1675 – The Tent Poles of Marketing with Wild Coffee Marketing’s Amy Anderson

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0:58with us right now it's the co-founder of wild coffee marketing it's amy anderson amy thank you so much for joining us thanks so much for having me josh truth be told if you are hearing the name wild coffee marketing and you might be thinking oh we're going to be talking about coffee we're not amy what are we going to be talking about today well wild coffee is actually a plant that was growing outside of my window while I was writing my business plan in Miami. It's native to Miami. It is vibrant, grows uncontrollably. I had to cut it back with a machete. And I was founding a marketing consulting firm about six or seven years ago.

1:36And I thought it was a really incredible metaphor for what I was trying to do myself, right, which was to self-found and fund a consulting firm and also grow the top-line revenue of my clients. Yeah. Marketing is a pretty broad term. what within marketing would you say you're most passionate about? Or maybe that, hopefully that aligns with the services you provide as well. But, you know, when we talk about marketing, where do you think we're going to go? Well, I was a client side marketer for almost my entire career. And I was working at big brands in New York, like Calvin Klein and the New York Times Digital.

2:13And I loved being on the client side. I was a corporate person. I never fancied myself an entrepreneur. I did not seek to start my own firm. And I had a shift in my family life. And I went back to work. And I had these two little boys. And I said, you know what, I'm going to take all the skills that I learned as a client side marketer. So by the time I exited the job market, I was a VP of marketing at a financial services firm. And I said, I'm going to go do this for multiple companies at the same time. And I think one of the biggest lessons for me as an entrepreneur was you don't end up really doing all the things that you're great at.

2:48You end up in finance and accounting. You end up in HR. You have to learn how to be a really good business leader really quick. You have to learn about scalability, intellectual property, all of the things that I really didn't anticipate, but has been the most rewarding work of my life. We call it business adulting. What types of clients do you work with today? Well, it's interesting. We're actually industry agnostic, but we go deep in a few. One is franchise. And we have been working with companies, national brands like Stretch Zone. I don't know if you've heard of them. Drew Brees is a board member and owns multiple locations, but they're actually a stretching practitioner assisted stretching.

3:29And we helped them grow from 50 to 300 locations over the last few years. And then recently we picked up some quick service restaurant clients. And then we do a lot of business to business as well. So financial services and fintech and SaaS. And then randomly, we've been the fully outsourced marketing team for Carolina Skiff Boats for the last three years. And for me, marketing, it's the discipline and you can make it very simple. And it's who are you and who are you trying to talk to and what do you solve for? And then where do you get that message and sort of find the lowest cost acquisition?

4:04Yeah. For someone that doesn't really play in B2B marketing, what are some of the major tentpoles that maybe are going to be pretty important to a B2B company that wants to get it right? Well, I think your content, right? People really want to self-discover on their journeys. We all know all the numbers. People don't want to talk to a salesperson anymore. People want to be able to learn what they want to learn. So it's really that conversational marketing piece. Do you offer live chat? Do you solve right up front for their problems? Do you talk about what industries you serve? And we actually pitched a company this week out in California, and they do energy procurement advising.

4:46And we said so many people talk about what they do. You can talk about how they do it, but you really need to talk about the why and the impact. And I think that gets lost for a lot of folks when they're actually positioning themselves in the marketing. We call it marketing myopia, where you talk about what you do, but you don't talk about what you solve. And that's really where we start with our clients. Yeah. And how, like, in terms of, like, your organization now and compared to other marketing agencies or consultancies out there, how would you position Wild Coffee? Well, everything we do is rooted in strategy, right?

5:24If you get two degrees off course and you go for too long off course, you'll end up in Ireland and not South Africa. And so we think it's really everything we do is taking that client side experience that my business partner and I have, and then bringing that into the leadership suite of our clients. So we actually sit in their executive team meetings. I go to executive team meetings for multiple clients every week as their outsource CMO. So a lot of people will say that they offer this service, but we are so ingrained that we're going, I was just at an offsite in Atlanta for two days with a client.

