Tarek Nazzal Of Nazzal Brothers On How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Always willing to learn: As we say, knowledge is power. In my experience, having the will to learn current and new concepts that are introduced in the digital marketing industry is beyond important. Technology is advancing rapidly so continuing to self-educate is a must.

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 Tarek Nazzal.

Tarek Nazzal is an entrepreneur that has been in the digital marketing industry over the past 4 years. He is currently the Founder & CEO of Nazzal Brothers, Inc., a full-service digital marketing agency focusing on web design and development, branding, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing. He currently resides in California and operates the marketing agency on a day-to-day basis.

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?

A little about myself, I was born in the USA and raised in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia to be specific. After graduating high school in 2012, I decided to take a gap year and pursue my soccer career. I was fortunate enough to have had the luxury of travelling to Spain and the United Kingdom to further my soccer career, which I am forever grateful for. However, in 2016 I decided to take a big step of moving to California to pursue my soccer career as well my education. During my time at California State University, San Bernardino (I was still deciding on what to pursue), I started an online personal training business. I believe this was the first step that allowed me to make the decision of shifting into the digital marketing industry. This is where I had to be creative because I was a one man show; from operations, demonstrating training lessons, and most importantly, continuing to market my services through social media, website, and posting articles on a weekly basis.

Throughout my experience in the online personal training business, I started generating a lot of interest in the digital marketing industry. I learned that everything is marketing. No matter how great your business can be, if you do not have the right marketing strategy, it will be difficult to scale and further grow your business. Therefore, I ended up graduating in BA in Administration, Concertation in Marketing at CSUSB.

Upon graduation, since I had a great understanding of digital marketing principles, I decided to start up a digital marketing agency. Three years later, here I am continuing to do what I love, which is helping businesses establish a strong presence to generate awareness and increase revenue. I had the luxury of working in various sectors ranging from finance, beauty, hospitality, roofing, medical, and transportation.

I continue to strive helping clients because my job is to ensure they have the right tools and resources to grow their business.

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?

Where do I start on this one lol. During my time when I was operating my online personal training business, I was literally writing articles daily and was receiving no traffic whatsoever on my website. There had to be something wrong that I never understood. I came to find out about something called “Search Engine Optimization”. I had no knowledge of SEO and the principles that needed to be applied; from title tags, mete-descriptions, using the right keyword, website speed, image optimization etc. I had realized that all of my time writing all these articles were worthless because I had no implementation of these SEO strategies.

However, I completely believe in failure because that is when you learn. I started to self-educate myself about all the different SEO strategies; from technical, on-page, and off-page, and how they can be implemented to generate traffic and improve domain authority.

Now, mistakes are part of the process and part of life. No matter how good you are, you will always make mistakes. Mistakes do not define who we are but knowing how to overcome these mistakes is exactly what makes us stronger individuals. Therefore, failure in my point of view is a positive if you know how to use it the right way.

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?

No doubt, my parents are my biggest supporters. Everything I have done in life was because of their support. No words can describe their support, but I will forever be grateful because they gave me a life and everything I asked for; from having the best education and allowing me to pursue my dreams of having a soccer career. Parents are the ones who believe in you when nobody else does. They always see the light in you which always keep you going and moving. Everything I do in life is dedicated to my parents.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

We as a company strive to provide the best services to our clients. We focus on integrity and trust, and it will always remain this way. The transparency we have with our clients is one of the most important elements to our growth. My job is to ensure that clients are being provided with the best tools to further grow their businesses. Most importantly, we always under promise and over deliver. This is how I operate the business because happy and satisfied clients will ultimately add tremendous value to my business in the future.

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?

The three character traits that I believe were extremely helpful are Self-Confidence, Self-Discipline, and Competitive.

Self-Confidence: I cannot stress how important this characteristic is. Whenever someone starts a business, there is always someone who doubts you. The most critical character trait is to never ever doubt yourself. If you doubt yourself, you already lost. It can be difficult to regain confidence, but one of the best ways to do that is by preparation. The one who knows what and how to do something, will always feel a lot more confident. I can personally say this from experience.

Self-Discipline: Anyone can start a business, but the most important question to ask yourself, is how consistent can you be? It takes discipline and effort to wake up early in the morning, perhaps cold call for 2 hours, sleepless nights to make sure you are doing everything in your power to keep the business running. I do believe this is what makes or breaks someone’s business, which is the consistency to keep going when you are tired and exhausted.

