Akvile DeFazio took the leap from employee to self-employed with her digital marketing agency, Akvertise. The transition wasn't always easy… but she wouldn't trade the experience for anything because of what she learned about business, marketing, and herself.We talk about the strategies Akvile used to build her agency from the ground up… and continues to use for business development and client retention.Listen in to find out…
- How speaking at events can boost your bottom line
- Where paid social is heading next
- Why normal networking doesn't work
- Strategies to be more visible to potential clients
- And more
Listen now…
Mentioned in This Episode: www.akvertise.com
Episode Transcript:
Steffen Horst: Welcome to the Performance Delivered, Insider Secrets for Digital Marketing Success podcast, where we talk with marketing and agency executives and learn about how they built successful businesses and their personal brand. I'm your host, Steffen Horst.Today I'm happy to welcome Akvile DeFazio as my guest. Akvile is the president of Akvertise, a social media advertising company located in Paso Robles. She works with companies of all sizes, from startups to big enterprises and prior to launching Akvertise, Akvile spent more than a decade working in house at a variety of companies ranging from outdoor gear and apparel, E-commerce to pet health insurance, online publications and internet marketing. Akvile, great to have you on the show.Akvile DeFazio: Thank you so much for having me, Steffen, it's a pleasure to be here.Steffen Horst: Akvile, when I did my research about you to prepare for the podcast, I noticed that you started off in physical therapy. So how does someone come from physical therapy and then decide, you know, what, I want to do a 180 and go into digital marketing?Akvile DeFazio: Excellent question. I'll try to keep it short because it was quite a journey. But my family tried to get me to go into medicine because that was a secure job field. And my father and my sisters, were all working in that field and naturally I figure, I'll listen to the adults in my life that I trust and I went that way and it was great. I enjoyed it, I learned a lot. But I realized at the end of it's just not quite what I wanted to do long-term and it wasn't fulfilling to where I thought maybe it should be. So as I was trying to get into grad school, I wasn't able to get in for two years and I realized that maybe this is the universe telling me that I should try a different path and really just hone in on what was interesting to me.And while I was working at the physical therapy clinics as an aide for a few years, I got to dive into marketing a little bit here and there for those clinics and I loved that, but it was such a minimal part of my job that I wanted more of it. And an internship popped up, I was living in Seattle at the time for an E-commerce position within the digital marketing department at a place called Evo and they do outdoor apparel and gear from snowboarding, skiing, wakeboarding, all that kind of stuff.And I was already into that stuff in my personal life as hobbies. And I really wanted to work there I was a frequent attendee of their events at that store and a question pushed to get that internship. And they grilled me at all those interviews. And they're like, out of 30 some applicants you were the only one that doesn't have a business marketing or communications degree. Why should we give this to you? And I guess I put up a good enough case to where they told me that I was the wildcard and they were going to go with me and they really gave me my start within digital marketing and I owe it to them because they gave me that chance and that's kind of how I fell into it, and here we are now.Steffen Horst: That's a great story. So, you started your internship at this outdoor company, what kind of digital marketing activities did you touch from that point on to now? Did you start off with social media marketing or did you do other social or other digital marketing activities first?Akvile DeFazio: It was mostly other digital marketing. I didn't get to delve into social media and paid searches until later in my career, but I started off E-commerce by just setting up our shopping feeds through a number of different online retail shops from Zappos to Back Country and all those kind of relevant websites to their brand. And then toward the end of my internship I ended up getting hired full time, which was great. That was the year of the recession hit in 2008. So unfortunately they had to let go a number of the staff members and nobody was buying skis that year, but I was fortunate enough to stay on board, but we all had to make a number of sacrifices and take cuts. But my schools loans started kicking in and physical therapy amongst many other types of education is very expensive.So I ended up actually moving to a different company and getting an internship there, it was a pet health insurance company.Steffen Horst: Interesting.Akvile DeFazio: And I was there for three months doing that and they were a startup at the time and there were about twelve of us in the office. And after my internship I really wanted to stay there because I liked the team, I liked the company and what they were doing and I told my boss I really want to stay here full time. So he told me to go home and try out Google AdWords for the first time and I didn't know anything about it other than what it was. But I never got a chance to explore the insides of it. So I went back to my friends at Evo, the place I worked at before then and I asked them to give me a rundown of Google AdWords in one weekend and they did and they came back with a list of recommendations for us to try out and my boss had tried everything except one thing and that one