Rapid Fire 30-in-30: Online Advertising with Jake Malishkevich (a skucon 2018 Production)

At skucon in Las Vegas, our Chief Content Officer, Bobby Lehew, conducted a few back-to-back, rapid-fire Q&A’s on the subject of how to use digital tools to drive sales. We called it “Rapid Fire, 30-in-30” and featured 30 questions (in total) posed to industry experts. It was a fast-paced and informative session intended to provide high impact answers in a very short amount of time. We have split up the video recording from the session into two separate installments, and in this session, Bobby sits down with Jake Malishkevich of Promodealer and talks about how to drive sales through click campaigns, social media advertising, and more.

In 2006, Jake Malishkevich joined Axiz Group. Under the guidance of the company owner, Joel Gross, he learned all about the promotional products industry. After realizing the industry was veering online, Jake convinced Joel to give him a small investment to start what we now know as Promodealer. Jake borrowed a book on HTML coding from a friend and brought in $10,000 on the first day the website was live. Within two years, Promodealer was generating over $5,000,000. In 2008, he graduated from DePaul with a degree in Marketing. In the past 11 years, Promodealer has grown from 1 employee to 15 and caters to clients such as Jack Links, Warner Bros, MillerCoors, Melia Hotels International, Fidelity Investments, the Super Bowl Hosting Committee, 5 Hour Energy, and many many more.

In this session, we discuss topics such as:

• Is there a suggested percentage of revenue or profit businesses should use to determine how much to spend? Is there such a magic metric?

• How ad spending changed and where it's wisest to make investments now.

• Which should a promotional products distributor consider: Adwords? Facebook? LinkedIn? Instagram?

• Answering the objection that "AdWords leads to simple transactional orders with clients who don’t care about relationships."

• Which KPI’s should a distributor focus on when reviewing advertising spend? What are the 3 or 4 most important metrics?

• Focusing on the customer journey first.

• The first step a distributor should take to begin to invest in online advertising.

Thanks to Jake for sharing his wisdom with the commonsku community.