Beyond Vanity Metrics: Building Revenue-Powered Campaigns with Anthony Chiaravallo

I get into this boardroom session and he asks the people, how many of you have a marketing person? And I'm like, hand up. And he's like, are they a brand or lead gen marketing person? And I was like, could you please explain to me what the difference is? And he goes, so you have the wrong one. I was like, damn it.

We build retargeting campaigns based on qualified users, site visits based on certain actions that users complete or don't complete. How does the brand come to life across different channels? And leveraging the AI tools, whether it's the large language models to help brainstorm ideas and audience insights, or generate copy in rapid succession, or leveraging a lot of the automation tools that are existing now on the platform level to help make your campaign set up more streamlined, more effective, faster. And the machine learning and the algorithms all play a big part.

Good day and welcome to the Wealthy Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Bob Govreau. I am so excited that you're here with me today. Hopefully we are going to continue to bring some extremely valuable content. In fact, I'm confident we're going to bring you some great confidence today, some great, incredible information today, I should say. And we're going to be talking about marketing. But before we hop into marketing, I want to just remind you that the Wealthy Entrepreneur podcast, this is the place where we dissect the elements that contribute to entrepreneurial success, from mindset and leadership to profits and revenue. Okay, let's talk marketing. So I have a guest that's going to be joining me today. His name is Anthony Caravalo who's got an agency that focuses on performance based marketing and how to scale with using performance based marketing. So I got to tell you guys before I bring Anthony in and, and he can't hear me say this right now until he's listening after. You know, performance based marketing is so powerful, you know, to understand how you can continue to spend money on generating effective leads and building your brand so that you're continuing to be able to invest more and continue to grow more and get a return on that spend is, is so incredibly powerful. And when you're working with an agency, this is something that you should be focusing on is how much you're investing and what your return is and to work with somebody who really understands that that's important. And, and to have the strategies in place to help you find the way for you to be financially and strategically successful. This episode is titled From Media Spend to Measurable Growth Scaling with Performance Marketing featuring performance marketing Expert and founder of Valo Media. As I mentioned, Anthony Kervalo. With over 16 years of agency leadership and 100 million plus in media spend under his belt, Anthony is the go to strategist for turning underperforming ad campaigns into high converting revenue generating machines. And I can tell you we've got some really great questions and some really great insights that are going to be coming out of today's episode. So you want to make sure that you stick all the way to the end with this. And in fact, Anthony's got a book coming out as well that we're going to make sure we drop a link to as well. Once you hear his expertise, you're definitely going to want to check that out too. So in this episode, Anthony shares his entrepreneurial journey from walking away way from big agency life to building a lean high impact performance media agency. He breaks down how he's used his own marketing playbook to scale Valo Media. The secrets to rescuing failing campaigns and what every entrepreneur needs to know about optimizing ad spend in today's digital economy. And also it's really great and I've got some really great questions lined up for Anthony too. As someone who's gone through not really understanding a lot about marketing, and not that I'm an expert in any way, but I can definitely keep up with the conversation and know what direction I'm heading for. Anthony's gonna give you a lot more insights of what that would look like for you as well as the business owner who needs to understand high level concepts of marketing, he's gonna share those insights with you today. So without further ado, I wanna invite Anthony Caravalo, founder and CEO of Valo Media, into our podcast today. All right, Anthony, so great to have you on the show today. Really excited to hear a little bit more about you, your story, and then learn from some of the techniques that I know you're, you're ready to share with us today. So maybe just kick it off, give us a little bit of an introduction and take us back to how you got started.

