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This week’s Ivey Entrepreneur podcast features Corey Shelson, MBA '12, founder of 44 North Digital Marketing.
After serving with the Canadian Forces for nine years, Corey joined the Ivey MBA program and launched a start-up soon after. While his first foray into entrepreneurship didn’t pan out the way he hoped, the itch never left him.
In this episode, Corey talks about his journey, as well as the growing importance of marketing in an expanding digital landscape.
Listen on Apple | Sounder
The Ivey Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by Connie Clerici, QS ’08, and Closing the Gap Healthcare Group, Inc.
Transcript
You're listening to the Ivey entrepreneur podcast from the Pierre L. Morrissette Institute for Entrepreneurship at the Ivey Business School. In this series Ivey entrepreneur, and Ivey faculty member Eric Janssen will anchor the session
Eric Janssen
Corey, thanks for sitting down and having a conversation,
Corey Shelson
Eric, good to see you.
Eric Janssen
It is great to see you. So I'm here with Corey Shelson from 44, North digital marketing. I'm going to talk today about all things digital marketing relevance for startups. But I wanted to start with you, as an entrepreneur would love to know your story in Super Justin, where the name came from, but how did you get into this business?
Corey Shelson
Yeah, so bit of a odd background, actually spent the first part of my life in the army, and left the army after a tour overseas in 2010. And did my MBA Ivey. That's kind of how our paths have crossed this through the network. During Ivey really enjoyed the entrepreneurship stream, really good program and worked in a startup after Ivey, I transitioned out of it after basically burning all my cash up, right, the Ivey program, great program, but it comes with a price tag, the startup world for about a year, you burned through all your personal cash, and I had to go get a job. So I went worked in engineering company, for a couple years, learned a lot, but really didn't feel like working in an engineering company the rest of my life. And at the time, my wife was starting this fitness business. She at the time was my girlfriend, she followed me out of town, left her teaching job here in London, moved up to to bury with me, and she started this pre and postnatal fitness business. And she said, I want to start this thing. How do you think we start getting customers to come and, you know, she handled the fitness side, I handled the marketing side and basically taught myself everything from, what is a Facebook ad to how to create landing pages, how to convert traffic into, into customers, and it was really a sandbox. And I can say, when you use your own money, to market your own business, you're much you're very, very careful with your cash and how you use it. So we had to bootstrap everything. And long story short, we started bringing a lot of people into this gym that she was renting space out of she was bringing, I wouldn't say more people than the gym was, but she was bringing a lot of, you know, traffic through the front door. And then we started doing business with that gym. And then the owner of that, gym owned another company. And we started doing business with that company. And then this kind of, you know, I hate the word side hustle. But this in the evening business that I was helping my wife with, quickly turned into a full time gig. So I left the engineering job put all my eggs in one basket with 44 north, and then kept going from there.
Eric Janssen
And the name 44 north where that comes from,
Corey Shelson
it's the latitude to bury. So I didn't know a bit of play on words army guy maps latitude. I think there were a few beers involved. And I came up with the name, it used to be actually like prometrics Business Solutions, Inc. But it's really hard to sell Business Solutions, like hey, you company, I've got this, I do business solutions and like, consultant, whatever, go away. So you know, started this digital marketing business needed a brand came up with it, I'd like the number. And, yeah, that's where it came from. We moved the business from Barry down to London, when my wife got pregnant, her family's here. And here we are three years later I've got a team now in London, six staff, you know, the covers all the major skill sets you need in digital marketing company. And, it's grown to the point where we're really servicing clients across the whole spectrum of b2b and b2c and, you know, really starting to make a name for ourselves in certain industries.
Eric Janssen
There's this rise right now, these, one call it one to five employee businesses. Is the ambition to grow. Do you want this like 100? Or 1000? Person business? Or is what's the ambition with it? What do you want out of it?
