Why Most Real Estate Marketing Fails (and How Dallin Cottle Fixes It)

Mike Hambright (00:01.132)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with Dallin Cottle. We’re gonna be talking about marketing. A couple of marketing nerds are gonna be talking about how to take your business to the next level. The timing is pretty good. We’re recording this right near the end of the year here, so by the time comes out it’ll probably be early January. Perfect time to kind of get your bearings straight if you haven’t already on what you need to be doing to market your business and get to the next level. It’s gonna be a great show. So Dallin, welcome to the show, buddy.

Dallin Cottle (00:23.746)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Mike Hambright (00:25.43)
Yeah, excited to have down here. By the way, just joined Investor Fuel as a sponsor and has a fractional CMO business, kind of a marketing agency. So we’re excited to talk about marketing today. Hey, before we jump into this, tell us a little bit about your backstory and kind of how you got here.

Dallin Cottle (00:39.266)
Yeah. So, so yeah. So got a political science degree, thought I was headed to law school. I took this random job at an advertising firm here in Utah. And I just loved it. I was like, wow, this is really interesting. Like the psychology and understanding, you know, big data sets and understanding how people voted and how people behaved in certain, you know, in certain situations, taking all that behavioral science and applying it into.

this marketing job really fueled my growth. And I just, I mean, it’s all I did. just hate, slept, I mean, market, you know? It was everything. so that, was there for about a year, getting so many insights. My job was to basically look at spend on paid platforms and analyze those budgets and find waste. So I would go in, audit a…

Google ad account or PPC account and find, okay, we’re wasting 76 % of our ad spend in these areas, let’s switch the budget over, let’s find the conversions and let’s make some money together. So that was my primary job, just figuring that out. That took me to a point where I was like, wow, this is great. Looked around me and saw that this is probably the end of, or this is probably about as high as I get in this company right now.

And so I decided, you know what, I’m going to quit. And so I did. And then I told my wife in that order. So that was a mistake. But I learned that the hard way. So quit. Yeah, told my wife, came home and then Googled how to start a business. And that’s kind of where, yeah, where Roar started was basically a Google search, figuring out what an LLC was eight years ago.

Mike Hambright (02:36.334)
Yeah. Yeah. The modern day version, you just ask your AI how to start a business and it gives you everything you need instead of a simple good. Yeah. It’s easy to get a document, but you still have to do the work, right? That hasn’t changed. Yep. So let’s talk about, marketing. One of the things that I love about marketing in the real estate space specifically is there’s so many people that are still like,

you know, winging it. Even some people that are operating at a high level, they’re really not very scientific about marketing. And if you’re a marketing guy, we’re both kind of cut from that cloth is like, just like you said, your first job was cutting waste and stuff like that. A lot of real estate investors are even probably honestly, all small entrepreneurs would would just say if there’s that much waste, they would they would definitively say that doesn’t work and just stop doing that altogether instead of like, well,

Dallin Cottle (03:08.503)
Yeah, yeah.

Dallin Cottle (03:18.199)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Hambright (03:30.876)
The way you’re doing it isn’t work isn’t working, but doesn’t mean you need to scrap the whole channel Right. So maybe share some thoughts on just like you you work with some high-level operators and I have to just talk about like the mindset of of a larger operator versus maybe folks that are kind of smaller that kind of like Quote try stuff but they quit or they give it a half-hearted attempt or they try to do it themselves without any expertise or what I’m just kind of talk about that dynamic of the high-level operator versus

Dallin Cottle (03:35.661)
Exactly. Yep.

Dallin Cottle (03:40.93)
Yep.

Dallin Cottle (03:51.777)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (04:00.61)
the everyday operator if you will.

Dallin Cottle (04:02.539)
Yeah, No, it’s really, it’s really interesting because let’s just take an example, like let’s say PPC or Google ads, right? what’s the, the high level operator, you know, sits down, they create their annual plan, they create the quarterly rocks and they say, we’re going to launch, let’s say they’re going to launch Google ads, right? It’s maybe say they’ve never, they’ve never done it or we’re going to double budget on Google ads or whatever it is. Right. so there’s, there’s that kind of, you know,

part of marketing, right? It was just like setting the goal and just like saying, we’re to up budget or whatever. And that’s great. The difference between the, I guess, the mindset of the high level operator and somebody who’s just like, be like, what can you do for a thousand dollars on PPC? Like that person is like, how can I just go as cheap as possible? I don’t really quite understand how it works. The high level operator is saying, Hey, I need to spend 80 % of my budget on things that work. But I understand that

there has to be some sort of test budget. And I don’t know if, mean, as part of this recording, what’s it, December 23rd today. So like Google released some algorithm changes just with Google ads not too long ago. mean, weeks ago, right? And in those changes, we noticed that when someone types into Google, like we’re all seeing it now, the AI search results. Well, guess what happened to all of our click-through rates? They dropped in half. So the high level operator says, okay, somebody might say, well,

