Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Street Level Marketing. I'm. I'm your host, Mark Lamplu, and I have a great show for you this afternoon. My guest today is Bill Decorsi. He's the chief Legion officer with Amer Life. And I wanted to bring Bill on, talk a little bit about lead generation and, and things like that. So, Bill, thanks for coming on the show.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: It was my pleasure, Mark. Thank you very much for the invitation.
[00:00:52] Speaker A: So, so tell me, I mean, we're. We're in a new world, so to speak. Especially with marketing. It seems like something changes every day. We get new tools, you know, what's the biggest myth out there right now about data in marketing?
[00:01:06] Speaker B: Yeah, it's an interesting question, Mark.
In my opinion, the biggest myth about data in marketing is that data on its own is automatically going to solve your marketing challenges. A lot of companies that I've worked with in the past believe that gathering more data is the solution. But in reality, data by itself isn't, you know, magic or anything like that. The real power comes from interpreting that data and then, you know, deriving some kind of actionable insight from the data and then, of course, applying that insight creatively and strategically.
That's where I find the effective marketing occurs when analytics inform and inspire your creativity and your messaging, rather than replacing it with, you know, something that is just the result of glancing at raw data. More is not necessarily better unless you're doing the right thing with it.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Makes total sense. I mean, you're going to have as all the information in the world, but if you don't execute it correctly and, and know what you're doing, you know, what you're doing with it, it's really just a bunch of, you know, noise, really.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: It. It can be.
[00:02:12] Speaker A: Yeah. How do you balance the quantitative insights with the creative execution?
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Yeah, so when I think about the quantitative insights that you can derive from looking at data or talking to your customers, balancing that with creative execution involves using the data certainly as a foundation to guide creative decisions, but you can't allow it to stifle your creative decisions. The quantitative data that we have access to helps us understand precisely who our audience is, what motivates the members of our audience, and where to reach them. And then the creativity that we have on our team transforms those insights into compelling messages and compelling stories. It's what I like to call a harmonious balance. One of those things, the quantitative data amplifies the effectiveness of the other, the creative, and that allows us to create campaigns that truly and deeply resonate with our audience.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: All right, what's one data point most marketers overlook but they shouldn't?
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm glad you asked this question. And it's a little bit of a confusing term because it's not used too frequently, but I'll try to explain it. I call it time of engagement. I don't know that it has a standard name. Now, I want to be very clear when I say time of engagement, that's not to imply that I'm looking at the amount of time that somebody is engaged with my content. Rather, I'm looking at exactly when people are most likely to engage with my content. It's very often overlooked. It's. But it's incredibly valuable. You know, as marketers, we prioritize things like clicks or conversions, but what we don't spend enough time examining is exactly when our audience is most receptive to our messages.
Understanding that in addition to who and where your audience is, that can significantly enhance your campaign effectiveness and engagement. And the good news is, is a lot of modern marketing tools give you that information.
Most email platforms will tell you when an is most likely to be read. If you're posting a lot on social media, there are tools, for example within LinkedIn that will tell you when you're most likely to get the highest engagement based on your particular audience's time in front of the screen. That's something that I look to as a. As. As something that may be a differentiator in, in making your marketing go from effective to supercharged.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, those, yeah, that's great. Once you get in the cadence of posting, you know, it really does kind of get. Guide you to give you the best amount of information on when you should post and things like that.
[00:04:48] Speaker B: Yeah, it certainly has worked for us.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Now you're with Amerilife now, but you still work for Electronic Arts.
How did your time at EA shape your understanding of customer behavior?
[00:04:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I worked at Electronic Arts, specifically EA Sports, for a long time.
I was a senior researcher there.
And the. The. My understanding of customer behavior was informed directly by the observations that I was able to make both in a qualitative way by talking to customers in a quantitative way, by looking at the data, EA was ahead of its time in terms of highlighting the importance of immediate real time audience feedback. If you think about gamer behavior, they are constantly providing instantaneous reactions to updates, new features or changes. And if you tie that in with social sentiment tracking, looking at what they're saying online, it taught me the value of that information in order to have rapid, responsiveness and the need to actively listen, listen and adopt our strategies based on the genuine preferences of behaviors that we were seeing, you know, in situ right there in real life.
The results, we found it fostered deeper loyalty and engagement because people knew we were listening, they knew that we were responsive. And by the way, when we did respond, we would often say in our marketing messages, we've heard you, we've listened to you. This is a change that, that is based on your preferences right now.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: What makes a consumer insights team truly effective?
