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Hey guys, Ryan Alford, your host of the Radcast. Before we get to today's episode, just wanted to drop a quick note. If you've been enjoying our podcast and want to work with us directly, either with Radical or if you'd like for me to be consulting on your business from a marketing perspective, we'd love to help you and you can reach me directly by text message at 803-855-1832. Again, that's 803-855-1832.

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text me, we'll get back in touch with you. We'd love to work with you and help your business in any way that we can. You can learn more about Radical at radical.com. I hope you enjoy today's episode and we'll talk to you soon.

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You're listening to the latest Radcast News Update. Here's Ryan and Riley.

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Hey guys, welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. It's our weekly news segment here in the final stages of October. Like today is officially the 22nd. Is that right, Riley? Yes, yes, it's my mom's birthday today. Oh, happy birthday Riley's mom. Yes, yes, yes. 45 years young? Oh exactly, yeah, she's turning 27 today, so. Okay. Yeah, for a couple of times, but it's okay. Well, she's listening to the Radcast at all, then happy birthday. Exactly, yes, happy birthday.

01:18
Happy birthday Tracy. Mom. Tracy, okay. Yes. Let's call her by her real name. Yeah. Tracy, happy birthday. Mm-hmm. And you having a good week there Riley? Yeah, I'm having a really good week. I feel like we've been really busy, like in a really good way. I'm really excited about a lot of the upcoming stuff that's coming up on the Radcast and just radical in general. I feel like there's just been a lot, I feel like it's just been nonstop in a good way. Do you know what I mean? Just, yeah. There has, it's been busy. What we're doing, you know, we're busy with client stuff

01:48
of internal marketing and different things. Like we're revamping our website. We're busy with the Radcast and things that come with it. And then some other content things, which I'll talk about here shortly. So it definitely felt busy. And we just finished probably one of the bigger e-commerce sites we've built. Not that I've built, but that we as Radical has built. All about fabrics, it's got several thousand SKUs.

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and that's all about Fabrics.com if you'd like to go purchasing your crafting needs. That's awesome. So excited to get that. It's never done, because we're gonna be doing the marketing and fulfillment of marketing services for them to really drive traffic to the site. That's always the two sides of the coin. We work with a lot of clients, especially non-marketing driven clients that, hey, we built an online store to just start selling. Now you actually have to do marketing to drive it to it. Right, right, right.

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of digital ads or pay-per-click or content and SEO, which takes a little longer. So we've been doing that and setting up all our email flows and campaigns, so it's pretty complicated. But excited to get the site live and up. We've seen several orders come in yesterday and today already. So yeah. So that's been big and excited. We had Dave Gerhardt on the show this week. That'll be launching next week. You know, Dave is the CMO at Privy and if you're on LinkedIn at all,

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You probably see Dave's content quite a bit. He's definitely in the algorithm.

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Because when I get on, he's like the first in my feed. Maybe because I engage with it, because super bright guy, super approachable, and definitely one of the leading voices in e-comm, if not marketing as a whole right now. So it was a really great episode. I tried to push Dave a little bit on a few topics, trying not to make it the standard stuff that he's talked about 100 times, and I thought we got some good stuff out of him, and some real practical advice.

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for his book that's exclusive for the Radcast, so that's always exciting. So we'll give that promo when that episode comes out on Tuesday. Yeah, he'll set up a link. They just did an e-commerce playbook, kind of the definitive guide. We've ordered copies here for the agency, and that should be arriving. It's a hardback book, I believe he said. He liked the idea of it being tangible, and this makes a lot of sense. Like, I was that person in college where I needed the book.

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hardcore book and I needed to write and do all these things and I think he made that point very clear and I like the fact that's why they have that hardcover book. So it'll be a great little promo there. We'll put links up to everything like that. I think it comes right off the Privy site and I think they're starting to deliver shortly. And then from an agency perspective, we started and I've always kind of, we've always had a few little side projects

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from a marketing perspective. It started with Greenville Hustle with doing local community stuff. And then we kind of built some merchandising around that. They gave back to the community. A lot of the profits, or actually all of the profits over the summer, gave back to the Greenville United Way Fund for COVID relief. And so we've carried that through, but we're kind of doing a little detour to create a sub-brand for the agency. It's gonna be called the Radical Label. And it's gonna be merchandise that's,

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cool team as a lot of agencies do, but we most certainly do. Oh my gosh. Trendy. Yes. And I've always wanted to be able to practice what we preach and almost have...

