The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Carlos Gil is CEO of Gil Media, a digital media company that specializes in video production, influencer marketing, social media community management, talent management, and content marketing. Carlos is a first generation Latino marketing executive, award-winning Snapchat storyteller, and author of a recent bestseller: "The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI," available on Amazon. He presents bilingual keynotes at major marketing industry events. In this interview, Carlos reviews his unconventional path to success, the importance of passion, and the long-term humanizing person to person linkage that creates business opportunities. There are no shortcuts. He believes the strength of a company is in its employees. He hopes his book will help companies future-proof their brands and their businesses for the long term. In 2008, Carlos lost his job in the financial industry – the same day that he joined LinkedIn. A couple of days later, he started an online LinkedIn group job board, JobsDirectUSA.com., and promoted awareness through social media (which was in its infancy). He learned how to build relationships through social media and enabled thousands of mid- to senior-level career professionals to find jobs. Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, Mashable, Social Media Examiner and numerous trade publications featured his work with this startup. In 2010, Fast Company recognized him as one of the Top 50 "Most Influential People Online". Carlos worked for a couple of grocery stores chains, developing their social media platforms, before joining LinkedIn to run social media for their Sales Solution business unit. His personal brand grew as he was repeatedly tapped to speak at marketing industry conferences. Carlos took one final corporate job with BMC Software because he wanted the opportunity to work with Nick Utton. Used to battling the status quo in highly-structured hierarchies, Carlos had been frustrated by bureaucratic foot-dragging when he tried to get things done. Nick taught Carlos to "Fail fast, learn from that failure, and keep moving forward to what does work." Carlos says that it is important, wherever you are in your career, that you have a leader who really supports you. Today? A best selling book . . . A résumé showing over a decade of experience running digital and social media marketing for enterprise brands . . . A highly-successful agency working with an amazing roster of enterprise clients . . . Worldwide speaking engagements. For a man who dropped out of high school, got his GED, and jumped into an MBA program at age 30, Carlos has far exceeded expectations. He credits getting laid off in 2008 as the springboard for what has become an amazing track record of accomplishments. In the face of Covid-19, Carlos is one more entrepreneur re-inventing himself for these challenging times. For those who have questions, Carlos can be reached at @carlosgil83 on Twitter and on Instagram. (Just let him know you heard him on Rob's podcast), on LinkedIn, or by email . . . at carlos@gilmedia.co. To view Carlos interviewing his mentor, Nick Utton, (9/25/2018, topic "How to Sell to a CMO and Marketing Truths with Nick Utton."), see this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ql733a53xa0 Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Carlos Gil, CEO of Gil Media. He's a keynote speaker, an author of the recent bestseller, The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI, and he's based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Carlos. CARLOS: Hey, Rob. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me on the show. ROB: Sure, glad to have you here. Wish we were in person in Austin, Texas as we had planned, but the coronavirus had other plans. Why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about yourself and your own journey into the world of marketing agency speaking origins? CARLOS: My career in marketing actually started in 2008. I started my career in the early 2000s working in the finance and banking industry. It was right around the fall of 2008 that the banking industry took a turn for the worse. I was laid off. I was working for AIG at the time. The same day I lost my job is the same day that I joined LinkedIn. To put it into context for everyone listening out there, the moment I lost my job, hundreds of thousands of other Americans lost their jobs too, and the irony with what we're seeing happening today in this current crisis is – It reminds me a lot of what I went through about 12 years ago, early on in my career. I joined LinkedIn the same day I lost my job, and I became really inspired to help others find work. I knew that the likelihood of my finding a job in banking any time soon was probably not going to happen. It was looking really bleak. Within just a few days of joining LinkedIn, I became inspired to help others find jobs, so I started my first business, and that was an online job board. Now, to put this in perspective for you, I was 25 years old at the time. I had no experience running a business. My parents are serial entrepreneurs, so I knew that entrepreneurship and running a business isn't easy by any means. But the point where I was at in my career, where I didn't have experience running a business, I didn't have any seed money or real savings, and I definitely didn't have experience building websites or coding – or marketing, for that matter – the cards were really stacked against me. But I was really passionate about helping others find work. The first thing I did was I started up a group on LinkedIn called Jobs Direct USA, and then that group morphed into what was the basis for my online job board, and then eventually an events business. For about 3 years, I forced myself to learn how to use social media. Again, to put it in perspective, not having any real experience in corporate marketing at that point, social media was really new. We're talking about the years of 2008, '09, and '10, when businesses weren't really using Facebook and Twitter and even LinkedIn like they are today. I really learned how to use social media to form relationships, and it was those relationships that eventually helped me gain clients and grow my business and led me down this path of corporate marketing. I ended up getting hired by one of my clients, Winn-Dixie, which is a supermarket chain based in Jacksonville, Florida, which is where I lived at the time. They ended up hiring me to start up social media for them in 2011. I was at Winn-Dixie for a couple of years; ended up going to another supermarket chain called Save-A-Lot in the Midwest, where I was the Director of Digital. Then things really skyrocketed for me when I was hired by LinkedIn and relocated out to San Francisco to run social media for one of their business units. It was around that time that I worked for LinkedIn that I started getting hit up to speak at different conferences, Social Media Marketing World, South by Southwest, various industry conferences, and I started investing more into building a personal brand. Fast forward to where I'm at today, which is 2020, like you mentioned before, I've got the bestselling book The End of Marketing, which came out at the end of 2019. I have an agency, Gil Media Co., and I have this great résumé which spans now over a decade running digital and social media marketing for various enterprise brands – and now I have the pleasure of working with an amazing roster of enterprise clients. None of it would've been possible, Rob, without first of all losing my job in 2008 during a crisis and really turning to social media to brush myself off and build the brand that you see today, which is Carlos Gil. ROB: It's quite a personal brand. A lot of people have probably heard you speak, seen you on conference rosters. It seems a fascinating theme in your journey is that when you have your back against the wall, you're a guy that finds your way out. One of the times I became aware of you was when you were running social media for BMC Software. BMC Software doesn't resonate in most people's minds as a titan in social media, but you had a lot of interesting things to talk about, and they probably to an extent had their back against the wall to figure out how to do something in social media. Not engaging was not an option, but I imagine figuring out how to engage was a real challenge for them. CARLOS: I'm so glad that you brought up BMC, because BMC Software is the last corporate brand I worked for full-time as an employee. When I got hired by BMC, I was at this crossroads in my career. I went to go work for LinkedIn; LinkedIn was a great opportunity, but ultimately it wasn't going to be the end-all, be-all for me. I was at this crossroad where I was like, do I go out on my own? Do I go work another gig? The reality is that when you run social media for a brand – an enterprise brand like the Winn-Dixies, Save-A-Lots, BMCs of the world – it's all the same job. Creating content, managing a community, influencer relationships. It's all the same gig. It doesn't really change outside of the logo that you represent. What really steered me to go work for BMC was the CMO that hired me, Nick. He was a former CMO of MasterCard, worked for E-Trade, JP Morgan Chase – this is a guy that lives, breathes, and eats marketing, and I think it's really important, regardless of what stage you're at in your career, that you have a leader that really supports you. If you have a boss, you should have a boss that supports your growth, supports your endeavors, and really is your champion internally. One of the challenges is there's always this hierarchy that you have to work against. You're constantly swimming against the current. You have all these ideas, like right now, a lot of clients are coming to me and they're asking me about TikTok. So, I'm advising them on what they should or shouldn't do. Any time there's this emerging new channel, a lot of marketers are eager to jump on that channel, and then they're met with resistance. Whereas my boss at BMC, Nick, understood that if you want to constantly evolve, you need to be trying new things, and if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. You fail fast was his mantra, and you learn from that failure and then you keep moving forward to what does work. What I enjoyed about working at BMC in the 2 years I was there is that as an employee, they really gave me full autonomy to do my job. And now, as a business owner, it's that autonomy that was given and that leadership that I was surrounded with that's really helped me and my business, imagining the employees that I have and really growing my business with the mindset that employees are our greatest asset. It's not the products, it's not the services, it's not the logo, but it's the employees that make us who we are. Going back to at BMC, which is very