Evoking Customer Emotion
Tara Clever shares her insights into evoking customer emotion, why content has to be responsive to your customers, and why video marketing is vital for business growth.
[MUSIC]
Welcome to Demand Gen Visionaries.
I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios.
And today I'm joined by a special guest, Tara, how are you?
I'm so good.
How are you?
Excited to have you on the show,
excited to chat Margin Edge.
Be talking about restaurant marketing,
which is always fun, considering I feel like everybody's been to a restaurant.
And we all know marketing, so thanks for a fun combination there.
And we'll get into everything into your background as well.
So how did you get started in demand?
>> Yeah, so it's actually a very winding road.
Definitely not what I went to school for.
I feel like a lot of marketers have degrees, but they're like, that's cute.
But I thought at 18 or 22, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
So I am the proud owner of two degrees I no longer use anymore.
And actually got started in sales in the health and wellness industry.
I think in a lot of pieces over the course of my career,
I've been handed a blank slate, figure it out kind of job,
both in sales, marketing and operations.
And in all cases, I'm charged with the growth of either a department or a
product.
And then most literally landing in a marketing role with territory foods,
which is a venture back nutrition company,
probably my most literal demand gen role.
But that was D2C margin edge and many ways fell into my lap and
is my first venture in to B2B marketing.
And has been this really, really cool extension of some kind of hard earned
skill sets, I think over the years from various backgrounds and
various different types of roles that have really manifested in a way that we
've
got some really exciting outcomes and has been an incredibly, incredibly cool
moment in my career.
Let's get to our first segment.
The trust tree is where we go and feel honest and trusted.
And you can share those deepest, darkest demand and marketing secrets.
What does margin edge do?
So margin edge is a restaurant management system.
We digitize and streamline back office for restaurant operators.
You've ever had a job as a bartender or a server or
you know somebody who has, you understand that this vertical is an incredibly
complex one.
You have variable cost, variable revenue, a product that spoils, variable labor
And of course, over the last couple of years, you add on top of that supply
chain
disruption, labor shortages, a small little pandemic that didn't disrupt
anybody.
And so the complications and the complexity of running a restaurant is more
complex than ever.
Margin edge, what we do is we sync with your point of sale system accounting
software
and create real time data insights to help empower operators run their business
with a more data driven approach.
A lot of operators in the industry have gone off of gut, feel, instincts,
relationship with vendors, handshakes, paper, pen, clipboards.
And really what margin edge is charged with is bringing technology into the
space
and helping operators get back to the part of the business that they love,
which is the hospitality community and serving their guests.
You mentioned first bout with B2B, obviously pulling tons of lessons,
I'm sure from the B2C world and potentially even doing a little bit better of a
job
on some of those things.
Tell me about those types of customers, those types of restaurants,
what sizes are they and who's making those buying decisions?
Yeah, so we typically work with independent restaurant change.
So think one to 50 units, typically independently owned and operated.
So we deal with the mom and pop, single unit, family run restaurant,
all the way up to 50 unit chains.
It's interesting you say that I couldn't have known when I took this job
or stepped into this role with margin edge,
how much my background would help me think about demand and think about growth
within this world.
But operators, even though they are various heavy business people,
most of them have a significant emotional investment in their business as well.
A lot of heart and soul and blood and sweat and tears go into running a
restaurant.
And so when you're thinking about messaging,
when you're thinking about capturing their attention
and when you think about providing a solution,
that emotional resonance that's so common that you see on the kind of the D2C
side,
it's absolutely the way that we think about things here.
It's definitely the big change in a lot of times for restaurants.
And so it's a big piece of how we think about telling the story.
I'd imagine if it's the owner,
a lot of times they don't have a sophisticated technology buying department or
anything like that, right?
It's a lot of those decisions are made saying,
hey, this has been a pain in my neck for the last six years.
I got to do something about it.
There's no question.
I think the diversity of our audience is what makes our job and our company
so cool and interesting and such an interesting way of thinking about growth.
