The Power of No: Channel Strategy That Actually Works

Welcome back to the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. I'm your host, Sara Payne, and I'm bringing you fascinating conversations with some of the industry's top marketing minds. Today, we're talking about something that doesn't get enough credit in modern marketing, the power of saying no. With me is Gino Giovanelli, a digital marketing strategist, educator, and founder of Miles Interactive. Gino has helped brands like Caribou Coffee, Lifetime Fitness, and even the Super Bowl Host Committee use digital to drive real world impact. He's also a professor at the University of St. Thomas and hosts the podcast in the Key of D where he explores the intersection of. Of business and digital transformation.

Today, we're going to talk about smarter channel strategy, the power of focus, and how saying no might be the most strategic move a marketing leader can make. Gino, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks, Sara. Glad to be here.

Yeah, thrilled to have you here. I wanted to start off with something you said in our prep conversation that really stuck with me, and that's that this conversation is about essentialism, about doing fewer things better. So tell me more, Gino, about your philosophy on that.

Right. Well, I think, Sara, my whole career, it's always been about doing more, working harder, grinding harder, doing more things, everything that's possible. And I finally found a book by Greg McEwen called Essentialism that basically gave us the permission to say no. Because no gets such a bad rap in this world. If you ever had a boss that's asked you to do something, you just, you can't really say no. You don't feel right saying no. Or even just as a human being, I mean, in our DNA, our natural wiring is if somebody asks you to help them, you're going to say yes. And, and, and Greg does a really good job of giving saying no kind of a.

It makes it. It makes it all make sense, if you will, because it. It's actually more responsible to say no to certain things so that you can say yes to others. In fact, his quote is say no. The so say no so that you can say, hell yeah to the things that matter. And I've never had someone kind of give that. Give that kind of permission. And I appreciated it so much.

So I set out to say, whether I'm teaching students or I'm working with my clients, you know, we gotta. We gotta start off by saying no. And it's really hard to say no. But this book kind of shows you how to do that and how to do it the right way.

I love how you frame that in terms of a. Giving people permission, because I think you're absolutely right. It's a. It's a refreshing reminder in an important frame for this conversation today.

Right.

And it's, it's, let's be honest, can be liberating for a lot of marketers listening. It gives them, again, the permission to say no, which we all know is necessary to do. It's logical. It seems logical, but it's not easy. It's great in theory, but in practice, it's really hard.

It is. And if you don't mind, there's an example I love to use in the classroom that really brings this point home. I. I'll usually pick on a baseball player and I'll say something to the point of, you know, hey, Sara, do you swing at every strike? And if. If they're a good baseball player and D1, you know, St. Thomas, they're going to be. They'll say no.

Right?

And you just. You could just look at the reaction by the audience, like, really? You know, my. And I'll even kind of egg it on. I'm like, really? You'll let a strike go by at the risk of if you let two more go by, you're going to have the loneliest walk back to the dugout that you could ever imagine. And I'm like, why don't you swing at every pitch? And they'll go on to say, like, because they're what. What's determined as a strike by the league isn't necessarily what my strike is. And I'll even say, hey, what's. What's your pitch? And they might say, high end inside.

I'm like, so you're going to let other strikes go by waiting for the high end inside? And I say, what happens when you get the high end inside? He goes, they'll say, I got to hit the snot out of the ball. So the point is, you're going to let good ones go by because you're waiting for the best one. And that's what essentialism says, let the good stuff go so that you can say, hell, yeah, to the right stuff. And it's. It's. It's easier said than done. And it takes a lot of guts, and it takes a lot of confidence, but when you do it, it feels so good to say no to things. It's like, the other example is, like that when you're breaking up with somebody and, you know, and the person will say, are.

You know, are we. Are we pausing? And are like, no, we are breaking. I'm going to let this thing go. And, and that feel. It hurts to say it.

Yes.

But when you walk away and you go like, oh, okay, now I can. Now I can work on the right thing. And it's. But it's a, you know, this is people stuff. This. We haven't talked about marketing yet. Right. And, and that's what I try to teach my students is the human factors are so important to make sure we're doing the right things.

