Marketing That Solves Real Problems: Inside RED66 Marketing (ft. Rebecca Dutcher)

Speaker A: Welcome to Making Martech, where we spotlight innovative Martech companies and leaders who are driving growth, highlighting valuable insights and actionable strategies to stay ahead in this industry. Today we're here with Rebecca Dodger, founder and CEO of Red 66 Marketing.

Speaker B: Uh,

Speaker A: can you tell us a bit about what your background is? What inspired you to launch Red 66? What was the moment that you realized that this was more than just an idea and an actual business that you were ready to build?

Speaker B: Uh, 15 years prior to starting Red66, I worked at three different agencies. I learned a lot from web development, SEO, VR communications to branding, and just overall visual communication. But what I saw was I had several clients that continued to move with me through those agencies, and they were loyal to me and the brand, Rebecca, and how we continued to learn and evolve and work with them from a marketing perspective. And then I had a mentor of mine who was the CEO of a, uh, women's entrepreneurial organization that nudged me to hang out my own shingle. Said, you already have clients that will follow you. We'll help you. So in the fall of 2016, I did that.

Speaker A: So it sounds like you had some really strong relationships.

Speaker B: Yes, I. Our mantra is clients for life, but the relationships are what matter the most.

Speaker A: And it seems like you've brought that a lot into your agency as well. Right. Because things you mentioned to me was that you're really proud of the culture there at your agency. So can you tell us a bit more about that?

Speaker B: Absolutely. Building a culture in a team. You know, I played sports a lot growing up, and I always remember there was one coach who said, there's a reason why, you know, quarterbacks will buy their linemen gold watches, and it's because the linemen protect them, um, as the quarterback. So as the leader, my team, they're the front lines. They are who are doing the work. They're getting to know the clients so well. They're building who we are as a company. And supporting their personal and professional growth and goals is how we. How we make that happen. Every. Every employee has a personal roadmap that we review every quarter. So we look at what's their unique genius, what do they love to do from a work standpoint so that they get to do more of it. We also look at their personal goals, and some, you know, you know, younger employees who are a few years out of college are, you know, looking to build their savings or buy a house and pay off student loans professionally. They want to get, you know, get to the next level. They want a title Change, certainly salary increase, but they might want to learn and know more about this one area that we offer and we support that. So we've brought in financial experts to do budget training, share budgeting tips and things like that with the team. But we look for ways that they can get to those goals so we're supportive of them as much as they are for us. And then quarterly employee satisfaction surveys where they can say, you know, here's what we're doing great, here's what we need to work on, here's what I wish we could fix from a process perspective. But our, our values and our culture have all been defined by the feedback

Speaker A: in that survey and from this experience. What's something that you've learned about the importance of having a good company culture? Because I feel like when you have a good company culture that really just supercharges everyone's abilities within the company. Rather than having to feel like, I just gotta meet this deadline, I just got to do this, it takes the pressure off and brings it into a team like environment where you're really all pushing each other forward.

Speaker B: I think that's it is everyone supports everyone here. And even if we were faced with a challenge or if a client leaves, which occasionally happens, we take it really personally and it hurts our feelings really bad. So we want to do everything we can for clients. But if someone doesn't know how to do something or they made a mistake, we always look at it as a learning opportunity. The team, they joke that my favorite line is everything is figureoutable. Like this is, you know, we recently had, uh, a web project manager leave. She got recruited away, which is a bummer. So we had a nice send off for her and everyone's like, what are we going to do now? And the biggest thing is like, it's all figureoutable. You know, we do have someone who had wanted to be in that seat and was continuing to learn over the last several months. So there's not a lot of knowledge lost. And we have other resources so they know that we've got their backs. We can figure anything out together and we'll learn. It'll be uncomfortable, but we're all learning and that's what matters most. But no one's afraid to make a big mistake here because it's a learning opportunity and pretty, well, let's see. Yeah, there isn't anything we haven't overcome so far. So I think we'll be just fine.

Speaker A: And speaking of it all being figureoutable, one of the things you also said was that there's nothing that cannot be done through marketing if it's done. Expound on that a bit.

