The No BS Approach: How Digicom Stays Transparent | Hemant Varshney

#015: Hemant's journey into the marketing agencies began with a personal struggle. Having faced challenges while working with agencies that lacked transparency, Hemant was determined to change the status quo. His experience on the brand side, coupled with the frustration of not receiving crucial information from agencies, fueled his passion for implementing a more transparent approach. He recognized the need to provide clients with data-driven insights and make the entire process more accessible. This realization became the cornerstone of his mission to revolutionize the way marketing agencies operate. Through his own experiences, Hemant understood the pivotal role transparency plays in building trust and fostering successful partnerships. This realization not only shaped his approach but also inspired him to introduce a new standard of openness and honesty in the marketing industry.

Show Notes with Timestamps:
00:00:00 - What makes Digicom different?
00:02:11 - Why do agencies want to hide what they do?
00:04:18 - Step-by-step process of acquiring new customers
00:07:42 - The most effective tactic for acquiring new customers
00:13:19 - Developing and executing email campaigns
00:14:25 - Driving Sales through Email Segmentation
00:17:11 - Content-Based Campaigns for Education
00:19:15 - Leveraging Publications for Ads
00:22:12 - Importance of Attribution for Ad Performance
00:25:05 - Custom Modeling for Marketing Goals
00:29:53 - User Experience and Sales Conversion
00:30:33 - Qualitative Analysis Tools
00:32:09 - Data Visualization Tools
00:32:49 - Future of Marketing
00:36:41 - Community Launch

Hemant Varshney's Link:
Website: digicom.io
LinkedIn: hvarshney

Dylan's Links:

• 🎙️Podcast: BusinessConfessionsPod
• 📽️YouTube: @BizConfessions
• 📷Instagram: DylanWillx
• Linked-In: /dylan-williams

Other Episodes you might like:

• 7-Figure Blueprint for Any Business | Chandler Saine
• Building a Unique Online Fitness Empire | Lee Maasen
• Land Investing & Building Multiple Streams of Income Daniel Martinez
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Past Guests: Chandler Saine, Daniel Martinez, Stratton Brown, Lee Maasen, Nico Lagan, Daniel Roman,Tim Branyan, David Van Beekum, Nick Hutchison, Deirdre Tshein, Sanchez Zehcnas, Christina Lopez, Keigan Carthy, Hemant Varshney, Taniela Fiefia, Jennifer Blake, Nicki Sciberras, John Chan

Transcript

0:00

EDIR

Track 1: 0:00

Everyone seems to have a marketing agency nowadays. What makes Digi com different?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 0:06

that's a great question. and we do get asked this, every now and then, Digi comms tagline is, we are a no bullshit growth marketing agency. and where the, no BS comes from is everything is rooted in data and it's rooted in science. We are running a lot of tests simultaneously, and also dependent on budgets, but we are taking that data and providing it back to our clients. We're not a black box agency where everything is hidden. You don't know the what. You don't know the why. You don't know who our team members are. It's the polar opposite. We are trying to be as transparent as possible. And, being, like previously being on the brand side and working with agencies that just never gave you information onto the why was a challenge that I wanted to, work through and change. so that's what predominantly makes us different, amongst other cool things we do.

Track 1: 1:06

Why do agencies want to hide what they do?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 1:09

this is another great question and I'm gonna use, we predominantly work with D two C brands, but I'm gonna use doctors as an example. or lawyers as an example. there are a lot of times you'll have a doctor that can pay 2000 to$3,000 a month to an agency for website meet. So you have an agency, they come on board, they have, tried and, tried and trusted template that they leverage. They'll swap out the images, swap out the copy, build a site for a doctor, right? and then they have SEO site changes, and they have, hosting charges. And somehow it all ends up being like$3,000 a month. And a doctor can afford to spend that amount of money or. Maybe it's like$2,000 a month, right? And so they do. and doctor is of course busy, building the practice and focusing on patients and they just don't want to deal with it. So they're gonna pay the premium versus the true cost of all of that. It's like a couple hundred bucks a month maximum, so why do a lot of agencies hide this information? Is. depending on what industry or what type of work you're doing, you could be setting up your clients and services as a set it and forget it and billing a solid amount and not having to do a lot of upkeep and work. And so a lot of agencies, owners will ask, why not? And that is what I want to change.

