099 | Why Marketing Feels Broken and How to Fix It Fast with Bryan Phelps

Patrick: [00:00:00] What if the way you’ve always thought about marketing is what’s actually holding your business back? Welcome back to another episode of the Vital Wealth Strategies Podcast. I’m your host, Patrick Lonergan, and today I’m sitting down with Brian Phelps, founder of Big Leap, a digital marketing agency that’s helped brands from startups to giants like Avis Rethink how they approach growth in today’s shifting landscape.
In this conversation, we get real about what’s working and what’s not in marketing right now. We talk about the massive changes AI is bringing to the way people search and discover brands, how to clarify your messaging so customers not only notice you, but remember you and why Building trust is the foundation of turning clients into lifelong evangelist.
Brian even shares tools and strategies you can use today to focus your marketing where your customers actually spend their time. Instead of wasting money, chasing the latest shiny tactics, if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by ads that are too expensive, SEO, that seem to change overnight, or the [00:01:00] endless list of digital channels pulling for your attention, this episode is going to give you clarity and a system you can actually build on.
Stick with us until the end, because you’ll walk away with a framework that will help you scale your business without falling into the trap of disjointed tactics that drain your budget and your energy. And as we dig into strategies to strengthen your marketing foundation, it’s the perfect time to remind you that smart marketing and smart tax planning go hand in hand.
If you’re ready to start building out your own strategy to keep more of what you earn and put your money to work, visit vital strategies.com/tax to get started today. Now, let’s dive into my conversation with Brian Phelps. Today on the show we’ve got Brian Phelps from Big League Digital Marketing Agency.
I’m excited about our conversation because so often. We see that our entrepreneurs are frustrated by traditional marketing tactics. They’re just not working anymore. Ads are too expensive. SEO is shifting. Customer acquisition seems like it. It’s harder than ever. They also, the entrepreneur, just feel [00:02:00] stuck, frustrated.
You know, I think about what it takes to generate revenue, and having people knocking on your door excited about the product and service you offer is, it’s hard. It’s hard to get that going, and it’s hard to find lasting results. And then. I think philosophically business leaders shouldn’t have to choose between, you know, brand and performance.
Marketing should build trust and deliver measurable results all at the same time. So thank you Brian, so much for joining us here today.
Bryan: Yeah, no, it’s awesome. Great to, or excuse me,
Patrick: excited to be here. It should be a fun convo. Yeah. Very good. So can you give us a little bit of your background? I know you’ve been in the game for a long time and worked with some, I dunno, some big logo logos that people would recognize, but Yeah.
Can you share some with
Bryan: us? Yeah, yeah. I kinda got, I got started in the digital marketing industry back in about 2005, specifically in search engine optimization. So it was pretty kind of early in the game back then. And so kind of a classic agency founder story, a little bit of just, Hey, I turned out I was pretty good at it.
I built some of my own websites even. Drove traffic to those and monetized them through ads and [00:03:00] affiliates and did that got nights and that ended up making more money than my day job. So it got to that point where it’s like, okay, there’s something here. So split off and eventually started doing that full time and had lots of great, uh, you know, friends, colleagues, you name it, neighbors.
Mm-hmm. You know, that needed help with their websites. And so that kind of grew. To the marketing agency that we are today and we’ve changed a lot. As you know, digital marketing’s changed a lot outside of just SEO. We do a lot of other things. Yeah, we’ve been fortunate to work with some great brands, like an Avis car rental, all their business in North America for many years.
We’ve helped ’em and, but everything from that to brand new startups, you know, pre-seed and series A and B. And here in Utah we have a lot of tech startups and we’ve worked with a lot of ’em over the years.
Patrick: This is fantastic. So I, today I’d like to take the conversations in two different directions and we can, I think, tie all this together.
But I’d like to talk about how AI is impacting marketing and then also the value of, [00:04:00] uh, establishing long-term brand and messaging. Mm-hmm. I think those are both important, important topic. So if it’s okay, can we start on the, the AI side, and I’d like to just get your perspective on maybe. Some of the problems that we, uh, should be aware of with AI sort of entering the marketing space, and then we’ll move on from there.
Bryan: Yeah, so ai, it’s the, yeah, biggest topic in our world right now. And there’s maybe a couple components or different aspects of it. So all businesses are ques or wondering, you know, how can AI help me be better, more efficient? You know, let’s save money. So there’s an aspect there. And in the marketing world specifically, there’s maybe a, a bigger emphasis on, you know, searcher behavior.
