Training PPC Managers Who Can Train Others

Training PPC Managers Who Can Train Others Speaker 2: Welcome to The PPC Den Podcast. We're joined today by Gonza Martinez, my dear friend, my business partner, the guy in Miami, sunny Miami. How are things in sunny Miami this morning? Speaker 1: Sunny and cool, which is great for Miami. We are at a very, very cold 71 degrees. Speaker 2: Beautiful. Wonderful. Speaker 1: But it's like 50 in the morning, which I love. It might be just this week and then we revert back to 120. Speaker 2: What do you think about my NPR voice? I like it. I like it. Speaker 1: Is it AI? Because I know you've been playing with AR. You should try the same voice, but maybe in Austrian German. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: That would be very freaky. I do like it. Speaker 2: I do like it. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: I'm excited today. You know, I've known you for quite some time and you've been constantly, I almost think of it like when I work with a customer. You can almost like move up the value ladder. You know, what is the value ladder? The value ladder is like listening to this podcast and then maybe downloading a freebie and then maybe like signing up for our tool and like, you know, you work up the value ladder. I think what I love about what I've known of you and your e-commerce business is that you yourself have worked up the value ladder. Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm trying. Yeah. Yeah, I have. But yeah, I mean, still on that. Speaker 2: In the business. Speaker 1: Yeah, but I'm still on that journey. Yeah, for sure. Speaker 2: I think we all are. You know, one of my favorite books, this is the third time I'm reading it, is Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. I found him when he had a podcast called something like SAS Growth Engine, something like that. He's since transitioned to like a full-time business guru driving supercars. But He wrote this book called Buy Back Your Time, and the whole concept was evaluate what it is that you do and then delegate it so that you, as the owner of the business, can work in your zone of genius, your creation zone. Similar concepts to like e-myth revisited, so on and so forth. But I've been watching you do this, and you had a cool topic today, which was you first talked me through this, right? We're really intimate with PPC at one point in time. And then over the arc of your business growth, and I think over the last few years, you've acquired companies, sold companies, you've scaled companies, and now you are at a stage where you're actually training new PPC managers. Did I get that right? Almost. Speaker 1: You did a very, very, very textbook 80-20. You got 80% of that right. By the way, That book is on my nightstand as we speak, waiting to be read for the third time. Speaker 2: Get out. Speaker 1: You're ahead of me if you read it three times. So I'm now with, I'm trying to read everything Dan Sullivan has published. I'm with Gap and the Game. This is next to my, it's here on my desk at the moment. Speaker 2: Why are you reading that book? Speaker 1: Why I'm reading this book? I'm very much into mindset at the moment, both growth mindset and just trying to in this journey that you mentioned. Trying to understand where I should spend most of my time and how to lead people. The leadership part of my weekly work is now more important than, say, the PPC part of my work. And I think one of the best things that anyone can do is have an hour a week to identify where you should be spending most of your time and then realize that a lot of what you're doing It needs to be delegated or needs to be trained so someone else can take it over. But at some point, and I like what Dan Sullivan has been teaching for, I think, 40, 50 years, is that what he calls, some people call it the zone of genius. He calls it your unique ability, right? So at some point, it was very clear to me, and we had an offline conversation yesterday with you and Brent about this. It's like my unique ability is no longer PPC. Because someone in my team is doing that and is doing that way better. So can I add value in teaching PPC at the moment? Yes. Is that unique in terms of no one else in my team can do that? No. Therefore, if you do like a matrix and all these questions and answers, it's like, okay, then I should be spending time where no one else can add value. And I happen to know where those things are, those areas in my company that no one else can add value. So far, hopefully one day, that's also something that someone kicks me out of. But yeah, PPC is one of them. And you said, one of the things that you said is, did I get it right? The only part that I would correct is that I've trained PPC managers and now the next challenge is that they are training the next generation. And I'm like overseeing the training. But the idea is that they are able to train the next generation because the ones that I trained don't come from a PPC or didn't come from a PPC background. They almost didn't know Amazon. They're both engineers. So I trained them in PPC, Amazon PPC. They like their own value ladder, right? Where now they're way better than me. They're in the woods every day. Woods or weeds? Speaker 2: There's weeds