IAM1370 – Marketer Helps Businesses Attract Prospects in the Digital Space

Jon runs Squarely Digital, a digital marketing agency that specializes in content marketing and pay-per-click advertising.

The company’s mission — and Jon’s passion — is to help small businesses navigate the complex and confusing world of digital marketing so they can attract the prospects, leads, clients, and customers they need.

Jon founded Squarely Digital in 2013 after more than 20 years in journalism. Most of that time was spent at the Washington Post, where Jon worked on both the print edition and the website, in the sports department and newsroom-wide roles.

Jon lives in Alexandria, Va., with his wife, Pam, daughters JJ and Ellie, and dogs Duncan and Nutella.

• CEO Story: Jon was a journalist but the digital world really spoke to him because of being interactive. Doing it since 2013 helping businesses make it a win-win for both. Backed by a successful family business background since young – so creating a business of his own is part of his DNA.
• Business Service: Content marketing and paper click advertising.
• Secret Sauce: Laser-focused on client’s campaigns. Marketing through telling engaging stories. Knowing the clients well by spending time and asking questions.
• CEO Hack: Repurposing what you have, and placing your content in different forms makes a big difference. Book mention; Twelve Week Year by Brian Moran (12-week goals and break it down)
• CEO Nugget: Keep your clients in the loop all the time. You still need to connect even if they don’t seem to care.
• CEO Defined: When you’re a solopreneur -you do the work for your client while working on improving your business. When you have a team is to put your team into a position to do their best work, to grow professionally to be able to achieve their goals.

Website: squarelydigital.com

LinkedIn: jondenunzio

Twitter: SquarelyDigital

Facebook: SquarelyDigital

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Transcription

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00:21 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:49 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jon DeNunzio of Squarely Digital. John, super excited to have you on the show.

00:58 – Jon DeNunzio

Hey, it's great to be here, Gresh. Thanks for having me.

01:01 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, super excited to have you on and want to talk a little bit about all the awesome things that John's doing. So obviously before we jump to the interview, I'll read a little bit more about him. And John runs Squarely Digital, a digital marketing agency that specializes in content marketing and pay-per-click advertising. The company's mission and John's passion is helping small businesses navigate the complex and confusing world of digital marketing so that they can attract the prospects, leads, clients, and customers that they need.

John found a squarely digital in 2013 after more than 20 years in journalism most of their time was spent at the Washington Post where John worked on both the print and the website and sports department and news-wide roles. John lives in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife, Pam, daughters, JJ and Ellie, and dogs, Duncan and Nutella. John, super excited to have you on. Who doesn't love a dog named Natella? Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:52 – Jon DeNunzio

Yeah, you know we adopted her with that name. She was too old to change it, but we love the name.

01:59 – Gresham Harkless

Hey, that that would they would have an easy way into my house if I had a dog named Metellus. It's a smart way to kind of get him adopted. So I love that. So are you ready to speak to the IFCL community?

02:10 – Jon DeNunzio

Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to it.

02:12 – Gresham Harkless

Well, let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock here a little bit more on how you guys started, what I call your CEO story.

02:19 – Jon DeNunzio

Sure. So you mentioned in the bio, that I was a journalist for, you know, since I left college, most of my career had been in journalism. And I worked first on a print, you know, I worked before there was an internet really at first and then I worked on print well into the 2000s and I got the digital bug. I had a friend working on the website of the Washington Post and I was like, how do I get over there? I did eventually move there and When I got to the digital side, I just really fell in love. I love print journalism, but digital really spoke to me. It's more immediate. It's more interactive.

You actually see what your readers are doing, and what they think. You hear what they think. It was a charge for me. I really liked it. That's part of my backstory. Another part is I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My father started a business when I was about 13. He grew into a really successful business. I always had that kind of thing in my background. I'm like, that seems cool. There came a time when I was working at the post digitally and I was like, I'd like to have my own thing. Now that I'm in digital, I see how feasible it is. Startup costs and things like that are a lot lower in digital lives. Like there's not a huge barrier to entry.

So I was like, ah, maybe I could do something using the digital skills I've learned here and help other businesses be successful too at the same time. So if I could have my own business, I could continue to work in digital and help other people's businesses. That's like a win, win, win for me, I felt like. So I got started doing that about 2013 and I've been doing that since.

03:55 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely, I love that. So I know we touched on a little bit on how you're working with and serving your clients. Could you take us through a little bit more on what that looks like and how you serve the clients you work with?

04:03 – Jon DeNunzio

Yeah, sure. So, this blends into my backstory a little bit too. When I started, I was like, oh, I can do a lot of different things. I worked in social media at my old job at the post. And like, so I was willing to do anything that an early client would come by and say, can you help me with this? Yeah, I'll try. I can do this. But over the years, I kind of learned my real specialties and things I can help customers most with, my clients most with, is content marketing and pay-per-click advertising.