Speaker B: Sure. Marketing, communications, it touches everything a company does. Your brand, your reputation, what people think of when they hear your name based on their experience, whether an employee standpoint, recruitment standpoint, customer service. And when people ask what do we do? I say we help solve business problems through marketing. So if you have a new business problem or a lead gen problem, is that tied to your brand reputation, Poor reviews, customer service, and then we work on different campaigns there. If it's your employment brand and the way employees are treated or communicated to, can we work on internal communications? Whether it's newsletters, SMS platforms, um, you know, cool boards and contests and things internally that you know, everything ties to, like how things are communicated. So maybe it's not necessarily not anything that marketing can't fix, but good communication, which is still marketing can fix.

Speaker A: And fast forward to today. What are some of the biggest successes that you've recently had?

Speaker B: When we posted Open Positions, we filled them quickly. I would say that's a win. And uh, we also get applicants and people interested in working with us when we don't even have anything open. So I think that says a lot about who we are and our employees who are out there talking to others that it sounds like a great place to be. I feel like that's a really big win. We have some other clients where we keep the consistent marketing stuff from their social and their website support. But we've worked on different targeted campaigns to help them go after a big prospect. And this is where that sales marketing alignment really works. But we took a uh, print ad and uh, an email sponsorship that they were going to do for this one organization and we turned it into a whole campaign so they could really capitalize on getting new business. So it turned into landing pages, a B testing sales collateral and an email sequence. We looked at one print ad and I said we could do a lot more for this so they could really measure and get that impact. And it's working. And I think that's a pretty big win that we make a bigger deal out of things and take on more work just so the client gets the result that they need.

Speaker A: That's awesome to hear. And one of the things you mentioned was the sales marketing relationship. So can you tell us a bit more about that?

Speaker B: Sure. We're in the B2B space which can be very traditional sales driven. They have little to no marketing in house or they think of marketing as their website or their logo or Social media, but they don't think that people and consumers or customers prospects, they're out there researching options when they have a pain. If they are looking for a new service provider, they are out there making their shortlist based on what they find online. And that's, that's marketing. Right? That's really important. That buyer journey and that buyer process. Today like 75% of people who reach out to a salesperson or actually fill out a lead form have already made their shortlist and decision just based on what's out there. So sales reps are still very, very important. But it's more of an educational sale than you know, solution selling than just closing. So salespeople, it used to be you were doing all the cold calling, doing all the outreach, the follow up emails, the follow up phone calls and now there are CRMs and autom things that we can do where there's a lot more marketing air cover for salespeople so they can focus on going after the bigger fish and the more complex sale that requires that personal touch where marketing can again be that air cover. But we all need to work together because what salespeople hear in the field, whether it's objections or questions, marketing needs that so that we can have that content out there for others to find. And then knowing what's really just because someone filled out a lead form, is that a quality lead for sales or not? What do we need to do to adjust a form or the inputs that the salesperson gets to make it a better lead for higher quality sale and or faster close. So they gotta work together, they're not so siloed anymore.

Speaker A: So given that, what do you think is the way to approach this? Now when you think of sales and marketing being interconnected like this, what's the new way that you have to approach that?

Speaker B: There's a few things for certainly technology perspective, you know, sales, where are they keeping their leads? Is it an Excel file, a notebook, is it a pipeline management system or a true CRM and what that touches M? But some of our clients, you know, we'll talk to the executive C level person about marketing, but we also will call and talk to sales reps just because we want to, we want to talk to them. Their content is gold from a marketing perspective. And it's really opening those lines of communication that marketing isn't just a C suite function of the business like finance, operations and marketing and sales. Right. Marketing and sales need to work together and collaborate. So we've had a lot more conversations with sales reps. We have some clients who are like a boat dealership. We'll actually just walk into the showroom and start talking to the sales reps to get information from a consumer perspective. And that's how you get into the nitty gritty where it really matters. Not just the surface level, buyer Persona stuff.

Speaker A: I think that's a really important thing to remember. And I like that you guys are doing that because it's like you said, uh, like that information must be gold, right?

