Shifting Terrain and Smart Choices: Strategic Marketing in Motion with Michael Pomposello

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is shifting terrain and smart choices. Strategic marketing in motion. Today's guest is the founder and managing partner of Blue Polo Interactive, where an outsourced digital marketing team is just a click away. A big welcome to Michael Pomposello. Hi, Michael.

Michael Pomposello:

Hi, Andy. Thanks so much for having me.

Andy Splichal:

We're excited to have you. Now, you guys, you offer a wide offering of services including social media marketing, SEO, PPC, Influencer, discovery. I'm curious, where do you find the biggest bang for the buck is for ecommerce companies in today's changing landscape?

Michael Pomposello:

Oh, that's a great question. I think there's kind of a twofold answer to that. First of all, I think I'm seeing so many brands, these smaller, direct response brands that are growing up and starting to whether they're raising capital or bootstrapping and they're starting to have enough cash to throw around and whether they start doing a little bit in house and try to bring in an agency for some. One thing that I'm seeing that brands can really benefit from is working with one agency on all of these solutions whenever possible. Obviously us fantastic. But if not, I really see there are so many synergies that can be had when one agency is handling all of that. So right out of the gate, I think that's one thing, it's not so much a direct answer to which channel, but I think one thing partner with one agency because all of those people talking to each other in unison are going to help find Efficiencies. Back to the question at hand, I think one thing that's playing really well right now, as you mentioned, we do social ads, we do influencer discovery, influencer marketing, full influencer campaign executions.

Michael Pomposello:

Typically I've been telling know, hey, when you're maxing out your Facebook, your social, your PPC, start augmenting that with influencer marketing on YouTube, Instagram, podcasts, et cetera. Measure it, monitor it exactly like you are your other social and paid ad opportunities. And I think right now what's so exciting is we're starting to fuse all of that and say, hey, go out, do your influencer marketing and then let's take that, that, that personalized testimonial that we're getting on the influencer side of the activation. Let's go run that as native ads on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Facebook, Instagram, the Meta platforms, et cetera. So I think it's kind of this full evolution of you were doing A, we push you into B, and that plays right into what I was saying of when we're doing all this under one roof, we can take what we're doing on the influencer side, bring it back over to the social side and deliver even better results that way.

Andy Splichal:

So let's say a client comes to you and they're just starting out. They got some sales, but they say, Michael, I have $1,000 a month I want to use for marketing. Where should I put it? Where are you going to put it.

Michael Pomposello:

For me for a low budget like that? First of all, we'd want to make sure is their site best optimized to receive traffic? Are there any roadblocks that are impeding us? Are we measuring everything correctly? Because that $1,000 is not going to get them incredibly far. So we need to make sure that every cent that we're spending is best optimized depending on the brand. I would probably start them out on Meta. Facebook is a great place for us to get them in front of their audience. It's also a great place for us to learn about who their audience is. I love when brands come to me and go, this is my audience. And then we'll do some testing and go, yeah, it is. But also there's a wider audience than you realize.

Michael Pomposello:

And I think when we're able to do testing, especially on Meta, we're able to see things like that. Certain brands, I would push them right into Google PBC, hey, you have something people are looking for. This as a solution. There's no need to educate them on, hey, this is what exists in the marketplace. Rather, we just need to get your brand in front of the people looking for that solution. So I think that's kind of how I would pick one or the other for a brand like that. I would not try to introduce them to the influencers space yet, not until they have larger budgets, because the tests on those are typically going to be larger. And I wouldn't want to do a one $1,000 test, whatever that test result is, whether it's super positive or super negative, it's going to be a false positive or false negative.

Michael Pomposello:

Given just the lack of budget.

Andy Splichal:

Now, content creation, it seems to be a real cornerstone of your services. Can you share a specific instance where a brand's growth trajectory was significantly influenced by the type of quality, the type or the quality of the content you produced and how did it resonate with the target audience?

Michael Pomposello:

Yeah, absolutely. God, we do this for so many brands. Off the top of my head, we were working with a skincare brand. And what was so cool about working with them, it opened my eyes to the world of skincare. I started using their products.

Andy Splichal:

You look very nice, by the way.

