In this post, we are sharing with you tips from Alex Fedotoff, on how to hire amazing media buyers for your business. This aims to help you to detach yourself from the daily campaign errands and focus on expanding and scaling other parts of the business.
The message here specifically applies to affiliates who already have some momentum. Those of you whose businesses are already at $50 000/ month or more and need to detach your time from the business, but still can’t do it.
Some people and top affiliates like Maor Benaim and others have been able to grow their affiliate businesses to over $1 000 000/ month in sales while still managing all of their ads themselves. Though, the issue comes in maintaining that for a long time.
It’s better to leverage the time that you spend managing your ads and dedicate it to activities like finding more products, creating more stores, affiliate sites, etc. For example, if you have 2 - 3 successful stores, what if you had like 5 or 10 more of them. This could propel you to millions of dollars per month.
In this post, we want to share with you the tips from Alex on how to find those media buyers and what kind of qualities to look for. So that you can hire people that will eventually replace you and enable you to focus on higher-value tasks in your business, therefore you can grow your business faster.
Smart People
One of the most important things about hiring media buyers is that you want to hire smart people for this position as most of the time, it’s the position that replaces your main role as an affiliate. Especially if you have been working as a solo affiliate.
Choosing smart people means that you need people that can make critical decisions by themselves. For example, you can train your media buyers which is okay, but you should not underestimate the quality of people.
The quality of people can be very different. Some people can make decisions critically fast. You may give them a certain task, and they figure it out right away. But with others, you have to explain every step of the way, and it might have to do with their mentality.
Working with freelancers is generally good but the challenge comes when it comes to getting them to make key campaign decisions. They would always want to do what you tell them and nothing else extra. This makes you have an army of people that aren't functional by themselves which makes it tricky as you scale.
A lot of entrepreneurs have grown big teams and reached up to 7 figures per month but their businesses collapse because the team couldn’t sustain even when the ship is sinking.
When things go wrong in business, you need to have the people making critical decisions and it’s your part as a leader to empower people to make decisions. Even though they could make mistakes, they will learn directly from them.
T Personality
When hiring media buyers, you have to look for T personality traits. There are about 16 personality types and there are different letters that represent each trait.
If you're looking for a media buyer you want to look for T personalities. These people are more analytical than emotional. Which is a very important prerequisite for a media buyer who has to make decisions from campaign data, not their emotions or feelings. T people can do critical analysis and make data-driven decisions. They can know when something is not working according to the statistics and choose to stop or tweak it, unlike F people.
F people are more emotional people who can look at the data and then say maybe "the ad looks visually good and I like it so much, let’s give it some more time."
You need people that are much oriented to the numbers side rather than the emotional side because, with media buying, numbers tell you everything. Numbers tell you whether things like the ads, funnels, targets, landing pages are working or not.
So, a personality check is one thing that you should do to pre-filter people before you hire them. Other personalities like the F are great for other jobs that require emotional intelligence like public relations, client support, etc. But when it comes to media buying, the T personality is important.
IQ or Intelligence Level
In terms of intelligence levels, you can tell the differences amongst each of your team members over time. You will notice that some people are way brighter than others, and you'd want to keep working with them for a long time.
You'd want to know how to gauge and pick up such kinds of people right from the start. So, you can do small IQ tests within the interview to see how they rate or you can follow the way the top companies have done it over the years.
For example, with Amazon, if you read the book (The Everything Store) about when they were a start-up in a small facility in Seattle. They would only hire smart and intelligent people. This tells you a lot about their culture right from the start and why they have been able to make better decisions that enabled the company to grow. They had set high hiring standards from the start and would not hire anyone who wasn’t proven to be very smart or bright.
So, considering the intelligence levels while hiring makes sense to explain why an eCommerce company like Amazon was able to achieve high and fast growth.
Another way to pre-qualify for intelligence levels is recruiting young and smart guys who have been studying well and have a good track record in their performances. You can always find these fresh graduates from universities, and offer them great incentives.
For example, with Google, they would pick up top students from universities all over the world and offer to fly them to their Silicon Valley offices for internships. Once they gauge how well they perform during the internships, they’d then offer them competitive salaries.
The young recruits would be so good and productive for the company, and this tells a lot about the company’s growth and culture.
Now imagine you hire freelance media buyers without considering their intelligence levels. They might be good but they won't perform like the bright, sharp, and smart students who you could recruit and train to become your superstar media buyers.
That’s why new start-ups, with small teams of smart people, have been able to disrupt companies of 100s of experienced employees. It’s not to say those people cannot do their job. They can do and oftentimes they do very well. It’s just on the team leader level in your company where you need some very sharp people.
For the leadership positions like the chief media buyer, chief marketing officer, etc. Those people need to be sharp enough because there is a cap on where your business can grow with a certain level of talent.
Hiring from Backgrounds and Experience
Top affiliates admit that hiring media buyers doesn't necessarily need someone with experience. It's better to train someone who hasn't been working in the space as they come with out-of-the-box perspectives.
Alex Fedotoff mentions:
"Some of our best media buyers didn't know what Facebook Ads were and we trained them and now they're just amazing. They're like the top one percent in the world."
Conclusion
If currently, you have streamlined all your business processes and systems and your team is process-oriented, that's good. But if you want to go further to leverage your time then employing media buyers who aren't that smart will limit the growth of your business. There should be some edge in the business and it has to be the talented people that you don't have to tell what to do. They figure out stuff, create their processes, follow them and get results.
So, if you feel like your business is stuck at the same level of let’s say 6 or 7-figures / year and you want to do bigger numbers beyond that. Look at the limitations of your team, look at the intellectual capacity of your team because that might be your bottleneck. The tips shared in this post could escalate your business to the next level.