thing he said, you're hired and I got to teach myself and learn PPC from the ground up and that was officially my way into paid search, which later transitioned to paid social as well.Steffen Horst: That's interesting. So what's the transition into paid social and extension to paid search, because paid search obviously is more, a lower funnel activity where people actively looking for information and paid social is more mid funnel, even ... If you do prospecting, it's more upper funnel activity to kind of complete the funnel. Is that how you kind of went into social media marketing?Akvile DeFazio: It feels like every job was a big step. So after that pet health insurance company, I was attending search marketing expo conferences a lot with my team and I was looking to move to California from Seattle and the job that I had the time was in office only, so I was seeking new employment and I attended this conference, I was tweeting so much and Danny Sullivan who worked at search engine land before, followed me back and I had a conversation with him later that afternoon at that show and he told me to contact him after because he liked my tweeting style and they needed essentially a me on their team. So after that show I moved to California and I got a job there. So that was the last job that I had as an employee for another company before I launched my own and that's where I really got to learn a lot where I had the opportunity to do paid social, paid search and be in charge of the whole advertising funnel from start to finish.Steffen Horst: That's great. I'm sure you learned a lot out there …Akvile DeFazio: Oh yeah.Steffen Horst: When you were, I think it's Third Door Media, right? The company behind it …Akvile DeFazio: Correct. Yeah. Marketing to marketers is a challenge in itself, but it was a welcome challenge.Steffen Horst: Great. So then you worked at Third Door Media. At what point did you decide, hey, it's great to be employed, but it might be greater to be self-employed?Akvile DeFazio: I loved working there but there was no room for me to grow, and after almost four years being there, I yearned for something more. I wanted just more than the responsibilities. I wanted the authority to be able to help more types of businesses and be involved in more channels and be more involved with strategy and to be able to make those decisions and I realized the only way I was going to be able to do that after talking to my friends who run their own businesses when it comes to marketing or other types of industries and I really just was drawn to the whole journey of entrepreneurship even though I didn't know where to start, but that's kind of where the tipping point got and I realized that I needed to make a change and take that leap.Steffen Horst: Okay. So, after you made up your mind that, you know what, this is a great job, but I'm kind of stuck in a way, I can't progress, I can't grow. How long did it take you from making that decision to founding Akvertise?Akvile DeFazio: I was thinking about it for more than a year, but I am patient and I thought that maybe there'll be other opportunities within the company that would arise, but after a while it just got to the point where I realized that I needed to make some changes sooner than later and I reached out to a good friend of mine who's been running her own PPC agency for about ten years longer than I, and she's a very close friend of mine.Her name was Pamela Lund, and I wanted to ask her if I could shadow her for a day and I put it off for nine months because I was afraid she was going to say no or I'd be wasting her time, which in hindsight now it's taught me a very big lesson because when I finally got to the point where I emailed her out of mild frustration with where I was in my life at that point and she's like, you couldn't have emailed me at a better time. I'm actually looking to scale back. I will teach you everything I know and do you one better. I'll give you some of my clients because I'm wanting to build a completely different business that's not marketing related. And I'll teach you everything I know and I don't even know how I can properly thank her because that was essentially the start of what gave me the confidence to take that leap and as you know yourself being a business owner, there's no manual to entrepreneurship, so to have a mentor and to ask that question that had a massive result that was rewarding in the end and it still is every day as I continued to grow my business. Those were two big lessons that I learned that year.Steffen Horst: So you do this one day shadowing of your friend and that was then the start of Akvertise, how long did it take you then from that point on to found the company to get everything in place?Akvile DeFazio: Two weeks.Steffen Horst: Wow, that must have been very quick.Akvile DeFazio: I gave my notice and waited two weeks, I started to get my things in order and left the company because a lot of my friends, the other company that were like family to me and I wanted to lead properly, but at the same time that I knew that I didn't have enough time to take a break and I wanted to dive right in because I didn't know when I was going to start generating income from my new work, essentially.Steffen Horst: I think you were in a unique position, right? As you said, you all of a sudden had already a book of clients, which I think is probably the biggest challenge that wants to found their own company. Usually people take one or two clients or have already something lined up. But I assume that already gave you a lot of confidence because you didn't have to look at the end of the month, have I made enough money to pay all my bills?Akvile DeFazio: Absolutely, yeah.Steffen Horst: So, with that already in place, how did