Choosing the Perfect Legal Marketing Partner with Fractional CMO Josh Ramsey
Summary
This is a transcript of a podcast episode titled ‘Center Stage’ hosted by John Henson, where he interviews Josh Ramsey, a fractional CMO (Chief Marketing Officer). The discussion revolves around finding the right marketing partner for businesses, addressing common frustrations with marketing vendors, setting proper expectations, determining budgets, and deciding when to bring marketing in-house. Key points include the importance of clear communication, defining measurable KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), understanding the different roles in marketing (strategist, designer, coder), and the evolution of search behavior. Josh shares insights from his experience, emphasizing the need for businesses to establish their strategy and vision internally before engaging vendors. He also discusses the ‘law of diminishing returns’ in marketing spend and provides a framework called the ‘crystal ball of marketing’ to determine appropriate budgets. The conversation touches on various marketing aspects, including SEO, pay-per-click advertising, and the execution vs. visionary roles in marketing.
Chapters
Jon Henson introduces the podcast episode’s topic, which is about finding the right marketing partner for businesses. He emphasizes that the discussion will not be a sales pitch for any particular company. Josh Ramsey is introduced as a fractional CMO with extensive experience in helping businesses with their marketing.
Josh Ramsey explains the concept of a fractional CMO, which involves providing strategic vision and execution oversight for a company’s marketing efforts on behalf of the CEO. He differentiates a fractional CMO from a marketing consultant or strategist, highlighting their hands-on involvement in implementation. Josh shares a story to illustrate how a fractional CMO operates, working with a client to develop a compelling narrative and train the marketing team.
Jon and Josh discuss common frustrations that business owners face with marketing vendors, such as misaligned expectations, poor communication, and failure to deliver desired results. Josh shares examples of clients experiencing issues with pay-per-click advertising campaigns and emphasizes the importance of setting clear KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and expectations upfront.
Josh advises that businesses should establish their internal strategy and vision before working with a marketing agency. He suggests interviewing agencies, asking for case studies (including their worst ones), and setting clear expectations and KPIs. Josh also recommends understanding the agency’s strategist’s experience and qualifications.
The discussion turns to determining appropriate marketing budgets. Josh introduces the concept of the ‘law of diminishing returns’ and shares a story about a garage door company to illustrate how to optimize budgets across different marketing channels. He mentions a tool called the ‘crystal ball of marketing’ that can help predict returns on marketing investments based on data inputs.
Jon and Josh explore the decision of when to bring marketing efforts in-house by hiring a full-time or part-time employee instead of relying on vendors. Josh emphasizes the importance of setting clear expectations, KPIs, and defining what would lead to termination. He also discusses the challenges of finding individuals who excel at both analytical and creative aspects of marketing.
The conversation shifts to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and how Josh approaches it when working with new clients. Josh highlights the evolution of search behavior, with users now using longer phrases and questions in their searches. He recommends creating a ‘bubble map’ of keyword phrases to target rather than focusing solely on individual keywords. Josh also discusses the importance of understanding search terms and negative keywords in pay-per-click advertising.
In closing, Josh emphasizes the importance of understanding one’s personal and business narrative, as well as the psychology behind decision-making. He suggests an exercise called the ‘egg diagram’ to help identify impactful life moments that shape decision-making processes. Josh’s final advice is to start by identifying what has worked well and what has failed in the past, then set goals for different time frames to create a roadmap for moving forward.
This is a rhetorical question to introduce the topic of marketing strategies for business success.
Transcript
Host John Hinson
This is Center Stage, putting your firm in the spotlight by highlighting business owners and other industry experts to help take your firm to the next level. Hey, everyone, and welcome to Center Stage.
Host John Hinson
I’m your host, John Henson. And this week, we are talking about how to find the right partner for your marketing. And we’re going to talk about, or, you know, we’ve talked a lot about before how you as the firm owner should not be doing it yourself.
Host John Hinson
You should be doing the thing that you went to school for or that, you know, you are known for or getting paid for, not all of this other stuff. But how do you actually figure out who you’re going to work with?
Host John Hinson
And I promise this is not going to be like a 30 minute sales pitch for why you should work with spotlight branding or anybody else. I, you know, want to help you make the most informed decision that you can and what makes the most sense for you.
Host John Hinson
So that is why I am joined by Josh Ramsey. He does a lot of fractional CMO work. He’s helped all kinds of businesses with their marketing, and I’m excited for him to be here. So Josh, thanks for joining us.
Josh Ramsey
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Looking forward to the chat.
Host John Hinson
Absolutely. So yeah, I kind of, I gave like the bare bones kind of intro there. Tell us a little bit more about what you do and some of the experiences that you had.
