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Banking on KC – David Cacioppo of emfluence

 

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Kelly Scanlon:

Welcome to Banking on KC. I'm your host, Kelly Scanlon. Thank you for joining us. With us on this episode is David Cacioppo, the president and CEO at emfluence, a digital and marketing automation agency. Welcome, Dave.

David Cacioppo:

Thank you, it's really good to be here.

Kelly Scanlon:

I can't wait to hear what you say. All of the digital platforms that are out there, they can be very confusing and they can overwhelm business owners especially who have to know about it but they're not experts in it. So to get us started, get us all on the same page, what's a digital platform and what are the main buckets they fall into?

David Cacioppo:

Yeah, so that's a very broad question, and can be extremely broad, but let's narrow it down to just into my area of expertise, the marketing categories. So in the marketing categories, you have analytics applications which are going to help you analyze results and take large sets of data and make sense out of them to help you make marketing decisions. You have CDPs, or Customer Data Platforms, that are going to be your source of truth, where is all your data about your customers going to live, and then how are you going to use that data? You have marketing automation, which is the space we live in, which is to help you take that data, the information about your contacts and customers, and then leverage that to do marketing.

It could be anywhere along the customer journey, marketing, so it could be from gaining awareness to new customers, to serving your advocates better. So there's all kinds of categories within that. There's ecommerce platforms, there's just a large list. And one of the greatest resources for this is Scott Brinker's Chief MarTech, has a massive... It started off as this little compilation of about, I don't know, 40 or 50 marketing type applications, and they were all on a grid and it was this neat little thing, and now if you look at the grid, you'd have to blow it up to the size of a billboard to even tell what the logos are, it's enormous. There are thousands of players in the space in all kinds of different categories. So it can be a little overwhelming for a business if they're not exactly sure what they're looking for.

Kelly Scanlon:

In your experience, because you've been at this for 20, 25 years now, are there certain industries or certain kinds of businesses that can benefit the most from digital and marketing automation?

David Cacioppo:

It sounds a little too broad of a statement, but pretty much any business can benefit. It boils down to more about whether or not you have the human resources to leverage the platforms. It's about, do you have the staff and the time to dedicate to the software that you might use to help grow your business? And so just about any business is going to benefit from email marketing and just about any business is going to benefit from having a CRM to manage their customer data, it's more down to the point of who's going to do the actual work.

Kelly Scanlon:

So email marketing, CRM, social media are going to be the content, probably some of the biggest platforms within those categories are what you're going to focus on. What are some of the challenges that you see businesses, and particularly smaller businesses, what do you see them facing and how does your agency, emfluence, help them with those?

David Cacioppo:

It's sort of back to resource allocation. So small companies, people tend to wear lots of hats. So when we encounter businesses where A CEO is playing a marketing role or they've got maybe an administrative person who also does their content, you're struggling right there. And you fit somebody into a role that's not natural to them, most likely, they're not going to be great at it and it's one of their many roles, and so that's the struggle. And so what you would look for at that point is is there someone outside that could help augment that? What kind of an agency could come in and say, "I've got some people to do some of the work, but we don't know what work to focus on."

And these small businesses, they don't know. They're like, "I've heard that email works." Or, "I'll just go post stuff on Facebook and magically it's going to drive lots of sales." That's not right, this is not how that happens. Or they'll hear anecdotal stories and people go for these... A video went viral and suddenly they want to create a video, a viral video, and that's not a thing. You don't create a viral video. You create video content, and if you create the right kind of content, it will go viral. But if that's your marketing strategy, you're in real trouble.

Kelly Scanlon:

Yeah, and it's not a one and done kind of situation either. "Oh, I'm going to do social media, I'm going to develop this, and we put it out there. Okay, I've done social media for the month," or for whatever.

David Cacioppo:

That's right. Yeah, it needs to be consistent, it needs to be persistent, both things. And you have to have a plan. You should have a plan in advance. What are you talking about, why are you talking about it? What's the purpose, and what do you hope to get back from it? And in most cases, for a digital marketer, you're trying to get traffic online that will ultimately convert to customers.

Kelly Scanlon:

Yeah, so given all of that, how do you determine the right tools for your customers? You deal with lots of industries, lots of sizes of businesses, and as you say, you have to figure out what their goals are, if your customers have different goals. So how do you determine that?

