Driving Growth with Profitable Marketing Strategies by Mastering the Marketing Ecosystem

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Today, we are talking about growth, marketing, ecosystems and how to do more with less, and we have a great guest to help us talk through it.

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It is Angela Frank.

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She is a chief marketing officer with over a decade of experience.

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Welcome to the show.

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Hey Eric, thank you so much for having me.

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I'm really excited to be on and chatting with you today.

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Really excited to be on and chatting with you today.

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Great to have you here, so why don't we start out by you taking a minute or two to talk a little bit about who you are and what you do?

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Yeah, absolutely so.

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As you mentioned in your intro, I'm a fractional chief marketing officer, so my job is to help small businesses and medium-sized businesses create marketing strategies that are profitable, and I do this by implementing marketing ecosystems.

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It's actually the topic of my new book, and so what a marketing ecosystem is?

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It's a way of connecting all of your marketing channels to make sure that what you're doing is actually an asset to your business and actually producing profitable results.

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Awesome, and you also have a podcast on the topic of growth marketing, the Growth Pod right.

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Yeah, on the Growth Pod, I interview a lot of industry experts and people who are just enthusiastic about small business and building those in general.

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All right, we're ready to be inspired.

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Let's hear a story about some of the best marketing you've done, the marketing that you're the most proud of, where you had this moment of genius and you got like a thousand percent ROI or something crazy.

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But for me, that places the focus on things that are one-off successes and are not replicable, and so I'm most proud of the work that I've been able to do over and over again in all sorts of different companies, which is implementing, obviously, a marketing ecosystem, so putting this into practice.

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I was working with a small fitness equipment retailer and they had a classic small marketing business strategy.

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They were sending ad hoc emails, they were running Google ads and they had some other marketing channels as well, but there was no strategy behind it.

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They just heard that they should be doing this and so they were doing it, and so, when I came in, I had two goals One, assess where there were hidden opportunities for growth that this business was not either fully taking advantage of or just had not even started taking advantage of at all.

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It was totally not present and two, identify the places in the business where they were overspending on their marketing.

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And right away things became abundantly clear that their ads, unfortunately, were not profitable, and had not been for years, due to the way that their agency was reporting the numbers.

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It was, unfortunately, very shady and a very difficult conversation to have.

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Nobody wants to hear that they'd actually been losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on their ads.

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So that was an immediate red flag for me, a call out and a bummer for them, but we were able to spin it into something positive.

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The other thing and I'll talk about the positive element in a minute, but the other thing was that they were not fully utilizing email in the way that it could be implemented in their business.

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They were running e-commerce businesses.

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They had no automation set up or anything like that, and so we were able to turn this bummer of an ads not being profitable into something that one, we diversified channels and so the ads were profitable.

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But two, we were able to take a little bit of that budget and set up email automations for them.

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For example, we set up an automated abandoned cart sequence Very basic three email sequence that just auto-populated the product that the person left in the cart and the third email had a coupon, and that very limited email sequence generated an extra $120K in revenue for the business about $10,000 a month on average just by moving a little bit of that budget to set up the automation.

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And so that is what I'm most proud of is being able to connect things together and make actually profitable marketing strategies for companies.

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That's great.

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So I think it is easy, unfortunately, to get into investing in the wrong areas, sometimes in marketing.

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And when you talk about the marketing ecosystem, are you essentially referring to all the different ways you can market and all the different marketing channels and then finding the right balance with it, with those?

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A hundred percent.

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Taking just the example we talked about, we saw that email was a huge opportunity for them and we were able to also launch additional channels just by moving some of that overinvestment in ads around to create something that was more cohesive and profit generating for them it's interesting because it's come out as a theme across the last 100 episodes or so, a lot of people being pretty negative about the return on investment with advertising and being pretty positive about email.

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I don't think it's always been that way, but I think things have shifted that way.

