Jeremy Weisz 13:22
Yeah, I would love to hear a question that you have that kind of addresses culture in the process. But before you answer that, I can’t remember the person’s name. But I do remember I had someone on who had hired like 5000 people in their career, and they said they still only had like a, like 50 to 60% success rate. And so they had really honed the process. And they still, I guess heard the baseball like a Hall of Fame baseball player is still batting 300. Right, they’re still getting out seven out of 10 times. Right? So I guess it’s similar with hiring sometimes hopefully can increase that. So from a culture perspective, what’s an example of a question that you have in the process to evaluate culture fit?
Brandee Johnson 14:14
I’ll give you a couple of them. One will just openly ask what type of culture are you seeking? What type of culture do you thrive in? And what type of culture would maybe not work well for you, and maybe avoiding the obvious like nobody wants to work in a hostile environment, but there are cultures that are just neutrally like, like a culture that’s super-fast paced, that might be good for somebody and bad for somebody else. It’s kind of a neutral, like, which side are you on? So we will ask just, for them to explain the type of culture they’re looking for or that they’ve thrived in in the past. We will try to ask for examples, like, tell me what in a past, about a past culture have you loved Most thrived in and what has not been as desirable or you’ve not performed as well. We’ll also ask questions about managerial style. What type of leader, supervisor do you desire and work best with, and what would be some qualities of a leader that you would not work as well with? We’re looking for people who don’t want or desire a lot of direction. Now, in the beginning, for younger employees, like junior employees, we recognize the need to get more direction, but we are looking for people who have self-initiative and want to work a little bit autonomously versus working from a checklist every day that, here’s what I need you to do. So those are some of the things and questions that we ask.
Jeremy Weisz 15:45
I love it. You mentioned before about, you want everyone to have a voice. And that’s really important. And they may have been trained somewhere else, to not have a voice. So how do you incorporate like, if it’s a junior member, to encourage them to speak up and to share their ideas, which are going to be great, but maybe they don’t feel comfortable because of a past experience?
Brandee Johnson 16:12
Yeah, I’ll use an example. I’m working with one of our more junior employees right now and see so much potential in this person. And they’re just growing and thriving. And so, they do have a lower maybe competence and somebody who’s been in the industry for a lot longer, they recognize their junior experience. And so sometimes it’s helping push them out of their comfort zone in a way that they’re comfortable with. And they feel like there’s low risk of failure, or it’s acceptable to not hit the target. So things I’ve done is I have asked this person to take on a responsibility that is maybe outside of what they would typically do, maybe we would assign this typically, to somebody a little bit more experienced, it could be for example, here’s the problem we’re looking to solve for this client. Recently, we have a client who has a specific product line that is not moving as quickly or as well as they’d like, they’re not hitting revenue targets, I want you to spend an hour or two and come up and bring some ideas to me on what you think they could do, that would help. And that could be anything from rewriting product copy, doing more content creation, doing advertising, there’s just all kinds and giving them the expectation, this is just for you to learn and grow. And you may bring some ideas that we use, but you can’t fail at this. And so I think when people feel trusted, and they feel like you see something good in them, it boosts their confidence.
Jeremy Weisz 17:44
I love that, it seems like you give them a direct responsibility, and you’re building their confidence, but also building their leadership as well. They’re kind of flexing that muscle. Yeah, go ahead.
Brandee Johnson 18:00
Well, I was gonna say the other thing is to know when it’s okay to step back and let them lead. So with this particular employee, she and I together lead an internal meeting every week with our team on this client account. And after we had done that for a couple of weeks together, I needed to not be at that meeting, one particular week, and I had utmost confidence that she could lead the call. And so I asked her, do you feel comfortable doing this, let’s sit down in advance and prep if you need to, and she killed it. And so, she probably didn’t have that might not have had that confidence going in. But when she sees that her leader believes in her and that we trust her to lead a good meeting, and then she goes in and does that. It just boosts her confidence.
Jeremy Weisz 18:41
Yeah, I love it, I mentioned the beginning about, I know you help a lot of different types of companies, but you do help a lot of e-commerce companies. So I’m wondering, I guess for any, it can be a SaaS company can be an agency carving out a niche is a lot of times, top of mind. So I’d love to hear how you’ve begun to hone that niche for yourself.
