Ecommerce: Scaling Ecommerce Brands via Direct Response Advertising with Tyler Garner

Hey guys, we're here for episode 15 of the e-commerce opportunity, where I'm joined by Tyler. Tyler, how are you? Great man, I'm doing really well. Thanks for having me on. Yeah dude, I'm pumped for you to be here. Can you start with kind of what you're up to right now? What are you working on? So the two things, I've got a paid marketing agency, so we focus purely on Facebook advertising for e-commerce, direct-to-consumer, and a few digital product brands as well. And the other side of the business is we're now starting to build our own brands internally. You know, agency life's great, but I think when you can kind of see, you know, the opportunity there and you kind of develop the skill sets to help others go from pretty much nothing to millions of dollars, you kind of get the bug and you think, you know what, maybe we can do this too. So yeah, got two projects going on at the moment. That's awesome. And how long have you been working on the agency and what did you do prior? Oh man, that's a really good question. Agency life, I think I've been going for about, I've lost track, I think it's five years. I'd say five years. And before that, I was working in sales, so I wasn't doing anything along these lines. It was funny actually, I've grown up, I was never a person that ever grew up around, you know, being tech savvy or anything like that. It was only through working in sales, through a handful of different jobs that I've actually ended up at a company that was selling domain names and social media marketing services, basically just a full stack outsourced agency, very, very cheap products. And their main product was selling domain names and whatnot. And yeah, it eventually developed a skill set or knowledge around what I had to sell. I learned a little thing about this thing called the Facebook pixel and that you could target people based on ages. And I think coming from the sales background, I quickly kind of saw the opportunity there. I was like, wait a second, if I can, instead of trying to just call people on the phone who don't know me, but I can actually send an ad to someone and get them from a no to a yes, and it's going to cost, you know, bugger all money, I'm going to go for it. And so through my own fascination, I just started digging and digging and digging. And before I knew it, the guy that I worked with at the time, we went out, ventured into our own agency because he could do the websites, I could do the marketing. Well, I thought at that point, I thought I could do the marketing and that's what kind of forced me to learn. And then, you know, like any good partnerships, they didn't work out. So we went our separate ways. And since then, it's just been purely directly paid social clients. Nice. And what gave you the confidence? So like five years ago, when you're transitioning from sales into owning your agency, like what gave you the confidence to do it on your own? Did you have clients kind of on the side and as soon as that made you as much money, you jump ship? Or did you just be like, hey, I'm young, I've got not a lot of bills, let's do this? I was going to say it was definitely absolute naivety. Thinking it'd be easy, thinking, you know, look at all these people who need help. Strong sales backgrounds, never really struggled with sales, found it natural. So I'm like, I'm just going to cold call. I'm going to hit the phones. It's going to be sick. I'm going to live the dream. I'm going to Gary Vee the ---- out of this. I'm just going to work my ass off. And, you know, it's still here. So obviously, it ended up working, but it definitely didn't go as well as I thought. But all the great learning experience nonetheless. Yeah, that's awesome. That's hilarious. So talk to me, how did you end up learning paid social? Like, what was your process for actually learning it and mastering it? So this is really funny because most people have these stories where they found a mentor and they did all these things. I didn't do that. I think because when I first started, I started out very young and basically no money. So I can't afford a course at the moment, especially when the conversion rate between Aussie dollars and US dollars is so much. It wasn't a 997 course. It was a $1,400 course, a $1,500 course at the time. So I'm like, no, I can't afford that. There's no way. And so I just did my own digging, did my own research. I was in a lot of different groups, asked a lot of questions. And I think through... I just enjoyed the platform. I still remember when I was... Before I got into doing it myself, even at that time, I remember I would finish work. At that time, most people have to commute to work where I live anyway. So it was like an hour and a half commute. So on the commute, I'd be learning. I think I was studying marketing at the time. I did like one trimester of university. So that helped. And then when I got home, straight into a room, open up the computer, reading blog posts, reading case studies, just doing anything, I became a sponge for it. And I really enjoyed what I was learning. I was fascinated by it. I think it was through the fascination that it never felt like a chore. Studying at uni was a chore. Studying how to build a business and how to run ads and how to do all of that, that was never a chore for me. Yeah, that's awesome. I totally resonate with that. When I was doing some research on you before we hopped on, and also even hearing you say this, you kind of emphasized direct response. How do you define direct response and why is that so important? So I define direct response as getting someone from a no to a yes in the same day. And so that could be through a multitude of different ways. But for me, it's purely through being able to control a total buyer's journey in one click or in one attempt. So whether that's getting someone... I mean, I don't do any lead gen, but I would define direct response as like anyone giving you their contact