Jeremy LaDuke - Make your local business stand out! DIY marketing tips from 15-person EPIC NINE boutique firm
Jeremy LaDuke
Distinction and brand awareness are the things right now that are lacking in a lot of the marketing that people are trying to do, and so, if you're just starting, I would say how do you visually, audibly, stand out from the crowd?
Anne McGinty
Welcome to the 34th episode of how I Built my Small Business. I'm Anne McGinty, your host, and today we have Jeremy LaDuke with us on the show. This interview is, in part, about Jeremy's journey starting a boutique marketing firm, but it's also an opportunity for him to share advice that could help anyone improve their do-it-yourself marketing. Jeremy is the founder CEO of Epic Nine Marketing Outfitters, a 15-person boutique marketing firm with two goals in mind to help great local businesses thrive and to create a wonderful workplace for creative people. Jeremy is also the author of Climb, a how-to book for local businesses to navigate the world of marketing. He is a board member for the Sky City Entrepreneur Center and the Loudoun County Education Foundation. His business, epic Nine, won Pigeon Forge Chambers 2023 Best Non-Tourism Business of the Year Award and has been nominated for the Best of Blount County's 2024 Small Business of the Year. You can find a link through to his business in the episode's description. Thank you to our listeners for being with us today. Jeremy, welcome to the show.
Jeremy LaDuke
Hi Anne, Thanks for having me.
Anne McGinty
So, coming from the marketing world, what do you think every entrepreneur should know? Or?
Jeremy LaDuke
think about before starting a business. The thing that can really either propel you forward or hold you back is your brand identity. We've seen a lot of businesses that they have a great idea, they've got a great product or a service that they're starting, but then they just kind of fumble with the branding at the get-go. And if you can really nail that at the beginning, any marketing efforts that you have, it can just help. If you hold back or if you play it safe with your branding, it's just going to give you a hard time and you're going to have to use more energy and more money to get people to notice you.
Anne McGinty
How can someone create a strong brand identity that resonates with their target audience and what we've learned is that brands that are distinct, they stand out, they are noticeable.
Jeremy LaDuke
Whenever a brand is starting out, what you're really fighting for is people's attention. You're trying to earn a place in people's memory. That is the most valuable real estate, and so, to create a brand that really stands out, what an entrepreneur should do is look at their competition and go in as much of the opposite direction of them as possible, without really compromising your business identity, but just go in a direction that makes you stand out. You can think about this and how it plays out on a store shelf. You go to the store shelf and you're going to notice those packaging and those colors that stand out from the crowd a little bit more than the others. And try something that can grab people's attention.
Anne McGinty
Are there any rules of thumb, like when it comes to color selection, that you would consider If guiding someone who is maybe just in the ideation phase of their business?
Jeremy LaDuke
That's a fantastic question. You obviously don't want to have colors that just don't look good together. If you've got a couple of colors that are really strong part of your brand, I wouldn't necessarily add in a bunch of other colors to that Because, again, you're trying to earn those spots in people's memory and the easier you make it for them to recognize you as a certain color palette, the better. There's always exceptions to these rules. One of the rules of thumbs back in the day was if you're starting a food company, it needs to be red and yellow, right? So McDonald's is red and yellow, wendy's is red and yellow.
04:05
All these traditional fast foods are red and yellow. But now culturally we tend to see red and yellow as something that might be satisfying but it's unhealthy. So you see a lot of fast casual restaurants being green and colors that are a little bit divergent from that, like a Salseritas or Panera, and so I think the color theory ideas are somewhat similar to horoscopes right, kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, like if so many businesses in a certain category are using certain colors for things, we just kind of associate it with oh, that's what you should use for these colors. I would say again, it kind of goes back to how do you be true to who the business is and have something that stands out from the rest?
Anne McGinty
So what was it like for you when you opened Epic9?
Jeremy LaDuke
Scary, exciting. I always go back to this meme that I saw one time. It was a picture of a poster and it said we didn't do this because it's easy. We did this because we thought it would be easy. I feel like most business owners are kind of in that boat of you don't know what you don't know. There's just so many elements that you have to deal with. It's a little overwhelming. So when I first started it was just me and so my overhead was super low and I was happy if I got one client right at the beginning. But now we're 15 people strong and we need a lot more than that to keep things running, and so the dynamics change over time. But at the beginning it was just kind of a scrappy little startup. I was out there hustling at chamber events and networking events trying to get one or two solid clients.
