Episode 78 – People will share your message if they believe in it and it’s easy

Today I have two guests on the show, Ivy Garcia and Lisa Campbell Harper. Together they have co-founded BRANDfit which...

The post Episode 78 – People will share your message if they believe in it and it’s easy appeared first on Sideways8.

Today I have two guests on the show, Ivy Garcia and Lisa Campbell Harper. Together they have co-founded BRANDfit which fuels growth through powerfully relevant marketing to the most influential audience in our modern workplace, women over forty-five, offering a platform for understanding her needs, preferences, and motivators through strategic workshops, creative services, speaking and research. As both co-founders of the organization, they both award-winning and brand strategists and agency veterans with more than twenty years of leadership experience building distinctive brands, launching new technologies and inspiring community interests for some of the most significant brands in the world, as well as national and regional not-for-profits and organizations.

 

Adam: [00:00:08] Hi. Welcome to the Good People Good Marketing Podcast, a podcast about digital marketing and how to make it better so the good people and good organizations can have good marketing as well. I’m your host, Adam Walker, co-founder of Sideways8, a digital marketing agency and 48in48, a nonprofit dedicated to hosting events that built forty-eight websites for forty-eight nonprofits in forty-eight hours.

[00:00:29] Today I have two guests on the show, Ivy Garcia and Lisa Campbell Harper. together they have co-founded BrandFIT which fuels growth through powerfully relevant marketing to the most influential audience in our modern workplace, women over forty-five, offering a platform for understanding her needs, preferences and motivators through strategic workshops, creative services, speaking and research. As both co-founders of the organization, they both award-winning and brand strategists and agency veterans with more than twenty years of leadership experience building distinctive brands, launching new technologies and inspiring community interests for some of the most significant brands in the world, as well as national and regional not-for-profits and organizations. Ladies, welcome to the show.

Lisa: [00:01:17] Hi. Hello.

Adam: [00:01:20] This is so fun. I don’t normally get to interview both founders or even two people at the same time, so I’m pretty excited about this. I think is going to be a lot of fun. Thanks for joining me. Do you have anything you want to add to that bio there?

Lisa: [00:01:30] We’re just thrilled to be here and to talk with marketing today and if folks are interested in marketing to women forty-five plus, we’ve got a website @brandfitconsulting.com and we’re active in building a following on Instagram, Twitter, so look for us.

Adam: [00:01:47] You’re loving the Instagram like everybody else these days, right? That’s fantastic. I love that.

 

Ivy: [00:01:53] We are. We also wanted to say, too, we love the name of your podcast series.

Adam: [00:01:58] Oh thanks. I shopped it around to some smart people and they told me that this was the name to go with rather than the other names that I probably preferred.

 

Ivy: It’s good stuff.

Adam: [00:02:09] That’s great. Well, this is going to be really fun. I really appreciate your time. Let’s dive in. Related to digital marketing, can you share something that has worked well for you?

 

Ivy: [00:02:18] Yes. We’re always learning, but there are three things that we wanted to hit on today and one of those is that we combine consulting with coaching. What we found is that everyone benefits from a coach, elite athletes and even healthy brands, so our goal is to get our clients to the next level and set them up for continued success and that calls for an equal focus on internal and external marketing. That’s really the lesson here.

 

[00:02:44] One thing we know for sure is that nonprofit organizations that are successful in digital marketing activate their strategies by socializing their purpose frequently. It sounds good in theory, but how does that work in practice? We found that many times an organization develops a solid vision and mission but it isn’t always socialized and over time it doesn’t serve the organization effectively. So, to help combat this brand fatigue at the conclusion of our engagement with our clients, we package their integrated communications strategy into what we call a brand activation kit. And that can be easily printed, shared and referenced and leveraged for media, for fundraising, for culture, building, for board meetings, for employee on-boarding. The kit will also serve as a foundation for their future strategic planning and can be revisited and evolve annually depending on their goals, their territory growth, their new service launches and strategic partnerships.

Adam: [00:03:42] Fantastic.