So, yeah, you absolutely have the cases where you have an owner operator
who's making a decision based on maybe decades in the business.
You have some young up-and-comers and fast-growing chains
looking for things to streamline their back office.
And technology, it's not that it hasn't existed in hospitality before,
but it's certainly going through a bit of a renaissance,
the pandemic in many ways became a forcing function in terms of technology.
Literacy, technology, adoption, and certainly those buying decisions have
accelerated.
We certainly see that played out at Margin Edge.
I think you can see that across kind of our hospitality tech vertical.
So, yeah, we have a lot of different buyers, a lot of different reasons
why they're coming to us for help.
And that's what makes things really fun.
Okay, so tell me a little bit more about your marketing strategy
and then how does demand fit within that?
I started with Margin Edge 90 days before the pandemic hit.
So, I was 90 days into a brand new shiny job
where marketing had been essentially a sales support function
and only a really small team,
actually just a marketing associate out of college,
supporting the sales organ.
They knew that it was time to think about
marketing in terms of more of a growth mindset
and also bringing somebody in who could help think about the department more
holistically.
I came in, I was super excited, let's go.
And then all of a sudden, all things shut down,
all budgets are cut.
The vertical that you are marketing to is literally closed.
And so, it was definitely a fascinating way to start.
But the way that it has shaped the way we think about demand-gen,
I think is now kind of an indelible mark on the soul and culture of our
marketing department
because we really were forced to act in a really resource constrained way,
especially for those first six or nine months,
had to get very scrappy, very creative and measured everything that we did
incredibly closely, which has then pulled through to even the way we think
about things today.
So coming from D2C, I tend to be a customer economic stalker.
I am a big time reporting watcher.
I keep track of the numbers very, very closely.
And that was certainly very required in the early days of the pandemic.
What was cool though, is that even in those scrappy resource constrained
moments,
we were able to find a couple of channels and messages that really worked for
us.
And then by September of 2020, we were back to pre-COVID revenue.
And by the end of 2020, we were at 40% year over year growth.
And for company-serving restaurants, that was something we felt very good about
Hit our stride really started accelerating based on the foundational principles
that we had
when we had no budget and when we were really having to be creative and built
on the things
that worked in a way that I cried ourselves on being incredibly efficient.
So we saw 100% year over year growth in 2021 and we're on track for that this
year too.
And so it's been a really exciting ride.
Yeah. So we'll get into some of the uncuttable budget items here in a second,
but any things that that stood out to you as those efficiency focuses for you
from a marketing
perspective? Yeah. So in those early days, we really had no money. So I had
mailchimp and that was it.
And so the early uncuttable budget was the only thing that we were spending
money on.
And so email became our singular channel, those early moments. What was cool
about that,
though, is it did provide a testing ground for messaging, especially in a
moment where it was
so emotionally raw to meet our operators, to meet our customers in a way that
felt like we were
in it with them. And I know at that time it was so like, "Oh, kind of cliché"
by the end,
really like, "Oh, we're going to get together and everybody wash your hands."
And like, that kind
of nonsense, but because our CEO and a huge percentage of our team are all
former restaurant
operators, owners, chefs, executive chefs, our head of support is Smalier.
These are folks who
really understand the ethos of our vertical. And so our messaging was really
crafted in a way that
spoke. I think it proved out that it really spoke to the moment. And those are
lessons that
we've carried through even in years as the dust has kind of settled on the
other side of it. So
email was first. We started to see some nice growth, some nice need-gen
conversions. We actually had
a record-breaking quarter in quarter three of 2020, which I don't think we
could have predicted
really. And then we started to layer on some paid advertising on top of that.
But we used what we
learned in those email messages and in the calls to action and the responses
and listening to the
customer conversations to fuel our ad strategy. And so it was little by little.
We'd find little
channels that worked. We'd pour more into them. The case I made with our CFO
and CEO was as long as
I can prove that I'm bringing in more than $2 to every dollar I'm spending. I
should be able to spend
more and that made sense to them. And so that's really been our operating ethos
ever since.
