Empowering Small Businesses: Insights on Building Trust and Achieving Marketing Wins

Hey, hi everyone. Now, welcome to your show. E-coffee with experts. This is your host Ranmay here. And today we have Dave Williams, who is the owner of Upward Digital Marketing Group with us. Hey Dave, how’s it going?

Doing well, Ranmay. How are you doing today? Thanks for having me.

All good. Yeah. I can’t really complain. Great Dave. Before we move any forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey so far and, how did you land up in the digital marketing and web development space? And also more about your agency. What do you guys do? What do you guys specialize in? And we take it from there.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, real quick, just a little bit of my background. This is really a second career for me. I spent the first 15 years in a completely different industry. I was actually in an outdoor industry. I was in the landscape supply industry working with landscape contractors and municipalities and providing them with plant material and hardscaping materials. I did that for 15 years.

But when the housing and mortgage crisis happened, like an 08910 in that area, I decided to make a change and transition. Into online digital marketing. I had worked for a business. Actually, it was an owner in a business that was heavy into influencer marketing and we were an agency that worked with a lot of big brands Reebok, Under Armour Different companies like that and that kind of went its way.

We had a bunch of owners and we went our own way after seven years. And at that time I decided, listen, I want to stay in this industry, but I want to help small to medium sized businesses. We were, it was great working with the larger companies and the other agency, cause they had big budgets, but.

The biggest challenge was we were always our point of contact was always changing all the time There was constant change of these large corporations. So and I had a small business background working for small businesses So I felt the connection to them like hey, I want to help small to medium sized businesses.

So I was always interested in marketing. I was a president general manager of a company for seven years and a sales manager, and I was always really interested in marketing and advertising. So it was a natural fit to start something. Six plus years ago, I started upward digital marketing.

I’m the sole owner. My wife and I actually own it. We’ve got people that work for us and we specialize in web design, web maintenance, local SEO, social media management, online ads, reputation, email marketing, that sort of stuff. Really whatever it takes to work alongside businesses that serve a local client, that’s our niche.

We’re not, We don’t work with a lot of national clients. It’s mostly local businesses. And that’s our niche here. Probably 80 percent of our clients, Ron may or are in the Columbus, Ohio area.

But we do have you know, throughout the U. S. It really doesn’t matter where you are.

I just haven’t worked outside of the country before, but it’s mostly U. S. It’s all U. S. based companies at this point. So that’s that’s my journey. And and that’s our core services at Upward.

Lovely. Lovely. And how is it like doing business with your partner?

She actually worked with me and the previous agency that we had.

We’re on different ends of the business. She kind of heads up our social media management. She’s got a team of people that work with her on that. That’s probably not my forte. I like the web. Development and SEO side of the business. So we are on our different ends of the business. And so that helps we’ve been married for, quite a few years.

So it helps that we don’t actually work. Every single day together hand in hand. She really manages a lot of her clients and I manage a lot of my clients and we each have our own kind of team to help us do those services.

There is some crossover occasionally when clients are using services in both worlds, both of our worlds.

Lovely, lovely. Great. Yeah. Great. And how did it all start, upward digital marketing? And when you started, like we were talking about in the green room, starting an agency is not easy, right? Initially it is difficult. You will have your challenges, you will have your own learning. Tell us more about it and how, you actually overcome, these, battles initially.

Yeah, now that I look back at it. I can’t believe we did it. To be honest in the early days I was just focused on building websites for businesses and I was I knew some platforms to build websites in but then I quickly found out a couple things number one We didn’t have a portfolio So it was hard to get people to trust us like because I couldn’t show them much, Other than working at Other businesses I had worked on our business website, but outside of that, I didn’t have a portfolio.

So in the early days, Ron may I had to actually, I think I offered to do free work or really low dollar amounts just to build up the portfolio. And it was there was another challenge. The other challenge was trying to be an expert in a bunch of different platforms. We were working and, wordpress and Weebly and Squarespace and Wix and Magenta and all these other things.

