Author: Jill McKenna

Michelle Ngome:
Yes, thanks for having me. I help large organizations look at diversity and inclusion from a marketing perspective. Everyone’s doing marketing in some capacity, I’m making sure that your content and your visuals show diversity and inclusion in all of your marketing material for your campaigns.

Jill McKenna:
I imagine that your work has really changed in the last year with shifts to social awareness, social justice, initiatives that have happened as a culture. Can you explain a little bit more about how you are seeing companies embracing inclusive marketing now?

Michelle Ngome:
Yeah, I think the companies have definitely become a lot more aware since June 1st. I think it’s always been affirmative action/diversity, equity and inclusion, or diversity, inclusion and belonging, each company has their own name for it. I think it’s always been a component, but since June 1st it’s definitely gone in hyper-awareness mode. I definitely see companies making strides as far as galvanizing their own employees to say like, “Hey, what are we doing? What are we doing wrong? How can we do better?” And then, of course, hiring experts to come in and assess what that process.

Jill McKenna:
Yeah, I can see how you would have amplified your business because those are a lot of questions in a lot of areas that that companies need to cover.

Michelle Ngome:
Yeah. I think the unique thing about me, I say that I look at diversity and inclusion from a marketing perspective. I don’t have an HR background, I haven’t done talent recruiting and all that kind of stuff, but I have expertise in finance and marketing that overlaps when it comes to trends, reading reports and stuff like that. But I realized that the marketing department wasn’t talking to the HR department. In order for you to have an inclusive campaign, I think it starts from the inside of the organization, so that’s how I go in and help teams. I prefer working with the marketing team, but I’m like, “Hey, now that we’ve got this together, we need to work with the HR team.” That’s what I assist with.

Jill McKenna:
To that point, if people are wondering, is this for me, is this something I need, what is this exactly, can you explain a little bit more about inclusive marketing and exactly what it is for those who aren’t sure of the definition?

Michelle Ngome:
Yeah. Inclusive marketing is about creating an internal environment that’s going to allow for you to have a successful marketing campaign, because the marketing campaign is the external output that you’re promoting your company, brand awareness, sales, whatever the objective may be. What I realized is that there was a lack of representation or misrepresentation when it comes to Blacks and other minorities, but I feel that if you’re creating the environment where Black and Brown people are in the process, the decision making process of your campaign, that would help with the inclusiveness.

Jill McKenna:
That makes a lot of sense. I think it’s something that we see a lot as consumers too. A different example is I remember I used to watch really heavy gaming, like people win millions of dollars playing video games, and I noticed that all that was happening was this was being marketed to men. I was like, “You’re missing 50% of your customer base,” and so it’s only logical to think about not only doing it for the right reasons because we want to be inclusive, but you’re also cutting yourself off at the knees if you’re not thinking about the wider audience. Do you run into that a lot?

Michelle Ngome:
Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it’s one of those things, for so long it’s been the white audience is the mainstream audience, it’s mainstream America. I think most companies have looked at it just very broad and people are going to fall in where they fall in, if they like the product, they like the product, but lately we’ve been seeing where representation matters. Also, with that representation, you have a large number of Black and Brown people that are wealthy, that have disposable income. Nelson Media reports when you look at Black consumers, Latinx consumers, Asians, and even people with disabilities, each of those groups spend a trillion dollars in consumer spending. Your brand, your product caters to them, but they want to see themselves in their marketing because then it’s like, “Oh, I need that. I relate to him, her,” or whatever. Then, “I want to buy a house. I need to sell a house,” it’s like, “I see myself driving that car or wearing that makeup. All of those things are important and I just want to encourage individuals, even small business owners as well as the larger companies, that let’s be mindful of that moving forward.

Jill McKenna:
Are there other fundamentals of inclusive marketing that people should be keeping in mind when they’re doing this work or starting to look at themselves through this lens?

Michelle Ngome:
I think that’s why it’s important to create your team. I think diversity comes in an array of ways, diversity of thought, experience, socioeconomic, education, location. Diversity goes beyond race, we have religion, we have culture, and so many things. You want to bring those people to the table. You need to create that environment where individuals on your team feel like they can contribute, they can speak up when it comes to creating these marketing campaigns or even these job descriptions, that you, once again, hire the right people. That way, anything that goes out, it’s like your team has some input and it’s a representation of your company, of your work culture. I feel like for the longest we have lost sight of that, so I’m always encouraging people to be mindful of that.

Jill McKenna:
For marketing, beyond using stock photos of Black, Indigenous, and people of color, what can marketing teams do to also be creating that reach?

Michelle Ngome:
Yeah. Let me say this with the stock photos, because that is tricky, because the stock photo platforms are not that diverse in itself so that can be a challenge. If you’re able to create original photos, the best way possible during this time, I would definitely encourage you to do that. Some other ways, there’s actually a company in Portland right now, Intuitive Digital, I think they’re doing a great job. They’re a great example, where they did hire a consultant. They have this on their website and I think that’s what I loved about it. You see how they’re doing the work and they’re tracking it. They did hire a consultant, resources that they tapped into, they started a scholarship, an essay scholarship specifically for minority candidates. Those are the three things that I can remember right now. I think that’s the start. Once again, if you’re in Timbuktu, North Carolina, if you’re not in a major city where maybe there’s not a large Black population or a Black marketing population, you’ve got to get creative. You’ve got to find other ways to support the Black Lives Matter movement or just minorities in general.

