Justin Ulrich [00:00:00]:

I wholeheartedly believe that long form video is the hardest thing to create. And if you do create it and you figure out a way to do so, like, at scale and effectively at scale, you can take that and create any type of derivative content from it. And then you're able to see, like, if you take your content, you break it down by themes or categories, topics, whatever it might be, and you push that stuff out, then you can see what topics resonate. It's like, okay, now I need to create some follow up pieces around this topic because this resonates more with my audience.

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Angelo Esposito [00:00:32]:

Welcome to Wisking It All with your host, Angelo Esposito, co founder of WISK.ai, a food and beverage intelligence platform. We're going to be interviewing hospitality professionals around the world to really understand how they do what they do. Welcome to another episode of Wisking It All. We're here today with Justin Ulrich, the VP of marketing. VP Marketing, I should say, of Evocalize. Justin, thank you for being here with me today.

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Justin Ulrich [00:01:04]:

You bet. Thanks for having me on. This is exciting.

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Angelo Esposito [00:01:06]:

Yeah, of course. So, I mean, as always, I like to start with a very simple question. We got about 20,000 so restaurants in our community, let's say. And so we typically like to share anything we can related to the hospitality space. But a good place to typically start is to learn a bit about what is Evocalize.

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Justin Ulrich [00:01:27]:

You bet. So Evocalize is at its highest level, it's a tool that helps automate paid digital local marketing based on local data. And so that means that no matter what data you're piping into the platform, you can launch or manage ads across Google, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, all automatically behind the scenes so that operators can continue to do their day to day and worry about running the business without having to be marketers as well.

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Angelo Esposito [00:02:02]:

Love it. It's a consistent theme, even with us at Wisc. But even with a lot of the guests I've had is just how do we, and I say we, but I guess tech companies, how do we actually help these restauranteurs buy their time back and focus on the things that a, they actually love and the reason they got into the space, and B, on the things typically that they're good at? So it sounds like this fits right into that and we'll definitely get more into the product side and kind of dive into how you guys help. And maybe some mini case studies or wins you could share just to kind of paint the picture for our audience. But I always like to get the journey before we kind of get there. So maybe just taking a step back. Justin, I'd love to maybe hear your journey. I know the marketing journey probably has been quite vast, but what inspired you to kind of pursue this path? Why? Why Evocalize? And how did that kind of come about?

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Justin Ulrich [00:03:00]:

Yeah, I'll take a step back even further and just talk. Why marketing for a second. Because when I got into marketing, it was at the advice of some really good mentors I had at the time. When I had finished my undergrad, I got into accounting. I got my degree in economics and thought I could take this accounting, finance, something like that, or marketing. But I worked for an organization at the time, Dish Network, and it was just an easy transition for me into corporate to move into tax accounting and with the marketers like soul tax accounting was not the fit for me. So I found out in pretty short order after just a couple of months that, hey, I do like the corporate life, but I need to make a shift. And it made the most sense for me to go back to school, get my MBA and transition into marketing.

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Justin Ulrich [00:03:55]:

Got it from there. I've worked for all sorts of different orgs and different industries, mainly focused on demand gen and channel or partner marketing within those different organizations. And I've worked in telecom, payment processing, pos space all the way. I worked for a couple of SaaS companies, worked for Avero a little bit, led their marketing team there and they're in the restaurant space. And I took a little short kind of break to work for one of those dream brands once in a lifetime opportunity. So I had to go work for Polaris and led their brand marketing team for some of their off road vehicle brands, one of them being razer. And to me that was like I had such brand affinity and I had to drop everything I was doing. Even though I absolutely love the team at Avero, it was drop everything and pick up the family, move to Minnesota and go do something fun and exciting.

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Justin Ulrich [00:05:00]:

And it was exciting, it was draining, but it was super exciting. And I realized after a little bit of that that the SaaS space is more my speed. I love working for software tech companies and especially in specific industries. When I got back into SaaS, I worked for a couple of orgs that kind of targeted the home services space and franchise on that side of things. And now where I'm at, it's really an industry agnostic platform and restaurant is just one of the verticals that we happen to serve really well.

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Angelo Esposito [00:05:42]:

That's awesome. That's super interesting. And I guess the contrast from electric vehicles, right? You're talking about the electric vehicle.

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Justin Ulrich [00:05:53]:

The brand that I was over was performance offroad. So if you watch like a.

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:00]:

Kind of, like, interest. Okay, what's that? Electric vehicle company. So what's the name of that company? Because now I'm getting mixed up. It's Polar.

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Justin Ulrich [00:06:07]:

Polaris.

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:08]:

Polaris. Okay.

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Justin Ulrich [00:06:09]:

So they do atvs and side by sides and stuff like that.

