“Authentic” “Storytelling”

Tom Nixon (00:01.294)
Welcome back everyone to Bullhorns Bulls Eyes. I am, I guess your host, co-host Tom Nixon with my co-host Curtis. Have I got an episode for you today?

Curtis Hays (00:12.101)
you do. Yeah. So I know you are the host and I like to call myself the color, right? Isn’t there like the color man you usually like in baseball or whatever, right? So you got the guy who’s calling the plays and then you got the guy who kind of like throws out the stats and he kind of like knows, okay, this player’s batting this and in this situation, right?

Tom Nixon (00:17.952)
Okay, all right.

Tom Nixon (00:33.474)
Yeah, so I like how you position yourself as the person with all the answers and information, and I’m just the guy. Maybe I’m just the pretty face, right? So I got hired on my look. Yes, yes. Well, this episode is right into real. Because I think if I had chat GPT go and scrape our episodes from the season and say what were the two most common words that Curtis used throughout the episode so far? One would be authenticity and the other one would be storytelling.

Curtis Hays (00:41.717)
The good, you’ve got the voice for radio, right?

Tom Nixon (01:00.908)
And today we have a guest on who is going to learn us all the finer points of authentic storytelling as a means of marketing and effective communications. And I would love to welcome on Megan Swigert from Kinetic Marketing. Megan, welcome.

Meagan Sweigart (01:17.246)
Thank you for having me.

Tom Nixon (01:19.384)
Good to have you. So we hear that you are something of a storyteller or Kinetic specializes in the art of storytelling. But first, what’s your story? Give us a little bit about your background and what inspired the launch of Kinetic, which is a woman owned agency, correct?

Meagan Sweigart (01:36.542)
That’s correct. Yeah, so my background, my story, if you will, I actually started my career in architecture, as in the building type of architecture, which is a strange entry point into marketing and communications. But the way that that started was I love to be creative and visual creativity always came naturally to me. I love to write and that sort of thing.

When I got into the actual career of architecture, I wasn’t really ever dealing with people. And that was the thing that kind of was my springboard into becoming a communications professional, really kind of looking at what I was getting out of my career, not just, you know, the financial or leadership aspect, but what could I, what would make me happier? And so I made a big pivot and I went into communications.

Though I’ve done internal communications, I’ve done change management communications, I have done lots and lots of marketing communications. And so that has been my journey. I’ve worked on the agency side. I’ve worked in house. I’ve worked for Accenture, one of the largest companies in the world. I’ve worked for startups and now I work for myself. Katie and I started Kinetic. And the reason we did that was again, focused on the people and

the communication style that is really important to us. We are an agency, but we actually refer to ourselves more as a collective. And the reason we have selected that term is that unlike the traditional agency model where you’ve got, you know, your senior leaders going out and pitching and, you know, getting great work, then bringing it back and then giving it to your very junior strategist, designers, account people. And, you know, it’s, it’s frankly, in my opinion, kind of a broken model.

It’s not great for the people that work there, having worked in agencies myself. It is a pretty brutal existence. You have a lot of turnover. And then for the clients, you might love this senior strategist that you met with and are so excited for them to transform your brand, but they’re not actually doing the work. So what we have come up with is this collective model, which is essentially a group of people who are all independent. Everyone works for themselves.

Meagan Sweigart (03:58.674)
but we don’t want to just be freelancers. We don’t want to just be in a more transactional relationship where you need this thing written, here you go. Instead, it functions like a strategic agency. So we all go to market under one brand and our clients get the best of the best. It is only senior people. So the people who are selling the work are the people who are doing the work. And we work both as a traditional agency would on

you know, kind of staffing with a particular account team, working on a particular discrete project. But we also have a fractional side of the business, which is to have our senior strategists actually plug in and sit with our clients and fill gaps that they have there. So we really just kind of wanted to reinvent what an agency looks like now. You know, COVID changed everything in terms of

going into the office, working mostly locally, you know, for smaller businesses. Sure, big businesses like Accenture have worked globally forever, but, you know, smaller agencies really didn’t. And so we’re really leaning into that. And also to the fact that, you know, a lot of the best talent in this space has gone to work for themselves. So how do we harness that incredible talent to bring the best of the best to our clients?