you then go about to grow the company? So how did you manage a client, and I assume you were a single business owner, so you didn't have anyone else in the team to help you. How did you balance out taking care of the clients and doing, you know, growing the company?Akvile DeFazio: It was a lot of long days and weekends, but it was also very exciting because it was something I could call my own and everything that I put into it, I could see whether it was working out or not. And the biggest thing that I know that, I was in a fortunate situation where my friend was looking to offload work and I was looking to pick it up. I think that the biggest thing that has helped in terms of business development and retention with clients over the years is to network, whether it's in person or online. I'm very active on Twitter and I have been for years and honestly Twitter is a great source of just not industry friendships, but getting leads and building other relationships, maybe partnerships and like you and I met a digitally as well is just being visible and conversing and helping people, whether it's your industry or not. People will remember that.And I was attending conferences for years before starting my own thing, or even working at a marketing conference company, but just making sure that you are putting yourself out there as uncomfortable as it can be, it does get easier with time. Just ask people how you can help them and that you'll be surprised with our industry, I feel like there's so much work to go around and everyone is very helpful and willing to share information that, just get out there and say hello and start that journey with networking and it'll help your business tremendously in the long run.Steffen Horst: I recently read, in preparation for this podcast, I read that you, was it a year, 18 months ago you decided to be more vocal to go to go out and be an active speaker actually at a conference. Not only to go there and just sit there and listen to other people, but also have your own voice heard by people. How did you make the decision? Because I, you know, I think there are a lot of people out there say, "Hey, you know what? Yeah, there's this conference and I could apply for a speaker spot, but you know, what are people interested in listening to, and what am I talking about and I hate to talk in front of a lot of people." I mean there's so many fears people have when it comes to taking that step, from the post, I think it was a little bit similar for you. So how did you overcome that? How did you make the decision and how did you prepare for the speaking engagements. How did you come up with topics, that you pitched?Akvile DeFazio: Excellent question. Well, for 30 some years I've had terrible stage fright even though I've played in a number of concerts growing up with a very musically inclined family and I've had to be on stage since I was a kid, but I would black out and I knew that as I got older and my business was me, that I would have to showcase it and tell people what I know and share information and it wasn't enough just to attend a network where that plays a huge role in lead generation for our company. We haven't had to do any advertising, as we had been in business for four and a half years, but the speaking part really propelled it even further.So your three of my business, things took a little bit of a dip and that was the year they're really learned about doing business development and into your four. I wanted to do everything I could in my power to propel everything in the right direction and not have another year like year three. So at the end of year three I made a goal that for 2018 I would speak at least one at marketing conference and as soon as I put that out there on twitter and I started telling my friends through the industry, I was presented with a number of opportunities from podcasts just to get me warmed up, just speaking, but also transitioning that to him in person and doing events. And I started some stuff at the local Chamber of Commerce where I live. I signed up there and started attending events. I told people that I was interested in speaking and if I can ever share any information to help our community when it comes to marketing and advertising, that gave me an opportunity to do a number of events last year on a smaller scale.And then being in the marketing industry and attending conferences, most of my friends actually are speakers and they've always been encouraging me for years to do it, but I just never had the, you know, I wasn't brave enough to tackle that type of thing because it was so afraid. But toastmasters, it's an international organization and they have clubs everywhere and I decided to sign up to the closest one by my house which meets every Monday. And for one year I didn't miss a single meeting with that goal in mind that I would want to overcome my fears and sure, I still get nervous. I'm not refined by any means. But that helped me land more and more speaking opportunities, whether it was in person or online, from podcasts and webinars. And with each one, I've become more comfortable and it's helped my business become much more, I think I've gained more authority in the fact that I do know what I'm doing when it comes to work. It's not just me working in my office and my clients know what I'm doing, but to be able to share that information to community that has helped me learn to where I've grown into the marketer than I am today. I just wanted to give back and to not be afraid to do that.So if you are terrified of public speaking, long story long, I'd love to offer the recommendation is signing up for toastmasters. You can visit as a guest for free and just see what it's all about. But every club has the same format and it really