Yeah, of course. Happy to. Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to diving in many of these topics today. And you know, from an entrepreneurship perspective, it was something that I had an interest in at a very young age. Right. I was, you know, doing things as a kid that were always entrepreneurial in nature, whether it was building a Jurassic park under my deck and charging the neighbor's admission or having an onboarding program for other neighbors to basically Join the Legoland society that I had set up in my basement. So I feel like I've always been an entrepreneur at heart. And my first, what I could call real job out of college, I actually started in retail, but I don't really count that because it really wasn't for me. But my first real job was at a startup company in New York City in the media industry. And it was a sales job. It was literally smile and dial a hundred outbound calls a day, you know, boiler room esque environment. But it was, it had sex appeal. It was like, you know, it was the media business, it was the publishing world. And you know, we were basically taught to be entrepreneurs. We were in charge of our own projects. We had to generate buy in from the industry, we had to sell ad space, we had to get thought leaders on board, we had to work with journalists and designers to bring the whole thing to life. And that's when I really caught the entrepreneurs entrepreneurial bug, was in that first job that I consider is probably way back in 2008 at this point. And it was started by a Swedish entrepreneur. He had offices all over the world and they had these great company events out in Greece. And I was just like, this is the life for me. And I loved the Hustle and I sucked at first. I couldn't make a sale to save my life. But the mentorship of some of those office leaders, some of those early colleagues at that company who I'm still friends with to this day, I think, you know, really helped shape who I am as an entrepreneur. It would be many, many years before I started my own company. Right. And so from there I sort of rose through the ranks in various jobs. Everything from, you know, becoming a digital sales consultant to pivoting into being a marketing director. Eventually I made it a personal goal to land a role at a big agency. So I actually started freelancing. At first this was maybe Now I'm like 10 years into my career, you know, you know, taking certain sacrifices along the way. Choosing the longer commute, for example, that was, you know, a better opportunity, less money. But I saw the potential and it's like, all right, you know what, I'm going to make this sacrifice. I'm going to do the two hour commute each way because I saw the opportunity to build the network to work with brands that were of interest to me that were some of the biggest brands in the world. And so I did that for about six years at these big agencies and, and eventually, you know, after Covid hit, my position was Eliminated. And I had a client at, on the side at that time that I was just consulting with. A buddy of mine had started a, like a quick service restaurant chain here at the Jersey Shore. They serve like acai bowls and they actually grew to, they're over 200 locations now. But at the time they only had maybe like 15, 20 locations, which was still pretty impressive. And so I had them as a client on the side. I had been doing, you know, various consulting over the years for you know, small businesses like friends, family. Right. And so I was like, you know what, I'm going to just, I want to give this a shot. I have always wanted to start my own company. I had a few false starts over the years. So I was like, this is my time. Like you know, Covid hit job was eliminated. I got the client, let's do this. So that's sort of how I got started. And eventually that led to what's now my performance media agency or consultancy. And that's where sort of got my start into that whole world taking my sort of side hustle full time, as many do.

Absolutely. And so maybe just explain your agency. So Valo Media. Right. And so what. I know you said performance, so what exactly does that look like?

Yeah, so performance marketing is a branch of marketing that is very tied to business outcomes and measurable results. And the, the way that we define performance marketing is paid social, paid search, what people call pay per Click or Google AdWords. We also have our own in house demand side platform which allows us to run programmatic ads whether it's video or CTV which is connected TV across the open web across various devices. We're actually doing podcasting advertising for some clients right now. So pretty much any form of digital. I've done traditional in the past, but decided to really just focus, focus on digital marketing with our current company and we've been very successful with it and we've got just some great momentum going and we've got a broad spectrum of services under that umbrella. So we also offer like analytics and creative development for these digital campaigns because that really goes hand in hand, 100%.

Can I first, I want to give you a compliment, a big one that I think is such an asset for anyone who's in marketing that you sort of shared your experience in being in sales. Right. And so often, you know, working with different agencies, they've never gone and actually been reaching out to those leads that they're generating and going through the sales process. Like when you talked about outbound sales as one of your first jobs. I was like, what a great asset for every marketer to know because that's like the ground floor of dealing with, with leads and maybe even creating leads, you know, in that, in that way. So anyone listening, listen, if you can find a marketer who's actually done the sales calls as well, huge value add in there. Such a huge asset. So to love that, I want to share a quick story with you because I think it's relevant for our listeners also. It was a huge point for me and again, I'm going to give you a huge kudos in how you've built your marketing agency because I think it's brilliant. I hired a coach and my first coach was back in 2008 and it evolved that I started working with him a little bit more and we started doing these quarterly sessions where we'd go in with a bunch of different accounting firms and we'd go in and have this eight person boardroom session and he would always have a different topic. And the one topic that sort of came up was marketing. And I was always what I would determine to be a high performer and sort of eager. So I wanted to get into this session, you know, and be the superstar. So before getting into this, I hired a marketing person internally, my first one and I saw that she was really good. Well, she was loud on social. Like I just felt like she was capturing attention and I thought that that's what I needed was just more attention. And. And so I get into this boardroom session and he asked the people, how many of you have a marketing person? And I'm like, hand up. Super keen. I do Rob. Yeah, this is me. And he's like, are they a brand marketing person or a lead gen marketing person? And I was like, could you please explain to me what the difference is? And he goes, so you have the wrong one. I was like, damn it. So I definitely had the loudness being more of the brand awareness shout from the rooftops, but not converting into leads. So I love how you've created your agency where you know, you're focusing on performance based lead generation, converting to deals, right? Like that is. Guys, if you're working with an agency of any sort, this is the type of agency that you want to work with because it's based on delivering results which is driving revenue for you versus just people seeing your name more often. Consider it, you know, the billboard of the world where everyone drives by and your pictures on there and it feels nice and like your ego is stroked where you actually have the advertising that drives you revenue in your business and you can see exactly what's working and not working. And that's everything that Anthony said. So kudos to you my friend. That's. Hey, I should maybe do some sales for you. Anthony.

