A Political Marketing Strategist Reveals Big Time Secrets Of Influence with Phillip Stutts

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap em in bacon for business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business. Pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to bacon wrap business. This is Brad Costanzo and today I got a very special episode for me because I've got a repeat guest back. But he's not a repeat guest by your standards because you might not have heard him before. In fact, I interviewed him a few months back and, and we had a problem with the audio and I didn't catch it until I launched the episode. And I got some feedback from people saying, hey, what were the audio cutouts? So although a few of you may have heard a little bit about my guest today, the pleasure for me is I get to have another conversation with him because the first one was so killer, it kind of kills me that I've got to redo it. But that allows me to go deeper and to ask some other questions now that I know a lot more about what he does. That being said, I'd like to introduce you to, to Philip Stutz. Now, Philip is the author of an amazing book called Fire Them the Seven Lies Digital Marketers Sell and the Truth About Political Strategies that Help Businesses Win. You see, one of the interesting things about Philip is that he's got 20 years or more of political and marketing experience and he's worked with Everybody from Fortune 200 companies to presidential congressional campaigns. And he's done a lot of the really, really deeply important work in the political arena that it's translated to where he's now helping businesses large and small with theirs. And he's got some very interesting viewpoints about the way a lot of digital marketers and agencies work and the way they don't work, especially if you're a client who's hiring them. And I'd like to welcome Philip back to the show right now. Philip, are you on the line?

I am, and I think the universe is talking to us and saying we need to talk again. So I am honored to be here and appreciate your time.

Agreed. Well, we're going to treat this as if I don't know anything about you, but as I mentioned, for the folks, you've got a really interesting background with in your career, but you're also, you're also fighting a very Rare. Is it an incurable disease as well that you've had for the past, that you discovered, like in the past decade?

Yeah, yeah. No. I have an incurable esophageal disease called achalasia and that was diagnosed in 2012. And it's sort of the impetus of everything I kind of do. I wrote the book in large part because for a long, long time I sort of didn't live with very much purpose. And I was going through the motions and I was successful, but I wasn't passionate or purpose driven. And I was diagnosed with this disease in 2012. And, you know, the long and skinny of it is my esophagus doesn't work. It'll never work. The muscles and nerves are dead. I've had three major surgeries on it. I've had 15 minor procedures. That affects one out of about 100,000 people. Most of people are in their 70s and 80s. I was diagnosed in my 30s. And you know, the doctors a few years ago gave me the diagnosis that I would have a feeding tube for the rest of my life in the next few years. And that was like this. You know, you always hear people don't make moves and they don't grow until there's a lot of pain. Yeah. And I always implore people to not wait for the pain, but I did. I'm one of those people. And so the pain hit in that moment and I decided to change everything in my life, from my health to my relationships, to my family, to my business, and started a political marketing firm less than four years ago. And we've built it to over $20 million now in less than four years. And then I saw all of these crazy strategies and principles used in political marketing and wondered how they would work for businesses and was able try those out with a few friend, entrepreneurial friends of mine and had crazy growth for them. And then so I went out and interviewed 100 CEOs, from Fortune 500 to small business, and started asking them about the marketing, about their marketing, about digital marketers. And they kept telling me there was this massive frustration in the marketplace that they felt people were taking advantage of them. The marketing firms that they were hiring, that they didn't get to see an roi. And I saw all these things, Brad, and I went, man, that would never fly in Polish. I know that's hard to believe, but the political, you know, inside a political campaign, we're very ethical in the way we run political or we ran marketing campaigns. And so I decided to tell that story. And now we've got a massive bench of corporate clients and every single one of them has grown their business by applying political principles and strategies to their, to their companies. And so that's sort of where I am today and where it led to.

Nice. So a couple questions. A lot of them feel as though they're being taken advantage of. Give me some specifics on some of the ways in which they feel taken advantage of.

