Adam Torres and Shawn Denney discuss marketing.
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Show Notes:
When budgets are tight, how can you maximize your testing budget to make a real business impact? In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Shawn Denney, Growth Strategist at Intero Digital. Explore marketing strategies and testing.
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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 in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So did I have Shawn Denney on the line and he’s a growth strategist over at Intero Digital, Shawn, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much, Adam. All right, Shawn. So we got a lot to talk about today, man, a lot of business owners, a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of executives that listen to this, and we’re going to talk about testing business and marketing ideas for growth, who doesn’t want growth, especially profitable growth.
We’re going to get into that and more. But before we do, we’ll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we like to call our mission matters minute. So Shawn, at mission matters, we aim to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s our mission, Shawn, what mission matters to you?
I think when someone’s really passionate about their, their vision, their mission, their company, that’s really important. And so what matters to me is helping them bring those missions, those, those values to life. And that’s what we do at Intero digital is we don’t see ourselves as a vendor. We are a company that becomes part of your team.
So your mission becomes our mission. Your goals become our goals. That’s awesome. Well, love bringing mission based individuals on the line to share why they do what they do, how they’re doing it, and really what we all learned from that. So we grow together. So just, just diving right in. I mean, when did you get interested in even this concepts of growth?
I mean, obviously you’re a growth strategist in your day to day, but like, where’d all that come from? So I started out in marketing over a decade back and I thought it was fascinating just to see. What does, what is someone interested in? And if you look at marketing and business over time, what worked one day doesn’t work the next day or space it out.
It’s not day to day, but you get what I’m saying with over time, things change. And I think, I thought it was fascinating to say, okay, well, what’s going to work today and how do we set ourselves up for future success? Cause what we’re doing right now, isn’t going to continue with that. And then. How it all plays together.
Cause doing one thing isn’t enough. You have to do a lot of things very well to be a successful business. And Shawn, a lot of people have, you know, trouble with with change. So even when you say something like what work today may not work in a year or a month or six months or whatever, like, like, to me, that’s just part of the landscape and that’s just part of the deal because if it worked permanently, like long term forever, like everybody would be doing it right.
Like there, but there isn’t any magic like that. There’s now there’s true things you can do. There’s systems you can build. There is. Practices and their strategic ways to grow. But it’s not always going to be the same thing. How do you, how do you handle that conversation with clients or otherwise, or even yourself for that matter about like just growth and like what that looks.
So it really comes down to looking at and truly evaluating what’s working for you right now. And why do you think that’s working and what’s not working for you? And you have to be honest about that through that conversation with yourself or with. Customers or anyone else. And then as you’re looking at it and really taking that deep dive.
Okay, if it’s not working, what do I need to change? What is working? Let’s keep doing that for as long as it is working. But you can’t be stuck in your ways, and it’s a cycle of what’s working, what’s not, let’s change what’s not working. And then it just repeats and repeats and repeats. Yeah, one of the things that that people are sometimes uncomfortable with.
But to me, I mean, I love it. Like we have, I learned pretty early on that if we’re not always testing, if we’re not testing something new, even if it doesn’t work, we learn something like period, like there’s always a learning going on, like, what are your views on testing and where does this play into play into the, to the equation?
So testing is essential because user behavior change. If we go, if we go back and we look at what kind of marketing was on TV 50 years ago versus what was on TVs 30 years ago versus what was on TV five years ago, all of them are drastically different. It’s still the same medium. But what was said, how it was said, how it’s conveyed is drastically different.
And users are changing too. It used to be, you would watch TV, you would listen to radio. You might read a newspaper or a magazine, and that was how you would engage with media. Now, most people are online and they spend way more time online than other aspects. So when you look at it and say, okay, well, are they just on Facebook?
Are they just on Instagram? Are they just on Tik TOK? No, they’re on all three of those. And they’re on Google and they’re on YouTube and they’re on email and, and, and, and. And so part of it is saying, well, if I’m not doing any of these, how do I start adding that? How do I test what works for my audience?
How do I test what works for my brand? How do I test my voice on these different channels and how do I make sure that each one works for me in terms of what I want to convey, what I want to say, and how I want to interact with people at testing is really important to understand because you can’t just say, you know what?
I have to do email. That’s going to be the thing. Well, it might be the thing. It might not. And what email you have today might work great. But in a year it might not. And that may need to change again, based off your users and where they’re at and what they’re doing. What kind of channels do you work on?
So that’s a good point. You brought up email, like what other channels is like testing important? Or like, can you give us some examples? Absolutely. So paid advertising on Google is a clear one where testing is very important, not only in the messaging and who you’re going after, but even the platform itself.
When Google is constantly rolling out. Here’s a new ad format. Here’s a new bidding strategy. Here’s new ways to engage and new ways to show your advertising content. Well, if I roll as an example, performance max is a type of ad that Google rolled out that works across video imagery and written text inside of the Google search result.