Google’s not working anymore. We got to go do more direct mail, right? It’s like boom, boom, boom. And they just are cutting things out really fast. The high level operator says, great, all my competitors are now seeing a 50 % drop and I got to go crack what this is. And so they’re going to go deeper and they’re going to figure out and split test certain things, longer tailed keywords and different things to figure out, well, how do I get that real estate back while everyone else is, you know, crying that they’re not getting it, you know?

and they just stick to the strategy and they see it through.

Mike Hambright (06:01.784)
Yep, yep. And I think, you know…

You know, one of the differences from my experience is higher level operators and this is in every industry are trying to find reasons to spend more money on marketing because they like if you understand for every dollar you put in you get back X and X is you know a decent number like let’s just say 4X or above we tell people on the marketing, you know for real estate marketing because you have a lot of other expenses, but if you’re getting a 4X ROAS, which by the way is a 400 % return

I mean, we put in a dollar and you get back four. Like, keep going, right? Keep going. just basically, it’s like, I kind of use the analogy of a pond. It’s like,

Dallin Cottle (06:36.352)
Yeah.

Correct.

Mike Hambright (06:45.11)
If you’re catching a lot of fish, like don’t leave, like put more lines out and keep catching more. Like everybody’s goal to go fishing is to catch as many as they can typically. Right. And so you shouldn’t just say, Hey, I cast it out like five feet. didn’t catch anything. So I’m leaving in like five minutes. Right. It’s like, no, that’s not how it works. So you have to just kind of keep plowing into it. And so I think large businesses are always looking larger. Businesses are always saying, how can I spend more and get a good return on that? But a lot of smaller entrepreneurs, including real estate investors are like, how can I spend the least?

Dallin Cottle (06:49.164)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (06:57.057)
Yeah, exactly.

Mike Hambright (07:15.054)
and get something out of it. And it’s like, you have a job then you don’t have a business that you’re not going to really be able to scale that right.

Dallin Cottle (07:17.101)
Correct.

Dallin Cottle (07:21.973)
Yep. what’s, mean, go back to like that mindset though too of like, most people when big changes happen, when Facebook says you can’t target, you know, these things anymore, like there’s restricted categories or whatever it is. So many people, and I’m part of so many different marketing communities, everybody’s like, my gosh, nothing works anymore. And like, you hear all of this complaint and I’m like, I just spend that whole energy of saying, this is actually, these are just.

perfect opportunities for growth because now you have the whole market that’s struggling to figure out how this is going to work now. So all you have to do is just test faster and get to the top. And you just create so much more opportunities every single time there’s a massive change. So I like look forward to the change because it just means that me and my clients get a win.

Mike Hambright (08:12.086)
Yeah, it weeds about a bunch of people that are on the sidelines crying about it. Yeah, because the truth is, is all these ad platforms like they always figure out they always they have to find a way for people to win. I mean, otherwise they’ll go away like they want you to win and their model might change and they’ll be, you know, like at the end of the day, like it flushes out the people that aren’t serious. I mean, and it might suck for everybody for a while, but there is still a way you just have to find out like

Dallin Cottle (08:15.82)
Correct.

Dallin Cottle (08:24.276)
Exactly. That’s their… I mean they want you to win. Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (08:40.374)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (08:41.095)
they moved our cheese and it’s still there but we have to find our way through, right?

Dallin Cottle (08:44.012)
Yep. Yep. And the good news is for someone who maybe isn’t a really high level operator that’s trying to crack into a market, those are also the opportunities as well to say, when there’s those little gaps that happen, now you have an opportunity to step in and split the difference and be there, right? Get some space, get some ad space.