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Angelo Esposito [00:06:14]:

That's pretty cool. That's exciting. And so how was the shift? Obviously, from consumer perspective, super exciting. But I'm curious to kind of know from the marketing side, was it as fast paced or was that a little slower paced than you anticipated?

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Justin Ulrich [00:06:30]:

Oh, my gosh. That was lightning speed. Because you have one thing that they didn't do very well before I came over was taking. They had a lot of disparate kind of tent pole activations that were kind of one off, and they didn't do a good job of stitching everything together and nurturing their customer base along, even though the typical buyer's journey had like a nine month buying cycle from research to purchase. So you have to keep your customers engaged and warm throughout a long period of time. And so when I went over, it was identifying those key activations and kind of mapping them in with all the events that we would do, as well as any races for the off road race season and vehicle launches and stuff like that. So we put together a total comprehensive plan that would just keep customers engaged throughout the entire year. And any blanks that we might have, we kind of filled those in with content kind of campaigns and really did a good job at keeping folks engaged and helped to just crush our lead goal.

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Justin Ulrich [00:07:43]:

Our goal was 25,000 leads in the year, and we hit about 150,000 leads on the year that I managed the team there for the full duration of the year. So we did things right, but it was a lot of fun, like I said, but there's just a lot of travel and stuff that went along with it. And time away from the kiddos and missed birthdays and holidays and stuff gets daunting. So when it was over, it was bittersweet, but it was a chance for me to take what I had learned there and creating content in ways that cut through the clutter and bring that back into the space that I was more familiar with and had been for years.

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Angelo Esposito [00:08:24]:

Wow, that's super cool. I don't know if you'd be able to pick one, but I'd love if you could maybe share an example of any particular marketing campaign that you've led, and that's been a success, I think it's always cool to maybe share some success stories if you want to pinpoint. I mean, sure, you've done quite a few, really, years, but if you could mention any, that'd be pretty interesting.

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Justin Ulrich [00:08:49]:

Yeah. One of the coolest campaigns, I think, that I helped lead was when I was at a company called Mercury, Mercury Payment System. So we got acquired by Vantiv, and it was during the time, if you remember, when all the big box stores were having all their big data breaches. So, like Target and the credit card companies were, they basically said, we don't want to take on the liability of this anymore, so we're. We're going to implement EMV chips on our cards, and then it's on you, the rest of the industry, to determine or to find ways to implement this throughout the entire value chain. So the card companies were able to kind of push the liability off of their plates and under the rest of the industry, because they were doing their part right to be more secure. So I led a campaign where we called it security pays, and we built this out to be a year long campaign. It was about a million dollars that we put into it.

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Justin Ulrich [00:09:49]:

It was designed to incentivize each component of the value chain. So working through the third party sales pos, sales folks, and trusted advisors to implement more secure best practices, to sell more secure solutions, we incentivize the oems to take this new method of card payment within their machines, as well as all the merchants. We incentivize them to implement more secure payment or payment solutions within their brick and mortar facilities, as well as even the sales team, to really drive the importance of security, the five fingers of security, to really make the entire value chain more secure and the entire industry more secure. And it really led the charge throughout the rest of the country to make this big shift over to the EMV chips that everybody has in their wallets today.

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Angelo Esposito [00:10:54]:

That's crazy, hearing all that, when that shift happened to say, hey, how did you stumble on Evocalize? I'd love to know that story. When did that take place?

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Justin Ulrich [00:11:06]:

Yeah, recently. I had someone reach out and say, hey, there was an opportunity that a recruiter had brought to them that they weren't quite interested in because they had something good going and said, hey, you sound like you'd be a great fit for this role. And I'm always open to entertaining conversations. And it felt like a good shift from the role that I was in at the time to come over and to lead marketing efforts for vocalize. And I think that the thing that made me really excited about making the jump was because I don't want to just jump from company to company for no reason. The leadership here, more specifically with our CEO Matt Marks, he has got such an infectious love for marketing and he fully understands digital marketing. And as a marketing leader, to have your CEO have a marketing background is huge because then typically it's really easy to get alignment with different initiatives and to get their buy in on budgetary spend, whether it's across events or different initiatives. Right.

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Justin Ulrich [00:12:19]:

It's not pulling teeth at all. And they typically get that the dollar in is going to crank out three, four, $5. So it was really cool to hear not only his, like I said, that infectious love for marketing, but the passion that he brought across. He's been there and done that with other companies before and helped take them public. And it's one of those things where it's like financially you don't have to do it, but just because you want to do it and you want another challenge and you just want to do it again and do it again. He just has that kind of zeal for the space. So that was huge for me. And the other piece that I found really appealing was the company has been around for about ten years.