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Yeah, so we had a terrific team at ea and really what it did is it combined some real diverse and deep analytical thinking and creative thinking with an absolute clarity of purpose.
This meant that we didn't just look for interesting or novel data, but what we did instead was looked for data that we could translate into straightforward actionable strategies.
Communication was key amongst this high performing team.
Our team members communicated our insights very clearly. They, they communicated constantly. They prioritized the relevant data very effectively, which is something that a lot of teams struggle with, that prioritization of relative data, relevant data rather.
And they were making sure that they were describing these insights in a way that could directly inform key marketing and business decisions. And by the way, that, that also involves knowing your audience, understanding what exactly your audience is likely to react to. And in this case, I mean, for example, the, the, the product managers or the executives who are looking at these insights.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: How often should businesses revisit or update their customer Personas?
[00:07:22] Speaker B: I'm also glad you asked me about customer Personas. This is something that a lot of companies don't do. Either they don't know about them, they don't know how to do them, or they feel like they're too small to do them.
As a general practice, businesses should revise their customer Personas at least annually, right? I mean, there's, there's no excuse to let it go any longer. It should be part of your annual planning and refresh cycle.
But there are going to be events that are going to cause you to want to revisit this more often than every year. A new product launch by a competitor, for example, a shift in market conditions, a change in customer behavior, like the introduction of a new social media platform. I can't tell you how much the Personas in digital marketing changed. When TikTok was introduced, for example, that was something that was, you know, a relative upheaval and needed to be taken into account in terms of the, the customer transmission from places like Facebook and Instagram over to TikTok and your Persona needs to change in, in correspondence with that.
Even things like broader economic trends, how people are feeling, how people are seeing the direction of, of their own household pocketbook. If you're in a consumer package good business that you know where the demand is relatively elastic, that should prompt you to have an immediate update of your Personas. Because the problem with Personas is they not only lose their value if they're not accurate, relevant and reflective current realities, they can actually take you down the wrong path if they're out of date. See my example I just talked about TikTok. If you don't have a Persona for your TikTok user in your digital strategy, you may be making some, not just bad decisions, but some, some harmful decisions.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: Yeah, that's so true. Your customer Persona on LinkedIn is going to be like 180 degrees and what it's going to be on TikTok. So you gotta adjust your messaging accordingly.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: You certainly do.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: How do you define performance marketing today?
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Yeah, wow, that's a great question. I gotta think about that one for a minute.
It's defined my job well. It means that you have a rigorous focus on measurable results and continuous operation or continuous, I'm sorry, optimization.
It's about ensuring that every marketing dollar that you're entrusted with by your company can be clearly linked to specific quantifiable outcomes. And those skins could be leads generated, sales achieved or customer retention. Any of those things are, you know, obviously quantifiable. And if you're not tracking those things, you really should be. You can't manage that which you don't measure.
And we are in the measurement business as performance marketers. Modern performance marketing isn't just tracking things though. It's the optimization side that I talked about. It's continually refining your strategies based on what the data is telling you in terms of insights to continue to maximize the effectiveness and to demonstrate clear return on investment. You know, chief marketing officers are some of the, the shortest 10 years tenured members of the C suite. And, and the reason is, I think a lot of the reason that that many of them fail is because they don't understand the, the measuring and the optimization aspect of have a right. When you're entrusted with dollars that an organization gives you, they have a right to know what the lift is from those dollars. And if you're not measuring that and constantly getting better, you're probably not doing a good enough job.
[00:10:44] Speaker A: Yeah. What was like one of the most surprising insights you ever uncovered from a campaign?
[00:10:51] Speaker B: So thinking about this, I think about a Campaign specific to Amerilife. So Amer Life is one of the largest field marketing organizations in the country. We service mainly the senior market. We help people live healthier, more fulfilled lives through making sure they have a healthy and when possible, wealthy retirement. Nobody wants to worry about money as they get older. And recently we, we learned that generation, now that's entering retirement, they are more afraid of running out of money by a large measure than they are of actually passing away.
We work to make sure that people don't have to have that fear any longer. And we give them peace of mind both for their health and their financial planning.
But one of the things that follows along in the senior market is this, I'll call it almost a prejudice that senior customers aren't going to be responsive to targeted digital content, that they're going to continue to prefer traditional communication channels like direct mail or tv.
