Drive and Convert

Announcer: [00:00:00] You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon MacDonald: Hey, Ryan, I assume that our listeners are aware, but not all businesses online need the same traffic. So surprise, surprise. So much depends on consideration, target market, and budgets.

All right. So. If you're selling a 35 watch band, your conversion paths are pretty likely to be short, but if you're selling a 25,000 B2B server, or maybe even a SAS product of all things, we haven't talked a lot about here, but I have a feeling we will do more. You most likely have some complicated paths to conversion.

And I think, you know, we really have not spent a whole lot of time tackling these issues. And I think there's potentially a more unique [00:01:00] traffic source and pattern there that we should discuss.

Ryan Garrow: I agree. And I think it seems logical that when you're looking to drive traffic in a High consideration industry with high dollar value deals or lots of margin in those product sales.

It really still does, when you boil it all down, come a lot of times down to just budget, which in turn comes down to, were you already successful before you started spending money? or where you're at now. Like it's difficult unless you have an investor with really deep pockets willing to blow a bunch of money on the internet to hopefully win to be able to compete sometimes when you've got a large incumbent brand there.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: I just got the call this morning actually with a company that's launching into a B2B space. They're only going to have a couple thousand dollars of budget and they're competing against It's the web stronts and the Grangers of the world with essentially the same products in their little small slice of the industry there.

I mean, I, I painted a pretty bleak picture for them. I was like, it's going to be tough. Your competition is already spending six, [00:02:00] seven figures a month on Google capturing demand. You're going to be priced out of the ad auctions in just a thousand dollars. It's like. You know, a pea shooter against a tank to a degree.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Why even bother in those cases?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And I tell them most of the time, don't, I was like, you can pay me and you know, I'd have no problem taking money, but you're not going to be happy. So there's probably better places to spend your money. You know, startups in these spaces have to get somewhat creative for their traffic and lead flow while larger businesses or industry leaders really have to focus on creating traffic moats around what they're doing.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. So. I'm not sure I've ever heard that term traffic moat before what what do you mean by that because I don't even know how an industry leader would create one. What is that? What are we talking about here ?

Ryan Garrow: Before today? I don't think I've ever heard of it. But I was sitting down creating notes.

I was like, how do you explain some of these strategies I would talk about? I'm like, I think of it as like, okay, you've got this castle, you know, And you're, Oh, you've got, you can build a moat around it and it helps protect you. And we talk in business around, you know, how do you build moats or, you know, be in blue oceans and keep out the bloody [00:03:00] waters.

If you consider your traffic, your advantage on as a B2B large sales product or a SAS product, then you want to protect that. You don't want to just make it easy to, to steal that traffic from you. That's what I think you're trying to accomplish in a perfect world. And you're always going to have people trying to take it from you because they're going to see your size.

They can estimate your profit. You know, we know a lot of what SAS margin products look like. You can see their traffic and do backup math and calculations and be like, Hey, I want some of that profit. To start creating this mode, you got to think through your search funnel and then at each layer, figure out kind of how you're going to protect yourself.

What's going to keep the startups from coming in? I usually start with Google Bing and say, okay, you're capturing demand. And if it was me, I would almost do the opposite of what a lot of e com brands get advised to do. But I would say increase your bids, increase your CPA goals, meaning like be willing to pay more for a CPA than maybe what you can actually capture.

Okay. If you can get a CPA of, let's say 80 on Google and Bing, [00:04:00] and I can handle 120, 130, I might go up there anyway. Just because it's going to make it that much more difficult for a startup with less money than me to compete and I'm playing the long game.

Jon MacDonald: Well, it's almost like that story you were just talking about, right?

In the sense that somebody new who's entering that marketplace can't possibly compete spending a couple grand when their competitors are spending tens of thousands.

Ryan Garrow: Google many times will set a minimum CPC in a lot of industries to help give you that moat to a degree. But like I might be bidding a hundred even though I know I can handle.

I can take it for 50 or do really well there just because I'm competitive and I want to win. And I want a monopoly if I can get it, but I want to keep them out. And I want to focus really hyper focus on quality score because that's the area that small competitors can jump into these auctions and beat you.