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: And moving a bit away from the success side of this, on the other side of success, there's always some challenges that come paired with that success. What I'm wondering is what are some of the biggest challenges that you guys have had recently?

Speaker B: Good question. Everyone loves talking about challenges. One I can see is we have a client where, you know, launching a new website had left stuff on autopilot for a long time. And he's comparing like the marketing stuff we're doing to an inside salesperson that he had at one time who all they did were outbound cold calls. And of course they got more leads because they were outbound calling people versus marketing. You know, he's not looking necessarily at those that came in were they were closer to closing, they were easy. And of course sales isn't gonna say, yeah, we got that lead from the website. So the, I would say one of the biggest challenges is really communicating everything that we do do for clients and the outcomes. Because if it's not an E commerce, it's hard to measure the ROI of your marketing spend. Right. When it's a lead and it's a, you know, three, six, even sometimes a 12 month sales process, they forget where that lead came from. So we have a few clients where the challenge seriously is just demonstrating the true impact and outcomes that we've had from building their brand, their solid website presence and things like when it's a

Speaker A: long sales cycle, I think especially with all the technology out there right now, attribution and marketing is just becoming so messy. Right. You don't know where anything's coming from and sorting that out is an absolute mess. So how are you approaching that right now?

Speaker B: There's some things when they have the right tech stack that's important because if it came in from a website, um, you know, we have other, other plugins and things where we have UTM tracking on links. So if they came from a Google business visit or if they came from a paid ad or if they came from something else, we can, we kind of know where that visitor came from. So there's some attribution. You always ask how did you hear about it? But showing some of the inputs, the things and activities that we are doing. If we can see organic traffic increasing, we can see paid ads have a higher click through conversion rate. It's anecdotal but it's not a total guess. Uh, and how you're showing attribution and it's like sales are up and these things are working because we've been tracking that. But that would, that'd be the biggest challenge.

Speaker A: And uh, along with this trend where attribution is becoming more difficult, another big trend that's been impossible to ignore lately is AI. Right. AI is the big buzzword. Everybody loves talking about it and everyone has an opinion on it. So your thoughts on the AI shift and how do you see it shaping the work that you're doing?

Speaker B: I think AI is an incredible tool and it has a lot of applications we haven't even thought of yet. I was just talking with our team about our own marketing and we're working on developing a content engine with a developer with some AI agents that can take a lot of our content connected with keyword research, our buyer Persona and output better content so that we can work more on the strategy and fine tuning content versus writing it all. So I think that's the most common, right. Content creation. But using our brains is huge. I saw another connection I have on LinkedIn posting about AI in HubSpot now and it's been around a long time when you think about there's been algorithms and automation and robotics and all these things that have made us more efficient, fine tuned personalization and things like that. It will change the way we work for sure. I was just at uh, a couple different events the last few weeks where there's all the AI conversations, AI and marketing. But how do you use it for data analysis? How do you use it for automating those repetitive tasks? Not just from a marketing perspective, but you know, sales too, right? Can they send follow up sales sequences or after the sale you think about email marketing. I mean that's an automation now AI can help enhance it and personalize it further. There's going to be a lot of change, but there's going to be a lot of people that need to really harness their own brain power and strategic thinking to harness the power of AI.

Speaker A: And I couldn't have put it better myself, right, because it's all about separating that low leverage stuff from the high leverage stuff. And the high leverage stuff is really what's going to move the needle for you. Just based off what you've been telling me, it looks like you guys are getting into AI. So for the people that are still just jumping in the advice that you give them about, you know, what are some challenges, challenges that you've had when you're adapting to AI and then how have you went and addressed those challenges?

