Smart Marketing That Turns Side Hustles Into Brands

In this engaging conversation from the Simply Be Found huddle, hosts Dean and Rob chat with Scott Taube, the creative mind behind “Bad Cards for Good Golfers,” a company dedicated to making golf more accessible, fun, and inclusive through innovative card games.

Listen To This Episode On…

About This Huddle’s Special Guest

Scott Taube is the creative force behind Bad Cards fore Good Golfers—a company that brings fun, laughter, and a twist of competition to the golf course with innovative on-course card games. But his journey isn’t just about golf—it’s a real-world case study in smart marketing done right.

Scott’s background in music and digital marketing gave him the tools to approach business with creativity and strategy. In 2021, he combined his passions into a card game that quickly captured attention—thanks in large part to a viral TikTok video that resonated with golf lovers everywhere. That one post didn’t just create buzz; it launched a brand.

Beyond Bad Cards for Good Golfers, Scott also runs a marketing agency—where he applies the same smart marketing principles that built his e-commerce success. He’s a big believer in cross-platform visibility, emotional resonance, and the power of psychological insight in messaging.

If you want to reach out to Scott or check out what all the fuss is about with this card game, check out these platforms:

Key Takeaways From This Huddle

Scott didn’t start with a master plan—he started with frustration. A self-proclaimed “terrible golfer,” he wanted to even the odds when playing with friends who were far more skilled. So, he began tweaking the rules. During the COVID pandemic, those casual hacks evolved into a full-blown, on-course card game. Today, that idea is a vibrant brand that’s scoring wins in retail and online.

Golf Meets Game Night

His game is built for every type of golfer—whether you’re playing for drinks, laughs, or bragging rights. With 107 cards across five categories, every hole comes with a twist. Some cards make it easier, others add challenges, but all create memorable moments that keep golfers coming back.

Smart marketing wasn’t just a part of the plan—it was the plan. Scott used humor, creativity, and digital strategy to launch and scale quickly.

From Prototype to Product: The Smart Marketing Moves

Start Small, Learn Fast
Instead of diving in headfirst, Scott tested the waters with 750 units. It was a smart marketing decision to validate demand without overcommitting.

Go Where the Eyeballs Are
He leveraged TikTok with a simple explainer video. The result? Viral traction and a sold-out run within days. That wasn’t luck—it was smart marketing in action.

Scale with Confidence
Profits from early sales were reinvested to fund 10,000-20,000 unit runs. That momentum didn’t just grow the brand—it created a scalable business model.

Diversify Channels
Sales now flow through their website, TikTok Shop, Meta Shop, Amazon, and even PGA Tour Superstores. Scott understood that customers shop in different places, so he made sure the product was there when they looked.

Conversion Over Clout

Scott focuses on performance over vanity. “It’s not the number of views—it’s the conversion rate that really makes it happen,” he says. That’s a core tenet of smart marketing: Measure what moves the needle.

Lessons from a Digital Native

Scott brings valuable insight from his experience running a social media agency, and he lives by some principles that align perfectly with Simply Be Found’s mission:

Attention Is the New Currency
When creating content, Scott’s primary ask isn’t for money—it’s for time. And that makes every second of video and every swipe matter.

Be Where Customers Are
Scott’s omnichannel approach mirrors Simply Be Found’s Listings Engine philosophy: you need to be visible everywhere people are searching—not just one platform.

Own the Relationship
Smart marketers build email lists. Scott makes this a priority because he knows platforms change, but emails create direct access.

Use Every Comment—Even the Bad Ones
Negative comments? No problem. Scott embraces them. “For every negative comment, we had 10 sales,” he notes. Why? Because engagement fuels visibility.

Marketing That Grows With Tech—but Stays Human

Scott believes tech will change, but the fundamentals of marketing won’t. Whether it’s AI, augmented reality, or voice search, one thing remains the same: people buy from businesses they connect with.

“It doesn’t matter what comes out next—the fundamentals of human behavior and marketing don’t change. The emotional connection drives the purchase.”

Why This Matters to Small Businesses

Scott’s story is a reminder that smart marketing isn’t about being flashy—it’s about being strategic, intentional, and everywhere your customer is. At Simply Be Found, we teach small business owners to use the same approach:

• Be visible across platforms, not just one.
• Optimize for action, not just attention.
• Make technology work for you, not overwhelm you.

Want To Start Marketing Smarter?

Let’s talk about how Simply Be Found can turn your ideas into impact. You can start by checking out our membership benefits so you can see how Dean, Rob, and the rest of the Simply Be Found team can help.

Transcript

• 0:00 | Intro — Meet Scott Taube from Bad Cards for Good Golfers
• 0:27 | What is Bad Cards for Good Golfers?
• 1:16 | Making Golf More Fun and Inclusive
• 2:14 | How the Game Works (Card Examples)
• 4:00 | The Drinking Expansion Pack Story
• 5:43 | The Origins of the Game Idea
• 7:04 | Prototyping the Cards and Getting Started
• 8:46 | Designing the Brand and First Launch
• 10:00 | TikTok Virality and the First Sellout
• 11:14 | Understanding Conversion vs Views
• 13:03 | Second Viral Hit and Lessons Learned
• 14:44 | Why Attention is the New Currency
• 16:00 | eCommerce vs Social Media Platforms
• 18:08 | Sales Funnel Strategy & TikTok’s Role
• 20:46 | Multi-Channel Presence and Shopify Integration
• 23:06 | Running Giveaways with Purpose
• 25:00 | Repurposing Content and Influencer Strategy
• 26:46 | Owning Your Audience (DM Funnels + Email)
• 29:03 | Instagram’s Trial Reels Hack
• 31:00 | Posting Natively vs Automation Tools
• 34:00 | Social Media API Limitations
• 36:02 | Using Bad Cards as a Testing Ground
• 37:48 | How Scott’s Marketing Company Benefits from Bad Cards
• 39:20 | Data-Driven Marketing Wins 41:00 | LinkedIn for B2B vs B2C
• 43:30 | Future of VR, AR & Social Media Evolution
• 46:05 | Ads in Augmented Reality & Personalization
• 49:00 | Virtual Storefronts and Shopping in VR
• 52:16 | Human Psychology and Marketing Fundamentals
• 54:00 | Why Every Platform is Just a Channel
• 56:03 | Marketing’s Next Frontier with AI
• 59:27 | Final Thoughts on Social Commerce & Data Ownership
• 1:03:00 | Reddit, Hate Comments, and Free Exposure
• 1:05:35 | The Power of Email Marketing & CRM Strategy
• 1:08:08 | Why Scott Embraces Platform Algorithms
• 1:11:06 | Educating Clients on Real Social Metrics
• 1:15:00 | B2B vs B2C Content Expectations
• 1:18:00 | Final Takeaways and Where to Find Scott

0:00 | Intro — Meet Scott Taube from Bad Cards for Good Golfers

Host: Welcome to the Simply Be Found huddle where Dean and Rob talk about everything business and today we have our guest Scott on. Scott, welcome! How are you doing?

Scott: Doing great, thanks for having me.

Host: Perfect. Can you tell everybody a little bit about you and what you’re about before we kind of get into a conversation and just get started?

Scott: Yeah, so I am representing my company Bad Cards for Good Golfers. So we make fun on-course card games to mix up rounds of golf.

0:27 | What is Bad Cards for Good Golfers?

Scott: So whether you’re into drinking, gambling, or just having a good laugh, our games are kind of designed to make golf feel a little more inviting, a little more inclusive, take the pressure off of scorekeeping and really put the focus on really having fun and enjoying the round. We launched in 2021 and had some viral success, and it’s just kept climbing and climbing from there and here I am today.

Dean: Perfect. I know nothing about golf. I’m really good at putt-putting golf. That’s about it. I’ve only been on one golf course my entire life and that was during my divorce, and I remember this cart that was driving through and that’s about all I remember.

Rob: So Dean, you didn’t hang out with… So Scott, I was around a lot of the rodeo guys, professional rodeo people, and we used to play this thing called cowboy golf and anything goes.

1:16 | Making Golf More Fun and Inclusive

Rob: I played with these guys that were bull fighters and cowboy protection and that kind of thing, and the whole point of it was—I was a little younger at the time, a little more stupid—is before they had the tops on golf carts, we’d run and try to jump over the golf cart that was running at you full speed kind of thing. So my idea of golf is a whole different animal.

Rob: I’m a horrible golfer. I go out with six balls in my bag and I come back with 20 because I hit the balls at all spots down by the course, and I go back and get all these new balls.

Scott: You’re in good company.

Rob: So what is it you do to make golf different? Now I’m kind of curious.

2:14 | How the Game Works (Card Examples)

Scott: Yeah, so let me see if I have a… My studio is so dark right now. Got an open game, so this is our main game. We say if Cards Against Humanity and Top Golf had a baby and abandoned it on the golf course. So our main game’s 107 different playable cards and five different categories.

Scott: The idea is you draw a card before taking the tee box and then do whatever it says. Some of the cards are going to make the rounds a little easier, some are going to make the hole a little harder, some are just going to get you laughing.

Scott: A lot of them are pretty simple. So like this one right here—since you’re a putt-putt guy, I’ll throw this one up. So it’s “Toe putts”—you can’t use your putter on this hole, like high five iron only.

Scott: This one’s fun, it’s called “Prediction”—you must select your next club before hitting your current shot. So you kind of have to be like, “All right I want it to land here,” and you’re going to pick your club accordingly. And if you have the wrong club in your hands, then you’re just kind of damage control from there.

Scott: So there’s hard ones, there’s good ones, there’s fun ones. There’s attack cards in our game which are cards you get to play against other players. Simple thing, there’s one called “Walk it off” where they have to pick up their bag off the golf cart and walk the entire hole.

Scott: Just simple fun stuff like “Kickball” where after everyone’s tee shot, you get to pick one player and kick their ball as hard as you can in any direction. That’s really fun when they’re real close to a hazard or a lake and you just walk up and kick their ball into the water. It’s very satisfying.

4:00 | The Drinking Expansion Pack Story

Rob: So how many adult beverages does it take to dream this thing up?

Scott: Oh man, this was ironically a sober venture. You know, it was funny because we made the decision early on when designing the game: “All right, how dirty do we make it?” There were all those decisions and we decided to make it kind of like PG-13, so innuendo for sure, nothing blatantly terrible.

Scott: We’re tamer than Cards Against Humanity, I believe, and they’re sold in Walmart, Target, so I felt like that was a good benchmark for us. And then for the drinking rules, we asked and got a bunch of feedback of people saying, “I don’t know, the idea was like if we didn’t include drinking rules then we didn’t have to make it 21 and up.”

Scott: So we released a drinking rules expansion pack designed to mix into the game. The idea is if you want to have drinking rules, you mix those in. They’re the same card categories, and every now and then you pop one up.

Scott: The drinking rules are really fun because a lot of them are like, “While your tee shot’s in flight, everyone has to chug until it lands.”

