Would you like to jumpstart your leads with your ideal clients? We've got that and so much more today on this edition of The Inside BS Show. Hey now, I'm Nikki G. This is The Inside BS Show. We are again live here from the Design District in Global Furniture Group's space.

It's a space in Miami for their showroom. It showcases all the furniture they provide for the office setting, healthcare, and other industries. So if you haven't checked it out, you should.

They are in multiple locations across the country and they are graciously hosting us here today and are sponsoring our podcast. With me today is my co-host, Dave Lorenzo, the godfather of growth. Dave, how are you? Hey now, Nikki G. I am absolutely fantastic today here at Global's showroom.

So if you need some office furniture, this is the place to be. I wish I could show you how beautiful this place is. It is absolutely fantastic.

We're gonna put in the show notes how you can get to a Global Furniture showroom near you. We'll talk a little bit about them and what they do later on in the show. So Nikki G, you opened by saying the fastest way to get leads, am I correct? Did I hear that right? I opened with jumpstarting your leads.

All right, so we're gonna jumpstart our leads and what's the fastest way to do that? With advertising. Who's our guest today, Nikki G? Our guest today is Paula Romo and she can tell us all about jumpstarting our leads and so much more in the advertising space. Paula, good morning.

It's such a pleasure to have you here with us. How are you? Thanks for having me here, Nicola and Dave. I really appreciate coming down to the podcast.

This is wonderful. Plus this location is absolutely stunning. Global Furniture is really just breathtaking.

If you need any kind of furniture, this is the place to be. So thank you for having me. Great to have you here.

Let's start with how you got into digital advertising in the first place, right? What were you doing? You have an engineering background. So how did you get into digital advertising, Paula? Sure, so actually this is a little bit of a bootstrapping story. So our company Leadsmith has been around for 12 years.

It's a husband and wife business. And we actually, after we got married, we kind of were like, we don't want to go back to our normal lives. So we took a nice vacation.

We took like a year off to think and we got back. My husband actually started a bit of marketing in general. So we started with affiliate marketing.

And then we also, after we transitioned from affiliate marketing, email marketing, and that kind of stuff, moved into crowdfunding space. And then really from there was just a natural transition into paid advertising on platforms like Facebook and things like that. Because at the time, I'm talking like in 12 years, those were really the places to go.

Now my participation, he has an extensive marketing background. My participation was a bit different. I was always on the business side of the equation, a lot of business development, really understanding the market.

And the truth is, at least for me personally, I've always really been interested in this sort of small to mid-cap business sizes, where if you think about it, small businesses are about 44% of US GDP. And they represent about 46% of US private workforce. And I just always found that to be so empowering of a thought because if you can help bring these amazing technologies that exist today, that before would have been almost impossible for any business in the 50s to even approach, you can bring this technology and help people create their businesses, grow them.

I mean, talk about innovation that's happening, things that are happening in the whole US marketplace. And so that was really what drove me to bring it. So even as an engineer, you can bring all of these applications and really utilize them for that purpose.

And I always found that to be kind of a calling for me. So here I am. So how did you decide what the business would look like? Really, the way we started it was what kind of worked.

At first, what was paying the bills and things were changing, but technology also has been evolving significantly in the last 12 years. I mean, you've gone from, internet, like social media has really not been around and the ability and capabilities that you have from a technology-wise perspective to see what you're putting in your ads and your purchases and all that stuff, plus there's a very technical component to paid advertising and there's a very data-driven perspective. So those are skill sets that are very strong for both my husband and I. And so we naturally kind of found into that space and it's just been the place that really fits well for us.

Honestly, and then over time we kept seeing like, look, even though marketing is huge, as I say, you can compare it to lawyers where some do probate, some do business. Well, marketing is a huge spectrum of different things. And so in some of those, you have a lot of kind of social influence or PR, but when you're going into like paid advertising and things like that, it's a different type of skill set to understand.

And we just, it fit naturally to us and it feels great and we enjoy it very much. Honestly, it's quite exciting. So, and every day it's new, technology evolves.

I mean, just look at the news and you'll see different changes that are taking place. Let's start with the good about digital advertising. That's everything that you do online is trackable, it's measurable.

So you know what, like you know what you're doing today and what it produces tomorrow, what it produces in 30 days, what it produces in 60 days, what it produces in 90 days. When your clients come to you, do you find that they have an understanding that there's so much data available or do you have to educate them on that? I would say you'd have to educate them on that. And surprisingly enough, because again, although this technology is new, it's not that new, but folks are very, they don't understand what it is.

They confuse this whole concept around what marketing is, where when you're going into paid advertising, you're going into a very specific effort. So some clients have an understanding, they've been doing it for a while, and some are interested in getting into it, but they don't really know how to assess it. So we start really by letting people know that the value of this, and I'll give like a, I always found this to be my story to explain this for anybody who's listening as business owners.

We have helped a business sell fruitcakes. They sold like $5 million a year in like the end of year, you know, Christmas period of time. And so we were having dinner with family and we were telling them what we did.

We helped a company sell fruitcakes. And they're like, what? Like who, why would you sell fruitcakes? Who's interested in fruitcakes? Like what boring thing, blah, blah, blah. But yet of the whole team, well, there was one person who was my cousin, who older, you know, like 50 year old woman who's really interested and said, hey, you know what, that's a great idea.

