How To ACE Digital Marketing for Businesses (Strategy + Execution) - w/ Emma transcript

It's significant enough that it has absolutely destroyed traditional advertising you can see. That's the biggest thing that's changed, whether it's organic or paid. You have to be authentic and really connect with your customers. You're saying once they leave, I don't have access to any of that data. You're just not getting as many views as you've used to on your stuff. You're not crazy. That's because Instagram's algorithm has changed.

What's one popular marketing strategy that everybody thinks works really well but actually has come directly from our meta reps. Work with is saves, shares, and then comments. They have a high work. What frameworks you follow in trying to put forward the best ad copy? You can target by zip codes. We have clients that we're running ads in Spanish and English. And then the Spanish neighborhoods are getting Spanish ads. The English neighborhoods are getting English. We can go down to if you're married, if you have kids. I think it's just a great way to just use science on people. I know that sounds kind of twisted. Because the algorithm itself, even if there are people that resonate with all of those different pieces of your concept, the algorithm doesn't know what to do with you.

Welcome to the Ready Set Do podcast, where we learn from journeys of not experts who are just two steps ahead of us. A digital marketer or aspiring to be one, this conversation is absolutely essential listening. Emma Bigson for us, how recent privacy changes from Apple and elsewhere have completely transformed the marketing landscape. Almost forcing businesses to pivot from brute force advertising to authentic learning. We dive deep into why most marketing agencies are getting it wrong with their obsession with impressions. And she reveals surprising insights about what actually drives engagement, including an awesome anecdote of why a dentist's self is outperformed professional video content.

In giving it that theme of learning from somebody that's just two steps ahead of us, instead of an expert, my goal with this episode is to highlight the amazing work that Emma is doing at the Idea Farm in this fascinating field. I want to caveat that why the Idea Farm is full of success stories of happy clients. The field by definition just makes it difficult for anybody to be an expert. This is the Ready Set Do podcast and to support it, subscribe on YouTube and leave me a pro 5 star rating on Spotify or your favorite podcast app. There are also links in the description for more direct ways to support me. And now without any further ado, my friends, here's Emma. Emma, welcome. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Really excited to dig into the exciting world of digital marketing and many other related things that you do with the Idea

Farm. So maybe we should begin there. Can you walk us through briefly your journey with Idea Farm so far and just kind of how you've gotten to this point where you're in Houston now and you know, yeah, just how are things going? Yeah, absolutely. So the Idea Farm is a marketing consultancy that has an execution arm. So we were actually founded by my father over 50 years ago. I think it's 52 this year, which is wild. And I never anticipated being involved in marketing, but I also never got pressured one way or the other. So I, in all of my endeavors, non-profits and politics and NGOs, I was telling stories. I was building websites since I was in elementary school who were fun, but I was really fascinated with storytelling. And so I would end up doing

something related to media and communication. And then in 2019, my father passed away unexpectedly, and I ended up taking over the family business. And I had no idea what running a business would entail, but I did know how to tell a good story. And I felt like I had a really good gut feeling about what good marketing was. And since then, oh my gosh, the business has just grown and changed so much. I brought on an incredible CEO and my business partner, Jose Esquera, who has over a decade of experience with systems and operations, scaling companies, all the stuff I didn't know how to do. We have had a couple of different offices. We have grown and shrunk our staff. We figured out systems and operations. But our key of what we do now is we work with businesses who

have specific growth goals to help them achieve that through attracting their ideal customer. So that's messaging and storytelling. And we implement that on websites and social media and digital advertising in all sorts of ways. But our key is getting our clients that return on revenue that they're looking for. In October of last year, we were we actually relocated, like you said, to Houston to build out our headquarters here, because we were ready for a week. We wanted to be in a big city that had this energy to it that had this life that could really accommodate growing and in-person team. And we did a lot of research. And we found out that Houston actually was a really good place. It's Texas and so business friendly. Houston is super international. I

personally don't like winter and neither does my business partner. So that was also like so moved for us. Yeah, hardly any better places than Texas if you're not a fan of the, you know, American or mid-best winter, as I should say. Exactly. Our last office, as you know, was a mile from Lake Michigan. And it was really, really cold for a long time. So I've honestly, we've been thriving here and we still have clients all over the US, but it's such a good, it's like a good base camp.

Absolutely. Definitely sounds like it. And there's a couple things you laid out that have already caught my attention, especially around. You said you help clients or companies that have specific growth goals that you work with. But I guess before we get into that, I just kind of want to take a step back and maybe kind of contrast when you first started with this in 2019, what the landscape was like compared to five years later now. And in that, I know some of your bread and butter would likely be the same, such as websites and all of that. But when it comes to social media or any other, you know, any other intricacies involved with that, are you willing to speak on just how the, you know, a landscape has evolved over these past five years.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest change has been a twofold. One, Apple put together some massive privacy laws. So now Facebook and all of these other search engines and social media companies, they used to be able to track you all over the web. And what that meant is that you could essentially, if you had a big enough budget, you could brute force push your way into consumer pockets and you can get them to purchase things. And a lot of advertising, the quality of the creative didn't matter so much. It was just about getting in front of people everywhere you could.

