May 9, 2024

How Business Leaders Win by Approaching Marketing as an Investment

How Business Leaders Win by Approaching Marketing as an Investment

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How do business owners and marketers avoid wasting money on marketing?   In today's episode we discuss how to treat marketing like an investment instead of as an expense that doesn't drive results.

Eric interviews Jaci Russo, a seasoned marketing expert with over 20 years of experience, and she shares her journey in becoming a successful marketing agency owner, author, and podcaster.    Jaci then dives into the inception of her agency, her collaboration with her husband, and the dynamic of working together on their book, podcast and their agency.

The conversation covers their unique approach to marketing and branding, leveraging different perspectives to cater to various audience needs and preferences, and the importance of understanding marketing as an investment. Jaci underscores the value of external insights for strategic decision-making, the pitfalls the marketing industry faces due to lack of standardization, and strategies for achieving long-term ROI. Finally, she offers advice for marketers and business leaders aiming to succeed in 2024, emphasizing the need for strategic, proactive approaches over reactive tactics.

Get Jaci's book - He Said, She Said: Branding

Visit the Remarkable Marketing Podcast website to see all our episodes.

Visit the Remarkable Marketing Podcast on YouTube

03:48 He Said, She Said: Navigating Business and Branding as a Couple
05:29 Understanding Marketing Through Personality: A DISC Assessment Perspective
07:41 The Power of Strategic Marketing: Helping Businesses Stop Wasting Money
10:45 The Importance of Thinking of Marketing Spend as an Investment
21:08 Marketing: Advice for 2024 

Chapters

00:00 - Marketing, Branding, and Business Growth

09:46 - Media Buying and Marketing ROI

16:34 - Marketing and Branding Strategy for Growth

21:25 - Marketing Strategies for 2024

Transcript

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Jackie Russo.

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She runs her own agency for the last 20 years.

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She's an author and a podcaster.

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Welcome to the show.

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Thanks for having me.

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Why don't we start off by you sharing just a minute or two about who you are and what you do?

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Who?

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you are and what you do.

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Sure, I grew up in Louisiana, in Lafayette, which is the heart of Cajun country.

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After my time at the University of Louisiana go Cajuns I moved to Los Angeles and so my first real job not counting the bartending I did to pay my way through school was working at Creative Artist Agency.

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So I got to work with these amazing actors and actresses and writers, directors, producers all A-list Worked with is code for.

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I fetched coffee for those people and left the firm after a couple of years to start a production company with a director client, produced two major motion pictures, got to do the marketing for those, did product development and got to do the marketing for that.

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And that led me to Home Shopping Network, where we sold out of our products a number of times.

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So I got a call from the team at HSN as they were growing and got brought in to go work directly for the company and this was right when they were going through a major rebranding.

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So it was Ticketmaster, home Shopping Network, silver King Broadcasting, lycos, citysearch, usa Networks a bunch of these different companies all getting together around this idea of content creation and shopping and online and how those pieces were going to fit.

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So I did that and then moved back to Louisiana and started the agency in 2001.

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And so it's been a great 23 year ride and I get to do it with my husband every day, which some days is awesome and we work with midsize to large B2B companies, professional services, industrial manufacturing across the country.

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And you have a book and a podcast on the same topic, right?

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Exactly.

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Yep, michael and I wrote the book together, which is code, for Michael did all the work and I get all the glory, which I think is how it should be and then the podcast really started with me.

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Literally, I would read the blog and record it, which was like 2009.

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It was the early days of blogging and podcasting, and it was really retrospect pretty lame, but it allowed me to figure out some things, and one of the things I figured out was no one wanted to hear me read the blog to them like an audio book, without any talented voice, and so, during COVID, we turned it into a live one hour and we would just interview people on how they were making a pandemic pivot to save their business during that very scary 2020.

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And Michael produced it, and so then we evolved it into Michael would pop in every once in a while to basically fuss at me because I had done something that he thought was dumb and so I had to.

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He would, of course, correct me, and so then it was like well, if you're going to jump in, mr, I'm behind the curtain, then you're going to be on the front line.