teaches you how to improve your public speaking, whether it's impromptu speaking or a certain type of informative or inspiring speech or professional speech. There's different types of goals you can follow. So that was the biggest proponent of where I am today in terms of public speaking.Steffen Horst: That's great advice. So after you got over your fear, or the reservation, let's say it that way, of going out there and speaking publicly, how did you find the topics that you thought would be interesting for conferences?Akvile DeFazio: Typically I would pitch something, maybe something interesting that happened with a client, or a case study that I think could be applicable to multiple industries, or just seeing what's been previously discussed that their shows or sometimes they even just ask them what are you looking for? Who is your audience and what are they looking to learn when it comes to certain things that I specialize in when it comes to paid social? And if there's a lot of things on Facebook or Instagram because there's a much bigger, more established platforms, there's a lot of things that I'm currently doing this year where I've noticed that there are really big trends with Pinterest and LinkedIn and trying to pitch those as well because I feel like it's very important as a marketer to diversify because our jobs, we shouldn't rely our jobs on just one channel.Steffen Horst: Yeah.Akvile DeFazio: If something happens to Facebook, then what are we supposed to do? So it's just good to prepare and you know, test different channels. So I look for a little special things that can stand out, but also be applicable.Steffen Horst: Great. So you said business development is not really something you have to do, you basically go out and speak and that is the business development, so you don't have someone sitting in a company that has to call up people or it has to send out emails, which I think is great and obviously helps to alleviate a lot of pressure, a lot of business owners have when it comes to finding new business. Now that you're a business owner, when you look back at the last four years, what were the things about being a business owner, being self-employed that you did not expect that kind of took you completely by surprise?Akvile DeFazio: Honestly, everything, I didn't know what I was getting myself into, I had not previously worked at an agency, which I think I did myself a slight disservice because I had to really dive in deep into learning how to run an agency without having prior experience. So that in itself was a huge lesson, but business development to managing client expectations and learning how to price my services accordingly with industry standards, but also to make it fair for my business to grow. And also for the clients to be acceptive of it and to get results and make it worthwhile for them, so I feel like there's so many areas of running a business that I didn't previously know that just come with the journey. As you get to certain points.Steffen Horst: What area do you feel did you grow the most?Akvile DeFazio: I don't know if this is because it's new, but I'd probably say public speaking and just being able to communicate with much more confidence.Steffen Horst: Okay. And then on the flip side, you know, what did not surprise you all a business owner, what did you expect and that actually happened?Akvile DeFazio: I've heard that it's a lot of work, but it's incredibly rewarding and I had a feeling it would be that way because I wanted to put everything into it and just hearing what my entrepreneur friends have had to say over the years and just seeing how busy they are, so I knew it was going to be a lot of work. So that didn't surprise me and I was ready to take that on.Steffen Horst: Okay. And then how does a day look for you, when do you usually start? Do you start really early, stop really late or do you have a nine to five? Nine to six schedule?Akvile DeFazio: I tried to work normal business hours because clients do, but I am an early bird and I function best in terms of just brain capacity and I start my day usually between 6:30 and 7:00 AM and get a bunch of reporting done first thing in the day and send anything that's related to math, but I'm much more creative as the day goes on and I feel like it shifts around one to 2:00 and I need to take a little break and then get back into it, so I try to take lunch, but it's taken me all these years to figure out what works when and the fact that I can alter my day as I best see fit because I am in charge of my business, but I also try to stagger things like have phone calls or report certain days or certain times of the month or the week so I'm not overloading every single day and that I use it effectively.Steffen Horst: So you've really, at the end of the day, organized and scheduled your week, your month properly out, to be able to accomplish all the things that have to be done to achieve the outcomes that you're looking for and not to be surprised by things that come up all the time in an agency environment?Akvile DeFazio: Correct. Yeah, and of course you can't control everything, but I try to do my best to optimize my day and to be the most efficient that I can for my clients.Steffen Horst: That makes sense. For someone who thinks about, hey, you know what? I have this great idea. I want to launch my own business. What would you say to them? How and where should they start with the process of founding their own business?Akvile DeFazio: Don't hesitate, if there's any one question. If there's someone that you admire that's an entrepreneur or somebody that's doing the exactly same work as you, but maybe years ahead, reach out to that person asked for a mentor because it's an overwhelming journey in itself to feel alone, but