Honest Marketing

Amy Anderson: Marketing Strategies That Work

• Honest Podcasts • Episode 42

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Do you ever feel like your marketing strategy is missing the mark?

Well, on today's show, we have Amy Anderson, co-founder of Wild Coffee Marketing, sharing her insights on how to establish and grow predictable revenue and results.

Amy Anderson takes us on a journey through the evolution of her company's target clients, the importance of strategy in addition to creative work, and the role of a fractional CMO.

We discuss the shifting target clients of Amy's company and how they started offering a fractional CMO position to better meet their clients' evolving needs.

Amy shares the realization that a greater emphasis on strategy was necessary, beyond just creative work. We dive into the necessary capabilities that Wild Coffee Marketing had to develop in order to fulfill the fractional CMO role and implement effective strategies.

If you're looking to level up your marketing game, gain insight into the shifting landscape of target clients, and understand the importance of strategy in addition to creative work, you'll definitely want to tune in to this episode. Get ready to take some notes and start implementing these valuable insights!

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • The importance of a comprehensive marketing strategy
  • The evolving needs of target clients
  • The role of a fractional CMO

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And if you have a guest in mind who you think would be a great fit for this show, drop me a line at hello@honestpodcasts.com. 


Amy Anderson [00:00:00]:

If you're not always selling, you don't have a business. And my business partner said that to me one day, and I looked at other agencies and firms and thought, wow, they're really struggling. And I'm thinking, well, they're not actively outselling.

Travis Albritton [00:00:16]:

Welcome back to the Honest Marketing podcast, where you learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. I'm your host, Travis Albritton, and in today's episode, I got to sit down with Amy Anderson, co founder of Wild Coffee Marketing, to talk about specifically the work that they are doing and that she is doing with really great B to B and consumer based businesses to really establish their businesses and grow predictable revenue and results. So we talk about the foundational aspects of marketing that are still really important and how they're approaching it. We talk about how they integrate in to the clients that they work with to get the scale that they need to build a business that's awesome, but doing so without losing the personal touch. And then also just talking about the philosophy of marketing and how it has shifted over time and some of the things that used to work, that are back in vogue, that are working now that we need to start paying attention to. And so if all of that sounds really exciting to you and really interesting, you're going to love this episode with Amy Anderson. Make sure you stick around to the very end where I'll give you my number one takeaway with Amy. But here it is.

Travis Albritton [00:01:08]:

Let's dive in. Well, Amy, thank you for taking the time to be on the show. I'm excited to pick your brain as the marketing awesome guru that you are.

Amy Anderson [00:01:16]:

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Travis Albritton [00:01:19]:

So just a little bit of groundwork and provide some context. Just briefly describe is your professional background in marketing and then also what you do with Wild Coffee Marketing.

Amy Anderson [00:01:28]:

Sure. So I can't believe this is my 31st or 32nd year. I think you should stop counting after 30 in the marketing business. It's all I've ever known and done, but I've done it in a variety of categories and for a lot of different companies. I started when I graduated from college at 17 Magazine, so I started with big media brands in New York. And talk about cutting your marketing chops there. Got a lot of experience in the eight to ten years that I was in the city. And then about six years ago, I decided to do this on my own and try to benefit multiple companies at the same time and not just the one I was working for.

Amy Anderson [00:02:07]:

So that's when we founded Wild Coffee Marketing. I actually founded it with my former boss who hired me in 2004. So we have worked together in a variety of capacities over the last 20 years. I call him my work husband, I'm his work wife. We know each other's sentences before we say them and have a really powerful partnership and have built this company into 20 people in eight states now.

Travis Albritton [00:02:30]:

I love that story because it resonates with me where before I started the agency that I'm in. I was working for one company doing podcasting. It's like I want to improve the spice of life and branch out and help lots of companies, which helps my ADHD, where I have lots of that I bounce around with.

Amy Anderson [00:02:45]:

I love that. And you know what I've learned, too, is just because you're good at what you do inside a company does not mean you are equipped to run a company.

Travis Albritton [00:02:53]:

Sure.

Amy Anderson [00:02:53]:

And just because I happen to have some insights and some experience with marketing did not necessarily mean that I could run a successful marketing consulting firm. And I learned that I'm an accounting HR. I deal with cash forecasting, recruiting, talent management much more than I am my actual area of expertise. But I think it's been the most rewarding experience of my life that I could still have my passion for marketing, but also learn how to run a business and also create a culture that I feel really proud of inside my company.

