Dodgeball Marketing Podcast #64: Marketing for the New Normal

Chris Raines: Hello there. Welcome to episode 64 of the Dodgeball Marketing Podcast, your favorite podcast about marketing and dodgeballs.

Michael Utley: Not about dodgeballs.

Chris Raines: And the number one podcast on marketing and dodgeballs. Not about-

Michael Utley: [Crosstalk 00:00:13] Not actually about dodge balls.

Chris Raines: ...we've never talked about dodgeballs. Okay.

Michael Utley: I tell you somebody called looking for dodgeballs.

Chris Raines: Really? That's awesome.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: That's awesome.

Michael Utley: Yeah, we did get one sales lead for dodgeballs.

Chris Raines: I need a quote on 200 dodgeballs for a new league.

Michael Utley: He was local, he just needed a couple.

Chris Raines: Did you give him a quote?

Michael Utley: No. I told him Amazon.com-

Chris Raines: Amazon.

Michael Utley: ...had his dodgeballs.

Chris Raines: Just buy them from Amazon and mark it up to him.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Okay. All right. We're-

Michael Utley: True story, did happen.

Chris Raines: That took a turn. I love that.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Okay. We're going to talk about marketing. Today's episode topic is we're going to talk about marketing in the new normal, right? So obviously we're talking about marketing post-coronavirus pandemic. A lot of things have changed in terms of the way people do business, the way customers expect to interact with business-

Michael Utley: Post labor market reset.

Chris Raines: Post labor market reset, the Great Resignation, all of this stuff, right? So this is a lot of change in a short amount of time. And so we're going to talk about how to change your marketing or things to think about to change your marketing in this new reality that we live in. Things are always changing, but sometimes things change much more rapidly than in other times. We're kind of in one of those times in history now where there's a lot of changes happening really fast. So let's talk about it.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Yeah, number one: be ready to market your staffing needs on an ongoing basis. We both have companies that do online marketing. Mine is general service, online marketing shop. We do a lot of websites and marketing channel management. Yours, I would say, is focused now on advertising.

Chris Raines: Digital advertising for small local businesses and healthcare practices.

Michael Utley: Yeah, Bullhorn Media. And so over the years, we have occasionally had clients who came in during certain seasons, said, "Gosh, we feel like we need to put some dollars into staffing. We're struggling to find people. Can the marketing people help us with this?" And now we're actually seeing that conversation spread to cover more of the annual calendar and become a persistent topic.

Chris Raines: Almost an ongoing activity.

Michael Utley: Yeah. So I think that one of the new normals is for companies that we serve, which is a lot of different industries, coast-to-coast in the US, year-round. So there are a lot of variables that are controlled for, because of the diversity of our customer base.

Chris Raines: Regional is one of those. Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah. But even regionally, I would say, I mean right now we've got active programs in every region in the US. We don't do any international stuff really, but in the United States of America, we're seeing it across coast to coast. Now I would say that a lot of the Great Resignation has kind of leveled out a little bit since September, but it is nowhere near what it used to be, where if you had work that needed to be done, all you had to do was post a job and start going through candidates. Now it's really tough to find people. And so yeah, I think that's a thing.

So some of the things that are happening that we're seeing is just continuing to focus the best practices that we use for customer generation on talent acquisition. So this means you have another set of services pages on your website and that is your job openings. And so using SEO to optimize your job openings, to think about how you want those showing up, making sure that your job openings are correctly getting scraped into platforms like Indeed, using things like a promo bar on the top of your website, or finders fees using your existing staff as a referral source, a paid referral source for new staff members.

Chris Raines: Yep. That's a good idea.

Michael Utley: And incentivizing people for longevity. So yeah. [crosstalk 00:03:56] Things are really changing. Those are the new reality.

Chris Raines: Those are good too. I would add on top of that, I'm an ad guy so I always layer ads on top of it. But a lot of times you're going to, if there's a low supply and a high demand, you're looking to poach people that aren't actively looking for a job. And so the optimization SEO is always a good activity to do, but if you want to really grab people that aren't looking for a job, you got to get in front of them somehow. So advertising is a good way to do that. So that's another kind of activity you can put on top of all that stuff.

Michael Utley: Yeah. And that's really good especially in some of the social channels, you know, you can go after people who do have jobs.

Chris Raines: Right.