So important. And such a great metaphor. I love sports metaphors. So great for all the things in life. And as you said, because the human factor is so important. So on that note, let's talk about the reality that most chief marketing officers are facing. There's this constant pressure to show up across six or more digital channels, right? We got SEO, SEM, social content, email, email display, you name it. But you argued, Gino, that to do all six is almost never a good idea.

And, and why is that?

Why that is, is I don't think you need all six. Typically, if you really get down to what's the business trying to accomplish and what are the immediate needs, I said the smartest thing you can do is, is. Is cut channels. And I know you're going to say, like what? It's like you, these are weapons at your disposal. Why would you ever not pick one up? I'm going to first start off by saying the majority of marketing departments that I've worked in, or even there was some recent research that came out that said less than 10% of marketing organizations have people skilled in all. They call it six channels. And I'd argue when you add the traditional channels in there, you're north of 12. Right.

So you don't necessarily have the right skill sets on the bus. And that's a different issue. I would argue that you should make sure your people have. They're skilled in the, in the channels you need. And that isn't based on, on who you have on the team. That should be based on what your target audience needs. Right? So. But the point is you rarely have the luxury of throwing bodies and dollars at all the channels.

And I would argue that even more importantly, I don't think you should. I really don't. I mean, if you're, if you're a startup company and your goal is to get customers, I don't think you should necessarily use email because email's a great retention strategy if you have customers. But if you don't have customers, how are you going to email customers that you don't have.

Right.

So if you're a startup, I would say focus on channels like search and media advertising where you can get in front of someone who hasn't done business with you before to get them interested in you and move them through the conversion funnel at the same time, if you're an established business, you're a B2B business. You have 31 clients this year. Our goal is to have 31 clients next year. It's a retention game. And you should play heavy at email. You should play heavy, insert, sorry, social. And maybe not. Well, not maybe.

I would say not in search and not in media advertising because you don't need those and put your heartbeats where you need them so that you can hit those things out of the park. So those are just some examples where, you know, and if it's a truly balanced company, you got some hard company, hard decisions to make between acquisition and retention. But usually it comes down to Sara, which game are we trying? What's. What does winning look like? Are we, Are we acquisition mode? Are we in retention mode? And you know, if we're in that middle of hybrid land, then, then pick your spots even, even more carefully.

Yeah, well, I use this word once already, I'm going to use it again. I think this is liberating, right? This is, this is liberating permission again to, to choose focus. And I think we're, we're starting to get in a bit deeper in terms of some great advice that you have around how to prioritize your channel selection based on what your goals are. What other advice do you have, Gino, for. For CMOs and other marketing leaders as they think about channel selection across the funnel?

Yeah, it's. I mean, it's a lot of the stuff we just already outlined where it's, you know, it starts with business goals and priorities. And if it's acquisition or retention, you know, pick a horse and ride that horse. You know, the other one is to break habits. I think there's some research from Deloitte that said that, I don't know, 80% of the tasks we do every day are based on habit. And we get up in the morning and we check our email and we go to the office and we visit these people in the coffee room. And then we did it at. And we just, we check our search results and then we check our.

Whatever. It's like, are those the right things that we should do or are those just the things that we're in a pattern to do? And I would argue break Break those patterns. Here's the analogy that I would use when I work out with my trainer. You know, there are certain machines that if he doesn't come, there are certain machines that I just do in a certain order. And then when he shows up, he's like, no, we're going to start over here. I'm like, I don't like that machine. I don't if where they like it or not, you need to do it. I'm like, you know, it's like, so these.

Breaking the habit. If you don't believe that you work in a habitual fashion, think about next time you towel off after the shower. Sorry to go there, but everybody has an order in which they towel off out of the shower on right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg, you know, but like, and we do it the same way every day. We need these things in our, in our, in our day to break our day and to say what should I do? And, and where I'm going to is the desperate need for a digital marketing strategy that says what we should do versus what we could do. It's the should do versus could do.

Yes.

And, and the difference between should do and could do is a simple word. It's two letters long. It's N O. It's no. It goes back to essentialism is saying no so that you can say, hell yeah. So a strategy does just that. It says, here's what, here's what we're going to do, not what we could do. And, and that will break it.