I never even thought about the fruitcake. Like what a great thing, I can buy it online and this would be a perfect gift. And now why? Because she's a target audience.

She is somebody who's thinking about the end of year, who's thinking about, you know, setting up for the holidays. And she was the person I wanted to find. The rest of the table was full of people who had no interest.

Okay, they're not my audience. And so I always make this analogy because it's like, you have to really understand your audience before you do anything. Then you have to understand that your product fits.

Obviously that offer makes sense. Like you're not gonna charge thousands of dollars for the fruitcake. And then you have to put it in a message that like connects with them.

So if you have those three components together, that's like, oh, this is a place for us to start. And so what social media does is that it allows you to basically find all of those 50 year old cousins and all of the town and all of the US and not have to go to every single door to ask that question, right? And so that's what's so powerful about it. It's not like you just throw it out there and see what sticks.

And I think a lot of times people think that it's just, I just put something out there and I throw it out there and, you know, they actually expect amazing results with very little effort. But that's probably the biggest misconception. It's not, there's a very kind of specific science to it.

It's such a great analogy with the fruitcakes. It's how do we find those fruitcake purchasers in the marketplace with advertising? And you hit on something specific that I really want you to expand on a little bit more is having that right messaging for that person. So a lot of people come to you and they have a message or they don't, like how do you help them figure out what's gonna be the right message before we start going down this path? Sure, so, and I would say, interestingly enough, a lot of times business owners, they don't actually have the right message.

They have a perception that they're like, you just put that person in front of me and I'll sell it. But the reality is a lot of them don't. I'd say probably like 40% of them have a solid, like yeah, this is what I want, this is what I'm looking for, super targeted.

And then the others don't. And so depending to what degree we can assist in that process, because the only way you're gonna figure it out is by testing the message. So you can test the message online, but it may cost you, right? Or you can do other mechanisms by which we can do.

Now, obviously, if it's a certain type of product or an industry that we may have a lot of knowledge around, it might be easier because we can guide them a bit on that message. But for the most part, the business owner really has to understand what they're selling. And we tell them like, if you're not ready, don't start with paid advertising because you're spending money in advance.

It's better for you to try it. You could do organic posting, start doing things in a way that helps you understand that message, see what resonates. Try it in your networks, try it in different ways.

But don't, I mean, if you don't have that message, don't. Now, if you're ready or you have a solid idea around where it needs to be and you need to tweak the message just slightly, that's where testing begins at a paid advertising perspective, right? Because then you could say, oh, well, we tried these two or three variations. We start seeing which one works of those variations.

And then we start to see which one's the winner. And then based on the winner, you kind of double down on it and you make adjustments according to it and things like that. Okay, so the right messaging.

And then what else makes someone a good candidate for paid advertising? Well, the other thing is really to know the audience, right? They have to understand who are they selling to. Like in my example of the fruitcake, it was a 50-year-old woman who's the person probably in charge of end-of-year kind of events, right? They have to understand who that audience is. And a lot of times people, business owners, yes, their product could serve many people, but that doesn't mean that it should serve all of them.

And at first, start with the ones who are most probably gonna buy from you. Now, what's the greatest way to figure that out? It's to look at your former sales. Like who did you sell it to? Oh, I happened to have sold it to a whole bunch of lawyers that work like this, or I sold it to property managers.

So those are the parts. Could it work for lawyers and property managers? Maybe, but start with the ones that you know for sure, because then those other audiences can be addressed at a later time, but that could be a sort of an expansion plan. It doesn't have to be where you start because you want it to be successful, get your money's worth.

Let's talk about those clients who come to you and they know who their audience is, and they have a message. Maybe they tested it using direct mail, or they tested it networking, or they tested it by selling from the stage. So they got a message and they got the audience correct.

How do we figure out how to get that message in front of the right audience? Okay, so then we really gotta, we have to start figuring out what platform would be the right platform that works for them. And a lot of times the answer's gonna be it depends, because these are very broad generalizations, but let's say YouTube works best for men, and TikTok is better for younger audiences, or Instagram's the same. So there's a little bit of we can begin to guide people around what the right platform will be.

It doesn't mean that it's the only one, but you kind of start on the places that make most sense to find them. LinkedIn is also a wonderful platform as well, but again, it depends on what your offer is, and what the message is, and who you're going after. How do they determine what their budget should be? Because this is a question that I get a lot.

Like I love advertising. I especially love digital advertising because of the trackability. And the way I look at it, eventually if you're working with the right people, you're gonna get it figured out.

It's just a matter of whether you figure it out in three months, or six months, or a year, right? So eventually, because of the data, you're gonna get it figured out. So what's a reasonable budget to start for a local advertising campaign to target a local market? So, okay, the very first thing I think people need, the ideal scenario, the ideal ideal situation is for a business owner to really understand what's called like the customer lifetime value, right? So, it's not just like, okay, I sold this one action, okay, but it could be that it's, for example, it's an insurance company. So you're gonna buy a premium one year, but they're probably gonna stay with you at least three years, you know, maybe longer, right? Maybe shorter, but on average, they say three.

So now you know like, oh, well, it's worth it for me to make an investment. So I wanna compare that to the cost to acquire the customer. And that's really where the math starts.

