0:00 levels master class uh is yeah we are we are in uh we are live right now my name is Haplan I'm on the product marketing and education team here at high level and we are broadcasting this out into the world and people are starting to uh get notifications about this starting to jump onto streams whatever platform you are watching us on right now thank you so much for being here we are going to learn some real serious secret sauce marketing magic today from a very special guest. I'm so excited to get into it. I'm excited to learn today because we're going to be touching on some topics that I am actually uh very very interested in myself for continuing
0:46 my own development as a marketer. So, I'm excited [snorts] for us all to learn together. Today is how to go viral. How to go viral. Wouldn't you love to know how to go viral? Um yeah. And the man, the myth, the legend who is going to be teaching us this this is live with us right now. We are super lucky to have him with us. And I'm curious to actually rather than just, you know, blow smoke and hype you up. Totally. Uh uh from my perspective to have you talk a little bit about your journey, kind of introduce yourself to this audience um that that we have here today. I am curious to hear uh where you are coming from in your marketing journey and how you got to where you are now. Can you tell us a little bit
1:32 Austin? >> Yeah. Well, Haplan, first of all, thank you so much for having me on. It is uh beyond an honor to do this in collaboration with High Level. I'm so excited to share this with you all. And I see everybody in the chat already. I mean, I literally wrote the book on virality. So, uh, I'm going to just share my screen rather than just talk. I'll have some visual aid, uh, on a little bit of who I am. And, um, that'll give you a little bit of context, too. So, yeah, my name is Austin Armstrong. If you, if you haven't heard of me before, I've been doing social media marketing for basically my entire life. I feel like I was put on this earth to do that one thing. As silly as that might sound, but I've been doing social media marketing
2:17 for 21 years at this point. I started when I was 14 years old on MySpace. I had hundreds of thousands of followers on uh on MySpace on different profiles and I was monetizing that in different ways. I had an early software platform that helped other people grow their following on MySpace and we charged a monthly subscription for that. I used to sell HTML uh uh profile codes uh to date me back there. Uh I promoted local bands and t-shirt companies. I got paid to do email uh lead generation and I sort of have uh just been doing it ever since. Uh I currently have uh over four and a half million followers on social media across all platforms. Uh I very much practice what I preach and it's all
3:03 organic as well. Everything that I'm going to be sharing today and tomorrow in this workshop is really practical strategies that you can immediately implement. I'm currently the founder uh and CEO of syllabi.io. This is my first startup. It's about three and a uh little over three years old. Uh so I am in the software space. Uh I've also launched uh eight other micro SASS uh software tools as well. So everything that I'm going to teach you is not just about how to get those vanity metrics uh and likes and and shares and comments, but I actually uh have a whole philosophy of don't be a content creator, be a business owner who creates content. Now, like I just mentioned before, I've also uh just published my first book this year called Virality as
3:49 well. Uh so I am a new uh author. Uh I'm also co-founder of AI Marketing World, which is an in-person uh conference uh in Dallas, Texas. And I also had the privilege of teaching AI entrepreneurship at Duke University to M's level students uh last year as well and hoping in uh to to do that program uh again. So, uh, I I hope that over, um, the hour today and the hour tomorrow, I can share a little bit of my wisdom with you all and, uh, and and help some people out and hopefully it's it's really helpful stuff. >> That's sick. We're so happy to hear it. We're so happy to have you. I didn't know that you were an author, actually. So, this is that's very very cool. When did your book come out? >> This uh, December. So, it's been out
4:35 about three months now. Uh, which is cool. Yeah, it's forwarded by Dennis U. I've got a bunch of marketing legends uh that supported it and read it on the back of the book and it's awesome, man. It's this book's 20 years in in the making. Everything that I've learned, I spent over a year writing this book. Believe it or not, I did not use AI to write this book. I wanted to challenge myself and wrote it myself. So, it was hard. >> Amazing. Sick. And also, when you said 21 years, I was like, wait, a you you look like you're about 21 years old. So you've been doing this since very you must have been a child and lo and behold yeah since he was 14. So >> this is uh it's yeah we're not we're not overstating anything when we say like this is this is your life like this truly is your life. So
5:22 >> um yeah I mean apps and books and Duke the accolades are all there. I loved what you said about not just being a content creator, but being a business owner who creates content and [clears throat] you you in a really helpful way said that this is not just about trying to get your vanity metrics up. That is a huge thing that I have experienced and seen and struggled with as a business owner whatever >> with the whole social media game is the way that um so many people and folks I work with, businesses I've coached, etc. They're so like focused on trying to get that presence on social media, right? Get these top offunnel marketing activities dialed in. And it is
6:08 important, but so many of them do that at the expense of or with risking lacking attention to the way that translates into actual bottom line results in their business. They kind of start from the top down instead of working from the like starting from the the goal and then working backwards. And I think that's really thematic for High Level, too, because like High Level's whole bread and butter is about like lead capture and management and actually driving sales results. And and so like the difference between being able to make a post that gets, you know, a,000 views or or a thousand likes or whatever that that metric is, that's great and fine. But the real
6:54 question is how does that translate to the number of people taking meaningful action to become customers or clients in that business? Taking the next step to take advantage of a free offer or actually book a phone call or some sort of an appointment or just, you know, whatever the next step in the sales pipeline is to like motivate people. connect the dots between that engagement, that awareness, that top offunnel impression or whatever in into actually making something happen down the line that matters for that business. I think that's really what High Level is really really good at and that's a lot of what I preach when it comes to this organic stuff like being making sure that we're paying attention to how these
