Conversations with Leaders and Founders of Marketing Agencies, sharing wisdom on how they built their company, lessons they wish they knew when they started, and marketing and agency strategies for the months and years ahead.
Site
RSS
Apple
Recent rankings
Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.
Shared links between episodes and podcasts
Links found in episode descriptions and other podcasts that share them.
Building a Global Agency From the Ground Up With Tim Kelsey
Wednesday, September 11, 2024 • Duration 26:28
Tim Kelsey is the Managing Director of Pronto Marketing, a web development and marketing agency specializing in building, supporting, and promoting WordPress websites for small businesses. Over his 14-year tenure at Pronto, he has grown from an entry-level role in SEO to now overseeing a diverse team of over 90 members spanning Central and South America and Southeast Asia. With experience in customer service, strategic planning, and executive leadership, Tim leads with a strong focus on company culture and a commitment to empowering team success.
Unlocking the Secrets to Agency Growth With Marcel Petitpas
Wednesday, August 28, 2024 • Duration 31:35
Marcel Petitpas is the CEO and Co-founder of Parakeeto, a consultancy dedicated to optimizing agency profitability. With roles such as Head Strategic Coach at Dan Martell and former COO at Gold Front, he leverages his experience as a strategic coach and consultant to aid agencies and SaaS in operational and profitability optimization. As a sought-after thought leader and host of the Agency Profit Podcast, Marcel shares actionable insights on service business mastery.
A Journey of Growth and Learning With Jon Morris
Wednesday, March 13, 2024 • Duration 31:01
Jon Morris is the Founder and CEO of Ramsay Innovations, which helps businesses quickly scale through financial education and strategic funds allocations. In September, Jon founded Fiscal Advocate, which specializes in helping marketing communication firms manage their finances, gain business insights, and grow revenue. Before joining Ramsay Innovations, Jon founded Rise Interactive, a full-service internet marketing agency — growing it from a $10,000 bootstrap business to one of the largest independent digital agencies. Jon is also an Advisor for Fiscal Advocate and was previously an Advisory Board Member at Pixability.
Perfecting Personas
Thursday, July 30, 2020 • Duration 28:43
Justin Ramb is President and Sandra Marshal, VP of Client Services, at Bigeye, a full-service B2B and B2C agency that focuses on audiences, creative work, media and analytics, and data.
Understand audience:
Use primary and secondary research to discover who they are, where they consume media, what they look like, and what triggers them to convert
Develop marketing personas that match two or three target audience personas
Test strategies against those personas to ensure activities align with objectives
B2B:
Use current customer data to develop lookalike audience and personas based on existing data
Develop personas based on where company wants to head. Is it looking to capture new clients or new types of clients? Supplement data with key stakeholder interviews, additional research, online research, and quantitative/qualitative research.
B2C: Bigeye utilizes specialized tools to learn about a client’s audience and customers
Creative:
As part of persona development, the agency tests messaging, colors, headlines, and photography for optimal audience response.
Rather than resent the parameters of defined personas, the creative team appreciates understanding the target audience.
Media and Analytics
As part of persona development, the agency explores media usage.
Media develops a persona-based media plan and begins placement in that media
Utilizing Google Analytics and custom dashboards, the Analytics team tracks establishes targets and KPIs
Data
24/7 analytics data provides information about how things are performing.
Data answered the questions: Where can things be optimized? How are conversions going? Do the real audiences align with those targeted?
Bigeye started in 2002. In this interview, Justin describes the chaos of those early years and the ultimate discovery that the agency’s greatest success was driven by hiring team members who were committed, skilled, and aligned with the agency’s direction. Sandra added that the agency also has to “arm” new employees with “the appropriate support,” foster a sense of collaboration, and avoid over-siloization.
Bridging the Gap for Big Market Enterprises
Thursday, July 2, 2020 • Duration 33:04
Justin Gray is CEO and Founder of LeadMD, a performance marketing consultancy. The agency concentrates on achieving tangible, holistic business goals – defining a buyer, launching a product, increasing revenue – to produce bottom-line impacts, rather than focusing on middle-process goals such as website or cost-per lead-optimization. Most of LeadMD’s over 3,500 clients are B2B and B2C considered-purchase organizations – big market enterprises of $100 million and up.
A “considered purchase” is a complex buying decision, fraught with emotional and financial risks and potential rewards – one that requires extensive pre-purchase research and evaluation. In B2B, this space might include software purchases, but it is more than that. LeadMD’s clients include technology providers (50% of clients are software providers), healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, and “anyone with a channel sale type of go-to-market.”
LeadMD bridges the space between being a global strategy consultant and providing regional implementation. The agency has data science, strategy, and go-to-market teams – who set strategies, plug those strategies into a broad range of systems and marketing platforms, build processes that work for clients, measure results, and optimize performance over time. Justin says that broad scope of function is rare in the B2B space. LeadMD’s consultants find the diversity in clients, the variety and unpredictability of problems and solutions, and the challenge of cobbling together customized solutions . . . exciting, and average 5 to 10 active, and widely-different campaigns a month. Close client relationships are critical.
New clients may come to LeadMD with a particular goal. The agency uses its “Catalyst Marketing Framework” that clearly states the client’s objective and then provides a “laundry list” of what the client will need to have solidly in place in order to achieve the stated objective. This helps them align their activities to the objectives, and, in the end, produce significant, relevant outcomes.
Justin has discovered over the years is that many clients believe they already have a full understanding of their buyer profile. Often that “full understanding” is only superficial. Do they really know who their buyers are? All of them? Then, do they know the platforms where their buyers “hang out”? Probably not. Yet that information is critical to know because those platforms are where LeadMd’s clients need to focus their marketing efforts.
Marketing Wellness: When Food is Medicine and Movement is Life
Thursday, June 25, 2020 • Duration 29:06
Alana Sandel, Chief Experience Officer of the agency, Marketing for Wellness, has a deep passion for helping people “to be well.” Her personal health struggles inspired her to create her agency, which focuses on quality of life, healthy foods, and fitness. “better-for-you products” – “to build brands for a better tomorrow” – especially brands with solutions for people with chronic health problems.
Alana notes that 60% of our population suffers from chronic health issues. COVID-19 is dangerous, but even more of a threat to people with diabetes, asthma, cardiovascular diseases, and other ongoing health issues.
Marketing for Wellness works to link “best fit” social media influencers with client brands. Media events have been crippled by the pandemic, so the agency is exploring virtual and augmented reality options (for education and entertainment) to replicate the experiences audiences used to have with high-touch media events, where such events balanced digital-touch social. Alana anticipates an unprecedented expansion of companies’ use of augmented reality and virtual reality technologies to create meaningful experiences for their prospective clients.
Alana believes that the companies that survive will be led by people whose work “resonates to the core,” drives them, and feeds their passion. With the strain of the times, a lot of talent will become more affordable. People will develop common goals to help each other through this crisis. Companies not prepared to go digital will need to act quickly if they are going to survive. And right now, Alana notes, there are some great deals in both digital and traditional format channels.
Today, people’s immune systems are the only protection they have against COVID. When will we get a vaccine? When will we have a treatment? How is this virus going to change? What other viruses are going to plague us? When? Alana emphasizes, “The only thing that we can rely on is our immune system.” Many niche brands, Alana says, are developed in people’s garages or kitchens, out of inspiration or desperation. Because these small-time innovators understand their customers’ “pain points,” their brands come across as being “authentic.” She expects to see a lot of innovative product development, both in foods and beverages, with a strong shift toward healthier ingredients.
For the future, Alana expects brands already in foods, beverages, and wellness will expand their offerings in support of our immune systems. Companies not in those industries may support their communities by investing in health and wellness initiatives. Smaller brands will increase their corporate citizenship contributions and make a tangible difference to society through the products they create.
PR Surround Sound and Taking Clients to the Light Bulb Moment
Thursday, June 18, 2020 • Duration 32:07
Tara Murphy owns 360 Media, an entertainment, lifestyle, and hospitality agency that focuses on public relations, event planning, and digital marketing. In the last couple of years, the agency has expanded into hotel work and commercial real estate. 360 Media will have been in business 25 years as of next January.
In this interview, Tara describes how her agency utilizes a variety of complementary narratives, images, and quotes layered on different platforms (social, email, print TV) to build a “big picture” storyline and cadence a client’s message. Tara explains that a lot of companies have ineffective PR because they fail to link their messages across the various platforms. 360-Media often educates clients on how to figure out message cadencing and how to make everything work together.
360 Media’s expansion into the commercial real estate market segment came about when the agency was tasked to promote Atlanta’s Krog Street Market, one of the first “food halls” to gain global recognition. Tara explains that Krog Street Market could have been a glorified food court, but it became much more than that . . . and was pivotal in rejuvenating the neighborhood around it.
Understanding a client’s goals and objectives, mapping out a strategy, and then building a PR program with integrated story-telling, place-making, and branding components can change commercial real estate from a B2B proposition into a personal “what’s coming to my neighborhood” lifestyle play.
Tara provides tips on how to write and submit press releases in today’s environment, what makes something newsworthy, and how to help a client find the unique “angle” that makes a “me too” announcement stand out. (This understanding is the light-bulb moment.) Less is more, Tara says. You have to target your audience, then customize the pieces for each of those targeted audiences.
Tara notes a couple of things she might have done differently when she started:
She feels she should have been more ready to follow her intuition,
She made the mistake of extending too much credit to financially-strapped clients
The things that have helped 360 Media succeed for almost a quarter decade:
Focus Faster, Leverage Success
Thursday, June 11, 2020 • Duration 30:29
In 2007, after nearly a decade of experience in numbers-focused direct-response marketing, Matt Weber used a business broker to buy a small jack-of-all trades agency that provided sales training, traditional media marketing, and a small bit of web development. Over time, that agency became ROAR! Internet Marketing, where Matt is now President. The agency’s forte today? Measurable actions.
In this interview, Matt explains what a buyer can expect from a business broker, how to select one, broker limitations, and a broker’s role in facilitating business acquisitions. He warns that it will be challenging to evaluate transactional opportunities in the next few months. But, he also expects to see a lot of merger and acquisition activity as companies adjust to the COVID-impacted business environment. Matt’s general tips? Agencies will need to be more aware of costs now, “throttle back” on anticipatory hiring, , and eliminate “tool bloat” (buying multiple tools with the same functionality).
Matt is no stranger to change. In 2007, websites were little more than glorified brochures. Matt shed virtually everything of the original business, rebranded it, and focused heavily on digital marketing conversions and direct response. Early on, 85-90% of the agency’s revenues came from web development.
Today, 80% of his agency’s revenues come from recurring digital marketing services, primarily for three verticals: elective medical (almost recession-proof), recurring-business home services (need-based), and manufacturing (which has a completely different cycle than consumer-based marketing). Matt says, when you focus your efforts on a limited number of verticals, you “leverage your success more effectively,” and follows that with the comment: “Diluted focus yields diluted results.”
Matt has created a free tool, Smylelytics.com, which he compares to a car’s “check engine” light. (It won’t tell you what is wrong, but it will tell you when to take a look.) Twice a month, Smylelytics evaluates a company’s Google Analytics, translates the information into memorable, themed photographs, and emails the company with the (good/neutral/bad) “news.”
Matt serves as a national trainer for the Grow with Google program, where he presents small- to medium-sized businesses with a one-day class that covers Google My Business, Google Analytics, and Google Data Studio tools. He also speaks at conferences, frequently on the topic of, “5 Things Your Website Is Trying to Tell You but You’re Afraid to Ask.” Here, he provides a brief overview of those 5 things:
A Million-Brand Mission in a Post-Covid World
Thursday, June 4, 2020 • Duration 33:40
As a bestselling author and keynote speaker, Deb Gabor, CEO and Founder of Sol Marketing, has, herself, become a “brand.” She defines Sol Marketing as a brand-driven, strategy-led marketing firm in the business of creating irrational loyalty. Irrational loyalty means people are indelibly bonded to a brand.
When Deb talks about her agency, she does not list the provided services: she feels marketing services have become commoditized. Instead, she presents a passionate vision of what the future could be. She tells people she is on a million-brand mission – to impact a million brands in her career. She believes that the best brands in the world are truly unique – in why they do what they do. Her goal is to strengthen brands: making businesses more sustainable will up-level communities, and, ultimately, help people.
When the Corona virus hit, Deb’s speaking engagements for the next 6 months were cancelled. She is sheltering at home . . . but not sheltering in her mind. The question was: how was she going to generate income when she could no longer speak at face-to-face events? What could she do? How could she help her company? She mobilized her team and made her personal brand a “client” of the agency. “Figure out how this has impacted us,” she told her team, “and then what we need to do.”
Deb referenced an interview with James Stockdale in Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. Stockdale was held for 6 years in a Vietnamese POW camp. When asked how he managed to survive, Stockdale explained that he faced the brutal facts of his situation, but also kept up his hope and optimism. Prisoners who were over-optimistic, but refused to face the “brutal facts,” did not do as well.
Deb’s team identified around eight “brutal facts” about how Deb’s brand was impacted by Covid-19. Some issues were solvable, some were not.
The company pivoted and, got Deb back on track in a new direction – creating information products, building online courses, building sales funnels, and building webinar funnels. Deb identified the assets she needed her team to build, established a schedule, and set targeted monthly income goals for the information products, her speaking, and her book sales. Then, taking things a step further, the company prioritized a something new: authority marketing services for professionals, who, like her, were facing the same challenges. The assets her team built for Deb became a product that could help other speakers, authors, experts, coaches, and consultants.
Changing Behaviors to Improve Public Health
Thursday, May 28, 2020 • Duration 29:46
Jeff Jordan is President and Executive Creative Director of Rescue: The Behavior Change Agency. Rescue offers a broad range of marketing services for government agencies (public health departments, state and federal agencies) and non-profits seeking to promote positive changes in public health related behaviors.
Jeff started his agency when, as a high school student, he volunteered for his local health department’s youth-targeted anti-tobacco program. He transitioned from volunteer to contractor, tweaked the anti-tobacco program to approach teens in an innovative way, and grew the agency through “a lot of referrals.” He opened his first office while he was in college and continued his focus on behavioral change for social good.
In this interview, Jeff tells us that marketing tactics that are used to sell products don’t necessarily work in changing “fundamental behavior.” His team has to be expert, not just in marketing, but also in behavior change theory, psychology, and sociology . . . and know how to appeal to different subsets within targeted cohort groups. Jeff says that it can take years for a consistent message to bring measurable change, and although there is nothing equivalent to “sales data” to gauge message impact in “real time,” he has found there are some measurable interim “markers” on the path to behavior change. Tracking and measuring specific behavior-related attitudes or beliefs or pieces of knowledge over time can predict subsequent behavior changes.
About 7 years ago, Rescue won a $150 million FDA youth tobacco prevention contract. These funds allowed the agency to increase in size from 50 to 150 employees in 3 years. Today, Rescue’s 175 employees work out of 6 offices around the country. They serve government agencies and nonprofits in 30 states. Rescue creates programs for these organizations, but also has a library of campaigns that can be licensed.
Over the years, Jeff has learned to say “no” to opportunities that are not right for his agency. Budgets that are too small can limit a campaign’s success . . . . and blame for poor results will invariably fall on the agency . . . not on the tight budget. The smaller a client is, the more they tend to demand. Jeff has observed that agencies end up over-servicing smaller accounts to keep them, tie up senior personnel in servicing these smaller clients, and underservice their larger accounts. Jeff warns that really small accounts can hold an agency down.
Apple Podcasts
🇬🇧 Great Britain - marketing
01/12/2025
#76
🇬🇧 Great Britain - marketing
24/11/2025
#56
🇬🇧 Great Britain - marketing
20/11/2025
#100
🇨🇦 Canada - marketing
20/10/2025
#85
Justin outlines the updated review and review cycle program (structured through a program called Lattice) the agency uses to keep everything running smoothly. Every two weeks team members submit a four-question online survey that covers how they’re doing, what roadblocks they have, and anything they want their manager to know. Every quarter, team members submit three or four agency- and personal-growth goals. These are used to project the agency’s direction in the subsequent quarter.
Finding a mentor, someone a step or two ahead, can help a startup avoid pitfalls. Justin comments that if you find an outside counsel and can afford that person, it’s probably not too early. He also mentions ways to find such help for free. He says strategic, balanced growth is healthy growth and believes that a company that is not growing is dying.
Justin and Sandra can be found on their agency’s website at Bigeyeagency.com, where visitors will find an “incredibly updated” blog.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Justin Ramb, President of Bigeye, and Sandra Marshall, VP of Client Services at Bigeye, and they are based in Orlando, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Justin and Sandra.
JUSTIN: Thanks for having us.
SANDRA: Thank you, Rob.
ROB: Absolutely. Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Bigeye, and what is your superpower?
JUSTIN: Bigeye is a full-service ad agency in Orlando. We do a lot of different services. Full service, but we definitely focus on four key areas of audience, creative, media and analytics, and then data. We’re very focused on that and serve a variety of clients all over the country and several around the world.
ROB: Very cool. Is there any particular vertical or size of client that tends to be in your sweet spot?
JUSTIN: We serve a lot of different clients. Whether it’s a startup, a D2C, somebody just getting off the ground that’s looking for a really comprehensive strategy moving forward to launch their product or service, or all the way up to very large CPG brands that support lots of different brands under them. So, we’ve got a wide variety.
We have engagements that mostly focus on multiple pieces and customer journey, brand development, execution, media, and then the analytics and optimization. That full spectrum is what we focus on with our clients.
ROB: Right on. Knowing your pillars does provide part of the story, so maybe it’s interesting if we step through those a little bit piece by piece. When you talk about audience, what does Bigeye talk about when they’re talking about audience?
JUSTIN: We’re really focused on audience. We believe that’s the start of almost all of our engagements, all of our initiatives – really looking at, who is the audience we’re going after for that product or service? It’s really important to understand that audience, who they are, where they consume media, what they look like, and what are their triggers to convert. We spend a lot of resources upfront to understand that audience.
We’ve got a whole insights team, led here by our Vice President of Insights, Adrian Tennant, and he leads the team to really dive into that, both in a primary research way, or we’ll grab secondary research as well. That will then also get us into audience personas and developing those personas to have a target of two or three personas we’re going after, and we’ll always match what we’re doing back up to those personas to make sure we’re always leading with that strategy.
SANDRA: And Rob, it’s really been incredible to see how well that’s resonated with our clients. To see them be able to relate to an actual person and some of the persona development that we’ve done has really set a phenomenal foundation for many of our projects. Keeping that person in mind for the duration and the lifecycle of the work together has been really, really compelling.
ROB: It’s truly critical. You mentioned the startup side of the world; a lot of times when startups are asked to articulate their audience, it almost feels like an exercise in creative writing rather than in fact. Helping them dial that in seems like it would vary quite widely by customer. You mentioned that primary and secondary research. I’d imagine on the consumer side, you may have datasets at your disposal that the client might not even have, or maybe something within their data that they don’t know.
But then on the B2B side, are you diving in sometimes and interviewing their existing customers, their potential customers, and going deep on that personal level there?
JUSTIN: Absolutely. On the B2C side, we spend a lot of time looking at that audience and customer with some really great tools that we have at our disposal to get to who they are.
On the B2B side, it is important to grab the current customer data. We can develop a lookalike audience and really develop that persona based on existing data, and/or there may be businesses that are looking to capture new clients, new types of clients, and that’s where we’ll go through quite a few exercises with the client to understand those and develop personas based on where they want to head. We’ll supplement that with key stakeholder interviews, additional research, online research, quantitative/qualitative research. We always want to make sure that we’re matching it back up to solid data.
ROB: You put creative second in that list, and I’m sure that’s no coincidence. It sounds to me like given that focus on audience, the creative has a deep, deep link to the audience that’s being targeted. Number one, how do you think about creative? And number two, how do you help the creative types to view that audience information as a useful constraint rather than maybe a limitation on their creative juices?
JUSTIN: We find that a lot of the work that we do actually arms creative to produce better creative. They love to understand exactly the customer, the audience that they’re designing for. After we define those personas, we will often then go to another step before we get into creative of researching and serving audiences to make sure that we’re creating creative for them. We’ll test messaging, we’ll test colors, we’ll test headlines, we’ll test photography, and we’ll find out what those audiences most resonate with.
We have all that data; we will then turn that over to our creative team, and then they’ll match that up to what they’re envisioning to create for them. They absolutely love it. It probably initially was like, “Wait, what’s going on here? We’ll design what we want to design,” but now they’ve come to really appreciate having some solid information before diving deep into what they do.
