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, thanks for having me Arlen. Yes, no problem. And yeah, definitely excited to talk to you today because we’re going to 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 Supersite 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.

JPClement
[00:02:45]
I’ve been doing marketing, as you said for over 30 years, you can tell by my accent, I was not born and raised in the U S from outside of, of the country, but I came here for business school and stayed and made my way to 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. Oh shit feels like eons ago. And I got a couple of centuries ago, but I’ve done literally threw my crew rear any kind of marketing, both on the client side and the corporate side or the client side and the agency side, I got into the agency business in 2006 with aura, a company. That’s what it’s doing. I’m marketing, social media marketing basically, and influencer marketing before those things were even called that in 2006, you know, Facebook had just started to open up its platform to companies and to regular people, not just to students.

JPClement
[00:03:46]
And so it was really the beginning of the days of social media marketing. So I did a lot of ideas and then I struck out on my own and started, as you mentioned, we a marketing agencies or around digital marketing. And I was trying to find a way to make digital marketing agencies or marketing agencies in general, more efficient and more scalable. Typically the way you scale and marketing agencies, you’ll hire more people to do the work to me, that’s 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 kind of fallen the way to do that by creating their own marketing as a service platform that they coded themselves appropriately to software. And it kind of, to me, it was kind of seeing the lights and on the 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. And that’s why I’m a gr this is gonna farm this needle, a company that was doing exactly where it had 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 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 we’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 fatigue. You know, when you’re trying to buy something is a lot of research you got to do and it’s time consuming. You gotta look through reviews, you gotta do research. You got to email companies, you know, you name it, you got to 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.

Arlen
[00:06:35]
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 from 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 business, enabling the best word of mouth marketing for their customers is there, what’s the general rule of thumb there’s you guys go by?

JPClement
[00:07:10]
So there’s been a lot of new tools and tactics that have been emerging in the past few years and the marketing can be defined in a lot of different ways, but you said it right. I mean, what about 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 a 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 every passing year, we have more and more tools that we can use new word of mouth marketing and create those referrals. But I think lately one of, one of the things that we’ve been focusing on at least some time, but really paying dividends for our clients or customers is reputation management.

JPClement
[00:08:08]
So reputation management is also pretty big. You know, you can find it in many different ways, but at its core it’s know competencies, things like reviews being on the right directories and the right places for people to find you. But the attribution measurement is as become critical as a correlary of, you know, people saying, Hey, you know what interests me the most when I’m buying something is recommendations or referrals from people that I trust people do trust and do read to very, very large extent, surprise reviews, online reviews. So it goes for e-commerce. It goes for businesses who B2B businesses, where people read reviews on Google and apple places, engines in the, in some cases. So we raised a bunch of territories about it’s better. They’re specific to certain industries managing your in these areas and in these, in these locations, online location. So this is super critical and something that really can impact directly your business because you need bikes, your word of mouth and your referrals, but it also, it’s a critical factor in how people make their decisions.

JPClement
[00:09:12]
And he’s also something about it. A lot of companies don’t really realize, or they’ll know, and don’t be a lot of potential to. So this is a place where, you know, all kinds of tools that kind of companies about offers services, where they can help you with generating reviews, making sure your reviews are correctly, are done correctly, answering 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 that in the past couple of years, basically. That’s why, I mean, influencer marketing is also pretty big for word of mouth. It’s been being flourishing years. Now. It has been some issues with the FCC. You know, that I said, you know, if you’re getting a, someone’s giving a review to that is something that’s being kind of paid for, or I should have you given them the product and keeping their product.

JPClement
[01:10:03]
They have to say a whole bunch. There’s a whole bunch of disclaimers that influencers can have to abide by, but that’s also of course, a very efficient tool. There’s 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 a minimal fee, they will find that will put you in touch with the right people to promote your product, your services, your brand, that’s something shared with them. We don’t do influencer marketing, but there is all kinds of companies out there that do that. I’ve done a lot of it myself in their previous agencies and it’s, it works very well. And it’s what I’ve done my own ROI calculations, and it’s much more efficient than much higher ROI and the 40 standards that we just talked about it.

