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Marketing Essentials with Reed Hansen: AI, Automation, and Affordability

• Ed Drozda

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Is your small business ready to thrive? 🌟 Tune into this week's episode of The Water Trough with guest Reed Hansen of Market Surge. We discuss smart marketing strategies, from retargeting to AI integration. Learn how to make data work for you! 🎧 #SmallBusinessSuccess 

Welcome to The Water Trough where we can't make you drink, but we will make you think. My name is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and I'm really excited you chose to join me here as we discuss topics that are important for small business folks just like you. If you're looking for ideas, inspiration, and possibility, you've come to the right place. Join us as we take steps to help you create the healthy business that you've always wanted.

Ed Drozda:

Welcome back to The Water Trough folks. This is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and today I'd like to welcome my guest, Reed Hansen. Reed is the Chief Growth Officer at Market Surge, where he's helped everyone from scrappy startups to mid-market champs unify their data, automate smart workflows, and leverage AI to boost revenue without the enterprise headaches. Reed's been on the front lines of marketing innovation for over a decade. Think high velocity campaigns, predictive lead scoring, and razor sharp attribution. Hey, Reed, how you doing?

Reed Hansen:

Doing great. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm really excited to participate.

Ed Drozda:

I'm really happy to have you here. For those of us that are not familiar with some of these terms, high velocity campaigns, predictive lead scoring, and attribution. A quick overview; what are these things?

Reed Hansen:

Okay, the first one you mentioned, high velocity campaigns. Typically what that means is the ability to handle a lot of data and communications very quickly. So if you were to manually email or manually call or text, you can calculate the time it takes. You're typing and it's two or three seconds per text, a minute per email, and you send. But with automation, you can actually do that in mass. You can also schedule follow-ups that don't require your participation, and really enable you to reach hundreds of thousands of people with a single action. And once you have it set up, you can do batches in the future using the same email templates and text templates. So the velocity really comes from your ability to reach a lot of people with little action on your part.

Ed Drozda:

Alright, and how about predictive lead scoring?

Reed Hansen:

Yeah, if you go back to the fundamentals of marketing, it is crucial to define your ideal customer and create a profile of this customer. There are several factors, some are demographic, a lot are behavioral, and some of them relate to how they have interacted with your business in the past. These factors can add up to a certain score so you can weight certain characteristics, like are they a past customer, if they take an action, if they make a second inquiry into your site. Those become very valuable and the score can be calculated so if you have a row for each characteristic and then you add a weight; is age as important as the income that they have or is location of the country as important as their employment status. So you weight all these factors and you are able to end up with a score. Now what do you use the score for? It helps you to prioritize certain leads. So if you have limited bandwidth to follow up, you want to spend your time with the leads that are most likely to close or most likely to drive the most profit. So the scoring really helps you to prioritize both your sales and marketing efforts and allocate resources in the right direction.

Ed Drozda:

And then finally attribution, razor sharp attribution.

Reed Hansen:

Yeah, razor sharp is the maximum precision you can have with the tools that are available. So, when you're thinking about your marketing spend, you want to know where are my dollars and time best allocated? Fortunately, and unfortunately, a lot of sales require a lot of touch points. So, an uh, future customer might see an ad, they might browse your website, they might hear a podcast. There might be a handful of touchpoints that they've had. They might have had a sales call in the past and whatnot. But all of these touchpoints are pieces of that attribution puzzle, and you may see that some are more valuable than the others. You need a good amount of data, but when you are able to both track the attributive steps that a customer needs to buy and then value those, you can see which of those channels and marketing efforts are the most valuable. It requires a good disciplined approach to data collection and data aggregation.

Ed Drozda:

Thank you for that clarification for myself and for others who are listening, I appreciate that. So, let's go into a couple scenarios here, which you've experienced, and I think it'd be highly relatable to small business folks everywhere. First of all, we all know that businesses in general have tight budgets. That's just a routine. In a small business in particular, we tend to default to one or two marketing tactics, because of that budget constraint, we say okay, maybe Facebook ads, maybe email blasts or whichever, whatever. Now taking selective things is based upon our own experience, or we might have read something on a report somewhere or Lord knows what, but we are limiting ourselves to some degree. Obviously balance is important, but so is cost. Let's talk about balance and the cost associated with having an effective campaign.