You know, if I'm used to doing paid search and our strategy says we're not doing paid search anymore, if somebody doesn't beat me over the head, I'm going to keep doing paid search.

Right.

Know it. I'm comfortable doing it. And it does have results, but it's not the results I want.

Yeah, this is great. Building off of your weightlifting reference there. It's. It's no pain, no gain. Right. If you don't, if you don't have muscles in that certain area. Right. That channel is going to feel hard to you and you're probably going to avoid it.

Just like the, the, the machine that you're avoiding from a weightlifting standpoint.

Exactly.

And another thing that, that just really strikes me in terms of the challenges around this is it's not just the number of channels, but it's also about how messy it's all getting. Right. There's a blending of these channels that used to be very distinct. And it just seems like it's harder than Ever to tell what's working and where. So what advice do you have given that dynamic about how CMO should really navigate that chaos without losing sight of what matters?

Great point. It's so funny. You know, when I teach every semester, I have to tweak the courses. And when you teach digital marketing, it means that's in fact what I was doing before this call and how many do immediately after it's over? I'm renting, writing all my courses for the fall because things are changing. And it's amazing how many times when I say to students like, and it used to be a lot easier and now here's the way it is. And they're often like, is there anything that's easier now? And I'm like, sure, there's more opportunity, but that doesn't mean it's easy. And so, you know, one of my things is to understand what's happening in the channels and to know that they used to. It used to be so conveniently clear.

If you want awareness, you do media advertising. If you want interest, you do search. If you want consideration, you build some things on your website to help people make good buying decisions. If you want purchase, make sure you're shopping. It was very, very clear. We had these different channels that conveniently lined up to each level of the customer conversion funnel. And now it's just not the case. It's like, for example, media advertising is a great awareness channel, but if you could reuse it in a retargeted fashion where someone who has put something in your cart or in their cart and Sara calls me and I have to go pick her up somewhere and I come back and I don't make the purchase and it's lost that little tickler that says, hey, do you still want to buy that? That's media advertising driving conversion, not awareness anymore.

You were aware, you were interested, you had it in the cart. Life happened. And so media advertising isn't exclusively an awareness channel. More it's, it's, it's a powerful conversion channel. And people that media advertising, how could that be? So you, you have to kind of change your belief in these channels. And even, even your hero channels, you gotta like, sometimes your hero channels kind of spin out like, you know, like email. The people that kind of banked on that forever. It's like none of my students open email.

It's like, you don't, please don't fall in love with that channel. Be in certain instances if your target audience. But I mean, again, older crowd's great. But my point Is you almost have to be channel agnostic, Sara, where you don't fall in love with these hero channels that have gotten you to the dance because they've changed now and it's a new day. Another example is, is, is the mobile channel? Is, is mobile a channel or is it a platform? Yeah, I'm starting to, I'm starting to make. In my, in my teaching, I'm considering it more of a platform because the other channels like media advertising, search and, and, and social. Social. Well, when you do them on a phone, is that mobile marketing or is that email on a phone or is it social? And in websites, more websites are viewed on a phone than on a laptop.

So is it a, is a, is it, is our websites really like a mobile site? Is it. So my point is you have to sort of be loose with how you believe in these channels. And I always say to my students, don't let the cement dry around your feet because you're going to need to move because what got you here is, might not keep you there. And another example, you know, we used to poo poo TV and it's like now we've got over the top television which provides some unbelievable media advertising opportunities that is the most relevant and it's the lowest cost and it's not going to be that way for much longer. It's a temporary thing because most people haven't gotten on board with it. But most people sort of in certain industries have written off that big TV, broad, you know, awareness kind of thing. And I'm man, what you can do from a targeting perspective with over the top TV is powerful because you're showing messages to people not just based on the movies they're watching, but what they search. If they're doing it from their iPad, they've been searching all day on their iPad.

They've been checking email, they've been looking at websites. All that can fire off what ads you show them on a television show. So, you know, I've had to kind of eat my words a little bit in a lot of, in a lot of places. Places.

