Maximizing Digital Marketing Impact: Insights from John Horn

It can be very hard to stand out organically when you are new. If you're competing against people who already have rankings on Google, who have far more authority, domain authority than you do, that have already have built out their audiences and so forth. It can be hard to stand out from that noise organically. And so sometimes again, depending on what vertical you're in as a business, how competitive it is, how much noise there already is, sometimes you have to venture into the realm of paid advertising just to stand out from that noise and get in front of the people that you want to reach. If you're finding value in what you're watching, consider hitting the subscribe button and turning on the bell notification. Oh, and don't forget to drop a comment. I love hearing your thoughts and ideas. By the way, we have got a ton of other videos waiting for you. And if you are ready to level up your mindset, come hang out with us in our private Facebook group called Mindset for Business Success. Welcome to Super Entrepreneurs Podcast. I'm your host, Shahid Durrani. Today we have with us, John Horn. John is the CEO of Stub Group, a premium Google ads agency that helps business boost their digital marketing profitability by providing performance driven solutions. They have generated over 400 million plus in revenues, serving fortune 500s, multimillion dollar retailers and local businesses as well. I'm very excited to talk to John today. Welcome to our show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to chatting. No, it's great to have you, my friend. First thing that comes to mind because you do cater to small businesses as well. Entrepreneurs probably. I just wondering what your take is, what comes to mind as soon as you hear this question, is it a wise idea for a business or someone starting a new venture to go about it organically or to invest in ads to grow their business, to start seeing cashflow? It's a great question. I think a lot of it comes down to some of those parameters you mentioned, which is. Do they have the money to invest even into advertising at the beginning? Cause a lot of businesses, a lot of solo entrepreneurs, they don't, they have to build organically and there's a lot of good things that can come from that as well of just figuring out, okay, what's working, what's not working, how do I build things organically and get a system in place that's working that then as they make more money, then they can put that fuel into the fire and extrapolate the system that they've already created and run some advertising on top of that. So I would say for a lot of small businesses, often starting organically, even though I'm in the paid side of things, that's what I focus on. I will say for a lot of small businesses starting organically and trying to figure out what's going to work for them is a good place to start. The flip side of that though, is that it can be very hard to stand out organically when you are new, if you're competing against people who already have rankings on Google, who have far more authority, domain authority than you do, that have already have built out their audiences and so forth, it can be hard to stand out from that noise organically. And so sometimes, again, depending on what vertical you're in as a business, how competitive it is, how much noise there already is. Sometimes you have to venture into the realm of paid advertising just to stand out from that noise and get in front of the people that you want to reach while hopefully you're also working on your organic side of things and you can build that up over time. Because building it up over time can also be quite expensive. We sometimes think about organic, but it's a great way to test. You can also test with paid and there'll be much quicker. My only thing is that I see a lot of people in business struggling because they haven't put aside the budget for paid advertising. When we have such an incredible medium to get our message out there as soon as possible to create or to have a budget available for paid advertising or marketing to test or to launch or whatever the case may be in the beginning, rather than trying to fight through the noise, which could cause a lot of stress and they end up losing a lot more. So my question was just trying to see if in your professional opinion, I know it might be biased, but just as a business, do you think it's important for them to put aside some money and their main objective should be going in the paid route and why do you think so compared to organic? They both have benefits, but it's that cashflow. We need that cashflow in the beginning. Yeah. I think speed of results is one of the things that is one of the, one of the big upsides to paid advertising, because you can very quickly find out, Hey, is this working or not working? And when I say working, you can't always very quickly get exactly to where you want to be in terms of your target return on ad spend or cost per lead of those goals can take time to figure that out, but you can very quickly see, okay, are people engaging with my offer are actually getting good quality leads. Am I getting orders or not? Is this not working? I don't have the right price point. I don't have the right offer. And I need to fix that before I go and invest six months of time into trying to build up my organic rankings, for example. So I think it can be really useful in that kind of proof of concept as long, like you mentioned, as long as you are investing enough budget into it to really prove the concept, because a lot of small businesses, they'll be like, you know what, okay, let's throw a couple hundred dollars at Google ads this month or something like that. And the reality is you might as well hang on to that and go spend that somewhere else, because if you're not investing enough to collect enough data to see what works and what doesn't work, then you might hit a jackpot and be like, Oh, Hey, awesome. We've got a really great client, but you don't have the data to be able to repeat that next month because you're just not investing enough money into it. And so that's one of the conversations we'll often have with businesses reach out to us is, okay, what's that minimum kind of viable budget that we need to spend on a, on a monthly basis to