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I was helping one of my friends with one of their campaigns the other day on Google and I noticed for some of the keywords he was going after, it was $40 a click for some of the keywords and he went up like $40 a click.

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I know there's inflation, but it's insane because you could get a hundred clicks before you even get a lead, let alone a sale, and so I just think the cost of advertising on a lot of the major platforms like Google and Facebook has gotten to be very inflated, very competitive, and so I think that's what I think companies need to look at is how things are evolving.

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It's unfortunate.

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I remember 20 years ago when Google first started the advertising, it was a dollar a click.

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Years ago, when Google first started the advertising, it was a dollar a click.

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They've gone from a dollar to $40 a click.

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That's some pretty serious inflation.

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Yeah, it is.

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And the other thing is I feel like a lot of people are like ads are the biggest opportunity for my business.

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But in reality, there will be a sweet spot for you on any platform where, if you're spending just a very teeny amount of budget, you're not going to be able to have the scale.

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But the opposite is also true on the other end of the spectrum.

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Once you start getting into like huge budgets, you're also going to lose your efficiency, and so what I do is I try to find that sweet spot that works for the business and you don't need to force it.

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If you're comfortably spending $100K a month on ads and you're getting customers at a profitable acquisition cost, that's great.

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You don't need to try and spend $200,000 a month in that channel, and so I love what you were saying about $40 per click is outlandish, and if it's not profitable for the business, don't try and force it.

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So how do you find the right mix of marketing channels when you're working with a company?

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Yeah.

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So one thing I love to do is use the concept of the MVP the minimum viable product and apply it to what we're doing in marketing.

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And apply it to what we're doing in marketing.

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So when we launch anything new, we always look at doing the most minimal version of that launch that we think will provide us learnings and insights and results.

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So, for example, with the abandoned cart sequence, we didn't launch with a five, seven, 10 email abandoned cart sequence.

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We launched with three because we felt that was easy to launch and it would give us the right amount of results.

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Right, one email might not have been enough and two was maybe a good in-between, but three is what we went with.

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And the same goes for social.

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You don't need to go ahead and batch all of your content for the rest of your year.

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You don't need to batch all your email newsletters for the rest of the year.

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Instead, look at the places where you think your business should be playing and launch with a very minimal investment for time and money and then go with the channel that ends up producing the best results for your business.

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Yeah, that makes sense.

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Now you've run over $10 million in advertising, so you're obviously not against advertising, right, but you help your clients find ways to get the best return on investment.

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How do you help avoid situations like the example you gave, where people were being fooled by bad reporting or analytics?

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Yeah, so first of all, I start with the reporting and analytics, which is why I was able to flag that so quickly.

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Me, when I come in, I'm trying to help you with your strategy, and so the data and analytics piece is key to knowing what's going to work and whether that means we're going to work with your agency partner to assess their performance, bring and connect all of your data warehouse into our dashboarding software.

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It all starts there, and then you just have to trust that the numbers are telling you what's going on with your marketing, and I think that takes a lot of the emotion out of it.

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When we had the situation with that agency who was reporting shady, it was really easy to fact check that they were just putting all top line sales next to the ad spend, and for the owner of the business, they had their hands in so many places.

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It's just not something that they ever thought to ask because they trusted that relationship, and so for me, I try to operate as a partner with the business and just let the numbers explain themselves.

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Yeah, it's hard for founders and leaders who are trying to take on the marketing because it is so detail oriented.

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There's so many things going on there.

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It's hard to get into the details of all of it and master it.

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So tell us a little bit about about your book and what some of the key points you are trying to get across in publishing it.

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So the book is your Marketing Ecosystem.

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It really outlines a lot of what we talked about today.

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It shares all about how you can market less and sell more just by making sure that what you're doing in your business is actually producing profitable results, and so it's a very short book it's meant to be able to be read in an hour so you can quickly action on these items and start implementing them in your business.

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And the book also comes with a resource portal with all of my swipe files, so it's meant to be really plug and play, and the biggest takeaway is just look at what you're doing, test and trust the data, and don't let marketing become this big, overwhelming thing.

