Dan Barrett Of Adwords Nerds On How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
…The first thing that you need for sure is a dedication to lifelong learning. Even more than that, it’s sort of a combination. In fact, an incredibly strange combination of extreme confidence and extreme humility. what do I mean by that? Digital marketing is an industry that changes very very rapidly and it doesn’t just change, it changes such that a lot of things that work one day stop working.
Marketing a product or service today is easier than ever before in history. Using platforms like Facebook ads or Google ads, a company can market their product directly to people who perfectly fit the ideal client demographic, at a very low cost. Digital Marketing tools, Pay per Click ads, and email marketing can help a company dramatically increase sales. At the same time, many companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools often see disappointing results.
In this interview series called “How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales”, we are talking to marketers, advertisers, brand consultants, & digital marketing gurus who can share practical ideas from their experience about how to effectively leverage the power of digital marketing, PPC, & email.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dan Barrett.
Dan Barrett is the founder and Head Nerd at AdWords Nerds, the world’s number one online marketing agency working exclusively with real estate investors.
He employs a unique approach that combines online marketing best practices with rapid data collection and intense focus. With this strategy, Dan has helped dozens of clients grow their investment businesses while spending less time on their marketing.
Besides Adwords, Dan also runs the REI Lead Gen Mastermind, a high-level coaching program that teaches investors the skills they need to market online. He is also the CEO of Social Vantage, a social media management company that has helped dozens of small businesses grow their revenue. Having generated online leads for almost two decades, Dan has a wealth of information, which he is happy to share.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I got into business in a very roundabout way. My planned career path was to become a history teacher, and I originally got into history teaching as a way of balancing work and music. At the time, I was a touring musician. I was in punk rock bands and so on, and that’s what I really enjoyed doing. Besides, I wanted a job that basically gave me summers free, which is why I got into teaching. Luckily, I also loved kids, teaching, and history, so it all kind of lined up that way.
So I was getting my graduate degree in education, a history teaching student, all of that, and in the process, I had started developing some online marketing skills as I worked for the bands that I was in.
I was the one that ended up building up the website, and I was the one that would make the flyers. I also handle the money. I was the one that would get the t-shirts printed and deal with final record pressing and things like that. Over time, I started to freelance using those skills on the side to make extra money. And so I was doing my student teaching at a high school here in Connecticut, teaching history, and I realized that I was making more as a freelance marketer on the side than I would have three or four years into a full teaching career. At that point, I decided to make the jump into working for myself full time with the support of my wife, who came up with the idea and never looked back. It’s been something that I’ve really, really enjoyed. I still do a lot of teaching, though, and I still love it.
Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?
I made what I always called the classic a new business person mistake; the very first thing I did when I started my own business was to print about 5 million business cards, which by the way, if you are interested in prioritizing what you do for your business cards, probably not fame.
What’s more, when I first jumped in, I was planning on working with a friend, and we were going to start this business together. We called the business “Two Friendly Nerds.” He was going to do in-person tech support, and I was going to do online marketing. About two days after I ordered the business cards, my friend let me know that he had received a full-time job offer at a really prestigious company and was going to take that.
So I was on my own with about 5 million business cards that said Two Friendly Nerds on them. I was going to change the name, uh, but my wife very famously told me, “two friendly nerds is funny, one friendly nerd is creepy.” So I kept it as two friendly nerds for many, many years until we finally changed our name to Adwords Nerds.
I was thinking about that, and this is the takeaway from this lesson: when you start a business, there is a real urge to purchase or pursue the kind of trappings of legitimacy. You want to get the office and the fancy sign because we all have this kind of inherent insecurity. We’re not sure that we belong here, right? There’s a version of imposter syndrome that all new entrepreneurs have, and ordering business cards or t-shirts or whatever it is, is a way of sort of saying to yourself that this is for real, but it isn’t usually what moves the needle, right? What moves the needle is experimentation and direct outreach, finding your pitch, finding the right offer, that kind of thing.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Well, the two people who really helped me were my mom and my wife.
My mom was always really supportive, you know. I remember at one time, my computer completely disintegrated, and I was relying on it for work.
She chipped in and bought me a computer when I didn’t really have any funds to show that that was a good investment. She said, “pay me back when you can,” and I did, and that kind of belief in me is something that my parents have given me as a gift for a really long time, so I really appreciate that.
