A 3 Pillar Approach To Deliver Extraordinary Marketing Results
Do you want to achieve amazing results with your marketing? Dumb question right. There are many different ways to see great results. Today, I have some special guests with me - Shreya Banerjee and Paul Counts with Marketing Counts. They are going to share their three-pillar approach for great marketing results.
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A 3 Pillar Approach To Deliver Extraordinary Marketing Results
Tim Fitzpatrick: Do you want to achieve amazing marketing results? If you do, you do not want to miss this conversation. There are so many different ways that we can achieve great results with our marketing. I have a few special guests, not just just one, but two special guests with me today and they're going to share their three pillar approach for great marketing results. I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the right plan. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I am super excited to have Shreya Banerjee and Paul Counts from Marketing Counts with me today. Shreya, paul, welcome and thanks for being here.
Shreya Banerjee: Thank you for having us.
Paul Counts: Hey, thanks for having us. Great to be here.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes, it's going to be fun. I was telling you guys before we went on air, this is the first time I actually have two guests at the same time. This is going to be fun and it's with two other marketers, so I always enjoy that.
Paul Counts: That's great. We're looking forward to it too.
Tim Fitzpatrick: So before we jump into this, I want to ask you guys some rapid fire questions. If you guys both want to answer, totally cool. If one of you guys wants to pick one and go the other, I don't care how we do this, but are you guys ready to jump in?
Paul Counts: I think so. Are we alternating Shre?
Shreya Banerjee: We'll figure it out.
Paul Counts: Okay, I got you.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. You guys are connected. You know exactly what each other is thinking, right?
Paul Counts: Yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Okay. So when you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?
Shreya Banerjee: I like to watch movies.
Paul Counts: Yeah. College football watching that.
Tim Fitzpatrick: What's your hidden talent?
Shreya Banerjee: I like to organize.
Paul Counts: I can speak pig Latin.
Tim Fitzpatrick: What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
Shreya Banerjee: My dad, who always say yes.
Paul Counts: Smart entrepreneurs have a short pencil, meaning they take a lot of notes.
Tim Fitzpatrick What's one thing about you that surprises people?
Shreya Banerjee: I'm very short, but I have a very pack of punch.
Tim Fitzpatrick: How short?
Shreya Banerjee: 5Ft.
Tim Fitzpatrick: 5Ft. Okay. I think my wife has you beat by like an inch.
Shreya Banerjee: Oh, nice.
Paul Counts: Coaching football.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Okay. What does success mean to you?
Shreya Banerjee: Success means work with integration. That I don't have to worry about work or family time. It just happens. That would be amazing.
Paul Counts: Oh, sorry.
Tim Fitzpatrick: That's okay.
Shreya Banerjee: Go ahead. You answered that one.
Paul Counts: Oh, no. I'd say yeah. Working with people you love and working with clients, people, it's that balance. Right. So working with them.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Where's your happy place?
Shreya Banerjee: My happy place? Just relaxing in a beach somewhere. It would be amazing.
Paul Counts: Disney.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Disney. Right on.
Shreya Banerjee: Yes.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Any park in particular?
Paul Counts: Magic Kingdom. It's hard to beat that one, in my opinion, with my kids too, or just myself. With my kids.
Shreya Banerjee: I would go by myself.
Paul Counts: Yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick: What qualities do you value in the people you spend time with?
Shreya Banerjee: Integrity and honesty.
Paul Counts: Trust, being able to. Yeah, good personality, too. Sense of humor. That's the right word. Sense of humor. I can't laugh. It's not going to be fun.
Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it. Okay, so I have to ask this before we go on. How did the two of you get connected and start working together?
Shreya Banerjee: We met about four years ago, almost at a live event. So if you ever think that networking is not important, don't think that ever, because networking is so important. In our line of work, we're in digital marketing, what happens is people think it's all online. So why do you have to go network? Why do you have to go meet? You have to because you make relationships. Business in general is relationship business. Right. Everything in life is a relationship. So we met at a live event four years ago, and we connected. We both had things that we were lacking, and together it worked out great.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Cool. So you pick up where the other leaves off?