Michael Pomposello:

Thank you so much. I never understood moisturizing versus exfoliating. And then it seemed silly, why are you exfoliating? And then moisturizing? But I learned a ton in the process, and it opened my eyes to audiences that just as we were talking about before with there are audiences that know what they need, and they're going to go to Google, they're going to go to the search engines, type in I have this problem, and we want to come up as that solution. But it also opened my eyes to the importance of educating people like me who don't know what the I never knew what the word exfoliate meant.

Andy Splichal:

What is an exfoliant? Yeah, I don't know. But how did you educate, though? What kind of content did you create?

Michael Pomposello:

So in that case, we were mostly starting out creating text content and using that from an SEO standpoint to bring people in. I believe we did that all organic. We might have done a little bit of paid, and we were also using that text content, pushing that out as part of their social strategy. So that's kind of a threefold. We created the content, we were able to run it on social organically. We were able to capture SEO organically. And when we saw opportunities, we were able to boost that, whether on meta platforms or on Google with paid budget. So just learning about that and just getting that kind of content out and then it was also fun to work with the brand and their founder on creating some video content, talking about the ingredients, and that was his brand's.

Michael Pomposello:

Real differentiator is they use these really ancient natural ingredients in their products and educating their audience through video about why they're passionate about these specific ingredients and what the ancient origins of them are. And for something like that, we wrote it out. It was written out on their site beautifully. But that was something that I would have the pleasure of sitting in a conference room with the founders and seeing their face light up when they would talk about a specific thing and hold it up and pass it around and smell it. So we felt like video content was key there.

Andy Splichal:

How did you not to interrupt. How did you shoot that video content? I mean, did you have a professional crew? Was that done with somebody holding an iPhone while the founder talked about the product, holding it up? I mean, what kind of video or what quality of video content was it?

Michael Pomposello:

Awesome question. We did this all on iPhone, I believe the origin shots were done on Facebook Live, which was super fun because we scheduled it. We were able to reach out to their newsletter and say, hey, if you want to meet the founders and talk about these things, come bring your questions. It's a great idea. Going back to my previous point, we know what we want to talk about, we know the problems that we can solve. But bringing the audience in and getting their questions helped us create content for questions we wouldn't know that people needed answers to.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, that's a great idea. I love that. Now. Integration of AI. Everybody's talking about it. Everybody's been talking about it. Can you elaborate if you've been able to use it in your content creation and what advantages, if any of you seen from incorporating AI with your content creation?

Michael Pomposello:

Yeah, absolutely. I am so excited about the AI renaissance we're in right now. Personally, whether I'm helping a brand create content and lay out their content calendar or for my own brand. I was just on a call with my business partner and geeking out about this earlier. The biggest problem I have and content is in my blood. I started in marketing as a content writer and formed into a content agency, and we've really blown up from there. But my biggest challenge is I suffer from looking at a blank page and going, I don't know what to say. I'm an absolute expert.

Michael Pomposello:

I think all writers experts, but what are we going to talk about? And I was just talking about this with bring in your audience and have them ask those questions. But I absolutely love turning to Chat GPT and saying, if you are in this demographic, what problems are you looking to solve? What are five core problems you're looking to solve? What are ten kind of minor problems under each of those that you're looking to solve? Let's form those all into questions. And I love using AI as just a bouncing off point to get that first step of well, what are we going to talk about today? I don't know, but you tell me what we want to talk about and I can talk all day on it and my clients can talk all day about it. So using it to say, hey, if you're this type of persona and you're trying to solve these problems, what roadblocks are you facing? Can give us a really good list and we can use that to inform content strategy.

Andy Splichal:

Now once you have, I mean, that's a great idea. You're using Chat GPT for idea creation basically. But once you have the ideas, do you continue with AI or do you take it all over to a manual process?

Michael Pomposello:

For the most part, I wouldn't say the remainder of the process is manual, but I also would be remiss to say it's AI. I think from there we implement a lot of automation to help us scale. If we're spitting out 50 topics, well now we need to create 50 scripting sheets, we need to track all these things. So we do have some automation in the works of keeping track of what we're doing with them, creating all these documents, creating all these folders. But the actual content creation from there is a human looking at the question going, I know from my expertise, this is the answer, this is the problem that someone who's uneducated on the topic is going to run into. Here's a pitfall, here's the mistake. I see here's how I would solve that. And that helps us again, since myself, my team, my clients, we know these answers.

