Dan Sanchez here, but you can call me Danchez (my friends do). Oh, and here’s a link to my bio if that’s what you’re looking for.
I’m going to shoot straight with you.
I freaking love marketing. ♥️ 👨💻
But… despite tripling the enrollment of a university I worked for, I was still failing as a marketer.
Here’s my story
I was a 30-year-old marketing director who tripled the enrollment of a private college.
All on the back of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, CRO, and some epic nurture sequences. Our tech stack made our team of three feel like a team of thirty.
People were giving me high fives but I knew we had a problem.
The numbers were slipping. I felt like a fraud inside. I was the lead marketer on campus and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have y’all to ask back then either. 😉
After referrals, all our new students came from FB ads and Google Ads (which was properly maximized). I tried a half dozen other ad networks. None helped.
Sure, I put in way more creative and more budget but that only bought us time.
I didn’t know how to get earned media (the economics of it still don’t make sense to me), so I turned to growing our owned media.
👉 Tried social. Failed.
👉 Tried events. Failed.
👉 Tried YouTube & Video. Failed.
👉 Tried SEO. That stuck.
We doubled down on that and built the college site to 100k in monthly pageviews and a content site to 500k!
Yet… it was too little too late. 😔
I left before I could see it through but I never forgot the lesson.
That’s when James Carbary recruited me to come work at Sweet Fish. (They are the real deal. Hire them if you need help.)
They taught me how to use social and podcasts to grow organically. I taught them SEO.
I’ll never look back.
We grew dozens of podcasts, I grew my own LinkedIn account to 25k followers, and together we created a LinkedIn evangelist program that launched the personal brands of several employees.
I ❤️ paid media, but it’s easy come, easy go.
Growing an audience with owned media is the answer. If done well, it’s what also brings the podcasters, journalists, and other earned media channels to you for free.
My mission is now clear: To teach marketers how to build an audience to set them free from their dependence on paid media.
It’s a long and hard road but it’s the most powerful flywheel you can build for scalable growth.
If this story resonates:
👉 Connect with me on LinkedIn »