An Easy Way To Turn $30/mo Into Thousands Of Dollars

This is the six figure home studio podcast, episode 88.

You're listening to the sixfigure home studio podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio. Now your host, Brian Hood and Chris Graham. Welcome back to another episode of the [inaudible]

six figure home studio podcast. I am your host Brian Hood and I'm here with my cohost with the most co.

Keep it. That stays in the podcast. Don't you dare edit that James. Chris Purple Shirt. Graham, how are you doing today Chris? I'm fantastic, Brian, how are you?

I'm good man. My wife asked me another day, she said, is there some reason that Chris decided on a purple shirt

as his thing? Well, here's the thing. I was like, I gave it a try and I was, cause I was like, one, I don't want to make choices. Right? You Steve Jobs did. Yeah, I want a Steve jobs and then so that I can go into work and be singularly focused on the work that's at hand. But why the purple shirt? That's the question that we have here. Well part of it, I used to wear gray shirts and then I was like, I had one purple shirt and I was like, I look great in the show. And I was like, I like it a lot. And it stands out. And if you see a dude in a purple shirt, this happened to us at Nam. I'm the only guy in a purple shirt. And you're like, oh, there's Chris Graham. I can see them from across the room. So it was like a branding choice. But here's the thing. When I first started doing it, the podcast wasn't popular and then the podcast got popular and I kind of got trapped and I kind of want to stop, but I don't think I have a choice now.

That's great. I think uh, old navy took after you. They put out some limited edition shirt for 4th of July. They apparently, this is my wife's knowledge, she's the fashion guru of the household. She said that apparently old navy puts out a limited edition shirt every year for 4th of July. By the way, we're recording this podcast on 4th of July because Chris and I never take days

true. The one that's here was actually purple because it's a blend of red, white and blue or something. And that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. First of all, purple is a royal color and America's not a royal country. We don't do that stuff around here. They're just trying to be inclusive of all Americans, I guess from all backgrounds. Who says to himself, oh I can't wait for the old navy limited edition fourth and fill it short this year. Well the only major

1,994 of them to celebrate the starting year of old navy or something. So this is all secondhand knowledge. I don't know any of this stuff, so I'm just,

I would've gone with 1,976 personally, but that's just me. A true patriot, you know, 4th of July baby did you mean

1,776 cause we share weren't founded in 1976

oh yeah, that was our bicentennial. I mid 17th seventies

my God, can we, can we get on with the show my dude, that's embarrassing. I actually, we've got a banner more. Let's banner. We get an increase banner by 37% this quarter. Yeah.

What's new in Chris Graham Land? Okay, so there is something new. One of our most popular episodes is the negotiation, which is episode. I don't know. Go look it up yourself. It's episode 30 okay, thank you Brian. It is called 11 highly effective negotiation tactics. Any audio professional can use very popular episode. It was, we got a lot of feedback on that one. I used some of that technique with Amazon yesterday because yesterday, yesterday we ordered a new mattress and it was supposed to get here on Tuesday and Tuesdays also trash day. So me and my wife were like, well, we'll throw away the old mattress on Tuesday day and then we'll get the new mattress on Tuesday afternoon from Amazon. But Murphy of Murphy's law overheard this conversation and he said, I don't think so. I'm going to make sure that your mattress gets shipped from Indiana to Columbus and then back to Indiana for no reason.

And so we called Amazon, we can play, they gave us a small discount and in the, it showed up the next day after we slept on the couches and the box was kind of jacked up. So I called him and was like, no, let me speak to your manager. Got The manager on the phone and was like, you know, told them what had happened. You don't have that. Let me speak to the manager haircut crap. This is true. But I said, let me speak with the manager. Really cool guy. I had a really interesting accent. I could, I think it might've been a fake like British accent cause it didn't sound real. But anyways, he was like, you know, I'm prepared to offer you a 15% refund. I will ask my wife, which is an appeal to authority, go back and listen to the episode. Asked my wife, I said, well what do you think I need?

Does that seem fair? And she said, yeah, that seems fair. And basically long story short, the guy said, oh, so your wife thinks it's fair? And I said she does, but I'm not so sure that I do. And then I paused and then I just let it get real awkward. And then he said, I'm prepared to offer you a 30% refund. She, because of the pause, I didn't say anything. I made an awkward silence dude, that was straight out of that episode. Straight episode. Yeah. It's for whoever breaks the silence loses whoever breaks the silence first loses. Yeah. And so the mattress was like half off and it's a tough to needle. It's quite comfortable. Can you tell a dollar amount of how much you saved? Yes. It was a $750 mattress king and we got $310 off. Yes. So like how long did that phone call take you?

20 minutes. But I worked, I multitask. So I was like doing emails and stuff and was on hold and talking to them. It was great. Yes. So that's about $960 an hour. I'm just doing the quick math here. I'll take it. That's pretty good. On top of whatever your normally hourly rate is, Chris, which may or may not be that amount. I don't know. So wonderful story. Great Banter. We're doing. We're doing great today. Chris. I've got nothing else to add. I don't have any cool stories to add, so let's actually, let's just take this awkward moment to Segue into the actual episode today. You look, you're about to throw up right now. Nobody can see you right now. I just, awkward silence too. You see negotiation, you negotiate totally out of context. This doesn't mean anything. That's the wrong application. What we teach, don't do it. Chris says, dude, that's negotiation one-on-one right

there. Today's episode. If you could tell by the title, which was probably remarkable because I read all of our show titles. It's true. You're very good at it. We're actually going to be talking about how to get started with retargeting ads,

so I know you're thinking what though? Freaky Frac is that. Hopefully I did way better than that was a terrible pitch. Yeah, it was a terrible pitch. It's funny in the moment you're like titles when we're recording. Very bad. Yeah. But then after the fact, yeah, I always read them like that Tuesday they come out and I'm like, wow,

it's the writer's brain versus the speaker's brain. I don't have a good speakers brain. Like if I'm making stuff up off the top of my head or like if I want to tackle a topic, if I'm speaking it out, I could never do like a voice to text audio book. But if I'm writing it out, I can do some really good stuff. Totally the opposite. I feel like you just use a different part of your brain. And my wife's the same way. She can't, she couldn't like just speak stuff out, but if she writes it out, she's beautiful writer. So it's just one of those weird, weird things. So, but today we're going to talk about retargeting on advertising and before you tune us out, before you said, oh, that's not for me. I don't need that. I don't want that. I don't want to deal with that. Paid advertising is for losers or it's too complicated, or I don't know how to do it, or I don't want to lose money, or, or even worse, the worst excuse of all is I don't want to spend money on advertising.

