Building a successful paid media program starts with the right mindset. The most successful advertisers adopt the mindset of investors and carry out their strategies with the precision of scientists. This week, we’re excited to have Silvio Perez, Founder of AdConversion, join us. AdConversion isn’t just a B2B training course — it’s on a mission to tackle the challenge of training in paid media strategy. Sure, we’ll touch on the tactical aspects of building a paid media program, but what we’re really delving into is the often elusive realm of strategy. Why? Because, let’s face it, nailing down a solid strategy can be like navigating uncharted waters. Resources are scarce, and everyone seems to have a different take. Beyond our discussion, we’re opening the floor for your burning questions about paid media. Think of us as your go-to panel for any random paid media queries you might have during the show.
Podcast Transcript
You’re listening to the Digital Banter Podcast, the show where we tackle the challenges of B2B marketing head on and aren’t afraid to tell it like it is. Join us weekly as we talk to industry leaders, explore opportunities that impact the bottom line, and rev your company’s marketing engine with actionable insights and tips.
It’s time to burn the old B2B playbook and build something that makes an impact. Here are your hosts, Andy and James.
What’s up, everybody. We are back for another episode of digital banter live today. We are talking about building a paid media program. Now, as everybody knows from our LinkedIn content and James just spouting off all the time on this app on this podcast. We’re two paid media guys. So we’ve seen how it’s been done over the years.[00:01:00]
We have our pros. We have our cons. We have our kind of thoughts on the process, right? Well, we figured we’d bring in the big, bring in the big guns and have our guest Silvio Perez from ad conversion, join us and talk about it. On today’s episode, Sylvio, welcome to the show, man. Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be in here and I feel like we’re going to nerd out really hard.
So James, I’m going to kick this over to you. How the hell did you even get connected with Sylvio to start with? Um, well, a couple of different ways, but the way I did, the way I, uh, learned about ad conversion is honestly like learn looking for training resources for our team. Um, I know being agency side, one of like the most difficult things that we deal with is like hiring kind of like bringing on new people.
And, uh, in, I mean, anybody in the digital marketing space probably gets this, like, you know, you hired somebody 3 months ago and you brought on a new person. Like, everything’s completely different than [00:02:00] it was 3 months ago. So from. A training resources perspective. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times that we’ve tried to essentially build what Silvio is building and just given up on it because it’s just easier to take, you know, train people as it comes in and bring them in on the nuances.
Um, and I think that’s like, honestly, because we focus so much on the technical side. And like, I think the piece that we’re going to dive into today quite a bit is the strategy side, because, uh, when Yeah. All of that technical stuff changes all the time. You know, strategy doesn’t change that much. Um, and I think that that’s where, you know, the work that Sylvia has been doing has been super helpful.
I just joking before the call, like he’s officially part of our onboarding process with his free training. I mean, there’s a couple other people in there to shout out miles McNair. We use some of your stuff. Uh, but, um. Definitely been a huge help for me. And that’s how I figured out what he was doing. [00:03:00] I also looked at metadata, um, stuff like that.
So, all right. So, so give us a rundown around ad conversion, what it is, what it’s all about. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So essentially ad conversion is a digital advertising Academy. We teach B2B marketers how to scale paid ads with free advertising courses taught by the world’s best practitioners. So the vision is that.
Ad conversion can become the go to place in the world to learn how to run ads. So there is an actual place dedicated to give you a learning experience for your vertical. So, you know, we’re 100 percent focused on B2B and the idea is we will have these courses that are designed not only based on topic and the industry, but also based on sequence.
So we’ve kind of broken it out based on different tiers. So it’s like foundations launch, optimize, and scale. And then within each tier, there’s different courses. And the vision is [00:04:00] whenever somebody asks the question, I want to learn how to run ads for B2B, where do I go? It’s, Oh yeah, you got to go check out adconversion.
com. And that’s, that’s essentially at a high level. So does that mean you have your SEO humming along yet or no? And we just got it off the ground. It’s, you know, it’s, it’s interesting how, when the, the, how the vision drives the mission, you know, you, you hear all that and you kind of work backwards. So originally I was consulting, you know, even before metadata and I was just running ads was the ad guy, just.
