Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen
[00:01:39]
Welcome to the e-Commerce Marketing podcast everyone. I am your host, Arlen Robinson, and today we have a very special guest, JP Clement, and with 30-years of experience under his belt, he can help your audience in areas of marketing, digital strategy, and product management. JP, who is the new CEO of boomtime, has founded three digital marketing agencies and worked with numerous companies ranging from startups to global brands such as Johnson & Johnson and National Geographic. Welcome to the podcast jp.

JP
[00:02:14]
Thanks for letting me Arlen.

Arlen
[00:02:15]
Yes, no problem. And yeah, definitely excited to talk to you today because we’re gonna be covering an area that is our audience members know that it’s near and dear to my heart, which is word of mouth marketing, having to do with referral marketing, affiliate marketing. It’s a lot of what you guys do as well along with a lot of other digital marketing activities. So super excited to dig deep into that. But before we do get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today.

JP
[00:02:45]
So I’ve been doing marketing, as you said, for over 30 years. You can tell by accent I was not born and raised in the us I was from outside of of the country. But I came here for business school and stayed and made my way into the marketing world because that’s actually something that suits my personality probably better than what my classmates did, which was mostly went into the finance world. So I’ve been doing marketing for a long time. I started doing digital marketing in 1998, which is, feels like a eons ago and a couple centuries ago. But I’ve done literally through my career, career, any kind of marketing, both on the client side and the corporate side, sorry, the client side and the agency side. I got into the agency business in 2006 with, for a company that was doing marketing, social media marketing basically, and influencer marketing before those things were even called that in 2006.

JP
[00:03:38]
You know, Facebook had just started to open up its platform to companies and to regular people, not just to students. And so it was really the beginning of, of the days of social media marketing. So I, I did a lot of that and, and then I struck out on my own and started, as you mentioned, we marketing agencies all around digital marketing and I was trying to find a way to make digital marketing agencies or marketing agencies in the general more efficient and more scalable. Typically the way you scale a marketing agencies, you hire more people to do the work. To me, that felt very inefficient. So I thought for years about how to scale and replicate digital marketing campaigns in an efficient manner. And then I came across boom time and boom time. I had kinda found a way to do that by creating their own marketing as a service platform that they coded themselves proper software and kind of to me was kind of seeing the light and on how to do marketing very efficiently and very well at the same time and keep the quality up while making it more affordable for small and medium size businesses.

JP
[00:04:49]
That’s why I’m here kind from this little company that was doing exactly what I’ve been searching for, for for 10 years.

Arlen
[00:04:58]
Okay, great. Well thank you for sharing that. And like you said before we started recording, creating a digital marketing agency and making it scalable is a tough thing to do because traditionally you’re doing specific client work, you’re working individually with different clients, you’re meeting their needs. Although those needs are needs that a lot of businesses have traditionally, it’s hard to replicate that because you know, a lot of businesses are different, their needs are different. You’re creating ad campaigns for specific niche and it’s like, it’s hard to kind of come up with a, a concept where you can easily replicate that and make it more of a turnkey solution that works for a lot of businesses. So that’s great work that you guys are doing to be able to find that, that particular niche where you’ve replicated a lot of the traditional digital marketing agencies into a solution.

Arlen
[00:05:47]
That’s great. And you know, today of course we’re talking about word of mouth marketing, which is definitely a huge hot topic as I know you and I are aware of because the main thing that I see these days is that buyers have a tough time in the marketplace just because of the amount of options that are available when you’re looking to buy anything, whether it’s a product or a service. I like to think of it as kind of buyer’s fatigue. You know, when you’re trying to buy something, there’s a lot of research you gotta do and it’s time consuming. You gotta look through reviews, you gotta do research, you gotta email companies, you know, you name it, you gotta watch videos. And so if someone has been referred by somebody that they know or somebody that they trust, that alleviates typically all of that. And that’s why a lot of times people are always looking for referrals because they don’t want to have to go through that whole process of the research, the due diligence, and they would rather trust a recommendation for their friends. And so I think that’s why it’s really exploded over the years now with word of mouth marketing, really. What are some of the best, and I guess the latest, best practices and tactics with regards to a business enabling the best word of mouth marketing for their customers. Is there, what’s the general rule of thumb that you guys go by?

