Triangle Talk: Digital Dynamos w/ Brasco | Ep. 134

In this episode of the Biz/Dev podcast we talk to the formidable team of Brasco, Raleigh's premiere full service digital marketing agency. They share real-world pain points, innovative initiatives, and invaluable advice tailored for startups and seasoned companies in the Greater Raleigh area. Don't miss out on these expert strategies that could propel your business forward!

Links: 

Brasco.marketing

On all social media platforms as: brasco ///

https://www.linkedin.com/in/linnelson1023/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bives/

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David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Music by: BLXRR

Transcript

[00:00:00] Christie: The sexy part, if you can make marketing and branding sexy is the logo and the website. Yeah, sure. It's very sexy. But the sexy part is the logo and the branding, right?

[00:00:12] Gary: Hello and welcome to the Biz Dev Podcast. The podcast about developing your business. I'm your host today, Gary Voigt. David can't join us, but we are joined by my co host, Christy Pronto.

[00:00:21] Christie: Hello.

[00:00:22] Gary: today we have two very special guests. Please welcome to the podcast, the power team behind the local Raleigh digital marketing and strategy firm, Brasco, and Brandon. Brandon is the CEO and the brand strategist and Lin is the associate director of partner development, and thank you guys for joining us today. It's a pleasure to have you on the show.

[00:00:45] Brandon: it.

[00:00:46] Gary: So Brasco is a digital strategy firm. And from what you were saying earlier, then there's not exactly a marketing firm. So if you guys could give me a little bit more of a. 30, 000 foot view of everything you guys handle. That'd be great.

[00:01:03] Lin: my goodness. So we are a full service marketing agency. So that means we do pretty much everything. I'll turn it over to Brandon to dive in a little deeper.

[00:01:12] Brandon: Yeah, Gary. So Brasco is a creative branding and digital marketing agency. So you're correct. We do offer digital strategy and we're also, we are a marketing agency, but as Lynn mentioned, we're full service. A lot of times, what we do is we take clients through a brand, then plan, then execute. Approach and sometimes we get plugged into different places with clients that we work with, we may get plugged in upstream at the brand planning phase and other times we get plugged in a little further downstream where it's, hey, we need help, getting our marketing automation tool set up, or we need help with launching a new campaign, right?

So we're not at that point, helping them advising them on the brand side, but we still have a process that we. look through the lens of who they are through their brand lens. And then he'll let that guide the overall outputs and campaign work. Definitely a full service agency. So with that, we get plugged into different places with our

[00:02:10] Gary: starting from the brand. Yeah that's great. I'd in my current position, I don't do as much branding as I used to, but when I was a freelancer, that was something, a service that I did offer. And I did work with other marketing agencies that the sooner they were involved and the more they knew about the brand and the brand voice, the better they were able to market the company. So I'm sure like you said, no matter where you jump in, you, you Do you still have to go back and find that brand voice for each company in order to effectively market whatever they're doing, whether it's a campaign or a new product. So what is your approach 

what's your approach to learning more about that business?

Is it usually just like a Q and a with the business, or do you actually go look what they did in the past and then offer suggestions

[00:02:53] Brandon: So we have a discovery and an audit process that we go through and in some cases will work with very well established brands who already have a brand standards in place and they already have a lot of that information to find. They have great you audience personas, and they have all that figured out right?

In that case, they would share that with us and we would go through that process review and do a workshop with them just to make sure that everything is fully flushed out at that point. 

[00:03:18] Gary: From my experience in our experience, having a solid foundation and recognizing you do have to make a decision on where you're going to spend your time and your money to build that foundation in your brand. That's a pivotal point because. To what you were saying if you just go in thinking the product's going to be the product, the logo doesn't make me money. No one really cares about the company. They just want to buy the product. Eventually you're going to have to market that product. And it's going to be more than just a picture on a webpage that else sees and everybody else's webpage.

And you're not separating yourself enough to even give a value other than we sell this for this price. Yeah, I'm sure you've run into it where maybe some, you've CEOs are people in charge of the marketing for specific startups that are now in that phase of, okay, we have to start marketing. They didn't give enough thought in the beginning, or they don't know how to explain the ROI on marketing in its early stages. So I've had this conversation with even David and he'll fully admit it. When I joined big pixel, part of my job was to become, the person in charge of marketing. And then with that led to the conversation.

