Jason Ogden is the President and Partner at Syrup, a marketing agency specializing in fostering revenue and maturity for B2B companies. With a robust background in finance and operations, Jason spearheads revenue-generating initiatives, account services, and financial operations at Syrup. Prior to his role at Syrup, Jason served as the Director of Finance at Codesmith Development, where he established core financial and accounting practices and managed various financial functions, including reporting, forecasting, and cash requirements. A graduate of The University of Iowa Tippie College of Business, Jason brings a wealth of expertise in economics to his endeavors.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- Jason Ogden explains the services that Syrup offers
- Methods to create a successful brand strategy
- How does Syrup differentiate itself in the web development industry?
- Jason shares how companies can effectively balance their marketing budget
- Measuring the success of marketing initiatives and campaigns
- What role does customer feedback play in shaping a marketing strategy?
In this episode…
Crafting a winning marketing strategy is the cornerstone of business success in today’s competitive landscape. It involves meticulous planning, creative execution, and a deep understanding of target audiences. How can your business leverage innovative approaches to stand out and captivate your audience in the ever-evolving digital marketplace?
B2B marketing expert Jason Ogden explores the importance of having a clear brand strategy, emphasizing the need for strategic planning over mere aesthetic appeal. This underscores the role of technology as a tool rather than a standalone solution. With this approach, organizations are less likely to adopt technology without clear objectives or strategies in place. Jason also explains the ethical considerations and potential of modern data and AI in shaping marketing strategies. To propel your business forward with marketing, ensure a strategic focus, harness technology wisely, and strike a balance between immediate gains and long-term capability building.
In this episode of the Top Business Leaders Show, Rise25’s Chad Franzen sits down with Jason Ogden, the President and Partner at Syrup, to talk about crafting a winning marketing strategy. Jason discusses creating a successful brand strategy, how companies can effectively balance their marketing budget, and how to measure the success of marketing initiatives.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Chad Franzen on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Email the team at Rise25: support@rise25.com
- Jason Ogden on LinkedIn
- Syrup
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Episode Transcript
Chad Franzen 0:03
Chad Franzen here co-host of The Top Business Leaders Show, where we feature entrepreneurs and top leaders in the business world. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. We help b2b businesses reach their dream relationships, connect with more clients, referrals and strategic partnerships and get ROI through done for you podcasts. If you have a b2b business and want to build great relationships, there’s no better way than to do it than to profile the people and companies you admire on your own podcast. To learn more, go to Rise25.com or email us at support at Rise25.com My guest today is Jason Ogden, president and partner at Syrup, a marketing agency which grows b2b companies in revenue and maturity. At Syrup, Jason leads revenue generating activities and Account Services and directs financial operations. He is also a husband, a father of two daughters, and his specialties are people and numbers. Jason, great to have you today. How are you?
Jason Ogden 0:57
Hey, I’m doing great. Thanks a lot. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to being on.
Chad Franzen 1:01
Yeah, great to have you. Thanks so much. Hey, so just tell me a little bit more about Syrup. And what do you guys do there?
Jason Ogden 1:09
Yeah, we are a b2b agency. As you mentioned, we put together a variety of not just capabilities, but we engineered a model specifically for the needs of b2b companies. We do a lot of the same tactical things that b2c marketers do. But they have to be done and packaged and organized and executed in a very different way. And based on these different ways, we’ve ordered, organized a holistic model that focuses not only on bringing new opportunities into the top of the funnel, either through direct customer marketing, but also through events and partners, as well as on the bottom of the funnel, we focus on retention and expansion of existing revenue for our clients.
Chad Franzen 1:59
What, what brought you to syrup from your you’ve been there for I believe, more than 10 years now, what, what brought you to syrup from your previous role at eyespeak where you were Chief operator?
Jason Ogden 2:09
Yeah. So later this year, we will hit the 10 year mark. Okay. And 10 years ago, at that point, we took eyespeak, which was a creative agency that did messaging positioning, creative marketing, websites and collateral, a very project oriented company. And we put it together with a two year old marketing services startup at that point. And that was called Syrup, we took that name going forward. And what brought me forward was having worked at eyespeak for several years, and really understanding the marketplace. New needs over this past decade and beyond work are changing quickly. And internal teams were going to have a really hard time keeping up with the pace of change, the addition of technical expertise, and just a really elevated sense of buyer expectations. So our thesis was we’re going to put a business together to address those needs. And for me, that was compelling. And that’s why I’m the head.