Brandee Johnson 19:10
Sure. I know the challenge of this firsthand, it’s not easy to form a niche, especially if you didn’t do that in the beginning of your company. When I started LimeLight, again, it was about seven and a half years ago. I knew the importance at the time of finding and honing a niche. But as a startup, you’re also looking to say yes, a lot and three of my first clients, which were really good clients, were in three completely different verticals. I had a large education client, a large construction company, construction client, and then a large company and like the entertainment business and so it was like very, very different. And so we said yes, and then we started mostly growing through word of mouth and referral and the first several years, and we were getting referred to or called on by all different types of clients in different spaces b2b DTC. And while we felt that we were bringing value to those clients, we also saw that our team was being stretched thinner and thinner to not with just workload, that mental capacity to wrap your mind around so many different industries and marketing to D2C versus b2b can be different. If you’re looking at lead generation versus driving e-commerce sales, there can be different strategies. And so a couple of years in, we decided to hone a niche and the way that we went about that, as we looked at our current client set and our past client sets, and we said, we looked at it from a few angles, one, where do we really love working as a team, two, where do we feel like we are most impactful, and get sticky engagements that lasts a long time and have client relationships where these clients really see our value? The beautiful thing about e-commerce and it can be beautiful, it can be not beautiful, but we like it, it’s black and white, there’s little question as to are you generating a good ROI, because that’s closer reporting, you’re driving traffic, optimizing for conversion, and it’s pretty measurable, to see the ROI. And so we also then looked at it from like, an industry lens, what opportunity is this a good niche to go in, we worked with a consultant David Baker for a bit to validate kind of the direction that we wanted to move. And then one of the mistakes I think that we made in the beginning is we made that decision, and we communicated it internally, yet, we only just updated our website at the time to like, reflect that positioning. And that’s kind of where we stopped. And it’s not like if you build it, they will come. We’re not the only e-commerce agency in the market. So it wasn’t like just updating our website through SEO, magically we get this lineup of e-commerce clients. So we continue to grow in that niche, but kind of slowly and so we’ve really put more power behind it in the last year and a half, I’m creating more content related to e-commerce, building out more case studies related to e-commerce and then doing more business development outreach in the e-commerce space.
Jeremy Weisz 22:21
Really, some people specialize in an industry and some people specialize in a service. And some people specialize in both the industry and the service. So from the industry perspective, we talked about that from the services, what kind of services do you offer?
Brandee Johnson 22:38
Sure, we are kind of quote-unquote, full service and that we offer a variety of different services. And for many of our clients, they’re hiring us as the outsourced marketing partner to work across the channels. So we provide branding services, that’s anything from brand strategy, brand archetype logo, visual design and messaging. We also do paid media. So that could be paid social, paid Google, paid search, programmatic advertising, we do organic, social, email marketing, content marketing. And then one of the things that’s unique about LimeLight is we have a full in-house development team, this right here onshore, in our office, about eight developers. And so we do a lot of website design and development, app development, and really helping clients solve pretty complex technical solutions or finding integrations across their tech stack.
Jeremy Weisz 23:40
I’m curious, and this may not be a one size fits all, but from a developer’s perspective, are there certain platforms you’d like to build on from e-commerce perspective?
Brandee Johnson 23:52
Yeah, we do a lot in Shopify, big commerce and WooCommerce are probably our top three.
Jeremy Weisz 23:59
Got it? And then, I’m curious what the evolution of services looks like, right from the beginning. I’m sure you didn’t have eight developers. Right. When you first started? What did it look like in the beginning compared to now?
Brandee Johnson 24:13
Well, I mean, I’ll take your real quick journey through like start to now I mean, in the beginning, it was myself and one other per employee. And we were neither one designers were neither one developers. So we were kind of more like marketing strategist count project manager. And at that time, we worked with some freelancers, contractors in this specialized areas. And then we brought in our first graphic designer. And then we brought in I think, our developer was our second hire. And then we brought in a project manager, and we just kind of started to grow our team as our services and our revenue grew. It was just in the last few years that we brought some specific skills or services in-house that we had previously worked with contractor a freelancer on. Now we’re to a point where we do like 95% of our work in-house with our W two team.
