Ep 228: How to Simplify Your Marketing Without Losing Your Mind with James Hipkin

That quote from marketing veteran James Hipkin cuts to the core of a major problem for online business owners: too much noise, too little strategy. With four decades of top-tier marketing experience across four countries, James joins us to unravel the confusion and teach you how to swap chaos for clarity, without falling for the next shiny thing.

James Hipkin has been at the helm of multimillion-dollar marketing efforts and now helps small business owners use enterprise-level strategies on a manageable scale. His superpower? Translating big-budget principles into simple, actionable tools for the rest of us.

We Also Talked About:

• Why repelling the wrong customers is just as crucial as attracting the right ones
  
• The marketing funnel vs. the sales funnel—and why confusing them kills results
  
• The “hub and spoke” model for aligning your website, channels, and content
  
• How UTM codes help you stop guessing and start tracking what works
  
• Why most business owners are shouting from rooftops no one can hear
  
• How to build trust through your marketing (and why it matters more than ever)
  
• The truth about buyer’s journeys—and why ignoring them costs you sales
  
• “Call to action” vs. “People Like You” pathways—what to say instead
  

RESOURCES MENTIONED

• VIPchatwithJames.com – Book a free strategy session with James
  
• UTM.io – Tool for creating UTM codes (for tracking links effectively)
• Google Analytics – Used in conjunction with UTM codes for performance tracking

👉  Want regular access to tips, techniques, and advice from experts about growing your business?  My newsletter is for business owners who miss having weekends … and sanity.  If that’s you, sign up here.

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Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 228:  How to Simplify Your Marketing Without Losing Your Mind with James Hipkin

Surprisingly one man, James kin, and his journey from tour buses to boardrooms might just change how you think about marketing. Are you lost in the chaos of marketing tactics and shiny objects? Wondering which ones are actually worth your time? In this episode, James draws from over 40 years of marketing experience across four countries to help us untangle

the noisy mess of modern marketing. We take a look at why chasing every marketing trend is a trap. How to distinguish between good and bad customers, and the surprising connection between music dissonance and effective strategy. James also breaks down practical tools like the hub and spoke model and UTM codes.

Giving you a clear principle driven approach to marketing that actually works. Now, James isn’t just a veteran [00:01:00] marketer, he’s a pattern spotter, a simplifier, and someone who genuinely wants business owners to succeed without burning out His superpower lies in making complex marketing strategies accessible and actionable, especially for small business owners, trying to do more with less. This episode is packed with wisdom that you won’t want to miss. 

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin, and this podcast is for business owners who want to hear stories, tips, and advice from experts and online entrepreneurs who have overcome problems and challenges to get to success, because if they’ve done it, so can you.

Trudy Rankin: So James, thank you so much for being here. 

James Hipkin: Trudy, it’s an absolute pleasure to be here. I’m really looking forward to our conversation and sharing my experience with your [00:02:00] audience and helping them bring some order to the chaos. 

Trudy Rankin: And that, that is a good way of saying it, order to the chaos.

And also, we’re going to get into some kind of exciting things because we were talking just before we started about some of the frameworks that, or one of the frameworks, one of the examples that you’re going to be able to use. And I’m really excited to see you use it in action. I’m keen to see what it’s like, but I would like to start out by getting you to share with the listeners what just a little bit about your background, we’ve mentioned four countries and three continents, but maybe just tell people a little bit more about yourself.

James Hipkin: Yeah, it’s been an interesting journey, I have to say. I graduated from college with a music degree. 

Trudy Rankin: as we do. 

James Hipkin: And then I spent the next six years out of college working in the rock and roll industry, touring with major recording artists. And honestly, I learned more about teamwork and project management, touring with rock bands than I did in the subsequent 30 years of [00:03:00] experience working in marketing.

But at the ripe old age of 30, I decided I didn’t want to keep doing this. It’s hard work. It wasn’t the hard work that bothered me. It was just wasn’t a lifestyle that I wanted to continue following. And I thought about what it was that intrigued me. And I remembered a conversation I’d had with the lead singer and bass player of a band that I worked with quite a bit during this era.

