don't know if you follow or not, but what's impressed me about him is that he's a relatively unknown entity, at least in the terms of politics. He just decided to run for the Republican nomination this year. He'd written a couple of books before. I'm exaggerating probably, maybe not. He's doing 10 podcasts a day. He has his own podcast and he posted the other day he had two million views, and so I'm just super fascinated by the organic reach on Twitter or X, and then how that contrasts to. Does it make sense to do paid advertising there, or just what's the strategy for someone who wants to get in early on the Twitter 2.0, or X as it's called?

Speaker 2: 36:38

Like I had animated before, I think business owners and even if you brand yourself, if you are the business, I think, being on every social platform because there's no cost to do it right, and then you can get a lot of different social media, depending on what your time is. You can either post on them individually or you can use anything like a Hootsuite, you can use Posly to manage ourselves and clients, but there's a lot of different ways to be able to do that. So you definitely want to take care of the organic side, like you, paul. When I saw what Elon paid for Twitter, I was like I think he's grossly overpaid. And then I was watching. I watched CNBC in the morning while I'm working out and I basically saw an analyst talk about from the business. As it stood there. He overpaid but what he was really after because he had said he's going to build the kind of everything app. But what he bought was a gigantic user database, right, that was already opted in and they're using it. And if you look at it and as somebody who does marketing, where I'm acquiring clients and I've done mobile and I've built mobile apps and I've got people to say it's crazy expensive to get people to download an app and to use it. The client acquisition customer acquisition is very expensive and when they put those metrics to it, it's oh you know what. Elon's smarter than the average bear. I think he's proven that with Tesla, spacex the boring company the guy's usually a few steps ahead. He didn't make it a secret. He said this is what I'm going to do.

Speaker 2: 38:24

I didn't like Twitter as much from a user perspective because it was limited on characters and you were basically publishing gifts, not really videos. And already you solved the character issue. You can basically put anything you want on there in terms of length, it's now video, it's streaming video, it's long form video, it's everything. And so I, from a marketing standpoint, I think it's phenomenal and I think it's only going to get better. And when I was we're at a moment in time here when you and I were talking about this from an advertising perspective, x is very inexpensive right now. Now, I don't expect it always to be like that. If you want to get on there and run a paid ad, that is going to where you can get a click through. That's going to go back to your website or go into your funnel. I think X is a really good value. Is it always going to be like that? Probably not, because none of them do. I gave you the example of how I used to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on Google, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on Facebook, and we still spend money there, but it's. You have to be super careful because you can. You know you have to hit it. Every company has an ROI that they have to be able to do to generate a lead, and I think X is a great way to do that.

Speaker 2: 39:42

And to your point, on the podcast side, podcasts do, in addition to be able to get the story out there, have credibility. I think that, in addition to that, you also got a whole piece about when podcasts are put up on platforms. Google indexes those right. So now on this one, you've got Paul and Shane and Google picks that up. That means it's going to go into the search piece. So there's another level of credibility around a podcast right when Google organically picks that up. They send their spiders out. They're going to pick that up when you publish on the podcast side and so when people go in and they're doing research to say, hey, do I want to do business with this person and they can see that you've been on a podcast or you have a podcast.

Speaker 2: 40:39

There's also a reputation piece there. That's really good. That probably doesn't get as much focus, but you and I both work with investment advisors and stockbrokers and wealth managers and that's a big deal. When people go into research and say who is this person, it's oh look, they've been on this podcast and that podcast. There's also a reputation piece that's super good on that. And, by the way, I would say the same thing about LinkedIn and being on LinkedIn. It's not uncommon that when somebody goes in and puts a person's name in, that LinkedIn is in the top one or two search results. That's really common. I know it is. I do a lot of reputation management for companies and people and LinkedIn is a good one.

Speaker 1: 41:26

Yeah, I totally agree. A quick aside story is that I learned in terms of reputation management. I learned a lesson a few years back when I typed in Paul McManus into Google and I discovered that I was a bloodthirsty axe murderer out of Ireland, featured on murderpedia. And I realized, okay, wait a minute, that's not me. I don't think that's me. And I learned to put my middle initial G, and so now you always see me say Paul G McManus. It's not that I'm in love with my middle name, it's just I need to differentiate myself.

Speaker 1: 41:56

And the cool thing is, to your point is that when you Google Paul G McManus, what's going to show up is probably first or second is my LinkedIn, next is going to be my books on Amazon, next is going to be an assortment of podcasts. And so to that reputation piece is that in today's world, whether you're referred or introduced or cold marketing or what have you, we want to know who we're talking to. So we're going to Google their name and it's whatever that first page of Google has to say about you or directs you to is going to form a huge impression. So, whether it's books or LinkedIn or podcasts, et cetera, it's a great way to put up that best foot forward. I want to respect your time, shane, so I appreciate everything that you've shared.

