Dennis Yu

Dennis’s program centers around mentorship, helping students grow their expertise to manage social campaigns for enterprise clients like the Golden State Warriors, Nike, and Rosetta Stone.

He’s an internationally recognized lecturer in Facebook Marketing and has spoken in 17 countries, spanning 5 continents.

Dennis has been featured in CNN, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times, National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Fox News and CBS Evening News

He held leadership positions at Yahoo! and American Airlines and studied Finance and Economics at Southern Methodist University as well as London School of Economics.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Dennis’ success

Using a topic wheel to drive prospects to buy your product

Result if you follow the steps in Dennis’ session

Content, collaboration, and leveraging authorities to trigger inbound marketing gains

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

If you build up something that we call your topic wheel, right? That’s tied to your Facebook public figure page, your company Facebook brand page, your website, a chat bot, a Facebook ads account, your LinkedIn account, your email list, the, you know, there’s all these other assets.

If you tie them together in the right way, then you can make yourself appear bigger than you are, and then cause what we call inbound marketing. Right? I believe the best measure of whether your growth hacking is working is, are people coming to you and want to sign up?

So for example, if we demonstrate that the Golden State Warriors are a client of ours, and we have that on Facebook block, and we have the head of digital of the Golden State Warriors speaking at a as the keynote at a major conference that we arrange, and we have articles on the American Marketing Association talking about that.

So anyone in marketing, you understand that’s authoritative, right? Not because I said so, not because it’s on the Blitz metrics blog. Not because there’s a testimonial, which is obviously fake, you know, all these testimonials and references, those are all fake, right?

But when you have high authority, which is on the highest authority places, like, if you want to be known for Facebook marketing, you’re going to have it on the Facebook blog. If you want to be known in industry x, you’re going to have it on the industry x blog. How do you do that right? Then it has to be said. So high authority places it has to be said by the high authority people.

So who are the people that your audience trusts? The people that you want to buy from you? Who do they trust? If you can build partnerships with them, without being a sycophant, but actually creating value for those people, then you create inception.

Because that creates implied endorsement because of who you’re associated with, right? So, because of my position when I was at Yahoo, I got to meet the heads of digital that all these other kinds of internet companies, I built quite a network, right?

And by interviewing them, just like you’re interviewing me, and by making them look good, that makes me look good. They don’t even have to say anything about me, but just by association, right?

And then the third part is what, which is the case study, the checklist here is how you actually do it. So for example, we have this workshop guide, right? It goes step by step and how you create ads on Facebook for $1 a day. When you publish your knowledge on how you actually do something step by step.

A lot of people would say, “Well, Dennis, why are you publishing all your processes and how you set up your pixels, and remarketing audiences, and structure your Facebook ad campaigns, and all this, all the competitors are going to steal it from you?”.

I say, “No, they’re not because they’re going to come to us and say, “My goodness, I had no idea this stuff was so difficult. We really want to work with you guys”.

So, inception, or growth hacking or inbound marketing or PR, those are all really the same things. It’s creating authority where you have this thing called a topic wheel that has all of your content organized in a particular way. That then you run traffic through it by spending $1 a day on Facebook, right?

That means you’ve got a bunch of these videos on the outside, of you interviewing other people, have articles that you’ve written about other people, have interviews where you’re gathering information from other people who are authorities in a particular topic area.

For example, earlier today, we met with one of our clients who sells truck parts. So that’s not exactly a glamorous place. But if you want to be the like, Craigslist for buying and selling of truck parts, then you could talk about the network of truck parts and how much inventory you have and all the different manufacturers that you carry and how long you’ve been in business.

And that’s what most people do. Right? They’re talking about exactly what they’re selling. But if you follow this inception model, then you’re thinking, who are the people, who are truck drivers going to respect?

Who run who, you know, what are the conferences? And who runs those conferences? And how do I build connections with those people? Who has the biggest email list? And how do I provide value?

So even though my network, for example, might be selling truck parts, I could have all this stuff on how do I streamline my business? How do I get paid more as a truck driver? How do I save money on maintenance? How like, all these other things that are tangential to what I’m actually offering, because at the center of my topic wheel is what I’m selling.

One level away from that is my expertise in different topics. Six topics, one thing which is what yourself. Six topics all the way around this one and on the outside are all the people that have expertise in each of these topics.

Think of these like pizza slices. So you have people over here and they tie into a topic, you know, people over here, and they tie into a topic, these topics here in this in the center ring goes into the middle, and the middle is what you’re trying to sell.

And so when you think about these three layers, right, you have the center, you have this middle, and you have this outside layer. You have people, you have expertise, and then you have the thing you’re trying to sell.

No matter where people start on the outside, you can always get them to come all the way into the inside. Because when they spend time with you on any one of these videos, and the key on Facebook is you have these videos, you make a ton of these one-minute videos, for example, will print up socks with people’s faces on them, right? And they’ll make one-minute videos about that.

Because when you get one of these things in the mail unexpected, you’re like,” Oh my goodness, I can’t believe you know, Dennis sent me a personalized thing with socks or sent me a bobblehead”.

Or I’m not saying like you have to do stuff like this, but I’m just giving you an example of you know, how we tried to delight our customers, right, how we try to delight our partners. We try to do extra things for them.