Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Armando Abascal. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Armando, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I’ve been a digital marketer for years. Well over a decade now. I’ve worked for multinational companies abroad, large established agencies and startup ones. I was there when Instagram was nothing more than food pictures and when Youtube was nothing more than videos of kids visiting the zoo. What I’m trying to say is, I’ve seen it all in my industry and I can confidently say social media agencies are one of the two most untrustworthy service industries in America. The other one, if you’re wondering, is mechanics. Both use big words and complicated terminology to confuse and intimidate clients into unnecessary upgrades and purchases.

Almost 7 years ago, I decided to join a start up agency in Miami that was struggling to get clients. I have a very successful background in sales, as well as digital marketing, so I was the perfect fit to join the team as their new director of business development. The pay was terrible, less than half of my previous position, but the potential upside was limitless. I was getting in on the ground floor. Within a year, the agency had increased their revenue by 600% and I was now the proud holder of two titles: Director of Business Development and Director of Operations. If you’re wondering, the pay was still terrible.

But as we grew, an unnerving pattern started emerging in the way we conducted business. Something that, to this day, I feel guilty about being a part of, even if it was just by association and not by action. Our owner decided to take over the sales department to allow me to concentrate exclusively on running operations for our team and clients, a change I was very excited about. However, she started closing sales with small business owners (our target market) for social media services by lying about our capabilities and the results they could obtain. I mean, it was straight-up deception, promising results we couldn’t deliver on even on the best of days with the greatest of strategies.

The inevitable happened: business owners would sign up with us, excited to see us work our magic, but within 3-4 months, they would see through the overblown sales pitch they were given and stopped working with us. This went on for months, increasing the agencies revenue and profits, but creating a revolving door situation that was demoralizing for the team. The motto seemed to be: as long as we sign more clients than we lose, it’s profitable.

The final straw came when we took a struggling fro-yo business as a client. The owner, a french national, had been struggling for months. He was two months away from closing shop and declaring bankruptcy, so he decided to throw one last Hail Mary and hope for a miracle. He spent all of his remaining cash reserves paying for our services, hoping for a 50% increase in sales in the first month, the only thing that would keep him in business. Suffice to say, it was an impossible task and we did not deliver. How could we?

That was the day that I decided I could no loner be a part of what was going on. Social Media marketing is such an amazing tool for small business to level the playing field with established companies that I knew I could do better. I have been an entrepreneur all my life and it was time to stand up for small business owners everywhere. That’s when I decided I would start my own agency based on two pillars: charge reasonable prices and be completely transparent with our services and results. Thus, Create A Wave was born and I’ve been serving the small business community in Florida and Texas ever since, with a client retention rate of 82% for the past 5 years ad a thriving business. Turns out honesty is still the best recipe for success.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Create a Wave is a social media marketing agency focused on helping small businesses increase their brand awareness, monetize their following by implementing a viable, successful and profitable strategy.

Our main appeal is our reasonable pricing and the fact that we only require 3 hours of our clients time a month to work with us. You show up for our videoshoot, review our work to make sure its up to your standards and that’s it. We take care of everything else!

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

At its inception, Create A Wave was a Miami based agency specialized in helping restaurants with their digital marketing. We had a proven, winning strategy and we were slowly creating a name for ourselves in the South Beach restaurant scene. And then COVID happened. As we all know, the restaurant business was one of the industries hit hardest by the pandemic. As a brand new agency with a small portfolio, we lost 80% of our clients after they shut down for good and went bankrupt. It was devastating.

I decided to double down and simply pivot the business into new industries that had not suffered as much during the pandemic. Attorneys, contractors, real estate… We had to relearn and redesign our strategy to fit new industries we hadn’t worked with in the past.

That gamble paid off and today we are launching a new division of the agency specialized in helping attorneys called The Social Lawyer Agency. Im very thankful to my wife for supporting and encouraging me during those difficult times. It paid off ten times over.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

There are four keys to unlocking social media success:

1) Know your audience, Who are you making content for? Why would they find value in your content? We always create a customer avatar for our clients before we start making any content or strategies. If you don’t know what that is, google “marketing avatar guide”, it will take you less than 20 minutes and will give you an incredible insight of your target audience.

2) Be consistent and persistent. Growth takes time. You need to feed enough content into the system for the algorithm to understand who you are and who your message is for. Be ready to put in 90 days of content to start seeing results.

3) Have a strategy, Most accounts do what we call “post and pray”. They create a random piece of content, post it and pray that it does well. That’s not a strategy. Every piece of content has to have a reason for you to post it. What value does this give your audience? Is it educational, entertaining, motivational, insightful? Ask yourself, if you saw this content, what would you get out of it.

4) Learn to read analytics. Instagram and Tik Tok will tell you exactly how your content performs and where you can improve. Investing some time into learning how to read analytics will allow you to see what content, hooks, calls to action and style works for you. It’s all there!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.createawaveco.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/arrithemarketingguy

Image Credits
Create A Wave Co