Unlocking Revenue Growth with Effective Data Use

Join Anthony Karls and James Patterson of Rocket Clicks as they dive into leveraging measurement tracking to buy data and conduct market research. Discover the importance of waterfall reporting, how to refine prospecting strategies, and how to effectively utilize programmatic advertising for local entrepreneurs.

00:00 Introduction to Revenue Roadmap

00:13 Meet James Patterson: Digital Marketing Expert

02:23 Understanding the Concept of Buying Data

05:47 The Importance of Waterfall Reporting

08:39 Leveraging CRM Data for Marketing Success

11:50 Executing Data-Driven Marketing Strategies

18:30 The Role of Attribution in Marketing

23:18 Conclusion and Key Takeaways

#DigitalMarketing #Data #BusinessGrowth

Transcript

Anthony Karls: 0:00

All right, here we go. This is Revenue Roadmap, where we talk about sales and marketing for local entrepreneurs. So I am Anthony Carls, president of RocketClicks, and I got Mr. James Patterson again with us today. So last time we talked, James, uh, we talked about measurement tracking, uh, So we want to build off of that from our last conversation and kind of get into how we leverage that to buy data and do market research. But before we get into that, uh, if you could tell our, tell our audience again, we're just a little bit about yourself, what you do here at Rocket Clicks, what your background looks like. So you can have a little, little street cred before you start yammering.

James Patterson: 0:44

yeah, absolutely. So, um, yeah, thanks for the intro, Tony. My name is James. I've kind of got my started and got my start in digital marketing back in 2017 worked for a little small R and D company that was, uh, looking to save a few dollars, I think, on their marketing program and took a took a gamble on a college kid. Um, was great for me because I got to really touch everything and got a lot of opportunity to test around and find out what I liked, um, that ultimately led me to working with a larger corporation here in Wisconsin. got, you know, kind of an accelerated program in terms of what interests me in digital marketing, did some SEO, um, but ultimately landed on paid being kind of my preferred avenue within digital marketing. from there I wanted to work with a larger team of kind of, you know, You know, uh, experts in the field who are on the latest and greatest trends of, of digital marketing and paid specific. So started looking at agencies to work for and ended up here at RocketClicks. And so I've been here since January, 2021.

Anthony Karls: 1:45

And what are you, what are you doing now here at RC?

James Patterson: 1:48

Yep. So at RocketClicks now I'm an account manager. So I get the opportunity to work with our B2C local team. And we work with a variety of different local businesses and help them grow and crush their, Right now, 2024 revenue goals. So it's a lot of fun to get to impact their business, both on the SEO side and paid side. And we get to impact even some areas outside of your kind of quote unquote, normal, um, digital marketing avenues. We get to look at their sales process. Ui ux, um really just make impact across their entire business. So it's a lot of fun.

Anthony Karls: 2:22

Cool. So like I said, we, uh, last time we talked, we talked about measurement tracking, why it's important. We run into, uh, we run into this a lot with our, with our clients. We got to teach them how to think about this. And, um, one of the, one of the big reasons why is obviously when we, when we do this, we can track ROI and understand whether or not what we're doing is working, um, but there's a downstream impact around, you know, Buying data, uh, and going back to market with our learning. So can you, you talk a little bit about what it means to buy data and paid media, what the, what are the opportunities look like? What does this, what does this mean? What does this look like?

James Patterson: 3:02

Yeah, absolutely um, this is one of those concepts within marketing and I think a lot of um, You know, I think a lot of agencies don't do a good job explaining to clients and I think a lot of clients know, as a result, don't really fully understand. Um, know, especially as it looks to, you know, getting a really great strategy Online, right? Like one of the first things that you need to do is obviously build out those different channels Build out your accounts things like that A lot of times when people are doing that they're expecting kind of instant results, right? Like we're gonna make this be a you know A huge part of our business and we're gonna nail it and everything's gonna be go, you know Good and golden and a lot of times it ends up not being the case You Um, reason for that is because a lot of times it's just that expectation set, um, setting from kind of the beginning, you know, when we look at building out accounts here, rocket clicks, we do have principles that we like to kind of abide by kind of a shared language in terms of what strategies we like to start with. We'll always start with that. Um, but really what we communicate with clients when we're starting out, especially in new channels is that data that's coming in. We're actually buying that it's not really spending the money to acquire new customers. That's actually a result of buying that data that we can then learn from. So, you know, a lot of the clients that we work with that have the most success online, it's really those that have bought a lot of data over time and has used that data to ultimately get smarter. And then ultimately again, as a result, drive more business to them. So it's been, it's been really fun, you know, especially working with, um, newer businesses that are still kind of trying to learn what, you know, maybe a Google ads platform looks like and stuff like that, and kind of show them that this is the right way to look at it. And a lot of times it's that patience and kind of understanding that we're really purchasing that data to learn from that ultimately leads to successful. Yeah,

