Vi Wickam on Google Ads, AI, Brand Trust and Business Growth

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Hey, Don Williams. Welcome back to The Proven Entrepreneur Show, where we pull back the curtain on the real stories behind real revenue. Today's guest represents something pretty rare in the marketing world. Legacy-level persuasion blended with modern digital execution.

Now, you probably heard of the Wizard of Ads, Roy H. Williams. He's the man who turned advertising into art, built brands through story, and founded Wizards, Wizard Academy, though there are many wizards, Wizard Academy in Austin, Texas. And that's a place where entrepreneurs go to think bigger.

Today, we're talking to the leader, the wizard partner who brings that wizardry. It's a brand new mouth. I'm just trying it out, folks. When he brings that wizardry online, by Wickham is the driving force behind Wizards, Wizard of Ads Online, helping business owners translate timeless persuasion principles into scalable, scalable, scalable, emphasis, scalable digital systems that actually, here's the magic, people, convert.

So this conversation is about story versus strategy, art versus algorithm, traffic versus trust, and how entrepreneurs can quit shouting and start enchanting. Vi, welcome to the show. Thank you, Don. It's great to be on your show.

I really appreciate you having me here today. We're thrilled to have you and we're going to ask you the tough questions so that we walk away with real value for our businesses. And I appreciate you being here and being open-minded and open-hearted to today's conversation. Nothing better than a hard question.

There we go. Okay, so you are based in Loveland, Colorado. Yes. And you serve entrepreneurs.

Tell us a little bit about your business. I do digital marketing for businesses all across North America and do web development, Google ads management, Google business profiles, all of the things that tie together to make a successful brand online. We bring message alignment to online and offline media. And we really focus on creating a transparent system where business owners understand what we're doing and why we're doing it and generate real results for them instead of trying to snow them in a bunch of jargon.

Love that. You know, transparency, that was kind of the magic word there. In digital marketing, it's not an industry known for a lot of transparency. True fact.

And I'm being maybe even generous when I say it like that. For sure. But that is a real benefit to the business. Okay.

Let's say you and Roy walk into the average Facebook ad account today. would you call it advertising or would it be more interruption well first of all i don't do facebook ads because oh okay i really don't like facebook and social media uh i find it painful and it just sucks me in and i end up spending all this time and there are other people who are able to to just do it as an advertising platform and do it much better. Within the Wizard of Ads partnership, there are other partners who do social.

But your question I can still answer. I just wanted to lay that caveat first. I appreciate that. And I can reword it and say Google.

Well, first of all, like if we're looking at social, what we want to do is communicate connection and build, you know, it really is a brand building exercise. and a storytelling exercise. And that's, you know, like people treat social like a selling exercise. And every time you post, they think of it as an opportunity to sell.

And at most, 10 to 20% of your posts should be selling. And 80 to 90% of your posts should be building community and telling stories and showcasing your staff and making yourself approachable so that when people choose you or so that when people choose the service you offer or the product you're selling, you're the one that they know, like, and trust. Because at Wizard of Ads, what we do is we build brands that people know, like, and trust. When it comes to Google Ads, it's a whole different game because Google Ads is focused on being the person who's there when somebody's looking for you.

So in And so social, you're trying to show up in their life and become a part of their experience. In Google Ads, there's kind of two pieces of it. And this is one of the transparency elements that we do, which is we always separate brand searches from non-brand searches. So when somebody, and this is one of the things that is a secret tactic that many digital marketers do to make themselves look better is if you blend non and brand keywords you look like you doing really great things for them And really it the brand that doing the heavy lifting So I can say Hey look you know, your non-brand Google ads are giving you a three or a four or a five X ROI, but your brand is giving you a 50 X ROI.

And it's not uncommon for us to have 25 to a hundred X ROI on those brand keywords because one, they're a great match. They're looking for you. We're showing them exactly what they're looking for. Two, they've already chosen you.