ROB: That definitely makes sense. Stepping through, you talk about media and analytics. Those are both words I think that have known meanings, but they mean perhaps different things to different people. What do media and analytics mean within the world of Bigeye?
JUSTIN: We will continue the journey with our customers and clients. We’ve now created the creative; it’s all matched back up to the personas, and in that persona development, we’re also understanding where they consume media. Where most can we get in front of them? Obviously, in today’s world, it’s a lot of different places. Yes, it’s Facebook, it’s Instagram, but it’s also driving down the road. People still commute. Out of home is still important. It may be a lot of other platforms.
So, we will develop a media plan, again based on the personas, and then begin to place that media and watch it through the analytics team.
ROB: Got it. Then analytics in that case is useful as part of the planning process, whereas data is probably completing that loop and tying the results back to the business objectives?
JUSTIN: We watch that data, those analytics, nonstop. It is so important in the 24/7 world to watch how things are performing. Where can we perform optimizations? How are conversions going? Are we matching up to the audiences that we’ve outlined? It’s really important that we’re looking at those analytics. We create custom dashboards. We go beyond just relying on Google Analytics and we create those custom dashboards specifically for the targets and the KPIs that have been outlined early on in the process.
ROB: That entire story makes sense. Tell us a little bit about the origin of Bigeye. How did you end up starting this thing in the beginning?
JUSTIN: We started back in 2002, pre-internet, pre a lot of things nowadays. Frankly, it took quite a few years to figure out what the hell we were doing. It was a lot of trial and error. Figured out what we did best, what we did worst, and ultimately what we ended up finding was what caused the most success was to hire properly. Bring on team members that were not only committed, not only skilled, but really were part of where we were headed as an agency.
We brought on Sandra in the client services and account department and we brought on Seth Segura, our creative director. Still here today, and really defined, where do we want to go? That’s what has led us to the focus of audience, creative, and media.
ROB: Was one of those practices more prominent in the earliest of days?
JUSTIN: Hiring was just so important. Again, it took us a number of years to realize it was all about who was going to be on the bus with us. We knew that we had to get the seats filled, and frankly a lot of what we do can be taught. There is some skill to it, but a lot of it can be taught. So, understanding the aptitude and attitude of people that we were hiring, and was it part of the culture that we wanted to build at Bigeye?
SANDRA: I think to add to that, too, one thing that we identified early on was not only did we have to look for those good cultural fits and those amazing skillsets, but we also had to make sure that we were arming the people we were bringing in with the appropriate support and other members of the team to make sure all the wheels were continuing to run smoothly and there was an incredible sense of collaboration with everybody. We did not want everybody to be working in silos. We wanted to really make sure that there was the appropriate amount of department building that was also occurring while we were looking for this incredible talent.
JUSTIN: One of the big “ahas” for us was doing better reviews and review cycles. It was really interesting to me. To the fault of our own, we were doing a really bad job at performance reviews. We’ve done it multiple different ways through the years. We’ve done annual reviews, we’ve done anniversary reviews, we’ve done 360 reviews. Oftentimes we’d forget about it until somebody said, “Hey, can I get my annual review?”
I do think that’s pretty common in agencies. We’re running hard, clients are demanding things, things are changing, so the review cycle and performance reviews was something we realized if we were going to grow, we needed to make sure we put something in place that could help that. So we did.
Now we’re on a great schedule. We do two-week sprints where we do updates every two weeks. Team members will submit a four-question online survey – how they’re doing, what roadblocks they have, anything they want their manager to know. So, we’ve got these pulse checks with our team members. Two weeks in agency life can feel like a year, so we wanted to make sure that we were touching base.
Then we do quarterly reviews. We ask our team members to develop three or four goals for the quarter, all aligned with the growth of the agency, but also personal growth. We meet with them on a quarter basis, we review the quarters, and then we project where we want to head for the next quarter.
And then we’ll do the annual review, which obviously is the bigger one and more extensive, but critically important to continue to check in on the growth and the development of our team members, but also of the agency.
ROB: Right. I think people coming from some agencies would perhaps be a little bit shocked by that level of regularity, if you’re able to actually keep it in sync. How did you come to that degree of structure? Do you have a disposition towards structure and you just had to form the idea, or were there some tools that came into play to help you arrive at some of those conclusions?
JUSTIN: The “aha” was when a team member came to Sandra and I and said, “Hey, can I get my annual review?” and we said, “That’s not right. We need to put something in place and we need to stick by it.” We did a lot of searching and we ended up with a tool called Lattice. Lattice is an online tool that allows such great structure, but a lot of flexibility. You can customize what works best for your agency. We have found it to be incredibly successful.
SANDRA: It’s helpful to not find ourselves in an annual review where surprises are being uncovered about not only employee progress, but as a manager, how we could’ve helped them better through the past year. So, these reoccurring checkpoints really help us as leaders to be able to know where we can step in and either coach better or help to refocus energy. I think it’s definitely a two-way street in all of these reviews.
ROB: That definitely makes sense. You said the agency started in 2002, and that was certainly one “aha” moment. What are some other things, when you look back at the journey, that you see that you might have done differently if you were starting from scratch that you learned along the way? Maybe some lessons learned?
JUSTIN: I’d say two things. One, looking back, I would’ve been quicker to bring in outside counsel, somebody that can give us wisdom, that can consult with us, can look at our business, can look at our processes. Bring them in and really allow them to take a look at everything.
We did that about two years ago. We brought a gentleman in from Boston and allowed him to look at every single thing of the agency and to give us his feedback and his thoughts and his perspective about what we were doing – what we were doing well and what needed to be tweaked. I wish we would’ve done that much earlier. There was so much wisdom that came out of that. It was critical.
Secondly, I would say really defining our focus. What are the services that we really want to focus on moving forward over the next couple years? What are the industries we want to focus on? I do think agencies are prone to take anything and everything as long as it pays the bills, and yes, that’s important – but to really internally know as a team, “this is where we’re headed, both in an industry focus and in the services that we want to offer,” and then align everything with that.
ROB: When you mention that outside counsel, I imagine this sort of person can go by many different titles – some sort of a consultant, perhaps a coach, that sort of thing. I think there are some people you’re not sure if you can trust, so how did you identify someone that you could trust to speak into the business in that way?
JUSTIN: We wanted somebody that knew our business, was not in our business, but that can consult with us on the business. We found a gentleman who does search consulting, works with procurement departments for agencies, and allowed him to come in and really pick everything apart. He was a part consultant, he was a part coach, mentor to me and to Sandra and the leadership team. He was just really critical as we moved forward with the incredible growth that we’ve had over the last couple years.
ROB: That part is exciting. It sounds like you’ve more than gotten your money’s worth for whatever the arrangement was. I think sometimes when I talk to folks who are earlier in their agency journey, there comes a point where they’re not sure when they should start spending what could be a significant amount of money on this type of help. How would you think about when is too early to start squeezing that outside counsel to help you get outside your business and grow?
JUSTIN: Great question. I don’t think it’s ever too early if you can afford it, but I also think there are some ways to get some counsel that may not be so expensive or structured.
I know, early on in the agency, we sought out people, other agency owners, to connect with. We didn’t feel like there was some sort of competition there. We could have lunch with them and really talk shop and get some wisdom from each other. It wasn’t a formal thing, but we got together to at least have some counsel because we were young, we were small, they were larger, they had already been through the ups and downs. I think that was really important to have as well, which a lot of people can do if they search, especially nowadays where you can jump on a Zoom call or something like that.
ROB: That’s a good way to frame the current environment in terms of the opportunity as well as the constraints. I think it’s really helpful what you said there. It’s twofold – one is finding the people a step or two ahead of you and looking to them for some ways to move forward, and also, I think what you said about if you can afford the person, it’s probably not too early – I think that creates something a lot of businesses may want to find earlier than they do, which is a lens of profitability, a lens of healthy margins. How have you thought about healthy growth, especially as your team has grown?
JUSTIN: Healthy growth to me and to the leadership team at Bigeye is strategic and it’s balanced. We want to grow. If you’re not growing, you’re dying, so we want to make sure we continue to grow. We’ve been blessed and fortunate over the last couple years to grow rapidly, but we will continue to do that strategically, and we’ll do it in a balanced way. We’re not here to drive our team to burnout. We’re going to have a work-life balance. We’re going to make sure folks get out of here on time to go to their families and other things.
Now, everybody’s going to be available and be able to communicate, and afterhours, because clients will need something, but we’re going to do this growth in the right way. We’re not here to drive everyone to burnout to then go sell the agency. That is not the focus for us. We’re going to continue to grow and develop a really great agency in the U.S.
ROB: Then you also mentioned the importance of focus as one of the lessons that you’ve learned. Have there been lines of service or particular types of work that you have shut down? If so, what did you shut down and how did you realize that you needed to?
JUSTIN: Sandra, correct me if I’m wrong – I don’t know that we’ve shut down any services. We have fine-tuned our services in the sense that we know the ones that will be a win-win for both us and the client. There are services or engagements where if it’s maybe a one-off engagement, that’s probably not the right fit for us. We’re looking for multiple initiatives, a longer-term engagement than just doing a website or something like that.
SANDRA: In addition to that, too, I think we’ve identified through that when we need to acknowledge that it’s not necessarily our expertise per se, or if we know of someone who may be doing it better than us, we’re not shy to admit, “We want to make sure this is achieving the ultimate goal that you have, so let’s bring in either a partner or some outside help and counsel to be a part of this project together.”
ROB: That makes sense. A lot of times when it comes to partnering, you see a spectrum. Some agencies have a strong preference towards white-labeling their partnerships; some of them have a strong preference towards always surfacing and strictly saying “this is a partner,” and some of them tend to go somewhere in between. How have you thought about that decisioning process about if it’s explicitly always a partnership, almost always a white-label, or in between?
JUSTIN: Most of the time nowadays we’re comfortable in our own skin, and we’ll do a partnership. I think most clients nowadays have multiple agencies that they’re working with. They understand that not every agency can offer everything. They’re okay with having those partnerships as long as the agency is managing it; they don’t want another thing to manage. And they appreciate the fact that we say, “That’s probably not our most expertise, and we’d like to bring in this partner to walk alongside this journey with us.” They definitely resonate with that and appreciate that.
SANDRA: And actually, I’d say a good majority of our current clients were working with other partners and all playing in the sandbox together. So, it’s been interesting the shift that’s happened over the last couple years where that’s almost become commonplace. I think really making sure that we are not only developing that relationship with the client, but really being appreciative of others involved, has also helped to create seamless, great projects.
JUSTIN: That was probably a big “aha” of several years ago that the days of Agencies of Record are pretty much gone, from what I can tell. Clients have multiple agencies that they’re using or vetting or working with, so they understand the partnership aspect and definitely appreciate it.
ROB: That’s a great point in serving the client well. Sometimes it may seem that what a client wants is a one-stop shop, but it’s really worth clarifying. It’s not that they want you to be superhuman. They may want you to be a trusted guide to help them find someone to do everything. They may not want multiple points of contact. They may not want multiple billing relationships. Or they may want all of that. It sounds like you can serve them well by figuring out how they want to be served and what it is that they’re asking for, which is probably not for you to be Superman.
JUSTIN: Absolutely. Almost everything we do, we do in-house. We’re pretty control freak, so we like having folks here under one roof. We like to offer those services. Most of the clients that we work with understand that. They like that and really resonate with the fact that we can offer all those services to them, but also to work with other agencies as well.
A lot of the clients come to us because they’re just overwhelmed. There’s so many things on their plate, there’s so many platforms they want to be on. They want to stay ahead of the curve, but they’re just trying to keep up with what’s on their plate currently. So, they’re coming to us to really help backfill a lot of the work that they know they need to be doing.
ROB: That clearly makes sense. When you’re looking ahead, what is coming up in either the marketing world in general or particularly for Bigeye that you’re excited about?
JUSTIN: I’m going to continue to say and double down on the idea of audience. Everything we do is going to tie back to audience. I believe for us, it is resonating. We will continue to do the persona development and tie it to creative and media. There’s so much opportunity to understand and segment audiences. We can drill down to very, very micro levels of who we’re trying to reach. I think we’re just beginning that, and we’ll continue to dive deeper into it.
SANDRA: And because of that, too, I’ll just add onto that, we’ve been able to engage with some really incredible brands. My hope and my outlook towards the future is that we build on those relationships with those incredible brands and we start to work with even bigger and larger brands as well, doing innovative projects and really working on incredible marketing strategies and initiatives for some really cool people.
ROB: When you say audience, I can’t help but think one of the audience platforms that is a little bit more in the news lately is Facebook, and some brands opting out of advertising on Facebook, and probably some other brands stepping in and maybe claiming some cheaper inventory there. How are you seeing clients think about Facebook in terms of what marketing they put there?
JUSTIN: From our team and from clients, they’re cautiously watching it. We’ve not had any clients or any recommendations to make major shifts in their media budgets because of what’s going on there, but we are watching it. There are several things like that that we need to be mindful of and we need to be watching for our clients and making appropriate recommendations as we move forward with that media.
We have not seen a dramatic downtick in the cost of that. It’s still an expensive platform because of the targeting that Facebook has, but we’ll continue to watch it.
ROB: Got it. One thing I’ve seen, at least on the brand side, is some brands have maybe not shifted their overall budget, but they’ve shifted how they spend it. Some of them are scaling back on the brand advertising and drilling more into let’s say driving ecommerce or some sort of online conversion, or more outcome-based and less of the potentially risky brand marketing.
JUSTIN: Yes. Conversion is key, and everything we’re doing leads to conversion in some way. Now, that doesn’t mean that brand awareness is not important; it is, and placements like on YouTube, which tend to be more of a brand awareness play than a direct conversion – most people don’t click the ad on YouTube – but you need to be there. That’s where the audience is. It’s the #2 search engine in the world.
We know our brands that we work with need to be there, but we’re focused on conversions along with making sure the brand stays relevant, stays top of mind, and all matching back to, where is that consumer going to consume that media?
ROB: Super solid. Justin, Sandra, when people want to find you and Bigeye, where should they find you?
JUSTIN: Bigeyeagency.com is where you can find us. There’s a lot of information there. We keep our blog incredibly updated. A lot of great information there.
ROB: Sounds great. Any last words you want to leave with our audience before we get on with your day?
JUSTIN: Appreciate your time, and look forward to hearing feedback from folks.
ROB: Sounds great. Thank you, both of you, for joining today. It’s great to get to know you, and we’ll all look forward to being down in Orlando for some fun things at some point, once we get through this whole pandemic thing.
SANDRA: I hope so. Hope to see you, Rob.
ROB: Sounds great. Be well.
JUSTIN: Thanks, Rob.
SANDRA: Thank you.
JUSTIN: Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
LeadMD’s 3-person data science team digs in at a deeper level that its clients have – researching the market, defining buyers, assembling ideal customer profiles – and then translates that information into engagement and messaging frameworks.
LeadMD utilizes role-based psychological/personality profiling to select candidates who will strengthen the organization—either by reinforcing role-desirable traits . . . or by bringing a new direction to the role. The hiring process can take as long as 2 months. Fifty percent of the organization is employee owned.
Justin can be reached on LinkedIn, on Twitter @jgraymatter or on his agency’s website at: https://www.leadmd.com/.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined by Justin Gray, CEO and Founder at LeadMD based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast, Justin.
JUSTIN: Thanks, Rob. Appreciate you guys having me on.
ROB: Fantastic. Why don’t you tell us about LeadMD and where LeadMD excels?
JUSTIN: LeadMD is what we describe as a performance marketing consultancy. It basically just means that our outcomes are aligned to tangible business goals, whether that be revenue increase, product launches, defining a buyer – something that’s going to have a real tangible impact, not on the tactical side.
We don’t get into any engagements where we’re trying to optimize a website or a cost per lead. It’s going to be more holistic than that. Although we might conduct those tactics, we really desire to impact the bottom line of our clients – which are predominantly B2B and B2C considered-purchase organizations, big market enterprise.
Our secret sauce, or where we made our bones, is by operating bridging two different spaces. Normally you either work with a really high dollar, white shoe global consultancy like Accenture or Deloitte and they will help you set your go-to-market strategy or your marketing strategy, and then you’ll work with a much more regional partner that’s going to help you, maybe even an independent consultant that would pop in and help you operationalize that stuff. We do both, and we beat out the Deloittes and Accentures of the world every day.
Our real claim to fame is that we do stuff. Marketing operations is really the backbone of our organization. We’ve got the data science team, we’ve got a strategy team, we’ve got a go-to-market team, and these are all really smart people. But the thing that makes them truly unique is they know how to go plug that strategy into systems and make it work and measure it and optimize it over time, which is just a real rarity, unfortunately, within the B2B space.
ROB: For sure. You cast an interestingly wide net with your description that is still narrow in an interesting way. You said B2B and B2C considered purchases. A lot of times I think when you look at performance marketing groups, that B2B considered purchase dials in pretty tightly on let’s say software. There’s not a lot of white space around that. But it sounds like when you talk about considered purchase in consumer and non-software – where does the rest of the range go beyond that preconception about software, software, software?
JUSTIN: We’ve got probably five – because we’ve been in business for over 10 years, we’ve followed the marketing automation maturity curve, and we’re a primary partner of many of those providers. I’ve got over 3,500 customers, literally from vape pens to traditional software providers and everything in between.
But the primary concentrations we see are obviously technology providers, as you mentioned, software. Then healthcare, and that bifurcates itself into the payer/provider side and then the med device side. Both those industries, we’ve had a really strong footprint in. Then manufacturing. I describe it as when your grandma gets an iPhone happening in manufacturing right now. A lot of these organizations have really archaic marketing practices, but they’re springing forward into the latest and greatest because it’s become standard at this point. So manufacturing is a big one for us. Financial services, everything from traditional banking to online banking to credit unions.
And then really, anyone with a channel sale type of go-to-market. That can be insurance brokers, that can be real estate – commercial real estate, predominantly. Anyone that’s selling through the channel is also where we’ve seen a big concentration. But definitely, of that 3,500+, you’re probably dealing with about 50% that falls into the software provider space. Still a big industry for us.
ROB: Sure. But a fascinating range beyond that. If somebody looks you all up on LinkedIn, at least, if LinkedIn is to be believed, you have dozens and dozens and dozens of employees, but it sounds like you’re talking about quite a variety of products and perhaps even thousands of customers. It seems like there’s a story of tremendous leverage in there that I’d like to dig into a little bit, that you can be effective across such a range and across so many customers.
JUSTIN: Yeah. I think that’s just a function of necessity. With the rise of marketing automation and therefore marketing ops, there was this big talent vacuum that occurred. As we were building this agency and bringing people on and training them – and even advertising to them why they should come work for us versus go to the client side – the fact that they’re going to get exposure to – our average consultant is running between 7 and 10 active projects every month. That’s an incredible amount of exposure that they’re getting.
As I mentioned earlier, both from the strategy side of the house – fundamentally, how are they going to market? What does their buyer look like? How are they engaging this individual? – all the way down into how we make a platform like a Marketo work for that business. We’re talking to a retail burger chain right now. Loyalty programs are their predominant reason for up-leveling their marketing ops tech stack and therefore the surrounding strategies.
That’s so much different than talking to a traditional B2B software provider. I think that’s what frankly is the interesting part about what we do, and that’s also what we hear from our employees over and over again, like, “I don’t know what my day is going to look like, and that’s the exciting part about it.”
ROB: Sure, you have 7 to 10 different customers, each of which could ask you an interesting question that day or have something in their tech stack that might not be working quite as they hope. Do your teams specialize in particular marketing automation suites? Also, something I think is different – many agencies we’ve talked to will specialize in one. They’ll have HubSpot and just be trying to increase the quality of metal that is associated with their agency with relation to HubSpot. Platinum, or I guess you can go to gems, too, with Diamonds. How do you think about the right tool for the client?
JUSTIN: We were born as a Marketo consultancy, but right around the 2013-14 mark, we decided – Marketo was a predominant provider, and obviously still is, although owned by Adobe. What approach do we really want to be known for? Do we want to be known that all roads eventually end up at Marketo, or do we want to be a customer-driven solution provider?
At that point, although we still have partnerships with all of these different providers, we really do take an agnostic approach where we’re trying to understand, fundamentally, what is this business trying to accomplish? What is the best tech stack to reinforce that? And oftentimes that does go against hype. We may be recommending Pardot. We may be recommending an ESP, something that’s much more in tune with the business goals rather than our traditional partnership.