Michael Utley: Yeah.

Chris Raines: Yep.

Michael Utley: That's great. Yeah. Next up, why don't you take the next one?

Chris Raines: Yeah. So closing gaps in your tracking to know your ROI via call-tracking. So we're talking about phone call tracking and really the idea behind this is that as more commerce goes online, the pandemic really accelerated that, a lot of things that maybe you would just rely on people walking into your store or finding, you know, doing more brick and mortar sort of sources of traffic, they're going online to do that now. And so you need to start really paying attention to what is driving results online. So a lot of companies, particularly local businesses, rely on the phone number on their website. And so you really need to know what is driving those phone calls. So if you get, and that's where phone-tracking comes in. So we like to use CallRail, PhoneWagon is another one. There are a few platforms to use. CallRail I would say is the best and most robust one.

But installing that phone-tracking script on your site will allow you to say if you get a hundred calls a month, you'll know, you can hook it up with Google Analytics and you'll know what sources, what regions, what devices, et cetera, are responsible for your phone calls. And so that, like you said, we were talking about before the show, there's going to be more and more accountability that's being thrust upon digital marketing. So it's not enough to know, oh yeah, the phone calls seemed to go up this month. It's like, no, all the increase was from direct traffic and that's not a result of anything that you've done. Like you need to know, oh, not only did phone calls increase by 15, but 13 of those were from organic traffic. And oh yeah, five of those came from this landing page. And that's stuff that you can determine with Google Analytics and with call-tracking. So that's another thing, if you don't have call-tracking already set up on your site, go get it.

Michael Utley: Yeah. Yeah, next up in the new normal, in the economy and things moving to the internet and changes in the labor marketplace is: be prepared for a more remote workforce. We have, for years, [Chris, 00:06:56] in our companies, worked with folks who were a mix of local and people out-of-area, where we were developing relationships and working often for years at a time. Some of our closest relationships, people we work with on a daily basis, are in other regions of the country, the Mid-Atlantic area for us. And so with talent acquisition becoming tougher, if you have something that can be moved into a remote relationship, it could still even be full-time staff.

And so, GoEpps' parent company of Dodgeball Marketing, has made this change. We, this year, decided that we, and we do have offices, we can afford to have an office; we're here at the GoEpps office right now, we're in the loft and recording over a really nice space here. But to counteract the difficulty in acquiring talent fast enough for our growth, we moved to a remote-first management system and became remote-friendly. And so this is a big shift. I would say that what this is going to mean for a lot of companies is understanding and disaggregating the work that moves through your system as well as you can. And there are some things that can be remote that you never thought could, once you start to look at each person's activities and understanding what they need to do versus what could be moved to someone. So there's going to be a new sort of centralization of operations work around people who are physically present, but a lot of the other stuff can be done from anywhere.

Another thing is just reducing operations work. We are working down paper checks to as close to zero as fast as we can. We have so much, so many transactions, I would guess, [inaudible 00:08:50] what do you think, a thousand transactions every month coming and going?

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: And so the fewer of those that are on paper and having to be photographed and deposited to the bank with a phone the better. Well, how many examples of operational requirements that require physical presence do you have in your company that don't need to happen because of some of the new web-based tools and capabilities? We really are heading toward an economy that's completely integrated using all the full stack of tools that are available with the internet. And so for us, online banking is just a step in the direction of no paper. And so we haven't used paper for doing our work in the entire history of the company, but we always had checks coming and going. And so, yeah, that's a thing for us. So being prepared for a more remote workforce and kind of meeting that requirement halfway by working a lot of the physical stuff out of the process.

Chris Raines: And our next thing is kind of related to that is if and when you do go remote, moving to web-based management tools. So this is really important, particularly in the, just there's a lot that you can do and say when you're in close proximity to each other because there's the presence there, so you have to simulate that whenever you go remote. Okay? So a big part of that is using, both for doing the work and for just managing the personal relationship, so I like Zoom and Google Meet. I know you guys use Google Meet a lot, right?

Michael Utley: Yeah. We just switched over from Zoom to Google Meet.

Chris Raines: Yeah. And that's sort of to simulate the idea of being in a room and seeing each other's faces and being able to respond to how each other is looking-

[Crosstalk 00:10:36]

Michael Utley: Getting some emotional data.