So, you know, that's your opportunity to lose, not your opportunity to win. So you should be getting a 25 to 50% click-through rate on those opportunities, And you should be getting a 50 plus percent close rate on those opportunities because they already know, like, and trust you. Yeah, agreed. So let me ask you, do you think the industry, so the platforms and the marketing agencies, do you think they're training entrepreneurs to optimize for clicks instead of connection?

Well, Google's incentive is to get you to spend more. And, you know, I say this spending a half million dollars a month in Google ads, but, and getting calls or emails from Google ads reps trying to get us to spend more on a daily basis. Google's incentive is to get you to spend more and not to get you to convert more of that spend into revenue. You know, they really like, they don't want you to do so poorly that you stop spending money with them.

But they really don't care whether or not you're getting a 2x return or a 10x return. They really care. You should add more broad keywords and stop blocking so many of these keywords because, you know, we want you to show up all the time. Don't you want to show up all the time?

You know, your competitors are showing up all the time. You're missing all this opportunity. And I'm like, yes, please. I would like to miss all that bad opportunity that's going to cost me $500 or $1,000 a lead.

And I want to take the leads that are going to cost me $100 a lead. No, it's not like, it's not that, I mean, it's hard, but you know, if you play the way Google wants you to play, you'll just blow all your money on Google ads. And that's not what I want from you because I'm not incentivized to get you to spend more. And many agencies take a commission on your spend.

And this is another thing that Wizard of Ads does differently than most digital agencies. So most digital agencies take anywhere from 10 to 25% of your Google Ads spend and they pocket it. Some of them tell you that they're doing this. Some of them just do it and they don't even tell you.

So if a Google Ads manager says that you pay me and I pay Google, run away. because if you're paying them, you don't have accountability for what you're actually spending. And there are legitimate, good Google ads managers that charge a 10 or 15% commission. I feel like that in, well, I know that that misaligns our incentives.

My incentive is to grow your business as a Wizard of Ads partner. My incentive is to create top line growth for you as cheaply as possible. To do that, you know, I have to turn away a lot of those expensive opportunities to focus on the things that are going to be profitable for you. Whereas a lot of agencies just, you know, like they've got a $10,000 or $20,000 or $50,000 a month budget.

They just want to spend it all because if they spend it all, they get their whole commission. Yeah. Yeah. This has turned out to be a better interview than even I thought of.

So a couple of magic points I want to emphasize. One, Google's goal is not necessarily your goal. No, it's rarely your goal. Yeah.

And I will say that, like, when you're spending a lot of money, Google does give you access to people who actually are more experienced, more knowledgeable, more likely to give you guidance that's useful and actionable. but their tier one, you know, ads reps are saying, you know, just add more broad keywords and stop blocking so many things. You're, you know, which is the opposite of what you actually want. You want the phrase matches and the exact matches and you want to block anything that is not a good fit for what you're looking for in leads.

Pure gold there folks, pure gold. Listen to that. The other thing is, you know, if your contact at your marketing company says, hey, you pay us and then we pay Google, understand that is obviously not transparent. That is so not transparent.

And you have no way to know what they're actually paying Google. And there's a good chance that they're just pocketing 25% of that money. There you go. Okay, good stuff.

I thank you. Let me ask you this. What do you think is the most, let's talk about small business owners. Okay.

So 2 million and under. What do you think is the most dangerous marketing lie those owners believe? I would say that everything can be measured. And when it comes to online measurement, we do a really, really good job of it, but it's really hard and it takes a lot of time to set it up and to manage those integrations and things change and things break, even when you're measuring everything as well as you can, you're lucky if you're 65% to 70% accurate.

So, you know, we're talking about on the Google Ads side, we're measuring the impressions, we're measuring the clicks, we're measuring the conversions, and we're measuring form fills and clicks to phone calls and booking widgets And all of those pieces we measuring as well as they can be measured And then that going over to their CRM And so we pulling in data from their CRM and we saying we're matching these things together to say, well, this is how many of those leads the phone calls got marked as qualified leads.

