How does one market high-end home ovens?
They aren't the first item you'd associate with glitz and glamour.
Yet, unconventional marketing strategies, such as targeting women who have undergone cosmetic surgery, are more rational than intriguing when you understand the concept.
Marketing expert Jason Ciment challenges conventional marketing wisdom and invites you to explore the story's deeper layers, where consumer psychology and product positioning intersect to create magic.
In the 36th episode of the DesignRush Podcast, our editor Vianca Meyer talked to Jason – an industry veteran with more than 20 years of experience in utilizing internet marketing to enable businesses to get more clients.
Tune in to the full episode to find out:
- Why outsourcing digital marketing offers the most cost-effective solution through access to specialized expertise
- How to prioritize lead generation to drive business growth and establish industry authority
- How Jason measures marketing success – it's about rankings, traffic, leads, and sales
Who Is Jason Ciment?
Jason is the co-founder and CEO of Get Visible, a digital marketing agency focusing on web development, SEO, and social media. His background next to his 20-year marketing experience includes being a CPA and an attorney. Jason is a published author who shares his expertise through speaking engagements and his podcast to help businesses grow their online presence.
The first question you should ask yourself as a business owner is where is your market online?
Are you selling your product or service to a buyer directly or through an intermediary? Are potential clients going to search for your service on Google or do you have to serve them ads?
"A salesperson was representing a company selling a very fancy oven to use at home, and he figured out to target women who had cosmetic surgery."
"How do you make that correlation?"
"The idea was that, if they had cosmetic surgery, they want to show off their new nose, their botox, or no more lines on their face by inviting people to their homes."
"The oven would make them the star of their next party."
This story tells you everything you need to know to grow from being a good to being a great marketer.
However, Jason had another amazing tale for us:
"Years ago, a company had a tank with water where you lie for 30 minutes and chill out from the world."
"People aren't looking for that. They don't even know it exists."
"So you have to find people based on demographics that would make it seem like they're likely to want to go test something like this. We figured people who shop at Whole Foods or Trader Joe's are probably people with characteristics who would want something like that."
It's not just about finding channels that the clients might be on – you need to figure out correlations that aren't obvious
Having an in-house marketer who will do the work for you could sound like the most affordable solution.
However, Jason argues there are several challenges that could be easily fixed when you decide to outsource this part of your business.
- The first challenge is knowledge transfer
"When you hire someone, you have a risk of knowledge transfer because the person comes on board, has all this stuff sitting in their head, and then they leave – people tend to stay in a job for two years on average."
"So you invest all this money and time and resources in someone, they figure out the rhythm of your business and then they leave."
- The second risk is the opportunity across the fence
"You've got to pay somebody to be full-time, which means they need a full-time amount of work to do for you, which probably is easy to fill up a day."
"However, you're paying someone salary benefits and vacation time, costing you more than hiring an agency where you have no risk of knowledge transfer."
"When you outsource, this is the only thing we're doing – I've got a team that this is all they're doing eight hours a day. This way, you're getting the benefit of multiple brains looking at your situation and trying to figure out how to improve it."
"You're paying for a fraction of their time because you don't need them full-time necessarily."
"As a rule of thumb, if you're going to have an SEO professional on staff, you're probably spending between $8,000 and $10,000 every month."
"Agencies cost significantly less than that to get you a comparable result without any risks. In most cases, you're just better off outsourcing an agency that will grow with you."
Talking to Vianca on the show, Jason made a bold claim:
Generating revenue through leads should come before building the brand's industry authority
"You can spend all of your money building your software and build the perfect best solution."
"But if you don't have any money left to promote it, what do you have? It's like you have a treasure chest buried in the sand, but it's an island and no one can get to it."
"So practically, you didn't accomplish anything, as your goal is to get that software out there."
"In some ways, it's more important to build your lead pipeline – You can be very niche-oriented so that you can grow quickly in terms of understanding how to deal with that niche."
"If you're within a specific vertical, it's easier to move quickly and your brand value will emerge more naturally as you're engaging more people through the lead funnel."
"As you learn more about how people respond to your brand and how your culture is evolving, your brand can change. The thing you have more control over is how you do your lead generation, how people adopt your brand."
"For example, there's a company that never said they were the best. They said they were better than the rest. So it's not that they were good, it's just the others are worse."
"So the owner of this company put all his money into sales."
"He had all his employees on the phone doing sales calls. He wasn't giving a crappy service, he just understood that, after he called attorneys once a month for five years, every attorney in that particular vertical knew his brand."
Concluding the discussion, Vianca asked Jason to explain how he measures results in digital marketing, particularly when it comes to Google Search.
It's all about rankings, traffic, leads, and sales, according to Jason.
It's still rankings. You still need to run SEMRush to see how you're doing in terms of rankings, traffic, leads, and sales. That's your four steps."
You can add a fifth step, which is syndicating all the content you are creating. In that case, the traffic isn't just coming from rankings, but directly from referrals from other websites.
If you liked this interview, check out the full episode on the DesignRush YouTube channel and other streaming platforms.