Anne McGinty
What did you create at the beginning that helped you get the word out?
Jeremy LaDuke
Before I actually started Epic9, I spent a couple of years as a freelancer. So I would get on Craigslist every morning and scan really the whole country for any job. That included web design, graphic design, anything like that, and so I would get gigs that way. But anytime I would try to get local clients. It was always very hard because I was operating out of my house. I had a website that I'd point people to, but I didn't really have a place to meet people and it would wind up always being at a coffee shop and it was always a little awkward. So jump to the next stage. I needed insurance. I got a job at a marketing agency in a nearby town and really at that point kind of learned the business side marketing agencies work, but it was also a very toxic environment. So I was like I need to get out of here and I decided I'm going to jump out, I'm going to do my own thing. So when I started Epic Nine, one of my first two things is I need a space where I can meet with clients, and it was. It was a night and day difference between what I was doing before and the type of clients I was able to get locally. After that they valued it a little bit more. They recognized it as okay, this is a legitimate business. It's not some guy you know doing things out of his living room. Had the website, got a little, it was a little coworking office space and, yeah, just went from there.
06:59
The first like major client that I had that was actually started to have a good recurring revenue with it as a local heating and air company. And we we got to change their branding. They weren't going to change their name. You know it was the previous owner's surnames, right, eating and air and so I've tried to push them. I'm like, can you please change that? That's really hard to market. You know Smith's Insurance or Joe's Locksmith it's like there's not a whole lot we can run with there. But that wasn't negotiable. I got them to adopt a dog as their mascot and this was before I had ever learned the science behind the fact that fur sells. Right, if you could put a mascot with your brand, it gives it about a 20 percent bump in memorability and credibility. It's fascinating. That was 10 years ago. It's still on billboards.
07:47
That was the first major client and I think it's a fairly small community here. Right, we're right outside Knoxville. I think the whole county has about a hundred and maybe 150,000 people in it, and so our little town of Maryville is. It's not small but it's not huge, and so you know a lot of people and I would say most of the business that we got, especially in that the first five to seven years, was because of the relationships we built in the community. I always tell people that, as a small local business, your chamber of commerce is one of the best investments you can make, but it really depends on how much you put into it. You're going to get out what you put into it, and so go to the networking events, go to the coffees and the lunches and all those sorts of things. It's usually $200, $300, $400 for a year. Spend it, join and meet as many people as you can Any type of business where you have a presence in your local community. That's going to be your first stop.
Anne McGinty
And so your niche is truly local.
Jeremy LaDuke
Mostly yeah. So we've evolved a little bit and that's really where we started. That's still where our passion is is helping local businesses that are ambitious. Right, we want local businesses who want to have multiple locations or grow to a regional business or even a national chain. That's really where our heart is is helping those businesses that have some sort of presence in their local community. It doesn't necessarily have to be our local community, but they're providing jobs, they are helping create livings for the people in their place. They're giving to the nonprofits in their community. That's who we want to see thrive.
Anne McGinty
You have a tagline and it talks about conquering marketing mountains. What is a marketing mountain?
Jeremy LaDuke
Yeah. So they come in all shapes and sizes, right. Really, it's the goals you want to achieve, and sometimes people come to us and they're not really sure what their goals are. I'm always amazed by people who've gotten to where they've gotten in a business and they've never really kind of identified solid goals. They're just kind of riding the wave and dealing with things as they come and they've been successful, but they've never really said this is our goal for the year. And so the mountain really is what are you wanting to achieve that you need marketing to get there? Right? Is that you want to earn a certain amount this year for your revenue? Do you want to sell so many products? What's that ultimate measurable goal that you're trying to conquer products? What's the ultimate?
Anne McGinty
measurable goal that you're trying to conquer, and how much should a small business expect to put towards investing in marketing?