Sure. So in politics, in over 20 years of working in politics and political marketing, I've never, not one time, never, ever have I had a contract that wasn't month to month. And the reason being is it's just standard in politics. And so that's all I ever known. And the fact is that if a contract is month to month, as me, as the marketer, who am I putting my emphasis on? Is it trying to sell you something that you don't need? Is it trying to make a quick buck or because you've locked into a long term contract and I can do whatever I want or every single month, do I have to think about your outcomes as the business owner? Do I have to think about how I'm innovating, how fast I'm going? Am I putting my needs above yours or am I putting the business owner's needs above mine? And everything fundamentally comes down to that one. And that's, you know, one of the lies in the book I talk about, which is if you have a month to month contract, I must prove it every single month. And the reason that this was so shocking to me is when I Talked to these CEOs, they all said they were locked into six 12, 18 month contracts that they couldn't break. And even if the marketing firm didn't do their job or they were forced to pay them until the contract ran out, and I went, that is insane. That would never happen. In political marketing. When a candidate hires us, we either perform every single month, improve it and grow their market share with voters or we're out of business. And so that was the number one thing I found. And all these business owners were like, what do you mean I don't have to sign a long term contract? And I'm like, no, you should demand that of your marketing agency. And so that's one of the ways that I'm trying to get business owners to take back the power of their own marketing so that they win first and then the marketing agency wins second. And by the way, that's sort of my model. Right? And when the business owner grows their company because of the marketing that we do how long do they end up working with me? Like, forever. So I'm going to win as long as I put their needs first. And in politics, you know, it's kind of like this. We worked on a presidential campaign in 2016, and that particular we were in the Iowa caucuses and the candidate won the Iowa caucuses and we ran an ad, and the ad was then recognized as the top digital ad in all presidential politics of campaign ads that election cycle. That didn't make me any money in 2016. But I was able to take the success of my client first. Right. They won the primary, they were excited. They won, they got their outcome first. And then I was able to leverage it and market my own business off of it. And so basically that's the metaphor for what I'm trying to get business owners to do, which is go hire a marketing firm that puts your needs first and make sure that you grow your business first before they make money, if that makes sense.

So do you. And I want to circle back to one of the things, you know, back to some of the, like the political principles, et cetera here, like, and how that translates. And I want to kind of dive a little bit deeper into that because I'm really fascinated by it. But I do want to ask. So one of the things that you mentioned is, you know, obviously the not having a contract and making sure that the agency is on its toes. Right. And I agree with that. I actually don't have contracts with my clients. I actually, I've done it before, but oftentimes I've done that when I think that the client is going to be the pain in the butt. And I'm going to try to lock them in from my standpoint, because it obviously is beneficial as an agency to have a client on a contract, but I totally agree that it's not really beneficial for the relationship because if I'm not performing, you should be able to leave. But you do you do performance based.

Fees.

Do you do flat fees or do you do a combination? Typically when you're working with clients, I know with a performance based fee, it might be hard with political. But although, like, maybe you only get paid if they win, but it's called.

A win bonus, Brad.

A win bonus. Right. Yeah. So you get an incentive, you still get paid.

Yeah. And on the corporate side, we absolutely do. We typically do a flat fee for the first three to six months at a low cost so that they can see what we're doing, how we're building it. And then we come in and say all right, let's do sort of a, you know, like, let's have a performance bonus. So if we're growing your company, what, what does that look like? And what are the standards and what. And we work with the company to do that. But by the way, the company makes money first and then we get paid on the back end because we grew their company. Right.

So I'm interested to hear a little bit more about the performance based structures you do, because there's a lot of ways to do this, right? You know, you can sell, you can straight up sell leads. You can sell, you can be, if you're a media buyer, you can take a percentage. Although this isn't a performance bonus. I've never really liked when media buyers say, I'll manage all your media buys, but then pay me a percentage of your ad spend because that's definitely not a, that, it's not performance. You know, if I'm spending your money, that has nothing to do with return. There can be a percentage of sale, there can be a percentage of revenue, there can be. You know, what are some of the ways specifically around performance based fees that you have found that have worked really well with different companies of different sizes?

