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Finding the Right Digital Marketing Platforms to Grow Your Business

July 23, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 96 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with entrepreneur Joshua Sturgeon, about finding the right digital marketing platforms to grow your business!

Sections

How Josh Got Into The Marketing Field
Growing Up With Entrepreneurial Tendencies
Advice For Somebody Starting Out As An Entrepreneur
Is SEO The Right Fit For You?
Finding Underutilized Paid Channels
Facebook As A Marketing Platform
EmberTribe – Working In A Remote Environment
Conclusion
More Episodes
Show Notes

Finding the Right Digital Marketing Platforms to Grow Your Business

How Josh Got Into The Marketing Field

Paul: So here today, we’re with Josh Sturgeon of EmberTribe.

Okay, now EmberTribe. How old is this company?

Josh: EmberTribe is about three and half years at the time of this recording. We started the end of 2015.

Paul: Did you go to school to become an EmberTriber? What do you call yourself?

Josh: That’s my actual degree. No, I didn’t. I fell into this world out of a hybrid of necessity and curiosity and interest. I graduated into the heart of the recession in 2007 and at the time I also had a full load of grad school work and so I really just needed to find ways to make money and my geek way into all of this was through a dying phonebook company, where I was actually a door to door salesman and my one job was to try and introduce this digital offering to keep the company alive. And spoiler alert, the company went under. I didn’t go beyond three months there, but what it did introduce me to, was this idea of digital marketing, specifically SEO or search engine optimization.

And it just blew my mind that you could show up for just for specific things, you offer it as a business, and that people could find you for those things on the web and just do business for you. That just ignited a passion and excitement for this and now twelve or thirteen years ago and I …there was no formal education for it and so it was a lot of reading blogs and like building your own website and seeing what worked and didn’t work. So, I did that for a while.

Eventually, I worked for a larger agency and got to do this at a larger scale with companies like Staples, Thermo Scientific, and Unilever. But then I really learned the most when I was building a business with my wife at the time and needed to kind of put our own money on the line and figure out what was going to be the best fit for us as a small business. And so that’s where I think my learnings really took off because I was in the trenches so to speak, spending my own money. And yeah, that’s kind of the genesis, I guess, of how I got into all of this.

Growing Up With Entrepreneurial Tendencies

Paul: When you were a teenager did you say, “I’m going to be in digital marketing”?

Josh: No, not at all. When I was a teenager and even into college, I was very into music. I was very into that more creative side of things.

Paul: You wanted to be a rock star?

Josh: I wanted to be a rock star! No, not necessarily. I was more like singer, songwriter. I also taught music too, so I ran like a little music studio and I taught kids how to play guitar. So basically, I was really into that but I think that created an impulse, not the reality of the real world and I sort of channeled that creativity into how to make money and how to do that in a flexible way because time was constrained for me.

Paul: There are certain people, you sound like you have entrepreneurial tendencies. Would you agree with that? How did that surface itself when you were really young?

Josh: When I was really young, I was hustling. I was selling rocks at the end of my driveway.

Paul: Right, okay.

Josh: Selling rocks that I thought were cool. I probably called them crystals or something too just out of innocence but yeah. Then I started a handyman service when I was a kid. Look, I think everybody has that “I sold lemonade at the end of the street story” but…

Paul: Well, no. Not everybody. It is a difference in wiring from what I’ve seen.

Josh: Yeah, that might be.

Paul: So, what did you think? You were going to be an entrepreneur? Were you going to go work for somebody?

Josh: You know, it’s funny. I didn’t really frame it that way in my mind. Like throughout highschool and throughout college I found ways – because I was really into music – I found ways to fund my own recording and lifted albums and all of that was kind of an entrepreneurial journey in and of itself. I don’t think I possessed the language yet to understand like, “No, I don’t want to work for the man. I want to do my own thing.” It was more out of a matter of necessity and circumstance that I ended up working for myself in the beginning.