JP
[00:07:09]
Yeah, so there’s been a lot of new tools and tactics that have been emerging in the past few years. And world of marketing can be defined a lot, lot of different ways, but you said it right. I mean word of life marketing and referrals are today, still today after 10 years of my tracking. Those, those numbers research shows that the most impactful or influential way for someone to choose your product or your brand or your services is by recommendation from someone that you trust. So there’s been a whole industry, as you just mentioned, built around that, around that fact that’s been very, very, very steady across the years. And I think with very passing year we have more and more tools that we can use to do marketing and create those referrals. But I think lately one of, one of the things that we’ve been focusing on, at least at boom time, but really paying dividends for our, our clients, our customers is reputation management.

JP
[00:08:08]
So reputation management is also pretty big. You know, you can define it in many different ways, but at its core it’s, it encompasses things like reviews being on the right directories and the right places for people to find you. But that revision management is, has become critical. Its a Corolla of, you know, people saying, Hey, you know, what influences me the most when I buying something is recommendations or referrals from people that I trust. People do trust and do read to very, very large extent, which is a surprise reviews, online reviews. So it goes for eCommerce, it goes for businesses who, who be to businesses where people read reviews on Google and after places and list in some cases. So there’s a bunch of directories that, that are very specific to certain industries. Managing your reputation in these areas and in these, in these locations, online locations obviously is super critical and something that really can impact directly your business because it impacts your word of mouth and your referrals.

JP
[00:09:07]
But it also, it’s a critical factor in how people make their these decisions. And it’s also something that a lot of companies don’t really realize or don’t know and don’t pay a lot of attention to. So this is some a place where, you know, and there are all kinds of tools that kinda, companies that offer services where they can help you with generating reviews, making sure your reviews are correctly, are done correctly and serving those reviews and everything. But that’s something that any company can really do themselves too if they spend a little bit of time thinking about it and strategizing it. But it is a very important tool that we found in in the past couple years, basically. That’s one, I mean, influencer marketing is also pretty big for word of mouth. It’s been big for a few years now. There’s been some issues with the fcc, you know, that I said, you know, if you’re getting someone’s giving a review to that is something that’s been kind of paid for or actually you’ve given them the product and they’re keeping the product, they have to say whole bunch.

JP
[01:10:04]
There’s a bunch of disclaimers that foreign influencers can have to abide by, but that’s also of course a very efficient tool. There is also, now I’ve seen a lot of companies that do some kind of a service software as a service influencer marketing products where they actually will find for, for minimal fee, they will find, they will put you in touch with the right people to promote your product, your services, your brand. That’s something shared with that. We don’t do influencer marketing, but there is all kinds of companies that are there that do that. I’ve done a lot of it myself in the previous agencies and it’s, it works very well and it’s, I’ve done my own ROI calculations and it’s much more efficient and much higher ROI than advertising. Again, for the same reason that we just talked about.

Arlen
[01:10:49]
That is very true. I think the main thing with the influencer marketing is you’re tapping into people that have a built in audience really already, rather than kind of starting from ground zero with, you know, just kind of trying to announce your offering to the world. You’re announcing it to people that have a trusted and loyal following. And that’s why I think we’ve seen explosion of these influencer marketing databases and networks and services. Yeah, I like to think of those types of services as kind of matchmakers up between brands and influencers. They’re like a dating type of service or they match you up if you’re a brand, they match you up with right, the right influencers or enable you to find the right influencers by categorizing influencers based on their niches, their following, their numbers and all of that.