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a living, breathing e-commerce presence that we're testing and doing things on our own with our own brand that we then translate to clients. And so we did that a little bit with Bringable Hustle, but it's obviously been very localized. So this is gonna be much larger, much bigger scale, and gonna be kind of our testing ground for different e-commerce strategies. Obviously we're gonna use the traditional playbook that we do for most clients to kind of get the machine going.

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but then we can test certain things and do certain things that then we can deploy for clients and we have a working, living, breathing case study for them. It also gives our people a passion project a little bit because these designs are gonna be from our team, you know, and we're kind of playing around with positioning. But...

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the working positioning is bi-radical for the radical. And so we're gonna play off of the notion that people that are inspired, that can inspire others with our merchandise. And so.

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We're excited about that. It's gonna be fun. We're gonna have t-shirts and sweatshirts and pullovers and all the traditional stuff and excited to see where that goes. Yeah, I like all the designs that our team's been doing for those too because I just, I don't know, I love that. And they look so cool. I mean, I love the sweatshirts. I'm about to buy one actually. I cannot wait to buy one. I haven't put my order in yet, but I'll put the link in the episode notes. Yeah, we're gonna be a lot more on that. We're gonna have a big site launch.

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30 to 40 days away from having that specific store set up. GVILLE Hustle is there with all of our Greenville and kind of local stuff, gvilllehustle.com. But the Radical label will live right on top of our website and the radical.company website and so excited about it. And here's Riley with the news. Here is the Radcast News.

07:41
Okay, so Five Stars, they're already established as a company and an app, but they are expanding now with a new way to run loyalty programs and shopping analytics for small brick and mortar retailers. What's something that small businesses can take away from this expansion from Five Stars? Well, I actually used this app. I've only used it a couple times, but the local butcher shop, it's called New York Butcher Shop,

08:11
Thank you.

08:12
Aptly named. But the New York butcher shop is, you know, like there's only New York fashion. Yeah, New York butcher, you know, like anyway. New York gets all the love. Anyway, but use it there. You plug in your phone number. You get rewards points. It's very integrated, because I do like it, because all you have to do is get your phone number. And then they're keeping up with my ticket, which is actually pretty high, because I buy steaks like every week, and I'm a carnivore. I admit it.

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I love meat. I love steaks with big bones. Like my brontosaurus burgers. But I do. You're like Joe Rogan, I eat oak. Yes I do. I'll eat any meat there is, except human. Thank God. But in all seriousness, you plug in your phone number, they keep it with your tab. And next thing, and every time, not every time, but every third time, this is how much I order, they go, hey, you save five, 10, or 20 bucks on this order.

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all pretty integrated loyalty points. I haven't gotten any emails, I haven't gotten any SMS marketing, I imagine that's probably part of it, maybe I didn't sign up for it when I did it, but it's definitely more towards the.

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two to three, four store type chains. I'm sure they, someone's gonna go once again. No, we do a 30, we have 30 franchisees, they do 30 store franchise, okay, I get it. But it's still small. Smaller chains as noted in the article, Mom and Pops. So it's interesting, I think loyalty and these types of programs are growing, especially ones that are simple to use, easy to use like this one is. And 50 million in funding is anything to sneeze at. And so, it'll be

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interesting how they spend that if it's more in application development or marketing of the program. We'll see. But it's a cool platform and we'll see where it goes. What's the initial takeaway you think small businesses should like? The reality is any small business needs to know who your customers are and you need to be rewarding repeat purchases. It increases lifetime value, which is everything. It's

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and it's about that lifetime value. And when they know, a customer knows when they keep coming back, they're building points, you know, that reward system works, it's proven to work. And so if you're a small business, you should have some type of reward program that feeds.

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text message slash SMS, phone numbers, your cell phone numbers into your system or email addresses so that you're capturing and you know who your customers are. And so any platform that allows small business to do that, I'm a fan of, and if you are a small business, you gotta know who your customers are and how to serve them. Right, right, right. Changing gears a little bit, that's obviously something that's super important for small businesses, but I think this,

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of this episode I think is really just going to be focusing on some of the effects that COVID's just had on businesses in general and jobs in general, which ironically I think a lot of people are like, oh, this has actually slowed down a lot of job growth. And to some degree, it obviously has. Like I'm definitely not going to doubt that.

