Author: Brittany Crockett

We have all heard so much about how AI is going to change our world. And most of that really started to kick up in late 2022. Now, fortunately, I was at a marketing, artificial intelligence conference in summer of 2019 that helped me start framing my thoughts on the issue. In marketing, AI is going to be a game-changer. It already is in some ways, and in some ways that we can’t even fully appreciate. And while we are testing it and using it where we can, I felt it was important to implement an AI policy at the company to make sure that we had some guidelines on how to use it well. As more and more workplaces grapple with the effects of AI, I wanted to share our guidelines to potentially help your company think through it too. The first thing is that we, for one, welcome our robot overlords. We know that AI is going to change things, and we want to be inquisitive and use what we can to improve our work while maintaining safeguards from some of the unclear liabilities of the technology. And we have two main unclear liabilities that I’m concerned about.

One, where is our information going and who will have access to it? We are cautious about what AI tools we are using and what information we are feeding it. We are careful to make sure that we are not exposing secret information or trade information to AI bots. Frankly, we do not know who or what might be reading that data and what it might be used for in the long run. Number two, copyright for images and text is still up in the air. Any image generated by AI is generated from other images. The courts still have to deal with who owns what, and we would not want to put our clients in a bad position by creating a liability for them by using an AI-generated image that could end up in a lawsuit. Until there is more clarity on this, we will continue to be cautious. So with those two things covered, here are our 11 rules that we are using as an agency. One, we may use AI to generate ideas and inspiration. Ai is going to be able to help us look for new angles and ideas that we might not have easily thought of.

This is one of its most promising uses as a tool. Recently, I used AI to help find different DIY ideas for a home services industry client. I use those concepts then to write ads for our customers. Number two, we may use AI to generate text. We are willing to use AI to help write portions of content, but as you’ll see later, this is not the last step for anything. This is a starting block. Number three, we may use AI to edit, rewrite, reframe, or otherwise modify text we write. Ai can help us with the tone and examination of a topic that we may need help with. Number four, we may use AI to generate editable images. We are willing to use AI to help us edit our images and improve them. A staff member used AI to remove power lines from a photo recently. Number five, we will fact check any AI text because we know that AI is not perfect and any resources it helps with need to be fact checked. Number six, all AI generated content will be edited and refined by a writer. Nothing generated from AI is completed until it has been edited and refined by a human.

Number seven, the person who uses AI to generate text is responsible for its accuracy and fact-checking. This one is pretty self-explanatory, and it goes back to our core value of responsibility. Number eight, we will not submit or publish AI-generated content straight from the source. This rule spells out some of the previous rules. Number nine, AI does not replace the role of a subject matter expert, editor, or creative in the process of creating content. We value human creativity and seek to use AI as a tool for inspiration. Number 10, we will not use AI tools to generate anything based on the work of artists or creatives that they created that they have not been adequately compensated for. This one is tricky and it limits our use of many tools, but this one is going to be really key to the court’s determination of things moving forward. And 11, we will not use AI to generate deep fakes for content. I think deep fakes are going to be a social problem, and with a lot of our work is in video. It could be tempting to employ these, but we are going to avoid these for good or ill for our business.

These rules are not perfect and they will continue to change, edit as we go, but it gives us a start. I also want to give a shout out to Banker Creative that shared their list in the Agency Builders group that was an inspiration for much of this list. If you have any insight on rules that are governing your business with artificial intelligence, please send us a DM or shoot me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast. And if you found it helpful, please send it to a friend. And unless the robots take over before next time, we’ll see you on the next episode.

Kevin Adelsberger
Welcome to Episode Two of the Content Machine podcast with LeAnne Bentley, who’s the CMO for Leader’s Credit Union. All right, so since coming to Leaders, what are some of the things that you’ve learned about marketing?

