Shane Murphy (00:01)

Welcome back everybody. We're here today with Robert Brill. He's the owner of Brill Media, which is a leader in helping companies to manage the paid media landscape from everything from social media through TV. He's done it all and is truly an expert in paid advertising. So Robert, I'm super pumped to have you with us today. Thanks for coming and sharing your story with everybody.

Robert Brill (00:27)

Yeah, thanks for having me Shane, appreciate it.

Shane Murphy (00:29)

You bet. Before we dive in, can you tell us a little bit more about your background and Brill Media for that matter?

Robert Brill (00:36)

Yeah, absolutely. 22 years in digital advertising, digital media buying at agencies large and small. About 12 years ago, I started Brill Media with the goal of taking the guesswork out of marketing. And we see a lot of companies that are putting out marketing messages that are not persuasive, which means they don't get people to take the action that is needed to generate leads in sales.

So our job is to eliminate that guesswork and really help companies understand the solutions that their customers are looking for, the problems that their customers are looking to solve, and then provide transformation, how to achieve a benefit without a pain in a period of time. And that process really is critical to the growth of every business, including restaurants.

Shane Murphy (01:29)

Yeah, absolutely. think that phrase of taking the guesswork out of it is one that repeatedly comes up for restaurateurs when it comes to marketing. Most operators have tried dozens of different marketing channels and marketing tips and tricks, and it always feels like a guess. And sometimes even after the fact, you're looking back and saying, well, did it work? I don't really know.

And so I think that message that you're putting out there is so important. ⁓ From a restaurant perspective, how should restaurants approach paid media? This can be a really daunting and scary piece of marketing for restaurants because they know their food, they know that part of their business, but when it comes to actually paying for an ad, that can feel like such a foreign experience. How should they approach?

Robert Brill (02:26)

Yeah, food, for most places, food is a highly commoditized thing. so here's the process that we recommend restaurants deploy. Number one, validate your marketing messages, problems, solutions, and transformation. What you want to get to is a landing page, a page on your website that gets at least 15 % of the people to submit their contact information for a free offer, a coupon, whatever the case might be.

Once that happens, when you've created a system that provides transformation, how to achieve a benefit without a pain in a period of time, and you get at least 15 % of the people to share their contact info, you know you've captured attention. So when you run an ad, this is critical. When you run an ad, you have about two to two and a half seconds to divert someone's attention from what they were doing to what you want them to do.

So usually when people are on social media or they're consuming ads on websites or television, like on Hulu or Roku or et cetera, they, usually have, they're usually doing brain rot, which is brain rot consumption. Dog and cat videos, they're watching some entertainment. They might be on their phone looking at other things. They're kind of like just passing the time. They're looking for easy to consume content or they're doing some sort of research or trying to get more information.

or they're doom scrolling, reading the news and feeling bad about life. So now you've got to say something that is so impactful, so compelling that it diverts their attention from what they were doing into what you want them to do. And you have two and a half seconds to do that. So when a person sees an ad, you basically have three steps that you need them to take so that they click. And all this happens within two and a half seconds. Number one, you're going to give them a headline and a headline has to provide transformation.

the benefit you're gonna receive without the pain in a period of time. So what's the thing that you're gonna get by paying attention to this ad? Then their eye will drop down to the image. The image has to reinforce the headline that they just read. And finally, if you're looking at a Facebook ad, their eye will go to the top, they'll read the text. And that text, if it reinforces everything they just saw, you're gonna get the click. Now, when you get a click, you need to get people to a page that will pay it off somehow.

that will further reinforce that message and you want some sort of tangible action they can take. A lot of mistakes that companies make is they drive people to a page where there's too many links. people, the mind gets confused, especially if they're not really focused on something. So you don't want to give them a page where they have 27 different links. What you want to do is give them a page where they can take a single action. Book now, download a free offer or some other thing that shows interest.

