The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Unleashing Marketing Magic: Ivan Vislavskiy on Boosting Business Growth

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

Unleashing Marketing Magic: Ivan Vislavskiy on Boosting Business Growth Comradeweb.com About the Guest(s): Ivan Vislavskiy is the CEO and Co-founder of Comrade Digital Marketing Agency, a prominent firm with locations in Chicago, Miami, and Austin. Known for his strategic vision and leadership, Ivan has spearheaded the agency's growth, helping them stay ahead and exceed client expectations. With over 15 years in digital marketing, Ivan is dedicated to catalyzing significant client growth through innovation and performance-based marketing strategies, particularly aiding small to medium-sized businesses. Episode Summary: Join Chris Voss in this engaging episode as he interviews Ivan Vislavskiy, the dynamic CEO and Co-founder of Comrade Digital Marketing Agency. With over 15 years of industry experience, Ivan shares invaluable insights into the evolution of digital marketing, emphasizing the importance of performance-based results and helping small businesses achieve tangible growth. The conversation delves into the challenges of establishing a startup in the 2008 financial crisis and how Ivan turned those trials into victories by focusing on client success and retaining a results-oriented approach in his agency. The episode captures key themes such as navigating the highly competitive digital marketing landscape and the necessity of staying ahead of technological advancements like AI. Ivan discusses Comrade Digital Marketing's dedication to serving law firms, healthcare providers, and home services, offering bespoke solutions tailored to each client's unique needs. Listeners gain an inside look into the agency's functioning, including their comprehensive marketing audits, the importance of understanding client behavior across platforms, and Ivan's primary motivation—impacting the economic ecosystem positively. Key Takeaways: Comrade Digital Marketing Agency specializes in serving small to medium-sized businesses, with a focus on law firms, healthcare, and home services. Ivan emphasizes the importance of a result-oriented approach in marketing, prioritizing measurable outcomes like marketing qualified leads over mere traffic metrics. Understanding client behavior across multiple platforms is critical, allowing companies to tailor marketing strategies effectively and optimize budgets. Ivan shares the value of leveraging data to ensure marketing strategies are backed by concrete research to maximize ROI. The episode underscores the vitality of surrounding oneself with mentors and staying informed through continuous learning as a leader in digital marketing. Notable Quotes: "We focus on results. Our clients care about one thing: how many leads do you actually generate for me." "Digital marketing is ever-evolving. You never get bored; you always grow and challenge yourself." "For small businesses, investing in effective marketing can significantly impact not only their bottom line but also their communities." "In 2024, marketing is all backed by data. Subjective opinions are very dangerous." "Seeing the impact of marketing on businesses and communities is incredibly exciting."

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys. As always, we've been here for 16 years, going on 17 years, 2100 episodes.

How many podcasts do you know that have been around for almost 17 years with 2100 podcast episodes? And they're long, too. Like, I've seen a few people that do podcasts. They have a lot of numbers. And they do these five-minute, like, blips, which are kind of motivational. So they're pretty good that way. I don't want to knock them. But, damn it, we put in the work here.

So please refer the show to your family, your relatives, get a good reset.com, which has Christmas linkedin.com, for chest Christmas, Christmas, one, the tick tockity, and all those crazy places on the internet. Today, we an amazing young man. We're going to be talking to him on the show about his insights. We're going to talk about marketing. It's going to be a marketing show. We're going to learn how to do business the show about his insights. We're going to be talking about marketing. It's going to be a marketing show.

We're going to learn how to do business, do marketing, and all that good stuff. And I'm sure everyone will come with great insights, whether you're marketing yourself or whether you're marketing your company and business and all that stuff. Today, we're joined by Ivan Vyslovsky. He is the CEO and co-founder of Comrade Digital Marketing Agency, an acclaimed digital marketing firm with locations in Chicago, Miami, and Austin. Great barbecue in Austin there. A visionary leader, Ivan is dedicated to guiding the company's strategic direction, ensuring

that it stays ahead of industry trends, and consistently exceeds client expectations. And let's see here. He is recognized for visionary leadership he steers the company with strategic focus that keeps to the forefront of industry trends while constantly exceeding client expectations I think there was a some doubling of the bio here but possible yeah with a rich portfolio boasting over 400 successful projects he possesses a deep expertise in catalyzing I like that that word, catalyzing.