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Justin Ulrich [00:13:05]:

We helped a few years back when we were spending so much money across different platforms, Google, Facebook, that they basically came to us, said, how are you guys doing this? Help us to adjust our algorithms so that we can actually be more effective in bringing in dollars. Right? And so we helped as a Google partner, as a meta partner, and then Facebook to help them to better optimize their systems. And it was a really cool story to be part of. And we did it in a way. The technology is built to help multilocation businesses across any industry. So we really cut our teeth in real estate. And because that just happens to be where a lot of the connections were made. At the infancy of the company, so did really well there.

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Justin Ulrich [00:14:00]:

A massive percentage of real estate ads are run across our platform. We power realtor.com, tons of big real estate names that I can't give publicly, but we're white labeled behind their solutions. And basically I came into this challenge with, we've got 1.5 million users have access to the tool and nobody knows who we are. So how do we really create awareness, not only in the existing spaces where we operated, but then come into new verticals? And this past year, restaurant was one that we really came into to focus on. We've got the tools in place to really help local marketing, like super hyper local marketing with any multilocation business, but it's just a matter of now we got to go to this vertical, go to this vertical, go to the next one. So we're digging in now in restaurant and franchise real estate. Mortgage insurance is a big one for us too, but it doesn't get more localized than with a real estate agent in terms of marketing. So cut our teeth there.

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Justin Ulrich [00:15:12]:

And now we're rolling it across everywhere else.

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Angelo Esposito [00:15:14]:

Love it. And then when it comes to restaurants, what are the typical problems you see them facing when it comes to, let's say, this piece of the business? So the ad spend and the marketing, right, like you go in, what's their kind of like benchmark? What are they currently doing, if anything?

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Justin Ulrich [00:15:33]:

Typically, brands will help with the marketing from a corporate level and they'll run ads nationally. And it's great if you're running ads, it's better than nothing, right? You're helping to generate brand awareness and you're helping getting your name out there. But what you kind of lose sight of there is the local marketing aspect. So if you think of it this way, the platforms are designed to spend the money and they're going to spend the money in areas where they're going to most easily be able to spend the money. So if you have a national campaign and you throw it out there, the algorithms will more likely determine where the spend is going to be in LA, New York, Chicago, like big metro areas. So if you have a location in Des Moines that needs the foot traffic because their sales are slow this week, the ads running in New York is not going to help them. So we really help any multi location business be able to drive foot traffic or leads or whatever it might be in their geo, right? And depending on the industry, you can get really targeted. So like in the restaurant space, you can hyper target neighborhoods.

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Justin Ulrich [00:16:51]:

So if you have specific neighborhoods that they all go to, a specific high school and a local school wins a game, you want to target those couple of neighborhoods with some ads to say, hey, victory tastes sweet, come on in for a 20% discount on XYZ. And all that stuff can be automated and no one has to have a lick of marketing experience at the local level, but they're able to market very effectively at the local level.

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Angelo Esposito [00:17:18]:

That's actually really cool. And I was reading on your site, I don't want to butcher it. So I took a note, something like that. You guys improved some of the digital marketing effectiveness by 400% and reduced time spent by 98% for some of those local teams. So I love what you're saying. Sounds super interesting. Can you maybe share a recent example or. It doesn't have to be recent, but just a successful example where that rings true?

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Justin Ulrich [00:17:44]:

Yeah, we have quite a few examples. The 400% that's ROI on marketing spend, that was a result that was tracked in the real estate space. And I believe that may have been with realtor.com, if I remember correctly. But the 98% time savings is such a huge metric. The way that we looked, that kind of story is told is one of our clients has 550 franchise locations, and they were able to basically, each of their locations was spending about 9 hours a week managing, on average, managing their ads. If you think about like someone who's managing their digital ads, you have to create the campaigns across different platforms, launch them. When you think it makes sense to launch them, you've got to have your audiences set up, you've got to have your content created, you've got to have basically everything that goes into a campaign, and then you have to do that across multiple platforms. Google, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, that's for a campaign across all the platforms.

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Justin Ulrich [00:19:00]:

So let's say you want to do multiple campaigns in a month. All that stuff, it just takes so long to manage. And then if you're going to a b test anything, it's usually a person going in saying, oh, I'm going to switch the copy on this, or switch the image and let it ride for a week and see what the results are. But our platform does everything with, I just call them the robots. It's all machine learning based and it can determine. We had a client that it was like some preliminary testing. We did like 1000 tests within a month just to test different subject lines and stuff like that. There's no way that a person could do the things that we do at that scale.

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Justin Ulrich [00:19:41]:

And so that one specific case study with the 98% time savings, that was on average, their local offices were each spending 9 hours a week managing their ads, and they were able to bring it down to nine minutes a week managing all their ad programs. If you think about how impactful that is to your organization, even if you just looked at the marketing side now, in this instance, they were marketers that were doing this. They could think of all the other marketing that they could be focused on with another day in the work week. Really?

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Angelo Esposito [00:20:18]:

Yeah, it's huge.