⁓ And I know that might be hard because restaurants the interest is ultimately walking in and paying for food But at the end of the day like you need these micro conversions to happen Because these micro conversions build up to someone leaving the house getting into their car or walking down the road and actually spending money with you Especially when they weren't planning on doing that. So that's the process once you've validated your marketing messages Here are the next four steps number one discover your champion ads

Discover the individual ad and the individual targeting audience that drives sales. Next, you're going to scale up. Spend more money profitably to the places that drive people to walk in. Third, you're going to ⁓ institutionalize all the learnings in the, or this is now, yeah, third, you're gonna institutionalize all the learnings in the algorithm. The idea being that Facebook has its own algorithm, Google, et cetera. Track all that. And then finally, ⁓

That was actually number four. Number five is you're gonna expand, deliver more ads to more audiences or to more geographies or do things that will create more demand higher in the demand funnel, right? So the point is there is a systematized process. So we call that process that we talked about, it's called smart scale. It's a thing that reliably drives on average 680 % return on ad spend for clients that work with us.

The idea being that you should not just spend money and cross your fingers and hope it works. You must know for a fact that you're delivering the right messages profitably and that's what's gonna get you more sales. The next step after that is attribution, ensuring that you are tracking, you can track people when they saw an ad and they walked into your location. So we can go from large strategic ideas to very tactical ideas on how to drive sales.

Shane Murphy (07:11)

Yeah, could we maybe like walk through an example of like from the beginning what this looks like of, you know, I'm a restaurant, maybe, I don't know, I'm either like a pizzeria or a barbecue restaurant. And we're going to, you know, take this from the beginning. We're going to, you know, identify that headline, the image and the call to action, and then maybe talk through what that smart scaling process would look like.

Robert Brill (07:41)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy (07:41)

after that.

Robert Brill (07:43)

It all starts with a problem. The best marketing messages start with a nugget of truth about the customer. It's very hard to market a business from the inside out. It's much harder to, it's much easier to market a business when you understand who you are serving and why they're paying attention to you. What is the, the need that you are solving for, for a customer? Now, if you're selling pizza, ⁓ there's many pizza places. I live in Los Angeles or some great pizza and some bad pizza.

but the great pizza, ⁓ there's something unique about them, right? And here's the thing, it's not enough to have good food. you have to be, just to be in business, you have to have good food. Like that's the minimum level of quality that drives success. But that's not the thing that's gonna get people in the door. What's gonna get people in the door is understanding why your pizza fulfills some deep, dark need that

someone else's doesn't. So the idea is what we, the way we deploy this is there's ad testing that can be delivered on Facebook and Instagram where you just really throw out a lot of different problem statements. ⁓ I'm sick and tired of the same old chain pizzas. Okay. Let's see if that's a winner. And you go through like 30 different problem statements. And yet the idea then is that when you understand which

problems agitate the person the most that's the problem you want to press down on the press down on so agitation is important in This testing you're not solving the problem You just want to know which problem gets people to pay attention to your messages and then the next step in that process is to provide a solution and the solution is just a reversal of the problem if You're sick and tired of chain pizzas come check out Roebriels pizza

Right? It's just a mirror, a flip of the problem that the customer has expressed. And then you do this testing down the line and you get to transformation, how to achieve a benefit without pain in a period of time.

you know, and I can't formulate that off the top right now with, with pizza. But the idea is, ⁓ none of this is guesswork, right? Like you have the ability to understand exactly what the marketplace wants from you. Otherwise you're just guessing. Like you're just putting marketing messages out into the marketplace. And it's like, man, I hope this will work. And if it doesn't work, we'll figure it out later. That's the exact wrong way.

to market a business because you cannot rely on guesswork. You cannot rely on luck to grow a business.

Shane Murphy (10:26)

You mentioned one thing that is crucial to this whole process was the ensuring of attributions that you know what's working. so when I'm, if I'm ⁓ I'm Robrill's ⁓ pizza operator and I'm thinking through this, I just put out this ad with a bunch of other ⁓ options and I'm finding

I'm having higher click-throughs on, you know, hey, are you sick and tired of the normal chain pizzas? And I have my solution. I have this like really nice picture of maybe it's a like Neapolitan pizza, cause that's my thing. I'm not just the little Caesars. I'm Neapolitan. So I'm trying to focus on that. And I'm seeing higher click-throughs. That's one way for me to test that demand. ⁓

The next side of that that you said is, now we're seeing something that's performing. How do I scale it up and then institutionalize those learnings for the algorithm? What does that look like in practice?

