“Find what you want to work for you, find what’s already working, and then make it more valuable for your reader”

Brett Farmiloe was that kid with double bar glasses who enjoyed calculating the batting averages of his entire Little League team. It was no surprise that he grew up to major in accounting and became a financial auditor.

Markitors is an all in one online marketing solution for B2B companies. They combine marketing math with the art of auditing to provide internet marketing services for companies looking to completely outsource their online marketing efforts.

 

BusinessInterviews.com:  How did you come up with the concept behind your first company, Pursue the Passion?

Brett:  There’s a stat out there that says more than half of the American workforce dislikes what they do for a living. When I was a senior in college, I wanted to learn about the different paths people pursued to end up in a career that they really enjoyed. So, I jotted down a dream list of people I wanted to meet, reached out to them for informational interviews, and hit the road in an RV with a couple friends to learn about their career paths. We documented the interviews online for other people to get insight from, and to our surprise, a lot of people enjoyed and read our interviews. So, we just kept interviewing people to build up an online career education resource, and somehow we made it work.

BusinessInterviews.com:  What key insights did you gain while interviewing individuals who remain passionate and inspired by the work they do?

Brett: There were a few commonalities that we saw with the people who had a passion for their work. One was significance, the other was a sense of trust, and the third commonality was having measurability in their job. Let me give you an example for each commonality.

Significance is pretty simple. It’s being able to point to something and say, “This is why I do this.” A child therapist might see significance with that first kid they meet in the morning. A sports executive might see it when they walk into an arena of 18,000 fans. Everyone has their own significance in their role. It’s just a matter of being able to see it.

Trust can be summed up with this quote we got from a HR Manager: “There’s a lot of respect for managers who give you a lot of rope. And with that rope you can swing around on or you can hang yourself. But it’s you who are responsible for making one of those two things happen.” Everyone we talked to had that sense of freedom and ownership that came from being trusted.

Measurability is what keeps people going, because motivated people naturally want to see themselves progress. Everyone we talked to had at some point defined what success meant to themselves, and kept score on how close they were to reaching that bar.

You add all those things up – significance, trust and measurability – and I believe you’ve got someone who enjoys their work.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you talk a about the art of auditing?

Brett: For sure. Auditing is all about seeing what others don’t see in order to uncover a potential breakthrough. There’s two crucial parts to auditing: requesting the right information and then knowing what to look for within that information. That’s the art part. Once an auditors has all this information in front of them, and it’s up to them to discover what makes sense. They find out the stuff that doesn’t add up, dig deeper, and make determinations as to what’s happening. In marketing, auditing is crucial. You’re looking at qualitative and quantitative data to continuously improve your efforts.

BusinessInterviews.com:  What are some ways that a startup can determine what social media platforms are most relevant to their business and industry?

Brett: Online marketing all relates to a simple question: where are my customers spending time, and how can I reach them? Startups need to determine who their customers are first, and then they can go through a series of steps to find out which social media platforms their customer prefer. If a company has an email list, or a list of phone numbers, you can easily get an idea of how many customers are on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram by uploading the lists into the platforms. But really, it’s getting close to the customers, figuring out how they spend their time online, and creating a strategy to reach them. Since we’re glued to email, and everyone has an address – that’s usually the best place to start.

BusinessInterviews.com:  Can you expand on how being fired by a client inspired you to reposition the company?

Brett:  Yeah…so an ecommerce client of ours decided to part ways with us after a 2 year run. Naturally, when things don’t go your way, you ask yourself questions like, “Why did we get fired?” What I came to realize is that we crush it with our B2B clients, because we’re able to deliver results that grow our clients businesses. I just thought, if we’re able to efficiently deliver a B2B client one to two leads worth $20k each, and those leads are dramatically improving a client’s life, why are we killing ourselves trying to deliver 1,000 customers worth $20 each for B2C clients? So, after a few years figuring out who our best clients are through trial and error, I think we found our sweet spot in offering an all in one online marketing solution for B2B companies.

BusinessInterviews.com:  What are your top tips when it comes to blogging?

Brett:  Step 1: Find keywords in your niche. Step 2: Find the content that gets shared on social networks. Step 3: Find what content ranks on Google. Step 4: Take the popular and quality content you discovered and make it better.

Here’s an example. For an executive search firm client of ours, we decided the keyword “executive interview questions” would be something we’d want to rank for. We looked on BuzzSumo and Google to find what was out there. We found plenty of articles like, “10 Executive Interview Questions” – so we took that content and made it better with an article like, “15 Outstanding Executive Interview Questions.”

It’s a matter of finding what you want to work for you, finding what’s already working, and then making it more valuable to your reader.