Travis Albritton [00:03:29]:

What were some of those early lessons learned jumping from being an operator inside of somebody else's business to launching your own, which at the very beginning, there's lots of optimism. It's like, oh, we'll find clients easily. They'll just get it. We're going to create these really awesome long term relationships and cash will never be a problem. We'll never run out of money. I'm curious if there are any stories in particular that jump out in those early years of founding the new company and where it was like, oh, this is going to be much different than maybe what I was expecting.

Amy Anderson [00:03:59]:

Well, you hit the nail on the head with, oh, getting new clients will be easy, and we'll have long term relationships with them, and they'll all be perfect for us, and they'll all pay their invoices on time and they'll love what we do. So that optimism has to be euphoric, I think, to carry you through the initial eye opening sort of situations there. If you're not always selling, you don't have a business. And my business partner said that to me one day, and I looked at other agencies and firms and thought, wow, they're really struggling. And I'm thinking, well, they're not actively outselling. And we were really fortunate in that we've built this entire business based on referrals. And now we're getting a little bit more specific because we say, you know what, we want to specialize here and here, and we're going to go have conversations with the exact companies that we want to work with. So we're targeting that, and it's different.

Amy Anderson [00:04:46]:

Now. The other is the cash forecasting has to be at the forefront of everything. You do know what your runway is, be very clear about how you charge, what your profitability is in a service business, right? You need to know who your most profitable clients are, why, where's the work going, the money going, how do you time track all of that? We didn't used to track our time. We said, oh, we can ballpark it. And obviously that's changed as we've grown.

Travis Albritton [00:05:11]:

Now I'm curious because and we'll dig into a little bit more of the exact services that you offer, how you figured out the sweet spot of what you bill for and how you bill it. Because I know that some agencies, they bill by the hour, just like a law firm does. Others, they bill by the project. It's like, this is the fixed price for these deliverables, and then it's up to us to deliver it in a profitable manner. How did you kind of land on what your current pricing strategy is and how you put together proposals that are both profitable for you, but then make sense for the businesses that you're pitching?

Amy Anderson [00:05:38]:

Well, it's an interesting question because we thought that we had sort of unlocked the code of programmatic marketing in the beginning. We said, let's go for volume, let's work with smaller companies and then put them through a process. And very quickly we realized we're client side marketers. We're used to coming up with our own ideas, ideating all the time and then building those out. So nothing that we do is programmatic. And every business has a unique set of needs. And we actually see other agencies struggling because clients are thinking, well, they're not really thinking about me, they're just putting me through a process. Everything is rote.

Amy Anderson [00:06:12]:

They have me being managed with junior employees, right, who haven't quite learned the business yet. And so we actually shifted and we said, let's go upstream. Let's go to businesses starting with at least 5 million in revenue, and let's build it out that way. And I think it needs to be a hybrid, right? Some project and some retainer. And I'll tell you, one of the biggest things we learned is that starting with a project proposal and saying, guys, let's do this foundational work. Let's really get your messaging blueprint down. Let's make sure your brand is solid, let's understand where you sit in the market, what your unique value propositions are. Let's do all that.

Amy Anderson [00:06:48]:

Let's do that as a project, get to know each other. And then as we work together, Travis, we figure out what the ongoing retainer looks like, because how do you even know what to offer them until you've really gotten to know the business better? And that strategy has worked really well for us.

Travis Albritton [00:07:03]:

So let's dig into more of specifically what you do with your agency and specifically with businesses. And I want to lead into this by asking you, what is a fractional CMO? Because people may have heard of fractional CFO, but fractional CMO is a relatively new phenomenon. And what does that look like to actually be one?

Amy Anderson [00:07:21]:

Well, it's our belief that every company needs a CMO, just not necessarily full time, nor can they afford it. And that Chief Marketing Officer role sits in the C suite and translates the business objectives of the business and of the CEO and of the CTO and looks. Okay, what is the growth strategy? What are the KPIs and metrics that we are determining sort of growth and profitability by? And then it's our role to come in and say, okay, this is all of the marketing strategy that accompanies those growth goals, right? Because if you're not growing, you're dying. And we all know that, right? So every business is trying to grow all the time. So it's really that sort of strategy piece. And it's not always just digital, right? We do radio, we do offline, we do all sorts of other work in addition to the digital piece. But it really needs to start with a strategy. And that may be brand positioning, that may be messaging blueprints, like I mentioned, maybe finding new adjacent markets.