How are people. Finding new products or doing research that used to be exclusively done on Google. And I feel like we’re only chapter into a hundred chapter story on this, and so it’s a little early to maybe declare any kind of victory, but we’re spending a lot of time and resources for us and our clients helping them figure [00:05:00] their way through this.
Patrick: Yeah, because I see, like, it’s interesting when I go to Google and I search something now. Bard has given me a summary at the top to my answer. Mm-hmm. Where before it used to give me a link to a bunch of websites, and we have some, some clients that are content creators in particular niches, and they’re like, it’s interesting, we’re seeing our traffic sort of fall off a little bit.
Now. I think there’s two sides to that equation. They’re seeing their traffic fall off, but the people that they’re not actually seeing a decrease in revenue. So the people that are. Wanting to find them or still finding them and, you know, maybe not stumbling across them on accident and going, ah, this isn’t where I wanna be.
And Bard’s answering that question. But are you seeing an impact on AI with some of the, I dunno if SEO is the right term, but mm-hmm. People getting the search results that maybe they’re looking for?
Bryan: Yeah, I think maybe the best way to, to kind of summarize it a bit is if you think of like a buyer’s journey, you know, we look at it in funnels a lot in the [00:06:00] marketing world.
Search used to be able to kind of take people, almost generally speaking, kind of from the top to the bottom of that funnel. And so people would go do research, they would find new companies, new products, and then eventually kind of come down this funnel and convert. So where I think we’ve seen maybe the biggest change in AI as part of this, so the chat GPTs of the world, but we’re also seeing it on other platforms like Reddit, YouTube, Pinterest.
Mm-hmm. People are just finding products and maybe more diverse sources. Like you said, they’ll often come back to Google to, you know, research, continue researching or researching the company or just trying to find their website because AI services like chat, GPT don’t, uh, make it super easy to to click on your website there.
So we’re seeing the same thing like you described of traffic’s down, but sales sometimes are even growing because they’re being mentioned in chat, GPT or wherever and then just coming straight to the site. So it’s been a, it’s a shift for sure. And. For us and our clients on how do [00:07:00] we help you get, you know, discovered and then work our way down the funnel to a conversion.
Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. I, I love that. And, and really I think you, you just hit on a key point, like how do you get discovered? And I think about marketing in general, and it’s really a bit for attention, right? Like, if I can get somebody’s attention long enough to look at my product or service and go, Hey, that’s, that’s interesting.
I, I wanna learn more about that, or I wanna go buy that thing. And we, we could look back to billboards and direct mail. Yeah. You know, as sort of early, uh, opportunities for that. Then we got spam that, uh, that came through. And now, uh, now, now we’re, you know, seeing, uh, you know, I, I personally think email’s the best ’cause I own that channel.
It, uh, is an opportunity for me to, you know, I don’t have to worry about if I’m on social or SEO you know, the rules changing and then all of a sudden, you know. What was driving a lot of traffic to my businesses going away. So do you have thoughts on those different channels and how the rules change [00:08:00] and where ultimately businesses should be, you know, paying some time and attention to their strategy on the digital front?
Yeah.
Bryan: Yeah. I think that’s why is what you said on the email front, and we’re seeing a shift there of people focusing a little bit more on, you know, we call like first party data. So you know the direct relationships and access that you have because people used to think, Hey, if I can get everyone to. Like my Facebook page and they’ll see everything I post, which mm-hmm.
Isn’t the case even organically. Right? You don’t always see everything they may get, so you have to kind of pay to even reach your audience that you’ve worked a long time to, to build their SEO again is great, but, you know, changes and paid, uh, paid ads, paid, you know, social, it’s great, but it’s, yeah, once you turn that off, it’s gone.
So building those kinds of long term platforms, like you said. Makes a lot of sense and something that we’re seeing kind of a, a change as well, talking about kind that discovery and conversion process that we’re trying to help our clients with. It’s, we kind of talked to ’em about our main goal really [00:09:00] isn’t just to help you get discovered but also be remembered.
Mm-hmm. So there’s also, there’s a lot of data coming out showing that most people when they come into a sale conversation already know who they wanna work with. Yeah. So if I, you know, I’m shopping for HR software for my business. The chances are I might be searching for that today, but I’ve have like this, you know, last year of, you know, mental history of mm-hmm.