5:57So really understanding that strategy and what the business goals are of our clients. And then we're able to implement that. How do we do that? We actually have our own content teams and writers and social media content creators. We have video editors, We have graphic designers. And then our team, we don't have account managers like a typical agency or consultancy. We have consultants. So they come from client side and agency. So when we are hiring them, we say, okay, you are now the VP of marketing for four different companies at the same time on a fractional basis. So they're bringing that strategy piece as well, not just us at the executive level.

6:32If I'm a potential client, how would I know if I should be seeking for a fractional VP of marketing or a fractional CMO as opposed to just hiring a marketing agency to kind of do the work? Well, marketing agencies typically don't include the strategy layer, right? So if you don't have a senior CMO, VP level marketing person, and most companies, mid-level companies don't have them, CMOs are expensive and CMOs need teams to execute, right? So with Wild Coffee, you're actually getting the senior leadership and the strategy layer and the execution of those strategies. So yesterday when we were talking to a potential client, they have one in-house person.

7:14So a person who's really senior may do the strategy, can't do the implementation. And a person to junior may be able to do some things, but in-house marketing teams in this environment are incredibly expensive because it is very hard to cover all the disciplines you need to cover in marketing in this environment. Where do you find the content writers? Where do you find the designers? Some are better for digital than for print. Then you need subject matter expertise, somebody to coordinate all that. So when you do it on a fractional basis, the cost effectiveness is there, and then you have the talent that you need.

7:48And then you can mix and match the teams, right? So we can assemble a team that makes sense for our client. Yeah. I'm particularly nerdily interested. is a term in kind of the B2B side of things. What trends have you been noticing? You were talking about content earlier, but are there any particular trends that you're seeing that seem to be working well or also part of that? Are there any practices that are just don't have the effectiveness that maybe they had in years past? Well, people like to say that email is dead and we really are seeing the opposite. it just really has to be very thoughtful, personalized execution of that, right?

8:36If you really understand your data, your customer, your leads, and build funnels that understand whether someone's really ice cold, cold, tepid, warm, and segment data to that point to understand where they are, where did you acquire them? What have they expressed interest in? And then communicate with them in a way that meets the needs that they're expressing, then we're finding a lot of effectiveness in that. But it's, Josh, like those funnels run deep with webinar content, really deep sort of advisory content materials and white papers. You have to offer something of value. I don't really believe in gated content.

9:15I don't want to put walls up between trying to sell. Like that just feels gimmicky, right? I'm with you on that. And I think that that just, you know, like, and if I'm advocating or if I'm being empathic to the consumer, it just feels weird. Yeah. Like just tell me, like, I don't, yeah, it just, it seems disruptive to, you know, a normal, like I'm thinking of the analogy, like, you know, if, if you're on a date with someone and all of a sudden it's like, well, I go on a second date for you with you, but here's what you're gonna have to do for me first. It's just weird. That was uncomfortable. So It's uncomfortable and awkward, right?

9:55Yeah, that's not how real people act. Well, and I think after COVID, I don't like to even have to talk about it. None of us do anymore. But I think that so much of the salesiness got stripped away, right? We all saw each other in our personal environments. We all sort of got back to basics in a lot of ways. And I think the selling process has happened that way too. So things that are flashy, gimmicky, gated content, we don't really believe in it. We're just saying, look, we're here to meet these needs that we think you may have when you're ready, right? That really strong call to action, like book your appointment or, you know, it's more like, hey, if you want to talk to an expert in a consultation, but look when you're ready and we'll leave live chat on for you if you have a question and you can talk to us because I think you need to meet your customers where they are, not try to push them.

10:45So thoughtful content, thoughtful, personalized funnels, you know, live chat, you know, ability to do that with your customers as well. Well, it feels like, you know, you're treating your clients like adults. And I think it also, it opens up this much more of this less transactional, we are going to have a transactional relationship. It's going to be tit for tat, you know, kind of thing, as opposed to no, no, no, let's lead in a little bit of generosity, show that we are interested in collaborative relationships. I think that's kind of the vibe that I'm feeling from this example. There's a little microcosm of like, what do we want the dynamic to feel like?