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or downplay that there's actual data. I mean I'm. There's no doubting it. No, there's no doubting it, it's a reality. But with that being said, I think this is a really interesting turn for the digital careers because I think a lot of companies realize, oh my gosh, this is actually a valuable career. We should actually invest in really good graphic designers and having cyber security, that kind of thing. And I think this is something that if you're in the digital career, this is something that you need to.

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start investing in and it's worthwhile to have some of these jobs that are coming up, cyber security experts. Obviously, you want to make sure that everything that's going through online, whether that's paying or you're schooling or submitting assignments, whatever it is, that someone is there to make sure that nothing's going to get hacked, everything's going to be just fine.

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graphic designers the same way, and digital self-service, just making sure the user experience is nice for the customer, whether it's a customer, whether it's a student, or whether it's someone just trying to access your site randomly, that user experience I think is super important, and I'm glad to see that those kinds of jobs are on the up. Well, it's just, COVID has accelerated trends already there. Obviously we've been online in the masses for 20 plus years now.

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but it's escalated, am I saying that right? Escalated or increased e-commerce and more transactional things that happen online that require a sharing of data. You know, the just brochure type surfing that still happens, but.

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it's now more transactional flow of data, whether that's credit card data, whether that's images, whether it's all those things, and all that's been happening, but you just got a gas poured on top of fire that was already burning. And so all of that means, hey, there's more increases for security, there's more need for content creation from companies because there's more sources. You think that digital is like streamlined things.

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When in reality it's actually complicated them because the outlets of digital, whether that's social media, whether that's your website, whether that's communication channels, whether that's e-commerce, there's endless channels within digital that require content development. And so graphic design at a high level that differentiates, because you have more coming in, so you need more of it. And so everyone's doing more of it, so you need to differentiate.

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is important so you can see that continue to increase. And then the UI back to our.

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episode just from last week with Satya from Kahn's Home Plus who has a great background in UX design talked about this being kind of the crux of your brand in a lot of ways is that user experience. Because again, more people coming online, more people getting the Amazon experience, expectations are through the roof. They expect seamless, they expect Omni-channel, they expect what I do online works offline, that you know and understand what I need quickly.

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is huge, so you're gonna see a lot of growing UX needs. It's already there, but again, growing quickly. And you know. Just gas on the fire to your point. All these were already there, but now I think more companies, especially as more companies go remote and other things are happening, they realize, okay, we need to invest a lot more in more graphic, you know, like more of these kinds of career fields. Yep.

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So you're gonna see all of those grow and more. Anything with the word, I cringe at the word digital, or online or whatever, but it's explanatory to what it is. So you're gonna see anything with the word digital grow. What is something that, like if you're a small to medium sized business, what's something that you should take away from this kind of growth though? Is it something that you're like, okay, I need to hire more of, or is it something that you should just be aware of and then realize

15:50
You know, you just don't want to get to that crisis scenario when you're like, okay, wish I would have hired a couple more graphic designers or UX. Do you know what I mean? Like, I think the biggest thing is.

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Security is uber important, but there's a lot of local, just like there's small businesses, we have it, we're considered a small business, and we have IT specialists that we contract out that do our network security, they were just here this week doing upgrades. Exactly. And so there's local IT experts that can help with the security part of things. And then, yes, from a perspective of design and UX and all that stuff, it's either get with a good agency that handles small business, radical,

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or shameless plug. You okay right? Yes, I have a radical cough. Oh no. But in all seriousness, you know, I also advocate when the time is right having your own in-house.

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at least designer or someone of creative expertise that can do some of this. As your needs grow, you might need to contract an agency, but some of this stuff just, it will make sense for some companies sooner rather than later to do some of it yourself so that you can kind of execute quickly and be nimble. And so, you know, I think that's the perspective for small to medium business.

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I got you. As far as the marketing trends go that are kind of taking place again, I feel like we've talked about these before, but I like this article that just kind of walked through some of the things that are happening right now. And I think there's something that even goes back to our episode with Satya, something he had said, and the fact of, you know, as a brand.

