1747 – Online Marketing with Lauren Petrullo of Mongoose Media

Josh (00:00:05) - Hey there, thoughtful listener. Would you like consistent and predictable sales activity with no spam and no ads? I'll teach you step by step how to do this, particularly if you're an agency owner, consultant, coach, or B2B service provider. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create more than $10 million in revenue. Just head to up my influence and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to up my influence and click on podcast. We'd love to have you. With us right now. Lauren Petrullo. Lauren, you were the founder and CMO of Mongoose Media. You're found on the web at Mongoose Media's. Thank you so much for joining us, Lauren.

Lauren (00:01:11) - Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for having me. Hello.

Josh (00:01:14) - Also a fellow Orlando in Orlando. In Orlando.

Josh (00:01:18) - I don't know what we call a I'm supposed to call ourselves.

Lauren (00:01:21) - Yeah. A fellow individual residing in Orlando.

Josh (00:01:25) - Yes, yes. Right. There we go. Well, give us an overview of what you do with Mongoose Media.

Lauren (00:01:30) - Sure. So it's a digital marketing agency that services individuals, brands and companies that are looking for an avalanche of traffic. We work with a lot of e-commerce clients, a lot of hospitality clients, obviously, because we're in the space of Orlando, where most hospitality brands have some large entity and exist in this place. And yeah, we do a lot of stuff with SEO and Facebook ads is what most people know us for, or at least me for, because I've been doing it for years and have some pretty fun case studies for it.

Josh (00:01:58) - Yeah, tell me why you do what you do. Like in terms of like, who you work with and what brought you to this?

Lauren (00:02:05) - Yeah. So I actually worked at the Walt Disney Company. I did marketing for the Walt Disney Company.

Josh (00:02:10) - Well, kidding.

Lauren (00:02:10) - Yeah, that's how I ended up in Orlando. And then I stayed because taxes and housing were much better than in LA, where I was living before coming to Orlando. And what we do is we work with a lot of brands that are looking to scale to multiple seven figures or grow from like hi, six figures to eight figures within a five year period. And we have a whole host of activation channels from SEO, marketing automation, a team that's over 30 large. And in Mongoose Media we have a pack. And so we work with clients that are aggressively ready to diversify their traffic sources and not be so reliant on one funnel of leads or customers.

Josh (00:02:52) - Yeah, yeah. What's the risk in that.

Lauren (00:02:54) - When you have all your eggs in one basket and then something like an iOS updates comes out and eliminates all your Facebook ads traffic? Well, that's really fun to work with, but it's really de-risking yourself because we're at the wills of all these big tech platforms and algorithms. And, you know, our consumers are on these devices.

Lauren (00:03:12) - And every time a device changes or device updates or what have you, you are putting yourself at the mercy of someone who's going to be better and faster at it than you are.

Josh (00:03:21) - Yeah. Of all of the services that you provide. Are there any in particular that you're rather bullish on in 2023 and looking ahead to 2024?

Lauren (00:03:31) - Sure. I would say the bullish would be on Pinterest. Honestly in terms of it's just such an underutilized channel and it's like the most shock value and you're like, what? Pinterest still exists, but it's a competitive platform for users. It has a user base that's three times larger than that of LinkedIn. Like active users, Pinterest attracts a lot of individuals who aren't present on the main traditional social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. It attracts those individuals that are. I don't want to be on those socials that track and engage these conversations, but also for our clients that are using Pinterest, it's the most unsocial social platform, so it requires the least amount of work and follow up.

Lauren (00:04:09) - There's no DMs to monitor their comments to engage with. It's repurposing, and the life decay of a post is 1600 times longer than that on other social media channels. It's a search engine, social media hybrid, so it's just a resource where we've been able to get a million monthly recurring viewers to profiles. That leads to traffic to the website in under a year. For brands that had nothing, no present whatsoever beforehand. And what that means is, like you're putting all these posts on other social channels, which we do. We do other social media marketing, but a post on LinkedIn or post on Twitter or post on Instagram dies off after a few hours or a few days. And there's no way to really track how much traffic that generated without using Ktms and all these pieces, because those social media channels want you to stay on platform versus with Pinterest. We're driving thousands and thousands of visitors to the website to the offer to the services directly. Because Pinterest rewards the platform. When you get someone to be inspired to take action and leave Pinterest.