much B2B focused from a marketing standpoint, relationships are paramount. My mantra, Rob, before I turn it back over to you, is in this world of marketing that we're in today, you don't need to have the most followers. You don't need to have the most engagement. But what you do need to have is an engaged community of customers, clients, and fans – even if it's five people. ROB: Indeed. That's quite a range, going from Winn-Dixie, which is a consumer brand that is for everybody within the region of that grocery store chain – I spent middle and high school in Tampa, Florida; I know Winn-Dixie well, a lot of my high school friends worked there – to BMC, which is enterprise software. And it's not even – Zoom is having this moment because everybody needs to talk to everybody. BMC is not in a moment where everybody is still going to need it. Certain people are still going to need it. I think it flows nicely into your book. One of the themes of your End of Marketing book is really knowing where your target customer is. I think you've taken this lesson you learned in going so far between consumer and enterprise and taken a really good general lesson. It seems like maybe the book itself is some of these general lessons you've extracted that can apply to anyone. How do you think about that book in our current moment? CARLOS: I don't want this to come off as a cheap plug for The End of Marketing, but I think right now, humanizing your brand is going to be what keeps your brand in business. It's something that throughout my book and even throughout my keynotes now, I state upfront the reason why I wrote the book in the first place is to help future-proof your brand and your business for the long term. When I started writing The End of Marketing at the beginning of 2019, at no point did I ever think a year into being a published author, there would be coronavirus or I'd be quarantining and staying at home. But the premise of The End of Marketing and the methodology behind how you market as a human versus as a brand is that at the end of the day, people relate to people. Since the beginning of time, people do business with who they want to do business with, who they like, who they trust. For example, you had never heard of me, seen me speak, or even like what I have to say, you wouldn't invite me on your podcast. It's that basic. It's that simple. And it's not a hard methodology, but I think marketing has become so fragmented and marketers themselves have gotten so far away from the basics, and we get so wrapped up with having that content constantly flowing out – I refer in The End of Marketing, my book, to social media and the internet being this noisy digital ocean. And it is, because we're constantly facing this pressure to have to push out content. We're constantly looking at metrics. We're constantly comparing our wins and our highlights to someone else's wins and highlights. At the end of the day, if you focus on reaching individual people like a human being, not as a brand, over time they will show love for you. They will show an affinity for you. And that is how you grow your business. It's one person at a time. It's one-to-one marketing; it's not one-to-many. ROB: It's awesome how that probably ties straight back to that job board that you built, because you didn't set out to build a job board for the world. You were in a moment – and you were in finance; people may not remember just how bad it was to be in finance in 2008. It would be like being in a restaurant for this month when everything's shut down. You can't go out and get a restaurant job right now in this coronavirus pandemic. But you started block by block, person by person, connecting people to each other, connecting people to jobs, also in a very human business in Winn-Dixie. It now probably is tying right into the work you're thinking about for brands now, helping them realize how human they need to be in this moment. CARLOS: Yeah. I'm so glad that you brought that up. It's funny because I'm here thinking, maybe I need to dust the cobwebs off my Jobs Direct USA business plan and maybe bring it back. It's hard times right now. You've got a lot of people in hospitality that are being hit hard by this crisis. You've got a lot of people all over the board – I was just sharing this with you before we jumped on here; as a speaker, my entire business has been wiped out for probably all of 2020. Yes, conferences are saying they're going to reschedule, yes, they're saying they're looking into other plans, but the reality is that we're in this for the long haul. I think what's most important for anyone that's sitting out there listening to this is that you start thinking about how you're going to get to the other side. I will tell you this: the Great Recession, 2008, '09, '10, were some of the worst years of my life financially speaking, but what it did help me do is first of all build character because I was able to survive it and get through it, and that in itself helps you build tough skin in other scenarios throughout life. But really what it helped me do is acquire knowledge, and it helped me acquire experience. I think that's one thing that a lot of people don't realize. Right now, even though times are bleak and tough, you have all this time on your hands that you can be using to learn something, whether it's reading a book, whether it's going on LinkedIn Learning – if you want to look me up there, I have courses on LinkedIn Learning – whether its going on YouTube and watching and consuming. This is a prime opportunity for you to enrich your mind and allow that enrichment to be able to carry you on to what you're going to do on the flipside of this crisis. ROB: Indeed. It's hopefully a time where people figure out to watch more than just Netflix. Now, we were originally scheduled to meet up in person in Austin. You were going to be at South by Southwest as a mentor and also at the LinkedIn Studio there, providing a talk on the future of work. Share with us a little bit what you were intending to speak of in that talk, and even maybe some additional things – how you're thinking it may have evolved since then. CARLOS: I was going to be first of all doing mentor sessions at South by Southwest. Throughout this recording, I want to make myself available to anyone out there, whether you were going to attend South by Southwest or not. If you want to meet with me one-on-one, if you've got any questions, I'm really easy to find. You can go to @carlosgil83 on Twitter as well as on Instagram. Just let me know that you heard me on Rob's podcast. Again, any questions I can answer for you, any advice that you need, marketing-related, crisis-related, whatever it might be, let me know. But going back to South by Southwest, besides the mentor sessions I was going to do, I was also going to speak at LinkedIn's activation there called the LinkedIn Studio. It was going to be on the future of work. A lot of what I was going to talk about wasn't so much the technology aspect, because I think we all get it that work, whether coronavirus happened or not, eventually was going to move more to this virtual world that we're seeing happening right now, using tools like Zoom and Skype and Slack and other tools out there. But I think, again, my piece is you don't need a college degree from Harvard in order to get the really sexy brand marketing job or agency job. You don't need to have all this formal education in order to be able to run your own business, because I myself am a high school dropout that has a GED. I myself didn't go to college until I was 30 years old and I got into an MBA program. My point that I'm trying to make, Rob, is that you need to be able to get the basics and actually implement the basics and keep moving forward and keep learning and keep growing, and you do that by getting the opportunities that come your way and making the best of them. Relationships are paramount. I wouldn't be on this podcast right now, I wouldn't have the career I have, if it wasn't for the relationships I started building in 2008 as a result of a job loss. Again, when I think of future of work, I think it's not going to be based on where you went to school. It's going to be based on not just who you know, but who knows you. That's where personal branding is paramount. It's funny because I am a big proponent of personal brand, hence why I've invested so much into my own personal brand. Your personal brand is your new résumé. When people think about doing business with you, what they're going to do is google you, and within a few seconds they're going to learn everything that they need to know based on what Google gives them. And if you don't have a presence online, it's going to make it hard for people to be able to find you. Case in point, going back to the agency world, I run a successful agency that I started 3 years ago when I left my corporate job. I do very little business development. I do zero traditional business development from the standpoint of cold calling, pitching, RFPs. I participate in zero RFPs. The way that I've been able to grow Gil Media is through the content I create that lives through my personal brand channels. So think of my personal brand. Everything that you see on my Instagram, my YouTube, Twitter, even Facebook and LinkedIn – it's all funnel. That's to create that top of the funnel awareness, as we call it in the B2B world, and then as you subscribe to my content – and you subscribe by hitting a "follow" button – then at that point, I'm able to get you hooked. You're able to see who I am as a real person. You're able to see how I speak. You're able to learn a couple nuggets from me. That is something I've found is the way to circumnavigate the traditional business development activities to be able to get business. ROB: Perfect. One thing I wonder about a little bit – a lot of the people listening who are in the marketing agency world, and even with our own clients, when I think about our clients, I think about a person, I think about a name, I think about a relationship. And I think that's true easily on the consumer side and easily on the enterprise side, where the deals are large. Then there's I think this middle that can be somewhat mechanistic, the world of hundreds of outbound cold emails and SDRs and that small- to mid-scale SaaS play. When you're thinking about a brand in that kind of market, where people show up and put in the credit card, how do you think about humanizing and making that sort of brand personal in marketing? CARLOS: I think you still need the emails just to keep your name on the radar and stay in front of people. You still need to be out there, all over social media. Again, like I said before, social media and the internet is a noisy digital ocean. These aren't my rules; I just play by the rules of the house, if you will. But I'd say one-to-one interaction is where it's at. If you have someone