Business Growth Architect Show

Ep #122: Nicole Zeno: How to Achieve Better Results by Focusing on Key Marketing Strategies

• Beate Chelette/Nicole Zeno • Episode 122

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"Master the art of navigating buyer personas and strategic marketing alignment with Nicole Zeno. Gain actionable insights to simplify your marketing strategies effectively.”

In this episode of the Business Growth Architect Show we introduce Nicole Zeno, a marketing expert from Clever Cow Media. With her extensive background in entrepreneurship and her passion for connecting businesses with their core audiences, Nicole starts the episode by sharing her unique journey from growing up in an entrepreneurial family to carving her own path in the marketing and business world.

She reflects on her early days working in her parents' software web company and how this experience planted the seeds of her entrepreneurial spirit. Nicole moved to Los Angeles, where she worked in the music industry, doing everything from journalism and photography to directing and producing music videos. This period taught her the importance of storytelling and emotional connection, elements she emphasizes are essential in marketing. She emphasizes the overwhelming nature of marketing where business owners and marketing departments face burnout due to the "more is better" philosophy.

Nicole introduces the concept of strategic alignment, where your business needs to focus on activities that directly contribute to your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). She walks you through a practical exercise she uses with her clients, encouraging you to envision your business in five years and define clear KPIs that will guide your marketing efforts.

Nicole shares a compelling example from her show, "What the Frac," where she discussed fractional executives and the common mistakes they observe in marketing strategies. She highlights the disconnect that often happens when businesses either under or overestimate their marketing needs. Nicole advocates for a data-driven approach to your marketing, where your assumptions are tested, and your strategies are adjusted based on performance. She demystifies the data aspect of marketing, encouraging you to lean into metrics to refine your strategies continually.

The episode takes a turn towards the more human aspects of marketing as Nicole discusses alignment of core values and spirituality in business. She argues that your business suffers when your strategies and operations don't align with your core values and the lifestyles of their founders and teams. This misalignment can lead to burnout and a sense of disconnect.

Nicole cites an example of a marketing agency founded by two mothers who structured their business around their core value of motherhood, demonstrating how alignment can lead to fulfilling and successful business practices. She emphasizes that authenticity and alignment are increasingly important in marketing, as customers are drawn to brands that resonate with their values and experiences.


Resources Mentioned:

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Nicole Zeno:

Hi, my name is Nicole Zeno and I am the CEO and founder of Clever Cow Media and the co host of What the Frac. I have worked in marketing for a long time and I'm here on the business growth architect show to reveal to you tips to grow your business without the burnout. And you may feel a little more aligned at the end of this episode. So check it out anywhere you listen to podcasts, and see you there.

BEATE CHELETTE:

And hello, fabulous person, Beate Chelette. Here I am the host of the business growth architecture. And I want to welcome you to today's episode, where we discuss how to navigate strategy and spirituality to achieve time and financial freedom. truly successful people have learned how to master both a clear intention and a strategy to execute that in his spiritual practice that will help them to stay in alignment and on purpose. Please enjoy the show and listen to what our guest today has to say about this very topic. Welcome back Beate Chelette here with Nicole Zeno, from the Clever Cow Media in Arizona. And today we're going to talk about something that many of you are struggling with. And that is figuring out which is that one strategy that you should be using, and how to avoid burnout with all the 10,000 things that everybody out there is telling you to do. Simultaneous all at once. Nicole, I'm so excited to have you on the call. Thank you for being here.

Nicole Zeno:

Yeah, thank you for letting me talk about this topic. It's such an important.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Exactly. So before we get started, tell us a little bit about who you are, and what is it that you do and what problems do you solve for your clients?

