Building Better Marketing Campaigns Using AI Without Losing the Human Touch With Jonathan Lo

Intro: 00:00  

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig in to 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, 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 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 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. Well, I want to thank Dan Carver, who’s a member of our team here at RPM, for introducing me to my guest today. Jonathan Lo is a Fractional CMO and his business is called Salt Foundry Strategic Marketing. 

He’s also Co-founder and VP of Products at an AI startup called MySidecar. He’s also working on a book on marketing strategy called Empathy Marketing. And to top it off, he’s also launched an email newsletter on strategic frameworks called The Strategic Frame. Jonathan is a busy guy, and he has also earned a master’s degree in management from Harvard University and certifications from the McKinsey management Program. And he’s based in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jonathan.

Jonathan Lo: 02:00  

Absolutely. Rick. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Rick Rappe: 02:03  

Well, why don’t you take us through your career a little bit and talk about your transition from leading digital marketing in larger corporations to founding Salt Foundry and becoming a fractional CMO?

Jonathan Lo: 02:16  

Absolutely. My journey is a little bit interesting. My undergraduate degree was actually in electrical engineering, so I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, went to the University of Illinois and studied electrical engineering. That is what I ended up with with my bachelor’s degree in science. Now, near the end of my years there, junior year, I read some books and learned really about global poverty issues around the world.

I felt very compelled to make a difference around that issue and had a, you know, a really big. You know, moment where I think about, well, what really should I be dedicating the rest of my life to? And so I ended up accepting a fellowship program with a really great global nonprofit called World Vision. This is where I’m at. And we were able to work with this incredible organization. 

My commitment. There was a 13-month fellowship program to work on campus activism programs.

Rick Rappe: 03:16  

Wow.

Jonathan Lo: 03:16  

Now, when I went there, this great organization, which brings in $2 billion in annual revenue. The US office was about $1 billion. They impact over 40,000. They have over 40,000 staff in like 97 countries. The stats may be a little updated since I’ve last, you know, worked with them, but I loved that organization doing long term sustainable community development in the poorest of the poor areas of the world, really helping folks in all areas of of their walks of life with whether it’s food security, water, education, economic development and all.

So I learned a lot at that organization and felt really compelled to stay there after my first year was over. I was just finding a reason to stick around. And because my degree was in engineering, they knew that I could deal with numbers. So I ended up taking a temp job in web analytics. Learned a lot there, and then ended up being able to take over some of their organic social media marketing when one of their staff moved on to a different role, and I ended up joining full time, stayed with this organization for World Vision for seven years. 

And that’s really where I learned a lot about digital marketing. I ended up being a product manager of mobile products, ended up running a multi-million dollar advertising budget in paid search and display and all of that. And that was a nice seven years. I still love the organization and still donate to them. I was ready for a shift to continue to grow my career, and to learn the right, hard skills that I needed to to continue on in greater leadership roles and impact the world in different ways. 

And so about seven years after that, there was a multi-billion dollar e-commerce company called Overstock that found me on LinkedIn, hired me and moved me out to Salt Lake City. So that time with World Vision was in Seattle. Then I moved out to Salt Lake City. Overstock has seen his fair share of different seasons of life. I really joined at a place where it was really thriving and growing, and it was no longer selling overstocked products, but actually became a home goods retailer. 

Brand new home goods, really, their value proposition was that home goods, you know, sofas, area rugs and all that is really distributed. There’s no kind of main players in the space right now. There’s some retailers that have some of their own products. They create Burrows West Elm’s, but they tend to be higher end. Overstock was able to connect with thousands of suppliers, negotiate really good rates and deals, and be able to ship direct to consumer to find really good deals for folks. 

So you could get the look for less. So that was the season of life that I joined Overstock at, and I ended up running up over $50 million ad budget with their social media and display advertising. Then switch over to strategy roles. Near the end of my time then was when the pandemic hit, and I also decided to go back to school while working full time. So that’s when I ended up joining the master’s degree program in management at Harvard with Harvard Extension School. 

And so that took a few years. And at the end of that, I came to this huge transition moment again. And that’s when I decided to go out on my own and become a fractional CMO. So with all that kind of backstory aside, what even is a fractional CMO, a fractional CMO, CMO is a part time executive, essentially, that works within — embedded within companies. So I will only ever take on three, maybe four clients at a time. 

