The marketing movement by Refine Labs. Hey everyone, welcome back to the Marketing Movement Podcast. I'm Abed Durani, the Associate Creative Director at Refine Labs joined today by Jonathan Dane, the founder of Client Boost and awesome performance marketing agency. And I think he's one of the very best people to chat with about creativity and marketing, and I've learned a lot from him over the years.
So Jonathan, I'd love for you to sort of introduce yourself. Yeah, thank you so much. Friggin Flatter to be here to be honest, and it's not a lot of people that give a lot of time or attention to creativity. I think we're at like a turning point with BDB marketing where there's a lot of people that are going to experiment with this and do really cool things.
And my day to day is I just got to do random shit for fun and see what's six and what doesn't. And so there's a lot of things we can talk about. Awesome dude, I love that. Okay, so before we jump into anything, I know that one of your biggest answers for viewpoints on marketing is the Lemonade Stand Principle.
Can you just briefly explain what that is? Because I feel like a lot of what you do kind of stems from that belief. Yeah, it's sorry if you've explained this like a thousand times. No, no, not a lot of people know about it.
It was, I was on a show with Ross Hedgens at Cech Media out of San Diego and Austin, and we were talking about that. And I was basically making the whole point that, think of it as one street and you have a lemonade stand on there and all your competitors also have lemonade stand on there. And you have to get a card to pull over and stop at your lemonade stand. But how do you even get to start doing that?
Like what would you even change or intend to do to make that happen? And so when you look at it that way in a very simple manner, people have an easier time understanding how important all the details are, like your design choices that you have, the aesthetic. So the example that I made in that video, when I was bringing it up was like, well, think about the uniform that your kids or your team has on with that lemonade stand. Think about the type of ice cubes that use, do you use pellet ice cubes that are easier to crunch because they use the flaky ones, do they use the cube ones?
How is your sign too? Is it really cool? Like it will stand out more? And that's a qualitative question.
It's hard to answer quantitatively sometimes, right? But you can still answer it. Then you can look at things like, are you using organic limits? Are you having sugar free options?
Are you using milk fruit, sweetener? You know, we can keep going. And so to me, like bring it into what we do at Clients, it's like I'm obsessed that there's somebody new starts. And I see in their email signature that their phone number format is not following the parentheses space three digits, then hyphen, then four digits.
I'm like fixing it and people are like, why are you wasting your time on this? And I don't think people get, every single thing kind of like adds up to the bigger picture. And that allows you to then raise the bar continuously because you've already had everybody following you to that level too. So that's kind of like the background story on the Lemme like editing a blog post or writing a really good script.
I try not to, or anything. It's just you can't break that immersion. And I feel like that's really through like a small example of that being the email template. But you look at that on a wider scale.
You see a really carry out through the Clients Boost brand with like everything that you guys do. So we're gonna be awesome. We have some other things that we like exactly what you said. We call it the glass of gloom.
And what it basically means is that you can keep pouring bad things into this glass of water where it fills up. But at the point where you put one more drop in and it spills over. That's the point where that user on your website leaves because that immersion is broken. You said, or it's that client that cancels.
Or it's that employee who puts another two week notice. So what are you doing to eliminate that glass of bloom from being filled to a certain point? Like that's something we talk about a lot internally at KB. And you're absolutely right.
Like if you can figure out how to increase the motivation by design or the educational aspect. And or at the same time, you can also decrease the friction. You will have an easier time hitting your goals. And so you can't say that design and humor and entertainment don't matter because those are the levers you get to pull with and use which a lot of your competitors just are not even there yet.
And that might just be like the way things have been for a long time. But why do you feel that's the case? Like I feel like eventually once you venture into like that kind of territory of trying to create like unique content like you sort of conclude like those are the variables, right? Like you're maintaining, neat, interesting, like compelling design, right?
So like why do you think there's like a bit of a hesitancy to move towards that play? You know what I mean? Yeah, I think one part is I think the majority of the human population they will they might call themselves creative, but they might not be granted for the sake. Like I don't know how to use sort of shot.
I suck at drawing myself. So like at that level, I'm pretty horrible creatively. But I also know that it's a subjective field and you can have opinions about it. And that's where it makes a dangerous from a business investment perspective.
Because so much of today is used off like, well, show me the numbers, what's our lie and things like that too. You can't really easily say, hey, because we made this design change or we started introducing this mascot or these cartoon character, sure, you can do it on a big scale like your Gecko. And you want to have like brand recall surveys and all that kind of stuff like that out there. But the majority of businesses today, one don't have access to that, don't know it's available and also would have enough budget to probably quote unquote immerse their prospects in a new reality to then get their feedback of like, what's that better or not?
So it's much easier to stay in their lane and stay with what's black and white in my opinion. But that gives us a much opportunity for everybody else to take advantage of it, right? Because the bar is so low in that world. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you could say if it ain't broke, don't fix it and that's just like, hey, if you see the opportunity and it's working, you know, try it out.
And I think that's really the best way to go about it, is just to try and experiment and see what sticks and what sticks is you can sort of implement it into your strategy and refine it over time. Whether that be like, you know, a behind the scenes video or a TikTok video or just a really, really dope blog post. So that's really cool. One thing I've always wanted to ask you is, when you started Cline Boost, I believe that your first hire was a designer.
