Category: Blog

Here at Adelsberger Marketing, we believe in themes over resolutions. I’ve done a whole podcast about this. I’ve written about this every year for a long time. Each new year has a new theme, which gives us a focus to cover for the entire year. Two years ago, our theme was, “Faster Alone, Further Together.” It consisted of our team’s capabilities and an admission of my limitations. I’m not able to accomplish all the things we need to do as a company. I am limited by time, but also skills and then the ability to prioritize things. We need a team to accomplish all the things that we have to do and to do them at the level at which we need to accomplish them. And for us to continue to improve our offerings, we need our team members to do that. We need team members that are specialized in different things and focused on those things. If we want to run this marathon called business, we can only do it as a team. Our team has done well and our business continues to grow. And the natural evolution of a growing firm is an increase in complexity. When complexity increases, clarity diminishes.

 

More team members and more clients equal less clarity and less preventative measures are taken. As a result, our theme in 2023 was, clarity brings power. We get everybody on board with a clear vision, and then we align everyone towards the same goal with the right direction. That’s going to increase our clarity and that’s going to allow us to win. So by providing clarity, it helps us to know all that we need to do and how we need to do it and allows us to go and do it. Heath MacMillan, one of my friends, and he works at the TCAT in Jackson, said to me that “Clarity brings power, but power brings action. When the spring is compressed, it has tremendous amounts of power and is ready to act. And if you have power, you are bound to release that in action.”  So our theme this year is to “Chop Wood and Carry Water.” Chopping wood and carrying water are two things that are no longer fundamental to the lives that we live. But in a different time in our society, that was what you needed to do to survive. It was the basics. It was the everyday activities that allowed for survival.

 

You had clarity about what you needed, and you went and got it. My hope is that over the last few years, the alignment of our team and the increasing clarity and the building of infrastructure in our company will be like that spring that has been compressed, now released into motion. Now it’s our time to act. We have been steadily building a head of steam over the last few months with new clients, and now it’s time for the business to run at full speed. We’re going to take the fundamentals that we’ve built into the work and practice them every day. Everyone, because of clarity, will know their job and know that it’s time to do the work. We’ve built the tools to do the things, and now it’s time to use them. I’m going to be working to remove roadblocks for the teams to be successful and increase our sales effort. We’ve been sharpening our acts, and now it’s time to chop down the tree. Chopping wood and carrying water isn’t fancy. It isn’t glamorous, but it’s vital to survival. It’s the building blocks to success. It is the fundamentals of business. We have power, and now it’s time to put it to work.

 

So we’re going to go work to make 2024 the best year in Adelsberger Marketing history!

Classic problem. Business owner or leader is so caught up in doing the things that the business does that the business owner or leader fails to work on the business and fails to improve it over time, and that has consequences. It’s hard to do to work on the business instead of just in the business. As an owner or a leader, you have fires to put out. You have customers who need to talk to you. It’s the classic urgent slash important grid, and you stay in the urgent grid. But how do you move to the important things? Many people regularly fail to work in the important grid. The urgent is bright and shiny, but the important changes things in the long term. And can be the key to success or failure. So how do you do this? How do you focus on the long term and important changes you need to look at in your business? Let me introduce you to Traction by Gino Wickman, which is the book behind the EOS or the Entrepreneurial operating system. This book is a step-by-step manual on how to get, as they say, a grip on your business.

 

Some business books are largely theoretical or stay at a 50,000-foot view. Traction does not do that. Traction takes you from day one all the way through implementing an entire operations system in your business that will allow you to make plans and execute those plans too, above the hustle and bustle of everyday work. This book tackles everything from mission statements to 10-year vision casting. It has become one of our most common recommendations to people when we’re speaking about how to run a business. We ran a business for approximately eight years before we introduced ourselves to EOS, but I think it’s going to be a huge difference maker in the road ahead. Eos breaks a business into six key components: vision, data, processes, traction, issues, and people. Each one of these components are things that you’ll work on during the course of implementing EOS and running EOS throughout your entire company. Vision is the overall picture of where you’re going. It’s the 10-year picture of what you want to accomplish. People is making sure that people on your team are in the right seats on the bus, and frankly, that they’re on the right bus. Data is what you look at to know how you’re doing as a business, what you should score, and how you’re scoring, and how to improve that metric that means the most to your business’s success.

