Thriving In The Digital Age: Carson Hoffman and Ad Marketing

Carson Hoffman, CEO and founder of Kingsman Marketing, discusses the challenges and strategies in digital marketing. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the customer and tailoring marketing messages to their needs and desires. He also highlights the significance of building a personal brand and creating a sense of community through organic social media content. Carson predicts that the future of marketing will involve the use of AI, but authenticity and personalization will remain crucial for connecting with customers.

Transcript

Joe Crist (00:00.992)
Hey everyone and welcome to another exciting episode of Thriving in the Digital Age. Joining me today is Carson Hoffman. He's a 22 year old CEO and founder of Kingsman Marketing, your secret service ad agency. Carson, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm sure the audience would love to know more about you. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and what Kingsman Marketing does?

Carson Hoffman (00:21.214)
Yeah, absolutely. First off, thank you, Joe, for having me on today. I'm really glad to be here. So I actually started Kingsman Marketing my junior year of college when I was 20 years old. Right before I went back to school for my junior year, I decided that I didn't want to work for anybody else. Everybody else was

getting internships or working other jobs and I just knew that that wasn't for me. So what I did was did a bunch of research that summer and kind of figured, all right, like I'm going to do something in marketing because that was my major. And I decided to do Google ads as a start. So I did Google ads after I started my agency for about six months or so. And then once those six months were up, I kind of realized at the beginning,

you know, I'm not sure if I really liked doing the Google ads part as much, the reporting, the analytics and the research part wasn't as much my skillset. So what I did from then was kind of take two weeks off and was like, all right, what can I do that fits my skillset in marketing and advertising? you know, that kind of coal lines and everything would be a little bit more enjoyable for me. and that's when I came across marketing strategy and creative advertising.

So then after those two weeks and kind of figuring that out, dove into doing that more and then kind of rebranded the agency to what you know now as Kingsman Marketing. And we from there have kind of grown into a full service advertising agency. So we offer paid search like Google, we offer paid social, you know, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.

LinkedIn, stuff like that for creative and strategic advertising that produces results for businesses. The main kind of people that we have figured to work with right now has been e -commerce companies. It kind of varies across niches. So we've done work with outdoor brands. We've done work with lawn and landscaping companies.

Carson Hoffman (02:35.71)
lawyers and real estate agents. And I know those aren't in the e -commerce space, but they were brands that we worked with at the beginning to kind of get our feet under us. Another e -commerce brands that we work with are like clothing and apparel. So yeah.

Joe Crist (02:56.32)
Very interesting. So yeah, you do touch a lot of industry side.

Carson Hoffman (02:59.742)
Yeah, yeah, we've we've done a good job of kind of diversifying the target audiences that we work with. I would say our primary clients lie in e -commerce mainly a lot of the product businesses and e -commerce. You know, the reason we we kind of focus a little bit more on outdoors brands is that's one of my hobbies is just being outdoors and hunting, fishing, going on hikes, biking.

snowboarding and skiing is a big one too. So I kind of base it off of the interests that I have and it makes it fun to work with those types of clients. But it's also one of those things where we're able to work with a bunch of different niches because we've had experience in those niches.

Joe Crist (03:45.376)
Yeah, and I imagine too, because you actually do have that knowledge of how their customers think, right? It probably makes it a lot easier for you to really tell your approach. Be like, hey, I'm also your customer. Like, this is the stuff I care about, and this is also what other people really care about.

Carson Hoffman (04:00.99)
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's another important thing of marketing is, you know, a lot of marketing comes down to people try to market and advertise all of these different features and, you know, more about themselves than the customer. And that's such a big issue today, which is why I originally got into advertising and marketing in addition to like not wanting to work for somebody else was I just saw this huge gap in the industry of people advertising and marketing.

the brand and themselves more than what they can do for their customer and their clients. And, you know, being able to think like a customer and a client is critical to be able to be successful in marketing. It's one of those things where psychology is such a big part of marketing that I think doesn't get talked about enough and it doesn't get utilized enough either. And I think the more we can kind of transition our brains into thinking like clients and customers in

tailoring that in our marketing and advertising, the more successful brands are going to be and the more success they're going to have in the long run.