Creating YouTube videos, working with clients and had a lot of fun doing that for a while. But fast forward to today with ad conversion, I realized I’m like, well, if we’re going to become the go to resource, we’re going to create a destination and really a brand bigger than myself is really what I’m doing.
Then I’m like, well, then that means from a content perspective, the website must become valuable in itself. And I have this whole thing around, you know, getting ranked is like table stakes. Like, of course we want to get ranked. It’s table [00:05:00] stakes. But really the goal with every piece that we put out, at least the mentality that I have approaching it, is how do we create content so good that it actually gets bookmarked?
So that we are a resource and people have a reason to keep coming back again in the future. And I have this whole content strategy, like, outlined in, like, literally in my, uh, My notebook here. I should probably get it on on digital and like the first phase I think in phases and the first phase is the blog.
So we literally just launched the blog Probably it hasn’t been more than a month and we the first piece that we launched Was like 4, 000 words on an intro to B2B advertising. It’s just this masterpiece with like 20 contributions from other B2B ad experts. And then I just launched our first blueprint and a blueprint is like very tactical how to do a certain thing.
And it’s all around multi channel B2B retargeting. The thing is 35 pages long, I filmed 10 YouTube videos that I embedded into the, to the blueprint showing people how to [00:06:00] do things. There’s visuals, there’s diagrams, uh, I mean, it’s ridiculous, you know what I mean? And that’s a good piece of content. So it kind of ties back to that, that goal that we’re after, right?
Uh, becoming the resource.
Combination between that and Google ads help. I mean, that’s not like particular, like, like I’m excited about it. Why I like it is that like you are focused on B2B. I know your vision is much bigger than that, but you know, Dave Gerhart says it all the time. Like there’s no school for B2B marketing. Like there’s no school for B2B paid media either.
Right. I made a joke in my intro video about like performance max. Like there’s certain stuff that others, you know, if you just read. Basic how to stuff online. Like you’re going to be pulled in the wrong direction real fast. A thousand percent. Yeah. I mean, I was going to just to jump on that train, right.
A lot of the content [00:07:00] out there is super tactical. It’s super in the weeds, you know, whether it’s how to, or, uh, you know, combining the power of Google search and LinkedIn, like it just runs rampant out there and. One begins to wonder, like, has the proliferation of that content actually watered down the skillset of paid media people to become cookie cutter in their thinking or, Oh yeah, you know, uh, X, Y, Z says this, so I got to do this because this just makes sense for my business.
And it just feels like the skill development is kind of broken at this point. Silvio, I mean, what are your thoughts on that? How long is this podcast? We try for 30 minutes. Oh man. Uh, yes. A thousand percent. This is like, you guys are speaking my, my love language right now. Uh, it’s, I, you know, there’s a huge challenge is the problem with most ad people is they only know the channels and their [00:08:00] thinking is very myopic.
They only understand Google ads, right? This is like where you always have those classic. situations where it’s like somebody’s reporting on quality score to a VP of marketing when he wants to know about pipeline and revenue, right? There’s just a complete disconnect. And that’s actually why the first course that we launched is all around building a paid media program.
And by the way, no one asked me to build this course. Like when I pulled users and I was like, Hey, would you like to know where your biggest pain points? Everyone said Google, LinkedIn, uh, Reddit, and those are like kind of the big three. So, why did I build this course? I built this course because it was kind of like, if you don’t understand the 10, 000 foot view first, when you go into the weeds of the channels of Google or LinkedIn, I think of them as like tools on your tool belt, you know, and you can, depending on the job, you might need a different tool.
So, but if you don’t understand the premise of the job and how to create the plan, the blueprint that you’re going to then [00:09:00] execute, the tools are, are kind of just distractions, you know? So a hundred percent, it is a combination of a multitude of things. I think one, it’s the problem with the current state of online education, to be frank, you know what I mean?
Everyone, especially the average Academy, they create courses. To, to maximize profits. So they’ll just create a bunch of courses for volume. They’ll keep it broad for mass appeal. They’ll stuff as much info as possible. They’ll sell to everyone versus to like the people who will benefit most. And then you just repeat the cycle, you know, and yeah, and no one, it’s like the unsexy thing that nobody wants to talk about, but it’s.
