Navigating the Digital Marketing Journey: From Early Struggles to Industry Success

Hey, hi, everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay, here. Today, we have Dan, who is the Founder and CEO of Digital Elevator with us. Hey, Dan, how’s it going?

Hey, Ramna. Thanks for having me. It’s going great.

Yeah. Dan, before we move it in the forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your holidays and your journey thus far? Also, how did you land up in the digital marketing SEO space? Also a bit about your agency, what you What do you guys do? What do you guys specialize in? And we take it off from there.

Sure. Always a topic I like talking about. I didn’t study marketing or anything in college. I was actually communications major. Never was a guy who knew what he wanted to do. I think my life was more, figure out things you don’t want to do. So I did everything.

Why all of us digital marketers are like that, not knowing what to do when they started out?

Yeah, nobody There wasn’t really SEO classes when I went to college. This is going back to early 2000s. But yeah, I was so… My friend’s neighbor was a real estate appraiser, and he had lots of guitars and a couple of trucks in a nice house and had all this free time. So I was like, That sounds cool. So I did that for a little while. The market crashed. I said, I got to get out of this. I did construction, did medical sales. I did all kinds of stuff. And then eventually, I I did in flight school. I was in flight school, I thought I wanted to be a pilot. Once I finished the basic training, one of my friends was like, Hey, do you want to start a IT company or a SEO company with me? I was like, I’ll start a SEO company with you. That sounds really cool, actually. It sounds like something that’s up and coming, and not that many people were doing it. Initially, we started together a company that specialized in SEO for lawyers, which nobody was really doing at the time. Then we branched out, we went our own way with the company, and I kept doing SEO.

And along that way, I was doing a lot of the writing for the law offices. So I was basically a bit of a content marketer, even though I didn’t have formal legal training. But the lawyers didn’t have time, so they needed somebody to do it. And for SEO, you need content. So I was writing the content, spun off my own content marketing division, and kept doing that. And then was selling content marketing services, and then eventually was like, Okay, let me bring a full circle SEO into the mix here because I had some pretty good foundations with that. I got pretty lucky. I joined some local organizations, some tech hubs in West Palm Beach, Florida, and started networking with a lot of like-minded people. I was basically the resident SEO specialist as a tech hub with hundreds of people. I got really involved. I was on the board of directors and met a lot of interesting people, and I was the SEO guy for a while. That was really fundamental in me branching off into the business. I was still just a one-man shop, and then eventually started hiring people and growing and scaling out from there.

My first hire was a graphic designer/developer. We started building WordPress websites together and adding that on and then going from there.

Lovely. Lovely. Quite a journey. And why back it? How did it come? Did it come naturally? Or what is the story behind it?

Yeah. So we were fairly industry agnostic for a long time. I did the legal thing after my initial partner and I separated from that business model, I was doing whatever. I did a bunch of dental. It was a lot of health care clients, mostly by referral. I was a white label partner for a very big media agency. They were trying to move away from traditional newspaper and into digital. And so they hired me to white label and build out the division. There’s a lot of real estate in there, local furniture company. So you name it, I did it. My initial day is a lot of software companies, which was always one of my favorite things to do. And then just growing and meeting people. People leave companies. Their company gets acquired, it gets bought out, and they call you again. Hey, we like working with you. And so that happened. One of the notable clients was a big top 10 Fortune 500 company, and they were in life science. I got a nice case study out of that. Actually, that person continued on and went to work with pharma-type clients. I got reputation there. Then they were like, Hey, we want you to scale up your services for us, my big pharma client.

I realized this market was barely under-serviced in the regard that it was either pay at what I call Madison Avenue, $100,000 a month retainer, agency of record type stuff, or nothing, really, or you try to go with the company that doesn’t know the space. We were like, Okay, this is really interesting. At the time, the economy was weird. People were starting They’re going to cut back on their marketing dollars, right? You always cut back on marketing when the economy is a little funky. We said, You know what? Let’s pivot into biotech. This is really an industry where there’s opportunity. We can make a marketing dent. We have the case studies already, and we know how to service this industry. It’s definitely a challenging niche because these are all PhDs that we’re working with. There’s an opportunity there. We basically evaluated that the market needed our type of services, which was more for the emerging biotechs, not necessarily the Fortune 500, and especially around SEO and lead gen type stuff. It was a matter of we had the expertise. This is an industry that could really be scalable. There’s a lot of clients in it. There’s 4,000 new biotechs or something that start up every year, in the startup world I was in, but much more funded, should we say.