Because I dedicate approximately ten hours a week with each one, I’m really a part of their team, part of their executive team. I help define the KPI, set targets with the leadership, and then lead the teams and manage their agencies to execute. I’d like to say that I’m not an agency, but I’ll manage your agencies for you. And so I transitioned into this realm of world where I was able to support smaller organizations. And that’s my main focus these days.

Rick Rappe: 07:28  

That’s super interesting. Tell us a little bit about your AI startup called MySidecar.

Jonathan Lo: 07:36  

Yeah. So my fractional CMO business, which is called Salt Foundry, was going very well. Right. And so I was able to connect with my core competency really is in e-commerce direct to consumer. So if you have a product that you’re trying to sell and sell to everyone in America who is, you know, the right fit.

That’s where I have a lot of my expertise. So managing everything from paid search, you know, email, your website optimization, all of those elements. I’d like to say that, you know, the job of a CMO for e-commerce is to drive incremental traffic, optimize conversion rates, and increase lifetime value. Now, since being in this realm, I’ve also been meeting a lot of B2B startups, and I’ve learned that the CMO for B2B is to help generate brand authority, increase qualified leads, and enable sales teams. So I’ve got all these frameworks in place that I was able to create, to sustain this great business, of which also I’ve been bringing on other contract fractional CMOs who are experts in different industries. 

So if you have a need and this is, you know, if this is interesting to any of your listeners, I probably can find someone, if not myself, to really serve as the leader. I’d like to say you get all the benefits without paying the benefits, right? Right. On paper or contract. But really, in practice, your teams will feel like we’re full time, essentially.

Rick Rappe: 09:07  

Yeah.

Jonathan Lo: 09:08  

Now, because that has been going well. I ended up getting connected with a tool called my sidecar that had been running. The team had been running for about a year when I learned about them, and they were building and still are, a marketing strategy and execution AI platform. They’re AI native. And so I discovered that the founder was in Salt Lake City, where I live, and asked someone a mutual connection for an introduction, met with this great founder, Ralph von Sosin, and said, hey, I’ve had ideas to build a tool like this.

Anyway, I could see a lot of value for the my clients, the brands that I work with, also with folks like me, fractional CMOs and agencies and others. You’re really accelerating someone’s ability to generate a really effective marketing strategy and then enabling them to essentially have created a custom GPT just by plugging in a website. And then you can create all sorts of deliverables, whether they’re more strategic, like SEO keywords or tactical, such as landing page copy or sales scripts for your teams and such. So they were already on their path to doing this, and I ended up joining as a partner to be their VP of product. This was earlier this year in 2025.

Rick Rappe: 10:27  

Wow. Exciting.

Jonathan Lo: 10:29  

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 10:29  

You went from corporate to very entrepreneurial, which is always a fun transition.

Jonathan Lo: 10:36  

Yeah, I’ve heard feedback from folks that my career has been 14 years in-house, right, at only two organizations. So I really I’ve stuck around a lot. I’ve heard from mentors and others observing my career that they called me a bit of an entrepreneur, that even within these organizations, I’ve been very entrepreneurial and often seeking learning and affecting different areas and being very strategic and seeing connections between elements. And so I think it was a very natural transition to at some point have the confidence which my grad school degree helped with and the skills. Now, having worked in the industry for over 15 years to go out on my own and pursue these different, different paths of how I can be adding value to folks in their companies.

Rick Rappe: 11:23  

Yeah, it’s I mean, my career isn’t too dissimilar. I spent 15 years in the large advertising agency, large direct marketing agency world and ran the AT&T account for about ten years, and so got a lot of experience working on huge budgets and huge programs. And then I started RPM. Gosh, it’s been about 17 years ago now, but. Well, that’s super exciting.

I gotta check out MySidecar. Is that something that there’s a website that I can check out or.

Jonathan Lo: 11:56  

Absolutely. Thank you for asking. MySidecar is live. Go to MySidecar2. Again, that’s MySidecar2 and you will be able to.