And this is how many of them got marked as bookings. And this is how many of them were sold. And then we're passing that data back to Google as conversions. And so that Google knows what those leads, bookings, and sales were.

If we're doing everything right, we're getting 65% to 70% accuracy on that. And people think, oh, they're measuring everything. It's all perfect. No, it's a messy, messy situation, and it's very difficult.

And if you think they're 100% accurate, you're fooling yourself. Yeah, I love that. And I would just recommend to the audience, if you're trying to do it yourself, kind of have your foot in a bucket. For sure.

Unless it is your area of expertise. Yeah. Because even the experts are 65 to 70 percent accurate. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so if you're not expert, and you can just look in the mirror and you'll know if you are or not. Have you been doing this for 10 years or more? Yeah. 20, 30?

Expert, you know, you're probably wrong. And let me say this about like lead generation. So my history goes back 40 years in direct mail and outbound call center lead generation. And so the client always wants the very biggest quantity of the very best leads.

Sure. Typically, those don't go together. No. Typically, those are opposite of each other.

Almost never, yeah. As quality rises, quantity falls, and as quantity rises, quality falls. But when you put someone in, like, a platform, you need to understand that really their motivation is to provide you the minimally, the largest quantity of minimally viable leads. I don't know that anybody's ever going to tell you that.

I don't think Google's ever going to tell you that. No, absolutely they're not. Because, you know, Google doesn't care. No, no.

But I care because my incentive is to help you grow your business. If I'm working with you, like the only way I get a raise is if your top line revenue grows in that first year I'm working with you and each year after it. So that is aligned incentives is a critical element of am I incentivized to get you to spend more or to get you to make more? There you go.

Okay. Listen to that, folks. Okay, be properly aligned where you got the same goal. I got another big lie, which is that you can make more, you can money-making machine and you can just keep putting more money into Google and you'll keep getting leads at the same cost per lead.

It also doesn't work like that because as you and I both know, there is a limited amount of opportunity in a market. And so whatever that limit is on the keywords or the campaign that we're targeting, like the limit is the limit. And once you hit 50, usually 65% or so of the opportunity, you start paying way more. So say you're paying $100 a lead when you're at 40 or 50%.

That might be $200 or $300 a lead when you hit 65%. And it might be $600 a lead when you hit 75%. And, you know, the truth is, most of the time, that last 45, you know, 35, 40% is just not worth buying. Yeah.

Yeah. I love that. And the other thing I think people, people in my own practice is we have to explore, you know, sometimes the, and I'll just pull numbers out of the air. Sometimes the $100 lead is more beneficial than the $20 lead.

Sometimes. You have to track it all. Track it all the way through. If the average dollars per lead, forget dollars per sale, I'm paying for the lead.

If the dollars per lead on the $10 lead are only $20 and the dollars per lead on the $100 lead are $1,000. Yeah. You know, I need as many of those as I can get and I'll fill in with the others. Yeah.

And that's a good segue into the importance of building a brand, because the truth is, is branded leads are lower cost of acquisition and higher return on investment, you know, once you've built that brand. But you've got to invest to build the brand. And that is lock, stock and barrel for Wizard of Ads. That's what we do is we help businesses build brands and you get higher quality relational customers when they're looking for you and they know, like and trust you.

Yeah, yeah. And I would even not argue, but I would even add that know, like and trust is really important. Know and trust are mandatory. Sure, absolutely.

People do buy at times from people where they don't really have an affinity. They don't have a warm feeling. They don't. Maybe there's a personality complex.

They're like, I don't really like the guy, but I believe the guy. I trust him. Yeah, trust is mandatory. Yeah, and trust is certainly the foundational.

And if you betray the trust of your customers, there's no coming back from that. No. I've shared with my customers all the time, trust is a bridge built gradually, okay, from both sides. Yes, for sure.