information, anyone buying your product, anyone even just calling up, getting a direct action from that first day that you buy, I would define that as direct response. Cool. And obviously that's important. That's different than awareness for the obvious reasons, correct? Absolutely. Yeah. Cool, cool. So you're based in Australia. Are most of your clients in Australia? Are they in the US or they're elsewhere? Like where's your book of business? So if you ask me that about four weeks ago, I'd say 95% of it would have been, or 90% of it would have been US. And now all kind of happening around this time, we've had about two or three Australian brands actually come on board and a few other that we're talking to. So it is starting to expand a little bit. Typically, I find that, and this is the conversation I have with a lot of Australian clients when they ask how to work with other Australian brands before. A lot of the time it's, I would say no, but it's not that I don't want to, there's two reasons. Obviously economically, it makes more sense to work within a stronger currency because then our rates are essentially inflated because of that, that we take home, which is great. But second of all, there's a different level of market sophistication or there was. And when I got into this in 2016, the conversations I was having with Australian brands was actually really difficult. They didn't really believe in digital marketing, which sounds hilarious to say these days, but at the time they didn't really believe in digital marketing. They didn't think it was going to work for them. They didn't really want to do it. Any e-commerce brands that I really came across in Australia were all ideas. And I guess you would put in that category of entrepreneurs and they weren't really at that stage where we could come on and make a real impact for them. And so I found that the common kind of looking back, I found that there was a common trend that the best brands I worked with, the ones who were easiest to work with, the ones who understood this industry better were purely US based. And so I'm like, okay, that's great. I'm just going to keep pushing towards that, try and change my messaging, change my angles towards that. And I mean, when I first, very first started, I tried sticking to Legion and the funny part about, I guess, my trajectory or where my business ended up to where it is now, I never wanted to go down the route of e-commerce. And it just so happened that I kept on getting these people asking me, hey, can you run ads for e-com? And I was saying no for the most part. And then it was like a light bulb went off. I'm like, wait a second, I'm having more people inquire for me to run their ads for their e-commerce brand. Why am I not just going 100% into that industry now? And I knew enough about it by the time I was focusing more on Legion aspects. And so anyway, I've jumped ships. I've totally transformed what we were doing, meaning the whole systems and all the processes I was planning on building had to change as well. And yeah, now we're purely in the e-commerce space. And like I said, within the last two or three weeks, we've started bringing more Australian brands. It seems to be a bigger shift into the, with greater sophistication now, especially I think with everything else that's happening with iOS changes and everything else. I think that there's a lot more brands now who are seeking expert advice rather than just trying to wing it themselves because put it lightly, it's been a bit of a whirlwind lately. Yeah, no, I hear you. So in terms of working with people in the US, clients in the US, is that hard with the schedule? So right now for me, it's almost 3 p.m. in the afternoon. And I know for you, it's almost 8 a.m. Has it been hard from a time zone perspective or has that not been an issue? It's been all right. I've got one client in the UK at the moment, and that's probably the biggest struggle. Fortunately, he's a really cool guy. Our communication is pretty much just done all directly through Slack. We've had one call. I've even told him, hey, if you ever want to get on a call, just let me know and I can make the times work. But we've just got a really easy communication process. It's all just done through Slack. But as far as the US clients, our time zones are pretty flexible. So again, it's 3 o'clock in the afternoon for you, 7.45 in the morning here. I enjoy getting up early in the morning. Or 2019, I've pretty much worked until 2 a.m. most nights. But again, that's business. That's what you do. I didn't mind working late at those times. And so I just kind of structured my schedule around what made most sense for the clients. And when it's business, sometimes you just got to bite the bullet and do it. Yeah, it makes sense. And then in terms of the more kind of Australian push and kind of that book of business, it sounds like you're kind of partially attributing that to the demand and the interest of folks in Australia coming up to speed with it. And I'm sure part of it is probably your reputation, right? How much do you think is just the fact that there are so many brands in Australia that need someone versus your reputation? How do those weigh? I would say for the most part, it sounds funny to call it a personal brand, but I'd say the content that I've produced and the amount of time I've spent in this industry trying to educate others, just sharing what I know. I've really enjoyed sharing content on this topic. Again, it's something I'm passionate about. It's never really been a slog for me to have to learn this stuff. And so I enjoy sharing it too. And if I find a way that I can interpret easier, I like to relay that information to other people. And from what I found, a lot of the people, a lot of clients we are working with currently have all come in in one way or another through, I've seen your videos, I've seen your content, I saw you post this, really resonate with it. We'd love to see if we can work together at some point. And so, yeah, I'd say for the most part at this point, a lot of it's just been driven purely through organic content and just being, just persevering in this industry for as long as I have. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. In terms of content creation, you mentioned like videos and some posts, what platforms have been important for you? Like, is it Facebook, LinkedIn, this, that, and the other, like, what are your go-to platforms? So for me, I've looked into LinkedIn. I really want to make LinkedIn work, but I find given that we're in the e-commerce space, for me, I just don't find my market on there. They definitely exist, but the messaging is very different. The whole platform is very different. And obviously you need to be able to broadcast the message that's relevant to the platform as well as obviously the audience, but the audience is a lot harder to find. With Facebook, I find it a lot easier to find the relevant market. You know, pay groups, free groups, just different groups, all related to e-commerce. People are a lot more active in there. So that's been my main channel. I'm really vibing with Twitter at the moment. I know that you're heavily active on Twitter. I think it was actually through your podcast that I was like, you know what, I'm going to take Twitter a little more seriously. And it all kind of happened in really good timing. But yeah, I've been having a lot of fun on there. I've been meeting a lot of new people on Twitter as well. And you know, the platform is really cool. So although I can't say I've really capitalized on the opportunity of Twitter just yet, I'm definitely a lot more active on it. I'm really enjoying the conversations that are being had over there. I love to hear that. Keep going. Twitter is fantastic. That's so cool. We kind of talked before this about, I guess we actually talked about on this, you're doing the agency, right? I think we've talked about that a little bit. We can kind of talk about that a little bit more in the future, but I want to shift to your own internal e-comm brands. Can we talk about how long you've been working on that? And even on the team side, so how big is the agency team? Does the agency team that you run and own, they also work on internal brands? Can you just walk me through the process of that? Yeah, absolutely. So there is a much bigger vision to what I'm trying to achieve with both of these brands. So the first thing came with the agency. The agency was always, well, for most of the years anyway, recently has always been used as a platform to get into something for ourselves and to be able to build our own brands internally. And essentially the brand is the first stepping stone towards that. And the benefit I see of it is the team we're building on both sides, both support one another. And so we've got, there's about five or six of us at the moment in total. I've got a media buyer with me and my operations manager, and both of those are currently being extended across both businesses. And so we're about to hire a second media buyer and we've got two or three ladies in support. And we're currently finding a new graphic designer at the moment as well to just kind of help steer the brand direction and everything else as well. Because if there's one thing I'm not good at, it's being a creative director. It's that creative side. I'm definitely much more of that mathematical and analytical brain. So I need to bring somebody on who's kind of got that skill set so I can lean on them a lot more. But the bigger plan is to be able to use the agency team and obviously the learnings and the systems and the process we're building to be able to then build our own brands. And then from those brands that we're building, be able to share that information, those systems I've prototyped with the agency client. And then to be able to extend our services out further from there where we can offer DRO, we can offer email if we ever want to go down that route. If then we can, you know, continue extending our services there for the clients based on the systems we've built around the brands that we're building as well. And so they kind of go hand in hand together. But again, that's the bigger vision. It's the longer term plan. Takes a bit of time, but going well so far. Nice. And do you ever see a world in which like there's a hybrid? So for example, like on one end of the spectrum, you're building internal brands. On the other end of the spectrum, you're probably charging some performance or some rev share, some retainer for clients. Is there a world in which you take on clients? Do you take some skin in the game and whether doing selectivity, putting some cash in, taking some equity? Did you ever see like a hybrid being something that you're interested in? I could definitely see that occurring in the future. At the moment, the way we work is on a retainer or ad spend model, whichever is greater. And then there's kind of tiers as we go up in spend as well. But I think with the right brands, when you work together long enough, you understand the whole vision of the business. It makes a lot of sense rather than just saying, well, pay me the retainer, pay us the ad spend invoice. And that's all our services really extend to. I've never really restricted myself to that's just our service. The way I like to work with my clients, whether it's me running the ads or my media buy now, I like to be heavily involved in the full funnel aspect, meaning here's our drop-off point. Let me jump in. Let me inspect it. Let me take a look as though it's my own brand and let me help you troubleshoot this. And I take a lot of ownership in our work. And I guess because we are more performance-focused and performance-based, it's in my best interest to make sure that they perform best. Because if we can continue to scale, because we're improving performance holistically across the board, well, then as an agency, we're going to make more money as well, because that's how our retainers work. Yeah, no, absolutely. That makes