Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. I am your host as always, Ben Thomas here at market scale. You know, one of the questions that we get all the time is, hey. You see all these great wonderful marketing strategies that the biggest companies in the world are running, but small and medium businesses sometimes get left out. And we get the question, how do we do some of the same things? How do we use the best practices and principles, and strategies that work for the larger organizations, but do it in a way that's cost effective and scalable for the SMB market. To have that conversation, I brought on my friend Jason Dyer. Jason, Chameleon Collective. So good to have you on the show. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's good to be here. So let's set the table a little bit. There's a lot of different places that you get to work. You live in the fractional world. You live in the consulting world. What sort of are some of your expertise and areas of focus? I've been lucky. So in my career, I've done just about everything you can do in marketing. I can remember when I first started as a consultant, I would say, I'm a full spectrum marketer. And then you realize, wow. There's actually a lot more out there that you haven't done. So I don't say that anymore. But if you think about everything from let's make a product, let's build a brand, let's actually sell a thing, I've been lucky to do all those things. And so when it comes to the marketing stuff itself, that's where I get to say I'm a CMO. And so I definitely have touched everything that someone in that chair should know something about. But my level of expertise with the individual tools has waned over the years. But I always say my sweet spot's technology. That's where most of my experience is. The cool thing about being fractional, though, is you do get to do other things. And so there's been manufacturing and there's obviously some nonprofit. I have that in my background. So it's really fun, because you can go lots of places and it's always different and challenging. Look. You mentioned technology. So it's sort of the great equalizer over the last ten or so years. You know, no longer is it this world where you have to have ultra large budgets to to accomplish some of the things that I the the larger companies are because we have, you know, cost effective tools like Canva and, you know, CRM tools and all sorts of different things that marketers now have access to at a price point really that's more affordable. But Sure. At a large sort of maybe even a high level, what are some of the challenges historically that the SMB market has had versus maybe some of the larger companies? And I think maybe a question first is how would we really define the SMB market right now? There's lots of definitions, and I don't know that I'd be the the right pundit to tell you what the limits are. I have heard small medium business goes all the way up into a billion. And so I think that, frankly, you have to put yourself in that bucket, right, and decide where you are. I mean, there are some things about the maturity of your business. Some common milestones I'll hear is, you know, something to five million is still typically thought of in the startup phase. Anything five to ten still can be a startup, but the business experience to go from five to ten is different, and what's necessary is different. After ten is another level of different. And believe it or not, pass that into the millions, even hundreds of millions, a lot of the challenges are still the same. And so the numbers I like to talk about is if you're thinking small, it's anywhere up to maybe ten or even fifty. And if you're thinking that middle market, it goes up to two fifty, maybe a billion, depending on the kinds of things that you're doing, because you can be a billion dollar organization, still not maybe be as mature operationally as we might think. Yeah. I I like that you made that distinction too. Right? Because I think a lot of times people may define when they hear small media business. They may think the roofing company down the street. Right? It is. And and ironically enough for in some cases, it is. Right? My family has has had ownership ties to a roofing company for sixty five years, and and at that point, there there's a certain revenue threshold where that kicks in. Sure. But we're not necessarily talking about the car wash down the street. We are talking a little bit more enterprise, small and medium business. Yeah. I think that's right. And I think that that's where maybe the revenue thing makes more sense. Right? Think about an employee threshold. You start to talk about, should it be fifty? Should it be one hundred? And I just think those breaks are not so easily defined. Google it. There are a thousand people out there that are pundits in the industry that'll tell you where that line is, but that's where my brain is on it. Well, so the natural kind of first question here is, okay. There's a million things we can do, SEO, ABM, retargeting, advertising, all these different things. Where would you recommend sort of maybe whether it's a fractional, maybe it's a first time marketer in an SMB. Maybe they just took on a director role for the first time. What are some of the things really at the base level they should start with? Well, strategy first. So what I often find is small medium businesses want to start with, I need ads or, oh, I I want a new website or, yeah, AI is great. How do I use AI in my business? And those are good questions to ask. I think the challenge is you don't want to jump to, I'm running ads. You have to start with, wait a minute, who are you trying to target? Why are you trying to target