Nicole Zeno:

Yeah, I have a really interesting backstory. My parents were entrepreneurs, they owned a software web company that I worked at really early on in my life, I was always into the entrepreneurial spirit and decided, like most teens that I did not want to work with my parents, and so went out on my own and got a degree around video and design, and really was drawn to those pieces. Anyone who knows me knows that I don't do math. I'm not great at math. Like I'm not in those types of places. I was very drawn to design and storytelling, and how do you tell the story and the emotional response that you get from that. And so I graduated my degree, went out to LA and started working in the music industry did music journalism, photography, directed and produced music videos, and then realize that there was a space that needed a challenge in the music industry, in connection? Right. You know, it was during this time where people stopped buying records and record labels wanted to have people pay for meet and greets. And we were really losing connection in the music industry. And so me and my brother built an app for musicians that they can help them connect with their fans, and I fell in love with building businesses. So since then, I have worked in startup, I've exited multiple startups, I've worked in Fortune 100, marketing and fortune 100 Business ops, I have worked with small businesses, pretty much the gamut runs. And basically, I step in and help people where they need to be helped. And what I've noticed is there's a big gap in strategy, there's a big gap in operations. So business and marketing operations. And what's happening in small business startup, and even in some of the larger businesses is that people are running themselves down, they're making themselves burnt out, because they're trying to do too much like most of us know, there is a million ways to make money, there's a million ways to market your business nowadays. And there's a million activities you could be doing, and people are trying to do them all, even if it doesn't, like, go back to ROI, even if they don't know how to measure it. And even if they're not being good at any of them. And it's really hurting our business owners, and even the directors and people who are running departments in these companies. Yeah,

BEATE CHELETTE:

I mean, that message resonates with me a lot. Because when I go out, and I look at what my colleagues and competitors are doing, and just the sheer volume of what you're being told to do, if you follow somebody like Alex Hormozi who has what a team of seven that pumps out, I don't even know 50 pieces of content a day that that goes on every social media, which is that even practical for somebody who is a normal, a normal business owner, and is set a strategy that I should be following. And then I have whatever the Grand Cardones and the Brendon Burchard, and whoever else is out there and they all say the same thing. They all say more is better. So you say more is not better. Tell me why that is?

Nicole Zeno:

Yeah, I think that for most of us and it's information overload who do we listen to? And a lot of the people out there who are the loudest are the ones who have maybe did it once or had a specific The industry of company and they did one thing really well had success. And now they're telling everyone you have to do it right. And so there's so much mixed information out there around what is actually necessary. And what happens with small, especially small businesses, startups, even some of the larger businesses is that we know that the teams are small, the resources are limited. We don't have an unlimited checkbook. And a lot of these people who are out there saying, I'm amazing, and I'm a team of one actually have a team of 12, right behind them. And so what's happening is that people are taking this advice, they're trying it out, they're not seeing results, but they think they have to do it. And they just think they're not doing it well enough. I host a show called What the Frac. We just launched it not too long ago to help fractional executives, business owners, people like that think through these processes, right? Why are we picking these different activities, and are one of our main taglines is you don't need another course what you're doing, we need to implement correctly. And I think that a lot of that comes back to processes, it comes back to thinking through, what does the future look like? We run through with our clients this like exercise of looking at the big picture, what does it look like in five years? Is there a business out there that you could have tomorrow? That's what you're aiming for? And then we say, Okay, what's the KPIs are gonna get us there? What are the marketing activities, then? What are the campaigns that are going to get us to the KPIs? And what are the marketing activities that are going to get you to the campaigns to get you the KPIs to get you to the big picture, and a lot of times, it's not what the people who are running those departments are actually doing. So for instance, if you are, let's say, this podcast right now, right, and you think you have to put out you're spending all of your time editing, Instagram, tik, Tok, Pinterest, all these things, and we come in, and we look at your strategy, and we say, Hey, you can get three times the amount of traffic, if we just focused on Pinterest. And we take out all the time you're spending on these things. Now you have all this time to think about the other pieces, right? So we really are thinking, what's the foundation? What are the activities that are going to get us to the KPIs? Right?