Speaker B: There's so many different AI tools and we have 12 people on our team. So everyone has different tools they like, um, and people will use tools differently. So we actually made an AI team. So we have a couple people that are testing the different tools and how it works for our agency and building different ideas. There were four of us that went to the AI conversation, uh, panel with our chamber and we all had different takeaways that we collaborated and how we're using it. I went to another tech Trends event last week and looked at how others are using AI and even talking with our designer and our web team, like, people want to learn coding and I, you know, like, you're not going to be a hardcore coder from building, building a website, sorry, especially WordPress. We need to look at how AI is going to impact how, how fast we can build sites, high quality websites. Because bespoke and building a page at a time is going to go away. In some cases it's already gone, depending on the builder. So we look at all the work we do, what AI tools are out there, and then we test a couple, you know, we play with them. Um, you got to make time to uncover what's going to work for you. We're also looking to invest in bringing in an AI expert here to do a, uh, four to six week training course, four hours every week on building our own AI agents to automate our process and enhance our process. And that could be anything. But we look at it across all the functions of the business and then when we harness it for ourselves, we also then can incorporate it for clients. But we don't just say, hey, here's this bright new shiny tool and we're going to use it for you because we need to make sure that it'll work and be accurate.

Speaker A: And I think it's great that you guys are approaching it with that really holistic perspective because for a lot of people the mistake that they're making when they're jumping into AI is they're thinking of AI as just another tool where they're being told they need to bring AI into the company. So then they just try to work it into the process that they already have. But they're uh, not realizing is that the use case for AI is so impactful and so powerful that you need to figure out how you can actually rework your processes around AI, not just add uh, it in as a little checkbox. And when you do that, when you rework your processes around AI, when you create new processes around AI and that's

Speaker B: when you see the most impact and it's daunting. Right? There are so many things out there, how, how will we use it? And then having the time to test it and play with it when everyone's got work to do, right. There's all, all the things we need to do on a daily basis. And even talking with our team said if we need to bring in other support, I think about our creative director, right, Learning to use more AI from a design web build perspective. But she doesn't have time, she doesn't have the capacity. I'd much rather work and bring in a part time designer to free up her time for that learning because that's a good investment in our future as an agency and hers as well. If we just spend all our time doing what we do, we aren't going to learn about what's next. You've got to make time and give everyone permission to take that time to invest in new tools and technology. And I think about when I started in marketing point of sale systems and in this big family owned department store, they invested a lot in technology then too to look at cross shopping behavior. You could know who your sales people were that would only come in for sale based on their margin. We could mine that data and we did a lot of direct mail and we did a lot of broadcast media. Well now you can get really dialed in on people with technology. But some of those principles that I use there, you know, we didn't have a website back then. Email marketing wasn't a thing and there sure as heck wasn't social media. I'm talking about like 2000 to where we are now in 2025 and it changes daily. So you've gotta be uh, I wanna say unafraid, right to try new things and test em out. Otherwise you'll just fall flat and be stagnant.

Speaker A: And that's great that you have that action taking mindset because that's really what sets a lot of people apart. And a lot of companies face that exact same challenge that you are where they know that they have to get into AI but then you also have to figure out like where am I going to get the bandwidth to do

Speaker B: this, we run on eos. Not sure if you're familiar with that, but really even goes back to Stephen Covey where they talked about you put the rocks in the jar before you put in the sand and the pebbles in the water, because those are the most important things and they take up the most room. So as a team, we decide on our quarterly rocks, our key objectives that we need to work on that quarter to move the business forward. And a lot of that is operations stuff. So we've had people working and testing AI tools like every quarter, but we were focusing on something different. You know, first it was content, then it's websites. We look at different, even CRM tools, SEO tools. And now we're looking at, um, dashboard reporting for clients from Looker Studio and Semrush to now we're looking at Power by Analytics and all these other BI components because clients want better data and now there's more tools available. So we never sit with good enough. We gotta figure out what's next. And that's how we do it. From, uh, a quarterly perspective. The whole team knows why it's important. We have three or four big things and everyone is a part of that. We're not just pulling things out of the air to focus on. And we review those every week.

Speaker A: And I think that's another thing that I've personally noticed in my work, is that a lot of companies are stuck in a kind of exploratory phase because there's just so many AI tools out there, right. You don't know where to start. And exploring one leads you down the rabbit hole and you find 5 more and 5 more and 10 more and 15 more and it just keeps on going. Where do you find the ones that are actually effective? Where do you find the ones that have actual use cases within your business and are actually going to go and grow it for you? And I think that's a challenge for a lot of people is that you've been seeing as well.