Let me talk to him, Brian, let me, let me, let me talk to him here. So here's the thing guys, there's a lot of discussion from a lot of respectable, really smart, very talented people in our industry. And some of them say you should never ever, ever do paid advertising for your studio. And sort of two things happen there. When someone says paid advertising for their studio, they're like, well, isn't that cheating? If someone hires me after seeing an ad, it doesn't mean that I wasn't good enough to get their attention in the first place. No, it doesn't mean that at all. It means there's a lot of things trying to get their attention and sometimes you have to pay for the opportunity to get someone's attention. And here's the thing.

So let me just say that again. Let me re say what Christa said, you are paying because you weren't able to convert them on the first time, but it's better than not getting the gig altogether. So that's all I'm going to put there.

Right. And so there's two things I would separate. There's paid marketing, which is trying to get people who have never heard of you to check out your stuff and there's remarketing, which is trying to get people who have been to your website or interacted with you on social media to remember you, to see you again, to think of you and to stay top of mind. Here's the thing, whether or not you should do paid marketing to quote unquote cold traffic, people who have never heard of you before is certainly a context dependent discussion. There are people that shouldn't do paid marketing to cold traffic, but tough love. Every business on earth can benefit from remarketing. It's much cheaper than going to cold traffic, and I would go so far as to say, if you can't make money profitably with remarketing, you probably shouldn't be in business anyways. It's much easier

to actually piggyback off that. If anyone's still confused right now. Let me just quickly explain what retargeting is. Just so we're all on the same page here. If you think about advertising, let's just use Facebook for example, because it's just the easiest one to think about. Most people use Facebook or Instagram and you've seen the ads on there. Most people, when you think of advertising, the thinking of cold advertising, meaning that you are targeting people that have never heard of you before and you're attempting to turn those strangers into paid customers that is extraordinarily difficult to do profitably and expensive. It's extremely difficult, thus expensive. And so the difference between that and retargeting is with retargeting, you're only showing those ads to somebody who has already been to your website or they've already liked or commented something on social media, on your studio, social media page, and so they're already familiar in some way, shape or form with your studio brand or with you as a producer or a mixing engineer and mastering engineer.

They're already familiar with you. So it's a completely different type of interaction and a lot of you know what this is. You go to a website, if you've ever had a tuft and needle's website or you've ever been to purple mattresses website, you will get there ads for at least two months afterwards constantly. I know this cause I recently got a mattress a few months ago and I did a lot of research on what sort of mattress we wanted and I got tons and tons of ads from all sorts of different brands out there and I got re-targeted by every single one of them and I got targeted by a few other brands that I had never visited with cold ads. That's a different rabbit hole. We're not going to go down. So all that to say retargeting is really hard to mess up. It is by far the most profitable form of advertising you will ever be able to do. And just for example, I'll give you guys an example. If I spend 20 grand in a month, which I have in the past, not so much right now, but and like last year I was heavily involved in paid advertising. If I spent $20,000 on advertising, only about $500 of that would be for retargeting. Very, very cheap.

Let's clarify. You got a couple businesses

that's spread across multiple businesses, but only about 500 of that is to do retargeting. It's extremely cheap as I'm trying to say that it's like less than, it's like 5% or so of my overall ad spend will be for retargeting. However, that $500 that I spend on advertising will be probably the most profit is where all my profit will come from. I might break even on the cold advertising, but I will profit on the retargeting ads and that's what we want to focus on in this episode is helping you implement a strategy for your studio to do retargeting because it sounds complex on the surface level, but when you dig in and you really start to analyze what you can do with retargeting, it becomes a whole atlas scary. You start to see the opportunity there. You start to see how this is honestly some of the lowest hanging fruit at any business out on the Internet right now. And if you're not doing it, you're honestly saying no to money. Totally. Yeah. There's no reason not to.

Well, and here's the thing. Many of you are obsessed with not spending money. It's an unhealthy blue collar thing that you were raised with. And I was raised with the two. This idea that like any money spent is bad money spent. Not True. Yup. Not True. When you run a business, it's a limiting belief. It's a very limiting belief. If you have a job and you make a salary, then it's much, much, much, much, much more true. But when you're running a business, it's not like that. And here's the thing. Most people in our industry fixate on social media. They're like, Whoa, we gotta make a post. Ooh, I'm gonna take a picture of this piece of gear. Oh, I'm gonna, you know, take a video of this guy recording. Um, I'm going to do this. The same freaking photo that everyone does all the time.

A picture from behind me as I work on my studio gear. Yay. That's a different angle by five degrees. Then last week's picture. So when you're doing that stuff, here's the thing, here's what happens. Let's say you have a thousand followers on Instagram, 10% of those people will see that post. If you're lucky, if you're lucky, not 1000 of them, 100 of them. So you can post all you want, most of the people who you think are following you or you think might hire you aren't going to see what you're posting and it's wasted time. Now, here's why. That is Mark Zuckerberg, who owns Facebook, is a smart guy, love him or hate him, love him or hate him. He built this giant social platform. Then he bought a bunch of other social platforms, Instagram included, Instagram's owned by Mark Zuckerberg, and he said, I'm going to get a bunch of people to use this and I'm gonna make it really easy for them to get benefit out of it. They're gonna make a post and everyone who likes their brand or who likes them is going to see it. And then as people get more addicted to my product, I'm going to lower the percentage, the natural organic reach of each post so that people will learn that they have to pay to boost a post.