Yeah, it's a really good question. Well, let me even take a step back from that and lay out how we start the relationship. So I'm a big believer that everything is about trust, right? And I believe it is incredibly important for you to earn trust not only with your clients, but we look at it as the customer or the client. How are we earning the trust, the business? And so I would even tell you that I failed at this because everything I do is based on trust. And then when I got into the corporate marketing space a few years ago, I sort of demanded trust from the, the leads that we had, if that makes sense. I'm like, you know, like, no, we don't have, you know, I'm like, I'm basically like yelling at leads and prospects, like telling them to trust me. And it was like, oh, you know what, this makes sense to me. This is a metaphor. Like, you know, marketing companies, they demand that their customers buy their products in a tactical way. Like they'll say, oh, let's just run some Facebook ads and we'll do some Google AdWords and SEO and like, that's all tactics, right? It's demanding that you buy the product or service instead of taking a step back and figuring out what the strategy is to earn the trust of the customer. And when I sat back and said, oh, I can't demand trust. That's a tactic I have to prove trust. And so what we ended up doing a couple of years ago is we partnered with the largest data analytics and AI company in America. And we're the only marketing firm that has sort of this exclusive relationship with them. And we basically go in with companies and they have to do this. If they want to work with us, they have to undertake a customer Insights report or a client Insights report. So we do it for B2B and we do it for B2C. And you know, for an example we will go in and take, let's take a B2C client. So we have this one client right now. They had 25,000 customers records. We were able to overlay those customer records with this data analytics and AI company. And they were able to spend four weeks tracing everything about their customer base, everything. And so what we ended up finding was that this company had built an incredible marketing campaign based on discounts. And then it worked until it didn't and they didn't know why it didn't work anymore. And what we found was that the economy had changed, that people were making more money and they didn't want to buy any ads from someone that was screaming discounts. What they wanted was a higher standard. And that's what the data told us. And we went, my God, that's really interesting. So instead of this company had spent $1.6 million on marketing and lost business. What kind of was that again? It was a pest control company. And so the pest control company was like, we've, we don't understand, you know, we've been doing this. Discuss. What we found was their clients, their customers wanted green products. They wanted safe products. They wanted to know their families were safe or their dogs were safe in their house. They wanted to buy into a story. Well, this was a family owned business that they had never told their story before. And so, and the other thing which is crazy is in the data, Brad, we found out that their customer base wasn't buying discounts, but they were bundling their services with cable and a bunch of other things. And so they saw that as the discount that had a higher standard, that that was a smart way to save money. And so we started bundling their services. And that to me is the strategy, right? It's not running out and taking a bunch of tactical efforts. It's about now we understand the customer base and we can go out and earn their trust by telling the stories that they, they care about within this company and the services that they care about. And so once we are able to do that and we show the company, then they can make the decision whether they want to work with us or not. And every single company we've ever done this report for has done that. Right? And then from that point, we can develop. Okay, so here's where you are. Revenue. Here's where your profit. Here's where you want to go. If we take you there in this timeline, then let's back out. Like, what percentage we would get in a bonus once we hit those markers. But it has to start. I won't do it. And the reason being. Sorry, I'm still bustering.

No, this is great.

The reason I do this and where it comes from is that in politics, when a candidate hires us to run their marketing, the first thing we do is go out and take a poll with the voters and find out what they think about, what they care, what is driving them to make a decision. I can't demand a voter vote for my candidate. That doesn't work. I can't just run ads on whatever that candidate wants to talk about. I found out the 10 things that candidate really deeply cares about and wants to talk about on the stump. And then I go out and poll the voters and I find two or three issues where there is total alignment, where the voters are all in on that issue and the candidate is all in on that issue. And then that's the strategy campaign that I build around a political marketing campaign, and that wins. We've had in the last two years, three years, or. Yeah, last three years, we've had 196 victories in politics on my marketing side. Why? Because we figure out what the voters care about first. So now I'm thinking, why don't we do that with customers? And by the way, almost every marketing agency that I've come up against doesn't do that. They run out and say, you've got to rebrand. You got to do all these things. And it's like, but based on what? And mine is based on statistical data, customer data. And then that's the way we build a relationship. And the reason. Then we go in and ask for percentages. Because I have a. Here's my thing. I want to make. I want to eliminate risk with the business owner by going out and guessing a bunch of tactics that doesn't eliminate the business owner's risk. I also know this. Most business owners. And Brad, you're going to smile and laugh at this one. Most business owners hate marketing or they love it, but most of them hate it, right?

Yeah.

Necessary evil. They just, they think it's a pain in the ass. They don't want to deal with it. And so they want someone to come in and make it easy, take it off my plate, manage it, but let me have total transparency so I know what's going on. And so we obviously have built in tools where people can monitor everything we do 247 to see what we're optimizing, what's working, what's not working and we can do all that. But my point is how do I make it easy? How do I eliminate risk, how do I prove that I'm putting their needs first? And how am I using statistical data, artificial intelligence, all of those technology tools in order to give them the best chance at winning or the best chance at growing their business? I always talk about it and winning because I come from politics. That's really the baseline of how we build it out.

