Episode 46 – Optimizing Your Business's Growth Through Digital Marketing With James Hilton

Optimizing Your Business’s Growth Through Digital Marketing With James Hilton

Once again, I’m bringing you a wonderful guest. His name is Mr. James Hilton. He has a company called M&C Saatchi Performance. He is the real deal when it comes to building out mobile and digital marketing and understanding how the world has changed and sales are changing. It’s not even a should anymore. It’s a must to embrace mobile marketing. Over 56% of the people first go into their mobile phones to check things out and doing this the right way is important. It’s not about trying to close a client completely on your mobile application for B2B. It’s about opening up the initial conversations on B2C.

Can you close them on B2C, B2B? Absolutely. It depends on what you’re selling. If you’re selling complex sales, this is a great intro play to go. If you’re trying to move products and services in any capacity, it is a must. It’s not anything but a must. We’re going to talk a lot about working with agencies, not with agencies. We’re going to talk about how sales have shifted and a bunch of things. Let’s get to the interview. I think you’re going to enjoy it. Mr. James Hilton, here we go.

—

James, welcome to the show. I appreciate you being here.

Thank you very much for having me.

To give a frame for everybody, why don’t you tell us what your company does? It’s M&C Saatchi Performance. Why don’t you lay out what you do for people?

What we do as a business is that we are a media agency, where what we deliver is tangible results. In the days before the world was digital and trackable, people would put a load of money into media marketing. They wouldn’t know which bits were working. Every year, we see it as a drain and say, “How much do we put into it? We don’t know.” In 2006, I decided that it was a basic to launch a business that looked at performance marketing with the whole digital explosion.

When clients of mine spend $1, they know what they want back. It’s not about having this language is very intangible. Generally, they spend $1 and want $1.20 or $1.50 or $2 back. My business is about looking after the clients who have a clear ROI, what they’re focusing towards, and working all our efforts and their monies if there’s all the technology available to us to deliver to their objectives. Most of my clients’ budgets grow with us month per month because we are delivering growth and profit for them. It’s a very different way from the old-fashioned marketing agencies.

The number one complaint I hear from people in marketing companies, and CEOs, is, “I seem to dump a lot of money into mobile marketing, Facebook, Google, whatever platform. I don’t know how I’m getting my money back sometimes.” You saw that whole problem. You give them the whole quantitative data on everything that’s going on. A lot of times, they feel like, “I spent $30,000 on Facebook this month. I don’t know my ROI like I’m supposed to because I don’t know what’s going on.”

That’s exactly what we do. We unravel it for brands. We go through and look at it. The problem that people have is that when you work with Google and Facebook per se, and obviously Facebook owns Instagram, their self attributes in networks as well. They are spending your money and sending you the report card to say, “This is how well we did. You can’t audit it. It’s a black box. This is how well we did.” It’s very frustrating for brands. We feel it for brands. It’s very frustrating. They feel that they have to be at the table that is table stakes to have advertising at the table, especially when it comes to search. What they can’t do is understand that granularity.

We specialize in mobile phones as well. I launched my business before Steve Jobs came out with the iPhone in 2007, and it was a mobile-first business. Mobile now, as we all know, is the ever-present digital channel. The mobile phone is on you at all times, and it’s that connection between all the digital channels. It was particularly complicated mobile in the early days.

For us now, we’re a full digital agency, but we’ve got that experience from this very myopic, chaotic industry where basically no one knew what was going on. It was so hard to track. The solutions we developed when times were very hard and now helping our clients now when things are getting a lot more simple, but you need strong leadership to help unravel that.

Let’s delve into this mobile marketing. You’re the expert on this, so correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s not a question anymore of a company that wants to grow whether or not they should do mobile marketing. It’s more of a question now of how do I do it because it’s here to stay and it’s here to grow? Is that accurate?

