Marketing That Works Despite COVID-19 with Steve Dobbins of The Dobbins Group

Steve Dobbins is the Founder and CEO of The Dobbins Group, a full-service consultancy solving marketing and communications challenges. For more than 20 years, Steve has worked side-by-side with CEOs, helping them grow their brands. He’s helped brands such as IBM Watson Talent, Crumpl, Tarsadia Foundation, OCO Biomedical, SWIMS, and more.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• How Steve Dobbins is setting clients up for success during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• The Dobbins Group’s process for diagnosing issues with their client’s marketing strategy and coming up with a winning playbook.
• Mistakes businesses are making with their content marketing.
• Where to begin your content marketing.
• Marketing-as-a-service: how Steve and his team helped SWIMS launch their marketing in the U.S
• How Steve put The Dobbins Group team together
• Steve talks about his time in the Young President Organization and in Vistage and his best takeaways from these experiences.
• Strategies for a successful product launch
• Steve talks about his mentors and what he learned from them

In this episode…

Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, some companies have been able to pivot their businesses and blazed a new path for their marketing strategies. But so many other businesses have stuck to their old practices and are not getting the result they expect from their marketing efforts at all, particularly at a time when things have just gone into completely unknown territory. Steve Dobbins, who has over 20 years of experience marketing and growing big brands, says the first mistake they are making is running their marketing in a vacuum. So what exactly are they doing wrong and how should you market your business during this crisis and thrive?

Join Dr. Jeremy Weisz as he talks with Steve Dobbins on this episode of INspired INsider as they discuss how businesses are pivoting and doing their marketing differently to thrive through this COVID-19. and beyond. Tune in as Steve shares valuable insights from his own experiences of helping companies grow their brands, how his team helps them diagnose what’s amiss in their marketing strategy, and more. Stay tuned.

Resources Mentioned on this episode

• The Dobbins Group
• Steve Dobbins on LinkedIn 
• Cheryl Osborne on LinkedIn 
• Jake Brandman on LinkedIn

Insider Stories from Top Leaders & Entrepreneurs…

Never Miss an Episode and get Free Updates

Episode Transcript

Jeremy Weisz
Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders like the founders, some you’ve heard of, Steve some people have never heard of in some they’ve heard of so we have no Alper who started a large chain called Noah’s bagels. And Steven I love to hear about are some of those challenge stories like the things are hunky dory, but how people push through and Noah knows bagels turned into Einstein bagels, and he told me though, when he first started, he was selling religious tchotchkes out of the back of his trunk. That was his humble beginnings and so I love hearing the humble beginnings of things. And you know Tony Horton from p90x talked about Yeah, we know he sold hundreds and millions of whatever program DVDs for p90x but he talked about making money to street mine. That’s how he made food and rent money he would put his head on the street and do street Main Street performing to make it swing rent money. So that and many more check them out inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. And we help b2b businesses connect to their dream 100 clients and referral partners by running your podcasts. So it actually generates amazing relationships, amazing content and business. So podcasting, though, for me, seen as much more personal it was, obviously I formed amazing relationships out of this, but it was my grandfather was a Holocaust survivor and him and his brother were the only people that survive out of Nazi Germany from their family. And there was an interview done by the whole customer So his legacy lives on because of an interview. And so his interview is on the about page of inspiredinsider.com. And you could check it out but it really inspires me to I consider when I have a guest on I’m helping them and myself leave a legacy beyond ourselves. So if you are interested in podcasting for your business, go to rise25.com and learn more. And today’s guest I’m excited to introduce before introducing today’s guest, Steve, he’s got I mean seriously decades of amazing experience in marketing, growing companies and growing brands. I just want to thank a big shout out to Nick Araco, who introduced us and they have an amazing peer group and provide knowledge sharing to CFOs and car car owners all over North America for over 20 years. You can check them out at achievenext.com. Steve Dobbins is the Founder and CEO, of the Dobbins Group and what they do is they help companies solve marketing challenges and for over twenty years, he’s worked side by side with CEOs to help grow brands. They work with companies over the past decades like IBM Watson Talent SWIMS, YPO, Vistage and many more is collected team at the diamonds group. I’m not going to say see, they’re even more impressive, but they’ve worked with amazing companies. You work with At&t Johnson, Johnson DuPont and the NBA. They bring that world of experience into working with brands. So, Steve, thank you for joining me.

Steve Dobbins
Jeremy.

Jeremy Weisz
You know, I want to talk about SWIMS. But before we go into SWIMS, because you essentially you can go in and you do a multitude of things, right? You have provide cmo work, you can go in and help revamp social media messaging brands. And so we’ll talk about SWIMS but especially during this, you know, kind of crisis mode, hopefully coming out of crisis mode. You help people navigate this crazy time. So I’m wondering what the types of things people are calling on you to do and help them with.

Steve Dobbins
Understand. Great question, Jeremy. So we call ourselves an agile marketing agency, which has been super important during this crazy pandemic. We, you know, we’re a virtual organization that can grow and shrink as we need to. So pretty much any challenge that a client will come to us we can we can find the right people, and I just leverage people that I’ve worked with throughout my career, kind of the best and brightest, and bring them on board. So I’ve got a great crew. But this has been a really, really interesting time. We’ve actually grown significantly during, during the pandemic, had a first couple weeks we were about to sign a few clients and those went completely silent. And then suddenly, we started getting phone calls and people coming to us and saying, you know, I’ve been thinking about marketing for a while. I really haven’t done anything about it. We’re stuck Can you come on board and help us really working with clients to navigate through this crisis, which is absolutely unprecedented, making sure that they don’t go dark that they don’t lose. You know, they’re all facing some economic hits, but making sure that we’re going to minimize those, and most importantly, really setting them up for success on the other side. So we’ve had just a really interesting group of clients. Give me a couple of examples. We’ll go into that.

Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, go into some examples and what Yeah, what they want you to do.

Steve Dobbins
One of my favorites is, it’s company called Casco Contractors. They specialize in tenant improvements. So it’s a contractor construction organization that also has a design arm and they really have focused on improvements to you know, office spaces, etc. So there was a really natural pivot as soon as you know business this is we got the shelter in place orders in California. They kinda looked around and like, What’s an obvious fit is how to make our workplaces safer and healthier for the return. So they came to us they had no, they really were doing no marketing. They’re really successful. One of the top contractors in Orange County didn’t need to do a lot of marketing. But they were starting a completely new initiative. So Cheryl Osborne, who’s the CEO of just an amazing story, and this powerhouse woman in a man’s world is leading castle contractors and she had a vision she’s like, this is an opportunity for us, not only to you know, stay steady, but to really grow and really position ourselves and be an ally to our clients, old and new. So we went in, met with her shots, some quick videos, while keeping social distancing, and built a website within eight days had a full campaign ready to go and I think we launched six weeks ago. She’s been featured in LA Weekly. We got her on Orange County Business Journal. She’s getting calls all the time now that as we’re starting to finally ease up some restrictions, businesses are like, Oh shut what happens when we’re all returning to work? Our employees don’t feel safe. What can we do? We’ve got all you know, we’ve got all these office spaces, what does it look like? So she goes out and does an assessment and helps them gives them a full range of ways that they can, you know, retrofit their, their, their workspaces. So it’s been great. She’s a, she’s a wonderful CEO with a vision and, you know, just open to all of our creative ideas, and we’ve had a lot of fun with her.

[continue to page 2]