Josh Ramsey
Yeah. So again, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. You know, I love sharing the message because most people are not understanding or even aware that a fractional CMO exists. People understand the concept of a marketing strategist and they understand a marketing consultant, but oftentimes a marketing strategist or consultant is someone that’s just going to say, go do this or go do that.
Josh Ramsey
But a fractional CMO is really meant to get their hands dirty, to not only give the vision, but to put their hands on it, put their fingerprints on it on behalf of the CEO. So it’s not, it’s someone that sits at the executive table gives the vision, but then it gives the vision based on the CEO’s dream and then executes or make sure that the execution is done.
Josh Ramsey
Now that doesn’t mean, this is also clear to understand. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to build your website. The fractional CMO understands how a website should be built and the structure of the marketing system and gives the vision, but doesn’t do it.
Josh Ramsey
Will you indulge me on one quick story on the explanation? Absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, I literally just finished an email this morning to one of my clients and I have a marketing team that reports to me and the conversation I had this morning with the client, if I back out for just a second and explain the client, they have something good to say, but they don’t say it well, but they try to say it often.
Josh Ramsey
So it’s, have something good to say, say it well and say it often. The conundrum that they’re in is the storytelling. It’s the explanation of what they do well and explaining it to the audience that they want to reach.
Josh Ramsey
It’s easy to say it often once you have a good strategic message. So this morning, one of the initiatives that I’ve started was to come up with a solution to a problem. I outlined the vision of how our marketing project managers need to clearly communicate that.
Josh Ramsey
And then I’m training them and teaching them, this is how you leave a story. So this is what the operators did. Here’s how we define that. Here’s how we engage that into a storyline. And then it’s easy to again, communicate it.
Josh Ramsey
There’s all sorts of, you know, various as I call it, tactical marketing outlets to speak your message to, but if you’re not engaging enough and you don’t have a good storytelling of what your inside reality is, that becomes a problem.
Josh Ramsey
So that’s what a CMO does is say, okay, we have something good and here’s how we weave that story, give it to a team to weave it. I approve it as the CMO and then we execute it. So maybe that kind of helps understand just a little bit more.
Host John Hinson
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, you it’s, it’s essentially kind of in the name, you know, I mean, you know, you are the chief marketing person, like you are handling everything doesn’t mean that you’re literally doing it all yourself, but you’re facilitating and making the decisions that the owner would otherwise have to do on their own.
Josh Ramsey
Yeah, exactly. That’s it. That’s it.
Host John Hinson
Yeah. So, you know, we’re talking about marketing vendors because I think that’s where a lot of people start, you know, especially smaller businesses and trying to get some of that marketing help. So what, you know, especially, you know, you maybe even work with some vendors or vets and vendors as a CMO.
Host John Hinson
What, what are some of the biggest frustrations that you’ve seen business owners or even you have had with marketing vendors? And I promise I won’t get offended by anything you say.
Josh Ramsey
Well, thanks for not getting offended. Um, but you know what? I mean, I never mean to offend, but one thing about myself at least in understanding myself, because psychology is a big part of marketing.
Josh Ramsey
It’s understanding the human nature, why we buy what we buy. And ultimately, if I just broke that down, no matter what you sell, there are three levels that a business owner needs to understand, and this kind of leads into hiring the right marketing person or agency vendor, and it’s, it starts with benefits of ownership, objections to that ownership, and then vendor selection.
Josh Ramsey
And too often we sell on price, not quality of overcoming the objections and explaining the value, which is an advantage. So everything that we buy from a stick of gum, bottle of water to, you know, a Ferrari, it’s all wrapped into those decision -making that we make.
Josh Ramsey
So I think the first part is expectations when we hire somebody, both employees in house and also vendors. Oftentimes I see it that there’s not a clear expectation and what I often refer to as the KPI, a key point indicator.
Josh Ramsey
That way the benchmark is set and we all know what has to be done. Now, a lot of people will hire myself as a fractional CMO to make sure we set the right KPI and that it’s not dictated by the agency alone.
Josh Ramsey
Yes. So having the right expectations is very important as an, as I work on the inside of a company and look at the agency. So I would look at you and say, okay, what do you see that needs to be done?
Josh Ramsey
I love and value people’s opinion. Now I go off of my confirmation bias of is that opinion right or wrong? Now I love some conversations that we had of build the foundation first. So when you come to me and who would be my CEO, I would, and you said that to me, I would say, absolutely.
Josh Ramsey
Like build that foundation. Now where we might disagree is what is the foundation, right? But now that’s a finer point that most CEOs don’t know. They just love the buzzword. That’s where I come in and say, look, let’s set the KPI of what is the foundation and what is the right timeline to meet that foundation?
Josh Ramsey
Right. And then that second leads into the expectation of budget. So now when you are pouring a budget into it, when should your expectation or your KPI be met and associated with your budget, you know, um, so, I mean, I can go down a budget strategy if you’d like, but that, you know, again, trying to keep it high level for, for our short buckets here, kind of the two top things there.
