Genna Keller and Anne Marsden With Trevelino/Keller

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, CSU’s executive MBA program. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Genna Keller and Anne Marsden with Trevelino/Keller. Welcome.

Genna Keller: Thanks, Lee. Well, glad to be here.

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to get caught up with both of you. Before we get too far into things for folks who aren’t familiar, can you give us kind of an overview of Trevelino/Keller? How are you serving folks?

Genna Keller: Yeah, sure. Thanks. So we are a digital and marketing agency, and we’re serving folks in three primary areas public relations, creative services, and growth marketing. Ann and her team have recently joined us to add incredible depth and expertise on the growth marketing path, so we’re incredibly thrilled.

Lee Kantor: So for folks who aren’t familiar, can you share a little bit about maybe definitions of terms like what is growth marketing and what is specifically B2B growth marketing?

Genna Keller: Yeah, sure. Sure. I’ll lead off. And then Ann, you can you can add to it. But at the highest level we define growth marketing as you know, marketing that will grow the business. Right? I mean, it will grow the business from a sales perspective, etc.. And, you know, B2B is certainly a critical part of that. So and I’ll let you add to.

Anne Marsden: Yeah. So Marsden marketing, when we were acquired by Trevelino/Keller, we’ve been doing B2B focused marketing for over 11 years, and the the difference is that there is a need for marketing to now have a revenue responsibility. As a matter of fact, our tagline has been marketing that sells because it’s now marketing’s job to work more closely than ever with the sales organization and to put programs in place that actually move the needle on the sales side.

Lee Kantor: So how is that different than the past? I mean, I have a degree in advertising from many, many years ago, and one of the first things we were taught was it’s not creative unless it sells. So how are we back to that now? Like what? What’s changed? Well.

Anne Marsden: Well, first of all, the biggest thing that’s changed is the shift to digital. And with the shift to digital comes a lot of different aspects of how you do marketing and how marketing supports sales. First of all, B2B buyers don’t buy the way they used to. They now have the ability to go online and learn and make decisions without even talking to a sales person. So there’s a greater emphasis on content marketing and thought leadership, as well as the fact that with digital channels, we can now measure things in a way we never could before. You couldn’t really measure how your advertising was doing 20 years ago, but now you can.

Genna Keller: Yeah. And to add to that, Lee, I don’t think at a high level it’s different, right. You know, you’re not doing marketing just to market. You are doing marketing to sell something. But Ann’s exactly right. You look at the influences and you look at the buyer. I mean, right now we are dealing on the B2B and B2C, but on the B2B end, a lot of these buyers, the majority are digitally native, right? I mean, they they know this and, um, you know, they’re looking at the website first, they’re eMarketer, uh, published a study, 60% from their survey, 60% of the buyers go to the website, to a supplier’s website, 55% go to a webinar, 52% to Anne’s point conducts research, 50% look at peer review sites. So those are all digital platforms that growth marketing has the ability to influence that impact sales.

Lee Kantor: Now, um, just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s kind of worth measuring. How do you kind of discern, um, with the metrics that matter and really get down to, um, what are the metrics that matter? And let’s focus on moving the needle in those areas instead of just moving the needle on things that we can measure.

Genna Keller: Yeah, and all of.

Anne Marsden: It is about finding the right KPIs for what you’re trying to achieve. You know, I use the example, the fact that I have 36,000 Twitter followers or X followers doesn’t mean anything unless there’s a through line that says that the interactions that we’re having on that channel are actually educating people and creating more interest for us. So you have to go past vanity metrics and pick the right KPIs.

Lee Kantor: So how do you help your clients do that? Like what does it look like when you’re onboarding a client who obviously is not as savvy as you and maybe has a lot of things they think, they think or think they know. But how do you kind of educate them and move them into the mindset of this growth marketing and to help them understand that, hey, you know what, at one point we thought having, you know, lots of Facebook, uh, followers was a good idea. But to your point, you know, we have to, you know, have a through line to revenue and all of that stuff. While it looks good to talk about, you know, at the club isn’t really moving the needle in your business.