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It's a lot easier to judge from the distance.

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So then we started doing it together and that has been the most fun.

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Yeah, I was going to ask did you just being married?

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Did you run out of normal things to argue about?

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So you just thought you'd argue about branding.

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Is that what happened?

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I will be quoting you at dinner tonight because that perfectly sums up the entire 25 years of our marriage and 23 years of our working together while raising four kids.

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Those items have not provided enough discourse, so we had to go and create new things to chat about.

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You've already made it through all the normal married arguments, so you needed to bring in some branding and marketing controversy.

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I get it, I get it and that is the whole premise behind he said.

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She said, because I look at it from a very strategic standpoint, how is this going to make money?

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What are we doing?

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That's strategically different than everybody else.

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He looks at it from a very creative standpoint.

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He's a writer, he's a designer.

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So it's like how is this going to look good?

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And we have to have any idea that we're going to put out for our clients has to make both of us happy.

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You know what this reminds me of is.

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It is a little bit of the men are from Mars, women are from Venus we think about things differently thing, and I worked for this one CEO and he wasn't wrong about this, but it was also super annoying is he liked to do website design, particularly to argue about the homepage, cause that's a favorite sport at most companies have been at is, let's argue about the homepage, where no one can actually be right and it's all just completely a matter of opinion.

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But one of his fun things about it was is that we would propose a new homepage design and the management team had to sign off on it, but all the people on the management team were men.

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So then he wanted to bring in lots of other people in the company, different age groups, men and women, because women thought about it differently and then so to have all these people just giving their feedback on the website before who had never designed a website.

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It was very interesting, but he did at one point which I thought was right is that people do respond to marketing differently if they're men or women.

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So I do think there's a good balance in having that joint perspective.

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I agree completely and, eric, I'd even take it one step further.

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If you think about the DISC personality assessment, for example, it breaks all humans into four quadrants of how we approach our decision-making, our lives.

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Some people may be really needing a lot of information to make decisions, whereas some are like trust of truth in there.

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When you layer on top of that marketing, all of a sudden it's like oh wait, okay, hold on.

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If I'm trying to appeal to the headline personality type, try to appeal to the D of the DISC assessment.

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That's what we would call a headline personality type, because they're going to skim the headlines.

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They might look at some bullet points or some bold pullout quotes, but they're not reading a lot of information.

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They're entrepreneurs, they're making quick decisions, they've got their foot on their gas and they're going.

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You contrast that with the C personality type and they are really going to evaluate and weigh every decision with the utmost care and detail, which puts them into analysis paralysis.

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We would call that body copy, because they need to read all the words and they need additional research and they need more facts and figures before they can commit to anything.

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So each of those DISC, each one of those, has a different marketing style.

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So I think, yeah, it's not just men and women, it's not just people in the company and outside of the company.

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You got to take it that one step further.

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For personality types of am I creating the materials that's going to make them feel like they're making the right choice?

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Is there a personality type for a gladiator in a suit?

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Am I G?

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I'm just submitting a new personality type.

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I'm sorry, I have lots of jokes today.

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They may not be the best jokes but I have jokes, but I do agree.

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I am a gladiator, are you kidding?

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I watch every Shonda Rhimes show.

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I'm all in on scandal so I can show up as a gladiator anytime, anywhere.

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Awesome.

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So let's hear a story about some of the best marketing that you've done, that you're the most proud of.

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One of the things that I could rattle off a list of companies we've worked with, work that we've done.

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The one thing, though, that I would bring is something that just recently happened that I am super proud of.

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So I combined a team of really smart, awesome experts in their craft, not just around marketing, but around sales, around leadership, training, around professional development, around team building and collectively, because the agency is great.

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The agency is humming along 23 years in.

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I think I probably slow them down more than anything.

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My job is to stay out of their way.

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So I've been doing a lot of consulting, and it's been helpful to our regular clients.

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So we put on this GrowthX conference two days really helping entrepreneurs, business owners and marketing directors be better at what they're doing.

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It's time to leave the business and really get some professional insight from five different perspectives at these different levels.

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It was awesome.