Well, do I want that all rolled into one or not? That’s something that should be tested to see is it better separate or combined to get the best results. And so once you start gathering that data, and obviously this is going to be different on what you’re testing and how you’re testing and otherwise, like, how do you use that data or those things to make informed decisions?
Cause that’s ultimately like as a business owner, whether you’re thinking about marketing, where you’re deploying capital, what you’re selling your products. I mean, there’s so in everything we need data to make better decisions. Like how does that data help make better decisions specifically in marketing and growth?
So when, when you, before you even start testing, you have to have a, what’s your mission and B, what are your goals? What are we trying to achieve? Once you have that, you can then compare, here’s the data coming back. How much traffic am I getting? How much visibility, how many conversions, how many leads, how many purchases, how much dollars.
And you can see how much did I spend to do this? How much effort did it take me? Did this work or did it not? And really look at, okay, if I spent XYZ dollars, I spent 5, 000, I spent 300, I spent 50, 000, whatever it is. How many leads did I get from this? What was the quality of those leads? So it’s not in a vacuum.
It has to be looked through your whole ecosystem of your business of what am I trying to achieve to make sure this worked? And it shouldn’t be done from one person. This is a conversation between marketing, between sales, between operations, between that whole business of this is what we’re doing. Here’s the timeframe we did it.
Did we feel any changes? Did we see any changes? Our leads were up, but revenue didn’t. Is this because it’s a longer sales cycle? What’s needed to really evaluate the success of this in a holistic environment. Now, one of the things that’s going to come up for every business owner, I don’t care who you are, I don’t care the size of the business budgets, budgets, budgets, right?
If the budget’s tight and at what budget isn’t tight. I don’t know. Anytime I’ve heard a business owner be like, yeah, my budget’s not tight. That ain’t happening. I don’t care what it is. Maximizing or thinking about maximizing a budget or even having a budget on the side to test to make like real impact.
Like, like, how do you, how do you even approach that question? So first I like to set defined goals of what’s working and what’s not inside of, if I’m meeting this threshold, it’s working and I can keep pushing money into it. Cause if you’re making money. Yeah, and you are getting a positive return on that.
You should be able to funnel more money into it. Of course, to get that. So once you have that threshold, set the bottom X dollars or X percent and whatever that is, isn’t working. And you’ve set your time frame to test it. Okay, that’s not working. I’m going to test something else. And it’s a constant cycle of.
If it moves it up, whatever’s not working at the bottom, cycle that out and cycle that out and cycle that up. You want to give enough time to actually test it. So this, depending on the different channel, the different initiatives, maybe it’s one month, maybe it’s three months, maybe it’s six months, depending on your industry, but you constantly want to be looking at what’s that underperformer and cycle it out for a new test to make sure it’s getting there to your specific question of what if I don’t have enough budget though, like I just don’t understand how to make this work.
There was that old adage of. I know 50 percent of my marketing is working. I just don’t know what 50 percent got it. Do you have to then say, okay, well, where do I feel like I can either add a little bit extra or where can I say I can take a little bit off the top here and a little bit off the top. to push that further.
Mm-Hmm. Marketing is how your business grows. I know it’s one of the first things that’s usually cut when budgets get tight. It’s also the thing that’s going to push it when you have that capital to make it happen. Mm-Hmm. . So one of the most impactful decisions you can make as that business owner is committing.
To having that marketing budget and that testing budget as part of it. Maybe it’s 5%, maybe it’s 10%, but just setting that goal for yourself and sticking to it. Yeah. Talk to me a little bit more about interior digital, maybe some of the things you specialize in overall, like talk, talk to me a little bit more about the company as well.
Sure. So we are a full service digital marketing agency. We’ve got multiple offices across the United States in California, Utah, Colorado, Ohio, Missouri, and potentially expanding from there. And we specialize in that holistic approach to digital to digital marketing. So that doesn’t mean we can’t do things or we have specializations in like search engine optimization.
Or paid media advertising or web design and development content and PR. So we have these specializations, but inside of it, we have about 17 different service lines and different digital marketing channels that we work with to say, what is your team doing well? And where do you feel you’re not doing well?
Where can we augment you to make this work for everyone and hit every stage of that buyer’s journey of that consumer journey, To make it an effective engagement so that from all the way from awareness to retention, even after they’ve become a customer. And, and there’s an innovation lab as well too, right?
Like talk, talk to me a little bit about that. Yep. So one of our divisions is called innovation labs and what it it’s primary purpose. Is to find new technologies find new techniques to test these new policies and these new things that are coming out For example meta might give a very vague description about a new policy update.
That’s not very hold on Hold on. Hold on Shawn meta would never do that never, right Anybody that’s a marketer that’s watching this is probably just spit up their coffee. Go ahead Meta would never do this very clear every time go every single time So is Google. So is Microsoft. Oh, no, don’t bring up the Google.