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you should be focusing on your brand and the passion of why you even started your brand and that kind of thing and let the marketers do the marketing for the brand, right? Because unfortunately sometimes it can kind of get like, miss, like I don't know, it just kind of blends together and then you kind of lose sight of one thing. But I like that this, I like this list because I feel like it brings more the human aspect into the brand, you know, having a purpose, having the human connection, having agility.

18:02
fusion, trust, participation, and then obviously talent transformation. But I think all these things are really good things that brand should be taking advantage of and their marketing. But I do think they could be separated a little bit. Yeah, I think.

18:20
These are things that were already in motion as well. This is Deloitte's seven marketing trends for 2021 or seven things to focus on. Purpose has been one that's been growing. You see this with a lot of companies, a lot of marketing that you see out there. It's...

18:38
People are just a lot more, and there are people that I follow that follow the two channels. They firmly believe in this, or they believe that ultimately all the consumers care about is convenience. I think it's both, and it just depends. If you're buying a pack of gum in the grocery store line, it's convenience and opportunity. But about 70% to 80% of your other purchases, I do think people are starting to be more considerate of what is the brand's,

19:08
and what are they doing? Again, convenience can overrule at any time, but I do think a lot of people just want to know that the brands that I'm buying from are conscientious of the things that are happening today. They're conscientious of the mindset that COVID's kind of created, and that they're doing stuff to give back in some way, show your performance to things that mean something to me. And so I think this had already taken on, but I think...

19:38
You have this collective, I don't want to call it depression, but I think there's this collective weight.

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or burden that are on people right now from everything that's happened. Even the people, I mean, knowing you're wrong, I'm talking about everyday people. You know, the millionaires have gotten richer. And I'm sure they're feeling it in some way, shape, or form, but I'm talking about more the common everyday person, I think all has a little bit of a, wearing an extra coat. I feel like I've had a jacket on the last seven months. You know, it's just like a little weighty. And so I think any of the brands that's back to kind of point to here,

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that can be relatable and not generic in that understanding in their communication. And I think that's gonna be huge next year and definitely one of their trends. Agility is not surprising to me because again things are changing quickly and ability to adapt. Removing and I think of agility as not reactiveness, which they talk about in this is isn't about deploying.

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quickly some new tactic per se. I think of agility more in the essence of removing friction and getting the bullshit out of the way of process and procedure. And being able to move quickly. We work with companies, big and small, and it never fails. The biggest ones we work with are the slowest ones.

21:09
it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy because they have all of these historical legacy processes that are in the way and they say they're gonna remove them and they don't because everyone's always justifying their position or things like that. And I think if companies will start to realize that we just need more people doing these things instead of 17 layers, I think you're gonna see that increase which then improves the process for the client or the end customer because you will deploy

21:39
with less friction and it will have both that human connection and purpose built into it. Spend more time on those things than the, well, you know, we always did it this way, Sam. You know, or we, you know, I needed, I need that to go through this, the 47th lawyer to look at it, you know. And again, we know anyone wants to get anything out there that's been brushed, but at the same time, you're going to see that. Trust, participation, talent transfer, again, all of these things make a ton of sense with

22:09
is a big one. And when I think of trust, yes, I want to trust the companies that I work with in a holistic way. I think this is about expectation and delivering on expectation. I think there's an expectation for consumers that your e-commerce store or your brick and mortar store or things that you do that you're going to know and understand what I expect and you're going to deliver on that. And I think that is building trust.

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And in yes, in a more macro sense, you could think about it as, what do I trust this company? Are their profits being recorded properly? You could think of ancillary things that might imply trust, which definitely matter, but I think this is as much about delivering on the expectation that a customer expects.

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you to know how they feel, to you to know what they expect, to deliver a seamless experience for them, and really deliver on that. We actually talked with Satie about that as well with Home's Plus, that same thing of building trust and confidence with the customers. And that was back to the supply chain because there's been somewhat, there was some increased demand in certain things while there was a decrease in the supply chain because of the impacts of COVID, certain things closing and all that things. And so if you're gonna have stuff online and say I'm gonna have it there in seven days,

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you better have it there in seven days. If you're out of stock of something, it better say it's out of stock, and you're gonna be 30 days. You know? Because I've dealt with this myself, some things we've ordered for the agency, and I had no idea, I just ordered it, and I wasn't expecting two day Amazon delivery, but it was like four weeks later. And I'm like, what? I got that, okay, I'm realistic, I'm reasonable. Customers, and people are reasonable right now. They understand, most people understand, but you gotta communicate that.