Well, what Apple did was they basically made it where every iPhone user, which is a lot of the US market, as you know, and then other companies are following suit, now gets the choice to opt out. They have to opt into that tracking and most people don't. So what that means is you only get people on platform. So I can target you on Facebook. But if you leave Facebook, I don't really get a good idea of like, if you haven't chosen to track your cookies, I have no idea who I'm speaking to.

What that means is your creative has to be better. You can't just track people with sheer money and brute force. You actually have to attract them with the story that you're telling with the offer. So actually, that's the biggest thing that's changed in the landscape, whether it's organic or paid, is you have to be authentic and you have to really connect with your customers. So just a quick question on that. What you're referring to is when I go to when I first installed, say the Facebook app, it asks me ask app not to track. Is that what you're referring to when you say that exactly? Okay. And that has completely changed the landscape because so many big advertising agencies, they were so used to doing things the way they were doing. And then

their ad data just dropped. Their results dropped. They weren't able to get high quality results because their ads were stock photos and videos, super standard stuff. It wasn't personalized. And nowadays, consumers are so much more savvy. That's so interesting. And I'm sure you might have an idea on this, but what percentage of users would you say select the ask app not to track? Because there's three options, right? One of those options is just do whatever I don't care.

So do you have any idea about that at all? Just just be curious. We know it's significant. It changes depending on the year, but it's significant enough that it has absolutely destroyed traditional advertising agencies. And they have had to pivot big time. And we've gotten a lot of clients who've come over from other agencies because they're not seeing results. And that has forced them to either drop marketing altogether and then realize the thoughts not a good idea or to try to work with a partner that can get them better results.

That is so cool. So from what you're saying, it sounds like if my targeted individual will just pretend it's some individual and not a group of people, whatever they do on Facebook is still fair game. I could still target them based on the words that appear on the screen while they're on Facebook. You're saying once they leave, I don't have access to any of that data. Is that correct? Yes, that's correct. Okay. So makes sense. So the only reason I bring this up is I have another friend of mine.

He's based out of India. He does kind of digital marketing stuff over there. And in talking to him, maybe he's just not aware because there aren't as many iPhones in India as there are in the US, obviously. So that's already a big point of difference. But that's really cool. But I guess from there, that what comes to mind is, yeah, I guess how do you do that where you once you've lost your power of directly getting to your customers' pockets? I guess. And I know this is kind of a broad question, but I'm just curious as to what frameworks you follow in trying to put forward the best ad copy, or maybe it isn't a copy, it's just a visual, but yeah, in front of that person. Yeah. So it's three components, visual copy and offer. Okay. And we're constantly

A/B testing because every community is different. And every community responds to different messages differently. And so for example, we could work with two dental practices that are the same size, but in different cities. And our messages might be completely different. They might resonate in a different way. So our job is to put together and essentially test a wide variety of creatives, of offers, of stories that still align with our clients old. And over time, we figure out what really resonates with audiences. And that's how we're able to get that to work. And the other thing is attractive marketing. When you have a good offer, something that people are interested in, they're going to willingly give you their information. And so then you don't have to follow them around

the web and hope that one day you'll break them down, they're coming to you. And they're much more qualified when they come to you. I see. And that refers to the cold customer versus warm customer idea, essentially, like where you first show them your brand and you don't want them to do anything. And then in later successive targeted attempts, that's when you try to kind of bring them in. Is that the same as this or is that something different? Those are both. I mean, you essentially have your funnel. And so you, depending on our client's goals, we figure out where they are. And some of our clients, they want to really maintain what they have. And if they're a more mature business, it's making sure that their current clients are coming back and that they're spending more,

right? And they always want a new influx. But if you're a more mature business, you're really wanting to up the quality of your current client. Interesting. Where I look, you're a newer business. It's like, I got to get people in the door. I don't even know what my ideal person looks like yet, because I haven't had enough to figure that out. So we, we employ different strategies depending on the size of your business and the stage of your business. So that's really cool. That is not something I'd considered. Are you willing at all to contrast for us just from maybe like a really dumb example about how you would approach those two situations differently? So we can just go back to your example of, you know, dental practices and say one is, you know, older, the other is kind

of new. You're, you know, commission for both. How would you approach each in that, you know, these sort of different purposes where one is to just, you know, keep the lights on, so to speak, whereas the other is very aggressively trying to bring people in. Okay. So the first thing is that when you are a newer practice, you need to introduce yourself to the community, even if you, or if you're just, even if you've been around for years, we've had practices that have never done a look of marketing and they realize, okay, people don't even know that we exist. So it would be a combination of intro, like introducing yourself and your team and your expertise and then offering something, something simple, like a $99 new patient special. What can you do? That's low cost. That is a low

