Accelerate Business Growth: Expert Digital Strategies w/ RJ Huebert

I would suggest building up your remarketing audience, even though maybe not have that advertising budget just yet, start placing the Google ads pixel on your site, LinkedIn insight tag, put that meta pixel on your site just so it's like collecting those audiences of people who visit a certain page of your site or visit any page of your site so that when you're ready to flip on the ads, you can do remarketing because I think remarketing is going to be a better way than just like a cold ad to a cold audience that may have the interest that you're interested in. They don't know who you are. So get that remarketing tag in, start tracking. Welcome to super entrepreneurs podcast. I'm your host Shahid Durrani. Today we have with us RJ Huber. He launched his T digital consulting back in 2019 has been seeing some amazing growth and I'm very excited to talk to him today about it. He's graduated from the university of Pittsburgh with a bachelor's degree in communications and earned his master's degree in strategic communication management. Welcome to our show RJ. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm super glad to be here. It's my pleasure. My pleasure. So the main question that I have for you is what was your main focus to grow your company so rapidly in such a competitive space? Because as everybody wants to get into digital marketing, because it's lucrative, you're helping people, especially businesses that need help. But there's so many companies out there. You took a shine in all that noise. So I'm very curious to learn about that. That's a great question. And there, it seems like everybody has a digital marketing agency. I've been doing online marketing for like close to 15 years now. So I think that's one of the reasons why companies choose to work with me is like the expertise and quote unquote doing it. I've been doing it so long that I'm able to provide insights and strategic decisions to help them grow their companies. Are you running ads for your own company as well? I take it. Oh yeah, definitely. So I would say 95% of my business is networking and referrals. So I've been in Chambers of Commerce, AMA Pittsburgh. I've been shaking hands and kissing babies for years. And I always prioritize my network and friends. And it wasn't always like pushing the business, right? It was like getting to know the person. And who are they? What are they into? And then developing a relationship and then organically telling them what I do and how I can maybe help them. And that's how it's grown. But yes, I am also running ads for myself too. So how do you help someone, obviously it's competitive depending on the industry that your client is in, but how do you go about starting the campaign? Obviously you're going to do some research, but can you run down what exactly you do with a customer? Yeah, it's really, it's a process that we run at HPT Digital. So like we kick off a discovery call. So I want to know everything about your business, what you've tried. And Shahid, what I love is like thinking about marketing offers. How can I help the organization develop a strong marketing offer and a call to action so that when people see the targeted ads, they want to respond. They want to contact the business, but that's something that we specialize in. So can you share some of the steps you take to find that gold offer? Yeah, so it really starts with asking historical questions. What have you seen work with your audience? I run HVAC campaigns for Chapman and they're in Missouri. We have spring specials for air conditioning tune-ups and the winter there's special deals for heating campaigns. And then technology is a strong suit of HPT Digital. So we're running like ads on LinkedIn for like document ads, download this ad, I'm sorry, download this PDF. We're running remarketing campaigns on Facebook with like lead gen forms that pop up on the newsfeed. I've seen that work really well too. So it really just, the process is finding out what their goals are, coming up with a strategy based on their budget, launching the campaigns, and then finally like reviewing the performance and then kind of optimizing for the next go round. So that could be introducing new creative, looking for new audiences, testing new offers, or even landing page review. That's something that we specialize in too. Landing page review. Can you elaborate? Yeah. I love, I personally love lead pages. I use it all the time. It's a quick and simple one pager plug and play. We are not like a, we're not a design term by any means. Like we just focus on lead gen and online advertising, but yeah, lead pages. We find an awesome template that we think will work. We customize it and then we launch it and then we'll AB test against another landing page and see what drives the most engagement and results. Review page, what it means is it's the lead magnet. Yeah. So we do lead magnets. Absolutely. Guides work really well. The five step guide, I recently launched the 10 reasons why your online ad campaigns are failing because sometimes I do audits for prospects and I get into their Google ads account and campaigns are set up wrong. They don't have the right keywords. They don't have the right audiences. They don't, the ads don't utilize all the headlines and descriptions. And so it's just being able to think about all those things and then translating it for what the client needs. And then ultimately boom launch. That's my favorite part. Is there a specific strategy that you see as being your best one for 2024? Yeah. What's really killing it is Google ads for HVAC. So when you're eating system fails, when your furnace goes down, when you're starting to think about putting in an air conditioning unit for the summer months, also when you need a plumber, right? I got a leaky pipe, something's going down. Something in my house is like disasters. HVAC campaigns like search ads on Google ads is killing it right now. High intent industries have always been good on Google. That's right. But there's more competition now. What we're seeing is higher cost per click, you know, higher cost per conversion because there's just more competition in there now, which is fine, but it's a good place to play. But I think companies need to be aware. That's part of the research phase when you're talking to clients and going through the discovery process is like letting them know what we're seeing with our clients doing keyword research in their particular DMA or their target area and coming up with a great plan for their budget. A lot of companies don't have unlimited budget. The clients that we work with are spending anywhere from five to 20 K a month. So that's where we play. So I guess the budget needs to be higher now as well with the competition. Yeah, exactly. So if they, we determine what kind of lead volume do you want? What is your internal conversion rate? Once that lead comes to you, how quickly can you flip that into a sale and what percentage rate are you doing that at? It's just taking those all into consideration. Also asking the question like, Hey, do you have a dedicated sales team? I can drive you leads all day. But how quickly are you responding? How are you responding? Is it email? Are you calling? Are you picking up the phone? Are you texting? And it's just having those meaningful conversations. Do you do any paid ads for yourself? No, not right now. I have in the past, but my Facebook got banned a while back and I called them. I had other experts call them and they said, no, I had a freelancer. I