2197 - Unlock Full-Scale Marketing with a Part-Time Powerhouse with Rocket Fuel Labs' Amanda Patterson

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1:05with us right now it is amanda patterson amanda you are the ceo and founder of rocket fuel labs you work as a fractional cmo i love that role your website is rocket fuel labs.com amanda thank you for joining us thanks for having me josh yeah well before we get into your superpowers uh what have you been doing for fun lately? I don't know, music, entertainment, movies, TV shows, hobbies. What are you geeking out on lately? Definitely music. So I am a musician. I play guitar. I sing. I write songs. You're kidding. Oh my God. Tell me more. Yeah. I mean, I do it, you know, mostly just as a hobby right now.

1:50But my daughter who is now 15 years old has taught herself to play guitar. So we're starting to play together and who knows, we might, you know, do some gigs in town. We do live in the live music capital of the world. So we'll see. Are you playing acoustic? What are you playing? I have an acoustic guitar, electric guitar, and I'm learning, I'm teaching myself the mandolin. Oh my gosh. How cool. We could play some REM maybe. Yeah. If you could do mandolin and guitar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wish we had an REM tribute band here in Orlando. So I, I picked up the bass a couple of years ago, and it is just such a joy and fun.

2:33And by the way, no matter what your age, you can start like it doesn't matter like in that was my big objection like my and I think maybe we have similar stories. So my youngest son had picked up the guitar, and I saw just how good he got in about six months time. And I'm like, Oh, that would be a lot of fun. And so now, you know, it's kind of like you, it's like we get to play together and it's, it's like so awesome. What are your, some of your favorite songs to play or what have you been learning lately as maybe a better question? Yeah. Well, from, from a genre perspective, I, I am really eclectic.

3:08I love all types of music, but when I play, I tend to play kind of lean towards the bluegrass, the folk and sort of country. um so yeah it's just that my voice kind of is a little like emmy lou harris sounding so um and then my daughter you know her voice sounds like mine i mean we yeah so you probably can harmonize together nicely yeah yeah we have kind of a little judds thing going on right oh i love it did you happen to catch the movie a complete unknown about Bob Dylan? No. It came out a handful of months ago. Timothee Chalamet was kind of playing Bob Dylan. I think you'll like it because it really focuses on the history of folk music and that intersection, of course.

4:00He came in and famously plugged his acoustic guitar. He played folk music with an electric guitar. I think you'll really appreciate the story. It's a good movie. I think my daughter will like it too. Yeah.

4:18Well, Amanda, tell us about Rocket Fuel Labs. Yeah, sure. So I started Rocket Fuel Labs five years ago, actually the week of COVID. So I was in my lockdown, you know, in California with my laptop. But I started it actually with Michael Loeb, who has an incubator out of New York. He was one of the founders of Priceline. Initially, you know, I started by supporting his portfolio companies, just an incredibly successful investor and entrepreneur, and really helped them kind of get off the ground. And then we said, look, let's build playbooks around this because my background was as a CMO. I helped a company IPO.

4:59So we started building playbooks for early stage companies. And really what we do is we help companies hit their numbers. Because I was a CMO and I had a marketing previously, I think very strategically about my clients' businesses. And I ask them questions, often in the sales process that they don't get asked by a typical agency. So that's why we're a CMO as a service. We wanna understand what are your revenue targets? What are the unit economics that work for you? And then put together a plan with projections that are accurate and help them hit their numbers. So that's Rocket Fuel Labs. Been doing it now for, yeah, we just had our five-year anniversary.

5:43All right. So here's what I want to hear, Amanda, is give us your state of the union on what is, we're in the middle of 2025. AI has become such an integral part of how we do nearly everything in business, namely marketing. Give us a state of the union of what's working well in marketing right now. for those of us who don't do this work on a daily basis? AI is such a powerful tool. It is a tool. And I think the people that are getting the most out of it are the people who are using AI to enhance what they're currently doing and augment what they're doing and multiply what they're doing. So yes, AI allows you to spin up headlines more quickly.