Anthony Karls: 4:47

you're, so there's really two things to take away here. One is like the concept of buying data. That's how we talk about it. Building out new channels, um, the by product of buying data, if we're doing it right and getting the data is, uh, is revenue, right? And the better, the more we understand about our data. The better we're going to generate revenue from that. Um, so that's one, that's one aspect that you're talking about. And that's more of a philosophical approach than a, like technically buying data. So like when we're doing that, what are the things that were, that are really important to like actually gaining learnings from taking, taking the approach of like buying data revenue is the by product so that we're, we're ROI positive, we're driving results. We're making an impact on the business. Like, what do we need to do? To make sure we're doing that right. Because like you can buy data and waste a lot of money or you can buy data and you can actually learn stuff. So like talk a little bit about that.

James Patterson: 5:47

it honestly goes back to a lot of our, our last episode where it's so critical to have, um, waterfall reporting, um, implemented within your business. I mean, if you can't look at your own business and understand kind of what it takes to go from, you know, a user entering the site to how much, you know, it costs to acquire a lead coming in. So ultimately, you know, making it through the kind of opportunity or, or, um, you know, sales qualified stage to ultimately becoming a customer for your business. It's going to be really hard to go back to those channels and really make an evaluation to see if, you know, in a sense that data you purchase is going to ultimately lead to revenue, you know, driving revenue long term for that strategy. Um, so a lot of times what we like to do is we'll actually start again with that waterfall, um, reporting, getting the sales data. So,

Anthony Karls: 6:33

So what is, what is waterfall reporting mean? Cause that's a term we use internally. That's not run.

James Patterson: 6:39

If you've already internal, yeah. Um, leads. Uh, so when we talk about waterfall reporting, it's really basically thinking about. In some ways, basically starting from the top of the funnel. So like users engaging with your site and ultimately coming all the way down. Um, what, what does that trickle down effect? So what you can do by that is by getting, um, business metrics like your leads, um, opportunities, or a lot of times, again, will be kind of considered sales qualified leads. So basically somebody that came in through your intake team, ultimately talked to maybe a sales member or something like that, and actually gone through the kind of qualification process to understand that they are a good fit for your service. So driving those folks and getting that metric and then ultimately customers. So people that went from that sales qualified position to ultimately doing business with you and then the revenue that comes from those customers. By having all of those, um, inputs, you can then kind of build what we like to refer to as the waterfall, which again, shows this kind of trickle down effect. What the beauty is there is that you can back up into all these different numbers, right? So if you know now, you know, the average revenue you drove over the last, you know, two to three years, we can segment that by the month. We can segment that by then each individual sale that comes in. So what's your average customer value, bring them down to your average, uh, qualified set, uh, you know, sales qualified lead. Your average value for a lead and so on and so forth. So you can actually see kind of how it all fits together and ultimately make sure that you're evaluating platforms the right way.

Anthony Karls: 8:03

So what are, so how do I start thinking about doing that? Like, well, how do, what do I need to do to actually track that stuff? Because that, this is some of the stuff that we actually run into as, as issues that would be helpful to drive better growth over the long term if we actually were capturing these, these different data points. So like, what do those look like? What's important? To make sure we get and like in what portion of the waterfall should we get them and how does that tie back into like, you know, buying data by testing new channels or literally buying data by going to data platforms and purchasing things.

James Patterson: 8:39

Yeah. So, so, um, you know, the best place to pull those kinds of metrics and to share it with your agency partner or whoever is managing, um, kind of your digital marketing strategy, um, is to go right into your CRM. So like a lot of times, you know, depending on what system you're using, you can pull different views and reports. Um, as you should know. So, you know, like we said, we usually like to say about two to three years is best. Um, it's kind of a side tangent on that is a lot of times people want to make decisions off a very short periods of window, you know, very short period of time. So, um, it goes back to the data, um, you know, purchasing data and making decisions off of that. We don't want to make any decisions based off of just a small portion of time. We want to look big picture. Um, so it goes the same for the waterfall reporting when look at 2 to 3 years. Pull in leads, um, you know, sales, qualified leads, customers, and revenue right out of your CRM. Of course, you know, some businesses will have multiple systems, but basically that, you know, for a lot of businesses, you're going to be able to pull that right out of your CRM.