7:41 things actually translate and I think high level as a software as a as a culture is really really well positioned to help small businesses start to make that impact where they're not just creators and they're not just giving themselves a pat on the back for making a sick piece of content that got some good comments. and made people feel good, but actually was strategic and smart and like uh and efficient, right, at maximizing the number of conversions that get to the end of the pipeline becoming revenue for that business. And so, um yeah, it just it warmed my heart to hear you mention that because that's a huge thing that I see a lot of people who get a little bit a little bit too hyperfocused on just the top offunnel stuff without paying attention to the
8:26 rest of it. Uh that said, we need to take care of every stage in the pipeline and including maximizing impressions, maximizing all of the different algorithm hacks or whatever, you know, keeping up with the times and and trying to do the trends or whatever. And also the rest of it as well, being solid fundamental uh fundamentally responsible and and savvy business owners and the way we have the rest of that pipeline set up. So, I'm curious to hear you talk more about that and or take us where you want us to go because now the floor is really yours, Austin, to teach us what you have to teach us about learning how to go viral and have that make an impact in our business today. >> Yeah. Well, Haplan, I think that was very well articulated and I I couldn't agree more with the ever everything that you just said. It's very important and
9:13 that's what uh a lot of today is going to be about and I really would encourage everybody that's live and watching the replay of this to stay for the entire session today as well as come tomorrow because today is really going to be about setting the foundation the right way outlining your ideal client persona really dialing into who are you trying to reach because if you're trying to just touch everybody you're not going to dial in to who you actually want to reach and who is actually going to convert into buyers and loyal followers for your brand as well. And then we're going to really dial into all of those uh uh levels in the pipeline as well. The top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, the bottom conversion level of the funnel. And high level has been the
10:00 cornerstone of really converting all of these for myself. And high level is going to be mixed in throughout this presentation for you all. I just want to show you how I'm using it. I'm relatively new to the highle world. I've been using it for about a year, but I'm going to show you how much money that this tool has actually helped me make and it's going to be pretty mind-boggling to you. I I think to show uh everybody that's watching this uh how much money is is possible to make just through the highlevel platform and how much time that it's really saved me uh as as well. So, I'm going to go ahead and and share my screen here and we're going to jump in and and get started. So, let me share I'm going to share this tab here. >> All right, I'm adding this in and let's
10:47 see how it looks. >> Looking good. >> All right, fantastic. Let's jump in, y'all. So, like I was mentioning, today is really going to be about setting the foundation, everything that you need in order to go viral. And then tomorrow, we're going to stack on top of a lot of the principles that I go over uh today, and we're going to work in some of my sort of psychological hacks and engagement strategies and things that you can incorporate to increase that bottom line uh for trans uh transactions for yourself as well. I'm not going to go over this again because I just uh shared a little bit about who I am, but let me quickly see in the chat here. So, give me a one in the chat if you're already using Highle uh for your business and and give me a two if you
11:34 you haven't quite jumped into it yet. Let me just let me just jump back over here and and see. Give me a one if you're using High Level and a two if you haven't jumped in yet. Let's see where we're at in the crowd here. I'm going to do my best to convince. Lots of ones. Love it. Love it. Hap, maybe you can be my uh my my voice of the chat so I don't have to keep >> Yeah, I was just looking it up to see uh see who's who's all here. This is uh around the horn. I'm seeing ones [snorts] and we are on multiple platforms right now simultaneously. So whether you are on Facebook or on YouTube or on a different platform watching us uh you're in the right place and so different different platforms will have different
12:19 chats etc. But that's the uh the double-edged sword blessing of of being able to go live to so many places all at once. We get to reach more people and we have all these different uh types of chats happening all at once. But I'm looking at our YouTube chat >> and I'm seeing a lot of ones in there. Lots of folks on high level. >> I love it, >> which is really good. There's also a little bit of a lag. I'll just tell you this, Austin, like using the software that we use, it's like a couple extra seconds of delay. So, if you engage the chat, um, if you're in the chat, make sure that you are active and that you are responding to us so we can really feed off of your energy and and try to make sure that we're serving you guys properly. The reason why he asked is because he's tailoring what he's going to say to make sure it applies to the people who are actually really here and paying attention. Um, but also just know
13:06 that there is a little bit of a delay with the way it actually ends up streaming on YouTube. We're a couple seconds behind. Um, so yeah, thank you for your patience with that chat interaction stuff. That's just something to be aware of as well. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, 100%. And as he's saying, I very much feed off of your energy and engagement. So, as I ask you questions throughout this, I want to make sure that you're paying attention. But the more engagement that you give me, the more that I can cater this specifically for you. And so, I I I'm relatively new to High Level. I've only been using this platform uh for about a year now, but I wanted to share with you my results. I am not the best highle expert out there. There are some amazing uh experts out there. But from my personal experience,
13:52 this has been a tool that has made me so much money and saved me so much time. So you can see here, so we use uh high level for our um uh our uh conference AI marketing world. I use this for my uh paid community called AI Mavericks. I use it for uh comment automation. Um and I use it for the CRM and I'm moving everything over. But as you can see here, this tool works plain and simple. So whether you have used it before or you're kind of on the fence, this is my personal revenue in this platform. And I'm I'm super proud of uh how much that I've made through this platform just in the last 12 months. And that's why I'm so honored and happy to be doing this this webinar with everybody today. And
14:39 so, let's just jump right into strategy stuff. Defining who you're trying to reach online is really the most important part because if you you're flailing to create content for everybody, you're you're really going to reach nobody. And so, this is why a lot of people fail at marketing. They're just creating this general fluff content. They don't know exactly who they're trying to reach. They're not really dialed in. And so that's why engagement is so low. A lot of the time people think that they're shadowbanned or their content isn't just reaching the right people. And sometimes that could be true, but most of the time the reality is you're just not as dialed in as you need to be for some of this content.
