The Focus of Marketing Results, not the Marketing Process – Amanda Poplin & Jennifer Willard | CYBER Edition Pt. 2

Studied transportation development at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee at the Center for Transportation Education and Development

Certifications/degrees in Public Transit Management, Rural Transit Development along with Planning and Marketing for Transit

Graduate of the Disney Institute as a Disney Imagineer

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Watch the episode here:

The Focus of Marketing Results, not the Marketing Process – Amanda Poplin & Jennifer Willard | CYBER EDITION PT2

We have part 2 of 2 on an amazing guest that was on. She’s brought a friend and colleague from Eastern Tennessee. This is Amanda Poplin. If you read part one, that’s awesome. If you didn’t, read it after you finished this one because both of these episodes are amazing. Share these with tons of people. That’s what we ask because that’s how we grow. That’s how we continue to impact even more people and help out this amazing world we live in. Amanda Poplin, welcome back, and Jennifer Willard, it’s good to see you. What I have about you, Jennifer, is that you studied transportation but you’re in the marketing arena. You’re a graduate of the Disney Institute as a Disney Imagineer. Was that also in marketing for them? What did you do for the Disney Imagineer stuff?

I’ve been here in the Myrtle Beach market for a while. I have a very diverse and different background in marketing than your normal person in the industry. I did start my career off in public transit. I went to college at CCU for elementary education. While I was there, I started working at the transit authority and thought, “Maybe I’ll stick with this for a while.” I went to the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee for degrees in Public Transit Management and Real Transit Development, which is a very unique industry.

I worked at the transit authority for six years, and then I moved on to hospitality and tourism with Ripley’s Aquarium and all the Believe It or Not! properties here in Myrtle Beach. I worked for them for a couple of years as the Director of Marketing. After my stint at Ripley’s Aquarium, I moved on to Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament, which is a national brand dinner and show. I worked at Medieval Times as the Director of Marketing and Sales, as I call myself The Marketing Princess, for ten years at the castle here in Myrtle Beach.

I worked at 7 of the 9 Medieval Times national locations as The Marketing Princess. After that, I moved on to the resort industry with Bluegreen Vacations, which is a national timeshare brand in Myrtle Beach. It’s one of their biggest markets in the country. It was over five resorts here as well as I managed several welcome centers and a lot of different associates in marketing, sales and development. I then moved on to Beazer Homes in real estate and construction. Now, we have started our own digital marketing fund. I’m the marketing behind all of that. I have a diverse background in marketing.

To summarize, Jennifer knows her shit. That’s incredible. You’re doing all the digital side of things as you kept going, but in that whole thing, you didn’t talk about being Disney Imagineer.

I forgot all about Disney Imagineering Academy. Disney Imagineering Program was one of the fun things that I got along the course of my way that helped develop me as a marketing and creative engineer and would help diversify my career. I went to the Disney Institute. They offer a variety of different classes. You get mouse ears with all the graduates at the end of this program. That was a fun and creative course. Marketing and strategic development as well. Disney says, “The way to make it happen is to just do it.” I’m a big Walt Disney fan.

Digital marketing, there are a lot of misnomers about this that exist. I was at a client. I was there to talk about some of the cyber stuff because they’re shifting directions. It’s a law firm. They want to streamline and do a whole bunch of things. They‘ve been using the same platform for ten years. This poor dude has been a client for years. He’s had a lot of insider threats. One of the stories from him is in my book, Situational Ethics. It’s from an attorney that was trying to siphon off case files to launch her own firm. Her own firm failed before, but then she was trying to use this to jumpstart another one.

We had screen recordings of her entering in a credit card number to purchase a Dropbox subscription on her own to upload all these files. She’s done and disbarred. It was awesome.

Oh, no.

There’s no, “Oh, no.” She crossed the line. It’s like, “Sorry, you messed up.” That’s what we do, but I feel sorry for the dude because he’s had this happen a couple of times. We won’t talk about it. He went in and was like, “I’ve got five years left. I’m 62 years old. What I’ve done all these years is start getting my name out there. I need PR. I hired these people for PR.” I’m like, “What does PR mean to you?”

