Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted SEO podcast host. I'm here with Matt Slaymaker, who's going to introduce himself to us and tell us why we should trust him as a voice in digital marketing.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: What's up, guys? My name is Matt Slaymaker, like Jeremy mentioned, so I'm in the digital marketing space too. I'm a digital advertiser. Been doing this for around 10 years. We do everything from Google Ads, Facebook ads, Reddit, LinkedIn, and every platform that could potentially be used to reach for new customers. We use it. We work with a mix of B2B and E commerce brands, some spending only like $100 a day. We work with brands who are spending more than $30,000 a day on their ads. So a pretty ridiculous range, fun range of clients that we get to work with. So luckily I've had the experience to touch on all these different areas, see what works, see what doesn't, see what makes a brand successful, see what makes a marketing campaign successful. And then just as fun sometimes, not. Not so much for the client, but. But from a learning perspective, see what doesn't work and what makes a brand not necessarily resonate with customers out there. Right? So, but outside of digital advertising worked. I used to do SEO, too. Used to do website design, all that kind of stuff. I wasn't very good at it, wasn't very interested in it. So advertising was the area that I decided to drill down into.
[00:01:24] Speaker A: I like to do this at the beginning. That way we don't have too much ground already covered. But what is your hottest take for small business owners, B2B, E commerce that are running their ads, what do you want them to stop doing?
What's the worst thing?
[00:01:40] Speaker B: This honestly sounds crazy coming from an advertiser as an agency who oftentimes you hear people say like, oh, yeah, you should flip on ads, and all the customers will start rolling in.
My hot take is probably, you might not be ready for ads yet. And really consider that. Take the time to consider. It's like, will this actually help me or not?
I think a lot of times people think, oh, if I can just turn on ads and start seeing some stuff come in, then customers will start flowing in too.
Oftentimes, I find that the brands, like small businesses and startups who think that, hey, maybe ads are doing something for me, you flip in there, they're spending $10,000 and absolutely getting absolutely nothing out of it. Right? So kind of start from scratch in a sense. And always, I always tell people, start with the website because that's where you're sending all the ads traffic to. If you're not getting an organic conversion rate of 2 to 3% already, and it's more like.05%, 0.4%, then your ads probably are never going to work. Right. Like ads traffic will always convert 30, 40, 50% worse than organic traffic that comes through people who already know who you are, who are searching for you. So if you're not converting them efficiently, you're not going to convert ads traffic efficiently. So start there before you even turn the ads on, frankly. So the advice might be turn your ads off and evaluate. Is this actually doing anything for you?
[00:03:07] Speaker A: That's interesting because I was just talking with Greg Danao. You know, he's in the content marketing game and we're, we were talking about the challenge of the current AI conversion happening within SEO and that we have to be further out from the website in certain ways. But the website acts as the home base. I use the analogy of the Kraken.
You've got these tentacles that reach out and grab from different markets, reach out through different channels. But if your beak doesn't have the strength to crack open that mollusk, you know, that tasty morsel from over there, you bring it in and you can't crack that nut. Then you've got. Your website needs optimization, it needs attention. There's conversion rate optimization needs to be happening. There needs to be a review of your baseline marketing, like your usp, your unique sales proposition. Do you know what it is? What's your positioning? You know, those are some fundamental things that you got to work through on your website before your marketing, before you bring more people in. If it ain't working for the small amount of people it might, more people might not be the answer.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: You'd be surprised how many people I ask like brands that I ask, like, hey, what's your unique selling proposition? Like what. What makes you guys different? And they're like, I don't really know. It's like, we're a little bit better. Our quality is a little bit. And it's like, if you can't answer that question, then how are customers going to be able to, to tell the difference? And it's hard out there, you know, especially in the ads space. Like people are. It's a competition and if, you know, it's a battle for CPCS and whoever wins the click. But then if you win the click and they get to your website or wherever you're sending them and none of those things that you just mentioned are present Then your conversion rate's going to stink and you're going to lose a lot of money. One thing that you also mentioned is that that pivot that you guys have seen things moving to more of a zero click world and not people not actually making it to the website that we've seen with like the AI overviews and ChatGPT and a lot of people kind of changing the way they do search and love to hear what you've seen on the organic side. But from what I've heard from a lot of other SEOs, organic click through rates have really gone down over the last few years because people are getting their answer directly on like the overview and not actually going through to the website now. So Google Marketing Live was a couple of days ago and some of the new features and things that they added to ads are the ability to check out directly from the ad as opposed to ever even making it to the website. So now YouTube ads that you get, you can just check out directly on YouTube. It's kind of copying what TikTok shop has already been doing where people can just buy directly within the platform. And so a lot of those things that I talk about of like how important your website is and stuff like that, the storefront is kind of moving and it's not going to be just on your website. That digital storefront is going to be everywhere. It's going to be on YouTube, it's going to be on the Google shopping page where people can directly buy right there without making it to your website. So how you present yourself at every Stage through your YouTube ads, through your channel, the messaging that you're using on your shopping ads, that might be the only chance that you get to, to actually explain yourself and present yourself to a user.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: ChatGPT is in what early beta they've got. Rich, rich, rich people can advertise through ChatGPT.