Lisa: [00:03:44] Yes. As we talk about that digital activation kit, when it’s working really well, not only does the kit include our clients’ key messages and their positioning, images, hashtags, logos, all of those promotional elements, but we also offer and ask our clients to offer them to their marketing team. Again, a way to socialize that brand and coaching tips to bring it to life. They may also share it with the media, host donors, PR teams, event teams, customer service teams, and really anyone who has a role in sharing the marketing messaging. Often, we have a campaign, a fundraising campaign potentially, and we are asking people to become our brand advocates.

[00:04:30] In this way, we want them to share our message and we literally give them the tools to do that. We might give them even content to post on their own social networks, we might give them a story that they could literally publish that might go out to writers or editors or contributors. And what we find is that it’s much more likely that our advocates, the media, influencers, will talk about our story, will share it if they believe in the message and, this is critical, if it’s easy. The digital brand activation kits we give our partners literally makes that brand come to life and it does so in a way that’s super easy, super simple, all the tools they need to be vocal and consistent and an active brand ambassador.

Adam: [00:05:15] I love that. Especially the part that you mentioned about people will share your message if they believe in it and if it’s easy. I think that’s where a lot of organizations get tripped up, is that yes, maybe they do have a message that people can believe in but if it takes ten minutes to describe what that message is, it’s not easy enough for people to share it or, honestly, even to grasp it at that point. We have to really be careful to make sure that our messages are, are sort of bite-size and digestible and easy to share, right?

Lisa: [00:05:42] Right. And that they don’t live in a binder that’s created beautifully at the start of making your [inaudible 00:05:48] or at the start of the year but reside on a shelf.

Adam: [00:05:52] I love those plans that sit on shelves, those are great. They’re really good for starting fires in the winter. There’s lots of really good– I got years worth of plans digitally that are just hanging around. I love it. That’s one of my personality quirks. I love to make plans, it’s something that [inaudible 00:06:10] but I make them, I make them.

Ivy: [00:06:14] That’s awesome. That’s really one of the reasons why we started this consultancy. We looked back throughout our career and we could really pinpoint when the strategic relationships started to break down between the client and the agency, no matter what the makeup of the client, Fortune 500, organizations, smaller business, etcetera, and this is really one of our key findings is that when a strategy is not activated, it’s not alive, it gets lost literally on the shelf, but also just in the meaning and purpose and shared ownership within the organization.

Adam: [00:06:57] That’s right. That’s great. All right, that was really good. Question number two, related to digital marketing, can you share something that has not worked well that we can learn from?

Ivy: [00:07:06] Yes, absolutely. We are always trying to learn, but there are two things in particular. One is that a strategy that is not in motion doesn’t work. Just picking up on what we were just talking about, we like to say Newton’s first law of motion is always is also referred to the law of inertia, “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion.” In our experience, these annual digital marketing programs that don’t have periodic feedback loops and opportunities for adjustment, analyzing what’s working, what’s not working, just doesn’t work. So, too often these integrated marketing teams or a board or leadership council, they meet at the end of the year to plan for the upcoming year, they craft marketing and digital communication plans and then they just don’t meet again until another year goes by.

[00:08:00] We really try to keep that in mind. Our world is not static and, because it’s changing at a pace we’ve never experienced before, this extended period of static implementation it’s just out of sync with the pace of the real world. The first thing that we were talking about, of course, you’ve got to keep this strategy socialized. Again, it’s one of the reasons why we call ourselves BrandFIT. We know from experience that a strong strategy is an active strategy, so we try to bring that to life with the brand activation kit and make it easy for our clients, to work the process, even after our engagement is over. We’re always very mindful of trying to keep them healthy, even if we’re no longer involved. Back to the name of your podcast, it’s good people, good marketing, and we want them to succeed, so we try to give them everything they need for that.

[00:08:55] Then secondly– I’ll let Lisa take that one.

Lisa: [00:09:03] Another thing that we find lately is sort of top of mind for so many of our clients is segmentation. Everyone is all about mining that data and creating lots of little micro communities and being able to personalize content and individualized content. But the flip side of that is having the time and the resources and often the investment to actually create that content that is personalized and many of our clients are really not understanding this as a gap in terms of implementation. So we are really working with our clients to understand, as we amplify that level of sophistication in terms of audience segmentation, that we also need to help them understand how the plan for the results, how to plan for teams, how to expand their teams, how to plan for supplemental agencies sometimes.