Oh, I saw, you know, bamboo hr, it’s a great brand. I see their videos and so they may still come and do some research, but they kinda have a front runner. And so that’s a kind of a push for us as an agency is how do we help our clients be remembered. Mm-hmm. Not just discovered.
Patrick: Yeah. And I think you’re touching on an interesting thing.
Can we talk a little bit about branding and marketing? Because I think they’re different and I think they’re both important and so. Can you maybe define those two terms for us?
Bryan: Yeah, that’s a great question. From our perspective as an agency on the brand side for us is really focused on kind of your key message and your positioning.
So we don’t, you know, know you do the creative side of branding necessarily too [00:10:00] much, but, and that stuff’s great and there’s obviously a need value there. Mm-hmm. But for us it’s that aspect of how do we, how are we communicating with that audience? And so, you know, sometimes just saying, Hey, we’re we sell HR software is great and it’s obvious.
People often don’t buy very logically, people buy emotionally. And so we think about that with our positioning messaging as we look at behavioral drivers. And so the person shopping for HR software may not necessarily, they’ll say they care about all the features and benefits, but they’re often wondering is like, Hey, is this a safe choice?
Like if I buy this, am I, you know, making a smart decision? ’cause they’re a big company, I’m not gonna get fired for this. You know? Going back to like the IBM days where their tagline essentially was no one ever got fired for hiring Big Blue. Right? Like it’s the safe choice. So people shop that way. And so we are working on that.
That’s how we view kinda the branding world from our perspective. And then the marketing worlds. How are we getting, taking that audience, that message, and then how are [00:11:00] we distributing that, helping it convert, and then post-sale, how are we creating evangelists essentially? Yeah. Out of those customers.
Patrick: That’s really interesting. So I’ve, we, we talk about messaging and it seems like an easy thing. Like, oh yeah, just get your messaging figured out. But I’ve found, just thinking about my own business for the last 15 years, like getting my messaging dialed in and being able to communicate it efficiently and effectively has been evolutionary.
And I, I still don’t think I’m done getting that, that dialed in. It seems like it takes a lot of work to refine a message down, you know? Most people wanna use way too many words. It’s like, nope, we gotta condense that down to the essence of what you are delivering to people. And, and oftentimes it’s a, it’s a feeling, right?
Like you just talked about, like nobody got fired, um, you know, buying big blue. So is there anything, like, is there a, can you talk a little bit about that process on really refining the message down to it’s key elements? ’cause I, I think [00:12:00] oftentimes I see. People all over the place and it’s like, it’s not clear, it’s not clear what you’re doing.
Mm-hmm. When I coach your website, I’m not sure what’s happening here. Yeah. Um, and, and so yeah, I think as a marketing agency that is a challenge. Yeah.
Bryan: So for us, the process starts by trying to, you know, work with entrepreneurs and business owners to really understand kind their, why they do what they do and what’s kind of their uni unique perspective, you know, on the industry or the world.
And that’s all we’re ultimately trying to get out of. The meetings we have with those clients is, you know, a lot of people, they usually start meetings go pretty similarly. They’re like, well, trying to get to extra revenue. I wanna make money, I wanna not pay, I want to limit my tax liability and all that stuff.
And it’s, mm-hmm. Obviously it’s a big driver, but it’s not usually why someone really does what they do. So if you take kinda the money outta the equation, that’s all we’re trying to get at. And like you said, doing your own messaging. It’s the hardest thing in the world. Like even for us, like we have a hard time sometimes.
’cause it’s like you’re so like. In the weeds with it. And so it, it’s helpful to have kinda a another perspective on it. So [00:13:00] we have meetings with clients and we just, we pry and we ask all the questions and ultimately just help our clients discover that. And we, so we help kind of bring that out. Mm-hmm.
And so understanding that kind of what’s their unique perspective, you know, on the market or on the industry, helps us then move kind of into the messaging piece. And so we break it down kind of different stages of the funnel, so that top of funnel where people aren’t maybe like shopping, but they’re the right audience.
We tend to have maybe some more of that emotional, you know, messaging that it feels a little vaguer sometimes, but it, you know, make, you know, capture some attention like you described as people move from there to consideration that messaging is maybe gonna get a little different and talk about, you know, more of the, the product and differentiators, things like that.