them? What are you trying to say? Why is that relevant? You know, a lot of technology companies I work with, the visionaries in those businesses have an engineering background. Frankly, it's true of almost every CEO. It's difficult to take the creator of a thing and have them really tighten that message down to the one thing the audience cares about. Because when you made it and you poured your blood, sweat, and tears into that thing, it's very hard for that person to tell you, oh, it's just this, because for them, it's not that narrow. It's much bigger. But paying attention to what your market cares about, it has to start There. So one of the things that is really interesting about sort of the world of enterprise marketing, and and I'll sort of define that maybe as as b two b in this case. Right? Because b two c is a little bit different from a sales cycle standpoint. But from the b two b standpoint, now post COVID, about seventy to eighty percent of that sales cycle actually happens before the the buyer ever reaches out to a a salesperson, a rep, whoever. So that means a massive, massive chunk of that is digital. Right? And you hear people saying, I need to run Facebook ads. I need to do this. I need to have a TikTok. What do I need to do? How do you really start that conversation from a digital standpoint recognizing, like you mentioned, that people are looking for these things, but how do you you gotta meet them where they are. Yeah. I think you'd say it like that. So there's a customer journey. Right? So what you were talking about with now that journey happening digitally before anybody talks to a salesperson. Right? If you wanna believe in the idea of a funnel, it's just pushed marketing marketing's role in the funnel much, much lower than it has historically. You don't like the funnel analogy. People will talk about it's much more jumpy than that. It's not so linear. The bottom line is the buyer does go through a journey and take some typical steps. And so you need to map that and understand what that looks like. That's that's a whole job, really understanding that. Right? And there's lots of data sources for that. To me, there's nothing better than interviewing a customer to understand what they do. And it's great to have salespeople do that. That's important input. It's great to have product developers involved in that dialogue. But what I see happen a lot of times is your customer will not tell you what they will tell me. Or a professional research company. Just out of human politeness, if I know this is your baby, for example, I'm going to be a little reluctant to tell you it's ugly. Right? So that's an important point is get someone to gather that data for you that is not so tightly connected to you. Not that you shouldn't have your own listening posts. You should. But there's another layer there in getting that sort of objective listening post and then define that journey. And if you don't know, maybe you're the smaller business, you're like, I have no idea. Well, get started measuring it, and even just ask any questions of your audience. Get something to start from. Use as many data points as you can to measure and try to determine was I right or was I wrong? Because one of my favorite things about marketing, and I find this a lot to people I talk to in business, they see it as very simple. I make an ad. Like, I buy the Facebook ad. It's all I gotta do. Right? Tell them my story. But the problem, of course, is that you're telling that from an inside out lens. Right? And you need to instead listen to that audience and have them tell you what they have in mind. And really, really importantly, you have to remember it's dynamic. The market is never a set thing. Marketing is not set it and forget it. You can't just put those ads out. You know, let's say it's January and you pick up in December and go, how do we do? It doesn't work like that. It's far more dynamic. I love that you even talk about sort of the audience because they are are really in a lot of ways. It's a bidirectional conversation between your audience and and your marketing team or your sales team or whatever. But one of the the things that I've loved to see that's really come out of the world of b to c is crowdsource content, user generated content, audience. I mean, fandom maybe is the best word to do it. And, you know, you see in our personal lives, organizations and groups like the Savannah Bananas. Yeah. Who have two million people on a waiting list right now because they make TikToks. Now that's an oversimplification of how easy it is. Right? And and and we we know those folks well. But, You know, some of that has trickled into into the world of business. Right? We now know that, look. We have fans of our business. Sometimes we just gotta give them the microphone because these are assets as as part of our organization. Yeah. Absolutely right. Because there's another thing there, which is the legitimacy of the information. Right? Why do people like ratings and reviews? Because the company didn't tell them. Right? The guy down the street did. Now those come with their own trade offs. But fundamentally, it just feels more authentic, and therefore, it's not biased by any corporate or company agenda. That's what a real human thinks about a thing. And so handing the mic to those fans, whether they're influencers, whether they're individuals that just love you and they engage merely with you and tell you what they think, it's a really important listening post. Let's talk about authenticity. That's a a great kinda anchor point for us. You know, I think we can all sort of see through a lot of the BS and the facades that people put up from a corporate standpoint, and and and I can't