Natacha Gamer-Jones from Swoon Media Always Manages Expectations With Her Clients

Alright guys, welcome back to another episode of Growing Your Agency. I'm your host Ryan Shank. Today, super excited, we have Natasha Gamer-Jones from Swoon Media. Natasha, thank you so much for joining us today.

Hey, thanks a lot for joining as well.

Um, absolutely. So, um, I think your, your company is, is really, really interesting. Um, talk to us about Swoon Media. Talk to us about— you recently did a rebrand, so I'm actually curious, you know, why why the rebrand, and also just how you got into this space in general, like originally.

Totally. So I kind of consider myself like an OG techie, like about, you know, 16, 17 years ago after college, I, you know, I went to school at the Art Institute, did a web design degree, and really jumped into working with doing web design as a web developer. And so I kind of worked my way through the ranks from working as a web developer to a project manager, to the point where I was running digital marketing agencies for other people. Basically, it became a point about 6 years ago where I got laid off of my job and I was like, "I don't want to work for someone else again." I wanted to have that unlimited income potential, but I didn't know necessarily what direction to go. I definitely went all down on starting my own agency and it's been a wild ride ever since. It's been about 6 years since I've been an entrepreneur and working in the digital space and running my own company. What were you doing before?

Before this though? Like, what was your job?

I was the director of digital marketing for basically Daily Advertising. They were a big full-service advertising agency here in Los Angeles that basically, you know, they ran print, TV, and digital, and I was overseeing basically the digital department, which was about a $40 million account for like Intuit TurboTax, Ford, Honda Power Sports. So really overseeing everything from soup to nuts for anything digital. That could be apps, websites, paid advertising campaigns, social campaigns at its, you know, at its kind of right before, you know, kind of blew up, you know, in the past 5 years. But kind of was doing that right before I started my own agency.

Got it. So you were in the space, you were, you know, definitely at an agency, way larger agency. So you spun off, you didn't want to be, you know, subject to to working for someone else. You wanted to control your own upside. What did you do? What was the first thing you did? So you leave there, did you kind of wait until you had a client to leave? How did you get that first client? I think a lot of people are kind of in that like, I don't know what to do, I'm scared to jump ship. Talk to me about that.

Totally. So I think that the first thing that I honestly had to do was change my mindset because I was basically used to a paycheck every 2 weeks. I was used to having health insurance. I didn't I didn't really have to stress about when the next paycheck needed to come in. So, I had to really get serious with myself. What that also meant was stop going out, stop spending money on frivolous things. So, really kind of changing my mindset on how I control and look at my own money that's coming in. That was the first thing. The second thing that I did—

So, you brought your burn down. You brought your burn down.

Yeah.

Brought my burn down, exactly. Then the second thing I did is I kind of realized I needed to have some sort of branding for myself. So, I went through a little bit of a branding exercise where I got some photos. I also bought a domain. It's been like 3 names since, but now I'm set with my new agency, Twon. I branded myself and then I also looked at what I actually can deliver on. Running a digital marketing agency, you can be like— I considered myself at that point like the Jane of all trades. I know how to open Photoshop, I can do HTML, I can run a paid advertising campaign, I can run a team. A generalist. Yeah, exactly. A generalist. So I was like, what, what can I actually deliver on myself? Because I don't have any other employees. Um, so basically what I really kind of started on was, um, more on a strategy perspective because that's really how, that's where I, that's where I left off, which was really understanding everything from the inception of a project to the launch of the project. So that's what I originally started doing and it's ever evolved since then.

Okay, that's awesome. So, so first of all, love the mindset change. I went through something similar as well where it's like you really have to say like, all right, buckle down. Like, I don't have a guaranteed paycheck anymore. How do I— you know, you said all those things. One of the things I used to just tell myself, I gotta control my burn, get it down as low as possible so that if I do have any type of income, I'm not climbing up this huge ladder just to get to break even. So I absolutely love that, and I tell people that all the time when they ask me like, what do I do if they want to do that? Love the branding, by the way. I'm trying to like also do like a personal rebrand as well to be like more serious. So I want— I love that. So what did you— so, and then that, but like, how do you get your first client? So you do all those things, you know, and then like, alright, so you're buttoned up, you know, your mindset's there, and it's like you don't have a client, you know. So where do you get a client?