Speaker B: Well, I mean we talk about analysis paralysis, right? The uh, inability to make a decision because we're, we're looking at too many things and knowing it's always going to continue to change and it's going to change rapidly. So looking at, you know, best practices, how it works for your business and then working in it for three to six months because you're always going to be able to improve, continuous improvement. There will be new things, but if you continue to just test and you're never actually getting any traction, you're not necessarily going to Learn how it can impact your business. And that's where sometimes we just make a decision. This is what we're doing for, you know, the next three months and let's see what happens. And we might keep a list or a parking lot of other ideas and tools as they come about, but we don't want to chase bright, shiny objects from a tech perspective because, you know, it impacts 20 to 30 clients too, as well as how we operate day to day.

Speaker A: And that's a great perspective to have. Right. It seems like you recognize the value that bringing somebody in externally can bring to your business. A lot of businesses technically have the ability to go and do this all themselves, but, uh, it can take them way too much time. It can take them resources that they don't have to waste from us in

Speaker B: bringing in outside consultants. One, it makes sure we make the time right. Everyone's paying attention when they're in that meeting for four hours, learning from this person, where that's all they do. Do you think about the fit from a fitness perspective? Yeah, I have all the weights and things in my workout room at home and I can do it, but I don't. I'm going to go to the class where I've got a coach that walks me through it because I'm, I'm dedicated that hour. That's what I'm doing. We invested a lot of time and money last year in training the team and leveling up because they're smart people and we know we need to continue to learn and grow. So we took two hours every week for eight weeks where we brought in, like, an outside person to teach about paid ads, a person to talk about conflict resolution or difficult conversations with clients. Um, leadership things, uh, project management. Sometimes we forget all the things we do know until it comes back around and you're like, oh, yeah, I remember we did that. So it's making time. You just gotta do it. And I was, I was talking with a client where they had hired an outside developer to do their app and someone we knew, but the client was trying to manage it with the app developer. And I hindsight, I said, you know, we probably should have been in the middle because you're busy doing things and you'll say, oh, yeah, it looks good, but no one's really taking the time to go through that app. And then when they deployed it, it wasn't right. Well, that's because they're too busy doing and not taking time to focus on that, that project. And I think that I learned a lot from that. For sure, to make sure we stay in the middle and ask the right questions. Because if you don't have someone that's there advocating and dedicating that time and attention to whatever it is, tool training, you're only going to go as far as you can go. And that's not where we want to be. I've hired people the last few months that are smarter than me and know more things about HubSpot, um, and CRMs and a B testing and heat maps. I'm just blown away and that that's what moves us forward. If we only know what I know, then that's not enough to get us where we're going.

Speaker A: Exactly. And that's an awesome perspective to have because that's what really keeps you moving fast and growing fast is recognizing that you gotta learn from other people. Right? When you do that, you're gonna learn faster and you're not gonna be stuck in the same spot for months trying to figure out something that you could learn from somebody else. A lot of companies right now, they're making that mistake where when they think of adapting the AI and bringing in AI to their own companies, they've been saying, okay, we'll build this in house. We'll train an in house team of AI experts, experts to go and figure out AI and then implement m this in our business. And what I'm curious about is your perspective on that. When you're going and you're beginning to jump into AI, do you feel like there's really that need to go and try to focus everything in house or you should go reach out externally, learn from people and then go and focus on in house development for the things that are unique to you.

