From Data to Dollars: How Dave Burnett Builds Scalable PPC Campaigns That Actually Work

Jeffro (00:03.433)
If you’ve ever launched a paid ad campaign and wondered where your money went, this episode is for you. Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today, I’m joined by Dave Burnett, who has spent over 25 years helping brands like Merriam-Webster and Encyclopedia Britannica turn digital marketing into predictable revenue. We’re going to talk about how Dave uses data-first tracking, heat maps, and click intelligence to spot what’s broken before even spending a dime on ads. And we’ll touch on how to find ROI, low-cost keywords, how to structure scalable PPC campaigns from scratch and why AI has become a non-negotiable part of his workflow. So if you want smarter, simpler marketing that leads to meaningful growth, we all want that, right? So stick around, help me welcome Dave Burnett to the show. Thanks for being here, Dave.

Dave Burnett (00:48.92)
Thanks so much for having me on, Geoffrey. I really appreciate it. And yeah, and I can tell you that where some of that money went was to fuel Mark Zuckerberg’s jet, just so we’re clear.

Jeffro (00:56.344)
Well, he’s putting it to good use, right? Building AI and Oculus. Who knows what he’s using it for? But anyways, we want to keep as much of our money as possible, turn it into more money.

Dave Burnett (01:04.151)
Yeah, absolutely.

We can, absolutely. That’s the goal behind all this. We’re very performance focused. So making sure that we can get good ROI is always, always at the forefront. Cause we don’t want to spend any more money than we have.

Jeffro (01:19.167)
Yeah, and we’ve all been burned before. Anyone who’s done paid ads, hired somebody, didn’t know what they’re doing, and you get locked in a contract. So everybody’s got those bruises and scars from past experiences.

Dave Burnett (01:31.85)
Absolutely. Well, I was actually just on a conversation with somebody this morning who had talked about how their ad performance from 2016 to basically up to COVID was very different from COVID onwards. And that was both a combination of the market has changed, the technology has changed, but, they’re, of course their website changed. So there’s a lot of different things that go into it, but just trying to figure out, sometimes just trying to figure out what happened, what changed, what’s going on has been, is something that we all got to battle and fight with.

Jeffro (01:44.182)
Mm-hmm.

Jeffro (02:02.655)
Yeah, is there like a single biggest mistake that you see small business owners making when they start running Paydads?

Dave Burnett (02:09.742)
100 % and it’s all tracking. I realize it’s going to put some people to sleep. I’m sorry to do that to you, but if you don’t know what’s working or you don’t know what’s not working, then you can’t do anything. So the very, very first thing, and this took us, I wish I could say we learned it instantly, but we learned this the hard way, the hard, slow way, making sure you’ve got your tracking set up correctly is 99 % of the battle. And even if it gives you the answers you don’t want, you got to make sure. So the biggest mistake I see is people don’t have tracking.

Secondary to that is people who don’t look at their tracking. They just set it and forget it. think the AI is just going to do its thing or whatever they think. I mean, you got to look at it. You got to optimize. You got to make changes. Exactly. No, don’t. It’s got it. It’s got it. We’re good. So yeah, we see that all the time too.

Jeffro (02:41.601)
Ha ha ha.

Jeffro (02:47.339)
Like, la la la la. I don’t want to know. If I ignore it, it’ll go away.

Jeffro (02:57.703)
So I imagine that’s kind what you mean when you’re talking about being data first in your marketing, right? Actually having the data, knowing what the data is, seeing it, using it. What does that actually look like though? Can you walk us through if you’re launching a new campaign from scratch, what are the things that you’re looking for?