Amy Anderson [00:08:18]:

Is it product led growth? Is it geography led growth? So we determine all of that. We deliver the plan and we don't step out. That's where while Coffee comes in and we have a creative agency, a creative services agency in house so we can fulfill all the work that we just proposed. So you see how in line it is. It's not an agency using a CMO strategy. It's our coming into admin market company saying, this is a strategy now. We'll carry that out for you.

Travis Albritton [00:08:45]:

Did that evolve over time? So, like you mentioned, that the kind of clients you were targeting shifted. Did that offering that fractional CMO position, basically being a part time chief marketing officer, did that evolve as you saw those needs where you're doing the creative work? But it's like, man, we really just need to get tapped into more of the strategy. Like talking to the CEO about what are your goals and how do we get there and then let us implement it. How did that evolve over time? Because a fractional CMO is a very specific offer and you have to be uniquely positioned to fulfill that role, but then also to have all the downstream capabilities to actually put those things into practice. When you do pitch something or propose something, like, how did that evolve over time?

Amy Anderson [00:09:25]:

Right? Well, that's so interesting that you asked because I actually got my first client from pitching her at the dog park in So. She owned, she had just done Pharrell's wedding. She was an event planner and wedding planner. I knew her from the dog park. And I said, Cynthia, I'm starting this consulting practice and I'd really love to help you. And I started by doing her social, by managing designers for her website, from doing PR for some restaurant pop ups she was doing. And then my business partner, who was not with me at the time said, amy, you're one of the best strategists I've ever like. Why are you doing the work? You really need to be doing the strategy.

Amy Anderson [00:10:05]:

That's what you're good at. You're not good at social and I'm not to this day. It is not a strength of mine. And so that's what we started doing, but we didn't really know what to call it then. And I think the fractional CFO notion after a fractional CFO, which is actually who we use, so we walk our own talk, we use a fractional CFO and we started a fractional HR company as well called Wall Coffee HR. And so that's when we said, oh, we're doing this, we just need to call it that. And if you ask our clients, we were with a CEO the other day and said, I just can't replicate the strategy piece with you guys. You don't just come in and do work, mindlessly, you do the strategy around it and then do the work.

Amy Anderson [00:10:45]:

And that's where the effectiveness comes from, in his opinion.

Travis Albritton [00:10:47]:

Yeah. Because there are any number of agencies that can do creative work, make YouTube shorts, social media content, email marketing, X Y and Z, but without the knowledge and the understanding of integrating in all these strategies with what's going to help the business do well and be more profitable and grow. Then you're just kind of throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping that an algorithm likes you one particular day to make it worth it. Right?

Amy Anderson [00:11:12]:

Absolutely. Like, we're not looking for the next viral thing and just to make a brand look beautiful. That's part of it. Right. And I think that the team develops some pretty world class creative, but we have accountability to our clients for results and KPIs. So we usually track about three to five per engagement. So we are very clear, is it customer acquisition cost under a certain amount, certain number of marketing qualified leads? Sales qualified leads? Every month we work in our clients CRM systems. You can't say that you're an outsourced marketing and fractional CMO team without actually doing that.

Amy Anderson [00:11:47]:

Sure. And I think a lot of people say it and they deliver great work, but I think that we're really walking that talk and we're in weekly meetings with clients. My business partner and I stay heavily involved, which is why we won't scale to 50 people. To stay around 20 to 30 is really what allows us to do this.

Travis Albritton [00:12:04]:

Work well, there's all kinds of stuff that I want to dig into so many different rabbit holes. The one that I just want to affirm or something that really resonated with me is this idea of figuring out your sweet spot of how big you want to be and then just like being really content with that level of success instead of always chasing like, what's the next milestone, what's the next revenue metric? I noticed you guys were on the ink list.

Amy Anderson [00:12:25]:

Yes, we did make the ink list this year. 5000.

Travis Albritton [00:12:28]:

Yeah.

Amy Anderson [00:12:28]:

Thank you.

Travis Albritton [00:12:30]:

Which shows that you're not just a company that has grown quickly, but that you've sustained that success, but there can always be this sense of, well, maybe we need to be in the top 100 of the Ink 5000 list. Right. And there's always another way to grow or to get bigger. But just figuring out what success looks like for you and your business. And especially because a lot of entrepreneurs, they get into it because they're excited about the lifestyle that being an entrepreneur gives you, where you can own your own schedule, you can call your own shots, but it can very quickly become like, no. The business runs me because I've created this giant monster that I no longer have control over.