Joe Crist (05:10.624)
makes absolute sense. So obviously you have a really interesting perspective of this, right? It's like we understand the actual psychology aspect, also you have the perspective of a customer. So what challenges do you actually see in the industries you serve when it comes to market?

Carson Hoffman (05:26.91)
Yeah, the biggest challenges that I have seen are there's a few. I mean, the first one that's just glaring everybody in the face is being able to get the attention of viewers and customers and clients on social media and then being able to keep that attention and turn it into sales or future clients and leads and stuff like that. A lot of what you see nowadays is all of this

you know, surface level marketing and this really diluted and boring stuff on content on social media. And it doesn't get attention because it doesn't talk to customers. It talks about themselves. A great kind of analogy that I like to use is or saying that I like to use is features tell benefits sell. You know, and there's a lot of other a lot more psychology that goes into like effective marketing and advertising.

But when you talk about yourself and the features of what you offer, you're not speaking to the customer and what they can kind of envision themselves benefiting from what you offer. So let's say you were, let's say you're a cleaning product. Let's use Dude Wipes, for example. They've done a great job of this. They don't sell, you know, baby wipes or cleaning wipes. They sell a clean bottom.

You know, it's such a different sales tactic and marketing tactic to be able to use the benefits of what you offer and how you can help your customers either reach their goals and achieve their dreams, solve their problems, and how you can raise their status. And those are like three of the biggest ways that you can get people to be, have an affinity for your brand really. You know, the more you can kind of touch on those,

three to four things of how you're helping somebody, the more people are gonna buy into what you have to sell them and the more willing they're gonna be able to buy. And I think that is one of the biggest challenges brands face is being able to convey that message in the right way and the right context on the right platform and with right formatting for each platform. Because a big thing too when people go, when businesses go about advertising is they don't format

Carson Hoffman (07:54.718)
and correctly articulate their ads on each platform. Because when you think about it, when you go to LinkedIn, you're in a business mindset. You're not in a buying mindset because that's more so on Instagram. Instagram people go to consume media and kind of get news updates and stuff like that. And Facebook's fairly similar. There's mostly the discrepancy there is just like the age range and the target audiences for those platforms. And then when you're on TikTok, you're consuming

more so of just brainless content. You want to be entertained. You want to have a laugh. You want something to just make you feel good for that dopamine rush. And that's another big gap that I see in the industry is because a lot of people don't tailor their advertisements to different platforms. And that's kind of why we are here is to close both of those gaps and serve as that agency that can provide the right advertisements in the right place in the right context.

Joe Crist (08:54.88)
You know, you brought up something that I certainly see myself, certainly I've done myself, right? It's repurposing content or different platforms, right? But not actually changing the messaging, right? It's I do it myself. I know it's a very lazy approach sometimes. But yeah, that is a good point though, right? Where it's obviously if it's LinkedIn, it's very business and LinkedIn is really king when it comes to B2B selling. But if you're trying to make entertaining content,

Carson Hoffman (09:05.245)
Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Crist (09:24.384)
there were TikTok you really can't share the same message and that is something really really important that a lot of people do miss because obviously especially if you're a startup and you don't have a lot of manpower definitely don't have a lot of time you know you try to find shortcuts but really that does sound detrimental.

Carson Hoffman (09:40.702)
Yeah. And it absolutely is too. You know, the biggest thing in terms of repurposing that content and using it on other platforms is changing not only just the creative and the formatting of it, but also the copy you're using and the call to actions you're using. Because when you're using LinkedIn, the call to action is going to be different or it should be different than when you're on TikTok. Because if you're on LinkedIn, you'd rather somebody go check out your profile and schedule a call with you.

to learn more, or if you're on TikTok, maybe you want them to go buy a product or use TikTok shop. So there's, there's different call to actions that need to be used in different contexts, with different formats on different platforms for different people. And there's a lot of moving parts in marketing and advertising that I think people don't take into account. And there's so many little things that it's not a hack to use it. It's just context is king. And that applies when you're

talking to people like we're doing now. That applies when you have a photo on Instagram or a video on TikTok. And really being able to advertise in the context that you're in is huge. And I think that is like another thing that people have to be more aware of, especially as we're in this attention -based economy, is because there is no way you're gonna be able to get somebody's attention on TikTok for a post that's meant for LinkedIn. It just doesn't happen.