The first two hires, actually, yeah. The first two hires, okay, why was that the case? Why not a copywriter or a strategist or something? Completely honest with you, I was sitting on Conquering for a very long time and I know it was maybe until I'd say a year ago that I'm like, I get it now, like I understand the value of that.
And so, but at the same time, I knew again, going back to like a lemonade stamp console, that first impressions matter a lot. Partly that's, you know, due to Conquering. But mostly it's also due to visually how you're receiving and being impressed by a new website, the Lainauf example. So for me, the designers that we hired to begin with were like, okay, how do we have more fun with our website?
If you go like a wayback machine, it was embarrassing to look at right now, but I think that's always hindsight with everything, right? But I remember that I went to a costume rental place in Hollywood and I rented like a full on like astronaut suit because we had the whole branding around. We're gonna take you to the moon, we're gonna be in a rocket. It was so cliche from a marketing perspective.
But when I looked at everybody else's like team page or about us page, everybody was always like, you know, in their casual business attire and like nothing was even fun. And I was like, well, that's my opportunity. That's my lemonade stamp principle. And I also call it quantified differentiation, meaning, well, I cannot expect, especially as a newcomer to the block and I'm setting up my lemonade stamp shop, but everybody else has been there for years.
I cannot expect logically that anybody would want to stop in my lemonade stamp. Why would they, if I look the same as everybody else, I'd there's no way that I would convince anybody to stop there. And so knowing that it was just like, it was just my truth from beginning and I couldn't do anything but double down and triple down on that and on top of that, I also knew that a lot of paid ads, agencies were just focusing on the traffic portion that weren't focused on the commercial optimization portion. So that was also the reason why we cared about having that dual focus.
Yeah, so you initially started with that, right? Like it was a focus on PPC, but also designing like really good-looking landing pages and stuff. Exactly. We would give like a makeover to every client where it was like, hey, we know we're not following a brand guidelines, but truth be told, one, you'll have any and your current brand is shit from a look perspective.
Like are you okay if we do this makeover? A lot of clients early on would be like, oh my gosh, like it's not only performing better, it looks better. Can you help us with the entire site redesign thing? And so it was just helping them see that a kid like performance and looks can work together very well.
And so that was the reason why we had those two that I assume. Nice man. So building off of that, I'm a big believer in branded art styles. Yeah.
I think they're a great way for brands to differentiate when they pull them off right. Yeah. And I think client boost has long had its own branded art style and it's one of my favorites. So can you talk a bit about, I guess obviously I was gonna ask what made you take that approach, but I think it's against that as a lemonade stand principle.
But so could you talk to me about the thought process behind coming up with your art style? Like how do you guys come up with it? What did you consider? What did you have for inspiration?
What was like the end goal of it? Yeah, funny enough, I think it's like rooted in my fascination with video games like Sonic the Hedgehog, Mario, Kirby, and then some sprinkling of Japanese cartoon characters that I was obsessed with collecting growing up. And so I don't know if it was deliberate or I just subconsciously had that like, hey, I like them to be cute, I like them to be funny and I obviously wanted to be completely different looking for anything else too. And so I almost think that we can create these little characters that if we create them in like a plush, teddy bear style of people who wanna buy them, people who wanna wear that on a t-shirt or something like that because it is so unique too.
And so that was like the initial thing. It was purely based off what I like myself and really didn't do much research around that. And then it just like stuck. So we've morphed like the way that the eyes look a little bit here and they're the shadowing over the years, but nothing much has changed beyond that other than brand new characters like entering the Clanku show since we.
Yeah, and I love it because it's unique and but it's also at the same time, like I would say simple enough to where you can recreate all kinds of different assets in that style. I know you have all these different icons in it. You create like all kinds of different ads and pop-ups and stuff in it. So it's really cool to see that sort of like play out on a large scale like that and be consistent.
That's really cool. And we hear again and again, mostly again, anecdotally and qualitatively on sales calls, like people are like, you guys look so different outside. Like we love the, it ties into the personality of the company we are too, right? We are people that don't take ourselves too seriously.
We get shit done and we achieve a lot of goals, but we're also very approachable. And I think like letting people know that they might have joined like the Toys R Us website, it certainly turns some people off, but it also attracts the people that we know have the same mentality around it then that we do. And then again, the copy ties into that nicely, the roasting of the team members on our team page as well. Like it all plays into like just to have fun with it.
Yeah. I love that page. And I always thought like the About Us page is such a missed opportunity or low link fruit, right? Like you could just, because like every other page on your website, like that's for, I guess you could say the visitor or for the customer.
But I feel like the About Us page, like that's kind of for your team, you know what I mean? And so you could really do a lot of things with it. And yeah, I've read probably like every bio on the About Us page. I got to the point where it was like, hey, we didn't expect you to read this far.
Yeah, we have a lot of our team members are like that, that Jonas that are new, they're like, hey, when is my bio going live? Cause they kind of want this like, initiation slash like hazing ritual. Cause I'm the one who goes and talks to them. And I'm like, what are your guilty pleasures?
What are the things that you love? And I'm like, if it's not juicy enough, I like throw away all of it and I just mix with crap up. And I'm gonna correct that about you. And funny enough, it is again, going back to like humans, back from humans, right?
It is a page that people spend the most time on our site. And so it's entertaining for people. And again, we get that feedback too. So it's like double down on that.