Scott: But then there’s stuff where we just thought, “What can we do that’s out of the box? How can you just use the drink as a prop?” There’s one called “Hold it” where it’s like you have to play this entire hole, you can’t set your drink down. That’s really funny to watch people try to figure out how to hold it in their mouth by the top of the can and try to swing. Yeah, fun stuff like that.

Rob: Or if you’re playing with the right guy, he’ll just go get his drink and put it on his head.

Scott: Exactly. Little beer in the pocket. I have my straw, I’m good. I planned for this—little lanyard around the neck, good to go.

5:43 | The Origins of the Game Idea

Host: So how did you come up with this?

Scott: I was just a terrible golfer. I grew up playing just for fun, like with my brother. We’d go to like par three courses and just hack away out there.

Scott: My senior year of high school, my parents moved to a neighborhood on a golf course, and part of them buying the home is they got like a membership for the first year. So I’d go out golfing with my dad. Usually he’d get off work, if I was home in the summers, and then we’d walk through our backyard, tee off on the 10th hole, play 10, 11, 12, and by then it’d get dark, and we’d cross the street and walk home.

Scott: So I enjoyed playing. I played on my middle school golf team, but I was somebody who could never break a hundred by any means—so a bad golfer.

Scott: I had a friend of mine in Nashville that I know from music and touring, and he was like, “Hey, let’s go out and golf.” And he is a single-digit handicap. My rule is like, “All right cool, but you can’t give me any advice. I’ll go out and have a blast, I enjoy it, but I’m not working on my game so don’t give me swing tips, don’t get in my head.” And he was like, “Deal.”

Scott: As we were playing, we just started making up sort of fun weird things to level the playing field, like simple things like, “All right, we’ll both hit driver but then we’re both going to take my drive, and once we get on the green, you can putt twice from your first position.”

7:04 | Prototyping the Cards and Getting Started

Scott: You know, things like that to try and even it up without just adding strokes. And then we kept coming up with weirder and weirder ideas, and I just kept thinking about it afterwards. Just kind of how I’m wired, it’s like, “Oh you know what else would be funny?” This should be all saved somewhere, like, “What if it’s a card game?”

Scott: And it was four years later, kind of during COVID, and I had a bit of a creative lull, and my workload was a little light and I had some free time. I was talking about it at a party—we were playing cards with some people from our apartment, and I told them about this game.

Scott: Then that night I was just like, “Man, I’m going to be this guy telling the story into my 60s, like ‘Or someone else is going to do it,’ and I’m like, ‘I had that idea.'” And my wife was like, “Well, what would it take? Can you do it?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe, probably.” So I bootstrapped it.

Scott: I called my buddy who I’d done that round with and I was like, “Hey, you remember this game?” And he was like, “Yeah, I’m into it. I would invest in it. I’d love to be involved.” So I was like, “All right, I’m going to start a Google doc. I’ll share it with you, and as you think of stuff, plug it in. Let’s start there, let’s see if we can come up with a bunch of ideas.”

Scott: I figured out with some math that a card count would have been around 110 cards, which would be kind of like one of the break points. I was thinking 150 cards in my head—well, I was thinking 150 ideas. It’s like 52 in a box plus the instruction cards, so a normal playing card deck typically fits about 55 physical cards. So I’m like, “Okay, double it, and that should probably work.”

Scott: At the end of the weekend, I had 75 ideas written down. I had a note pad on my phone, and I was just thinking of ideas throughout the day. So the ideas came actually just pretty quickly.

8:46 | Designing the Brand and First Launch

Scott: And then just designed the cards. I had enough knowledge of Photoshop to get in there and kind of get my hands dirty, sent some comps to a buddy, again from my music days, who did a bunch of band merch and stuff. He’s an illustrator and a graphic designer, and I’m like, “Hey, here’s what I want for the logo, but I need you to actually make it.”

Scott: So this is our logo here with the little FORE and the teeth and the little Jolly Rogers with golf clubs.

Rob: I like it.

Scott: And from that, it just came down to the next step. It was always the next step because I had never launched e-commerce before. I knew marketing, I knew social media and digital marketing, branding—we had branding, voice, I had all that all day long.

Scott: But man, creating an e-commerce site, managing e-commerce, 3PL fulfillment, shipping, taxes, duties, sourcing—it was one step at a time. Like, we got to find someone to make these. So I reached out to all these different companies, some companies overseas, and they sent me cards. Cards were easy, boxes were harder to find—really a box we liked and that we could get made custom for us.

10:00 | TikTok Virality and the First Sellout

Scott: Samples sent in, and then we picked one, we designed it, we sent it off and got the first—I think we ordered 750 for our first run, having no idea if they would even sell.

Scott: We put our explainer up on TikTok, and this was in 2021 or so. Our explainer video was at that time, because they limited to 60 seconds, it was in three parts. And one day our store started going off, and we realized one of those had just—I say viral, but it wouldn’t even really be considered viral at the moment—but a couple hundred thousand views on it.

Scott: But it was converting really, really high—really high shares, really high purchase rate, really high conversion. And we sold out in a matter of days, and then rolled that all into another round. We put all that money into 2,400 units air-freighted back so we could keep our momentum up.

Scott: We were pre-selling during that time, so by the time those landed, we were sold out in a week. And then we kept rolling, so we’re ordering 10,000-20,000 at a time.

11:14 | Understanding Conversion vs Views

Rob: You made a really important comment though that I think a lot of business owners miss out on—it’s not the number of views and stuff, it’s the conversion rate that really makes it happen. Do you think that was really the factor? I mean, you could have had 200,000 views and only converted a few, that would have never taken off for you. So can you explain the process a little bit on how that worked for you?

Scott: Yeah, there’s so many factors at play. I think what really helped us was, while it doesn’t seem like a terribly original idea, I was convinced that somebody else had done this. And since then, there’s half a dozen different games out there, which we expected.

Scott: Actually, another company launched really at the same time as us—like we had product in the ocean because it took three months to get it, and they released on Amazon. I’m like, “Oh crap, they’re going to think we copied them.” But it was great because if I had seen their game, I maybe would have not done it. I’d have been like, “All right, it’s already out there.”

Scott: But yeah, I think the fact that it’s a unique idea. When you think of virality and sharing, people want that social value. When you share ideas and information, it’s wired into us, it’s a survival mechanism.

Scott: So when you see something that you’ve never heard of and you feel like you’re on the start of the trend, there’s this real pull to share it. Even though most of the people that probably watched that video were not golfers, they knew a golfer and they sent it to them. And they thought, “Oh that’s funny,” and they sent it to some other people, and then they bought it.

Scott: So I think it being just a unique idea, also kind of at the time when social selling—people were comfortable, now are very comfortable buying from just anybody on the internet. It doesn’t have to be a store, can be on somebody’s Shopify, small business, things like that, Amazon. So it was just kind of the right intersection for everything.

Scott: But yeah, it converted really high. And of course that’s amazing, and you wish everything would convert at that many sales per view. It’s not always the case, but it’s nice when it happens.

13:03 | Second Viral Hit and Lessons Learned

Scott: We had a video last October, something like that, about a year, a little over a year ago, that went mega viral for us. It was us reading negative ad comments and kind of blind reading and then blind reading the responses from our intern.

Scott: So the whole premise was I had already set everything up so that I could do it with my business partner. So we’re in a golf cart, and he was blind reading everything. The idea was like, “Hey, we discovered this was happening. We got to figure out, are we supposed to fire this person or give him a promotion? What do you think?” And then we were reading these savage replies.

Scott: It went super viral, and not really even to a golf audience, because it appeals—sure, it’s golf, but it’s really more about the story of karma and putting people in their place and standing up to the Karens of the world. And I think it’s pushing like 14 million views now—huge sales boost from that.

Scott: It converted at a way lower rate than the original video because the targeting was so much broader, but once you have 13-14 million views, I mean, the scale of that—it converts at half a percent, and that’s still a huge lift.

Scott: So yeah, some videos convert really high, ones are kind of more entertainment.

14:44 | Why Attention is the New Currency

Scott: But that’s the thing—when you’re releasing social media content, the most finite resource is not money. You’re not asking for people’s money. That isn’t the biggest ask—it’s asking for their time. That’s the biggest ask, asking for their attention.

Scott: And that’s what companies like mine and everyone else, when you’re advertising, you’re vying for people’s attention. You go for the lowest cost per attention. If you get somebody to pay attention to you for four or five seconds, that’s so valuable.

Scott: So really making sure that you capitalize on that, whether it’s educating, informing, entertaining, or converting. Once you realize that everybody’s only got 24 hours a day, and you’re not awake for all of those, and you only spend so much of that time on your devices, and all these advertisers are buying for your attention—so you just have to have the better ad, or the better content, the thing that’s more entertaining or is going to get them to stop scrolling. And that gets harder and harder as people get better and better at making good content.

16:00 | eCommerce vs Social Media Platforms

Rob: And the algorithms have changed. So, Scott, you own a social media company as well, so you have that on top of this one.

Rob: The social world is starting to take this huge shift. I had a conversation with our team this morning. I’m like, “All right, we’re not going to put as many videos out to social as we were. We’re going to focus on getting those to YouTube because that’s working better for the B2B world.”

Rob: But I mean, you still have to go to TikTok, you still have to do all that stuff for those reels, but not as much. Start aiming towards our website and making our website the center point to where the blog has the video, it has the content, has all that because we have a higher conversion rate if they come into the website piece.

Rob: Now I think e-commerce fits into that same piece. You have to—it all depends on what you have inside of your alignment of how they’re going to buy, but if they can’t buy directly on that social media platform, you got to aim them to where they can make that purchase.

Rob: So it’s a whole entire dance and balance more than it ever has been because you want to be able to also get them to convert and to be able to get those conversions. Most of the time in e-commerce, they have to be on your website. Do you agree on that?

Scott: I mean, for us as an e-commerce company—B2B certainly—but for us it’s sort of a double-edged sword. We can sell everywhere. Like we now have TikTok shop, people are very comfortable with that. So our products are on TikTok shop, we’re on Meta shop, we have select products on Amazon FBA, and then our website obviously.

Scott: I would prefer that people check out on our website for a number of reasons. One, we’re able to capture their info, which with Amazon FBA we don’t. So we don’t have that sort of data, which obviously for re-engaging them when we have new products coming out or expansion packs, but also just for the data on our end on the back end to do campaign lookalike audiences and things like that—email is really great to have.

Scott: But the other problem you run into—for us, I’ll run a meta campaign that’s primed to convert. So the idea is that they’re converting on Meta Shop or it goes to our website and they convert on our website. But we have to factor in this entire halo effect—just because somebody discovers you in a place where they like to consume media doesn’t mean they’re going to check out in that place.