barrier to entry to drive people to your door, because once you get them in and then they get to meet you and they get to meet your team and how amazing you guys are, you guys can keep them. You guys can foster that relationship, but the hardest part is to acquire that new customer. So that's something we would do for a newer practice is we would take content, we would tell their stories, because specifically with a service based business like that, trust is super important. So we speak to people's anxieties and fears. We talk about, is the dentist a specialist in anything? Have they gotten any certifications or gone through any advanced training courses? Anything that we can do to introduce them to the community, to build that trust and expertise? That's what we would do for

a newer practice, for a more mature practice that has a really established patient base. Usually, they want to bring in those higher dollar services. So maybe they're doing more smile real instructions, things that are $20,000, 30,000 big, big projects. The first thing is you have to be willing to invest. You're not going to be able to get that kind of client without investing more money on the front end. And more mature practices can do that. And that means really tracking that experience. We would do full on testimonials before and afters. We would be really intense about targeting using the language, using people's emotions, much broader area, because we know that we're not going to get as many results as people that might sign up for a $99 new patient special and might need regular maintenance work. Those people are few and far

between that have $20,000 or $30,000 and that are willing to spend that on investing in their smile. So that, it's a little bit of a different process that takes longer and costs more money, but your return on investment is far, far higher. I mean, it's really appreciated that the bike that makes a lot of sense. And then, yeah, I know we're really getting into the weeds here, but you know, every time you say something new, I just keep thinking of more new things. So, when it comes to the actual ad itself here, I know there's a component where you can, at least I know this is true for meta products, but I know you can search for words that have appeared on the person's, you know, like screen, for instance. So is that something you do? And do you just kind of

try to retrace your steps back and think that if this is a person that has not heard of this company, why would they, you know, hear of us or what could they possibly be searching about that might make them a good customer? Is that how that works or is that not something that is done at all? So I actually think that applies more for product-based companies and service-based companies. So if you're selling a particular product, that is the strategy we would employ to see if someone is looking up a similar product. If you're a pen company and you, I want to know who's been looking up stuff about pens, who's been checking out, you know, whatever it is with service-based businesses, it's more about emotion, about trust, about expertise, and what we will do sometimes,

depending on the scale of the client, especially if they're entering a new area where they don't know their community very well, is we'll employ a customer research survey. And that survey that goes out to people, it will talk about very specifically, it will identify their needs once fears and goals around a product or service that our client is trying to offer. And with that information, we get to see the language that they use to talk about that service, to talk about how they feel, how important it is to them, what matters to them, and then we can essentially use that language to make sure that we're targeting them correctly. So you're actually the one that does the service as well, essentially, right? So you get to design it and you get to kind of

call the shorts in terms of how you want it presented, so that when the output comes back, it is usable for you directly, is that right? It is right. Wow, that is really crucial, you know, yeah. Well, because then you're using people's length instead of guessing, right? It shouldn't be a guessing game. It's a matter of, well, how, instead of us telling you, this is what we think should matter to you about your, your smile, if we're going to keep the dental example, this is what we think you should care about. If you actually take the time to ask people, you might be surprised, you might be right, but a lot of times we're wrong or we're missing something that matters more, you know, and so that's why we do the surveys. That's also why, no matter how long we work with our clients, we are continually testing new ideas and new versions

of, of the creative, because it's surprising sometimes what people really resonate with. Like, we could put, so we have a client in particular that we put out the most beautiful high-end video testimonials, but you know what has performed the best is he took selfies. We asked him, we said, "Why don't you just take some selfies with your patient? Do you like take little selfies with your phone?" And we did slide shows, carousels, of him taking selfies with patients, and it performed the best out of anything that we've done this entire year. Wow, huh. Why do you think that is as in like, yeah, what, what dictates that? This is so curious. Well, hindsight is 2020, so I would never have been able to predict this, but now that we can see that, it's authentic.

It feels like, okay, this does feel like someone I can trust. He's clearly having fun with his patients. He's comfortable enough. They're comfortable enough with him, but they're willing to get into a selfie with him. He seems like one guy. Okay, maybe I should go there. Maybe I was nervous to go or afraid of being judged, but why I'm with someone that could treat me like, wow, but why would not? Absolutely. And then do you ever kind of extrapolate these ideas or findings or learnings from one industry and see if it applies to other industries? Is that something that you experiment with at all? All the time, and the more that we've been in business, the bigger competitive advantage that we have, because we have seen it with so many different industries.

We have seen how the work we do in dental transfers to primary care transfers to law transfers to, you know, home services, I mean, it's wild. And then on the same side of that, if you go to e-commerce, there are lessons you learn from a bakery that are different from a tool, a hardware store, and you start to draw parallels because at the core, humans are all more similar than we might care to admit. Yeah, it definitely sounds like such a fascinating cross-section of psychology, communication, and a bunch of other things that have always really fascinated me.