15:24 >> I'll add one thing in there, Austin, really quick, just on the uh on the great. Yeah, I I hear it all the time that people are like, "Oh, there must be something wrong with my account." And particularly with high level users, I have uh it's it's kind of a a jump to conclusions quick thing to be like, "Oh, if you're posting through the social planner on high level, it gets seen by less people." That's something I've heard like quite a few times, but um >> you got the best rebuttal to that. >> Oh, yeah. I'm curious what because because that is something that I've heard and and I mean there's all sorts of different rumors floating around about this and that. I feel like the the rumor mill about what like the algorithm and all the like it is it is a it's it's very very >> it spreads like wildfire is what I'm [laughter] trying to say. And c so certainly we want to make sure that
16:10 we're uh very judicious and very discerning in how we set up like our mindset around our relationship to social media as we're engaging it on our business. But um but absolutely the myth about the social planner stuff is one that I hear a lot. So I'm curious to hear you speak to that. >> It's it's complete BS and it's one of those um those excuses that we make uh that prevents us from creating just better content. Listen, it doesn't matter how your uh po social media post is put up there. Good content is going to get engagement and shares and and transactions. Also, think about it this way. So, this is my this is my real rebuttal. Schedulers allow you to stay more consistent and publish more than
16:56 your competitors. If you are only able to personally create and upload one to three posts per day, I don't care even if there is anecdotally some sort of small amount of uh uh reduction in reach, which I don't think there is for many of these platforms, you can simply outpace that just by scheduling more. So, if you're only able to to manually post one or two posts a day, but you can use High Level to schedule 10 to 15 posts a day, you're going to far outperform those one to two a day anyway. So, I just that that drives me crazy when I when I hear those excuses as well, cuz it's like that just think
17:42 about it for two seconds. Use a schedule like use a scheduleuler, but use a scheduleuler with really good content. It helps you just stay consistent. We're in this era where with AI content and and everybody's using schedulers at this point to increase their output. If you're only manually posting something that you um because you think you're going to get a slight advantage in organic reach, you're going to get blanketed by everybody else that's that's using that content. You have to use a a tool like High Level to stay competitive in today's era. I'll end that rant there, but I I I get that all the time. Same thing with like best time to post. That's such BS, too. Good
18:27 content gets discovered no matter what time that you post it. It It literally doesn't matter. These are the excuses that we tell ourselves that prevent us from just creating content consistently. >> Yeah. But I'm so glad you're speaking to it because that is such a it's such a pervasive thing and and there's a lot of like imposttor syndrome out there and in in our industry and a lot of stories flying around the rumor mill and um yeah these like these stories proliferate and I'm really like it's very refreshing and and clear and helpful to like you know maybe there's some like ounce or kernel of truth in one or two of these whatever first of all with the with the planning aspect. Yeah. like every business that's on its on its game is using some sort of scheduleuler or planner or organizational tool to be able to do
19:13 this. Um I actually just saw a presentation at at an event I was doing with >> somebody uh sharing their results from their social planner. So like we're actually looking at the social. So we know that it's not the social planner necessarily that is that is the cause of of of people doing this and and it's not necessarily the time of day like the Yeah. the the kernel of truth here and there with some of these little hacks or these tactics like that may or may not be true in any given case when you hear about oh this or that way to kind of hack the algorithm but I think what you're getting at is that >> regardless of the veracity of of those types of claims or those ideas or or those strategies it's kind of just like those are like one or two% maybe things
19:59 like at most but is your time like you watching this on YouTube or Facebook or LinkedIn or wherever you are. The question is, is your time best served in obsessing over these little baby tactical details that are maybe going to make one or two% uh needle movements on the the the algorithms, you know, way that it promotes content or whatever, trying to hack the algorithm. Is that where our time is best served? trying to get into these uh these very nerdy like rumorbased like keeping up with the times like the way the algorithm's always changing. Like is that really the best way to succeed or is it to take a more holistic approach to just >> thinking about the big picture of what
20:45 our business's messages, what you're about to get into with like actually just connecting with the audience and focusing on the content itself to try to connect to that audience. I I don't want to uh I don't want to jump the gun here, but it sounds like where you're going to be taking us right now is to a new mindset of like let's just focus on making good content that connects with an audience in a way that's smart and well thought out with this ICP that we're about to learn from. And when we can do that [clears throat] and we can actually capture people's attention, then we're going to we're going to win regardless of of what time of day we posted on or what what specific hashtag we included or what, you know, if we hit the right trend at
21:31 the right, you know, all that little that that's minutia compared to the big picture strategy. So, um, >> absolutely. >> Also say I totally see where you're headed with that and I'm interested to see what's next. Yeah [snorts] absolutely. Well said. And and so as we're defining who we specifically want to reach, you have to spend that time getting in the weeds of who exactly are you trying to resonate? What are the pain points and problems and their online behaviors that they're struggling with? It's not just I create content for business owners. No, you need to get a little bit more specific with who that business owner is. Where are they in the world? Where do they hang out online? What are the core problems that they're dealing with? What solutions have they tried before that have failed? What are
22:16 really tactical things that you can actually help them with? And this is going to apply for any any content that you're trying to create online. And so, you know, let I want to ask the audience here a simple question. Who drinks water? Let me know in the chat. This is not a not a trick question. Who drinks water? Let me know what some of the the comments here are. Uh, Haplan, >> is that Ed Sheeran? >> It is. That's the correct answer. Ed Sheeran drinks water. >> Ed Sharon drinks water. >> Everybody drinks water. Everybody drinks water, right? This is not a trick question. But then, how did if everybody drinks water, how did a brand like Liquid Death that came out of nowhere become a billiondoll brand very quickly?