18:08 | Sales Funnel Strategy & TikTok’s Role

Scott: And so you have to be everywhere. Luckily with Shopify, they have—they’re pretty early to market with integrated plugins for all of the other platforms, so everything runs through Shopify. There’s a little bit of setup on Meta, a little bit of setup on TikTok shop, but it all runs through Shopify, which means our 3PL, it all stays nice and organized. Amazon not so much.

Scott: The customer behavior—so what we saw on TikTok when things were going viral on TikTok, you would expect to see on our website traffic because—this was when we launched, it was before TikTok shop was around. You would expect to see that the website traffic was coming from TikTok because our website was linked in the bio.

Scott: What they were doing was they were going to Google and they were googling our name natively. So we had all these organic spikes in our name, and the only reason they would have heard about us was from this TikTok video.

Scott: So we learned very early on the customer behavior is like, “Okay, great, you need to make sure your SEO is on point because people are going there.”

Scott: What we’ve realized, we take a very holistic approach when we look at our acquisition costs. We have to go all in, which is tough because when you’re pulling levers on meta ads, you have to consider the whole landscape. Because what we’ll see is you would look at a meta ad that’s set to convert and it’s converting at $25 per sale—that’s absolute trash, you’re losing money. But when that happens, they’re going and googling you. They’re going to Google, Amazon a lot of the time. And then we see an uptick.

Scott: So we have sort of a baseline on our Amazon because we do advertise on Amazon, so we have baseline numbers. And any elevation from that, we sort of have to attribute to where the traffic’s coming from. So it’s a little messier.

Scott: But yeah, you can sell everywhere, and you have to, because people will consume their media how they want to consume it. I like TikTok for certain things, I like Meta or Instagram for certain things. There’s people who just live on YouTube. That doesn’t necessarily mean that when I buy something, I want to shop on TikTok or Meta—I want to go to Amazon, see if it’s there first because I’m a Prime member, and I’ll add it to my cart and it’ll show up with everything else, and I don’t have to put my info in, so I don’t have to think about it, it’s just done.

20:46 | Multi-Channel Presence and Shopify Integration

Scott: I do try to order directly from websites when at all possible. We offer free shipping and everything. I mean, if you’re trying to support smaller brands, obviously always just go to their website because they’re going to make the best margin from that. Even like fulfillment and stuff, our team makes money on that. And so it’s always a better way.

Scott: But yeah, you just got to be everywhere and easily accessible for when they want to make that purchase, so there’s the least amount of resistance as possible.

Rob: Well, there’s a key piece that you brought up there. You might be really sucking eggs inside of this platform or this type of network or however—you don’t know where anything is going to go viral at or viral for you. Because looking at something of getting 100,000 views on something, you’ll go, “Great!” but if you made no sales off it, it doesn’t matter.

Rob: So you want to be able to make sure you go viral for you, which is going to make your bottom line bigger. But being everywhere is the whole entire key to that because you want to be wherever they’re going to look for you. You want to be inside that spot for them to make that purchase.

Rob: And you almost have to take your marketing—still, not as much reporting as we have, as much data points that we have—you still don’t know exactly where your customers are coming from. They might find you on ChatGPT using their search functions, they might find you on voice search, they might find you on Google, Bing, all these different places, social media networks.

Rob: So we look at that as a whole entire tree. So you have your organic piece at the bottom—I’m not sure if you’ve watched any of our stuff on this—but you have the organic piece at the bottom, which is your citations, your website, and then you have all your stuff up inside of your tree. Well, everything is connected.

Rob: So when you add up your marketing budget, you have to put it as one line item and then go, “What are my sales?” And that’s really what your numbers are, because they might have consumed you over here, bought over here, and connecting that A to B doesn’t always exist.

Scott: Yeah, and I think it’s important too when you’re running a campaign for anything, especially in our world, I always try to stack as many KPIs as I can. When it comes to those key performance indicators, obviously conversion is what you want, right? Number one, you want it to convert, you want to make money off of it.

Scott: But what if this viral piece of content doesn’t convert? What else can I grab out of it?

23:06 | Running Giveaways with Purpose

Scott: We might use, let’s take a giveaway for example. So we’re running a giveaway right now with another direct-to-consumer golf club brand. So we’re giving away a full set of their wedges and a full set of their irons, running this giveaway for a month.

Scott: Now, giveaways notoriously attract people who want stuff for free—they don’t always convert, right? So just by having a giveaway post, those tend to go a little more viral naturally because you have people tagging in comments and sharing, so you are getting that echo.

Scott: So provided you had to pay for the prize—say you paid $700 for this giveaway prize—it’s like, “All right, obviously I want it to convert a bunch, but what else can I get from this to make it all worth it?” And so whether that’s pieces of user-generated content from people submitting stuff, an email grab…

Scott: We run a mini chat salesunnel, so it’s basically like a CRM funnel that all runs on the back end of Meta, so Messenger and Instagram. So basically it’s an opt-in function, it’s a way to grab emails in exchange for entering. You know, ain’t no such thing as a free lunch—give us your email. That gives us the opportunity to reach back out to you, to reconnect, to sell you products, to remind you when holidays are coming up, to hopefully convert that to a sale later.

Scott: So it always comes down to like, how many things can we get out of this? If we do an influencer campaign where we’ve paid an influencer, I’m going to make sure that the language of our contract gives me access to the final video and I have permission to run it as an ad.

Scott: Because say the influencer campaign didn’t convert and I’ve invested this money—well, suddenly I have a nice, really good organic, professional-looking, user-generated piece of content that I can now run as an ad. So instead of paying somebody to shoot ad creative, I’m doubling up on that.

25:00 | Repurposing Content and Influencer Strategy

Scott: So finding the most KPIs you can have—obviously if it doesn’t hit your ideal, your number one, and you have these other ones, cool, you learned something. Here’s what I gained from this.

Scott: So just sort of setting yourself up for success in that way, I think, is important, especially when you’re doing a marketing play like a giveaway or an influencer campaign or something sort of out of the box—a tournament, a live event, whatever that’s going to be.

Rob: So the process of redirecting is really important for you on those kinds of promotions. Is that what you’re saying, Scott?

Scott: Yeah, I think the retargeting, the regrouping, the repurposing—there’s so much stuff going on behind the scenes. And I think a lot of business owners have no idea that all that stuff even exists because they’re used to running their business. So if you don’t have the marketing background, you don’t know what’s possible out here.

Scott: I mean, it’s—for us, email is always king still, because any new platform that comes up, people are going to sign up with their email, or an API that’s running through a social platform like Meta that already has their email.

Scott: The goal is to link back to that specific person. So if you want to—I mean, obviously TikTok came around, whatever the next thing is, we’ll have 70,000 emails to load into that to try and find our audience on that, so we start with a leg up.

Scott: And then of course, email drip campaigns for us are one of the higher converting sales channels for us.

26:46 | Owning Your Audience (DM Funnels + Email)

Scott: A lot of the stuff that we do when we’re doing contests—somebody opts in for a contest or a giveaway, and we’re just like, “Click here to enter.” They enter, we end up with, “Just give us your email address, that’s how we contact winners anyway,” they do all of that, they get through, and like, “Cool, you’re in to win now.”

Scott: If they come back for the next giveaway the next month and they opt in, our system already knows we have their email address, so they just opt in, they’re good to go.

Scott: Obviously we follow up with some sort of like, “Hey, by the way, here’s what we sell, here’s what we do, here’s some customer reviews.” There’s sort of this little mini drip campaign thing, and then we leave it. But we’re able to try to do some retarget marketing to them as well.

Rob: For social, for ads, I’m assuming?

Scott: No, so the whole point of doing this mini chat function is to own our audience. Because currently, we don’t own our audience. You own your email list, but you don’t own your social media audience like you think you do.

Scott: I mean, we have 133,000 followers, but I don’t get to reach them all the time. I get a percentage of them if the algorithm deems that I can reach them.

Rob: All right, so I saw a report over the weekend that’s 3%. So when you post out to Facebook, it’s an average of 3% of whatever your following is got to see that post.

Scott: Wow, 3% has actually been the benchmark for my company for a long time. It’s been the benchmark on engagement. Like when we work with influencers and stuff, a 3% or better engagement rate is really what you want.

Scott: There are workarounds. It’s funny because our goal is to reach a new audience always. Yeah, we put out fun stuff and videos, and I love that our followers engage and things like that, but our goal is always to reach a new audience, to reach new people, to hear about our brand, buy our products and stuff.

Scott: When you put something on social media, the way it works is you get 3% of your audience, right? So in the first—and there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors around all this—but the gist is, you release something, it goes out to a select few of your followers. We’re going to see how they engage, we’re going to look at the shares, the playthrough rates, the likes, the engagements, the links, what they click on, all of that. We got to prove it out to that little bit.

Scott: Okay, cool, that worked out well, we’re going to serve it to a larger version audience, a larger version audience. And now we’re going to start trickling in people who don’t follow you, and these are the people that we want. So to get them, we have to have some sort of virality with our existing audience to be able to get over to that one.

29:03 | Instagram’s Trial Reels Hack

Scott: Well, Instagram has this feature out called trial reels, and their idea is that they want their content to do well. They want you to release good content. So they’re arming you with that. It’s like, “Hey, before you send something out to your followers, release it as a trial reel. We’ll only send it to people who don’t follow you. We’ll give you some free data to know whether you need to tweak or improve. Release a couple versions of it and then determine what to give to your followers.”

Scott: Which is awesome if you’re an influencer. You want to make sure like, “I don’t know which one of these versions is going to do better. I’m going to release them both and then figure out what to give to my followers.”

Scott: We’re on the other side of it. We’re like, “You’re telling me I’m going to get guaranteed 2,500 eyeballs who don’t follow us on everything?” So we’re posting a bunch of stuff that we’ve already posted that’s already on our feed. We have years of organic content, so we just filled our trial reels with it. So everything you post is like 2,500 new eyes, 2,500 new eyes, and we don’t end up sharing it to our main feed—delete it, put up another one, put up another one. So exploiting those sort of features, using the opposite side of it because it benefits us.

Rob: You know where that fits into what I’m going to say, don’t you?

Scott: No, it’s kind of like your whole—

Rob: It’s kind of like your whole kindergarten thing. You give a marketer a little bit of something that works really well, and marketers will ruin the shit out of it. They will take that away because everybody’s doing that now.

Rob: All right, Scott, what was the name of that program again? Could you repeat that for everybody?

31:00 | Posting Natively vs Automation Tools

Scott: It’s just called Trial Reels, and it’s on Instagram. It’s been around for a bit.

Rob: Right, but a lot of people don’t understand, they don’t know that that’s even there. That’s a great piece of information for our small business people that are listening to us, or any size business that’s listening to us.

Rob: I mean, it’s one of those things—Dean, I love our social media suite, but our social media suite is for the busy business owner that wants to broadcast everything at one spot. There is a lot of benefits—my biggest poll in everything, there’s a lot of benefits to logging directly into some of these social media platforms and posting natively.

