Unforgettable Marketing Campaigns that Drive Results

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Today we are talking about how to run great campaigns and we have a great guest to help us talk through this Joshua Ramsey.

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Welcome to the show.

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Hey Eric, thanks for having me.

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Good to be here.

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Now Joshua is a chief marketing officer.

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He's run many thousands of campaigns over the years.

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Why don't you take a minute or two and share just a little bit about who you are and what you do?

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In short, I started my career in the late 90s selling media, and the problem was that I could never retain a book of business because people would pay for marketing and they would expect to get a result at a phone call.

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When that didn't happen, they bailed out.

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So I kept selling media at a great volume but never retaining clients until I went to work for a top 100 ad agency and realized why marketing wasn't working.

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So from there in 2004, I was able to catapult my business light years ahead of others in identifying the best way to position what's called your strategic message, which is your core message, it's your unique selling position, it's your business owner's blood, sweat and tears and how to take that message and place it tactically in the right location so that your audience will actually be able to consume what great message you have.

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But if you don't have those two items nailed down, that's where things fall apart pretty quickly.

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Success is not guaranteed just because you're running a campaign.

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So tell us a story about how you came in and you ran a great campaign and you crushed it.

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We're ready to be inspired.

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I was approached by a company that was a pest control company and they asked me to figure out a way that they could sell to a specific avatar.

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And basically what they were looking for is they had identified a key group of businesses that they knew would buy what they sell sometime in the next 12 months.

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So I went with them, worked on compiling this list and identifying the key players in it.

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We then put together a good, solid message that was unique to them.

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They were a pesky patrol company, so what I came up with was it's more than a logo, it's a shield of protection.

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So we ran with that for a real long time and it gained some real traction in their marketplace.

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And it gained some real traction in their marketplace.

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On top of that, we created a 12-touchpoint campaign that I affectionately dubbed the fireproof campaign, because it catches fire and it doesn't burn.

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And what we found was, through these 12 touchpoints, we had first reverse, calculated and engineered our model of spend.

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What we knew is the retention of a life of a client, so if we signed someone, how long they would stay, and we knew what our gross profit margin was, all the way down to the net, as I call it.

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So when we identified this information, we knew what our budget should be and we set our budget that if we closed one sale it would pay for the entire campaign.

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So we modeled the 12 touch points around what the value of that one sale would be.

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So that way we had low risk, high reward.

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That was our focus.

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Right, because ultimately in marketing my approach is let's not spend a lot of money but let's get the best result.

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But then it goes to the analytics and the data, and if your message isn't placed well enough or communicated, it falls flat.

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On a little bit of a tangent as I tell this story, just think about it in today's age, it's not what you say, it's not how you say it, it's what's perceived by your audience.

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So the perception really is everything.

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So what we ran through this campaign ultimately had multiple touch points.

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But the big touch point that hit was when the phones lit up and what happened was we created a box and we put a six inch fake roach and a six inch fake rat into the box and painted with our logo and our phone number on it.

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We had six calls immediately when that box hit.

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We had three of them who were ladies.

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Two I think of the three were the wives of the owner.

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She opened the box and she screamed and she called to yell at us.

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All three men, no fake story.

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All three men or husbands, ceos, whoever it was in the background because I didn't answer the calls.

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I we would hear them laughing in the background because she opened this box, this huge fake rat and roach falls out.

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The he laughing, she's angry.

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We get three sales 100% the first three, the next three that come in with the men still lapping new prospects.

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We closed six deals.

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I could walk you through the ins and outs of it, but the main thought, the main strategy, is the timing matters, the commitment and consistency matters.

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But if your messaging doesn't have something of value that someone can relate to, you can't become relatable.

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When friends and influence people 20 minutes versus 20 years.

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If you can't have something that's worth remembering, where someone will go wow, that impacted me this way or that way and they remember you, it doesn't work.

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And as my final point to that story, it was interesting because five years after that we had mutually parted ways.

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We were still friends.

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That's how I'm able to tell you the back end of this story.

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But five years later they were at a trade show and they're standing there offering their services.

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Lady walks by and she looks to the man with her and nudges him and says hey, remember I told you that fake rat showed up in a box in my office one day at my old job.

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He starts laughing, he goes yeah, that was hilarious.

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She goes this is the clamp in me.

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They sold in their 43 years to that date They've been in business for 43 years.

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They sold their largest contract because of marketing that was well-placed, well-remembered, impactful, created something in that person's narrative, their storyline, that it resonated with them so much that they got their biggest sales.

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It was a military base that they sold in Kansas.

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That was their largest sale that they've ever had.

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Base that they sold in Kansas, that was their largest sale that they've ever had.

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So sometimes things work really well, but the plan of execution and the agility to change is always important.

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Wow, that's a great story.

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I love it.

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I think anyone who's ever had a mouse or a rat would really appreciate the humor and the creativity of that story.

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And you have to be a little bit brave to run a campaign like that because people will react very emotionally.

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But that's actually like you said, it's all about how things are received and it clearly works driving huge clients, getting great response.

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What's the point of running a campaign if you can't get a great response right?

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So talk to us a little bit about you've run many campaigns over the years, thousands of campaigns.

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Talk to us about what you think, in addition to that story, makes a great campaign.

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How do you think about is this campaign going to be great or not?

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I think where a lot of businesses miss right now is what's called KPIs, your key point indicators.

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I think that this word needs to be known to every business owner and it baffles me at times that people don't understand this KPI rule.