 

Issues are things that come up that need to be discussed with the team and have to be improved on and you get to talk about them weekly. Processes are the way that you do business, and this is going to be an area that you look at your systems and improve your systems. Traction is where you take the vision, the processes, and the issues, and you turn them into action steps that make a difference in how you run your business. This book does a great job of going from a 10-year vision to details like how to run a meeting to get to the 10-year vision. It is clearly written by someone who’d been in an entrepreneur’s shoes but had figured out how to structure things in a way that made progress to get traction, or as they call it, to go from vision to traction. One thing is that you’re going to think that you know about your business until you start EOS. It’s going to reveal things to you that you didn’t know about or things that you thought you knew about your business that are wrong. This book may need to be on my reading list every year.

 

In the next episode, I’m going to talk about our first year with EOS, what we’ve learned and how it’s worked out, and hopefully what we’re looking forward to in the next year as well.

In fall of 2022, I began the work of implementing EOS as a structure for our business. Eos is the Entrepreneurial Operating System. It’s a framework for improving your business and getting work done on top of the chaos of client work that you might already be doing. I tell people all the time, it’s really easy to work in your business and not on your business. And as the leader of the business, my job is to work on the business and create a better future for my entire team. When we went to implement EOS, we already had a vision and mission statement, but we didn’t have core values. One of the things I had to develop was our core values, and that was something I initially drafted and got feedback from the team. We then developed those into talking points, and I got graphics designed around them. We work to talk about this every single week at our team meetings, although I’m not perfect at that, and it’s something I have to continue to work to integrate into our work culture. The second big change this has brought to us was a restructuring of our meetings. Typically, we have two meetings per week, the first meeting being a staff meeting, and the second meeting is what we call our catch-up call.

 

Eos and the demands of EOS meetings caused us to change some of the content of those meetings to be more structured around the EOS model. While we don’t have a quote-unquote leadership team at the business of our size, everyone is involved on the EOS team because the size of our team, which changes some of the dynamics of the book. During our staff meeting, our weekly longer meeting, we review all of our projects. That is something we’ve always done. But in addition to that, we’ve started sharing our scorecard and reviewing issues and reviewing our rocks for the quarter. Our scorecard is an enormous tool for transparency in our company. We choose to go over revenue numbers. We talk about utilization rates, which is an important number in our industry. We talk about the leads that have come in and when we’re having the leads come in that we need. We also have things that are holding me accountable as well, like how many networking events I’ve attended. The transparency that we have brought, I think, and based on feedback from the team, has increased the feeling of ownership from team members that they have in the organization.

 

Anytime leadership is silent on a matter, people will fill that void with their own narratives, which may be based on fact, or it may not be. I do it, and our team will probably do it. Everybody does that. So it behooves leadership to fill those silences and to speak on important matters. We’ve had a few months this year where we’ve lost some clients or clients haven’t paid on time, and so our revenue numbers have not looked as good as I would like to them to have been. And that affects some of the internal culture things that we do, like profit sharing and fun things. But instead of the team just knowing that those things didn’t happen, they have a much better understanding of what’s going on and what’s affecting those numbers than they did in the past. The understanding that has been brought from that transparency has relieved some of the burden on me for those roles, but also, I think it helps the team feel better about where we are as a company. Another component that has been really helpful for us in this first year of EOS is implementing the People Analyzer. The People Analyzer is a tool that EOS implements for you to review with all of your employees, and it starts with three questions.

 

Does the person get it? Do they understand the culture here? Do they understand what it means to work here? Do they want it? Do they show the drive to get the work done? Do they show drive to grow? Do they show drive at all? And do they have the capacity to do it? Are they capable of doing the work or capable of learning how to do the work? And then following up on that, you get a plus or minus rating for each of the core values of the company. Has this person demonstrated the core values in the last quarter or have they not? Each quarter, we go through those questions together, one on one with a staff member. In fact, we even do it with our interns near the end of their time as interns so that they can experience what an evaluation is like. During these sessions, I’ve had our staff grade themselves before they come to see me, and it’s been a growing tool for me to see where my team feels strong and where my team feels weak and what I can do to adjust that and help them to be successful.