Paul Counts: Yeah, absolutely. I was a solopreneur for many years. So dating back to when I was 13, I've been doing this 23 years at some level, my own business, whether marketing for other people, whatever the case is. And so I was doing it myself. Then I met Shreya four years ago, and I knew that I wanted to get to another level, achieved a semblance of success by myself. And I was like, I want to get to that next level. I need somebody that knows, processes, insert Shreya. We started talking, found out she has a process based background, and then the rest was history. Here we are. And now we apply her process based approach to marketing, which makes it pretty powerful.
Tim Fitzpatrick: You never know where you're going to meet people.
Paul Counts: No, you never know. And live events is probably the number one driver of our business as far as meeting people. I mean, we go through a list of clients and people we worked with and whatever the case is. And any entrepreneur watching this, I mean, if you aren't going to live events, you're missing out big time, right.
Shreya Banerjee: Or even meet ups or someplace where you're networking.
Paul Counts: Yeah. Chamber of commerce. It's all there. They're all there. You just have to go out and meet people.
Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it. So tell me more about what you guys are doing at marketing counts. What type of clients are you working with? What type of work are you doing?
Paul Counts: Yeah. So we do a lot of work with influencers. We work with influencers a lot in the personal development space. We work in the health niche. We've actually worked with people in a variety of niches. We make kind of a joke that all we need is a pediatrician. And we will basically have said that we've worked from beginning of life to end of life.
Shreya Banerjee: We have done funeral homes. Yes.
Paul Counts: So funeral homes, financial planning, savings. I mean, the list goes on, right? Get your development in the middle of it. Insurance. Yeah. And that's because we have a process based approach. We don't have to be stuck in one area. But yeah. So we work with a variety of clients, different industries.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Cool. And I know we're going to get into kind of your philosophy and methodology, if you will. And I'm excited to do that because I think we share a lot of the same thoughts on marketing. Let's talk about first pet peeves. I have plenty of them. What's your biggest pet peeve when it comes to how marketing is taught and implemented?
Shreya Banerjee: I'll get started on this one because my biggest pet peeve is anybody who thinks that they need to go towards digital marketing or start an online presence, the first thing they think of is social media. Social media is not end all be all by any means. It's a piece of it. It's a piece of engagement. And we're going to talk about our process. We call it our FTE process. And what it means is it's a foundation first approach, not a traffic first approach. So our biggest pet peeve is that traffic first mentality of I'm just going to go create a social media profile, I'm going to start driving traffic, I'm going to throw up ads.
Paul Counts: I think a lot of the reason it's taught that way is because if you look at in College, right, we're taught to basically go work for a large Corporation in a weird way. Right. But a lot of times what they teach you in College marketing classes or even high school classes is really designed to help you be to do marketing at a large scale with a company with a billion dollar budget that really doesn't care if a campaign doesn't work because, hey, we'll just throw more money at it. Small business owner, they don't have the luxury of just throwing out another hundred thousand or another million dollars to a campaign if it doesn't work. So you have to hit your numbers. And it's funny, when we've worked with actually some larger organizations, they're shocked that we can actually get a decent conversion on landing page. And it's like, well, if you actually look fixed your foundation first instead of just throwing traffic at it, you are going to be amazed at the results that happen. And that's something we've learned is that it's not sexy. It's not attractive to clean up your landing page and make sure that it speaks to your target avatar, to your target audience. If you're messaging, if there's a disconnect in messaging, you're not going to get the conversion. And the conversion is really what counts more than anything else pun intended there.
Tim Fitzpatrick: So it's really if I'm hearing you correctly, successful marketing isn't multiple things, but you have to have the proper sequencing. If your sequencing is out of whack, the tactics are not going to work. Correct. And there's a lot of people that are putting the cart before the horse. Right. They're jumping in with both feet, taking action without having the proper foundation for those tactics to actually work.
Shreya Banerjee: Right. A lot of people, they jump forward. Like you said, put the cart in front of the horse and the cart doesn't move because you go into social media, you go into starting to put ads, and then you don't see the conversion. Then you get frustrated and you go, darn it, marketing doesn't work. But in fact, marketing does count if you just put the cart behind the horse. Right? Then if you have your foundation, you're capturing your leads. Like, you're going to start seeing those results, but people do it opposite. I have so many pet peeves with this, but one of my biggest pet peeves about marketing is people, they think it's short term. And if you want to be successful with marketing, you have to take a long term approach. I think there's somebody was telling me a story the other day. God, I'm trying to remember exactly what the story. They were talking about digging for gold. Right. And this guy had this land that he bought, and he was digging for gold. He kept digging, digging, digging, and he stopped. He's like, this isn't working. Sold the land, and the next guy found gold, like a foot below where the guy and so it's like, so many people have such a short term approach, they try it and they're like, this isn't working. And they move on to something else. And so they just constantly spin their wheels and don't give things enough time to get traction. And honestly, that's probably a lot of marketers faults because there's tons of marketers out there who are like, oh, yeah, we can generate these free tomorrow.