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But the KPI simply is.

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This is a measuring stick of true expectations and what is the outcome.

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And then go back when you have the data of the outcome and look back at what the KPI was and did you succeed or fail?

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And it's okay to fail, but you have to fail.

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Forward in understanding why.

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Don't hang your head low on it, but understand why.

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But everything really is in the analytics.

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A lot of times when people work with chief marketing officers, they need to understand that there's really, in my opinion, two types of cheap marketing officers.

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You have what I dub as the butterfly.

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They're the ones that love imagery, they love vision, they love color, they love pictures and placement and all of that, and they're needed in this world a hundred percent.

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So there are many good fits and businesses that I can think on the top of my head, three of them that a CMO I've worked with and recommended to another client because they were just really good at the butterfly.

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Then you have the analytic guy or woman is focused more on the data, what happens when we do this?

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So when we do that, when we modify this, when we modify that, the analytics don't lie in the result that you get.

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I was working with a brick and mortar company, very large.

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They had six stores there in the Miami area and the business owner asked me hey, I need you to run a campaign and I need to drive traffic to my store.

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I said, no problem, I got it.

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So I ran a specific campaign through Google ads and when I ran doing was we were running Google, my Business location the metric that was not being paid attention to was how many users were actually clicking on directions and go, and Google will tell you if people click drive versus location, because your location is an impression, but going get directions and start is a different method impression, but going get directions and start is a different method.

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So when I showed him this metric of the increase, it was interesting that it seemed to be, in my perspective, a little dismissed, and it was dismissed simply because the walking in the store he didn't have a piece of paper from their phone to the store clerk to say I came in through this, but we were able to see the traffic trends of his office, along with the traffic trends of Google and the directions, and be able to see the time and date stamp.

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So it's really interesting when you start looking at the analytics.

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But you still need that pretty side.

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But really, when people are looking to hire a CMO or a head of marketing, these are some of the things that I encourage people to look at.

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Are those elements, along with the KPIs, of what are you really hoping to get out of it?

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I think that's great advice being analytical, versus just designing stuff that looks really great.

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You want to have stuff that looks great, but I think the analytics is weight-wise more important.

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For sure, especially in a market like we're in right now, where everything is not frothy, people are a little bit less likely to spend money, money is changing hands a little bit less, so I think that the unit economics of looking at marketing as an investment is much more important.

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Some B2B businesses right now are way off track because the way they were thinking about marketing isn't working as well right now, because they're spending so much money on the marketing that it takes years to pay it back.

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Years to pay it back.

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And I think that if you're analytical about it, you know what you can afford to spend to acquire a customer, and I think there's lots of great ways within campaigns to get that response.

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And tracking it back to where it came from is really important.

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One of the best things that a lot of people tell me is you just have to ask every new customer how they got to you, and I think that's also something that helps people be really analytical, like you're suggesting.

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Yeah, good information in, good information out.

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You can make good decisions and good choices when you have that.

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But there is one thing just to note on that part is sometimes high tide raises all ships.

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I don't like saying that.

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It doesn't make me get the warm and fuzzies, because I love, in a perfect world, to have a vacuum where we can track the attribution 100%.

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And no, I spent $5 over here and $500 over here and $5,000 over there and this is exactly what I got from it.

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But it doesn't work that way, unfortunately.

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But there are ways to get close to that.

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But there are ways to get close to that and that's finding out where your customer came from, but realizing that the brand effect as a whole does influence how they're, whatever they're going to tell you, cause ultimately you take the data what they told you, and then what you can see online and you put that together and you do your best to just figure it out from there.

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And I think you'd spoke to it.

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And if people see my resume, they realize how long I've been around.

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Or if they look at me and they see a little bit of gray hair, they realize that I've been around a little bit.

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But when you have the experience added with the data, that's the maturation process that puts out the good stuff.

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That gray hair is called experience Joshua.

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Experience and wisdom is what I tell my kids, but they never listen.

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Awesome Final thoughts for founders, business owners, on how they should think about marketing going forward.

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I'm going to give two quick nuggets here.

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The first one is I think I've seen more and more a trend that's very under leveraged, very easy to fix and I think it would have significant impact, and that is something called H tags.

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In websites, h tags are typical, what's called heading tags, and if you'll go back in and read your heading tags and think to yourself, when you read a heading tag of your website, does it invoke interest related to a keyword that a user would be searching for?

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So I think that's an important one.

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That's just a real quick fix that people can do.

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It will just cost you a little bit of your time and energy to read and think through that.

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And the other one that I would tell people that's trending a lot more right now is programmatic.

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Advertising really has caught fire and if people are not hearing about it or knowing about it, you need to change that.

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If you're running a business you're looking to do marketing, programmatic is really the next new age generation.

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You can run it.

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I have campaigns.

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I'm running the smallest $500 on a small area.

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We can hit B2B.

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You can pick your avatar.

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You can pick your persona.

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There's so many fantastic things when it comes to programmatic that it is just the next wave of where we're at and it's the next.

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It's the next, it is the future.

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It is here, it is the future.

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It's just about how fast people want to jump onto it.

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I love it.

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Two very nerdy marketing suggestions and I think that people should reach out to you and get in touch if they'd like to get more details on that and other suggestions.

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I'm going to link to your website in the show notes so people can do that easily.

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We really appreciate you joining us today, sharing your story and your insights.

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We appreciate it.

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Yeah, thanks, eric.