Network Of Opportunity – Feature Profile: Daniel Rudy

Network Of Opportunity is a unique forum in which we pose a series of concise questions to a wide variety of successful business leaders, politicians and artists, who share their unfiltered insight into the past – present and future of the world.

 

Daniel Rudy
Daniel Rudy, Co-Founder, Technology Director, Leading Edge Digital

Dan’s focus is on digital marketing such as achieving high Google rankings, blogging, animated banner ads and lead generation, optimization and verification.

Additionally, Dan employs digital techniques as a successful entrepreneur with ownership interests in global personal care businesses. He is also a member of American Business Associates business development council.

 

 

1)            Most gratifying business achievement

John Wanamaker, Marketer
The Great 19th & Early 20th Century Marketer, John Wanamaker

Being able to verify to clients that our digital marketing is actually bringing business to them with a very high ROI (return on investment), is my most gratifying business achievement.  Although this sounds easy, optimizing ad spend has be-deviled marketers since the 19th Century days of the great retailer, John Wanamaker who famously lamented “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”  These days, we can use technology to know and eliminate Wanamaker’s wasteful half, while optimizing the fruitful half.

We know that the money from SME businesses is like blood and we treat it as such.  The added business we bring could be needed for a child’s college education, paying an entrepreneur’s mortgage or even putting food on the table.  That’s a responsibility we don’t take lightly and we do everything in our power to ensure that we are spending our valued clients’ funds in an optimal manner.

 

2)            How do you approach change?

Technology and its impact on marketing is coming at us at an ever-increasing rate.  Being an engineer, I relish these advances since they allow us to be more efficient.  Changes provide us with an advantage since we are early adopters.  To stay ahead of the curve, we frequently study the vast amount of Google and other digital material.  Also, Twitter is a great way of keeping up with technology.  Basically, you follow those whose advice you value, enabling real-time and continuous learning.

 

3)            Major Business Goal

Value Proposition – Our major business goal has been to offer Fortune 500 level digital marketing services to local and national SME Businesses.  We feel that we deliver on that promise and even Google recently recognized that by awarding us their coveted Google Partner Badge.  Furthermore, we receive a lot of referrals via websites that we have built.  We try to make each site artistically unique and high performing, especially on Mobile devices.

Revenue – Double our revenue in two years.

 

4)            Belief About Networking

We humans are very social creatures.  We need to interact, learn from, and when appropriate, teach and help others.  In business, that’s called Networking.  ABA is our primary networking resource and it’s proven its worth to the point where we’ve joined two ABA groups.

Networking actually dovetails very nicely with digital marketing.  When you meet people, they already know your name or company from your activity on the web.  Also, business people are more likely to engage with your online posts if they know you, the person.  In business parlance, Networking and Digital are synergistic.

 

5)            What technology do you love for yourself, for humanity and what tech do you not like?

Smart Phone, Tablet, Desktop
What Device Will Come Next?

Technology I Love For Myself – As I was saying earlier, I love lead tracking since it enables much more efficient marketing.  These days you can account for leads such as Phone Calls, Form Fills/Emails, E-commerce Purchase and the latest, and most amazing “In Store Visits”.  But just as key, the lead sources can be traced back to organic search (SEO), Paid Search, Social Media Marketing, Email etc. and the ROI for each calculated.  The wasteful channels and ads are scaled back or eliminated and the over-performing ones are increased.  In May 2016, we set a personal record of 550 verified leads to a single local client via SEO & Sponsored Search.  Last month, we topped that at 599 leads.

What I Love For Humanity – GE Food Technology, also known as GMO or genetically modified organisms.  Although widely misunderstood and even hated, in the past 20 years, this technology has helped to lower the number of people going to bed hungry from 18% to 12%.  In other words, hundreds of millions of lives are saved by a technology, whose safety has been more researched and verified (over 1,800 peer reviewed papers), perhaps more than any other technology in history.

Technology That I Fear – I’m with Prof. Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk on this one.  If artificial intelligence ever becomes smarter than humans, there’s no guarantee that this relationship will continue to be benevolent.  Even some of our Leading Edge Digital marketing incorporates algorithms that optimize for leads, but we, the human controllers, don’t know exactly how the algorithm thinks, nor do we need to.  It’s awesome, but also scary.

6)            Position at Leading Edge Digital – Co Founder, Technology Director.

I tend to focus on digital marketing such as achieving high google rankings, blogging, animated banner ads and lead verification.

7)            Describe yourself in one word.

Indefatigable.