And then we move kinda in the conversion conversations, and that’s the promotional type stuff, right? Buy, you know, pay upfront, get a discount, or, you know, 50% off, that kind of stuff. Clients. And so we ultimately just try to map, understand the business and then map some of that messaging to where the buyers [00:14:00] are in their stage of that journey.
Patrick: Mm-hmm. That’s really good. And one of the things I was thinking about, as you were saying all those things, is there’s also a level of trust that I’m trying to build with the buyer. And I think about even this conversation here, one of the reasons we do the podcast is people can sort of check us out. You know, they can learn and hear how we think and how we.
Approach, we’ll say life in general, you know, because we think it’s important to have a worldview, something you stand for. This is the direction we’re going. And all of our thinking and advice sort of revolves around that, that, that worldview. Mm-hmm. And I think that just helps create trust. So the more things that you know, we can do to build that trust, and I think that comes from just great messaging.
Bryan: Yeah. We talk about, and this, I’ll give credit to Kobe Bush that works with us, who taught me this little, his saying this is like a personal driver of his, but it applies for our clients, is. People notice different, so there’s a lot of, let’s call it just financial advisors out there in the world. And a lot of ’em, you know, will say similar things, but when you see something different right, you notice and you pay attention.
Mm-hmm. So that captures, you know, that first [00:15:00] piece of attention. So people notice different, they align to genuine, and that’s that trust building layer that you just described. So podcasts like this, you know, whatever, however you wanna get it out, you know, the message and let people, you know, kind of get a feel for things.
They can align to genuine if, like you said, like all things in life, like does that align with how I view things too? And then so notice different align to genuine and then evangelize, you know, those great experiences. And so our ultimate like KPI is, you know, that last piece and does that, we can almost measure that by client referrals for example.
Mm-hmm. Like how are we kind of meeting all the different aspects that we’re going for there?
Patrick: Yeah. I think about that evangelism piece and, you know, creating these evangelists for the, the brand. Mm-hmm. Is there. I feel like that’s hard to do from a marketing perspective. Like I feel like a lot of that happens needs to happen at a culture level inside the organization.
And so I, I love the fact that you’re measuring, you know, referrals, but I also like how much control do you feel like you have over that from, as a digital
Bryan: [00:16:00] marketing agency? Yeah, no, that’s spot on. It’s, you know, there’s things we can do and, you know, email sequences we can send and, you know, try to help people with that.
But it, we really think it’s those conversations that are happening offline there. At your kids’ baseball game or over the fence, you know, talking with peers and things like that. And so, you know, we can try to measure that. You know, we often ask, you know, how’d you hear about us? Even if we can digitally measure people’s, you know, path to us, we still like to ask ’cause someone goes to Google and searches for Big Leap that it’s gonna show up as, oh, organic search, that’s great.
But when we ask another layer on that, it’s like, oh, well my neighbor said he worked with you guys and you’re awesome. Mm-hmm. So that’s really how they found us. And so. It’s kind of this funny thing going from this digital into more of the real world, and I think that’s where most of those referrals are really happening.
Patrick: Yeah, I think that’s, that’s great. I’m thinking about all of these, these tools, we’re talking about refining our messaging and thinking about AI and how it can [00:17:00] assist in this process, right? Mm-hmm. I found a lot of value, we’ll call it late at night on a. You know when my family’s gone to bed and I’m sort of like noodling on an idea and me and chat GPT are having this whole dialogue on refining some of these things.
Are you seeing AI as a, I’ll say an assistive tool in these things versus just like letting the machine run and come up with its own messaging? Yeah. I’m curious your perspective on, on that.
Bryan: Yeah. Yeah. We love, you know, AI and what it can do. We’re not, I wouldn’t say we’re all in, in a sense, just ’cause it’s changing quickly and.
It becomes one of those tools where if everyone can produce the same thing, nothing’s different anymore, right? Mm-hmm. So you’re noticing different, going back to that. And so where we’ve found a lot of value, if we can define these things that I just described, you know, why the company’s, why we call it an ideology, you know, what’s their kind of driver?
We go through some different exercises to kinda get their, their tone of voice again, what, how they view things. And if we can kinda load that in first, then we get good, unique. Content that’s no one else will be able to reproduce. [00:18:00] Yeah. And so it can assist writing, but it’s not replacing the thought. You know, we’re still providing that.