Paul Counts: A lot of trend marketers, in a sense, right.
Shreya Banerjee: From the trend point of view, we have had several clients who come to us. We service fractional CMOS for companies as well. And they come to us and say, well, this is hot. So why are we not? Should we jump on it? And like, yes, we can. And they come back and say, why do I have to tell you this? Why can't you come up with this? Right. Your job as a CMO should be that. But as a CMO, we're looking at the entire marketing process for your company. You don't jump from trend to trend to trend. It's okay to try a new trend and go see what's there, but you cannot let go of your basics of the things that are already working. You can't jump ship and leave everything else behind.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Right.
Shreya Banerjee: Because if that new platform crashes, then you have nothing left.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.
Paul Counts: It took three months for that platform to crash. And then they came back and said, oh, yeah, you're right.
Tim Fitzpatrick: As we talk about this, I'm thinking about clubhouse.
Paul Counts: Yeah, that was it.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Who knows? Maybe I'll be totally wrong. But gosh clubhouse was so hot in the beginning of the pandemic, and I hear hardly anybody talking about it anymore. And I know some people that spent a lot of time every week on clubhouse building an audience. And I don't think the audiences are there nearly as much.
Shreya Banerjee: If they were smart they would have collected that, moved that audience somewhere else, collected their emails. But most people don't do that. They don't focus on the foundation.
Paul Counts: They do for a foundation. Instagram. I'm building an audience on Instagram. But you don't own that audience.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. That's rented marketing channel.
Shreya Banerjee: Right. We always say that if you're jumping from trend to trend, you're more doing marketing as a hobby rather than as your work or as a not necessarily work, but for a business, you're not building your business. You're doing a hobby. Jump, jump, jump.
Tim Fitzpatrick: One of the things you said Shreya was about, hey, it's okay to test some of these trends, but we need to keep doing what we're doing that's already working. Right. Why would you want to jump away from something that's already working? But that's another conversation. How much do you think is okay for them to test on some of these trends? Right. You shouldn't be putting half of your budget into something that you're testing.
Shreya Banerjee: Right. No, definitely not. Try it out. Like go slow. I wouldn't really say, like what percentage of budget. It kind of depends on you and where you are. If you are not set up your foundationally at all, gosh, no, forget the trend. It's a shiny object you're trying to run after. Focus on your foundation first. You shouldn't be spending any time on the other stuff. Right? But if you are getting results from you're just trying to go to the next level. Everything is set perfectly. You're just trying to go to the next level. Then, yes, invest some percentage, maybe 10%, 25% of the budget on the new stuff. But even that's a lot.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, that's a lot.
Paul Counts: It is a lot. And it's almost like rolling the dice. It's like playing the lottery in a sense, when you decide to jump away from a foundational principle and into something that you think is hot.
Shreya Banerjee: Right.
Paul Counts: You're just rolling the dice.
Shreya Banerjee: Especially with a new technology. Like you said, Clubhouse only lasted for a few months.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Do you feel like marketing is evolving quickly. I mean, the fundamentals and the foundational elements of it don't change. I know you guys agree with me when I say that.
Paul Counts: 100%.
Tim Fitzpatrick: But even as the tactics and tricks and tips are changing, do you think that it's evolving that quickly where if you wait 90, 120 days before you begin to look at it, that you're going to miss a window?
Shreya Banerjee: For a new technology, maybe. Because as a new technology is introduced and people are jumping in, you might be one of the people that have the biggest following up there. If you start early versus if you're starting late. Yes, maybe. But again, to the point, if you don't have your foundations at and you're not transferring, so you're not transferring your leads from that new platform to something more stable, like your email list, then it's useless. It's completely useless. We always say that all these platforms are like highway traffic. Everybody is going on there. If people are taking an exit and coming to your house, if you're not getting their information, you're going to miss them. It doesn't matter whether you're jumping early or jumping late. If you're not capturing the information, it doesn't matter.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I love that. So let's get into the FTE. You guys touched on this. Explain why the letters FTE will literally transform a business or organization.