That's incredible. I love it. What a use case for marketing as if we need to
justify ourselves,
especially with a young company and one that's trying to put their flag in the
ground to say,
"Hey, we're in invest in marketing and invest in a marketer like you and then
to build that out."
But when the other way, it's like, "Oh, marketing doesn't work." But now it's
like,
"Hey, look at the results." That's exactly right. And I think in listening to
your podcast and
some of the conversations, certainly the demand-gen perspective from a more
established
marketing department is very different than my lived experience is kind of a
first in the role
in many ways, building it from scratch in a way that those... I really had to
prove the return on
investment. And honestly, at this point, especially navigating what we have
over the last couple of
years, the conversations that we have that I have with our leadership or with
our board are so easy
because the clear outcomes of the investment are we have reporting around it,
we have shared
language around it, everybody understands why we're doing what we're doing. And
I'm given a huge
amount of freedom to test and experiment, given the fact that our measurements
are so disciplined,
that there's a really quick feedback loop. If something's not working, it's
okay, because we
know quickly and we're able to move on. And that culture, I think, I couldn't
have done anything
if there wasn't an appetite from leadership, from my CEO and from our board, to
really let us go,
try, test, learn, and as long as the finances pulled through and the outcomes
looked good,
we were allowed to do more of it. So that's really where we've... That's how we
've operated
over the last two and a half years, almost three, actually. Let's go to our
next segment. The playbook
is where you open up that playbook and talk about the tactics that help you win
. You play
to win the game. Hello, you play to win the game. You don't play it, just play
it. What are your
three uncuttable budget items from one budget item to now many? What are your
uncutables?
The first and foremost, the incredibly talented people that are on our team, I
work with the most
resourceful, creative, scrappy, resilient, amazing, smart people, and nothing
that we have accomplished
over the last two and a half years would be even remotely possible if I did not
have them. I would
choose them as one, two, and three, actually, but since that defeats the
purpose of this question,
I'll answer the others. I would say the other piece is kind of part and parcel
with the customer
listening, which is content, being able to be responsive to your customers and
what they're
going through in a way that lets you add real value in the message that you're
providing to them.
In the beginning of the pandemic, my CEO and I had a joke, it wasn't really a
joke because it was
true that we looked at everything that we put out into the world at that time,
is this handwashing?
Are we telling people to wash their hands? If we're telling people to wash
their hands,
we do not need to put it out. Is it handwashing? Now brands are not telling
people to wash their
hands anymore, but we still use that phrase where it's like it has to be unique
, it has to be valuable,
and it has to respect the intelligence and expertise of our industry. If we're
telling them things they
already know is not worth putting out, it's incredibly valuable. And then third
, I would say
our paid channels let us meet people. Again, hospitality tech's not really
emerging. What we do
in the space is I would stay still a little bit on the early side of that
center of the bell curve.
When I think about our paid channels allowing us to meet people who don't know
the
dissolution like ours exists, it's an incredibly important part of our growth
engine too.
In this type of market, I'm curious, how does video play into your content
strategy?
Because I've seen it work really well in SMV before. Oh my gosh, video is so
important to us.
I mean, first of all, I think anytime you're trying to tell a story, it's an
incredibly valuable asset,
but what we do, and again, this may just be our scrappy startup vibes, but we
make an investment
in the content and then we chop it up and use it a bunch of different ways. And
so the B-roll
from our video content, we use to take our blogs that turn them into video
assets. We're able to take
our longer-form videos and turn them into ads that perform really, really well
for us across
Facebook, which is a channel I didn't expect to work. I actually am on record
as saying it wouldn't
work and it is an incredibly valuable channel to us. Video has allowed us to
bring forward
our clients as the center of the spotlight. We would so much rather, it's all
of our photography
is of our actual clients. We don't use any stock photography, our video assets
are a way for us to
shine a spotlight on the people who are doing really hard work and not on
ourselves. And that
always feels really right to us because we are here in service of operators,
not to be the star of
the shows. So I want to talk about the cost of creating that type of video
content, but just like
video content is expensive. Going on location, you have to go on location. You
can't do the Zoom type
recording on a video platform. You got to go in person. You got to get the B-
roll, then making
the burger. You have to get all that stuff at the restaurant on location. So it
seems like that
could be something that potentially is really expensive if you don't do it the
right way.
