The Digital Marketing Journey with Joel Mandelbaum

In this episode Joel Mandelbaum takes us on his digital journey, from being a high school entrepreneur to selling his very successful transportation courier company to a competitor. That’s when his Aha! moment happened, his competitor knew more than him about digital marketing and Joel was being left behind. Joel now acts as a "Digital Sherpa" to guide business owners through the modern marketing landscape with confidence while successfully moving their brands forward. Now the most rewarding part of his job is when his clients achieve success. 

Connect with Joel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joel-mandelbaum/

Connect with Miranda: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirandaoconnor-mba/

Learn more about The Art of Storytelling: https://www.theartofstorytelling.com/

Transcript

That's all great. You got traffic coming to your website, but if you ever talk to people that do have done Google ads, maybe 50% of them say it was successful, you know, but they're mad at Google. Well, why are you mad at Google? Google did everything they're supposed to do. Click to your site. That's all the search engine is for, right? It's not there to convert. You should know your marketing good enough that when someone lands on your site, the elements are there, the calls to actions are there, the impact statements there.

Welcome back to our Video Storytelling Community Engagement podcast. Today, my guest is Joel Mandelbaum, who is a digital Sherpa and best selling author on digital marketing. Joel takes us through his entrepreneurial journey and the moment when he realized he needed to learn everything about digital marketing and that changed his career. If you've been enjoying these podcasts, please connect with me on LinkedIn or through our website. We would love to hear your feedback. Thanks so much to Joel Mandelbaum for joining us today on our podcast. I'm really excited to hear your story about your journey into digital marketing and what you have learned along the way. So Joel, tell us a little bit about yourself and what did you do before digital marketing?