We do have specializations internally, certainly. We’ve got folks that have a big Pardot footprint, HubSpot footprint, Marketo footprint. If you think about the 6,000+ martechs on the market today, that gets pretty complicated pretty quickly. But really, we structure ourselves down into practices, and all of that will fall within our revenue ops practice. So those folks are constantly thinking about what skillsets we have, how we up-level those, how we maintain our certifications, and ensure that whatever comes long, we’ve got enough context to give the best performance for the customer.
ROB: I think something that’s implied – and tell me if I’m reading this correctly – by the tool stacks you’re mentioning, your Pardots and your Marketos and whatnot are a little bit upmarket from the entry level marketing automation platforms. Is that a selection filter for the type of customer, or is that an outworking of the type of customer that you tend to pursue?
JUSTIN: Yeah. When I say big market, I really mean $100 million and up. Everyone’s got a different definition of their market levers, but for us, our best client starts around $100 million and goes up from there. I’ve got a Fortune 3 company right now that has an active engagement with us. So it is that mid enterprise level footprint.
ROB: That sort of client often has a very high expectation of touch and relationship with their marketing providers. With that 7 to 10 customer per staffer ratio, the accounts they’re serving, how do you retain that sense of touch? Or is it really, because you’re delivering results, the touch is a little bit easier to manage and you’re not just trying to say sweet things to them?
JUSTIN: I would say regardless of how we’ve grown or scaled, the customer relationship has always been the centerpiece there. You’re never going to get away from the fact that when something goes wrong or a customer has a question or a customer just wants a piece of information as they’re going into a board meeting and they need that final piece that’s going to make them look awesome, they’re going to want to reach out and have someone answer the phone, answer their email, be on Slack, whatever it happens to be.
Relationship is absolutely critical. Again, I think that’s a unique element when you see an agency of our size that’s still able to maintain not only great client relationships, but personal relationships within that. We’ve got folks that have called us on weekends where it’s not our problem, it’s not even in our space – maybe something happened in IT – but marketing knows that they’ve got this great partner that is great at problem-solving, and “Hey, let’s reach out to them and see if they can help us.” I’ve been on those calls on Saturdays before.
It’s a tricky line. You want to make sure that you’re setting boundaries and you’re letting the client know, ultimately, we want a relationship and a partnership here, not something that’s going to feel like a whipping boy. But I do think you can’t get away from that within an agency. Any time you try to automate and people insert these separated ticketing systems and portals and things like that that their clients have to go through, I think that’s always a bastardization of the client relationship.
When I say 7 to 10, also, I should clarify that they may be hopping in and doing a piece of that project. Fundamentally, we’ve got principals aligned to those accounts that do all the account management and the relationship management. Because of your specialization, you might need to hop in and troubleshoot something on a Pardot platform or help with an integration for Marketo. But it’s really critical that we maintain a one to few relationship with the folks that are charged with managing that relationship.
ROB: That’s aligned with what you mentioned earlier, with those different practice teams. But you probably didn’t start off with a variety of practice teams, so how did this whole LeadMD thing get started?
JUSTIN: The short answer is accidentally. Yes, you’re absolutely right. Most agencies always start in the same manner, which is one person aligned to an account, like “Just don’t piss them off. Just don’t have these guys call me and say, ‘You’re providing terrible service.’” Everyone focuses on that one to one. I think agencies go through a number of maturity inflection points, but certainly when you realize that’s not going to work for your business long-term is probably one of the most difficult.
But back to your question in terms of how this got started. I was a very young VP of Sales and Marketing at a payment startup. It was actually my first venture into startup world. I graduated in marketing. I had three marketing jobs after college; I hated all of them. Suddenly I stumbled upon this new world, which was startup. I completely fell in love with it from every dimension that you possibly could.
In that business, we were selling through channel partners. We had 30+ different partners where our solution was integrated. It was a payment technology system. When we went to market and we marketed, we had to look like we were either marketing on behalf of that partner or co-marketing with that partner. We had that built into our standard agreements with them.
I was managing an ESP with that requirement and pulling lists and sending out these blasts and trying to make it seem like it was a lead nurture thing, although we didn’t even know what to call it back in 2006. Went out to Dreamforce and was talking to one of my buddies out there who owned a Salesforce agency. He said, “Hey, you should really talk to these guys over here.” We stumbled upon Eloqua, and I was like, “Wow, what is this?”
So, we did this whole evaluation of marketing automation platforms back then, like V Trends. There were so many that are not around any longer. In fact, the only two that were in that cycle were Eloqua and Marketo. Marketo I stumbled upon eleventh hour. They had a little 10 x 10 kiosk out at Dreamforce, if that tells you anything about the year.
ROB: [laughs] Which would still set them back a pretty penny.
JUSTIN: Right, totally. Jon Miller, who’s one of the founders, was working the booth. Bill Binch, who went on to become their CRO, was working the booth. I talked to those guys and described what I was looking for, and they showed me their platform. I was just blown away by the drag-and-drop nature, the intuitiveness of it and so on. I signed the contract right at that show.
We came back, we implemented it, loved it, rolled it out to my team. Eventually I sold my piece of that business and figured I was going to do the typical, “Hey, let’s go live in Italy for a year and take a year off” and so on and so forth. I flew over there. I took two weeks off. While I was over in Italy, a couple of my relationships called me and said, “Hey, can you do what you did over at this company,” which was called Billingtree. I said, “On a consulting basis? Sure, let me figure out what that would look like.”
Those three clients who reached out became our first three retainer relationships. It was just me, operating in a spare bedroom, supporting these guys. Fortunately, because of the advent of marketing automation and the rise of these technologies, the phone just kept ringing. I had to bring on employees at that point, and before you knew it, we had 12 employees and I had to take an office space.
Truly an accidental business for me. Not something I ever intended to get involved in. Never had run an agency before, never had run any sort of people-based business before. Always technology or payments. Just a really interesting experience that has really become the heart and soul of my businesses.
I’ve sold four businesses since I’ve had LeadMD as an agency, and it’s definitely the one that I am the most emotionally attached to.
ROB: With the timing of you starting that business, you were a little bit before businesses probably cared about social in any way. Is that accurate?
JUSTIN: That was the big conversation at the time, like, is social going to catch on? Who should be on social? Just like marketing automation, there were like 100 different social media platforms, like Big and – God, I can’t even remember all the names of them. Just these random little – so everyone was playing around.
I was thinking about it the other day. I can think of days where all I did was set up profiles on different social media platforms because we had no idea what was going to take off. Obviously, for business, LinkedIn has become the home for everyone, and that’s where we spend the majority of our day from a sales engagement standpoint, from a content publication standpoint.
But yeah, early days, that conversation was taking place across social, it was taking place across CRM, it was taking place across marketing technology and marketing automation. No one really knew what any of this stuff was going to become and if it was going to catch on. My early content creation was centered on that, like “What is this marketing automation thing and why should you care?”
Every once in a while, I’ll feel one of those little waves come around. Manufacturing went through that 2-3 years ago, where they’re asking, “What is marketing automation and why should we care?” You get these little flashback moments as laggard industries fall into more desire for digital transformation and so on. It’s interesting to feel that nostalgia when those circles come back around.
ROB: I imagine when manufacturing comes around to it, you probably have some playbooks in place and some understanding of how to measure success. How do you help filter when clients are asking – you have some industrial software company who comes to you and says, “Tell us about TikTok.” Who’s to say that TikTok doesn’t become – at one point in your business, I imagine LinkedIn was not a place where people should be spending time. How do you start to filter and maybe experiment when something is potentially relevant, kind of relevant, or strategically critical?
JUSTIN: Fortunately, questions like that all root back to the same answer, and that’s the buyer. It’s a great emphasis for us to start the conversation on “How well do you know the buyer that you’re trying to engage? Are they spending their time on these platforms?” and really have that be the guiding light around a recommendation.
Oftentimes when we first engage with a client, we’ve got what we call our Catalyst Marketing Framework. Essentially, it’s just a big menu of dependency, like, “Hey, I want to launch this product in EMEA via a demand-generation go-to-market.” “Great, here’s the 15 things that you need to have in place and shored up at a decent maturity level in order to succeed within that.”
The box that always gets checked on there, i.e. the customer feels like they’ve done a great job around it, is, “I do customer profile research and buyer personas.” Then as we proceed down an engagement, that’s also the box that tends to get rewound and revisited. We say, “Well, you felt pretty confident in that, but as we dug into the research that you have and the information you have around your buyer, there’s some gaps there. Let’s dive in and help you better define that process.”
We have stood up a data science team. It’s small but mighty. It’s literally three people, but they’re producing some awesome, awesome results in terms of market research, buyer definition, ideal customer profile assembly, and then the translation of that into engagement and messaging frameworks.
Long story short, we answer those questions through the lens of the buyer, and it’s a great opportunity for us to dive in where often a superficial look at who the buyer is has been conducted in the past.
ROB: Right. I think a lot of businesses are pushed into inventing a fairytale about who their ideal customer profile is, and you having three data science people who know what to do with the data is many steps ahead from the forced hypothesis I think a lot of businesses get into.
JUSTIN: That’s the danger of data science, actually. The one thing we’ve learned about these services is you really have to set a strong foundation for the fact that data is going to be the determinant of what we do. Even when you think about the narratives that happen within an organization – like I’m extremely opinionated about who our ICP is. I get challenged all the time from our marketing team, like, “Is that truly correct still? That’s something that was true 5 years ago. Let’s go out and go into the market and do some research and validate that.”
If you’re going to open that door, you have to open the door to being really uncomfortable, because what you often find from a data perspective is incomplete data. It’s the fact that you can’t draw those lines without going out and doing customer interviews or prospect interviews and employee interviews. Therefore, organizations really have to be prepared to say, “A lot of these maxims that we’ve held up are not supported by data and may be untrue.”
We’ve had to do a lot of expectation setting around the engagements that involve data science because the results are often quite different from what the internal narrative actually is.
ROB: For sure. I appreciate your willingness to be questioned and not just to say, “I’m right and I know because I’m in charge and I’ve been doing this for a while.” I think that willingness to be wrong probably helps model what your own team does in engaging with clients and how to guide them through that process gently, where they may be wrong, but you’re really just interested in helping everything be right.
JUSTIN: I’ve had some meetings in the past where maybe we’ve involving a vendor or someone from the outside is sitting in – we had a leadership coach in, in Q4, and they were in one of these meetings and afterwards said, “Wow, the way your staff questions the things that you say, are you ever bothered by that?” My mantra is ruthless pragmatism. If you see something that doesn’t make sense or isn’t supported by something or you think it’s assumed or you think there’s a better way to do something, everyone here has the license to dive into that and really question that.
I think sometimes that can be a bit uncomfortable for people from the outside. They have these strong lines of strata that are drawn where it’s like someone breezes into a meeting, says something, leaves, and everyone just has to go run and do it. I think that’s the value if you’ve got a really strong team and you embrace becoming a people-based business.
ROB: That ruthless pragmatism sounds like a cousin of radical candor and that whole line of thinking. Have you had people where it turns out that it may not be a fit for the organization with that level of candor? Is there a way you filter for that on the way in?
JUSTIN: We’ve done probably more work than I even want to admit around trying to profile for hiring and really getting into role-based profiling. We have a 200+ question survey. You don’t have to answer all the 200 questions; it just says, “Answer these for an hour. Do at least 100 of the questions.” It is a psychological survey – I forget who publishes it; some university – but our data science team got a hold of it and scrubbed out a few questions that are inappropriate for an employer to ask, and now we give that up front.
We don’t provide the results of that survey to our team until someone’s ready to make an offer. What we’ve done is essentially taken all of our employees, had them complete that survey – it is a personality survey, akin to a DISC or a Briggs-Meyer, and it really gives great insight into the traits and the skillsets someone’s going to have. But we’ve also scatter-plotted those around role. So, we know that in our project management role, here’s the big skillsets that stand out. We take the lens of, do we want to change that? Do we want to bring in someone that’s more extroverted to push the team into a certain direction, or do we want someone that fits the existing mold?
I will caveat all of this that we are by no means where we want to be in this process. It’s always a maturity curve and a learning process. But I think for an agency, every single person I bring in is going to develop personal relationships with the client – I don’t care if it’s an associate, which is our lowest level of consultant, least amount of time in the chair; if we lose that individual, someone’s going to say, “Hey, are you guys okay over there? I was really enjoying working with so-and-so. They’re the key to my account.”
Any loss of employee, whether it’s voluntary or involuntary, is a natural stick in the eye of an agency, so we have to be really careful about who we bring in. We have to be really intentional about the types of people we’re looking for. It all boils down to the desire to employ owners, like people that are going to own whatever they’re working on. 50% of this organization is owned by our employees, literally, through an equity program. We want that to foster the type of environment that we’re trying to create and be a representation of that.
But that’s so difficult to uncover, even when you take 2 or 3 months through an interview process. There’s so much that comes out in the day to day that you just can’t get exposure to. Every day we’re trying to get better.
ROB: Fascinating, Justin. Based on what you’ve learned so far in building LeadMD, what are some things you might do differently if you were starting over right now?
JUSTIN: God, there’s probably a host of them. I would say certainly one of the first things I would do is go to specializations earlier. We spent a lot of time trying to hire for these unicorn generalists that could do strategy and be really adept at tactics. We spent a lot of time pulling our hair out, wondering, “Why can’t we find more of these people?” The short answer is because they’re incredibly rare and rarely exist. I would certainly go more into a segmented and a specialty type of approach earlier.
I’d also say – you have to remember the year that this was formed, 2009. People rarely knew what marketing automation was. They didn’t know what it did. Certainly no one was implementing it around any sort of consistent methodology. We productized our offerings very early, but when we did so, we also really painted ourselves into a corner. For a number of years, we became a Marketo implementation shop because all of our products were focused on that implementation or optimization motion.
Then we had to spend a lot of time unwinding that and getting back to our roots and fundamentals of starting with strategy, starting with the real reasons why, and building from there. The brand ramifications that that has in terms of the runway and the necessary rebranding and the time it takes to get that optic to change is something that added a lot of lead time to our business that I wish it hadn’t.
Productizations is really critical in terms of trying to define the quality of outputs, but I would not take such a laser-focused productization approach.
ROB: I want to pull on something there a little bit, because I think what may often happen is that you’re starting, and you’re the superhero, and then you hire some people who are pretty good superheroes too and do all of those things, but as you said, they’re sort of unicorns. I think sometimes there’s a tension in the billing model that can make pulling that apart a little bit difficult. You feel like, “I’m charging X amount for a superhero; how do I switch to charging for a team?” Was that something you learned, or did you have a different path through that transition and that challenge?
JUSTIN: Yeah, absolutely. Fortunately, there was a degree of immaturity and inexperience that set our original pricing. I’ll say something that’s quite embarrassing and I rarely admit: when we first launched this business, our rate per hour was $75 bucks an hour because I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Right now it’s $300, and $500 for end version work. So, we had a lot of room to grow there because I was charging $75 bucks an hour for my own time.
As we adjusted along the lines of what you’re describing, which is you have this rock star, “I’ve been charging X for them; now I need to scale, I need to charge potentially the same X for that individual,” we were able to scale our pricing up on the upper bound rather than having to have it come down. Early days, I had a lot of competitors that were very upset with me because of the pricing that we were introducing to the market, and it was just my own inexperience, quite frankly, that made that happen.
ROB: Now I think you have some pricing that is probably aspirational for a lot of people who are listening, who would like to figure out how to charge $300 or $500 just for their own time, much less for somebody who they’ve brought onto their team. I think there’s probably a lot to learn in the middle there that makes it easier to learn –
JUSTIN: Sorry to interrupt, but we still run into downward pricing pressure, of course. We’ll run into a $25 million hypergrowth organization with another $50 million bucks in funding, and they have no problem paying for anything. Like, “Okay, great, send me over the MSA.” Then we’ll run into a global, highly visible, highly well known brand – and I won’t say the name, but the biggest rideshare organization out there – and they’ll throw something out like, “Hey, we don’t pay more than $165 an hour for consulting.” We went through an incredible procurement cycle there. We don’t dip down that low.
The only thing that really adjusts that mentality for the client, I think, is being able to call in references and referrals from folks that look like them that say, “Yeah, an hour with them is expensive, but only because it’s worth three employees. Only because it’s knowledge that you’re never going to get internally, you can’t hire for it, and it’s really uncommon what they’re combining over there.” You’ve got to build up – and certainly discounting and things like that are critical to building up those referral sources and getting people to take a chance on you.
But once you’ve got both a good stockade of references and folks willing to go to bat for you, I think that’s the most powerful lever that you can pull there. Like, “Let me put you in touch with someone that you respect that we’ve worked with, and let me have them give you the story.”
ROB: There’s so much wisdom there to unpack. You’re talking about the referrals; earlier, woven into the conversation, you also talked about LeadMD in a consulting role, and you talked particularly about benchmarking. You’ve positioned yourself alongside Deloitte and some other folks that I think really helps elevate that brand profile instead of saying, “Hey, we are Scottsdale Agency #25 and we are here to help you get some leads.”
JUSTIN: Yeah, totally. People think in terms of stories. How many people have put “We want to be the Facebook of X or the Uber of Y” in their pitch deck? People need frames of reference, and I think that really helps them do so. We are the combination between the best strategic Deloitte out there and the best independent consultant you can think of, because they both have really great aspects to them, but they also both have downfalls. The reason we exist is to eliminate those downfalls.
So I agree. I think you need to speak their language. There needs to be a shared vocabulary established there.
ROB: Really solid. Justin, when people want to find you and LeadMD, where should they go?
JUSTIN: They can of course go to the Google machine, but the best channel to get me at is certainly Twitter or LinkedIn. I’m @jgraymatter on Twitter. On LinkedIn, you can just search for me, Justin Gray. LeadMD is just leadmd.com.
We use Drip, so there’s a little chat feature on there. You can mention that you want to chat with me or anyone within the organization, and we can hop on and have a bit of a discussion there. I love to talk to anyone that’s curious about business, marketing, sales, life, any of those topics. I’m happy to lend my time. I find those conversations very interesting. So if you have a question, please reach out.
ROB: Perfect. Thanks so much, Justin, for coming on and sharing so much about that LeadMD journey. It sounds like a really excellent ride.
JUSTIN: Thanks, Rob. Appreciate it.
ROB: Thank you. Take care.
Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
A lot of people will continue to support their wellness experience digitally, but Alana does not put her trust in health gadgets. Devices may measure some vitals, but the most accurate and complete picture of an individual’s health is in the bloodwork. Simplicity – eating better, thinking of food as medicine, eliminating toxins and artificial ingredients from our diets, and “moving more” are the way to win health, even without the gadgets.
Alana can be found on LinkedIn at Alana Sandel, and on her agency’s website at: marketingforwellness.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Alana Sandel, Chief Experience Officer at Marketing for Wellness based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the podcast, Alana.
ALANA: Thank you, Rob. Happy to be here.
ROB: Fantastic to have you here. Alana, why don’t you start off by telling us about Marketing for Wellness and what makes Marketing for Wellness amazing?
ALANA: Marketing for Wellness is designed to help better-for-you brands to succeed in the marketplace. What makes us amazing is really our deep passion to help people to be well. Whatever we do now is really built around health and wellness and how we can help build brands that have the next amazing, great-tasting product that’s gluten-free and dairy-free, or a fitness company that can get people moving and get them excited about living their life to the fullest. How can we make them successful?
It’s really about our passion, our values, and about an outstanding team of professionals who put their best to help many brands out there who need a voice, who need their stories to be told.
ROB: There’s certainly been an explosion of these better-for-you products. What do you think has created that opening and that opportunity? And how do you think about some of the challenges, because there’s almost so many that it’s hard to break through the noise?
ALANA: What created this huge demand is a new generation of more mindful people who appreciate the fact that wellness is the new currency. People are much more conscious about the choices they make, about where their attention goes. I think we’re dealing with a new generation that looks at our Baby Boomers and ask themselves the question, “How can I have a better quality of life?” I think this is one of the areas where we see a lot of demand.
In terms of challenges, how you break through the clutter, I believe if your product is truly great and you have a wonderful story to tell – and especially if it comes from your experience, because a lot of those niche brands were created in a garage, in a kitchen. They came from either a point of inspiration or being desperate. [laughs] They really understand pain points. Usually these smaller, authentic brands really get their audience and they’re able to get noticed. I think it all boils down to what you’re really good at.
ROB: At the onset, you alluded to, in your introduction, the food category and I think fitness as well as some categories. Are those maybe some of the hotter areas for this better-for-you movement?