For sure, if you go back and look at digital marketing or mobile marketing is that the mobile is always on you. The mobile has so much data attached to it. Obviously, we have location data. We can see a lot of your users signing in. It’s a personal device. You never share your device. You’d never let someone set on your device and say, “Here, take my mobile phone for a couple of days.”

It doesn’t work like that. It’s a very personal device. Basically, mobile is the first place you go. If you look at the data, over 55% of all budgets in digital are going mobile-first. It’s the first port of call where you go on the mobile device. What people need to realize is that mobile customers are often on the move as well. You may not get the deep dwell time.

Mobile is the ever-present digital channel. Click To Tweet

What you have to do is think about mobile content, snackable bite-sized content. Content should be for the consumer on the move but also looking at the engagement of not trying to get someone to fill out. If it’s a financial firm, for example, we’d like ten questions. The ultimate deal on the mobile phone may be somewhat limited.

It’s about understanding the consumer, and that’s consumer-first journey planning. If the mobile is the touchpoint of the first engagement with the consumer, you can move that across the desktop very seamlessly or move that across to any other channels as they want. Get that initial engagement. The dwell time on mobile exceeds every other device out there. That’s where the consumers are. Marketing budgets are following that.

Is it only B2C or B2B as well?

It’s B2B as well. It comes back to the hyper-targeting that you can do on the mobile phone. We can look through all the different sites available to us and basically the destinations, the programmatic industry, and the industry generally. We can understand the audience. By understanding those audiences, we engage them at the right time and basically the right locations.

We can understand people by job title, seniority, or on a daily commute. There are so many different ways we can use the data that digital affords us. What mobile is doing, in essence, is enriching the data even further. Ultimately, the digital revolution is about understanding your customer, your consumer on a B2B and a B2C, and their needs. Once you can do that in your journey plan, the world’s turned into your oyster.

We have clients who started with us with $30,000. I’m not kidding you, and they’re doing like $4 million or $5 million a month now, growing and learning. Basically, we look at our clients like acorns and oaks for us. We take on smaller clients if we believe in their businesses because we grow with them. Once the budgets are grown, that means everyone is doing well. They’re getting a positive ROI, and basically, we can scale it out for them. The more we can scale, the more global capacity you have on that digital is infinite. It’s a very exciting channel.

What I love about this is it’s a get-to-know-you-type thing. It’s easy to do if you understand it. A lot of people think digital marketing is mobile marketing digitally. The people that I talked to, especially the traditionalist, are the folks who are a little bit older. We always did business on the golf course, that type of crowd. They think that this digital process that they’ve got to go through is so different than what they’re trying to do on the golf course.

What I’m hearing is that mobile marketing is the intro conversation or the intro connection point. From there, you’re growing that relationship. You can take it across the desktop from that point and keep growing the relationship. Maybe you still go out on the golf course, but it starts on the mobile phone now because over 55% of the people go there first. Is that accurate, or am I off-base?

The way you look at it, if you have like technology like Salesforce or HubSpot, it unravels all your sales for you. A lot of clients are using that. Ultimately, you can see that it’s a multi-touchpoint environment that we live with them. Consumers need to be touched in multiple different formats before they engage. Mobile is a very strong first port of call. The dwell time on mobile will be 3 or 4 hours a day. It’s extraordinary high. If the consumers are there, it’s great. You can take it on to the golf course, for sure. I suppose what it comes down to is a funnel. When you’re looking at the funnel, it’s like, “What goes in the top?” The golf course, I think, is the bottom of the funnel.

If you think about it, you can’t take 10,000 people out to play golf every month. You haven’t got enough time in the day, but when you’re looking at digital channels, we can funnel through those 10,000 people. We can put them into the hopper and generate them down on a funnel. At the end of the funnel, they’re people you can play golf with. You can close the deal on a larger deal on the golf course. When you’re looking at the mobile ecosystem, an app first culture, it’s so easy for customers to click on an ad and download an app. It’s so second nature for them to do that. Once they download that app, the whole revenue channel comes behind that.

