Small But Mighty Marketing Teams: Podcast Evolution

Podcast Update - moving from "How I Work" to "Small But Mighty." Josh Becerra and Shinhee Son share insights on ways to prioritize learning over metrics and connect digital marketing to your business’s bottom line.

This episode discussion revolves around the importance of having a structured framework for marketing, highlighting strategy, process, data, and communication as key components. The hosts emphasize the value of building confidence within marketing teams by setting clear goals, maintaining good data hygiene, and fostering open communication. They advocate for learning organizations over merely KPI-driven ones, promoting a mindset focused on continual learning and adaptation. The conversation also touches on the challenges faced by small marketing teams and the benefits of a systematic approach to managing priorities and tasks.

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Transcript

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Feel like a framework is really important to have to set the guardrails. What is that framework that you've been working on?We try very hard to do what we say we're going to do and I think that builds confidence. Your dreams get bigger, but it's because you've been learning constantly and I think that is really important. Marketers out there, we really just have to be focused on being great at communication, kind of owning our stuff. What are we doing and how is it rolled up to the strategy?That's one of the key pieces. And then communication. Hey, what's up, everybody?Josh Becerra here with my man Shinhee Son. You know, you've seen me doing how I work videos for a long time here at Agrurian. We're going to try something new. We're switching it up a little bit. We're going to the small but mighty marketing. Podcast. That's what this is going to be called from now on. Small but Mighty Marketing Podcast. It's a little bit of an evolution, right?So Shin, you and I worked pretty heavily with a fractional CMO over Q4. What was it, 2023, I guess. So pretty recently and and that kind of helped us evolve into this idea of small but mighty marketing team. So anyway, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about your role here at Augurian and then we'll get into it. Yeah. Well, I've been leading growth here. So really on the marketing side of Gearian since the beginning of the year. But like Josh was mentioning, was working through the marketing planning, like how do we reach the people that we want to reach?And it really crystallized into who is that person or who is that audience, what is the type of content we need to produce and in what format. And so that's why I'm really excited about us creating this podcast because I think it really does. Give us another perspective, you another perspective. We're able to kind of talk in a in a different way as well. So I think you guys will also really enjoy that. Well, and one of the kind of hard things, just to be honest, is getting guests to show up all the time so that we could have consistent content was always a little bit difficult. So you know, she and I, we, we work together every day, so it's gonna be a lot easier for us to be a little more consistent. But hopefully you'll still get the same amount of value out of what we talk about here. So let's talk a little bit about this idea of small but mighty. So we did this work with our fractional CMO, Veronica from Authentic. Let's go Veronica, shout out. Yeah. And one of the things that came out was our very best clients, the people that we feel like we can make the most impact on and that get the best results are those that are in companies of like 10. 20 million to 150 million in revenue, but they have really small marketing teams, like literally two or three people in the marketing function, which is crazy because they run around with their hair on fire. This might resonate with some of you, right?You're in charge of the website and the digital marketing, the SEO, all the things, but you're also in charge of branding and messaging. You're in charge of like trade shows, I don't know, e-mail marketing. It's just like a lot. And so I think what we found doing some of our research was, man, if we can just show up for those people and like take paid media, organic search, analytics kind of off their plate so they can focus on some of those other things and they can trust us to like do amazing work, get the results that they need and honestly make them look good within their organizations like those are our people. So that's why we call them Small but Mighty Marketing teams and that's why this is moving from the How I Work podcast to the Small but Mighty Marketing podcast. Yeah, I mean I think that's we we talk with a lot of different, you know, I CPS ideal client personas and so or profiles and we have learned, you know there's a lot of things that marketing directors or senior level marketing leaders. Are trying to accomplish, but they're just always held back because you've got to do all the things that Josh was talking about. And so that's where I feel like a framework is really important to have to set the guardrails, to give you some structure. And I know we've got a structure that we've been building. I know you've been working on it quite a bit. There's patterns that you've been noticing. What is that framework that you've been working on?Awesome. So you know, at Augurian, our tagline is have confidence, Shin appropriately wearing the shirt. There you go. So have confidence. We call it our confidence framework and basically it's centered around confidence in the middle. But you really need four different. There's four kind of attributes to an organization or a leader that's operating with confidence in their digital. So the first one of those things is their strategy, right. So you need to have a a good strategy. You need to be aligned on strategy. So leaders up and down the organization, all the stakeholders have to actually like be aligned on that strategy. So that's the first key component to like