Host John Hinson
Yeah. And I love that you talked about, you know, making sure that the vendor doesn’t dictate the expectation, right? Because I think, uh, you know, something that I see a lot, and I think what frustrates a lot of people is they go work with like a PPC vendor, for example, a Google ads vendor.
Host John Hinson
And they’ll say, yeah, we’ll get you a hundred leads a month. And you know, you get started and maybe you do get a hundred leads a month, but 98 of them are junk and they’re not even relevant. And then you go to the thing and you’re like, you’re not producing what I said.
Host John Hinson
And they’re like, yeah, you, we got you a hundred leads from what we’re doing exactly what we said we were going to do.
Josh Ramsey
You know, I’ll give you two quick stories on that because I love that you say that and you’re dead. Right. You know, I’ve, I’ve one guy that just hired me and I literally have a call later today with his ad agency.
Josh Ramsey
And what he already told me is I went through the discovery process is that they, the, his vendor, the agency that he hired, he’s paying over four grand a month to now for his small business, relatively small business, that’s a big chunk, but he’s looking at it as this as an investment.
Josh Ramsey
So when we look at it, what I’m here to do is, is get the maximum potential out of that ad agency. So in discovery, he’s getting phone calls from people looking for information on a project that’s already started, but he’s showing up in pay per click for things like Home Depot and he’s a remodeler and he’s going, you’ve already started this project.
Josh Ramsey
You’re not a valid lead. So he calls the agency and the agency casted such a wide net that they burned through his budget in two weeks. That was meant to be four weeks and he got nothing from it. Well, I’ll give you another quick story.
Josh Ramsey
We’ll saw on that one to wrap that up. We’re having a discussion today to fix that and to modify and manage his budget better. Now I’ll give you another quick story. I have a client who I have an ad agency and my agency was generating leads for him.
Josh Ramsey
And the problem became, he quickly bounced back and said, you know, Hey, you generate all these leads, you got 15 in one week. This is great, but they’re all crap. And I said, okay, explain to me why, right?
Josh Ramsey
Cause now it’s setting the clear expectation of the, the value of a lead of why is it garbage, right? I’m cool with saying, Hey, I produce garbage, but if there’s no communication, now the expectation is unrealistic.
Josh Ramsey
I’m not trying to rhyme there, but the expectation is unrealistic. Because there’s no communication. That’s why for myself, again, every client’s different, but we use a CRM with agencies to get that information sharing where a business owner has to bounce back and say, this specifically is why it’s bad.
Josh Ramsey
And then any agency can work on that. Well, I say any, if they’re an agency of value of, you know, good ethics, morals and values, they can fix that. But that’s, that’s some of the challenges that I know other business owners have faced.
Josh Ramsey
So.
Host John Hinson
Yeah. Well, I mean, even we’ve, we’ve faced it, right? Cause you know, we don’t do any pay -per -click ads as a service. And so, but we wanted to market ourselves through that kind of channel. We worked with another agency and you know, their default was to maximize impressions and get the lowest click rate that they could.
Host John Hinson
And that’s kind of their default. That’s how they help people. And we started seeing that like people were reaching out to us thinking that we were lawyers. Cause obviously like we do marketing for lawyers, but somehow people were reaching out to us thinking that we were lawyers.
Host John Hinson
And so we’re like, no, okay. And then we got to the point where we were like, look, we want to get really focused on this. We are totally okay with a higher click rate and lower impressions. If those are just all being targeted, right?
Host John Hinson
And they could not wrap their head around it. And so we just don’t work with them anymore. Yeah.
Josh Ramsey
Can I speak to that just real quick? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What people fall into that they’re not oftentimes aware of is what are called in AdWords, pay -per -click, AdWords, is what’s called search terms.
Josh Ramsey
And a search term, when you put in a keyword, you have three variables. You have broad match, exact matching, phrase match. Now, I’m not going to go granular, right, for the sake of time here. But when you understand that you have a keyword and you have these three variables of how that search term has worked, and then you can see what people are actually typing in, that’s where I would come in as a fractional CMO to you and say, let’s look at our search terms.
Josh Ramsey
Like, I don’t disagree that we’re going to pause and we need to change strategy. But this kind of goes into when you hire an agency, one of the top questions. So let me put a big exclamation point on this.
Josh Ramsey
Huge, massive, everyone hear me? Find out who their strategist is and what their experience is. Because agencies will hire pay -per -click managers and executors and designers. But when it comes to, let me simplify in a quick explanation.
Josh Ramsey
When you simplify this, it comes down to three brains that build a website or do marketing. You have design, think about the brain and the lifestyle of the designer. Then think about the coder who actually has to create what’s going to happen.