David Cacioppo:

It's a matter of sitting down and understanding their overall business strategy first. What business are you in and what clients do you serve? And then how do you get more of those clients? What do you hope to get from those clients? And what do you hope that they do across their entire lifespan from when they were a stranger, didn't know who you were, to they're one of your best advocates. That all needs to be taken into consideration. And of course, in that consideration, you also need to take into consideration a budget because there's a lot to do. And so the smaller the company, the smaller the budget, and you're going to have to start off with simpler applications that probably do less, hopefully cost a lot less, but can drive some results. And so that's what we look for is, is there any sort of low hanging fruit, anything obvious that we could say, "Let's start here. Let's move the needle. Let's get some revenue associated with your efforts."

Kelly Scanlon:

We've been throwing the word automation around quite a bit, and I want to make sure that our listeners understand what you talk about when you talk about automation, you hear about business automation, but when you talk about marketing automation, what's that employ?

David Cacioppo:

For most people, the heart of marketing automation is an email marketing strategy. So if I get your attention enough for you to raise your hand and say that you want to subscribe, you want to hear from an online retailer, I want to subscribe because I'm probably going to get some discounts and things like that. So what happens at that point? Well, you're automatically going to get an email back with a 10% discount as my bribe to you to subscribe to my email list. But then there's going to be a campaign that follows that. And so you could, at a very simple level, just send out an email once a week with a special offer to everybody in your entire database. That would be okay, that's a starter methodology that will produce some results. You will get positive results from something as simple as that.

But what you would really like to do is have that strategy be far more sophisticated to say, "Okay, Kelly signed up for my list and we gave her the initial 10% discount, now let's see whether or not she's clicking on the email and whether or not she's made a purchase for that 10%. And if she hasn't, let's automatically send a follow-up to remind her, 'Hey, don't forget you've got this valuable coupon available to you.'" And then once we track that you have made a purchase, what now? So what we want you to do is come back with a bounce back offer.

So we're going to come back to you and say, "Hey, a week after your product delivers, how did it go? Give us a rating one to 10. What did that look like? Was it a great experience? Could it have been better?" It's important to analyze the results of that, but also can we throw something in that we'll get Kelly to make her second purchase, because what we're striving for here is a repeat customer and a high level of lifetime value. We want you to keep coming back and so automation can do these things behind the scene. It starts with a human right. It starts with all of us saying, what is my strategy and how should I communicate with Kelly to get her to keep coming back for more and to make her fall in love with my brand?

Kelly Scanlon:

And I think we've all experienced everything that you just said, and there can be some kind of creepy aspects to it too, like maybe 48 hours or 24 hours after I put something in a cart but haven't made the purchase, I'll get an email saying, "Oh, there's still something in your cart. Did you forget that?" And just things like that. Or the green dress that follows you around after you've clicked on a green dress. Every website that you open then there's the green dress. The automation is amazing, really.

David Cacioppo:

It is. And I think early on, more folks were sort of creeped out by the whole thing. Amazon was really early into this, the abandoned shopping carts and stuff, but it's common practice now. We're sort of used to it. If you're a marketer, you know it works really well. Is that, you were thinking about that green dress, and that green dress is following you around, and if you run these kinds of targeted automated campaigns, they do convert and you're going to get more sales from it.

Kelly Scanlon:

So for business owners who are new to this kind of automation, what's some advice or some insights that you can give to them to make sure that it's successful?

David Cacioppo:

Yeah, so I think the first part is to step into it in small increments. One of the most common mistakes we'll see is people just never starting. They'll invest in software and they will be so fixated on the idea that they must have the complete 100% strategy end-to-end buttoned up before they ever hit the go button, that they're wasting months and months of time where they could have been learning. Could they have launched, and maybe it wouldn't have been the best campaign it could ever be, but it could be successful.

Kelly Scanlon:

And it would be real feedback as opposed to feedback that you're guessing at.

David Cacioppo:

Yeah. Yeah, you're going to wait 9, 12 months to determine whether or not this perfect campaign launches and succeeds. Whereas a month in, you could have launched something simple and see results and make adjustments to your overall strategy based on that. So getting people to start early I think is pretty important.