Tom Nixon (05:19.052)
Yeah, Curtis, you remember the super friends gang that there was a Bizarro Superman and a Bizarro Batman and a Bizarro this. So I feel like we’re talking to the Bizarro kaleidoscope here. It’s like exactly what you and I are building, but they’re women and we’re men. So it’s like Megan, everything you just described is exactly our model. It’s hilarious. In all three of us now on the show, Curtis all fell backwards into the marketing business from some other field. So

Curtis Hays (05:28.776)
Yes.

Curtis Hays (05:33.105)
We are.

Tom Nixon (05:48.258)
This is interesting. Did you hear like.

Meagan Sweigart (05:50.174)
was so interesting, yeah.

Curtis Hays (05:51.605)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we, we, I started doing this in back in 2017 without really realizing what I was doing. It was just sort of filling need and bringing people in on projects to just solve problems for clients. And then, and then Tom told me a couple of years ago, you’re doing the team Lance model. So that’s, that’s what we call it. Megan is team Lansing and Tom that that’s, that’s actually was, was coined by somebody else. Correct.

Meagan Sweigart (06:10.974)
Team Lamps, I love that. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (06:17.306)
Yeah, Brian Clark, Brian Clark, who is the invented copy blogger. He invented content marketing in a lot of ways. And then he says, like what you just said, Megan, this is the model for not the future, the present, because we don’t need to be tied down to expensive offices in certain parts of the world that we can only service. So yeah, we feel you. Let’s get into what it is that you do in Curtis. Do you have our notes and Freddie? I want you to ask this question.

Meagan Sweigart (06:30.867)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (06:45.876)
My gosh, okay. I gotta be prepared here. I’m not prepared.

Meagan Sweigart (06:50.238)
Okay.

Tom Nixon (06:50.35)
Okay, I’m going to text it to you.

Curtis Hays (06:51.828)
You gotta tee me up for this question.

Tom Nixon (06:55.402)
No, this is right in your wheelhouse friend. Okay. You’re seeing the sausage made in real time. Everyone. Yep. Ready? Here we go. Every phone on you.

Curtis Hays (06:58.004)
All right, now we’re going to talk about keywords, aren’t we?

Curtis Hays (07:05.804)
I do. know what it is. So, we’re living in a world right now and a lot of clients are coming to us and they’re saying like, we need SEO. We need SEM. Can you help us with keywords? you optivate? We use the right keywords on our pages.

Tom Nixon (07:08.078)
Okay, ask the next question.

Curtis Hays (07:29.65)
I’m starting to have some different conversations in my responses to those clients to say, look, we’re living in a world today where we’re not focused on the keyword. We’re focused on who your target audience is, who are you speaking to? And we need to create language that matches that target audience. We’re not writing for a search engine. We’re not writing for an algorithm. We’re writing for people. And that’s a mindset that you guys are under, is it not?

Meagan Sweigart (07:55.65)
It is, I could not agree with you more. In addition to the SEM SEO conversation, which, you know, the bottom line is traffic to every website is down. And that’s because of Gen.ai. That’s not how people are just not consuming the same, consuming information the same way that they were two years ago. I mean, it’s the Wild West. So, you know, on the one hand, you’ve got our School of Thought, which

you know, in my biased opinion is the correct school of thought. Then you have kind of the other end of the spectrum, which is optimize everything for Gemini. And what’s interesting about that is they can kind of work together because when I go to chat GPT and I ask, you know, where should I go for vacation this summer? are my parameters. It’s going to give me an answer and it’s going to pull from content.

that answered that question in a human way. And that is the interesting thing about optimizing for AI right now is A, nobody really knows how to do it yet. And B, what we’re actually seeing is that the more kind of human focus language is what’s coming up, we’re not writing for Google anymore. So you could even say that writing for humans in a human tone and really giving the answers to the questions that we’re all asking.

is the best way to rank. So I’ll be very interested to see how that landscape continues to shift. But in terms of that authentic storytelling piece, I think that, yes.

Tom Nixon (09:31.336)
yes. Let me just point out for the record. The question was, how do you define authentic storytelling in today’s marketing world? And Curtis didn’t want to say authentic and storytelling one more time. So he skirted around the issue. Or there. Yeah. So what I mean, seriously, what is authentic storytelling? Because those are kind of two over. No offense, Curtis, two overused words in the marketing world. They’re becoming something of jargon. So let’s define it and let’s talk about what we’re really trying to.