You know, if you've got a very large Google ads account, that's not getting a lot of attention in many areas, you may have three to five out of 10 scores. Meaning that if I'm a small competitor, I'm going to get hyper focused on that. I can get a [00:05:00] 10 out of 10 and outbid you for less money. You might be bidding 100, but I might be able to get that same click for only 30 because I've got a much better quality score.

Large brands can't take their foot off the gas and allow for those creaks to come in. So you really do have to pay attention to those details. If I'm advising an aggressive business, you know, somebody like myself. I might say you need to find a way to get a second entity in that auction That you own and control not something that you don't break any rules by doing it, by the way It's just you have to be very clean about it.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: You can't have the same credit card on there You can't have the same billing address You need to make sure Google sees that second entity bidding in that auction as a second entity as a competitor to you, even though the ladies may be flowing up to you at the end of the day So some of them might be that you create a best of list We had a client that did this in a much simpler industry He was selling t-shirts based undershirts and he created this huge ecosystem where he became a like a t-shirt guy And was like doing all of these reviews of undershirts funny [00:06:00] enough, he won every best-of list.

He's like, Oh, that's got the best quality. It's got the highest thread count. It's all these things.

Jon MacDonald: This is the old mattress play. All the online mattress brands done this for years.

Ryan Garrow: Yes. And it, I think it gets overlooked in its simplicity. Like you're just going to create this entity that you like, but it can bid because it's Collecting review.

And you might even set up, realistically, you might set up affiliates, affiliate links to your competitors. Why not.

Jon MacDonald: make something off of it? Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: You send them traffic, you might as well at least make some money off it. Yeah. And so, but you're gonna win most of the awards on there. So that could be one way to do it.

Sometimes you will acquire or create a reseller of your product so that you know, if you're selling this piece of sass and this. Ryan's, you know, store is going to be one of the resellers of that. I can own that. There's nothing against that rule. It's a separate business. Maybe my wife owns that and she's the reseller on there, but it's my, I'm controlling the budget goes in and the reseller gets some of the revenue share just like a normal one would.

And then sometimes in the B2B like online sales, you would buy [00:07:00] it. You can buy a competitor

Jon MacDonald: Oh, that's a good idea.

Ryan Garrow: and control it that way. One of our clients, and we pulled this from Fossil Watches. Where I don't know, 10 years ago, they owned the watch market in the U S I mean, they owned like the top 10 brands.

They made all the watches. They had Fossil. They had a watch station. They had all of, I mean, they could, they basically came to us during certain periods of the year and said, we want to own watches, wallets, and belts for men. I'm like, well, what do you, what do you mean own it? We don't want to see any competitors anywhere in the auction on text ads or shopping.

You have all of our properties. Go make that happen. Like, okay. So if you weren't organic top three on any of those during holiday, you were not getting traffic for those. It was going to be painful competing with our team on that space. So it's, it's thinking big,

Jon MacDonald: interesting,

Ryan Garrow: but really focusing on some of those details within the space. Okay.

Jon MacDonald: So I think everyone right now knows that you're super competitive. So this doesn't surprise me, but I love that tactic. You know, it's [00:08:00] taking something that is legit, Google lets you do it and using it towards your advantage. And I love the buying a small competitor up to be able to do that. I think that's a great idea.

Okay. So I get that you can create this mode around demand capture and properties like Google and Bing, but so many SAS or software as a service clients that we work with at the good have massive amounts of traffic coming from sources like affiliates or LinkedIn is huge now. How do you put a moat around those?

Ryan Garrow: Well, of course, it's usually, it's usually not as simple as controlling Google and Bing because that's a very direct spend a dollar, get this relationship. But again, I think as long as you're thinking within the details and minutia of those areas of the traffic, I think you can find ways to really Corner the market and keep small competitors out, even big competitors sometimes depending, but like, for example, affiliates are big in the SAS space.