He goes through this long ten-minute explanation of stuff, leaning over, talking quietly. I’m like, “I thought you were like a wolf in a jury trial. Come on. Speak up.” That’s what I’m thinking while he’s doing this. I’m like, “To summarize your ten-minute rants, you receive referrals from colleague attorneys that generate you revenue. You need to keep yourself in front of them and top of mind.” He’s like, “That’s it.” “In one sentence right there, that’s what PR means to you.” He’s like, “Yeah. I think we need to use LinkedIn because it’s free and we’re missing out. I got this list of 500 names. I’ve got 1,000 connections on LinkedIn.” I’m like, “1,000? That’s it?”

His wife was in the room too. She’s like, “I don’t think LinkedIn matters because it’s just all of his friends and everything.” I’m like, “Here’s the deal. Nobody under the age of 40 knows you exist. The people that you want, that’s great because all of your peers are your age. That’s okay because you’ve got good friends, but they’re in their years to where they’re thinking, ‘I got 1, 2, 5 years left.’ Everybody under 40 are people that can look up to you and be like, ‘I want to be like you someday.’ They’re going to refer cases and make money.”

As a personal injury, he keeps 1/3 plus case expenses of the settlement. A referring attorney keeps 1/3 of the third so they still make money. It’s cool how that works. If it’s a $1 million settlement, he keeps roughly $350,000. The referring attorney gets a little over $100,000 for not even doing the work. That’s how the structure works.

It’s multilevel marketing in the simplest form.

I’m trying to explain this concept as I said this because one of the things that I love about what we do outside of the cyber stuff is we were going through this and defining our purpose, our core values and everything. I’m like, “We like to create holy–shit moments.” At this table, his wife goes, “You’re right. Nobody under the age of 40 knows you exist.” I’m like, “I know. That’s what LinkedIn is for.” I walked him through these things. What’s your experience, Jennifer? You have a digital marketing agency. Is that your biggest hurdle in education?

Yes, education of the client.

It’s educating the clients. I’m a huge believer in LinkedIn. If you check my profile, I have probably 7,000- plus connections.

I have 200.

In part one, Amanda drops her props all over the place for real. It’s incredible. It’s a huge download of cyber knowledge. It was intense and amazing.

Now you know the reason why I’ll add 200 people to it.

You’re in cyberspace. I’m in public relations and I need to be in the LinkedIn realm.

Go watch that one on YouTube because Amanda came on episode one. Amanda came on totally sweaty like she just came in from a run or something like that. She popped in her AirPods. She’s like, “Rick, let’s do this. Let’s go.” Jennifer, thank you for letting us had some fun. Please, continue.

Educating our clients on the values of a variety of different marketing channels, not just LinkedIn, but every marketing channel that’s out there is a challenge. A lot of people do not understand the value of LinkedIn and of what it can do to bolster your career as well as your identity. One of the things I did while I was on Corona-cation in 2020 was worked on my LinkedIn profile. I was adamantly making connections, doing online training through LinkedIn, as well as a lot of posts and connecting with other business entities that I can gain knowledge from.

It’s the B2B platform. From digital marketing, do you get into LinkedIn at all or are you mostly on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram for what you do for your clients?

As for the clients, it’s mostly Facebook and Instagram. We always strongly recommend LinkedIn, especially for that B2B connection because it is a B2B platform. It’s not necessarily the same as trying to connect with consumers on Instagram, but a lot of businesses don’t understand why it’s such an important platform to be on as well. There’s validity to LinkedIn. There’s validity to the connections and the business relationships that you can garnish from LinkedIn. Most of our clients don’t recognize that and it’s always Instagram and Facebook, which are the two most popular platforms.

How has the landscape of Facebook and Instagram changed over 2020? I got shadowbanned three times in 2020 on Instagram.

I don’t want to know what you were posting.

It might have opinions. I got action blocked a few times also. I filmed the movie Liberty Lockdown. It was a documentary. During the pandemic, this is what I was doing besides on the weekends. It’s bad for me to be stuck at home. This was April 2020. I was stuck at home. I bought timeshares and clothes online on the weekend of April 2020. I got to get out and do something. I made a movie, Liberty Lockdown, all about government overreach.