My wife was the one who encouraged me to jump into business on my own. I never thought of myself as a business person at all: I did not think I would be good at it. She was the one that saw the potential there really early again when I didn’t really have any evidence to the contrary, so I really appreciate that.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
The fact of the matter is, marketing agencies like Adword Nerds and social vantage tend to be anonymous. They tend to be largely outsourced, faceless, and they all kind of look the same, and it’s hard to really stand out in terms of what you do. We do a lot of social media management, we do PPC, you know, and it’s hard to stand out because of the services, so I think the thing that makes us stand out is just the fact that we’re actual people who care about relationships with clients.
In many ways, we are commoditized. You can get someone to do roughly similar service from anywhere in the world, right? So why go with a company like Adwords Nerds? Ultimately, it’s going to be about the relationship you have with the person that is working with you.
We take that kind of trusted advisor model very seriously, where we don’t always tell our clients what they want to hear. We tell them what we think is in their best interests, and we take that very seriously. We stay up front and really try to build trust over time. What that allows us to do is have clients that say, “they may not be the cheapest in the world” (although I think our services are quite affordable and quite efficient that way), “but I know them, and I trust them.” That ultimately is priceless; to sell that sense of trust, right?
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
I’ll be honest; the first thing is straight-up laziness. Laziness in the sense that I like interesting things and I like to learn, but I hate to do rote work over and over again. And what that’s done is lead me in a kind of roundabout way to a systems mindset.
I’m very intent on building systems, automation processes, whatever we have to do so that the people that work with me and myself included can work on really interesting and important things and not on the sort of tedium that any business ends up being comprised of. What that’s done is lead me in a kind of roundabout way to a systems mindset. And I think if you have that kind of systems orientation, it really, really serves to leverage the work that you do and allow you to have a bigger impact on your clients than you might otherwise need to be.
The second thing is that I tend to be naturally pretty empathic. I find it relatively easy to put myself in someone else’s shoes, and sometimes that’s a detriment, right? It can make it hard, for example, to let employees go when it’s not working out, or they’re not a good fit for the culture, but in terms of client relationships, it allows me to really get in their shoes and understand how it would feel for them to be in that position.
You know, they’re hiring someone for a technical job that maybe they don’t really understand, and they’re worried because they’ve had bad experiences in the past. What can I do as the agency owner to allay that anxiety and put them at ease? The more I can do that, the stronger that bond between agency and client will be similar with my employees.
I know what kind of person tends to like working with me, and I know what that person tends to prioritize and care about.
So, I don’t micromanage my employees because I would hate if someone micromanaged me. I try to get my employees interesting work to do. I try to give them interesting puzzles to solve. I try not to tell them exactly what to do. I let them design their own workflows and their own work rhythms because that’s important to me.
Finally, besides systems orientation and empathy, I think just an ability to really care about learning; I’m a really deep learner. Um, I care a lot about exploring the world around me, reading, taking notes, and writing. I do a lot of long-form writing on a blog as a hobby. And part of why that’s important is to me is that writing allows me to crystallize the things that I’ve read and consumed and turn them into knowledge — pieces of information I can use to change my environment and the world around me. And I think when you are working online in any context, learning is the ultimate meta-skill because things change incredibly quickly. If you don’t stay a step ahead of at least your client base, you are very quickly going to get lapped and left behind.
So, systems orientation, laziness, empathy, and a real desire to learn are the things that I bring to the leadership equation.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
We’re always trying to work on stuff and testing things. I always say we’re an experimentation company because we are always trying to beat our current best practice. So, it’s so baked into what we do at this point that it’s kind of hard to separate something I’ve done in the last year or so.
What’s new to me is I started a blog called better questions that is completely separate from Adwords Nerds. It is a way for me to write long-form about the things that I’m reading and things I care about, and that’s been really, really fun. I think we’re up to close to 8,000 subscribers at this point, and it’s really helped me in the business in a lot of unexpected ways.
Like I said, writing helps me to figure out what I believe and to make those ideas concrete in a way. I don’t think you ever are forced to do something new till you try to put things down on paper. So yeah, I’ve been really enjoying that.
Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. As we mentioned in the beginning, sometimes companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools like PPC campaigns often see disappointing results. In your opinion, what are a few of the biggest mistakes companies make when they first start out with digital marketing? If you can, please share an example for each.
