EP323 - The Double-Edged Sword of Building Your Brand ft Dii Pooler

📍 Hello and welcome to PPC Live, The Podcast, formerly the PPC Chat Roundup. My name is Anu, the founder of PPC Live, and if you're used to hearing advice from PPC experts about how to ensure that you're keeping up with the ever changing landscape of our industry. Don't worry, you are still in the right place.

But instead of relaying what the PPC experts are saying, I'm bringing the PPC experts to you. Every week I'm gonna be speaking to a different PPC expert about their biggest effort, but also how they turn things around. What was surprising, what was disappointing, and literally just what changed in terms of how they do things that made them a better marketer.

Today I am gonna be speaking to the fantastic Dii Pooler. If you're a PPC Live community follower, you would've seen her name pop up on different articles and she's yeah, just such a great contributor in terms of. Giving checklists of how to use performance max and optimizing landing pages and just things that will always be effective if you are paid such manager today she's gonna be sharing a story about an experience that she had in a meeting earlier in her career and how the expectations, she actually quite set

she would've said, she said herself, weren't actually quite met. And yeah, how that caused a lit bit of a rumble in a client meeting. So I hope you enjoy, let's take it away today.

 Hello, do welcome to PPC Live The Podcast. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. My absolute pleasure. Yeah, I'm so excited guys to have Dii on the podcast today. She's such a great contributor. I know I say this of several of my guests, but that's where I'm gonna get my guests from the people who have contributed so much to PPC Live.

So she's another one that legit, she gives us amazing checklists. Amazing how-tos . And I think I literally did, this was even like a last minute ask of Dii and I was like, Dii do you wanna get on the podcast? She's sure, why not? And she's just so positive. And can do or always ready to dig in and help and no surprising, at all.

In in, when we actually, when I say a little bit about what she's done Dii has been in the industry for about 11 years now, she's a digital marketing executive and she started up her own company and she does like project management, especially specializing in paid search and she builds high performance, Google, Facebook, and Bing ads that deliver an impressive return on ads spend, especially when your budgets are in the six figure range.

She plans marketing campaigns to collaborate and in a collaborative and delegative way and cross departmentally, especially supervising and ensuring marketing projects are completed and on, on time and within budget, and she sees projects from start to finish within a waterfall and agile framework.

Now, we were, when we're going through that descriptions, I did warn Dii, that I want her to explain what she means, but a waterfall framework because I think it is a very cool and very unique way of doing project management that I think is very effective. So please go on Dii explain what support framework is.

Thank you. Thank you so much for that introduction. That was wonderful. So in project management there is a waterfall method. And with Waterfall it's a step-by-step kind of chronological methodology. So you do one thing, you finish it, and then you move on to the next. So you don't go jumping ahead to other projects and it's no circling back. So is what I would say is the waterfall method. So in your clients, for example, you would start off with that consultation. You would learn what they need and their requirements. You put everything out there upfront. Then you design their campaigns or their strategies, you do your implementation, and then from there you either build their campaigns, you optimize it, et cetera.

So it's a waterfall framework. Fantastic. Sounds great. I'm going into some interesting facts about Dii. She's a philanthropist. She volunteers a lot for her community. She's also a dog mom, an amateur boxer, and I just have won like seven fights. So don't look at her as thinking that, oh, she's so demure and lovely and gentle.

She can kick ass. And I love that about her. And is there any part of that you wanna share more of more with us today? No, you did a great job. I'm really big on philanthropy. I am a listener for an app called Lowkey. I write letters to hospice. I also do some charitable work where I help pack boxes in Phoenix at the church.

So I'm really big on giving back to the community because the community has always poured into me, specifically the PPC community. So it's been great. Amazing. Oh, you have definitely given into the PPC community has much, you probably, much more than you've even received and you have no idea. It's people like you that makes me go this is how I know our PPC community is going

keep on thriving because we just got into, 'cause I've been in this, in the industry for close to 20 years, and very much at the beginning we were all like learning, not knowing really, what the best practices was. Google did seem a bit simple. Then things got a bit complicated, but there was still a bit of gatekeeping.

