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