 

The final big component of EOS was defining one-year goals that fit into our 10 year goal. We broke those out into 90-day increments, and through the first half of the year, we’ve done a great job of hitting those. We’ve hit some snags in the third quarter goals, and they’re bleeding into our fourth quarter, which is not great. But we have some goal, we have accountability structure around it, and it allows our team to make progress on things that we wouldn’t likely have made progress on in other ways. We’ve had goals in previous years that through lack of leadership on my end, we have failed to maintain and implement over time. This structure that EOS brings to the table is a stronger set up for success. The shared accountability, the shared weekly structure, it allows it to not be ignored or swept under the rug in ways that other things could have been. So as we complete our first year, we’ll be pushing to accomplish a few things, and I will be setting up our themes for next year and working with the team to pick out rocks and figuring out how they fit into our work for next year.

 

I would highly recommend Traction and the EOS system to anyone who runs a small business or a small organization, or a big organization for that matter, if you’re interested in getting better instead of doing the same old thing. Have you implemented EOS? I’d love to hear from you and compare notes. Honestly, there’s a lot of things that we could do better with it, but I’d love to hear about your experiences with the EOS. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast, and we look forward to catching you on an episode in the near future.

 

Is it marketing or is it sales? This is a classic question that I run into all the time in my world. In this episode of the podcast, let’s dig into what the distinction is between marketing and sales. What’s the role of marketing and what’s the role of sales and why does it even matter? Well, let’s start with what is marketing? Marketing is the effort of getting someone’s attention and motivating them to take your call to action. We believe in a large definition of marketing. It’s anything that interacts with your customer. Unfortunately, that definition alone leads to some blurry lines. Really, practically in most organizations, marketing is all the external factors that help a customer become a customer or help a customer stay a customer. Sales is enabled by marketing and contains the actual transactions that move a business forward. Many times in the B2B world, there’s a relationship that is managed in the sales department, like with an account manager. Why are these distinctions important? In an organization, depending on how large it is, knowing who’s responsible for what is important. It helps people focus on the right activities, and it helps people be evaluated based on what they’re doing.

 

It helps us know what we’re tracking and who’s doing what. But it is a collaborative relationship, and when it’s not a collaborative relationship, there will be issues. How can marketing and sales work together? I view marketing as enabling sales. So marketing should be listening to sales, but sales should be also listening to marketing. It’s a little bit like a marriage. In a healthy marriage, the husband and wife talk and they lead together. Sales might say, ‘Hey, this messaging is not working,’ and marketing shouldn’t be like, ‘Well, I know more than you.’ Sales might say, ‘I need a brochure.’ But marketing might say, ‘instead of a brochure, what if we built a website?’ That way we can control it and make A and B testing and things of that nature. It’s important for both parties to play nice with each other. Let’s talk through the life cycle of a brochure and how might the two work together. Sales might say, ‘We need marketing material.’ When we go out to the marketing place, marketing should respond and say, ‘Absolutely. Let’s help you make that so that you have all the tools you need to be successful in selling.’

 

Marketing and sales should then be able to collaborate on creating that for sure. Sales should be able to say, these are common objections that we face. These are our customers’ common needs that we can fill. And this is the gap in the marketplace that we’re filling. Marketing should be able to say, okay, if this is the objection or this is the gap, this is how we can say that in a manner that helps people see the need if they’re not immediately aware of it. Then marketing can put it all together in a package that allows us to quickly and clearly communicate who we are, but in a way that intrigues the end customer. Marketing can then handle the design, the photography, the writing, the printing. Then sales has this new tool that they can go and use to sell more stuff. Over time, there should be updates to this, and then sales is going to be able to say, Hey, this is working well, or This is not working well, and this is why we think that is, and this is what we hear from our customers. It’s a collaborative relationship, and that should be the same across videography, websites, marketing strategy, all of those types of things.

