brent weaver: i'm brent weaver and you'rewatching uguru's, the most watched web series to become a more profitable and in-demandweb professional. today, we're hanging out at advision marketing in denver, colorado.i'm hanging out with their vice-president of business development, chris kampfe. welcometo the program. chris kampfe: thank you. brent weaver: so, where'd you get your startin digital? chris kampfe: my first career out of college,i was hired by a travel company as a copywriter. and because i was far and away one of theyounger folks in the office, i became sort of the de facto we guy, which i had no backgroundin. and fortunately the company was based
out of the u.k. and i wanted to do some travelafter college and this company just happened to have the, excuse me, a good fit for travelingabroad because i wanted to travel after college. i wanted to get more professional experiencein that career, or excuse me, in the digital marketing sector. and they sent me to england to train withtheir digital marketing team. so, right out of school i got to sit with their seo personfor six to eight weeks, their paid search person for six to eight weeks, their web designer,their email marketing person, and so it was a pretty comprehensive training which had,i guess pretty much from that point charted the course of the rest of my career and todayto be in the digital marketing space.
brent weaver: and how did you get involvedwith advision? chris kampfe: so, in 2011, i was doing someindependent consulting and was renting some office space down in the loto area, and ibumped into matt waldie who actually had been running advision for several years at thattime, and we both happened to be from omaha, and we both happened to be doing a lot ofwork in the paid search seo space, and it was just too serendipitous. so, we after sort of intentionally stayingaway from each other for a little a while, decided this is dumb, let's get together,and it's more or less history from there. brent weaver: and so now you primarily, you'vegot this business development title in your
name and your title, i assume you're the onegoing out there and getting new clients and that kind of thing? chris kampfe: yeah, to some degree. well,yes. a lot of our business right now is referral as i imagine, most smaller agencies, businessesor new business generations. the business development kind of title for me at this currenttime in our agency's growth is more very genuinely just fielding in-bound leads. we'll get referralsfrom partners, from existing clients, from just folks that we happen to know like you.i would say, "hey, go talk to these guys." and the, i think need for business developmentindividual at our company was not so much that we need a proactive outreach, but weneeded a proactive on boarding process to
get into the production as seamlessly as possible. so, it wasn't, you know going to hit the streetsand knocking on doors. it was a lot of people were doing that to us, but it was just managingthat influx of interest. brent weaver: so, how would you say you woulddefine a typical customer for advision? chris kampfe: by and large, the types of folksthat we work with are more interested in lead generation. so, we do have a number of ecommerceclients that we work with or other businesses where the digital objective is very transactional,somebody puts down their credit card and then they just get the product or service instantly,ala, amazon, something like that. but, as we've moved more in the directionof in-bound marketing using marketing automation
and a lot of content marketing, we've foundthat where we see that work particularly well is in professional services. so, we work witha number of healthcare industry folks, i'm try to think, some web design agencies. reallyit . . . brent weaver: so, it's you guys actually workingfor other web design agencies doing in-bound for them. chris kampfe: right, right, yeah, becausewe actually don't do any web design. so, the . . . and actually the origination of kindof this type of service in and of itself that we've found was when we were doing only paidsearch a lot of the problems that our clients were encountering were not a derivative ofthe traffic that was coming to their site,
or the lack of traffic, or the lack of qualitywith the traffic. it was some general feeling, some evidenced and data based feeling thatthe traffic is good, the site just isn't quite working. and we delicately wanted to tell people youneed a new website, but maybe they had just gotten a new website. and so when we cameto discover different tools like hub spot or there's a number of other ones out there,we realized that we then had the ability to make incremental increases to conversion rateswithout having to burn their website down and build it up again. that actually led toa lot of relationships with design agencies who we needed to integrate these, excuse me,these software platforms with, and they ended
up becoming partners, clients, and so that'skind of how that started. brent weaver: so, we have a lot of web agenciesin our audience and i'm interested. what do you guys see as the number one problem withtheir websites or what they're doing wrong to convert some of that traffic into goodleads for them? chris kampfe: good question. first of whichi'd say is probably persona development. for us, that's a very commonly overlooked aspectthat we help our clients with is trying to really understand who are you trying to getin front of and what are the needs that they're trying to satisfy that you might have a solutionfor. so, if your client is an independent business owner versus a marketing director,they probably have two very different needs