ALANA: Absolutely. These are our basic needs. Food is medicine, and I think a lot of people are starting to appreciate that fact. We’re looking at food differently, and we’re reading the ingredients. We’re getting ourselves educated. Because of social media, things are going quite all right now. If you have a great product, people will endorse you, they will embrace you. If your product sucks and you’re not being true to your claims, it will also become pretty transparent relatively quickly.
When it comes to fitness, movement is life. If you are not out there, if you’re not taking the time to invest into your wellness and not giving yourself time to take a class or go for a walk or just do breathing exercises, your body is not going to be happy. So, food and fitness are definitely two big pillars that people are paying attention to and taking better steps than we used to in the past.
ROB: What marketing channels are you most often involved in? What are the key avenues to get the word out on a brand that probably can’t do everything?
ALANA: I think it’s obvious now that social media is one of the most important channels, especially working with social media influencers. Our agency has spent a lot of time to create valuable partnerships, working with social media influencers directly or through talent agencies. It’s really an art to find the best fit between the influencer and the brand to make sure there is really an authentic relationship where it doesn’t feel forced or staged.
Many influencers actually don’t want that. They’re looking for brands that they can represent with passion and brands that align with their values. Social media is basically a space that we embrace, that we enjoy working with, and this is where a lot of our work is done now.
But obviously there are other avenues with digital marketing, and most recently I have to say, because we can’t do media events like we used to – we really appreciated the balance it could create between high touch during the events and digital touch social. We’re exploring options with augmented reality right now, AR and VR, and how we can replicate experiences for people to connect with brands around entertainment and education.
ROB: That’s a very salient trend. Some places are opening up, but to a large extent a lot of people still aren’t going out. They’re certainly not getting together for events in the wake of this global pandemic around COVID-19.
Are you also finding perhaps some amplification opportunities that were less appealing before? You’ve got these influencers, and at least what we’re hearing sometimes is that some channels are opening up for paid media in ways where you used to have to spend a little bit more money to get the same message out.
ALANA: Rob, clarify your question for me.
ROB: Have you seen any opportunities open up because maybe the cost for certain ad channels is lower because some retailers aren’t advertising, some movies aren’t advertising, so you can get let’s say an impression rate or a click rate or something that’s lower than it used to be?
ALANA: Oh, absolutely. In the last I want to say 5 to 6 weeks, we’ve seen a lot of great deals on different channels. Both I would say in digital and traditional formats. Yeah, I agree with you on that.
ROB: That makes sense. Alana, tell us a little bit about how you got into this Marketing for Wellness. The business is a little bit newer, but your industry experience is quite extensive. What shifted your attention in this direction?
ALANA: When I started with my own journey back in 2001, I always had a commitment to myself that I’m not going to compromise on what I believe in. Early on, pretty much as a team, we primarily went after brands that we knew improved quality of life, but it was really a mix of organizations, from food companies to financial services companies and not-for-profits.
Last year, I realized that I really want to polish my focus on working with brands that can make a special difference for people with chronic health conditions, because I think with 60% of our population having chronic health issues and with COVID-19 putting a lot of these people in a very vulnerable spot, I think those people that have diabetes, asthma, cardiovascular diseases, and others need a lot more support today perhaps than before, especially when it comes to food and beverage companies.
So, Marketing for Wellness is designed to build brands for a better tomorrow, and we’re focused on quality of life, but our special attention now goes to those brands that have a solution for people with chronic health issues.
ROB: It almost seems like this was a little bit of a reboot, that you had built this career and you had built a firm that could do more things, and you felt the desire and saw the need to go focus in a little bit more. Is that part of the journey?
ALANA: That’s right. This is under my skin. This is something that I’m vested in personally because it’s part of my personal wellness journey and the struggles that I faced. I know there are a lot of people out there with pain points that have not been addressed.
Obviously, there are medications and there are a lot of health options, but at the end of the day what’s important is what you do every day and how you invest in yourself. What type of food you eat, how you exercise, how you develop yourself from within, how you make your life meaningful, how you look for purpose – this is all interconnected. It’s all one big holistic picture that creates wellbeing for people. But for those with chronic health conditions, it’s a lot more challenging. It’s a lot more painful. It’s a lot more expensive. I’m really embracing those brands that have great products to help those people manage life much better.
ROB: You can definitely hear the resonance between this business and your own personal journey. I couldn’t help but think as you were talking earlier about influencers, and now about some of these different conditions, it almost seems like a very good intersection where there could even be brands that would pay some influencer more to advocate on their behalf – but someone who self-identifies with a particular health concern, a particular need, may just be so grateful to find a product that helps them, whether they’re dealing with celiac or lactose intolerance or whatever, that they might choose your clients over a lot of other options. Is that part of the dynamic? You get to resonate also with your influencers?
ALANA: Absolutely. I’ll give you one example. I have the privilege to support Lively Foods. They are a manufacturer of a kefir beverage. It’s a probiotic drink that is rich with good bacteria that loves your gut. It’s especially important now because most of the health of our immune system sits in our gut. About 70% is there. So, taking care of our digestive health is critical.
Lively Foods is so loved by those people who appreciate how good this product is for their lives, both for adults and kids, that they’re extremely popular with influencers, going beyond food. You can see it on Lively Foods’ Instagram channel, classes that range from fitness to mental and emotional health. Influencers are drawn to this brand, knowing that this is one of the best choices you can make on a daily basis to keep yourself strong and resilient by taking care of your gut. So yeah, this is exactly right, Rob.
ROB: That definitely makes sense. I can’t help but notice when you talk about originally launching a business in 2001 – many would say that was not the best timing. Many would say that this year is not the best timing. Of course, 2001, we had 9/11 and the dot-com bust. Along the way, you also kept in business through the Great Recession as well.
What are you seeing, knowing that we’re probably heading into recession now – or maybe we will have an amazing recovery, as the stock market seems to believe – but knowing that we may be into a leaner time, what have you learned, at least the past couple of rounds of downturn that you have been in business through, that you’re thinking about as we look forward?
ALANA: Great question. Here’s my big idea. I believe if you are doing something that resonates with your core, something that drives you, something that you’re passionate about, you’re going to make it. You’re going to be resilient, and you’re going to find ways to sustain your business and yourself and your family. It’s not going to be easy in the next couple of years, but there’s going to be a lot of talent available that perhaps before were a little bit pricy for small to mid-size brands to tap into. There’s going to be a lot of I would say common goals to help us through this crisis and find better solutions, so people are going to be drawn to ideas, and those people who have tools and solutions that can actually help us.
So, I think we’re going to see a positive transformation where people are really working together on projects that inspire them and connect them to their better selves, and this will give us strength and resilience. We’re going to see a lot of great ideas. We already do. I believe it’s not going to be easy, but at the same time, we’re going to tap into some areas within ourselves that are going to give us that superpower.
ROB: Right. This is the time where the tourists in the industry might go away, the folks who could stick around when you could just throw a stick and find someone who needed some help with digital advertising. Those types might be on break for a little bit. People need thoughtful performance, and they need someone who’s going to adapt and find those opportunities. It sounds like you are on that journey.
ALANA: I believe I am, yes.
ROB: If we widen the aperture a little bit, Alana, having been in the industry for quite a while and having been a business leader, a business owner, what are some things you would do differently if you were – I mean, you are starting over from scratch, so maybe it’s more interesting to say what are you doing differently this time that you left behind when you left your previous business?
ALANA: Happy to share. One of the things that I wish I did from Day 1 is finding a mentor or mentors. For me, when I found my mentor, Ted Pincus, he was a financial PR pioneer. Unfortunately, he passed away. He made a world of difference within my life. Within the short time that I knew him, he led me to some really important decisions that I’d make. Because of his guidance, I joined an executive management course at Kellogg Business School. I revisited how I managed the business and how I looked at priorities.
I would encourage everyone, no matter where you are in your professional development, whether you work for a small business or a Fortune 5000 organization, I think having the right mentor by your side, who can listen, who can reflect, who can give you guidance, is the most important step you can take towards your success.
ROB: That process of finding and then also recruiting a mentor can be a little bit intimidating. In other words, some people would say that going up to ask someone to be your mentor is a lot like walking up to a stranger and asking them to marry you. How do you think about that process of, number one, finding someone who’s resonant and isn’t just somebody who seems important, and number two, building that relationship to the point where it’s not such a weird question, perhaps, to ask for a mentor?
ALANA: I think there are a number of options. My path to finding Ted Pincus, my mentor, was through another private organization where I reached out to some of the people I knew and I said, “I’m looking for help. I need guidance.” Once people got to know me, they said, “You should talk with Ted and see if he could help you.” Then Ted led me to another person who I greatly respect, Lloyd Shefsky, who was also a part of the Kellogg School, who led me to other ideas and opportunities.
So, it’s kind of a chain reaction. You talk to people, you connect with people, and you find the right person. I see many universities now, their alumni programs, offering that as an option, or there are now online portals where you can go in and look for a mentor or make yourself available to mentor someone.
I think it takes a conversation. It takes creativity, how you reach out to people. If you set an intention and you’re clear on who you need in your life now, I think you’ll find the right solution as long as you’re creative and resourceful.
ROB: Which is all part of success anyhow. I did want to poke in on one thing you said there. You initially said you didn’t say, “I need a mentor”; you said, “I need help.” First of all, asking for help is a tremendously powerful thing, and it’s also a much lower commitment. How soon into that relationship did you feel like it was going to be a long-term one?
ALANA: I knew right away. Ted understood me. He immediately responded to some of the issues that I had, and he really lent constructive support on many levels. This relationship was meant to be, so I was really fortunate to find Ted.
ROB: That’s great. You also mentioned there was a geographic resonance with Northwestern – around Chicago. People do have that affinity around their school that makes them more likely to help, I think. So that all makes plenty of sense there.
For those of us who are not as deep in the wellness industry – I think a lot of us know the lactose, gluten – what are some surprising categories of product that you see coming up? Maybe some new client categories or just the digital marketing world making the universe smaller for people to find exactly what they need?
ALANA: One of the things that I see coming, which makes me really excited – again, I’m going to use the example of food and beverage because I think this is going to be one of the biggest areas where we’re going to see change – is innovation around ingredients, what companies are putting in our food now. There are a lot of breakthroughs around alternatives to sugar.
In fact, my team a few years back was working with an organization, Tate & Lyle, as they were branded a sugar alternative, which was monk fruit. We were engaged in this process, which I was really passionate about. I think we’re going to see a lot of innovation from a product development standpoint, both in food and beverage.
Also, I see a lot of digital innovation of how people experience wellness. With COVID, there are a lot of restrictions. Before, you could go into a yoga studio and take a class with 30 people in a really tight setup; now, that capacity is probably going to be cut in half and classes are going to become more expensive. So, we’re going to see a lot of people continuing their experience digitally in terms of how they’re going to support their wellness.
Another thing that I see, and actually I’m a part of, is I believe we’re going to see a lot of smaller brands creating contribution to the society at large, not just bigger brands. For example, my firm recently launched a project for wellbeing, which is a not-for-profit initiative. We are developing a platform where we make it much easier for people to practice wellbeing. It’s not only about employees; it’s also about the wellbeing of employees’ families and loved ones. So, we’re actually investing resources to build a platform that can create more wellbeing and wellness.
I think we’re going to see more projects like that coming from smaller organizations. Fortune 5000 companies have practiced corporate citizenship for a while, but smaller companies don’t have as many resources. But now, with the transformation we’re seeing, I believe a lot of people will be driven to make an impact and make a contribution and to make it tangible so people can really feel the difference of their efforts.
ROB: A lot of that can line up with these brands also owning their own platforms. I know I’ve seen some things. What have you seen in terms of shifts around smaller brands and ecommerce, perhaps, in this season?
ALANA: Oh, my goodness. I think those companies that were not prepared for digital transformation had to wake up and get their act together really quickly. If you are not prepared to sell your product online –whether on Amazon, on Etsy, or maintaining your independent platform, or a combination of all – you’re going to have a really difficult time sustaining business.
I saw a lot of companies, overnight, getting an online makeover in terms of getting their ecommerce act together, which was very impressive. And I’m not surprised, because we have a lot of tools and technologies. You can build a website overnight. If you know what you stand for and what you want to say, you can do that. We built the For Wellbeing platform in 5 weeks, and it has thousands of resources. Technology creates opportunities right now for people who get it done quickly.
ROB: The toolsets are certainly remarkable, between some of your lightweight website things, your Wixes, your Webflows, your Squarespaces, but even into – a friend of mine runs a company that has been in the grocery space. They’re in technology for grocery gig economy work, and a lot of that went away, and they very quickly stood up not just an online store, but a multi-vendor online store. They’re a mini Amazon that lets all their different clients sell food products online, and they did it so quickly. It would’ve taken months and months, if not over a year, to do this in different areas, and now a Shopify store – I think there’s a reason their stock went up. It’s just so fast, and there are so many tools that integrate, that you can be shipping just shockingly quickly.
ALANA: Absolutely.
ROB: Alana, we’ve pulled forward several years of digital transformation already, so where do you see the next horizon now? People who have been pulled into the future now, what is their next future that they’re being pulled towards that they’re going to have to figure out, as maybe a challenger food brand having a wellness dimension to it?
ALANA: I think brands that can will market around wellness, and this is how Marketing For Wellness is set up, to help organizations to figure out how they can market around wellness. With COVID, you realize that our immune system is the only shield we currently have to protect us against COVID. We don’t know when we’re going to have a vaccine. We don’t know when we’re going to have a treatment or how this virus is going to behave, and are we going to have other viruses that might intrude on our lives? The only thing that we can rely on is our immune system.
So we’re going to see those brands that are already in the space, in food and beverages and wellness, stepping up their game and helping people to support their immune systems. But then we’re going to see companies who might not be in that play – they might be in a different industry, but they want to support their communities. They’re going to start investing into wellbeing and wellness initiatives. That’s one area that I see.
Another one, I definitely forecast huge growth for AR and VR technologies to take off, and for many brands, figuring out how to use it wisely, in a way that people can have meaningful experiences – and there are already some interesting innovations coming, like from Lego, where they employed an AR tool working with a company called 8th Wall to create retail experiences to get people to stay in the store longer and get engaged with the product and buy more. We’re going to see a lot of the area of AR and VR, I believe.
ROB: Around wellness in the past few years, with things like the Apple Watch, and as it’s actually become better, we see people trying to quantify some parts of their health. Same thing with Fitbit. But a lot of the sorts of health that you’re talking about seem like they are harder to quantify – for instance, the quality of the sugar in a particular product or the quality of your gut biome. Is there anything emerging that you see that may quantify a new area of health that has been a little bit unobserved that may help a category pop?
ALANA: Let me first share with you my perspective on all the gadgets. I think they’re awesome. I think we need them. I do want to know how many steps I took. But at the end of the day, if you look at the number of insurance claims, they’re the same. We still see doctors at the same rate as we did a few years ago, regardless of how much investment has been made into gadgets and into platforms. This is just my overall position.
The most accurate measurement of how well your body functions and the most precise measurement is your blood work because gadgets measure some vitals, but it doesn’t give you a complete picture. I saw some really interesting technology coming out of Germany where they actually measure your wellbeing and your wellness using your frequency. It looks promising.
But what I believe in today is simplicity. As long as we can get people to eat better and to perceive food as medicine, if we eliminate toxic ingredients, artificial ingredients from our diet, if we move more, it’s a win. Simple steps. Even if we don’t have any gadgets. [laughs]
ROB: Yeah, simplicity more than technology.
ALANA: Simplicity, yes.
ROB: I dig it. Alana, when people want to find you and find your company, where should they go to find you?
ALANA: They can find me in two places. They can find me on LinkedIn, Alana Sandel, and they can go to our website, marketingforwellness.com.
ROB: That’s a good domain for it. I like it. Alana, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It’s been great chatting with you.
ALANA: My pleasure, Rob. Thank you for inviting me.
ROB: Now more than ever, I can say: Be well.
ALANA: Thank you.
ROB: Bye.
ALANA: Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Being open to morph and willing to take on new challenges
Keeping a diverse client base
For the past 2 years, 360 Media has published the Atlanta 100, an end-of-the workweek e-newsletter and website (theatlanta100.com), which each week features twelve 100-word stories and 100-second videos on topics of intrigue in the Atlanta area. Lots of information . . . quick and easy access.
Tara can be reached on her agency’s website at 360media.net or on Instagram at 360 Media, Inc (@360mediainc).
Transcript Follows:
Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Tara Murphy, Owner at 360 Media, based in my own hometown of Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, Tara.
TARA: Thank you so much for having me.
ROB: Thank you for coming on. I wish that we were not sheltering in place and we could then actually meet up in Atlanta and do a live interview. Those are always fun. But we will call that for another time. Why don’t you start off by diving into 360 Media and where 360 Media excels?
TARA: Sure. 360 Media is an entertainment, lifestyle, and hospitality agency. We focus on PR and a little bit of event planning and then digital marketing. Our sweet spot is traditional PR, and we are about to celebrate our 25th anniversary in January of 2021, which is very weird to say. We’ve morphed over the years but always have stayed under that umbrella of entertainment, lifestyle, and hospitality. That’s our focus and the sectors that we work with.
It’s been really interesting the last couple of years. We’ve expanded a little bit into hotel work, commercial real estate. We have a lot of those clients who say that we make corporate cool. We take commercial real estate and turn it more into a lifestyle play, which is really fascinating and interesting. It’s been a wild ride over the years, and we’ve continued to morph. But PR has been the area we’ve always continued to excel and focus on.
ROB: Congratulations, by the way, on that 25 years. Hopefully you’ll be in a good position to actually plan an event for that, because that would be an excellent thing to be able to do from where we are right now.
TARA: Thank you. Yeah, I’ve had a couple of people say the same thing, and I’m like, “We still have 6 months!” But that’s going to fly by.
ROB: For sure, it will. It’s interesting you mention that shift in commercial real estate. What do you think it is that has made it shift so that normal people are interested in development of cities and new things that are happening? Nobody really gets excited about an office building usually, but something indeed I think has changed with the emergence of let’s say Curbed and some of the blogs in the space and that sort of thing.
TARA: Yeah, good point on Curbed. I think they’ve really helped make it accessible. For years, everyone just thought of real estate – there would be a sign in front of a building or in a window, and it was like, “Okay, what tenant’s going to go in there?”
But I would say probably in the last 5 to 7 years, it’s really turned a lot more into the storytelling, the place-making, the brand awareness, because you’re creating these pockets in cities that are little neighborhoods. Obviously, you live in Atlanta; a lot of people these days, because of the traffic and the growth, are staying in their 3-5 mile radius around their home. They want to know, “Do I have those everyday needs accessible?” and “What’s coming into my neighborhood?”, whether that’s a great little restaurant or a boutique or some sort of service that you want to be able to use.
I think people get more excited about “this is what’s coming to my neighborhood.” People are really thinking about the needs of the neighborhood. Also, what’s really popular in Atlanta is not just taking buildings and revving them – actually renovating, going in and repurposing. I think people have gotten really excited, so that’s opened the door to a little bit more interest and knowledge from the general public.
It’s funny; with a lot of the real estate clients that we’ve had, it all started because we got brought on for Krog Street Market, when that got announced here. For those that don’t know, that’s a big food hall in town. It was one of the first food halls that made a mark globally, and it was interesting being part of that because people look at that and say, “It could’ve been a glorified food court” – but it wasn’t that, and it isn’t that to this day. That really helped change that neighborhood.
When we finished working on that project, when the developer sold a couple years ago, it opened the door to a lot of other real estate clients coming in and saying, “Hey, how do you take something like that and make it accessible for the general consumer or get them excited, or how do we get press like that?” It really was an area that I never thought we would get business in, but it’s been challenging and fascinating and fun. I think we bring a different viewpoint, coming at it from the lifestyle perspective rather than the B2B perspective. Clients like that. We’ve been able to get press, so that’s been good.
ROB: I think we do want to hear those stories, these origin stories, these entrepreneurial stories, of something that we hope becomes something bigger. I think it’s something that we lost. Food courts at one point actually were a place of innovation and entrepreneurship and of good stories. Chick-fil-A heavily grew in food courts, and I believe the Great American Cookie Company started in Atlanta, Georgia in a food court.
We went through a season where those things didn’t happen and there wasn’t that entry point for an entrepreneurial restauranteur. And it’s back. It’s cool that you get to be a part of that story.
Now, PR means a lot of things to a lot of people. Some people think about trying to get a software company an article in Forbes or Fortune, and some people think about this very encompassing suite of services, often on a local level. When you break down PR into the pieces and parts, what are the actual details and activities and day-to-day things you’re doing for clients?
