Q&A with Evan Weber, CEO of Experience Advertising

Evan Weber turned a successful run as Director of Marketing at DentalPlans.com into a leading digital marketing agency that he founded in 2007. Utilizing tactics and processes he developed with DentalPlans, has stayed on the cutting edge of the digital marketing world as founder and CEO at Experience Advertising.

Read on to learn about Evan’s business philosophy, keys to success, and lots more.

Experience Advertising is the digital marketing agency I founded in 2007, to bring the strategies and processes I perfected at my former company, DentalPlans.com, to companies all over the U.S.A. We manage all types of online marketing and social media strategies for businesses, so they can grow their targeted traffic, increase their website’s conversion rate, and boost the overall ROI they are receiving from their Internet advertising budgets. We provide these agency services to companies that want to grow their online revenue by outsourcing their digital marketing to an agency that’s more proficient than their in-house staff or other agencies they may have used in the past. Because we first focus on boosting the client’s website conversion rate, which is the click-to-sale or click-to-lead ratio, we are able to attain the better ROI than they have previous experienced in the past from their online advertising campaigns. Frequently for instance I hear, “Google Adwords doesn’t work for us. We tried and it was a huge waste of money.” My response is usually, “You didn’t do it right.” Then we proceed to work on boosting their website conversion rate, when combined with a more methodical approach to advertising on the platform, will lead to far better results than they experienced previous. They are then able to maximize all of their digital marketing channels.

I got the idea to launch my agency after leaving my former company and then thought to myself, “I can implement the same strategies and processes that I utilized to grow website traffic and sales over time for my previous company.” Because of the fact that I have amassed a large number of connections on LinkedIn, I was just able to pick up the phone and sign my first crop of clients, because they knew how effective I was at marketing and growing my former company. So it was fairly easy to go into business for myself. Also, I knew from being in the industry, how most companies didn’t utilize the same processes and procedures that I did. So by that fact alone, I knew I would be able to get better results by implementing better processes for managing their online advertising campaigns.

Because we provide services to companies related growing their affiliate marketing channel (i.e. online referral program), I get to speak to and help the referral partners of the clients we work with. This allows me to help those affiliate marketing partners of our clients in a few ways including: analyzing their websites and providing helpful feedback about how to increase their website traffic, how to increase the amount of money they are making from their website, and how to make money online in general. For instance, what types of online businesses are profitable and what they can work on, on a daily basis, that will help them attain their goals sooner rather than later. Giving out free advice, as well as my helpful articles and videos, to the affiliates of our clients’ affiliate programs, and gratitude I get from them, is definitely the favorite thing about what I do.

A far as making myself more productive, I use task lists to keep myself organized, and then I drink coffee to keep myself going fast. I have a lot of tricks of the trade that I use to make it seem like I’m working 24/7, like scheduling posts ahead of time. I also use tools like Hootsuite to post the same message to several social networks at once, which saves a lot of time. I do believe in utilizing your smartphone to increase the amount of sharing you can do with your content for instance. So, I definitely believe in leveraging apps and tools in order to make myself more productive and increase the amount of content that I’m able to create and to share with my audiences and the world.

Ultimately, I would like to grow my agency into something that a larger company would want to buy, since I’ve created a lot of value in my agency, something that another larger agency would want to add to their portfolio of services. For instance, we have created a very large database of affiliate marketers and influencers that would be very valuable to certain types of companies. Recently, I have launched a set of digital marketing courses (Digital Marketing U.) that help get some of the content I like to share with people into their hands. So, I plan to develop my online courses further and expand my offerings there over time.

The most valuable lesson I’ve learned is that whatever you do you should treat people well in business. I don’t believe people need to step on people to get ahead in business or with their company. I refuse to believe that you have be ruthless to get ahead in business. You can achieve all of your goals and attain the type of success you want while being really nice while you go about it. No one can ever question me based on what I’m doing, since I have 1000’s of people that will vouch for the fact that I have helped them get ahead with their online projects, without asking for anything in return. I’ve also done a lot of sharing of other people’s content, which builds up a lot of “social karma” which is a term I coined that refers to the phenomenon of sharing other peoples’ content and in turn they will share yours. When one of your connections, followers, or fans, shares a piece of your content, it can be very powerful and allow your content to reach an entirely new audience for free.

If you want to succeed in the digital marketing industry, you definitely have to spend a lot of time learning more about the field and staying on the cutting-edge of the industry. If you can stay on the cutting-edge and bring those strategies and techniques to your clients or to your own projects, you will be able to deliver a lot of value. One of the things that bothers me about digital marketing agencies is that a lot of them are lazy in how they deliver their services. A lot of that boils down to their experience level and their ability to handle the marketing tasks in a truly proactive way. I recommend going to work for a company in their marketing department to get a good handle on how difficult it is to generate ROI with online advertising, and how you can increase the rate at which people are buying from the website or filling out the lead form, so when you branch out and do this for other companies, you can do it more effectively in my opinion.

Outside of work I like to play basketball and have always done so. I like to listen to Rock and Jazz music. I’m a big fan of Jimi Hendrix, and sort of see myself as the Jimi Hendrix of the digital marketing industry. How could anyone have an issue with that?!

I also like to work on the weekends and at nights. When you run your own business or agency, sometimes you have to work after hours and on the weekends to make it happen. Also, I like to provide my clients with a high rate of responsiveness, so to think they would have to wait until Monday to get a response from me, it absolutely horrifying to me. I also think they like the fact that I work 7 days a week 24 hours per day.

I haven’t read an influential book in years. I do read a lot of online articles and blog posts about digital marketing and social media. I like to stay on the cutting edge of my field, for a couple of reasons.

1. if a client brings up something they may have heard about or read about, I will likely be familiar with it. Also, when you signup for a lot of digital marketing newsletters, you receive a lot of emails with helpful articles and blog posts, that keep me informed about what’s the latest in digital marketing. I can then contact whichever client it pertains to and see if they are interested in trying out the strategies, or whatever it may be.