 

This is similar how we work with our customers. Our customers are doing the sales and we are equipping them to make those sales happen. What happens when conflict arises? Conflict might arise because sales might feel like marketing is not bringing them good leads, or marketing might feel like sales has unrealistic demands or is not using what they need or make. An important thing is, as a leader above both of those, is that you help them work out those conflicts and work together to solve the problems of the business. When each department knows what they’re responsible for and what each is getting graded on, this can mitigate lots of tension. Are you in marketing or sales in a small organization? I do both of those roles for my team, but my team helps me build all the tools that I need to go enable sales. So are you in marketing? Are you in sales? I’d love to hear from you about something from a marketing department or a sales department that has made your job easier. If you’ve got a great one, send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for tuning into the Content Machine Podcast.

 

I hope to see you on a future episode.

 

If you’re a social media marketer or a marketer in general, generating content can be a challenge, especially over the long haul. The internet is a content-hungry beast, and we’ve got to keep feeding it. With all the customers that we work with, we have to always be generating new ideas for content and then implementing them. Here are some thoughts on how you can also generate content in an ongoing manner. The first and most important thing about content generation is understanding who your customers are. Who’s the target market? Every business’s target market is different and without a good understanding of who these customers are, and in the business we call them personas, you’re going to be spitting in the wind. The first step is to take some deep thought or maybe do some persona exercises on who your customers are and what they care about. As we look about what they care about, let’s think about a few things here. One, do they have a relationship with the organization? Or the people at the organization, do they want to see behind the scenes? Do they feel like they’ve got privileged information or are they just there for a deal?

 

Making a list of what’s important to our customers will give us an opportunity for a starting place when we start to generate ideas for content. In a second vein, we want to think about what we want the customer to know. Most businesses start here, but we put it in second place because what the customer wants is the most important part. When we think about what we want them to know and what are things as a business that we want to make sure they know about, that list is different. Gary Vanderchuk’s methodology of a jab, jab, jab, right hook, the jabs are what the customer cares about, the things that are entertaining, the things that satisfy them. And the right hooks are the things that we want to promote. So what do we want them to know about? Maybe it’s what makes us special, what makes us different than our competition. Maybe it’s some new product for sale or a club or a membership opportunity or some way to contact them like an email list or a text messaging service. The things that we want to promote are many, but we have to understand that they are not necessarily exciting for the customer.

 

And then when we think about those two things, we also have to think about what is the level of awareness that this customer has of our goods and services. Are they a current customer and a friend of the business? Do they need a little education on who we are and why we’re important? Are they not aware of us or that our service exists? Or maybe they’ve never heard of us and didn’t know that someone sold what we sold. Depending on that level of awareness, we may need to approach the content we’re creating differently. And then we have to think about is it organic social or paid social? Because the platform affects the content as well. But when we think about whether our customers know us or not, we should be trying to think about how that content reaches different segments at different times. We need not just to focus on experienced customers, but we also need to reach out to new customers and introduce ourselves in different ways. Finally, I like to think about a list of emotions that we can evoke. There’s a long list that we use, including things like being interested, happy, sad, and insightful.

 

These different emotions can help us think about ways that we can interpret the needs of our customers and the things that we want to promote. So instead of just saying we offer X, we want to imply it in an insightful and emotional response. We might say, did you know what X can do for a business and this is what we have done to someone’s business and how we’ve helped them? Or this is why we don’t do this because of X or Y. Pairing the emotions with the content can help you see through a way to make the content more relevant. Having content that can be approached in a different manner can help it be more engaging. Are you producing content? Are you a content producing machine? What’s your favorite piece of content you’ve ever produced? I would love to hear about it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast and stay tuned for more great episodes. And we’ll see you on the next one.

How do you stay up to date with marketing? If you’re leading an organization that is not a marketing organization, how do you stay on top of your marketing? Are you investing in a staff person who’s keeping up with marketing? Is it their sole responsibility? Are they having to do all the areas of marketing or are they focused in just one area? Or do you not have someone in marketing and are you having to try to learn marketing for yourself, even though you might be really good at something else like banking or insurance or roofing? There’s been a new concept that’s becoming more and more popular in our economy called fractional work or outsource work or part time work for chief financial officers and chief marketing officers. This fractional CMO or part time CMO or outsource CMO has become more and more prominent and it’s something that we are doing more of because more and more companies are deciding it’s not worth investing in a marketing person full-time for a couple of reasons. When you hire a full-time marketing person, you want them to do everything. And it’s very difficult to do everything. Very few creatives are capable of doing many things very well across lots of disciplines.