Mike Hambright (09:02.146)
Yeah. Right, right. Yep. So let’s talk about the kind of like done for you model or kind of do it yourself model. And obviously a lot of smaller entrepreneurs just say, well, I’ll figure out how to do it myself. And, you know, I kind of told you upfront, I usually tell people like, would somebody else hire you to run their marketing or you could, you could, you could find and replace marketing with rehabs or

Dallin Cottle (09:21.164)
You

Dallin Cottle (09:26.902)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (09:27.47)
you know, anything in business, like would somebody else hire you to do that thing? And if not, why did you hire you because you’re never going to be as good at somebody that that’s all they do, right? But I think a lot of small businesses try to figure out a way to do everything themselves, which is kind of the definition of of staying small, honestly, because you can’t scale yourself your own time up. But just talk about that the benefits of kind of working with somebody that knows what they’re doing, versus just trying to keep it in house.

Dallin Cottle (09:36.95)
Right.

Dallin Cottle (09:44.95)
Red.

Dallin Cottle (09:52.768)
Yeah, yeah.

Well, just like, I mean, putting into perspective, just like you’re saying, like I’ve got my 10,000 hours times 10, right? Like in this marketing space. it’s like, I’ve read all the books, I’ve gone all the courses, I’m part of all the other masterminds. Like I go to marketing conferences and learn things and part of communities. And that’s like all I do all day long, team of 60 members on our team that are constantly just learning and figuring stuff out.

wow, AI is changing like this and we need to be doing AEO this way and we need to be doing SEO that way. And then, wow, the Andromeda update on Facebook just released and wow, are we taking advantage of this? like, so all of these different things that are happening and like, we are adapting and trying to stay on top of it. And this is all we do. So someone who’s running an operation or, you let’s just say you’re a really good real estate investor, but you’re also playing, you’re also doing marketing, like,

There’s no way that you can split your attention on all those different things and be good at them to a point where you can compete and beat the market, right? So yeah, it’s interesting that, and I think that’s where it’s like, do it yourself. I think the tendency is like, I want to save money. Like I don’t want to go spend money and, you know, overinflate and try to get all these different people in the mix or whatever, or I’m going to go chief. I’m going to go hire a marketing coordinator for this amount. Well,

I always say, even when I hire employees, like you hire a video editor, let’s just say you have a video editor that’s like, oh, they’re really cheap. They’re over in Egypt or Pakistan for $4 an hour. That’s great. Well, I’ve noticed that the video editor that may be five, six times that actually edits faster. And so you get better quality, faster results, and you think that you’re paying, like you think you’re paying, you know.

Dallin Cottle (11:46.73)
You’re for that, but you’re really not. You’re paying about, it’s like pretty much sixes because of the results that come from having quality in your organization. So all the way up, yep.

Mike Hambright (11:52.438)
Yeah. Right. And I think for a lot of us, the problem is, they can’t see the expense for.

opportunity costs on their P &L. Right. It’s like, well, what could you have done if you had done it a better, like a more efficient way with somebody that knows what they’re doing, you know, and you can’t see that on the P &L. Just like you can’t see when you have rental properties, you can’t generally you can’t see like your vacancy costs. It’s just revenue reduction. But there’s no if there was a line there that’s like, hey, it’s taking you three times longer to turn your properties because you’re just trying to do it yourself versus having somebody that’s their responsibility.

Dallin Cottle (12:03.914)
Yeah. Yep.

Dallin Cottle (12:30.166)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (12:31.676)
It’s like your revenue would be higher, but it’s not right in your face. So people just act like it doesn’t exist when it’s still there, right?

Dallin Cottle (12:35.99)
Right. And there’s still the other side of it where it’s just like, I mean, really thinking about the quality of life. So I know that some of our clients that have handed me the credit card and said, you know, for example, Google ads, like you have an unlimited budget, just keep this row ass, right? And literally hand the credit card so that they can go on the family trips and the vacations and.

Mike Hambright (12:54.86)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (13:00.46)
Like the reason why most people get into real estate is to create freedom and to create like passive, you know, passive income and to create freedom for themselves. so doing some, doing a job that you don’t love where you’d rather spend time with your family. That’s a huge other side of it. Like the talent and the marketing and all that stuff and getting the results is great. But the other side of it is like, what do you really want? Like, what do you really want to do with your time and, and that freedom you’re creating? You’re creating a, you’re just creating another position, another hat to wear in your, in your company.

So.