Jill McKenna:
Thank you so much. I have just enjoyed myself so much. I’m really appreciative of your time. If people want to find out more about you, where can they go?

Michelle Ngome:
Yes. MichelleNgome.com, Line25Consulting.com is my company. You can pretty much find me, first and last name, Michelle Ngome, N-G-O-M-E. I’ll say follow me on Instagram for the cool stuff, Facebook for the real stuff, and LinkedIn for the professional stuff.

Jill McKenna:
Perfect. Thank you so much, thanks for your time.

Michelle Ngome:
You’re welcome.

Melissa Barker:
Thank you so much for having me. My name is Melissa Barker, and I am a digital marketing consultant, as Jill mentioned, as well as the author of the first college textbook on social media marketing. Really, my specialty is working with tech companies with their digital marketing strategies, as well as small business owners—helping them with their marketing sales and scaling best practices and figuring out how to grow their business.

Jill McKenna:
We’ve had the joy to work with you in the past and have had just an incredible experience. And I’m so delighted that we’ve been able to do that and that I get to speak with you again.

Melissa Barker:
Wonderful. I so appreciate it, too.

Jill McKenna:
I know that business services clients often come with high expectations and sometimes high dollars attached to them. Can you speak a little bit about developing and managing those unique and special relationships?

Melissa Barker:
Absolutely. So the business service clients are absolutely my favorite in terms of those to work with. But like you said, they definitely come with different relationship dynamics, especially with larger organizations where you generally don’t have just one point of contact, but you need to be building relationships throughout the organization at large. So the biggest things that I recommend around this is really getting clear on how you are building credibility. So showing previous client examples, having those references, but then also building trust. And so when we’re thinking about really building and developing trust with bigger clients, it’s all about delivering high quality work, strategic recommendations, and then delivering those on time. So, yes, you need to deliver quickly, but you can’t let the quality of your work suffer.
 
In terms of actually managing the relationship, there are three things that I always recommend, especially when you start with a new client. First is to get a clear understanding of the expectations the client has in terms of how frequently you need to be communicating, because there’s a lot of variety in that, in my experience. Some clients want to talk to you every single day; others say, “Hey, here’s the project. I’ll talk to you when it’s done.”
 
[You also have to] understand their preferred methods of communication. For some of my bigger clients, they have me on Slack, so they have that really high-touch, frequent access to me. Other clients, on the other hand, are really happy with email. So, it’s not only understanding how frequently they want to be speaking with you, but also what is their preferred method of communication.
 
And then, finally making sure that you’re integrating within their team. Even if your point of contact does not necessarily say, “hey, set up meetings with everybody on the team,” if there are names that keep coming up in those initial conversations, or people whose work you know you’re going to have to learn more about, being proactive in having those conversations, setting up those meetings, and building those relationships from the beginning.

Jill McKenna:
It sounds like you attack it from the get-go, but mindfully, and respond to what it is that they need and they’re looking for.

Melissa Barker:
Yeah, absolutely. And really focusing on developing a relationship that has the potential to be a long-term relationship, so you become that trusted provider that they reach out to whenever they have a question. If you’re a little bit more relaxed about building that relationship at the beginning, they may or may not come back to you in the future.

Jill McKenna:
That makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. What type of client experience and service standards do your customers tend to expect? Because I’m sure that they’ve not only worked with you in the past as a consultant, but other folks as well.

Melissa Barker:
Yeah, absolutely. And there are the fundamentals of creating great service, which is that quick turnaround, really high quality work, delivering, developing against your timeline every single time. But in addition to that, there are five things that I always recommend for service providers, especially when it’s a high-dollar client or someone that you’re looking to build that long-term relationship with. First is getting comfortable using their tools and systems. Oftentimes I find that service providers don’t necessarily want to integrate or learn all those tools, but it is worth that time investment, especially for your high dollar clients. Because of that, I’ve learned things like Basecamp, Asana, monday.com. So getting really comfortable with all the different project management tools. And it will be really worth that time investment for you as a provider as well because inevitably there will be other clients who use them too.
 
Second: make sure that your recommendations in whatever type of service you’re providing really fits within what they’re capable of, their scope, the budget that the client has said they have, the people, the staff, the budget—because oftentimes what I see with a lot of my one-on-one business coaching clients that are also service providers is that they’ll make these really big complex recommendations, or they’ll make recommendations that are smaller than what the client wants. And both of those leave your client in a very strange position where they can’t really implement your recommendation. So, be mindful to fit within the scope that you get from the beginning.
 
Third is make sure you’re reporting on impact, or showing them how to report on the impact of what you’re providing. And not just telling them the quantitative story, but really getting into the qualitative side and giving some analysis around whatever metrics and numbers you pull, and telling that story. Creating the story for the client is super critical.
 
Fourth is make sure that when you’re delivering your recommendations, you leave your client feeling really empowered to follow through. Because I think it’s easy to come in and say, “Here’s everything you’re doing wrong,” versus coming in and saying, “Hey, here’s the baseline and here’s the opportunity.” So I think, again, not framing the recommendation, making sure that you can take it from that 50,000-foot view, and give the exact steps that they need to follow to be able to implement your recommendations.
 
And then last is treating their business like your own—really taking the time to understand the client, the history, the product or services that they offer can make you really valuable. Because when consultants come in, for any kind of business services, and they’re giving all these recommendations, but they don’t fully understand the history of your business or the nature of your products completely or your industry, it really makes it hard for the client to want to follow through on the recommendations. So again, that upfront time investment. Even if they’re not asking, even if it’s not billable hours, doing your homework and really thoroughly researching the business ahead of time, or asking those correct questions from the get-go can make you feel like a part of their team.