Corey Shelson
Yeah, I don't think so. I mean, more people typically equals more problems, not to say that employees are problems by any means, our employees are the lifeblood of our business. But you can make a lot of money. And you can be very successful with, you know, five or six staff. There are companies here in London with 50 6070 staff that comes with certain pros and certain cons. I really like the Small Business scrappy type work. We've got a great team very dedicated people. I think what I'm more interested in is less about the number of people but this business model, how do we take what we what we're doing as an agency and start to productize certain things and be able to scale them that way? I think they're more profitable business models than just trading time for money. Right. And that's what we do right now. We trade time for money. It's great, you know, we're doing very well. But we've got a few things in the works that are less trading time for money and more, you know, productizing certain services, and, being able to push them out at a very high quality, but with much less labor. And I think that's direction that I think a lot of five or six Person businesses can take and scale but just in a different way,
Eric Janssen
How often those one or few people businesses is a maybe I'm over generalizing. But it seems like it's a consulting type business, right? Like you're, you're a person who's got some knowledge, you trade your time for money. And it seems to me that some are getting beat, you can do incredibly well doing that. But those that are getting beyond that are figuring out a way to productize parts of it. They may not always be involved in some capacity, but it's not directly trading time for money anymore.
Corey Shelson
Yeah, I think the biggest aha moment for me was, every time I used to do a sales proposal, it was custom. Right? People will come to me and say, hey, I've got this business x, y, Zed, and I need help doing this, what should what should I do, and I often found myself on the phone, trying to pitch the solution, right there. And then without having taken the time to really understand their business. And a I think it discredited me, I think it discredited our my abilities. And it didn't come off as genuine as genuine. And and now people call me and I say the exact same thing almost every single time is, I actually have no idea what we should do for you. And if I tried to tell you what we should do on this phone call, then you should not choose me as a service provider. But what I can tell you is that we have a process to figure out what you need. And basically, if you get on the bus that stop at the first stop, I'm going to take you through about eight stops. And by the time we get to stop eight or nine, we're gonna have a really good plan. And that plan is gonna be based on hard facts, data, competitive analysis. And that plan is going to then take us through the next year. And it's amazing how that's shifted the way that I sell. But it's also shifted, the way that we do business is now our projects are starting in the same spot, we can train our team, and we have developed our team to go through a standard set of processes. And our clients are getting a ton of value. And we haven't even started executing it. It's still the research and analysis and planning. But now they have a 12 month or 18 month plan based on hard facts, they know their budgets, they know where they're going to invest their money, they know why. And for a lot of people that have no idea what digital marketing is, or why they should be doing it. There's a massive amount of information that they need to understand why. And there's a huge education aspect that goes into what we do. And that initial planning research phase, and then be able to present them with a plan. They go, Ah, I see why you do SEO or I see why you're going to use ads. I see why we needed a new website. Right? A lot of companies will just pitch Yeah, we just build a new website. But why the heck would you just develop a new website, unless there's, you know, an SEO justification or conversion rate justification. And for the most part, I can't tell you that in five minutes on the phone, I need to look at what are you currently doing? What's your website being used for? What are your objectives? People will come to me and say, Hey, can you run my AdWords campaigns? Yeah, sure, we could. But I don't think it's about AdWords, I think it's about the fact you want to sell more Windows, or you want to sell more real estate or you want to sell more shoes. Okay, well, it's not maybe it's not maybe Google AdWords is the wrong place to go. Maybe we need to be focusing on some other strategy. And that initial research planning phase that we go through, that brings all of those recommendations to the surface and really allows us to say, Hey, here's what the other top window companies are doing. Here's what the other top lothing, you know, t shirt companies are doing. Here are the best practices, and here's what we can learn from them. And here's we're going to apply to you to make sure that you're competing at the same level. And people really like that. And that's the way we're taking the business.
Eric Janssen
Yeah, that's an amazing approach. Really good approach. I want to rewind a little bit. So you said people are asking, trying to figure out what is digital marketing? Let's start there. Let's start out with what is digital marketing? Why is that relevant for businesses today?