Like don't be afraid of that. It also just helps so much with everything else that comes into it with the approach ability it leads to all these other wins that we have to that are real effects. I don't think people really get how valuable, again, the starting process of the seat of being good at design and caring about that a lot and being different can lead to people feeling more as like, oh, this is my community. Like KB has an identity.
Whereas if they went to another agency, they're like, I'm having a hard time understanding what the identity of that company is. And so I can't bond with it. And that's what we're seeing too. Yeah.
And I think it goes back to what you said. Like when you attract clients, like they have the same mentality and they're probably aligned on your philosophy better and from like a marketing perspective. Totally. And I think it's really interesting to note that for everyone listening or watching later that the page where you guys roasted every member in the company is paid where visitors spend the most time.
So I think that's a testament to the fact that you should experiment and be creative and just do something different and try to have fun with it. And entertainment's always a good factor to sprinkle on top. Exactly. So, okay, so real quick, just back to the branded art styles.
For a brand or company once they go this route, one steps would you suggest they follow, especially today, like when a lot of companies do it, but they also have the same. They have like the small heads and the big bodies. So like, how would you suggest the brand go about it today if they want to do it right and have it evolve over time into like a differentiation factor? Right.
I mean, I can only say like what I did and what I spent a lot of time on and still do to this day is I go on dribble, you know, website with freebies, like dribbling a basketball and spend a lot of time there because that's where I'm like, ooh, this is cool. This is cool. I like that. And it was all starting off with what I like myself.
So if the person in charge at whoever's listening or whatever company you're at, just like just doesn't, I'm not going to like roast anybody. Like if they don't have style, if they're not, I guess, cool, or if they were new balances, like, I don't know, it might be hard for them to go and have their interpretation of what looks good being the final decision maker. So it could be more of like a democratized effort inside your company. But I think you can go very quickly and do like a mood board style, inspiration board style of like characters or, you know, if it's cartoony you want, we almost went the route of doing, you know, the video game cup head, the retro cartoon style.
Like that's a really dope style too, that I think more people can use. We almost went, this is an old other thing too. We went and we were going to papercraft our entire website. You know what papercrafting is?
Like where it looks like paper. It's, but it's literally paper. So like we hired somebody that was like very good at scalpel cutting paper and then gluing, making 3D, I have to send you some pictures of it too. But the turnaround time was just insanely slow.
And there was just like too much that we'd had to rely on like one person to do this. But I was just like thinking like the stop motion style that we can do, the papercrafting was one. And then the other idea that we had was like a clay nation where like you basically have a play-doh style. I'm like that's a whole other way of raising the bar.
They're like, okay, you can't, you can't, if you replicate this, we know that you've copied us, right? Like it's pretty damn obvious. So that was the mindset, but I learned and saw all that inspiration from browsing dribble and just getting like a ton of different visual cues that was like, oh, this is really cool. And again, I look at it to you, what looks different than all of our other competitors.
Like all the other lemonade stands like that. So having all those other websites that are competitors in tabs and being like, is there anything that stands out? Like what, and if not, like you can easily bet that anything you do differently, it's gonna be a winning recipe for you. A hundred percent, yeah, dribble is like my go-to source.
It's like my second home. Just typing in like mountain landscape illustration. Yeah, just going into the rabbit hole with that. So beautiful, so beautiful, I love it.
Yeah, for sure. So I wanna talk a little bit about storytelling, marketing. And because I think maybe it's me, but I feel like I don't agree with the general consensus on what storytelling and marketing is. Like when you, even if you search up like a blog post, like, hey, good examples of storytelling and marketing, it'll always give you, you know, some kind of like case study or a testimonial or, you know, something that's, I wouldn't consider storytelling.
When I think of it, I think of sort of like, like characters in a storyline, and you know, like maybe even a fictional world. And I feel like when I kind of say things like this, like it may sound like I'm making it really complex, but I'm not so like, I'll recreate an episode of Game of Thrones and like, Harry Potter, yeah. Yeah, but when I do, like, so a good example of that, you may have seen it, the ads winter made for the copy testing. So I think that's a good example of storytelling and marketing, like you have characters, you have storylines, you have this like world that they created and they could have easily just made a video.
I'm like, hey, this is what the software or the tool is. This is what it does. And here are some features, but they accomplish that anyways, but they do it through like these little plays on, like, hey, you know, the importance of testing your message before it gets out there. So you have like people proposing like really awkwardly and getting shut down and stuff.
So it's a lot, it's, and Monday was a, I would sort of consider that an example. Monday, Monday, the wildest example I've ever seen of a company, did you know what they were called before? They're called Monday. No, they're called the pulse B-A-P-U-L-S-E and like just horrible branding.
And they just like, I don't know, they just like, just bulldoze through a wall on the paid acquisition side to get enough unieconomics to get investment and just turn into Monday. But it's like, it's like prettiest, like kissing the frog turning into a prince or whatever scene in B2B. Yeah, no, I didn't know that. Sorry, didn't mean to cut you off.
The pulse, it also is a horrible name. I feel like it's just like, I'm gonna get it. It's a bit weird, yeah. No, that's a very interesting little tidbit.
Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to get a little bit on your perspective on storytelling and marketing. Yeah. You can get the right, like, how do you, I think, just like anything from a best practice perspective or any recommendation marketing, you have all the people that have never done it.