Anthony Karls: 9:36

Yeah. So what, what are the data points of the, that we need to be capturing in our CRM so that we know what we're doing as well.

James Patterson: 9:45

Yeah. So, I mean, it's going to vary depending on your business type, but, um, to give it as broadly as possible, every meaningful step within that process. So what I mean by that is like, you're obviously gonna have an intro step, right? Somebody's coming in. Ultimately, they made contact with you on your site. Or maybe they saw your phone number on a, you know, map listing, something like that. Obviously, a lead makes contact with your intake team or automatically gets answered if they come in through a form. Capturing that step, I think, is one of the most important ones. And then, of course, you're probably, um, other even more so important one would be then actually the customers coming in. Because everything along the line, right? There's all these little, you know, little conversions that happen throughout. So usually what, the way we like to look at it is that we, we're going to need leads. So again, how they're coming in. Um, usually we're going to call it a marketing qualified lead. Of course, it's going to be a little bit different. So like if you're a law firm, um, that's usually going to be like an eval, right? So somebody made contact with, um, again, an intake member, they're saying, Hey, I'm interested in this and that, you know, I want a personal injury. Well, we don't do personal injury. So then they're out, but we want to capture those types of things to make sure that again, When we're buying data on the front end, we can say, Hey, look, the leads that we're driving through this data purchase through these different strategies that we're implementing, we're getting more of not that and more people making their, their way all the way through. so it's, it's that marketing qualified lead. And then, you know, sales qualified league, like I've talked about a lot of times that's then making contact with the sales team member. then, I said, ultimately, do they become a customer from there? Um, every business is going to vary a little bit about what's in the middle there. Um, but ultimately it's at least those four steps or some combination of that. and again, it's very critical because a lot of times you can learn a lot in those in between phases, although, you know, obviously net new leads and net new customers is often, you know, the, the ones you hear the most about.

Anthony Karls: 11:36

So if we, if we're capturing, you know, name and email and phone number and address, we're tracking this all the way through. What can we then do with that data once we have a significant data set? Like, what's, what's possible there?

James Patterson: 11:50

Yeah. So, so one of the, one of the coolest things that you can do once you start to accrue some of that data is, is really refine your prospecting strategies, right? Like there is no better data source. To show what does my customer actually look like then your customers, right? So like that is the most purest form of data that exists out there. Obviously, you know, google's changed their uh, Their tune in terms of uh, depreciating cookies and things like that But you know first party data is always going to be the the true premium. Um, you know, you got you You've already established that so pulling data sets out of your crm like, you know, you mentioned Usually it's going to be some combination of first name last name email phone You Um, address can be applicable to, and some of these, you can actually go to other, um, platforms and learn about your customers. Um, one of the ones that we use is working with Experian. They offer this, um, so basically, uh, matching your customer records to, uh, credit card data. And they will actually build out a, basically a profile on what the different groups kind of come out of your data from your customers. And it can be so impactful, right? So a lot of times when you're making decisions about how to prospect to people who you think, right, kind of make up your target audience, well, you can take the thinking out of it because now you're getting some really hard facts, right? There's no, I don't think, I don't think the credit card companies have any data that nobody, you know, that they have the. The absolute monopoly on that stuff. And, um, it can be really, really powerful to, again, take the guesswork out of it. So, you know, one thing that you could do then is you get, you get the report back and some of the programmatic platforms, you can actually target those specific profiles. So you go from learning about all of the kind of makeup, you know, what does the profile kind of, you know, look like from a demographic or a behavior, lifestyle, psycho, you know, psychographic, things like that. Yeah. Um, that can be great for kind of like building, you know, kind of a group of those different targeting settings and other platforms in some platforms, you can actually target that specific experience profile. So it can be really impactful because you know, the, I think probably the most wasted spend that goes out in marketing, right. Is guessing at who you think your customer is.

Anthony Karls: 13:55

Yeah.