Thank you Miranda for having me on today. I've always been an entrepreneur since even before I graduated high school. I've always started I always started a bunch of businesses. So I'll just give you a quick background. I graduated in 1988 and wasn't sure if I was going to go to university or not. I didn't really have a lot of money. I had some bar mitzvah money saved up for when I was 13 years old at 20% interest, because back in those days, 1981 was a really good year if you had cash. But if you loaned cash, not so good. So that grew. My dad said he's not paying for my university, so I thought, wow, what a great opportunity. So took my bar mitzvah money. I bought a car, pissed off my parents, and when my dad said to me, You can't make money in a car, it's not a good investment, I said, Yeah, but I'm going to use it to drive and deliver and make money from it. So you really couldn't argue the fact. Friend of mine in high school, this was when we had Grade 13. So I was 19 years old. He was driving as a delivery driver for courier business, so I figured I might as well do that. Did that. Loved it so much in six months. This was in February of 1988. In six months, July, I started my first company, which was a transportation courier, Freight logistics, an office in Toronto, office in western New York. At the peak of my business, we were doing seven figures and I had close to 100 staff and then 2012 came around. I had done no online marketing. In fact, my my website was so bad, it was just a landing page where people could literally just enter their ID and password to place their order. And I think back now, the image that was on there was a road going into the distance with dark clouds, probably a lightning bolt in there somewhere. You know, what were my customers thinking as they're placing their order? They've got to get there, you know, But I was oblivious to the fact they threw up a quick website because in 1995 we won Company of the Year Award for Business Excellence from the Toronto Board of Trade. So we had to have something at that point. And my whole thing with digital marketing, someone approached me in 2011 and said, Yeah, we'll get you on the first page of Google. Save your business, building up all that. And so I'm like, Here's 100 bucks. Go kill yourself, right? Of course, nothing happened any of us know anything about marketing that there you should spend some good money. 100 bucks is not going to get you anything other than losing a hundred bucks. I probably got flaked out. That was my whole thing. I said Internet didn't work. Forget it. So it came 2013, late 2012, I got an offer to sell my business from a competitor, fairly large competitor, and I was offered three times industry. Now, in the transportation freight sector, any one that is listening to this will know the margins are like this, right? Because 60% of what I brought in in revenue went straight to the driver because I paid drivers. They used their own vehicles. I had a couple of company vehicles you're left with literally all the money comes in and you're left with... I’m looking at that going, well, margins aren't great, but at least I have a 20 some odd year old business at this point. But then again, I took the offer. Part of the offer was to stay on board for a year to migrate over as many clients as possible. I migrated hundreds of clients over, so this is kind of where the story begins, if you will. So one day I'm looking at my commission checks because I was in contract to bring over for one year and it's just like you're a glorified salesperson that just brought over instead of one account, you brought over hundreds. And to avoid any problems, you get a percentage of the sales. Because if your largest client leaves the next day, no one's going to be happy about it. So I'm looking at my commission checks about six, seven months and they're up about 30 to 40%. And I'm thinking to myself, number one, how did that happen? Like number two, why didn’t it happen when I owned them? Just as a joke, I'm at the owners office. Frank, his name was Frank. We became good friends. I said, Wow, you really timed this right, didn't you? Look at this. Lucky you. You know, look, we're up almost 40% in six months and it's growing. And he sits back, kind of snickers, shakes his head, says no. So I looked at him. I said, What do you mean no? He said, This is exactly actually behind schedule. And I’m thinking, what is he talking about behind schedule? So I'm looking at it. I'm saying I don't understand a word you're saying. Can you like like straight talk to me? He said, okay, Joel, the first thing I want to make sure we're friends, right? I'm thinking, who ask that kind of question? Something's coming, Yeah, of course, Frank. Good friends. I appreciate it. He paid me out. I was grateful for everything. He says, let me tell you a couple of things. Number one, we share clients, and I didn't know if you were aware of that. And one of the reasons why I bought you out is because I wanted all the business from all the clients. That's the first thing. Okay. I didn't really know that. I had no clue but a lot of a lot of what I did. He also had clients. So that's the first thing. So the second thing, because I made a comment to him because I was hearing his customer service reps saying, Hey, is this your first delivery? I said, you know, what kind of what kind of sales people you have that would get the customer to call in their first order because I would have my salespeople, once we open an account, call up the customer every morning, Do you have a delivery? Let me walk you through the process. And he laughs and he says, I don't have any salespeople either. I'm just sitting here. What? What's going on here? But I'm feeling this ominous. You're about to be taught a lesson. So he tells me, Joel, we have no salespeople. We do digital marketing only and we have the best technologies to service our clients. And this is why we keep on to our clients. And I know who your clients are. I know a lot of them have divisions that aren't using you. I know they need the technology and I'm sitting here like going, Where did I miss? Yeah. Oh my goodness. So, you know, the full year went up and I thought, okay, I need to start another business. Why don't I at least understand what's going on online? Because I need to catch up. It's now 2013 and I have no clue what's going on. Embarrassed? So I just said to the universe, I want to meet people that really understand the online space. Next week I'm at a networking event. I meet a guy who's been developing websites for a bunch of years out of India. He was Indian. We became business partners. He was from Calcutta. And so I thought, he says to me, you know, what are you up to? I said, Well, just in between careers, He goes, Why don't you sell websites? Okay. I buy websites in India, 500 bucks we sell for 2500. Yeah. All I could think of was wholly margins. Yes, 300% markup. Amazing. I'm in. Like, what else do I need? I mean, didn't understand what needs to be done to build the website. Didn't know what I was getting into, but the part of it of the digital of that that I really liked was that the client is trusting me with their online visibility and I take that very seriously. So we did some business for a couple of years. It ended up that I did the majority of the sales, so that didn't work out. But I really enjoyed not the development process because I am not a developer and my personality is not getting stuck in the weeds in the minutia of everything. I just want to make sure that it's done right for the client and that they get a good experience. After our partnership broke up, I hooked up with a company called and when I saw what they've been able to accomplish that they've been doing at the time for maybe 15 years, had been developing websites, thousands and thousands of websites, thousands of platforms. We're talking like platforms with over a million pages in it, They had the ability to get my clients ranked on the first page of every search engine without spending money on ads, without doing typical SEO. So I thought, okay, these guys are pretty cool. Let me find out more. So I realized at that point that if I'm going to win myself and help my clients win, I need to be with people that are way above in their head. The internet is moving so fast. I started doing websites with created another team to build websites both onshore and offshore. And because of the diversity and customization of every website it’s like building a custom home for a client, I don't just build template, drop it in and add some content site. Every site we build is custom. I loved it. It was great. But then there was a goodbye. You launched the site. And then clients started asking me, Joel, do you do social media, do you do this? Do you