2282 - Social Media Advertising Uncovered: Insights from Mad Marketing House's Madison Hollimon

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0:58With us right now, it's Madison Holliman. Madison, you are the founder and CEO of Mad Marketing. You're found on the web at madmarketinghouse.com. Madison, it's great to have you. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Yeah, well, I assume Mad is short for your nickname. No, everybody actually thinks that, but it was more so like, you know, Alice in Wonderland where you have the mad powder and he's just like mad crazy. crazy so for me it was like having this crazy mad house of creatives that you hire to help you with your marketing so for me that's kind of the origination of you know mad marketing came from that movie the other thing is just a coincidence a happy coincidence well we're going to get into that in just a little bit more and I certainly want to get your insights on what's working right now in marketing before we do that Madison you're in Augusta Georgia so what do what are you currently doing for fun when you are not at work?

2:00So I love to take my three kids, our family in a boat and go from Fort Lauderdale or Miami to the Bahamas. Oh my gosh. Our favorite thing to do. We'll do island hop. We love it so much. Yes. What kind of boat? um typically it's like a bigger center console so about 47 feet long um it's fun we have the best memories we've been in like 10 to 12 footers in a storm that was gonna be my question is you know it's not really out on the open ocean so how does one navigate water what's yeah and do you do you just do you just work to do you timeshare a boat do you rent one do you own one so my dad builds them so we always have a different boat that we're either delivering to a customer or that they have is like to use for promotional we obviously do his marketing as well yeah um adrenaline power boats but it's a two million dollar almost 50 foot long center console and we love to go hang out in the bahamas shoot content and it's a really great family activity Well, no joke.

3:13Again, that probably aligns with someone who creates a lot of social media content. Madison, give us an overview of the work that you do with Mad Marketing. So we are essentially an authentic content creation agency that specializes in social media creation of content. And then we have a really great arm of our business that does paid advertising on Google and Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram. So clients will hire us to do organic social media content for their pages and or paid advertising. So typically it's a matter of, okay, what are your goals? How fast do you want to get there? And then that will determine if we're just going to go the organic route or if we're going to add paid advertising in as well.

3:53Okay. So are you advertising primarily on social? Yes. Okay. And so for someone who hasn't been paying attention, can you share what's been going on in that world with Facebook? Because I know Facebook and Meta are making some very big changes for how advertising is done. Can you give us an overview of that kind of a state of the union for that world? Yes, it's ever changing. And everybody always asks us, like, how do you guys stay on trend? And the answer is simple. We have a staff of 15 to 20, depending on the time of the year, and we dedicate 40 hours a week. So we have thousands of hours a week dedicated on these platforms.

4:36That's the only way we're going to ever know how these algorithms are working. When it comes to paid advertising, there was actually a big lawsuit with Facebook a couple months ago, it kind of resolved a few weekends ago, where they're putting some limitations on being able to track certain user data. But there's some awesome, there's some really great integrated tools that our agency uses to be able to continue to track. There has been a little bit of pickup for everybody in our industry in the past few months, it's been a little bit of a challenge, but there's always a solution. We use some third party tools that really help us integrate that data so that when our client is spending thousands of dollars in marketing, we can say, hey, you actually had this type of return on your investment.

5:18So that's why tracking is like our insurance policy. Is Meta making moves as well to be a little bit more consumer facing on the advertising platform? Or is that something that's just you're always going to need an agency or someone to help you out with that? You're going to need an agency because the amount of steps and what it takes to set up a campaign properly would take somebody full-time a couple years to learn and navigate. The AI that is integrated now in these tools is pretty crazy. We use like pixels, so we're able to track people's IP addresses. So say we had somebody make a purchase, we're going to be able to track that person's IP address and say, hey, this person actually looked at it X amount of times.

6:07So if somebody comes to me and They're like, oh, like I spoke to that person so and so long ago, but they converted through an ad. It took the ad to get them to convert. And we only know that because we're able to attach our pixel to their IP address. Yeah, so when you said like Meta's AI kind of advertising, kind of campaign management, what's your experience of that so far? There's a lot of learning happening. It still takes a lot of having a person behind the screen, managing it every day and checking it because you can turn on some of those AI automations, but it will quickly make a lot of error.

6:48So it's kind of in the infancy, but it will quickly evolve. Sure, sure, sure. I bet. I mean, I know Zuckerberg and crew is kind of all in on that. Well, Madison, what is working in terms of performance for ads today? UGC, which is user-generated content. So it looks like somebody filmed it themselves on a tripod or a handheld iPhone. People are able to better relate with that type of content. It doesn't feel sales. It feels genuine. And that's why, like I said, we specialize in authentic content creation. So when we're making high quality content, we want it to still look like it's capable to come from the person that is making it.

7:37Okay. And then, so are there certain types, obviously, you know, consumer products are doing quite well. Do you work exclusively B2C? We do both. We do B2C and B2B. So if someone wants to advertise and it's a B2B service, I don't know if you have any case studies or best practices that you'd recommend. Are there any nuances to advertising that audience versus just regular old consumers? Yeah, it's a lot more of a refined pool of people that you can market to. So a lot of those people don't necessarily have to spend as much money when it comes to ad spend because you're not targeting a ton versus if you're targeting a consumer, there's millions of people.

