1660 – Understanding Your Customers with Win Big Media’s Brandon McKee

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0:58with us right now brandon mckee brandon you are the ceo of win big media you're found on the web at win big media.com brandon thank you so much for joining us thanks for having me josh i'm excited yes so share with us what win big media does human-centered data-powered tell me more you got Got it. So we got a lot of really good folks working for us, as mentioned. And then, you know, ultimately what we do is we take a data driven approach to marketing. And so there are a lot of agencies out there and we like to be the best option, right, because we're taking a data driven approach based on 230 million American consumers.

1:41And so we have a partnership with one of the largest data collections agencies in the country. That's where we extract that data from. And then we ultimately execute on that. And so we like to say we're not going to throw something against the wall and hope it sticks. Unfortunately, you know, I believe there's a lot of agencies out there, but not a lot of great options. And so, you know, we're really out here trying to make a difference in just the average business owner's day and, you know, ultimately make sure that they see results. They see a marketing ROI, which so many come to us and report to us that they haven't gotten ever.

2:13So, yeah, that's what we do. Yeah. And where did WinBig Media come from? and what are kind of the origins? Yeah, awesome story. And so we're actually come from the political side of marketing. And so as you can imagine, on the political side, things move very, very fast. And if you lose, you lose. I mean, there's no coming back from it. So that's where we originally started. And then we figured out, my partner, Philip Stutz, and I figured out that this actually works for corporations as well. And when we take this data-driven approach, when we really look at psychological drivers and understand our customers and then execute against that, we get better results for corporations as well.

2:55And so as you can imagine, not every voter is the same on the political side. And the same goes for our customers, whether you're a Fortune 500 company or you're a small business doing 2 million a year. Yeah. And so who do you work with today? Like what types of companies, size of company, geography, that sort of thing? Yeah. So we're fully remote organization. So we'll work with you if you are in California or even if you're right where I am in D.C. So no restrictions there. Our ideal client is someone, a small business owner, all the way up to a Fortune 500 company that's really just struggling to get that marketing ROI and really understand their customers.

3:35What we like to do before we do any sort of advertising is we really take a media agnostic approach to things. And we're going to run what we call our customer insights report. And again, we're tracking about 230 million American consumers, 500 million connected devices, and over a trillion different data points at any point in time. And so once we understand your customers, understand their psychological drivers, and really understand what they need to see in order to convert, that's when we actually start advertising for you. So that can be for, again, a Fortune 500 company or a small business owner just really starting to take off.

4:11All right. All that said, give us, I'm hoping you could give us maybe just like a quick state of the union on what is working well in marketing. And are there any recent trends over the past year or two that you'd say, yeah, listen, if you're not aware of this, you really ought to be. All right. I'm going to sit back, grab some popcorn. Let us give us the lay of the land on marketing today. Totally. So I would say this is that what we're seeing is a lot of people pulling back on marketing spend specifically within brand awareness. And our recommendation and what we're seeing in the data is that customers may be pulling back on their spending right now.

4:56But what we saw in the pandemic is a good example. People did the same thing. They pulled back on spending and then later they were ready to start spending those dollars again. And what happens when you pull back on your marketing as an organization, especially in the brand awareness campaigns, meaning you're not looking for leads, you're just looking for people to understand who you are, what you're about, what your philosophy is. And when you pull that back, you really pull back, you know, your market penetration. And so what we're seeing is the customers and the clients that we have that are actually doubling down right now and what we would call a tougher economy are actually increasing revenue, increasing ROI just because they're taking advantage of this time.

5:37And so if you're a business owner out there and you're looking at your budgets, you're looking at what you're going to cut right now because things are tougher. It really, really shouldn't be marketing. In fact, you should think about increasing those budgets. It's we see it in all our clients from our clients doing a hundred million dollars a year to our clients that are doing two million dollars a year. The customers and clients that are actually putting forth money into their marketing campaigns and really, again, focusing on brand awareness. I can't stress it enough are winning because that customer six months from now is going to be thinking about that home services, that plumbing, that garage door that they've been thinking about purchasing that they didn't six months ago.