having confidence. The 2nd is like process. In my experience, I've found that like by having a great process that you can rely on. It's easy to like it facilitates communication, which is another one of the pillars we'll get to in a minute. It facilitates that communication. So let's say that you have a strategy, you've aligned on it and you say, OK, this is what we're going to do over the next three months to try to execute on this strategy. Well, you got to have that documented somewhere. You got to have a process for how you're going to actually execute on those things so that when. Other stuff comes up, which inevitably it does. You can go back to your process and say, well, this is where we are in our process and what you're asking me to do is kind of like shift resources or change. So do we really want to make that change or do we not want to make that change today? And if yes, indeed we do need to make that change, well then the process should dictate, well, what are we taking off of the table and to in order to have enough space to put this new thing on the table. So process is a second, third is data, right?So good data hygiene, a trusted source of truth, numbers that not only you can count on, but that actually give you insights into what's working and what's not working. So that's the third kind of key pillar. To the confidence framework and the last one is communication. So and I think this is like one of the biggest ones. We were just at a lunch yesterday and we heard from the person we were talking with about how like communicating to leaders up and down the chain and other stakeholders like that's where like a lot of the rub happens and so. Communication is key. I don't know if you took anything else from that lunch or about communication. No, I feel like communication is what binds all of those other like the other components of that framework together. Yeah, and you've got great data, but you need to be able to share that information or connect the dots in that way. You also have strategy. I mean, if you just have all the thoughts and ideas in your head and not sharing it with your stakeholders or even with your team, then what good does it do?They don't know where you're trying to go. And how you're trying to direct your marketing resources. And then you have your process, right. And so these are the processes, the things that you're doing in order to accomplish those goals or to act on that strategy. And so you need a lot of that communication quite frequently. And that was something that I I actually learned quite a bit in that conversation was it's not just about these key points. You know, for example, it's that maybe it's a shareholder meeting that you're preparing for or maybe it's the monthly updates or quarterly updates that you're doing. It's really all the the things that you have to do in preparation for those that is also really important. So that was a a big take away for me and and why I feel like this framework does really connect all those dots and I think also communication. Is what make all of those things end up working. So I feel like, yeah, if you're really good at getting your strategy aligned, you have a process that the entire organization understands. You got great data that is this trusted source of truth that's shared across the organization and you're good at communication, you're going to have that confidence. So that's what we talk about when we talk about having confidence in your digital. We have to help our clients like build themselves up in those four key areas. Now the other key thing that we also talk about a lot with our clients. Is this idea of what's your mindset or approach to like the information that you're receiving, right. So like the insights that you are getting from this data, like how are you reacting to that?And that's where I talk a lot about you got to build a learning organization, right. So I'm just kind of tired of. Seeing companies that operate as like KPI chasing kind of like ride or die, these are our KPIs. If we don't hit them then like you know blow up the marketing team, all the initiatives bring in a new CMO. Like I feel like there's this kind of there's organizations that are always chasing KPIs and then there's organizations that are learning organizations and I fall on the side of like building a learning organization. One of the if you've ever you've been to the doctor of course. Right. If you ever go to the doctor and you're in pain, they'll give you like that scale where on one side it's like a red face that's just like crying and it's like the worst pain you've ever felt. And on the other side is like a green happy face. You've seen this before. OK, Yeah. So I know. Bear with me. Bear with me. I I use a lot of metaphors. So what's funny about that scale is if you show up to like the office of the CEO and you say, hey, we didn't hit. 100% of our KPIs, we hit about 70% of them. But here's what we learned about our customer. Here's what we learned about our product. Here's what we learned about our competition. Here's what we learned about the messaging and what's resonating in the marketplace. Like, while that's not going to be like, yay, no pain at all, it's also not going to be like dark red crying. Oh, this is the worst information ever. And so I would argue that. If you show up to that same CEO's office and you say to them, hey, we hit 100% of our KPIs and they're like, yeah, high five, let's go. How'd you do it?And you're like, I don't really know because we were running a couple of different things and we had that launch that kind of overlapped with the other thing. And like that is not going to inspire confidence. And I believe that you're going to be further down on that like kind of pain. Scale than you were when you only hit 70% of your KPIs. So that's why I like huge advocate for building a learning organization. Yeah. You know, my take on that is, you know, I do think KPIs have a place, right?Yeah, of course. They are those the milestones where you get to celebrate or you know you're making progress. There's all those