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Scaling Service Companies Through Data-Driven Marketing with Tyler Dunagin

• MatthewBertram.com • Episode 637

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Tyler Dunigan shares how he built a platform of brands providing turnover services to the largest property managers in the US, growing from painting to flooring, bathtub refinishing, and patented products.

• Understanding your target audience is critical – Tyler discovered property managers were his key clients, not property owners
• Data-driven marketing decisions are more effective than relying on assumptions
• Analyzing client budgets revealed opportunities for additional services within the same customer base
• The "Edge Strategy" concept helps identify adjacent business opportunities within arm's reach
• Looking at the market size and potential before developing products helps validate business ideas
• Testing different marketing messages and website versions shows what resonates with different customer segments
• Personal branding is becoming increasingly important as "social capital."
• Only 4-5% of LinkedIn users post weekly, creating an opportunity for those who consistently share content
• Network effects within your own business ecosystem can drive exponential growth
• Baby boomer businesses changing hands create massive opportunities in traditional industries

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

Find more great episodes here: https://www.internetmarketingsecretspodcast.com/  

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Speaker 1:

This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.

Speaker 2:

Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, matt Bertram. I am changing a lot about what's going on, as you know. I've been talking about the podcast name's going to be changing. We're doing additional branding, we're doing the mastermind group. We've been growing as a company and we've been exploring new avenues and hopefully you'll like the new format. As we've expanded out. We're going to build these into playlists.

Speaker 2:

So, if you have a particular interest, a lot of people ask well, hey, where do I get started with this, where do I get started with that? And you know this podcast is going to fall into the like entrepreneurial category for people that want to make some money. I think a lot of people want to make a lot of money and they think the internet can do it, and they're absolutely right. And so I wanted to bring on a guest that has done that same thing multiple times. He's on the Inc 5000 list, he's grown and scaled multiple companies. He's actually in a niche space that I recently heard about that I do believe is booming, and he agreed to come on. So, tyler, great to have you on, buddy.

Speaker 3:

Matt, I'm stoked to be here. I can't wait to get into it and talk opportunities and everything else around those things. Excited to be here.

Speaker 2:

Awesome man. Well, you know, we we can definitely talk um some personal branding as well for anybody listening to this podcast, cause I I think that, um, one of the biggest things that is important in any kind of deal that you get into is people need to know who you are, and people need to you know there's, there's some virtue signaling that has to happen today, like I think that that's starting to become the new social capital, you know like, absolutely agree.

Speaker 3:

That's one of the reasons why I'm on, and I'm sure your other guests do the same.

Speaker 2:

Right, like so. So I mean now, uh, you're going to go meet somebody, right, whether it be sales or you know you're, you're doing a deal of any sort. You're going to go search them on Google, right, you're going to go look at their LinkedIn profile. You're going to try to, like you know, weigh them up, value them up, like who? Who is this person I'm meeting? And and then you can find out so much more.

Speaker 2:

One of the things I did is when I was in in sales, I I got, I won this pharmaceutical contest right out of school for GlaxoSmithKline and so I became a farm rep out in Florida. That was like kind of my first career, first job from sales, but I always leveraged marketing. I won that contest through marketing, and when I was selling people, I used to have two business cards. Okay, one was the business card of who I was representing at the business and the other one was my personal blog because I wanted people to see who I was. And this is when, like, you're building like a, a really wanky site, okay, um, and I mean these were in the websites when the stuff like moving gifts were the thing, right, like the whole site, like, like, like. So I just trying to trying to date myself there, um, but it was really important that. I mean, you know, facebook was was, uh, only in colleges, right, like it was only in colleges and and it was the cool thing to be part of. But not everybody had a Facebook. People couldn't go look up your Facebook and you were just poking people at that point on Facebook, if you remember, and so you know, social media wasn't developed that much.

Speaker 2:

I can tell you I was probably one of the first people on LinkedIn and I was. I was doing I was running a staffing company, so I flipped the staffing company. In my 20s. Everybody would go on LinkedIn and they would put their resume on there. If you knew, if they were building out their profile, they were looking for a job. It was great vision.

Speaker 2:

This is where I grew up. Also, I would tell you that my mom was one of the first people from Microsoft, and so I was playing online games with her employees and became friends with a number of people from Microsoft that went on to do crazy things. I mean like, if you look at the, you know people that came out of Microsoft. I mean someone that used to run Starbucks. I mean I can go down the list, like venture capital, but like, okay, this is about you, dude, and one of the things that I'm seeing, okay, is there's a lot of people that listen, that know marketing and have an entrepreneurial flair, whether they're at the end of their career and they're stepping out.