Dave Burnett (03:11.234)
Yeah, absolutely. just starting with the same data. Okay. So if we’re starting with from scratch, very, there’s a few fundamentals you got to make sure you’ve got right. The first thing is alignment between your keyword or targeting your messaging in your ad and your landing page. So the AI actually, so we’ll just talk about Google for a second. The AI is smart enough that it

goes to your website now when you put a landing page into your ads and it actually crawls your site and crawls your landing page and knows what your page is about. So say for example, your landing page was about jewelry, whatever it might be. Or if you’re a services business, it might be about, you know, you’re a lawyer and a lawyering or attorney, you know, whatever that might be. So on that landing page, if you’re talking about, you know, being an attorney for employment, you know, employment lawyer, then what

Google will say is okay, the ad should be relevant to that. So if you put up an ad like hey, buy my, I don’t know, buy my t-shirts and then your keywords were all around t-shirts you’re selling but you’re landing them on a page that is associated with being an attorney for HR, it’s just not gonna line up. So Google in particular has a really good what they call quality score and if the better your alignment is, the better your quality score will be and actually the cheaper your ads will be.

Because Google will take your money. They will let you advertise to sell t-shirts to an attorney’s page. They will let you do that, but it’s gonna cost you a lot more money as opposed to if you had an ad that was well-defined about all the problems that you solve as a HR attorney. All the different ways that you can add value to people in your ads, and then your landing page aligns with that. So that’s kind of the very first fundamental, making sure you’ve got alignment.

after you’ve got tracking. Cause then as soon as you start driving traffic to your page, you want to make sure that what you’re doing actually is converting to whatever it is that you want it to do. If it’s a lead or if it’s a phone call or if it’s a form fill or whatever you’ve got.

Jeffro (05:14.517)
Yeah, well, it’s interesting that Google does that to ensure the alignment because it kind of protects them and their own reputation as a provider of good links, right? So if I were to click on an ad and it took me somewhere random, like, oh, OK, I guess I can’t trust Google ads anymore. Right. So that’s that’s probably why they do that. That’s awesome.

Dave Burnett (05:31.116)
That’s a hundred percent why they do it. And then the more interesting thing is once you, once you get a 10 out of 10, so say you are the top ranked ad keyword combination, your quality score is a 10 out of 10. You can actually start to drive, change the auction, change the way the pricing works. Because as soon as you start being willing to bid a bit more, you know, that, that click used to cost me $2. Now it’s only costing me 50 cents, but I’m willing to pay $10 for that click. All of a sudden, everybody else’s cost in the auction goes up.

So you can actually, you you can impact your competitors based on how good your ad that you’ve written is relative to your landing page and your keywords that you’re choosing.

Jeffro (06:10.965)
I didn’t know that, that’s very cool. So while we’re talking about lower cost keyword strategy, I know you had done something with Merriam-Webster and the word aardvark. Can you tell us about that?

Dave Burnett (06:12.781)
Yeah.

Dave Burnett (06:22.094)
So Miram-Webster Dictionary is a very interesting case. Basically, it’s a dictionary, right? It’s online. And so they have competitors though, like everybody does. So they have thesaurus.com, they have OxfordDictionary.com, they have a number of different people. So even though they give a great response to, if you’re looking for a keyword like aardvark or whatever that word might be, like what is an aardvark, be interesting to see if actually the…

demand spikes after the podcast comes out for Aardvark. But anyways, what it does is, you you don’t always rank number one for all these keywords and say there was 10,000 searches a month for Aardvark. I’m not saying there is, but if there was, and they were ranked number three, you don’t need to go to search result number two or number three to learn what an Aardvark is, right? If you found it on OxfordDictionary.com, you know.

Jeffro (06:52.926)
Ha ha.

Dave Burnett (07:17.75)
Right? So you don’t need to go any lower in the search results. It’s just kind of the same with everything. What happened is the way they make their money though is by page views. So when you actually go to their website, they use Google AdSense and they get paid by advertisers when you actually visit their site. That’s how they make money. They got back in the day about two cents per page, like per visitor, because the average visitor would visit two pages. They got about a cent a page. So what we did is we put up

a Google ads campaign for them targeting some of these keywords where they ranked number three, number two, number three. They just were never getting the clicks, but because they were so relevant, speaking to that quality score and because nobody else was bidding on aardvark, we were able to get them one cent clicks actually a little bit less than one cent to click. So every time somebody clicked on their ad went to the, went to the Miriam Webster results page for aardvark or others, they actually made a cent every time.

somebody clicked on that ad. So they were profitable just by page views based on what we were running for them. And that was, it was really interesting seeing thousands and thousands of clicks go through for these random words.