Michael Pomposello:

Once we have that broken down and put into a format between the AI and the automation, it's just a matter of us plugging in our expertise.

Andy Splichal:

Now let's keep on the theme of content creation. What are some common mistakes that you've seen that companies make with their content creation?

Michael Pomposello:

I think wanting to do too much too quickly is something that I just see so many people get so excited about, especially with the advent of AI. And before AI it was spinning and after AI it'll be something else. But everyone wants this silver bullet solution of here I talked about we can generate 50 topics, we can speed up the process, but then someone actually has to sit and plug in that expertise. AI is not this magic bullet where you're going to hit go and it's going to spit out everything because trust me, we've tried that and we thought, oh, can this work. Luckily we have a great editorial team in place that looked things over and said, okay, this is putting out really good drafts. But it's also very confidently citing things that are wrong. It's making up fake citations, it's making up fake studies, it's giving out fake facts. We were talking about things in the medical space.

Michael Pomposello:

It's giving out fake guidance on how to deal with regulatory situations that if people were to implement, would wind up in hot water with one, if not more, three letter regulatory bodies. So I think for brands that are on a budget, you're a one man show. You're a two man show. By all means, use it to speed up your process. Use it all the way up to drafting, but definitely make sure you're reviewing it. You're really allowing your expertise to shine. Do not hesitate to double check and double verify and Google everything it's saying because if it's not passing the sniff test, it might be making things up completely wrong.

Andy Splichal:

Now, marketing and ecommerce realm, it can be tricky. Could you highlight an example of a marketing strategy that initially appeared promising for one of your clients that you implemented, but it could have led to a missed opportunity or even setbacks?

Michael Pomposello:

Yeah, actually this plays really in with an earlier question you gave about if someone comes with $1,000 a month. And I think it goes beyond just one specific strategy. And really the biggest pitfall that I see brands doing, especially when they're doing it in house with no kind of outside counsel, like an agency saying, no, don't do that, is taking small dollar amounts and throwing them at doing one thing and then analyzing the results of those one thing, for better or for worse. So let's say running one Facebook ad to the tune of $500 or going this month, let's try influencers, and reaching out to one influencer, paying them $1,000 and either saying, wow, that was wildly successful, or wow, that absolutely bombed. I think one thing that we always try to talk to our clients about are setting the correct budget expectations and setting realistic goals of if we want to start to dabble in Facebook, let's not just run one creative. Let's not run one creative to one audience. We're going to need enough sufficient budget to run multiple creatives to multiple audiences. And if we're looking at $100 per creative, $200 per creative, now you're going to start to see that expand from a $200 test into a $1,200 test very quickly.

Michael Pomposello:

And I think things like that scare clients. And your question before was so good, we're starting with $1,000. Well, let's make sure we're diversifying that out enough successfully to where the results are going to actually tell us and actually give us guidance. And I think especially brands here that will do influencer stuff will come to us with, I have a $5,000 budget. I'm so excited. Can you do something for us? The answer is yes. Can I? Of course I can. I can find five influencers and spend $1,000 each.

Michael Pomposello:

I can find one influencer and spend $5,000. But the question we always have to ask ourselves, whether it's Meta, Google or an influencer Play, is, is this budget going to give us sufficient diversity to where the test is actually going to bring back, hey, you tried this. This worked really well and this didn't. And here's everything in between or is it going to just give us that false positive, false negative of you spent $5,000, you sponsored one thing, it worked. Well, now my client is going to get all giddy and go, well let's just scale that up, right?

Andy Splichal:

But you don't really know because we.

Michael Pomposello:

Don'T really know either way. And I think that's the number one pitfall that I've been seeing is back to what we were even talking about with content. People want to do things really cheap and low budget and that's going to create these monkey wrenches down the line of either something's terribly wrong or it's giving us a false narrative either way.