Track 1: 2:34

I feel like from outside looking in, if I'm a business owner and I'm hiring an agency that's not transparent, or actually I would rather have somebody who's transparent to show me how much they're doing. Therefore to show me I don't want to be doing that. let the professionals do what they're doing. Let me do what I'm good at doing. And that's the way it should be. You would think, I just, I feel like that goes to show that a lot of people aren't doing what they're say, what they said they're doing. keeping that transparency, I guess I would say.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 2:59

Yeah, I, that's a, okay, so y there are a lot of instances, you take the same web dev agency, for example. They're doing what they're saying they're doing, they're just, the costs are being so marked up and so masked. It's not like they're, the site's not being hosted, it's being hosted on GoDaddy. They might be paying the 30 bucks a

Track 1: 3:20

Yeah.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 3:20

GoDaddy, it's happening, right? But, not everybody's the industry expert in the specific field to understand, hey, like for example, if we wanted to go and build, a new house, right? And contractors will mark up their supply costs and get paid on the back end of it, there are. it's just people are doing business. I think that when, like our model is very much as our clients are scaling, we're scaling with them. And for us to get them to scale, we need to be transparent. We need to, showcase the data because there's certain products that might be selling in. If we don't let the client know and they sell out of inventory, then that causes issues, right? yeah, transparency.

Track 1: 4:00

So your company does quite a bit of things, a few different services. Can you walk me through the step by step process of acquiring new customers for your clients?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 4:10

Sure. so we, kick off, with a partner, we like to audit, I. work, two reasons why. first is the client has goals they wanna hit, and we can do an audit and realistically understand. Can you hit that goal? So say in an example, a client spends a hundred dollars and out of that a hundred dollars, they wanna make a, they wanna make a thousand dollars, so they want 10 row ads, right? return on ad spend. And we're seeing historically they're at 0.5. for the hundred bucks they're spending, they're at, they're consistently getting$50 or, and so we'll do an audit and we can come back and say, Hey, listen, like 10 X ROAS is probably not the first mile marker. What is your break even point? your break even point. Yeah. isn't a half a row as it's probably. A two or a two and a half or a three depending on what your cost of goods are, and operational margins are. So we'll sit down with our client and we'll break down the, what is the break even point first. and once we get an understanding of that, then we start figuring out, okay, cool. we understand your breaking point. the plan and here's our hypotheses. Here's what we're gonna go test on meta. here's what we've seen, the landing page conversion rate. for, say the market is 3%, we're at 0.8%, so we need to maybe do some landing page tests. we're doing a site speed check where, you know, auditing your landing page, giving you feedback. Let's make these changes here and go back to market. Cool. We're back in market. we're running ads. and we now start to get to a two ROAS because, however, like the math works out, you go from a 0.5, yeah. you go from 0.5 ROAS to two roas because we've understood your, like breakeven pump points and margins and your, conversion rates have jumped from that 0.8 to say two and a half percent. We're still below industry average. Okay. Next question is, all right, now that you're breaking me breaking even, how do we get you to. how do we get you to a four oh as, let's just say that's the number, right? And so looking at your media buying costs, and we need to work on the creative side. And so we start cranking, cracking away at, chipping away at the creatives, right? So what creative is working? Is it video? Is it static? Is it gif? Is product shot? Is it a person shot? Is it a lifestyle shot? Is it, what type of verbiage are we using? and then also, maybe you're selling multiple products. So how can we get bundles up and going to get the a OV, up? And so all of these are, different tests that impact all the other metrics, across the business. And so we're analyzing the bit, the metrics. We are reporting back on the metrics. And our goal is to improve the metrics across the funnel. And so going back to the, the first part is like we do the audit, we learn, we, then we get to the next part of understanding what your break even is. From there, we build a plan to go to market, to run media on the various ad platforms and then, continue to grow and scale your program. and that's just like a very easy, very easy set in a nutshell, of kind of what we do.

