Cutting through the Noise: Winning Strategies for Digital Marketing

Hey, how are you doing?

It’s going great. I’ve been looking forward to this interview for a while. I’m glad we get to connect.

Sure. No, I appreciate it. Again, thank you for having me on. Like I said, I’ve been a little forward to this for a while. The journey started, man, it’s like 21 years now, since I used to have hair. That was the first thing. But it started by accident. It became a hobby where I started playing around with websites, email marketing, and a lot of fun little stuff that was a lot different 21 years ago. It became a little side hustle where I was doing affiliate marketing in its earliest forms with some paid ads on Google AdSense, really in some of its infancy. It grew from there. One day, I was at the wrong networking meeting, which had a bunch of business owners, who were all looking for some help with setting up their websites. They were all older. Most of them have passed away, but they were professional doctors, lawyers, chiropractors, and dentists, about 20 of them in one room. For some reason, I opened my mouth and said, I can help you with that. The next thing, I had a little side business along with my affiliate business where I was helping these doctors and professionals get set up with basic websites, and email marketing, which back then was different.

It was just a newsletter. It morphed eventually over the next six, to seven years into what is currently Bad Rhino, which is an agency I started with my business partner Rich. We started Bad Rhino focusing on social media. I pulled in all the other stuff underneath us, and we started to build out social media plans. This, again, is in 2010. It was brand new. What exactly do we need for a business? Why are we doing this? When we started building that, and it’s evolved ever since over the 14 years we’ve been in business, I personally, just a marketing junkie, somebody that likes to read up on everything, learn everything and help businesses out, both large and small, from a strategy perspective and build out the right things. Personally, it just became a hobby that became my agency that has grown ever since. We sit here in Westchester, Pennsylvania, and serve clients that are large and small all over the United States and around the world. It’s been a fun ride. I like to play a lot of golf, and I like to go to different concerts. That’s a little bit about me.

As we grow Bad Rhino, that funds my other hobbies, which are a lot more fun than work sometimes.

Yeah, no, it’s a great question. Thanks for asking that. I’m glad you noticed that. Life at the Turn is a branding vehicle for Bad Rhino as well as myself. What it does is that brand particular, we have other golf brands, but that one, in particular, is just showing off different products that are actually of good value to a golfer and also helping those businesses get more exposure. There are a lot of small businesses in golf that need a little help in marketing, and maybe they can’t afford an agency or they’re not quite ready yet. What we’ve done is we have a list of about a half million golfers on an email and we’ve been promoting them. We just really launched Life At The Turn. Launched a couple of years ago, but it was like a soft launch, and now it’s starting to pick up a little bit more. We launched it off the back of what we call our fanatics brands where we have golfing fanatics, pickleball fanatics, duck hunting fanatics, fishing fanatics, and the list goes on and on. They’re just affinity audiences that we can advertise to. But from a golf perspective, yeah, it’s just the love of golf being out there playing, I always wanted to tie the two together.

I can talk about golf and marketing all day. I thought, You know what? Let’s bring those two together and work with those companies. We’ve been very lucky at Bad Rhino to work with a lot of big brands in golf as well as some smaller ones. I thought of a different way that we could provide a great service to them, and that’s how life at the turn was born.

Marty McDonald in 2015 would have answered this question completely differently than he answered it in 2019, and then he would have answered it in 2024. When you first start a marketing agency, you understand it. You understand the service that you provide very well. The clients sometimes don’t understand it because the game changes all the time. It has been even pretty digital marketing. If you go back 100 years, marketing was completely different, but the tenants are the same. The idea is to get your product or service in front of people. It’s just the mediums have changed so much over the years. Starting an agency means you know it very well, and you can become very passionate about it and talk about it and understand this is why you need the website, this is why you need the SEO, and this is why you need the paid side. This is why you want to sprinkle in social media. The challenge is there as far as things changing, what happens with those ideas and the challenges that come up is you have to evolve as the agency. You have to change with the Googles of the world, the Facebooks of the world.

Sometimes it becomes a challenge because costs go up as businesses grow. Different ideas come out which can distract you as an agency owner. Different concepts can distract you, which could then impact the services that you provide. I think the biggest challenge when you start is to get clients to buy into what you’re doing. That’s number one. Number two, then, is retaining them. Those first two are just the constant challenges that you have all the time. As we’ve gotten better as a company and as an agency, we’ve been able to retain our clients and bring on new ones, obviously, or we wouldn’t be in business for 14 years. But at the same time, you have to constantly evolve as an agency owner, not only personally and learning new things but also learning new technology and strategies that can put that technology to the best use and make it work for your clients and then articulate that in the best way that you can. The challenges are They constantly evolve because of the technology. But I think two things there, like I said, I would answer it differently in 2015 versus 2019 versus 2024, is that the way you keep up with that and service your clients the best, that always is remembered and always keeps you in good graces and keeps you in business.