And when my team started here, we, we challenged that perception because my, my, my mother is, you know, a, a large consumer of digital content. Most of the people in our targeted age band are, and I didn't think it was an appropriate prejudice to have. So we went heavy into digital. And the older demographics taught us that their responsiveness taught us that they are far more digitally focused, far more personalization focused than people normally give them credit for. They are digitally engaged generation that we have. And as you know, everybody's on a device right now. You'd be surprised just how well that works compared to more traditional methods like out of home advertising, direct mail and television. Digital works with seniors.
[00:12:44] Speaker A: I follow. You know, a lot of people I'm connected with personally are, you know, in their 60s and 70s and, you know, they're communicating on social every day, so.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: Every single day.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: Yep. Well, we're out of time for this segment, but when we come back, I want to talk about targeting, you know, smarter, not louder. So we'll be back with a word from our sponsors, Foreign.
Welcome back to Street Level Marketing with your host, Mark Lamplugh. I'm here here with Bill, and we're talking about lead generation. And I want to kind of talk about lead generation, segmentation and audience first thinking.
Bill, what is the biggest mistake companies make with lead generation?
[00:13:59] Speaker B: The biggest mistake companies make is when they prioritize quantity over quality. A lot of companies are focused on generating large volumes of leads without any real understanding if those leads match their ideal customer profile. And in my opinion and in my experience, effective lead generation means fewer leads, but those leads are better targeted. The leads genuinely align with your offerings and they result in a higher conversion rate and ultimately stronger customer relationships.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Yeah, it's kind of like a similar thing here.
You know what I do, I'm chief marketing officer in the automotive business.
Sure.
You know, they, in the beginning of the year before I was here, they had double the amount of leads coming in.
But the closing ratios on, you know, on the phone ops and stuff like that were in the single digits. Now they're in the 40s, you know, so it's like you're getting better quality in.
It almost becomes less expensive too. And you know, in the end and.
[00:14:58] Speaker B: It becomes less frustrating for the people who are looking at those sales opportunities. Right. We all, I mean, we struggle with morale as a cmo. You understand that you're going to have interactions with your sales agents, worker, they're going to say not so nice things about your leads. And it's always great to have data, but if you have, and we've all had this single digit closing ratios, it's a lot harder to say, no, no, no, no, we need to look at the sales process or we need to look at some of their other aspect of engagement. The leads are doing just fine. But when you're closing in the 40s, you've got a lot happier people putting forward a lot less effort for a lot more success.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: Yeah. What, what does a successful audience segmentation actually look like in practice?
[00:15:38] Speaker B: Yeah, you really need to understand your audience segmentation to be able to do what we just talked about, which is to get the right kind of lead that matches the person you're looking for. And it means probably what everyone thinks it means. It means identifying a clear and distinct customer group based on things that are meaningful differences between people like behaviors, interests, and what their need state is. And I would caution you don't use demographics. That's the worst way for you to build out an audience segmentation. Even normal demographics that we're all used to using, like age. Sure, if there's some eligibility criteria for your product, you might want to use age.
But in reality, if you're going to get into the practice of doing marketing in a modern, contemporary, effective way, you need to be able to do tailored messaging, you need to be able to do customer officers, and you need to offer personalized experiences to people. People want to feel like they're uniquely understood and valued.
And that only comes when you create audience segmentations that take into account the meaningful differences between people, their behaviors, their interests, and where they are in terms of their need state.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: Right.
Now, can you walk us through lead star and what makes it effective?
[00:16:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So let me describe what Lead Star is first. Lead Star is a compliant, always on, on demand lead generation platform exclusively for Amerilife agents. It empowers our agents. It gives them high quality compliant leads. As I mentioned, I on demand, we have calls, we have data leads, we have leads across all of our lines of business. We've got some terrific partners out in the marketplace who have helped bring this to fruition, as well as a terrific support staff here at Amerilife who keep the lights on some of the features about it.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: It.
