Dave Gulas:
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Beyond Fulfillment podcast. I'm your host, Dave Gulas, and this week my guest is the CEO of global social media Marketing, Benjamin Kepner. Welcome, Benjamin.
Benjamin Kepner:
Hi, David. Thanks for having me today.
Dave Gulas:
Yeah, thanks so much for being here. If you could, for everyone, can you tell us what global social media marketing is and how it got started?
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah, definitely. So I know that name is a mouthful. Kind of the origin of this story is that my college degrees were in international business and marketing. So I was looking for a name with those two majors and landed on global social media marketing. It really kind of started as a thought leadership kind of blog article. I started it all the way back in 2011 and I was attending different marketing conferences and speaking with thought leaders within the marketing space. Really got my start in social media marketing as social media marketing was actually just becoming a job, if you can believe that, in 2011 and went from one freelance client to the next and then eventually found myself in Denver, Colorado, where I live today. And after I was let go by an employer, I took on a bunch of freelance clients and my tax accountant at the end of the year said, hey, Benjamin, you've got something here.
Benjamin Kepner:
You're making more money with your freelance than you were all year with your full time job. So you should create an LLC and actually turn this into a business that will help you for tax benefits. And the rest is history. And the company today we focus mainly on digital marketing services and paid ads. We do a lot of Google Ads, meta ads, YouTube ads and things of those sorts. We can also offer other additional things that you might need, like email marketing, sales, funnel development, and websites.
Dave Gulas:
Okay, so you got your start in social media marketing when it first became an industry. Did you see in those early days, like the potential? Because it's crazy thinking about it. I mean, we're just over ten years later and it's grown exponentially. But did you see the potential in those early days?
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah, I definitely saw the potential because I remember when I graduated from college that most of the cmos or head of marketing for companies at that stage, because social media was so new, none of them had experience. They may at a basic level have had a profile for their personal, but they had no idea where to start on leveraging social media for their business. Early on, I was doing a lot of educational presentations on this is the channel, this is how you can leverage it. And it really started in organic, and then as time went on, all of the ad platforms were developed on the social media channels. So Facebook was the first profitable social media channel. But MySpace had already been around for a long time, and probably one of the reasons why Facebook took off. They were one of the first social platforms to really figure out advertising. Kind of went back and forth on thinking like, is this a career path? And ended up working with an influencer marketing company that got acquired.
Benjamin Kepner:
The name of the company was called Insight Pool, and they were acquired by Sizzeon. So yeah, I think after that, that kind of told me, like, wow, this company just got acquired with their tech behind social media and social media budgets. Just today they are more funding of budgets from overall marketing budgets are going to digital and social media today.
Dave Gulas:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We see that. How did you like, especially in those early days, like you said, some of these top cmos had no experience and didn't really know where to start with social. How did you develop such an expertise so early?
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah, I mean, I think the unique thing is, like, thinking about, like, kids today, right, like, that are growing up with social media and tablets and things like that. I'm of the millennial generation, so I was kind of just graduating high school when social media was becoming a thing. Like, I got my first, I had a MySpace and then Facebook going into college back in the day when you actually had to have a college email to even get a Facebook account. So I think innately, if you grow up with a certain technology, you're just going to be more comfortable with it. Whereas maybe some of those cmos, they're later in their career, they're used to doing the marketing that they were doing. So, hey, Benjamin knows more about social media because he's grown up with it, he's comfortable with it. And then that just led to me also researching their specific questions. And there was a ton of educational content, as I had mentioned, that was coming out around social media in the early two thousands.
Dave Gulas:
Okay, so you had some very early freelance success and you realized, I've got something here. So you decided to turn it into like, a full fledged agency, if you will. What was that transition like, going from just freelancer to creating an agency, hiring a team, and kind of learning how to navigate that?
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah. So the first year was really more, it was just me. So classic entrepreneurial story, right? Have an idea, hopefully go through the process of, like, registering a business. So, you know, that whole journey as an entrepreneur for me, like, I have no, like, legal background or finance background. Like, my focus was marketing and sales, so I had to learn all that stuff. And then to your point of, like, going from freelance to, like, an actual legitimate company with people that I was hiring. I didn't hire my second person, really until the second year, end of second year. And so the way I thought about trying to build a team early on is I was still pretty, pretty young.
