Mastering Data-Driven Marketing: Unveiling Strategies for Sustainable Business Growth

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to E-coffee with experts. This is Ranmay, your host for today’s episode. Today we have Logan, who is the founder of Argon Agency with us. Welcome Logan. Great Logan, before we move forward, why don’t you let our audiences know a bit about your journey thus far and what Argon Agency is all about, what you guys offer, what are your core competencies, how long have you been there, and we can take it forward from there on.

Absolutely. So, I started my career off by actually studying neuroscience at Florida Atlantic University to become a physician and I ended up veering away. Starting, an entrepreneurship. I started a company. It was called bacon boxes. That was my first one.

And that’s where I learned that I had a good footing and a knack for marketing. And I enjoyed it. So, then I spent the next 10 years gussying up my skill set and, really honing in on my specialties during covid. I was the CMO of a behavioral health group and I stepped away from that position to start our agencies.

So, we’re just about a year and 3 now and we’re a full-service digital marketing agency. We focus on something we call CMO support, which is just, the organization of the entire marketing department for the companies that we work with goes a little bit beyond just digital, but we do, focus on websites and SEO, social media management, content creation and curation and so much more than that.

Wonderful. Yeah, you have added a diverse career in marketing and business development yourself. Logan, can you share some of the key milestones and experiences that have shaped your approach to marketing and entrepreneurship?

So, I think the way that my understanding of marketing developed is a little bit different than somebody who traditionally just went and studied marketing.

I started with psychology and, like, how people perceive everything from words and sentences to colors, and then now that I’m in, I had a career shift, I’m able to take the knowledge that I learned there and utilize it in my marketing campaigns, and we see a lot of success that way, because instead of Just coming up with an idea.

We’re taking data that we know has proven structure or has a history of having a good, good amount of people coming to it due to perception. And then we can use it in our campaigns.

Wonderful. And I’m talking about marketing, that is so much noise. Now, AI has come into the picture and all of that happening, right?

What is your advice to all the entrepreneurs and businesses, to create an effective marketing strategy that not only, grabs the eyeballs initially or momentarily, but also, helps them to build those long-lasting customer relationships?

So, I think really listening to who your customer base is and then using your [00:03:00] marketing platform to describe that in detail, like who you’re trying to reach, what you’re able to offer them, Developing your unique selling point really for a business.

It shouldn’t be that hard. It needs to align with your morals and your values and what you’re hoping to change about the industry that you’re entering right when you’re starting the business and then keeping that aligned throughout everything you do. My best advice is that if you’re an entrepreneur or somebody that’s just entering, the marketing field when you’re finding your marketing partners to work with, you need to vet and see if they understand your business and if they understand your market.

Absolutely. And then, we all at some point, not exactly 100 percent of the population, but a lot of us, want to start our gig, right? Many of those aspiring entrepreneurs struggle with, Finding the unique selling proposition, USP as they call it, as for you, what strategies would you recommend to [00:04:00] help all these budding entrepreneurs, discover their USP and effectively also communicate it in their competitive market.

So that’s a question that we work on usually with my first strategy calls when I’m working with the business, but developing that I think is a lot easier when you’re asked the question forward. They get nervous trying to answer it, but then you start changing what the question is.

And you ask, what do you do? How are you, how are you different than the guy down the street? Or, what kind of feedback are you getting from the people that you’re serving? Are they enjoying your product? Does your product offer a feature that other products don’t offer? Is it, even if your product is less let’s say, it’s maybe not as bulky or, some people might say that they love Semrush, but you’re that’s expert level.

That’s somebody that, you need to know how to navigate it, giving it to somebody that doesn’t understand the background of it, they’re going to be lost in it. So even though it’s expensive, it’s highly used, it requires a technical skillset, but then somebody might like rank watch because they’re able to go in it.

They’re able to understand. The data and the analytics there. So that gives you your unique selling point, even though it seems like it might be a less competitive, robust software or the competitive pricing is lower, they may feel like they’re not getting the value, but when you look at it at a stance of like user-friendliness, that’s your selling point.

So, what you need to do is target the right person with that. And then you end up with, more retention and you end up with those people being really happy because they didn’t have to learn Semrush or take a million courses to be able to find out the information that they needed to know. That’s my case stance on it.

No. A brilliant take. A lot of us get lost in the battle of fighting our competition without, realizing what is our key USP. It might be a very simple thing, which we overlooked in terms of fighting the battle with the industry leaders or the top players out there without even realizing why our existing customer is there and why they are with us, even when they’re aware of the top players out there.