James Patterson: 13:55

takes them out of that. Now you get to say, nah, I'm going to target. Basically exactly who my customers are, who aren't currently my customers. So it's a, it's a really powerful tool to, to utilize that. I think a lot of, a lot of businesses. Um, unfortunately overlook how much value they have and all that historical data that they accrue from building up their business over time.

Anthony Karls: 14:16

Yeah, so at its simplest point, if we're, if we're starting a business, you know, starting in, you know, like, at least for the BTC local team that we run, which that's very targeted on professional services, we're very, very likely to start in Google, we're going to start buying data through organic search and paid search and start capturing all of that in our CRM. And ideally, like we're, we're being very detailed about what we're capturing so that in. Call it two years after doing this and like refining it and getting better and optimizing that we can then take that and like learn even more. And then we can go to the top of the funnel where it's cheaper and leverage some very cool tactics because, you know, like you said, like you get psychographic and demographic information, but that impacts messaging. It impacts images and impacts is how you think about delivering assets. To those customers, um, or potential clients and, um, it's all backed by credit card data now, and it's, it's no longer a guess. It's like, oh, I think they look like this.

James Patterson: 15:22

Yep. Yeah. A lot of guessing in the industry for sure. And you bring up a really powerful point too, as it relates to creative, right? So. As a lot of businesses guess who they think are probably, you know, their typical audience if you will well then you're also guessing in your creative and your messaging and Probably impacts other areas of your kind of overall marketing strategy that you can refine based off that data you get back

Anthony Karls: 15:47

Yeah, and when we, so when we talk about going to these different platforms, um, now that we're like, you know, we've purchased a bunch of data on the front end. We've now done a, we've now done some market research. What are some of the delivery options that we have in terms of assets like using this because it's we're not talking search anymore when we're talking about this. We're talking other asset types with very specific audiences. Like, what do those? What do those look like?

James Patterson: 16:14

Yeah, so generally in terms of like really executing on that data. It's going to be dsp's Um, so that's going to be programmatic advertising. So a lot of times that's going to be display ads. So everybody sees these all the time. If you're not in that, in the advertising industry, you may not have realized it, but display ads are just essentially image ads of different sizes that then you can optimize for different placements of tablet, desktop, mobile, um, native, which is another similar form to display, except there's no image. Um, so a lot of times it looks like search ads on websites. So outside of the search results page. Um, and then you also have, um, other forms of video media. So, um, OTT, CTV, uh, pre roll, which those are, you know, the videos, if you ever been on a news side or ESPN, you start a video, you think you're starting a video about, you know, Aaron Rodgers on the jets and all of a sudden an advertisement starts before it goes, you can get all those placements. And again, you know, because you've gotten this really great. data set for you know, really based off your customers Like you can make sure you're getting those placements on the right websites that are really relevant to to your you know audience So it's really powerful that way.

Anthony Karls: 17:21

Yeah, and you'd be doing that instead of going to your local ESPN.

James Patterson: 17:26

Yep.

Anthony Karls: 17:27

Wheeler and saying, all right, I got to, I got to drop 15 K and hope that this does something.

James Patterson: 17:33

Yeah, and and you know to keep bringing it back And I hope my customers use espn, right? It takes out all that guesswork Um, it's really cool with some of the DSPs too. You can kind of work with them and make it more, um, audience based inventory model. So it's going to go after that audience specifically. It's not going to, you're not, you're not going to have to select what inventory you want based off where the audience goes, you know, maybe you thought everybody is on ESPN, but really they're watching a lot of videos on food network, right? Like you, if you went all in on ESPN, you'd be missing out on a big. Big opportunity there. So it's really great for that. And like I said, I think, uh, you know, I think every business right wants to strike that good balance between marketing spend and obviously the return that comes from it, doing things like this, tapping into your customer lists to then understand who they really are through a service like Experian. Is really going to drive a lot of benefit for you to ultimately cut down on, on wasted marketing spend.

Anthony Karls: 18:30

Yeah. When we, when you talk about, when you talk about that, how do, uh, when we go to market with these different platforms, we like to build these waterfalls first. Can you talk a little bit about the why and how attribution, uh, why we do that and how attribution is reliable or unreliable in this circumstance?

