Building High-Impact Marketing Strategies on Lean Budgets With Candace Chapman

Intro: 00:00   

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig into their inspiring stories. Learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19  

Hey, I’m Rick Rappe, host of the Response Drivers podcast. Here I dive deep with marketing experts and innovators to learn how they approach targeted marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how we can stay ahead and in an evolving marketing landscape. Response Drivers is brought to you by RPM Direct Marketing. RPM helps companies develop hard hitting, direct mail creative and utilize advanced testing and targeting methodologies to reach customers and prospects.

Our goal is to fully optimize your marketing performance to drive more sales and exceed growth expectations. We deliver smarter, more profitable direct mail solutions so you can turn your direct mail programs into a predictable, efficient sales channel. Check out rpmdm.com to learn more. My guest today is Candace Chapman. Candace doesn’t just step into startups, she transforms them with a passion for building B2B marketing programs from the ground up. 

Candace has a track record of igniting growth, refining strategies, and delivering measurable results for startups. What’s your secret sauce? A unique ability to create high impact marketing programs on lean budgets. Backed by over 12 years of experience as a growth focused marketing leader. Thank you for joining me today, Candace.

Candace Chapman: 01:40  

Well thank you. It’s so nice to be here on RPM. I’m looking forward to it.

Rick Rappe: 01:45  

You’ve been instrumental in transforming startups. Can you share a little bit more about pivotal, a pivotal moment that defined your approach to building B2B marketing programs from scratch?

Candace Chapman: 01:57  

Well, at the risk of sounding like I pivot all the time, I prefer to call them refining moments.

I learn new things from every organization I’ve worked for, and each new thing is combined into how I lead today. I came to my first B2B company after spending the first part of my career in B2C. My last B2C job was at borders, where I made the jump from visual merchandising in the stores to online at borders. Com because our stores were closing and the leadership didn’t want to lose me.

So that brief digital experience got my foot in the door at my first startup. But I knew nothing about B2B marketing. So I’d say my first refining moment was discovering that having an understanding of visual merchandising in a store, the idea of where to place things to attract attention and pull the customer deeper into the store. Those were the same concepts I could use to build websites and customer journeys. And the way, the way we developed marketing signage in the stores. 

That gave me the insight I needed to establish our brand to protect our brand, drive the branding. So I also did use one of the best things my dad ever taught me, which was never say I don’t know, but say I don’t know, but I’ll find out. So that’s kind of how I started. So how that would translate to our listener might be to think about what you’ve learned in other areas of your life. It could be sports. 

It could be the arts, volunteerism, pretty much all of that is transferable to marketing.

Rick Rappe: 03:42  

So that’s really good advice. Yeah for sure.

Candace Chapman: 03:46  

There. If I think about another defining moment which is more recent, well I won’t say recent, but more recent than that was when I let go of the imposter syndrome, and I started believing that I deserve to have a voice at the executive table. For me, it’s been hard historically to challenge leadership when they decide somewhat unilaterally on a direction for marketing to take. I’m not someone who can respond in the moment with a compelling counterargument. I have to go away and think about it.

So I’ve learned to take the information and go and gather my data and my thoughts and prepare to have the discussion. And with all that, then I ask myself, is this a hill I’m willing to die on?

Rick Rappe: 04:34  

Yeah. Good idea.

Candace Chapman: 04:36  

If so, I make my case.

Rick Rappe: 04:40  

And you make your case with your guns loaded with research and information and the proper arguments created. So that makes. That makes a lot of sense. Sometimes I wish I had the self-control to bite my tongue and go get my stuff together before I make, before I try to make the argument. So that’s really great advice.

What drew you to specialize in creating high impact marketing strategies for startups on a lean budget, and how has that shaped your career trajectory?

Candace Chapman: 05:14  

Well, you know, even when I worked at large corporations like borders, they were always strapped for budget. It’s kind of like how every company wants to double their sales. Where did that number come from?

Rick Rappe: 05:27  

You know. Right.

Candace Chapman: 05:28  

Some executives head. But I was raised by a frugal dad, so it was natural for me to watch our spending in whatever company I worked for. When I hear about how much money some companies spend on things like Google ads, I can’t. It boggles my mind. But lack of budget, which I’ve basically always dealt with.