11:25I'm here to help, right? Isn't that why we're all in business? I mean, yes, we have revenue acceleration to pay attention to, but I'm here, especially in a B2B environment, I'm here to help you. And so when we were speaking to this potential client this week, we said, that is so great that you know everything about what you do, but really what you're not saying is how you have helped others and how you can help them. And you need to really flip that narrative. And I think it's important to go look at your website and say, you know, if I'm someone coming with a need or a pain point, am I clearly explaining how to solve that?

11:59Okay. You're causing me to rethink a couple of things, you know, and I'm even thinking about, you know, we, you know, there's most of the stuff we do is fairly open and, you know, we don't gate things, but even like the webinar, you know, the temptation is, hey, register for this webinar, blah, blah, blah, blah. So then they were getting the follow-up and stuff. But I think about how many good people we might potentially lose because of that gate. And if, listen, the people who like you and resonate with you, if you treat them like an adult, they know how to get ahold of you. You don't have to beat them over the head, right?

12:35Especially when you're talking about higher level B2B sales with leaders. All right, this is good. I'm so, Amy, I'm grateful we're having this conversation because you're like, you know, you're making a lot of sense to me right now, Amy Anderson. Well, they know who the players are, right? They know where to find you. So don't sell them. You know, it's the other interesting thing that we were talking about this week. So we are rebranding and creating a brand architecture for a commercial real estate data-driven platform. These guys are young. They are doing some of the most incredible work. and overselling doesn't fit who these guys are.

13:11On the flip side, it's so tempting to use a lot of jargon. How many times can you say data-driven? You know, how many times can you say accurate and on time, you know, real time? So, you know, just to stay away from jargon to have real conversations as well. Don't use a lot of fancy words to create a category that doesn't even exist because you're not using accurate language, you know? So I'm trying to pull them. And then my team went a little too far with the familiarity and I had to pull them back because we're in the middle of this process. But it's just speak in a way that resonates and talk about how you solve problems and stop trying to sell so hard.

13:51All right. Wildcoffeemarketing.com to our friend that's listening to us right now, whether they searched for you or search for Wild Coffee, they found this website. Now they've been listening to our conversation and they're like, okay, all right. Now, where do they go from here? Well, I'm on LinkedIn under Amy Anderson at Wild Coffee. There are several Amy Anderson's. There were two in my sorority at Chapel Hill. There were two Amy Anderson's as a Chi Omega's at the Chapel in Chapel Hill. So there are a couple of us, but the Wild Coffee one is me. And I'd love to talk to folks and even just to schedule some time to have me look at sort of your overall strategy.

14:32And maybe if you are looking for your strategy or at it, you may realize you don't have one that says buttoned up. I am so passionate about helping these midsize companies who every company deserves a CMO. Maybe just they just all can't afford them. And that's where this fractional basis comes in. It's not my entry into your company so I can do your strategy and then get all of your business. It's because I really, really believe that leaders need some strategy help. And I would love to offer the many years I've been doing this to that end. Excellent. Wildcoffeemarketing.com. When someone goes there, what should they click on?

15:08What do they do? Oh, well, there's an insights button. We actually named our blog Deha Brew. The team has a lot of fun with wordplay, with a coffee. Our teams are divided into pods, purposeful, but not. And so I'd love for them to see some of our insights and our writing. And at the bottom of those pages, you can always schedule some time and contact us that way. Yeah, you do. It's a very high value blog, including one article I'm looking at, Top Six Digital Marketing Trends for 2023. You're going to want to take a look at this from someone who is in the trenches doing great work with fantastic companies.

15:45Amy Anderson, it's been a delight having you again, your website, wildcoffeemarketing.com. Thank you so much, Amy, for joining us. Thanks so much for having me, Josh.

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