It depends on where the cost of sale is and where your business specializes. In my experience at digital work, every industry has different costs for acquisitions. We work for gaming companies. You have like cost acquisitions at $0.50. We work for financial institutions with costs on acquisitions over $1,000. Everyone’s got a different cost per acquisition, but everyone’s got the same drive to deliver transparent learnings on an ROI basis. That’s what M&C Saatchi Performance does.

I’m so grateful we’re having this conversation because it’s like when the ATM came out. It took what, 20, 30 years for people to adapt to think that “My money’s not going to be eaten by this machine.” A lot of times, people when I speak to them, and these are not solo entrepreneurs, mom-and-pop companies, these are some large companies, hundreds of millions of dollars. They’re still contemplating should I be using digital technology?

I know I’ve got to do it, but there’s this reluctance that if they put this thing in, all of a sudden, it’s going to go puff. Their profitability will drop below the level they needed to go. It’s putting more money out than the money coming back in. What would you say to somebody who’s like, “I know I need to do this, but should I? Is it a must anymore? Is it something that is a potential thought that I should have and then maybe investigate down the line?”

It’s interesting because you’ve got someone who’s created a very successful business, and the way they’ve done that is through their traditional ways of marketing. We have full respect for that. They understand that things have to evolve. My voice then is the core has to be what they’re good at already. Digital doesn’t change it. It supplements it. It doesn’t have to change everything that we’re doing.

There are so many different ways we can use the data, which digital affords us. Click To Tweet

What I would do is ask your agency is can digitally perform as well as what I’m doing already? If it can’t and there’s no issue with supply and the way you’re doing it, this will maybe not be right for you. I think this is what it comes down to is that we do digital, the KPIs, the most important thing, the cost per acquisition. That’s what we’re looking at.

If you can get it cheaper somewhere else, great. The problem with brands who come to us is that they can’t get the scale they need through their traditional channels. We don’t say like, “Depart from doing what you’re doing.” We say, “Let’s infuse this into your marketing mix. Let’s use a CRM solution to help us understand what is driving what?” Which parts of your expenditure are driving the sales? Basically, slowly fusing in. The cost to get involved in a digital and mobile space, you’re not talking about millions of dollars. Many clients thought, “I’ve got $20,000, $30,000. That’s what I would invest in a month.”

With that money, any agency should be showing you that we start with our cost per acquisition here. As we went down, I wished I had more money. The cost went down and down. The reason being is that we do optimization. We look where the money’s going. We have the technology to move the money to where we’re seeing the most traction. That’s when you can easily get into a digital marketing strategy because you know you’re being looked after. A lot of it’s about clear KPIs, making sure you understand exactly what you want, and money marketing is lost when people don’t look at attribution.

They don’t know what’s driving what. They don’t have a clear understanding of what they’re trying to define where they see successes. Ultimately, it’s fraud. I think now this will help steer their clients to make sure that they’re getting the right brief from the client to make sure that they can get the right results. One of the things worth noting is that from an agency perspective, we’ve got offices around the world, offices in America, Asia, and Europe. We have a very large spread.

One of the things I’ll be frank with you about, every new client costs me money. If this test doesn’t work, I’m out more than your out. I can assure you. I’ve lost a lot of money because a huge amount of work is needed to get new accounts live. Where we start to regain our money is about month four onwards. We are as committed as you are to making sure this works.

If it scales, which means, let’s be honest, if someone’s giving me $1, I give them $2 back. They’re making double their money. If it scales, I can scale my fee because, basically, we’re getting a percentage of the uplift as well. We’re all on the same side. I think that’s my performance agencies are such a vulnerable asset in industries that we are so on the same side as the CEOs.

We want this to succeed more than them sometimes because we have a full month of loss coming our way and had to get the whole team ready for a new client, and we want them to succeed. We’re in it together. I think as long as you get the relationship right with the agency you select, it’s joint loss and joint gain. I think basically you’re in very strong hands.