Amy Anderson [00:13:04]:

Right. It's definitely much more challenging on a daily basis. So I think back two years ago and I'm like, oh, I thought that was challenging. Look where we are now. More people, sort of more to manage, more process. But we've always used, I don't know if you're familiar with EOS, entrepreneurial organizational or operating system. So we have used EOS from the beginning. One of the major points I love about EOS is the planning.

Amy Anderson [00:13:29]:

Everything is divided up into quarters. Then a year, then three years, then five years. So if you go out to five years and you look at a revenue number, you can just throw out what you want. But in our business, we know exactly how many people it will take because we know revenue per employee. Right. We know how much we call them pods. They're individual teams within the firm. We know how much a pod can handle.

Amy Anderson [00:13:53]:

And I'm like, that's 17 pods to get to that. And that's where I think you really need to be realistic with yourself. I'm a big fan of unbridled ambition, but I think you need to look at what's realistic, what it entails, and what the revenue has to look like and what your margins have to be to make it work. So again, it comes down to the money. Right.

Travis Albritton [00:14:14]:

Always. Cash is the gas for the engine to make the whole that's right. Go. And I think EOS is it traction by gino.

Amy Anderson [00:14:22]:

Gino Wickman.

Travis Albritton [00:14:22]:

Yeah.

Amy Anderson [00:14:23]:

Yes.

Travis Albritton [00:14:23]:

Sitting over there.

Amy Anderson [00:14:24]:

That is required reading. Oh, wonderful. That's required reading for all of our new team members. We are religious about our level ten meetings. We do quarterly planning sessions for our senior team in person. Every 90 days, we fly everybody in. And I think that that because we've been a distributed company since 2017. It is something that has really kept us together, kept the culture tight, kept the relationship strong, as we do spend time in person.

Travis Albritton [00:14:50]:

That's fantastic. So I want to pivot to one of the reasons I was really excited about having you on is because you serve a ton of different industries where most experts or consultants, they really specialize in one particular vertical or niche. But you guys tap into a lot of different things. And so I want to know, as you get into onboarding new clients and kind of taking a peek under the hood. What are the biggest common mistakes that you see companies making, even at the level that qualify to be a client for you at that 5 million annual revenue mark? What are the biggest mistakes that you're seeing consistently pop up that are holding.

Amy Anderson [00:15:28]:

Them back in the B to B space, not realizing the importance of content. So one of the first things it's interesting, we work with a few private equity firms who introduce us to their portfolio companies, and so there's a lot of mid market B to B in there. And I love that energy companies, construction and infrastructure, I mean, it's just like a nice change from some of the consumer franchise brands we work with. But when you ask them, they'll call and say, oh, we need SEO and we need a new website. And I'll turn around and say, well, what's your distribution strategy and what does your sales organization look like and what does your outbound sales effort look like and how is the team organized for growth? And then they start to say, oh. So they'll come to me with sort of a narrow topic or a narrow activity or tactic. They think they need to grow the business, but they're missing sort of that overarching strategy. So I really love to look at distribution and sales first, and then do they really know their customers? Do they really understand pain points? And because a lot of these companies tend to be myopic, and I think we all need to ask ourselves, do we talk about what we do or do we talk about what we solve? And we always want to be talking about what we solve.

Amy Anderson [00:16:41]:

So I think that's one of the bigger mistakes that people sell and talk and describe and elucidate on features and all this, but they're not really in a very genuine way connecting with the proper target audience in a way that solves their problems.

Travis Albritton [00:16:56]:

It's so much harder than it seems like it should be to understand your target audience on a really deep introspective level. And even in my own business, that person has shifted over time as I have evolved and as the business has evolved. But every time I go through the exercise, I'm like, wow, I feel like I'm just creating a version of myself that I want to sell to because I know myself better than anyone else, rather than going directly to the source and say, okay, you are my person. I don't know why, I don't know how. I just feel it in my gut. Can I sit down with you and just ask you lots of questions to get to know you and what you're going through and what pain points you have that I could solve or would be valuable enough for me to solve, that you would want to actually pay to solve this problem. Because that's the other thing, is it's not just identifying the pain points, but it's the ones that are big enough that someone's willing to throw money at it to fix it.

Amy Anderson [00:17:45]:

It's the value they place on what you offer that's unique that no one else does. And April Dunford wrote a book called Obviously awesome, and she works in the tech space out in California, and it changed the way that we look at positioning. And positioning is important when it's done correctly and oftentimes. It was like a bad mad. Lib. We would say, for this client, we offer these three things, and we promise you the following she has completely sort of reverse engineered that. So we ask our clients, if you didn't exist, what would people use or who would they use? And in some case, it could be a spreadsheet. And so we look at competitive alternatives.