Jeffro (08:24.369)
Yeah, well, and I wouldn’t, it’s kind of unintuitive. Like I wouldn’t think that, why would they bother paying for Aardvark? Because like, do they get advertisers that say, I’m okay with putting my ad on the Aardvark page, even though it’s probably elementary school kids doing projects? Like, does that matter?

Dave Burnett (08:42.062)
I never got involved in that side of things. That was an internal issue there. I know that their advertisers on their pages were a variety of different people. And because they were part of the Google AdSense network, there would actually be people who would choose to be like, you know what, the right type of people are on miriamwebsterdictionary.com. I might sell, I don’t know, like as you say, school supplies. And so if I’m a school supplies person, I’m willing to pay for those page views because enough people are there on that.

Jeffro (08:46.061)
Ha ha ha.

Dave Burnett (09:11.47)
you know, education based website that eventually some of them will buy from.

Jeffro (09:15.667)
Right, interesting. Now I want to talk about something else you mentioned, because you said if you just find out what an RVARC is, you don’t have to go past the first result. But now we’ve got AI results, and a lot of people aren’t even leaving the search results page to go there. So you can’t get those page views anymore just doing that same type of approach. So I’m curious to hear from you. How are LLMs affecting PPC results, not just on Google, but even like some people aren’t going to Google anymore. They’re going to Propel XT or ChatGPT or something. So talk to us about that.

Dave Burnett (09:44.11)
Yeah. So basically we’ve been kind of spoiled. I mean, think about it in a good way or a bad way, but we’ve been kind of spoiled with Google being the dominant. mean, okay. Bing has also been there, but Google being the dominant search results for last, what 20 years. So as a result of that, you know, they did kind of fragment a little when social media came in and a bunch of searches. now people actually, you know, search on YouTube, which is also owned by Google, but they also search on, you know, tick tock and they search on X and they search on whatever else linkedin.

for relevant search results. So search was kind of fragmented but into social. Now it’s fully fragmented because of the way the AIs, the large language models are all coming on board. So one way to look at it is what is the type of search that you wanna be shown for? So this is the situation where the large language models, they are really good at kind of imitating Wikipedia right now. And the reason why I say that is because

A lot of the searches that happen and trigger AI overviews right now are informational in basis. So if you’re like, what is an aardvark? Absolutely, that’s going to be an AI overview right now associated with showing. But if you were like, I want to buy, okay, I don’t know what you would buy, but I want to buy an aardvark something else. I want to buy a T-shirt with an aardvark on it. And I don’t know why we’re going down this path, but either way, bear with me. And so if you’re looking for a T-shirt with an aardvark on it, that’s more of a commercial, right? Purchase.

So it won’t show at this point, the AI overviews don’t show that they will show, you know, there will be search results. There will be a merchant center results. There will be a product results associated with it, but you won’t necessarily get an AI overview unless you said, what is this t-shirt made of that has an aardvark printed on it? And how does it get printed? And then it would be like, it’s cotton and you use press, know, use a press and blah, blah. Then it would give you that AI overview. So search intent is a big thing.

as to what’s going to trigger AI overviews and what isn’t at this point.

Jeffro (11:47.186)
Okay, and do you help your clients figure out what ones they should go after or how to target that search intent?

Dave Burnett (11:55.104)
Yeah, absolutely. Cause going back to the lawyer example or the attorney example earlier on, it’s kind of like, okay, what does an HR attorney do would result in an AI overview, right? But if you were like, okay, I want, HR attorney in Chicago, it would show you the HR attorneys in Chicago. The best way I can think of it actually, probably easier reference is Starbucks. If you just search for Starbucks, you’re going to get Starbucks.com, right? It’ll show you some information on the right about the company and other results.