remember who did the study. But right now, organizational trust is at an all time low. Right? But the trust of humans is at an all time high. So the importance of reviews, the importance of social proof, the importance of case studies actually now is more important than it's ever been. Absolutely. Right. I think one of the things that you feel if you're a company is, well, then where's my brand? Where's my story? Like we talked about strategy earlier, you have to have it. You have to put out your point of view, but you have to be listening to what that audience then has to say. It's Just we're in a world now, and I can remember it. I'm old enough to remember when, all the marketing and advertising trades are talking about, it's gonna switch. The consumer, the customer, they're gonna be in control. And, you know, everybody was lamenting that. And how am I gonna drive everybody in if I don't control the narrative? And I felt like that conversation went on for forever. However long it actually took, it's it's flipped. The the person who's the buyer, they are in control. They will make all the decisions. So listening to them, listening to what they say about you, and in fact, encouraging it is a really smart marketing tactic. That doesn't mean, again, you don't have the thing you say about yourself. It just means The place to put the emphasis may shift depending upon where your strategy is. One of the hardest challenges about implementing a strategy like that, especially one that's community centric or social centric or whatever, is is tracking KPIs. Right? Because when you focus on brand marketing or influencer marketing or whatever or or, you know, x y z. Right? It's it's it's not as easy as it used to be to to attribute that. And now look at the end of the day, we wanna pump the bottom line. Right? We wanna hit revenue. But as a marketer, you wanna be able to attribute that. What are some of the best practices that you've seen right now for people who use some of those? I will air quote this, fluffier marketing strategies. Yeah. One of the ones I hear a lot is, and I'm sure other people hear it, is vanity metrics. Right? And some of my friends in the agency business are really, really good about telling you, look at all the impressions I got you, And it's not worthless. But to your point, it's not ringing the cash register. It's not maybe informing that journey that lets you to make smarter decisions about the kind of influencer content that you encourage or the messages that you put out. And so I would think about metrics that maybe start with a click but end with an attribution, which is did the person purchase? What did that timeline look like? What did they do in between the point where you first got the click to where they transacted? So think about your website, for example. What sort of steps did they go through? Fundamentally, you can't measure too many things. You can quickly figure out some of the things that are noise because obviously paying attention to everything isn't healthy either. But you start from sort of putting everything on the table and then trying to sort of winnow that list down to the stuff that obviously makes the biggest difference. And then your ultimate goal is shortening that sales cycle from the point where they heard nothing about you to now they know you, and now they're taking an action to engage and, in fact, purchase. So which are the right metrics? It does depend on your strategy, what moves your business. Right? And so I would always tell people, you can afford it, spend some money on somebody that really understands data very well and can help you with attribution. It's a really important investment if you can afford that in your maturity. But fundamentally, getting to the place where it turns into a sale, those are the metrics to pay attention to as opposed to the ones that say this many eyeballs. You know, that sort of brings up a natural conversation about spend and budgets and availability for resources and hiring things like that. And and the reality that we face is a lot of small businesses. They don't have the dollars necessarily or the the backing or the funding that a unicorn mine or something like that. What are those immediate sort of wins that you can generate maybe with a smaller budget that help actually attribute to some of those things that you brought up earlier? Well, I mean, what we're doing right now. So one of the things you can control and you can do ad nauseam is create your own content, right, and encourage your fans. You mentioned that earlier, right? That costs you next to nothing. Email is obviously very, very expensive. Just about anything on social media, is directly related to content, pretty cost effective, right? Your owned media, your own website, for example, how you use that as a tool to tell your story and to nurture that journey, pull people into the information they want at the time they want it, that kind of stuff is not as costly as other tactics might be. So, you know, we're talking about content here and creating content. I will say it's one of the harder things I see clients grapple with. They always start out with, let's just make it. But you probably are laughing because, of course, they can. But there is some discipline to making that content. A lot of the CEOs I talk to, they're very bullish on their availability to make that content, and they make a few things. And then they realize that's a lot of time for me to plan for. So I don't say that cavalierly, but it is one of the things you can really control. And I did an experiment this year. I was trying to publish on LinkedIn In five days a week, in part because of this dynamic. I tell my clients, you can do