It's really, it's a math equation here, but you start to think, okay, well, if the cost to acquire the customer is less than the lifetime value, and I can fund that, you know, that makes sense from a cashflow perspective, then yeah, I mean, if you're gonna sell a widget that's 50 bucks, you don't need that much money. But if you're gonna sell a product that's $10,000, you can't expect to spend $1,000 and just like, oh, that's gonna be great. There is a relationship between what that cost to acquire the customer is, and you have to kind of be ready, sorry, the lifetime value of the customer, and you have to be ready to understand that kind of investment.

You know, less than that, I mean, people I think have really misaligned expectations around what they can achieve, and how long it's gonna take, and how much testing, even when you have the right message, even when you have the right audience, even when you have all those pieces, there's still consistent testing that'll take place. So it's not gonna be in one month, you're gonna get a million dollars in return. No, it's gonna take a little bit of time.

So we always tell people like, you know, really make that consideration around what the lifetime value is more than anything. So as you're starting out, your cost to acquire the customer may be equal to your lifetime value, but eventually because the programming gets better, the cost to acquire the customer tends to go down, and the lifetime value of the customer, if it just stays the same, you're making money, and you're getting a return on your investment in month three or month four. The idea is to get the return on investment as quickly as possible.

Correct, and also keep in mind, like you might have a cross-sell that takes place. So they were a customer for your property, but now you're adding it onto, I don't know, your vehicles as well, or something like that. So that's why you have to understand that from that perspective, but ultimately the idea is, if it costs me less than how much money I make for this customer, and I can pay for that.

Now in some cases it might be a little bit less, in like the first month, great, that's ideal. And the more we work on it, the more we test, the more we change the message, the creative, all these things over time, that number's gonna continue to go down. And the more that you can upsell that offer, make the right bundle that makes sense, or all those other pieces, you're gonna make, you're gonna have a bigger difference, and it's gonna be more lucrative for the endeavor.

But you have to start with that idea. And I've had the benefit of seeing some of the graphs. So the graphs that you've done, which I appreciate because I'm such a data-driven person, that I want to describe this for our audience.

So I like the way that you framed this in that you're not just thinking about, I'm paying for advertising. You are thinking about, what does it cost me to acquire my client, and then what is my investment going to be so that I make a return on that? So I'm paying less to get each customer. And that can take a different amount of time depending upon the client, the industry, right? So what does that process look like as you're going through that? Because I want to make sure folks appreciate that and kind of have a little patience with it.

Yeah, for sure. So I'll give you an example. We've been working with a legal firm, and initially, the cost to acquire, so it's really the cost per lead.

And we can get into a lot of the technicalities. But in essence, it's like, okay, at the beginning, it would cost them $300 to get a lead, right? But by the end of six months, we were basically at $40 to acquire a lead. A lead to a customer, that's a conversion process.

That really falls outside of usually what digital marketing does. That's more on the sales process of the company. But if you think about it, in eight months, I mean, you were able to go down almost, well, it's like 12%, like 90%.

You were able to reduce it about 90%, 85, around that. But that's pretty significant. And all that was doing was testing the message, figuring it out, keep adjusting.

So I think one of the number one kind of misconceptions, again, that business owners have is really to think about this as how long this is gonna take, how much testing is necessary. And they think of marketing as an expense instead of thinking about this effort as an actual investment for a return, like anything. I mean, you're gonna invest in a property, an asset, whatever.

You don't think of it from that perspective. You have to really give some thought to what is the outcome that I want out of it. It's not like, oh, I just spent $5,000, whatever.

What did it bring to you? And did that make sense to what you wanted to achieve for that goal? You bring up a great point about conversion. So marketing is about driving traffic, driving leads, and sales is about conversion. You want people to come to you after they've got their conversion process down, correct? You don't want them coming to you, taking all of these leads that it costs a lot of money at the beginning to get, and then experimenting with conversion at that point.

So they should be able to convert when they come to you. Yes, I mean, we always tell them, our job as Leadsmith is to bring you high quality, highly qualified leads. That means you've told us, I want this person with these characteristics, with like this much revenue, whatever the cases are.

And we're like, okay, here you go. But there is, it's a lead, it's not a sale. Some people might say, oh, well, what about like, when you do online shop? Well, okay, online shopping is a little bit of a different, we're talking about when there is a sales process involved.

In that point, it's really about you guys defining, the business owner has to know if the lead comes in, you quickly reach out to them, you do a follow up, you talk to them again, like you called them once, maybe that's not enough. But you have to know already what that process is. And don't, then a lot of times when they don't have it in place, what happens is that the business owner feels that the effort was futile.

When in fact, I could have brought you 40 qualified leads, but you didn't do the sales process or your sales process just didn't work. So before you get to that point, you have to really feel like, I am ready to receive 40 qualified leads, can I really close them? Because if I'm not ready to do that, then don't come. And we talk to our customers or at least prospects around us, you're like, okay, so you guys ready? You have a, there's their CRM, like who, it's not you, the business owner, who's probably gonna have those calls, it's probably somebody in your organization.

So is that in place? Yes, okay, great. And if it's not, then we're like, look, you really need to address this, because we've had that issue multiple times, and so now we know it as a thing that we review in advance. So one other point you mentioned was about really getting leads, right? So I want to focus on that for a moment, because a lot of this is about getting a broad amount of leads, beyond what you could possibly do on your own, beyond going to networking events, for example, beyond specific targeted email messaging you're sending out to different customers.