Scott: Yeah, it’s a bummer because we do a lot of the same thing. You want to be able to put it in one place. Realistically, I would just love all of the options to the nth degree, that you can tweak all the levers that you can pull.

Scott: With Sprout Social, Hootsuite, a lot of the functionality is there, but it’s not exact. And there’s even algorithmic things where you want to add text on screen. Even if I’ve done captions in another program, they reward the things on screen. So even putting text on screen and pulling it completely off the screen—things like that where you’re just trying to please the algorithm a lot of times.

Scott: So yeah, it’s an ever-moving target. There is benefit to working directly within a platform like you were saying, Robert, but I think really for that, it’s like, commit to one or two that are your most viable, and then outside of that, let them fly.

Scott: We produce for Instagram and TikTok, and we let that fly to Shorts, and we let that fly to Facebook. So it’s not optimized for those channels, but we’re not going to devote that much manpower to specifically make post tweaks for each of those. It’s just you run it, you gotta pick your battles there.

Rob: It’s better than nothing because you never know which one’s going to hit. But that’s one of those things where I mean, they only release certain stuff out to the API for like our social media suite, which competes with Buffer, Hootsuite, Social Pilot—all those things. We’ll go neck and neck with them any day of the week with our social media suite.

34:00 | Social Media API Limitations

Rob: But there’s just certain things that don’t get released to us that you can do natively that you cannot do from the API calls. And there’s things that happen inside of certain profiles inside of social media. And Dean, I know that’s an area you really haven’t touched much on as far as that whole world.

Rob: But there’s something that Scott might have access to that I don’t have access to, but I might have access to this other feature over here that he doesn’t have access to. And it’s all based on how many followers, how much engagement, what they’re trying—there’s beta stuff that’s constantly coming out from the networks.

Dean: Oh yeah, like my camera had an AI function all of a sudden following me. I shut it off, and then I do some hand gesture and it keeps kicking back on. I mean, nothing’s perfect in this.

Scott: Yeah, I think the trial reels is pretty much rolled out to everybody, but we got it kind of early, and I was like, “Oh, I see what they’re trying to do with this, but here’s how I want to use it.”

Scott: Yeah, working natively can be a benefit, but it’s also a big time commitment. So it has to be something where the juice is worth the squeeze for you. And then outside of that, just being everywhere, easy to find, popping up in the world and all these different channels—it’s a lot to keep up with, but it’s important.

Scott: It’s great to have tools that have an automatically built API. I was mentioning earlier on the e-commerce side, there’s a lot of that functionality that works really well that goes directly to our Shopify. I couldn’t imagine having to individually manage different sales channels because we’re on half a dozen. To be in there managing each one every day, it would just be a nightmare—inventory not all syncing up. It would be crazy.

Rob: So I use WooCommerce for all that, for all my big e-commerce sites, and I’m able to do the same thing and pull it and have all the levers. I have that whole system built out for e-commerce.

Rob: E-commerce is a completely different ballgame than an actual retail shop, or if you’re talking about a contractor or whatever you’re talking about, Dean, in your other business. It dives into both of those different sides where you have your stores, but you also have your storefront. Which then, when you have both, you’ve touched on the stores a little bit for it, but you haven’t gotten to that next level. And there’s a lot of other things you could do inside of there as well.

Rob: But yours are so unique, it’s crazy. But that’s why every single business is very unique in its own way, and how you approach it is all going to be based on budget. That’s going to be a consideration in there, but the biggest consideration is going to be how much time do you have and where are you going to see the biggest benefit.

36:02 | Using Bad Cards as a Testing Ground

Scott: Yeah, time’s just another resource. Early on, you tend to have more time than budget, which is great. I think it’s great to start out scrappy and really try stuff and make it work and think outside of the box.

Scott: And then I think it’s helpful because then once you do backfill with budget, it’s dumping fuel on an already lit fire. You know it works for you, you’ve done the A/B testing. It’s really easy to burn through marketing budget trying stuff out.

Rob: Oh yeah, and ads lead you alive, especially ones that don’t work. I mean, it’s all a game that you have to be able to learn.

Rob: So Scott, you started off as a musician if I remember your backstory right. So you went from musician, then you started your social media marketing company, and then you went to starting off having this bad cards company going—am I looking at that right?

Scott: Yeah, and there was overlap with the marketing company and music as it was kind of something I did on the side—a lot of consulting and sort of 1099 freelance work. I worked for a bunch of social marketing companies, kind of hopped on projects for seasons.

Scott: And then COVID hit, and music touring was non-existent. So my wife and I—we were playing together and we had an electro-pop band at the time—we diverted our attention towards the marketing company because there was a lot of traction there, and we could scale it if we wanted to invest the time. And so we did, and it grew really fast.

Scott: We have a team of probably about eight now, and our COO runs a lot of the day-to-day. So I’m involved a lot less than I used to be, significantly less than I used to be. And it’s allowed me sort of the space to work on Bad Cards. So it was sort of like there was overlap between the music and marketing company, and then it was just marketing, and then we’re missing that creative component, then Bad Cards came in.

37:48 | How Scott’s Marketing Company Benefits from Bad Cards

Rob: So when you started Bad Cards and you started at the very beginning, you had to think about it like the business owner being in there and figure everything out. How much did you learn and implement now into your social media company?

Scott: What’s great is actually Bad Cards gets to be a proving ground for a lot of things that we’ll take into—

Rob: You could play, and it only hurts you, it doesn’t hurt somebody else.

Scott: Exactly, because I’m comfortable with—I didn’t want to say failure, but—trial and error. Because as long as you get data and you learn something, it’s like, “Cool, I know to avoid this in future, or this didn’t work.” Back down to the list.

Scott: When you’re talking to a client, they want to know what’s going to work for them. Obviously, there’s sometimes it’s like, “Here’s the theory, here’s how we think it’ll work, here’s what we’re expecting.” And then we’ll own like, “It didn’t work this way, we’re going to pivot,” or “Yeah, it worked great, it’s doing better.”

Scott: So things like I was talking about, the mini-chat salesunnel, the CRM directly through DM—that’s something that, when we talk about the algorithm and stuff, I think the thing you should always look for is: pretend you’re the algorithm. Pretend you’re Meta. If you’re advertising on Meta, what does Meta want? And then try to sort of scratch that itch.

39:20 | Data-Driven Marketing Wins

Scott: They want to push these new features. So if they’re pushing things like video, if they’re pushing things like instant experience, if they’re pushing things like DM conversations for conversion, you should do that stuff. Because they’re just going to give you extra love, because they’re kind of getting people to use the feature. So when you lean into new features—

Rob: Yeah, and they want it to be a success because they told, you know, they have investors. They’re like, “This is the next big thing,” and they’re going to pull some levers to make sure it’s the next big thing. So like, let’s take the benefit from that.

Scott: So I mean, the mini-chat, that’s what I was saying. There’s a lot of focus on moving to DMs and DM groups and DM messaging groups that they have, because they’re finding that users are spending more and more time in their DMs, especially on Instagram.

Scott: I think it’s because the user behavior goes to TikTok to consume, YouTube/YouTube Shorts to consume, and then back to their original platform to connect—much like I did with Facebook to Instagram. I’m a millennial, and a lot of the new people are like Snapchat to—you know, they’re going to keep the thing they started with because it’s their whole friend group, business, they communicate.

Scott: So anyway, with that, we decided, “Okay, I’m doing a big investment in this big roll out for this mini-chat, this DM CRM functionality.” Whatever I learn from this and whatever success or failure I see from this, I am able to take to my marketing company when I have a client that has a problem to solve. And I’m like, “This could be a way to do it.” Then I’ll have the data and the case study.

Scott: So yeah, you’re absolutely right—Bad Cards gets to be my case study for everything I want to try. It’s a little playground, and then anything I learn, I obviously carry that into consulting and contract work with our other marketing company.

41:00 | LinkedIn for B2B vs B2C

Dean: So I get asked a question—so we utilize Dean’s other company for that, and I’ve got my handful of companies. What we have inside of there, but I learned more by playing around with those. I wouldn’t be able to coach, I wouldn’t be able to innovate, we wouldn’t be able to build what we’ve built without being able to build it for a purpose and also be able to play with it. Because if one of my companies has a hiccup inside of it, it’s one of those things where, “Okay, well we learned, picked up the data.”

Dean: Failure is okay. You don’t learn how to ride a bike without falling a couple times. You learn that hurts, and then you learn how to ride a bike without your training wheels. So there’s a lot of stuff that comes from there.

Dean: We were just talking about the things that you’re comfortable with, what you started with. Where does LinkedIn fall for you? Do you find that workable? Because I’m visualizing business-to-business people being golfers, just because that seems to be the trend. Has that been a successful platform for you? Or are you a typical millennial and you didn’t try LinkedIn yet?

Scott: This being in my line of work, when there’s a new social media platform or a push for one or a demand for one, I’ll join it, I’ll participate. And that’s a big Gary Vee thing—don’t post anything until you’ve consumed content, so you understand the conversation being had and you can speak in a tone of voice that fits the room.

Scott: I downloaded the LinkedIn app and TikTok on the same day, and I spent time in both of them. And I definitely think there’s—they’re very different worlds.

Scott: It’s funny, all the platforms are different, but the human psychology and what people want is the same. I mean, it’s the same people on TikTok that are watching funny stuff or scrolling on Instagram reels that are on LinkedIn during the day, just allowed to be on LinkedIn on your—

Rob: I agree with Gary Vee on that, that they might be the same person inside of there, but when they’re in each network, they’re thinking about a different process and they consume the information differently.

Rob: If you guys and I were hanging out and we were having a conversation like this on a podcast, the language is going to be different, the tone is going to be different than if we were at a business meeting or if we were in a bar. And that’s something we tell our clients a lot of times when we’re running their social across different platforms.

43:30 | Future of VR, AR & Social Media Evolution

Rob: We’re like, “You need to speak—say what you’re going to say, but if we were in a business meeting, I would speak differently than if I was in a bar. If I was in a bar speaking like it would in a business meeting, you would get the ick and you’d be like, ‘What is happening?’ If I was in a business meeting speaking like we’re grabbing a drink at the bar, you’d be like, ‘This clown needs to get out of here.'”

Rob: So you need to have the right voice for the room. And so for a lot of companies, while you’re still keeping your branded voice, it needs to sort of shift across platforms to be a little more casual or whatever, but still maintaining your branding, your voice.

Rob: For LinkedIn, I read a lot of reports, I do a lot of research. We don’t do a ton of B2B with either of my companies. Realistically, as sort of a fan of a little more black hat, sort of gray area participation in marketing—I’ve done things on LinkedIn where essentially it’s like, “Cool, I want to reach the decision makers in this vertical.” And then I’ll use a program that will essentially scrape all the emails of anybody in that vertical, and then I can reach out to them. I’ll put those into a Meta ad and directly just reach out to that customer list because the cost per attention is cheaper on Meta, plus you’re kind of approaching them in their off hours when they’re just scrolling, which is nice.