sense. In terms of, I kind of talked about a little bit, but in terms of your day-to-day or week-to-week, what does that look like? And how do you split time between the agency side and the e-com side? That's a really good question, because it's a lot harder than I first anticipated. When I first started the brand, my time schedule was probably a little bit more chaotic. So I will typically, at this point now, what I'm doing, because I've realized that I'm an easily distracted person, I can't just say I'm going to do both. Everything's done through Slack, all communicational channels and stuff. And so I'm constantly improving at the moment, our workflows and our systems, looking into the agile scrum methodology and working with my operations manager. We're moving everything over to ClickUp at the moment, because everything else was a bit chaotic before. And so that's definitely starting to streamline a lot of our processes. But my time was still stretched 15 across the board. And so what I'm doing now is whatever's the highest, most important goal within the month. And so basically working within the sprint methodology in a way, whatever's the highest and most important goal within the month, whether that's on the agency or whether that's on the e-commerce brand, one kind of gets sustained while the other one gets pushed. And so what I mean, sustained, you do enough to make sure that it's surviving. But if you've got eight or 10 hours in a day, 80% of that's going to go towards the one that you're really trying to push that month. So for example, the agency has been a big push for me at the moment, working on systems, working on efficiencies, making sure the clients are looked after. Again, with the rollout of the iOS 14 changes, it was always going to be the biggest, most important business for us to really focus on and make sure that one, the clients feel comfortable that we've got it under control. And two, we needed to be on top of it because it's a major change and it was inevitable, but no one really knows what's going to happen. And so yeah, it comes down to what's most important for me within the month in order to achieve the goals. Is it going to be the agency or is it going to be the brand? And then from there we kind of work backwards and say, we achieved this goal, what do we need to do? And work backwards from there. More on like a daily aspect, I like to, every day I'll kind of before opening the laptop, checking out the phone, doing anything like that, I've got a notebook next to me where basically I'll kind of just keep an eye on whatever the monthly goal is, re-read it, re-recite it, that kind of thing to stay focused. And then pretty much anything that comes up as ideas or goals or any thoughts that might come up, I kind of just drop them down as either a to-do list or things to remind myself to be able to get through the day to help achieve toward that monthly goal. Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you. In terms of the team, I think you mentioned you have five or six folks, are they all based out of Australia? And as you look for new team members, are you hiring within Australia? Do you look kind of overseas? How do you think about hiring? So hiring, the best thing I love about this online business is that you are not restricted to your geography, which is fantastic because for me, being limited by geography would probably be quite difficult because we don't live in a capital city. And so for me, my whole team's remote. So I've got one in Japan, one in India, two or three in Philippines, and then wherever our creative director comes from is another story. I am speaking to a woman though from Australia who may fit that role. So again, we're not limited to only working within Australia or working outside of that. It really just depends on what demands are really there or who the right fit is. You can look at people for the right fit rather than what country do you live in, which I think is really, really helpful because it allows you to find the best type of talent. And then again, for the media buyer, it's going to be a little different because most of our clients are in the or because they're in, now they're starting to operate again within Australia. I think it's important. I am most likely the second person we're looking for is going to either be on the Pacific or Eastern time zone or the Australian time zone. People take a couple hours here or there. So New Zealand, Philippines, anywhere in between, it's going to be somewhere between there just because I need to be able to be with them more times than not. And when I'm starting my day, I'd like to either be able to catch up with them in a time that's realistic, not halfway through my day. Yeah, that makes sense. Random kind of interesting question. What would you say like the biggest similarities and differences are between like US consumers and Australian consumers? And part of the reason I asked is one, I'm interested in two, like, I just feel like for whatever reason, Australians are obsessed with like the Kardashians and people like that. And some of like the trends from the US kind of extend there. What are some similarities and differences between like, you know, us US folks and kind of you guys in Australia? I don't, I tell you what, I don't know if we could say that there's many similarities. Like, obviously, we're both developed countries. So we know that they're essentially an affluent country that we can go after because there are people who have the money to spend. But I find that entering both the US and the Australian market for ads, like we can have a client who's crushing in Australia, go to US have difficulties or vice versa. And the messaging has to be so different. The way that we position ourselves has to be so different. Best example I can give is even those in the digital product space in America, very pro-capitalism, very pro, you know, look at all the success I've had, look at how much money I have. In Australia, if you do that, people will