Advice for Agencies | Justin Croxton

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I am David McBee. Our guest today is Justin Croxton, the CEO of Propellant Media, a digital advertising technology company with offices in Charlotte and Atlanta. Justin's agency focuses on programmatic display as well as other forms of media, including paid search, social and video advertising. Justin is passionate about marketing and mostly providing brands with best practices to yield results, but doing it in a fun way. Justin, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Justin Croxton: David, the man himself. How are you, sir? David McBee: I'm fantastic. Thanks for asking. Justin Croxton: Absolutely, absolutely. Thanks for having me on today. David McBee: Hey, I love that my guests actually write their own intros because it often seeds my very first question. So in this case, I got to ask you what is marketing in a fun way mean? It sounds awesome. Justin Croxton: Yeah, I know right? So it's not so much just the practice of marketing and coming to the office, building campaigns, having client conversations. It really has more to do with your personal way of being in marketing. Are you enjoying it? Are you smiling? Are you having fun in the space that you're in? Are you relishing the challenges that comes with digital advertising? And yes, there are some specific tactical ways for it to be more fun, gamification, stuff like that. But for me, I just try to come to many of my conversations, whether it be internal marketing we do at Propellant Media or stuff that we do with our clients via meetings that we have or webinars, anything, putting a smile on your face, having a little bit of fun. You're doing this stuff for eight to 10 hours a day. You got to have a little bit of fun in it. So that's sort of the way that I try to approach it. David McBee: No, I totally get it. My wife's a fifth grade teacher and she's always complaining about that one kid that's always mouthing off with a joke or whatever, and I'm like, that's me in every Zoom meeting, so I totally get it. Justin Croxton: We need it. David McBee: All right. I want to ask you about the size of your campaigns. I know a lot of agency owners that I talk to work with local businesses, but Propellant does some larger enterprise deals, so what advice do you have for folks who are trying to go out and get those bigger clients? Justin Croxton: Yeah, the advice that I have for those folks that are trying to go after some of the bigger clients is you have to take yourself out of the vendor mentality and move to more of a strategic partner relationship. And so what I like to say, and I think some of the folks over Simpli.fi can appreciate this. You want to feel like you're at the level. If I'm a CEO or if I'm a CMO, I want to feel like I'm at the level of someone who can talk the way that I'm going to talk and think the way that I'm going to think in terms of real business problems that I'm trying to solve for. And the reason why I say that is for many of these larger campaigns, if you're trying to win those deals, you know need to think about that, you need to have some context and or experience beyond the programmatic world. So that includes paid search, that includes paid social, that includes understanding how to marry their data into an analytics dashboard that is beyond programmatic, that also tells a story in paid search and paid social. Being able to have those intimate higher level conversations really does matter beyond just the programmatic world. And the reason why I say that is because many times when folks are trying to think about investments, they're thinking about paid search, they're thinking about paid social, they're talking about all other media, OTT. But if you're looking at multiple providers and you see the two guys over here, or two guys and gals over here can provide more overarching strategy that includes things beyond the programmatic, even if you are not going after that business, you're able to build more trust with that provider that's talking. That can still talk the talk on the programmatic side, but still have some overarching conversations that can impact their business on the paid search, paid social. Even if you're not managing that stuff, it builds more trust. David McBee: And can you tell me about your experience with pitch competitions? Justin Croxton: So it's funny, we were fortunate when we were first kind of getting off the ground. We're a diverse owned agency. And so what that means is we have some... I'm African American, I'm Black, so other partners that are Black as well. And so there's a minority supplier development council that allows for companies like ours to cultivate relationships with some of the larger brands like the Coca-Colas of the world. And long story short, they were having a pitch competition and I didn't think anything of it. Someone saw me doing my thing at one of their trade shows and they had the pitch competition. They pulled me to the side and says, "Hey, I think you'd be great for this pitch competition." I was like, "Yeah, when is it?" It was like, "Oh, it's going to be in the next 15 minutes." I was like, "How many people am I pitching to?" "It's going to be about 90 people in the audience, about three judges are like... You got to show up when you guys show up." And long story short, I pretty much pitched geofencing advertising. I talked about geofencing as being the digital advertising technology tool that we leverage as a digital advertising firm. That's what we've used to help differentiate ourselves. But we use that as part of the pitch competition effectively. We won it. Someone else saw us do the pitch and they said, "Hey, we'd love to bring you out to CBS News studios to do another pitch competition for them as well." Won that pitch competition as well. And so I say that to say for everyone that's out there, there are ways to do Google searches for pitch competitions. But for us it was more of a chance to get some notoriety, get some experience, get some exposure. It's great content. It's a great talking topic as you can see, obviously. And yeah, so that's the story of how we got into doing pitch competitions. We haven't done them in a while, but those are two ones that we really hit. There's a couple others that we hit as well, but that was the story behind that, effectively. David McBee: I like that. And when you're not doing pitch competitions, how are you getting new clients? Do you have an inbound lead system? Justin Croxton: We do. So we have some outbound, we also have inbound as well. If there's any tip that I can give everyone that's out there though beyond just paid or organic or traffic that you're driving versus inbound email marketing, the value you bring to people matters more or just as much as those two things. And so what I mean by that are things like Simpli.fi TV, like what we're doing right here, or the webinars that you might do or eBooks, things of that nature. Any way that you can elevate someone's perspective on the problems that you're trying to help them solve before they become a customer gives you a higher likelihood that they will become a customer. Or at the very least, we'll consider you in comparison to some of the other competitors that are out there. A lot of people miss that mark. They create content, they gate it, they make it so difficult for you to gain access to it. It's like, yo, open up the floodgates, just give it away. Or at the very least, use it as a baseline to get someone's email address or contact details. And so not to ramble, but structurally value, paid traffic, organic traffic, all that inbound, that's important, but the value component around content makes the difference. And that that's really what's helped us quite a bit in terms of lead generation, things of that nature. David McBee: That makes me feel pretty good about my project here. Thank you for that. Justin Croxton: Yeah, amen. David McBee: All right. Before we go, is there a book or piece of media or any kind of tool that you feel has helped you become successful? Justin Croxton: There's a really good book out there called Atomic Habits. Gosh, I'm forgetting the author's name, but it's such a great book. It really just puts you in the mind frame of how to create better habits around the things that are really important to you and your life effectively, personal and professionally. If you think about it, in business, it's all about consistency and perseverance. And the same pretty much can hold true in terms of building great habits. It's about perseverance and consistency, but removing those roadblocks that stop you from making those small wins. 1% today, 1% the next day and 1% the next day. And great book. You can do a Google search for Atomic Habits. I promise you. It'll pull up probably one of the better books that I've read in a while. I try to do a number of books a month, at least two to four roughly. David McBee: You're quite the reader then, aren't you? Justin Croxton: Somewhat. Somewhat. I'll say two. Let's say two on the left side, but there has been months where I've done five, so it just depends on how I'm feeling that month. David McBee: Yeah, I'm a junkie. I read two or three at a time, so I totally get it. Justin Croxton: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. David McBee: Well, my friend, thank you very much for being on Simpli.fi TV and then sharing all your great wisdom today. I appreciate you. Justin Croxton: Happy to do it. Thank you so much. David McBee: All right. And thank you guys for joining us on Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee, be awesome. And we'll see you next time.