Latest / The Marketing Brief / Sydney & Brian Talk Marketing Systems, Segmentation and Community-Based Marketing (S1 E9)
Transcript
- Brian Aucoin: Hello and welcome back to the Marketing Brief. I am your host Brian Acquan and this is the podcast where we briefly touch on topics across the marketing landscape. always, we're joined by industry experts and we're really excited today to be joined by Sydney Boyd. Sydney, how are you? Sydney Boyd: Hi, I'm doing well today, Brian. Brian Aucoin: Thanks for joining us. Would you like to introduce yourself to our listeners? Sydney Boyd: Yeah, sure. So my name is Sydney. ⁓ I am the founder and CEO of Die Hard, Inc. We are a marketing system for attendance based businesses. So think your venues, your event producers, hospitality, et cetera, anywhere where people showing up in IRL accounts for a major amount of your revenue. Our marketing system is the best way for you to be able to understand your audience size and the people who show up for you and then market to them more efficiently. in marketing for the past five years, really focusing on building loyalty systems and AI features to support it. So this just seemed like the natural next step. Brian Aucoin: Nice, awesome. I'm very interested in marketing systems. I've been writing a lot about them. I think it's the natural progression from ⁓ campaigns, excuse to marketing systems. Another thing I've been writing about and published this week is the conversation economy, which is another progression, I think, is coming from the attention economy where we were all fighting for, there's 24 hours in a day and we need to own the consumer's mindset for X number of hours. Sydney Boyd: Hmm. Brian Aucoin: ⁓ I think there's a natural progression now to that's great, but we don't want to be shouting at people. want to be having conversations with people. So how do we kind of get to that stage? So I think both of those things really dovetail nicely into what you're doing. Maybe we could start talking about fan marketing and why you got into it. What, what, ⁓ what you like about it. Sydney Boyd: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, for sure. So I spent a lot of time working at Epsilon, which is a publicist group agency. So I was building these really complex marketing systems for Fortune 500 companies. 90, just to qualify it for you, 90 % of B2C Fortune 500 businesses have some aspect of loyalty marketing, whether it's through your natural points based system or some type of surprise and delight program design. And they're basically what those systems are, are great ways to collect first party and zero party data on customers, right? So loyalty marketing has been the lifeblood of a lot of marketing decisions because you want to be able to keep your most loyal customers happy and then identify others that have the potential to be the most loyal and that's the best way of allocating your marketing spend. What I found was I've always been passionate about music. I'm a former event producer myself doing neo soul nights when I was in college and it was just so different when I was in college and I didn't know these tools exist when you're putting up a lot of money. You're wearing a lot of different hats. Marketing is probably of the most crucial things you can do for your events because it determines who shows up yet it typically falls to the wayside ⁓ the expense ⁓ in the state where it's like okay I'm just gonna do what I call is shouting into the void where I something on social media ⁓ and have a 5 to 10 percent chance of someone actually seeing it organically which ⁓ to that into like perspective for you you're more likely to get food poisoning which is 17 % than to have someone just see your event flyer on their Instagram feed Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Wow. Sydney Boyd: And then there's the other piece where 90 % of this group of event producers and operators are spending money on ads, yet only receiving, only 30 % are receiving actual retention. the difference between what Fortune 500 companies have and what normal events, producers, attendance-based businesses, et cetera, have is just access to different tools. So I worked on platforms where they were doing very complex things around in-depth data analysis, lookalike modeling, offer targeting, being really that loyalty ledger system. to be able to drive different engagement, yet for other businesses that aren't Fortune 500 companies, they're instead stitching together several different tools to be able to carry out marketing campaigns in half the time. Brian Aucoin: Mm-hmm. Sydney Boyd: These tools are built for retail. They're incredibly difficult. they're requiring either you come to a tool where you already analyze your data, have some understanding of your segments, and then are using their tool to deploy, which is what they're intended to do. Or there you're stitching together a bunch of different workflows, but you have to have some type of a marketer brain and analytics brain to be able to do that. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Sydney Boyd: We're serving the people who don't typically understand that. And I just noticed there was a major gap. And so I wanted to create a platform that by leveraging AI tools is truly your marketing co-pilot end to end. So analyzing your data, understanding your audience, and then actually building that workflow to drive people back. So you can spend the rest of your time doing the other things that are important, like booking venues, talent, et cetera, versus spending time doing the data-driven marketing that's essential, but often pushed to the wayside. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Nice. Awesome. Very well put. I love the idea of marketing systems. I think it's just the world we're in right now is consumers are at different stages all the time. And if you're not ready for them with a message, that's kind of how I always define marketing systems. Is there way that you talk about marketing systems ⁓ now? Kind compare it to like what a campaign was? ⁓ Sydney Boyd: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I think I more so I'm thinking about it as a marker marketing operating system So I believe that there are aspects of the marketing journey where it's around your first is who am I targeting and understanding your audience? Most of our core users don't even have that level yet, or if they do, it's very high level where they're doing one size fits all marketing. Then comes, okay, I understand my audience. I segment them. I understand the levels and nuances of my audience. So in our platform, we have, we call our four proprietary segments that we build the logic to. So new, engaged, and diehards. ⁓ then our AI segmentation agent will also suggest segments are personalized and specific to your fan base. So your group or the people who like a specific genre of music, the people who have come back time and time again, but you need to win back because they haven't shown up in the past month. It pulls out all those different patterns based on specific parameters and clusters and association rules that our AI is able to detect. And then it's like actually pulling the full life cycle. So we allow our users to set perks. through our platform, but then typically what, people use a loyalty marketing system is that distribution piece. So who does it go to and when, and when is the proper time to actually time that level of communication and how do you speak to them? And our platform handles that distribution as well as actually suggesting the campaigns to reach that specific audience segment. So all they have to do is drop, upload their data, auto segments, campaigns are suggested, input their perks, perks are distributed. And then it's that full life cycle of as they use it, the platform gets smarter. and smarter on their audience's behavior. So now it's suggesting in an even more intelligent way the best way to reach people. And so that's what I mean by like a full operating system that's end to end that does the full marketing life cycle in a simplified way. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And are you kicking out measurement as part of this too, like is lifetime value being calculated so that you can kind of see it? Sydney Boyd: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so... Those are all the facets that are a part of what's underlying those segments. It's lifetime value, retention rates, acquisition, engagement behaviors. All of that goes into our proprietary metrics and then also what's guiding these AI ⁓ ⁓ we're looking at all those different things and then surfacing it in a really simplified way because we know our users ⁓ ⁓ professionals. They're not ⁓ deep into marketing. They literally just want a system to be able to tell them what they're supposed to do in a smart way to target people. And before we even built our platform, we started as an agency first, just analyzing and helping them understand their audience base, and then giving them strategy on how to do it until it got to the point where we were like, why don't we just like productize this. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, absolutely. So as part of my ⁓ last role, I was at Gooder Sunglasses and then was part of building out the first loyalty program they had. And one of the important reasons I for it was we needed a reward for our heavy fans, ⁓ our right? The people who are purchasing more sunglasses than anyone else. What are the reasons that you kind of push clients towards loyalty program and like Sydney Boyd: Nice. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brian Aucoin: fan-based marketing? What are the payoffs for them? Sydney Boyd: Yeah. Absolutely. So this function is like a deconstructed loyalty program, right? There's no strict program design rules. It's more so surprise and delight, right? But the reason why we push it is because I think actually a lot of fan marketing tools are passive because your diehard fans are going to authenticate and tell you who they are because they want the benefits of emotional attachment and proximity to who that artist is, venue, DJ, et cetera. They're naturally going to tell you who they are. But where things get a little bit hairy in the data is the segments that below that. the people like your engaged fans who have that potential who just need that nudge to become your diehard most valuable segment that you have no way of identifying unless you're actually knee-deep in your data or your new fans that attended one of your events had above average spend above average behavior than what is standard for that group. How do you identify them and then create ⁓ type of ⁓ marketing orchestration drives them up the pipeline based on the loyalty potential that they've exuded. That's exactly why we think it's so important and that's a sell in that why we're able to work with six different venues, DJs, artists, record labels, et cetera, because identifying diehards is easy. The future of marketing isn't about just identifying them. It's about finding more people like them and then guiding up their journey to become your most highest value segment. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, I would think another progression of that is building a community, right? And do you have ways to like kind of build and nurture that community as it kind of grows? Yeah. Sydney Boyd: Yeah. Absolutely. So. We initially take in ticketing data, transactional data, CRM data, right? And that's great. But what we really want to get to is the lifestyle, psychographic preferences of who your audience is that really makes your niche community. And so we do have polling features where you can send text-based polls to people in exchange for perks where they can answer questions like, what made you most excited to come to my event today? My outfit, meeting new people, letting loose after a week, et cetera, but already we're beginning to profile people. on those types of questions and then that automatically is feeding our AI segmentation where we're trying to detect additional people that are ⁓ to that type of niche profile Additionally, like it's the people who are constantly buying more than like three tickets because ⁓ they're your group organizers They're bringing a bunch of people to your show that also in and of itself is another type of communities and what I've found from working with these clients is that ⁓ they several subsets so Sometimes it's generational. Sometimes it's based on characters the more you learn about them, the better. And that's exactly what we try to find is help them maintain that core community, which is why people showed up in the first place is for a feeling and the enjoyment of being in that space. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, totally agree. I really love community building. I think when I talk to clients, I often make the point that, yes, they love your brand, but they also love other people that love your brand because they want to be around people with like interests, right? And that's probably not more true than within ⁓ communities that you're building. So ⁓ that resonates as well. ⁓ Sydney Boyd: Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Like one of our clients has a music listening club. So we'll have around 100 to 150 people show up and just listen to records. ⁓ ⁓ do you know about the community? They're audiophiles. They enjoy listening to ⁓ music as well as stuff from the past and being able to hear the history behind what was created from these albums. Already I have a really ⁓ idea of the type of person that would go to that event just based on that. And they're coming for community ⁓ be with other people who also are audiophiles and like that silent listening and to just share in that together. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, totally agree. Well, I always love to ask my guests what's something you're excited about. This can be in your professional capacity. This can be in your personal life. But is there something that you're excited about right now? Sydney Boyd: Ew. think ⁓ for like what we're building, we're just getting started. So right now we're focusing on own channels. So like SMS and email, but our development roadmap starting next So in March are working on paid media. So being able to take automation from just your own channels to now paid channels where you can deploy ads based on ⁓ lookalike that we've targeted from your, we've detected from your customer base and ⁓ being to pull that and like, I think in general, I get excited by being able to give people the full suite of marketing tools that have historically been gate-kept or behind really expensive price tags in a super usable way so they can market and grow in the best way possible. It's why I did this. It's why me and my team get excited about it is this is a feature that'll now continue to add to what our tool set is and then just continue to grow. Brian Aucoin: That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing that with us. I know your website is die-hard.io. I assume people can find you on LinkedIn. Is there a better way for people to find you? Sydney Boyd: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so for any questions or if you guys want to get to know us, reach out to us at hello at die-hard.io. We're happy to get started. Also on our website, you can just sign up for our wait list. We'll be doing our official launch in May. We have beta available to certain clients right now, but if you want to get started and be able to use the platform, ⁓ that'll available to you in May. Brian Aucoin: Amazing. Thank you so much for joining us today, Sydney. Sydney Boyd: Yeah, thank you for the time, Brian. Brian Aucoin: Awesome. Well, this has been a brief marketing conversation on the Marketing Brief podcast. I'm your host, Brian Acquan. Stay curious. Sydney Boyd: Thanks.