shut down your ads. People, I don't know if you, are you familiar with a tall poppy syndrome? No, I'm not. What is it? Okay. You're going to love this. This is Australian culture, basically 101. So essentially, tall poppy syndrome and Australians are known for this. I had a client actually remind me of this. Tall poppy syndrome is essentially where in a field of poppies, if one grows too fast outside of a full field of poppies, it gets cut off. They cut it because they don't want it to be taller than the others. They all have to be on an equal field. And so in Australia, tall poppy syndrome is when, if someone knows that someone's actually getting ahead in life and they're getting better and they're making a big note of themselves, or they're just achieving success, it is more common in Australia that they're going to shut you down and tell you to, you know, stop getting a big head, or they're going to talk badly about you because you're something. I don't know where it comes from. Maybe it's back from the whole convict culture, but it is very well known within Australia that there's this tall poppy syndrome aspect. So it is different from, yeah, Australians to Americans. The other difference, I'd say, is Americans love to consume. I've noticed that even on customer support emails, we'll have people say, I don't get my disability check until next week. Can I order it then? And I'm like, Jesus Christ, like you are buying our stuff, like repeat customers, like lifetime values over $500, repeat customers. And these people are waiting on a disability check. And I'm like, wow, these people will spend their last cent. I've heard stories of people going to debt just to purchase, just because there's this, the American dream, as far as what I perceive it to be from what I can see, is people consider the American dream or their freedom with being able to buy and consume. And I think credit, at least when I was over in America as well, visiting, people only use credit. There's no debit cards over there. My wife and I at the time didn't have a credit card. So when we were visiting, we could almost couldn't get a rental card because we only had a debit card and they wouldn't accept it in New York. It was the weirdest experience in my life. Yeah, that's crazy. That's crazy. Nothing that I would ever think about. Man, this was so good to have you. I have one final question. So you kind of were very self-taught with digital marketing, just something that you were fascinated with. You couldn't afford courses, so you kind of just threw yourself into the mix to learn. You know, if you were to kind of tell someone today that wanted to learn Facebook ads or digital marketing, what would you tell them? Like go to YouTube, go to Twitter, like pick this course, like what are some resources that you'd recommend for someone trying to learn? You know, it's funny because I've done it without it doesn't mean that I encourage that onto others because honestly, I think I'm very stubborn. So I've refused to fail. I've refused to let something beat me. I've got a competitive nature. And so I continue to just pursue and pursue and pursue even when I was kind of punching the face a million times over. I don't know if I'd recommend that for others. Yes, you can get a lot of free education from YouTube. Yes, you can reach out to people and ask good questions. I would say join paid Facebook groups where a lot of people are willing to share those things. I wouldn't say if you're starting off that a 10 grand mastermind is the right thing for you because you're just totally on total different levels and it's not for you. But I think that, you know, as long as someone can vet and find the right person with education, that it does make sense to, you know, expedite the learning curve by buying courses. I mean, even now for me, I think I've bought maybe three courses total in my lifetime. Events are fantastic. So events are a really good one. Your course was one of the ones that I bought. I haven't been able to go through all of it yet. But again, I'm handicapped when it comes to email. So I needed to rather than at this point now, because the business is doing okay, rather than trying to learn it at this point now, I'm like, you know, courses are going to be the right next step to develop the skills I need. But yeah, so I would say if you just start now, reach out to people, ask people questions, get active in groups, you know, just become a sponge and learn as much as you can. Blogs are a fantastic way. There are some blogs out there that share more than what a course can share, just because people are great writers. They're not great on video. They're not great on any other platform other than just sharing all of their knowledge. And yeah, I'd say, you know, pay groups or different groups can be a really good platform for it as well. And that was such a great way to end it. Tyler, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for your insight and your knowledge. For someone that wants to work with you, work for you, learn more about you, whoever it might be, what's the best way for someone to get in contact with you? So at the moment, Facebook is definitely the best place to find me. Again, I'm getting more active on Twitter, so give me a follow. My follow account is a bit low at the moment, so I definitely need a few more followers there. But I promise to only share high value content on Twitter. But yeah, Facebook's definitely the best place where they can find out a bit more about me. Cool. Just searching your name on both Twitter and Facebook or what's your handle on Twitter? So my Twitter is TylerGarner underscore. You can find me on Instagram there, but that's just my personal life, so you're not going to see much. And then you've got Twitter.com slash TylerGarner underscore. And then on Facebook is TylerGarnerAU. Are you sure for Australia? Yeah, I'll drop that. Thanks, man. Appreciate you. Awesome. No worries, man. Thanks for having me. All right. Cheers. Yeah, of course. All right.