6:18and you want them to think of you, not your competitor. Yeah. And so what would be some examples of maybe specific things that like, so let's say that you start with a client. Are you kind of focused, obviously kind of focused holistically or like what segments of that do you bring your leadership to? We're very, again, media agnostic. So what that means is that we're not going to ever come into a situation and say, you know, Josh, you guys should be spending all your money on Facebook because that's where the leads are right now. We actually take an approach where we run your first party customer data, if you have any.

7:00And then we're going to use our third party data, those 230 million American consumers I mentioned earlier. And we're really going to figure out where your customers are, because if they're not on Facebook, we have no business spending your money on Facebook. Right. And so that's really the approach we take. And we've seen it time and time again. And, you know, great example is a garage door company we're working with right now that it will do about 200 million dollars this year. When we first engaged with them, it wasn't as much about, you know, hey, how can we spend more dollars? It's about making your ads more efficient, making your current budgets more efficient.

7:32So are we in a market and are we spending 40 percent of our budget on Facebook when actually direct mail highly indexed in our insights report? And that's the direction we need to go. And so we really don't have any, I guess, thoughts on Facebook versus Instagram versus Google. We're really going to tell you where your customers are, and that's where we're going to recommend the money flows, if that makes sense. Yeah. And when we talk about money, are you pretty bullish? Well, I guess, again, it's always going to be a it depends. ends. But in terms of investments, are there any that you're seeing generally that are, well, this used to be generally, we used to see that there was a pretty decent ROI.

8:23We're seeing less ROI here. We're seeing better ROI, just trend-wise. Again, not that it's for everybody, but just any observations on where you could be spending. Obviously, Yellow Pages ads are out. Maybe newspaper ad might be, I don't know, any kind of just generalizations like that? Yeah, definitely not the yellow pages. I can say that affirmatively. But no, I mean, I think, Josh, one thing we're noticing is that across the board, when it comes to Google PPC campaigns, performance max campaigns, it's getting more expensive. That's for sure. Because people are starting to figure this out. So the customers and clients that six months ago started spending dollars towards PPC, Google Performance Match, which is a brand new platform in the last 12 months that's been doing really well for a lot of our clients.

9:13That is starting to get more expensive because people are waking up to it, right? People are now starting to spend dollars there, which raises the price for everybody. And so when you're looking at your campaigns, you have to be really, really efficient in how you're setting those up. And a lot of business owners that we engage with, especially if they've been kind of doing things in-house or maybe even have someone that's got a couple different hats running those campaigns, we jump into those ad campaigns and they're really inefficient. They're not targeted correctly. The negative keywords aren't there.

9:45They're spending money against things that they shouldn't. And so that's what we're really seeing heavily across the board. Again, that doesn't mean that that's for everybody, but Google getting more expensive and we're really actually starting to see a comeback on the Facebook and Instagram when it comes per cost per lead. And so again, that's how it works for everybody. It depends on your business, but that's something we're seeing across the, across the market. Yeah. For someone that's ever hired a marketing agency, are there, you know, in, what would be some advice that you would give on how to, I would say hire, but also kind of that a marketing agency and also included in that?

10:29What might be some red flags or green flags that you would recommend looking for? Yeah. We're big believers and it's one of our core values in transparency. So that's the first thing I talk about when it comes to your current agency that you're working with. And by the way, we work with a lot of clients that have multiple agencies within them. So we work really nicely in the sandbox. But the first thing I always tell clients to ask is about the transparency, about the reporting, what are the KPIs that that agency is tracking to make sure that the investment you're handing them is going to have an ROI, right?

11:04So if you come across an agency and everything seems kind of, you know, the curtains are pulled over, you know, oh, we don't really track that or this, that's usually a red flag. The other side of things, and I'm biased towards this, because again, we are data driven marketing agency. But if there isn't any data to point to, as to why we're doing something, that really rubs me the wrong way. We've had so many clients come to us with horror stories of gone through six or seven, seven different agencies. It always comes back to, we were throwing stuff against the wall and hoping it sticks, or they were taking a shotgun approach to marketing instead of looking through that sniper rifle, right?