Jeremy Weisz 25:06
So would you say most of the time you’re hiring local, versus whether overseas or across the US or most of the people kind of in where you’re located?
Brandee Johnson 25:18
Yeah, so we’re located in Kansas, and we have a team of 25. And about half of them are local within a driving distance. So call that like, 12 or 13 people. And they’ll come into our physical office, we do still work in person together a portion of our team. And then the other half of our team are remote and work home office, we have two geo hubs, both like to ours on both sides of us, where we have like four or five employees in each hub. And so they work home office, but they can also get together and work once a month together. They also have the proximity they can drive into the office, some of them do so weakly, some of them don’t. And then we have a couple of employees who are just, you know, one in Michigan and one in Pennsylvania. So it varies. We’re not always hiring local.
Jeremy Weisz 26:04
Let’s talk a little bit about what you do you help the company or help a company Backyard Discovery. And what did you do with them?
Brandee Johnson 26:11
Well, we’ve worked with this client for multiple years. When we started with them, we mostly did project-based work around video creation. They are a company that sells swing sets, wooden swing sets, and outdoor patio furniture. And so that’s how our in garden engagement started. And then it’s just grown and blossomed over time. We are doing some really fun work with this client right now that includes website optimization, redesigning some of their product pages and category pages and doing ongoing AB testing, as well as user testing to optimize that online conversion rate. Their unique, well, it’s somewhat unique to some clients, at least, in that they have good sales volume coming through their Shopify website, but they also have the majority of their revenue that comes through retail partnerships like Home Depot, Wayfair, Amazon and the like. So one of the key value drivers or values that we bring to them is content creation, that can be kind of two prong and help both on their website to educate customers, help them be found online and drive up conversions, but also where those assets can be used also on Amazon and Home Depot, and there’s partnerships to also increase conversions.
Jeremy Weisz 27:27
So they have a b2c and b2b component to what they do. Yes. And then they all over the US, or were they so they can sell anywhere? In the US?
Brandee Johnson 27:40
Yes, they sell all throughout the US. And then they have a UK website, a Canada website and an Australia website.
Jeremy Weisz 27:47
Wow. Okay. What is that ideal client look like for you? Yeah, I mean, that’s an example they saw all over the place that what are the components that an ideal client?
Brandee Johnson 27:59
Yeah, I’d say ideal client is an e-commerce client that has a product or service that they sell online. Many of our clients do have both a D2C and a b2b model. We work with another company that’s a candle company. And similar to back your discovery, this client sells, b2b, through their wholesale channel to places like Whole Foods or florists, wedding and event facilities. And then they also sell D2C to end consumers. So a product that sells online and then also I would say, we like to engage with clients who have a product that is doing well and has demand in the market, I think, sometimes companies wait until they are like declining, and in a death crisis to reach out to an agency, those can be challenging, because they may not have the stamina and the wherewithal to, take the time as needed to build up. So, ideally, we’re working with a client who is already growing and looking to accelerate growth in a pretty aggressive way. And they believe that digital marketing and branding is important to that growth, and they’re looking to partner with an outside partner to help drive growth.
Jeremy Weisz 29:13
Sometimes when you come in, I mean, one of the reasons I’m curious, what are the reasons people come in? Have they plateaued? What are the reasons they come to you?
Brandee Johnson 29:24
I think it can vary. So I’ll weigh in to like, use a couple of examples to answer the question. One of the e-commerce clients that we’ve worked with for about five years, they came to us because they acquired this company, and the previous owner had really divested in the marketing investment for many years. So the company had went from being a brand that was on Oprah’s favorites, to a brand that was about to go into bankruptcy when they purchased and so they did not have an internal marketing team and they did not want to build that internal capability. And so they wanted to partner with an agency to really stand up a marketing program around a brand that had a good history, but was not seeing current success. In contrast, another client that we are working with, they came to us because the opportunity in the market is so great right now for them, and they are growing so fast. And there’s so much opportunity on the table, that they need much, much, much more bandwidth and strategy to capitalize on that opportunity.