So talk to us about that, because I think that's a point that I really want you to emphasize. Yeah, absolutely. So the purpose of this is, I feel like you guys are always saying this, and I think it's so true, it's really about leveraging yourself, right? Because there's only so many hours of the day, right? We only have 24 hours, somewhere we gotta sleep, somewhere we gotta drive, we gotta work, all of these things, right? So if you want to grow your business, and, or maybe you want to remove yourself slightly from some of that networking event, whatever, you have to think about creating a system that's actually gonna drive the leads to you, so that you're ready to capture it.

And then you'll have a sales process. Why this is super valuable? Well, one, as a business owner, it's nice not to have that reliance that it's only you who are driving the money. But two, if someday you wanted to sell your business, now you have a whole system.

That system is worth, you know, it's established. So as an engineer, as an industrial engineer, I can tell you, having those systems in place, I mean, that's just an amazing asset that anybody else who's thinking about buying your business is gonna say, yeah, for sure, because the business owner leaves, I still got this process that's working, I still got leads coming in regularly, great. But if it's just you, what happens if, you know, you have an issue, you have a family situation, whatever, then that's, you know, that reliance on you is gonna be just, it's incredible pressure for business owners in general.

And I think that they need to begin to think about that, I need to be able to get myself out of this in a certain way, how do I do that? Marketing is really your best tool to do that when you're ready and you have all those pieces in place. You are speaking our language, Paula, as you know, it's one of the key drivers we talk about in Exit Success Lab is that sales and marketing support systems, and this is exactly what we are describing. What Paula just explained to you is that having a system in place for continuously generating leads for ideal clients in your business has its own value and drives up the overall value of your business.

So I'm glad you mentioned that because it's critically important. But it's not just kind of, let me go to someone and get some leads, it's I really have to refine that process and make it this well-oiled machine so that I know who those clients are. I've got that messaging down and I have the expert who can help reach those clients in a broad way.

Yeah. So let's talk about retargeting now. How does retargeting work and why is it so valuable for business owners? Sure.

So retargeting is basically, it's basically a technique, let's call it, or a tool in your marketing arsenal, which is somebody saw a message. Let's say you're on Facebook, you saw an ad, seemed interesting, right? And you are now gonna, because of the technology, you're really able to create audiences based on the behaviors of those folks who are your prospects, right? So let's say, oh, I know that Nikki G here, she clicked on my ad, she went to my website and she perused a little bit, great. She's a big peruser, Nikki G, she peruses a lot.

I can create an audience saying, everybody who has come to at least the landing page and saw the video for, there's a video at the landing page and it was there for 50%, like 50% of the time, I want you to create an audience. And so then I go and I tell platforms like Meta, hey, can you please continue to now serve this other ad that provides additional information that will push you a little bit down what we call this funnel, right? So it was the, I'll remember the acronym in a minute, but the idea is it's, you have this ADA. So it's attention, interest, hold on a second, desire and action.

So Nikki G, she just got, she had attention in my ad, right? But now she has some interest. So now I'm gonna provide her with a little bit more content that's gonna spike that interest a bit more. Something that's gonna be like, oh, like now that I wanna see more of that, right? And so that's where the retargeting helps.

At the end of it, it's like, you have to give your prospect what is that additional piece of valuable information that's gonna help them move down a little bit more from just perusing to clicking on something more specific to potentially setting up a call with you to eventually going and taking the action of buying. So you're looking at my behavior and I'm using just myself as an example to follow your example. So you're looking at my behavior, where I was on the internet, how I got there, and then you use that to find more people like me and feed me the second ad.

Correct, correct. So hopefully I have now, so what are you expecting with me in response to that second ad? So what are you looking for? The idea is now that I've gotten you, that now that I've served you the second ad that gave you a bit more of that information, you're gonna come back and you're probably gonna come back and potentially do that call to action, which could have been like, hey, book a call with me or download my informational guide, something that you wanted, right? So that's, again, I'm gonna move you a little bit forward to eventually get to talk to you so that I can explain why this product is what you need, right, and that's kind of the whole purpose. The other great thing about the technology is that you can be kind of, let's call it like omnichannel, like you can be on meta, but you could also potentially be serving something on LinkedIn, and because of all the ability to track these things, I can still work on these different platforms, and so you see me, and there's this recognition.

Suddenly, it's not some random thing. It's like, oh, I saw her there, and I saw her there, and oh, I checked her website, and ah, and suddenly then now it's like I have awareness of this brand, I have awareness of this product, and that helps the process along. And in the end, you know where these processes came from.

So if I end up buying something, you can go back and track to see how did I get, right, how did I get here, and you can help the owner see that, where the clients are coming from with the work that you've done. Yeah, and I would say that a lot of times, that's not set up. There are, sometimes owners just wanna do it themselves, and you know, I commend them for trying.

Having said that, you know, there's a lot of pieces in there that can be very complicated, right, and so if you don't have those tracking in place, then you miss out on the data, and you miss out on the ability to build those audiences that are gonna help you later on, right, because the algorithms feed off of the data that they're receiving from going into those different places, right, of the website or the ad or whatever the case may be. So that's one, and a lot of times, unfortunately, there are agencies out there that aren't very, they might be more on the creative side than on the technical side, and so they may skip over those things, right, because yeah, oh look, a whole bunch of people like clicked on this thing. Great, but clicks aren't actions.