Amy Anderson [00:18:23]:

Then we look at features or benefits or products that we have that they don't. Then comes the value part, right? So when you talk about the money that people are willing to spend for that, we really dig into what do they value about this when you're in that market, and then you can start to dive into that. But when we start a new engagement, we insist we talk to all senior level executives, and we talk to three to four key clients, because the reason people work with you may not be the reason that you think it normally.

Travis Albritton [00:18:50]:

Isn'T, at least in my own experience. It's like, oh, I think this is why. And then it's like, no, I actually care about this. It's like, oh, well, then I don't need the 90% of the things that I'm offering. You actually don't care about those things, even though I thought that they mattered.

Amy Anderson [00:19:03]:

Right? And so I think it's really important to sort of have that objectivity when looking at it. Plus, it helps you get to know your client better when you're asking those questions, and then it can pull the client away from describing everything they do. We have this product. We do this service. But what's the impact, right? How are you actually making your customers lives better? And I do think that's a little bit of a phenomenon after COVID, too. People don't want to be sold. They want you to be genuine. They don't need to see everybody on zoom in their bedrooms, things like that.

Amy Anderson [00:19:34]:

But let's not oversell or have things too sleek. Let's just if I have a product and you have a need, let's talk and see what we can get done here.

Travis Albritton [00:19:42]:

Well, and that's why I love being in B to B, because you can scale a successful company with that consultative style of selling. Very interpersonal, very connection driven, which is hard to do if you're in a consumer space and you're selling $5 widgets and you got to support a whole team. But if you could just land a dozen really great clients that are ideal and serve them at a super high level. You can reach that scale just by setting up zoom calls and saying, what problems are you going through? What are you experiencing? How can we help solve them? And if I can't solve them, here's somebody who could solve them. And just that posture I've seen really work well in the B, two B space where if people feel like they're understood their needs are considered and that the person isn't across from them at the table, but they've come. Around to the same side of the table, and you're looking at that problem together, and it just completely shifts the experience of being on a sales call from come on down. We got a brand new deal on this used car over here. I promise it's great and you should buy it now before somebody else does.

Travis Albritton [00:20:42]:

To absolutely. What kind of car do you need?

Amy Anderson [00:20:44]:

Yeah, it's like going from being sold to being heard. Right. And it's interesting that you bring up sort of the empathy and really listening. And I think that's where we all need to be in business in general as a whole, for your team, for your clients. And we have this mission that we've had for five years where we say, you know, the heart of what we do is to make executives feel safe. And that may seem a little weird that we say it that way, but it is so important to us that they're like, oh, yeah, just wild coffee's. Got it. Or I don't have to worry about that because on know Amy and Solo and their team have got our backs and that we do what we say we're going to do, that we deliver on time, we deliver quality and results.

Amy Anderson [00:21:26]:

And so I think that you have to really look know, we have empathy for those executives who have so much on their plate that we are the last thing they ever need to worry about or focus on. And we will come to meetings with our KPIs and our results and our amazing creative and our energy right. And our listening to know that we're here listening to what the needs are of the business and we're going to execute on that.

Travis Albritton [00:21:48]:

Amen to that. So the next thing I want to talk about is when you bring on a new client and you are getting fully integrated into the team, what are the first things that you install? What are those fundamental pieces that regardless of what kind of client you bring on, regardless of what kind of market they're in, these are the non negotiable things that you must have in order to be set up for long term success.

Amy Anderson [00:22:13]:

I think that people oftentimes don't look at their website, especially on a mobile device. I think you need to look at your own content. Right. Because the experience starts on your website. Typically, that's the first place customers will come see you and do you have three calls to action? Above the fold? We say above the fold. That's my newspaper person talking. Yeah. On that initial sort of header image.

Travis Albritton [00:22:34]:

Screen, before you scroll, before you have to take any action.

Amy Anderson [00:22:38]:

Before you take any action. Are you delivering the message they need the options they need to navigate further, whether it's a login, it's a request, a consultation, things like that. So that piece of real estate of your own content is really important. The second is how people reach you. Right. Like, are all of your channels and all of your contact forms fully operational? So that any point because you'd be surprised how many companies I'm like, hey, is your contact form on your website integrated into salesforce and automatically routed to your team? Or is someone monitoring all of your social channels so that as it's used as a customer service platform, you're answering same business day or within 24 hours? So it's sort of those critical touch points that we'll look at first, make sure they're operational monitored, and that people can do sort of the basics when they first encounter you.