Speaker 2:

I'm seeing a lot of people move into the consulting space when they worked at a big company and what they're realizing is they don't have that big brand behind them anymore. It doesn't open the doors, right, and so they have to step back and they have to build their, their personal reputation, right, and who they are and what they did. And you got to tell that story. And so give me your pitch as we get into this. Give me your pitch on who you are and what you do, yeah.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I would love to. So in a nutshell, I am a lifelong entrepreneur. I'm 34 years old, so I like to say I'm still early-ish in my journey, but I've been involved in real estate from flipping houses to managing them to getting into multifamily. I managed a quarter billion dollars of assets under management. That's when I really learned the space. I built companies for high net worth individuals. They would hire me. I would be a consultant. Hey, I need to build this thing, help me out here and you just learn how to structure things. Fast forward.

Speaker 3:

I got involved in managing multifamily apartments, like I mentioned, and when I was in it although it was corporate America, it was a big job and all those good things I got to brag at the family reunion about them. I hated it. And that's when I saw the opportunity for the companies I left to start and today I own a company called TurnServe and that is a platform of brands. I got to start them all. It's my playground, for lack of better words. And in a nutshell, we provide turnover services and solutions for the largest property managers in the US and we provide convenience turnkey services such as painting Example, I own the company apartmentpainterscom, I own apartmentflooringcom, I own Liquid Liner and all these other ones and all of those roll up and we go to market as turn serve and we say, hey, we could help you with convenience here, we can get your units ready for you.

Speaker 3:

We've innovated, we've built some products. We've patented a couple products in that space as well, and we've innovated, we've built some products, we've patented a couple products in that space as well, and we're building out software in addition to all those things to bring it all together. So, collectively, I am just a relentless entrepreneur. I'm always busy in a good way. I can't sit still to save my life, and I just love creating solutions that can scale. I don't want a job forever, so I always build companies with the exit in mind, and a lot of that is around sales and marketing first and then the solution second, and that's also something that we can dive into today about some of the largest service brands in the world being sales and marketing agencies first. So, in a nutshell, that's me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, the world started to flip on its head right the world started to flip on its head as, uh, as I mean, today you can reach more people through marketing, uh, in more ways than the big brands could dream of years ago. Right, um, I mean, you know one of the one of the, the key things that no one's doing? Okay, post once a day on whatever platform you say. I'll tell you, 4% of people, I think or 5% of people maybe it's a little bit higher than that, I think, but it's probably pretty close to that Globally are the ones that actually post once a week on LinkedIn. That's it. Everybody else is consuming content. Wow, right, like, look at that opportunity. There's so much opportunity.

Speaker 2:

Youtube is the platform that more people are on longer than any other platform. People want to get their news, people want to get their information, and if you're a heavy YouTube user, you know that there are gaps. There are gaps in what you're searching for, what you want. So, like, the industry starting to mature, but there's still huge opportunity. Right, there's people that have, but there's always going to be people ahead of you. There's going to be people behind you, but, but every platform, there's an opportunity to build your personal brand on that, right, and and and.

Speaker 2:

Marketing for companies helps them tell their story, right, and that means you can connect with more customers. So you know, let's say there's some property managers out here, right, and they've heard about you. I mean one to many. You're reaching so many people, right, you don't even know how many people you're reaching. And then there's repurposing their sharing of the content, like the number one thing that Gary Vanderchuck says everybody's heard of Gary Vee cause he cusses all the time, right, um, or, or, if you like, wine, um, uh. I've heard him on at South by Southwest and some marketing conferences and he's actually like a super nice dude and he's very smart. Like, if you get through the cuss words of like, what are you saying? He's saying like social media, you're going to grow your. You're going to grow your company, leveraging it more than any other thing that you could do. He goes, you'll cancel your meetings. You know your sales meetings. If you knew that you could just get on social media and you can tell your story, I can tell you. Right now we're landing at our agency, ewr digital, a hundred million dollar companies left and right. Okay, inbound.

Speaker 2:

That changes all the the the B2B sales process on his head, cause, man, I get sucked into like these lunches. I do not want to sit down for a two hour lunch in the middle of day. That crushes my whole day Right. And in Houston I got to drive somewhere. I got to sit down.