Kelly Scanlon:

Mm-hmm, and just keeping at it. And being patient, that's for marketing in general. So many people think they put something out and in the next hour they're going to have people banging on their door, but you're in it for the long haul.

David Cacioppo:

It does take time, and it's something that you... You don't set and forget. And I think that's kind of a misconception about it, is that you can set it and forget it, but you're not really doing justice to the power of the applications that you have available to you in that you set it, you let it run, and you monitor it, and then you constantly test it, you challenge it. You say, "Well, that's good, but could it be better?" Put a challenger test campaign in place to say, "Is this campaign a little bit better than that campaign?" And monitor that. And if it is, great, launch that campaign, keep that campaign running and introduce a new challenger, it's a never ending story.

Kelly Scanlon:

Yes, exactly. Well, and talk about never ending stories, the field just keeps evolving. How do you, as a provider of these services, how do you stay on the forefront of the advances? And more importantly, how do you determine the timing to offer some of these things to your clients? As you mentioned, Amazon was on the forefront of some of this automation and it sometimes creeped people out, and so sometimes it's too soon to introduce things. So how do you stay on top of it? How do you determine when to introduce it to your clients?

David Cacioppo:

So we have a pretty significant advantage as a software provider. So we provide a marketing automation platform, but we are a digital agency and it's a big piece of our business. So we have clients that don't even use our software. In fact, they might use another piece of software that's inferior.

Kelly Scanlon:

Of course.

David Cacioppo:

But they come to us with what they have, and we're not forcing anyone to change to our tech stacks, there are other good tech stacks out there, but we have the advantage of running advertising campaigns, marketing campaigns on behalf of lots of clients so we get real world experience. We're doing this every day for people and so that helps us guide the development of our product. So that's a big piece of it. Us wanting to do things that technology currently doesn't do, we can invent the technology or add the technology to what we have to our current tech stack and say, "Hey, it now needs to do this." Because it'll make our jobs better, we can deploy more effective campaigns. So that real world experience of working for actual clients, being the strategist, being the producers for that is a really big advantage for us. On top of that, we spend a lot of time listening to customers, or talking, having conversations with them, face-to-face if we can, to say, "How's it going? And what do you you not like and what can we build for you?"

And we'll very directly ask that question, and sometimes it's something that doesn't make sense, and we'll have that conversation that belongs in a different tech stack, but a lot of times they have very specific needs, some of them are just super simple to build. "Oh, that would be helpful to you," we'll analyze and say, "That would be helpful to everybody. We can build that." And sometimes it's a pretty big complex piece, so adding a major set of functionality to an application is not something we take lightly. We would go and we would plan, we would make sure there's a real use case for it.

Kelly Scanlon:

Mm-hmm, absolutely. So in many respects, your team at emfluence is driving this change. You're just not sitting back and adopting things, you're driving it. This is something that I thought was very interesting. I'm going to take you back, I don't remember exactly how many years ago, but I think it's been about 20 years ago, you had a full service marketing agency with a couple of other partners, and you sold that, but you carved out the digital portion and it was just getting started at that time. How did you make that determination to carve that out from that sale and turn it into what would become emfluence? What were the indicators that told you, this is the future, I need to hang on to this?

David Cacioppo:

To me, honestly, the number one driver for it was I was having a lot of fun with the digital piece, and that was really my piece of the puzzle when it came to our traditional agency work was I was the digital guy driving that. Now the other guys were doing some of the work as well, but I was the main driver behind it, and it was just fun and it still is fun. This is a really fun job that I have is the ability to create this stuff and have clients use it and be happy. So that was the main driver for me. And then when it came down to the actual transaction itself, the buyer was most interested in not our digital, so everything but the digital essentially.

Kelly Scanlon:

Interesting.

David Cacioppo:

And at the time, there was a very specific need. They had a growth spurt. That growth spurt didn't require digital, it required creative resources, it required account management. It required almost everything but digital in a significant way. And so at the time of the transaction, here, I am super passionate about this, knowing that it's not really their jam, they're really excited about it, as excited as I am about it and so I was fortunate enough to have a mentor at the time through the Helzberg Mentoring Program, which I know you're very familiar with. And I sat down with him and he happened to be a mergers and acquisitions guy, and I said, "Here's my situation." And he said, "Well, maybe we can just see if you can keep the digital." And I was like, "Huh? Is that a thing?-

Kelly Scanlon:

That's possible in a sale?