What is the end goal? The end goal is not about the number of clicks, the end goal is how many customers did I actually get, and how much money did I make off of this. That's the end goal. Everything before that are sort of just steps in the way, but that's what you gotta optimize for.

Give us the criteria. If you're selecting an agency to work with, what should we be looking for? Sure, so the first thing is, I would say definitely think about an agency who one, who understands the, who understands the platform, so there's a technical component of it, right. Some, like I said, some agencies can be very heavy on the creative side, which is great, but they may not have that, so you really wanna, you wanna say like, okay, how much do you know about these tools, right.

That might be a hard question to ask, but that's a really important one, right, and then also they have to know, or at least have an understanding of how to set up all of the, they're basically called pixels, or your Google Analytics, or in, what do you call it, LinkedIn has another one. They each have these different little tracking capabilities that you need to put in place, so that's one. Then the other part is, you have to put like, an element that's definitely creative.

All of it today is, it's content. Before, Meta kinda used, there were different ways, they had other capabilities before all the changes that have taken place in the like, last five years. So now, the way you create interest, or understand, or can capture the interest of an audience, understand how to group them, is really on the content.

The content is what's gonna say, is it relevant, did it resonate, did it action things, right? So, you have to have an agency that can understand how to convey that message, and that it works on Facebook, you know, or that it works on YouTube, or things like that. That's a really, that's another big piece, like an image that says like, happy 4th of July, that's great, that's not gonna do anything for you. I mean, it's great for your existing customers who are like, oh, you know, that's nice that you post it, but it's not gonna bring you new things.

So, they have to really think of a strategy around what kind of content are you building out. So those are the two pieces, and then, unfortunately, sometimes you'll have some agencies that are heavy on the, maybe a little too technical, or you hire them from maybe outside of the United States, and like, their focus is just really a very technical one, but not understanding how to build that creative. So it's really those two pieces together.

So let me ask this, if we have business owners who are not as familiar with the space, what questions can they ask someone to discern whether they've got the technical, the creative, or both? Okay, the first thing is I would say, first, you know, can they, it would be good to see some examples of prior work that they've been doing with companies, with other customers, like, it doesn't have to be necessarily just in their space. I mean, it's probably fine that it's good. I wouldn't rule out that you couldn't work across different industries, but it's an agency that you can see some of the work that they have been doing.

The second piece is definitely to ask, like, is the data wind up yours? Because a lot of times what will happen is some agencies will kind of, they just put everything under you, under kind of their tools, and then it becomes like a black box. You don't really know what's going on. And it could happen that tomorrow you're not happy, or maybe you just don't have the money for it right now, and they'll just keep that stuff.

We don't think that's right. You know, I mean, honestly, that's, you could call it stickiness, but I think that's just really messed up, because, you know, as a business owner, you should be able to retain all of that data. So that's another really important question to them.

And then also say, like, hey, what kind of reports are you sharing with me? Like, what are you telling me, right? I wanna, I know that sometimes it can be a little bit, but I want to know what are the results that I'm getting. And you need to be, as a business owner, become educated on those reports, because you should think, oh, well, what is my cost to acquire a customer? Well, you have, we have to work together. We gotta figure this out so that we can work together as a team and understand that, right? So those would be my components to do that.

If they say, oh, no, we don't really do that, that's some hesitation. Or if the other one's like, no, you just give me the content and I'll run your ads, you're gonna basically kinda, you know, it's like a, you're missing a leg. It's not gonna work.

All right, so what industries does this work really well for? What industries does it work sometimes? And what industries should stay away from this? Okay, good, great question. I would say industries that work really well, especially in these platforms, let's call it, let's leave LinkedIn aside for just a bit, but I would say definitely in your metas or like your YouTube, and it can also be, by the way, you know, Google's display. You can still put videos and things like that on it.

Anything that's like on the B2C space. B2C is like a really powerful thing. So if you're, I don't know, a family law, family law's a great place to kind of begin to understand these pieces.

They're, they don't know. I mean, think about it. Most people, especially in the legal space or anything that's, some financial stuff, things like that, people just don't know.

You don't really know what you're getting yourself into. So the more that you can put that content on it. So family law, insurance, probate, Yeah, that kind of stuff.

Trust in estates, that sort of thing. But if you're in the, like, let's say, even if you're in the trade space, like you're working to kind of find the folks to be like, you know, why is my window better than that guy's window? Well, explain it. Like, oh, because we use this different type of technology.

We're faster. We can do it better. We understand your things.

You know, put testimonials, like that kind of stuff. So I would say definitely in those platforms, B2C is like the best thing. I mean, it's super easy.

It's the most effective for sure. Okay, and who should avoid advertising, like digital advertising? I shouldn't say who should avoid it. For whom is it most difficult to convert, to make it work? Okay, when you're trying to target a specific industry, for example, we've seen this, where in the medical space, but you're trying to target around a specific health insurance.

For HIPAA reasons, for, which are, sorry, like health regulations, things like that. Those kinds of things, I would say, it's very, very hard to target for. Things are very dynamic.

You're not gonna get that kind of information in there. So it's not, we don't recommend it for that space. I'm not saying no to the whole medical industry, but I would say no to spaces like that.