Yeah, no, great point. And I, I don't envy your position as a digital marketing professor having to stay on top of all this stuff and rewrite your syllabus. Right. To make sure that you're staying current on all of this.

Yep.

As, as a, a teacher.

Yep.

Do you have a favorite framework or, or model that you use to help people decide which channels to prioritize at different stages of the funnel?

Yeah, I do. And that interestingly along the way hasn't changed one bit. The framework is. It's like scaffolding. It's just there. And then the things that you hang on it are obviously going to change. But it's a five step process. Every student goes through it.

I have a digital marketing course I teach and this project is creating a digital marketing strategy for a real business. So they pick a client and they have to go and they take the client through this methodology that I teach them and it's a five stepper and I'll just hit the high points. The first one is to is and the words are very carefully chosen here, is to confirm business goals and priorities. Which means if we're going to make sure that the digital stuff is lined up to make the business successful, not the digital marketing team success, the business successful. You have to know what the business goals and priorities were. And there were plenty of companies, Sara, that I worked at where I really didn't know what those were. I'm not surprised either. Oh, I'm not it.

I mean when I ask my students I'm like which one? And I go through the five steps. Like which one would you call elusive? And no one would ever say confirming business goals and priorities. They think that that's just, that's like a syllabus. Everybody's got one. It's like, well, no. And in fact I can't remember a company that I worked for that, that it was widely known in terms of what the business goals and priorities were. Down to a measurable revenue. Like we want to make more revenue than last year.

Is that a dollar more or is it a million dollars more? Is it a hundred million? It's like I want to lose, I go to the gym, I want to lose weight. Is that a pound? Is it 30 pounds? It makes sense difference, right? So, so that's the first step is confirming business goals and priorities. And the priorities usually around acquisition versus retention. So once you lock that down and I use the word confirm on purpose, Sara, because I don't want the digital marketing people to make up what they think the business goals and confirm means go find out what it is. Somebody's done the work. When I was at Radisson, not good. But I made. We made up our own business goals and priorities.

We thought all we want to do is try to sell hotel rooms on the, on the Internet. Who would argue with that? But when you're selling hotel rooms through not the best of websites like cheap hotels.com or discount hotels.com, you're like a room's a room. I just want to sell that. And that's a hundred dollars of revenue per night. And you're like, you're hurting the brand, Gino. I'm like, I'm making money for the brand, you know, like, you're killing us, man.

You're killing our brand.

And I'm just like, what is the goal? And they're like, to clean up our brand to improve its position in the market, to get a higher perception so we could raise our rates. And I'm like, oh, so, like, how did I miss this? I'd missed it because I never asked. Sure, I should.

I appreciate you sharing that. I appreciate you sharing. We all make mistakes, right? I appreciate it.

Oh, my gosh. One of many times I'm like, should I pack my office before lunch or after? But my point. Okay, so it starts there. The next. The second step of five is to. Is to consider all channels. And you might think, well, duh. I'm like, a lot of times companies rule out channel.

It's like, well, we're not going to do email because we don't have anybody that knows how to do it. And we're not going to do paid search because we don't have anybody that knows what to do. Like you're going to consider them all. They might not all make the cut.

Sure.

Consider them all initially, especially how they line up with the business goals and priorities. And if they make the cut, they'd go freaking hire somebody that knows those skills and don't not use that channel because someone doesn't.

Yes.

Sorry. I'm getting excited here a little bit, Sara. I knew, but no, it's.

Hey, I could tell you're a great professor. I would sit in your class all day long. You got the energy and the passion, a lot of learning.

I usually have to bring a change of shirts because I'm sweating. But. So we consider them all initially, and then the next step is to brainstorm what could be offered under each channel that aligns to the business priorities to achieve the goal. And that's an easy one. That's brainstorming. Right. The fourth step, which is the painful step, is prioritization.

Yeah.

This is where the essentialism comes in. This is where the, you know, we brainstormed. Every idea is a good idea. But tomorrow we're making hard decisions, and prioritization is where we say no to at least three quarters or two thirds of the ideas so that the only thing that's left is the fastball down the middle that I want to hit. Yeah, that's my pitch. Right. So, and this is, I teach them a method of looking at impact versus burden of every opportunity. Because if you just pick the opportunities that are going to bring the highest impact, they might bury your business in terms of years to market cost might burn your people out.