Joe Crist (11:08.16)
Imagine too, when people are also on that platform, they're in a different mindset as well. Right. Yeah. If you, I am, if you saw a very like long clip on Tik TOK talking about something that's like not terribly interesting and you're just like, okay, whatever. And you just keep moving, right? You don't really retain it. But if it's like you go in there like the LinkedIn, you're like, okay, well, this is kind of cool. And I can read this because I'm just, I'm surfing LinkedIn right now. I'm looking at it. I have to like, okay, that is actually kind of interesting. I can read that because I'm already in the mindset saying, Hey,

Carson Hoffman (11:11.358)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Joe Crist (11:39.232)
business focus today or I'm business focused like in these next few moments where I'm able to retain this because I'm going to already come in with the idea of like I'm looking for either someone to help me because there are people out there or I'm just surfing and I don't know if I'm actually looking for any help but I'm already my brain is already adjusted to now like hey this is more business based as opposed to I'm trying to look at something funny.

Carson Hoffman (12:02.512)
Yeah, a hundred percent. And that's something that everybody has to keep in mind too. And another big thing that has kind of changed in the last five years in terms of marketing and advertising on social platforms is TikTok's introduction of interest led content distribution. So before TikTok, everything on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, whatever was mostly, it was who you followed.

it was, you know, relevancy content distributed to, you know, the, the user of who they follow. So if you're going on YouTube or Instagram, it's going to be, you know, if you follow sports accounts, it's going to be mostly, ESPN and sports centered and you know, accounts like that. But now with the introduction of TikTok, a lot of these social platforms are moving into interest led graphs for the distribution of the content.

And so being able to now it's you're you're able to get your message to more people more easily if you do it right. So the biggest thing in advertising and marketing with this is addressing people's problems and needs when you have a problem to solve for them and also directly targeting who you want to target. So if you're on if you're making a TikTok video now and you address single moms in Missouri,

for childcare, that's going to be distributed more to that audience. And the better the content is, the more it's going to get pushed to that audience. And the other thing, too, that comes with back to repurposing content is seeing how those ads or organic posts perform and then creating different posts and ads on top of that to be able to expand your reach and your target audience for effectiveness. And I think that is something that

a lot of brands and businesses have not realized yet is this more attention led or interest led distribution of content and how that can help advertising. So let's say that you put out a post for your clothing company and it was a video that was kind of showcasing who you are, what you're about and why you do what you do and the message behind your clothing. And let's say it did really well. What you could do then is kind of go off

Carson Hoffman (14:31.358)
on tangents about each part, like who you are and where you're from, why the brand is what it is, and give more detailed introductions. And then you can also run an ad from that video and expand your reach to a broader sense of people because you already know it's done well. And that's kind of like the strategic organic content as paid advertising. And that's something that we've kind of focused on now as well. The more we grow and the more we work with and have these conversations with people in the industry,

is like, okay, let's create 10 pieces of content for this brand and we're going to distribute them across these 10 days. This is what we're going to have for the post. And then depending on what does well, we'll use that as our next advertisement and create different forms of it because it's already been social proof. We already know it's going to do well and we already know that it's going to reach the right people. And I think in advertising now, that should be a lot of people's approach is grinding on social and seeing what works.

and running what works as ads.