Competitive: As an athlete, competitiveness is in my nature. I always set targets and ask myself, “How can I do better”. This can be tiring because sometimes enough is not enough and always want more. This is a very good attribute in my opinion because this itself is a motivation that can take your business to the next level. It is important to set goals because that is how the bar is raised; whether personally or professionally.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Were always working on new and exciting projects! As a full-service marketing agency, we work with companies in various industries, and apply similar marketing principles for each.

However, every industry has a different marketing strategy, so when we work with a company in an industry that we have minimal experience in, we always challenge ourselves to provide the best value and services. Every project we attain, its always a learning experience because every client’s needs are different. As I mentioned, we focus on trust and integrity and will always provide the best of our services to our clients to ensure their satisfaction.

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.

Digital marketing consists of various activities, from search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and social media marketing.

Search Engine Optimization: It varies on the company. Some small businesses do not have a great amount of knowledge on how SEO works, therefore implementation strategies are not applied correctly. It is critical for companies to optimize their websites using SEO strategies, such as using specific keywords, image optimization, title tags, and meta-descriptions. These elements are a small part of SEO.

Search Engine Marketing: This consists of Google and other related search engines using PPC ads. It is vital to have the right digital marketing strategy and understanding the purpose of the ads being created. The most important element is to set a campaign objective or goal. Ask yourself, “What is the purpose of the ad?” This is where many people fail. If you do not have the right strategy, PPC ads can be extremely expensive, depending on the industry.

PPC ads come in various forms; such as Search, Display, Video, and Shopping. Each form consists of a different goal. For example, Search is used to generate leads, whilst Display is more towards building brand awareness.

Social Media Marketing: This is probably the most common form of marketing. This is the easiest to do because its inexpensive. As always, it is important to know what the purpose of the ad is. Just because this is cost effective, it does not mean you will achieve the projected results.

However, it takes lots of testing to find the “right” ad that works and converts. This is where “Split Testing” comes into play. It is critical to test two different ads at the same time to see what works and what doesn’t.

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.

A digital marketing campaign should be clear and precise. There are several stages in a campaign that should be considered. Here is an example of a Google PPC Campaign:

1. Campaign objective: This is the most important aspect of the campaign because this dictates the next steps. What is the goal? To Drive traffic? Generate leads? Create brand awareness? However, in this example, we will focus on generating leads for a roofing company in Southlake, TX.
2. Campaign type: As for the campaign type when generating leads, the most common would be “Search Ads”. The purpose of using this campaign type because we are basing the ad on keywords that are being searched. The search being made is based on something specific because the user is looking for something in this present moment.
3. Keywords: The search being made is based on a specific keyword. For this reason, keywords should be selected and chosen carefully for a campaign to be successful. By using our example of a roofing company, some of the keywords we can use are roofing company in southlake, southlake roofing contractor, best roofing contractor in southlake, roof repair southlake, and roof replacement southlake.
4. Match type: There are 4 different match types: Broad Match, Modified Broad Match, Phrase Match, and Exact Match. Each one of these match types allows the keyword to have some sort of flexibility. For example, if a user is searching for a roofing company in Southlake, TX, an Exact Match of a keyword would be “roofing company in southlake, tx”. Therefore, the Search Ad should be displayed to the user. However, several factors affect the placement of the A, such as the Quality Score.
5. Location: It is important to understand the location of your potential customers because if this is not carefully taken into consideration, PPC ads can get expensive depending on the industry. For example, if a roofing company in southlake would like to display the ads in specific areas such as Colleyville, Dallas, and Westlake, then the location targeting should focus on these areas only.
6. Extensions: These are literally extensions that are part of the placement Search Ad. A few extensions are Sitelink, Call, Location, and Offer extensions. If there is one thing I learned is to create as many extensions as possible because it increases the size of the placement Search Ad and takes most of the space. In our example, by using the Call extension for the roofing company, we will add the companys’ phone number, and by using the Sitelink Extension, we can encourage potential customers to view a few of our roofing projects done in the past on our website.
7. Landing page: A landing page is a single web page that is accessed via a hyperlink displayed in the Search Ad. The structure of a landing page should be clear, keywords used above should be scattered throughout the web page content, sample of projects, testimonials from previous clients, and most importantly, it must have a Call-to-Action that acts as a lead capture. This allows potential customers to input their contact information. This is referred to as a lead.
8. Optimization: In marketing, optimization plays a massive role in making the most of the campaign. This includes tweaking the number of keywords, adding/removing extensions, changing the keyword match types, and perhaps improving the landing page.