But yeah. Then later I came to realize that some of my core values are to have freedom of lifestyle, to have independence, to be able to have open horizons. As I’ve gotten older and self-reflected more, I’ve been like, “Oh yeah. This has been in my DNA for a long time. I just couldn’t label it back then.

Advice For Somebody Starting Out As An Entrepreneur

Paul: What would be one piece of advice to somebody that was starting out now, as sort of an entrepreneur? I know you do some mentoring. In doing mentoring, you can’t be as honest as one might want so we’re anonymizing everyone out there. What would be your anonymous advice to people?

Josh: Man, I’d say you probably have a vision in your head and in your heart about what this could look like. That might be ten years from now. I would say, divide that by a thousand. What’s the one step that you can take now? I think the biggest mistake that I see with a lot of entrepreneurs is that they so badly want to be in business for themselves, but they so badly want this product to come into existence, that they are afraid to see it not work and therefore, they never start.

Paul: Oh interesting. So, they never fail.

Josh: They never fail because they never start. And you see people working on a logo for six months and you see people doing whatever but putting off the hard thing and the hard thing is usually talking to somebody who isn’t your mom or your dad or your friend or your girlfriend and getting them to give you money for the thing that you want to produce. And that’s not greed or that’s not anything else except validation and you need to get validation for what you’re trying to build otherwise you’re going to spend a lot of time building something that nobody wants.

Paul: Right.

Josh: You might feel good about what the future might possibly hold but when push comes to shove, there’s no business there.

Paul: I’ve also found when you, the entrepreneur, engages with anybody, most people don’t want to hurt your feelings.

Josh: That’s true!

Paul: And so, they’re going to say, “Oh yeah! That’s great!” And if you shift the conversation, “Well, will you give me twenty dollars right now and I’ll deliver for you in six months? “Oh, I’d never pay twenty dollars for that!” And you start to get to the truth of the matter.

Josh: Or I need to talk to my wife first, you know.

Paul: Yeah, exactly. That’s really what you want to get to. And also, to have other people to ask on your behalf. I have a friend who’s doing this.

Is SEO The Right Fit For You?

Josh: Is SEO the right fit for you? It really depends. I mean, a lot of startups that we work with, like they’re inventing a new category so there’s nobody even searching for what they’re doing so SEO would be the wrong fit for them until they’ve generated some demand for the new category.
So, rather than just take a pre-ordained checklist of different marketing channels that somebody else is recommending you do and then retrofitting that to your business, it’s better to kind of have an understanding of where you sit in the market, who you’re trying to reach, and then prioritize your spend on marketing from there.

Paid is usually a really great option so start with that because you can learn very quickly and then you can build the content and then capture the SEO traffic over a longer period of time but at least start with renting. It’s almost like going to the customer and asking for the money now. Then you’ll know now if it’s going to work or not.

Paul: Yeah. Well, I think an important take away for me here is this identification of the importance of the different channels because SEO isn’t bad but it’s really hard to rule the world in SEO. But advertising, I can always buy an ad to my target market. Then it becomes, do I offer something that’s quality?

Josh: Right.

Paul: Is that fair?

Josh: That is fair. I mean, and I want to be fair and give paid the same treatment and to say that you are competing in an auction, right?

Josh: To give you a very specific example. We have a client who’s going up against Salesforce and Blackbaud in Google search, those paid ads. That’s expensive man. Those guys are spending millions of dollars in search. And so, the big innovation for that client was finding another paid channel that was underutilized at the time, for business to business, which was Facebook and we reduced their cost probably by eighty percent by making that change.

Paul: That’s interesting because both of those are very business oriented, very C level finance-oriented products. And you got to those people through Facebook?

Josh: On Facebook, yeah.

Paul: When was this, timeframe wise?

Josh: This was probably 2016 going into 17.

Paul: Okay. Is that viable today?