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Justin Ulrich [00:20:19]:

And if you think about, kind of roll that over into another example where you might not have marketers at different locations doing certain things, but they're gms or they're franchisees. These guys and gals may not have any experience really at all doing marketing because typically they buy into a franchise because the system, right, the system makes tons of sense. There's efficiency there and you now have tools that help do the marketing for you based on data that's super efficient. Whereas someone without marketing experience, they're not going to understand the platforms. They get bogged down with just the day to day, every day. Sometimes they know they need to do the marketing, but they don't know where to get started. And it typically never gets done. And if it does, it doesn't get done right or it's out of brand compliance or whatever it might be.

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Justin Ulrich [00:21:13]:

So that's where we really shine in helping to automate all that stuff so folks don't have to worry about it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:21:20]:

That's amazing. On that note, just for maybe some of our listeners to just imagine maybe the high level process, what does it look like? So I can imagine some of our listeners, obviously, that have multi locations listening to this, maybe getting their curiosity peaked. What does it look like? They come to your website, maybe they request a demo. What does the actual process of getting set up kind of look like at a high level? Because I'd love to maybe paint some picture for them.

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Justin Ulrich [00:21:50]:

Yeah. Typically if we start a conversation with you, you'll visit with probably a 15 minutes kickoff call just with one of our sales reps, just to vet it, make sure we're a good fit and there's some alignment there. It's to save our time, to save your time. We do have some parameters that right now, candidly, we sell into enterprise companies. So if there's 100 plus location, that's usually right in our sweet spot. If there are fewer, we can entertain conversations and don't want to let the cat out of the bag, but we will have solutions that can serve others very soon in the new year. So that's something just to keep an eye out for. So if you are interested at all, no matter what your size, drop a line, feel free to reach out.

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Justin Ulrich [00:22:44]:

But we have that initial conversation to vet whether or not it's a fit. And then we have a follow up with a higher level sales rep that'll really talk about, hey, these are the goals that you told us in the first call, what you're trying to achieve. Here's how we can help you achieve those goals. So we really leverage what we call command a message from us on the sales side to really identify, like when someone has told us what their pain points are. Let's just get down to how we help you solve those pain points and not throw everything at you. What we can do, it's one of those things where it's not quite the sky's the limit, but there's so much that we can do. We just talk about what your goals are and how we can help you solve those specific goals. And then we'll get into crawl, walk, run.

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Justin Ulrich [00:23:29]:

We'll do some of the really cool, other cool kind of whiz bang stuff that we do. And then we have a third call, typically where we bring in a solutions consultant and they will also invite your listeners to bring in their techie folks to have a conversation with our tech geeks and really talk to how the systems tie together and how we help get things implemented. And from there we go through an implementation process where we work with our team, our customer success team, as well as the partners team, our clients we call partners, because we truly do see them as that. We partner together to ensure their success. So our success team will help ensure that those programs are set up with all the branding, compliance, all the guardrails we want to put in place, all the automations, all the data feeds, all that stuff. And then we kind of set you loose and we're there to help support you. So it really isn't one of those things where it can seem daunting anytime you stand up a new technology, but it's not that way. We help ensure your success, because your success is literally our success.

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Justin Ulrich [00:24:45]:

So we're there to help out.

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Angelo Esposito [00:24:47]:

That's great. Typically, let's say post implementation, when does an average partner, or in this case, let's say restaurant, start seeing some of that ROI?

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Justin Ulrich [00:25:01]:

Honestly, Angelo, it all depends on the goals. So implementation for us can go anywhere from ten days to six weeks plus depending on how deep you want to get. So like a realtor.com is like a big implementation. They would take a couple of months to put together. But through that implementation phase, we determine with you what are the goals that you want to hit, and then what are the success metrics that we're going to both work towards to ensure that not only you hit your goals, but that you see that value from the get go. And then we also work with you to help identify ways to roll this out through your system. So if you have individual folks that you want to hand the keys off to and let them also go in and manually launch programs because they can very easily, with a push of a button, launch things on their own. If they want to do some above and beyond stuff, we work with you to help ensure that that gets done as well.

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Justin Ulrich [00:26:02]:

But yeah, it's a really quick process to get things stood up. And then depending on the goals of the programs that we create, some of them are just to automate the triggering of promotions. Some of them are actually to track the ROI on promotions. If we push something out through Google, are we able to actually associate people coming into the ad that they clicked on? So there's that attribution piece. Some folks want to just drive app downloads. There's all sorts of goals that we can help you achieve. So it just depends on the goal.

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Angelo Esposito [00:26:38]:

Love it. And I'd be curious. Right, so you help restaurants and other markets, as you mentioned, help them with their marketing, specifically local marketing. How do you guys market to these clients? So let's take restaurants. Where do you guys find your typical success when trying to, I guess, reach the restaurant audience? Are you guys also taking advantage of paid ads or. I'd love to hear a bit about that side of the business.