Josh Ramsey
And too many times we stop there. The third brain is super important. That’s the strategist. And the strategist looks at it and goes, okay, logically, what was the disconnect in between all parties? And we go, oh, well, they were searching for attorney law.
Josh Ramsey
Well, you showed up as marketing attorney law. Your search term wasn’t set, right? So then we go market as a negative and we market as a negative keyword. Boom. We keep running the campaign. It just, we took away the biggest sore spot rather than hurting the entire campaign.
Josh Ramsey
We took away one little sore spot, that’s the pain point. And we say, don’t kill the campaign, right? Don’t kill the messenger, change the messenger’s route, right? And get it, get there a different way.
Host John Hinson
Yeah, absolutely. So you talked about, you talked about, you know, setting expectations, right? And so what, you know, and we’ve mentioned a couple of different things already. Are there any other specific questions that, you know, business owners should be asking these vendors to make sure that they’re getting on the same page and setting the proper expectations?
Josh Ramsey
Yeah, that’s a great question, but I’m going to be a little vague on this one. So the, you first need to set your strategy and your vision internally before you work with an agency. So an agency is meant to sell what they’re good at, right?
Josh Ramsey
I mean, anyone listening to this or watching, you are meant to sell what you’re good at, you’re not going to say to a level, you’re not going to say, oh yeah, you should go do that instead of this. You’re meant to sell what you’re good at in the marketing world.
Josh Ramsey
What a CMO does is it sits with the CEO and says, what are we good at? What are we trying to do? What, how do we want this to come in? And therefore I help business owners dictate to the agency. This is what we should do.
Josh Ramsey
I mean, one of my offshoot campaigns that I’m trying right now is working with agencies to be their strategist. So I go under contract with them that I’m not going to go resell to another agency, but I’m going to work as the strategist and not be a fractional CMO.
Josh Ramsey
I’m going to be the CMO of an agency to be the lead strategist to say, here’s what we do in a lot of agencies are working with me on that because they don’t have a strategist, they understand the problem here.
Josh Ramsey
So again, let’s back out of that rabbit hole for a minute and come back to your question, the question being, you know, what’s the expectation? Well, you need to set that properly internally with your own KPIs then interview, and just as a quick point of reference, we haven’t, we haven’t chatted about it, we could talk about it as needed, but I published a book back in 2019 and the first chapter gives you five points on how to hire the right agency, how to set the right KPIs, how to interview an agency.
Josh Ramsey
And I kind of kind of call it a manual or a guide that you keep in your back pocket, you’ve reviewed, then you ask a list of questions to the agency and you go back and see if they match your KPIs. And, and that’s where, again, I try to be a little bit vague because everyone has their own problems.
Josh Ramsey
Everyone has their narrative, right? If you speak psychologically, we all have our narrative and burnt times, hurt times, pain times, and they’re all going to be different for everybody. So that’s why there is some ambiguity to that.
Host John Hinson
Yeah. And, you know, you also probably think about like, you know, like you said, like, what’s important to you, you know, and again, just making sure that, you know, you both have the same working definition of the results that you expect to have.
Host John Hinson
One other thing that you mentioned, and I want to get this because we get this question a lot. You mentioned budget, you know, a few minutes ago, is there is there any sort of set guideline or recommendation in terms of like, what percentage of your budget should be going to marketing?
Host John Hinson
Or is it one of those it depends sort of things.
Josh Ramsey
So I use a law called law of diminishing return, and let me kind of give another quick story here. And the story is of a garage door company. And they came to me, we were working together for several years.
Josh Ramsey
You know, the full lifecycle of most agencies with companies is about 18 months. The average that I work with is over four years. A lot of that I attribute to just being very blunt and honest, which some business owners don’t like.
Josh Ramsey
They want to be told and patted on the back that they’re right. And I’m just not that guy. I’m a very like, what you really want is money. We don’t do right. Like that’s why we’re in business is to make money.
Josh Ramsey
So I look at business owners before we even get started. And I say, Look, do you want to make money or do you want to feel good about yourself? Right? Like, you know, go feel good about yourself once you’ve made money.
Josh Ramsey
But back to my story with the business in the garage door company, they came to me, we were working for several years and and they came to me one day and they said, Look, you know, we turn off pay per click and our phones die.
Josh Ramsey
And we have business, but our phones die. And we turn on pay per click and we’re spending all this money, we should cancel you, Josh, as SEO, and we should just do pay per click, be done. And I said, Okay, I don’t disagree.
Josh Ramsey
But let’s take some confirmation bias and look at the data, right? Let’s be analytical about this. So long story short, after doing some quick research, it only took me about two or three days to pull all the numbers together and verify them.
Josh Ramsey
At the end of the day, they were right, their volume of calls was way up on pay per click. They were spending, however, very important to know, they were spending $180 for a closed deal with pay per click.