Track 1: 7:22

and I know it's a lot of testing, split testing, a lot of small tweaks, things like that as well. Going into that, and it's probably different with a lot of different clients.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 7:31

Yes.

Track 1: 7:32

Can you nail down. A tactic or something that you guys have ran into that you now use that has proven most effective tactic on that initial side.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 7:42

Yeah. so there's a couple things. It's gonna change by client.'cause we can have a beauty client, versus a pet client, versus, a consumer packaged good client. So changes. But, I think that we've added to our repertoire in terms of like testing and strategy would be, running influencer, a lot more influencer based campaigns, going out, influencers. And the next question might be like, so how are you finding these influencers? we don't use some of the tools that are out there, in the sense where, you're spending, a couple thousand dollars a month to find the influencers. A lot of the time the data is just scraped data. Instead, what we are doing is we're going out and doing research of influencers who work within a specific category, micro, to midsize. We're not going out after the very large influencers we have, but, usually the yield is much better, on a larger influencer. And when I say this, I mean we whitelist the influencers. our goal isn't to just have them post organically. It's post organically, but the really, we want the content, to leverage as, in, as part of our paid strategy. So we jump in, we'll find the influencer, we'll chat with them, we will send them the information of the client, the samples, their, content back, and we'll also ask, Hey, can we chop up the content? so now we have different styles and rights to use the same content that this, content creator or influencer developed, and then we'll go to market. And so that's been added to our repertoire. And, the most part, I would say we see pretty s you know, solid success. when I say that, 40%, better CPAs or ROAS versus baseline, most part, but it takes us a little bit, to get there, to find the right style of content. yes.

Track 1: 9:34

I've got a few, a couple things came to mind at that point. I'm sure once you've, I guess you build that client base of, influencers over, over time as well know which ones work well with certain products or certain industries as well. So then you can start using that to your advantage. I'm guessing'cause you offer the influencer management and you touched base on what that was. Is there anything that you didn't touch base on what that influencer management is?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 10:00

no, I think, I think I covered, the majority or Yeah, pretty much all of it of how we operate influencers. our goal is, might be different than, say other, contractors, consultants, agencies. Our goal is to leverage the influence influencer asset as a paid ad over them just posting organically.

Track 1: 10:20

Yeah.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 10:21

So that, that's the, that's a, main, I think main differentiation point versus, other folks as well. L

Track 1: 10:27

So I want you to break that down a little bit more because I, that's really important. Some people might be overlooking that, not only, so you mentioned white listing, right? white listing, which means that it's coming from their profile or their profile picture comes up on the ad, right?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 10:42

Yes.

Track 1: 10:43

Okay. Just wanna make sure I had that right. And what other funnel goes in with that? is that just the one aspect of that funnel of it going through, but what other creatives have you seen? Like I'll give you, you can even gimme an example. Can you run me through what that looks like of, Hey, I've got this product. We would choose this influencer because they've done this and then this is how we would market to them.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 11:05

