Adam Torres and John Horn discuss digital marketing.
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Show Notes:
StubGroup is a premier Google Ads agency that helps businesses boost their digital marketing profitability by providing performance-driven solutions. In this episode, Adam Torres and John Horn, CEO at StubGroup, explore Google Ads and the future of advertising.
About John Horn
John Horn, CEO of StubGroup, has spent his professional career focused on creating and delivering a unique, successful product to each client, every time. He and his agency have worked with brands ranging from multinational corporations to mom and pop shops, and have generated over $350 million on behalf of their clients. He has also created marketing educational content consumed by over 90,000 students online and is a frequent podcast guest.
About StubGroup
The premier Google Ads agency when it comes to performance and customer care, the team at StubGroup applies a relentless work ethic to each campaign. We collaborate with companies ranging from publicly traded corporations to small local businesses.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to apply. All right, so today’s guest is John Horn, and he is CEO over at Stub Group. John, welcome to the show.
Adam, thank you so much for having me. All right, John. , this is big, big topic. So, we’re going to be talking about digital marketing. We’re going to be talking about Google ads. We’re going to be talking about how you help clients and, , what people should be looking out for. And I guess, just to get us kicked off here how’d you get into advertising?
Like, where’d all that begin for you? Just advertising in general and digital. Yeah back in the day. It really Well, it’s been a bit over a decade ago in that range is when we started Stub Group. And we started Stub Group really focused from day one on Google advertising and other pay per click platforms.
Was that your first, by the way? Was this your first foray into digital and into advertising? Largely, yes. For that, you know, I’ve done some email marketing, some things here and there and so, the reason I really wanted to get into digital advertising and Google and Facebook and so, so forth, is because we saw so many brands, you know, moving from traditional advertising over to digital advertising. Absolutely. And There is this massive need, still is, always will be, massive need for people who know what they’re doing to steward that ad spend as people are trying to figure out, okay, , what on earth does digital advertising mean?
Where can we spend our money? How do we track the success of it? So forth and so on. And so we started with that goal of, all right, how do we, Help businesses figure out those things and and very intentionally use that word steward because that’s what we believe we are We are the stewards of the budgets of our clients trying to spend as effectively as possible and then also show them through, , good reporting tracking the success or hopefully not lack thereof Of how that depends being spent Yeah.
What are some of the and obviously only so much that we can do in, you know in a podcast episode, but when you start thinking about high return, you know, ad campaigns and even just kind of wrapping your head around that, especially for new clients or otherwise, like, where does that conversation begin?
generally it begins around targeting. It is. All right. Who, who is your target audience? And, , don’t just tell me anybody in the world, you know, let’s talk about, you know, truly who is the most likely. But I work with business owners, John. That’s not enough. People that have businesses. Exactly.
Yeah, every small business owner. Like, all right, now let’s, you know, let’s stop the early conversation. Exactly. It’s about honing down. It’s about identifying, okay, well, You know, let’s say maybe theoretically every small business, , is someone who could purchase your service. Cool, well, who is purchasing currently?
You know, what are the patterns we can identify? Is it geographic? Is it a particular need, a particular use case, whatever? And so let’s figure out what’s working well already for you and your business. And who are your best customers based upon that? And then, awesome, how do we replicate that? How do we identify?
Other businesses or consumers who match those patterns, who are searching for those things, who are expressing those needs. And then how do we communicate to them that you are the best fit to meet those needs? Where do you find in the early stages that people often go wrong in this step? Like, , where’s the challenge there?
I would say a lot of businesses, very common, I’ll see either on our, our paid social channels or just reach out to us looking for help is, well, I tried that already and it didn’t work. You know, they could be talking about Google or Facebook or fill in the blank. Okay. And that’s, you know, it’s often true.
They, they tried some advertising campaigns in a platform. They didn’t see good results. And so they say, Oh, this platform’s not for me. But the problem is the platforms it’s, you know, it’s really, really easy to waste money on the platforms because it’s really easy to spend money. And unless what you’re doing and you have really, , someone really carefully structuring things, monitoring things, reporting on things, et cetera.
You know, you’re just contributing to Google or Facebook’s quarterly earnings. And so that’s, that’s often the mistake I would say is businesses who. Try to prove the concept of a particular advertising channel without really giving it the opportunity of having someone or an agency or an in house team member Whatever who has the skill set of giving them the best shot for success on that level just breaking it down a little bit further.