Curtis Hays (09:42.644)
I knew we’d get there. I knew we’d get there.

Meagan Sweigart (09:46.654)
We’re there. We’ve made it.

Curtis Hays (09:59.029)
Well, and since we paused, let me add something to what Megan said too. And ChatGPT also, when you do that search, that what is in a search, it’s when you do that prompt and you ask ChatGPT that question, and yes, you’ll give it parameters, but it also knows everything about you that you’ve asked it prior and the information you’ve given it. So it has that memory and that memory is about you. So again, this like, this fact that you’re writing for a

Meagan Sweigart (10:19.161)
Yes.

Curtis Hays (10:28.468)
person, the LLM connect you with the people because the LLMs know so much more about you than say Google did just simply because you had a Gmail account and it was tracking behaviors you were doing. Where the LLM I think is getting at a much deeper level to getting to know who their users are, which then can connect answers to, you know, businesses basically. Yeah. Brands.

Meagan Sweigart (10:54.938)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (10:58.952)
So talk about that authentic storytelling. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (10:59.18)
Yeah. So, yes, but that was a good interruption because a great segue into you’re not writing for a generalized machine, right? You’re writing for everyone’s going to have their own trained LLMs. So for you to, you know, approach this as if you’re going to figure out the secret sauce. I don’t think there is a secret sauce. Every human is going to have their own LLM and their own trained agents. So

All the more reason back to authentic storytelling is to tell those stories in a human way about humans to humans, right, Megan?

Meagan Sweigart (11:29.97)
Yes, absolutely. And it’s amazing to me how many brands have a bit of an identity crisis going on. Because at the core, you’re telling your authentic story, you got to know who the characters are to begin with, what the plot’s going to be, what the challenges are going to be, what the story arc is going to be. And if you don’t even understand what your business stands for, what makes you different, what the rest of the competitive landscape looks like.

what your targets want and need and what’s keeping them up at night and what are they thinking about. If you don’t know any of those things, then you can’t tell a story that’s going to be compelling to your audience. So there’s a certain amount of like, you know, digging into the psychology of your brand, if you will, and understanding who you are, what you do, why it matters, why it’s different.

Tom Nixon (12:17.934)
Mm.

Meagan Sweigart (12:22.122)
Once you’ve got that, and that sounds a lot simpler than it is, because it is a big, you know, there a of stakeholders involved. It’s a big effort, but it’s very important. Once you’re there, then you want the most important thing that the biggest error I see is brands that are leading with me, me, me, me, My brand does this. I do this. We’re awesome. We did this.

The second, I mean, imagine being at a cocktail party and someone just walks up to you with no preamble and it says, I’m really great. Like it just, doesn’t work. And so a big part of that authentic storytelling is, the acknowledgement of the person that you’re talking to acknowledgement of how they’re feeling, what they’re facing, the, you know, potential for risk that might happen in the future. So starting with that and

talking about it in human terms, like we’re talking about authentic storytelling as being a jargony phrase, which I agree, not using jargon, speaking to them in plain language. I always I had a mentor a long time ago that said to me, people don’t buy from businesses, they buy from people. So if your brand does not appeal to people on a personal level, you’re done. It’s just it’s not going to work. So coming back to kind of the storytelling element of it, I think the biggest thing

to think about is number one, making sure that your customer is the hero of the story. You are the helper or the guide. And then being very clear about how you get them to where they need to go. If you can do that and then get that message across all of your channels and then tailor it as you get down the funnel, start to get into the how, start to get into the proof points, start to get into the building sense of urgency.

That is how you leverage storytelling to be a tool and stand out because not that many brands are doing it well.

Tom Nixon (14:21.742)
Wow. I mean, I see Curtis is chuckling that I’m chuckling because again, it’s like we’re talking to bizarre Curtis and Tom here.

Curtis Hays (14:31.06)
Whoever got you on this podcast obviously did a really good job getting, doing their research. because you know, you, you would actually think our audience, like we set this whole thing up to like basically. Reinforce everything that we’ve been talking about for the last, you know, 10, 12 episodes, maybe more, right?