I think I'd love to hire you. That's, that's perfect actually.

But you know, from a, from an outsider perspective, you know, you've built this agency to do exactly what business owners need. And if they're looking to scale, this is the type of agency. And I got to tell you guys too, Anthony works with some very, very successful brands. And you know, these successful brands don't just come in and pick anybody off the street. Finding people who can actually get a large ROI in what they do because they know how to do it, especially if they've been in the sales role before. Awesome. So kudos to you my friend. I'm going to turn it back to you here. I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the marketing that you do. And I know that we've sort of identified that, you know, one of your skill sets or one of your areas of expertise is you come in, you identify underperforming sort of ads or lead gen strategies and you turn them into what you reference as revenue powerhouses. Can you walk us through sort of what you would identify as, you know, a low performing campaign and some of the strategies that you have to turn it into a revenue powerhouse?

Yeah, absolutely. So happy to dig into that. When we audit like performance marketing campaigns, we do this all the time for big brands. We do it for small companies. I've done it for other agencies. So other marketing agencies will hire us to come in and say, hey, take a look at our paid media. What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? And I'm sad to say the majority of agencies are not doing it right. Right. And it's important for what some of these brands are paying. It's really surprising. But the truth is you don't know. They don't know what they don't know. Including the clients actually now, yes, some clients are very savvy with performance marketing. Others that we support, creative and PR agencies specifically, not so much. And that includes on the client side as well. So one of the first things that we do is we have a whole checklist that we go through when we're auditing a client's paid media performance. Let's just start with Google Ads. Cause that's very common. Clients spend a lot of money on Google, on Google Ads, brands across various industries. It's very competitive. It's typically a lower funnel channel, which means higher intent. You've got users, people every day going into search, looking for services, products, you name it, right? So Google Ads is effectively a, you know, lower, higher intent channel where brands want to show up for various keywords. And what we've found, some of the biggest issues is just with the account structure and the setup, right. 90% of the effort is having a good strategy and having a good campaign structure. And that's where most brands, you know, that's like the, that's like the foundation and that's where most of them are missing the mark. They don't have campaigns segmented properly. They have keywords grouped, you know, incorrectly. You've got branded keywords which is people searching for their brand name mixed in with unbranded keywords. Those are people searching for more generic products or services. Right. And so think about the difference between, you know, someone searching for a landscaper by name in their area versus just landscaping services near me. Those are the difference between a brand, branded and unbranded keyword. And so we find a lot of customers and a lot of clients have those, those keywords mixed together and they don't have their campaign segmented correctly. Another thing we see is they don't have any competition. Competitive conquesting campaigns, that should be another line item where you're actually targeting your competitors names. We also see bid strategies that are totally wrong. We see, for example, when you go into Google Ads, they've got tons of data in there, so you have to know what you're looking for. Number one, when you're looking at bids, you might see that you're paying a certain cost per click for a certain keyword. But then the client is bidding for something that's for, for an amount that is five times that. It's like, no, no, your bids need to be very closely matched, maybe a little bit above what the actual cost per click is because that's going to then make sure you're not overpaying for clicks. And then number three I think is important is tracking. Most clients do not have the right tracking set up. They think they do. And the agencies, believe it or not, are actually not so good at this. At least many of the ones that we've worked with and audited. And believe it or not, this is very common with marketing agencies. And the tracking is so important, especially now with AI is so prevalent in these campaigns. If you don't have the right tracking and you're not sending the right signals back to the algorithm back to the Google Ads, the meta ads of the world, then you're feeding it bad data. And that AI, that algorithm is going to take that bad data and it's going to compound your problem tenfold and then you're really talking about wasted spend. So what we have found is that clients, campaigns and accounts get flooded with junk traffic because it's informed by bad data. And now to dive a little deeper into the, into the tracking thing, you know, we look at what marketers call conversions, which is any type of post, click action. So somebody clicks on your Google Ad, come to your website, what do they do? Do they fill out a lead form? Do they, you know, click to call? Do they, you know, buy something? Is it an E commerce brand? Are you selling products through your website? Do they about complain, complete a purchase? Do they add something to their cart and then leave? There's any number of actions that somebody can take when they land on your website. Most of the time performance marketers like to track leads and all these things. Something that actually ties it to real revenue and that's great. And we do that and we optimize campaigns towards those objectives. However, the majority of people that come to your website, they're not going to complete that final conversion on that first visit. It might take 5, 6, 7 different touch points before they're ready to complete convert. So we measure other types of conversions as well, what are called behavioral conversions. And this is something that we see a lot of brands and a lot of clients miss. And I'll give you an example. A behavioral conversion is somebody who comes to your website, they might not be ready to buy, they might not be ready to fill out a lead form yet. So we need another way to qualify this person. So we look at metrics such as time on site, are they spending more than two minutes on the website, for example, are they visiting more multiple pages? Again, they're not ready to convert. But we need a bet, we need a way to qualify them even though they didn't convert, because we need to send that signal back to the ads platform, whether It's Google Meta, LinkedIn, whatever. We run ads across all the major platforms and we need to send that signal back. So that way the algorithm and it's a lot of it's driven by AI now is we have to make sure that it's getting those quality data signals so that we can qualify users who are not converting because again, we need to bring them back. So that brings me to my next point, which is retargeting how Are we now bringing back these users and most.

