Drive and Convert

Announcer:
You're listening to drive and convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better ecommerce growth engine with John McDonald and Ryan Garro.

Jon:
So Ryan, you have been involved in conferences or as you said earlier, the gauntlet of conferences the past 2 weeks Outside of the sunshine, because I know at least one of those was in Palm Springs, so lucky you. It rained in Ryan Portland while you had nice weather. I'm assuming because the weather was nice and knowing you, you found time for golf. And because we both like good food, I'm sure you had some fancy dinners in there. Were these conferences helpful? I'd like to know beyond sunshine, golf, and fancy dinners, which all sounds amazing to me. Mhmm. What'd you take away from these? What do you really wanna talk about today with these conferences and events that you've been at?

Ryan:
I don't think my wife listens to my podcast. So hopefully, she's not here because if she you know, baby, if you're listening to this, they're they're terrible. They're not fun. I had terrible food. For people not my wife, I I do enjoy the sun, especially when you leave Portland in February. Yes. I think the last 2 Mondays I've left for the conference. It's been raining on my way to the airport, or snowing on the way to the airport.

Ryan:
And so I went to Palm Springs, Vegas, and then I head to San Diego next week. There's some wonderful things about conferences. And then there's some other things that I think as a brand, there'd just be I would be frustrated Mhmm. As a brand going to some of these and walking the expo floor just because there's just everybody is saying the same thing. So how do you filter through that? How do you understand what's true and what isn't? Because everything in a conference looks shiny and great. Everybody's putting their best foot forward. There's no skeletons in the closet. There's no, unhappy clients that none of these vendors have ever had.

Ryan:
So it's like like, how do you how do you work your way around that and and understand that?

Jon:
Well, that that okay. So that's a great place to start then. You've been walking these ecommerce conference floors, talking with brands quite a bit over the past couple of weeks. What are your biggest takeaways then?

Ryan:
For me, it's becoming more apparent than in the 15 years in ecom and online marketing. Not much has changed. I mean, companies are still looking for an easy button to grow, and there's no shortage of companies promising that they are the easy button that will make all of their problems disappear. That hasn't changed at all in 15 years.

Jon:
Surprised surprised.

Ryan:
Yeah. It it shouldn't be surprising, but it it's also frustrating to see the same companies promising same things, and I have to believe that there's a lot of overpromise under deliver that come out of this conference Jon. Like, the q one is all about ecommerce conferences, it seems like every year.

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
Just gets more and more intense in my idea in my world, just how condensed it all is. But also on that, as I've sat through some of these conference talks and some thought leadership things I've been a part of and seen. From my perspective on the marketing side, driving traffic is is only getting more complicated. And with, you know, Google Analytics changing, maybe better, maybe worse depending on your opinion on that. It's changing. It's causing all of this traffic and the and the tracking of traffic that we, you know, got really excited about over the last, you know, decade, decade and a half of being able to track things. It's it's still not perfect and it's getting maybe less perfect with this. So the traffic driving and and attributing it is getting more and more complicated.

Ryan:
I think companies are getting generally better at marketing themselves at conferences. I think there's always some that are just like, well, I'll have a booth and I'll get business. Other ones are getting little more creative with offers and and how they're presenting things at their booth to kinda be shiny and, attractive. And and it's almost like they're getting better at the dating game the longer they've done it. And I think companies need to be better at at understanding that and kinda protecting themselves as they go talk to these companies there. Because I don't know if there is a company out there that's not been taken advantage of by some expert or agency or vendor in the marketing space online. Like, it I think that is the consistent thing across all 5th grade. You've been taking advantage of.

Ryan:
I hear there all day every day. Right. Like, I don't trust agencies. Okay. Well, great. There's all always bad ones.

Jon:
Yeah. I mean, I think the there's the personal aspect of it with an agency. You're dealing with other people where when you sign up for a SaaS tool that's supposed to help you or a a Shopify app or something like that and it doesn't do what it says it's going to do, you kind of unsubscribe and then forget about it because it's a faceless app, right, in most cases. So I think that is the big difference in why people feel like taking advantage of because instead of reading it on a marketing site, they were told by somebody during the sales process what was gonna happen. So I can totally understand that. I hear I hear that nonstop, especially in CROs. It's become more commoditized that folks are saying, hey. I've tried CRO, and it didn't work for me.