Why I got shadowbanned was because of this content. We were promoting the film. The film was about government overreach. Everything started getting tagged with that little CDC disclaimer. We weren’t even talking about the virus. That’s the thing. The movie wasn’t even about the virus. It was about the government’s response to this entire situation. Even with ads with dollars that we were spending, it was only showing my paid ad revenue to my existing following, which was stupid. You’d look at the insights and would say, “100% were already following Mr. Rick Jordan.” I then got action blocked and all this other stuff. There are these unspoken rules. What have you seen around this? How do you play nice?

We’ve never been banned.

We’re doing something right. We’re not getting banned. I’ve been staying away from politically hot topics and other things. That keeps you out of the banned rail in any platform that you’re using. There are analytics and features in there that automatically pick up on certain words no matter how you use them. It’s a flag word. All of a sudden, you’re on that. You’re going to get on the banned list. I’ve seen a lot of changes. The message in the content that we post is not necessarily related to any social or political ties. That’s probably one of the reasons we haven’t had a lot of banning or flagging on any of our content.

What have you seen from a success part point? Do you have specific industries you typically work with?

We work with a variety of different businesses from eCommerce platforms, from leather stores to CBD, to watersports. We’ve got everything from attractions and retail to other types of businesses that are online. As far as the ads, as long as we are creating dynamic content that doesn’t cross those lines into the political realm or doesn’t include other things that are hot topics, you don’t get banned.

You’re saying I did something wrong.

Maybe.

They do have the checkpoint when you go into it. It will say, “Is it a sensitive topic? Please pick it.” Maybe that’s what’s giving it. You’re trying to be honest. Maybe that’s what ticking the box.

I’m just trying to stir the pot a little bit because I understand straight up that those are not the platforms if you want to have an awareness or reach people. Those are not the platforms to have that unless you’re part of a legitimate political campaign or something like that. I’m sure those profiles have very special treatment versus an indie filmmaker that’s putting stuff out there to the public to try to bring some truth to the world.

If you didn’t notice, on the politics in 2020, everything started popping up with, “Have you gone to vote?” All of those kinds of things. Facebook has changed the dynamics of how they try to engage with consumers and people who are using the platform from a political standpoint. I was tired of seeing the notices, “Did you vote yet?” I’m in business.

It is a generation that does eat iPads.

I don’t think all babies leaving the hospital should get their own iPhones.

I’m so with you on that for real. My twins got their first iPhones when they were seven. They’re young. I was a good dad too because I waited until they were thirteen and then I’m like, “For your thirteen-year-old birthday, we’re going to get you Instagram accounts. Let’s get you on there.” I even talk to them about posting consistently because the algorithm needs to depend on you in order to show your content out there. Look at the hashtags and all that. At some point, we can do things. They’re awesome. They see me and all our guests on the show and everything. They get ideas. My son and daughter have business plans. My son has three different business plans already that he wants to chase.

It’s impressive to see kids with goals.

Especially business plans. That’s great. Did they write it in cursive?

No. It’s on Google Docs. We outsource what we don’t care to do ourselves. There we go. They got on Instagram. They’re doing consistent things. It’s just a typical 13, 14-year-old account. At some point, it will have a purpose to it, but now it’s just teaching the consistencies in the algorithm. It’s awesome to see them use this. The shifts that you’ve seen in Facebook as you talked about Facebook getting involved and saying, “Did you go vote?” Isn’t that just a data collection tactic?

I think there are deeper tags. It’s a data collection tactic. I also think that it’s an engagement. There are multilevel prongs to the attack of what they’re trying to do with that information. I question it a lot.

We’d probably hurt our heads so bad when you think about that stuff.

We’ll get to the logistics after a little bit of a rant here about what you do. About 1 or 2 months before that, another thing I saw on Facebook was it was asking me, “How are you feeling? Are you experiencing any of these symptoms? Please answer even if you’re feeling healthy. Have you gotten an antibody test? Have you gotten a COVID test?” All of a sudden I’m like, “You just want more data.”

This thing came about. This is a good topic for tech for both of you because this is a shift. You can go on Instagram and Facebook. You can see all these digital marketing gurus that exist out there. Most of them are not worth even the money that they spend to even put that ad in front of you, to begin with, because they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re screwed after this past iOS update. Apple is locking down on privacy on the phones. What’s the transition with that?

There had been this huge battle between Facebook and Apple around privacy. Facebook makes all of its money off of ad revenue and then there’s Apple over here. I swear it’s just positioning. That’s all that it is, which is good because they’re starting to notice, “People are collecting my data without me giving consent or they’re not being transparent about it.” Apple got in trouble for that many times too.