Now, this isn't the same for a personal Instagram or a personal Facebook page. You actually get a much higher percentage of people that your post reaches on your personal pages. But on business pages or business Instagram accounts, that is not the case. And so retargeting is a way for you to reach not just more people but the right people. And that's the big key here. And if you go back to episode number 83 where we talk about how to double your income by aggressively following up, that was just, you know, five or six episodes ago, that is really going to give you an idea of why this works so well. Because in that episode we talk about following up aggressively. I would follow up 15 times in a two year period in order to win a Gig. That's just staying top of mind. As people go through life changes, they go through different phases of their musical career, whether they're writing or they're recording or they're mixing or mastering or releasing and touring.

They're at different stages at different times. And if you can use followup or retargeting on advertising, if you can use one of these two methods to stay top of mind, then when it comes time for them to book studio time, you will be on the top of their mind. So they will hopefully reach out and actually contact you. When it comes time to book studio time or mixing services or mastering services or whatever it is you do. But if you're not top of mind, when it comes time to book the Gig, you will not win it ever.

Yup. It's a battle for top of mind. And so here's kind of a funny, stupid, goofy skit that I'm gonna embarrass myself. I can't wait. I hear Rico. So for most businesses in our industry, a potential client comes along and they're like, oh hey, look a producer. And that's the end. They're like, hey, that's cool. Maybe I'll work with them. And then they leave. And then they forget about you. That's how it goes. Most of the time you don't know this because you don't see when someone sees you. That's the way social media, the Internet works. They're like, hey, cool website. Now they're gone. Retargeting is a little different. Retargeting is, hey, cool, the producer, hey, nice website. Whoops. See you later soon. Hey, that's another cool ad for that. Producers, Hey, that's a pretty cool song that a producer did. Oh Wow, he's doing some great work. Maybe I should hire him. These ads come up again and again and again. It keeps pulling you back to your brand. It's a tractor beam, keeps pulling you back and it keeps you top of mind and it gives you more opportunities than the 14 seconds that the guy was on your website or that he checked out your Instagram account to reengage with them and to try to pull him closer.

There's a free tool I want to pitch here called Hotjar, h. O. T. J. A. R. It'll be in our show notes to the six figure home studio.com/ [inaudible]

88 hotjar does it hold farts? Because that's what it sounds like.

That's amazing. That's amazing. Actually. It's better than that even. It's all of that's incredible. So what it is, it's a plugin that you can just hook into your website, assuming you have a website for your studio and it will record the session of someone coming to your site so you can see what they do from the time they get there, to the time they leave. And you'll get to learn a whole lot of stuff. When that happens, you're going to find out that creepy. An ad blocker maybe blocks the music player from loading at all. So they can't even hear your portfolio and you didn't know that. Or you're gonna find that they read your headline in bounce constantly means your headlines Bad. Or they get to your form and start to fill it out and they're like, ah, I don't feel like doing this.

And then they leave. You're gonna find out all sorts of interesting things and was just going to help your website. But despite all of the things you could potentially do, even the best converting website, you might get 10% of people to fill out your quote form. Yeah, you're kicking butt if you can hit 10% yeah, 10% to double my website. Mine's been hovering around 5% for forever. So if my website converted 5% Chris, I'm sure yours is somewhere around there somewhere similar to that, hovering around that. I don't think it's 6% right now. That's very nice. All that to say 95% of the people that come to my site leave and likely don't come back. If they do come back, they're not filling out my form the second time.

Let me jump in here real quick. The number one reason they don't come back is they forgot about you. It's that simple. They just forgot about you.

That's my point. So when you are not taking advantage of 95% of your website's traffic, you were leaving so much money on the table. They came to your site to maybe listing your portfolio to check out your work. Maybe someone referred them to you, maybe they found your credits on Spotify. They wanted to go check out this guy's work. He's a producer and I found this song I like and I liked the sound of it. So I googled his name and I came to this dude's

website. Check out his work. Love it. I need to think about this guy. Next time we're going to record our music. Never see again, they're gone. But with retargeting, you can then show ads to that person once, twice a month for the next 12 months for very, very cheap amount of money. And we're talking like to show an ad, and I think we've talked about this before, but to show an ad to a thousand people, it might cost you five to $10 to show them an ad one time. That's an insane deal to me. 1,000 people that have been to your website of last six months, it's an insane deal. So obviously you want to show them more, like 12 times a year, but it's still a tiny amount of money for how much one project is worth to you. Like my average project value is about 2000 bucks.

Chris is probably a quarter of that, somewhere around there. Maybe more than that now I'm not sure. Yeah, it's about, yeah, even one project for either of us, we'll pay for an entire year's worth of advertising for our studio a lot of times, so I think that's enough really good reasons for people unless you got something else to add of why advertising is such a good thing to do. Here's the other thing that I don't think most people know. When you set up a retargeting advertising campaign, it's a little challenging slightly at first to figure it out, learn it. There's plenty of great resources out there to figure this out, but here's the thing. You can set it up and eventually you can pretty much forget about it. You can just know you set a budget, you know in Google or Facebook or wherever you're doing this and you'd say, Hey, Facebook, you're allowed to spend up to $10 per month on getting people who have already interacted with me, who already know who I am to see my stuff.

Again, I think the minimum, just to clarify is a dollar a day, so about 30 bucks a month on an ad set. Okay. Yeah. My advice, if you are in a position where you are regularly working with a decent number of customers, and I would say that you know more than you know, two or three or four or five a month, spend $50 a month and retargeting or just set it to the minimum. Honestly, I think there's very little reason unless you just have no one interacting with their social media page. It's not just website visitors. By the way, it's anyone who has visited your studios, Facebook page, your studios, Instagram, people that have liked or commented on things like to me, unless you have no one interacting on social media and no one coming to your site at all, you should always have at least a dollar a day ad spend on retargeting on Facebook.