I'm a catalyzer. I'm going to change my title. In catalyzing significant client growth. His passion for creativity permeates the company's culture, promoting environment where ambition and innovation flourish, enabling the development of pioneering in-house projects. Welcome to the show. How are you, Ivan? Hey, Chris. Thank you so much. This was a very lengthy intro for sure. I guess I'm going to have to remember that. Looks like the PR agent doubled the lines there for me. So I was like, wait,

I just wanted to make sure you get it right. That's probably what it is. Repetition is the mother of mastery. Give us your dot coms. How can people find you on the interwebs? For sure. Our main website is karmatweb.com. This is a website for our agency. You can learn a lot about us and what we do. So give us a 30,000 overview.

What would you guys do there? Sure. As name suggests, we are a digital marketing agency for you that don't know much about what digital marketing is we basically market companies in the digital space used to be traditional media traditional marketing TV ads radio ads newspaper and so on ever since dot-com boom digital became such a big and popular phenomena and especially during the covet era everyone went to digital so at camera we help local service

businesses grow by bringing them more clients online specifically hence digital we do this by building chrome's websites getting them to rank at the top of Google and other search engines, and running ads that deliver results. Our ultimate goal is to make marketing a high-performance investment for our clients. It's basically what we're trying to do. And we're ensuring that our clients, who are mostly small businesses, can see that every single dollar that they spend on marketing generates a strong return on investment oh wow and so you help your clients you've been doing this for how many years now 15 it's been 15 years we founded a company at 2008 that's time to open the company

oh yeah that that definitely was jesus christ, that was a hell of a time. I know, I was wiping out everything I owned for 20 years. It was rough. Yeah, not a good time to own a mortgage company as your key jewel in your crown of companies. But, you know, we're still here, kicking and taking names. We're just not doing mortgages. Anyway, yeah, that whole thing. But you survived.

You got it. You guys have multiple offices. Tell us a little bit about your upbringing. What gave you the entrepreneurial bug? What influenced you, maybe parents, childhood, to want to eventually get into the field you're in and become an entrepreneur? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Ever since I was a kid, I guess I found myself talking, taking leadership roles in schools, in various after school activities. I guess it was always a part of who I am. When I started working in digital marketing, this was probably around 2006, 2007, I want to say, I spent time at various other agencies working in different roles. And one thing I've noticed going from one agency to another, most of those agencies were always focused on servicing larger clients.

And small businesses were always neglected, were always overlooked. So together with my business partner, Stan, this was a mission of our company when we accepted our agency that we're going to help small businesses grow and give them the same white glove service, the same kind of results that they deserve. That's 15 years from when we started the agency until now. It's been our mission ever since. And so it was hard to start a business in 2008, I imagine it was.

What were some of the challenges you had to overcome or maybe lessons you had to learn? Was there any cathartic moments people can learn from? You know, it wasn't as difficult for me. I was in my early 20s, and I was fearless. I didn't really have anything to lose. This business kind of really started as an accident. As I was working with other agencies, I had my network that started referring some jobs to me. Hey, Ivan, could you build a website for me? Hey, Ivan, could you recommend me this?

And so as I started building this for my friends, I really enjoyed it. And I did incredible work. The quality of work was really high. So they started recommending me to others. And little by little, my network grew. And that's how I started getting more and more projects. We started hiring people, freelancers at the beginning. I think when we have three full-timers, when we finally decided it was time for us to switch our attention fully to growing this business, because we saw a potential in this.