David Cacioppo:

Can we do this?" He goes, "You can always ask." So it was conversation with my business partners first and I said, "Hey, I'd like to do this." And they looked at it and they said, "Well, as long as it doesn't kill the deal, we're on board." And so we went to the buyer, said the same thing to them, and they said, "Yeah, that's fine. That'll be fine." I was like, "Wow, did that just happen?"

Kelly Scanlon:

Yeah, the rest is history, here we are talking about emfluence about 20 years or so later. 2023, some people might call it the year of AI. I know it's been around, but it just exploded in 2023, and especially in the popular media, there's so many opinions about it. What's your take on it? How's it already shaping business and how do you think it's going to continue to do so?

David Cacioppo:

So we're fans. We're fans of AI. It's imperfect for sure. It's not taking over jobs at mass pace when it comes to marketing, it's helping people. It's helping people do their jobs. And so we've integrated it into our tech stack, and so as you create campaigns, create emails or landing pages, you have access to AI to help you compose your content.

And so when we used to go out and demo our software, we'd say, "Look, the hardest part of your job is strategy and content. Our software makes tactical execution very easy. It's easy to deploy campaigns. You got to go get your content, and you got to have your great strategy." Now, our messaging is different, you still are responsible for strategy. You have to have great strategy. You already have a great tech stack to help you deploy the campaigns, but now the content piece, which used to be one of the biggest bottlenecks, has become much easier. And so we look at AI for content development, generative content as a boost. It's going to get you 70, 80% of the way there, whether it's, I can't... I've got a blank canvas in front of you, I don't know where to start-

Kelly Scanlon:

Yeah, getting over that initial writer's block.

David Cacioppo:

Yeah, Give me some ideas, give me an outline to start with. And it's not going to be a perfect outline, AI's not perfect. So you're going to have something to start with to get you going. It's going to go out and it's going to do a whole bunch of research for you, and it's going to compile it into, you can be as specific as, "Help me write a 400 word email marketing campaign around the idea of X, Y, Z. Give me five main talking points." You can be as specific with your prompt as you want, and it's going to come back with something that's 70 to 80% okay. Absolutely do not copy and paste and deploy that campaign. This is where I think that the people that are most excited about it, that are trying to take shortcuts are going to fall short. They're going to do that, and you're going to end up with content that can be flat out inaccurate. AI can-

Kelly Scanlon:

And we've heard those stories, or worse that it's racist or just all kinds of bad things.

David Cacioppo:

Yeah, bad things can happen, good things can happen also. So it still requires humans, and for most creative folks, doing the research is not the most fun part of it. It's assembling the information and putting it into a new format, bringing some extra life to it, and establishing your brand voice around this stuff.

Kelly Scanlon:

I was going to say, the voice. Being able to create that brand voice and make it distinct from your competitors and so forth is so important. What are some of the other ways that AI is going to shape the future? You talked about content, but are there other ways that we're going to see it at work?

David Cacioppo:

Yeah, so it's already at work behind the scenes, this is not as visible, but it's analyzing data. It's helping you quickly look at large sets of data and make judgements on campaigns that are not only most effective, but could they be re-targeted for other audiences? There's just, the more data you feed it, the better information you get back. Of course, there's some caveats with that, you have to make sure that you're feeding the right data to the right platforms. You don't want it to be public data, right?

Kelly Scanlon:

No.

David Cacioppo:

You need to make sure that your data stays your data, you just want something to analyze it for you and pull out some insights for you. And even at that, we're not perfect, it is able to do work very, very quickly, but there's still humans that need to be involved here to say, "Okay, I see that it's coming back with these recommendations, does that seem right? And let me go cross-reference that. Let me check that."

Kelly Scanlon:

You talk about the data, and another big topic is data privacy. It's becoming increasingly important. Fraud is rampant. So how does your agency navigate that balance between doing personalized marketing and respecting user privacy?

