How to Drive Epic Digital Marketing Campaigns

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Chris.

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He is a digital marketing guru.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thanks, Eric.

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Thanks for having me.

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So, before we jump into your story about some of the best marketing you've done, why don't you take a minute or two and tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are and what you do?

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do Absolutely.

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Yeah, my name is Chris Rodriguez.

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I run a company called IXL and I've been doing digital marketing for two and a half decades.

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I guess the first chapter was doing entertainment digital marketing during the days of MySpace, when MailChimp was barely a thing.

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That phase I cut my teeth in the guerrilla marketing but digital side and I realized my passion was more for the process and the craft of digital marketing than it was the actual, let's say, people or clients I was marketing and so I therefore pivoted into tech startup marketing and I've been doing tech startup marketing for the last 14 years.

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And after a stint in New York City tech I'm a native New Yorker I then relocated to Washington DC, virginia DMV area, and I've been in DC tech, virginia tech for the last nine years.

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Awesome, great track record.

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So, with all those many years of great digital marketing experience, tell us a story about some of the marketing you've done that you're most proud of.

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I was able to work on a Kevin Durant advertising campaign and I should say spent more money on an advertising campaign in four weeks than probably the total of the rest of my career combined, and I'm proud to say that campaign was the highest performing still to this day in NBA Top Shots history.

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Glad to see that me getting my hands dirty with proper targeting across Facebook ads, twitter ads, et cetera.

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Glad to see I still know what I'm doing.

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So, yeah, one of my favorite stories to tell that's awesome because you're passionate about sports and clearly, people who are watching these ads the fans are also really passionate about it.

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So if there's passion on both sides, that's probably what drives the great results right.

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Exactly, Exactly.

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So what was the impact of that campaign?

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Was it helpful to their goals?

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Yeah, I'd like to think so.

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The core KPI there is sales of a digital product and so, by driving rabid fans directly to a landing page that represents the exact player or team that they were fans of, there were high click-through rates, high conversion rates, as you might expect, and yeah, as I noted, it was one of the better performing campaigns for that company.

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I will say the results were in the seven figures, which is humbling to share.

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Driving millions of transactions through advertising and email is definitely something that I look forward to the next opportunity to do some similar damage.

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That's great.

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And what was the hardest thing about it?

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The hardest thing about it half the battle when you are in an earlier stage company it's probably the majority of the battle, which is to say we recommend X, let us do our thing, we will stand by our results, good or bad.

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But when you get into larger orgs, there's technical debt, there's many stakeholders, there's history, there's strong opinions and as much as that has less to do with digital.

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You have to actually have the awareness and acumen to understand how to explain your recommendations, how to explain, let's say, messy data, attribution, flaws, things of that nature, resource allocation, budget modeling, and so a lot of that stuff is where you level up as a I'll say as a professional digital marketer.

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So that's always one of the challenges when you get into a large org, but I'll say that org was particularly large.

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Yeah, lots of variables and issues to work there.

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So that's great that you're able to get that sort of result and the other challenges you were mentioning.

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But sometimes they do have other challenges, including maybe they don't have as many resources or as big of a budget, right?

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Correct, that's exactly right.

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So you pick your poison, for lack of a better term, and what I will say is I personally and, by extension, my agency, ixcel we represent a tremendous passion for the craft.

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We love funnels.

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My email marketers love the concept of email hyper-segmentation and smart lists and workflows right.

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My advertisers love the concept of hyper-targeted audiences, and so all of that is to say you really get the opportunity to flex those muscles, without maybe some of the political ramifications that I mentioned before in smaller companies.

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But to your point, eric, budget constraints are obviously very much a real thing.

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So we tend to try to find, for lack of a better term, the sweet spot where a company is, I'll say, still a startup, still establishing itself, but they most likely have hit some milestones.

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Whether that's fundraising or whether that's product market fit, that's usually a place that we like to shine.

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Yeah, I think when you're doing marketing for startups, is it that you really have to be more guerrilla?

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You have to figure out how to punch above your weight, if you will to some extent, to make the resources they have go further.

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Yes, but I would also say that prioritization and transparency and communication can often guide you in the right direction matter any other variables?

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So everybody wants a thousand things done tomorrow, but if you can agree, through transparency and communication, on the correct 10 or 15 things to do, then you've set proper expectations and you set yourself up for success and your clients are understanding what they are to expect upon the next chat or the next week's meeting.

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So that's where it graduates from digital marketer to digital marketing consultant or even greater, digital marketing agency.

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Makes sense.

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So thank you for your insights there and appreciate you being on the show today.

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I will link to your website in the show notes so if people want to hear more about the great things you're doing, they can feel free to connect with you there, and we appreciate you being on the show today.