Paul Counts: Yeah. The approach we've taken, it comes from Shreya's process based background. So that's really, SHreya you can tell them a little bit about your lean. Well, as you say it, I always Butcher it.
Shreya Banerjee: I don't have a traditional marketing background. I'm a mechanical engineer by trade. I worked for corporate career for over twelve years. And I used to go from manufacturing facility to see if there's a breakdown in the process. And if they're not meeting their numbers, why they're not meeting it. And let's fix the processes so they can start meeting the numbers. So I come from a very process based background. I'm a lean Six Sigma black Belt is what Paul was referring to, that he always butchers. The transition when I met Paul and we were looking into the marketing, creating this agency, we said, let's take that process approach in marketing. We don't see that very often done because either agencies are like, oh, Facebook ads hot, right?
Paul Counts: They jump to what's hot.
Shreya Banerjee: So we take a very process based marketing approach. And that's where the FTE comes from. It's not full time employee. F stands for Foundation, T stands for traffic, and E stands for engagement. So foundation being your landing page, your website somehow where you're capturing your information, your customers information. T stands for traffic. All the different platforms paid free. However you want to drive it, you don't have to pick all of them. That's one of the things people think, too. There are 30 different social media channels. I need to be on all of them. No, you don't. And then E being engagement. Engagement is where we teach social media most. Not so much on the foundation phase. Engagement is like, okay, now that you have your audience, how are you building that relationship with them? Follow ups, social media posts, email follow ups. Right. All of that. And this is the approach that it doesn't matter which industry you're in. If you follow this. It works. It works. Anything.
Paul Counts: Yeah. It's powerful. And you should see how uncomfortable most people get when we don't cover social media. Even when we're speaking, presenting, whatever, they get very uncomfortable that social media is not covered until the end because they're like, under foundation. They think social media is their foundation. Under traffic, they're like. But no, not yet. It's more of an engagement. It's designed to be an engagement tool. And at the foundational phase, that's where we really push that. Capture the email, capture the lead is so critical. And that's where people are missing, because there's no money without the follow up. And businesses missed the chance to do the follow up when they aren't capturing. I mean, part of our foundation is even setting a Pixel correctly, dropping a Pixel so that you can retarget them on the right platforms effectively. And you know what we find you reference that marketing is constantly changing. When Facebook had their big algorithm shift, I knew several agency owners that were just throwing their hands in the air and just thought, I don't know what I'm going to do. My clients are going to hate me. Our clients are just fine. When Facebook went down for a day, our clients were just fine because we could still send emails that we could still engage with people. Our business wasn't built on sand. It was built on a solid foundation. Like we like FTE, really to a house as well.
Tim Fitzpatrick: I use that all the time.
Paul Counts: Foundation. Yeah. And you have to have that. It's so important.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. When people just jump into the tactics, they're building a house without a foundation and it's not going to last long term. So, yeah, it's incredibly important. One of the other things you touched on, Paul, was just staying in front of people. Right. And I can't remember where I saw the statistic. And I think it varies depending on what it is. But anywhere from like 5% to 10% of your market is going to be ready to buy at any given one point in time, something like that. So who cares? We could split hairs on the exact number. The bottom line is a large percentage of your market is not ready to buy at that point in time. So if you're putting a message in front of them, that is not going to resonate with them at that point in time because that need or problem is not there or it's not great enough. How are you going to stay in front of those people? So that when that need does arise, they think of you and you guys keep talking about email. That's why it's so important to get people on your email list, because that's how you're going to nurture and stay in front of people. If you get them to follow you on social media, they may do it, they may see you there. But we have to have ways to continually stay in front. And email, in my opinion, is one of the best ways.
Paul Counts: It absolutely is. It's got the highest ROI. Still, people still check email on their phone, and we always reference that. Hey, what is Pinterest? Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, the list goes on, Michael's Best Buy. And if you go to every major brand, what is the one thing they always ask for your email. So that should tell you something right there. But people still want to push back on that and are like, well, text messaging, well, you can collect texting. That's great. But there's a thing called the FCC that doesn't like text messaging that much limited on what you can spend when you can send it.