Speaker 1: 42:40

I got two final questions. One is there anything that I haven't asked you today that you think would be meaningful for audience or that you want to share before we end this conversation? And then the second and the final question is for someone listening to this who is and that's interested in learning more about you potentially reaching out to do business, who is a right fit client for you today?

Speaker 2: 43:04

Gotcha In terms of. Is there something we haven't talked about? I would probably emphasize what our relationship is, paul, as an example and that is there is no one group that I know of that can do everybody, everything for everybody, really well. What we try to do at Market Leverage is we try to find really good people that are trustworthy, the same ethics as we do, are kind of client centric and have expertise in areas. Because we were just talking about X. There are people now that are X is moving at such lightning speed with their APIs and everything they just.

Speaker 2: 43:50

I could spend all my time working just on X. Whether I would get in a good ROI probably not. You and I work together and you mentioned this. You obviously have. You have a book, you've got podcasts and then you have a terrific LinkedIn strategy. I call it an organic LinkedIn strategy for inboxing, but also group posting and everything else. That's a very specific skill set. We do some stuff. We do typically more organic and just posting as just the channel piece.

Speaker 2: 44:24

So I think it's important for business owners to recognize that it's not just about finding one person. First of all. You need to get in and start executing one thing at a time I see a lot of businesses. They want to go so much and then they get a paralysis and I'm like, hey, listen, one thing a lot of times I'll say we're going to focus on this, get this working, because pulling content, getting content from business owners is really difficult because they are they're very busy and it's actually one of the things, one of the kind of I'll call it your superpower. It's one of the superpowers that you guys have at your company, paul, which is you're so good at taking a little bit of information and then expanding on that from the average business owner or author that can't write a whole book, and especially all the stuff that you're doing with artificial intelligence now is ridiculously cool and that's only going to become more and more. But I think that having ultimately building a team but you don't have to do everything it's impossible for every business to do that it's get it going, start getting successes and build on that. I'm very appreciative of the relationship that we've had in helping clients together.

Speaker 2: 45:46

As far as market leverage, we do a little bit of everything. We've specialized in Google search. We do I mentioned reputation management. We do everything from building out websites to building funnels. We're huge in the database side. When I talk about databases, I'm talking about building client databases, email building funnels. On the back end We've done that together. You've actually built marks. We don't need to reinvent the wheel there because we've got so much other things to focus on. We were happy to work with clients and also existing businesses. We don't want to reduplicate things that are already done, but really try to optimize things, because in the end, it's about getting new clients into business and all working together to make that happen 100%.

Speaker 1: 46:33

Yeah, and just to add, I like how collaborative we are To your point. It's often difficult to get consistent content from a client for busy, et cetera. I think what you and I do very well on behalf of Mark is we get the book and we purpose that in the newsletters and the emails and then we share that with you and then you repurpose that into all the different social media platforms and whatnot I think emails as well. I think it's a very great relationship synergy that we have In terms of where people can find you. What's the best way for someone to get a hold of you or just to learn more about you.

Speaker 2: 47:10

Sure Website is just MarketLeveragecom. As I mentioned, we've been recognized as an Inc 100 ad firm and a Fortune 5000 fastest growing private company. We've had good success over the years great group of people, a little bit of a family atmosphere and people can actually reach me directly at my email just Shane shane At MarketLeveragecom. One thing I'll say, paul, real quick before we go. You were just talking about where you create content. I think this is actually worth a 30 second explanation, in that your group and your staff create specific newsletters and content to go out on LinkedIn and I'm very specific about it.

Speaker 2: 47:54

You do it for Mark Verhill. Then my team then takes that and, depending on the social channel, slices it, dices. It takes that content called repurposing right and we do it for different channels and we make it go across all platforms. So in the end, all those social platforms that we talked about, we're reaching all those different audiences. We're getting eyeballs on them from one specific piece of content that your staff is creating that gets repurposed across probably seven, eight different platforms in one way or the other, sometimes in its entirety, sometimes pieces and so you're really content wise If you look at it from a business owner standpoint, taking what pain to have one piece of content created but making sure it's getting out to millions of people over all these different social media platforms. All organic, not paid right. On the organic side, if you think about that, wasn't even possible. It wasn't even possible 15 years ago. It just wasn't. Now there's more reach, more organic reach, than ever before, so it's an exciting time.

Speaker 1: 49:02

Yeah, and the secret to that is that because we start people with a book and we get them to focus on that, we capture 12,000 words or so of their message, their voice, their, etc. Which then allows us to seamlessly create those newsletters, because they're simply based on the book, etc. Which then allows you to do what you just described. It's very cool. Thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed the conversation. I hope our audience did as well and look forward to seeing what the future looks like. I know you and I will be collaborating and excited to see what X has in store for us, Artificial intelligence has in store for us and anything else that maybe I'm not thinking about yet, but it's on the horizon.

Speaker 2: 49:45

That's great Thanks for your time today, paul, appreciate it.