6:34it can help you brainstorm. It can help you, you know, some summarize, like on the agency side, we have tools that help us summarize meetings that we have with our clients and things like that. So it does save you a lot of time. Obviously it can also help you from a data perspective. I think where people go wrong, can go sideways with AI is when they completely outsource to it, almost like treat AI like it's a person and create an ad for me or create a video for me. And I have seen you still need a human creative director. You still need people. Yeah. It's the bigger decisions for absolutely. Yeah.

7:19Yeah. So you see even large brands making this mistake. For example, Coca-Cola did an ad at Christmas that was all AI generated people. They use no human actors. And it was really obvious that they weren't real people. And they received a ton of backlash. And it's because Christmas is about people. It's about family. It's about relationships. It's about connection. And so they got a lot of backlash for creating a completely robotic and computer generated ad, it didn't resonate with people. So I think there, there's still a lot of instinct in marketing that is important to make sure that your, um, that the work is good and, and AI should not be super detectable in my opinion.

8:13Like if somebody is seeing an ad or marketing, it should, they shouldn't look at it and go, Oh, that was AI. You know, um, if you're using AI tools properly, it's not going to be detectable. No. Oh, God. No, absolutely. Right. As long as, you know, you got to, you know, it's, again, it's kind of like pilot co-pilot, right? You know, a pilot probably doesn't have to be actively flying the plane the whole time, but the pilot needs to be there to make sure everything is doing what it should be doing. And in some cases, you know, the intelligence around the pilot is going to be smart or perceived with the pilot doesn't have access to.

8:51This is the first time I've heard this analogy with AI. I like this. But yeah, I absolutely love that. Let's get a little tactical in terms of marketing right now. What things are falling out of favor? And I want to particularly advocate, and I don't know how much experience you have kind of in the B2B world. A lot of folks in this audience are kind of lean a little bit more B2B. Any observations in terms of like tactically what's no longer working very well where you would say, you probably want to spend a little bit more time on this aspect of outreach or whatever? Yeah. So a couple of things come to mind.

9:31I'll start with AI. AI is definitely changing SEO and SEM, and it's impacting the way people execute on search. And the best example of that is HubSpot. So HubSpot built their search traffic and their business in the early days with very generalized SEO. They created content around everything you can imagine related to marketing, you know, templates, guides, ebooks, so that if you searched for, for example, you know, how to run a good email campaign or what are the best subject lines, you were going to likely to find a HubSpot article. Um, when AI rolled out and now Google has AI overviews, which I'm sure you've seen, um, those general questions typically get answered by AI overviews.

10:19And depending on how much digging somebody wants to do, they may not go any further. They're going to get the answer they were looking for in that overview. you. So HubSpot actually saw a huge decrease in their SEO traffic over after that AI rolled out. I don't want to get the number wrong. When I say huge, I want to say it was north of 60%, but your viewers can fact check me on that, but it was really significant. And it actually caused a lot of discussion in the marketing world about what in the world happened here. So the advice that I give to people now is really make sure that you're optimizing for quality over quantity, which is probably a best practice anyway in marketing.

11:06You want to attract, especially if you're a B2B, right? You're not a B2C brand that's trying to become a household name to everyone in the United States. Usually if you're a B2B company, you want to be targeted and make sure your marketing dollars are getting in front of the right people. So having your website and your paid ads really optimized for very, very precise, specific searches that are bottom of the funnel and that are going to align really well with what you offer. And we try to help our clients in that regard. The other trend I see is tied to data. So there have been a lot of changes in data.

11:46It was the wild west for quite some time where like pretty much marketers could target anybody variety of things like really, really easily. So the analogy I use is like, if you're selling bottled water and you are, all you have to do is like go to the marathon in the desert. All you have to do is hold up a sign that says I have water and people are going to come buy it. So, but that's very different from, you know, just standing on the street anywhere in the U S selling water. You have to have more creativity. Your ads have to be more thoughtful. So the trend, I would say where things are moving right now, because they've clamped down on data privacy.