[00:17:24] Speaker B: We look at our numbers all the time. We have real time analytics and in addition to that, we take the risk out of the utilization of those leads by going through a very comprehensive compliance verification process. As you know, the regulations around lead generation are voluminous. I mean they're frankly, they're a little hard to get your get your arms around, even if, like me, you do this for a living. But it's important that you focus on it. Calling somebody who hasn't asked to be called or worse yet has asked you to stop calling them is not just a bad way to treat a customer, but it's also something that can be harmful in terms of TCPA suits and the like. So we make sure that all the leads come in, have TCPA verification and we actually indemnify through our third party partners any of the agents using the system to get leads against any TCPA suits that might come their way. We haven't had any yet and it's because we do things right on the front end. But the reason I mentioned analytics is because we are very transparent about our results. The good, the bad and the ugly. And thankfully most of it is really great. Our CPAs are at the low end, meaning the better end of what you would expect in our industry. Our lead volume is very robust. It just allows people from going to go from sign up to selling within moments.
And we assist them every part of the way in terms of providing sales script guidance, coaching and things like that. The bottom line is this. It's a technology platform that allows agents to instantaneously connect with genuinely interested customers.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm in California, so the rules out here are even more, I think, stringent.
So I, I get it with the, you know how difficult it can be with us. We need three options on a website and oh sure, newsletters.
[00:19:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And by the way, if you're a modern marketer and you're doing business in the United States or you're doing business worldwide, you need to take what you will call the highest common denominator, especially if you have limited resources. Look at what's, you know, you know, it's ccpa. Look at what's happening in Europe with their, with, with their regulations. It's not a bad practice to do your nationwide or worldwide marketing according to those preferences rather than trying to pick and choose, you know, what, what you can do in different states. The fact of the matter is these rul there to protect customers. And like we talked about in the previous segment, you want to get somebody who's genuinely interested and you can build a relationship with that starts with being very clear with your engagement on them. In terms of lead generation.
[00:20:03] Speaker A: Yeah. How do you identify the difference between a lead and a real opportunity?
[00:20:09] Speaker B: Yep. So a lead in my mind and in our practice becomes a real opportunity when that person that we're talking to demonstrates clear meaningful interest combined with, you know, the readiness and capability to purchase the service or, or product that you're selling. And the way that we go about that identification process is by analyzing engagement behaviors, verifying the availability of the funds that are necessary to make the purchase and what their timelines are. When are they looking to make a purchase?
These explicit intent signals are really what's the differentiator for me in terms of a lead which is sometimes motivated by pure curiosity to an opportunity.
You know, the, you can tell what that intent is if you look at the data the right way.
[00:20:58] Speaker A: How do you align lead generation with long term customer value?
[00:21:04] Speaker B: The short answer is you do it right from the start. So aligning lead generation long term value is actually absolutely a prerequisite.
[00:21:11] Speaker A: Right.
[00:21:11] Speaker B: I mean ltv. I focus a lot on CPA because of the brokerage nature of our business.
But, but when you have different types of sales funnels, especially you know, controlled sales funnels, where you have insight into the lead coming in all the way to the retention at the bottom. CPA still remains important, but really where you should be looking at it at is ltv and you should be looking at your ratios. The most important ratio is your LTV to cost of acquisition ratio. Right. I mean if that's not above one, then that's pretty darn good indicator that you're going to go out of business, you know, and the higher it is, the better performing your. This is one of the ways that we look for higher lifetime value is, you know, we're, we're looking for leads that don't just have a single purchase in mind, but have the potential for cross sales, repeated transactions and ongoing relationships. High Retention in the insurance business is a big indicator of success and high lifetime value. How do we look at this? Well, you can do it in a couple of ways. You can look at data of, of identifiable cohorts that are, have stayed loyal and, and, and see that they're likely to stay loyal or what you can do that that works even better than trying to predict it on the front end is once you get a customer in the door, you can take the same focus that you had on generating a high quality lead and you could transfer that to a high focus and intensity on servicing and retaining that customer. That's the key in my opinion. There's no shortcut, but the key is to make sure that you're doing everything you can to retain that lead. What I like to say to our, our sales and distribution teams is think about how hard it was to make the sale. You want to put at least that much effort into keeping the sale on your books.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
What's the role of AI in prospecting and nurturing today? Are you using it or.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: Yeah, so. Absolutely. So AI does a great job by looking at vast data sets rapidly and accurately, enabling highly personalized interactions at scale. So we talked earlier previous segment about how important it was to not just look at the quantity of data, but actually the actions you take and the insights you derive from that. AI is the most important false, the most important force multiplier that's come out to allow us to do that. If you're asking the right questions with the right data set, you can take huge amounts of customer information, you can predict customer behaviors and you can deliver timely messaging to those customers on the retention side. But to cut through it all, the one thing that everybody should be doing because it's readily available is using AI to optimize your lead scoring framework. Everybody has a lead scoring framework. If you don't, you should.