Apple is saying, “We’re going to introduce all these features.” There are things on your phone called the Device ID, which tracks you. Things listen to you. We’ll put it that way. They show up on our Facebook feed as ads. There are ways that Facebook has tracked these and you know this. Can you help everyone whose reading? What was the Facebook pixel? Does that even apply? How do you target people? How does somebody get targeted for these ads in the first place?

I did a series of Facebook ads for a client. I didn’t have any difficulties targeting the people that they were looking for, but I did go by age. It does say by preference because they’re cookie data, so everything’s on the back end. It’s not probably as available as it had been before. With the Facebook realm, the algorithm is still there. They like stuff. They’re going into that whole arena just the way you want if you are going to Google and typing up searches. I haven’t noticed a lot.

There’s a lot more breakdown in the demographics and multiple services that you can now swipe for any particular ad content. I did a series of campaign ads for another client, leather specifically. Breaking it down to people who ride motorcycles, who love leather, who are interested in those specific topics. There are a lot more breakdown options as I’m looking into the dynamics of it. We have a pixel implementation on Facebook.

I always have to ask myself when Apple does something, is that’s to make old Apple versions outdated? Apple tends to lock down older versions of it when they implement a new operating system. The old computers that you have can’t read any of the new phones. With the new computers, you can read all that old stuff. We bought an older Apple phone to either eliminate those from the system. Also, legitimately, some of the elements that they had in security features are not available on the 10 that’s on the new version of the Apple 10. Pixelation is a controversial kind of thing. It is a process to make sure that your pixels are in place with the website and all your algorithms already are in chains with your ads so that you are hitting the right audience.

I’ve seen the code. I looked at the code briefly. It looks like the same thing that you do. That reminds me of one of those tags that people have if you want it to run a specific campaign. That’s what it reminds me of. That was me glancing at it though.

What I want to know is did it shut down any of the old Apple sites?

That’s what I want to know.

This is ever-shifting, just by the sheer amount of knowledge you hit me with. That’s the differentiating factor between you and all these other digital marketing gurus that exist because there might be some element of trial and error, but all they do is trial and error. I don’t think they’re looking at data. I’ve dealt with digital marketing agencies like that too. If you’re working with an agency, unless they can provide you with hard data to make the decisions based off, they’re just guessing.

You got to get granular. Who’s your demographic? Who’s your client? The culture needs some standpoint the better you are. We’ll choose the construction industry. I’m working with a client whose home started at $500,000. When you look at what potential market segment of consumers can afford those levels of homes, it’s a very specific demographic. The more granular that you can get with your demographics, the higher ads and your campaign results will generate a better ROI.

I couldn’t even imagine running anything that was not specific and then perform so poorly.

I try to get super granular when I look at the different types of consumers that I want ad into the campaign set. I understand what the price point is. What is that age group? Is it males? Is it females? Is it people with an active lifestyle? It’s like, “I want to live on the beach but all I’m getting are these mountain homes.” I love geo-fencing as well. I still think it’s such a unique thing. I don’t think businesses suffer from that secretive tracking because, in all fairness, I knew that Bob was sitting at home in his underwear. I know that he likes eating hobo cakes or whatever.

It wasn’t like you could get down to that. Everybody had an identification number. It’s not like I have a secret book that had everybody’s tracking number. Google Analytics did an update to the G4 property. That was rolled out in beta at the beginning of 2021. They’re automatically converting all the sites everywhere to that. I feel that is a better data set than what the previous one did. That’s supposed to adhere to all the security regulations and user’s privacy. The one thing I do miss is my news popping up on Google Chrome. I’ve got to go and fix that. It hit every point that I liked. It had computer stuff. I could have anything and everything. I didn’t have to go search for it. It’s on the Google Chrome.

There are limitations to that. You’re a little more private than you used to be, which is cool. You talked about geo-fencing. That’s huge for these because I’ve seen this be a miss by other digital marketing agencies with the geo-fence. Let’s use this example. If you’re a dentist and you’re trying to drum up business by bringing people in for cleanings, you’re not going to have people driving 100 miles to come to your dental practice. That’s common sense stuff here, but then I saw something on a Facebook group that I’m a part of. This is in IT.