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Justin Ulrich [00:27:07]:

Let me ask a clarifying question. Are you getting at how are we marketing to our prospects or how are we helping our prospects market to their clients, their customers?

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Angelo Esposito [00:27:17]:

No, I mean, I would love to know. The first part I think we touched on. Sorry, the second part I think we touched on. It's more how because your product helps them market. I'm curious, just from your point of view, how you market to get those customers. So how do you guys, and you being the vp of marketing, do you use any of your own tools or is it really, you guys maybe have different channels like partnerships or things like that?

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Justin Ulrich [00:27:40]:

That's a good question. So it's funny, when I came on board, we didn't really have much in place by way of marketing and I started in November of 2022. So just a little over a year. And in that time we refreshed the brand entirely. We stood up a new website because I know that if we're going to be put, I don't want to throw good money after bad. Our old website was garbage, lack of better term. So I knew that it wasn't really converting and it just had no visual appeal. So the brand piece was important for us to get nailed down.

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Justin Ulrich [00:28:19]:

So we put a lot of effort into that and into the site. And then now on the digital side, it's like now how do we optimize and continue to drive better engagement with the site and with other assets that we create, we don't use our product specifically to market to other companies. Right now, the product itself is a lot more geared towards b to c. So if you think of the channels, Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, those are going to be what our clients use to best market to their folks to try to drive them through the door. There are other things that if we're fully capable of doing, like LinkedIn, for example. We just haven't gotten that implemented because we haven't had a client that said, hey, I really need this thing. And so the opportunity hasn't. But it wouldn't take long to stand up.

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Justin Ulrich [00:29:18]:

If we had that set up, I think we'd use our product more. So what we do use, though, is we also have a managed service component to our business. So we have some of the best paid marketers that they have. Their entire careers come from the agency space, so tons of experience on the digital marketing side of things, so we're able to leverage them where they're needed. But candidly, we're at the stage where our company is at right now. Paid just isn't a huge component of our strategy. It's in there, but it's not where we're more heavily focused on events candidly, because that's where we get. A lot of our clients are at different events, and there's some other key things that we do.

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Justin Ulrich [00:30:12]:

The podcast is one of the things as well. We have the local marketing lab, which we bring in industry pros like you and the tech side, or it might be leaders at different restaurant organizations, whether it's a brand or groups or whatever it may be, to share their insights and to help inspire other folks that have multilocation businesses as to what they should be doing at the local level. So that's been a huge push for us. We just launched episode 20 yesterday. They say when you hit 20 episodes, you're the top 1% podcast in the world. You're talking to a big deal.

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Angelo Esposito [00:30:58]:

Yeah, exactly. I remember reading that, too. But it makes sense. A lot of people stop after episode, like four or five or maybe six.

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Justin Ulrich [00:31:05]:

Yeah, it takes a lot.

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Angelo Esposito [00:31:08]:

Half the battle is just consistency. Right?

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Justin Ulrich [00:31:12]:

I think from a marketing standpoint, where people typically sell themselves short is they give up too soon or they may not start at all, because the thing that they want to do just seems so daunting. But at the end of the day, we preach it all the time on almost every episode. You don't have to have some grand strategy to start doing something, it just start. And you're not throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, you're just throwing something. And hopefully you have that something kind of based or rooted in a hypothesis that's data backed and you were able to then try something, test, fail forward, fail fast, or find out what works and then scale and move on from there. But you just got to start. Yeah, podcasts are difficult too because it's like there's so much that goes into it. You have to have a lot of different, wear a lot of different hats if you don't have a big team, big time.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:20]:

No, it's funny because I've learned that through action and through doing these things. But half the battle, like you said, is starting. And then once you start, it's just being consistent. Because one thing I've learned is just like, you're never going to know everything until you just start. Obviously you want to plan as well you can to give it your best for shot. Like watch a video on how to do podcasts and make a check. Sure. Start, find the right tool, don't go in blind.

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Angelo Esposito [00:32:46]:

But no matter how much research you do, whether you plan for a day or a month or once you actually hit the ground, then you'll kind of discover all these other things. And it's one of those things I always say is like you're just going to learn. And I think hormone quoted said it well, but it was something along the lines of quantity over quality until you can do quality, quantity, quality, something like that. But basically when you put in so much reps, you're naturally going to get better. So it's like, don't worry about quality in the beginning. Not to say like come up with a shitty podcast. But no matter what, your first podcast episode is not going to be as good as ten and it's not going to be as good as 20. Just keep going.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:26]:

And as long as on every episode you're like, oh my sound sucked, let me get a better mic. Oh, that video sucked. Let me improve my Internet speed. My questions suck. Let me prepare better. You know what I mean? Half the value is like doing that, like getting consistent and on every chance making something better. And then you look back and all of a sudden you have pretty decent quality and people are like, oh, that's awesome. But no amount of preparation would give you that result on the first podcast anyway.

