This week, Bill sits down with Jennifer Sutton, expert in research-driven marketing strategy. Jennifer is the founder/CEO of Bright Marketing and the founder of Orange WIP, a media company that supports entrepreneurs. She brings over two decades of experience in media and brand strategy, helping businesses uncover gaps, refine positioning, and accelerate growth.
Bill and Jennifer dive deep into the importance of market research in B2B and manufacturing marketing, why many companies struggle with sales and marketing alignment, and how challenger brands disrupt legacy players. They also discuss the role of AI in marketing, strategies for breaking out of stagnant growth, and why agencies should be seen as strategic partners and "brand counselors," rather than just service providers.
The Role of Research in B2B Marketing
Challenges in Market Positioning
Marketing & Sales Alignment: The Missing Link
Leveraging AI for Smarter Marketing
Practical Strategies for Growth
Don’t miss out on transforming your B2B marketing strategy.
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Jennifer: It's like, we don't like to make guesses in our own business. Why would we allow our clients to make guesses? And big, big decisions that they've got to make. And I think also just kind of telling, getting the category, the market, especially the B2B players more comfortable of agencies are your friend. We know how to look at, we can help craft, but we're just the messenger, right? We're just uncovering the gaps, but we'll help make those gaps, we'll close them, remove the friction and make, you know, let's achieve the goals that everybody set forth, but we are not the enemy for sure.
Intro
Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. I'm Bill Woods. Today we have a special guest with us, Jennifer Sutton. And Jennifer is a three-time founder, four-time mom who has dedicated her career to helping build healthier and sustainable brands. She founded Bright Marketing in 2013, a now multi-million dollar marketing and advertising agency, and in 2022 founded Orange WIP, a media company that aims to connect the local markets and support founders. With her expertise in research and insights, she designs research studies and purpose-built workshops for leadership teams. With Orange WIP, she also hosts the weekly podcast for founders, Hello Chaos. Welcome and thank you for joining us today, Jennifer.
Jennifer: Hey, thank you. I appreciate being on here. And I will say it's orange wip, like WIP because it's work in progress because that's what we all are. We are all a work in progress.
Bill: I love it. I love it. So Jennifer, obviously you have a lot of experience as a three times founder and more probably as a four time mom. I mean, you have a wealth of experience to draw from, but maybe just tell us a little bit about what brought you to this point and how your start as a research designer really led you on this journey.
Jennifer: Yeah, so, you know, when I started out in agency, which is right after school, you know, out of college, I'm probably one of the only very rare birds that actually is is doing what I went to school for. Which I know is very, but, you know, I jumped into agency right after school. And when you go work for a large agency and you're not like, especially like creative or you just want to go into account service or specialty in like PR, writing, they throw you in the media department. that's like, don't, you you're getting acclimated. So you get to learn all the terms, how advertising works behind the scenes, how to read data. And because of, I had a degree in research design, I could actually, not just look at the data, but I could go and look at studies that were done in a lot of these trade industries and go, this wasn't a well done study. They didn't get enough people, the questions are designed poorly. So these things are gonna be mushy, mushy data to make big, a lot of these companies were making big dollar decisions based on that data. So you climb through the ranks of an agency of having that knowledge. I spent over two decades in media where you have to look at all the data to know media consumption behaviors, where are people consuming, where are the specific targets consuming, how to spend your dollars very wisely. Even if somebody has $50 million, you're still being scrutinized to go talk to a client. Because guess what, when it doesn't work, when that $50 million campaign doesn't work, they don't go yell at the creative team. They yell at the media team because that's who recommended that spend level. So you've got to have your rationale. You need to know why you chose what you chose, how to look at the post data to go, ooh. That didn't perform the way we needed to perform. How do we pivot? But most importantly, it's like, how do you read the data, the pre-planning data to help prepare briefs, to help coach the creative team to go, is how you need to design. This is the message. This is how it's gonna perform best on this media outlet. And really having that integration between, you know, it's media and message. And I think that's been lost for the most part, especially like if you're not in a big agency or working on a big brand, a lot of people haven't kind of learned that. And you see that, you know, when you go, who doesn't observe that when they go even on like in packaging, you go to a, into a grocery store, you're watching something on TV, or you see an ad and you're like, that's being now served to you directly, and you're going, why am I being served this? Or this is, I can't even read this. Who would even put this out? You can't even read it. But that's really, that's how I kind of grew in the agency world is, knowing how to read data, knowing how to plan advertising frameworks, how to prepare creative teams really led me to become more of a brand strategist. At the same time, being able to dot connect around marketing operations, advertising planning, to make sure that all assets are being utilized at the nth degree. Because after you start an agency and you know, you own your own business now can feel, you know, now I feel my client's pain of writing those checks or work. Or when I opened the agency, it was really, we saw a gap in the business community of, wow, there's a lot of companies who cannot afford a big, big agency. There's a lot of companies that don't even know that agencies exist to outsource their marketing and advertising too. And that's where I was like, man, I can take all this learning that we did, you know, we got over 20 plus years and I can break it down into a place where we can really help accelerate, you know, mid-size companies, small businesses to really get them to achieve their goals because branding, marketing, and advertising are three different frameworks, and you and I work on this, nobody really knows the difference.