But a lot of that is informed by slow moving technology. AI is making that move at hyperspeed.
[00:24:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I was just having a conversation with a former colleague of mine that we started a call center with together and they've been struggling lately and you know, office politics involved. But he was able to get his point across bus by using AI to analyze the data over the last few months to the owner and say, look, don't take, you know, my word for it, you know, the data is, you know, it's right here from the AI, you know, of our issues and what.
[00:24:40] Speaker B: Problems we're having and doesn't it feel good to go into a conversation like that with Data rather than two competing sets of feelings between two competing people trying to get their point across.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: That's right. Numbers don't lie.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: That's true.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: Well, we're out of time for this segment, but when we come back, I want to talk about, you know, the marketing intelligence and, you know, you have your insight to action.
So we'll be back after a word from our sponsors.
Foreign welcome back to Street Level Marketing with your host, Mark Lamplugh. I'm here with Bill from Amerilife, and I wanted to talk a little bit about turning research and data into storytelling. Bill, how do you make research digestible for decision making?
[00:25:58] Speaker B: Well, you use the key term there, storytelling. And my answer is making research digestible involves simplifying complex data into clear, concise insights that have an accompanying narrative. Decision makers, in my experience, they, they prefer a straightforward, actionable insight rather than the story of how you got to that insight, which, by the way, there's a lot of work that goes into that. And I think that it's fair for people to want to tell that story. We looked here, we looked here, we did this.
That sometimes causes people to glaze over. If you're really looking for people to follow you all the way to the punchline and help you make a decision, the best thing to do is to give them an actionable insight that has a clear narrative. This is what our customers are doing and this is why they are doing it according to our research.
And then pop in visual elements.
Executives love dashboards. Executive loves charts. Executives love chart. They love when you summarize key points and you highlight the practical implications of what you're doing, dropping in jargon, telling the story of how you got to where you got, that's going to derail the conversation. You avoid those things. You're going to ensure that your insights are quickly understood and that the action that needs to be taken will be considered in full.
[00:27:16] Speaker A: Yeah. What's your process for turning raw data into marketing gold?
[00:27:21] Speaker B: Yep. So this is a little bit behind the scenes, and I have got some great people on my team that help me with this. But our process generally involves first cleaning and structuring the data to make sure that we understand what the actual individual data elements mean and how they relate to one another. And that's where you can get into some pattern identification. And when people say insights and things like that, really what they're talking about is pattern identification within data. And once you have those patterns formed, you can start to draw some insights from them. I'll give you an example that just came to mind.
We found that in the first few months of Lead Star being on the market that we weren't really seeing the kind of adoption and success that we had hoped for. We very quickly dug into the data and tried to figure out why based on the activities that we were recording. And it wasn't immediately clear. The pattern was a little hidden. We used a technique called cluster analysis to actually look at different groups of users within that data. And something popped right to the surface that has helped us to this day identify who's going to be successful and who's not going to be successful on Lead Star. And it is positively contributed to both our success on the platform as well as the adoption of the platform. And that simple insight that was only clear in cluster analysis was that in essence, there were two types of users. There was one type of user that got, that got less than 10 leads and generally said, this isn't for me.
And those users that had gotten 30 or more leads and said, this is for me, there was no gray area in between. Those two clusters were the only ones that emerged. And what we began to realize, or what we realized right away based on that insight, is that it takes a little time to learn to sell using a tool like this. And if you don't stick with it and you give up, you're not likely to have been successful through those first leads. But once you, once you take 30 leads through the system and you start to get your feet under you, it becomes the greatest selling assistant you could ever hope for. Those people are wildly successful. So the tire kickers, you know, we need to do more to nurture them, to continue to encourage them, to train them, to give them feedback, to get them over that hump once they've taken 30 leads, because when they do, it is, is almost certain that they will be successful with the platform. That, to me is a great story about how data was able to, you know, inform, you know, a, a piece of marketing gold.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: Right. And then talking about insights, how do you evaluate which insights are actually actionable?