Genna Keller: Yeah, yeah. And I think we can tag team this one in. Um, you know, first off, we as marketers have to understand the client’s business, the prospect’s business. Right. And what are their goals? You know, what are their short term goals? What are their long term goals? Um, and long could be. And short can be defined by any difference measure. But we’ve got to understand what is important to them and where do they need to move the needle. Right. Then, you know, we will look at the different channels that map to that, um, that they understand. Right? They may not understand all of the sausage making in the background, but they understand at a high level what their buyers are influenced by and where they’re going. If they don’t understand that we can even do tests, right, so we can test different channels and then we can explain to them, hey, look, this is who who you’re getting from X, this is who you’re getting from LinkedIn. This is who what’s happening from an email marketing perspective, this is your website traffic.

Anne Marsden: Very often times we have people coming to us and they have a sense of who their buyers are, but they haven’t necessarily dug deep into understanding actually, which channels do they use? Where do they go to learn, as Jenna mentioned, you know, do they use peer review sites? Do they attend webinars? And so, um, every client is different in terms of where they want to get to and what where they sit competitively within their landscape, and doing the research to understand the buyers and where they are. And the best ways to get in front of them is a key part of putting the plans together. It’s really helping them develop a go to market strategy to be the most effective.

Lee Kantor: So how do you help someone develop a go to market strategy when the market changes so rapidly? Like, you know, the search engines change their algorithms. Ai is now coming into play where that’s affecting search engine optimization and how you structure content. Um, how how do you kind of deal with this ever changing moving landscape?

Anne Marsden: So the methodology doesn’t change tremendously. But what you learn as you’re putting your methods to practice does bring you new information. So there’s no such thing as a set and forget mentality. You know, the the thing about being mostly digital is that you’ve got to constantly be iterating, learning and staying at the forefront of the different tools that your buyers might take advantage of, and also the technologies that we can use to better get in front of and service those prospects.

Genna Keller: Yeah, yeah. And Lee brought up the I, you know, phrase, right. It’s omnipresent. Um, and it is the wild wild west of that. And so, you know, we are constantly evaluating the tools and the technologies. And, you know, we’re constantly evaluating how can we stay current and how can we, you know, take advantage of those because you can’t just do those in a vacuum. You still have to have the human filter. Um, to your point, to keep up because everything is consistently changing. But you’ve got to have, you know, the folks that understand and can interpret what is happening in that realm.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you have any advice for the business to business marketer who maybe was relying on some of these third party platforms, like you mentioned, LinkedIn and Facebook and, um, and then they realized that, you know what, when I’m posting there and I’m spending a lot of time and energy and resources there, it’s not going to everybody that I think it’s going to and I’m going to in order to reach all those people, I’m going to have to, you know, pay those platforms. Because the old adage is true that if you if it’s free, then you’re the product. So they are realizing more and more that building up those kind of, um, audiences in those third party platforms isn’t really your audience.

Anne Marsden: I think that you have a good point, Lee, but particularly what it points to is the need for every marketer to understand all of the different channels that they should be using at the same time. We talk about omnichannel marketing because that’s what buyers now expect. But that’s also, as a B2B marketer, the only way you’re going to win. Gartner did a study, and they found that companies that use four or more channels to reach their target audience were 300% more effective in their marketing programs than those that just just used 1 or 2.

Genna Keller: Mhm. And to that point, you know the set it and forget it. That’s that’s gone. And those four to use Gartner’s data could fluctuate and change depending on the month depending on the seasonality of the business depending on, you know, what is going on from a macro economic perspective. You know those your channels are constantly evolving and that is our job to look at them and see which ones are working and which ones are not. And that is the beauty of the digital channels. We can see that, um, and we can see that in real time, and we can make adjustments in real time and advise our, our client base and marketers on what they should do.

Lee Kantor: So any advice for the B2B marketer out there? We’re like, what’s the low hanging fruit today? Where are some, uh, places they should be, um, putting their energy and resources. Uh. Any advice?

Anne Marsden: I think the advice.

Genna Keller: Go ahead. Yeah. Go ahead.