Totally. So yeah, so basically, like, you know, obviously, you know, there's LinkedIn, right? And so I was always kind of— I always had LinkedIn and I I was adding people, I never really used it at all, and so I realized that it was just like this bucket of contacts that I was collecting and I wasn't really doing anything with them. So what I ended up doing is, LinkedIn has had a feature since day one where you can actually download all your contacts into CSV format, so I downloaded all my contacts into CSV format where you can get their name, their title, where they're at, and I wanted to, what I first wanted to do is I kind of wanted to bucket who I knew, in the industry and like what they could do for me. Right. So, um, I downloaded the contacts and then I was able to kind of, um, create like little email templates that I could blast, um, to all of these individual people. So I didn't necessarily have to write these custom emails. So I basically wrote a bunch of templated emails to these people. Um, if they were in LA, I set up a coffee or a lunch and, um, basically, you know, just wanted to brainstorm, let them know what I was up to. But obviously, you know, I'm one of those people where I want to provide value even though The goal was really to get referrals, so if there was anything that I could do to help them, which was—

Oh no, oh no. Hello? All right, so we're recording now. Cool. Um, all right, so, so I know we're in the middle of, uh, you're talking to me about getting your first client. You're going setting up meetings, you download the contacts from LinkedIn, you set up the meetings with people that can potentially give you referrals. Um, so then what happens from there? You're talking to those people, you're getting referrals.

Yeah, yeah. So I probably talked to, I probably had like 20 coffee, uh, dates, you know, from that. And, you know, out of reaching out, let's say, to 100 people Pretty good conversion, 20%. I'd say like 18 out of 20 people, I would say, were kind of like, wah wah, you know, they're just like, oh yeah, like happy to help you Natasha, whatever. You know, it's like, you know, everyone's busy, right?

But by the way, what's the ask? Yeah, I was gonna say, what's the ask? Is the ask, hey, I'm starting this agency and I'm looking for businesses to help grow, or is, you know, What kind of services, I guess, were—

So it's, you know, this is, this is the thing. I think that when an entrepreneur— you just like froze up. Can you hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you.

Okay. There you go. I think when like an entrepreneur like myself or any other people that are listening to this, uh, you know, uh, first start out, there's a little bit of an identity crisis going on because you have like the, the experience that, that I had in my career and it's like I could have done all these different things and it's like, You know, I wanted to make sure that like a lot of my meetings actually didn't probably go the way I wanted them to because it looked like I was all over the place, right? So, um, I realized that after meeting with like all these people, I wasn't being very specific on what I wanted, right? I was maybe giving them value saying, hey, you know, use me if you need to bounce some ideas off of, like there's my value. But I wasn't saying, I have 40 hours a week, I'm a consultant now, I'm interested in doing X, right? I wanna do digital marketing strategy for startups, or I wanna do web, you know, I want web design clients, or I want those kind of clients. So it wasn't specific enough, and because I wasn't specific enough with my ask, they did not deliver on the referral, right? Versus, you know, nowadays someone knows that we do killer web design, as an example, right? So we get a really great lead that's a big brand name, that's awesome, right? Because they know we do really great design and it's a very specific thing. We also do all these other things maybe behind the scenes, but that one person knows we do really great design. So you kind of have to focus, you have to focus on what you really want.

Got it, awesome.

So then how did you, where did that first client eventually come from?

Did it come from someone that you connected with off of LinkedIn and then the coffee?

Yeah, so I ended up connecting with this guy that I met actually at a networking event probably like the year before, and he actually was starting his own healthcare startup in Santa Monica. And he had like a coworking space, and he invited me over to his coworking space, and he's like, hey, you know, maybe you should get a feel for what it's like to work in a coworking environment where there's a lot of other entrepreneurs you can bounce ideas off of. And that was like such an excellent invitation because I was able to go there and actually I didn't get business from him, but just by being in that kind of surrounding where there's a lot of people that are just like me, kind of trying to figure out what's going on, whether they're starting their own product or company, I was able to network. From there, I actually got an introduction to a guy down in Orange County where I did— I would consider that my first consulting gig under my agency, which was digital marketing strategy for his company. From there, that one client, it's like the snowball effect. Snowball effect. You need that one client to give yourself that confidence to know that you can do it. So maybe, you know, I didn't— I could have been paid more, or I could have done, you know, I could have done something different to maybe last, have the engagement last longer. But that first connection really definitely gave me the confidence to know that I can make this happen. But at that point, then once that contract was over, it was like, okay, what's next, right? So you— then that's when I was like, okay, we need to have a business strategy put together for this. So that's basically how that went.

