Creating a Unique Identity for Ad Campaigns | Tyler Horsley

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Tyler Horsley. After a career as a US federal officer, Tyler founded Nuclear Networking in 2010, a business growth agency that utilizes AI, proven systems, and targeted advertising to enhance campaign performance, increase conversion rates, deliver fast SEO results, and automate sales processes. Tyler grew Nuclear to over $5 million in just five years, earning a top 5% ranking on the Inc. 5000 list. That's a lot of fives in a sentence. He later sold the company to a private equity group and became a partner. Additionally, he is actively involved in philanthropy, serving on boards and advising impact companies. Tyler, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Tyler Horsley: Thank you for having me. Looking forward to it. David McBee: I'm excited to have you here. So I want to jump right in with this question, which is based on something I heard you say in another podcast. So I'm totally stealing this, I just want to put that out there. But all advertising starts with the message itself, so how do you help your clients create a unique identity? Tyler Horsley: I was trying to come up with something with the number five in it just to carry this forward, but it's not working. So what we ask our clients and everybody, all listeners with clients and more out there, also kind of thinking through this lens of, if I lined you up with 10 competitors as an example in an audience of prospects, and I only gave you 10 seconds to tell me why you're better than the person next to you, what would you say? And most individuals, when we start with the why, ripping Simon Sinek off so is essentially, well, we're highly rated on Google. We score an A+ rating on the Better Business Bureau. We've been family owned for 15 years. It's like, yes, those are great secondary qualifiers, but those aren't core differentiators. Many companies have that. And so we help really get down to the DNA of why a company is great in the passion behind the founders and what they really do different before we even talk about advertising. David McBee: What are some of the questions that you ask to actually nail that down? Because I've had so many business owners say, "We have great customer service or blah, blah, blah." Tyler Horsley: Sure. So we actually have an entire two to four hour workshop for this thing. But summing some of the core questions down that people can think about is what goals are you helping your clients reach and what pain are you solving for them immediately? And then once you have those benchmarks, then you can start getting into the why or the how even, like how are you helping do that, and how is that different from the person down the street offering the same thing, et cetera, et cetera. And what we're trying to kind of craft is again, really understanding core differentiators, they may have something in their mind. I meet a lot of founders who do, and if you get to talk as you do to a lot of founders, I'm sure what they say out loud is very different than what's on their website. Their website is really basic and educational. But why is that? Well, they outsourced their company voice. They likely hired a web design firm who made it beautiful, but that passion isn't clearly conveyed in less than 10 seconds of hitting their site. So we start with that first and then we move to margins. What is the lifetime value of a customer? What are you willing to pay to get that person? If we know that they're going to close? And then we move into the real goal of this conversation, which is the objective, what is the objective that we're going to actually drive here? Not just we sell roofs, but the objective is to handhold them through. If your grandmother or a five-year-old can't understand what they're doing once they get to your site, we're doing it wrong. So it's fill this out for a free roof inspection. Do not wait for leaks to come through your house with every free roof inspection. We give you a $50 Starbucks gift card, and I'm making this up on the spot, but it's like, very clear what to do next, what I get in return. There's clear value through a loss leader that no one else is doing. Great, I'll do it. And so these are the types of thinking and methodologies that we use through this workshop. David McBee: I'll bet it wasn't easy to cram your two to four hour workshop into that two minute answer. Was it? Tyler Horsley: I missed like 80% of it, but it gives some of it. David McBee: All right, well let's skip ahead to kind of a different topic, which is once you've figured all that out, what do you feel are the best digital channels for the advertiser to share their story? Tyler Horsley: Yes. I want to provide a little bit more context around this answer too, because I can name platforms and I certainly will in just a moment. But what we do with that information is we create hyper controlled environments. We live in a easily distracted society. And so what we don't do is all these channels I'm going to recommend in a moment, we're not driving traffic to just a generic website. Back to objective, we got to keep people really focused. We're driving them to one objective, one task, one outcome. And so what we would do is create hyper controlled environments, whether that be a landing page, a funnel, and more. And then we try to automate that backend to better serve and manicure the client. Because what we also learned, other agency owners will get this as well, most clients just request traffic. But what you don't ask them is do you actually have a sales funnel on the backend to like, are you calling your clients back? Are you emailing them? Are you manicuring them? 50% don't. And of course as advertisers we're like, who gets blamed? You can stab me, everybody out there who doesn't like this message, but agency owners are like, yes. Who gets blamed? Marketers. And it's actually like, well, you have 10 things that make a campaign successful and we fill the gap in for three of those. But if you don't have a backend way to close your clients, you don't have a CRM, you don't have these things like that's going to fall apart. And that's not actually something that most marketing companies provide. So channels that we love, especially if it's funnels and these objective driven campaigns direct to consumer advertising primarily. So I'm actually just for the record, so you know I'm not biased, huge SEO fan. Just on a personal basis. We've developed a lot of AI around that. We do rank people quickly, thanks for saying that. But it's like direct to consumer, highly targeted advertising, paid ads, standard platforms obviously Facebook, Instagram and more. But leveraging newer technology around like OTT, over-the-top for people who need to know that that's your video streaming services and more. And you can get really granular in geofence with those as well. So those are the platforms that we see the quickest success on. David McBee: Let's talk a little bit about the targeting of those ads. Everybody's connecting data and targeting audience segments. I know that personally, I see a lot of ads for the outdoors and health and fitness and I rarely see a shampoo ad unless I'm watching broadcast television. So how important do you think targeting is to making those ads effective? Tyler Horsley: Highly important. And if you are a user out there and you're getting targeted for shampoo and you have no use, if you don't have hair, you would clear your cash because you clicked on something you shouldn't have. And people are following you around forever. I think it's highly targeted, right? That's why we do this entire workshop and this subjective driven campaign thinking to begin with. We don't need more shotgun marketing approaches. It's a quick way to waste a lot of money. If you don't have a solid message for a specific audience in mind, like I want to serve people that live in this area that happened to love pizza, love the Denver Nuggets and hate BMWs for some reason. It's like the more specific and the more niche down that you can get, I can just speak from an SEO perspective, the quicker you will actually gain success online because you have niche expertise in a specific vertical instead of generally the master of all. The same is even more true with advertising. And again, it's the most efficient way to spend your money because you know, statistically the people that are looking at your ads campaigns are the most qualified, right out of the gate instead of just winging it and guessing it. Like a traditional TV commercial, somebody's eight year old kid just watched that commercial and you just paid for that impression. And it's like that wasn't a good use of funds. So yeah. David McBee: It's been the swan song of digital to say, we don't waste your ads. We put them in front of the right people. Tyler Horsley: Yep. David McBee: So final question. Thank you so much, this has been amazing and I can't believe it's already been nine minutes. Do you have a favorite podcast or a book that you feel has helped you become successful? Tyler Horsley: I would say, and it's simple, but it's what we call like a no dub book, one of the books that I've enjoyed the most. That's just helped me because I need regimen and I need rhythm in my life. If I just highly motivated, I've got that part of my brain broken that's most entrepreneurs do to just go, go, go and try to achieve all the time. But Atomic Habits is a book that I like. Again, for the average entrepreneur, I highly recommend reading it. You'll go, wow, that makes sense. But for me, that's important. So I get up every morning at a specific time and work workout every morning, but while I work out, I'm also listening to podcasts or audio books. And then when I'm on the cycle, I'm reading and I just do the same thing every day, every day, every day. And habit stacking is one of the methods there that just helps optimize time. And so yeah, that would be my recommendation. David McBee: Thanks so much for being on Simpli.fi TV. This has been great. Tyler Horsley: Thanks for having me. 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.