[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to Big Ticket Pros, the podcast for agencies, coaches and high end service providers who know what it takes to thrive in competitive markets. I'm your host Ana Gonzalez and you can find me on social media at anabaprime. Our guests share insider tips, strategies and sometimes cautionary tales to help you close bigger deals and scale your business faster. Big Ticket Pros is sponsored by Conversational Funnels, the new way to close deals in 2025 that does not rely on any of the old traditional methods everyone hates. We use this method to book 121 qualified sales calls in 10 days without any ad spend, outreach or endless social posting. Download the free step by step blueprint that shows exactly how we did
[email protected] that's conversationalfunnels.com Today's guest is Andrew Barrow.
Andrew, at age 12, built his Funnel first website on geocities and never looked back. He pioneered early ad tech for publishers like Women's Word Daily, Lonely Planet and Variety and led digital campaigns at major agencies for brands like Verizon and the cw.
Now as the founder of Revenue Arc, he merges decades of experience into a growth platform that helps brands and agencies drive real measurable success.
So, Andrew, welcome to Big Ticket Pros.
What is the best piece of advice you would give to someone just starting out in your industry?
[00:01:25] Speaker B: First, thank you so much for having me on the show. I would say the first big thing when it comes to starting your advertising journey is to take a step and try to figure out what you want to do with advertising and to recognize that advertising without marketing won't be successful. You need to have your marketing journey, your marketing funnel, your user journey to conversion all set up before you get to advertising perspective. And a good agency will tell you exactly how to do that. And that's something that we do here at Revenue Arc.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: What you're mentioning is interesting to me. Like you said, I can talk advertising without marketing is useless.
And for whoever is listening, can you point us what is the difference between advertising and marketing?
[00:02:22] Speaker B: So this is actually an interesting problem as a lot of people have this view of conflating the two and they do work together.
But marketing effectively is everything from your email campaigns to sometimes it's just called organic quote unquote. But I would say yeah, email marketing, your, your website and the design, anything that you're doing in terms of like interviews or anything like PR related as well as outreach and using social media influencers as well as any, anything within that realm is your marketing and you have to think of where, how do they like in an ideal journey with no advertising, how would someone discover you and then go through the entire process? And that is, that effectively is marketing in a nutshell.
The advertising perspective is just the creative that is put into a spot somewhere, either digitally on the Internet. Whether it's a banner ad placed programmatically or it's a social media banner or it is a, an ad on tv, all of that is advertising. And the one thing that I would be very, I would really kind of hone in on is that advertising effectively is just steroids for marketing.
It will do wonders if you put in the work you're constantly posting on your social media channels, you're constantly sharing we you're putting out email blasts, you're constantly updating your website. All of that will do really, really well. And if it is doing well, we can make it 10, 20, 30x the performance if you don't do it. Very similar to taking steroids and wanting to get really strong. It's the equivalency of taking steroids and sitting on your sofa and assuming you're going to turn into Arnold Schwarzenegger the next day. That is just not going to happen.
So you'll end up burning a lot of money and potentially do some actual brand damage. Because if you don't, and actually you'll, you won't convert like it'll, you'll do some serious brand damage because somebody will go to your website, they won't understand it. They'll be like, I don't have never heard of this service before. They'll get confused. You have to think about the entire pathway.
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Okay, sorry I left because I know you said brand damage, but the first thing that my Spanish brain understood is brain damage.
No, it's me.
It's like, that sounds so dramatic, but maybe also you will get brain damage if you get brand damage.
[00:04:54] Speaker B: No, I mean you will. I've seen, I mean I literally have seen like a lot of companies come in and they just assume and you know, especially in our early days, which we just assumed that marketing was set up, all these clients would just come in and they would be stressed to an extreme. They're like, it's not performing. I don't understand it. It's like, well, I. We checked out your website and you said you were improving it and then we went to it and it's still the same. Nobody knows what the service is and no one sees that. That proof point as to why I have to have this service.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: I think that, okay, so you just unveiled that. It's, it's, it's not like the chicken and the egg. If I understand correctly, marketing comes first. With your organic, like you mentioned your email campaign, you design, your interviews, your pr, your outreach, your social media stuff, like the ideal journey for people to find you organically.
And then after that comes the advertising.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Correct. You have to have it in that way because again, otherwise you're wasting money.
And you know, I've seen, I had actually two great examples, real world examples, like we're working with a company called Aptera on their crowd equity fundraising and we were able to generate for them through. They have like almost like perfect marketing. I could not ask for a better marketing plan because we were able to take that and do wonders with it. Where I think there was like a 24x return on their investment with us because everyone was kind of flowing into their conversion funnel and so it was really, really easy to get that money in the door. They had a great selling point, they really listened to us and we were like, you need to improve this, change this, swap this out.
And that's what we were able to do. At the same time, almost to a T, we had another client who was just like, we're really just focused in on just getting the advertising to get us going for a very similar offering, different kind of investment, but literally never, I think it's right, maybe 2x and then eventually just crashed out and, and we cut it off pretty quickly. Like that's something else I would definitely recommend for anybody in the entrepreneur space who's looking to hire an ad agency or an ad platform like ours is.