Speaker 2:

I don't know who these people are, but what? What is that? What are people doing? Okay, they're trying to, um, get to seven hours. Okay, they're trying to get to know you for seven hours. That's what conferences are about. That's what everything's about. Getting to seven hours. Then you're going to know, like and trust somebody. That's like the magic threshold. Um, actually, in dating, too, you know I'm I'm married, but you know, in dating too, it's seven hours, different locations, multiple platforms. Okay, 7-11-4. That's the magic number that Google's done a lot of research to come up with Seven hours of content.

Speaker 2:

See your brand name 11 times on four different platforms. That's the framework that we operate under, and if you think about any major brand, anything that you bought in, anything that you've had interest in movies, I mean, it goes anywhere. That that's what people are looking for, and and so you can take marketing, you can apply it to any product, and I know you've done that, and so I want to hear about some of these businesses uh, maybe some case studies of things that you've done. You've identified this opportunity which, when you're trying to sell something, identify something that's very expensive. What's the most expensive thing that people own? What's their biggest asset? It's their house. When you get into bigger numbers, you manage more money. You get a bigger percentage. You make more value for somebody. Based on that, most millionaires in the past have made their money in real estate. So I think it's a great place for people and I think there's a lot of opportunity. Tell me how archaic it is, where you kind of saw opportunities early on. Tell me a little bit more about the origin story.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, of course. So you said it well, sell something that's expensive, right, or go after things where it generates a lot of money. It well, sell something that's expensive, right, or go after things where it generates a lot of money. And for me, when I was younger, you look up to people that are successful and killing it, crushing it, all those things and they were in real estate I said, okay, cool, I have no money, but I'm willing to work, let me try it out. Well, same concept. You look at a house. You can buy it for 70 grand, put a hundred into it and sell for 300, you know that prints cash.

Speaker 3:

For me, that wasn't quite big enough yet, and so that's when I started to look at the market holistically All right, what's bigger than single family real estate? It's multifamily. And so what I do when I look at something, I want to make sure that I'm not getting involved with a dying dinosaur of a space. Sometimes that creates opportunity. A lot of the times it's getting abandoned for a reason, and that's you have to look like. For me in the in the multifamily housing space, it's old, it's archaic, but it's predictable, it's steady and it's growing. 50% of renters move every year, and so I flipped the framework. Instead of trying to find one or two houses to do, instead, I would go after one or two property manager, property management companies that have thousands of apartments under management. And so today, if we land one client, the LTV of that client could be $500,000, it could be $5 million, and we only had to sell them once. And so that's where we look at the high ticket offerings, because it's reoccurring. I don't need to go sell 10,000 homeowners, so to say I can, but my time is better spent, from a marketing and effort standpoint, going after the whales for lack of better words, and so I always look at the market first.

Speaker 3:

Second thing I look at is what could I improve? Like, I don't want to get involved and just be another cog here. Like, can I seriously improve, update or innovate the space? For me, my background, it was absolutely yes, in the industry I got involved in because I knew it well, I spoke the language, I felt the pain in that industry, and so that's also something I always try to be conscious of.

Speaker 3:

What is my offer, what is my value proposition? And if it's a hypothetical that I can achieve, I'm probably not going to do well in there. So I need to make sure that I could add value and I understand firsthand. What is the process? What am I solving everything around that? And then, little by little, once you're in that space, for me there's a book called Edge Strategy.

Speaker 3:

I don't know if you've ever read this, but once you have something going on in one space, you see what else is within arm's reach. Like, hey, I'm already here, I already have resources being deployed here. What if I just did this one extra thing? And so for us. So TurnServe as a parent company. Today. It started off as one company and now I have over 10 LLCs underneath the umbrella and each one is producing millions of dollars.

Speaker 3:

And that didn't happen by chance. It's because we had our eyes open and our heads on a swivel, trying to find opportunities to create better offers and solutions for our customers. And that's exactly how we went from a painting brand to a flooring, to a bathtub brand, to now a patented product brand and now bringing it all together with software, so on and so forth. All of those things are within arm's reach and it all has to do with the industry I got involved in and focusing on what I'm good at. So those are the first things I always look at and consider before getting involved.