in the woods. Speaker 1: It's weeds in the woods. They're both in the woods and in the weeds in the woods. Speaker 2: Can you help us visualize your org chart? What do you refer to yourself as in the organization? Speaker 1: I'm the CEO and I retain 80% of the COO, which is the next chunk of work that I want to get. Speaker 2: Describe that COO bucket. Speaker 1: The COO is everything that's operational, operations in the company. I'm still in charge of operations. Everything that's processes, like I asked my marketing team, like the off Amazon team, okay, we need to come up with processes to how we manage and how we run TikTok shop or Shopify store, or how we run ads, how we work on finals. There has to be a process. With all of those things, same with product development. So I'm behind all of that and Amazon still when it comes to big level processes, but not on the operations. I try not to do operationally. At some point, this is good news. If your company grows to a certain scale, you normally don't find yourself trying to do certain things because you just can't. And that helps. It's a little bit, you know, it's frightening not to be able to, I mean, things become so complex that even if you allocated the time in doing tasks that you shouldn't be doing, you can't do them because you don't have enough time. The problem becomes bigger and then the solution becomes easier. And it's, I don't know, I need someone to fill this role. I can't do it myself. Speaker 2: What about, you know, marketing leadership, like a CMO? Are you also in charge of that? Speaker 1: I'm unfortunately, yes and no. I had someone that was in charge of that. Didn't work out. I consciously didn't take that role because I think I could not do it properly. So now we don't have that person. And we do need that person to have a CMO. Ideally, there's a CMO. I just hire a CFO. What's going to be our next? I mean, he's developing into a proper CFO. He's a financial controller now. And when I hired him, I hired him with the promise that he could develop into a proper CFO. So this person reports to me, then operationally, I'm still debating whether we need a COO or the COO component Of each department can be assigned of the head of department. Speaker 2: Have you ever explored fractional leadership, meaning like a fractional marketing leader, fractional CFO, fractional COO? How many people are at the company? Speaker 1: We are 13 now. Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah. Speaker 1: Or three brand. Speaker 2: It's a concept that you see coming up time to time, you know, like the actual like, At a team size, you know, maybe under 30, sometimes a fractional person, you know, you don't need a full time person to manage a team of Three marketers, maybe that is like a fractional type role. I've been hearing more and more about that over the last few years. Speaker 1: I've tried it. I've tried a fractional, what was a fractional CMO at some point, didn't work. That's why I hired a full-time one and also didn't work. But yeah, you know me, I have a preconception that's probably, I'm open to the possibility that it's incorrect. It's hard to jump in and out of things and it's hard to dedicate your entire skill set to one task if you don't own it and if you don't have a vested interest. I have nothing against fractional anything, but I know they become more of consultants. People that come and take care of your marketing department and they own the results of your marketing, without ownership, it's very hard to delegate. I think anything fractional, fractional CFO or fractional, like a fractional CFO might probably make more sense. But if it's someone that has to create strategy and own results, Instead of calling them fractional CMOs, I would call them a marketing consultant. Someone else has to own the task, if that makes any sense. So, yeah, I'm open to fractional roles as long as you don't think they're owning the result. Speaker 2: Well, let me pivot to the Amazon world. I see this at every Scale of Amazon. I often talk to the owner of the company, who's also the CEO, who's making all the strategic decisions. And then at any scale, whether they're doing $10,000 a month in revenue, $10,000 a year in revenue, or $10,000 a day in revenue. I think they do $250 million, a huge company. And even at that company, Even the largest right down to the smallest, there's a haze when it comes to, what does my org chart look like on Amazon? Meaning so many times, I think like Amazon PPC, Amazon SEO, like Amazon marketing, either someone gets pushed into it, like, oh, you know, you did Google Ads 10 years ago, like you're going to be our Amazon marketer. And then on top of it, or they say, like, let me just I use a software and now that software is like the PPC manager and it's like, well, the software can't show up to your board meetings and sit at the table and explain why results were 10% better. There still needs to be a person in that seat. And then at the same time, is that person self-managed? Who's actually in charge of the result of doing the thing? And I see this so often where Entrepreneurs, sometimes I see entrepreneurs who are like really tuned into digital marketing. And they're really good at, you see this a lot with D2C companies, they're, you