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So we're into this, and I'm talking about media buying.

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That's one of my early origin stories.

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I'm a licensed, certified media buyer, and back when the media we bought was TV, radio, newspaper billboards, the olden times last century and so I'm talking about how to make decisions, how to evaluate media packages, how to make sure you're getting a good return on your investment.

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One of the business owners in the back of the room raises their hand and says based on what you just said, I think I've made a horrible mistake.

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And I was like okay, share with the class, because it's about 25 30 people.

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And she said I spent $60,000 last year on tv ads with this one local tv affiliate.

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And I said tell me again who your target audience is.

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She goes like 25 to 45.

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I was like do you want me to tell you made a horrible disaster and wasted $60,000?

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And she said yes, and I was like you very much.

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Did you track your people who walk in the door?

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How many people came from that?

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She said three, and two of them came from the TV station where I bought the ads.

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I was like okay, and I said let's talk about how that could have been.

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So that evolved into us creating these things called BSU Reviews, where we now will go in and assess someone's current marketing, their website, their social media, their media spend their messaging, their collateral materials, everything and give back a report unbiased.

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I have no skin in that game of.

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These are all the things you're doing.

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Great, these are things you can do better.

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Somebody else in the room was like look at mine before I commit to this thing.

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They were about to spend $350,000 on an ad campaign.

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We gave them back, reached more people more often for 42 grand and I was like that's what you need.

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You need somebody who understands marketing.

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So to me that's the big win is being able to save somebody a lot of money.

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Last week it made me very happy.

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That's great.

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I think marketing is an investment.

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I always preach this.

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It's not spend, it's an investment.

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And so helping people do an assessment so that they can get the best return on their investment is a logical thing.

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But a lot of people they would talk to a financial planner or an investment expert before they would make a stock market investment or mutual fund investment, but a lot of times they don't talk to someone who's really an expert in marketing before they make a huge investment in marketing and it doesn't really logically make sense to me because I think they view it as a operational expense.

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I blame us.

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I blame our industry.

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It's our fault.

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We've done two things really badly.

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The first thing is that we have not held ourselves to the same high standard of other professionals lawyers, accountants, wealth managers, bankers, real estate agents you name any professional service.

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They all have an education, licensing and continuing education, set of requirements.

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Marketing bought Mac.

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Now I'm an expert.

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There's no rules.

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Anybody can call themselves an agency.

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Anybody can call themselves a marketer.

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We did a horrible job as an industry to build in a code of conduct and a set of best practice standards and we are punished for that now.

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So that's on us.

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The second thing that I think we've done to screw this up for ourselves is that by not having this licensing process and establishing terminology like you can't call yourself a realtor unless you've taken a certain set of tests.

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You can be a real estate agent, but to get to that next level it's another set of tests.

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We didn't do that.

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So companies go out and hire marketers who aren't trained, don't know what they're doing, waste a ton of money, and now they're all gun shy.

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So they do think of it as an expense because they've wasted a ton of money and not gotten a return on that investment for it.

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I am always amazed when a marketer, like an agency, quote unquote says to a client so what do you want me to do?

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And I'm thinking, agency, quote unquote says to a client so what do you want me to do?

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And I'm thinking, no, you wouldn't go to a doctor and expect the doctor to say so, what test do you want me to run?

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What medicine do you want me to prescribe?

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What should we do today?

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No, the expert in the room should be in charge and leading.

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And so those are the two ways that I think we've screwed this up ourselves.

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I think that makes sense.

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There's no Series 7 license to be a marketing broker.

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Maybe there should be.

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The one thing that strikes me is that for most of the last 20 years I've been a CMO on the venture capital and private equity backed company side, and when they invested in SaaS companies in particular, this is an interesting return on investment story is they put a trillion dollars of capital over the last 15 years in the SaaS companies, so they developed probably what I think is the most advanced way of thinking about marketing return on investment and they created this whole SaaS metrics way of evaluating.

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That has metrics like customer acquisition costs, which is the fully loaded cost of sales and marketing, and customer acquisition costs compared to lifetime value of the customer, and they have 20 of these different terms that they've coined and formulas for SaaS companies and their operating metrics.