I like it. Now you mentioned, and you don't have to say who it is because you mentioned though that you are working with a very large big data company, et cetera. But what I mean, if you want to mention who they are, that's cool, but otherwise do you have any recommendations for anybody else out there who is a marketing agency, consultant, etc. If they want or even just a business owner to start to say, okay, how else can I get some of these insights as well?

Sure. So I'm going to leave the name out but I will tell you this. We were working with them with very large political and corporate clients. Like over the corporate clients were more Fortune 200 and the data was costing high five figures, low six figures to do this. And I said to them I want to provide a way that small businesses could undergo this and it not break their bank because they're just not going to buy that. And so we got the exclusive licensing agreement to do that and we paid a pretty hefty fee. And I made a, I made it, I made a bet. And the bet was that there is very few marketing agencies out there that use data to devise a strategy. They test the messages based on that data, they find out what works, they eliminate what doesn't and then they go full force into the marketing campaign of by eliminating as much risk as possible and going into what we know works. And I said that's my model, that's what I'm going to do and I'm going to bet it. And so I spent a lot of money to get the exclusive licensing agreement and now I'm able to Offer it at a, you know, between. It depends. If you're a non profit, we give you discounts, but basically we do it from about 3,500 to 4,500 bucks. That's not bad. And we do that because I want to prove and build trust. That's it. I want to build trust.

So now is that one of the. So when you're working with a new prospective client and you get going now, you're not eating that cost, like you're asking them to invest that basically. Right. Like a few thousand dollars for you to run that data, you'll come back with the campaign. I don't imagine you're running that on a prospective client on your own, are you?

No, no. I paid the licensing agreement six figures so that I could do this exclusively. And the client invests in it. You know, it does two things. One, it's one project and if I don't prove its value, it's like a 45, 60 page report. It's totally insane. It'll tell you what the customer thinks, what they feel, what they value, their top three values in life. It'll tell you the, it'll index the platforms they're on. We did this for Instagram Influence recently and she had built over six figure following on Instagram and she wanted to go into Facebook as the next sort of platform to move into. So we did this customer insights report for her and we found that her audience actually indexed the Facebook indexes. The number four platform for her to go onto, number one was not even Instagram, it was Pinterest. Interesting. She's like, my God, I never even thought about pushing out my content on Pinterest. And number three was Snap, it wasn't Facebook. So she was about to make this large investment into a platform that was indexing as the number four platform amongst her followers. It's crazy. And so that's one. It tells us what we want to know so we can eliminate risk and help build the business too. If a business owner comes to me and this happens, by the way, 90% of the time the business prospect will come and say, yeah, I don't want that data, I just want the get rich quick pill. Can you just run some ads for me? And that tells me all I need to know and I say no every time because I have a successful business, I don't need to compromise what I know works and to build trust and long term relationship. And if that business owner doesn't want to undertake things the proper way, it saves me time. So I don't have to. We don't have to follow or pursue them or go down rabbit holes. And there's so many rabbit holes on business owners that are what I call tire kickers. And my thing is I'm going to make it easy. I'm going to eliminate your risk. I'm going to put all the onus on you growing first. But you have to prove and commit to doing it the proper way. And if they don't want to do that, then they're not going to fit. They're not a good fit for me. And it's the same thing in politics. That's how we look at political game candidates. And so there's so many weird correlations with it, Brad. It's just, it's, it's kind of eerie in that way.

Yeah, it sounds like it. On the performance, on the performance stuff. And you mentioned something here that alluded to it because, I mean, different companies, it's. It can be more challenging to come up with a performance incentive that makes perfect sense. Do you sometimes, just like you said, if, okay, if, like, let's take a baseline and if we grow it here, like, you know, we'll be bonused a dollar amount, a percentage amount.