Okay we're going to slightly update. We're going to rebrand. We're going to slightly update how we look and how we present ourselves. And we're going to try to create some brand awareness. the pushback I got was if I'm spending this much. And all we're doing is getting our name out there and not getting any new clients, how can I justify that? So then there's that educational part of marketing too, that I'm sure you two are probably way better at than I am. So if there were a small business or a new company that was just starting and they're at that point where they're like, wait, maybe I should start paying more attention to my brand and the foundation, how would you. How would you explain to them the quote unquote ROI on creating brand awareness for yourself?

[00:05:10] Brandon: Let's first recognize that it isn't easy. Okay. And you mentioned the word education. Let's go back to even in college, so I went to East Carolina University If you look at marketing, the work that we do in marketing is segmented in education. So if you go to a university and you look at the work that an agency does as a full service agency, we are doing marketing, branding.

We do web work. I know you have partnered and work with you guys on those types of projects occasionally. There's digital marketing, there's design, there's video. So if you go into a university, into an education setting, marketing lives in the business school. PR lives in the communications department. Graphic design lives in the fine arts and the art department. Web, we don't know where those guys are. Those guys are, they're over in, IT services somewhere, yet marketing has to have a role in it. And that's just scratching the surface of how segmented we are in terms of how we're training students and training people up.

So you look at you take that, and then you jump ahead a few years. Someone's graduated. Maybe they came out of the business school. They had a great idea for a company. So they've started a company. They're very focused on the product because they're a product person. It's a common thing we see. And so now we get to your question, Gary. It's okay, now they're at the, I need to think about marketing and I need to think about my brand and how do I'm thinking numbers, maybe I'm a numbers person. So I'm thinking, how do I calculate ROI and where do I start? Because my training and marketing was so segmented before, and I don't know where to start.

And so I think just recognizing A, that it isn't easy, whether you are a seasoned business professional, a leader who's been leading a, professional services or technology or healthcare company for 30 years, you still probably, are. You're, you have the authority over marketing and your organization, but you're probably not an expert at that. And so you're trusting individuals. And so you're, some people are boiling it down to dollars and cents and ROI, others are boiling it down to I've, I can see something changing or I can feel. Some sort of visceral, like this is working or this is connecting with my audience. And so I think again just recognizing it isn't easy now with that being said brand is so measuring your investment on developing a brand. So let's say we don't have a brand. We have to develop a brand. If you're tying an ROI to that that can be difficult to do. You have to have a very long term outlook to your ROI when it comes to brand, but if we're talking about we want to launch a new, digital ad campaign, or we want to redo our website, or we want to reach a new audience, there's a sort of a new market that we're launching into. Those things are much easier to tie ROI to. And so luckily, we've

seen

the shift in budgets that go from traditional to digital that makes it easier for us as marketers to tie together some of these metrics so that we can show ROI. But that's definitely a trend that's happening is attribution back sort of attribution models on your campaigns. and there are a lot of folks that are. Working on some really great products out there that marketers like us can take, customize and apply it to, um, our organizations. 

[00:08:34] Gary: It's much easier to have the conversation about the measurable results than it is trying to convince someone that while they might not see dollars and cents coming in from the initial part of the branding and it will pay up in the future. So I agree with you. It's about education. Not just about marketing being segmented across multiple different channels, but just what the overall goal of marketing is versus the short term temporary steps.

[00:09:03] Christie: I would say also, too. I think it's a one plus one equals three situation. A lot of the times the branding and the marketing is there, and you might have the difficult conversation of getting to the ROi But it is a pathway to then have someone like Lin come in and have your strategic partnerships.

Because if you don't have that brand awareness, if you're not resonating with an audience, And know what your goals are and have that, then you're not going to be able to maximize, that type of potential. So speaking to a potential client about, let's amp up this brand awareness, it's so that we can lead us further down the path to then align with other individuals, perhaps, that get us further down the path for those leads to come in, because we so clearly defined who we are and how we're speaking to these individuals so much so that now this brand and us align it. And so we're maximizing that connectivity, which is something that Brasco does very well. And something that I was connected to them and attracted by them in the first place is that language around the connectivity, not just the attribution and dollars and cents, but about the heart in connecting with a brand and being aware with that.

And then. Creating a picture around that, that made a client feel safe to spend that money, which is, with changing trends and things it's difficult to get there. So it's a very nuanced conversation. 