Okay, I’ll give you two; one more philosophical, and one more implementation-wise.
On the philosophical side, there is a real fundamental misconception that people often have when it comes to online marketing and has to do with the type of system that online marketing is or interacts with. You may think that there are all sorts of systems that surround us all the time, right? The car that you drive to work is a system — there are pieces that interact, right? Your family is a system — It has got a dynamic of its own; how you relate to your significant other or to your kids or to your parents or whatever, right? The economy is a system, the housing market is a system, our bodies are systems, and these systems all interact in various ways.
When you compare the systems, one to another, they differ primarily in the number of units that are interacting and the type of interaction that those units have. For example, you might have a simple system or a clear system. A clear system is something like, let’s say, algebra, where if you put the same input into a given algorithm, you will always get the same output X plus Y will always equal Z, and it is completely reliable, completely clear, right? And so, I always say like a clear system and examples, like I put in a dollar and I get out to that is a clear system.
Now, a complicated system would be something like the human body, right? The human body has clear rules — don’t swallow a bunch of, you know, arsenic, it’s not good for you, right? and you have people that understand the body at a deep level. If I’m a liver specialist, doctor, surgeon type of person, I know a lot about the liver and how it works, but there’s also so much going on so many moving pieces, and so much context that it gets far more complicated than a clear system. In a clear system, I said, X plus Y always equals Z. And so, if your job is to get Z best practice is to add X plus Y but for the human body, there is no such thing as best practice, which means a rule that you always apply. Instead, you have to take into account some context. For example, if you say I have a headache and he was like, great, take two aspirin, that’s the best thing to do, but it’s not the thing you always do, because if the patient with the headache is a baby, then taking two aspirin might kill that baby, right?
Context is incredibly important in complicated systems. Then there are complex systems that don’t just have a whole lot of different pieces and a whole lot of different interactions, but they are systems in which the way the pieces interact changes the rules of the system. An economy, for example, is a complex system. I try to buy low and sell high, you do the same and we interact in a certain way. And there are certain patterns, for example, described by economics to that way that we interact. But if we interact a certain way too much, that creates a wall street crash, and all of a sudden, everything’s off the table, right? So, the way that the pieces interact change the rules of the system itself, and as such, it’s incredibly hard to predict.
Finally, there are chaotic systems where there are no rules — the aliens are bombing the planet, we just got to run, and you just got to whatever. There is no rhyme or reason now. Why am I telling you all this? The primary fundal fundamental misconception that people have when they get into online marketing is they think it is a clear system. Take Google Ads as an example, if I target this keyword, I will get this many leads at this price. Why? Well, because my friend did that, my friend targeted this keyword and got this many leads at this price. Therefore, if I do this, I target this keyword, I get this many leads at this price. If X plus Y, then Z.
However, online marketing systems like Google ads, Facebook ads, Microsoft ads, and SEO are not clear systems — they are markets. They are not clear but complex. The price that you acquire a lead for in your market differs moment to moment, day to day, week to week, depending on what your competitors are bidding, or on how many people are searching for that keyword. For example, if you are targeting the housing market, how is the economy affecting the housing market, the number of buyers or sellers, which affects the number of searches, which affects the supply and demand relationship between the number of advertisers and their bids, and depending on what they think they can make, they might raise their bids or lower their bids.
It’s a bit like the stock market. If I told you, I’m going to give you a list of the top 10 stocks of last year, these stocks made everybody tons of money.
Last year, all you need to have is this list of 10 stocks moving forward and you’ll be rich. Well, the problem is those stocks were great last year, but it doesn’t make them great this year because everything changes, right?
So, this misunderstanding of thinking, you’re going to get a clear outcome when really you’re entering into a complex marketplace is the number one source of frustration, money loss, anger, and bad results, because you have to understand that in situations of uncertainty, there are ways you can stack the deck in your favor and ways you can get way better results over time.
But you have to understand the system you’re in because if you expect X plus Y equals Z and you add X and Y and you don’t get Z, you can’t turn around and blame algebra for your problem because you weren’t doing algebra, instead, you’re trading stocks. I hope that makes sense.
The second single biggest issue, single problem most people have when they get into these marketing tools is they don’t cap their downside. You have to cap your downside. What do I mean by that? When you are entering into an uncertain situation, any kind of complex system, like for example, investing in stocks, well, you probably have an intuitive understanding that even if you are sure, you’re really confident a certain stock is going to go up, you shouldn’t bet everything you own and all your clothing and your kids’ college income or in a college savings fund, right?