Leigh Anne Bentley
What I’ve learned about marketing since coming to leaders? I know I talked about getting in the weeds more, but really getting into the data has been great. Because you can really see people what their needs are, how to help them. I think it’s been a lot more smart marketing. And I think in the past, we had a lot of TV campaigns, and I still buy tons of TV. I love TV. But if you’re buying broadcast, you’re marketing to the masses. You’re doing cable, you can market to much more select targeted groove for the golf channel or the fishing channel or common, you know who’s watching those channels. But when you get into even the digital, which is the more trackable now, which is great, or when you’re trying to get to your data, you can really pinpoint what their needs are. I love the fact that I don’t want to send a checking account campaign to someone who’s had a checking account with us for five years. And so you do a TV campaign, you’re targeting people who… Everybody, in a sense. And so I love how deep you can get into the numbers to make sure you’re targeting the right people, that your message is the right, because I always tell our team, My job is to make sure it’s not just pretty, but it’s effective.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Do you have your right call to action on there? Do you have the right headline on there? And they do a phenomenal job. I mean, I’m not… That’s something that comes natural, but it’s being able to really get deeper in the data into the numbers. I love how you can track things now because again, we’ve even been trying to tracking some TV. We put some QR codes on some television. And so they have we’ll say, hey, that came from… We actually had an ad in Super Bowl. And so we had several come back to our ITM tracking and says, hey, this person watched it in Memphis. This person watched it in Jackson. And so it was fun to see where those came from. Now, broadcast is still a little different. It’s harder to track that still. And I wish I want that magic wand. This is how many came through this. Now we do ask those questions. When you join later, our questions at the end. How did you hear about us?

Kevin Adelsberger
Do you think those are accurate statistics?

Leigh Anne Bentley
I think some of the information is. They’ll say, I mean, it shows where they saw it. I think.

Kevin Adelsberger
It’s a magic wand. Or when they self-report.

Leigh Anne Bentley
And.

Kevin Adelsberger
So- Do you feel good about those?

Leigh Anne Bentley
I like seeing them. The ones that I like to see are the ones that we pull in from our Google tag manager. Oh, sure. I love seeing them on our dashboard. We know this media brought in X number and actually seeing the funnel. We were looking at here’s how many people actually may have clicked on our application and this number actually completed it. But what happened in the middle? And so why are they falling off? Where’s the hard spot that… What do we need to fix? Is there something that’s keeping them? So getting in those nuances and those little details is the fun thing that I wasn’t able to do on the agency side.

Kevin Adelsberger
Well, and probably something that’s changed.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Since- Oh, it’s changed quite a bit.

Kevin Adelsberger
What have been some of your big successes, you think? Big successes. That you can talk about here, I guess.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I don’t think I can take credit for any just really big success. I think it’s been such a team effort. I think we’ve got a great leadership team that works well together. I think we’ve got a great marketing team. We do a lot of things that I’m proud of that’s a little different than agency worlds. Like I said, everything was billable hours and so my mind still thinks that way. But every Friday morning we have a marketing huddle. And so we read a book together and try to learn from that, or we have somebody come in from outside and come talk to us about something. And so I think it’s being able to be interested to have continuous improvement, not constantly being right at the computer, constantly productive. So I think we’re being more productive by bringing those things in. By sharpening your ax. Exactly, by sharpening your ax. With the first two hours sharpening your ax instead of cutting down the tree, exactly. So I think the successes have been really coming together. We’ve done a lot of great things. We’ve had great campaigns. We’ve launched our new website. We’ve launched a new CR-M.

Leigh Anne Bentley
We’ve brought in different… We’ve opened up new branches. Merchandising is something that’s fun with us that we do a lot of our places. But I really just think it’s coming together as a whole and seeing a single vision. Our IT department has really enhanced and we work really well with them. And I think the last couple of years, especially operations, marketing, and IT, including analytics, has just been we meet frequently, making sure that right-hand knows what left hand is doing, that we are maximizing our efforts. And it goes back. Instead of a one big success, it’s those small incremental things that makes a bigger difference in the long run.

Kevin Adelsberger
That makes a lot of sense, especially an organization your size. There’s so many things that could go wrong.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I think that’s one thing. That’s something else I’ve had to do a lot with, is there is a lot more crisis management, I guess, in this. You think about it when an ATM goes down or something else happens or there is some data issue. Stuff happens. Things happen all the time. We have to make sure we’re on point that we’re communicating with our members. I think communication is key. I think that’s one thing I love about marketing is the more you communicate, I think it’s just if people know what’s going on, it’s so much less nerve-ing than being left in the dark.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah, because if you don’t have a good reason for something, you’re going.

Leigh Anne Bentley
To assume the worst. Our online banking goes down and we don’t have something posted that they can go and go, Oh, that’s what’s going on. Then they start getting on Facebook and then it’s like, Oh, something’s happened. Also my team is really good if it’s nose on a white day and we’re responsible to get up that morning, know, we work with operations on what’s going on. And then we’re putting out those communications, putting out our social media posts, our email, what’s going on in online banking, our in-app messages. So there’s more ways to communicate now than ever. So many more ways. So I think that’s something that’s changed a lot. There are so many ways to communicate. Sometimes there’s too many. Because sometimes I’m like, I know someone sent me something, but is it on my email or is it in my team or is it in my Slack or Facebook Messenger or they text me? Oh, yeah.