Rob: So I do some different stuff like that versus LinkedIn ads. A lot of people I know in my industry that I’ve worked with, they complain about them so much that I’m just not going to say anything there.

Rob: But I mean, obviously B2B is a lot more expensive, but your acquisition costs typically tend to be a lot higher because that’s a much bigger—it’s not a $30 card game purchase, that’s tens of thousands plus of revenue that comes from that lead. So you can definitely afford to spend a lot more money on your acquisition cost for a lot of people going B2B.

Dean: I want you to try something for LinkedIn. I want you to take something you’re going to put out to TikTok for a short reel or out to Facebook and start posting it as you inside of your connections that you have inside of LinkedIn for you personally. Don’t do a company page, do it for you personally and send it out there just for a month. Anything you’re sending out to another network, just include it in there and just send it out and see how well it does.

Dean: Because I think you’re missing a little bit of an opportunity—I think you’re missing out on free opportunity because worst case scenario, they’re going to go, “I’m going to unconnect with you,” and I don’t think you really give a shit.

46:05 | Ads in Augmented Reality & Personalization

Scott: Well, kind of, kind of you do, but you don’t. With our marketing company, I mean, we’re a boutique agency, and so we’re pretty selective about clients, and we’re at sort of another growth point. So reaching out, we do use LinkedIn as part of a connecting point, and less of advertising, less hard selling, and more of like, that’s kind of done through email and stuff, and sort of a touch base of like, “Hey, we should be connected,” and that sort of trust building. So we do use it a lot for that.

Scott: So I could see my COO and my marketing team being like, “Hey man, what are you doing posting this—”

Rob: So I’m seeing kind of a shift inside of LinkedIn, and I’m seeing something kind of happen with Bing majorly with that. So Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so I don’t know if you knew that or not, but Microsoft owns it. So you have Bing places.

Rob: I am feeling that Microsoft is getting ready to make a huge shift since Microsoft has such a big share inside of OpenAI. I see something happening between LinkedIn, Bing places, and ChatGPT or OpenAI for the part that they have. I see something kind of emerging from what I’m seeing from the technical big overall picture. They’re working on something—I don’t know what it is, but I think it’s going to change LinkedIn for how that social environment is going to work.

Scott: That’s interesting. I mean, that’s always my thought too is just like, “Oh, if you’ve got essentially got a social media network you’re allowed to kind of play with at work”—”Oh, it’s research.”

Scott: I had a job in college at a campus TV station. When I had no work to do, I would just go to the Apple website—they had movie trailers, like it was a big thing. They just showed all the movie trailers on their website. I would just watch movie trailers all day because I’m like, “Man, I don’t know, this is kind of work.”

Rob: Most firewalls don’t block LinkedIn. A lot of firewalls, corporations are now blocking all social media networks besides that one.

Rob: When I look at things from a data aspect for how the world is kind of changing for social, for search, and all the stuff that’s mixed in there—for one, I think we’re going to have some new social media platforms pop up this year or at the beginning of next year. Don’t know what those are going to look like or be, but I think they’re going to be more AI based. Facebook will probably go buy them to try to stay on top of it—that seems to be the new thing that ends up happening.

49:00 | Virtual Storefronts and Shopping in VR

Scott: That’s always interesting to me when people always ask, “Oh, when’s the next social media platform coming up?” And I’m like, “When there’s a need.” What do you think is missing right now? Because with TikTok came video—that was it. It was video first, and Instagram was picture, was kind of the spin-off of photos.

Scott: Well, you had Twitter, and then that was just text, and then it came into Instagram because that was more photos. So it’s like you would have Twitter but you would also have Instagram, and then it would be like, “Okay, I’ll have Instagram but I’ll also have TikTok.”

Scott: And it was sort of backfilled with features, right? So now you can post videos and photos—you could post photos on Twitter once Instagram came out. And then same thing with video working back. But what’s the next missing component outside of just algorithm?

Rob: The virtual reality stuff, which makes no sense to me whatsoever. Meta’s got that covered.

Rob: I haven’t played—I’ve never worn any of the virtual reality stuff yet. I have not went into the metaverse yet. Do you play video games, Robert?

Rob: Nothing.

Scott: Never mind, I’m just saying—I grew up playing Halo and Call of Duty and stuff, and I tell you what man, I’ve had VR for a hot minute, and first-person shooters in it are incredible.

Dean: I heard it takes you into a whole world. I’ve never been a big gamer. I won Super Mario Brothers, the very first version, and burned out four TVs and three consoles to be able to accomplish that. All you had is the pause button—you didn’t have a save button back then. But no, I never really got into games.

Dean: I think the—I think really what it’s going to be, and I’ve seen a lot of movement, people buying up real estate in the metaverse, and it’s like, “Cool, we’re going to have this virtual storefront,” things like that. And then we saw this stuff with NFTs, and I’m like, there’s still—there’s still some functionality in that. It kind of hit this big old hype, but there is actual practical functionality that will kind of backfill.

Dean: I think the next thing is augmented reality, mixed reality. So you’re wearing a device, and you see this with like the Meta glasses and stuff where you’re seeing digital stuff within a physical space.

Dean: On the gaming side, there’s a game which I have not downloaded yet because I don’t have anyone to play with, but you go through your house. It’s a shooter game, and you design the level through your house. Like you’re walking through, you build a barrier, you put guns, you put ammo, you put charge points, and then you’re playing laser tag in your house in this VR space, and you’re hiding behind stuff that you built. And it’s augmented, so you’re seeing your actual space with these other things on it.

52:16 | Human Psychology and Marketing Fundamentals

Rob: Talk about a mind fuck. I mean, geez, dude, it’s so cool. Next thing you know, you blow up your TV, and you didn’t know if it was real or if it was fake.

Scott: I tell you what, on the game that I play, it’s basically Meta’s version of Fortnite. So you know, you drop in with a squad, it’s this whole big map that gets smaller and smaller as you go to keep you forcing the teams together. You’re getting ammo, you’re getting guns, you’re getting upgrades, and then you’re fighting other teams, things like that.

Scott: Well, part of the functionality of this game is you can climb anything and you can jump off of anything. And if you open your wings, you have this wing suit that comes out, and you can glide anywhere.

Scott: So I’m terrified of heights, and they have these windmills in the game that would be a couple hundred feet tall in real life. So you’re literally climbing, climbing, climbing up to the top of the windmill, and you’re looking down. My hands are sweating so bad, and you have to step off of this thing and open your arms.

Scott: So when you see people jumping into their TV on those TikTok compilations—I get it. When they get to the end of the balance beam and they dive into the wall—it’s immersive. And that’s the thing—your brain doesn’t know the difference. It’s responding—it’s like watching a scary movie. You know there’s not a murderer in the movie theater with you, but you’re still having the visual reaction.

Rob: You guys are talking a foreign language, man. My first video game was Pong, come on.

Scott: I like Pong.

Rob: But you know what I liked? If I go back to the Atari games before the Nintendo came out, I really liked Frogger.

Scott: Classic.

Rob: But I don’t know what is going to be next, and I don’t know—I think there’s gonna be some major shifts, and there’s already been some major shifts for how businesses are being found just in general, but for what it means for the business world, what it means for how people consume content, I don’t know.

Rob: We’ve taken such big, huge jumps in technology. I mean, when I was a kid, you went to Blockbuster and rented a movie. Actually, it was before Blockbuster even existed—you went to a family place, and they had a curtain in the back, and they had adult movies behind—

Dean: Be kind, rewind, come on you guys, right?

54:00 | Why Every Platform is Just a Channel

Rob: I mean, I can physically close my eyes and remember exactly how that store was laid out. But it’s one of those things where we’ve taken such big jumps, and I don’t know where it’s going to go from that piece.

Rob: I was talking to a group of investors over the last week, and they’re like, “Well, what do you think?” I’m like, “I don’t know what’s missing. Someone will figure out something that’s missing.”

Dean: We hit a plateau, aren’t we a little bit right now? It seems like we go to a plateau like in anything, and then all of a sudden somebody comes up with something.

Scott: I think VR and augmented reality are going to be the next really big thing with the big applications. I think AI obviously—AI is huge, and I think AI is going to be almost the best at like this data-driven component of it, of really kind of turning it up to 11. What we had before is just going to go through the roof because you have this AI processing stuff in the back end.

Scott: When I try to think of applications as a marketer, I’m like, “Okay, what would it look like?” Okay, I’m thinking, let’s just say VR—when this came around and people were buying space in Meta, I’m like, “Cool, is Bad Cards gonna have a virtual retail space? Like you can go shop our store, you can walk through it, you can draw cards, you can go hit out of little sand traps?”

Dean: Like, are you thinking that during this conversation?

56:03 | Marketing’s Next Frontier with AI

Scott: That is the bane of my existence. No, that’s always a question we get. It’s continually a no for me, but I’m not so stubborn that I won’t ever revisit it.

Scott: But yeah, it’s real hard to—I mean, we sell a card game for 30 bucks right now, and even with shipping and fulfillment, if we take an app, it makes it harder to make money. Obviously, we could do ad sales and subscriptions and stuff, but I’m essentially creating a problem for myself to solve.

Rob: I mean, that’s why I didn’t bring it up in the beginning of the conversation, because I had this whole entire argument and fight with myself while we’re having the conversation.

Scott: I think the biggest component is like our customer base—our followers are primarily golfers, male, stuff like that, but people who shop from us, it’s a pretty even split men/women, all age groups, because it’s a very giftable item. So the second we become an app, we lose the gifting.

Scott: Also, we’re in retail—we’re in PGA Tour Superstore, Shields, PGA airport stores, and a bunch of stuff. So we would lose that retail component as well.

Scott: But yeah, I mean, shoot, I’d set up a virtual store in a heartbeat. But the other thing too is just think about advertising. This is cost per attention, right? So you start having Meta glasses—everybody starts wearing these Ray-Ban glasses around for whatever functionality. And then when they look up at your store, your physical storefront, or your sign could be something that’s directly targeted to them. Are we now doing targeted ads to people in physical space as they walk around?

Rob: You take that to the next level, if you’re going to go that far—you take it to where they can come into your store, pay, and then it’s a group of them that are going to go golfing all together, and they’re going to play bad cards at the same exact time inside of virtual reality.

Scott: For sure, but I think if I’m—I can’t even imagine what that would cost to develop out.

Scott: But it’s all happening. If I think about, “Okay, I have a retail store, I have PGA Tour Superstore, I get golfers in there all the time, and I have products and stuff that are advertised in there, things like that.”

Scott: Or a stadium, and they have partners and stuff. Say I have a retail space, I have people coming in, and I have ads up. Well, suddenly, instead of that being a static ad, that could be a video ad. It’s showing different stuff because I know who my market is that’s in there, and these people are paying to be on there.