If you’re like Starbucks near me, it would show you three or four listings, a map, that kind of stuff to find the Starbucks near you. If you were saying, Starbucks Frappuccino, it would take you to the Frappuccino page. That is the first result. So Google and the other LLMs and the other search engines, they want to show you the most relevant search result for whatever you put into them. So the difference between Google and chat GPT or perplexity is

You’re looking at search results and search queries versus generated prompt results. So that’s what you have to think about is these are generated prompt results. Like you asking me about what I know about PPC is more like a generated prompt result. I am not going to give you a link to my website and then tell you to go there. I’m going to tell you what I know about it. That is exactly how the large language models work. If they tell you what they know about it. So the secret is how do you get into their knowledge base?

so that they know to trigger and say, well, you know, the best digital podcast is Jeff Rose, right? Like how do you get shown in that search result is the real key.

Jeffro (13:35.889)
Got it. So on the other side, so that’s how it’s affecting the search experience. But what about you guys setting up ads and doing targeting stuff? What are some of the more useful ways that you guys are using AI or ChatGPT and other tools to kind of streamline your process or spark better ideas and all of this stuff?

Dave Burnett (13:53.56)
So we’re using it all the time. mean, the individual specialists who have on our team that do this, they use it in a bunch of different ways. I mean, I personally don’t run as many ads as I used to. I mean, I’ve been doing this for a while, but I tend to do more strategy more. And so the actual implementation that’s done by our team, though, we use all of the tools that we can. One that’s really helpful, for example, is when you’re putting together a Google ad and you’re putting together either a responsive search ad or you’re putting together a performance max.

You have the ability to have like 15 headlines. You can have four long descriptions. You can have two long headlines. You have all this content you can put in. So what we do is we actually use Chat GPT for Sheets. So we put a Google Doc or Google Sheet together and in the Google Sheet, we have different prompts that we use. And then it actually auto fills 15 of this in the right character length and you know, four of this and two of those in the right character length.

based on our landing page, based on our client’s approvals, based on everything else. So we’re actually using tools to save us all that time and then you send it to the client and be like, does all this make sense? Is this what you want to be shown for? All that kind of good stuff. So that’s just one example of how we’re using it at this point. There’s other examples that we’re using, using some of the other tools that are out there. And so one of the things that we’re doing that’s really interesting is with Facebook ads.

And so what we’re doing with Facebook ads is car dealership ads, for example, with the car dealership. of the things that you can do is, you know, you have different markets that you would potentially market too. So different languages, let’s use languages as an example. One of the dealerships that we work with a partner on, basically what they did is they went in and they hired an actor to go in and they filmed the actor with the, you know, in front of the dealership, standing in front of a Ford.

standing in front of a car and basically talking about the dealership, talking about the latest specials, all that kind of stuff. So you got film people there, you got the actors time, you’ve got pre and post production, all that kind of stuff. So once you had the post production, what we did is we said, okay, now we want the person to speak Spanish. Now we want them to speak Mandarin. Now we just want them. So we actually used HeyGen, which is a tool that anybody could kind of go and sign up for and use, train the model on the actor.

Dave Burnett (16:19.394)
And then now we are serving ads to specific demographics who speak those other languages and have it as default on their browsers. And so we’re serving them an ad and serving ads in other languages is way, way cheaper than serving in English. So.

Jeffro (16:35.727)
was about to say, I would imagine so. Well, yeah, because you’ve probably got way less competition.

Dave Burnett (16:38.566)
Mm-hmm. So that’s a couple of examples of how we’re using it. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So if you can find those little areas that are less competition, but Google still wants to show you or, know, Meta wants to show you, then yeah, that’s what we do.

Jeffro (16:53.996)
Awesome. Yeah. I think MrBeast used that strategy too. He’s got all his same content dubbed into other languages. So he’s got multiple, he’s got a Spanish channel, he’s got all the other ones. And so he now has all those monetized too, which helps him support his content, make more money and all that. So that’s brilliant.

Dave Burnett (17:07.0)
Yep.

Dave Burnett (17:12.246)
Yeah, it’s really, really interesting to see. And the clients are happy about it because they don’t have to bring in a Spanish speaking, a Mandarin speaking, you know, any of these other things you’ve got. And they’ve got, as long as you’ve got the right deal with your actor, you’re fine. You just got to make sure you got that covered. But yeah, you’re good.