things like enjoy the journey or what's that one where it's you teach them how to fish and they can fish forever, something like that. And so. What you learn ends up usually, you know, outlasting the KPIs and the goals that you've set, right?Because they're tied to a time. But what you learn is, is not. It compounds. And then now you're able to do what I think is the most important thing, which is to be able to reproduce the results. And so there's that. And then there's also this, this feeling of being centered and when you're confident. It usually means is because you've gone through the thing that you are you used to be afraid of or you knew you couldn't do. Yeah, and now you can. You can go fish. Now you can go deep water, deep sea fishing or something. But if it's your first time, you're you're obviously not going to be confident. But if you've gone many Times Now you're thinking, well, how do I catch a different type of fish?Like how do I catch a bigger fish?Like your dreams get bigger, but it's because you've been learning. Constantly. And I think that is really important in any organization. Yeah. And like on the inverse I'm talking about, I've heard stories where like the CFO shows up and says, hey, we are want 20% growth in the company in the next year. And so you need 20% growth in your organic search traffic. And they like mandate that to the marketing team and then the marketing team is just like, well. What if I told you I could get 20% growth without getting 20% growth in organic traffic?Like those two things don't actually correlate all the time. And there and there's almost like a no, no, that's your KPI, go hit it. And that's those are like the disconnects in mindset that I'm talking about that like really get companies in trouble and then you're seeing like this vast turnover. In the marketing function where you're losing kind of all those learnings, right. So like somebody might spend three years and they might have all these insights that they've now they like really understand, OK, here's our next best step. And then it's like you're out and then the new person comes in and it's going to take them a ton of time to even get to that place. So anyway. I mean, it is what those vanity metrics are. You know, I think about those in that kind of environment where you hit your goals and the business might look at it and they're looking at their bottom line. But the goal was were these vanity metrics and you hit it and they might be thinking, well, where's the results?Yeah. And so that's where when you're so focused on the metrics and potentially the wrong metrics, I mean, you're really setting yourself up for failure. And also I think about if you're just really gunning just for the metrics, you may end up cutting corners. You know, you may be doing things a little bit more rushed and all of a sudden you're sitting on a House of Cards type of thing, which. It's because you didn't learn anything and now it was you just threw money at a problem, potentially. You again took shortcuts and now you want your team to reproduce it. They're not. Yeah, it's it's a recipe for disaster, I think. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I'm just a big advocate for building learning organizations. I feel like that's why that communication piece is so like vital. Because like if you don't, if you can't communicate like how you're doing your work, why you're doing your work, what you're taking from the data and how that's informing your next best step, then like you don't have that shared mindset. And that's where you, I see companies getting into trouble all the time, so. You know, marketers out there, we really just have to be focused on being great at communication, kind of owning our stuff, our area of expertise and really trying to like build that shared mindset around like, hey, we this is about learning. It's not only about hitting. You know that one key metric. So how are So what would be a great way to learn like how do you foster that type of organization?Yeah. I mean I feel like some of the things that I've had experience doing is when you have a CEO or leader like hey, we've got this bright shiny object or like we need to go in this direction or they even can show up and say like I think the image on the home page is wrong or I think that the what we say like the the headline the H1 on the home pages is not right and I wanted to. To say this or I saw our competitor doing this thing. They're like using this channel or this platform. Like we need to, you know, take all of what we're doing and move it over to whatever LinkedIn because I saw our competitor doing it. We need to do that. Well, like the way that I always approach that and the way that I try to like instill that learning mindset is by just saying, great, you know what, we can test that. Right. And so it is like leaning back on our experimentation on our kind of conversion rate optimization tools. Yeah, because as soon as you like start saying, hey, great, we actually took that image that you wanted on the website versus the image that was on the website and we ran an AB test for three months. And we ran all the traffic and this is, this is the result of that test. And guess what?Like you're wrong, right? And we tested it. So like it's a way for you to be responsive to leaders who maybe like be like wanting to run in One Direction or another while like instilling this mindset of testing. Cause nobody is gonna like once the data is presented and they very well could have been also been right, in which case you give them a high five and say, hey, great idea, like we tested it and you're right this. That new copy is really working a lot better from a conversion rate standpoint. So I feel like that's a tool that I've seen work. Yeah, I mean the the clarity that you get from a test result is it really does change the game. Yeah, you know when you have an intuition or a feeling and then all of a sudden you have a number that actually either affirms it or or you know is. Counter to it, you can carry that into all these other follow-up