Honestly, I will even confess already, I don't know how long we've been talking, but I feel like this is something I would really enjoy doing if this was my job. You know, just, I'm just getting more and more convinced that this is awesome. It's like you're being a detective while also kind of being a scientist while also getting to be kind of like a culture commentator. There's just so much going on here. But related question on that, do you like maintain a kind of a repository of, you know, all the clients you work for and have all of the learnings over there because, you know, like maybe you work briefly with somebody for two months, three years ago, and then something that worked really well there might work with your next client, whoever is, you know, commissioning you. So is that something that just lives in your head or how do you

kind of maintain that knowledge base? So we take mental health notes and we have a really strong system and we have our ad library and all of our resources that we ever want to go back to something. But more recently, we've started to do pace studies really with almost every single client. And that gives us a time to see what we have learned, what we accomplished, what, and if, specifically, what are the quantitative outcomes for that business as well? Because I feel like a lot of marketing, you get a bunch of qualitative outcomes, but that's not always directly tied to to quant. Yeah, to what the revenue is. And so we have done a lot better job of tracking holistically where the business is at. So when we work with our clients, they truly are partners. And sometimes

we've had people say, whoa, why do you need this information? I've never had a marketing company ask, because we are going to ask you, we want to know what's your revenue goal for 2025? What is your current monthly revenue? How many customers do you see a month? How many customers do you want to see a month? And it's okay if you don't have those numbers, but come back to us when you do. And then if you want to track what you're what's going on right now, we'll even help you establish those goals. Because if you don't have, if you're not measuring it, there's no way for us to to form a partnership and to see what we're doing is actually impacting your business in a positive way. Exactly. Yep. And if you can quantify it, there's nothing you can do about it. Like that's

the first step you need to be able to quantify what you're delivering. Do you have enough to turn clients away? Has that ever happened? I mean, in a really good way. But we have sometimes you clients who are just not quite ready for us. And it's we can scale with we actually started a pretty affordable price point. And we have really big websites, for example, but we can build landing pages that are a beautiful entry point into the whole scene. But sometimes we have clients that we have people have come to us that are opening, say they're opening a restaurant when they're saying, Oh, I want to get things kicked off. I want to hit the ground running with advertising.

But they actually haven't even had their they haven't opened yet. They haven't had their first month of service yet. And we could drive people like crazy, but they hadn't even hired their staff and they're off it. You know, they're their manager. And when we develop partnerships, we want to make sure that the money you're spending is a is a true investment in your bus business. And so if you don't have the pieces for success, same thing. If we have a client that wants to run digital ads, but they don't have a website, we're going to say that needs to be accomplished first, because otherwise, where are you sending people to? You know, so it's it's about having a conversation and telling them we are here when you are ready and putting them in the direction of free resources

of things that they can do on their own until they're running grass. For sure. Similar question, kind of in the way you, you know, structure your team. So from what you've laid out, it sounds like this is a lot of work, like a lot. So yeah, what are some guiding factors around how many people you could potentially start with? And what sort of personas you need to even go to market as a digital marketing company? So do you, I guess I'll just let you answer that.

Oh, okay. So I actually think you should start as small as a narrow as possible in your service offerings. Just be the being that will service offerings. Interesting. Like, and so, and so in what you offer, it should be super narrow so that you can control it and you can slowly build out your team and you can build your capabilities as you go. Sometimes I think that people say like, we're full service agency, we can do it all. And that was the hardest thing for me to like go up because our, ah, ah, you know, you can't do everything all at the same time. And you certainly, as you're just starting out, can't do everything all at once. Now, as you grow and you build strong team members, okay, they can handle this. Our website department is solid. Let's look at opening

another vertical. And then you go from, if you can build it like that, great. But if you're someone like me, that was like, I can take it all. Like, because I had a little, I had my hand in everything. I had built websites. I had done a lot of writing and content photography, videography. So very much just starting out. I was like, we can do it all. But what that means is you can't scale super effectively because you are pivoting so quickly from one thing to the next to the next.

And especially when you're hiring people, they're going to have a hard time too because you need repetition, you need systems, you need organization in order to really get something down and get it really well. And it's only in our recent years that we have understood that. And our core offerings, like we have consulting. And then we offer three core products, website design, paid ads, and specifically on Facebook, Instagram, and Google, and website management. And then, and we do have graphic design like branding kit, but that kind of falls under our website. And that's what we offer. And the thing is, as a partner, we have partners with large scale media buying companies, with companies that will go in and do your social media, with all sorts of these little pieces and

these gaps. And we have found partners that we trust. But we're not going to spread ourselves in trying to do all that. So that's my advice to new, you know, marketing, and also just new business owners in general is start small, start narrow, become an expert in that thing, and then work your way out. That makes perfect sense. Was there a reason why you left out, you know, social media page, post promotion, all of that, or is that included in one of the three products?