It’s a heavy metal band out of Canada called Rush. And And Geddy Lee was explained to me how they had vertically integrated their business, and we had a very good conversation around this whole concept, and what that did was open my mind to the concept of, look, if the, this guy who’s like rock and roll bass player and singer in a band can think about [00:04:00] his, what he does from a business point of view and have the success that they’ve had.

I could probably apply what I understand and know in business as well. And it was that conversation that really opened my mind to this opportunity and the possibility that I could do this with my music degree in six years rattling around the country and buses and transport trucks. So I went about getting a job as, at an advertising agency.

And that’s how I made the transition. And, the guy who hired me said I wouldn’t normally hire someone like you, but there’s something about you that intrigues me. And he said, are you willing to start at the bottom? So I’m there as a junior account executive with all these kids right out of college.

And I said, yeah I’ll start at the bottom, but you need to review me every six months. Cause I suspected [00:05:00] I’d be a fairly fast learner because I had all this practical experience and life experience, frankly that the kids out of college didn’t have. And and that’s in fact what happened. And so that, those early days, and this was back in the day when, people actually got trained well at advertising agencies, spending six weeks writing my first memo to a client, right?

Cause being taught how to properly write a memo which people aren’t doing anymore, which is unfortunate, but that’s how I got started and people often ask me, how did this odd background prepare you to have the success that you had in marketing and advertising? And I said when you’re a musician.

There’s a number of things that you have to understand. You have to understand the power of dissonance. 

Trudy Rankin: Yes, that’s interesting. Yes. 

James Hipkin: And, you have to be [00:06:00] empathetic. You have to know how to listen. You have to know how to listen to your audience, and you have to know how to listen to the other people performing with you.

And those two skills, the ability to value and embrace dissonance, and the ability to be empathetic, both which come from my music background and music training, and the six years of experience touring with rock bands. This held me in very good stead in the marketing and advertising world, because it, I discovered that those skills are not as common as one would think.

Trudy Rankin: I find that fascinating, because probably unbeknownst to most people listening, I’m a musician myself, I play a French horn. I participate in the community groups and, for just for playing. And I enjoy it. I love it. And that [00:07:00] concept, I had never thought of that concept of dissonance and being able to appreciate and tolerate dissonance in order to get to the beauty beyond it or within it as being part of a marketing approach.

That’s fascinating to me. I find that interesting. 

James Hipkin: It’s about creating tensions. To and recognizing that a key aspect to marketing is This is both underappreciated and not as commonly known, but it is as important to repel the wrong customers as it is to attract the right customers.

Trudy Rankin: Which is counterintuitive to people who are still in the early days of their game because more is better, right? The more you have, the better it is. But do you want to just expand on why that’s not necessarily the case? 

James Hipkin: I tell you the reality is that the bad customers take more time and energy than the good customers do.

And if your customer portfolio is [00:08:00] full of bad customers, You’re going to get overwhelmed by all of their demands. I got recruited. I was an executive vice president at an agency in Chicago, and I got recruited to be president of a small agency in San Francisco, and one of the things I did in the first six months of taking over this office in San Francisco is I fired one third of the clients.

Trudy Rankin: That would have left people feeling a little bit nervous. 

James Hipkin: Actually, what happened was profitability went up and staff turnover went down. Because we were working with the clients who valued what we were doing, and had, and their budgets were growing, And our staff was working for clients who valued what we were doing, and who had the budget to invest in what we were doing, as opposed to having to struggle with people who we weren’t a good fit for.

Trudy Rankin: But it takes some discipline to [00:09:00] be able to move past that. Maybe it’s a fear of lack or, you’re worried about the fact there might not be enough clients or enough revenue to go around if you get rid of one that’s a pain in the neck or doesn’t, isn’t a good fit.

Maybe you won’t hit your targets, your revenue targets. Talk to me just a little bit about how you, I’m just curious, this is my own personal curiosity. How did you go about working with the staff? You said turnover got, was lowered, so you kept more staff. How did you work with them to help convince them that dropping these people was a good idea and that they would still have enough work to do?

James Hipkin: It really wasn’t that big a challenge because they instinctively knew that and they didn’t want to work on these businesses because it was just not a good fit. And, so you’re dropping clients that are not profitable, and staff turnover is expensive. It’s expensive to replace people.