Jill McKenna:
That’s very thorough, and it is obvious that you’ve developed that over time in working closely with some of these people.

Melissa Barker:
Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a learning experience, too, because I think initially I maybe didn’t do all of those things, but as time went on, I’m learning the importance of yes, a little extra upfront time investment in learning their systems and being willing to integrate, make a big, big difference.

Jill McKenna:
And once you work with your clients over a period of time and over years, how do those relationships tend to change or more for what do they need later on?

Melissa Barker:
The biggest thing I’ve noticed over time is that I get brought into lots of different kinds of marketing projects, or things that even maybe sometimes fall a little outside of marketing because they want to work with the same people, right? Because there’s that foundational understanding of the business, they trust the quality of the work that they’re going to be getting. So sometimes I’m actually learning some things in the process as well, to be able to fully serve the client in the way that they’re asking for.
 
But I think the biggest changes over time are really that, there’s less negotiation actually in the proposals. They’ll sometimes even tell you the budget and say, “Hey, what can you do with this amount? How much can you fulfill of this?” And so it becomes less of a negotiation and really trying to prove credibility, but there’s that high degree of trust already. So it’s really about making sure that you understand what their needs are and you can deliver against it. And then I think the way that the needs change are really just that they sometimes actually end up meeting more tactical support. So once you’ve given them the strategy, they’re coming back to you and saying, “Hey, could you actually help us with certain parts of implementation?” And if there’s that element that you actually do offer, it’s a really wonderful, longer term relationship opportunity.

Jill McKenna:
I’m sure that that serves you both really well. That’s great. Great. Thank you so much for your time, Melissa. I appreciate you so much. And if people want to find more about your work, where should they go to?

Melissa Barker:
You can find me at melissabarker.com. You’re also welcome to add me on LinkedIn. I’m Melissa Barker there as well. Either is great, but I always love to connect with folks, especially those who come from Ruby, and these conversations are always wonderful to have.

Jill McKenna:
Great. Thank you so much, Melissa.

Justin Dunham:
Yeah. So, ércule is a boutique digital marketing agency and our mission is to make it so that your content is successful. One of the things we’ve noticed is that people can write and produce all kinds of things, but there’s so many other things that you need to know to actually translate what you write and create into success. We do a lot of SEO for clients. We do a lot of content strategy, and we situate that in a full-service agency. We often do things, like marketing operations and analytics, too, and even paid media for folks as well. That’s what we do.
 
Jill McKenna:
I know business services clients can often come with high expectations and sometimes high dollars attached to them. Can you speak a little bit about developing those unique relationships and managing them?
 
Justin Dunham:
The number one thing we’ve found in this business is it’s all about creating that personal connection. You just can’t templatize everything. It has to be about the people who you’re dealing with on the client side and the people that you are dealing with on the agency side, and the relationship between those people. And of course, it’s about the work, but the relationship has to be really good for it to be successful.
 
So in terms of managing these projects, I think a lot of it is the emotional energy that you bring to the interactions with people. It’s being responsive to what they’re looking for. It’s being willing to sometimes not necessarily go way beyond the scope of what you’ve been hired for, but trying to be as responsive as you can to all kinds of unexpected or perhaps even uncommon things that might come up during the process. And your job as somebody who’s in client service is to do the best you can to actually help the client with that problem and help them look really good at work.
 
Jill McKenna:
But how do those relationships change over time and through multiple projects? Because you can have these relationships for a very long time. So how does that evolve?
 
Justin Dunham:
I think the way those relationships evolve, hopefully they get a little bit deeper. And as a result, they get more efficient. So I can think about lots of examples where we’ve been hired to work in one very specific area and it becomes possible to expand that work or deliver more value for our client because we’ve gotten to know them in this one area. We know their approach. We understand their business. We can work together well with them. And that lets us work on other things that might be more challenging or that might be adjacent to what we were originally working on.
 
And that’s what you really want. And that’s a huge part of this business is being able to evolve the relationship in that way. I think the other thing that happens too, is your client hopefully becomes an expert in a lot of these areas along with you. Or maybe not an expert-expert, but part of job as working in client service is to really help educate them. And so, they’re asking better questions. And so they can work with you on getting deeper and deeper into the real challenges, the real places that you might be able to create value for them.
 
Jill McKenna:
So, what kind of client experience and service standards do your customers tend to expect and how is that driven by that relationship that you’ve explained?
 
Justin Dunham:
We’re an agency with a real focus on partnership. We’ve had clients who have engaged us and a big reason has been, hey, we’re not talking to your salesperson. We know we’re talking to the actual team that we’re going to be working with. And that’s a big deal for our folks. So in terms of how the engagement works, we always try… And again, let me know if I’m giving you the answer that you are looking for here. In terms of the way the engagement works, there’s a lot of responsiveness in terms of, for example, all of our clients have their own Slack channel with directly with us. And we don’t have an SLA. You know, we don’t say like, we’re going to get back to you in an hour or two. It might take longer than that. But just having that channel where they can actually really talk with us at any time they want, even if we don’t respond right away, makes a big difference.
 
So I think that’s part the engagement and that’s part of creating that relationship with them. I think the other thing is, of course, you have your weekly meetings and there’s all sorts of other things, too. When we do reporting with our clients and updates, our decks are always in the same format. They’re really easy to read. We think a lot about the user experience that our clients are going to have in terms of parsing the data that we’re giving them. A lot of agencies, we’ve seen them send clients like Excel spreadsheets that are not very well-organized or long memos that are not formatted or not well-written. Writing is a really key part of communicating as well, especially digitally and in digital marketing with clients. And so good writing, good, well-structured writing is also a really important part of that.
 
