How Ad Genius Brings Transparency And Honesty Back To Businesses Through Quality Digital Marketing

All right, what's up, everybody? Today we got Brett from ad Genius. Brett, how you doing today, sir? Great, Nate.

How are you, man?

I'm doing excellent, man. So we just spent some time. Brett was helping me get my Google profile. What is it? Google business profile.

Google business profile. Yeah, it used to be Google, my business.

Yep.

You were suspended.

I was suspended. You helped me get it reinstated. So, yeah, today we're going to talk a little bit about Brett, his. His story and kind of his process and his journey in the online space and. And just go over that. Because, Brett, I'm curious to know. Like, man, you know, first question I have is, like, why did you get into online advertising? Like, what makes you want to help a local business get a new website or to get seen on Google or to optimize their search? Like, what, what, what. What makes you want to do that in the first place?

I appreciate that you asked me several questions. So I'm going to go back to, like, how I didn't get my start right. I've owned other businesses. One of them, I was doing business consulting for financial advisors and a couple of other, you know, friends during the pandemic. I was writing their business plan and their marketing plan and then sending them off to marketing agencies and just always really disillusioned by, you know, what marketing agencies would sell them that they didn't need, that didn't fit the plan. Because, you know, we say sometimes if all you have is a hammer, you treat every problem as a nail. And that's what was happening. They were. They were getting sold things that really didn't move the needle for them. But they look good, right? So. And then is, you know, why do we do websites and those types of things? We do websites because we think that a website should be more than a billboard for vanity for the owner. It should convert. Right. It should be a 247 salesperson. And your website never sleeps. And people find you that you didn't know to put your. Your message in front of. They'll, you know, they find you online. So you need to make that journey really clear for them. Most. Most businesses, most websites have too many calls to action. So it's a confusing customer journey and a confused mind never buys. So we. We straighten out that story, make the offer very clear. We build a really high converting websites, and then we drive traffic with, you know, search engine optimization and paid digital ads through Google and Facebook. So.

Well, I've seen some of your websites.

Yeah.

Very phenomenal work. Very phenomenal. I mean, compared to some of the stuff that I've seen and some of the stuff that I've even done for myself. And, you know, we don't sell websites to clients for that exact reason, is it's hard to find quality work. And I think every business owner knows, like, you know, everybody needs marketing, but it's really hard to find somebody that can do it well. So, I mean, what kind of, like, impact have you seen on the businesses that you work with? You know, some of the, you know, maybe some of the numbers that you guys have done, but not only that, just the impact that you've been able to have on their business and more importantly, on their life.

Yeah. So great question. And I mean, I can go down that rabbit hole with you, but I was in a networking meeting with Phoenix Chamber of Commerce today, and the former president of Phoenix Chamber of Commerce, we did their website, and she stood up and just gave me a shout out in front of all these business owners and said, you know, they've had a. They've had their business since 1996. And when we looked on the back end, they were getting no traffic. Right. Their message was unclear. Honestly, it was hard for them to articulate what they do because they're very niche and nuanced. So we plugged in some things to drive traffic. We did some keyword research, not just short tail, but long tail keyword research, to figure out, you know, what they wanted to rank for and what people were searching for and the questions people were asking. We wanted to optimize their website for that. So we redid their brand, we did their web copy, you know, optimized all that. And, you know, they're a couple months in now with doing SEO and month over month. Like, the first month we were getting baseline data, but from first month to this month, they had a 361% increase in traffic to their website, which was good. And they said, their phone's ringing. So anyway, it was just pretty cool.

Like 300 time 61.