You need to cap your downside because you understand that even if you’re confident, there is a chance that things might go sideways, and you might lose that money. Now, when we go into marketing, it is exactly the same way. I can feel very confident that you are going to, on average, for example, acquire a client worth a thousand dollars for a hundred dollars. Net spent that’s 10 times return on your investment. That’s great, but that is an average over time. And any average over time necessarily hides periods in which your performance is lower than the average, which means you might have a month or two where you get nothing.
And that’s on a campaign that is going to generate on average, a 10 X result. So, you have to make sure that what you budget for your campaign, the amount of time you spend on your campaign, and the amount of effort you put into your campaign is not so much that if it does not succeed right away, you collapse under the pressure budget, an amount you are comfortable losing. It’s not because you think you’re going to lose it. It’s because you admit that the universe is a chaotic place, and anything can happen. And if you do lose it, you want to be sure you stay alive to play another day. So those are the two big issues that I see all the time misunderstanding of the kind of system that you are playing in and then not capping your potential downside.
If you could break down a very successful digital marketing campaign into a “blueprint”, what would that blueprint look like? Please share some stories or examples of your ideas.
There are a couple of elements that go into any successful marketing campaign. And the thing I want most people to take away is that the world’s best marketing campaign cannot save a poor product-market fit, by which I mean if your service or your product does not match what the public is actually looking for, you cannot convince them otherwise. I am not in the market for, you know, a strapless red wedding dress. I’m not, and you’re going to have the world’s best marketing campaign for it.
Your campaign might be so good that I actually choose to watch your marketing campaign for fun, but I’m never going to buy a strapless red wedding dress because it’s just not what I need.
So, ultimately all good marketing campaigns start with understanding what the market is looking for and matching the service to meet those needs. This is something that most people don’t really think about, they think, and I’ve fallen prey to this as well. You think you can solve business problems with marketing, and you can. All you end up doing is adding marketing problems to your business problems.
Now, that being said, if you have good product-market fit and you’ve got it, got serve a track record, and you say, hey, I know people want this either because someone else is already selling it, or, you know, I’ve done this in the past, whatever it is, then really what I’m looking for in any successful long-term campaign is a couple of different things.
One, I’m looking for some sort of repeat, repeated or repeatable that is designed towards improving top-of-funnel results. What do I mean by that? You can come up with an amazingly creative ad, a social media campaign, a video, whatever it is, and it will do gangbusters, but ultimately sooner or later, people are going to get tired of it. Right? Where’s the beef is a classic marketing campaign, but you can’t just run the exact same commercial over and over and over again.
Think about, uh, you know, Flo with progressive. She’s in a million different variations of the ad with Flo from progressive, right?
Not just one over and over. And so really what I’m looking for is not just a great creative, although that would help. What I’m looking for is what is the repeatable process by which we are going to continue to create valuable creatives? Do we have a split-testing process? Do I have clear metrics by which I am judging the result of a creative, for example, click-through rate? Am I looking at click-through rate in Google ads or in Facebook ads or in Microsoft ads to determine which ads are doing better?
Am I killing the losers and then promoting the winners? Am I routinely, let’s say every week or every month or every three months, depending on how much volume you’re generating, writing new creative, or testing new options for delivering those ads. Right. I did text ads, and maybe I’ll do video ads, right? I did a post ad, maybe I do a long-form text ad, whatever it is. Right? So that’s what I’m looking for. One repeatable process at the top of the funnel. And then I’m also looking for a repeatable process at the back end of that funnel, right?
I’m looking for conversion rate optimization over the long haul is the landing page matching. My ad is the landing page matching — What happens after the conversion is the landing page, doing a good job of getting people to move through that funnel ultimately.
What I’m looking for on a successful campaign. If I really, if I had to bet my kid’s college education on a given marketing campaign, I’m not betting on any one ad or anyone landing page or any one channel. What I’m betting on is a scientific process of consistent and never-ending improvement. And if I can have that, I can pretty much sell anything.
Let’s talk about Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) for a bit. In your opinion which PPC platform produces the best results to increase sales?
The answer which everybody hates is it depends. And it depends because different PR products and sales have different levels of market awareness, and different levels of market awareness are going to dictate which channels are going to do better. The big divide I would give people is between intent-based marketing and demographic-based marketing. So, what I mean, what do I mean by that intent-based marketing?