And so what happens is that advice mutates over time and everybody has their own interpretation of that. Everybody has their good ideas. Like you have the idea not necessarily like Game of Thrones or my joking Harry Potter, but my initial thought was like, do I tell people, do my ads look like me, like washing and waxing cars on Craigslist before I became part of KB now? Like is that the story they want to know?
Like, I'm just completely overcomplicating it. For me, what I'm learning over time is that it's more around if you have an opportunity to do it and you can inject some potential emotional reaction in a good way, do it. But make sure it's tied into something that's not super far off or something that's completely random from your business. An easy way to do it could be client testimonials.
Everyone has like their own, like, oh shit, I was like, in a dark place, then came client boosted, look at me now kind of thing. Like you can do that very easily and have much unique story telling. But when people say you need to intertwine it with your emails, you need to intertwine it with your ads. And I'm like, well, how do I do that in text ads on Google?
I only have 35 characters. It's like, I can't do that, right? So like they're missing the whole tactical aspect of it. And again, showing the proof of like, here's the before and after.
And that's what I was getting upset with, where everybody was like saying the same thing. And the thing that pissed me off the most was somebody saying something along the lines up, you tell your story at the right time to the right audience in the right way. I'm like, obviously, but like how? That's like super vague advice, you know what I mean?
So. That's really literally why I kind of started this whole thing on creating and marketing and why I've been posting about it and talking about it. It's because I feel like there's just a lot of blanket advice, like, hey, good content. Hey, stand out for me, see you have same as, hey, be a big company.
And for the past three years, I was just sitting there like, cool. Right? Exactly. Like, no one, like there was nothing.
And so I kind of just had to like observe like the landscape and so like, refine labs, client booths. Like, these are the companies, I would kind of just be like, okay, I'm not going to learn this stuff from reading or following any kind of content marketing influencer or anything like that. So I have to like, just watch and observe what different people are doing and different agencies are doing. And I had to kind of go like, you know, over the years, I kind of, you know, xt out the people that I felt like, okay, that's kind of the same, you know, but yeah.
I feel like that was the best way to go about it. So that's really why I'm trying to dive a little bit deeper on these topics. And because, you know, it's mostly all subjective. And I want to get the viewpoints of the people that I feel like really, really know their shit.
Right. Like, you know, a better way to say it. And it comes to creativity. Yeah.
And I think too, the majority of advice, this is my first party data rules. And also is the reason why that type of content is type of content that's most popular and gets the most back on something like that too, because the majority of advice is theory. It's the same thing in the classrooms. And once you kind of like have a lemonade stand, it's like, hey, I can get you results.
These are the tactical things that you need to change today. And in your factory or on your conveyor belt, you will start seeing the outcome that you want, because you got to tweak this, tweak this, tweak this, and do it this way and here's execution. And so when people don't do that, they might feel good that they're just adding to the noise, so to speak. And it doesn't allow them to break from the pack.
And it doesn't allow them to build modes of any sort or thought leadership or let's say like creating fans as well. And that's where I think we finally have to do a tremendous job just on the organic social side, especially in DIN obviously, where everybody who writes from the company there that you're at, like I feel like there's a takeaway of some sort might not be tactical every single time, but there's like, I know that everything is rooted in something that they know they're talking about because they've tried it as well. And but that's not how it started. And so over time, they eventually created a lead and they were able to like, you know, have a stronger and longer lead compared to other companies.
So yeah, just want to mention that. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And I think it just goes with like the consistency and like a viewpoint similar to yours on just like playing the long game in marketing. And I mentioned it to someone the other day, I think it was my manager, the creative director, I said that if client moves and refind labs were people, like they'd be really good friends.
You know, like a lot of. I believe it. Yeah, there's a lot of similarities in terms of like, just the philosophy, but then it's a very, it's like kind of two different approaches that both really, really just kill it in their own ways. Yeah.
And it's a good like live case study to just in terms because because client boosts and refinds both brands are like just killing it off of content marketing, but not like the traditional sense of content marketing, what everyone would think like, Oh yeah, just blog posts and white papers all day longer. You know, newsletters are so much more involved that goes into it. And speaking of that, one of one, something you made recently, and it's like one of my favorite examples of like creative concepts now is Zoltab, the marketing strategy calculator. And I want you to talk about this a little bit, but the reason I love it so much is I was just talking about a day about if you just go with like message and type of content, like you'll just get average content.
But if you go, you have a message and then you choose your type of content and then you apply a creative concept to it, like you'll knock it out of the park. And I feel like this is a good recent example of that, like you guys could have just made a normal calculator or strategy generator that accomplished the goal of giving the visitor a free strategy, but you were like, hey, through that, let's make it dope and interesting and you need it from my perspective. But I want to get like what made, again, it could send from the lemonade stand principle, but what was the actual process of creating like Zoltab? And how did that go?
Yeah, it's funny too, like when you allow creativity and design to be part of your business, you almost have like multiple ways that you can place your bets and they'll still do well. Now some will do better than others, but that's when it becomes too subjective. So it could have been a robot. You know, it could not, it didn't have to be Zoltab and Zoltat just for the people listening is a borrowed from the movie Big with Tom Hanks, where he's not tall enough to go on the roller coaster and he wants to go on there with a girl and there's Zoltar, which is like a fortune teller machine.