this. So I thought, okay, I'm going to eat my own dog food here. Can I do it? And I did. It did take a little bit of planning, but with a little bit of collaborating with AI, for example, topically, like what about this? What about that? And just thinking through the stuff I might want to say, it got pretty easy to publish. I probably could have published every day. Now, I'm not a CEO, so full disclosure. But it is actually doable to create content, and content as the hub of a marketing campaign where you push that information out, that is low hanging fruit. Well and I would even add this. Right? I think a lot of people may be hearing this and thinking, oh, I'm gonna create on GPT and all that. And sure. Right? That's that's good to have access to that. But there is no substitute for for human style content or content. Right? Whether you call it user generated content, crowdsourced, whatever. There is something value up about seeing somebody's face and a subject matter expert sharing, you know, whether it's executive strategy, whether it's marketing strategy, that is that is still irreplaceable. I think it is. And there's a couple things there. I mean, one of which is AI is a great tool, but by itself, it's not sufficient. You have to have a human in the loop. And if you read the AI articles, a lot of companies are realizing this, right, that it can't just be let the AI do it. You need humans in the loop on whatever that AI is doing. Now, maybe at some point in the future, it's so good at it. You don't need the people anymore to do that particular thing. But if you're creating content, you're finding your voice, you're trying to make sure the market understands who you are and who you're not, The human has to be there. So, you know, my answer would be, sure, use AI, but don't default to AI. Keep the human in the loop. But then your other point is really relevant, and we see this, I think, in statistics on LinkedIn, lots of other platforms, A person talking in the camera authentically is the way to go because we're humans, we relate to that. It takes off that corporate shine piece where then it feels manufactured and maybe less truthful than if a person's simply telling you what they think. Well, last question. We'll land the plane with this. I think the the largest disconnect, at least, that I've seen between the revenue side of the business and the marketing side of the business, if you wanna separate the two, is marketing being subservient to revenue? Yeah. Now I've had several conversations with a lot of enterprise marketers who still, you know, came from the the creative world, found their way into the enterprise world, and, you know, really have embraced a lot of the revenue side. But you do see still this disconnect in SMB where the marketer wants to be creative and do all these things, but sometimes it misses the point, of the the revenue attribution. Where would you recommend people that maybe come from that creative side or maybe even are just fresh out of of of college or trade school start that conversation specifically? So if they're having a a disagreement about how creative to be, for example? I I I would even say how can they start quantifying marketing actions and creativity into attributable revenue specifically. Well, I mean, were talking about metrics before. One of the best ways to do it is measure it two ways. I mean, AB testing is not a new concept. Right? So if there's a creative person with a really strong opinion about a piece of creative, run it both ways. The market will tell you what resonates. So that's one way to deal with that. You mentioned earlier, though, the sort of subservience to revenue. And a marketer, but I've also been We're gonna get yelled at that, by the Yeah. Believe me. I get it. But I've I've also been in sales personally. I've also started my own company where I had to do both. And so I would like to answer that from the perspective of someone who understands both. Most of my career is in marketing, yes. But I have done both. And my answer would be they are not two different places. They are one sort of part of one engine designed to drive the business forward. So sales, if you're thinking sales, for example, I would add product into that and marketing. That's a three legged stool that is going to deliver value. And at the end of the day, in any game you play, you keep score. Now old world marketers I know would say, look at the brand metrics, awareness is through the roof, and I don't want to downplay awareness. You have to have it, particularly mature businesses, right, have to have and maintain a particular perception. But if all you have is awareness, you don't have a business. And so the scorecard is in the business, and it's in our partners in finance, and it's agreeing on what those metrics are that matter. That goes all the way back to strategy. When you set your strategy, it has to be designed to have particular outcomes. Those outcomes get agreed upon. That's the scorecard. So I don't think subservience is the right word. I think we're keeping score. Did it work? And I think marketers have to be practical. And salespeople have to appreciate that creative person pushing the limit. The natural tension of that is where great stuff happens. Well, Jason, look. I think we've officially just made this a part one because we're gonna have to have similar conversations in places like nonprofits, enterprise businesses happy to. Even startups and things like that. We're gonna have to have you back on the show. Oh, it's generous of you. Thank you. Jason Dyer, thanks so much for coming on Experts Talk. Thank you for having me. Thank you all for tuning in. Be sure to like and subscribe. Check us out next time.