All right, so my buddy just bought me Bose glasses, right? for, for Christmas. Really nice gift. He didn't have to do that, but thank you. you. so we take this, and what I can do with this is I can take product shots, I can wear it, I can have a video shot of me as I'm walking down the street. these are all different, forms of content that can be a static, that can be video assets. there's a couple different styles of ways I can talk about the product, right? I could just have a voice overlay. I could be talking directly into a camera, showing how this connects to the app, or having images. And so the first part is where lot of folks that are like, Hey. Let me get free product, please, and I'll post you on my, stories and my, feed. That's one form, and that's organic, right? Like the goal of those posts are for, for, folks of the influencer who follow that influencer to see the product and to see, what's being used, how it's being used. and that's one form of it. And that's great. but what we like to do is we take that content and we put it into ads, and we connect the influencer's account just like you would see a brand's account to, our campaigns, or to, the business manager and then the campaigns. and we run ads from their handle. So then, in, in this instance, if this was Bose would have their account, they would have my profile, it would link into their account. I would be talking about, these glasses and, that's called whitelisted. And so what we are really good at is, we're a paid media agency, a growth marketing agency, and are leveraging all different tactics to drive paid growth. and, that's the, that's essentially the different differentiation between organic and paid and whitelisting and not whitelist.

Track 1: 13:00

Thank you for clearing that up. that's something I didn't know for a while until getting into kind of the space and everything. so whenever you're developing an email campaign for a client.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 13:11

Yeah.

Track 1: 13:12

What steps do you take from the conception to the execution? Because I know every product's different. So do you use a framework on how you create that and then leading up to execution? What's that like?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 13:25

Yeah. I think the goal is to understand what the point of the campaign is, right? are we doing a welcome email? are we educating. are we trying to sell a product because it's Black Friday, cyber Monday, or a special, day? So the first question is, what is the goal of the campaign? Goal of the campaign is to, to welcome new purchasers. Okay, cool. and teach them, how to use the product and, enter into the product family. same example. Bose glasses, right? But I went out and bought these Bose glasses. I get. in email and, I get my receipt. And then after that it gives, I get a number of different emails that tell me how to use these glasses or what connects with these glasses. And, as I start to fall in love with this product, I'm like, okay, cool. What else does Bose have? And it's and then you shift away from like these welcome educational emails to. Selling more products that the company has to offer. then we can move into a marketing email section, right? So you are thinking about what is the goal? I wanna drive sales for not the Bose glasses, but anybody who falls into this segment of purchasing Bose glasses. there might be an adjacent product that pairs perfect with this. So the goal is to drive sales for that product. And if we have a hundred thousand people in our list, we then segment out the number. Let's say it's 20,000 people that bought these Bose glasses that can easily pair with this product. So now I have email segmentation going on. then start to create copy, which we'll have to test over time. I'll create the email design. subject line, and then we'll test through what subject line op like has a better open rate if we don't have any learnings there, what ha what email body is it short form? Long form has a better click out rate. So click out from email to a landing page. and then ultimately, which emails have yielded more sales and think about why. those are, similar to, talking about influencer, it's like there's two different strategies here, but it's what are, what's the goal of the campaign?

Track 1: 15:32

Are you guys breaking down every new product you have or you figured out? Hey, this subject line works well with this industry and this niche, and then this style of messaging or copy works well with this. is that kind of how you've done it or are you split testing and testing every new product that comes through?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 15:49

I think, okay. So we've, we

Track 1: 15:51

I.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 15:51

tested granularly. but you can only do that when your lists and segment size is, there, it's, there's a large engaged audience. and we've sold a ton of different products. but, and, but there's I think instead of getting so granular that we take a step back and we think about, okay, if someone, Who falls in a mom's audience, let's say as an example, bought this nourishing cream, they also buy these other products for themselves? so we, so instead of it being at the product level, it could be at the product category level. Now, what that allows us to know is there this, one individual or the segment of individuals. into this bucket, which means these product sets we can market to them, pretty, pretty directly. and just having that learning based on interaction, based on, the various emails and then also the types of products they're already buying. So like how are you categorizing them or tagging them in your CRM.