BEATE CHELETTE:

Now, I like this a lot. So I have a really good example that I think is very timely, ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter. Now x, it has become, in my opinion, an absolutely unusable tool. For anybody wanting to grow their business. It is a tool of grumpy, dissatisfied mean people that say horrible things to each other. And it's all opinion based. I look at it and I go, why am I even here. And I have two Twitter accounts. So or x accounts, whatever that's even standing for. And so there has to be a conscious decision, which we made. So we said, well, we're gonna for sure, delete one. So we cutting this down by half because nothing's happening. There's no clicks, no likes, no forwards, no shares, no anything. The other piece is that we need to look at platforms, to your point, like Facebook has lost a lot of relevancy. And with the inability to advertise as successful as we used to be able to, it's become very expensive from your strategic perspective is so you say when you talk to your clients, you take them through this exercise of stripping what's not necessary and explaining to them what they need and what they don't need.

Nicole Zeno:

Yeah, and it really comes down to three things like you just made a really good point. Number one, who are your buyers? Where are they at? And it's not just who are your buyers? Right? I was talking to someone the other day, who's buyers, our CEO CMOS, like executive level people? Well, if you think about it, let's say that executives looking for a service, or we're a software, they're not going out there and Googling themselves, they're telling someone in their team who's trusted to go do the research, right? So it's not just who are we who is your buyer, but also who is influential to that buyer? Right? So for instance, you're doing, you're doing marketing for retirement home, well, you might not be actually trying to hit the people who are going to be in the retirement home or like assisted living facility, you're going to be hitting their family members, the kids who are putting them in there, right? So you have to think through the buyer persona, where are they? Where are they're getting their information from and who is trusted in their circle decision circle. Second piece to this is what is your goals? Long term, I would even argue that this might be the most important piece. I think this is also the piece that gets overlooked, right? So a lot of times when I talk to executives, they bring us up in as fractional CMOS. They try to hide a lot of these pieces of their business but from us they think marketing doesn't need to know these things. And they think that it's just going to be the same same piece over and over again, right? Well, maybe not right. So if you are looking to exit the company and sell the company in three years, my marketing plan is going to become pletely different than if you're looking to expand membership, or you're looking to become a thought leader, right? These things change. So what the business looks like in five years is going to change. And where you are now, are you in maintenance mode? Are you in growth mode? Are you in Product Validation mode? So often we get startups who are in Product Validation mode, but they want to they're doing activities for growth.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Oh, they want to scale all the time. Yeah. They want to be out there read Eos, or traction, and they're like scale scale scale, like, what are you scaling? You got nothing to scale? You don't have a business yet? Exactly.

Nicole Zeno:

Yeah. And so my marketing plan and and even budget is going to be very different. If you're scaling, or you're validating your product, right? Like completely different pieces, or a third major piece of this equation is going to be budget, right? Do you have the resources? Or where do you feel most comfortable spending those resources, if you have a large budget, and you understand that, let's say thought leadership is going to take a long time to build, then, and you're okay, spending that money and not seeing a return right away? Great, let's do it. But if you have a small budget, and you need that money to be returned right away, we shouldn't be writing blog posts and trying to build our thought leadership, we should be using other channels. So just because your people might be on Facebook, or you might be on Twitter, it doesn't mean that this is the time to do it, we may have to phase that in later on as your goals change. And that all of that culminates in the data that you need to look at those KPIs, the data that you're collecting, and a lot of marketers shy away from data, because executives don't understand where the data comes from, and how it works together and marketing. Unfortunately, the attribution is not there. And so they shy away from data and marketers need to be leaning into data to make sure that we're hitting every quarter. Okay, this is not working. Let's take this out. This is working, let's increase this right? Can I just explain one thing about marketing, I don't know if everyone knows this, but marketing is making an assumption, validating that assumption, and then building the plan, right. And what most companies want is they want someone to come in at a high paid number, and say, This is how you're going to make your money. And that's just not how it is we have the higher paid the marketer means the more experience, so they have to make less assumptions and validate last. And that's the only reason that they're higher paid, but they still need to validate based on data. And that's the same thing with buyer personas, the same thing with campaigns, ads, anything that you're doing, you need to make an assumption, our people are here, they're going to relate to this messaging. Let's now validate it, let's take six months of this messaging, let's validate it by success, success looks like this number. And then let's review it and decide if we have to pivot. And that's marketing for you, that makes