TARA: It varies per client. A lot of them will come knowing that they need PR, but not exactly sure what we can do for them or what we bring to the table. A lot of times it’s definitely, especially in our pitching, a little bit of an education as to what we do a little differently than most.
But our day to day varies depending on if we’ve got an event that we’re working on, or if it’s a product or a restaurant opening. From press releases to pitching media outlets – and that’s print, radio, TV, online, influencers now, which is a big taboo topic – pitching all of that, crisis management if there’s an issue, management of the day-to-day messaging and storytelling for a client. We also do a lot with social media and digital marketing, whether that’s us doing it for a client or working with another vendor that they have.
We help create the storyline for the PR side, and where a lot of companies fail is that they’re not weaving these things together. When that message is weaved together, whether that’s through their email blasts or their social media platforms, it all works together. They may see something on social, then they see something in an email, then they see something in print or on TV, and you get that bigger picture storytelling.
So, we do a lot of education with clients on how to figure out their cadence of messaging, but then also, how does that all work together? Are you telling the same story on every platform on the same day? No, let’s not do that. Let’s build it out. Let’s weave in PR. Let’s weave in quotes. Let’s weave in whatever the reaction is from the general public, or high points.
There’s a lot of strategic work that we do now, which for me personally is my favorite thing. Starting an agency 25 years ago, I didn’t know a lot when I started. You don’t know what you don’t know. As it’s grown and PR has changed and morphed over the years, strategy has always stood out to me as the key need. Understanding a client’s goals and what they need to get out of it and then mapping out a strategy – that’s where we’ve had, knock on wood, our most successful campaigns and client work.
I remember years ago, prior to starting 360, I worked at an independent record label, and we used to have to monitor how many calls we made, and we had to send out so much product. It was like you send out hundreds and hundreds of pieces of music and you just see what sticks. You can’t possibly call thousands of journalists.
I learned during that time that it worked for a short period of time, but then what really changed was, let’s target. Maybe we send all this stuff out and whatever sticks, sticks, but let’s target 10-15 outlets that we really want to tell the story to, and let’s figure out that story for each outlet depending on what they cover.
As we started to do that, we had big, successful pieces, and they were larger features. That was the turning point for me, going and working with a lot of clients and figuring out, “What’s our strategy and how do we make more impact?” They always say less is more, and that definitely resonates a lot these days with PR.
So, every day is different, but those are the base things that we work on. Some days there are some new things brought to the table, especially during a pandemic. [laughs] We’ve done a lot of new stuff that I was like, “Huh, never thought we’d work on that or do this kind of thing.” But for the most part, the overarching PR is a lot of writing, pitching, press releases, and storytelling.
ROB: You can definitely see where that 360 degrees comes in for 360 Media. I think PR is often misunderstood to be shouting really loud, and you’re talking about it so much more like a surround sound, where you get those different touchpoints that really reinforce the story and create that picture in your mind.
You mentioned press releases, and I think press releases are perhaps one of the most misunderstood, maligned, and also misused tools that are out there. How do you think about and redeem the press release and help it to be the noble thing that it is, and also maybe how people may misuse them?
TARA: That has become a very hot topic in our office. You go from one extreme to the other, where, as you said, people get confused by it. Not everything is worthy of a press release, but then again, there are plenty of times that a press release done well can cut through the clutter and gets picked up exactly how it’s written, and that is a win for a client, and obviously a win for us.
In this day and age, there’s an amazing 24-hour news cycle and there’s a lot of opportunity to get coverage, but there’s also fewer journalists and people working at publications, so you’ve got to find that middle ground that you’re not inundating them with useless information, but you’re also providing enough that if they are short-staffed or they are one person covering five or six feeds, you have enough information there that they can pull content, don’t necessarily have to deal with you or do an interview, and get a story up.
Part of what we do is not only look at things and say, “Yes, that’s worthy of a press release,” but we also look at what information we have. Do we have video? Do we have photography? Do we have quotes? Is there another way that this may be delivered to a journalist that would resonate more than just a press release?
We really are now weighing out how that information goes out on our email list. Some days it is just a traditional press release, and other days it’s a video that then links to a blog post that has more information, or it’s an e-blast that is an invite to experience something online, especially now, since everybody’s working remotely. There’s a lot of different ways that we’re doing it, and we continue to change it up and think, “How is this going to land and what’s going to interest someone?”
That’s been really good. We get a lot of feedback from journalists who are like, “We’re not getting the same old, same old from you, and that’s really what stands out to us,” which I love.
On the press release side, though, I will say if you write a great press release – and sometimes I get dinged from people and they’re like “it’s not AP style” and all of those things that are traditional. It’s like, no, this stands out a little bit differently because we write in a little bit more of an editorial fashion. Some of our clients can be dinged as a little fluffy, so people are like, “This isn’t really newsworthy. It’s a little too fluff.”
But we try to find that middle ground where it’s like, here’s an editorial piece for you that not only covers what’s newsworthy on this end, but it can be cut and pasted and either put on a blog, or if an influencer is putting something up on their Instagram, they’ve got quotes they can use from the client, or a link to a Dropbox that’s got photography or graphic assets that are done for Instagram, Facebook. We really try to make it very easy because everybody is so crazy busy, and that also stands out.
Press releases are interesting. We just had a conversation this past week about a client. They wanted something in a press release, and I was like, “No, it’s not going to land right. Let’s do XYZ.” It stood out and it was different. There’s a lot of stuff going on, obviously, with the pandemic and restaurants reopening. Because restaurants are reopening, everyone thinks, “My dining room is open. This is newsworthy.” Well, we’re in a huge influx of dining rooms reopening, so what are you doing that’s different compared to everybody else and you’re not just opening? So we had to dig a little deeper, and we created the story, which then was like, “Okay, this is press release worthy because they’re doing some stuff differently.”
ROB: This is where maybe someone will say they’re doing this different menu, they’re doing this different format of service, they’re doing this very unique thing in terms of how they’re protecting people, or even some restaurants have been able to get the story out about how they are doing a mini-grocery. Is that the story?
TARA: Yes.
ROB: Instead of saying, “Hey, we’re still open and doing takeout.” It’s like, yes, so is everyone else who wants to save their restaurant. What are you doing that’s different from just “yes, you can place an order on Uber Eats”?
TARA: Yep. It’s interesting because at the time when everybody was pivoting, that was newsworthy because some of these places weren’t on Uber Eats or Grubhub or any of those services. But then it was like, okay, that’s newsworthy for all of 5 minutes, but what are you doing differently for your team or onsite or the meals you’re delivering?
A prime example, Mission + Market in Buckhead is one of our clients, and for the first couple of weeks as they were pivoting, they were doing themed nights where it was like family meal and just different things. That was working very well for them, but what they ended up doing also was realizing that so many restaurants were closing at the time, they stepped up and on Thursdays were doing meals for people that had lost their jobs because of COVID.
So, they not only covered the hospitality industry, but they were like, “Anyone that’s lost their job, if you can show that you’re no longer employed, you can order a meal through us.” They did it I want to say for 2 months and served over 1,500 people every Thursday. It was really incredible, and they got a lot of attention. Now, they didn’t do this to get attention, but we had to put it out to say this is what they’re doing so that people knew, and it ended up getting a lot of positive attention and other companies that wanted to support and give sponsorship to help cover the meals they were covering themselves. It turned into a much bigger thing. We got a lot of press out of it, even though that wasn’t the game plan for it. It really made them stand out.
ROB: For sure. There are a few folks I know in the service industry who just seem to have a natural knack for storytelling and baiting the hook and getting the right stories out there and getting coverage. How much of this thinking and getting these stories to land right is instinct, and how much of that do you think can be developed? And if it can be developed, how do you think about developing that proper mindset?
TARA: I think some of it is instinct. I think also some of it is development. I think you’re on the money there, because a lot of people – any client; it’s not just in the hospitality industry – they’re in there day to day, and they can’t really see everything that is exciting or interesting, or maybe they’re not up on the day to day of what’s newsworthy or what might be resonating in pop culture. Meanwhile, they’re doing something and it’s like, oh my gosh, here’s a local story that resonates with a national story or something that’s trending nationally.
When you start working with a client and start putting those ideas out there or talking to them or digging in a little deeper, all of a sudden you see their eyes light up and it’s like a light bulb moment. They’re like, “Wait a second, we’re also doing XYZ.” It’s like, “Yes, that is interesting and that’s newsworthy.” That’s been a really cool thing to watch as we continue to work with clients. Over time, you get in that groove, and they start seeing what you’re seeing.
They also start understanding how media works. Sometimes we’ll have clients call and say, “I read this piece. We are doing this. Can you reach out to this writer and perhaps they would do something on us?” That’s always cool, when we see clients grow into understanding what editorial options they have. Or “Hey, we’re looking to do something for our anniversary. We don’t want to do it exactly like everyone else. Here are the ideas we’ve come up with.” We come in and fine-tune that stuff.
We also sometimes – I think this is one of the things that we’re really known for amongst the clients we work with – just coming in and seeing things differently, and giving them a picture. They may come to the table and say, “Here’s what we have. This is what we’d like to do,” and then we say, “Okay, this is great. Let’s take this up a notch. How about this?” That’s been really cool, to have clients that are open to collaboration and getting it to a place where it’s like, “This will get you small press, but this will get you big press.” They’re like, “Oh, okay!”
That part is a lot of fun, especially when you tell them something is going to happen and then it does. [laughs] Which you can’t guarantee, but when you’re like, “This is big,” and then we take it out and either pitch it to someone exclusively or put it out en masse and they see the response they get, it’s like, “Oh, okay, you guys were right.” That’s a lot of fun.
It’s interesting, too – I had a new business pitch last week over Zoom, which obviously is new. A lot of calls and a lot of Zoom pitches. But in the midst of the pitch with this potential client, they were talking about some of the things they were doing, and immediately I was like, “Why don’t you take this and you could do this and this and this?” The look on all of their faces – we were on Zoom and I love seeing it – they were like, “Oh my God, that was right in front of us.” I was like, “Yes, but you’re in it. You can’t see it.” That part was great.
We had a follow-up call yesterday and they were like, “We took what you said. How about this, this, and this?” And we’re not even on board yet. We’re just now going through the proposal. It was funny. I was like, “Yes, that could all work.” That’s an interesting – either you have to feed people or they get into it and get excited.
ROB: And maybe the people I think have good instincts just have really good help, so who knows?
TARA: [laughs] Both.
ROB: [laughs] Tara, almost 25 years ago, when you started up 360, did you have any inkling that you were in it for the long haul? What was the formative driving force there?
TARA: No, I really didn’t. It’s funny; a lot of times people ask, “Did you have a business plan? Did you map things out?” For the longest time, I was a little embarrassed. I was like, maybe I did something wrong? I didn’t have a business plan, and I never mapped out, “Here’s my 3- or 5-year, 10-year goal.”
When I started 360, I had just left a record label, and the owners were married and they got a divorce. It was like you had to take sides, and the label crumbled. I jumped ship with the female side of the business because she was my day-to-day, and she started another company and I worked there for a little bit. In the midst of that, she ended up taking another job. There were four of us that had gone with her. I started to reach out and do résumés and call people and all these things, and it just never went anywhere.
I had interned with a company called Concert Southern that is now the Live Nation Atlanta office back in the day, and I was there when they started Music Midtown. I was an intern on Music Midtown the first year, and then they called and were like, “Why don’t you put in a proposal? We need a PR person, and you know this event.” I was like, “What?” [laughs] I put like a 27-page proposal together. I’d never done one before. I put it in. This was Year 3 of the festival. I’d been an intern on the first one, volunteered on the second one on the PR communications side, and then put in a proposal for Year 3.
It ended up becoming my first client, but I didn’t know it at the time. It was more, “Sure, I’ll do this. This is a 6-month gig. This will pay me some money.” I had to move back in with my parents right after college for a little while during this time because I didn’t have a job. It was kind of like, “Okay, let’s do this.” Then I started to get other business. Then it was time for Music Midtown again.
So, 3 years into it, I was like, maybe I really need to get a business license and do some things rather than this freelance stuff. I ended up getting my first employee and built it from there.
Sitting here now and thinking about it being 25 years later, there’s so many things that happened over time – the recession and things that we got hit with – and to still be here is mind-blowing to me on a lot of levels. I didn’t have a business degree, and I got a ‘D’ in PR in college. It was not what I wanted to do. [laughs] It’s like, you put your mind to something and you can do anything.
Sometimes when people ask me about a business plan, I say, had I done that, I probably would have failed because I would have been one of those that had to stick to the business plan. Over the 25 years, we’ve morphed and we’ve opened the door to other types of clients. Like I mentioned earlier with commercial real estate, I would have never, ever opened the door to that. But it rolled in in a very interesting way, and it was like, “Okay, let’s go down this road.” That’s I think kept us going.
Honestly, even in this pandemic, probably 80% of our clients have put us on hold because a lot were restaurants and entertainment and events. Our hotel, real estate, design clients are all still booming, so that’s been interesting. Had we not had that, we would probably be in a little bit of a different spot right now. But our restaurants are coming back and things are changing.
I’ve learned a lot over the last 25 years. But no, I would’ve never guessed that we’d be here. Ever.
ROB: You mentioned learning some things over the course of the business. What are some things you’ve learned along the way that you might do differently if you were starting anew?
TARA: It’s interesting. I was asked that question one other time, a couple years ago, and I had a very different answer. I think for me, there’s not a lot that I would do differently. I probably would learn to go with my gut, my intuition. I wish I had learned to do that sooner. I’ve always had a strong gut reaction and intuition, but sometimes it’s like, “That doesn’t make sense right now. Why are you thinking that?” I didn’t fully always embrace it. So I would probably do that sooner.
I also would not let people – you bend for clients that might be struggling or things that are happening, and I have bent probably one too many times for people who owed me money. I let it get a little too far down the road, and then it becomes harder to collect. I’ve learned that a lot more in the last 4 years of business. You get to a place where you’re doing well, and it’s like, “Oh, we can let someone slide for a little bit while they’re struggling,” and then it just ends up catching up. We got dinged a little too much the last couple of years. So, I probably wouldn’t let the debt get too big. I’ve learned a lesson there.
I also probably – there were two times in my entire career that I took clients for money, because it was big, but my gut said “these aren’t right for you or the firm.” Again, just listening to my gut. I would do that much sooner.
But I think also, in what would you not do/what would you do, as entrepreneurs, when you have no fear in the beginning because you don’t know what you don’t know and then you go through an experience and you’re like, “Ugh, been there, done that. I’m not doing that again” – I think it’s important as an entrepreneur to really be open and let things flow in and assess them, and not be closed off to things.
It really, truly is how I’ve grown 360. Putting out there, “Hey, I’m interested in more events or festivals” or whatever it is, always, doors open. Being afraid is fine, but you can take a pivot, you can take a next step, and it does work out. I think you just have to control your fear and be excited about it. I think that’s important.
ROB: That’s all very practical, and I appreciate that. I also had some wounds on the not collecting money quick enough train. It’s never, ever fun, because you realize quickly that when someone is going out of business, there’s just really not going to be money for you, for the most part.
TARA: [laughs] That is a lesson to learn.
ROB: You think about “Oh, bankruptcy, you split it up” – no, no. There’s just no money. Good luck. [laughs]
TARA: Yeah. Also, being diligent. I will say this: I have a former client that has owed me money since 2017, and I got a check last week. In a pandemic, I’m getting paid. I’m like, okay, this is the universe looking out for me. But it was being diligent and not just letting it go. I wouldn’t have done that before. I just would’ve been like, “It’s just a write-off. Let’s move on.” But sometimes good things happen.
ROB: Yeah, don’t write it off until you’ve asked a few times, at least, right?
TARA: Right. [laughs] Totally.
ROB: Excellent. Tara, when people want to find you and find 360, where should they look for you?
TARA: We have a website, 360media.net. We are also on Instagram under the same thing, 360 Media, Inc (@360mediainc).
We also are the publishers – I didn’t even mention this – of the Atlanta 100. The Atlanta 100 is a weekly newsletter that we do, and there’s a website, theatlanta100.com. It’s a weekly newsletter that goes out every Thursday or Friday with 12 stories about Atlanta in 100 words. We’ve been the publishers of that for the last 2 years. There’s a lot of not only stuff about Atlanta, but also our clients as well.
ROB: Excellent. Sounds solidly played. We’ll get all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on, Tara. It’s been a pleasure. Again, maybe someday we can do an event in person.
TARA: I know, I would love that. It was good to hear that you’re here. Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun.
ROB: Thank you. Bye bye.
TARA: Bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Does your website, as a salesperson, feel confident in selling your business? Is it effective in turning leads into sales?
Where should you focus your limited time and budget?What do the analytics show you about which efforts are paying off and which are not?
Is your landing page making a good first impression? What does your landing report say about what your first-time visitors do on their first visit?
Who likes you best? Focus your efforts on communicating with those who like you the most.
Are certain pages repelling your customers? Stop serving the bad pages.
Mayt is available on his agency’s website at: RoarontheWeb.com or on Twitter @BestWebDesignFL.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Matt Weber, President at ROAR! Internet Marketing based in Altamonte Springs, Florida just outside of Orlando. Welcome to the podcast, Matt.
MATT: Thank you. Great to be here. Been looking forward to this for some time.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. I’ve been looking forward to this as well, especially with some of the interesting nuances of your own history and background. Why don’t you kick us off, though, by telling us about ROAR! Internet Marketing and what the company specializes in?
MATT: Our real specialty is conversions. We’ve been around since 2007, and back then we started lead tracking, lead recording, and a focus on measurable results. That came from my background in direct marketing. I did direct mail. I did nearly a decade of direct response marketing where if you couldn’t measure it, you didn’t do it. Back in 2007, that’s not what websites were. In 2007, websites were kind of glorified brochures, and nobody was really talking about conversions and goals and tracking things.
That was our entrée into the marketplace, and we were really one of the pioneers in that area. We’ve continued to evolve that – to the point, though, where we’ve gotten a little bit less into web design and more into digital marketing. When we started the agency, 85-90% of our revenue was web development, and now 80% of our revenue is recurring digital marketing services. So our forte is measurable actions.
ROB: Who were some of the first sorts of clients that were really open to thinking about their website as less of a brochure and more of a destination and opportunity to actually get action? I think some people were willing to spend more money on expensive brochures for a while, but who started turning that corner to thinking more progressively about their websites?
MATT: Elective medical. Cosmetic surgeons, LASIK, cosmetic dermatologists. They came into 2007 with a fairly refined understanding of how much a new patient is worth, and they had some sensitivity to cost per lead. So that’s where we get our start, and that was the segment that was most receptive to our messaging, followed by home services. They were also receptive to that because they were prolific direct mailers. So, they did receive that message well, and we’re still in those two verticals today.
ROB: That makes sense. Certainly, a lot of elective medical can potentially be fairly large tickets, fairly decent margins, and probably also so on the home services side. Was it larger project stuff, or were you also finding things even down to emergency plumbers?
MATT: More things that had a recurring value – your pest control company where it was an average lifetime value rather than a transaction value. They got it pretty quickly. Let’s say you engage with a pest control company; you’re going to typically stay with them for 2+ years at $70 a month or $80 a month. Those companies understand lifetime value as opposed to transaction value, so this worked well for them.
ROB: That’s a great line of thinking, especially to find your way into some of those good long-term customer lifetime value – not so much restaurants and that sort of thing.
You started in 2007. You started at perhaps an inopportune time, much as anyone who started a business last year may feel right now amidst this coronavirus crisis/shift/recession, whatever we wish to call it. How did those next couple of years going through that financial crisis with the business change your thinking, and how is it shaping how you think about the virus era and post-virus era that we are in and heading into?
MATT: I want to answer the second part of that question first because we have always run our business imagining that we were always in the worst of times – because we were, in 2007-2008 and early 2009. We were in times where we were watching this deposit so that we could make this payment. We were running checks to the bank and then saying, “Okay, now we can make this payment.” Everything was almost on a minute by minute basis.
We never forgot that. I think it’s a lot like people listening who might have grandparents or great-grandparents from the Depression era and how that affected their spending all the way up until their late life. That happened to us and a lot of businesses, so we always managed the company as if times weren’t great. That’s helped now. We’re in a stronger financial position, we’re a financially strong company, and a lot of that is the attitudes that 2007 and 2008 brought with us.
ROB: How much of that comes naturally for you? I think any entrepreneur, and especially in the marketing and agency world, one of the first questions you’re asked when you meet anybody is “How many people do you have?” It’s this tempting ego number to hire a little bit ahead of need. Probably throttling back on that along the way, was that a natural thing for you? Or was it an acquired discipline?