Andy Splichal:

So one of my favorite questions for my guests is what do you think is in store in the next twelve to 18 months for Ecommerce?

Michael Pomposello:

I obviously don't know. I wish I had the crystal ball because all of us would be better for it. But if I had to guess something that I do see more brands moving into is as I mentioned, on one of the top questions we were talking about everyone's doing Meta, everyone's doing influencer marketing or to some extent these brands should be doing one or both of those. I think what's been really exciting is seeing more brands merge the two and saying, let me go partner with influencers. Let me have them reach their audience and then let me take that content and allow it to live on as an ad on behalf of our brand on meta platforms or boosting that influencers post to our audience, to our audience of followers, to our target demographics. And I think we're really starting to see more results of brands doing the influencer work, getting that initial boost, measuring that again, taking those learnings and scaling them out, but also using that content beyond that initial influencer boost as its own ad unit to reach new audiences. I think that's been really exciting. We've been seeing that be successful the trailing past three months and if I had to guess in the next twelve to 18, I think that's where we're going to see more budgets shaking out.

Andy Splichal:

And the other question I like to ask almost every guest and it's because of me and how much I like to read, but have there been any business books that you've read that you could attribute to your journey as an entrepreneur?

Michael Pomposello:

Oh, I love this one. I think the biggest one early on that made me open my eyes was The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. I think yeah classic on so many fronts. I mean, first of all, it's kind of a clickbait title know. Are you actually working 4 hours? No. But you're focused on doing the things you love. I think it set me up very early on from a young age with a mindset of I am not going to be the best at everything but there are people who are and I think it even as the book kind of ages. It focused on do what you can, outsource the rest or staff the rest or whatever.

Michael Pomposello:

It touched on early automation and I think automation continues to get better, continues to be easier for the everyday person to use. We were just talking about content, AI and automation and I think that premise is kind of so well introduced to me through the four hour work week of what am I really good at? I'm really good at answering these questions. What am I not good at? I'm not good at coming up with the question. I'm not good at making the documents great AI automation. I'm focused on what I want to do. The second book absolutely has to be cash advertising by Dr. Drew. Eric Whitman.

Michael Pomposello:

I think anyone in marketing that should be required reading after years of saying I could teach a course on copywriting, that would be the textbook I was tapped to teach. Like a three hour crash course on copywriting. And between that and Influence by Robert Chaldini, those two go so well hand in hand and I think anyone who reads them in those two in any order are going to have such an eye opening vision into what makes the average person tick and how do we use marketing to influence their decisions.

Andy Splichal:

Now, do you have a favorite success story of one of your clients that you'd be able to share?

Michael Pomposello:

Oh, that's a great question. I hate playing favorites with my clients and there's a lot of clients I can't talk about even if I could. So I'm going to talk about something we're doing really recently that is super fresh, top of mind and plugs into everything that we just talked about. We're working with so much of what we do is in the medical space, whether that's for your household name, pharmaceutical companies, your household name, over the counter companies, your consumer packed goods, everything from the highest pharma down to a box of tissues. We have consulted for those companies in the influencer space and I think what's been so exciting in the past, again, trialing three months or so are we started working with local medical practices for let's know, cosmetic non necessary surgeries. Most recently we've been working with a LASIK practice out of California and it's been super exciting working with them. They've tasked us to go out, find influencers to come in, experience the power of LASIK, see what it does for their vision, see how that changes their career. These are fitness influencers.

Michael Pomposello:

In this instance. They get to tell that story. We have the coolest job on earth because we get to go out, find people and say, hey, would you like to do LASIK? Would you like to have 2020 Vision? Let's answer all your questions there. And I think we're also seeing this is just the peak of our expertise because they're doing exactly what I've had the privilege of talking about the past few minutes of we're going out, we're finding them. It's influencer marketing, it's reaching their audience, it's bringing people into the practice through these influencers audiences. And then the practice is going ahead and using that as their creative for their meta ads, which we are extremely confident are going to outperform everything that they've put out to date, which are all beautifully produced, studio quality, creative about the practice. But seeing this kind of user generated content approach, especially with people with these short attention spans, myself included, on TikTok and Instagram, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe. Once you see that studio produced ad, boom, you're gone.