Tom Nixon (14:36.993)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (14:50.22)
Right. Yeah. And I got we should point out just nakedly honest. Like this is the first time I’ve ever spoken with Megan. We didn’t even have a pre show listeners know how little prep I do. Teasing. But this is like so fortuitous because this is like you’re speaking our language. I we call it. We did an episode a few ago that laid our model over the sales funnel model and over the race model. And our model is a messaging is why how what? Which is that? Why is that?

Meagan Sweigart (14:56.72)
Yeah.

Meagan Sweigart (15:18.482)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (15:19.402)
heroes, the hero of the story. We always say it’s not you. It’s the customer, the listener, whatever it is. And you got to first connect with their why Curtis. mean, this is like an epiphany for you more recently, I guess, but it’s like it’s the most effective way to engage that audience and say, yeah, I understand your pain. As a matter of fact, I felt it in the past and we’ve developed a way to make that go away. How does that sound before you even tell them what it is that you’re selling?

Meagan Sweigart (15:48.221)
Mm-hmm, exactly.

Tom Nixon (15:51.182)
So is that what’s broken about how handle brands handle messaging in your they start with the here’s what we do because this is what Curtis and I have been saying all season. Here’s what we do screaming it from the Hilltops. This is the features, right? What was the analogy that somebody used? I think it was last week’s episode Curtis where they the product is head bandages. Remember?

And the messaging was all about how it’s form fitting and it won’t stick to your skin and all this stuff. And when really the only thing that the other person cares about currently is their neck is bleeding out. They don’t care about all your features, right? Curtis. Remember

Meagan Sweigart (16:30.166)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (16:31.764)
Right, right, we gotta stop the bleeding.

Tom Nixon (16:34.054)
Exactly. We’re stopping the bleeding. So he called it. His framework was all about mind states in communicating to the appropriate mind state at the appropriate time. But what are you seeing, Megan, in terms of what’s broken? Because we agree. I mean, you’re preaching our exact gospel.

Meagan Sweigart (16:34.577)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (16:47.412)
And I’ll add to that, and what we’re seeing when brands come to us and say, we want SEM, we want SEO, we want content marketing, whatever those types of things are. And if we take a look at their current brand positioning, what they’re saying just simply on looking at their homepage and their website, if that isn’t in alignment, and they’re just talking about themselves and not connecting with a customer at their problem, pain or aspiration, we have to then say, pause, wait a second.

before we can really do these activities, we need to figure out your brand platform. We need to figure out your voice, who’s your target audience, and what you’re gonna need to say to them to connect with them. And then we can start to do all these other activities because we’re in a world where if you’re not doing those types of things, you’re not connecting with audiences. So, are you seeing the same thing, Megan?

Meagan Sweigart (17:37.445)
No, absolutely. It seemed the same thing. It is amazing. know, if I’m in conversations with a prospective client and, know, often they’ll say like, hey, here’s where we’re at. Here’s what we do. Like they’ll very perfectly articulate their brand and what they do. And then I’ll go to the website.

And it’s like, this is not the same company. I have no idea what you do based on looking at this website, you know? And I think, know, often our marketers have the right instincts and they want to do this the right way. But talk about bureaucracy. So often if you’re an in-house marketer and you’re looking at this brand and you’re, let’s say you’re new, like we got to overhaul this, you know, we’re talking way too much about the product features.

Curtis Hays (18:03.005)
Right.

Meagan Sweigart (18:26.082)
We need to take this in a new direction. If you then run that up the chain and you’re head of product and you’re head of sales and you’re, you know, if let’s say it’s more of a tech company, like your VP of engineering, like any of these, these big stakeholders, the founder founders, yeah, don’t even get started on founders. Founders, know, they have a very specific vision for, for who their brand is. And they’re not always open to an expert coming in and saying, Hey guys,

Curtis Hays (18:45.192)
Yeah.

Meagan Sweigart (18:55.344)
Yeah, this is all great and it’s all accurate. But if we want to get in front of these people, this is what we need to lead with. So that can be a challenge to, know, I think sometimes it’s, it’s, you know, not, not realizing that there’s an issue, but then also I do think a lot of times marketers realize there’s an issue, but they don’t have the power to change it. So that’s another, the kind of like stakeholder alignment data can really help with that. So, you know, any data that can be pulled around

Curtis Hays (19:13.385)
Mm-hmm.

Meagan Sweigart (19:22.302)
You know, any testing that’s been done on messaging on websites, you know, different versions of sales presentations, things like that. Like any data that you can get if you’re in this situation where you’re trying to battle for revamping your brand, get those data points so that you can prove to your founder, your CEO, your CPO, whoever that it’s time.