Chad Franzen 3:18
Yeah, what is kind of, you know, just in general kind of inspired you to focus on you know, marketing strategies to drive business growth.
Jason Ogden 3:28
Yeah, so on a purely personal level. I really like b2b Because so much of it is relational and service oriented, versus physical goods and transaction oriented we all do in our everyday lives. I personally, like that aspect of it professionally, might be part of our thesis as it’s just an underserved market. There are a lot of marketing agencies out there, they tend to skew a little heavier B2C. And in our local economy here in Atlanta, most of the big name companies that have gone on to make a name for themselves or that exist in the startup ecosphere, or even in the middle market, skew, pretty heavily b2b. So that’s reflective of our local marketplace. So put the personal side together, but the marketing market opportunity together and she made sense.
Chad Franzen 4:29
I know it’s Syrup. I was looking at your website. So one of the services you offer is brand strategy. Can you give me kind of an overview of maybe some successful components or some components of successful brand strategy?
Jason Ogden 4:43
Yeah, I think you really have to look at it kind of across two different boxes. The first is an increase in potency of how you talk about your business. Now that could be the message that you use, a marketing asset. That could be the way that sales people talk about the business. But however it is it, it gets elevated through the brand strategy exercise. And then the other axis is oftentimes an issue that clients are aware of walking in the door, which is consistency. They understand that buyers are turned off, when I look on LinkedIn, I look down a website and talk to a person. And it’s all three completely different disjointed conversations. It doesn’t exactly instill confidence. So on the one hand, you have sort of potency and quality of message. And on the other axis, you kind of have consistency across the whole sales and marketing ecosystem.
Chad Franzen 5:46
Yeah, you mentioned consistency. I know another service that you guys provide is a visual identity. How do you kind of develop a comprehensive visual identity system that goes beyond just a logo and you ensure consistency and effectiveness across all branded assets?
Jason Ogden 6:04
Yeah, so the development part of your question really flows from the first offering, which is the brand strategy. I think there’s probably the most confusion around the topic of brand in the marketplace of any of the things that we talked to prospects or strategic partners about. And people have their own kind of angle on what it is and what it means. And the digital identity side, that lends itself to sort of a belief that it’s an art project, or that it’s just a function of having unusually talented designers, and creatives, when, in fact, to your point to do it well, to create something compelling and interesting, that resonates. It’s got to be strategic. And the strategy comes from what’s in the brand strategy, how you talk about your business, who your target audience is, what they need from you, where you communicate with them, etc. So that’s how you drive the quality part of the design creative. And then, as far as consistency, we provide at the end of an engagement, it’s typically somewhere between a 40 to 60 page guidelines document that covers every application in print and digital use. So that down the road, week two, year three, when you’re buying assets from outside vendors, there’s already criteria around this is how it’s to be used at trade shows on printed assets on video display. And here’s how it’s not supposed to be. And as long as clients adhere to the guidelines, consistency will be a byproduct.
Chad Franzen 7:51
I know web development is another one of your services. In what ways would you say maybe Syrup differentiates itself in the web development industry?
Jason Ogden 8:02
Yeah, yeah. So that is a really good question. Most of the existing clients that we have, they walk in the door with some version of a templated, or proprietary theme that their agencies have built for them. So basically, we’re different in the sense that we start with continuity content throughout the entire site. So that’s written words, calls to action site architecture. And from there we design. And then rather than trying to dump all of that into a template or a theme, we create custom themes to wrap around the design of the specific site. To take it a bit further, because 75% of our business is marketing services. We do all of the things big and small, on the backside, or under the hood, so to speak, that we would want to inherit, if we were to inherit a site. So think SEO, fake integration with marketing, stack tools, deep, deep customization of the WordPress CMS, which is something that most of our competitors don’t take the time to do. The idea there is we want it not only to perform as a marketing act, but we want to make sure that the end users can make whatever changes they need to do quickly and easily. So I’d say those things.
Chad Franzen 9:32
Right. Great. I was checking out one of your recent blogs, you really provide some great thought leadership there on your website, you wrote that marketing budgets and performance are closely intertwined. Can you kind of elaborate on how companies can effectively balance their marketing budget to achieve optimal performance?
