Dominick Montgomery Teaches Students at Victory Bible College about Online Marketing.
Brad Post, Create the Movement
Dominick Montgomery, Create the Movement
Brad Post, Create the Movement: Welcome to our podcast. Today, we are going to be hearing from Dominick Montgomery, our Chief Marketing Officer of Create the Movement, as he shares with a group of college students about online marketing.
Dominick Montgomery, Create the Movement: Hey guys. Again, my name’s Dominick Montgomery. Just a brief history on me, and then we’ll get into some, like, nitty-gritty. But, my background’s in music and video actually. Did music in L.A. Came out here, got with Brad, worked at firm with him, and we kind of blew that up. Then we both kind of struck out on our own. We both had our own companies, and then recently we just partnered.
I am one of the worship leaders at Guts Church. Did music over there, and I help with their media as well. We have grown Create the Movement from about four employees to about 14 in the past few months. So, we’re doing really well. We’ve got a lot of clients from small, like I said, small shops, to, you know, we deal with Messianic synagogues, we deal with roofers, we deal with law firms. So, we’ve kind of got to see a lot of different markets and realize their goals, and try to, maybe, intertwine them.
I say that I’m a digital marketer first. I’m not a video guy. I’m not a SEO. I’m not a web designer. I say I’m a digital marketer. Because, what I’ve found out over the years is that all of this stuff has to tie into together. And I’ll go into kind of how we’ve come to that point, and how we’ve tied it all together with our clients. And how well that’s doing for them.
So, I guess in order to start off with, in order for you to understand why we’re at the place where we’re are, and why are clients pay us monthly, and why we get really good checks, I guess, or really good payouts, is because we focus first on the client’s goals. And nine times out of ten, if you’re dealing with a client, or anybody, the goal is to have a reaction from somebody visiting their site. Or, seeing their brand. Right? Normally, that reaction is signing up to their website, or paying them for a service.
So, the main thing is, how do you get to that goal? What we focus on first is getting people to their main hub, and their main hub being their web presence, so their website. Kind of to backtrack, we really tout our ability to have our client’s websites show up first for a certain search results. Okay? We, don’t by any means say we guarantee they’ll show up first. And if you hear anybody say, “We guarantee that we’ll get a website to show up first in Google search results.” – probably lying. Or, they’re just trying to get your money. But we work really hard to get our clients there.
And we do that through SEO – search engine optimization. We do that through social media. Do that through video. We do that through Google AdWords. Do you guys know the history of SEO? You know how all that got started? Cool. So, you know, the whole, like black hat SEO? And you’ve learned all that good stuff? Okay. Awesome.
Okay. So, back in the day, it used to be, in order for a site to show up, Google has an algorithm that kind of searches the internet and finds relevant websites according to a search. Well, in the early 2000s, a lot of companies did what’s called black hat SEO. And they did a lot of tactics to trick Google into having their site show up first. One of the main cases being JC Penny running a Black Friday sale campaign. And they made all these websites. Pointed all these links to all these websites they created that had to do with JC Penny Black Friday sale. So, when anybody search ‘Black Friday sale’ JC Penny showed up.
Well, Google saw what they were doing and they penalized them. Took them off search results for, I think, over a year. And it cost them billions of dollars. So, that just goes to show you how much money can be made from showing up, you know, for relevant searches.
From then, til now, we’ve kind of had to follow Google standards, and do the right things with our websites so they show up first. Right? And it’s kind of evolved now. So, it used to be you write good content, you have the right keywords in that content, and hopefully people will find you.
But now, it’s more about user experience. Which is where video comes into play, which is where social media comes into play. So, we really focus on once somebody lands on a website, how do we keep them engaged? How do we keep their interest? And how do we get them to convert? Right?
If I’m moving too fast, and anybody has any questions let me know. Okay? Cool. So, a lot of our clients have kind of falsified expectations. They think, “You’ll make me a website. People will come to the website and sign up.” Well, it gets really technical. Which is why we have to charge a monthly retainer because we do a lot of work monthly on each of the sites.
There are some clients that we have even, that we have to turn away because we say, “We can’t really do much for you.” And a good example of that is we had an estate planning attorney who does like wills, and living wills, and all that good stuff. Estate planning. And she was with us for a while, and we had her showing up first result for all of her keywords. She was getting good traffic, but no conversions. And we realized it’s because half of her visitors are about to pass away. And they’re probably not going to be online looking for something like that. Right? So, digital marketing doesn’t really work in every market. You know? And with them what probably, we could have done, was go to their hometown, go to the funeral homes, go the nursing homes, you know? Go to the hospitals, and see what kind of, maybe, print ads we could do for them. Put them on the backs of phonebooks. Because their target audience is still probably looking at phonebooks and that whole thing.
But we do get a lot of cool cases, cool clients, that allow us to be super creative and just do what we know works best. We had a client in Brownsville, Texas. A young attorney, I think he’s like 27. Worked in a small office. It was like, man, like maybe 50 by 50 feet. A real small box. And he said, “You know, I know, everybody’s moving towards video. I want to do video somehow. And I just want to get my name out there. So, we flew out. We filmed about 30 videos for him. All off the cuff – nothing scripted. That might go against what they teach you here. We did everything off the cuff. We just kind of tried to be real personable with him. Reason being is, attorneys are not trustworthy in a general sense. Right? When you think attorney, you think like ‘Better Caul Saul.’ And you know, they’re kind of slimy.