Josh: It’s still viable but there might be better alternatives depending on what your business is.

Paul: Maybe LinkedIn?

Josh: LinkedIn is very expensive but also very targeted.

Facebook As A Marketing Platform

Josh: But here’s the takeaway though. Although Facebook has now more limited business to business targeting options than it did before they removed some of those things, what they do have is two and a half billion people in their ecosystem, so just statistically your audience is there. If you consider even the internet in the population of the world, that’s a massive market share so the chances are that the people that you want to reach, is probably on that platform or in that ecosystem somewhere. It’s just a matter of, can you get to them the most efficient way possible. It’s worth a shot.

Paul: My questions have always been around, will those people make buy decisions in that context? Sort of like if you’re swimming, you’re not interested in buying a TV. It’s sort of like that just doesn’t make sense. Whereas, if I just finished lunch, I’m not interested in looking at restaurant ads. So, I’ve never been able to understand how we go to a Facebook where… I use it for figuring out how my family’s doing and friends and then all of a sudden, I see something about a technology ad, I’m a geek. Those two don’t give necessarily.

Josh: Yeah and I think one key distinction and strategy for using these channels is to not necessarily go for the sale in one click. Statistically, we know that over ninety-five percent of the people that visit your website will never return again unless you’re given another opportunity to. So, there’s different tools that we can use to give you multiple – what we would call maybe “ad bats” to try to buy.

But one major strategy especially in the business services side is just capture tension and capture a point of contact so even if they’re not ready at that part of their buyers’ journey to buy from you or to even schedule a sales call they might be interested in some piece of content that you created or something else in exchange for an email address or some other information so you can email them later or message them later. That’s a good way to come off it.

Paul: Cool!

EmberTribe – Working In A Remote Environment

Paul: Well we’ve been talking with Josh Sturgeon of EmberTribe. Where are you based?

Josh: Yeah. Oh, that’s a loaded question. So, I’m here north of Boston. And I have a business partner who’s in North Carolina but the rest of our team of about twenty people, is spread about nine different states across the US. We’re a completely distributed team.

Paul: Oh, that’s cool. Now do you service clients all over the world or do you just work in one city in Alabama?

Josh: No, it’s all over the US and Canada and some of those companies are multinational so they’ll have different locations but for the most part, no, it’s not constrained by location at all. And, just like as our team works together in a remote environment, we’re working virtually with a lot of these clients as well.

Conclusion

Paul: Well, there’ll be ample opportunity in the shownotes and links for both Josh individually and for EmberTribe. And I just wanted to thank you for coming in and it sounds fascinating. It’s never as simple as we want to make it but it’s also not as complicated, especially with a Sherpa like you, guiding us through it.

Josh: Yeah, definitely my heartbeat for anybody is, just start. Just try. Your upside is so potentially high that it could transform your business in a way that you could never have imagined it’s worth at least at test to run.

Yeah, Paul, thanks for having me. This was a great conversation!

Paul: Absolutely, alright. Thank you.

More Episodes:

This is Part 3 of 3 our interview with Joshua Sturgeon.
If you missed part 1, about how to spark growth with digital marketing, you can listen to it here!
If you missed part 2, about how knowing your customers will help you with digital marketing, you can listen to it here!

Show Notes:

Digital Marketing: Know Your Customers

July 9, 2019 / / 0 Comments

On Episode 95 of The Edge of Innovation, we’re talking with digital marketing expert Joshua Sturgeon, about how knowing your customers will help you with digital marketing!

Sections

Introduction – What’s With The Name
An Ongoing Strategy
Know Your Customer
How Can Digital Marketing Be More Effective?
Is Digital Marketing a Good Fit For You?
How To Get Customers To Your Website
How To Market To Certain Types of Customers
How To Target a Specific Product
Marketing New & Innovative Products
You Don’t Know All the Answers Until You Try
More Episodes
Show Notes

Digital Marketing: Know Your Customers

Marketing: Put a Lot In to Get a Lot Out

Paul: So here today, we’re with Josh Sturgeon of EmberTribe.