It’s key. And at the end of the day, like coming from somebody that worked in ad tech, like when I was at metadata, if the only value you bring to the table as a performance marketer is understanding Google ads or LinkedIn, you’re not going to have a job in five years. Like that’s just the truth. And we knew that years ago, you know what I mean?
It’s only getting accelerated today. I tell [00:10:00] my, my, my former team and then my, I guess you call it my current team. I always say, you know, the people who still have a job five years from now in this space are the ones that are the strategist, the ones that know how to think and then leverage the tools however they might advance.
To then execute on their behalf. Yeah. I mean, I think TASP over just call it out in the chat, in the comments. Great. Right. Channel expertise is not the same as marketing expertise. Yeah. Um, and I think the other thing too, I mean, James, I mean, if you look back over our tenure together, right. I mean, I hired you back in the day.
And when we think about like the types of training that we’ve done for our own agency side, we’ve always found the best success with that hands on learning mentality, right? Great. Let’s teach somebody, but then you got to go do it. You have to get the assignments to actually practice it hands on because that’s the best way you learn at the end of the day.
You rather than watching all these videos and things like that and not being able to apply it to your own business. You got to go do it. Right. And it’s rinse and repeat. And that’s how you build the skillset. But [00:11:00] also on top of that, that’s where you start to have those conversations that are like, not necessarily theoretical, but more trying to connect the dots.
Like, okay, so you did it this way. You got still to the end goal, but why do you do it this way? And start to poke and prod at that strategic thinking to get more marketing expertise out of those channel conversations. Yeah. One of the, when I was at metadata, one of the things that I did was build the performance marketing team.
They’re essentially like the internal agency. And I was really fortunate to go through the experience of having to hire people that were extremely junior. I mean, I had one person that didn’t even know what cost per click was, you know, I’m talking about like, like the as junior as it gets, you know what I mean?
And I You know, fast forward, those people ended up managing millions of dollars in ad spend for different clients. Some of them actually gone off to do their own agencies. Some of them are working like full time now as like performance marketing managers. Some of them are consulting. [00:12:00] And with all of those people, we started with the thinking, the strategy, the why, you know, and by teaching them that first and then getting into the channels, things started to click and then they can connect dots.
Uh, and that’s that was a huge insight for me of like, unfortunately, because this doesn’t exist, we learn by learning the channel first, which is kind of is what it is. There’s there’s no better solution at the moment. And because of that, we have this tunnel vision thinking. So one thing that I’m not a big fan of in the space, and you see it a lot with like, different agencies trying to position themselves as different, right?
So everybody has like, A different framework, right? You have the demand gen people, the lead gen people, the brand people, the performance marketing people, like, and everybody has like a different spin. So I know us as an agency, like I never want to be like a demand gen agency. I don’t want to be a lead gen agency because you pigeonhole yourself in a strategy [00:13:00] that may work for a short period of time and then not work later.
And like, we ended up having to pivot with clients all the time. So. My question from a strategy perspective, like what are some of the things that you take in initially, you know, working with a client, working with a brand to help decide, like what framework is going to work best for them or if it needs to be completely custom, which most of the time it does.
Yeah, there’s a few things and they’re not even paid related. It’s just like business objectives. Number one, what’s, what’s the goal or what are we trying to go after? How soon do we need it? Um, what’s their current state of reporting and tracking? Who are they going after? What are the markets we’re interested in penetrating?
So really getting clear on the product marketing side first, uh, on the who and the, and the what. And then the, the cool thing about the scale framework specifically that, that we built and that we use in the building a paid media [00:14:00] program course is that. It can be customized regardless of the business type, which is really cool.
So it’s very versatile. So in the sense of if we have a product led company, we can adjust the stage slightly to account for them versus a sales led company. So using the same framework, we can then take the client’s goals, their priorities, and then start to map them against that framework as like our canvas.
As the first step of building their strategy, uh, along their bill, uh, paid program. What about in the land through the lens of like, maybe I’m the head of marketing a brand and it’s more about strengthening my existing program versus let’s say a startup where maybe I’m marketer number one and only loan marketer, and I’m trying to get this thing off the ground.