The classic example is Google search ads. Google search ads are amazing because I can find somebody that’s going into Google and typing in size 10 air Jordans, or even by size 10 air Jordans and get in front of just that person. It gives me a lot of control, and specifically, it gives me the ability to get in front of people that want what I have right now.
Now the problem is not all products and services are things that people know they want. For example, if I’m a life coach for rock climbers and just to make that up, rock climbers might not know what a life coach is or how it might benefit their athletic career, right?
They might not know that, and so I might have to take a very different approach because if I wait for people to type in life coach for rock climbers, I might wait forever. So instead of intent-based marketing, I might go demographics-based marketing. The classic example of which is Facebook ads or Instagram ads, something like that, where I’m saying, it’s not people searching for me specifically what I do instead. I want to get in front of this type of person, 20 to 30-year-olds that like rock climbing, right? And then I might put content in front of them that gets them to know who I am and sort of warms them up and then educates them.
And then they’re going to pull the trigger, right? So, it’s not necessarily which channels are best, it’s which channel is best for this situation. You got to understand how your service or product matches the market. You’re going after for my money. Intent-based Google ads, Google search ads is still the king. And for demographics — based Facebook, Instagram, that kind of thing is still king. But it depends — if you’re going after gen Z, you might want to go on Tik TOK, right?
There’s no one size fits all for anything. I wish there were because it would make my job a lot easier.
Can you please share 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful PPC campaign?
one, there’s no such thing as a set-and-forget PPC campaign. This is a myth you can absolutely set and forget if all you want to do is spend your money forever and not get any results. If you do want to get results, you have to pay attention.
I would say to just be aware that the general trend of the industry is towards a heavier reliance on algorithms. So, what’s going to happen is that over time, advertisers, meaning you, the business owner, are going to have less and less, uh, control over what happens inside the ad account.
Whether your ads are shown to the right audience or which ads end up getting promoted, that’s going to be largely within a black box, that is the algorithm controlled by these advertising channels. And so, what’s going to be of utmost importance over the next 10 years is really controlling what you have power over, which is your bottom of the funnel, your sales process. You follow a process, your conversion rate optimization. These things are going to be critical.
Finally, the thing I would point out is that today lead attribution is getting harder and harder to do meaning it’s getting really complicated to really know this ad produced this lead from this channel, so on and so forth. Because what ends up happening is people are on multiple devices, they’re bouncing between multiple channels, meaning I saw your ad on Facebook, and then I Googled you, then I clicked on the organic result, which took me to a YouTube channel. And then I bounced to your website
It’s like, well, it’s really hard to track that lead all the way back to that Facebook ad that maybe they never even clicked.
It’s hard to impossible given some technological changes that happened in 2021. And so the way I tend to think about this is that all these things are one giant system. And I might have an ad campaign. Let’s say a Facebook campaign that doesn’t look like on the surface, it’s generating many leads.
But if that campaign gets me in front of people that I care about, and then those people sort of know about me a little bit more, and then they go and Google me a month later. If I turn off that Facebook campaign, I might see a drop in my organic search results, right. Or my results in another channel.
So this idea that every channel is separate, and you can really dial into the specific return on investment of specific ad, I think those days are kind of gone. Instead, what I would think about is how can I, as effectively and cheaply as possible, get in front of the audience that I care about. And if I’m doing that, I’m getting some kind of engagement. Generally, I’m going to be happy as long as my backend sales are trending in the right direction.
Let’s now talk about email marketing for a bit. In your opinion, what are the 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful email marketing campaign that increases sales?
A couple of things about email marketing, and I don’t consider myself a world-class email marketer per se. But I do think that there’s sort of a fundamental mistake that people often make, which is assuming that because it’s email, it is somehow profoundly different from any other form of communications or sales. And I think that’s wrong. Email is essentially asynchronous. I mean, it is asynchronous communications and sales. That’s all it is.
And so, we have to be respectful of people in the same way. We would be respectful to people if we were talking to them face-to-face and that means not wasting their time. The number one piece of advice I would give people is don’t waste people’s time. We are in 2022 — it is not 2015 or 2006 anymore; people get it. They know what you’re doing and what email is. People don’t want your emails. I mean, it’s just, it’s a lot, right?