Joe Crist (15:34.016)
No, I think it's a great idea. You know, on the topic of like solutioning, right? So one of the, a lot of what I'm hearing does make a ton of sense, but for those who are obviously starting or struggling with their marketing, like what's a good approach for them to really just start with, right? Cause I mean, everybody's always asking, he's like, what do I do first? Right? Cause

Carson Hoffman (15:56.51)
Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Crist (15:58.112)
If you don't know marketing, you don't know marketing and that's fine, but obviously there's answers out there. So what would you tell the audience? Like if they were starting from zero, what first steps should we take?

Carson Hoffman (16:11.006)
Yeah, that's a great question because it's a lot of things. It's something that everyone can relate to at one point in their life if they're starting a business. And the number one piece of advice I would have is to get on organic social across the board and put out as much content as you can across all these platforms and see what works and what sticks. You're gonna learn a lot more about

not only the content that works, but also the people that you are resonating with. You know, the comment section is something that's greatly overlooked in terms of figuring out who you want to target and who you are targeting. It's also going to give you more content ideas because people are going to tell you what they like, don't like or want to hear or not hear. Organic social is also the easiest way to

make it nowadays in terms of growing your business and having having to get traction. Best part about it is it's free. The only thing it's going to cost you is your time and effort. And if you don't want to put in any money other than just using your phone right in front of you, you don't have to. You know, there's a bunch of free apps nowadays that you can go on and edit like CapCut. You can use Canva for posts like

There's so many different ways to go about social media marketing and a content aspect of organic social, and it's free. Like there's no reason not to be putting out content on social media every single day. It's free and it's the easiest way to get noticed.

Joe Crist (17:47.904)
Yeah, it brings up a really interesting thing too. So you mentioned before the attention economy, right? Love that phrase by the way.

Carson Hoffman (17:54.59)
Thank you.

Joe Crist (17:56.768)
We really do imagine that game has changed too with how digitized the entire world has gotten. Obviously, back in the day, it was like, hey, what's your SEO like? What are you doing? What's your ranking on Google? But with AI really just producing so much content out there, it really did drown out a lot of businesses. So I really do understand that having social media and really building a brand and a very one to many, but it does feel very one to one sometimes through content creation.

whether it's through Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or what have you, TikTok, right? And correct me if I'm wrong, people do feel more connected to the businesses that way.

Carson Hoffman (18:39.006)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a way for them to engage with the brand and really get to feel like they're a part of a community. You know, one of the going back to marketing psychology in such a big part of humans existence is being a part of a community and a tribe and having that kind of collectiveness to reach towards a certain goal. Or in this sense, like being a part of a community to feel like you're a bar, you're a part of a certain group of status. Like, you know, it's

It's people who wear Louis Vuitton who like the feeling of having higher status. They like to feel like they're a part of that community. You know, same goes with like a Rolex status or, you know, Rolls Royce. But then you also have people who are joining different statuses in terms of baby products. Like they're joining the status of being parents. So they want brands that are going to make them look good as parents. There's a bunch of different ways to go about.

being a part of a community and building your brand online. And again, organic social is the best way to do it.

Joe Crist (19:43.072)
wise words indeed. The one thing too I've noticed people and especially the younger community not folks like me but it's getting out there and actually really showing your personality as well right and then it makes you much more relatable right people I can't remember who told me this but people don't buy from companies they buy from people right and actually having your personal brand really connected to your company's brand really does shine through.

There's a lot of big names out there that I can name them but I can't name the companies they own. But I know if they have a company it's a good product because they're good. They care and their personal brand carries so much weight that really does increase their authority.

Carson Hoffman (20:28.286)
Yeah, a hundred percent. And having a personal brand for, you know, if you're the CEO of your company or the founder owner, whatever, you know, your highest title is in the company, having a personal brand to couple with your business is huge. I mean, that is why I started posting on LinkedIn.

on January 1st of this year was because I knew that in order to effectively grow the company and eventually get people coming to us I had to be the one to put out content to get myself noticed to be able to get the company noticed and the other thing that I and I saw this from I believe Jimmy Kim from Sanlain is he was talking about You know his personal brand on LinkedIn and how vital it is nowadays to not just have

the founder and CEO and the top guy or the top girl at the company have a personal brand, but also the employees underneath because that's more people that you're getting to have a reputation who will then want to come to your company. So it's just increasing the personal brands of everybody that works for the business to be able to benefit the business and benefit each other. And I think that also goes back to creating a community within your own company culture and being able to use

everybody effectively to get on these social platforms and build the brand and provide free value to people. That's one of the other big things nowadays is just providing free value.