So I look at the sweet spot between the impact of doing that opportunity versus the burden of achieving it and obviously you're going to pick the high impact, low burden stuff, duh. But you're also going to unfortunately have to dabble in some of that high impact, high burden. You know, burden could be cost, it could be complexity, it could be contingency, it could be skill set, all that stuff. And you have a nice balance of cherry picking high impact, low burden. With high impact, maybe higher burden, most of the good stuff is going to take some work. No pain, no gain. You said it earlier, right? But stay the hell out of the bottom quadrants that are the low impact, low burden or the low impact, high burden. You know, it's funny, you could say, yeah, who would ever do low impact hy burden? You're right, not many people do.

But you know what a really popular quadrant is that lower left where it's low impact, low burden. It's busy work, Sara. It's, you know, it's like, it's that I've, I've used macros to build this report that nobody reads. It's like it's really easy to generate the report. Nobody cares. It's like it's low burden and it's low impact because nobody cares. And stop doing that. And when you free up that oxygen is cutting everything kind of below that, that, that and I wish I could draw you that little quadrant, but imagine a four boxer with impact on the, on the Y axis and burden on the, on the horizontal axis.

But that, that just you get rid of now. And now what you might find is, hey, you know, after we made all those cuts, we only really have two mobile things and we've got 30 email things. It's like, maybe we should cut mobile and move that mobile resource over to help the email resource and not just keep doing mobile. That person might have two things to do all year. That doesn't make any sense. So that's where you could potentially cut a channel and be able to justify it to the 15th floor when they go, I heard a rumor that we're not doing any more. And you're like, yeah, because here's all the opportunities that we brainstormed and here's how they scored impact of burden. And.

And there were better ones and we chose the better ones.

Yeah, absolutely.

Who made those scoring decisions? Your CMO scored impact and your CIO scored burden. Talk to them. And it.

Absolutely.

Anyway, you get through this painful say no thing, and then what's left becomes your marketing plan. Whatever.

So number. Number five in the framework, is that. Is that execution then or no?

Yeah, I create the. I call it creating the digital marketing plan that says we're going to do. Every row is a thing we're going to do. And a column is the month or the different month. We show when the work is going to happen and when the actual thing is going to launch and how long is it live. And the example I use with my students, Sara, is I say every day around 3 o', clock, I start getting texts from my three boys that say, what's the dinner strategy? And. And all they want to know, Sara, is what are we having for dinner? And one will say, I think we should go to Punch Pizza. The other will say, I think we should go to Chick Fil A.

The other will say, I want to go to Domico. And then they start rolling around saying, well, we went to d' Amico last time and I got a coupon and we just start this chatter. Meanwhile, my wife would always want to cook a meal at home. Okay, so here's the point. Nobody eats until we make a decision. And companies spend the first quarter just swirling about all that they could do. And by the time they make those hard decisions of the should do versus the could do, they burned a quarter.

Yep. See it all the time. See it all the time.

No.

Yeah.

And once, you know, like, hey, let's cook a meal at home, then you go, okay, Sara, you're going to clean the kitchen at 4. We're going to eat at 6. So let's back in. Someone's going to clean the kitchen at 4:30. Someone's going to go to the grocery store. While you go in the grocery store, someone's going to start boiling the water while you're shucking the corn, someone's going to set the dip. It's like, that's not hard to do the dinner plan. Once you know whether you're eating in or going out.

That's the step. 4 is. Is the killer. I mean, we're just going to keep spitting and everybody wants to make a case for their. Their things and we're. And all of a sudden it's dinner time and nobody's eating.

Yeah, absolutely. Gino, I know you. I know you have more real world examples. Right. You talked about the Radisson one. More from, from Don, this perspective. Let's, let's talk about some more on the what worked well side of things. Whether you want to share company names or not, I know you've got a lot of great examples.

Sure.

What, what does this look like in action? And, and, and how's it worked out for, for other people?