Kevin Adelsberger
So we actually… For our team, we have a standard of communication about what you use to communicate about what, because I was tired of getting text messages. I was like, No, only send me a text message if something is on fire or I’m not at my desk. Because yeah, there’s so many channels.

Leigh Anne Bentley
And it just keeps growing. We have 70,000 members right now. So you think, Okay, so how am I communicating with them? And what is their best method? Texting right now is one of the best methods, but you also have to make sure you’re compliant. So the hell goes back. Because one thing at agency world, because I did do bank marketing before, my area that I specialize in was professional services. I basically did banks, insurance, real estate, and then B2B. So I was already used to the compliance side on the banking side, but you still have to dig in even deeper and different things. And can I do this? And we have a great compliance officer that is not a, No, you can’t do it. There’s this. You can’t do that, but let’s find a way that gets you- Which.

Kevin Adelsberger
Is a great quality of the compliance- Fantastic. -is fantastic and not super common.

Leigh Anne Bentley
It’s not common. I’ll go to conferences and they’re like, Oh, don’t you hate working with compliance? I’m like, No, they keep me out of trouble. They’re like, Make sure if you add this on there, if you add this disclosure, then you’re good. I love working with our compliance department.

Kevin Adelsberger
Well, what are some of the challenges that you think you face in your role?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Challenges? Well, things are changing drastically. You have to constantly stay up what is the latest thing. Obviously, TikTok is one of the biggest things. But for security, we’re not on TikTok. You can’t do it right now. There’s different trends from that. I do think I talked about AI earlier, just got back from a conference where the whole conference was talking about AI. And so… And the changes with that. And everybody loves ChatGPT and everybody loves the programs, but people think of that one. But people think of that one, but AI is going into so many different areas. And so I will say the one takeaway, because the biggest question that we kept on being asked over and over again, Well, is AI going to take over? You’re going to have to cancel all marketing jobs because of AI? Absolutely not. But the marketing people who are not using AI are the ones that aren’t going to be long term. You just have to incorporate that and make sure you’re utilizing it in the best uses. And I would say the biggest threat to us coming up in a good and bad way is AI because so much fraud can happen in the AI aspect.

Leigh Anne Bentley
We’ve already talked about that. How can we look for different ways to thort fraud through different services. It’s very prevalent. Every day text messages going out, people spoofing emails. It is so prevalent that we’re actually doing a fraud campaign as we speak. We’ll be launching it. We’ve already launched it digitally. We’re actually even doing postcards. We understand this is not a money maker for us, obviously, but we want to make sure our.

Kevin Adelsberger
Members- increases trust with.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Your members. Well, I hope so because we want them to be taken care of. We want the ones… We don’t want them clicking on a link in the text that’s going to a fraudulent aspect. We don’t want people getting phone calls from leaders that didn’t sound like us, but they’re saying, Hey, I need your username and password. We will never ask for your username and password on the phone. We tell our members, and I hope everybody listening here, no matter what institution you’re using, if you get a phone call from one and you’re not sure or even if you just want to be careful, say, You know what? I’ll hang up and call you from a number I know. And what’s your name? I’ll ask for you. We tell our people that all the time. If you’re concerned about who you’re speaking with, hang up. Don’t call this number back, because they spoof our number. And they said, Just get online, find a number that you know is us, and ask from me. And so we try to do that all the time, making sure people are talking to the right people and not getting scammed because it’s very prevalent.

Kevin Adelsberger
I am a citizen of the internet, and I am probably less prone to being phished or manipulated than most people. And someone hacked one of our customers’ emails a couple of weeks ago, and they got me. And I tried to log in to something that wasn’t the right link because I was chasing business. And then a couple of hours later, he’s like, Sorry, we got hacked. And I was like.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Oh, no.

Kevin Adelsberger
I had to tell my team that I got phished.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, no, I understand. We have very stringent security or IT department. I’d put them up against anyone, but things still happen. And so we’re trying to be so proactive. We also are reactive. We have services that we use that if you’re traveling, let us know you’re traveling, or you may get denied until we call you and say, Are you in Boston? Are you in Texas? Or did you make this last charge? And I think members really appreciate that. Sometimes it can be frustrating. Like, My car got denied. Yeah, you’re just trying to buy gas. I’m just trying. But in some foreign place, they weren’t not supposed to be, but we didn’t know they were. And so it can just happen that way. But we try to be proactive. I do think fraud and marketing against fraud and toward fraud and safety is a huge thing, and how AI is going to.