know, the the owner of the company has such incredible knowledge of the space, like they've been selling protein bars for the last 20 years. They know it so intimately and like they can go and they know exactly what their Facebook campaigns should look like. They know exactly what's going to resonate with their market and they're actually, they just like, it's almost like they're playing t-ball and they're hitting home runs every time. It's like, oh, they know exactly how to do this. They have the time, energy, And then that is rare, I think. I think it's rare for an entrepreneur to be really good at product selection, product market fit, running the company, and then show up to their Amazon PPC account and be like, I now have just as much energy and enthusiasm to this Running Amazon PPC, thinking of SEO, doing all this stuff, as well as product development, as well as running the company, as well as making decisions, as well as analyzing the finances. Well, it's very rare that people have the same level of interest in all of these things. So I think that segues to Our concept, meaning, so you gave this great presentation in our weekly Mastermind and Core. We're not going to do the whole thing here, but we're going to highlight some of the key points and give, like if what I just described sounds like anyone. And, dear listener, It probably sounds like a lot of people. I think I fall victim to this in my own companies. You might fall victim to this in your own companies. I think this is a common entrepreneur trap that we fall into. Nobody cares more about the company's success than we do. No one has more incentive to fix everything as we do. And it is incredibly difficult to be expert level in all these things. And It's pretty interesting to see, like, I think the goal of a lot of entrepreneurs is to create systems and environment, a culture, so that Other people can do great work and drive it forward that you don't have to, right? Yeah. Speaker 1: There's a culture that I think, before we talk about training people, in this case, PPC managers, but I think this concept can apply to anyone that you're trying to train, even yourself, how you self-train yourself. You mentioned something that to me has been I was shocked when I started finding this in many entrepreneurs and business owners because I thought it was. Kind of basic that everybody that owns a business should know or should love certain areas of the business are critical. Finance, product development, service, whatever, depending on the type of business. And more often than not, they are in love with one area of the business, not in love with the others. And the others, they get neglected. It's not that you're not loving everything. Or at a similar volume, but it's like you're actually neglecting every other area in your business. And that's, I would say, I dare to say, the most common finding. So when you're trying to train someone, I think, and we'll talk about mindset in a second, I think the right mindset for the upper level, the owner, CEO, whatever you want to call the business owner, the entrepreneur, they need to understand that no area can be neglected. And then if you're not good with numbers, you actually hate them. You have to train yourself to love a side of it. Even if it's delegated to someone who loves numbers, you need to make peace with certain areas of the business. And if you make peace and you're exposed to those, eventually you don't need to love them, but you need to stop dreading areas of your business. Otherwise, it's very hard to grow a business when you hate the most critical parts of it. That's my personal take on it. And that's what I'm trying to train. When I train team members, that's when I tell them within their scope of work, if you hate certain parts of your job, then eventually you can delegate them. That's the 80% that you get rid of. But you can stay in this, like Dan says, it calls the unique ability, what you love to do, what brings you energy. The more you spend time doing that, the more energy you get, the more excited you get. But the other 80%, if you don't know how to train someone else, if you don't know how to do the other 80%, good luck delegating it. Speaker 2: Let's walk through this. What I think is interesting is the timeline. And what's cool about this is you cover a lot of Amazon specific things. So I think the takeaway for people listening to this is really like, well, what do you actually You know, what's your checklist to be sure that if you expose a person to all these topics, if you tell them to go out and research them, if you share whether you're training them or someone else on the team is training them or you task them with learning a lot about these areas, I think these kinds of things is pretty valuable. So The first thing that I say is that you have this timeline of like, one month to a year is really like, how often like, because you just did this, you just hired a PPC manager who has experience with Off Amazon PPC, and you want to get them ramped up on Amazon PPC. Speaker 1: I'll just rephrase that slightly. My team hired him. Speaker 2: Cool. Speaker 1: I was part of the interview process, but they chose a candidate, selected a candidate, tested, they came up with a test, and then they decided to hire