[00:09:59] And this is not always an easy task, to go to a board to say, “We’re doing something completely different and we need more time and money.” Whoa, you might hit a wall there. What we really help our clients do is build that business case to say, “This is really important and if we make this investment, the results can be game changing.” This more sophisticated content play doesn’t happen with the old team and the old tools that we really do [inaudible 00:10:27] increase their technology capabilities, sometimes we need to introduce new frameworks for collaboration, new frameworks for in real time response, new tools to literally customize images, customize text, customize calls to action. Just helping them understand how to scale and how to do that over time in a way that is rationalized back to a good return, one month, two months, twelve months, twenty-four months and on down the road.

Adam: [00:10:59] Right. Okay. That’s good. I like that. And I like how you’re thinking about that. I mean, I think segmentation is important, you’re right, and it is genuinely underestimated and extremely difficult to do and it’s a nice idea to say, “Oh, let’s segment our audience” and it’s a whole nother thing to actually spend the time to do it appropriately and well, so that’s great. I love that you’re thinking in that manner. Okay.

Question number three, this is probably my favorite one, related to digital marketing, can you tell me something that you’re excited about?

Lisa: [00:11:31] So many things I’m excited about.

Adam: [00:11:34] Everything. [inaudible 00:11:36] more excited about.

Lisa: [00:11:38] Our short, short list is, one of the things we are just super jazzed about is the availability of free or low cost technology tools for nonprofit marketers. There are just so many new niche tools out there that help teams, what we were just talking about, expand their ability to craft dynamic, beautiful, compelling and engaging content. We’re going talk about two tools here that we don’t represent but we have used and we found our clients have great success with. They are just two of many. One is called Canva and it’s literally a low cost design platform that allows marketers to create those consistent brand assets at a super low cost with professional look and feel. It [inaudible 00:12:24] millions of stock– are you familiar with it?

Adam: [00:12:25] Very, yes. Canva is fantastic.

Lisa: [00:12:29] Millions of stock photography, illustrations, vector files. You can upload your own brand guidelines, your own colors. And it’s great for those teams, too, where you have maybe someone from internal human resources and training. He wants materials for on boarding that had the similar look and feel to all of your external marketing materials but also your social marketing team may have access to this tool, so it’s just a great way to offer lots of predetermine precise templates for direct mail, newsletter design, social media, post presentation designs, and save a lot of time and money getting your materials to look beautiful. That’s one.

[00:13:08] Another one is an organization called Crowdpac. Are you familiar with Crowdpac?

Adam: [00:13:13] Not familiar with– and you got me there. I’m interested in now.

Lisa: [00:13:16] Well, we met the founders. We had a great opportunity to meet them this spring. We attended a conference called The United State of Women in Los Angeles and we met the Crowdpac founders there and just love their technology and their mission. It’s all around helping more people participate in the political process through running for office, and finding candidates and causes they believe in.

[00:13:39] It’s a platform and we think it’s the only platform where candidates can test the waters of a run for office and literally you don’t need a bank account or formal campaign. You can set up your profile and just solicit feedback from folks who may be interested in supporting your cause, your mission and or your campaign. They have a start running page. They describe it as a start running page that enables anyone to basically collect credit card back pledges. Think of this as a GoFundMe but it’s a trial GoFundMe and it’s all around political or nonprofit mission oriented campaigns.

Ivy: [00:14:21] It’s an open platform?

Lisa: [00:14:22] Yes, it’s open to all types of candidates and not leaning one way or the other, any, many different causes, grassroots organizations. Their core mission is that you are trying to do something good for the community. We think that’s just cool, cool technology.

Adam: [00:14:17] That sounds really, really– I think I may have heard of it at one point in time because I was aware of sort of a network for candidates to test the waters on, that sounds familiar, but it’s been a while. That sounds just truly amazing. I’m going to have to look that up right after the show I think.