Robert Brill (11:37)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So, ⁓ in, the testing period, we're just looking at click-through rate, which click-through rate is most effective for the business, for the ads that are running. ⁓ when you get people to a landing page, you want to track whether people are submitting their contact info for more information for a free down, for a free coupon or whatnot, or a discount coupon. ⁓ the point is you have

A predictable and reliable marketing flywheel when you get a lot of people to take the action that they need. So that's number number two, like just the metrics. Are you getting at least 15 % of people, which is by the way, the average for the industry is two to 5%. So when you're at 15%, you're you're three to seven times higher than the industry average, which is fantastic. That's where you want to be. Then you want some sort of customer relationship management system. So CRM system where

You can capture someone's phone number, maybe their email address, maybe you get their name. And now you can match that information back to actual sales. won't be a hundred, you know, it won't be perfect, but it'll be close. So the idea is if you capture a hundred combinations of email address and phone number, and then you look at your sales, how many, what percentage of those people bought from the pizza place? Right? So now you have the ability to say, look, we, we marketed.

And 25 % of those people turned into money for us within the next 30 days. Now, how do you bridge the gap? So that's attribution. That's direct one-to-one attribution from marketing to sales. Now the question is what, the one thing that didn't get discussed here is the big gap between contact info is acquired and a sale is generated. So there's a big chasm, there's a grand county there. How do you build a bridge over that process?

So what you need to do is continue with the SMS targeting, ⁓ SMS messages, email marketing, and ad retargeting, right? They've already expressed interest. Now it's time to close them in that last mile. Now it's time to get them to a place where they went from, I'm interested. Now you've got to convince them to walk in. And how do you convince them to walk in? ⁓ Serve them up ads, send them emails, send them text messages until they walk in.

or they unsubscribe. Because frankly, if they unsubscribe, that's okay. Like unsubscribe just means that they weren't really your people to begin with.

Shane Murphy (14:05)

Yeah, I think that's a big one that sometimes, as operators, feel like, ⁓ if someone unsubscribes, I take it personally. And I think, ⁓ someone doesn't like my product, they don't like my food. But in reality, it may have been, hey, this person joined because you did catch their attention. ⁓ And then the more time went on, they're not actually translating to sales. And if they're not translating to sales, you want them

Because you don't want to be paying for the text messages paying for the retargeted ads paying for all these things that add up ⁓ It's okay, and it's not a personal thing they may never have even tried your product, but your ad got them in the first place

Robert Brill (14:49)

And there's also other things. They might have just started a diet. They may have just gone to the doctor and find out they have fatty liver. They may have just realized that they're lactose and they can't have cheese. They may have found out that they just lost their jobs. It's time to cut back. Like life happens to people. Everyone on your marketing list has something going on with their lives. So they may not want to be reminded of the fact that they were, they love pizza and now they can't have pizza as much as they want.

Maybe they're making lifestyle changes. Maybe they are starting taking ZipBound and Ozempic and they're just not as hungry as they once were. Like there's a lot of life happening to the individuals that are on your marketing list.

Shane Murphy (15:32)

Yeah, and I think this is this is crucial too, because sometimes, you know, I'm curious your thoughts on this. Sometimes restaurants take the ads and you're just going directly to like the call to action is to place an order. And other times it's geared towards I'm gathering the contact information, even pre-order where they might be filling out something like you said to get an offer or to get

get a deal and that requires name, email and phone number. Ideally with, I'm also subscribing to the email list and the text marketing list so you can chase them down later. And what are your thoughts between taking people to that type of contact, like generation form versus straight to an online, like an ordering call to action?

Robert Brill (16:29)

Yeah, I mean, I think there are several desired actions that you're looking for from an individual, right? The first is people need to know you like you and trust you. The second idea is consumption drives convergence. The more they're going to get to know you, the more likely they are to buy from you. So, there are going to be ads that will drive people to an action that they cannot, you know, you don't want to drive people to a order now button.