BEATE CHELETTE:

a lot of sense. Looking at this, from the perspective of people go like, well, I don't need to know how to grow my business, I just need a marketing plan. And I need somebody who's very good at marketing, and then all my problems are gonna go away, you and I know because we've been in this for a while, is that this is the part that comes very far down the road, because we have to have all these other pieces in place we have to in order when we talk strategies, like what is it that we're building? Who is our buyer persona or our avatar? And then are we is this product, a product that this avatar even wants to buy? Where are these avatars? Where are they hanging out? And then how do I reach them? How much money do I want to spend? So there's so many steps that kind of go into that? What would you say to somebody who says, Alright, fine, I'm, you know, I built it, I know what I'm doing. I'm now in the growth phase, and I'm looking at marketing, what's the most successful marketing strategy you've ever used? And I bet that you probably gonna get asked that exact question every day.

Nicole Zeno:

I think that you're you're 100% right? There's a lot of myths, right? The myth is I don't need marketing right now I'm building the business. The myth is the product is so good that it sells so well.

BEATE CHELETTE:

People just gonna want it once they find out that

Nicole Zeno:

it kills me every time or the myth. I don't need a marketing team. I have a sales team. Right. And there's lots of there's lots of these myths. One thing I would say is the most successful marketing plan you're going to have is twofold. One is going to be thinking about marketing holistically in your business, right? Marketing should be touching almost every single department. So let's say you are primarily b2b, sales outreach type of company, you should still have a marketing team that is building assets of supporting the sales team, right they should have at their fingertips, things assets that They can send to potential clients and say, Hey, we thought of you about this and build relationships with maybe they're not doing social media, maybe they're not doing email marketing, but they're still helping with the messaging company, let's say you are in that growth in that phase where you're not growing, necessarily users, but you're growing the product. Marketing should be involved in those core values, they should be involved in the messaging. So if you want marketing, if you are in a product validation stage, you want marketing involved in buyer personas, you want marketing quality in your core values in your messaging, I've had clients who come in with messaging that's really off, because they wait until the products done, then they wait till they see that people are buying or not relating, and then they bring marketing in. Or I see clients, especially startups who go for investment, and don't calculate the correct marketing budget. And so now they're trying to play catch up afterwards, with marketing rights marketing needs to be holistically a part of your business, you need to have them on your executive team, you need to have them in those planning conversations or in some way, giving them the insight and transparency to do what they do. And at that point, you'll see a plan being made. The second piece to this that's really important is that not all marketers are created equal. And this is really important with small businesses and startups, because what happens is, they find a marketer for $30,000, who's just out of school, and they expect them to build the right plan and know everything they need to know to do. There are multiple types of marketers, there's the strategic cmo level marketer, they are the people with the experience, they're the people who know how to read all of the data and the reporting and to say, Okay, our assumption was correct, or it was wrong, here's the time to pivot, they're going to build that plan that's successful. You have the executional. Marketers, they're the ones who are cheaper, and are going to execute on a day to day. But so often, they're asked to build a plan, they don't know how to build. And so when you marry the two of those together, that's when you see the magic. And that's where like something like a fractional cmo comes in where small businesses can't afford a CMO level person, or they're paying them a lot of money and expecting them to execute and they can't, right you have the fractional come in and help build the plan, the executional on the day to day at a lower costs, and be cautious of agency, most oftentimes agency model, what happens is you should be using them to help you execute on the stuff that's over and above in a lot of times, that's what I see is that they go to an agency thinking they're gonna get strategy, they actually just pay higher price for execution. And if you marry all that together with a great strategy, your marketing plan is gonna be amazing. Yeah. So

BEATE CHELETTE:

what I'm hearing is that there is a lot of education that's necessary for a small, medium sized businesses to really understand what marketing is. And it's somewhat shocking, because we talk about marketing so much. And everybody always talks about the marketing plan the marketing this. And yet, at the same time, there seems to be such a fundamental misunderstanding of, you know, how marketing is different from sales, which I still hear all the time, and how to put this marketing plan in place. So let's make a quick pause. And we'll be right back after this message. Have you ever wondered what the actual amount of your true earning potential is in this market? To find out what your talent is worth? Take our quiz at what'syourtalentworth.com, you will find out your actual earning potential amount by using our proprietary profit formula. Enjoy the quiz. And again, the URL is what'syourtalentworth.com. So Nicole, we just spoke a lot about the strategy, rounding, finding a good marketing strategy using data to be very specific about measuring on what impact you're making, on what platform to to see what works for you, and to do less, and to do it better. Do you subscribe to this idea that I've heard a couple of times master one general first and then move on to the next? Yes.