Corey Shelson
So digital marketing is the same marketing, old marketing stuff that people have been doing since the beginning of time. But we're just doing it on a computer. And instead of, using some other traditional form of marketing, like billboards, or radio or or newspaper, we are just applying the same fundamentals, to targeting people, predominantly in a browser, either on their phone, on their tablet, on their laptop, on their desktop, I don't really care about the device. It's about getting people through a browser, because that's where most people are spending their time. Today, when they're looking for a business, the days of a phone book, The days of yellow pages, and saying, I need a plumber, get the phone book, Honey, let's go to the Yellow Pages and find triple A plumbing, right, the days of yellow pages where you name your business, a plumbing, so you can be at the top of the Yellow Pages and that marketing strategy. they're by the wayside. That's called Google. Right. And, I'll throw some facts out here, but like, they say, like 90% of online experiences, start with a Google search. if you are ranking in the top three positions in Google for a very specific sets of search terms relate to your industry, you're going to generate traffic and that traffic is going to result in in business. So anybody business right now who's not investing in some digital marketing strategy, in my opinion, is putting themselves at an a massive amount of risk, because their competitors are, we're working with a company and an industry that I, I won't talk about. And they realize they've been in the industry for 45 years, they have spent no money in digital. And these new businesses run run by, let's call it quote, unquote, Millennials are popping up. And sure those their houses may not be as good or their t shirts may not be the same quality, but they're investing in digital marketing. And now they're ranking up the top of Google. And,we've got folks coming out saying, hey, like, people are going to our competitors, because they can't find us. Or because we have one review. That's two stars on Google My Business and saying, I don't even know Google My Business is, but apparently, it's important because people called us and said, Wow, do you guys know you only have one review? And it's a two star review? Yeah, but we've been doing X and Y for 45 years. Yeah, but you've got a really bad review on Google My Business. And, people who are buying homes or buying cars, these are now that 20 something year old. People who care about this stuff, they want to see you,what's your online presence look like, from a review perspective? Can we find information about you online? can I do? Can I check you out on Facebook, or Instagram or LinkedIn, and connect the dots and do that bit of we've all played in the online dating game a bit, right? You, you meet somebody online, and you do the little, you know, you check them out in a few different platforms does everything add up. And if you don't, there's a huge risk that people aren't gonna pick up the phone, and they're gonna call the guy down the road, or the company down the road, that that does look good on all those platforms. And where there's online reputation is very polished. And I think that's what it comes down tom it's all about trust. It's all about reputation. And, you know, being online, digital, you have to, as a business, have a trustworthy online reputation, which is more than just creating a five page website and launching it and hoping that that's good enough, you have to be maintaining all of your different platforms. So that when people come and look at you, and they do that was that like that sniff test? Like, let's let's look around here, what do they look like online? What do they look like socially? That it all adds up? And it all tells the same story?
Eric Janssen
So as a call it early stage company, if you're just getting going at what stage? Do you start to think about your? I'll purposely ask it this way, your digital marketing strategy? When when do you even start considering that page in the playbook?
Corey Shelson
I think you have to be doing it right away? I mean, I don't think it should be an afterthought. Sure there are many businesses that that digital marketing or inbound strategy may not be the business model, like some companies could be built based on an outbound sales model, we're gonna hire 10 sales reps, they're going to make this many calls per day, we know the conversion rate is x, y, Zed, and, and that's their model. But I'll go back to it doesn't matter what business you're in, you need to have a effective digital marketing strategy. Otherwise, you risk your competitor doing it better than you and you losing market share to them. I think, pretty much any business should be starting from here, our revenue goals, we want to do this quantity of business, whether it's project based or you know, product sales, and then working backwards through that digital marketing math to say, if we want to sell $2,000, in roofing jobs, how many quotes do we need to do? Okay, sorry, would I say $2,000? roofing jobs, let's say $2 million, and roofing jobs. And our average roofing job is 10 million or $10,000. Okay, how many quotes Do we have to give? how many leads Do we have to talk to? Okay, based on that number of leads? How many visitors Do we need to the website? And therefore, what should our plan be to get that traffic there? If companies aren't doing that, and not doing that math and working backwards from here are my revenue objectives and working back to therefore I need this many people to come to the site and working through all of the assumptions, then I think they're leaving a massive part of their marketing strategy on the table. The problem is, I think most people, I would say most people, many business owners don't even know where to start. They don't even know how to do the math, because they don't know what they don't know. It's just something that it's a little bit too, too scary. It's a I should do digital marketing. I'm not sure what I should do. So what are my options, I hire somebody, I use an agency. Some agencies are good, some are bad. And it ends up being pretty stressful for a lot of a lot of business owners, especially when they're trying to run their business.