And so what is it that excites you about working in the marketing field, being in an agency? What really motivates you? Oh, a couple of things for sure. Number one, seeing an impact of marketing on the businesses, business owners and the lives of the businesses, right? Because that, you know, if we are able to help them grow, that impacts not only the business owner, that impacts all the team members within the business and their families. And then that ends up impacting the entire community. And then it goes even deeper. So in a sense, we kind of impact the entire economy, per se, which is very exciting so that's

that's one thing that i wanted to highlight second thing is marketing is ever evolving you probably at this point marketing is growing in such a with such a dynamic rate with all the ai technology and other improvements that you constantly have to innovate. You constantly have to stay on top. So you're never bored. You always grow yourself. You always grow your team. You always constantly challenge yourself, which is very interesting.

As a leader, how do you stay motivated and focused and make sure that your leadership skills are sharp. For sure. I sort of have a vision, a big grand vision, whether it's going to take 5, 10, maybe 15 years. But we do want to become one of the larger independent agencies that services small agencies. That's our big goal, right? And we know that it takes a lot. We know that we're currently here. It would take us a long journey to get there. We surround ourselves by really good coaches and mentors that help us, you know, being aligned and, you know, with the guidelines of

where to go and how, you know, where to not make mistakes so that we can get to our vision quicker um in most cases i speak with them sometimes you know i love learning from other leaders i read a lot about very successful entrepreneurs i watch a lot of podcasts a lot of promotional videos and you know five minute videos that you mentioned at the beginning of this video. Some are quite inspirational. Oh, yeah. So it's a combination of those facts that helps me stay motivated and, you know, laser focused on the future. Yeah. I mean, it can really make all the difference in the world.

On your website, I'm looking across several different services you offer. You guys are a full service agency, of course. It looks like you guys have some things where people can get in touch with you. And then there's a report people can order. I think they can get an expert marketing audit by working for your website. Tell us a little bit about some of those offerings. Yeah. So for any business that is looking to expand on their marketing, we could be a really good start.

Let us know, reach out to us, and we would be happy to review what you've currently done. We would be happy to discuss your goals, your objectives, and what stands on the way. And we'll deliver a full-on report, which will be free of charge, that will detail our plan of how we see achieving your goals. And sometimes we'll honestly tell you that maybe we're not a good fit for you. For instance, we've been a generalist agency for the first 11 years of our existence. And about four years ago, we switched to focusing on three main areas, three main industries, then legal, home services, and healthcare. That's where our specialty is nowadays.

So if you are an e-com shop, we would recommend you to another really good agency, but we're probably not going to be able to help. Wow. And that's an honest way to do business. I mean, I've done that for decades with my clients, where I'm just like, yeah, I mean, you're just not our fit. And you want a good fit because if you don't have one, it's usually painful to all parties involved.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Definitely. So people can go on your website. They can investigate you more. They can get an expert marketing audit that will tell them website speed, SEO performance, content performance, conversion rate, competitors rank. That's probably good to know how you rank with your competitors and backlink quality. And what do you see is the biggest challenge most of your clients come to you needing? What's the most popular ones they're hitting on?

Quite honestly, there's a lot of BS marketing. What I see what I mean by BS marketing is cheap marketing that a lot of agencies, a lot of individuals say, you know, we do marketing, in reality, they don't, you know, they'll do maybe some activities that, you know, they claim will help you, you know, achieve better results, but they don't. And many companies that come to us, they're just, you know, they're tired of being burned out in the past. They're tired because they invested all this budget in all this BS marketing and never worked. And that's the

biggest problem in our industry that there are fewer and fewer believers because there are just not that many good marketing companies. And another challenge is marketing is extremely competitive. So in order for a company to have a really good marketing, a company has to be able to invest. Because there are a lot of companies that have been doing that for many, many years. So guess what? In order for you to be competitive, in order for you to be good, you have to catch up with them, and that takes an investment. That takes a lot of work to get to this point.