While we all, go out, bang our heads on targeting the blue ocean out there. It is very important to [00:06:00] understand your existing customer base and why they have come to you. What are the features of your product or service? That they like, and probably, your USP might be hidden in those questions to your existing consumer base while, a lot of us ignore that and look at, all those rosy pictures out there to find, yeah, I’ve got this, which probably is not the way your customer base is interpreting things.

Your product or service, right?

I use that a lot when I’m talking to clients. I always like to ask them. Okay. You’re comparing yourself to a company that does the same thing, maybe, or offers the same-like name service. So, for example, when I’m talking to the drug and alcohol treatment centers one might do detox residential care, which is the first level of care.

You get somebody in there, you’re 24-hour medical team. But then you’re comparing yourself to a different center, or you’re trying to do something like the other center, but one is treating middle-aged alcoholics that, have a white-collar, blue-collar career. And then the [00:07:00] another one is treating 18 to 24 that, are college students that, partied and had some issues and, they have a different, it’s a different community.

So whatever’s going to be best for your centers, who you should be marketing to. So, if right now you’re getting the bulk of, 18 to 24, then you’re messaging and your marketing needs to be that. Because if you start taking, a 45-year-old middle-aged alcoholic and you put them in the mix with the 18 to 24 heroin addicts, they’re going to be like, get me out of here.

Why am I, I don’t relate to these people. This isn’t therapeutic for me. So that’s at least, we try to look at that.

Absolutely. And then anyway, at times, it works in your favor if you look at simple solutions rather than, go and try to find out something which does not exist.

So yeah, a very valid point there. Like you mentioned earlier, you have been. Heading the show in an organization, then starting your agency. So, the marketing landscape is becoming increasingly data-driven, right? With all those software tools and all that we have at our disposal.

How do you teach your clients to, balance data-driven decision-making with, creative aspects of marketing to achieve optimal results?

I love this question. So usually when you are in a role that is decision-making role, you look at the charts and the graphs, even if you do not understand what the data means, and you’re making decisions based on which line is going up and green.

And, if your visitor count, for example, an SEO, your visitor counts going up, your keywords are going up, but then you look at the quality of the keywords, and you’re ranking for things that aren’t relevant. So, you might get a ton of traffic. So, this happens in addiction treatment a lot too, because the general population, like you might have 1.3 million people searching. How long is Eminem sober? But not a single person searching how long is Eminem sober is looking for drug and alcohol treatment. But that’s the number one keyword. You’re getting, 3,000 visitors a month from it. But it’s like, what is it doing for your business? Nothing.

It’s not even giving you brand recognition because the people that are coming to view that information, they’re not your market. They’re just not the people that, they’re looking for other reasons. So, what I usually tell my clients at first too, when we first started the strategy is I take the whole list of keywords, even if there’s 24, 000 of them we rank them based on relevance, Low quality, or Low relevancy, medium relevancy, high relevancy branded or locational. And then we put them in order of which ones we want to, and which ones we do not care about. And then maybe we’ll take that blog post and reoptimize it because it’s already getting a ton of traffic, but maybe reoptimize it for a different keyword.

Or talk about instead of, Eminem’s, how long is he sober? Maybe asking how Eminem got sober? Or how does someone get sober? And then use Eminem as an example. So, it’s changing the conversation and the work, but you’re going to see your keywords plummet, so your report’s going to be red. You’re going to see maybe a bunch of keywords come off of there, but they’re keywords that are giving you just like fluff.

Would you rather have 3, 000 people come to your site and, 30 percent of that be your client, or would you rather 3, 000 people come to your site and 0 percent be your client? And that’s the question that I start asking them and they may start to see it in a different light instead of panicking that things look red or, whatever.

And then usually by, a couple of months later, they trail back up, you’re in the green, but then you’re ranking for things for drug and alcohol treatment near me. How long is rehab? What’s the best rehab to go to? What rehab did Eminem go to? Those types of questions instead of how long is somebody sober for?

Yeah. That is how we also look at it. We also do a lot of comprehensive research. We also researched the competition. We’re landing in the top 10 to understand their subs as well, and, this is a very common practice in terms of link building as well, which I’ve seen, the one which you mentioned for keyword [00:11:00] research, the kind of traffic, a lot of traffic manipulation happening. In your case, there is a traffic of 3000, and a lot of it, let’s say 70, 80 percent of it are coming from a keyword, like for example free movies download or something like that, which is not at all, relevant.