It’s expensive to not find new people. It’s expensive to train them, et cetera. [00:10:00] So it was about consolidating and focusing. And theoretically, we should have had more staff than we had, so the typical motion would be to hire more people, and I didn’t do that. I got rid of the clients that weren’t profitable and weren’t a good fit for us.

Trudy Rankin: So I want to ask you a quick question because I think that the listeners would be interested and I’m interested definitely because you would have walked into this agency, you would have looked around, you would have looked at the customers that you had, the clients that you had, and you would have had some sort of process going on in your head about how to tell which ones were good fit and which ones weren’t a good fit. Can you just maybe unpick that thinking process a little bit? 

James Hipkin: There’s two sides to it, as there are with most things. There was the data side, which is the, what were the financials? What were the, how much was it costing us to service this business?

How, what kind of growth have we experienced or not with them over [00:11:00] the period of time? Was, were they profitable on an account basis? And then there was the softer side. I sat down and talked to the key person at the client to try to get to know them, to get a sense for where they were coming from.

And I remember one of these conversations with one of these clients that we subsequently fired. And we were having this conversation and I was there with the executive creative director. And she leaned over and whispered in my ear and said, James, unclench your jaw, you’re going to hurt yourself.

Trudy Rankin: That’s a pretty telling signal, isn’t it? 

James Hipkin: Yep. So it was a combination of those two things, qualitative judgment on whether I felt like this was an organization we could work with and the quantitative judgment on where they were at from a financial perspective. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, that’s really interesting.[00:12:00] 

So you’ve had held a number of marketing positions. Basically looking at your profile and things like that you’ve worked and had clients that are pretty high up there and stuff. Do you want to maybe just talk a little bit about your transition from working at the sort of the top levels of corp, or with top type corporates and then moving into what do you do today?

Do you want to talk a little bit about that? 

James Hipkin: I’d love to, and it actually builds on what you said in the introduction. Whereas when you have the opportunity to work in multiple cultures, in multiple countries, one of the things that you learn very quickly in order to survive, is that you need to distill what you’re doing down into principles.

And when you understand the principles, when you can articulate the principles behind what you’re doing, principles are universal. Principles cross cultures and principles [00:13:00] cross budgets. If you understand the principles behind what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter whether you have a multi nine figure budget or 10, 000. The principles still apply. And that’s what my superpower, if you will, is the ability to distill a lot of these things down into principles and into ideas that are easily understood, can be executed in a small way, or can be executed in a large way. And that’s the power of a principle, right?

And I learned that when I got thrown into the international world and suddenly had to explain to business executives in Latin America what the hell we were doing. 

Trudy Rankin: And there’s a, yeah, it’s a different culture, different way of thinking about things, and you can put your foot in it and in your foot in the poo or in your mouth, either one really easily.

James Hipkin: Oh, yeah. Oh, [00:14:00] yeah. And particularly, the other, the triumvirate, we talked about the, dissonance, and we talked about empathy. The third leg in that three legged stool is humility. Recognize that you don’t have all of the answers. Recognize that there are times when you need, There’s a trend going on in business right now where the fractional CMO is becoming a much more important thing.

And the reason for that is, so many business owners are, they’re really good at what they do, but that doesn’t make them really good at marketing. Yes. And, if you give your little digital marketing agency a bad brief, you’re going to get bad results. Now they might be pretty, but it’ll still not work.

Pretty doesn’t mean it’s going to work. [00:15:00] 

Trudy Rankin: That is a hard lesson to learn. 

James Hipkin: Yeah. It’s the most common problem I see when I’m auditing digital marketing programs or websites or whatever. The most common problem I see is not copy your design. It’s an absence of strategy. 

Trudy Rankin: Can you just expand on that just a little bit?

Because that is something that I think most people would not have twigged to, or they might not have understood that might be the case. 

James Hipkin: Most small business owners, when they’re doing their marketing, it’s akin to the business owner is standing on the roof of his building, shouting at the world at large about how wonderful they are.

Okay, first of all, the world at large probably can’t hear them, and if they can hear them, they don’t care.

What strategy does is, what I’ve just described is inside out marketing. You’re inside your bubble and you’re shouting out to the world. Strategic marketing is outside [00:16:00] in marketing, where you understand who your ideal customer is. You understand what they’re like demographically, you understand their characteristics, what they’re like as people.