Benjamin Kepner:
I had been out of college, I guess, what, seven years at that stage when I started my company. But I still had really good connections and I had been mentoring at the University of Georgia, where I graduated. And eventually somebody told me that they offered internship opportunities through the mentorship program and through the business school that I went to for class credit. And I said, oh, this is great. I can stay connected with my university. I can offer a social media marketing internship or a business development internship. And in return, the student would get class credit. They don't have to buy any textbooks, they don't have to take any tests, and they get real world application.
Benjamin Kepner:
And then in return for me, I was getting free labor costs legally through the university. So that was something that I learned early on as well, that when you offer internships, technically it's illegal to get a unpaid internship unless that student is getting class credit. And so I built that relationship, and that's really the early days of how I built the company. As time went on, I started to realize that I was spending a lot of time training people that were in college or that were recent graduates, and they really just didn't have the knowledge or expertise because they were going through the process that I went through when I got a marketing degree. A lot of theory, a lot of testing and concepts, but not actual, like, hard tech skills or applications of applying the knowledge that they had to actually real world clients. So as that went on, I kind of moved the model more to a contractor, independent contractor. And to this day, that model still works very well for us. We have independent contractors all over the world.
Benjamin Kepner:
And then finally, just to answer that question, I did attempt to try to have full time employees and build a benefits and health insurance and all that stuff. And that was also a whole other learning curve. And so we've kind of found a mixture now at this stage that works good for our company of having a combination of full time employees. Maybe people that are a little bit older, right? They're not, you know, in their twenties, maybe over the age of 30, with a good background or good experience. And then we still have that contractor balance so that we can have contractors that have the same opportunities that I had when I was a freelancer with flexibility and remote work and just the opportunity to get unique projects.
Dave Gulas:
Okay, so then you handle it basically by the client or by the job, whether you're going to need to pull in additional contractors or have some of your full time people work on it, just customize it to the job.
Benjamin Kepner:
Exactly, yeah. I mean, some of our clients, you know, it's not a ton of work, it's more like monitoring and setting up of campaigns, whereas other clients that are much larger, they need consistent touch points. So like weekly status calls or they might have like, you know, consistent campaign launches or if you're doing like product launches. So it really just depends on, you know, what's the scope of work for the client and, you know, what's the bandwidth that we're going to need to support that account.
Dave Gulas:
Okay. And from where you were on the early days, like you said, when you just grew the company and after launch, like how is your service offering evolved based on, you know, how social media and just marketing in general has changed over the past decade or so?
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah, that's been crazy for us. I mean, it's been so much change. I would say anybody that's in the social media space would understand that even today, how I used to post on social media ten years ago organically is completely different on how you post today. So things like hashtags didn't exist when I first started or there wasn't the ability to check into places so that you have geolocation targeting and you couldn't tag other people in the first iterations of social media. So really when I started in social media, it was really focused on organic. And then I think what ended up happening is that Facebook was really one of the early adopters of saying, okay, we have the user base for our social media network. Now we need to start figuring how we're going to make money from social media. It's great getting a bunch of likes and posts, but when you look at the bottom line for business, a business isnt really going to care about getting 1000 likes if it doesnt generate sales or revenue.
Benjamin Kepner:
I think thats where everything shifted. We really started in organic and were doing a lot of content creation and that took a lot of time. Also, you get into those conversations about branding with a brand, a business owner or the company has their unique outlook on how they want to communicate the brand. And as time went on, I started to realize that paid advertising was going to require less work and it was going to have more impact. And so one of the quotes I always tell our clients today is like, if you're not doing paid social media ads, you're really behind in where the industry is at this stage. You could still do organic content. It takes a lot of time, but the results of the impact that you're going to have from paid advertising is going to be much greater. So it's kind of that transition of like starting organic and moving to paid.