23:05 They know who their ICP is. They went after a very specific untapped market in a boring, oversaturated industry of water. Something that comes from our tap in our house. Something that Aquafina and and uh Smart Water and there's all of these brands out there. All of these brands focus on a different ICP. If you study what Liquid Death did, they actually went after bands and uh and punk and rock bands in particular, they had sponsorships with energy drinks like Monster Energy for instance, and they literally weren't allowed to drink other bottles of like Deer Park water because it was a competing with um they only
23:52 wanted to share the the energy drinks. And what people were doing is they were actually uh emptying out their energy drink brands um and putting water in it and so that they could drink out of that brand. You see this in the UFC for instance. I'm a I'm a big MMA fan all the time. There's these Monster Energy water bottles that they give them after the fight. They're not drinking an energy drink. No, it's water, right? And so this was an untapped big opportunity that they saw. Nevertheless, uh sober people. So, I personally went to a lot of rock concerts and and punk concerts supporting uh my friends bands and a lot of them were straightedge. They but everybody had was drinking alcohol and it it's it's kind of boring to like have just a bottle of water when everybody
24:38 else has a a can of beer in their hand. But Liquid Death looks cool. It's cooler um to to hold. And so that's how they really captured that market as well as some really funny marketing. And so they're really they really understand who is interested in uh in their product as well as who they don't want. And so that's a really important aspect of of your ICP as well is who do you not want to attract? Who do you want to turn away so that you can focus more on who you want to reach? And so this was a whole campaign uh that that liquid death did of people love us on the internet where they share their trolls. And so this guy, this was a real ad that Liquid Death ran. As long as I live, I will do everything in my power to destroy your company's reputation. You are a part of
25:24 the problem humanity faces, and you will not succeed. Good will prevail over evil. What you are doing is destructive and wrong. You should be deeply ashamed. You're promoting such a demonic message to the masses. You will not succeed. Liquid Death saw this. They laughed because that is not their ICP. They put money in front of this guy's negative review in front of this campaign. That is a perfect example of understanding your ICP, who you want to reach, who you don't want to reach, and working that into all of the different content strategies. And so, how do we actually define that ICP? So the old way you could, you know, talk to every single user uh that you have and really think about and test an ICP and then go
26:12 through that iterative process. But thank god that we live in a era of AI where this makes it there's so much data in these LLMs and different tools. And so you can you and you can interchange this uh between chatgpt or claude or gemini or grock or whatever your LLM of choice is. And so you could type in a simple prompt like this. I am a Enter your business type that helps this target audience. Help me create a detailed ideal customer profile. Please include the demographics, the psychoraphics, their biggest pain points, where they spend time online, what content they consume, the language and phrases that they use to describe their problem and what would make them stop scrolling on social media. Be specific as possible. I want a real
26:59 person that I can picture. This is what chat GPT gave to me. I'm going to show you an even better example, a tool that I'm obsessed with recently that took this whole process to the next level, but I don't want to force uh you to use a million different tools. Um, this is what it gave to me. The overwhelmed small business owner, her name is Sarah M. She's 34. She lives in suburban Texas. She's a local fitness studio two years in. She posts on social media 2 to three hours a day. Her pain points are post constantly uh but almost get zero engagement. Uh she uh doesn't know who her ideal uh client wants to see. She feels overwhelmed by all the platforms. She's tried paid ads. Uh she's spent a decent amount of money, but she only got
27:45 three leads. This is where she lives online. This is the language that she uses. And so that's fine and that will get you pretty far. But the last month I have been obsessed with this cool tool called Perplexity Computer. Let me see a one in the chat if anybody's used Perplexity Computer yet. And give me a two in the chat if you have never heard of this. And I am not talking about Perplexity. I'm talking about Perplexity Computer. This is their AI agent. So let me know in the in the chat here. What are you seeing happen? You got some ones or twos? Uh, we're waiting on the comments coming in, but I did have see a funny comment from um from the chat on the water when you were asking who drinks water here like and it's [snorts] actually kind of
28:32 thematic. We had a lot of people saying yes, water. Yes, everyone drinks water. What? We had one person in the chat saying they only drink vodka. So, which is, you know, obviously a joke, but also just kind of like to give it the type of day for a second, just like Jeff P that that troll, right? And there's a sense of being willing to polarize, being like identifying an ICP, specifying this is the person that I'm serving. It means you're not serving all these other people. And so it's like a a an interesting strategy where you're intentionally even proactively like liquid death is they're proactively like polarizing out some people. They're saying like we are not for everyone. If you are like Jeff P and you do not like
29:18 images of skulls on your cans, then like you are uninvited from the party essentially like kindly and gently uninviting some people from the party is the price of admission to what you're talking about to being able to really dial in that ICP. And so [clears throat] um yeah, it's something that we we acknowledge and we don't necess like that is part of it that and that it actually helps us in the process of connecting with the people who we are going to serve rather than trying to cast this super wide net that ends up just being very vague and very uh very bland and not really connecting with uh with anyone. At the end of the day, we'd rather connect with the right people so
30:04 we can go serve them, create a relationship with them, and go and, you know, weave our way into growing our business in partnership with that audience. Uh, and it does come at the expense of being able to uh, you know, serve everybody, right? >> Yeah. Yep. If you try to serve everybody, you're going to actually serve nobody. So, [laughter] >> and now we're seeing a lot of Yeah. If you try to serve everyone, you'll end up serving no one. If you know exactly who you're going to serve, then you can actually make some inroads and get some good results. I am seeing stuff in the chat now and there's a lot of twos, a lot of people not familiar with perplexity computer at all. I see one one which means there is one person at least on our YouTube audience that is familiar with perplexity computer. I myself have not used perplexity
30:50 computer. Um but I know that high levels AI agents are very close behind um a lot of these more with AI agents. I'm sure I'm 100 going to uh 100% going to be switching over from uh Perplexity Computer to High Level uh once they have some of these uh these capabilities. Um which I sure I'm sure they will uh because if you all keep up with uh uh High Level's uh uh pace of growth, it is insane. They are rolling out uh new features, new AI capabilities every single day, it seems. I was at Level Up last year and uh Sean just dropped like 200 new AI features that are coming and it was absolutely insane. But what Perplexity Computer is is it's essentially their AI agent. Uh it it uh