There’s a free version if you just need your one company. And if you’re in-house, it’s actually very easy and convenient for you. Plug in your website URL and then you can upload a list or typed out a list of competitors. Or if you have strategy documents, you can upload those as well. Hit enter. 

That will generate a marketing strategy for you, and then from that you will be able to validate all the pieces your value proposition, your competition, your market placement, brand positioning, brand voice. You can validate and lock in sections and then regenerate everything else. If you know things need to be adjusted based on your personas or whatever it is. Once you have that, then you can create initiatives and deliverables. So this is where you say, hey, I need a sales playbook or a new go to market strategy for a new product that I’m launching, or I really need to generate traffic to the website. 

You can select an initiative which is, in a sense, kind of your job to be done in a sense for your marketing intent, and then it will recommend all sorts of deliverables of which you can then generate real content against. That’s where I previously had mentioned landing page copy, SEO keywords, you know, sales call scripts, emails, etc. it generates all of that. And then there’s a full library where you can, in an organized fashion, you can edit, you can have the AI edit sections, tweak it, save it, and we’ll eventually build team functions as well, where then you’ll be able to send this to your clients. If you’re an agency, send this to your manager if you need approval. And so we’ll be creating a lot of team collaboration features soon.

Rick Rappe: 13:49  

Well, I’m going to play dumb a little bit and ask a few more questions. Digging a little deeper into this because it sounds like, you know, automation. And that is going to be replacing the human marketer with, you know, automated answers. What’s the role that the CMO will play in this new automated, you know, AI driven world?

Jonathan Lo: 14:11  

Yeah, absolutely. I see artificial intelligence and our current iteration of it. Right, which is a lot to be engaging with large language models with Llms, just like any other form of technology that’s come up in the past. We don’t need to fear it. In fact, it will enhance what we can accomplish and will enhance the creativity and the wisdom that humans have.

Right? And so I actually see that this is the overall movement and trend of AI is going to be beneficial for all folks we’re making, not we my team. But you know, society is making breakthroughs in medical research. There’s just so many different elements in autonomous driving that is going to benefit all of society. So for the CMO, this is not something to be afraid of. 

It’s a tool to brainstorm against. It’s a tool to get content faster. I’d like to say if ChatGPT can get you about 50% of the way there, and if ChatGPT plus an hour’s worth of re prompting and effort and going back and forth, you know, an hour later he can get you 60 to 70% of the way there. My sidecar should be able to enhance marketing. Directors and CMOs should be able to get you 80% of the way there and faster, because we have already infused a lot of. 

We have three marketing experts on the business side of this, constantly thinking through the prompting. And we’re leveraging not just prompting, but also more advanced tools such as retrieval, augmented generation, Rag. There’s other pieces in the background that are ensuring you have a really high level deliverable. And on top of all that, then a very easy UI to make changes, tweaks. Engage with the AI. 

Our AI assistant is called Howard, which is the founder of Ralph’s dog. You can engage with Howard to then make any tweaks that you need.

Rick Rappe: 16:08  

Perfect. Well, we want to make sure I gotta. I gotta talk to you more about this and make sure that you get direct mail plugged into my sidecar. So you want to have some sort of direct mail component in there as well. We know that digital marketing is definitely first, but or people think of it first and tackle it first in many cases.

But direct mail can become a great sales channel for companies also. So don’t forget about direct mail.

Jonathan Lo: 16:33  

No, absolutely. And direct mail I mean, it’s amazing what works, right? And it really just depends on the I’ve used this term before job to be done, which is this theory that was essentially created by Anthony Ulwick and made popularized by Clayton Christensen in his book Competing Against Luck. Clayton Christensen was a Harvard MBA professor, and the idea relates to that term. You may have heard that phrase.

You know, people don’t need a quarter inch drill. They need a quarter inch hole, right? So really, what are you hiring or firing products or services to accomplish in your life? And direct mail is so fascinating because yes, it feels very old school. But what other marketing platform or channel do you have that gets 100% open rate? 

Like someone’s going to thumb through all of their mail just to see. Right. You have an opportunity to capture their attention where they don’t have the same kind of banner blindness as they do with online marketing. Multi-channel. Very important. 

