Brad Post, Create the

Movement

Dominick Montgomery, Create the

Movement

 

Brad Post, Create the Movement:

Welcome to our podcast. Today, we are going to be hearing fromDominick Montgomery, our Chief Marketing Officer of Create theMovement, as he shares with a group of college students aboutonline marketing.

Dominick Montgomery, Create the

Movement: Hey guys. Again, my name’s Dominick Montgomery. Just abrief history on me, and then we’ll get into some, like,nitty-gritty. But, my background’s in music and video actually. Didmusic in L.A. Came out here, got with Brad, worked at firm withhim, and we kind of blew that up. Then we both kind of struck outon our own. We both had our own companies, and then recently wejust partnered.

I am one of the worship leaders

at Guts Church. Did music over there, and I help with their mediaas well. We have grown Create the Movement from about fouremployees to about 14 in the past few months. So, we’re doingreally well. We’ve got a lot of clients from small, like I said,small shops, to, you know, we deal with Messianic synagogues, wedeal with roofers, we deal with law firms. So, we’ve kind of got tosee a lot of different markets and realize their goals, and try to,maybe, intertwine them.

I say that I’m a digital

marketer first. I’m not a video guy. I’m not a SEO. I’m not a webdesigner. I say I’m a digital marketer. Because, what I’ve foundout over the years is that all of this stuff has to tie intotogether. And I’ll go into kind of how we’ve come to that point,and how we’ve tied it all together with our clients. And how wellthat’s doing for them.

So, I guess in order to start

off with, in order for you to understand why we’re at the placewhere we’re are, and why are clients pay us monthly, and why we getreally good checks, I guess, or really good payouts, is because wefocus first on the client’s goals. And nine times out of ten, ifyou’re dealing with a client, or anybody, the goal is to have areaction from somebody visiting their site. Or, seeing their brand.Right? Normally, that reaction is signing up to their website, orpaying them for a service.

So, the main thing is, how do

you get to that goal? What we focus on first is getting people totheir main hub, and their main hub being their web presence, sotheir website. Kind of to backtrack, we really tout our ability tohave our client’s websites show up first for a certain searchresults. Okay? We, don’t by any means say we guarantee they’ll showup first. And if you hear anybody say, “We guarantee that we’ll geta website to show up first in Google search results.” – probablylying. Or, they’re just trying to get your money. But we workreally hard to get our clients there.

And we do that through SEO –

search engine optimization. We do that through social media. Dothat through video. We do that through Google AdWords. Do you guysknow the history of SEO? You know how all that got started? Cool. So, you know, the whole, like black hat SEO? And you’velearned all that good stuff? Okay. Awesome.

Okay. So, back in the day, it

used to be, in order for a site to show up, Google has an algorithmthat kind of searches the internet and finds relevant websitesaccording to a search. Well, in the early 2000s, a lot of companiesdid what’s called black hat SEO. And they did a lot of tactics totrick Google into having their site show up first. One of the maincases being JC Penny running a Black Friday sale campaign. And theymade all these websites. Pointed all these links to all thesewebsites they created that had to do with JC Penny Black Fridaysale. So, when anybody search ‘Black Friday sale’ JC Penny showedup.

Well, Google saw what they were

doing and they penalized them. Took them off search results for, Ithink, over a year. And it cost them billions of dollars. So, thatjust goes to show you how much money can be made from showing up,you know, for relevant searches.

From then, til now, we’ve kind

of had to follow Google standards, and do the right things with ourwebsites so they show up first. Right? And it’s kind of evolvednow. So, it used to be you write good content, you have the rightkeywords in that content, and hopefully people will findyou.

But now, it’s more about user

experience. Which is where video comes into play, which is wheresocial media comes into play. So, we really focus on once somebodylands on a website, how do we keep them engaged? How do we keeptheir interest? And how do we get them to convert?Right?