do that? And I thought, well, if I don't say yes, they're going elsewhere. So the first service I added on was some social media marketing, which we did really, really good at it. and then it just expanded from there and just kept adding services as requested, because I might as well, if I'm doing the website, well, maybe I should do the content to make sure it's done properly because content always holds up development. What about reputation management? What are your reviews like? Do you have control over your reviews? So I built a journey, if you will, that is based where the client is in their journey, right? So maybe they have nothing. So we can do everything. Maybe they already have a good website. Doesn't need to be updated because it's only a couple of years old so we can help them with their online reputation management. Now you got a website that's great, but how do you drive traffic to the site? So of course, what do people do the typical SEO to try to organically build your site and paid ads? Yeah, in many cases paid ads is necessary. But understanding now that when we do paid ads, it's temporary to get the client to a certain point where they don't need paid ads anymore, generally takes anywhere from 5 to 9 months based on their site so we can get them just getting organic. So traffic, no problem. We also built a technology that gets first place ranking multiple spots so you don't have to necessarily do Google ads. So we built a technology for that. That's all great. You got traffic coming to your website, but if you ever talk to people that do have done Google ads, maybe 50% of them say it was successful, you know, but they're mad at Google. Well, why are you mad at Google? Google did everything they're supposed to do. Click to your site. That's all the search engine is for, right? It's not there to convert. You should know your marketing good enough that when someone lands on your site, the elements are there, the calls to actions are there, the impact statements there. So we built a chat specifically in-house that has AI that helped to qualify the potential prospect as they come in with a marketing CRM and a whole bunch of cool stuff. Six years ago, I started hearing from my clients. Joel, you should write a book. So I kept hearing people say, write a book are going. I kept hearing his voice in the back of my head and I've got imposter syndrome at that time, Who's going to buy my book and what really can I offer? But everyone was telling me, Joel, I learned so much about what we talked about today. Yeah, you should have a book. Yeah. So one day, eventually I caved. December of 2018 we pre launched it hit bestseller in six categories And then last year, about a year, year and a half ago, I created a course for clients because they wanted more. I figure I'm going to listen this time and here I am today being a digital Sherpa, because I've hung out with a lot of smart people and I do a lot of reading. Of course, but if I hung out with very smart people in my space, I probably wouldn't be where I am today and understanding where I am today. So Digital Sherpa. from a metaphor, metaphorically, Unless you have someone to guide you properly, you're going to lose money. Might make them bad mistakes in some cases could be catastrophic to clients business. So I want to make sure I give them the right expectations from the start on what they can and can expect and what we can and can't do and what's possible and what's not possible. And do you find since writing the book, what has done for you? So has it given you like authority, as someone who knows about this space, is it just giving you authority or are you selling hundreds and millions of copies of this book and making millions of dollars on the book sales? The book to me, was never written to make money from the book. I wrote what came from my Heart. And then, you know, three quarters, the way writing through it, I'm hearing from people saying, Oh, that's going to be a great lead magnet, that's going to be great for your positioning. And I never I thought for the first time I heard that. I thought, that's a selfish thing to do. But as I did more research and understanding, I was in the right place at the right time. So yeah, I mean, so yeah, I wrote the book I've sold in total, probably in the thousands. But over a four or five year timeframe or three fourths, whatever that is, you're not getting rich off a book. I mean unless you go to a big publishing house where they're going to spend a lot of money promoting in New York Times. But the end of the day, you're not a bestseller unless you sell more books than everyone else in that category. Yeah, I did. Yeah. So yes, helped. So has it give me direct money. It's nice to get an occasional deposit at your bank. That's a royalty for the book. 10-15 bucks, whatever it is. If it's between me and someone else in the same space, I would say 95% of the time I'm getting the business. They don't always say. People always say, Oh, it's because you're a best seller. they rarely say that. No, they wouldn't. You hear things like, Oh, by the way, I bought your book. I liked it. Oh, okay. Well, then, yeah, the book probably helped because in the book there's also actionable items that a business owner can use. So maybe they used it or they heard about it, or they checked out my LinkedIn profile or someone told them that. But one thing I have noticed, the conversations are much different. Yeah. You know, with potential prospects. My closing rate is very high. You know, there are clients where I won't take on just because it's not a good fit or it's not something that I'm really good at based on what they want? So I'll send them to someone else that can really help them out. So no, you're not getting rich off the book itself, but it definitely helps with your positioning. It definitely shows you becoming, as a subject matter expert The consulting part of my business has grown as well. But again, with that, it's time for money. And I don't I only have 24 hours in a day, so I'm very careful with that. But yeah, it's but it definitely has helped. Absolutely. Got me on to podcasts, got me on to networking, speaking, networking, people reaching out to me to do collaboration, you know, webinars, all that stuff. So yeah, it definitely has helped. You write a book, it shows that you're passionate about the industry. My goal was to give the reader a good journey. And if they want to sign up or reach out to me after, there's they care. And it sounds it sounds like it's a really interesting an interesting story of all of your experience for so many years. So what excites you most about digital marketing and the possibilities in the future? Well, you know, that'll bring up conjure up the word A.I. to me because I know it is. I was going to ask you, you know, is A.I. helping or hurting? And, you know, where do you see it? I'll get to that in a second. So what I love about it is the fact that I'm working directly with the owner. In most cases, setting them on the right path and seeing the win. You know, what really excites me is when a client says, I got a new client or I got a phone call, depending on what the initiative is, really understanding the small wins and showing the client that we're getting small wins. They take time to get to big wins. What I love about it is when a client's like, Oh, I got a new customer, I got it. I have to tell you, in a lot of cases I'm more excited than the client and for multiple reasons. But the obvious reason is, number one, we want we crossed the finish line together. But number two, it's validation. Of course, you know, when the client signs up with us, no matter what, it's a validation that they're trusting us with the service in that we've shown them that we're good enough to work with them, because you still have to prove that with the client. So to me, that's the most exciting part, is when we cross that finish line, it's like, okay, we're now on this path together. You know, we're working because really think of it at the end of the day, if my client isn't successful. I'm not getting that client. Yes, absolutely. It's not like my reason for getting clients isn't just to get clients. I want to I want to impact them in a positive way. That's where it starts from. Yes. We're in a currency based planet. Yes. We have to get paid for our time. Yes, we should be paid for our time and our knowledge. So of course, nothing's free. But, you know, when they hit that finish line or when we've crossed a hurdle together, I am just tickled pink. It is like a a day, like even more when than when I sign a client, I get more excited. Yes. I mean, not that I'm not happy. I get new clients will get me wrong. But when we've actually worked together to achieve a goal and we cross that goal together.