David Cacioppo:

It boils down to permission. You have got to get hand raisers from your prospects, from your clients, your customers to say, "I've given you my email address, you didn't go harvest it. I'm asking you to market to me. I sign up for email newsletters because I want discounts on things." That's it. And, like me, even though I'm in the business, mostly I will ignore those messages until I need them. So I get two messages a day from some giant ecommerce companies, it's ridiculous. I don't need those most of the time, and so they filter into a promotions tab, and when I'm getting ready to go to that retailer, I go look for the most recent email and I take advantage of the offer.

Kelly Scanlon:

Is there anything else you can say about data privacy?

David Cacioppo:

We are certainly responsible for protecting data. We hold a lot of data and we're responsible for protecting that. We work with a third party to help keep us sharp, and so that organization is responsible for taking our practices and things and analyzing them to make sure we're doing the best job we possibly can. So it is super important.

When you talk more about privacy and things like that. I think for marketers, some of the most important emerging stuff is regulation. So the EU has got some very strict rules, the US has some very basic rules, but they're getting more strict. One of the challenging things is getting more strict state by state, with California leading with some, "Hey, if you're marketing to people in California," which you may not even know. If all I have is your email address, that doesn't mean you're in California or not in California. So it becomes an increasingly complex landscape for marketers to try and navigate and so you're kind of looking for, well, what are some of the most extreme things that I might be held accountable for and play by those maybe most strict rules, and then you'll probably be fine for the rest of the rules.

Kelly Scanlon:

When I hit a website that's from outside the United States, especially as you say in Europe, you do, you see all these extra things that come up. It's annoying to me when the little box comes up and tells you to reject or to accept certain things, and it's like, "Oh, I just wanted my information," or whatever, but they're trying to protect you and protect themselves.

David Cacioppo:

I think one of the most challenging things about that, again, for the marketer themselves, is that in the EU, there's the right to be forgotten. So I can tell you, "Delete all the information about me," which can create some pretty dramatic challenges. And as simple as it seems, it's not delete Kelly's email address. It's, delete Kelly's email address and all the information that might be associated with her along the lines. So it could be historical sales data, it could be all kinds of things that I might be responsible for deleting. And then, is that data only in one place? Is it only in your commerce system? Is it only in your marketing application? Or did you transfer copies of that data over to your CRM? It can be a challenging mess to untangle some of that stuff.

Kelly Scanlon:

Do you see the US trending in that direction?

David Cacioppo:

I think eventually it's going to get more strict. We're slow so far, but things are leaning in favor of consumers, and I think that's probably the right way to go.

Kelly Scanlon:

Where does emfluence go from here, Dave?

David Cacioppo:

We'll continue to build on the tech stack. We are having just a ton of fun with it. We've got an incredible client base, and so we're going to continue to build it out, but we're focusing right now on first party data. So because you have opted in, I need to do the best job I can of taking care of that little piece of gold, which is your email address probably, but it could be some other data point about you. How can I best leverage that to create a great relationship between you and I, the customer and the marketer? And so first party data is really where we're focused on the digital side, on the software side, but also on our tactics for our customers. The two most important things right now for a company are your brand and your first party data.

Kelly Scanlon:

Well, Dave, certainly lots of insights here, lots of helpful information. Thank you so much for being on our show today, and best of luck to you and emfluence and eager to see where it goes.

David Cacioppo:

Awesome. Well, I really appreciate being here. Thank you so much.

Joe Close:

This is Joe Close, president of Country Club Bank. Thank you to David Cacioppo for being our guest on this episode of Banking on KC. It's apparent that emfluence isn't just riding the wave of digital and marketing automation trends, the agency itself is a trendsetter and future shaper. David and his team are steering change, not just adapting to it. In a world where trends become benchmarks, emfluence blends vision with technology to define what comes next. Kansas City's history is rich with stories of innovation like the Kansas, City based creators of Teflon pans, automatic telephone switcher systems, automatic fire alarms, and multiplex theaters. Dave and current Kansas City entrepreneurs are actively shaping our future across industries like bioscience, stadium architecture, healthcare, and others. We can't all transform industries, but we can shape the immediate worlds we live in by staying inspired in all that we do and by living with purpose. Thanks for tuning in this week. We're banking on new Kansas City, Country Club Bank, member FDIC.