100% agreed. Listening to this show right now there are at least a few youngish probably dudes cause most of our audiences. Dude's 97% yeah. Who are competing with baby boomers. You're competing with entrenched guys who've been doing this for awhile, you're going to start doing remarketing and you're going to wipe the floor with these old school guys who refuse to learn new things. I'm telling you right now, there are going to be people, I'm going to meet you in a year at Nam or something like that and be like, due to sort of doing that. And I started crushing it with my studio. So cheap, so easy. And you just have to figure it out. Set and forget and make sure that you are continually reengaging people who have expressed interest. Cause this is what happens if someone comes to your website. It's like walking into a physical brick and mortar store and then saying [inaudible], which is an open door.

There's a possibility of a sale there. If they walk away and never come into your store again, there's no possibility of a sale. Your goal is to get them to come back in another time and then go [inaudible] and then they leave and then they see another ad a week or two or a month later. Then they come back and say, hmm, I'll take it. That's the goal of remarketing is just to get them to come back in the store again. Now we've got a whole bunch of ideas on just easy things that you can do to create these remarketing ads cause here's the thing, a remarketing ad that is just like all

for mixing services. I offer mixing services that'll probably work. It's better than nothing, but it's better than nothing. There's a lot more you can do. There's a lot more you can do. We've got some good ideas for you. If you're interested in implementing some sort of retargeting campaign for your studio, there should be more than fids for me to pull from is where you have an advice buffet for you for content ideas for ads and guys, guys, we've got to

really, really, really good idea last, we've saved it for last. This is a smoking good idea. We came up with this idea and neither of us has tried this yet. This is a brand new marketing idea that no one in your entire industry is doing and no one knows about unless you listen to this podcast. It's pretty dope. So stay tuned till the end of the show.

It'll work for somebody and I can't wait to talk about it. Let's talk about idea number one here. Content idea number one, this is something you actually do yourself, Chris. And this has been very, I don't want to use the word lucrative because that just sounds skeezy, but it's pin a profitable ad for you. And that is, I made a whole bunch of money with this the head. And you can too. Let's just make it sound like an infomercial that is screenshots of your reviews. Explain that.

Yeah, dude, so easy. So I am very lucky and I've also worked really hard for this, of asking for reviews when someone says they liked working with me. I've got hundreds of five star reviews all over the internet on Google and Facebook and some on Yelp, just kind of everywhere. And that's great because when someone, Google's Chris Graham mastering, um, you can see the tons of people have been happy working with me, so here's what I did. I pulled up, I think it was like my Google reviews and I just, if you on a Mac, if you hold down,

it's Facebook reviews. I'm looking at your ad right now. Okay, there you go. That's amazing. You found it that quick remarketing baby. Well, no, no. I just want to mention something. This is a secret weapon that I'm going to give our audience right now. This is actually worth the price of admission. I use this all the time, but we never talk about ads on our podcast and so I never share this resource, but I don't know if you know this Chris, but you can look up any active ad for any brand on Facebook. Tell me how to do this. It's the Facebook ad library will have a link in the show notes. If you go to our show notesPage@thesixfigurehomestudio.com slash 88 there is a link. You can go to it. I just typed in Chris gram mastering and I see your that we're talking about right now, but yeah, so you can search any active ad for any account out there and it's frigging awesome. So if you want to start lurking, other people would get ad ideas. I use it all the time for ad ideas.

That's amazing. And here's the thing that's beautiful about marketing is this kind of like audio. You never finish learning about it. You're never done. There's always something else you could do or something else you could learn marketing probably even more so than audio. It is a very, very, very large universe and you are only limited by your creativity and a little bit of knowhow and that's pretty cool.

Like go ahead and say one more thing about that. I'm looking at the actual ads that you're talking about right now, Chris, where you're advertising, you have over 105 star reviews, which is an amazing feat in and of itself and we're going to talk about what this ad is actually accomplishing and why you're doing it this way. But I want to mention the thing that is most important to me on this Facebook ads thing where you can view these ads. It shows when this ad was first published old, it's November 15th, 2018 the day before my birthday and the coolest thing about that is you've been running this thing nonstop probably or at least, yeah, off and on for the last like what does that 10 months or so, eight, nine Mike into the math out of my head, but that's an ad that's really, really good. You'll see a ton of accounts that have ads that are just posted this month. Most of those won't make it. You see an ad that's been around for that long. That's an old ad on Facebook, which means it's working well.

This is a completely side note. I had an ad I ran for six years, killed it for me. It was awesome. But yeah, this ad this, so you guys can completely steal this idea. This is one of my best ads ever is once you've collected a bunch of reviews. I did this on Facebook. I had at the time, I think like 107 five star reviews. I think there's a lot more than that now. 106 but who's counting 106 whatever. Just go in there and on a Mac, hold down shift command and four and then drag a box over whatever you want to take a screenshot of. I took a picture and then I posted it on my Facebook page and then I targeted that ad to be shown to people. I think it's like one to two times a month after they've visited my website. That's it. So again and again and again, they're like, wow, he's got a lot of five star reviews. He must be good. Oh Wow. He's got a lot of five star reviews. So again, like let's do this stupid skit that I'm embarrassed to do and please don't mock me in the Facebook group for doing this, but

oh hey, mastering engineer for food. Wow, he's got five. That's a lot of five star reviews. It really is a lot of foster reviews, but so many first started off,

I'm gonna hire this guy. That's, that's what's happening with the remarketing and all the time people hire me who have seen that ad or they comment, so that still gets comments. Even though I posted it such a such a long time ago. And so that's just such an easy idea of you're just like, hey, I don't suck. And a lot of people think I'm good. Don't forget about me. That's the point of the ad.

