089: Diagnosing Paid Social Campaigns & Nurturing Stronger Client Relationships with Joe Wolf (Office Hours)
In this episode, Danny and Joe Wolf, Head of Paid Social at Optidge, explore how to troubleshoot struggling paid campaigns, why communication is more important than ever, and what it takes to be the kind of agency clients trust again—after they’ve been burned.
With deep experience across paid platforms and a keen sense for client relationships, Joe and the team don’t just run ads—they build partnerships that last. From tactical frameworks like Optidge’s 5-Point Check to real-life stories of client rescue missions, this episode is packed with practical insight and refreshingly honest advice.
An Optidge “Office Hours” Episode
Our Office Hours episodes are your go-to for details, how-to’s, and advice on specific marketing topics. Join our fellow Optidge team members, and sometimes even 1:1 teachings from Danny himself, in these shorter, marketing-focused episodes every few weeks. Get ready to get marketing!
Key Points + Topics
[00:05] – Joe joins Danny to talk about the moment client relationships stall—and what agencies can do when paid social performance starts slipping.
[01:10] – Danny recounts a live example of turning a cold lead into a hot opportunity just by picking up the phone—and how personal connection changed the game.
[02:21] – They dig into the creative conversation—how clients often think a $50K video guarantees results, but social media success is built on fast, strategic testing.
[03:26] – Joe shares what makes a great paid social partner: clients who know their gaps, want collaboration, and trust you to fill in the blanks together.
[04:25] – They unpack how to talk about budget and expectations early—because nobody wants a surprise when the first month doesn’t produce a unicorn ad.
[05:08] – Joe compares paid media to startup investing—most tests fail, but the winners more than make up for it, if you’re patient and data-driven.
[06:00] – Danny and Joe highlight why Optidge doesn’t trap clients in long-term contracts—true partnership means earning trust, not enforcing it.
[06:55] – Joe walks through the math every client should understand: CAC, CPL, ROAS—and how Optidge helps them reverse-engineer realistic performance targets.
[07:50] – They introduce Optidge’s 5-Point Paid Social Check—a tactical framework for diagnosing weak spots in campaigns, from targeting to creative to tracking.
[08:30] – Joe explains how they handle UGC requests—by leveraging partner networks rather than faking influencer vibes with in-house “content theater.”
[09:10] – Danny reflects on how many of Optidge’s best clients came after a bad agency experience—and how overcommunication rebuilt their trust.
[09:58] – Joe gives a behind-the-scenes look at Optidge’s pod model: paid search and social specialists working together with shared goals and open channels.
[10:55] – They talk about cross-channel synergy—how paid search informs paid social, especially when it comes to high-cost keywords and content mapping.
[11:40] – Joe explains why sometimes the smartest thing an agency can do is walk away—especially when a prospect refuses to align on strategy or goals.
[12:30] – Offer testing gets the spotlight: Joe shares how clients with multiple offers—free trials, premium packages—benefit from structured experimentation.
[13:18] – Danny talks about a strategist feeling disheartened by performance—only to be publicly praised by the client in a business group. Reminder: perception matters.
[14:12] – Joe reacts to a live WhatsApp endorsement where a client says Optidge “feels like they built the agency just for us.” Authentic relationships > dashboards.
[15:09] – They compare how agency bias can creep in when you only manage one channel—and why managing the full paid media spectrum keeps things honest.
[16:03] – Joe emphasizes why no one channel should carry the full load—paid search and social media should pass the baton, not compete for the win.
[17:00] – He breaks down how mentorship happens at Optidge—senior strategists coaching juniors, and everyone learning together through structured feedback.
[18:02] – Joe closes with a reminder: success in paid social isn’t about hacks. It’s about aligning expectations, testing smartly, and committing to real conversations.