Yeah. So almost. Almost four times. You know, the. The visitors. And that's before everything really goes into effect. Like, this is just establishing some things without tracking. Correct. Correct. Yeah. So, I mean, paid ads are always going to accelerate things, but sometimes we don't use paid ads and go to a website because people get there and they don't know what. What to do, or they get to your website and it's so cool. They don't know what to do with it. Right. They. So they get lost and then they. Their mind wa. Get an alert and they're off. So we're doing paid ads. We either will use a form or we'll use a landing page because we want people to do one of two things. Take action or leave. Because we don't want to pay for your traffic if you're not going to engage with us. We want to make it very simple for you to do, you know, just to take the next step. So anyway. Yeah, well, I mean, you're asking me several different things and I love mixing it up like this, but yeah, it's fun. I think. You know, one of the things that we do really well is we understand marketing, we understand buyer psychology, we understand bit business owner needs and their goals. So people will come to us and say, hey, I need XYZ solution. Because they saw their competitor was doing that and they want to do it. We often tell people, don't do the same thing as your competitors because we're trying to get you out of the sea of sameness. Right. We don't want you to look just like every other ship that's docked at the, in the harbor. We want you to, you know, look different and stand out in the crowd. So, doesn't mean we're not going to use that strategy. But, you know, the, the thing that sets us up well, the way that we're able to, to help people is just really knowing, like, that's probably not the best solution for you based on your budget. And I feel like it's our responsibility to be a strategic partner to tell you that. So I was a financial advisor and a pastor, so a weird mix. But as a financial advisor, people would say, hey, I want to retire one day. We would ask them, like, where are you now? Where do you want to be? And then we reverse engineer the process to get them there. So we do the same thing in marketing rather than just throwing it on the wall and seeing what sticks.

So. Yeah, well, man, that's, that's incredible. And speaking about goals too, like, what kind of goals do you have for ad Genius, you know, and, and where are you guys looking to, to take this, this journey?

Yeah, it's, it's fun because we, we have spent some time in several niches, like we, we spent about a year and a half focused on financial advisory services because I understand that I'm not afraid of compliance. The problem was that compliance, generally when there's a corporate heading or a broker, dealer, even if you did everything right, they would, the compliance guy would still say no. Right. And that's frustrating for advisors. So, I mean, we have Some strategies or workarounds. But it was tough to develop a relationship with somebody who entrusted us and then their company said they couldn't do, they've asked us to do right even when we follow the rules. So we also spent some time in solar and done really well for solar clients. We love high ticket home services and lead generation for that. I know there's a lot of lead generators out there, but some of those people are just, they're, they're selling vendor lists. We don't, we're not a lead provider in that. We don't have a, an inventory to sell to people. The, we market legitimate businesses and we help good people win. We want to say something about that, but I'm gonna wait. So we will market like on a brand to invite people into relationship with reputable businesses. So we don't do generic lead capture those things to really help people, you know, excel. So but I will say, you know, you help people in financial planning or in a home remodel or solar, some of these, these niches that we focused on and have, you know, had very good results. And people will say, well can you help my insurance agent friend? What about my real estate agent friend? What about this roofing company that I know? Can you help this auto transport company or this med spa? Right. So rather than focusing on a niche, we just focus on really being a strategic partner to not try to be a volume play but really work well with people to help them, you know, help market. We say mid market businesses. Most of the businesses we work with know if they're doing, you know, $1.52 million kind of on the low end is where we like to be up to maybe 10 million. That's sort of the, the sweet spot. But recognize not everybody's got that budget. So if somebody comes in with their lower budget, they're more of a startup. We help lay the foundation to build the asset. And then you know, if we have these mid market businesses that have been around for a while, they have a website but they're not driving traffic or it's not converting. We engineer that, we clarify their offer, we drive traffic, make sure that you know, we get their systems dialed in for conversion. And then we have great software solutions too that automate lead response right when a lead comes in, so there's no lead left behind and pulls leads from multiple different sources from you know, social, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google business profile, chat, all these sources, it all pulls into one platform with automated responses or the owner can elective, you know, have somebody real time respond. But the biggest thing is we don't want to drive traffic to something where there's not going to be a response, where it's going to an email address that nobody's monitoring.

So yeah, like so many businesses, they just, yeah. Somebody submits a. We let a lead on your website and nobody ever, you never hear from anybody. And you know, those are your warmest leads too. So you guys handle that. You're kind of like a one stop shop. I mean, and I love what you said about helping, helping good people win. Right?

Yeah, we don't work with bad people. Yeah, yeah, I, I think, you know, clients who were in agreement with us, most of those people have been with us for, you know, for years. And we're planning on your, you know, multi year relationships. That's the way we structure things because we show up every day and we do what we say we're going to do. But in two instances, we've had to fire clients who, you know, we found out they were lying to the market or wanted us to participate in that. And we just, it's just not our ethic. You know, we want to help good people win and I don't want to say we want to help bad people lose, but we certainly don't want our name associated with people who are going to treat people dishonestly. So.

100%, man.