And that was difficult. I found out early on that. I was not an expert in a lot of these and my team wasn’t either and I Scaled that back to really focusing on wordpress websites although we have clients that come back to us that are in different platforms and we still help them, but so that was challenge number one not having a portfolio, but then over time I built that portfolio We built that portfolio and that helped launch, sales in the future The other thing was We were attracting a lot of bad leads in the early days I Tried to customize everything for everybody I tried to get a hundred percent conversion rate on every prospect and I knew in the early days I should have known in the early days that you’re not gonna you’re not gonna close every single sale Sometimes people just aren’t a good fit or you’re not a good fit for them.

And So I went through that crucible of learning, I can’t be all things to everybody, but it, and people told me that before I started the business. And while I was starting the business, but I ignored them, I thought we could do everything, but I learned the hard way that you can’t. Yeah, so life lesson learned there.

And you have had held various leadership roles, and across different industries, right? So what was the key lesson from your earlier roles that kind of, still guides you today?

Yeah, I think, yeah, when you’re leading have different leadership rows, obviously you’re supposed to be leading other people. And so there’s a lot of components to that. So I think what’s helped me in this role here is particularly in digital marketing, where there’s a lot of remote teams. I have to be intentional about being engaging with our team following up with them quite a bit, be clear in communication. So that’s one part of leadership. The other part of leadership is you have to make decisions a lot of times, and sometimes they’re short term decisions or sometimes they’re long term decisions. And I think that’s helped me over the years being in some of these positions to focus in. Sometimes it’s hard to make a decision and sometimes it takes a while to make a decision.

I’ve learned over the years and these different roles that I’ve had, and I was, President of a company, I was sales manager of a company that, there’s short term decisions you have to make today. And then there’s long term ones that you can’t make in a day. You have to research and dig into it a little bit more.

And then sometimes it’s advantageous that maybe kick the ball down the court a little bit and not make a decision today about it. You see what plays out. And so I think that’s me having some of these different roles being a business owner today.

And then, you guys specialize in, dealing with local and small businesses, which gives immense satisfaction, when they grow, you help them do that. But budgets, are a constraint, at all times, bearing some exceptions there. So how do you look at that? How do you handle operating in smaller budgets and then trying to achieve what you have,

It’s a great question because in my old agency world, there’s big massive budgets and sometimes you would sign a contract for A year, multi years.

And so you felt almost safe if you will. But so that is not the feeling we have now working with smaller local businesses. It keeps us on our toes that we constantly have to be, doing our very best work for them and we can’t just take them for granted.

And so for us, what we do is we really try to get to know the business. And our goal is to get them to trust our business and trust that we’re partnering with them. So that involves, clear communication, checking in with them admitting sometimes, Hey, what we tried here isn’t what we were hoping. Let’s pivot and try to do something else here. And I think at the end of the day, these small to medium sized business owners, they just want to know.

That they can trust you and that you’re really partnering with them and in their best interest. And so that’s what we try to remind ourselves. I work for small businesses in the early part of my career. So I think I have an understanding of how they think. And so that we just tried to remember that Ron may every day when we’re working with these folks that they’ve got a lot in their plate.

They’ve wearing multiple hats. And we can’t bring problems to them. We have to bring solutions to them. And sometimes those solutions are education and other times.

it’s actually executing the digital marketing services. But so I try to put my hat, put their hat on my head. And if I was in their shoes, what, how would they be thinking or feeling right now? The best I can,

no, that is really great. You said that, right? It’s difficult to understand where they’re coming from, as a digital marketer, you’d want more budgets to execute your plan, your strategies, because you see that, if you invest more at that particular point, you’d be able to achieve more, but it is not really You know, it’s possible at their end at all times.

So I’m really glad you said that we’d add on, talking about building strategies Dave, for small to mid sized businesses. So how do you balance quick wins? Because that is important for them, and along with long term growth plans, because you can visualize that as a marketer versus, them emphasizing on long term growth.

They would really want quick wins. So how do you balance, both of it?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think on just being clear with them and up front and just developing like short term wins versus that long term strategy. Again, we try to get to know these businesses. So when we are brought on board to help a business, we’re diving in and looking at the business totality.

Especially from an online perspective, if the customer shares offline stuff with us or their sales or how it’s been with their business since they started, we love to get that information. Not every client shares that with us, but so we dive in and at least look at their online existing presence.

And then we say, where are there opportunities right away? Maybe it’s. Listen, you need to get more Google reviews, or maybe it’s we need to increase website traffic, and maybe that’s a short term win versus long term strategies of, hey, we need to get you on page one of Google on these search terms.

