Digital Transformation: Strategies for Modern Marketing

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show E-coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay, here. Today we have Adrienne Wilkerson, the co-founder and CEO of INC 5000 winner for Beacon Media + Marketing with us. Hey, Adrienne. Hi. Adrienne, before we move forward, let’s get the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey thus far? How did you start Beacon Media? How is it going? We take it from there.

Okay, that sounds wonderful. I started my first company in 2001. That was Beacon Publishing and Design. We focused primarily on graphic design, website design, and branding. It started because, one, I realized I made a terrible employee, and I made a perfect boss. I was good at organizing and telling people what to do. I had way too many ideas that didn’t always fit within somebody else’s company structure or business structure. I’ve just always wanted to find my trail and blaze that trail. There wasn’t always a lot of opportunity to do that within an existing corporate structure. That was part of why I started my first business, the other part was seeing a need in the industry where a lot of small businesses were struggling with trying to find affordable marketing services. Back then, again, my specialty was website design and logos and branding and that thing. But I wanted to be able to connect with that small business and that startup. That was what birthed the original company back in 2001. Then I ended up with a couple of designers working for me over the years. But by 2005, 2006, and 2007, I realized things were changing in our world, in our industry, and that traditional advertising was not going to be a thing much longer.

Facebook was emerging, it was MySpace, and then Facebook, and then the iPhone coming out in 2007. We now have a computer in our back pocket or purse, and we don’t need a brochure anymore. The stuff that I had built my whole career on up until that point was going to be pivoting and changing. I realized we needed to make that shift as well. I ended up with Jennifer Christensen, who was coming from the marketing side of things, and I was coming from the design and organizational side of things. We merged businesses in 2012 and launched the first digital marketing agency in Alaska, in Anchorage, Alaska. It grew from there. We went national in 2017, I would say and never looked back in some ways. Now we work with clients across the country and in Canada as well.

Lovely. Quite a journey, I must say. Running an agency has its challenges. We know that. Now, when you’re starting it out, again, the challenges are different. Again, you would have faced a lot to keep the lights on, to get it going, and now, where you arrive. Talk us through those initial challenges that you and your team would have faced, and how you overcame them. This is for the listeners who are trying to start their entrepreneurial journey.

That’s a great question. I think one of our unique challenges when we started that, thankfully, is not as much of a challenge anymore is just when we first started as a digital agency, it was so new that nobody knew what was going on. Nobody knew what PPC was. Facebook wasn’t even doing paid ads when we started. It was all organic content. It wasn’t just the challenge of finding trained staff. Jennifer, I literally would learn how to do digital marketing at night, the nuts and bolts of it, and teach our staff during the day how to do it because it was so new. We were all learning organically. So anytime you’re starting an entrepreneurial journey and you’re launching a company where you’re an ultra-early adapter, it is a much, much harder road. I don’t recommend it for most people. It is exciting. It is exhilarating to be able to say that you were the first with this or whatnot. But the level of education that we had to do for every single sale was astronomical. It was more education oftentimes than it was even presenting our products or our services.

Because it was also new. Our clients didn’t even know what we were selling them. What we would hear more often than not was Facebook things not going away. I guess I need a Facebook page. What am I paying you for? You’re playing on Facebook all day? I don’t understand. We launched a whole new, a whole division of our company that was just focused on education. At that point, all of our clientele was in person. So much of what we were doing was meeting the challenges and adapting to the challenges as they came up because we never knew what was going to happen one day or the next. Something I would say to all new entrepreneurs who are looking to get into this, you have to be adaptable, you have to be fluid, and you have to be willing to pivot on a moment’s notice. Especially if your industry is tied to technology like ours services that exist one day quite literally may not exist the next day. That happened to us many times. We would have to call clients up. I know that you’re like, Hey, that product we serviced, we sold you last week?

