Home Service Domination_ SEO, Digital Marketing and Online Ad Tactics That Work: Mason Dorner - Ascenditt

This is the Beyond the Story podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. And now Sebastian Ross Mason. Welcome to the show.

Thank, you so much Happy to be here.

Happy to have you here, man. It's great to connect with you. You and I met, I guess about a month ago, over in Dallas with our Apex friends.

Yeah, yeah, the Apex entrepreneurs meetup.

A good old Apex, bringing folks together one meetup at a time, always Absolutely how long you been in Apex.

So I joined Apex, actually a year ago. I joined Last Black Friday because they had like a lifetime deal and I had met Ryan we both spoke at the same event, together on the same day, and so I met him a few months before, kind of became aware of and I followed him for a little bit and, you know, decided I liked the stuff, like what he was about. So when they did their deal last year I joined Apex and then kind of his fate would have it, less than a month later, you know he needed somebody who paid ads really well and was looking for somebody to run that forum, and so I reached out and we've been working together ever since.

Love it, man. Power of connections and relationship right? Oh yeah, absolutely so. I love to tell people's story on this show. So let's back up a little bit for some context, help our listeners better understand a little bit more about you and your back story and what really brought you to present day, and then we'll get into what you, what keeps you, busy on a daily basis.

Sounds good, yeah, so so my back story. I'm a marketer by trade, I own a couple of marketing agencies and then I'm also launching my own e-commerce brand with two other partners. One of them is my partner in the agencies, but we're launching our own e-commerce brand, cumq1. So that's what's going on right now. We mostly focus on performance marketing, so paid ads, email, sms, like landing page optimization, and work predominantly in SaaS and e-commerce and then do a little bit of like higher enterprise home services, like very large roofers, but basically we do the type of marketing that makes people money. We don't really do graphic design or video production or stuff like that, like we're the math and science side of marketing. That's what we're really good at is building machines to print people money Amazing.

So what does that look like? As far as you know, you mentioned home services. So if I own a pressure washing business and I need more foot traffic and more calls coming in of people that need my services, how does that all come into play when it comes to acquiring you guys to help out with marketing?

Sure. So I'm going to use like a Roofer or an HVAC company as an example, because fresh washing businesses are usually too small. That's why I kind of qualify that time services segment as enterprise. We only work with really big companies in that space. Got it Okay, cool? But yeah. So like we have a Roofer that came to us and like, hey, we want more leads, we want more appointments, we want more guys standing on top of roofs, and so they already had they're one of the biggest roofers in the state of Florida already had inside sales team, already had a CRM, they kind of had that tech set up. That's why we tend to work with just the bigger home services guys and why we like software and Ecom, because those people typically have their tech stack right, and so if you don't have a tech stack, it's really tough for us to build on top of that. But if you have all that stuff figured out, or mostly figured out, and you have a good product, then we can kind of pour gasoline on that fire. So this Roofer had a great product, had their sales process down, had their tech process down. So we came in, built their Google ads out, built their Facebook ads out. We actually took over from another agency that was running their Google ads, but using kind of a different strategy, we came in and, with our approach, actually didn't just increase their leads, but actually doubled the close rate on those leads. We tend to focus more on quality and we also watch how this stuff progresses down the funnel and we make sure it actually closes, versus a lot of agencies just generate leads and kind of say here you go, well, how'd they do? Versus we focus on quality and making sure that they actually close, that they upsell, like we follow the whole customer journey, which really sets us apart. So, in a nutshell though, we basically increased the size of that company by 500% in six months.

Wow, through our paid ads. And so why was Joe? Because, like, why is home? Why is home, why is marketing only work for home service businesses? I mean it really. I mean it seems to really hit pretty good. I know some really successful digital marketers that focus in that area on there. I've tried it multiple times thinking you know what? There's got to be people out there that want to start a podcast that don't know about me. So let's set up a landing page, let's set up a link, a calendar link, of sales video, and I've spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars only to come up empty and people do book and it works until you get somebody on the phone and realize that they're just not a qualified prospect even though we've already qualified them. So what have you seen as the distinction, as far as industries that you work with, pertaining to how digital marketing works? Because I know it works. It just hasn't worked for me, and you've probably heard that multiple times before.