Jason Ogden 9:53
Well, optimal performance, you know, it really starts with what you’re up to. Right or Are you in growth mode? Are you in survival mode over the trailing two years, the SAAS space, which is one of our core verticals, went from sort of using this term, loosely grown all costs kind of mindset. And then in early 2022, when conditions started tightening, it shifted completely. And they started for the first a lot of the first time in history, focusing on sustainability retention of existing clients. And it’s just extremely different how you approach it from a not just a budgetary standpoint, but what are you measuring, measuring? Wise, right. So in growth at all cost mode, you’re looking at things like web traffic and forum conversions, which are, you know, always on the table. But we saw a huge shift during this trailing two year period towards not just a focus on existing customers, that bottom of the funnel piece we talked about earlier, but also on partner led motions. So how can I market to my strategic partners for the benefit of getting new business that way versus trying to market direct retaining customers?
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Chad Franzen 11:23
What role do you think technology plays in shaping modern marketing strategies?
Jason Ogden 11:32
Yeah. That is a loaded question, right. That was, you know, when we think back to the thesis of this business, the speed of evolution, the marketing stack, was certainly one of the things that we kind of bank on. And I don’t know how much I would consider where we consider when we’re advising our clients technology as a strategic asset necessarily. In and of itself, I think, when it’s thought of when technology is brought into the equation too soon, before you have a strategy, before you have objectives, before you have a process and goals, it can end up kind of being the tail that wags the dog. And we inherit a lot of clients who have a really bloated marketing stack with things that they don’t need more common than things that they don’t use. And they bought into the auspice of, if I buy this thing, I’ll have this new capability and it will just happen well, the technology really only enables the doing of certain types of work, and you still need to have the work done. So I think there’s a lot of dissatisfaction in the marketplace, technology wise, when they think they’re buying a new marketing capability when the tool is just there to help with that. Now, when you switch over to more modern data, trailing 15 months, you know, you bring AI into the conversation. And I think on the negative side there, you certainly have ethical considerations when you’re in the services space, right? Number one, we’re not going to use it to generate content via design or copy. There’s risk around intellectual property infringement. And there’s also, you know, it’s to be determined whether or not the marketplace will accept content generated by AI, again, via design of a written word, or I saw a really terrible video on LinkedIn today that was aI generated. So we don’t know if the market would even accept it anyway. That said, it can be a very powerful tool. Back to your original question on the strategy side, specifically, once we understand clear objectives of what we’re trying to accomplish, when we’re in the broader ideation stage, and we want to go wide with what’s possible, and what could we do before we decide what we should do? What team on a whiteboard and an AI taking things from there and expanding and giving new options? is a real value add to strategy. Rarely in and of itself, is it going to give you all the answers like I think at some level, we all believe I’m just going to type in a few words and I’ll have all the right output. That’s not really the state of it right now. That can absolutely be a force multiplier and idea generation.
Chad Franzen 14:47
When it comes to developing a holistic marketing strategy. Is it a challenge or is it important to balance short term tactics that may be good right now with long term strategy
Jason Ogden 15:02
It’s essential. One of the things that’s a great question is that a lot of non marketing oriented business leaders walk into the conversation and the discipline and field of marketing is that which they know the least. So it tends to become, I saw somebody over there do this, why don’t I do that? Or I read an article about this, why are we doing this? And it just by its own nature becomes this de facto list of, of individual tactics in terms of balancing revenue versus maturity, which is, I think, really the center of your question here. If you’re doing marketing, yes, you’ve got to focus on the activities that generate revenue during this calendar year. Where people start missing the boat, is when they think that that’s all that marketing is and that they only care about that one thing when in reality, a portion of your budget, you need to start building so that in year two, and year three, you’ll have additional capabilities that you don’t have today. And being affected in marketing, especially in the b2b space. It’s not just turning on a switch. I mean, it takes a long time for things to materialize in some cases. So part of our holistic model, an aspect of it is cadence. And we have a very well defined structure where, within any given 90 day period, we’re focusing on the things that drive revenue that drive opportunities into the funnel. But every 90 days, we sit down with our clients to look at past performance, look at business goals, are you guys on track? How does the state of the funnel overall look, and let’s consider making an investment in that strategic realm. So that six months from now, 12 months from now, we’ll be able to do things that we can’t do today?
