Episode 115: Want to Generate Leads? Start Tracking with Ted Lau, Owner of Ballistic Arts, an Award-Winning High-Touch Digital Marketing Agency

What you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why B2B companies are often underserved by traditional marketing companies and strategies
• What the different parts of the digital marketing funnel are, and how understanding the funnel can help you generate and convert qualified leads
• Why websites are still a key part of a marketing strategy
• How giving away expertise for free can actually generate more business
• Why the most successful companies are the ones that resolve their customers’ pain points

About Ted Lau

Ted Lau is the owner of Ballistic Arts, an award-winning high-touch digital marketing agency that focuses on growing sales leads for small and medium sized businesses.

He leads a team of creative professionals in digital marketing strategy, video production, graphic design and web development to provide effective ROI for businesses that want to raise brand awareness and garner tangible leads for their business growth. Ted is also a host on Canada's #1 marketing podcast Marketing News Canada where he discusses the latest insights on all things marketing, advertising, and communications with today's brightest minds in the industry.

Additional Resources:

Ballistic Arts Instagram

Ballistic Arts LinkedIn

Ballistic Arts Facebook

Transcript:

Small and mid-sized B2B companies may not draw as much attention as B2C companies, but their business makes up the majority of North America’s economy. While their marketing may not be as flashy, B2B companies still need no-B.S. strategies that generate leads. That’s where Ted Lau, founder of digital marketing agency Ballistic Arts, comes in. He joined the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast to talk about the importance of the digital marketing funnel; why tracking is the key to generating qualified leads; and why likes, followers and impressions mean nothing if they don’t increase revenue. Read the episode transcript here.

Sharon: Welcome to the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst Podcast. Today, it’s my pleasure to welcome Ted Lau, founder of Ballistic Arts, a digital marketing agency. Ted is speaking to us from Vancouver, Canada, although they have an office in Bellingham, Washington and they work all over the West Coast. Ballistic Arts combines innovative, creative storytelling with leading-edge analytics so they can really move the client’s needle. Ted leads a team of experts in design and branding video production, web development and lead generation. We’ll hear all about this and more today. Ted, welcome to the program.

Ted:       Thanks, Sharon. Happy to be here.

Sharon: So glad to have you. Tell us how you got where you are.

Ted:       That’s a long story. I’m starting to age a little, hopefully in a good way like fine wine. Basically, right after university, I started the business. I was trying to get into the film industry. I graduated four months or so after 9/11 so nobody was hiring, so I thought, “I’m just going to freelance and what not.” I worked on an indie film. I met the director at the time, and he and I got along quite well. He was like, “Do you want to start a business together?” I was kind of naïve in my early twenties, and I was like, “Well, yeah, how hard could that be?” There you go. We started setting off on our journey. We started as a video production company, and then one thing led to another. A lot of our clients were SMBs, small and medium-sized businesses, that didn’t have the wherewithal or the budgets to hire large agencies to help them do all their marketing.

This is, again, in the early 2000s. I had to make DVDs that people could stick into their machines, and a lot of them said, “I don’t even have a TV in here, but I notice that you design your own brochures, and it’s quite lovely. Can you design mine?” In your early twenties, you’re like, “Well, yeah, I’m starving. I’ll do whatever. Yes, I can do that.” So, we immediately got into the graphic design biz. A few months after that, people said, “Ted, this web thing, this interweb, the internet, I don’t think it’s going away. I noticed that you designed your own website. Can you help us?” I was like, “Yes, I think I can.” We started becoming a full media marketing agency, and we did creative work up until probably 2018 or 2019.

Then I bought out my business partner, which is whole other podcast if you want to talk about that. Then I wanted to start helping small and medium-sized B2B companies. That journey I had, that first 15, 16 years in the business, we went from small and medium-sized businesses to large companies. We worked in healthcare. We worked with a lot of large real estate developers. They got larger and larger. These are multinational companies, some of them, and it became a little bit—financially it was rewarding, but it didn’t feel like we were helping the little guy anymore.