Jeffro (17:20.173)
Right.

Jeffro (17:28.343)
Yeah, no, that’s really interesting. Okay, so here’s another question. So you’ve built multiple businesses, helped other scales. You’ve done a lot with email automation, but when do you layer in PPC campaigns? Is there a time where that makes sense or is it just kind of totally dependent on the industry and the business?

Dave Burnett (17:48.472)
So there’s a number of different times where we actually get involved in bringing in PPC campaigns. there’s a guy named Alex Hermosy. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him. He is, yeah, he’s great. So his framework is basically that there are four ways to acquire people, like acquire customers. There’s cold outreach. So reaching out to people you don’t know. Warm outreach, reaching out to people you already know. Making free content like this.

Jeffro (17:59.257)
yeah, of course.

Dave Burnett (18:17.398)
And then there’s also paid ads. So basically that’s, those are the four ways that you as an individual can actually generate leads for yourself, for your business. And so what we’ve found is paid ads are usually great as your fourth option, right? If you’re just getting started because you’re actually paying money to bring people to your site. So if you are able to bring people to your site and then kind of test it, see how many people remember back to tracking, seeing how many people visit your site.

seeing how many people convert to whatever action you want them to take. And then before you start putting fuel on the fire associated with paid ads, because there’s nothing that will drive a business into the stratosphere faster than paid ads. And there’s nothing that will drive a business into the ground faster than paid ads. So you just have to be very, very careful that you’re doing the right thing because it’ll, it’ll just accelerate whatever it is that you’re doing.

Jeffro (19:15.501)
So what are those non-negotiable metrics that you’d be looking at to make that decision before saying, okay, let’s do it. And because, like you said, you can get burned real fast. So how do you know if you’re actually at place and you’re ready to scale?

Dave Burnett (19:30.178)
Well, the first thing is there’s so many different kind of business model things that that brings up as a question. So I, ideally the fastest way you can scale is if you can pay back your ads in the first 30 days. The reason why I use 30 days is because you have the ability to be able to get free financing on a credit card or whatever else, or even more ideally the money you make from the clients you acquire.

and have them pay you back before you then have to pay your ads bill. So, you know, if you’re paying for Google ads, they usually give you 30 days. you know, today’s beginning of July, by the end of July, you can advertise all month, but then you got to pay your Google bill, right? So if you say, for example, you’re a service business and you sell, I don’t know, say you’re, go back to the lawyer. and you know what? An accountant, let’s use an accountant this time. Just switched up a little bit.

Say you’re an accountant and you want to acquire new customers. Right now you look at your website and you’re like, okay, we’re getting a thousand visitors a month to our website. And of those visitors, we’re getting 10 phone calls. And from those 10 phone calls, we are getting one new client. Right? So you can say, okay, from those 10, where our conversion rate is 10 % of all new inbound inquiries. So, but it took a thousand visitors to get those 10 inquiries. So how many more?

visitors do we need and how much will that cost? Okay, so say if that one client, you make five grand off of that one client. I’m just trying to use easy math. So, you know, if you are able to spend less than five grand to get that next client and they pay you that money in the first month, it’s a worthwhile investment because accountants…

are actually really good for recurring, right? Like every year you need to do every, however many months need to do taxes. You need to file your state taxes. You need to do your corporate tax, all this other stuff, right? So it’s a recurring revenue. but if they can pay for it in the first month, that makes sense. So you got to take a look at a business model perspective. How long does it take for you to get money in and how fast can you use that money then to repurpose it back out to make more money? There’s some real easy rules of thumb.

Dave Burnett (21:48.206)
that you want to have at least a three to one return on ad spend to make it make sense for a service business. So what that means basically is say you spend $1,000 in ads, you don’t want your cost per acquisition to be more than $333 because basically usually depending on what your margins are, it’s going to cost you $333 to run your business, know, pay yourself, pay your staff.

pay for overheads, whatever. And then you can use the second $333 to pay for the acquisition of that client. then the third $333 can go to buy you your next client, right? So the first client actually becomes the fuel for you to buy more clients using this channel. And especially because it’s recurring revenue, you then take a look at the lifetime value of that client. And that lifetime value of that client is what really matters. Because they may spend five grand

Jeffro (22:39.904)
Mm-hmm.