There are other some things obviously that are regulated that these platforms will tell you right away, like you just can't do that, you know? And so you do have to follow those kinds of code of ethic kind of things for sure. And then on the B2B, it's not that it won't work, but it's a longer educational process. And so that might not be the first place for you to start.

It might be like you have to establish a bit more of that relationship. So that's not something that we would recommend. We tend to stay away from it, only if you have, you have to have like a lot of things on the checklist done before you can really get into it when you go into the B2B space.

So you mentioned the data piece, and I want to explore that just a little bit more. So when you had, you used it in the context of sometimes the companies who perform the service, and not your company, but some that do in that space, retain the data rather than give it back to the business. Tell us why, tell us what's in that data that's so valuable to that business or that they want to be thinking about that and they want to capture that data moving forward.

So basically what's happening is you have all of your historical data. You have, what you're doing on those platforms is you're building audiences. Just like we said, Niki G's perusing on my website.

Well, all of that data is being captured on those platforms and that's happening inside of, in the case of Meta, for example, it's called the business manager. You're building all that information. You have all the ads that you served previously, which ad was good.

All of this information, all of the historical data of what audiences, all of this stuff, if your agency walks away with it, you're basically starting from zero. And let's say you want to hire another agency, or maybe you just want to take a pause, whatever the case may be, you're starting from zero. That data should be yours.

And like I said, a lot of agencies, not all, but some, will just retain it because they feel like it's a way to keep you there. But at least for us, we feel like if you're not happy with the service we're doing, then, okay, then you're not happy. Then we've done something wrong, right? But you really shouldn't think of, you should really think about like, this is my data.

I should be able to keep this information and you should request it from them. Yeah, this is the data about your business, about the behavior of the customers that you are servicing or you are targeting in the marketplace. And you should be able to utilize that to move forward because there's independent value in it.

Yeah, it's your products. It's videos about your products. It's your money that you've spent on these ads.

Like I said, we really don't see a reason why you should not. It's a bit more of a gimmick, I don't know, a gimmick, a mechanic of just trying to be sticky and so people won't leave them. But that shouldn't be the reason what drives an agency to work that way.

So for those of you listening, make sure you're asking for that data upfront to be kept with your business following the course of any engagement with a company you're working with, like Paula's. Yeah. It should be in your agreement, I would think, right? If it's not, or they are not providing you an agreement, you certainly want to be asking those questions.

And that's why we're asking those questions of you because you, right up front, tell them this should be, you have a way of thinking that other agencies don't. Yeah, and I would also say this, we've also seen this happen. Let's say an agency goes out of business and they just, they're gone, right? Maybe they weren't gonna not give it to you, but you're like, now I can't find anybody.

What if somebody got hit by a truck? You literally can lose this stuff. So you should always be an administrator to your business managers and you just provide access. Meta and all of these platforms have made it in such a way that you can retain access, they can retain access, you give them the levels of access that you need and everything will work fine.

But don't, you know, make sure that you're being diligent around that because I think it's really important. Let's talk about the business model. Speaking to that, how do you guys get paid? So the way we get paid is we basically have a, it's a retainer fee plus a percentage of ad spend.

And the reason we do that is at the beginning, the percentage of ad spend is obviously, it's the same, it's always gonna be around like 10%, but it accounts for growth in the accounts, right? So because at times, you know, you could start with a smaller budget, but then things are getting better and that's great and you wanna invest more money. And so, I mean, you know, you can have clients that are spending, you know, a lot of money. Like at first you may start with a couple thousand dollars and then you go to five, then you go to 30 and then you go to 100.

There's complexity to that. So that percentage of ad spend is what, is the way that we kind of hedge against that effort. So if you think about it, that's really kind of the structure.

Many agencies operate this way. The other structure is that sometimes agencies will just charge a flat percentage over the ad spend. Obviously that percentage is gonna be like larger, that kind of stuff.

Okay. Paul, tell us about your entrepreneurial journey. So you and Michael are working in this business together.

How does the work get divided up? Because we have a lot of people who are listening, people who may be watching on YouTube. And in fact, even my business, I started working with my wife years ago and then, you know, she ended up doing her own thing and I ended up doing my own thing and started this business with Nicola. So talk about the division of strategy and tactics in your business.

Sure. So we're quite fortunate in the sense that we're very complimentary people, the way we work together. So he, as I mentioned before, has a, you know, he's the marketing, he's got the marketing background.

I always say marketing guru because honestly I think his stuff is amazing. So once our client, once we've begun the engagement with us, you're pretty much working all of the time, you'll be working with Michael moving forward and then the rest of our team. So account management, you know, managing the ad, like everything is gonna be happening over there on that side.

On my end, because, well, my background is I'm an industrial engineer, but I've worked a lot on, I also have a lot of, I have an MBA. So I have a very strong kind of strategy and financial background. So I'm always looking at things in terms of like, okay, what is the market that we're looking at? Who are we going after? So I'm very much in the business development side of the equation, understanding what is the right offer? What's the same thing, right? Like, what's the right audience? What's the right offer? You know, what's the right platform? If it's networking, if it's this or that, like really understanding those pieces.

And so then I bring in all the business development side. And then all the stuff that's like financials, those also fall under me, but these are just like our background. So we get to be, we get to kind of cover those things.