So we actually, as part of our digital advertising service, we will take the content from our clients, remix it, and post on their social media page. However, that is not, I've totally different than full on social media management. And that's something that we're actually going to be launching in 2025. But the reason, the reason we've held off for a long time is to do it well. It's been hard to crack the code because you need to be local. So you need to have a local presence that's actually getting content on the ground from your physical, from your client. You can't do stock photos and videos, right? So you have to have a local present. You also can't just schedule your posts and then ignore them. You have to do what's called community engagement. It's now it's harder

than ever before in the organic world to build a community. There's so much competition. The algorithms are against you. And so there's a lot more that goes into it. And we would never offer something that we didn't feel like we could support 100%. So we would rather connect you with a local creator that has the time that energy that specializes in going to your door, taking that content, building it out and being your community engager as well.

So this is very interesting. And help me, you know, just unpack this a little bit. So you're saying we'll move over from dentist agencies and let's say there's a study abroad consultancy, right? Let's say they're based out of Houston. They help students from America go out to the rest of the world for higher studies or whatever. You're saying that for their social media management, like regularly, like with the posts and all of that, you would need somebody on the ground so that they can document what they're doing their services. I guess I'm trying to understand what's wrong with just not taking their pictures and just using, you know, pictures of Europe or something to market that. Are you seeing that? Just that doesn't work? Is that right? Yeah,

pretty much. Now it is like that does not work. You if you want to see the content that works, the creatives, the creators that work, first off, people care about the people behind the brands, the team members, not so much the brand itself until you've actually built your brand to a point. So if you're looking at big companies, they don't have to do that because they have, you know, but as small businesses, small to medium size, people buy for you because of your story and because of the people and the team behind what you do. And you, the social media part is truly a partnership because we want to know what's going on in your life, on the ground, in your business with your customers. And if we're completely out of touch with that, social media is so quick. Trends come

up every single day that, you know, it changes. And so it's, you really have to have someone who's on the pulse of what's going on in your community so that you can accurately connect with them. That makes sense. Yeah. And I guess the reason I brought up specifically the study abroad situation was my friend that I referenced, he was talking to me about this client that he's trying to work with. And yeah, he's just not getting the results that they would want. And I think this has a lot to do with that because I looked at their page that he was helping me for them. And really, it's just, you know, a bunch of, you know, like go here, there's this scholarship here, whatever, blah, blah. And yeah, as you said, but there's no personal connection to the people behind the

organization. Like it might as well just be a black box, which makes sense to me why somebody would not be too keen to interact with. So that's really cool. I feel like that, that explains a lot. So moving forward here, yeah, what's one popular marketing strategy that everybody thinks works really well, or you know, some of my uninitiated listeners, such as myself might think work really well, but actually don't. Okay, so I think it's the overall marketing strategy of clicks, but just clicks in general or impressions in general, people love to see that their stuff was seen by people.

So actually, yeah, impressions is even even more dramatic of that. We will blow people away when they see that 50,000 people I've seen my ad that's so exciting. As compared to I would much rather that 2,000 of the right people see your product or service. And so that is a really hard misconception when people want to be seen by everybody. I'm like, your product or service is not for everybody. And the quicker you understand that, the more profitable your business is going to be.

That's, do you think that still tracks for, let's say, creators, or if, for instance, like I know, idea farm does a lot of content themselves. So is that metric still not important for individual brands? Or is that just for when you're trying to sell a service or a product? Gosh, it's so important for individual brands. It's understanding your audience, as well as yourself. The only thing that's really important with individual brands, and actually we tell this to businesses as well, is you need to make sure that you're not just pandering to your audience. That what you are providing is something that resonates with you, that you are passionate about. But you can't, if you notice, there are creators that will try, it's good to try out new things. But if you're consistently, I'll take TikTok for example.

If you're trying to do the outfit in a day, but then you're also doing like, I'm going to cook, and then you're going to go on a political rant, and then, you know, you're going to show about a video game, it's actually much harder. It is possible, but it's much harder to build a community because the algorithm itself, even if there are people that resonate with all of those different pieces of your content, the algorithm doesn't know what to do with you. And they don't know, the algorithm doesn't know who to put you in front of. They're put you in front of the people who play the video games, or the people who cook like you do, or the people who read the books. So it's always best, same thing, as I said before, to start out with your one thing, and then, and expand on there, and still try things out, but don't have to do a

million things all at the same time. So that's very interesting, especially because that pertains directly to what I'm doing here with daddy said, do I feel like what you describe in terms of the algorithm, just feeling, you know, all sorts of wonky, because of what's going on is probably definitely applying to me. So is there any workaround for that at all, or actually, before you get there, is am I even right in assuming that, would you say you're right in assuming that, especially if I mean, you if your data has shown you that you're kind of all over the map, maybe some episodes, we've gotten a lot in some episodes, we've gotten like very little traction. And part of that is just the nature of the beast. That's why you have to create more content and see what resonates.