Kevin Adelsberger
Increase that. Oh, yeah. It’s going to get way more dangerous here.

Leigh Anne Bentley
You have voice. People can replicate voices and everything else. It’s going to be wild.

Kevin Adelsberger
So other than AI, what do you think the future of look marketing looks like? Which I know AI is a big part of it, but I didn’t want your answer.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Just to be AI. Just to be AI? Well, I think we don’t know what it’s going to be like in five years, because I think the transition has been so fast. They talked about the Internet took what, four years to hit 100 million people, and AI has taken four months, one of those types of things. So I don’t know what’s going to be next because I think it doesn’t exist yet. And so I think looking at big picture marketing, I still think it all goes back to knowing your… It goes back to the basics. Who is your target audience? How do you reach them properly and how do you treat them? It goes back to the whole umbrella, back to that see, smell, taste, touch, hear, experience. It goes back to treating your members or treating your customers the way you want to be treated and putting them first and smart marketing. Again, like I said, not marketing a product to them that they’ve already had, or don’t market a student loan to an 85-year-old. I might say that my 85-year-old doesn’t need a student loan somewhere, but that’s not- But statistically. Specifically speaking, know your audience.

Leigh Anne Bentley
And I think people want to be heard and they want to feel, I guess, one of the buzzwords that’s been around a little while that we use frequently and we talk about a lot in marketing, is the personalization, that marketing is not for the masses anymore. I mean, it is personalized and it’s personal. And so it goes back to that connection. I mean, two-way communication is here. People constantly posting stuff to you through email, through through chats, through all social media platforms, anything public, anything’s out there. And so we want to make sure that our members are heard and that we’re providing the services that they want and that we’re growing with them. Because some products we have now may not be needed a couple of years from now. So don’t- So it’s not just the marketing, but it’s what you’re selling. So don’t always hold on to something just because you’ve always done it. And that’s one thing we do say a lot in my department is just because it’s always done that way. That’s a pet peeve-like. And so we’re always, after every event, we sit down and have a continuous improvement meeting.

Leigh Anne Bentley
After something else happens, we sit down and go, We have done this better. And then that’s the first thing we look at when we start working on the next project.

Kevin Adelsberger
All right, one last question. If you had a little change in your pocket… Just kidding. We work with you guys on producing the pocket change podcast.

Leigh Anne Bentley
You did a.

Kevin Adelsberger
Great job. You guys ended that question. And so I was just going to set you up for that one. But LeAnne, thank you for taking the time to join us on the Content Machine podcast.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Can I just stay on that? Yeah. Watch the pocket change podcast.

Kevin Adelsberger
That is- That’s right. Anything you want to pitch? And then where should they find out more about the Leaders Education Foundation?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Leadersgives. Org. And please join, $10.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. That’s hard to argue with. So thank you for your time.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.

Kevin Adelsberger
Thank you for listening to the second episode of the LeAnne Bentley podcast. If you missed the first one, go back in the feed and check it out. Thank you for checking out the Content Machine and we hope to catch you on future episodes.

Kevin Adelsberger
Welcome to the Content Machine Podcast. This is episode one of two with leaders credit union’s CMO LeAnne Bentley. Leanne, thanks for taking the time to join us.

Leigh Anne Bentley
I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kevin Adelsberger
Leanne, you’re all about Jackson. You’re all over town. You’re on the United Way board.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I just rotated off literally this past month. I just rotated off.

Kevin Adelsberger
After several years.

Leigh Anne Bentley
I’ve been on there since 2016.

Kevin Adelsberger
2016, and then I know you’re involved with the Leaders Education Foundation as well, and we’ll come back to that in a minute. But can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up in Jackson?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I was actually born and raised in Jackson. Okay, I didn’t know that. I was born and raised in Jackson. My family, my mother grew up in Jackson, so one of those long time Jacksonians. My dad’s from Crockett County, so all West Tennyas, Cillians. But I grew up here, went to J. C. M, to school, graduated there. Actually took my first marketing class at J. C. M, which has got me into marketing. Went off to Chattanooga for a couple of years, worked on there, did my marketing degree there and the NBA, worked at agency in Chattanooga for about five years, loved my time there, loved East Tennessee. But all my family is back here and my husband’s family is back here. So we came back here and the rest is history.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. So you came back and worked.

Leigh Anne Bentley
As an agency here? We did. I worked for Young Associates. It’s a great firm. They still do great work. They do a lot of research stuff on a national level and then marketing on a regional level. And they do fantastic. Yeah.