[00:06:38] Speaker B: I'm on the wait list, I haven't heard back.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: Peasants aren't allowed in yet, right?
[00:06:44] Speaker B: I have heard it's changed. So like when they first rolled it out it was on, they were charging advertisers on a CPM basis where it's like a $60 cpm kind of high. Now they're starting to do it on like a click by click basis. So like once it is available to everyone, I think small, medium, large sized businesses, it'll be a platform that everyone could potentially benefit from. But in terms of like who can actually access it. Yeah, you're exactly right. They want a certain level of spend, guarantees that you're going to come into ChatGPT and actually spend, not come in and spend a thousand dollars and be like oh this didn't work that then they want the data and they want to see if this is going to work or not.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: Any hints or inside information whether this is the, the pressure point, the, the key to Pandora's box to finally give us some sort of metrics or visibility of how many users are, are seeing these branded queries from within the tool. Because quite frankly, from my understanding we're quite blind.
I, I know if you're on, on Bing Webmaster Tools it'll have some small visibility signals through Copilot which I don't know how accurate or how detailed or how useful those are. I've seen promises from Fabrice Chanel from the Bing side that Copilot will be giving some additional metrics.
Any indicators out there that you've seen that we're going to be getting, you know, Google Ads, API type volume information to quantify the spend on the ad
[00:08:22] Speaker B: side for with these on ChatGPT and LLMs? Not yet.
I'll have a better idea once I'm off that wait list and can see what it's like in there because yeah, yeah, I haven't heard any sort of. I would be shocked if they don't give you any sort of advertising level data of like what are the specific searches that triggered your ads to show all that should be in there. A lot of these platforms like Google Ads try to move away from like for privacy reasons and just, I don't know, like move away from giving you data. So like when Performance Max first came out everyone hated it because it didn't give you any data you couldn't see. Like what were the search terms that led this to show? Was it on display, YouTube or search? It's like nobody knows. And over time Google actually started to roll more and more reporting into it. So whether it's they don't have the capability to report on that stuff initially and then upon advertiser demands they ultimately start adding that kind of stuff in.
I think that'll probably be the case with ChatGPT too because there's actually this new platform. Have you heard of Applovin, Axon by Applovin?
[00:09:30] Speaker A: No.
[00:09:31] Speaker B: Do you play? So it's ads that serve in mobile apps a lot of times in games.
Do you play any sort of mobile app games? Have you in the past?
[00:09:41] Speaker A: I'm banned from, from it. I got addicted to some really silly like card playing game. I'm not going to embarrass myself by saying which one? Just, just that I. My wife was like, you are always looking at your phone, you need to delete that. And you're not your addictive personality. Apply that to something that's going to generate some revenue versus constantly staring at your screen.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: So yeah, I used to play Clash of Clans a lot on my phone. It didn't have the ads or anything in it but man, I would spend so much time on it. And so when I deleted it I thought, oh, this is going to free up time for productive things. I'm going to start practicing Spanish on duolingo more and things. And none of that happened. I just got on my phone and went through Instagram instead. But so there are certain games, like games I play with my wife, for example called Stop where it's like this word guessing game and you can unlock like you can get hints through it by paying tokens and things like that. And the way to unlock tokens is to watch an ad, for example, or if you're going in between levels, you'll get an ad. And these ads are typically unskippable. So they'll be like a 30 minute or not 30 minute, that'd be crazy. A 30 second long video ad, uh, maybe an image ad that praise with it as well. And so yeah, those are typically ads that are being run through Applovin and Applovin's great. Like our clients are seeing a really, really great performance out of it. Uh, like I mentioned, you know, having a non skippable ad format, it can be really, really helpful. You get people to watch more of your ad versus on YouTube for example, after 5 seconds people are going to hit that skip button on meta. They're going to scroll right past it.
But the problem is Applovin doesn't give you any data. So all that kind of stuff that you were asking for of, you know, who are our ads showing to? It's like, are they showing on good apps or bad apps? We don't know. We have no idea. And so as an advertiser and as an agency, we're constantly demanding Applovin like hey, when are we going to get some of this data? Like our clients don't feel comfortable advertising on it if we don't have this data. Like it's coming, it's coming eventually, eventually.
So I think that's the case with a lot of these platforms. As they find the ability to report on it and as there's enough demand for that kind of reporting, they kind of get their hand forced on it.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: This is kind of a hybrid SEO slash advertising opportunity.