Right. There’s that marketing rule of seven, which I think is probably the number must be a lot higher than that. But the marketing rule of seven states that on average, it takes somebody seven touchpoints with your brand before they’re ready to buy with you, right?

Rick Rappe: 17:53  

Yeah.

Jonathan Lo: 17:54  

Again, with banner blindness and all the advertising, the reality is going to be much higher. And many studies have been done on the beneficial effects of multichannel marketing. So hitting people and helping to, to create valuable messaging and ways to engage with them through different channels.

Rick Rappe: 18:12  

Yeah. We try to go for the surround sound effect when we can, when we can do it. The tricky part about that sometimes is when you run the numbers on the costs and you see lift and performance. When we pair direct mail with other things and the question is always like, is it paying its own way? Are we getting enough of a return on the investment to justify the expense?

So we always have to run the numbers and really make sure that we dig into those details. But. Well, AI is also rapidly changing search marketing I think in many ways. Right. Like it’s you used to search and get the list of links to click on and go explore someone’s website for the answer. 

Now AI is just giving you the answer, so it’s definitely changing rapidly.

Jonathan Lo: 18:59  

Yeah, and there’s a lot of research being done now. You know it used to be search engine optimization SEO. Now the term I’ve been hearing more and more is generative engine optimization, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we know the answer yet. And all that I’ve seen so far are all the same kinds. You would not change anything you’re doing right?

Provide valuable content to your target audience and around keywords, or right around whatever topic it is or ways to help them. And once all the algorithms and the AIS get signals that that is helpful content, they will reward your brand essentially because you’re the ones being useful. I, I think nobody at this point. This is June 2025. No one at this point has cracked any sort of difference code as it relates to SEO.

Rick Rappe: 19:51  

Yeah. At some point it creates this weird sort of feedback loop. If everyone’s using AI to generate the content and then.

Jonathan Lo: 19:57  

Well.

Rick Rappe: 19:58  

AI is using the content to generate the answer. It’s like, isn’t it like a loop? I don’t know.

Jonathan Lo: 20:04  

Well, that brings up two really good points. One is, you know, I say my sidecar, my AI startup should get you 80% of the way there.

Rick Rappe: 20:13  

Yeah.

Jonathan Lo: 20:14  

I don’t believe that because it can’t get you 100% of the way there. I say that because it should only get you 80% of the way there, and you need to provide your human hat on and intelligence. Right. And actually take it that last mile.

Rick Rappe: 20:28  

AI is better with AI plus human collaboration. That’s been a consensus opinion for pretty much everybody that I’ve talked to on this podcast, which is, you know, several, quite a few marketing CMOs. But it’s interesting how AI is accelerating things. So. And it does things so rapidly that you can kind of just, you know, create content and fire it out there and do the just quick, quick iterations instead of, yeah, agonizing over things and perfecting them.

Jonathan Lo: 21:02  

Yeah. But I will say there, there’s more and more evidence that the search engines and the LMS are stinging content that they believe is AI generated. So I said, there isn’t necessarily, you know, an obvious answer for how to add value. But I will say the one thing we have learned is you do need to put a human on it. And if you just have AI do this loop over time, actually, it seems as if there’s evidence that the tools will not prioritize your brand and your content as much because they know it was AI generated.

Rick Rappe: 21:39  

Interesting. That’s interesting. Well.

Jonathan Lo: 21:42  

That’s a fascinating transition potentially to my book, if you want me to.

Rick Rappe: 21:47  

Yes. I was going to ask you about your book next. Your book focuses on empathy marketing. Tell us a little bit more about that concept and why it’s crucial in today’s marketing environment.

Jonathan Lo: 21:59  

Yeah, absolutely. Empathy marketing is a term I’ve been using for about a year now. It’s not a term I’ve heard much, not to say that I necessarily invented it. There’s a lot of empathy when you think about user experience. But when I think about empathy, again, it relates to that foundation that I’m building on with jobs to be done.

Right. And so the idea of empathy marketing is that in every stage of the marketing funnel, and that’s just the funnel is just one easy way to understand, you know, folks going from awareness of your brand to consideration of your brand to purchasing. And then you can always add layers. So I always add two more, I add one is repeat purchasing and then becoming an advocate. So of those five stages of folks who will be in your marketing funnel. 

