115. Implementing the Dollar-a-Day Strategy in 3 steps

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Okay, so when I hopped off the recording with Dennis Yu for last episode, do you remember, Bonna, how excited I was about starting to implement the dollar day strategy?

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Oh, yeah. You were, like, bursting out of your skin. We gotta do this. You know, we got the perfect, really great, you know, set of content. I think that we can apply this.

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To 100%, and we're gonna get to that. We're gonna get to that. But I, you know, the way that Dennis outlined the dollar day strategy was so incredibly simple. And even when we did it and we implemented it and he helped us, you know, he walked us through exactly what it is to do. It is actually really, really simple. It is one of the most simplest, which is very underrated. I feel like we try to complicate strategies so many times, I guess, because it's like, well, that's the only way that we can, quote, unquote, sell it. But his dollar day strategy is so simple, and yet, but let's like, you know, we always say things are incredibly simple, but they are not easy. And as you'll see, as we go through and we talk about how we've implementing. How we've implemented the strategy, it's definitely not easy. There's a lot of nuances that actually comes back to the theme that I feel like time and time again I talk about, which is that whole, like, rubbish in, rubbish out thing or garbage in, garbage out, where everything, everything hinges, all the strategies that are related to content. Definitely content marketing. It is always so important to think about what the anchor content is, whether that's anchor content by way of how we define it for capture, which is your long form podcast audio, or it could be anchor content that Dennis might define it for the dollar day strategy, which is the social media post itself. And so, anyway, well, I'm kind of seeding some of the things that we're gonna be talking about, but it was incredibly eye opening, actually going through his process, implementing it, and being like, oh, we need to relook at some things that even we're doing. So we're gonna spend this episode going through step by step, the actual, like, how to implement, how we've implemented the dollar day strategy. And then next episode, we're going to talk. I think we're going to circle back about some of these deeper learnings, things that we probably, just by virtue of the fact that we're doing and doing and doing it gave us a really, really good opportunity to step back and relook at what it was that we were doing and go and be like, oh, we've got to, we've got to start changing a little up here and there. Anyway, so I'm sitting next episode as well. So over the next couple episodes, we're going to get into implementation, but also some of the really, really important learnings that I think was definitely beneficial for us, but is 100% going to be beneficial for you as well if you're listening or watching this. So let's get into the dollar a day strategy. So let's quickly recap, bonna, like, what, what is a dollar day strategy? Why did we even, why is it important? Why is it something that we, we definitely, I got excited about definitely from, you know, talking to Dennis about it, but that we would actually highly recommend that people start to think about implementing as well.

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Yeah, absolutely. It's like you said, it's very, very simple. Nowhere to hide. Unfortunately, with this framework, what it is simply is a dollar a day. You invest a dollar a day of your money into boosting organic content that you've already created, like we spoke about on social media. And you can do this across every platform. It's not just limited to one. And basically, you do that with the purposes of very small budget, you know, for a seven dollar week and a dollar a day to test messaging of things that, you know, you know, has performed quite well and organic organically. But you want to put it out there and give it more and amplify it more to see how it, how it goes. But also, if it does do really well, you just continue the process to continue reaching newer, colder audiences who may not be part of, you know, your existing audience already. So very simple. And like I said, this really, Dennis is really, really big on, you know, using, like, a data driven framework to ongoing content creation and optimizing and marketing. So this is kind of the most basic, simple, and most effective way that I've seen that work, like I said, across platforms. So in its essence, that's all it is. It is what it says on the tin. It's a dollar a day.

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It's a dollar a day. All right, so we're going to get straight into it. Let's start with, we've distilled kind of like the implementation. And by the way, Dennis literally, he did a recording with us where we shared our screen, and he was like, okay, now do press that button. See that button over there? Just press that. Not that one, but, and now scroll down. And you want to untick this and you want to put this number in, and you want, like, he literally did that with us. So we're going to share that on YouTube. We'll link it to the show notes as well. But I'm going to be honest, it wasn't probably the most riveting listening experience. So I was like, I don't know if I would call our episodes absolutely riveting. Ether. What do you mean?

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I wait for these to drop.

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Bonn is just like, this is what's gonna make me famous. Exactly.

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This is my ticket to fame.