31:38 is it has 19 different models built into it, all of the main LLMs, uh scraping capabilities, uh image generation capability, all kinds of of different things. And I use this to do a lot of really deep uh research and then execution and SOP content creation strategies for myself. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with it. But so I took that same or very similar prompt uh right and I fed that into Perplexity Computer and I got a much more detailed uh outline here and I actually want to show it to you. So it outlined this um uh Maya Torres. This is her name. And it gave me much more detailed uh information. So, I'm going to share this tab uh over here
32:25 and let me go into this. So, you see my screen? Okay. >> Yeah, looks good. >> Ideal client persona. Yeah, perfect. So, this did a much better job of outlining um exactly who my ideal client persona is. It did some research on competitors online. It gave me uh their income and salary. It gave me detailed demographics in here, psychoraphics, aspirations, the fears that they're struggling with, the biggest pain points and detailed information about all of this technical overwhelm, where they spend their time online. It didn't just give me three things like chat GPT. It gave me specific platforms. It gave me hashtags that they're using. It gives me
33:10 what do they do on those platforms, the specific content that they consume. It gave me podcasts that they listen to, YouTube channels that they watch, courses that they follow, languages that in very detailed fashion of what it describes. You can see all of this is such incredible detailed information that gives me a better understanding of what content that I can create that's going to resonate with this person in order to go viral and the ultimate goal of actually driving more sales. And so then you can take that even deeper and ask follow-up questions from that ICP once you have that information in that same chat. So, if you're using Chat GPT or Gemini or computer, you can
33:56 ask follow-up questions like what are the top 10 objections that this person has before buying? What are five emotional triggers? And you can go deeper and deeper and deeper into those. And that's essentially what uh Perplexi Computer outlined for me is this just masterful document of everything that I would want to know about this person. And then we can jump a little even deeper of what platforms are they spending their time on, right? And so not every platform uh is is going to be right. You don't need to be everywhere. This is some highlevel overview. Uh B2B, they tend to spend more time on LinkedIn and YouTube and X. If they're local business, they might spend more time on Facebook, Instagram, and Google
34:41 Business. If you're targeting Gen Z's or millennials, Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts content, Facebook has the biggest reach, though. And so, you can have a prompt like this in that same follow-up chat box of based on your ICP, what social media platform should I prioritize and why? And so, this is one of my examples here, YouTube. There's a lot of opportunities on YouTube right now for new creator boosts. They're pushing shorts, the evergreen discovery ability on it, recommendations for type of content that I can create, immediate action plans, non-negotiable items that I can follow, what I need to post on Tik Tok, what I need to post on YouTube,
35:28 high priority tasks that I can start to build within the next 30 days and then 60 days and 90 days and a year. It just builds builds builds. But it all starts with that ICP that you're trying to reach. Now, personally, my recommendation is Facebook. This is where I spend the most of my time because that's where the vast majority of my reach and my ROI is coming from. I bet that most of you that are on this webinar with us right now that came from my link specifically came from my Facebook profile. And I share that because this is my results over the last year. Look at this
36:14 happen. In the last 12 months, 2025, I organically reached 1.4 billion people on Facebook through my content. 1.4 billion. This is not dollars spent. This is not advertising. This is creating organic content on Facebook because I know my ICP and because I know what content is going to resonate with them. There's also a lot of really cool opportunities of why you should create free organic content on Facebook right now. They are going allin on content creators. They just announced uh uh last week that they last year they paid over $3 billion to content creators on
37:02 Facebook through their content creation platform. And they just announced this past week as well that they have a brand new platform to pull other content creators that are already on YouTube and Tik Tok that have large followings through this fasttrack program. So, they will pay you if you have over a million followers on Tik Tok and YouTube and you are not creating uh content on Facebook, if you apply and they approve, they will pay you $3,000 per month and boost your profile. And so, if you already have amazing content and you're dialed in with your ICP, why would you not add Facebook to the mix? These are some of my reels. I highly recommend posting video content on
37:49 Facebook. And no, I don't just mean posting an Instagram reel and sharing it over to Facebook. I mean natively uploading uh a reel through the Facebook platform. You can also do this through Highle Socialuler, by the way, as well that immediately connects to all of your social media. So why would you not add the platform and connect it into highle scheduler that has the most active users? And so what content performs best for all of these people? So this is what I found is working the best right now for me. Short form videos has the highest reach. Facebook and Instagram reels shorts and Tik Tok. I tend to spend less than 60 seconds on these videos. I know you can upload
38:36 longer short uh content on there, but 60 seconds or less tends to be where I um uh get the best uh view duration on my content. Carousel posts, so multiple images that create high uh educational content for Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Long- form content for YouTube specifically. static image texts I post on uh Facebook, Instagram and uh LinkedIn and then texton posts have performed exceptionally well for me across all platforms. In fact, if we go back here for a second, if you look at uh from the 1.4 billion views that I got, look at what 78% of the the viewership is, this is from last year,
39:21 by the way, 78.2% of those views came from text content. Now, text content is going to reach a lot of people, but video content is where you're going to actually build that trust and rapport online. I still think video is king, no matter what this stat says, though. And so, let's go into then after we have our ICP dialed, how can we actually look at what's working for our competitors as well? >> Hey, can I jump in with a quick question Austin? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So, this just comes straight from the chat. I'm trying to stay out of your way as much as possible here, but >> Oh, no worries. I've got I've got so much content. I'm trying to speed it up. >> Okay. Really quick, we got a lot to go through >> on the identifying the ICP, just could