Kevin Adelsberger
And you were there for?

Leigh Anne Bentley
I was there for all over 12 years.

Kevin Adelsberger
Twelve years. All right. And then an opportunity showed up at leaders. So what was your excited to jump into leaving the agency space and into a, well, I guess, a captive space? You’re working for one client all the time.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I really never thought I would leave agency space because I did love agency work. That’s all I knew. For my first job out of college was at agency. And then when I moved back here, that’s where I gravitated to. But I got a call one day from leaders, and I wasn’t really planning on moving, but I can say that they were doing some really great stuff and some lot of stuff that really listened to my heart about financial wellness and things that we were doing. I guess one of the conversations that really spurred me into really even considering it, one of the questions they had asked me, who said, Well, if you were working here, what’s important to you? What do you want to see? And I said, Well, it’s ironic that you asked that. I said, My husband and I were just at church. We were just talking about programs. We were trying to brainstorm programs the church was having, and both of us independently put down financial wellness. And so that’s one thing that through our conversation, I said, We really believe in that. There’s something you believe into. You can put marketing dollars behind it, and they’ve put their money where their mouth is. And that’s something we’ve done and been a part of to the community. And so I feel like it’s a mission base in a sense. And so it’s hitting a different level. Although I love my agency days, I feel like on an individual basis, I’m making a big difference in the community for the people who need that step up or need financial wellness, counseling, or need to understand a credit score, or how to get out of debt. And so it’s been a passion from that aspect of seeing what I believe in and being able to put marketing dollars behind it.

Kevin Adelsberger
That’s neat to get to make that transition. And part of your work at leaders, well, not technically at leaders. I don’t even know if you explain how it’s connected to the Leaders Education Foundation.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Yes, it’s actually a separate entity. Leaders Credit Union is actually obviously a non-profit financial institution that was started in 1957. The Credit Union decided back in, I guess, several years ago, we want to be able to do more in the community. There’s one thing that I love about leaders, credit union, is we’re very community minded. As a non-profit, we look at it and go and figure out ways to give back. That’s how we’re able to help some of different companies. When we go do classes, we go do different things. How are we able to sponsor events is that our money is reinvested back into our members because we are member-owned, and so we invest back to the community, to our members, and technology. But we wanted to be able to do even more. So in 2019, we formed the Leaders Education Foundation. It’s actually a separate 501(c)(3), and it’s a terrible organization. It’s a nonprofit, not to be confused with a not-for-profit. Okay, that’s a good decision. So our leaders credit union. It is a not-for-profit. This is a nonprofit charity, 501(c)(3), so tax deductible type of things. And so with this, we’re able to expand. We have sponsors ourselves, and then we go out and sponsor different organizations. But we started as education credit union. So that’s why we created the Leaders Education Foundation. That was our heart and soul of where our mission was.

Kevin Adelsberger
Because teachers were the first customer.