There’s this guy out there getting a bad rap regarding IT firms. I won’t say who he is on the show but afterward, I will. In this group, one of the actual IT business owners was saying that the ad spend was around $600 and they got 65 leads out of it. Many people were saying that this was their campaign set. It reached tens of thousands of people but they got 65 that responded to this ad, so 65 actual leads to call on that said they’re interested. I’m looking at $600 and they’re like, “I would never spend that to get that amount of leads.” I’m like, “That’s $10 a lead. Are you kidding me? It’s good to pay $10 to get a legitimate warm lead.”

What’s important is how many of those leads are converted to being a real business.

Out of 65 leads, let’s say you set an appointment with 20% of them. That’s twelve appointments-ish. Let’s say you close 20% of those, or let’s say you even suck and you only close 10% of those. That’s 1 to 2 closes on a contract. That’s somewhere between $30,000 to $70,000 a year for a managed services contract, and you’ve paid $600 to get that revenue. Come on.

When you break it down to that, it makes sense. When people see the bigger spend, the reaction is, “That’s not effective,” when it really is. That’s when you have to get down to breaking down the numbers.

I had a client one time. They went completely numb when I finally pulled all of the data from their ads. This is circa 2013. It was a little bit more difficult to compile that data but I got good at it. I learned that they spend almost $500,000 being in Google Ads that year and only $40,000 of that was generated. I’ve never seen anything like that. I was like, “These people need Jesus. They don’t need me.” I’ve never worked with anything so astronomical. It wasn’t like they were selling fences and stuff that you order online and have them shipped to your home. I’ve never seen things as bad as that. It was horrible.

On the dollar side, let’s go back to the example of a dentist. From a digital marketing perspective, that is a typical ad that I know exists, “Come in for a cleaning” or something like that. “Here’s a $27 cleaning,” when normally it’s $200. It’s called a loss leader in business. They’re losing a little bit of money on it to get more people in because they clean them and they X-ray them. They find cavities and it’s like, “You need some more work. We need to drill and all these other things.”

The loss leader gets them in the door. For something like us, when it’s online, there’s also a lead magnet, which could be a swipe file, a PDF or something like that in our industry. That initial offer is a loss leader typically. You lose money on it to gain more money on the backside. What’s a typical spend for someone that’s never been in that? Let’s say it’s a single dentist or something. Here’s a question I know a lot of agencies ask, “What’s your budget?” The answer is typically, “I don’t know. I’ve never done this before. Can’t you tell me what my budget should be? Where do we start?” How do we go? How do you start with those virgins in the digital marketing space?

Pretty much everybody that we ever looked at. I always say it depends on how much full throttle we go and the level of expectation. If you expect us to reach 10,000 people in a day, you have to have a budget in place to reach 10,000 people a day. My first question normally when they say that to me is, “What’s your level of expectation? How much business do you realistically want to generate in a specific period of time? Let’s set some goals. Let’s say we want to have 50 leads and you want to have 20 conversions out of those 50 leads.” It’s breaking down the numbers and figure out where’s that spend. On average, a good place to start with digital marketing spend or a brand new client somewhere, not even going out full throttle out of the gates is probably around $500 a month, just to start out with a simple hands on it, depending on what their goals are.

My pre-requisite is if you don’t have decent SEO, I won’t take you on because I’m like, “Just give me your money at this point,” and it may or may not work. There are several different factors. That’s the infrastructure around what you do needs to be in place as well. A lot of people don’t realize that running Facebook Ad campaigns is not the end all be all to your ROI or what you do as a company. If you don’t have proper infrastructure all the way around from the website to all your social media channels online, you’re not doing yourself any favor with your digital imprint online.

There are many factors that go into that. Google is constantly changing the algorithm. When they did the one years ago, that screwed me up. It was very difficult to understand. I had to reread it 3 or 4 times to start understanding it. The content is a game. For anchors, it’s having more than 500 words.

I call it shot video, shot pictures. That’s what it’s all about nowadays. We don’t pay attention to things that are normal.

I don’t know if somebody sent me a meme or something like that at one point in time on Instagram. In order to see some of the posts, a lot of these large accounts, I’m talking about millions of followers on Instagram that are posting humorous videos, you have to follow their private accounts. You have to request. I’m assuming that’s it. One of them was kids getting hurt. That was this profile. I don’t know. I’ve got almost 300,000 followers on Instagram but I only follow 300-something.