Jill McKenna:
What do you wish people knew about business services work and what you all do and what this is really like, tending those relationships every day?
 
Justin Dunham:
I wish people knew that business services is this: To do it well is this incredibly complicated and often very fun—a combination of technical expertise, which you have to bring to the table. You have to know what you’re doing, that’s what you’re being hired for. But together with that, there’s a big emotional component to it, which is around explaining what you’re doing and why it’s valuable, being responsive to what your clients, perhaps their fears about what might happen with a project or even what might be going on with their business. And also responsive to the fact that usually clients hire you because they don’t know very much about a certain area and they don’t have the expertise.
 
You have to find a way to communicate that to them and help them understand more and feel really good about what you’re doing for them, knowing that by definition they’re not in a position to always deeply evaluate everything that you’re doing from the position of an expert. I think people really overlook that emotional component to the service. And again, technical expertise is the foundation for the whole thing. Providing the services, doing it efficiently—that’s the foundation, but there is a huge component, which is just about building the relationship, good service, keeping your client first, really thinking about what their needs are even beyond the technical stuff you might be delivering for them.
 
Jill McKenna:
Thank you for that answer. Justin, it’s been so great to talk to you today. I’m so thankful for your time. Where can people find you online?
 
Justin Dunham:
Check us out at ercule.co. We have a library there—we’re constantly writing about topics that are useful to know for small businesses and startups around marketing and how to make yourself successful and how to get everything set up. I’ve also got a chatbot. We’re always happy to do office hours. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn—Justin Dunham. I’m right up there and posting all the time. So it’d be great to hear from you all.
 
Jill McKenna:
Thank you so much.
 
Justin Dunham:
Yeah, thanks a lot.
 
Jill McKenna:
Have a good one.

Loren Feldman:
Sure. Well, thank you Jill. It’s a pleasure to be here. I appreciate your having me. I have been doing this a long time—about 20 years now, it pains me to say. Previously, I’d been a general interest journalist with magazines, a little bit of business stuff. I did go to business school, undergraduate. But in 2002, a friend of mine was named editor of Inc. magazine, and he was kind of figuring out what he was going to do with it, and I happened to have been fired from a job as editor of Philadelphia Magazine previously, So I was looking for something to do and he invited me to sort of just hang out, no pressure, see if I could help and get to know it.

I had had some experience with business journalism, but no experience with entrepreneurship, and I kind of fell in love with it. I thought I would be there for a few weeks, and 20 years later I’m doing the same stuff. It’s been great. I spent about six years at Inc. and then I went to The New York Times. They kind of asked me to build their version of an Inc. magazine as a web vertical inside The New York Times. I did that for about six years, and then I went to Forbes and they wanted me to do their version of it. And I spent about five years there.

They’re all great publications with really smart people. At each place, they all wanted something a little bit different, and I learned something really important at each of them. And then ultimately, about two years ago, decided to leave Forbes and try to bring it all together in one place. I found a partner who was kind of my backer and we created something we called 21 Hats, referring to all those hats that an entrepreneur has to wear. The idea was to try to bring together everything I’d learned at Inc. and the Times and at Forbes, and create the platform for business owners. Unfortunately, we ran into this pandemic thing you might’ve heard about, and our plans haven’t quite played out the way we hoped, but we’re still working on it and still trying to do some good stuff.

Jill McKenna:
I’m curious, with your work with the small business owners and in speaking to them, what are the creative collaborations or problem-solving practices that you’re seeing entrepreneurs embrace now? Which ones are working, and which ones maybe are not so much?

Loren Feldman:
Interesting. That’s a really good question—that I should have some more time to think about.

Jill McKenna:
I can come back to it.

Loren Feldman:
No, let me give it a shot. I’m trying to think of a good example. I think we’ve all been so thrown off by what’s happened. We’ve all had to develop new routines and figure out new solutions, do things differently. Again, a lot of that’s been out of desperation, and it’s been difficult and not all of it has succeeded, but I think it’s broken down barriers that will help a lot of people in the long run.

Just the fact that you and I are having this conversation over video right now—this kind of conversation happens—you’re doing this to publish it—but people are doing this all the time not to publish it. And one of the things that changed for me, we collaborated with a lot of people on webinars. I mean, webinars have existed for a long time, but the idea that we could get a large number of people to set aside time in the middle of their workday to watch a webinar at the drop of a hat—it never would have occurred to us. But it became something that was acceptable and people started doing it, and we found ways to partner with other companies that had information to share.

I just did a webinar for a really terrific organization called The Great Game of Business. They’re not that well known. They’re not a household name, but they have a cult-like following among people who believe in the practice of open-book management—the idea being that if you share what really drives your business with your employees, your employees will get much more engaged, they will care more about their jobs, they will look for opportunities to help the business, they will generate ideas from the frontlines that you otherwise wouldn’t have gotten. A lot of business owners who do it actually say it takes the weight of the world off them because it means they no longer have to answer or solve every problem themselves. A lot of the best answers—better answers actually—come from the frontlines, up to the top.