Guest + Episode Links
Episode Transcript
Danny Gavin Host
00:05
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Mentor. Today, we’ve got a special episode lined up and I’m joined by Joe Wolf, Optidge’s Head of Paid Social. In this episode, we’re diving into a topic some of you may have experienced – professional relationships that used to work wonderfully, but you have recently hit a wall or aren’t going as expected. We’ll start by discussing insights from real-life interactions where a client was facing challenges with their paid social strategy. Joe and I will also explore Optidge’s unique initiative, the five-point checklist for paid ads. This framework helps identify where campaigns might be faltering, whether it’s due to targeting issues, stale and creative or ineffective campaign settings. We’ll discuss how the Optage approach differs from traditional agencies, emphasizing a hands-on, data-driven methodology. So, whether you’re struggling with your own paid social campaigns or looking to elevate your strategy, this conversation is packed with valuable insights and actionable recommendations. Let’s jump right in.
All right, so I’m really excited that you told me to follow up on that lead today. Really, yes, because typically I wouldn’t like to respond and you know I would just send another email, but actually picked up the phone and I called him and then we had some back and forth, you know, and finally we actually had a conversation, so it’s pretty cool. He didn’t even remember filling out the form, but he’s like we’re in the process of looking at paid social media agencies because we get a lot of traffic to our website and it’s not really converting and it seems like now paid social is more of an accepted way in getting people and he’s looking at like five, six agencies to send proposals and then, after he’s kind of vetted that out, to have two that present in front of his whole team. Now the trick for that phone call. What was so cool was that he happens to be the same age. He’s also built like a company of 30 people. He would really like to relate to that, which was awesome, and I spoke about the importance of measuring leads and the quality of those leads, something which he kind of knew was important but didn’t know what he was doing.
02:21
We spoke about the creative offerings that we can provide as well and he’s like, oh, do you offer this big video photo shoot that we have to fly out to you? And I said, hey, I was at a conference earlier this week and one of the agency owners does $50,000 or $60,000 commercials and I asked him well, why don’t you get more into paid social type of advertising videos, why don’t you make those? And he’s like it’s a totally different world. He’s like to do a $50,000 commercial. It’s very different from coming up with all this different type of creativity.
02:51
So I said the same thing was with you. Yes, we need to have quality creative, but to go spend $10,000, $20,000 on something just for social, for it not to convert, and then you’re like, oh shoot, so we have to find a way to balance quality and quantity when it comes to that creative. Yes, and he also asked about UGC. He’s like do you have access to UGC? And I said we don’t do UGC ourselves, but we do have a partner that we can work with. And it was a really great call. So, going from like the five point checklist type of thing for it to be like an actual deep intro call where I’m sending him a proposal, it was really awesome.
Joe Wolf Guest
03:26
Yeah, I mean that is what we’re looking for in potential partners is someone that has had some sort of experience in the past running this stuff and knows where their problems are and where their gaps are. And once we can see when a client or prospect really can identify those gaps, there’s usually a long tail success with those people because they can identify what we’re trying to fill the gaps with and not just leave it completely up to us to just like kind of read their mind and try to like be this separate entity from their team and we’re just kind of delineated between all this stuff that’s happening on their back end being directed to and trying to deliver these results without this back and forth. So if they’re kind of telling us here are the openings where we actually need you to fill the space, then we can fill them and we can have more of a partnership. If we’re able to have a lasting partnership where we’re actually working as an extension of their team, that’s where we see the most success.
Danny Gavin Host
04:25
Yeah, and you know that it really works because I just got an email from him right now giving me his actual email address, not just his Gmail type of email address. That means the phone call was good. Yeah, I’m glad you picked up the phone. Oh, we also spoke about it’s kind of scary big investment and I said, okay, you’ve got to look at it this way. There is going to be some upfront costs, there is going to be a fee that you have to do, but then after that it’s really about hitting your targets. So we have to know how much you’re willing to spend on a customer and how many leads it’s going to take to get to that customer and get that cost per lead and make sure that we can optimize that. He also mentioned different offers, like a higher offer, a lower offer. We can optimize that. He also mentioned different offers, like a higher offer, a lower offer.