Yeah, I mean, I think in your particular case it's because it is kind of a niche product and it's also a product that requires commitment from the prospect and you know, even though you take a lot of the heavy lifting off, it is still a commitment. It does require a lot of follow through, and so I think that that's kind of challenging. I think also, in your case the targeting even could be challenging. So it doesn't surprise me that paid ads is like not not been it for you and I probably wouldn't even recommend it to you. Again, that's why we only work in those three categories, because we have systems built in those three spaces of software, e-commerce and home services where we know we plug this machine in and it works 80, 90% of the time. So that's kind of why we focus in those spaces. But there's lots of niches that we kind of try to stay away from. Insurance is one it's tough to sell. You're competing with massive, massive companies. It's highly commoditized, so that's just one example. That being said, I know people that are successfully running Facebook ads for insurance at a small scale, like little agency owners or brokerage owners who have taught themselves how to do paid ads, but again at larger scale, which is what we really really focus on. It gets really hard, and that's just one example. There's lots of other industries that we tend to avoid. Actually, even coaching and mastermind groups are one that we have avoided like the plague until we got the opportunity to work with Ryan, and the reason is for there. It's just a really hard space and it all comes down to your name and your brand authority. So we had worked with some smaller coaches that didn't have that name, didn't have that brand authority, and it just didn't pan out because they hadn't built the machine for themselves yet and they were kind of trying to use paid ads as a shortcut instead of as a growth lever, whereas with Apex, the brand is there, ryan's name is there, ryan's brand is there. That's pouring gas on a fire versus taking the shortcut to building a presence.

That's funny to say that I almost I mean, that's exactly what at my mind. Really, one where my mind went to it was like ads are probably working for what Ryan wants to do based on the existing digital footprint, and then you guys bring your expertise in on what you already know that you can do. What about digital products like courses and stuff like that, and courses, books, things like that?

Yeah, I mean in generally that generally that's another space that we would tend to shy away from for the most part. There's a few folks that we've worked with, but we're very careful. Again, it's got to be somebody that's really got their act together, that has a following, that's already got sales, because if you can't sell your product without ads, you're probably not gonna be able to sell it with that. So that's kind of what we're careful about. We've sold courses for Ryan, books for Ryan. We've done stuff for a few other folks in the space as well with those types of products. But again, that's one we're really careful about and we really don't advertise that we work in that space because it is something that we're very choosy about where we'll go, you know, with those types of products.

Yeah, I mean speaking of authority, and people have to know who the hell you are In order to say, hey, maybe I want to buy that course and learn from that individual. I mean, I think people miss out on that minor component there, that you've got to have some sort of existing digital footprint out there or at least appealing enough for people to go, you know what? And there's just not to mention just a Barrage of noise, because everyone was stuck home for a year with the pandemic and finally decided to dust off the old Facebook's and start creating content. And now, you know, there's almost too much noise and too much content and I believe that the tide will go out and those that are true creators, providing value, contributing in complimenting their brand, will still stay standing. But there was a point in time, even with ads, where ads are amazing. Ads are amazing, ads don't work anymore. The iOS Update ads don't work anymore and now ads are just there and they're their ads, and I think that. Have you considered? You know when our brains will resolve to like TV commercials that's like the only example I can use or, like you know, traditional advertising. We just tune out now, like is that, is that, is that? Do we have some shelf life with digital marketing? You think before, because I'm already sick of YouTube ads. No, you know, I you tube TV ads and like net. The cheaper Netflix plan has ads too.

So yeah, yes and no. I think, and first of all, I love all those adpocalypse is that have happened, because if you're good, you're gonna figure it out and it's gonna turn out half the market. And yeah, it was easy 10 years ago when I got into this, or 15 years ago and I got into this. You could run a stock photo to a crappy website and print money. It's not that way anymore. But every time something like that has happened, you know my partner and I and our team and ascend it. We've risen to the top and figured it out. So we've learned to lean into it and look at it as a good thing. There's gonna be some attrition. There's gonna be. This is gonna be a time for us to eat, so we've leaned in on it. In terms of people getting bored of ads or like tuning out, I don't think that's gonna happen. I think the challenge is to make ads better and make ads more relevant, which we're already seeing, like the advent of tiktok brought UGC style ads Kind of into acceptance from the population as a whole. It used to be an ad, had to be highly produced and it looked like an ad. Now a lot of ads don't look like ads. You know it's an influencer talking to a camera sharing their experience. You know it doesn't feel as salesy, and so I think people are just going to continue to get more creative and the content is going to have to evolve. I don't think ads are ever going away. I mean, they've been advertising, you know, since they were making posters on printing presses 2000 years ago. So I don't think advertising's going anywhere, it's just going to continue to evolve.