Scott: What if, instead of this smart TV that links up to any sort of AI glasses—because this is a world where everybody’s wearing them, right? So suddenly I have a signature on all of these people. So now, instead of selling the advertising space in my store, I’m selling advertising space almost like it’s an app. So you guys and me are all going to see different ads on this TV directed towards us because I’m an attentive audience there. There’s the attention—that’s what I’m selling.

Scott: It’s like stuff like that that was just totally not something we can even really comprehend because it’s just not there—but three years? So fast.

59:27 | Final Thoughts on Social Commerce & Data Ownership

Rob: We’re really close to it, it’ll be a whole new shift. And it’s going to be a shift where a certain market is there, and then it almost opens up the current market we’re in for everybody that’s on it because you’ll have a bunch of people that just go focus on that. And it actually makes this a lot easier to do than that.

Rob: Then you’ll have to make the shift to have both, and it’s going to be a huge pain in the butt for whatever is going to be coming, but I agree with that.

Scott: But I think the thing that’s always excited me with whether it’s a new platform, a new feature, or really when stuff goes away—when there’s a big hit, when adversity hits, when basically anything happens that levels the playing field—the people who are going to figure it out, who are going to get creative, are going to win. And that’s a place I like to be in.

Scott: I don’t like doing—there’s a lot of things you have to do because it works, and that’s why everyone does it, like email drip campaigns, not very sexy. It’s just like, “Cool, we have to do this stuff, but what can we do that no one else is doing?”

Scott: And so when there’s a new platform, figuring out the best way to be on it, to exploit it, to do the most with it—to me is always exciting. So when something new does come out, then the wheels start turning. It’s like, “All right, how do I do this?”

Scott: But it doesn’t matter what comes out next—the fundamentals of the marketing and the human behavior and what they connect with does not change. All of those sort of principles are still there. It’s like the need that elicits the search, it’s the emotional connection that drives the purchase, and specifically for direct to consumer at any level, it’s “Does this resonate with me?”

Scott: And when it comes to ads that are going to be in your face when you’re walking down the street and stuff, same things—as a marketer, you’re going to look to educate, inform, entertain, to offer value on the front end, whatever that is, offer value, show yourself as somebody who’s offering value, and leave a trail of breadcrumbs that is like full loaves of bread back to your site, to your store, to your program, to your consulting, to whatever it is, so that they can discover it on their own. Just make it really easy for them to discover.

Scott: So that will all remain the same—it’s just how do I do this within this new application and the next application and the next application?

Rob: Well, it’s all about your data. So when you control your data, having all that information, it’s all still going to be based on that. So it doesn’t matter what world comes up or pops up, it doesn’t matter what new device.

Rob: I mean, I remember back in the 90s when I was building websites back then, you were building for basically one said screen—it was the big box screen back in the day. And the color palette wasn’t very huge, was better than a black and white, but you had pixelation and all that. You didn’t put a lot of pictures on anything because it didn’t accept it.

Rob: But nothing’s really changed to today based on the data, because it’s all about putting out the data and making sure you’re everywhere. Everywhere could be a huge world.

Rob: It’s constantly changing. I know we’ve looked at the virtual reality stuff for Simply Be Found. When that happens, when it takes off—I think it’s still too new to be able to know where it’s going to end up from what I’ve seen, so I’ve kind of kept an eye on it.

Rob: One day I’ll put some glasses on and see what it actually looks like. I have used the Meta version of the regular glasses that’ll replace a phone or be an addition to the phone—that’s as close as I’ve gotten to it versus actually the big, huge goggle pieces. I haven’t done any of that yet.

Rob: But it’s one of those things where it’s interesting where it’s going, but you have to control your data and you have to make sure you’re following everywhere because not everybody’s going to go that direction. They’ll still be over here, they’ll be over here. And that’s what I love about marketing—it stays the same, but how you deliver it is there.

1:03:00 | Reddit, Hate Comments, and Free Exposure

Scott: I mean, it’s just all there. It’s kind of like AI—we’ve had AI forever. We just repackaged it and had access to new hardware that actually had software that worked with the hardware to produce natural language, which we’ve been working on for years.

Rob: I mean, I did some black hat stuff back in the day that was written articles and stuff, but it’s nowhere near what you could do today. You knew exactly where it was coming from, and it did not sound good.

Dean: You say the black hat is now acceptable today?

Scott: No, always. But you test those limits over time, right?

Rob: I got you.

Scott: I think it’s—as a marketer, I think it’s great to—I’m slow to adopt things from a business perspective, but I’m quick to participate, because then I know how it works. We go back to that Gary Vee quote where it’s like, “Download this app and use it for a month, participate on it, understand what the user experience is like before you start presenting stuff for the user.”

Scott: And so for me, same thing is like, I want to be very plugged into AI—I mean, I use AI all the time—but be very plugged into this and the capabilities and what’s happening to know when it is the right time to pull the trigger and when the application is there, when the intersection for how good it can be and how good it should be goes right.

Scott: So it’s like, “This is so close, I’m not going to use it yet for this application, but we’re not far away.” So I’m mentally prepared that this functionality is going to be taken over by AI once it’s there, and it’s not going to be far off.

Scott: So yeah, being plugged in and knowing about what’s happening, whether or not you’re participating from the marketing side or applying it to your company—two totally different things. I’m an early adopter when it comes to trying things as a consumer. I’m a late adopter when it comes to implementing them into business. I want data, I want case studies, I want personal experience to really know if it’s gonna win.

Rob: And I watch things and I like to watch them and I like to figure out okay, where is it going to be, what’s the market going to be like for it. And that’s what I love about marketing—we’re in an ever-changing mode for what it’s going to be.

1:05:35 | The Power of Email Marketing & CRM Strategy

Rob: It’s kind of like voice search. So voice search, we were one of the first people really to talk about voice search, wouldn’t you say, Dean?

Dean: Yeah, we pretty much dominate that whole area right now because we were early in—we were all in at that early on. I started seeing a shift for people using it, and I like to watch people. So I’ll go to different places and I’ll just watch people and see how they’re interacting with their devices and what they’re doing.

Dean: I love Vegas for that—probably one of my favorite playgrounds is to go to a casino and see how they’re consuming data and how they’re interacting with stuff and the human behavior piece, because that’ll tell you a lot about where someone’s going to end up and what technology is going to come to be able to help that part out.

Rob: I mean, it’s kind of like—we wouldn’t have the internet if it wasn’t for porn back in the day, because that’s how it made all of its money. It’s true—porn and illegal activities. And that’s what made the internet.

Rob: I told someone that the other day and they’re like, “I don’t think so.” I was like, “You’re right.” I was like, “What do you think made the internet?” She goes, “Well, I started using the internet because I started, you know, all my Bible studies on it.” I’m like, “Well, that might have been a small part, but it wasn’t the main part of what made the internet.” The reason that your Bible study was on the internet is because porn blazed the trail and built the structure around it, built the infrastructure, because the money was there.

Dean: Do you know what the very first text message, basically what would be considered a text message between things, do you know what that was originally invented for by using cabling? It was actually for them to be able to communicate between nuclear warheads so the bomb facility places for them to communicate to the next piece because they had to manually pull it.

Dean: So that whole entire thing was all data transferred through data lines and fiber lines or whatever they were for being able to communicate, but it’d be a message on a screen, and they thought it was absolutely cool. That was the very first forms of text message.

Scott: I want to do case studies on every new piece of tech. So I’m going to say everything started as a weapon, started as discovery, government funding to make it a weapon. Then it goes down to consumer level—we’re going to make it porn, and then it’s everything else. So it’s discovery, weapons, porn, everything else comes underneath.

Scott: I love that concept. I want to do a whole bunch of research on that. That would be such a funny TikTok video—everything you do on the internet, you think—you get to thank every new advancement in technology, communications, you get to thank weapons and porn, and then you get what’s left. That’s the proving ground.

Scott: I mean, it’s an interesting concept because if you think about it, you go all the way back to the westerns—they all had the saloon and they all had the dance hall that was, you know, where you could go upstairs. It’s been what’s been innovating towns forever and bringing people to look for gold and so why would it stop with technology?

Scott: They do call it the new gold rush every time there’s something new—that’s what they refer to. So it’s like, all right, there’s opportunity and there’s money to be made, we’re going to need some smut involved, that’s just how it works.

Dean: Get my mind out of you guys’s gutter, man.

Rob: But it’s one of those things where it’s absolutely just crazy along the ways, but history repeats itself and we develop based on how much information we can consume and the data points that are there.

Rob: Right now, I think you have more money opportunities making sure you control your data than you’ve ever had, and I think there’s a lot of value to the data. And I don’t think people even realize as a consumer how much data we know about them when they come to a website and when they interact on these social media networks. And most businesses would have no idea how to even make most of that data useful.

1:08:08 | Why Scott Embraces Platform Algorithms

Scott: It’s funny when—it’s weird for me on the consumer side, like I don’t mind. Like, yeah, tailor the preferences to me. I’m going to have to watch a commercial anyways. I’ve discovered products I love on sponsored ads and things like that and suggestions from Amazon. Like, absolutely show me—if you’re going to show me ads, show me ads I want.

Scott: It’s so weird how people have the hubris to think that like you just get to play for free. I’ll say this—we ran ads on Reddit, and if you understand the Reddit community, it’s just the most cynical. Reddit’s great, I think you get some really high-value, highbrow, smart, funny jokes and interactions—I love to read.

Scott: But it’s full of cynics, and we ran ads on there, and it’s so funny because I left the comments on, which people are like, “Good on you for leaving comments on,” because I’ll get in there and get dirty with them.

1:11:06 | Educating Clients on Real Social Metrics

Scott: Not in like a—I’m trying not to violate terms of service, but like just being kind of like pretty gray area. People who are like, “Oh, you know, just going off, and like why would you—this is crap, why would you advertise on Reddit,” blah blah. And obviously being in golf, there’s this whole “shrink the game, there’s too many people playing, there’s too many new people to the sport,” and we get lumped into that—people hate us for that.

Scott: But yeah, there’s plenty of naysayers out there, and they all live on Reddit. And so reading these comments, I’m just like—this idea that like, “This is bullshit, there’s ads on here.” And I’m like, I don’t want to hop in the section like, “How much do you pay to use Reddit every month? It’s free. Do you think Reddit just does it out of goodness of their hearts? They’re keeping the lights on using advertisers like us. So like, just keep scrolling.”

Scott: That’s the thing is if your alliance is with the platform that you use and you have to watch a commercial or you have to see an ad, that’s so that you get that for free. I get being upset when you pay to subscribe to something and you pay for ad-free and then you’re getting ads—then you can be mad because you paid to opt out of that. But nothing’s free—your data is what you bring to the table.

Scott: You want to enter a contest? We want your email address. Doesn’t mean you have to buy anything, but we’re gonna get the chance to pitch to you. Everything’s a time share basically—you’re gonna get the free vacation, sit through the meeting, please.