Sure. I, I can speak on behalf of. I. So I was a consultant for Caribou coffee for, gosh, eight, eight or 10 years. Right. And, and in that tenure, if you will, we, we've, we figured out our digital marketing strategy. And for a brand like Caribou, first of all, coffee is the most consumed product in the world by humans. Right.

So, yeah, it's like, it's, it's everywhere. And, and people at this point kind of have their favorites. Like, some people love Caribou, some people love Starbucks. And you know, and there's a growing contingency around Dunkin and all the other ones. The point with Caribou was people have pretty much made up their mind. And so I'm not sure how many people Caribou is really going to steal from Starbucks. And that would be an, I call it an acquisition strategy. So at Caribou, we focused on retention and we had a loyal, rabid, rabidly loyal base, Sara.

And if we could just get that base of customers to do one of two things or both. One is to come in more often. On average, they come in. Let's say this isn't the real number, but let's just say the number is once a week. You know, they drink coffee more than once a week.

Right.

You're going somewhere else. If I could get all the existing Caribou coffee customers to come in twice a week versus once a week, we will double revenue.

Absolutely.

Just everything else being equal. Okay. The other one is if we can get them when they come in, to spend twice as much. Okay. So maybe they get a bakery item or maybe they get a wild drink, or maybe they get a large versus a small. If I can increase. We call that ticket. If we can increase the ticket by 2x, we will double revenue by 2x.

If I can then increase visit frequency and ticket I 4x revenue.

Yeah.

Tell me another thing that's going to 4x revenue.

Right.

And so you think, line up the cannons. Let's go after getting, getting the existing people that we know that love us. We don't have to make them aware. We don't have to make them Interested. We just have to get them to buy more often and spend more when they do. So we would use be using email and texting and social. Okay, but let's switch gears. Have you ever heard of, I think it's called Wild Wildfire Coffee? It's a.

I have not. It's a brand. Hold on, let me look at my notes real quick. They're called Wild Wild Flyer. And what they do is they provide people who are homeless with a job to make coffee for people. There's a huge missional component, brand new, best kept secret in the world. Because it's like, you know, wouldn't that, wouldn't it feel great if you got your coffee from somebody who is homeless and needs the revenue to be able to not be homeless? And the problem is nobody's heard of. So their strategy shouldn't have anything to do with email and social because they have no fans because nobody knows them, they have no email opt ins into their database because no one's.

So hammer down on search, hammer down on media. Right. Build those channels up to get some customers and then in year two, three, four, start working those retention strategies. So there's an example of two different companies. One's playing the retention game, one's playing the acquisition game, which means they're down to two, three channels at most. Which is definitely doable.

Yeah, absolutely. Great examples. Thank you for sharing those. On this show, we talk a lot about disruption that healthcare marketers are trying to drive, whether it's changing behavior, breaking down stigma, pushing the industry forward. So I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about using digital to fuel meaningful change. And I've heard you say that some things deserve to be even bigger than they are and that digital marketing can help make that happen. So for our listeners who are leading those initiatives, campaigns to truly change things for the better, how would you use digital to accelerate that movement?

Yeah, okay, great, Great question. And a tough question too. I can think of three things that come to mind is. And one is a little bit. It's a leap, but we're always searching for that viral campaign that just catches fire on social. I mean, we just saw it with the Coldplay video. In that case, it's, it's. Right, it's a negative one.

But if you could imagine, let's go to a different one, like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Okay.

Yep.

So my, my former wife, my late wife had als. Okay. And, and I just remember thinking like, there's no research, there's no money. It's not. It's not a disease that can't be solved. It's a disease that only 1 in 50,000 people have it. So. So most people don't know about it.

So there's no money. Right. But the. They're still living off of the money that they made from the Ice Bucket challenge.

Yeah, it's un.

Can you. Those poor marketing people every day are like, how do we do ice bucket 2.0? How do we do ice bucket 3? The problem is, is there's no ant. There's no secret weapon on viral. It's just, it's so organic and so unpredictable. And those guys, trust me, I know the ALS folks in dc, they have tried to rack their brain and recreate it. So I don't want to throw out a pipe dream and do, well, just come out with something that's right. But at the same time, don't ignore it. I mean, you never know, you might just get one right.

