Today's Guest

Aaron Marks is the President and Founder of Aspire Marketing Group. Aspire is an inbound and digital marketing agency that fuels growth at small-to-medium B2B companies. Aaron was an early digital pioneer, starting his own boutique agency, Three Group, in the early 2000s, when digital marketing was mostly about website design and digital experts were often called "webmasters". Since then, he's worked with dozens of companies and clients of all sizes, emphasizing his strong belief in inbound marketing – earning people's interest in your products or services, rather than pushing them on your customers. Throughout his career, he's demonstrated time and again that inbound marketing results in marketing that your customers love while ultimately improving the bottom line by having a higher ROI. Aaron uses his 15+ years of in-house marketing leadership and strategy experience to help small business leaders accomplish agile and affordable enterprise-caliber marketing. Aaron helped us understand the practical steps business owners should take to utilize technology to grow their businesses. 

Resources Shared

• Aspire Marketing
• Thryv

Episode Transcript

(Please excuse grammatical errors due to transcription)

Gordon Henry:                 Hey, hey, this is Gordon Henry at Winning on Main Street, your small business podcast, and this week we have an expert on small business marketing who can help you grow. Always good. Welcome, Aaron Marks.

Aaron Marks:                    Hey there, it's good to be here. Thank you.

Gordon Henry:                 Thanks for coming. So quick intro on Aaron. Aaron's the CEO and founder of Aspire Marketing. He has a monthly newsletter called Small Business Pulse that offers practical tips for acquiring more leads and customers for your small business. Aaron was a digital pioneer starting his own boutique agency in the early 2000s. Since then, he's worked with dozens of companies and clients of all sizes emphasizing his strong belief in inbound marketing. What should you, our listeners, get out of this episode? Every business needs a steady flow of new customers. Aaron can help you figure out how to drive lead flow for your business. This show is brought to you by Thryv. Small business runs better on Thryv. So Aaron, welcome to the show. Why don't we start by having you tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the marketing space?

Aaron Marks:                    Oh, wow. Yeah. I think I got into the marketing space kind of unintentionally. I consider myself to be, I say a digital native. Fortunate to grow up in a household where my dad and made sure that we always had a great computer, a great internet connection, and I remember being an early adopter in that regard. Most of the people I was friends with wasn't even thinking about internet and we had it. And so I grew up being a connected person, probably spending a little more time on my computer than my parents probably would've preferred instead of sports or whatever else it might be. But that was really it. And so in my teenage years, so this puts us into the late '90s, early 2000s, I started to do website design. All of my friends who were working at, I'm thinking Best Buy and the grocery store.

                                               I never worked a job like that. I was doing website design. I was selling to local small businesses here in Pittsburgh, pitching, getting invited in at 16 years old to try and convince them why they should spend a couple thousand dollars to do a website with me. But that was digital marketing in the early 2000s. And now over the last 20, 23 years or so, that's evolved a lot and I've said, hey, I'm really passionate about ultimately doing the things that a business needs to get traction and get customers online, and that has evolved and I've tried to evolve with it.

Gordon Henry:                 So you've obviously been doing this for quite some time. When did you launch Aspire, your agency, and how long have you been running that business?

Aaron Marks:                    Yeah, so that spun out of the pandemic. I was like many, many people, a pandemic casualty and kind of spent my few months just thinking about what is it that I wanted to do? And I have a lot of passion for helping, obviously why I'm here. I have a lot of passion for helping small businesses. And the reality is where I am in my career, a typical small business is not probably poised or many of small businesses aren't poised to hire someone like me full time. And so my thought was I could help a lot of companies doing what I do. And so it started off as consulting. And so what was that, mid-2020? And has evolved into bringing a team on to compliment my capabilities and be able to support things end to end for clients.

Gordon Henry:                 Fantastic. So let's get into how you think you help small businesses and how clients like our customers should be thinking about marketing. So I guess big picture before we go into the tactics, how should small businesses think about marketing strategically? What's a big picture way for them to approach, how do I bring customers to me in an efficient way? What's the best way to put myself out there?

Aaron Marks:                    Yeah, it's a great question and it's something that a lot of businesses struggle with. I mean, the answer to me is fundamentally pretty simple. It's who are your customers? How well do you understand them? Where do they go? What do they need and how can you reach them? And the businesses that are best at doing that are the ones that thrive these days. Bottom line is people do not... They don't want to talk to salespeople, they don't want to be sold to. They want to do research on their own.

