Data-Driven Advertising Tactics | Frank Neill

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I am David McBee. Our guest today is Frank Neill. Frank is the founder of FN Digital Marketing, a hands-on digital marketing consultancy built to drive real results. After years in the digital agency space, Frank sought to establish a firm that can be nimble, flexible, and cut through the noise to deliver straightforward, effective solutions for clients to win with social media and digital. Residing just outside of Philadelphia, PA, Frank is a husband and father of three who also spends time playing in a metal band and is continually fascinated by how technology and innovation can be used to make real connections with real people. Frank, thanks for being on Simpli.fi TV. Frank Neill: Thanks, David. Yeah, happy to be here. David McBee: So I want to cut right to the thing that I think inspires you. Having done a little bit of research on you and having talked to you just real briefly before we started recording, it seems like taking action or getting a customer to take action is your thing. Could you dive into that for me? Frank Neill: Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of that stems from where I started right out of school, which was more than a couple years ago. I jumped right into the radio business. I was in the radio and broadcasting business for a long time, on the marketing side, on the sales side, on the management side. The thing I loved about it was at the time, and this was pre-internet, there was such a time. It was, in my view, the closest connection between a media medium and a consumer. You could really move people to action. You could really make meaningful connections with people moreso than you could from a billboard or from a print ad. And so, that's where I started as a marketer and that's the thing that has stuck with me, even as the tools have changed and the medium has certainly changed, and the internet obviously revolutionized and changed everything, goes without saying. But at the end of it there's still people on the other side of a message that brands or organizations are trying to get them to think something or do something or feel something. With all the noise, and all of the tools, and the tools are great. Meta Ads Manager is terrific, it does amazing things. Google's ad platform is phenomenal in terms of the data and what you're able to do with all these tools but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that we're still trying to get people to do things and feel things. Maybe that sounds a little too mad men, maybe that sounds a little too old fashioned, but it shouldn't because at the end of the day that's still what it is, it's still moving people to action. And so, that mindset carried me through my whole career and hopefully will until the end of it, and so even though I consider myself a digital marketer that's still the name of the game. David McBee: So in the digital space you've got the most mundane Google search engine marketing ad, which is just text, and then you've got display ads 250 by 250. Now you've got audio ads that can be playing on Spotify and in podcasts like this, and then streaming television so with those in mind ... Also, there's all sorts of levels of social media, of course but, with those in mind, what do you think is the best medium for storytelling? Frank Neill: Boy, it'd be tough to pick just one. Even a simple Google search ad, text only ad can tell a story done the right way. Just like that, you still have to think about what's the person on the other end of that keyboard thinking right now? What do they want? What are they seeking? What's going to move them? That mechanism is less creative, one could say, there's certainly no design to it. It forces you to have to be more creative in what you are writing, and what your ad should say, and how it should function, and what your ad extension should be so creativity comes in all forms, from the most sophisticated video asset carousel ad layout. We certainly as marketers probably all geek out at really cool looking design and creative and use of space and everything. It's terrific, I love it, but a few well thought out, well-placed words can be creative in their own right, again, if you're thinking of it from the psychology of what's this person want? David McBee: So how do you figure that out? How do you figure out what does my client want and how can I get them to take action? Frank Neill: You put yourself in the mindset of others as much as you can. I've had the benefit of representing a lot of different types of clients, whether it was in my old life as a broadcast medium person, now with social media. I've written copy, organic paid for pet brands for a cat product, and I don't own a cat. I'm highly allergic to cats but yet I had to think about what does this target person want and what is she primarily going to respond to? I've worked for skincare brands. The same. They weren't targeting me, or self-tanning products. I wasn't the target there but I have to think like that. How do I get into the mindset of that end consumer? None of this sounds particularly digital because we think a lot in terms of tools and in terms of data and I'm not minimizing that, I use the data just as much as anybody, but it does start with psychology. David McBee: So let's say you've gotten a good grasp on that. Talk to me about data. How do you leverage data to take that to the next level? Frank Neill: Yeah. Well then, yeah, you use the data to validate some of those hypotheses first, and if you've done your homework, you've done your research, you've done your audit, you have a pretty good sense beyond just what you think and infer about a particular audience. Now you can prove that out through research and through existing data. That's step one. Then, once you've done that, what data gives you the ability to do is to start small test and measure, A, B test the heck out of it and then you don't have to just make assumptions. Again, I'm going to go back to those radio days for a second. You had one 30 second commercial that you wrote and you hoped it did really well. You'd run that for days, weeks, months, whatever, and use sales data and conversion data as best as you had it to prove it out. Well, now those sellers and you and I and all kinds of digital marketers, we don't have to wait that long. We can dynamic copy variations, for example. I was just doing that for a client with a meta ads manager. You launch those, you let the algorithm help you out, and you just watch, and learn, and observe, and optimize, and the data that comes back is so powerful, so useful in terms of how you slice and dice that segment. Again, it all starts with being a smart marketer, knowing how to approach it and what some best practices are, but then the data really reinforces it. Before you spend a dollar, you should have a pretty good sense of what that consumer looks like, what the segment looks like, what the KPIs are and should be. That's a whole other topic that we probably don't have time to get into which is, are you even measuring the right thing? When you can measure everything, how do you pick what's the most important thing? A lot of that just comes down to doing it for a long time and making some mistakes, learning from them and getting better the next time. David McBee: All right. Well, this has been fantastic but before we go I want to ask you, do you have a mentor or a favorite podcast or a book that you feel has been instrumental in your success? Frank Neill: My go-to podcast used to be Seth Godin, and I still love Seth, it's not a knock on him, but two people have risen to the top in the past couple years, neither of which are probably strangers to folks that are listening. But Malcolm Gladwell is an obvious one, and Rick Rubin, he's one that you may not think of him in a business context first and foremost. He's known primarily as a music producer but he's just such a creative mind and a brilliant mind. He does a lot of thought leadership around what is creativity and how to be more inspired and how to build things and create things that go well beyond music. He's mostly known as a music producer but his reach goes way beyond that. I've been really gravitating towards him lately. The other one would be one of my favorite books. One of my go-to books that I continually tap back into is Phil Jackson, who was the coach of the Chicago Bulls and the LA Lakers for a long time, and he wrote a book called Sacred Hoops. It's a nice alchemy combination of basketball, if you're a sports fan, Buddhism, spirituality, and leadership all rolled into one so if your personal life touches on any of those things, there's definitely something in it for you. David McBee: Well, thank you so much for being my guest today. I really appreciate your time. Frank Neill: No, this was great, David, hope we can do it again. Appreciate it. David McBee: And thank you guys 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.