The 19 Entrepreneur Edition Orange Label

In Part Two of our podcast, Jenny Dinnen shares three real-world examples of brands that utilized data insights to reconfigure their strategies and best connect with their audiences. From a financial institution to a hardware store and a non-profit organization, here’s how data can be used to confirm or challenge your marketing strategy.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:00] This is The 19, a podcast that delivers marketing insights from Orange Label in 19 minutes or less. This year, the agency is celebrating 50 years of working with established brands that are driven by a fearless entrepreneurial mindset. What does this mean for you? It means enriched conversations and stories with marketing and leadership experts aimed at improving lives.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:28] Welcome back to The 19: Entrepreneur Edition! Let’s jump back into customer data and insights with MacKenzie Corporatation’s Jenny Dinnen.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:36] So we track the CMO surveys. They come out twice a year, and the latest one reports that brands tripled investments in marketing, research and intelligence since February of 2020.

Jenny Dinnen: [00:00:47] Wow, I love that.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:47] So that’s yeah, it was pre-pandemic, right?

Jenny Dinnen: [00:00:51] Yes.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:51] So in your experience, why do you think more and more brands are relying on research and intelligence after the pandemic?

Jenny Dinnen: [00:00:58] When the entire world just shifted upside down.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:01:01] Right.

Jenny Dinnen: [00:01:01] You know, it’s funny of being in this business for a long time. For a while, we were in the convincing business. We were trying to convince people like, hey, you should be using data.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:01:10] Right.

Jenny Dinnen: [00:01:10] We have information, you know, instead of making decisions based on gut feel or of what’s always worked in the past, like there is information that’s showing you trends and patterns of what’s happening. So we were in the convincing business we are now, which feels nice in the confirming business. Like everyone’s like, okay, we know that we need to. I mean, one, I think there’s a lot of buzz things out there right now. When we went through the big data buzzword there for a minute, which is good, but in theory most companies are drowning in information. And some of them it’s kind of like we need like small data or middle medium data, like just use what you’re have here. And there’s so much talk about being a customer centric companies, but I think that people don’t know exactly what that means or where that is. But why is the investment happening? There are so many tools out there that is making it easier to gather information, to collect information, to connect with. I mean, there’s so many tools out there. I was chatting with someone earlier this morning. I think last year maybe it was maybe in 2020. There are four billion surveys that were sent out, which is mind boggling. That’s just like mind boggling to me, the fact that everyone from the bagel shop to every single airline and hotel and rental car can send out their own surveys, I think is fantastic. The tools that are available that are coming online are there that companies can do it. I believe what’s missing, which we might get to a little bit, is then remembering just because you can collect all the information, we still need to say what does that information mean?

Rochelle Reiter: [00:02:46] Yes.

Jenny Dinnen: [00:02:46] So why do I think it’s doubling? I think that the technology is exponentially coming online for the tools that are available.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:02:53] Yeah.

Jenny Dinnen: [00:02:53] And they’re starting to see, hey, we need to be able to connect with our customers.

Brands are always looking for ways to stay relevant! With 38 years in the data collection industry, MacKenzie Corporation understands how to pivot and incorporate changes to help brands evolve to meet customer needs. Co-owner Jenny Dinnen shares the secrets to the organization’s success and tips on how to use data to enhance the customer experience in this two-part podcast.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:00] This is The 19, a podcast that delivers marketing insights from Orange Label in 19 minutes or less. This year, the agency is celebrating 50 years of working with established brands that are driven by a fearless entrepreneurial mindset. What does this mean for you? It means enriched conversations and stories with marketing and leadership experts aimed at improving lives.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:29] Hello and welcome to The 19: Entrepreneur Edition! I’m Rochelle Reiter, President of Orange Label. You’ve likely heard the saying, “It’s better to be proactive than reactive.” But when it comes to brand marketing, how can brands be proactive? One way to remain agile in an ever changing market is through data driven decision making. Specializing in forward-thinking, data-focused solutions is our guest, Jenny Dinnen. Jenny is the co-owner of MacKenzie Corporation, a customer insights consulting firm, and a certified foresight practitioner. Jenny, welcome to The 19. We’re so excited to have you on the show today!

Jenny Dinnen: [00:01:05] Thank you for having me. I’m so excited!

Rochelle Reiter: [00:01:11] First of all, let’s start off with what types of research McKinsey Corporation provides to brands and organizations?