them, negotiated salaries. They did the whole thing, which is, it's part of this, it's part of proper delegation, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. That if someone has never done PPC in any form, paid traffic, like in any way, Before, do not hire them to do PPC, meaning like if you have the brain for doing paid traffic, that's great. And like with digital marketing, like so much of it is self-taught. So I think like that's one thing I see too. If you are an Amazon seller, it is incredibly uphill to become an expert in PPC yourself. Only because it's almost like what you've done in the past is a great indicator to what you'll do in the future. It is incredibly difficult to change the way that your brain works. It's very rare to just wake up one day and love spreadsheets and love, wow, a bulk file if I download it, I get every single campaign that I can manipulate in a spreadsheet, and then I can play with it, look at the data, then analyze it, and then upload it. It is very rare you wake up one day and just want to do that. Speaker 1: Not going to happen. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: Not going to happen. Speaker 2: So I think that's my first... Speaker 1: If you like painting, and that's what moves your needle, colors, and that's not going to happen. That's why this starts with hiring the right person, which has the right mind, which sees beauty in numbers or It's able to work with numbers for a very long time. And like I said before, and not feel drained, but the opposite. Find beauty formulas and things like that. So yeah, the right mind and mindset. Speaker 2: You know, I grew up playing real-time strategy games. In fact, I still play a little bit of Starcraft 2 every once in a while. But for me, it's like my brain was always like this. Like I always liked, in case you aren't familiar with real-time strategy games, basically it's like you versus Someone else and you all have the same starting units and then over the course of like the the game you get to like pick and choose how you use your units. Do you build like sky Units, do you build land units? Do you build water units? What's your combination of units? You have to go scout the competition. So I loved doing this ever since I could remember. I remember first playing, shout out if anyone's ever played Warcraft 2, but those real-time strategy games always lit me up and I found a lot of that in doing digital marketing. So I think finding the right person and Even during the interview process, seeing the anecdotes is really key. I think there are some marketers out there that are much more heavily slanted towards the brand side of things, like the brand feel, what it looks like, what people think of it. It's like those people are generally not good at Doing the digital marketing and vice versa. Speaker 1: And what I found is a lot of people that are working as PPC managers are not numbers people. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And they're good at following SOPs, which is part of the conversation today, but they're not good at thinking in an analytical way to come up with their own, to even fight or contest the data. Speaker 2: You know, I had a really interesting interview with a PPC manager and I was asking them questions like, what would you do if organic sales percentage dipped or whatever, asking all these questions. They had really good answers to everything. And then came the spreadsheet assessment. Here's a spreadsheet of search terms. What would you do? What is your observation here? Really had trouble with it. So basically, this person was really trained on being able to talk about these concepts. But when it came to the nitty-gritty stuff, that part wasn't activated. So I just thought it was a really fascinating thing where you should be able to assess these things in an interview, both from the strategic component to the technical component. Unknown Speaker: Technical component, yeah. Speaker 2: So let's get into it, actually. You have a slide here, Learn the Basics, Amazon University. Where did these 10 concepts come from? Like, is this actual, like, made by Amazon or did you come up with these? Speaker 1: No, these are things that Amazon can teach you. So there's, as we know, there's Amazon University where you can go. This is just meant to tell people, I mean, don't spend time creating a training manual or whatever you use for your information. About campaign types, match types, they can send them to Amazon University and tell them, listen, use the first week to go over all this material. And there's no point in you as a company creating any of this because Amazon creates it and the most important part, keeps it updated. Speaker 2: Especially because it changes a lot. I would say like As someone who's made courses before, we've talked about building courses before, building an internal course is probably not worth anyone's time. And like, sometimes I'll get asked a question like, hey, what's the best course on Amazon advertising? And it's just like, well, for somebody brand new, it's like, yeah, just go. Go get certified in it from Amazon. They have all the up-to-date information for you, way more updated than anyone else. I've also found that courses are generally just an upsell to something else. I feel like courses have really degraded, I think, over the last five years, maybe ten years. Speaker 1: I agree. But in this case, for a PPC manager, there's a Information like the one you're displaying on screen and there's how to use the information. I think training should be around how you use information because information is out there in Facebook groups or LinkedIn or Amazon University. I mean, you name it. But how you use it is what matters. And a lot of people use it Incorrectly or, you know, not good enough. Speaker 2: I have to say something. I actually do feel like if anyone's going to LinkedIn to learn Amazon advertising, they will have a really warped view of everything. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Only because it's really difficult to know what's actually important by just going on LinkedIn. So anyway, you send them to Amazon University. This is... Speaker 1: Yeah, just learn the basics. I mean, in terms of use of time, if Anyone has to sit down with the other person to describe what a broad versus phrase match type is. It's not very good use of time. Go to Amazon University, learn the basics. In our case, the new person comes from an advertising background, so we don't have to explain what ROAS, ACOS, or KPI is. Speaker 2: So they run through, and so this is from Amazon University, campaign types, match types, placement types, bidding types, keyword research, competitor research, audiences. Amazon Marketing Cloud, DSP, and some... Does Amazon University actually touch on some strategic work? Speaker 1: What they do describe is what the funnel is, what's awareness, what's consideration, and which campaign types act on each one. So now you can read from Amazon. Yeah. Speaker 2: And then I think this slide is pretty cool. It says train the right mindset, the role of advert. So like all of these things I think are more mindset, strategic, like If you look at point 12 here, it's talking about cost of goods and contribution margin and number five is developing a PPC personality, avoid machine-like decisions, develop critical human-like things. Tell me where all of these points came from and how do you actually teach these to someone? How do you teach someone to You know, don't reinvent the wheel. Don't aim for perfection. If it works, it works. Speaker 1: Masterminding, it's not a one-time knowledge transfer. It's impossible. So part of this is creating the right culture within the department where people are trained to have the right understanding on Amazon PPC. They know what they're trying to buy, what they're going for. And again, this can vary company to company, but they have what the company understands as a mindset. I run what success looks like for a campaign, for a product, for a brand. And then you start walking them through the right concepts. For example, there's one there that's highlighted that's spend, spend, spend. You know, as the owner of a successful agency that most brand owners is like, okay, I want to spend up to $30,000 a month on Amazon advertising. And I'm like, why? Why? Why would someone want to spend up to a certain amount if that's converting well, if that's, you know, has a low tacos or low a cost? The goal is to outspend the competition. You know, what you should be pursuing is To become the highest spending brand in your category and not a loss, obviously, but that has to be the goal. And in our space, unfortunately, that's not a common mindset. It should be in any advertising space on Amazon, outside of Amazon. Right now, the companies, you know, DTC companies, it's all about who can Outspend the other, really. It's about a customer acquisition cost tolerance for the company. The one that can spend a higher CAC wins, wins impressions, wins the shares, the eyeballs, right? So all these things about mindset, I would say the 20% that they cannot get anywhere else outside of your company is the mindset piece. Anything else is learnable out there. And the reason why mindset has to be a recurring conversation, it's not a one time knowledge transfer. You need to have several meetings a week. For the duration of the tenure of that person in the company, right, in that seat. Speaker 2: Yeah. You know, it's interesting. Sometimes over at Star Scientist, we have great marketers, but sometimes I see them just sitting on the same budget with a 10 ROAS. And it's just like, hey, when you see that, what should you do? You should suggest a budget increase. Things are going great. Let's lean into this. Let's get it going. And that It's one thing to know the basics, like the mechanical components of running a campaign. It's another thing to... I would summarize this whole thing. In terms of like understanding business goals and modifying what you're doing to the business goals. So I think this is a great checklist here and I'll just read it off for people in case they're driving or something. The role of advertising at different Amazon businesses, advertising economics versus unit economics. That's a profitability analysis and lifetime value, cost to acquire a customer. You've got short term, long term, P&L, being proactive in your accounts versus reactive. Developing a PPC personality based on business goals, like are we very aggressive? Are we more conservative? Are