                                               And so the key is that your business is findable. And I think understanding what are your customer needs are and how you can serve them is the part I'd underline there. And I think that that's something that I think a lot of businesses forget about and get stuck talking and either talking about themselves entirely or doing what I call random [inaudible 00:05:55] marketing work where like you said, you get tactical and you say, hey, my competitors are on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever it might be. I'm going to do that. But is that really serving your customers' needs and how you can best serve them? That's the question to be asking.

Gordon Henry:                 Right. Now I know you're a big advocate for inbound marketing. Why don't we just say upfront, what is different about inbound marketing versus say traditional marketing?

Aaron Marks:                    That's a great question. Traditional or outbound marketing I've heard described as another way is push marketing. It's pushing yourself out there. So what does that sometimes look like? That's your billboards, that's print advertising, that's trade shows if you're into that, that's knocking on doors. That's cold calling, right? You're pushing yourself on people. The problem is buyers don't respond to that as much anymore. Think about when you do your own purchases these days. It used to be that you'd have... There was a big knowledge gap before the internet. Your disparity between sellers and buyers. Buyers had to rely upon the seller's expert knowledge. Hopefully it was [inaudible 00:07:00] expert knowledge.

                                               The internet has completely changed that perspective. And now your buyers can go get whatever information they need and find it online. And so inbound is about giving your buyers the resources, information they need, content, resources, making it really, really easy for them to transact with you and let them do that all on their terms. So it's about being findable and giving your customers what they need and being helpful instead of just pushing yourself in front of them. And if you think about it, these inventions that are a part of our lives today, like spam filters on email, like caller ID on phone, they didn't used to exist. I remember a time when they didn't exist 20 some years ago. They came to exist because people were tired of outbound.

Gordon Henry:                 Got it. Okay. So let's assume I'm a small business, local business in some type of service, doctor or accountant, or maybe I have home services of some sort, and let's just make it easy. I have revenue of a million dollars. Okay? I'm a million-dollar business. How much should a guy like me be thinking about spending on marketing? Is there a percentage? Is there a dollar amount? What's the budget that somebody should be thinking about?

Aaron Marks:                    Yeah, it's a really good question. There are a lot of benchmarks out there that are not super top of mind for me in this conversation about a percentage. And different businesses have different benchmarks about generally what a typical business is in that space. So a service's firm versus a retailer might spend very different things. I'll tell you how to think about it because that exact percentage, there's different recommendations, different practices, but ultimately the way you've got to think about it is you have to be able to acquire a customer profitably. That's what this really boils down to is how much is a customer worth to you? In marketing speak, we often call that your lifetime value. Over the entire lifetime of transacting with a typical customer, how much revenue are you going to get? How much profit are you going to get out of it?

                                               And then you can back that into what we call customer acquisition cost. How much does it cost to acquire that customer? And for this to work for most companies, unless you're venture funded, which is not your audience, you can't be underwater. You can't spend more to acquire a customer than they generate for your business. And so that's how you can start to think about it is how much can I realistically spend to still profitably acquire customers? How many customers a month do I want to acquire and how much budget is that going to require? That's roughly how you want to think about it. And again, there are different benchmarks that give you some sense of what average firms are doing, but even that's maybe not right. If you've never spent anything on marketing, you're probably not going to ramp up to what the average competitor of yours is doing at a million dollars. It's all ultimately built on your margins and how much you're willing to spend to acquire a customer.

Gordon Henry:                 Right. So maybe a small business business should be thinking about how many customers they need to acquire this year, maybe how many they'll lose, how many jobs they want to do, that type of thing. Let's say maybe I'm working on people's houses doing remodeling or something like that. Maybe I'm looking to get 10 jobs this year and I think about what I'm going to get out of those jobs maybe over the lifetime of that customer. And then there's some kind of ratio about how much I could afford to spend to acquire that customer. Is there a standard ratio of cost to value that you have?

Aaron Marks:                    Yeah. Often two to one, three to one. I mean, again, very, very business dependent. There are certain businesses that are willing to do a lot more than that, but that's your customer acquisition cost. Sorry, that's the issue of your profitability to your customer acquisition.

Gordon Henry:                 Right. That value created or profitability to the cost of acquiring. Okay. That's good. All right. Switching gears a little bit. How important is it for a small business to have a customer database? I mean, when I think about their marketing, you want to have a database of your customer so you know who they are so you can manage the ongoing communications. Right? It's not just the upfront, there's ongoing communications, right?