No, I’m just playing. And so part of our role as the Innovation Lab is to say, okay, let’s actually test this. Let’s find exactly what this means, what those limits are. So that when you engage with us, you don’t have to do that test. We’ve already done it for you. We know what works. We know what doesn’t. We understand the nuance by industry, by policy.
And we can push that and our clients can get the benefit of it without having to invest specifically. In testing themselves for those. Yeah. And giving an example, that might be something like maybe they, they, they have a new update on a type of ad that you can put out or to a certain like targeting. And all of a sudden they’re like, okay, you can’t target this, but that’s very broad.
Does it mean I can’t, I can’t do it at all? Or does it mean a little, like, what does that mean exactly? So you’re testing it with your dollars. To see, like, if you’re going to get this strike or ding or this, like the ads not approved or things like that, I just want to make sure I understand it clear and that our audience does.
Am I off on this? Cause I think it’s a big deal. I haven’t heard of many companies doing that, if any, that I know of. Yep, that that’s absolutely correct. So something like as an example, in some states, CBD might be legal in other states. It might have some very hazy policies around what can be advertised, what can be said around CBD, what cannot be said around CBD.
And this isn’t just for meta, this would be for Google. So we’re going to say, no, no, we’re going to test, we’re going to find the exact limits of what’s allowed, what’s not. What’s the reach it’s going to have? What are the limitations? What’s the extra cost associated with something like this? Or even something not as controversial, potentially, as a topic like that.
Looking at these AI platforms. So chat, chatty, Gemini, as those are rolling out. Google’s rolling out their AI overviews inside of search. So how does this work? How does someone impact that? What does it even mean? Where Google’s saying things like, Well, if you have the right content, We’re going to show the best one there.
Okay. Can you be any more vague in what you’re actually saying? Said the right content Shawn. Didn’t you get that? Duh?
We’re gonna test what actually triggers those overviews what triggers chat gpt versus gemini What’s different than what they’re looking for? How do we make that work to understand and make sure that? Valuable information or misinformation. How do I identify that as it’s coming through some of these technologies?
Yeah, it may, it makes so much sense and it, and it does show, you know, forward thinking from the company and you brought up AI, so, you know, I got, I have to, I can’t let you put that on the table without going further. Like, like how is that being used in terms of like, whether it’s Intero digital, like currently or future, or just like what kind of conversations are being had?
Cause I’m sure, you know, just. It’s for thingy company. You guys are doing something. Absolutely. So AI is changing the way that search is happening and people are interacting with gathering internet or information off the internet. So when someone’s using a search engine, it doesn’t matter what search engine, whether that’s.
One of the new AI search engines or a classic one like Google or Bing, they’re coming with a pain. Wow. Isn’t that interesting that we’re talking about it as a classic one now? Yeah. All right. Wow. Continue. But that’s like, that’s, that’s already new. And you’re right. More and more people are saying that like our lexicon has already changed, whether we like it or not, or otherwise that’s already now classic.
Go ahead. But I, that just blew my mind when you said it. Cause I keep hearing it. I obviously I do a lot of interviews. I talked to a lot of people and I keep hearing it. I’m like, wow, that’s already like classic. And we’re already thinking in that manner. The whole we’ve all shifted and with any of those search engines, however, we’re using them, we are coming with a pain point or a problem.
We want something, whether that’s information to solve or answer. Or to just entertain us or whatever it is. We’re still looking for that information, but something that’s very different about these newer AI models is it’s an interaction, not a one way street. So historically on something like Google being.
You type in your keyword phrase, it brings up information. You click on a link and you are finding that solution with something like chat, GPT, as an example, I type in what I want, it’s going to come back with information and I continue the conversation with it while I’m going, while I’m getting deeper.
And that is already a huge difference in terms of search behavior and how we interact. So to get a little nerdy here on the stats. Typically, a person is going to type between three and seven words into a search engine to get it. For something that is voice search related, so when we talk into our phone or we yell at Alexa to actually search for us, that jumps up to about 16.
When we are interacting with something like chat GPT or Gemini or perplexity or any of those, it becomes closer to 100 word conversation that we’re having with the platform to get that information back and refine the nuance answer that we want from it. And that’s only just started within the last year.
That’s going to continue to evolve for how we interact with things, how we talk to it, what information we get back, when we get it back and the form that it comes in. So now how does, how is this, how is this affecting some of the decisions that you’re seeing people make when it comes to their marketing and to their growth?
Like, how is that affecting it through this change in this shift? It, it is just starting out, but absolutely yes, because as people are shifting off of Google, And going over to chat GPT or Gemini, that also means businesses are now saying, but how do I be on that platform? I want to still be relevant. I still want to be there.