Michael Pomposello:

And we're hoping that implementing this user generated content of this guy reaching this audience, talking about his personal experience, will get us more time on the ad, better ad recall, and better outcomes all around for the client.

Andy Splichal:

Now, Blue Polo Interactive, you got a first range of services. You offer a lot of stuff, but if you were going to pinpoint your core expertise and what sets you apart, and I think you might have just did that, but just to be clarify, what service aspect or area of digital marketing do you think that would be?

Michael Pomposello:

I think it's twofold. Everyone and their mom wants to say that they're in the influencer space in 2023. We did our first influencer marketing campaign before that had any definition back in 2013, that was for Macy's, and we scaled that out from there. So I think that is somewhere where we have over a decade of experience. And again, I think that's opened our eyes to really creative ways to do things, really practical ways to measure things. And again, just bringing that third party expertise that you should be paying for when you're tapping an agency that isn't just, you could do this in house, we're going to take it off your plate. You could do it in house, we could take it off your plate. And we're bringing a decade of experience to that.

Michael Pomposello:

On top of that, we've been producing content since 2009, and obviously we've seen the evolution of what content creation has looked like since 2009. So similarly, when we work with a brand, we get very excited. As you've seen my enthusiasm for, hey, there's AI, there's automation, there's content creation, we're going to need to tap you, you can tap our team. But between content creation and our decade of experience in influencer marketing, which I think is content creation just by a different name, I'd say those are the two things that we're most passionate about. And when you roll all of that up with our ability to deliver on social ads, Google Ads, SEO, it goes back to what I was saying. US having all of these resources under one roof really empower us to deliver the most success for these brands.

Andy Splichal:

And how does your fee structure work?

Michael Pomposello:

It really depends on the type of engagement we're dealing with a lot of brands right now who are just coming to us and just want I just got a $50,000 budget from a household name brand and they said, here's how this is going to work. We're going to give you 50 grand, you're going to spend 40, you get ten on behalf of the management. When we're dealing with really large budgets like that, on the influencer side, it's going to be very similar along those lines of we're managing the budget and we take a percentage. Similarly, if we're just doing ad buying on meta platforms and Google, it's going to look similar of a percentage. Smaller engagements for, let's say, just influencer. What we'll do is we'll look at what your audience is, we'll go out and look at what the cost of executing that media is. We'll bundle all of that into a nice clean CPM for you to digest. We'll say, okay, you want 50 lifestyle influencers? Great.

Michael Pomposello:

We can execute all of that against a guaranteed view delivery count on a 50 70 $80 CPM for that influencer media.

Andy Splichal:

And what kind of budget does somebody need to work with you guys?

Michael Pomposello:

I would say our low end engagements for a really low end engagement, we can help do influencer discovery. We just did a slew of these for $2,500. You give us who you're looking for, we can go out, find them, pass them off to you. On the high end, we get quarter of a million dollar budgets where the brand says, here's the budget, you take your commission, spend the rest, measure it, analyze it, feed us back the results.

Andy Splichal:

And how can an interested listener learn more about working with you?

Michael Pomposello:

Come right over to Bluepolointeractive.com. Reach out to us whether through our forums, our email contacts, our social contacts, but I'd say starting there is going to help you understand us and understand if we're a fit. And if we are, we'd love for you to reach out and explore that conversation deeper.

Andy Splichal:

Well, it's been great. I've enjoyed chatting with you today. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we go ahead and wrap it up?

Michael Pomposello:

I think hopefully that my passion for, again, the future of tying that influencer marketing content to the actual ad platform and native content has come through and I really hope to see more brands doing that in the next twelve to 18 months.

Andy Splichal:

Well, great. Well, thanks for joining us today, Michael.

Michael Pomposello:

Thank you so much, Andy. It was a pleasure and I really appreciate you having me on.

Andy Splichal:

For listeners, remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information on Blue Polo Interactive or connecting with Michael, you'll find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our Podcast Resource Center, available at podcast.makeeachclickcount.com. We have compiled. All of our different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact information in case you would like more information. Any of the services I have discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing.

Andy Splichal:

And I'll talk to you in the next episode. Bye.