We were lucky to catch up with Julie Neumark & Holly Bowyer Marketing Agency recently and have shared our conversation below.

Julie Neumark & Holly Bowyer, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We love asking folks what they would do differently if they were starting today – how they would speed up the process, etc. We’d love to hear how you would set everything up if you were to start from step 1 today

Julie: At M3, Holly and I have a saying that we developed early on—”lessons learned.” We actually turned it into a hashtag for ourselves! Basically, it refers to the gift of clarity we receive from choices we might make differently, given the chance. One of those lessons learned has to do with clearly defining our target audience.

When we started the agency, we did “everything for everyone,” and what we learned was that A) we were not experts at everything and B) we actually felt more fulfilled serving certain audiences. So, we niched our service offerings as well as the audience we serve. It’s funny, because it’s actually counter-intuitive to what we originally feared about niching. We thought it would limit our pool of opportunities and instead, it has actually expanded it.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Holly: Julie and I have very different backgrounds which makes us great partners and our skill sets complement each other nicely. My background is corporate America. Although I went to college thinking I was going to be a teacher, I took a marketing class with a friend and had some fun and then ended up graduating with a marketing degree and went on to a career in marketing, working mostly in media & technology companies. My first job was working for the publisher of Architectural Digest and Bon Appetit as a Marketing Assistant. My job was to conduct competitive analysis and provide insights and materials that would help the sales team position our products against the competition. I loved that job, the products and enjoyed working with the sales team. That experience led to other opportunities in the media space. When the magazines were sold off to Conde Nast, I left and went to work at JD Powers on their Media Research study and then headed off to the LA Times/Tribune for 10 years where I ran the Advertising Marketing team and led the magazine division. But there came a time in the newspaper world, that I realized that in order to stay relevant in the media space, I needed digital experience. I was fortunate enough to land a job at Yahoo! where I was responsible for working with large brands and agencies to showcase the use of a variety of digital products including search, mobile and video for advertising purposes.

Julie: After graduating from college with a marketing degree, I followed my dream as a singer/songwriter and traveled the world with my band for 10 years. As I look back on that time, that was my first marketing job because I was responsible for marketing the band and I used all sorts of tactics to increase the awareness of the band and our songs. As my music career started to wind down, I took all my marketing prowess and began working as a marketer in a few different start-up technology companies. I realized that my creative skills as a writer were very useful when it came to developing marketing content, social media posts and other materials.

Holly: Julie and I met at YP.com – yep, the REAL Yellow Pages. We worked there for 1.5 years together in the Portfolio Marketing team. Our group was responsible for marketing a broad array of digital products to small-mid sized businesses (SMBs). We executed a very robust marketing strategy to educate SMBs on a variety of digital products they could use to advertise and promote their business. We created a variety of content and email campaigns, executed many local events across the US, and established a library of sales materials. It was a fun job, and our team had a great camaraderie together. Unfortunately, the company was acquired, and Julie and I found ourselves out of a job. So, we teamed up and started Media & Marketing Minds – better known as M3.

When we started, we were very focused on working with small-mid sized businesses. We were applying our experience and learnings from YP.com and helping SMBs increase awareness by using a variety of digital products. Their primary goal was to find new customers and we would work with them to put the right tools in place to achieve that goal. But over time, we had the opportunity to work with some larger companies and realized that we enjoyed the bigger, longer-term projects so started to focus on working with larger media & technology companies. We love working with companies to launch new products, educate current and potential clients of their offering, and/or attract a new audience segment to their products.

We have a motto at the agency that guides how we approach our business and work with our clients: Tell it. Plan it. Sell it. Here’s a rundown of what that motto means:
Tell it: We help businesses TELL their story. We have an approach that guides us down a path to create marketing messaging that a company can use to market their product. We create the top 3-5 Reasons-to-Believe (RTBs) in the product and then develop messaging that will be applied to a variety of marketing materials to support those RTBs.

Plan it: We create a marketing PLAN to take their story to market. This is a cohesive plan that outlines a number of tactics that can be used to market the product. This generally includes an overview of the customer journey and tactics to be used along that journey including the creation of content, email campaigns, events, and industry partnerships.

Sell it: We help execute that plan and SELL their product. The creation of content is probably one of our primary areas in this part of the process. Content can include writing blogs and creating lead-generation materials, case studies, and sales enablement collateral as well as producing videos and helping to manage email campaigns.

We work with clients in each of those stages, but our favorite projects are those that we can participate in all three stages and help develop the messaging, create the plan to take that message to market and then execute that plan.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Julie: This is a tough one, mainly because we are still unlearning it! The lesson centers around our value and our worth and it tends to manifest itself within our pricing. I distinctly remember the moment for me when I realized we were underpricing our services. Another female colleague shared her consulting rate with us and I was aghast! I couldn’t believe what she was charging, and that people were paying it. She is tremendously smart and experienced and truly delivers value…but, so do we. It hit me at that moment that the only difference was that she knew and trusted her value and worth.

For me, I know that some of my own self-doubt was deeply rooted in the patriarchal society I was exposed to growing up—a belief system that I adopted as my own eventually. I don’t say that with resentment or disdain, it’s just how it was. But I knew it was up to me (and us) to be a part of the shift and it starts by shifting within ourselves.

Today, I would say that Holly and I are much better about knowing our value and using it as a compass to guide our pricing and even the types of projects that we choose to work on. However, I also know that it is a lifelong lesson that requires your attention on a daily basis.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

Holly: We had the opportunity to work with a client in the tech space to develop and execute a strategic sales event for them. Julie and I both had lots of event experience and were very open to talking to the client about executing the event they wanted to do. We thought we were coming into the project to help pick up the project after the events manager had abruptly left the position. However, we quickly realized that absolutely nothing had been done and there was only a glimmer of an idea about an event that was going to be held in 3 months with their top clients! There was no strategy created and no consensus among the executive team about the focus of the event. So, we were starting from scratch. But we signed on to help them and committed to meeting some unbelievable goals.

We kicked into gear with our Tell It. Plan It. Sell It approach and pulled together a positioning statement and messaging for the event, created a plan on how to drive attendance and attract sponsors as well as addressed all the logistics of the event from creating a speaker list, to determining the internal presentations and product demos. We also figured out all the event’s meals and fun activities, which included morning yoga and surfing with the CEO and a party on the beach with flip flops and signature cocktails. In the end, we had a great client summit with 150 of their top customers who raved about the event and gave 5-star ratings from the final feedback forms. And we accomplished the two top goals which were to educate their clients about the extensive product capabilities and build stronger relationships and lines of communication.

The name of the event was ENGAGE and at the end of the event, after everything was finished and we were sipping on a glass of wine, Julie gave us each a sweatshirt, with a logo she designed, that said “Dis-ENGAGE”. We wore those sweatshirts proudly because we felt like we had accomplished the unexpected!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mediamarketingminds.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mediamarketingminds/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mediamarketingminds
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollybowyer/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/julieneumark/
• Other: Note: For LinkedIn, we are much better at posting/using our personal pages vs our M3 page.

Image Credits
Emma Bertrand, [email protected] Robin Foley, [email protected]