MATT: It’s an acquired discipline. You brought up a great one: labor. I think a lot of agencies do hire before the need.
Another one is tools. I run into a lot of agency owners that have six or seven or eight different tools that duplicate functionality. These tools reshape themselves, they come out with something new, so the agency buys a subscription to this one without canceling the subscription to that one, and all of a sudden they’ve got what I call “tool bloat.” They’ve got subscriptions to a bunch of different things they didn’t even know they were subscribing to.
That happens as well. Being mindful of that I think is a result of the 2007, 2008, and 2009 experience, where we track everything we spend on a recurring basis, what we’ve committed to, and we’re very cautious about our labor expenses.
ROB: How do you manage those labor expenses when you do start to get close to the margin? I think we’ve all had that experience where we have a little bit more work than we can do or maybe a lot more work than we have capacity to do. How do you think through some of those inflection points?
MATT: We’ve got quite a few spreadsheets and calculations that we do behind the scenes, and there’s a premise behind it, and that is: we don’t want to be that agency that hires up, loses an account, and lays off. We mathematically figure out not only what the point is when we need to hire somebody, but what’s above that so that if we lost anything, we don’t want to lay off.
I’m happy to say that since 2007, we have never laid off a single employee because we’ve lost an account. We’ve eliminated a position because the scope of work changed, but we’ve never eliminated a position because we’ve lost a client.
Now, when we go to hire people, yes, people are looking for money, absolutely. But at some level, they’re looking for stability. A little bit lesser so today than maybe 6 years ago, but we get to tell those people, “This is our philosophy. We don’t want to hire up and lay down. That’s not who we are. We want to build a team, a coherent team, and we want to build for retention.”
We’ve been very fortunate in that. We’ve got folks that have been with us for 10 years, 8 years, 7 years, and it’s because of that philosophy. They know underneath it all, we’re trying to build something progressively stable.
ROB: That’s insightful. One thing that goes along with that dynamic you discuss of losing an account and laying people off is also revenue concentration. Some agencies can be anywhere between let’s say 30% and 70% all-in with one client. How do you think about revenue concentration? Is it something you try and manage, or is it something you just deal with and manage around?
MATT: We definitely try to manage to it. In fact, we not only manage revenue concentration within a client, but we try to manage revenue concentration within a vertical. Our three verticals are elective medical, home services, and manufacturing. Those were chosen because elective medical is almost recession-proof. In fact, a couple of our cosmetic surgeon clients had some of their best years in 2007 and 2008, surprisingly. Home services are need-based, so it’s hard for a consumer to give up let’s say their pest control company, as an example. Then manufacturing has a completely different cycle than some of the consumer-based marketing that we do.
So, we not only look at revenue concentration per client, we look at it per vertical. We don’t want to be heavily invested into any one of those three verticals.
ROB: Really interesting, and makes a ton of sense. Matt, how did you get into this business in the first place? What led you to move from whatever you were doing before to starting ROAR?
MATT: I was working for the broadcast industry. That’s where I grew up. I spent 15+ years in the broadcast industry. Then I worked for an exciting and fast-paced direct response marketing company, and I was in a job that was very challenging. A lot of travel, a lot of 65+-hour weeks. My wife at the time also was in a very challenging position, and our daughter was about two years from graduating high school.
We looked around and said, “What does life look like after our daughter leaves the house?” We came to the conclusion that if you are going to kill yourself for somebody, why not kill yourself for yourself? So, we went on this process of buying a business.
Interestingly enough, we ran into a business that at the time – and this is early 2007 – was a high-end luxury home theater business. I was going through the financials and going through the business, and it was owned by a gentleman who was an extremely smart engineer, and he had a great business from a technology standpoint, from an execution standpoint – but he was a horrible marketer. I thought, “Ah, this is for me because that’s my strength. I’m a great marketer.”
I was just about to put pen on a contract to buy that business, and our business broker called and said, “Hey, there’s another thing out there. Why don’t you take a look at it? It’s an advertising business.” Of course, business brokers call everything an advertising business. So we went and looked at it, and it was a guy who had started this small shop that did a little bit of everything – it did sales training, did traditional media, and it did, back in 2007, a little bit of web development.
We looked at 2007 and we said the future is digital, the future is web, the future is not traditional, and the future certainly wasn’t sales training to us. So, we bought that company in early 2007 and began to morph it. We got rid of its traditional market offerings, got rid of the sales training, rebranded it, and got heavily invested into conversions and the direct response portion of digital marketing. And that’s how we got into it.
ROB: I think a lot of people may not be familiar with working with a business broker. Is that something you had done before? Is that something you would do again? Maybe in this season there’s other businesses that would be worth acquiring?
MATT: I think so. You’re right, I think we’re about to enter an interesting time for merger activity and acquisition activity.
I do think a business broker is a time saver. It doesn’t give you a pass on doing your own homework because business brokers can never be an expert in your line of work. In the acquisition opportunities that we’ve evaluated since then, that is very apparent. They don’t know the metrics to ask and they don’t know how to peel back the onions of the financials to look for what really is a healthy agency.
But they do save time. In fact, a lot of agencies that might be for sale – how do you find out about them? It’s not like you can drive by and they’re going to put a “for sale” sign on the outside of the building. The only way you might be able to find out about them is if they’re represented by a business broker. So, I do think if you’re looking to acquire something in the coming months and years, definitely find a business broker that you can trust and build a rapport with.
I think it’s a little bit like buying and selling a home. You have to have a rapport with your real estate agent, and that real estate agent needs to have some level of expertise. You wouldn’t engage with a real estate agent who doesn’t really know the neighborhood that you’re buying in, and you might not do the same thing with the business broker. Don’t engage somebody who doesn’t have at least some high level awareness of the type of business that you’re looking at.
But they are not going to be the expert, and you’re going to need to bring a fair amount of analytical power to the evaluation of any potential transaction.
ROB: That’s a very timely insight, I think. For someone who hasn’t worked with a business broker before, I think a lot of times when you generally talk about acquiring or selling an agency, quite often they’re revenue and retention financed.
How does that dynamic work with a business broker? Is it similar, where there’s an earn-out and payback period? Or is it a little bit more of a buyout and transaction since there is a middleman in there who isn’t involved at all in retaining clients the way you might be doing if you were acquiring an agency more directly?
MATT: Yeah, brokers aren’t really keen on the whole earn-out scenario. [laughs] But they’re going to attach a value to the transaction regardless of how that transaction is funded, ultimately. So, the broker is going to seek its commission based on what that topline value is, and it’s going to be paid at the beginning portion of that transaction. If the transaction takes years to complete, the broker will get his money upfront.
ROB: So, the rest of the transaction, are you then able to still revenue finance it and set those terms directly with the owner?
MATT: Yeah, and that’s part of the negotiation. I think we’re going to see changes in that upcoming. I think that we’re going to see some vulnerabilities for shops that are heavily invested in these segments that we just talked about. If you’re running a digital agency and 80% of your revenue is coming from restaurants right now, I sympathize with you. You’re in a tough spot. If 80% of your revenue is coming from travel and tourism, I empathize with you. You’re in a tough spot.
So, what is that owner going to do? Maybe that’s an agency where that owner says, “You know what? Maybe it’s time for me to look at other things.” You have to then bring in the power of where that revenue came from, what it could be, and could you potentially help diversify that revenue? It’s going to be a challenging time in the next few months to evaluate transactional opportunities.
ROB: Going back to the start of the business for you – you talked about how you’ve navigated a previous financial crisis, but I think another thing you’ve navigated is in 2007, as you mentioned, websites were essentially glorified brochures, and social media was in an infancy if at all. LinkedIn I think was around, and Facebook I think was around for college kids.
As additional marketing channels have come online and become viable, how have you navigated the process of when this is relevant to someone in manufacturing, when it’s relevant to someone in elective medical, or when it’s time to sit on it and tell them to take a back burner and maybe it’s not time to put their business on TikTok?
MATT: Great question, and this is where analytics comes in. This is why it’s such an exciting time to be a small or medium sized business owner. If you think about where it was to be a business owner in the early 2000s – and way before that – the data was in the hands of agencies, and the data was in the hands of media outlets. You really couldn’t answer that question that you just asked with clarity.
But now the data is in the business owner’s hands. The paradigm has changed. It’s not a matter of speculating whether TikTok is of value or whether Facebook is of value. It’s a matter of making sure you have the measurements setup in place and answering that question objectively.
We have this conversation a lot. You’ve got a lot of companies that are way too heavily invested into social media because they thought it was cool, because it was the thing to do and everybody was writing a blog article on how you have to use Facebook 5 years ago. But then when you got into the numbers and you broke down the facts, a lot of folks weren’t getting the ROI off of that investment they made into social media, and they were overly prioritizing it.
So, the answer to your question is you’ve got to have the analytics and you’ve got to get the data set up, which has grown so much since 2007. Now everybody has the key to unlock the answer to that question with clarity.
ROB: Very, very interesting. It makes sense, too. Data-driven decisions help here, especially when you have these transaction/conversion focused clients who know what a lead is. It’s always easier to have an objective discussion around that.
Now, if you rewind and if you were going to do this whole ROAR! Internet Marketing thing over again from scratch, what are some of the things you would consider doing differently if you were starting over?
MATT: The biggest thing I would do differently is we were way too late to get into the game of specializing in the three verticals that we’ve chosen now. We at one time were proud of the fact that our portfolio contained everything from A to Z, and we would look at the world and go, “The world’s our oyster! Everybody’s a great prospect!” Ultimately that turned out to frustrate our salespeople. It sounded good, but it really wasn’t a smart thing to do.
When you focus your efforts on a limited number of verticals, all of a sudden you prospect better, and the biggest thing that you do differently is leverage your success more effectively. When you look at any particular business that knocks on your door as a prospect, you typically may not have a great story to tell them of what you’ve done in the past. When you narrow your focus and somebody knocks on your door in one of those verticals, you’re very confident that you have a success story to share with them, and that becomes compelling.
So that’s absolutely the one thing that I would do differently faster. I would focus faster.
ROB: There’s so many interesting levels of discipline in here, because I think some people get into the entrepreneurial world and they think about the excitement, they think about the risk-taking, and I think they think about that correlating highly with running a successful business.
It sounds to me, if we peel back the DNA here a little bit, it sounds like you have built in habits that lead to running a healthy and successful business that is good for your team, that gives margin to invest in them, and candidly – at least, a lot of people I know who have this sort of habit – it’s actually better for their personal bottom line than having a bunch of employees and an infinite number of lines of business. How have you thought about the difference between a healthy business and the ego around it?
MATT: I think running a business sometimes is kind of like the Olympics. For most folks, you have to specialize in a particular event and do well in it, but there are those rare individuals that can participate in the decathlon and be good at 10 events.
I found out that I’m not one of those people. I need to focus on a particular specialty. So that’s what we’ve tried to do. We’ve tried to focus on being a fantastic digital agency that produces results and tried to attract employees that share that singular vision. We’re not thinking about this exciting app that we could do next week, and then we’ve got this idea for this other app that we could build the month after that. Not that we haven’t tried to expand beyond our range; we have. But it’s been cautious and it’s been measured.
I had a former boss tell me one time, and it sticks with me for a long time, that diluted focus yields diluted results, and that is something that I continue to live by. I’m very conscious of where our mental time and attention goes. If our mental time and attention gets diluted, we see it. We see it show up in the numbers that we track. Sometimes it’s my role as the president to bring us back and make sure that we’re focusing.
ROB: Matt, outside of ROAR, you have a couple of other interesting things that you shared, and probably some other interesting new hobbies amidst this pandemic. Among some of the professional things that you do, interestingly, when people are traveling, you go on the road and speak with Google, actually. What do you share about, and how did that come to pass in the first place?
MATT: Yes, I’m a national trainer for the Grow with Google program. About 10 years ago, a call came into the office and our office manager answered it and she said, “Hey Matt, Google is on the phone for you.” I said, “Sure they are.” There’s all these people masquerading as Google. But I pick up the phone, and indeed, it’s Google.
On our website at the time, we had some videos that were called “60 Seconds to a Better Business Website.” We did this series about helping small and medium sized business owners get better results from their website, and they somehow found it. They saw I’m in the video, and they said, “Hey, we’d like you to come to Atlanta and audition for this program to be a trainer.”
At the time, the program was called Get Your Business Online (GYBO). So I went to Atlanta, I auditioned, and I got the job. For the next 3 years, I traveled all over the country for them, teaching Google content.
They disbanded the program, and then about 2 years ago they brought it back under a different name, GWG (Grow with Google). A little bit different content. So, they host these events all throughout the country. They’re typically a day long, and in that day of presentation where they invite small and medium sized businesses, they’ll do a class on Google My Business, they’ll do a class on Google Analytics, they’ll do a class on the Google Data Studio tools.
I’m one of the people – there’s 13 of us – that teaches those classes. All totaled, I’ve gone to 37 different states teaching for Google and teaching those classes, and it’s been a blast. It’s been a real blast.
ROB: That’s a really good credential. It’s a good tip of the hat to what you know and the business you’ve built. Specifically, you’ve presented on “5 Things Your Website Is Trying to Tell You,” I believe you said that you’re afraid to ask. What is our website trying to tell us that we’re scared of?
MATT: this is a program that I do outside the Google confines for a lot of conferences and trade events. It’s called “5 Things Your Website Is Trying to Tell You but You’re Afraid to Ask.” Real quickly, the five things:
Number one, it’s trying to tell you whether it feels confident selling your business. Ultimately, your website is just a salesperson. That’s all it is. Just like you would measure the effectiveness of a salesperson – how many leads did they turn into sales? – you really need to be doing the same thing for your website. It’s going to tell you whether it feels like it’s doing a good job at that.
The second thing it’s going to do is it’ll tell you how to prioritize your time if you let it. We’re all investing in these different marketing activities, and if you look at your analytics, they’re going to tell you which ones are paying off and which ones are not. We really need to focus. Unless you’ve got an unlimited budget and unlimited time, you’ve got to stop doing maybe your organic efforts because your paid is so much more profitable, or vice versa, stop doing your social because your organic is – but if you’ve got limited time and budget, you’ve got to focus. Your website will tell you how.
The third thing that your website will tell you if you let it is, are you making a good first impression? One thing that’s never changed is that you never get a second chance to make a good first impression, and that’s true everywhere, and it’s true with websites. If you look at your landing page report, it’ll tell you what first-time visitors due when they come to your website for the first time. It may not be making a great first impression, and that could be costing you money.
The fourth thing your website is trying to tell you is who likes you best. It’s 2020. We don’t market to everybody anymore. That’s ridiculous. Let’s shave that down and we’ll find that women are more receptive to our message than men, or 35 to 54s are more receptive to our message than 18 to 24s, or we’ll find out that people in the city are more receptive to our message than outside of the city. Whatever that pattern is – there’s always a pattern – somebody likes you best. Let’s spend our time and energy talking to them rather than trying to convince the whole world that they should buy our product or service.
The last thing that your website is trying to tell you is some of your food is not very good. It’s trying to tell you that some of your pages are just flat-out repelling people. If you imagine being a restaurant owner for a second, and every single time you put down a particular dish on a table – every time – people looked at the dish and they got up from the table and walked out of the restaurant – imagine that happened to you. Ultimately, what would you do pretty quickly? Stop serving the dish, right?
If you think about websites, you know what we’re all doing? We’re still serving the dish. Because we do have a page that you can look at the statistics and go, oh, people look at that page and go, “Ugh!” and they get up and leave. If you look at your exit page report, you’ll see what pages that’s happening, and you’ve got to cure that because if you don’t, then you’re just like that restaurant owner who’s continually serving that dish that’s forcing people to walk out the door.
So those are five things that your website is trying to tell you, but you’re afraid to ask.
ROB: I can definitely see why a lot of us would stick our head in the sand on that and try to do the thing we do every day rather than looking in the mirror and actually thinking about the data on our website and the page that everybody bounces from. It’s straightforward, but I think we all certainly need that reminder.
One other thing in your background I can’t pass up and I have to ask about is Smylelytics. That’s just a fun, catchy name, but what is Smylelytics that you have created?
MATT: I’ve met a lot of small and medium sized business owners, and I talk to them about data like you and I are talking about right now, and they nod their head politely – and yet even my own clients, who I try to make data a little bit more accessible and enticing to them, they’ve got busier things to do, frankly. A lot of my clients are owner/operators. They’re running the business, they own the business.
So, I thought, how do I get this treasure trove of data that can be fundamentally business-changing to them in a way that they want to look at it? What Smylelytics does is takes your Google Analytics data and translates it into memorable photographs. So you can go to Smylelytics and you can pick a photo set – maybe you like sailing; there’s a sailing set. Maybe you like dogs; there’s a dog set. Maybe you’re into cute babies; there’s a cute baby set.
You pick that, and then Smylelytics is going to send you an email twice a month, and it’s basically going to turn your analytics data into red, yellow, green. Super simple. If things are going well for your amount of visitors, then you’re going to get a happy baby face if you selected the baby. If things aren’t going well, then you’re going to get a sad baby.
You don’t have to think about it, you’re not worried about charts, you’re not worried about graphs, you’re not worried about formulas, you don’t have to dig your way through the weeds of Google Analytics. In a nanosecond, you can get the Smylelytics email, which comes out twice a month, and you can instantly know, “Hey, things are going well / things are going not so well.”
It’s kind of designed to be like the check engine light on the car. The check engine light doesn’t tell you anything. It just tells you that you should go talk to somebody. That’s what Smylelytics is designed to do: give you the confidence that everything’s going okay, fantastic. If it’s not, you know it, and whoever that trusted resource is in your life, then you ought to tell them, “Hey, we should look into this.” Maybe it’s nothing. Just like that check engine light, sometimes it’s something significant, sometimes it’s not. But you should pay attention to the check engine light, and that’s what Smylelytics does.
ROB: The way you describe it – we can’t tell because we’re on a podcast, but it does make me simple. Is that a paid tool? Is that a free tool?
MATT: It’s absolutely free.
ROB: Great. We’ll get that in the show notes as well. It’s Smylelytics.com, is that right?
MATT: Right.
ROB: Excellent. Matt, when people want to track you down and want to find out more about you and ROAR! Internet Marketing, where should they go to find you?
MATT: We are RoarontheWeb.com. That’s where you can find ROAR! Internet Marketing. And on Twitter, I am @BestWebDesignFL.
ROB: Legit. You can tell you started up in an SEO environment. That’s so important to this day, amongst all the other things you’ve learned along the way. Thank you so much for joining us, Matt. I think you’ve had a lot to share that’s really helpful, and we can all bring a smile to our faces and websites in this time.
MATT: Great. Enjoyed talking to you.
ROB: Thanks so much, Matt.
MATT: Bye bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Deb says she has never seen a better opportunity than now for “smart people with expertise that can elevate other people in their own businesses, in their lives – I’ve never seen a better opportunity for them to share generously that expertise with other people.” She challenges people to think about: “How can I be indispensable to people at this time? How can I share something that I know or that I can do in a way that helps another person?” In reaching out, Deb says “be helpful, be authentic, be true to your brand.” She now spends around 6 hours a day, every day, presenting public or private webinars, and consulting one-on-one with business leaders, marketers, creators, or people with personal brands who are interested in setting up their brands to thrive during these unusual times.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Deb Gabor, CEO and Founder of Sol Marketing based in Austin, Texas. Deb is also a bestselling author and keynote speaker, and I think you’re going to enjoy this conversation. Welcome to the podcast, Deb.
DEB: Thank you. I’m really glad to be here.
ROB: It’s fantastic to have you here. Why don’t you tell us about Sol Marketing and about your own journey as well into authorship and speaking?
DEB: Right on. I tell people that I’m in the business of creating the condition of irrational loyalty, and when I say irrational loyalty, that’s that feeling that you’re so indelibly bonded to a brand that you’d feel like you were cheating on it if you were to choose an alternative. It’s kind of how I feel about my iPhone, and the weird feeling I get when my friends who have Android phones send me text messages and they show up in green bubbles. I’m so irrationally loyal to i-thingies that even if I would hold a competitor’s phone in my hand, I’d feel dirty.
So that’s the business that I’m in, and how I do that is by running a brand-driven, strategy-led marketing firm. We do all the marketing things, and the reason why people hire us is because they need a good kick in the ass. They’re growing rapidly, they have a lot at stake to get it right, they have no time to waste, and they need someone to lead them through the hard work of branding. Is that a good explanation?