Dean: Someone watches YouTube, right? We have YouTube premium, I watch all the commercials—I turn it off because I want to see what’s being directed towards me and what gets my attention. You know, Rob does that a little different, but I don’t mind the YouTube commercials.

Dean: It’s market research—send me a dozen Skyrizi commercials. It’s all pharmaceuticals now, but still. It’s just like what you’re saying—I get to buy stuff based on your age, you know, because they know all the facts about you and they’re redirecting to you based on what you search for as well.

Dean: And that’s no different from what TV used to be. Because the only data they had, the only data points they knew was, “All right, if you’re seeing it, you’re watching TV and it’s 4 in the afternoon or it’s 3:00 in the morning. We can draw a lot of conclusions about this person.”

Dean: So I’m going to serve you these 900 number ads late at night. It’s like the old Lawrence Welk show—you knew that the geriatric people were watching Lawrence Welk at 6 o’clock at night or 7 o’clock at night, and then they would redirect.

Dean: You’re absolutely right. So data is always being collected, and the psychology is still there. It’s just that now we have more data points. Like Rob, he’s always—he loves to dive into that data stuff.

Rob: I might not game, but I play with data all day long.

Rob: I was gardening this weekend and working on setting everything up, and I had a laptop going. I wasn’t—Dean, I told Dean I was going to disconnect, but I had my AI. So I created a whole system where I have all the main AIs all communicate with each other, and they have to argue out points.

Rob: I was looking for different points, so I put this whole entire sheet together before I started working in the morning, and by the time I came back, I had a whole entire data set of research out there.

Rob: One of the things I wanted to look at is I wanted to look at Facebook to see if Facebook has made any changes to where it makes sense for us to do any ads inside of Facebook, because the first time we ran ads, we got the same reaction you did for Reddit inside of Facebook.

Rob: I mean, that was the only comments, that was the only outreach we got. We got like one customer that signed up from a Facebook ad for Simply Be Found. The rest of them were like, “Why are you advertising? Stop advertising to me.” And it’s like—

Scott: That’s so funny, it’s like, “What the f is wrong with you? Come on, if you engage with our ad, then the algorithm thinks you like it, and they’re going to send you more of our stuff.”

Scott: That’s always sort of my kind of funny little—when Bad Cards came out and people were in the comments threads, that was the thing. We would have almost no positive comments because people don’t want to be the naysayer or that speaking out against the group.

Scott: So you have all these negative comments, and it’s like, for every negative comment we had, we had 10 sales. So it’s like, cool, we keep going. It pushes the algorithm—it’s not like people are going to be like, “Oh, this is a cool idea.” “Oh, people hate this.” They’re not reviews. It was like, “I like it, I’m just not going to say anything.”

Scott: So my fun thing was always like, the people that go into our comments and hate on us—the way that the algorithm works is come Christmas time when we’re spending more on advertising, it’s going to target the other devices on your router at home because they think that you like our product. So your wife, your fiancée, your girlfriend, your brother is going to buy this game for you, and I love that, and you’re gonna have to smile and pretend like you like it.

Rob: And that goes for anything, right? Negative is still good, right? Is that what you’re trying to say? Nothing is—

1:15:00 | B2B vs B2C Content Expectations

Rob: And that’s the difference between a B2B product versus like what you have for Bad Cards, and kind of why I wish I had a product that was like that side hustle, to be able to do that side. Because a B2B product—no one buys a B2B product and says, “Hey honey, look what I bought you for Christmas.” I mean, it just doesn’t happen that way.

Rob: You open a whole new can of worms with B2C that you can have so much more fun with, and then you get to also piss them off more when it becomes their stocking stuffer.

Scott: That was so funny. “I wish I—oh, it’s cool, thanks, thank you.”

Rob: Can you imagine getting that on a video? Can you imagine getting that on a video and being able to use that for social media?

Scott: “I hate these guys. What the hell?”

Scott: Oh my gosh, yeah, that’d be a really fun video to do where we take a negative comment. We do this like, or hire one of these guys that do these “be found” things—like they can do all that stuff on social. I’m pretty good at that too, like, “All right, this person said this, so we did this, and we found this, and we found their fiancée, and we found this person.”

Scott: And so at Christmas time, we just hammered that—we were DMing them, like basically, almost like a free product, almost at cost just to get it in their hands so they give it as a gift.

Scott: We’re pranking the negative people by giving a deep discount code to their loved ones who are going to buy it for them as a gift. And like, have in there—”With this offer, it’s for our—it’s like, we’re giving you this offer, but what we’re hoping is that you’ll film them opening it and send it back to us.” So if we could get one, that would be so fun.

Rob: That’d be a fun product. That’d be a fun whole entire marketing campaign.

Rob: The closest thing I’ve ever came to that is we have chat inside of our website. People come in, they chat with Dean and I—we’re the only two right now that operate chat. But we’ve had a competitor—one of our biggest competitors, which is a publicly traded company, decide to have all these people start to be able to message us.

Rob: Well, I got really tired of it, so I tracked them all the way down to what coffee shop they were all sitting in, which was down from their corporate office. And there’s like four or five competitors that are inside of that area that are big players for us. And I was like, “So, are you enjoying coffee over there?”

Rob: All the chats shut off, and as soon as he did that, Scott, everybody stopped talking. And then I got a phone call. Going back to my VC days, their CEO called me, and I’m not going to say their name to throw them underneath the bus, but he calls me up and he goes, “You can’t do that.” I said, “Well, why can’t I do that? I tracked everybody down. Stop wasting my time.”

Rob: “And we’re a small little tiny company compared to your big publicly traded company. Stop wasting our time unless that’s your goal—I’ll turn on some bots for that coffee shop then, have a conversation with a bot all day.”

Rob: So he’s like, “Well, how’d you tell—how did you know it was us? How did you figure that out?” I said, “That’s for me to know and for you to figure the hell out. Go have fun with that. Go put an R&D team on it.”

Rob: So that’s why the data that you collect when you’re online is just phenomenal, and I think you’re right on that, Scott, on that whole thing because it works for the seller as much as anything.

1:18:00 | Final Takeaways and Where to Find Scott

Rob: That’s why small businesses need a coach that understands all of that stuff. They need someone on the back side—Simply Be Found offers that, your other social media company offers that. I’m sure you could pitch that if you want to, it’s totally fine with me for whatever the name of that is.

Rob: But it’s one of those things, Scott—you have to have someone who understands that playing level. The average business owner has no idea where to even start at and the opportunities. If you communicate—but if they don’t communicate to you and say, “This isn’t working, this is working really well”—if they don’t say those things, you’re just going blind and you can’t have as much fun with it, right?

Scott: Yeah, if you have the data, you don’t know how it’s performing or what levers to pull, and you’re just flying absolutely blind. Or not even knowing like, “How’s this converting? How well does this do? How’s this compared to another channel?”

Scott: If I’m working with a client on the marketing side, it’s like, “What are you doing already, and kind of what’s the benchmark? What’s the number to beat?” And if they don’t know that, which a lot of times happens—they just don’t know. Like we’re taking over their social media ad spend, and it’s like, “Do you know what kind of campaigns you were running? Did you have a full funnel? Were you just running web? Where was the money going?” Or anything.

Scott: That’s actually—I will say this really fast for anybody on the digital marketing side or client-facing. I think the best thing that you can do is educate your clients, especially in social media.

Scott: We’re not doing anything that no one else can do. Like, every individual person has the ability to set up a Facebook page and Instagram and go in and set up a business suite and do all the advertising. We have access to all the tools built into that they have access to as well. Do they want to spend the time and the money? No, that’s what you’re getting.

Scott: It’s like, you can do this, but you don’t want to. It’s like—you wouldn’t go to somebody’s yard if you’re mowing lawns for a living—you wouldn’t go try to convince the homeowner that they don’t know what they’re doing out in the yard. That’s not the sale. The sell is like, “You don’t have the time for this. I have the expertise. I’m going to do a great job.”

Scott: So I think by informing, even in pitch meetings too, giving people little—especially a lot of competitors in the social media space will put the focus on like, “Oh, followers.” And so what they’ll do, they’ll do some bots, they’ll do things like that to build the followers, and they sell that as their KPI.

Scott: We go in immediately and we’re like, “No, no, what you want is this audience.” And so what happens is when clients we work with for a long period of time get approached by competitors, they’re asking questions that scare the competitors away.

Scott: It’s like, “Well, are you just going to be running engagement ads? Because really, we want web traffic, and so we don’t really see this as a—” You give them some language and it scares everybody away because they’re looking for somebody who’s just going to like write the check every month. They’re going to come in real cheap, and they’re just going to be throwing some bot accounts on to just get their likes up.

Scott: And like, “Oh yeah, now you have—you had 200 followers, you have a thousand now. How good did we do?” And I would ask them directly, I’m like, “Did your sales go up? Did anything of those convert? Did your engagements go up? Nothing—you’re wasting your money.”

Scott: So educating people—don’t try with the smoke and mirrors, just talk about what you talk about, be passionate, inform them, share the information. It builds trust, and then also it just scares away the competitors because they’re armed in those conversations to ask questions that the competitors a lot of times don’t even know the answers to.

Rob: You know what’s funny about that is they’re piggybacking. They’re calling your customers off of that for that to be able to get them to come over to them because you’ve already done the hard work to be able to get everything working.

Rob: So I tell everybody: when you start marketing, you start getting everything where it’s good, you are going to get more phone calls. They’re going to come with these reports that are just nothing but for sales, just to sell you on.

Rob: And what I like about what you just said, Scott, is the fact that I’ve walked into a restaurant when I was doing just strictly marketing agency stuff. I was like, “Well, how are things going?” “Well, man, this marketing company did amazing. I have thousands of followers.” I said, “Oh great, let’s look at your report real quick.” And we looked at all their followers on Facebook because that’s all there was at that time.

Rob: And I’m like, “Great, they’re all in Philippines, India, and Bangladesh.” I was like, “So how many of these are you going to get to come in and take care of your lunch special? Because they’re the ones liking your shit, and they’re the ones that are following you, and something tells me they’re not coming to your restaurant.” And he goes, “Well, I didn’t know that.” He goes, “They just keep telling me I have to get my counts up.” I said, “Counts don’t matter—dollars in your bank account.” And getting to the right person’s a lot more valuable than getting to someone who can’t spend any money with you.

Scott: There’s very especially someone that probably doesn’t exist or probably a bot. And there are very few occasions where I think that there is value in that social proof component, in that sort of “fake it till you make it.”

Scott: One example would be with musicians and bands as they’re trying to get opportunities. What’ll happen is if they have a big following, they will get the call back, they will get the second look. They will do that. So the bummer is that if you weigh down your followings, if you fake that number and all of that—again, the goal there, the KPI is not to have a real interactive following, it’s to have a big number to get A&R to pick up the phone, to get the booking agent to sign off in the gig, to get the headline band to sign off on you opening the tour.

