Last month, Obu Interactive turned 5 years old. Or one thousand, eight hundred twenty-four days old, for you City Slickers movie fans. From 2 people in a 120-square-foot room watching the market crash in 2008 to a dope office and 18 of us. Yeah, I’ll take a handshake.

You probably think this blog post is going to be about what we learned and our successes, right? Nah. Let’s keep the blogsturbation to a minimum and talk about what we should have done better.

Thinking like a parent, the greatest lessons to pass down are the ones we don’t learn early on, right? Let’s give it a try…

1. Facebook ads do work. People opine back and forth if a person will click a Facebook advertisement while friend-stalking. Here is our opinion: some people will click anything. Like social scavengers, if an ad is relevant and intriguing enough—and Facebook has the tools to help you do it—people will go to it. Make sure they go somewhere special. That doesn’t necessarily mean it must be to a website — so consider using a company Instagram feed for more pictures. People like original pictures.
2. Obsess over paid search. What’s Google’s stock price bumping along at — $800? More than 90% of that is generated from advertising revenue. For the new agency owner: when Google calls, don’t be concerned. They don’t want to take your clients or try to discover your top secret creative strategy. For 99.9% of advertisers, they already know what we are all doing. Google wants to help, and you should listen. They have ALL of the data we advertisers really want, so listen to what they have to say. Now we obsess about paid search, and we listen.
3. We came from the world of SEO, polluted with strategies to try and trick a search engine and do just about anything to get to the “top” of search engine result pages or SERPs, which resulted in many fundamentals being overlooked. The most important: engaging body content, clear headlines and genuine calls to action. Yes, there are many other fundamentals, but this is most important. Groupon grew because of its great content about a deal.
4. Collect (and protect) emails. Probably one of the most disappointing lessons was that from the get-go we didn’t collect emails to use them properly for future campaigns. We literally have tens of thousands of active email addresses in our inboxes, so hopefully soon we’ll have this remedied. Anyone have suggestions on how to pull them out of our Gmail accounts? Google, do you?
5. Follow through, dammit! This is the macro-lesson that we have learned and are still improving on. Following through on your marketing, operational procedures and maybe, most importantly, promises to your team.

You have to consider the web experience from the moment they see your banner and text, to the 3 seconds they spend on your page, to why they should convert, what they will see next and how they will be contacted. You must follow through on the whole strategy.

Lastly, I know a lot of people say they love their work — but usually while complaining about something. Well, when you love someone, you tell them often and say it out loud, right? And for no reason. Try it out.