Many of the tech players in my space have affiliate programs and they're, they're nice, but they're almost table stakes for playing. Like if you don't have an affiliate program or a partner [00:09:00] program that pays me a rev share, it's like, yeah, are you, are you even trying to a degree? If I were to create a moat in affiliates for a big SAS company, Or a large player in the B2B space.

I would want to create tiers that, you know, a small competitor just can't play it. And so aggressive pricing is one thing. So if standard in your industry is 15 to 20 percent of the SAS revenue to a partner, go 30%, I mean, make it uncomfortable for a small company without much money to be like, how would we pay 30 percent or more?

If you're smaller, oftentimes you have to overshoot the incumbent. to take that partner away. Aggressive pricing can be one thing. It doesn't have to be an all the time thing, right? You could just be like, I know this guy over there or girl over there is starting to start up a competitor of mine. I'm going to make sure they don't get off the ground.

Small competitors usually lack a few things, money, time, and clients. And so if they don't have all of those that you have an abundance of, or at least more than they do, as an affiliate, you want to provide those things to your partners or your affiliates that you know your small competitors can't do.

You've [00:10:00] got the clients they don't, you can provide leads. For your partners, find a way to engage your clients. Find some needs that your partners that are sending you business will like, I mean, everybody in the partner space loves reciprocal lead flow.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a key, right? It's gotta be reciprocal, but 30 percent is intriguing.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. I mean, so I have some competitors that will just do it for Revshare and that's fine. You know, there's many agency owners that will take, you know, 15, 20 grand a month in rev share from partners. That's great because that's going right to the owner's bottom line or affording employees that maybe you're trying to build up when you're as big as LP 10, 15, 20 grand.

It really doesn't. It's not bad. We're not going to turn it down. Don't get me. Don't hear me to say that.

Jon MacDonald: Shop in the bucket. I get it. Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: It's a drop in the bucket for us. But so it's when you can give leads that keeps me from saying, Hey, all things being equal and you're giving me leads, guess who's going to stay the predominant partner for us.

You know, there may, if you've got more cash, you could provide cash for a certain tiers that you hit. You know, we're working with a partner right now to try to do some of that for some of our employees. Like, Hey, we're going to do a set of incentive trip for some of the [00:11:00] lead flow that they're going to be getting.

Well, that's unique enough that a small competitor to them is not gonna be able to come to me and be like. Yeah, we'd like to, you know, give your employee a 100 gift card. Cute, not gonna turn it down, but at the day, they're probably not gonna pay attention because they have this big cruise trip coming up with this partner.

Inviting them to events with your client. So if you're already doing some events with your clients, where they're just gonna be in the same spot. Invite a partner that you like, that you want to keep from going to a smaller competitor. Just getting them in the room with your clients is going to be valuable to them.

Again, if you're inviting me to just meet with your clients because you're there and you're saying that Ryan's valuable and logical position does good stuff.

Jon MacDonald: I mean, I feel like that's the only time we see each other face to face anymore since COVID is like those events, right? Come see our clients. That's an interesting one is too.

Ryan Garrow: LinkedIn is tough because I feel like it's been evolving a lot and it seems to be, it's a pretty even playing field. Anybody can post anything they want. There's no restrictions to being able to post a piece of content there. You don't have to pay to play there. And so it is fairly [00:12:00] flat, democratic, even playing field space.

Most bigger businesses though will have a content team to help. And I think that's the resource that becomes more valuable is if you have a solid content team regularly posting. The key is engaging thought leadership pieces. And this is going to take some work because there's a lot of garbage on LinkedIn.

Like it's just I don't want to see another case study. I I don't I just don't care great You have a business you've probably done something good and you can spin the numbers most case studies when I get in them It's even some of our partners I'll go into the case and be like don't you want to put this in front of your clients?

I'm, like no your case study is garbage because you one partner in particular talk about How they increase conversion rates. I can increase conversion rates. Like we talked about, like, not, and it wasn't you, it wasn't Jon, by the way, but it was like, I could just cut off your non brand traffic and conversion rate goes up.