Nicole Zeno:

And now. I would say I wouldn't put a number on one. But what we normally do is put a number on KPIs. Right. So we say okay, realistically, we find that most companies can't do more than four to six KPIs at a time, they just cannot focus on it. So we can generally look at between three and you know, three and five KPIs. Depending on how big they are. If they're huge KPIs, then we're going to get down to the three number if they're smaller, and we can check them off. Then we go up to that five or six number, and from there we build marketing activities that are going to hit those KPIs. Now, with that being said, I think that most people Um, especially small business owners do not have the patience to master one channel at a time. And they just don't have the budgets to do it or anything like that. So they need to really be thinking through a few things. I like to break it up into 1/3 1/3 1/3 1/3 of the stuff is things that we can knock off the plate and see improvement right away. 1/3 of stuff is the long term game, right? What are we going to be building for five years from now, because marketing is not an overnight thing, in a lot of activities. And then the third, last third is kind of that middle ground, we know it's going to hit our KPIs. We know we have time for it. And a lot of it is just like, oh, every day maintenance marketing, right, the emails that have to go out the social media that might have to be posted. But all of this is back to those buyer personas, right? So my clients who I was talking to you about before, who had $100,000, in the marketing budget, we saw that they were using it for social media, when really when we looked at their buyer personas, 99% of their sales came from their sales team, and not one hour was being sent spent on supporting their sales team, right? How do we take the most amount? Your your efforts and make sure we're getting ROI from them? And that's really, why would I think

BEATE CHELETTE:

I like this, I like this a lot. So switching gears over to our second big topic on the show spirituality How does spirituality play any role in this KPI? Hardcore? Let's look at the strategy piece that you do. Because sometimes, this might even come across as contradictory.

Nicole Zeno:

I think spirituality means a lot of things to a lot of different people, right? So it's really about finding, I want to call it core values, right? I want to say that it's finding the people, you built a product, you built a service for specific people, right? Just to solve a challenge. Who cares if these people over here don't like what you built, it's not aligned with them, right. So finding that alignment, finding who your people are, whether that is your team that you're hiring, it's the processes you're building, it's the lifestyle that you're working in, right, let's say, for instance, there is a marketing agency up in Colorado. And it was started by founded by two women who were mothers, and everyone who works there, and the clients they serve are all mother owned businesses, because maybe they don't work on Fridays, because or their, their schedule is a little bit flexible, right? Because for them, that's their core value. That's their, that's what feeds their soul. Right. And so they built a business a successful one around that. So I think that with when we're talking about burnout, which is something we keep talking about, where P business owners, entrepreneurs experienced burnout is when their product, their processes, their lifestyle does not align with who they are. And if we want to call it spirituality, we can, but it doesn't align with their goal, their futures, their, what they see for their life. And then they become burnt out because they're constantly doing activities that are bringing them further away from the end goal from whatever is feeding their soul. Right. So for instance, I think in here in the States, we pick careers, based on not based on the lifestyle we want, we pick it based on Well, I want to be a doctor, I want to make a certain amount of money. And what I truly think is we have to go back and switch that around. Here's the lifestyle I want at the end of the day, here is what feeds my soul at the end of the day. Now let's build a career that fits into that, right. So let's say that's doing that's living in a small town, and being able to have your local shops, it's doing more charity work, it's having a four day work week or making sure that your employees are taken care of on a different level than in a corporate job, you can make that happen. And when you're doing that you feel in alignment your customers feel in alignment. And the one thing we are seeing in marketing is that alignment and authenticity are going way further than you know than anything else that if you're out of alignment customers are not picking your products.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Yeah. So what I'm hearing from you here is that the way you look at spirituality is really from a resonance and an alignment as you just said, perspective to say spirituality doesn't necessarily have to be religion or a particular mindset. It can also be a core belief system, that that puts out what you really truly believe in and you know, as a as a formerly single mother, I have to say that my core value was it couldn't work after 445 I had to be a daycare at five. That was non negotiable. So there were no happy hours and no after work outings or lots of client dinners. It was lunches, and breakfasts because there was no other way. That's what I had to do as a single parent, I had to be there for my daughter at the end of the day. So if we look at spirituality from that perspective, that it is about the clarity that you talked about. And you said, that's what you start with, with your clients to say, well, what is it that you want? Who are you what's important to you? And then that has to transpire throughout every area of your, of your business? Because then there is this alignment and the resonance. So when you do you see that there's, the results are different, when this is in place, when people are really living in that in that sweet spot? Because marketing is marketing is not always very spiritual. If I can just say like that, right? Yeah. You know, where I'm going with a question is like, is there a conflict? Or how do you reckon How do you reconcile this? Yeah,