Destroyed in an instant. And so treat those relationships like the goal that they actually are. Okay, so let's go to AI. Nobody's talking about AI.

Nobody. Let's talk about AI. Nobody's talking about AI. Man.

So let me ask you this. We live in a world where AI can generate ads in seconds nanoseconds but persuasion isn just typing you know it psychology Do you think AI today can replace an expert copywriter or is it just a tool in the wizard's hand? Well, it's absolutely a tool. And there are lots of people trying to replace humans with AI.

And in my experience, I've been playing with AI since it's been a thing. It is a tool that can do a lot of the grunt work, but it always requires human input and knowledge and expertise on the front end and on the back end. So you really, at best, you're getting 10 80 10 where you get that 80 in the middle that grinding done by the machine but if you're not if you don't have the expertise to ask the right questions to know what what questions you need to be thinking about you're just going to create a bunch of garbage which is what most people are doing with ai right now you know a lot of gobbledygook a lot of just flotsam Yeah.

Yeah. And so I'll just share this. Publish nine books, working on book number 10 and 11. We've done about 200 of these episodes.

Speak, you know, we post on five platforms five times a week. So if I have a problem with content, it's that I have too much. And, but my team, you know, we fed all of that into a specific AI engine. Sure.

And so with all of that investment, okay, AI Don's pretty good. Sure. He's not quite as, I don't think he's as good as Don, but he's pretty good and he's certainly a lot faster. Hey, AI Vi is also pretty good, but I still have to edit AI Vi every stinking time, even if I give him a really good prompt.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. Okay, so what do you say to a founder who says, my product is service or experience is great. It should just sell itself. Well, good luck with that.

Good luck with that. Okay, enough said. That's good enough right there. Okay, here's my closing question.

If an entrepreneur listening right now feels stuck, they're working harder than ever, they're not breaking through, what's the mindset shift they need to make? That's a good question. I think that it'll depend on the person. I mean, sometimes it's taking a step back and asking the question, am I doing the things that are actually going to move the needle?

Or am I just working in my business, spinning my wheels, doing things that feel productive, but they're not actually making a difference? And I think that that is a very common thing people do when they get stuck. They do the things that they know how to do. And the things that got you into this problem are not going to get you out of it.

I love that. And so I think, and of course I have an affinity towards coaching and consulting, but many times if you'll get someone else with fresh eyes, not in your business, somebody from outside your business, in a couple of minutes they can identify the logjam and set you free. And that's a good thing. So Vi, how would a listener reach out to you to Wizard of Ads Online?

What's the easiest way to make contact? Well, my website's really hard. It's wizardofadsonline.com.

Brutal. And you can also look at viwickham.com and that will get you there too. But, you know, like I've got a bunch of tools on the website for making sure you don't get taken by a digital weasel.

and that you've got control of your online assets, which is another one of those things that small entrepreneurs and even medium-sized entrepreneurs fall into where they fully trust somebody and they don't verify and they don't have control of their own digital destiny. So there are tools for that on Wizard of Ads Online as well. So I would encourage everyone, you need to be sure you own your domain, your profiles. Your website.

Yeah, you need to own it all. All the Google properties. And unfortunately, there have at times been service providers who typically under the guise of, hey, this is easier this way. But it's just bad structure.

It is. And bad structure will come back and bite you. I've seen people held ransom for those assets. You know, that is not where anybody wants to be.

No, no. I thank you so much for being on the show today. It's been a real treat. I'm grateful.

Thank you, Don. It's been a pleasure getting to know you and a pleasure sharing this space with you. Thank you. Hey, folks, that's today's episode of The Proven Entrepreneur Show.

We'll see you next time. Thanks. Bye. Bye.

That's today's episode of The Proven Entrepreneur. Go to provenentrepreneurshow.com, subscribe to the show, leave an iTunes review, and you could win a $25,000 VIP day in Dallas with Don himself and get Don's easier and faster selling with video course free. Please join Don on the next episode of The Proven Entrepreneur.

Thank you.