[00:10:20] Brandon: Yeah Christiey, I think you made a good point about how, it's about a lot of different things. It's like making a cake, right? So

lots of

ingredients go into a cake. I'm not a cake maker, so I can't tell you, so maybe you, maybe one of you can. What's one of the first things you might put in a cake?

 Those are those early key ingredients when the cakes made and you're eating it You don't really think about what how much wonder how much flour they put in here Like I wonder how much vanilla extract or baking soda went into this thing. It's no, but you had to have it, right? it's crucial but to tie how good the cake was to measure how good the cake was in the end and to, can be difficult unless you're breaking, you're diving into it. But when you're eating the cake, you're just not thinking about that stuff.

Like this, the cake's good. I like it. Good job. And, but it takes a lot of different things to go into it. So I look at the brand going back to your question, Gary. I look at, The brand is being very early foundational, early ingredient that goes into it. It's going to be hard to tie it. The end result of how good the campaign was and how much business that generated a few months later, once the brand is done and all of your assets are up and all your, you have a nice creative campaign and you have a great website and some really cool functionality that big pixel has put together and then Brasco has come in and helped you launch a new campaign and all of these things work together to really, what we're looking for is resonating with our audience, resonating with a customer, getting to that one person or multiple people and getting them to feel something and to think something and to take an action in That's what it's all about. Or to get them to, to think about something differently or whatever the charge was or the goal was there. and so it's hard to just take that 1 piece and say how did that, if these things

all work

together.

[00:12:02] Christie: That's a perfect segue. I was thinking to maybe in taking that metaphor or analogy for the baking. You know when you have a good piece of cake, but when that baking soda is off and it just tastes wrong, and you know there's something going on here that just isn't right. It's not resonating.

There's something that's not happening. And I think to shift the conversation a bit, we're seeing a lot of startups that we're working with. Starting to come to us and we don't perform marketing for them, but it's just the conversation that they're starting to have, which is, hey, I have this agency and it's a one size fits all, but something starting not to feel right because they're just putting all of the same cookie cutter efforts.

The analogy again, the cookie cutter efforts into into this and our voice isn't sounding right. It's not resonating and the trends are changing so quickly now as to what does work and what doesn't work. And that's why, Brasco is finding such success is that you really are honing in on what is the thing that is successful, which is that brand voice.

Is what makes you who you are what problem you're solving what pain point for your client? Are they solving for their clients and then creating the narrative around that doesn't feel like clicking a cta button But it feels like you're really Solving that problem for them. So I'd love for you guys to speak about some of those pain points that you're hearing of the clients coming in for us, it's that the marketing isn't aligned anymore because trends and things are the consumers are changing so readily.

So I'm interested to hear what you guys are hearing as those pain points.

[00:13:29] Brandon: Lynn, you're, you and I both are having these types of conversations with clients, but I think may, you may have a few things in your mind in terms of people that you're talking to. I'm curious what your response is to that. Some of the pain points you're hearing on your end.

[00:13:41] Lin: So I'm hearing there's a lot of pain going on out there. We've got organizations that are growing that don't have a lot of. Help there's 1 or 2 people. There's 1 person wearing multiple hats. You've got organizations where the C suite has been around a long time. And they only know things to go to be a certain way. We also have people with limited budgets. We have people that realize they don't know what they don't know. So those are just a couple of things that's going on out there. And you have organizations that are trying to scale and they want to do a lot. There's a lot of people that want to do everything and they want to start tomorrow. And going back to what Brandon said, it's understanding their brand first and then building and executing, right? Creating a plan and executing and running down the road with them. those are just some of the challenges that we see out there. People come, they're like, I want to start tomorrow and I want to do this. Okay, great. Do you have this? Yeah. Great. Let's take a minute and it's in the discovery and getting to know them. It's in the conversations. It's in the relationship, really creating a space for the person that I'm talking with or Brandon is talking with, we're talking with together for them to be. Just, I like to call it fully self-expressed to tell us what's really going on in the background so we can help and set them up and the company for success right out of the gate. 

[00:15:05] AD: BigPixel builds world class custom software and amazing apps. Our team of pros puts passion into every one of our projects. Our design infused development leans heavily on delivering a great experience for our clients and their clients. From startups to enterprises, we can help craft your ideas into real world products that help your business do better business.

