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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#770: Constant Contact CEO Frank Vella on how B2B marketers and SMBs can partner for success
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Frank Vella
To realize the future America needs. We understand what's needed from us to face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this. Okay, I have to tell you, I
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Greg Kilstrom
was just looking on ebay where I
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Frank Vella
go for all kinds of things I love.
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Greg Kilstrom
And there it was.
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Frank Vella
That hologram trading card. One of the rarest. The last one I needed for my set.
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Greg Kilstrom
Shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams. One One of a kind. Ebay had it and now everyone's asking,
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Frank Vella
ooh, where'd you get your windshield wipers? Ebay has all the parts that fit my car. No more annoying, just beautiful. Millions of finds, each with a story. EBay Things people love the Agile Brand.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as we explore marketing, technology, AI, E commerce, and whatever's next for the omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show. Is the increasing investment in marketing by SMBs a sign of growth and optimism, or is it masking a deeper struggle with confidence and effectiveness? Agility requires both adapting to the rapid pace of technological change while also understanding the core challenges faced by your customers. Like SMBs struggling to measure marketing ROI, it also demands a willingness to simplify complex tools and processes, empowering businesses to achieve more with less. Today we're going to talk about the evolving landscape of marketing for small and medium sized businesses, the challenges they face, and how B2B marketers can become essential partners in their success. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Frank Vella, CEO at Constant Contact. Frank, welcome to the show, Greg.
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Frank Vella
Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm pleased to be here.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, really looking forward to this conversation. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Constant Contact. Sure.
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Frank Vella
Well, I'm proud to be the CEO of Constant Contact. We are a digital marketing platform built to make it simple for small businesses to grow their business in whatever context that means for them, whether it's connecting with their customers, building their brand or selling their wares, whether that's a service or a product. And so we've been around for a couple of decades and have been solely focused on small business. And I lead this great company. Prior to that, my career has taken me through a few great companies like Microsoft. I started my career in Microsoft Canada and have spent time in the United States building companies like Virtustream, Quest Software and working at HP Enterprise.
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Greg Kilstrom
Nice. Nice. Love it. Well, yeah, let's dive in here. And first thing I want to talk about is what I refer to in the intro is this confidence gap in small and medium sized businesses. And so Constant Contact did some research recently that suggests a growing confidence gap among these SMBs regarding marketing efforts. What are some of the key factors that are contributing to this lack of confidence even as they're also increasing marketing spending?
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Frank Vella
Yeah, so we poll our customers constantly, both in the United States and throughout the globe and we produce what's called our Small Business now report. This quarter's report says it all. The headline number exposes that only 18% of small businesses feel very confident in their marketing effectiveness this year. And that's down quite a bit from last year. And I would say for starters, their general confidence is down. They have a lot of headwinds in the market today and they really are looking for ways to grow. They have cost pressures, supply challenges and are really looking for their marketing dollar to say more. And what is driving the uncertainty is the variety of tools that are available to them. As a small business owner, you have at your disposal almost everything a large business does as well, but you don't have the team to deploy it. So you're looking around and saying I do social and I've added video and I do email and I do sms. What's really working. And they haven't cracked the nut at really getting an roi. Understanding what moves marketing effectiveness for me. And that's what our study says is their concern.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And so as we talk today, there's of two threads here which is, you know, the, the small and medium sized businesses and their challenges. And then you know, what can B2B marketers do to help these, these SMBs that you know, to your point are they have access to everything but the resources for a few of those things. Right. So, you know, beyond just providing tools, how can you know, B2B marketers help SMBs better understand and demonstrate effectiveness? You know, if, if there's that confidence gap, you know, how can they help with that? Demonstrating effectiveness of marketing.
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Frank Vella
First, it's understanding the small business and understanding that if your small business is producing a podcast or servicing lawns and gardens or being a doctor or a lawyer, one thing you're not is a marketer. And you don't have a budget and a staff to be a marketer. So simplifying the complexity of what's out there and then leveraging technology to make the most of it. And that's really the leap we're seeing now where you can almost not have to choose if you're smart about leveraging tools that can access all platforms. That's a big step forward from where we were a long time ago. But the small business just doesn't have the resource to do it. So if you're a marketer, that helps the small business really evolving from doing it with them to doing it for them. Leveraging technology is what they tell us they're looking for.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, to the point of the, the SMBs having access to, to lots of things, but really, you know, it in generally speaking, it makes sense for them to focus on a few things and a few core channels that they can do really well. You know, SMBs are embracing, according to the research and things. You know, SMBs are embracing tools like email marketing, video and AI, but often struggle to leverage them effectively. You know, how can B2B marketers work to simplify these technologies and make them more accessible to these resource constrained businesses?