Of us, the magical marketing trick. I love retargeting.

Yeah, you gotta have the retargeting. There's so many different ways to do it. And we find clients are like, oh, yeah, we're running retargeting. And we look at it, we're like, actually, your retargeting campaigns are reaching 95% new audiences. You're not even retargeting the right people. So we build retargeting campaigns based on qualified users, site visits, based on certain actions that users complete or don't complete. So, for example, a user adds a product to their cart, doesn't check out okay. They get dropped into their own specific retargeting pool, and we use dynamic creative optimization or what's called dco to then retarget those users with specific product ads based on that item that they had in their cart. You've probably seen it. Anyone who shops online is like, I was looking at this product, I didn't buy it. Now all of a sudden, I'm seeing it everywhere. It's in my social feed, it's on this website. It's literally everywhere reminding me to go buy that. So that's another thing that we do.

That'S awesome and love that retargeting. You know, the first time I learned about retargeting, I think it was on Facebook ads, would have been when I first maybe learned about Facebook ads. So I don't know if it was 10 years ago, I don't know when they started, but somebody that I was working with at the time had sort of said, oh, yes, we retarget those people who've sort of looked at or spent a certain amount of time on something. We retarget them multiple times with different other areas to continue to get them excited or to not let them slip away. And I was like, wow, that's pretty cool. That's pretty powerful. So if your marketing advisors that you're working with, guys, are not talking about retargeting as a tool, regardless of whether they have my level of knowledge or Anthony's level of knowledge on how to do it, they need to be at least looking at that and optimizing because, man, oh man, there's just so much goodness that can be happening in there. Anthony, question for you on, and I know you, you talked about a lot of different metrics and some interesting. On the behavioral conversion time on site, stuff like that. Thinking from a high level, from like a CEO perspective, when you're looking at assessing whether or not your marketing team is doing a good job. You, you know, a lot of the conversation comes up as return on ad spend or roas overall, just as a high level, what would you suggest if, if a CEO was looking at that as a metric, what would a guideline be for someone doing a good job or not so great of a job?

Yeah, it's a great question. And again, it's so different by industry. Right. We look for, we look for a ROAS between 3 and 7x. So for every dollar you spend, you get 3 back or 7 back, right? I think it 100% depends on the industry. And here's the other thing. Some CEOs can get very caught up in ROAS where every single dollar needs to be attributed directly to a specific campaign. Right. And there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of issues with that approach because it's primarily a last click attribution model where you're measuring the last click somebody made and then they bought or they cap, you know, filled out a lead form, whatever it may be. But you're ignoring potentially every other touch point that that user had before they, before they got to that. So just because somebody clicked on a Google Ad and bought doesn't mean that they didn't see a post on Facebook and were influenced or they didn't see that billboard, right? It's like, so it's a little bit more complex, not a perfect science. Now there are, you know, clients that we work with that have, you know, robust multi touch attribution models or omnichannel attribution models. But it's hard, it's not an exact science, right? But it is important because we, we've had clients across the board, we've had clients that were investing $80 million a year just in the lower funnel, just in those Google Ad campaigns and ignoring for the most part the top and the middle of the funnel, awareness and consideration and just going right to conversion. And it worked for a time. They were getting really good returns on ad spend. They were getting really good performance. They could invest 80 million and make 150 million. They were happy. But sure enough, what happened was over time, more conversations, competitors entered the market. They were spending more. And Google's solution was you need to be spending more money. You got to pump more money. And they're like, well, we're, we're capped. We can't spend any more money. Right. And so they started to learn the hard way that there does need to be a balance between brand and performance marketing and so I'm a performance marketer. I'm all about it. But I also recognize the importance of brand. But you can't do them in a silo. Right. And I think that's been the mistake, is that the brand team is doing this. They're, you know, buying billboards, they're running these TV ads, they're doing radio, whatever they're doing. And then the performance performance team is like, nope, we're focused on transactional media. That's it. I spent a dollar. I made five. Okay. There needs to be. You cannot have those things in silos. There's a lot of studies that have been coming out. Actually just recently attended adweek in New York City, maybe about six months ago. And there was a ton of studies that came out from WARC W A R C about how the brands that have effectively integrated the brand and the performance marketing teams are just exploding, while the ones who were siloed or ignored brand or ignored performance performance and just went all brand are really struggling. And I've seen it with our own clients. And so now we're seeing sort of a shift in the industry, you know, going back to the connection of brand and performance. I actually wrote a book about this that's coming out in the next couple of weeks. So it's called Brand Powered Media, and it's about connecting brand with performance to drive absolutely amazing results. And so it's really key, especially for CEOs, because I get, again, I get it. You want to attribute every dollar that's spent. And there is a way to do that. It's by having, you know, good communication between the teams. It's about having good measurement systems in place, and it's about making sure your attribution model is aligned with the reality that we're seeing in the marketplace today, which is that no user journey is the same. Right. It's a fragmented media landscape. There's, you know, thousands of channels and touch points and ads that people are seeing every single day. And each one potentially plays a role in that customer journey. And so that's something that we're really working with clients on, helping to pull together this year.