tests. And so now people also start to get excited because now it's like, OK, I'm not just, you know, licking my finger and, you know, putting in the wind. You're measuring it and now you can point it in the in a direction, become more precise. And when you become more precise, that is an outcome of being confident, right?Because you know, OK, if I. Do this. I'm probably going to get this type of result because of all these tests that you have. So now imagine your whole marketing team or whether it's your in-house marketing team or you're working with an agency or a consultant. I mean that is a very, in our opinion, a key component to have in a partner because it does transform you into a learning organization. You're not running around with your, you know, head chopped off like it's. And and so therefore you inherit some of that confidence and now you'll start feeling that when you go into your meetings and you're you're pitching or you're you're talking about the results. You can actually confidently say it's because of this or it's because of these things and this is what we learned. And usually I find that you know C level or you know the higher up you go, that level of insight is something they can get right. Well, this conversation is reminding me. At that same lunch you had mentioned and this is another kind of way to think about how do you address some of this stuff that's kind of coming at you from different places, trying to like pull you away from the the plan or the work that you have. You were talking about how earlier in your experience. You would jump when somebody said like, hey, like I want to do this, I want to try this thing. You would just like jump and spend 1020 hours like dissecting it so that you could get them their answer. And I thought it was, I thought it was funny how you said you learned to just like ask them like, so how like how important is this to you, right?And they might just, oh, it was just kind of a curiosity to mine. So if you want to just talk a little bit about that experience, yeah, I, you know, not that I wanted to throw up after I realized how much time I spent doing this. It was because, you know, early on in my career, I was just trying to get recognition. I was trying to prove to myself and to others, hey, I know what I'm doing. And so every request that I got from a client or every request that I got from a peer, I was, I treated it like. They were all the highest priority item, you knowAnd so came up on the top of my list and all of a sudden I got several others. And now I'm spending all this time researching, figuring it out, presenting it in the right way. And then I would send it to them and they would say, oh, thanks, yeah. I'm sure it was awesome. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm sure it was. I hope it was at least. But no, it was, it was really eye-opening because when he started asking, I'm like, how important is this?Exactly. And then I realized majority of the requests that I have gotten, it was more out of curiosity and maybe just to kind of learn something, but it just really wasn't urgent. Yeah. And what?Actually influence or what caused the thing that caused it was that my priorities were just smashed. Like the things I needed to do started to kind of hinder, you know, it started to stress me out. I had to spend a lot more hours, you know, trying to get everything done. And so that was, I mean ask is is a big, big learn in in my career. Yeah, you just got to ask like how big of a priority is this?And that's part of like relying on. A process too. So if you, if you have a process and it's clearly articulated and we've aligned on these goals and then somebody shows up and says, hey, I want to know about this, you can say, great, like how big of a priority is that?Is it more of a priority than the goals we've previously set and agreed on?If so, let's talk about, let's talk about the trade-offs. Maybe you have an opinion about why it shouldn't be prioritized, but it gives you that opportunity to have that conversation, which I think, yeah, now we know. Yeah. Now we know to ask that very simple question like how important is this?Is this a key priority?We've got other priorities. Do we need to reshuffle the deck?Those are the things that I think as marketers, if we can just do a better job at, we're going to build a learning organization, we're going to kind of take back some of our power and and feel confident in the work that we do. So you either you go and you have a lot of conversations with a lot of different marketing leaders, business owners and. You know, within that that framework, the the data, the strategy, the communication, the process, is there something you're seeing in terms of what a lot of them are experiencing?Is it really evenly spread out?Like what's been your perspective on that from all those conversations?Yeah, I feel like at least where we at Augurian are excel and have put put a lot of focus at because of like these conversations is around process. And around communication. So process in the sense that, you know, we understand and our clients understand what we're working on at all times, who's working on it and if they're on track or off track on those commitments. And So what that allows for is a like a high degree of transparency and accountability. And so like in a lot of the conversations that I have, people are showing up and saying like, I don't even know what they're doing. You know, on my account or I don't understand why they're doing the things that they're doing and and so that is partial communication, but it's also partial transparency. You know, there's our, our industry's kind of weird in that there are certain actors that are out there like pretending that SEO is some like, I don't know, wizardry or like black box that's behind the curtain, right, like the Wizard of Oz. Nobody can, nobody can understand it. And I think what we do is we like. Pull back the curtain, help people understand these. OK, we said we wanted to see this type of growth in our organic traffic. So we're going to take on these