Pay-per-click advertising, most of what I do is Google ads. The ads you see when you search something on Google, top of the page, there are 3 or 4 ads up there, maybe 1 or 2 ads up there, that sort of thing. That's something I learned early in this second career of mine. I really like doing it and I found I can offer a good amount of value to people. There are certain businesses that it really works well for. And then content marketing was a natural to do and to continue to do as I pared down some of my other offerings because again, We just talked about it.

I know the content. I know how to create something that grabs the reader's attention early, keeps them engaged, and provides some value and that sort of thing. Part of it's about understanding your audience as well, and that's something else that I brought to it. Paperclicks are easy to explain. People get that, that that's the ads. I help you run your campaigns. A lot of people find it complex or time-consuming, and that's where I come in, right? And I can do it.

On the content marketing side, what I really help people do is create those ongoing campaigns, which is like, OK, you're going to do 2 blog posts a month, or you're going to do 3 blog posts a week, or whatever it is, and you're going to do an ebook every so often, and we're going to do this. And I will help them create it. I will create it for them. We'll work with a third party, but I'm going to make sure that you have a good plan, you have sound principles behind it, and you're creating that good content that shows up in search.

And when people find you, they start to know you like you, and trust you. And that content brings people down the funnel, right? So it works best for a company that doesn't convert people immediately, but they have customers who are researching and you're providing that content that's basically showing you're an expert and you offer a good product or service that's a match for certain people searching on those topics. Does that make sense?

06:16 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I love that. That's definitely an art in and of itself. And would you consider that to be what I like to call your secret sauce? It could be for yourself personally, the business, or a combination of both. But do you feel like that or a combination of that is what sets you apart and makes you unique?

06:29 – Jon DeNunzio

You know what I really think, the things that make me unique, one, I run a small, nimble operation where if I'm paying and when I'm working with other contractors and things like that, we're paying super close attention to what's going on with your campaign. And if there's an issue and we see it or you see it, we act and fix it quickly. You know, I think with bigger companies, there's a longer process for that sort of thing. So we're able to do that and really be laser-focused on you and your needs. So that's one part of the secret sauce. But then I think a lot of it and probably a bigger part of it, goes back to journalism again. One, marketing is telling your story, right?

In an engaging, meaningful way. And so working as a writer and an editor really helped me get better at that. I can figure out those questions. What are people gonna find interesting about this topic? What are they, you know, how do we explain why it's important? Those sorts of questions are things I did all the time in my old life. So I can do that now really well. And then also there's something about, you know, is a really important element is the client, my relationship with my client, right? I feel like I will spend time with them and ask the questions so I really get to know their business.

And that makes me a much better marketer for you. If I understand, oh, this is exactly what their product does and this is who it works for and why it works and all these things. And It goes back to, again, my journalism career. A story I love from early in my journalism days is about an editor who assigned me to an auto race. I knew nothing about auto racing, but I ended up interviewing one of the winners. They made some fixes at a pit stop that let them go ahead and win in the final few laps of the race.

I asked a ton of questions and I got it down and made sure I understood. Then my editor told me afterward, Man, I would have never guessed you didn't know anything about cars. I'm like, well, that's a win. I did it right. That's the approach I've taken with almost everything, you know? I might not know everything about your business and your industry when it starts, but I'm gonna spend the time and we're gonna make sure I know it really well and I can tell your story and it's gonna seem authentic. So that I think is the secret sauce there.

08:34 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love that. And would you consider that to be kind of like what I like to call a CEO hack, which can be an app book or habit, but something that makes people more effective and efficient? Do you think that's, you know, the hack or is there part of a hack of making sure that whatever you find that you can lean into and you're comfortable with to lean more into that instead of trying the latest and greatest or whatever it might be?

08:53 – Jon DeNunzio

Well, you know, I might have said that, but then you just said something else that spurred another one of my favorite hacks that I hadn't thought about before until recently or until this interview, I guess, is using what you find. I'm big on repurposing. I'm big in marketing on if you're writing a blog post, there might be 2 or 3 nuggets in there that make great tweets or something like that. Use that. Or if you've written a few tweets about a topic, turn that into a blog post later. You probably do it with this podcast. You take a long podcast interview and then you pick little bits out of it and use it for other parts of your marketing and things like that. I'm big about that.

Use what you have and what you create and get a lot of mileage out of it. Because if you just write a blog post and you never go back to that topic, you've done a good job maybe, but you haven't gotten anywhere near the mileage out of it. You can't. You got to ring it out and try to use it as many places as you want. Because as you know, online, people's attention is distracted, right? They might see something, they might not see it. Even if they see it, they might not pay attention to it.

So if you put your messaging out there in different forms and different places a lot, it's going to make a big difference. I would say, yeah, so repurposing is one hack. If I had one other CEO hack, I'd put in a plug for my favorite book right now, which is the 12-week year. I don't know if you've heard of this by Brian Moran. That is kind of my Bible of planning. The concept of this is that you plan for 12 weeks at a time, right? And you break that 12-week period down into weeks. And so you have maybe 2 or 3 big goals for those 12 weeks. And then you figure out what are my tactics that I'm gonna use to accomplish these goals?