Jeremy Weisz 30:32
What are some of the mistakes people make withe-commerce? Because sometimes people come to you, and you’re gonna look at everything and optimize it give strategy also implement? What are some of the mistakes you see that are halting their progress?
Brandee Johnson 30:48
Yeah, so I’d say there’s mistakes and a few categories. Some are like, let’s call it entry-level basic mistakes. And then there’s more advanced mistakes. Entry-level basic mistakes that we still see with companies coming in is their websites not optimized for search engine, so they may lack meta descriptions on pages, they may lack proper H ones and headers throughout pages, their path to conversion is just clunky. And anybody who gets on is going to recognize that. So those are kind of the low-hanging fruit, but high-impact mistakes, I would say the more sophisticated mistakes, if you’ve gotten through all of that, and you’re in a good position, but it’s hard for brands sometimes to see outside of their own purview. And to see things from a customer perspective. So oftentimes, they can get really caught up in the features or specifications of our product and really go heavy on that, and miss the benefit or the value that a consumer might see. And so even in the way product copy is written, that can be an opportunity for improvement. Having video used properly throughout the e-commerce journey is a mistake. Often companies, you either don’t have the video assets, or maybe they have some assets, but they’re not leveraging to them to the full extent. I would say another, I’ll put one more out there. And that is just not monitoring and analyzing your analytics to know what’s working and what isn’t working. And so somebody might make a change to the website and never come back and test it to know if it worked or not. I’ll use an example recently, we launched a new hub on a website, so new portion of the site. And we called it learn in the navigation. And then we did some user testing. And we found very quickly that people did not know what when we said what do you expect, you’re going to see when you click on learn, they would articulate and it was nothing like what we were actually driving them to. So we renamed that section through that user testing. And we’ve been testing it out for three weeks. And we’ve seen a I think the other day was like a 359% increase in people clicking on that tab in the navigation, just a lack of understanding data.
Jeremy Weisz 33:05
I love that Brandee because that applies to any company really like when you talk about they’re focused on features and benefits that could apply to an agency it could apply to an e-commerce company, it could apply to a SaaS company. So I loved hearing you walk through that. And we talked about some of the benefits piece I love to tear. What do you do with the candle company that you mentioned?
Brandee Johnson 33:34
Yeah, so we’ve been working with them for five years and we started the engagement with a rebrand the brand was kind of stale, it looks dated in the market. So new logo design new brand messaging, then we moved into re-theming their Shopify site to also reflect the new branding and make that much more modern. They were fairly inactive on social media at the time so lamp launching a holistic organic social media strategy along with Instagram being a primary focus and then also paid social. We have also done some search marketing for them to drive both top-of-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel conversions. We do email marketing with them have stood up email marketing and have had that become more and more sophisticated. As we’re seeing here on the screen if you’re watching we’ve done quite a bit of photography for this client. Obviously their product is a very visual and aesthetically pleasing product so showing the different uses of candles and such now I think it’s good for viewers to know this candle company is very premium candle company so we’re not talking about the candle you’re gonna grab up the checkout aisle of Walmart these are premium candles that are handmade and often used for weddings and events as well as people who really enjoy a high-end candle.
Jeremy Weisz 35:16
You also talked about an education company. How do you do work with them, you know, compared to the candle company and Becker Discovery?
Brandee Johnson 35:28
Yeah, so this education client that I’m getting they’re out of Europe, and we work with them virtually. And when they came to us about a year ago, they were looking for some brand work to start with. So they are part of a larger well-known brand, they you would know the name and recognize, but they have an education division that sells into schools that is lesser known. And so that’s really where our focus was around is how do we take the parent brand and leverage and lean into that to create brand awareness within the education sector. And so for them, we went through a brand archetype workshop where we really dug into the brand, the essence of who they are, how they’re helping their target audience. And then leveraging that brand archetype that they came out with. The next phase of our engagement was creating campaigns that would run through 2023. And those were mostly brand political campaigns, but also include product-level campaigns, and for them, in addition to selling on their e-commerce site. They also have a b2b play, but it’s through distributors. So they have distributors in their network. And so there’s whole play on getting product into the distributor catalog on time. And so working with multiple distributors across multiple companies, or I’m sorry, countries, is very important, that has really tight timelines to make sure things are delivered on time.