If I’m moving too fast, and

anybody has any questions let me know. Okay? Cool. So, a lot of ourclients have kind of falsified expectations. They think, “You’llmake me a website. People will come to the website and sign up.”Well, it gets really technical. Which is why we have to charge amonthly retainer because we do a lot of work monthly on each of thesites.

There are some clients that we

have even, that we have to turn away because we say, “We can’treally do much for you.” And a good example of that is we had anestate planning attorney who does like wills, and living wills, andall that good stuff. Estate planning. And she was with us for awhile, and we had her showing up first result for all of herkeywords. She was getting good traffic, but no conversions. And werealized it’s because half of her visitors are about to pass away.And they’re probably not going to be online looking for somethinglike that. Right? So, digital marketing doesn’t really work inevery market. You know? And with them what probably, we could havedone, was go to their hometown, go to the funeral homes, go thenursing homes, you know? Go to the hospitals, and see what kind of,maybe, print ads we could do for them. Put them on the backs ofphonebooks. Because their target audience is still probably lookingat phonebooks and that whole thing.

But we do get a lot of cool

cases, cool clients, that allow us to be super creative and just dowhat we know works best. We had a client in Brownsville, Texas. Ayoung attorney, I think he’s like 27. Worked in a small office. Itwas like, man, like maybe 50 by 50 feet. A real small box. And hesaid, “You know, I know, everybody’s moving towards video. I wantto do video somehow. And I just want to get my name out there. So,we flew out. We filmed about 30 videos for him. All off the cuff –nothing scripted. That might go against what they teach you here.We did everything off the cuff. We just kind of tried to be realpersonable with him. Reason being is, attorneys are not trustworthyin a general sense. Right? When you think attorney, you think like‘Better Caul Saul.’ And you know, they’re kind of slimy.

So, how do we convey to our

audience, or to the people that are visiting the site, that you cantrust this guy. Well, the best way thought would be through video.He’s a young guy, a handsome guy, thankfully. Really nice. And so,we stayed down there with him for two days. We filmed like 30videos. And they weren’t, he didn’t just talk about law. He didn’tjust talk about cases that he’d dealt with. He talked about hisbelief in the law. And he talked about what led him to law. And howhis family’s been in law. And he talks his cases home with him, andit burdens him. You know? This kind of stuff that left him kind ofvulnerable, and it was kind of edgy. You know? It’s on the line foran attorney to actually put himself out there.

So, we did that. We built them

an amazing site. It’s totally video-centric, and it went againsteverything that typical SEO should be. A typical SEO is, you know,a home page needs to have at least 500 words on it. It need to havethese keywords in it. Each page needs to have, you know, thisamount of words. If you have more content, text content, than yourcompetitor, you’ll show up first. Well, some page maybe had 20words on it. Interior pages were just transcriptions of his videos.And within 60 days he showed up first for every keyword he wantedto show up for.

So, what’s that tell us? It

tells us the whole medium’s changed. Right? It tells us about userexperience. It’s about time on-site. So, somebody’s come, they’reactually watching his videos. They’re actually reading along,engaging with the material. Yeah.

His site got shared all over

Reddit. It got shared on design forums. It got shared from attorneyto attorney. We were asked to write for the Texas Law Board,Technology Magazine, all this huge crap that just came from beingreal. You know?

So, we’ve kind of applied that

concept with our marketing now, and with our clients now. And it’skind of hard, and you’ll see that it’s hard – oh, yeah?

What matters to the client is

sharing their story. What matters is converting people that theyactually want to convert. You know? A lot of times we get a lot ofleads for clients, and we think we’re killing it. And we send themthe report at the end of the month. And we say, “We got you 45leads.” And they say, “That’s great, but only two converted.” Youknow? And we’re like, “What the heck? Why?”

Well, it’s because we have to

align ourselves with the client’s goals – every time. And,sometimes, we can’t really achieve that through just a website.Sometimes we need to be on Instagram like posting pictures. Maybethat’s where their core audience is? You know?