12:32And that is not, if anything, I think we're moving more and more in the direction of people having their own data privacy, like owning their data. And so it's harder for marketers to get right in front of people at the right time, which means you have to go back to basics. We're not all the way back in the 1960s or the Mad Men days where it's all about creative, but we still have to do really, really good creative. So, you know, make sure your marketing is good. And I think, you know, a lot of companies got away with sort of so, so creative. Yep. No, I ain't going to fly today. Amanda, tell me about specifically how you with Rocket Fuel Labs work with your clients.

13:24Yeah. So it's interesting you mentioned B2B because most of our clients are B2B. Oh, wonderful. Yeah, most of them are. That was my background. I do have experience with two-sided marketplaces as well because I worked at MindBody as the head of marketing and they launched a consumer product while I was there. But yeah, most of them are B2B. So how we work with them is we really start, like I said, with the plan. We're not an agency that focuses on tactics and leads with that. So in other words, there's agencies where it's like, well, we need to do paid advertising, so let's find a digital agency.

14:06Or we want to do SEO, so let's find an SEO agency. We have those capabilities. I have SEO digital specialists with decades of experience. but we want to start with the strategy because the mistake I see founders make is they don't start with the audience and understanding like who they're going after and so they execute on the wrong things in the beginning. So we start with that. Who are you going after? How are we going to track results? If we bring in all these leads for you, what are you doing with them? Do you have the right tools in place? Can you set up the reporting and make sure you're processing the leads and following up?

14:50And if there are any gaps when we do that audit and assessment, we've closed the gaps. And then we put a bottoms up plan together and say, okay, these are the tactics we think make the most sense for your business, for your product and your end user. And then we execute. We move really quickly, but we really want to be strategic because we want our campaigns to work also. So it's just as important to me as it is to the client that the campaigns are successful. So we really look at it like a CMO would. And I think that's what makes us different. Yeah. So your website, rocketfuellabs.com, I know you both have resources.

15:35By the way, you're a really good LinkedIn follow. I'll just say this. But to our friends that are listening, whether they're ready to engage or want to have a conversation or just want to learn more about the work that you're doing, let's give some next steps. Yeah, yeah. They can reach me at Amanda at rocketfuellabs.com. You can also go to our website and check out more information and, of course, book a meeting with us there, too. Yeah. All right. Yes, rocketfuellabs.com, Amanda Patterson, again, founder, CEO, and fractional CMO. Hey, before we go, in terms of someone that might be listening, how do they know that they need a fractional CMO as opposed to just hiring a marketing agency?

16:25Yeah. So I would say if you're pre-series B, definitely pre-series A, but even pre-series B, you probably shouldn't bring on a full-time CMO. If you're at a stage where you're thinking, okay, I need to hire a full-time marketing director. I need that person to know what they're doing, but I don't have that much budget. then I think you should talk to a fractional CMO or CMO as a service like us. Because for the amount of money you would pay one salary for one person, what you're doing when you hire a firm like ours is you're kind of leasing part-time an entire marketing department. In those early days, you don't have the budget for a full-time designer, writer, developer, marketing ops manager and a CMO, nor do you have a need for full-time positions for all of those, but you need people who know what they're doing at the same time.

17:31That's kind of the conundrum that we help them solve. So I would say if you're at the phase where you're like, okay, I need to focus on marketing, but I don't have the money for a CMO. I need somebody who knows what they're doing and I have to hit my numbers. I don't, you know, I don't have a huge appetite for failing or falling down or wasting six months after bringing on the wrong person and not getting results, then I would say you should work with a firm like ours. It de-risks your marketing for you. Absolutely. Amanda Patterson, again, CEO of Rocket Fuel Labs. Thank you so much, Amanda, for joining us.

18:11Thank you, Josh. Bye.

18:43one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies.

19:24Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening. And thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.