A lot of times, in the agency world that I’ve experienced anyways, myself or my clients is they’re like, “I can do this. Give me a monthly retainer, a percentage of spend, and we’ll see how it goes.” It’s one of those things that the owner or entrepreneur or the company itself puts in tens of thousands of dollars. Four months later, they’re finding out this isn’t working, and now the agency, not your agency. I know that based on what you said. Those of you who are reading, if you’re doing something like this and you get a performance agency, they’ve got part of the profitability or loss tied into their performance when it comes down to it.

Most agencies, James, that I’ve ever talked with won’t do this. They won’t even have broached the idea of doing this. Quite frankly, I don’t think they know they can deliver it, but they’re taking people’s money. That’s what I see happening. It’s like in the old days of SEO. When we added an SEO company, 70% of our clientele were already with some other client prior, but they got burned once or twice before they got to the right place. I’m hearing you do the same thing. Why don’t other agencies or people do that? What’s preventing the people from doing this?

There are a few things. For a lot of our clients, our reputation precedes us. We work with lots of large brands and small brands alike. A lot of our clients want full transparency saying that “We’ll pay you X pay on the media. We’ll give you a retainer. We want full transparency. We want everything.” There are two sorts of thoughts about it.

Certain clients and I understand them saying, “We’ll pay the fees if it’s the X percent of the retainer, but we want all the upsides.” If we can do a target, say $50 a customer, if you’re going to get it for $5, we want to keep the whole $45. That works very well as well. We’ve got a lot of brands saying, “We want the full transparent version.”

We’ve got other brands saying, “We don’t want to take the risk.” We’re saying to them, “We’ll do a very small test. If the test is conclusive, we’ll take the risk for you. We know it’s going to work.” You often get the hybrid ones as well, where people come in and say, “I want full transparency at the beginning.” Basically, as it gets larger and larger, they say, “Can you make this a fixed cost for us and take away the variable cost for us?” We say to them, “We can, but obviously, we’re going to have to charge you a little bit more than you’re paying at the moment because we’ve got to take the bumps in the road as well.”

I think around it is that an agency should listen to what clients’ requirements are before defining a way to bill, invoice, and know what type of media you need. It’s a very exciting ecosystem, the digital space. There are fantastic opportunities out there, but ultimately, it’s a partnership. The relationship I have with my team, we have hundreds of people around the world. It’s a partnership. I have to look after them. They look after their jobs, and this is how our organization works.

What we can’t do is basically, if any part of the value proposition takes advantage of someone else, it all breaks. It comes down to clients and agencies. It’s a partnership. We’ll work with the clients as partners. We have a lot of clients who work out of our offices for a few days a week. It’s a proper partnership. I think that’s what people should be looking for. Agencies embrace them into your organization once they’ve proven themselves. The more you can give the agency, the more they have your business, and the better you’ll see your results. It’s a defined way of working.

Digital doesn’t change, it supplements. Click To Tweet

One of the growth strategies I teach my clients is finding agencies and building their own internal-type process. I love what you guys do and agencies, in general, is that you don’t have to hire a whole new contingency of internal staff to have an agency. If we hire your agency, we get all your internal staff. We get all the resources, but we don’t have to create it from scratch. It’s a leverage tool.

If companies can create the leverage within, we teach them to build partnerships and agencies and sales teams through their agencies. That’s an expansion mechanism that they’re going after a different market altogether. They have agents that are out on the field, driving business into them, but HubSpot does these types of things anyways.

What I love with your agency is that this is great because when I was describing what the traditional business goes through, they get in with a traditional agency. I saw your eyes go rollback because you know the game. That cued me in on the integrity that I already know you have, which is one reason I’m so grateful you’re on this show. What we’re talking about, if I’m getting this accurately, is sales have shifted. We’re in an ever-changing process on this whole thing. We have to learn how to sell in this ever-changing because if we don’t, it’s going to change without us. It’s already changed.