ROB: That’s perfect. How did you come to this positioning? A lot of people talk about what they do, they talk about the nuts and bolts, the details of what they do, and I hear you coming at the conversation from the complete opposite direction. You’re coming from a vision of the possible future, a vision of where things are going. How did you arrive at that view that this is how it needs to be?
DEB: This is the work that I actually do with my clients, so a little bit of this is the process of eating my own dog food. I firmly believe that the best brands in the world are not just different; they’re truly singular and they’re unique, and that uniqueness comes from truly why they do what they do.
When people talk to me personally and say, “Hey, Deb, what are you obsessed with? What are you working on right now?”, I tell people, I’m on a million-brand mission. Through my career, I want to have impact on a million brands. The reason why that’s important is if I can help a brand be a better brand, it helps them create a more sustainable business. More sustainable businesses are great for up-leveling communities and truly helping people.
So, I’m really internally motivated, and I’m very, very driven. It’s an obsession and a compulsion for me, so I can’t really talk about it any other way.
The other thing is I work in Austin, Texas. There are 150 other people who do exactly what I do, including a direct competitor whose office is directly across the street from me, and when I’m at my office, at my desk, I look out this gigantic picture window and across the road I see the tombstone with her sign on it, and it drives me absolutely mad. Her services, her functional benefits, the stuff that she does as a company is exactly the same as the stuff that we do as a company, yet we don’t compete. We really don’t compete for the same clients because the reason that people hire us is vastly different than the reason that people hire her company.
So that’s one of the reasons why I don’t default to the comfortable way of talking about agency business in terms of “here’s what we do” because those services have become relatively commoditized. I want people to remember me for what I’m about, and I want people to really understand the specific singular thing they get from us that they can’t get from anyone else. That’s why I talk about it in terms of “here’s the mission I’m on and why I do what I do” and being in the business of irrational loyalty.
Also, if I told you “We’re a branding and strategy and marketing services firm,” you would be like, “Meh, everybody else is that too.”
ROB: Yeah, you definitely hear that a lot, and it’s a tremendous visual metaphor to have that nemesis across the street. I find it motivating for a lot of teams to know who the enemy is – not in a jealous way or a competitive way, but in helping you refine and define the mission.
You mentioned you’re based in Austin, Texas. We were originally supposed to meet up in person at South by Southwest. It’s April; South by Southwest is cancelled. It didn’t happen. We are sheltering at home. But you, as we were talking about before we started recording, are not sheltering, in your mind. How has your strategy shifted amidst this coronavirus outbreak, amidst this pandemic, amidst some companies pulling back and some accelerating forwards?
DEB: I think I shared with you before we got on the interview here that I’m in touch with a lot of business leaders through my personal and business networks, and they fall into two camps right now. There’s one – these are the folks that are shuttering everything, they have their thumbs in their mouths, they’re rocking back and forth, they’re lying on the doormat in front of the front door – they’ve given up. They’re throwing in the towel.
Then there are others who are really looking at this through a new lens and practicing the art of the pivot or figuring out, “How this is an opportunity for me to emerge with maybe new offerings, new products, new services and things like that that are going to position me for the long term?”
One of the things that I did that I think is going to be really helpful for your listeners is I went back and reread my copy of this great book by Jim Collins called Good to Great. The day that I decided to pick up Good to Great again, I opened up the book and it opened directly to a chapter where there was an interview with James Stockdale. Jim Stockdale was previously a vice presidential candidate, but he was also an admiral and a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. For 6 years, he was in a POW camp.
Collins interviewed him for his book and asked him, “How were you able to actually get through that experience relatively unscathed? How did you endure 6 years in a POW camp?” What Stockdale explained was that he was able to maintain hope and optimism in the face of the brutal facts of his reality. He also explained that the people who were in the POW camps who were overly optimistic and refused to face the brutal facts were the ones that didn’t fare very well.
That’s called the Stockdale paradox. I was reading about the Stockdale paradox probably right about the same time that South by Southwest was getting cancelled, and it was really empowering for me because I actually did an exercise with our leadership team where we went back and revisited our core values and our core purpose as an organization, and then we documented all the brutal facts.
The brutal facts of the current situation are, personally, I make most of my money as a speaker and an author and a workshop leader, and every single speaking engagement I had scheduled between South by Southwest and the end of July was cancelled, all over the course of about two days. That’s a brutal fact. Another brutal fact was I do mostly B2B work in our company, and we had already been seeing some supply chain issues with our clients, making it really difficult to do things like shoot videos of their products. That had started happening back in January, so that was a brutal fact.
Another brutal fact was everybody’s going to have to work from home, people are going to be less productive, we’re going to have connectivity issues. Another brutal fact was I looked at how much per day does it cost to operate my agency, and how much cash runway do I have? How many days of cash runway do I actually have in the bank?
And for each of these brutal facts – and there were about eight of them – there were some that I could do something about, and then there were some that I couldn’t do something about. But for each of those brutal facts, my leadership team and I acknowledged every one of them, and then we flipped immediately to “What is our response to this brutal fact?”
What I’m doing during this time, which gets back to your original question of like “you’re not sheltering in your mind,” one of the opportunities that surfaced from really examining these brutal facts was the notion that I’m at home in Austin, Texas for 6 months without anywhere to go. What can I do? How can I help the company?
Two things came of that. One of them is that we made a very strong pivot to offering authority marketing services to other speakers and authors and experts and coaches and consultants – people like me – to help them share their expertise without the need for face-to-face events. We had already created a business for me out of this – I’m a client of my own company – and we were offering it to other people. We turned this into a service.
I’ve had a number of conversations with other people who are in my same situation where we’re offering these kinds of services, which are like creating information products, building online courses, building sales funnels, building webinar funnels. That was one thing.
And then another opportunity that came from that, which is really where I’m not sheltering in my mind – I have never seen a better opportunity for smart people with expertise that can elevate other people in their own businesses in their lives, I’ve never seen a better opportunity for them to share generously that expertise with other people. I literally have been spending I would say probably 6 hours a day, every day, if I’m not doing a public webinar, I’m doing a private webinar. Or I’m having one-on-one consultations with business leaders or marketers or creators or people with personal brands who are interested in understanding how they can set their brands up to thrive during this time.
ROB: I love what you say about uplifting, because even though you could have a disposition towards making the most and really transforming business to thrive in this environment, we all I think still need a little bit of encouragement and uplift from other people for those days when maybe we’re not feeling quite as strong about it. We’re all going to have a down day here or there.
I’m very interested by what you said about authority marketing and focusing there. I think that’s a word that has been used and misused. I’ve seen it misused in such a reductive way as essentially buying a book for yourself.
DEB: Yep, exactly. Which actually, I think the people who wrote the book Authority Marketing, the purpose is they wrote a book called Authority Marketing to teach you how to buy a book to do authority marketing. I look at authority marketing in a much more comprehensive way.
ROB: And you’re providing that service to people who know the difference, too. The people that you’re going to work with are people who know how to get a book published, probably. They might change what they’re writing right now, but it’s not “Help me be famous.” They probably have a brand. They probably have some opportunity. They probably have some skills. But a lot of these folks probably don’t have the tools around them the way you do.
DEB: Right. I invested significantly over the past couple of years to actually build these things. I’ll tell you a quick story about where this all came from.
I wrote my first book, called Branding Is Sex: Get Your Customer Laid and Sell the Hell Out of Anything. Yes, I am the person who used both the words “sex” and “laid” in the title of a book. When I wrote that book, it really was part of this compulsion to share that information with as many people as I could. I give away our methodology, my expertise, 30 years of experience and track record in brand strategy – I give that away for the cost of a book.
But what I didn’t do was connect that back to how I wanted to grow in my own career, how I wanted that to serve my agency business, and how that was going to be the pathway to what my vision is for myself. I wasn’t very intentional about it.
After that book came out, fortunately for me, because of brand disasters at the hand of such great brands like United Airlines and Pepsi and Uber and Papa John’s, lots of other branding dumpster fires that happened, I became the world’s resident authority on brand disasters and botched corporate apologies. I became the person who was able to answer all the media’s questions about who’s handling it well, who’s not handling it, what brands should do, what brands can learn.
It was really during that time that the second book, Irrational Loyalty, was written, because that book basically wrote itself. I thought, I need to be smarter and more intentional and definitely more thoughtful and strategic about how I want these pieces of content that I’ve created to serve me in the long term.
That’s when it became apparent to me that I needed something other than just a book to express my authority, because a book is just one method. I do a lot of public speaking, but I also wanted to share my expertise in other ways so that people could consume it in more actionable methods for them. So I went out and attended a Mastermind of some of the best digital marketers in the world. This is one of those Masterminds you pay $30,000 a year to be a member and then $10,000 an event. Definitely the upper echelon.
I happened to be there because I was a speaker, but I got to spend an entire 3 days with people who had 9-figure sales funnels. I thought, all right, these people are selling information products and they’re selling a buttload of them. They’ve created a way to scale their personal brands or their business brands or whatever. I could do that too.
I went out and asked all those people, “Can I hire you to build this for me?” They were all like, “No, you can find other people. Go see this person, go see that person.” I started talking to people, and I was interviewing people, and there was no shortage of people who were willing to put me into a sales funnel to sell me a course on how to build a sales funnel. I was like, what the hell? This is ridiculous.
So, I mobilized my team, and my personal brand became a client of the agency. I was like, “You guys are going to figure this out. We’re going to build all of these assets. We are going to build all of the automated marketing platforms. We’re going to tie all of this stuff together, and we’re going to build a business for me. Here’s a metric, and by this time, in this many months, we’re going to be making this much per month revenue off of these information products. I’m also going to do this much in speaking, I’m going to do this much in book sales.” We built a business around it.
Over the last year, I had a number of clients coming to me saying, “I want to be you. How do I build that footprint?” I said, “Well, interestingly, we built it internally.” When the current coronavirus situation hit and all the other authors and speakers and experts and coaches and consultants, like me, were like, “Oh my gosh, I’m stuck in front of a computer in my dining room, working over Zoom; how do I impact many, many people?”, I was like, I’m good. I’ve got stuff.
But I also was able to work with the company, and we made a pivot. We made this quick pivot. I said, “We need to really prioritize these authority marketing services.” So that’s the story of a pivot. I hope that’s helpful to your audience.
ROB: I think it’s absolutely impressive and resilient, and something to learn from. I think a lot of people strike out to write a book as a hunt for where their expertise is. It seems to me that in particular, the services you’re providing require that somebody have an expertise that goes beyond just a book.
But if someone’s feeling like they really need to have this expertise and this array of services around it, but they’re not quite sure where to go, where to focus on their expertise, how do you think about zoning in something that a person can offer that nobody else can offer, but they can’t put their finger on it quite yet?
DEB: That’s an interesting question. That’s a question that I’ve been answering for a lot of people over the past couple of weeks – people like me who are sitting around with a little bit of time to really navel-gaze and pontificate for themselves about where they’re going.
My recommendation for that is to just ask the question of “How can I be indispensable to someone at this present time?” That’s the first question, honestly. I always start everything from a reexamination of my own personal core values and my own core purpose and my mission and my big hairy audacious goal and where I’m going in life. I’m lucky that I have that as a compass.
If people are thinking about this and they’re like, “What expertise can I share?”, the first place to start is really with, why do you do what you do? Or why are you? It’s a very existential question. Simon Sinek’s stuff helps with that a lot, too. I recommend that people do some examination of that.
But then ask the question, “How can I be indispensable to people at this time? How can I share something that I know or that I can do in a way that helps another person?” If you’re looking at creating content and putting content out to the world to share your expertise with only the goal of making money, you will never be able to make money. If you are putting content out in the world because you truly have a message that you need to share with other people because it’s going to elevate them in a particular way, it is your job to figure out specifically what you do.
I always tell people, just ask the basic – I have these three brand questions. The questions are, “What does it say about a person that they use my brand? What does it say about them?” The second question is, “What is the one thing they get from me that they can’t get from anyone else?” And “How can I make my customer or my reader, my listener, my viewer, how can I make my person a hero in his or her own story?”
I think that people will find a lot of answers there. In my own experience with not being super intentional about how I’m going to use a book – I’m very intentional now because I have a book and I have another book and I have a speaking business and I have classes, and we’re starting up some online courses, I now have a webinar series, all that kind of stuff – the whole purpose of that is to create a community, and create a community that I can engage with and share my expertise with.
My goal in my approach of sharing expertise first and not asking for anything in return, my hope is that it’s going to elevate a lot of people and make them irrationally loyal to me. Then, when people are in a situation where they’re back to buying stuff, they’re going to want to buy that stuff from me, or they’re going to want to buy that stuff from my company.
ROB: Right. I think what you’re saying there – it’s subtle, but this is not a time, for the most part – unless you’re selling surgical masks, this is not a time to be selling for a lot of people, but it is a time to be investing deeply and helping, and sometimes helping – I think you’ve done some work with startups; a common thing in startup land is a lot of times you’ll ask for help, but you get money. If you ask for money, you’ll get help.
DEB: [laughs] That’s true. I have a business where I work with early stage companies, helping them tell their story effectively through their investor pitch. That’s something that we always say. You have to treat fundraising like a branding exercise, but the ideal customer that you’re going after is an investor, and you have to figure out how you’re going to elevate that investor’s life. How are you going to give them bragging rights from offering you that kind of help that you’re looking for?
But you’re 100% right. Now is a time to be looking at everything through this lens of helping versus selling. I’ve been telling everybody this. You really, really have to ask that question of “How can I be indispensable at this time?” There’s lots of businesses that we can’t use right now. There are lots of things that feel to us that they are maybe luxuries that we shouldn’t indulge in right now.
As a brand, any kind of brand, you can still help during this time. It’s not just like the parent company of Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior retooling their factories to go from manufacturing perfumes to making hand sanitizer, or Tito’s Vodka here in Austin doing the same. It’s also, how can you help people deal with the current situation at hand in a helpful way?
Really good example – I’m a skier, and I was super bummed that my season got cut short this year. One of the places that I buy gear from sent me the most delightful email. It acknowledged the current situation, showed real regard for humanity, and it said, “Hey, we’re also bummed out that the season got cut short. If you’re feeling bad, here’s a link to a playlist of your favorite ski porn” – which is a playlist of really fun ski movies on YouTube. And further down in the email, there was a nice feature that you could link to on their website about ski touring – which, for people who are not skiers, that’s the process of climbing uphill and skiing down. You don’t ride a chairlift; you climb uphill and you ski down.
The ski areas are closed, but there’s plenty of places to go into the back country. A lot of people need tips and tricks for doing that and doing it in a way that’s appropriate for the current pandemic conditions, so how do you still stay safe and ski with a buddy without getting too close? Also, safety – it’s avalanche season, all that kind of stuff. Further down in the email, they merchandised, “Here’s the best of the 2021 gear that’s coming out. Ski season 2020 is over; however, it’s never too early to dream.” So it was a light message, and it was not sales-y at all.
Then what I loved, at the very bottom of this email, I truly was delighted to see there were the signatures of everybody who works in the store. It was very personal. It was very authentic. It was really sincere. It was totally on brand. It was helpful. They’re not selling ski gear right now. People are not going online and buying a $1900 pair of skis and a $700 pair of boots right now. They’re just not. However, this brand is going to stay connected not just in my mind, but in my heart. The next time I do need something, I’m going to go to them.
Looking at everything from this lens of helping versus selling is what’s going to help brands connect in the long term and remain relevant and thrive when this is over – which this will be over. Come hell or high water, it will be over, and people will be back, but nothing will be the same as it was before.
ROB: It ties back nicely – it sounds like they even may have asked some of those questions that you asked, of what are the things they can’t change. The thing they accepted that they can’t change is that people cannot go skiing, and asking people to buy a pair of skis to sit in their closet for next year is not maybe a very good message.
I’ve seen, I’m sure you’ve seen, I’m sure everybody has seen an unbelievable number of emails from companies about their response to COVID-19, and half of them say, “We’re just going to keep being the business that we already are.” That’s maybe an innocuous brand fail. But you, being someone who keeps track of some bigger mistakes, what are some bigger mistakes people have made in messaging around this crisis that we can learn from? Not to trash them just to trash them, but to trash them by way of example.
DEB: I have something that would be really fun right now, which is this morning, I wrote something that is the perfect COVID-19 email that comes from that brand – I call it the perfect “we’re all in this together” email. How many “we’re all in this together” emails have you received from brands that you didn’t even know you were on their email list?
ROB: Oh, uncountable.
DEB: Yeah. Let me read you the message. It’s entitled, “An important message from our CEO”:
“Dear Deb,
“You don’t ever remember giving us your email, nor do you know how we got a hold of it. You once briefly thought about us 7 years ago; however, we’re here for you during these (unprecedented, uncertain, challenging, unsettling, unusual, rapidly evolving) times (pick one). We’re keeping everybody safe and monitoring the situation. If you need a new wine rack/sofa table/machete/floor lamp/outdoor fireplace/Aston Martin, we’re in this together.
“Also, here’s a reminder that we’re also here for our employees, whom you didn’t even realize existed until just now. Our thoughts and prayers go out to everybody affected by the current health crisis. Just know that (brand that you didn’t even know had your email address) is by your side during these tough times.
“We’re in this together, and I’m on Richard Branson’s yacht –
“A Brand You Don’t Really Know.”
That’s the big crime right now. During the first week – this was just post-March 11th – everybody was rushing to send out their COVID-19 email. All of them were “a letter from our CEO,” and they were all entitled “We’re in this together.” That’s my parody of that. Worst is automated marketing. Turn off your freaking automations, people.
The day that the WHO announced that we had a global pandemic – and it was also the same day, I believe, that we closed off our borders to people arriving by airplane from most countries in Europe – I got an email from Air Canada asking me, “Hey, don’t forget to opt in to get insider information and savings on your next flight!”
I also received an email from another brand, like a big box retailer, from whom I recently purchased a box of legal pads – you know, those yellow lined pads that we write on at work – and they wanted me to give them a review. I was like, “Oh hey, let me stop everything and give you a review.”
Then probably the worst offender that I saw during that time period was the email that I received from a clothing retailer. The headline on the email was “Staycay is better than vacay,” and they were advertising a 40% off friends and family sale. This is anything but a staycation, people. We are sheltering in place. This is for the safety of all humanity at this point. Don’t make light of the situation.
On the flipside, like the example that I gave you of the ski gear retailer that sent me that great message, I’ve also seen incredible efforts from brands, big and small, to be helpful.
I have a really good friend who owns a chain of ecofriendly dry cleaners, and if you think about it, dry cleaners are not doing really well during this time, are they? It’s considered an essential service, but since we’re working from home – I don’t know about you, I don’t know what you’re wearing, but I’m doing what I call the “business mullet,” where I’m wearing business gear on top and I’ve got workout pants on the bottom. It’s business on top, party on the bottom. We’re just not wearing dry clean-only clothes.
He called me in a little bit of a panic and he was like, “I think my business is going to completely tank.” I said, “Let’s think about this for a minute.” He’s an ecofriendly dry cleaner. He also has a network of vans and drivers – it’s a pickup and delivery service. They come to your house, they get your stuff. I said, “Everybody’s working from home in their day pajamas, and they make the transition to the night pajamas later, so they’re not doing dry cleaning of their clothes.”
However, I work in my dining room and I have a set of really hideous, very dirty drapes. I said, “Do you guys dry clean drapes?” He was like, “Yes, I do.” I said, “You know what? It sounds like a time for you to educate people on the household items in your home that, while you’re working from home and looking at them for 24 hours a day, you might think about getting cleaned, to have a cleaner, healthier home.”
I said, “How can you be the arbiter of helpful content? You’re an ecofriendly dry cleaner. How can you be the arbiter of content that is cool, that’s helpful content about how you can keep your home clean during this time that you’re sheltering in place with products that you have around the house that are also ecofriendly? How can you also provide helpful, useful content to people while they’re working from home? Nobody sees more business casual clothing than the dry cleaner. How can you, in a fun and uplifting and elevating way, create some content for your immediate community showing them the best and worst of Zoom fashion?” Just to bridge the gap with content.
This time is bringing out the best and the worst in people. Don’t send the email that’s the “We are in this together,” and God forbid, please don’t use any of those words that I used in my parody email. Make sure that you’re being authentic and sincere to your brand. What you do as a brand during this time is going to define you, more so than what you say. This is a time for people to take action. Thank you for listening to my TED talk.