Bill: Yep, it's all the same. It's all that stuff we do. And one of the things I think you just said is very important and it's missing in the approach that a lot of people take today is we have to understand the modern value proposition of the services we deliver. And they do cost money. They are an investment. But if we're enabled as an agency to activate not only like that branding, that marketing, but then if we can also then integrate with the silos of sales, the silos of customer service, like in those different areas of a company, we can leverage the investment in those assets the entire way through the potential customer, current customer and customer service experience. And we need to do that. I think we, we, as an industry of marketing agencies need to need to do a better job of communicating that to our clients or being more forceful about it because it is competitive. We have to provide more value. And I think we're starting to see people accept that we're not just there to run ads. We’re not just there to like come up with that next slogan or that positioning statement. Yeah.
Jennifer: Or just content, just I need somebody to post three times on Facebook.
Bill: Your role as a researcher and your education in that space and then your professional development in that space, what are some pieces of data or areas of data that you feel companies have been missing the mark on really looking at? And maybe when you've been able to go in and uncover data that helps contribute towards great strategy and great planning and just run with that. Yeah.
Jennifer: Yeah, so I'm gonna work it backwards, because this is how we usually uncover things. We usually start with the discovery of like, what do you want to achieve, right? And a lot of times we get, I want to hit, I want to be 1 billion in revenue within three years, or I want to be 250 in a year, whatever. And it's like, okay, well. What's the action plan that you're gonna get there? And it's shocking that there is no plan in place.
Bill: No, it's a dream. It's a dream.
Jennifer: It's a dream and we're usually working with the marketing team, VP of marketing, VP of sales, and it becomes like, they're looking at us like, well, we just need to get there. I'm working on a marketing. They're like, I'm working on a marketing plan. And it becomes a tactical comms plan, not strategic. And that's where we start kind of working, and we do best when we start working with true leadership in the company, and that's where they can see the shift of, oh this is what marketing does. These are the questions I should be getting from marketing. This is the framework I should be asking myself as a company leader of okay, you want to hit that one billion in revenue. Okay. Well, what's the makeup of your customer base today? You know, is that, is it 80% coming from 20%? Where's the market? And you know, where's the market going? And have you grown just because the market has grown your category? And when, and so I have like a list of questions. I go, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. And it's, and I will only get answers to about three out of the 50 questions. And most, and a lot of it is these like big assumptions of, I don't know why we grew. Like we just, we've grown flat. We grew 30% year over year and now we've just been plateaued. Well, why is that? Have you guys uncovered the category in the market? There's a lot of secondary data out there that exists that you don't even have to pull. But it's like, or it's have you lost customers? You know, have you, have you plateaued because your churn, your, client churn, your customer churn, you've lost business to a new, you know, somebody that's new in the space. Oh I've not thought about that. Yeah, we've lost to them. Well, why? What are they saying? And then, you know, then it becomes like we go through the branding exercises, right, of what makes you unique? Why are people doing business with you today? Why aren't they? Why are you losing sales? Why are people, you know, when your contract's over, if it's a six month contract or if it was a 90 day trial or if it's a 10 year contract, why are they not renewing? Well, I don't know. Well, you know what, maybe we should do some research around that. Let's design some like a customer satisfaction. What's your net promoter score? What's some other like key indicators to go, you know, you think that these are your strengths and this is what you think is relevant and meaningful to the market, and a lot of times those assumptions are wrong. I would say there's usually when we do big studies