Jon:
I was like, okay. What would you try? Well, we ran a 100 a b tests on our site. And I'm like, how a 100? What were you doing? Like, who are you working with? Well, these folks out of India said they could do a 100 AB tests and and, you know, $500 a month. And I was, like, wow. Okay. Yep. You get what you pay for. But

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
I think that opportunity, you're right, is there for all consulting type engagements. Okay. So you listed off quite a few things there, which is awesome. I think that's a lot of good takeaways. What's a company to do with all of this?

Ryan:
Well, I think it is, you know, for all the good things, bad things within conferences, they're a good place to meet a lot of people all at once. And that part is really good. But I think it's becoming more important for brands to find their experts. And I think all companies have different sizes and even in the same vertical, there's just gonna be different experts that you resonate with that are gonna be your people.

Jon:
Mhmm.

Ryan:
And so I think you have to find those people. You know, all things being equal between 2 competitors, the one with access to or using experts is going to be the one that wins. They're getting better advice. They're out there learning more, and they've got experts bringing that insight into their organization to help them compete. And I think the the smaller you are, the harder it's gonna be to find experts. And so, you know, you may need to go, you know, into a conference and dig a little deeper, and you don't have the resources that a larger brand has. Larger brands can afford to hire experts and maybe fire them easily and hire another one if it doesn't work. They could also bring them into the company, hire internally.

Ryan:
Mhmm. But, you know, larger brands have to filter through a lot more crap probably because of their budget. Everybody's like, yes, you're our target market, so pay us. And they all wanna be paid. I'm boiling this all down. It you have to find your experts. Right. And the wrong ones can hurt you, so you have to, you know, there's that mantra within hiring, like, hire slowly fire quick.

Ryan:
If you're hiring external ex experts or agencies or vendors, that's the same exact thing. Like Yeah. Take your time hiring. Don't make an impulse decision. And if it's not working, you need to be away walk away quickly. Place them.

Jon:
I'm seeing a trend, and maybe you're seeing this too, as there's a lot more agencies that are claiming to be experts. I'm seeing a lot of bigger brands, especially now even smaller brands, I suppose. That's starting to be true on the smaller end. But they're hiring individual experts for individual needs. That need could be, hey, I just wanna drive Google Ads. I'm gonna go to the Google Ad expert agency, or I need help on Amazon, I'm gonna go directly to that Amazon agency that only claims to be an expert there. I'm finding that that's happening more and more when we're brought into the situation that we're ending up teaming up on this almost super team of folks who are maybe smaller agencies or or midsize agencies that are experts in one unique thing, and they're kind of bringing us all to the table together. It has its pros and cons, especially a big con if you don't have someone on the client side to manage all of those agencies.

Jon:
Right? If you're just expecting them to all share amongst each other, that's gonna be your problem. But I think it's interesting. Like, there certainly is no shortage of these companies out there claiming to be experts, or I think the big one right now is everyone's saying they have the best AI, which I think is hilarious because, you know, most of them aren't even AI truly. Right? So

Ryan:
Yeah. Well, I mean, a couple of good points. I mean, I think we've gotten mature enough as an industry that we do likely have more experts than we had 15 years ago. I mean, 15 years ago, you've been doing this for a year. You you might be considered an expert, but you've only got a year of experience. Now you've got, you know, people like us that have, you know, might as well be dinosaurs in ecom. But we have the insight and expertise. Then and there's more people now that have stuck with it long enough to be considered an expert, in my opinion.

Ryan:
So there are, you know, more experts to see through or hear from, but the AI the AI piece, you know, just blows me away. I was I was in Vegas yesterday walking the conference floor for an Amazon event, and it was a pretty big one. I would estimate somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% of all the vendors exhibiting there had AI on their back drop.

Jon:
Wow.