05:08
Ideally, we could test those out as well, which was really good, and I said you want to choose an agency that you have a good partnership with. I said no one is going to be able to make this profitable in month one, just like Mark Cuban. He invests in 10 companies in Shark Tank. There’s no way that he’s going to hit it big with all 10. Most probably nine won’t do well, but one will do so well that it does well.
05:28
So that same concept is with paid media if you’re not going to hit it on month one, but the trick is, can we find those unicorns and then make it work? So you need to have patience. So as long as you see that these campaigns are going in the right direction, you are going to go. And obviously you want to work with an agency that also has a good out policy right, like, if it’s not working, let’s work with someone who at least says you know, we, we both agree this is not going to be best for you and we want to do things that are working. You want to do things that are working and we’ll go our separate ways.
Joe Wolf Guest
05:56
We’re not trying to walk anyone into a long-term deal just to walk them into a deal. We want to have a beneficial relationship with them. If we have problems, we’re going to let them know. We are going to try our best to deliver the results that they need and I think what you mentioned about backing into these numbers and what we’re going to be trying to get to from a cost per lead standpoint is really important, because some people will come to us and have no clue what their numbers are. They just want to grow. They don’t know what their efficiency numbers are. They don’t know what the baked in costs need to be from an investment standpoint when they’re working with us. Sometimes we have to help them with that. But the worst thing that could happen would be if they come to us and they don’t have any real goals and their only goal really is to get a five ROAS and to grow 100% year over year. Those aren’t based in reality right, like we sometimes do have to, and the ones that don’t listen or have a dialogue before we actually sign with them and work with them, that we kind of know that that’s not going to work. So we have, you know, in the past said no to some clients when they have unrealistic results that aren’t malleable with working on some of these realistic KPI projections, once they’re able to look at the ideal cost for acquisition on an overall basis. That’s where we can really start going.
07:09
And I think what you mentioned with paid media does take time and it can be one ad that ends up delivering a ton of results and you do need to test. But the other part of it is we have an omni-channel structure within our agency. We want, when we’re bringing on a new client, to have both paid social and paid search and also ideally they’re supporting their organic rankings through SEO and developing that on a longer-term timeline. But when you’re developing a campaign that includes paid social and paid search and there’s so many different platforms that can fall into that, that’s where we usually see the biggest lift and even if you’re not getting something to happen in the first month or even the first three months from one platform, the other one is usually going to be picking things up and you really see a holistic view of performance when you’re bringing both of those together.
Danny Gavin Host
08:02
And that’s the advantage that we bring to the table, the fact that we manage the full payment and we’re not going to defend. If we just did Google ads and we see it wasn’t doing well we, you know it’s a little bit harder to defend hey, you should do it. But in this case there’s no bias. It’s really about finding what’s working and putting more money into it.
Joe Wolf Guest
08:20
Yeah, exactly, and I think what’s also great is like we we work on a pod structure where we’re kind of vertically aligned with an account manager, we have a paid search specialist, we have a paid search specialist, we have a paid social specialist and then we also have department leads that are being completely read into the situation, going from basically advising those paid social specialists who are doing the day-to-day work on what’s going on. So those components can all talk to each other and there’s information that gets shared between paid search and paid social. You know there could be a keyword that might be way too expensive to capitalize in paid search and you know you’re only going to be able to get X amount of clicks on it because the CPCs are just way too high. But if that information is passed off and those are converted right, you’re only going to be able to push X amount of the budget to that. You’re also going to have to supplement other long tail keywords into the mix.
09:12
But if that information can get passed to paid social, some of those keywords can turn into interest-based audiences. And I know that’s like taboo nowadays to use interest-based audiences, but they definitely still work and, most importantly, you can see what the intent is. If people are converting on specific keywords, even though they’re high CPC baselines that you have to pay to be able to get them, you can incorporate that into a copy. You can even have some keywords going to a specific landing page, have retargeting going to that landing page and have the topic be completely about that. So there’s enough traffic on a really high cost keyword or an array of broad match keywords within that topic or phrase match keywords. You can then retarget them with specific copy around that topic.
