Beating Competitors with 100x Your Budget
Dr. J’s guest co-host Spider Graham invited Kevin M. Ryan to join in discussing the book they wrote together, Taking Down Goliath: The Digital Marketing Strategy for Beating Competitors with 100 Time Your Spending Power. Listening to this show is a great way to get to know the authors of this book, which begins with some goal clarification work to lay the basis for developing strategy and learning the tactics of using particular digital tools.
Kevin explains his desire to write a cross-disciplinary, holistic guide for small businesses in contrast to the many narrowly focused marketing books that were readily available. By emphasizing overall strategy and providing many examples, the book makes it possible to see where the various digital channels can play a role in marketing within a limited budget.
Because of the Internet, anyone can now engage with potential customers, finding out what their needs and interests are. It is no longer necessary to have deep pockets to film an infomercial—YouTube is available. You can invite viewers to let you know by posting comments what they think of your message. Because of search engines and alerts, you can find almost anyone commenting about your product or service and respond to comments, whether they be positive or critical. Personal interaction takes time but is an excellent way of fostering “organic growth.”
While Goliath-like companies can spend fortunes reaching wide, general audiences, the Davids use shrewd reasoning to identify a small target and deliver precisely aimed, individually tailored messages. And that is where digital marketing excels.
Kevin Ryan founded the strategic consulting firm Motivity Marketing in April, 2007. Kevin is known throughout the world as an interactive marketing thought leader, particularly in the search marketing arena. Today’s Motivity is a group of professionals focused on thought leadership, innovation and exacting tactical execution in a modern digital advertising agency environment.
Over decades in the business, he formerly has served as global content director for Search Engine Watch and Search Engine Strategies, VP, Interactive Media for the Interpublic Group agency. Wahlstrom Interactive, and CEO of Kinetic Results, an Advertising Age Top 20 search engine marketing firm. Directly feeding our marketplace intelligence, Kevin has published hundreds of articles on search and interactive marketing in industry publications such as Advertising Age, iMedia, MediaPost, ClickZ and Search Engine Watch. His insights are universally acknowledged as best in class by marketers everywhere.
His former client roster and personal case history includes market-leading brands Rolex Watch, USA; State Farm Insurance; Farmers Insurance; Minolta Corporation; Samsung Electronics America; Toyota Motor Sales, USA; Panasonic Services; and the Hilton Hotels brands.Widely quoted and recognized as an industry expert, Kevin has appeared often in our most trusted news outlets: ABC, CNN, The Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times and numerous others. Rob ‘Spider’ Graham is a 20 year veteran of the digital media buying, selling and production industries and is currently the CEO of Trainingcraft, LLC, a company providing digital advertising strategies, marketing and sales consulting and training solutions to publishers and advertisers. They provide industry leading training specifically for publisher sales teams through their CertifiedSalesTraining.com site and have just recently rolled out a training and education community for digital marketers and advertisers at spidergraham.com.
Spider is an expert on many areas of digital advertising and marketing including interactive marketing, digital media sales, audience targeting and programmatic media selling and buying.
Rob has over 20 years of experience designing and creating digital advertising and marketing materials-education and training products; he has spent 18 years as an adjunct University professor teaching over 100 digital media development, online marketing, media buying and ecommerce business courses at the University of Massachusetts, Harvard University and Emerson College; Rob has over 12 years online course development; he has been a speaker at over 100 different digital marketing conferences and venues ; he is experienced in Rich Media advertising and audience targeting; he is the Author of Advertising Interactively, Fishing From A Barrel, Going Native and Co-author of Taking Down Goliath: The Digital Marketing Strategy for Beating Competitors with 100 Times Your Spending Power. He has over 8 years as a monthly columnist for ClickZ.com covering Streaming and Rich Media technologies, Behavioral Targeting strategies and technologies and targeted media buying; and Rob is presently a columnist for BizJournals.com covering online business and digital marketing best practices for small businesses.