[00:15:30] Brandon: For the longest time and even still today. Organic SEO search still makes up the highest percentage of of conversion. So you look at all the different, ways you can take someone through your process, through an ad process, and get them to convert to a lead or to a sale on your e commerce site or whatever it may be. SEO, organic SEO is still, the most it's the best channel.

Now it's always been the hardest. To obtain, right? And there's a lot that goes into it. It always changes. But the way AI is playing a role there now is the way we're searching is changing. So what does that mean for organic search? And so there's a lot of a lot of conversations happening on that right now.

Our digital marketing team has been spending a lot of time researching, reading, getting up to speed on what's going on, talking with folks, talking with our reps at Google. Just really trying to gather all the information so that we can make good informed decisions. Consultative recommendations for our clients,

[00:16:25] Gary: Christy, you had a question earlier.

[00:16:27] Christie: no, I think I was just going to say that 

the sexy part, if you can make marketing and branding sexy is the logo and the website. Yeah, sure. It's very sexy. But the sexy part is the logo and the branding, right? 

But if you have someone recognize your logo and it's for a horrible situation or a horrible customer interaction or a bad user interface, then you really haven't done the job.

So it is again, all about the building, that perception and the brand awareness. That's why the brand and the marketing is so much in line. That plan is so much more important than the sexy part of just getting it out there with the logo and the website. And again, it's ties back to the whole conversation of ROI is.

Yes, you can get it out there fast and you can do it very quickly. And then your name is out there and that's very sexy. But at the end of the day, where's the substance? Where's the foundation? It's just like a relationship. It can be hot and heavy and amazing, right? But at the end of the day, if there's not trust, if there's not loyalty, if there's not faithfulness within the brand, then what do you really have in the end, except just hollow promises, which people and consumers are getting very wise.

To feeling it and sniffing it out and knowing that this is just smoke you're blowing or this is a real business,

[00:17:34] Lin: You know, that's a great segue into what we're doing. I think for small businesses and startups, right? So we

talk about

people that need something and maybe they don't have the luxury of long time and they don't have the luxury of deep pockets or big budgets. We formed a division in Brasco called Studio B and Studio B is same brilliant team behind the curtain, but we put together packages for small businesses and it's a little bit of a lot of things. And I'm going to turn it over to Brandon to just share a little bit further because we're talking about something that, ideally we'd start out with understanding the brand, we would do the website, we would start coming up with strategy, we do a logo, all that other kind of stuff, which could take a little bit of time. And a little bit of money, but how can we do something very tactical to get these people stood up right now and then maybe fine tune later. So I'm going to turn it over to Brandon to talk about the why behind it and the how I can tell you it stemmed from a lot of conversations that we've been having in the Raleigh area and more heavily in the Wilmington market, which is where I am.

With a lot of startups and a lot of small businesses. So we heard a need out there in the community and we huddled together. We thought on it for quite a while and we launched studio B. So I'm going to turn it over to Brandon.

[00:19:03] Brandon: Yeah. And Gary, I think you talked about challenges earlier. For Brasco, that's always been a challenge for us since we started 15 years ago. Uh, we started out, one of our clients was a, was one of the largest corporations in North Carolina. And another one of our clients was a small startup, right? So wait a second, we have a large. Oh yeah, and then another one of our clients was the North Carolina Department of Corrections, and that's a whole other story. We'll talk about that later. But, so we're providing services, as you can see, in the over 15 years to larger large corporate clients, non profits, government, and then you have this other group of smaller businesses, startups, and we were providing everyone with the same Brasco experience.

And in some cases you're fitting a round peg into a square hole. And, but everyone's happy because they're getting, in our terms, we're getting great experience, but they're not all getting the same. They don't all need that in other words. So especially the small business, what a small business needs are the essentials initially.

They need things that are going to help generate revenue, help them grow, so that then they can come back later and. Reinvest to do things. The right way if you will say the right way now that we're not doing things the right way we are doing it. We're doing those things the right way. But if you want to really get down into strategy and sort of be strategic with your brand and you want to be strategic with your marketing strategy and you want to dive into those things that takes time. It takes energy. It takes investment that a lot of small businesses don't. So what we've learned over 15 years is that there are things that we know they need and that we know work. So the things that work for them, we've created packages that allow them to get started on those. And we've, as Lynn mentioned, Brasco has created a division called Studio B, and we do have a dedicated team within Brasco that focuses solely on those clients.

 It's Great for everyone. It gives small businesses a way to get started something that's that that they can, that can really help them and can do it a budget friendly.

