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Will Bater is a digital marketer who has run 6 & 7 figure paid marketing and social campaigns for clients including Shaun White, Linkedin, and Music Festivals across the globe. He sold his first company at 23 and since then has focused on paid Facebook advertising for brands, events, and his own ventures. Let’s dive in!
What are you working on? How did you come up with this idea?
Will Bater: I have a lot of irons in the fire at any given moment but my two main projects are a Paid Marketing Agency for brands and events and Tenzo Tea where I am running Customer Acquisition. My current passion project is working with a local record label, Porch Party Records, and helping with their digital marketing.
How is your company different?
Will Bater: Paid/Event marketing has a tendency to be really cookie cutter & shady at the same time. Especially when you partner with a large agency. I keep seeing people get burnt by the agency model because they aren’t very savvy and the agency takes advantage of them. I like to consider my company more boutique and hands on right now which allows me to provide input, education, and strategy at all the parts of a company’s digital initiatives which ultimately leads to the success of paid marketing.
What’s your dream with your company?
Will Bater: Well right now the dream is tied between continuing to grow my Paid Ad and Event clients & blowing up Tenzo Matcha Tea. But at the end of the day, I want to be the Go To Digital Marketing agency for Music Events, E-Sports, and Tech Conferences.
How do you creatively advertise?
Will Bater: A lot of it comes down to nailing the fundamentals so you know how to break the rules. But more than that my process is very much “I wonder what would happen if…” sometimes nothing comes of it but other times you uncover something really great. In events there is this formula that everyone follows and instead of standing out you become one of the crowd. I specifically try to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. That comes with its own host of issues but it hasn’t failed me yet.
What’s Your Favorite Channel To Advertise On?
Will Bater: I love paid Facebook. So Much. You can practically map out the perfect message to the perfect person at any given moment. It is a lot of testing your ideas, learning, and then adjusting your strategy which I really enjoy.
What were your biggest failure and biggest success? What did you learn from them?
Will Bater: I think my biggest failure was during my first startup that I co-founded about 6 years ago.
It was a whole bunch of failures, not just one.
Granted, we were eventually acquired but the jump from a college kid who had it pretty easy to getting a real product out into the world was really fuckin rough.
There were failures all over the place haha. It was pretty much 2-3 years of failing a lot. I didn’t make the best hires, realized I am not a CEO type (lol), dealt with stress in unhealthy ways, neglected personal relationships, and didn’t understand marketing for traction or how set real goals.
Luckily I had people around me I was able to turn to who helped me work through this stuff once I blew it but it was a pretty rough few years.
Through it all I realized that I love growing companies and my skills in marketing got beefed up. I also learned you can’t run before you can walk and that was a hard one to come to terms with.
On the flip side it is also one of my greatest successes. It wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t pretty but I am very proud of what we accomplished.
Since then I have had lots of cool things happen like being paid to travel the world, getting my first celebrity client, and generating money for people but my greatest successes that I am most proud of was earned by failing.
In failing I developed the skills that allow me to work for myself on my own terms and gives me the option to pick and choose what I want to work on.
This type of freedom has always been my number 1 goal.
Give the readers the best entrepreneurship advice you have.
Will Bater: Remember at the end of the day it is just a ride. Don’t get so wrapped up in your ventures that you neglect your friends, your health, or your co-workers. Balance is key to staying power in this game and it is ok to take a weekend off.
Teach us something!
Will Bater: In Facebook when you need a new cold audience to help scale up:
Pull out one of your most valuable custom audiences and run them through Audience Insights.
Check out the lifestyle section.
Make note of your top lifestyle categories (these categories can’t be targeted normally and they don’t tell you what they are).
Click “request audiences from Acxiom Data Guru”.
Fill out all the info and submit.
In 24-48 hours the audiences will be available to use in your ads manager without spending a dime.
This just cut the CPL of a clients campaign in half to under $2.80.
What’s something new you’ve learned in the past month?
Will Bater: I have had the pleasure of learning a ton about AdWords from a good friend of mine. Everything from optimization to launching full campaigns in under an hour (keyword research to launch). I started in FB ads so it’s awesome to have AdWords in my tool box and the confidence to take that on. He also has a ton of experience so I have been able to skip a lot of the trial and error and get straight to the good stuff.
Teach us something we don’t know (it’s vague and open-ended on purpose)
Will Bater: In events, the live stream is becoming increasingly important and provides a big chunk of revenue. You would be surprised how much extra sponsors will pay to have the rights and branding around a good stream. So one of my major specialties from my work with festivals is driving viewers during an event to stoke out the sponsors.
More or less it goes like this:
-Create as many relevant audiences as possible before event day.
-On event day, clip parts of the livestream in real time to get in-the-moment bites that make a great hook.
-Drop em on Facebook, set budgets to accelerated, target your audiences.
-Jump into google analytics and see what is driving the best or most traffic depends on your goal. Cross check with FB.
-Monitor things like location, age, and other demo data that might help you uncover a gem.
-Go back to FB, drop more spend into the audiences and ads that are doing well, remove the spend from the ones that aren’t, create a new audience if you have the info you didn’t have before.
-Repeat all day.
It is pretty much a typical ad strategy but much more fast paced which I find really exciting.
What do you think you do better than most people?
Will Bater: Paid marketing for events and event day marketing. The days of an event are always crazy hectic and leading the digital strategy is no joke. You really need to be on the ball and have plans A-Z ready to roll because something always goes wrong. You also need to be an effective communicator so you can keep your team moving together as a unit.
What should an entrepreneur focus on?
Will Bater: Stop reading and start doing. Read when you have a specific issue or for fun.
Where do you see yourself and your product in a couple years?
Will Bater: I’m working towards bigger clients, traveling the world as a marketing consultant for events, and slanging the best matcha tea to the masses.
Authors Note: Will Bater is one of my good friends, so I’m a little biased – but he’s a legit marketer and a super great guy. Follow him on social media (I do): Instagram, LinkedIn, and of course his favorite, Facebook.
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