But for you, you're interviewing lots of different people, and you want them to be from different background, but you can have a general theme. What is the theme? And if you repeat the theme, okay, so maybe it's, I'm looking to have authentic conversation with business owners or business leaders, maybe it's like, I'm looking to have, so figure out what it is in a few sentences. And every single interview you can be with, like, because for us, we're industry agnostic, we work with all different kinds of this through, yeah, that's always interesting, yep, education, you know, we, but we have figured out that our niche is how we serve our clients, and at what stage of business we serve our clients. We are not for everybody at every time. We are for businesses that have hit a ceiling, and they know they want to get over there,

but they're over here, and they are willing to invest the time and the money to get there, and to build a partnership rather than a vendor relationship. So for you, figure out your core message, your core theme, and bring every episode back home to that theme for you. Interesting. So it's not so much about the, you know, topic of the subject as much as it is about the hopefully consistent theme that kind of binds everything together, that brings people back, and using the same exact thing applies to brands is where that are trying to advertise on.

Yeah, think about some of the biggest podcasts in the world. You have Joe Rogan and Andrew Huberman are two, two examples of hugely popular podcasts, but they have so much variety in the guests that they bring on. And Andrew Huberman, for example, his whole thing is health and wellness, understanding the mind, understanding the body better. You know, it was really, really neuroscience, right? But it's like a super broad, like, if you look at the episodes and the people that he's interviewed, and also long form, he likes really long form content, deep diving, but the conversations are so diverse, but they all come back to his theme. That's true. I wonder if, do you know if there's any exceptions at all to that? Like, you know, just trying to be devil's advocate here, and just trying to think

if anyone has ever been able to do this without sticking to this central theme, I guess not. You would have to have a theme, I guess, right? Well, I think a lot of times you may not have identified what that theme is. The other thing is there are creators I've seen on TikTok that do, they don't care. They're like, I'm going to do me. I'm going to, and I respect that so much, they're doing the political content and the cooking content and the gaming content, right?

And all the things, but what they'll see is they will eventually, if they do it long enough and they're consistent enough, you will build a community. It's all it is, is these tools will help the computer, thus the application understand you to serve you to more people. So with those creators, a lot of time, what they struggle with and they share their frustrations is only like this kind of content gets seen by everybody and all my other content, like nobody sees. Is the algorithm not pushing it? Right. And then you kind of have to, you know, do a reckoning in that, do I just want to do this or do I still want to do everything else or what's going on? So human beings, we are capable of nuance, we are capable of understanding that you are interested in so many

different things and you're just curious and you're just here for it. The algorithms though, they are not as smart. So I think it's about figuring out how to use the tools to your advantage, while also being authentic to the multifaceted version of you. I think the way you refer to the algorithm, you have a few times already in this conversation is very interesting for, you know, somebody that I feel is so close to it and works directly with it. I know they're different for each platform, but I'm just trying to kind of understand your rationale behind. So, you know, it's, so here, I'll tell you what I know about it. And then you can kind of tell me where I went astray or add more flavor. So I know that the biggest things when it comes to any, really any social media algorithm is consistency. I think is a big one. And then there are some

other things such as, you know, help it help you. So make sure you have your long tail SEOs. You have like all of your relevant tags for YouTube. Do a good job with your thumbnail title for Instagram. Make sure your reels are shareable because that promotes reach more than likes and comments as such. So like, let's pretend one of our listeners is kind of at my level of expertise when it comes to algorithms. What are some, you know, hidden secrets that you've learned through your time with working on this that most people would use, you would say would not. It changes.

One, it they they are consistently changing. And so, two, whenever platforms publish new features, use them relentlessly, because inevitably, the platforms want you to use those features. So, they're going to push your content more. If you're using them to mine, right? Yes. So those are the two little thing. I mean, no matter how silly it is, like Instagram releases, the sticker feature, use it Instagram, you know, or like YouTube releases. Yeah, YouTube shorts, use it. And that's a way that you can kind of leverage off of what's going on. And the other thing that I'd say the biggest trend I've seen is it used to be it was all about views.

And now it's about engagement. It's about community. So for example, meta hairs, and this has come directly from our meta reps, you know, that we work with is saves, shares, you know, and then and and comments. It's it's so much they have like a hierarchy, because if your post is being saved to reference later, if you're supposed to being shared to somebody else, and the comments, like that matters so much more now, than the likes, then the fall even even then followers, because you can have a lot of followers. But if your engagement is bad, like, it's not relevant. Yeah, you see this on YouTube all the time, where there's people with, you know, like 200k subscribers, but they only get like, you know, 10k views per video. So yeah, as you're saying, something is something is not sinking there.

Why do you find this also interesting? Is that not normal? Like, is that not common for like just people you interact with? This is actually a good question here. I think it's often a little technical for people, or maybe I just am too busy working with like people in my industry, and we already know, and I don't get to have enough conversations with people who seem really curious, and actually want to hear the the behind the scenes.

So I will confess there is a bit of a vested interest here, but this whole podcast situation and such. But I will say generally, this is something that has always just fascinated me, mostly because of the reasons I was stating earlier, because you're getting to hat into culture. That is my, that is the single biggest or coolest thing out of this entire thing. Like, you need to really understand people, or you will not be a good online marketing person.