JP
[01:11:35]
Yeah, they basically do the hard work for you and crunch all those numbers because some influencers, I mean some people might appear as valuable influencers, but if you do a deep dive into their, for instance, their profile, their social network, their social networks, you realize that, you know, they, they might have a lot of followers, but the surgeon very active. So, which is, that’s a sign those people might not be a really good influencer after all. So those companies that you mentioned, they, yeah, they do all that background checking and, and work and, and actually they can actually even rank people in your industry or for your niche in terms of, you know, whether very more valuable or not. And yeah, it’s a very useful service and something I highly recommend Yeah. For, for large companies out there.

Arlen
[01:12:16]
For sure. And so since you know, you’ve been 30 years in the business dealing with digital marketing and, and marketing in general, you know that whatever campaigns that you dive into, whatever things that you put out there, you’re only gonna take it so far as to what type of results is pulling in. You know, if something is not really hitting those right numbers and it’s not getting you that proper return, you gonna quickly pivot. And so with word of mouth marketing, what are the key metrics that are used to specifically measure the success of a word of mouth marketing campaign?

JP
[01:12:48]
Yeah, this is a great question. I mean, A is one of my pet pees and pet projects I’ve been thinking about for a long time. And you do have to track your campaigns to make sure that they’re, they’re successful. And if you don’t look at the numbers, you won’t be able to say whether your campaign is doing well or not. And setting benchmarks at the beginning of the campaign is critical too. So you know what you have to hit and then you can adjust in accordingly. And the beauty of digital marketing is that we can measure pretty much everything. So as opposed to the good old days of traditional marketing where it was much, much more difficult. But going back to your question, I mean obviously for water mouth campaigns, reach is critical, you know, depending on the side of your market. So how much of your potential market can you reach within with that word of mouth?

JP
[01:13:34]
And tracking that reach is pretty critical, but reach in and of itself is not enough. You know, you can find a way to put your message in front of some people, but in the end you don’t necessarily, you don’t know. But that’s not enough. That message needs needs to be transmitted back to other people. That’s the whole referral and word of mouth concept. So looking at at that, the virality, if you wanna call it that, of your messaging and your campaign is also pretty critical. So tracking that, there are ways to do that, so be more complicated, but that can be done as well. The engagement is also goes with that virality. So it’s kind of almost step one before even you look at royalties like, is your campaign and engaging your customers enough and in the right way or your targets, then they may be consumers, not not just customers.

JP
[01:14:21]
So that’s important. But ultimately for me it’s your, your conversion rate, right? How many of the number of people that that you reach is how many people are actually, are you gonna capture, capture. That capture might be very different from different businesses, but, but that conversion is critical because once you have a conversion, you can compute your cost per acquisition. We should go to the conversion rate. But so cost per acquisition is something that I highly recommend or tell our clients to keep a on because you know it’s gonna really drive the success of your campaigns and, and in the end, you know, you can find an influencer that has a very engaged audience that’s right for you, you spending X, but you know, we’re not sending that many actually not that many actually, and up doing whatever it is that you want ’em to do and therefore your cost acquisitions skyrockets. Its, and so the raw number is like, you know, are we getting a lot of engagement? We getting a lot of word of mouth, but in the end you want these people to convert whatever your conversion

Arlen
[01:15:19]
Is. Yeah, exactly. That’s really the bottom line. But yeah, those, the ultimate conversion can vary depending on the business because you have a lot of businesses that are, you know, if you’re in the e-commerce space, of course you get a traditional direct to consumer sales on the website, that’s pretty straightforward. You’re trying to convert as many as possible, get as many sales coming through from those referrals. But then at the same time, when you do have other e-commerce or service based businesses that may not do direct sales directly on the website, but they work more as they need to get leads, as many leads as possible and convert those leads. And so

JP
[01:15:56]
Exactly. And the conversion can just be, you know, someone filling out a an inch interest form, right? Yeah. That’s a converter force for some businesses.