It requires that I take a test and try methodology, especially with digital advertising, which can suck down a budget really fast. All tests precisely developed to meet our goals that we could expand if successful. So I’ve never really had a lot of money to spend, but if I did, I think I would still be pretty surgical. I’ve also learned the art of negotiation with things like trade shows and events, but that’s a whole different podcast.

Rick Rappe: 06:25  

Yeah, I mean, that’s great advice. And we absolutely in our direct mail world, we totally also believe in test small and measure carefully. And really learn from your testing and then roll out you know what works. That makes an enormous amount of sense. And we live in this time when we can get so much data, why not use it, right?

Candace Chapman: 06:49  

Yeah. I mean, today with Pairaphrase, which is the company I’m working with right now, I’ve really found a sweet spot where as a fractional CMO, I’m hiring fractional experts from all over the world to join our team and execute the marketing strategy in their expertise. Yeah. We’re able to excel in so many areas, rather than hiring a much smaller team of full time marketing people. I’m loving this structure and I’m really seeing the results.

Rick Rappe: 07:21  

Yeah, we engage with a lot of clients in that way, too, because we’re such a focused direct mail agency that we, we, we engage with sort of a bigger virtual team of agencies that all have specific specializations and things like that. So that makes great sense. At Pairaphrase, I want to get into a little bit of a question about AI. How do you integrate AI powered tools in your marketing strategy to enhance customer acquisition and retention?

Candace Chapman: 07:52  

Yeah, so we have trained a GPT that’s tuned to our company and our marketing materials. So the GPT is used to develop drafts, first drafts for emails, social web, and also to provide insight for advertising campaigns. It knows who our ISPs are, what our voice sounds like. It helps us skip a lot of the early repetitive content development and get to the good stuff. And the more data we feed it, the more effective it becomes.

So, you know, this is just over the last couple of years. It’s been a game changer.

Rick Rappe: 08:31  

Yeah, it’s really evolving quickly. It’s an exciting time. It’s hard to keep up with all the advancements as they happen. But it’s very exciting.

Candace Chapman: 08:41  

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 08:43  

Can you discuss a time in your career when data driven insights have led you to a significant shift in your marketing approach?

Candace Chapman: 08:50  

Okay, I’m going to get on my soapbox for a minute about reporting. I was part of an organization, borders, where some folks spent days of the week, Literal days of the week. Polling reports. So many reports. When is there time to actually use the data?

But when I was at Phenomenon, a genomics startup that we grew to a scale up, we started to use EOS or the entrepreneurial operating system. I couldn’t recommend it more. It’s a great framework for doing business. And one of the foundational principles is traction, where you build discipline through regular goal setting and check ins. And I knew that reporting and data was important and necessary, but this structure really helped identify the real drivers of the business. 

So we could focus on those and not lose ourselves in vanity metrics. So data driven insights has shifted my approach. Well, now at Pairaphrase we’re using what I consider to be the best CRM on the market HubSpot. It’s not perfect, but it’s leaps and bounds better than anything else I’ve tried. And with it, I can create reports that I used to have to do manually. 

It’s magic. With our form report, that’s my favorite. We’re able to quickly see the journeys of the prospects and identify if they’re a good fit. And one of the things we found is that while we were getting visits from all of our paid ads, we’re only getting form fills from one of our campaigns, one of many, one that we almost paused. So that was a huge insight that we used to adjust our advertising and landing pages.

Rick Rappe: 10:39  

Yeah, we’re using HubSpot as well. And it’s interesting because I could probably learn a lot from you on how to use HubSpot. We’re still still trying to figure it all out. There’s a lot to digest there, and I need to spend more time in the HubSpot Training Academy watching their videos.

Candace Chapman: 11:00  

So yeah, I think it would have been a lot, a lot harder. Well, first of all, HubSpot’s very user friendly. This is not an advertisement, but you know.

Rick Rappe: 11:10  

HubSpot can sponsor the yeah, Response Drivers podcast. Maybe.

Candace Chapman: 11:16  

But if I hadn’t slogged through Salesforce, I think it would have been harder for me to catch on to HubSpot.

