Why Be Number One When You Can Be the Only One: Marketing Wisdom from 50+ Years in the Game with ...

Hello, happy Friday. I'm Flora, and welcome back to another episode of The Human Side of AI. Today I am sharing a conversation that I got to have with Mr. Marvin Drobes, a Brooklyn-born marketing veteran with over 50 years in sales, marketing, and digital marketing, and 19 years running his own agency, Earning Coach Marketing. And you'll hear all about that. Marvin has a motto I love: why be number one, one when you can be the only one? Let me say that again. Why be number one when you can be the only one?

I love it.

In this conversation, we talk about what actually hasn't changed in marketing despite all the tools and technology, how he's using Google Notebook LM to breathe a new life into his podcast, kind of like we do on our Friday AI podcasts, and why he still believes prompt engineering is one of the most valuable skills anyone can develop right This conversation is full of real talk and refreshing perspective, but fair warning, Marvin does threaten his dog at the top of the conversation. I chose to keep it in to give you a little snapshot of who we're working with, and obviously he's joking. No dogs were harmed in the making of this podcast. But if we can make you smile like that while also dropping real AI wisdom for your sales and marketing, we'd love a 5-star review wherever you're listening so others can listen too. All right, let's get into it.

Super conversational. It's just two humans chatting. So if you don't mind, I'm just going to start pushing record and asking you questions.

That's fair. I like that. And if my dog starts barking, should I kill him or should I just, you know, send him out to be slaughtered?

Oh, well, wait until after the call for that. It'd be distracting.

Okay.

All right.

Well, Marvin, where are you calling from?

New Jersey.

New Jersey.

And are you, are you, are you from New Jersey? What brought you to New Jersey?

I'm from New York City, Brooklyn. In fact, I lived in Indiana when I went to school and then came back, got married, and we moved to New Jersey.

Okay. And how long have you been out there now?

Oh my God. It would be 52 years.

Wow. Have you seen it change a lot?

Oh, absolutely.

I bet.

We're starting to look like California. More traffic.

Oh my goodness. Well, you and I were connected because you also have a podcast. Will you tell us a little bit about that?

Yes. The podcast, Online Digital Marketing Today, was created Out of two things. One, I have a private Facebook group, uh, that I made public recently, but it was to help take all my 50-plus years of experience and try to make it simple— and that's a bad term— easier for people to go ahead and learn what I have learned in marketing, advertising, and sales over those years. Yeah, all the great gurus gurus out there that are, you know, selling their courses, they're, they're selling their, uh, training programs. A lot of them, or, or in general, the shiny object syndrome is out there. And I've been fortunate, I've had enough money to live and to, to work and, and to enjoy my life. But I also noticed that a lot of people are buying things that they, they start to use and they don't perform. It's not necessarily the people, it is the programs that they're buying. So being in a financial situation I'm in, I would buy them, I would run through them, and if they were good, I could share what's working, and then they can go ahead and jump in there, and if they wanted to buy it, they could do so. Okay. To help them.

That's great.

And does anything come to mind?

Like what?

What are some shiny objects that you're thinking about?

Well, for example, we could go back to the most recent is the AI platforms. I mean, most of them are free, but if you want to get the most out of them, you know, it's $15, $20. And if you buy ChatGPT, then you go to Perplexity and that's $20 a month. And then you go to Claude and Gemini, you know, you're jumping around, you end up spending $60 a month to ask it to write an email for you, you know? I mean, um, and unfortunately automation hasn't gotten to the point yet. I, I, I do believe it will, that it could humanize itself. It— but right now it doesn't understand words. All it does is write them out for you.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, everybody's jumping on the wagon.

So talk to us a little bit about your background in sales and marketing and advertising over the last, you know, few decades.

