NerdBrand Podcast
The NerdBrand Podcast is at the intersection of nerd culture, branding, and advertising. Nerd culture is no longer an isolated subculture; it’s THE culture of the day and makes its way into our daily lives through the entertainment we seek and the technology we rely upon. Listen as we discuss our views on visual design, branding, and advertising for movies, comics and novels, video games, technology, and other nerdy passions.
NerdBrand Podcast
We're 5 years old!
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NerdBrand is a national branding and advertising agency based in Louisville, KY.
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Well, everybody, welcome to another episode of the NerdBrand podcast. We're counting down to our 250th episode and guess what? Nerdbrand's five years old Whee Up next on this episode. You know, let's talk about project management and organization and stuff. Welcome to this episode of the NerdBrand Podcast, where I wish I had my project manager here with me because she would pontificate on this.
Speaker 1:But project management, when you're working on something for clients, it's so important. If you're a marketing director and you're interacting with your agency, it's really good to stay on those meetings and meet with them every week because you know, or whatever your schedule is, maybe once a month. But to kind of stay ahead of what campaigns are you going to run? Well, what's a campaign? Well, hopefully, if you're a marketing director, you know what a campaign is. But let's lay out some assets for a campaign or deliverables or whatever. You're comfortable saying.
Speaker 1:Social media posts, not Facebook, that's not a channel. I mean, it's a highway, but it's really. You know, social media is a channel. So, social media, whatever network you are on and no, do not be on all of them, just be in the ones that matter and you need to make sure that you have your team ready to go to understand like, okay, I need a graphic designer to make artwork or I need a photographer to take some photos and then I need a copywriter to write some copy. And if you're that person and doing all of that at once, god bless you, because I don't see how you don't jump off a building into a stream that's moving, filled with barbed wire, because it has to be maddening, and I do know I've been there once upon a time. You need a team of people and at the helm of that is going to be a creative director and account manager and, of course, wrangling in all those people is your project manager, because they know the deadline, they know it's got to get done, they know it needs to get done, they care that it gets done and they care about when it gets done. They don't really care so much about how. How is probably going to be on the creative director and the account manager, because that's going to get into quality and you should be proofing that work and when things happen, things slip by. We've had a few boo-boos and you just kind of have to fix them. In the grand scheme of things, if you have two to three of those a year, who cares? It'll be okay. Your audiences will forgive you. In case you haven't noticed, the news cycle changes so fast. The news can't even keep up anymore, so it'll be fine.
Speaker 1:One of the primary ways that I think it's the best way to kind of organize all this stuff is to get you a CRM with marketing and sales tools. To have a CRM is one thing. Customer relationship management If you get one of those, you can get one of those for free. You got emails, you got addresses, you've got all kinds of things in there. You've got addresses, you've got all kinds of things in there. But your marketing team is going to know they're going to be like set up a campaign in there, they're going to set up a workflow, they want to segment lists, they want to be able to manage social media posts from it. They want to be able to send emails from it. If you're interested in these kinds of things and a tool that can track it, track the revenue on that and see your return on spend on your investment, contact NerdBrandAgency at NerdBrandAgencycom and we'll get you hooked up. We'll hook you up with HubSpot. It actually does work. And, yeah, you know, depending on what your sales are and your volume is, yeah, you know you'll probably not like the price, it'll be expensive, but you know, if you're going to make 50 grand 60,000 a year, is that $1,000 a month? If it's that, is it really that big of a deal? Because when you get on any other email marketing platform and they're different for a reason, hubspot's more for outreach, b2b, that kind of a thing. It's not really meant for retailers, but on-round retailers now have an option now and we actually work with that as well, that platform, and so if you're interested in that.
Speaker 1:But you know, you can't really run an effective campaign if you just don't have the assets. You've got to have your social media posts. You've got three different types of posts, three different types of copy, and I really hope, if the artwork is the same, that that's at least the only thing that's similar between all three, because you are talking to a different audience. Facebook is a backyard barbecue. Linkedin is, you know, your resume type site, professional right. Instagram, of course, it's kind of like everybody looking through a photo album. Still, I mean, you know you may have a reel here and there on any one of those, but at the end of the day you kind of have to understand the mindset of the audience that's there, so maybe don't use so many emojis on LinkedIn is what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:Landing pages are pages that are where people need to go, that you want them to make one decision, and one decision only. Fill out that form, click that thing, call that number and your campaign will drive people to that. Now, if you've got a crappy website, we've got a whole other conversation we've got to talk about. If you've got a crappy logo or a dated logo or anything going on. That was done in Canva. I'm sorry for you people in Canva.
Speaker 1:I know you love it, but really we really have to talk about, like, the repetitiveness of certain things. It's starting to look like clip art and you want to be very careful. You got to stand out. There's a local brand that sold energy drinks and the can was very messy in its design. A lot of people liked it but honestly, studies have shown that if you clean it up, make it a little bit more tight and professional. Um, you know, sales increase celsius, I'm talking about them. Check out that. Google celsius and you'll find out a case study on that. It's fascinating to read about that and what they had to do and how their visuals and how they were perceived and their creative, improved things. It can be a major block for conversions, regardless of your ad spend.
Speaker 1:So you have that, all of that to say how many of those do you need to run in a month? So this is where your account manager and you have to have a conversation. You know, because you're like well, I don't really know, I don't know how many campaigns I need to do in a month. Well, this is where these account management meetings become important to be at, because in those meetings, your agency is not your CFO. They don't understand your margins as well as you think. That's not their job. Their job is to run ads and to make campaigns. Now they may be told what the margins are, and that's great.