that you want to do business with right now, or if you have a general idea of the type of client it is that you're trying to reach, your objective is to get in front of that person, one way or another – whether it's an email, a Facebook ad, or a direct message on Twitter or Instagram. Where most people mess up is they're relying on LinkedIn and they're running ads and pumping out content on LinkedIn, and they're spamming, quite frankly, through direct message, everyone that they can on LinkedIn. Here's what I can tell you as someone that has worked at LinkedIn as an employee and teaches on LinkedIn's platform: LinkedIn is a phenomenal directory to find who it is that you want to do business with. But it's not where you go to actually network. What you need to do is to see if the individual that you're looking to do business with is on Twitter or if they're on Instagram. If they're on one of those platforms, or both, follow them. Consume their content for a period of time so you know what they're into. You want to know what their hobbies are, what their interests are, and you want to organically form a relationship with them. The reality is that when you talk about any sizable business deal, whether it's SaaS, agency work, whatever it might be, people are not going to meet you on the first date and agree to do business with you. And they're definitely not going to sign off on a high 5- or 6-figure or 7-figure deal with you just because you direct messaged them on a social network. It takes time to build that relationship. That's real talk. And I can tell you for a fact that I've never messaged someone out of the blue and all of a sudden they're like, "Hey, here's a 6-figure deal for Gil Media!" It just doesn't work that way. But what I will tell you is a good strategic path is think of all your prospects as seeds in a garden. Right now, I can tell you that I've got dozens of seeds that have been planted over the last several years, and even before that, when I was still working in corporate marketing and I knew eventually I was going to go out on my own. Those seeds you plant in the garden, and as you engage, as you mature the relationship, that harvest starts to bloom. Some of those trees grow bigger than others. Some of those trees sprout dollars on the branches. Some of them just stay as little buds, little bushes. But my whole point I'm trying to make is that you need to really think about going wide and also going deep – going wide in terms of you want to be able to have a lot of prospects, but you also want to go very deep with the relationships and not think about relationships as being transactional. When you start thinking about relationships as being about money and transactions, at that point you don't have a relationship. You just have a transaction. In this market, especially this market now where people are going to be tighter with budgets, I'm telling you, the relationship is going to be worth gold. ROB: So true. I think sometimes the thought leadership we get is from companies that are in a hot category. If you are out there selling marketing automation and everyone feels like they have to have a marketing automation or maybe two of those, then maybe you can get by with being a little bit transactional. But unless you're selling toilet paper right now, you probably can't be very transactional. It seems like very much a time to plant rather than to harvest, except in very rare situations. But as you're talking, I'm listening and it sounds like – I get what you're saying about planting seeds, but casting a wide net while planting seeds sounds overwhelming. How do you think about relationship across a wide range of people that you're working to build real, authentic relationships with, but recognizing that it's going to take some time? CARLOS: It's removing the transaction out of the relationship altogether. It's actually connecting and forming an authentic and organic relationship, asking someone, "How are you? How are you weathering the storm? How's your company doing? Is there anything that I can do for you? Hey, I work for this company; I'm not really trying to sell you anything, but I just want you to know that I exist." The irony in all this is that since we started this crisis, since work from home became a thing, I haven't sent out one email yet. I haven't sent out any piece of communication selling anything to anyone. Yes, I had an email that went out letting people know that my book is on sale on Amazon, and yes, I've got this course on LinkedIn that you can watch, but in terms of actually selling agency services, nothing's gone out. I told my team, "You know what? Let's chill. Let's not be aggressively pitching to anyone, and let's let the game come to us." No kidding, in the last 2 weeks, I can't tell you how many CMOs, CEOs, C-suite executives have been hitting me up personally to help them with their crisis comms plan on social – what to say on social, do an audit, review. It's crazy what happens when people don't perceive you as being the cheesy salesman and instead they perceive you as the good guy, the advocate that's here to help them. I think regardless of where you sit in an organization, whether you're an account executive, a sales rep, a CMO, owner – whatever your role is, make business about the relationships and the people that you're truly trying to serve and not about the transaction. When you start operating with that mentality, you're going to see how business is going to start coming your way when you least expect it. ROB: That's perfect. When I think about what you have done yourself, when your name shows up in their inbox, without you saying a thing about your business, they already know who you are and what you can do for them. They have a sense of brand, of what you can do there. But it's also worthless without the staying on their radar part. I know for myself, when I think about partners we have, people we work with, people we go in together on deals and help serve customers – the ones I think about are the ones who have spoken to us most recently, and it's not the folks that say, "Hey, just checking in." It's the folks I've built a relationship with but have also stayed on my radar so that I remember them, so that when an opportunity crosses the path that I can't do myself, I pick up the phone and I talk to them. So it is that planting and that harvesting. It really makes sense. How do you think about avoiding that "just checking in" dynamic? I think right now, "How are you?" is perfect. We are all I think looking for someone to tell how we are with trust. How do you think about that when it's less obvious? How do you keep that relationship? Because people will tell you, "Find this article, send it to them" – sometimes it still I think feels kind of fake, cheesy, and forced. CARLOS: That's such a good question. I think in this market right now, we operate with a servant mindset. It's about giving, not taking. The more that you give, the more it'll pay itself off tenfold. It's using social media to listen to what people are saying. It's going in the right groups, running the right searches, paying attention and swooping in with solutions to people's problems. I'll give you an example. I have a lot of downtime right now. Because I have that downtime, I'm looking to make use of that downtime. One of the objectives on my plate is getting on more podcasts. I didn't go out and run an ad on Indeed or LinkedIn or even post some looking for a virtual assistant; instead, I just went on Twitter and I ran a search for people that do VA work. I was able to connect with someone right away – and again, it's different because I'm not selling anything to them. On the flipside, I want to give them money so they can do work for me. What I'm trying to say is those are the type of opportunities that happen when you, in this case, have a solution to someone's need or someone's problem. ROB: And you're probably also getting more inbounds right now, which probably helps tip your own brain on what to be thinking about. When there's an uptick in the data on something technical, there's an uptick in the human factor of that as well. CARLOS: Yeah, 100%. It goes back to what I said earlier. We're all people, we're all in this together, and at the end of the day, people do business with who they like and who they trust. Regardless of what services it is that you sell, your objective as a salesperson, as someone who's trying to drive and increase revenue, is to be able to connect your buyers with solutions to their problems. This is probably not the best time to be cold calling and cold pitching and hard selling, but this is the time to be connecting with those individuals and just get on their radar. ROB: Absolutely. One thing we're definitely seeing, if you look in the tea leaves – we'll email a certain number of people every week to look at future bookings for the podcast, and I can tell you, it's typically cold contact. A lot of people will say yes because they want these conversations, they want to share their journey, they want the exposure. But I'll tell you, the accept rate is basically double what it was 3 weeks ago. The information is there in the detail. I like how you talk about these searches and these platforms and LinkedIn as the tools to help you understand how to be a better human to other humans. CARLOS: Yeah, 100%. Podcasting especially right now, it's really high. I'm sure that between last month and this month, you're going to see a big increase in downloads, subscribers, and listens because you've got more people that are tuning in. You've got more people that need content to consume that's not just news and doom and gloom. I think right now, podcasting is a blue ocean. If you can find your niche, you can carve a lane for yourself in that niche, and you can find ways to monetize with, again, brands or advertisers that normally are trying to get in front of a certain audience, and they're finding ways to pivot or reallocate their budget. If you're able to bring a specific audience, then man, a podcast could actually be quite beneficial from a revenue standpoint. ROB: Absolutely. Carlos, you shared earlier a very generous offer to connect with listeners. Remind us all, when we want to go out there and find you – other than obviously your immediately findable personal brand – what's the best way for folks to connect with you? You said @carlosgil83 on Instagram, Twitter. Google you, I'm sure they'll find you. Anything else? CARLOS: You can connect with me on LinkedIn. You can also send me an email, which is carlos@gilmedia.co. ROB: Perfect. Thank you so much, Carlos. You have dropped gold. I know you're sowing seeds for a tremendous future already in the midst of all this, so congrats on being ahead of the game there. CARLOS: Thank you so much for the opportunity. ROB: Thank you. 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.