Absolutely. And you know what? There's definitely been a huge push towards personal brand and identity brands over the last few years. And to your point about the performance marketing, you need to have some form of that branding in place. And what a great way to have performance marketing marketing back behind a strong brand. So the collaboration of both is definitely something people should be looking at. It's definitely a combination is super Powerful. Okay. Brand powered media. This book. Is there a way that people can get on a pre order list? Do you have a link that we can share after the episode where people can click on it below and make sure they get an access to a copy of it?

Absolutely, yeah. Brandpowered media.com I'll actually, I'll throw up a splash page today. Actually it's not live yet but this is one of the first mentions of it on a podcast. So it'll, it'll be live by the time this episode goes live. And yeah, would love people to, to preorder.

Yeah, no, that would be fantastic. Love that. And I will make sure that we order at least one copy as well. Appreciate that. I'm excited to hear it actually. It sounds really great. So here, here's one of the other challenges that I see with marketing agencies now. Marketing. I would say the barriers to entry to get into the marketing space are pretty low, right? Not to be a successful marketer, but to get into the space. Anyone can say, oh well, you know, like my first social media person was like, oh well, she knew how to make a post on Facebook. She got hired. She was annoying me enough on social media that I thought that she'd be a great person to annoy everyone else. And yeah, that didn't work out so well. But you know, the barriers to entry are low. One of my pet peeves that I see especially, you know, having access to, you know, over 4,000 companies financial information sort of across North America is where I see a marketing agency that talks about how they're going to really scale somebody's business by generating all these great leads and the return on investment. So great. And then when I look at their numbers, they're not scaling or generating enough leads to really be financially successful. And now my understanding is that you actually practice what you preach, which I love. So I would love to hear a little bit about how you use performance marketing to grow your agency as well.

Absolutely right. And it's, it's, it's typical to see this. It's. What is it the shoemaker's dilemma where all your clients have these marketing campaigns but you have no shoes, no marketing campaigns yourself, so you have to walk the talk. Right. And, and it's not always easy because you're always busy. You want to do the best job for your clients. So, you know, for me, I've had a renewed focus on marketing my own agency this year. And it's different. Like we have clients that are in consumer, that are in, you know, B2B industrial equipment versus supply. We have technology clients and so the strategies that we, that we deploy for them are different than what we do for ourselves because knowing who our buyer is and how our sales cycle looks, but we take the same strategies and we look at it through an integrated marketing lens. It's like, okay, out of all the channels that are out there, awareness, consideration, conversion, you know, which ones are most effective at converting our audience. Right. And we also test a lot of things. So in the past we've done a lot of thought leadership. So I'm very active on LinkedIn, consistently posting content and got a decent following on there. So I think a content strategy is really important. Same goes for the website. Consistently publishing relevant content on the blog that are using SEO key phrases that are targeted towards our exact audience and the things that they're looking to accomplish and achieve. And then of course, running ads for our agency. So whether that's Google Ads, whether that's LinkedIn ads, we're actually experimenting now with a LinkedIn thought leadership campaign. And I don't know if you or your listeners have heard of these, but they're relatively new, they've been around for maybe a year or so. You actually create content on your personal page and, and then you can run that in an ad campaign. So the ads are not running from your brand account like your company's page is running from your own personal page. And that puts a face to a name. Right? Because especially in service based businesses like marketing agencies, people buy from people. It's very relationship driven. It's a long sales cycle. So building that personal connection is so important. And these ads, basically, you know, we're running them as part of a campaign that distributes my content directly into the feeds of our icp, our ideal customer profile. And so that's a great way to generate awareness and engagement. So I would say top to mid funnel for those, but then of course, we're driving them to a form where they can click to book a call. Right. So these are very effective strategies that we use. We always try and look at the full marketing funnel. I don't want to just invest only in the bottom funnel because again, now I'm asking people to convert that didn't even know me. They don't know what we do do. They haven't taken the time to read our case studies to learn about our brand. So we are investing in the full funnel and then of course, retargeting these individuals that come to the website, building relationships through podcasting. I wrote a book this year which we've talked about. So that's another form of marketing that I'm doing. And then speaking engagements at conferences and also sponsoring relevant conferences. These are the things that we do in the marketing world to engage with qualified buyers. Right. Our buyers are CMOs, marketing directors, directors of digital strategy. People that are making budget decisions for their companies, for their brands, that are looking for agency partners that understand performance marketing that can help them put a strategy together and importantly work collaboratively with their other agency partners, their internal teams, whether it's brand or creative or pr, analytics, whatever may be. So having that collaborative approach in our messaging, in our campaigns is important because it's a big value proposition to what.

