Sometimes companies and their owners try to find the universal recipe of creating a successful marketing strategy. But all businesses are different like people are and need to find their own approach. We think Nadav Dakner's insight can help to put your marketing strategy in the right order and to create your corporate recipe of success.
Who is Nadav Dakner?
Nadav Dakner is a Founder & CEO of InboundJunction, an Israeli-based content marketing company. This company helps others to boost their online visibility through PR, SEO, and Social Media. Nadav always implements the newest trends and advances in SEO and his expertise is truly invaluable and outstanding.
General Questions
Question: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your career. How did you start and where are you now as a marketing expert?
When I got out of the army, I knew I wanted to open my own business and the idea of having an online business was very appealing to me because the internet never sleeps. For me, that meant that my business will work 24/7.
I started out as a poker player and I also studied psychology at an Israeli university. At the same time, I started looking into Affiliate Marketing and SEO and owned a business with my cousin. As time passed, the business grew and grew so I had to quit Poker and invest less time into my studies.
Our knowledge, reputation, and clientele grew over the course of a decade to a point where our agency is considered to be a top-notch player in Israel and the entire world in our field of expertise - PR, SEO, content marketing, reputation management, and social growth.
Nowadays we work with leading brands and startups from all across the world and we love what we do.
Question: What are the most favorite and the most challenging aspects of your job? Explain why.
Our agency has between 60 to 80 active clients and campaigns every month.
That means I have to stay on top of most of these campaigns and think of each and every company campaign, as well as manage my own company, employees, and finances.
Thankfully my team is absolutely amazing so it works!
Question: What do you consider to be your biggest achievement and your biggest failure?
My biggest achievement is definitely creating and ascertaining InboundJunction.com as the top and most successful marketing agency (in our niche) in Israel, and possibly even amongst the top 3 in the world. This took almost 10 years to achieve, a lot of very hard work, and sleepless nights. We have around 30 employees and 8 digits ARR.
My biggest failure was another business we’ve opened with other partners. We capitalized on a great business trend and grew a separate company very quickly, but we did it wrong so eventually, it caved in on us. Our idea was great, but we had the wrong partners for it as we did not get along. Things escalated very quickly on both a personal and business level and even though the company was showing growth and growing revenues we couldn’t bridge our differences. I consider it a failure that’s very hard to learn from because there were no signs on the wall. I guess that in business, like relationships - sometimes you just need to start a “get married” and problems will start to surface even though it’s all sunshine and roses in the beginning.
Question: What 3 elements do you consider necessary for a marketing specialist? How exactly can these qualities assist in the way to success?
Creativity/Innovativeness, execution, and consistency.
Creativity and innovativeness - being able to come up with fresh ideas that will make an impact that your competitors aren’t doing. And then, being able to take your ideas and thoughts into practical steps and formulate
Execution - Putting all of these ideas and thoughts into action and executing them relentlessly to the best of your ability.
Consistency - Staying true to your strategy and execute it long-term without fail. Almost nothing works instantly, growing a brand takes time and effort.
Nadav Dakners' team
Question: Do you have an everyday ritual that helped you achieve success? What is it?
I promised myself a couple of years ago that every day I’ll do at least one thing that makes my business better, one thing to make me smarter or healthier, and one thing that’ll make the world better. Corny, I know.
Question: How do you distract yourself from stress?
I like to take care of myself. For starters, I try to work out almost every day to keep my physique in check and I also have a really good diet of real food. On top of that, I try to get a lot of sleep.
Question: What motivates you and inspires you to work harder?
For me, it’s the building of our company and assets. I like growing our team and revenues and perfecting our service to help many companies grow. It’s the feedback our clients give us that makes us smile and work harder to keep them happy.
Question: How do you keep up with the latest marketing trends? Can you suggest any useful methods or sources?
We have a lot of clients in many different niches who are enrolled on very different types of campaigns so we’re always super dynamic. Our team is diverse and we have expertise across the board when it comes to marketing. We learn something new every day and perfect the things we already know, in terms of execution.
Question: Is the COVID-19 pandemic a threat or an opportunity for your work?
Thankfully in our line of business, it’s an opportunity. That’s because more and more businesses swift their focus and efforts online, which is where our agency comes into the picture.
Marketing questions
Question: Which marketing channels are the most relevant to promote a new product as of today?
There’s no one answer that fits all scenarios. It really depends on the product niche (cybersecurity? Blockchain? lifestyle?), the audience (geolocation, age group, B2B? B2C?), and a multitude of other factors.
One thing that I see clear across the board is for a company to be truly successful they have to crack both the paid acquisition (PPC/media buying) and the organic growth (SEO, PR, content marketing, blog, and social awareness)
Question: How do you determine whether a marketing strategy has been successful or not?
To determine the effectiveness of a marketing strategy you first have to lay out a comprehensive plan with KPIs. The only way to truly measure your marketing’s impact is by hitting your goals, whether they are actually quantifiable (growth, leads acquisition) or more qualitative (brand growth, general awareness, trends). It all starts with blueprints.
Question: Describe your most successful marketing campaign.
While I’m not able to share specifics, we have recently started to invest in a few companies and team up with them to explode their online brand.
In one company, we were able to rapidly grow and position our startup (alongside other partners, and the team) as the leader and top player of the niche we operate in. We’ve more than x100 our MRR, appeared in all the important media outlets, and dominate a large chuck of the organic rankings, and that’s only after a year of work.
Question: Has any of your marketing activities failed? If so, what went wrong and what would you do differently next time?
This sounds weird but we never really “fail”. This is because our model is very very unique. We don’t work on a “classic” retainer but rather guarantee a certain amount of deliverables so our clients are always happy. It actually never happened that we didn’t finish a campaign and failed to deliver.
Special questions
Question: Who is your personal hero?
Arnold Schwarzenegger 🙂
Why? Consider that he was a young cashless foreigner who migrated to a whole new country in which he didn’t know anyone. Fast forward a few decades he was the governor of the most important state in the US (and in some ways one of the most important people there), a very successful businessman (founded a lot of businesses), became a famous movie star, and of course, was Mr. Olympia 7 times. How crazy is that?
Question: If you could immediately acquire one new skill, what would it be and why?
Deep analytics and technical analysis. While I’m pretty good with overall macro and micro (finances included), I was never really a “deep numbers man”. Reading sophisticated graphs, financial reports, and analyzing deep analytics insight is not something I consider myself an expert in.