We’re like, Hey, let’s go all in on this. Then from a marketing standpoint, it really helps with our targeting. It’s hard to market an agency going after, Hey, we do marketing, versus we market X. I wish I would have done that earlier in my career. But yeah, so that’s where the biotech transition came in.

Yeah, narrowing down on the industry or the niche that you want to specialize. It also makes the life easier for your announced team, which specializes in one niche and have the expertise, case studies, and understanding of the domain much better. Yeah. It helps as well. While you started out, Dan, running an agency and making it work is another game. But when you start it has its own challenges. Getting those first clients, setting up the finance, the recruitment, hiring key members. What were those initial challenges, Dan, and how did you overcome them?

Initially, it was trying to fit good people into positions that maybe they didn’t have experience in. My first hire, he was actually hired as a project manager. I was like, I need project manager. His background was graphic design and dev, and he’s still with me, actually. It didn’t work. I was like, a terrible project manager. That was a challenge. Sometimes you hire good people and you just got to find the right spot. We’re like, Hey, why don’t we just go after your strengths? Because there is opportunity here and there is design and user experience involved in SEO. It’s not just about rankings, right? You need to convert people. It was a natural transition there. But scaling was a little conversation we had before the recording. It’s trying to find when you have enough revenue to hire and then taking a chunk out of your revenue and when to do that and how to forecast that. That, I think, is a challenge for any company that’s scaling. It’s like, When do I hire? What’s the capacity per teammate for X amount of clients? Then at what stage do you maybe get a subcontractor in place as you approach that new client load?

Let’s say for us, we find that around five or six SEO clients per SEO strategist is like the sweet spot in fairly larger campaigns. And that’s it. They’re supported by other people. But initially, I thought it was 10. And then you find out you’re going to burn your employees out. So that was a challenge. There’s a lot of learning there. A lot of employees will just continue to work and not necessarily let you know that they’re burnt out and overwhelmed. You almost have to have a six-sense. We basically built processes in for resource allocation with software that says your resource allocation is probably going X for this client per month, which is going to tap you out. If you get another client, we’re going to have to forecast that we need another employee. That’s how we’ve done it. It’s not like a guesswork thing. It’s a software and project management, hourly resource allocation that’s based on pretty sound assumptions we’ve been around coming up on 15 years. You know, Hey, this is going to take X amount of effort per month for this employee. And then after that, he or is going to be done.

They’re not going to be able to work anymore. Those were definitely some of the hardest things as you scale. And lately, it’s staying on top of trends because marketing in the last two years has probably been the most wild that I’ve experienced. The past two decades, Google doesn’t know what it wants to do. You’re on page one one day, you’re on page six the next. Their clients, businesses depend on it. And it’s not your fault. It’s not their fault. Google’s decided to rank Reddit number one. All of a sudden, you’re like, okay. That’s challenging. Convincing people to diversify has also been interesting. Some of them have been stubbornly living and dying by a CEO for six years and think that it’s never going to end. It’s like, okay, You have to spend more money now, and it’s going to have to be pay-per-click, social, things like that. Client education is always a challenge, too. These are all typical agency owner things, I think, that are fun. Pretty common, right?

What is your take on all this talk about SEO being dead. Have you come across clients quoting you that, that it’s not going to work anymore and all that stuff?

Yeah, I think people have been saying that for years, and they’ve repeatedly got proven wrong. I think diversification is more important than it’s ever been. I’ll lean into that a little bit, but by no means dead. Definitely, there’s a lot less traffic being sent, I think. There’s conflicting studies from people that I trust in the industry where actually people are seeing more click-throughs with AI overviews and things like that. Other people are saying some industries have less traffic because of AI overviews and Google taking up all the bandwidth or the ads taking up everything. But I think we’d like to think holistically about the sales funnel, how people go through their buyer journey. And it’s not just bottom of the funnel ads, right? If nobody’s ever heard of you and you get them to click on their ad, it’s extremely difficult to convert them, especially with our biotech clients, because often very long sales cycles and quite a bit of money. And these aren’t bouquet of flowers, generally. Sometimes these products are millions of dollars. You’re not just going to click an ad and sign up. So I think that’s where SEO comes in, right?