We typically do a percentage amount, but we also are flexible. Like it's the business owner's business. I'm not do something and then they don't do it. Like, we'll go together. There are some times where a lot of B2B businesses where we'll take this data and it tells them everything they need to know about their clients. Right. And so we did this recently for a financial client, B2B and they were going into credit unions, they were going into large banks and small banks. And they wanted to know how their sales teams could speak to those individual sectors differently in order to increase sales. And so we undertook the research report, the customer insights report, and we were able to ascertain the various differences between all three. And then we went out and trained their sales teams. Now, there's not a lot of upside in the sense of saying that they weren't going to run big marketing campaigns. What we were able to do is geofence the buildings. Their sales teams were going in a week before the sales teams hit and a week after. So when the sales teams walked into these buildings, they were like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we've seen your ads and we've been online recently. Right. It didn't cost that much money. And in those instances, and a lot of B2B's, we don't take percentage. We just work on the projects or we help train them and we do a few projects for them. But there's a way to help any kind of business through this data. Nice.

Okay, perfect. What has been. What has been kind of your. In the political side, you know, in addition to. I'm trying to think of the best words for this in. In addition to what you just said with doing the research first and really understanding that what's been one of the biggest parallels or things you've been able to transfer over from the political side of marketing to the other, like just general corporate side of marketing, besides what you've just said, which was hugely valuable, which is going deep and knowing them, has there been anything in particular that has transferred over very well?

Totally. And it's again an outlier that that 95, 99% of companies, marketing agencies don't do. It was interesting. I had a long interview with Gary Vaynerchuk on the DailyVee and we actually talked about this. But it's using comparative advertising. Basically what I mean by that is in politics we know how to evoke emotion in our ads in our marketing. Everybody hates negative ads in politics, but we do it because it works. And if I'm able to look at that on the business side, it's not the same. Obviously, I'm not going to go club a rival business over the head and knock them to the street and offend half of my audience or half of my customer base. I'm not doing that. But there are so many different ways to do it. Comparative advertising, if you're a business owner, that gives you unbelievable growth. And I write about it in the book, but my God, comparative advertising is such an outlier process that most business owners are scared shitless to even try. But the ones that do it have massive growth. So I'll give you a couple examples of. And I don't need to like, you know what I'm talking about on the political side, the negatives and all that stuff. On the corporate side, there's a best story of the last year is Burger King. So Burger King in December ran this thing called the Burger King Detour or the Whopper Detour. I don't know if you heard about it. They ran it for one week. They did it in December. And basically this is what they did. First of all, they offered their customer base $0.01 whoppers. Okay, well, $0.01 whoppers means you're making a connection with your customer because they love that and they all of a sudden are now Connected to Burger King. In order to get your $0.01 Whopper, you had to download their app. Frickin brilliant. Now Burger King is gonna collect all the data of people that are eating burgers at their place and then they'll be able to market to that data the same thing we just had this first discussion on. I love that. Then in order to get that free burger, you had to order it from the app across the street at a McDonald's.

Wait, so you had to.

You had to go to the McDonald's across the street from a Burger King and order the free what? The $0.01 Whopper from.

McDonald's?

Yes, at McDonald's. Now that is what I call comparison advertising. That does. Who is offended by this? Who is knocked out? Oh, the McDonald's executives don't like it. Okay, other than them, who else? No one. It's hilarious. And, but here's the thing. We did a case study on it. I wrote about probably netted Burger King over eight figures and free advertising. USA Today, Yahoo, Bloomberg, everybody wrote a story about this marketing campaign. And every story, every single one said basically that McDonald's was getting punked. How great is that?

Yeah, exactly.

Burger King didn't say McDonald's stinks. Burger King just said order our $0.01 Whopper at a McDonald's. Every camp, literally every article was like, they got one over on McDonald's. Like, it diminishes McDonald's brand. It builds brand for Burger King. It builds connection, it collects data. It is literally taking all my headaches splitted because it takes everything that we do in politics and they executed it perfectly. And then they got all this free media out of it. Right.

So that ended up being a really good publicity stunt for the media like that. How would you maybe do a comparative advertising? You said you had some more examples that somebody who's not like a mega brand that's gonna get picked up and written about it like that. Let's say it's a business doing like $5 million a year or something.

So it's a great question. We work with a supplement company, a really successful supplement company, and we did this Customer Insights report. And one of the things that we found at in the Customer Insights report was that their customer base, it's not that they were healthy and they were, you know, eat healthy foods. We found out that like over 50% of them were vegans or vegetarians, either one. And that they despised the soda industry. Like, I know that sounds obvious, but how do you know that Specific data, Right?

How do you know it versus guess it.