Eric Janssen
So my question was, where do you start? You suggested the math so the math makes sense. I see probably, between all of my courses and consulting work and things I probably see upwards of a couple 100 business proposals, plans, summaries, pitches whatever a year. often overlooked is the bottom up analysis to figure out how many customers you need. So the mistake is like the market is this big, I will take x percentage in your one wrong, the math you're talking about is if we want to do 2 million in sales, we typically convert, in order to get the sale, we're gonna have to go to some, if it's a roofing company, we got to go to their house and give them a quote, we convert 20% of the quotes that we actually do in person, therefore, we need X number of, we need to complete X number of quotes at a certain average deal size in order to convert them to hit and keep working back from there. So to get the quote, you need a certain number of appointments to get the appointment, you need a certain number of online leads, that's the math that people aren't doing.
Corey Shelson
That is the math that people aren't doing. And that is the math that we do every single day. And that's how we get graded on how well we're doing as an agency or the clients that we work with. Right like to give you an idea. For some industries, let's pick industry a don't to get too specific, you know, let's say hypothetically, you're spending $10, a click to get somebody to your website through AdWords, which if you didn't know, that's literally what you could be paying, that's a lot of money, right? So to get 100 people to your site, you're spending 1000 bucks to get 1000 people to your site, you spending $10,000. $10,000 is a lot of money, like I don't personally want to go take $10,000 out of my bank account, and just give it away unless that money is gonna have an ROI. Right. So then you get those 10,000 people to your site. And now you need to convert them into either a phone call, or a get a free quote or start a free trial or, you know, request a demo, the average website is converting at about 2.35%. 2.35% is pretty low. And in most industries, if you're actually converting at 2.35%, when you look at the numbers, and you look at the cost to acquire the traffic, the conversion rate on visitor to lead, and then the conversion rate from lead to sale, you'll lose money every time. So the top performing websites are converting at 10% Plus, put to get the conversion rate of a landing page or website from 2.35%. And to get it north of 10 is a tremendous amount of work. And it's more than just a nice looking website with a fancy picture or a cool little video. There we've got a checklist of probably 100 different items that we work through. And every single item makes a small incremental improvement. But that is the digital marketing game as being able to create places to send traffic, typically, we call them landing pages, that can be your homepage, or it could be an actual product page or a service page, driving the traffic there. Analyzing the quality of the traffic, analyzing what people are doing on the page, looking at the different elements of the page be at the messaging, the functionality, the way it responds to different devices, what the target customer is doing, and then trying to draw out conclusions of, maybe if we make this small change, we could actually increase the conversion rate a bit. Right? Not no one change typically is going to double or triple your conversion rate. But small incremental changes over time can make the difference between you having a profitable online experience with digital marketing, or having you know something that's you're just blowing money out and not making money on the on the approach.
Eric Janssen
So this could be potentially overwhelming for new business owners or even I mean, experienced, wouldn't call myself a seasoned veteran. But I've done a few things. And me rolling up my own sleeves lately into the digital marketing world. I thought I knew it. I didn't know it as well as I thought I did. So until your own money's, you know, directly on the line. And you're teaching it and actually doing it yourself is different. So it can be overwhelming, right? There's a lot of things to test. There's a lot of different tools and technology. And when you start to do your homework, if they're digital marketing tools, they're good at digital marketing themselves. So now I'm getting 20 emails a day from all of these services. I'm getting bombarded online with all these tools, I don't know where to start. So marketing math, I agree with you, then what I want to avoid the overwhelm trap of this digital marketing overwhelm that I seem to be falling into.
Corey Shelson
Yeah, I mean, I think you've got to take a look at your options. So option one, learn it yourself. Option number two, hire somebody who knows how to do it. Option number three, find a company like ours to work with, that can do it for you.