The point is the philosophy is have empathy for them in each stage. Listen to them. Do customer research. And but really the thing is focus not on just selling your product now, right? So when I worked, you know, in e-commerce, you can obsess over that 2-3% who buy on, you know, based on your, your website conversion rate. 

So if 100 people come to your site, every brand is really obsessing over how do we get that 2% to 2.001%, right? Because it truly can represent a lot of sales today. But I believe and I’ve seen evidence that you actually need to have empathy for the 98% who aren’t ready to buy today. Also, you need to understand what is this person — need to go from awareness to consideration. And how do I add value to their lives without asking even more of them at that point? 

And I believe, and I’ve seen, that when you actually have empathy and you add value at every stage of the shopping journey. You will end up being rewarded with overall increase in sales, customer satisfaction, repeat rates and brand advocates.

Rick Rappe: 23:57  

Yeah, yeah, I believe that to be true. Our concept work that we do around, usually in direct mail, we often start with a thought about the situation that the buyer is in and or the potential buyer is in, and sometimes they’re not even aware that they have an issue or a problem. And we have to, you know, make them aware and take them through that whole process of, you know, interest and all the way to action. So it’s interesting. Tell me a little bit more, if you don’t mind, about your newsletter, which is The Strategic Frame.

You discussed various strategic frameworks. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Jonathan Lo: 24:41  

Absolutely. So if you’re wondering why does Jonathan have so many different things going on in his life right now, and how can he possibly focus in, you know, on anything I’d like? I’ve noticed a trend that all of these four elements of where I’m focusing relate to making marketing strategy accessible. So being a fractional CMO means, hey, some companies, usually companies that are about $5 to $50 million in annual revenue, can’t afford a full time CMO. They’re very expensive, over $300,000 to $400,000 in total comp for an experienced CMO.

And so now they have access to have a partial CMO. And there’s absolutely an 80 over 20 there, right? You can get 80% of the value for maybe 20% of the cost investment. So that has an element of democratizing or making accessible, you know, strategy. The AI startup is, hey, if you want to engage with the platform, you know, you can go there. 

It’s an AI first platform to engage and get strategy. If you want to learn more about the philosophy of marketing, that’s where I have Empathy Marketing, the book that’s coming out. And finally, now I’ve also thought, well, what is another free way that I can, you know, share something that I nerd out about anyway, which is strategic frameworks. And one of the reasons I seek out additional extra career learning, such as the McKinsey management program that I went through, that, you know what I learned in grad school at Harvard? Like, why did I even do that? 

The classes I, I really gravitated toward the most related to strategy and thinking through strategic frameworks. And what that means is, well, how do you even approach a problem? And what are the different methods and processes that you can go about in order to make a really wise decision? And so that’s what this newsletter is about, The Strategic Frame, which is currently going to be hosted on Substack. So if you want to direct URL It’s thestrategicframe.substack.com. 

This strategic frame I will weekly be sharing strategic frameworks. One of them, the first one that I plan to send out, is a tool I use all the time with all my clients. It’s called messy, mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. And the idea is that it’s a method in order to break down complex problems. So for one, there actually is an art to even writing a good problem statement to begin with. 

I learned about this in the McKinsey program as well as in grad school. You know, a lot of it follows some of that smart methodology in a sense. Right? But essentially, you want something at a high enough level that it impacts the whole organization. Not too small, but it’s also probably has a certain KPI attached to it in a certain timeline. 

And so a bad problem statement could be how do we grow this business 100X, you know, really quickly with zero budget. Well it’s not really feasible. But, you know, something realistic could be. How do we double our revenue within the next 12 months, given a constraint of our current marketing team and budget of, you know, $20,000 per month or so? Right. 

So once you have a great problem statement, then, Missy, the rule is that all the children branches. If you’re doing a decision tree, the children branches must be mutually exclusive. There’s no overlap between them, but they’re collectively exhaustive that together the children branches represent everything.

Rick Rappe: 28:20  

Every option.