When I go on, I like to engage with things that interest me. I don’t go on there to meme or anything. I’m there to connect with people and to almost do a lot of one-way communication to say, “Good job. Read my comments on things, my DMs,“ and all of that. With this one, I don’t know. I haven’t seen this profile ever to my knowledge. It came on, but that was the thing. Somebody was jumping into this ocean or something. It’s the thing to where they slip back and they crack their head on the dock or something like that. I was like, “Oh, God.” I go into the profile. What’s all that? People raking their backs and doing all this stuff. I’m like, “Unfollow, please.” That’s it. People pay attention to stuff that’s not normal.

That’s what’s made TikTok so popular. People like some weird videos on TikTok that made no sense.

One of my favorites was this woman. She’s like, “I got three looks. It’s all I know how to do. I’m a mom, a homeless mom and a hooker.” She did these three things. It’s the sweatshirt for the mom or something like that. I don’t know if the mom is holding pads. I got my team telling me where it’s at too. She then goes total hot dress for the hooker, which was hilarious. It’s not normal, but it caught my attention.

I’ve never seen that many people do look lip-syncing so very well, or the dogs.

Let’s talk about TikTok real quick and then there’s also Clubhouse that I want to talk about. It’s the big four if you include LinkedIn. I’m talking about social media as if it’s the airlines. You’ve got Facebook, Instagram, which is Facebook because they’re owned by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, but then you’ve had a couple of others like Parler in 2020. They got killed off for the reasons that you would expect. Clubhouse pops out of nowhere. Clubhouse started to take off, but then you saw their downloads freaking tank and go way down. I was using the branding agency because we hired a new firm. They were like, “You got to get on TikTok and Clubhouse.” I’m looking at these things. I’m like, “That looks like a waste of my time.”

I’ve been in some Clubhouse rooms with some pretty cool people, but then I look at how you have to be successful on that. You got to have your phone on all day long to be in these rooms. I’m like, “I’m doing things here. I run a real business. I’m not looking to be a Clubhouse star. What outcome are you looking for here?” That’s another thing. Where do you see are those going? Clubhouse is a big one. There are big articles on Entrepreneur.com about that. Where’s that one going? Where is TikTok’s future? Do they even matter when it comes to the big four that exists?

TikTok had taken such a stronghold on the younger generation. It’s between that 16, 14, 20-something age and the older generation. The demographics are funny when you look at it because on Twitter, even within itself, is a whole other animal, as I call it on all the social media platforms. You get a lot of celebrities on there that are huge tweeters that don’t necessarily do TikTok videos. The celebrity status hasn’t reached TikTok in my opinion yet. Twitter is still the place and Instagram for celebrity posts and celebrity content if you’re looking for that level. TikTok hasn’t quite gotten there yet. I haven’t seen the number of celebrities and stuff on there.

Kevin Hart is trying to do some stuff.

Inevitably, TikTok is a platform that is starting to take off in the younger generation, with some of the older generations too, if it’s grandkids. Somebody is going to fish that content off them. It’s going to be interesting to see what the world of TikTok looks like in another year or two. People believe that is the next big platform that’s growing.

I’m impressed by the stats that I’ve seen with the ads. I can’t wait until Kim Kardashian does her TikTok thing.

It’s a surprise she did one with her pants on. Even men would be wearing those things.

The white leather chaps?

No, I’m talking about the butt.

Those Amazon ones?

Are they on Amazon? I didn’t know. Everybody was buying them. I saw one person who did not need to buy them because it does not help them. I was like, “That went really well.”

Clubhouse is not one that I’ve been particularly active in. TikTok is a platform that I see that’s taken a launch. There were other options that were out there. For whatever reason, TikTok is taking it all.

They’re selling bobbleheads with things in them and they’re sold out.

In some of the circles that I’m in, Clubhouse has taken ahold. It’s an incestual community. It’s like the entrepreneur community or online coach community. That’s why I see a lot of that. There are also pseudo-celebrities, but they’re almost like seminar celebrities in the business world. That’s where they’re known within the seminars but that’s about it. They’re going on Clubhouse. They’re selling the coaching programs. Digital marketing stars are on Clubhouse. You’re missing out, girls. Come on.