Rick Rappe: 11:23  

So yeah. Oh, I know I’ve tried many different CRM tools and yeah, it’s hard to have the discipline to maintain the data. And then when you lose the discipline of maintaining the data, then it goes quickly downhill from there.

Candace Chapman: 11:39  

That’s dirty. Very dirty.

Rick Rappe: 11:41  

Let’s talk a little bit about innovation with the rapid evolution of marketing technologies such as HubSpot. How do you stay ahead of the emerging trends so that your strategies remain effective?

Candace Chapman: 11:56  

Well, I love podcasts like yours and audiobooks. They’re both great. Then you can listen to them while you’re in the car, while you’re exercising. You know it. It helps you to multitask and, you know, kind of justify the time.

Even though we shouldn’t have to justify the time. One I’d strongly recommend other than this one is positioning with April Dunford. She’s awesome. So check her out. I’m cautious about new trends. 

They’re usually just old ideas with a new fancy name, so if the idea makes sense though, I’ll do my small test, measure, refine, repeat process on them and see what happens.

Rick Rappe: 12:43  

What role do you think customer feedback plays in refining your marketing strategies in a B2B context?

Candace Chapman: 12:51  

Well, it’s obviously so important and it’s so hard to get because you don’t want to take up your customers time with things for you, right? We’re supposed to be giving them a service, so how can we ask them for their time? But we have a wonderful success. Customer success specialist who talks to our customers all the time. While she’s helping them.

She also gets feedback primarily about our products. But this feedback also informs how we market to our audiences. So for instance, we got a letter. We got feedback from a customer that we lost because they had existing software that integrated a new feature that was translation. It wasn’t as good as ours, but it was convenient for them. 

So that told me we needed to include more about our API integration in our marketing, and not just on the API page, because we also have easy integration. But they, you know, they might not have known that. And so that kind of feedback is just golden.

Rick Rappe: 14:02  

When you’re building and leading marketing teams, how do you foster a culture of innovation and accountability within your teams?

Candace Chapman: 14:10  

Oh gosh, I love this question. I see myself as a servant leader coach kind of thing. That sounds really high and mighty, but I just I love teams, I’ve built most of my teams from scratch, starting as a sole contributor and growing from there every time. Pretty much. I love finding great people to collaborate with, but as far as fostering innovation, it’s different based on whether I have a full time staff or freelancers.

So when I had a full time staff, I would set aside learning breaks every other week on Friday time set aside to not work on the endless task list that never ends, but to learn something new. So it was up to them to decide, but it had to be related to their role in the company. It could have been taking a course or reading a book or listening to a podcast. We would share what we learned together, sometimes in a more formal way, like a presentation to the rest of the team. But many times, just dropping ideas into slack or at our Monday meetings, it really helped us keep each other sharp. 

But for my current team, we can’t set aside limited time we have for learning break, but we do share ideas with the rest of the team on slack. And I encourage them to share what they’re learning outside of our walls or virtual walls and and thinking, you know, in our stand up meetings.

Rick Rappe: 15:43  

Can you share an example of how you’ve adapted a traditional marketing tactic to fit the modern digital landscape?

Candace Chapman: 15:51  

Okay. Well, one thing I really liked about challenger selling model is the idea of introducing your value. Starting at a very surface level and moving deeper as the customer learns more. They call it spark, introduce, confront and spark can introduce usually happen while a prospect is self-learning. Without our intervention, we don’t even know who they are.

Spark is short form content at the very top of the funnel or customer journey. Today. There are so many ways to use modern digital tools to provide this. A great example is when a marketing company has a free subject line checker or authority score checker. This draws in people and gives them a gift, but at the same time, it’s an opportunity for that company to show their value. 

 Right now, we’re working on a translation cost estimator, where prospects enter a few data points and we show them the time and money saved by using AI powered translation like Pairaphrase. In the past, this gift could have been like a fruit basket with a flyer in it, you know. So it’s kind of the evolution of that kind of thing.

Rick Rappe: 17:13  

What qualities do you look for when you’re assembling a marketing team and that’s capable of executing high impact strategies on lean budgets?