Ryan:
You know, I mean, it was, like, I think there was a shipping company that was, like, yeah, we do logistics. Okay. Well, they they get LTL and ship freight and AI was on their backdrop. I'm like, pretty pretty sure you're not using AI. Well, we're gonna find the best routes. Like, it's going from China to the US. It's it the boat goes west to east. It's not complicated.

Jon:
Yeah. Unless it's your boat, you're not finding the route anyways. Right? Like

Ryan:
No. It's like somebody else is doing it. There are subs there are some vendor of yours. And it was funny even we had a obviously, Jon conference in Vegas, there's gonna be some drinking. And so myself and one of my, colleagues at logical position, we sat down and there's a competitor there that's an automated system. They've been around for a little while. And they're claiming to have the best AI specifically, and they were focusing on Amazon ads. And we've seen their system work, and we've seen change issue.

Ryan:
We we know it fairly well. We compete against them on multiple arenas. And confronted in an environment where they had had a couple beers and the truth serum was there, they actually admitted they don't have AI. It's more of a, you know, a marketing change that somebody looks in their equation and tweaks it.

Jon:
Like it Mhmm.

Ryan:
AI is not being used as readily as people are saying it. But if you don't say it, it it people won't pay attention because everybody wants to be on the cutting edge. So as a a company wants to use a vendor that says, oh, they're the best. They've got the newest technology. Like, which I get. But just saying the, you know, artificial intelligence, which some people using AI might even know what that that's what it means.

Jon:
Right.

Ryan:
So there's you have to be careful. I think yeah.

Jon:
I agree. There's a ton of SaaS apps out there and service providers saying they they use AI, and it's not AI when you get down to it. And I think it's true. It's because people respond to it, clients respond to it, thinking, oh, you must be ahead of the curve. I wonder how long that will last, quite honestly, but it has worked the last 2 years maybe. And then I think right now, if you think about the economic conditions, especially in United States but worldwide, the only companies really getting funding are those that say they have AI, and there's really not a lot of funding to go around. So if you're not saying that you have AI in there, you're you're probably not gonna get funded. So I think that's also influencing a lot of these SaaS brands that want to grow and need outdoor outside funding.

Jon:
Excuse me. They really are forced to to say they have AI just to be part of that circle.

Ryan:
I mean, yeah. I've used chat gpt to help come up with some proposal things or help I used to help me brainstorm. I think chat gpt is phenomenal for brainstorming. But that doesn't mean that Ryan Garo has AI. It means that I've used chat gbt to prompt some things. Cool. I guess, be careful.

Jon:
Yes. Yes. Alright. So knowing all of this, and there's a lot of truth serum that should be out there in the future, hopefully.

Ryan:
Mhmm.

Jon:
But what does a brand do to sift through all of these things to find the experts they really need?

Ryan:
Well, outside of taking him to Vegas bar and buying him a couple beers and asking questions.

Jon:
Might be worthwhile quite honestly, and you get a free trip to Vegas. Right? So

Ryan:
Yeah. It might make sense for your brand depending on how many extras you're hiring. I've come up with on the plane ride back, I came up with a list of what I think, 6 things every company can do to help them find their marketing experts, you know, and and really focusing on external ones. I'm not gonna go in how to hire an internal expert and do that whole interview to but every company is gonna have some external experts.

Jon:
Fair. And so what strikes me here is that you were so bothered by what you saw. That on the flight home, you were like, what are 6 ways people can avoid this situation? I mean, that says a lot to me already as a service provider that the skepticism that is introspective here, right, of our own industry. I can't imagine what the what the brands and clients are out there thinking. Like, that is, you know, that that that strikes me as this is a challenge that we have to confront because there are so many I don't know if I wanna call them bad actors, but I think under that type of umbrella. Right?

Ryan:
Yeah. And I think, you know, that it's the salesmanship game, like, the sales side, marketing side of lots of companies will push the envelope to Mhmm. Get attention and get people in the door to at least talk, which I I kind of understand that to a degree. But it's when you're, you know, selling somebody something and setting expectations that are not gonna be realized and you're aware of that, like, you just can't do that. Like, one of my goals, and I've probably told this to you multiple times, I wanna put the bad actors, the snake oil sales people in my industry out of business.

