Break Through The Digital Space
While it may seem like a simple feat to gain high ROIs, it can prove difficult to gain - and keep - consistently high ROIs. While it may take time for your brand to consistently see a profit, utilizing some of this week's podcast guest's tips will ensure that your brand can start to make key differences in the journey to gain high ROIs.
Building brand awareness and enhancing user experience are only some of the ways to increase ROI, and Kenny Gray is here to share many more ways to increase ROI. In this blog, Hollywood Branded shares how to gain the highest ROI in order to break through the digital space.
A Little More About Kenny
Kenny is the owner and founder of GraytMedia, a digital marketing agency that helps scale revenue, build brand awareness, and enhance user experience to get their highest ROI for eCommerce businesses. For over six years, Kenny has been helping businesses break through the digital space by building big picture strategies for marketing and leveraging paid advertising, data and analytics, marketing automation, SEO, web design, and conversion rate optimization. He has scaled multiple eCommerce brands to 6 and 7-figure incomes over consecutive months by dialing in on the user experience.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: How did you get started in this industry to get you to become an agency owner specializing in digital marketing?
Answer: It’s been quite the journey, I’d say! Right out of school, I got a small position with The Golf Channel. Their headquarters were here in Orlando, so I got really lucky. I got with NBC Sports and did some SEO analytics reporting and a little bit of YouTube social media stuff and that just kind of triggered it. I unknowingly kind of already had a knack for it, where I was working in hospitality. I was helping promote local bars and nightclubs and things like that. It’s technically marketing, but I didn’t really realize it at the time. It just kind of caught my attention and I really started to dive into it. After that, I got a position with a smaller agency in town where I learned a little bit about media buying, which came naturally, as I already knew analytics and how everything functioned; I had a lot of experience from The Golf Channel. From there, I thought about how the way that websites run is a little more interesting than media buying, so I decided that I wanted to learn email and MSP, so I had to learn how to build funnels in order to build websites. I had all of that curiosity and I just kept pulling on the string and kept teaching myself, essentially. I was blessed with the opportunity where I had projects to work on. Sometimes they were favors or low fee projects, but eventually, as you start to learn more, you can learn from your peers. From there, I started to freelance for a little bit, which was going really well. Then, I started to build a team, and in turn, wanted to learn how to run the business side of things. I knew I could deliver on the service, but it started to get a little bit boring, so I turned to teaching people how to do what I do, so I could start to focus on the big picture side of things. Now, business is going great. It’s definitely a different environment and atmosphere than it was when I first started six years ago. Over the last two or three years, digital marketing has changed so much; a lot of people are savvier and more involved in it all. You have your drop-shippers and your influencers who are doing their own digital marketing now, which is very interesting.
I was actually really looking forward to filming this show, especially because of the name “Marketing Mistakes;” it’s something we always focus on, especially in terms of paid ads. You can buy data, but you might be wasting time and money that you could be putting elsewhere. Sometimes, it’s not about where you’re spending your money. You know what’s wasting your budget and what you really need to spend your money on.
Question: What’s the first step you take with clients to make sure they’re not wasting their money? How do you start them on their journey to success with you to ensure that they are no longer doing all of the incorrect things they once were doing?
Answer: It’s going to be different with every brand and client you work with. Sometimes they’ve been around for a while, and sometimes they’re only selling stuff on Amazon and aren’t capitalizing on having their own store where your margins could be a bit better and you have a bit more control. Some people have been running their business for a while; this one company we worked with had been around for about four or five years, and I noticed that they started to grow too fast internally. We shared that we could get their conversion rate to be much better by doing sales funnels and bundling email marketing and traffic products, but that they also don’t need to pay for graphic designers. Sometimes busy work isn’t good work. Work with purpose; work for a reason, not just because you can afford to hire more employees.
I can spend $60,000 on Facebook ads and get you at least $60,000 back right now, or you can spend the same on an organic social media manager, but I don’t know if that same amount of money would get you the same return as quickly, especially when you’re in the early stages of a brand. When you’re doing million-dollar months consistently, ads can kind of be a cherry on top. But ads are an enhancer, and we can get more brand awareness out of them through them. Not to be cliché, but taking a step back to do that 30,000-foot view to see what is making you money and what is losing you money is important.
Question: When you’re working with a client for the first time, where do you start? It can be a bit mind-boggling for a lot of small and mid-size business owners, especially in figuring out the whole other beast that is the digital landscape.
Answer: There are so many different avenues, and it can be really overwhelming if you’re not in it every day. So for somebody new coming into this landscape, first we have to figure out what you’re trying to sell. What solution does your product or service provide to any of these issues where people are going to be looking for them? When it comes to digital marketing, the whole point is going to target when your target demographic is going to be in so many cases. In the last decade, there have been a ton of Facebook and Instagram ads, because it’s been the leading app that everyone is using. If I’m going to put up billboards, I’m going to put up billboards on the busiest highways, and right now, that busiest highway is Facebook and Instagram.
Next, we want to figure out who your target demographic is and where we think they’re going to be; in some cases, that can be Facebook, and in some cases, it can be search query-based. There are so many channels we can go after, so once you figure out your target demographic and where they will be, you want to cater specifically to that channel. If we’re looking at Facebook, you're going to be dealing with a different set of creative and landing pages versus
if you’re going after a younger demographic on TikTok. Then, we’ll want to entertain them. We know their attention spans are a little shorter and we’re really gonna have to dazzle them They’re very savvy with the market, so you really have to convince them why they should pick your brand over your competitor. They grew up with the Internet, so they might not be as susceptible to scams and shady dealings.
Question: So when you’re looking at all of these different approaches to eCommerce, is there one that is your go-to that will always be included when building out a campaign?
Answer: I always start with their website. What the user is experiencing is really important, and we can manipulate it in a way through ads on other sites to get a great click-through rate. Buying ads is a really cheap way to get traffic through clicks, but once they finally get to your page, there’s a potential for disconnect. It can be something as small as if your page takes too long to load; you’ve already lost your first opportunity to pitch them. Once we work on the website, we’ll start to implement tools like email or SMS marketing so that we can market directly to them and hopefully target them down the road.
When it comes to paid ads and more organic marketing, I tend to suggest that most brands should be on every channel, but that you should shift your budget to cater to what makes sense. It’s really important to create multiple touchpoints; just to get that first purchase the user journey could be long-winded. Maybe they discover you through a YouTube video, and then they go to your website. Through there, we can start targeting them by remarketing on Google, Facebook, or TikTok. Eventually, they may give us an email, which provides us with more value. These are all multiple touchpoints that you can use to dig into analytics to see where specifically they can bounce off on your site. It’s something that can be A/B tested; at first, sometimes you have to buy a lot of data to determine what the market is telling you, and then you need to start pivoting.
Question: At what point, looking at socials, should a brand realize that things aren’t working out? Is there a rate of increase that you should have on your social media accounts for it to be worthwhile?
Answer: That’s a tough one. You want followers, but you don’t want bad followers, and it’s all about quality when you’re talking about overall traffic. You don’t want poor quality traffic that doesn’t engage with you; it doesn’t help if you have 50,000 followers but you only get 5 comments on a post. Quality is going to be huge; in overall growth, every month you’re going to want to see something around a 5 or 10 percent growth to be heading in the right direction if you’re talking to the right audience. As you get these followings, take a look to see if they’re liking and commenting on your stuff; are they engaging with you? Are you engaging with them to make them aware of you? You can have small levels of growth, for sure, as long as you have a high level of engagement. Engaged followers will lead to sales quicker than a high number of unengaged followers.
Check Out The Podcast!
Kenny has so much great information from her experience in graphic design and branding. Check out the podcast below to learn more about creating great visuals!
Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:
- Build Your Brand Around Your Best Customers
- Manage Your Media Strategy With An Ever-Changing Climate
- Market Your Online Course Like A Master
- How To Properly Pitch Your Contacts
- How To Secure Leads And Demands Through Social Platforms
Every week we release a new podcast featuring guests with so much knowledge about marketing, you don't want to miss one! How can you make sure you don't miss an episode? Click below to subscribe!