like that, and they're not, when I say big studies, they're important studies to those companies. They're not greatly expensive. I mean, it's less than an ad campaign. You're so busy out there. But like the data you'll uncover is so, you know, it validates about 70% of what you think. And then the 30% is like the shit, the aha, the whoa, I didn't know that the market thought that way or I didn't think people thought of us in that way, whether it's positive or negative. Sometimes it's like, hey, you got, people know who you are, they recognize you, but there is no saliency. So that's not good either. That means they can't recommend you, they can't think of like, of who you, it's too neutral. If you think of it as like celebrities, they do cue scores of like how it helps them figure out who's gonna hire them for like the big movie gigs. If their score comes in and it's too like, yeah, I know them, but I don't know enough about them to either love them or hate them, they don't get hired. Brands are the same way. Companies are the same way. So it's like, how are you are you gauging in that? Because a lot of times people build, these companies build their brands based on more intrinsic, right? This is what I do well. This is what I think the market, this is what I think the problem I'm solving. This is where I think the market wants, but they've never validated it because sometimes they just get in the market and they're growing and they're doing business. And that could be going on for 10 years, 20 years, 40 years. And all of a it starts going, okay, well, are we comfortable with this? Is this a 1% growth? Are we comfortable with just a 5% growth? And the CEOs or the board of directors are going to go, this market, we're seeing a growth of this industry of 20%. Why are we only growing 1%? But some of those conversations aren't trickling down to the marketing team. Because the CEO or that leadership thinks of marketing as an admin. Those are the people that just respond to who comes on our website. Those are the people that just put together our graphics and our materials versus getting those people around the table because marketing people probably have some of those answers if they've been doing their job well and looking at the data. So that's kind of like working at it from the branding side of it. Coming in from it from like an ad side of how we usually get stuff revealed is we'll take over an ad campaign. It's like, OK, I need to get 20 leads a week. And we start asking questions like, OK, well, what's your close rate? So if I get like, what's the sales process? Well, what do you mean by sales process? All right, let's talk through that. Because we're being judged on, you're judging us not just on lead gen, but you're judging us on revenue. Like, are you meeting your revenue goals? So I need to know what your sales process is like. And when we hear things like, well, we don't really have a sales, or I have a sales person, that's not a process. Or so those are kind of triggers, you know that. Or it's like, okay, you know, I usually, once I get leads, we have a 60% close rate. I was like, great, is there any slippage? Like, what's the process? You get a lead. Do you make a phone call? Do we need a nurture via an email? How are you getting it to physically on the phone? And then what happens there? And it's amazing how people, a lot of companies, like we're working with a company that has 30 salespeople. This process isn't written out. It's not documented. It is not systematized. To be able to figure out how to optimize, and that's where we start looking and going, okay, so. If we give you 20 leads a week, you're saying that they typically, 10 of those will turn into a proposal. Out of those 10, five are actually being closed upon. And within a 90 day cycle or a six month cycle. And just asking those questions through the, like what's the process to a sale. A lot of the salespeople might kind of know it, but it's not really more quantifiable. They just know it more intuitive. It's not documented. But the marketing people most of the time don't know those answers at all.
Bill: Yeah, if you have a company that claims that they have a 60% close rate, then I'm going to argue that they have a data collection and attribution problem, that they're not properly recording the marketing qualified lead to sales qualified. There is a discount somewhere in the process that is unnatural and inaccurate because nobody closes 60%. And if they do, they're not talking to you and I because they have so many sales that they're like through the roof, right?