To your client’s business, right? And if u get a link from a site such as that, or PBNs for that matter, it’s not going to make the needle move for your client. While we can say, you have X number of backlinks with so and so DADR, so and so traffic, we also need to, put our pen down, get into it, dive deep, understand what sort of traffic, where are they coming from, what keyword searches are happening, what are the SERPs and all of that, right?

I say one of the things that’s severely underrated in that is conversions. That’s what I want them to look at. I was like, look at the conversions, the cost per conversion, the cost of the traffic is your phone ringing from [00:12:00] these campaigns, which blogs people are filling out the forms on or initiating the chat because those are the clients.

Those are, that’s where you’re getting, that’s the data that matters. I don’t care how many people came and looked at your page. I do not care. I care how many people picked up the phone.

How does it bother you? That’s 10, 000 people coming onto my website and not even five calls in a day or a week.

What do I do with those 10, 000? It is just an analytics number, which is of no good. It is not going to help me keep my lights on as a business, right? And you as an agency can show me those numbers and, take your it in a, but as an agency, as not only agency as people who are being trusted.

These business owners, not only keep the lights on but also get things moving, and grow their business. There are a lot of people dependent on that particular business, their employees, and stuff like that. As experts in digital marketing or the [00:13:00] marketing domain, they have trusted us with this responsibility, and to make the conversions happen, as you mentioned, it does not matter how many people are.

Looking at your business, it is just a figure that is only going to be good if you keep the ratio moving in terms of, let’s say, 3 or 4 people out of 10 are calling me or filling up the form or getting converted, like you mentioned, otherwise, just a number, which is going to get us our retainer fee, but not going to help the client in the long run for sure.

Yeah, now we see it across all industries too. And we take over projects and then the client doesn’t have a firm understanding. They just want more, they want more traffic, they want more bustle. They want, to rank for more keywords, but they need to know what it means. So, like we start really with okay, so what’s most important about this traffic when they come to your site, what do you want them to do?

And that’s the first question we asked them. If they say, and they never just say view, never, that’s not a, there’s not a business owner on [00:14:00] this planet that will say, I just want them to look at it ever. So, you want to figure out, okay, so of call data or call traffic, if it’s a call that they’re looking for, what is the most engaged person that is ready to pick up the phone and become a customer or a patient or a client or whatever they are to that person?

And That’s really what we target, but you have to teach the business owner sometimes that’s what they’re missing or that’s what’s happened because you have ones that either got burned by a bad agency or had somebody in the house that didn’t know what they were doing and then they have this bias around it.

Oh, SEO doesn’t work for me. It does if it’s done properly, but I don’t think anybody even asks you these questions. And I get frustrated with my questions too. Like, why are you asking all these questions? I’m like because I want to give you quality. I want to give you, I’m giving you, I don’t want to guess because if I’m thinking that you want form fills but you don’t have somebody to go and pick up the phone and call these people and then they’re just filling out the form and no, nothing’s happening, then yeah, I, that’s not for you.

That’s not the right person. We want phone calls then, or we want we want something else done. We want purchases. It just depends on the industry, [00:15:00] but. I love to ask a lot of questions. Sometimes they love it. Once I start to explain why I’m asking the question, then they’re like, okay, I get it.

But it’s tedious. It’s more in-depth, but it allows us to, charge a higher ticket price and it allows our quality to be better. Like me, we have almost no turnover. I talked to agency owners a lot too. And they have, a 30 percent turnover of their clients or they have all these people that are locked into contracts but aren’t receiving value from them.

We don’t have, we don’t have, we don’t have the problem. We don’t lock people into long-term contracts. I have a 60-day out, which is different from a lot of agencies. And that’s because we stand on the value that we provide. I think our biggest problem is finding talent in the area that we live in to come and physically be in office, but we tried the remote model and it wasn’t a, it wasn’t good.

We ended up with the same problems as outsourcing overseas.

No. We also follow very stringent. Processes wherein a lot of it is about, educating your customer. It’s very difficult for an agency to say no to a client. We get a lot of clients with a huge [00:16:00] PPC budget, to fight off the competition and they do not even realize that the authority of their website is probably double what you have, right? You are starting your business and they have been there for some time now and they established this just because you have money to the extent I’ll tell you, Logan, I ask business owners, let’s say if we get it 30 calls tomorrow, what’s going to happen?

Who going to take these 30 calls in the first place? What does your operations look like? And they were like, none of my previous agency partners or whom we are evaluating right now. I’ve asked this I said, because, they are not looking at a longer run. I do not want you to be a. Five grand client for me for the next five, or six years. Only when you grow, do my ticket size for, this particular acquisition growth, right? It’s not that I’m doing any charity. I’m looking at your growth, which is directly proportional to mine. And I need to look [00:17:00] at it because. Getting ready calls till you get it.