You understand the pain that they’re struggling with, and you understand the transformation, the gain that they’re hoping to achieve. That avatar.

is an example of outside in marketing. But the avatar, like most things, is a two sided exercise. And where many businesses may have an avatar, they may, or sometimes it’s called a persona, the other side of that coin is mapping the buyer’s journey. Understanding that the process that the consumer goes through is not simple.

When they’re, have no need for what you’re selling. It doesn’t matter how good your [00:17:00] marketing is, all the best marketing in the world is not going to change a customer’s need state. They don’t need it. They’re not going to see it because they’re being exposed to six to 10, 000 marketing messages a day.

Just noise. In order for you to break through the noise, you need to understand their journey. What’s the, what are the sort of things that happen to them that cause them to become aware that maybe I need to solve this problem? They walk into their kitchen and there’s water on the floor from the dishwasher.

That’s an event that happened that suddenly they’re in the market for a new dishwasher, right? If they’re not in the market for the new dishwasher, they don’t see any of the advertising. So understanding. Each stage of the buyer’s journey, understanding that what happens, what are the questions that the consumer has, what are the obstacles they’re trying to [00:18:00] overcome at each of the stages of the journey from awareness, through consideration, through prospecting, into decision.

Each of those phases is distinct and you go through it. I’m sometimes taught, tell a story of, you’re in the shopping, you’re in the grocery store and you’ve got the cart and you’re motoring down the, an end dial and suddenly out of the corner of your eye, you see a thing for breakfast cereal and it, and you go breakfast cereal.

I don’t, I think we’re out of, we should probably, so you make a left turn and down into the aisle you go, and then you’re overwhelmed by a wall of different choices. So then you quickly run through in your mind, the consideration issues. Now, what am I looking for? I’m like, I need, needs to be healthy.

I need to be sugar free. It needs to have fiber, whatever the decisions are. happening at that point. That narrows it down to a specific area in the shelf, and there’s two or three [00:19:00] brands there, and you’re into the prospecting stage, you’re trying to choose between brands. I’ve had good experiences with that brand, but that brand is on sale right now.

They start comparing packaging, they don’t necessarily read the packaging, but they, it leaves an impression and they, and all this can happen in 30 seconds. 

Trudy Rankin: Yes, having just been shopping yesterday. Yes. 

James Hipkin: And that buyer’s journey happens all the time, but how many business owners do you know who’ve actually bothered to map it?

Trudy Rankin: That’s interesting because it reminds me that a lot of the people that I talk to confuse the buyer’s journey with their own selling journey, if that makes any sense. 

They’re not the same thing. Can you just maybe unpick that just a little bit? 

James Hipkin: It’s a bow tie. You’ve got the marketing funnel, which is all of the stuff that happens before the purchase is made.

The purchase is the knot in the bowtie. And the [00:20:00] sales funnel is everything that happens after the purchase is made. And they’re not the same thing. And I see them confused all the time with like people expounding on the internet and YouTube and various places where they will enter, they’ll use marketing funnel and sales dump funnel as a synonym.

They’re not. They’re not the same things, and it’s important that distinction is clear, because the other thing that, that’s important in another one of these principles, the most important sale is not the first sale, it’s the second sale, because if you can sell something to someone two times, the chances that you’ll be able to sell it three, four, five, six times are exponentially improved.

And that’s where the bow tie gets involved. You’ve, if another story from my past large telecommunications company hired us to help them with customer loyalty. They were literally losing [00:21:00] customers faster than they were gaining customers. They were on track to be out of business in about 18 months.

We sponsored a research study to help understand loyalty in this particular sector. And I don’t remember any of the outputs from the research study. It doesn’t matter. But what I do remember is one sentence from the researcher’s introduction. When he was introducing the readout from the survey, this is a guy who specialized in loyalty research, and he said in his experience, 90 percent of loyalty problems can be traced to a flawed sales process.

Okay. That marketing funnel, which is the process that people went through, does it build trust and build relationship? Is the purchase the next logical step in the buyer’s journey? Or do they feel like they’ve been tricked into buying something? 

Trudy Rankin: Yes. 