you're not alone. There's a lot of people in our position that are looking to take that leap or already have done it and they can offer a lot of great advice, so seek someone out and ask if you can shadow them for the day.You never know what it'll turn out to be, it might end up like my beginning, but if not, just start connecting with people and I guess back to that just ask for recommendations, advice of where you can start maybe listening to podcast like this one or look for some online forums for entrepreneurs or maybe just pick up some books that might be popular among the entrepreneur community to dive into that and just start building it out. Also start with the website and just make a list of everything you'll need for the first few months to get up and running. If you work in marketing, which you probably do, listening to this podcast, but look at what other agencies are doing and what you can do to replicate that, but to call it your realm using your own voice, your own mission, and just turning that into your brand.Steffen Horst: Okay. From your perspective, how important is it to kind of focus on the service that you're offering in regards to not going too broad and saying, hey, like in your case you could have said I do paid search, I do paid social, I do display, I do email marketing. I do native, et Cetera. How important is it to really focus on one service that you can do really good compared to doing a lot but not that great?Akvile DeFazio: Excellent question. I actually started off my company doing all of the things that you just aforementioned.Steffen Horst: Okay.Akvile DeFazio: And during that dip in year three, I realize that I don't take my own advice. I tell clients to test every aspect of their campaigns for their business and see what works and what doesn't, but I wasn't applying the same methodology to my own business and after sitting down with a few friends at conferences and they run their own businesses, I asked them what would you recommend? And they told me eat your own dog food or you know, take your own advice. So that was the year that I realized that this could be a good test right now because things are down and I'm looking to bring it back up. And while I've done all these things for over a decade, I realized that I love doing paid social lot more. I'm fascinated by targeting based on interests and behaviors rather than keywords.Steffen Horst: Yeah.Akvile DeFazio: And I still offer that, but I decided to remove all the paid search services off of my site. I still do them on occasion if a client wants to expand into those areas, but I have people that do that now. But I focus primarily, I've decided to specialize just one thing and become the person that can do X, Y, and Z for paid social. And I really started pushing that out there. And I've always thought that if this doesn't work out, that if it's just too narrow of a service offering that I can always revert back, and offer more. And I thought I would have to revert but it turns out that I've actually gotten more business and telling people exactly what I do, especially when talking to business owners who might not be as savvy to different marketing terms.Where I say, "Oh, I did digital marketing." And that's a really broad term. There's so many different aspects of it to where when I started specializing and I said, I do Facebook ads, I do Instagram ads. The normal person that uses those apps knows what they are and they can relate much more and I've gotten much more business since doing that, so definitely dive in and figure out what you're passionate about and build that out and let people know that you specialize in that. So then you can be the go-to person for those services.Steffen Horst: That's good advice. Have you come up with situations where your client was approached by another agency that offered everything. They're probably bigger, usually. How did you keep your position? How did you keep the client? How did you convince the client, that you know what? I am the right one for you for social media advertising?Akvile DeFazio: That's a really great question. I've had a few scenarios like that and I've managed to get some clients that I didn't think that I could get as being the small agency that I currently am, and we don't just set it and forget it. There's a lot of things that need attention and not just because it needs it, but because we want to do it and I emphasize that to clients that we may be small but we're mighty. Whereas larger agencies, they do a great job, I'm not trying to take anything away from them because they do offer all the services and it's convenient to have a one stop shop for everything, but sometimes depending on certain agencies that have had experiences in the past, they, they're just so overloaded with clients that they're not able to dedicate as much attention as certain clients need and, or maybe even want.So being specialized and being smaller, I do work with other agencies that we partner with and we specialize in our own services so we're kind of a collective of small agencies and can provide the same services and maybe to a degree better, because we're so small and we're able to, you know, really give all the attention that what we can to those clients and it's worked out in the past for us in this, you know, they, they want to make it much more seamless and just go to a one stop shop, but it can provide a lot more to have a bigger client like that. Then by all means, I encourage them and I recommend them to certain ones that I know do great work, so it just depends. Every situation is different. Every client is different, but we just try to do the best we can and you know that's not a good match, we're happy to send them somewhere else that they can get exactly what