Mathew Sweezey is the Director of Market Strategy for Salesforce, a company best-known for providing and supporting a cloud-based, cross-departmental customer-relationship-management solution. Salesforce has expanded its offerings to include a broad range of integrated service, marketing, sales, front end, and back end business software. Mathew is an award-winning marketer, podcast host, technology pioneer who writes about consumer behavior, media theory, and new marketing strategies. His publishing credits include AdAge, Brand Quarterly, VentureBeat, Forbes, The Observer, and The Economist. Twelve years ago, Mathew started a marketing technology company that provided online lead generation. This failed experiment provided him with a valuable education. He joined another startup, Pardot, and initiated its thought-leadership practice. Like a string of ever small fishes being consumed by ever bigger fishes, ExactTarget acquired Pardot and then SalesForce acquired ExactTarget, with Mathew maintaining his ever-expanding role as each-organization's marketing thought leader – exploring the future of marketing. What he learns is communicated internally to guide company direction, externally to customers to help them "better their businesses," and even worldwide to conference attendees in his keynote presentations. Mathew is the author of "Marketing Automation for Dummies: (2014) and, just-released this year, "The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media" (Harvard Business Press). Mathew started writing this book long before the world heard of Covid-19. As companies reel from the overnight environmental changes wrought by this virus, his message is acutely "on target" . . . suddenly the whole world has had to figure out a new way to interact. In this interview, he discusses the changes marketers will need to make to meet the challenges of a "changed environment." Mathew spent 5 years researching over 20,000 global consumers and over 20,000 brands and then looked at the general marketplace. He reminds us that, when we have a specific environment, we play a game that fits that environment. When the environment changes, the game, likewise, must change. Mathew says that today's consumers produce the largest amount of noise (their devices are second). He believes the consumer now controls the environment, which changes marketing's requirements dramatically. Marketing is no longer just a message . . . it is an experience. Purchases now are not just a single "click-here-and-buy decision," but rather a process of guiding a customer along a curated journey. To "cut through the noise," companies will need to be agile, distribute marketing functions throughout the organization, build strong relationships with their customers, master internal alignment, continue to invest in strategy, and experiment and adapt rapidly. From all this research, Mathew believes he has identified the key to the success of today's high-performance marketing organizations . . . executive buy-in to this "new idea of marketing." With the Covid-19 challenge, he would like to help people understand what we should be thinking about, how we plan a road for recovery, and how, specifically, we deliver moving forward. Context, he says, is a "significant part of what consumers are going to demand." The Salesforce website is: https://www.salesforce.com/. Mathew can be reached on Twitter at: @msweezey. To schedule time to talk with him one-on-on-one, reach out to him on LinkedIn. "The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media," is available on Amazon. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Mathew Sweezey. Mathew is the Director of Market Strategy for Salesforce. He's an accomplished public speaker, podcaster, and author of the forthcoming book, The Context Marketing Revolution, published by Harvard Business. Welcome to the podcast, Mathew. MATHEW: Rob, it's so great to be here and talk with you again. ROB: For sure. For those who don't know, Matthew and I go back a little ways from Atlanta; he has since moved on to the beach, basically, I think. But I think that actually transitions well to you telling us a little bit about yourself, your journey, and what might be called a dream job for a marketer. MATHEW: Myself, just a guy that loves marketing, let's start there. The journey really on this current path started, I don't know, 12 years ago when I had a startup. We were a marketing technology company. Essentially, we're doing online lead generation, lead arbitrage for an SEO term. That then ran for about 2 years. Lost a lot of money, learned a lot of stuff. Shut that down and went to work for another startup, which became a great success, out of Atlanta, Pardot. I was Employee 13. I helped grow that company up, and then we were acquired by another company called Exact Target, and I transitioned to the thought leadership team there. I had started the thought leadership practice at Pardot, and then we continued that at Exact Target. Then we were acquired by Salesforce, and then that led me to the thought leadership side of Salesforce, which is where I reside now. I'm really focused on the future of marketing and on that POV for the organization. So that's the nutshell of where I came from and what I do. ROB: That's a pretty awesome journey. Very few people get to take that rollercoaster ride from 13 people to acquired, acquired, public company now. I think unless people are really deep into enterprise marketing stacks, they might find it counterintuitive to have strong marketing thought leadership within Salesforce. There's that typecast view of Salesforce, obviously, on the sales side because sales is in the name. But tell me a little bit about how even with the acquisition, marketing has come to the forefront of Salesforce and how Salesforce as a whole thinks about marketing, and then within the marketing cloud and where that's leading. MATHEW: Marketing is a wide, wide, wide swath. The larger the organization you are, the more facets and the more things it comes to represent. Really at the heart of all of our marketing is helping us connect companies with their customers in new and better ways. Most people know us as the CRM platform. Yes, that's definitely where we started; now we're the number one provider of probably 5 or 6 different business software categories, from service, marketing, sales, there's frontend, backend – there's a whole platform and range of things. That's a large swath. Where my role fits in is helping on two fronts, really diving into looking at what the future looks like to help roll that back in to internal insights as to what we should be thinking about moving forward, and also then helping roll that information and those insights directly to our customers through one-on-one meetings, through lots of different formats, as well as then writing an onstage presence in traditional conferences and keynotes. For us, marketing is a wide range of things. You can look at the brand aspects, the one-to-one aspects, the events. There's so many different facets. But really the heart of all of that is helping our customers be better at business and really helping them connect to their customers. ROB: That's such a good big picture view. You mentioned conferences. We were originally supposed to meet up in person in Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. You were going to hop on up and give a talk, talking about this new book that you've got coming, The Context Marketing Revolution. Amidst the disappointment of not meeting up and South by Southwest being cancelled in this COVID-19 crisis that we are in the middle of, give us the picture of the context marketing revolution and some of what you were excited to share but didn't get to, but you can get to now. MATHEW: Part of my job is doing a lot of research. Over the past 4 or 5 years now, we've really done a lot of research looking into the key traits of high-performing organizations. That's based on multiple largescale surveys, doing both surveys from consumer sides, brand side – we've looked at 20,000+ consumers globally, about 20,000+ brands over the past 4 years globally, and then combining that with looking at the marketplace at large. What I was realizing was there was something that was fundamentally different going on, and a lot of people were simply missing the boat. That's really where this idea of context marketing revolution comes in. It's two basic aspects. One is the basic concept that the idea we have of marketing, we can no longer iterate upon because it was an idea that we created at a different point in time, and marketing is a game that we play given the specifics of an environment. It's game theory. Given an environment, we play a specific game. When the environment changes, we have to change that game. The environment has changed so much that we have to change the very fundamental idea of what this thing marketing even means. This means a whole new role, scope, and function, not just how we take that thing we know and apply new things to it. So that's where the word "revolution" comes in. Then the idea of context is essentially the antithesis of attention. The old foundation of marketing was let's grab someone's attention and come up with some creative way to get them to do what we want them to do. The reality is, now that the entire environment is controlled by the consumer, and to reach them you have to go through multiple layers of AI, through multiple channels – all consumers now, all purchases, are journeys – what we must realize is, one, breaking through, now the foundational element is context, helping them accomplish a goal in a moment. Two is that to motivate a decision, now all decisions are considered, so now our goal must not be to get them to take the final action, but simply guide them to the next step and continue to do that multiple times, and that is how we motivate modern consumers to act. Looking at all of that and taking in the big scale, that was the big thing I was hoping to write about in the book, to show the number one key trait that high performers have right now, high-performing marketing organizations, is executive buy-in to a new idea of marketing. It's not new marketing ideas; it's a radically new idea. That's what I was so excited about to get out with this book. Then this whole thing happened, and now this book is even more relevant because the things that we may not have thought about – we're talking about radical change in the marketplace. A lot of people say, "Yeah, that may affect your demographic, but not my demographic." The reality is, the entire world was forced into a new way of connecting and communicating overnight. My father is 75 years old, doesn't know how to use a smartphone; is now having to do Bible studies via Zoom over a smartphone and figure that out overnight. Large scales of the population are going to be operating and expecting different things, and they're going to expect us to accomplish their goals in hand. I'm going to stop with that and turn it back over to you, Rob. ROB: Especially in this moment, people don't even know what they want. They don't know what they need. We're all a little bit discombobulated and need someone who cares about our lives, who actually thinks about what we need rather than someone who is going to tell us what we need. There's some stuff you just can't tell people they need, and there's some ways you need to tell them differently. You were scheduled to speak at a conference, go on