11:45And so for me, if there's nothing to point to, there's not a data point that says, this is why we're putting your money here. I would run fast from that situation. You've worked with some pretty amazing brands. I'll list a few. Walmart, Nissan, Juul. I mean, it's a lot of, let's say, Atlanta Motor Speedway, Texas Motor Speedway. You know, I'm curious. Oh, and then you got Tony Robbins and Grant Cardone listed here. Yeah. What, what, what, what, what, how did you get into some of these industries? Sure. Well, so a lot of, you know, the, the brands that you just read off, Josh, it tells you how serious some of the big players in the world are about data.

12:36Right. And I always say this to our smaller clients that we work with, because again, we'll work with you starting at a million dollars in annual revenue. So it doesn't mean that we're, we're too big to work with a smaller business, but we, we kind of phrase it like this, is that those big companies and all your competitors are utilizing data at a very extreme level. Some of those clients you just talked about too, Josh, we work with strictly on data. We're moving from DMA to DMA, region to region. So these players are incredibly sophisticated about how they spend their marketing dollars. It's not just the one size fits all.

13:12I'm marketing the same way in Texas as I am in New York, right? And so you'd be surprised on the mid-sized businesses that we engage with, how many are doing that. And so we always say this, the big players are using data and they're using it to their advantage. And that's how we've kind of come into contact with them. It's that what we do is because we have this proprietary engagement with this analytics agency, is we're able to offer really sophisticated data for a fraction of the cost that it would normally take. So you're not going directly to a one of these data collections agencies and paying them some astronomical fee to have access to this data.

13:51You're working with us to get that for a fraction of the cost. And you're getting my team to be able to analyze that data and tell you what it means. Because I always say this good data can get bad really quickly if you don't know how to read it and you don't know how to execute upon it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's like interpreting that data and getting meaningful action items to, you know, because we've done that. It's like, okay, well, we know this, but what do we do with it? And sometimes I found myself with that. Like, so how do you, I mean, obviously, I think that's where it really helps to have someone like yourself or your team, you know, to be able to help interpret and set direction on that so that, you know, your client doesn't have to worry about, okay, now I know this, now what?

14:39But that's got to be very valuable. I would imagine that your background in politics, I know you're based in D.C., I bet that that's informed you a little bit. Totally. Absolutely. I mean, the one thing, and I'll give more credit to my partner, Philip, on this, but we all have a really good understanding is that politics really helps you understand that, let's say there's 5 million voters in a specific area. You are not going to reach all 5 million of those voters the same way, right? Some of those voters have a different perspective on an issue, right? And you need to reach them on their level about what they care about.

15:16And the same goes for customers on a corporate level, right? So, you know, our marketing to, you mentioned Atlanta Motor Speedway, really interesting race, actually, because normal marketing you might do for a couple of buddies getting together, having some beers, going to the race, having a great time. There was a segment of that, right? But there was also a huge segment of families that wanted to get out after COVID and go have a fun time in a clean and safe environment. And if that wasn't being projected in that advertising, you'd miss out on a ton of revenue. So that's how it really translates the same way we would in a political campaign, talk to 2 million of these voters and then a million of these voters one way or another.

15:57You have to do on the corporate side of things, too. Yeah. Yeah. Brandon, your website, winbigmedia.com, what would you recommend to someone that's listening to our conversation right now? And they're like, okay, I would love to have a conversation, learn more about what we may have been missing out on the past, what things we can learn, how we could be a lot more intelligent about the marketing that we're doing. What's the next step for them? Yeah, absolutely. So we've actually set up a cool landing page. So it's winbigmedia.com forward slash undefeated. And so if they go to that link and they just fill out a brief form for us, we'll reach out very quickly within 24 hours to start that conversation up.

16:42Yeah. winbigmedia.com forward slash undefeated. We also have a link in the show notes. So if you're listening to your podcast player, just click on the little notes icon or click around, see if you can find it. And we'll have a direct link to that page. Brandon McKee, again, CEO, WinBig Media. Thank you so much. Really, really appreciate your insights today. Thanks for having me, Josh.

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