And he wishes that he was basically big and so it doesn't happen right away, but then he wakes up next morning being an adult in like a kids bed and his mom is freaking out and I don't want to give too many spoilers if you want to watch a great movie. And so I was like, okay, we'll kind of like fortune teller style, like you don't know where you're going, you don't know what to do from a marketing perspective to achieve the specific goal. So let's use Zoltat, which is a plan where it's for the advertising from Zoltar to be like, get your inputs, like you're trying to run LinkedIn ads, but your cost per conversions too high or your PDB staff company. Here's all the objective data that we have from all our clients at KB brought to you in a prioritized fashion.
And what you're seeing right now is like version 1.0, we plan on doing a lot more to it, but already from like the launch, we had like that the time spent on site for that page was 50% more than the average of our entire site. And what's crazy is a lot of people will be like, well, what conversions did it bring you? And that's where I really don't care because I want people to consume. I want to make sure that when somebody reads an ebook, if you have it on PDF, you can't really track that.
So put that ebook on a landing page, track the scroll depth, track the time on site and change the hook in the intro to get more people to read more because if you don't get to consume, the chance of them buying later down the funnel isn't going to increase, right? As much as it could be. So it was borrowed from obviously following our cartoon character style with everything. And then we added animations in there.
And then we introduced some other things like the crystal ball, the all-seeing hand and things like that too. And again, based on the limits and principle, there are marketing strategy generators out there, but none better this entertaining. And so that is like a win. And then we run with it and then we continuously make it better in the future too, we want to.
Yeah, no, I totally agree when you said that like you don't care about the actual conversions because like that's what, see, look, this is my bone to pick with content marketing. Like anyone in content marketing is, and this is, dude, I had a content marketing agency. It's what I did for five years. This is why I moved on and I switched to the engine, right?
But if you ask anyone with content marketing is the best content marketer, it'll be like, oh, it's educating your audience and establishing your brand as a thought leader. So when they're ready for a solution, you come to mind and they come to you, right? Everyone will tell you that, but no one follows that because even like when we were ranking really blog posts, I outranked, like I outranked Canva for a bunch of stuff with a totally new Canva rip off software, right? It's ranking and we go from like zero to 50 DR, zero to like 40,000 visitors per month.
And it's just like, yeah, but they're not signing up for our blog and it's just like, hire a CRO expert. Like, you know, like you want me to go in there and change the CTA's and stuff. And I felt like we talk about it, but we're not really trying to educate. And I feel like a good example is this, like so you have entertaining about us page.
You have all these behind the scenes videos, you have Zolta, you have the website itself, you have all of the LinkedIn content. And if there's like some CMO at some, you know, company that fits your ICP and she or he has just been sitting there absorbing that stuff for like seven months, when she calls you, it's gonna be like, Hey, what's up client booths? Like hold on, it's like, we've known each other for so long. And it's like you're ready friends.
And you know, because they've seen so much about you and they love it. And I think it's like, when you do this, just like KB's been doing just like Refine Labs is doing, I think you're building more than an audience. Like you're building like this community of admirers. You know what I mean?
Like it's more than an audience. So I think that's a huge testament to what you said, like doing all of this stuff and not really concerned about like, oh, but is it converting? When you see that, dude, since launch, like the version 1.0, it's been getting 50% more time on the page. Like you said.
There are, I'll give you some mind blowing things right now. This is like a little back story. I had another agency that I founded in Utah and they are like three years older than us right now. And I was in charge of ops and then charge of sales and in charge of marketing and the CEO and I butt heads because I was like, I want to build a brand.
I want to build something where there's a line out the door across the corner, around the corner of people just knocking on our door to come work with us. And he was more like, no, I want to do networking. I want to do referrals. I want more of the faster immediate impact.
I'm like, I'm like, we can still do that. But I also want to build a slowing while we focus on the fast lane because we've got to make money. We've got to have people come in. Right now, they are at about 160 employees.
We're about 130. And we have slowly been like the hair versus the tortoise kind of approaching because we now have a foundation that that snowball just keeps growing in size. And we keep getting more and more organic traffic. And everything we do feels like a little bit like King Muyas.
We just touch it and it turns into gold. And it's very easy because we've already built an established authority. And so that's a real life example of like, the problem also the people listening is that you didn't do that from the start. It will be very hard for your mind to switch to something where like you have to be playing the long game while playing like the short game, the faster games.
And they'll try it and they'll be happy about it and they'll just give up kind of thing. And the problem is like, we just keep increasing the size of our moats. We keep putting more alligators in there. We keep increasing the size of our castle walls.
We have molten, what is it not lava, the tar or whatever. Like we just have like arrows and equipment. Like we have so many defenses to be a stronger and stronger company from a marketing perspective. And the problem that I think a lot of people don't put a lot of effort in is that they don't really look at the micro metrics.
Like before you can get a conversion from content, all these other things need to happen, right? Like one, you need to like at least be indexed by Google. They need to be somewhere on like a ranking within the start of Google. Then they can get up, you know, great.
Then you're getting clicks. Then you're gonna click through rate. Then it's a time on site. Can you increase the time on site?
Then it's like the tofu offer within the block host. Can you do that? Could you potentially do like both who offers because somebody coming in business and you over time already knows you so you can get away with that now. You don't have to just do tofu.