Jeremy LaDuke
Yeah, that's a great question and we get asked that a lot. It's valid. We do that with everything else, from insurance to if you have to use a lawyer. You're going to want to know before you get too deep, how much is this actually going to cost me and what am I going to get out of it? That's the other side of that coin. I would say it always comes back to your goals. If you want to double your revenue, you're going to need to invest more to get there than if you just wanted to increase by 10 or 20%, and so if your goals are lofty, expect the budget to be lofty as well.
10:53
Some of your audience out there right now is listening and you're in your first or second or your business and things just aren't like just taken off. You're normal, right, it's a struggle, it's a hustle for a little while, and you've got to invest in your marketing for it to pay off for you. So it really comes down to goals. What are you wanting to get out of it and then how much? How much are you willing to invest to get that? What we take a lot of our clients through is to visualize this as a sales funnel. Right, it's essentially, you can picture a funnel shape and at the top you have your brand awareness, right? These are the people who've never heard of you but are just. They're just seeing your logo, they're just hearing your advertisement. And then at the bottom are the people who are ready to buy. They're ready to invest in whatever you have to offer.
11:44
Your quickest, easiest way to get money is going to be that lower funnel part. It might take you three months or more to get anybody that's at the top of the funnel down to the bottom. Your easiest way to grab people is at that bottom, and this is where things like Google search ads. You can get them to click and go to your website so you can pay to get that click.
12:01
But if your website doesn't build credibility or win them over, or if your competitor's website looks a lot better or just makes more sense, then they're not just clicking on your link, right? They're going to be clicking on maybe two or three other links just to compare. And so you want to have a website that can convert, right? You want to have branding that builds credibility. So we try to encourage people to have a little bit of money going into the search ads. That's going to hopefully generate some calls or some clicks, but you don't want to neglect the top tiers of that funnel, because that helps the whole system be a lot more efficient and a lot more profitable for you.
Anne McGinty
So I was recently speaking to another business owner who gets hundreds of thousands of visitors to his website every month and has a very low conversion. For someone like that, what would you start to look at?
Jeremy LaDuke
Oh goodness, a couple of things. I'd maybe wonder where is that traffic coming from? Because it might be junk traffic, right, sometimes, when we see really low conversions and high traffic rates like that. It might be traffic coming from a link that people are clicking on, but they're coming to that site for a very particular thing and that's not to buy right. And so that would be where I'd start, like how valuable is that actual traffic? And then, if it's valuable, if it's like, okay, this is traffic that should be converting, you'd have to look at the website itself. Do you have slow load times that can turn people off and send people going, or is there something just about the experience on the website that makes it hard for people to search through your store? Or the checkout process is cumbersome. And you can do all this in Google Analytics. It's free. They can go in and see where are people dropping off, like what page are they getting to, and then just leaving and really look and figure out what's wrong with that page that's kicking them out the door.
Anne McGinty
Yeah, so what do you see as the most common mistakes that businesses make in their marketing efforts, and how can they be avoided?
Jeremy LaDuke
I would say the one that affects everything else, is playing it safe. It's a risk either way you go. You can have risky branding and risky advertising and profit from it, or you can play it safe, but then you're risking not making any money at all. And so I think people don't want to be different, right? They don't want to stand out all the time, right. They think just the merits of their service and their product are going to catapult their business, and that's just not reality for most of us. And so I think being willing to think outside the box with your branding and with your advertising is key.
14:42
The great news is 99% of all of the advertising and branding out there is boring. So you don't have to be like a liquid death, which I love liquid death, I'm a I'm a huge fan. You don't have to be a liquid death necessarily. You just got to be funnier or more distinct than everybody else in your town or in your industry, and that's not extremely hard. It just takes a little bit of risk. It takes a willingness to say I'm going to do something a little different and jumping out there and doing it. The other is not having measurable goals, what we see a lot of times, just in business in general is, if you don't know what success looks like for your marketing, it's hard to judge whether it actually worked or not. Focus in on what does success look like. You know after a year of working with us if we haven't achieved x, then we've failed, but if we have achieved x, then we've succeeded right. And so how do we define that?
Anne McGinty
because otherwise we're just everybody's flying blind and if a business wanted to outsource their content marketing, how much does that actually cost?