They should be willing, always willing to cut things off when it's not doing well, like pretty quickly. If they're constantly saying like, well, we gotta stretch it or we need to increase budget, generally those are big red flags of they're just trying to take your money.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: Oh, that's, that's really great advice. I think, think, and I am going to ask this because of that.
So you say when hire an ad agency, if things are not working, they should be willing to cut things up. How long do you think that people should wait before saying this is not working? Like some, sometimes people can, or the agencies can say, oh, this will take 90 days or this will take 30 days. Like is there like a number that we can.
[00:08:04] Speaker B: No. So typically if you launch the campaign, unless there's something fundamentally wrong, you should be able to see some level of results within like 72 hours.
It should be really, really, really fast. That's the benefit of, especially if somebody was working in the programmatic space where you're using all this advertising technology, it should be like pretty quick in terms of getting initial results. Now, it's not going to pay for itself right away.
So what you want is within 10 days it's at least trending towards it pays for itself. Whatever money you're putting in is money. It's saying it's getting out. And then within two weeks, so another like four or five days after that 10 day mark, you should be at net profit. So it should be like at least 1.1x return investment.
And then after about 4 weeks you should have a good baseline of all right, we're going to get 4x10x whatever. And then you'll kind of know where you're at. And then it'll take like a lot of experimentation turning things off and on of what ultimately will work. But it's pretty fast. And if somebody's like, no, it takes a really long time.
That is only if you didn't do the marketing work in advance. If you did the marketing work in advance, it should be just like that and should pick it up and go.
Now that said, literally, and I've seen this constantly, there's no ability to fundamentally tell you with an attribution of I saw this ad does I converted. A very few people click on ads, even if they do, sometimes it's accidental.
And of all the conversions, all the platforms will take credit for 100% of the conversions they expose their ads to.
But you don't know who ultimately on the journey or why the person ultimately converted.
Every ad tech is like, oh, we have the best methodology. We have the best methodology. Literally, it's all like snake oil.
Like just because there is an inability for any ad tech to get inside of the mind of a human and actually go, Yep, this is 100% what I was thinking. Typically what they do is they saw the ad, maybe they saw it a couple of times at a banner and subconsciously implanted and then maybe they saw a video ad and then they were on Facebook and they did this. You should view it more of like a rising tide raises all ships. And if you're trying to figure out whether or not certain tactics are working, measure them by the tactics that you know that you can prove. And if you can't prove it, then it's probably not the right tactic for you.
[00:10:34] Speaker A: That's pretty interesting. Also, it will take me out. I'm going to go back, I guess, I guess full circle. You mentioned Something about you need to have great selling points. So you have to have your marketing and all the organic that you need and then advertised thing is the creative that will put you on the spot. But having a great selling point is it all comes to your message. If you have a great message, I mean, it doesn't matter if you don't. If your website is ugly. If you have a great message, it will convert. If you have, if you have the greatest website ever, super pretty and like fireworks in there, but your message is not resonating to anybody, it will not convert.
[00:11:16] Speaker B: Correct. I mean, that's the, that's. I mean, that's a hard sell for any company is we have a product, we'd love to sell it, but we have to have that like one almost one liner that gets somebody that perfectly paints in your. In the mind's eye of your ideal customer profile exactly what you do and why you need it. And so that is unbelievably hard. It is probably one of the most difficult things for anybody to do.
I've been there myself.
It. It's not fun because in your head you're like, oh, well, we're unique. We're the special butterfly. But nobody's you. Like, nobody else is you. And they're good. They see you as one of many. It's like, well, you don't get it. It's just like, that's the point. They don't get it. So you have to figure out how to make them get it.
[00:12:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: Otherwise you're just going to be boiling the ocean at the end of the day of trying to find really great clients. So the unique selling point has to be something that's digestible very easily. And one line, maybe two, if there's some sort of nuance to it, Max. But that's pretty much it.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: Awesome. So, Andrew, tell us about who you serve and how people can reach out to you.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
So Revenue Arc is the company that I represent.
We specifically have two separate divisions. The division that I focus on is Revenue Arc Marketing. We help companies by running their advertising. So we'll run any aspect of the advertising. We use a very unique solution that is based on artificial intelligence and the latest models, literally.
And it basically can tell if somebody's about to be in market for your product.
So it knows the different points in which somebody's ultimately going to become in market and start searching for your product. We can get there a week beforehand and get in front of them. We call it ARC foresight and it allows us to buy ads on TV online, wherever it might be based on that data point. And if you need to get in contact with us, it's just you can reach out to myself. Andrewevenueark.com and that's Revenue ARC. With ARC, some people like to spell it ark. It's not, it's not Noah's ark, but that is an easy way to get a hold of me. Or simply just fill out a contact
[email protected] or revenuearchmarketing.com awesome.
[00:13:40] Speaker A: So we're going to wrap it up here. Thank you, Andrew for joining us and sharing some wisdom about thriving in a competitive industry. You can learn more about what Andrew does by visiting by sending him an
[email protected] or going to RevenueArt.com did I get it right?
Awesome. If you are an agency coach, professional services provider or otherwise some expensive stuff, we'd love to have you in a future episode. You can
[email protected] and once again, if you want to learn about the new way we're booking dozens of qualified calls per week with no ad spend, download a free blueprint@conversational funnels.com that's all for now. Go get that big ticket punched. See you later.