Like how does that framework or mindset change for those different kinds of situations? I would say the difference is you’d first do an audit. So you’d first have to audit your [00:15:00] existing structure from there. You would then because the challenges with most people is there. They don’t realize they’re they’re only penetrating 1 stage.
So for example, this is one of my favorite things about the scale framework is like, it shows you, uh, all of the different areas that you can have an impact. And then within the scale framework, we use the five stages model. So number one is you have to audit where you are right now. And from there, you can then map it against the five stages model and see what’s the gap.
So for example, maybe all we’re ever doing is capture. We can do create, we can do accelerate, we can do revive, we could do expand. Those are four other stages we haven’t even thought about. That we could potentially put dollars against to make an actual impact in terms of investment. So I would say number one is learning through the scale framework.
You can understand your strategy first, like audit that, then go through your configuration, which is all around your reporting and your measurements. Then from there, you can audit [00:16:00] your process around assembling campaigns, which is what the A stands for. Then L is around learning. So do you have a process in place for learning?
And then finally is around expansion. Do you have a process in place around expansion? Do you have a process in place around securing budget from stakeholders, experimenting, and building a library of learnings? I think that expansion part is key because while it lives at the end of the framework, it really starts at the very beginning because I mean, how many times have all three of us had conversations with a client or a brand where it’s like, Oh yeah, you know, we’re, we just want to test out and pilot Google search.
Well, okay, great. That’s one little channel out of the entire possibility that exists out there. So like, what’s, what’s the end goal here, right? What’s the triggering event for trying Google search. You want more. Leads you want more bottom of funnel kind of intent driven stuff. Like it’s less about the channel at the end of the day.
It’s more about the strategy and the end goal to your point. Sylvia of, of what does that expansion looks like that [00:17:00] hits the actual business bottom lines? Yeah. A thousand percent. We always say, take the 10, 000 foot view first before we, you know, we get our foot on the ground. So let’s dive deeper into this.
Cause this is a question we get all the time. Advice for small brand. Uh, they got 3000 star budget. They’re just starting their paid media program. What are some of the things that they need to have in place? You know, would you start at the top of the funnel bottom of the funnel? Like where would you go?
Yeah. So first and foremost, just taking like a huge zoom out. So the scale framework is the entire process from going from, I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve never done this before to I’m a legend. And now I’m expanding, I’m scaling across channels. So the framework itself is the process I would walk someone through.
So the S stands for strategize. So this person with 3k a month, I would say, all right, fantastic. Let’s work together. Let’s first figure out your strategy. [00:18:00] So then from there I would use the five stages model as the canvas to actually map out the strategy. So I would say, okay, you got three K a month. We have five potential stages.
We could make an impact. Given your budget, is it realistic for you to be able to hit all five stages with 3K? Probably not. And also, given your goal, you said you want to drive demos this month, correct? Okay, well then, like the saying goes, let’s not sell a hamburger to somebody who isn’t hungry. Let’s focus on the people who know they have a problem first, which is the capture stage.
So let’s convert interest from in market buyers. Right. So that’s kind of like the, the decision tree in my mind that I would go through and how everything kind of feeds into that. So then from there would be diving even deeper. It’s like, okay, what are, what are the, now that we understand the stage we’re going after, what are the KPIs we will measure?
Okay. So. You have three K. How do we know if we’re successful or not? I always say to clients. I’m like, are we, are we winning a winnable fight? Like, is this game winnable? Because if [00:19:00] it’s not, I don’t want to play. I don’t think you want to play either. So from there, we understand the stage. We’ve allocated the budget.
Now we need to understand the KPIs. From the get go. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve made this mistake. Fast forward three months. Oh, we’re not successful. And I’m like, what do you mean we’re not successful? Like this, this, this, and this happened because there’s a misalignment of reality. And you need to set those expectations.
So from here, we will set the KPIs on the leading and the lagging side. So leading KPIs, what are the first things that we can get insights on really quickly within a 7 to 14 day period? Lagging KPIs within a 30 to 90 day period. So for example, with the 3K a month. On the front end, we’re going to look at your cost per demo opt in as an example, on the, on the lagging side, we’ll look at pipe to spend generated from, from these campaigns that we’re running.