Shreya Banerjee: There's also text messages blinding, right. I get text messages from some of the stores and I go, not really.
Paul Counts: Yes, it's the same thing. You can argue all day that, yes, some people try to say text messaging is where it's at. But have you ever tried doing that with international phone numbers to have fun with that? So it depends on who your market is. And we do collect texting for ourselves and clients. But you can only use it sparingly. There are certain restrictions you have to have. And you can't just go blasting a text every ten minutes because you feel like you want to. The FCC doesn't allow it, nor do the texting platform. So you have to be very careful. Plus, it's expensive. It adds up. You're paying for text.
Tim Fitzpatrick: You got to make sure you get the proper opt in too, with text. If people don't opt in and you start sending text messages, you can get in serious trouble.
Paul Counts: Oh, yeah, you're in big trouble.
Tim Fitzpatrick: But you know the other thing about text too, that people don't realize, look, open rates are incredibly high. Yeah, but it's super personal. If you start bugging people on text with stuff that's not relevant for them, they are not going to be happy.
Paul Counts: No, it's a tactic that should be used to a certain degree. But some people assume that's the be all end all, because in their mind, it's funny because a lot of people, when they work with us. Right. They go with what's in their mind. So in their mind, I see stuff on social media and in their mind they see stuff in text message. So I don't use email. Well, just because you don't maybe don't use it that much, which is still a lie, because we all know you're checking your email for stuff. So don't tell me you don't use email. But that's where that disconnect is. And the other part of staying in front of them that we didn't reference is even like putting a Pixel, even if you're not going to run an ad at that point. But drop a Google Pixel, use ad roll, which will get you across banner ads and other websites. What we love to do is drive traffic from sources like, let's say it's our own email list, or drive traffic from Google Ads to a landing page or SEO search engine optimization, where you get the traffic where people are actually searching. And that's when you drop that Pixel, because then you know, when you run an ad, they've already expressed enough interest to come to your website. That's why getting targeted traffic is so good. And we make a joke about, well, would you rather have people stumble across your business? If you have a physical business, would you rather somebody stumble into your store or cross your store? Typically, if they're stumbling into your store, there's another reason. But that's what's happening on social media. They're stumbling into your store. Whereas on Google and Bing and on actual, like YouTube, places like that, they're more likely to actually be seeking you out. So they're seeking not stumbling. And we'd rather seeking us than stumbling across this.
Shreya Banerjee: They're problem solving platforms.
Paul Counts: Right.
Shreya Banerjee: People go there to solve their problems. And I have a problem. I go to Google, I go to YouTube, I go to Pinterest. I want to learn something. If there's a solution out there, I want to know about it because I want to buy it.
Paul Counts: Right.
Shreya Banerjee: Versus Facebook. I don't go there saying, let's see what ads I get targeted for today.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. There's high buying intent with things like Google, where you can target very specific keywords, whereas Facebook people don't necessarily go on Facebook to buy something. Right. They're there socially, and in most cases, we're just interrupting what they're doing, right?
Shreya Banerjee: Right, absolutely right. So you could run it strategically. You can still run Facebook ads, but run a Google ad first and Pixel them and then retarget them on Facebook. That way, you know, the traffic that you're getting is very targeted and you're not wasting your marketing dollars either. Running a very high Facebook ad budget.
Tim Fitzpatrick: So for those that don't know because we're talking about retargeting. With retargeting, you have captured some information that they have visited something specific, whether it's a specific page on your website or your homepage. They visited something, and you are taking that information, and then you are sending another ad to them at some other place. It's just like, I look for a car and all of a sudden I'm seeing Chevy ads at every website that I visit. When you guys retarget, is there a specific period of time that you retarget people for? Like, or is this because I think some people think like, oh, you don't typically retarget ad nauseam for an extended period of time. Does that window that you retarget vary based on the type of client that you're working with, or is that fairly fixed? What are your thoughts on that?
Paul Counts: Yeah, it varies by the client, and it also varies by the action that you want them to take. So typically 90 days at the most, that would be on more on the high end. Right. Because they're going to forget about the offer. But we do target beyond that because of the fact that, you know, if you have, like an ecommerce store and you want to drive them back, it doesn't mean you're going to retarget them with the similar offer or the same product or whatever the case is. Because sometimes they you'll go to ecommerce store and you see that same product. You don't want to retarget that more than seven days or so. Because if you target that way too long, they're going to be like, wait, I moved past that.