Joe Crist (21:58.528)
Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. So that brings up a really interesting question too now. So as I mentioned before, right, it was, you know, maybe five, 10 years ago, it was really just focused on like SEO and bringing people to the websites and really gaining that. And now it's really, it's personal brand. So as we progress, right in the digital age and technology gets more sophisticated and we can do a lot more things, how do you see marketing in the future when it comes like advertisements and really doing any of this?

Carson Hoffman (22:26.526)
Yeah, that's a great question because I actually got asked this yesterday and my answer is kind of funny because a lot of the talk now is around AI and where AI is going to be and not being able to trust ads or marketing from brands because you won't know if it's real. I think that is going to be a way that the marketing industry progresses towards is using AI and marketing more.

But the other problem that's faced with that is not knowing if a brand is legitimately advertising this product or this person. Something I do love that Metta has done to kind of cope with that is the necessary disclosure of using AI in an advertisement or not. And that's been huge for people to kind of trust ads more.

if they see that there is AI used. I also think a lot of brands are going to need to move towards a personal brand on social media for not just themselves, but for the company like we just talked about. I think it gives you more of a personal feel from top to bottom, but also different people in the company have different messages and different personalities.

So when, you know, let's say I am looking at a CEO, the CEO of Nike right now, and I'm not really, you know, I don't really resonate with his messages as much as I do the CMO. You know, those, if both of them have brands, I'm still going to like Nike because I like the CMO and I like what he has to say. I think that is where marketing is going to need to shift to in order to gain more trust from people.

and also be able to increase the validity and the social proofing credibility of the consumers in the consumers minds of businesses.

Joe Crist (24:32.352)
That's a really good point where it's.

you really do have to try harder to connect because there is a lot of noise. And that's the unfortunate fact of how much technology we're actually leveraging to create content is the amount of noise that people actually have to get like sift through in order to find that product. But really it's harder for the companies, right? Because they have to really tailor their messaging and they can't really take shortcuts, you know, where it's, it's like, Hey, we'll just use AI to generate this. It's like, well, AI will help you.

Carson Hoffman (24:59.774)
Yeah.

Joe Crist (25:05.472)
but it's not gonna solve your problems. You have to really define your process and understand really what you're trying to do here. And then use AI to leverage it as opposed to having this AI just fix it for you. And I do see a lot of companies getting very dependent on that where they're saying, we have this AI tool, we'll just use it. And then as a result, because they don't have a well -defined process, what they're putting out doesn't reach anybody.

Carson Hoffman (25:15.902)
100%.

Carson Hoffman (25:29.054)
Yeah. Well, and going off of that too, you brought up a great point is, you know, you can't just use AI now to do everything for you in terms of like putting out marketing and advertising because people know when it's not a real person. They know the language. They know, you know, the formatting. Like there's, there is a human intuition behind knowing marketing or knowing what people are saying versus what a robot's saying.

and I think right now, especially being able to differentiate that as a brand and maybe using AI to help you is something that brands should, I encourage them to do and explore because it helps, you know, with the creative process or with strategic processes and stuff like that. But being able to edit it and make it feel human is a vital aspect in order to gain the trust of people and also sound like a real human.

Joe Crist (26:23.232)
It's interesting you say that trying to make it sound human. So I've been doing a lot of research myself into this lately. So the two components that actually do make AI sound human or humanize AI, it's perplexity and versiness, right? Human beings do not talk like AI. Typically when AI generates something, it's very perfect, right? It's a well -written argument and everything is evenly done. But with human beings, when we actually speak, we may not realize this.