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 you to people that have a trusted and loyal following. And that’s why I think we’ve seen an explosion of these influencer marketing databases and networks and services. Yeah. I like to think of those types of services as kind of matchmakers between brands and influencers that like a dating center type of service, where 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, they’re following their numbers and all of that. Yeah.

JPClement
[01:11:35]
They basically do the hard work for you and crunch all those numbers because it means 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 those origin very active. So which is that’s assigned those people might not be a really good influence. So those companies that you mentioned, yeah. They do all that background checking and origin and they actually, they can actually even rank people in your industry or for your niche in terms of, you know, wherever a very, more valuable or not. And yeah, it’s a very useful service. That’s something that I highly recommend for, for larger companies on there, for sure.

Arlen
[01:12:16]
Sure. And so since, you know, you’ve been 30 years in the business dealing with digital marketing and in marketing in general, you know, that whatever campaigns that you dive into, whatever things that you put out there, you’re only going to 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, are you going to 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?

JPClement
[01:12:48]
Yeah, I mean, now that thinks he’s one of my pet peeves and pet projects. I’ve been thinking about none of these for a long time. And you do have to track your campaigns to make sure that they’re a very successful. And if you don’t look at the numbers, you won’t be able to say whether your company is doing well or not. And setting benchmarks at the beginning of the campaign is really critical too. So you know what you have to hit and then you can adjust it accordingly. And that’s the beauty of digital marketing is like we can measure pretty much everything. So I was supposed to be a good old days of traditional marketing, wherever it’s at. It’s much, much more difficult. But going back to your question, I mean, obviously for word of mouth campaigns, reach is critical, you know, depending on the size of your market.

JPClement
[01:13:29]
So how much of your potential market can you reach within with that word of mouth and tracking that reach is pretty critical, but rich 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 to be transmitted back to other people. That’s the whole referral and word of mouth concept. So looking at that, the, if you want to call it that of your messaging and your campaign, these are also pretty critical. So tracking that very ways to do that. So it’d be more complicated, but that can be done as well. Do engagement is also goes with. So it’s kind of almost step one before even you look at by royalties, like is your campaign and engaging your customers enough and in the right way or your targets, but then they might be constantly with not just customers.

JPClement
[01:14:21]
So that’s important, but ultimately for me, it’s your conversion rate with how many of the number of people that you reach is how many people are you going to capture, capture that capture. It might be very different from, for 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 an eye on because you know, it’s going to really drive the success of your campaigns. And in the end, you know, you can find an influencer event as a very engaged audience. That’s right for you, you spending X, but you know, they’re not sending that may actually not that many people are actually doing whatever it is that you want them to do, and therefore your cost per acquisition skywalk gets. And so the raw number is like, you know, are we getting a lot of engagement? And we’re getting a lot of word of mouth, but in the end you want these people to convert whatever your conversion is.

Arlen
[01:15:20]
Yeah, exactly. That’s really the bottom line. But yeah, those, the ultimate conversion can vary depending on the business, because we have a lot of businesses that are, you know, if you’re in the e-commerce space, of course you can have 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

JPClement
[01:15:57]
The coverage and can just be, you know, someone filling out a, an interest form, right. That’s a completely enforced for some businesses.

Arlen
[01:16:05]
Exactly. Right. And then ultimately it’s up to the business to decide how they want to incentivize 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 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. Exactly. I think at this point or listeners and people in general really can see the real advantages to word of mouth marketing. We spoken so much about, especially in this current climate that we’re in, we’re so competitive on 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’ve worked with?

JPClement
[01:17:15]
Yeah. So there are a few disadvantages to one of my marketing, but for me, one of the biggest challenges when we talk to our clients by word of mouth marketing is the amount of time that it takes to create that’s word of mouth. So I always use 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 without a lot of other techniques and tactics for digital within in digital marketing. And then that, that seed will grow, you know, and become a plant that will bear fruits and fruits are that we’re enough, those conversions, right? But that takes a while. It’s not something that you can turn it on, like this, it started a lot of steps that you have to follow to get there.