So it’s just helping, you know, I think great people and smart people that maybe aren’t, you know, the most technical writers be able to write well, but it’s really the uniqueness. And Google has a term, you know, around like meat or eat where it’s talking about expertise, authority, that kind of stuff. We’re providing that layer into it.
Patrick: Yeah, absolutely. And I. That’s a hundred percent been my experience. It’s like, you know, if I just let chat, sort of produce something, it’s generally garbage. ’cause it’s, it’s the average of
Bryan: everything on the internet,
Patrick: right? It’s hallucinating, right. Like it’s trying to, you know, come up with this thought versus like, you know, uh, moving it in a general direction.
I think that is good. And I also, you know, we had an interesting conversation in one of the previous episodes with, uh, camp Networks, which is all about like taking. IP and making sure that it is protected. ’cause we’ve seen a lot of that. You know, I feel like [00:19:00] ai, you know, there’s all sorts of lawsuits that, you know, is coming against some of these AI firms that are sort of scraping the data.
And then it’s like, I think you could maybe unintentionally end up with, uh, somebody’s, uh, yeah. Materials that are yours and you’re, you’re putting them out there in the world. I don’t know if there’s anything to discuss there, but I think it’s, it’s interesting. Yeah.
Bryan: It’s, it’s always been a concern of ours, of, you know, especially with, you know, big, uh, and bigger companies, of course are all very concerned about that, but we think it applies to everyone.
And you know, that that stuff changes pretty frequently and, you know, court cases will get played out and we’ll get a precedent eventually. One other thing that we’re seeing now is state, at a state level, passing laws about disclosure. Around ai. So you know, you’re seeing a lot of companies jumping into, you know, maybe like sales AI bots to answer make calls or even the content, if it’s a hundred per a hundred percent produced by AI in some states, you have to start disclosing that on the website.
So it’s kind like going back into the influencer world, you know, or they have [00:20:00] to disclose paid products or some of the privacy laws that have happened. That’s all super new. But I think we’ll see some of that as obviously there’s obvious concerns, especially around video and audio ai and replicating, you know, people’s voices and scamming people.
Yeah. And so it’s, it’s a concern and people are jumping on it quick, which again, it’s innovation. I’m mm-hmm. A huge fan of Yeah. But there’s definitely some legal and ethical concerns probably that will come into play.
Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. This is good.
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So I’m going to just, I think about, we’ve talked a lot about, I’ll call it our marketing foundation, making sure that our brand and our messaging are aligned. Now, I’d like to talk about. I think about digital marketing and there’s so many different channels out there, and, you know, I could be doing paid, I could be doing SEO, I could be creating content.
You know, there could be like, we’ll call it pr, you know, well, what, how do, how do I know where to start? It seems like I’ve got this limitless menu of things to go, go try and I don’t, as the business owner, it’s like, I don’t know. I have my, maybe my own opinions, but, uh. I just don’t know. It seems like it’s a scary, scary place.
Bryan: Yeah, that’s a great question. And like you said, there’s no shortage of [00:22:00] places. I was talking to a business already yesterday who just acquired a, a plumbing business, and he said, well, how much should I, you know, be paying for marketing? And it’s like, well, you could spend, you know, as little as you want and as much as you want.
You know, you could spend a million dollars on meta if you wanted to. So it’s a tough question to answer for in his case. Where we like to start and where we recommend people start is since there are so many options, how do we focus and understand where do our audience, our potential customers, our ideal customers mm-hmm.
Spend time online and how are they influenced? And so there’s some tools, one, a great one called Spark Toro that you could, uh, look out there and you know, just talking to customers is a great place to start as well and understand, you know, what are the platforms they use. So people are talking a lot about ai, but we often find for a lot of our clients that’s not actually.
One of the more common places people are shopping for what they do. Mm-hmm. And so a tool like Spark Tour will show you that people in this audience used YouTube and Google more, uh, AI less, or it could be Pinterest depending on, you know, if you have [00:23:00] maybe more of a visual product. And so we try to focus first on, you know, where do they spend time online?
And then again, like how are they influenced, which kinda comes back to some of the messaging, but that helps us direct our time, effort, budget, content to really create things. Where they are instead of trying to test a little bit everywhere and spreading ourselves too thin. Right.
Patrick: Yeah. And I think you, you sparked something in my mind about like spending a million dollars on meta for ads and there’s a, a statement we just believe is true.