40:08 you speak for a second on >> even for folks who wouldn't even necessarily have enough to be able to fill in that prompt uh the the the prompt in the chat GPT or the perplexity computer. you're like being able to say my audience is this or like there are some people in the chat who are not even at the point of of knowing who they're trying to identify in the first place. Would you give >> this next section? Yeah, this >> Yeah. >> Yep. This next section is going to perfectly answer that. So, if you don't have it uh outlined, this is the best way because you don't need to start from scratch. you can look at uh adjacent companies or competitors that have already done all of this research and are performing really well and then you can reverse uh engineer that and apply it for yourself. So, let me answer that
40:54 by just continuing if you don't mind because this is how this is how we can ethically uh well, >> you know, that's a there's a there's a moral gray area there with with uh with with AI, but we're going to do this in the best way that's that's possible right now of of finding uh different competitors, studying their best performing content, using AI to find the engagement patterns, looking at their posting frequency, finding identity gaps. And I say this too, and I really want to emphasize this last point here. Do not do this to just copy and paste content. It's that's the most unethical thing that you can do. You will get called out. Your content might get flagged as duplicate content. You can get banned. It's also just not a good
41:40 look. You know, you are a unique individual. You have a unique expertise and perspective. You have a unique life. You have different ideas. So take what has worked best for your competitors that have done that work and apply your perspective, your expertise into it. That's how you can use this strategy to really capture and get ahead regardless if you know who your ICP is or not. And so one of the prompts that you can use and again you can interchange this chip pt with grock perplex or perplexity uh gemini um uh claude whatever your your your tool of choice is and so you can say something like analyze these five competitors uh in your niche um and if you don't even
42:27 know what competitors you are you can add some general information about who you are what you do what you're trying to build and say find me competitors and uh and it will do some some research online to find those competitors for you, unless you already know who who your top competitors are. And then for each competitor, tell me what content themes get them the most engagement. What are their outlier videos? Uh what an outlier video means is a video or a post that performed exceptionally better than their average on their content. I've been obsessed with studying outlier content recently. I won't go too down too much down a rabbit hole there. Um because I I do want to cover as much content as I can here. I know we we have about 15 minutes left, but I've got so
43:13 much good stuff. Um uh and then this is an exact prompt that I used in Perplexity Computer to do this. U so I'm going to show you this, but I basically did this for my YouTube uh I I wanted to outline a complete uh YouTube content strategy that I can begin to execute. Here's some competitors that are performing exceptionally well in my space of AI content creation. I want you to study the the the best topics. I want you to look at their outlier videos in the last 6 months. I want you to download their thumbnails and tell me about their best titles and I want you to create me an outline titles that I can AB test and create the thumbnails for me. And so I'm going to blow your mind here for a second. Um, I'm going to
44:00 share this and I want to share it with you what this actually created for me. And so it it did all of this research on all of these YouTube channels for me and it looked at how many subscribers they have, how many videos, all of this information. It showed me their outlier videos. These are videos that got in this instance 9.5 times more views than their average. This video got 8.8 eight times more views than their average, 5.5 times. And these were the thumbnails from those best performing videos as well. And it did this for all of my competitor channels that I wanted to study. And this is just for YouTube. You can apply this to any social media platform that you want. You can apply
44:47 and add your ICP into it. And so then what it does is it creates me a content strategy that I can execute. So, it outlined this video for me, chatgptt hidden hacks for marketers. It gave me different title variations. It gave me an entire outline for that video of what I can cover. And then it actually took my headsh shot and created the thumbnails for me. These are really good thumbnails. And so, it gave me an entire strategy with all of these thumbnails. I can ver uh I can test AB test all of the titles that I can AB test. And I actually do this all the time. I'm doing this right now for Facebook. I did this earlier today where I looked at a a competitor's Facebook page. I'm doing this for
45:33 LinkedIn right now. I'm doing this for X. And so I'm using AI to scrape the best performing content in my niche that's performing well. I'm feeding it my ICP information and giving it information of who I am as an individual and as a content creator and using AI to blend all of these things together to create me a content strategy that's going to resonate with who I need to reach my ICP and go viral for me. Now, another great way that you can study your competitors as well is through the Facebook ads library. And so I'm going to briefly show this here. Uh if you go to facebook.com/adslib, this is an amazing hack that nobody
46:19 seems to do. So let me share my screen over here. And so you can do it by ad category, but you can also type in um a particular uh keyword here. If you sort this by, you know, United States and then all ads and then I can type in something like AI video generator. And this is going to show me the ads in my niche that people are spending money on that are active. And so I can look at their videos, what they're pushing. I can look at the ad copy and I can go through these and see, you know, what platforms they're actually spending money on to run this ad. And so this is a fantastic way that I can not just find organic content, but
47:06 I can find adoriented content that I can run as well. And you can type in anything that you want in here too and study all of the those competitors. And so I want to go into some of the, you know, as we were beginning this presentation as well, there's different stages of uh of content funnels as well. So, the top of the funnel, and this is where I tend to spend uh most of my time, uh because I have this philosophy of all boats rise with the tide. And so if your baseline is 200 views or 100 views on your on your content, 10 likes or whatever, if you focus on slightly broader oriented content, it's going to bring more people in and then you can
47:52 spend more time in that sort of middle and conversion oriented content to actually convert more of the people that you reach. And so at the top of the funnel, um this is where you're going to cast a wide net. This is the the broadest. This is not this is the the highest level of your ICP, you know, super broad awarenessoriented content. Um something like a listical uh 10 AI tools you can't ignore in in 2026. Uh or or memes or trending content or a brand new uh uh news uh oriented story in your industry or something. And so let me show you just a quick example of this. >> These five websites feel illegal to know. Then why would you tell me? >> Perplexity.ai/computer