And so that obsession with progress and continuous improvement is often it's knowing that we're trending in the right direction because of those micro metrics and those micro conversions that we're tracking. So just wanted to share that because like people don't know really how much of a ripple effect. And this is another crazy idea. We started doing the stuff that Refine is doing on the LinkedIn posting with the hope that it would actually attract clients.
The more anecdotal evidence I've seen is that it's better at attracting new hires. I'm like, cool, like that's a ripple effect that they didn't know about, but that's what great marketing can do for you is that it just allows everything else to be easier as well. Yeah, no, it's really effective in building like an employer brand because a lot of like potential hires see it as like a place where everyone's kind of like aligned and maybe the enablement and empowerment going on behind the scenes as well. So yeah, I think that works really well.
And another thing about what you said, I think, you know, when you do this, again, kind of like what KB's done with the brand as a whole and what, you know, Refine is doing with LinkedIn, I think like when you are consistent, like you eventually reach this point where people didn't notice it when it was like, you know, you were laying the fruits, but now that it's all coming together, it's like, okay, holy crap, like how did that happen? I want to be bad, but now it's kind of like too late to catch up because it's not like just stopping, right? Like continuing to go. We have more resources now.
We can do more things. Yeah. I got some other examples that might be helpful for the people just to kind of then to know that it doesn't just have to be like a tool that you're creating, like this old type thing, but like even in the early days of KB, we were swinging like way above our league and we decided to not just do infographics, but infographics. So we go to our site, we actually see them and we partnered with like 25 other brands and the whole goal was like, they had to be bigger than us.
We didn't want to partner with anybody like smaller than us because we wanted to take some of their like audience pool that was obviously bigger than ours. And so we created these 25 infographics in the 25 first days of December in like 2016 or something like that, when like the second year that we were in business. And it was something that like nobody has ever seen. It was like Shopify.
It was HubSpot. It was a unbalanced like it was just like some big names. And that was an example of like again, Quantify Differentiation, Lemonade San Principal. We did the same thing with our videos on YouTube.
We called them our Boost Bits where not only was it backed with data educational, it was also entertaining because we just had like a lot of different scenes and everything and we had animations inside those videos too. And so some of the comments were like, you know, your video quality is over 9,000 or just a lot of people raving and you might not be able to get any results necessarily from like YouTube. But I just know that it added to the mental glass that we're trying to fill in the minds of people that might need us like three years from now, four years from now, five years now. We're making those deposits, right?
And some other things we're planning on doing is we want to create a like an actual like news segment, like a new studio segment that shares with you the previous marketing updates that like, hey, new betas from Google or Facebook, new algorithm changes on the SEO side, new laws that went into place and then first party data kind of thing. But make it super entertaining at the same time. Almost like SNL does like their stuff, but having the execution and obviously the resources to do it. Again, another thing that anybody competes with that, then like we know that everybody would know that we're the first ones to do it, right?
So there's so many of those things where the bars such, like it's so low that even though it feels like you have to catch up, there's still so many things you could do. And you got to ask yourself too, as a founder, it's like your goal is to be acquired one day. Like it is a long game. Like we're gonna hit, we're in about to finish year seven right now.
And like in like go on for another five years for me, it might be even longer than that. Like you have plenty of time, it's like a stock market analogy. It's like the best time to invest was yesterday. The second best time is like to do it today.
I might butcher that analogy, but something along those lines, like you can invest and you don't have to worry about catching up at all, because you need to focus on like your own performance and your own progress. So don't even look outside. Yeah, no, that's brilliant. I guess what I wanted to ask you, that was one of the things I wanted to ask you about, like you guys kind of invented GIFO graphics at one point.
So I'm glad that. I don't know if we invented GIFO graphics, but I'll take a few say so. I think you did. I don't think they were around before that.
I remember seeing the yellow one, that was about landing page. Oh, was it the PVC food pyramid? I think so. And they have like the columns, the client boost like.
Oh, that was one we did with user testing, the company user testing. We have, I think we have like nearly 30 on our website that you can see. Marketo was another one we partnered with too. So yeah, there's a lot of different angles, a lot of topics.
I think you may have done one with Unbounce as well. Yeah, really like four, I think with Unbounce. Nice, nice. Okay, so a few takeaways.
Yeah. Okay, so when it comes to like creating good content, right? I have a framework and I wanted to ask if you had any kind of framework or any steps that listener or viewer could follow, just to sort of get them going, to sort of create like some hard rows. Maybe they want to create as old tad or they want to create that new segment, which is really cool.
I wanted to do that kind of, I don't know who we were thinking about the same thing, but I was thinking of like an IGN news roundup video, like GameStop type of thing and just sort of like these caps. I also, I also want to do this like make live videos, but like stream video games, like maybe like the new Resident Evil because it's scary and I say it easily. I'm thinking like, okay, what if I'm just talking about like content repurposing or something, but at the bottom left hand, you can see like the game I'm playing and I'm just like trying to talk about it while being scared, shitless. And so I don't know, like I felt like maybe there might be an overlap between gamers and marketers.
So I think everything will merge. I think everything will merge and everybody marketers, like you're the same like they ruin everything and eventually like it's gonna bleed into. I think one big thing too is like, it's gonna be really exciting to see you in the first BDB company can actually sell merch at a successful point like close and stuff like that. Like obviously companies like Salesforce and stuff like that have an entry advantage.
Companies like us, like what they buy, you know, things like that too. That's interesting too. Okay, B branded stuff like you can make some dope shoes, like air force and in order to stuff. Have you seen our custom air forces that we got from somebody?