Leigh Anne Bentley
We were. In 1957, we were started by teachers, just because back in the day, I did not realize this until I got to the credit union world. But teachers were considered part-time employees. So a lot of times they did not work 12-month contracts. So a lot of banks in different places would not give them loans without being cosigned or something else by somebody who had a full-time position. And so that’s one reason there were so many teachers credit unions created throughout the country. And then obviously we’ve grown since then. We merged with West to Seek Healthcare Credit Union. We’ve merged with Jackson-Sun, Cable, there’s a lot of different ones that we’ve merged with to become what we are today. So we’ve gone from 10 members to over 70,000 members. And now instead of just being focused on just teachers, we’re focused on educators, businesses, factories, healthcare, and communication. So healthcare, communication, and education are our three focal points, but we obviously work in much more other verticals as well, just because we’ve been able to grow so much through the mergers and different things that we’ve done. But the foundation, going back to that, how it’s really different is we are an arm of support for the community. So we have three areas of focus that we work on. One of them is educators, like right now we have our Leads Educator Grants that we’ll be giving out. We’re giving out probably, I think, $35,000 the next couple of weeks to different educators. They’re broken down into three categories. One’s our teacher classroom grants. My mom was a teacher. As I was a member of the credit union back when I was in high school, it was my first bank account. And so she taught school here at Jackson-Masson County Schools. So we give back to teachers, they can apply to how they’re going to spend a thousand dollars to their classroom. I know how much money she personally put in her pocketbook, out of her pocketbook, I should say. It was definitely a family sport. We were going in and helping get classrooms ready and putting bulletin boards together. And she spent a lot of her own money on her class throughout the year. So we said, What can we do to make a bigger impact? So right now, 25 of those grants, $1,000 grants, you can apply for say, How would you use this for your classroom? And then they have to create a video. They’re on our Facebook right now for voting. And then in October, we will give away 25,000. We also have professional development grants. So if someone wants to get additional certification or something and they need a little more funding, so if their school agrees, has to approve on that, then they can apply for grants for that. And then our last one is teacher appreciation. So just because we’re helping the classrooms out, sometimes they need a little extra loving as well. So principals and district leaders can apply for teacher appreciation grants to maybe stock a closet or throw a coffee party or whatever they want to do. So that’s our area for we support our teachers. The other is supporting students. We do that through collegiate scholarships and workforce development scholarships. Our workforce development scholarships, we have three times a year. Those are giving out people apply for TCATs or community colleges can mostly apply for those. And then our collegiate scholarships, we do every spring, and we’ve been giving away about $25,000 worth of grants or scholarships every spring for that. So that’s how we support our current students. And then our third area of focus is current programs. We know we can’t create and do all these new programs when there’s so many ones out there. They’re doing great things. So we try to find ones that are supporting education and see how we can help fund them, how we can help fund volunteers for them. So the ones we support right now, we support the Reed team. They’re one of our larger donors that we do. So we’ve got a five year commitment with them to help make sure they’re covered and then we support them in their while wagon, which supports the children, all the books going behind the rifeabust and different neighborhoods. We support West Teach, the program through Westar. So we make sure that that program has got funding to keep the teachers when they need additional fundings and how to pay for those programs. We’ve given money to the Imagination Library. Right now we’re doing programs for different scholarships for different arts. We did the art boxes past year with the Jackson Arts Council. Those were boxes that went to school system for different counselors that they can have projects when they talk to students. They gave them an activity and they could keep the art boxes. And there’s just a few of them that we’ve done. We look for different ways to increase that. And so actually, we just launched this past Friday. We’re helping the Jackson Grown program out of the co. So we just started that last week. So that’s our first year sponsoring that program. And we’re very excited. They’re doing a lot of great things too.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. One of my Sunday school students is in this class with Jackson County and he is excited about it.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, it’s a great program. We’re excited to be a part of it.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. So you guys are giving out a lot of money every year.

Leigh Anne Bentley
We do. We try to look for money for ways to really support what’s here on education basis. And so those are the three ways we do it through those lenses in a sense. But we get that it’s a membership based organization. But the great thing is it’s only a one time $10 membership fee.

Kevin Adelsberger
Who are the members?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Anybody can become a member. I encourage anyone listening today. It’s just $10 to join a member. But the only thing that really does is it allows us… You supply online, your $10 goes to our base, in a sense. But that allows us to collect your information and make sure that we can continue to inform you of what’s going on through our newsletters, through our social media. And then there’s never another ask after that for membership fee. Now, if you want to make a donation, anything over $10 can be giving you a donation. And it is a 501(c)(3), so it is a tax exempt donation. And then we’ll send anything out for any memorial or in honor of some people. And so we also have sponsorships. So other companies around West Tennessee and other places sponsor us. So their money helps to expand our efforts. And so we partner with them. And then just people join and make donations. We participate in the Give 731 Day and all of those programs. And so that’s how our funding continues to go and grow each year.

Kevin Adelsberger
The $10 membership fee, is that a marketing or a business decision?

Leigh Anne Bentley
It’s really a business decision for this aspect of showing commitment. I mean, not business decision as in we have to have $10 in order to just stay active. But it just shows a level of commitment saying, Hey, I want to be a part of this organization. I want to make sure that I’m making a difference as well. And then I just know that I’m contributing to that aspect.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. No cheap email subscribers. They’re literally paying you to get on your email list.

Leigh Anne Bentley
And so we just keep this informed and let them know that they’re not just on an email chain, that they’re making a difference. Their $10 was used because everybody who works for the foundation, including myself, I have a service president, we have a vice president, we have a director of community engagement, we’re all volunteers. So none of the money that goes towards the foundation goes towards any staffing needs. And I think in our policy, I think 95 % of all money raised has to go back out in the form of scholarships or grants or programs. The five % just covers our hosting every website or whatever, all the different expenses that filing our tax forms.

Kevin Adelsberger
Or just the CRM to keep track of those $10 memberships.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Exactly, our CRM program. So all of those dollars are very intentional that may use for educational purposes and really helping the Westlande community. And we service the Wesley community, river to river, border to border.