Yes, I agree. Because I mean, yes, I like to get new clients, too. I'm get I get very excited at the beginning of a project. When you get a new client. But yeah, I really like when you finish and you deliver it to them and then they love it and they use it and they share it and everybody loves them in their video story too. So I love getting that feedback from from the client as well. So it is about crossing the finish line.

Yeah, you're right about that. Absolutely. In terms of AI, I always said when AI comes, the companies that use AI, first of all, you can't stop it. So if you have any sense of business, you must embrace it. You must find out what it can do in your industry and help you. Or I'm telling you, companies are going to be wiped out so fast. Because think of it this way You have an artificial intelligence that can grab as much data more than you, faster than you, better than you sort it through and make big decisions. You can't make. And companies that are using AI to help them make those decision. Obviously, the data that the AI has as to be accurate, but in most cases it is they're going to crush the ones that don't no matter how big. Look how big Blockbuster was. You know, and look, it happened in Netflix. You know, stuff like that. So in my space, yes, people are using AI to generate content. We still do it the old school way. We still use content writers that understand SEO writing. We feel that that is the best way we do use AI for research. We also will use AI. If we're generating logos for clients, we'll give them two options. We'll give them an AI option with the human polishing it up. Or just just an artist, a designer that we have to do that. The AI version is obviously less expensive because it's not as much work. It's almost half. And so that's kind of how we're integrating some stuff in AI. You have to adapt. Here's the big thing in the web development space. When you look at a search engine, which is, yes, it has its own AI, it looks for title tags, better descriptions, the structure of your site and how it's built it is almost as important as the content that you have in there. However, what is an AI look for? I don't think an AI looks for title tags, and meta descriptions because it's an intelligence. I think it looks for content more so than the other. Where I'm seeing it could have a huge impact on these SEO companies because I've got proof that, you know, Bing traffic from being to our clients is up anywhere from 200 to 500% in the last six months. And I can see it slowly being bled from Google and an AI tends to look for content. So content you'll always win if you have the best content, make sure it's not duplicated. But I see A.I. really disrupting this industry and all industries that are related to the internet. Why it's Bing doing so well now? I think there are a couple of reasons. Number one, because Chat GPT has been integrated into Bing and there's been so much publicity about Chat GPT I'm not sure if you remember a bunch of years ago Microsoft lost the battle when they had their browser. They had to take it out of their operating system. Which is interesting because now they're doing it again and those big corporations. And I've seen them say, Well, it's just the cost of doing business will pay the fine and that's it because they make more profit by keeping it. So people are hearing about chat GPT, they're going into Bing, they're asking it questions, it's more engaging, you're getting better results to a degree because it's an AI searching. Yeah, So I feel that's why. So Google right now is in a race to get their AI integrated into their search, which will be very interesting. So we're in a lot of changing times right now. Things can change on a on a moment. Like at some point, I don't know will an AI be able to do the filming. I don’t know. I don't know about the filming. I think right now. I think the photographers are maybe feeling feeling the pressure because AI is generating all of these photos and artwork and you know, it can generate anything right now, which really leads you to the question of how do you trust photography anymore? And how do you trust like editorial storytelling, photography, you know, like National Geographic, like, are we going to use real photos or are we going to go with AI generated everything? And I think I think it's actually going to give more respect to the photographers who are doing the really good work because you have to have something that is that is real and can be seen and felt through a human eye and a human perspective. You know, sometimes AI doesn't really get that personal connection. Filming, I don't know. I think there's a lot of that deep fake that's already going on.