 

Marketing strategy is different from graphic design. Graphic design is different from videography. Videography is different from social media and social media is related to but different from copywriting. Previously, small and medium-sized companies would expect someone, whether they thought it out loud or not, they wanted someone to do all of these things and to do them all well, and that’s just an impossible task. We’ve worked with several companies where we either augment an existing person’s ability or advise those marketing managers to a higher level, or we come in and fill the need completely because we can provide marketing strategy and with our team delivery of that strategy. Additionally, because of our experience in the marketplace, we have a lot more experience than a lot of people who start in these positions because many times these companies hire younger people to fill these roles and we bring a touch of experience and expertise from different industries and cross-pollination from our different accounts. When you hire internally, the hiring and firing of staff members brings a lot of cost and a lot of trouble that can come with it. You have to be thinking about, I’m not just hiring this person for a few hours, I’m hiring them 40 hours a week with salary and benefits and time off and drama and things of that nature.

 

So how do you compensate for all that? The great thing about a fractional CMO is a fractional CMO is responsible for providing value, not punching a clock. You can fire them and hire them, and well, there’s no severance, there’s no insurance, and there’s no drama. David C. Baker pointed out that perspective and seeing the bigger picture are hugely important values that consultants bring to the table. You are dug into the details of your work. You’re looking at the map with a magnifying glass, and we’re standing back and looking at the entire mountain. Outside consultants give perspective that insiders can often miss. Marketing consultants are available. Like I am, you can call me. But the question you need to ask is, is the focus of your organization enough on marketing? Are you properly equipping someone to do the marketing if you’re internal? Or are you spending enough time learning so that you can stay up on top of what’s new in marketing? Because someone has to do it if you want to thrive as organization. So if you’d like to talk about hiring a fractional CMO and maybe that would be us, I would love to set up a Zoom with you.

 

Give me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com or send us a DM. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast. Stay tuned for more insight and future episodes.

As a marketing company, we think about marketing for other people all the time. It’s what we do for a living. But it also means we think about marketing for ourselves all the time, but we just don’t always have the time to do it. The phrase, The Cobbler’s kids have no shoes comes to mind, even though everyone on my team has never heard that phrase before. A long time ago, we decided to focus on three pillars to conquer our marketing. After talking about those, if you hang on to this episode, we’ll look at the next steps as we invest more in ourselves. Our three pillars of marketing: invest in the community, position ourselves as experts, and build stark raving fans. Investing in the community is actually a part of our mission. It says, in a culture that values our team and community. We invest in our community because we believe we have a responsibility to give back as someone who has had success here with the people and the businesses from here. We believe a rising tide floats all boats. If we support our community and help to make our community a little bit better, we can also prosper a little more together as a whole.

 

When the community improves, we fulfill our mission, and we open up more opportunities for us to do business with people in the future because more businesses will exist and existing businesses will do better. One of the secondary benefits to investing in the community through service to the community is meeting new people. Working shoulder to shoulder with some folks or supporting their causes through discounted work is a way to build better business connections than handing out business cards in an event. It builds a genuine connection and mutual trust, and this sometimes leads to new business opportunities, which I’m never mad about. We believe strongly in positioning ourselves as expert guides for marketing in our area. We want to be viewed as who you want to talk to when marketing is on your mind. Being positioned as the expert leads to new business and helps create top of mind awareness as people move through the community. The more people view us as experts or the people to call, the more likely someone is to refer to us even if we’re not close friends. How do we do that? We do that primarily through education. We are willing to educate others on marketing through blogs, speaking at events, or participating in things like the Co’s Office Hours.