certain products that we're advertising more aggressive or more conservative? Avoiding machine-like decisions, adopt a holistic approach where you think of the entire business, don't reinvent the wheel, 80-20 on everything, ad budget versus ad spend, when is the right time to spend, what to spend it on, sort of like P&L, contribution margin. I think I want to share a quick note here. I've talked about this on the show before. Shout out to Orlando Bloom. I'm kidding, this is not Orlando Bloom, but Bloom's Taxonomy. This is the whole thing, right? You have them do the Amazon University course so they can just remember the stuff. Can they repeat back to me what the three campaign types are? Then you want them to understand it. Can they explain the differences between the two? Can they know when to actually apply them? How do you actually go and do the thing? How do you actually create a good campaign? And then of course, can you analyze the results? Can you evaluate the results? Can you analyze different approaches? And of course, can you create and improve your own? Can you create a novel approach to something? So like, I see a lot of this in what you're describing, where it's just like, you need them to know stuff, remember it, they need to understand it, they need to know how to do it. Then as they get more and more into it, they should be able to analyze and understand and make judgments and prioritize different things and eventually take that information and create their own strategy that's customized around the business goals. So I love thinking and training someone in this regard. So I thought that was really cool. I think this is huge because all of this mindset stuff I would put under the bucket of like company goals of like, how do we operate? What do we do? What's our strategy towards getting there? I think that's really nice. You got some really interesting things here, which I think is good for any PPC marketer to understand business context, like sort of a full funnel digital marketer. What I think is really cool on this page, which I want to point out is like, what drives a click? And you mentioned badges, like this whole sort of concept of like, what drives a click? What drives a conversion? That's actually way different skills than just like Knowing a structure of a campaign. What's good campaign structure versus bad structure. But like actually understanding where conversions come from and what makes your product have a higher conversion rate versus lower conversion rate. What makes your product have a higher click-through rate versus a lower click-through rate? Not enough marketers go this extra step of understanding the mindset of how to actually grow an account, how to synthesize your own strategy. I think a lot of marketers sometimes will stop at, well, I know what a perfect campaign structure looks like. Perfect in quotes because it's like, You know, I think having a plan is better than having no plan. But then like having the right plan is the best. And like, you can't develop the right plan for the situation you're in, the product lifecycle, the niche, the industry, the lifecycle, the company, the company goals, like all of those things. Make digital marketing really hard because you and I could be selling the same product at the same price point, same features, same everything. But if I'm really dialed into all of these things, like understanding the product life cycle, What's unique, all of those things, that's where the magic happens. So how do you nail this into people's head? Imagine you hire someone and all they know is just the campaign structure, that's how you do bid optimization, but how do you shift it from just doing bid optimization to doing bid optimization in accordance with company goals? Speaker 1: Great question. And it was in the hire the right people. Sometimes it's better to hire someone with no prior Amazon knowledge than to hire someone that has the wrong mindset and that has been applying that mindset for 10 years. So think of a PPC manager that has been working for 10 years and has a machine-like way to optimize campaigns. You know, like if this then that type of mentality where he was siloed in a way that he was not responsible for main image, pricing, coupons, you know, strategy. Speaker 2: Optimizing in a vacuum. Speaker 1: Yeah, optimizing in a vacuum. So that was never part of his or her obligation. Therefore, it's not part of the mindset. And if you look at the org chart, which is what you asked, the Amazon PPC manager is the brand manager eventually. So what I'm trying to do with this training is to train Brand managers in the future, and now the brand managers are training PPC managers to become brand manager. And when we hire them, it's like, okay, you have the goal of becoming a brand manager in a number of months or years, right? And for that, you need to understand all of these concepts. Otherwise, you are a siloed PPC manager, not a traffic and conversion manager, which is how I like to see it, but a siloed PPC manager that Can actually be replaced by a computer with greater efficiency. Speaker 2: I saw this trend in Google Ads where it used to be pretty easy just to be a Google Ads agency. And then over time, you're like, oh, like we should look at the landing