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All right, but so we thought that we would actually distill what it was that Dennis walked us through into kind of the three main steps. Talk you through that here. But definitely, if you wanna go watch him talk us through it step by step, then that'll be on YouTube for everyone to see. All right, so let's get into step one. The fun part. This was the fun part. This really was. Okay. Yeah. If you're listening to this, Bonan said that in quotation marks. I mean, I don't know why you would put that in quotation marks. We always have fun. Not fun here, but. Okay, let's get into step number one. So that's really about actually identifying. So the important thing with the dollar a day boost strategy is that it's not about boosting every single piece of content that you have. Right. It is. We have to be very intentional with the ones that we want to put money behind, because even though it's only a dollar a day, if you still money. And so we actually want to choose or find the content that is actually working. And this is almost the start of the data driven approach or the methodology to Dennis's strategy. So let's talk about how do we actually identify the posts that are worth boosting.

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Yep. So this is why we talk a lot about playing the content game. That's what this podcast is all about. And that's why you need to actually have been publishing regularly in terms of your content for you to have a, I guess, a bit of a, you know, set of content to go to, to identify and relatively. See. Now, the rule of thumb that Dennis gives any, anyone implementing this framework around identifying high performing posts is for it to have at least a 10% engagement rate. So how you can find that, it's very simple. You go into the blue box that says, see insights for each of your posts. You can click into that, and then you will see your engagement number, your impression number, and your reading reach number.

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Yes.

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And the engagement rate that you're looking for is basically the engagement number has to be at least 10%. Of your reach number.

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Okay. Yeah. And so I guess let's talk through the example that we even showed. So again, if you want to go watch the YouTube video, we'll link that in the show notes so you can go over there. But we literally, we had a post with Katie Brinkley. Shout out to Katie again. And they had a really, really great engagement. Right?

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Yeah. So our organic engagement rate on that was 28%. So we were like, yes, this is a high five moment. So we were really pleased with that. Obviously, you know, Katie's really great. We had a lot of really great excitement in the post. Now, the one thing that Dennis talked about is to make sure that we want to, as a human, you want. As a human, you want to look at these numbers, because it's very easy to calculate that engagement rate. But really look at the key thing he's wanting us to look at is the quality engagement. So it has to be 10% quality engagement. And that's where you want to look at it to say, okay, well, how much of this, you know, when you look at the engagement number, how many of these comments are maybe your own, right? Maybe, you know, how much of this is just like, people, you know, that maybe aren't really your target market potentially and things like that. So you do want to make sure that you actually work through that, too. So for us, it was probably more closer to 14 or 15%, which is still higher than the 10%. So he was like, this is still totally a post that you can boost, still meets that threshold, but just make sure that you're looking for quality engagement and just not engagement as a flat number.

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Yes. And I'm gonna see. So this is a content honey trap for people who know the content honey chat model. I'm gonna leave it a bit of a cliffhanger, because we learned a lot about when Bonna mentions the quality of engagement. We're actually gonna dedicate pretty much the whole next episode on this because this was definitely a mix of an eye opening moment, a slap in the face moment, a come to Jesus moment, like all of the things combined. Does that sound dramatic?

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No, I think it fit the situation very well. It's not likely to be overdramatic.

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No. So we're actually going to really dive into that in the next episode, because for all of us listening, watching this, we're here to win the content game. That is literally what this podcast is about. Oh, my gosh. Like, there is actually nothing almost more potent than what it is. Probably we're going to be talking about next week to winning the content game than what we talk about next week.

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Absolutely. So you have to listen.

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You have to listen anyway.

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Yeah.

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Okay. So that is, step number one is to actually identify which content. So we're talking about Facebook here. Dennis likes Facebook and X. We don't have an ex account. Well, we do now because we did our homework. But it, you know, let's just say we don't have an x account. So we are definitely more Facebook first. So in the YouTube video as well, that will link to this, where Dennis showed us it was based on Facebook, but you can definitely use it for X as well. So that's the first step is really to identify what content, which of your organic posts is actually working. And 10% quality engagement is the threshold.

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Yep.

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All right. So then we get into step number two, which is really about choosing the goal. Because anytime you put money behind, whether it's boosting or just if you're adding. If you're adding ads, if you're advertising, you need a goal to work towards that. The platforms actually know that that's what you're working towards. And so, I mean, for boosted posts, it's actually kind of easy because really all we're looking for is engagements. And so I don't know if there's anything any more you wanted to add to that. Please.

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Yeah. The main thing there that you want to make sure of is absolutely right. So with boosted posts, I want to say, like, 95% of time is going to be for engagement because that's likely the kind of content that is high performing for you organically. And again, it's just all of this is also an experiment because you're constantly testing, you're using data to really see which messaging lands better. And the main key point that Dennis makes here is that the most important thing is that the goal that you choose to tell the platform what your goal for this boost is, is congruent with the message you have in the actual content of the post.

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Yes.