Yeah, Facebook changed. It doesn’t exist anymore. Here’s how we’re going to pivot. I feel like that was a word we said ad nauseam and got sick of. Oh, time to pivot again. Time to pivot again. That’s entrepreneurs. I had no idea how much being a business owner and being an entrepreneur would require me to be that flexible and to be willing to constantly adapt and change. It made me question so much, even about myself and in a good way, needing to, Okay, am I comfortable with pivoting again? Am I comfortable with pivoting again? You just have to get used to and comfortable saying, I was wrong and I messed up, and it’s time to pivot. I tell my team a lot, that failure is not the problem. Not learning from the failure is the problem. You will fail nonstop anytime you start a business. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. You learn more from your failures if you’re willing to own them admit them and learn from them than you ever do from your successes. But that’s hard. A lot of entrepreneurs have very strong personalities. We don’t like admitting when we’re wrong.

I hate it. But I have had to learn to be very good at it because we don’t know it all and we need a team around us to make that work. But at the beginning, you have to know everything as much as you can because you end up wearing a dozen hats, I think. So flexibility is the name of the game, being willing to pivot, and being able to own and learn from mistakes are, I think some of the key points that nobody talks about that are important to being a successful entrepreneur.

You touched upon technology in our industry. Ai is something that has been there for some time now, but last 18 months or so, it has hit us hard, and whatever we want to put it. AI is increasingly integrated into marketing strategy these days. As for you, how can businesses leverage AI effectively without losing that human touch?

Yeah, I love that question. What we use a lot is that AI is an amazing copilot. It can be a great assistant. It can help enhance what you’re already doing. But if you want to maintain that human touch, it’s got to stay as a copilot. You can’t let her fly the plane to you to put that analogy through. How does that translate into day-to-day life for us and most businesses? I was just talking to a group up in Canada earlier this month, and we were talking about how you can’t give AI those prompts, let it generate your website content or your blog content or your social media content, and then just copy and paste that. That is losing that human touch. That’s letting AI fly the plane, as it were. When we leverage the strengths that AI does bring to the table, which is great at giving us prompts. AI is amazing with the research that it can do the amount of data that it can collect that would have taken us hours and hours if not days. To correlate in the past, AI brings all that together. But if we get lazy, for lack of a better word, and depend on AI instead of taking that data and humanizing it, then that’s where I think we cross that line into losing that human touch.

I encourage people, to use AI to do SEO research or keyword research for your blog Use it to do target audience, research, and ask questions, but verify everything it gives you. Because what I often say is AI is still a child. It’s still in its youth if you will. None of us believe everything. None of us believe everything that we read on the internet or see on the internet, but AI still does. It is still learning to differentiate true information. Honestly, it’s hard for us humans to do that sometimes, too. But there’s no differentiation for AI. If the information is there, it takes it, pulls it, and gives it to you as fact. We still have fact-checking AI which may be disappearing soon. But at this point, we still have to fact-check AI and humanize AI. That’s taking the information that it gives us and putting it into our own words. That’s the piece that we still humanize it. But that’s a critical step that it’s easy to get up and get lazy with.

Yeah, absolutely. I think at the end of it, once you have gathered that information, which you’ve mentioned, I’ve taken a lot of depending on what we are trying to extract. But yeah, that final humanization touch is very important. With now Google being Google, coming up with all those updates about AI content, all that stuff, it has become more crucial to have a good content team in place. The content folks who were worried about their jobs back in December 2022, December 2022 is when it hit us. The ones who have gotten more tech-savvy in terms of using AI to make the work easier are the ones who are paid the best. It has worked the opposite of what they were scared about.

Yeah, we say a lot, and this is not something we came up with, definitely something we’ve borrowed, but AI isn’t necessarily going to replace people, but people using AI will replace people that are not. I like it. In the old days of the factories where we were making vehicles and cars, it used to be somebody behind that screw gun, screwing in every bolt into that vehicle. Then machines started to replace that. The people who kept their jobs or the people who learned how to program those machines and maintain those machines. That, I see, is our evolution with AI the information we get out is only as good as what we put into it. It’s still that strategic piece, that empathy piece, that intuition piece that humans contribute to that. Without that, we don’t have that human element, if you will. That’s the piece that I see where we’re still maintaining, essentially, and learning how to manage those machines.