That’s where the education comes in. People are reading blogs. They’re going to download a white paper. They’re going to go to your service page. They’re going to have a meeting. Buying by committee is a very big thing, right? It’s not just one person that makes decisions and pretty much all B2B buying decisions. It’s five, six people. Those people all search differently. I think SEO and content marketing, which I lump together because we do a lot of SEO-drivencontent marketing, is the best form of marketing to meet people at all the stages of the sales funnel because you educated them. And then furthermore, talking about AI, which I referenced, but AI starts to pull its content from somewhere, too. It’s not just pulling it out of thin air, it’s pulling it from web pages. I think that’s the next thing is, how do we figure out where AI is going to be pulling its content from and how do we get in front of that? Because I love using AI personally for interfacing queries. I’m using it to help with my landscape project in my backyard. I see that I’m not going to Google for that.

So it’s adapting to that. And if it’s not Google, maybe it’s a different search engine. I think by no means is it dead. I think SEOs just need to pivot and understand that it might not always be Google.

Yeah, absolutely. You have worked across the gaps in terms of having plant-imaging biotech startups to Fortune 500 companies. I understand there’s a lot of difference, but if you can highlight, let’s say, the major ones out there, what is the difference between working in a startup environment for a startup client versus a Fortune 500? And what are the lessons that you have learned because of the diversified use cases that you might have come across working with these setups?

Sure. Good question. Startup world is generally restricted by funding. They usually don’t have a burn rate that they can’t just keep going over. They don’t have a proven product yet in general. You’re coming into that. And the teams are a bit leaner, so there’s a lot more people wearing a lot more hats. You don’t have the resources. At the same time, I think the benefit of startups or fast moving teams is that they can move fast. Working with Fortune 500 companies, you’re just like, Hey, you need to make this quick change. And it has to go through legal. And one month later, two And then a few months later, it’s approved when it was just a very simple title tag was wrong. And so in that regard, startups are exciting. They’re new. They try to be a little bit disruptive. I know that’s a buzz term, but that’s what’s exciting about startups. And there’s more pressure for marketing to perform much quicker. Definitely in the startup world, we’re focused on very quick ROI, whereas with the Fortune 500 company, maybe they have more room to go through budgets or test. I think a common misunderstanding with marketing as it relates to companies of both sizes is that everything just works every single time.

It’s not always the case. Sometimes it’s testing, sometimes you’re trying three different things, and maybe they’re all working, but one really works, and you’re ultimately throwing the other two out and just doing the one, but you had to spend the money on all three to get there. With Fortune 500 companies, as it relates to SEO, it’s small changes generally can make a big impact, and you have to weigh those. Small companies, small changes don’t make a big impact. If I go change on page of a Fortune 500 company’s website, given their domain rating or the domain authority, it’s probably going to be pretty impactful. If I go do the same thing in a small company that has a small domain rating, not a lot of reputation out there, it might not be anything. You really got to approach each one differently in terms of business impact. For some startups, I might not even suggest SEO. I might say you should just be doing brand awareness type stuff because you’re not going to rank. It’s going to take two years to rank. You might not have the budget for this. Obviously, it depends on that budget conversation.

But so those are the lessons for those two in my experience. I love big corporate sites and making quick changes that you can instantly see in two weeks. But I like also the speed at which the small companies can can work, and that’s their advantage against the Goliaths in the industry.

The decision-making in startup, mid-size set up just like fast, was all these huge enterprises. So yeah, that’s there. And talking about SEO strategies, Dan, how you cater to the biotech audience and generate quality leads for your clients, depending on the specific niches that they are in? How do you tailor these strategies according to that?

For our brand, specifically? For digital elevators leads or for their leads? Client leads?

For your leads.

For our leads? We practice what we preach. We rank pretty well for some pretty good keywords. We spend a lot of time on that. We’ve recreated some resources. We do rerun paid ads. We do a ton of content marketing. We do link building to our own stuff. I make it a point to do help a reporter out type digital PR. I try to answer those. I know that platform’s dead, but the equivalent of those, I don’t even remember the name of the ones that I’m using now, but I try to answer those. My job as CEO is business and sales. So that’s where I focus. I still like to do strategy for clients because I feel like I’m good at it. The marketing stuff is really where I’m always trying to… I want to rank for biotech marketing agency or biotech web design, and there’s always fluctuation there. But yeah, our biggest source of leads is our content marketing, I’ll say. And those tend to be way better leads than pay-per-click leads. So that’s That’s what we’re doing. I’m constantly writing blogs and reverse engineering what’s out there and trying to win in that division.