Jenny Dinnen: [00:01:19] Oh, my gosh, what type? So we’ve been doing this for a minute. We’ve been around for 35 years. You know, most of the research that we do. Kind of broad stroke is all around, I mean, customer insights, right? So which I know broadly speaking, but really we are looking to understand the human beings on the other end of products, services and experiences. So when you back up and talk about the human beings on the other end of that, that really opens up the scope from not just customers but prospects, customers, employees, stakeholders. So we do a wide variety of research projects and really all along the customer journey. So we kind of get in a little bit deeper of what that means, but a lot of quantitative and qualitative.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:02:06] Right.

Jenny Dinnen: [00:02:07] Kind of get it of what all that means there, but research to really start understanding the human beings and their buying behaviors and what’s going on, the why behind they buy.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:02:16] The why.

Jenny Dinnen: [00:02:17] Yes!

Rochelle Reiter: [00:02:17] That’s great! So you’ve been in business for 35 years, which you mentioned, and your positioning for your brand is be relevant, stay relevant. Can you expand on your secret to remaining in business for 35 years?

Jenny Dinnen: [00:02:30] Yeah, so 35 years. So and I guess to back up, I think 35, 38 years something. So my dad started the business a long time ago. So we are a family business. My twin sister and I are in and running the business, so we came in 12, 15 some years ago. So I’ll kind of pick up from I mean, well, growing up in the business in high school and working with them, but when Kate and I came into the business, the data analytics space has changed so much from 35 years ago, and I feel like it was like Dad catching lightning in a bottle way back when. When Kate and I came in we started thinking. What is happening outside of just our business, which I think is a really big thing for businesses to be doing, is I think for a while there it was head down getting the job done, just doing what we needed to do. Kate and I had the honor of coming in and taking a look back and outside and bringing in...

What comes to mind when you think of sports sponsorships? If it’s big-name brands and big budgets, you’re not alone. With 20 years in the world of sports marketing, Matt Wiech shares how brands of various sizes can get creative with sports sponsorships to find the perfect match. From the benefits and risks, to current sponsorship trends and how to measure ROI, this engaging conversation will tell you what you need to know about sports sponsorship marketing for 2023.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:04] This is The 19, a podcast that delivers marketing insights from Orange Label in 19 minutes or less. This year, the agency is celebrating 50 years of working with established brands that are driven by a fearless entrepreneurial mindset. What does this mean for you? It means enriched conversations and stories with marketing and leadership experts aimed at improving lives.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:33] Hello and welcome to The 19: Entrepreneur Edition! I’m Rochelle Reiter, President of Orange Label. One of the best examples of brand affinity is that of sports fans In talks about our weekends or conversations with friends. You constantly hear phrases like “my team” or “we won the game.” You may even know someone that holds superstitions that wearing a specific jersey had something to do with that win. Associating your brand with that level of community can help increase brand awareness, earn consumer trust and boost ROI. Today we have sports marketing expert Matt Wiech with us to share more on the topic. Matt is an award winning sales and marketing professional specializing in sponsorships. He’s worked for teams including the Anaheim Ducks, San Francisco 49ers, and the Los Angeles Angels, and he currently teaches sports marketing at Cal State Fullerton, Pepperdine and Chapman. Matt, welcome to The 19!

Matt Wiech: [00:01:23] Oh, thank you so much for having me in Rochelle. I’m really excited to be here.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:01:31] So tell us more about your background in sports marketing.

Matt Wiech: [00:01:34] Be it from a young boy. I’d always wanted to play a professional sport, but at a certain point you realize that you don’t have the physical tools to be able to kind of quite get there on the field, on the ice, on the court or what have you. And so I had to go out there and figure out what I was going to do for a real job. And I think you and your listeners will learn here quickly that I have a gift for gab. And so I immediately gravitated towards the sales and marketing realm and ended up going to school at Arizona State, getting my Undergraduate Degree in Marketing. And then I went along to Pepperdine and got my MBA and at that point decided I was going to go out there and find a job in sports. And what had initially sounded like an easy task was made very difficult. I ended up writing four hundred cover letters to every single sports team in the world, essentially at the time. This is in the mid-nineties and I ended up getting three hundred rejection letters back saying, We’ll keep your information on file should something open up. But a couple of people had written on the note. Hey, you should check out this professional baseball employment opportunities and it rotated around the country and it still does today where it’s essentially a job fair. So you’ve got a bunch of twenty somethings with college degrees all suited up with their resumes in hand. And you go to this job fair and there’s a board with a couple of hundred jobs up there. And literally I just took my resume and I put it in every bin. And so what ended up happening was I got a job offer to work for a minor league baseball team in Memphis called the Memphis Chicks. They’re no longer in existence. But some of your listeners may recall that Bo Jackson, that was his first professional baseball team before he got promoted to the Kansas City Royals back in the mi...