or they'll use two different sets of languageto describe what it is they're looking for, for you to solve. we start there as the origination and a lotof marketing companies probably do the same thing. but then understanding iterativelyhow to take that persona and create an ongoing dialogue with them to establish you as, iguess the source of trust and truth in helping them solve that problem. so, if you are adesign agency, you might look into . . . well, you start with the idea that you're tryingto solve a problem, but then follow-up with, how can i establish that i'm the best personto solve this problem? so, first problem is, we're not getting enoughbusiness from our website. okay. well, what
type of business? we're trying to get moreclients for our such and such business. well, what are your client's interested in? whattypes of magazines do they read? how do they engage in different types of content online?how can you replicate or produce content that looks like what they like that addresses eitherthe specific type of problem that they're trying to solve or issues that are ancillaryto that. and then third, how do you integrate technologyto support that dialogue. so, is it a drip email campaign, is it getting blog subscribers,is it, you know whatever that might be. brent weaver: do you find a lot of other webcompanies come to you with, oh, we work with small business or something like really broadand how do you guys help them to kind of focus
their energies a little bit? chris kampfe: that's a really good point,very good question. i don't know that most companies come to us with, we work with smallbusiness, but it is broad to your point. it's probably more along the lines of, we reallylike working in a particular industry, but the industry is very general. so, it's like,we really like working in healthcare. well, does that mean you work with actual practitioners,do you work with insurance companies, do you work with companies that provide supplementalservices to the healthcare industry, and really try and laser in on that because a marketingmessage for a physician's clinic is very different than an insurance company.
and so what we try and do is actually get. . . help them navigate within the larger vertical, what are the more core verticalsthat we can segment off a message to specifically. brent weaver: what would you say the percentageof your clients that are actually web pro's versus just mainstream type businesses? chris kampfe: actually we don't work witha whole lot of web pro's specifically. we do work with a hand full. i would say froma percentage basis it's probably 5% web professionals, 95% a wide array of industries. brent weaver: okay, that definitely makessense. so, you guys say you do in-bound marketing. so, it comes to like that work. how much areyou guys doing versus how much are your clients
doing? i guess . . . chris kampfe: sure. brent weaver: mostly around like content creationor ad campaigns and those types of things. a lot of web pros i talk to, they're not sure,like how much they're supposed to do versus how much their client's supposed to do. chris kampfe: yeah, great question actually.this is something has been a big push of ours to solve over the past probably six or eightmonths because we'll work with clients that are in very niche industries that we don'tthink that we have the expertise to actually write about it. so, maybe it's a very obscurepiece of software and that software appeals
to a very niche industry that we don't haveany experience in, and initially we would have looked at something like that and saidwe can't write about this. i don't know anything about that area and can talk about it witha level of specificity that's going to be reflective of the expertise that our clientsare looking for. what we ultimately found was that from justa project management perspective, one of the biggest hurdles that we've dealt with personally,that web professionals that we work with, as partners deal with, is getting contentfrom clients whether that's image assets, whether it's copy, whether it's video, whateverit is it might be. and to circle back on your question, initially we probably allowed 50%of our clients to do that themselves. and
now, we probably handle 95% of it. and there'salways a little bit of a battle because everybody thinks, oh, well i can blog or i can writean ebook. and the debate is not over whether they can do it, it's the debate over whetherthey will do it. and more often than not, they have their own businesses to run, sothey don't have time to produce an ebook or something along those lines. so, we've gotten some pretty good systemsin place to harness the knowledge that they have and use our resources to actually producethe content that hopefully everybody feels is reflective of their expertise and theirthought leadership. brent weaver: how do you guys structure yourin-bound projects? are these, like mostly
retainer based projects or are you guys doingone off campaigns through your clients? chris kampfe: they're almost entirely retainerbased, but that's almost the nature of the longevity that is required for them to reallywork. so, it's not that we would help somebody out with just kind of a onetime project, iguess if you will, but the nature of content marketing is as we believe it and understandit is that your primary goal is to establish trust and expertise with your clients, andwithin your industry. being that it's not a transactional relationship like amazon,you go to amazon, you want that book, somebody buys that book. it's a longer term relationship,so it requires more content and it requires a longer term nurturing exercise.