You always have to remember the customer service part and the communication part. Those two challenges are in and of themselves the only challenge, I don’t know what the heck that was with balloons, but we’ll take it. Those are the only two challenges that you have to focus on overcommunicating and always staying on top of those things with the communication and services that you’re them the right way because everybody gets, oh, look, squirrel, a new tactic or a new something. Clients do the same thing and they ask you for that. As far as sometimes in a marketing agency, to always just keep that same trajectory going and that same common keys, where’s the ROI in this? And always focus on what’s going to be best for the client. That’s the best way I can answer that question because there’s a wide variety of challenges running an agency, but I think it’s always the changes in technology. But if you always keep your clients first and foremost and over-communicate, you’re going to do well.

Sure. I think I have two really big concepts around AI. For us, we’ve been using AI, I think for about seven years, like 2017, were some of the things that came out that you could start to leverage that. We’ve always been utilizing it. I think people get scared a little bit about it replacing jobs. But I think anybody who is looking at AI in any industry should look at it as a tool and look at it as a tool first and foremost. Where we’re going with it, I think there are some question marks there about how we’re going to use it and leverage it as human beings with all these different types of learning. But I think ultimately, it’s a tool that you can leverage, but you have to know how to use that tool. Every agency needs to learn how AI fits into what we do, and that goes across every industry. It’s not going away. It’s been around for a while. People have been using it, but it can’t replace certain things quite yet. Strategy, how it interacts with what you’re currently doing. If you look at a piece of AI content, whether it’s a video, audio, or anything, you can still hear it.

You can still see it. That’s not quite right. There’s something off with that, but it’s getting better.

Everybody’s feeding into it, so it’s to be a part of it. But I think how you leverage it in your day to make your job better and also perform better and do certain things better, that’s where AI fits in. The future for agencies, I think, is a little murky on the basics. The basics are going to be taken over by AI. I don’t think it’s quite there yet, and I don’t think it’s going to be next year or two years. I think in three to five years, though, a lot of stuff is going to be taken over that you pay people for Hey, give me a structure of how this website should be set up. Hey, I can do that in 10 seconds, and you can then utilize that to create something. I think that’s going to evolve, but you have to understand how the tools work because then when you put it into practice until the machines completely talk to each other and then create everything, you still have a little bit of runway there. But it’s going to change a lot of things, and it’s also going to make things move faster.

Utilizing AI to create ads and test ad copy has been great because you can create a ton of ad copy fast. But also I’ve seen AI create something that should convert and it doesn’t convert, and you need a human eye to it. It’s not quite ready, but it’s evolving fast, and it’s something that you shouldn’t ignore.

It’s funny because you talk to people and they think AI in the way it’s used now, like you said, ChatGPT and all the other tools that are out there. We’ve been leveraging AI for seven years, and it’s not something that just burst on the scene last year. Now, it’s viable to make money, right? Now, they have to get market share and have more people using it. It’s fascinating.

We came up with what we call the Bad Rhino crash method, which is a crash method, or crash is a group of rhinos. Bad Rhino, just fits in the marketing, so we call it the crash method. That has a couple of different variances based on the side business for DUI attorneys, home services, plumbeandVand, and AC, that stuff for local businesses. Then from the other side of it, we have larger companies that need a little bit more of a custom plan. We still use the same methodology, but there are usually a few other variables. We’re working as part of a team within their company, so Our agency is working with the senior marketing director and the CMO and then their entire team. That takes a little bit more tact and a little bit more well-thought-out process, which is more like a CMO, an outsource CMO, where we have looked into the entire organization and we’re involved with a variety of different tasks that are digital marketing related and helping them tie all their marketing plans together. But we developed one simple plan that works for local businesses. Then that plan will also work for larger companies, but there are a few other nuances that have to come in, like the big real estate companies that we work with.

They’re not necessarily going to need a full-blown Google business just using something simple to work for them. They need additional things. They need video, they need additional content, they need strategy along with their websites, and page strategy. There’s more strategy put in there, more face-to-face time, Zoom calls, and things like that discussing other marketing initiatives because they’re much larger companies than, say, a DUI attorney who’s looking for leads just within a 20-mile radius. There are always different nuances, but For our local clients, we’ve developed the Bad Rhino crash method. That’s more of a package offer that works for them and will deliver what they need, which is leads and phone calls. Then on the other side, we have more of a CMO package, which is more consultative and strategic.

Sure. I think everybody looks at society as they either love it or hate it. There are very few that are in between. They understand it, they need it. Just about every company should have some social media presence. But really, it’s not getting caught up in what I would call trends in social media. A lot of companies want to be on TikTok. All right, but where’s the ROI there? Is it brand awareness? Do you want to be the rock star dentist that’s on TikTok? Okay. Are you going to get new patients or new clients from TikTok? Probably not. Should you be on there? Yes. I could argue yes. I could also argue no. But how much do you want to invest in it? What types of time do you want to put in there? What types of content do you want to put in there? Is it going to yield a result? We’re always data-driven at Bad Rhino. So whatever is bringing in the results, that’s what we want to do. When I see clients with social media, they go, We need to be everywhere. I’m like, Do you need to be everywhere or do you just need to have a presence?