Josh Ramsey
Now, that fit their margins, right? Like when you when we ran their gross profit margin, their cost, we ran all the numbers on the budgeting. And like I said, that’s a whole other story that I could walk through at another time.
Josh Ramsey
But when we walk through this, this number, 180 was still below their threshold of revenue that they could spend for a sale. If I recall, right, it was about 250 was was their top line. But when we looked at SEO, SEO was $50.
Josh Ramsey
Now, they were getting a smaller volume, less calls, but they were more qualified. And they were selling at a better rate at 50. I could give the same story again and again in different industries and different things that we’ve done.
Josh Ramsey
But here’s the thing to understand law of diminishing return. They said, Well, Josh, can we get rid of the pay per click and spend it on SEO? And I said law of diminishing return. No, because they were already spending about $2 ,500 a month on SEO.
Josh Ramsey
And I said, if anything, we need to start scaling that back because we’ve already reached the threshold, or we need to change from what we were doing and use a different type of SEO. Because again, a lot of people don’t understand, there’s different types of SEO.
Josh Ramsey
I mean, at the core, it’s link building and content building, right? And those kind of go together, but they are different. So that’s the law of diminishing return that we have to be aware of is at some point, you got what you got.
Josh Ramsey
And you move on from it. And then as far as budget goes, I created something called the crystal ball of marketing. And it truly dictates exactly what you should spend and what you’re going to make. And it’s it’s a beautiful mind type of tool that works 100% of the time when you input the right data, it will output for you exactly what you need.
Josh Ramsey
But I think that answers at least the beginning part of your question.
Host John Hinson
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, I think so many people get focused on just the hardline numbers that, you know, it is it goes so much deeper than that, because there’s so many other things to take into consideration in terms of the different kinds of marketing that you’re doing, like, you can’t just put a blanket number over it, you know, and expect that to go well, you got to really look deeper into it.
Josh Ramsey
Yeah, yeah, there’s so much to that, but you’re right on with it, yeah.
Host John Hinson
So on the other side of that, you know, we talked a lot about vendors. And you know, something that we see, you know, is, you know, a solo or small business, they will work with a vendor for a time, they will grow, and then they’ll get to a certain kind of revenue number.
Host John Hinson
And at some point, you know, they’ll kind of think like, okay, well, I’m spending this much on a vendor, which is more than the monthly cost of having someone in house. And then they’ll bring that person in house.
Host John Hinson
So you know, in your experience, you know, is there a right time to bring marketing in house to hire a full time or a part time person to handle it? Or what have you seen?
Josh Ramsey
Yeah, you know, that’s such an absolute loaded question. And one thing that I’ve learned in my experience of, of doing conferences is that, um, people sometimes take what I’m about to say and they take it as the holy grail, at least when I teach conferences, they do this and then they do it and then they call me six months or a year later, and then, you know, yell at me and say, you, you lie, you know, you’re, you’re full of it.
Josh Ramsey
So I try to walk delicately about this. So if anyone comes to me later and says, or to you and says, you know, your guests lied to me, let’s take this as a grain of salt, right? A lot of times we’ll use trigger words where I’ll say something like, you know, red cup, and that means like, remember red cup, I told you that this isn’t the holy grail.
Josh Ramsey
There’s, there’s things around it. Right. Um, but yeah, I mean, when to bring someone in versus keeping outsource, again, it’s going to number one, go to your strategy. Right. Because if, especially with, if you’ve dedicated your time to pay per click, let’s just say, and that’s all you’re going to do, then at some point to bring in a manager is going to be important, but then set the expectation is the manager going to manage the agency, pay them a little less is the manager going to take over what the agency does, make sure that they have the right.
Josh Ramsey
Qualifications, right? You need to look at case studies, just like you would hire the agency. You need to look at what they’ve done. And let me talk about case studies real quick. Start asking agencies for the worst case study.
Josh Ramsey
Ask them who is your worst client and why? Right. I like to ask clients, how do I get fired? And they’re like, what, like, you’re about to get hired. Why? I said, because then if the expectation meets properly, where I know if I don’t do this, I’m out the door.
Josh Ramsey
Right. Yeah. But I would even reverse that when I hire people, how do you think you’re going to get fired? Like I’m hiring you. So I don’t want to, right? But where’s that expectation met? So again, when you bring someone in setting the same thing, the KPI, what is the expectation?
Josh Ramsey
Tell them this is what gets you fired. If you don’t get this done, then I gotta let you go. Cause it’s not worth it. So there’s just a lot to that. And I know I’m not giving you the real answer of this is when you do it, but I think it’s different when you go SEO or website maintenance versus paper click versus can they do everything?