Jennifer: That's right. There's no problem. They're not looking for an agency shift, right? And then we're like, there's no, we call it slippage. There's no slippage? Like there's no like, you know, gaps in that. And what happens when we start turning stuff on and a lot of times they're like, you know, you get people that are posturing. They're like, I know what, you know, I know how to do this. And we always, we've got to be very open, approachable because we can't be, we're not the enemy. Like we're just uncovering. But we tell that in our onboarding story. Like we're walking with you, but it's gonna be like therapy. You're gonna uncover data and it might scare you, but that's okay. It's the reality of it. And we just gotta create an action plan to close the gaps. Smooth out the friction, close the gaps. But that's how we kind of know, you know. Okay, you think you have a 60% close rate? All right, well, it comes out, it's a, you know, they really have a five, like, it's a 5% close rate. Or there's gaps in their process of you get the lead. Hey, you, you know, we had a company that literally is like, it's going to this phone number, you know, that we're tracking it. Somebody is not answering the phone. Right? You know, and the CEO was like, What? Who? We're like, well, whoever you have on between this time and this time, they're not answering the call. Oh and by the way, when they do answer it, here's the recording. We gotta help you with a script. We also have had clients that make it really difficult to close a sale, to do the sale. Or even sometimes even get the lead. You and I think I've talked about this in the B2B space. You push people to a landing page that has a booking link and then all of a sudden that booking link has 10 freaking fields in it. And you have the abandonment of, I was like, man, we had 500 people start that process and only five people have come through. Like, can we just not make it easier? You're gonna ask all these same questions, right? Your salesperson's gonna ask all those same questions. What is it doing? Oh no, and the salespeople, oh I need all that. Do you? What's more important, lead collection that we can then nurture and you get on the phone and book, let's book your calendar up versus only having conversations with five people that made it through that form, that you're gonna repeat those same questions and frustrate that user and then only close one out of the five because the others were either didn't show up or were so turned off by the process that, you know. They found other companies to do business with. Again, it like starts out with those kind of, why do people do business with you? Why aren't they doing business with you? Who were they doing business with? And why do you think? And then let's go validate those assumptions through some surveys, either with your current customers, if you have an exit survey of why they left, can get really good information there, or just polling the market in that industry to see how do you rank among your competitors to go, you know, these companies, like you're in a top of mind awareness that people are like, I know this, but I know nothing about them. Well, your tactics then are gonna be completely different for those that either have heard about you but really know nothing more or don't even know about you unless it's prompted. And then when it's prompted, it's like, I think they do, you know, I've heard they only do this type of service or however, whatever attributes. And you're like, that's what people think of us, you know, in this marketplace? And that's what it's like. Those are those ah-hahs. But all those drivers, when you look at like your funnel, every, you know, there's different tactics to hit those funnels, but those are what you're going to build your action plan around. It's based on the data. Do I need to build awareness? Do I need to build consideration and preference like saliency? Do people think about me the way that I want them to think about? And then how do you fix the operations, the marketing and sales operations to actually nurture the lead, bring them in the pipeline and close the sale as quickly as possible?
Bill: Well, and I think if we go back to the example you started with of the, we have a billion dollar brand that is now flat. I think the first thing, and you brought up a good point, let's look at the industry and what's the CAGR. What's the compounded annual growth rate that's being experienced in the industry? And if there's a variance from what they're experiencing as to what the industry is doing, that's a very non-debatable point that we can frame the discussion with. The next step is then, and I think you alluded to it, we have challenger brands who are doing better, who are coming in on our turf, grabbing market share. And I have a theory as to two of the most important items that companies need to look at. Number one is they need to do more voice of customer research and voice of client research because what the challenger brands are doing is they're being more nimble and they're responding more quickly to the market and this older, more mature, more longevity in the market has become stale, stop listening. And then, so that's one, is voice of customer, which kind of ties into your research. Then the second point would be 75% of the buyer's journey for B2B happens online before you contact sales. That's kind of the numbers.
Jennifer: That's right. And when you say online, it is social and the website.
Bill: Yes, video, YouTube, anywhere, anywhere they can get it where they don't have to talk to a salesperson and challenger brands and the people who are experiencing that growth are listening to the customers more, more quickly. They're responding to those pain points more accurately, and then they're communicating more extensively across the entire internet. That's where most companies are losing.