Yeah, that's interesting. And I always think about the notion of like earned confidence, because I think like some people kind of, you know, get in their own heads if they're at a company and they, you know, they can do it, but they're like, you know, am I only doing it? And maybe this is like just me, but it's like, am I only doing it because I'm plugged into this big machine? Like, I know I am capable of doing this, but can I do this without, you know, all these other resources? And I think like once you do break out on your own, you are able to get your own client and deliver for that client. Like, you just have like such a different level of confidence going into the next one and the next one and the next one because it's like, you know, that you did it without the support of, you know, the machine behind you. So I always think that, you know, that getting kind of that first win and also like there's a factor of just like getting little wins, I think, under your belt that is really important. So transitioning into today, what are you doing for clients today? How are you getting how are you getting clients today? It's obviously different from back in the day. What does that look like?

Yep. So we rebranded to Swoon Media, and so what we're basically, who we are is, you know, we're a digital marketing shop, but what we focus on is we basically focus on one part human creativity, the other part AI. One of my last engagements, actually my previous company that I owned, Reflection Labs, got acquired, and then I bought it back earlier this year, and then that's why I decided to rebrand because it was like a fresh start. And so the company I worked at last year called Tonic, they had an AI product. And the reason why they acquired us was because they wanted to run video paid advertising campaigns. And so what I learned about AI was that that is definitely the place where, where things are going. But obviously, you know, robots don't— robots are only as good as the scientist that sets up the robot, right? You can't have stuff just go on auto— that go on autopilot. So I really loved learning about AI because it kind of connected to my nerdy sense, but it also— I realized there was a lot of opportunity to create automation for my clients in the digital marketing space. And so, you know, really what I like to do now is, you know, take, let's say, a client that has a, you know, let's say a fashion brand and look at what they're doing from a day-to-day perspective, which is like taking up their time looking how you can automate that to save them time, to make sure that they have, you know, they're able to, you know, keep the client, keep their clients coming back to their website, doing all different types of things. So, you know, we're a mix of design, development, and using different types of AI tools really to deliver on clients, to deliver our clients results.

Got it. Awesome. And then in terms of, you know, reporting back to clients, what are some metrics that you're reporting back to them on now? Is it leads? Is it, you know, calls? Like, what do they care about? Like, you know, and I guess along with that question is what are the types of clients? You know, obviously like an e-commerce client would care about, you know, purchases and ROAS and stuff like that, but, you know, maybe you just kind of speak to that a little bit.

Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, like for anyone listening, there's really two types of ways in advertising that I break down metrics. It's brand awareness or it's conversion, right? So brand awareness is if someone's paying for a paid advertising campaign just to make them go, you know, get a million likes, or like represent, hey, this is a new brand in town. You know, that might be one, that might be one thing, right? That's a brand, that's what I would consider a brand awareness campaign. The other type of campaign would be a conversion campaign. So a conversion campaign would be getting more e-commerce sales. It could be getting contact lead forms, you know, if it's like a B2B type engagement. So really, it's, you know, if it's, if it's a client that is wanting to have the, hey, we're new, you know, we're new in this space, that was what I would consider a brand awareness campaign. And if it's a client that's paying us basically for, let's say, a new e-commerce site, I would put that under the conversion-based campaign because everything that is based on either bucket is the metric, you know, at the end of the day, right? And so that's kind of how I break it out. And then there's many metrics obviously that fall under either bucket.

Okay, and then when you're meeting with clients, is it, you know, are you going over the numbers, you know, weekly, biweekly, monthly? And, you know, is it a, you know, meeting on the calendar, or are you sort of just pushing them a report? What is that, right, I guess, kind of like dynamic look like?