Anne Marsden: Uh, I think I think the advice has to be different for each person in each organization because you have to measure what is their maturity model today. If they’re not, um, super digitally focused, then the first, then start there. If they already have a fairly sophisticated tech stack and they understand that, then the advice becomes, where can you be gaining maximum ROI from each of your investments and using all of your investments together in that technology stack.

Genna Keller: Yeah. And even to back up, um, I think, you know, we can get caught up in the tools and the tech and the AI because that’s it’s cool, right? I mean, and it really is. And, and we have data as marketers that we’ve never had before. But oftentimes I think folks need to go back to the basics. And that basic is their messaging, right? Their content, you know, what are they saying externally to the market and is it right? Are they being consistent, particularly when you look at all of these channels. Right. So I think sometimes, you know, we all need to take a deep breath and just go back and make sure we’re we’re saying what we want to say and then we tweak it, you know, based on all those channels to.

Lee Kantor: Now, can you share a story maybe that illustrates how you were able to work with a company? You don’t have to name the name, but maybe share the problem that they had when they came to you and how you were able to take them to a new level.

Anne Marsden: Absolutely. Um, for instance, without naming clients, um, a very large manufacturer, um, had a had a need because they hadn’t put a lot of focus on their digital channels. They had a website, but that was about it, and they hadn’t really invested in understanding how it was being used. So they asked us to help them form a go to market approach that was digital first, and they recognized that their buyers were retiring, they were aging out and new, and they were selling to engineers, and they had new engineers coming in, so they wanted to find out the best ways to reach them. We started doing the go to market planning and the research. And just to give anecdotally, one of the things we found out, which we didn’t expect, and you don’t sometimes you just don’t know until you do the research. The one of the most popular social media channels for these engineers was Instagram. Turns out that these guys like to take pictures and show what they’ve been working on. So. So that opened up some new ways to get in front of and communicate with them. I mean, but that was only one of many things you have to put an integrated set of programs together to reach those people and get them the content that they need. So who I can tell you, go ahead.

Lee Kantor: Sorry. No, go ahead.

Anne Marsden: To close the loop on that. I can tell you that at the end of the first year, the program was so successful, the board decided to roll it out to the rest of the divisions of the company. They also tinkered with the idea. Because of that, they should stop doing trade shows because why spend all that money to face to face if our digital is being so successful? And we said, don’t stop doing that. You still need face to face. You know, it’s just you need to balance it.

Lee Kantor: So what is the ideal, uh, traveling Keller, uh, client look like now?

Genna Keller: Yeah. Um, I think it is. It is a company that believes in integrated marketing. Um, and particularly understands how marketing can impact sales. Right. And when we say integrated, you know, we do think of folks that understand growth marketing or want to. Right. Um, but also value public relations, the PR side of the business. And that goes back to that content and the messaging. And then you throw in some creative services that could be, um, a website design, it could be a refresh for a trade show, you know, as Anne mentioned. But understanding how all of those disciplines work together and understanding how they can help each other, and it really makes for a a marketing program that is firing on all cylinders. But you also have flexibility, right? So again, there may make some senses where it is you lean more into the PR, then you dial that back and you lean more into growth. So those are the fun ones where we can, you know, really just help them across the spectrum.

Lee Kantor: So what’s the pain they’re having today where a call to Travaglino Keller would be the right move?

Genna Keller: Yeah, that’s a good question. Um, and I think it varies by call and inbound leads that we receive and the folks that we know, some of them, it’s resources, purely a resource. You know, they need help. And they may be, uh, a marketing team of 1 or 2. And, you know, they need help on strategy. They need help on execution. Um, some it may be there is a new product, a new service, a new brand, a new company to launch. And it is that complete go to market strategy, you know, how do we get out there? Some it may be, um, growth pains and they may need funding or they may need to get in front of some strategics from a partnership perspective.

Lee Kantor: And if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you, either of you or somebody on the team. What is the website? What are the coordinates?

Genna Keller: Yeah. Well, you know, we practice what we preach. So we’ve got all of our social channels. But Trevino Keller comm.

Lee Kantor: And that’s t r e v e l I n o k e l l e r com.

Genna Keller: You got it.

Lee Kantor: Well, thank you both so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Genna Keller: Thank you, Lee, for having us. Thank you.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.