Mike Hambright (13:30.296)
Yep, yep. And like you said, these things constantly change. I’m a founder of Investor Machine, direct mail company, but direct mail has been around for a billion years. mean, but it’s not.

it’s not necessarily the mail. Sometimes it’s the piece, sometimes it’s the copy, but it’s often the list and the data and the ways to get the data and now using AI and machine learning to kind of refine the data. That’s where the evolution is, not necessarily in a letter or the stamp or whatever. And so people will say, well, I know how to do…

Dallin Cottle (13:47.425)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (13:55.926)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (14:01.952)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (14:05.152)
this thing. It’s like, yeah, but that’s changed a lot. And certainly pay per click and all online advertising, everything with AI, like things are constantly changing. So like the average person that doesn’t do that for a living can’t realistically keep up with the evolution and all the changes going on.

Dallin Cottle (14:08.316)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (14:22.805)
Right? mean, even you take something like radio ad or something like that, right? Where it’s like, yeah, we’ve done this forever. But it’s like, if you’re not constantly changing the messaging, the content, like it gets stale, it gets dry. And so having somebody that understands the brand, the message, your target market, your area, being able to talk like, hey, we’re local here in this city or whatever that is and create a story that’s interesting and fun for people to understand and realize what you do.

Mike Hambright (14:28.94)
Right.

Dallin Cottle (14:52.703)
Just always, like you said, just always has to be changing and getting better at it, going deeper.

Mike Hambright (14:58.638)
Let’s talk about what has changed, maybe with all the changes in AI. Just some of what has changed and maybe give us a sneak peek from your perspective of what’s coming so real estate investors kind of have a better idea of how they need to adapt their marketing.

Dallin Cottle (15:10.911)
Yeah. Well, I think that one of the great things about this market and the target audience is that a lot of the things that have worked traditionally will continue to work, right? They will continue to TV will continue to work, getting attention like radio, direct mail will continue to work. Like you said, it’s going to be more about the little strategic advantages within each of those segments, right? All of the traditional stuff will

continue to work with those adaptations, the digital marketing side will have huge changes, a lot of big changes over there. And I don’t know what camp I’m in of, you’re never gonna have to hire another marketing person to do your PPC in a couple years. Part of me kind of believes it, part of me is like, know, Drew’s still out, we don’t know exactly what it will look like.

I’m thinking that, I mean, when I look at the market, I mean, it’s been shifting a lot. mean, marketing companies don’t charge more today than they did 10 years ago for PPC services. It’s always, it’s been the same. So there’s more players. It’s a race to the bottom. It’s all, it’s all about creating. It’s all about just the results that are driven from those campaigns. So I do think that AI, like with our clients, we’re doing a lot of stuff with AEO. So everybody’s going to keep.

you know, the target market, 55 plus, you know, distress seller, motivated seller, like they’re all going to Google when they’re, when they have that type of motivation and they’re typing in those keywords, where that search is, or if it’s going through chat, GPT or whatever, like we’re starting to really hone in those, the large language models, LLMs and understanding AEO and where to go and get that attention. and I, it’s the

most bizarre thing to go and look at Google Analytics and see, wow, that deal came from Chad GPT. It’s not, there’s not massive volume. Like I’m not telling everybody like, you go do all this and you’re to get this huge volume play, but you’re going to start getting deals from, from AEO if you start investing in it now, it’s like putting out direct mail and hoping that the next day you’re going to get, you know, all these phone calls. Maybe you get some of those calls. Some of them are saying, Hey, take me off your list. And the others are saying, you know,

Dallin Cottle (17:32.095)
whatever or you’re looking at a six month window or whatever on it sometimes. And that’s what I think AEO is gonna be is it’s, you lay the groundwork right now, it’s going to pay off in a couple of years from now, like big time.

Mike Hambright (17:43.31)
Yeah, for those who don’t know, talk a little bit about what AEO is. I think there’s a lot that you say that, and they’re like, what the heck is he talking about?

Dallin Cottle (17:47.763)
Yeah, so

Yeah, so think just any sort of like AI like search, right? So using Chaggbt or Claude or Gemini or any of these other AI platforms. I mean, even when you get a new Chromebook now, the default is AI mode, right? So you don’t even, it’s not Google search anymore. Like you get a new laptop, Chromebook, you are typing, you are going on AI and most people that are buying that, like they don’t really know the difference now. And like you can click AI mode.