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So, you know, if it is an action or a sales post that has, you know, remarkably done really well because they don't tend to do as well on social media, then you may want to test, you know, the conversion, one of the conversion goals. Now, caveat. There is conversion goals do cost more money, so you might get less reach. That would be the only scenario where you might think about. But the rule of thumb here is just choose the goal that is congruent with the content of the post. Yeah, we'll be engaged in engagement.

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So this gets to be super easy. That's a super easy step. And then slightly hard. I would. Okay, anyway, we're going to come back to this, but like the next step really is about choosing your audience. So we're just going to take a really quick ad break and then when we come back, we're going to get into how to choose the audience for your boosted posts. Okay. All right, so we're talking about the Dennis used dollar a day ad strategy. And basically we've covered the first two steps, which is finding the content that is actually worth boosting. So 10%, again is your threshold, 10% engagement quality, engagement rate. Number two is to choose a goal for your booster post, which we just, I mean, that was an easy one, like tick, you know, engagement, just make it that. And then we want to talk about the audience because anyone who has run ads at all knows how important the audience is to actually make your ads work for you, to have them actually perform. Right. So this is actually one of the most crucial steps.

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Oh yeah. The one that I think people definitely stress out. I know I used to stress about the most. And when you are doing cold ad campaigns, that's still going to be an issue. But the great news that Dana shared with us in terms of how far Facebook and meta has come on this space is that we don't have to do very much when it comes to boosting our post for the audience side of things.

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Music to my ears.

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I know. So if you have been running ad campaigns regularly, if you do that regularly, your existing audiences will come up and you would already know which ones are your high performing audiences. So you can just pick those to boost this too. But if you are completely new to it, like we were in this particular example, Dennis's main point is that you don't actually have to spend a lot of time defining the detailed, you know, targeting, like picking people who might also like other software products and things like that for us. Because the engagement on the post is what meta uses to filter through the audience to boost this post to, which is great. So that's why it is worth doing that upfront work, to just check what kind of engagement you're getting, making sure it's the type of people you want to reach, and then meta will do the hard work for you to say, okay, I already have a bit of a snapshot of the type of people that like this content. I'm going to go and find more of these types of people, which again is just, oh my God, that's difficult, right? Because you're like, I don't want to, you know, have to think about all those things, because maybe there's factors. I don't realize. Maybe it's not an age thing. Maybe it's an interesting. Or maybe it's something else.

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Yeah.

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They have the data. They've done a lot of work. So this, I thought, was just like, this is really, really powerful.

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That's awesome.

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Yeah.

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That actually takes a lot of load out of running ads now.

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It does, yeah. And then for us to also just be able to say, well, let the data again, like that they have, because that's the expertise they bring to this tell us, because we might learn something new about the type of people that come through as well, which is great.

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Yeah, that is awesome. Okay, so see what I mean by how simple this strategy is?

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It's, like, nothing to hide behind it. That's the difficulty. But it is awesome.

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It is so, so simple. Okay, so, again, I just want to, like, just quickly recap. So there's really largely three steps to this dollar day ad strategy. It's pretty much find content that is working. It is choose a goal for the ad, for the boosted ad, and then it's the audience for it. And then basically, you just put, literally a dollar.

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A dollar a day.

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You know, when you go into the. And you'll see this in the YouTube video with Dennis, but you, like, you literally put in $7. That run for seven days.

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Yep.

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And, like. And then that's it. And, I mean, there is a follow on step, which we will come, which we will also, I think, go a little bit more in detail in a later episode. Once we've kind of gotten a bit, we run this strategy a little bit more ourselves, and we have more results, and we can actually talk about this, but it's really the optimization part of it. And that's really about, if you find that even at a dollar a day, that content is really taking off, it's really reaching those engagement goals. There is nothing wrong with putting more fuel into that fire. Just keep putting money into it. Why not? Because if it's actually getting you the results, then, yeah, you found a winner. Again, super simple. So simple, but again, not easy. And we're gonna. In the next episode, we're actually gonna talk about the step number one, which is honestly the hardest. This is the hardest step because choosing your goal, choosing your audience, as we said, like, tick, tick. It's super easy, but actually a creating content that works. And I shouldn't say because kind of, I was gonna say, be finding. But it kind of linked. So really, the main thing is, like, creating content that actually works. And we got some feedback from Dennis about our content, and we will share that with you in the next episode, as well as kind of what, what our next actions almost are, because I really want to talk about almost the, not just the, the thing to do, but also almost like the psychological, like.

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The shift you need to make.

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The shift. Yeah. That, you know, we, as entrepreneurs who create content, need to make. And I think that that will hopefully be valuable to you listening or watching this as well. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks for joining us. My name's Deidre Shen.

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I'm Bonna Rai.

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We are from cap show. This is win the content game. And as always, stay intelligently lazy.