And you put them into the different weeks of the 12-week plan, and that guides you the whole way. And I started using it last year, and I think it's just a great organizational system, a great way to think about things. If you plan for a year and you say, I wanna do all this in the next 12 months, that's probably too long, right? So many different things are gonna happen, but 12 weeks is kind of a good number. So that's my other little hack. It's a 12-week year by Brian Moran. I think it's really worth looking up if your listeners are looking for something, to help in that kind of productivity planning, accomplishing your goal space.

11:04 – Gresham Harkless

So I was asking now for what I call a CEO nugget. So this is a little bit more of a word of wisdom or piece of advice. It might be something you would tell your younger business self if you were to hop into your time machine or you might tell your favorite client.

11:16 – Jon DeNunzio

Okay. Yeah. So this is probably, this is something I would tell myself or probably I don't know. I think it applies to younger entrepreneurs and especially solopreneurs which I certainly was 7, 8 years ago was just me. And my nugget is to keep your clients in the loop all the time. Even if you have a client who never asks for reports, never really checks in, doesn't seem to care when you email them or call them and tell them about something, they don't really engage with that stuff, you still let them know. Make a regular schedule, send them a report, send them an email every week, every 2 weeks, whatever seems right, and make sure.

You got to tell them, here's what I'm doing for you, here's how it's helping you, and here are the results we're seeing. Because while they might not seem to care half the time you send it, 3 quarters of the time to send it. Every client gets that there's that day for that client where they're like, is this spend really worth it for me? And if they are boss or someone is asking them, why are we spending X amount a month on this marketing campaign? You want them to have that answer top of mind, well, John's campaigns deliver me 15 weeds a week.

That's why we're doing this. And so that's why you do it. I've made the mistake before. I think I made it once really, and I didn't make it again. I knew I was doing good work for a client, but I didn't really talk to them that much. So when it came time for them to think about changing gears, I didn't have a lot of ammunition to tell them, no, no, stay with me. So that's my thing, right? Stay in touch, let them know even if they don't seem to care, even if you're virtual and you know when you're virtual there's almost hardly any connection there right sometimes with and a lot of us in marketing and doing this kind of things are working virtually with clients now so you've got to still connect with them and say hey here's what we did last week that's my nugget.

13:02 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. You're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So John, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:12 – Jon DeNunzio

You know, I have 2 short answers. one, if you're a solopreneur to me being a CEO, instead of just being a consultant, means you're spending time working on your business and in your business. I know it's a cliche, but it's a really important thing and a delineation or difference in the 2 kinds of roles here between consultant and CEO. If you're a CEO, you're doing all that work for your client that they asked, but you're also always thinking and balancing, how am I growing my business? What's my next step? How am I making this all fit so I continue to thrive? I continue to get opportunities. I get my business to where I wanna be. So I think that's it when you're by yourself.

Now, when you have a team, as I had a big team back when I was in journalism, I don't have as much of a team now, I think being a CEO is putting your team members in a position to do their best work, to grow professionally, and be able to achieve their goals. That's really what I want to do with whatever time I have left working. It's hopefully a long time. I would love to be able to help people who find digital, like I found digital, and really love working in it. Let's find a way to turn that into a career. Let's find a way to take that and really go with it. And I've learned a few things and I can pass them on and help you do that. That's what I think a really good CEO would be. I'd be a good CEO if I did that.

14:29 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, John, truly appreciate that definition. And of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want us to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get out of you, find out about all the other things you and your team are working on.

14:45 – Jon DeNunzio

Sure, so I'd say 2 things. one, I publish a newsletter roughly twice a month, the email newsletter, and I offer tips on how to succeed with content marketing and pay-per-click marketing. And I do both of these things and I'm in those 2 fields because I think I'm good with words and numbers. So the email newsletter is called Keywords and Numbers. And if you go to squarelydigital.com slash email, you can sign up there to get the email newsletter.

I think it provides some value and you get a feel for how I market myself as well as how other people do a good job of marketing and you can apply it for your own business. The other thing I'd say, and I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, is if you look up John Denunzio on LinkedIn, John J.O.N., Denunzio D-E-N-U-N-Z-I-O, follow me, send me a connection request. I think it's also the address is linkedin.com slash IN slash jouns. So I'd love to see LinkedIn participate in the conversations we have there. That'd be great. That's really it.

15:44 – Gresham Harkless

That's awesome. I truly appreciate that, John. We're definitely gonna have the links and information, the show notes as well too, so that everybody can get ahold of you on LinkedIn and also find out about that awesome newsletter. I love the name, Keywords, and Numbers, and I think that's such a great play on words as well too, and the value that you provide there. So, definitely appreciate you for all the work you do, obviously the time you took today, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:05 – Jon DeNunzio

Hey, thanks, Gresh. I really, appreciate you having me on. It was a lot of fun.

16:09 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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