100%. As for where we're going, I mean it, it's fun because we keep, we keep attracting really good talent. Right. When people bring a skill set, um, we've, we've opened up several directions that I didn't think we would head in because of the skill set of the, the people on our team. So that's fun.

Well, like we were just talking big picture.

Oh, go ahead.

Oh, excuse me, excuse me. But I was just gonna say on that tangent, just a light bulb. We were just talking about the ad genius Google booster program that you guys are doing. Yeah, I mean, getting the reviews up there, getting people to launch more reviews. You know, I've seen a lot of success with the same strategy, you know, Martial arts gym, from 16 reviews to about 66 reviews in just about a week's time. You know, so like that kind of stuff, man, like, you know, so helpful for local businesses. I know you're the guy on Google business profiles and that, that's, that's super great. So I mean, all in all though, you know, I'm curious like everybody, you know, a lot of people see the, the, the Gurus Online, the 17 year olds in their mom's basement that say they make 100k a month and all these kind of people. And what would you have somebody that, you know about the challenges that you faced as, as an online business owner and, and with that genius, like getting it up to the point where it is today. I know, I know we've had some conversations about the challenges that both you and I have shared. What you have to say is like the, the biggest thing that was a challenge for you to overcome.

You know, I, I think, I think we tried to solve a lot of this is a multi faceted answer. It's like turning a diamond. Depends on the, the you know, side we're looking through at the time. I think we tried to do too much too quick and we tried to do, we tried to make people happy by giving them what they asked for. And I said it a little bit earlier but you know, I've learned to push back a little bit and say, well that's what you're asking for. But you're, you know, what is the reason for that? Because based on what we know, I feel like it would be malpractice for me to implement a solution that I was asked for just because somebody asked me to sell it to them. You know, in a lot of cases we take them to a completely different pivot. Right. That they didn't expect. So you know, I think, I think the confidence to challenge some of those preconceived ideas, you know, in the early, earlier stages, I think that to answer your question directly, I think that was a challenge, you know, because we didn't want to say no. And sometimes, sometimes we do say no. But we also now have some phenomenal tools that are, you know, capitalizing on what a business has to generate leads, you know, using their, you mentioned Google business profile or their website, using the assets they already have in place. If somebody doesn't have a website but they're looking for leads, they probably don't need to start with the website. They probably need to run some paid ads and we have a strategy for that too. Or we'll just run it to a landing page. We build that out very quickly and then they can test their offer and test, test the market and find out what converts and then once they're generating revenue, then they can reinvest and build out around what the, what offer they've proven out. So as far as, you know, other challenges, I think, I don't know it, it. I, I've caught a lot of breaks, you know, that like I've, I've, I've been around great people. Um, I, I have already had a trusting reputation, so I think that, you know, helped me a lot. Um, and I feel very blessed for where we are. Uh, it's gone faster than I thought it would, would go. But, you know, we keep moving the goal posts, right?

Absolutely, man. Well. Well, that's awesome. And, and yeah, man, I know. It's like, you know, people, people think they want one thing, and a lot of companies exist to just sell them what they think they need, but it takes a real consultant, a real expert, a real professional to say, hold on, you know, this is what, you know, this is what looks good. This is what the, the gurus are telling you you need. But actually, if we don't have this right, none of this is ever going to work. Right. And I think that you guys do a really good job with that. So. Yeah, man. And where can people find you online? Where can they reach out to you and everything like that?

Sure. Ad genius.com is direct line to our calendar. We typically, we'll do a 20 minute consult just, you know, down and dirty to kind of figure out what it is people are wanting to do, and we gather some information there and then, you know, if it seems like there's good synergy and they're, you know, a good fit, then we'll help them take their next step from there. So, yeah. Ad genius dot com. Ad genius dot com.

Awesome, man. And we're on today at Shift Social. This is the process podcast here. We're on with Brett from. This is the ad genius right here. So hit him up, guys. If you're a. If no matter what business you're in, he's. He's got a solution for you. As long as there's the synergy, as long as there's a good fit. And you'll find that this guy pours into every single person he works with. So definitely. Brett, appreciate having you today, bro. And appreciate having you on here and look forward to seeing you in person next time we link up, man.

Yeah. Nate. Hey, thanks for the invite. This is fun.

You're welcome, man. Any anytime. We'll see you.