Curtis Hays (19:45.202)
Yep. Yep. And what do you do, to get that data?

Tom Nixon (19:50.018)
Well, what I like to do is go directly to the sources themselves, the heroes and ask them, tell me about your story. We asked them the journey like, cause we want to tell these stories back to the client. A lot of times our client has never heard the entire story. They picked it up somewhere in the middle, which is this person reached out to me and said they wanted to hire me. Right. And so they, and then there’s the happily ever after what they missed was what led up to that. And so we want to understand.

to our clients clients, what was life like before you even went looking for a solution? Like what, what led you to the point where you said, I can’t live like this anymore. I have to go find a better way. And that’s where the story starts, right? And that’s where the story for your next customer, that’s where their story is already happening. So you want to connect with them there, not whether they’ve already got your beautiful thing of the shopping cart and they’re to swipe their credit card because that’s the story’s over at that point, right? That’s the ending.

Meagan Sweigart (20:47.708)
Yeah, happy ending.

Tom Nixon (20:48.598)
Not really, but yeah, that’s the happy ending. Right? And so if you’re optimizing for conversions way too early, going back to data, Curtis, if you’re measuring conversions, but you haven’t even converted the unaware to aware that you’re measuring the wrong thing, you’re spending the money in the wrong place and you’re going to get the wrong results, which is predictable. So. Let’s talk about trust for a minute. So authenticity, trust.

Curtis Hays (21:09.95)
Yep.

Tom Nixon (21:16.876)
The other trope out there, similar to what the one you heard earlier about people buying for people, not businesses, is that people buy for people they know, like, and trust. Right? So how do you use storytelling in my view is the most effective way to start earning some trust and some liking and some knowing before the person has actually experienced anything with your brand.

Meagan Sweigart (21:27.344)
Mm hmm.

Meagan Sweigart (21:38.86)
Yeah, so it is definitely the storytelling element, but I would argue it’s also who’s telling the story. So there are schools of thought that say that like the corporate blog is dead. You know, these kinds of content platforms where we’re just saying like, here’s some information, you know, that were at a time designed to feed Google.

I don’t necessarily agree that it’s dead, but I do think that making the content more personal and more directed at specific buyers is really important. I also think that something that brands often overlook is the importance of their executive team actually being spokespeople for the brand. Because if I’m on LinkedIn and I see the supervisionary CEO talking about something that really matters to me,

I’m going to look into it. am much more so than, you know, a LinkedIn post from a company that’s like, you know, check us out on our latest blog. Like it just, it’s, that is what works. And so the other thing to think about is a lot of these, like take LinkedIn, for example, that algorithm does not like company posts. It does not. It likes human posts.

Tom Nixon (22:54.766)
Mm-hmm.

Meagan Sweigart (22:55.314)
And having your executive team, so you know, got to get your messaging right. You got to get that across all of your channels. This is assuming that’s all been done. Another way to stand out is to have the actual people from your brand telling that story across channels. And then also highlighting company culture, like that might sound counterintuitive. This is not an HR exercise. But again, because people buy from people.

I’m more likely to buy from a brand if I feel like, they treat their people really well. I there’s, have as a consumer, like boycotted brands that I know are not treating their people well. So there is a certain element of really putting the human at the forefront that I think makes a big difference in addition to all of the important foundations for messaging that we’ve talked about today.

Tom Nixon (23:42.156)
Yep. Well, Kurt, this Megan, you might not know this, but this podcast is a story in the making. Curtis, remember you asked me to do a case study for one of your clients. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (23:52.977)
No, remind a case study. Yeah. how this podcast got started. Yes. It was, was, I will ask Tom for a case study to write a case study for one of my clients, which does live on my blog, which nobody sees, but that case study turned into videos, which, know, eventually now, you know, hundreds of people have seen the podcast, both that story as well as future stories that we’ve been able to tell. now

Megan, you’re getting the chance to tell your story and we’re just having fun with it, really. you know, that’s if I was posting content from Kaleidoscope’s brand page on LinkedIn, I don’t think anyone would really be taking a look at it. But the fact that we’re using this as a medium to just talk about our business and our industry and what’s changing and, you know, getting other like minded and not like minded people here to talk about things.

just brings visibility and does that know, like, and trust.