Yeah, absolutely. Content at the end of the day has to be consumed by us humans. That storytelling aspect of it, the emotional question, and all those factors in terms of us making that final decision of buying a product using a service, whatever. That aspect is so important to resonate with your target audience versus just writing content for pushing content which reasonably grammatically correct, and factually correct. But that storytelling part of it is so important. I see a lot of content up there who are just targeting the Google algos to rank, right? But even if you rank and it does not resonate with your brand voice with your target audience, how does that work?

That’s where you end up with huge bounce rates because people Sure. Show up in searches because they’re playing the algorithm game and they’re doing all that. People might hit a website, but they’re not going to stay if the content isn’t human and doesn’t resonate with them. We’re all getting better and better at going AI wrote that. That thing. But you said it beautifully. It has to resonate because we’re still marketing to humans. We might be trying to mess with the algorithms, but at the end of the day, we’ve got a market to humans. They’re the ones still making the buying decisions. Yeah, I love how you said that. Thank you.

Moving on, Adrienne, company culture. It’s one of your specialties that we have found out. Let our audiences know a unique strategy or something that you’d have implemented at your agency, Weekin, to foster a strong and positive work environment. In our agency scheme of things, we know retention of resources is also very critical. How all of that is something that you’re balanced out at Weekin is something we want to know.

Yeah, absolutely. Company culture is something that I’m very passionate about. Really what Jennifer and I set out to do is create a company we wanted to show up and work at every day. The idea is that filters down. It’s almost that adage of treating somebody the way you would want to be treated. That’s a foundational piece for us we all want to be respected as people. We all want to be respected for our ideas, for our identity, who we are. A foundational part of our culture is just to be respectful and treat people like human beings. We talk about being a very family-focused, people-first company, and that affects all of our decisions. We filter through, Okay, we’ve got extra profit. What are we going to do with it this quarter? The first question is, how do we benefit our people with this? Because we are people first. Not It’s a company. That is something that Jennifer and I committed to each other from the very beginning. We did have a pretty crappy culture at one point. I feel like Jennifer and I woke up one morning and it was like, This is not the company we wanted to create.

How did this happen? We had to take a really tough look at ourselves because a company culture comes from your leaders. Whether you wanted to, whatever company culture you have, it comes from your We’re like, Where did we miss the mark? A lot of it, we hired people that we probably shouldn’t have and that wasn’t aligned with our vision for culture. They were much more focused on profit, on systems, on processes. People were an afterthought. We had to do some house cleaning, and we had to know that we had allowed this to flourish in our organization. We brought it back to, We are a people-first company, and what does it What is it going to take? We went and talked to each employee, What is it going to take for you to want to show up to work every day? It all came back to the same thing people wanted to be respected as people. We talk a lot about how your whole person shows up at work. We don’t believe in this work persona, personal persona thing. You are a whole integrated person. Whether you want to own that or not, your personal life does affect how your work performance happens and vice versa.

It all affects everything. That is one thing that we are very passionate about here is owning the whole person. That gets messy. I’ll be honest. There are times when it just gets messy. We’ve had to have conversations. Okay, we understand that you just need to take the day off. There’s so much going on in your personal life. You just need to take the day off and get that sorted. Okay, no, maybe you need to take the week off and get that sorted. But it’s like, How can we support you? Because of what’s going on at home, we’ve been through divorces with each other. We’ve been through the deaths of loved ones. We’ve been through weddings. We’ve been through spousal abuse and trying to help employees get out of abusive situations. We’ve been through the gamut of stuff with employees. But what we found is when we’re willing to have those conversations and go, Look, your work performance is struggling. What’s going on? What’s going on at home? Some people are more comfortable than others sharing what’s going on. But it’s almost more about asking that question than really getting the entire answer because it shows we care about the whole person more than just their work performance every day.