Jennifer: Yes, I agree with you and I'm gonna throw some other stuff in there too. So one, a lot of companies don't even recognize what their market share is. So like if it's you’re a billion dollar company and they've gone plateau, you know, we kind of come in and go, well, what's your market? Like, do you own the market? Like are you 70% of the market share, which is like we've seen that where they are the behemoth and there's not much more they can do to grow. But what they need to do is then, you go, I gotta defend and retain my turf. And so, yeah, it becomes, you can't just like rest on your laurels because you've gotta still, how do you then excel in service? How do you, making sure that your processes are all about responsiveness or whatever you need to do to retain. So like your sales shift and a lot of organizations, I think, don't do this enough where they go, I've got this sales team. Well, I'm just gonna have them continue to sell. So it's like, you need to probably think of your reorganization to go, I need to shift these bodies to then become more account service people. I need to shift my systems and to look at the structure that way. Because you're right, what's happening in these markets, if somebody is an older company or they have gone, you know, the reason they've probably gone stagnant is exactly what you said, if they've kind of lost the ability to serve and listen to the customers because, and especially if you've got these behemoth brands in some of these categories, this is where the startup, the entrepreneur is coming into play. They're looking at the gaps in that category because they've either worked in the industry, they might have even worked for the company and said, I see a pain point. And I mean, we're working with four startup brands that are well-funded, but they are entering into categories that are owned by two large competitors that own like 60%. But when they did their market research, the customer, the buyer was saying, we need a third alternative. We are dying. If you just come in the market and you just are competitive, we will flock to you. So we've seen that in four different industries, life science and biomedical. We've seen that in industrial and in manufacturing. But they're looking for the third. They're looking for the fourth because whoever kind of owns the market share today, they're unhappy. But they have done the listening. They have said, ooh, there's a place for us to come in. Sometimes it's technology. A lot of times it's just service. It's just coming in with a little bit uniqueness in there, nimbleness, their ability to react, respond, and provide a better customer experience. The product might be the exact same but just in the delivery and these companies are excelling, like accelerating and grabbing market share because they did do the market research. They did hear, this what I think of these companies. This is how, you wanna come into this space, this is what we would like to see.
Bill: So I love this conversation about research and how it impacts just about every aspect of what we do and should impact corporate strategy more. Two points. One, think the knee-jerk reaction of established brands and challenger brands is it's always price. And the reality is if you do the research, the pain points are not specifically in industrial manufacturing. We don't do a lot of biotech or life sciences, but it's not always price. It's more about service, supply chain fragility. There's a number of other levers that are very, very important. And the impact of research and proper market strategy can go well beyond just getting leads and that type of thing can help you position your company so that you don't have to race to the bottom and take lower margin to maintain your dominance or to be a challenger brand that breaks in. Are you seeing that with these clients?
Jennifer: Oh yeah, so part of the brand exercise that we take clients through and you spoke really well about that, how do you position? Where's your uniqueness, your value proposition? What do you come to the table with that is relevant and meaningful and different than anybody else in that category? And how do you uncover that? How do you talk about it? But a lot of that is doing that market research. And when you look at any buyer, especially like in B2B, our human, our human brain. We make decisions really off of three, I call positioning frameworks. And that is price, right? And by the way, there's only one price leader in a category. So if you're competing on price, but that's not how you're like, there's only one Walmart. And there's a Walmart for a reason, right? Because they have created their entire operation and their brand, their whole brand. Now, not everything is cheaper, right? But they’ve positioned themselves to be the low price leader in the market. So that's the challenge if you're like, if so, if you're like all about price, and that's like, unless you're the first, and that's how you've positioned your entire company, then you're going to lose every single time on the price conversation. But the other levers are you can, you are, buyers make a decision on again, low price or price conversation, product. So positioning on product, whether that's depth or breadth or quality, best in class, that, you know, type of thing, or, and then service. And when we say service, it is, it's the experience. So are you the Disney of your category? And there's ones that you can really straddle the fence between two. So if you wanna come in and be more like a Target that's a value brand, because price, like low price positioning versus no, no, no, we do really good products, but at a reasonable price. We bring value. Or you can do price to service of convenience. But what are the convenience levers in the industry? In B2B, a lot of it is nimbleness, it's responsiveness, is the experience online. If you sell products, it a virtual showroom that somebody can walk through? Is there a walk around of a product that I, so I don't have to go physically and see it? So is it again, easy to do business with what's the experience? Is the personality of everybody that I talked to cheery, you know, is it like, you know, it's a great day at BRIGHT Co., you know, that kind of a, is that the personality, the Disney, the Disney experience, or is