ROB: Oh, it’s fantastic. To take action, to give, and to rethink. If a dry cleaner can rethink their business for this time, then so can any of us. I know, Deb, you’re certainly not the only one with the “business mullet.” You might’ve seen this – I saw Walmart said that their sales of shirts are up and their sales of pants are down.
DEB: Yes. [laughs] I love it. It’s amazing.
ROB: It’s pretty universal. Deb, when people want to get more from you, when they want to see what you’re doing – you mentioned all of this content you’re putting around your brand, all these different tools that you’re putting out into the world – where should people go to find those things?
DEB: People should go to debgabor.com. All the things are there, including the webinar series, which we’re adding new webinars every day. These are open and available to the public. Like I said, I’m bringing on a bunch of really, really interesting experts. Our focus really is just to help people. Nobody gets paid for this. I have experts in my network, and I’m helping them connect with people and share their expertise to help other people.
There’s ways to get in touch with me. You can send emails to me via the site. I’m on all the social media stuff as Deb Gabor. You can find me. I love to hear from people. If you hear this and you’re like, “Wow, what you said, I really like it” or “What you said, it’s complete B.S.,” I want to hear from you. I love to talk to people. I’m an extrovert, so this time of sheltering in place is really hard for me. So please, connect with me. Please, please love me.
ROB: [laughs] Fantastic. Yes, I am in that boat with you of severe cabin fever.
DEB: [laughs] Yep.
ROB: Thank you for coming on the podcast, Deb. You’ve given a lot today. It sounds like you have an absolute ton more to give. I hope people will seek you out, and hopefully next year we can actually connect in person in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest.
DEB: Yeah, I hope so. Thank you.
ROB: All right, thanks, Deb.
DEB: Take care. Bye bye.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
Jeff applauds the move away from condemning people who choose unhealthy behaviors and the increasingly broad awareness of underlying lifestyle situations that contribute to these behaviors. Jeff’s agency attracts employees who want to do something good in their careers. He describes the agency as “responsibly rebellious,” and explains that is manifested in the way the agency encourages clients to take risks in a responsible way.
Jeff can be reached on his company’s website at: Rescueagency.com. The agency runs what Jeff describes as a “pretty robust YouTube Channel” at: youtube.com/rescueagency.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Jeff Jordan. He’s the President and Executive Creative Director at Rescue: The Behavior Change Agency. Welcome to the podcast, Jeff.
JEFF: Thanks so much, Rob.
ROB: It’s excellent to have you here. Why don’t you kick us off by telling us – it’s right there in the title, a little bit – Rescue: The Behavior Change Agency. But tell us a little bit about Rescue and where you excel.
JEFF: We are a public health behavior change-focused agency. What that means is that we exclusively work for campaigns that strive to change health behaviors for social good. Almost all of our clients are public health departments, state and federal agencies.
When we say behavior change, we refer to actually changing a fundamental behavior that a person is performing. So rather than changing what we would describe as a brand preference of someone who drives one car, changing them to drive a different brand of car, we’re looking to change that fundamental behavior of actually driving the car and converting them to ride a bicycle instead. Or in other health arenas, things like quitting smoking or eating healthier, etc.
ROB: Perfect. Is that something you’ve actually engaged in? Encouraging people to ride a bike instead of driving a car?
JEFF: Not that one. [laughs] But it’s an example people tend to understand.
ROB: What are some examples, digging a little deeper, of campaigns? You mentioned smoking cessation. There’s probably some other interesting things you’ve worked on. What are some examples?
JEFF: We work from simple behaviors like quitting smoking or not using drugs or not vaping and things like that to more complex behaviors like healthy eating, where we’re actually promoting specific types of foods, specific changes to what they eat, as well as mental health behaviors that are even more complicated – trying to get people to reduce stigma and recognize when to seek help, when to do something about the feelings they’re having, and whatnot.
ROB: Very interesting. You mentioned brand preference; in some cases, I think people think of brand preference as being kind of pliable. Maybe it is just as difficult to change as some health behaviors. How do you think about, or how do your clients even think about, measuring these behaviors over the long term? I imagine the feedback loop on one of your campaigns might be rather long in some cases, given the research required to gather those results. Or maybe there’s something unexpected I’m not thinking of.
JEFF: You’re absolutely right. Behavior change, we usually say you need a couple years at least of consistent campaigning to really see a measurable change. Unfortunately, we don’t have sales data to look at to see what’s happening in real time, so we rely on self-reported surveys and things like that that either our clients perform or that we help them perform to see what people are saying about the behavior.
You do have some interim steps that you can measure on the path to behavior change. Whatever your underlying theory is of what you think is changing in order to change the behavior, such as specific attitudes or beliefs or pieces of knowledge about a behavior, you can measure those, and then those can be pretty predictive of a behavior change later down the line.
ROB: One benefit it seems like you might have in your industry – is the behavior change industry perhaps a little bit more open about what works and what doesn’t than maybe some particular vertical market, like marketing soda or something?
JEFF: I think it’s a double-edged sword there. It’s more open in the sense that you can survive on theory for a longer period of time. In the commercial world, you can have a great theory, but if it doesn’t turn around sales in a quarter, you’re kind of out of luck there. In public health, you can survive on theory for a few years. So that does allow you to explore more options.
But that also allows bad work to remain for a long time. We see that there’s a lot of mistakes and common pitfalls that clients fall into, usually when they work with traditional agencies, that just happen over and over again because it works to sell a product, but it doesn’t work to change a fundamental behavior.
ROB: What about openness in terms of tactics? In some cases you have organizations like the UK’s famous – I may be misattributing it, but their Nudge Unit there. You have probably published research in some cases around behavioral change. How much of your work is synthesizing and adapting those things to a community and to availability of resources versus cooking up something completely out-of-the-box and new?
JEFF: There’s a lot of theory and approaches already within public health behavior change. I think the UK is interesting in that they tend to have movements that occur there within behavior change. 10-15 years ago, they were really social marketing, and then it switched to Nudge, and they seem to all move a little bit more cohesively, maybe because it’s a smaller country.
Here in the U.S., we don’t see as much cohesiveness in the approaches. The latest and greatest CDC strategy or FDA strategy, those do have a big influence on the work, but a lot of states are making decisions for themselves and applying the theories and approaches that they’re comfortable with – everything from states that might still be using hardcore scare tactics like the ’90s in their drug prevention work, all the way to other states that are more open-minded in realizing things like adverse childhood experiences influence how people make decisions about risk behaviors later in life. That’s something that the state of California is really looking at.
You have a really wide range of approaches and comfort level with those approaches. One of the things that we have to do that is kind of unique to our industry is we often have to share some of that education and some of those case studies from other states with potential clients so that they can understand, these are your options. You don’t have to just do the scare tactics. That’s not the only thing out there, and actually it often doesn’t really work.
So, we have to be the experts not just in marketing itself, but in behavior change theory, psychology, sociology, all these things that go into it.
ROB: It sounds like there’s a difference of tactics, a difference of outcomes. Are you seeking cessation? Are you seeking some sort of treatment? Are you just seeking a reduction of use in something that is now legal in certain places? It sounds like you are able to pool that expertise and help – in the ways that many agencies are, but you don’t think about it so much in public health – bring those best practices and learnings from other clients.
That makes me want to pull back and dig in. You’re in a very unique area of focus. I think we’ve done probably 120 or so episodes right now, and we have not been in a conversation with an agency owner who is in public health and behavioral change. You mentioned you’ve been in the agency, at least, for 20 years. Did you start off with that area of focus? How did Rescue come to be?
JEFF: We are definitely a unique agency. I actually started the agency when I was in high school. I was a volunteer for my local health department’s anti-tobacco program. That was a youth program.
They worked with a local agency, and after volunteering for about a year, I noticed that the kids we were reaching, the teenagers we were appealing to, were not current smokers, and they were never going to be smokers, whether we existed or not. These were good kids. They were leaders. They wanted to put this on their college application. There was really no change I could see that we were causing, even though we were successful from the sense that there was a lot of youth involvement and we were doing a lot of things.
Fortunately, we had an advisor at the health department that was also pretty savvy in terms of youth culture. I like to joke that she was a break dancer when she was in high school, and she was maybe 7 years older than me. So, she was still pretty connected with what high risk youth culture might look like versus low risk youth culture. I said, “Why are we spending all our money on these youth?” She was open to allowing me to move from being a volunteer to being a contractor to start to provide some of these services that would change who the program appealed to.
That continued for the next year or so in high school, and very quickly we started to innovate in a way that just wasn’t happening in public health, particularly with teens. That turned into a lot of referrals. While I was in college, we grew a lot through referrals and got our first office when I was in college and things like that. So, we really grew organically, and from Day 1 have been exclusively focused on public health.
ROB: What does the team look like today? What are some of the scale points and key hires to where the team of the agency is now?
JEFF: Today we have about 175 employees, six offices around the country. We are the largest marketing agency in San Diego, but most San Diego businesses can’t hire us. [laughs] Our work, though, is spread around the country. We don’t have a specific geographic footprint. There’s not one place where our clients are clustered. We work with about 30 different states and with the federal government, with the FDA, as well as Veterans Affairs and others.
Some of the big scale points that have occurred – there’s been a few. The biggest one was about 7 years ago, when we were about 40 or 50 people at the time and we won a contract with the FDA to do youth tobacco prevention. That contract was a $150 million contract for an agency of 50 people. We very quickly grew thanks to that contract. We brought on our CEO, Kristin Carroll (who’s still with us today), at that time, who helped us grow quickly. Within a matter of 3 years, we went from about 50 people to 150 people.
But in that time, we’ve continued to grow with other clients as well. Some other notable wins are the California Department of Health’s nutrition campaign as well as some other states that have brought on larger contracts.
ROB: You mentioned that many San Diego businesses probably can’t work with you. Does that reflect a change in the overall deal size that you’ve pursued?
JEFF: No, no, that’s just mainly because we don’t do commercial marketing. You have to be a public health oriented campaign. We work with the local county health department, we work with the local school district, and we also work with the district attorney’s office. So, we work with a lot of local government agencies, but we don’t have any commercial customers here or anywhere else.
ROB: I see. Once many agencies scale, and especially north of 100 people, I think a lot of times they become very focused on just the FDA size deals. How do you manage that different granularity of client size within one organization and not become really fixated on hitting those homeruns?
JEFF: That has definitely been a problem of scaling up. There aren’t that many FDA size deals in our space, so we’re forced to continue our more modest deal size – which we’re very happy with.
But I think the biggest challenge that has occurred is being careful not to try and apply universal lessons to the entire agency. Some things that we do for our largest client don’t necessarily apply to our smallest clients. We’ve gotten in trouble sometimes in starting to do things for our smaller clients the way we do it for our larger clients and then going over budget and overcomplicating things when they don’t need to be. And vice versa, also making sure we don’t get too simple with our biggest accounts. We have to operate in this limited budget standpoint for some of our accounts and then a more open budget to explore different things with our largest accounts.
That’s probably the biggest thing we have to remind ourselves of and be cautious with. Really, we’re operating like two different agencies within one.
ROB: We are chatting here right in the middle of the spring 2020 COVID-19 epidemic. How has that changed your mix of business? Do you have clients that are working within – do you have some stay home campaigns running and that sort of thing as well? I imagine any work you’ve done, you’ve had to learn very quickly.
JEFF: Surprisingly, we haven’t gotten into any stay at home work, mainly because we tend to focus on long-term campaigns so that we can measure these long-term changes. It does affect COVID because a lot of the reasons that people are passing away because of COVID is because of preexisting conditions that we’re trying to prevent with some of our other behaviors. So in a way, they’re all connected.
But when there’s an emergency like this, communications get out pretty quickly and go viral pretty quickly. You don’t really need the traditional long-term campaign to figure it out.
The one thing that has changed the most for us is the production of new creative and new messages. Right now we’re focused almost exclusively on creating animated work and infographics and things like that. Our clients still want to produce the work, still want to put new messages out there. Right now, people are consuming media more than ever before, so we’re still cranking away new stuff.
ROB: That’s excellent. Jeff, you’ve been at this for a little bit; you’ve built the largest agency in San Diego, which is quite a thing. What are some things that you’ve learned along this journey that you might do a little bit differently if you were starting Rescue all over again?
JEFF: There’s so many lessons you learn, but you almost need to learn them in order to grow from them. I think that one of the things that we learned was not to be afraid to say no to an opportunity if that’s not the right opportunity.
I have to teach this lesson to every new business development person we bring on or client service person we bring on. It might feel weird to say no to a small client, but keep in mind that if they don’t have enough funds for us to do a good job, they won’t blame the budget; they will blame us for not doing a good job. And without fail, the smaller the client, the more they ask for.
Oftentimes I’ve seen a lot of agencies get stuck in this world where they are over-servicing smaller accounts to keep them and underservicing their larger accounts, and it’s usually top-heavy. It’s usually more senior people that are servicing these smaller accounts, who are now not able to go out there and pursue bigger work. So, you really have to be careful of the really small accounts holding you down.
ROB: How do you think about positioning and communicating the scope with the small accounts so that their expectations are aligned? Or have you found it’s hard to manage them and you just have to pick the right ones and let someone else have the ones that are going to ask for the full buffet for 5 bucks?
JEFF: We definitely let someone else have those. [laughs] It’s about being transparent upfront and saying, “Look, this is what it takes to do good work, and this is why. These are all the components that need to go into something.”
We have found ways of being able to accept smaller accounts with different strategies. For example, something that’s completely unique to our space is we actually license campaigns. We have about four different preexisting campaigns that governments can license from us and that are reused over and over again across the country.
That has allowed us to open the door to some smaller – not the smallest, but some of the smaller accounts that don’t have the funds to create new campaigns, but do have enough funds to implement a licensed campaigns. That’s something that could never happen in the commercial world; no one would ever want to share anything. But in our space, the government loves to share, and they actually love the reduced risk that comes with knowing this has already run somewhere else.
ROB: Right. I can see you coming with some results, and they can see what the campaign looks like out in the world. They can probably even go and visit and see in some other place how this campaign looks in the wild, which you can’t do, to your point, for most businesses. Maybe you could get away with it in – I don’t know, if you were just serving one lawyer per market, or one plumber, or something crazy like that. But even then, they probably wouldn’t want to share.
JEFF: Right, exactly. There’s so many things that we do here because we are focused on this space that would just not be possible if we were a generalist agency. And that’s part of our argument for potential new clients: look, you can hire your local ad agency that everyone has heard of that has done all the car dealerships and local banks and things like that, or you can hire a specialist in public health. What’s going to happen if you hire a specialist in public health is you’re going to get all this institutional knowledge about how public health marketing is different from commercial marketing and be able to be more effective, more efficient, and have all this research and tools at your disposal.
ROB: Jeff, at 175 people, you’re up above that 150-person Dunbar number that many people talk about as that maximum number of people you can be in relationship with, or people might phrase it differently. How have you thought about structuring, organizing, and persisting culture as you break through dozens and then triple digits and then over 150?
JEFF: We had a pretty strong culture before I knew that company culture was a thing. It comes from the culture being embedded in the work. A lot of times, folks try to put this layer of culture on their organization that doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. That’s where culture tends to fail or feel shallow.
Where culture is really strong and real is where it manifests through the work. For example, one piece of our culture is that we describe ourselves as “responsibly rebellious.” What that means is that we want to push our clients to take risks within a responsible way. That is manifest through a lot of decisions that we make for our clients, things that we present to our clients, ways that we approach how we work with our clients.
Then, when we say that’s a part of our culture, it’s true. It is a part of our work. It’s part of what we do. When we talk about being science-based, we have a giant in-house research team that does presentations for us that is then infused in the creative and in the strategy. So, I think the best way to maintain culture is to just have an identity that is real and that you truly apply every single time you do the work.
ROB: It almost seems like some of the culture would be self-selecting. Not to say that people might not view Rescue as a very attractive place to work, but it seems like an odd company to sign up for unless you have a real interest in messages of public health and in helping people and helping communities. Do you find that in the interview process?
JEFF: Yeah. This millennial generation that’s now dominating our workforce, we are the ideal kind of company to work for. They want to cause social change. They want to have an impact, and we can allow them to have that impact. So, definitely the people that come in are people who have an interest in doing something good with their career.
And that helps. Everybody in the agency wants to have a good outcome from that campaign on a deeper level than just simply delivering for a client.
ROB: That makes sense. Jeff, what’s coming up for Rescue that you are excited about? Or maybe it’s even something in terms of either broad messages that you’re seeing trends in, or even tactically?
JEFF: One thing that’s pretty exciting is that we’re seeing a broad awakening of the underlying lifestyle situations that lead people to choose unhealthy behaviors.
The best example of this is what’s happening in California with the new – California has a Surgeon General for the first time, and she is focused on infusing adverse childhood experience understanding, which is this area of health research that talks about if you had these really, really big things happen to you when you were a kid – things like divorce or a parent dying or domestic violence or mental health in the family, these heavy things – those things set you on a trajectory to take on much higher risks later in life. And if you can embed an understanding of who people are and where they come from in your work, you can be more effective with these populations.
So, an understanding of that, an understanding of mental health, an understanding that people don’t do risky things in isolation. They do them from a complicated equation of everything that’s happened in their life. That was just not existent for the past 20 years, particularly in things like drug and alcohol prevention, where it’s like “people who use drugs are just making a bad choice, they’re just stupid, they’re just bad and they need to be told to stop doing bad things.” [laughs] That’s just not how it works.
It’s really nice that a lot of public health is moving away from that perspective and instead moving towards a deeper understanding of the complexity of human identity.
ROB: Absolutely. It brings to mind for me – you have a responsibility; the messages you’re putting out there are not messages for any particular – you probably work with governments of every political party possible.
JEFF: That’s right.
ROB: But we live in a world where – what you’re saying even hearkens back to partisan politics. How do you think about putting messages out into the world that have to transcend politics and party?
JEFF: I think we all suffer, across industries, across topics, from talking to ourselves and not understanding someone who’s different.
One of the things I like to say that I feel makes this so different is applied empathy. It’s not just that we have more empathy than someone else, but that we actually apply that empathy to how we create our messages and can articulate, when we’re going to create a campaign for rural men, why that campaign has to be so different from a campaign, for example, for African American women. What is different about their life experience, their attitudes, their worldview, their values that will change the way we communicate to them – but also change what we’re saying.
A great example of this is that we do a ton of tobacco prevention work, still, with teenagers, and you can talk to an alternative teen in an urban area who listens to rock and things like that – you can talk to them about the evilness of the tobacco industry and all the horrible things they’ve done, and they will get fired up. They’ll say, “I don’t want to support an industry that’s destroying the world and manipulating people.” So, you can motivate them not to smoke just by talking about the tobacco industry to them.
But then you take a rural teen, a country teen who maybe is a younger version of the right side of our political spectrum, and you talk to them about the tobacco industry and it just doesn’t even faze them. They’re like, “Well, that’s their right as a company and you have the right to choose what you’re going to do, whether you do that behavior or not. It’s all about personal responsibility.”
If you don’t know that difference and if you don’t know that they are processing information differently and caring about different things, then you’re just speaking to yourself. You’re just speaking about what you care about. And that can apply to so, so many different things. Within politics, its’ so interesting to see people just yell within their bubbles about things that they care about and are baffled by why no one else cares about them or why the other side doesn’t care. All you have to do is just spend a little bit of time on the other side and you’ll understand why they don’t care about what you’re talking about.
ROB: It’s a great thought for all of us on meeting people where they are instead of where we think they are. Jeff, when the audience wants to get in touch with you and with Rescue, where should they look for you? Where should they find you?
JEFF: Yeah, definitely. Rescueagency.com is our website. There’s contact information there for different folks. But also, if you’re just interested in what I was talking about and learning more about public health marketing and behavior change and things like that, we have a pretty robust YouTube channel, youtube.com/rescueagency. Lots of actual workshops and videos that we’ve done explaining our approach and research and some examples of the work.
ROB: Perfect. Jeff, thank you for joining us. Thank you for the thoughtful work that you do. We’re grateful for it, and look forward to a lot more of it in the future. Congrats on all the success.
JEFF: Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.
🇨🇦 Canada - marketing
15/10/2025
#88
🇬🇧 Great Britain - marketing
18/07/2025
#100
🇬🇧 Great Britain - marketing
22/06/2025
#70
🇬🇧 Great Britain - marketing
28/04/2025
#54
🇨🇦 Canada - marketing
28/03/2025
#76
🇨🇦 Canada - marketing
27/11/2024
#87
Spotify
No recent rankings available
Related Shows Based on Content Similarities
Discover shows related to The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast, based on actual content similarities. Explore podcasts with similar topics, themes, and formats, backed by real data.