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At the end of the day, marketing should be producing profitable results for your business, and if it's not, that's okay.

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You just need to take a step back and reassess what you're doing and make sure that you're investing in the channels that make the most sense for you.

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I think that's great advice.

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The one other question I had for you was what trends do you think are going to shape how marketing goes over the next few years?

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Yeah, one of the things that I am keeping a close eye on is how Google and other search engines are incorporating those AI snippets in search.

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I really think that, while this makes a really great user experience, where you put in what's the best flavor of ice cream and then Google gives you everything that you need right there.

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You don't have to click to any websites or any other landing pages it's not the greatest for marketers, because now you're losing an important source of your organic traffic, and so I think that Google eventually will get to this place where you can only pay for traffic from Google.

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Those AI snippets, I think that Google eventually will get to this place where you can only pay for traffic from Google.

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Those AI snippets, I think, will get so good that everything will be right there for you and there's no reason for a person to click off, and so the only reason that you would is through an ad, and so what I'm doing and encouraging my clients to do is build out a stronger social media presence and a stronger content strategy to be able to diversify where they're getting organic traffic from.

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Yeah, I think that's a good prediction.

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I think that AI is disrupting SEO for sure.

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I'll be honest, over the last 24 years, since the year 2000, when Google first came out, I never really thought the Google search experience was the absolute best experience.

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You could definitely say it was simpler and cleaner than like the busy mess that Yahoo had going on, but I never was like this is it?

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This is the end result, end result, and so I'm actually glad for the AI summaries to be coming out, because I think that's closer to what a better experience that people have wanted for many years.

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It just hasn't been there, and so maybe the new SEO is getting into the AI summary results.

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But I agree with you, that could be challenging because you have to figure out how to tap into the language models.

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What might be made more sense is how you can advertise and be there next to the AI results.

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So I think it'll be interesting to see how that evolves.

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For sure, I think certain channels, like SEO, are definitely being disrupted and evolving.

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Yeah, and also maybe there will be some other benefit that Google introduces if your content is good enough to be included in the snippet.

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But I really think just from a user perspective, if I'm able to come and get my information, that's all I'm really coming to Google for.

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I'm not trying to click and read on other websites, and so it'll be really interesting to see how this element of SEO plays into your business.

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Moving forward element of SEO plays into your business moving forward, and OpenAI just announced their own search engine, so they're just competing directly too.

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So it'll be interesting to see how many people go for that, and I think the big thing is coming.

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This is exciting In less than a month, when the Apple intelligence rolls out and iOS 18 on phones.

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I think that's when people are going to have the AI with them in their pocket every moment of every day.

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That's going to be really interesting to see if that's an accelerant to make the change of pace of this even faster.

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It'll be really interesting.

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Yeah, definitely Lots of big changes coming up in marketing, for sure.

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Yeah, definitely Lots of big changes coming up in marketing for sure.

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Final thoughts for today on how marketers and business leaders can do well in marketing going forward.

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Yes, if you loved anything that I said about the marketing ecosystem, I offer a free copy of my book.

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You can get it at yourbrandevolvedcom backslash free book and with the book, like I mentioned, you get all my swipe files and things.

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So it's really plug and play in your own business.

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I have seen the marketing ecosystem work not only in the health and wellness niche, but for B2B, saas and all sorts of different types of companies and different scale of companies from just a couple million a year all the way up to 250 million a year.

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So I really believe in it and so, if you are interested in implementing that in your business, yourbrandevolvedcom backslash free book Awesome.

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Thank you very much for that offer.

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Encourage everyone to check that out.

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I'm going to link to that in the show notes so people can easily get to that and get in touch with you if they have more questions about what we talked about today.

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We really appreciate you being on the show.

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Thank you so much for being on.

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Eric, thank you so much for taking the time.

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I really appreciate it and I really enjoyed our conversation.