Effective Digital Marketing Tactics and Strategies for Success

Thank you, Matt. I’m so excited to be here.

Oh, wow. That’s going way back. I think I was the talkative one, probably in class. It depends on which professors you ask. If you ask my accounting professors, I was the one hiding in the back of the room and trying to flip my wrists on the edge of the desk because I was bored. And if you asked my economics professor, I was the one to sleep at the back of the room. But if you ask my marketing professors, they would say, I’m the one who was really into it and was asking a lot of questions, who was sitting in the front row, you know, challenging them sometimes with questions.

What I’ve loved about marketing from the start and why I have pursued it in my career is actually it all goes back to psychology. It’s all about communicating to people in a relevant way and helping companies communicate who they are, what they sell, and what message they want to communicate or help them resonate with their target customers. So, it’s not just about companies, but all of us as people, as professionals, whether you’re a doctor, a garbage man, a marketer, or a brand manager. You’ve got to sell your professionalism every day. You’ve got to have stakeholders that you want to convince. Even as a parent, my kids are my stakeholders, and I have to project a level of authority, love, and friendliness yet get their respect. So, with everybody we interact with in our lives, we have competition goals, and as companies, our marketing clients have specific communication goals with their target clients, with the public in general, and with their employees. So, I feel like marketing is really all about communication. It’s all about how we communicate as humans but on a corporate and business level. So, that’s what always intrigues me about the psychology behind marketing and how you get that message across in a relevant way.

A few people have influenced me, and some of them are celebrity-level, and some are just people who have worked within my career. So, if I look at just my personal career influencers, I’ve had several bosses that shape me and my professional approach toward marketing. So, I’m just going to like pick one, and this is one of the things I always advise people when they’re students or people who are starting a career. Don’t start a business right away. Go work for someone because you’re going to learn so much, especially if you go and work for anyone, whether it’s a small business, whether it’s big business. You gain so much knowledge by working for a company, learning their processes, and finding out best practices. So, some of the people who I learned the most were actually my bosses before I started my business. Even when having Napkin marketing, I’ve learned a lot, even from clients. I worked for Rogers Media early in my career, in early 2000. This is back when Rogers was actually a publishing company. One of my first bosses, his name is Jim Barnes. He is still my Facebook friend, a big lumberjack guy. But he was actually a chief editor of the Rodgers magazines, and our job was to turn these magazines and create websites for them. One of the things I remember Jim telling me because I was responsible for doing marketing for all of these different publishers at Rodgers, they all had different magazines. They were really our internal clients, but I didn’t even feel that way because I was young, and I was like, okay, these are just projects I have. But, you know, Jim said to me one day, I think it was one time where I was supposed to get a report to a publisher. I was supposed to do something, and I kind of missed the deadline. And he’s like, you know what? You need to build a reputation of being a reliable person. You need to build a reputation of reliability. That’s a marketing thing, but it’s also a general business thing. Being able to deliver on your promise, being able to keep your word. That’s something as a brand people want to be able to see. A company they can trust. That’s something you should have in your brand. In your career, you want to be able to show that you’re delivering on whatever you promise, which is the core of our service commitment to our clients. So, I think one of the things the lessons Jim imparted to me is being consistent and reliable as a cornerstone of your professionalism because people will judge you based on that. And I had another manager when I worked for another publishing company after that, it was called The Business Information Room, and I had a great manager. Her name was Jennifer Hunter. She brought me on board, and we were actually doing direct mail campaigns, if you can believe it, back then.

For different magazines and publications. I always came up with great ideas for these campaigns. But what Jennifer imparted to me was the importance of staying on schedule. She had a lot of systems and delivery schedules, and there were times when I would put out a campaign, but it didn’t hit the mail on the intended mail date, which affected revenue going forward for months. So, just the importance of sending out a campaign, not only making it creative because a lot of times marketers are like, I want to do the most creative leader hashtag, but you know what? You can come up with the most creative, amazing campaign, but if it’s like four weeks behind to market and it’s out to market so late that it’s delayed in delivering revenue, for that company, no matter how frigging creative it was, it was late, and it doesn’t do the job. So, from Jennifer, I learned the importance of staying on schedule and being organized that way, and that’s as important as creativity.