If you've done that in the past and people aren't ordering maybe there's an indicator that your message like this so You want to unlock every step of the sales process? But what I would say if like you drive people to an order form and they're not ordering in the sufficient quantities that you're looking for Either your messages are not right. You're serving ads at the wrong time You're serving ads to the wrong audience or your prices are too high or people don't actually like what you want What you have unlikely that they don't like it, especially with pizza. Everyone loves pizza ⁓

Right? So that's number one. But I would say that you, the, from the strategic perspective, it's important to validate which process is going to be that predictable and reliable marketing flywheel for the business. So I want to get you as close to the sale as possible. And if that doesn't work, then we need to fine tune why it doesn't, doesn't work. It's like when you're baking something, right? Like it's very specific quantities and you can go from.

a really bad cake to a really good cake by making very small changes into the process. So your sales system is the same type of thing. Like one small tweak and unlock a huge opportunity for the business. Um, but I like, I like both and it sort of depends on the type of business you are. If you have multiple locations, um, if you're a solo proprietor, you know, like there are different reasons to do different things and it's that becomes highly specific to your mark, your specific needs.

Shane Murphy (18:28)

Yeah, it's interesting too, because we see this as our company's an SMS marketing product for these restaurants. And when restaurants look at their web traffic, they're almost always surprised by how much web traffic they actually have, because they have way more web traffic than people who actually click that order online button. And they look at that and say, gosh, I might only have one...

one to one and a half percent of the people who come to my website actually ordering online. And well, what happens with all the other people? And what we have found is even just by putting like a web form pop-up that where people join the text club right when they hit your website and you're presenting them with an offer, they enter their information and opt in.

the conversion rate to ordering online at that point goes way up because now they have something that they're actually gonna use. And so they land on your website and they don't just leave. They say, and I can get, know, I need to, I can join in order to get the free XYZ or the X percent off. Cause maybe your ad is 10 % off that catches their attention. They click. And then it goes right to the ordering page, but you lose a bunch of people.

If you get them to join the text club in order or the email club in order to get the coupon, now you're converting and you can follow up with that customer to keep them coming over and over again. And so I think that there's some strategic value in what you're describing of breaking it into pieces, get their information and still focus on that call to action to transact.

Robert Brill (20:04)

right.

Right, and you've got to give them a reason to sign up for the text club, right? Like, are they going to earn free pizza? Like what, is the thing? And usually what works well is giving them something in the moment. So like if they sign up and they order right now, they get something interesting. So like, I don't, I would look at the free pizza or the free thing that you give away for joining the text club. Not as I would not look at it as

⁓ an expense from your bottom line. I was looking at it as a customer acquisition with a trial, right? Because the, if, cause like we said earlier, having good food is the minimum like steak to be successful, right? So assuming you have good food, you want people to test it and the trial opportunity is, is hugely valuable of getting a repeat sticky customer in your, in your sales pipeline.

Shane Murphy (21:08)

Certainly. Now we've talked about the example that we used here was like a Facebook and Instagram ad to drive, know, drive these call to actions. I know you've given so much advice to operators about what channels are right for them. And when, when you're talking to a restaurant, how do you help them identify what channels right for them? Should I be on

social media, radio, TV, like display ads. ⁓ Walk us through some ways to think about that.

Robert Brill (21:45)

Yeah. So the first thing to note is that marketing is a set of ⁓ elements that work together much like the elements of an orchestra create a symphony. Like a violin on its own is great. Several violins are better, but a whole orchestra of many different instruments, including many violins, make this beautiful sound. Your marketing is the same way. Google is not competing with Facebook.

they're working together. Banner ads are not competing with Google, they all work together. They all serve different roles in the same equation to create that symphony of sales. So the opportunity for every business is to understand the unique instruments that are necessary for their business, for their unique circumstance to generate sales. So determining where and what to run in terms of your marketing, whether it's paid,

or SEO, search engine optimization, social media, email marketing, et cetera, is highly dependent upon their unique circumstances, their budget, their business goals. If you have 20 locations around the country, or I'm sorry, in a city, your efforts are probably gonna be different than a solo operator with one location. When we have the budget conversation, really the question is how much can you spend and still feel comfortable and sleep at night?