And then in the past few years or so, especially during the pandemic years, I think we then just realized this whole gatekeeping is not the way to do things, and everybody was just open and sharing all their knowledge first on Twitter, then a lot on LinkedIn. So yeah, you are you're definitely one of us in terms of the people who love sharing in this industry.

It's really great. So anyway, without further ado, we've kept our listeners waiting long enough. We wanna get into the thick of the stories about an f-up you've experienced as the podcast, title is, it's all about the f-up and the triumphs that we face and how we've turned those f-up into triumphs.

Dii what f-up do you want to share with us today? Yeah, I want to talk about how personal branding can go wrong, so I have a story and it pertains to that. Sure. Go ahead. Awesome. So I would like to just give you a quick backstory. Yeah. So I built a personal brand. I built my authority, but what I didn't realize was that I was also building expectations that I couldn't always meet.

So I. Yeah, I, have a strong personal brand that got me in the room, but it also gave me a higher bar to, to meet higher expectations. And it put me in a place where I could never make a mistake. I can never miss, I can never say, I don't know. So I had a particular. Experience where I had a corporate client schedule a consultation with me with layered questions on YouTube, CTV and multi attribution.

Just on the fly. A little bit about me. I do have some experience 10 years or so experience in paid search. I specialize in Legion. So when I didn't have this polished answer in. Point zero five seconds. The energy in the room just flipped, like it went stale. Okay. And now here comes like the passive aggressive jokes and the microaggressions.

It's like comedy central, O, which is hard to smile through because I give back to the PPC community as much as I can, and it's not my nine to five, this is my 24 hours because I'm really passionate and I love what I do in the industry, and because I genuinely love what I do it's hard to stomach.

But I did, I, I stomached it and when you're in a private consultation, you're set up to answer these questions. And if you have a slip up, it's almost like people are setting you up to go, "Aha! You're not that smart!". Yeah. I can do that too. Especially if they are also at the same place as me.

Maybe they have five to seven years of experience in the PPC industry and they need an expert to come in and speak on a matter or if they need an expert to go in and help optimize a campaign, do an audit. And they haven't also built their personal brand. They look at you as a threat almost because you've taken the opportunity to do it, but they haven't.

So they have this like egotistical power move that they wanna put in a consultation. Even in a consultation. We're not talking interviews. Yeah. So that's what my experience has been. Thank you for sharing that. That is very, I imagine that's not something where would we'd want to admit because yeah we put this version of ourselves out there and

sometimes you just don't know what people are gonna read into it. So to try and tease that story out a little bit more you know what kind of were the comments that were coming at you and how did you then, in what state did you leave that meeting? Did you leave that meeting okay, you had, you did end up answering the questions or it had to be like, sorry, I have to come back to this at another time.

Yeah, a great question. So one of the comments that stung was I was saying that in Google Ads in particular, there's no right way. Even if there are best practices, everything works different for every single industry. Yeah. Even if it's niche, like everything works different for every specific type of campaign.

I can say search partner network doesn't work at all. But I have seen it work for a very specific type of client. That's just the truth. And they said exactly. I agree with you. And that's why I don't believe anyone should write a playbook. It was a very smooth, underhanded comment because.

I have a playbook. I have a full 800 page book that I wrote recently. This isn't something that I wrote six years ago. But even then, when you're writing a book in this industry, it's forever changing. You always have to give, some, alterations to it, but my reaction, so honestly I reacted pretty well.

I was okay with it, but internally I got really defensive. And I had to take time to really process my thoughts and my inner dialogue because what my inner dialogue is saying is, okay, I've spent years managing accounts and helping clients scale mentoring peers within my space, building my brand while being 10 toes down with my family.

So when it comes to my passion and love for PPC, I stand on business. Yeah. Yeah. When someone acts like one mistake or one imperfect moment outweighs the bloodshed and tears that you put into your work. Yeah. It gets a little different, especially being a woman in a male dominated, field.

A woman of color in a, male dominated field. You fumble once and suddenly, you're the butt of the joke. Yeah, I think for me, I had to stop confusing other people's projections. Onto me. Yeah. That's theirs to sort out. Yeah. My personal brand. When it comes to your personal brand, the pressure doesn't come from you.