Josh Ramsey
But I think at some point, whenever the business owner, I’ll leave it on this. When a business owner gets so overwhelmed that they’re spending, you know, I would call it, and again, this is a vague number 35 to 45 or more percent of their time in marketing.
Josh Ramsey
They need to find some type of manager, some type of manager or fractional CMO to step in and manage that percentage for them so that they can focus on higher level and then only spend 15 to 20% on the marketing side.
Host John Hinson
Yeah, and I love that you bring that because I think I know when I think about this, I think about it more on the execution side of things. Because that’s, that’s just how I’m wired. Like I’m, my default is just I’m going and I’m just getting things done.
Host John Hinson
And one thing that I’ve seen in marketing is that you really need two very different kinds of people, you need the the analytical minded person who understands data and can really go through that and make decisions and really informed decisions based on all that data.
Host John Hinson
But then you also need a creative mind who can create compelling copy who can speak to your audience and really understand that that emotional and creative side of things and finding one person who does both of those things very well is extremely difficult.
Josh Ramsey
It’s almost impossible. Cause you’re almost talking about left brain, right, right. Yeah. But there are a small select amount of people that can do both. And I would raise my hand and say, I can do both, but I am definitely more of the analytical side of here’s the data, but I understand how to communicate that data, right?
Josh Ramsey
Now, if you asked me to design something, I would be terrible. I’m not great at that. I’m going to go look at examples and be like, this is the direction we should go. And then I hand it to a designer and say, go, go make this happen.
Josh Ramsey
Um, but I understand the strategy and what we’re trying to do within that. So, I mean, we could talk so much about just what you said, right? Cause I mean, there’s like probably 10 bullet points that I could write down and go through with you on that.
Josh Ramsey
Right. Yeah. I mean, you’re, you’re talking about these different mindsets. And again, that kind of goes back to the coder versus designer versus strategist. And what you’re talking about, I’ll leave it on this and we can move whatever direction you’d like.
Josh Ramsey
But when, when you’re talking about the person that gets it done, now you’re talking about the visionary versus the execution, right? So as a fractional CMO, I understand what the execution should be and the process that if you are working, if we are working together, I’m going to look at you and say, go execute, here’s the vision, but I understand how it should be executed and understand because of my background and experience and how long I’ve been doing it, which is over 20 years.
Josh Ramsey
I know I’m relatively young, but you know, over 20 years, being in my mid forties, there’s something to say of I’ve seen how it’s executed. So I’ve seen what project managers have done right and what they’ve done wrong and the best way to do it.
Josh Ramsey
And it doesn’t mean that I can give or always dictate the best way. Cause I’m always learning, but I can say, look, this is a pitfall and I know you’re going to fall into that pit if you do it this way, but you gotta have that executor and I’ll tell you right now as a fractional CMO, it’s not my job to be an executor and I don’t want to do it.
Josh Ramsey
I want to stay in my lane. This is what I’m good at. And then I’ve hired people around me that can do and execute what I either don’t want to do or what I’m not good at.
Host John Hinson
Yeah, no. And that’s, you know, again, it, I, the more conversations like this, I have, the more that I see is just everything is so layered and interweaves so much together. Because again, as a business owner, it goes the same way that you’re saying, like, business owners is the, you know, a lot of times has to be the visionary is the visionary.
Host John Hinson
But so many, especially smaller ones, they’re also trying to execute as well. And that’s just not really sustainable. Like, you have to be able to delegate a lot of that stuff off. And so the one question, one more question I wanted to ask you before we wrap up here, you know, if anyone has been following us at spotlight branding for any amount of time, you’re aware that we have like an anti SEO report, we had like kind of this anti SEO stance for a while.
Host John Hinson
And not that we’ve tapered off of it. But, you know, our whole idea around it was, you know, that’s not where you start, you need a lot of supporting marketing to help make that sort of thing work better.
Host John Hinson
But I know in our industry, especially legal marketing industry, the majority of marketing companies out there, that’s the service that they push first. And that’s what you know, everyone says, Oh, you got to do this, you got to have SEO, you got it, you got to make sure your rankings are optimized, your ranking is.
Host John Hinson
So for people who are going to try to add that to their marketing strategy, what is your approach to it when you’re working with someone new, right? Like, do you you know, do you go find a local company to do it?
Host John Hinson
Do you find a national company to do it? You know, is it something that you even handle yourself in, you know, talking about the execution side of things? Like, where do you go with that sort of thing?
Josh Ramsey
Yeah. So the first thing is, is understanding the core and the core has really changed and not a lot of people are aware of this, but if you think about, this is always a fun exercise, right? And so everyone close your eyes and really process this.
Josh Ramsey
And, and I mean that in seriousness, because when you close your eyes, you get rid of distractions and you clear your brain, you take a deep breath. So if you close your eyes, you take a deep breath.