Speaker B: There's quite a bit of research you can do on your own, but there's a ton of information out there and combing through it is a lot. No one's going to do this alone. And there's so many tools that are changing fast. And you know, we work with a development, uh, company where they like to build stuff and they like to break stuff. So we're learning from them is how they built a content engine and then they're helping us build one. Like probably could have figured that out, but why? Right? You think about time and investment. Like I know if I had employees spend months or weeks on this, it would still be a lot more cost effective to license what they've built and learn from them than to spend all this time trying to figure it out. But we also spent the last year testing different tools and oh man. If we could find something that did this and then, then we found someone who did it. So we weren't going in it blind or just trusting an expert, but we knew enough of what we needed and saw how they were doing it and then it led to that conversation. But I think it's so big and so broad and so many different things that it can touch for a business. And you know, we're just talking from a marketing perspective and operations, but I think about, you know, manufacturers and the, even the business intelligence they can get. And now you think about how it can help you augment your supply chain and you can see disruptions and a tech trends thing I was at last week, again, they talked about how, you know, healthcare is going to continue to change through AI and personalization and you being able to, you know, input your own systems. The gentleman was wearing an aura ring and it can, it could predict when he was going to get sick before he even felt it. He's like, I feel fine. What are you talking about? And like three days later he was sick. Yeah, yeah. It's um, West Michigan tech trends. Keith Brophy, he does it every year. He has done it for decades and talks about here's 10 tech trends and it was all about AI this time. But yeah, it's transforming everything.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, me personally, my dad is a dentist and he went to a dental conference recently where they were demonstrating some of the new technologies that are out there in the dental space right now. And one of the things they went and they were demonstrating was they'd created an AI that basically from end to end could go and place an implant in a person's mouth. So that is normally like something that is highly involved for the dentist. Right. And when it came to something like this, I mean, it's not perfect yet. The dentist still had to be there watching and supervising that the entire time. And it took way longer than a dentist could have done it for. But it's really interesting to see how fast this is developing because the in performance our surgery like that is just insane.

Speaker B: Uh, it is insane. And also think about the applications like we talk about here in the U.S. right? But a doctor think about other countries where they don't have the professions that we have. And what a game changer some of this healthcare and other technology can bring to people that don't have access that we do here in the US Just as an example, you know, another thing our team we were talking about this morning is AI's impact on the environment. Like all the water uh, energy and things that these servers take. I toured a data center a few months ago, and they're building a whole new warehouse. Right. Hundreds of thousands of square feet with data cooling racks and data cooling data centers. And I mean, that takes a lot of resources. That's not, um, unheard of. Right. But thinking about that impact, too, so using it effectively and efficiently, like, you don't have to thank it. It's really not a toy. There's other, other implications from this emerging technology. And, you know, it is like the industrial revolution too, you know, when the assembly line and all those things impacted jobs safety, the environment. And it's like, here we are. It's impacting jobs safety to a point. But the, uh, you know, the environment and all these other things, it's just the next tech revolution. And people will adapt or they won't, but we'll have to adapt. That's just, that's just how it is.

Speaker A: And I think that's a great thing for us to leave off on. Before we end, I do want to ask you one last question and the same question that I ask every single guest that comes onto my podcast, because I want to move away from the business, I want to move away from the tech trends, and I want to get to you. Right. So my question is, what's the most overrated piece of advice you've encountered recently?

Speaker B: I know there's the line out there. If it doesn't challenge you, it doesn't change you. Um, I don't know that that's overrated. There was one piece of advice that I give to others where it talks about, you do make the most progress outside of your comfort zone. So if you're, you're comfortable, you're not growing. But I will say that that could be a little overrated, because sometimes just being comfortable and getting ingrained in what you'. There's a lot of comfort and ease in that. We've gone through a constant state of change the first six months of this year, so I would love to just be comfortable for a couple months or a couple weeks. Yeah, that's all I can come up with on the fly. I'm sure after we hang up, I'll think of something amazing and I'll have to email you.

Speaker A: Alrighty. Well, thank you, Rebecca. This was a great conversation.

Speaker B: It was. Thank you.

Speaker A: Yeah. I really appreciated you, like, telling us so much about Red 66. The way that you guys are navigating, how quickly the world is changing right now. That was great. It was a great conversation. And for people that are wondering more about Red 66 and want to get in contact with you, what would be the best place they could go?

Speaker B: Go to our website. It's red66marketing.com. And then we have those social handles on, um, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, all those places.

Speaker A: Perfect. Rebecca, thanks for coming on.

Speaker B: My pleasure. Have a great afternoon.

Speaker A: Yeah, you too. As we end today's episode of Making Martech, I'd like to thank all our listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to share this and subscribe to our show so you don't miss the next one. I'm your host, Hymnish Jindal, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.