We've noticed that it's much better when we don't, when we don't work together within those spaces, because it doesn't work out. So we're good. We keep very aligned and in communications of how the day-to-day works, but we both know what to manage and who do we manage and with our teams.

So it's a division of responsibilities between the two of you. Yes. Did that happen naturally or did you sit down and say, let's divvy this up? I think initially, a combination of both.

At first, I mean, because again, this is his space, the very much marketing creative side of stuff. That's just so much him. And it really wasn't me.

I'm very much, you know, I'm very much kind of product, business, finances, like I'm very square in that sense. So initially it really started to work. And then at some point I did try to kind of support some of the technology stuff, but then I realized the truth is I, you know, like everything, there's only so many hours of the day and my time is better suited to really focus on all this business development and all the financials.

So that's where I stayed. And I felt like it's, we wound up like everything, you know, as business owners, we test. So we were doing that.

And it was like, hmm, this is not working as well. And now we're just like, we're going to do this. And actually this has worked really well.

And I've, I know what to do, what not to do. You know, hey, it's not perfect. There's always days where it's like that, but for the most part, it's a good structure and it's a good way of understanding.

Cause somebody has to be looking forward and the other one has to be sure that the delivery is making sense, is like effective. Right? So it's, and I know it's really hard for a business owner who's doing all of that. We just, we were fortunate that we just happened to be two people who have very complimentary skill sets.

So that was a big reason why we wanted to work together too. We like working together. You are very thorough.

So there's been a couple of times when, like when I first met you, I first met you at one of our breakfasts and then you called me to follow up and you asked a lot of really good, really smart questions about us and our business. Is that how you approach the intake with your clients? Give us a sense for how you onboard new clients. Sure.

So, and I'll even, we can start asking like the first thing, even just for prospects, we will tell, the first couple of questions is a little bit of understanding what have people done before? Right? So what have you done? Like, have you done anything? Some people have done a lot of different marketing things. Things have worked, things that haven't worked. Some people have done nothing, right? A little bit of a combination.

So it's really important to us to understand that. It's important to us to understand what's the technology kind of stack that they have. Some people have CRMs.

Some people manage their business off of their phones. I have seen it all, honestly. It's so surprising to me, because there's so much technology and it's fairly cost effective, but nonetheless, like I said, people have managed their entire businesses off of their cell phones with nothing else and it works, right? So we want to understand like what's going on there.

Is there a website? You know, what happened to it? All this kind of stuff. What are you selling? What's the price point, you know? Have you actually sold this? Because sometimes folks have, you know, expectations of what they think it could sell or things like that. So it's like, let's look into some real data.

Like how many of these units or services did you sell? What was the price point? Because we're helping, we are trying to get that cost to acquire a customer, at least some estimates around what that's going to be and what that lifetime value is. So we're kind of in the back end. We're like doing the math to figure out like what is it going to take? Like, and based on some criteria, do we think it's feasible for you to enter into some advertising efforts, right? And then other assets that you may or may not have, like do you do any, I mean, do you have like, do you have some video assets? Do you have emails that you're regularly working on? Different things like that.

Like that's usually the kind of things that we're doing. And lastly, do you have a budget? A lot of times the answer is no. And also what is the expectation? You know, everybody, I mean, if I ask, you know, what do you want? And they'll say like, I want a million dollars tomorrow.

I'm like, well, yeah, but that's not gonna work. So what is reasonable? Like what do you feel like if you were to invest this, do you expect to get out of it, right? And so then we start working. So we are very numbers.

We have these wonderful spreadsheets and we basically begin to calculate and we say to you, yeah, this is feasible, right? Or no, it's not feasible. Like you're not gonna get what you want, right? Or you are gonna get to one. So that's our intake process to see if you really are a qualified lead.

Once, sorry, if at the end of it, you know, we close your customer, then we begin a little bit more detail. So we're kind of following up on the pieces that we already had. Okay, oh, you have this website.

Okay, great. Do you have the pixels? Do you have Google Analytics in place? Even if you're not doing ads, you should have Google Analytics in place. You should, a lot of people don't have it or a lot of people don't use it, but it's really important.

Like, hey, it's an amazing tool. It actually tells you who came to your website. It just says that with no other reason.

It just tells you like, oh, these people came here at this time. I mean, there's got so much data in there. It's amazing and it's free.

There's other more elaborate platforms, but I mean, I think that's really good. Then we start to really understand, okay, so who's your audience? And all the things that we said, well, what's the message that you've tried? What's the selling point? You know, what is it that people want? What do they don't want? Who are your competitors? And so we start to craft all of this information. We get to gather this information so we can begin to craft what a message is gonna look like.

For us in general, the messages today are, they're video. You have to create content. Maybe historic, you know, before, you could kind of just do like a picture and that was good enough, but the truth is today, it's content.

So you have to think that there's going to be investment in place that is gonna be around creating that content. Like, can it be you sitting at your desk and it's just like, you do a zoom and you can capture it? Yes, that can be done. It can be done with your phone and it can be very elaborate with a lot of bells and whistles.

That a little bit depends on what we recommend and what you're willing, how much budget you have for it. So then we have to build that content. Then we have to make sure all the things are put in place and then we can begin the rest of the process.