James Patterson: 18:54

Yeah. So, I mean, I think, uh, when it comes to measurement, right. There's no business that you'll work with. That's, uh, not going to ask you, you know, well, how do I know if my ads are doing well and stuff like that? Right. you know, there's obviously metrics in the platform that can give you directional evidence in terms of, you know, are things going well or not. Right. So it's not to say that there's no value in paying attention to those metrics. But the reason why we start with the waterfall is ultimately, although we do want to make sure that our channels are doing the right things, right? Finding ways to measure strategies. Ultimately, the waterfall is going to tell us exactly if we're doing the right things. So starting there and understanding that marketing isn't these little silo channels, it's really this You know, overarching holistic strategy that all impacts each other. You know, there's no platform that can say nine out of 10 times, you know, that, um, you know, paid specifically drove this. A lot of what you find is it is modeled. Like if you go into a lot of the resources and stuff, a lot of these different platforms are modeling a lot of that data anyways. So having the waterfall to really be your, you

Anthony Karls: 19:57

So when you say, when you say model, what does that mean?

James Patterson: 20:00

yeah. So basically what they're doing is using AI and machine learning to basically say, based off of his, you know, historical data in your account, we know on average, it takes this many clicks or add interactions to lead to a conversion. So some of the platforms will actually take those kind of historical data points and say, well, I'm going to count a conversion for them. Um, so one way you can fight against this modeling, right. That I think a lot of people aren't necessarily always privy to is use offline, um, conversion importing, which can be incredibly powerful to pull it back and it's still not going to be a hundred percent, right? Like the reality is, is there's, there's a lot of touch points to any given. customer that comes into your business. Right. Especially, you know, there there's few services out there, right. That we're, you're the only one that offers it. Like, you know, there's, there's often competition. There's a lot of different things and different noise and distractions out there having a really good marketing strategy. That's that is kind of covering all bases. There can help you really look at the waterfall and say, Hey, when I'm have. know, maybe a specific channel like Bing, which maybe doesn't look like it's doing very well in, in, um, you know, auction and enabled, we actually see a lower cost per lead, but the, the platform itself might show you that, uh, maybe this isn't the right platform for me. So being really intentional there about like what data you're bringing back to the platforms is first and foremost, really important. having that waterfall there to like really show you like when we turn things on and off, like what impact does it have actually on the business that should ultimately be the, you know, the main area that you're using to, to really measure and evaluate, you know, is this marketing tactic working or not?

Anthony Karls: 21:33

Yeah. So in practical terms, having the waterfall and then going from, all right, currently our strategy is we got, we got paid search and we're running some LSAs and we got some map stuff going and we got organic search and we're going to introduce programmatic based on all our data because we've started capturing this stuff. Well, we're going to, we're going to watch the waterfall and what, what happens. Like, do we keep the ROI that are, that we're targeting is our, our metrics going up? Are we, is the spend that we're making in this platform actually working? Um, we're going to measure, we're going to like look for signals in the platform, but what we actually care most about is like, what's, what happened with this. With this waterfall.

James Patterson: 22:15

Yeah, absolutely. And, and, you know, generally as an agency, what we like to do is we'll have kind of two forms of this, right? Like we'll have the waterfall itself. And then we'll have an executive dashboard. So like that goes more until like, we, you know, we're, we run media ourselves as an agency, like we understand you do need to have some gauge on like, is this channel doing what we want it to do? Um, it's just being very intentional to the fact that those metrics that we see in platform aren't always going to be super accurate, knowing it's modeled, knowing it's not seeing the full picture that somebody actually, You know, saw your organic listing the other day, and that's really what spurred all of their investigation to your brand. Um, the, the waterfall ultimately is going to let you know, you know, if, if, uh, to your example, you know, if you launch something brand new, and all of a sudden you're starting to see more leads come in, and maybe it's, you know, coming in through something like indirect or unknown in, in Google Analytics, right? You may not really know where it's coming from. Well, then it doesn't matter because you have the waterfall reporting there to really tell you and, and let you know, a hundred percent, like, is this making the positive impact that we expect?

Anthony Karls: 23:18

Awesome. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. James dropping a little bit in here. So look forward to our next combo, but big picture we talked about today. If you're going to, if you're going to market and you're investing in, you're investing in your marketing and use it, like you should use that word, you're buying data and you're learning from data. So you can, you can build a, you can build the empire you want to. Like, really continue learning, uh, and doing it well has long term results, compound those effects. So, appreciate it, sir.

James Patterson: 23:54

Yeah. Thanks. Seven.