Daniel Romano on Strategies for Online Visibility and Engagement

Daniel Romano, Co-Founder & CEO, Good Moose

Can you share a bit about your business and how it has embraced the digital landscape for growth and visibility?

We specialize in helping brands grow and scale in a sustainable way through advertising across all media channels. The evolution in terms of tools, channels and targeting capabilities have helped us to accelerate growth and achieve massive scale with relatively small teams.

What specific strategies have you employed to enhance your online presence and engage with your target audience?

We have always focused on delivering excellent service and outcomes to our clients. I strongly believe that when the focus is on the quantity of clients, it is very hard to keep up with the quality of the work. We built our business to instead focus on the quality of the clients that we work with, and most importantly on engaging with the ones that we know that we can help to substantially grow and achieve their business goals.This strategy has allowed us to be incredibly successful with our partnerships, but it also allows us to enjoy the work we do and be somewhat picky of the types of businesses we work with. The result of working like this is an extremely strong retention rate, both with our clients and with our own employee headcount.

Can you provide an example of a digital campaign or initiative that significantly boosted your business’s visibility or customer engagement?

We worked with Sol de Janeiro and Snapchat to launch the brand's first AR Lens in the market last year. The lens played into consumers' use of the channel and drove high engagement (1.75x higher than the average camera playtime and 3.5x higher save rates compared to AR Beauty Benchmarks) and ad recall (up 63%). The retargetable pool it built for us on the platform also allowed us to impact and guide the consumer journey, ultimately leading to greater efficiency and scalability from Snap overall.

The digital world is constantly evolving. What challenges have you faced in maintaining an active and effective online presence, and how have you overcome them?

There is definitely more noise out there and the way platforms grow, reach and gain exposure has radically changed over the last years. A few years ago, good content could reach big audiences and generate traction, ultimately growing online presence without too many friction points along the road. Now, most of the high impact platforms limit a lot of organic reach, only allowing brands to scale if they pay. This has accelerated channel diversification companies to diversify their channels. While continuing to grow their organic presence is incredibly important, it requires more content, more strategy and more effort to adapt things per channel.  During the last 3 years we have been proactively helping our clients to diversify out of the core channels to hedge their risk.

What tools or platforms have you found most effective for building your online presence and engaging with your audience?

It really depends on the type of content and objectives. For us, since we are a growth agency, the biggest platform where it makes sense for us to share some of our wins and success stories is Linkedin, given that most of our potential prospects or current clients spend a large amount of time there. Having said that, those audiences are usually less engaged or less vocal than audiences in more casual social platforms such as Meta or TikTok.

How do you measure the success of your digital strategies, and what key performance indicators do you focus on?

At the end of the day all of our efforts need to be tight to business results. Long gone are the days where companies celebrate impressions or clicks. When we evaluate our efforts, we always think in terms of objectives, new opportunities that we generate and eventually conversions. In addition, there might be some instances where our efforts could be tailored to a subset of objectives, such as recruiting the right talent  or client retention. In these cases, it is quite simple to measure success, but more often than not, we find ourselves looking at those original objectives set out by the client and figuring out how our work impacted their bottom line.

The digital landscape is always changing. How do you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies, and how do you decide which ones to adopt?

It’s hard to know what works until you try it at least once.  When it comes to deciding if a platform or technology is a good fit for our agency and our clients, we are very open-minded in our approach to testing.  In the instances where we may not know of a new trend or technology, we keep ourselves up-to-date through our peers of like-minded marketers, as well as well qualified newsletters, podcasts and online publications that cover the spaces we focus on. We’re all in this together and knowledge is power, so where we can find knowledge, we seek it out!

What advice would you give to businesses that are just starting to establish their online presence and engage with customers digitally?

It’s a marathon not a sprint. For us it is very important to be clear on our values and core priorities on everything that we do and have clear intentions, knowing that we will be held accountable for that by our team members as well as clients. So we really try to take the time to identify what is important for us, and what really makes you unique to ensure that there is a real alignment between the perception that we create among ourselves and the reality of what we deliver.