it all about product? Are we the Nordstrom in our category? Are we the Brooks Brothers of the category of the, you know what, nobody's gonna have finer products than us. Like we are the elite when it comes to products. But our human brains, it only accepts really those three kind of decision levers. And within each of those, there's different like value, we call them value dimensions of if you're gonna be a product positioned brand, you gotta plant your flag and it's gotta be infused in every touch point. So that means that you know, you better be doing research when you come up with the product itself. Like if you're an industrial manufacturer, are you engineering it in a way that's elegant? That is, you know, might have, I'm just like, my client of ours was, forklifts, right? So it's like, are these comfortable? Like, they, do we have an elegant design? Do, you know, the steering, all of that. Like, how do we represent that? Or again, it's an experienced brand. And it's fine when we talk with clients, they're like, well, I want to be all three. You can't, you can't. Like, operationally, you can't be the best product with the best customer experience at the lowest price. Operationally, it's unstable. And that's what we call, like, there's so many case studies of brands year over year for the last hundred years, anybody that's tried to position in those three are bankrupt. They're brands that go no longer. And it's not anything, and then somebody's like, well, okay, this year I want to be product, and next year I'll be service. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, that's not how works. You gotta plant your, you know, you kinda plant your flag in one of those areas. And that's how you position your, that's how you talk about your company. That's how you teach your people. Like that becomes part of your culture of hiring and how you want others to talk about. But you gotta uncover the market of like, what does it mean to be, have product excellence? What does it mean to be service excellent, you know, to those, to the market? Cause you'll be really surprised what comes like, what are the words that people use that comes out of that? And then how do you, and you're like, whoa, we match up like out of the 20 words that the, you know, the client or the customers, the market was saying is really important. We match those, those are our strengths and they all kind of fall into like experience category. Well, maybe we're an experience brand. And because you got to be competitive, every company has to be competitive in all three. I mean, you can't come in and say, like, we're gonna, we have the best product, we're gonna be 10 times as much, right? Or we're gonna have the best service and our product ships. Like you can't do that. You've got to be competitive in all three of those buckets. But it's real, it's like, where are you going to position to really stand out? And that's really what crafts a brand. And it just, decisions become really, really easy to make at a leadership level. When you go, need to be an experienced brand. And our customers want, you know, in this market, they want a virtual showroom. They want to be able to have a product selector on your website that they can go, this is what I need. Here's my, and now give me three choices of what you have. And can I do a one click purchase? So that means, oh gosh, I gotta then invest in my digital architecture and my digital infrastructure to have a website that's tied into my CRM, that's tied into my ERP, so that I can elegantly serve the customer in that way. Or you do a product positioning and you're like, we do the best product. But man, we're losing money. Well, maybe you should do some research to go, are you over-engineering your product?
Bill: Oh sure. Well and I think one of the challenges that a lot of industrial B2B manufacturing companies face is to get to the framework and the mindset that you're talking about, you need to be a mission driven organization. And then that, you know, waterfalls from there. That is a very difficult place for many companies that have been operating for 30, 40, 100 years, and they make stuff and they were enamored with things and features and benefits to then move into the framework of being mission-driven and picking one and living and dying by that. So I think that's one of the challenges then. And as you said, decisions and campaigns and momentum at the organization becomes easier if you have that clear vision.
Jennifer: Right. If you know your positioning of kind of like that pattern and you know, we sit, what I call our brand discovery workshops and our process, it's therapy for a lot of the, you know, we're counselors, but a lot of it's brand therapy. And we kind of look at it to go, you've got a brand, you've grown, you have owned this market for 50 years or eight, it's a legacy brand. But just like anything else, your home, there needs maintenance. Sometimes you need a like a facelift, right? You got a home that's built in the 70s, maybe the basement needs some new polish and tightening of the, sealing up all the gaps or this looks like a 70s or an 80s Brady home. I want a new facelift on the outside so people think of me differently. And same with like, you know, and same with like ourselves, we all personally like, okay, now I've aged myself, now it's time I need to, you know, I need a facelift. I think companies and brands, I think we need to normalize that it's okay to do that. Like, you need to kind of know different of you go in interest, like you have a marriage. You got to go through counseling. Sometimes you've got to like say, hey, let's take a step back. Like we've had some challenges here. How do we move forward? I think we just, I think for a lot of times these companies that are maybe they're, it's like the CEOs, these like, they know something's wrong, but they don't know. Like they don't under, or they're like, have I done something? Like, no, it's just might be time. Like you got to, it's an old house. It's time to do a little refresh. We need a new roof. We needed some new paint. Maybe we want to change up the color. You know, but maybe we need some new landscaping. Like it's just kind of going through that. We need a new voice. We will because you know, it's it's it's just natural and normal to do that.
