Jeff Stanislow Radio Show (Podcast during COVID-19)
April 20 th, 2020 - AM 820 Radio Tampa Bay - Business and Marketing Show.
Presented by: Chief Internet Marketer and Jeff Stanislow
Today's special podcast features Cynthia Plunkett owner of CP Marketing + Co.
Cynthia and Jeff talk about the CMO's role regarding Digital Marketing. What does the CMO really need to understand and how it impacts the overall strategy. What can be delegated to others, and what should just be assigned and move on!
Digital Marketing brings a lot of data and understanding how that data roles up into the KPIs set by the CMO in their marketing plan. Learn more about how the CMO thinks or should think about Digital Marketing.
Listen in to our conversation.
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For convenience the Transcript of the conversation is below as well:
[00:00:00] Hi, this is Jeff Stanislow the Chief and Chief Internet Marketer. Wanted to let you know we're doing a great chat today and we're going to talk with our favorite person Cynthia Plunkett from CP Marketing + Co.. How are you doing today? Hey there Jeff doing really well. So I got a chance to talk to Cynthia Plunkett about marketing job in digital marketing specifically recently and I was so impressed by her skill set and capabilities that I invited her to join me here on off of Internet marketer program and wanted to just get them dive in a little bit about some of the great things that are going on in digital marketing and have a chance for Cynthia to introduce herself. And we're going to talk about specifically like the chief marketing officer role and how digital marketing plays an important part about that and what they really should know off.
[00:01:00] And maybe really don't need to know at the same time. So Cynthia Cynthia. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself. Great. Thanks Jeff. This is awesome. So I am a Tampa native or funny enough. We you and I met over LinkedIn just from a mutual connection. So the world is so small and here we are sharing showing the same city. I have wage come from a diverse background of online marketing really starting from the affiliate world and 2013 drove into link building and ran a specific digital marketing strategies to online reputation management brand management and really a general a lot of the front-end digital marketing aspects of optimizing a web sites, whether they're product-based or service-based. So yeah, you know talking today about what achieve marketer really is expected to do well.
[00:02:00] To handle a lot of digital assets and channels is really important when you're going to present data or opportunity whether it's to your client or or a brand so I'm excited to this stuff can be fun. Yeah great. Great. So before we get into that stuff now you mentioned link building and you and I talked a little bit about this last week. What are some of the things off some of the trends that you're seeing in the link building industry, and I know some people they look at them and they say link building and there's this taboo about it, but it's still a very critical part of I digital marketing strategy. What are your thoughts?
[00:02:42] Yeah, thank you for asking man. We could definitely talk about link building 4 hours this stuff is so interesting but I will summarize for the sake of all of our time what I'm really seeing is like most link-building experts and anyone who is trying to develop a strong backlink profile for themselves or a client site is frankly. We are always listening and waiting for any kind of update or change from Google Google really has on the stronghold here when it comes down to how creative or how you know white hat or black hat our link building efforts can go and with the drop of a hat, they will penalize anything that is just, you know, not to their needs some of its predictable some is not some you know,
[00:03:37] I guess I'm strategies that are we still see that are working and prevailing really is a content-based strategy when it's you know, the content is King conversation is, you know true to a point but it comes to genuine Outreach as well. So building a killer three thousand word article with graphics and functions or features that you can play around with or skip through really lays flat if the team doing the Outreach doesn't get it in front of the Right audience. So content still resonates Google wants to see you produce authoritative thought leadership work. So definitely my choice would be stop trying to turn out 250 and 500 word blog posts and expect a great result. We're really looking for in-depth information and that can go beyond text log.
[00:04:37] That can be video that can be Graphics that can be interesting feature function type of you know development on the site. That is Juicy. We we want. So that's where you'll see links coming in from that's what Google wants you to keep producing. Yeah still working out for a lot of people for sure. I know we you know, we had talked a little bit of Link building and when I see mentioned taboo is just because it was a strategy back in the day that you know that Google loves links and then and that fostered a whole community of companies that basically just were aggregated links and selling links and things of that nature but you know that has been since cleaned up so good linking strategies are good for your site. So if they need that CMO and we're going to talk, you know, we like I said, we can talk further about linking and its own specific case for an hour if you want, but for the CMO, you know one of the things.
[00:05:37] Just really recognizes. That was a strategy. It was a time in place for it and it is gone now and if someone actually asked about uh, you know a strategy to you know, buy into some links or even uh, you know, Journal League Farm per say that something you want to run from but not to just disregard. I'll linking strategy for your company, correct. Right, right. And what's hard for perhaps to see ammo who is just Vaguely Familiar with link building is you're relying on that link building maybe company that Outsource team you chose or just that in-house link Builder to better understand value of a link and not so as a CMO. You don't need to know the intricacies of the Outreach and you know, what content is going to work or not, you know as a CMO you need to be dead.