Yeah, um, I got out of college, um, as a teacher, special ed, psychology. I went on to get a degree in sales and marketing and advertising, and then I piled it higher and deeper and got another degree And what I learned is concepts never change. The methods by which we execute those concepts constantly change. Back in the '70s and '80s, people used print ads, you know, newspapers, flyers, the mail magazines that were popular back in the '90s. Today it's all done through what we're doing now. You know, it's the internet. You don't have a Yellow Pages anymore, per se. You know, they still print them. I get one every 2 years, which I find amazing. I don't know how to get sponsors to spend that kind of money to be on that. Direct mail has been greatly affected by that. I mean, people like Money Mailer and Valpak, They don't have the subscriptions they had years ago.

Yeah.

You know, so everything's made a turn. But the concept of getting the message out there, billboards, whether they're digital or on, you know, driving down the highway, the concept is the same to get your voice out there in print.

So you have a motto. And, and I'm, I'm kind of wondering how this comes into play, but I read, why be number one when you can be the only one? Where, where does that play into this, this, this digital world?

Great question. Um, in the years that I've been working online, which is going now, we're in our 19th year as an agency.

Congrats.

Uh, thank you. Um, what we found out is that Google's algorithm will go back to when we had Google Places and Google Places changed to Google Business, Google My Business, and everybody said, oh, what did they do? And when you investigated it, you found out there were really no changes. They just changed the name. It made more sense to call it Business My Business. Okay. In 2022, when Google changed it to Google Business Profile, there was a major shift in Google's algorithm. They no longer wanted you to have to compete against the big brands that are out there that occupy and pay literally tens of thousands of dollars to their advertising budget, but they wanted to help the little guy, and it became a local populous that they wanted to reach. They wanted to make you number one. The only thing with Google's algorithm is they don't want anybody to be on top all the time because, yeah, when they drop you out of the top, the first thing people think of, at least the businesses we work with, oh man, I got to start spending money on ads so Google puts me back on top.

Of course.

And that's exactly how Google makes their money. So we went ahead and we started working locally when it became the thing to do and noticed almost within, I would say, maybe less than 90 days that we could get people into the map pack, you know, number one. Because if you're not number one, two, or three or you're not on page 1, which was the top 10 businesses in an area. Most people never get off page 1 that find you on page 2, let alone if you're on 3, 4, or 5. Makes sense. Um, so working with the companies we were working with, it started to become much easier in the local area to go ahead and to push people into that page one position. Now, to get to number one and be the only one really depends on your location. We live here in New Jersey where our towns, some of them are very large townships where I live. I believe our total population is about 60,000. To the south of us, Toms River, New Jersey, is, is probably 80-something thousand people. So if I was doing a search for Lakewood for a Toms River, you may not come up number one, but you'll still be on page one and a good shot that you'll see traffic to your business or website. If you're in Lakewood and you look up, we have a very good chance of being number one. And depending on what we do with your business profile and your website, if you'll allow us to manage it, we can go ahead and we can create that number one spot where you're the only one, where you don't show up just in the money pack or, or three-pack of Google, but further down on the page. We've had situations where we've occupied 4 and 5 spots out of the 10, and that's what we mean by being the only one. But the, the motto that we live by is don't be the, you know, number one, be the only one, comes from when Google changed their, uh, profile from Google My Business to, uh, Google Business Profile. That was an actual real change that took place in their algorithm. They didn't want to just be, uh, promoting you against, you know, national companies. They wanted to give you an opportunity to compete. They wanted to give you a voice in your neighborhood and And of course, I think they thought, and I think they're right, that the smaller businesses— there's so many more of us that if we spend a little, a lot less money than the big boys, they'll still get the big boys' business. But the little guys, there's a lot more of us, and we can add more to their bottom line. I think that's what took place. So being a local business, the idea that we set up to just do for our clients was not only to get them in the map pack, which is important, but to have several other listings on page 1. That's what we mean by being the only one. No matter where they clicked on page 1, they ended up guiding to your business.

So how much of your, your day-to-day is working within Google, Google Ads, and, and Google in general?