Michael McDougald of Right Think Agency messaged me this morning of an interesting case where an ad company was using the, the, the click to call button that was from the GBP profile for a small business and they were running that in, in app games and other small advertisers to drive clicks and those. It was click to call only so that the ad would click and it would turn into a call and that was generating GBP clicks and traffic that we're boosting these, these local service businesses. Google local profiles.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: So it's interesting, interesting. I was interested to see if you had, I don't know if in your niche, if you were B2B on the local level or if you had some service level businesses that you had done some ad work on to see if there you had been able to measure or connect, you know, Google search console, Google my business profile performance.
When you activated ads and advertising on specific channels or through specific markets. If you saw, you know, a correlative effect, I know very, very firmly that there is that extra 10% boost if you're ranked number one and you're advertising you, if you, if you run ads, you'll get 10% more on top of both. Both from 2010, 2015 studies. That was very true. Is that still true? Is there a synergy? And if there. I hate that word but I said synergy. Is there synergy?
So corpo, is there synergy between those two? And what have you seen as far as connecting, you know, Google Organic, Google My business, Google search console performance and brand visibility with bolstering it through these secondary ad markets?
[00:14:16] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. So when you allow like call ads to show on through via Google Ads, all that stuff will get automatically recorded in the platform. So like if somebody were to click on a Google Maps ad, so you've probably seen them before where you search locally and then up the first listing that shows there might say sponsored or ad or signed away. That is a Google Ad.
It used to be its own ad format. Now it's often through performance max or a call extension, something like that. But those calls can get recorded in the platform. So you can see who the phone number was, how long was the call, that kind of basic information. But if you want something that's going to give you like real data of like where did this phone call come from? Was it Google Organic search where they clicked the Google Business Profile? Was it Google Ads? And then what did that actual call sound like? Did it turn into Business. My favorite tools for that kind of stuff is CallRail and this other one called what converts. That one's a little bit cheaper oftentimes, but, but they're both really good for it. So once you get to a certain size and you're wanting to, you have enough phone calls coming through that you need to have some degree of attribution here to know where are these coming from? How should we invest in marketing to get more of these? That's where investing in a tool like that I think becomes more of a no brainer. If you're only getting a certain amount of calls every day like one, then it probably doesn't make sense to pay for a tool like that just yet. But the cool thing about a lot of those tools as well is that you're paying per like second or minute that is being tracked. So the more phone calls that it's tracking, the more you pay. So you're not paying a huge amount or anything like that if you're only getting a certain amount of phone calls as well. Um, but, but what have you seen? What are, what are some other ways that you've been able to track that down a little bit better.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: So tracking's really interesting because you know, like the behavior like in the SEO search world we're seeing that Google is lied.
Google has lied to our faces. And they said click behavior on the serp. You know, they said for the longest time it's not used in rankings. And what they meant is it's not. Or they said it's not a ranking factor but it's used in ranking systems.
[00:16:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I hear that a lot.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: So you know, the lawsuit came out, details from the grand jury showed that hey, not only does the behavior of how people interact on the SERP function, but it's the, it's the C of the ABC content links and how they interact with the, the serp.
So if you can get more interaction with your Google business profile every time that somebody leaves a review, not just leaves a review, but you know, navigates. I had a Joy Hawkins, she loaded I think it was 10 or 20 phones into her car and drove to her client's location and, and was able to measure the change in their rankings afterwards because the, the signal proved that there were real people coming to this location.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: So it was like a measurable like spike after she did that and she hadn't done anything else for that use case to kind of prove out, hey, this is, you know, going, going to a location, that's one thing. Searching up the Profile, you know, so there's, in your Google business profile, there's a clickable link that is a click to call. You can copy that link with that extension, that Google extension, and it will track it as a call that occurred. So if you are serving mobile ads to people and they're clicking a link that triggers a call, then it's attributed and can have positive lift and boost to your profile.
So that's kind of a hybridized and I, I agree. CallRail, I've used multiple times. I hadn't heard the other one, but anytime where your lifeblood, your conversions come from calls, you're an idiot if you're not tracking this stuff.
[00:18:36] Speaker B: Like, yeah,
[00:18:39] Speaker A: swap out. Like, you do have to be careful where you use the numbers that go into the pool and whether or not you're purchasing them long term. Because I had one case where they had a pool number fallout and, you know, calls were going to this other business afterwards or they picked up calls from another company that weren't that and the phone number that entered their pool. So that kind of contamination can happen with phone tracking numbers. It's not perfect, but it's probably a really good idea.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: And the thing that we've learned from all of these platforms, really, whether it's Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, is that the platform rewards engagement, but it particularly rewards real engagement.