Reed Hansen:

Yeah, so if we talk balance, there are earned channels and there are paid channels. Earned channels primarily take up your time, you know, require time and effort, and paid channels take up your time, and effort, and your money. They both are great ways to get clients. The paid channels, I think if you are looking for quick wins are a good place to start. A few dollars a day can start getting you additional web traffic; five to$10 a day, you can experiment with messaging and offers, and you can see what lands and what doesn't. So I would try multiple approaches, or try A-B testing, where you vary single variables like subject line or timing of the day, or format of an ad, and start collecting data, seeing what works, and seeing how your audience reacts. There are other channels that you can use that are relatively low cost, that can augment this and actually can help feed into remarketing channels. So I'll go back just a step to the ads. In each case, remarketing is a great way to utilize your ads budget, where if you are collecting web traffic that has Google cookies tracking with Pixel, that enables you to send ads to a more targeted audience. They're somebody that's already interacted with your brand and that will increase your conversion percentage on those ads. So you can take some additional low cost activities to help boost that traffic. If you do email marketing that links back to valuable content on your site, that gets people to click on links, then they enter an audience, assuming they have a Facebook account, but they enter an audience that can then be captured in a remarketing process. You almost create like a virtual community where they are served content and whatever lands draws them back to your site and repopulates them in retargeting campaigns. A lot of people don't use the retargeting in ads. They focus purely on demographics or geographies and they miss out on a lot of opportunities for a second touch on their business brand.

Ed Drozda:

Retargeting. What you're saying then is if I've shown an interest initially, you're designing your program in such a way that I will get another touch from you.

Reed Hansen:

That's correct. There's a few assumptions: you have a Facebook account; you haven't blocked all the cookies if you're not based in Europe where that's much harder to maintain. In the US we have a friendly environment for creating these retargeting audiences, and you can create systems that feed this traffic in real time from your website to the targeting audiences in Google and Facebook.

Ed Drozda:

For me anyway, naive as I am, it sounds like it'd be a relatively labor intensive thing, but I presume that's not the case.

Reed Hansen:

It is not the case. Actually, all the information you need is available on the free training available from Facebook and Google. It's like the 200 level, you know you start at 100 and you turn on the ads, but then the next step, and this is where they really start to work, is making ads be the second, third, fourth, fifth touch for your brand, because you've been able to apply an identifier on them virtually.

Ed Drozda:

You have created the content, you put it out.

Reed Hansen:

Right. Right.

Ed Drozda:

Then once it's in this system, the system is designed to recycle to those that expressed an interest. Not all people in the first round, but those that expressed an interest, or does it go back to the same people, all people.

Reed Hansen:

There's adjustments you can make. You can have the audience be refreshed based on recency. So have they visited your site in the last 30, 60 days, and then cleared out those that haven't revisited. Or you can continue to have a large database and continue to market to anybody that's visited your site forever. I recommend the former approach to keep it fresh, and I would use more of an email marketing approach, like long-term newsletters, long-term nurture campaigns, to work with people that get colder over time as they have more distance from your website. There's a combination of systems. You can use a CRM, use the ad management tools from Meta and Google, and in some cases it requires an integration with a tool like make.com or Zapier that can enable some real time transfer of that data between systems.

Ed Drozda:

So, we build this platform, we've got information going out there.

Reed Hansen:

Yeah.

Ed Drozda:

Let's just for a moment talk about the importance of monitoring this. Once you put things out there, if you build it they will come, and all that kind of stuff is just not necessarily true. One has to monitor. Is the monitoring built into these systems or is that something there's another level altogether?

Reed Hansen:

Well, what's nice about most of these modern systems is that they have reporting functions built in, but if you solely rely on their systems you'll be logging in and out of Meta and Google ads, and your CRM dashboard, and even your Zapier dashboard. Looker Studio or many CRMs allow you to embed the data, create an iframe with data pulled directly from these systems. Meta and Google make that easy to do. They have basically streamed realtime data and you can embed these reports on a single dashboard. Which you should do, and be checking daily for any downtime, any weird spikes or troughs in activity. Over a few period of a few weeks, we'll start to observe some trends and maybe opportunities to improve. I do this for my clients, but I would emphasize that it's very accessible for a non-technical person to set these up. So I think this has really been democratized, but having good information is critical to making this work.

Ed Drozda:

So I guess it's like building a financial portfolio.

Reed Hansen:

Yeah.

Ed Drozda:

We don't put all of our eggs in one basket, we diversify. What I'm hearing you say is that even with a tight budget, it's still necessary to diversify. It's not sufficient to have one thing out there, but there are various low cost places to go or things to do, and that by building a uniform mix in that portfolio, we'll have the greatest bang for a buck. Is that fair?