Track 1: 16:47

Okay, so you all, like I was saying before. You guys focus on a more organic marketing funnel approach, is how, I guess I, I can say that. you use publishers to push ads. You use content creators to push a product or to use a product and then to drive traffic to it on the back end. what other subtle funnels have you seen that work well?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 17:12

we like to use content campaigns. and when I say content, advertorials, advertorials, are articles that live on different publications. so you see an ad, here's, here's HelloFresh, we tried HelloFresh. Here's what happened. Ran a lot of those ads back in the day. you click on that ad and you get to a landing page, which is essentially an article talks about, and the article, talks about the experience of leveraging HelloFresh. And then you click out and you're like, oh, you know what? This sounds like me. I need this. You click out and you purchase. And so we like to run content based campaigns, and again, content can be leveraged in different ways. We're talking about content as in advertorial style campaigns. that's a funnel that works really well for, for products that, and services that need more education. think about buying a mattress. Do you want it plush? Do you want it hard? Do you want, is, should it be springs or hybrids or foam? there's just so much education that's required. For the right mattress. And, and as someone that just bought a new mattress and has marketed mattress companies, there's a lot of information. Information. And so content-based campaigns work really well for me to learn, Hey, this might be the right mattress. going to, it's essentially, I would say it's like going to YouTube and watching a YouTube creator talk about a product. But in, article form.

Track 1: 18:42

Okay. I was talking to somebody the other day who was in a service based industry that was finding publications for service-based businesses, but they said it was, five,$10,000 to even get like a publication done. Are you seeing the same thing with a lot of these product-based publications?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 19:01

Yes. most definitely. And the, this isn't, so much of a, like a new thing. It's all these pubs. charge quite a lot of money, up to 50 K for an insertion on for, and it's not like they're hard, like real hard costs against it, right? It's, like a writer writing it up based on what they've gotten from the brand. but it is good marketing. It allows the brands to be featured in and use some of those tags on their site. And it does make a big difference. And do we leverage them? Sometimes? it depends on like the client budgets. what I have learned and similar to influencer, is we run ads from the publication handles, like we whitelist the handles and run the ads to the publication. yeah, so like similarly, we are whitelisting and the one thing that I've learned from running a number of tests is. If the publication has two to 5,000, followers or more, the performance of the content is not dependent on the number of followers. is dependent on the quality of the content

Track 1: 20:06

That's if it's below or above 2000 followers

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 20:10

above the two to 5,000 mark.

Track 1: 20:13

because it's eyeball, because it's gonna, enough eyeballs are gonna see it at that point.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 20:19

from a, like a paid approach, right? for us it's, the quality of the content is more important than the sheer following of the accounts. And like similarly, we see this for, influencer as well, like in, in paid, in running, these whitelisted campaigns. There's this minimum threshold we wanna get above. It doesn't need to be like a million followers or hundred thousand followers. it's a pretty low number. It just needs to be really good quality content that connects with the audience.

Track 1: 20:50

And I am sure too if it a larger number of followers with good content is even that much better. I.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 20:57

Sometimes that's the, that's what I'm saying, like that's the interesting part. It's the quality of the content, trumps the number of followers, like really good content with, someone that has like a million followers, let's say, that is great. It's, I'm not saying it's not great, but that, that is, that might not work as well from a paid perspective, not from an organic perspective, from a paid perspective that might not work as well or as long, as a really good piece of content from somebody with 2000 followers or a publication with 2000 followers.

Track 1: 21:31

Where are you seeing the biggest, roas as far as a service or something that you offer?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 21:36

like an ad platform. Google tends to typically pro have a higher ROAS than, other ad platforms followed by. Followed by like the social platforms and then we have the display video platforms that, that come later. But then the question I think also that is important is how, like what is attribution? Who gets the credit? How do you get the credit? and to add to that part, using a product like Triple Whale, for attribution. Understanding touch points, has been imperative to scaling A lot of the partners we're working with

Track 1: 22:12

What is that called?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 22:13

Triple Whale.

Track 1: 22:14

And that's a performance based software.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 22:18

Yeah, so it's it's in, it's an attribution platform that allows you to give credit to the various touchpoint of a user's journey before they make a purchase or as they're making a purchase.