So engagement, it looks different on everything. So like click through rate is one thing. If people get your ads on Facebook and they click on it, Facebook looks at that as, hey, people like this ad and they're clicking on it, right? Same with if they like the post or they comment on it or they share it, same Facebook, LinkedIn, they look at all that kind of stuff and it's like, hey, this is a good quality ad that people like and we're going to keep serving it to people and, and how they do that is one. You know, a lot of these platforms, you throw the ads in there and Facebook's the one that kind of decides which one gets more of the spend than others. Usually that'll be based on the goals that you have set for that particular campaign, if it's like ROAS or whatever. But it picks up on some of those signals like conversion rate, click through rate, all that kind of stuff and throws it. And Google does a lot of the same stuff. So what used to be the. There you've. You're familiar with the metric called quality score, right? Of course, for those who aren't familiar, quality score was made up of three components and quality score was one of the biggest things back in the day that led to what, how much you actually pay in the auction. So it was basically your bid times quality score and that ends up being what you paid. Now it's quite a bit more complex than that, but the three main components of quality score were ad relevance. So does the ad speak to the keyword that you're bidding on and that you're showing ads for Landing page relevance. So when you send people to the page, is it relevant to what they search for or is it completely different? Google doesn't like that. And then the last one was expected click through rate. So the more clicks you're getting, you know, the more people like your ad and they actually want to click on it, the lower in theory you would be paying for your CPCs. Now it's quite a bit more complicated. And like all throughout the years there's always been people trying to black hat their way to take advantage of a lot of these things.
That, that tactic that you explained, which I think is hilarious, taking 40 phone phones to a store to see the impact of it, that is a black hat tactic I can get behind. I love the commitment that comes with maybe going out and buying 40 phones and seeing the impact on that.
But, but Google, you know, their algorithm is smart enough to know like there are certain things like if someone clicks on your website but then immediately hits back or they immediately leave the website, Google doesn't reward that click as much as someone that comes and clicks on it and then they spend 60 seconds or more. It's tracking session duration, it's tracking engagement time. So people that are actually on the page and scrolling and things like that. So there's a lot of companies out there who will promise you, hey, we have this, you know, system where we can get you a bunch of clicks and it's bots to your website and it's going to give you SEO value and it's going to give you all this. And it really doesn't because Google has caught on to that stuff years ago to know like, hey, this is a junk click, hey this is a junk phone call and weights that kind of stuff differently. It's the exact same with like links, right? Where you, there's bot farms out there who can spin up all these different websites and it's like, hey, I got you a thousand links from Domain Authority, one out of a hundred websites.
None of that is going to carry the weight of one link from 50 out of 100 domain authority website, right?
[00:22:38] Speaker A: So, so I helped spin up AI ads and Beyond a podcast by Lisa Rae. And she interviewed Russ Simmons and he said, tell me if you agree or disagree, but creative is now the new primary driver of your success.
The creative output, like what you're creating as a collateral ad. Collateral has more impact now than ever. It used to be, you know, your keyword selection, your keyword ad group grouping. Now it's the visual stuff, the video reel that you're putting out and the quality of that is more impactful than ever.
[00:23:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it depends on what platform you're talking about. So for Meta, that's been the case probably for the last like eight years. And especially here in the last couple of years, creative is 60, 70% of it, I'd say probably more like 70%, because most of the targeting options that work the best for pretty much every brand out there on Meta is broad targeting or Advantage plus, where you basically just tell Meta, go find my customers. And it does a really good job of it where it's like once it picks up on, it sees a few things that have come through, a few purchases, it's like that, that's the person, let's go find more people like that.
So you really don't have to do a bunch of very specific targeting on Meta. Like if you try to these convoluted interest based and lookalike audience layering and try to make it a very narrow audience, you're going to see worse performance out of that than you would if you just did broad targeting. But that doesn't really work on the Google side yet. So like on the Google side, like if you try to do that on YouTube, it probably won't work as well as if you create a more specific audience like a demographic based intent audience or an interest based audience. That kind of stuff still does way better. And so on the Facebook side, yes, creative is what allows Facebook to find the right people. And so the better your creative is, the better your conversion rates are going to be and then the better Facebook can do of finding the right people for each of those creatives and the more that you give it and the more radically different angles that you allow Facebook to use, the more it's going to be able to serve that specific creative to the right person. So like for example, we have a client called Forkful and they sell meal kits and one of their top performing ads is this one that's the number one gym hack and it's a picture of their meal kits. And that ad serves to a very different audience than some of the other ads where it's like if you're a mom you need this. If you're a busy mom, you need this. If you're a working professional you need this. And so giving that creative diversity of all these different audiences angles is really how you're going to find success on Meta.
Especially after some of the recent updates like the Andromeda updates where Facebook doesn't reward you as much for making small little tweaks. So it's like hey, here's our top performing ad, let's just change the color a little bit. Facebook's like no, that's not a different ad anymore. We need better diversity.
But yeah, like Google Ads, like especially with search ads, targeting is like if you're showing, if you're a dog food company and you target cat food company and it doesn't matter how good your ad copy is, you're, you're not going to sell product. So and, and with Google broad match keywords and how much they're pushing AI max and things like that, there is a lot of opportunity to show for the wrong stuff. As we've seen and tested that, I'd still say targeting is more like 50% of the game on the Google side.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: Let's talk about boring.