Aaron Marks:                    Yeah. I mean, I think what you're kind of alluding to here is the concept of a CRM or something like that. Yeah. I just fundamentally believe that that is, to me, that's table stakes. I was just writing a social post last night actually about this, and I was kind of saying to myself, the theme of the post is 10 years ago was cool and hip to adopt CRM in 2023. It's not optional. Your competitors are doing it. Working out of spreadsheets is inefficient. You don't get any insights or practical knowledge out of spreadsheets. And so having some sort of database, having it managed in a thoughtful way is going to make your business more efficient. It's going to allow you to do better reporting. It's going to allow you to do better marketing as well. Because you can't just market to anybody. You've got to have a database that you're marketing to.

Gordon Henry:                 Now, you talked about inbound marketing before, but a lot of people think about marketing in terms of things like search, social display. Do you in your consultation to the small business adopt those strategies as well? The search, social display, things like that?

Aaron Marks:                    I think all those are really important levers, and I think they all have different value in different things. I mean, I think the statistic is something like 70% of transactions are with a Google search these days. Especially when you're talking businesses that serve a geography, right? Local businesses. If you're not showing up on Google, it's like you don't exist anymore. And if you're hard to find on Google, again, what's going to happen? They're going to call your three competitors that show up on the first page and not you, or they're going to email you, whatever it might be. So that is really, really important. Advertising, again, you talked about display ads, some of those other things. Those are interesting, right? Because they can be done to be inbound. You don't have to create an ad that's just come to our website.

                                               A lawn care business. What are the things that I need to consider when buying lawn care services or even what are the treatment options that are available for weeds in my lawn? Obviously I'm not an expert in lawn care, but bear with me. So thinking about those things and serving that up through your search, serving that up through your ads and giving value is a really good way to win that trust. And you talked about social as well. Is social media probably a high ROI activity for most local businesses? Yeah, it's probably not. But what can it add value with is mental availability, staying top of mind. Because most of the time people don't just buy on the spot, they go do some research.

                                               And if you think about the way people research, they probably go do some research and then something else catches up with them and then they do a little more research and something else catches up with them. You can get them following you on social media and sharing stuff that's valuable and helpful. So inbound instead of just, we're the best, here's our number, we're the best, here's our number. You can really earn people's trust, keep yourself top of mind and keep them engaged through that process.

Gordon Henry:                 Right. Let me just peel back the onion a little bit on this inbound idea, because I believe the idea of inbound is that you're creating valuable content that people will find, right? But in competitive headings, in competitive markets, if I'm a plumber in New York City, I mean, I can write a really good blog post, it's still hard to show up on page one because there's a lot of plumbers in New York City. So how do you overcome that since most people don't go beyond page one of Google?

Aaron Marks:                    Yeah. I mean, so a couple things, right? Yeah, if you're a plumber in New York City, it is hyper-competitive, right? Let's fully acknowledge that. People do go beyond page one. I mean, obviously that's one thing to keep in mind is you're going to have to spend a lot of money if you're a plumber in New York City to get to the first page, but you still have to be findable. I mean, there's a difference if you can crack that third page or that fourth page versus not cracking any of those pages. And I think the other thing is just continue to think about, again, plumbers, there's going to be a ton of content out there, but what are different things that are underserved? Are there niches of plumbing that are underserved? Are there questions that are underserved?

                                               To me, those are some of the different ways you can play. And it is challenging. I mean, content, there's more content out there than ever. And by the way, it's not any easier now that ChatGPT can write decently acceptable content and is getting better every day. But the more helpful you can be, the more you can be findable, that's a big thing. And in marketing speak, we talk about this concept of the long tail. The long tail is maybe plumbers in New York City probably gets 10,000 searches a month, but gosh, again, I'm kind of showing my lack of expertise, but there's probably specialty plumbing services that I'm not thinking about, right? Drain snaking or something like that that maybe only get three or 400 searches. As a result, they're less competitive.

                                               And so as you work your way down that long tail, which is just basically you think of your graph of how much search volume something gets, and plumbers New York City is up here, your long tail goes like this and it goes lower and lower, but there's a lot of it. That's your other opportunity is can you identify things that are more niche and try to rank for them and maybe crack into that vaunted first page there?

Gordon Henry:                 Sure. Makes sense. Now what about word of mouth I guess I'll call it or free marketing? So many businesses, you talk about marketing, spending on marketing, working on marketing, and they say, well, our customers love me and I only do business by word of mouth. And maybe there are a lucky few out there who really can do that. But what do you tell customers who say that in terms of what else they need to do?

Aaron Marks:                    So the fun part is that this can all play into each other. If you're really good at word of mouth and your customers love you, make sure they're leaving you reviews on Google and whatever other platforms that you use to get some of those leads, right? Because there are a bunch of different platforms out there that index these things. Those reviews are signals, by the way, to Google. So if you're getting good reviews and you're fueling all of that and you're closing that loop and getting more referrals, more reviews, that's going to feed everything else you're doing. So this all interplays into each other. But I think you're absolutely right. I think that that does have a role to play. And I think another thing when I've worked with local businesses, just ask for those reviews.

                                               If I could leave you with a piece of advice is ask for those reviews and ask for those referrals because a lot of times you just get them. But if you ask for it, you're going to get more. And I think that's the overarching theme though is all of this stuff interplays in a digital era, the impact of a bad review is really significant. The impact of a good review benefits and adds value to all these other things that you're potentially doing. So I guess bottom line is I don't think of these as ors, I think it's and, and I think again, you've got to figure out based on your customers, what are the most important things you can do within your budget, within the customer acquisition cost, all of these things that we've talked about?

Gordon Henry:                 Right. Now you always hear it's cheaper to keep a customer than find a new one. How should small businesses be thinking about keeping... Of course they should do a good job when they have the customer in front of them, but what should they be doing from a marketing perspective to keep that customer coming back?

Aaron Marks:                    Yeah. So the goal is to just keep yourself top of mind without being annoying. That's ultimately it is you don't want to annoy people because guess what? 2023 the law requires that people can be able to opt out of emails. If you're doing texting campaigns, the law requires even more strictly that you be able to opt people out of those. Social media, people can unfollow you. So this is one of the challenges of a lot of businesses that just think, hey, I'm just going to go be active on social. I'm going to post pictures of us and talking about our promotions. People have no reason to follow that. There's no reason to engage with that type of stuff. You need to do those types of things and they're valuable to do, but you need to balance what is the rate frequency? How do you add value?

                                               And if you can do that, so email marketing, social media, those are things that you can use to keep your business top of mind. And that's really the play here is I think a big shift for me that's happened over the last few years is I used to think a marketer's job is to get people to come buy from you. I've increasingly kind of settled on people buy when they're ready to buy. A marketer's job is to make sure that when people are ready to buy, they can find you. And when they're not ready to buy, you can keep yourself top of mind so that they don't take their business to someone else. LinkedIn has an institute that describes that concept as mental availability, and that's really it, whether it's with existing customers and new customers, you need to keep yourself mentally available, but you have to do it persistently but not annoyingly, and you have to strike that line.

Gordon Henry:                 Right. I don't ever want to hear a mattress ad until I'm ready to buy a mattress, and then suddenly I'm looking constantly to find the best mattress. So it's when I'm ready, I'm really ready. So Aaron, why should a small business hire a marketing agency?

Aaron Marks:                    So that's a great question. I mean, ultimately a small business can't become an expert on all of this themselves. And you may hire someone, but one person can't be an expert at all of this stuff themselves, right? SEO is a really specialized discipline. So we're talking about search engines and rankings. SEO stands for search engine optimization. Your ability to land on that first or whatever page on Google, that's something that is super specialized and it changes every single day. Google literally updates its algorithm, weekly, monthly, things like that. And so you're constantly battling that, plus competitive pressure.

                                               Ads, Google makes it really easy to get started with Google Ads, but to really be successful and maximize the platform, it's an incredibly complex platform. Content, do you have the time to write content? Do you know how to write content that ranks for SEO? These are all specialized skills, and that's the advantage that an agency brings is you're going to get a team of people who are special experts who've spent a large chunk of their career honing in on certain skills. And that's not easy to do, whether you're trying to do that yourself or whether you go say, hey, instead of spending money in an agency, I'm going to hire someone. That person's going to have certain skills, certain strengths, certain weaknesses, but it's not going to cover, it can't, by the nature of just human skillsets cover all of those things,

Gordon Henry:                 Right? I guess I could do my own taxes or cut my own lawn too, or even do my own plumbing, but it probably wouldn't turn out that well.

Aaron Marks:                    That's right. That's right.