Speaker 3:

I get pitched business ideas every day. There's people that have companies that want to join our platform. Pitch business ideas every day. There's people that have companies that want to join our platform, and it's one of those things to where you say like, hey, there's probably a repurpose here somewhere, but it's probably not going to be a paving company. That's going to, you know, like think of the boring company versus some old excavating company. You just want to make sure you're getting involved in something where there's a future versus a dead end.

Speaker 2:

Well, you know one of the things you said and it probably flushes it out in that edge strategy. I actually haven't read that and I'm an avid reader, so I got something new for my reading list there. It sounds like what you've developed is network effects within your own business. So those are the businesses that are growing today of you bring somebody else into the network and then it helps everybody else. So you bring on a client Well, it benefits all the different companies you have. You bring in another supplier. Those suppliers might be working with other people that they might be touching or whatever, but the strength of the network as that network grows, it becomes more powerful and more valuable based upon what you have, and so it's like an ecosystem. You built like a hub and spoke ecosystem it seems like yeah, that's exactly it.

Speaker 3:

Then you you get into cross selling and other opportunities and you talk about social validation. If you're already in the space, you already have a name, your brand is coming up, whatever it might be. It's way easier to sell people that you already do life and business with.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, One of the other things that you said that that I definitely resonate on, uh, is um, you have to know what the problem is that you're solving and you have to, you have to really zero in on that and understand the value of that problem. And once you have a problem that nobody else is solving or not solving in a way that you can solve better, that, uh, you know, has a lot of value as far as what it does for somebody. Um, now you have a business idea. A lot of people just have crazy business ideas, Okay, but they don't think about is this, is this a product market fit? There's like I've had some IP attorneys on and so they're telling me all kinds of people have all kinds of crazy ideas and you can patent whatever, but if people don't need that patent or you're going to market something that people don't want.

Speaker 2:

So that's the cool thing about social media. There's a lot with market research, um, that you can start doing. Uh, you can test out. Um, uh, you, you can really test out before you. Uh, cement branding, okay For, like, different products. If you put stuff out there, you can, you can do polls, you can ask questions about it, but you can see what people are buying, like.

Speaker 2:

One of the things that, uh, I had somebody on that's doing and it really was impressed, is they were running ads for a product they hadn't developed yet to put them on a waiting list. Okay, now you, you, you, you get into this area of clarity and and and and all that. But they were, I think, that think that they had a true intention of developing that product, and then they were running that product with all kinds of different copy. Does that make sense? So they were going to develop that product, but they wanted to decide on the branding, the look, the language, how they were going to communicate that message, and so they ran all these different ads and you can measure the click rate. You can measure, you know, does that person sign up, like, so you can create some KPIs and what becomes clear when you do email testing or anything else is there's a couple that work really well over others If you test enough, right?

Speaker 2:

I like, actually like testing like the whole alphabet, like I like to start one variable at a time and I'll test 26 different titles and then you know I'll test the copy. Copy doesn't have to change that much. You just got to get them into the copy and you're kind of speaking to different people and you got to see how that copy works. But you test, like different variables and you can see that. So anything that you're trying to do or create or message you're, you're able to kind of put that together. I mean, tell us how you did that with, like, your first business, right Of like, okay, like you had this big vision, you knew you had this problem. Um, you, you, you started to get into the contracts but you kept expanding, right, like, you kept seeing those opportunities. So how did you identify that? What did you? You know, like, like, like. Why did you make those decisions? To, to, to spin it up the way you did? Sure?

Speaker 3:

So so it was twofold. One, we in in the, the, the service space, not so much the product business, I'll talk about that in a second but in the service space, we were literally like running into other providers and we would like what are you doing? And that's how I started my bathtub refinishing brand, because my painting brand couldn't service a unit because there was somebody refinishing a bathtub and I just organically stumbled upon it and I was like, oh, that's interesting, what's going on here. And then you learn and you see other vendors and they're, you know, within arm's reach, so to say. So, observing them is one thing. However, go beyond that.

Speaker 3:

When we started selling our core services initially, we discovered that the multifamily space is very contingent on budgets, and so we got to the point to where we realized, hey, if we could analyze a budget, not only for the service we're offering today, for the service we're offering today, a lot of these mega firms that with, with billions of dollars under management, we'll literally would send us their budget for allowance on, on a spend on our, our services and everybody else's as well. So not even just the online, you know, for marketing and everything else. We we learned their budgets for how much are they going to spend on floors this year? What about outside, exterior?