So you're doing agricultural equipment, you're installing,
[00:26:25] Speaker B: I have a client like that installing
[00:26:28] Speaker A: a concrete wall, you're behind the meter power generation for AI company.
How do you go about crafting creatives that catch marketing that markets when your product is burning waste oil in your oil in your a motor oil shop?
[00:26:49] Speaker B: Yeah. The fun thing is every, pretty much every business out there, at least every business that deserves to be in business and is successfully getting new customers, they're solving an actual problem in the world and there, there is a real reason that they exist. And so it a lot of times with marketing it's not about just saying hey, here's this product, buy this product. It's about hey, hey, here's this pain point that you have and here's how this solves for that. Here's this big life changing impact that this is going to have for you. So it's like we're not selling like for example I used to work with this brand that sold this car sensor where if you plugged it into your car it tells you what your check engine light means. And on the surface that sounds kind of boring.
It's like I'm not a mechanic, I don't care about cars, this means nothing to me. But when you market it in a certain way it's like find out if your mechanic is ripping you off or not, it's like, hey, that's a much more fun angle. Right. And that's something that resonates a lot with people. It's like find out if you're overpaying for your car repairs. It's like save thousands of dollars. There's an angle and a benefit, a value that is going to resonate with people. So if you know that agricultural products example, it's like on the surface, honestly, there is a lot of boring elements to that. But to the person that wants that product, there's something about it that is very exciting. And so that's where it all starts with marketing, creative messaging. Find out what your audience actually cares about, what do they prioritize, what is the pain point that you're trying to solve for and play around with it and see what, what's the best way to attack that angle.
And one other thing I love to do to come up with some ideas with that is you'll run stuff on Facebook as an ad, for example, and you'll get a bunch of comments that come through some people trashing on your product. I mean this is way overpriced. Some people being like, oh, I love this because blank, blank, blank. That's one of my favorite ways to come up with new ad concepts where you identify what are people not like about this that we need to attack and Objection. Bust as we call it. And then what are the things that they love? And giving us some new ideas that we hadn't even really considered for this before. Right.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: It kind of, there's a push and pull of, there's, there's some taglines and it came up after my interview with the Permacast Wall company and I'm going to be asking, you know that it's Oxygen wall monitor company I'm meeting with tomorrow.
Like in the conversation, like what are the values that you want to bring to the market, to people to understand and what do you think about this challenge? That inherently they can't actually hold that value if they're just telling people like there's a performative element of like as a company you just have to say that this is what you believe.
[00:29:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:29:56] Speaker A: If you don't say it, then you don't say it and you miss the mark. But there's also this kind of make believe world of marketing where you're saying what it is that your values of your company are. And oh, we're, we're mission oriented, which is good because you're communicating your value. Hopefully you're delivering that in the product that you actually deliver. But there's also kind of a cognitive dissonance of like, if you don't tap dance to say that you do that thing, you don't at all. You can't communicate that value. But you're also tap dancing, which isn't genuine.
It's not true. It's.
Can you have genuine from the heart? Marketing period is kind of my question.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: And you can, absolutely. But you have to show it. You can't just say it to, to your point, you can't just say it's. It's kind of like, you know, we're. When I went to college and learned about marketing, like we had a class about like sustainable marketing, for example. And Patagonia was the name that everybody talked about because they were like one of these great examples of a brand that lived that value of sustainability in terms of like how much they donated to it, the stuff that they made their materials with. And that was a very real reason that people decided to buy from, from them.
And so fast forward a couple of years, everybody's saying, oh, we're sustainable. Oh, we're made in usa. We. All these things that cruelty free, all these things that everybody is saying.
And so it doesn't really actually make you stand out anymore at all, especially if you're just saying it and you're not actually showing it or explaining that well. So one brand that I thought did a good job of this, we worked with a brand called Yellow Leaf Hammocks. We, they were on Shark Tank back, I want to say, five years ago and they made their hammocks in Thailand. They were hand woven by villagers there. And their mission was to empower women in those communities to improve their lives through jobs and things like that. And so some of the videos and, you know, collateral that worked really well for them was the business owner walking through the village and showing and meeting the people and seeing the faces of the people who are actually weaving the hammocks. And every hammock that's woven has their name, the person who wove it written on it. So it's like that's the kind of stuff that actually brings your values to life. If you just say, you know, we're charitable or things like that one, people don't really trust you or believe you. Nowadays. I think people have grown weary of businesses being charitable and nice and things like that.
But it just doesn't resonate the same way as if you can actually show it and bring it to life for them.
[00:32:50] Speaker A: So my Wife works at a tattoo parlor, and, you know, she showed me, shared a TikTok with me, and I want to talk about TikTok too, but of, like, a small business owner who's like, well, I guess I got to put on a hat and song and dance to get on the TikTok and, you know, like, ooh, and they're like, waving pom poms and like, look at me.