When we care about them, their work performance is so much better because they feel cared for and they feel recognized and seen and heard as a person. That’s some of the more nebulous side of what we do. Some of the concrete stuff is we offer unlimited PTO here. Because if somebody’s starting to burn out, we would rather they take the day off and come back way better tomorrow. Or take a week and come back way better next week. We’ve just found that there are times when you have to push through. There are times when there are client emergencies that it’s all hands on deck and we’re all just rocking to make it happen, but those are spikes. We can’t expect everybody to maintain that level all the time. America is really bad at this. Burnout is almost a badge of honor in this country, and it’s terrible. It needs to stop, in my opinion. It is one of the worst things that has ever really, not the worst, but it is a harmful thing, I believe, for American culture. There are so many other cultures that do it so much better. As far as better paternity leave and maternity leave and really caring about somebody’s mental and emotional health and not just expecting them to be an automaton that just can crake all day, every day for 365 days.

Nobody can function like that. Unlimited PTO is one thing that we do. Flex Fridays is another thing that we do here where we pay people for a full week But if they get their work done early, they’re just on call. They don’t have to show up. They don’t have to be in a meeting. It’s just knowing that there’s that flexible day that, Hey, if they want to just put their head down and get an hour’s worth of stuff done to feel like they’re finishing up the week, great. Or if they want to go attend their kid’s baseball game, they can do that and not feel like they’re guilty. Don’t feel guilty because they’re letting somebody else down. Both of those have been successful components of our culture. We do a lot of what we call head and heart check-ins. We’re like, How are you doing at work? In a very brief thing, we don’t need all the details, but how are you doing at home? How’s your heart doing? How’s your head doing? Just giving people an opportunity to share that, we’ve noticed, has been impactful. You’ll always have those people that want to overshare, but you work with them individually.

Help coach them through what’s appropriate, and not appropriate to share at work. They don’t even appreciate that, we found. Those are some of the specifics that we’ve done here that have made an impact.

Lovely. I just loved it when you said you own the entire person when he or she walks through the door because it’s not only about professional personally, and how much, irrespective of how much we talk about it, how much the industry and overall, gurus talk about it, having more the life seat with it, It’s really difficult. Yeah, agree. It is. Great, Adrienne. This has been a brilliant conversation. I’m sure our audience would love the insights that you have shared today. But before we let you go, I’d like to be a quick rapid-fire. I hope you’re game for it.

Sure. Go for it.

Yeah. Your last Google search.

The last Google search was the best gel pens. I love to write and journal, so I’m always looking for the next best cool pen out there.

I was going to ask the reason for that, but now I got it. All right. Your celebrity crush.

Very good one. Jason Statham.

All right. I relate to that there. Okay. And your favorite client story.

Favorite client story.

It can be a bit longer answer.

We have this one client that started as a sole proprietor, and she wanted to grow. She didn’t tell us, but what we were charging her for the marketing budget was almost half of her monthly revenue when she signed up with us. She didn’t tell us this until almost nine months later. She was so excited to grow, that she implemented every recommendation we gave her. She asked us so many great questions. Within six months, she grew from a sole proprietor to being able to start hiring new providers. She 5Xed, I believe, her revenue in one year. Now, that’s extreme, but to me, it’s an amazing example of her choosing to lean into not just our recommendations, but other business experts’ recommendations. Like I said, it was later when she came back and shared with us that the risk that she actually took with us and just her willingness to trust and to invest that much in her marketing was very humbling to us. We were very grateful to be able to be a part of that journey. But that one’s probably one of my favorite extremes. When she came to us and was like, I get to take a vacation, or she’d made enough money that she could take a vacation.

That was in year three, I think, with us. But it was just amazing to watch her growth and how much she was willing to lean in and pivot and do all the things we talked about.

Lovely story. All right, moving on. What did you do with your first fee check? The first one of your life.

First one of my life. I went out and bought my first real professional wardrobe. I realized how off I was. Yes, I think I bought my first suit with my first paycheck.

Great. I will not grill you any further, Adrienne. Thank you so much for taking out time to do this with us. For our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

We’re on pretty much every social media channel. You can usually find us at Beacon or our website, beaconmm.com.

All right. Lovely, Adrienne. Thank you so much. It has been a real pleasure hosting you. Cheers.

Yes. Thank you so much.