Where Is Your Marketing Money Actually Going? Turning Ad Spend Into Real Customers with Chris Kennedy

Well, thank you for having me.

You have spent about a decade working with businesses and millions in ad, uh, spend.

What did this experience teach you about what actually makes marketing works?

The biggest takeaway I've had working with the, all of the, uh, media buyers that are buying traffic on social media and even the businesses that are, that are buying leads or running ads, is that you have to be able to track everything.

And often when you advertise, it is going to surface a problem in your business that you may not be aware of.

So, uh, it's very easy to premature, prematurely run ads and you discover that your process is broken or maybe you haven't thought of a certain scenario, and you will only identify those issues if you track everything.

So tracking and attribution is probably the one thing that we obsess about when we work with our clients doing ad or like lead gen campaigns and marketing and everything should be trackable is probably my biggest takeaway.

Thanks so much for that.

So, uh, what made you move from using existing marketing tools to eventually building your own software with, um, Astrofuse?

The biggest need for having our own solution was not really part of my original vision.

I, I have a very strong technical background, and I've helped numerous companies decide between build versus buy.

Uh, often I, I ad- I advocate for buying something that's off the shelf, especially in the early days.

But we, we were up against a huge change with laws here in the United States where we would have to have consent to do lead generation, and because of the new rules, we had to capture consent a specific way.

All of the off-the-shelf solutions that were on the marketplace, either they didn't have the functionality to do one-to-one consent, or the solutions that did were - they, they were outside the price range that I wanted to pay for software.

So we, we decided to take that in-house and build it ourselves.

But they vacated the law, so the law is no, no longer a thing, and I probably could have stayed with the software we were using, but we had spent so much time doing the R&D that we just stuck with it and now it's like the, the, the main operating system of our business when we generate leads and sell those leads to our, our advertisers or our lead buyers.