Matthew Slaymaker runs Slaymaker Marketing, a paid-media agency managing Google, Meta, Reddit and LinkedIn ads for brands spending anywhere from $100 to $30,000+ a day. He joins host Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO Podcast for the most honest conversation an advertiser can have: most businesses aren’t ready for ads yet — and the fix is the website, the angle, and whether your brand values are shown or just stated.
🎧 Prefer audio? Listen to the full episode on Castos.
You Might Not Be Ready for Ads
Matt’s hottest take sounds heretical coming from an agency owner: consider turning the ads off. Brands routinely flip on a campaign, spend ten thousand dollars, and get nothing back — because the problem was never the ad account. The tell is your website. If organic visitors who already know you aren’t converting at 2–3%, paid traffic — which converts 30–50% worse — won’t save you. Fix the USP, the positioning and the conversion path first, then buy attention.
“You might not be ready for ads yet. If you’re not getting an organic conversion rate of two to three percent already, your ads probably are never gonna work.” — Matthew Slaymaker
The Storefront Moved Off Your Website
The digital storefront is no longer a page you control. Google now lets shoppers check out straight from an ad; YouTube and TikTok Shop let them buy inside the feed. The Shopping ad or the pre-roll may be the only chance you get to explain who you are — so every touchpoint has to carry your value on its own.
Creative Is the New Targeting
On Meta, creative is roughly 70% of the outcome. Broad targeting or Advantage+ beats convoluted interest-and-lookalike layering — you tell the algorithm to find your customers and feed it radically different angles (the same meal kit sold as a “#1 gym hack,” a busy-mom fix, and a working-professional shortcut). On Google, targeting is still about half the game: the best copy in the world can’t sell dog food to a cat-food search.
“Creative is 60, 70% of it on Meta — probably more like 70%. The better your creative is, the better Facebook can do of finding the right people.” — Matthew Slaymaker
Sell the Pain Point, Not the Product
Every business that deserves to exist solves a real problem — so marketing isn’t “buy this product,” it’s “here’s your pain, and here’s how this ends it.” A boring car sensor becomes “find out if your mechanic is ripping you off.” Agricultural equipment, concrete walls, oxygen monitoring — each has one thing the buyer is genuinely excited about. Matt’s favorite idea source is the comment section: mine the objections and the praise for your next hook.
“Every business that deserves to be in business is solving an actual problem… it’s about, here’s this pain point, and here’s how this solves for that.” — Matthew Slaymaker
You Don’t Have to Do the TikTok Dance
Do small business owners really have to put on a hat and dance for the algorithm? No. Be real to who you are — people see through performance. You don’t need to be on every platform; go where your audience is. Matt’s own channel is LinkedIn, in the format he’s comfortable with. If video is the play, get interviewed or hand the camera to someone who enjoys it.
Point AI at the Real Bottleneck
The best AI use Matt has found isn’t a flashy autonomous ad platform — it’s a workflow that wires Claude into Slack and email to score team proactivity and account attention, so a growing agency stays on top of client communication. Jeremy’s leverage point is content: one 45-minute interview becomes 4,000+ words that an MCP-to-WordPress pipeline publishes across sites, with Blotato scheduling weeks of posts across eight channels. Same principle — automate the leverage, not the busywork.
This recap is drawn from Matthew Slaymaker’s conversation with Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO Podcast. Matt published his own companion take on the same exchange — read it on the Slaymaker Marketing blog.
Authentic Brand Values: Can Marketing Ever Be Genuinely From the Heart?
Jeremy Rivera
There’s a push and pull of there being taglines and values that came up after my interview with the Permacast wall company. And I’ll be asking the oxygen monitoring company I’m meeting with tomorrow: what are the values you want to bring to the market? … There’s also this kind of make-believe world of marketing where you’re saying what your company’s values are — but you’re also tap-dancing, which isn’t genuine. Can you have genuine, from-the-heart marketing? That’s kind of my question.
Matthew Slaymaker
You can, absolutely — but you have to show it. You can’t just say it. … Everybody’s saying ‘we’re sustainable, we’re made in USA, we’re cruelty free’ — it doesn’t make you stand out anymore. One brand that did a good job of this: Yellow Leaf Hammocks. Every hammock that’s woven has the name of the person who wove it written on it. That’s the kind of stuff that actually brings your values to life. If you just say ‘we’re charitable,’ people don’t really trust or believe you nowadays. But if you can actually show it and bring it to life for them, that’s a very different thing.
The episode: Listen on Castos · Watch on YouTube
Free Downloads
- 📊 Slide deck — “You Might Not Be Ready for Ads” (PPTX, host edition) · guest edition
- 📖 Companion eBook — Ten Truths, One Honest Playbook (PDF, host edition) · guest edition
- 📄 Full interview transcript (DOCX)
Connect with Matthew Slaymaker
- Agency: Slaymaker Marketing
- LinkedIn: Matthew Slaymaker
- One free ad audit (normally $500) — the big button at the top of the site