Tim Fitzpatrick: I already bought that.
Paul Counts: I already bought that. Right. But you do know they're interested in electronics for the home, right. If they bought a Roomba vacuum, let's just say, or something like that, just throwing that out as an example. So you know they're interested in home electronics. So therefore you could target them other home electronics categories down the road. Right. And that's kind of the approach we take. You don't target for that same product, but you do still target them because that's a valuable data. That's almost like having it's the best thing you can get next to an email list where you don't have the direct info, but at least you know what they want. Because if they're shopping home electronics and cool, you've got another widget that you could put in front of them or a whole category or a guide about the top ten things you should do before you buy your next widget or whatever the case is.
Shreya Banerjee: That doesn't happen very often at all. I don't see it. The reason Roomba came up because I bought it two weeks ago.
Paul Counts: Right. Yeah. Half our meetings are her talking about setting up a Roomba.
Shreya Banerjee: My Roomba is so amazing. I'm still getting targeted for Roomba even though I bought it two weeks ago. And even big companies don't do that.
Paul Counts: Talked about wasted ad dollars. Right.
Shreya Banerjee: Right. It's a complete waste because they have unlimited ad budget. But you have a small business. If you're smart about it, do target that, because I don't see many people do that.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah.
Paul Counts: Interesting. Because you'll get charged. Right. This is what people don't understand. Even if you're running retargeting ads, you're still going to get charged. You're actually going to get charged for every impression on some of those platforms. Right. If you're running some retargeting.
Tim Fitzpatrick: With retargeting, most of the time, it's not cost per click. It's cost per impression.
Paul Counts: Yeah. In a lot of cases. And so you're going to end up spending money unnecessarily if you're running those retargeting, especially on like, if you're doing a Facebook retargeting or Google retargeting or something. And so why are you throwing impressions of somebody that already purchased? And that's just like throwing.
Shreya Banerjee: Think outside the box. Because right now, if they show me the Roomba bags or parts, extra parts, I would much rather buy that rather than the room by itself. Think outside the box.
Paul Counts: Right.
Tim Fitzpatrick: I was going to ask you that. So in this example of ecommerce, if you buy a Roomba now, what else are you going to need? And if they retarget you with that kind of stuff? Right there's a who knows, maybe you would have bought that stuff when you originally bought it, but maybe not. You didn't know. And now that you got your room but you're like, oh my God, I need this, this and that.
Paul Counts: Yes. And that's where you're there. Right. When they need that, they already have the product and instead of just blowing money. And the thing is success in advertising, this sounds really funny to say that success in marketing is not correlated to what you're spending. It's funny to even say this because we've had people that have actually questioned what we do for them because we reduce their ad spend tremendously by 90% in one case. They were literally throwing money and we were questioned, what are you doing? Because you're not spending enough on ads. And it was just like, are you kidding me right now? Right? Like, we literally saved you a huge amount of money and we actually got you more leads and more profitability. But you're still calling us into the question because you looked at the ad spend, it's shocking. But that's what people are trained to think because people that don't understand true marketing the way all three of us do here, and that foundation based approach, they view it as marketing is just throwing ad dollars at something or posting on social media. It's ironic, but that's the logic that's out there, which is crazy.
Shreya Banerjee: Now, true marketing, if you look at it, that it shouldn't be all ads driven, it should be all encompassing with the foundation, with email, with everything. So a lot of times when you think that all my ad budgets less, what is marketing doing? Look at the other stuff that was not being used before. It is being used now.
Paul Counts: Right.
Shreya Banerjee: And you should be using it because if you're not, you're just leaving money on the table.