Yeah, production crew we work with is called Tri-Factor. And what I love about
them is that they work
on a flexible point system. So we sign up for a certain number of points. We're
able to kind of
slice and dice those points in whatever our needs are for the quarter. So it's
an ongoing
subscription, which I love that helps our CFO be able to wrap her head around.
It is a kind of
just standard cost in our marketing budget. And it gives us an incredible
amount of flexibility.
I also think about that singular investment in the actual piece of content as
an investment
that actually serves across a lot of our channels. And so anytime I'm able to
use the same asset in
multiple places, especially when we see the return on investment and ads almost
immediately, it's
almost instantaneous when we roll out new ad assets with video associated with
them. We see a really
nice lift that in essence it pays for them, pays for itself. In our case, it
definitely does.
And the software highlights and animations, some of those things that live on
our website has been
an incredibly helpful part of our relationship with them, that it's not just a
one trick pony,
they can kind of help us across a lot of different ways we think about video.
Yeah, it's cool. I mean, we talk a lot on the show about content. It's almost
always
un-credible. And as a company that creates podcasts, video series, I think
about a lot.
But one of the things that I think is so cool about what you're talking about
is when you are
creating video, video is just like a medium, right? That's not like delivered
asset, right? It happens
in video. But the way that you can tell the stories of your customers has to be
visual. You need to
see the kitchen, you need to see the line cook, you need to see that the
establishing shot of the
exterior, like you have to have that stuff otherwise. And like, I don't know if
you have any stats on
this, but I'd imagine that like, if you were to create a video that didn't have
an establishing
shot, that didn't have the right B role, the different things and all that
stuff, had a really
good, well shot interview with the person, it would probably perform like
exponentially worse. And I
think that like, that's one of the things that people, depending on the type of
thing, you don't
need to watch you do this interview, you can listen, you know, in your car. But
for those type of people,
for restaurant people, they need to see that stuff to understand, to gain the
whole picture of what
they're looking at with like a case study or something. I couldn't agree with
you more and you
something that's like, hopefully, the many marketers listening to this will
like nerd out on this a
little bit. We did a ton of testing around both photography and video assets.
And when we started
with a front of house or exterior shot, it was like meh, we started with a back
of house, like
action shot, something in the back of house, it was so immediately identifiable
by the operator as
this is for me, that it outperformed anything from the front of house. And so
now because we've worked
with our video crew and our lovely group of photographers that serve us in
different markets,
everyone understands the emotion that we're trying to capture. And it is
absolutely that
lived experience of somebody in the back of house. And it is such an immediate
validation point for
our brand to say we get it. Everybody else would show you front of house, we're
showing you back
of house. And it means that we understand what's important to you. And that is
we learned that
kind of the hard way, but from a lot of testing and a lot of analysis. And now
that is our bread
and butter, you won't see any front of house shots as any anchor points and
visuals across the board.
Gosh, I love it. I was so wrong, but also a little bit right. I said,
you were right. I said establishing shot. I just didn't know where it would be.
I thought it was
going to be in the exterior. It's chopping onions. It's chopping onions or like
messing with paperwork.
Yeah. And it's the and I don't know, I don't know if this the same way for
everyone who comes to
the website. But if you go to margin edge.com and you see the first visual on
the site is the
dude with the mask with the chopping onions with the backwards hat my wife used
to be in service
industry and stuff like that. I was in back hanging with those folks all the
time. It felt very real
and lived in when I came to the website. And I know next to nothing. You could
not have given me a
bigger compliment. We just rolled out that website in, I guess it was May. And
what I told the design
firm that helped us with the website was that I wanted it to be tattered up
tech. I needed it to
not feel like white and like gleaming and like appily. I was like, I needed to
feel technology. It
needs to feel together. We wanted to have personality. We wanted it to have
grit. We wanted it to feel
like representative of the people that we serve. And yeah, our photography
brings that to life.