collect the data that we need to make you successful. Yeah. And John is getting a lot more expensive too, right? A lot more competitive fighting for those leads. Like you said, you did a pretty large budget. To get anywhere now, right? It's a very competitive world out there, especially if we're talking about any of the major advertising platforms like Google or Facebook or Instagram, most people who are on there at YouTube as well. Absolutely. So there's a lot of competition, which obviously drives up those costs. Now there's still a lot of it again, does come back to what is your business? We work with small businesses who are targeting a very local geography and Hey, yep, they have competitors, but as long as they're really strategic and how they're running their ads, how we're running their ads for them, they're still seeing great results for not tons and tons of money. It just really depends on what type of business you're in and what the competitive landscape looks like. But there's, there aren't many magic bullets left in the Google ad space. It's not like a decade ago where you might be getting, Oh, Hey, I can get five cents a click for forever and I'm going to be a millionaire. That's not the case anymore. And that takes me to my next question. If there's any strategies or any advanced strategies on Google ads where you find consistency in delivering that performance that your clients are looking for, which you could share today. Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of it comes down, I'd say to the convergence between automated and manual. So Google has done a lot of great things in the automated space and how you run ads. So for example, there's a lot of different ways that you can choose to bid on Google for showing up for different searches. And Google has a number of automated bidding strategies where if you are inputting good data into Google, if you're telling Google, Hey, this is what's happening on my website after people click through the ads, these are the people who are, let's say submitting a form submission on my website or who are calling after seeing an ad. If you do a good job of inputting that to what we call conversion data back into Google system, then Google, generally speaking, their automated bidding strategies can do a much more efficient job of getting you other. Yes, absolutely. Other similar traffic compared to trying to manually set your bids. And that's, there's always exceptions to every rule, but by and large, if you have enough of that good conversion data to feed back into Google, that's one thing that we see work well for our clients is strategically leveraging that automation to get more of those types of people. That's AI driven, probably. That's the, the influence of AI that made that shift. Absolutely. Yeah. It's, it's AI that's looking at literally millions and millions of signals every single time someone does a search and saying, you know what, okay, here's, here's the patterns I see that make this person similar or not similar to the people that you are saying are converting on your website. And so I can bid more, Google can bid more to, to get you in front of that person that they think is likely to convert based upon those patterns or less, if they're not likely to convert. And they can just do that at scale in a way that humans literally cannot accomplish. Yeah. AI is so incredibly cool, but it comes to a thought that what is going to happen with a lot of supporting companies like yourself, for example, you have a Google ads agency or advertising agency as agency. Don't you feel that side of the coin could also be driven completely by AI? Maybe not right now, but it could be where your input, the type of business and feed it some data, if you have the data, if you don't, you collect it first and you feed it and it does all the type of ads you need to do, what you need to market, what's the message, for example, all those strategic steps that, you know, take pride in your company to provide the results for your clients done by AI. Oh, do you see that happening or do you feel threatened or do you feel like you're going to jump on this to incorporate, or maybe you already are incorporating some of this, but what do you see the future of ad agencies like yourself to incorporate with Google's efforts with automations? It's a fantastic question. And one of the, one of the big questions in our industry today, certainly personally, I'm very optimistic about the role of agencies like stub group in still in the future, connecting advertisers and the platforms they're using. There's a lot of reasons for that. I would say the biggest reason is there are some things that AI machine learning are really good at, and there are some things that they're just not good at. And what we are doing is we're leveraging what they're good at looking at those millions and millions of signals that humans can't making decisions, finding patterns, finding trends, things like that. But the AI is not good at really understanding the unique aspects of a business and saying, okay, what is their unique value proposition? What is it that people are looking for that we can provide as a business better than our competitors or faster or cheaper or fill in the blank? And then what is the strategy that we should take to communicate that to the different segments of our audience? So I would say the role of agencies has evolved over, over the years, it has always been very strategically oriented, but it also used to be much more tactically oriented back in the day where we're manually changing bids and doing all sorts of button pushing within accounts. A lot of that is done more efficiently by the AI. And that leaves agencies more time and focus on the strategy and on the idea of exactly the creativity and getting that right data back into the platform, because that is incredibly important. Garbage in, garbage out, as they say. And there's plenty of quotes out there about statistics and data, but it's so easy to feed the wrong inputs into the system. And then it just does a really good job of using those wrong inputs and wasting your money really quickly. But you've got to have somebody sending the right data, qualifying that, quantifying that, monitoring things, seeing what the AI is going off the rails. We need to course correct. We need to