So some prospects come to us hoping that they can achieve results right away. That never happens or very rarely happens because it just, you know, they're not in vacuum. You know, there are a lot of other great businesses that already had it under control. So people can see some examples of some of your portfolio of work that you've done. You guys serve law firms, home services and construction, healthcare,

e-commerce, manufacturing and small business, and more. And then you guys do PPC management. What is PPC management for those who are uninitiated? Yeah, e-commerce. We still have a lot of great case studies with e-commerce companies just because marketing for local service businesses and e-commerce businesses is very different um that's why we're probably not going to be good fit there but to your question what is pay-per-click ppc stands for pay-per-click is basically running marketing ads on different channels so that your company would show up

when someone is searching for your service or a product. What's the importance of doing that in being on different places, marketing channels, as opposed to just one? It's important to understand your client's behavior when they search for a solution or for a product, right? So what we usually do, we do a very deep dive research to understand if I'm a buyer, how would I go about searching a solution provider? And then we would identify what are the platforms they usually go to. And based on the budget, based on the goals, we would devise a plan. We would suggest a strategy,

which might have one channel or multiple channels. It all comes down to your budget. Because if you have a very limited budget, go into one and try to crush it. But if you have sufficient budget, then absolutely go wide and try various platforms. Yeah, because you never know what's going to hit. Sometimes, you know, I think one of my first companies, we did a mailer of 100.

We did 100 mails because we were running on like $2,000 startup. And we did 20 of different industries that we knew were in the business we were in that work with our companies like what we were trying to build. And I remember my one partner was like, don't do that industry. That's not going to go anywhere. There's probably no money in that. And sure enough, the one industry that responded to the mailer was that industry. And it was actually one of the most profitable industries you could hit on. That's so interesting.

Yeah. And it was just one of those things where I'm like, well, send it out. We'll just, you know, this is what you do in product AAB testing. You throw shit out and see what sticks to the wall.

With us, Chris, in most cases, we actually know what works really well, but there's still a really very good component of R&D, research and development, that you still need to execute. Because in your case, that one industry, I guess all of your competitors decided to skip on this industry

for the same reason. They probably thought there's no money in it. So you guys did your own research. It was more my business partner was wrong. Oh, I see. It was more my business partner was dead wrong,, I see. It was more my business partner was dead wrong and it wasn't the first or last time. Dinah was very subjective. You shouldn't waste your time doing that.

And I'm like, you know, this is a lesson. You shouldn't waste your time doing it. And I'm like, you know, it's 20 stamps or something to that industry out of the 100. You know, fuck it. But we knew they were working in the industry with people. So we weren't just shooting into the fog blind, but you know, doing that spread that we did to, that would have been five different industries was really important too. And of course, back in the nineties, it was also good to, it was also, I don't want to

use the word words, dumpster diving, but it was really good to get strategic information on your competitors. And back in the 90s, it was a complete... Yeah, I love that. But back in the 90s, it was a completely different world, right? In 2024, marketing is all backed by data. So subjective opinions are very dangerous.

We usually... I'm trying to remember now if in my book i told people we dumpster dived so that's a good one yeah i mean i had a friend who back in the 80s and 90s was steve jobs personal he couldn't figure out who it was but he was really angry because one magazine there was a mac magazine would always would always have the scoop on what apple was doing and they couldn't figure out where it was coming from he was dumpster diving apples and they were dumb enough to put all their thing and steve jobs was oh man how come this one magazine i think he was banned always knows everything about it. Always knows. It was a dumpster never. Hey, listen. Maybe it was a secret doing of Steve Jeff.

Maybe he was trying to get some PR. Yeah. Might be. By doing so intensely. My friend who ran the magazine company, he was not happy with us. But public information is public information if you throw it on the street, people. Anyway, what else about your agency have we covered? There's some other services you have, digital marketing packages, content marketing, local SEO services.

So you do the SEO stuff. That's important, Google SEO. You do web development as well. So you do web design, packages, developments. So you'll help people build websites and stuff. Yeah, Chris, I think, you know, for an average listener, I don't think they'll know the differences between different sub-services that we apply to generate results. I think what's most important is we're a result-oriented company. We're a performance-based company. So when

prospect comes to us, we look at the number one factor, which is what is your goal? What is your budget? How can we get you to your goal? And then we look at various services and we'll come up with the strategy, right? We would come up with the marketing plan that will be a combination of one or maybe multiple services to achieve that goal. But it's different from one company to another. Most importantly, we focus on the result. And the result thing. Yeah, and the result being usually marketing qualified leads. And that's what differentiates us from other marketing agencies. When you go to many agencies, freelancers, and so on, they'll give you as a result, they'll tell you,