Travis Albritton [00:23:29]:

The mobile website thing is so true. It's like, you'd be surprised how many people design a website. They're like, oh, it looks great, and then you throw it up on mobile and it's not optimized at all.

Amy Anderson [00:23:38]:

At all. Right, so we design mobile first, usually, especially if it's a consumer brand, beta bree brands we may develop on desktop first, and then just make sure that the mobile is obviously optimized with everything that we do. But you have to look at your traffic, where's it coming from. I bet you there are a lot of people who'd be surprised how much mobile accounts for their overall traffic on a monthly basis. Right.

Travis Albritton [00:24:00]:

Be the majority, I would suspect.

Amy Anderson [00:24:02]:

Right.

Travis Albritton [00:24:03]:

Even if you're in B, two B, because people are clicking through from LinkedIn, probably on LinkedIn on their phone, you're absolutely right. They're still going to a mobile website. So once you have those fundamentals in place, what are the things that you're doing that you feel like are innovative or unique as far as strategy or approach to doing the things that everyone thinks they should be doing? But it really comes down to the execution. Like, you brought up the SEO piece. It's like SEO this magic wand that converts internet traffic into customers. And if we just give me SEO, it's like, well, what are we optimizing for? What are your keywords? How do we make sure we capture those and actually deliver content that people would like and read and consume? So I'm curious, what are the things that you found to really work for your clients beyond the fundamentals to really help them accelerate whatever their business goals are? Are there like one or two strategies that jump out?

Amy Anderson [00:24:50]:

Yeah, I mean, I think everyone's trying to crack the code of lead, gen and b to. B. And then we actually have this interesting part of our business, which is franchise. So we work with national franchise brands. And when you talk about looking under the hood, what we see is typically they've had one or two marketing people and a series of digital agencies, and there's chaos, right? And so I think just shoring up who owns what. In a case like that, where everyone's registered on Meta, where those ad accounts live, all the Google My business profiles, and we recommend software for that. So in an engagement like that, it's just trying to see where everything is and who owns it is sort of that fundamental. I also know, and there are studies that came out of England and it's maybe seven or eight years ago, there's a book called The Long and Short of It, and they actually did studies on effectiveness of advertising.

Amy Anderson [00:25:40]:

And what fundamentals go into effectiveness? One is that you have to have an awareness play and be thinking more long term with your marketing efforts, right, so that you can have short term effectiveness, but they're going to drive your profitability down because typically they're promotionally driven, right? So that effectiveness, that awareness piece is really, really important because we are very ambitious. When we start a client engagement, the client typically has hired us six to eight, nine months too late, and they want us to start generating leads right away. And this is a major lesson I've learned in the last few years, which is to say, let's look at your share of voice, how much you own in the market, how much people know you. And let's get that. Awareness piece stabilized and underway and start to grow your share of voice in order for the lead generation and the advertising to be more effective. The other part that they found is that really creative work that is emotionally driven is much more effective than rational advertising. So we have actually injected humor into online bookkeeping and tax planning company. We're using puppies and children.

Amy Anderson [00:26:47]:

And it was a risky strategy, Travis, but we know that in order to break through, it has to be really creative, right? And it has to be emotionally driven and there needs to be awareness underneath it. So that is something it's hard to educate a CEO on that to say, you know what? I know that you really wanted to hire us a year ago and things are a little bit of a mess, and now I'm going to ask for patience, not because we're not going to deploy this work. It's because it's going to take a while for the work to work.

Travis Albritton [00:27:15]:

I feel like brand lift as a marketing strategy has almost gone extinct in the world of direct response advertising, where everyone's like, oh, if I can just track how much it costs me to buy a click, and I track it to a sale and I have a certain ROI, just throw more money at it. And so when you're talking about these awareness campaigns, it's like, wait, maybe not everyone is an algorithm that acts like a robot and that you can just perfectly predict future results based on this $150 Facebook ads campaign.

Amy Anderson [00:27:46]:

I can hardly breathe because I'm so glad you said this. I want to scream hallelujah. It's one of the hardest things, and especially with executives who have not been in the business as long. And they said, I've gone and told my board that we're doing performance marketing because I have figured out that that is the most effective and not effective. That is the most performance oriented, cheapest way for us to grow the business without ever considering the brand building piece. And that that won't work unless there is a brand that people have an association. And what does it take to create that brand? Right? It's a verbal system, it's a visual system. It has so many elements to it that need to be used repeatedly, consistently, in the forefront of what you do.