a book tour – all of that is necessarily in the trash, but you still have a book coming out. How have you even thought about remixing the book launch process amidst this change? MATHEW: Yeah, it's difficult. I think the number one thing I can do is no one cares that you have a book, right? It's like, "Cool, you've got a book coming out." No one cares. We all have problems. We're all trying to figure out how we take what we were planning on doing and either salvage those efforts or redo those efforts. So everyone's got a lot of work on their plate, and it's happening rapidly fast. The best thing that I can help people do right now is understand, number one, what we should be thinking about, and number two, how we then plan for a road for recovery. The good part is context is a part of both of those answers. It's not the only answer, but it's definitely a significant part of what consumers are going to demand, and then the specifics of how we deliver that moving forward. What I've done is set up personal time. I've opened up my personal calendar to anybody. In fact, there's a post that went up in LinkedIn this morning that says if you want to schedule time with me, I'm more than happy to have any of these conversations with just you one-on-one – this is not a webcast; let's just talk one-on-one. So I'm trying to do those efforts. Definitely reaching out personally to everyone in my network to ask for a hand, let them know what I'm helping out with, so that if anyone that they know needs that help, they can get that information to them, as well as saying, "Hey listen, I need a hand too. If you could simply let one other person know about this, that would be a big help to me right now." Those are the ways that I'm trying to pivot in this current time, as well as just continue to transition a lot of the other efforts from physical to virtual and just take the rest day by day, like everyone else. ROB: Right. It's definitely been a reset, and I think it's been really helpful, because I had to go into my own business to reach out to some people that I'd worked with before about maybe working together again on some things. In the first couple of days after everybody went remote and everybody shut down business as usual, I struggled a little bit. I said, what is the appropriate way to even reach out to these people? It's human, and it's also realizing that even in this disruption, there are still ways – we all need help, and some of that help is business, and we all need to be thinking about how to help each other rather than how to sell each other stuff. It's actually a really good reminder, I think. MATHEW: Yeah. If we look just as a basic roadmap – in the book, I talk about the 5 elements of context: available, permission, personal, authentic, and purposeful. If we ground our efforts in those 5 elements, we will be fine moving forward. Available. How do we make sure the information and our help is in the way that they want it and where they want it? If they're asking questions, we need to make sure we have answers for those questions and that they're easy to find. That means a single central source of information. Starbucks is doing a great example of this right now. They've got a page of how they're moving everything that they can do in one place. From a business standpoint and a marketing standpoint, we must do this not only for our customers; we also must do this for our partners and all stakeholders at large, as well as our employees. When we're communicating with people, we need to make sure we have the permission to communicate with people and that we're using that permission appropriately. There was a great comic that came out today from Tom Fishburne – he's a comedian, he's a comic. The comic is there's this person reading an email and they turn to their spouse on the couch and say, "Hey, this is great. The company we haven't heard from in 5 years just reached out to let us know how they're going to do things during this current crisis." It's like, if people aren't engaging with you for 5 years and you're now reaching out to them, they probably don't care. You're probably just now spamming them and flooding their inbox and probably just causing things they don't want. Then we continue down. It's personal. It's not just how personalized we can take a mass message and personalize mass messaging; it's how personally can we actually deliver that message? Human to human, how many people can we connect together? That's really one of the big things we're finding. People are learning to connect without us in new ways. They are easily being able to make connections via all types of new methodologies – working from home, and we talked about Zoom, we talked about all these other things. We need to also be a part of that, whether that is us connecting our advocates to other people, whether that's us connecting our employees and delivering these messages. Then finally, the last two, authentic and purposeful. These messages have to be authentic. What we need to think about in that word is empathy. We have to be empathetic. And to be empathetic, that means you have to have constant conversations with your audience to know what is empathetic right now, and that's going to change day to day. You need to be having conversations with them to find out what those things are. The last element is purposeful. We need to find ways that are purpose-driven, and there's tons of examples right now. One, you could simply find a new way to use your products. You could come up with purpose-driven efforts. Nuun is doing a great example. They're creating care packages. If you're not familiar with Nuun, if you're an adventure athlete or an athlete, Nuun is a thing we drop in water that's full of electrolytes to keep us going. But who needs to keep going right now are healthcare workers, so they're asking their audience, "Tell us who your healthcare workers are so we can send them care packages." Lessonly created a coloring book so parents that are working from home can simply print out a coloring book for their kids to play with, to help keep them busy. Chipotle is focusing on safety. They've created new ways to ensure that the delivery food is tamper-proof. They've enhanced the functionality to know where your order is to make sure that this whole delivery to home is a seamless and as best an experience as it can be at the current point in time. If we can ground our efforts in those 5 things, we will be contextually marketing and will be poised to break through and still drive growth during this current point in time. ROB: Right, and it's all super necessary. The available, personal, permission, purposeful, authentic – if you're missing some of those elements, if you're not authentic, if you're not purposeful right now, it's going to come across very, very wrong in the moment of what people are dealing with. If you're not thinking about the personal, where people are and why you need to communicate a message of food safety – because you could copy Chipotle's message and it still wouldn't necessarily resonate, depending on who you are. As we're sitting here and looking at perhaps an accelerant for some of this revolution – or maybe it's even a necessity more than ever – when did this revolution start, and what fueled the growth and tipping over of the revolution? MATHEW: The revolution is a direct response to a market change, and that market change is the fundamental aspect. This is like hardcore, fundamental scientific theory of what we should be thinking about. It's media strategy, media theory. Essentially what we look at is, who does the media environment operate for? There was a specific date I was able to find out through research. Up until 2009, we lived in a world that was specific. It was called a limited media environment, and that means media was limited in three specific factors: creation, distribution, and access. Given those factors, it operated for brands. We were the ones who had the capital to break through. We could pay to have content created; we could pay to have content distributed, as well as there was a limited amount of content, so the noise we had to break through was a certain type and a certain way. It created a certain game. But then you start thinking about, what happened when consumers started to be able to create their own content? That really started back with the invention of email, and it's continued forward and has exacerbated over time. We don't really think about how radical today is from 2007, but it's radical. Just think about this: the amount of data we create per day today is 500 times more than the amount of day we created per day in 2007. The amount of mobile connections is 30 times greater than in 2007. The largest human gatherings are 100 times that size. We have 1.6 billion daily active users on Facebook. That's 800 times the size of what it was in 2007. It's a radically different era. What we live in now is the infinite media era, and that's what really is causing this revolution, because now the entire environment operates for the individual. The consumer is the largest creator of noise; number two is their devices. So how we as marketers break through is radically different. And then because there's infinite information, how they make decisions is radically different. That is the cause of this revolution. It's really a shift in media environments, from the limited media era to the infinite media era. What we see now is just an exacerbation of these things. Now consumers' lives – what I say is the tinder was there. All of these elements were there and the change was happening, but what happened is this current scenario sparked that tinder, and it went wildfire. Populations that would've taken 5-10 years to really adapt to these changes had to adapt overnight, and they just adapted. That's really where the revolution came from and what's driving this. ROB: That makes sense. It went from very slow, to your point, to very fast. There was a time of television monoculture, of three national networks. What I hear you getting at is the filter was the media, and now the filter is all the way down to the person. And we had a couple of middle roads there. We had cable, and cable got more and more and more cable, so you were a little bit of a filter, but the brands still had access to shoot content through a cannon at you. Now it really is each person can turn you on or turn you off as a marketer. It's getting more and more overwhelming. MATHEW: Yeah, and increasingly so, the consumer doesn't have to, because the environment is doing it for them. That's really the underlying factor we need to think about. Between you and them in any medium is a layer of artificial intelligence, and that AI is optimizing for the context of the moment. That's why context is the foundational element. Look at anything. If you do a Google search, we can all ask the same question, but we will all receive a different answer based on us in context – who we are, where we are. If we look at a social media feed, they're not chronological feeds. They're contextual feeds that AI is optimizing for whatever you're going to engage with most, which is the most contextual thing for you in that moment. You start to look at how modern media formats operate – TikTok doesn't even have timestamps on posts. You can resort and resift infinitely, and you never even think about time. It's only to the context of the moment. The time doesn't matter. That's really the underlying thing we have