Benjamin Kepner:
And then as time went on, we expanded out to some of those other marketing services. We got really into paid search. We do a ton of Google Ads. I mean, I would say about 90% of our business today does Google Ads. And then what we also started to realize for all of our paid advertising is that, you know, most marketing agencies will focus on driving the leads or the sales or the conversions, but they kind of stop there, right? User goes to the website and then, hey, business controls from there. We started to realize that if we could control more of the lead nurturing process after we regenerate conversions or leads, that that could be additional business for us and additional services. And so that's when we started getting into sales funnels, automated email drip campaigns and things of that sort because we saw better conversion rates of the leads that we were generating. So, yeah, that's kind of a nutshell.
Benjamin Kepner:
And then last thing I would just say is we've gotten ton into data analytics in the last few years. And I think that's due to just the overall landscape of data privacy law changes and the updates to Google Analytics for in the last couple of years.
Dave Gulas:
Okay, you hit on a couple of things there. One is going to be my next question. So with so many agencies out here today, just tons of them, how do you stand out? What sets you apart from others that might look the same on paper?
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah. So I would say like a typical ad agency is, again, they're not going to focus on everything that happens after the conversion. So you think of like a typical marketing funnel, right. It's awareness, consideration and conversion. Most people are going to, once a conversion happens, that's it. We've worked very closely with small to medium sized businesses and enterprise and realized that the impact of our advertising campaigns really needs to be tied to monetary transactions from a revenue, gross profit, profit margins, things of that sort. I think that's one of the things that separates us from a lot of other marketing agencies, is that they just generate the leads and they're not actually looking at the quality of those leads. Another thing that we've really attempted to start doing in data analytics is to start to actually have identity resolution of users that come to a website.
Benjamin Kepner:
So collecting their information, this is a big thing moving forward in marketing. So first party data collection, getting their name, their email, personal identifiable information, and then creating marketing campaigns with that information also I think has kind of separated us. And then the last thing I would say is that not every marketing company can be like a full service where they can do creative and marketing and insights and advertising. So we are able to do all of those things. And then finally I would say we've really kind of taken our knowledge as a marketing agency and thought through. Not every business has the funds to pay for our services. They might want to outsource it or they might want to have internal teams. So we created a new model where we do freelance hourly consulting as well, which is not typical for a marketing agency.
Benjamin Kepner:
Most marketing agencies are going to offer a retainer option. They're going to charge you like a year contract or six month trial period or whatever that agreement of those terms is with a flat fee and then a commission of ad spend. On the other hand, for us, like if a small business doesn't have thousands and thousands of dollars, we're able to provide them an hourly rate so that we can educate them and they can build the systems and strategy in their company with themselves.
Dave Gulas:
Have you seen that work in terms of maybe someone that wasn't ready and you give them an hourly consulting just to help them grow and then eventually they're in a position where they can expand services with you?
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I would say in 1 hour you can only give somebody so much information that's going to really grow the business in 1 hour. But we have had clients that are doing like hourly consulting with us and they'll buy like a bucket of hours for the month. So they'll buy like 15 hours. They'll get on, you know, Zoom or Google Meet calls with us and we'll talk through strategy. Some of the tasks too that they're like setting up, like if we're setting up like their CRM or helping them with their sales funnel build, they might just ask us, hey Benjamin, can you guys just build this foundation for us and then we can optimize from there? And so we've seen that work really well for like marketing automation or CRM clients. So yeah, I would say the hourly consulting works, but it's not going to work if we're doing like one or 2 hours. It's going to work more if we are working with the client over a few months and we're buying a bucket of hours.
Dave Gulas:
Okay. And particularly now right in 2024 with the clients you're working at. What are some of the biggest challenges that you're seeing brands have in terms of communicating their message and just getting more conversions?