[00:30:05] Speaker B: Yeah, you have to look at insights based on their clarity and their potential impact. And how practical is it to actually implement things? I mean, there's, there's all sorts of ideas that we have, and of course, we all truly believe that there's no such thing as a bad idea. But some ideas won't have the impact they need to have. Some of them aren't practical to implement, and some of them really don't provide the amount of clarity you need to take immediate Action. The example that I just gave you, it had it scored very highly in all three areas. It's very clear what was going on. The impact was very, very clear and very positive. If we pushed for change and practicality of implementation, it just meant we need to work harder with one group of users and get them to shift to themselves into the second group of users. So those are the three things. What's the clarity of the insight, what's the potential impact if you were to take action on it and how practical is it for you to actually implement it?
[00:31:01] Speaker A: Yeah. What's the role of experimentation in modern marketing?
[00:31:06] Speaker B: Well, experimentation is crucial in modern marketing. It allows us to test hypotheses, to measure outcome of those tests and rapidly iterate on strategies. It reduces your marketing spend risk by providing empirical data on what actually resonates with audiences. And that allows you to make informed, data backed decisions and continuous improvement. When I first started in, in marketing, it wasn't even called performance marketing. Back then a lot of people didn't think to ask, did you try something different because your decisions were largely baked? I mean, if you put a yellow pages ad in the yellow pages, there wasn't a way for you to go back and modify that. If you had newspaper advertisement, it was the same way. You might be able to change it to the next week. But that meant, you know, getting your freelance art director back on, on contract and making all sorts. It was just easier to sit it out there. You know, Wanamaker, you know, once said famously 100 or so years ago that he was sure that 50% of his marketing spend worked, but he just wasn't sure what ha, what half of that spend was working. We, for the first time in human history have the ability to know what actually works. So experimentation, it's, it's as fundamental as anything that we do.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: I'm in the car business, so we, we rely very heavily on customer feedback. How do you intergrate customer feedback loops in your campaigns?
[00:32:31] Speaker B: Before I tell you how we do it, I want to tell you something that I've observed about customer feedback initiatives.
And it's a shame. I think that there's a lot of businesses out there, there that are afraid to collect customer feedback because they don't want to hear what people have to say.
Car business is great. The car business is, you know, the compensation is tied to feedback. I mean, all of us who've purchased a car understand, you know, that, that that person is looking for a 10 on that survey and that is going to directly impact their compensation. Now that may actually drive some bias into the actual feedback. Which is why I think open ended questions and like are very important in addition to a numerical score. But I don't want to go down that analytical and statistical and research rabbit hole.
I will say the first thing is don't be afraid to hear from your customers because you're going to eventually hear from them anyway. You're eventually going to hear from them in your, in your P and L. So you'd rather have an opportunity to make things right by listening to them. What does it involve? What do I do? I actively collect and analyze all of the responses I get from our customers. When I send out our net promoter scores, when I send out our customer satisfaction surveys, I want to hear what people are saying. And if I get a score that's at the, at the margins, either way, either very high or very low, I will respond to that or I will call that person personally and say, why are, why do you think we're doing such a great job? Or why do you think we're doing such a poor job?
So that's it. And you have to, you have to have your ear to the ground. Regular surveys, social listening feedback forms everywhere you can.
If you're not taking into account customer feedback because it's either too difficult or you just have an inversion to it because you, you're not somebody who really deals well with negativity and a lot of us are like that.
You're not doing your business any justice.
[00:34:20] Speaker A: It's, you know, talking about the customer feedback.
You know, Google's releasing that new AI search, you know, that instead of it actually giving you search results, the AI gives you answers based on what you're searching. So I did a test, you know, would you rather go to Tim Moran Ford? And I used a competitor's name to the AI and it basically analyzed all the customer feedback from the online reviews to choose what dealership that it recommended.
So I mean it's going to be huge.
[00:34:57] Speaker B: That's, that's, that's interesting. That's a really big trend in customer decision making that's going to come to the forefront. It's starting to emerge right now. But if you're smart, you'll be all on top of that.
Everybody here is aware of the necessity of SEO search engine optimization.
The latest thing before what I'm about to talk about was, you know, zero click optimization. A lot of times when you search on Google these days, you don't even click. You get your answer right at the top and that answer isn't provided out of thin air. It's usually provided by a company that's put out zero click optimized content that draws your attention as the answer to commonly asked questions and then allows you should you choose to engage with that business directly via click. I think the next thing that's coming and I'm seeing emergence of this just as you did, is going to be the AI recommendations that, that will come out. It'll be interesting to see as to whether or not you can buy your way into that best of breed framework that AI recommends. I was over this weekend searching for a particular part that I needed for a particular machine that I open that, that I, that I own own and oh chat GPT was using terms like this part is the gold standard and this part has the best customer service behind it and this part has the, the, the, the most number of cycles between failure and I was like, it's, it's making a recommendation like a seasoned professional.