So how can you tell me that making this little change just magically increased conversion rates across 5, 000 clients? Maybe, but you've got to give me some real data there and your case studies are fluffy. So,

Jon MacDonald: yeah, I think, you know, LinkedIn's becoming more like, in some ways, like Reddit, where the community will come after [00:13:00] you in a way, they'll call you out.

If you do things like that, and it used to be that you could post whatever you wanted to LinkedIn and everybody was kumbaya. Everyone was great with it. And, you know, high fives and likes and thumbs up everywhere. And I'm noticing as a lot of folks who were on Twitter left Twitter wanted something more business minded as Twitter has gotten away from business have really come on and said, you know, like, I love this, but you got to bring value.

And if you're not bringing value, then I'm Or you're trying to fake bringing that value, then I'm going to call you out on it. And I think that's fair. And I love seeing that. And I think there's a lot of ways to make LinkedIn work for brands. But you're right. It's tough because anyone can post anything.

And you are at the whim of the likes and follows, if you will, that are on there. And you got to deliver value. It's the only way to do it.

Ryan Garrow: Yep, giving me a picture of you and partners at happy hour.

Jon MacDonald: [00:14:00] Like, yeah, this isn't Facebook.

Ryan Garrow: I mean, no, it's like that. There's a time and place for that. And I get it. And you want to call them out, but it becomes the easy button.

I think it'd be like, I'm going to go to face facing and I tagged you and it's great. And yes, you need to tag partners and give them some of that. Especially if you're a leader in the space, your team does a phenomenal job at this. I mean, there's so many times that we come across clients, we share, they're like, yeah, Jon is everywhere.

He's such a big deal. And I'm like, he is. Yes. But I also know that he's got a great team behind him, you know, pushing that out there. Like it doesn't just happen by accident. There's a lot of intentionality with what your team does and how you're repurposing content. You write books. To give yourself more things to talk about and do so.

I think Jon MacDonald is a great person to go if you're trying to think about LinkedIn. And he does it from, yes, he's a leader, but he does it with a very small team. So you can adopt Jon's strategy as the market leader. But also maybe think about it too, as an incumbent, like you just have to be very intentional.

So LinkedIn is somewhat challenging as the market leader because of that.

Announcer: You're [00:15:00] listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of the The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers.

And Ryan Garrow 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 MacDonald: I think it is, and I think too many people lean on the business instead of the individual, but LinkedIn. nobody follows businesses. They follow people on LinkedIn. And so you can't just post from your company account and ask your team to like it. Not going to do anything. You really have to engage and be part of the community.

Similar to Reddit, as I mentioned, where you have to be part of the community. You can't just pop in and promote yourself. Doesn't work.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, [00:16:00] I wouldn't even go to those stories I have there with I was trying to solve some Amazon problems. I went in there and I could see people doing I'm like, Oh, this is Stay away from that part of Reddit.

Yeah. But yeah, another example to look at too is Barb Brewis from No Commerce. I think he does a great job of being really authentic on LinkedIn. Yeah. Historically, he's really built up a good following, and so you can duplicate what he's doing. And No Commerce, I would argue, is one of the, one of the market leaders in the post purchase survey space.

Yeah. So they're trying to keep their selves insulated, and so the whole team has to be going. Like, if you don't have, I'll say this, if you're a large entity, In the B2B, SaaS space, and you don't have a LinkedIn strategy for your organization, I think you have a problem.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Because it's not like your business needs to post.

Again, like you said, nobody cares. But your C level VPs, directors all have something that they are strategically posting about. And you have to be willing, I think as a big company, to let your people become elevated. There's a lot of leadership, I think, to get worried like, Oh, if they get too big for me, they're going to demand more [00:17:00] pay, or they're going to get recruited.

I'm like, well, anybody can recruit anybody on LinkedIn. I know who the best people in e com are across the board. It's not a question. If you want to hire the best here, here, here. I know who it is. It's, it's more about, are you going to create some value and encourage them to be part of your company is how you should be thinking, not like afraid of them getting picked off because they're being helped in their LinkedIn strategy.