Jon:
Right.

Ryan:
And I feel like I'm doing an okay job, but it's like whack a mole, and there's a lot of them there. So I've I've the more people I can educate on just how to be looking at vendors, even if you don't work with me, that's fine. Let's just keep you from, like, losing money, hopefully by picking the wrong one. So the 6 things I came up with we're gonna start with, don't trust marketing collateral just because of what I just said. Like, understand that companies are going to say things to get you interested or peak interest, and that's fine. Like, you know, who was it? Oh, Gatorade says be like Mike years ago. Like, I understand that if I drink Gatorade, I'm not gonna be able to dunk a basketball like Mike. You know, I my mom tried to make me believe I could do anything and that, you know, yes, you're only 5, 6, but you're gonna be able to dunk.

Ryan:
It's gonna be great. You know what? It's not gonna happen.

Jon:
Fair enough.

Ryan:
I didn't take that Gatorade commercial to believe, like, hey. I'm gonna dunk like Mike, but I'm like, hey. Could it make me better? Probably. Let's investigate how it can make me better or rehydrate me better. So there's no checks and balances on the on the people that are printing the things that go to conferences and sit behind the the booth or whatever. Mhmm. The guy printing it or a girl printing it, they're not thinking, like, this isn't AI. Why are you putting this on there? There's, like, yeah, Whatever you're paying me, I'm gonna print whatever you tell me to print.

Ryan:
So just know there's no checks and balances there.

Jon:
Yeah. And there's no industry standards around this. Right? It's not like you're like, the FDA does food and drug, right, where, you know, at the end of every drug commercial you see on TV, there has to be all these disclaimers. If Yeah. Consultancies had to put disclaimers at the end of all their ads, oof, I mean, there's some hilarious. I've I've been seeing a whole bunch of hilarious meme, if you will, accounts on LinkedIn lately, and one of them is all about ad agencies. And it's really funny because one of them this morning I just saw said, ad agency of 5 grows to 25 for the client meeting thanks to friends and family. It's true.

Jon:
It's like you just had all your friends and family come in and sit in the office while you had the client come in for a meeting and, you know, to look big. Right?

Ryan:
Mhmm.

Jon:
And I had to laugh at that because it's so true. Like, that's the type of stuff that happens because there's no regulation around this. Right? It's unfortunate.

Ryan:
Yeah. I mean, even as I was walking around meeting some potential partners, in the space, because that's why I was there to try to find companies that would help our clients grow. Like, I'm walking around and and I'm telling people about logical position. And as I was back reflecting, they have no idea if I was lying saying that we have, you know, 8,000 clients. Like, we do, but how would they ever verify that? There's not you can't even go to LinkedIn to see all these companies are said we work with them.

Jon:
Mhmm.

Ryan:
They can see that there's up to 900 people maybe that say they work at a logical position, which is great, but I also know that there's a bunch of fake people on LinkedIn that send me messages about their business coming to the US, and I can help them with a new project. I'm like, I know that this model is not working out of India. So be careful.

Jon:
Yeah. So start by not trusting that marketing collateral. That's number 1.

Announcer:
You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on ecommerce growth. Your hosts are John McDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with ecommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garo of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
The what what's number 2?

Ryan:
So number 2, somewhat along that line, but be careful with AI. And people claiming II, even if they have some AI or automation in their systems from a marketing perspective, when you're driving traffic, you really don't need AI Mhmm. Or or significant automations. You know, Google and Microsoft both have significant investments and products in the AI world. Like it's documented, like Microsoft gave $13,000,000,000 to chat gpt to be able to leverage all that. And now there's Elon Musk is mad because it's making money instead of being nonprofits. Whatever. But obviously, Microsoft has AI.

Ryan:
Google's had AI for well over a decade publicly, and they're now I think they're changing the name from Bard to something else now, but Mhmm. Google's got AI.