Kevin Adelsberger
So it’s the leaders education foundation. And this is not like an accusatory question, right? No. You’re clearly doing really great things. How does that fit in with the larger public perspective of-.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Of who leaders is? Well, I think it just shows that we know we’re not alone in giving back, that we want to make sure that other companies can partner with us to show that difference. Leaders is very generous, and they’re obviously very good to donate to us each year. They keep funds and then within the year we get some funds from them to make sure our programs are good. But we want to expand that. And we know we can do more scholarships. We can do more leads grants. We can do more supporting as we grow with other organizations. Just having that partnership with other people, I think, gives validity to us. And so it doesn’t seem so individualized.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. It’s not just an outlet for leaders, philanthropy, because you have other people contributing.

Leigh Anne Bentley
We do, and we try to market them. Right now, we’re trying to do some focus and some profiles and some of our sponsors that give to us and our scholarships. We have some of our scholarships in their name. So town and country realtors is one of the first ones that stepped up and said, Hey, I want to be a part of this. One of our scholarships each year is a community service scholarship sponsored by town and country. And so that money that they give goes back out to the scholarships in their name.

Kevin Adelsberger
Well, who doesn’t love Joey Hale?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Absolutely. Absolutely. Agreed.

Kevin Adelsberger
So that’s a great outlet for a lot of good work to be done. Let’s talk a little bit about marketing. Okay. So if you were to approach marketing from a philosophical, like a big picture level, what comes to your brain in that moment?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I really think marketing is sometimes underestimated. They think it’s just advertising. And so so many people think marketing equals advertising, and that’s all it really is. We’re marketing is really the umbrella that encompasses everything that has to do with your product, basically the four P’s. What you’re actually your service or product that you’re selling, what’s it going to cost? How are you manufacturing and how are you selling it? What are you selling it for? How are you getting it to somewhere? And then how are you promoting it? So that fourth P, people think that’s all that marketing is. But what’s so great about marketing, it touches everything. We talk about the four P’s of marketing, but I also talk a lot about the four walls of marketing, meaning everything that you see, touch, smell, experience, are the bathrooms clean? Is the parking lot clean? We actually have a scent that we put in all of our leaders’ branches. So if you go in, every one of our branches smells the same. And so everything that we have that you experience is part of our overall marketing umbrella. And I really focus on it’s not just what’s a great campaign or, hey, we launched our website, because those are great and fun and a little more, not tangible as physical, but tangible as you can see the campaign, you can see that. But we really focus a lot on our brand and focus a lot on our culture, because one thing that we love is how our members are being treated. Our brand goes into brand phraseology. We greet people the same way. We have the same, What brings you in today, is a phrase you may often hear when you come in. Like you always say something you need something from someone instead of saying, Oh, no problem. We always say, Absolutely, happy to help. And so it’s just those little bitty nuances of being able to, first of all, connect the dots that people hear that, they start recognizing it. They get to the point where if you don’t say it, they recognize that you don’t say it.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah, that’s when you’re doing a good job.

Leigh Anne Bentley
I have a story I love telling. I was actually at a medical clinic just having a checkup, and I had my name tag on and I hadn’t taken it off. And they said, Oh, can I ask you a question about this so-and-so product? I’m like, Absolutely. And so I talked to them a few minutes. I got my app out, showed them how to do things and how to find something. And I said, Do you need anything else? Do you know anything else I can do for you? And she’s like, No, that was great. And I said, Well, a lot of help. Happy to help. And she goes, Thanks for choosing the Women’s Clinic, which is one of our absolutely happy to help. Thanks for choosing leaders. And so I think she’s just very… It’s just hits… When you hear it repeated back to you, it’s great. And talking about wearing my name tag, I love the fact that when I wear my name tag to Walmart or somewhere else, I’m stopped nine tenths of the time just to tell me a good story about some of our employees. And that to me, I know it’s not a campaign, but it talks about our culture, talks about our training, and talks about the overall, the full marketing scope of all that we’re doing. And it doesn’t just the marketing department. It takes our operations, takes our training department. It’s all of us working together. We’re all going together. It’s absolutely all going together. So that’s the fun part, is seeing the cohesiveness between all the departments, knowing that brand is so important to us that training is really hitting at home all the time. But our brand phraseology, how we’re doing, and everything that we wear inside the branch, everything that we do, everything else is part of that all encompassing aspect.

Kevin Adelsberger
Is that something that you were able to do in the agency world or something that you’re really able to do when you got in-house?

