Steve Krull of BeFoundOnline: How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales

An Interview With Orlando Zayas

…Try Smart Shopping campaigns. This is relevant to the upcoming Holiday season! Let Google do the heavy lifting. You have to have your house in order and once it is, Smart Shopping will automate bids and drive sales. This way you can increase your holiday horsepower while not spinning your wheels.

Marketing a product or service today is easier than ever before in history. Using platforms like Facebook ads or Google ads, a company can market their product directly to people who perfectly fit the ideal client demographic, at a very low cost. Digital Marketing tools, Pay per Click ads, and email marketing can help a company dramatically increase sales. At the same time, many companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools often see disappointing results.

In this interview series called “How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales”, we are talking to marketers, advertisers, brand consultants, & digital marketing gurus who can share practical ideas from their experience about how to effectively leverage the power of digital marketing, PPC, & email.

As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Steve Krull.

Steve Krull is the CEO and co-founder of Be Found Online, a digital marketing agency where he and his teams have been helping businesses with online visibility for more than 10 years. When he’s not working, Steve can be found reading spy novels, rooting for the Chicago Cubs and riding his bicycle.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I’ve been a practicing digital marketer going on, wow, is it almost 20 years — yeesh. Anyhow, I spent nearly a decade of my career managing tech, sites, dev and snuck my way into managing digital. I fell in love! When I found myself liberated in 2006 following an acquisition, I decided I wanted to make my next career in digital marketing and, wouldn’t you know, following more than a decade in tech, I founded an agency!

Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?

Funny…this is where I answer from Goodfellas “Funny how…like I amuse you”. The best lessons come from the worst mistakes. When I was still in-house, we redesigned the site to make it easier for users. In doing so, we moved key content two clicks further from the top of the site. Google wasn’t happy and 60% of our traffic went away overnight. Thankfully, it was identified quickly. The key for me in this was realizing how delicate a balance there is when redesigning a site. These lessons have fueled hundreds of successful site migrations since.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

Brandon Rowe! He’s the godfather of BFO. Brandon had worked with my partner Dan in a previous life. Dan & I had begun working together, even before BFO was BFO. Dan was out late at a Cubs game, got a call from Brandon who was called in to “rescue a client”. He needed ideas by the next morning. Dan raced home, where I met him and in our caffeine and fueled frenzy, we pulled together 5 ideas. The client chose 3 of our ideas the next day and, there it was, BFO was born. FWIW, the client was a Fortune 500 retail brand — we nailed it and have succeeded for businesses small and large since!

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

It’s all about the humans. I can’t say enough about the amazing people that I get to work alongside each and every day. If you want something more practical, I’d offer process & experience, we’re always evolving and trying to be of service to our clients. Anyone can buy clicks, we want to provide exceptional service as well.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Collaboration, Transparency & Trust

• Collaboration — Early in my career I worked for several “top-down” managers who would walk in, give you a list and tell you to get to work. Once, we launched a site refresh and it blew up everything. My boss kept insisting on a course of action and was over my shoulder cursing (not at me, just in general). He wouldn’t listen as I offered solutions — maybe because I was new, but likely because he was a jerk (I found this truth a bit later). What happened, he got called in to see his boss to explain, while he was gone, I was able to fix it, using my own path and diagnosis. I’ve chosen to be a collaborative leader since that day.
• Transparency — We’re an open book company and share everything but salaries. I think it’s only fair to empower the team to see the data and numbers, with the ability to ask questions.
• Trust — No story here, just a rule — Give 100% trust on day 1! Don’t make people earn it, give it freely and then track progress/performance. If progress isn’t where it should be, diminish trust a bit. And hey, make sure you communicate that with your employee.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Yes! We’re in the process of tackling Facebook tracking issues that came about as a result of the iOS14 privacy updates. Using “Server Side Tagging” instead of cookies, we can recover quite a bit of the transaction data, giving our clients once again a view into campaign performance. This setup is so much more than point & click, we’re really enjoying the groundwork.

Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. As we mentioned in the beginning, sometimes companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools like PPC campaigns often see disappointing results. In your opinion, what are a few of the biggest mistakes companies make when they first start out with digital marketing? If you can, please share an example for each.

I’m going to answer this in two parts, part one if the user side and the other is brand.

Starting with users, the biggest mistake is thinking they can ask someone on their team to take the Google or Facebook certifications and immediately run a successful campaign. We’ve taken over countless campaigns that we’re well intentioned and horribly executed. Yes, agencies cost money but what’s the lost opportunity cost of hoping that one person can learn and do effectively and efficiently?

Brand is really brand and product. The mistake here is a lack of strategy. PPC is not a strategy, nor is Google. We define strategy as “how we’re going to win the next period”. We are often asked to launch campaigns that don’t have a clear or obvious goal. You can’t succeed if a client one week says “sell as much as you can” and the next week, they come back and say “generate as much profit as you can per sale”. While these aren’t entirely exclusive, they are competing. A good strategy will define this up front so you’re not wasting time and money trying to get to one or the other.

If you could break down a very successful digital marketing campaign into a “blueprint”, what would that blueprint look like? Please share some stories or examples of your ideas.