It comes from people's idea of who they think you should be. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not the image. I'm a mom, I'm quirky. I'm a little socially awkward. That's really me. It's not, who you think I should be, yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. And who, who was like, your support in that moment?

Is, was there anyone that you felt that you talked through in that moment? And what was their advice to you in that moment? Yeah. So a few people, this is gonna be interesting. First I'm very like, intuitive and I know how to talk myself down from situations like this. I spoke to my dad and honestly this community having the opportunity to speak to you, to speak to our peers about what's happening in our industry with PPC branding. So even tell telling you has been very therapeutic in nice what happened and yeah. And I'm hoping that my experience helps give people some type of perspective.

So yeah, absolutely. It's this kind of very much in this side situations. It's all about perspectives. Was there any I would say opinions from people that surprised you? Would you say as to how you should approach the situation or did it all make sense then in terms of the pathway, were there any like even like from your dad or your, or any any of the colleagues in our field that were like, oh

didn't think that's what I should do in that situation and really gave you food for thought in terms of approaching situations like this. I don't think there was. Okay. What I thought was interesting in terms of reactions is that even though I was the butt of the joke in that moment, they still publicly supported me in terms of still following me on LinkedIn, still interacting with me.

So I, I found that to be interesting in terms of their response. Yeah. In terms of my peers in the industry I'm speaking about clients in particular, but my peers have always been supportive. Yeah. I've never had any issues with the PPC industry in terms of my peers and my colleagues and things of that nature.

But it's clients that I'm trying to give the warning that they have this expectation. Because I think there are other marketers who come in and they oversell and they over promise and they say, Hey, I can give you X amount of leads at this cost per lead. I can give you this customer acquisition number, consistently.

It's. It's a little bit jarring because when clients do meet someone who's going to be completely honest and transparent, they're like, no, I wanna go to the, the person who is promising the most and moving the quickest and who claims that they're going to, give me rainbows and, yeah

whatever. Yeah. And like looking back, was there, like even, let's say we look back to before the meeting, was there any signs that you feel that maybe you missed that you now think back of oh, I should have picked on the fact that this is, this kind of client is this way, or this kind of meeting is gonna go this way because of X, Y, Z, that you feel like now you are gonna look out for those things in future meetings?

Yeah. There were a couple of signs. So one is being completely honest about my background and what I specialize in. I have a lot of specialty and a lot of specific industries, so real estate, automotive, et cetera. And this client was corporate and the people who I was working with, they, worked at a lot of like fang type of companies.

And I don't have that experience. I work. Solely for about seven to eight years of my professional career in agency. So it was a different type of meeting because we speak a different language. They speak, there's corporate politics and yeah. I was the shiny new thing that they wanted to try out and see if I could potentially mesh with, so there was that.

Also, they did let me know ahead of time that YouTube was a main focus. Also Performance Max. But with Performance Max that's my thing. I love Performance Max. I love all of the updates. I'm a. I'm a realist, but I'm a Google optimist. Nice. Because it's what I've been doing. Yeah. And but YouTube, it's not my strongest suit.

And so I knew that going in, but I still wanted to, entertain the conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Someone is going through this right now, let's say. What advice would you give them in terms of 'cause especially if we go back to when you, how you started the story, it's almost not necessarily that you'd misrepresented yourself or it's more like they put you on a pedestal that you didn't necessarily have put yourself on and it made you sound like you weren't as experienced

as you might have wanted to seem in the room or or what, or they make you sound as experienced like as you are in yourself would you have would you have done anything differently and what's the big advice that you'll then give to anyone going through that same, the same situation?

Yeah. My main advice is you definitely want to build your personal brand and give back to the community. Like the, everyone knows that's important. Yeah. But the main advice when building your personal brand, specifically in PPC, is you have to anchor yourself and I would say building your brand for a purpose that's bigger than you.

Whether that's, family, your legacy, your truth, your values. It needs to have depth. It can't just be about money, if that is the case. Because with building your personal brand, criticism is going to come, yeah. It'll come. That's whatever you do. Yeah. And so when you're anchored

the criticism will shake the leaves, but it won't shake the roots of who you are. So the criticism will shake the leaves but it won't shake the roots. That's gonna be a clip we're gonna share to people. That is such a great thing. That is such a great thing to remember. Know who you are. Know no, know what you're doing it for.