Jon:
Gemini. Right?

Ryan:
I think it's going to Gemini. Yeah. They're changing the name to now it's Gemini. So if you have this AI in the platform itself that's driving traffic and then you're Jon stick another AI on top of that, like, and I don't know what happens with 2 AI robots fight. I mean, we don't have battle the bots on TV anymore, but who knows? But why would you have bid optimization on top of Google Performance Max bid optimization? Like Yeah. That does not logically make sense.

Jon:
It gives me the vision of having 2 Alexas talking to each other. Right? Yeah.

Ryan:
They're gonna have a great conversation, but if they're not working for you at that point, who knows what they're gonna do? No. And I and I go back to, you know, being in this every 15 years, we can go back to some of those, you know, automated systems of 10 years ago. That 10 years ago, they were pretty good. Like, there were some good you know, it wasn't AI, but it was they were automatically building certain things out in Google Ads that made them more efficient than our team that was, you know, all human powered. Mhmm. Now 10 years later, those agencies are gone or they're a fraction of the size of their former self just because Google and Microsoft saw what was happening and said, hey, we need to make certain things easier for our clients, which are the advertisers. The agencies are not clients of Google. Well, I mean, our money goes there, but that's not their focus.

Jon:
So Right.

Ryan:
Understand that. Like, AI is not going to be, you know, the difference in driving traffic generally more efficiently. And it's important to note too that AI is not the expert. You know, yes, if you have an automated system doing some stuff or an artificial intelligence helping learn or or look at some data for you, great. That in and of itself is not going to help your business get to the next level. It's going to be the account manager helping work with you or your team to interpret some of that or help direct the AI. And so if that company yeah. You know, you can have a Ferrari sitting in your driveway.

Ryan:
But if you're gonna take it to the track and you don't know how to drive a Ferrari on a track, good luck. It's Yeah. You're not gonna get anywhere. You know, I would be a terrible race car driver even though in my head I'd love to race cars. Don't put me in a formula 1 car and expect me to be able to drive that. So, you know, understand AI and its role in what you're trying to accomplish. And that, you know, most companies should just oversimplify it when they're analyzing. Do we need AI in this? Knowing there's AI here and here.

Ryan:
Specifically, this is an Amazon conference that I was just at. And Amazon is not to the level of automation and AI that Mhmm. Google and Microsoft are. They're kinda behind on their ads platform by they're catching up very quickly, but I would still put them maybe 2 years behind. And so there's probably some automation that still makes sense and some in some a a I in my air quotes here on my podcast. That can still move the needle and help a little bit on Amazon, but that is not going to be the case, you know, in a year or 2 years when Amazon's, you know, system catches up

Jon:
Right.

Ryan:
Relatively quickly. Amazon is throwing a lot of money at their, advertising platform, and I think it's developed extremely rapidly.

Jon:
Okay. So start by not trusting marketing collateral, then be careful around AI because you probably don't need it. What's the third one?

Ryan:
The third one, as you go to conferences as a brand or an ecom business, you want to go there, you know, with the goal of learning, not necessarily going to say, I'm gonna go here to find, like, a new paid search agency.

Jon:
Mhmm.

Ryan:
That would be a bad goal. You wanna go and say, I'm looking for some help on paid search. Great. There's a few vendors here. I would go in, and I wanna ask the other companies that are not paid search companies there, who do they partner with for paid search within their organization? Who do their clients use that does good work even if they're not there? If they're there, that's kind of a bonus to say, hey, I'd like to actually talk to them. Hopefully, they're not side by side because that may prove that there's some relationship there that may not be giving you truth within that. But I think, you wanna come out of that with 3 to 4 companies you probably should be talking to around that for that particular vendor you're looking for. And then don't ever sign up with one of those companies at the conference.

Ryan:
That would be a a bad idea almost across the board. Probably getting drinks. They're probably paying for talks, that make them appear smarter or more capable than they actually are. So just be careful. Everything looks better at a conference. Take a week after that to digest it, make some reference calls, things like that. But go in with your eyes open always to that.