Arlen
[01:16:04]
Exactly. Right. And then, then ultimately it’s up to the business to decide how they want to incentivize the, that referral, whether it’s for the lead or whether it’s for the actual converted lead. You know, I’ve seen a bit of both, you know, you have companies that are really just trying to get, their teams are in place to try to convert those leads, but they want to just try to drive as many leads as possible. So what they may do is just, you know, reward people for the leads, not necessarily for the conversions, but you know, I’ve, I’ve seen a little bit of both. It just depends on the space that you’re in and you know what you can really, what you think you can motivate these affiliates and these influencers to do to get you to drive conversions to your business.

JP
[01:16:42]
Exactly.

Arlen
[01:16:43]
I think at this point our listeners and people in general really can see the, the real advantages to word of mouth marketing. We’ve spoken so much about, oh, especially in this current climate that we’re in, we’re so competitive when people are really now relying a lot more on referrals, trusted sources, people that they know or influencers. It really seems like there’s so many advantages. But on the flip side, what are some disadvantages to word of mouth marketing compared to other types of marketing campaigns that you’ve seen and that you work

JP
[01:17:14]
With? Yeah, so there are a few disadvantages to word of mouth marketing, but for me, one of the biggest challenges when we, we talk to our clients about the word of mouth marketing is the amount of time that it takes to create that word of mouth. So I always like use the, the analogy of a plant or planting a seed. So the content we create and the things we do for you is planting that seed, but then we have to water the seed with our, a lot of other techniques and tactics for digital within digital marketing. And then that, that seed will grow, you know, and become plant that will bear fruits. And those fruits are that word of mouth, those conversions, right? But that takes a while. It’s not something that you can turn it on like this, it, there are a lot of steps, but you have to follow to get there.

JP
[01:18:00]
And those steps take some time. So when we get a client that says, Hey, you know, can you do this for me? I need results in three weeks. We are like, well there are things we can do about word of mouth not, will not necessarily get you there in that amount of time. Now talk about a three month project or a six month project. Yes, that would definitely work. So I think that’s something that has to be kept in mind. Word of mouth marketing is that life cycle of a word of mouth marketing campaign is much lengthier than just buying some keywords on Google, on Google ads, right. And, and doing it that way. Yeah,

Arlen
[01:18:32]
Very true. Definitely takes time, you know, to get the word to spread and for, to become viral for people to refer others. And that for really to try to spread. I mean the only virality that I have seen with word of mouth marketing campaigns is if you really kind of land of big fish, so to speak, where you’ve got a big high powered influencer that has a really large audience or following and that’s really engaging and if they put something out about your particular brand, there’s a chance that of course you could get a, a large spike in your, your sales and direct direct traffic. So that’s one case where the virality can really explode overnight, really.

JP
[01:19:12]
Yeah, you can strike gold as you just mentioned, or sometimes you have the right message at the right time with the right influencer for instance. And that and of things catch fire, right, in that work. But I think as a rule of thumb, you know, I think telling people that you, you know, we have to take our time to make sure this works is probably better recommendation.

Arlen
[01:19:31]
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely. Well, you know, as you’re ready to wrap things up, I’m, I’m always a huge advocate of learning from what other successful companies have done, so I wanted to kind of pick your brain and see what companies that you’ve worked with or you’re just familiar with in general that have had a lot of success with word of mouth marketing that you can highlight.

JP
[01:19:48]
That’s a tough question. Yeah, so we work as, as you know, mostly in the B2B space, but one of my marketing actually does work in B2B marketing for B2B companies, Sorry. And so yeah, we’ve had some, we’ve done some really, really powerful LinkedIn campaigns. So we’re basically, we capture leads via LinkedIn because of course B2B companies very well Reed on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is kind of their world as opposed to Facebook or Instagram or Twitter for B2C companies. We’ve had some really good success with companies in very niche markets and creating like a lot of value. So you wouldn’t what, what, who those companies are, but we have some ways of generating a ton of leads via basically, you know, virality, the viral that you can get on LinkedIn by creating the right content, connecting with the right people. So having the right type of searches and you can, LinkedIn is a world in and of itself.