And then from there, we go into the actual channel selection. Okay, what’s going to be the best use of that 3k? You only have 3k. So likely it’s going to be one channel to start and you know, [00:20:00] you just kind of keep going down that route. But once you have. The big outline of like, okay, here’s where you start.
Here’s where you end. It then becomes much easier for people, especially if they’re not paid ads, people to have a map that they can follow. Right? So if they’re flying, like I’m in Lisbon right now, I want to go to Lisbon to Miami. I need a flight plan. And the scale framework is your 10, 000 foot view on building the program.
And then within the strategize stage, we use the five stages model to start to build out the actual strategy. And then from there, we go into the next stage. Once you have your strategy locked in, which is around configuring. And this is, in my opinion, the place that most people need help, not even strategically.
It’s the configuring, which is all around how do you actually configure the necessary visibility. To know if you’re heading in the right direction from a reporting perspective. So I always say like you could have the greatest advertiser of all time. Like you could have the Yoda [00:21:00] of ads in your ad account, man.
You could have James Kravick, legendary James Kravick. There’s nothing legendary here. And I promise you, if you had James, Andy, and myself in your account, managing your ads, and we don’t have the necessary reporting and dashboards. We can’t help you, you can’t even help yourself, like you have to have this, which is why it’s the second part of the, the, uh, scale framework.
And in the course, we go into like showing people how to build a paid media program. And I feel like with each one of these, like we could have a whole podcast. Um, but, but that’s the second piece. So that’s kind of how I think about it. So like the scale framework is the high level process and the roadmap.
And then we start from the S and we work our way to the E. So let me bring up, I want a common pain point because I feel like people need to hear this like, uh, my question, I’ll be direct. Can you work without CRM data? No, absolutely not. If the goal, if the [00:22:00] goal is, Capture and we want to drive pipeline and revenue, you are already setting yourself up to fail because how do you know, if pipeline and revenue happened, if you can’t connect to your own data, it’s like, it’s a logical, you know, one of the biggest misses though, it really is like one of the biggest misses.
Yeah, you, how I, it’s like, uh, I’ll give like a side note for, for the agencies listening and the freelancers and they’re like, I don’t know how much the charge. I’m like, well, you don’t know how much to charge because you don’t understand how much value you’re providing. The reason you don’t understand how much value you’re providing is because you have no real insight into what you’re actually doing.
That’s a, that’s a cold pill to swallow, but it’s true, you know? And I, and I say that out of love because, like, I said that years ago, you know what I mean? And then I realized this, and then I’m like, well, wait a second. Because I, I tell my team this, it’s like, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Because at the end of the day, they’re going to blame you.
Because most people don’t take accountability. You know what I mean? So it’s like, [00:23:00] I always say, it’s like, imagine you knew somebody was going to get cancer in six months. You knew, and you love this person. It is your moral obligation to use everything in your power to convince them of the problem that they have and the impending doom that is coming their way.
And if they’re not willing to do it, Then I’m not the right person for you. I got nothing to go for that. No, that one’s uh, that one’s being clipped after this. Starting with the cancer comment. No, but it’s so like, it’s, it’s so true. And I think that that’s like what Chris Walker used to talk about this a lot.
Like I won’t work with you unless you give us CRM data. I will say like, we’re not necessarily in that position. Like, is that my opinion? Yeah, like, you know, it becomes really difficult over time to drive leads or drive demos and then like Even like relying on them to give that information back to [00:24:00] you.
Like it’s not the same as just being able to go in and say like, Oh, like we, you know, we drove this. I used to love e comm, right? I hate e comm now. I used to love e comm because you can make a change and you can see how many dollars you made the next day. I used to love that. And I would spend way too much time on my e comm accounts.
Cause I could go in there and I could be like, Oh, I made this much money. I made this much change in B2B. You could never do that. But now. We get access to a lot more backend data and like, I can go in and be like, Oh, we drove like six leads today. Like, who are these people? Do they fit the ICP? And then like tracking them through.