Like, you are doomed to fail if you don't understand people, and I just love understanding people, and I think it's just a great way to, yeah, just do science on people, and it sounds kind of pristine. Yeah, no, and actually something, you just said something that really reminded me of something. So my passion is international relations. I love cross-cultural relations, I love people, I love understanding how people think in different ways, how we can connect to people all over the world. And as our company has grown, we put ourselves in a really good position to help international businesses penetrate the US market, because it's not just about understanding people, it's about understanding the cultural context as well. And so we have gotten a

chance to work with the Latin countries, some companies from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, East Asia, and Southeast Asia that are trying to integrate into the US market, and until they were working with us from communication strategy, they were struggling to connect to the consumers, because we think differently, we speak differently, there are these little nuances that unless you grew up here, you might miss. And so that's, we found that it's like wild, and there's also bias, and there's stereotypes, and all sorts of, you know, negative negativity at play.

And so understanding the human psyche, we can actually work with some of the incredibly talented businesses that keep, they just haven't figured out how to communicate that what they, that they are the best at what they do, and have people believe them in the US, and we get to, to bridge that. And that's a really cool space where psychology, you know, meets advertising. I'm kind of interested in exploring that just a little bit more. Can you, are you at all able to give an example of what such a company was that they, what they were trying to do and how you were able to? Yeah, a good example is this summer, I guess it was maybe this fall, we worked with a super prominent Nigerian billionaire businessman in real estate mogul to bring a a stable sort of a conference into the Houston area. And we had a super short runway for this

project, and oh my gosh, I would love to work with them more and do longer. So how did you find them? How, how was this connection made, first of all? Oh, they, they actually found us, so we have a, they had a PR, a wonderful, I love her, a publicist that is here in Houston. And yeah, we just had friends that referred them to us, and they knew we could act really fast, they knew that we could help. And so they had like, some of the most incredible people that were going to be speaking at this conference. But because they weren't easily recognizable names in the US, and they didn't quite get that, their Nigerian team was like, oh, we have to do, in Nigeria, it is slap their name on anything. And then people just show up and drove. And we had to break it to them, we're like, even the Nigerian American community here may not

know some of these people, we have to reintroduce them, we have to kind of educate them, we have to share what they're going to learn. And then the, the graphics, they have like a global team. And they put together all these graphics, and they weren't bad, but they, they felt like, they felt outdated, to be so honest. And then when they said, we want to be like these, these people want to be like these, uh, impediners were like your graphics, your videos, you're not, you're not there, you're not to wear the cutting edge of US marketing is. And so we went together all of these new visuals that felt so much more up to date and contemporary. And that's an example of how we took the mess. And then we also educated the audience about who these people were and why you should

care about them. You know, this person started a, uh, started with $5 in his pocket and now runs a $5 billion real estate company. This person, blah, blah, blah, you know, it's just that little bit of cultural context that made all the difference. So that one's especially interesting, because it sounds like it's almost like a marriage of both, um, online marketing, as well as on the ground old fashioned, you know, event management. So I didn't actually realize you did that as well.

So how, how is that a foreigner? Oh, so we partner with other businesses. So, and now where it's like, because we have the consultancy, our goal is to look comprehensive. 360 degrees. What do you need to do for your marketing efforts? And on the ground in person is so important. It just needs to be a piece of the strategy. And I think it works really well, because if, you know, if somebody goes to just an on the ground event company and later they find out that, you know, what would be great and online presence. So then that company can be like, well, we know just the guys for you. Why don't you call Emma over at the idea of farm and she'll hook you up. And I bet that works both ways.

And you probably get this all the time as well. Yeah. And how do you get people to sign up for events, uh, online? They sign up on, they hear about it online. They sign up online. And then when they're in person, you have the opportunity to really bring them into your community. So for us, it's like melding the best of our worlds. And I bet Houston comes in really clutch with that also given how vibrant and how just it really feels like just the perfect spot to be in if you're trying to do this type of thing. So yeah, there are, there are always events happening and people are excited and ready to show up. So that's definitely the case. But you can have that happen anywhere from small towns to big cities all over. For sure. For sure. And then just to take the

conversation back, I know we are probably bored of this already, but just a couple more questions on the whole growing organically online. So first of all, it sounds like what I've been told is that when you're organic, so we'll just eliminate any other platforms and just say look at Instagram, right? So there's some brand that they're trying to build like a big Instagram presence. Obviously, there's two ways to do that. You can have paid ads where you just show your stuff on when people are going through stories and something comes up and they might get targeted. And then that way they can be your followers or you could just, you know, grind out every day, pump out content like you were, you were sharing, make sure you have your person able there's a person behind each

post. It's not this random stock images, blah, blah. So if a company is starting out, let's say in 2024, which and let's, we'll just say that they have a reasonable ad budget. So they're not, this is not the company with the deepest pockets in the world, but they're reasonable. They're willing to spend whatever they take. And their goal is to, it's a service based company. So their goal is to, yeah, both twofold, like just put the name out there while also attracting some customers.