Hopefully the website and the language brings that to life. But video is a huge
piece of telling
that story as well. Yeah, the three chamber sink or whatever it's called and
like all that stuff.
We actually have a channel on our chat system where all of our former operators
, we have a lot
of former operators on our team are on the channel and we'll ask them, how do
you say
sink? How do you say like we will send things to them and be like restaurant
this up for us.
Make sure that this sounds like somebody in the kitchen, that somebody from an
office like writing
web copy. That's a very active part of our job is learning the lingo.
Yeah, and it's a great lesson for marketers, right? It's a glycol system. I
think is what it's called.
It's a great lesson for marketers, right? Telling the story of the back of the
house and
understanding that understanding the lingo, finding the right people who know
how to speak that,
especially if you don't come from that world. You mentioned you said Facebook
works really well
for you and you didn't think it was going to. Yeah, I really didn't. I am on
record as being
an essay or and my first hire was a growth marketing manager and he came in and
he is
got such an asset and he came in and he was like, I think we should try it. It
's like, how would
Facebook understand who our buyer is? Like, how would Facebook, nobody's like,
I'm an operator
in a restaurant on their Facebook profile. Maybe some are, but most wouldn't be
, but man,
there are some incredible black magic happening in whatever algorithm that sits
underneath that
platform. I'm sure I'm not breaking news to anyone on this podcast, but for us,
Facebook has been an incredibly powerful way to meet new audience, to meet new
prospects,
to meet a new audience. Obviously, search, paid search is a big part. Somebody
googling our features,
we always want to be at the top of those search returns, but in terms of
interrupting somebody's
behavior, creating demands that didn't exist before, highlighting our content,
telling our story,
Facebook has been a massive impact for us. Their second highest performing
channel
and continues to grow with us, which has been really cool.
So I want to go back to content for a quick second here about resources and
that type of
material. These are things, whether it be webinars, whether it be how tos,
whether it be calculators,
all those like other resources, tools and stuff that B2B marketers often play
with. An SMB,
sometimes those work really, really well in terms of like a tool or a
calculator.
Other times, there's not as much resource heavy content. Again, it always
depends.
But I'm curious for your industry, is it more like that they just want to get
in and get solutions
and get out of there? Or are they coming to learn and grow too? How do you
think about that?
Yeah, it's a really, really good question. My answer has evolved. In the early
days,
we were really focused on conversions. Truly, that was it. It was sign up for a
demo,
get in front of our sales team. Let's make this happen. And as our team has
grown,
as our goals have grown, as our sophistication, as a department has grown, we
've been able to meet
people further and further up the funnel. And that content story is a bigger
and bigger piece of
the pie. For us, we don't meet our operators the same place you would meet
maybe like an HR
professional buying enterprise payroll software. If you're not on the LinkedIn,
I don't think we're watching a ton of webinars does help that Facebook and
Instagram tend to be a
very visual storytelling platform. So we're able to do a lot of our content
distribution there.
We are moving more and more into these kind of standalone value-based tools
that people can
down. We have a food cost calculator that does really well for us. We have an
ROI calculator that
does really well for us. Those are always ungated. They're always as standalone
addition to existing
content. And I do think there's a world down the road where we do more like a
podcast or webinars
or participate in more of those things. But because of the way that we've grown
our department,
which has been incredibly methodical, I always look for opportunities where
there's some space
to make a new investment before I make it. And so when you think about our
conversion, what's working
now, it's like, okay, there will be an unlock where we're able to make those
investments in some of
those higher costs, both from a financial perspective and also time in
bandwidth perspective. That is
not a small piece of the equation for us. But I see that it has to be a step
function ahead
if we're going to continue to expand the audience, to expand our conversion, to
continue the growth,
the way we have it mapped out over the next 24 months. Any budget items that
maybe you're not
investing your stuff, I mean, you're kind of talking about some of maybe that
long-form stuff as
maybe is nice to have, but not necessarily needs to have but any other stuff
that you're thinking
about. Right now, we're making a pretty significant investment in formalizing
our customer listening.
