Alex Berman (L) of Cold Email, Leadshark & Taplio With Dennis Yu, CEO of Content Factory
About Dennis Yu and Alex Berman
Dennis Yu, the Chief Technology Officer at yourcontentfactory.com Chats with Alex Berman from Cold Email, Leadshark, and Taplio about what agencies get wrong. Content Factory is a digital marketing company that partners with schools to train the youth. Dennis’ specialty is Facebook ads and mentorship. In this interview, Dennis shares how he grew and continues to grow his digital marketing company. Alex Berman is a successful Youtube Creator, lead investor at A&R Ventures, and founder of Leadshark, Taplio, X27, and more.
Young employees – the elephant in the room
Agencies are composed of a lot of young adults, especially in New York. They’re hustling, working hard, saving money, and most importantly making sacrifices. We can see three of them sharing this tiny little one-bedroom thing because they want to be in Manhattan. Same thing in San Francisco. As an industry, we should be open about it. After all, we’ve got kids too! And we’ve got smart kids and you’ve got smart kids. However, this is not a comparison of who’s got smarter people.
It’s about the process more than people
We all have smart people, but we should have a process that we must be transparent about. And we hold ourselves accountable to a checklist. So, if you’ve got an agency working on stuff, the first question to ask is – where’s your checklist? Clients should insist on wanting to see it. And if an agency doesn’t have one, the clients are going to question whether you have repeatable excellence. A client can also doubt whether you can scale getting the same thing done. Furthermore, now the clients know that the agency is not lying to them. It has a transparent process and most clients know what is going on.
Creative freedom for clients is a must
Having a process in place, also allows for creative freedom and transparency for a client. At Content Factory, Dennis harnesses the power of analytics. He allows the client complete creative freedom, whatever their niches, whatever funny video they have, whatever thing they have on TV. They’re so proud of their content. Daddy has got their latest Superbowl commercial. Awesome! You guys be as creative as you want! Creative freedom also amplifies to the different audiences the different projects that an agency may have worked on in the past. And ones that it thinks will work in the future based on what they observe or maybe it’s a lookalike audience. So, at Content Factory Dennis will amplify the content that they create. And that is how they have a creative agency that is awesome at everything they do. May it be SEO or advising clients on using free Google Tools.
Dennis Yu (L) with Alex Berman
Three rules that are the holy grail of client satisfaction
At Content Factory, rule number one is the client makes all the content. They do not make their content, just don’t. The number two rule at Content Factory is that all the data is owned by the client. Most agencies, on the other hand, hold the client hostage because the ads are running via their account. It’s hard to figure out what’s going on. You can’t switch because if you try to switch, you lose all the audiences and all such kinds of bad things. The third and final rule at Content Factory is that the process should be followed based on a checklist. They execute checklists on ads and analytics and amplify what they are working on for the client. Processes put in place at Content Factory have helped clients with business and digital PR strategies. With these three easy rules, the benefit for agencies is that they can double their prices.
Believe in yourselves and work with the right kind of client
Dennis believes that agencies should believe in themselves – unapologetically, and in what they are selling. They must believe that they are worth a lot. And even if their stuff is shoddy, let’s say the quality stays the same. Agencies think, well if I double my prices, I must double my quality. Not really the clients that pay you more are the ones that treat you better.
There are clients that we do very little for and they pay us an embarrassing amount of money, but they see the value. Because all it takes is a few tweaks and that’s worth millions of dollars. This is all I got, I got $500 a month. I expect magic. And they’re going to call you up like three times a day. No right? So, the first thing agencies must do is double their prices so that they can talk to a different kind of client.
Competition vs partnership
And then there is competition. Dennis says that they’re not out there trying to compete against other people. In fact, the other people that do Facebook ads, they’re his friends, and they often come to them for help. And Dennis goes to them for help on certain things like, for example, professional sports teams and retail and big brands, events, B2B, SAS, etc. So, competition turns into partnership leading to referrals.
Alex Berman (L) with Dennis Yu
