[Top Agency Series] The Right Digital Marketing Investments With Josh Becerra

Josh Becerra is the Founding Partner and President of Augurian, a digital agency focused on boosting leaders’ confidence in their digital marketing investments. He has 15-plus years of experience in digital marketing and is highly skilled at making complex data intelligible. Josh excels at creating clarity during client meetings and providing reports focusing on aspects of a client’s digital marketing initiatives. 

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Josh Becerra talks about Augurian and its services
• Josh’s leadership style and the company’s core values 
• Augurian’s gamification through baseball
• Josh shares some team-building tips 
• The pandemic’s impacts on Augurian 
• Who are Augurian’s ideal clients? 
• Josh discusses his framework for content marketing — and mistakes companies often make in their marketing strategy 
• Augurian’s customer success stories

In this episode…

The digital space is a complicated environment. So how do you convert leads into clients and drive results for your business?

Josh Becerra recommends partnering with experts to craft digital strategies that are both profitable and scalable. One of the major mistakes companies make is beginning their marketing strategy at the bottom of the funnel, near a customer’s point of purchase. However, an expert partnership can help you understand the whole client journey, begin at the top of the funnel, and close on high-quality leads. What other digital marketing investments can help your company grow? 

Tune in to this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast with Dr. Jeremy Weisz as he welcomes the Founding Partner and President of Augurian, Josh Becerra. Josh talks about Augurian and its content marketing framework, his leadership style and team-building tips, and strategies to solve marketing challenges and convert top-notch leads.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Augurian
• Josh Becerra on LinkedIn

Special Mention(s):

• Simon Sinek 
• Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)

Book(s) Mentioned: 

• Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek 
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman 
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni  
• Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek 
• Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box by The Arbinger Institute 

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Growth Through Acquisitions – What Is Your KPI and Northstar? With Jason Swenk”
• “[One Question] Building a Platform to Empower Others With Jason Swenk Host of the Smart Agency Master Class Podcast”
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights With Jason Swenk Host of the Smart Agency Master Class Podcast”
• “How to Set and Achieve Goals With Ian Garlic, Founder of Video Case Story”
• “[Top Giver Series] The Power of Video Storytelling to Transform Your Business with Ian Garlic of StoryCrews”
• “[Top Agency Series] Expanding Your Brand Impact Through Social With Duncan Alney of Firebelly Marketing”

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com. I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I have Josh Becerra of Augurian. And before I formally introduce you, Josh, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast. Since this is a part of the top agency series, you can check out some of the other ones, Jason Swenk, on the podcast, where he talked about building his agency up to over eight figures and selling it and now they’re acquiring agencies. And what they do to evaluate the agency that they’re purchasing. I had Ian Garlic on who specializes in video case stories, and how do you best tell your customer stories and Duncan Alney who works with food and beverage brands, and check those out, they all share great advice. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25. And at Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships. And how do we do that we actually help you run your podcast, we are an easy button for a company to launch and run your podcast. We do strategy, accountability, and full execution around the podcasts. So for me, Josh the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And personally, I found no better way over the past over a decade to profile the people in companies I most admire and share with everyone else what they’re working on. And I know Josh has a podcast as well. So we’ll talk about that. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should. If you have questions, you can go to rise25.com. Both my business partner and I have been doing it for over a decade. So we’ll feel free to answer anything that you have to throw away. And I’m excited to introduce Josh Becerra’s 15-plus years of experience in digital marketing. He is an advocate for connecting digital marketing to a business’s bottom line and prioritizing learning over metrics. And Josh is a founding partner and president of Augurian, like I mentioned, which is a boutique digital marketing agency located in the great city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. And Josh, thanks for joining me.

Josh Becerra 2:28 

Thanks for having me. I got the Minneapolis right behind me.

Jeremy Weisz 2:31 

And for people who want to check out their website, it’s augurian.com. So just start off Josh with, tell people a little bit about your company and what you do.

Josh Becerra 2:45 

Sure, no problem. Well, first of all, I appreciate you having me on as a guest. During that you’ve been doing podcasts for 10 years, I think I’m in like my 30th episode is like wow, inspirational. So yeah, so Augurian is a, like you said, a boutique digital marketing agency. We aren’t a full-service agency, we’ve made a strategic decision to focus on kind of four key areas. The first of those is paid media. So that’s like Google ads, and all the paid social platforms. And we do all that management for clients. The second thing is search engine optimization. So SEO. Third thing is content marketing. And we can get into like how we think about the customer journey, later on. And then the last thing is analytics. So what we don’t do is we don’t build websites, we don’t do like email nurturing workflows. We aren’t a creative agency, don’t come to us and ask us to build your brand or like design a new logo or anything like that. We are definitely data wonks and love digging into data, understanding what’s working and what isn’t for our clients and learning from that.

Jeremy Weisz 3:55 

Sometimes it takes discipline to say no, right? And I’m sure you have clients who are like, hey, can you do this website? Hey, can you do this email? What out of those services you don’t do was a toughest for you to stay disciplined on and saying, no, we are sticking to these things, and we’re not getting something else?