And so by investment, it's somewhat financial, but it's mostly just a time and
priority shift
for our team. When we were smaller, it was easier to sit on a lot of demos,
listen to a lot of
conversations as we've grown, both within our department and across, that
becomes a little harder.
So we've made some formalized investments around what does it look like for our
team to stay very,
very close to our customers. What do the feedback loops look like for customer
listening back into
product, back into apps, back into support? How do we take those insights and
operationalize them
to think about things like customer retention, customer success, even infusing
our brand
through the customer experience? What are hospitality touch points we can be
listening for when somebody
has an amazing life event? How do we celebrate that if they're going through
tough times? How do we
recognize that? We work in hospitality. These are the people who know your name
and know what you
drink before you sit down at the bar. It's really important to us that as we
scale, we are able to
hold on to that culture of hospitality and find intentional ways to infuse it
through the customer
experience. And I am thinking a lot about that, how we invest in that, how we
structure it, and how we
make sure that it is a scalable piece of our marketing infrastructure that isn
't just like,
"Oh, we're interested in this today, but it's nice to have that we really bake
it into the way
we think about growth." How do you view your website? We love our website. Our
website's new.
I would say our website is a... It's pretty rad. I have to say, it's really
good. I was,
it's always tough when you come and you don't know if it's like, did you just
redo it or not? I
tend to not walk on eggshells too much. And if I like the website, I'm going to
say so. But I do
think it's really rad. It has a really cool design and is just well done. So k
udos.
You have no idea how happy that makes me. I will have to take that sound bite,
package it up,
and send it to the team that sweated over this. It took us probably eight
months to bring life to
this project. We were not that these details probably don't matter, but we were
on a really,
really broken website so much so that we couldn't optimize for SEO. We couldn't
make any changes
without breaking it. It was terrible. So this wasn't just a redesign. It was a
complete overhaul
and move to HubSpot. And so now we finally have flexibility and freedom that we
never had before.
I would say this is probably a V1 of our broader vision, one that we're really,
really proud of.
I want it to be, wherever you meet us, I want our website to be a congruent and
complementary
piece of the story you've been told. So whether you've met somebody at a trade
show,
whether you've seen our ads, whether you've heard about us from a customer, and
you land on our
website, I want the story that we tell about ourselves to match what they are
hearing out in the
marketplace. And it feels incredibly important to me that it also feels rooted
in the experience of
operators and with empathy for the complexity of the job that they do. And so
yes, is it about
marketing software? Of course, it's about marketing software. Is it about
converting to demos? Of
course, it's converting demos. Of course, it is. But it's my belief that those
things
are not as efficient or effective if it is not rooted in the emotional story
and the
experience of the person who's landing there. So I see our website as a living,
breathing,
flexible, fluid extension of the story of our customers, of our clients, of our
vertical of the
industry that we all love so much. Let's get to our next segment, the Dust Up,
whether that's with
your board, your competitors, your sales team, or anyone else. Have you had a
memorable dust up
in your career, Tara? The thing that came to mind when I heard this question
was early on in my
career, I didn't realize that you could do a good enough job that broke things.
I thought good job
meant you did your job and all the good things could happen as a result. And I
can remember this
one campaign we ran that worked so much better than we could have ever dreamed.
We had not at all
properly prepared any other department for what might be coming. We had this
massive influx of
customers. I'm celebrating everyone is like, Tara, what have you done? The
ripple effects of
impact of my behavior. And again, this is a lesson learned early on, but one I
still take with me,
which is to make sure that we're thinking about the customer experience as a
result of a campaign
as it impacts across departments, which I'm sure is a lesson most folks have
learned. Maybe not as
hard as I learned it, but we literally broke things, like broke things. It was
a bad customer experience,
it was a bad operator experience, it was operations experience, it was across
the board, something that
I didn't know that too good of a job could lead to very bad things. So now I
try and go into any
campaign with like, okay, what if this goes poorly? But also, what if this goes
exceptionally well?