so, just as an example, if you were goingto some professional for services that would be thousands of dollars and you really wantedto trust them first, you would go visit their site multiple times. you would vet that person.you would, i guess read different pieces of content that they've produced to really understandeither, a, is this person truly an expert and b, does their service philosophicallymethodologically align with what i'm preparing to spend a lot of money on. and so just thenature of the fact that the buying cycle in professional services is so much longer leadsinto us having longer term engagements with the folks that we work with. and it's generallyour belief that if we can continually show a positive roi on that effort, those willbe relationships that'll last a long time.
brent weaver: how important is paid searchwithin you guy's content marketing campaigns you guys are doing. chris kampfe: critical. we actually startedas a paid search agency and iteratively evolved into other services. from a content marketingstand point we really sort of see three primary service components of what we do. the firstof which is traffic acquisition. the second of which is going to be onsite optimization.and then the third is going to be lead nurturing, lead management, database management. so, from a traffic acquisition stand point,there's quite a few channels you can pursue right now and there's only an increasing numberof them. we would typically make the argument
that paid search is going to be the lowesthanging fruit from a traffic acquisition stand point. so, search seo and paid search peopleare always going to debate one way versus another. they're all good as far as we'reconcerned. paid search just has a level of predictability to it that makes it the lowestof the low hanging fruit. if you're looking for a denver dog walker and you're doing seo,which you should be, you have a somewhat mitigated sense of control over your ability to driveorganic traffic because at the end of the day google very much controls that. in paid search, google levels has actuallygiven you more direct levers that you can pull and it may cost a little more. it doescost more in most cases, but the level of
predictability that you get and the guaranteethat you get associated with those dollars, i'd often argue it's worth it. brent weaver: how do you push kind of theorganic boulder up hill in terms of selling, right, because that's a question that comesup all the time is, my client wants to know when. when will i be number one? when willi be on the first page of google? how do you guys position? i assume that's part of yourpitch at some point. brent weaver: if you're doing organic, howdo you guys position that with your clients and what kind of promises do you make? chris kampfe: sure. it's a great question.well, the promises are, i guess kind of two-fold.
we don't promise results. anybody that doesresults, i think is exposing themselves to a degree that it's probably uncomfortable.it's probably a scenario where you're setting yourself up to have a difficult conversationwith your client, but we do promise that we'll never do anything that would adversely affectyou, we'll never do anything that google has outright said this is bad. we do promise thatwe'll deliver what we say. we do promise that we'll make you aware of any trends that arecoming up in seo, any best practices, any shared use cases of somebody who's maybe ina similar industry has seo's that we have seen work. but, in terms of responding to the question,you know when am i going to be at the top,
it's a tough question to answer. if you werestarting a company right now where you had a new idea for a credit card, it's incumbentupon us to tell you what visa, and mastercard, and american express are doing from an seoperspective, the years of, i guess back log credibility that they have in the search engines,and just what's in front of you to overcome that. often times those conversations go downthe route of, well, let's look at a different channel. if you were . . . brent weaver: so, essentially you're sayinglike we could look at seo, but the likeliness of you actually getting any results from thatare like nothing. you could pay us to do that, but it's very likely...