Josh Ramsey
Here’s what you think about. Think about how you did a search in 2018. How many words did you put into Google when you did a search? Now, today, when you’ve done a search or you do a search after you listen to this or watch this, how many words do you put in?
Josh Ramsey
And on average, the words have more than doubled and most of the words have transformed into language of how do I, so when you think about it that way, what I first of all suggest is create phrases and we created internally, I created what’s called a bubble map of keywords and the bubble map of keywords are built more around blogs of phrases that we want to rank for, and then we want to work on that angle of these phrases we want to rank for rather than a keyword.
Josh Ramsey
Because a keyword can still get a lot of search volume, but a phrase gets a lower search volume. It’s a longer tail, but it’s, but it’s a higher transactional keyword rather than a navigational or informative keyword, right?
Josh Ramsey
Which is the desired content of the searcher. So, you know, as a, for instance, if you Googled fractional CMO, I don’t show up in the top 100 of national ranking, but if you type in fractional CMO, Dallas, Austin, Houston, Oklahoma city, Salt Lake city, Boise, Denver, Miami, Hawaii, and I could go over 32 keywords that I rank in the top five top five, if you use that term.
Josh Ramsey
And I know I’ve got CMOs out there that are chasing me because they want that word. And I look at it and go, you know what? I want someone that says local. So when you ask local or national, let me give you another quick story and a quick fact, most big brands, when they hire a CMO, they hire from outside, not inside.
Josh Ramsey
Two on that. And everyone go do your research. They hire big brands, hire from the outside, not in their industry to bring them in their industry. So there’s a double edged sword to that. And the answer is it’s more about the KPIs and the relationship that you can build with the agency and can they meet those KPIs more than is it, is it if they know your niche or don’t it’s more about what is, what do they do?
Josh Ramsey
Because I don’t specialize in one thing. I specialize in a lot because I’m looking at what do we want to achieve? And what are the KPIs? What are the measurable KPIs? And when we all agree on them, I don’t miss that target.
Josh Ramsey
That’s one thing I’m very confident. I don’t miss targets. And if I do, it’s not by much because I’m watching along the way as the arrow goes towards the target, and I know how to redirect that arrow to get it to land where we want it to land.
Josh Ramsey
Yeah. So I think that answers your question in a little bit of a roundabout way, but it also gives a little bit more education as the key words and where they, where they’ve tailed off to.
Host John Hinson
Right. Yeah. I mean, for me, I think the biggest takeaway is just take, take the time to vet and set the expectations and, and really feel good about, you know, who it is you’re working for. Now, I will say this people in our industry, they take a lot of time to make a decision, you know, like don’t draw it out to where you’re starting to miss opportunities.
Host John Hinson
Like, you know, do your due diligence. Absolutely. Talk to different agencies and do all that. But you know, don’t, don’t wait weeks and months at a time to where you start to forget these conversations that you had and it becomes more of a recency bias sort of situation rather than that, you know, getting the right solution from, from the information that you gathered.
Josh Ramsey
Right. But on that, right. We’re saying the same thing internally, set your KPIs, set your expectations internally first. Then when you interview the agency, pull the trigger, what today’s market, they say hire fast, fire faster.
Josh Ramsey
So I hope this doesn’t go against your philosophy, but I would say, get those short term contracts, get that three or four months in my professional opinion, I look, and I even do a four month engagement.
Josh Ramsey
And then after that it’s a 45 day cancellation. So they can get rid of me very quickly if they choose to, if I’m not hitting the cusp. And there are clients that I’ll tell you right now that I will disengage with because either personality disagreement or vision disagreement, or KPI being unrealistic.
Josh Ramsey
I’ll back out and say, look, all due respect, I want you to go somewhere and spend your money where it’s wise. So take off, you know what I mean? I’ll make a smooth transition. I’ll hand everything over, you know, I’ll make sure that everything’s there.
Josh Ramsey
I’ll answer your questions up to a point. But I’ll say, this is what we got done. This is where we’re at. Here’s the handoff. Here’s the baton, but yeah, make, set your KPIs, right? I mean, know what you want to achieve and what’s realistic, interview the person and move forward.
Host John Hinson
Right. Yeah. And, and more often than not, like you still make progress, you still, you know, get forward a little bit and worst case scenario, you walk away with the knowledge of, hey, okay, this isn’t for me, this doesn’t work, I can go try something else now.
Host John Hinson
And so, you know, definitely, you know, sitting around trying to think of a decision to make, is it helping, you know, you got to make those fast decisions and learn something at the very least along the way.
Host John Hinson
Before we wrap up here, tell everyone how they can get in touch with you learn more and also to check out the book that you mentioned
Josh Ramsey
Yeah. So my book is on my website and I would encourage everybody to first Google fractional CMO and put in your city that’s near you. See if I show up, but my main website is jrcmo .com. So that’s Josh Ramsey, chief marketing officer .com.