That's right. And so now we're like, oh, this is it. Now we know who to go negative on in this marketing campaign we're about to launch. And we're so excited because who amongst their customer base will be offended that we're going after the soda companies? Nobody. They're already against the soda companies. And this is a pharmaceutical grade supplement company. Right. So you could almost say in the future because there's a lot of articles that have come out lately about the, you know, how safe or how potent some of these supplements are that are on the market right now. Well, we have a company that has a great standard, they have great ethics. We should talk about how they, their product, their supplement is a much higher grade, that it is much more potent and it has all the things that you're looking for and it's vegan backed or vegetarian backed or whatever. But those are the two industries that we're planning right now to figure out how to go after which is the lower rung supplement companies that are taking advantage of customers and improving this company's worth and then going after the soda industry as well.

Okay, that makes sense. I like that.

Nobody's offended by that.

No, no, exactly.

In fact, what you're doing, their customer base becomes emotionally attached to that, that product or service. Right.

And in that case, you're not, you're not using your advertising necessarily to pick on like a competitor at their level. You're either picking on, you're throwing rocks at a, at either an industry enemy or a characteristic of the other people. Like you're kind of, you're personally kind of doing that in your book, which is, what is it? The seven lies that digital agencies tell you. You know, never trust them or fire them. Now you're doing the exact same thing.

I'm going negative on my competition and it's.

But, but you're not naming an individual necessarily painting. And if you do. Right, and if you do, maybe you name an individual like a big mega brand that is like, you know, I don't know, BBDO or one of these huge advertising agencies, you could call them out because they're not really a comparative thing.

Yeah, like yeah, yeah. And by the way, it's big and small. I'm painting a very broad brush. But I also, in telling the truth, I interviewed over 100 CEOs and all of them, every single one of them had fired a marketing agency at some point in their business. Lifeline Lifetime. That's insane. All 100. I was like stunned by this. One Fortune 500 CEO. I was traveling in China with Peter Diamandis, who I know Peter, I love you. We were traveling to China and we had a Fortune 500 CEO. And he and I were sitting on the bus going to some Shanghai startup company to go meet with them. And he's telling me the story, the same story I hear over and over again. And he got taken advantage of. He got locked into a long term contract on and on. And I looked at him and I go, my man, you gotta fire those guys now. And that was sort of the impetus of the book. Like, I literally went, oh my God, that's the book.

Fire them now. I love that. And I do think that that's one of the other problems I see is that a lot of agencies, their goal is selfishly to grow, right? Like, and they. And the way they grow, and there's nothing wrong with that, that's every business's desires to grow and to scale. And the way a lot of them feel as though to do that is just to take on more clients and take on more. And then you get to a point where the service level becomes commoditized. And, you know, you may have been a big fish in a small pond at one point as a client, and then later on you're a small fish in a big pond. And I personally believe that it's, you know, because agencies are treating their clients just as customers and not as clients. And I know Jay Abraham talks a lot about this in his strategy of preeminence, which I've done an interview with Jay in the past and we've talked about this, where I know when I'm working with a client, I may be delivering one, they may have hired me to deliver one specific service, but I always take a holistic look at the entire thing and think, how else can I improve your experience with me and their experience with the entire results, even outside of this specific service that I'm providing you? And when I know when I do that, I haven't had the need to lock clients in for long term. They know they can fire me at any point, but they also know that, you know, I'm doing, I've got, I've got their back, I'm doing what's best for them. And they, the other trick is always let them know that you've got another trick up your sleeve. If they fire you, they might not get it. So that's been one of the things that's worked for me personally.

No. And that's 100% by the way Jay Abraham wrote the forward to my book.

Did he?