Let’s look at where your sales are coming in from. Let’s look at where your traffic is coming in from. I’m not saying that you should not be on social media, but how much do you need to spend time content-wise, add dollars, etc, and make sure that you’re fulfilling what you need on the business side and bringing in new clients, partners, customers so that you can complete the sale. Everything is like a wheel. It always has been. Within that marketing wheel, you need to look at what’s your website is, what’s social media doing for you, what’s your SEO doing for you, what’s your paid ads doing for you, your email marketing, and so on, and complete that whole circle. When it leads back to, do they call you? Do they click to buy? Do they set up an appointment? Whatever that case may and make sure that everything comes back to that main spot where they can make a purchase and do something that is going to yield a result. Social media fits in there, and it’s just not getting distracted by the trends that are out there or things that you think are going to be cool.

There’s a time and a place for that, but you also want to make sure that you stick to what’s going to bring you a while.

The first thing we often see is they don’t post enough or they post in bursts. Way too much. Yeah, way too much all at once. We start everybody out Depending on the industry, depending on the location, We get them first on a content plan and say, Okay, this is what your next 90 days are going to look like. We’re going to make adjustments here, but we’re going to start either lighter or heavier, depending on the type of company it is. Then we’re going to analyze those results and mix in a little bit of page strategy in there. I can take a look at it after about three weeks, adjust it going into day 30, and then take another look at it around day 45, and then start to evolve that strategy to get you the maximum results. The biggest mistake I always see, especially in small businesses, is exactly what you said. They’re either posted a ton for a month and then they stop and there’s nothing, or they only post every once in a while, which will get you any traction within the algorithm. The other thing is you want to have some paid component.

It doesn’t have to be huge, but you need some paid component to make it all work.

I think anything being around for a while, if you told me in 2007 and said, This is the future of SEO, I would have been like, You’re crazy. What’s all this? The biggest thing that changed that was this, the phone. Changed websites, changed everything. If I were starting anything today is knowing a handful of items that I know and having hindsight’s always 2020, and it’s your biggest benefit. You just don’t want to make mistakes, say mistakes over and over again. I think what in social media, particularly in digital marketing, is a lot of people will jump on trends that never really work out long term. They’re short bursts. They fit into an overall strategy if you have one. If you’re starting a company and you’re looking at digital marketing as your play or something online, which you should be in 2024, just look at what ultimately are you doing to serve a customer. If you’re selling a T-shirt, is it a good T-shirt? Okay, rely on a good T-shirt and worry about the other stuff later on. If it’s a service, is it a good service? Do people are going to pay for it now?

What’s it look like in three, or five years? Sometimes it’s hard to see down the road three to five years, but you want to look at what the end game is no matter what you start, how you get out of it, and what are you going to get out in between that time frame. I think as the world changes and things faster than they ever have before, and they’re not going to slow down, you need to be able to shift pretty quickly. Whether that’s a marketing strategy, whether that’s an inventory strategy, whatever it might be, you need to be able to shift pretty quickly. That’s the biggest piece of advice I would give somebody is, what does it look like today? What do you think it’s going to look like in a year? What do you think it’s going to look like in two years? Then let’s map it out from there. Because if you are going to make an impact, you want to stick around for a good amount of time just so that you can make that impact. Maybe it is, do you want to sell the company? Do you want to keep the company?

Then start to work backwards from your end goal rather than try and always move with whatever their trends are.

Sure.

My last Google search was actually for VSLs if you can believe that, for video sales. All right.

My favorite client, what story?

I think how we got into craft beer. We were in the craft beer industry for quite a while. I wrote a book called Great Beers, Not Enough, and did a lot of work from about 2014 until the pandemic. The funniest thing about that is, and why I bring it up, is I was on stage and It’s a theater style. I couldn’t see the crowd. It was black. It was about 200 people in there. There’s one person who is just yelling questions. She’s just constantly peppered me with questions in this giant theater in the Q&A part and went up becoming one of our biggest clients. It was pretty funny because the interaction started completely different than any other client we ever had.

My celebrity crush? It’s probably a golfer. It’s probably Tiger Woods, to be honest with you.

Yeah, usually at a golf course. If it’s not weather like today, it’s raining, you can also find me watching baseball. I’m a Philly season ticket holder and enjoy going to baseball games and watching games. If the game’s not going on or I’m not playing golf, pretty boring. Probably a cocktail to bed early on a Friday. All right.

The first paycheck of my life, I probably paid a bill. But I think the first fun thing I did with a real paycheck I got was buy a car that I wanted, not just a car that I wanted to drive around or get me to and from. I bought a Honda passport in 2000. It was a 1999 Honda passport. It was a used one. But I always wanted a little and that fit the bill. That’s one of the first purchases I remember buying that I was like, Okay, all right, I can buy something that isn’t just a necessity. It was a little bit of a luxury.

Exactly.

Sure. You can go to Badrineoinc.com, B-A-D-R-H-I-N-O-I-N-C. com. You can find out all the information there. You can contact me right through there if you need to, and be more than happy to answer any questions. Just mention this podcast.

Thank you. I appreciate it.