Podcast - How It Started

1. How did you get into marketing? Or how did you start your business?

We're a digital marketing agency specializing in Facebook, search and we do other things like branding and website creation optimization and email. Really kind of bread and butter on social and search. Google shopping things like that. We've been around six months or so. Just kind of having fun getting some clients going and getting the performance forming. It's a fun thing to be doing taking a new client on and perform. We're having fun. Sure. I've been in digital marketing now about six years. I started as a true affiliate marketer just trying to arbitrage profit based on CPAs that were paid to me on Facebook or Google. That morphed into product ownership pretty quickly. I saw that there were a lot of people out there that were just putting some money up buying products or starting an E-service and hiring other people like affiliate marketers to sell it for them. I realized that if I knew how to buy traffic I could start my own product and just run my own product and be completely self-employed. I got into that. Started a couple of different products and made and lost money both. That's part of the process in starting a company is you have to kind of make that investment as I like to look at it now. That's the way you learn lessons sometimes. Figured out how to successfully run and scale products and all the lessons that come along in doing that. Trying to apply some of those as I moved forward to different E-services that we currently run in-house. Basically, optimizing government services as kind of a middleman to make it seamless, smooth, and quick. Then also selling hard goods like flashlights and bone rough products. We also work with ... Those are our internal products that we run and then we have a agency that we started that really fell in our lap a little bit. We had an idea for creating this a la carte service, and it was doing advertising reviews on Instagram and trying to be funny about it and fun and educational at the same time. We just had this wave of clients that came in and saw value and wanted us to work for them so we could optimize their campaigns. Now we're in the agency business and we've got clients and we're starting to grow that. It's been a fun ride here for me on digital marketing and we've got a few business partners here. Three guys I work with they're all owners of the agency and other products. We have fun working together. It's one of the most important things to find people that you like to work with and know things that you don't know. I'm lucky in that working with smart guys that are highly skilled too though. It's a challenge every day to be an entrepreneur but we're up for it.

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2. What’s been the hardest thing about starting (your business) ?

Without a doubt, it is managing client desires and your own goals for them. We have ideas of things that we wanna do and try and we know we can get the revenue up maybe or optimize the funnel a little bit better. Getting pushback from clients because they don't see what we see the way we see it which is great. They own the brand and they have great vision for it. One of the things that owning your own products half the time is you can do whatever you want and be nimble that way. When you work with clients and you're helping them grow their businesses it's their business and you don't have complete control. Website changes are slower. Developing traffic pages is slower. There's an approval processes. Pushback on different creatives we wanna use and stuff. It's all ultimately ends up being good for the brand because they have a true identity that they're creating and we're not getting in the way of that. As digital marketers though we're trying to scale and do the best we can so we have ideas of what we wanna do and having to answer to the client's desires and demands has been a bit of a difficult thing to really be totally 100% comfortable with.

3. What is large demand or challenge you see in marketing, in general, right now?

Everyone today seems like to be a guru it's funny you look on social media and everyone's claiming they know everything about everything. That's been a big hurdle. We know what we're doing and so we're instantly credible to ourselves. Having to establish that credibility with someone that maybe you don't know or you haven't talked to before while they're already skeptical because they're getting hit from 30 different angles from all these different people that claim they know everything can be a bit difficult. I think the differentiating factor for us is two things really. The first is that we own our own products. We understand not just the way that the ads need to run and the performance metrics that need to come in but also the backend too. We'll advise clients all the time about adding insert to their shipments because the shipping's already paid for. Many of them maybe don't do that. Or, we'll tell them you know you need to add a deep discount after somebody cancels their order to try and get them to come back. Optimizing their email funnel. We'll tell them how to handle customer service differently. You need to have different refund amounts that you're willing to offer. Or, instead of offering refunds maybe try and just send them more product. Or, give them a month free. Or, extend the next billing a couple ... It's these things that I think a lot of our clients have found to be really valuable because we're able to share perspective from both sides. When we look at ad buys too we talk to them like product owners also because we are product owners. I mean, I understand that if my traffic is at 80% ROI or return on ad spend that doesn't necessarily mean they're making money. They could still be losing money. There's a lot of cost. There's employee cost. There's customer service call center cost. There's satis product cost. All those things need to be added into your total expense lood to determine if you're actually making money. I mean, the worst thing would be for us to start scaling something and then the client was actually losing money even though our ROI 60% on the traffic. We like to take a little bit more of an all-encompassing approach. Not that we're involved intimately in the backend of the operations we just like to give our perspective and thoughts on important metrics and information that might help them make more money. We have the experience to give that information wisely. The other thing I think would be the quality of the work. Like I said the initial part of answering this question there's a lot of people out there claiming that they know everything. That's been difficult for us to just get for new people that aren't referrals to just get the credibility before we meet with them. Once we do an audit 99% of the time we're finding things that are horribly wrong and need to be changed. That's where we're able to separate ourselves very quickly is just the quality of work and knowledge that we have and are able to deploy for the clients is two-fold. Ads and then understanding the backend of their business as well.