A few years ago, people were working from home. Now it’s regular. I remembered several years ago, we were talking and teaching companies how to work virtually, and they were pushing back on that and saying, “This isn’t going to be. My company internally won’t embrace it,” those types of things. Now it’s like, “I got rid of all this floor space. People were being productive at home,” etc. We’re now into an ever-changing sales mode of being able to acquire those. I see digital as not even a necessary step, but it is part of the process now. A lot of decisions are made now on the marketing side before it ever even gets to the sales channel. Are you experiencing that as well with your clients?

I think what we’re finding is you’re completely right. Things have changed. The last few years have been extraordinary for every reason out there. Let’s be honest now that we all use Zoom. In the old days, it was like, “Can you hear me? Can you see this? I’m sharing it.” We now take it for granted that people can see us and see what we share. In the old days, we travel the world to be with each other. We keep moving from town to town, saying, “I need to sell. I need to go to Chicago. I’m going to Seattle, all this world.” It slowed everything down. It’s not viable anymore viable because people aren’t all in the same location.

The final engagement can be at a zoo and a conference. All the teams and everything that we have to is people used to the whole digital experience now. Consumer mindsets have changed. People aren’t in the office anymore. I know that’s a whole debate of why not and could they. The reality is they’re not. There’s a huge drain on people. We have no talent.

There’s a massive talent drought globally. I hear it from all my offices. Their biggest challenge is talent. With that in consideration, we’re now working with talent who are not based out of offices because it suits them. They can be in different parts of the country. We have people all across America and all different states working for us, basically out there, not in our offices, but for an office.

Things have all changed. Knowing that has happened to us, that has to happen to your customers as well. Your prospects are not in the office anymore. They’re not picking up the phone like they used to. They’re not at these networking events they used to be. Whether that’s right or wrong isn’t the consideration for us because we’re not lawmakers. What we are always we know we’re marketers. What we have to do is learn to adapt to the situation that we work with it and know COVID has created, like a whole, a tremendous amount of opportunity for us, which is digital-first, digital native.

If you’ve got used time, if you look at sales, the more people you hit, the more likely it is you’re going to get a bite. Basically, you can be fishing in unlimited places all at the same time. You’re not going to have to fish in one place at a time. Ultimately, that’s what makes the industry so exciting, but there are obviously challenges with it and understanding it. There are plenty of people out there who now do. Brands are leading by the hand through this change.

Can we expand upon fishing in unlimited places at one time? A light bulb went off in my head because we all think we have this focus market. Most of us do think we have these focus markets. What I heard is I can fish in unlimited ponds and unlimited test ponds for a very low-test fee. In the old days, we used to do focus groups with companies or whatever. Quite frankly, I don’t think most focus groups are accurate anyway, but that’s my opinion. I can be fishing in different places, which I heard and get intelligence. How does that work? I imagine there are people reading his going, “I can do this. How?”

I’ll tell you a hidden secret. When we launched a digital-first, when you think about digital-first, there’s no back office required. It’s an app. What we do, and we do this many times, we launch it first in Australia because, in Australia, it’s English speaking. It’s got 25 million people. It’s got the same demographic as, basically, we can pick out in other developed nations. We’ll test it in Australia. We’ll see if it works. We don’t have to do the big budgets because we can hit your jets. If you think about America, that’s 400 million people. Australia is 25 million people.

The audience that we’re hitting can hit a high penetration of the right audience, but not that much money. What we do is model it and see what’s working. What was the action? How much per action was that? How much was the download? How much was the sale? What was the time from downloads? We can model everything and see how it works. If the numbers are strong enough, we say, “We can turn on other markets.” We can turn on antipodean markets. We can go, “Let’s get into Canada, America, and the UK.”