pages. We should like optimize the form that gets filled out. We should have some say in the email that people get after they fill out the form or the text messages they get after they fill out the form. So thinking sort of full funnel, I think that has arrived on Amazon for a while, where it's like, let's think full funnel. Let's think about that product image. Let's think about the A plus content. How are you navigating brand tailor promotions? Which was once, so like think of yourself more as a marketer than just a PPC. Speaker 1: There's something very valuable here, which is I'm comparing The PPC Den is the one to two months of training that someone... Speaker 2: On the bottom. Speaker 1: Yeah, on the bottom. If you have very robust SOPs and the process for which we do, we have processes of what has to be done. People can choose to do them on Mondays or Tuesdays, but there are things that have to be done with any product and any brand, right? So if you have those and you can create SOPs, then someone that Mechanically applies that can be trained in one or two months. I don't think it needs more time. But if someone will be trained on the right mindset with the right skills, et cetera, that will take a year to become somehow reliable, right? I'm able to operate and able not only not to break anything, but to grow things. It takes a year. Why? Because there's initial... I love how people learn and everybody learns differently. There are people that learn almost mechanically, vertically. You tell them ad spend and ad budget and ad spend is not the same thing. And boom, they get it. And next time they'll use the concept, they'll use it right. Rare, but there are people like that. Most of us learn through concept acquisition. And then practice. So the practice yields a result. The result reinforces the concept that you acquired. And that's really when the learning happens. So you need to give these people one to three months of conversation and knowledge transfer. And then you need to have them apply that concept as soon as possible. So they start learning. They are not learning. They're chatting with you over concepts. They're understanding. What you want them to do. And then once they start doing it and they start failing and they start succeeding, that's when the learning happens. And that's around three months. So three months of talking, three months of doing. And then there's something called, especially in these minds, the pattern recognition. Once you see your ad account or your campaigns or your keywords reacting In a certain way to your changes and your optimizations, then you start creating pattern recognition. This scenario, I've seen it before and I've done this before and it created this result. I'll do it again. Oh, it worked again. So you start recognizing these patterns and that's when the training gets solidified, I think. And that takes a year. Speaker 2: What I also think is cool here, you have, what I think is unique is I talk to, I think I talked to like a hundred people a month about digital marketing on Amazon. And I think that I'm always trying to give them like a broader view of why things are the way that they are. So I saw this and I thought this was really nice. A lot of these concepts I've talked about on the show before. So I just think it's a really nice reminder about like We recently did something in core actually. We had like 25 marketers fill out the survey where they had a rank most important thing up top and the second most important thing second. And there was like 75 things or actually too many things on the list to organize. But The number one thing that people ranked highest was actually just goal setting or strategy. That is the most important thing to know before you do anything else. It's just like, why are we doing the things that we're doing? And you've got a bunch of strategic goals here. And if someone just uses this as a checklist to incorporate in their own learning, like, do I understand ranking and domination? Do I understand You know, maybe traffic and conversion or evergreen campaigns. Do I understand awareness campaigns? This is great. So I think this really rounds out a really strong, talented marketer. How do you teach people these things? How do you get them to understand the intentionality? Speaker 1: I'm sorry to give you the bad news. No one can be trained on this. People can learn this themselves. What you train is the concept of this exists and this is what something that's working well looks like. And these are all the variables that you have to learn in order to become good at something. This is like a roadmap to become proficient or professional at something or excel at something. Then the concept is there, but you have to walk the walk. You have to learn yourself from using the skills and increasing the skills based on your own experience. That's why it's impossible to train someone on anything to become, you know, to that level of proficiency because experience is a key factor and that needs time. And I've read books about learning and training. And as long as you keep moving and you keep learning, you're always bettering yourself, right? But it takes time, not only because of your brain and its own ability to amass information and learn, but because in our trade, you need scenarios to present themselves. You need a competitor's ASIN to be discounted at 30%, see what that does to your campaign. So you need to be facing different scenarios when they repeat themselves two, three, four times. You know, you go like, Oh, this is this is I'm not gonna go crazy. I'm not because you pull up a report and you go like, Oh, my CTRs are down or what happened? Okay, go look in the marketplace. See if that If there was a change, look at your competitors' BSRs from last week. Did they improve? Why was that? Do you have a way of tracking sales price from your competitor? So all these things need to be used in order to be... It's self-training. You just need to give the right scenarios and the opportunity to expose themselves to the right information. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a concept that comes up a lot. Which is just being a good digital marketer, being good at PPC, being good at SEO is kind of like being a good detective. I would also say the most common success factor I find in any digital marketer is like days of activity per month, meaning these concepts can be Told to someone like, hey, there's such thing as a defensive campaign. Hey, there's such thing as top of funnel expansions. But I generally find if someone like checks in on their accounts every day, what eventually emerges is this concept of, like if they're intuitively interested enough, what eventually emerges is this concept of like, well, my results are A, I want to get them to B, Where is the opportunity? How do I find this opportunity? Oh, there's this thing called Top of Funnel Expansion. Let me explore that. What does that look like? What are ways to do Top of Funnel Expansion? You begin to do that today, and then you check in over the coming days, almost like a kid on Christmas, where it's like, what is this going to reveal to me? And then what am I going to do about it? That is, I think, such an innate skill that people need if they really want to be good at PPC. This is to be interested, to try to move it forward, to ask yourself. I think the number one question someone can ask is why were results the way that they were over the last week, month, whatever, and not 10% higher? How can I make them 10% higher in the next seven days? What would it take for me to increase these 10% in the next seven days? Whether that's possible and you come up with a hypothesis, you do it, you test it, you see what happens. Then you ask the question again, why did it work or why did it not work? Is it even possible to do 10% more? I think just that sort of driving force is one question to always have at the top of the mind, which is why were things the way that they were? Where is the next 10% of growth? And let me go out and get it. Speaker 1: Yeah. And once you have someone trained and doing things right, then it's when you start challenging those decisions more and more because I can assure you, If you look a year or two years down the road, if you look at what the person is doing, he might be missing, he or she might be missing something that you discussed on that first mindset rating. And that's just how it is. And then if you're training people, you need You need to be not only open to that possibility, but you need to be sure that that's going to happen and expect it in a way so you don't feel disappointed and you don't start ranting, all these people don't learn. And you need to also do a self-assessment. And if you were good at this at some point, yourself, say, okay, how long did it take me to learn? I can assure you, people are probably bitching about learning faster than you did. You just don't remember how long it took. Speaker 2: I'm still learning. Last question for you. In one sentence, what do you think separates a good digital marketer versus a great one? Speaker 1: I hate this one sentence things because there's no what needs to normally For me for me. It's always like a book. Speaker 2: I was gonna make you do one word, but I'll give you a whole sentence Field of view. Speaker 1: The more you can look at without getting distracted, because there's a lot of data that distracts from what's important data, the more variables you can include in your decision-making process, your assessment on anything related to marketing, the better you become. Speaker 2: Well said. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's... Speaker 2: Gonza, my dear friend in Miami, have a great rest of the week. I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing this mindset. I hope it inspires people to, you know, work with themselves if they are their own PPC manager or work with someone on their team if they have an in-house PPC marketer or in-house Brand manager, even better work with their agency if they're working with an agency, just sort of like knowing how to think about this. I hope we've given people some new keys to unlock some new doors. Thanks so much, Gonza. Everyone else, I'll see you next week here on The PPC Den Podcast. Have a good one. Speaker 1: Bye. Unknown Speaker: Now bad mistakes, I've made a few. I've had my share of broken words. Oh yeah The PPC Den, my friends. And we'll keep on going. You are the PPC Den. We talk about Amazon. No time for medicals because we fix the game, baby.