So I think, especially for myself, when I was choosing my major, what do I want to do at university? I was a bit of an artsy kid in high school. I went to an arts program for my high school. I was a drama major, and some would say, drama queen.

Oh, awesome.

Yeah. Like, when you’re an artsy kid that gets encouraged, and you think that being creative is everything, right? But then, when you get out into the business world, you see what actually determines success. I’ve worked with many people who weren’t as creative as me but were sometimes more successful than me because they could churn out the stuff faster. Well, I’m making myself sound like an idiot.

But that’s one of the things I learned that helps me now because now I am a lot more disciplined in terms of schedules, in terms of like the operations I put together in my business, in terms of knowing the importance of project management and that’s what I’ve implemented in Napkin Marketing. You know, when we manage a client project in getting it out on schedule, being organized, having the communication within the team, making sure that everyone’s briefed and knows their deadlines, all of that operational stuff. It’s because of mistakes that I learned from when I was younger and working for someone. So, the bottom line is to go work for someone. So, make mistakes on their time. I know I shouldn’t say that, but you get that opportunity to learn. That’s what I think of working for someone as an extension of your entrepreneurial education.

Yeah, absolutely. Now that I’m on the journey of Adina’s bosses. I was going to mention another amazing manager I had who brought me on board at Yahoo, His name is Hunter Madsen. Hunter was just the kind of consummate professional, always kind of well-spoken. He was also a professor of marketing. Basically, everybody at Yahoo kind of treated Hunter as the resident genius, and every word he said was like a drop of gold out of his mouth. You know, one of the things that he taught me when I was at Yahoo was how to build consensus within an organization because it was a big organization. People don’t remember Yahoo, it was a thing. It was a competitor to Google and Microsoft at the time. So, it was a big organization. We had a sales team of like 20 or 30 people, and we were just the Canadian Division. There was a whole entire U.S. head office that had its own marketing department. It had its own business development and sales teams. There were sales strategists. There was the whole technical team, the developers, and everything. So, a lot of times, when you want to get a new idea sold through the organization or even a small idea, you have to get other people on board, which is what happens when you’re in a big company. One of the things I do love working for myself is that if I come up with an idea, we can do the idea that day. My idea needs to get my clients on board. That’s not true completely. I can get my clients on board, have to pitch the idea to them, and have to pitch the idea to my staff, so they think it’s a good idea. It’s not like a talk or see. But especially in a big company, if you want to get anything done, you have to be able to have some influence and build your influence. So, one of the things Hunter taught me was when I came on board. He tasked me with starting the trade marketing department at Yahoo, which was like all business-to-business marketing. So, I was helping market Yahoo to current and potential advertisers, and I was putting together business conferences, events, and seminars where I’d have our advertisers or our key knowledge specialists at Yahoo! For example, I did a conference on how to market to men. I did another market for women. So, at the center of that conference was obviously promoting Yahoo and promoting our lifestyle property, for example, as a vehicle for advertisers like Dove or Procter Gamble, who want to market to women. I’m being very stereotypical here, but we did another conference about marketing to men. We had mobile marketing, and obviously, the end goal was to sell mobile advertising on Yahoo, but we’d have a whole thought leadership event where we’d have people who were specialists in the mobile marketing side at Yahoo! Kind of percentage speakers. So, the whole idea of doing these events and conferences, we had to pitch this within the organization because I wouldn’t be able to do that just on my own. I had to get the budget approval to do this. I had to get speakers approved, and I had to get the whole project approved. So, I would tell Hunter about these ideas, and he’d be like, okay, put this together in writing, put it together in a presentation. Now go and pitch the sales team and get them to think that this is a good idea. I think it’s a good idea, but I want you to pitch the sales team, so they’re behind it. That was kind of intimidating to me because I had this team. They were all good-looking, successful, smart-talking, smooth-talking sales reps, and I wasn’t as confident as they were. So, basically, I followed Hunter’s advice and put together a presentation like, here’s how this thought leadership event will go. I branded it like even before I branded it to the audience. I don’t remember what I called the marketing-to-man conferences, but I think we had one called Buzz, which was the mobile marketing conference. Hunter came up with the big screen and little screen, which was about mobile marketing and kind of just regular marketing and coming up with a catchy name, even to market the project internally.