oh, we've driven this much traffic to you. You know, you see this many clicks and so on. We don't care about that. Our clients don't care about that. Our clients care about one thing, which is how many leads do you actually generate for me? How many of those leads do I convert? And then how much do I need to pay for,

or do I pay with my marketing for each of those leads so that I can understand and I can make an educational guess of how much money do I need to pour into marketing to generate more money on the bottom line or top line rather than bottom line. And it looks like people can go to your website and request a quote from you. It says your average clients see a 4.5 times ROI. That's what we've measured. So we always measure an ROI of our marketing campaigns. And on average, that's what we see, 4.5%. Is there a minimum to a finance spend or whatever investment that a client needs to have to work with you guys? Is there a minimum spend?

Certainly. It will definitely depend on the company and their situation, but we would say probably $3,000 to $4,000 would be a minimal that we would entertain just because we're, once again, laser focused on providing results. I think I have that. Will you take a check? No, I'm just kidding. We will. once again laser focus on providing results i think i have that will you take a check no i'm just kidding we will people do that now this is still it's still going on except in vegas they don't take checks i would love i would love to take checks because you don't need to pay three

percent oh that's true as you pay on credit card charges so that's true they used to i do they still charge you for checks to process i don don't know. I think they do. They charge you for something. Well, not our case. Zero. We don't pay anything. The ATM fees, they're the ones where they get you. I think that's the new game.

Anyway, why don't we talk about your agency, how you work with clients, what you do, any other examples maybe of clients that you work with? I can see on your website you've got your portfolio of some of the different things there. Anything we haven't talked about with your company and what you guys do there? I think you covered it pretty well. And I think it's not truly about us. It's truly about our clients. And that's how I like to put it. If you have any questions or even if you're not sure about how to grow your company, just reach out to us. We're not going to charge you anything. We're not here to sell you. We're generally here to help you and provide our advice and our recommendation. And sometimes that's what we do.

Funny enough, people actually leave us Google reviews just because we help them out. And we told them that, look, we're really not a good fit here, but if we were you, here's what we would do. We would go out and we'll reach out to this person and so on would honestly give them the best advice we could and people leave us amazing google reviews for that that's great without even asking that's great and you never know when those people kind of convert like sometimes you know you can talk to somebody and maybe they're not financially in the right place for something or other. But if you convert them later on, they're like, hey, I finally got me some money to put together.

I'm going to go do those things. So, yeah, that can make it work. So final thoughts and pitch out to the audience as we go out on how they can reach out to you on board, et cetera, et cetera, and your.com. Yeah. If you have any questions about marketing or entrepreneurship, or you want to talk to me about what we do and maybe how we can help you grow, how we can help you with an advice, just go to comradeweb.com. And you can also send me a personal email, which is E Ivan at comradeweb.com.

And by the way, there's E at the end of work comrade. I know some people misspell it. So they really leave the E off. So education has kind of gone to hell in this country, the last, I don't know, 20 or 30 years, but that, and people don't read either. So there's, you know, they got that going for them, but yeah, it was always in, in Russia, the TV watches you anyway, a little bit of Russia. So don't worry about it. read either so there's you know they got that going for him but yeah yeah it was always in

in russia the tv watches you anyway a little bit of russia so don't watch tv if you're in russia yeah i'll be traveling to russia anymore soon i guess after that trip anyway the russian people always seem to be wonderful i wish they i wish they had better leaders but you know it is what it is anyway guys thanks for tuning in thanks, Ivan, for being on the show with us. We really appreciate it. Chris, thank you so much. It was my pleasure. Remember, if you ever go to Russia, always pay the extra to stay on the bottom floors

because it's harder to get thrown out a window or down some stairs. Chris has a theory of why that works. My visa just got blocked to Russia. Who knew? Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4chesschristmas, linkedin.com, 4chesschristmas, chrismas1, the TikTokity.

All those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us out.