So anyway, they have a terrific organization. I’ve been going to their annual event every year for, I don’t know, close to 10 years. I’ve made a lot of great contacts there. This year, they to cancel it. Actually, I think it was held last week, or maybe this week—I’ve lost track now—but I suggested to them that they let me do a pre-conference webinar talking about all the reasons not to do open-book management, because a lot of people are skeptical of it. A lot of owners say, “Why do I want to share that information?” If they’re not doing well, they’re concerned that they’ll scare their employees away. They’ll run in the other direction. If they are doing well, they’re concerned that their employees will ask, “Well, why aren’t I getting paid more?”

Those are very legitimate questions. There are good answers to them. So, I pitched this collaboration: Let me do it. We’ll host it, but I’ll do it for you. And it’ll turn into a video that you’ll be able to use for years, because anybody who considers joining your organization and adopting this practice is going to have these questions. They’re going to want to get them answered. Let’s just create the best possible conversation we can. I took three of the owners from my podcast, who I knew were skeptical about open-book management, and got the organization to supply three of their superstars, people who have done this for years and had success with it, and we had a conversation. I orchestrated it, it got a little tense at times, because there were differences of opinion, but we got to the heart of the matter. We had entrepreneurs asking very real questions.

I’m sure we scared some people away. I’m sure we brought some people in. But that’s what we wanted to do. It’s not for everybody. Some people who were scared away should have been scared away—it’s not right for them. But for others that would work. And I’m hoping we had a conversation that helped a lot of people. I don’t know if that is what you were looking for, but that’s a collaboration that would not have happened if it hadn’t been for this crazy environment.

Jill McKenna:
Yeah. I mean, that’s exactly it. I’m seeing things happen that we…I liked to say as I was an entrepreneur with competitors and people in my industry, rising tide raises all ships, right? There are so many different ways to come together. When this all started, I was reading an article that was about Mark Cuban speaking to nonprofits about they’re going to be facing. And kind of the hard answer for them, from his mouth, which I think makes a lot of sense, is you might have to combine forces. You might have to meld your ideas into one. You can’t all survive and ask for the same amount of money. Some of you have better mailing lists, some of you have better adoption events, some of you have better whatever, and it’s maybe time to group, which I think makes a lot of sense. And I know that there’s even small businesses doing that. Does the city of Chicago need 25 comic book shops? No, but maybe it needs 10 or 15, and maybe you’ve got a better back catalog than I do, or whatever.

Loren Feldman:
Right. Some of that’s painful collaboration as people are weeded out, but certainly that kind of thing is happening.

Jill McKenna:
Right. And I’m curious, to that end, what do you love about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship? This is your primary language. What do you love about it?

Loren Feldman:
Oh, I could talk for hours about that. I had no idea what I was getting into when I got into this. As I told you, I went to Inc—at the time, I had kind of specialized in helping magazines redesign and rethink what they were doing. I’d done that at a couple of places, and I thought I would do that at Inc. and then move on, but I really did fall in love with it. Part of it is I love the intellectual challenge. I love trying to figure out which businesses will succeed and which ones won’t, and how much of it is the idea and how much of it is the execution. To me, that’s all really fascinating. So that was part of it.

Entrepreneurs are really interesting people. I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t know. Obviously, they’re by definition risk-takers. One of the things that I learned doing this is something that a lot of my colleagues as business journalists still don’t fully understand. I mean, I’ve worked with some of the smartest business journalists in the world at Forbes and The New York Times. And they would often ask me, “Why are you interested in covering small business or entrepreneurship?” To them, all they heard was the word “small.” They understood that it was important in the aggregate, but they didn’t necessarily understand what I found exciting about it. And to them, it was, “Alright, entrepreneurship—I get it if you’re talking about a venture-backed company that’s going to take over the world and change the world, Uber or something like that”—that they got.

But the typical, smaller entrepreneur, who’s not venture-backed, they didn’t realize that that’s real risk. That’s risking your own money and your own livelihood—and often your own house. Most business journalists have no idea that it’s routine for a business owner to borrow against their own home. They think risk-taking is what happens on Wall Street, which is of course risk-taking with someone else’s money in most instances.

I love that I learned from a lot of people at Inc. Their star writer at the time was a guy named Bo Burlingham, who’s written some terrific books, including Small Giants and Finish Big. He kind of took me under his wing and I sort of followed him around for a few years, met a lot of great people, and learned a lot from him.

One of the things I learned from him is that he discovered that a lot of the best ideas in business bubble up from smaller companies. If you pay attention to what’s happening, they’re the ones that are really being creative. He was aware of that long before you saw big companies creating accelerators, deciding that their own R&D department wasn’t working as well as the startups out there that were independent and doing their own thing and not dependent on the budget of a big corporation. You’ve seen this trend of big companies trying to create their own accelerators to harness that power of entrepreneurship and startups. Bo saw this a long time ago.

Even what I just mentioned to you, the open-book management idea—that’s something that bubbled up from a small, failing company. It was actually a division of International Harvester that was told that had to shut down in Springfield, Missouri. They remanufactured engines there. And the head of the union at that shop said, “Wait a second, give us a chance. We’re going to buy this from you and we’re going to make it work as a company.”

They did that about 30 or 40 years ago, and it’s a more than $600 million business today with all kinds of divisions—all predicated on this open-book practice and, in fact, on employee ownership. They have people who work on the frontlines, working on an assembly line who retire as millionaires because they own a piece of the company. They have a stake in the outcome.

That’s a long answer to your question. But to me, learning about these things was really exciting. I loved meeting the people, hearing the ideas, and sharing what these companies have learned so that other companies can emulate them and try to do the same thing themselves. To me, that was really exciting.