And. Oh, wait, that was more than 30 seconds. I messed up. Sorry. Cut.
Talk to me about the pressure of now in SMB. Owners got a turn on their iPhone and song and dance, and the. The other tattoo artists that she's apprenticing under, they're like, I just want to do the stuff. Do I really have to be an SEO, a social media creation expert now?
And her answer to them was yes. Is that your answer? Like, suck it up, buttercup. This is the digital world that we live in. If you want to show proof of what you do, you gotta do it. But does that mean everybody's gotta do the silly TikTok dances or no?
[00:34:03] Speaker B: I don't think so at all. And, like, don't two things be real to who you are. Don't be someone that you're not because you feel like you should be. I feel like people see through that, and it won't resonate with people if it's not what you're comfortable with. So, one, start there. And then two, think about, like, where do you actually need to be? You don't need to be on every platform. Like, if. If TikTok is your audience, then great, yeah, fine, Go there and try to find ways that you can bring to life your content and stand out in a way that's still true to you.
For me and my audience, it's primarily on LinkedIn, so. And I'm also the type I don't like. I am comfortable in this format where it's like a podcast, a conversation.
Dan. I'll speak on stage. What I don't like is recording myself and, like, talking to the camera. It's like, there's no feedback loop there. It feels completely unnatural. So I still haven't posted a video on LinkedIn of me talking. I will. I need to do it. But. But for me, what's more comfortable and what I've seen more success with is just doing, like, sharing advice on LinkedIn, sharing an experience, and. And it's. It achieves the same goal in the sense that you're.
You're establishing yourself as an expert, you're establishing your credibility and authority. And expanding your reach now on TikTok, and it can transition into what works and what doesn't. On TikTok, it's obviously a video format and you have to hook their attention in those first couple of seconds or you're going to lose them and your post won't really reach anybody.
So, yeah, that, that organic feel of like trying to be exciting and stuff like that.
Yeah, you do need to do it in some way, especially if you feel like your audience is there. But what I would encourage people to think about is the, the format and style and who you can potentially work with to make it feel more natural and comfortable for you. So, like, maybe there's an employee on your team, an intern who is more comfortable being in front of the camera and they can do a lot of that kind of stuff and maybe there's someone who can kind of interview you and tee you up with questions. So. And then edit it so you feel more comfortable and you're not talking directly to camera. Because I think a lot of times what throws people off is that feeling of like, I keep trying and I just can't get it right.
So kind of reevaluate, like, how are you tackling it? And don't box yourself into like, this being your only possibility of way to tackle that.
[00:36:37] Speaker A: So this question comes from my previous guest. Hopefully I get this published in order.
He wanted to know, what are you building on the agentix side, not just the AI side, because we all now have, we can't help it, they keep baking AI into everything.
And so there's these little native tools here and there and everywhere. But is there anything that you've done unique with prompting, with skills, and then with that next fanciful layer of like, hey, agentic, you know, I had interviewed the founder of Groas and he claimed to have created a fully agentic ad platform that, from soup to nuts top to bottom, handled all of the Google Ads experience agentically.
Have you toyed around with such a tool? Have you built anything that's helped in your content creation, your creative workflow, your ad selection, keyword selection, matrix, et cetera? That's on the LLM AI side and anything that's slipped into or is on the agentic side of things?
[00:37:50] Speaker B: Not that I've built, but I have played around with other people's tools and I still have like no idea where to start when it comes to building your own and AI agent or anything like that. But the ones that I've seen that are really cool are ones that can, yeah, log into Google Ads, integrate with Claude and build campaigns directly, build presentations directly.
That's a big time suck for any agency. Anyone who's working across several different clients. So most of our specialists, we work across like 15 clients right now and each of our specialists work across, you know, six to seven and, and one of the biggest time sucks for them is. Yeah, preparing for client calls. You'll have a weekly client call. Yeah. Zigza.
Do you have kids?
[00:38:33] Speaker A: I do. Fortunately they never really went through that. I shut it down pretty hard. But I'm now at the meta stage of enjoying turning it back on those that did enjoy it that much.
[00:38:43] Speaker B: Oh man. I was at the water park the other day and there were so many kids there. It was on Memorial Day and just the amount of times in just random context I use this, I'm a man. This thing's everywhere.