Google. My team works in Google. I mean, the team actually is in, in there every day, every day for hours, you know. Um, we've been assigned an internal person that works with them from Google that kind of gives us heads up where we're going. Um, one of the things that's really important is statistics and, uh A lot of the agencies, my competitors, they're great at setting everything up, but their reporting is poor. The lack, you know, lack of another word. I mean, they don't share what's happening. With having an insider who gives us those reports, we can look at them, we can trim them, and we can share the important things that people who are in business working with us actually understand. You know, it's not a— another problem is it's great to get a lot of visitors. I'll give you a great example. We have a restaurant that when we, uh, took over their account, they were getting about 1,600, 1,800 views per month. Okay.

Okay.

The question is, how many of those people were visiting your restaurant?

Yeah.

So how do you convert those?

Okay, well, you got to have a form or you have to have a text messaging system where you create what we call loyalty club. Okay. That tracks not only through the messaging, but when Google gets involved, knows that people are clicking the link inside and then gives you those reports. So when you run a special with a coupon, they know that people are going. So all of a sudden, number one, that restaurant went to 4,000 views in like 60 days. And the coupons that we were using on Google Business Profile and through text messaging showed they had over 300 visitors that came to the restaurant in those 60 days. That's a lot of business.

Yeah.

Huh.

So is that kind of your ICP? Are these like these smaller restaurants?

These—

is that, is that your ideal customer profile?

We—

it was. We, when we started back in 2008, yes. That was our, that was our go-to. 'Cause we ate out a lot and it was easy to talk to the owners. They saw us all the time, you know? Yeah. And we had the system. Today we kind of work in two professionals that we work with, home service providers, the electricians, the plumbers, the HVAC guys that are out there. And I'll be transparent here. The reason is they have money to spend.

Okay, great.

Okay.

Your customers have money to spend, right?

I mean, more important for us is, you know, you get an HVAC guy who is knocking out you know, $700,000, $800,000 a year in work, he knows that his marketing and sales, he should be putting in, you know, $10,000 a year into that. Okay. And most of them are willing to do that. A restaurant who's selling, uh, you know, tacos or pizzas, you know, for him to get to $400,000 or $500,000 a year with a profitability of maybe he walks out of there with $75,000, $80,000 in income for himself, He doesn't want to spend the money. He thinks, you know, it's not relevant. His, his, you know, real estate. What's the number one thing? Location, location, location. That's the same thing with restaurants. They think because they opened in the right spot at the right time, people are just going to come to them. Not going to happen.

So, so what made you do this? I mean, in those 19 years of having your agency, So much has shifted, right? Technology. I mean, we had COVID, like, so obviously I don't have to tell you any of that. So, so what made you say, hey, you know, I'm going to start a podcast? And what, what has made you continue doing that?

Okay, going back to my private Facebook group, we were doing trainings to help people in sales and marketing and advertising, and I realized at that time that I'm not a guru. I'm an average guy who was very fortunate, who cut a slice of life and, and ended up lucky, because I still believe luck plays in, in the part of life.

Yeah.

And, you know, I had my mentor say to me, you should be doing your training in your, in your group and, and make it into a podcast. And I said, well, okay, I listen to podcasts. How do, how do I do that? Now, you know, he says, you recorded it, you find a platform you like, you put it out there and people will find it. And, and instead of putting it in your group, just put it on the platform, and then in your group, send them to the podcast.

Yeah.

And that's what I did. And today we're approaching 5,000 downloads in 3 years we've been doing it. So, you know, and I've not monetized it, which is my mentor keeps screaming at me, you know, why aren't you monetizing it? I said, because I'm doing this because I want to, not because I have to.

I love that. So you've been leaning pretty heavily into AI with this podcast. Is that just because that's kind of what everyone's doing now or it's because it's relevant to your day-to-day and that's what people are asking about?

I think it's twofold. Number one, I'm still looking for podcast guests that I can interview that are relevant to the online digital marketing space. I've done a lot of people. I get emails, I don't know, 3 a week, maybe more, that say, I have someone, you know, someone who represents the podcaster and says, I have this person, I think they're ideal for you, and give you a little— and say, great, schedule them on my calendar, we'll get together. And, you know, I'll determine whether or not they're valuable to the audience. Yeah, they, they say, yes, great, we'll have them contact you. They never contact me.