So, how do we convey to our audience, or to the people that are visiting the site, that you can trust this guy. Well, the best way thought would be through video. He’s a young guy, a handsome guy, thankfully. Really nice. And so, we stayed down there with him for two days. We filmed like 30 videos. And they weren’t, he didn’t just talk about law. He didn’t just talk about cases that he’d dealt with. He talked about his belief in the law. And he talked about what led him to law. And how his family’s been in law. And he talks his cases home with him, and it burdens him. You know? This kind of stuff that left him kind of vulnerable, and it was kind of edgy. You know? It’s on the line for an attorney to actually put himself out there.
So, we did that. We built them an amazing site. It’s totally video-centric, and it went against everything that typical SEO should be. A typical SEO is, you know, a home page needs to have at least 500 words on it. It need to have these keywords in it. Each page needs to have, you know, this amount of words. If you have more content, text content, than your competitor, you’ll show up first. Well, some page maybe had 20 words on it. Interior pages were just transcriptions of his videos. And within 60 days he showed up first for every keyword he wanted to show up for.
So, what’s that tell us? It tells us the whole medium’s changed. Right? It tells us about user experience. It’s about time on-site. So, somebody’s come, they’re actually watching his videos. They’re actually reading along, engaging with the material. Yeah.
His site got shared all over Reddit. It got shared on design forums. It got shared from attorney to attorney. We were asked to write for the Texas Law Board, Technology Magazine, all this huge crap that just came from being real. You know?
So, we’ve kind of applied that concept with our marketing now, and with our clients now. And it’s kind of hard, and you’ll see that it’s hard – oh, yeah?
What matters to the client is sharing their story. What matters is converting people that they actually want to convert. You know? A lot of times we get a lot of leads for clients, and we think we’re killing it. And we send them the report at the end of the month. And we say, “We got you 45 leads.” And they say, “That’s great, but only two converted.” You know? And we’re like, “What the heck? Why?”
Well, it’s because we have to align ourselves with the client’s goals – every time. And, sometimes, we can’t really achieve that through just a website. Sometimes we need to be on Instagram like posting pictures. Maybe that’s where their core audience is? You know?
But, we try to take what we know and apply it to each market. And it gets kind of tough. So, what I always encourage is, don’t get caught up on the technicalities of things because the client’s eyes will glaze over. And they’ll say, “Well, you’re talking about getting us links. We just care about clients. We need money You know? We hired you to bring us business.”
So, that’s one of our main things, is to align with the client’s goals. We do that through video. We try to push video a lot – even with attorneys. Especially with cool industries. Like, we have a sign-making facility that makes cools signs. So, we want to shoot videos of them welding, and apply a storyline to it. We’ve got roofers, and we get a drone and fly over them, you know, while they’re roofing. Just cool aesthetics that keep people on a website.
It’s cool that you’re bringing in people that know this day and age. Because that’s how the culture’s going to change – just newer things. And as you guys come up, and you’re telling these things to the client, it makes it easier for everyone who’s in this generation to actually sell.
Right now, there’s kind of a 50/50 balance. We have older business that are stuck in their ways, and who will not listen to you when you’re saying, “You’ve got to do video. You know? People will watch you.” And they’re like, “We’ve never done video. We’re a million-dollar company. We don’t need video.” And then we’re saying, “Well, to help tell your story.” You know? We’re going for the whole marketing and story-telling aspect. They don’t want to hear it.
But I think right now, and with the years to come, that’s really going to change. It’s really going to shift because people want what they see. So, the more we can get on the web: storylines, and videos, and that sort of thing, the more people will want it. You know? It’s kind of – it will become industry standard really.
So, as far as digital marketing we do that with websites, video. We do social media. So, social media is huge for us. And Google, a lot of times, Google puts out alerts saying, “This is how we rank websites. And these are the standards that you have to follow.” We follow those standards. But sometimes Google doesn’t tell the truth. Because their main goal is to put people who do SEO out of business, and I’m convinced of that. They want to provide the perfect search. You know? They’ve shown that with Google Glass – you know, that thing where you can look at an album cover and say, “What album is this?” and they find it and play the music for you. So, Google wants to provide a perfect search.
So, in that sense, if we’re building websites that have keywords stuffed in it, and the sentences don’t really make sense, and we’re just saying, “Tulsa Personal Injury Attorney is the Best Personal Injury Attorney in Tulsa.” Like, nobody wants to read it. And I think Google’s getting to – their algorithm is so advanced now that it will see that these sentences aren’t making sense. This isn’t unique content. Nobody’s really going to want to read it. You know? And it does through: one, being crazy awesome and technical. But also, two, tracking data, tracking users on sites, looking at sentence structures, seeing if sentences have been written this way in other websites across the web.
I think with Michael Gonzalez one of the ways we were able to shoot past the competitors was because we transcribed everything he said in his videos the exact way that he said them. And I think that was one of the huge points as to why his content performed better. I think it’s because Google sees this is a topic that this guy’s talking about in sentence structures that have never been written before. You know? It’s really unique content. It’s like absolute unique content.
So, I think in the future Google’s going to provide people with those results, instead of, you know, educational resources, or articles, or stuff like that. It wants stuff that people are interested in.
A good example is if you search ‘best Seattle coffee shop’ there’s going to be three results. The first result doesn’t have that structure – ‘best Seattle coffee shop.’ The second and third results do. But the first result says ‘coffee shops in Seattle’, or something like that. So, if you look at those websites that first result is a cool map. It’s interactive. It lets you scroll through and look at the coffee shops. It gives you a glimpse into the coffee shops. It tells you the price points of that coffee shop, and how atmosphere in them is. The other two kind of provide like a list, but those, the second and third results have ‘best Seattle coffee shop’ written all through them. So, it tells us user experience is what matters to Google. And that was a big change in the SEO community, and it kind of screwed up a lot of strategy. Like a lot of strategy.