Bill: Well and I think this pivots into another topic I wanted to discuss with you, which is AI. Whenever we look at what you've just described as a need, there's a gap in the market where mid-sized companies, so let's say anything sub 500 million, right? They don't have a staff of 20 people in marketing. They don't have millions and millions. Like these are for more of your entrepreneurial startup, mid-sized companies. I would argue that the pain of the refresh, the pain of the remodel can be less than it ever was because you can leverage experts in agencies, fractional CMOs, whatever channel you choose to go with for your human interaction. And those folks who are adopting AI, they can move so much faster. There's so much more, like we don't need millions of dollars that may have been needed 20 years ago to run these expensive focus groups and like we can move very rapidly and…
Jennifer: Yeah, the tools that we use to uncover, to survey, to poll, to do usability, you know, it is a third of what we used to have to spend to like uncover that data. But I think it's also, you gotta have people that really know how to use the tools.
Bill: Yes. Yeah. Just having the tools. I can buy. So I can buy masonry tools. I can go to Home Depot. I can leave this call right now and go buy masonry tools and plastering tools. The outcome of me performing that function will not be consistent with someone who has done that for years and years and years and has tons of experience. It'll probably be a wall. It may fall over. But I can get a wall. They can do things where it's got a pattern and it's very beautiful and aesthetic and functional. I may only be able to accomplish one of those things. So you're exactly right. Having the tools is one thing, knowing how to use them is another. And I think when we look at the value proposition of what does it cost anymore to really fix those problems, to start to address and get on the path to correcting them. The accessibility and availability and affordability have those have never coincided at such a great place for companies, but they just need to admit they have a problem and take that first step and contact somebody, right?
Jennifer: That's right, that's right. Exactly. I mean, we've helped companies kind of make that shift to go, do you really need 20 salespeople? With the tools that are out there today, with marketing automation, you might only need two salespeople. And shift to be, because customer service operation, instead of paying 20, six, seven figure, you know, in commissions and all that, you pay two or three people really, really well and have some lower level admins that run customer service, but use tools to amplify the sales process, right? So you've got that, but definitely in like market, you just with content creation, you gotta know how to use the tools, how to craft the prompts, and then look at stuff on the other end to go, does this match up with, is this really the right voice? How do we make sure that we have a really good editor, a creative oversight? Because that's where we've seen failure, of agencies that have gone straight AI and it's like, whoof. Mistakes are happening or inconsistent because people are using different tools. Some tools are better than the other. But the uniqueness of the voices, the personalities, or the look and feel is getting is we're losing the uniqueness of it. So having kind of that creative editor play that oversight is key. You need somebody that really has that experience on the back, not just on the front end, but on the back end.
Bill: Well and the premise we're taking to market with this at 50 Marketing is that we're working to use more tools to make us faster so we can deliver more value. And there are steps in the mid-market we've had to skip for the best decade because our clients didn't have budget and we had to, you know, burn dry powder on other things because we didn't have the tools. Now we have tools that accelerate our efficiency and where we feel the market demand is going and the value that our clients are going to demand from us is that we go and do voice of customer research. It's very difficult to get clients to buy into affording that. But whenever you can say, the retainer last year was X and this next year we have a lot of tools, innovation, people, process tools, improvements that we're going to become more efficient. We can deliver more for less, but don't spend less, add in the things we should be doing that the big brands, that the Fortune 500 companies are doing more efficiently and be better. And I think that, I think the agencies that adopt that are going to be very successful. I think those that just become the AI only, I'm going to kind of rip people off because I'm just going to plug it into AI and whatever spits out, I'm going to put it online and we're good to go. I think that's going to be a very short-lived exercise and experiment. And I think by 2026, those folks are not going to maintain their competitive positioning or their value proposition in the market.