Dave Burnett (22:47.918)
or that other example, they may spend $1,000 with you, but they might spend that $1,000 with you every quarter, and they may stay with you for five years, so that client is actually worth $20,000, not just the $1,000 that you originally got from them. And I realized that was a lot of math, sorry, but.

Jeffro (23:02.816)
Yeah, well, this all kind of… No, no, but this underlines the importance of the data-first approach, right? You need to know your numbers. Like, yes, this is kind of a simple math equation, right? But you have to know what’s working and what’s not, which means you got to track that stuff and you got to know how much you’re spending to acquire a customer and to fulfill for that customer your margins and everything. But I like how you explained that it can be used to turn into kind of a flywheel effect so that once you’re there… All right, now we know that’s the time.

to scale. Before that, OK, we’ve got to fix some other things before it makes sense to pour more money into it. So that was really helpful. Thank you.

Dave Burnett (23:38.346)
Yeah, no, it’s, one of those things where understanding how long people stay with you is also a very important thing. And then when they leave, which is called your churn rate, right? Just understanding how long people stay, how much they spend with you as they stay, how much it costs for you to fulfill on your service over that time. And then how much of that money can you bring forward into this period where you’ve got your Google bill? How much can you bring forward to then pay for?

the acquisition of the next client or customer.

Jeffro (24:09.365)
Yeah. Okay, so a big piece of this is fixing the time in between, getting to that point, right? So let’s say someone is running paid ads, they’re getting leads from the ads, but those people aren’t booking. How do you go about diagnosing and fixing that disconnect?

Dave Burnett (24:26.446)
So a service, just so I’m thinking about things the right way. So you’re talking about a lead that comes in, say, a service business, comes into the landing page. They fill out a lead form, but then they’re not actually booking a meeting with somebody. that just so I’m on the same page as you? So that’s a sales process type of solution that you should take a look at in that particular case. So there’s a bunch of different stages of acquisition, right? There’s, you if you’re trying to get everything from click,

Jeffro (24:31.421)
Right.

Jeffro (24:42.92)
Right.

Dave Burnett (24:56.226)
to close, how are all the steps in that process handled? So the first thing is, say they fill out a lead form, then you gotta take a look again, metrics, how long does it take you to respond back to them? Because if you surf like how I surf, you’re gonna be like, that looks interesting, click, fill out that form, done. but maybe there was this other one, click, fill out that form. I’ve got 10 tabs open, filling out forms, trying to get the solution that I want. Whoever gets back to me first,

I’m going to view the most favorably, right? The second one, maybe third one, the 10th one, three days later, I got no interest, right? Like you’re way too late. So response time, we always recommend to our clients under five minutes, responding to any inquiry. If you can actually pick up the phone and answer the phone, that’s even better. That’s zero, you know, like in terms of the delay. If it’s a form fill, if you can get it under a minute, there’s a bunch of different studies, but the overall kind of general…

Consensus is if you can get back to them in under a minute, you are going to win, have a much, much greater percentage chance of winning that business. And I know in some of our clients that it’s increased, like there’s one I’m thinking of right now, it’s a service business chiropractor. They change theirs to a respond within one minute and an increase their booking rate, their show, their booking rate and show rate by 67%. So they.

It’s a huge improvement. It’s just getting back to people faster.

Jeffro (26:26.813)
does it make a difference in that percentage if the person calling them is a human versus an AI bot?

Dave Burnett (26:34.028)
Well, yes. There are people who I know use tools that are just kind of like, you know, like say for example, I filled out a form on the website. I know there are tools out there that were an AI bot will call you and just say, Hey, are you a real person? Just want to verify some details. I’m a bot, but I want to book you in with Steven next week. He’s got some more point. He’s got time at 3pm. Does that work for you? I’ve heard of scenarios where that is that’s working.