If my visibility outpaces my capability, it hurts my credibility. You know, it’s like I could go buy a Super Bowl ad, but that might overwhelm, you know, our operation with a number of clients and then, then we’re failing everybody and it’s no good. So I think the. The marketing needs to scale with the business.
And are you seeing in that vein, are you seeing like this is what a healthy spend should be as a percentage of revenue? And I know that is super hard to use that like, because it probably [00:24:00] depends on the type of industry in that type of thing, but yeah, I didn’t know if there was something that entrepreneurs could be going, oh.
I’m out of line. I should be spending more money, or man, I’m spending too much money and not getting the results I should be getting. Yeah, no,
Bryan: it’s great. Like you said, industry is, you know, very, depending on your stage, you know, we get, we work with some funded startups that are spending, you know, many multiples of their revenue because they’re early revenue wise, but, and the model, of course, is a little different with them.
They’ll spend six months worth of revenue to, to generate a customer, but it mm-hmm. Pencils out for ’em. But for most businesses. Most, you know, entrepreneurs and people that maybe are, you know, self-funding and things like that. It’s always that balance when you’re first getting going, right? It’s gonna be a higher percentage, but there’s a lot of studies that show for the average, it was a study of, I mean, I think it was thousands of CMOs.
It was generally speaking between like 10 and 20% of revenue to be spent on marketing, including spend agencies, headcount, all that kind of stuff.
Patrick: And I think one thing, and you’ve got quite a bit of experience working with private [00:25:00] equity backed brands, and I think that says something to me because one of the first things private equity will do is dial up the marketing and sales engine.
You know, they will invest more money in that to like. Start generating more revenue through the business. And I think that’s great. So I appreciate those percentages for people to look at and go, okay, where are we at from a spend perspective?
Bryan: Um, yeah. And again, great use for AI is to go ask some of those specifics, you know, and they often go find, you know, a research that maybe was done.
So yeah, in the agency space where we are, it’s kind of fits in that 10 to 20%. Again, depending on your growth goals and all those fun things.
Patrick: Yeah. So just to recap where we’ve been, we clarified our marketing foundation with, you know, our brand and our messaging, and then we’ve talked about, you know, what channels do we start with?
And the answer there is you start with the channels where your people, your potential customers are hanging out. That seems to be wise. And then I think about, I’ll say long-term sustainable growth. How do we. [00:26:00] How do we put our marketing together and continue to expand on, I’ll say those channels and sort of measure the progress that we’re making in our, in our marketing, because it seems like the landscape changes.
About every 10 minutes there’s a new social media or a new, you know, we’re seeing chat and AI sort of invade the search a space, and so I feel like the challenges you face as a digital marketing agency are, are mm-hmm. They’re robust because the landscape keeps changing on you, so. I’m curious how we sustain long-term growth in that, that ever-changing environment.
Bryan: Yeah, that’s a big emphasis for us. When, so when we talked, I talked about, you know, what’s your unique perspective on a market? So when we went through this exercise for us, that was a big driver for me back when I got started was I’ve always, uh, I love this idea of like evergreen things or, you know, making money while you sleep, right?
Like how do you build things that last, not just short term or you know, you put in eight hours and you got paid eight hours kind of thing. We call that, you know, our approach to that, we call it brand led [00:27:00] performance marketing. And so a lot of people over the last 10 years especially have just focused so much on performance marketing.
Meaning they’re only targeting or advertising people that are in like pure shopping mode. Like I’m searching for HR software, I keep, I’ll use, keep using that example. Mm-hmm. And the challenge with that now is, yeah, like you’ve said, ad costs are rising. You know, economic factors of course tie into that on, you know, price sensitivities.
And so if that’s the first. Uh, first interaction you’re having at that stage, you’ve kind of missed the mark already. And so we look at that funnel and we say, okay, the bottom 5%, there’s, uh, studies have shown about 5% of your audience is in market at any time. 95% of the, your ideal audience isn’t really in shopping mode.
And so we’re trying to help our clients understand like, how do we, you know, speaking of channels, you know. Start building that trust, that brand, that reputation early on. So again, you’re remembered not discovered when the time comes for a purchase. Mm-hmm. And so what I love about that is it just, it kind of transcends the, [00:28:00] you know, the shiny balls that change all the time.