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Angelo Esposito [00:33:52]:

So for people listening, take that first step. Whether it's podcasts, whether it's content, whether it's doing paid ads, I promise you, if you're doing paid ads for a year, you'll be better than if you did it for a, like, it's just the time you kind of put into.

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Justin Ulrich [00:34:06]:

So you, I saw you had Sean Walshef on your show, so he was our first guest.

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Angelo Esposito [00:34:11]:

Nice. He's awesome.

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Justin Ulrich [00:34:12]:

If you want to listen to our episode, it's our first episode. Local marketing lab. It's awful because like we're talking, the quality just wasn't there. Sean was great and his content was great, but we had some echoing going on with the mic toward the first. Actually, I recorded the whole episode without hitting record, so Sean had to do it all over again. But he talks about it's quantity plus speed plus consistency equals quality. And if you do those things, just get as much out there as you can quickly, you're only going to accelerate your learnings. You may feel like you're exhausting your audience, but at the end of the day, only about 1.5% of your audience sees an organic post, any given organic post that you put out there.

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Justin Ulrich [00:35:06]:

So even if you post the same thing over and over and over, it's very likely you're not going to fatigue your audience. And the loyal ones that are seeing it more often, well, they're loyal. They're probably going to want to see more of your content. So I wouldn't let that worry get in your way of just slamming content. We push, man. It's getting to about five posts a day just because we're just trying to accelerate as many learnings as we can. And where you may have, like if you look at the unit economics of each post, they may go down a little bit and we may be affecting the algorithm from the standpoint that, hey, we're not driving as high of an engagement rate, so maybe they might not serve it up as much. So each individual post may not be getting what we want, but at the end of the day, the quantity of posts that we're pushing out is able to get us the volume that we're looking for.

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Justin Ulrich [00:36:02]:

So that's why we're doing that and we're able to generate learnings quickly to see what type of stuff resonates more. Is it long form video, short form video, images, AI generated images, like newsletters, whatever it might be, we're quickly learning. And that's been huge for us in creating the podcast specifically, as well as in breaking into new verticals.

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Angelo Esposito [00:36:26]:

It's so true. It's like getting that feedback loop just to echo that point. It's not just pushing the content, but the more you push and then getting that feedback, you just get so much more feedback than if you're posting once a week or once a month. And it's funny, at Wisc, we've been doing kind of something similar over the last year. We've been kind of like increasing output and then increasing channels, even channels historically we never used. We're like, hey, we should probably get on TikTok. And why not? Let's post on threads. Even though just channels that maybe our audience are not really on, like, a lot of restaurants, at least what we've seen, they're more on, like, let's say a Facebook on an Instagram, maybe the bigger chains or hotels on LinkedIn, but we still post on other channels because the opportunity cost is just like, it's very low effort at that point to repurpose content, and it's like, why not? And let's see.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:17]:

And I remember the first time we got a lead that came in through. At that time, we just started TikTok. I think we had like five followers. But it was funny. We got a lead that came through that channel that we tracked through attribution. It was like, that's really cool. It's one demo request, but it's really cool. You never know where your audience will be.

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Angelo Esposito [00:37:35]:

And so test. Just test. Put the content out there, put the quantity like you said, and then quality will get there over time.

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Justin Ulrich [00:37:43]:

Yeah, and I would say, too, majority of marketers will create a content piece, and they'll still spend probably 80% of the time creating it and 20% of their time promoting it. And really, you should look at it from this standpoint. So you spend the same amount of time creating content because you want to create the same quality, but you should be spending 80% of your time promoting it. So it's, how do you take that content now and create derivative pieces and promote it in different ways and across different channels? Whether it's the different social channels or email or whatever it might be, you should be spending the majority of your time promoting it because the heavy lift is already done with the content creation. It's like, well, how can you now sweat that asset and get as much out of it as possible? And that's one of the things that I 100% learned at Polaris, because there, too, if you think about content that's created when you have a big brand, their marketing budget is massive. Massive. And so if you spend 250 grand on a 32nd or a minute long spot, it's like, okay, well, how can I cut this up in a little bit. You have to sweat it out because you don't have any more budget to spend on developing other big pieces like that.

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Justin Ulrich [00:39:11]:

So although the budgets are big, a lot of it's spent on the paid side. So creating the content, it's like one, you get kind of one shot to create your big content and then you have to figure out, well, how can I now take this and get more and more juice from the squeeze? And that's what we try to do. And it seems to be working really well.