Track 1: 22:29

Oh, okay.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 22:30

you can use that information to wait. Should meta get the credit or YouTube get the credit? Or should them, should they all equally get the credit? Because like you have a platform like Google, let's say, and the numbers are, it's a 10 row as in Google, right? Everyone's doing great. but it's all coming in from branded search. People are searching your brand before people search your brand. They need to learn about your brand somewhere else. Meta might be doing all of the work for people to learn about your brand. And we take the same example, You have a mattress, purchase windows 30 days. and for meta it's seven days for, Google, let's just say it's 30 days. and so someone sees an ad on meta, they do research, they understand who the brand is, what they do, why, why they should be, get, purchasing this mattress. Cool. They go on YouTube, they do more research, reading, reading. They get two weeks in, they finally decide, Hey, I'm gonna buy a mattress. Let me go to this company A that I saw that, that served me an ad. They make a purchase, they Google it, purchase because we're outside of the attribution window. meta will no longer count that as a purchase, and it just looks like it's a Google purchase. And but on Google then, the question is like, how do we scale this? How do we get this bigger? on Google, there's an there's a finite number of searches that are occurring, and for you to grow that finite number, you need the other ad platform. So a like Triple Whale allows us to understand your marketing mix of how people are interacting. Through, the, the site, like the purchase cycle, and we can say, okay, we need to increase, budgets on meta and try to get people to purchase within the seven day window on meta. But if they fall outside, Google is picking it up. And so what is the blended performance of both of them? And is it, if we're scaling here and we're scaling here is total business. if like your MER. your marketing efficiency staying consistent or increasing, or is it decreasing? so just other we need to look at so that your business is running profitably and we're not just dumping into money to meta, to just dumping it in meta or pulling back because it's oh, there's no performance here. it just, it really gives you the insight into an omni view of what's going on, which helps you grow your program.

Track 1: 24:46

I am sure you've seen a lot of, data points on that end. After seeing that and using that software, what, after using that, what stories it told you? And I know it's different with every product, but after using this now, what story is that told? What story has that told you so far?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 25:04

Post iOS world and we take that data and put it into our own custom modeling. we take it a step further. It's not just, Hey, triple L's giving us this information. This information is Bible. It's, we take it, we put it into our own custom modeling and set goals by channel. that. we have visibility into something that, a lot of advertisers lost visibility into for a few years, post iOS 14 and 14.5. and so that has taught us how to scale programs. and I know this sounds a little vague, but it's where should we be putting money specifically? scale a program. and it is our job, that if we are putting money into meta and on the ad platform, you're not seeing anything. But because we're able to change, certain windows or information, you can do it on meta too, but it's just, attributing in a different, logic. You. That information then allows me to say, okay, overall we've spent 10% more money month over month, but we've made 30% more revenue month over month. And here's how I can credit that. The thing is though, for every brand is you wanna pick an attribution strategy and stick to it because otherwise it's comparing an apple, orange, and a banana and it's, they're very vastly different attribution model. So it's, we gotta figure out what the attribution model. Is for your business?

Track 1: 26:32

Years ago, I'm sure we did not know that. or we would look at something and say, Hey, we're getting a return here. Let's just throw more money on it over here. But really the customer journey is so much longer than that. They need to see something multiple times before it's so rare for people to go and just purchase

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 26:48

Yeah.

Track 1: 26:48

seeing something once, or a new product. and just going through that customer journey and knowing that it sounds like you guys have figured that out and can. Play that from the beginning and then play that through and know, hey, we need to spend a little bit more, we're not showing it here, but we need to spend more here because the full picture it's 30% more sales at the end of the day.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 27:06