We use a process internally that keeps the client well informed from the start of the sales process through their engagement with us. In short: Organize, Prioritize, Plan, Execute, Report, Analyze (OPERA). This ensures we’re aligned with the customers needs and goals, have a working strategy and have put plans in place to support the goals. Every action should relate to a Pillar or Goal. If we, or the client, suggests an action that doesn’t align to goals, an alignment conversation occurs.

Let’s talk about Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) for a bit. In your opinion which PPC platform produces the best results to increase sales?

That’s a loaded question and my best answer is “It depends”. It depends what you’re selling, who you’re selling to, the price of the product and the sales cycle (lead gen vs eCom).

Can you please share 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful PPC campaign?

With respect to Paid Media you need to know your goals! It’s imperative to have an acceptable range and don’t overthink it — use Red, Yellow, Green for ease — if performance is RED, you have a ton of work to do or an issue that needs to be addressed. If it’s YELLOW, you have some work to do. If it’s GREEN, keep an eye on it and work through other tasks.

Know your audience. Google has evolved well beyond the point of keyword auctions and while there’s still an auction happening, it’s much more intelligent. Use Customer Match and Lookalikes on every platform to dial in your best prospects and folks that look like them.

This one is more of a tip — Try Smart Shopping campaigns. This is relevant to the upcoming Holiday season! Let Google do the heavy lifting. You have to have your house in order and once it is, Smart Shopping will automate bids and drive sales. This way you can increase your holiday horsepower while not spinning your wheels.

Let’s now talk about email marketing for a bit. In your opinion, what are the 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful email marketing campaign that increases sales?

1. Never send unsolicited emails! I can’t believe the number of people who still believe this works.
2. Make it about them! Even if they’ve agreed you could email them, companies fail to personalize messages. If true personalization isn’t in the cards, leverage segmentation.
3. Segmentation! Put users in groups based on their activity or interests. What product or service did they buy? What have they clicked around on or downloaded? Even small lists can be segmented effectively.

What are the other digital marketing tools that you are passionate about? If you can, can you share with our readers what they are and how to best leverage them?

Recently I’ve become impressed and intrigued the the changes LinkedIn has been making to their ad platform. It would appear they are evolving to provide coverage for all aspects of the marketing funnel. That plus the targeting available make LinkedIn a very good choice to engage with potential customers.

Here is the main question of our series. Can you please tell us the 5 things you need to create a highly successful career as a digital marketer? Can you please share a story or example for each?

I’m not sure I’ll get to 5, but I’ll try. I was going to lead with Passion but that’s not always true. While I love Digital Marketing, I am passionate about the people I work with and our clients. I wouldn’t know that if I hadn’t fallen in love with Digital many years ago. So, I’ll start by saying “more than an interest” in an area is a good start. Note, just because you’re really good at something doesn’t mean you’re passionate or you love it. Just because I was good at accounting in college, didn’t mean I wanted to be an accountant — I didn’t have enough interest. Now that you’re interested, dive in! Go whole hog, as they say, this is where you figure out if you’re passionate. If you are — awesome. If you’re not, don’t worry, it’s still a cool career and a great job, you can get passionate later (but don’t wait too long). If it turns out that you’re good at it but not passionate, you’ve proven you have the aptitude, so keep learning. So, my second would be Growth Mindset. Seek knowledge, continue growing. A quick third is be Open Minded. Maybe you thought you loved the Bid & Budget management that comes with PPC and it turns out you don’t. Keep moving forward — maybe the spreadsheets aren’t your thing but writing compelling ad copy and designing landing pages is? Or maybe you figure out you prefer building reports and the storytelling aspects? I’ll end at 4 and this one applies to desire to learn and aptitude — get some certifications! Google has plenty of free certs, Facebook Blueprint is tough but fair, HubSpot has oodle of free classes, tests and certifications. Even platforms such as Centro (Basis) and SEM Rush have certifications. Any of these can set you apart, spark your passion and at a minimum, they look pretty good on a resume.

What books, podcasts, videos or other resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?

This is tricky. I tend to follow ideas more than people or titles. For instance, I really like reading about Apple’s privacy features so I’ll open 6–8 tabs to consume different views and I’ll rabbit hole from there building my own ideas along the way. I know there are a ton of podcasts that are worthy, I just don’t personally get much from them (it’s just me, not them). I use video when I want a show & tell session — there’s nothing better than watching someone else click through to ease my pain of learning!

Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Professionally, I would like to see more Open Book Management along with Employee Ownership. We’re not there yet and I keep working, adding to my body of knowledge and know that one day, we’ll get there.

Personally, my life and world have been deeply affected first by Autism and by Cancer. What I want is for honest dialogue between sides instead of the incredible amount of finger pointing and media madness that surrounds diagnosis, treatments, vaccines and the like.

How can our readers further follow your work?

I’m trying very hard to publish more. Look for articles on LinkedIn primarily with the occasional post on our site. I am on Twitter but mostly there to follow really smart, witty, amazing and funny people who provide enrichment to my little corner of the world.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!