1895 – Creative Marketing with Roger Littlepage

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0:58with us right now it's roger little page roger you are a long-time friend uh i think we've known each other since the early yeah mid 2000s yeah so it's great great to have you on the show listen you're the founder and ceo of maple tree marketing your website is maple tree marketing.com roger Thanks so much for joining me. Thank you so much, Josh. Great to see you again as a good friend. And I love what you've been doing here and definitely wanted to jump on to kind of be able to touch base again. Yeah. Maple Tree Marketing, share just a bit about what you do, who you work with and kind of how you do that.

1:38Absolutely. We are a full service marketing company. We have roots in the established in the hospitality industry, which was my background, but we have now expanded across the entire U.S. in all kinds of different industries. We do everything from website design and development to website maintenance and hosting, paid media. We've gotten very, very good and very effective. Social media, we do some of that as well as marketing strategy. And that's a whole nother category where we go in and we're really become your marketing team that really is supporting you and supporting your sales initiatives and your entire framework of your company.

2:13You got started, I think, in restaurant marketing, right? In hospitality. Hotel marketing. Hotel, yeah. Wow, that must have been a really interesting during COVID and all that, and kind of post-COVID and the rebound from that. What was that world like? It's the reason I have a business, to be quite honest, Josh. I was actually at the time working for Marriott International. I worked with them for over eight years and worked my way up to the company and got to the point where I was director of some really large portfolios, supporting all of Marriott marketings for all the franchisees across the US.

2:472020 hit and because of the relationships I built during that time Marriott basically went dormant and people still traveled that summer if you remember and I'm mowing the lawn in my backyard don't have a job and I my phone's ringing off the hook from VPs and CEOs of some massive companies and I was like I don't have any you know I don't have any access I don't have anything and finally one of them said you need to do something about that I go well what do you need to do and they go start a business. So 2020, I started this company and we've been growing ever since. And we started in the hospitality, focusing on details, moved to restaurants.

3:23And then from those findings, we're now in pretty much every industry out there. You have a pretty decent sized team. You have a huge book of business, Roger, and someone hearing your story. I don't want them to write off your experience and saying, well, good for Roger. He just knew a bunch of people. But what you were doing for eight years is to stick with the tree metaphor. I noticed you had another one in there, the roots, but you're planting seeds for eight years. And I share this frequently just about how critical this is and where you plant your seeds is not necessarily where you reap your harvest, right?

4:00But just how important this is to every day focus on building meaningful relationships because you get to a point where I don't want to say you cash in, but it's like, it's just not as difficult if, you know, from a marketing perspective, all you've been doing is just blasting out spam at people. That's not a really great path to a lot of meaningful relationships in my experience. Maybe share a little bit more of your insights and your experience from that dynamic. Well, absolutely. I mean, again, that's why my phone was ringing and no one was picking up at, you know, my former corporation. They were calling my personal self because they had it.

4:38And these are people that I had jumped into a system and a process in place that was set up by a corporation and enterprise level. I couldn't do much about from, you know, except listen to the needs of the clients. And I spent years doing this. And again, I would provide the feedback to, Hey, I think we need to progress our solutions for our clients. Of course, when you have a large multi-billion dollar company, it's a slow moving ship and not a lot of that gets done, but I would do what I can. And one of the big facets of my entire years in corporate America is I worked remote since 2012. I did it before it was cool is what I said.

5:15But one of the things, as I said, even though I work remote, I need to be with the clients. I had the largest travel budget on my entire division because I was constantly in the offices, at the hotels, building those relationships. So, yeah, I mean, I can't say I, you know, say cash in because I was sowing the relationship built off of integrity, a, you know, best in class work. And honestly, listening was more than anything is listening to what their needs are. Even if I couldn't do anything, then I now can do something because I own my own company. and every single client that had signed up with me in the very, very beginning stages were all of the clients that I had supported when I was at my married corporation.

5:59So Roger, obviously you spend a lot of time in the marketing world. What is working well right now for the industries that you serve? Great question, targeted approach. One of the things that I continue to see errors on from whether it be a large company, a small company, whatever it may be, you don't have a plan in place. You wake up in the morning like, oh, shoot, I got to make a post on Instagram or I got to make a post on LinkedIn. And you try to come up with something. I'm sure all of your listeners are sitting there nodding their heads. We've all been there. But you need to have a 90 day strategy.

6:34What is your paid media plan look like? How are you advertising your company? You need to have a faceted approach to your marketing. If you do that, you kind of start identifying what works and what doesn't. The other thing that I would mention is you have to start cutting off the things that are not working. You can use any analogy that you want, pruning the vine. I'll use pruning the tree just because that's my, you know, my shtick here with my company. But if you're doing something just to do it, and just because that's a way you've always done it, stop. What does the data show you? We are a data-centered company.

7:09And every time we get in with a client, we look at the data. And I've had people, Josh, that have been willing to pay me. Literally, I've had one just last week. They said, hey, we want you to do our social media, all of our accounts, large client,$4 ,000,$5 ,000 a month just to do organic social. And I looked at it. I looked at their followers. I looked at their base. And I said, you don't need this. Please do not spend money here. I can take that money, spend it in Google Ads or Google Performance Max or some of these other tools or revamping a website so much more effectively where you actually get an ROI.