Reed Hansen:

Yeah, I think so. I would add that you don't become stagnant, that you continue to try out new approaches as you grow. Listen to vendors that have interesting ideas, network and talk to peers, and see what's working for them. I think we have to be constantly evolving our approach and tweaking messaging even within the existing email campaigns.

Ed Drozda:

I know that AI is a big part of your business, so what about AI in this process? It has a lot of potential, a lot of different things that can be done. I guess it's a form of diversifying your portfolio, as I'd mentioned before, but there are some things that are just not realistic. We don't go out and hire data scientists to incorporate AI because we're just not in a position where we can afford such a thing. I guess the big question is what kind of affordable AI is there for entry level folks looking for marketing support?

Reed Hansen:

Yeah, absolutely, and I do recommend that business owners of all sizes should be utilizing AI to some degree, for the sake of getting familiar. There are many of these platforms that have free tiers. You can get your feet wet using the free version of ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot, and just asking questions. Which is a great start, but I would add there are tools that are large language model and they have packaged it in a way that is specific to a business function. One that comes to mind is Jasper AI, which has been around for a few years and continues to improve, and that's for copywriting. Great tool, relatively inexpensive, and it helps you generate blogs with keywords embedded and has dozens of different templates for different use cases, but saves you a lot of time, in many cases, helps you write better than you would naturally. A few others, Canva, I'm a big fan of, and it's very inexpensive. I think most businesses could use it for less than$20 a month and do the vast majority of their graphic design needs with it. It has AI embedded; if you instruct it, it will generate what you need. I referred earlier to Zapier and Make. Now these are good tools to be familiar with, and you start to get into a little bit more of the technical piece. Again inexpensive, they're charged based on usage. If you have data from one system that needs to be combined, and often in years past, we've found ourselves cutting and pasting a lot of data back and forth to make a report or make a presentation. Zapier and Make, which are essentially the same tool, I prefer Make, but they allow you to visually diagram where data needs to go from one place to another, how it can be filtered, and it will do that behind the scenes without you doing anything. It will combine Google documents that are kept online with an existing financial system or it can help you automatically schedule social media posts, or reports that need to be delivered. Great tools to be familiar with. I can keep going, I don't wanna be too talkative, but I've really liked the Google Looker Studio, which has AI in it to help you build really nice looking reports. These reports can be embedded in other documents or other systems. It's another situation where you describe what you want and it will build as you describe it. So each of those have free options to dabble in, and they have free training and they are quite easy to learn. So, great places to start, and really good tools to help you manage your business with minimal staff.

Ed Drozda:

Seems like there's a lot of options out there. As you put it, these are things that people can experiment with. I surmise that one of the most important things is knowing as you go into this process of looking for things to experiment with, you better be really clear about what you're looking to accomplish. Yeah. Because there's just so many options out there. It could be overwhelming. Yes, yes.

Reed Hansen:

I'm victim to that more often than not. I was like oh, I don't have a problem to solve, I just have a toy to play with.

Ed Drozda:

That's fair, there's so many things out there. It's understandable that one would get caught up in it. And depending on what position you're in, that may or may not be an effective use of your time, but if you're clear about what you're looking to accomplish, there are many things out there to support you in the process. Absolutely. I wanna ask you another question here. In business it's not unusual for periods of cash flow crunch to come along, and marketing for reasons I don't quite understand can be seen as a line item to be slashed. Sometimes people say no sales are more important. Well, no, marketing will go first, and I don't know what they're selling at that point, but things such as this. I think we can both agree the idea of trashing or slashing marketing altogether is not a good idea. But what can one do to maintain their momentum and keep that marketing flow going at times when they're tempted to slash that marketing budget.

Reed Hansen:

Yeah, this is a challenge because marketing sometimes feels like it is, you know, I don't necessarily have a switch to flip that I could get more leads today or more leads tomorrow from the marketing department. So maybe a lot of businesses feel like, well, if I switch it off, I'm not actually hurting my business today or tomorrow. The thing is that marketing does generate leads and touchpoints and it is potentially a little bit more of a long game, but, I don't know who feeds the sales force if you don't have an authoritative brand, if you don't have ways that clients can efficiently find you, based on what they need. If anything, I would flip it and say that the marketing should be prioritized over sales because there are people that will do business with you if they have a way to pay you, which the marketing provides. If you don't have that then the salespeople will be sitting on their hands or expending a lot of effort without an appealing product or a problem that they're able to solve. There are always low cost and free efforts you can make to continue your momentum. We always try to look at our ad spend in terms of conversions, and if we can put a price on our whole spend and the conversions we're getting out of that ad spend. In theory, if it costs us less than the customer value that we're acquiring, that justifies itself. We should continue that course and continue to further optimize. But if it really is an issue of we're spending more than we're bringing in, that's a decision point where you pause and reevaluate. But I think in most cases, the marketing investment does generate more than it makes, but it is sometimes a little bit invisible because of the number of touch points that it requires and hard to attribute to an individual dollar spent.