Jeffro (26:35.689)
Ha

Dave Burnett (27:02.808)
but there’s the delay in the speaking as I delay as I’m speaking myself, but the response time from the bots is still a little too long. It’s the delay and they’re gonna fix that delay within the next kind of, I’m sure six months because it’s going up to the satellite coming back down, going to the model, the model responds, comes back up to the satellite, comes back down. Like that takes a second.

And as long as we can get down to under half a second, it’ll be just completely conversational and that’ll be really, really good. And I know it’s getting closer, but it’s just not quite there yet.

Jeffro (27:40.883)
So then what that tells me is for now, you should run your ads during your business hours when you’ve got someone glued to the phone, right, until the AI’s good enough to take that over and they can do it around the clock.

Dave Burnett (27:52.526)
Yeah, or you could do it and just have it say, Hey, you’ve reached us. You we, would normally talk to a human, but you’re talking to the bot because it’s after, you know, 5pm. We’re happy to answer this still. can still answer all your questions and get you hooked up with an appointment. If that works for you, if not, we’ll call you back Monday morning at 9am after the, you know, after the 4th July, whatever it be. Right. So.

Jeffro (28:14.717)
Yeah, it’s interesting because there’s so many new ways we can use AI and it’s just going to get better and better. So Dave, thanks for spending time with us today. You know, this is just another reminder, you know, successful marketing doesn’t come from luck or guesswork. Like you’ve got to have the clarity, you got to the data and even just the strategic approach that you guys have from all your experience of doing this and figuring out what works. That’s what’s going to get you there. So if you guys are listening and you want to connect with Dave or learn more about how he helps businesses take their marketing budgets and turn that into

predictable revenue like we talked about. Check out his links in the show notes. And Dave, I’ve got one last question for you before we wrap up. If you had to start over with zero followers, zero traffic, and just a $1,000 ad budget, what would you do in your first 30 days?

Dave Burnett (29:00.952)
That’s a great question. I would first and foremost understand my offer. What am I selling and who am I selling to? I would, so there’s something called, you know, defining your ideal customer profile, your ICP. So I, the very first thing I would do is I wouldn’t spend a dime on ads until I was able to figure out who needed what it is that whatever it is that I was selling.

I would then go and do some of that for people in my ideal customer profile for free. I would say to them, you know what, I’m doing this thing, you know, donate to your local charity if you want, but I’m doing this thing and I want to get better at it. So how you’re going to pay me is through feedback. Is that okay? And that would get, you know, five people to agree to that. Once I got those five people, I would say, okay, you know, if you’re happy with how I worked, I would love a review, a Google review to build some authority.

And then I would get them to give me that review and then ask them if they had any referrals. I would then get the referrals and I would start doing that. But those people they referred me to, I would start charging money. And once I got some paid customers, they give you a real feedback. And then beyond that, once I got the real feedback, what I would then do is figure out what they liked, what they didn’t like. And I would spend as much time as I could refining that until I had a great product.

then I would spend money on ads, driving people to the product that I’ve built based on real feedback with real user reviews to give authority to whatever it is that I’m selling to whoever it is I’m selling it to. So that’s what I would do. I would build a business from scratch with real people, with real feedback.

Jeffro (30:48.744)
I like that. You didn’t just rush into the ads. You got it all figured out so that you could have that scaling point like we talked about. that at least you have a better chance of that so that your ad spend will go as far as possible. Awesome.

Dave Burnett (30:59.616)
Yeah, there’s no point in spending the money if you’re not going to actually like, if you don’t know what you’re selling to, you don’t know who you’re going to sell it to and you don’t know what they want. You just lighten it on fire. mean, just, you know, go in the backyard and light it on fire. You have better results that way. You least stay warm.

Jeffro (31:15.004)
Yeah, no, well, that’s a great reminder. So thanks again, Dave. Thanks to all you guys for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on Apple or Spotify. It definitely helps more business owners discover how to achieve digital dominance in their industries. That’s it for now. Thanks again, Dave, and we’ll see you all here next time. Take care.

Dave Burnett (31:31.064)
Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye.