"Being versatile. Our industry changes quickly, now more than ever. And it’s not slowing down. A good marketer must have the aptitude to pivot and pick up new skills to keep up with changes to thrive."
Marketing a product or service today is easier than ever before in history. Using platforms like Facebook ads or Google ads, a company can market their product directly to people who perfectly fit the ideal client demographic, at a very low cost. Digital Marketing tools, Pay per Click ads, and email marketing can help a company dramatically increase sales. At the same time, many companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools often see disappointing results.
In this interview series called “How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales”, we are talking to marketers, advertisers, brand consultants, & digital marketing gurus who can share practical ideas from their experience about how to effectively leverage the power of digital marketing, PPC, & email.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Derek Chew.
Derek Chew of Fullmoon Digital On How to Effectively Leverage The Power of Digital Marketing, PPC, & Email to Dramatically Increase Sales
Derek Chew is the Founder and CEO of Fullmoon Digital. A former early Yahoo! employee where he cut his teeth in digital marketing. Fullmoon Digital is one of the few 100% independent digital marketing agencies in the United States. The firm is cross-functional with deep experience in SEO, digital strategy, programmatic, analytics, performance marketing, paid media, social advertising, and creative. They push the envelope of what is possible in terms of marketing and technology, all the while providing best-in-class digital marketing service to their “pack” of clients. For more information, please visit www.fullmoondigital.com
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this series with Authority Magazine. I started in digital marketing over two decades ago in affiliate marketing. I fell in love with marketing and its dynamic landscape — I see marketing as puzzle-solving and it gives me real excitement to constantly look for solutions to solve business challenges.
It was a wild wild west when I got into digital marketing. To succeed as a digital marketer you had to learn quick, adapt ferociously, and pivot at the flip of a dime. Prior to launching the Fullmoon Digital agency, I was leading digital efforts at major companies like Organic, Yahoo!, LegalZoom, and others. For many years, I worked on projects that required me to solve challenges in technology, design, branding, and performance. It was exciting to be part of large organizations, but I started to feel something missing — passion for doing the right thing, even when things were difficult. To actually make a mark in the work I do, I knew it was an uphill battle but one that I was looking forward to because most agencies tend to choose the easy way out.
I wanted to work with a group of people who understand what it meant to do the right thing. I wanted to build a team that is brave and unapologetic for being creative with solutions, even when it sounds “crazy.” When I started Fullmoon Digital, I didn’t know much about running a business, but I did know that I would not compromise on the quality of my work from day one. With over two decades of experience working for some of the most recognizable brands and companies, I had enough experience under my belt and was ready to challenge the status quo as an anti-agency agency.
Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘takeaways’ you learned from that?
Oh boy! This one happened early in my career. This mistake stuck with me, and I still get flashbacks from it. I overspent on a client account by thousands of dollars. It was bad. In a nutshell, I made a targeting adjustment on the campaign with bid adjustments and allowed the Google Ads algorithm to maximize my clicks. That’s all fine, but the error was not setting a maximum cap on the CPC. And boy, did Google Ads algorithm go to work! After a few days of the campaign running buck wild, I received an alert that my CPA had increased by 400%!
Probably the most important thing coming out from that experience is to master the basics. Things that seem trivial are usually the ones that are overlooked and can cause potential damage because of negligence and complacency.
None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
My wife, Gianina. I don’t give it enough credit to her. Throughout my career, she’s been super supportive — even when some of my career choices were questionable. I mean, she allowed me to learn from my shortcomings and went along with me on my career rollercoaster. Her unwavering belief in me was a major reason why I was able to continue pushing obstacles to get to where we’re at today with Fullmoon Digital.
As a life partner, my wife was able to be brutally honest with me when I needed the feedback, and taught me that open communication was an important part of building anything meaningful. As we build the Fullmoon Digital team, I am starting to understand what it means to communicate deeper and build real relationships with clients and pack members.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
How we operate is different than the typical agency. We take a more anti-agency approach when it comes to operations. For example, we limit the number of new clients that are added each year. This limit is based on years of learning how to achieve client excellence. Many agencies overload their teams with too many accounts (up to 20 in some cases) and stretch their resources so thin, people get burnt out and stop enjoying their work. We dig deeper with our clients and integrate vertically, instead of horizontally. This means that we don’t focus on a single service and get as many accounts as possible. Our approach is partnership-based and evolving to become an agency of record with our client partnerships.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
No guts no glory, right? 😊 Anti-fragile, perseverance, and analytical comes to mind. As a business owner, only you will understand the stress, sacrifices, and mistakes that can crush your spirits. And yet, as a leader whom your team relies on, you must dig deep into your soul and give everything you have to make things easier for your team. It’s not an envious position as many may seem to think.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Yes. One awesome impact project we’re working on is with our partner SeaTrees. They are a non-profit organization that is working with teams around the world to restore the ocean by planting mangrove trees and kelp. We’ve been working with the SeaTrees team for over 2 years now — helping them mobilize people online to build awareness on educate them on the importance of saving our ocean.
Ok super. Now let’s jump to the main questions of our interview. As we mentioned in the beginning, sometimes companies that just start exploring with digital marketing tools like PPC campaigns often see disappointing results. In your opinion, what are a few of the biggest mistakes companies make when they first start out with digital marketing? If you can, please share an example for each.
PPC shouldn’t be seen as a quick fix. A common misconception is that PPC can deliver immediate and good ROI — that’s completely hogwash. Good ROI, yes. But immediate, not even close. But that doesn’t stop agencies from making lofty promises to get the deal done. Until 5 years ago, PPC may be the quick fix for brands looking to drive immediate sales; and many PPC marketers are stuck in the past. The larger agencies are dinosaurs, so their strategies tend to move much slower than a small and experienced agency like Fullmoon Digital — red tape kills progress!
I have lost prospects in a RPF process — coming to find that a main reason we didn’t win was because of the size of our agency. Most companies are attracted to agencies that are “popular” and have brand badges plastered all over their website. It really looks like a webmercial (just made that word up!). The good news for a smaller agency like Fullmoon Digital, we are in a position to bring on companies that are starting to realize (through the pandemic) that big doesn’t equal good. Look, just because we’re small doesn’t mean we’re cheap. Just because we’re small doesn’t mean we cannot kick ass. Our client retention rate is 95% since we started in 2017 — that says a lot!
If you could break down a very successful digital marketing campaign into a “blueprint”, what would that blueprint look like? Please share some stories or examples of your ideas.
Good question. The idea of a blueprint is static to me. It’s very anti-agency to think that way because agencies charge a lot to develop marketing blueprints as part of their consulting services. At Fullmoon Digital, we believe that our “blueprints” should be as fluid, dynamic, and adaptable as the industry we’re in. That does not mean that we shoot from our hip, but if it requires us to shoot from our hip then we will.
One of our clients in the automotive industry is a prime example of why blueprints don’t work as well as people think. They launched a new product and our team worked with them to take the product into the market. The initial strategy was to target a certain truck make and model — a group of audience we thought we knew would love this product that is designed to boost horsepower. And they did! That was a success. But the strategy also underlined that we continue to reach every owner of that make and model to win hearts and minds. After three months, we saw sales declining, but traffic and awareness was at an all-time high. So, what gives? Well, it turns on, within that truck audience group, only a subset of owners were our target customers — the rest were just, well…happy with what their truck can do. Once we honed in on the customer type, within a week, we relaunched new campaigns to target similar truck owners from other makes and models — the rest was history. 7 years in, they are still a Fullmoon Digital client partner.
Let’s talk about Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC) for a bit. In your opinion which PPC platform produces the best results to increase sales?
Best results depends largely on the business objective. All PPC advertising platforms (Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Bing, etc) play different roles in determining results. Let’s take Google Ads and Bing Ads for example. Most PPC marketers will ignore Bing because the volume is low. That’s good for agencies like Fullmoon Digital who is anti-agency, we will gladly take everything Bing gives us. Yes, most of our clients drive sales from Google Ads. But Bing is such an untapped platform — even with an exponentially smaller market share, a sale is a sale.
I feel many agencies are underserving companies by ignoring Bing. It’s a total disservice.
Can you please share 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful PPC campaign?
These are the pillars for the team at Fullmoon Digital.
- Master the Basics. I cannot stress this enough. Too many people try to get fancy but neglect the foundation of a good PPC campaign.
- Dare to Test. Everyone has an opinion; you know that saying. In short, stop the meetings and start the execution, test your hypothesis, and scale.
- Keep up with PPC trends. There are many thought leaders who are up to date with the latest updates with algorithms. Spend at least 30 minutes per day reading and learning. Keep your mind engaged with what’s going on. A successful PPC campaign can be more effective when you can connect the dots with what you’re doing and what’s possible.
These things are not necessarily revolutionary — they do build solid foundations and helps our team approach PPC with a growth mindset.
Let’s now talk about email marketing for a bit. In your opinion, what are the 3 things that you need to know to run a highly successful email marketing campaign that increases sales?
Email can be a productive channel for both B2B and DTC businesses.
- Audience segmentation. Sending the right content to match the people you are talking to will make huge difference. Build your email audience segments, map them to automation, and see your campaigns flourish! 😊
- Automation. Sequences and email automation can be tuned to be a high-powered marketing tool. Sending timely emails out based on triggers keeps your customers engaged, cart abandonment, educated, and entertained. Don’t underestimate the power of automation — but spend the time to test as you build your automation.
- Deliverability. Emails are useless unless it’s delivered successfully into your recipients’ inbox.
What are the other digital marketing tools that you are passionate about? If you can, can you share with our readers what they are and how to best leverage them?
I’m a huge fan of research tools. SEMRush is high up on the list for me when it comes to PPC. There is also some SEO software like Screaming Frog that I use frequently to deep dive into website data. The most successful PPC marketers know how to combine data from different tools, extract information, and use it to scale campaigns. The team at Fullmoon Digital are encouraged to look beyond surface data and think differently about how to use the information.
Here is the main question of our series. Can you please tell us the 5 things you need to create a highly successful career as a digital marketer? Can you please share a story or example for each?
This is a tough question because it’s subjective and is really no one-size-fits-all.
- Being versatile. Our industry changes quickly, now more than ever. And it’s not slowing down. A good marketer must have the aptitude to pivot and pick up new skills to keep up with changes to thrive.
- Patience. This is one of the most underrated soft skills.
- Desire to Learn. Complacency has no room in a good marketers’ mind. Anyone who wants to succeed as a digital marketer must consistently want to learn — not only about PPC but many aspects of digital marketing like SEO, analytics, content, design, and more.
- Do the right thing, especially when it’s difficult. This will set you apart from the status quo marketers. I’ve met many marketers in my career and most talk a good game but fail to deliver when rubber meets the road. Given a choice, most will be lazy and do the minimum. So, if you want a sustainable career, get in the mindset of doing the right thing especially when it is difficult because it’s the most refreshing thing your client will experience.
- Master the basics. Easier said than done. I’ve audited so many Google Ads accounts by so-called PPC agencies and without fail, I find basic mistakes that are PPC 101. I’ve worked on Google Ads accounts by fixing basic errors and seen performance improvements. Don’t be fooled by fancy strategies before you master the basics. There’s a lot of room for improvements in the basics.
What books, podcasts, videos or other resources do you use to sharpen your marketing skills?
Blogs and audio books are my go-to resources. I spend 30 minutes each morning going through some industry blogs to check in on the pulse of what’s happening in the world of digital marketing.
Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. Here is our final ‘meaty’ question. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
A non-profit organization to help marketers find a good home, then using that revenue to provide free career coaching services to help marketers become the best they can be…and while not everyone can get a job, perhaps this can help marketers start their own business and spark entrepreneurship.
How can our readers further follow your work?
Our website fullmoondigital.com is the best place to learn more about our pack, our work, and what we stand for. LinkedIn
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!
This article was originally featured on Authority Magazine.
We hope you found Derek Chew's insights on leveraging the power of digital marketing and PPC valuable.
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