Winning Results through Audience Targeting | Chris Rodriguez

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, brands, marketers, and media buyers. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Chris Rodriguez, CEO of iExcel. Chris is a 20-year marketing veteran with a passion for driving growth and tangible results for brands and entrepreneurs. He has worked with over 30 startups across all tiers of funding, generating brand awareness, web traffic, signups, downloads, and, most importantly, customers and revenue. He now runs the agency iexcel.co, a B2B SaaS-focused demand generation and marketing operations agency based out of the greater Washington, DC, area. Chris, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Chris Rodriguez: Thank you so much for having me, David. I'm excited to chat with you today. I really love what you're doing here. David McBee: Thanks. I'm excited to have you as well. Now here at Simpli.fi TV, we jump right into the question. So I'm just going to ask you, compared to its traditional counterparts, I'm talking about TV, billboard, and print, digital marketing is often very focused on measurable performance, and we'd love that about it, but I understand that you have also successfully leveraged some awareness campaigns for digital. Is that correct? Chris Rodriguez: The short answer is yes, but I'd like to qualify this a bit. So at the end of the day, I found my way into digital marketing specifically because of its tangible and measurable metrics and performance versus, with respect, brand-oriented marketers or creative or design-oriented marketers. So in the end, no matter what effort I'm putting forth, it always has to lend itself to something to measure. Now, what I've found as a bit of a specialty is the ability to target the right people. The right people can mean different things for different products, but to find that right audience and target them with advertising or target them with outbound efforts. Obviously, you want success in the form of engagement and finally a conversion, but it's actually not a negative to have simply impressed upon that person. In other words, if the right person saw your digital advertisement, social ad, display ad, cold email and they didn't engage, you've still actually created targeted awareness. There are ways to measure that in the end, but we call it the halo effect, which is to say, though we're doing digital and we're checking our metrics, we are certain that we have, at the very least, created visibility amongst the right people. So that's a way to kill birds with one stone, for lack of a better term, which is to still focus on tangible, measurable funnels and performance. But also, you know that even without any clicks, the impressions are serving the right people. David McBee: That sounds very familiar to my story, Chris. I actually was a certified Google AdWords trainer back in 2008 and did a lot of SEO and paid search for a decade or so, and then Simpli.fi came knocking on my door and asked if I wanted to join a display ad company, and I literally laughed. I was like, "What would be the point of that?" Because I do Google AdWords. That's where people click. But just like you mentioned, I've learned that the display campaigns targeting the right people at the top of the funnel actually have an impact on those lower funnel strategies like Google AdWords. Chris Rodriguez: Absolutely. Before you get into any topic, I want to react to that. David McBee: Yeah. Chris Rodriguez: So I have found some interesting use cases for display advertising. One, yes, what we're talking about, the awareness component, but I've actually had some click-worthy and conversion-worthy success with display ads, which is not usually what you would associate that medium with, and specifically to import a custom audience, let's say, into Google, such that even though technically you are going audience targeting, if you're targeting a subset of 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 people in a CSV, you are still actually doing hyper-targeted awareness even at the prospecting level. Of course, retargeting is retargeting, which is to say that's always helpful and impactful with display advertising. So when using the right creative, for example, a soft ask, a download of a white paper, something to that effect, I've actually gotten some conversion success with display ads there as well. David McBee: Yeah, I don't think there's any question. Here at Simpli.fi, that is our story. Target the right audience, and you can actually get some measurable performance. I myself actually started looking at a new pair of glasses just yesterday, and I bet you can't guess what kind of display ads I'm seeing this morning. Chris Rodriguez: Awesome. That means some people are doing the right job, so that's good. David McBee: Yeah, absolutely. Chris Rodriguez: Yeah. David McBee: All right, besides display advertising and obviously the measurable bottom-of-the-funnel stuff, what do you find to be some of your favorite digital tactics for your clients? Chris Rodriguez: Yeah, so I would say social messaging has never gotten out of style. The medium is one of the highest to engage, highest to reply, and you can actually get more meetings, in my experience, from a social DM than you can from a cold email or an ad. There are pros and cons to that channel. Of course, one of the, I guess, nuances there is that you're using your own personal profile instead of your brand's profile. So obviously, I'm speaking not as the agency iExcel when I'm socially DMing. I'm speaking as Chris Rodriguez, the CEO of iExcel, and that engenders trust. It also makes it feel like, if done correctly, you're a real person. This guy's a real person, and perhaps that can lend itself to wanting to do business with a real person instead of a bot or a big brand. So I have found that social DMs continue to be a strong suit. What used to be a heavy use case, at least for me, of Twitter DMs, now known as X, that has morphed into a complete and utter focus on LinkedIn. I am a big believer in LinkedIn. It feels obvious now to say it, but I have been fully committed to LinkedIn for 20 years, it feels like. So to see it now be the ultimate glue of all things marketing and B2B marketing is a welcome evolution for me, having been immersed in it for some time. So a big believer in LinkedIn DMs. I would also say a similar medium, but a little more taboo, SMS marketing. Similar in the sense that it's still a short message that you are mostly engaging with on your phone. However, it is very sensitive in the sense that people are very gated and protective of who they DM and what the context is, SMS rather, of their text messages. So if done correctly, you can actually get similarly very high open rates, very high reply rates, very high engagement rates through SMS marketing, but a very taboo polarizing channel. So proceed with caution. David McBee: Gotcha. All right, we're about out of time, but do you have any other advice you'd like to share with your peers in the media buy-in and agency space? Chris Rodriguez: The one thing that I'd like to say is, people often ask, whether on podcasts like this, in interviews or even in peer-to-peer conversation, what's the new tactic? What's the new channel? Because that feels like a cool or sexy question to ask every time the calendar changes over the year. My thought process is, you have to reverse engineer the human element to your digital marketing. I think about my own behavior. I open a few key social media apps. I look at my phone. I browse certain websites. That didn't change just because the calendar changed over from December to January. So what might change are the how. So the implementation of how you are to still connect with someone like me on those channels. So an example would be, I get cold email like the rest of us, I get annoyed at poorly written cold email like the rest of us. Stipulations in Google's new email rules are stating that spam limitations have never been more limited than ever before, starting February 2024. So now you have to be extra personalized or extra tangible with your asks, even though it's cold. My point is, the channel is not defunct. The channel is not to be ignored. The approach as to what you do on the channel simply has to morph and change. So for me, my stack still remains Facebook ads, Instagram ads, LinkedIn ads, where applicable, Twitter ads, TikTok ads, Google search ads, Google display ads, YouTube video ads. Perhaps the targeting and the approach changes. I'm still doing cold email outreach. I'm just getting better about my segmentation and my personalization. Personalization at scale. Almost madlibs like copywriting, that adds a bit of personal while also being broad enough. So that stuff isn't really going out of style. It's just a matter of getting better, less broad, and more targeted. David McBee: That's some very good advice. Thank you for that. Chris Rodriguez: Absolutely. My pleasure. David McBee: Chris, what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Chris Rodriguez: My company's name is iExcel. Our website is easy to remember. It's iexcel.co. Not .com, but .co. I'm also pretty active on LinkedIn, so feel free to check for me on LinkedIn, Chris Rodriguez. My LinkedIn username is chrisexcel, E-X-C-E-L, and I have a cartoon avatar. So easy to find, easy to remember. David McBee: We'll have a link to it, of course, here in the transcript. So, Chris, thank you so much for being our guest on Simpli.fi TV today. Chris Rodriguez: My absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me. Great chat. David McBee: Thank you all for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry-leading, media-buying, and workflow solutions. For more information, visit simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.