they're looking for because sometimes that'll come back with some good Karma points or even some work down the line.Steffen Horst: Yeah. I want to go back one step when you said in year three, business started to dip a little bit downwards. Did you have any fear, any doubts at that point and if so, how did you manage that? Because having talked to a lot of business owners, they always say, or many of them say, you know what? When things get tough, that's when it's really hard to stay on course and to keep motivated. How did you overcome that situation? Other than in addition to saying you know what, I'm focusing on paid social media only.?Akvile DeFazio: That was a tough year and a lot of tough decisions had to be made but I didn't want to go back to working for someone else, now that I had a taste of running my own business, so I just wanted to do everything that I could. So from public speaking to learning how to business development. But the thing that I learned that year that helped keep propelling things forward, that I knew that I couldn't go ... You know, things were already pretty bad, I learned to diversify. So essentially what happened that year was to get a little bit more context to that I think would be very helpful for some of your listeners, is that I lost my two biggest clients in one week and it was through no fault of our own. I've been working for those clients for two, a little bit over years at that point.But one, their CEO resigned and they had to pull back on everything. And then the other one got acquired by a larger company and that was great news, but it came as a surprise, which, you know, I wish that we would have found out earlier, but that taught me that, don't have just a bunch of larger clients because if anything happens like that you lose 90% of your income and then you have to scramble to find everything else. So it took about eight months to get back, but I kept feeding the funnel, having conversations with people, taking on smaller projects in the meantime, being less selective. Just to keep feeding the funnel and feeding finances and keep going forward because they really didn't want to go back and I didn't want to close my doors.Steffen Horst: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So throughout the entire podcast we talked about going from being an employee to business owner, we haven't talked at all about social media marketing. So as kind of one of the last questions from your perspective, social media world, what is the big thing over the next two, three years that businesses need to pay attention to and need to go into, need to do basically?Akvile DeFazio: I know this isn't new, but I feel like it's still heavily under-utilized. But start doing video, create video content for every part of your marketing funnel, whether it's email, whether it's organic social media to paid social. Start creating video because people are so distracted these days with technology and just over stimulus of everything that goes on in different channels, whether you know, the social app or you're just browsing online.But video, a lot of companies are doing it, but it's still heavily under saturated with Facebook, Instagram, there with newsfeed videos, going live or maybe even doing stories, which is a great way to do short form content. You don't have to get a big team or have high end equipment to start telling your story, and showcasing behind the scenes and showcase your brand and they can turn those into ads and expand into other areas as well, Pinterest and LinkedIn, they've made significant changes over the last year and you can really get a lot of organic and paid visibility there and it's still under saturated compared to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, so test those channels out. Create video content. It's a really great quick way to connect with your users in a visual way and you'll be surprised what those will, you know, they actually convert a lot better. And you'll get higher engagement rates typically because people digest the content much easier than they would with text.Steffen Horst: Yeah and when you say video, we're not talking about a minute video, I assume you're talking about short form video, so where does that ten, 15 second videos?Akvile DeFazio: Yes. So test out different ones, see what works best for the story you're trying to tell. The best thing to do is put your best foot forward in the first ten to 15 seconds of the video if it is longer than that, show your brand so users aren't left wondering what this is about, show your logo, show product or your service, but you know, start with something small, maybe 15 seconds long, maybe try 30 and if you have a longer brand story, maybe a minute, but just see what works well for the different audiences and the channels that you're using.Steffen Horst: Great. Thank you so much for that advice. Akvile, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast. If people want to find more about you and or Akvertise, how did it go about it? How can they find you?Akvile DeFazio: Thank you so much, it was a pleasure speaking with you Steffen, you can find me at Akvertise.com. That's A-K-V-E-R-T-I-S-E or you can find me by my name, which is a little bit more complicated, but it's Akvile DeFazio and you'll find me with at Twitter.Steffen Horst: We put the website into the description, so it's easier for the listener to find information. Thanks everyone for listening. If you liked the Performance Delivered Podcast, please subscribe to us and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast application. If you want to find out more about Symphonic Digital, you can visit us at Symphonicdigital.com or follow us on twitter at SymphonicHQ. Thanks again. And see you next time.
.png)