Josh Ramsey
So jrcmo .com. On there, there’s everything that you need. There’s a book download. There’s free information. I have the world’s largest SEO library that I’ve compiled. It has somewhere over 160 different strategies that you can implement or research.
Josh Ramsey
I have just a ton of ton of information. And then my call to action is I work with people for free for at least the first two hours. I’ll work with them for free to prove my knowledge, to prove that I have the experience and to help them get the right vision because I do what Google wants to do for everybody.
Josh Ramsey
And that is create the best user experience because what I’ve proven to myself and a lot of people that I know, if I come in and give you the best user experience and show you my knowledge and everything that I have to give you, and I can point you on the right track, people come back.
Josh Ramsey
People will come back to me, learn from me, want to work with me. And I’ve seen that time and time again, I picked up my biggest clients over the years just from that word of mouth of someone going, yep, that guy’s good.
Josh Ramsey
Yep. That guy’s got experience. Yes, that guy is ethical and moral and he’s going to be honest with you. So again, jrcmo .com is where the book is at, where other information is at. You can also, I think on my homepage it says solve your biggest marketing headache.
Josh Ramsey
Although we do a lot of A -B testing, so you may show up and see it say two hour free consultation or solve your biggest marketing headache. But you can always contact any way through that website and we’ll get you set up with a meeting.
Host John Hinson
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, just sitting here and talking to you for the last 35 minutes or so, I can tell you know your stuff because there’s so many different rabbit holes we could have gone down.
Host John Hinson
I mean, this could have been a seven hour conversation just covering all the different areas of marketing strategy. So you know, I’m looking, I’m looking forward to coming back. Oh, yeah, we can, we can absolutely make that happen.
Host John Hinson
So one final question here before we end the show, if you had one final piece of advice for our audience, what would it be?
Josh Ramsey
And again, that’s so hard because everyone is so different. But I would say, start with your narrative. Identify in your narrative what’s worked well and what has failed you. Then I tell employees, and you can even use this with the employees, I tell them, give me your 30 day, your three months, your six months, and your one year goal.
Josh Ramsey
And then go a little bit step beyond and give me your five year. And I think when you create this goal path, both for yourself, from your employees, from your agency, it starts to paint a picture of where you should go.
Josh Ramsey
And a lot of times we live today in a narrative of we make choices based on our past. And sometimes that’s a fail point for us. So understanding the psychology of why we make decisions is really important.
Josh Ramsey
I feel like I should write a book about it. There’s probably a book out there that I haven’t found yet that’s written about it. But it is psychologically based where we make decisions, we have arguments, we buy things, all based on our narrative.
Josh Ramsey
So understanding where you’ve been is just as important as where you’re going and why you’re gonna make those decisions. So I guess I would probably, at least for this conversation, leave that as a focal point of really drawing out your narrative.
Josh Ramsey
And if you haven’t ever looked this up, there’s something, I think it’s called the egg diagram or the egg chart. And you draw an egg and in that egg, you write out the most impactful moments of your life.
Josh Ramsey
And you do it with a picture rather than a word. And you tell your story to someone that’s close and confidential to you. But when I did that for the first time back in 2018, I think, or 2019, I mean, it blew my mind of the things I kept remembering.
Josh Ramsey
And I left it on my wall for 30 days. And it really helped me understand and why I make decisions now from my birth and my first memory all the way up. And I think that can help both in business and in personal because they all interweave.
Josh Ramsey
And then you start to make better decisions based on understanding the hurts and the fail points, both in your personal life and in your business life and understanding. Again, trying to sum this up, you made a bad business decision.
Josh Ramsey
Why? Understand the why and the narrative of why you made that decision back down to when your business started. Therefore, you don’t make that decision again. And I’m gonna tell you right now, I still make those bad decisions, right?
Josh Ramsey
I look at it, I’m like, I should not have done that. But when you have that chart up in front of you, you can then remember that narrative and try to make better decisions. So hopefully that’s maybe a good stopping point for us.
Josh Ramsey
Again, I mean, that’s a whole nother conversation just to understand that as well, so.
Host John Hinson
Absolutely. No, all of that just absolutely great. A lot of great insight. And I know that, you know, I say this a lot. I know when I walk away learning things and with some new ideas, I know our audience gets a ton of value out of it as well.
Host John Hinson
And so really do appreciate it. And I appreciate all of you for continuing to listen. Please leave a rating and review wherever you’re listening. If you have not done so yet, it helps the show grow and really is valuable to get that feedback from all of you out there, but that’s going to do it.
Host John Hinson
Thanks so much for joining us, Josh. Thanks again. Thanks for listening. To learn more, go to https://spotlightbranding.com/center-stage/.