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?

Honestly, it really depends on the industry. Also, it varies whether it’s a B2B or B2C. For a B2B company, LinkedIn Ads could potentially be of great use because it targets specific professionals in an industry. For a B2C company, Facebook Ads is a very cost-effective method to build greater brand awareness, but Google Ads can be used to generate short-term sales, specifically using Search Ads. However, as stated before, it can be very expensive depending on the industry.

Can you please share 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful PPC campaign?

There are many things that someone should know how to run a highly successful PPC campaign.

1. PPC Principles: Depending on the PPC chosen (whether its Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn ads), it is very important to understand the different features and how they can be used in the most effective way possible.
2. Setting Objectives: Setting an objective/goal is crucial to run a successful campaign. It is important to map out all the features described above in detail. Brainstorming and noting every step of the process will give you a clear idea on the direction of the campaign.
3. Experience: The only way to experience is through trial and error. It is always best to start with small budgets for testing purposes. It takes consistency and effort to achieve best results for any PPC campaign.

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?

Email marketing is one of the many digital marketing strategies that can reap major benefits for any company. Here are 3 things needed to run a highly successful email marketing campaign:

1. Targeted email list: It is crucial to know who the targeted audience is. However, it really depends on many factors, whether this is for a B2B or B2C company. For a B2B email marketing campaign, identifying the target market is needed because you are reaching out to potential customers who may have interest in doing business with you. On the other hand, a B2C email marketing campaign can be dedicated to customers who have been purchasing your products or services in the past. Therefore, past customers are easier to convert, but it takes consistency and effort to make this possible.
2. Follow ups: I cannot stress how important this factor is. As we say, timing is everything. Continually following up keeps your company in the mind of the customers so when they decide to make a purchase, your company is the first one that comes to mind. The moment emails are sent distantly apart, they eventually turn into cold leads, which then becomes 10x harder.
3. Visually appealing templates: A visually appealing email template will automatically allow customers to behave and react differently. In addition, the email template should be well-structured, allowing potential customers to navigate easily through the different CTAs.

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?

As a marketing agency, when we develop a full marketing plan for clients, we always include every marketing tool to ensure maximum exposure. For example, redesigning their website to promote maximum visibility and reduce bounce rates, optimizing their Google My Business profile as well as all their social media accounts, having the write content marketing strategy (Blogs) to generate more traffic, and most importantly, integrating SEO techniques to improve their websites’ search engine rankings.

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?

1. Understanding digital marketing principles: It is vital to learn every piece of vocabulary in digital marketing to have a grasp understanding of current and future trends. This is a great start. For example, understanding concepts such as website design and development (WordPress etc), social media marketing (Campaign types), search engine optimization (technical, on-site, and off-site SEO), and PPC ads (Search, Display campaign types as well as keyword targeting).
2. Always willing to learn: As we say, knowledge is power. In my experience, having the will to learn current and new concepts that are introduced in the digital marketing industry is beyond important. Technology is advancing rapidly so continuing to self-educate is a must.
3. Networking: I cannot stress how important this is because this does not only expand your knowledge, but also creates business opportunities and future collaboration between professionals in the digital world.
4. Communication skills: As a digital marketer, knowing how to deliver messages across various platforms and being able to share compelling stories is essential. Most importantly, how can a message captivate and tap into customer emotions. This can differentiate between a good and a great marketer.
5. Data analysis: The only way to measure campaigns and view their success is by understanding the various measuring tools, such as Google Analytics. This allows you to track website traffic activity and locate the source of traffic. This helps marketers focus on factors that promote website growth and increase sales.

What books, podcasts, videos or other resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?

The internet has all the information someone needs. It is free and easy to obtain. I personally read a lot of blogs and complete various certifications to keep up with current trends. Every year I manage to complete all Google Ad Certifications, as well as HubSpot Certifications that focuses on all digital marketing activities (Content Marketing, Digital Advertising, Digital Marketing, Inbound Marketing).

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. 🙂

I would like to start a movement that would allow people to feel more confident and pursue their dreams. People fear change, but sometimes change is all what someone needs to reach their full potential. It takes courage to step out of their comfort zone, but I do believe everyone should do something that scares them because this is how we learn and continue to make our lives way more interesting. We only have one life, so better make sure to try everything because this could not only lead to more opportunities, but happiness and fulfillment as well.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Visit our website as we continue to make updates. You can also follow us on LinkedIn.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!

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Tarek Nazzal Of Nazzal Brothers 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.