Danny Gavin Host
09:52
So pivoting to another story that happened this week. So I was sitting down with one of our paid search strategists and she was telling me about a certain account that she has put her blood, sweat and tears and love into this to really make it work and unfortunately it’s not going as quick as she is expecting. We’re getting the right type of leads, but the companies that are signing up are too small. They’re small and medium, but they fit everything that they need, just they’re not large enough. So it’s hard for her because it’s like we want to keep trying it out and we want to keep doing it, but it’s moving a little bit slow.
10:26
But what’s amazing is I’m part of an entrepreneurial referral network on WhatsApp and someone recently said, hey, is there an agency that specializes in paid media performance marketing? And there’s like three or four agency owners that came in and then I came in and said, yeah, hey, why don’t you consider Optage as well? And suddenly two people stepped up to the plate. One of them is that actual client, and look at what they said. I can vouch for Danny, the most professional and competent firm I have encountered. I can honestly say that they make me feel like they created their whole firm just for my account. So it’s amazing.
11:04
Right here we have a scenario where our paid search strategist from her perspective it’s hard because I’m not getting that success right away. But the people that she’s working with that’s not the issue, right, it’s not even in their mind. What’s in their mind? They see the care and the dedication that Optage has for them and that’s what sticks out and that is what you want in an agency, right? All agencies are going to have ups and downs, but the question is, are you going to have a relationship where it’s like a real partnership and where both people care about what’s going on? And the fact that that guy stepped up to the plate in front of this whole network of like 300 people and said, hey, this is Optage. The next comment right under that, someone wrote, wow, and that’s exactly what I felt that’s amazing.
Joe Wolf Guest
11:54
Yeah, I mean, there’s so much you can do from a day-to-day operational standpoint to get some of these costs down, and obviously our goal is to do that. We’re successful at it. We’ve been fortunate enough to have success with many clients and we’ve been awarded one of them, but what we pride ourselves the most on is having a good relationship with these partners. Like some of our longest tenured clients go beyond five years, our average is probably two or three years, right now Exactly, and that’s a testament to that partnership. And it’s a two-way street, because if we are working with someone that isn’t giving us the attention that we need to be able to do well in these campaigns, then we’re not going to play that game either. We try to make it a real extension of their team and we try to make it about giving them the service that they require, along with the performance.
Danny Gavin Host
12:50
So, Joe, it’s crazy, I had this amazing pitch six months ago with this moving and storage company and I thought it went so well and their situation was they were working with an agency that did kind of everything, but they weren’t really able to measure results. So my whole pitch came to Optage. We measure results. We’re not just stopping at the lead, but we’re looking at what happens to the quality of the lead and who the customer is, and we’re tying it back together so we actually know what’s going on. And I pushed it, pushed it, pushed it and they loved it, right. What happened?
13:22
I got an email saying, hey, we decided to go in another direction. We found an agency that has more experience than you when it comes to the moving and storage arena, more experience than you when it comes to the moving and storage arena. We love you, but we’re going to go off. And it felt literally like a slap in the face. It’s like what I thought. We were going so well and just because I don’t have that experience, you’re not going to look at me, and so, on one hand, you can appreciate that, right.
13:46
People can think, ooh, I need to go for an agency that has the exact experience of what I did. But I think what people are missing is it’s not just about industry experience, but it’s experience in many situations, whether it’s with a Catholic high school or whether it’s a SaaS company, if it’s with a doctor’s office or if it’s with a plumber. The point is, if we have perspective, in all these different industries, we’ve seen a lot of scenarios and you know what, especially when it comes to paid media, there’s ups and downs and you’ve got to pivot. And even when it looks like it’s bleak and it’s dark and what am I going to do? But if you put your head together, let’s try something else. So, actually, not being in the same industry, but having multiple points of contact you’re able to do.