So when you look at AI and people that, oh, you know, as soon as it came out that were winning in ai, they were people that had invested in building their brand well before AI was a thing. So there’s little hacks, you know, ways you can try to show up in ai and they may work for a bit. But the people that really focus on building that connection, kind of serving, serving the market, versus taking from the market, they win.
When you talk about SEO content marketing, even paid ads, they perform better. They’ll show up in AI and then whatever comes after that, they’ll do well.
Patrick: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love that. I’m a big Seth Godin fan. I was reading Seth Godin’s blog before I knew what a blog was. Mm-hmm. I get his email
Bryan: still every day.
Those short ones there.
Patrick: Yep. This was back in the early two thousands. I was reading Seth’s blog and he talked about that exact thing. Creating this permission asset. Like if you just show up and keep adding value long enough, you don’t have to worry about, you know, hacking the SEO, you know, algorithms, you’ll be found ’cause you’re so freaking valuable.
That’s what [00:29:00] Google’s trying to do. You know, with SEO, and I remember for the longest time, and I haven’t done it lately, but if you googled Seth, like just his, his first name, he was the guy that showed up first in all the rankings and it was like, Hey, that’s, that is very cool. I think you’re onto something there.
You know, we can. And I don’t know if we want to talk through, you know, the frustrating component of people looking for a drivethrough breakthrough, you know, uh, and I think about, hey, what’s the big new thing in marketing that I should go, like, you know, jump into and that they’re bouncing around all over the place and that they’re, you know, not seeing the results ’cause they’re not sort of committing.
I don’t know if you have any comments on that, but, uh, I feel like that’s. Something that’s important too, is not chase the new, new exciting fad.
Bryan: Yeah. It’s interesting and we, you know, as an agency, people come to us and they, you know, expect results, you know, and ideally quicker. And so we always are trying to balance those two things.
Mm-hmm. Because there are, like I mentioned with AI and there have been with SEO from years and years and years, unique things, little tactics I guess I’d call ’em, that will help you. So we’re not necessarily opposed to that as long as it’s, [00:30:00] you know, in the SEO world, they’re talking about black hat stuff, so stuff that really violated Google’s terms of service and so it.
That example, if you, there was a common way of doing that was buying links. So you’d go to some marketplace and get people link to you and you’d rank well, and then people actually got penalized and then saw like a decline in traffic. So we’re never in favor of that. But some of the shorter term tactics, so like with AI for example, you know the messaging, going back to that for a second, that you use about yourself really influences what you potentially show up for.
So if we call ourselves. A digital marketing agency, we’re more likely to show up that than if we just call ourselves a marketing agency or mm-hmm. Performance smart, whatever. So those, I’d say, are some of the little tactics right now that people can do and that you’re not harming yourself, you know, in the long run.
But staying on top of that or working with an agency that stays on top of those things to get the quick wins. Mm-hmm. That’s, again, just continuing to build the brand, but it’s not gonna take away from the brand should that little, you know, loophole get exposed someday.
Patrick: Yeah. No, I like that. And [00:31:00] I’m also curious about your perspective on content marketing.
You know, I look at some of the brands you’ve worked with, like one in particular that we like Spoonful of Comfort. It’s been a, we think that service is great. First it goes back exactly to your point. The first thing that happened is my mother-in-law passed away. A friend sent us, you know, a spoonful of comfort.
Sort of like, we’re like, this is incredible. This is good food. Love how it’s packaged, and. Sort of how it makes us feel, right? Like it made us feel cared for. And I then we’ve had friends in life situations and we’ve used Spoonful of comfort because that experience was so good to, and, and so I’m curious, like you’ve had some fantastic results with Spoonful of Comfort.
I just look at the, you know, 2300% increase in organic revenue, 1900%. Increase in organic transactions, you know, like all of those data figures. Wonderful. So can you talk to us a little bit about content marketing and how that, [00:32:00] ’cause I think it ties back to some of those things we were talking about a few minutes ago.
I
Bryan: think it’s changed probably, maybe more than anything when you talk about ai. So those examples, that case study you mentioned. Mm-hmm. Pre ai, we help them create a lot of content. Worked with, they have an amazing internal team and create content around all those different scenarios, you know, like you talked about of, you know, gifts for.
X or you know, mother’s Day gifts, like that kind of stuff, right? People go to Google and they’d be looking for a, a product. And a lot of people still do that. A lot of studies are showing, like AI is just adding to the search pie. It’s not necessarily chipping into Google really that much, if any. Mm-hmm.
