The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast

Moira Vetter, Founder and CEO of Modo Modo Agency (Atlanta, Georgia), built her company with a focus on "marketing for business people." Modo Modo serves a B to B client base and some larger organizations with B-to-B and B-to-C challenges—leveraging value, developing story, and strengthening brands in the face of company carve-outs, acquisitions, divestitures, and reorgs—times of great potential r...

Ron Tite, founder and CEO of Church+State (Toronto, Canada), discusses the evolution of content and advertising and how, today, a marketing problem is no longer a content problem or an advertising problem—it's one unified problem—winning the battle for the consumer's time. Church+State operates under the premise that every ad can be a piece of content if it is good enough, and every piece of conte...

In this interview, David Mullen, president and partner of The Variable (Winston-Salem, NC), explains how any company can defeat its biggest competitor and drive sustainable, long-term growth. David articulates the holistic mindshift and strategies needed to develop products people want to buy, build "people-friendly" companies, and win long-lasting, loyal customers. He emphasizes the need to focus...

Erik Lokkesmoe, Principal at Aspiration Studios (Nashville, TN), provides insights into how strong branding, a brand's relational partners, and brand-based distribution systems are changing marketing; highlights how some of the "newer players" (NetFlix, Amazon Prime, Hulu) are tracking audiences' viewing viewing data to establish future project direction; and comments on how marketing metrics illu...

Tommy Swanson, is CEO of Stripes Agency, a Dallas, Texas based, performance-marketing-focused social advertising agency. In this interview, Tommy talks about intriguing changes in digital marketing, including the increased use of FaceBook as a marketing platform, other trending platforms and platform tools that will impact the industry, brand lift studies, and how behavioral data supersedes demogr...

Jake Finkelstein, CEO of Method Savvy (Durham, NC), a full-service, data-driven, omnichannel marketing agency working primarily with mid-market enterprise brands, spoke at Atlanta's 2018 Digital Summit (where this interview took place) on how user experience design principles and human experience design impact SEO performance.   In this interview, Jake talks about his company's 5-phase core-value-...

Cheryl McCants, Founder and CEO of Impact Consulting Enterprises (East Orange, NJ), took her journalism background and founded Impact, a communications/marketing/digital company. In today's interview, she explains how "story" works as the foundation for an effective marketing campaign, why it is important to be mindful of industry trends and be ready to leverage experience to diversify into new cu...

Mark Luckenbaugh, Cofounder of Local Client Takeover and Web 20 Ranker (South Central Pennsylvania), discusses the ever-changing challenges today's digital marketing agencies face and his risk-minimizing scaling strategy.   Mark's Web 20 Ranker provides "white label" products and services to help digital marketing agencies minimize manual work bottlenecks. White label services and products are sup...

Brooke Beach, Founder and CEO at MarketWake (Atlanta, GA), a results-driven, strategy-focused digital marketing agency, partners with medium to large companies looking to grow, scale, or introduce new products or penetrate new markets. In this interview, she explains how her company "partners" with its clients to take them to "the next level," how she expects AI, A, and holographic technologies wi...

Will Schenk, Cofounder of the product engineering firm, HappyFunCorp, based in Brooklyn, New York, talks about his company's role in facilitating new product development. Do you have a great idea for an app and there's nothing like it on the market? Have you been "spinning your wheels" trying to get some heavy-duty functionality built into a client's website? Do you need some back-end client-manag...

Roxana Shershin, President and Cofounder of Digital Additive, an email marketing services agency, highlights the ability of email marketing communications to marry data, technology, and creative for truly personal marketing communications. Although email is one of the oldest forms of digital marketing, it is constantly evolving. Today, the content of an email may be altered, depending on when it i...

Lee Odden, Founder and CEO of TopRank Marketing, a B2B digital marketing agency, talks about how a customer-empathy-focused approach, building authenticity, and maintaining credibility can do more than convert prospects to sales. He suggests content can also be used to create anticipation, increase customer retention, and inspire advocacy—things that are far more important for long term company su...

Zach Williams, Founder and CEO of Venveo, an agency providing building product marketing, addresses this niche market's unique challenges (including "invisible products") and diverse target audiences (big box stores, retailers, builders, contractors, and homeowners). In this interview, Zach: Presents questions to ask when considering niche specialization: "Who do we do the best work for?" and "How...