to think about. Context is what now the modern environment operates for. And if you can't create that, you're going to be filtered out. The environment is going to filter you out on its own because it's optimizing for the individual, not optimizing for the brands. ROB: That's fascinating even to think about TikTok. I'm not certainly in the core demographic of TikTok, and I hadn't even noticed the timestamp, but it does make sense because within that platform, there are hashtags and there are memes and there are moments, and that's the context. The context is not the time; the context is did you catch the wave when it was going through the platform, or were you late? Or did you happen to make content that intersects with something 4 months from now and then you're back in context, you're back relevant. The algorithm may even resurface you. Is that the direction? MATHEW: Exactly right. ROB: Right on. A lot of our audience for this podcast is in the marketing agency world, and I'm sure plenty of agencies intersect with your world; I'm sure you speak to plenty of people. One of the things I think may be starting to tip over now is there are some very traditional structures for teams that work on brands, that work on marketing content. How do you think we're going to need to change the structure of those teams, the composition of those teams as we are heading into this context world, this revolution, where we can't ignore and we can't just make a content pipeline the same way? MATHEW: There's lots of answers to this question. There's lots of factors. The easy answer is the top of the line is agile. We all have to change the way that we structure and think about work, and that means really moving to an agile format. That's the simple answer, and essentially that just means data-driven and iterative at a very high level. You can go very specific and say agile organization, agile agency, agile workflow. The second is the concept of distributed marketing job. There used to be the concept that the marketing department was the department who created marketing. That's not true anymore because marketing is no longer just a message. Marketing is now an experience, and if all departments now have customer-facing experiences, we must realize that all of these people are now marketers. If we're thinking about this from a brand standpoint, now what we must have is a distributed marketing role. What I believe is going to be happening is we're going to find citizen marketers. The term "citizen" essentially means any person that's not an expert in a field being enabled by artificial intelligence to be about 90% proficient as a trained expert. So what we're going to find is we're going to be able to empower just about anybody inside an organization with technology and artificial intelligence to allow them to be hyper-efficient marketers. That's how we're going to see marketing distributed across the organization. What that means is now who runs marketing needs to be elevated, and there needs to be a CXO or CGO – chief experience officer, chief growth officer – who's monitoring all these experiences and optimizing for the most efficient customer journey that optimizes for the best experience. So those are a couple of ways I think we're going to start to see things change in terms of the way that we work and how we operate. ROB: Really, really interesting. One thing that I think about is you talk about people creating content. Obviously, as we can see from Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and all of that, the quality of content that an individual can make is ever escalating. There are one-person teams that can do amazing things, and because of that it's efficient for them to target perhaps a very small or giant audience in a large and interconnected world. But within that context of increasing content quality and volume, what then is the place for people who are still trying to deploy very large, ambitious projects to create content, to create relevant messages for people? How can they think about that? Is there a budget that can be too big in this new era? MATHEW: Let's tackle the first one. I don't think there's ever a budget that can be too big. We can always find ways to do more stuff and test new ideas. But I think what we need to really think about is it doesn't matter if you're going to create something small or create something big. The whole point is the modern media environment operates for the individual. If you are thinking about creating something and then trying to come up with a creative way to put that in the marketplace, you're fundamentally flawed in your strategy to begin with. We must realize how to work with our audience, not how we work on our audience. There's a major problem we're going to face, and that is the content conundrum – because like you said, if an individual now can create content at such a high level, who are we competing with? We are now competing with an infinite amount of people, creating an infinite amount of content. That radically changes how we think about content creation, in two ways. One, how much we have to create. I firmly believe that we're going to have to move into a fast advertising and fast content model, just like fast fashion has moved into a fast fashion model. Delta, great example. You get on a Delta flight, you don't see the exact same Delta safety video every time. Every month they put a new safety video on. Why? Because it's empathetic. We must realize that we can't put one storyline out into a marketplace and expect that to keep people's interest over a period of time when their normal marketplace is rapidly changing by the moment. We're going to have to move to a new model. There's two ways that we can do that. One is super agile methods; the other is by working with our marketplace. Look at brands like Coca-Cola or Daniel Wellington. Daniel Wellington, the startup watch brand, sells $100 million of watches; 99.5% of the content about that brand that lives on Instagram was not created by the brand. 80% of the social content about Coca-Cola, not created by Coca-Cola. We need to come up with ways to work with our audiences to help create this content and get it out there. If it's not done with them, it's done on them, and no one wants things forced upon them. ROB: We used to have that ability to force things upon people, more or less, right? MATHEW: Totally. That was the whole point of the limited media era. It was a monopoly, and we had control. That's why those ideas that we had came about. But those no longer work. New environment, new games. ROB: It seems like when you think about a big film, the ceiling now is higher than it used to be, but I think the floor is also lower. If I summarize some of what I'm hearing you say, the consumer has a higher ability to say "no" than ever before to a Batman movie – you name it. You can push a Batman movie and people can say, "We don't care." We can say no, the information travels instantly, and people will say "We don't want to see that." Whereas you could've had a good week or month at the box office before. They can just go turn on TikTok instead, thank you very much. MATHEW: The hobby of hobby, right? How many hours are people spending watching YouTube videos about how to do hobbies and never doing those hobbies? There was a great piece on the radio this weekend about that. ROB: As you're thinking about the brief or maybe not brief trough that we're in right now, where everybody's cutting back their expectations for the second quarter of the year, and as you're thinking about what will emerge on the other side, whether it's a few weeks or a few months ahead, what do you think – obviously you have this context message, but tactically, what do you see emerging that's going to be the DNA of the strongest products, firms, and teams coming out of where we are? MATHEW: There's going to be a couple of basic things that people are going to have to have moving forward. One is the brands that have the best communication with their stakeholders and customers right now are going to be positioned to be the best moving forward. The question is, what do we do? If you don't have a daily conversation with people and understand how their lives are changing, how their buying processes are changing, how their needs are changing given the current situation, you won't have the right answer. To know what to do, you simply have to talk to those people. Whether that's through daily calls, whether that's through weekly calls, you need to have them. Once again, they have to happen across your stakeholders, your partners, your vendors, your agencies that you work with, as well as your customers. You've got to have that information to know what to do and how to respond. So that's going to be a key thing. The second thing is that we have to realize that even in downturns, there's still a couple of things that we must do. You must have the best internal alignment. You must master internal alignment. There's been a big trend that we've all been working towards removing silos, but still the reality is that there's a lot of companies where silos still exist. This is a massive problem because currently, if you've got different departments talking about different ways of dealing with this scenario, you can imagine how that's going to resonate inside your marketplace. You need to master internal alignment. Second is excel at stakeholder continuity. Third is we need to continue to invest in strategic efforts. When you look at what happens during downturns and during times of crisis, the brands that rebound the fastest and rebound the highest continue to invest in strategic efforts. That means right now, if you're thinking about, "Should we be changing and investing in new technology to give us new capabilities?", you probably shouldn't put those on the back burner because once we come out of this, those are going to be critical. If you've implemented them and understood them now, you'll be poised to use them best when you can coming out. The fourth is rapid experimentation. Those companies that are experimenting rapidly with what we should be doing and then rolling those learnings back into their standard programming are going to be succeeding faster than anyone else. I see it as a combination of those things that we need to be doing to sustain and rebound quickest. ROB: Perfect. Mathew, very exciting with the book coming out. Very exciting when we let you back outside to go talk to people in public. When people want to find you and learn more about what you have to say and maybe even connect with you on some of these chats, how should they go find you? MATHEW: I'd say the best place is probably LinkedIn. You can follow me on LinkedIn. I publish a lot of stuff on LinkedIn. And then Twitter. It's @msweezey on Twitter. Those are really my two channels. You can find me there; you can catch up with all my information. ROB: That's perfect. Go find Mathew. He's a great follow. He's a great person too, so if you get a chance to see him in person, you should definitely get to know him there as well. But you can also catch him online or maybe catch him on a boat. They still letting you out on a boat? MATHEW: I think, but all the boat ramps are closed. ROB: [laughs] Tough times. We'll look forward to brighter days, and thank you so much for sharing. I think there's a lot to be bright about right now. MATHEW: Hey, man, thanks for having me. ROB: 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.