Don't all, don't be all about chasing the money. Yeah, I love those tips. So that kind of meeting, did it change anything for you in terms of your process, in terms of, process with clients, what you do before, during, after? Is there anything specifically that changed for you in how you do things?

Yeah. Being extremely intentional about the types of industries, the types of clients like. Just being extra picky. Because they're being picky too. When you're going into these consultations with your clients, they're interviewing you, you're interviewing them it's the two-way street. Yeah. So just being honest about the type of work that I want to do and the type of impact that I want to make, amazing. That's true. And being able to say, it's not even about saying, 'cause I know that one thing that I've spoken about with several other experts on the podcast is about saying yes or no to certain clients. And it's also okay to even say yes or no to some industries. There's some industries that you're like, look, that's not my strength.

That's not the area I want to do. And just making that clear, communicating that clear so that people don't have higher expectations. Yeah, just be intentional about what area you wanna focus in and yeah go all in those areas. So that's been a very great conversation about the story.

But yeah, I would also like us to even discuss further more about the industry and the mistakes that we may see or we may not see. It's even more so though not see how to say. Do you feel that we talk, like we talk about mistakes enough. And why do you think it's important that we actually talk about mistakes in the industry?

I feel like we do talk about mistakes quite a bit. But it's not that we're not talking about it, it's the way we're talking about it. Like I feel like when you go on Twitter and you go on LinkedIn, it can be a little bit snarky and very meme and Hey, let's try to change things up. And it's not very compassionate like this way that you're going about with your podcast.

We need to have more compassionate understanding and more guidance instead of the snarky jokes is what I would say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like it is talked about a bit, but we need a bit more compassion in how we do it. Fantastic. Is there a safe way though that we can do it? So you mentioned, this podcast, and I promise guys I did not plug that to Dii to do.

Like in our in, in different like companies. So you manage teams, you have a team of folks that you manage and you deal with. And I can imagine like for junior staff, what I think is important, that was, this is what's been said at several episodes, I'm not even gonna belabor this, that, you will make a mistake at some point in your career.

And it's not about if but when. That's where you learn the most. When you're testing, you're learning and you're learning from things that have gone wrong. And so you learn to do better. But would you say, is there is there like an advice that you can give for managers to encourage like their team to, so that they do not feel too scared to make that mistake or to open up to communicate about the mistake of where they've gone wrong so that the fix can come quicker?

Yeah. There's two things. I wanna talk to the managers and I wanna talk to freelancers, agency owners. Yeah. For freelancers and agency owners, when you own your mistakes around people who value growth, you get evolution. You evolve. Yeah. But when are around people who don't take accountability, they look at your mistakes as an opportunity.

Yeah. They. Use that as an opportunity to paint you as the villain. Yeah. So with the right people owning your SHIT leads to elevation with the wrong people it makes you easier to blame. Yeah. So ask yourselves, now this is to, hiring managers. What happens when this person makes a mistake? Even if they don't own it, what is your reaction?

What is the energy? How are you supporting them? Are you making them the villain? Are you blaming them or are you looking at opportunities to fix it, grow and evolve? So that's, yeah, that's the main question. Amazing. So was that, you said that then that's to managers, so like freelancers be more intuitive and take a look at yourself.

And yeah. So to freelancers, agency owners, when you own your mistakes around people who value growth, you evolve. But around people who avoid accountability, your honesty makes you the villain. Yeah. So remember who you're around now for the agency owners and, excuse me, not agency owners, my managers, but for managers, hiring managers, et cetera.

Look at how you are responding to it. Are you responding to it with compassion and opportunity to grow, an opportunity to evolve, an opportunity to fix something? Or are you getting scared, frustrated, and looking for someone to blame? Yeah. That's how you can manage mistakes. Amazing. Absolutely love that.