And who needs to know about these two possible outcomes before we even launch
it? So it is a
lesson I hold very dear, although it was painful to learn. Yeah, it's an
absolutely fascinating
concept because that funny, I was thinking about this earlier today, this exact
thing,
because you're talking about sort of like a viral sort of campaign. And how do
you staff,
how do you prepare what tools do you have in place to be able to do that stuff?
It's such a
great point to make sure that if you're one of those type of companies that
might have a campaign
that really pops off that you're able to capture all the value and not send a
bunch of people
pissed off wishing they had free ice cream cone or whatever.
God, it makes me sweaty just to even think about that again. It was really one
of those things
where it was like the highest of highs and then immediately like crashing down
like all of these
things that we didn't expect to happen and how differently it would have been
handled if we had
been able to plan contingencies. But we really didn't think it was going to do
anything. And so we
just hadn't taken those steps. And now I do not play that game anymore. We
track out best case
and worst case scenarios and get everybody on the same page way ahead of time.
Okay, let's get to our final segment. Quick hits. These are quick questions and
quick answers,
just like how quickly qualified helps companies generate pipeline faster,
tap into your greatest asset, your website to identify your most valuable
visitors and instantly
start sales conversations. It's quick and easy. Just like these questions go to
qualified dot com to learn more. We love qualified. We love them dearly.
Go to qualified dot com and learn more quick hits. Terry, you ready? I am.
Number one,
what's a hidden talent or skill that's not in your resume? I'm very, very, very
good at
interrupting any dog walk that is happening around me and greeting the dog a
lot of times at the
annoyance of the dog walker. But I'm incapable of stopping in a mex
of a lot of what he says to be true have found it to be true for us here at
Marginette. So that's a
pretty good one. Yeah, shout out to him making great stuff, great LinkedIn. We
talk about it all
the time on our marketing team, we're big fans. Dark social. All right, best
advice for a first
time at a marketing trying to figure out their demand strategy. I would set
expectations with
whoever is in charge of you and your department. I really believe in
transparency from day one
with my CEO, with my CFO in terms of this is probably what it's going to look
like. We're going to have
some false starts, but we're going to have some really nice moments. We're
going to double down
on the nice moments. We're going to pull back on the false starts. And this is
probably what my
budget's going to look like in those first couple of months. If you understand
that and can set
expectations and create shared language with leadership who may or may not have
a marketing
background, it gives you the freedom and flexibility to say, see, this is what
I was talking about.
I told you there were going to be some things that didn't work, but here's the
thing that did
work. So I'm stopping those things. We're doing more of these things and here
are the outcomes I
expect here. And that has been an incredibly valuable way that I think about my
relationship
with leadership or whoever I'm working with in our departmentally is being sure
that what I'm
looking at and the way I'm thinking about things does not exist in the silo,
that it's something
that's shared, there's transparency, and there's even some education so that
folks understand what
you're talking about in a way that you're not just a line item on a budget, not
just an expense.
They can understand what you're doing in terms of its contribution to the
business.
Well, that's it. That's all we got for today. I forgot one thing and that is I
buried the lead
here that Tara is hiring. So if you're a product marketer looking for a great
place to work,
check out margin edge. You can just you can hit me up, you can hit Tara up,
but if you're a great product marketer, she's looking for brilliant folks.
Yeah, check out our Glassdoor. We're very proud of it.
Go read all the things. We're a great place to work. Awesome. Well, yeah, we
super appreciate
you coming on the show for listeners. Go to margin edge.com. Check it out. If
you know someone in the
restaurant business or restaurant industry, they got a restaurant. Send them
over that way.
Is there any final thoughts? Anything to plug? No, this has been so, so fun.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, thanks so much for joining.
Bye.
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