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah, I think one thing that I see that almost every client that I work with is the tracking. So they don't have proper conversion tracking in place. And that's probably just like, either they were working with another marketing company that doesn't really understand how to do that correctly, or their internal team is not familiar with how to set up proper tracking. And this is something that's really important, um, because if you're paying, for example, a lot of money in advertising and you're not able to track those conversions, it's not to say you're not getting conversions, but you're actually not going to be able to measure those things. Right. So, like, as a savvy business owner, you would be surprised how many companies that I asked the question of, what is your lifetime value? What is your cost per lead? What is your average order value? They don't know those numbers because they're not properly tracking them. So I would say that's probably one of the most common mistakes that I see within the industry. And then from a messaging perspective, I would say that one of the other things that I see very common on social media especially, is that they're kind of like, talking to the masses, they're marketing to the masses, or they're promoting their brand, and they're not actually thinking about personalization.
Benjamin Kepner:
As customers today of brands, we don't want to receive the same message that Bobby sue or Nancy Jo is going to receive because we're completely different people with different pain points and different lifestyles. So as marketers, the more that we can personalize our message and also include stories from the customer themselves, I think some of the big brands like Coca Cola and Starbucks, they do a really good job of that, where they use user generated content to tell the story of the brand instead of the marketing team pushing out all the messages.
Dave Gulas:
Okay, and what is there any certain type of industry or type of company that you specialize in?
Benjamin Kepner:
I mean, I would say we've definitely been in a number of different industries where we have expertise, so definitely travel, e commerce. We spend a lot of time in law vertical, also the insurance vertical, but we don't really have, like, I would say, an industry that we steer clear from. We've worked, I think, in over 40 industries at this stage in our seven year existence. So we welcome the opportunity. I think that's also something that kind of separates us from a lot of other marketing companies. I think most marketing companies, for good reason, focus on a few verticals, maybe five to ten at best. And they know that because they know that the industry, they're experts at it. They have maybe case studies, and that's great.
Benjamin Kepner:
We have that as well. But I think a lot of other agencies are, because they don't know what they don't know in that industry. They shy away from that. And so we don't, as long as it makes sense from a revenue generating perspective. And I think that also has given us a lot of new innovative ideas where we get into a new industry and we learn something in that new industry, and then we're able to apply maybe some new learnings to another industry that we wouldn't have been able to apply in that industry if we hadn't been in a new industry.
Dave Gulas:
Okay. And some recent phenomenons, too, I want to get into and how they've affected business and what you do. Like TikTok shop, we saw the rise in the popularity of that, the social shopping aspect. Like, how does that, like, how do you handle something like that?
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah, the shopping is interesting, right? Like, I would still say today, like, the concept of social commerce is still relatively new. I mean, we're really just talking within the last five to ten years that that's even existed. But you are seeing all of the social media platforms now move towards that model. And it makes a lot of sense. The social media platforms, when they're talking to their investors, obviously, or their shareholders, they care about users, but they also care about active monthly users, which is something you see a lot in social media statistics. So they want to keep people that are actually on the platform. They don't want them to leave. They also own that data.
Benjamin Kepner:
And so going back to that whole first party data conversation, if we're generating leads, for example, or sales on Facebook, that's great. But we're also now sharing that data with Facebook directly, whereas sending somebody to your website, you own your website, right? And you don't technically have to share that information with anybody if you're generating those sales or leads. So to answer your question about the TikTok shop, I would say all of the social media platforms are headed in that direction. But as consumers today, I don't think that the majority of the population today is still buying products or services directly in social media because that's not what they're used to in their buyer journey cycle. So I think a lot of the younger audiences today, because they're growing up with that, they're going to do that, but people such as myself that are millennials and older, I think there's kind of a balance there. Some of us are doing it and some of us are still not, because some of us just have a better preference of not buying on social media.
Dave Gulas:
Okay, and how about the rise of AI in the last year and a half? How has that impacted your business model?
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah, we weren't going to get through this podcast without mentioning AI. Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's crazy. I mean, I literally like, because I'm also like a student of marketing, right, where I'm constantly learning. I mean, every day I'm inundated with, you know, these are the AI tools and marketing. These are the AI text that need to be coming out. I think a lot of marketers, like, if you talk to any agency right now or you talk to any head of marketing, a lot of them are fearful of AI. Most of them, the majority, a lot of them are fearful for a lot of different reasons. Number one, they don't understand AI.