So let’s just say we if we were taking and I know this isn’t a perfect Roadmap, there’s a lot of things in between so far, but listen, i’m obviously jumping around a little bit Nothing’s that simple. We get that but But just kind of drilling down a little bit further. Are there some nuances or maybe differences between how you are approaching whether it’s B2B versus B2C, like, let’s go a little bit further into that side of things.
Yeah, absolutely. So there are quite a few differences and it’s a lot of similarities and all the differences between, you know, business to business, digital advertising campaigns and business to consumer. I would say one differentiates them is that. Generally speaking with business to business, it depends on what your business is, but often it’s a little more of a needle in the haystack where.
There may be a lot of consumers, residential business out there that are searching for similar things as businesses might be searching for, but that obviously are not your audience. And so a lot of digital advertising is about excluding people, not just finding the right people, but trying to prevent.
Other people who might be searching the same keywords as a business owner, but who are never going to purchase your SAS product or whatever. And so trying to make sure that , you’re not wasting so much money on the wrong people that even if you are hitting some of the right people.
It’s not a good ROI. So that, that targeting and figuring out, okay, where are people spending their time in the business world? How are they searching is important. And there’s a lot of ways that you can go about trying to craft your ad messaging and approaches to, you know, to try and, and get in front of the right people and keep the wrong people away.
I think probably another. Big difference is sales cycle time as well. So there’s exceptions to every rule, but generally speaking in the B2B space, the sales cycle between someone clicking through and actually purchasing a service or product or hiring you is often longer than on the consumer side of things.
And so you’ve got to take that sales cycle into account as well when you’re running advertising campaigns and analyzing performance and judging, Hey, is this campaign working or not? Well, if it takes six months for you to turn a lead. Into a customer you probably shouldn’t decide three months in whether or not the campaign is working If you are yeah getting leads into your pipeline, obviously if you’re not getting any leads that it’s a moot point But a you’ve got to give yourself enough time to really get through that sales cycle and identify on the b2b side Whether or not something is is working.
Well Now you’re correct me if I’m off on this. The company specializing Google ads, correct? Yeah. I would say Google ads is our number one focus. And then in addition to that, we also manage a number of other platforms like Meta and Microsoft and so forth. what’s interesting, like what, what’s on your vantage point?
Like we always hear about updates and other things that are going on, whether it’s Google ads or other way, otherwise, like you’ve been , a decade over a decade in on this work with many, many clients let’s say you stewarded a lot of assets in your day already and, you know, with much more to come what like excites you right now?
Like what’s on your dashboard or what’s interesting to you that’s happening in advertising right now in digital? I say the billion dollar question right now is how all of the, I like that learning models . Yeah. There’s a lot of I like that. Go ahead. Yeah, it’s about how will or won’t user behavior searching for things change with things like chat GPT with Google is in the process right now of making some significant changes to what the search engine results page looks like incorporating their Gemini and different things. And so there’s a lot of questions in the marketplace.
How are people, is Google search going to, Remain the number one place that most people go to start their search for something. Is it going to be, you know, 20 percent is going to chat GPT or two other places. And so it’s exciting because at the end of the day, all I care about is connecting. Our clients to customers.
So I don’t really care where they’re spending their time. If that’s on Google search, that’s in check, wherever I want to figure out, how can we make that connection? And I’m confident that the paid, you know, advertising side of things is going to continue to play an important role in that. Because every company wants to make money.
And generally speaking, they realize they can make money by charging businesses to make that connection to their audience. So, it’s really I should say, it’s exciting. And those are the fundamentals that go back to newspapers. I mean, how far back do we want to go, right? Like, how as far back as we want to go.
That’s, that’s the fundamental way of how we add value, right? 100%. Yeah. That’s one of the things I talk to the team, which is, look, there’s these tools we use right now, you know, Google ads, Facebook, whatever the tools are always going to change. They’ve changed massively over the last decade.
Things have come and gone, , the way things look , like they do now, we’re not going to look the same way in 10 years, but companies will always need to connect with customers. And that is how we view. Our business then we can adapt and evolve with the methods and tools that are out there to accomplish that purpose.
Yeah. And I feel like, , and I don’t know, I, I’ve just seen for companies, especially in advertising or otherwise that are staying in front of it, like to me, what has happened a lot of times is it’s expanded the market and like it making it easier has even just Educated people I can think of the early days of even a facebook and we don’t do any advertising or stuff like that But I just think about like when I was contributing to their quarterly, you know, they made it really easy, right?