Ivy: [00:14:53] Yes. A few other things that we just want to touch on. The second thing that we’re super, super excited about is just diversity. I mean, we’re thrilled about the growing interest in diversity of imagery and digital advertising and in all of marketing. There’s a huge movement of afoot to help normalize this idea of human variations in all shapes, sizes, ages, ethnicities, backgrounds. These are people that are representing our real shared communities. Historically stock photo houses don’t have a lot of diversity.

Adam: [00:15:31] They’ve a lot of handshakes, it’s what they got, handshakes. That’s all the stock photos are.

Ivy: [00:15:34] Exactly. But we’re starting to see a shift and we want to be part of that shift as well. We do want to give a shout out to a couple of agencies and organizations that we think are really doing a great job. They’re focused on creating photography and video assets and motion graphics featuring all kinds of humans. One is Upsplash, the other— Are you familiar with Upslash?

Adam: [00:15:57] I’m familiar with Unsplash. I’m not familiar with Upslash.

Ivy: [00:16:01] Yes, Unsplash. Yes, thanks. PhotoAbility.

Adam: [00:16:07] I’ve not heard of that one.

Ivy: [00:16:09] It’s another great one, PhotoAbility.net. A new one that we just found called CreateHER Stock.

Adam: [00:16:16] Oh, cool.

Lisa: [00:16:17] That’s very interesting. If you sign up, they will send you actually an assortment of images and they have a specific focus on African American and female, so if you’re in (inaudible 00:16:30) that particular group, they’ve got great representation. Pexels is another one. They’re awesome, and representationmatters.me, again, all different types of imagery there, some for folks with disabilities, some with images of super young folks, some with older folks, and we’re going to speak to that in a minute too. But really one of the plane on that a little further and in keeping with the movement, one of the things that is really near and dear to our hearts at BrandFIT is the opportunity to advocate and amplify the contribution specifically of women forty-five and older. And we’re super excited because we are developing a platform along these same lines to feature stock photography and video literally featuring women in their forties, fifties, sixties, and beyond. because we know that this group of women make up 85% of all purchase decisions for family, home and communities, and they are in the not for profit space the major donors and volunteers. There’s a staggering gap in the same way we were talking about some of these other underserved groups. You can’t find images (inaudible 00:17:49) so we are going to be hosting this project and really disrupting this. Our project is called “Her Shot” and we think it’s pretty groundbreaking. Our goal is to produce and license a hundred— Excuse me, not a hundred. That’s way too low. A thousand images of women forty-five plus by 2020. This is really going to be an exercise in authenticity and we’re going to be having a call for models to represent a diversity of ages, ethnicities, body types, and we’re going to showcase women forty-five plus photograph living their beautiful best in locations and settings all around the world, so super excited.

 

Adam: [00:18:34] Wow. That is truly ambitious and really inspiring. I really liked that a lot. That sounds amazing. This is called “Her Shot”. Is that also going to be the url as well?

Lisa: [00:18:46] Stay tuned.

Ivy: [00:18:46] Yes, stay tuned.

Adam: [00:18:48] I jumped ahead. I apologize, not intended there.

Ivy: [00:18:51] Invite us back in about six months and we’ll tell you all about it. We have one last one last piece we just wanted to share with you, too, we are most excited about and it is another special project we’re developing for 2019. In the vein of everything that we’re talking about today, how do we arm small marketers, small businesses and especially not-for-profits with all the tools that they need for success? Earlier this year we are talking about this and we were asking ourselves, how can we help these people as much as possible? Not all organizations can afford us. They can’t afford marketing consultants. They can’t afford agencies. They don’t have a marketing staff or they have to make dire trade offs for marketing or their marketing dollars are less effective because they don’t have a strong brand foundation or they just can’t communicate their needs.

[00:19:44] We want to address that. And our answer to this is to make our expertise and our process available to them through a virtual curriculum that would be super affordable. It’s an evolution of our brand activation kit. We’re workshopping it with a not-for-profit client we have now and it’s just so much fun, it’s exciting, and it’s going to be a step-by-step process of creating a successful annual plan for themselves. Our purpose is to share the latest frameworks and tools and best practices and make it nimble and actionable and at the end affordable for as many (inaudible 00:20:21) organizations and small businesses as possible. We really do believe our world is a better place when good people are doing good things and we want to foster that success and energy.