But yeah, so I mean there's cool applications in that sense of some cool AI agents doing that. The main one that I've been using, it's not an AI agent or anything, it's just a workflow that has been really cool and productive for me is integrating Claude with Slack and email and using it to identify who on the team is being like extra proactive, who could maybe step up a little bit in that sense. Because one thing that's just very important for maintaining client relationships, giving confidence and things like that is to make sure they're hearing from you and to make sure that on a daily basis we're doing something. Even if it's just internal team conversations, coming up with ideas, sharing a new insight report. So one thing that Claude has done is go through and basically it just scores the whole team and it's like, hey, here's who's being super proactive. Here's where we could be a little bit better. And it does the same thing with like the change history of Google. It's like these are the accounts that are getting a lot of love and attention. Here's the ones that aren't. So from a management perspective, now that I'm not the one on a day to day pressing all the buttons in the account, it allows me to kind of step back and see where are the opportunities to level up the team and see where we could grow more from a client management perspective, but also our own level of proactivity and communication. So. So that's been a really cool way.
[00:40:14] Speaker A: Kind of ties into a question I got from the Kalinka group where they wanted to ask about your, your business plan and what was the hardest part right now for your business plan. And as we're kind of talking about the agency life, agency owner side of things, it sounds like that's, that's a good solve. But when you're looking at, you know, what your, what your goal is for your agency, what's a sticky widget, what's an area that isn't quite fixed, is somewhere where you're looking to get some help or need. Know that you need to do some work.
[00:40:50] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I. What's. I'll start with what's worked really well for us, which is growth through referrals and partnerships. So I'm part of several business community groups and a part of a platform called Storetasker, where they send you leads and they take 20% of whatever closes. So win for them, but win for me in the sense that I didn't have to do anything to get these leads.
And that's been huge. You know, we've grown our agency like 200% over the last year just through keeping clients, upgrading clients, and growing through referrals and some of those free leads. What's been the challenge is finding more stuff just inbound and getting people that have never heard of you before or didn't get referred to you to come through. And it's, you know, the same things that our clients pay us for. Right. To help them solve for getting more leads and whatnot. And to this point, you know, historically it was like we just don't have enough budget that we can throw at it from an ads perspective. Now we're to that point, so we started to reactivate some ads funnels and explore that a bit. But SEO, you know, that's an area that we just haven't invested nearly enough time and resources in from, like, link building and PR and so stuff like that I'm trying to be better about with content on LinkedIn, going on podcasts and things like that, to do a little bit of pr, link building and whatnot. But yeah, it's. It's the inbound marketing, I think, is kind of the challenge for every agency owner. And, like, there's certain things that works better than others. You know, some people find a lot of success at events where you can go through. For me, I feel like every time I go to an event, I get a bunch of business cards, make a bunch of connections, but it never turns into anything. So it's like, that wasn't worth the thousand dollars I paid to be there.
[00:42:41] Speaker A: But, yeah, it is interesting. I've. I've attended a number of different conferences Wearing different hats, you know, both as an individual consultant, you know, part of an SEO marketing team, run a booth for Raven SaaS tools.
And it's very easy to get distracted by the bright and shinies, and it's very easy to get lost in the, in the, you know, oh, here's a business card. But the real money, the only times where there's real money has been changed hands is at the bar afterwards.
[00:43:18] Speaker B: Yeah, right, right. That's where you really get to know.
[00:43:20] Speaker A: It's. It's. The value wasn't in the presentation. It was, oh, ch. Chatting with somebody over the hot dog hors d' oeuvres that they served afterwards. And, oh, hey, you've got. And it's mostly cross pollination because, like, if you're going there in hard prospecting, like, people can smell it, so you're much better aligned. Like, hey, I've got something you want to reach the same folk.
[00:43:45] Speaker B: And the hard prospecting people, they always cut off the conversation so abruptly because they're like, I have to talk to like 30 people while I'm here. So, like, you'll be in a deep conversation with them and they're like, you can tell on their face. They're eager to, like, go talk to somebody else.
Like, and they're like.
And then they leave.
Yeah. So it's like that debate of, like, which is more valuable for you to talk to 30 people for five minutes or to talk to five people for 30 minutes and make an actual connection that you'll actually stay in touch with or just be the guy that everybody remembered as. Oh, yeah, that guy was kind of aggressive.
[00:44:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:44:25] Speaker B: What about you? What have you guys found to be that, like, what's working? And then the kind of sticking point of like, this is saying, we wish could be better.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: So I'm, I'm a big proponent in eating your own dog food.
And I, I, as a cobbler, have been working very, very hard these past couple months to finally put some shoes on these poor orphan kids and actually do some SEO work.
You know, I, I have SE Arcade, which is my SEO agency site, and.
But I've refocused the value proposition to, to.
I'm basically doing two things. One is I'm link building through podcasting for secondary clients, and I'm also helping build white label podcasts for brands for agencies using this.
The huge amount of dialogue and value. You know, this interview is, you know, 3,000. What's 45 minutes? And it's 44,000, 4,500 words worth of Content. And the sad thing is, you know, most podcasts, they're going to be stuck in an MP3 file, right? But that transcript, I just.