chris kampfe: well, it depends. if you werestarting a denver dog walker, the likelihood that we could get you on the first page oreven the first position in a matter of months, potentially weeks is very high. and we havea number of case studies where that's true. typically what we try and do is just lookat a cost benefit of the competitiveness of your industry and the budget required. it'snot that even if you're in a hyper competitive industry, you couldn't find ways to make seowork, but it's all a cost benefit analysis. so, seo like anything else is also somethingthat we encourage people to think about as one tool in their marketing belt. it's justthe tool that you have to exercise the most patience with. it works phenomenally for somepeople. it works, i wouldn't say poorly for
others, but if they're in an industry whereit is very competitive you need to tap our expectations. brent weaver: so now, you as an individual,you been in this market and this space for a long time. do you have any daily, weekly,or monthly practices that you've been able to keep up on that have helped you get whereyou are today? chris kampfe: in terms of my own sort of professionaldevelopment or . . . brent weaver: yeah. chris kampfe: sure. so, one of the thingsactually that we did, i guess we started about a year ago was came to the realization thatnone of us are sales professionals. so, we
did hire a sales coach that helped us in avariety of capacities. i think, i would argue one of the most useful capacities was reallyunderstanding how to properly scope a project. under promising and over delivering are twokind of concurrent things that we strive for and so being able to ask the right questionsthat set you up to scope a project where you can almost ensure that has been really helpful. so, we keep regular hours and meetings withour coach. brent weaver: is this just at a leadershiplevel or everybody in the company kind of gets taught how to sell? chris kampfe: it actually started companywide and then as it became apparent that we
all needed to have individual areas of expertise,it became more or less siloed into me being the main point of contact, and the main personthat develops that for our company. but, it definitely trickles down into everybody elseas a project comes in. the people that are actually in the production execution of thathave a strong understanding of the way that it was sold so that they can execute on itappropriately. yeah, just sorry, does that answer that? brent weaver: sure. what kind of trends areyou guys following right now? chris kampfe: content marketing in and ofitself is going through a very interesting trend. i think the idea of content marketingin its inception was just really being viewed
as an authoritative figure in your space.so, the more you wrote about a subject matter, or produced video, or blog, or whatever itis that you might be, that in and of itself would be enough once snowballed to get ourbusiness or get you to the top of the search engines, or whatever it is it might be. as that, i guess mindset effectively proliferatedand more people were actually doing that, it opened up, i think mental space for peopleto say, i know i need to be producing content, but i could also be doing something more cleverwith that content. so, the first aspect of that became probably a integration with emailmarketing. so, moving away from sort of the if you build it, they will come, if you justhave a lot of content on your site, people
will find it. while that still rings trueto some degree then we had to proactively get that in front of people. so, we builtan email database where you go about acquiring that, however some people do and get yourcontent proactively in front of people that might not be looking for you. right now what we're seeing a lot of is adserving platforms that are really built specifically for content marketing. some of these thingsare outbrain or meltwater. essentially they operate very similarly to other publishernetworks, but their value proposition really seems to be aligned with somebody who is readinga piece of content online, maybe on a news site, and your piece of content gets integratedinto that site. so, those platforms operate
very similarly from a logistical stand pointhow many other media buying channels would. as simple as a google display network, butthey just serve your media differently. that's probably the most interesting one to us. leaning on top of that, the publisher networkand the data exchange network with the content syndication is really probably one of theforefronts of what we're trying to really solve right now for our clients. if you havea particular content type and you have a very specific demographic audience, and a veryspecific sort of niche within that demographic, so they're into crafting. how do we use yourcontent to get in front of this demographic that has that interest off of your site andthen bring them back on? that's probably one
of the more interesting things in our spaceright now that we're trying to figure out. brent weaver: so, like, i mean can you giveme an example that like when i read an article and then used one of those networks to publishthat article then drive that content, that traffic back to my website. chris kampfe: yeah. so, let's say you workedfor an organization that made supplies for people that were into crafting. well, on theone hand you know from a, i guess a demographic stand point who your historical clients are.so, maybe they're men in between 30 and 40, but there's a lot of men in between 30 and40 that are not interested in crafting, but you know there's a subset in there that isinterested in crafting. so, if you just hypothetically
went to espn.com to push your content to thatad network, there's a high likelihood that you're going to get in front a lot of peoplethat aren't interested in crafting although they are your target demographic, so, that's where you layer in the data exchangenetwork. so, the data exchange network is going to ensure that you can still show onespn.com to a male demographic between 30 and 40, but you're actually just showing tothe people who have as a by-product of their historical behavior online, shown an interestin crafting in some capacity. and so it's marrying your content to the persona type,to the sites that they go to and making sure that those are all in line, that you are havinga very targeted ad spend, and mitigating any
waste or fat in that ad spend. brent weaver: and how do you guys bill yourclients in terms of ad spend? is it . . . do you guys have a flat rate and then just adspend is above that? are you guys charging a percentage of . . . chris kampfe: we usually have a floor witha percentage that scales. the idea being that as the ads perform more effectively, hopefullythe data will elucidate that, you'll increase your spend, and everybody wins. brent weaver: cool, very fascinating. well,chris, we appreciate you taking the time to hang out with us today. i wish you all thebest. hopefully, we can check in with you
some time in the future. chris kampfe: absolutely, thank you. brent weaver: all right. well, stay tunedfor more good content from ugurus.com.
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