Jeremy Weisz 36:57
Speaking of that, you know, your background is over 15 years of project management. Okay, one of those being Lego. So, I want to get to kind of how you manage the projects with your company, but what are some of the things you learned from Lego and the other company?
Brandee Johnson 37:18
Yeah. So yes, early in my career, like coming out of college, I took several roles in the project arena project was like a process analyst and unprocessed, proven consultant, project manager. And I definitely went through a lot of corporate training during that time. And so I definitely, it became built into my DNA as a professional. And so when I went to Lego and became the Senior Marketing Manager of the education division, I definitely brought in those project management skills into that team and then have at LimeLight as well. So some of the things that what that looks like in our agency, we use a project management software where we build out you know, every client and every project, every project has milestones and tasks, those tasks are assigned to an owner with a start date and a due date, we monitor those regularly, because it’s very important to me that if we tell the client we’re gonna deliver on the first we don’t deliver on the second or the fifth. So there’s just kind of the software that helps with good project management visibility into, if you’re working with, let’s say 30 clients at a time, and a larger number of projects, there’s just a lot of moving pieces at once. And so having the right technology to give visibility into Gantt charts and such, I think also, the structure of having really good solid briefs is a important part of project management within an agency environment. Obviously, the brief is used to gain alignment with a client on what we’re going to do, and then it kicks off our internal team, setting the expectations for why we’re doing this, what we’re doing and what success looks like. We’ve seen success and lack of success in this through our years where a solid brief with a solid internal kickoff meeting can result in a project that’s delivered very efficiently and effectively. And a weak brief with a weak or missing internal pickoff can lead to a lot of rework, frustration within the team. So, those are some of the key aspects of project management. I think it’s just also mindset. I think some agency owners have a background and creative or development and especially creatives, and I’m not knocking on a creative but their genius in other areas. And so project management is sometimes a weaker point. And so those agency owners just have to make sure that they have the right person on the bus to handle the understands the value of project management. Not that I’m the only one doing project management agency. In fact, I do very little of it, but I understand the value of it and so therefore accept profit classes and systems in place that enable us to have solid project management.
Jeremy Weisz 40:06
Yeah. I mean, it could also be someone who is really good at it and a visionary and they just hate it. So often for myself, I avoid things that I don’t like doing. Right. And so they could fall to the wayside. Yes. So, Brandee, first of all, thank you. I want to encourage everyone to check out limelightmarketing.com. I have one last question. And my last question is tech stack. You mentioned project management software, what do you like using for your tech stack?
Brandee Johnson 40:37
Okay, for the agency specifically. Okay, we use Excello or our project management system, we use Basecamp for client communication tool. As far as we use, like Ahrefs, we use, for our dashboards, we’re using what a graph, and we like that a lot. We use Banner Snack for some animations, obviously, we use the Adobe Suite. For more finance and operations, we use QuickBooks online. And there are a couple others that are like just fun ones and not as common, we use a tool called Bonusly, that is really good agencies or any company, low cost. And it’s a way for employees to recognize one another. It allows you to assign points, we call ours, lime likes to others. And so it’s integrated with Slack, which is another tool that we use and love and Google Drive. And you can say like @Jeremyplus10Limelikes for going above and beyond on XYZ project or getting this feedback from a client. And then it forces you to hashtag and we have our values, our core values set up. And so you have to hashtag with a core value. That’s just a really immediate way that employees can recognize one another. It’s going through Slack. People are also learning about the great things their peers are doing. And then it rewards them with points that they can cash in for variety of online gifts. There’s one more as kind of oh, and we use bamboo HR and implemented that about two years ago after moving off like spreadsheets for maintaining employee data. And that’s been really good.
Jeremy Weisz 42:21
Do you have a universal inbox? What do you use for like email support? Just Google Google email. Brandee, first of all, thank you. This has been fantastic everyone check out limelightmarketing.com And we’ll see everyone next time. Thanks, Brandee.
Brandee Johnson 42:38
Great. Thank you for having me.