Lauren (00:05:09) - So it's like the total opposite of all this conditioning we've become accustomed to. So we've been super bullish because it's way cheaper CPMs. There's so little traffic or in terms of competition, and you get so much traffic in terms of value that you get ahead of your customers before most are even in consideration stage. So it's a really powerful tool that we've been super bullish this year on.

Josh (00:05:33) - That's fascinating. I was not expecting you to say Pinterest, but hey yeah, that's that's why I love having so many great diverse conversations. So can hear what's so we can all kind of, you know, why we listen to podcasts, right? We can have our ears to the track and really listen to really, really smart people that are doing good things. So I would think Pinterest, for example, would be fabulous for fashion and makeup and. Um, girl things or lady things, right? Sure. That's terrible. Are there some areas that you have seen have success that might be a little surprising?

Lauren (00:06:10) - So yes, don't worry what you think is what most people think.

Lauren (00:06:13) - Which again, is why I'd refer to it being such a like blue ocean of opportunity because I was like, oh, it's all female and it's beauty, wedding and interior design. Cool. The statistics say otherwise. It's 60% women, which means it's 40% not.

Josh (00:06:29) - Yes. Wow.

Lauren (00:06:30) - Yes. And to go even further is like you have your obvious brands that are on Pinterest. And if you're not on Pinterest and you're in the obvious category of DIY and beauty and food related stuff, you're missing out because your audience expects you there. But if you're in the non expectant category on Pinterest, I'm talking mechanics. I'm talking water filtration coaches and programs for education. That space is just it's a supply and demand drought. Like there's so much demand for learning and growing and people are not providing the supply. So those that come in in the non obvious are just sweeping up all this traffic that it it almost seems unfair with how easy it is to grow a presence so quickly. But like we'll just pretend we're amazing at what we do.

Lauren (00:07:19) - So obviously we know all the tricks.

Josh (00:07:21) - Now. And Lauren, what types of clients do you typically work with and who might make a really good introduction for you at Mongoose Media?

Lauren (00:07:29) - Sure, the best clients that we work with are brands that are already spending at least $15,000 a month on their marketing campaigns, because the clients that we can really help is like, you have a car with an offer that's driving revenue to your business, and then what we can do is add more fuel and like special enhancements to your vehicle to drive faster revenue assets and like give you like a secret toll road kind of of access. So brands that are already spending $15,000 a month on their various marketing campaigns and are feeling stuck or stunted on specific channels like, oh, those are easy slam dunk wins for us because we don't have a one person that does social media, one person that does all ads. We have departments, specialists and heads with teams underneath them for TikTok, for Pinterest, for Facebook, ads, for Google, ads, for Bing ads.

Lauren (00:08:19) - They're all such different aficionados of those respective algorithms that they've been trained to only hone in on success on that one. While as an agency at large, we get to amplify quickly and leverage pieces together when our team is cooperating, so we can take a Facebook ad campaign interwoven with a marketing automation strategy so that you're getting even more bang for your buck, lower CPMs and synchronized audiences so you're not going after an undesirable target market.

Josh (00:08:49) - Yeah. And are there any trends in marketing that maybe you see advised out there and make you go, oh, people, people people. No no no no.

Lauren (00:09:02) - Gosh, there's so many like.

Josh (00:09:04) - Was like.

Lauren (00:09:05) - I cringe. I think the obvious one is like, oh, I everything is going to replace your marketing team. I'm just like, oh, you're so immature and amateur for thinking that we use AI, and AI has like ten x gain. We are able to do higher quality at a faster pace, but we don't use AI as a substitute. It's a tool that we've interwoven into our various SOPs, and the way that we tech stack our various AI tools together is something that, like, I'm not going to say, gives us a total competitive advantage and competitive edge.

Lauren (00:09:35) - It's just not something we're seeing a lot of people doing because I want to be like, oh, jump on the bandwagon, look at all this stuff it's going to do. You are still reliant on an output from an input you provide, and if your input is trash, you're going to get more trash amplified. Yeah. So if you can leverage in different tools so that what you're providing is layered in with data, which is layered in with human intervention, you can get a product that is likely going to be more IP protected. That's going to be more consistent with the actual messaging you want, and isn't going to be this obnoxious noise that everyone else is doing because they're just one click. Oh, look at all this stuff. And you're like, wow, it looks the same as everything else.

Josh (00:10:20) - Yeah, it reads like I yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, you know, kind of this idea of having a brand voice and being able to communicate, you know, human to human is absolutely what performs.