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Angelo Esposito [00:39:33]:

Yeah, it makes sense. It reminds me of mean, I'm sure other people have other terms. Gary Vee had like this, the way he broke it down was like pillar content and then kind of micro content. And the pillar content might be something like this long form. It could be a podcast or blogs or whatever, and then slicing it. It's funny because when you start actually thinking about it, there's a lot you can do. Like with this video, we'll probably turn this into 1020 shorts. And of those shorts, there'll be different styles for different channels.

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Angelo Esposito [00:39:57]:

And then some of those could just be quotes and then be like word kind of quotes for Insta. Some of it could be turned into regular posts. So it's like, it's just interesting how something that could be sound bites that are just put there with an image versus the actual video. So it's interesting to see even now. One area I realized where I was lacking on the Wisc side was like the written side. It's like we're doing blogs every week, but we kind of stopped there. And then I was like, wait, we should take pieces of this blog and post it as micro content and then lead to the blog or post a status update on LinkedIn and lead to the newsletter. So just like, even, there's no limit, you got to get creative on, like, okay, how can I repurpose this? And people absorb this content in different ways.

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Angelo Esposito [00:40:40]:

And so I think it's important to test and see and see what sticks. Kind of like what you alluded to and then double down on those things.

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Justin Ulrich [00:40:47]:

Exactly. Yeah. If you think this conversation right now, it's words that are happening and words, whether they're internalized through your ear holes or your eyes, you can take this, take the transcript, and there's your blog post. And now you get with the blog post, now you get SEO value that you can start driving people to your page. So there's value in just trying to create all sorts of different ways for your content to be consumed. Because like you said, you may have, I don't remember the exact percentage, but maybe two thirds of people are like visual learners or visual consumers of content. They're going to resonate with infographics, images, videos, stuff like that. But the other third, you're just going to leave them in the dark.

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Justin Ulrich [00:41:34]:

No, you got to create the readable content and the ebooks or whatever that might resonate with them. But it can all be created from the long form video. Honestly, and I've heard Sean say this a ton too, but I wholeheartedly believe that long form video is the hardest thing to create. And if you do create it and you figure out a way to do so, like at scale and effectively at scale, you can take that and create any type of derivative content from it. And then you're able to see if you take your content, you break it down by themes or categories, topics, whatever it might be, and you push that stuff out, then you can see what topics resonate. It's like, okay, now I need to create some follow up pieces around this topic because this resonates with my audience and kind of go from there. There's just so much learning that can come from starting with that long form video.

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Angelo Esposito [00:42:24]:

I love that. I love that. And it's funny because you mentioned Sean soy. I totally agree, by the way, Sean is great. He was a guest on the super, super cool guy and one of the things he always said that I loved was the concept of being the show, not the commercial. But a lot of people think too hard on how can I make that perfect 32nd commercial and spend a lot of time and little output. Whereas think about the opposite. Just start filming the be the show, be the 60 minutes, don't be that 32nd in between.

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Angelo Esposito [00:42:53]:

And a lot more people are interested than you think in the kind of day to day. So in the restaurant context, it was like, don't worry about making that perfect ad only like sure, try to make it. Why not? But behind the scenes, your new hire, clip from the chef. Like just day to day stuff. Your stock didn't come in little clip. People consume that stuff too and make it relatable. You have a new menu item, so someone tasting it, it doesn't have to be perfect. And it's funny.

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Angelo Esposito [00:43:21]:

Sometimes I find the more raw, the video feels more authentic too, when it's not too obviously there's a place for really high quality edited stuff too, but it's a super interesting concept. What I'd love to know from your end is what's next for you guys? Maybe at Evocalize right. You have a ton of marketing experience. Work at some really solid brands. You listed some, but you have a great kind of variety of experience. You have a lot on your tool belt, I guess to put it lightly. Where do you see the next steps for Evocalize? Like obviously you mentioned some of the initiatives. Maybe you're going to have potentially some product releases for less than 100 locations.

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Angelo Esposito [00:44:04]:

But I'd love to hear from your point of view kind of what's next.

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Justin Ulrich [00:44:08]:

That's going to be big. Being able to come down market for sure. If you think about a typical 1235 location business, they don't have the marketing chops or the dollars that you might have. A much larger brand has to kind of throw towards creating world class marketing. And our system is legitimately just that. It's world class marketing capabilities. We could take really sophisticated, complex marketing, full funnel lifecycle programs that are always on and run and continue to learn. We can give that to someone who really has never done paid marketing ever and be able to just kind of flip it on with a switch.

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Justin Ulrich [00:44:59]:

That's going to be incredible. And like I said, that's very short term. Where we'll have that available in terms of where we're going this year for us is going to be massive. We already have huge, I can't say so many superlatives. Massive, massive traction, specifically in the restaurant and the franchise space. We are a rolling ball, like chasing Indiana Jones. I pushed out a blog post or a LinkedIn post a couple of weeks ago. We're absolutely crushing it, which is super exciting and I think a lot of it is.