Last point on this is if somebody's working with another agency and they're not happy, can they take the data from that agency and show it to you and have you give them some ideas of a couple of things you would do differently so that they know that you really know your stuff? Because here's what I'm thinking. Like, I know you relatively well now. I know you for a little over a year and like I said, you're very thorough and I know Michael probably that same amount of time too and I've spent some time with him and he's really smart and he knows what he's doing in this area.

So I would completely trust you if I were targeting folks for whom this made sense. If I'm already using an agency and it's been seven, eight, nine months and I'm not acquiring a customer at Breakeven yet, if that's my client, I'm like, this is not working. You're not getting good advice here.

Can I take that information, show it to you and you go, here's two or three things we could do right now to boost this? Yeah, absolutely. So again, as I mentioned, these platforms, they have the ability to give you access at certain levels. So there's these, they're called viewer access and the beauty of viewer access is that we can just look.

That means you can't touch anything, we can't fix anything, we can't do anything to it, but we can look and we can tell you, look, there are actual very, very technical setups within these platforms that we're not gonna get into this conversation but we can see that they're not set up appropriately, right? So I'll give you an example. Like we had a client, they were doing stuff, but for some reason they were targeting Florida and Puerto Rico and they had set it up where 90% of the money was going to Puerto Rico. We're like, well, if you want all of it, are you sure that's the right distribution, right? So it could be something as simple as that, that you don't know because as a business owner, you're not probably ever gonna get into the platform and we can start guiding it.

So we can give you those low hanging fruits immediately. So that would be one way that we can definitely take a look at stuff. And then also just kind of give thoughts to, here are some other recommendations.

And lastly, again, we're business owners, Michael and I, and we both actually have MBA. So we have a lot, we bring like 20 years of corporate life experience prior to this. So we can have these conversations with you to say like, are you sure this is gonna work out? It's more than just an agency.

You can definitely see us as like your marketing partner, your business partner who can say, okay, that makes sense. Like, oh, right now I'm going through this or I need to hire or I have this problem or I know that there's seasonality in place and I have these. So those are conversations that we can completely understand.

Some agencies because they're so, their focus hasn't been that. They don't bring that to the conversation. This is a little bit of an added value that we provide as an agency.

Paula, I know the answer to this question, but I want you to answer this for our audience. So when you have these long intake processes with potential clients, are there ones where you get to the end of that process and you say, look, this isn't going to work for you or I don't think your money's going to be well spent doing this? Yeah, yeah, we do. And again, growing pains of a business as I think as everybody, we can be like, we know what are the right, what's the right fit for us and we'll tell them like, hey, you're not ready for this.

You might be ready in a period of time, but here are some things that you could be doing. We talked about the message. You don't have the right message.

You don't know. Why do you want to spend money on figuring out the message if it's going to cost you so much? When you could, emails or you could say, you could just send mailers or you can go to your networking events and test it. Like, hey, did people talk to me about it? Did it resonate? These are all very cost-effective ways of basically testing it out.

And when you're ready, then come to us. So we're happy to give recommendations. You may want to do just something that's very organic, organic posts.

It's a great way too. Are people conveying with that? Literally, you can grab your phone and create stuff. It's hard.

We get it. So we're just saying, test. We'll let you know.

If you're a candidate for us, great. But if we're not, we're the first person to tell you because we don't want you. We don't want you to, we know how hard it is to make money as a business owner and then just to lose it.

Like, it hurts us because we know what that feels like. So we're the first ones to really tell you if it makes sense or not. Well, also a successful client is going to be with you for 10 years.

They're going to be with you forever. You're making money for them. They're printing money off of your back.

Yeah, they're happy. They're like, hey. I think one of the, well, I find it was a couple, but he, the business owner told his wife, like, these are the people, this is why I'm so busy all day.

This is why I'm on the phone all the time. And they were happy. And the wife was happy too.

So it's like, all is good, right? That makes us feel really good. I mean, we help you grow your business. I mean, that's amazing.

For me, it's just really one of the things that really drove us to create this business and just keep working on it. And to stay in this sort of two to 50 million, because this is this perfect space where these tools are available that were never available 50 years ago. Who could do anything like this? You'd have to have so much money.

You wouldn't have the reach. There was no way to test it. You couldn't test.

Like, it was impossible. And today this technology is here, but it's hard because as business owners, you know how hard it is to carry every hat. If we can help you grow, I mean, that's literally the reason why we're doing this.

All right, Paula Romo, Leadsmith. How can people get in touch with you if they want to work with you? Well, my email and my number, 786-973-4455. Again, slower.

786-973-4455. Okay. And my email is paula.leadsmith.io. Okay.

.com.io. paula.leadsmith.io. We're going to put all that down in the show notes. I'd like to thank Global Furniture for this wonderful facility that we're using today for our podcast studio. If you are looking for furniture for your office, there is a Global Furniture showroom somewhere near you.

If you can hear the sound of my voice, there is a Global Furniture in your city. If you'd like help finding a Global Furniture studio, you can reach out to us or reach out to Francisco Ramirez. We're going to put his information down in the show notes as well.

And if you haven't heard our podcast with Francisco, it was fantastic. We will put that link in the show notes also. This is the Inside BS Show.

I am Dave Lorenzo. I'm the Godfather of Growth, and she is. Nikki G. And we'll be back here again next week with another interview.

We'll see you next Wednesday at 6 a.m. Thanks for joining us and goodbye.