People don’t always think because I could have just said, Oh, we’re just doing a thought leadership conference.

But kind of coming up with a brand and coming up with the proposed speakers, like thinking through the whole event, packaging it up, and pitching in internally before we ever think that externally. Because then you get an internal fan base of support, and they’re like, Yeah, this is a great idea, and a lot of times we’ll have a meeting with the salesperson. I present this to the sales team, and then we’re at different sell-through levels. So, maybe first we present it to the sales director, and he is like, Yeah, hey, what we’re thinking of doing still all pitch together and in a presentation format and hey, do you think this is a great idea? Yes, it’s a good idea, but I think you should do this, this, and this. I think you should have this speaker. Okay, perfect.

The double idea, and then the next level, is the boss of the sales team has bought into it now. Now present it to the whole sales team, and then they know that their boss is bought into it.

Then they can also. But you’ve got to present it as a collaboration. It’s all about like you’re not doing something and pushing this project down people’s throats. You’re like, okay, this is what we’re thinking of doing, and by the time you present what you’re saying you’re doing, it’s like 95% baked. But you could be like, what do you guys think? So, do you have any feedback on this? Do you have any idea? They might have some small ideas, where they might be like, Yeah, this is amazing. By the time you presented like that, you know, people are like, Yeah, this is great, let’s do it. But some people might say, oh, I have an idea for a speaker. I have an idea for this and that. And then that’s their opportunity to be heard. And when you get that feedback at those meetings, you gotta listen and be like, Oh, hey, that’s great. Let me try to incorporate that somehow because the whole idea of those meetings is not just to present but to listen.

As a big organization, you’ve got to show that you’re a team player and that people are having some input into your work. You’re not just steamrolling your ideas through.

So, it’s a little bit of a, like, a whole political thing. Everything becomes law. Did you ever see that Family Ties episode where somebody in parliament they’re trying to pass a bill or they’re trying to pass a law. They don’t go to parliament and be like, I want to pass this law. Vote for me. No. They probably have like 500 conversations with all the different members of parliament who might oppose or support it and build rapport. It’s a political process. Right?

I think that one of the lessons I definitely learned from Hunter is how to manage the corporate internal politics of the organization when you’re trying to pitch your ideas.

Absolutely. It’s different in a small business, but one of the things I’ve definitely learned and I have to keep kind of implementing is if I have an idea for a client and I am just in a meeting, I just randomly talk about it. I’m like, Hey, I think you should be doing webinars. Then they’re going to come up with like 17 reasons why webinars are bad. Usually, I’ll be like, okay, you know what? We don’t need to discuss this. Let me take this back. Let me come back to you with a more fleshed-out proposal and idea. Then I come back to them with like a few PowerPoint slides. Here’s the type of webinar that you might want to think about. Here’s what it will look like. Maybe we’ll mock up the landing page. Here’s what it might look like, and that’s how people would sign up for it. Here are the projected audience leads, I can see you getting out of this. That’s a completely different story than just talking.

How you present your case and how you present your ideas are everything.