Okay.

Okay. That's number one. So I wanted to stay at an even keel with the podcast. I wanted to record regularly. I'm a big reader. Uh, I, I guess I got that when I was in college, you know. I wanted to read everything I can absorb through people who were successful, who have made it. And, and I started reading a lot, and I realized one day, because again my mentor says, go check out this Google Notebook LM thing, and, uh, I think it'll help you get your podcast moving even further along. I said, what is it? He said, I'm not telling you, go look at it. First off, it was free. No more spending money. Number 2, it had 2 interviewers that were talking to each other based on information that I was giving it.

Yeah.

And I said, I don't have to get on there and my lousy voice quality.

I like your voice.

Oh, thank you very much. So I tried it out and I was blown away. I was blown away. The promise that they were gonna bring on other voices and, you know, free while it lasted and all that. Today it is still free. There is no fees for it. They have not increased it. They have done nothing with it. Well, I take that back. Now you can build infographics in there and stuff, which we use. For our, uh, you know, uh, Facebook group when we post the links. And I— so I started going through my library of marketing, sales, and advertising books and realized that I have a closet that instead of clothes, it's bookshelves all with books. I must have 800 books. And I started looking through, pulling them out had to dust some of them off and then went ahead and realized I have some of my best favorite books, whether it's Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, which just about everybody in the world has heard of, to a book that maybe nobody's heard of, you know, that's called Buyers or Buyer Personas. Okay. And I said, you know, I wonder if the NotebookLM, if I go online and I use ChatGPT, Perplexity, or any of those, and I went ahead and I said, are you familiar with this book? Yeah, love it. Can you highlight the book? Can you, you know, I want to make a podcast out of it. What would you recommend? You know, like I'm talking to the AI like it's a human being, which I find funny. I even say please and thank you to it.

I do too.

Yeah. So I went and did that, and I forget what the first one was, and my, my listenership jumped like 90 people.

Wow.

Listen to that one download. And I said, oh my God. I think I'm on to something. Yeah. So I grabbed the next 9 of my favorite books, then I did the same thing.

Love it.

And all of a sudden, having like, you know, 400 downloads, it went to 700, then 1,000.

Congrats.

And, you know, approaching 5,000 now. And every now and then, when I find someone who's willing and able and who fits the group criteria, I do an interview with them and put them up there as well.

But otherwise you have your AI hosts run it. I love it.

That's right. You know, I love it.

I love it.

They work cheap too.

So you also said something that, that, that caught my attention. You said AI is no longer a competitive advantage. It's the new, the new baseline, right? And I'm, I'm hearing that more and more with people. It's like now it's just you, you're expected to use it, right? It's not this, hey, if you haven't touched AI yet, it's, it's okay. You need to, you, you, you, get on board, right? So, so that said, I mean, in your world, are you still coming across people that are scared and overwhelmed by AI, or are you just kind of—

let me— yeah, I, I'm sorry to interrupt you, Flora, but I must say this. It's important to understand AI is moving at the speed of light.

Yeah.

Uh, I recently saw something, I forgot the guy's name, who's brought out robots that take care of senior citizens.

Jeez.

Okay. That'll literally go to the refrigerator, find the milk or the juice or whatever you asked it for, or make a cup of coffee for that matter, according to the demo, and then roll it in and bring it in to the person and hand it to them. So the robotic part is separate, but the AI that drives the robot is what's happening. LLM is great, but the people who use it, the businesses that we work with, that we speak to every day, are not using it to fulfill anything other than what I said earlier. They'll ask it to write an email. They'll ask them, you know, to write a Facebook ad or a Google ad for them. Okay. And the prompting— all the younger people I work with always said, well, Marvin, if you were starting out right now, What would you specialize in? And I tell them prompt engineering. Still learn to be a prompt engineer.

You think that's still relevant even with, you know, all of these cloud tasks and projects and the coworking? You think that the prompting is still key?

Go back to what I asked or answered you before. People go ahead and get in there. And they ask, write an email, blah, blah, blah.