[00:21:01] Brandon: It

Us. It helped us because it allowed us to have a dedicated team just focused on that type of work.

So they weren't jumping around from, oh, today I'm working with, and then tomorrow I'm working with Gary's HVAC company that we keep talking about.

Um, you know, that's, that's a hard switch. That's a hard switch there, uh, for a marketer.

And so I think allowing our team to have focus, it's been great too.

[00:21:26] Gary: Well, that leads me to my last question here, which would be. All the work that you've done with small businesses and just as a company yourself, what would you say are the top three pieces of advice that you would give to a new entrepreneur or a small business to set themselves up for success?

[00:21:42] Lin: Don't start with the logo.

[00:21:44] Christie: right. Tip four, yeah.

[00:21:49] Gary: I'm joking. Don't do that.

[00:21:51] Brandon: Yeah gary, that's not the way to go. Yeah, 

Lynn, I think we can maybe both chime in on this one. Uh, I think it's important to, so as a small business owner, especially as a startup, it starts out with just you, right? You and maybe your business partner or you and maybe one or two other people. one thing that I know for sure helped me and that I've talked to other people and it helps them is You have to trust you. There are going to be aspects of your company that you are not going to be an expert in. So when I start, I'm a marketing guy. I'm not trained as a bookkeeper. So I'm naturally going to learn some of those skills over time, but I have to find people that I can surround myself with who can help me. Sort of make up for my areas of weakness. And I have to trust those people. I cannot micromanage because if I continue to do that, I'm not able to really focus on my strengths. I'm a big believer of playing up to your strengths and any successful business there. If you go again, go back to university, go to college, you're going to see there are lots of key functions of any business and. I would challenge to find that person who's amazing in all key areas of the business. I want to meet that person. I want to hire that person.

they, they usually don't exist. The person who's highly organized. And very good at project management is probably not the person that's going to be really good at the networking events, securing the next business or the person who's the developer heads down, that person's definitely probably not going to be the greatest person at the networking event, securing your first big contract. But if you're the developer who's working on the new software application, you probably want to figure out a way to someone that you can partner with, there's someone on your team, or, or if it's you got to get to that, you got to get revenue up to a point where you can invest in that person who can come on board and help you with that.

So trust is critical. the other thing that comes to mind for me is it, I think a lot of people start companies with a passion something, for a product usually or usually it's a passion for the product or for the service. And in that passion you are developing the product. You're putting everything you've got into that thing.

And, um, it's easy. To lose sight of these other things. And so I guess it's tied to my last one, but, for me it's really a race. It's a race to the first to generate revenue. It's a race to revenue. Because once we can start to generate revenue, then we can take that and reinvest it in other key areas of the company. 

 Couple

[00:24:30] Lin: of things also have a budget, have a range, right? A lot of people are hesitant to show their cards and say, this is what my budget is. But have a conversation, put a range in there. I've got $5,000 to $10,000 dollars right? That's a pretty big range, but what can you do with that?

And it's okay to send over, we'll send over a proposal based on the budget constraints that the client's given us. And we give them options if they're like, Ooh, gosh, I really, we'll make modifications. We want them to be happy. We'll also guide them and say, that's not a good use of your money, or let's not put it all over there because we haven't done this yet.

That's the being open to the consultancy and to the relationship. And it goes back to the trust, not only trust internally, but trust externally. If you're coming to the experts. Know that we've got your back.

[00:25:24] Gary: So for anybody that wants to learn more about Brasco how can they get in touch or reach out to you guys?

[00:25:29] Brandon: They can go to our website at Brasco dot marketing. A lot of times people say Brasco. marketing. com. It's no Brasco. marketing. and you can also find us on all the socials there by Brasco and you'll see us with the three slashes at the end of our name. But you should be able to find us with an easy Google search as well.

B R A S C O Brasco. marketing. And give us a call if we can help you.

[00:25:54] Lin: Yeah.

[00:25:55] Gary: We'll put and I both are

[00:25:56] Lin: on LinkedIn. If you'd rather just reach out that way, that's totally fine too.

[00:25:59] OUTRO: Hi, I'm Christy Pronto, Content Marketing Director here at BigPixel. Thank you for listening to this episode of the BizDev Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email, hello at thebigpixel. net. The BizDev Podcast is produced and presented by BigPixel. See you next week. Until then, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Threads, YouTube, and LinkedIn.