48:38 is a fully autonomous AI agent that I use to find potential brand deal companies, automatically email them on my behalf, and then even respond and negotiate because it can run for months at a time. So are we going to lose our jobs? Manis.im just launched agents. It's like having your own personal assistant that >> right. So it's super highlevel overview. It's not a deep tutorial. this one video is sharing five useful websites just high level just high level high level and that gets uh this type of content tends to go more viral for me so that when I'm doing my middle of the funnel content that I'm building um uh talking about uh deep strategy on how to do a particular tool educational content I'm
49:25 going to get more viewership and eyeballs on this because more people are coming in now this middle of the funnel content is where you're actually able to build trust with people. These are going to be deeper dive tutorials. Here's a step-by-step strategy. And so, here's another example. >> Entire chat GT history so you can train Claude. Step one, come over to claude.ai and make sure you're logged in. Then you're going to click on your name settings. In settings, you're going to come down here, click on capabilities, and in memory, they have this option to import memory from other AI providers. Click start import. It has this code here. Just click copy. Then we're going to come over to your chatbt account. Just log in. Paste in that prompt from Claude and click go. It's going to give you this really detailed explanation here. Just click. >> All right. Right. So, this is a
50:10 stepbystep tutorial piece of content. It's that that building that trust that showcases that I am an expert for my ICP of what they are interested in. I've brought them into my funnel through that top highlevel funnel. Now, my content, 20% of the content typically for me is educating, educating, educating. And then when we get to the bottom of the funnel, this you don't want to just overly sell. If you do like it, nobody wants to follow somebody on social media that every single thing that they post is an ad. No, they're there for uh entertainment education distraction edutainment. So, you can kind of combine some of these elements a little bit. And so it's like the jab, jab, jab, right
50:56 hook strategy from Gary Vee. You just give, give, give, and then ask. And so every now and then you can do a conversionoriented piece of content that's much higher uh much more likely to actually drive conversions. And so here's an example of that. I'm hosting a free Nano Banana 2 workshop for you to show you how to use it to grow online and make some money. You can RSVP by going to this website, aimavericks.co/webinar. co/webinar which has all of the information about the nanobanana workshop or just comment nanobanana on this video and I'll right so this was a very specific call toactionoriented content you can do this is an example I did this for a webinar that I was hosting but you can do this for lifetime deal launches or um a
51:45 product uh a new product feature or a limited time offer uh lead magnets if you're trying to capture more emails or anything along the lines of that. But don't do this for every single content. You want to follow a funnel like this, 75% broad. Bring people in. Bring people into your audience. And then convert um middle of the funnel oriented content. Share your education. Share your expertise. Tell them how to do something specific so they've gotten all of this information. They're aware of who you are. they've you've earned their trust by showing them step by step how to do something and then you swoop in with the conversionoriented content and capture them and capture their lead. This is really what you need to focus on is that
52:32 credibility, that consistency, and that relatability because trust is what ultimately is going to convert into sales for you. And so, let's set a realistic publishing cadence. We were talking about that a little bit. Um, and I put this image, uh, this GIF up here because without any context, this is going to look super weird. And so, uh, I know there's a delay in the chat, but let me give me a one in the chat if you've seen the movie, uh, everything uh, all at once. And, uh, I know there's a delay. I'm going to keep going, but I I just love this this Hot Dog Fingers uh, movie. This is this is a strange movie, but you don't need to be everything everywhere all at once on social media. you can pick a couple platforms to start on, you know, because if you try and post a million times a
53:17 day on every single social media platform, you're going to burn out. Even if you use an amazing scheduleuler like High Level to stay consistent, it just can burn you out. So, really hyperfocus on on what your ICP, where your ICP is hanging out online. That's where you should p uh uh primarily spend the vast majority of your time. Let that become your new norm. build up that consistency and then you can start to add other platforms into the mix. But wait until you build that habit and then you can increase that that consistency at frequency. I've been doing this for 21 years as I said at the beginning of this. The only reason I've been able to outlast is because I love what I do and
54:02 I just build. I I I didn't have success on all of these platforms at the beginning. Um, just specifically the last six years I started on Tik Tok. I really figured out Tik Tok first and then I used that to grow on YouTube and then I used that to grow on Instagram and then I started to grow on Facebook and now I'm starting to grow on LinkedIn and I'm starting to figure out X and so I'm taking it slow over a period of time and and before you know it you have 4 and a half million followers on all of these social media platforms but it's a long journey of just starting somewhere really taking the time to master it master the content and who you want to reach. and then building upon it, building upon it, building upon it. Now, Highle Social
54:47 Scheduler can really help you stay consistent. So, they've done a fantastic job of letting you connect your Facebook profile, your LinkedIn, um, uh, Pinterest, uh, Instagram, Tik Tok, threads, your Google business profile, YouTube, even Blue Sky. You can even add your own community in here. Uh, as as well, you can upload bulk content to create. You can schedule your content across every single social media platform. You can even reply to comments. You can check your analytics within High Level all in one place. You can even check social trends. I love this about High Level 2. That's why this I I just fully stand by High Level as one of the the best complete social media marketing viral content CRM
55:35 all-in-one systems. You don't need to pay for 10 different software tools to do all of these different things. You can do everything really efficiently inside Highle to help you be more consistent, to help you create better content, to help you stay on top of social trends. I mean, we can see right now I did I was putting this together two days ago. I can see what's trending on Google Trends. I can see what's trending on Pinterest. I can see what's trending across Tik Tok when their hashtags, popular songs, Wikipedia pages that's going up, you know, um, uh, rest in peace Chuck Norris that just, uh, passed away the other day. Um, I, you can create content around breaking news because High Level shows you what to do. I also personally host my community, AI
56:22 Mavericks, inside High Level as well through their their uh, community called Collab. They've done a great job. In fact, we were looking at another platform. There's a couple out there, uh, paid community platforms, but the reason why we chose High Level is because everything that we do is in High Level. So, why would I pay for another um, uh, community uh, software program when High Level has everything that I need for one amazing price? They've just made it a no-brainer for everything. And so, this is a quick strategy. I'm going to go more into this tomorrow as well. Um, this is how I drive. Uh, I'm going to leave this as a teaser for tomorrow. I'm going into there's a lot of really deep dive strategies tomorrow to actually how you can uh increase your