So it's one hit wonder kind of things. So that's one. I'll park that to the side. In a more practical construct, I mean, you could look to some of the existing channels and go, are we really taking advantage of everything they have to offer? And one that comes to mind, Sara is in social media. And it's so funny because so many of my students, when I say, raise your hand if you have an internship, two thirds will raise their hand and I'll say, how many of you are doing digital marketing? And the majority of those people are doing digital marketing. So that's where a lot of the digital marketing internships are happening. Or, sorry, the internships are happening in digital. And.

And I'm like, you know what, what are you doing? And they're like, I. I just doing social. And I just, I post three times a week and I just, I try to knock out these posts. I'm like, what are you writing about? They're like, just whatever comes to mind. I'm like, I'm like, back to what are the business goals and priorities? They probably don't know. But regardless of that, there is a weapon that's available in social, both on Facebook and Instagram for B2C and LinkedIn for B2B. And that is creating custom audiences where you can say, I want to create an audience specific to a post. Okay? The post will resonate with that audience.

I don't care if it doesn't resonate with an audience that it doesn't. It's not relevant. Okay. I don't even want to pay for those Impressions, but you can create an audience of people of a certain age in a certain location with certain interests and all those kinds of things, and then you throw your posts at those people. Or more importantly, you can create custom audiences from people that should be following you, that aren't. In other words, you can create a custom audience based on people that have been to your website in the last 10 days. Now, they're not following you. So technically you can't reach them organically, but you can, you could still reach them.

There's still a warm lead. You might have to pay to reach them, but it would be a good person to reach because they've been to your site or they've opted in your email or they've downloaded your app or they've interacted with your post. Like, you can create custom audiences around these, these groups, people that have bought from you before, you know, everyone that's bought decaf. I want to, I want to create an audience of just those. So we have this new decaf product or a new Rainforest alliance thing. If whatever their interests are, we're going to hammer them with those things. We shouldn't limit it to just the people that follow us. Because, because think about all the brands you love, Sara, that you're not following.

Right? Absolutely.

Taco Bell, I love that brand. And I don't follow them. I don't, there's no reason for it, but I just don't. It's like human nature. But, but they, if they were smart, they could, they could create a custom audience around me because I've been to their site and I've been to their app and all that. Anyway, that's one thing, and that's a good, that's a good retention play because I'm going to assume those people, if they've been to your site they bought from you before, they're in your email marketing program, they're in your loyalty program that you're an existing customer. The other one though, that I think is the low hanging fruit that I haven't talked to any of my interns that even know what it is and that is lookalike audiences, which are people who look and behave like people who follow me.

Yes.

So like, so I could create a custom audience of people that have been to my website or people that have bought from me before. Great. I can create a lookalike audience which are people who, who haven't done those things but behave like people who have. And that's an acquisition play. I'm like social for acquisition. I mean, right? And, and I don't hear anybody doing it. And the same thing holds True for LinkedIn. If it's a B2B marketplace and not B2C.

They just have different names. I think the custom audiences on LinkedIn are called matched audiences and the lookalike audiences are called predictive audience. So there's, it's kind of like tier 2 social. But so many people are obsessed with just posting X times per month, week.

Right. And if you're only, if you're only staying in that organic play like that just, it's not going to do much for you.

Yeah. On average, I think like of your followers you put out a post, only less than 7% see it.

Yeah. And so algorithms are really, really.

Yeah. Because yeah, they'll show it to a couple people and if they love it, they'll show it to a lot. But it's, if it's not that great of a post, they're going to shut it off like a spigot and then you're, you're kind of hosed. Unless you start throwing some money behind it. I'd say throw some money behind it. And, and particularly if it's, if it's a good post that's done well with a small group of people. Let more people see it even if you have to pay. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

That's one. And then I have a third if there's time.

Yeah, absolutely.