Eric Janssen
So do yourself hire someone, you're like your own employee
Corey Shelson
Hire your own employee that like has the skill set that can do all of these things or then use an agency. And there's pros and cons to every option. I started off because we didn't have the cash learning it myself. But I also had a keen interest in doing it. So for me it just fit but I had to learn web design, web development, search engine optimization, pay per click advertising management, social media marketing, email, marketing, automation, data analytics and reporting. That's To learn, and I'm still not done learning. I mean, every single day, I'm watching videos, I'm listening to thought leaders in the space and seeing what people are doing. We know which social platforms have the highest organic reach. Right, right, right now LinkedIn is huge, right. And, you follow a couple influences, you can see the type of content they're producing and where they're pushing it out. LinkedIn is huge, right? You're very active on LinkedIn. And you know, we've done we've connected recently through your LinkedIn posts, you didn't pay for any of those posts, right. But I would say most people that are following you or connected with you are seeing those posts, and they're getting great organic reach. Same, if you were to have posted those exact same things on Facebook, I probably wouldn't be sitting here today, because the organic reach on Facebook is pretty much nothing. So I guess my point is learning it yourself, you have to have a keen interest, because there's a ton of stuff, you need to be exposing yourself to option number two, hire somebody, here's the challenge. Digital Marketing is not like a one trick pony. I'm a graphic designer, now I'm a digital marketer, or I can develop websites. Now I'm a digital marketer, or I can do Facebook ads. And now I'm a digital marketer. That's why it takes my whole team to service a client. So I think there are people out there that can do all of it. But most of those people are very happily employed making a lot of money. So I would say you probably want a budget in today's economy $70,000 a year plus, to get somebody who has the type of knowledge he would need, right, or divide $70,000 by 12. figure what a monthly retainer would be, and then go talk to an agency to figure out if they can provide the same quality of service, they may not spend as many hours on it, but they've got a group of experts. So in our team, we've got a designer, we've got a developer, we've got somebody that is really, really good at running Facebook ads, and Google ads, and we've got somebody that's really good at doing SEO and analytics. And we've got the strategy person and the copywriter, like all of those skill sets we have in house. And I think the challenge in hiring somebody, although it's possible, right. And there's companies that do it good life, being one of them. Good Life, fitness has a whole team doing this, but they literally need a team. And so then your third option is work with a company that you trust that aligns well with your values, culturally within your company. And I think the agencies that are like the five to 10, employees, you're still going to get the attention of the owner, right, you get to the 5060 7080 person agencies, you may not, I think there are plenty of them that are doing very well. So I'm not trying to put them down by any means. But I think the level of service you're going to get from a smaller agency like mine to a larger agency, they're going to be bang on one or the other. And I think people need to consider using both. I think, for me, my biggest lessons learned when I was doing this type of work for myself. And so it's not a bad idea for business owners to get their feet wet, try some things, you know, experiment, realize what you know, and what you don't know what you can keep in house and what you need to outsource, or what you need to partner with an agency for, for example, we work with clients, we don't need to be managing their social media accounts for them. And in fact, I'd prefer not to be right, a lot of the time social media is that in the moment type data, or in the moment content, whether it be video or a story or a post, that us as an external agency, we're not on site, and we're not able to capture that. So have your person that's in house be your social media coordinator, maybe come to us and we'll help you figure out what the type of content they should be posting what platforms they should be on, what hashtags they should be using, what tools they can use to, make their efforts a little more efficient. But do that stuff in house, use an external party for the more heavy lifting work like marketing, automation, automating repeatable tasks, creating, integrating a CRM, like customer relationship management system, to do, integration with your sales team and do the automated email follow ups, the heavy lifting on web design and development, data analytics, integration and reporting that kind of stuff, a lot of people are gonna have a hard time learning on their own. And it's easy, I think it's more suitable to hire experts to do and then keep the things in house that you can do in house comfortably. And in fact, if you do it that way, I would say your social media is gonna be better if you do it in house, because you're going to have that real time, you know, content, and it's going to be more genuine than something that's planned 30 days in advance. When we were building my wife's fitness business, small business focus on pre and postnatal, in bury, it was crazy. We're still training,
Eric Janssen
what is the business?