Jon:
Okay. Alright. What about number what are we on? 5? Yeah. 4.

Ryan:
I think we're on 5. Yeah. 44. So the 4th one is understand you get what you pay Ryan then prioritize based on your resources. Mhmm. You know, for example, I'm not gonna be able to hire John McDonald level CRO talent for $500 a month. Like, John McDonald is a verified expert. He is going to charge a premium on his skill set because he is that good and he can demand that.

Ryan:
Somebody's telling you they're gonna charge you $500 for CRO, you're going to get that level of CRO.

Jon:
We can just shut the show off right now. Thank you.

Ryan:
Yep. Done. I just dropped my mic. Oh, wait. I could bring that back. And so it's interesting when you're looking at marketing online. I generally advocate for brands building their traffic from the bottom of the funnel up. Like, capture the very bottom of the funnel, then add a level, then add a level, and your return on ad spend drops as you move up.

Ryan:
Conversion rates drop as you move up the funnel as well, but built Jon the bottom up. And you may need to hire your experts from the top down. And what I mean by that is you likely can't afford the best paid search agency talent if you're making less than $1,000,000 in revenue. Mhmm. You know? There are some very good agencies out there. Their minimums will be prohibitive if you have a small spend on Google and Microsoft. But you might actually be able to hire a great fractional CMO that can help you set better goals and understand how to actually grow and develop a brand that can help feed top line revenue and brand demand and help guide some of that paid search efforts down further down. So understand where you are in the growth segment in your space and what your resources can afford and what would be the best.

Ryan:
And then what I would do if I'm smaller on the smaller brand side, I would set a goal to get that net ex next expert. So if I started by hiring that fractional CMO, I would say, okay. I've got that figured in. I can see my p and l. Maybe the next expert for me, I'm a see fractional CMO and I agree that it's a paid search expert. Mhmm. Okay. Great.

Ryan:
Let's see when we get to this level of revenue or this level of spend, it makes sense to bring on an expert to handle that piece for us. And then as I move up the funnel, I file another expert.

Jon:
Yeah. One of the things that I always enjoy hearing when I'm on the phone with a potential client who has reached out to us is when they say, we have done all of this other work, and we are now ready to optimize. When I hear that, I'm thinking this could be a good fit for us because I realize that there are a lot of steps before you should optimize. And if they have taken those steps, all the better. But if they're just trying to scattershot different services to try to find whatever is gonna work for them and they haven't had a plan and they haven't really followed a path to unlock working with additional experts, then probably not a good fit. Right? To me, I need somebody who's gonna be a little more methodical about it, and that's what you're saying as well is unlock the ability to hire that next expert, but don't let it stop you from hiring the first one. And I think that's really good advice, Ryan. I like hearing that.

Ryan:
Well, thank you. And it feeds in well to what you do and what we do. And and I think the next point would be understand what you and your team are best at.

Jon:
Mhmm.

Ryan:
And then find comp find talent that compliments you well. You know, for example, I know that I'm great at driving top line growth. Like, I'm passionate about it. I've done it a lot. I just I enjoy it that if that's one of my core competencies. And what I'm often not good at is creating operational processes that will build the efficiencies in the middle of the p and l. Mhmm. Right? If you want me to be like, okay, our operations are struggling here in the manufacturing process.

Ryan:
Ryan, can you go in and try to look at that? I'll be like, that mean I can look at it, but it's definitely not gonna be where I'm gonna come up with a great idea because I've got experience here of what it is. And I think an important asterisk to all that is also be aware of yourself and that just because you really like something doesn't mean that you're going to be the expert your company needs in that area.

Jon:
Mhmm.

Ryan:
You know, I really enjoy, you know, shooting hoops. You know, I'll get in the backyard. I'll shoot hoops. I enjoy it. It's fun. It's relaxing for me. It's actually how I do some of my thinking. But if I needed a point guard for a team, I know I'm not gonna be great for that.

Ryan:
Like so watch for that in your business That you can maybe participate with that expert Mhmm. But don't be that expert if it's just something you enjoy that you know you maybe aren't the best at.