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You know, you've got to set it up. Whether it's your email flows, whether it's your online experience, whether it's your call line or face to face, do what you'll say you'll do and be clear on your communication. Do you feel like people are, when I'm saying people, I'm meaning like people in customer service of that business or whatever, like do you feel like people are afraid to almost have that kind of real communication? Because it's almost like that, because everything is just very uncertain right now.

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like I'm gonna guess that this is gonna get to you in two weeks, do you know what I mean? But then it's like when that comes to them and then it's like actually it's four weeks, I mean I feel like I would kind of be rather being my head a little bit like, okay. I think there is concern, I think the way you handle that when you have unknowns and your best assumption, you be up front with the customer. If that's an online experience you have in there and you're clear shipping terms, these products are coming directly from our manufacturer.

25:00
They should deliver in seven to 14 days. It's possible that they will take longer and we will email you with an update by day 10 or whatever. And just be clear. And that way if they needed it immediately, they go somewhere else. If they didn't need it and they wanna be loyal to you, you've been clear with them. I think consumers can take it. I think that's the biggest thing that brands are starting to learn, the ones that really succeed.

25:25
Consumers can take it. They get it. But you just have to communicate it. And I think there was this fear, well, leave it ambiguous or whatever, that that was the way to get the sale. I'm not gonna make the sale unless we're ambiguous. If we're ambiguous, we'll make the sale. But then you never keep them. It's back to lifetime value. How many one and done sales does it take to overcome that? The acquisition cost to get them there in the first place. All of those things have to be in consideration and that's all lines under trust.

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No, I liked that trust one. I felt like that was a very, I think that's gonna be coming up a lot more, and especially into 2021. And again, I know it's already been here. I know all these things have already been here. But I do just think that that human aspect of branding is becoming way more apparent for most every brand now, versus just the bigger brands realizing they can have the aesthetic. I think smaller brands are realizing, no, we can have this aesthetic, and we can have this human kind of feel,

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and energy through what we're branding. And I think more people are receptive to that because it's emotional, right? And I think that's important to be.

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highlighting with your brand. Because I mean, humans are humans because we have emotions, right? You're not gonna get your AI person, you know, because they don't have emotion. Like, you know? But. That robot can't convey emotion. But he might can if he helps you get what you want. That makes you happy. But no, B to H, business to human. Exactly. Been talking about that for years and I didn't coin that, but it's just, it always made sense to me. Like the first time I heard that,

27:05
or eight years ago.

27:07
CMO at one of my previous lifetime jobs, but I heard that and I was like, that really stuck with me. I started using it and I've used it ever since. Cause it just made sense. And now I mean it's becoming full mainstream. And I'm glad it is to be honest. Yeah, it should be. It makes sense. It's like we buy, whether it's B to B marketing or B to C, until we're taken over by robots, the person on the other end is human. Just be human. Be human in your communication and your messaging and your emails.

27:37
It doesn't have to be so corporatey. Here's our band standards and we are here to help our customers because we help our customers help. And that's great, you should help your customers, right? But just have that, like hey. It's like hey Sally, you know, we're here for you. Times are tough. We gotta be honest, our supply chains have been interrupted from all this.

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Hello, you know, talk to me. So I was like, okay, I get it, I understand. And yeah. Yeah, anyway, all this aside. Now I'm looking forward to see like how 21 goes and I know that's something we're gonna be highlighting on the Radcast with other guests, just kind of where marketing trends are going in 21, what other people's opinions are. So that's kind of where we're at now and then.

28:24
I'm excited for Tuesday's episode with Dave. That'll be super exciting. So tune in for Tuesday's Dave Gerhart, CMO of Privy. And we had a great talk, 30 plus minutes. And I think you can get a lot from that. And I think that's all for today, Riley. Appreciate it. Yeah, it was a great episode. And we'll see you guys next time. See you.

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To listen to full episodes or to contact us, visit us on the web at theradcast.com. Or follow our host, at Ryan Alford on Instagram. Thanks for tuning in.