And it just honestly, it makes the job more fun too, but you can do much better work because you can realize that you had 50 leads on a terrible ebook download from Nigeria and that that strategy isn’t going to work for you. Right. And you could just. Put it to the client right away, right? It makes a huge difference.
100%. And one really hard thing. And like, I see the comment by Courtney around how do you get clients to provide the necessary [00:25:00] data to build better dashboards, especially if you’re working in B2B, it can be really tough to get access to the CRM just from a security perspective. And you have to sign like your life away basically in agreements to even get the hope of getting access to the CRM.
So one really. Tactical and practical tip I have for you is instead of you getting direct access to the CRM and getting a direct login where you can get exposed to all the other things that you shouldn’t be saying, instead, use a shared space. So, for example, like with our clients, we use Google Sheets.
It’s free. It’s simple. You can, you can afford Google Sheets and we just have the data pushed into Google Sheets. The client that we need to, to build, then visualize it with the dashboards and Google sheets and in the course, and module three, not to plug the course, but we, we have the dashboard that we use in there with clients and they can just push the data in with no PII, no personal identify information.
So it’s just like create date opportunity amount, uh, UTM source, uh, the lead source detail, et [00:26:00] cetera. And that’s really it. And I’d show you how to build it in, in module three. But in terms of the specifics. Uh, another thing I just want to call out here, just to kind of bring this part of the conversation to a closure is for anybody that wants to dig a little bit deeper into on the client side, how do you try to get them to give you more of this data, check out a couple episodes of digital banter ago with task over.
Uh, we definitely dived into that pretty in depth, uh, when she was on the brand side of things and just kind of how to have those conversations at multiple levels. And also just having that directiveness that we’re all talking about of, I can only do so much with what I’m given. Um, all right. So Sylvia, as we kind of start to bring today’s episode towards the closure, I like to ask a question around, I still have it here.
If you were to wave the magic wand, right? What’s the one thing that you would change about B2B marketing today?[00:27:00]
Oh, that’s tough. There’s a, I, I can’t ask for three more wishes. You get three takeaways. So you can use those as your lifelines, I guess, if you want. I would say, I would say number one is to not forget. the art. I think B2B, we have a tendency to be infatuated with the science, which is great. But at the end of the day, you can have the most beautiful campaign set up the one, the most wonderful report in the world.
All your prospects see is the ad in front of them and the offer that they have and the landing page that they’re going to write if you’re using a landing page. So I would really say that. Folks sometimes they think too much in a way like they think a lot about the things that don’t really matter and then they Don’t think very much about the things that do and one of the biggest things that do is you’re creative You know at the end of the day like even with the building a paid [00:28:00] media program if use a scale framework or any other Framework for that matter.
That’s great. Like you have this dashboards reporting everything but now it’s like, okay Like, I always tell my clients, like, let’s get the plumbing out of the way as soon as possible. You know, like, I don’t want to spend a lot of time on that. I want to spend time doing the stuff that’s cool, like testing new things and new creatives and thinking about cool ad angles that we can then build awesome integrated campaign ideas around.
So I would say that’s the number one thing is they, they sweat the details that don’t matter and they don’t pay much attention to the ones that do. I got nothing on that because we hear it every single day. So you can nail down that one. Uh, all right. So if you want to use that as your one out of three actual takeaways, you’re, we’ll give you a free pass on that, but give us some actual takeaways for our listeners today.
Actionable takeaways on things to stop doing in, in B2B in general, go for it. I would [00:29:00] say number one is stop using the same. Creative on all channels and expecting it to perform equally. You need to respect each platform, each platform, almost think of it as like its own country that has its own customs, its own people, its own regulations.
So one very common example is somebody takes a video that they ran on LinkedIn and Facebook, and then they slap it as a YouTube ad, they put a thousand bucks behind it, and they’re like, Oh, YouTube ads doesn’t work. It’s like, no, no, you didn’t, you’re not winning a winnable fight here, you know? So I would say that’s one.
So learn the platforms first. I always recommend like becoming a user yourself. So for example, I ran TikTok ads in January of last year, and I really wanted to see, can you reach B2B buyers on a platform like TikTok? But before I actually ran an ad, the first thing I did was I actually used the platform.