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Justin Ulrich [00:45:36]:

It's a testament to the team and all the hard work that they do in creating products that actually serve a very real need. But we do it in a way that's differentiated. We don't have people behind the scenes pulling levers. Like, it's not manumation. Some companies will have you go log into a portal, you select that you want to run a campaign, you think that it's automatically happening, but you're placing an order, basically filling out a form and someone's doing it behind the scenes.

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Angelo Esposito [00:46:01]:

Right?

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Justin Ulrich [00:46:02]:

Our tech is far surpasses others and people are noticing and it's creating a lot of buzz, which is really cool and a lot of momentum. So specifically within the restaurant space, you're going to see us a lot more. We came into the space kind of cold last year at the beginning of the year, knowing that the tech would serve the industry, but not having the experience doing so coming into the industry kind of brand new. So now that we have that momentum coming into these event the event season and stuff like that, people know who we are, and that's a lot of fun and super exciting, and I can't wait to see where that goes as well as we just continue to roll into other industries beyond restaurant home services is another big one for us. If you think of the different pest controls or roofing companies or anyone that might have to generate leads, segue just sidebar the FCC ruling that just happened, and I don't know if you've heard about this, but where they've adjusted the TCPA guidelines, where no longer they've closed the lead generation loophole, no longer can companies like Angie's list have you submit a form, fill and distribute that lead to 20 different organizations. The user who submits their own information as a lead has to explicitly say where they're able to share or who they're able to share their information with. So like a checkbox of ABC land company landscaping, XYZ landscaping one, two, three, landscape. That's going to be huge in different industries where lead gen is required.

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Justin Ulrich [00:47:52]:

So think mortgage, insurance, real estate. Think of like if you go to lending tree and you submit your information because you're interested in the mortgage, that type of stuff is likely going away or going to be very different, and the cost of leads is going to shift, and small businesses are going to have to generate their own pipeline. They won't be able to afford getting leads the same way that they've been getting them. And that goes into effect either in June or July of this year. So they just came out with the announcement a couple of weeks ago. So that's going to be a huge shift within the industry that's really going to catapult our business, because we do help those businesses generate their own lead pipeline. So that's another big one for us.

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Angelo Esposito [00:48:41]:

That's huge. Yeah, I can already imagine. It's like you said, insurance. I'm even thinking not too long ago we had a flood out of a place and we had to call insurance, but we also had an adjuster, all that kind of stuff. And I'm thinking of guys like that that serve hundreds of people per month probably. But how do they market? Where do they get their leads from? So it sounds like you'll probably, like you said, to use your wording, have a catapult there. But that's awesome. And so for people who want to find you guys, obviously the local marketing lab podcast, I'm sure they can hear that on typical channels, Spotify, Apple music, et cetera.

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Angelo Esposito [00:49:21]:

Where else can people find you just to maybe give you guys a quick plug?

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Justin Ulrich [00:49:26]:

Oh no, I appreciate it. So LinkedIn is probably where we're the most active, honestly. So just add a vocalize on LinkedIn, tons of content on there. We're pushing out podcast episodes every week as well as blog post newsletters. Like, you could subscribe to our newsletter, follow us. As an organization, we've got a lot of really good, I think, solid content and tips and tricks and stuff for folks to help better grow their business and market at a local level. And then, like you said, all the different podcasting platforms were the local marketing lab podcast. So check it out.

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Justin Ulrich [00:50:01]:

It's a lot of fun. We like to laugh with the guests, and we usually create some wacky AI image that we show, incorporating some of the favorite things of our guests into the image. So most recently, I had Jeff Alexander on the show. One of the more recent ones, Jeff Alexander was on the show and he teaches cycle class and loves the got a picture of him looking like Rambo with his jacked arms redhead band like in a spin class. It's just a lot of fun. And it's cool because it allows us to really connect with different industry leaders and see a different side to them that you might otherwise not see. So check it out.

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Angelo Esposito [00:50:48]:

Super cool. Yeah, I'd love to. If there's the right timing, I'd love to even be on it. Talk a bit about the restaurant side, the back of house side, and obviously got a ton of personal stuff too. I'm more than happy to share, but yeah, we'll definitely set that up. But for everyone listening, thank you for joining us on another episode of Wisking It All. And once again, we're here today with Justin from Evocalize. And for those of you who want to check it out, you heard it LinkedIn, Evocalize.com.

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Angelo Esposito [00:51:17]:

And you can even check out their podcast, the local marketing lab podcast. Thank you for taking the time to join me. Justin. Loved chatting with you and hearing about your really vast marketing experience.

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Justin Ulrich [00:51:29]:

You bet. Thanks, Angelo. Appreciate it.

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Angelo Esposito [00:51:31]:

Beauty. Feel free to check out WISK.AI for more resources and schedule a demo with one of our product specialists to see if a fit for.

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