change this. We need to put some, some parameters in place. And so I think there's still a very, very important reason for the existence of agencies to do those types of things and to help advertisers steward their funds. But just to be honest, machine learning is going to evolve and it's going to get really intelligent, maybe you guys will create something that incorporates with AI to provide that creativity. Yeah. I think a lot of it comes down to direction, giving the AI the right direction. And then within the right direction and parameters, AI can be very effective at coming up even with new ideas, new ways of saying things that we wouldn't have thought of, but giving it the right parameters within to work and then go set that creativity forward. So now regarding algorithms and algorithms is for every business, they should know about it, but they may not completely aware of all the algorithms because it's so difficult to keep up. They're just completely changing. And now with artificial intelligence and correct me if I'm wrong, it might amplify these algorithms shifting on a moment to moment basis. Is there any examples that you could share, if you have noticed any shifts like that and what businesses could do to stay on top of it? So one of the most significant changes recently within the past one to two weeks has been Google adding what they call AI overviews to search engine results pages. So now when you go to Google and you start searching for things, often the first thing that will come up at the top is what they're calling an AI overview, which is leveraging their Gemini tool to actually summarize information and give you an answer to your question without taking you to a website. And that is, there's still a ton of unknown. Exactly. It's their direct competitor, chat GPT. And it's answering your question. It's answering your question when you type it in without you needing to click go somewhere. Now they all haven't seen it yet. Sorry. Sorry, John, is it launched or is it launched right now? Yep. I haven't, I haven't seen it. On my browser. So I'll take a look again. Yeah, absolutely. And it's one of those things where it doesn't show up for every single search. It depends. Generally, it's more likely to come up for kind of question, research related searches, what is an umbrella made out of, or what's the best businesses will miss out. Potentially that's the billion dollar question right now, which we don't know the answer to yet, because this is such a new rollout Google on their end is saying, Hey, because we're providing source information and links to websites within these AI overviews, Google is saying that's actually great generating more traffic for publishers because people are seeing maybe questions they wouldn't have thought to ask previously and wanting to dig deeper into things. Whether that's true or not, we'll find out. Google obviously has an incentive to, to try and model publishers by saying that type of thing, but that's going to have a really big impact on both the organic side of things, SEO businesses who are trying to rank their websites for search terms, as well as on the paid side of things. Now I think it's going to have more of an impact organically than paid because Google makes their money from their ads. And so they are incentivized to continue showing those ads and continue emphasizing those ads. And so I still think that ads are going to continue to play a massively important role in the Google ecosystem and in answering questions and connecting people to solutions on the organic side. A lot of questions that are going to be fleshed out in the next couple of months here. And it benefits Google to ensure that people are clicking on their ads, obviously on that page, but actually I'm just thinking out loud. If someone does a search, their ad shows up right on the page. And if anybody clicks on the ad, that's when they earn money. But if someone just gets their question answered on that page, they would miss out on clicking the ad unless they incorporate the advertising or the resources in the answer. Does that make sense? Yeah. And it's this balance that Google has to play between a, they need to answer everybody's questions and be the best possible answer because that's what keeps people coming back to Google to find solutions, but then B, they get all their money from advertising. And so there's always been this fine balance and continues to be this fine balance. I think with the AI overviews, we'll continue to see the type of question that is asked is going to play a big role in whether or not Google chooses to show an AI overview or an ad, which has always been the case. There's lots of questions. If I ask, okay, what's the weather today? Google's probably not going to show an ad anyway, because that's not really a very monetizable search. Just, I'm just, I want to know what the weather is so I know what to wear and I'm going to be gone. And so Google can answer that easily with an AI overview. And they're probably not going to be losing any ad revenue by not showing an ad, but it has a good experience for a person. Whereas if I go and say, Hey, what's, what's the best software for video editing? That's a very purchase intent related search term. And so Google is going to be much more likely to show ads from video editing tools, because that is a good experience for me when I go and try and find a solution and Google can make money from that. Yeah. Dynamically, just what they're providing or spinning out as more dynamic for you, John, you have coached over a hundred thousand students in advertising, which is awesome. Um, can you share any misconceptions or mistakes or things that students completely misunderstood? Yeah, absolutely. I'll probably tell him my answer specifically on the Google ads side of things, since that's where I've done most of my training and teaching and working with clients as well. I would say, but I think it's a lot of this applies to other platforms as well. A lot of people come into it with the misconception that a, it's going to be easy and B it's going to be cheap. It's not easy and it's not cheap. Generally speaking, because of how mature the platforms are and how, again, how much competition there is. So a lot of people, let's take a small businesses as an example, they'll be like, Oh, okay. Yeah. I