When you think about like how important it is to see those five stars is building trust. It's building social proof. It's just basically saying like when you see a five star, like with a hundred reviews for restaurant, like, Oh, this restaurant obviously doesn't suck. There's no way you're getting five star reviews for that many reviews unless you were a quality restaurant. I'll give it a chance. You're pitching a free test master here. So it's like, yeah, five star review over a hundred reviews. It's more than worth the chance of me taking to get a free test master. I'll go ahead and pull the trigger now that I'm ready to do it. And I think that's why it's worked so well for you is because you're staying top of mind over a long period of time and yeah, so that's idea number one, screenshot of reviews. Anything else to add to that Chris before we move on?

That's it. It's just that simple. All right, so I did number two. If you go back to last week's episode where we talked about lead magnets, how to create a lead magnet for your studio. This is a very good place to actually use your lead magnet and that is through retargeting. So I'm going to actually picture this real quick. Someone comes to your site, listen to your portfolio. They like what they hear. They're not ready to take the next step yet. So they go off to do whatever it is they have to do that day, which is probably order more merged for the next tour. They are probably trying to get on the next big Spotify playlist. They're trying to finish up writing for the album. They are talking to their management, they're talking to the label. They have all these things going on. They're busy.

They don't have time to, you know, sit around and contemplate what studio they're going to go to. But now they're getting an ad on Facebook that has a lead magnet that is directly solving a problem they're facing right now in their stage of their album cycle. I don't know what that problem might be. You have to listen to episode number 87 to come up with a really good lead magnet for them, but if you do a good enough job, this is going to be a thing that immediately solves a problem that they are facing right now. And this is a way for you to get their name and email address so that you can stay top of mind without having to retarget them in the future because now they're on your mailing list. Brilliant. Yeah, I love it. Yeah, and what this does is this is doing something called building reciprocity. Chris, you want to talk about what reciprocity is and how it affects people?

Yeah. Reciprocity is a fringe sauce typically put on scalped potatoes, and I regret this as soon as I said it, I hate you so much. You love me and you can't help it. Reciprocity is when you do something nice for someone and then they feel like they should do something nice back for you. That's it. And reciprocity is interesting because that's a go like too far down the nerd rabbit hole here. But you think about us as hunter gatherers, you know we were basically like picking mushrooms and berries and maybe hunting a deer every once in a while for like millions of years. And we lived in groups of cave men and women of less than 150 people based on what anthropologists have done some research on. And this idea is that it was really an advantage for [inaudible].

Okay. But the funny side story I went on down about you yawn. So the idea here was that if you had reciprocity, if you felt the need to do something to someone who did something nice for you, that that was a significant survival advantage. If you were in a caveman society, a society that had reciprocity was much more tightly knit than one that wasn't. So it's natural human behavior to want to do nice things, nice things for you. And when you do something nice for a potential client, sometimes that means they will do something nice

for you. Yes. So here's one of the big things I want to talk about with reciprocity. Real quick. Lead magnet on retargeting ad. Great, great idea. Something. If you have a good lead magnet, that's the first place you should start promoting it is through retargeting on perfectly. Facebook is the easiest way to do this. Instagram also, whatsapp is about to start getting ads on it as well, which is owned by Facebook. Just so you know. But the thing about reciprocity is you can have no other differentiating factors between you and a competitor. You get an identical prices. You can have identical offerings. You have nothing unique about you, but you've built up a lot of reciprocity with someone. They're going to hire you every single time after the fact. And I think this is one of the reasons you've got so many people hiring you from the podcast.

Chris is just, you've built up so much reciprocity from all the knowledge bombs you've dropped over the last 88 episodes to where when it comes time for someone to hire a mastering engineer, they're going to look nowhere else other than Chris Graham mastering.com it's just cause I'm good Bryan. It's got nothing to do with that cause I'm talented. It's because you're good and that's honestly the base baseline of being a successful mastering engineers. You have to be good, but also you've sown a lot of good seeds into our audience and so you are reaping the reciprocity effect of that to show, this is just kind of a tangent between, we're fitting two topics into this episode. One is talking about reciprocity and one is the lead magnet on Facebook retargeting. Let me tell a funny story real quick. I love your funny stories Chris, cause sometimes they're not funny, which is also funny.

Hey, if you're laughing at me or you're laughing with me, I don't care just as long as you're laughing. Right. That's true. When we went to NAM, I was considering building a mastering course, which I might do someday. At this point, I'm a little too consumed with some other projects I'm working on bounced, Butler, almost done. Stay tuned. And uh, I remember I pitched you on my mastering course. We had a hotel room with two beds and I was pitching you and you were laying in bed on my mastering course and you straight up fellas,

whatever that was. I straight up remember it. Cause that was first of all, if anyone's ever been in nam, the west coast, damn, not the boring Nashville one. If you've been to the, to the Anaheim Nam, it is a lot to take in. It's true. At the end of the day, you're exhausted because you've been talking all day that you've just heard instruments all day. You've walked 30, 40,000 steps. Like it's just, you've eaten like bad food, truck food. And so that was what was set up for you telling me you're mastering course in the hotel room. Well, I think that was the day we walked past the drum area of Nam. That'll kill anybody's soul. Man, if I die and go to hell, it will look like the drum section of man. If you've ever been in the drum section of guitar center, it's like that multiplied times a hundred conservatively, conservatively. Super Good Chris. Chris

is Mirko conservatively, conservatively. It's at least a hundred times worse than a guitar center on like a Friday at five. I don't know. Wind's bad at Guitar Center.

I Dunno. Somebody that works there knows. Let's go back to the retargeting ideas cause that's what the episode's about.

Three target. The topic of this idea. What idea of this topic.