Michael Barber worked for a number of agencies before he founded barber&hewitt in 2015. He intended for his new company to provide marketing strategy and planning for midmarket B2B brands, but ended up spending 50% of his time consulting with agencies dealing with growth and development issues. In February 2018, inspired by the opportunity to work with a larger team and by his client company's cul...

What are the right tools, the right strategies and tactics, and the right content for a successful marketing and sales pipeline? These questions led Scott Armstrong, Partner, to start his agency, Brainrider , in 2010. Brainrider is based in Toronto and San Francisco. In this interview, Scott discusses his agency's demand generation, prospect and customer nurturing, and lead management strategies f...

Terry Hedden, CEO of Marketopia, a Tampa Bay, FL-based company that offers end to end sales and marketing solutions for IT companies, has grown his company to 80 employees in a little more than 3 years. Marketopia develops comprehensive B2B website-to-appointment-setting solutions to help IT service providers stand out in the crowded, often hard to differentiate channel. Terry attributes his compa...

Eddy Badrina is President of BuzzShift, a Dallas, Texas-based digital strategy agency that focuses on B2B and B2C client growth through the synthesis of business metrics, strategy, and creativity. In this podcast, he explores how digital marketing can revolutionize the brand CMO's role—from being an advertiser running a cost center—to functioning as a Chief Marketing & Technology Officer—redefinin...

Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing, a B2B sales and marketing consulting firm based out of Seattle, Washington, is an author, blogger, speaker, and host of Sales Pipeline Radio podcast. Heinz Marketing builds predictable, scalable sales pipelines for startups and for companies targeting enhanced, consistent growth. In this presentation, Matt relates that "61% of decision-makers include podca...

Alex Membrillo, CEO of Cardinal Digital Marketing, based in Atlanta, Georgia, talks about how companies that want to grow have found that marketing comes first to "plant the seed" the sales force harvests. Alex started his agency as an SEO company in 2009, when he got out of Georgia State on the tail of the Great Recession of 2008. Today, his company provides search, paid social, and programmatic...

Kevin Planovsky, Principal of Vert Digital in Atlanta, Georgia, discusses how he started his "full stack" mobile- and social-focused marketing consultancy. Keys to Vert Digital's success include: comprehending clients' business models, problems, and KPIs understanding the administrative challenges CMOs face in translating corporate directives to actionable challenges for their marketing organizati...

Mike Popowski, CEO of Dagger Agency based in Atlanta, Georgia, explains the orientation of his strategic content agency, where content is the touch point between brand and consumer and platform placement follows customer behavioral trends. His company focuses on content development, right placement, right timing, and analytics, primarily in video production. Mike notes that content today is far di...

Jason Swenk, Digital Marketing Agency Advisor, Coach, and Mentor, provides a comprehensive framework to expedite agency growth and life-cycle agency management. In this podcast, he covers: Vision: Where do I want to go and why do I want to do that? The importance and application of passion, knowledge, and expertise. Position: Why specialize in one client-focused niche, master it, and then port tha...

Danica Kombol, President of Everywhere Agency, talks about the impact of personal storytelling on brand-building and future purchase behaviors and highlights an opportunity many companies miss when they hire influencers to talk about the products/brands they love—that brands, trapped in a traditional "slick" advertising mindset, fail to repurpose the gorgeous, visually-rich, more authentic influen...

Nathan Taitt, CEO of Blueprint Digital , based in Atlanta, GA, discusses his company's use of integrated digital, multi-channel lead generation strategies for his service-industry customers. He believes that: 1) Facebook can play a key role at all funnel levels, 2) Establishing funnel-stage KPIs facilitates customer expectation management, and 3) On the leadership side, the employee and top line r...

Guy Alvarez, recovering attorney and Founder and Chief Engagement Officer of Good2bSocial, a full service digital marketing and social media consulting agency, provides a brief overview of effective social marketing strategies in the "legal" niche market. Good2bSocial's clients include some of the largest law firms in the world, as well as consumer-focused law firms, ad agencies for clients with l...