Jon MacDonald: You have to understand that you're going to be helping people with their personal brands and that's okay. You want that. And yeah, they take that when they, when they move on. Hey, at the same time, I think that obviously we do it. So I think it can be fairly, really valuable. And any other points for like a large brand wanting to create a moat around their traffic? You mentioned a few large names earlier, but

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I would say events can be a great moat for trackers. If you're in the SaaS or B2B space, you're probably involved in events, or there are industry events that you probably need to be at if you're not. That is a great source of traffic and lead flow and you need to create a mode around that.

I don't think it needs to be a booth at every event because I think a lot of times that's [00:18:00] a waste of space. The expo, we rarely do, and I can't say logical position is perfect at this, but we rarely have a booth because that's not often where the money's made. Sometimes you have to have a booth and that's fine, but even just making sure your logos on the event guide.

So you have some branding and awareness and you have a person there that is willing to go out and meet people. So when I'm going to events. I find that the the companies that are most successful have the right person at the right event. I often don't like multiple people at events if I'm the same company. Just a personal preference of mine.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: Because I find that they, you'll have maybe one person that's good at events and they put somebody else to tag along. They end up latching on and not covering double the space. They cover maybe less space than one person would alone. And so one person that really understands how to just network. And I'll say this. If I go into an event not knowing if it's going to be good, it's already failed.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Like your event is made the two weeks to a month before you even show up. Where you've got meetings already [00:19:00] booked. You've got partners already engaged. You've got events outside of it that you're attending.

Like we have a person or he loves conferences. Like he, it is hands down. He loves it more than anybody else on the planet. And he wants to meet every single person. He's phenomenal at these, but he, he doesn't plan yet. He like, it's like two days before he's like, Ooh, I got to get to a happier on Tuesday because I don't have one yet.

And then what am I doing after happier? So he'll do it. But he does it in much more condensed than I would prefer, but he, after every event, so that's one of the people I will go to an event with because he's fully autonomous, but I, and he stays out later, like my bedtime, usually in an event about nine o'clock and I'm done. You'll take the early morning coffee.

Yeah. He handles the 9am to 4am or 9pm to 4am shift and it's great, but we leave an event and Everybody knows it's amazing if you're going to do an event, you don't necessarily need to do all of you know what he does and stays up late, but he has an impact. And so if you're going to be in an industry leader and keep those away, you need to have some of that.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And I think, you know, you have to have the right personality for that, right? If [00:20:00] you're just a by nature and introvert. And don't really like those things, then don't, don't go because you have to engage.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, don't force yourself into that.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. You've got to be willing to sit down at a bar with a beer and talk to somebody you've never heard or, you know, even a glass of water.

You don't know them. You're going to meet them and they may be a prospect. They may not, doesn't matter. And the final point, I think for large brands. is going to be you need to have great relationships with the other top companies in an industry. And so if you have the, like the top three companies in an industry solving problems together for the same group of clients, you've essentially created an unbreakable cartel scenario.

Like always one of my goals, you know, there's like, I want to be able to have a cartel or I kind of friend, lead it up to a syndicate. Now you get the best of the best. And once you get them together and then they're solving problems for these clients, those clients are not going to leave, right? A group that's working really well together to help them grow.

And so when you have the scale to be able to pick up the phone or email The other really large company helping them and say hey, we'd like to help [00:21:00] solve this problem with you And we're going to we have the resources just to give you and not ask for anything in return We just want to make sure this client's taken care of that goes a long way And that's going to come back and create this circular system of referrals Which will keep going around and around and it makes it very challenging for You know, a competitor, small competitor to try to jump into that flywheel because it just won't be an entry point.

Jon MacDonald: Well, I'm glad I'm part of your cartel. Excuse me, syndicate. How would you suggest the startup do just that though? I think the vast majority of brands are chasing the market leader, right? So if you're not part of that market leader cartel, how do you make that happen? What do you, what do you think you need to do?

Ryan Garrow: It's obviously tough as you would see, like the reason the big companies are big is because they've done some things right. And so you're trying to undo something that's been done very well. And so I think against the grain, probably I would tell a smaller brand to think small, not as in you don't want to take down a big competitor of lofty goals for your business. But you need to get very specific and targeted.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: And I have this [00:22:00] conversation regularly with partners trying to partner with me at logical position saying, you know, we want to partner with you. I'm like, okay, great. Yeah. Everybody wants to, cause we have a lot of clients and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that, but you can't come to me and say, well, we can't, we built this tech to do all of these things that probably take place.