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If they're best in class and, in fairness, saas companies generally over the last 15 years have been some of the most profitable companies because they came up with this measurement system and they figured out some common nomenclature across the 10,000 SaaS companies out there about how to talk about it, and I think actually what I've seen is some of that is starting to permeate more broadly through B2B, but not completely yet, because a lot of companies still just think about things as but we'll just take 8% of our revenue and spend it on marketing and I'm just like, no, that's not the way you do it.

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No, you make a great point, and I'm thinking about a company we worked with two years ago who was heavy entrenched in oil and gas.

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That had been their main industry the entire 20 years of their company.

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They built themselves up to a solid 20, 25, $30 million entity.

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They were doing great.

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Everything's humming along quite nicely.

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They now need to transition into work around offshore wind farms because they see that's where the industry is heading.

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Now we have to do what we call change the conversation and get them out of this heavily entrenched O&G portfolio of clients and marketing materials and into a very green renewable wind solar, which was into their line of talent, but very different target audience, very different messaging.

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So we did.

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The outcome is that nine months later, not only are they making more money, because now they have really been able to change the conversation to this, but now they're being acquired for 8X what they were originally valued at six months before they hired us, because we've been able to elevate them.

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So I know that we don't always look at it or at least the industry doesn't always look at it for the real value.

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But it goes beyond just the immediate return on investment.

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There's a long-term ROI here that has to be factored in.

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What I love about what you're saying about the SaaS companies is the way they're able to measure.

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It is so clear.

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Like I, I love our clients that have a very direct market transaction, conversion income like straight line, and so when we take that same philosophy, we can apply it to a lot of different industries because now the tracking is so much better.

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When we ran TV ads and radio ads back in the day, maybe people saw it, maybe they did something about it.

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Now I know when they see it, I know when they click on it, I know when they convert, I know it works and doesn't work.

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One of the things is that it is possible to lose money on marketing and not have a good return on investment, just like it's very possible to lose money in the stock market to lose money on real estate.

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Almost anything that you invest in that it can have a high rate of return has an equal high rate of risk.

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And, as we're in a more challenging economy now, some of the SaaS metrics for some of the companies are a real head scratcher.

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Some of them are struggling with payback cycles.

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The sales and marketing for every customer they win takes five years to make it back.

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So now they're having to reevaluate what are the different things we should do.

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What we were doing in the past doesn't work anymore, and so I think that's actually a good thing, because, as I was looking at your agency's site, there was a list of, I believe, over 30 different things that you can help clients with, which is amazing, and for my podcast, I have a list of over 200 topics that I talk to guests about broadly in terms of marketing.

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So marketing is a very broad area.

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When people just say, invest in marketing, there's so many things that you can invest in, so many things that you could do To the point of your earlier story.

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I think a big question is what should you not do and what should you do?

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So is that one of the main things that you help your clients figure out?

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It's the very first thing.

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So when the agency Brand Russo works with medium to large size companies, they typically have an in-house team.

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They're doing things already.

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We come in with new perspective, and so we conduct our razor branding assessment, where we look at it through a couple of different sets of eyes.

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Inside out, what does your internal team think?

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How do they feel?

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They know stuff that no one else knows.

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So we got to get that out of them.

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Service is going to know things, sales is going to know things, customer service is going to know things.

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Accounting is going to know something.

00:19:04.025 --> 00:19:10.214
So everybody's got some valuable knowledge, but they're so siloed that has not been shared enough yet.

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So good, we can pull that out.

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We're going to talk to the current customers.

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We really need to understand why they chose you, because they had other options.

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So what was the hook?

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What made them see you the right way and feel seen by you to make that commitment?

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Then we've got to look at people who should be customers but aren't.

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Why not?

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Who are they using instead?

00:19:31.642 --> 00:19:34.928
What has been the deciding factor for them?

00:19:34.928 --> 00:19:36.270
Is it awareness?

00:19:36.270 --> 00:19:40.058
Is it a misperception about what you do and how you do it?