Yes, exactly. And the other thing, with like our attribution modeling that we do is it gives other team members goals where you, we use the same email example, right? It takes a person that is deploying emails to go from, Hey, I'm sending out emails, and the goal is to make more revenue to, Hey, your goal is to drive a hundred sales at this a OV marketing these products, to generate this much revenue. And that is your goal. And then it's oh, wow. There's alignment across the board of, and everyone's goals ladder up to this larger. Revenue goal and marketing efficiency goal, which allow us, to grow businesses and become profitable. And I know I've said profitable a bunch of times. I've also ran ads in the era of, a lot of VC-backed, startups, HelloFresh, BarkBox, fab Fit, fun, splendid spoon. like I've worked, I've ran fingers to keyboard marketing for all of them. And. There's a large point where it was like grow at all costs. Now we flip the script and it's Hey, what is profitable? What is sustainable? How, how do we, we don't double growth, but we grow at 40% a year. But, the business is yielding cashflow. so that's something we very much focus on. It's how do we get the business to yield cashflow and be profitable.

Track 1: 28:27

Which has overlooked a lot of dumps.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 28:29

Oh yeah. Yeah, it is. absolutely

Track 1: 28:31

What other tools or software are you guys using?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 28:34

tools, software. I would, okay, this is, this might be a little funny, but, my favorite tool to use is YouTube and, I always say that I graduated with a degree from YouTube University. and I know it's not something groundbreaking, but there's so much good content that if you take the time to just educate yourself on challenge you're trying to solve for, somebody there with a video out there that can, is talking about the subject, which is helpful. outside of that, There are some like data, like analytics tools that we're leveraging. I think one great tool is Microsoft Clarity.

Track 1: 29:14

Okay.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 29:15

if you've, have you heard of it?

Track 1: 29:16

briefly, please tell me about it.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 29:19

sure. okay. It's. It's like a Hotjar. for those of you guys that are not familiar with Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity, there are tools that give you web webpage analysis, but what I love about my Microsoft Clarity is it creates videos of users who are interacting with your site. So you get to see their mouse move around, for every interaction that occurs on your site and why that is unbelievably important is people might be clicking certain buttons on your site, and trying to access, let's say, ingredients for food. and you're seeing like, let's say there's a, food brand, users are hitting the site. They're not purchasing. The reason why they're not purchasing is they're trying to figure out what's in the ingredients. can watch these clarity videos to be like, oh, okay, they're clicking on the ingredients and it's in tiny little script. What if I make it larger and put it front and center? And now what does that do to sales? And you might see, your sales bump up, your conversion rates go up. And so that tool is a qualitative tool that I like to leverage that allows us to go out and learn the qualitative journey of a user on your site.

Track 1: 30:29

Yeah, that's good. I didn't know it was to that extent. I had just heard of it before.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 30:33

Yeah, it's great. It's free. it's from Microsoft. It's a, of code that goes on your site. And, of course it's not identifying who a person is, it's just showing like the user journey and you watch enough videos. There might be a specific pattern that, or, it might showcase where people are getting stuck and if you are able to unlock. And get people out of being stuck, then, that might help drive more sales.

Track 1: 30:59

Is that, does it learn patterns over time or is it something that you just have to watch and figure out yourself?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 31:05

You gotta watch and figure it out. I'm sure may, with chat GPT and all of that, I'm sure there's gonna be some AI that tells you something, but. at the moment you just go through it yourself. It is time consuming, but some of these small changes can make the biggest difference.

Track 1: 31:22

Yeah. If everybody, if, if you watch 20, 25 customers, and. 10 of them, are getting stuck or stop at one point to make something bigger or to do that, and then they leave and then other get past it and do what they need to do. that, hey, that might be something we need to focus on.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 31:38

Yeah, exactly. I.

Track 1: 31:40

That's huge. What other tools have been, helpful that you guys use that's worth mentioning?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 31:44

Yeah. that's, like that's, we were using a lot. I'm trying to think outside general, add tools that, are out there. I think like those two are like the two big ones that I. might be less familiar with, that I'd like to point out, but like others, yeah, I think those two for the most part. Other, other tools could be like Google Data Studio, sorry. Google Data Studio where it creates data visualization. it's a free tool by Google. and if you are. Able to structure data in spreadsheets or leverage their templates to pull in information from an ad platform. It'll templatize and create charts and, visuals for you, that can make you know your life much easier.