Meagan Sweigart (24:50.105)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (24:51.17)
That’s our first three episodes were, so I called Curtis afterwards. said, Mario is a great guy. He’s Curtis’s client. Amazing story. If I write this case study for you, it’s going to be 6,000 words long because I have to tell the whole story. And the story starts way before you ever got involved. And, you know, Mario was really struggling doing some things on his own, doing some things with other agencies. And then he met you and then one thing changed and then

That’s where the next part of the story started. So we did a three-part episode and we told the story of three chapters. And I, to your point, Curtis, I think people were more interested to hear from a family business owner, second generation about how he took on the amazing responsibility of carrying on his parents’ legacy. And now he’s building this company into a multimillion dollar enterprise. So that’s the story we could have done a whole episode, how, how to change your SEO and what, everything that Curtis did for him. But would anyone have cared? I don’t know.

But they did. We still get people commenting on that episode, that three part story, which I’m just going to put a plug in for what’s wrong with case studies. Case studies, I think are great, but I think we the old way of packaging a case study saying challenge this company had this problem solution. We did this. We are the heroes outcome for one. It’s become such a recognizable sort of framing that you know what’s coming. This is a sales slick.

Meagan Sweigart (26:07.358)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (26:17.25)
This is like, okay, this there’s no story here. If you want to effectively tell the story, abandon the old way of doing a case study and just tell the story as a journalist would. And you’re going to get people more engaged. So that’s my one thing that marketing leaders should rethink going forward. Megan, what about you? What is something that marketing leaders, whether in-house agency CEOs of companies should rethink going forward?

Meagan Sweigart (26:42.698)
One thing that, and this does tie into our business model, but we formed this company because we believe in it, is when building marketing teams, think very critically about what you need in-house, what specialties you need in-house, and what specialties could be supplemented. So I’ll give an example. First of all, I think

Probably all of our listeners are aware that marketing budgets are often the first to get cut and it’s very frustrating. And that’s just something that comes from above. so budgets are cut. You’ve got new needs, but you don’t have an open seat. You can’t hire anyone. Bringing in someone or someone’s fractionally, that falls within your program budget. So it’s different. You can ramp up what you need from a different budget without having to

ladder it up the chain and ask for an open seat. The other benefit is, let’s say you have your team is short staffed, you need help with design, PR, and let’s say social media. Those might seem kind of related, but they are distinct disciplines. And you can try to find one person who can do all three of those things, but I can guarantee you that they won’t be able to do all three well.

So then you’re in a situation where you’re, you’re, you’ve got somebody who’s working super hard, but they’re not able to deliver at the quality that you need. Instead, you could look at hiring three experts, one in each of those disciplines on a very part-time basis. They could ramp up during busy seasons. They could ramp down during slower seasons. And you’re not in the position of like, if the next staffing reduction comes around, you’re not having to lay someone.

So we’re definitely not proponents of like replacing full-time hires with contractors who are basically working full-time without benefits. So I just want to be very clear about that. That is not the model. But if you need help with social media, ask yourself, do I need 40 hours a week of help with social media or do I need eight? And if the answer is eight, use that seat that’s open for something else. You know, maybe you need like a senior strategist or maybe you need a digital marketer.

Meagan Sweigart (29:05.468)
So think very carefully about the capacity of your team and the right people to bring in at the right time, at the right level.

Tom Nixon (29:15.852)
Yep. Well said. Right.

Curtis Hays (29:17.384)
We call it augmentation. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re augmenting your team whenever you need an analytics project, you need some dashboards, we’ll help you with that. You need some content written, we’ll help you with that. You need to build a media plan, we’ll help you with that. Just come in and come out whenever you need the team.

Meagan Sweigart (29:20.178)
Yeah. Yeah.

Meagan Sweigart (29:24.976)
Right.

Meagan Sweigart (29:31.431)
Exactly.

Tom Nixon (29:36.238)
Curtis, I’m going to give you a chance to answer the same question. What’s one thing marketing leaders should rethink going forward?

Curtis Hays (29:42.421)
And well, I mean, I put me on the spot here, but I had a conversation with Mario earlier today. We went on a couple of different tangents, but AI a hundred percent is at the forefront. think here’s the thing. think marketing leaders, we mentioned this the other day that the, website is no longer the center of the universe for your marketing and that you need to branch out and look at marketing.