00:19:40.058 --> 00:19:43.346
Is it a lack of value, so they're caught up on price.

00:19:43.346 --> 00:19:44.717
What's the missing piece there?

00:19:45.358 --> 00:19:49.477
The second thing we look at is promise why you, what's your point of differentiation?

00:19:49.477 --> 00:19:53.856
And that's going to be different for different target audiences, so we have to take that into consideration.

00:19:53.856 --> 00:19:56.945
The third we call connection, and this is the messaging.

00:19:56.945 --> 00:20:04.943
This is where we stop letting you just talk about yourself, because that only matters to you and, like your mom, instead you got to talk to them about them.

00:20:04.943 --> 00:20:09.221
We've got to really make sure that they're the hero of the story and you're the guide with a solution.

00:20:09.994 --> 00:20:12.760
And then, last but not least, where should those messages be going?

00:20:12.760 --> 00:20:22.486
So we're looking at the marketing you've been doing from a very tactical standpoint, to what has been happening and what's working and not working.

00:20:22.486 --> 00:20:27.060
And then what should the tactics be moving forward, based on each of those target audiences, so that they see the message enough times?

00:20:27.060 --> 00:20:32.480
You're talking about right now average of 8,000 ads a day that we see.

00:20:32.480 --> 00:20:38.791
There's no way, no way anybody can take all that in.

00:20:38.791 --> 00:20:42.779
So we've built these filters to block it all out uniformly.

00:20:42.779 --> 00:20:48.279
So by blocking it all out, we are able to make sure we don't see anything that doesn't pertain to us.

00:20:48.279 --> 00:20:57.557
So your message has to be so targeted and so specific that the target audience feels seen and feels heard and feels like you're the right one for them.

00:21:00.083 --> 00:21:02.107
Yeah, there's a lot of noise out there these days.

00:21:02.107 --> 00:21:06.482
I think how to stand out in that is the real key.

00:21:06.482 --> 00:21:13.622
So, given we are where we are, we live in very interesting times here in 2024,.

00:21:13.622 --> 00:21:25.523
What is the best advice that you have for marketers and business leaders who want to win in marketing in 2024?

00:21:26.506 --> 00:21:39.540
Get an outside third-party perspective so that you can be more strategic and proactive and less reactive and trying to do the things that you used to do, because what got you here won't get you there.

00:21:40.742 --> 00:21:41.945
All right, great advice.

00:21:41.945 --> 00:21:48.394
Thank you so much, jackie, for being on the show, for sharing your stories, sharing your insights and your advice.

00:21:48.394 --> 00:21:58.329
I'm going to link to your website, your podcast and your book in the show notes so everyone can go check those out if they want to learn more and get in touch.

00:21:58.329 --> 00:21:59.915
We appreciate you being on the show.

Jaci RussoProfile Photo

Jaci Russo

Founder & CEO

Jaci Russo, P.C.M., is a passionate leader with a proven track record of driving growth and exceeding expectations. As the co-founder and CEO of brandRUSSO, a strategic branding agency headquartered in Lafayette, LA, Jaci has been instrumental in establishing the company's reputation for excellence in delivering reliable and high-quality results.

Russo's career took off after joining the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in Los Angeles, CA. Later, while working with media mogul Barry Diller, she played a pivotal role in shaping the brands of major entities such as the Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, and USA Network. However, in 2001, Jaci set her sights on a new horizon, determined to create something uniquely her own, and that's when she co-founded brandRUSSO.

Beyond the boardroom, Jaci is a published author and highly respected speaker on branding and marketing. With over two decades of experience as a Brand Strategist, she brings a wealth of knowledge and a dynamic perspective to her topics, speaking from a rich reservoir of personal insight.

This experience led her to create Brand State U, an accessible online learning platform for small businesses and DIY marketers. Jaci also conducts Brand Builder Workshops and produces brandRUSSO's Razor Branding blog and podcast, offering guidance in today's
marketplace.

Jaci holds a Professional Certified Marketer (P.C.M.) designation from the American Marketing Association, is a graduate of Leadership LA, has successfully completed the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Bus… Read More