Delete yourself. This screenshot of review, screenshot of reviews. We talked about advertising lead magnets for retargeting. This next one is one that is good if you're already creating this sort of content but it's studio videos. Quick example is I know a guy, not going to name a name but he has video cameras set up all over his studio and it's for the purpose of just creating content on the fly. If you're recording a band, they've got something interesting they're doing or saying or teaching or just something funny happens. They can quickly and easily start to record cause there's lights everywhere. There's cameras everywhere, so they just have tons of content by the time they're done filming a record and some of this content is just pure gold. And so if you were to set some of your best videos up that you have already created for you, like a youtube channel or that you're sharing on social media, if you just boost those and just put them in a campaign that's on your retargeting list to where people are just getting an inside look of what it's like to record with you, that is a really, really good way to build trust and likeability.

If they see what it's like to work with you, all the fun times you're already having or the interesting stuff or the unique ways you're capturing sounds or something that's just super interesting and like, Oh I never thought of that. I didn't know that's how they did that. Like have you ever seen Foley work where people are creating like sound effects stuff that sort of stuff's intriguing.

Oh I love that stuff. Side note, if I'm ever like out in California or somewhere where a listener does a lot of fully and my family can come and watch you do fully for real movie, that would create a lot of reciprocity.

I'd be surprised if any movies are doing that sort of stuff anymore because of sample libraries. Like you have every sound conceivable in a sample library. Now, some movies I would imagine are just using sample libraries now. Every sound Brian quota sound right now that doesn't exist. Believe that cause that's the worst sound ever quote a set. What's a sound that you don't think exists out there and yes, that sound exists, Chris. It does. Now we probably shouldn't put that down. It sounds like a bad German dungeon porn thing.

Yeah, it grows. We leave it to you, Jamie. James, you're the German. Here's the, here are the German. All right. James is our editor. He's fantastic studio videos. Anything else to add to that, Chris? Oh yeah, here's an idea. So I would bet that even right now, and if not right now, definitely in the future, that if you had two identical studios in two identical towns on the opposite sides of the country, one of those studios had name brand microphones. You know, I can't name any of them because I'll get the gear solid alert. That's true. For those of you that are new to the show, we don't talk about here. Yeah, we don't, you're not allowed to. Somebody else. What happens? Yeah. I'm going to say a name brand here in just a minute, but let's say you had like really expensive name brand mikes and no cameras and no lights set up in your studio and this other identical competing studio had rode mikes.

How about Shinzen quality audio Shinzen quality audio mix, those fake knock mikes you see in the basement at Nam? Uh, I wouldn't stretch it that far. I've been really impressed. The road stuff and it's very cheap. Yeah, it's very inexpensive compared to like, you know, you know what stuff from Austria does it start with a letter you, I don't know what you're talking about right now. I mean n you 87 Oh, that's the model number, not the company, Brian. And guess let alone for you sir. Yes, I come. Oh, and planning that for years anyways, so if these two studios win at it, you got studio number one who has name brand, thousands of dollar Mike's, no cameras, no lights, and another studio who has good but relatively affordable mix and good cameras and good lights. I would put all my money on the studio with cameras prevailing and growing the most, especially if you're taking this content you're already creating and posting out there organically if you're taking it an amplifying it for retargeting on Facebook and Instagram.

Yes, and that's an important caveat there. Cavita caveat, I don't know how to say that word, but I love it and caveat, but yeah, caveat. So if you're amplifying that content, so let's say here's a good example. Let's say your studio is in San Diego, California. Oh, well it's a vagina and you record. That's going to make no sense to anyone that hasn't seen anchorman. So just, I just like to think anyone that's not seeing that movie, they hear me say that and they're like, well from a movie he said it, don't worry about it. Anyways, this idea, let's say you recorded a band that was pretty well known in Sam. Did I say San Diego? Yeah, San Diego. Okay. Let's say let's Go San Francisco. Let's city Babu [inaudible]. Why are you changing the city now? What's that? Where are you changing the city? Well, because Germany is like the band from San Francisco, there'd be notes cause other songs are about San Francisco.

So let's say your recording journey in your home studio. This is a bad example. You shouldn't do this, but I'm just, I hope you're going somewhere with this, Chris. I may too. Me Too. But let's say you recorded journey in your studio in San Francisco and you captured videos of it and you know you had everyone that come in your studio was like, hey, we might use videos, promotional, you go to approve them, whatever. And then you took a video, just a snippet of journey recording and your studio and you remarketed it to anyone that had been to your studio webpage. It's great content, right? In San Francisco, people are more like, Oh snap, Yo, I'm gonna check that studio out. And again, this isn't a good example, but it's something where you can take that content. Should we edit this out? I like it cause it's a bad example. Such a bad example, but I think a good example would be yes, please show me a good example. A lot of cities have

what we call bands, bands, bands, bands. Those are bands that aren't quite famous, but all the other bands in the city loved them. That would be the type of band you want to capture content. Show him in the studio because other bands who might want to hire you will see that. Brian, should we start a band and call it band's band? I'm going to move on here. So we've talked about screenshots or reviews. We talked about lead magnets, we talked about studio videos. So amplifying content you've already created. The next would be music videos. I don't know about you Chris, but a lot of the music that I've mixed or recorded over the years has had a music video created for it and a lot of those videos are fantastically done. Like they spent twice as much on the music videos they spent on the entire album on one music video.

I can think of one video for a project you worked on for your old band that I saw that's like black and white and my daughter on Nora, she's three has hotspur Brian for those of you that don't know. And she was like, yeah,

I want to see Brian play the drama.

So like we pulled up this video and the video gets more intense and more intense and I had to eventually press pause because your lead singers face like caught on fire or something,

which is like the worst CGI of all time in like 2006 or seven and it was like, oh, okay. She's not ready for this. Well anyways, you've recorded a lot of artists in your career, Chris, or you've mastered a lot at arts. I've recorded in mixed a lot of artists. A lot of those have been turned into really good high quality music videos and for you to share those on uh, on ads, on Facebook for specifically retargeting ads, uh, it's not going to be hard for you to get permission from the artist and the label most likely because they're getting free promotion. You're getting two benefits from it. The first is, is a really, really good thing for positioning when a high quality music video is associated with your audio. Because Facebook and Instagram, both very visual platforms, Instagram specifically, so a lot of times and eye catching music video or at least a clip from an eye catching music video is a great way to stop the scroll on Facebook or Instagram and get them to actually consume the content, the ad that you're showing them and for them to see the end product, it makes it a lot easier for them to then visualize the end product for themselves.