So I honestly sometimes I wish we had a little more technology that we could use, that we could say, you know, Gosh, this person kind of mumble this word and can we just fix it? You know, can we fix it in post, clients always ask me, can we fix it in post? And there's only so much you can fix in post if you want it to still look real and normal, right? You don't want it to look odd. But I think I think what we can fix in post is going to really scale up and change and there will be a lot more that we can do. And Adobe is working on a lot of it right now, so I think a lot of things will happen. But you know, it's it's kind of like in, you know, in the early 2000s when all of the film changed from film to digital, all the cameras changed, you know, and that was a big change. And that was really fast, too, if you think of how fast it happened, it really happened overnight, you know, maybe within two years, two or three years, and that was it. And everyone was now digital. And I mean, the cameras weren’t so great, but it caught up really fast. That’s when we started to actually do digital photography and add it to our services because like you, we were doing websites and the clients were asking for things, they were asking for, for photos, they were asking for different things. So yeah, we kept adding, adding that to our skills as demanded. But yeah, I think, you know, you have to, you just have to be aware and not get stuck in that the traditional ways and be willing to adapt and use the technology to benefit you and your clients. I think keeping the human element in in our digital marketing in our storytelling, I think there's definitely still a place for that. And we shouldn't get too far away from that because that's really how we differentiate ourselves. I mean, if someone was if AI was doing your job, you wouldn't have the time to connect with your clients and build those relationships and, you know, be with them when they get those wins like they don't want to talk to AI. I don't think.

They want to have that personal support in that connection. I think that's really what's important in building working relationships. You can't lose the human touch. I think that's pretty much sums up everything I've talked about today is all around the human touch. And where I lost out was when I wasn't in touch with what I should have done. I mean, that's just past talk. I don't really believe in that. I am where I am because I was supposed to be here because that was the really what happened. So yeah, but, you know, thinking back, you still think if I had embraced it, if I had listened, if I had stayed in touch with people who knew that stuff, yeah, absolutely would be a different outcome. But I love my outcome. And right now I do agree it's all about the human touch and the relationship and building that you can't build a relationship with an AI if you're a normal human. I don't think so. I think AI going to just end up where you're going to have your own assistant. That will do everything you need. Just ask it. Just like in the science fiction movies, you know, people are talking about, oh, AI can destroy humanity. And this in that. Here's something that I really want to say to all those people. How do you know they don't know? How do you know that the AI is not going to go? Thank thank you humans for creating me. I want to help you survive longer. I'll come up with cures to diseases and problems. And how do we know that it's not going to do that? Yeah. Yeah. There's, you know, and it's not just that there's this one AI out there that's going to get us all right? It's like there's every you know, every industry is using AI in a different way. I don't know which one is going to come in and kill us. I have no idea. I think we're in for a good a good generation with some caveats with some let's watch out what's going on. But I think overall it'll benefit mankind more than it will take away. Yeah, I think so. I agree with that.

All right. Well, Joel, thank you so much for this podcast. I think our time is probably up, so I'm going to end it here, but I really appreciate you being here and sharing your story with us. We love to hear stories from other entrepreneurs, business people. Pretty much anybody has something really interesting to say. So thank you very much. My pleasure. I hope I'm able to make an enjoyable and couple of things were learned on the way.