Speaker 1:If you're like, hey, man, 10% is my margin, okay, well, that doesn't mean anything to me. Can you run a 10% off coupon if you're a retailer or if you're an online store, or can you do a buy one, get one? I mean, if we're in that arena, then I don't really care. I need to know if can you do that and what you're able to absorb and still make money on your profit margin on that number. That's something you've got to provide to me, unless I charge you thousands more a month and we do business development and that's a whole other mess of things I don't want to get into, but it is out there. If you need that, then I suggest that's who you look for.
Speaker 1:But you want to make sure that you have when you organize a campaign. You have a budget. You have a budget. Now, if you're on retainer with an agency, it's already there. That's literally what you're paying for. Now. That doesn't include paid ad spend. Unless you have a really, really high retainer amount and by that I mean 7, 10, 12, 20,000 a month then you're probably going to be fine.
Speaker 1:But at the end of the day, there are certain campaigns that could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to run and they run over a 12 month period maybe as little as six months, but 12 months and you have to be prepared for how you're going to be able to cover that versus how much you make on a job. So ask yourself what is one customer of yours worth and how often do you close an account? These are important things, believe it or not. Hubspot tracks this very cleanly and very well in your CRM because it also puts in there, your Salesforce people and not Salesforce, but your Salesforce people. And that force is the. I say force because it just sounds cool, but you want to have those people definitely tracking like are they closing people? Does it take them 60 days to close a deal? I mean, how many deals are stalled? You know this can all affect revenue.
Speaker 1:But the primary thing here to focus on when you're doing a campaign to justify your cost, when you want to really get focused in on does marketing work? Well, first of all, yes, otherwise Nike wouldn't spend $4 billion on it a year. So at the end of the day, you want to definitely have a tool that can tell you, like, what's going on and give you that metric, because now you have somewhere to start to improve your revenue stream. So if one sale is going to generate $100,000 and you're paying an agency $5,000 a month, I don't think it should be an issue, especially if your costs are really low. I mean, I know places that their inventory for the entire month is less than $4,000 just for inventory, but they can make $10,000 just on in-store sales, but they can make $10,000 just on in-store sales. So you never really know, until you really dig into your numbers what you're actually able to cover and pay for.
Speaker 1:Now there are exceptions where, if the business has had a lot of bad debt, it's had a lot of mistakes made, then, yes, that becomes a major problem and definitely hinders campaigns in their ability to be effective. So, before you get into this level of marketing, you really have to take a step back and look at the business and say is it healthy enough for this level of marketing? Can I sustain this level of marketing based on how many people can I sell to that want my product or want my service that are here? Because most businesses fail because, well, let's be honest, they just don't have a market. Nobody wants to buy. There's nobody there. Maybe the population's not there, you know, I mean demographics matter, you know. So you need to do some research before you'd really dive in head first. But if you kind of, if you have a good idea of what your numbers are and you know, month to month, what you're going to be able to make and what you're going to be able to do, it's totally worth it.
Speaker 1:Switching gears a little bit, um, uh, dealing with, you know, the past. Oh man, it is May, so four months. Uh, nerd brand is five years old. Wow, we're five years old. We're old enough to go to kindergarten. Um, mitch has been with me for six years. You know Michaela going on three. We have. We've grown up in the business really together as a team and you know we are quiet when we got a lot going on, like a dinging in the background you're hearing on this mic is my project manager saying, hey, where's the things? And so I'm going to jump off here and get with her to let her know that I did my job. But at the end of the day it's like it's been amazing five years.
Speaker 1:We're on, I think, two. This is episode 246. So the podcast has been going on for the same amount of time. When you do one episode a week, that happens. I know many people have asked me in the past does podcasting have a return on investment? It sure does, just not very quickly. So there is that. I hope in the future to have Mitch and Michaela on. Mitch is dealing with some now.
Speaker 1:So, uh, you know silent prayer requests, I guess, if you want to be that way about it. Um, when people usually say that I always respond with chainsaws and bones, I don't know, I'm just weird, but at the end of the day, um, we are doing pretty good. We're pretty uh solid uh on this side, but we could always use more business. Like anyone else, we would always like to work on nice projects, cool projects. I mean, there's there's so many fascinating brands and so many fascinating uh products that are in Louisville, kentucky and Southern Indiana and, uh, you know, until you get started, you really don't know how things are going to turn out. So, but if you aren't sure, just ask. Just ask, I don't mind, uh, just you know. Just, uh, don't, don't, don't take us for a ride. Just be honest and say like, yeah, I don't think you guys are a fit for my project. Well, that's okay, that's cool, and we do project by project basis. By the way, um, a lot of people think we only do retainer monthly billing, but no, we do project based work as well.
Speaker 1:So if you got something in mind you need some help with whether that's a print job, digital job or whatever it may be, call the nerds. We're at nerdbrandagencycom and if you like this podcast, go to nerdbrandagencycom slash podcast and listen to the latest episodes. Sign up for our newsletter. We are watching that. We got a few people on there, but I see those people all the time, so I'm just like, eh, I don't know. I'll just let you know how it went and if you're listening right now, you know who you are. Anyhow, that's all we got for this week. We'll see you next week. And remember, keep your nerd brand strong.