Chris Raines: Yeah. And you don't get as much, but you can simulate it with things like Zoom and Google Meet. The other thing is streamlining your project management. So if you're a local business, you might be in the habit of just kind of keeping a board up for what the to-do tasks are-

Michael Utley: Yeah. If your [crosstalk 00:10:52] are on a whiteboard, they might move to a Google docs sheet.

Chris Raines: Yeah. So doing shared documents that way. So a lot of good, there's a lot of good project management, digital project management. I think you guys are on Basecamp. We use Asana. But kind of taking everything that happens in-person or on a whiteboard and seeing if you can digitize that helps streamline things once you do go remote. And I would especially say the video conferencing piece of it, a lot of times you need to have difficult conversations and it's really hard to do that if you're talking on the phone maybe, or doing like IM or something like that instant messaging. So move to web-based management both for project management, financial management, like you said, and person-to-person communication. Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah. We found this to be really helpful. I really think that my dad, when I was really young taught me that every business consists of three things: what you do, how people find out about it, and how money moves around. And so for us, we have one major web-based management tool for managing each of these three things. For us, it's Basecamp for completing actions, so our entire workforce of both staff and outside support works with us in our Basecamp. And then for marketing and people finding us, we're using HubSpot as our CRM. So our stack is then those two, Basecamp and HubSpot, and then we have QuickBooks for finance. So we're moving more of our cost management into an automated attribution capability built out in QuickBooks. And so we had to do it manually for a year to get enough data, but now we're back-loading that into QuickBooks to make it smarter.

So I think of these three as sort of three different pillars that are next to each other, all resting on a foundation of Slack. And then we actually even built our own web-based set of bookmarks just to stay organized with what the authoritative versions of certain documents were [crosstalk 00:13:00] and that's our standard operating procedure's document-

Chris Raines: And that simulates the company workbook and Slack simulates the, "Hey, did you get that ad review in?"

Michael Utley: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Raines: The [crosstalk 00:13:09] the talking across [crosstalk 00:13:11] ...the really quick chatter.

Michael Utley: Yeah, ephemeral chatter. Yeah. So we've actually, with these two foundational elements and then these three, what we call super departments, created a system that can help us scale. But this is really tough transition for companies that have been around for a while. And there are a lot of companies that are happening on the internet, and there are a lot of companies the internet is happening to.

Chris Raines: Sure.

Michael Utley: And you've got to decide which of those you are, but there's no company now that is immune to the internet, except for Madison Glass in East Tennessee, or East Nashville.

Alright. Last up! Marketing for the new normal, the last element; we'll be pretty brief on this: keep life positive. This has been my toughest challenge as a leader. I have found, I find change often very depressing. I'm having to talk myself out of a funk on how much change is happening. But I think for a business, there are some important things.

Number one, it's important to always signal that you're open for business. When the tornado hit last year, within an hour of getting into the building where our offices had been hit, [Jeana Medlin 00:14:25], who heads up our entire production team, she and I had met, collected any laptops that we saw in the building before we had to evacuate and sent out a message to all of our clients that said, "Hey, you're going to see Nashville on the news today. We got hit by a tornado and we need you to know something: we're open for business. If you have a proposal in process with us, we do not need a delay. We have a backup system and we are fully open and operational. And actually, we don't want you to help us by delaying working with us. We want you to keep the economy in Nashville strong by keeping your projects that are in process with us on schedule or upcoming with us on schedule."

And that was a decided effort to keep everyone focused. Both myself, the staff, and our clients focused on where we're headed and not throw sand in the path and slow things down. And I think that's kind of a metaphor for how we need to handle things like COVID, the labor crisis, riots, which we had in Nashville. We had so many things hit us at one time, it was kind of overwhelming. But for us, we've always taken the approach of we're going to do what we're going to do. We're going to meet our goals. We're going to deliver for our clients regardless of the weather. And that's, I think we've done a better job than the post office, but rain or shine, we keep things moving.

Chris Raines: Yeah.

Michael Utley: Yeah, that's it. Raines, you want to take us out?

Chris Raines: Yeah, that's it. Follow us, I'm going to read here: Dodgeball SEO on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn for links to new episodes, marketing resources, and more. So thanks for tuning in.

Michael Utley: Yep. We'll see you on the next one. Thanks, everybody.