SEO initiatives in this first quarter. In order to achieve those initiatives, we got to break those down in the monthly kind of task and then those tasks can be broken down even further in the sprints. And now we've got like a a Sprint cadence that our clients can understand. They know who's working on what and when and if they're getting it done and so. Yeah, I feel like to answer your question like process and bringing clients along so that they actually understand like what did, what are we doing and how is it rolled up to the strategy. That's one of the key pieces. And then communication, like communication is is huge, right there. We just, I just was on a a call where someone just said like somebody that their vendor would like commit like I'll get that back to you by the end of this week. And then they would have to follow up like 12-14 days later and say like, hey, you said you were going to get that to me like a week ago, like what's going on?So again, that's like where people start to lack confidence, right?It's because you don't actually do what you say you're going to do. So, you know, we try very hard to do what we say we're going to do. And I think that builds confidence and then we just have a really clear. Transparent process that delivers a ton of accountability. So that's how we're solving it. Yeah. I mean, the process really improvement. I mean, I think a process gets created from learning. You end up learning that, oh, that was a bad mistake. How do I avoid that mistake again?And so you end up writing a SOP or you end up writing steps or criteria to not go through that same thing again. And is that something that you are also hearing?Maybe there's not a lot of. Testing being done or it is because they're just not learning and therefore they're just stuck at the strategy and they need help with actually making it come to life. Yeah, I mean, I do think that the other piece of it is like insights. So you know, I have this little thing that I always say that reports is different or not the same as reporting, right. So a lot of times I also hear that like we get these reports from our vendor. And I I don't know what to make of it. Like I I don't understand what what I should be paying attention to. There's green arrows pointing up and red arrows pointing down. There's a bunch of different data in there and it's like what what's important in here. And so I think insights is another huge component to that. So it's like you really not only do you have to have like a process, but then as part of your process you need to like. Digest what it is that you're seeing. Why?Why are you placing importance on certain things and not on others?And then how are those things driving recommendations?So like insights I think is another like key component to this. I hear a lot where clients or prospective clients show up and say like. I'm the one driving the ship all the time. I show up to our meetings and I say, hey, should we be doing this thing in this platform or should we try this type of ad campaign? And their expectation really is, is that the the vendor partner is the one who's the expert and they're the ones who should be showing up with the thought leadership and saying like, hey, like there's this new tech campaign type. It's really performing well with our this other client type and we want to try it with you and here's how much budget we want to put behind it and here's how we could see it working like that level of thought leadership that your agency partner needs to be bringing. You shouldn't be the one as a marketer, in-house marketer like showing up and telling them what to do. Otherwise you have a really high price order taker and nobody likes to pay for that. Yeah, that's, you know, I find some, I find examples of that even in my own life and. You know where you and in my experience with clients that they'll share, hey, I read this thing about this headline and and lately it's ChatGPT4 and it's recent, you know, and now it's or Gemini. And they'll, you know, you'll read a headline and you'll think, OK, is that something I need to be worried about or is that something that I need to do anything about?And so then I will, you know, share it. I'll ask or I'll say, oh, this is something that should be done or needs to be done. But really, I feel like it's it's almost like a symptom of not having someone advising me that knows more about it than I do. Yeah. So I end up having to bring in these ideas because I'm worried about it, right. And so having whether it is an agency partner or in-house team members or your peers, I mean, I do feel like it is important to have someone that is looking at that day-to-day because. You won't be able to do that. I mean, you've got, again, you might be doing trade shows, you might be doing events, you might be doing conferences and everything reporting, maybe doing some of the work and then you've got to manage the team. There's just so much that you have to do. And I think there's like a an important thing to be able to delegate some of that work. Yeah, some of that mind share so that you do get those great ideas. Yeah, yeah, that's a great segue. I mean, we're going to be talking a lot about all of these topics. And how it is that you can like claw back some of that mind share as a marketer and how you can get the results that you're going to be held accountable for, but how you can do that with partners, how you can kind of lead an organization. I mean, we've talked about the confidence framework, we've talked about building learning organizations, we talked about a lot of things. So the future of this kind of small but mighty. Marketing Podcast is really that Shin and I are going to sit down and have some of these conversations with you about some of these things that we're seeing, what we're hearing from others, and hopefully it provides a little bit of insight. Maybe we give you some tips and ideas, but either way, we'll make it fun, hopefully. And I hope you enjoyed this first round of the Small But Mighty Marketing Podcast. Thanks, Shin. Thanks, Josh. See you.