Humanistic, Purpose-Driven Campaigns and Sequential Messaging | Nick Smith

David McBee: Hello and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, marketers, media buyers, and business owners. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Nick Smith, President of Loud Canvas Media. Nick is a seasoned digital marketing expert whose company supports over 1,000 websites and 400 active clients. With a unique journey from being a pastor to leading strategic marketing campaigns in the pharma industry, including work on three of the top 10 most expensive drugs globally, Nick brings a deep understanding of purpose-driven leadership, rare disease strategy, and impactful storytelling. Nick, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Nick Smith: David, thank you so much for having me today. David McBee: Before we start, Nick, and dive into our conversation about leveraging data and targeting niche audiences, I got to ask, what can you tell us about those three super expensive drugs? How much did they cost? Nick Smith: Sure. Well, a lot of people like to ask that question, and the reality is that there's a range and it's always changing. So back a few years ago when I was putting this together in terms of working on these actively, one of them was a therapy that was in the gene therapy space and it costs a little over $2 million per a single dose, while the others tend to be in that $600,000 range annualized costs in the rare disease space. So the numbers in terms of global charts and most expensive therapies are always changing year by year. But yeah, that's my experience. David McBee: Wow. All right. Well, we're not here to talk about drugs. Of course. I'm sure you talk about that on other podcasts and I hope people will tune in for that. Simpli.fi TV audiences all about targeting and reaching niche audiences without wasting a lot of ad impressions, and that can be especially difficult for B2B and healthcare related audiences. So I want to ask, what targeting strategies are you leveraging to help your clients? Nick Smith: Sure. Well, I like to take a humanistic approach first, and so everything that we do starts with strategy and understanding those audiences at really that micro level. And that could be the transition that I took out of that pastoral realm in planting churches and working with people on a one-to-one level for so many years. But the reality is, is that we see a large change in the return on investment and the conversions that are pulled through when we take a simplistic approach to the strategy, understanding that each person behind the number of impressions is actually a name. They have a story, they have a plan, they have a desire, they have a dream outcome they're hoping to achieve. So just starting with the basics. I think it's very easy for us because maybe if you're in the technology space like myself, it can be very easy for us to start technology first and work backwards from there. I know the tools I have at my disposal, I know how we can implement campaigns, but we've found a lot of success comes from starting really at that ground level first, understanding what the human needs are, pinpoint the pain problems on the front end and then on the back end, making sure that there's a robust measurement strategy in place so that way you can quantify your marketing efforts and qualify them against the different campaigns that you may be running. So a little bit of a two-part answer to that question. The first is on the front end, strategy is so important. Tactics before strategy is the noise before defeat as Sun Tzu said. So starting with strategy, getting that down, really understanding your target audience. Utilizing tools like social listening and honing in on that audience's perspective allows you to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time as opposed to a more of a blanketed approach. And then again, on the back end, how do you know what good looks like and how can we measure for optimization and for improvements, ensuring that there's a strong measurement strategy in place that allows you to see the follow-through interactions, not just the initial interactions. For instance, your impressions, your clicks, your click-through, but also what's taking place on your digital assets across the board to really understand what that return on your investment is and the key actions that were taken from your users post-advertisement. David McBee: All right. So measurement is important. We talk a lot about data and analytics and the impact that they have on our campaigns. So what measures do you put in place that help brand marketers quantify the impact of their campaigns? Nick Smith: One of the biggest problems that we see with brand marketers or brand managers is that they've got a segmented approach to their marketing. And what I mean when I say that is maybe they have one agency or one marketing effort that's happening in this silo and they have another agency taking care of another target audience or another campaign in a separate silo. And when those media buys are taking place, the brand managers, brand marketers, are really relying on those who they're making the purchase with to report back to them with the data on how well their campaigns are performing, or how well their tactics are performing. And we like to kind of say that this is a lot like having the fox guard the hen house. So having a unified data measurement strategy in the back end that is separate from all of your media buyers campaign reporting is crucial. It's crucial for a lot of reasons, but the primary one is really to be able to understand, again, from a qualification standpoint, what is actually happening after that traffic is being generated and is it traffic that helps you to accomplish your strategic comparatives, helps you to accomplish your goals? So on that measurement strategy, we often are looking at things like what are the key decision factors towards a purchase decision or what are the key decision factors that we're hoping to see influenced in an audience that might have a negative position towards the brand, or a neutral position towards the band, or a positive position towards the brand. Each one of them is going to require different metrics along the way, and ensuring that that's something that's being handled outside of those who are actually doing the performance implementation is one way of safeguarding making sure that you get the best return on your investment. David McBee: I really like that, how you broke it up into the basically three different audiences just for that one product. And I'm sure you do multiple campaigns for your products and services to reach different audiences that have different goals. Nick Smith: Yeah. We like to segment down by audience perception. So one of the things that we found really drives your, your ROI and your conversion rates on your marketing spend, whether it's in-person promotional or non-personal promotional material is making sure that the right message is being delivered to the right person. And it's a lot trickier, it's a lot easier said than done, but the basis of this is that if we were having a conversation with one of your target audiences and then a secondary target audience came in, you would change the way that you