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Frank Vella
Yeah. So we have hundreds of thousands of customers that have anywhere from 10 to 50 employees. I can't recall one of them asking for AI. That's not their business. What they need are tools that make them more effective. They tell us they don't have more than an hour to spend on marketing. And if we can make that hour impactful, if we can understand that they don't have a marketing department and that the business owner is typically the person doing customer service, payroll, servicing the store and the customers. Saying things like embracing artificial intelligence or investing in video really means exposing those tools to them in a way that they can naturally use them and deploy them for return. They can't think of the idea they are not the marketers. It's a tool that embraces the technology to put the latest and greatest in front of them and then leverage all avenues.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. I mean, because in that way I don't think consumers are asking for, you know, email marketing or video marketing or, or AI, you know, to, to that point as well. So, you know, I think there's some parallels there with the SMBs who are, again, not, they don't have a, an email marketing team like an enterprise might or, or something like that. And so, you know, how do you guide an SMB to use these things? Because they, they work, you know, email, video, AI, like all that stuff. It, it works when done well. How do you guide them to use those things into a cohesive approach?
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Frank Vella
Yeah, I like that question because we started on the question of confidence. I'm not confident and I'm not confident as a small business because there are so many things I see my competitors doing. What should I do? And where it becomes effective is doing something once and reusing it. I'll give you an example. A coffee shop might use a tool like ours which leverages AI. And about half of the small businesses in the United States are now using a tool that embeds AI. So that's great. And they use that tool to draft a fun post in this coffee shop, a fun post about a new seasonal drink. And now they send that same message out tailored differently to an email blast, a quick little video that they put on Insta or TikTok. And they take this one idea and they extend it three ways. That's efficient, but the tool just has to do that for them. And the important thing where they start to see efficiency and understand their gaining is a learning that marketing is not a point in time event, it's a campaign. So taking that one piece of content and harnessing different audiences through Insta and Meta and then email and following up with SMS means they're meeting their customers where they are. And now they get to start to see the effectiveness of a tool that automates and generates content for them.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's, it's doing more with resource constraints. Right? It's, you know, because there's, there's only, even if, even if there's a, a marketer or a small marketing team and some of these, you know, there, there's only so much they can do. You know, I think another, another part of this and really, you know, being able to thrive despite resource constraints is, you know, certainly I talk a lot about agility on, on this show in a number of different ways. What is like true agility look like for an SMB? And, and how can they achieve it with, with limited resources?
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Frank Vella
The Fact is, they've had to do it with limited resources. One of the things. So, as I said, we've been around for a few decades, and our success comes from small business owners being resilient and weathering every storm. And the general economy might seem good to some, but I'll tell you, it's always tough being a small business owner. I talk about my own experiences. I'm here at Constant Contact because my family are small business owners. And as the guy who worked at Microsoft, theoretically, I knew technology and I would help them set up their constant contact instances and you would see how connecting with your audience makes a difference. And if you're a small business owner, you love your customer, it is your friend, it is your family. And so agility for a small business just means making smart, fast adjustments with the resources you have and then leveraging, whether it's community, industry resources, tools that help you, or agencies that are focused on helping you succeed. But one of the beautiful things about small business is resilience. Time and time again, whether it was the pandemic, interest rate hikes, and now some economic uncertainties, we see a tough and weathered small business owner that just knows how to run lean and figure out how to solve a problem. And then I'll just wrap that into, so do what you know how to do well and leverage the right tools that do your marketing or, or, or your HR processing or, or things that, that are not in your wheelhouse of expertise.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And then, you know, so, so to pull that through to, you know, B2B marketers focused on, on SMBs, you know, how do they, how do they help these, these SMBs do more with less, be more, more agile and, you know, kind of alleviate some of these burdens. Simplicity.