Yeah, I agree with that. I totally agree. That's the way that we perceive thing. It is the way we buy things. I mean, I'm a sucker for ads, to not the right ads, not the traditional. And I was fact, I was using Rogan as an example because he always did a really good job when he First started over the past, you know, over the first few years when he was, when he started to implement ads. Now it's like I'm the biggest and baddest out there. It doesn't really matter. So we're just before he would occupy like 10 minutes of the show, the first 10 minutes to just all ads. Now they're sprinkled throughout there, but it's still. He went back to, instead of like making it that conversation ad I don't know what you call it, there's a specific name for it. It's now like this episode brought to you by athletic greens, the number one thing I love to drink, every single. So it is more back to that ad format. This, yeah, this program is brought to you in part by and I think that that was the part that started to get phased out, because when, when I was, if I was able to, you know, integrate a, a product or service into our conversation, and I'm endorsing and you're agreeing with me and I'm like, oh, and, by the way, shameless plug, go to podcast launch lab dot com forward slash ad For 10% off while we're talking about it. I mean, why not, mason? You know, that type of casual dialogue really converts fact. I just I made a post and an article, I read an ad age that Podcasters are influencing buyers more than ever now through podcast advertising. So it's gonna and that's a billion dollar industry already, so it's gonna be interesting to see how that continues, you know to to unfold.

Yeah, I think we're going to continue to see that and I think we're going to see it probably continue to get more programmatic to where like because we do all of our buying through self-serve platforms, mostly on Facebook, google, tiktok. I can log in there, point, click, choose where I want my stuff to show. I think podcasts will hopefully continue to move more that direction Because it lowers the barrier for, like, I don't have to make individual deals with individual hosts or whatever. For the most part, obviously, the Rogans and people like that are still going to be direct deals, just like premium publishers on the internet. They're still direct deals. They're not necessarily on Google's ad network, but I do think podcast advertising is going to hopefully move more programmatic to make it easier for folks like me to access that run across more places with less effort, less negotiating, less back and forth, etc. That's just the way every other medium has gone and with podcasting becoming more prolific and more effective in terms of influencing buying, I think that's going to probably be the shift that happens and it should be doable. I mean, most of the podcast game is pretty centralized, you know, between Spotify and Apple. Apple's rolling out their own ad network. They've been real quiet about that, but it is coming. That's part of why they took away the data and the cookies from Facebook and Google. It wasn't about privacy. It's so that they can be the only ones that have that data. So it wouldn't surprise me if Apple podcast got rolled into that ad inventory when they launched that.

Yeah, I agree, and Spotify is going all in too. I mean, they've got the megaphone platform and you know that's, you know, to be able to go in there in the same same way that ad networks have always worked, but, you know, simplified a bit more and making it a little bit easier for advertisers to actually access the network and the audience and placements that they want to be able to get. So, yeah, it'll be exciting to see you know how all that unfolds. So what do you guys say? We were. You know we're rounding out here 2023, which is just wild to even say. The time we're recording this Thanksgiving is next week. That's just bananas. What are you guys excited about as you round out 2023 and uh and and going into 2024?