Jennifer: Right. Let's hope so, because they're cluttering up the space. Same with using AI for SEO, but really not knowing how to gauge. Is it really working or not? I think it's kind of cluttered up. But also, I think agencies that also aren't adapting AI in their own operational efficiency. We've seen some other agencies that have all in-house creative staff full time and I'm like, whoa, like that, the nimbleness isn't there, like, and it's expensive and clients also aren't willing to pay that much in value for a, I’ll call it manual creative team. So we've got a blend of like our, like we've, we've adopted AI, so our strategists are really using it to then create better briefs for our creative team, but also kind of taking it a step further to go, hey, here's some language, here's some headers, or here's like some ad concepts to react to. And so we've used our full, like more of our people, our creative people, their brains to be more creative oversight, push us to the next level of the concepting and then being really good creative editors on the backend to go, let me clean that up so it really matches the brand and makes it more unique and distinctive in the marketplace. Or let me clean up the, not just visuals, but then the words, to go that sounds too artificial. How do we make, because we still, we can still recognize that it is human, right? That sounds AI. So how do we leverage that? But yeah, to your point, I think the agencies like ours that are using data, knows how to use the tools to do more voice of the customer, understanding what's happening on, and also looking at the data to go, we're not seeing the pipeline movement like we should. How do we then adjust? Like we see that transparency, but then react. Like we're just gonna go ahead and make the change based on what we see. So our clients don't have to, we're not waiting for them to tell us, right? We're just doing it. So we get the movement.
Bill: So Jennifer, this has been a great conversation. I think.
Jennifer: I know, it's like we could keep going for a long time. Sorry for the rambling.
Bill: So no, no, this is great. And I think, you know, the theme that we've really, we've really circled around and touched on so many times here is the research and how important it is to inform our decision-making, our strategy. And when we can create that alignment based on good data and proper research techniques, I think that is part of the future. AI or not. Whatever other levers you want to pull on the delivery, on the execution, strategy is number one. We have to do the research if we're going to move forward in an efficient way.
Jennifer: And they do not make, it's like, we don't like to make guesses in our own business. Why would we allow our clients to make guesses? And big, big decisions that they've got to make. And I think also just kind of telling, getting the category, the market, especially the B2B players more comfortable of agencies are your friend. We know how to look at, we can help craft, but we're just the messenger, right? We're just uncovering the gaps, but we'll help make those gaps, we'll close them, remove the friction and make, you know, let's achieve the goals that everybody set forth, but we are not the enemy for sure.
Bill: Well, Jennifer, know geographically you guys are located in the upstate in South Carolina, correct? In that region. So we also want to make sure that you have a moment for an absolutely shameless plug. How to get in all of your contact details and those type of things will be distributed in YouTube and on all of the episodes and that type of thing. But if you just want to give a little plug for you and your business and how people can get a hold of you, we want to make that available to you.
Jennifer: I appreciate that. So it's Bright Marketing. Yes, we're headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina, but we actually serve clients all over. We have clients actually in California. I think with digital and Teams and all of that, we can expand kind of our footprint. We're a full-service branding, marketing, and advertising agency where we identify the friction in a business to then mend those gaps to accelerate the company. And we can do it whether it's a marketing, you know, fixing branding, marketing or advertising problem. You can find us on our website, gobrightnow.com or if you want to get a hold of me and if you like I have, you can book an appointment with me, you can chat with me, go to my LinkedIn and book an appointment. I am happy to spend 30 minutes to an hour with anybody of just, hey, this is my problem. What should I do? I am open to do that. So go to my LinkedIn.
Bill: Well, and Jennifer, one of things I really appreciate about your insight, I also went to business school, so I studied marketing. So I'm doing what I trained to do as well. And there is a difference between accidental marketing agency owners and people who are accidents like you and me who continue to have accidents or run these marketing agencies. I don't know if that's the right thing, but like having fundamental training and education on the ways to do corporate marketing as well as more tactical marketing, marketing research and those types of things. I can tell from the conversation that you have a completely more rounded and full perspective on the way to do these things because you're using frameworks. You're actually going back to fundamental things that were talked about by like Ogilvy and some of the the great founding forefathers of this industry. So I really appreciate your insight. And I think you could bring a lot to an organization that needs to remove that friction. I really want to thank you for coming on board. I'm actually going to be in Greenville in a couple of weeks for the holidays because my in-laws live down there. So I know that area very, very well.
Jennifer: Great. Well, we'll go to coffee or something. I'd love to meet you. Yeah, so absolutely. Well, very good. Thank you so much for having me on. This was a fantastic. I love conversations like this.
Bill: Yeah, we learned a lot. Probably the greatest benefit we've had to the podcast is it's allowed us to do voice of customer research very naturally and then also iron sharpening iron by talking to other agency owners, experts and marketing executives to really see what is missing in the market and what we need to do in a better way. So, no, I really appreciate you coming on today.
Jennifer: I appreciate it. Thank you.