guess a lot of policies were broken. And that can happen. If URLs change, if the ad companies think, I see this on Google ads, like circumventing, like you start saying one thing in the ad with a copy, the image, and then maybe the destination has something totally different than what you're advertising or the URLs don't match. So yeah, it was carelessness a hundred percent, but definitely I think ads is the fastest and the best way to generate business instead of going organic and anything else. Everything else is just really way too slow. Ads is definitely the way to go in terms of you turn on the faucet, right? And it immediately starts coming. But I think you need to work your network and referrals. I think that's step number one. See if there's that low hanging fruit. Just be asking questions. Hey, what are you doing now? What are you focusing on? What are your challenges and are you looking to grow? That's a big part of my question. Number four, are you looking to grow? Are you ready to invest in growing? Because most companies will say, yeah, I want to grow, but then they don't have the budget. They don't want to invest in acquiring new customers. So you go locally within, in your network to see if you can get business, especially for the newer businesses, you go to your phone, you check your address book and your network on LinkedIn and et cetera. But obviously you're catering to, to establish businesses, which is great. Can you share with us any steps that type of entrepreneur could take? You shared one to network, but something else that you could share for an entrepreneur that can get the ball rolling, speaking to leads without doing ads initially. So I would suggest building up your remarketing audience. So get into, even if you maybe not have that advertising budget just yet, start placing the Google ads pixel on your site, LinkedIn insight tag, put that meta pixel on your site, just so it's like collecting those audiences of people who visit a certain page of your site or visit any page of your site so that when you're ready to flip on the ads, you can do remarketing because I think remarketing is going to be a better way than just like a cold ad to a cold audience that may have the interest that you're interested in. They don't know who you are. So get that remarketing tag in, start tracking. Are people watching your videos on meta with the pixel? You can track if they watch a portion of your video, three seconds as a group play, just start really understanding. Are they interacting with your meta page and your Instagram page, liking, commenting, sharing, and then just start thinking about remarketing ads to those people. Do you have any experience or knowledge about influencer marketing and how it would compare to what you do? We don't really play in the influencer space. That's something that is not one of our highest capacities. I heard it's a good Avenue, especially for established businesses. I just, you need to be careful with the influencer just because they have a large following doesn't mean it's right for the product or service that you want them to promote. So my thing is just do your due diligence and your research. Make sure it's like a good fit. But yeah, I think that's something I would like to try when I do events because networking and referrals plays such a big part of what I do in bringing new leads to my business. I like to put on events and I have an upcoming one with a business in Pittsburgh. They do videography and we do lead gen and online ads. And so it's a very complimentary event that we put on to bring people into our network. And that is a little bit of influencer marketing in that I'm tapping into their network, their established businesses. And it's not necessarily a person with a hundred thousand followers, but they have a solid fan base and dedicated people that interact with them. And then they promote HPT digital. I promote studio me and it's a win scenario. Yeah. It's like a strategic partnership, right? Those work really well. That it's been so meaningful. Like I do that a lot in terms of the small business development center here in Pittsburgh at the Duquesne university. Like they are a huge partner. I do events for them. I help in their, they do competitions for small businesses. I help judge some of those. And I think just getting the backing, it's almost like SEO and domain rating, right? When a domain posts your link on their site, they're giving you the pattern in the back, okay, we trust this person. They're verified. We're connecting the dots. The small business development center does that too. And do you do the strategic alliances online or in person events? Both ever since COVID let out, like I am a big proponent of the in-person stuff. Love like interacting in person. I love just wearing your, uh, whatever you want in your house, but it's fun to get out there and drink some beers with people, eat some food, just no, it's definitely, yeah, it's definitely another layer of relationship building when you're in person, because you get to read each other's vibrations more closely than you would online. So that's wonderful. If you ever need a mindset person, let me know. I would love to join in on those strategic alliances, helping businesses grow with mindset. And it worked with me as well. I've done a few strategic alliances events. They were amazing because as long as everybody's in on it, as long as everybody is excited to grow or promote and to work that event. Can I ask you a question? Have you tried a LinkedIn event, audio or like a webinar, like a live event? No, no. So I tried one and it actual attendees was small for my first one. I think I had seven to 10 people when they joined their networks, find out about the event, what's happening. And they see your name, your brand, what you're talking about. So that might be an interesting Avenue to pursue. If you ever wanted to jump on like a LinkedIn live event, let's, we could do one together. You talk about the top three things, top of mind. I'll come with some info and we'll provide value to our network. That's a great idea. RJ. Just writing this down. So I don't. All right. And if you want something great, great. I was going to say, if you want to talk mindset or if you want to talk business or whatever. Yeah. We can figure that out. We can meet and set up an event, what the actual topics will be about. And obviously they're short, probably going to be under an hour anyways. Oh yeah. Yeah. I think 40 minutes would be like a sweet spot to it during lunch. So could you share with us what you feel your innermost superpower is that got you to this point in life? Going for it. I don't let it let, I don't sit back and let things come to me. Like I go after what I want. Okay. So you're persistent as well. Persistent. Yeah, absolutely. Like I'm about to celebrate year five for my business or a small business. And it took going after my first client, that first job, that first web design project, and wanted more out of life. And I'm going to get it. Yeah, it was good. I, the reason why I wanted you to come on, because the fact that you have done some growth in a short period. And I know a lot of people pivoted during COVID and I'm just hoping that this could add some value in someone's life. This conversations. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. No, that's great. Man Ray RJ was great having you on the show. It was a great conversation. I'm wishing you all the best. Definitely. We'll keep in touch. That'd be great. I would love to. Thanks for the opportunity. My pleasure.