8:29so you need to have a little bit more money to stretch to reach the millions of people versus when you're targeting b2b a lot of the times you're going after somebody's hr manager or head of their all like cfo coo and those are easy to target on like linkedin for example these people put those types of titles in their bio and when you run ad you can target those types of people based on their information that they're listing on their profile. All right. So if somebody, how would somebody know, like, let's say that they're B2B and a lot of folks, you know, kind of both camps on that, but, you know, for a B2B, let's say it's like an agency owner.

9:11Let me ask you, do you run ads for your agency? I used to, but now we are basically referral only. So we don't have to anymore. But when we did, it worked. I mean, typically I would launch campaigns. I would do them for a couple months at a time and I would get all the leads that I wanted. I would work those leads. But then it got to a point where I'm a big believer in networking, building relationships, and we kind of grew our agency that way. Okay. So to a business owner audience right now, how might they know that they should do some research into paid ads? like let's say they're kind of in your boat and they're like, yeah, we got a lot of referral business.

9:57Should we dump money into ads if we already have folks coming in? So I would ask them a simple question. Like, what is your goal? Are you wanting to double your business in the next 12, 24 months? Are you looking to launch another special offer, another arm of your business that is new? Do you have a competitor that's just literally killing you in the back, you know, with their current marketing, that's just kind of overtaking and saturating your market. So you kind of have to ask yourself those questions. And if you answer yes to any of them, I would invest money in paid advertising because after a couple months, you spend enough money, your pixel and the AI do its thing, you're able to directly see the investment you're making and how it's returning on that money.

10:45It does take time. It does take money. It does take patience. But after a period of time, you're going to be excited that you invested in that kind of tool. If someone is generating their own UGC, what tips would you give? I would say make sure that when you're creating that content, you're in a space where there's nice light shining towards your face, not behind you. you have something a camera that's steady that's a clear image when you're editing that or if you're filming I always tell my clients that are traveling and send me content slow steady clips work because then you can easily piece them together if you are talking and you want to extract audio or you just want to use b-roll make sure that your message is clear and concise so that when you are putting text over it or you are doing a voiceover, it makes sense to your audience.

11:48And that just kind of goes back to like, what is your goal? Who are you targeting? Who is your avatar? And knowing your audience so that you can then deliver that direct message to them and it can work. As a bit of a social media nerd, which I assume you are, where do you think like social media, like what do you think it's going to look like over the next year? I don't know if you've given this much thought, like what is social media going to look like in the next few years? Do you have any ideas? I think we're going to have a really hard time depicting what's AI and what's real. Because right now you can kind of tell, but there's some stuff that you have to really ask yourself that you'll watch and you'll be like, there's no way that this is real.

12:31But over time, it's just going to improve and become better. And people in my industry, like my advice to them would be know your market and own your market and be the best in it because there's so many people out there doing it and it will kill your business. hmm all right well um who would be someone that would be kind of an ideal fit for you i mean obviously you don't work with everybody and there's certain types of folks that that you cannot get out of the park with and probably some they're like yeah not not really great fit for us like who would be like ideal like who should definitely be uh grabbing a conversation with you or your team i love working with a product-based business because it's very it's a lot easier of a item to sell versus a service.

13:20We also do a lot of personal brands. I love working with personal brands. It resonates with me and our team. We also do a lot in the medical space. We work with a lot of med spas and plastic surgeons. I have a big background in that from my earlier days of marketing. So I would say those three, you know, product-based businesses, people building personal brands and people in the medical aesthetic space. That strikes me as a pretty competitive area in advertising and on Instagram and Facebook. How do you differentiate yourself from all the other noise? And how do you keep your CPCs, CPLs down as well?

14:05It is a very competitive market, but so many med spa and plastic surgeon owners aren't investing in really good social media marketing. They'll have like somebody internal doing it that's younger or has been doing it for a while. And only one person can do so much. And when you hire a team of creatives, you have 15 people on your team that can shoot photo, shoot video, edit it, storytell it, post it, run ads, do the strategy. And when you're able to invest in a team, instead of just that sole person, your content stands out. It's easy to You'd be able to scroll and tell who's got professional team behind it and who doesn't.

14:46And, you know, as well as your UGC style content is going to be better. Your ads are going to perform better because you have a team of specialists behind it. So you typically have to spend more money up front, but your return is going to be greater in the long run. Upmaster, your website, madmarketinghouse.com. When somebody goes there, what would you recommend they do if they either want to have a conversation or I don't know if you have any resources that you'd recommend? yeah so you can follow us on instagram mad marketing house we post weekly tips on creating social media content how to stand out um and then as well as our website if you come across and you feel like we would be a good fit to help you with your business you can fill out a form we'd love to set up a call and learn more about your business and just see if it'd be a good fit going looking through your instagram yep you are a very instagram friendly uh agency you know how that Instagram game works.

15:42But I know it's like as an artist, like I don't know, I'm not an artist, but I know art when I see it. Yeah, this is Instagram content all the way. All right. So again, madmarketinghouse.com, Madison Holloman, again, you found her CEO. Thank you so much, for joining us.

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