We do for sure. And you know what, even you talking about all those different strategies, I'm like, okay, I'm doing a lot of the same things. So hey, if Anthony's doing it, you know, I gotta be on a similar track. I am intrigued about the thought leadership campaign. I think that's exciting. Like I've been around on LinkedIn for quite some time with just continuous providing content. It would be interesting to start to convert that because it is, it is interesting. And I'd like your take on this too, but it feels like people are more likely to connect with a personal brand than a corporate brand. As far as, you know, sharing. If you ever look at companies brand pages versus the individual leaders of those companies, the individual leaders always seem to be substantially higher. Like you said, being able to connect individually, people buy from people. Curious though, from your perspective, with all of your experience in different media buying and using different platforms, what's your platform or media of choice?

So from a paid media perspective, I would say it's been LinkedIn. You know, Google is, is, can be effective, but you have to spend a lot of money in art, in, in this industry. If I want to bid on keywords for a pay per click agency, I mean people are paying over on $100 a click for one click, you know, and we're a smaller agency so we can't compete with the guys that are spending half a million a month. And there are agencies out there that are spending that on acquiring pay per click clients. We're not there yet. Maybe one day we will be, but for the most part it's hard to compete. So LinkedIn can be very cost effective. It can be expensive as well, but if you can be very specific with your campaign, we can take that content. And again, I post regularly on LinkedIn very similar to you, but that's only reaching my followers I need to reach people that aren't my followers. And so the thought leadership ads are a great way to do that. It does spend the budget pretty quick. So if you have a budget of let's say 500 or $1,000 a month, that comes down to about 15 to $30 a day, you know, you're going to spend that budget pretty much pretty early on in the day because the CPMs are like over $200, which is the cost per thousand impressions. But it's something that we found to be effective in generating that trust, building that awareness and just building warm audiences. That's the key. A lot of people jump right to lead gen and start like I need to get leads. So we're going to, you know, email blast 10,000 people, but you're not taking the time to nurture that audience. And so a lot of what we do for ourselves and for other clients is building warm audiences, running content that generates awareness. Sure, they watch the video, they learn more, they click through, they engage, they read case studies, whatever it may be, they're not ready to convert. But that's okay because now we're taking those people and we're actually retargeting them through what we call warm audiences. So now when I'm serving an ad to convert to someone, they've already been primed, they watched a video from us, they, you know, we've already sort of bucketed them into a different targeting list where we have ad engagers, people that watch 10 seconds or more of our video, people that visited the site and spent over two minutes. These are really effective ways to re engage those, those audiences.

And from what I've seen with LinkedIn too, as far as, you know, targeting an audience, their targets seem to be maybe the most specialized or more specific versus others, which is, I don't know, it's pretty great. We've got a campaign going right now looking and for recruitment of new team members and you know, the ability to be very specific on who it is that we're looking for and their experience and titles is so, so great. I feel like LinkedIn is so, so good for that.

Absolutely.

Okay, great. Well, thank you for that. Let's, let's talk about where digital marketing is going because for someone like me, I pay attention. I'm not a marketer per se. I just play in the space and try and keep up. But that's what my marketing team is, is for. And working with experts such as yourself to bring, bring in even greater expertise. Where do we see the digital marketing going you know, is AI going to have an impact on this? How do you see that flowing and what does the next few years look like?

