#38 Lars Maat - How Messengerbots will make you more money

This time with Lars, the CEO of the advertising agency Maatwerk Online about how you should be using Chat or Messenger Bots to get more traffic and more sales on your website, or even more leads if this is what you aim for. You can find Lars on Twitter.

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Here is the transcript of the podcast:

My name is Peter, and this is podcast episode number 38. If you can, go and comment, go and rate this podcast on the podcast app wherever you listen to us, and tell your friends that this is the place where they can get the best info on what is going on in marketing conferences, even if people are not able to go to the conference, every presentation in five minutes. Today, we are going to the Netherlands, where I'm very glad to welcome Lars.

Lars: Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Peter: Lars Maat, thank you for being here. You are the rising star in PPC. At least a PPC Hero said that. You are the owner of the Maatwerk agency. What do you do in the agency, and what are your things? What's your favorite thing on the internet?

Lars: To be honest, the rising star was back in 2020. It already feels like a light year ago.

[laughter]

Lars: Yes, that's true. PPC Hero made me a rising star in the PPC business. I think mainly because that year I spoke at PPC Hero Conf in London. I was announced best speaker of the conference. I think that gave it a boost, but, yes, my name is Lars. I'm currently owning online marketing AC. My background is really purely PPC. Google ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Microsoft ads, stuff like that. At the moment, at the AC we are with 30 people. We are doing online marketing from A to Z. Basically, the only thing we don't do is build apps.

We build websites, webshops, we do SEO and PPC, of course. I'm focusing on developing the business at the moment, try to implement new things. Innovations in our industry are a weekly thing as you might know. [chuckles] We try to keep up and then make sure that everything is set in place for our clients.

Peter: You are one of those people who likes a lot of stress every day because advertising campaigns fail all the time and the algorithms change, and the number is going the wrong way. Do you enjoy that?

Lars: Let's just say there's never a dull moment in an online marketing agency.

Peter: [chuckles] See, this is why I like to do SEO. It's everything a bit more-- We have a couple of months to do stuff. In advertising, it's hours.

Lars: To be honest, sometimes I'm really jealous of my SEO colleagues because, let's say, we are having a call with a client and a client is a little bit stressed about something, for example. We know if something goes wrong in a PPC account, you have to fix it right away. If something goes wrong on the SEO stuff, you just pick it up in one week or two weeks. It doesn't matter because you got the time. Yes, sometimes I'm a little bit jealous about the fact that I started to learn the wrong business.

Peter: [chuckles] I know, but on the other hand, your business is the sexy thing in marketing, I think, for the last 10 years. SEO is somewhere not really the public favorite.

Lars: Yes. I can understand. To be honest, we went to New York, we went to San Jose, California, on an invitation from Google, and my SEO colleagues are all jealous of me, so--

Peter: [chuckles] My wife is actually an advertiser. We've met in an agency where I was the SEO. She was the advertiser. It's very obvious in our personalities and things, how we see the world and everything, how we are very different. Lars, I've invited you to the podcast because you spoke at BrightonSEO. It was a bit different Brighton as we know it from the past, how did you enjoy the online version of Brighton this year?

Lars: To be honest, this was my first BrightonSEO