Josh Becerra 4:15 

Yeah, that’s a great question. So probably website development. Website development is something that’s challenging. And many times, because our teams need the website to be performing well, in order for like, if we’re driving, we’re paying money using Google ads to drive traffic to a website, that experience is also part of whether or not that person is going to convert on the page. Right. And so we’ve had numerous kind of over the years discussions about like, well, should we get into this or should we not get into this or whatever. And I think, today we’re still not, we’re not on board with building out a whole bunch of Web devs and trying to do that for our customers. It’s like a very kind of subjective, very kind of artistic in a lot of ways. It can be very artistic and we’re just focused on like, numbers.

Jeremy Weisz 5:17 

Yeah, it’s a slippery slope. But I totally see, the next thing is like, well, we’re going to be driving a ton of traffic to this. Can you make these tweaks because we feel that we’ll increase your conversions? Right? And so typically, now you give them, you give them like a feature set? Like we want to make sure can this do whoever does this and have them make those changes?

Josh Becerra 5:39 

Yeah, it really depends on the client, right? But there’s clients who have in house teams and we are benefit from that. So we can say, hey, we want to run like AB test on this, can you stand up a page with these. There’s other clients who allow us to make changes in the sense that like, there’s products like Google optimized, where you can actually run AB tests, and you don’t need a web dev. So our team is very fluid and experienced and doing some of that, like conversion rate optimization is for sure a thing that we do. And so we need to figure out our workarounds to be able to do run some of those AB tests, but not building full websites, not a single web dev on the team.

Jeremy Weisz 6:28 

Talk about, I know you are big into leadership in leading teams, what are some of the things that you really do with the team that helps them thrive?

Josh Becerra 6:40 

Yeah, that’s a great question. So I think, I’m a big believer in kind of the Simon Sinek Start With Why so, we have our why, our how, and our what very clearly defined, and we talk about that, and we have our set of eight core values, which is a lot. But it’s fun to kind of see the team rallying around that buying in and embracing those like, major kind of cultural cornerstones of what we’re trying to build here. So an example of that is like, in our Slack channel, we have a kudos Slack channel. And anytime somebody like wants to give a kudos to a teammate for helping them out or something like that, you’re gonna see like, hashtag kudos to so and so for helping me out with this thing that I needed to get done really quickly. And they did an awesome job. And then it’s like, hashtag honor teamwork, right? So every time a kudos comes out, it’s pended with some sort of a hashtag around one of our core values. So I feel like, part of leadership is not only having those foundational things in place, but actually getting them to kind of live and breathe within the day-to-day.

Jeremy Weisz 8:00 

When people on your team think of your core values, is there a one that sticks out to most people first?

Josh Becerra 8:10 

We had like, so we do like a Monday meeting. Right? And we’ll let people share some like a highlight of their weekend. And then we will have some piece of business that we get into we do like a kudos session. Well, one of the kinds of pieces of business we once did is broke the team up into groups and had them go and like, talk about what’s your favorite core value and why. So we do that kind of activity to also try to embed a little more of that. And we had them like write it down on a shared Google sheet so everybody else could see it and kind of the why. Man, it’s like all over the board.

Jeremy Weisz 8:49 

What’s something that you remember from that what someone wrote their favorite core value and why?

Josh Becerra 8:55 

So there was a lot of balance work life. So that’s a core value of ours. Work smarter, not better, is kind of the tagline to that one. And I think we have people who have come from other agencies, where they’re like really burning their people out or grinding them really hard. And we, since COVID, have had a highly hybrid workplace, people can basically work from wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work is kind of getting done and they’re available to their teammates and clients when they need to be. And so we see like, the work-life balance and kind of that hybrid workplace and giving people a little bit more of that autonomy is like a huge piece of our employment value proposition beyond just like what your compensation is and all those things. So that one is one that comes to mind for sure when thinking about that list.

Jeremy Weisz 9:59 

Which is your favorite?

Josh Becerra 10:02 

Well, I’ll say have fun. That’s for sure a favorite because I just feel like, if you’re not having fun, then why are you doing it? Right? But I mean, I helped write them all. So I love them all. But yeah, have one is a great one.

Jeremy Weisz 10:24 

Talk about baseball.

Josh Becerra 10:27 

Okay. Yeah, I mentioned this to you, prior to us like recording. So we do something called baseball at Augurian. And basically, what it is, is our teams share wins that they’re having with their clients and on their client accounts with one another. So someone will get up and they’ll prepare kind of an ad bat and say, okay, here’s what I did, here’s the win that I had, here’s the impact that it had on the client, either from like a revenue perspective or conversions perspective, or input, whatever it is. And then their team, the other people on the team who are listening to their at bat, they all vote was that a single, double, triple or homerun, right. And then we keep score. And at the end, we have a couple of seasons every year. And at the end of the season, we know who has hit the most homeruns. And then they’re like our baseball winner. And so we actually have jerseys that say like Augurian on the front numbers on the back. And we’ve kind of made it fun. And I know that the team loves playing baseball, because it’s fun, we’ve kind of gamified work in a way, but also because it gives them an opportunity to like hear what their colleagues are doing. It gives them ideas like, oh, I’ve never thought of doing that with a client. I’m gonna try that with my client over here. Right. So it’s just a great way to like share knowledge, to let them help each other level up to have a little bit of fun, right. And we’re digital marketers, so we’re competitive. So people want to win baseball.

[continue to page 2]