Jeremy LaDuke
It varies and I think you get what you pay for. We've seen prices around here. You know around $500 a month for folks to get on there, but what that tends to be is just that uninteresting kind of templated sort of post that doesn't really get you anything. It's this weird thing. It's like we've got to be on social media so we're going to pay this person over here 500 bucks. Oh, they post three times a week.
16:07
It's great, you know, it's the box that's checked, social media is taken care of. But what they've done to themselves is they've posted so much uninteresting garbage that Facebook and LinkedIn and all the things have deprioritized them in people's feeds, and so by the time they get to us, we've got to re-energize that, because all the people that are currently following them have just stopped engaging with them and their content only gets seen by, you know, their mom and their family, and so that $500, even though they're getting posts, it's going down the toilet. And so when we come on board, I mean it's a significant amount of money that someone would pay us for social media management and we tell people that may not be worth it for you at this stage, right, until you can grow your business to where, financially, this makes sense. We don't want to take that money from you because that money needs to go to things that are going to actually pay off for you quicker.
Anne McGinty
At what size does it warrant hiring a third party to manage it?
Jeremy LaDuke
Yeah, it's really. I know, I know you want to, I know you want a solid, concrete answer, but it's really hard.
Anne McGinty
Let's just say it's you Like. Let's say that you were in the position I mean, obviously you can do this for yourself, so you don't need to. But let's say you had a different business and you wanted to outsource it to another company. How big would you need your company to be before you decided it was worth the expense?
Jeremy LaDuke
I would say at least a million a year. This is a very arbitrary number, right. I'm just kind of I've kind of thrown something out there, but I would say at that point you've probably got enough budget to where you have some flexibility on what you use it with. I think we're going to start to see this next period is people start to swing a little bit back stronger towards brand marketing, and that's really where social media falls in. Right, social media is not necessarily a performance marketing tool. It can be, but most of the time it's not. But we're going to start to see people swing back more towards brands and realizing that, all right, we know this isn't going to pay off for us in a few months. This is going to be a long-term tactic and when you're making a million dollars a year and you've got a decent profit margin, I think you're at the point where you can say, all right, I can invest in something long-term and this makes sense.
Anne McGinty
Yeah, so before starting on a marketing campaign, how do you look at the consumer behavior and analyze it?
Jeremy LaDuke
The first thing we start doing is you're looking at your competition how much market share do they have, how much share voice do they have and really figuring out what are they doing right, what are they doing wrong, and kind of analyzing where some opportunities are on that, and then also looking at is there anything about your business or any opportunities that you haven't capitalized on to maybe get a new market right? Is there a certain need that's not being met or maybe a certain population that's not being targeted that creates an opportunity for your business? And then there's other tools that go up to being able to look and see. All right, if you're a retail business, we can go in and see how much foot traffic your competition gets. We can help you identify what's a good location to start a new store in, because we know that this location gets X amount of foot traffic.
19:13
What type of demographic is going there. So we can get some pretty solid, concrete numbers on how much business is your competition doing, how much can you expect to do If you're going into a certain part of town, where are the people that you want, where are they spending time? And this is all based on cell phone data, right, so we can go back anywhere up to 2017 and figure out how many people were in a certain spot in time and where they went to after where they came from to get there. It's fascinating and scary.
Anne McGinty
Is that data public?
Jeremy LaDuke
Yes, yeah Well, it's not like public public, you have to pay for it, but it's anonymized, so that pool of data has to be at least 50 people. You can't go and find out where and was on a certain point in time. Somebody can, I'm sure, because that exists somewhere, but the cell phone companies don't make that available to the data services.
Anne McGinty
I didn't realize that you could even access it on the level that you were describing.
Jeremy LaDuke
Oh, it's fascinating.
Anne McGinty
It really is. It's kind of freaky and fascinating at the same time. So what other tools and technologies or software have you used or have you seen that you could recommend for a small business owner who is trying to streamline their marketing process?
Jeremy LaDuke
There are a couple of Google products that are completely free, and even if you're paying somebody else to do these things for you, you should own these or at least have access to them. Google Analytics is kind of the core that most businesses use. That's going to give you all the data that you'd want to know about your website right how much traffic you're getting, how long people are staying on your website, what pages are they visiting. If they're clicking from links, where are they coming from? Are they coming from social media or are they coming from another website? But Google search console it's kind of a sister product to analytics, and search console will tell you information about where you are ranking on search terms. What search phrases are people actually searching for before they click on you?
