Digital Marketing Boot Camp, Session 1: Bill Hauser from the SMB team, shows us the terrain of digital marketing and how to create a thriving business that can take on any terrain. SESSION TRANSCRIPTION introduction My name is Bill Hauser from the SMB team. And to kick off the digital marketing boot camp we'll review the 2020 digital marketing landscape for SMBs. And when I say SME, I mean small and medium enterprises. Today we're going to go over some of the biggest changes happening in digital marketing and how you can capitalize. We'll dive into: Getting traffic Focusing on conversions Multi-channel magic And that's the multiplier for all of your marketing. Stay tuned till the end because in the end multi-channel strategy is going to tie it all together when we talk about traffic and conversions for your business in 2020. Backstory: How I got into marketing Before I got into weeds, I want to tell you a bit about my story and why I'm so passionate about digital marketing. So I've already gone through what we're going to cover about traffic, conversion, multi-channel magic, and I'll explain the problem of the personalization curve, which is one of the biggest pain points for SMBs in their marketing. So 2007 was the height of my adolescence.
I grew up racing dirt bikes and all my life I trained to compete in national championships. And in 2007, I qualified. I was one of 40 people in the United States to Employee Email Database qualify for motocross nationals. And life was amazing. And in 2008, three months after qualifying for nationals, I was in North Carolina. I live in Philadelphia. We go down south in the winter to train because it's cold in Philadelphia, too cold to ride. So I'm in North Carolina, and I did this 150 foot jump on my dirt bike and the bike falls under me and I crashed into the ground, and I broke two vertebrae in my back. I went from the high of the highs to the low of the lows in 2008. And a few months later, my family business went bankrupt. And as you know, financial problems being the number one cause of divorce, it led to a chain of events in my family, because quite frankly, we weren't recession proof. And that's what motivates me so much to help businesses because I want to build recession-proof businesses. So 2008, a few months after I broke my back, I ended up stepping on my dad with another woman. And that was because he was trying to escape the fact that we had $800,000 in debt and he didn't share it with my mom and me. And over the next three months, after sharing that with my mom, being an only child, everything we had was ripped out from under us. Our house was repossessed, all my mountain bikes were repossessed.
Everything I owned was taken from me because we didn't have a recession proof business. And here's how I got into marketing: After two years of not talking to my dad from that day on, he called me and I hadn't spoken to him in a long time. And called me and he said, "Bill, I can't believe you told mom what happened." And he was blaming me for what happened and I panicked on the phone and hung up. And I found out about two days later that he was holding a gun to his head while he was on the other side of that phone. And I didn't know it and he was in the middle of New York in the woods. And thank goodness that day he wanted a second chance to build his business. And he turned to the woods behind him and fired every shot in the woods. And from that day on, he pledged never to put his family in that situation again. And a few years go by, you know, I'm in college right now. I held out my hand to bury the hatchet. And I say, "You know what dad, I want to work on your marketing. I'm going to learn marketing, so we don't make the same mistakes as in 2008. So we don't contract anymore." So I contacted him, I learned how to create a website. I learned how to shoot an intro video for him and lo and behold, I created a Google Ads campaign for him. And after he only made $50,000 a year for three years, I got him a $200,000 job in five days creating a Google ad campaign for him. Since that day when I created this Google ad campaign I have operated from a place of passion to make other businesses, other business owners never feel the pain I have been through