My first interview today, I already turned it into three articles for my guest site, PDF ebook version, a slideshow version of it as a downloadable. It's been uploaded and published on three of my different sites. My personal SEO consultant site, the SEO Arcade side, the podcast site, all through Royal MCP connected to WordPress and so I'm able to do that. And plus with Blotato MCP connected to Claude, I've got three works. We three work three weeks worth of posts, one day a week, two posts on eight different social media channels, linking to Collateral that I just made.
[00:46:36] Speaker B: Then you're good, man. You don't need pod, don't need a podcast for the next few weeks.
[00:46:40] Speaker A: No, I need, I need the podcast. The podcast is the engine because I think it's the, it's where the value add comes in. It's where the, the information gain because it's what LLMs can't. Don't have anecdotes, LLMs don't have personal experiences, they don't have conversations. And so whatever threat comes to the SEO world from agent, from agents, from AI, from LLM Tools and whatever overviews the value, the people that are doing the valuable thing are doing this, you and me right now, talking about it. It's the best keyword research in the world. In fact, I haven't done keyword research that didn't start with a conversation in the past year. And I have a keyword research tool on SEO Arcade. I have a keyword research tool. I built it. And that, that was the start of this whole agency thing was, oh, I worked at Raven Tools. I can make a better SEO tool that's for, better for keyword research and clusters. But I found the keyword and clusters is better done after I have the conversation to find out what the C keywords are for a particular niche topic, subject. Because it's useful to get keywords, search, volume, information, but it doesn't dig into the niches, it doesn't dig into the long tail effectively.
Conversations like this do. We don't, we don't look at, oh, you know, the most popular 5 keywords and let's talk about those things. It's, what's your anecdote? What was your lived experience? What are you building? What did, where did you lose? Where did you, you fail? You know, and so that's, that's what I've been doing.
[00:48:11] Speaker B: Yeah, love it, man, I need to get on it. We're like, I'm doing a lot of that stuff in the sense that I have Claude analyzing some of these like conversations and call recordings and like I have it integrated with Fireflies or call recording software and it reads the transcripts and comes up with content and stuff like that. But I need to get like a true MC to do what you're doing where it just auto pushes it out to all these places. That's the manual work that I'm still doing that I need to stop doing so that I can have an hour back in my day every day to not work and, you know, go to the gym or enjoy some sunshine.
[00:48:44] Speaker A: Well, it came out of like, my wife was like, you're looking at your phone too much. I'm like, why am I looking at my phone so much? I'm like, because I would walk away from the laptop and I grabbed Claude and be like, trying to post to all these social channels. I'm like, yeah, you've had buffer for 20 years and you can't find a solution to, to be able to post to your socials like, you're not a digital marketer. Come on.
But happy to talk with you or anybody else who wants to hire my professional SEO consulting services to get this content podcast system cracking and working. But a little bit of self promotion. I usually don't indulge in that, but that's too perfect.
[00:49:28] Speaker B: But that was a good time. That was a good moment for you.
Yeah, man.
[00:49:33] Speaker A: To wrap things up, what's a question that you had in your mind that you would have liked to been asked before you came on the show?
[00:49:44] Speaker B: Oh, that's a, that's an interesting one.
Honestly, I thought you asked really good questions because the main, the main things that kind of come to mind is like, what does it take to be some successful with advertising?
And like we talked about earlier, I mean, I think it all starts with, you know, the website and where are you guys going to send people to. You touched on creative being such a huge part of it is.
[00:50:11] Speaker A: And it is.
[00:50:12] Speaker B: And then targeting. I mean, those are your main three levers that you're pulling at any given time.
So. No, man, I think you did a great job. I don't think I'd add any questions to the list.
[00:50:24] Speaker A: Fantastic. I love it. Well, shout out. Tell us what is your preferred social medium?
If people have questions they want to follow up, give you some of that inbound that you're looking for, where should they try to reach out to you? Are you posting your TikTok dances or are you more of a LinkedIn boy?
[00:50:43] Speaker B: Not TikTok dances yet. I'll work on them once I. Once I get the moonwalk down. I'll post some like that on TikTok. But no, I'm on LinkedIn. So. LinkedIn. Matt Slaymaker. I'm the one with the black shirt with the microphone.
So, yeah, check me out there. Slaymaker marketing. We're on LinkedIn. Go to slaymakermarketing.com we have one left. It's a free audit that we do for any brand. So if you're spending already on your advertising and you want someone to take a look and see where it could be more efficient, we'll tell you if it's working and if it's not working.
So there's really not a good reason not to do it because it's free. It's normally $500 and we have one left. I was thinking about extending that and bumping it back up to five, but I'm like, I'm tired. I've been doing so many audits recently. I'm like, I'm. I'm ready to start getting paid for these again. But if you want the one last remaining one, yeah, go on the website, claim it. It's the big button up at the top of the website. But Those are the two main places that you'll find me. LinkedIn or go directly to our website.
[00:51:45] Speaker A: Well, thanks so much for stopping by first.
[00:51:47] Speaker B: Thanks for having me.