That usually is what it comes down to. Some people don't like that answer because they say, there's a minimum requirement for Google. There's a minimum spend on Facebook. There isn't. For any business, there isn't. Like I would say, the first step is don't spend money if you don't know what you're doing. Like don't boost posts. That's just a waste of money. ⁓ Several reasons for that. The fundamental is that you're just spending money without any strategic understanding and

Facebook says, cool, you reach 1,708 additional people. So what? Like what turned into sales? I'd like, I'd rather have a system and a process that's deployed than just pressing the boost button. So you can say I'm doing marketing and advertising. Like it's not going to result in anything. ⁓ you know, you're doing marketing poorly. If you say Facebook doesn't work for me or Google doesn't work for me or something else. So if you're saying that, that's an indication that you just don't have a strategy. You don't have the right advisor. You don't have the right people giving you.

⁓ Helping you make good decisions with your money ⁓ So I Would say first step here's this is in to kind of like encapsulated here's more or less everything you need Mark develop your marketing message ensure that what you're saying is relevant because you don't want to spend money on ads that are just bad or not persuasive because you'd rather just not spend the money then because it's not gonna work Get your marketing messages in line ⁓

Facebook has a really powerful algorithm. So now I'm giving you the strategy for why each channel should be on the campaign and what it what its purpose is. Facebook and Instagram, single source of advertising, really great algorithm, really great at matching people with the stuff that they're into right now. So your business can get in front of the people who want pizza right now. That's number one. Google is really great for capturing additional capturing that demand. Someone sees your ad on Facebook. They go to Google. They search your ad should show up.

Search engine optimization should be part of your equation because people will want to search for a good pizza in Sherman Oaks and those people need to find your business. needs to show up. Okay. I would also look at listings platforms. Yelp would be a good one. Google business profile would be another one. So you want, you want to show up in those places. And then finally, if you want to go higher in the demand funnel, so meaning create more demand, you're going to run ads on

digital out of home, you're going to create bat. You're going to run banner ads, which are really inexpensive and highly valuable. And then you're going to want to look at connected television, Hulu, Roku, et cetera, which you can target down to like a zip code or several zip codes, right? Like you don't have to be very broad. doesn't have to be very expensive. What should you run as an individual proprietor or even a chain of, of, of restaurants? don't it's, it depends on your budget. depends on what you want to accomplish. It depends on what allows you to sleep at night.

What I encourage everyone to do who's listening to this is really understand what their growth engine is. What gets people in the door? If I'm on a call with you and you don't know what gets people in the door for your business, if you don't have any concrete evidence of what it is, then the first step is really understand what gets people in the door. Because what if it's all Yelp? What if everyone just comes in through Yelp? Well, maybe Yelp ads are good. I hear horrible things about Yelp, but that's a different story.

But the point is, what's the thing that drives so much of your business that you should be doing, you should be pouring money into it. Whatever that is, we need to figure that out. That's, that's what you should do.

Shane Murphy (26:47)

Yeah, Robert, this has been super fun because I think this is one of those interviews where someone could listen to any 30 second chunk of what Wayne talked about and they'll get very tactical advice and value that they can go and implement. So there is a lot of tactical advice here that's really great. Thank you for walking through these examples, laying this out the way that you did. There's some absolute just... ⁓

Robert Brill (26:56)

Hahaha

Shane Murphy (27:17)

treasure troves of gold for operators in here. What's the best way for people to follow you and your company after they

Robert Brill (27:20)

Thanks.

Yeah,

check out our business, Brillmedia.co, B as in boy, R-I-L-L, media.co. If you're listening to this and we have a conversation and you mention it, we'll give you $500 off our message validation process so you can have that predictable and reliable messaging that results in at least a 15 % conversion rate of people wanting to know more about you, downloading your offers, et cetera. And really at the end of the day,

You can email me robert at brillmedia.co and message validation will give you a $500 discount on that.

Shane Murphy (28:03)

Amazing. Thank you for that offer to the audience here, Robert. And again, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for sharing all your wisdom with us today.

Robert Brill (28:12)

Thanks Shane, appreciate it.