Jill McKenna:
Yeah, and I think we’re seeing so much of that “difficulty breeds ingenuity” attitude right now. When I had a business, it started during a recession and it took off like gangbusters. And a really interesting story I came across doing this series is I talked to two folks in Louisville, Kentucky, and they were attending a protest after David McAtee’s murder. And during the protest in Louisville, Kroger shut down in the neighborhood with customers inside, said, “We’re not doing this,” boarded up the windows, people coming in got kicked out, and left the whole West End of Louisville in a food desert. They ended up starting their own delivery and order service for groceries for their neighbors and community—a nonprofit—and then they realized that the community really needed it.

Now they’re starting a for-profit business, and I’m not sure what the model is called—they’re taking very low profit—but what they’re doing is creating living-wage jobs and giving the employees at this market that they’re creating some status in the community—”These are good jobs. We’re not going anywhere. We’re not a nonprofit who’s coming in here, fly by night, ‘we’ll only be here six months’—we’re going to establish and stay here and create a community market so that we’re not reliant on these other companies that are just going to leave when things get hard.” That’s one of the coolest stories I’ve heard come out of this. And what a business model to create from difficulty that supports its own community and become symbiotic. It’s been great.

Loren Feldman:
That’s a great example. And actually, what you were saying about your own business, you only mentioned it briefly, but that’s a perfect example too. When I first got started and started meeting entrepreneurs like you, it was all new to me. And the idea that growing really fast, that that seemed like, well, that’s everybody’s dream, right? That’s what you want. That’s everybody’s goal. But the stress that that can create and the dangers of failure that that can create, I had no idea. I’m not saying anything that an entrepreneur like you doesn’t already know, but for someone from the outside, learning that, trying to understand that, that’s just a perfect example and why I loved meeting entrepreneurs like you as I started trying to figure this out.

Jill McKenna:
Yeah. I mean, it’s a tightrope every day with no net. It is every single day. Before I came to Ruby, which is such a great place for me to be, because I’m really serving small businesses which I understand so much, every single day was…you never knew what you were going to get. It was often in the car, eating grocery store sushi on the way from meeting the banker to go meet somebody to see if I want to hire them, to go meet a manufacturer, to go meet a vendor—and then, if I’m lucky, get home at a decent hour, eat dinner, and then start working again until midnight. It’s every day, and that was for 10 years. And yeah, I’m just sad I didn’t meet you sooner because I think we would have avoided some of the pitfalls of being successful. Nobody tells you in our country, with our model of business, that you can be too successful and you can be too successful too quickly.

Loren Feldman:
If you haven’t seen it, there’s a terrific book called No Man’s Land. It was written by a guy named Doug Tatum. What he writes, essentially, is that every company that has any success is eventually going to reach a point that he terms “no man’s land,” where the things that allowed you to succeed to the point where you succeeded are no longer going to work. You reach a point where you get a big contract or something happens and you have to step it up. And the people you have in place, maybe they’ve been great. Maybe they’re your friends, maybe they’re your relatives. They’ve been incredibly loyal, you love to see them, maybe you spend Thanksgiving with them, but they’re not the right person to take the next step, and you have to have a really difficult conversation with them. That’s just one small example. It might be your relationship with your bank that you’ve outgrown. There are any number of things. You’re going to hit a wall in all sorts of ways—and that’s if you’re successful! And that’s something a lot of people don’t realize. It’s just so hard.

Jill McKenna:
So if folks want to find out more about your podcast, your daily email, where can they go and find out more?

Loren Feldman:
Well, they can find me on LinkedIn if they’d like to connect. I’m always happy to connect with people. It’s a Loren, L-O-R-E-N, Feldman, F-E-L-D-M-A-N. They can go to 21hats.com and find our archive of podcasts there. We’ll be publishing a new one on Tuesday. We always publish on Tuesdays. Or they can go wherever they get podcasts, whether it’s Apple or Google or whatever.

Jill McKenna:
Thank you so, so much for your time and insight. I’m really appreciative.

Loren Feldman:
My pleasure.

David Lambert:
Hi, Jill. I take on all of the paid media here at Ruby. So I do all of our digital advertising spend, Google Analytics, Google ads, Facebook ads.

So mostly anything that we do from a paid perspective, I’m involved in one way or the other when it involves marketing, and then really trying to tie that into long-term goals and optimization and efficiency. So that’s where I spend the majority of my time, as well as helping some of our systems connect and talk to each other.

Jill McKenna:
I have a whole list of questions for you, but I want to start with the one that I hear the most when I’m in any of the marketing groups I’m in—the women in business groups, the entrepreneur groups. The number one question that small business owners seem to have that I encounter is: How do you do Facebook ads and Facebook boosts successfully? So first, can you tell us if there’s a difference between boosts and using the ads?

David Lambert:
Yeah. The difference is pretty small. It’s pretty minor, but a boosted post is essentially something that you just put out for free. It’s an article, it’s a picture. It’s a status update, but then you’re telling Facebook: “Hey, I want to show this to an audience outside of the people that come to my page.” So I want to be promoted to, there’s different targeting parameters, but essentially it’s a post you’ve already put out there, and you’re like, I really love this post. It’s getting Likes. I want more people to see it. So then you just put it out into the world. An ad creation is essentially the same thing, but it didn’t start from a post that you’ve already done. And that’s the biggest difference. All the targeting options, being able to pay to promote it, are still all there. It’s just kind of where you started in that initial journey of things.