We’ll put that on our to-do list.

We’ll try the special needs one.

Maybe we can end with this too. How do you determine who you want to work with? There’s somebody out there for everybody. It’s like that cliché. Some people will go to these gurus and not get any results, but you’ve got to be selective with who you work with.

I’m way more selective.

We’re so selective. We only accept a special clientele. They have to have the worst thing that happened to them in the entire world. They show up broken and they’re broke because I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. They want us to make miracles happen with half of that, if half of that, maybe a third of that.

Are those the ones you turn away or are those the ones you take in?

I said, “Both of us cannot do this.” This cannot be our fate. I thought I was bad but she takes the cake.

You’re looking for those. This is typical in the digital marketing space. People will spend a boatload of money with lots of different agencies. I’ve been that person. I did not see the results. There’s no focus on data and the actual outcomes. It’s like, “Let’s throw some ads up there and guess at the whole thing.”

We’re around the same age. She’s just a couple of years older than me. We had to work hard. We’d be ten times better than most people. There’s not a lot of people who have the caliber of talent that Jen and I can come up with.

In my selection process, we are very selective about who we work with. There are some clients that we’ve had to say, “This is not our cup of tea or not an industry fit for us,” for whatever the dynamic reason might be. There had been things I’ve turned down. I said, “I don’t feel like this is in my wheelhouse. I can’t give you the level of expert opinion and advice that you’re seeking for this.” We try to be honest and open with the clients and make sure that whoever we take on from that point, we were able to generate the type of results that they need. Whatever they’re doing is within our wheelhouse and capabilities. Whatever product that they’re offering is something that we feel good about pumping out there and promoting and have skills at it.

We’ve taken on sports clients. I don’t watch football, basketball or anything. She’s well informed. We have a male client. They sell via the life of an alpha male.

She was quite surprised when we got in there talking about all this stuff. She’s like, “How do you know about that?” We’re trying to make sure that we completely understand our clients. If we select them and work with someone, that we have a good understanding and a good grasp of what their product is and what we’re trying to do.

We’re unique in that sense. Everybody’s individual. You don’t get cookie-cutter box stuff, which is the downfall of the digital marketing realm. I used to have fun with the kids that would call me and be like, “Are you telling me traffic is driving away from my website? It’s not on page one?” “Yeah. That’s right there.” It’s like, “Please leave me alone. Go read a book. I don’t know what you’re saying.” Many people are selling services and making a boatload of money. They don’t have to produce or show anything. Jennifer and I sit here and if we can’t get the results that we want to achieve, then I don’t think this is going to be a good fit.

Of course, they have levels of expectation. They want to see their ROI, whatever that is. It’s important whenever we’re performing, whether it’s hosting, content development, press releases or event facilitation. Whatever we’re doing is acceptable and able to produce the level of expectation that the clients set for us.

Thank you for focusing on results too with that because that’s another thing that I see. There are not many out there that are that way, so I appreciate that. You’re right. I’ve experienced that myself with a branding agency or digital media agency. There’s no focus on the results for the most part. It’s just, “We’re going to do this stuff just because we need to do this stuff.” “What’s the outcome? The outcome is what I’m going to dictate here because I’m the one that’s paying you to do this. What are my expectations?” I love that. Thank you both for being on, Amanda and Jennifer.

Thank you. It’s good to see you.

Important Links:

• https://LinkTr.ee/mrrickjordan
• iTunes – All In With Rick Jordan
• Castbox – All In With Rick Jordan
• Google Podcasts – All In With Rick Jordan
• Spotify – All In With Rick Jordan
• Stitcher – All In With Rick Jordan
• Amanda Poplin
• Jennifer Willard
• Situational Ethics
• Entrepreneur.com
• YouTube – Amanda Poplin | Cyber Edition pt 1
• https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning
• https://Vimeo.com/ondemand/libertylockdown
• https://Tinyurl.com/79knndte
• https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_film
• https://Tinyurl.com/2xcbkzes
• https://Tinyurl.com/28nwns9m
• https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_on_investment
• https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Geo-fence
• https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization
• https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Parler
• https://en.Wikipedia.org/wiki/Clubhouse_(app)