Exactly the same thing that we’re selling our clients. Yeah.

And you have worked with multiple clients. I’m sure you have had a lot of successes. What is your favorite client story? That one story which is really close to your heart.

The clients, there’s a bunch. I think one stat that I like to lean on, which was really interesting interesting was that we looked at the numbers and so 44% of our clients have actually exited or been acquired. I thought that was interesting. Obviously, there’s correlation, there’s not causation there, but it’s a testament to our team and a testament to the private equity groups or the acquisition companies that are buying these clients that they’re looking at a nice website that does its job or a good marketing. You don’t want to buy a company that’s failing. That doesn’t really happen. You’re not going to get a good valuation like that. Maybe somebody might buy a deal. One of our health care clients was this company called Duvasaco. They were doing emergency medicine. Revenue cycle management was the industry they were in. That was a friend who I’d worked with before. He came, he got the job there as head of marketing, and we came We basically did everything. We built the website, we did the on-page, we wrote up the sales copy, we created all the white papers, we ideated all the content, we ranked them for everything, and they sold for a very nice multiple, and the whole team benefited from that.

I still work with several people from the team, which is awesome because they’d become your friends. So that was probably one of my biggest success stories because when they came, they had zero marketing. They had a great piece of software. But they had zero marketing. And then with the help of their marketing strategist who was awesome, and then our digital side, where we basically did all the digital side. And when they went to conferences, people were like, Oh, I know you guys. That was a win for their founders because nobody ever said that to them before because they were looking at the household name brands. That was a really good one for us because we were basically responsible for the whole digital side of the operation. But you sell yourself out of a client because they get acquired and they’re done. But that’s our goal, make our client successful. That’s always rewarding when, okay, if it’s a small player, I got a seven-figure valuation. If it’s a big player, you got a eight or nine-figure evaluation and they sold it. Sometimes you get to stay on. Sometimes they’re just done. They’re all gone. They’re all on their yachts somewhere sipping cocktails.

Yeah, absolutely. Great, Dan. As we wrap up, what is that one key takeaway you would like our listeners, and especially those in the biotech space to remember from this conversation that we have today.

Yeah. Biotech is great because it’s a little bit farther behind the rest of the marketing world in the sense that you could probably focus the majority of your marketing efforts on SEO, paper click, and brand awareness type stuff. Whereas other industries, there’s a much bigger emphasis on social media, which is exhausting, right? Like being on social all the time or having. it’s a whole different animal. It’s a whole different marketing content campaign than SEO and content marketing. I find a lot of biotech companies just do pay-per-click. Which is great. It’s fast, right? But it’s way more expensive because of the ad fees than SEO. But I find SEO is still the best in terms of lead gen, cost per lead, and acquisition. I think it’s often secondary topay-per-click, and I think it should be primary. Plus, like we were talking about before, in terms of buyer journeys, SEO with good content marketing, research content marketing, is going to be the best way to get these clients that typically have really long sales cycles. So that would be my best advice for anybody in the marketing space or considering marketing their biotech.

All right, lovely. You’re done. This has been a brilliant conversation. But Before we let you go, I would like to play a quick rapid fire with you. I hope you’re game for it.

Let’s go.

All right. What do you do with your first paycheck, Dan? First paycheck of your life?

I have no idea. I probably saved it.

Son of a financial planner. Yeah, okay. Friday evenings, where do we find you after work?

With my family. I got a baby and a lovely wife and a dog, and we go down to the beach or hang with family or friends.

All right, lovely. And your last Google search?

Probably a biotech search for a client’s competitor.

All right. Do it again. All right. The last one will not give you any further. Your favorite spot?

Surfing. I’m a big surfer. Okay.

Florida explains that. Yeah. All your time today. It has been a lovely conversation. And I’m sure our audience will find a lot of insights and a lot of value in terms of what you shared today. So, yeah, cheers, man. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. It’s been fun.