How To Steal Ideas From Other Industries to Reinvent Your Marketing with Casey Armstrong

– Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of three minute marketing where we interview some of the world’s leading experts and movers and shakers in terms of growth marketing across different channels. We talk about search, we talk about social, we talk about analytics. We bring it all together in crystallized three minute value bomb, interview style pieces, I’m Chris Mechanic, your co-host or one of your hosts slash co-host. Here today, here with me is Casey Armstrong which I’m super excited to have. Casey. Casey is like the quintessential guest here. He’s a growth marketer. He’s, he’s a, a Swiss army knife. He’s highly skilled. He’s seen a lot of things. He started out on the agency side as an entrepreneur. Then he moved into his own information product and that was acquired. And then he moved on to consult with some very, very impressive brands. Pantheon. I know you did some awesome things for and currently with ShipBob. ShipBob is a leader in three PL, third-party logistics. They help e-commerce companies basically, you know earn more margin by shipping more effectively. And I know that you’ve got some exciting things going on there but super excited to have you man. And I’ve got a great question for you.

– Perfect. Thank you for having me, Chris.

– All right. So your three minutes is going to start uh once the question ends and I will get my little timer going so that you can, well I’ll give you clues but here’s the question, a person like you which has a vast skillset has been, you know has seen a vast number of industries from I know you’ve spent a lot of time with e-commerce all the way to, you know B2B sales and more are B2B tech. And one of the things that I think that you do brilliantly is take concepts that are working in one space and kind of reinvent and translate them into another. I know that a lot of brands right now are thinking about innovation obviously it’s top of mind, everybody’s under a lot of pressure to do more, better, faster, cheaper, um and we often find ourselves just tweaking and testing you know, 1% lift here, which would but everybody wants that next game changing idea. And you’ve, I’ve seen you do that a couple of different times. So I’m curious, like how do you think about it? You know, how do you set when you approach an industry? How do you query your mental database and make these extrapolations and triangulations and come up with these ideas? And maybe if you could provide an example or two of either things that you’ve already done or are thinking about that, be great. And I’m going to start the timer. Right…now.

– Perfect. So appreciate the kind words. Umm I think that, like you mentioned understanding multiple channels and how they work is paramount for people to succeed. I know that’s something I look for and everybody that I hire that you’re not just, you do need to be great that let’s say what you own or the channels you own but you need to have an understanding and an interest in others. For example, I think one of the biggest missed opportunities for many brands is is like utilizing your PPC data to feed into like your SEO strategy. And that’s not like a one-time thing. It’s something you’re doing all the time. Um I also think that people spread themselves too thin without doubling down or ten-exing. down on a channel that’s working. And so I think especially the start, picking the right channel and prioritization is key. And so find a channel that you believe has a high floor but also has an extremely high ceiling. And in that ceiling will continue to grow over time. I think too often people chase the shiny penny because they think it’s the next big thing versus like where, you know where are you um most likely to have success. Um uh. But again, that, that ceiling is extremely high. And so like you mentioned, It’s taking stuff from other ideas I agree. I think, you know, I’ve been fortunate to work in from direct response to e-commerce brands, to a lot of it’s B2B and B2B is what I enjoy the most. Um and an example there of something that that I’m really proud of that I think worked well was I was working. I was consulting for a company called SighnNow. and they’re an electronic signature tool but their founder, hats off to him. He actually launched the first online notarization tool. Um and he actually went so far to get it um to work with legislature, legislation over in Virginia to get it approved um and roll out that product. But the thing is those there’s, that didn’t exist. It was creating it was creating something completely from scratch. And so if he said, Hey here’s a million dollars to go spend on like paid or SEO. I would have given a million dollars to build a month because there was zero search volume for that. But there is a huge pain point and that people did not really like the notarization options out there um but they weren’t sure where to go. And so we actually what we did is we actually created a Yelp for notaries cause a lot of that data was already public. And so we were able to create a website that was generating hundreds of thousands of views within a couple of months for people searching for um notaries in Los Angeles notaries in California, notaries in, um you know the Midwest on one end of the spectrum and the others. Those, we were seeding it with the reviews. And also we were helping rank a lot of these individuals many of whom did not have a website. So I might search for like myself. So I searched Casey Armstrong or Casey Armstrong orange County or Casey Armstrong, whatever it may be. And I find myself and so I can claim my profile. And now I start using that as my own website. And so we’re using that to help funnel. This is B to C play with Yelp and we’re using that to funnel and create demand for our B2B product of which there was a lot of demand but nobody knew that this solution existed.

– So that was awesome. Casey, I have so many more questions. We can continue riffing but that is our three minutes is up. Um let everybody know where they can find. Find more about you or get in touch with you or shipbob.

– Yes, please come check us out. shipbob.com the leading global fulfillment solution for direct to consumer brands. Happy to help. You can email [email protected] or follow me on Twitter, which is at KCA.

– They are very, bad-ass, we’ve looked at a lot and there’s they have some distinct competitive advantages. Check them out if you’re in e-commerce and if you want to continue listening to Casey and I riff there should be a link down below in the show notes if not just hit [email protected] I will send you the notes as well as a whole bunch of other goodies. Thanks very much. We’ll see you next time.