You have the budget right now and you will look at your final conversion. You will not look at; how many calls did run my get it? What happened?

The quality of the calls. Cause that’s the thing, the quality of the calls. I’m a huge fan of call tracking. I’m a huge fan of recorded calls.

I’m a huge fan of sharing that data back and forth between the clients too, because sometimes they have a salesperson too, that’s like not doing their job. So that’s one of my favorite tricks put me on the phone. And they’ve never had, they’ve never had an agency owner do that either. I was like I’ll pretend to be your age, your agent today.

I’ll give you one hour and I’ll answer your leads as they’re coming in. And you just tell me your top three selling points. I got you. And then I closed the first one that came in. They’re like, oh, what happened?

Yeah. I was good. I was coming to that, so why didn’t I say that, while you have this budget for your agency market a person, whatever, spend this money on your operational costs as well, because if we get the phone ringing, the person wants to the phone. How is your [00:18:00] product or service being explained and what is your process after that is equally important. You got 30 form fills, you get 30, even let’s say quality calls. What happens after that is going to create my monthly, next monthly budget.

it matters even how fast they answer the forms if you leave them through the weekend, somebody did it on Friday at 5 p.m., but then they don’t get contacted until Monday. They probably contacted five other people at that time and somebody else answered the phone.

This is a very operational process, right? If any business is not as structured as, let’s say, a large-sized enterprise would be a lot of, I’m not saying that only large by. Enterprises are structured. A lot of mid-sized businesses are also very structured, but, while we sit down and do those discovery sessions, we need to understand, even if we are doing our job, what is the bottleneck, in the entire process, why is the revenue not getting converted even after us getting good quality leads [00:19:00] doing our job, no black hat, all white hat best practices.

But as a process, as their partner, not as a vendor, as a partner, we got to understand, how we. Get in revenue for them and look after the entire process and it has to go beyond our contractual obligations. Again, depends from agency to agency, their processes, and their business model at the same time

Yeah. That’s why it’s so hard to find good partners. It is. Yeah.

It is. I’m sure you’re going to get a lot of phone calls after this podcast live for sure. Great logan. It has been a brilliant conversation. But before I let you go; I’d like to play a quick rapid-fire with you.

I hope you are game for it. All right. Okay. Let’s start with an easy one. Yeah. What was your last Google search?

it was for a client’s GMB to see if it’s coming up yet.

or GPP. Sorry, we changed.

Oh, yeah.

I say GMB now and people look at me like I have six heads.

All right. Okay. Moving on. Let’s say if we were to make a movie on you, Logan, what genre would it be?

A movie on me? Probably drama and suspense.

All right. Lovely. And what did you do with your first paycheck, Logan? My first

a paycheck. Like from the agency?

Your first paycheck of, the first [00:21:00] one of your life.

Oh, of my life? I don’t even remember, honestly. But probably saved it. I was really big on saving. I have a unique background where I started school early and I was working full time when I was very young. And I ended up buying a very expensive car. That was my goal. So big on saving.

Okay, lovely. Let’s say if you were to travel back in time, what period would you love to go to?

Take me back to the caveman.

All right. Okay. And the last one, we will not grill you any further. What is the one thing you like the most about your job or let’s say your business or about this industry?

You can pick any one of them.

Okay, so I love seeing explosive growth when a client goes from being maybe like smaller size or even just them to then [00:22:00] having, a second building and people working under them or their team expansion. I have one that just opened a whole new building. Beautiful. And then also being a part of that as well as far as styling the rooms and then taking the photography and videography I have another one since January.

We’ve opened six centers. They fly me out to California to go and, take pictures of the centers and hang out with their staff there and just hearing the feedback and that one, it’s creating good jobs for people based off of work that we’ve helped contribute towards to it’s creating a value for their customers and their patients and their clients.

And we love hearing that. That’s why it feels rewarding.

Yeah. Can relate to this one. Yeah. Creating more jobs, business expansion, and all of that. It gives you a lot of satisfaction. Then just the revenue in your bank account, you feel good about what you have done.

Yeah. Great. Yeah, Logan. Thank you so much for taking out time and do this with us. And it was a lovely [00:23:00] conversation. I’m sure our audiences benefited a lot from, what they heard from you. Great tips and some tricks out there. Thank you, Logan.

Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Thanks.