We can target people who have set English as a default language on their phones. We can go globally. You’ve got to go to a country where basically like they don’t speak English like Italy, for example. We say, “Fine. We’ll target people who’ve got English as their native language in Italy.” That gets all the English people covered. We start rolling around and saying, “Let’s do a quick translation. Let’s go to Spanish. Now let’s get Spanish. We can get South America covered.”

You don’t need an agency in every country. We have clients. We represent 40 markets. We don’t do it in each market. We have someone there. If you think about the opportunities, that’s for digital-first. If you’re looking at like lead creation, we can do the same. Digital is boundaryless, and that’s what makes it so fascinating. That’s what makes the businesses so exciting because we’ve had businesses that started in one market and now are truly global.

The more people you hit, the more likely you’re going to get a bite. With digital, you can be fishing in unlimited places all at the same time. Click To Tweet

That’s because the marketing channel has enabled them to do that. The rest of the bit can start in, but the marketing channels have always been the bugbear for everyone. I can’t get an agency in every country. I can’t create a brand in every country. We’re saying to them, “You don’t need any of that. We can create a brand for you to performance advertising.” We’re creating a brand, but we’re still getting a positive ROI. That’s where it gets exciting.

To anyone out there who’s sitting on the fence about it, the way to look at digital is excitement. It’s not Generation Z. It’s not these young Millennials. It’s every part of the ecosystem now is in this space. With the right attention, we could look at any business and identify there’s an opportunity. If there is what you’ve got the ability to do is, when you get it right, you can go 5X, 10X, 15X. You can keep going up. That’s where it gets super exciting.

I’m sure there are a lot of people that are reading this is going, “I can target by language. If we’re going to go to Italy, let’s say whatever percent of the population speaks Italian solo, I can target the people who have English set on their phones, and now I can hit them or vice versa. I want to hit people speak Italian or whatever the language might be.” That is absolutely brilliant because I know people don’t think like this unless they’re in your world. They’re not going to be able to think like this because they’re not in your world. They have their own specialty.

That’s what we unraveled. Another thing I think is fascinating, which is a real mind-blowing thing for me, is it’s been led by Meta, which is Facebook, which is the lookalike targeting thing. We have the ability to work with our clients basically, and we say to them, “How many customers do you have?” They may say, “500, or I’ve got 50,000.”

It doesn’t make any difference. Give us a database of the clients that you have. We’ll do all the work. We’ll get it uploaded what the technology will do. It will upload it to like Meta, and it will say, “This is our audience. We don’t want to advertise to these customers because they’re already our audience. What is common in these audiences? Go and get me an audience similar to this?”

The technology will go through all the 5,000 and say all of those 5,000, the common thread of all of them was this. The algorithm would immediately go and take it off, but we will control the creative and everything else to go and get that look alike audience. You get fascinating things. When we started to look at the audience and the profiling and things such as that, we found out, and I’m not going to go through its reasoning. We found that the common thing is it was a female-dominated book. A lot of them rode horses. They liked the equestrian side of life.

There are a million reasons why that could be, but that insight was fascinating because we were like, “Now, we know a lot more.” We’re going back to the brand owners saying, “Our data is showing that you’ve got a 9X going to be in equestrian.” If we’re doing future marketing, hit that audience. That’s where your audience is. The data will define everything for you.

You can get DNA profiling from the data. That’s fascinating. People are worried about getting into digital if you’ve already got email addresses. Digital will basically work like cotton socks off to use that data to find the next audience for you, which will be the same people, just more of them. It’s fascinating. That’s the tip of the iceberg of what we’re doing.

We have authors here that are going, “I can do this with a book lunch.” If we know, they’re equestrians, and we target those types of people.

If you want to go offline with it, go to the magazines. If you want to do some live light activation, don’t do some sponsorship with the events. It sets the whole thing up for you. We know for a fact that this isn’t probabilistic data. This is factual data. It’s deterministic data. That’s a big difference. I’d like to take people’s views is that the problem is a big change that happened with Apple. They changed their tracking. I will be cynical. Apple tried to get into advertising. They bought a company called Quattro Wireless. It wasn’t very good. No one used it, and they got upset.