Speaker 2:

about landscaping. You got basically RFQs for everything, right Everything. Yeah, you knew what they wanted, and so what?

Speaker 3:

we did. We took that initial concept and we reached out to a few core clients and we said, hey, our assumption, based off of some data that we have, is you might have 14% of your maintenance budget to spend towards this. Is that remotely close? And, surprisingly, it was spot on almost everything that we tested, and so we built out frameworks around that. Now, granted, we got a little bit lucky there. Admittedly, we didn't have to fish quite as much, but interpreting that data, it saved us a ton of time. But then we would look at okay, how do we monetize that? All right, how do we build a service that or a solution that could fill that void?

Speaker 3:

And then, once we did it, uh, our first version of our website had there was like six different versions, and each one is built by either somebody different or it was a template, and it wasn't the fact. I wanted to live forever. I wanted to know am I, am I speaking to a residential person right now? Am I speaking to a property manager? Am I speaking to a property owner now? And crafting that in a way? We tested, we had over 70 versions of our initial test and what we found out was it's property managers driving it when, initially, I was marketing and trying to sell property owners, and so just a subtle little shift there helped us realize that, hey, we could probably improve our funnel here astronomically just by changing the scope and who we're marketing to and understanding our ideal client profile and their characteristics and what they're searching for and everything else. So it's and we didn't start off perfectly. Obviously we stumbled upon some things and we we we got a little bit lucky here and there, but really just interpreting that data and deciding what to do with it allowed us to keep on moving. And then that that actually the last part I'll share on that is this that actually tiptoed us into our own product business.

Speaker 3:

So I love service companies, I love all those things. I've always had a wish just to create something meaningful and be able to show it in my hands to somebody, versus saying like, oh, I'll do this service for you, that service for you. You know, as an entrepreneur, I have 10 service companies and I have, like, I can't show you. You know, you got to visit my website, so to say and so I wanted to build a product that was useful, and it was actually in that bathtub business I was mentioning, where we saw a vendor doing it in an outdated way, and I and and we essentially took what he was doing. We said there's a better way to do this. We didn't know what it was yet One.

Speaker 3:

We looked at the data how much is spent every year in the service? Okay, cool. And then what about the market? How big is the actual space? How much do people spend on this product every year? And it was massive, surprisingly massive, and so we took two years and around a quarter million dollars in R&D. We actually patented a product that was third-party tested against Sherwin-Williams, home Depot, lowe's, you name it, and it beat them all. Repo, lowe's, you name it, and it beat them all. It beat every single one for what we do. And then we started selling offers via email cold emails, we're testing clicks who's likely to sign up for a newsletter, who's likely to sign up for a free orientation, whatever it might be, and all of those things just go back to refining the offer and making sure that we're tracking the success on those things. So we look at the analytics probably more than anybody else, especially as a service company on our side.

Speaker 2:

You know, taylor, I'm thinking what we should do is I have been contemplating moving into a long-form format of a podcast. Okay, so, like typically, these podcasts are another 10 minutes from here. Like we're going really fast through all this stuff, right?

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker 2:

I think what we could do is people would like listening to how you are looking at things as a business, cause there's a lot of people that listen, that are at an agency or work for an agency. You're kind of peeling back on where I see marketers lacking today. What young marketers lacking today in agencies I'm coaching is they got to get inside the heads of the clients that understand the marketing. A lot of times they're doing marketing for big companies that have big moats, big logos, whatever that are actually just now starting to have to do marketing Okay. Or small companies that don't have the budget to do anything fancy, or people that are just too busy to even look at it. Like I can tell you at EWR, when I talked to the account managers, there's a handful of clients. When I talked to them because I've started to open up office hours, they're like yeah, yeah, we get the reports, they're looking good, blah, blah, blah, but they don't even know what they mean. The clients don't even know what the reports mean, right? So how does that translate to business? And I think that there's a lot of people that do find this podcast, that know that there's a digital transformation going on. There's a what is it? 75% of baby boomer businesses are going to change hands in the next couple of years. Okay, huge opportunities, massive, huge opportunities.