But at the same time, if you look at what’s happening with services like substack and the sort of rebirth and re-emergence of email newsletters, it’s clear that people are hungrier than ever for high-quality content delivered in their email inbox. They just don’t want your b******t, and so for me, I treat email and email marketing very much in the same exact way I would treat sitting down with someone for dinner and having a conversation with them that I think is going to deliver value. Right? So, I think about email as a platform for delivering value and building a relationship over time. I mentioned before that I run a blog, it’s also an email newsletter, that’s called Better Questions. Um, and you can link to that at https://www.betterquestions.co.
I email people once a week, and I email them extremely high quality, well thought out, hopefully, well-written pieces. Now, if you are running a very specific email marketing campaign, like let’s say somebody signs up for some sort of lead magnet or course or something, I do think you can email them a whole bunch of times during the week, as long as you provide value every single time. And one of the ways that I think about this is, the reason that I’m using email is I am training my audience to react in a certain way. Think about it in a video game. If you want to train the player to act in a certain way, let’s say to take a certain action or to perform a certain move. You reward that player. When they do it, you have the screen light up points go up, you get a positive noise, something cool happens on screen.
If you want to train a dog to sit, when you say SIT, you positively reinforce that dog. Every time it sits. When you say, sit, you pet it and you say good boy, and you give it a treat. This is not rocket science, it is the foundation of behaviorism, but it’s also treating other people with respect. If you want them to do something for you, like open your emails or respond to your offers, you’ve got to make it worth their while. And not just at the point you make the offer, you’ve got to make it worth their while every single time they interact with you. So if you send low-quality, cheesy emails, you are training them to ignore you. Maybe you want them to subscribe, but they’re going to stop opening. They’re going to stop caring. You want them to think, oh my God, this person just sent me an email. I’ve got a check, I’ve got to read it, I’ve got to see what they have to say. And similarly, when you make offers, you have to train them that your offers are so good that they do not want to miss out.
You’ve got to train them that when they buy something from you, you not only deliver you over-deliver to the extent that they are on the lookout for offers from you. So think about email marketing, not as this kind of static funnel, where you extract value from other people. Think of it as a platform for teaching people and positively reinforcing people for listening to you and reacting to your offers. And if you can take a step back and think about it that way, you will have the most responsive email audience you could possibly imagine.
What are the other digital marketing tools that you are passionate about? If you can, can you share with our readers what they are and how to best leverage them?
There’s a couple that I particularly like. Um, you know, I think we can focus a little bit too much on tools, and there really isn’t a tool that helps to provide a ton of extra value to an audience. It’s ultimately what marketing and forming long-term relationships is.
Um, there are tools that make the logistical process easier, quicker, and more efficient, and I like anything that helps me save time.
For example, there is a tool called missing letter, which is a M I S S I N G L E T T R. See what they did, they’re missing letter with no E, and that is like a social media scheduler. One of the things I really like about missing a letter is it will read an RSS feed. I’m very big on this idea of content stacking, by which, I mean, I have a medium in which I’m most comfortable. Generally, it’s making videos and writing. Those are the mediums I like to operate in. And so, I focus on creating the best content I can in those mediums, my YouTube channel, my blog, whatever missing letter can watch RSS feeds or your YouTube channel and pull in that content, and then very quickly uses some AI and stuff. It will help you create a year’s worth of social media posts around those pieces of content.
So, not only does it resurface old content, and drive people back to the site, but it also books out your social media queue for a really long time. The whole process is very seamless. I like it quite a bit.
The other software that I really, really like, and actually it’s my most used piece of software on my computer, is something I do everything in. And that is Rome research. Rome is a networked note-taking tool. It’s basically a text pad that allows you to take notes, but it’s sort of like you’re building your own version of Wikipedia. So, everything I do; writing, reading, basically everything I do during the day gets put into Rome and connected in a variety of different ways to all the other ideas I have.
So, when I do research or when I work on a client’s work, when I want to take notes on what I’m doing in a given marketing campaign, when I’m taking from a book or a course, I put everything in Rome. And then later when I want to turn that into content, or I want to turn that into a campaign, or I want to brainstorm on something new, I can easily pull in the variety of thoughts I’ve had in the past.
It’s very hard to explain without actually doing it, but I highly recommend it if you are someone that lives online as I do. Rome research is essentially a second to the brain for me, and I don’t think I can live without it at this point.