21:19
That helps you understand where you're getting your website traffic from. To kind of take it to the next level, you can use Google Analytics and Tag Manager, but that takes a little bit more of an advanced setup. If you've got a handful of hours to spend watching YouTube videos, you can probably learn to do it yourself. But that's where a lot of what we do when we do tracking is we get all of that tracking set up. See how the website's actually performing.
Anne McGinty
So what can readers expect to learn from your book Climb?
Jeremy LaDuke
I call it a marketing guide for local businesses and it really helps them understand what things should they be thinking about for their marketing, what are some practical things they could be doing, and it also gives them some resources on how to interact If they're going to hire somebody to do something.
22:06
It gives them some resources to understand how to speak that language, what questions to ask. And so there's part of the book is kind of textbook marketing type of stuff like that. And then the other part is a narrative where you follow Eva Marley, the main character, as she is given her father's business Her father has to retire and he's handing down this book and toy store in a main street setting and get to follow her story as she brings it back to life. Right, it was kind of on the downward trend and now she's bringing it back to life, and so you get to see how some of these things are implemented in an actual business. It's really focused on what are the marketing struggles that she has. It's a way that people can really see themselves in it. Even if they're not a book and toy store shop, the principles can be easily applied to anybody that's in a local business setting.
Anne McGinty
Yeah, and so let's just use an example. Setting yeah, and so let's just use an example. Let's say my daughter and her friends are passionately making slime and they want to start a slime business in a very saturated industry, but they could do it locally here. So what advice would you give to them that would help them differentiate their brand from all the others?
Jeremy LaDuke
And I think I would pull it back a little bit before we get into the marketing side and really wonder is there a need for this thing, or do we think people are actually going to want this thing? Right? I think it's a but where you know she's inviting other kids and they're paying you know 15 bucks for admission, and then they get to come in and like, just make slime, right Cause that's where the joy of it is. It's not really necessarily the slime itself, it's the thing is the making, and so maybe she creates a little you know pop-up shop where we're at the farmer's market where all the kids come and make slime for five or 10 bucks.
24:03
If I could give a name of another book that it's a little bit more academic, but it is probably one of the best marketing books I've ever read. It's called how brands grow and in it they talk about people are not looking for differentiation, right. People are not looking for a bullet pointed list of why you're better than the competitor. What really helps a brand grow is being able to stand out and be remembered, and the way that you do that is just going hard with brand awareness. Again, it's not something that pays off immediately the next day, but it's ultimately how you beat your competitors. And so I'd say in a saturated market, you've got to have something that just catches people's attention. Speaking of saturated markets literally the saturated market you've got to have something that just catches people's attention. Speaking of saturated markets literally the water market I love this as an example.
24:50
But Liquid Death. When they came in, they were an underdog competitor, but they identified this opportunity to go into a market where, if you open the cooler door at any gas station, you're going to see a wall of clear bottles with blue tops and blue wrapping, right. This is a case in point of competitors doing the same exact thing as each other because they feel it's safe, right? Nobody's going to get fired for saying I think our water bottle needs to have a blue wrap around it, right, and we need to name it something like mountain mist water, and so you're not going to get fired for that. It's going to feel safe. The board is going to look at that and say no, it sounds good, let's do it. But here you get this business that comes in and they say we're going to call our brand liquid death. Our whole brand is going to revolve around death and murdering your thirst. It's going to be in a can, it's going to look like beer, but it's actually going to be water.
25:45
If that had failed, somebody would have gotten fired for that right. If that didn't meet the sales quota, they would have looked at that guy who ever had that idea and said you're done, get out of here. We're going to go back to the bottle with the blue wrapping, but in a wider cultural perspective, they proved this idea that distinction is much more important to growing a brand than differentiation. Right, they didn't say, hey, we've got the best tasting, we've got the most pure, our water has minerals. They didn't do any of that. They just made an incredibly distinct brand and ran with it, and now I think their latest valuation was over a billion dollars. Distinction and brand awareness are the things right now that are lacking in a lot of the marketing that people are trying to do, and so, if you're just starting, I would say, how do you visually, audibly, stand out from the crowd?