Speaker 2:

And and no one knows, like none of the old marketers know anything about analytics I mean, some of them do, but I've been on a number of cross-functional teams that you buy the print ad, you buy the radio ad, you buy the billboard, you buy in the magazine and your job's done, okay, and you're like I guess you got your views, like I hope you sold your business. Um, and it's frustrating for me, right, and and and I feel like when I'm on those cross-functional teams, they're all asking me and my team for data and all this kind of stuff and I'm like like they haven't made the transition yet. And if you look at TV spots, um, you know, I knew one well, I still know, but he sold his business, one of the biggest TV advertising companies. Okay, the ad, the ad spots are going down by so much because they don't have analytics, but CTV over the top, like streaming, all going up, right, so it's, it's shifting and there, and there's this big, there's all these changes happening. But I can see that there's a lot of businesses, especially in businesses that have been running the same way for a long time, haven't made that change. So you're you've made the change to understanding the analytics that helps you drive the decision-making, and also leveraging the marketing to get the things done that you want done, and also in multiple verticals, right. So, like you know, okay, we can talk painting, we can talk carpet cleaning. I mean, these are all different marketing strategies and you have different companies that are making a lot of money, and then there's operating those companies and finding the right people to put in those places.

Speaker 2:

There's a lot I think to talk about, and I think that putting together maybe a long form podcast of people that are looking to make that transition from corporate America okay, because the gig economy is not going anywhere. It's certainly on the rise. I think that there's going to be layoffs that that are going to be coming in short order. Right, I think housing is actually going to be a big issue too, but I won't go into that. There's a lot of stuff coming and there's going to be a lot of people retiring and they still need to make revenue.

Speaker 2:

And and I'm I've done some coaching, or check out my LinkedIn, like I uh, under secretary of the energy department, cause I work a lot in oil and gas uh, helped her get her podcast up and going Like, I mean, there's people that have great skillsets, okay Of you know you want to get in with the government, you want to, you know you want to get some things approved, whatever. But how do they market themselves, right, how do they market their businesses? And I just think that from your perspective and from my perspective, we could slow this down. We could talk about some of these different things and we could and I personally listen to. I don't like the short, short podcast, okay, and I've been looking to move to the longer form podcast. But you gotta you know it's not as easy as people think to to make that transition and to find that content. But uh.

Speaker 2:

I think, I think that I think that that's what we should do. I think we should should wrap on this podcast and and it'll it'll publish in a couple of weeks, but we'll get, um, we'll set up a time to do a long form and we'll we can map some of this stuff out and dig into a little bit more, and I think it would create a lot of value for people and then, uh, people get to know you, um, a lot better. And and also, like what I think I want to communicate to the audience uh, audience, is the thinking right, how you're identifying things, what you're thinking about. How does that translate in the business? What are the struggles you're dealing with? How to overcome it? But also, I want to keep interjecting data, because I am such a proponent of data-driven marketing and I think it makes all the effort, because it was like, yeah, I think this could work, but let's just run it and A-B test it and we'll just see what the right answer is, because what I think might be the right answer is not what the market thinks right, and I was like I always let the market decide and so we have a really good company culture because, well, hey, everybody puts up their ideas.

Speaker 2:

We have a really good company culture because, well, you know, hey, everybody puts up their ideas. We take the best ideas, we try them out and then we figure out what actually wins based on the data Right, and so everybody's always kind of um, optimizing to that Um, but I would love to do that I. I I also have a startup hard stop here. So, um, let let's go ahead and wrap, and then we'll, we'll talk more and we'll reschedule something. Let's go ahead and wrap and then we'll, we'll talk more and we'll reschedule something. So hopefully everybody got some value. But the one question that I do ask people and I want it to give an opportunity for anybody that's listening to contact you but what is the one biggest unknown secret of internet marketing in your mind, of growing these businesses?

Speaker 3:

Oh, okay. So I think it's nothing super clever. If I'm going to be honest with you, I'm going to double down on what I said before, and you hinted at it as well. It's understanding who you're marketing and your target, and understanding. You are inherently biased to assume you know what they're looking for. You don't. You need to interpret the data, you need to understand their pain points. If you could, just you might have the best, most strongest gun, the you name it, it's so accurate. But if you have that scope aim just a little bit left, you're not going to hit. Understanding who you're going after and why, and then not knowing how to interpret the data to where you're not fooling yourself, is the number one superpower. You have to start there.