It was actually a struggle to get any competitors to, to, to show up in the recommendation because AI was convinced that this was the one and only part of art brand that I should consider.
[00:36:38] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it's, it's going to be very interesting to see especially with the search and PPC campaigns, how that trend changes once they start integrating the AI search. Absolutely.
Well, we're at a time for this segment but when we come back, you know, I want to talk about scaling success across the channels. So we'll be back after our work from these sponsors.
Sam Foreign welcome back to Street Level Marketing with your host Mark Lamplu. I'm here with Bill from Ameri Health and you know, we're talking about lead generation and I wanted to get into the performing, the performance marketing and multi platform ecosystems. We're in a world now where there's tons of ways to reach new customers and you know, how do we keep our message the same while also reaching potential customers on different platforms? Because we know different, you know, segmentation of customers use different platforms like TikTok, Facebook.
So Bill, how do you ensure consistency across your platforms that you're using?
[00:38:17] Speaker B: Yeah, it starts with my teammates who are responsible for creating clear brand guidelines and the associated messaging strategies that are built on the mission, vision values of Amerilife.
That's how you conceptually make sure that you are remaining consistent across all these platforms.
And the team that helps me with that is really top notch. But here's an important component that I think that a lot of people don't necessarily think about first and foremost when they Think about maintaining consistency. And that's your cm, your content management system, part of your Martech stack that allows you to put content out into different channels.
Not to make this a talk about, about martech, but I mean, if you talk about a good content management system combined with a good damn digital asset management system, these systems can work in concert with one another to kind of keep you compliant with your own brand strategies and make sure that you're not going off message. Now it's very interesting this, we talked about AI a lot here.
AI is, is one of those items that can also help with this particular type of management as well. There are AI proofing tools out there that you can put your messages through and you can get a graded score as to how well it is maintaining your brand's voice, as it were.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: Right. And I gotta apologize, I think I said Ameri Health when I introduced the company. I had insurance on my mind. So Mayor Life, I apologize.
[00:39:52] Speaker B: If we were to pick a second name that probably would be an appropriate name. But I will tell you, we're big into the wealth planning and management side of things too. So between Amer Health and Ameri wealth, we came up with Amer Life.
[00:40:05] Speaker A: What's the best way to optimize a campaign in real time?
[00:40:09] Speaker B: Yeah, another great use case for AI. But you know, real time optimization in reality just relies on closely tracking the immediate performance metrics that you have and then having agile processes behind the scenes that allow you to have quick adjustments. I mentioned earlier, earlier in the previous segment that, you know, executives love dashboards. Well, truth be told, I love dashboards too and I'm looking at them constantly. As a matter of fact, I've got a screen over to my right here that's got a dashboard on it right now and if certain thresholds are, are exceeded that somebody's going to get a call or a text message.
You know, you, you put, you combined those kind of things. Just the observational effect with automated analytics tools that now are available in AI and, and a terrific response team led up by, by my lieutenant, Megan Guido, who if I'm going to talk about Lead Star, I absolutely have to drop her name because she's the person who's really running things behind the scenes and doing a great job with it.
It's an always on mechanism that allows us to rapidly tweak our messaging, our targeting or our channel allocation so that we have maximum efficiency.
[00:41:15] Speaker A: I'm going to come up off topic a little bit, but Lead Star, so that's something you guys built in House and you know, are working on.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: Yep. So it's a combination of partnerships with third parties that allowed us to do it in, in a very agile manner. You know, there's a, there, there's a, call it a business principle, a book that my wife introduced me to called Buy, then Build.
We decided to go with Buy here. And the fact of the matter is, is I'm not sure, given our focus on customers, meaning the agents that we serve on our distribution platform and the beneficiaries who are benefiting from our products, I'm not sure with that particular focus that Amerilife would have been the best company to develop the kind of technology that we want to have as part of our distribution platform. So we went out and we took a while to determine who was best in class and we've partnered with these best in class companies in the insurtech space to bring Lead Star to market. So Lead Star is a, is, is an underlying technology that was developed by some very smart people doing very smart things on, in computer science and insurance tech, sprinkled with a little bit of our guidance of the roadmap in terms of understanding our customers, understanding our agents and asking them to do things that will help serve their needs.