Jonathan Lo: 28:21  

The make up of every option right of the parent branch. And then you just keep going. You keep breaking it down more and more until you at the end, have all these very specific tactical elements, but you recognize how it ladders up strategically to your goal. So that’s an example of a strategic framework or mental model that I plan to share.

Rick Rappe: 28:41  

Yeah, that’s super interesting. Boy you approached that with an electrical engineers mindset. Also, I think, which is interesting.

Jonathan Lo: 28:51  

I do.

Rick Rappe: 28:51  

And so once you —

Jonathan Lo: 28:52  

The fun of marketing, right. Marketing is so much — both the science and art and blending those together. And so I find that taking these strategy frameworks that can feel a little black and white actually are more creative than you realize, because there’s different ways to fill out, say, a Swot analysis or Pestle or whatever it is. But there is so much value then in coming back to, well, did we cover all of our bases? Are we thinking about everything holistically?

Rick Rappe: 29:20  

Yeah. So then once you have your decision tree, your possibilities, your levers, I might call them defined. How do you then go about sort of determining which ones you want to pull and how to where to put your focus for accomplishing the goal.

Jonathan Lo: 29:40  

Yeah, absolutely. So in this particular case more frameworks. So so so to build out on this.

Rick Rappe: 29:47  

Framework.

Jonathan Lo: 29:47  

That can be helpful is actually to start adding numbers against your current case and what you believe might be possible. So if you’re talking about how do I increase, how do I help my companies sales by X, whatever. You know, the first branch of that might be increase revenue or decrease costs. Right. That’s a messy method.

So how do you increase revenue? You can probably increase revenue through your online or your offline marketing channels. That is one way to break it out for online. Maybe it’s paid, earned and owned or paid. Then it’s Google, Bing, Meta, etc.

Right? So that’s an example tree we can use here. So in your current state though, how much of your revenue like what are some of the numbers across each of the branches. And so each of the branches should sum up to 100% of the previous one. Right. 

So if we’re talking paid media, how effective is your metaverse or Google versus your X or whatever else it is. Right? Right. You can start putting numbers against everything and see either. Oh, offline we have all these wholesale partnerships. 

Offline is not performing nearly as good as online. And so there’s a huge opportunity there. On the flip side, maybe 90% of your businesses offline, and that’s where your expertise lies. And you don’t have the resources to grow online. So just, you know, a 5% shift in your wholesale might be the bigger opportunity. 

Again, there’s a bit of an art then to looking at all of your opportunities. And so what I would do then is take all of your end branches. And here’s where framework number two comes is, you know what folks call the two by two matrix Eisenhower matrix BCG matrix I recognize the last two I mentioned usually have a specific axis, but essentially you put it on a two by two matrix with two axes. Right. Usually relates to level of effort on one axis and, you know, relative impact to the business or estimated revenue you. 

That could be generated for the other axis. And you optimize. Right? That’s one way to then see. Of all of your options, you know, for the lowest amount of effort and the greatest impact. 

What opportunity is there?

Rick Rappe: 31:56  

That makes sense. Yeah. I guess a lot of people might look at the current performance of their digital marketing and also say, well, it’s currently performing well, but it’s kind of maxed out in some cases, and it doesn’t have the room to scale up. Other things might be more scalable, you know, depending on if you’re not using them yet, there might be a huge opportunity there. So I guess it’s a matter of looking at the performance versus the opportunity, perhaps.

Yep. Interesting. Well, your frameworks are interesting. I’m going to be a subscriber and be checking these out. I think these sound right up my alley, so that’s exciting. 

Well, we’ve talked a little bit about AI, so I won’t get into that. But is there any other technology that you think is really important for marketers, current marketers, to embrace in and use technology?

Jonathan Lo: 32:53  

You know, there’s so many options to accomplish what you need. I found that really depending on the industry, different players and tools will be more effective. What I will say, though, is to make sure that you’re working with influencers and micro influencers, because that is how word of mouth and authenticity will come across today, right in the age of AI. I’m seeing more and more that folks don’t quite know what to trust online, and especially if it’s just a landing page, right with with copy. Or you just see, you know, stock photography and, and text over that selling something.