See, there you go. Somebody painted our little cartoon characters on white air forces instead of two as a gift. That's super dope. So sorry, framework back to framework.
Do you have any kind of steps or framework that's somewhat? We do. The one that comes to mind that the strongest is definitely like our blog post framework where obviously doing like our keyword research, content clusters, making sure that our content answers as many questions as possible where Google can pull those answers. And then on top of that, the actual meat of the article would be, you know, who has, we focus a lot on tactics and takeaways, not so much on hypotheticals and theories, because I think that's what the majority of content out there does.
And so like we want to make sure that whoever reads our content can take those things away, implement them and see the results. The other part is do we have the most takeaways? Do we have the most tactics as well? And then do we also have an entertaining aspect from a copywriting perspective and obviously like our characters and stuff like that with a featured image?
What we want to do moving forward is creating like custom illustrations for all of our blog posts so that nothing outside is screenshot. And then we're also looking into content upgrades, meaning like little downloadable value to bits, either Excel, Sheets, tools, formulas, PDFs, one page or summary is not kind of stuff, she cheats. And then the last thing too is we use, gosh, fuck, I forgot that for a freaking bill it comes to me, but there's some software that gives us like a grade on keyword usage, keyword density, how it ranks compared to other blog posts on the same topic. That's it, yeah, clear scope.
So we use clear scope too. That's kind of like the main bullet point of framework that we follow right now. Nice, that's super awesome. Yeah, I'd have something similar where it's kind of like where you just grab a marketing objective and then understand the message you want to sort of convey or deliver and determine the type of content, like the content format that would be best suited to like accomplish that objective and then determine how you could turn that brand asset into a memorable experience for the reader, viewer, listener.
I feel like the more awesome content I see, I feel like it all kind of fits this framework, like whether it's Zoltat or the Winter ads, like you could sort of like fit it to those steps. So I feel like that could be something that just sort of like, whether you want to have like a series of like thoughts or questions like you do with your blog post framework, like, okay, like do we have, you know, dope illustrations, do we have that, do we have the most information, like do we have the most insights? So it could be like a thought process that you go through or it could just be like this sort of like initial steps that you follow. I feel like that's something that a lot of people should try is sort of like come up with their own methodology that they could follow to produce like creative content and start like experimenting.
Yeah, and I think what you can also do if you're trying to get buy in from your team, you know, shifting courses away from what you have been doing or how you've been doing it to something like we're talking about on this episode is even invested in having like some level of focus group really like take your current content like your blog post for example, compared to the other competing blog posts for that keyword that topic in Google and simply ask them, which one is your favorite or give them some parameters? Like, which one do you like the best? And if the answers are all spread around, that's your opportunity. Meaning like if there's not a clear winner, what you're looking for is really like a clear winner, even if it's not yourself, to understand why is that one being chosen?
And then like now you have the insight because it doesn't matter. It reminds me of like how if you think of like Instagram tracking you, think about it almost like a human being from Instagram looking at you going through Instagram and be like, oh, you're scrolling pretty fast. Oh, you're slowing down and scrolling. Oh, you're just looking.
Oh, that was interesting to you. And then you keep going back. Oh, you're tapping on this one. You're double-tapping the hearted.
Oh, and this one you're actually sharing or putting to your story or sending to somebody else. Like each action has a different value. And so you can kind of mimic that. Like they can do it obviously with their algorithm, but it's like imagine a human being in front of you where you're like, which of these things do you like?
And there's 10 different things to choose from. And it goes back to the Lemme Sand principle. Like this is your street. These are all the Lemme Sand stands.
Which one do you choose and why? That gives you so much insight into doing and like changing your course. And then the level up to that is that if you can get people who are not your customers because they can already be biased obviously, but people who are like in your target market. And that's what winter by the way can do too.
Like where you ask them like for feedback around like what's better compared to these things and stuff like that. That gives you a ton of like momentum knowing that you can double down in the best in creativity around your content too. Because I guarantee you people are gonna like, I like how that looks or I like how that many feel. They were like whatever it may be, right?
Yeah, dude, when winter came along, when I looked at websites like client boost and even the one that kind of had made for planet content. Cause people would tell me like, oh, I said a lot of time on that side. What if there was like a tool or some kind of testing service where we could not just like test a design, but everything as a whole in terms of like how fascinated or mesmerized the person was by the entire experience. Yeah.
So I thought that was pretty cool. I mentioned the Instagram was a real person cause I'm literally working on a TikTok right now. It's gonna be my first TikTok where I'm like, are you dancing in there? No, it's gonna be if we're targeting ads for real people, it's just like me walking into like Reebok and like looking at shoes and walking out.
And then like the dude just following me. And I'll be like, hey, remember me? And so yeah, and I don't want to ruin how it ends cause it'll be kind of funny. But yeah, that's really funny.
Yeah, it's really funny. But just to wrap it up, what's in the future for client boost? Are you guys, cause I think I heard you mentioned somewhere that you might do a rebrand. I thought that was interesting.
I don't think we'll do a rebrand other than maybe the one we did from last year, started last year from our website. Client boost, the name will say there. We are considering either acquiring or building sibling agencies or specific to different types of clients, price points, because we get a lot of, we get like over 50 inbound bottom of funnel leads per day. And the majority of those are not ones that can afford like our regular price point.