Yeah. That's awesome. So Jay is a really good friend of mine and somebody I modeled in a lot of ways. But the strategy of preeminence. And it's true. Look, I would tell you this. If you're a business owner out there, you're listening to this right now. I have a question. And the question is, how many big marketing strategic campaigns will you run in the next five years? How many? Because that is a very important question you should ask. Because I'll give you a couple examples, like Chick Fil A, who I love to write about, because I think it's just an amazing company. I mean, they've moved and almost becoming the number three or number two fast food maker right now in this country. They're only open six days a week, which is just totally insane, right? Everything about them. They're good, great customer service. They have an authentic, great product. They're kind. Every time you go into one of their stores, they're nice. Nobody's trying to, you know, get you out of there. But they've had this marketing. They've had one big marketing strategic campaign in 25 years called eat More Chicken, where basically, you know, you got the cow who's trying to save his life and he's telling you to eat more, more chicken. Right? And you're probably thinking of it right now, Brad, and laughing, because it's a great campaign. One. They've had one campaign in 25 years, the Aflac Duck. That is one strategic marketing campaign for 19 years. My point is this. 95% of the businesses that come to me say, and we had this call last week with a business, they said, we spent $100,000 last year on Facebook ads, and we did not grow our market share. Or, you know, we have. This was a law firm, right? A big law firm. And they had 90% of their business came from referrals and 10% came from marketing. And they wanted to even out that percentage. They wanted to have a more equitable percentage. And they spent 100 grand to test out a bunch of Facebook ads, by the way. That's all tactical. They had no research. They didn't do anything. And that percentage did not get closer. And so that's what I'm talking about. Like, you're just running a bunch of ads. And so these business owners come to us and they run a big marketing campaign, and they didn't grow. And I asked where did they devise their strategy? And they can't give me an answer. And so the point is, instead of paying a dumb tax and going out and spending all this money on a guess which may work until it doesn't or doesn't work, ever do it the proper way. Figure out what people care about, what your customers really, really care about. In this case, what their clients really cared about. One of the things we found, and this is a law firm, right? One of the things we found was that people don't come to him because of a marketing campaign. This, this law firm, they have a problem. They need somebody to represent them. That's why they Google law firms when they go in there looking, you know, but what's the difference that makes the difference? Once that potential client, Google's law firms, what makes these guys the difference? Well, one is trust. So instead of these lawyers sitting there yapping like you see on TV about how they've won all these awards, we actually get the people that have benefited, that have horrific stories that these client that these lawyers fought and helped and won cases for. We have these clients tell the stories. Now what we also found out was their client index, their client base over indexed on veterans, as crazy as it sound. So they have a lot of clients that have won cases that are veterans. So we're going to have veterans now running around talking about how this law firm stood up for veterans. And then finally, their client base wanted to be part of the community. They wanted to know that the companies they invest in give back to the community. Well, this law firm gives tons to charity. Tons. And they never told that story. So we're going to start highlighting how this particular law firm gives a portion of any, you know, any verdict they get to charity and the community. By the way, that person didn't find this law firm because they wanted to. And they wanted to hire a law firm because they gave the charity. They had a problem. But every law firm is marketing to the problem. What we're marketing to is the second order of this whole situation and what they want and the data that tells us what they want. So that's where we kind of look at it, right?

Well, yeah, and you get the initial exposure because they find you looking for the problem. But then what? Yeah, what makes the difference between looking on your website and then making the call and saying, yeah, I think these guys are right. For me, I know that one of the three pillars of website conversion is understanding, you know, three of the questions that are going on in a customer's mind when they get to your site, which is, where am I? What can I do here? And then the most important one is why should I do it? And you're, and by doing that, you know, whether it's on your website or in follow up campaigns, answering the why should I do it with you? Is the, is the key and sounds like you're saying, which I agree with. The best way to do that is to really resonate with who the prospective customers are on multiple levels. And there's only one really way, one real way to know how to do that and that's by analyzing the data.

That we have available.

Totally.

You know, I love it.

So are there any big nuts you're trying to crack right now? Anything, I mean, besides just, you know, as a, as an agency owner yourself getting more clients, is there anything that you're, you're trying to particularly solve, find, hire, meet, figure out?