So, I mean, I think it really depends on like the engagement. So like if you have a, like an SEO client, or you're doing like a paid advertising campaign, you know, obviously clients that are new— clients that are that are not educated in the digital marketing space, there's a learning curve where you have to do a little bit of education where you have to explain to them what are the kind of important key metrics in SEO, what are the important key metrics in paid advertising. Because I always say like SEO is the long game and paid advertising is the short game. So the problem is, is that sometimes if you are reporting too frequently, it's almost kind of like they're not seeing results because they're seeing all these reports where the number, the tick is only going up a couple numbers, right? So, To answer that question, it's really, it's about kind of setting expectations in the beginning of the contract of what the goals of the engagement are, knowing that you can actually make those milestones. So for example, if a client's paying you for SEO and they're like, I want to be on page 1 for this key phrase, and you're like, their industry is like so saturated, right? Like whatever, Kylie Cosmetics is on number 1 and they want to be the next Kylie Cosmetics. So you have to let them know and say, this is who you are, this is who they are. And you know, if you want to be on page one, you know, in a short game, you have to do some paid advertising. And if that budget— if you have a budget, you can do it. But if you don't have a budget, you have to— we have to be creative and we have to do other things. So, um, it's kind of, it's kind of really a mix. But, but just to kind of answer something that, something that you brought up earlier, um, you kind of have to be very specific with the types of clients that you want to get, because if you work with someone that knows the value of marketing, they're going to value your experience. If you work with someone that doesn't know the value of marketing, they're basically going to shit on you, so to speak. You know what I mean? So you want to work with people that value you.

They don't see the results, they're like, you're not doing anything.

Exactly.

That sort of thing.

Exactly.

It's like, look, this is a long game. You gotta know LTV versus like, look, It's not, maybe not gonna pay off this month, but look, in the long run, like, this is gonna be wildly profitable, but you gotta look at, you know, all in, that sort of thing, right?

Totally, and it's just, it's an investment, and like, the other thing I would say is do not get into the game where someone's offering you equity for sweat equity for doing a bunch of work, right? Because, you know, you have a lot of founders out there that wanna get, you know, that wanna hire people for free work and be like, oh my God, this is the next Facebook, since like, this is the best thing since sliced bread, and it's just like, I'm like, I've had 7, I've had 7 offers before where I've taken equity, and it's like, get paid for what you're valued, you know, value yourself, get paid for what you're valued, and get clients that value you, right? And I think that's the number one thing.

Absolutely, absolutely. Awesome. So time is coming up here. One of the last things that we love to just ask everyone, what is your morning routine?

Morning routine. So morning routine is pretty basic. I wake up, I walk my dog, I make coffee, I do actually. It's a cocker spaniel wiener dog mix. She's a little crazy dog. But yeah, I do that. I make coffee. But you know, honestly, what I do, from a spiritual perspective, I really set the intentions of what I want to accomplish for the day so that I don't end my day feeling like I didn't accomplish something. Because sometimes, as we know in our industry, you can have a lot of busy work and you're just like, shit, I didn't accomplish anything today, right? But if you actually set your intentions and say, hey, I had a new business meeting, I'm going to finish and deliver this project, this, that, and the other. It doesn't mean when you get a check that you accomplished something. Every, every, it's like those little wins that you actually add up to actually being that successful entrepreneur that you are.

I love that so much.

Yeah.

I think setting the intentions kind of going into the day, hey, what do I like, you know, even just goals for the day. This is what I'm going to do. I think that is so powerful and it also makes you feel like that level of accomplishment at the end of the day that ultimately kind of goes into like fulfillment. I think that's super, super important.

And you've got to also like, just to add one more thing too, and that those intentions just aren't just listed, that those intentions aren't just work intentions, they're family, they're— it's all about that balance. Because I think a lot of entrepreneurs know that are listening to this, and even myself, it's super easy to work 17 hours a day, 7 days a week. There's always going to be something to do. But if you don't have that balance, you're going to burn out and then you're going to, you're going to feel like you failed. So, you know, it's really about like, I have these like 3 mantras. It's basically flex, focus, and free time. So focus time is when you have your meeting times and you have your like, you know, the work. You have your flex time, which is basically like, you know, um, you can go for a run or you can take your dog for a walk and you can call your mom. And then free time is whatever happens, right? So if you're going to have flex, focus, and free time, you plan your week like that, you actually feel like you're having a balanced life because the life of an entrepreneur or digital nomad that they like to say is like traveling the world and being on the beach. But it's like, there's no Wi-Fi on the beach. I already tried that in Panama, right? So it's just like, it's like, that's, that's, that's not flex time. That's flex time trying to find a Wi-Fi signal point to send an email. So you really got to figure out what works, you know, but it's about the balance.

Yeah, totally.

Awesome. So thank you so much, Natasha Gamer-Jones, Swoon Digital Marketing. Appreciate you bringing on the podcast today.

Awesome, nice to talk to you.

All right, take care. See ya.

Bye-bye.