So I used it and I used it for, I always say for at least 30 days, like, you [00:30:00] know, for 30 days straight, just be careful. We don’t develop an addiction, uh, but, but use the platform, understand the nuances. I always say like people who are great at creating content organically, you know, it’s, it’s funny. Cause they kind of like shit on ads people or like vice versa, like, Oh, I grew organically or.
You know, it’s like this, this divided camp, which is like crazy to me. But if you’re already doing things great organically, you are a couple of steps away of becoming a fantastic advertiser and learning the data side, you know? So I would say that’s one I’m ranting a lot. Uh, but the, the second thing.
actionable takeaway for people is you can’t fix what you can’t see, which I feel like has been a big theme this episode. There’s really no excuse to not have the proper reporting. I, and I’m, I’m sorry. I just don’t have sympathy anymore for, especially for like startups that have raised capital. Me myself now, as an entrepreneur, like, you know, very early on, I don’t have any venture capital money.
I don’t have any a 10th of a [00:31:00] 10th of a 10th of like what. Other people do not to compare myself, but I have been able to build a dashboard in Google sheets to give me some level of visibility, you know, so it’s like, there’s really no excuse you. You accept what you tolerate at the end of the day, and it’s very true.
And, and when you are the leader of the ship, you’re, you know, the, the buck stops with you. So if you’re ACEO listening to as a founder, you know, at the end of the day, everything is your fault, even when it’s not. So take accountability and make sure that you have the things that you need so that you can be successful.
Um, and I would say that’s, that’s probably the next one. And then the third one is don’t, don’t get in the habit of checking boxes. What I mean by this is you, it’s very easy to hear something and then just like try it half assed and then just check the box. It’s like, Oh, LinkedIn thought leader ads. Let’s try that.
And then you do it. And then it’s kind of like not with real thought or integration with other [00:32:00] things going back to strategy. And of course it doesn’t work or you don’t think it works or whatever the case might be. Or even like with content, we need a blog. Let’s create content. So we’re just going to start to create content and it’s like very half assed.
And it’s like, you’re better off at being incredible at few things versus doing a lot of things poorly. You know, like the, the difference between good and great is dramatic, dramatic, you know, like even producing this first course that’s free, like to be able to get it to the level of production that it required, having resources, like.
Uh, for example, our, our transcripts are proofread for typos. We highlight key points and benefits on them, all of this stuff. And this is a free course, you know what I mean? And it’s like, I’m already seeing word of mouth, people referring, active version of their friends and things like that. And then on the other hand, I’ve worked with companies that have millions of dollars in budget and they have content teams, but they don’t understand what I’m saying in terms of like [00:33:00] committing yourself to mastery, to making things that are truly worthy of shares and referrals and likes.
And then they put budget behind it to create demand and they don’t actually get any real traction. And it’s like, well, why is that inputs and outputs? What is the input here that you’re then outputting out there? And if that’s wrong, it’s you’re not gonna, you know, get the result you’re after. So I would say don’t fall into that trap of checking boxes just because you hear someone say something on LinkedIn today or chat TPT this or that or whatever the newest thing is like understand the game you’re playing.
Get obsessed about who you’re serving and just focus on that. And then all these other new things that come up. I’m not saying disregard it, but I’m just saying don’t prioritize it right now. Like look at it, learn about it. And then see how it can integrate into the bigger picture later on. Perfect. A huge fan of focusing on a couple things and doing them really, really well.
The, I don’t know, the shiny [00:34:00] object thing is very tough sometimes. Yeah, especially when you’re a creative person. All right, Silvio. So where can people learn more about ad conversion, but also connect and talk to you? Yeah. Visit us at ad conversion. com and you can connect with me on LinkedIn, uh, Silvio Perez and happy to answer any questions.
All right, man, it was great having you on today’s show. Everybody likes subscribe, check out digital banter episodes, like I mentioned, but more importantly, go check out ad conversion as Silvio mentioned it’s free until next time. Catch you guys later.
Thanks for listening to the Digital Vanter podcast. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss an episode. For more resources and to keep up with the show, visit dragon360. com. Until next time.