57:08 engagement and convert more people. But high level really is my content command center and I think it should be yours too because it just helps you batch create your content that you can schedule out and publish everywhere. You can create and host entire communities online. You can use it as your CRM to uh funnel people from awareness to the consideration to actual buyer. You can handle your entire email marketing campaigns through high level. You can use it to build landing pages. You can host your entire um uh conferences on on High Level. So, you don't need to pay for a million different tools. And that's why I'm so beyond honored to have the privilege of doing this two-day workshop with High Level and teach you
57:55 what I know from 21 years of social media marketing and apply it into a tool like High Level because this is the one tool that I really believe that you all need to help take your uh content strategy to the next level in order to go viral and convert more business leads. And so I want to give you a little bit of homework for tomorrow. And I want and I I really strongly encourage you to go through this as well because I'm going to ask some of you to present this tomorrow and we can workshop it in real time. [snorts] What I want you to do is use some of these prompts from earlier to write out your detailed ICP. Use those prompts and outline who that is. Who do you want to
58:41 reach? Don't sleep on this. This is one of the most important things if you want to reach more people on social media. I want you to then identify the PL primary platform where you want to spend the most amount of time for your ICP. Where are they spending? Where do you want to create content? And I want you to create three pieces of content that you're going to create and schedule out. I want you to create one top offunnel piece of content. I want you to outline one middle of funnel piece of content and then I want you to create a piece of content that's uniquely for you. Just something that's going to work your personality into it a little bit. We're not going to do conversion oriented content just yet. And then if you are feeling brave, I would strongly
59:28 encourage you to sign up for high level so that you can use it to schedule and connect all of your content in there. And so I think we're right at the hour here at 100 pm, but I'm happy to answer any questions and I hope this was genuinely helpful for everybody. Give me one in the chat if you learned something today and this was helpful. >> Yeah, let's give it up for Austin. Thank you so much for all of that. That was super cool. Like very very helpful. Can you bring the homework up again just to make sure that folks who are uh wanting to make sure that they do that? Guys, I am a big believer in homework. You guys should absolutely do this homework and show up tomorrow ready to get the most
1:00:13 out of it. We are doing this again. We We're only halfway done. We're going to be back here same time, same place tomorrow uh to >> Whoops. Whoops. Where's my uh >> Can you um >> Yeah, I'm going to bring up the prompt as well. stop your screen and bring it back. >> Can you uh stop your screen share and then bring it back on accident? >> Yeah, probably a second. But yeah, we're we're going to continue journeying together. I'm curious. I'm going to collect a question or two in the chat and see if there's any additional clarity you can add. But um really fast, can you just kind of uh set us up for tomorrow in terms of like like pitch us give us a good reason to show up tomorrow because I know we all got a lot out of today and I want to make sure
1:00:59 that everybody understands what we are be covering tomorrow and why you got to be here tomorrow. >> So today was just the baseline. Tomorrow is going to be all about how to take things to the next level. some of the, you know, you you you learn a couple tricks when you've been doing this for um uh 21 years on social media. So, I'm gonna share with you exact strategies to immediately increase your your bottom line viewership, psychological triggers that you can work into your content. Like, uh get give me a one in the chat here if you've seen my videos before. And I know there's a delay here, but if you've seen my videos, you know that I work in some Easter eggs
1:01:45 into my content. And some of these Easter eggs are the exact reason why my content goes viral. And so, even though that I have my ICP dialed in and I'm creating this top offunnel content, there are little things that I incorporate into all of my content that fuel. It's like putting rocket fuel. um uh in your car, it's just going to go explosive in the best way possible. I'm going to talk about some strategies uh for conversions as well. Um there are some ways that I I teased at the end of this presentation that um there are just some little lowhanging fruit things that you can do to increase your um uh uh conversions on
1:02:31 your content. Um and then uh some collaboration strategies. Basically, tomorrow is going to be all about uh conversion. And so, tomorrow is going to be the the good stuff. If you thought this was good today, you have you have no idea what's coming tomorrow because these are all the the secrets that I don't really share uh in detail in as much time uh as I as I do in webinars because we kind of gloss over them. So, tomorrow, I think, is going to be something you've you've never heard or seen anywhere online. There we go. That's the setup. I love it. Um, okay. So, yeah, you guys have the prompt from him. You have your homework. Show up tomorrow with your
1:03:16 homework done. That is how you are going to get the most out of tomorrow and this whole workshop that we're doing. I would tack on for folks who are not super familiar with High Level Social Planner. It got some love from Austin in the presentation and that's for very good reason. Make sure you check it out. log into High Level, pop into the marketing tab, and and check out the social planner. There were some questions about getting it properly set up or or like little tech bugs like, "Oh, this post isn't working or where can I see this or that." Check out the knowledge base. Go to help.go.com and or use that blue question mark in the top right hand corner of your screen to start a live Zoom call with support. you can get on a live call with support on Zoom one- on-one to make sure that you understand uh features like the
1:04:03 social planner. So you don't necessarily have to be, you know, spend hours getting uh posts all scheduled and your whole calendar set up, but make sure you are familiar with it because it is a very powerful tool. And it is the way that high level really makes an impact on the stuff that Austin is talking about h helping you scale your content, leverage it, and make it more efficient in the way you're actually operating uh your your your content strategy and the way that it ties to your sales strategy. And so, uh, I'm super excited to get into more of that tomorrow. And we're just so grateful. You got a lot of love in the chat. Lots of ones, lots of thank you Austin's. >> And I will just echo that. We're so grateful to have had you. So, I'll go ahead and wrap us there, but we are
1:04:49 going to be back tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. Pacific, 12:00 p.m. Eastern, rocking and rolling with Austin Armstrong. I can't wait to do it. what she did.