Jill McKenna:
Great. And to that end, for both, you really need to know who your target audience is, right? You really need to know who it is you’re targeting. Otherwise you’re just throwing salt into an ocean and it’s not going to make a difference. So how does a small business owner go about identifying their ideal customer profile or perhaps their target audience?

David Lambert:
Sure. That’s a great question. So you worked hard on your content. You know what your messaging is. And really the biggest point is: What audience do I show this in front of? Just like you’re saying. There’s a couple of ways to go about that, especially on Facebook. There’s so many different parameters, whether that’s demographics, whether you’re going after men or women, location, industry, there’s a lot of things. It’s easy to get caught up in really dialing that in super narrow, or going way too wide. The biggest thing is to find a balance. And the easiest way to do that is connecting your Facebook to your website. So you add a little script—they call it a pixel—and basically it evaluates your website traffic.

And you can go then into Facebook and say, “Hey, Facebook, do your thing. You’re an algorithm. You’re automated. Look at my traffic and find people who are similar to that.” So they do a lot of legwork, and there’s different percentages without getting too technical, but there’s like a 1% match, a 2% match, 3% match and so forth, I think up to 10. That’s a really great place to start, because you don’t have to necessarily ping down everything you’re doing. And Facebook does a good job of trying to find those people. So I think that running those kind of campaigns, along with another segment, or audience, is really powerful. So generally I start with one lookalike campaign or ad that targets what Facebook is automating, and then create an audience, a saved audience, based on who you think your customer is. Whether that’s industry specific, like lawyers, or home services, or if it’s demographic, if you know that [age] 30–45 is really where your sweet spot is with people resonating with your product, you kind of drill those down.

And Facebook does a really good suggestion for how big your audience size is. If it’s too narrow, if it’s too broad, they’ll tell you. There’s a little graph that it tells you exactly where you are. So that’s a good thing to look at in general, to know if you’re close or not, but that’s where I dig in. And then you can play with going after different little audiences. I’d start out a little broader, unless you know that this is your customer. Like, if you only sell to barbers, just go with that. You don’t have to do ages, you don’t have to go too narrow, but you want to pick a point where you’re kind of comfortable and it’s all about monitoring that success, and how many click-throughs you get, and the web activity. So I’d start a little broad, unless you are a hundred percent certain who you’re talking to, and then you can narrow it down over time and kind of save yourself some dollars there.

Jill McKenna:
And when small business owners and small business managers think about starting to dedicate a budget to ads on Facebook, or on any social media, how should they start to think about allocating dollars? And what’s a logical way to go about creating that budget?

David Lambert:
That’s a great question, and it comes up in 100% of conversations I have when I’m consulting for this kind of thing, it’s kind of an art and science. So it is, there is a bit of unknown of, especially when you’re starting out your first ad campaign, you really don’t know the response, or how many customers, how many potential customers have to see your website or see your ad before they convert into a sale, or even a lead. So it has to be something you’re comfortable with. You have to have enough for it to be impactful for, you know, a few hundred dollars generally a month would be pretty minimal. So you want to be looking at it in that framework. But if you know you have a high value customer, a lot of times people take a portion of what that first sale will be.

If your first customers walk in the door and spend a thousand dollars, you could easily calculate: I’m willing to spend 200 bucks to acquire one customer. And then I’m going to test a campaign—say I’m going to spend it a thousand dollars over the course of a month and kind of see what leads I get, how the response is and formulate it there. So it’s really important to know what your lifetime value of your customer is. But a lot of business owners, that’s a sticking point for them. They’re not too well-versed in that. In that scenario, I usually suggest, if you know your profit per month, take a percentage of that, that you’re comfortable with, whether that’s 10, 25% of your profit, try to utilize that for finding future customers, because that’s going to help bring leads into your funnel, without getting too technical, of like you’re building up an audience that you could sell to next month. You always want to be bringing people in of interest so that you’re not struggling, you’re all of a sudden, “Oh, I don’t have enough customers this month or this week. And now I don’t know what to do. I need to just spend enough money to keep the doors open.” You want to be trickling that out, and being better about optimizing or refining that, so that people are able to find you amongst the other free ways that you’re promoting yourself or improving your website. So I’d just kind of pick something that you’re comfortable with, whether that’s $100, $200, or, if you have a 10k budget, great, I probably wouldn’t throw it all at once. I’d probably slowly ramp up, but it’s deciding what you can sustain as a business and try to lure in more people to see your message.

Jill McKenna:
So, some broader questions, and transitioning to just some things I hear from: I know a lot of entrepreneurs, I know a lot of small business owners, and I see some patterns develop once their businesses is maybe a little bit established, but they’re not totally sure what to do next. And marketing or advertising can seem really overwhelming, and like something that would be a time-suck to learn and start doing. So. I’m curious if you can give a brief overview of some of the best channels for advertising for small businesses. What’s the best return on investment they can seek through some channels?

David Lambert:
Sure. There’s a lot out there, so it is easy to get daunted. I would say probably, my favorite channels, especially starting out, are generally Facebook or Google search ads. And those are for two different reasons, Google search ads, you can really get to the intent of someone. So when someone types something into Google, flowers nearby, or pool cleaners in Houston, Texas, and you see the ads pop up before the organic results, and those are people bidding on those strings of words, they’re keywords, they can be phrases, and it’s really easy to get to that intent. They cost more than, say, going to Facebook, but you know that person is actually looking for your service. So it’s easier to get into that mindset and craft your message to someone looking for pool cleaning in Texas, rather than interrupting their feed through Facebook.