Corey Shelson
Yeah, so that business is called mum and Bob's health and fitness. My wife is no longer running it, she's gone back to be a teacher. And I quickly learned as I like, husband wife combo. It's super hard to be in business together, and then be friends and partners. And now parents we needed a break. And I think probably for the sake of everybody's benefit she's gone back to teaching. And it's not because the business wasn't successful. The business was very successful and you know, we I still have ideas about Maybe selling it or franchising it. But with 44 north, it's so busy, I don't really have time to focus on it. But with that business, the goal was to sell pre and postnatal fitness to women that were six months leading up to having birth, so who want to stay fit leading up to having their baby and that kind of year post having their baby, huge market pre and post you see the stroller fitness groups everywhere you see the the fitness focus classes in gyms. And we saw an opportunity to build this business. And we started running, you know, create some landing pages and running Facebook ads, and we started trialing different marketing strategies. And I mean, if I think about the number of lessons I learned in that six months or a year, creating that business, doing it on my own, and bootstrapping, any business owner that takes that level of interest in trying, they're actually gonna be much more educated when they deal with an agency, because they're going to know a little more than just saying, Hey, we have a problem. Can you fix it? For example, we we were running traffic to a site, which was free classpass. So, Facebook ads drive the traffic to a landing page, offering a free class pass, and free class passes, we were giving out, like, what's that term, like, they were just flying off the shelf. But the quality of the people showing up for the free class passes was just horrible. tire kickers wrong income demographic. they were never going to become a paying customer. So although they were very cheap leads, the quality of the lead was crap. So then we said, okay, well, let's make them pull out their credit card. And we started selling a $9, three class pass. And we started running a new campaign around that. And although that quantity of leads coming out, were much lower. Two things happened, the quality of the people who showed up, were much higher, and the conversion rate on coming out to a paid, discounted class. And that traffic converting into now somebody paying $90 a month for a program, versus the person that's coming up for free, the conversion rate was way higher. The other thing that we I learned is, I was charging $9 for a three class pass, it was only costing me about 850, to sell the $9 class pass, which means I would spend 850, make nine bucks, spend 850, or nine bucks, make nine bucks. And so the marketing spend itself was being covered by these free classes. So now I have this, and you'll you'll listen to these online gurus that talk about this, like, you know, start with $10 and scale it and you don't even need a marketing budget to start. That's all they're talking about. They're saying take $100 invest it, make money be more profitable than you were when you spent money and take the money and reinvest it. And over time your marketing budget gross. Yeah, newsflash, that's really, really hard to do. And if it was that easy, every company would be doing it. But it's tremendously hard. We just happen to crack the nut in that small business, where for the most part, we could keep investing money, and it would keep paying for itself. And essentially, it generated free leads. And that's the goal for any digital marketing business. So I learned a lot about pricing, and how to get people in the door and how to convert that traffic. I also learned a lot about analytics, and how important it is to be watching what people are physically doing. So I often give this presentation about digital marketing framework. And I talked about placement of call to actions. And I'll talk about making sure your call to action is above the fold. So on the landing page at the top when you get there, but also having your call to action throughout the page, and especially have it at the bottom. And I'll often ask, you know why? Why do you guys think we should have the call to action there? And people say, well, because people are lazy. They don't want to scroll back up that good. There's, it's obvious that knowledge is out there. Especially in a younger crowd, when I'm talking to like, you know, the 20 somethings, they've grown up on the internet, they can they understand, they may not know why they understand it, but they see it. Well, turns out about 95% of the traffic coming to our landing pages were coming by mobile. Right. So you think about these women? What are they doing? So pre and postnatal? Typically, let's look at the postnatal. So they are they've just had a baby, you know? So are they busting out their laptop and throwing it on their lap? while they're No, they're not they're carrying they're carrying their baby around? Or maybe they're breastfeeding. And so they're all on their mobile device. And it turned out a ton of our traffic. And I would say the majority of our traffic was coming in, I would call non peak hours not coming like in the after work period. No, no, that's when that's when, like dinner's being made and kids are trying to go to bed. They were coming in the middle of the night, like midnight to 4am. And we actually were seeing a massive spike in purchases coming at like 3:30am 4am. And I just couldn't wrap my head around it. This is before my wife and I had our kids. I was like, what the heck, like, Why are women buying these $9 class passes at 3:30 in the