But, we try to take what we know

and apply it to each market. And it gets kind of tough. So, what Ialways encourage is, don’t get caught up on the technicalities ofthings because the client’s eyes will glaze over. And they’ll say,“Well, you’re talking about getting us links. We just care aboutclients. We need money You know? We hired you to bring usbusiness.”

So, that’s one of our main

things, is to align with the client’s goals. We do that throughvideo. We try to push video a lot – even with attorneys. Especiallywith cool industries. Like, we have a sign-making facility thatmakes cools signs. So, we want to shoot videos of them welding, andapply a storyline to it. We’ve got roofers, and we get a drone andfly over them, you know, while they’re roofing. Just coolaesthetics that keep people on a website.

It’s cool that you’re bringing

in people that know this day and age. Because that’s how theculture’s going to change - just newer things. And as you guys comeup, and you’re telling these things to the client, it makes iteasier for everyone who’s in this generation to actuallysell.

Right now, there’s kind of a

50/50 balance. We have older business that are stuck in their ways,and who will not listen to you when you’re saying, “You’ve got todo video. You know? People will watch you.” And they’re like,“We’ve never done video. We’re a million-dollar company. We don’tneed video.” And then we’re saying, “Well, to help tell yourstory.” You know? We’re going for the whole marketing andstory-telling aspect. They don’t want to hear it.

But I think right now, and with

the years to come, that’s really going to change. It’s really goingto shift because people want what they see. So, the more we can geton the web: storylines, and videos, and that sort of thing, themore people will want it. You know? It’s kind of – it will becomeindustry standard really.

So, as far as digital marketing

we do that with websites, video. We do social media. So, socialmedia is huge for us. And Google, a lot of times, Google puts outalerts saying, “This is how we rank websites. And these are thestandards that you have to follow.” We follow those standards. Butsometimes Google doesn’t tell the truth. Because their main goal isto put people who do SEO out of business, and I’m convinced ofthat. They want to provide the perfect search. You know? They’veshown that with Google Glass – you know, that thing where you canlook at an album cover and say, “What album is this?” and they findit and play the music for you. So, Google wants to provide aperfect search.

So, in that sense, if we’re

building websites that have keywords stuffed in it, and thesentences don’t really make sense, and we’re just saying, “TulsaPersonal Injury Attorney is the Best Personal Injury Attorney inTulsa.” Like, nobody wants to read it. And I think Google’s gettingto – their algorithm is so advanced now that it will see that thesesentences aren’t making sense. This isn’t unique content. Nobody’sreally going to want to read it. You know? And it does through:one, being crazy awesome and technical. But also, two, trackingdata, tracking users on sites, looking at sentence structures,seeing if sentences have been written this way in other websitesacross the web.

I think with Michael Gonzalez

one of the ways we were able to shoot past the competitors wasbecause we transcribed everything he said in his videos the exactway that he said them. And I think that was one of the huge pointsas to why his content performed better. I think it’s because Googlesees this is a topic that this guy’s talking about in sentencestructures that have never been written before. You know? It’sreally unique content. It’s like absolute uniquecontent.

So, I think in the future

Google’s going to provide people with those results, instead of,you know, educational resources, or articles, or stuff like that.It wants stuff that people are interested in.

A good example is if you search

‘best Seattle coffee shop’ there’s going to be three results. Thefirst result doesn’t have that structure – ‘best Seattle coffeeshop.’ The second and third results do. But the first result says‘coffee shops in Seattle’, or something like that. So, if you lookat those websites that first result is a cool map. It’sinteractive. It lets you scroll through and look at the coffeeshops. It gives you a glimpse into the coffee shops. It tells youthe price points of that coffee shop, and how atmosphere in themis. The other two kind of provide like a list, but those, thesecond and third results have ‘best Seattle coffee shop’ writtenall through them. So, it tells us user experience is what mattersto Google. And that was a big change in the SEO community, and itkind of screwed up a lot of strategy. Like a lot ofstrategy.