4. What are the best opportunities in your opinion, in marketing for small businesses right now?

The biggest opportunity for us is in terms of signing clients is to go out and do audits. Anytime we're able to look at peoples policies even if they are peoples advertising campaigns it typically either they don't even have enough ads running or don't have the right keywords. Basically their campaigns aren't set up well at all. They're not remarketing at all. They don't even have one ad, two ads up. The biggest chance for us to get business is to go out and audit different companies current campaigns and structures. I mean, it's specific to signing business it definitely it's referrals. Just leveraging the clients that we have, getting them to introduce us to people is without a doubt the best way to get clients. Depending on if it's a client referring us or somebody else, obviously, we'll pay referral fees too. In terms of bringing in new business that's the biggest opportunity. And you know, a lot of the time we'll find nothing wrong with Google, but they need some work on Facebook, so we'll work on Facebook for them too. And if there's nothing wrong, we'll tell them. There's been an occasion where a campaign's were really strong. And it as like, we think we can do better, but ultimately, it was pretty good and we didn't really recommend they make the change because it would have been a lot of work for them to change to us and it would've taken a lot of time to maybe get them a little bit better return, so we'll tell them that too. And I think that's really pleasing for people to hear, especially having done it in the past. Like you know, I don't know if it's going to find anything, but if we do, obviously, we'll tell you. And if we don't, we'll tell you that too. The biggest opportunities for them on digital marketing. It depends on what their product is or what their company selling. If it's a fast service or if it's some sort of hard good. You know, we're a digital marketing agency, so surely we believe that the majority of opportunity lies online. I think unless you're an enormous company looking for incredible amounts of scale, there's not much reason to go off of Facebook and Google to accomplish your goals. Now obviously you want to be able to have some influencers as a part of your campaign as well. And the big challenge there is attribution. You know, it's the return on influence that you're trying to figure out. But I think a dynamic campaign across all of those platforms is really the biggest opportunity, regardless of what the product is. So if it's a transaction that you're looking for, Google's a really great place to start with a remarketing campaign for logs to customers on Facebook. And then having branding elements through social or Instagram with influencers is a always a really great idea. I mean, if I had to give a specific strategy for just picking something out of a hat, I would say that if you're going to use influencers, something we always like to do, if we're talking about bang for buck and trying something that is going to go far for a brand owner, would be to ... Negotiate a deal with an influencer, you want to make sure that you offer this influencer more money up front with the idea that they are going to self promote the post themselves. So let's say the influencer wanted $500 in their media kit. Initially you would offer them whatever it is, $650 and ... but in the contract it states that they have to promote the post for $150. It just seems like every time we have influencers that do work for us or for clients and we put this stipulation in there, they have this almost like ... this probably isn't the right way to describe it, but this cringey moment where I think there's ... basically influencers are just really about looking hungry for likes and thirsty for likes and every time they promote a post, I think they kind of think that it's coming off like that. So as a result, if you're forcing them to promote it themselves, they want the content to be really, really good. So they put way more effort into it. And you get way better content out of these people and they promote for you to their audience, which is a really great value element to working with influencers. The other thing I would say is to do dark posts if you didn't want to pay premium dollars for influencers but you wanted to advertise on Facebook and Instagram. Dark post is basically just getting advertiser access, having an influencer give you advertise access, give you content but not post it to their feed and promoting the pictures or videos that they create for you through their social accounts with their social name on the ad. It's basically, a lot of the value from influencers comes from being in the feed. So if you take that element out of the negotiation, the value drops dramatically. So now you're talking about $50 or $60 per picture and paying them 1% spend. And the cool thing about Instagram, as far as this reporting states, you can't omit Instagram followers from a campaign. So you can force you way into those people's feeds with the influencers name, but it's just not in their feed. So that's a really good value to, certainly if you had to choose one and you're looking for one thing to do and you're looking for the best performance on conversions, that's probably going to be Google. Leads, we found Facebook to be very successful as well.