Mike Hambright (18:13.091)
Wow.

Dallin Cottle (18:20.691)
Like you can use Gemini now on Chrome. Like it’s just going to start to adapt and pretty soon, like, like I said, like the, like the AI searches when someone types in, you know, need to sell my inherited house or whatever that is, or like, you know, you know, I need to do this fast or whatever the search result for that is going to be AI. So where you used to be able to say, let’s run, you know, these campaigns, sell my house fast. And then you pop up the top three on PPC.

Well, now there’s a huge chunk of real estate that’s the AI result. And so in that AI result, people are, you talk different to AI than what you put into Google. Google is like little keywords that get a quick response of like these general areas, right? Like, oh, you need to sell your house fast. Like, okay, I kind of got you here. AI is like, hey, my mom passed away. I’ve been feeling kind of sad. Like people talk to AI like it’s a, like it’s a human sometimes, right? It’s like.

Mike Hambright (19:16.835)
Right.

Dallin Cottle (19:17.419)
I need to sell my house, my mom died. I just don’t know really what to do. don’t know if I can sell it because of these things. I want to do it fast. We have funeral expenses. They’re talking through the situation. And AI says, that’s a great question. I’m really sorry to hear about that. Let me give you three options for how to sell your house. So how you market or how you talk about the blog articles and the things are different now. so AI, especially Gemini’s model, looks at Reddit.

looks at all these different kind of more like local type of business approaches or local influencer type of approaches than your traditional large SEO. So this is good news for the small operators. And I think large operators know this. And so AI is very much catering towards the person that is a small influencer in your space or a small like.

business or a local like, we sell houses in Green Bay, Wisconsin, or we buy houses in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that’s who AI is really for. It’s for that local presence. Someone’s been around and now it’s just tweaking the strategy so that it works. Did I go too much in the weeds on that?

Mike Hambright (20:27.97)
Yeah. Yeah. And for real estate investors, no, no, that’s good. Real estate investors specifically, like operators, it’s a different approach to effectively how you’re going to get found online. So if you’ve put effort into SEO and, you know, created content and backlinks and all that, it’s like the search engines just look at it differently now. And I don’t think, you know, I’m not an expert in it. You probably you’re probably way more of an expert than I am. But I know enough to know that the way you’ve been doing it is going to change.

Dallin Cottle (20:46.75)
Yep.

Dallin Cottle (20:56.074)
Yeah, and then there’s SEO groups that will say, oh, it’s all the same stuff. it’s like, it’s the same stuff. Like the results that are happening right now, there are some components that do still work. The problem is, that 40 to 60 % of it is changing and it’s just gonna continue to change. So if you keep doing what you’ve been doing, you’re just gonna slowly kind of drift off into the abyss. You’re not gonna be aware, you know, you’re not gonna be aware of that.

Mike Hambright (21:20.844)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (21:25.598)
where people are going for help, right?

Mike Hambright (21:28.195)
Yeah.

Yeah, it’s one of those things where if you want to take advantage of this opportunity, you need to talk to somebody that knows what they’re doing because you could just guess, but it’s not going to be, you’re just not going to be optimized. So, or you’re in the problem is with a lot of smaller people is they like, I’m to do it on myself, my own. you think of like the trajectory of a missile or like a plane or something, if you’re off by like 1%, I mean, it’s not that big of a deal, but over time you’re like off by 360 degrees. Like you just, you just went in the circle, you know, and you went,

Dallin Cottle (21:56.501)
Right. Yep.

Mike Hambright (21:58.878)
where basically so over time that being off a little bit is a big deal. Hey let’s talk about you you run a fractional CMO business where you help people manage across all different channels right and so I’m you know you and I have a lot in common in terms of our beliefs about marketing and there’s a ton of real estate investors obviously this is a real estate show so we talked about real estate investors probably the same for all small and medium entrepreneurs that like find one channel and they just go

Dallin Cottle (22:00.554)
Craig.

Dallin Cottle (22:12.414)
Yep.

Dallin Cottle (22:18.654)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (22:23.594)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (22:28.762)
go heavy into that without thinking about this idea of kind of omnipresence. Like you want to be found like.

Dallin Cottle (22:33.012)
Yep.