Josh (00:10:34) - And Lauren, I see that you're pretty active in our local community here in Orlando. Just because I don't get to talk about this very often. What do you like about living and doing business in Central Florida?

Lauren (00:10:46) - Uh, question. I would say easiest that like the airport's 20 minutes away from where all the business happens, our convention center attracts a lot of brands and potential customers, so I don't have to go very far. That's right. They all come to me. I'm like, yeah, let's go get lunch. So I will say the location is strategically set up, that I don't have to travel as much as I would if I were living in a different non large convention attraction. Also, because Disney is here, a lot of our clients have kids and they end up visiting Orlando for Disney. And because I worked the Walt Disney Company, I was an innovation producer. I also worked with Disney Institute, which is the in-house business consulting division for Disney. There's really cool tours and tidbits and fun facts that I get to share from my time there and from like insider stories that their whole vacations end up being like work write offs for them.

Lauren (00:11:43) - And we're constantly inspired. Like, we have such competition here for imagination that you can just go to a park, you can go to Epcot, you can go to Harry Potter land and have a fresh perspective.

Josh (00:11:53) - What were some of the, you know, again, since you have your background with Disney as well, what were some of the maybe things that you still bring up today in regards to? Here's what Disney does as well. So here's something that you could learn from the mouse that might be practical for your own business goals.

Lauren (00:12:12) - Absolutely. One is just that. The last impression is the lasting one. And so where that was done really well at Disney is the parking experience. At Magic Kingdom, for example, you've just spent, let's say, $2,000 for your family to go into the park here in Florida. Orlando is hot. There are mosquitoes everywhere. It's 100 degrees outside. You're surrounded by a lot of humans that are not a lot of walking space, and you just wait two hours for a line and your kids are overstimulated and crying and demanding every toy, and you're ready to go back to your hotel or home, and you get to the parking lot and you're like, where's my car? And now you spend two hours looking for the car, even though you had this magical time.

Lauren (00:12:51) - Your daughter met Tinkerbell for the first time. That last impression of, I don't know where my car is. I'm exhausted and I have to look for it can now be the lasting impression of an entire vacation that could have cost your family 10 to $20,000. So if you are remiss to pay attention to that last impression being that lasting one, you're wasting all that effort and energy of capturing that lead. So where that translates really well for marketing is once you've caught a lead and this is undeniable stuff of trends that people should be doing, this is just foundational smartness that people neglected. When ads got really easy and cheap, traffic sources were easier to come by. When someone gets into your ecosystem as a lead, and then you wait for them to call you, or you don't have this speed lead initiative where you're getting in contact with them, at minimum with a text message. The last impression they have of you is that you're just another fill in the blank, because there was no touchpoint. It was like, yeah, I think I filled out that form maybe, I don't know, it sounds like ten other businesses that solves the same problem I'm looking for.

Josh (00:13:57) - Yeah. All right. Your website, Mongoose Media. Us. Someone's been listening to our conversation, Lauren. And they're like, okay, I like Lauren. I think she saw she solves big problems for people like me. But what would you recommend if they're just hearing you for the first time? What would that next step in the conversation or their experience be.

Lauren (00:14:16) - Sure if you're looking at your marketing systems and you're like, wow, Lauren, she's pretty sharp person. I've heard her about being this distraction queen or what have you, and you're looking at and seeing like, ah, your campaigns or your offers set up for success in 2024, because there's this assumption that pixels will go away, that you really have to rely on first party data, like send us a message on immediate us. And what we can do is just do a quick audit of what your funnel looks like, to see if there's really quick wins of gold that's falling off your pipeline, or like small. I'm talking like 500 to $5000 per month minimum small tweaks that you can make that can make a maximum difference.

Lauren (00:14:56) - Again, I'm talking about like going from five figures to six figures in a month because of small las impressions that are not lasting for potential clients. Like those are quick things and takes us 20 minutes to dive deep into. So if you feel that you're leaving money on the table and that you're in a space where you're doing all this marketing and you just can't expand, oh, hit me up. I've got you all day.

Josh (00:15:19) - Lauren Petrillo, again, CMO and founder of Mongoose Media, found on the web at Mongoose Media's Lauren, it's been great having you here. Thank you so much for joining us.

Lauren (00:15:29) - Thanks, bash. Thank you everybody.

Josh (00:15:36) - Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence slash guest. If you're a listener, I'd love to shout out your business to our whole audience for free. You can do that by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or join our Listener Facebook group.

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