JP
[02:20:44]
There is a lot of things that you can do there as a, a B2B company to get that world enough going and becoming, you know, so actually we turn our clients into their own thought leaders and influencers themselves. We don’t rely a lot on other influencers to drive traffic to them. We actually build them into those kinds of people themselves and build their audience and build their partly leadership and all that kinda stuff. So we work with companies like the Trans Royal Group in Canada and they’ve seen incredible value from what we’ve been doing for them through those LinkedIn kind of campaigns that we manage for them.

Arlen
[02:21:21]
Okay, great. Great. Well yeah, thank you for highlighting that. I, I, I appreciate it. You know, that just goes to show that, yeah, the businesses these days do have the power to become their own best advocates. You know, a lot of times a lot of businesses don’t really look at their own networks and the ability for them to get a, a message spread virally. So it can definitely be done. You don’t necessarily always have to rely on outside sources. So I’m glad you pointed that out and that’s definitely a great testimony to word of mouth marketing. Well, I’ve definitely learned a lot jp, and I definitely really appreciate you coming on the podcast because of course this is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart and you know, a lot of our listeners are, are looking for ways and cost effective ways that is to spread their message and word of mouth marketing is definitely one way to do it. But before we let you go, I always like to switch gears here so our audience members can get to know you just a little bit better. So if, if you have one closing fun fact that you don’t mind sharing that you think our audience would be interested to know about yourself.

JP
[02:22:22]
Yeah, so totally not business related, but I’m, I love biking bicycles like push bike as the, like Australian friends call them. So I, I’ve done a lot of biking in my life, mountain biking, road riding a bunch of other things. I’ve, I’ve competed and pretty successfully too back in when I was younger and, and didn’t have to run business, had more time for biking, but I taught myself how to build bikes from scratch so, you know, by the room, by the folks and all that. And I’ve always been fascinated by, by wheels and Okay. And there is a whole like thing history about how to make wheels and it, it’s a rabbit hole that’s easier like me to find to, but I built my own bike wheels.

Arlen
[02:23:03]
Wow, okay. That’s definitely a, a unique fun fact. I don’t think I’ve heard that before. I didn’t know that was such a thing to build your own bike wheels, but it kind of makes sense, especially I know a lot of people that do biking where I am in, in Florida and you know, they kind of get into the maintenance of it and everything. But I, I hadn’t heard somebody take to the level where they’re creating their own wheels. I know a lot of times, excuse me, people customize the bikes with different unique wheels. Yeah. Lighter wheels and all of that, but to make them, Yeah, that’s good. Interesting. And thank you for sharing that. I, I appreciate Of course. But lastly, before we let you go, if you, any of our listeners wanna reach out to you and pick your brain anymore about word of mouth marketing or or anything digital marketing, what is the best way for them to get in touch with

JP
[02:23:46]
You? Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn, obviously I spend a lot of time there, JP CLE basically to find me on LinkedIn. It’s not that many with that name. You’ll find me. And then the other ways of course to go to our website, boom time.com, omt i e.com. We also do our own podcast. So maybe I can return the favor and have you on the one hour podcast. We try to tell people about digital marketing, we also write a lot of content to help people with digital marketing. They don’t have to become our clients. They can access that freely on our website. So there’s a lot, it’s a good way to get in touch with us. And we also, there’s a lot of, which I think is pretty good information, I say so myself on our website.

Arlen
[02:24:25]
Okay, great. Well that’s awesome. Well thank you for sharing that and thank you for that opportunity. I would love to be on you guys podcast as well and we’ll definitely talk about that at some other time. But thanks again and I recommend all of our listeners that are interested in taking their business to the next level and their digital marketing efforts to the next level to reach out to you to see how you guys can help them out. And thanks again for joining us today, JP, on the e-Commerce Marketing podcast.

JP
[02:24:50]
Great. Thanks all to Arlen. Thank you.

speaker 1
[02:24:54]
Thank you for listening to the e-Commerce Marketing podcast. 

Podcast Guest Info

JP Clement
CEO of boomtime