James Hipkin: That distinction is very important. I’ll give you an, I’m on a roll [00:22:00] here.

One of the things, it’s a bit controversial that I tell people is stop saying call to action. 

Trudy Rankin: And say instead? 

James Hipkin: And say instead, you’re not creating a call to action. You’re creating a pathway. Now, effectively and functionally, it’s exactly the same thing, but the mindset is, shift is really important. A call to action is a marketer shouting at a customer and telling them what to do.

People don’t want to be shouted at and they don’t want to be told what to do. A pathway, a People Like You pathway, calls out to sub segments in your audience, says, Hey, if you follow this link, click this button, we’re going to give you all kinds of valuable information that’s been tailored specifically for you.

And guess what? When they follow a People Like You pathway, they’ve, two things have happened. They’ve told you exactly who they [00:23:00] are. And they’ve chosen to follow that pathway, which means they’ve given you permission to give them more information. 

Trudy Rankin: Makes a lot of sense. 

James Hipkin: So inside out marketing, shouting at the world at large about how awesome we are, or outside in marketing, understanding who your best customers are, understanding the journey that they’re on, supporting that journey, building trust, building relationship.

So when they do make the purchase, It’s just the next logical step in their journey. And when that happens, the other side of the bowtie, the sales thing Hey, customers like you have also purchased this. It’s received in an entirely different way as opposed to somebody’s created a tripwire in a ClickFunnels funnel, right?

Trudy Rankin: Makes a lot of sense, a lot of sense. And I can, in my mind’s eye, I can see examples of exactly that kind of flashing. [00:24:00] And it brings me to my next question because one of the things that we talked about a little bit earlier here was this example that you had, but the, which I would like to get into and to lay the groundwork for that, I just want to just say, One of the things that, for myself personally, and also when I was just getting started, and also for some of the people that I work with they’re, marketing’s hard, right?

And I’d be, I’d love to know the answer to the question of how many people who run businesses actually are good at marketing their businesses. And I suspect it’s just a very small number of people. 

Most people are good at their expertise, they’re not good at marketing, as you said earlier on. So what that means is that whenever we hear the gurus in quotes, gurus telling us about this new latest, greatest way of 10-Xing your leads or 10-Xing your sales, or do this and you’ll be a billionaire, whatever, you’ll be driving a Ferrari and have a yacht which is a lot of BS, quite frankly.

Anyway, lots of people hear these things and they go, Okay, I’m going to try it. I’m going to try it. And so then they stopped [00:25:00] focusing on the thing that they were doing that was starting to get a bit of traction and they start to focus on these other things and you end up splitting. And I can say this because I’ve done it myself.

You end up splitting out your energy. You’ve got it off in a bazillion different streams and then none of them work. So could you please bring out your example that you were showing me earlier, and let’s just walk this through and see how you can help people not succumb to the bright shiny object syndrome is where I’m getting to, I think.

James Hipkin: Let’s start with a principle. Okay. There’s a famous story a business reporter was interviewing, his name was Peter Lynch. He was the fund manager of the Magellan Fund, which is a mutual fund out of Fidelity in Boston. Very successful. had years and years of above average growth and etc.

And this business reporter asked him, so what, to what do you attribute your success? And he was expecting a long and involved and complicated answer. [00:26:00] And Peter Lynch looked at him and said, water the flowers and prune the weeds.

Trudy Rankin: I like it. 

James Hipkin: And that’s a fundamental principle that differentiates successful marketers from people who are getting overwhelmed by the noise and the shiny things. Find out what’s working for you and do more of that. And, if you want to try something new, that’s fine, but do it in a test versus control method where you’re not stopping what you’re doing, you’re just spinning off a small amount of budget to run a test to see if the test is going to do better than the control. And if the test does do better than control, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Do a confirmation test. Take the test and double the size of it and do it again to see if it happens again.

build [00:27:00] into things gradually. Patience is a very underappreciated virtue and it’s so important. One of the things that I talk about, and I think this is the analogy that you’re leading up to, there’s so many choices. If you have an avatar and you have the buyer’s journey map, that goes a long way to helping you clean out the choices.

Because you’ve got something objective that you can assess something new against. If your avatars, the demographics in your avatar is that the, your primary audience is men in their, over 40, I don’t care what your nephew says, TikTok is not where you should be.