So, how do we talk to a CEO or an executive level person who is sitting there saying, “I really want to acquire a market and I want people to buy my stuff basically. I want leads. I want all that stuff.” And they think they’re just going to spend… “Okay, here’s a thousand dollars and that’ll just keep running. There. I buy a toaster and I don’t think about it.” This seems like a very different value proposition in that it seems like you have to put a lot in to get a lot out. Is that true?

Josh: Yeah, I think that in a sense, that’s true but you don’t have to make huge bets. So, the clients that we’re working with, some of them are starting at 5,000 dollars a month or less. Some are spending upwards of 500,000 dollars a month. The level of scale can change drastically but you can still benefit from this even at the lower levels of spend.

Paul: But it sounds like it’s a continual investment. It’s not like you’re going to have one ad and then you’re done.

Josh: That’s true. That’s true. Yeah. For a variety of reasons this is very much an actively managed type of engagement. So, this idea of setting it and forgetting it, isn’t a reality for digital marketing for a number of reasons.

One, is that you’re participating in an auction. And so that auction itself is dynamic and you have a number of advertisers who at different points in the area even – like at the end of Q3,Q4 – a lot of people are spending money in advance of holiday shopping, Black Friday, and it gets very expensive to run ads on some of these different platforms. So, you want to be actively managing your budget there.
The way that we liken it honestly, is when hand over your money to say an investment manager, they are going behind the scenes and they’re actively trading your portfolio and making sure that they’re hedging bets and managing risks. It’s very similar to what we’re doing on these platforms, is that we’re actively managing these campaigns but along the way, trying to recycle the learnings that we’re getting about your audience and about what people are responding to, back to you as an executive so that you can do some better strategic planning for the future and understand what’s the next product that you need to release. What do you need to change about your sales process? How do you need to be more competitive in your market?

So, it’s this constant stream of filtering the learnings that we’re getting from the campaigns but also making sure that your money’s just going up in smoke, what we’re managing for you.

Paul: And it sounds like its… and if I’m thinking, “Okay. I’m going to start a business. I’m going to do this.” It’s not going to be an aspect where, “Okay. Marketing. I need to spend a thousand dollars in that and I’m done.” It’s really going to be a continual investment that never goes away really, until I’m satisfied that I don’t want to make any more money. Is that really the case?

An Ongoing Strategy

Josh: It is. You want to commit to an ongoing strategy. And you’re right to think about it that way. There are probably a few rare exceptions where I maybe have an event if I’m in the event business. But even then, because we’ve worked with some of those businesses, they are marketing year round, always looking to the next event. So, it is an ongoing kind of practice and change to your business. If you haven’t invested in marketing yet, you need to start adapting a mindset that, “Okay, this is something that you do before you get in trouble.”

Paul: Right, right.

Josh: It’s something you do to be proactive and create demand and to have a full pipeline and that is an ongoing process.

Know Your Customer

Paul: So, it sounds like we’ve learned many important things, but one of the critical things is, know your customer and know where they frequent the internet and where they ask their questions and then, answer those questions at those places.

Josh: Yeah, that’s right. I think it’s where a lot of people will rush and skip over, unfortunately because it is so easy to get started with digital marketing. We find that people aren’t taking the time to aim before they fire. Or we’ll see people that are on the other end of the spectrum. They spend an inordinate amount of time not talking to customers but hypothesizing about what they think their customers want and then they never launch and they never start learning.

Paul: Right.

Josh: So, we really try to take the middle road there with, “Okay. Let’s get some really good data to understand what makes your audience tick but let’s launch as soon as possible so we can let the data do the talking and reveal to us what people are responding to in real time.