Or of 10 of your partners. I'm like, well, you're not going to replace 10 of my partners. You have 50 clients I can't afford to do that. Number one, you might be the best and i'll need to pay attention to that And help you along the way if you are the actual best in certain niches, but be hyper specific around what problem you solve for my clients that I can go to them with My account teams and say hey i've got this partner That's going to solve a very specific problem that is not probably being solved as well by other partners More specific is more better because you can always expand on that.

But if you're telling me you can solve all my problems I'm just not going to listen, it's not going to help. And another thing I would do is if you're a small business at startup, you've got some clients that are probably pretty passionate about you, they've taken the gamble on you and they like your tech, [00:23:00] usually you've started that because of relationships, double down on those, follow those customers to their events.

Doesn't really matter what event it is, you want to be by their side. Number one, you're playing defense to keep in front of them and build a relationship, keep the competitors out, but you also want to see who else is there and what's the potential. You know, a great example was early on in my partnership career.

I followed one of our clients to outdoor retailer, which is a, that's an amazing event. I love it. Everybody listening should try to get to outdoor retailer because it's just super cool.

Jon MacDonald: The kegs come out at like two, it ends up being a party.

Ryan Garrow: and there's all the coolest stuff coming out next season is there.

Like you can see all the new shoes, all the new stuff going on trucks. You see, you know, vehicles that haven't come out yet because they're outfitting them for products. Just do it. It's super cool. And it's in Denver, usually, which I like, I think they started moving it around, but it's just a cool spot.

When I went there with this client, number one, we had a ton of fun. We rented an Airbnb with. They're they're team and I stayed with them. I kept them and deep in the relationship, but I also leveraged that relationship to open up new doors and outdoor retail. So I was just [00:24:00] walking the floor saying, Hey, how you doing?

What are you doing for marketing? What's going here? I saw, you know, opportunities for clients or new companies come on board, but also I was like, Hey, you service the same companies I'm trying to talk to, and we don't compete. I'm going to partner with you. Yeah. So I created some great partnerships there and I wasn't supposed to be there.

So they don't allow agencies in Dow to a retailer unless you, you might be able to, if you spent a disgusting amount of money at the time though, they were like specifically. No agencies.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And so the hack for us was we would go every year and speak there and we would have a client speak with us. And that was always the hack to get into those conferences because if we can have a client get us a badge and a speaking slot and then we would do it with them and we would basically turn it into a case study and they would talk about their experience and we would provide value of how to do something and how it turned out for this brand out there. Retailer love that.

Ryan Garrow: Oh, yeah.

Jon MacDonald: [00:25:00] They always loved it.

Ryan Garrow: And it's unique enough because your competitors weren't thinking like that because there was, there was a wall around that event saying it's really difficult for an agency to get in.

So don't try. I was like, well, I'm not going to, I usually don't take no for an answer. So I'm like, what can I do? And great. So think through things like that, where it is a walled garden, keeping in mind. You out on purpose along with your competitors, no matter how big they are, then figure out what can I do?

Sometimes it's just, Hey, I've got clients there. I'm going to have, find some, look at the list of sponsors and be like, Hey, I see you're going to be there. I'd love to throw an event for you and some of your clients. I'll cover the costs and we're just going to do. A happy hour across the street. Yeah, you know, I did that at, it used to be called IRCE.

Jon MacDonald: Oh, yeah.

Ryan Garrow: It used to be good. Now it's garbage. I don't even know what it's called now, but it's, I don't even, don't even waste the time going at this point. And IRCE, if you're listening or whatever you're called now, you can call me and we can talk through it. But it's not great. But then it was, and I said, I had Brent Baum, Ross, the CEO of Listrack.