Like so they made it easy and what we and we put some money into it at one point and you know We do other things but then podcast is our main thing, but I just mean, Like the market expanded at that point, because I was, as a small business owner was willing to like, , to experiment and explore.
And if I felt that, , we want to go further along that line, then we would have done good to hire an agency like yours or any others that, that specialize in that, if we felt that that was what we’re going to meet our need, but had the market not expanded to where that was on my, like, , on my vantage point it would have never happened.
So I think back when I look, when I think about that, I think about the yellow pages, right? Like how long, and the yellow page is still out there. The yellow page is still like, people still have yellow pages. People still have like, if there’s still people doing that, like it’s not going to disappear. It’s just going to get bigger.
Exactly. It will, it will get bigger and there’ll be more opportunities and also, , more opportunities , for differentiations as there’s, as there’s more ways that people find that information. , if you look at now versus when the Yellow Pages was the way to find, you know, business local to you, there’s so many more ways now you can find and therefore so many more opportunities for businesses to get a cutting edge and, getting the right placement.
Yeah, I want to jump around a little bit here. So talk to me about, I mean, , a company building high performing teams. Like , what’s some of your secret to keeping the team together? I mean, we’ve done a lot, a lot of things just for context for somebody that may listen to this far into the future where, , this 2024 may we’re post pandemic, like, like you’ve been in business, obviously 10 years.
So you’ve already weathered multiple storms. Right. Like building high performing teams, like talk to me about like some of your secrets or keys to success there. Yeah, we’ve we’ve done a lot of experiments over time. We’ve, we’ve done the good, the bad and the ugly and trying to build a, build a good team, definitely learn, learn some things along the way and still learning every day.
I think some of the things that we’ve learned are education , is really not a focus, especially in the digital advertising space. For me, I don’t really care what your schooling was or what your degree was. Because you can’t learn in school what we do currently, generally speaking. I mean, you can learn high level important things about running businesses, about marketing ideas and concepts, et cetera, but you’re not going to know how to sit down and run a Google ads campaign.
And if someone puts out a course about that, by the time that course is published, it’s probably not going to be accurate anymore because they’ve changed things since then. , we’re very much focused on experience and people who already kind of understand the platforms that we’re looking to manage on behalf of our clients and try and bring on people who have got track record of success and also looking at their character.
So integrity is something that’s very important to us. We are transparent with our clients. We don’t mislead them, fudge numbers, things like that. And so it’s very important to find people who, Are going to take that approach and be transparent internally and externally. If they make a mistake own up to it.
And it’s important to to create a culture where. If someone makes a mistake, it’s not about, Hey, let’s go scream at that person, point fingers and make them feel terrible. It’s about, okay, you know, it’s a mistake, own up to it. How do we make sure we don’t make this mistake again? And as long as we’re making sure we’re not continuing to make the same mistakes and always getting better and improving, that’s what I want to see.
And so by building that type of a culture, it makes people willing to. I think be more transparent and say, Hey, I did this thing. How do we fix this? As opposed to trying to hide those problems or issues or mistakes, and then they balloon into much greater problems that have to be dealt with. That’s great.
Well, I just have to say it has been a lot of fun. Fun having you on here, John. Lots more we could talk about, but we’re about out of time for this particular episode. That being said I know that people that are listening are going to have more questions. They want, we want you to check out a campaign that they’re running or otherwise.
How do people connect with your group and learn more about Stub Group? Yeah, best place to connect to be through our website, stubgroup. com. You can check us out on there and we offer, we call our free consultation. So we’ll take a look at advertising you’re currently doing, tell you the good, the bad and the ugly about it and how we might do it differently.
Or if you’re just getting into the space we’ll kind of put an action plan together for you and give you some ideas on how we might start digital advertising for your business. Amazing. And for everybody listening, we’ll put that information the show notes that you can just head right on over and speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters, we’re all about bringing on business owners, entrepreneurs and executives and having them share their mission, the reason behind why they do what they do, what we can all learn from that so that we can all grow together.
If that sounds interesting to you, we welcome you hit that subscribe button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re putting out new episodes and new entrepreneurs, and we don’t want you to miss a thing. So again, hit that subscribe button. And John, again, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks so much, Adam.