Yeah, you know, no. You know, right now, more than anything, it's like you probably get this too. It's just the brand side of this thing. I mean I've got, I'm talking about just speaking agencies and they want to put me out because there's this unique thing about where we come from in politics. And I'm not here to talk about policy or Trump tweets or where Ivanka went to dinner last night. That's not what I'm here to talk about. So there's this sort of, and again, think about this. I position myself in the marketplace to be totally unique and an outlier. There's probably no one else out there doing what I set out to do. And that's again, what I try to implore monks businesses is try to, you've got, your marketing has to be an outlier marketing. It has to figure out what people aren't doing and go in that direction based on what the customer feels and thinks. And so for me it's like, how do you balance all the brand stuff with, you know, running a political marketing agency and a corporate marketing agency and probably, I mean, we talked about this before we went on. It's you know, like, and by the way, I have a young family and all that stuff. So it's kind of like, you know, you're just trying to balance it all. And I'm on the road a lot, so trying to be a better dad and all that stuff. And then, you know, I'm, we alluded to this earlier, but you know, I've set this sort of marker down that I'm going to find a cure to my disease in less than five years. And I made that mark about two years ago and In a couple months, I will start the clinical trials. The first ever clinical trial. Well, it's a one man clinical trial at Johns Hopkins. And they're going to take stem cells out of my calf muscle, grow them, culture them, and then I will go back a few months later and they will inject them into my esophagus to try to regenerate the muscles and the nerves. And here's the thing, the ignorance of an entrepreneur, of an entrepreneur is beautiful, I think because the doctors at the Mayo Clinic basically told me, your disease is what it is, Take your medications, the medications have long term dementia effects and take your medication and we'll see you in six months. And by the way, you're going to have a feeding tube in like five years. So just get ready for the inevitable. And this was at the Mayo Clinic, right? It's not like it's local yokel hospital. Like the Mayo Clinic told me this and I told them, no, I want to find a different way. And they kind of of chuckled at me, right? And then the ignorance of being an entrepreneur was I said, well, I'll go figure this thing out and it may work, this clinical trial may work, it may not. And if it doesn't, I've got a plan B. But I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna sit here and just take that. I have to wait for a disease to take a part of my life and, you know, I'm just not gonna do that. So I guess the challenge more than anything is just how do you manage all the things that are going on right now? Take it one day at a time.

Well, man, I'm rooting for you. Stem cell therapy is also super exciting. So once you got another guy in your corner rooting for you, and I really appreciate this. Now you said earlier on something about if anybody's listening to this and really resonates with you, that you've got something to offer for free. Is that right?

So, yeah, I mean, one of the ways, again, this is how we try to build trust, right? We created this free 5 minute marketing audit for any business owner that if you're a business owner and you think you're doing your marketing is great, or you can improve, or you're trying to figure out where your holes are in your business. If you go to my website, philipstuts.com audit, it takes five minutes, you fill out this form, my team at my company, at my marketing agency will spend two business days pouring over all your publicly available digital marketing footprint from your website to your ads. To your retargeting, to your emails, everything. And we'll produce a 7 to 10 page report about what you're doing right and what you can improve upon. And then, but that's not all. We'll actually do a 30 minute consultation call when we deliver the report and we'll do it all free. Now, for a business owner, if they go, wow, this is like some kind of sales funnel. You don't have to hire me, but if I do a good job and have proven it and you want to talk about what the next step looks like, we'll talk to you. But if it not, this is free, so take it.

I love it. And how do they get that?

Yep, just go to philipstuts.com audit and I'm sure it'll be in your show notes.

Yeah, I'll make sure to put that in the show notes. Philip, man, thanks again for stopping back by Bacon Wrap business and sharing all this stuff. I know it's always, it's always fun to hear how other people are doing it and I love, I love that the really database, trust based approach that you take to the entire industry and helping to make it, you know, people a little bit more accountable to results and making sure that businesses know that they can hold people accountable to results because that's ultimately what they pay people like us for.

So once more, you know, it's fun to do this podcast because you live what I preach and I'm grateful for that. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk to your audience because, Brad, you built a following through this podcast and you've built an authentic relationship with those people, whether you ever meet them or not, and you serve those people and I admire it and really respect it. So I'm grateful to be here.

I appreciate it. Well, keep me informed on how everything's going, both personal wise and business wise. And I really look forward to continuing this relationship, Philip. And you're not coming out here for traffic and conversion next week, are you?

No, I'm not. I am out in LA a bunch and what I'd love to do is I'll do a side trip to San Diego one day and we can.

Yeah, let me know sometime when you're here. We'd definitely get together. So for everybody else, thank you for subscribing to the podcast. If you haven't actually hit the subscribe button, make sure you do that so that you get all of the good updates that we've got. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me@askbradaconrappedbusiness.com I look forward to hearing from you. And if once more you would like to take Philip up on his offer, go to the philipstuts. Com audit.

Right.

That's the.

Backslash audit. Backslash audit. Cool.

All right, guys, see you on the next episode. Talk soon.