Jessica Rhodes is Founder and Co-owner of Interview Connections, the first and leading podcast booking agency. The beginning? Jessica started working from home as a virtual assistant, booking her father on podcasts, so he could get exposure to his target audience and amplify his brand . . . without a lot of travel. Then added companies. While many of her clients think they would like to be on "big-name" podcasts, Jessica feels it is important for them to be strategic about where they "spend their time" and about getting on the right shows. Rather than using a "shotgun" approach, entrepreneurs will be far better served if they can get on shows where they will be addressing 500 of their best potential clients. Most of her bookings are for mid-range shows . . . with a few hundred up to a thousand super-targeted listeners. Jessica's co-owner, Margy Feldhuhn, started at Interview Connections as a contractor in 2016 and hired on as the first employee in 2017. A year later, on the occasion of Margy's first annual review, Jessica made her a co-owner. The "fit" was that good. The company hit its first 7-figure year in 2019. Jessica notes that podcasts are not an effective marketing strategy if they are intermittent. Podcast interviews need be part of long-term marketing strategy – done with consistency and momentum. Jessica recommends doing an interview a week, 4 weeks a month, year over year. Advantages of podcasting: Podcasts will "live" indefinitely – as long as people continue to search for what you teach. Backlinks between the websites of interviewers and interviewees boost SEO rankings. Interviews increase a podcast guest's credibility and help establish him or her as a leading expert. Podcasts attract qualified leads in a way very different from other marketing strategies Effective podcasting is not about the ego. It's really about "relationship-building and getting in front of the right audiences." Jessica believes it is very important to have clear, written systems in place before you hire someone for a new position. it's easy to train and onboard them. Interview Connections has a full-time staff of employees. Jessica believes the full-time staff is cheaper because contractors: Will constantly demand more money as they gain the skills you teach them Leave for another job or for vacation at will, providing no consistency for your clients Take the skills you taught them to your competition. Podcasting is growing every year. Jessica recommends people guest on podcasts before they "start their own show," just to figure out where your podcast fits in. Jessica can be reached on her agency's website at: https://interviewconnections.com/ or by texting the word "GROUP" to 38470. You will receive a link to Interview Connections' free Facebook group, Guest Expert Profit Lab.

It sounds too good be be true, but there's really no catch to using the Payroll Protection Plan Program forgivable loan program to keep your Marketing Agency team in place and pay the rent (for free). Jason Blumer is an expert in the business of Marketing Agencies, Accounting, Taxes, and more, and is here to answer the key questions of how you can use the CARES act to solidify your business in the midst of Coronavirus uncertainty. Additional Resources: The SBA site that explains the PPP (you can't apply for this until April 3rd but this link has a sample form to download): https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/paycheck-protection-program-ppp The SBA site that lets small businesses know where to find a lender (must apply at a local SBA lender): https://www.sba.gov/local-assistance Where to apply online for the SBA Economic Injury Disaster Grant of $10,000: https://covid19relief.sba.gov/#/ Jason's Previous Podcast "Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast" Episode: http://convergehq.com/podcast/avoiding-chaos-to-expedite-agency-growth/

Jason Ciment, is CEO of GetVisible, a consultancy and digital agency that builds websites, drives traffic to websites through search engines and social media channels, and provides digital reputation management services. Most of the agency's 10 employees started their careers as professionals working in businesses other than marketing. Jason, himself, started as a CPA/real estate specialist in a big accounting firm. He went back to school to study law, worked a summer with a large clothing factory in Sri Lanka, and spent time in the NYC rag trade before he finished his law degree. What then? Time to start a business. Jason launched Magmall, an ecommerce business selling magazine subscriptions, in 1997, and dug into pre-Google search engine optimization. (Early Google became one of his clients.) Over the years, GetVisible added a new skillset every couple of years: service business website development, pay-per-click ads, social media services, reputation management, LinkedIn-associated services, and email marketing. Each time the company decided to offer a new service, it hired someone who already had the needed expertise and introduced them to the organization's philosophy and its Assessment Toolbox Methodology, a means of discovering a client's customers and where on the digital landscape they are to be found. Jason admits that the company is relatively small. Leveraging limited assets is important. A big question and challenge is always: How can they stretch a dollar and produce a higher ROI with a lower cost? A few innovations . . . GetVisible has never had a sales force. Jason feels that salespeople focus on sales; he wants to focus on client outcomes. GetVisible uses a what Jason refers to a "transparent contract," a flat fee, six-month contract that, rather than tallying up a total of separate service, targets producing a client's desired results and itemizes how the client's money has been allocated. The agency implemented a simplified wireframe process to increase WordPress site development efficiency, promote intra-page symmetry, and get early client involvement and buy-in. Jason believes a website needs to answer 3 questions: : What is it that you do? Who do you do it for? Why are you better than anyone else? Get Visible builds healthy online branded Google and Bing search reputations for its clients. But, what can be done when a company gets damaging listings, bad news, or bad reviews? There's the clean way and the not-so-clean way of removing someone's "bad news" from the internet. The "not clean" way is to actually try erase the bad thing that is damaging a client's website, not an easy thing to do. The clean way? GetVisible creates a flood of "good news" content for its clients. This more current information pushes the bad news down the page. Good news won't make "the bad stuff" disappear completely, but the bad stuff will become obsolete and irrelevant. Jason can be contacted on his company's website at GetVisible.com, or through his LinkedIn profile, where those interested can sign up for his "secret newsletter." His first book, I Need More Clients: Digital Marketing Strategies That Grow Your Business (Amazon, 2016), has straight five star reviews.

Blake Akers is the owner of Webology, a digital marketing agency that started by "knocking on the doors" of local small and mid-size businesses. The company focuses on using Google for organic and paid search, providing scientific SEO, testing, and data analysis on the organic side and split testing ad campaigns within paid search. Today, the agency takes its focused expertise and works regional verticals, e.g. roofing and niche legal firms – companies that typically have a high cost per click and a high per lead value . . . companies where Webology, because of its tight industry focus, knows the business. Webology's intention is to work exclusively with one company in a vertical in a geographic market. Blake claims that, if you know how to rank a local roofing company website, you get a lot of leads on the search engine results page (SERP) – those from organic search and those from the Maps Pack (3-pack). The Maps Pack is the group of up to 3 businesses that appear in a box at the top of the page, after the advertisements. The Maps Pack is a valuable piece of real estate . . . studies suggest if a the SERP has a local pack, that local pack will get the majority of the clicks, but the Maps Pack alone will get over 40 percent of the total clicks. How did Blake get Webology so well-launched in such a short period of time (3 years)? Branding. Blake researched SEO to figure out what it took to rank a website locally and get leads for small- to mid-size businesses. . . starting with his company. He asked some critical questions: How do we write really, really good copy that sells, but also checks off all the boxes in regards to competitor averages? How do we enhance a page for users and still fit the averages that Google is looking for? He started getting some answers when he reviewed everyone else's "best practices." But, the true answers did not come to light until after he dove deep into data science, assessed competitor averages, and identified and implemented advanced SEO strategies. This knowledge gave him the tools to help his own company grow . . . and a product he could sell to his clients. He has used his own company website a number of times to beta-test new ideas that later get rolled out to customers. If there is one thing he would change back at the start, Blake says he would have gone after more client reviews and worked even harder at building up his brand. Today, he is a lot more proactive about reaching out to his clients and interviewing them to get those valuable endorsements. To contact Blake, visit his company's website at: https://webology.io/, email him directly at: blake@webology.io., or ask general questions at: info@webology.io.

