What You Need to Increase Your ROI & How You Can Do It with Nadine Nocero-Tye

00:00 Andy Splichal Welcome to the Make Each Click Count Podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guests to discuss today's topic, which is what you need to increase your ROI and how you can do it. Today's guest is the VP of Sales and Marketing at SyncShow, with over 10 years of experience in both B2C and B2B world of digital marketing. A big welcome to Nadine Nocero-Tye. Hi, Nadine.

Nadine Nocero-Tye Hi, Andy. Great to meet you. Thanks so much for having me on today.

Andy Splichal You know, we're excited to have you and excited to talk ROI. So so let's jump right in and and talk about it. Your company is a self-proclaimed ROI obsessed marketing agency. But I'm curious, when you were defining ROI, are you focusing on that immediate sale or are you calculating ROI based on the lifetime value of a customer?

00:52 Nadine Nocero-Tye First, I just want to say it's a great question. I love that you're asking because it means that you're looking at ROI in a really unique way, and I'm going to tell you, it really depends on a customer. I'll tell you, we rarely ever look at lifetime value. Often we'll look at annual value. We put together annualized digital marketing campaigns and those tied to ROI focused goals. So in order for us to back into that math, we take a look at what's your current average order value and then how do we determine an ROI driven marketing campaign to hit a return on investment for that year campaign? So we usually say, OK, what is what is an initial sale look like for you, client? And then what does the buying cycle of that new client look like? So for some of our clients and customers, they sell something one time and one time only. And it has a really high average order value. So one new customer can cover more than cover the cost of marketing. And showcase an ROI. Other times, we have a smaller average order value, but we typically sell to them several times a year. So we're going to look at that and say, you're expected year one revenue of a new client is X. And this is how we're going to track towards that.

02:08 Andy Splichal Yeah, you know, I think that's a really an important distinction because I have a lot of clients that look at customer acquisition and say, well, I'm breaking even. Yeah, but they're not considering that that client on average has three sales of the year and you're only paying for that first one. So I think it's important for for people to know that with their numbers.

02:31 Nadine Nocero-Tye One hundred percent.

Andy Splichal Now, when most clients come to you, what do they think they need help improving? And is that different from what they usually need help improving?

Nadine Nocero-Tye Yeah. So this answer also varies greatly. When we get into having conversations with a client, more often than not, they come to us with a pretty specific problem. My sales process is broken. We're getting a ton of leads and we're not able to close them. There's a big drop off around conversion to sale. Or they come to us and say, we're trying to grow in a really specific geographical area and we need a better go to market strategy to attract in that specific location. Other times, it's just quite simply. I'm not getting the lead gen that I need or the the conversions that I need to be successful and to make this sustainable. Sometimes when we dive in with our clients and actually get a look at behind the curtain, it's pretty clear that there are certain things that are broken or different things that are broken than what they realize. And we need to spend time doing some foundational tuneups to make sure that when they do go to market, they can go to market successfully. And more often than not, that's going to be the case that there are other things that we need to improve to sort of actually solve the problem they're looking to solve.

Andy Splichal What are some of those common things?

Nadine Nocero-Tye Sure. So I know we're going to talk a lot about what it means to be an ROI driven company, but one of those things is messaging and value proposition. So to me, it doesn't matter if you have a great marketing team, an amazing sales team, if neither can really clearly articulate what you do, who you do it for and why you do it better than your competition. If you're driving a ton of traffic to your website and it's not clear to your end user what they're buying or why that's valuable, then it doesn't matter how great your marketing is. And if you're getting all those folks to your website successfully, who cares? They're not going to convert. They're not going to buy if they can't align on it. So oftentimes people come to me and say, I need lead, Jen Nadine. But in reality, it's like we got to back all the way up because what you really need to do is understand how you're going to market and how you're serving those customers so we can be successful or they'll say, you know, I'm getting leads, but they're bad leads and they're just not closing. And then I come in and find, well, your sales team doesn't have a really strong process and how they're following up and how they're closing those leads. So we actually needed some better nurture support between initial conversion and sale. And I know, I know obviously we're going to be talking a lot about e-commerce today, but what we do more focused B2B online selling. So how do we how do we tee up a hot lead to a sales team so they can actually close them offline and then move them into an e-commerce program afterwards?

05:08 Andy Splichal So I think that's a good segue to the next question, because when I looked at your website, I noticed that you were a certified story brand guide that just jumped off the page. I mean, I've read the Donald Miller books. Is that from the Donald Miller program?