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Frank Vella
When I talk to small businesses, they just want the easy button. The analogy I use is we didn't have GPS to get from point A to point B at some point in history. We have gps, it's great. But if the technology is there to teleport me to be in person with you as opposed to over a video call, then I want to leverage that technology. And, and that's what a small business wants. Teleport me to success, do more for me, and do it in a way that is simple, that I can understand and leverage. And so we put so much into trying to make the complex simple. And my advice to anybody dealing with a small business is they're time constrained, they're cash constraint, they're human resources constrained. Simplicity and effectiveness go a long Long way.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah. So I know we've talked about this from several different angles here. I wonder, just as we kind of are wrapping up here, if you could give one piece of advice to those B2B marketers out there looking to better serve SMBs, what would it be?
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Frank Vella
I'd say maybe not one, maybe two. The first is the onus is on you, the provider, which is me in this case and people who do what I do. The onus is on us to figure out the technology in this case, whether it's AI or video or whatever makes the next evolution of marketing better. It's on us to sort that out and deploy it in our tools so that a small business can leverage AI without knowing anything about AI the way a larger business does. And if you're a small business, and we're seeing this in the data, don't forget the basics that have been tried and true are often the most reliable. And it's complimenting, not abandoning certain things. And we see the data tells us that as times are more constrained, email and SMS are still the most reliable forms of marketing, whether you're a large enterprise or a small one. But you can't stop there. And you have to complement the resources with social and other aspects of, of a fully rounded campaign. And our job is to help you grow, whether that's getting you leads, get new donations, getting you presents and more customers. Our job should be. Our job as providers to the SMB, to the small business community, is to help you make the most of what you have.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And so then, you know, looking ahead, I'm sure, you know, you do plenty of this as a serving those small and medium businesses. You know, what, what are some of the biggest opportunities that you see, you know, looking out ahead for B2B marketers to partner with SMBs like you've been doing, and create mutually beneficial relationships.
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Frank Vella
I draw the analogy to the mobile devices we use. When the technology forced us to require four devices to do what one device did, we did. And we had the greatest of technology for that iteration. So that took a camera and a phone and a fax machine and a computer. But once the technology is there, you're behind if you're not leveraging it and so bringing it together. And unfortunately, a small business has to deploy all the tools that an enterprise does in order to compete. The hardware store on Main street has to compete with a big box store that houses all the resources. And so I come back to defining simplicity in a context that is specific to an industry or a Use case. How a real estate agent deploys our technology is different than how a service provider like a doctor or a lawyer does. And then understanding we live in a connected ecosystem. So we spend a lot of effort ensuring, if I use the real estate community as an example, that we connect to the systems and the proprietary services that that industry uses to run their business so that they don't have to switch from tool to tool and have different marketing lists from their CRM or their customer list. And if we can join to what's relevant in their ecosystem, then cumulatively we all become more relevant and effective for that small business person. And so we can't just live in our world. I have a marketing tool. Go figure it out. We have to evolve to. I have a marketing tool, I leverage the technologies so you don't have to. And I connect to what's important in your world through integrations, whether that's a canva that produces content or a proprietary dealership, real estate agent, etc. Type application that is unique to your day to day.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. And I mean that's powerful because it's a, it's a relationship. It's not just sell. I mean, you know, we've got to sell. Like the small businesses have to sell stuff too, but like we've all got to sell stuff, but it's a partnership and there's, there's give and take there and there's mutual understanding. Right. So yeah, so much so. Yeah. Love it. Well, Frank, thanks so much for joining today. Really, really appreciate your insights. One last question for you. I like to ask everybody what you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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Frank Vella
Not much different than what I'm advising for our small businesses or the providers of small business. So my job is to help take the complex, a lot of technology, a lot of marketing, a lot of integrations and just simplify it. And if I can help simplify in my day to day for my employees and for my partners, then we're a better partner, we're a better employer, and we hit the trifecta of customers, employees and technology that makes things work. And so we have a North Star keep it simple for our customer. And part of achieving that is keeping it simple for ourselves. And in the world of AI and video and technology, it's hard work to keep things simple. And with that, I'll also say it's a pleasure to be on such a successful podcast and show and I appreciate you having me. Greg.
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Greg Kilstrom
Oh, thanks so much. Yeah, it's been great talking with you. Well, again, I'd like to thank Frank Vela, CEO at Constant Contact for joining the show. You can learn more about Frank and Constant Contact as well as get a link to the research we discussed by following the links in the show. Notes thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event. Go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
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Frank Vella
The agile brand. With the all new Audi Q3, the answer is always yes. Yes to adventure. Yes to escape. Yes to right now. The all new Audi Q3 made for the S life.