Oh, well, I do have a client who started off that way, but they sort of became a success story with our help. So, I actually had one client, he is still our client, and his name is Shan Mae, and he works with his son now, Janice Mae. They have an amazing business called Manifold Data Mining; it was started by Shan. Shan is a mathematics professor, and I’m not even exaggerating to say that Shan is a mathematical genius, analytics, and statistics genius. So, I actually came across Shan initially. I hope if you’re listening to this, it is okay to share this story. But I actually met Shan initially because I was purchasing services from him, so he had a data analytics business, and I was trying to do a market research-related project for a client that was trying to get market research on things like the clientele target market for my other client, and I came to Shan, and I was able to get the market research from him. And one of the things I said to him was, I was Shan; you have this brilliant bag of research. You’ve got these great statistical tools. As a marketing nerd, I’m appreciating everything you’ve got on offer here, including the knowledge and insights I was able to gain from your market research bank. The insight in the statistics you come up on customers, but your website looks like total crap. You’re so brilliant, you’re so professional, and the quality of the product that you deliver is on a world-class level. But that’s such a dichotomy from your website, which reflects the professionalism of the actual product delivered. What if we could help you to show a more professional image that’s actually in line with the quality that you deliver, the quality of your brain, to be honest, the level of experience and knowledge because he’s like a genius in world-class and what he does as an analytics expert, he also helps Fortune 500 companies with their customer insights and market research. So, I was like, you’re sort of helping Fortune 500 companies, and you’re at a Ph.D. level, but your website looks like it was done by a high schooler or something.

It doesn’t reflect the professionalism of where you’re really at. So, I would love an opportunity to revamp your website so it could reveal the level you guys are really at. Maybe If I can share my screen, I can show you.

Yeah. So, basically, what we did, and this was a couple of years ago already, but it is one of our case studies, is that we created a new website for Manifold Data Mining, and they are just even rethinking their whole brand. Am I sharing my screen?

So, what we kind of when we delved into their brand, and this was not just me, it was with my account manager, my design team with a copywriter is that they are really about customer insights, and we want to give them a fresh new look. They had sort of a hackneyed look with a lot of old fashion icons. So, we actually did this illustration-based look for them which showed statistics and people using statistics. But we also have pictures of like lifestyle.

You know, we have this whole data page that showed shopping trends, lifestyle trends, demographics, and so we actually created all of these icons, custom from them by our talented designer, Chanel Miller. So, honestly like, I’m proud of this project, but the reason I’m proud of it is that I think it speaks to like the core of what we do as marketers, which is to bring ideas to life and translate what companies do into an understandable language and that language is a visual language as well as like auditory, verbal and the written language. It’s our job to tell their story, right?

And that’s the challenge. You might be telling a story on the surface level. It’s a data company. Most people are going to be like, that’s pretty boring. But that’s a challenge as a marketer, and you gotta sometimes take what on the surface seems like a boring brand or boring service. You gotta find the spark, the brilliance, and the value that that company delivers. Whether it’s a fun, food, or lifestyle brand, or it could be an elevator consulting company which we had, we had a client who is an elevator consulting company. We’ve had so many different businesses as our clients, but for every client you deal with, you have to find that thing, that spark that’s going to make them interesting.

I like to find all my numbers at my fingertips, but I know like one of the biggest things is that they weren’t getting many leads out of their old website, and I think now they’re getting at least like, you know, probably ten times the number of leads that they got in the quality of the leads as well, because we sort of peppered that website with lead magnets, basically people can download samples of the research, they can download samples of the data.

Every time someone wants to download one of those, those were kind of given away for free in quotations on the old site. They were giving away a lot of that info. Now we sort of put all that information gated. You gotta fill out a form to get some of that, and every time someone fills out a form, that’s a lead. So, they’re having a lot more, you know, visibility into who’s using their website. They’re getting a lot more leads out of their website because there’s like, you know, one of the things I try to teach my clients to try to, like, you know, do with us within our projects is you got to booby trap the website, for lack of a better word. A booby trap with conversion points.

Just be like your contact us form on your site. That shouldn’t be your only conversion point. You should have lead magnets and white paper. You can download data like videos and things that are data that people have to fill in a form to interact. So, that’s where we sort of, we kind of booby trap this website in a positive way. So, when visitors are on here, there are lots of little areas where they can download stuff.

Websites have to be sales funnels.

Absolutely.

Yeah. And we try to incorporate that into every website we build, and sometimes it takes a little convincing to help the clients understand the value of having something like an e-book. E-books have been around for ten years at least, right?