Speaker 2:

Well, people don't start with strategy, okay, people don't start with research and data, they just want to jump into it. And that's why I think people fail a lot on social media strategies. They just jump in like it's about posting a lot. No, it's not about posting a lot. Right, it's very strategic. And that's why I've kind of stepped away from the agency a little bit. I still oversee all the strategy and everything going on there. But, matthewburchamcom, like I'm doing a lot of helping people get out of ditches with their kind of problems. But it's all like thought process and it's strategy work. And we always start with who's your target audience, what is that customer journey? And then we start testing out offers to figure out what they want. Okay, and, and to your point, you tweak something just a little bit could make a huge difference. It is wild how much difference.

Speaker 2:

So, so, so you know, this podcast used to be predominantly, for 10 plus years, about SEO, and SEO now has become well, I want more leads, I want more business. How do I make that happen? It's everything. How do I use the social media platforms? Right Cause their algorithms, how their algorithms work, how how it all works together. And and it's now about well, getting that message to the right person, which you can do today, but then converting them and it's about conversion rate optimization is, I think, one of the biggest things, and that's that's the biggest thing is like get the fish on the hook and then reel them in. And so I would love to uh, uh, get, get, get some time with you where we can, like, maybe even sit down and, um, really have a long form conversation about, uh, how to think about this and how to do it, and I think that from that, I think a lot of people will be.

Speaker 2:

Really, I want I want them to be in our conversation. I have a lot of these conversations with certain people and I you know, I'm in a couple of text groups with some some great people that it deletes like the messaging, you know, after about a week, right, and all that stuff is so valuable, but it it's like no one gets to see behind the curtain. That's what I want to do. I want to pull back the curtain and I want to like really look at stuff and and and help people that are searching online, that are struggling, that are trying to find the answers to what they're looking for. And I mean it's out there and I think we could lay it out for them.

Speaker 3:

So that's what I'm gonna do. Yeah, let's do it. And I have so much to reveal behind the curtain, so to say. Like you said, and in my companies, I have investors and people on my cap table and whatnot, and a lot of these folks have sold businesses for billions of dollars and they're in the service space, they're in the online space. What I'm learning is they are a sales and marketing agency first and understanding what are they looking at? They're looking at win rates and all these offers and you name it, and they are growing like crazy. I have friends in the home improvement space that did a hundred million dollars in their third year in business because they are sales and marketing analytics interpreters. They know what they're doing and I would definitely love to sit long form Things that I've learned, even the past 12 months, six months and even more recent than that, things you would never assume, and colliding analytics and marketing to operations and scale, and so much more.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. So if people want to hear more, we just gave everybody just a taste of what we're going to be talking about. How can they reach out to you right now If they're like I got it. I got to talk to you right now Number one space.

Speaker 3:

I'm super involved in LinkedIn. I will respond to every message, unless it's an automated AI message and it doesn't do a good job of covering its tracks. Reach out to me there Also. Dunnigancollectivecom it's just my last name, collectivecom. I have a snapshot of some of my companies on there, some blogs and things like that. Linkedin any socials really and as long as you're real, I'll respond to you.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. Well, everybody, go check that out. Today is an exciting time because you have access to AI, you have access to the internet, you have access to all the social media platforms. You can reach people, like I talked about at the beginning of this podcast, in a way that, like businesses, marketers would drool. Okay, like 30 years ago, like now is the best time to start.

Speaker 2:

If you haven't started, if you're stuck, there's answers, there's solutions, there's opportunities and there's people that can help. And so, if you want to grow your business with that tool, reach out to EWR Digital for more revenue in your business. We'll give you a free consultation, no pressure. We can see if we're a fit. We can point you in the right direction. We have a lot of connections and we want to get you the help you're looking for. Stay tuned for the mastermind group that's going to be coming out next month and then we are going to be turning that those into trainings that you can get If, if a mastermind group's not for you.

Speaker 2:

I've been having people ask me about it for at least three years now and we finally got to that point. We've launched it for the energy category and I've taken a lot of those trainings that are helping CMOs of Fortune 500 companies in the energy space, and then I've applied it to the small business category. So stay tuned for that. Uh, stay tuned for the name change. Um, so, unknown secrets of internet marketing. And we'll still redirect it. Uh, best SEO podcastcom. Uh, but we are launching something new. I just feel there's the times changing and a lot of uh, a lot of things from uh, the lining of the stars to the, to the, to the politics, to the life cycle. I just feel like there's change everywhere. Hopefully y'all feel it too. Look positive, know where you're gonna go, drive in that direction and until next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye-bye for now.

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Matt Bertram

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