Here is the main question of our series. Can you please tell us the 5 things you need to create a highly successful career as a digital marketer? Can you please share a story or example for each?
The first thing that you need for sure is a dedication to lifelong learning.
Even more than that, it’s sort of a combination. In fact, an incredibly strange combination of extreme confidence and extreme humility. what do I mean by that? Digital marketing is an industry that changes very very rapidly and it doesn’t just change, it changes such that a lot of things that work one day stop working.
The next is an industry that, really forces you to continuously throw out your preconceptions of how things work and how they should work and rebuild them from the ground up to match the new reality.
And so, you need to have a deep sense of confidence that you can do this, that you can handle it, that you can figure it out.
And you also have to have the extreme humility to understand that no matter how well you understand how things work today, tomorrow, that could all go in the garbage, so, that extreme confidence that you can figure things out, this is something that’s a huge part of my personality.
I’m very cocky, sort of by default, but what I’ve learned through a Scrabble contact with reality over and over is that that can definitely lead you astray, and you need to be humble enough to realize, “Hey, every now and then I need to learn it all over again.” So that dedication to learning, um, is really the second thing. So, if you say like condiments and humility, as a combination as number one, number two, dedication to learning, you need to have a system for learning. You need to be okay with learning. You need to like taking online courses, reading books, watching YouTube videos, reading blogs.
You need to like staying on top of all that stuff because if you don’t, you’ll be very quickly left behind, and you will hate your life. The name of the game is Fast. Moving is fast changing now for me, that is fun. It keeps it fresh. I hate doing the same thing over and over again. So, the idea is that Hey, every now and then there’s a total curveball that gets thrown, and we have to reinvent ourselves and reinvent our service.
That’s exciting. It’s risky. And it can be a little fraught, but it’s exciting. It’s fun. So, if you have that dedication to learning, that curiosity about how things work, that’s really gonna serve you. Well, a third, you need an analytical mindset. We are in a universe where there is more and more data to be had. And in fact, there’s so much data that a lot of times, it’s a matter of which data do you choose to pay attention to rather than do you have data at all?
So having some kind of analytical mindset, being able to sit down and think deeply about an issue, look at the numbers. And from those numbers, pull a story that allows you to create effective action. That’s really what the analytical mindset is all about. And it comes into play in so many different ways in online marketing, and particularly if you’re going to run your own business doing this, there are just so many to look at. There are so many different data points, and it can be easy to get swallowed up in it. It can be easy to go too far down that road and just have like kind of data analysis paralysis as well.
So having that analytical mindset, being comfortable with numbers, I mean, as a kid in school, I hated math. I was all English, all writing.
I hated math. I was not a numbers person at all. So, I’m not saying you need to have like this inherent mathematical skill. I took remedial math every year up until college and then never took it again. But over time, I’ve become comfortable with numbers and comfortable with some kind of level of analytical mindset. And that’s really critical to me.
Fourth, you need to really have a deep interest in people, psychology, sociology, anthropology, management; these all come into play. For one because marketing is really highly reliant on psychology in terms of what really moves people. What makes people act the way that they act? What are the dynamics of groups? What are means, what are narratives? How do all those things play into what the decisions that people make?
What is effective communication? All of these things rely on an understanding of people. And if you’re not interested in people, and you’re going to have a hard time translating the technical skills and marketing to effective actual communications, actually getting people to make a decision.
It’s one thing to be able to set up an ad campaign. It’s very much another to understand what that ad campaign should say in order to drive people to take the actions that you want to take.
And so, marketing is this, especially online marketing, it’s really a unique combination of technical skill and, um, humanistic understanding psychological knowledge. That’s why I like it. If it was all technical, I wouldn’t be into it, but I love that combination of technical and psychological. So having an understanding interest in psychology and that deeper set of like human communication, it’s really, really important.
The last thing you need to be really successful as a digital marketer is something that I think is not unique to digital marketing, but I think it is true of all successful people. And it’s a commitment, a personal commitment to what is called double-loop learning.
single-loop learning is you have a problem, you try to solve the problem, see if it worked or not, and then you try again or not, depending on what happened. So, if you hide a dog treat and a dog goes looking for it, it might sniff under the couch. Didn’t find it? Okay. So, it’s going to go again. It might sniff under a pillow. Didn’t find it? It’s going to try again. It sniffs under the chair found it. That’s that single-loop learning. There’s a, “did I achieve the goal? No, try again.”
