Reading Time: 4 minutes
Reading Time: 4 minutes

From Magazine Subscriptions to Digital Marketing Success: The Journey of Jason Ciment

In this episode, Jason Ciment, CEO of Get Visible Digital Marketing Agency, shares his entrepreneurial journey from starting a magazine subscription service to building a successful digital marketing agency. The future of marketing is also explored, focusing on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and potential acquisitions. The importance of building intimate client relationships, creating unique and better content, and defining boundaries in marketing strategies are discussed. Additionally, he delves into hard conversations, Yiddish phrases, job opportunities, AI resources, and valuable recommendations for reaching out.

Jason Ciment is a seasoned digital marketing expert and CEO of Get Visible, a renowned digital marketing agency. With over 20 years of experience, he has helped numerous clients achieve higher search engine rankings, increased online visibility, and improved website performance. His expertise lies in SEO, PPC management, social media marketing, and reputation management, making him a trusted authority in the digital marketing arena. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency:

  • He transitioned into the digital marketing industry by offering search engine optimization services and later expanded to provide a full suite of digital marketing services.
  • The agency’s growth has been largely driven by referrals, and Jason’s involvement in networking organizations has been instrumental in acquiring new business.
  • AI is a game-changer in marketing, enabling agencies to deliver more and create tailored content. However, the challenge lies in creating better content when other agencies have access to similar tools.
  • Acquisitions can be beneficial to increase economies of scale within the same stream of business, rather than diversifying into new areas.
  • The host suggests utilizing different AI tools and resources like Google Bard, ChatGPT, and Poe.com to access a broader range of AI models.
  • Planning and defining boundaries within marketing processes is crucial before exploring new possibilities and strategies.
  • The guest shares an old Yiddish phrase and an old Arab curse, both with amusing and interesting implications.

Resources:

Connect with Jason Ciment:

Connect with our host, Josh Hoffman:

Quotables:

  • 06:36 – “And we have a thing we call all hands on deck. Like when you have a meeting, you’re dealing with the people doing the work. So you’re not dealing with an account rep who says, oh, let me go check with this person or that person. And sometimes clients feel overwhelmed because they’re getting too many emails, let’s say from different stakeholders. But at the end of the day, they’re getting expertise at the root level, at the ground level. And they’re not having it filtered through an account rep, who often doesn’t really understand what’s going on.”
  • 09:23 – “So if you were working for me, you’re coming to work for me because you have my mindset and my partner’s mindset, which is it’s not a nine to five job, and we’re not clocking people in. It’s a passion job. And your reward is not the money. That’s just a measure of success. The reward is the satisfaction in accomplishing the outcome that the clients want and that you want. So I think it’s like, it’s just, when you don’t have salespeople and you don’t have quotas and you don’t have commissions, the mindset’s different.”
  • 12:48 – Jason: “The best reason to acquire is economies of scale. Because if I have or the team already in place and I could bring somebody in that gives me more of the same type of business, I would rather do that than try to open up a new stream of business. So like I don’t want to go into media advertising as an example. So I wouldn’t do a parallel, I wouldn’t do a related thing to go horizontal. I’d go vertical to stay within the same stream.”
    Joshua: “No, I think that that makes sense.”
  • 08:18 – Joshua: “But is there anything specific that you set up to make it intimate? Or is it really just the people you hire or the right people? Like how, what’s the ingredients in there?”
    Jason: “Well, it’s two things. It’s definitely the people that we hire. Like there’s an organization I belong to, I’ll give them a shout-out. It’s called ProVisors. So I get a lot of business from that because it’s like a networking organization like Letip or BNI, let’s say. But it’s high level. So you’re dealing with partners of law firms, partners of accounting firms, managers of bank departments. Like, it’s not low level, it’s very high grade. So you, you don’t sell to people in the room that you go to, you sell through them.”
  • 10:38 – Joshua: “You mentioned either on this call just now or on a previous call, that you made an acquisition and you bought the software company that you had hired previously. Yeah. What was the acquisition process like? Was there any surprises, good and bad? Like what did that look like? Yeah.”
    Jason: “So what happened was, I was the biggest client for my magazine business. I bought the software company that had an e-commerce platform from the early to mid-nineties. And so the big surprise was that within a few months, some of the biggest clients quit. So what I thought I was acquiring, I didn’t get, that’s number one.”