Paul: Yeah, I find that when I’m talking with potential entrepreneurs, they have this brilliant idea. And I said, “Well has anybody said they’d buy it? Have you actually talked to a human, a person that would actually buy it that wasn’t related to you or didn’t want to offend you?” And that’s really hard to get people to realize how important that is.

How Can Digital Marketing Be More Effective?

Paul: So, we have a lot of small business people. Do you think digital marketing… How can it be made more effective? And I’m implying here that it seems like, for small businesses, depending on the business, digital marketing isn’t always as effective. And I’d like you to think about that or talk about that.

Josh: So, in the cases when it’s not effective, there’s usually a few culprits. One is that, who they’re trying to reach is so niche that they’re spending a lot of time trying to boil the ocean basically. And that probably isn’t the best approach for something that’s ultra ultra niche. It’s hard to basically identify and find those people through programmatic and ad form. And in those cases, we usually recommend something like cold outreach or just having a very focused presence at conferences or whatever it might be. ABM is its own kind of beast and that’s usually one of the reasons why people will fail.

But a more common reason is that people will try one channel like Facebook, not have success, but then throw the baby with the bathwater and assume that all digital marketing isn’t effective for whatever business line they’re in and that’s just not true.

Is Digital Marketing a Good Fit For You?

Paul: So, I’m just thinking back some people that I know listen to this – CPA firm. Is Digital marketing a good fit for them?

Josh: Absolutely.

Paul: Okay. That sounds like if you’re trying to build an H&R block or something like that, that digital marketing would work but how do you get into the more specific, more nuanced… Because it’s a local firm. They do a lot of stuff in the community. They’re not going to have ten thousand clients. They’re going to have, you know, a couple hundred. How does that work with digital marketing?

Josh: Yeah. So, I think one, getting razor focused on who you can serve best as a CPA, knowing that you’re in somewhat a commoditized service, that there’s a lot of folks that can offer this service. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of people that need this service. But get really really focused on who you can serve best. And then, also being able to surface customer stories of people that you have worked with that meet that criteria.

And what I would recommend, just in very practical terms for a CPA, is for instance we could target people who look like they’re a small business owner and so therefore their taxes are already potentially complicated and/or as a CPA you could offer them a lot of value because there’s a lot more flexibility to optimize for tax season.

But then also, I would couple that, maybe parrot maybe, with also an interest of people, say Turbo Tax, or some sort of DIY solution. And then we would devise a campaign understanding that, okay, at least on some level we believe that this is a good fit of people. On some level we would devise a campaign that says, “Tired of losing time and sleep come tax season? Doing this on your own? Your business has enough worries of its own. Let us audit how we might be able to help” or whatever.

But just, again, getting super focused about how you can help. And then let’s go to these targeting-rich platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn to try to match and find that audience and then devise a message that really gets at the heart of their pain points and what they’re trying to solve.
Is There Enough Business For Me To Get Customers?

Paul: Okay, so let’s say you propose that – I’m the CPA – is there enough business? We’re on the North Shore of Massachusetts, north of Boston and we’re not going to be doing taxes for people in North Carolina. So, is there enough business to actually get enough customers?

Josh: Let me answer it this way: Let’s find out.

Paul: Okay, alright. Fair enough.

Josh: What’s your wager? Would you be willing to spend a thousand dollars to get an initial benchmark of how this could perform for your business? If it works, what’s the upside for your business? That potentially endless stream of referrals or new clients and then, they’re going to stick around how long? What’s your lifetime value of a client? It could be ten, twenty years times a thousand dollars a year. So, you stand to gain ten thousand dollars, twenty thousand dollars per customer. What’s a thousand-dollar test to see if it’ll work for you?

Paul: Okay, good idea.