morning, and then it dawned on me. They're probably breastfeeding. Or they're probably sitting up with their kids in the middle of the night trying to console them to go back to sleep. And and they're exhausted. So they're sitting on their phone, they're scrolling Looking around on Facebook, they're seeing our ads, they're going to our landing page, they're scrolling through, they're clicking on this, countdown timer, you've got five hours left to get our $9 class pass, they'd click on it and make make the purchase. And I was like, wow, that's interesting. Like, all these purchases are coming in the middle of the night. And then I started looking deeper. And I realized we had a massive, not only were we getting a lot of purchases, but we were also losing a lot of people at the checkout. So I had to ask myself again, like, why is this happening, I had to put myself again in the customer shoes and, and the only reason I could come up with and I verified it with some people who, you know, were in the program where they were breastfeeding, they didn't have their credit card on them, where's the credit card, it's downstairs in their purse, or it's maybe it's a shared credit card that they owe husband and wife share. So they couldn't make the purchase, because they didn't have the credit card. So what did we do two step checkout process, you fill out step one, you opt in for communication via casl, Canadian anti spam legislation, you know, a statement. And if somebody didn't purchase within, I think we had it set at half an hour, if you didn't purchase, complete step two of making the purchase, within half an hour of doing step one, then we would note you in our system as saying, abandoned cart, and we would flip you an email the next morning saying, Hey, we noticed you were checking out but you didn't purchase, here's the link to purchase, you can still get the deal. And again, we saw our conversion rate go up again. So you know, as a digital marketing agency, it's crazy. The lessons that we're still applying three years later, from the stuff I was doing when I was bootstrapping, with my wife three years ago on this, pre and postnatal fitness business that we're not even running anymore. And I would say my advice to any business owner is you need to educate yourself, right and watch some YouTube videos, learn a little bit about SEO, learn a little bit about Facebook ads about web design, all this stuff is publicly available, you just go searching on YouTube, and you can find some good and obviously some bad, but I would say there's a ton of good content out there, listen to podcasts like this, and then go talk to somebody and be able to come to the table with a little bit of education. Because I think your strategy is gonna be much more powerful if you do that.
Eric Janssen
It's interesting you talk about digital marketing is the digital, it's reinforcing the same thing that you've always done, but digitally. And so when you talk about that example, that story, it's an you had to go analog, I mean, yet digitally enhanced in that you looked at the data. But then you went analog to figure out what is this data saying? Like what what activities in the real world are painting the picture in the data? So it's like, the more things change, the more they stay the same? Yes, it's digital. But like, these are real people with real behaviors that you had to dig into to get to those insights.
Corey Shelson
The difference is now we have the data at our fingertips. Like, literally, I can take a client, any client, working at the trucking company, right now we're launching a campaign, the beginning of next month, within 24 hours of launching that campaign, I'm going to have data coming feeding back to us where we can start analyzing things like how long are people spending on the site? What are they clicking on? How far are they making it through our interactive quoting form? What device? are they searching on? What locations? Are they coming from? what keywords? Are they clicking on? What keywords are they searching, you can't do that with a billboard or a newspaper ad or radios radio spot. Now don't get me wrong, I love radio. I love billboards, I think those 40 foot tractor trailer billboards on the side of the 401 are awesome. And I actually went down the route of trying to start a 40 foot trailer sign company, because I think they're so effective. But you don't get instant data coming back to you from a billboard with digital. You know, if you have all the analytics platform setup, and let's face it, I say all the I'm talking like Google Analytics, which is free. And there are a couple of other platforms that we use that we pay nine bucks a month for 12 bucks a month for these aren't like massive investments. But if you set these platforms up, and you know what to look for, it's quite easy to start deriving actionable conclusions that you can use to start, you know, optimizing your campaign. And that's what's so cool. And that's what I think is so awesome for small businesses. Because you have the you can be nimble as a small business.
Eric Janssen
If there was one resource that you recommend people whatever website to visit book to read article to read, is there one that stands out?
Corey Shelson
So really depends on what you're trying to learn. So if you want to learn about, say, marketing automation, then I would check out Active Campaign and just read, they've got a really good like blog that you can read and then check out videos of people implementing Active Campaign on YouTube. I think you YouTube universally is the best thing that's happened from an education standpoint probably ever. Right? You think back to like, Khan Academy? You ever use Khan Academy?
Eric Janssen
I haven't. No, I know about it.