Chad Franzen 17:05
So how do you measure the success of a marketing initiative and campaign?
Jason Ogden 17:10
Yeah, I mean, it depends on what the objectives are, right? It could be geared at a new business, you know, something that’s account oriented, and that becomes easy. It’s just a number of conversations that you generate from a target list of, you know, somewhere between one to 300 accounts usually. Or it could be, we need to do a sleeping beauties campaign. And that could be people that have been sitting silent in the CRM, for a long time, that data is not scrubbed, or organized or segmented, and we come in, we organize all that. And then we warm them up and generate opportunities from pre existing contacts. And then back to kind of in the trailing 15 months, it’s very much been a function of partner led events, like we talked about. So how many conversations or direct referrals to different measurables? Have I gotten from my partner network over the trailing period? So again, it really depends on what the objectives are. And back to that maturity piece. You know, that’s, that’s a lot harder, right? Because everybody wants to know, performance and ROI on that. How do you measure the performance and ROI of an investment in your brand? Or in the skin of CRM, right? You know, you need to do those things, but they’re pretty costly. So how do you measure it? Do you allocate it over the three to five year life value of the project? So we have to have very real conversations about people with our clients about the value in the long term strategy before they invest?
Chad Franzen 18:58
What role does customer feedback play in shaping your marketing strategy?
Jason Ogden 19:04
Yeah, at minimum, it’s a baseline. And what I mean by that is if our clients have an aspirational future state, and that could be either in growth numbers or clients after management or something quantifiable, or it could be something a little softer, like market perception or client satisfaction, something of that nature, that client feedback serves as, as a baseline in terms of where are you today relative to that future state goal and do you have a lot of work to do or a little bit of work? And then on the other end of the spectrum, you know, it can be one of the most valuable assets that you have your customer success data, whether this is written testimonials reviews on a third party site, video testimonials and reductions into new prospects and opportunities that your clients will walk you in the front door. There’s all kinds of value that comes from that on the back end. But you’ve got to earn all that.
Chad Franzen 20:12
Do you find yourself having to adapt a strategy, maybe midway due to changing market conditions or consumer behavior trends?
Jason Ogden 20:19
You mean like in the last four years or so? Yeah. So going back to our 90-day cadence, that’s when we’re always looking at those things. On average, Chad, what we try to advise our clients is, if we’re going to try something new and different, we would ask you to give it a six month horizon, you know, barring if something severe in the real world is happening. And we’ll measure and see how it’s doing over that period of time. And not to start reading false negatives and hyper adjusting too quickly. You know, that said, the last four years have had a lot of ups and downs in a short period of time. So our 90-day cadence is where we’ve really had the ability to either scale things down, especially in the category of media spend, has been one where people can get their budgets under control quickly, if they need to, or reallocate resources, be it across content, or all the other technical disciplines.
Chad Franzen 21:32
I have one more question for you. But first, just tell me how people can find out more about syrup.
Jason Ogden 21:38
Yeah, go to syrup.com. Check us out on the about page or you can find me at LinkedIn, Jason Ogden, helping b2b companies solve growth problems.
Chad Franzen 21:51
Final question for you. If somebody you knew or maybe a friend’s kid or something, decided that they were going to devote their career to marketing? What advice would you give them based solely on your experience that they couldn’t learn in school, or something like that?
Jason Ogden 22:10
It’s a lot different to provide marketing services and advice to people than it is to be marketed to. We are the most marketed to society in the history of the world only until next year, where we become more and more marketed to. And I think a lot of young people only see the sizzle aspect, the cool thing they mention, when in reality, a lot of fundamentals don’t really change a lot over time. It’s a lot of convergence of creativity, data, technical skills and ideas. And it can be pretty chaotic. If you don’t have a good structure in terms of how you make decisions and how you actually execute work. Whether you’re in an agency or in a brand, it can be a pretty chaotic realm to work in.
Chad Franzen 23:09
Okay. Hey, Jason, it has been great to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time and all of your thoughts and your insights. Really appreciate it.
Jason Ogden 23:17
Thanks, Chad. Really enjoyed it, man.
Chad Franzen 23:18
So long, everybody