If they want to put out a single and they want to get a music video for it, they are seeing the full completely done project. At the end of the day, what all this hard work culminates into and that helps them motivate themselves to taking the next step towards working with you.

Bingo, and here's the thing, here's what you want to happen is that potential artists that wants to work with you sees content that you've worked on and says to themselves, I want my fans to,

I feel the way I feel right now while watching this music video or while listening to this recording, and if that happens, you're going to get hired. That's it. The other thing is as far as what to say in that sort of ad, all you need to do is talk about the experience of working with these people in the studio. Shout out the videographer who actually did the video because that's going to build more reciprocity with that freelancer because then they will maybe promote you in something. Cross voting each other is always a good thing to do in this business and that's pretty much all you need to do. You can even do a call to action like Chris does in his ad. If you go to that ad library thing that we linked to in the show notes, you can actually see Chris's ad that he's doing right now how his called action just says need your songs mastered, get a free master, and then you can just click the thing to get the free test master, but that's called a call to action. So video's just saying love working with these guys. This music video turned out amazing props to videographer tagged here. If you can even tag on ads, I don't know if you can, but props to So-and-so at something. Videography.

You actually cannot take anyone on [inaudible].

Okay, well that makes sense. Well, you can still shout out their name. If you want to record your next single with us, click here and fill out a quote form super simple. These don't have to be some crazy masterpiece because these are not people that you're trying to convince to come record with you. There are people that are already probably interested in working with you. You're just getting them over the hump. This is really more just top of mind. That's why worst case scenario, if you just had an ad that said, get your songs mastered with me, get your songs mastered with me, get your songs master with me. Actually, that'd be a good video. Remember, head on, apply directly to the forehead, head on, apply directly to the forehead, head on. Apply direct dot before. Oh my God. Yeah, that's the worst thing ever. Yeah, but if you're a studio and you're just basically saying the same message, it's still accomplishing the same thing. You're just trying to vary it up with these different ad ideas.

Totally. This is great stuff, man. Well, we got two more ideas. The best one is coming. Brian, I want you to deliver that one. Let me pitch our last idea. This is a good one. One of the biggest problems that people who run recording studios have is fluctuations in income and especially when you've got a gap where it's like, crap man, I'm booked solid for the next month, but Tuesday and Wednesday of this week are not booked.

Yeah. I've had this in the past where I went and I actually sent an email about this recently or a week ago. If you're listening to the podcast now where I talked about I made $20,000 one month and then $2,000 and next month. That is a massive fluctuation in income.

Yeah, so this idea of like, okay, you've got open space. If you have people that are like, man, I'm like right on the verge of hiring this guy. I would love to work with them. I'm thinking about booking time with them if that's what your model is, you can remark it when you have a gap in your schedule, you can run a onetime ad and just say, hey, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of next week are open book. Now while space is still available, if you're interested in booking, typically I book a month in advance, you know that sort of thing. You can run this sort of ad and you can probably fill that hole with, you know, you could run a discount, you know, whatever. But there's also a scarcity play here of, hey, there's this one block of time and only one person is going to get it.

Is it going to be you? It gets very, very interesting and I really think that in the future, one of the biggest changes that we're going to see in commerce in general, whether that's restaurants or recording studios or whatever, is that when people aren't up to capacity in when a restaurant's like only a quarter of the tables are full in the future, those restaurants are going to run a spontaneous ad that's going to be a sale to convince people to come into so they can fill it up and be it to capacity. Same thing for recording studios. If you have an open day, you can run an ad to fill just that day and if it costs you like $3 to do that, man, you freaking win.

I think one of the biggest things here is no matter how good you are at your studio, no matter how high quality your stuff is, even the best people have gaps in their calendar. Maybe somebody canceled last minute or maybe you just couldn't get this awkward gap filled out but it's like a three day span. You just want to have some work here. Facebook ads for retargeting is a really good way to get the message out to a lot of people very quickly and to fill those little spots up so this is another really good use of that is running these last minute sales or even last minute offers if you are at a high demand, just the fact that they know that they can get a last minute booking with like a week or two's notice whether you discount or not. There is a scarcity to put in there to know that like there's only one spot available. I'm booked up six months in advance from now. I've got this one week gap open in a couple of weeks. If you want it, fill out the quote form and let's get talking right now.

Yeah, this isn't a thing yet that I'm aware of. But in the future you absolutely, I would guess through like acuity or Calendly, these apps that let you sync with your calendar and let people make payments to book your time in the future. I'm sure there'll will be add integration that you'll be able to flip on some plugin or some software and it'll automatically look and see, oh, he's not booked, then I'm going to run an ad automatically. That's totally going to be a thing. It'll be normal. It's not a thing yet. So you need to do it manually in the meantime. So like I said, here's our last idea. I think this is a fantastic idea. Brian and I were discussing ideas for podcast episodes and we were kind of going back and forth about Spotify and we were arguing about, you know, whether or not you should put a Spotify playlist of your work on your website and, and just sort of spit out this idea out of nowhere. And the whole episode was built around like, holy crap, no one's doing that. Why is this not the normal thing to do? So this next idea Brian's going to share it is incredible. And if you're listening to the podcast on Tuesday morning, hurry up and do it because no one else knows about it, but you right now.

Yeah. So real quick, the conversation was originally Chris and I talking about like adding a Spotify player to your website, linking to like a Spotify playlist. And Chris thought process behind this was, well, if we get them to go to a playlist off of my site, maybe they'll listen through it more times and kind of develop an affinity towards me because they've listened to my playlist so many times. I don't hate that idea. It's okay. But my big thing is as far as conversion optimization, meaning getting as many people to sign up for a quote request on your website as possible to maximize that number. You don't want to have anything on your site that links them away to something else that's going to distract them. And that's because Spotify will, as soon as the app opens up, it's gonna like pop up and say, Hey, this new release just came out.