I had one or two people from Google on stage. And I just opened up a [00:26:00] bar across the street from McCormick Place over there in Chicago and just said, Hey, invite some of your friends and come on in. I literally whoever who cares that I had some budget spend. It wasn't a ton, but it was great. Met some phenomenal companies, but I had to think outside the box of how to get companies outside of the event that I couldn't pay for because I was small at the time.

I couldn't make it happen. Love that. And I think you need to think through partnerships. You know, big competitors can really do more in partnerships. Then you can, if you're small, but partnerships becomes a way that you can level the playing field. If you focus more on the relationship piece. I think a lot of large brands that I see in the SAS space gets large enough that the partner team isn't maybe necessarily as important as some of the other things in the organization.

And so it doesn't get the attention and therefore they don't attract the top talent into the partner space. Not always, but many times. And so their partnerships in that ecosystem become more of just an affiliate relationship essentially, where you get a, you're a number and you get a newsletter and commission payouts.

But if you have somebody that's really good in partnerships and building relationships where they come into your [00:27:00] organization with existing relationships, that can do a lot to move the needle because I will often do more for a partner that is just a good person and have a good relationship, even if I could make more money from a payout or something from a larger partner in their space.

I think you just have to get a little more creative in that space. And then I would say when you're looking at the search, you are going to look at marketing online. And I think you have to play a spot in that to a degree. But if your budget is such a small magnitude, it's hyper focused. And so you might only attack a small sliver of the market.

And, you know, if you have a tenth of a percent of the market right now, getting to two and three percent would be huge anyway. Yeah. Very targeted landing pages. And think through the entire search funnel, because you don't have the shotgun blast to hit everything in the funnel. Across all search terms and so you need to think kind of that ClickFunnel, like if they need to see this piece of content on LinkedIn, then how do I get them in?

Mm-hmm. A first party list of remarketing, so I can say, then I get them on, you [00:28:00] know, meta and then I can get them on the display network around Google and then I can get a YouTube video in front of them. You can be big to a very small group of people with the, with the budget, but doesn't even have to be big.

Yeah. You just have to be highly intentional and that's where you're thinking small. Like if I'm going to create a POS system for aftermarket auto, that's a massive mark. You cannot spend enough money at SEMA to have an impact for that as you launch. And so what you need to do is say, I'm going to be aftermarket for this particular subset of products.

Maybe it's going to be chrome wheels for cars between the sixties and seventies. And those are one really good at, and I will know the product better than any other partner trying to service them. So when I get in front of them or get on a phone call, they know that There will be nobody that knows the products I'm trying to sell better than them and you land and expand from that say, okay, I'm the best at this.

Now I'm going to add on the ancillary products that maybe they have or spend this other retailer that's trying to sell those. Similar enough things will look at them and say, Oh, you [00:29:00] do work with them. I know them and you're doing really well. Great. Let's try that as well.

Jon MacDonald: I love it. It all comes down to face time, right?

Being willing to have that conversation, meet up with them in person and share the love, right?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Well, and just making sure that you're not, you know, once people are getting insight, like you're taking advantage of, you know, like Jon's team and making sure the conversions are good because it's, you offline around, The SAS product, the conversion doesn't happen on the site necessarily, like getting somebody to sign up for free.

I do that all the time. I have so many emails with free Adobe. Don't tell Adobe, Jon. I know you're looking at Adobe things that I had to edit a PDF. So I'm like, God, I got to get another email address because I just need to edit this one thing.

Jon MacDonald: Stop killing our conversion right over there.

Ryan Garrow: But it's, it's after the fact.

So you guys make sure you're, you are thinking through that full funnel, not just. Oh, we got a free trial. Therefore, we're done now.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: So a hundred percent. Don't ignore that.

Jon MacDonald: Awesome. Well, this has been enlightening to talk about more traffic for larger brands and how that complicates things and how to build that moat of the traffic moat, thinking about all the other ways you can, you can make [00:30:00] this work.

So I appreciate your time today.

Ryan Garrow: No, thank you, Jon. Maybe I'll have to trademark that traffic mode thing.

Jon MacDonald: Love it. Have at it.

Ryan Garrow: Thank you.

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