So absolutely, AI is already having a pretty big impact. And I think just this week actually Google announced a new ad type called AI Max. I don't know if you've heard about this yet, but it's a, it's an evolution of their performance Max ad type, which many marketers were hesitant about because they considered it a black box. It was like Google handles everything and the AI handles everything and you don't know where your ads are showing up or what, you know, creative combinations are being used, couldn't control certain things related to your bid strategy or the placements. But now Google has offered a new ad type called AI Max that will give more manual control back to marketers so you can see where your ads are showing up. You can disable certain placements that maybe you don't want your ads showing up, maybe certain platforms like Gmail or you know, other placement types that are generating more, you know, low quality traffic, for example, and we're going to just see more of this. I know Meta is doing something similar at the same time they're trying to cut out marketing agencies. Zuckerberg just made a bunch of comments that just come to us for everything. We'll do it all. Our AI will create all your ads for you and you know, the algorithm will handle everything. But anyone who's worked with the Meta Pro team knows that that is a complete fallacy because the support and the strategy of the pros that work there are anything but pro. It's pretty bad. So I think marketing agencies are safe, but the role of the media buyer is changing. It's less of the optimization slog and it's more so strategy and creative. And so that's going to be, I think the next iteration of where marketers and media buyers go is actually, it's a good thing. It's taking away a lot of the grunt work and it's, it's freeing up headspace for marketers and media buyers, digital media buyers specifically, to think more strategically and how, how does the brand, you know, come to life across different channels? And leveraging the AI tools, whether it's the large language models to help brainstorm ideas, mine audience insights or generate copy, you know, in rapid succession, or you know, leveraging a lot of the automation tools that are existing now on the platform level to help make your, your campaign set up more streamlined, more effective, faster. And, and of course the machine learning and the Algorithms all play a big part. Those are getting smarter all the time. But it comes down to the data quality. So if you're not feeding these AI systems good data, then it's just going to compound your problem. So you need somebody, at least for now, you need need somebody with that understands the platforms, that understands these things, that can go in, look at it holistically and understand, okay, where do we need to be showing up? What's the strategy here? AI can't quite do that just yet. It might change, but for the most part, we need that human strategist. And also from a brand perspective, Right. The one thing that differentiates brands is that customer experience, number one. But also the emotional connection that a brand is has. And so leaning into their brand story, these are things that AI can't replicate. Sure, it could come up with ideas, but when you're talking about transactional media, lower funnel performance campaigns, the algorithm is just always going to optimize to the lowest common denominator. And so what that's going to do is it's going to create just a sea of sameness among brands because again, the algorithm is just going to keep producing what's performing, what's performing, what's performing. And it's ultimately, you're going to end up with five brands in the same space, all looking the same, sounding the same, running the exact same ads, and then the whole thing is going to break. You need to have that differentiator for your brand and you need to have that story, that customer experience really dialed in. And you have to establish that emotional connection because that's what's going to make people choose you. That's what's going to drive loyalty, that's what's going to drive customer lifetime value. And then the performance marketing and the AI tools and the efficiency and the automation, that's just, just fuel on the fire, you know. So starting with that core, starting with that foundation of brand, and then going out from there with the performance, that is going to be the future and that. And you're going to see the brands that do that well are going to be the ones that really thrive.

Okay, so that was extremely valuable and insightful. Thank you. If I'm a business owner right now, which I am, but if I'm a business owner listening right now, and I have a budget of, let's say, and I know it's going to differ from industry to industry, but just as a general Overview, I've got $5,000 a month to spend in marketing. What's my best Play going forward. What should I be thinking about with that sort of ad spend?

Yeah, so with that ad spend, the first thing I would do is find an agency partner to conduct a data immersion and just really just say, hey, let's just spend, you know, two weeks or however long it takes, one month, but usually not that long, at least for us. Some agencies are a little slower. But do a data immersion audit. All your existing systems. Where are we spending money currently? You know, even if, even if they're not spending money currently, let's look at our website analytics. Let's look at what traffic's converting. Where are they coming from? What keywords are they driving? What locations are they coming from? Look at your customer data. So if you have an email list, how, you know, what does that list look like? Like, what are some questions we could ask our existing customers to help us generate valuable insights to then inform our marketing strategy? So before you spend a single dollar on paid media, I would say invest in doing a proper data immersion, a proper digital channel audit, which we offer to clients for free, by the way, just to get an understanding. It's like, okay, here's our baseline, here's what's working, here's what's not. Here's where we're spending money and getting no return, and here's where our tracking is not quite, you know, up to snuff. Here's where our attribution model is falling short. Once you have a better idea, then you can start saying, okay, we can set some benchmarks. We can now put together a strategy and say, what channels should we be on? Some clients, you know, it might make a lot of sense to be on Google and Facebook. Others, it might make more sense to be doing, you know, something totally different. So it really just depends. I would say in many instances, the digital paid channels are the most efficient, right? The Googles, the Facebooks of the world, you're always going to get your biggest return on those types of channels. But it doesn't mean that you should be ignoring other channels and other campaigns either. And so I would say start with a data immersion audit. Your existing ecosystem, your analytics, see where, you know, the leaky bucket might be, where, where is money just pouring out? And then from there, once you have that understanding, now we can put together a strategy and understand, okay, where do we start? So with that data, you'll start with just a few tests. Let's test channel X, Y and Z for a small portion of the budget. Let's see what works, let's see what doesn't. Work. So I wouldn't even Recommend spending that first 5k in the first month. Probably spend half that. And until we figure out the formula for what works, what drives those most efficient business outcomes that we want and then from there we can scale those campaigns. So really important. And then also quarterly or monthly refreshes of creative, we audit so many clients, big brands that are just running the same ads over and over again, they're not doing the proper amount of creative refreshes, especially on Google where that's just easy to just set it and forget it, which we find a lot of other agencies do. But there needs to be an audit of your creative as well. And so as part of that process, I would recommend taking a long hard look at your different ads that you're running, particularly on Google, and making sure that your search ads match the keywords that users are typing in because that's going to improve your quality score, it's going to lower your cost per conversion and it's going to raise your click through rate.