Corey Shelson
I think I got through my MBA using Khan Academy. Like when I had to learn about accounting, it was a Khan Academy video. And not to say anything about I'm just not smart, very smart. So I'd have to spend a lot of extra time in the evenings, trying to reteach what probably should have come obvious to me and class. Khan Academy is great. That's YouTube free resource. So YouTube by far, I would say one of my favorite people in the world right now digital is Rand Fishkin. Rand is awesome. So if you're looking if you're looking to learn anything about SEO, Search Engine Optimization, man, is he a beauty is a from Moz? Is that Moz? Yeah. So Moz is a platform that we use for doing like competitor analysis and keyword research. And analyzing how websites doing within Google, and Rand Fishkin has this series called Whiteboard Friday, our SEO like, right here, agencies newsflash, our whole SEO strategy, by the way, is based on Whiteboard Friday. There you go. You have our secret sauce. And I would say any other person that wants to learn SEO, at Whiteboard Friday is a one a week video series that he released. He literally has a whiteboard, it is what it you know, it sounds like he has a whiteboard. He explains up one aspect to SEO, and he's got 200 videos, he went to learn SEO go watch Rand Fishkin on Whiteboard Friday, that guy's a beauty. He's a great public speaker, good looking dude, you know, and just, you know, he walks you through all of the methodologies. And I would say every single video, you can walk away and go, Hmm, interesting. I'm gonna go do that, like very actionable, not not theoretical in any way. And then I would say for Facebook ads, Google ads, there are online training programs through like Udemy. Or like 14 bucks. And mix that with some YouTube videos, you can learn anything you need to learn about Facebook ads, those would be my recommendations.
Eric Janssen
Those are good recommendations. So one last question I wanted to ask, a question I like to ask her most recent guests is how can we as a community help you as business owners? So we've heard answers, like I'm growing. And these are the types of customers that we're looking to work with. I'm working on a new segment of our business. And if anybody's got experience in it, they might be able to help you out. But I'm curious if we can help you at all with your business.
Corey Shelson
Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I mean, we're on fire right now. And it's it's great comes with its own set of challenges. So there's probably two or three things. The first thing is there's a lot of great people coming out of the MBA program and the HBA program, we need I think, to do a good job of, especially the the Ivey network is huge. And the night the Ivey network is, I would say one of the most differentiating factors for me and why I came to the program, especially being an army guy coming to the program with no network on the private side or in the business side afterwards. So I think from a network perspective, how do we connect students, with agencies or with companies that are owned or led by Ivey people? I mean, the McKinsey's, the banks, I mean, that their formal part formal part of the MBA program, whether it's through interviews, interview prep, but I would say on the small business side, on the entrepreneurship side, there isn't as much of that connection I would love the race rosters, the 44 North's, Alex van der Hoeven, great guy doing amazing things, he probably needs some IV people, maybe you guys bring him in, just not me. Just I'm just joking. But like, get, get us small business owners in and see if maybe there's an alignment with some of these students, whether it's for summer placements, whether it's for full time jobs, or even some of the consulting programs you guys are running. The other thing is, conversely, with anybody who's listening in the IB network, I mean, if you're struggling with a digital marketing problem, I mean, we're growing, looking to align ourselves with the right customers, happy to have a conversation. And I just appreciate we're doing here with the podcast and you know, bring in all of us to participate, talk a little bit about what we do, what what we know what we don't know what we think is happening, and then getting it out to the network, because I think everybody gets value.
Eric Janssen
That's great. Last one. So how can people find you if they want to contact you want to get in touch either with you could be you personally? Or maybe it's through your company website? What's the best way to reach you?
Corey Shelson
Yeah. So if you're looking for to contact us regarding digital marketing, whatever, 44 North digital marketing, just simply google us and you will find us. Alternatively, on LinkedIn, Cory kjellson, send a connection request and happy to chat and connect on there.
Eric Janssen
Awesome. This is great, I think, starting to demystify the what happens behind the curtain in in digital marketing, rooting it in real life, analog, Pete real people is a really great lesson. So, thanks for sharing is great to have you on and we will come have you back and do round two at some point.
Corey Shelson
Thanks, Eric.
Introduction/Outro
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