communicate with them based off of their interactions, based off of the pain points that they've already expressed to you and based off of the goals and the achievements that they're hoping to see accomplished through the campaign efforts that you're helping them implement. So in the same manner when we're looking at a digital marketing campaign, an omnichannel marketing campaign, it helps to segment down your audiences by what is their perception towards the brand. If they're already having a positive perception towards your brand, they're sold out, they love the product, then serving a message to them that is trying to convince them about how wonderful you are, doesn't necessarily do the audience justice or help you to advance them towards accomplishing your mission. But serving them an ad that maybe has them advocate or leave a review or something of that nature, would help you to do that. And in the same manner, you could look at a neutral position towards your brand or a negative position towards your brand. And the negative position towards the brands, you're going to want to be serving messages that are more thought challengers, that are more competitive or advantageous for you to show your benefits and features from a competitor's perspective. Or maybe you're doing objection handling right in your messaging strategy because you know that the audience that you're talking to has a negative perception towards your brand. David McBee: I've interviewed a lot of marketers and I haven't heard that advice before. I really, really love that. Thank you for sharing that. Okay. So in B2B, and I assume in medical as well, often in industries like this, there are multiple stakeholders in the purchase decision. So how do brands progress the stakeholders towards the sale? Nick Smith: So starting with strategy first, it's understanding who is the target audience and what are those stages. So if we go back to perceptions or if we even just look at the buyer cycle, outlining those from a strategic perspective and understanding which one of those steps are most important, this is something that's customizable for each one of your business use cases. So it's something you really have to look at at an individual basis. But then when you take that humanistic approach and you realize that each one of these people behind the numbers has a felt need, a felt pain point and a desired outcome they're trying to achieve, it really just becomes about trying to figure out where they fall within the user journey or within the map. Once you figure that out, you've already got your messages, you know your brand better than anybody else, it's sequencing those messages in a manner that moves behavior, that moves action. And I think again, the unique perspective of coming from one of the fifth-fastest growing churches in the United States and dealing with interpersonal issues with thousands of people, from doctors to lawyers to drug addicts, to those who are facing housing insecurities. At the end of the day, every single person is living a unique human experience and there are shared components that we as advertisers have with them. So leading with empathy, understanding who the person is that we're speaking to and really thinking, "If I were in their shoes, what would the next message be that moves me closer towards the desired outcome?" The pieces start to fall into place there once you start doing it. But again, that's strategy first as opposed to looking at tactics first. David McBee: Can we talk about tactics for just a second? Specifically sequential messaging, how do you go about doing that? Nick Smith: Well, technology has come a long way in this. Certainly the utilization of different cookies as well as systems like CRM Systems, whether they're using a Salesforce or a HubSpot, give you the ability to segment down your messaging across a wide variety of channels, omnichannel. So one of the first and most important aspects is to be able to unify your audience's behavior to a specific audience type or user ID. Once you get that portion down, again, the rest just becomes how are you segmenting the message? Are you aware from the feedback loop of your data and analytics that that person saw that message and then supplying another one towards them? The rest is comparative, A/B split testing, understanding, hey, if we sent this certain number of communications or this type of ad out and we saw this conversion rate, it performed better than the other one. But what I find most of the time is that brands have a hard time segmenting down enough and getting those touch points down to a minute level enough that the changes they're making tend to be at a higher, more general level. So continuing to niche down, continuing to segment down in your messaging strategy and delivering the next logical sequence of communication, it does all come back to strategy. The tactics side of it is just the implementation. Do we want this to be by way of text message? Do we want this to be by way of programmatic? Do we want this to be by way of email? And again, an omnichannel, the user's the one making the decisions, and so do you have a stack? Are you leveraging technology in a way that dynamically is able to shift and adjust the messaging that's being delivered based off of those users' interactions? That can tend to be another barrier for brands in terms of getting to market quickly and seeing those returns on their investment. David McBee: That is some great advice you've shared with us. I'm so grateful. Before we go, do you have a podcast or a book that you feel has been instrumental in your own success? Nick Smith: Yeah. I would say the competitive advantage or The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni, he talks a lot about work culture and creating teams that love to do what they love to do. So again, more of a human-centric approach, but the work that has to be created for all the advertising and the creative that we put forth for our brand clients comes out of the brains of some very, very talented people. So trying to craft a culture where they feel recognized and valued and where they're able to grow in their career aspirations tends to be what sets organizations apart according to The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. So great book. Recommend it for anybody that's in organizational leadership or trying to accomplish great things. David McBee: Great. We'll check it out. And what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Nick Smith: Well, you can visit me at loudcanvas.com. I've got a chat located down there on the right-hand side, and I'm on the other side of that chat. So if something I said struck a chord or you have question about it or you want to know how to apply it to your specific business use case, head on over to loudcanvas.com and would love to chat with you. David McBee: That's great. Thank you so much for being my guest on Simpli.fi TV today, Nick. Nick Smith: Thank you so much for having me. David McBee: And thank you guys all for watching Simpli.fi TV. Please help us out with a like, comment, a share, a review, and be sure to follow or subscribe to be informed about new episodes. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry-leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.