And even inside of something like Google search changed its layout, it’s changed its format in the search engine results page quite dramatically, lots more features than it used to have with video carousels, image carousels. And people also ask. And Quora’s becoming a more prevalent part of it. Reddit’s becoming very popular as a core feature of the search result.
So what used to just be, Hey, I would go to Google. I would get my answer now. How do I impact this entire ecosystem to make sure I’m prevalent wherever someone’s searching and finding me, which is interesting to me because I look back at, and when I say this, some of the younger people are going to be like, what is he talking about?
But if you’ve been in this long enough, I remember when Google business and just adding, like having to have your business having its own page on Google. That was a big deal. There was a lot of people that made a lot of money setting up businesses with Google, which is Google pages for their businesses and listings.
And those that were early adopters and figured it out, some of them made some real money based on being findable on search. And otherwise, let’s just say classic search. They made some real money because their competition that wasn’t paying attention and maybe You know, took five years or whatever the amount of time was.
And there are some people that still haven’t and still don’t realize they’re losing leads because their Google page isn’t like legit their Google business page and they’re not findable. Like that’s a very simple example. And that’s kind of like where I think of it in my head of where it started. But those that adopt this and start thinking about this kind of stuff sooner.
Those that are going to, they’re going to just naturally show up first. They’re going to get like, they’re going to be showing up more on unbalanced, valuable content for the end user, which is the person that’s searching or interacting for that particular business and or service and or piece of content or information, because ultimately it doesn’t matter.
One theme is like across the board and that is. They want your eyeballs. They want you to sit there. They want you to be on their platform. They want you to go to their platform as much as possible, because that’s a part of the anybody’s model, social media, search, chat, GPT, whatever it is, if you’re using the tool, there’s a potential to monetize your traffic one way or another, which would whatever model they use.
So for the business owners who are kind of ignoring this, it’s like, ah, don’t let this be another, like Google business moment, if you ignored that too. And then you ignored this and that, like, it’s just, cause this one, I mean, my belief is that it’s just going to happen faster and that’s going to be, that’s it.
So then it’s not going to be a difference of like, you just decrease pretty slowly. It’s going to be a, you wake up one day and you were, maybe you were getting a certain amount of lead flow online and now it just disappeared. Out of nowhere. And then the switch was just shut off and you don’t know why.
And you’re trying to now think it’s branding or connecting with the client or this, that, which it might be, who knows, but probably not. Not if it’s just an abrupt, like turn off of lead, which is possible. It’s possible. Not, not, I don’t know if it’s probable, but it’s possible for those that don’t choose to stay up to date.
Very much so. And the user behavior is only going to continue to evolve with it. So this is, this is. This is not something where, and I’m not just talking to AI. I mean, the ecosystem, this is not something where it’s a, Oh, that’s a nice to have this is on the path to, this is necessary for the business.
Yeah. Well, Shawn, this has been, man, this has been a lot of fun having you on the show and getting into just growth and what’s going on there. What’s like, what’s next for you? What’s next for Intero digital? Like talk to me about what’s next on the plans on the horizon. A big one that we’ve been doing a lot of testing on, we’ve already touched on a little bit, which is this AI and how we interact with it.
It’s referring to generative engine optimization. So how do you make someone show up and be that answer and that authority for those different responses? And that’s a big push for us to make sure that we are able to fulfill that and be effective for all of our clients in that front. Yeah. Another big piece of it is to make sure that.
Whatever’s coming next because there is going to be the next thing for sure. We aren’t just waiting for it, but we’re ready for it whenever it launches because every single one of these channels and every single business. It’s going to continue to test and it’s going to continue to go through an evolution that we can’t sit on the sidelines and watch happen.
We have to help make it happen to where our clients are feeling the successes from it and not the pain from it. Yeah, it’s great. Well, Shawn, if somebody is listening to this and they want to follow up and continue the conversation, I know we scratched the surface on some of these things and I know you can go away further as can your team.
How do people connect with Intel Digital? You can find us at interrodigital. com. We have contact form, phone number, email readily available there. You can find us on social media, Interro Digital, very easy across all the major platforms, or if none of those are working and you’re like, but, but how do I just call?
There’s also our phone numbers all across the internet. Feel free. Whoa, a phone number. That’s what I’m talking about, man. A real company. I love it. So we’ll, by the way, we’ll put, we’ll, for everybody watching, we’ll put all that information in the in the show notes so that you can just click on the links, head right on over to the website, of course, or give, or give them a ring as well.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t hit the subscribe or follow button yet, we welcome you to do so. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new entrepreneurs, new executives, new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration.
going to help you along the way in your journey as well. So that’s what this is all about is all of us growing together. So definitely hit that subscribe or follow button and Shawn, man, this has been a lot of fun. I look forward to continuing to watch your journey and thank you for coming on. Thanks for having me, Adam.