Gratitude at Scale

MakingBank S3Ep26 with Dennis Yu

If you’re looking to move your brand and your business forward, Dennis Yu says it comes down to “how simply you can say complex things.” It’s all about the fundamentals. Along with simplicity, Dennis attributes the success and longevity of his career to a lifestyle of gratitude and mentorship.

“Connections and mentorship mean everything. I previously thought it was all about how hard I could work. Asking people for help is awkward. It’s cheating and I’ve learned in the world of business, cheating is the way to work.” Calling connections “cheating” might be casting mentorship in a negative light, but Dennis is absolutely right — having someone guide your journey, help you out, and dispense advice can give you an immense leg up.

To be clear, he’s not talking about nepotism (although that helps too). He’s talking about building a network of successful people around you to foster your own success. The way that Dennis created that environment for himself was starting from a place of gratitude.

A thank you card can seem like a waste of time, especially when we’re pressured to drive towards maximum productivity and efficiency. We think ‘If I can carve out a little more time, I’ll be able to accomplish x, y, and z and then I’ll really be getting somewhere.’ But when you cultivate a gratitude habit, the people you work with, no matter whether their admin, tech support, or outside vendors, will want to work with you and work with you well. It’s a product of the environment you create.

“The most powerful thing that you could do in a business is to have gratitude and say thank you. So I systematized it, because I’m an engineer.” Dennis’ company teaches people how to say thank you at scale to the people who matter in your life. He takes that history of gratitude and moulds it into stories that teach others about your life and your business by asking simple questions your customers care about.

“What we’re doing is harvesting the good things that other people have to say about your business.” It’s a simple idea that takes the complexity of your business and breaks it into manageable ideas for customers to consume. How do you do it yourself?

● Start with a collection of 1 minute videos in a 3×3 format answering these questions:

  o Who are you? — make it personal, specific and relatable

  o Why are you telling your story?

  o What? — the easy part, the thing you’re trying to sell

● Quantity: Make 30–40 of these videos. Remember that only 10% of videos succeed, so get comfortable cranking them out! Shoot them in different backgrounds, selfie style, out and about so you get lots of variety with a real feel.

● Testing Period: Test these different stories. Give a wide variety so Facebook can see which content works with which audiences.

● Evergreen Funnel: Overtime you’ll get your “greatest hits” the top 3 videos in each category that yield the highest response

When you’re going through the process, it’s easy to get sucked into thinking you need to generate, generate, generate. Which is true at the beginning, but once you’ve established what works with your greatest hits, the majority of your time should be spent tweaking things.

Dennis recommends spending 80% of your time fine-tuning, and 20% creating new content. Why? Optimization. Creating new content is experimental and can be risky. The Facebook Algorithm needs time to work, processing the competition, audience, price, so it can find its winners. “People don’t realize that Facebook is so powerful that if you can just feed in the right ingredients, and you don’t screw the machine up, it will work.” Beware of creating too many campaigns and ad sets too quickly, as it puts too much pressure on the algorithm to figure out what’s working. Simple is best.

Those are the beginning tactical steps for optimizing your Facebook marketing and saying “thank you” at scale. Test it out for you business and see what gratitude can do for you!

“When you say thank you at scale, when you do good things for other people, when your product is good and you’re actually systematized, this is the thing people like.”