Oh man, lots of stuff. Honestly, it's been a really great year for us. So Ascendit has been around for six years. Uh, technically speaking, I've actually only been full time on the business, though for the last coming up on two years in February. So this started as a side hustle, you know, kind of in the basement of me and my business partner. He left his full time job. First I was a CMO at a tech company actually until two years ago. We exited that company for over a billion dollars. I cashed out my shares and it was like, okay, now it's time to go all in on my thing, and we knew that exit was coming. So that's part of why I was building this on the side and really working two full time jobs for a couple of years, but so went full in on that. You know, over the last two years, right, and the growth and learning has been tremendous. I mean we were growing and pretty successful before we had both gone all in on it, but since then the growth has been been really amazing. I mean, a couple of things we cracked this year was we actually started running our own ads this year. 90% of agencies out there don't run their own ads, so we run our own ads, we call our own leads, like we, we actually use the process that we sell for ourselves. So that was a big growth lever for us. We now have predictable revenue on our business, which is huge. So the business this year doubled In Q4, we did a bunch of hiring so we basically increased the size of our team by about 50% and we're small, we're like a 12 person team but we increased our staff by about 50% To kind of lay the foundation for the growth of next year. Cause we went okay, we started this business off just getting referrals, getting business through our own network. Then we built the lead gen pipeline, built predictable revenue. Then we had to build the processes of people to service it and so that's all kind of in place now. And things get real quiet in Q4 in the marketing world, like obviously you're working really hard on like Black Friday and stuff, but nobody's really switching agencies or switching providers, and it's more so in Q1, that's when we get a lot of business. So we've laid the foundation for that. We're really excited now that we can basically we can get customers on demand. We have the people and processes to service it. So we're excited for that. Again. We're also launching our own e-commerce brand. We've helped to launch 30 plus e-commerce brands over the last couple of years, so we got to learn all these different business models and all these different products with the intent because, by the way, agencies are a terrible business you can't sell them for anything and there are a lot of work and so we kind of looked at that as we're going to find a couple of businesses that we really like through this process and we're either going to invest in them or we're going to eventually start our own, and so we've done both. We've invested in five different companies that are our clients, and then we're also starting our own e-commerce brand in 2024. We just finished our investment raise for that. So, yeah, there's a lot of exciting stuff coming on the horizon in 2024 across kind of our whole portfolio of companies.

Love it, dude. That's momentum right there, going into a brand new year. Absolutely is so. If someone's listening right now and they're like wait a second, I'm a perfect fit. This is exactly what I need. How can people get more information and get in touch with you and your team?

masondoornercom. I've got links to all my socials on there, links to our agency websites. There's a lead form on there you can fill out or hit me up on LinkedIn. Just, masondoorner, amazing.

All those links are going to be in the show notes. That's the description of this podcast episode, in case you're wondering what in the world a show note is. Mason, my brother, it's been great to connect with you again. It was great to initially connect with you out in Dallas. It was fun to know that we had a mutual friend, really outside of our current circle of networking and master mining that we get to do. The world continues to get smaller and smaller, so it's great to be in the mix with you here and I look forward to more conversations, but want to wish you guys continued success with what you're doing. Hope 2024,. It breaks all kinds of ridiculous records. Any final thoughts for our listeners?

Oh man that's a really broad question. Oh man, you're kind of stuffing me with this, Just based on what you do.

It's like, hey, listen, marketing it's always the redheaded stepchild with freckles. What do we do with it on here? But if someone's listening to it right now, kind of final thoughts on what marketing could potentially do, based on you know what you guys have seen.

Yeah, all right. So thank you, I appreciate you.

Sorry about that curveball there.

Yeah, oh, it's all, it's all good. So the biggest thing I see when we I have this conversation all the time, which is I hear paid ads don't work for me or they don't work for my business. That's true. Sometimes, again, there's some niche ones like yours or like the insurance space that I talked about, but in general, when I hear people say that and I do roughly 50 account audits a year and when I look into those accounts where I hear people say, oh yeah, I tried it, it didn't work for me, it doesn't work for my business I almost always find a smoking gun. There's always something that was done wrong, there's almost always some kind of pilot error and unfortunately, the digital marketing space has gotten super scummy. There's tons of people that have taken 997 courses and declared themselves an expert and wasted other people's money Terrifying and I would say 50% of the businesses that we take over for we're doing that. We're the cleanup crew and we find those smoking guns and the business owners are super skeptical usually and a little skittish at first, but we can almost always find the smoking gun installer system and make it work. So I would say, if you've had that experience, we're like oh, paid ads don't work for my business. Make sure get get a second opinion of somebody that's really good and truly is an expert, because the person that sold you on them being an expert might not be. So get that second opinion, because more often than not, paid ads do work for most businesses. It's just that the person running them before was not the correct pilot.

Love it. Mason Dorn, appreciate your time, my brother. Look forward to seeing you again in January, and thanks again for hanging out for a few minutes. Likewise, thanks for having me on. You got it, man. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story podcast. Be sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way, you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Be sure to appreciate it. Signing off from the podcast launch labcom studios. We'll talk to you next time.