Paul Counts: Well, yeah. And some of this takes time. That's the thing. It's time. It takes a lot of time. One great example, we had somebody that striving for one of the most competitive phrase in the market with the competitions, Mayo Clinic, Harvard, John Hopkins University. You can imagine how hard that would be to rank after 18 months. Right? All of a sudden it goes from nowhere to first page of Google and they literally go from 3000 clicks a month for this keyword to over 30,000 keyword clicks a month just in the span of just in that span of 18 months. But it took it was consistent effort. And finally, Bam, but it's like that referencing where the guy didn't want to strike gold and walked away early. That happens a lot. And people go, SEO sucks. It doesn't work. Move on to the next tactic. And they don't realize that. And what we also love too, is another pet peeve, right? Doing consulting. We always joke. We're like, hey, watch, because we have no problem firing clients. It's something we've done if we aren't in alignment with them or we will go our separate ways and we always make jokes. We're like, well, just wait, when the new marketing company, they'll get the benefit of what we just did for the last six, seven, eight months, and then they're going to come in and go look at this great ranking in SEO.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. We're doing a great job for you.
Paul Counts: Yeah. We're doing a great job for you.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. It's interesting. Shreya you mentioned about just look, paid ads are a good strategy and I think they belong in a larger plan. But the way I've always looked at paid ads is it's a way to generate quicker results while you're investing in things that are going to take longer term.
Shreya Banerjee: Right.
Tim Fitzpatrick: But if your business is based off of paid ads to generate leads, you're like a drug addict. What happens when the dealer goes? You can't find any dealers anymore.
Paul Counts: Wow. That's great analogy.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Right. Because stuff changes, right. This is not a set it and forget it thing.
Paul Counts: No.
Tim Fitzpatrick: It's always evolving. And if things change, Paul, before we jumped on you, we're talking about the whole Facebook algorithm change.
Paul Counts: Right.
Tim Fitzpatrick: That threw a lot of people into a tail spin, is it? And that is a bad place to be.
Paul Counts: Right.
Shreya Banerjee: Everything changes. Everything. So people a lot of time pushback on SEO is we have no control over it. Google can change its algorithm at any time, like you just said. So can ad platforms. There's nothing guaranteed in life. Everything changes. So you will make sure both and organic is very important for your business. If you want it to continue to grow, you can't just have it.
Paul Counts: It's so important. It's the best converting traffic. I mean, we actually can see with ecommerce clients, we work with number one best converting traffic after their emails. Email is number one. But number one after the email is SEO organic. And then paid ads come in around a fraction of what SEO is. And as far as conversions go, even Google Ads, which we love, Google Ads. But Google Ads still outperforms Facebook ads. But that's because really like we talked about Google Bing, when you advertise on those platforms, they're seeking you, they're stumbling into you on the other platforms. If you get nothing else out of this, call, at least think of those things.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. I love that. It's a super important distinction.
Paul Counts: It is.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Right. They're seeking you rather than bumping into it. Right. Super important. Now I want to finish by talking about mindset. And I have a feeling where this is going. But how can your mindset influence your marketing results and make it better?
Shreya Banerjee: Yeah, it's very important because mindset just like with anything in life. Right. Well, what we see from our students and our clients is we work so hard on a campaign, it doesn't work the first day. Hearts are broken. It doesn't work. Marketing doesn't work. You have to be consistent with whatever you do. If it doesn't work, no worries. Make tweaks. Make those conversions. You have to make tweaks. Paul is expert at fixing things like, let's get the conversion up right. It doesn't matter if it didn't convert the first time. Let's make it better. You have to have that mindset. If you can't do that, then you're not going to succeed in anything in life. Forget marketing. But you have to have that in marketing, too, because any results is not custom. We live in that generation. I call it a Tik Tok generation. Right? Like everything's fast, super fast.
Tim Fitzpatrick: You got it right now.
Shreya Banerjee: It's not the reality. That's not real life, that's not marketing. You can't have everything right now. Even if you run ads, which is faster traffic than organic traffic, doesn't mean that your ads going to convert at the first go. No, it doesn't mean that you're keywords at the first go. You might have to have 25 different iterations before you finally hit that jackpot and go, wow, yes, this is it. I'm going to scale. So if you give up on the first go, you're done.