Mike Hambright (22:35.714)
You you want to dominate online. You should dominate every channel. By the way, they all fit together. People get a piece of direct mail or they see your ad on TV. And then they go Google you and they look for you. if you’re not optimized for SEO or AEO or certainly buying your own keywords at a minimum on pay-per-click, then guess who all that mail and all the TV ads are doing? They’re feeding your competitors in your market because they are doing what you’re supposed to do. And so just talk about kind of layers of marketing and how everything fits together.

Dallin Cottle (22:42.719)
Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

Dallin Cottle (22:57.822)
Yeah, exactly.

Mike Hambright (23:05.648)
how real estate investors, if they’re not already thinking this way, should be thinking.

Dallin Cottle (23:10.334)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I love your baseline, like, hey, are we doing this right? Basically, a four row ads is a great measure to say, okay, are we doing this right? Usually, you start with a channel or two and you start doing that, you start getting traction, make relationships with agents and you kind of work your way up and to the point where it’s exactly what you’re saying. And when we’re looking at overall strategy from TV, radio,

SEO, AEO, Google Ads, Bing, Yahoo, should I say Reddit? I haven’t heard that in any circles yet, but Reddit, becoming a local influencer, answering the questions that people are asking. You start looking at all of these different channels and it’s exactly what you’re saying. So like your TV ads will increase the…

people that are searching, right, will increase your Google. Running Google Ads will help your SEO. Your SEO will help provide insights for your Google Ads. And then when people search and they go to your website, then there’s the whole branding play, making sure you have reviews on Better Business Bureau and on your Google My Business profile, having reviews there and building reputation is also a key. And there’s the social proof. it’s never just…

one strategy that will help win a market. If you want to dominate a market, you have to go broad and you have to do it strategically in testing, know, a lot of people they say, well, I’ll just start small with my direct mail. So they’ll spend out, they’ll send out what, 2000 mailers? And like, how long is that gonna take to get a deal? Like you’re eight months in, maybe, but your volume is so low. The same goes with PPC, the same goes with your TV ads, the same goes with all those.

you have to have enough oomph, or enough, depending on the market size, to actually saturate it enough to get the attention you need to convert. So a lot of people think, well if I spend this, then I’ll ramp it up as soon as it works. That’s not the case. So it’s being strategic with a strategic budget, picking a channel, getting it to the four row as, and then picking the next one, maintaining it, and getting better at it, and just keep adding those channels as much as you can.

Mike Hambright (25:10.926)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (25:35.337)
throw back into the marketing, the better your chance of growth, right?

Mike Hambright (25:39.854)
Yeah, I think and having the mentality of like, what is it going to take for me to make this work instead of like, trying to find a reason to stop doing stuff as soon as possible? Because quite frankly, there’s only a handful of major channels like if it doesn’t work, you should be freaking out a little bit. Like, how do you make it work? Because like you need it to work, right? Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (25:56.03)
Yeah.

Correct. Yep.

Mike Hambright (26:00.494)
I think, you know, the guides I typically tell people is like, don’t go into, I usually say, this is my advice. You might think differently. It’s like, look, you should have a foundational channel that…

that brings you at least three to five deals a month. Like you don’t have to start diversifying until you’re spending enough to do that. Maybe a little bit, but you shouldn’t go into any other channels until you have some foundational channel that’s getting you at least a few deals a month. And then I’m like, don’t go into a new channel unless you’re prepared to spend enough to get a deal a month through that channel, whatever that is. Maybe it’s five, six, seven grand. Like it depends on the market, of course. And unless you’re willing to stick with it for six months and risk

Dallin Cottle (26:25.897)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (26:36.713)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (26:42.195)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (26:42.404)
not making a dime from it. Because what happens is people go try something. Like you said, they’ll spend enough to get a deal every four months and they’ll try it for two months and they don’t get anything. And they’re like, yeah, that doesn’t work. And it’s like, well, why would it have worked? You didn’t do what you needed to do to make it work, you know?

Dallin Cottle (26:52.691)
Yep.

Dallin Cottle (26:57.491)
Right. Well, that’s, mean, yeah, putting on my fractional like CMO hat. What’s also interesting about that is that sometimes, and this is the way we think as fractional CMOs is that.

how you answer the phone from a direct mail piece, sometimes it’s really different from what the intent is on Google or another channel. So if you treat every channel exactly the same and you say, well, here’s our conversion rate over this period of time for this channel, and you apply that same philosophy to another channel,

Mike Hambright (27:24.27)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (27:41.682)
and the follow-up process and the nurture sequences afterwards, like doing the same thing for Google PPC and the same thing for cold call leads. Those are very, very different follow-up sequences. The quality of the lead, the type of lead, the motivation of the lead. And so as like CMOs, we’re looking at that motivation. We’re listening to those calls. We’re understanding, okay, yes, that goes into our long-term nurture.