5. What’s the best & worst marketing advice you’ve ever received?

The best advice I ever got was to read the copy out loud. That might be pretty cliché, but if you just read what you've written out loud it really helps you understand before you put an ad live or whatever it is, if it's a body copy. Just read it out loud and it's going to tell you really quickly how it sounds, how you're even able to read it and how other people are going to receive it. So that's the best of advice. Every time I read it out loud it seems like I have to rewrite it two or three more times, which is frustrating, but, so. The worst is ... we always have, internally here, we always try and avoid the words I think. It just seems like opinions can be split test to find the right answer now and it's more of a ... our attitude is let's try. We always try and say let's try this, instead of well, I think is. And a lot of the times it's ... that can be the worst thing, is well I think this is right or I think this is the way we should do it. When if you can test it, you're always going to get the right answer, so that's probably the worse way to go, in terms of deciding something. Just a straight referral. Essse Caffé is a coffee company ... A big coffee company in Italy and they're coming to ... moving into America and we're helping them with all the branding and website creation and obviously all the digital marketing that comes along with that. Helping them with the packaging. And it was just a referral from a colleague that had been in the industry down here in San Diego for quite some time. And kind of hit it off with the guy and talked about his opportunity and he's now got funding and we're just getting it going for him, so that's really fun. That was the very first. And then ever since then, that we've just go this referral web that's gone on. And that coupled with the clients we got from these ad reviews, it seems like we've got a little momentum here.

6. How did you get your first customer(s), that weren’t friends or family?

Well, when I started in digital marketing I was just an affiliate. So you can go to the networks that are out there and just sign up and try and sell some product. You know, you build a pre-sale page and to not really have any idea how to make an ad or write body copy and you're just kind of flying by the seat of your pants, working part time trying to figure it out. So working through networks. I wouldn't really call selling products as an affiliate, those are your clients, but that's the very first. I just went on to a network and just decided I wanted to figure out how to make it happen and lost some money early on and started to figure it out and turned it around. And ended up starting my own products from there. So the first actual like client client, aside from friends that I've helped out, really started not too long ago. Did I lose you? Oh, okay. Yeah, no problem, let me try it again. The first client we got was a coffee company, it was coming out of Italy into America, SA Café. They just got their funding here and are moving forward with making the whole brand and we've got all the branding going on for them, with box designs and setting up email flows and building a whole website and a really dynamic campaigns across all platforms, the advertising platforms. That's the first client. That was a true referral, just from a colleague that had been in the industry with us down here for a long time and said that we were the guys. And started working with them and he's since referred us to a few people and signing on big clients from doing all these ad reviews on social. So that was the first client. It wasn't a ... You know, when I first got started, it wasn't like ... I was just an affiliate. It was just working, selling products for product owners. Working through networks. You can just sign up, create an account and fill out a couple of forms and you're off to the races with an affiliate. And you can try and make some money selling products for people. So it wasn't like ... and then from there I quickly moved into creating my own product. And then it was just running my own products for a long time. So it's not like we've had this proper agency going for a long, long time taking on clients. We just happened to know everything about the branding and digital marketing from our own efforts. And now as a team here we've got our first real set of clients that we're working with, for the last ... you know, it's only been six months or so. I really think On It is doing it right, right now. For a sports nutrition brand, if you look at ... spectacular email follow ups and digital design work that's been done. I just really admire the people that take their and do good work. And spend the money creating great content. Spend the money on graphic design work and they don't skim. That's the reason these brands get up into the millions and millions of dollars of sales. What really impresses me about all this brands, or any brand like that, is when you look at their stuff online and they're doing everything you would do, or it's better maybe than you would do, and there's no errors. You can't find anything wrong, it's so impressive to me. So there's a couple examples.

7. What is something most people do not know about you or would be shocked to know?

I really love to cook outside over a fire. I watched that, not to sound like a total basic, but I watched that Netflix documentary with Francis Mallmann and ... What's that, Chef's Table? I just thought it was so cool how he was cooking over fire outside. And you know, I have two kids ... Yeah that's the guy. Yep. Uh huh. And I have two kids, so it's pretty much lockdown mode after they're asleep. Can't really leave the house or do anything you know. So cooking has become something that I can do while being in the house and it's something creative and fun, and I can do it if they're asleep or whatever it is. And I can do it every day, so. That's something I kind of find a little joy in, the passion. Something I can be creative in, outside of digital marketing. You know what's so cool about it is that it's so fascinating and enjoyable to watch people that are really good at what they do, that really enjoy it. I find that very intoxicating, to watch just experts do what they do best and talk about it. That's the thing that really sets me off on those shows.

Rapid Fire Questions:

- Netflix or A book:

Oh man, I'd go Netflix for sure.

- Apple or PC:

Apple. It's just so user friendly. You never have problems with it and I find that Apple's just always consistently fast and the battery's last forever. If it's a laptop or a phone or whatever it is. I don't know, I just ... I've been using it forever too, so maybe that's a part of it. My boy moved over to Android and he really digs it. He might not go back, but ... I don't know. I guess I'm a long term fan of Apple.

- Call or Text:

Definitely text. I just like to get that message out real quick and then be done with it. I'll even send voice messages to people, because I can just kind of get what I want to say out to them. There's actually an app that I've really fallen in love with called Marco Polo. Have you heard of that? It's great. You can send long form messages to people and check them when you want at your leisure and reply at your leisure. That has really taken over everything, in terms of the way I communicate. I'll have pretty high level conversations or just fun, casual conversations with people throughout the day. My buddy and I will go back forth rapping about something in real estate or whatever. And then one of us will just drop off because we get busy with the day and then we'll pick it up the next night at 8 p.m., kind of right where you left off. And it's so easy to just record and send a message, you don't have to ... it's just totally seamless, that's a new technology that I've really become a fan of.

- Sunny or Rainy:

Well if I liked rain more, I'm in the wrong city. Yeah. No, I definitely would go with sun. Especially, I want to cook outside right, so I'm in the right place for that. It's like sunny ... what is it sunny, 364 days a year here.

- Coffee or Coke:

Yeah I got a real coffee problem man. It's the first thing I get when I wake up and I drink it half the day, so. I got to go with coffee on that one. I am totally and completely addicted. Yeah. Oh man.

- Rocky or Creed:

I would go ... I'll go Rocky. Like the OG Rocky. I'd go with that all day. Just a classic movie, you know, you can't go wrong. My kids will watch that movie and think wow, this is a good story. You know Sly has a hell of a story man. Have you heard his whole story with Rocky? Dude, he was so poor, he had no money. He was so poor, trying to get somebody to sign Rocky and he sold his dog, he was so poor. He might have written Rocky after. He was so poor he sold his dog to eat food. And I think he thought of Rocky then after and sold it to the studio and he had the be the star role and had to buy his dog back. But man he was really going. I've probably butchered the story, so somebody out there listening is going to think I'm losing it, but it's something like that man, it's just nothing to something, it just really clicked for him.

- Mountains or Beach:

Oh, beach for sure. San Diego man. Gotta be the beach.

- Comedy or Drama:

I don't know. I really don't watch too many movies. I really read a lot of books. I'm usually reading two books at a time. I've walked to work for like five or six years now and I walk all the way to work, it's about a mile and a half, and then I walk all the way back and it's great. I read these ... I typically read like a more technical book on the way to work. So that's something that my brains can actually absorb and it's handling more like textbooky. I'm reading this SEO book, I want to learn a little bit more about SEO right now. And then on the way home I read more of my casual book. I'm reading Linchpin right now by Seth Godin and ... So I'm really a big reader and if I'm watching a show, it's typically something having to do with my kids, like Dora the Explorer. If you need to know anything about a Disney movie, you know, just ... I'm your man, I know them all. It is man. Oh, quiz me baby. Moana's a good one man, it's a good movie. What was that one that just came out, The Avengers, or ... not The Avengers, the ... I can't remember. There's just so many. Yeah, The Incredibles too. Yeah. You know, there's some good ones coming out.

- Google Ads or Social Media Ads

No. I think I got to go with Google on that one. If I had to choose one, I think that's the one. You could get people to your website and show them a lot of creative and copy that you want them to read and put videos on the website, so. You can put a lot of that on your ads on social. If I had to choose one, I think that's the one that would get people to the website and show them the creative elements as well. You know, it's high intent, so I got to go there.

8. What is your favorite tv show, movie or podcast?

My favorite podcast is typically Rogan. It's so diverse. He's got people on there from geologists to political knowledgeable people to celebrities to fighters to ... I mean it's so dynamic and he does, in my opinion, a really good job of towing the line of right in between having an opinion and not. So, people probably think he's a meathead, that's probably very, very stiff in his opinions, but I think he does a good job of balancing and interviewing. He just does a great job of keeping people talking and he's been doing it so long, so. It's a good podcast. If I had to make a recommendation for a podcast, it would be one that's really over for a long time, but I stumbled upon a while ago. It's the founder, I can't remember, I think it's Kevin Hale, founder of Wufoo, did like something like 10 or 15 podcasts a few years ago, and they're really good man. I mean if you're looking for something like in our industry to listen to, that's definitely what I'd recommend. It's really good. It's cool because sometimes he'll change his mind and he'll change other people's mind and that's the ultimate goal, is to be able to change your own mind about something, because you've been enlightened and learned something too. That's the kind of state I find myself in. Did you listen to the one ... it sounds like you listened to his podcast. Did you listen to the one about sleep? Oh man, it's like, I can't remember what the guys name is, but you just have to Goggle Rogan, sleep, in the podcast or I'll send it to you maybe and you can put it in the notes or whatever. It's a pretty good one man. The guy talks about how important sleep is.

Full Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5qESvyGrSuMT7ydsBx6y9t

About the Author

I am Bobby Dietz, an entrepreneur, content creator, and advertising professional. I am the Co-founder of ATTN Digital Marketing Agency and have entrepreneurial experience operating businesses in nutrition, cosmetics, automotive and travel. Follow me on LinkedIn for daily advertising tactics, business vlogs, book reviews, and more.

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