That is so key. Now in our era, very much of Ai I never want this, the whole conversation to start from what's the Ai it issue but I'm sure we see a lot of this and even going specific. Are there some ways that you feel that you've seen AI has been used that is used wrongly in terms of or maybe something that is really very much actually being misunderstood in terms of how people are using like, let's say P max campaigns or any other AI functionality that you're like, people are actually effing that up and you'd like to help set the record straight here.

Yeah, there's two things that I'm a little bit concerned with AI is resorting all of your ads to an AI agency. We don't want to do that. We don't want all of our ads written by Ai. Yeah, that's the wrong way to go about it. We need it to be written in human language. Yeah. So people can relate to it because marketing is about connecting with other people in whatever way that you're meant to.

The next thing that I get a little bit concerned about, so I did do a consultation with a company that wanted to hire someone to help train their AI to perform audit recommendations. Great. Cool. I love Ai. I love that we're doing that. However, it seems like they're trying to do that to replace PPC specialists and with everything in life marketing in particular, life is ever changing.

The economy is changing, the industry is changing and trying to resort your PPC analytics to an AI agent it's not. It's not a good move because a lot of things can happen overseas. A lot of things can happen with tariffs that can affect how people interact with your ads. So we have to keep that human element in mind before we go and train an AI agent.

So those are the only thing, the two things that I'm a little bit concerned with AI. But other than that, I'm a proponent of it. I utilize it. I think, we should get with it instead of, trying to make it get lost yeah. Yeah, I think there's, it's just a learning curve that we need to try to understand and not necessarily use it for everything, but definitely test it out.

Definitely test it as your, almost like your pa, that helps you organize your thoughts, that helps you organize what you have in terms of what you've thought strategically, and then it helps you like, organize it in a good way. This has been such a great chat. You've given so many great insights.

And yeah, this, this is the length of the podcast that our listeners are used to because, I want them to, almost like binge through the episodes and watch as listen to as many as possible. So we're gonna leave, things here, but before we go, I have another a question, one last question that is just no not PPC related, not marketing related.

And just something just so fun out there that I ask all my guests before they leave. If your career were a movie, what would be the title? It would be the PPC strategist escaping the Matrix. Oh wow. The PPC strategy, the matrix. Okay, so explain that a little bit more. Do you feel like we're in the matrix?

I'm very spiritual, so I believe reality is very similar to the Matrix . Yeah. I think with PPC in particular you're fighting to be yourself, to stand out to help people. You have to go against the grain a little bit. Yeah. And it's about owning who you truly are and giving your authentic self to people.

Yeah. You get eaten by the Matrix and then you learn how to escape from it. And I'm at the point where I'm owning my own lane. So owning your own lane. Love it. Owning your own lane. I'd say that could be a good backup title. Owning Your Own Lane. That could be a good, another good movie title. Thank you so much de for this fantastic chat and for yeah, taking time out of your, I'm sure very busy day with all the fantastic things you do, whether it's within paid search or your volunteer work.

It's been such a great chatting with you. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Bye.

  Thank you so much, Dee, for sharing that very honest and transparent experience. Remember. If you are, if you know what you are doing and you know what you are talking about and you're confident in yourself in terms of what you're working on, you might have your leaves shaken, but the roots will never be shaken.

So the leaves might be shaken, but the roots might not be shaken. Go back to the episode to remember exactly what the phrase was there. But yeah, make sure your roots are strong and when your leaves get shaken, don't worry about that. Just keep moving on and keep being strong in knowing what you're doing for more information about the, all that all we've shared on that episode

and yeah, the full transcript, not just even the show notes, go to podcast.ppc.live in terms of PPC Live and our PPC live events we've got our July event coming up in London on the 31st, which is our third year anniversary event. I can't wait to celebrate with you all. So yes, please get your early birth tickets.

That's happening on July the 31st, so just go up to ppc.live to get your tickets. Before I leave you, I'm also delighted to share that I'm taking on coaching clients, and if you book them at hourly slots, we can have a one-to-one conversation about how to direct your career or how to work on a client that you just can't figure out or how to even help with managing an agency that you're working with in-house.

So yeah, just book a time, go to themarketinganu.com to get more on that, to be able to book the some time with me. So yeah, I hope you have enjoyed the show, and I look forward to bringing you more PPC f-ups and Triumphs next week. Bye.