Benjamin Kepner:
They don't have an AI background, they don't have an AI team. And so they're struggling to catch up because they're still maintaining the marketing that they're doing for their current business. But they actually need to take time to learn AI. It's like how I just told that story about social media in dealing with CMOs back then that didn't know anything about social media. I had to take the time to educate them. So same thing is going to apply for this with AI. I see it as the next boom after social media in the marketing space, where if you're doing marketing, you're not doing marketing with AI, then you're way behind. And so last year was kind of, for us, kind of that realization of like, we were already doing some AI things from an advertising perspective, but we weren't really using a lot of AI softwares or AI tools at that stage.
Benjamin Kepner:
We actually went to a conference at the high level summit in Dallas and discovered a tool called hey Gen, which is an AI video creation tool. And that's revolutionized the way that we create videos and courses today. And that's been really cool for us. I mean, it's essentially allowed us to double or triple the amount of videos that we're able to crank out for our company and for our clients. And so that's huge, right? Less manpower, hours, more creative options that we're able to create. So I think one of the big things for AI in the marketing space right now is definitely the creative side, being able to create images and videos with AI. But I would also challenge anyone listening to this podcast that outside of those things, you really need to start thinking about every piece of the pie and marketing. Where can you use AI in email? Where can you use AI in data analytics? Where can you use AI in website development? All those things exist today.
Benjamin Kepner:
And it's not to say that AI is replacing a marketer. And I think that's where a lot of fear is in this space is like, am I going to get replaced by AI? I think at the end of the day, marketers are humans that can think through complex nuances and that AI is just another enablement tool, just as social media is for a marketer.
Dave Gulas:
So just a way to basically get maybe lower level or TD's tasks done quicker and expand your capability to just do more in terms of man plus machine, and it becomes a lot more effective.
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah, I mean, I don't think that anybody should do all their marketing in AI. That's not what I'm saying. I think you should use it for efficiency and research and where it makes sense. And I do think that it's really important to have a human component to the process of having an AI process within your marketing. Should still be some human eyeballs that are reviewing it. Cause we've all seen those horror stories online of an AI solution doing something crazy and then a company getting sued or a bad pr release or things of that sort. So we just wanna be careful at the end of the day that we use the technology in a way that there's still a human that's reviewing the solution to the output of the AI.
Dave Gulas:
Okay. And with everything that you've done and everything that you've accomplished with your company over the last decade plus, what's next for global social media marketing?
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah, I think for us, there's been a lot of focus on data. So data analytics, Google Analytics four and Google Tag manager have been a big thing for us because of all the data privacy loss. So right now, if I had to, like outside of AI, which we'll definitely talk about again, I think data in general, how do you track those conversions in today's world, with the cookies going away, all these third party trackings are going away from data privacy laws, how do you have a first party data collection strategy? And then how can you start doing data modeling, which a lot of industries or businesses are still not doing today? They're not collecting enough first party data. They're not able to do things like predictive analytics or predictive audiences and build really refined audiences for personalized messaging. So those are some of the things that are really top of mind for us as we move forward in the next couple of years. And then AI is going to be baked into our service offerings. We are going to offer AI marketing services and that's still new for us, but we're going through the process of figuring out where does that make sense and what clients feel comfortable with that. I think those are the two big things for us right now.
Benjamin Kepner:
In the next couple of years, huge focus on data analytics and data governance and data strategy. Then where can we use AI where applicable?
Dave Gulas:
Okay. And if people want to get in touch with you and learn more about the services you offer, what's the best way they can do that?
Benjamin Kepner:
Yeah. So the best way they can get in touch with us is our website. Our website is global socialmediamarketing.com. so it's just our company name. And if you are interested in our services, there is a contact us form page on our website. You can just go to the contact us and fill that out. I actually am the person that talks to anyone that's interested in working with us directly from a booked call. So if you're interested, feel free to go to our website.
Benjamin Kepner:
We'd be happy to help.
Dave Gulas:
Excellent. And we'll link all that in the show notes for everyone. All right, well, Benjamin, thank you so much for taking the time. Really enjoyed our conversation and that's all the time we have for now. We will see you next time.