Or we may need to help you build your email list. You don’t have an email list, so we can’t send out. blast to people. Whatever I think it’s, I think it’s identifying them and then communicating to the client. And then what’s great about the short-term wins Ron is that once they realize you help them do that, then that trust gets built.

And then, And then they’re more willing to do other things in terms of social media services or campaigns. Yeah, it’s our goal when we bring on a new client to really try to show value immediately. And you’ve heard the old saying with trying to what’s the saying about promise less and deliver more or something like that.

We’ll tell them what we’re going to do with our service, but we try to do more than that. Yeah, there you go. There you go. And so that’s what we try to do. So that’s our mantra here is just let’s try to do more than what we told them we were going to do. And then oftentimes that leads to them, them trusting you more.

And at the end of the day, that’s what it’s about is getting our clients to trust us and go and go along on the journey, as you said previously, before our interview.

Great. Great. Yeah. So I did, so many years, right? Prior to this agency, you also worked with another agency.

But, let’s stick to this one, upward digital. What is your favorite client story?

Oh, gosh. Yeah, here’s one. So we’ve got an existing client right now. They’re in the kind of the entertainment industry, if you will. But before we were hired, they had worked with a couple other agencies and they had went through that constant loop of trying like a 30 day, whatever campaign or strategy, and then giving up, then trying another one, 30, 60 days, giving up 30, 60 days, giving up.

And so they weren’t. Major believers in online digital marketing and I was fortunate because when I came in I immediately recognized that and Talked to them about the importance of sticking with something for a really long, really Giving something a go and giving it some time And to their credit they adopted that attitude And they have had the best two, the last two years of their existence.

They got over a hump that they could never get over from a sales revenue. And now we’ve surpassed that. And now there’s some talk of maybe opening a second location. And a lot of it has to do with just them adopting, changing their mindset. Marketing and advertising has to be a long term play here.

It has to be part of the cost of doing business. And there’s such a focus sometimes on return on investment. And sometimes people are looking at that ROI way too early.

Or maybe they’re looking at the flicks and web rankings and really the ROI is my business growing. And and so kudos to them for really, believing in what we were, Trying to convince them to do as far as the strategy goes. That was a long winded story.

I know. But that was a good one.

Yeah, that was a good one. Dave 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. Sure. All right. You lost Google search.

Car rental place near me. All right.

My daughter wrecked our bashed in the front of our car. That was my last service.

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

Oh, gosh. Man, I’m old. I’m 51. So you’re really You don’t look like, you don’t look like, Oh, thank you.

You can

go back easily then.

Yeah I probably I probably went and bought some food. That’s probably what I did with it. I probably wasn’t smart with it.

All right. Your next vacation.

My next vacation is my 25th anniversary. I think next year for my wife and I, yeah. And I think I would. If I can swing it, I would like to take her to Napa Valley in California.

That’s her dream. So that’s what I’m hoping. It hasn’t been planned yet, but that’s what I’m hoping.

Lovely. I really wish she would do that. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Great Dave. Final question. We’ll not get any further beyond that. Where do you find Dave Williams on Friday evenings after office?

A lot of times my wife and I will go grab dinner somewhere and just come home and sit on our patio. We’ve got a dog. My son’s usually with friends. My daughter’s off to college. It’s usually just my wife and I sitting on our patio and looking at her backyard. And I spend most of my life near or on a computer.

So I’m usually outside a bit, not on a computer. So that’s where you’ll find me usually on a Friday night.

All right. Good. Eddie, thank you for being such a sport and yeah, more importantly for our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

Yeah, upwarddigitalmarketing.com is our website. Feel free to email me directly davidupwardigitalmarketing.com. Those are probably the two best. We’ve also got an info at upwarddigitalmarketing. com. So yeah, reach out. I’d love to chat with you and even if it’s just about what’s going on in our industry or if there’s any way I can support you, let me know.

Lovely. Great. Yeah. Thank you, Dave. This has been a wonderful conversation. I’m sure our audience would find a lot of, inside benefits and the insights that you shared today. So yeah. Thank you once again. Yeah. Cheers.

Thank you, Ranmay. May for having me. Really appreciate it. Best of luck to you and best future success as well.

you too. Thank you, Dave.

All right.