Melissa DiGianfilippo, Co-founder and President of Public Relations, Serendipit Consulting, Scottsdale, AZ Melissa DiGianfilippo is Co-founder and President of Public Relations for Serendipit Consulting, a full-service marketing, PR, and creative agency. In this interview she talks about the questions she asks to suss out what each client truly needs – as opposed to what they think they need: What's the goal? Is it storytelling? Is it brand awareness? What's unique about the brand? Does the company have sales goals? What Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are important? Once needs are established, what services does a client need? Media relations? Digital marketing? Zocial media? Content creation? Do they need everything? Melissa believes that "all marketing tactics are moving in the direction of measurability." Serendipit customizes its PR services: strategizing placement timing and geography. Melissa explains that they are "looking for a lift in traffic" at the time a TV segment airs and afterward. TV segments, difficult to track in themselves, are reposted and shared on social media. Trackable links help customers to understand the value of PR placement and the role of social amplification in strengthening placement impacts. Did the placement drive a direct increase in any of the tracked KPIs? Melissa believes thought leadership and subject matter expertise are the most powerful kind of PR. If one thought leader in an organization is good, "more than one" can highlight a company's diversity. Being featured on a consistent basis – in national broadcast or news or print, local markets, and industry-related publications – and talking about trends, forecasting, and your personal story may not produce immediate results. But this kind of exposure will, over time, drive influence for your brand, establish you as a credible thought leader, and boost KPI results. Melissa credits Entrepreneur Organization with contributing to her company's success. After 11 years in business, Serendipit has over $4 million in annual revenue, high profitability, 30 employees, and a culture she describes as "enviable." Melissa is candid about her company's mistakes. A few years back, when the company decided it wanted to go to "the next level," they hired an expensive "expert" to lead the charge. BIG MISTAKE. Nine months of BIG MISTAKE. Melissa says that owners need to know that they don't need to hire a high-ticket "name" to pull an organization up. Employees have the capability, within themselves, to grow their skills and ramp up an organization. A structured commission program has proven to be win-win . . . for employees, for clients, for business partners, and for the agency. Another mistake? Melissa and Co-founder, Alexis Krisay, love business development. Melissa warns that when agency owners sell to customers, they may tend to sell themselves and not their agencies. Which is what Melissa and Alexis did. Then, when the "unknown" Serendipit team started working these projects, clients were not happy. Weren't Melissa and Alexis supposed to be leading the initiative? Today, Melissa and Alexis bring the teams in early during the sales process. Melissa can be found on her company's marketing-education-content-rich website at: www.serendipitconsulting.com, by following @serendipit on Instagram (or for Melissa's longform stories, @melissadflip on Instagram), or on LinkedIn.

Location 3, is a digital marketing agency that "delivers enterprise-level strategy with local market activation. In its 20th year in business, the Google-Analytics Certified agency works primarily with franchisors to understand their business objectives and facilitate enterprise strategy alignment and with individual franchisees, to promote hyper-local-level marketing activation. Services include business listing management, SEO, data and analytics, and driving new revenue through paid search, paid social, local programmatic buys – and anything else that makes sense for boosting local level revenue. How big is the franchise market? Alex notes that over 50% of all US retail locations are part of a franchise organization. Only about 30% of the approximately 750,000 franchise locations in this country are in fast food/casual dining. Almost anything, Alex explains, can use the franchise model. Location 3 focuses less on fast food and more on services or franchise systems with measurably higher customer lifetime values. In this interview, Alex explains how Digital marketing at the local level is interesting, but also complicated. Unlike direct mail, where someone can walk into a store with a traceable coupon, programmatic vendors (e.g., Google and Facebook) can claim, based on their technology, that someone saw or engaged with your ad or website on their platform, and ended up in your location. When promotions are on multiple platforms, how does one tell which one actually drove the store visit? And how should the proportion of spend be tweaked to maximize revenue growth? To facilitate optimal decisions, Location 3 provides franchisees with full turnkey campaigns across a broad variety of platforms, tracks return on ad spend, and shares that information with it clients with full transparency. Location 3 developed a franchisee-facing software platform, LOCALACT, which serves as a hub of local digital data. Franchisees can use this tool to see their local page analytics, how their local Google My Business is performing, and where their traffic is coming from; respond to reviews; and buy additional media. Alex can be reached on his company's website at: https://location3.com/, on YouTube, or at 820 16th St. Suite 300, Denver, CO 80202. You can always check out our website. We're very active. We have a pretty active YouTube account. We put up some video content. We go to pretty much every franchise tradeshow that's out there, so if you're in the franchise space and we haven't met you, I'm sure we will soon. Very active in that community, the tradeshow community. If you're ever in Denver, we're right on 16th Street Mall right downtown.

Ten years ago, when the real estate bubble finally burst, Jeff Pulvino closed his decade-old real estate investment company and sweated through the "Now What?" people face when they find themselves out of a job. Social marketing was in its infancy. Jeff pivoted his company, and, using the strengths of its internal marketing department, jumped into Facebook marketing, and, ultimately, built a full-service digital marketing agency. It was not an easy climb. Eight years into agency life, Jeff realized that, without a strategic plan, the agency was just "marketing in the dark," and often failing to deliver what customers wanted and expected – a specific goal had never been communicated. Today, most of their 4- to 5- year-long client relationships start with a marketing strategy workshop, a 30-day, low-level engagement where the parties can mutually get to know each other, discuss objectives and strategies in depth, and determine if there is a "fit." Jeff explains that "most entrepreneurs, business owners, and established businesses come . . . for marketing, but they have no real defined marketing strategy." As an additional challenge, these clients often come to Boost when declining sales have left them strapped for cash. They may know the results they want . . . and desperately need to survive. They may even by hyper-focused on some particular technology, but often fail to have an understanding of realistic timelines. Boost Media Group takes a step back, looks at the realities of cash flows, calculates how long it will take to generate a return on investment, and then crafts programs that address a client's current cash needs and long-term growth objectives. Starting with this workshop session has exponentially increased Boot's close rate and its ability to attract new customers. One of Boost Media Group's sub-brands, Fitness Media, helps "big name clients" in the fitness industry develop their funnels and monetize their brands. In this interview, Jeff identifies some of Boost's keys to success. In the early years of the agency, he focused on sales. Over time, he has learned that it is not about how much the agency sells . . . it's more important to make sure clients are a good fit. He credits having a robust technology stack of project management tools, templates, and proven processes . . . and iteratively improving those processes to meet the needs of his employees, clients, and his company . . . to being able to consistently deliver great results. Boost recently acquired another agency, SearcherMagnet, which is "highly specialized in direct response lead acquisition." Jeff says that acquiring another company brought with it experienced, high-level, passionate team members that Boost never would have been able to hire. He looks forward to expanding more this way in the future. Jeff can be reached on his company's website at: https://boostmediagroup.com/, by phone, on Live Chat, or by filling out a Contact Us form.

John Hernandez is Owner and Partner at On Advertising, a marketing and advertising agency that has, over the past 26 years, rebranded itself, leveraged "new identities," survived a recession, and increased and changed its client base. In this interview, John talks about his company's "humble beginnings" and reveals the strategic decisions that helped it grow. Ron Meritt, a television meteorologist, started NPR Public Relations in 1993 as a side gig. He provided traditional PR for nonprofit organizations . . . working out of his house with 1 client. In 2002, John accepted Ron's invitation to join the business and quit his job at the television station. They took out an SBA loan to cover payroll, rebranded the company as PRfect Media, and offered a flat fee "one-stop-shop for everything" marketing solution for small businesses. In addition to traditional marketing services – billboards, TV, radio, PR, and support – they utilized video, a technology application new for marketing. John's television-world experience – in graphic design and in scripting, shooting, and editing video – provided a differentiating and cost-saving advantage for both the agency and its clients: They didn't need to hire outside firms for those services. Six or seven years ago, the agency was doing a lot of non-traditional work, but people on the outside perceived them as a traditional PR firm. What to do? How about doing the same thing the agency would do for its clients? John and Ron tasked the agency's employees to rebrand the company and On Advertising was born: The employees set the color palette, the logo, and the brand. In a bold move, the agency took out a revolving loan and relocated the company from a commercial building in the Phoenix suburbs to a downtown high-rise, putting their signage on a street with heavy traffic all through the day. That move almost doubled their business: they were now visible, accessible, and re-defined. John says On Advertising has two growth strategies: to build the business organically and to expand its client base and capabilities through mergers and acquisitions. The agency still maintains its revolving credit line to even out the cash flow and to facilitate these acquisitions and mergers. John lists a number of keys to On Advertising's success: He believes the company gets traction as long as it treats itself as a client: spending money on itself; boosting its website presence, Google Analytics, and social media presence; and embracing media marketing technology. He emphasizes that it is as critically important to have "trustworthy team members on the outside" (CPA, attorneys, PEO) as it is to have good employees. And, to weather a recession, as this company did in 1987-88: John recommends developing multiple streams of income. John can be reached on his company's website at: https://onadvertising.com/