Anne McGinty
Wow, that was a fantastic answer. All right, I've got two more questions for you. Going back to when you pivoted from working for somebody else and starting your own boutique marketing firm. What advice do you have for a listener who may be currently working in a marketing department at a large corporation and they're getting jaded or feeling undervalued? What advice would you have for someone like that in creating their own marketing firm?
Jeremy LaDuke
I would really recommend looking at the amount of work it's going to take to get the thing off the ground and figuring out if it's worth it for you. In our industry the marketing industry we see jump out there, try to start something and then in a year or two they've wrapped it up and done something else. I know the time and energy and the blood, sweat and tears that goes into that and I would hate for someone just to jump in and spend all that time and energy and it not work out. So I would say, really think hard. Is this something you really want to pour your life into? Because it's going to consume you for a while.
27:32
I think at this point in time, it's hard to be a freelancer right, especially with AI coming along. People think that's the easy button. They can go get copy written by AI, they can go get generate images with AI. Pretty soon, I'd say in the next year, a couple of years we're going to have a pretty decent video generating tool with AI, and so a lot of people who are leaning on freelance gigs. I think that's going to become a harder and harder market to be in. So you've got to really find a way to diversify how you're getting money right. So specializing in just doing that one thing, like just being the logo person or just being the photographer or the videographer or being the social media person all that stuff's going to become really, really hard, and so you're going to have to find a way to diversify and maybe team up with some people and bring some people on that can do all the things with you.
Anne McGinty
Yeah, that's great advice and very insightful. For a final question what advice would you give to your younger self, say, 10 years ago?
Jeremy LaDuke
10 years would have been right about the time I was starting Epic Nine. I would say pay more attention to your money, right? Pay more attention to where things are coming from, how much money you're spending on things. I think for people in a creative industry, that's not our strong suit, and so make it a priority to get that locked down. As much as you can, talk to a CPA, a bookkeeper. If there's no way you can do it, find somebody that you can either pay or that just loves you a lot, and they'll come on besides you and help you make sure you're making money for the long term. I'd say that some of the biggest mistakes I've made in the business journey was getting into bad debt, and that will suck the life out of you and it'll cripple your business, and so figure out your money as quickly as possible.
Anne McGinty
Well, that's great advice, and thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your marketing tips with all of us, and a bit of your story too.
Jeremy LaDuke
Thank you for having me. This is seriously. It's been an honor.
Anne McGinty
As always. Thank you for being here. Today's key takeaways when coming up with your brand, try to think about what can grab people's attention. Think about your brand as having its own identity. How can you be distinct, how can you be noticeable and what can earn a spot in someone's memory? If you have two colors that are a strong part of your brand, don't necessarily add more colors, or it can make it harder for your brand to be memorable, but, that being said, there are always exceptions to the rules. If you are a business that has a presence in your local community, consider joining your local chamber of commerce and meet as many people as you can.
30:18
When it comes to a marketing campaign. Answer the question what are you trying to achieve? Campaign? Answer the question what are you trying to achieve? Is it a specific revenue? Is it selling a certain number of products? What is your measurable goal? Be willing to take little risks and think outside the box with your branding and advertising, because 99% of the advertising and branding is boring, so you just need to be funnier and more distinct than everyone else in your industry.
30:48
When conducting market research, make sure you know who your competitors are and look to see what are they doing right and what are they doing wrong, and can you find any opportunities in that? If you're interested in starting your own boutique marketing firm in that? If you're interested in starting your own boutique marketing firm, think really hard about whether or not you're willing to put in the amount of work, time, energy and commitment to make it a success. And make sure to diversify your services and consider forming a team of people who can turn your marketing firm into a one-stop shop. And finally, if your business is in a creative field, make sure you pay attention to your cash flow. Spend some time learning the money side of business. Talk with a small business CPA and a bookkeeper and if you don't have the capacity for the money side of the business, bring someone on who does. That's it for today. I release episodes once a week, so come back and check it out. Have a great day.