JPClement
[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 like, well, what are things we can do by word of mouth? And that will not necessarily get you there in that amount of time. Now talking about a three month project or a six months project. Yes. That would definitely work. So I think that’s something that’s to be kept in mind or a math 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 then, and doing it that way. Yeah.

Arlen
[01:18:32]
Very true. It definitely takes time, you know, to get the word to spread and for it to become viable 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 large spike in your sales and direct direct traffic. So that’s one case where the vitality can release explode overnight.

JPClement
[01:19:11]
Really? Yeah. You can strike gold, as you just mentioned. Sometimes you have the right message at the right time with the right influencer, for instance, and that things catch fire. Right. 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 that these sports is probably a better recommendation.

Arlen
[01:19:31]
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Well, you know, as we get 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 have.

JPClement
[01:19:49]
That’s a tough question. Yeah. So we work as, as you know, mostly in the B2B space, but one of my marketing, she does work in B2B marketing for B2B companies. And so, yeah, we’ve had some, we’ve done some really, really powerful LinkedIn campaigns. So we’re basically we capture needs the LinkedIn because know of course, B2B companies very well represented on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is going to have 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 went under what was this companies are, but we have some ways of generating a ton of leads. The basically, you know, virality, the viral ads that you can get on LinkedIn, like 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.

JPClement
[02:20:45]
There’s a lot of things that you can do there as a B2B company to get that order not going and becoming, you know, so actually we turned 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 on into those kinds of people themselves and build their audience and build their thought leadership and all that kind of stuff. So we’ve worked with companies like the trans rail group in Canada, and they’ve seen incredible value from which we’ve been doing for them to those LinkedIn kind of campaigns that we manage for.

Arlen
[02:21:21]
Okay. Great. Great. Well, yeah, thank you for highlighting that. I, that I appreciate it. You know, that just goes to show that yeah, the businesses, these, they 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 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 4k is definitely one way to do it. But before I 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 you have one closing fun fact that you don’t mind sharing that you think our audience would be interested to know about yourself.

JPClement
[02:22:22]
Yeah. So totally not business related by the I’m a, I love biking bicycles and I can push bikes as I was transference call them. So I I’ve done a lot of biking in my life, mountain biking road, riding bunch of other things. I’ve, I’ve competed pretty successfully to, if I can, when I was younger and didn’t have to run business, it had more time for biking, but I taught myself how to build bike wheels from scratch. So, you know, by the, by the spokes and all of that, and I’ve always been fascinated by, by wheels and, and there is a whole like thing history about how to make wheel. Then it’s a rabbit hole. That’s easy for me to find through, but I build my own bike rules.

Arlen
[02:23:03]
Wow. Okay. That’s definitely 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 hadn’t heard somebody takes to the level where they’re creating their own wheels. A lot of times, excuse me, people customize the bikes with different unique wheels, wheels, and all of that, but to make them, yeah, that’s good, man. Interesting. And thank you for sharing that. I pretty much, but lastly, before we let you go, if any of our listeners want to 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 with you?

JPClement
[02:23:46]
Yeah. So you can find me on LinkedIn. Obviously I spend a lot of time there, JP Clemens, basically to find me on LinkedIn. There’s not that many with that name, you’ll find me. And then do you have a ways to go, of course, to go to our website, boom, time.com B O O M T I n.com. We also do our own podcasts. So maybe you can return the favor and have you on the one hour podcasts, 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 websites. So it varies a lot. It’s a good way to get in touch with us. And we also use 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 your guys’ podcast as well. We’ll definitely talk about that at some other time, but thanks again. I recommend all of our listeners that are interested in taking their business to the next level in 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, DP on the e-commerce marketing plan.

JPClement
[02:24:50]
Right. Thanks. All right Arlen. Thank you.

Podcast Guest Info

JP Clement
CEO of boomtime