Tom Nixon (29:44.031)
How do you limit it to one, right?

Meagan Sweigart (29:55.39)
you

Curtis Hays (30:11.764)
You know, if you call it the peso model, paid, earned, shared, owned, whatever model you want to take a look at, but you need to have a… Yeah, it does. It does. We’re going to have Gini on. But your marketing mix needs to be more comprehensive. And it’s finally starting to click for Mario where he’s like, I get it. I get it now that like, I’m getting, I’m going to be getting business, not from people coming to my website and calling or filling out a form.

Tom Nixon (30:17.006)
That just rolls right off the tongue now. Wow. I’m depressed. Go ahead. Continue. Yes, we are.

Curtis Hays (30:41.054)
that it’s going to happen in potentially inorganic or unorganic ways or just organic ways through activities that I’m doing to just get me and my brand out there. And we had this very long conversation because he’s a direct-to-consumer business. We had a very long conversation about thinking outside the box and going to LinkedIn to build his referral network. So he’s in senior care, elder care attorneys.

Meagan Sweigart (30:59.614)
Okay.

Curtis Hays (31:10.59)
facilities that do physical therapy. Like a number of these could be organizations in a B2B play that he does thought leadership content to from him, Mario, the expert in senior care and the rest of his staff who aren’t selling to them, but educating them about changes in legislation, changes in payments and compensation and insurance and all these other things that they’re really good at and they understand.

And now they become the go-to resource. so when I have a referral, I think them. I don’t think of a competitor or a big name brand. that’s, think that, you know, that’s my message is like, you got to start thinking outside the box.

Tom Nixon (31:51.614)
I might just.

Meagan Sweigart (31:56.262)
Okay.

Tom Nixon (31:57.198)
Yeah, well, yeah, good point. And you know what? He might want to tell a story or two because I know they’ve got some amazing success stories because I spoken with the parents and the children of these families whose lives he’s impacted. Megan, last question for you. What can you think? I’m to put you on the spot now. What’s one of the favorite stories you’ve ever told for a client? Can you think of one?

Curtis Hays (32:03.55)
They do.

Meagan Sweigart (32:20.062)
Do you mean like a story that is for the client as in their voice or do you mean?

Tom Nixon (32:25.922)
However you want to answer the question, it’s fine with me.

Meagan Sweigart (32:31.228)
worked for.

Meagan Sweigart (32:37.128)
So when I worked at Accenture, I worked for their supply chain division. And that might sound a bit dry. However, it was during COVID and supply chain was a huge topic of conversation just in society at large. And we told a story about the importance of supply chain resilience in

having the success of businesses that are actually shipping their goods all the way down to humans. And so adding kind of that, you know, yes, we were selling to other businesses, but like they have to sell to consumers. So we went all the way to the kind of human impact of supply chains not working versus working and then kind of worked our way back towards, you know, making sure that the businesses that are shipping goods

are able to do that and then, you know, thinking about like the baby formula, the toilet paper, all of the things that we took for granted before COVID and now take for granted, honestly, that were really scarce. And so I think that’s my favorite because it’s a potentially dry subject. It’s very much B2B, but we were able to get the impact of the service that Accenture was offering all the way down to like the baby that needs formula.

So I think that’s my favorite in terms of just like the impact of the story.

Tom Nixon (34:08.833)
That’s another way to think outside the box is taking it one step further down the value chain and say, let’s tell the story. Let’s talk about where these products ended up, right? In the lives that they impacted. Yes, you sold to a business, but eventually, why did that business buy from you? Right? Because they have somebody a mouth they have to feed or whatever it is. So great. All right, Megan, why great kinetic marketing communications? Where do people go to find out more about you and learn your story?

Curtis Hays (34:16.969)
Mm-hmm.

Meagan Sweigart (34:17.704)
Great.

Meagan Sweigart (34:25.095)
Right.

Meagan Sweigart (34:31.664)
Yeah, our website is kineticcoms.com and then we’d love for you to follow us on LinkedIn as well.

Tom Nixon (34:39.064)
Great. All right. Well, we will link to both of those in the show notes. So, as they say, that’s our story and we’re sticking to it. So we’ll see you next time. Tell you another story next week on bull horns and bulls eyes.