The third one is something I referred to earlier, which is that over the top television stuff which, which is just channel for digital marketers. It's often we associate with that old RCA television that our parents have in the, in the living room that's got the rabbit ears on it. I mean, what I'm talking about is all the shows that you can watch on your laptop, on your iPad, on your desktop or on a Roku tv. There's tons of inventory available to advertise for these health companies or whoever was trying to get to break through. The point is there's, there's tons of inventory which means you can get really good reach. And, and because there's tons of inventory, the cost per touch is low. So low touch, low, cost per touch high. Reach and relevance can be high because again, when you're, when you're on your iPad today, you've been searching for stuff all day.

You've been clicking on things on websites, you've been in your Amazon, you've been looking at, you know, Google and now you're watching, you know, your, you know, Yellowstone. And now when you're seeing the ads they're triggering off of. But not only that, you're the kind of person that watches Yellowstone or shrinking or whatever, but all the other stuff you did today.

Yeah.

So it's, it's hyper targeted. So you add the combo hyper targeted, which means mass relevance, mass inventory, which reads mass reach at low cost. And the, and the. And it won't be that way much longer because people like us are talking about it.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Get on that quick.

Yeah, I mean, that's. And, and it was funny. I was slow to go there. I had a friend who kept telling me, like, Gino, what the hell are you doing with ott or is that a channel yet? I'm like, you know, tv. I, I figured they cover it in the other. Like he. I'm not talking about tv. I'm talking about over the top television.

Streaming television.

Yeah. Smart.

Yeah.

Great advice.

Thank you.

Uh, so before we end here, Gino, and, and I can't believe how time flew on this. And so much great advice. Um, I suspect people are going to want to get in touch with you and, and talk to you more because there's so much great advice. But how do you stay current on digital? How do you stay plugged in? What do you do?

Yeah, so one of the things as a teacher, this is the curse. I'm a lifelong learner, so I love to learn, but if I just taught, I would never learn. I feel like I get, you go to bed smart, you wake up dumb. It's like through the semester I don't learn much, but when I get off and I have January's off, I have summers off, I just dive in. And I've. And I have my own consulting business. I've been doing my business for almost 20 years now. And so I have active clients and I just throw myself into any work I could do on digital to do it with my own hands.

And everyone's like, you know, don't you want to have a lackey that can do that stuff for you? And don't you want, you know, it seems like it's pretty basic stuff. You're like, I want to touch every part of the engine, I want to touch every part of the car. So I do it or I do it for a living. Right. And I have a, and I have a variety of different resources that I just tap into around the country for the, for the latest trends. You know, I do, I look at E. Marketing. I looked at like Dan, I'm in and some groups there, but I, I mostly get it Through a network of people that do the same thing I do.

And the fact that Minnesota Sports and Events just lets me play and, and, and, and, and they pay me to play and try new things and get your hands wet and don't ever think anything's beneath you. Here I am, I'm the oldest guy there and I'm doing all the work that they think interns should do. I'm like, I, I wanna, I wanna know it. I wanna know it. That's the only way to teach it. So do love that they say, what is it? Those who do teach, those who can't do, teach, and those who can't teach, teach gym. I'm like, those who can do. I think we should.

Those we should work and those who could do more should teach. You know, teach others how to do right.

I love that. That's so great.

But yeah, it's. I wish I had the secret weapon. I mean, there's a couple podcasts that I follow, but, you know, a lot of them have to do with the human factor, the Simon sin 100% in the melt. It's like that's the biggest issue, I think, is not the digital marketing isn't the hard part. It's changing the mind.

Yep. I agree. I agree. Such great advice. This has been a really amazing conversation today. Thank you for reminding all of us that no can be one of the most powerful tools in a CMO's playbook. And I'm going to tell our audience if they want to hear more from Gino, because I'm sure you do. Check out his podcast in the key of D.

A lot of great insights on digital transformation. How else can folks get in touch with you, Gino?

Probably LinkedIn is probably the best way. So it's Gino Giovanelli. I'm sure if you have program notes, they'll be in there.

Yep, we'll put that in the show notes for sure.

That would be great. Yep. That'd probably be the best way to do it.

Thanks so much, much. This has been a real pleasure.

You're welcome, Sara. Thanks for having me on the show.

Absolutely.

All right.

And thanks to all of you for joining the Health Marketing Collective, where strong leadership meets marketing excellence. Because the future of healthcare depends on it. We'll see you next time.