Track 1: 32:28

Where do you see marketing going in the future? What kind of trends?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 32:33

So right now we're on this, content creator kick, you're scrolling on TikTok and you are scrolling on, IG reels and it's tried this, we bought this. Oh, when my personal opinion is when. Content, like content creators first started to become a thing and it, it's been a thing forever. But on reels and TikTok specifically, it was like, Hey, this is a real personalized review and at this point, it a real personalized review? And how are consumers gonna change their, their reaction to it? And from here, do we go to a QVC style ad again, back in the day or some Other ads that aren't super polished, or do we go back to something that is super polished because it's like the brand telling us, I think we are going to go through this like influencer and content, creator wave for a little while, but at some point think consumers are gonna scratch their head and be like, is this even real?

Track 1: 33:31

I didn't think of it like that. You're thinking past that point. I'm thinking everybody's going towards the influencer route, but you're thinking the step past that on when that gets burnt up too.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 33:39

Yeah. Yeah. So it's like what is authentic, right? The entire idea of this is it for it to be authentic, but if everybody's doing it and a lot of people are getting paid, doing it or getting free product, is it authentic?

Track 1: 33:53

I didn't think of it like that. That's good. What do you wanna see whenever you're, whenever you go to buy something? What make? What makes you buy?

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 34:00

okay. I like to do a lot of research, on, if something's like a couple hundred bucks, I wanna do research on it. whether it's these glasses, I didn't buy these, but,

Track 1: 34:10

Yeah.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 34:11

no, like I, I would read up, I would, wanna understand people are using it, why they love it. Really, and then do I need it? I love the YouTube reviews, and I know a lot of it is similar to like influencers, and they, YouTubers are content creators, and they're getting free product, but calling out, Hey, this is, I, this is a free product. Like I, and it's so much more, real, and calling out, Hey, this is a product. I got this product. It's for free, by the way. There's an affiliate link at the bottom. If you click on that, I make money. and I like that a lot more to learn about a product because they're also talking about what they like and what they don't like about the product. and so I would like to see much more of that. But the thing is, with. TikTok reels. Everything's so fast, right? It's like we have three seconds to figure out if a hook works or not, versus on YouTube, you're doing research.

Track 1: 35:11

Yeah, that's the, I'm sitting here looking at my post headphones, that, that's probably my last big purchase. I guess I, I made the end of last year. I did the exact same thing. I went to YouTube. I watched an honest review of it to where somebody was not sponsored by this or not getting, I looked for the one that just didn't have an affiliate link on it.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 35:29

Yeah.

Track 1: 35:29

I had one guy who literally just told me what he did not like about it, and that's what made me buy the product. It was the one, it was, I was comparing it to the other major, headphones as well. But that was the one thing, somebody just had their honest opinion and told me what they didn't like about it versus what they liked about it. And I was like, that's honest to me. I can. I can deal with those. I'm gonna get these

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 35:50

Just the authenticity. It's, I think the question is how do, for marketers going forward and us too, we run influencer, like absolutely. But it's how do we keep it authentic? And I think a part of what we do or try to do is we identify folks that would like the product. We let them know what the benefits of the product are, but we don't give them a script. here you go. Tell us what you think.

Track 1: 36:15

Yeah, authentic.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 36:16

us content, Yeah.

Track 1: 36:18

That's good, man. I'm gonna respect your time here. where can people go to find out more about you? Man.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 36:23

Sure. please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. haint Varsi is my name. And, check out our website. It's digi com.io. D-I-G-I-C-O m.io.

Track 1: 36:35

And I'll link all that stuff too in the show notes so everybody has that. But man, I appreciate you coming on today.

squadcaster-19e7_1_01-30-2024_161119: 36:40

Thank you for having me. I've had a blast.

Track 1: 36:42

Absolutely, man.

36:44

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