And so one more question sort of as a follow up to this. So as a lot of business owners who, you know, when you're looking at creating content, I'm guessing you would suggest video probably gets higher level of engagement than other copy. Looking at that and from again from a business owner perspective and going the idea of creating this sort of content is daunting and time consuming. Any advice for the business owners on how to, you know, scale their copy so that it's constantly nice and fresh and sort of presents the brand well?

I would say absolutely find a way to work collaboratively with AI tools that can be very effective for generating copy and content at scale. But don't just go with what the AI spins out. You really need to train it. You need to have it ingest all of your company backstory and data. The more data you could feed into a large language model, the better because then it can get very specific and it could be very unique in the content that it helps you generate and it could produce that content much more efficiently. But of course you also, I would recommend, you know, working with people that are specialists, right. And so there's actually a lot of great talent coming out of like Western Europe and, and so sites like Upwork, you can find really, really great content strategists, writers of all kinds for very, very efficient rates. So I actually really enjoyed listening to your most recent guest actually where he talked about, you know, don't feel the need to have all your employees within a 30 kilometer radius. Right. I think, you know, we've, I've built an agency. Yeah, I do have an office that I go into just to kind of get out of the house. But all my employees are remote and they're able to, to do what they have to do. They know their jobs and I give them the freedom to do them. And they're all over the world because I want the best talent. And so don't be afraid of, you know, looking outside your area to hire very, very efficient people who are the best at what they do, even though they might be 4,000 miles away. So that's a huge leverage opportunity in a business, especially for, you know, a company that's smaller and the budgets are tight. Leverage. Those, those experts that are offshore but not necessarily, you know, in your backyard because you're going to find that they can help you with this and they can produce content very efficiently and very, very high quality and they can do it fast.

Awesome. Love that. Anthony, this has been incredible. So many amazing, amazing insights. If people were looking to reach out to you, we're going to have for sure the link to your new book, which is very exciting. I look forward to checking it out. If people were looking to connect with you and your team, what's the best way for people to find you?

They can Visit my website, Valomedia.com. that's V A L L O Media. Com. They could also follow me on LinkedIn so you'll have the spelling of my name in the podcast description so they could find me on LinkedIn. I'm always posting valuable content so would love for them to give me a follow.

Amazing, Anthony. Thank you. Once again, guys, this has been the wealthy entrepreneur speaking with Anthony on all things digital media and performance based marketing. To be honest, so many insights and if you don't understand some of the concepts that are in here, that's okay. That's why there's experts like Anthony to help support you and your business. But knowing that you're working with somebody who's got these insights and the knowledge to be able to help support you in the right way is so valuable. And guys, I gotta tell you, I've had too many times where I've worked with people who, who maybe didn't have the knowledge that Anthony has and it sounds like it's pretty rare. Anthony looks like pretty much of a gem in the space, but, you know, finding somebody who knows what it is that can help take you to the next level is super important. And finding that right partner is so valuable. So once again Anthony, thank you for all of your insights here.

It's my pleasure. Thank you so much.

So, guys, this is the Wealthy Entrepreneur. If you like this episode, make sure you give us a follow. Right. And if there's anything in here that you've liked or you have questions about, drop a comment below. I'm going to guess that Anthony's going to be checking for those. I will definitely be checking for those as well. And if there's somebody that you feel could benefit from this, the knowledge of how performance based marketing can work, please share this. Right. Grab this, send it to somebody who you know has been struggling with marketing or if you're you have somebody who's looking to enhance their personal brand or their company brand or to look at scale and generate more leads in a predictable way. So very valuable. Grab this, send this to them. We are on a mission to empower entrepreneurs with the confidence to make informed decisions and to ultimately make a huge impact in the world. So if you can do that and share that information with the right people, that's exactly what we're looking for. Once again, make sure you give us a follow because I would love to see you next week when the Next Episode episode comes out. We're always here to drive really valuable content for you. But once again, my name is Bob Gover. I'm the host of the Wealthy Entrepreneur. It's been a pleasure to have you here and I look forward to seeing you next time.