Now double-loop learning is where you still have this single loop. Did I achieve the goal? No, try again, but you have a second loop on top of that. That’s asking yourself, can I solve this problem in a more effective way? Am I learning in the most efficient way? Am I acting in the most effective way? You are not only judging the outcome of your actions.
You are judging how you decide, how to act, how you learn and react to reality. Are you being defensive? Are you being entitled?
Are you misunderstanding? Are your prior assumptions about how things work inaccurately? This is what is so important to all forms of success because we all go in with a certain set of understandings of how the world works.
And oftentimes, people that get rewarded for that rely on that single set of understandings for their entire lives. But the fact is the world moves so quickly, and it changes so often that even if you land on the most successful investing strategy, marketing strategy, whatever it is, the likelihood of that strategy lasting for the length of your career is zero.
And if we don’t embody this ability to change how we learn and change how we act and change how we move through the world, we’re never going to be able to adapt.
So just to go back, humility and a little bit of arrogance, uh, dedication to learning, um, dedication to second, a second loop or to a second loop learning or whatever I call it.
Um, a technical mindset, analytical mindset, right? And an understanding and interest in psychology. What books, podcasts, videos, or resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?
What books, podcasts, videos or other resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?
I actually don’t read a ton of specific marketing materials, although that isn’t always the case. I do read a fair amount of business, and specifically, I’ve kind of recently been into jobs to be done. So, a couple of books on the jobs to be done with the framework, but I tend to read primarily, outside of business. So, I’m very interested in systems dynamics, and systems thinking.
I’m interested in learning things like Canavin, which is spelled a C Y N E F I N, which is complexity theory, really, really fascinating, uh, theory of constraints. There’s a wonderful book by the name Of The goal by Eli Goldratt. The theory of constraints has completely transformed how I think about marketing. It is the core of how I approach pretty much every marketing and account optimization problem, but it’s not a marketing book. It’s a book about manufacturing. So I am of the mind that if you read the same books that everybody else reads, you will tend to think the same way and thinking the same way as everyone else can be useful sometimes, but it’s only ever going to make you average.
It is the ideas outside of the norm that you can apply to what you do that makes you truly different and truly unique and effective. So, I tend to look for mental models and ideas outside of the world of marketing. I read a lot about investing. I’m a big fan of Howard marks, Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanac, of course, is the classic there. Howard marks has written a couple of different, wonderful books on investing that I highly recommend — Theory of Constraints, Anything There, The Goal by Old Rat, which is the first popular book on the theory of constraints. Can Nevin, which is not yet a book officially, but is a variety of articles you can find on Hartford, Harvard business review, and so on.
Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
That’s very kind of you to say, I don’t know about that.
You know, it’s hard because obviously there is, um, any number of, um, injustices in the world, economic, racial, gender-based, sexuality-based, areas of deep political strife, violence, political violence, either.
So many places where you could do good. But I think if you were going to try to solve the one problem that would solve all problems, or at least have the most effective impact, it would really be teaching really proactively teaching, uh, rationality, the reason, the use of reason.
And decision-making understanding, trade-offs understanding, things like game theory, these ideas that tend to seem academic from the outside. But if you think of human beings as this interesting mix of pure animal and rational, right, we have these animal drives and desires this deep, um, sort of instinctual, ability.
That’s incredibly powerful, but it’s married to, what Daniel Conaman calls The System to Thinking. This sort of highly rational, highly complex sort of difficult mode of thinking. I truly believe that if we could have more of that, we would tend to make better decisions and better decisions would make the world a better place.
So, for me, rationality is tied to a deep sense of humility, my ability to understand the world, and my ability to truly understand opinions that are different from mine.
I really don’t believe I know better than other people. I try my best to understand as best I can and decide as best I can based on what I know, but I know that I’m never going to get the entire picture of the world is just too complex. It’s too fast-moving, and so I give people a real large benefit of the doubt because of that. And I just think if that attitude could be a little more common, we might be a little better off.
How can our readers further follow your work?
A couple of different places. Obviously, the agency is https://adwordsnerds.com.
My personal blog is https://www.betterquestions.co. And, you can actually see my YouTube channel as well, which is, https://www.youtube.com/AdWordsNerds.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!
Dan Barrett Of Adwords Nerds On How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, &… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