Amy Anderson [00:28:35]:

And that's the hardest part to really get into people's minds when they think, okay, let's see if it's a dollar a click and I have $100,000, right? And that's it. And they'll look at some industry benchmarks. I think that part is always important too, just to bring up benchmarks and sort of by industry. And we share that with clients so they know how they're performing. But their performance piece is not everything. And I do think it's gone by the wayside. And I think with the new iOS targeting, things are not as straightforward as they used to be. And you have to try a little bit harder, right? And you have to have in a brand that people have to know you, then they can decide if they like you, then finally if they trust you and then they want to buy from you.

Amy Anderson [00:29:17]:

But people go right to the phase four, to the buy well.

Travis Albritton [00:29:19]:

And the irony to me has always been that the companies that are most synonymous with performance marketing, they're some of the best brand builders I've ever seen. Like Google is now a verb, it's a search engine, but it is a verb that's in our vernacular that people use to describe searching for things online. And so they built performance marketing around that even ClickFunnels, which has almost like a cult like following at this point. They have a really powerful brand behind their performance marketing. And so the only reason that works is because they have such a strong brand voice and such a large percentage of that real estate taken up with sharing their values and their perspective with their content. So yeah, I'm 100% behind you. That brand lift needs to get back into vogue and I'm bringing it back. We're bringing it back.

Amy Anderson [00:30:03]:

Bringing it back. It's critical.

Travis Albritton [00:30:07]:

And the other thing that I love that you shared is how you're really tapping into the psyche of the person on the other side. Not in a manipulative, tactical way, but just recognizing that even if you're in a B, two B space, you're still selling to people.

Amy Anderson [00:30:19]:

We call it people to people. My content team goes crazy when we say B to B. They're like. Amy, please don't say b to b anymore. This is P to P, our director of brand strategy and Content, Mela Tellitz, who's one of the most talented women I've ever worked with. People. Not just women. She says, Please remember, this is P to P.

Amy Anderson [00:30:37]:

And we're connecting with a person and not a company. And I think that's very important for people to remember and to have empathy and to really get into their minds and psyches and know what drives them, right?

Travis Albritton [00:30:48]:

And that's where babies and puppies makes sense, because at the end of the day, you're trying to reach out to a person that has an emotional attachment to babies and puppies, and that's going to resonate, especially with just the sheer volume of advertising that we see every day. It's like, how do you make an impression? Not only where they say, that's kind of funny, but actually remember the brand behind it so that down the road, when they see another ad from you, they're like, oh, that's the same company that did this thing two weeks ago that I saw.

Amy Anderson [00:31:16]:

Exactly. And so it's almost like 80% of the work is already done. Once you have gotten your share of voice, they understand your values, they understand what you do. They understand why you do it, because you've shared that. I was actually reading a Marketing Millennials newsletter this morning. I really like it. I have the whole team read it. And he talked about progressive and Flow and how they were really struggling behind Geico and they didn't really know it was actually an accident where they were filming a spot and the guy got his receipt and saw how much he saved and said, wow.

Amy Anderson [00:31:47]:

And then she said, wow back in this really kind of loud way. And they were like, oh, maybe it's a really in your face person who's sort of delightful and approachable with a big smile. And then we put the insurance in a box and she's actually selling something tangible. So you're buying from someone you trust and you know what you're buying. And look at the success. I think it's ten years, eight years they've been using flow right now, she has a companion. I think his name is Brian or Brad or something. But again, risky strategy, but they kept testing, testing, testing, and they were seeing lifts in numbers, so they kept going.

Amy Anderson [00:32:21]:

And I think that iterative. Marketing is really important, too. Try some things, see when your creative starts to flatten out. We're seeing it right now on a B, two B campaign, and we said, okay, time for a refresh, because we were looking at the numbers. So test, see what kind of lift you get. But don't forget the awareness piece. Always. It's not just performance.

Amy Anderson [00:32:40]:

Be pleased when you see those brand awareness impressions happening because they mean something.

Travis Albritton [00:32:45]:

They do. Every impression is a person on the other side. As long as you're filtering out all.

Amy Anderson [00:32:49]:

The bot traffic and hoping they're not scrolling too fast.

Travis Albritton [00:32:52]:

Exactly.