Trudy Rankin: Yep, that is absolutely right. 

James Hipkin: And don’t try to boil the damned ocean. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve, clients have come to [00:28:00] us and we’ve got, okay, we’re going to stop doing that, we’re going to stop doing that, we’re going to stop but, are you getting any leads from it?

I don’t know. Exactly. So there’s a simple idea that not hard to do. You’re probably familiar with it. Your audience might be familiar with it. I’m happy to explain it if you think it would be of value. And that’s this concept of UTM tracking codes. 

Trudy Rankin: It’s probably worth talking about a little bit. It was around for a while and then there’s all these tools and you didn’t have to do it anymore and people don’t really understand. I think a lot of people don’t understand what it does. 

James Hipkin: You still need to do it. What a UTM tracking code is. You’ve seen URLs where there’s the URL and there’s slash and there’s something else and then there’s slash and then there’s a question mark and there’s a whole bunch of stuff after that.

That question mark stuff after that’s a tracking pixel. And when you add UTM [00:29:00] codes to your URLs. When you’re out in Instagram or you’re in Pinterest or you’re doing LinkedIn or whatever the channels are that you’re, you have a presence in and you’re using UTM codes. Google Analytics picks those UTM codes up and streams out that data so you can now see where your data is coming from and you can see what they’re doing on the website.

As a result, are they bouncing within 10 seconds, or are they spending 3 or 4 minutes on the page? Are they going to other pages? You can see all of that if you just simply add that UTM tracking code to your links. And that’s what helps you understand which are the flowers and which are the weeds. And when you find the ones that are working, do more of that and stop doing the other [00:30:00] things.

Trudy Rankin: Stop doing the other things. And I have to say, because I can say this with some certainty, a lot of people that I’ve worked with start out being afraid of Google Analytics. So being able to read the data is one of the most important skills that you can develop as you’re going through and trying to build your business.

I won’t go off on a big speech about it, but it’s really important to be able to read your analytics. And I just wanted to just then take that then talking about just talking about the whole avoiding bright shiny object syndrome and just be able, being able to understand how things actually work.

Can you just go through that wheel and hub spoke the wheel and spoke example that we talked about earlier? 

James Hipkin: If you think about in the online world, your website is one of only two digital assets that you actually own. Your list is the other one. Everything else is rented land. So think of your website.

It’s like a bicycle wheel. You’ve got the [00:31:00] hub. That’s your website. You’ve got the spokes. These are the media channels that you’re using to send your message out to your audience and that your audience follows back to your website. That’s where the UTM codes. get involved, is understanding that flow. And then the rim that holds it all together is your content and messaging strategy.

And that comes from your avatar and your buyer’s journey map. When you connect everything together, you’ve got the most profound invention in mankind’s history, second only perhaps to fire. 

Trudy Rankin: The wheel. 

James Hipkin: The wheel. But when they’re just individual things, they don’t have much value. They’re nice and shiny and stuff, but they don’t have much value.

The power comes from the connections. Content and messaging strategies are the rim [00:32:00] and it’s based on what your customers are interested in. The media channels are the spokes. And again, that comes from the avatar demographics, for example, that example I used about TikTok a second ago. Demographics can really help you understand what media channels to use and what media channels to not use.

Your content, your characteristics is how you craft your marketing because you need to, you’re talking to people here. You need to have your messaging written. Another underutilized and wonderful goldmine of insights into how people actually talk is Reddit. Virtually every business you can imagine, there’s a subreddit where people who are interested in what it is you’re selling are in there talking about. stuff. Now it’s not it’s not a valid research platform and you’ve [00:33:00] got to be careful with it because it’s doing election surveys based only on people who have landlines, right? It’s not representative of the market as a whole, but it is still a very valuable resource.

Area to find out how real people are talking and what kind of words they’re using. So that hub and spoke idea really helps a business owner decide, is this new thing, does it fit? Is it gonna add value to my wheel, or is are the connections going to be legitimate? Or is it checkbox? Is it somebody told me I needed to do this, so I did it, and there it is, check the box.

That’s not marketing. 