Adam: [00:20:33] That’s great. That’s at least part of the reason that we started 48in48, was that same reason. Too many nonprofits just cannot afford a decent website and so well, let’s get some professionals together and provide it for them. So far so good. Even though it’s a wild ride, it’s a good ride. Well, this is great. I’ve got a lot of notes. Let me see what I can do to recap these. This is really fantastic. Let’s see.

[00:21:00] Question number one, related to digital marketing, what’s working well? You mentioned that you intentionally combined consulting and coaching and you work on both internal and external marketing. You also talked about your digital activation kit, which includes key messages, messaging, logos, images, and other promotional materials. We also discussed socializing the brand and giving brands the tools to really share their message. The part that I really highlighted out of that is that people will share your message if they believe in it and if it’s easy. I think that’s the best quote from that particular section.

[00:21:34] For question number two, what has not worked well that we can learn from, you said a strategy that is not in motion doesn’t work, so the collecting dust on the shelf is a bad strategy. Bad Adam for doing that sometimes. And a static implementation is out of sync with the real world because we’re just growing too fast, moving too fast. A strong strategy is an active strategy. Segmentation is important, but it’s tough and often underestimated because it takes a lot of time to do data mining, create micro communities. But the flip side is, it takes resources and time and investment and too often that’s just very underestimated by organizations. They need to think through how to plan staff and build a team.

[00:22:14] Then for question number three, what are you excited about? You said the availability of free or low cost technology. You mentioned Canva, which I’m a big fan of. I also like, just as a side note, Adobe Spark, which is not free but it’s a fantastic tool and I use that often. And then Crowdpac, which I’m absolutely going to have to check out which I’m excited about. You said you’re also excited about diversity and a growing interest in diversity and you mentioned several stock photo sites that are doing better in that regard. Some of which I’m aware of and others that I’m also going to have to check out.

[00:22:48] Then you mentioned your platform that is going to feature women forty plus and your project to get a thousand images of women that are forty-five and over by 2020, I believe I got that right. Then that you’re also creating virtual curriculum for small organizations that otherwise just can’t afford your type of consulting but desperately need it. Did I miss anything in that recap?

Ivy: [00:23:10] No, you get an A+.

Adam: [00:23:12] Oh man. I got an A+. I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten an A+ actually. Don’t tell my kids. Well, I appreciate that. Is there anything else you want to share with our audience before we go?

Ivy: [00:23:22] I don’t think so. If anyone has any questions about what we talked about, all the contact information is readily available and we’d love to chat. This was so much fun.

Adam: [00:23:37] Yes, it was fun for me too and I can’t thank you enough for being on the show. I’d love to have you back. I genuinely love your mission. I think it’s really important getting that level of diversity out to support. And it was funny because when you said women that are forty plus are really not featured on stock photo sites, something my mind clicked. I’m like, “You’re right, never. I’m on stock photos all the time and you’re completely right. It’s all these twenty-year-olds that are on there.” What’s the deal with that? It’s not real life. Come on, be realistic, people. What are y’all doing? No, that’s really good. I think your project is fantastic. If I can help with it in any way, please let me know.

Lisa: [00:24:21] We’d love that, thank you.

Adam: [00:24:23] All right. Well, thank you both for joining in. We’ll have to do this again sometime.

Lisa: [00:24:26] Let’s do it.

Ivy: [00:24:26] Let’s do it.

Adam: [00:24:30] Thanks for listening to the Good People Good Marketing Podcast. To get more resources about digital marketing, make sure to go to goodpeoplegoodmarketing.com where you can find more podcasts, blogs, and other fun resources. Also, if you want to find me, your host, you can find me on Twitter at @ajwalker and on my blog at adamjwalker.com where I blog about leadership, productivity, habit building, and the craziness of having five kids. Thanks, and tune in next time.

The post Episode 78 – People will share your message if they believe in it and it’s easy appeared first on Sideways8.