Amy Anderson [00:32:53]:

So you better use some scroll stopping creative. You absolutely think about how it looks, the format, the size of it, what you're saying, the color, because people have the attention span. What are they saying now? Like a small goldfish, not even a regular one. So you have to break through that too.

Travis Albritton [00:33:08]:

So this is great and we could talk for hours, but the last thing I want to maybe we'll do a part two and then we can cover more things. I would love it, but I would love to hear how you scale systems and processes internally within your team while maintaining that very boutique level service with your clients, right. Where you are fully integrating in with their processes, their systems, their team. And every business is structured slightly differently. And maybe in one you have this person owns all of these roles, but over here it's fractured between these four people. And how do you basically create scalable systems where you're not just pulling your hair out, where every single client is like a new business, but still maintaining that personal touch, where they feel like you're coming in and just molding yourself around what they're already doing?

Amy Anderson [00:33:55]:

Right? Well, it's the spirit that goes into it. Right. One of our values is that we're not just partners, we're super partners and walking in the same step with them. So when you bring on new team members and they know that that is really important and central to what we do, I think they come with the spirit of that process is only as good as its documentation and followed by all. And that's an EOS tenet. That's really important. You have to document your internal process. So regardless of how an engagement is structured or a client is structured, when the work comes to us, it happens in a pretty primary sort of central process or set of processes that we use and then those need to be adapted as we scale or we bring on new types of clients.

Amy Anderson [00:34:37]:

We just brought on an engagement last week. It's a national Burrito chain with 100 locations and they want us to help their franchisees, who, by the way, are wrapping burritos, are not really interested in using marketing software. We need to get them all to adopt the software. So that's a new type of engagement. But how we communicate, how the work comes in, how you communicate with creative and technical teams inside of Wild Coffee is always the same. But those processes I really challenge people to look at their process inside their company and then is it documented. And if it's documented, that's great. But is it followed by everyone the same way? And every Friday in our all team meeting, we kick off the meeting with a process tip.

Amy Anderson [00:35:19]:

And the team has so much fun with it. They create really fun slides, they use videos, they use all sorts of things to just reinforce that, because the whole team knows that process is there to keep them safe. Right. Two, process is there to avoid chaos. Process is there to help with scaling. So it's a really important part of what we do. So regardless of what the engagement looks like, the work flowing through the organization looks relatively the same.

Travis Albritton [00:35:43]:

Fantastic. I know for me, I learned that lesson the hard way, where it's like, oh, I'll figure out a process later. It's like, well, once you need the process, it's almost too late. It's like, all right, you're already behind the eight ball. You needed this six months ago before you got to this critical juncture.

Amy Anderson [00:35:57]:

Absolutely. And they used to write it down because at least you've put a stake in the ground somewhere and saying, this is our process, and if it needs to be adjusted, great, then adjust it. But I just think process is not sexy. It's not something that everybody wants to think about with running a business. I certainly didn't. But then I said, people don't know what to do. And as you're bringing, especially in a remote working environment, when I have people from Seattle to the UK and Florida where we're like, I want everyone to feel comfortable that they know what to do, and then that consistency is really helpful.

Travis Albritton [00:36:29]:

Awesome. Well, Amy, where can people go to learn more about you, more about Wild Coffee marketing? Where should we send them out into the Internet to connect with you?

Amy Anderson [00:36:37]:

Well, Wildcoffeemarketing.com is our domain. And I'm at Amy Anderson on LinkedIn with Wild Coffee. We've been publishing some really cool articles. We're in the process of redoing our website and putting all the podcasts that I do up there, too, and putting some new creative work on. But our website and LinkedIn are the two best places to find us.

Travis Albritton [00:36:56]:

Perfect. Well, those will be linked down in the show notes. For your convenience, just click on over. Amy, thanks again for your time.

Amy Anderson [00:37:01]:

Thank you so much for having me.

Travis Albritton [00:37:03]:

So I would say that my number one takeaway out of the many awesome things that she shared in our conversation was to not over index performance, marketing. It's very easy to be able to track clicks, conversion rates, sales, but it's also just as easy to forget that the person that you're trying to sell or market to is an actual person with thoughts and emotions and feelings. And so thinking about how do we add puppies, how do we add babies, how do we really connect on a personable level with the people we're trying to reach, not being so concerned with always converting or always getting the sale exactly at that moment, but instead building a positive connection, a positive attachment to that person. So when they're ready on their own terms, they'll buy from you. Make sure that you go check out Wildcoffeemarketing.com. Go connect with Amy on LinkedIn. You can again find those links in the show notes below. Until next week, be honest.