A lot of our ideas actually just put together and then we have fluff and then the ideas come together and then we have fluff. Right. And that's how you can tell a human is actually writing it. Right. And there's plenty of tools out there that I can use myself that I actually use to detect AI to see, you know, is this, is this AI generated content? You know, and if, if I'm sending out content that looks like it's just written by a machine and it doesn't actually really connect on a emotional level to somebody, then I know it's really not going to make the impact I want.

Carson Hoffman (27:14.018)
Yeah.

Carson Hoffman (27:21.438)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's funny too that you bring that up. So earlier in, I believe February of this year, I did a little bit of my own experiment on LinkedIn. So I, a couple of times, what I would do is I would put out a post that I wrote by myself, you know, with my own brain, and then I'd write one with AI to compare and see how things were doing.

And I'll tell you this, the ones that I would write on my own would not only get more impressions and engagement, they'd get more likes and they'd get more people to talk to me through DM. But the ones that were written with AI, less reach, less engagement, less people talking about them. And it's crazy because it just shows how intuitive humans are and how good they are at reading

you know, reading the room and reading what they're what they're consuming.

Joe Crist (28:19.968)
really good point especially as a new business when you're really trying to reach people though it may seem like a convenient shortcut it really is hurting you in the end.

Carson Hoffman (28:28.798)
Yeah. Yeah. And it doesn't, the problem with AI too is it, it feels like it's talking to you and not with you. Like it feels less like a conversation with somebody. and it doesn't, it lacks the human aspect of the voice and the tone and being able to kind of hear it in your head when you're reading it. but the other thing too is it doesn't feel authentic. I think there's something about that, that people can kind of pick up on in content and marketing.

is it lacks authenticity. And that's something that people really respond to in marketing and advertising is the authenticity aspect of the brand or the person behind it and the product. Authenticity is just what gets people to connect and feel like they're a part of that community.

Joe Crist (29:18.144)
That's an amazing point and that is the goal, right, is to connect. I imagine people are, because they're so tired of it at this point, right, because it's like, you can tell. And people really, when they see that, it's an abnormality now. It's like, this is a real person and I can interact with this and I want to interact with it now and I don't want to interact with machines because machines don't feel the way we feel.

Carson Hoffman (29:41.342)
Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, kind of going off of that is people, people like to feel like they're being talked to, not just talk that or like they're, you know, reading something that does nothing to do with them. We like the personalization. We like the one to one feeling. And there's kind of this aspect that of marketing that kind of goes into this of, again, back to psychology.

people want to feel special. They want to feel like you're just speaking to them. And the more you can do that through your marketing, the more success you're going to have. But with AI, it's a little bit harder to personalize it because it doesn't feel as genuine and as authentic.

Joe Crist (30:31.104)
So Carson, we are reaching time and I did want to ask you something. I'm sure the audience would love to hear this too. You clearly know a lot when it comes to marketing space and technology and what the future looks like. But if there's anything you could tell the audience, right? And any parting advice, what would you like us to know?

Carson Hoffman (30:50.75)
I would say that if you are scared to start

Don't be, because it's way worse in your head than it is in reality. And speaking from experience, you will get much more support than you will hate. And going off of that, if you're going to start from zero and start marketing and start advertising, start on organic social. Pick one platform that you want to absolutely crush.

and then post on the other ones if you don't have the time and just keep it a little bit, you can keep it similar but try to change it up a little bit but really just attack organic social. There's no excuse not to because it's free, it's only going to take up your time and your effort and if you're starting from zero those are the only things that you really have to give.

Joe Crist (31:46.752)
said absolutely well said. Carson thank you so much for joining us today and to the audience out there. We really hope you appreciate this show. Again Carson Hoffman he is the CEO and founder of Kingsman Marketing.

Love the show, I learned a lot myself. I feel a little more competent and capable of my marketing approach now. I hope those out there do as well.

Joe Crist (32:14.368)
those listening to our show, join us next week for another very exciting episode of Thriving the Digital Age. Thank you so much for coming out.