So how do you still sort of set and give some value to other potential clients? Is one thing we're looking at? And the other thing too is we have been building in public for a very long time and sharing transparently like our milestones and all that kind of stuff. What the focus will be in the near future.
We plan on selling and being acquired. And we want to add some more gas to the fire and do bigger things. And in the last seven days, I've probably had around 10 investor conversations already. And I think this is important for people who want to build an agency or want to know that like, hey, it is actually possible that you can make something that can change your life in a dramatic way and also that people on your team's lives do financially.
And we have just this January just finished. So we're in February now of 2022. And we have just finished the first month of our three year plan we called our Bivit Vision. We basically have done the math of like, if these teams achieve these goals and can stay consistent, that means that math-wise, within 10 months max, we will be at 100 million ARR company.
And so it might be hard to get to those levels of a performance for each team, but that's something we've already put on paper and that's something we're like aggressively executing right now. And so we just had a record sales month here in January. And it's kind of like the momentum and excitement is on a whole other level. So those are like the next big things they're waiting on TV right now.
And do you have any like what you would consider unique or interesting content in the works? Maybe in like the coming the rest of the year that you like it'd be amazing when it all comes together? Yeah. So one of the things I mentioned was that news cast thing would be really fun because I don't think there's like really anything out there where like people could get a summary very quickly and also be entertained about it.
The other thing is we want to come out with a brand new format of podcast and gamify it. And we're also looking into creating micro games as content experiences that are also educational at the same time, like a dual lingo kind of thing. But something where like imagine like digital flashcards for example, or something like that, that people can just like, it's everything is different. It cannot be the same that you've already seen or we don't really want to do it.
That's our whole premise. Dude, that's so amazing. Yeah, no, I, you mentioned that and it reminds me like I wanted to make this like six episode animated series about like an intergalactic conqueror who wanted to be known as like the nicest conqueror in the universe. Yeah.
He finds out like people are terrified of him and he has like a down advisor tells him that he needs a content marketing agency because he's not like telling his story or whatever, correct? Yeah. He's like ventured through the cosmos to find a content marketing agency. They find one and this is back when I was, I had my own.
So they find me and yeah. Yeah. I have to explain it to them and they have no idea what I'm talking about. So I go through like a whole like it was essentially going to be a free course.
But yeah, through these episodes and like really beautiful animation and these funny characters and like funny conversations and stuff. Yeah. But like when it gets to certain points, like I could hit you up to be like a character in the show and you go. I would love to.
And like yeah email and like landing pages stuff with them. Maybe I don't know like Brian Dean or something to go over the SEO part. You know, actually going to be that six episode animated series. And yeah, hopefully I'll still get to make it.
Yeah. I think it'll be fun and it would be a good little content. I think more people should take risks. Like one of the main big goals we have is there so much in the world that's marketing and sales related like the way you dress the way you talk, the way that you write the way that you have a conversation with your boss.
Like it's all like how do you market yourself? And so when I saw that headspace like the meditation app, which is obviously primarily B2C had a Netflix show. I was like, fuck, maybe you need to have a Netflix show. Either either a vlog style like share our growth kind of like a little bit of playing into like Shark Tank and entrepreneurial spirit that a lot of people love or simply scripted really well and helping people understand like, hey, if you really want that job, this is the exact approach you take.
Like you should not just send your resume, do that, send a loom video too and also send a gift. And then hit up everybody on LinkedIn to get a foot in the door. Like tactical things like, you want to do this? We are going to then test it in real life and have 10 applicants.
They're going to tell us their dream place to work. And then we're going to see how we get them to actually get a job. And obviously they might not have the skills or whatever. But we want to see how far we can take it and do like real life experiments.
I'd be like, oh shit, this is the new way of applying for a job. Like I'm not just going to set out 20 applications. I'm going to go after that one. I'm going to get it or I'm going to get it.
And reason why they don't want to hire me. And I can learn on that. And I can create those skills and get that experience and then come back to them. So that's something where I think invest in the fucking moonshot ideas.
But again, keep focused on those micro metrics because if those aren't there, then like then don't create another six series episode the next time. Because nobody cared to watch the first one, right? But you can do so and you can keep leveling up that way. And that's our whole vision statement within KB is literally some down to two words, continuous improvement.
Every day we are obsessed with making something of progress or improving something 1%. And we literally had the expectation of everybody who's a leader within KB show what you can do and raise a bar. And you'll get help, you'll get resources who will invest in people that you can talk to, to understand how they did it, everything is possible. Like we can make it happen.
So if you have that mindset for your content and your creativity, then do something daring that other people had it done. And then with the micro metrics, you'll figure out if your execution was good or not. And then just. And just if it works, implement it as a bigger part of the strategy and just doing it.
And exactly. It'll help you build that mode. Like you said, kind of like what you guys have done. And yeah, man, I really appreciate you taking the time out to have this conversation today.
Yeah, so I'm at the time. It was really dope talking to you about all this stuff. I'd love to do it again sometime. Maybe have a part two or something.
Let's do it. We can come back and we can share once we've launched some of these other creative endeavors. Like what are the results from? And all that kind of stuff?
Perfect. Yeah, that would be awesome. And actually some data and some statistics to go on. I think we'll do it.
We're like part two. Story time. Everybody's doing it wrong. Here's how to do it, right?