If it doesn’t feel authentic, then there’s no reason to pay attention to that brand anymore. That’s why so many brands are even growing just when their founder is willing to go on TikTok every day, once a day, and just talk and document their journey and what they’re going through. There’s a real level of authenticity there, and that’s where also the modern day version of, you know, word of mouth referrals relates to influencers. So find folks who are in your niche and partner with them so that they believe in your brand. Right. 

You have to make sure your product is actually good and useful and have them advocate for your brand. And so not exactly a piece of technology, but a philosophy around — we need real people. Still, marketers still need real people to talk about real things in an authentic way that isn’t just behind the mask of AI.

Rick Rappe: 34:22  

That’s really good advice. How do you approach measuring the success of marketing campaigns? What are some of the KPIs that you focus in on, and and what do you — how do you advise clients about that?

Jonathan Lo: 34:37  

Yeah, absolutely. I’ll share again the three territories of KPIs and maybe I’ll dive into the B2C ones more so in the B2B world. What I’ve seen is items around generating brand authority. So that can be, you know, a number of people who visit your webinars or listen to your podcasts around increasing qualified leads, then that might be downloading a lead magnet. That would be website visits, and you can retarget them with ads.

And then enabling the sales team is what resources PDFs or whatever it is, or even sales scripts or what you’re learning in the marketing side, just integrating really well to enable the sales team. On the B2C side, I really kind of see three main territories of KPIs, especially in digital. There’s driving incremental traffic. So you look at how many total impressions you have, what your engagement rates are off platform. You know then ultimately how many people visit your various purchasing channels. 

That could be your website, that could be a marketplace like Amazon or Walmart, you know, driving traffic to your products wherever they might be purchased. There is an optimization of conversion rate, so obviously you need to drive qualified traffic. And that’s always a debate of, you know, how good is the traffic to begin with. But on optimizing conversion rates, what can you do about your product imagery? What can you do about, you know, your copy and the way that you answer questions now that someone has shown interest? 

Can you retarget them? Can you give them potentially deals and great customer service so that they actually want to purchase now that they’ve heard about your brand? And then finally, another kind of major territory in the KPIs for B2C relate to increasing customer lifetime value. So that is that repeat purchase that I mentioned near the bottom of the funnel, as well as creating brand advocates so that your customers actually become your sellers, right? They do that word of mouth to all of their friends, and they’re the folks that they have influence around. 

So customer lifetime value relates to for a particular custom. How customer? How often are they repeat purchasing from you and then how what dollar amount? And of course that will depend on your industry as well, because somebody needs napkins more often than a front door.

Rick Rappe: 36:55  

Yeah. It’s funny. In direct mail we can definitely influence response rates obviously by what we’re doing. But with offers and creative strategies and things like that, we found we also can heavily influence conversion rates and even affect what people are buying and the lifetime value. So it can all be kind of studied even in the initial marketing effort to some degree.

Well, boy, this has sure been interesting and I feel like I could talk to you for another hour, probably. But I know we probably are running out of time. So I want to wrap up with a few final questions. How can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more and potentially hire you to help them with their marketing?

Jonathan Lo: 37:44  

Yeah, absolutely. I’ll give maybe way too many links, which breaks all the rules of marketing of keeping one clear CTA. But feel free to find me on LinkedIn. The direct URL is the slash and then JonathanLo7. /jonathanlo7. Right?

Find me on LinkedIn. Also go to my website saltfoundrystrategy.com. That is the — you can see case studies around all of my fractional CMO work for the AI startup. You can go directly to mysidecar.ai. And then for the newsletter. 

It’s thestrategicframe.substack.com and for the book. No URL yet. But that will be coming. So if you follow me on any of the other platforms, you’ll hear all about it as I get closer to publishing.

Rick Rappe: 38:36  

Yeah, that’s great. And I’ll put a link or links for all of those things in the show notes. And if people want to go to the website for response drivers comm, they’ll find this episode. And then look in the show notes and you’ll find those links. Well, it has been an absolute pleasure talking with you.

I’m excited about your newsletter. I’m excited to try your AI platform. I’m excited for the book. It’s been great. So thank you so much for your time and we will talk to you again soon.

Jonathan Lo: 39:09  

Yeah, thank you so much, Rick. I really appreciate it.

Outro: 39:11  

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.