Jon:
Okay. Great. So okay. So what's what's the final point here? I think you have one more. Right?

Ryan:
Yep. The final point is is a really challenging one that comes up often, and it's a a debate that will rage as long as we have businesses. But it's internal versus external. You know, does this expert or this talent need to be an internal person, human that you've hired or an internal team or does need to be an external team? And I guarantee there's not a perfect answer for everybody. But I'll give you my opinion for what it's worth. If you've gotten to this level in our podcast, maybe my opinion matters, but I keep it pretty simple. If it's core to your business, think internal. And then I would be external for almost everything else for various reasons.

Ryan:
But, you know, an example would be if you can't run Google Ads or Meta Ads for your business for whatever reason, maybe you're selling guns or cannabis, SEO is going to be very core to the survival and growth of your business. I would say hire an SEO person that has proven expertise, in various areas of SEO. You can look and you can externally see their work very obviously. If they work for that, you can call references. Obviously, they're an expert. I may actually give that person equity within the business to make because there isn't as likely to be a career path for that person if they're leading SEO in your organization. Usually, you don't go, you know, SEO chief marketing officer.

Jon:
Mhmm. Right.

Ryan:
You're gonna be probably leading the SEO because they're so important to that. But let them maybe hire some external experts to do the actual work that they're leading and setting strategy for.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
If you're building a brand, you know, your voice is going to be very core to the business. You know, so email and social community management may be much more core than the ads piece. So you would lean into having the community management email communication be internal, whereas the ads piece or even just executing a loyalty program could be external. You know, we had a the last comments, dude wipes was there. That is a phenomenal brand story if you haven't. They understand who they are and what their who their target market is, and they attack that very well and have some great humor for it and very specific reasons for that humor.

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
And so internally for them, communicating and nurturing that community, 100% an internal expert talent. Executing ads may not need to be as internal or a core competency that they own internally for them. And so just understand that within your business and what you're trying to do and what you're trying to execute. I also warn brands, because I've seen it a lot over the years where you'll have internal employees build up a resume internally and then leave to an agency, get promoted, come back to a branch. So there is that zigzag between brand and agency that just happens in in many roles. And if that role is likely to do that for you, it may help to have external in particular because it will keep the consistency there. One of our brands we worked with, every probably 8 or 9 months, they would lose the person in charge of paid search. And they just would say, hey.

Ryan:
I've paid search for this well known brand. I'm leading all these agencies. They would go to an agency and be a director and lead teams that were going leading agency brands. Just very consistently. Because we were their paid search agency executing this a lot of that strategy, it was very easy for them to keep their paid search operating at a high level because the agency executing was consistent. And then we would be able to work with a new person and say, okay. Here's what we've been doing. You may or may not like it, but let's maybe figure out what makes sense for what your goals are as the new head of paid search Mhmm.

Ryan:
Managing us is going to be. So every brand will be different on this internal, external, but, hopefully, that can give you some direction on that.

Jon:
That's great. Okay. So your let's call him Garrow's 6 tips for finding and using marketing experts. So we've got start by not trusting marketing collateral. Be careful around AI. You probably don't need it, and most brands aren't actually using AI to begin with even if it's in their marketing. Don't go to that fancy conference and just say, I'm gonna sign a contract and, use only the 3 or 4 that you see there. Do your homework.

Jon:
Understand you get what you pay for, and then prioritize based on that. 5th is know what you and your team are best at. Find that talent that compliments you well. And 6th was internal versus external. Right? So when should you hire internal versus farm it out? Did I get all 6 of those right?

Ryan:
I think so.

Jon:
Awesome.

Ryan:
You were paying you were paying attention.

Jon:
Sometimes they do. Right? Awesome. Well, thank you, Ryan. This was very helpful. I appreciate it. And, it's always good to have you have to go to these fancy conferences and bring back all this great information. And next time, I'll join you for the, sunshine, golf, and fancy dinners. How's that?

Ryan:
I think that'd be great. You should join me for sure.

Jon:
Alright. Sounds good, Ryan.

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