 

At Office Hours, folks can sign up for a free consultation with us and walk away with free action steps. And a nice benefit of being positioned as an expert, it allows you to charge a higher fee for your expertise and sets you up to do advice-only work or consultations. We want to get to a place where a significant part of our revenue comes from head work, not just the work we can do with our hands. But the biggest thing that we’ve done to help our marketing is we make stark, raving fans. Most of the folks we have worked with, not all of them, of course, but most of them love working with us so much so that they’re willing to talk us up and recommend us to the community. How do we create stark, raving fans? Well, one, we deliver. This is actually one of our core values also. We do what we say we are going to do, and if it is within our power, when we say we are going to do it every time we show up and we get stuff done. Also, when we deliver, we deliver good work. We make work that accomplishes goals for our clients, and they appreciate it.

 

While we deliver and we do good work, we also make a great partner. We are fun to work with, and we push people to do better for their companies. Going above and beyond in customer service is a long-term investment in building a reputation that precedes us. Now moving forward, there are two particular things we’re going to do to pour fuel on the fire of our business. The first one is creating more content. We are investing the time in creating content like this podcast or this video to help build our position as an expert and help expose more people to our work. In this, we are taking a little bit of our own advice that we give to clients. More content equals more opportunities to be discovered. So expect to see more content from Adelsberger marketing this year. The second thing is that we’re investing in culture. We want to be the best place to work in West Tennessee. Why? Well, I believe creativity wins the day. How do you have creativity? By having good talent. And how do you attract and retain good talent? By having a great company culture. Having a culture that values our team is part of our mission statement and will give us an advantage in the future talent war.

 

I believe company culture will be the biggest defining feature of a successful company in the next 50 years. And so, we’re doing our best to be ahead of that trend now. Thanks for listening to the podcast. If you found this episode helpful, text it to a friend. If you want to talk about doing business with us, contact us at adelsbergermarketing.com.

We believe company culture is key to any successful company. We also believe that that culture is visible and important from the moment any prospect comes in contact with your company. The entire hiring process can help show an applicant how your company acts and thinks. But when the onboarding process begins, you really get a chance to start setting expectations and instilling who you are as a company. A successful onboarding process shows who the company is in three ways: relationally, culturally, and technically. Successful onboarding is relational. We have a small, tight-knit company, so we work to to exercise this in onboarding, allowing new hires to quickly build a rapport with their supervisors and coworkers will help them transition smoothly. At Adelsberger Marketing, we start each new hire and each new intern with a company lunch. This helps them meet everyone and experience the environment of our interactions. We follow those up with each person, spending about an hour with each staff member one on one. This time allows us to get on a first-name basis with each new person and helps them learn about what each team member does and what they bring to the table.

 

These also expose interns to a few different fields of study and may give them a chance to learn about a new discipline that they had not considered before. Having these one-on-one contacts will help us with cross-communication as we get into the real work. Most of our projects are touched by lots of people on the team, so being able to have good communication with everyone is key. Quarterly, I have check-ins with each team member, one-on-one. But when new staff or interns start, I make sure to check in them several times in the first few weeks to make sure that all has gone well and that they are ready to do the work. Onboarding also covers culture. We want to make sure that our onboarding is not just relational, but it also clearly covers our culture. We have been working to define in words the culture that we have built here at Adelsberger Marketing for years. So we take time in onboarding to communicate who we are as a company. We cover the mission and the vision, but we also take time to explain the how and why behind those statements. We also work through our core values and explain how they work out in our day to day lives.

 

This also allows us to set the expectations for behavior at the company. We also give each person some swag to make them feel part of the team. Finally, we cover the technical bits of working at our company. We cover what software we use and what we use it for. This is what everyone thinks about when they think about onboarding or orientation, but we go as far as to explain what modes of communication are for what needs. When should you send an email? And when should you send a Slack message? We additionally cover our AI policy and our communications expectations. Our goal with all of this is to not only set expectations, but to also help a team member or intern be successful and not leave them in the lurch of not knowing how to work with us. When someone comes to work with you, it’s your responsibility to make them successful. We are always working on updating this process to make it more successful. And then we make changes to our checklists. So a question for you, what’s the biggest difference maker you have seen as a new person at a company? I would love to hear some ideas and maybe it’s something we can add to our process.

 

Thank you for listening to the Content Machine podcast. If you found it helpful, please send it to a friend. We hope to see you on the next episode.