[00:42:38] Speaker A: How are you determining which channels deserve the most spend with your marketing?
[00:42:43] Speaker B: Right. So the normal question you're going to get, the normal answer you're going to get here is that it's going to rely on, you know, exclusively on performance metrics like, you know, roas.
But the fact of the matter is, is, is that you really need to be looking at roas, your return on advertising spend your customer acquisition costs on channels, your engagement rates, your LTVs, lifetime customer values on channels, in addition to putting aside money to experiment on channels that are just emerging. I used the TikTok example not too long ago. I'm sure there's going to be opportunities for AI advertising that will be coming up shortly. Channel spending decisions should rely mainly on those things that they're traditionally relying on, like your return on your investment metrics.
But I will tell you I'm willing, when able to put money into channels that don't have a proven track record to see if we can be an emerging leader in those areas.
[00:43:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I know. A new one for me now that I've kind of been diving into is like well before you used to have if you want to be on tv, you had to go and sign a contract with, you know, a provider and spend amount of money. But now they have like streaming platforms where you can Set budgets just like your PPC campaigns. Pick, target your audience and then stream on Roku and, and things like that.
Are you, have you been using any of that?
[00:44:06] Speaker B: We have not to date, but it is something that we are actively looking at for our coming open enrollment season. Also, some of our, our, our coming Marilife communication type efforts are going to look at very targeted distribution for recruiting agents as a possible way to break through. So it's a smart thing to do. Do. We're not there yet. Right now all of our demand is being satisfied by the, by the channels that we're experimenting in. But believe me, it's without giving too much away. It's on our radar.
[00:44:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, I, I love it. I mean I, you can get a.
To give you an example, we wanted to put a ad campaign together. So on a Thursday I was able to create a video like you were talking about your podcast, Edit it, film it, get it ready for the streaming platform by Friday afternoon. It was submitted by Saturday night. I'm sitting at home watching a movie and there, there was our ads on tv. You know, it's like amazing.
[00:45:03] Speaker B: Yeah. To think that television could become that agile as an advertising platform is, is really an incredible turn of events.
[00:45:12] Speaker A: Yeah. How do offline and online marketing efforts play together?
[00:45:17] Speaker B: Yeah, this is one of my favorite favorite things to do.
They can and should seamlessly complement each other to have this unified customer journey. My favorite way to do it is to integrate offline data like events and direct mail responses with online insights. So any digital interaction that you have, if you layer for example, direct mail in with online messaging, think about this scenario.
I receive a piece of direct mail from a company that I haven't necessarily heard of.
Now it may be a product or service that I'm interested in. It may be one that would actually be beneficial to me. But if I don't have any familiarity or trust, the likelihood that I'm going to open that piece of direct mail or really pay it, pay any attention to it goes down considerably. But imagine a scenario, and this is a very realistic scenario that we're employing ourselves.
Imagine instead of just that being the first touch point with the customer that instead throughout their browsing, you know, the history before they get that mail, they're seeing your advertisements, they're seeing your Pre roll on YouTube videos, they're understanding who you are, just opening the door a little bit to a relationship and building some familiarity and some credibility. And then the mail piece arrives. It's going to be treated a whole lot more differently currently.
[00:46:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Direct mail is another one for us. And now we're able to create our list, send out our mail, submit our lists on the streaming and social and. And pretty much hit the customers and on every touch point, you know, to get them in store and then you can geotarget them and track them walking into your store. I mean, it's. It's amazing.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: It is amazing.
[00:47:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So while we're out of time and I wanted to give you some time to, you know, share your information with the audience, audience website, your company information, how they can get a hold of you, you know, if they want to ask you any questions or listen to your podcast.
[00:47:16] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So my social handle online is Professor Leads. I do have a YouTube channel. It doesn't have a ton of content right now. Where I'm publishing most of my content is on LinkedIn. So I would invite any of your audience to follow me on LinkedIn. You can search for my name, William Decorsi, and you should be able to find me. And in terms of a Mary, if you are in the market for any of the senior health and wealth solutions that our platform provides, you can contact me directly@w decorsiife.com or visit our website, amerilife.com and I will look forward to hearing from all of you and interacting with all of you online.
[00:47:59] Speaker A: Thank you.
Well, we come to the end of the show, so we'll see everybody here next week on another episode of Street Level Marketing.