So there’s still an opportunity there for producing content like that, but where when you layer in the AI aspect of it, that content. May show up, you know, in an AI overview, but sometimes again, they’re pulling from lots of people, right? So they’ll do that. So kind of the aspect to make that content successful is some of that, you know, digital PR world.
So again, building the brand. So if I go to chat GPT and, you know, say, Hey, my mom’s turning 80 this [00:33:00] year looking for gift ideas. She likes cooking, and, you know, people search for these really long things, spoonful, or anybody that’s gonna be a, you know, a recognized brand in that space and have content.
That an ai, you know, search is gonna be able to reference and then resurface. So definitely still a place for it. It’s a harder conversation because people, we’ve had this formula for the last 20 years of buy, produce content, you know, uh, go, you know, if it shrinks here, there’s gonna be a thousand people that click on it.
Those a thousand people will convert. And there’s just this simple formula and it’s a lot more disjointed now and, and frankly, a lot of the. CFO crowd we work with have a hard time, you know, adjusting to this a little bit. Yeah. Just they’re, they’re smart too. You know, super smart, smarter than me, numbers people, but some of those traditional marketers that have been in the space a while going kind of back to some of the old metrics, it’s the intuition.
Those people are doing well right now from a, you know, navigating the changing landscape.
Patrick: Yeah. Brian, this has been fantastic. We’ve covered a lot of ground [00:34:00] in our marketing discussion. Is there anything that we. Should be talking about that is important for the entrepreneur to understand about their marketing strategy that we haven’t touched on yet.
Bryan: Yeah. I feel like, yeah, we covered kind of, that was a little masterclass in less than an hour, but it’s, it’s a changing, changing landscape. Who knows? In a week from now, maybe we’ll have to, you know, correct. Something I said here, because that changed. But on LinkedIn, I created a newsletter. I’ve never had one until just the last few weeks.
Mm-hmm. But kind of to fill this purpose of. Most entrepreneurs, even marketers sometimes don’t have the capacity to really keep up with everything that’s changing. So in that newsletter, I try to publish that kind of as needed, but quick and short just to really keep people informed on, you know, what’s changing and what can you do with it.
Patrick: Yeah, Brian, we’ll have a link to that, but your LinkedIn profile in the show notes so people can check that out there. And I also think people should just go to big leap.com. Your website’s fantastic. Of course. It better be for a digital agency, right? Yeah. But I, I think [00:35:00] if as somebody navigates your website, takes in some of the information, you know, a great next step is just talk to a strategist.
You make that easy to do, put your name and contact info in, and they can get plugged into your team and get, to get the process going. Because I, I think it’s worth at least a conversation to figure out like, okay, where are the gaps in my, my, my marketing? And there’s everything from, you know, that we’ve already talked about, the awareness, the consideration, qualification, purchase, all the way to.
There’s evangelists that are, you know, singing praises at the brand. And so the fact that you’re helping people through all of those, I think are incredible. So this has been a fun conversation and also really digging into how AI is affecting the marketplace. But it should be looked at as a tool, not, not the answer to our marketing.
So this has been a lot of fun. I do appreciate it. I think about the stakes, right? In the ever changing environment that we’re living in. From a business point of view, if we don’t have a systems driven [00:36:00] strategy, entrepreneurs, we’ll just keep wasting money on disjointed tactics, struggling with unpredictable growth and effectively losing market share.
And I think about the framework that you outlined for us entrepreneurs, you know, they gain a marketing system that can scale with their business. It builds trust with customers, drives efficiency, and gives them confidence to just focus on run, running, and optimizing their business and their lives and not worried about.
Man, where are we gonna find this, uh, this next customer or client? So, mm-hmm. I appreciate all of your wisdom that you’ve shared so far. Thank you so much for joining us.
Bryan: Yeah.
Patrick: Thanks Patrick. That’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you found real value in this conversation with Brian, and that you’ll take a moment to share it with someone who could use these insights in their own business.
And don’t forget to join me again next week for the 100th episode of the Vital Wealth Strategies Podcast. You’re not going to want to miss it. If you’re ready to start building out your. Own tax strategy and keep more of what you earn. Head over to vital strategies.com/tax and take that first step [00:37:00] today and remember, you’re a vital entrepreneur.
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