Nicole Zeno:

I think that, like you just said, right, you your thing, your alignment was that you couldn't work after four, right? What I say to clients a lot of times is, okay, this is what you imagine your business to be, right? This is, when you ask someone, where are you going to be in five years, the first thing they come up with is revenue, they come up with the amount of team members, maybe they have, or the amount of users and they start talking in these numbers that are really vague, and basically just what they think success is, right? I think that you know, our society, we think of like, okay, I want to be the next Uber, I want to be the next Amazon, and they look at the numbers, we need X amount of users X amount of revenue. And a lot of times, that's where we start, and I say to a client, okay, we can make, if I said to you, I can make your company into a $2 million company, but you're gonna have to work until 7pm. Every night, you might be like, Okay, I could do that for a few years. Or maybe you start stretching your limits or your alignment, and then you start feeling burnt out to write because every time that phone calls, every time you get an email, every time you have a task, or a dinner, that's after that four o'clock time, because that's your alignment point, you're going to it's going to feel painful. But if now we're talking about let's okay, maybe you are only a million dollar company, or you're only a half a million dollar company, but you get those alignment points in. So every meeting is a lunch meeting, that same meeting, that was a dinner meeting doesn't feel as painful, because now you're committed, you're aligned, and you can work and be more productive towards it. With that being said, think about the products you use on a daily basis. They're the ones that had a story that resonated with you that aligned with you. That was very clear. And what I see a lot in marketing is that when the messaging is not aligning to customers, it's generally because when we talk to the executives who are building that messaging, they're not aligned, or it, they're conflicted. And if you think about business as a series of choices, every day, we make small decisions. And those small decisions slowly either get us closer to our, our main big vision, or they get us further away from that main, big, big vision. If you're not checking back in and aligning, it's really easy to look back into yours and say, we're not talking to the right people, the products not in the right place. We went where the money was, and not where the alignment was. And that's where you start feeling birds out. All

BEATE CHELETTE:

right. So I what I'm taken away from our conversation is a much more intensive intensified search to these alignment points. I actually really liked this term that you just mentioned and to say, Are my alignment points actually present we do know that when you are in alignment, and there is resonance, energetic resonance, success is more likely because you are removing all these friction points how you operate. So for somebody, Nicole that has now heard about you and wants to find out more, where do we send them back in to learn more about you? Yeah,

Nicole Zeno:

absolutely. They can find clever cow media, clevercowmedia.com. And on all social media, check us out at What the Frac we are a web show on YouTube, as well as you can find us on LinkedIn. And what thefracshow.com And you can find me on socials under Nicole Zeno as well. Please reach out I'm happy to help or answer any questions.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Thank you so much. And that's it for us today. Thank you so much for listening, or watching this episode of the business growth architect. And until next time, and goodbye. So appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for listening to the entire episode. Please subscribe to the podcast. Give us a five star review a comment and share this episode with one more person so that you can help us help more people. Thank you again until next time, Bye bye

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