14:32
And what’s awesome about this is that six months later, about a couple of weeks ago, they came back to us saying, hey, the agency we chose it’s not really working so well. We have no idea what our ROI is, so the same problem that they had before they had again, and to me it blows my mind how that even happened. But they’re like, hey, we really want to work with you. And so just kind of a testament to, at the end of the day, right, what’s important. When you’re investing money in paid media performance marketing, you need to be able to know what’s going on with it, and if you can’t, people can say whatever they want, but at the end of the day, you’re never going to know. Is it really working or is it not?
Joe Wolf Guest
15:12
Yeah, I mean that is so true there. Not, yeah, I mean that’s so true, like there are so many agencies that do try to niche down and you know we do have there’s there’s a portion of our client base, historically and currently, that does lean towards a certain industry or a certain size company. But I think what we really specialize in is the different scenarios that you’re going to see from a day to day situation, and it’s really about problem solving. Like what we like, take a huge amount of pride in. Besides service and performance is problem solving and we’ve seen pretty much every scenario under the sun. So it doesn’t necessarily matter what the industry is that we’re working in or the company, the size of the company. We’re able to be extremely nimble. We’re able to look at that previous experience that we’ve had and incorporate that into whatever the situation we’ve been in, because we have been in those situations before. So, for example, if we have a sales team that has a really, really bad follow-up, right, it can. It could be any industry where you’re generating leads. It can be any size company even you know there are huge cons to having a massive company because you could end up having six different sales reps across all, like across the U S, or even 10, where you have like 50% of them in the U S and then the rest across, like Europe, right, and that can end up having massive roadblocks with getting feedback from these leads. So what we’ve had to do in the past and that goes vice versa with we’re talking about a small company If they end up having just one person fielding leads, like there’s, obviously we’re sending a pretty good chunk of leads we have to fix that backend. So what we end up doing is trying to come up with streamlined processes and working with them, so it doesn’t really stop paid media from generating those leads.
16:48
We force our clients, whether they’re interested or not or not, to look at the backend and make sure that there’s a streamlined approach.
16:57
We offer HubSpot specialty and services like that. I think we’re HubSpot certified and basically that part of it is one of the biggest components of our success in the lead gen space. And even when you look at e-com, we’re looking at backend numbers. We’ve invested in tons of tools where we’re able to verify information coming from different attribution models across meta and Google ads and Google analytics, and all these different platforms are going to measure things differently so it doesn’t stop at leads. We really go the extra mile to look at the data on the backend and make sure that’s incorporated into our analysis. And when things aren’t working and there isn’t a level of clarity that’s required for us to perform the way we want to, we push and we try to have that ongoing negotiation or discussion with the client on what can be done on that back end to improve things, because that is really where this does get crystallized and it can’t always be just on that front end. When you’re looking at people clicking on ads right, it needs to be how you convert them.
Danny Gavin Host
17:55
And therefore half the time, like you said, we’re going to go ahead and build some sort of CRM. So in a perfect world, we’ll get people to move to a proper CRM like HubSpot, which we love. At a minimum, we’re going to be creating a spreadsheet, tracking those leads, figuring out the quality of what they turn into customers and then taking that data and putting it back into the system so that we can optimize correctly. And that wraps up today’s episode of the Digital Marketing Mentor Podcast. A huge thank you to Joe Wolf for sharing his insights and experiences with us today.
18:24
We hope you found value in hearing firsthand stories about the ups and downs of paid social strategies. It’s clear that even the best campaigns can face challenges, but with the right approach you can turn things around. If you’re interested in optimizing your own paid social efforts, I encourage you to explore Optage’s free five-point checklist for paid ads. It’s a fantastic resource to identify areas for improvement and set your campaigns up for success. Thanks for tuning in and, as always, don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review and share this episode with your fellow marketers. Until next time, keep experimenting and driving those results. Thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Mentor Podcast. Be sure to check us out online at thedmmentor.com and at thedmmentor on Instagram, and don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts for more marketing. Mentor magic. See you next time.