05:27 Nadine Nocero-Tye Yes, correct, correct. So Donald Miller wrote the book How to Build a Story Brand. It's a fantastic read for anybody who works in marketing. But then from that, he created a pretty processed methodology where you can become a certified trainer in his method. And that method, again, is really about showcasing what you do and who you do it for and why you do it better than your competition. But the way that he structures it is to stop making yourself the hero, stop patting yourself on the back about how wonderful you are as the company or as the business or as the product and instead focus on your customer or your client and say, how can you make them the hero in all of this? What's it going to make them feel like when you solve their problem, when you sell them whatever it is that they need to be more successful? Because ultimately, that's how people are buying. And if we can establish that trust and create that validity, it really removes a lot of those barriers along the way.

Andy Splichal What did it entail to become certified in the story brand guide?

Nadine Nocero-Tye Yes, you know, we went through our story brand training during covid. And so I know we ended up doing a lot of it online through some coursework with him but and his team, but I know that they also do in-person training sessions. And then you also have to maintain and re-up that certification pretty regularly to make sure that you're staying consistent on it.

Andy Splichal And did your agency exist before you brought in that certification?

Nadine Nocero-Tye Well, that's a great question. We did. We've been around for almost 20 years. We've been story brand certified for for less than five. We either for the first time got I think for the first time we got certified prior to covid, but maybe it was during one of our re-ups that it was all online.

07:07 Andy Splichal And how has becoming certified in the story brand helped you increase? I mean, what has that done for what you've provided for customers? How have you seen the impact?

07:23 Nadine Nocero-Tye Yes, yes, we 100 percent have seen the impact from it. And it's actually a twofold impact approach. So for our agency and for our business, we're listed as a certified trainer. And as we talk about SEO, as we talk about how to be found, as we talk about referral partners and referral networks, you'll find us through the story brand partner directory. But we're also ranking high in search for certified story brand trainers in manufacturing and transportation and logistics and professional service. So we see a lot of our own lead gen, where people have read the book or have heard of the methodology and are looking for someone to guide them through creation of their their story brand. And so we get our own leads from that, which has been great for our business. And it really supports what we do from a go to market standpoint. And the way that it's impacted our customers is going back to that example I just gave you, we can market till we're blue in the face. But if it's not clear what the win is from the purchase and how it's going to make our buyers feel and how we can align with them, we're not going to be as successful or reach our full potential. So we have a great opportunity to really help our clients say, you're doing a great job marketing, you're doing a great job selling. How do we take this to the next level? And that's going to be around storytelling for your brand and your business.

Andy Splichal So when you first talk to a prospective client, what are you looking for? What kind of questions are you asking or how does that process go?

Nadine Nocero-Tye So first and foremost, we're a digital marketing agency that only works in a few industries. So we're B2B exclusively and we work in transportation and logistics, manufacturing, professional service firms and SaaS. And what I look for when I'm talking to a prospect, it's not about how big of an organization you are, but it's more about how aggressive your growth goals are. Our agency is really motivated by working with companies who want to put in place procedures and processes to see a return on investment. And in order to do that, we need to ensure that we're aligned on growth goals, that there's a clear indicator of where we're going and we're the team that's going to help you figure out how to get there. So a lot of my questions are around what are your growth goals? What are your sales for this year? What are your projected sales for next year? What are you looking to achieve from a from a marketing campaign? And what does success look like to you for your department, but also for your organization.

09:51 Andy Splichal Yeah, I think that's great. I think you need to have those clearly defined goals. If you don't have the goals, how do you know if you're if you're hitting them or not and if you're going to be successful now? Tracking for B2C is important. Yes, but B2B becomes a little bit more difficult. You don't have the checkout button. How are you how are you calculating the ROI? How are you calculating the efforts of different marketing campaigns given that B2B nature?

10:23 Nadine Nocero-Tye Absolutely. Well, first you hit the nail on the head. B2C tracking is really fantastic when it comes to monitoring your checkout buttons, when it comes to looking at your data to say how are you know, what are your conversion rates? What's your average order value? How are people checking out? How are you cross-selling and upselling? So I love that. And it's wonderful. The B2B side is absolutely more difficult. And oftentimes clients will come to us and just say, this is really overwhelming. I know that there's impact from our website, from our email campaigns, from our paid campaigns, but I'm having trouble with attribution. So there's a lot that takes place. We're also a HubSpot Platinum partner. So we're big believers in using not only the marketing automation, but the CRM side of the tool, we track everything and we look at look at things that come in and we say, OK, how do we follow this lead, lead as a person or lead as a company? And how do we attribute what they've done on the website or done through digital marketing activities with where they've gone in their sales journey? So there's also a lot of two way communication, even though we're on a marketing agency, we often report into a VP of sales or a chief revenue officer. And how are we regularly interfacing with their sales team to say, was this lead good or bad? And then honestly, it's a lot of pipeline conversation. So we have an offline average order value. We have an offline average sales cycle. When you put something in cold online, how does that change? Does your average order value go up or down? Does your sales cycle go up or down? Does your percentage of closed one go up or down? Your percentage of getting to proposal, again, up or down. And we evaluate all of those things. But we create a lot of our own KPIs and metrics using some of those examples to determine whether or not we're providing value and showing success.