Ed Drozda:

Mm-hmm. The reason I brought up foregoing marketing for the sake of sales is an actual experience that I had with a client. In hindsight, they realized that they really didn't fully understand. They really believed that sales was the driving force behind the business and yes, outward facing to some degree that's true. But it has to be built on something, and if you take away the marketing, it's kinda like a house of cards, there's nothing there, or very little. That's why I use that particular instance. But in business, people, particularly those who are new in the game are going to go through things like this, and they're gonna find that they've got to experience it and find out firsthand. What does it mean if I forego marketing for the sake of sales? Okay. Or vice versa, whichever the case might be. The interrelationship between things is very important, but we have preconceived notions and sometimes those are not validated notions. They're just things that we heard or maybe things we misinterpreted. These things can happen. So let's take a small Mom and Pop operation. Okay. Not unlikely someone like that would be listening to this podcast. They are building their marketing campaign, and they want to find the most effective way. They don't have an abundance of budget. Mm-hmm. But they do want to be mindful about hitting as many people as they can. They are aware of their clientele. They know who it is they're trying to serve. They have developed a brand. They've done the background work, if you will. They got all the material, they got all the data? But they need to convert that into something viable as a marketing presence. Advice for them? What do you got?

Reed Hansen:

Yeah, so I take they've been in business and they understand who their customer is.

Ed Drozda:

Yes.

Reed Hansen:

And largely their behavior, fair to say like as a starting point?

Ed Drozda:

Yep. Perfect.

Reed Hansen:

So knowing that they have a lower budget, they aren't gonna spend thousands of dollars right out of the gate, what I would recommend is a real focus on, you always wanna prioritize retention, and referrals. I feel like those are some very high ROI efforts that you can do. So there's a few things in the mix here. You want to be targeting your clients, your returning clients, that will open your messages, that will be receptive. You need to find them when they need to make the next purchase. Is this a monthly purchase or is this a quarterly; you need to find them at the right time. And that can be a print mailer, email, a call or a text, just to remind them that if they're in need in that period, that you are there and ready to help. Then you need to find the key touch points where they are ready to give you positive reviews. So collecting reviews both in video format and in the public forums and packaging and sharing those reviews are great ways to utilize your existing business to give you authority and help answer the question of should I do business with this Mom and Pop shop? Are they small because they're bad at their job or are they small because they deliver a high level of service? You also need to find the times when they are ready to refer you new business. This can be a long-term drip. I love newsletters. I love frequent, long-term touch points where you offer incentives for them to refer the business. Like a sale, we'll give them 20% off, we'll give you a 10% commission for somebody you refer, and try to keep that cycle going. So I would say start with the customers you have, the people that trust you and like you, and utilize them to the max capacity. A very low cost that you can get new clients very quickly, because customers know other people just like them that have the same needs.

Ed Drozda:

I abide by the same thing. I call people like that ambassadors, who speak up on your behalf because they are engaged with you. They do believe in you, and they're willing to tell other people about you. I think that's a fantastic piece of advice. We're getting to the end of our time here, so I'd like to ask if there's any last thing you'd like to leave us with before we go.

Reed Hansen:

Yeah, I would throw out that I have really enjoyed this exercise of networking with other content creators and podcasters. Seeking out speaking opportunities, podcasts, you can reach out to journalists, you can reach out to local chambers of commerce mm-hmm, teach sessions on your field of expertise, and get your name out there. Just offer to do, to speak, appear, or teach for free. Those opportunities are extremely valuable, and they help you refine your message. They help you make great friends and contacts, and establish some authority on a big platform. Ed, I feel like I've made a good friend in you and would love to continue to collaborate in the future, as an example. But, put yourself out there and put a face to your brand and the people will come. Thank you for your comment about me and I happen to agree with you a hundred percent. I too look forward to maintaining, continuing this relationship, thank you very much for that. We got lucky. We met each other under those circumstances and I think that was fantastic. So I am going to wrap this up here. Once again, I've been joined today by Reed Hansen, Chief Growth Officer with Market Surge. It has been a pleasure having you here today. Thank you. It has been a pleasure to be on.

Ed Drozda:

Well, thank you so very much for that. Folks, I am Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor. Here at The Water Trough, until next time, I wanna wish you a healthy business.