7:42So long-winded answer, but don't be afraid to change things up and based off of data and the strategy that you have in place. Yeah. When you typically start in, Roger, with a new client, I would imagine there's a lot of, you know, kind of digging in, seeing what's going on. Are there any common things that you see that, you know, like, yeah, you know, if I can inspire business leaders, business owners out there to stop doing this, do more of this? Like anything immediately come to mind? Yeah, I think kind of a little bit of my previous answer can answer that. But also one of the big things is, again, we do a lot of website builds and website stuff.

8:20And we have our hand very heavily in SEO and in Google, the Googleverse. There's a lot of things out there that are changing. There's a lot of free information out there. As a CEO or as a business owner, There's so many things to focus on, I know. But people today, they're not going to be influenced by a billboard of yesteryear. They're not really going to be looking at newspaper articles. And honestly, there's a lot you can do for very, very little to no cost, to be quite honest. And that's some website content. That's getting yourself out there, posting here and there, having a strategy in place, like I said.

8:57There are some changes that have happened in Google, and I don't need to get too technical on that. But Google is now experimenting with a lot of different ranking factors. There's a whole big uproar this month right now with Google and some of the core updates they've made. But even more so that's been a slow moving target is all the advent of AI. Google is using what's called search generative experience. And instead of just focusing on keywords, it focuses on a massive amount of data and information, blog posts, customer reviews. third-party websites. This is the information that if you're not searching your business and you're not seeing what people are saying about it or newspaper articles or being out there, you need to.

9:42There's a lot of free publicity out there. I know you do a lot of that, Josh, in your network, and that's what you do. And that is actually what's starting to fuel these search results that are actually getting above any sort of keyword and search rankings when someone's searching your industry. Yeah. Yep. Roger, when you work with someone and someone might be listening to a conversation right now and they might know that what they're doing is not working really well. Maybe it's just kind of limping along. They just have a lot of questions. And then I'll tell you from the perspective of an SMB business owner, I think most of us at one time have either worked with say a marketing consultant, agency, maybe it's just simply applying some ideas that we've learned on YouTube or a book or something like that.

10:31And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't work, but we don't want to make a mistake. How can someone engage services of marketing professional and maybe limit the mistakes that they might make either in that hiring or, you know, kind of some of those decisions that go into that? Yeah, it's a very multifaceted question. One of the things that I will use from my personal experience is you're going to make mistakes. It's going to happen. That's the way you learn. That's the way you figure out. But of course, you want to mitigate the long-term effects of those mistakes and learn fast. One of the best ways is to learn from others.

11:07Something that I've done in my business is I had a great network of friends and family and individuals that I knew. And I noticed after about two years in this business growing so quickly and so largely, all of a sudden I found myself going, I don't have a good peer group. And I know that sounds really odd, but like if I'm talking to somebody or I have a question about something about my business or, you know, in your case, Josh, for your question about marketing, who are you talking to? I found a local area group here that is literally, you have to apply to be a part of the program. It's CEO only round table type meetings and discussions.

11:43And that has been pivotal to, I think my business growth. And there's a lot of times that we're talking marketing and that's where I'm using my expertise. These are not people that we're trying to get as clients. This is even playing field with everybody. In fact, you're not allowed to network in most ideas. You're not joining to get business, but find those individuals. If you're seeing a business that is maybe a competitor or maybe in a side industry, look at that. Look at different industries. What grabs your eye and your attention? If you're searching for certain areas, is what are you finding that's resonating with you?

12:19And I think that is one of the number one things that you can do to kind of start seeing what maybe that is looking like. And of course, stay, keep your ear to the ground with articles and podcasts, of course, because this industry is changing so quickly in marketing. And I'm telling you right now, Josh, if you are working with a marketing consultant or a marketing company, and they can tell you, I guarantee you, I'm gonna take you from this to this, or if they're saying, I got this, I know what's happening, this is it. And they're, you know, giving you the shiny object. It is too good to be true because I'll tell you this right now, once you figure everything out, and this is coming from a guy who runs a marketing company, once you figure everything out, it all changes anyway.

12:59So you have to stay up to date. There's so much evolution that's taking place right now. And, you know, again, if we're just trying to figure this out and you're going based on good content that's out there, that's, listen, And that's great. But, you know, again, working with a professional that this is all they do. Yes. Listen, I wouldn't say that my area of expertise is marketing. I'm competent at it. But if I truly want to make steps forward, there's tremendous value in just surrounding yourself with smart people. Roger, so next steps for a friend that's listening to our conversation, mapletreemarketing.com.

13:33When they go there, what would you recommend they do next? Take a look at some of our work where we're continually building that website. You'll see a page here soon with some articles and blog posts that we're doing about in the news. It's been a really big push of mine this year. To your CEOs and other listeners, you know, you got to focus on the money-making activities, as I'm sure we all know. And sometimes you get too far in the weeds. So, yeah, reach out to the experts. Figure that out. We will be happy to help. And even I'll be the first to tell you, like, hey, I think, you know, with what you're going or what your industry is or even to the point of, hey, I think your budget is best spent elsewhere.

14:10I'll tell you that. I think that's where I think has grown our business because of we're looking out for our clients first. So look at the website. You can also touch base with us on LinkedIn, Maple Tree Marketing, or myself, Roger Littlepage. That's always a good source of references as well. Yeah. Roger Littlepage, founder, CEO, Maple Tree Marketing, your website, mapletreemarketing.com. Roger, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh, for the opportunity. I appreciate it.

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