want to throw ads. Let's, I don't know. I'm a semi plumber. I want to put ads out there and yeah, anybody is searching for a plumber. Of course, they're going to click on my ad and of course, they're going to want to reach out to me and I'm going to have 75% conversion rates because I'm here and I'm a great company, so forth and so on. But it's just not that simple. Not that easy because a, you have to compete with everyone else who's out there and has that same perspective and is also spending money. Um, and B people don't know you're a great company unless you do a really good job of explaining that and explaining how you meet their needs. And so a lot of people don't think treats advertising as a magic bullet where, Hey, if I just throw my ads out there and people will come and things will be good, but no, it's advertising is, is fuel for a fire. And if you have a good business with a good model and you're treating your customers well, and you have good processes to follow up with leads when they reach out to you, so forth and so on, then advertising can be incredibly effective at helping you scale as a business. But if you're not doing those things, if you're not running your business well, if you have bad margins, advertising can't fix that. It just puts fuel on whatever your situation is. And I always, when we're working with clients, it's about. Let's talk about your business first, before even the advertising side of things, let's talk about your business. What are your margins? What's the lifetime value of your customers? How are you making money? How are you different, your competitors? And then how can we leverage advertising to get you the right types of customers that are going to fit into that narrative that they have and that business model that they have and be successful for them? So I think, yeah, it's going back to misconceptions. It's thinking that it's really easy thinking that it's cheap. Um, and thinking that advertising is a magic bullet, as opposed to, you got to focus first on your business and what your business model is and how you're going to make money and then advertising after that. The last one is really important and really interesting. It might be a thought pattern. I'm just going to advertise and I'm good to go. Everything's going to change. So it's critical information. Absolutely. So regarding keyword strategy, can you share an effective process to identify profitable keywords? Going after high competitive keywords, obviously it's expensive and you need a pretty big budget. But is there anything else that you could share that people could utilize to get some traction when it comes to selecting keywords? Yeah, a couple of things I'd say. First, think about capturing low hanging fruit. And what I mean by that is there are generally different categories or levels of keywords that you could target that could be relevant to your business. Let's, I'm just going to take, make up a silly example. Let's say you're selling umbrellas. Let's say that you have an umbrella that is really fancy, smart technology umbrella. You could target people who are looking for umbrellas that is relevant to you. But if people are looking for smart umbrellas, technological umbrellas, that's much more likely to convert for you because that's exactly what you have. And that's much more your target audience. So if I was creating campaigns for you, I probably wouldn't start with just umbrellas as keywords. I start with smart umbrellas, technologically enhanced umbrellas. Those are your core low hanging fruit. Let's see if we can get that traffic to convert because you know what? If that traffic doesn't convert, then you're probably not going to convert people just generally looking for umbrellas either. And then you can build your way from there, scale through the different categories and see which different categories of keywords you can get to convert profitably because some might be relevant to you, but you're not going to see a high enough conversion rate or you're going to see too high of a cost per click on average to actually make it work for your margins. So it's about not just what's relevant to you, but what is relevant to you within the margins that you have to work with. So that's probably one tip I would give. The other thing where I would say you have to think about keywords these days is back in the day, it was all about massive lists of keywords. It was about, Oh, how do people, how do people misspell this? And if I had this misspelling as my keyword that I'm targeting, I can get a leg up over my competitor who hasn't thought about that and it doesn't really work that way anymore because of the way that Google has evolved over time and Microsoft and the other search engines where rather than having massive lists of keywords, it's more about kind of categories and themes at this point. It's still called a keyword, but in that umbrella example, you might target umbrella as a keyword and then there's going to be, Google is going to match that to all different types of hopefully relevant searches that they think pertain to someone looking for an umbrella. It might even have the word umbrella. It might be people like how to stay dry outside. Google might be like, you know what? That's the same intent as umbrella. So we're going to show your ad to that type of person. And so a lot of optimizing on the human side these days is looking to see, all right, how is Google making those matches? And sometimes they get way too aggressive and they're wasting your money. And so you have to say, stop making this type of match and do things called adding negative keywords, basically telling Google, I don't want traffic that contains these types of searches or these types of words and constantly honing that over time to, to get the right relevancy of traffic that you're looking for. Excellent, John. I appreciate you man for coming on the show today and talking about all this. Hopefully we added some value out there and I'm great to see the growth that you're experiencing and to see where you're going with this, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence. If you do create such a vast change in your organization or something very exciting, please do come back on the show to talk about it. Will do. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.