¶ Creating a Strong Brand Identity
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 ?
Welcome to ow 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 .
Hi Anne , Thanks for having me .
So , coming from the marketing world , what do you think every entrepreneur should know ?
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 .
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 .
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 .
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 ?
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 . 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 ?
So what was it like for you when you opened Epic9 ?
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 .
What did you create at the beginning that helped you get the word out ?
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 . 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 .
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 .
And so your niche is truly local .
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 .
You have a tagline and it talks about conquering marketing mountains . What is a marketing mountain ?
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 ?
How much should a small business expect to put towards investing in marketing ?
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 .
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 . 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 .
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 .
¶ Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
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 ?
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 .
Yeah , so what do you see as the most common mistakes that businesses make in their marketing efforts , and how can they be avoided ?
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 .
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 ?
how much does that actually blind .
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 . 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 .
At what size does it warrant hiring a third party to manage it ?
Yeah , it's really . I know , I know you want to , I know you want a solid , concrete answer , but it's really hard .
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 ?
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 .
Yeah , so before starting on a marketing campaign , how do you look at the consumer behavior and analyze it ?
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 . 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 .
Is that data public ?
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 .
I didn't realize that you could even access it on the level that you were describing .
Oh , it's fascinating .
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 ?
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 ? 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 .
¶ Marketing Strategies for Local Businesses
So what can readers expect to learn from your book Climb ?
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 .
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 .
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 ?
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 .
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 . 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 .
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 ?
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 ?
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 .
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 .
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 ?
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 .
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 .
Thank you for having me . This is seriously . It's been an honor .
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 . 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 .
¶ Starting a Successful Boutique Marketing Firm
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 .