Candace Chapman: 17:24  

Well, my favorite quality is scrappy. These folks that I work with, they need to be able to figure out how to make things happen. Back to the I don’t know, but I’ll find out idea. I want to hear how they made Lemoncello margaritas out of lemons. We’re not just talking lemonade.

Let’s bring it up a notch. That’s what I’m looking for.

Rick Rappe: 17:50  

Great advice. Looking back on your career at this point, what advice would you give to your younger self as you’re starting in the marketing field?

Candace Chapman: 18:03  

I would say take time for the learning, for the free thinking. There will always be things that need done. It will never stop. So you have to make it stop. Even if just for an hour a week, to step out of the work and expand your horizons.

Those are when the best ideas come. Those are sometimes when the only ideas come because you’re too busy in the work. So yeah, take time.

Rick Rappe: 18:29  

Yeah, I like to walk and hike and work out, but when I go on a long walk and come back with a whole list of ideas of things that I got to talk to my team about, it’s kind of funny as you look out into the into the future, if you had a crystal ball, what emerging trends or technologies are you most excited about in the realm of B2B marketing?

Candace Chapman: 18:53  

Well, there’s a lot going on. It’s the one that I’m thinking of is not necessarily new, but it’s important. And that’s zero click marketing. This is a term that was coined by Amanda from Sparktoro, which is a great tool for market and audience intelligence. It means that many people can learn about you and your product before ever seeing your website.

I overuse ChatGPT as a search engine, Reddit, dark, social, all of these things and more are combining to replace a traditional visit to your website in many cases. That’s a real problem for tracking attribution, but not necessarily a bad thing overall. For one, if your SEO and content marketing is working, you will be found in these other places too. So and then as far as attribution, there are companies out there who are working on that challenge. So that’s exciting because that’s a nut that I really like to crack. 

I really hate not knowing what’s working.

Rick Rappe: 19:58  

Yeah, that seems to be a problem that we run into a lot with clients is they don’t really know how to attribute their traffic and their sales to the right channels. And we definitely see some people that some clients that are using don’t have strong data to base their decisions on.

Candace Chapman: 20:16  

So yeah, that’s another reason I love HubSpot reporting. While it’s not perfect, it really has given me more insight than I’ve ever had into the customer journey. If we have.

Rick Rappe: 20:28  

Yeah.

Candace Chapman: 20:29  

One more concept. I want to spread the gospel of jobs to be done.

Rick Rappe: 20:36  

Oh yeah.

Candace Chapman: 20:38  

For those that aren’t familiar, it’s a framework that focuses on the why behind customer behavior. So instead of just asking what customers want jobs to ask what job is the customer hiring this product to do? So someone doesn’t just buy a drill, they hire it to make a hole. That seems really simple, but it can really change the way you look at your product positioning. So yeah appreciate that.

Rick Rappe: 21:10  

Yes. You’re the second podcast guest who recently brought that up. And I think it’s a very valid point. I mean, we have to shift our thinking as marketers to what are the problems that we’re out there trying to solve. I mean, so much we get so wrapped up in the product benefits or details, I guess, I guess you should say, and forget about the benefits.

And so that’s really important. That makes sense. What book did you say that came from? Did you mention a book name?

Candace Chapman: 21:38  

I think it’s just called Jobs to Be Done.

Rick Rappe: 21:40  

Oh. Is it okay?

Candace Chapman: 21:41  

Just look it up. You’ll find it.

Rick Rappe: 21:44  

Will do. We’ll put it in the show notes if we can. We’ll find it and put it in the show notes.

Candace Chapman: 21:49  

Predictably Irrational is the positioning book that you know that I was talking about with April Dunford?

Rick Rappe: 22:00  

Oh. Very good. Thank you. Well, this has been a pleasure to get to know you and to to learn about your career and to hear your advice. I think it was all wonderful.

If people want to get in touch with you, how should they get in touch with you?

Candace Chapman: 22:17  

I think the best way is through LinkedIn. You can find me Candace Lynn Chapman. I think my picture looks pretty much like this, so shouldn’t have a problem.

Rick Rappe: 22:29  

Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a real pleasure and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Candace Chapman: 22:34  

Thank you so much.

Outro: 22:35   

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover?

Just drop us a message at responsedrivers@rpmdm.com. Until next time, keep driving response and making your marketing work smarter.