[00:06:37] Need to understand. How can we correlate frankly a link to Roi and myself being that link Builder and the one who's had to sell these strategies to to higher ups and and the c-suite it's a dance that you have to explain you have to describe value just like we describe value with you know, investigate SEO and your content or your website and development the same thing goes with links effectively. You cannot correlate a link to you know, a specific value unless that link is certainly a trackable link that you can correlate to an exact conversion and that conversion then has a dollar amount wage in most cases. We're building links for you know, mostly for for volume, you know to gain a lot of links back to your site, but there's also Authority Song
[00:07:37] And those types of value-driven metrics they come from Google and Google is not going to give you a dollar amount on those value metrics. So you had to justify the authoritative and relevancy of a link coming back to your site. As you know, your own dollar Mark. So if ten lengths a month or a hundred links a month, it's justified by the 20 or 50 hours you spend on it. You need a recognized. Okay. Well where else does the link affect me if it's not a direct conversion then I need to understand that this link is okay quote improving my back line profile. Well, what does that mean? Well other ways that links affect us are or affect websites and both of them are rankings, you know, it's not a direct correlation either but we can we have heard and we've read from Google plenty of times that links are frankly a backbone a, New Jersey.
[00:08:37] Can really support your other organic SEO efforts. So yeah, you got to think that way, you know, when you're a CMO, it's you don't need the nitty gritty's all the time. You don't need the the specifics on how to link up business done. But you do need to be able to understand and value and you got to sell it to you to your team. You gotta sell it even to your higher-ups as well who are going to invest in this kind of strategies. So often along with links and in digital marketing, you know, just a kind of and working with the chief marketing officer, you know, but they have the saying, you know death by data, you know, you know one person to Arms, you know, you can't do everything and just you know, how often do you like to structure to work with the chief marketing officer or executive level person when it comes on a digital marketing because we all know it can get so granular you off.
[00:09:37] That you could have a person that's just dedicated to the technical SEO four on page, you know for search engine optimization off, but that also a trickle up to the CMO who's got to make sense of all that and how do you how do you talk to the CMO? How do you tell them what's important? How do you define what the the key metrics or performance indicators that they need to look for?
[00:10:04] Great question the way I would advise this guess it's a little bit to fold. But if you are the lead strategist on all of these types of Faith efforts, it's likely because you were given a task. You were given a goal to complete and you're told we need to reach these numbers and you need to go figure out how to do it. So looking up that who may have commanded that mission it's about providing the results to to the ones who are asking it off and that that can frustrate I think a few Chief marketers who are familiar with getting down to the granular but frankly a CMO is looked at home or their overall, you know, they they're looked at as an orchestrator, you know, we want to see that they can manage.
[00:11:01] A variety of digital campaigns successfully. So to answer it I guess briefly here is if you're covering three bases found all three or or not. All of them are are producing those goals. We're expecting that Simo to get in front of it. We want them to either whether they get in the trenches and and figure out which who who in the team is is kind of not performing or or which which digital asset is not performing they get out in front and say, you know, we're trying to reach this goal and these are working these aren't
[00:11:42] Now that really answered it very well, but I'm trying to say that you know, when we get to asking a leader for results, we do also hope that the leader can can understand a day off from their team were on their own whether they're reading it from analytics or reading it from a report that their their team member provided them. Right? Right, right. Where do they get some ways were not Chief marketing officers, you know or this or that type kind of get sideways or get off on tangents mostly that you see dead. Well think about it when you hire the type of Chief marketer you've hired where does their background if they have a strong pay-per-click paid ads background wage? They will Deep dive and Sidetrack themselves into perhaps
[00:12:34] Majority of their reports really just you know producing from from these paid campaigns and it just comes from a from a background of experience that I don't want Chief marketers to decide track in their own silos of expertise.
[00:12:54] We want them as the broad Strokes finker. We want data and creative from them. And so if they get sidetracked into their, you know, those personal Endeavors, you know, we're going to lose sight a bigger picture is pretty quickly.
[00:13:14] Yeah, I completely understand regards to what you're saying about the as far as you know, what their strengths are. It's kind of like, you know, you bring on a team right, you know, and if you have a star player that's a pitcher, you know what I mean? They're going to pitch and so if you bring on a chief marketing officer role that might be strong and he Commerce well, they're probably naturally going to be worth, you know, migrated towards the strength their strength and e-commerce for that particular company, but also needs to be aware of, you know other disciplines that are retired as a chief marketing officer cuz there are not just the You Know Chief they should have someone that's a heads up their eCommerce for them. Now, you know, yeah. Yeah, you're right. It's like, you know, if you know, the higher has has a strength in a certain background you'll need to know that there's going to be times where you may ask them to prove.