Now, yeah.

Whose voice do you want to use?

Yeah. Okay.

You know what? Do you want me to write it like a common person? That's what you're asking when you don't say, I want you to be an email specialist who, who writes emails to convert people into visitors and a follow-up series that takes the visitors into conversions. Into people who do business with you. That little prompt is a big difference in results that people will get if they want to write it that way. Problem with business owners is, guess what? They want to run their business. They don't want to learn this stuff. And that's where marketing agencies like ours comes in.

I love that.

So where do, where do people find your podcast? Where do people find more about their, their marketing agency? And sorry for the long-winded question, but What questions are people asking themselves right now to make sure that they are really the right, the right potential client for you? Like, who is that potential client for you before they even come to your website?

Again, a great long question, but let me try to answer it this way.

Let's hear it.

The, the person who's looking for help is a person who realizes their time is more valuable doing whatever they're doing. Yeah, they're not going to work all day. For example, I just, um, started work, uh, yesterday in fact with an HVAC company, and he's been around 30 years. He never had a website, worked strictly word of mouth. Uh, he moved from Brooklyn to New Jersey 3 years ago. He specializes in the religious communities that are in our area. So again, a great place to be. And if you are a lansman to the community, it's going to make it a lot easier for people to refer you and recommend you because most of them are close-knit. But he knows that there's other people that, you know, the old saying, if you know, if you know 6 people, you know everybody in the world. You know, okay, um, you're connected. Um, so he came to me and he said, look, I, I believe now's the time that I turned 52 years old. I need a website, I need a social media presence. And somebody said I need a Google presence. And I was on, I was on the internet, I found you on the internet, and You were like the first name to come up in the search.

Awesome.

But I was impressed by your 47 reviews. I read them all. And then I went to your website and it, and it's, it was like you were speaking to me. And I will say that to anybody listening to this podcast, if you have a website, remember, it's not about you. It's about what you do for the reader who's come to the website.

I love that.

I love that. So, so people go to your website and they say they just feel it. They say, yeah, this website resonates, this website speaks to me, and that's how I know I need to reach out to Marvin and work with them.

Exactly.

I love that.

And in the meantime, how do they access your website, your podcast?

The podcast is best found on— right now, the strong two are, of course, Apple and Spotify.

Great.

Okay, those are the two big ones. It's on, uh, FM. It's on the 17 platforms I believe we occupy. Um, a few of them, you know, I, I've never heard of them, but they're out there. Google, uh, of course, is, is another one that you can find it on. Uh, all you have to do is search for, uh, my name, Marvin Drobes, D-R-O-B-E-S, and it'll bring it to you. Or you can go look for Online Digital Marketing Today.

Amazing.

And it'll, you'll find it. And as far as my website, it's earningcoachmarketing.com. I invite you to go check it out. We're in the middle of upgrading it because we wanna make it more for what's in it for them than what's in it for us. But there you'll find the podcasts in a separate place. Plus you'll find a helpful blog posting area that we, we blog and, and, and actually try to help people who want to be a do-it-yourselfer.

Super cool. Well, Marvin, you've mentioned luck a few times on this call, and I think I'm the lucky one to be able to chat with you today. So, you know, I think, I think you offered a really cool perspective and some nice reminders, you know, particularly your website and just what you're doing. It's not about you. It's what you're able to offer and you know what the value is for the customer. So thank you for that reminder. And I also love that you said, you know, this hasn't necessarily changed over the, you know, the last few decades you've been in business. It's just the method that has changed. So you just brought some really refreshing perspectives and I appreciate our time today.

I appreciate you as well. And how do we get to listen to your podcasts?

Oh yeah, we also on Spotify, um, our website, we share with our school community, um, and Apple Podcasts as well. And of course I'll be sharing all of those links with you as soon as I get it posted.

Sounds great, Flora. Thank you for taking the time, and I enjoyed speaking to you. And if you need any other help in the future, please feel free to reach out.

We'll be in touch for sure. Thank you again, Marmon.

Bye-bye. Bye.