Andy Splichal How important is Google Analytics in tracking some of this?

Nadine Nocero-Tye It's crucially important. I actually just before this just got off of a team webinar. We run a book club and this sessions book club was all about data and analytics. We did a lot of chatting about GA4 and estimated data versus raw data and how we best manage around that. For us, if we can't track something, we can't manage it. So it's hugely important for us to understand where your traffic is coming from, how people are engaging on your website, because at the end of the day, that's how we're going to try and make improvements to your conversion rate and to also your brand awareness and where we're pushing for growing your traffic set.

Andy Splichal And have you started using GA4?

Nadine Nocero-Tye Our team is in the process of transitioning all of our clients over to GA4 dashboards. So we are we are using it. We are setting everyone up on it. And all future state clients are heading in that direction.

Andy Splichal What can you say to people that are hesitant to make that move here? We got a couple of months left before it's going to be, I guess, the only the only game in town, really.

Nadine Nocero-Tye Exactly. Well, I think, you know, when you talk about hesitancy, that's just the answer. It's going to be the only game in town. It's better to get ahead and let's go ahead and make the make the adjustments, start to get some of the interpretation of that data and where it's going, knowing that it's estimations. You know, when you now look at year over year data, there's going to be a discrepancy in a way that wasn't before. So there is going to be some apples and oranges instead of just apples and apples. So we're looking at this and saying, embrace it, jump on board and start to make. Adjustments accordingly.

Andy Splichal Now, how much with your clients do you see they typically spend on client acquisition versus. Improving their website or trying to improve their conversion rate, what's the average budget allocation marketing budget?

Nadine Nocero-Tye Oh, that's a great question. So when we come to our clients with a total marketing plan, there's going to be detail around both. And it really depends on each client. If we have a client that has a great amount of brand recognition, traffic, and we know by simply focusing on conversion rate optimization, we can improve sales, we'll spend a lot of time and budget there. Oftentimes, it's usually a bit of both. But I also tell my clients who don't have the brand recognition or the presence or the traffic, we need to build you up there first so we can also start to look at the data set with a wider data range. We need a lot of web experience to then make some decisions around conversion rate optimization. So if you don't have the strong data set that we need to be successful from a testing standpoint, we're going to focus more on acquisition and building there before we build on conversion rate optimization. And if you have a little bit of both, meaning you have conversion opportunities on your site, we're able to look at that data, you have a fair amount of traffic. That's where we're going to swim collectively and try to make sure that both of those things are accounted for. And if in the rare case, you have a ton of traffic and you have a great brand and a great sales proposition, but you're not converting, then that's where we're going to spend all of our time and money on conversion rate optimization. I had actually an e-commerce client years and years and years ago that sold uniform equipment, so scrubs, janitorial outfits, things of that nature, a lot of different types of hospital linens, hotel linens, and they had a huge amount of traffic coming to their website. They were ranking organically for brands, for specific products, I mean, doing really, really well and had just an absolutely abysmal conversion rate. Like less than half a percentage point. And we looked at this and we said, if we just spend time revamping your website and revamping your products and your carts and the way that we're handling that, you don't have to spend any money on other marketing. You're already there. You need to now maintain your positioning and you need to make sure that your website's in great health and compliance. But we pitched them an entire hundred thousand dollar plan around just website conversion rate optimization. And they said, no, thank you. They were like, what we're looking for is just instead to make sure that we're penetrating our markets, reaching out on brand awareness and they're looking for more acquisition.

16:47 Andy Splichal Yep. Hey, I know it varies from client to client, but if there was one thing you could give listeners that might be able to generate them a quick win when it comes to improving their ROI, what would it be?

17:04 Nadine Nocero-Tye Sure. So what I always tell clients is give your website over to someone who does not know what you do or what your ultimate goal is on your website. Sit over their shoulder, have them sit down at a laptop and say, go through this website and I want you to do what you think should happen here. And if they're not navigating to your top products or to your top calls to action or to the places that you want them to be spending the most time on your website naturally, if they're not naturally heading in that direction or taking the user path, that's an ideal state. It tells me you need to take a look at the way that you're setting up your buyer journey or your top products or the way that you're laying out your website to make sure that it is optimized for what you ultimately want to sell or ultimately want to do.