Leigh Anne Bentley
I will say it’s been much easier in-house. One thing that’s been so great about being an in-house person versus an agency is how much deeper you can dive. And so I had some fantastic clients and people I loved working with that I still stay in touch with today. But you put a campaign out and they go, Oh, that was great. And they were happy. But what was the bottom line numbers? You didn’t always know. You didn’t really get into the weeds. And so especially within the financial industry, there’s so much data you can really get in the weeds and work with. We have a great analytics department. So if we’re trying to find how to help someone we can find the right target audience to really go for. It’s very interesting talking about going from agency to in-house because I always thought, Gosh, I don’t know. I’m afraid I’d be bored in one sector because I had so many different variety of clients before and different marketing budgets and different target audiences and different geographic markets. But basically, we run our marketing department like an agency. We have our front line clients, we have our mortgage clients, and we have our investments clients. We have our community investments. We have our workforce partners. We have what we do for the community. So in the same sense, because my mind has been structured agency world for so long, I don’t have billable hours anymore.

Kevin Adelsberger
We avoid those as much as possible.

Leigh Anne Bentley
But outside of that, we have everything in-house. We have a phenomenal team. We do our own graphic design, our own videography, our own PR, push releases and distribution, our own community engagement team. We even have someone in our marketing department who focuses on innovation and member experience. And so they’re the voice of our member. So as we’re working out campaigns, as we’re working out with, we’re launching a new product or a new service or how that’s going to be experienced, they look at it like a member journey. Where are the roadblocks? What can make it easier? She really knows a lot of our systems because she’s been there for 20, up to teenth years. And so she says, Well, we can change this in this system or remove these questions or add these to have a more seamless approach to make that member experience, that member journey better. And so she makes constant improvements daily. They’re little, but over time, they make a huge difference. And that’s what we’re constantly striving to do, is small incremental changes that make a big difference to our members and our community. Yeah.

Culture is key to success in a business. It attracts talent, it retains talent, and that overflows to your customer’s experience. Sometimes broken culture isn’t obvious because we like to blame things that are easier to see. But as this book says, your company will only be as profitable as your culture allows it to be. Sometimes companies treat the symptoms and not the problem. One of the good things about this book, Culture Built My Brand, is that while good culture is frequently pointed to as a way to keep and retain employees, Mark Miller and Ted Vaughan, the authors, point to its value in winning more customers. After all, the reason you want to keep good employees is to keep value in your business. Turnover can hurt customer relationships and cost enormous amounts for recruitment and training. It also helps to point to the value of it to those who don’t get it. Company culture is not just a nice thing to have, it’s crucial to building a business that will last in the long term. Here are some of the insights and parts that I really enjoyed from this book. One, everything in your business should point to the culture you want to build.

From the budget to the communication tools, these things should be culture-oriented. Building a culture that wins is in the DNA of a business. One of the sections I really enjoyed in this book was about rituals. What are repeatable things that you can use to build culture? At Adelsberger Marketing, we have two weekly meetings and one quarterly meeting that we use to try and instill our culture’s core values of responsibility, team, and creativity. But annually, we have an event that reflects on our values for our team members as well. When I give our annual state of the firm talk and then talk about next year, I always review the last year by reviewing how different areas reflected the mission of our firm. Using your mission statement to review the life of your firm or your business is a great way to integrate the two things. And these rituals extend to onboarding as well. A company of our size, we do not onboard staff super frequently, but we onboard interns three times a year, which gives us a test of our systems regularly. We always start a new onboarding process with a team lunch to help the new hire get on a first-name basis with the rest of the team.

This book also recommends sending out new hire kits with swag, having staffs and greeting cards to clients, and a lot of other practical and implementable ideas. The last thing I want to highlight here is the importance of developing a company vocabulary. Talking about anything is difficult without the right vocabulary. We run into this all the time with clients when we were talking about creative things like design. Again, imagine a customer trying to explain that they don’t like a gradient without knowing the word gradient. Eventually, we will be able to figure out what they mean, but how much time is saved, and how much meaning is conveyed by using the right word at the start. Our company has many internal vocabulary words like clarity, which is based on our annual theme this year. But when one of us says clarity, we know that someone needs to pause and give more information. And these words help build a culture by building something that only insiders will know. And it’s a great way for my team to give me a hard time. It will save time and build relational trust with anybody who knows the same vocabulary. This book is one of the best I have read on culture building.

If you get it, let me know. I would love to discuss it with you. The title is “Culture Built My Brand” by Mark Miller and Ted Vaughan. Do you have any rituals in your business that help grow the culture? I’d love to hear about them. Shoot me an email, kevin@adelsburgermarketing. Com. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Content Machine Podcast. If you found it helpful, please send it to a friend. See you on the next episode.