Scott: Then there’s a component there. But what you do sacrifice, and you have to understand is, you sacrifice your ability to reach your audience through that channel because it’s going to be completely watered down.

Rob: Well, your reach is—you’re not going to reach those people because now you’re reaching a bunch of people that are just bots.

Scott: Yeah, so if you care about it, it matters, and if you don’t, it doesn’t. I also do think that there is—this is less about following and more about engagements and stuff—if you have things that you have to post that are sort of like, they’re a necessity, they have to be posted, they’re not the sexiest and most compelling pieces of content—obviously try to do them in a way, but putting some engagements on those again is just the social proof aspect.

Scott: I used to do this when I played music. This one actually didn’t throw off our audience too much, which I really liked, but you would release a music video to YouTube, and then I would throw 30,000 views on it in day one through these little cheapy black hat apps that do it like real slow so it doesn’t flag. And then I would have that number in my head—30,000 is zero. But what happens is then when you go to promote that video, our playthrough rate was a lot higher because people saw it and it’s like, “Oh, this many people viewed it, this is worth my time.”

Scott: You have that social proof component—that’s essentially like a bunch of five-star reviews on a product you want to buy. And so then they go and watch it.

Scott: So obvious data—we didn’t care where in the world people were watching us from. We wanted organic views, so we knew after 30,000, everything was real. And so we would wind up with—in a normal video, we’d get, let’s say, 5,000 organic views on it over a month. If you start with 30,000 and then push it out, your organic views are up in like 60,000 organic views.

Scott: So again, there are very few occasions where that does make sense, but again, it always comes down to your KPI and your strategy and does it serve your strategy. And if you would ask that restaurant, “What is your main KPI?” “To get butts in seats, to sell specials, to get our lunch round full.” “Great, now let’s design a program that’ll facilitate that.” And it might not be social media.

Scott: So many of our social media meetings, a lot of times, especially with consulting, especially with a lot of B2B, it’s just like, “Why do you want to have this, that, and the other?” It’s like, “Oh, because.” And I’m like, “I don’t think this is going to serve your main—I think there’s Google search, organic SEO—these are ways where I would see—”

Scott: I have recommended clients like, “Don’t spend money on social.” When we’re talking in our meetings, I’m like, “I’m not going to take your money if it’s not the best thing for your company. I’m not going to give you bad advice, like ‘Do this, do this, do this.’ If you check all those boxes and it’s going well, then there’s an opportunity to incorporate social. Then come back to me.”

Scott: I mean, I think it goes a long way with trusting and stuff too. But yeah, a lot of companies are just in there to like, “Let me sign the client, let me get them on the books, I’m going to feed them some data and pull the wool over their eyes.” And it’s a crappy way to do business, and also it doesn’t serve anybody, and you can’t last long like that.

Dean: We do post out to Facebook and all that different stuff. When I looked at data, we’ve never really—I think we’ve sold maybe 10 accounts to anybody inside of social media for the B2B side. I mean, you would have thought when I had the conversation with the team this morning before I hopped on this huddle with you and Scott, my whole conversation was, “We’re gonna kill that off, and we’re going to start focusing on everything coming back to the blog.”

Dean: But this isn’t what everybody says, and I said, “I really don’t care what everybody says—it’s not what the data says. The data says this, and we could get more from this, so we’re going to go this route to be able to do this.”

Dean: Because at the end of the day, data really doesn’t lie very much. You can make some mistakes on how you interpret that data, sure, but the variable is not very big. But it depends on your brand.

Dean: What I love about the marketing world that we’re in today is you could take a business that is doing the same exact thing, and they’re in a different location or they have a different vibe, but yet they’re the same exact industry, and all of them have a different data set.

Dean: If social might work for this guy over here because everybody likes him inside of that social media world, Facebook might be a good option, TikTok might be good. Also, there’s no telling—I mean, we see realtors all the time that do really funny—I saw a realtor that—because they have to be on social media, right? And so one that was just going through a house, but she was doing a voiceover in each room. She was like, “If I were playing hide-and-seek, this is where I’d hide in the house,” and you saw her feet sticking out from under—it’s really funny.

Dean: And it’s like, if you’re a local realtor or you’re a realtor and you’re looking at that, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, Debbie from Tucson’s killing it.” And she has all these millions of views. But do you know if that gets her listings?

Dean: Maybe it does, but it’s like, you can’t—you don’t really know how it converted for her outside of like, now Debbie can probably sell some collagen cream because she has a following that listens to her. Or you might get an HGTV show. But there’s no guarantee if somebody’s going viral that it’s converting to sales.

Dean: So obviously, I mean, if they can use that audience in some way—but especially when it’s a niche audience or it’s really like when it’s geo-restricted audience, then like, we’ve done a lot of geo-targeting, geo-mapping, pulling mobile ad ideas and stuff, and following customers into target zones and stuff, which is creepy and really cool and fun to do.

Dean: Because it’s just like for a restaurant, you don’t want—you’re in Atlanta, you don’t need somebody in San Francisco liking your page. “Oh, maybe they’ll visit once.” That’s not what you want—you want actual customers. And so yeah, if you don’t have the data behind those numbers, do you even know if it’s working?

Rob: Well, look at it this way: how much of it are you doing to be able to have your ego of “This is what I’m doing,” because it gives you that dopamine—I think is what it would be—that releases out because, “Oh, look what I’m doing.” It makes you—it gives you a feel-good moment inside of there. But if it’s not going out to your bank account, it’s crazy.

Rob: But I mean, real estate is an interesting market when you’re talking about marketing. What comes to my mind first—back when we did phone calls and we did all this different stuff, we had this real estate agent inside of Dallas, Texas, and she subscribed with us and became a member to be able to get her firm onto voice search.

Rob: So this lady, we’ll call her Debbie just for shits and giggles—she wanted to be number one inside of voice search. She sits inside of an office that has 200 realtors and then has another office across the way that has another 400 realtors that are attached to that office.

Rob: And she calls me up and she goes, “I’m not number one.” “If I’m using your system, how do I get to—why am I not number one?” Absolutely just pissed because she wasn’t number one on voice search every time.

Rob: And I’m like, “Ma’am, if I could sell you the number one spot of being on voice search every single time, for one, I wouldn’t be selling it probably to you, but there’s people that would pay a lot of money for that spot to be known as the number one builder for your area.”

Rob: “You have over 800 people that are inside of the real estate market in Dallas that’s within a mile and a half from your location. It’s going to rotate through all of you at some point based on some kind of data algorithm behind there. You’re not going to rank number one for ‘realtor’ for every time. And if you do once out of however many searches happen for that, congrats.”

Rob: She got so pissed off. I’ll never forget that. You got to think about what your whole entire market is because—that was a conversation point between us for a long time on that whole thing because realtors are a very interesting group of people because of the trying to get their inventories up and all that stuff and make sales. It’s a tough market to get your marketing out there because they’re all putting money into it to get themselves seen. So it’s a tough one.

Rob: But I like the idea of that—I’d love to know what kind of results that person’s getting. It’s just such a great approach, you know.

Rob: I think the whole entire Bad Cards concept is awesome, even though I don’t play golf. I think you came up with something that’s awesome.

Rob: And I was thinking about the LinkedIn piece—we’ll make sure we publish this out to LinkedIn. I’m really kind of curious on the data side to see how many people do it. So I want you to stay in communication with me and let me know how many people from LinkedIn came over to you, if you can tell, because I think that would be a really cool piece there.

Rob: And when it comes to e-commerce, what I love about e-commerce probably the most is you have a lot more data points. Once you get into a retail shop, or a construction, or realtor, your data points go way down. You can track every single step inside of e-commerce—you get a lot more data points.

Scott: I’ll say this—anybody who sees this, especially on LinkedIn, go over to our Instagram. Everything we have is Bad Cards FOR Good Golfers—F-O-R. If you search any combination of that, you’ll find us. Look for the skull and crossbones.

Scott: But if you DM us or message us, this will work on Facebook too—”POD”—P-O-D. That’ll send you an offer, but then I’ll have that data on my end to know who saw this, saw that word, and went over. And even if you don’t buy anything, just go through and just put in the “POD” trigger, and then we’ll be like, “All right, okay, I see you.”

Rob: I mean, but that’s the fun thing about data. I really enjoyed today’s conversation, Scott. Thank you for coming on. We could go on probably for another hour talking about—I’d love to have you back on at some point. But for those that are listening to this one, where can they find you? How can they find you and all those different details?

Scott: Yeah, on social everywhere, we are Bad Cards For Golfers—F-O-R-E. Our website is badcardsforgoodgolfers.com. And if you prefer to shop on Amazon, you can certainly find us on there as well. So anywhere online you buy stuff, we’re there.

Rob: Awesome, perfect.

Scott: Well, thank you so much for sure. It’s great meeting both of you guys, great chatting with you. It’s been a pleasure.

Rob: Have a good one. Bye.

Robert Downey

Robert Downey: Revolutionizing Local Marketing and Voice Search Optimization Robert Downey is a distinguished figure in the dynamic world of local marketing and digital innovation. As the co-founder of SimplyBeFound.com, he has proven to be a master in local marketing strategy and a pioneer in voice search optimization. With a career spanning nearly three decades, Robert has dedicated himself to enhancing the visibility of small businesses and fostering stronger connections between these enterprises and their local communities. Robert's journey in the marketing realm began in 1995, and since then, he has led over 1,000 marketing campaigns, contributing significantly to developing more than 5,000 websites. His expertise spans various industries, equipping him with a nuanced understanding of their unique challenges and opportunities. This extensive experience broadens his skill set and cements his position as a thought leader in local business marketing. One of the keys to Robert's success is his ability to deliver impactful results using local SEO strategies. He excels in this area, demonstrating that businesses can use small advertising budgets to be successful. Instead, they need the right strategies to reach consumers actively seeking their services. His approach needs to include the importance of bridging the gap between local businesses and potential customers, which has often hindered the growth and visibility of many small businesses. As a fourth-generation entrepreneur, the entrepreneurial spirit runs deep in Robert's veins. This heritage has ingrained in him a profound understanding of business growth and evolution, especially crucial in the fast-paced startup environment. At SimplyBeFound.com, he applies this strategic vision to simplify the local business discovery process, leading to significant growth of the platform, an expanded user base, and increased revenue streams. Beyond Simply Be Found, Robert's achievements include launching over ten successful online businesses and startups, a testament to his versatility and expertise in the digital business landscape. He brings a unique blend of programming skills, marketing acumen, and business development experience, offering a fresh and invaluable perspective to today's digitally-centered business challenges. In essence, Robert Downey is more than just a local marketing expert. He is a catalyst for growth, a digital marketing innovator, and a mentor to businesses striving for success. His extensive experience, profound industry knowledge, and unwavering dedication to the success of small businesses make him an indispensable ally for any business aiming to enhance its local presence and achieve sustainable growth.

See Full Bio