Paul Counts: And even if you do well on your first day, just think of how much better you could do if you kept at it a lot of times. And it's a combo where they just give up too early, they just give up too early, whether it works or doesn't. And at that point, it's not even strategic. It's just because nobody has a glass ball, nobody knows how the audience is going to resonate with a message. And you hope that it's going to hit. I can guarantee you, during Super Bowl ads, not every one of those ad sticks. Some of them do really well. Some of them do amazing. In fact, we did an overview of the Coinbase one, that was incredible. It's a dancing thing. They used everything to a T that we just talked about here, everything. They hooked your interest. But then when they got the traffic, they had a landing page with an opt in, captured your email, they got you engaged in the app. I mean, it was incredible. It was super well done because they actually did the right steps, which is ironic because very few larger companies do that. They just blast your name out there. But yeah, it's taking your ball and going home way too early. That's the biggest that's where you got to have that mindset that I'm going to stick this out and make it work. We just did our own offer with another organization, and it wasn't converting, but we kept at it and we finally got it six times the conversion rate. It's like 600% increase in conversion rate. So it went from a webinar that converted at 5% to 30% because we stuck with it. Had we just been satisfied with 5%, which a lot of people are on a webinar, they're like, oh, 5% but we were like, no, we can keep tweaking this offer. Keep tweaking this offer, make it stronger. And so we didn't give up. And that happens a lot, though. It happens a lot with people where they just, well, this converted okay. Like Shreya said, marketing sucks. Here we go again. It's a bad mindset to have it.
Shreya Banerjee: It's okay, though, to complain and whine a little bit? We do it all the time. Why us? Why can't we just have things easy? We do that all the time, but then move on, move on. You have to continuously improve.
Tim Fitzpatrick: So here's what I'm hearing you say. We need to be open minded. We need to take a long term approach and be invested in this. And even people like the three of us that are doing this day in, day out, we're testing all the time. What we can take frameworks, right, and foundations that we know work. But there's always little nuances. There are changes in the market. We are always testing and making incremental improvements. And it's those incremental improvements that give you exponential returns in your results.
Paul Counts: Right.
Shreya Banerjee: Exactly. Very well put.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Okay. I knew we were going to think the same on this site.
Paul Counts: Great, right? Yeah.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Who knows? Maybe I need to have a contrarian on here so we can get into a little bit of a debate.
Paul Counts: We've got a list of them if you'd like.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I was going to say, but yeah, I love hearing other people's views. We share a lot of the same thoughts, but we think about them in slightly different ways. But the end result is the same.
Paul Counts: Right.
Tim Fitzpatrick: I think there's too many people that their expectations of marketing are unrealistic. And because of that, they're never happy. It's our expectations that get in the way. I love it. Guys, it's been a fantastic conversation. I've really enjoyed this. Any last minute thoughts you want to leave us with today?
Shreya Banerjee: Be consistent. You can't say that enough. Be consistent. Don't care about the results. Yes. Care about the results. Just be consistent.
Paul Counts: Right? Yeah. There's no better word than that. Consistency counts. It really does. That's what we preach it. Harp on it. It's doing this, being consistent and being okay when it doesn't go well, we've already hit on it. But it's not always going to be perfect. It's marketing and you're never going to convert it 100%. So that's okay. It does.
Tim Fitzpatrick: So if people love what you've been talking about with your FTE framework, where can they learn more about you guys?
Paul Counts: Yes, you can just go to marketingcounts.com. Marketingcounts.com and check us out and we'd be happy to connect with you. We have a free offer there people can download on 26 A to Z of Email Marketing. 26 Tips for Email Marketing.
Tim Fitzpatrick: Cool. I love it. So marketingcounts.com, it's spelled exactly how it sounds.
Paul Counts: Yes.
Tim Fitzpatrick: So go to marketingcounts.com. Shreya. Paul, thank you so much for taking the time. I've enjoyed this conversation. And for those that are watching, listening appreciate you. If you're struggling with your marketing, we've certainly talked about a lot of things, but if you're not quite sure what that next right step is to get you where you want to go, you can always hop on over to our website. Rialtomarketing.com. It's R-I-A-L-T-O Marketing.com click on the get a free consult button. Happy to chat with you and give you some clarity so you can move forward with confidence. Thanks so much. Till next time, take care.
Connect With Shreya Banerjee and Paul Counts
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About the Host?Tim Fitzpatrick
Tim Fitzpatrick is the President of Rialto Marketing. At Rialto Marketing, we see many businesses battling information overload with marketing. As a result, they aren't sure what their next marketing steps should be to get where they want to go. We help B2B service-based businesses create, implement, and manage a marketing plan to communicate the right message to the right people so they build results that last. Marketing shouldn't be difficult. All you need is the RIGHT plan.