Gordon Henry:                 So at your agency, Aspire, tell us a little bit, who are your clients and what do your typical jobs look like?

Aaron Marks:                    Yeah. We skew pretty heavily toward the B2B sector. Worked with some B2C clients as well throughout, but definitely due to my career background, have a pretty B2B slant. I think we've got a couple different types of clients that we work with. I think we have some clients that are, like you talked about, more local businesses, mostly serve a certain geography, especially professional services, real focus of ours. And then we have some of those clients as well that have more of a national focus that's often verticalized as in they sell to a certain vertical or set of customers, but they don't really care whether you live in or I live in Pittsburgh, or if you live in New York City or something else. We do a three-step approach that I take a lot of pride in and I've refined over the years.

                                               Typically when you meet with an agency, their priority is to sell a retainer, an ongoing monthly engagement. Because ultimately that's what we want. That's what any agency wants is that recurring monthly revenue from you in return for really great help. What we take a lot of pride in is that we have quite a few steps before we get to that where we try to earn your trust and we typically start off by doing a complimentary assessment where we'll come in and we'll say, hey, here's the things that you really could be doing and doing better. Let us show to you that we're committed to your success and that we know what we're talking about and establish a mutual fit. And then we can potentially talk about what an engagement looks like from there.

Gordon Henry:                 If somebody wants to get that complimentary assessment, where should they go to find you and talk to you about that?

Aaron Marks:                    Yeah. So our website is Aspire, A-S-P-I-R-E, marketing.group, G-R-O-U-P, because apparently the.com was taken long before we existed. Welcome to 2020s. But there's a big button right at the top for a complimentary assessment. You can click that, fill in some information, tell us about what is making you seek us out and what challenges you have, and we'll go from there.

Gordon Henry:                 Okay, that's awesome. So just as you look ahead, first of all, what do you think are going to be the big changes in marketing over the next couple of years? You hear about ChatGPT a lot. What's next that you think will change for the small business marketer?

Aaron Marks:                    I think automation at its core, which includes AI. That also includes things like CRM, marketing tools. I think that's the biggest theme, right? My position kind of on how much of a threat ChatGPT is is evolving every day. I'll probably look back in two years and be like, wow, because it is evolving every day. I think right now I would be hard-pressed to today see a ChatGPT replacing a marketer. On the other hand, ChatGPT should make marketers more efficient. It should allow you to... In my mind, it's an iteration tool. It's a planning tool.

                                               Those uses are really valuable and I think being able to use that and become more efficient is really the key. And I think that that's true across things like CRM and marketing automation tools as well is again, how can you become more efficient? How can you automate things that shouldn't be manual? To me, those are the big trends. That's the big stuff that's coming and I think that's where businesses should be thinking is how can we better automate processes and pieces of the equation? I think businesses that try to automate everything and just let AI replace humans, I don't think we're there at least yet. And I think a lot of people have a lot of things to be worried about for that day that that comes.

Gordon Henry:                 Yeah. We totally agree that many small businesses could benefit from automation and just start taking advantage of the tools that are readily available. So whether it's sending out a regular email or sending out a regular newsletter or sending out a reminder, those kinds of things are very effective at getting people to come back. And very often it's kind of low hanging fruit that many small businesses just don't take advantage of yet. So I really appreciate your insights and for stopping by.

Aaron Marks:                    A pleasure. Yeah, and I'll maybe on a note just leave you with what you talked about from an automation perspective, and you had early asked me about just what should businesses be thinking about with the existing customers to keep them activated? Can you put people's birthdays in and can you build automation based off of that? Here's your birthday gift, 10% off. I recently did that actually with the business we work with and with a jeweler business we work with actually. Or it's been six months since you purchased from us. We haven't heard from you. Is there anything you need? Here's a coupon. Those are the types of things that I think can be a really valuable place when you talk about automation. I'm glad you mentioned that.

Gordon Henry:                 Yeah. Fantastic. Well, Aaron, thanks for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. Great to have you. And I hope some people will look you off at aspiremarketing.group. Is that right?

Aaron Marks:                    That's it. I appreciate you having me. Thank you.

Gordon Henry:                 All right. And I want to thank our producer Tim Alaman, our coordinators Tiet Barnett and Daniel Huddleston, and if you enjoyed this podcast, please tell your colleagues, friends and family to subscribe. Please leave us a five star review, which would help us in the rankings. So small business runs better on Thryv. Get a free demo with thryv.com. Until next time, make it a great week.

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