Great content marketing delivers value to an audience, independent of the brand that created it. This nugget was shared by Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Advisor of The Content Marketing Institute in our latest podcast. From capturing first-party data to measuring KPIs, this episode will help you further develop your 2023 content marketing strategy to be a valuable resource for your audience.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:00] This is The 19 a podcast that delivers marketing insights from Orange Label in 19 minutes or less. This year, the agency is celebrating fifty years of working with established brands that are driven by a fearless entrepreneurial mindset. What does this mean for you? It means enriched conversations and stories with marketing and leadership experts aimed at improving lives.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:28] Hello and welcome to The 19: Entrepreneur Edition! I’m Rochelle Reiter, President of Orange Label. I read a quote in Publisher’s Weekly recently that said, “Content is the engine that drives visibility.” What I love about this quote is that it emphasizes just how important content is in your marketing strategy. If your content is driving your visibility, you want that engine to be reliable. You don’t want to churn out content that sputters out just after a few clicks. As the Content Marketing Institute says, it’s about creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content that attracts a clearly defined audience and ultimately drives action specializing in content, longevity, strategy and creation. The Content Marketing Institute has been an industry leading resource for over a decade, and today we’re so excited to speak with the institute’s Chief Strategy Advisor, Robert Rose. Robert has worked on content strategy for global brands, including Capital One, NASA, Dell, McCormick Spices and Microsoft, and he’s even written three books on marketing. Without further ado, here he is. Robert, welcome to The 19.

Robert Rose: [00:01:32] Oh, thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.

Rochelle Reiter: [00:01:39] So you’ve been with the Content Marketing Institute for over ten years. Can you tell us about your role as Chief Strategy Advisor?

Robert Rose: [00:01:46] Well, sure. It’s funny, I started as Chief Strategy Officer, and that was back when we were quite literally four people. And I met this guy, Joe Pulizzi, back in 2009, 2008, and we met at a conference and we started talking about content marketing. And we were we were, we were birds of a feather and fast friends immediately. And the interesting thing is, is that he was just starting Content Marketing Institute at that time, and I was just coming off of a CMO role. And the whole thing was, can we evangelize this new process called content marketing in larger enterprises? And so it started out really my role there is was sort of the Chief Strategy Officer to half my job was to help the organization grow and get bigger and do all the things that it wanted to do around events and media and all those things. And then the second half was I built a consulting and education division for the company to build a curriculum, as well as a consulting practice to help bigger brands be able to bring this whole content marketing thing to life. And then in 2016, post acquisition, I was no longer an employee of the company, but I stayed partnered with the organization. Joe rode off into the sunset and started writing novels and doing his thing, and I basically stuck around and had a job and they didn’t want any of the consulting or the or the education part of it. So I spun up my own little company called Content Advisory and still partner with CMI for the event and the media and the strategy part of the engagement. And basically that is my role these days with, with Content Marketing Institute because I lost the officer part of the title,

When searching for influencers for your brand, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the number of followers they have. Pause and let the follower count drift to the background. Are they producing creative, quality content? Do (real) people comment on their posts? Are they already posting about your brand or engaging with it? Jackpot! Influencer expert Kayla Mueller shares how to get scrappy with your influencer marketing strategy by identifying who you want to work with, knowing how to measure ROI and staying away from distractions in part two of our podcast.

Chelsea Ragland: [00:00:00] This is The 19, a podcast that delivers marketing insights from Orange Label in 19 minutes or less. This year, the agency is celebrating 50 years of working with established brands that are driven by a fearless entrepreneurial mindset. What does this mean for you? It means in rich conversations and stories with marketing and leadership experts aimed at improving lives.

Chelsea Ragland: [00:00:28] Welcome back to the 19 with Kayla Mueller, Senior Creative Strategist at Popular Pays, a Lightricks Company. In part one of the podcast, we discuss the value of influencer marketing. For part two, we’ll be sharing tips to identify influencers that resonate with your brand and insights on how to track campaign performance.

Chelsea Ragland: [00:00:51] What are some tips for identifying influencers that resonate with your target audience?