They did their own advertising, their keyword stuff in their app store, which isn’t right, but not big enough. They weren’t winning the advertising war. What they’ve done now, we’re going to be on the side of the customer. We’re going to turn it all off. They’ve literally flicked the switch when it comes to privacy. We used to be able to track people for life. It was frightening how much we could get. Everything we do is compliant. Apple has now said, “We’re going to restrict this massively.” They’ve turned the dial on there. It’s one of the reasons that we see Netflix. Their share price took a tumble. They lost customers.

The reason they lost customers is they can’t acquire them as easily as they used to. It was a bit easier than it was. It’s harder to buy customers because we’re moving slowly now to more probabilistic determinants that we’re moving that way slowly. At the scale of Netflix working, they were working on razor-thin margins. They had it down to how much they required customers. Apple has changed the ecosystem.

What you saw is they’re able to put all their money into Android, which is Google’s ecosystem. Everyone said, “If I am looking to make it fun, let’s work with Android.” All the clients, they’re all splits over and say, we’re going to do Android only. Google is going to change the rules as well to make it a little bit more protective.

I’d be surprised to see them doing that because Google loves data. The whole business revolved throughout them using data. It’d be interesting how they change it. The insight from this is that if you’re not doing anything digital, do it now because we’ve got so much open data still available to us through the learning. If we can learn it once through Android, once you’ve learned it, you’ve got the map forever. That’s what we say to our clients. We’ve proven this out again and again.

It’s not just Gen Z or millennials. Every part of the ecosystem now is all in the digital space. Click To Tweet

We’ve done very similar advertising for many years, and here’s all the data. As the data is getting switched off in increments, it’s not the end of the world. Now is the time to give it a go. If you haven’t got the data, put it in your R&D, your testing budget, but however you want. If you don’t have that data, it could be harder and harder as the years go by.

I love your enthusiasm for this because I do a lot of interviews, and with certain people, you could tell they live for what they’re doing. It like lights them up. You’re one of those guys. I appreciate that. I think your message is very sound, do it now, because if you don’t do it now, a year from now could be different. It will be different and no matter what, because technology moves on, but the reality is I think it’s a great message because sales have changed, if we’re not embracing the new in another year, you’re going to be behind. You’re already behind now, that type of thing. James, if people are like, “I got to talk to this guy. I got to get ahold of this company,” how do they do so? What would be the proper path?

My email address is James@MCSaatchi.com. Ping me an email. I will deal with it. At the end of the day, go to MCSaatchiPerformance.com. I can guarantee everyone there is an opportunity out there. I’ve yet to meet a brand that doesn’t work for me. It may be more expensive than you thought. My cost per acquisition isn’t as cheap as I wanted it to be. What happens basically, but ultimately, we can always find customers. We can always find opportunities and create learning. Time’s going to get hard now.

We’ve got inflationary pressures coming through the roof if you think about what’s going on. Times are going to get hard. The cost of living, the living squeeze, everything is going to get harder. If you want to get out there wider and more efficiently, digital is the way to do it. This is a recession-proof way of doing it. We find that in recessionary times, our business gets even brisker. This is a brilliant recessionary proof way of doing it because of its ROI. You’re not going to give me $50,000 next month if I don’t give you $75,000 back. That’s how people look at it.

We can help model the lifetime value. We can help model all of it. Ultimately, it all starts with basically the inquisitive CEO. I’m so pleased to report that we worked with some companies and also mom and pop shops virtually. When you’ve got good ambition and have an infinite way of dealing with your product, we can’t sell enough. We’ve got the ability to distribute globally. We don’t have that global ability to sell. That’s when it’s exciting. I would encourage everyone to give it a go.