[00:14:13] December challenging reports or or success metrics that if they're not if they're not prepared or skilled in there in that field need to be open to accepting a a higher or another team or another tool even if it comes down to something smaller to help you get those wins. It's unfortunate that if we end up pulling up a chief marketer up against their back on something that you know, they just had don't have the background and it's the chief marketer fails and it's also important facts if marketer to to admit. Hey, you know, I don't have the background in this but I'm going to be resourceful enough to find someone or something to help me fill in these gaps. So, right if it were a bit of admitting that vulnerability
[00:15:05] Right, right what you know.
[00:15:10] What type of how do you how do you talk about budgets with your Chief marketing officer? You know when when you're when you're there and you're talking about putting together the budget or something, you know, do they and then how does it relate to what's going on now with covid-19. It's unfortunate as as we both know that a lot of times marketing and advertising kind of get lumped into this expense and often just get cut quickly because usually the contractual obligations it's not it's not a massive project that people in the middle like a manufacturing project and so they can kind of pause things and shift budgets and cancel things and marketing and advertising often gets lumped in with that expense side of things. So tell us a little bit about what your thoughts are working in in, you know, a crisis like this or you know, or a downturn for your dog.
[00:16:10] You know when working with a chief marketing officer great. So we would experience here with our own clients. We're doing that exact same thing. We are fortunate enough to have the ability to flex and just pivot with our budget with the intention of not just turning off the switch box certainly navigating and reworking the strategy when it comes to deciding a budget even during a crisis is listening to the data first unless you know, well, let me just say I don't think it's possible to predict the changes per month that are happening if there is no consistency data. So if March came around and we continued with the similar budget, we've got shutdowns going through and and truly a changing economy. We need a job.
[00:17:10] You there's a there's a balance of predictive analysis and also our ability to react confidently and not erratically so knowing that there are fingers crossed right only a few months of this. We need to justify why a budget should remain or decrease frankly. I can't speak to all Industries, but if you're not completely lowering a budget you should be finding ways to reallocate it. For example with traffic off say generally speaking down for a lot of I'm going to use construction commercial construction versus residential construction residential construction is probably I'm sorry residential construction is down commercial construction is not ads down. We're going to say are quotes as as down. So if birth
[00:18:10] Budget is equally split between those two. We need to recognize. What do we reallocate toward toward commercial and we're and if we're talking let's say paid ads, for example, where are you changing your ad copy? What's the messaging? What's different right now? And the pivot during a crisis is messaging. So perhaps the ad copy May read wage, you know still same day shipping for four items or still available for production, you know kind of re-emphasizing a something that's up to date and it's not just kind of your normal normal play on ad copy. Those are the type of pivots. We need to see from a CMO that admits although traffic may be low in some cases. Our our efforts can still be used elsewhere and we can certainly reach the audience that still still searching or or purchasing.
[00:19:10] Right, right. That's true. That's true. I mean I always say it's unfortunate a lot of times but you know, there's opportunities for people to take market share right now to you know, if the people who were advised pulling back and you can spend more, you know, you can actually competition. Yes make a significant impact on your on your market share right now. Um, and so anyways, well, I tell you what, why don't you tell us a little bit about how people can get a hold of you and the type of services that you provide maybe your website and some things like that. And then I'd love to have you back we can dive into some more specific, uh, you know conversations may be about you know, your thoughts on social media when it comes down to the chief marketing officer, you know, maybe even died more than that leak building dialogue that we had early on birth.
[00:20:09] Our conversation great. Yeah. Thanks Jeff. This is great. I love love really talking shop with yeah. This is really interesting and I hope it's been a valued your listeners. So wow. Yeah, I have you know Tampa native but helping our clients who are looking to improve their their presence online predominantly focusing on web development design your organic SEO strategy all the way through your paid media beyond that off-site things like link building social media management and email marketing. Those are all service wage and proud to support and help with and you know, you can read on my website with more information what those services offer and the value it's my initials feed em, and then marketing code, There's a contact form. You're welcome to fill out if you have some questions or you're not really sure where you want to go. You can also find me on LinkedIn. It's just Cynthia.
[00:21:09] Get and yeah, add me send me a message. Let's talk about what you need help with happy to help from small businesses to large corporate Enterprises. The the stuff is really important job. We love love selling this kind of value right and I'll include the links on the page for chief internet marketer, and we'll be sure to share this segment of our social media posts as well for everyone and then Cynthia. Thank you very much for your time, and we'll do this again here sometime in the next week or two, and we'll dive into another subject home from Jeff. Thank you so much. All right. Have a good one. Thank you.