Trudy Rankin: There’s that sentiment that, just as we bring this to a close, is that sentiment that I’ve heard so many times, is that you have to be everywhere with your marketing. And I just don’t, I don’t get it because I don’t think it’s possible for people to be everywhere, efficiently or effectively.[00:34:00] 

James Hipkin: I’ll tell you another quick story, because I know we’re just about ready to wrap up. That telecommunications company, the first meeting I had with the chief marketing officer, I came into his office, we sat down pleasantries, thank you very much for hiring us and he said, we’re really happy that you’re here and all that nice stuff.

And he said, so how are we going to go about this? And I looked him right in the eye and I said, I need you to spend less money. He damn near fell off his chair. Wait, what? No, I need you to, you’re spending too much money. But we’re trying to solve this thing. Yeah, you’re throwing money at it. You don’t, you’re not going to solve it by throwing money at it.

80 percent of your revenue is coming from 20 percent of your customers. Do the analysis. You’ll see that I’m right. What we need to do is focus the loyalty budget on the 20 percent that actually care.

Trudy Rankin: That makes a lot of sense. Did he listen to you? 

James Hipkin: He did. [00:35:00] It took us about a year to put the program together because this is a, it was a 2 billion dollar base of business. So this was not small. Took us about a year to put the whole program together. We did a lot of testing and some research. I told you about the research before, at the end of the first full year of the program running, I was having lunch with him or coffee for breakfast or whatever it was. And so I asked him, so how’s it doing? How’s it going? And he said, we’ve generated 20 percent revenue growth at a 2 billion dollar base of business. We have not changed our market share.

Trudy Rankin: That is pretty impressive. 

James Hipkin: And we did that for four straight years.

Trudy Rankin: Do the math. That is a lot.

James Hipkin: Understanding who your customers are, understanding what they’re looking for, supporting them, supporting their journey, knowing which ones are valuable and which ones aren’t. These are simple things and simple [00:36:00] ideas and their principles. They apply whether you’re a multi seven figure, multi nine figure business, or a small business, they still apply.

Trudy Rankin: That is really, a really important message. I think that. And I’m going to include myself. We all need to listen to a lot more. That’s been really fascinating. James, we could talk about this for a long time because this is an area where I’m always trying to improve my skills. And just, I think everybody needs to get better at marketing, be able to do it better.

If people are interested in either connecting up with you or getting in touch with you, or maybe even getting some help, where would they go? 

James Hipkin: If they go to VIPchatwithjames. com, they can book some time on my calendar. I’d love to chat with them about their marketing. It’s very valuable. I’ll be able to share some of my experiences and add some value.

And it’s also very valuable to me to hear the kinds of problems that people are [00:37:00] facing, et cetera. Obviously our business is the website design and development, and now we’ve started to do a lot more marketing services. A conversation we might want to have in the future is about how a small business owner can start to harness some of the marketing ideas and marketing techniques that for budget reasons are not available to them that large language models are now making available to them.

And that’s one of the areas that my team is working on very closely is how do we bring some of these powerful tools to bear in a way that a smaller business can actually take advantage of them. 

Trudy Rankin: Absolutely. I have a huge interest in that area. So that could be something we could definitely, get you back onto the show and we could talk about with some details, I think because an area that’s got a, it’s huge opportunity for growth and it just makes a, makes it possible for a small business to do a lot more than they could have [00:38:00] otherwise.

James, it’s been fantastic just having you on the podcast. I really appreciate you just taking the time and sharing your wisdom based on your expertise. And yeah, I really do appreciate that. 

James Hipkin: No, it’s been my pleasure, Trudy. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation and hopefully some folks have gotten some value from it.

Trudy Rankin: I’m sure they have.

 If James’ advice hit home and made you rethink.

If James’ advice hit home and made you rethink your marketing approach, take a moment to jot down just one thing you’ll implement this week, and then actually go and do it. Maybe it’s identifying your flowers and weeds. Maybe it’s finally setting up those UTM codes, or maybe it’s giving yourself permission to prune.

And hey, if you found this episode helpful. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any future insights. Leave a review and let me know what you’re learning. It helps others find the show and lets me know what’s resonating with you.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll catch you next time on the [00:39:00] Online Business Launchpad podcast.

[00:39:00]