But, I have a number of lawyer clients, and with each lawyer-client, we have tried to launch an eBook on their website related to their specialty. So, I have an amazing client, Ken Pope, who is the leading expert in estate planning, and it’s super neat. It is estate planning for families with disabled children. So, God forbid if you have a child with autism or you have an adult child who’s disabled, you need to think about their future and how you are going to plan. Kids who are not disabled can become independent one day. But if you have a child with a lifelong chronic disability, you have to consider their future as an adult. How are they going to be taking care of themselves? So, I’m saying all this because Ken helps people deal with that. He puts together estate plans and tools. So, one of the things I’m proud to have helped Ken with is we helped him launch a number of eBooks. So, the special trust that you set up for disabled children is called a Henson Trust. We created an e-book about the other side of his service offering, which is adult guardianship. He helps people manage adult guardianship issues. So, with these, it can enable him to share his expertise. Or if anyone is coming to the site looking for information on how to do this for their child. They might not be ready, but you know, people who are top of the funnel and middle of the funnel. So, you have those top-of-the-funnel people who might not be ready to sign up for a lawyer consultation and pay for a lawyer consultation. But they might be a lead for him in the future.

They have the opportunity to download an eBook, and Ken can have them in his funnel and in his newsletter list as well.

We’ve also helped him set up this evaluation form.

So, this is one thing I encourage my lawyer clients as well is to humanize your brand. So, he has this digital area where he explains his approach and his practice. People can basically fill in the form to talk about what’s their family situation with their child and where they are in their estate planning journey, and that’s for people who are a bit more bottom of the funnel for Ken, where they’re actually filling in a consultation form. So, for the eBooks we’ve set up for him, we have a checkbox. So, you sign up for the e-book with your name and email. The telephone numbers are optional. One of the checkboxes on the form is “Yes, I like information on Ken’s State Planning Services.” Please contact me for an appointment. And you’d be amazed at how many people just from signing up for the e-book also check off the permission that they are interested in an appointment. So, that’s a clear lead to be contacted. That’s a perfect example of something where we baked a sales funnel into a website. So, I encourage all my clients to have something like that, whether it’s an e-book, whether it’s a gated video, gated webinar. There should always be something you’re offering for free. That is a lead generator for multiple things.

Get your book list because you have so many good books that you’ve just talked about.

I am writing it down.

Most business owners are not trained in business, and they’re not trained in marketing. So, they just naturally don’t always think in that direction. They just think, okay, a website communicates my services, or sometimes it’ll have their bio. They’re just not thinking of their website. It’s like, oh, how do I make it into a sales funnel? And that’s again, that’s like our job as marketers, you know, to help them understand. Not many people even know how to package their knowledge into a lead magnet. So, again, I think that’s one of our jobs as marketers to help them. They don’t know what they don’t know. The plastic surgeon you talked about he’s busy being a plastic surgeon. He’s busy with his medical expertise and shows people how to make their faces look like Kim Kardashian or whatever. Everyone’s kind of wrapped up in their area of expertise. I’m also wrapped up in marketing. I might not know as much about finance. So, the answer to that is we’re all overwhelmed by the world out there. There’s so much information out there, and they’re probably just so absorbed in the delivery of the service they already deliver in their business that they don’t like that direction.

But that’s our job as marketers to educate them on that opportunity.

I would love that.

It depends on what area. I think, you know, it’s all about balance. So, if you’re looking to get into a marketing career or if you’re an agency owner, I think being always able to balance the rational and the creative. So, by that, some of the products during this meeting was like being able to deliver great creative, great campaigns, and great messaging, but also balancing that with being on schedule, having your operating tight, being on a budget, and making sure that your projects are profitable. As creative people, I think we’re always about making the most creative and beautiful website. But I think, as marketers, we have to be practical and be like, this website is really a tool to deliver leads. So, how can we create a beautiful professional image but still make it a sales funnel?

Yeah. I’m happy to talk with you. They can go to napkinmarketing.com. Fill in my contact form, or you can email me at adina@napkinmarketing.com. And I will be happy to connect with you. I’m also on LinkedIn. My last name is really hard to spell. It’s Zaiontz.

We’re really excited to connect with anyone who’s watched the episode, and I’m really thankful to Matt. I’ve learned a lot from you today as well.

Absolutely. Have an awesome day.

Take care.