Or, Hey, this new podcast episode came out, or Hey, listen to your weekly playlist that we just curated for you. They're doing anything they can to distract you from the thing that you want them to do. Spotify is going to get them to do what they want them to do and so for that reason, I don't love the idea of having anything that pulls people off of your website. However, this is where the idea kind of shifts into a retargeting idea because I love the idea of someone listening through your playlist in developing affinity for your work. I've done this in my past. I know when my old band was choosing a producer, I would listen to everything that producer put out because I had already developed an affinity for his work and I wanted to hear everything he did because I wanted to visualize how our music was going to sound once we were ready to record with that producer.

You can sort of short circuit this by building out that Spotify playlist of all of your past working really good, strong portfolio. Chris kind of came up with this idea because he was talking to a coaching client who had an incredible portfolio and they were just thinking of ways to leverage these songs that he had worked with and these artists that were notable in ways to get it out there so that they can get more clients. Well, this is where retargeting comes into play is by just creating a Spotify playlist of your best work, 10 to 12 songs, maybe more, and then promoting that Spotify playlist on Facebook as ad retargeting. This is a way to get people that have already been to your site that already are familiar with your work. They probably already listened to a few songs to say, Hey, you're on your phone right now. Just click this button, listen to my playlist. You can hear the rest of my songs. This is a good way to get people to start familiarizing themselves with your brain and hopefully building an affinity towards your overall sound or whatever it is you're doing. This is a great way to sort of hack that sort of affinity growth as quickly as possible. This is super interest. Christine

for one specific reason. When someone's on their phone, their attention, undivided, they're not multitasking. Hopefully they're probably not like driving their car and scrolling through Facebook unless they're a real seriously terrible person. And what happens when you get someone to click on that link to go to your Spotify portfolio playlist, let's call it a portfolio playlist. That's the new word. Everybody, once they hit that, they're going to be like, oh cool, these songs I read, I'm going to go finish washing the dishes or I'm going to go finish my workout or I'm going to start my drive to work. And while they're doing something else, you are there passively in the background building a relationship with them. Think about that. Does that sound familiar? That's what we're doing with you right now through the podcast. Podcasting is so amazing because you can multitask, consume. If you leverage that power with your playlist, if you've got, you know, 12 amazing songs that you make a playlist out of in Spotify and start to share it with people and let's face it, Spotify is the most popular way that your potential customers are going to listen to music.

If you do that, you start to develop this relationship and this like, wow, that song was great and like I said before, hopefully they have this moment where they say, man, I want my listeners to feel the way I feel right now while listening to this playlist. If that magic moment happens, if you create an emotional experience for your potential customer while listening to your playlist, your odds of getting hired have just gone through the roof.

This is just a good way to build trust with your potential customers because they're going to start loving your work. I think this is gonna be a lot more effective for those of you who are in a tight knit niche. Like in my world, the metal world, there's not a wide variety. It's not a drastic, wide variety that unlike Chris where you're doing like hip hop, R and B CCM pop, you're doing acoustic folk. Like there's just so many different varieties to where like I'm probably only interested in one or two of those genres as a potential customer. So you give me a playlist of all these different genres. I'm not going to listen to the entire thing. Most like in my world I'm metal fans and metal fan. For the most part there's a little sub genres and for the most part I've even niche down into just a few sub genres. So all my music's relatively in the same vein. So someone would probably binge listen to a full playlist without stopping.

What's so funny is I know there's at least one listener right now. There's like no nerves, not metals. And that wasn't funny know it wasn't, are you saying someone in the metal community is an elitist? No Way. Uh, it's really funny. There's, I think I'm saying his name right, but Finn McEntee, punk rock, NBA, the Punk Rock, NBA. I love watching his stuff because he's kind of just like poking fun and making memes about this niche genre and he's killing it. He's got like over a hundred thousand subs on youtube right now and it's crazy cause he wasn't like killing it really recently.

He's found his stride in what he's doing for sure.

Yeah man. Here's a six figure home studios. Salute to you, Finn, McKinsey and McKinsey. Hopefully we're saying your name,

but if he actually spoke at the event that I spoke at and Orlando. Nice Dude. All right, so somebody go out there and try that in the Spotify playlist thing, you could try title, you could try apple music. I don't know if you can do playlists like that. It's worth trying, but Spotify seems to be the most widely used to me.

I'd recommend, you know, Spotify for sure titled Just did come out with some new features to promote the creators involved in the process of making the music producers and engineers and all that stuff. So that's going to be interesting to see how that develops. Hopefully in the future you'll be able to like Google yourself in Spotify or wherever you're listening to music and see every song that you've ever worked on right there. Certainly not the case right now, but probably will be in this in the future.

Yeah. Spotify released their like credits thing like a while back and I'm like still not credited on the majority of the stuff that I do.

Oh Dude, I'm probably credited on 5% probably not even 5% of the stuff I've worked on for mastering engineers. It's a little weirder.

Yeah, a lot of it comes back to the labels not submitting stuff correctly. So yeah, it was just one of like it sucks, but you can try to talk to labels and they'll do it half the time. Anyways, that's a side problem. Anything else you want to add on this, Chris? I think retargeting, I think we did a pretty good job convincing people why it's so important. So easy to do for like 30 bucks a month. You can set up a campaign. It's like, where else can you turn 30 bucks a month into a bunch of projects?

That's the right point right there, man. I think that's a good mic drop moment. There is no where else you can spend $30 a month and get a better return in your investment and to retarget for your business on Facebook. Probably Facebook, Instagram, maybe Google, check it out,

try it out, and then post in our Facebook community@thesixfigurehomestudio.com slash community or just search for the six figure home studio community on Facebook. Tell us your results on retargeting.