And that’s more if you’re a service business. I feel like that’s really strong if you offer a service, just because you can talk to that person looking for that right now. So you have a good chance of getting there, but it’s going to cost you a little bit more for someone to click on your ad, say, five to a hundred dollars per click, depending on the audience. Like, if you’re a dentist, you’re going to be paying quite a bit of money for that click, but if you’re a pool service cleaner, it might be $15, $20 in your area. It’s an auction, so it’s hard to say just flat out, but that wouldn’t be uncommon. For Facebook, you’re kind of interrupting. They’re searching for other things, or reading news articles. And the cost is much, much cheaper. So a cost per click in that scenario could be a dollar or two; $10 would be pretty high for Facebook, depending on your segment. It could be well above that. But for general small businesses, I think that that’s realistic.

But that ad is shown to many, many more people if you set it up in that way. So even if they’re not clicking, hundreds of people are going to see your graphic. And it’s a good way to kind of establish brand, especially for consumer products like sunglasses, or food products, or something I could buy on Amazon and ship to my house in two days, those perform really well on Facebook, not that services don’t, but it just takes a little bit longer, because you’re interrupting their search. They weren’t thinking about pool cleaners necessarily.

And then they have to kind of categorize that in their mind. And if you’re shown to them several times, then it’s likely that they could convert, or they could be more interested, but it’s not as direct to the conversation as say, Google search ads would be. So I think that those are probably the best, and they’re also the biggest platforms. So if you figure those out for your business, it becomes a big staple of your marketing campaigns, and you can refine and have these new, very well-known channels that are very effective, if you figure out your formula for your audience.

Jill McKenna:
Awesome. How does a business owner go about knowing which channels might be best for them? Are there certain channels that are better for certain industries? You explained a little bit of that, but I’m wondering if there’s a hard and fast rule for some of that.

David Lambert:
I wouldn’t say super hard and fast. It tends to be a little split that way, where I would say physical services, or like people powered services, Google does a really good job. If I’m looking for an accountant, if I’m looking for a trusted professional, I think Google is just better about that. It’s more likely that they’re going to see your website. So you have more real estate for them to actually click, because they’re looking for that. So it tends to be a little higher value, but Facebook is super good about digital services. If you’re selling widgets, if you’re selling marketing services, if you’re selling some ebook, or even Amazon books, those are kind of the impulse, lower value, is a really good way for a lot of companies to start out there. But I wouldn’t say that if you’re in this segment, you can’t advertise on both.

I’ve seen it work across the board. There are ways that I would tend to go and test out. That’s the fun thing about advertising, or the not-fun thing if it’s your dollars and they’re not directly turning, but it is sort of experimenting on every channel. The investment level also really dictates where you’re going to go. Most people can’t… The small business, their first venture in advertising—I would pick one channel and really try to walk up your experience and see kind of the feedback you’re getting from it, whether that’s web traffic, whether you’re starting to get leads, rather than say, “alright, we’re ready to go, we’re ready to advertise—let’s go on all channels.”

I think that that’s the biggest thing that holds people back when they’re doing small businesses—”I need to be everywhere, right now, all the time.” And that’s really not the case. I find you’ve got to put your effort in one area and you can have it split up a little bit, but you really want to figure out one channel, whether that’s getting your website dialed in, whether that is getting a Facebook profile where people are starting to interact and comment on your stuff, or whether that’s trying Google search ads, or display ads, or YouTube if you happen to have video content, and then trying to figure—once you get some legs there and are sustainable—then you can start to think about bringing on these other channels and broadening your audience to your products.

Jill McKenna:
With that train of thought, what are some easy ways to advertise that people often look past? Often, it feels so overwhelming, we think we’ve got to reinvent the wheel, and we kind of dive in the deep end and then we feel overwhelmed and quit our efforts. So what are ways that small business owners and entrepreneurs can look at advertising in just small ways to see if they’re happy with what it might yield?

David Lambert:
Sure. I always think the most underrated campaign is not direct advertising, but word of mouth. I think we overlook that so much as just businesses in general. It’s not that well understood. I would put money toward your customer referral programs or anything, because you have someone that’s happy with your service. It can act like an advertising avenue, if you say to your happy customers, “You refer someone, we love the business.” Especially if you’re a small business, making a case, people love to help out services that they really enjoy. So I would think about putting together a program where for every sold referral, you give them some incentive, whether that’s 50 bucks, whether that’s 10% of the sale. I think that that’s a really good avenue, and it really helps you think about some of the biggest assets you have, which are your customers, and people really take recommendations and testimonials very, very highly. It’s a channel that I’d really look at.

From an advertising perspective, ones that we haven’t really hit on are, it’s a little more difficult, but those influencers, they can be really beneficial to your company if they speak directly to your customers. Or even better, is partnering with a company that’s aligned with you, but not competitive. So if they’re complimentary, that’s a really good channel to get into. So if you sell digital marketing, like SEO, search engine optimization, but that’s all you do, and you find a company that does graphic design, or they do web design, try to partner up with another small business and say, “Hey, we can pass referrals back and forth. Here’s a finder’s fee for it both ways.” That’s a really good way to try to utilize some business, because a lot of people get leads that they can’t fulfill.

So, either finding a complimentary service, or people at different stages of company size. If you’re better at working with really small businesses, it’s likely that a bigger ad agency or service provider, that’s not a good customer for them just for how they practice business. So if you can come help underneath and support customers, or leads that they’re already getting, that’s a good way to start capturing that and figure out some agreement there.