So I guess which way would you prefer? I know that's still pretty broad, but I'm just trying to understand what are some specific cases where ads or paid ads would be a better idea than just trying to grow organic. Yeah, you need both. So nowadays, it used to be when you open Instagram that whoever was in your community, you would see their post and it was a timeline. So whoever had posted the most recently, you would see it right up front. Things have changed a lot.

Instagram has leaned into pay to play. They would, basically, if you've noticed before, if you've been posting on Instagram for a long time, and you notice that you've just not getting as many likes, or if you post reels, for example, you're just not putting as many views as you used to on your stuff, that's, you're not crazy. That's because the Instagram's algorithm has changed, and they are really encouraging people to pay, right? So we strongly recommend building a strategy that combines organic and paid, you can maximize what you are doing. And so to do that, for example, short-form video content, specifically on Instagram, it's reels. That is where you want to be predominantly living. Now, when you do full-on advertising, people don't realize Facebook has a

lot of tools that make it simple for anybody to run ads, like boosting a post. Those are not, that is taking a megaphone out to the street and saying, "Hey, guys, look at my post." And you don't know who's walking by and you don't know if they care at all. So they don't look at the target, that's for you. Not from boosting. And not, and there's even, it's so ridiculously limiting, and we have clients who are like, "Yeah, I haven't had." And I'm like, "No, you haven't." And we have on the back end, it's like the business.facebook.com, you have to build a business manager, build out the ads manager, you have access to everything. We can target by zip codes. We have clients that we're running ads in Spanish and English. And then the Spanish neighborhoods are getting the

Spanish ads. English neighborhoods are getting English ads. We can go down to if you're married, if you have kids, if you're a woman, if you're over the age of 55, I mean, you can get so granular on top of that, if you already have a customer list, if you already have an email list or whatever it is, we can upload it and say, "Okay, I want people that look 99% similar to these people that also live in this specific area, and that's who's going to see the ads."

So it's wild the tools that you have. Long answer, the short answer is we would put together video content targeting your ideal customers, but we'd also encourage you to put out a posting schedule that's pretty regular to develop partners that can share your content to in to figure out what are the community partners where you guys can build each other up together and swap audiences so that you're essentially tackling the organic and the paid at the same time.

That makes sense. Are you at all or, you know, actually really, just the last question here before I let you go. But are there any specific type of clients that you just get annoyed with a lot or are just inherently in front of all of theirs, but just kind of a pain to work with? I don't know why. I feel like there must be something every industry has this, so I'm just curious what's the version for your industry? Yes. So we have a type of client that exists in the world that no matter what, if they don't see it, they don't believe that it's working. So we have a client that loves a billboard, because why they can see that billboard every day they dragged on the road, even if that's not leading to direct conversions on their website. On top of that, if we're running Facebook ads,

it's amazing about having one person coming in and saying, "Oh, it's not you on Facebook." They're like, "Yes, it's working. It's working." And if you don't get that verbal response from people or they're like, "Oh, I don't remember. I looked you guys up." And they might say, "This isn't working." And we've actually had clients who have stopped working with us because they say, "This isn't working." Their numbers plummeted. Three months later, they come back, being like, "Oh, no, we need help. This is not working. We need to figure it out." And then we got their numbers back up. So I think it's about it's those clients who want to directly, especially if you're in a service-based business, in your e-commerce, we can directly attribute every single tail.

Right? And we've gotten so much better at attribution on marketing for services as well, but there's still going to be people that maybe their friend told them about you, but that wasn't enough. They had to see you talking on Facebook. They had to get that email. And you've had a lead nurture then, right? See, for us, the hardest type of client is the one who's like, "But how do I know that they came from you?" That does not sound like the ideal experience for really anybody to work with. But yeah, we'll leave that at that. But I want to thank you, Emma, so much for taking the time today. I'm really dropping this masterclass on all things considered, all things pertaining to online marketing. I feel like I've learned so much, and I know I could probably keep going for another hour or two, but for the interest of time, and

also because, as you said, I should stick to my team, which is around an hour-long conversations, not too little, not too much more. I will let you go here. But again, thank you so, so much for taking the time, and I really appreciate you. Absolutely. And if anyone wants to learn more about what we do or reach out, we do offer free consultations and want to dig into businesses, you can find us at www.theideafarm.net. And yeah, we'd love to hear from you.

And just for anybody listening, I will also drop, drop that URL in the show notes and descriptions that are anywhere. So it's easy for you to find without any issues. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. I'll talk to you soon. That brings us to the end of episode 42 of the Ready Set to Podcast. Thank you for sharing these episodes with those that continue to benefit from them. If you would like to support me, the easiest way to do that is by subscribing to me on YouTube, and leaving me up to a five star rating on Spotify or your favorite podcast app.

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