I wanted to get back to our roots, and I noticed that a lot of business-to-business folks aren’t supported by the marketing world. They don’t actually have the inclination to seek out marketing, and marketers don’t really want to work with B2B. They find it boring. It’s not Lululemon. It’s not the L.A. Rams. They want to work with those companies typically, so I noticed that B2B companies were underserved. If you look at the stats, B2B, small and medium-sized businesses are the backbone of the North American economy. They’re like 89% of the economy. So, I thought there was a good opportunity for us to support that, and we got into lead generation digital marketing for a lot of SMBs, a lot of B2B professional service companies, a lot of B2B distributors and manufacturers.

They don’t really need all this huge marketing, branding, blah, blah, blah. They need business. They need sales. So, I was like, “What if I helped you get leads?” That really perked one of my clients’ ears, and he said, “You know, Ted, if you could get me leads, I’ll never leave you.” That was basically it. Again, I didn’t really know how to get there, but I had a vision where I thought if we could marry the data and the creative and focus on one goal, not vanity numbers, but really focus on actually getting people business, leads, solid, qualified leads, not garbage tire-kicker leads, there was a place in the marketplace for that. It’s been very rewarding over Covid.

We actually started this division, I want to say, six or eight months before Covid, and not because I had a crystal ball thinking the world’s going to shut down with the global pandemic. It was simply me wanting to serve a particular community. I think Covid, as disastrous as it was for many people and as devastating as it was for many businesses, it was very helpful for us to be in a position to support these businesses. That division grew very rapidly over Covid because people were like, “Oh my goodness, we’re shutting our doors, but I got a little bit of government money. Can you help get me business and keep my doors open?” I was like, “O.K., no pressure.” We set goals. We created strategies and tactics around that and supported them in generating revenue, and it’s been very successful.

Sharon: Did you think about jumping ship and going back to the film industry at some point?

Ted:       That’s a great question. I think the film industry, like of a lot of industries, is much more glamorous on the outside than it is on the inside. Like they say, this is how the sausage is made in the factory, whatever that saying is. I started noticing many of my friends who were in the film industry starting to get burnt out. They were working 12, 18-hour days, a lot of overtime, a lot of low pay, and it was a lot of grunt work. It took 10, 15 years to get into any kind of leadership role because there are union rules and whatnot, not to say there’s no place for the union.

I just found that it was very tiring for a lot of these folks. A lot of them ended up having marital issues because of it, relationship issues, health issues, addiction issues, and I thought, “You know what? This is not really for me.” I was tied to the hip by a lovely girl back in my college days, and I wanted to make sure I was able to seal the deal, as it were. Funny enough, she is my wife of 17 years. We got married in 2006. We started dating in 1999, got married in 2006. It’s 17 years this year, and after I bought out my business partner a few years ago, I brought her in as a 50-50 partner. We’ve been partners in life and partners in crime for a number of years now.

Sharon: Pretty good. It sounds very fulfilling.

Ted:       It is.

Sharon: You do a lot of different things. How do you define digital marketing? You say you’re a digital marketing agency. That could mean a lot of things.

Ted:       Yeah, absolutely. Great question, Sharon. The first thing is that, for us, it is anything that is online for the most part. I think a lot of folks will do PR and outreach and influencer marketing, those kinds of things. Those are not our forte. Our forte is around helping folks on things for the digital funnel. If you don’t understand the funnel, it’s top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel.

The top of funnel is where you get the awareness. People who have never heard of your business before don’t know you from Tom, Dick or Harry. You’re just like every single person in your industry. Getting awareness is top of funnel, and activities like that that we support are things like digital ads, be it Google, LinkedIn, Facebook. We’ll even do Snapchat and Twitch and Pinterest. We’re exploring TikTok for some B2B companies. So, that’s getting the awareness out, but you also have things in top of funnel like SEO work. You have PPC, which is part of the Google landscape, blog writing to support the SEO efforts, video ads, YouTube ads. Whatever those things are just to get the word out.

Then the middle of funnel is the consideration phase. People have heard of you. It usually takes about eight to 10 touches for them to even realize you exist. Once they actually convert and come to your website, that’s the consideration phase. We need to have really good, thoughtful content on a website. Gone are the days when if you look pretty and half-decent, they’re going to just call you. You need to actually provide value. So, we do a lot of work around supporting website content creation, creating marketing strategies and actually executing on them. Maybe we’ll have video content that is not a video ad, but it’s something that educates the end user, the client’s client or p