If you don’t want to go through an agency, do it yourself. Go into Google, buy some keywords, go into Facebook, go into Instagram, and give it a little test. Make sure you track everything. I guarantee you prove it does work and come to MCSaatchiPerformance.com, reach out, and then we’ll scale it for you, whichever way works best for your audience.

James, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate that. I know everybody else will. I know people are going to be responding and going question, question. You can reach out very easily. I do recommend that you reach out to James, even if you have a question and an inquiry or curiosity about will this work for my company?

As he said, you can go do it yourself in the beginning and try it out. My experience with that, James, is they’re better off contacting a guy like you, who cares and has the expertise. You can point them on the right path or even be able to help them. It might be much more cost-effective than they figure in the beginning. I recommend they reach out to you.

I think what I’m trying to do is to make sure is that my experience, I worked on the internet from the beginning. I was on the internet in ’96, ’97, basically, when it was embryonic. I got into mobile before mobile for Steve Jobs and the other crowd. I don’t want people not to do it. Whichever way they feel most comfortable, I totally advise on to go so they understand how to make this work. The thing about digital is it’s ever-present, enormous. Your budgets can go in seconds. I certainly like to make it work. The main thing is they must do it. If you have distrust for agencies, fine, go and do it. I can assure you the agency is the best way to do it.

Ultimately, the excitement and the opportunity are out there for all of them. Me, I used to be on the marketing side. I have been on the brand side. I’ve done both sides of the equation. I haven’t seen it from both sides. I will sell the digital economy of my agency first because I know that this economy is growing at an unprecedented rate. There’s so much more to come. We are still embryonic. I look forward to we did the same thing. We can talk about what’s going on in the industry. I know it will be fascinating.

James, thanks for being here. I appreciate you being on the show. Reach out to James and give it a go. As you said, “Do it now.” James, thanks again.

Thank you very much.

—

Here is the cool thing to understand. As I said at the beginning of this, it’s not a consideration anymore. It’s a do-it-now thing because here’s the thing. I loved what he said about Apple changing the rules and cutting back on the available information. Google is thinking about doing that as well. If you’ve got a year’s play before this happens, get in now because the more you understand about lookalike audiences, the more you understand about the way to do this the right way, you’ll understand that it’s not a big risk when you do understand how to do it the right way. It’s only a big risk when you don’t know how to do it the right way. What you’re doing is you’re pumping money into it.

Believe me, Facebook, Google, Instagram, you name the platform, even LinkedIn, they all love a bit of ignorance because you keep pumping money, and it’s not working for you, or it’s working, but not optimally. You want to make sure that this is optimally working. I hope you got a lot of value. I trust you did out of this particular episode.

If you want to get out there wider, more efficiently, digital is the way to do it. This is a recession-proof way of doing it. Click To Tweet

If you love this show, which I hope you do as well, please go up and give it a five-star review and tell other people about this. If you have any questions or you want to hear about a particular topic, reach out to me at DougBrown123, that’s my LinkedIn profile or Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com. Let me know what you would prefer as a topic. We’ll source that talent and get you exactly what you’re looking for.

As always, if you’re looking for help in building your business, creating A player teams, hiring, managing, retaining top sales talent, or getting yourself or your team into the top 1% of sales globally in your industry, reach out to me. I’ll be happy to help you. Until next time. Go out and sell something, sell a lot of it and sell it profitably and make a ton of money and help others change their lives to your success.

Important Links

• M&C Saatchi Performance
• James@MCSaatchi.com
• Doug C. Brown – LinkedIn
• Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com
• https://www.MCSaatchi.com
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/thejameshilton

About James Hilton

James Hilton is the CEO of M&C Saatchi Performance and an accomplished marketer with over 17 years of experience in direct response marketing strategy. James has held senior executive positions at leading global brands, including Guardian Media Group, WeightWatchers Online, MGM Mirage, and Grey Advertising.