How To Get Customers To Your Website

Paul: So now, I have to have a website. I built my website, and nobody comes to it. What am I doing wrong? Is that an irrational expectation? I probably think it is. If you build it, they will come? I built a website, spent could of thousand dollars, couple hundred dollars. I did it myself, whatever. And I’m disappointed. It hasn’t really produced anything. Are you going to sit there and say, “Well, what did you expect? Of course that’s the way it is.” What do you counsel me? Because I don’t think you could say, okay fast forward to what you just said, and I think you’d still say I have to have a decent website. So, that was a pre-requisite but it wasn’t necessarily going to get me new customers.

Josh: That’s exactly it. I would say, “Paul, you’re off to a great start! But don’t stop there!”

And I think the website in 2019, when we’re recording this, it’s a critical piece to your marketingness. It’s going to give people a doorway into your business but if people don’t know where to find you, if they don’t know you exist, they’re not going to walkthrough that door in the first place.

Paul: Right. I’ve invested a bunch of time and money into it, and they can come up to the door as you said but nobody seemed to come. So, I’ve spent all this time writing all this content and every week I post a new blog post about this and nobody comes. What do I do about that? Is that where advertising comes in?

Josh: Yeah, so having the ability to control traffic from your target audience, I think, is an incredible opportunity. And we talk about this strategy as what we call like a rent-to-own strategy. And just similar to like the real estate market where you can rent a place for a period of time and eventually own it, we see the same thing with paid traffic. In the near term, let’s get faster feedback groups. So, let’s understand what going to work and let’s rent that traffic by paying for it from Facebook or from Google. But let’s eventually own some of that traffic and that’s where more of the content marketing will come in.

Paul: Oh, I see.

Josh: Where you’re getting, maybe, the organic rankings in google and you’re showing up for stuff or your stuff is getting shared organically. And a great way to jump start all of that and learn very quickly, is by renting the traffic or paying for it through advertising.

How To Market To Certain Types of Customers

Paul: So how do you apply that to the CPA example that we were using? So, we have the CPA firm and we handle people who want to pay a lot of money to get their taxes done because it’s easier to have people pay a lot of money than to just have… we’re not doing the commodity basically, so we’re special advisors. So, we have blog posts about taking advantage of this new law. Don’t forget about this, don’t forget about that. We go out and we start advertising. We don’t want to have a used car salesman up there or that to be the result. How do we build ads for the higher end things as opposed to just, I guess, there’s a lot of products like an iPhone or an Android device or the new phone where I would imagine there’s a lot of vigor around those ads and capturing that response. How do you do it in some of these more long tailed decisions that people have to deal with?

Josh: Yeah, so if we stay on this CPA example. Let’s call it a premium CPA service that’s maybe 10x what you’d have anywhere else. I think, if you’re going to invest time and content and creating content, I think you want to reverse engineer what you want that content to accomplish.

Paul: Okay.

Josh: I think the mistake we see a lot of people making is they go up to the whiteboard, they brainstorm a bunch of topics or ideas that may or may not appeal to their target audience and then they’ll spend hours upon hours writing about it and guess what? Nobody cares.

Paul: And they never test it.

Josh: And they never test it. Yeah.

Paul: They never asked their customer what they thought.

Josh: Exactly. But on the other hand, if… because at least you have some existing customers and you’ve gone through this sales process, you know what their objections are in the sales process, you know what their fears are and you know that as a service provider, people are really buying time with you. And So, there’s a part of you that you need to be selling there.

Now if you know that, if you know that’s going to attract and convince people to work with you, start there! Don’t start with just cool ideas about taxes and laws. That stuff is good but its secondary. Focus on the things that are going to help you when you get on the phone with somebody be like miles ahead of where you would have been otherwise. And then that way, we can focus on having fewer content pieces but they’re more effective and leverage the paid traffic maybe, to get in front of those people more efficiently.

More Episodes:

This is Part 2 of 3 our interview with Joshua Sturgeon. Stay tuned for Part 3, coming soon! We’ll be talking about finding the right digital marketing platforms to grow your business!
If you missed part 1, about how to spark growth with digital marketing, you can listen to it here!

Show Notes:

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