17:56 Andy Splichal Now, my next question, I think I already know the answer based on our conversation, but have there been any business books that you would attribute to your success and your journey as an entrepreneur?

18:09 Nadine Nocero-Tye Sure, sure. So as we've discussed, Building a Story Brand by Donald Miller is a great book. There are two others that my agency really loves. We run our business on an EOS model. And so the book Traction has been really beneficial to us. We love it. It is how we run our own business, but also how we approach client solutions. And then last but not least, a big one for me is Gary Keller's book, The One Thing. You know, as you talk about building and growing a business and focusing there, that's also been really beneficial.

Andy Splichal What's the second Donald Miller book? I know I read it.

Nadine Nocero-Tye Oh, my gosh. It. I can picture the cover and I'm completely blanking on what it's called.

Andy Splichal All right, we'll get we'll get that as soon as one of us thinks of it. Now, I get in the show notes. I have been getting a lot of emails about it, because he's still doing a lot of public branding around it. Now, let's get a little bit more detail about your agency. How long have you been around?

19:04 Nadine Nocero-Tye What services are you offering clients and how are you helping to increase the ROI? Thanks for asking. So things have been around for a little over 20 years. We are still founder led. So my CEO, Chris Peers, our president and founder and CEO, and he started the business really with two things in mind. So being a marketing agency, moving forward with website development, but also doing a lot of branding. And the thing that we've spent less time doing since I joined the agency, I've been there just a little over 10 years. That's when we became a HubSpot partner. That's when we really stopped focusing more on like the visual and graphic branding and said, we need to make sure that marketing is more than just arts and crafts. It's more than how things look and how they make you feel. How do we benefit from this great amount of data that we have and how do we move forward with data driven marketing to provide a return on investment? And for us, that means that our clients in the B2B space are coming to us for lead generation website builds. How do we turn your website into more than just a brochure? And how do we make sure that it's generating revenue? And then how do we make sure that your organization is really moving forward with a sales and marketing team that is revenue focused and creating a full digital ecosystem of success? So how are we taking an omni-channel approach to your go to market strategy?

Andy Splichal And do you have a favorite success story of a client that you could share?

Nadine Nocero-Tye Sure. You know, I have I have a recent one that I actually wanted to share with you. We took over some digital marketing for a client in the manufacturing space. We've been working with them for almost a year now. And we just did an analysis of the six months of work with us compared to the same time last year with their old agency. And not only have we seen great success in all metrics, but specifically their PPC campaigns, so as you talk about customer acquisition cost, we we provided them with an almost 400 percent increase in qualified paper click leads. I always say it doesn't matter how many leads you're getting if they're not qualified and if you're paying leads that aren't qualified, even worse. So, yeah, an almost 400 percent increase year over year in their paper click leads and then also almost a 200 percent increase in their organic leads. So coming from blogs, case studies and working to turn those to conversion points. And through the years, have there been any specific challenges that you sometimes struggle with and getting results for clients? You've already touched one point, attribution and B2B can be really difficult if you're selling through distribution, if you're a manufacturing company. It can also be even more difficult to track that. So we're always looking to creatively solve those problems, bring in additional tools and software and a tech stack to make sure that those things can be successful, then I'll also say, you know, there's there's a certain degree sometimes of people or teams thinking that they want things and not willing to go along on the journey with you. I always sort of equate what we do to also like seeing a personal trainer. We can tell you all day long what you need to do, how many reps to hit, what your workout schedule should be. But we can't always do all the work for you. So especially being a marketing agency, we stop once things hit pipeline. So I'm well with support around pipeline. I'm never going to close for you. So sometimes it's just getting that cultural shift of an organization to get people to come along on that journey with you.

And I know you mentioned it earlier, but who is the perfect client for your agency?

Yes. So again, it's a it's a B2B organization, transportation and logistics, manufacturing, professional service firms that serve those folks and then software companies as well. And how can an interested listener get in contact with you? You can head to our website, SyncShow.com. You can also always reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm on the platform constantly.

23:02 Andy Splichal So feel free to send me a direct message and we can connect there. Right. And I looked it up. It's business made simple. Thank you. Yes. Well, this has been great.

23:14 Nadine Nocero-Tye Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today? I just wanted to say it was such a pleasure getting to connect with you. I'm really looking forward to chatting more and just seeing where the show goes.

23:24 Andy Splichal Well, it's been great. Well, thank you for joining us again. Thank you, Andy. For listeners, remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information on connecting with Nadine or SyncShow, you will find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you want more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center available at podcast.makeeachclickcount.com. We have compiled all of our different podcast by show topic and include each of their contact information in case you would like more information on any of the topics discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.