Mike Hambright (27:54.467)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (28:09.897)
this goes into this nurture, this goes here, this one needs to be called every day, three times a day, nonstop until they say, here’s our keys. So like the follow-up is also a huge part of marketing and looking at it from start to finish, we’re really ingrained with our clients, like acquisitions teams, the lead managers really understanding marketing. It’s not just like, hey, we send a bunch of leads over, like cross our fingers, hope that it works.

No, we want to understand all the way to how much money do we make on each of those leads and what is our

Mike Hambright (28:47.374)
Yeah. Yeah. One of things I love about your model and why people should think about, you know,

working with somebody like you is you look across all channels. And so I have a lot of friends that own agencies, so I’m not knocking them. But if you you run a pay-per-click agency and then you do your direct mail over here and you do this other thing over here, like if you’re not getting all those people together to talk, which nobody does, then how do they know? Like they don’t nobody’s looking over your business overall to say, how can we optimize the channel we’re doing based on what other channels are going on? Right. They’re just people are just kind of making it up and expecting it to all.

Dallin Cottle (29:20.168)
Yep.

Mike Hambright (29:23.312)
But like why would it it’s almost like you would never go You wouldn’t that’s the it’s the reason people have a GC or the house needs to be GC’d when they rehab a house like if you’re electricians not talking to the framer and They’re not talking to the HVAC guy like they’re stepping all over each other things take longer. Nothing gets done, right? It ends up costing more Right. I mean, it’s it makes sense when you explain it that way, but marketing is no different, right?

Dallin Cottle (29:33.299)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (29:37.821)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (29:45.661)
Yeah, absolutely.

Right, and then also just having somebody in the seat that, I mean, whether it be a fractional CMO or just a high level marketer inside of your company, somebody that understands when the vendor says, that’s just kind of how it goes. And they’re just like sending over these metrics sometimes or whatever. And there’s been more than, you know, more than a hundred times I’m like, no, I understand SEO. Like that’s not right. So you guys need to fix it. So.

Mike Hambright (30:15.032)
Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (30:16.764)
being able to speak the language, but also being like, hey, I know you have some bonus spots on your, you know, let’s get some bonus spots. Like we’ve had some low lead volume on radio, like come on, right? Like being able to know the space and know different channels and what levers to pull and how to get more bang for your buck. But also yeah, how to build the relationships. I love building the relationships with the team or even building the in-house operators.

being able to manage the team members and being able to take that off of the CEO and founders of the companies, being able to help them free up time with expertise and build a culture inside of that marketing department is also a really fun part, just building it in-house.

Mike Hambright (31:01.966)
Yep, yep. Awesome. Hey, Dallin, if folks want to learn more about you or maybe to work with you or learn more about what you do, connect some way, where do they go?

Dallin Cottle (31:09.318)
Yeah, go to RoarCMO.com. So Roar like the lion or here on my hat. RoarCMO, ChiefMarketingOfficer.com. So, and you can schedule a strategy call with me and my team and take a look, do some audits, take a look at what you’re doing and see if there’s anything we can do to help.

Mike Hambright (31:30.254)
Awesome. Sounds good. Thanks for joining me today. Good to see you. Yeah.

Dallin Cottle (31:32.946)
Cool, thanks Mike, appreciate your time. Thanks guys.

Mike Hambright (31:34.754)
Yeah, everybody. Thanks for joining us today as we were recording this right before Christmas, but it might come out in early January. Nonetheless, it’s kind of the New Year is here for sure. And if you’re not doing things differently than you have in the past, then you’re not going to move forward. And I think Dallin, I both believe very passionately about marketing. It is the fuel for your business. It’s what fuels your business forward. It’s the it’s literally the gasoline you put in your tank. And so if you’re about to drive across the country like you need to have a clear plan of how to get there and you need to

to make sure you get gas along the way, otherwise you’re gonna stop in the middle of nowhere and get stuck. And we don’t want that for you. So, appreciate you guys. Hope you got some good value from today’s show. Happy New Year. We’ll see you soon.