Daniel Pope - From Likes to Cash: How to Build Marketing Systems That Actually Convert

Daniel Pope  0:00  
There's no silver bullet in marketing, but market research is as close to a silver bullet as I found, if you're already converting people, awesome. Do market research, start spinning up paid advertising. Another thing you can do is go back to those same people you did market research with and ask them for referrals.

David Bush  0:20  
Welcome to the Business Builders playbook, the show that breaks down the systems and strategies behind Predictable Revenue Growth to win in business. In each episode, we're diving into the proven strategies that separate the winners who scale from the losers who fail. This show is sponsored by bdr.ai the AI powered business development platform that automates your outbound prospecting, so you can focus in on closing deals instead of chasing leads. Let's get started.

David Bush  0:49  
Hey, welcome everybody. I'm David Bush from bdr.ai, and I get the distinct honor to be able to talk to Daniel Pope, the chief storyteller and founder of be known LLC, also known as be known online Comm, and we're going to dig down deep into some hot topics on lead generation marketing strategy and and Daniel's a great guy to go to because he's had a tremendous amount of success and getting more inbound opportunities for organizations. So Daniel, thanks for joining me today.

Daniel Pope  1:20  
Yeah, David, thanks for having me on Yeah. Super excited to talk about this stuff and just go behind the scenes with everybody.

David Bush  1:26  
Yeah. Well, let's get this

David Bush  1:28  
out of the way. You cheer for the University of Tennessee. Do we have that correct?

Daniel Pope  1:32  
Yes, I sure do. I live in downtown Knoxville and Go Vols,

David Bush  1:36  
fantastic. Well, we're excited to maybe talk a little bit of football trash along the way, but we'll get right down into the marketing aspect. So I want you to give everybody just a quick little synopsis of what has brought you to the point that you're at today, crushing it with digital marketing and helping owners, founders, CEOs and solopreneurs and all those things in between, to really help them to generate more inbound opportunities?

Daniel Pope  2:02  
Yeah, absolutely. So my backstory is actually in information technology, it and I grew up with a passion for technology, computers, making things click online and and through a series of different businesses over the years, teaching my grandparents friends how to use the computer to website design to then I started a Social Media Marketing Agency, and I quickly realized that you can't cash a like clients like dollars over likes and and it's, it's been this series of fortunate events that has led me to starting be known LLC in 2018 And David, as I think about all the different businesses that I've had and huge quotations around that, but different businesses I've had, you know, I jokingly say the only thing I've learned how to do is create a better logo. But all that to be said, I really just cut my teeth on the different marketing skill sets that we need to have over the years, such as, okay, social media isn't working for them. Why? Well, it's the copy. Okay. Let's learn copywriting. Let's learn some graphic design. Let's jump into this world of funnels per se, and then to advertising. And so I think of it as skill stacking, David, and that's what has brought me to where I am today, just being able to be blessed enough to sit in this seat.

David Bush  3:26  
Fantastic. Well, I'm going to need some tips from you on how to train your parents friends, on how to use a computer, because I'm at that stage now myself, but we'll get we'll get to that later. So let's just talk a little bit more about some of the things that you've been able to accomplish. I mean, you've been able to you've been able to generate five to 12x results for clients on Ad Spend and and really helping them to leverage webinars, emails and paid ads. So, you know, I don't know if you're going to give us all the secrets, but like, what is the secret sauce behind that performance? Yeah,

Daniel Pope  3:58  
it's actually as simple as it sounds, using data and using data to drive our decision making, rather than spinning up campaigns or trying to fly by night it or trying to use the quote, unquote hack of the day. And the reason I say that is because, as you know, there are a lot of different competitors of mine out there, and what I call Yahoos and people that, yeah, they have an agency, per se, but they truly don't know the fundamentals of proper marketing. And my flavor of marketing is what's called direct response marketing. We want to elicit and solicit a response from somebody using a series of calls to action and properly set up pages to get someone to essentially buy or die. And I know that sounds harsh, but going back to your question of, what are some of the tactical things that we do, I am in love with, well, set up webinar systems. And you know, I hear it all the time, but Daniel, webinars are dead. It's not 2021 anymore. Well, no. They're not at all. And the reason I say that is because every single one of our clients is using a properly set up webinar system. And I look to some of my competitors too, and some of my mentors, and they're using great webinar systems. David, when I say webinars, what I mean is a video based, online based presentation that you're able to perform one too many, whether it's a five to 15 minute webinar, or some may know it as a VSL, a video sales letter, or it's a 60 minute that takes you through breaking down false beliefs, building up new belief patterns, and presenting a new opportunity. It's all under the same umbrella. And so I'm a big believer in systems and automations and the webinar system itself, it generates a higher ROI out of any of the other systems that we've tried, not astronomically higher. I'm not talking a 20x increase. I'm saying it's just marginally higher. And that's where the money is made. It's made in the corners, the pockets, the margins right there. So that's what I'm I'm looking at. When I see a new client come across my my desk or in my inbox, I say, okay, what are they currently doing? And can it be improved? Can it be super charged with a better system? And the first thing that we do is use webinars, little more to it than that, but that gives you an idea of the angle. I'm coming at it from systems and automations, one to many aspects rather than All right, let's post and pray.

David Bush  6:36  
So you're using recorded based webinars, not live. Is that right?

Daniel Pope  6:40  
Both actually, Oh, okay. And so in some cases it it works better live versus automated. Okay,

David Bush  6:47  
so you're using that live webinar, and I'm assuming that that's because the live webinar is going to be able to be the fastest way to add trust, credibility and authority. Is that

Speaker 1  6:58  
absolutely so once you get

David Bush  7:01  
that trust, credibility and authority, you're driving them back to some sort of lead magnet or free offer or something that's going to move them further down the sales funnel.

Daniel Pope  7:11  
Essentially, it's almost 5050, where 50% of our clients are selling something that they can sell right there at a point of sale, something that is a, you know this before, but $997 course, or a $500 program the other 50% are driving to book a sales call to talk about a very high ticket premium offer. Maybe it's a coaching program that has done for you aspects on it something that I consider $2,000 all the way up to about $200,000 okay? But we we don't necessarily send them back to a lead magnet or jump down a further rabbit hole. They're either gonna buy or they're gonna book a call, and everything we do is in accordance to that. So if I'm working with a book a call type of client, then every single page, every single asset that we create, pushes back to book a call. And another little pro tip for you, because I bet you a lot of the listeners will be booking a sales call, not just trying to sell a $97 course or whatever, but when you're able to capture that registrant for the webinar, it's a lot cheaper than going out there and trying to capture an application for, hey, apply for my thing. Suddenly they're in the car lot and they're getting, Hey, you don't have to put money down, but go ahead and sign your it's like, okay, it's a lower barrier of entry. So I had an old business partner that talked about it in this way, sell the thing before the thing. It's a lot cheaper and a lot more efficient to do so. So when we're setting up the webinars for book a call as soon as they register, then on the confirmation page it says, Hey, wait. Let's take action immediately. We can help you through whatever you're going through. Go ahead and schedule a call. Go ahead and take action so the barriers are down, and then we hit them and we say, hey, remember that thing you just registered to fix your pain point. Go ahead and talk with us. Bypass. Don't wait. Don't wait. Let's get it solved.

David Bush  9:18  
That's fantastic. And are you handling all of those technological details for the clients that you're working with? Is that part of the services that you offer?

Daniel Pope  9:28  
Yeah, David, it goes back to my information technology background. That's quite literally what I have a degree in. I didn't take a single marketing class. Actually, funny enough, I don't share that too often. It doesn't build up a ton of credibility. But I didn't and in the question is around the tech support aspect of it, we focus so heavily on marketing tech that I like to say we're the IT team that actually makes you money. Normally, it is a cost center. You're just. On call. Hey, it's me and six other dudes. Well, computers broken, but no, we're the tech team that comes in and helps your company make money. Just so happens that we know a ton about marketing as well.

David Bush  10:12  
Yeah, well, you've obviously been titled or labeled, or maybe it's self, self proclaimed, but as the chief storyteller, so do you weave storytelling into most of your content and webinars? Is that what you're doing for clients is helping them to tell a better story about who they are and what they do and why they do it and all that.

Daniel Pope  10:33  
Yeah, this is something I realized a while back, is that everybody wants to be known for something. And actually I was in the shower when I was running my previous agency. I was in the shower one day. I was just frustrated and fed up more to the story. Not going to get into all that, but I sat there and said, Hey, why does the best known beat the best? Why do people out there who they may not have the best product, it may be a bad product. Hey, it may be a scam even, but why are they known so well? Why do why do they get their content going viral? And so anyway, I went down this rabbit hole of best known beats the best. How do we? How do we be known for something better? How do we have that impact and so be known on my shirt here, for those of you who can't see, I wear a white polo with a green logo that says, Be Known every day. It eliminates the choice that I have to do. So as far as the chief storyteller moniker, I never wanted to use the title CEO, because, quite frankly, I'm an LLC. I have a small boutique team. I think Chief Executive Officer at this stage is a little little too big for my britches, so it is self appointed. Maybe I shouldn't say that it's like the rock naming himself the rock, but chief storyteller is self appointed, because I realize that everyone has a story, and for me as a marketer, and for me servicing my clients, I need to get their story. I need to extract their story from them. So it's not that I'm the best storyteller at all. I enjoy stories. I like making up a good story, for sure, but it's how I can come in and be the chief storyteller for their story, how I can come in and extract their lessons and message and and the mess that they've gone through, and craft some really great copy and advertising, marketing assets for them. Yeah,

David Bush  12:44  
well, could you give us an example of maybe somebody that came to you with a challenge? I mean, obviously you've worked with a lot of different people, but is there one that, one good story that the chief storyteller could tell us? Yeah,

Daniel Pope  12:56  
it's actually a client of mine that I worked with last week. So she is starting out in the the online marketing journey, but what she has gone through as a 58 year old nurse with no savings. Had she was a single mother, she still is a single mother, but her kids are grown now. She has no retirement, and so she is trying to take what she's done offline. She's sold this program offline very well. She's taking it online. And so she just sat down and said, Daniel, I don't I don't know how to produce the videos. I say, Well, what are you saying? She said, Okay, so this program, it's going to give you all the things in terms of, like, all the assets you need. I'm not going to get in the details of the program, but she talked about features. I said, Well, here's your first problem. You're not pulling at my heart strings. Nothing in there is emotional. She said, What do you mean? I said, we need to talk about your backstory. The I told her the mess into your message. And so we started diving into it. And at the end of it, she started saying things like, Hey, you out there, overworked nurse, you know you've you've been in a situation where you're not able to advance in your career, you have no savings, you have no retirement. Basically, you're staring down the barrel of a gun that time is going to slip away. Take it from me. I'm 58, years old. I don't have much time left before I'm in retirement age. There's a better way, there's a different way. There's a new way out there. So that's just one example of somebody who they've gone through so much and they're so close to it that they don't see that they need to be compelling and emotional with it. They need to pluck at the heart strings. And I talk about this in a funny way. I say I need to be the harpist plucking on the heartstrings of life. And. Hmm, and that is the same story that most of my clients go through. They're so close to it David, and you can't see the label from inside of the jar. And for whatever reason, my clients, they have a great program, and they've sold some successfully, but that is what is capping them, the lack of a great, emotional, compelling story, capping them from ever going past. Let's just call it $20,000 a month, good money, but that's not a ton of people impacted. Happy to dive further into it, but that's just an example of how we can go from features to then selling transformations. Yeah, I

David Bush  15:43  
love the comment that you made earlier about the you know, how are the best known beating the best? Because I think that there's a lot of people that are watching this right now that are saying, you know, I am really good at what I do. I would be considered to be an expert at what I do. However, very few people know that I can do it, and very few people know why I do it and why I'm better than other people at doing it, and how I do it and who I've done it for, and you know where I go to work, to go do it, and who can be served by. They just don't know those answers. So that's when your storytelling comes in and becomes so valuable to business owners and CEOs, which I like to call myself CEO. It's the chief everything officer, because I get to do everything right.

David Bush  16:27  
Gets great. I get to have, I actually had a

David Bush  16:31  
professor when I was going through school. I graduated with a degree in mass communication, so I didn't have any background in specific business training, but I remember going into the advisor right before I graduated, and she said, David, you didn't specialize in anything. There's no emphasis. So how are you going to find a job? And I said, Well, I didn't go to school to find a job. I went to school to number one play football, but I also went to school to get a chance to learn about a lot of different things that I could apply to my future business opportunities. And so, yeah, I do think that, yeah, Chief Executive might be a little bit rich, but chief everything, or chief energizing is the other one, because you got it. You know the what do they say? US small business owners, we only work half days. Pick any 12 hours you choose. So you you have to do a lot of things. They have a lot of energy to do those things. So let's, let's talk a little bit about moving from becoming a master content creator and chasing likes and comments to actually being a entrepreneur and business owner who is converting people to become clients that are paying us money and actually ringing the cash register, if you will.

Daniel Pope  17:44  
Yeah, yeah. So you know, there are a lot of people you know actually have the blessing of being able to coach women who are in my field, information products, coaching courses, etc, and their startups. So the number one problem per se that I see is, Hey, Daniel, I'm posting on social media, pick any flavor platform, but I'm not making any money, and I don't go into my spiel about like stone, equal whatever. It doesn't matter, because these are 20 minute sessions. But I see this all the time. The problem that they have is they don't grasp the concept of traffic to conversions. They don't they don't know it. They don't understand it for whatever reason. They haven't plugged it into AI yet and said, Hey, how can I get traffic at the most realistic, affordable and efficient rate? And then also, what is my offer? So traffic? Traffic comes from a lot of places, and easiest answer is Facebook ads. But let's think a little bit bigger than that. We could go after strategic referral partnerships. We could even post a billboard on the side of the street. We could do a TV spot. We could do YouTube advertising. So many different ways to get traffic to our thing, outside of just posting on social and then from there, the most important piece, David is the offer itself. So that's the number one issue that I see people not making money, is they don't have a good offer. They don't have an irresistible offer. As Alex hermosi, who literally wrote the book on offers, 100 million dollar offers. Shameless plug to him, is that that book has changed my way of thinking on this stuff. But their offer sucks. I'll just put it bluntly. Their offer sucks again. They're trying to sell the features of it. Hey, you're going to be able to get all the you're going to get the payment processor and the tech stack, and we're going to give you the you know that you're going to get the calendar links. You don't have to worry about Calendly. It's like what? I don't care. I'm already using Calendly. Why would I switch? Oh, this is going to save you time, energy, money, etc. So more to it than that, the elements of a great offer include scarcity. Urgency guarantees risk reversals, transformative outcomes, things like that. But back to your question about, what are people missing so traffic? They're missing traffic, quality traffic, at affordable rates, in an efficient fashion, consistently, and they try too many things, so they're posting on Tiktok. They're also trying to run Facebook ads. They're trying to go after the local farmers market down the street, and everything is spread so thin, when in reality, all they have to do is figure out one way of getting traffic triple down on that and run it till the wheels fall off. And then they need to have a great, high converting, highly compelling offer that their market actually truly would foam at the mouth for, essentially. And then they're also missing systems, and whether it's systems in terms of the right people in the right seat at the right time, following the right procedures. Or it's systems such as the technical systems that we set up the landing page that looks great and is highly compelling or a proper video presentation. Or it's systems of discipline, such as waking up every day and doing income producing activities rather than, Oh, I'm fiddling with my email or website button color again. So I'm sure there's a lot more things that that you and I can think up right now, right? But those are the, not the 10,000 foot view. I try to drop it down to 1000 foot level, but those are the big things that I see going wrong, yeah, well,

David Bush  21:43  
and it is one of those things where, you know, there's so many shining objects, there's so much social media distraction, there's, you know, I mean, just in the book, 100 million dollar offers. There's probably 100 different things that you could go spend time and energy and effort trying to refine that could be creative avoidance, because it's more fun and maybe less challenging to go make your offer better than it is to go out there and take a, you know, less than perfect offer and test it. And you know, people just want to continue to, you know, keep rotating the fenders, you know, and not necessarily ever driving the car. And so I totally get what you're saying. So let's talk about, like, a specific, actionable step. You know, what are some of the things that a solopreneur or a business owner that has a modest budget? What could they go into right now where they could put money into something that's both smart and scalable and reinvest in that for growth and test it?

Daniel Pope  22:41  
Yeah, I'll cover this answer in a couple different scenarios. Let's say scenario one, you have an offer that is actually selling, and let's say it's a $3,000 program, and you're getting five new clients a month for it, nothing crazy. But also, you're not a scrappy, complete startup where you haven't sold anything. So what you need to do right now is, if you're not already doing so, go back to your existing customers or clients, and you need to start asking them, Hey, before you bought this thing, what was going through your mind? Pain points, trials, tribulations, what did you want to get? And then during the program, if they haven't already finished it during what? What was, what was going on during it? What did you like? What did you not like? So fix your product. If it sucks, if they tell you things they don't like, and a good sample size, fix it up. And then afterwards, hey, now that you've completed the program, what? What did you think? What did you achieve? What kind of result did you get from this thing? That's good, old fashioned market research. And the reason I start with that is because, David, there's there's no silver bullet in marketing, but market research is as close to a silver bullet as I found every single time we or a client does proper market research, literally getting someone on a zoom call and asking before, during and after questions, it improves their marketing ROI by an incredible amount. And so once you do proper market research, once you go back to customers or clients, and if you have no clients, and we'll talk about that in a second. But once you do that, then go out there, and if you're not already using some sort of paid advertising, I want you to start throwing out campaigns. So campaigns is just a fancy way to say you have ad copy plus an ad graphic or an ad video targeted to a certain group of people, pushing them to a certain link, whether it's register for a webinar or download my free ebook or guide over how to do XYZ. So that's the first thing. If you're already converting people, awesome. Do market research. Start spinning up paid advertising. Don't go crazy with it. Modest. Budget. Mine is a bit subjective, but if you have 500 bucks a month or $50,000 a month, think about how you want to allocate your budget accordingly. Another thing you can do is go back to those same people you did market research with, and ask them for referrals and put it specifically. Hey, do you know two or three other people that would like this, that would receive benefit from this. Oh yeah, Tammy and Susie, great. You got two new customers. You turn one into two more awesome for free. If you want to sweeten the pot a bit, you can give them referral commission. All right, so that's scenario one. Scenario two is, let's say you have no clients. You're brand new. And this is something I work with a lot, actually. You know what they say, service providers, you should absolutely work with people who are startups and broke, right? No. So you're brand new. So you need to do similar things. Is what I talked about with the market research yet. You don't have any clients yet, so go out there and figure out who already has the attention of your ideal client, your ideal buyer, whatever you want to call them, get really specific, and they're going to be found in Facebook groups. They're going to be found on Amazon book or product reviews. And I said, it depends on what you're selling, right? But there are a lot of things out there on Amazon, so look at the five star and one star reviews, and they're also going to be found on YouTube channels and YouTube videos. Look at the comments. Look at what people are saying. So I want you to start creating a big old library, a Google Doc, full of the patterns and trends and words that they use, then you can pop that sucker into AI and AI can do the rest. No, seriously, I don't mean to give a cop out answer, David, I'm just saying that AI is now your six figure business coach for free, and as long as you talk to it in such a way, it's saying, Hey, I'm trying to put together this business. I have no clients, but here's a big old document full of things that people are saying, What should I do next? It will put together the next steps. And if, if you say, hey, that's too much, I can't handle all that right now. Say, put together a week by week plan. Just tell me what I need to do, what is the biggest income producing activity? What's the one thing to take a page out of Gary Keller's book, the one thing, it's the one thing I need to do this week, such that everything else falls into place or is unnecessary. So two scenarios out there, you want me to do any, any other scenarios, or you want to throw

David Bush  27:41  
No, that's great. Yeah. If you have anything else to run, to share, go for it.

Daniel Pope  27:44  
Yeah. So what happens? Scenario three, you are tapped out. You've reached that ceiling. You're like Daniel, Dad gum it. I can't scale this thing. Well, you're most likely running paid advertising at this point. Maybe you've run paid advertising on meta and YouTube. Maybe you've dabbled in Tiktok, maybe you've dabbled in Quora or Reddit. You've reached your quote, unquote ceiling. So what you can do is figure out your winning ad creatives. So your video that did well, your graphic that did well, your copy that did well, and you can scale those by creating variations of that creative so very simple example, take a winning video. It's you talking maybe it has some captions on it. Make it black and white, make it sepia, change out the intro, change out the outro. And so what's the beauty of that? Is any ad platform out there is based on algorithms and also the auction system. So it's going to show your ads to a specific pool of people, and over time, it's going to learn about that pool of people, and it's going to continue to show your ad to that pool of people. And as the pool of people gets bigger, it expands variations. Go out there and say, Hey, advertising platform, I've got something that's winning, but yet it's a little bit new. So it's going to show essentially different strokes for different folks, different flavors of ice cream. It's all ice cream, just different flavors. Now that way you can scale your budget, keeping the same winning creative. You can start to scale with new creative that you feel confident about, but you can also look at other sources of traffic. And to get a little deeper in this conversation, with scenario three, you can go after more people that already have the attention of your ideal buyer. So for example, you could start to sponsor podcasts. You could start to sponsor YouTube channels. Take it a step further, you could start to acquire sources of traffic, such as buying Facebook groups, buying or becoming the primary owner in a YouTube channel. Oh no, they don't want to sell out. Everyone has a price, and most of the time they don't know their true price. So you, as the business owner now puts on your acquisitions hat. And says, You know what? I am actually capped out on advertising. I am spending $3 million a month. I can't scale any further time to buy a Facebook group. So anyway, that's more, little more to it than that. Oversimplified, but yeah, yeah.

David Bush  30:17  
So in your experience, has buying Facebook groups been a good return on investment? I mean, is that something that you've had some experience with?

Daniel Pope  30:27  
It depends, like anything, it depends, in theory, yes. So actually, no of a colleague. He mentioned this to me last year. He went out there. He has a software for cold emailing. He went out there and he realized there was a group of, it was sales people. I think they were like, I think there were setters and people that set appointments on calendars, and it was a group full of disgruntled setters. And so he went to the the admin, and he made the admin proposal, and he said, Hey, I have this thing. It could add a ton of value to your group, you know. Have you ever thought about relinquishing control for a price, you know? Have you ever thought about selling this group, and I'm not trying to take over completely, but you can still be the admin, but I would be able to promote, and we'd set up a funnel from this group into my thing. The guy sold the group for $1,000 $1,000 this group had 10s of 1000s of people in it, so my my colleague, walked away with an extremely good deal, because his, I don't remember the specifics. It doesn't matter too much, but as you can tell from my tone of voice, $1,000 he probably got 1,000x ROI on it from that. So, yeah, it all just depends. With anything. Do your due diligence. Don't spend more than you can afford to to lose. And think about the economics of your customer math. Think about your cost per acquisition right now, your CAC, customer acquisition cost, and then compare it to your LTV. And then, if you are capped out on advertising, then start looking at Facebook groups and say, Okay, I could advertise to this Facebook group. Or I could just buy this Facebook group outright, and if it's $1,000 and it has 10 people in it, well that's okay. I'm buying a each person for 100 bucks. I know that they'll spend $200 with me. Cool. It's a 2x ROI on each customer. Anyway. Nice.

David Bush  32:38  
Yeah, I'm curious to know this is might be poking the bear a little bit, but what role do you feel like automation plays in the marketing integration ecosystem? Like, how do you use technology and systems and automation? Yeah, or AI for that matter.

Daniel Pope  32:55  
Oh, man, I use AI every single day. So I'm a big believer in AI in terms of efficiency, and is it going to cut out a ton of jobs. I don't know that's above my pay grade. I'm not going to talk about that right now, but I do know that it enables my team and also my clients to make better decisions, to not have to start from a blank page each time, and that saves 10s and 10s of hours each week, and that compounds greatly over time. So automations, I'll start with a basic level. I love platforms that are all in one, and you're probably already thinking of one to yourself, and I'm going to sit here and say, Yes, that's the platform that I like, because if it's all in one plus, it gives you the ability to set up email sequences, text sequences, pages that you don't have to manually reset each time or change the links out, or you don't have to spend time manually doing certain things. That's a winner in my book. So automations, I absolutely love to take it a step further, some more advanced automations is, let's say David, we're on a zoom call right now, and at the end of it, zoom is going to be smart enough to put together a transcription. So what you could do is you could set up an automation that says, All right, I'm listening to zoom. Anytime I have a new zoom transcription or video, I can then pop it into my Google Drive. I can pop it into my central library of you know, hey, here's my meeting notes. And then I can take that and plug it into AI and say, Here's my tone of voice. Create copy for me. This is how I talk. This is my tonality, or based on my meetings with clients. Tell me how to take this a certain way with this client. Tell me how to sell my next proposal. So I love automations when done correctly. David, I have a little moniker for it actually. And if I'm looking at a specific business function that is being done, let's say it's copywriting, then my moniker is eliminate, automate, delegate. And can we eliminate it? Well, no, because copywriting is important. Can we automate it? Yes, to a certain extent. And then if we can't eliminate or if we've automated to a certain extent, then can we delegate it? So yes, at that point. So another business function is taking the Zoom recording and putting it in a Google Drive for someone else to access. Can we eliminate it? No, it's necessary for that specific function. Can we automate it? Absolutely. Okay, great. Another example with Delegate is I'm setting up a landing page. Then can I eliminate it? No. Can I automate it? I can set up a template, kinda, yeah, but I have to delegate it, and I need to go out there and find the best person at an affordable rate within my budget to delegate it to. So that's, that's how I think of automations. Time and a place for automations, absolutely, but sometimes we don't, we don't need it, and automation just for the sake of automation. Yeah, there's a lot more income producing activities that we could be doing. Yeah, well,

David Bush  36:20  
there's a lot of people out there that are getting to the point where they're feeling a little bit overwhelmed, or, you know, there's been that, I don't know if you've seen that visual where it shows the hockey stick of the growth of AI and technology, and then it shows the flattening line of the human's ability to adapt and to, you know, keep up with it. So, you know, I'm running into a lot of people, and there's days when I feel like it myself, and I'm in the business, you know, it's Yeah, where it's, it's like, it's almost exhausting, the number of new things. And then, you know, the constantly feeling like that you were behind. It's like, well, if you're not using grok, or if you're not using, you know, Claude, or whatever the new technology is. I mean, I just saw a post on LinkedIn today that said, you know, and if you're not using these four AI tools, you're doing it wrong. And it's like, you know, well, yeah, you could use perplexity and get a better result for this particular need, but it's like, how do you over? How do you overcome that feeling of being overwhelmed or just, you know, fatigued?

Daniel Pope  37:33  
This hits me pretty hard. Actually, I don't, I don't know that I have a solid answer for this. Let me. Let me talk through it, because this is something that I'm going through myself. You know? What I try to do is I block out social media most of the day. And yes, as a digital marketer, someone who markets for my clients online, we use social media all the time, but I don't particularly enjoy social media, so I try to avoid the noise of, hey, use this specific flavor platform. Hey, you need to use Sunny D. What's Sunny? D? Oh, that's the new AI platform that does, you know, it transcribes zoom calls, cool. Okay, great. What? What I will do is, if I have a specific, very niche need. I'll go to one of the big platforms, Gemini grok, or chat GBT, and I'll ask it for help and help parsing through some of the things Gemini deep research is really great for helping me create plans of action. It overloads information. But the big plan I can then take to another platform or that same platform, and say, All right, distill it down like I'm, you know, early high school. Just give it to me straight. Shoot it to me straight, high school language, and it does a good job of it. But truthfully, at the end of the day, what I find is is helpful for me, is if I can go to the gym at the end of the day. I do a great gym session, and it's my reward for slogging it out. But if I do a good gym session, and I go to the sauna and the steam room afterwards, that helps me sift through all the days and all the platforms nonsense, and also stay up to date with some stuff, using different podcasts and whatnot. There's a few people that I trust anyway. All that to say, it's every man's journey. As long as I can wake up, know what I need to get done and and make sure that my mind's in a right place, cut out the noise as much as I can, while still staying quasi up to date with certain things, then my mind's better for it. Maybe not the answer that the you wanted, David, but that's, it's, it's something that I'm going through that journey right now of, yeah, I

David Bush  39:59  
appreciate. At the authenticity and integrity, just to answer it in a way that best serves you and is honest to the others about where you're at in your journey. So as we land the plane here, I would love for you to you know based on your expertise and experience and education, give us a three year vision as to where you see marketing going for us, small business owners, solopreneurs, coaches, consultants, all the things above. In three years, what can we expect?

Daniel Pope  40:28  
Yeah, so there's, there's been a shift, especially this year. I'm sure you felt it. But there's been a shift from, hey, let me buy a course, and that model working very well, especially from 2016 all the way into 2023 ish, and now as of recording, it's September of 2025 to date ourselves, if someone listens to this in the future. But there's been a shift towards we need something high touch and experiential. So my most successful clients right now, they not only have their course, the video library of asynchronous training, but they have accountability or coaching bolted onto it, and then they also have some sort of done for you, type of service on the back end as well, or even included. So it's something that provides a great experience, because they have it's them coaching, plus facilitators other coaches. And if you're not to that point yet, that's completely okay. Just, I want you to be concerned about caring for your client, and not just saying, hey, buy my course or program. But I think that extends into not just my world, which is information products, a crazy, weird corner of the internet, but most other businesses as well. And you know, after covid, I feel like people got enamored with this whole online world, online money. And you know, everybody was thrown for a loop with, don't come out of your house, versus the desire to be around people. But over the next three years, I see the boutique service, high touch, high reward, high value, high feedback model as being a winning model. Yes, Amazon, Walmart, big companies are going to exist and going to continue to thrive. So it will take away some of their competition, but I see a big revival in the mom and pop type of stuff. And honestly, David, a big desire for man. I can't wait to go into the shop down the street that sells boutique olive oil, and she treats me like a person, and she spends 30 minutes telling me about her travels to Africa, and I get to taste every single one, and then I walk out of there spending $80 in oil. What the heck that happened last month for me? So the obviously, I don't know, I'm not an Oracle over here, but what, what I do see is paying more attention and being being there for the customer. You know, if I kind of step out of my shoes for a second, I'm like, Daniel, but that sounds so basic and but, yeah, I think it's a it's going back to the basics, going going back to what made this country very successful in the first place. Everybody banding together, boots on the ground, mom and pop, real American type stuff. As for me, my vision with be known. I think of my company almost like a movie studio. I'm looking for great talent per se that has a desire to impact a lot of people. They just don't enjoy the messes of business and marketing. And then we come in, and I act as the Talent Agent per se, helping them get a great deal. And hey, you're hired on to do this movie. But also on the other side, we're there to put the caterers in place, the photography, the camera equipment, all the logistics and minutia that they don't want to deal with. I want to set them up in a way that, Hey, come on in to be known. You can have your program, you can have your course, you can have your customers. Let us take care of the rest. So anyway, it's it's been a long journey, but I think that has really set me apart is the fact that at the end of the day, I care, and I care too much, and it is helped me a ton. It's also hurt me in some ways, but I truly believe that's where we're going.

David Bush  44:41  
That's fantastic. Well, as we, as we wrap up, I'd love for you just to give everybody a little bit of an insight as to how the process works with you. What's the best place for people that are watching this video to go to to get more information? Is it the website be known online.com? Com, or is there another place where you'd like to direct them? No,

Daniel Pope  45:03  
that's exactly it. It is be known online.com, and if you can't find it for whatever reason, then you can just Google. Be Known LLC. But as of right now, I take all the sales calls, and on the website, it says, No sleazy car salesman, no sleazy salesperson. I enjoy going in, because at the end of the day, I'm still boutique. I need to make sure that the people, the clients that come into my business because of how closely we work with them, they pass all the tests they pass, any due diligence. I need to make sure they have a rock solid mindset for scaling. So that's it. You'll schedule a call with me if you're looking to grow or get marketing support or marketing systems help, and it's either going to branch off into two buckets on one side, we can, quote, unquote, my attorney hates it when I say this, but we can partner together and we can, we can partner together, and we can grow long term, And we're there for you, and we can come in as your complete, outsourced, done for you, marketing team that also provides fractional cmo level of strategy. Or we can just be a support arm, and we can set up systems. We can set up advertising. We'll make sure it's running, and then we can stay on long term to support it, or we can transition out. So that's it, and if we're not a good fit, don't worry, I have a huge library of resources I'll send you.

David Bush  46:30  
So not highly interesting, yeah, well, I can see why the distinguished Jim Cathcart referred us to connect, because I think we're of like mind and like heart and like values. And so it was great getting a chance to learn a little bit more about your experience and expertise and education and, yeah, I mean, other than football teams, I think that we're, you know, we're, we're equally yoked in a lot of the things we want to accomplish. So I'm excited to get a chance to, you know, partner with you and do more together and share more of your expertise with our clients and our connections, and hopefully do the same for us. But yeah, thanks so much. Appreciate you. Daniel, Oh yeah,

Daniel Pope  47:07  
absolutely. David, thank you so much for having me on and the thoughtful questions. It was a great time.

David Bush  47:12  
You bet. Thanks everybody. Check out. Be known online.com, or Google. Be Known LLC. Thanks, Dan, thanks.

David Bush  47:24  
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