Kayla Mueller: [00:00:55] Influencer marketing, if you haven’t done it before, can be very overwhelming and the more work you put in, like the pre-work and the planning of finding the right influencer creator, the better it’s going to be all around for everybody. Brands, take a look and they’re like, this is the type of creator we want. Well, first, let’s look at sales data, like, who’s buying this? Who is your audience? Like, sometimes brand teams, agency are like, this is the target demo. And we’re like, Are you sure? Because if they are, that’s totally cool. We will go with that. That’s amazing. But if you have any sales data or, you know, hey, most of my audience is in California, for example, let’s just look at creators who are in California and like look at if most of their audience is there or if a product is only available in a certain place, let’s just focus on that. So I think just taking a step back, that’s like a theme in most of my answers is take a step back and like really think about it and be intentional. So once you know who that audience is and you’re engaging the right people. Search for creators so you can use software tools like Popular Pays. Where I work, you can work with agencies like Orange Label, you can work with both at the same time, and then you can even get scrappy.So based on like your resources and your time, you can look in the platforms yourself. You can search for people talking about your competitors. If you want to take that approach, you can search for people talking about a specific like category or vertical that you’re in, and they may be a thought leader there. So there are ways to get scrappy like in the platform just based on. Kind of what your resources are. Even I would search for like branded hashtags. You can do that in the platform. Anybody has access in TikTok and Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest to search for brands in there and like, see what’s popping up. Who’s already talking about your brand? I think we’ve definitely seen a lot of successful campaigns even outside of my team where people are already talking about a brand or product. So is that not a perfect fit, right, where you’re talking about a specific skin care, people already posting about it. They already have almost all every product in a line already.

Influencer marketing may not be for everybody. By the end of this podcast episode, you’ll know exactly what influencer marketing is, how brands benefit from it and how to decide whether it’s a fit for you. With spending on influencer marketing forecast to reach $5 billion in 2023, this is a must-listen podcast to plan your content strategy as we approach the fourth quarter. Tune into Part One of The 19: Entrepreneur Edition with Kayla Mueller, Senior Creative Strategist at Popular Pays, a Lightricks Company, and Orange Label Social Media Supervisor Chelsea Ragland.

Chelsea Ragland: [00:00:00] This is The 19, a podcast that delivers marketing insights from Orange Label in 19 minutes or less. This year, the agency is celebrating 50 years of working with established brands that are driven by a fearless entrepreneurial mindset. What does this mean for you? It means enriched conversations and stories with marketing and leadership experts aimed at improving lives.

Chelsea Ragland: [00:00:29] Kayla is the Senior Creative Strategist at Popular Pays, a Lightricks Company, and faculty associate at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. From Oscar Mayer’s viral face mask influencer campaign to stunning travel content for travel app Liist, Kayla is a creative force for content, curation and influencer strategy and has fun while doing it. Kayla, welcome to The 19!

Kayla Mueller: [00:00:53] Thank you, Chelsea. I’m so excited to be here!

Chelsea Ragland: [00:01:00] Awesome. Can you tell us a little bit about your background in digital advertising and influencer marketing?

Kayla Mueller: [00:01:06] Definitely. I was first drawn to advertising. I had an email internship and I loved advertising. I thought it was incredible how you could target different people. And then after that, after school, I went and worked in paid search for a few years at a big agency. That was a really cool experience, and then I found myself at a boutique PR firm. So there I was, kind of leading social media strategy photoshoots, social calendar planning, a lot of different things and influencer marketing there as well. And then I kind of found myself now at Popular Pays, a Lightricks Company, where I’m a Senior Creative Strategist and I make a lot of RFPs for brands. I’m sure we’ll get more into what my specific role looks like, but it is really humbling to be in the world of digital. I think it’s almost been eight years at this point and it’s really cool to see how it has evolved and it’s just a really exciting space to be these days. So, I’m really grateful.

Chelsea Ragland: [00:02:10] Absolutely. And we’ve seen such great success with our clients’ influencer marketing campaigns. For those that may be unfamiliar, how would you define influencer marketing?

Kayla Mueller: [00:02:20] Yeah, that’s a good question because we talk about those words. We use some of these words all the time. There’s so many marketing and advertising buzzwords. So I think it’s so important to kind of take a step back and revisit what those words are. I think at its core, to simplify, influencer marketing is word-of-mouth advertising. It’s hearing that a friend has bought something and it makes you want to buy it or learn more about it. And it’s kind of that referral and testimonial type of process. So it’s really, at the end of the day, partnering with humans, people, and gathering testimonials from them to promote a product or service. And I think one reason why influencer marketing is so successful and why influencers are so helpful to a marketing strategy is that it’s a human testimonial, right? So it’s, it’s humans and people talking about a brand or service instead of just a brand,