Lisa Genovese is the President of BottomLine, a hybrid between a research firm and a marketing agency that helps brands secure market share through in-depth research. With her extensive background in both marketing and agriculture, she brings a unique perspective to the company, specializing in uncovering key insights that drive critical business decisions and strategies. Throughout her career, Lisa has led BottomLine to assist numerous prestigious clients like Pure Encapsulations and Verge Agriculture, guiding them through market expansions, rebranding, and digital campaign optimizations. Her approach combines data-driven insights with innovative marketing solutions, resulting in measurable growth and success for her diverse clientele.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [03:27] Lisa Genovese shares how BottomLine uses data and research before implementation for better strategies
- [04:28] How BottomLine evolved from a startup to charging for in-depth research insights
- [07:08] The five impact pillars to differentiate your brand in the marketplace
- [09:43] How BottomLine’s marketing research helps clients set realistic and informed goals
- [17:52] The unique approach to mystery shopping in b2b and b2c markets for competitive analysis
- [21:07] The Importance of internal team structure and leadership to an agency’s success
- [30:06] The predictive index and its role in BottomLine’s hiring process
- [37:10] BottomLine’s customer success stories
In this episode…
Have you ever wondered why some marketing strategies fall flat while others resonate and convert? What if the secret to marketing success is simply a thorough understanding of the people you are trying to reach?
Innovator and marketer Lisa Genovese discusses how in-depth research and innovative marketing tactics can transform the trajectory of a brand. She discusses the evolution of her company, highlighting key hires, the implementation of psychometric tools, and the refinement of services offered. She shares intimate insights into her impactful strategy work, including a case where mystery shopping revealed a prickly receptionist issue hampering client conversion rates. Lisa demonstrates the power of marrying research with practical marketing applications.
In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz hosts Lisa Genovese, President of BottomLine, to discuss leveraging research for effective marketing. Lisa explains how she has harnessed the power of research to guide clients such as Pure Encapsulations and Verge Agriculture to amplify their market presence. She shares transformative stories from the field, revealing how an in-depth understanding of target audiences and the competitive landscape can lead to successful outcomes.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
Related episode(s):
- “[Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
- “[Top Agency Series] Expanding Your Brand Impact Through Social With Duncan Alney of Firebelly Marketing” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
Quotable Moments:
- “I firmly believe that the best strategies are rooted in research.”
- “Until you’ve done your homework and you’ve done that deep dive into research, you’re kind of just chucking spaghetti at the wall and hoping that it sticks.”
- “Mystery shopping is an interesting thing internally where everybody gave their hypothesis on what they thought was going to be the outcome of this study.”
- “The problem with brand loyalty is that it doesn’t actually correlate to sales and revenue on a chart; brand attachment, on the other hand, does.”
Action Steps:
- Conduct thorough market research before implementing marketing strategies: Understanding the market and customers through research can significantly improve the relevance and effectiveness of marketing efforts.
- Embrace predictive analytics to improve hiring decisions: Leveraging data-driven tools like the predictive index can ensure the right fit for job roles and enhance team productivity.
- Engage in competitive analysis through mystery shopping: Mystery shopping in both b2b and b2c contexts allows for a deeper understanding of competitors and can reveal areas for improvement in customer experience.
- Integrate brand attachment principles into marketing practices: Cultivating brand attachment through shared experiences and understanding customer needs leads to stronger relationships and can boost revenue.
- Re-evaluate company messaging for different market segments: Adapting messaging to resonate with targeted audience segments, such as switching from medical jargon to consumer-friendly language, can improve outreach and sales.
Sponsor for this episode
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Insider Stories from Top Leaders & Entrepreneurs…
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:15
You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr Jeremy Weisz.
Jeremy Weisz 0:20
Dr Jeremy Weisz, here, I’m founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I have Lisa Genovese of wearebottomline.com. And Lisa, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out. Since this is part of the top agency series, there’s a couple of interesting ones. Adi Klevit. Adi Klevit has an interesting niche. She helps businesses as an easy button to produce and create SOPs. So if they want to smooth out their staff onboarding, their client onboarding, or just any operational pieces, they call her, and she helps dig into those things. So that was a really interesting episode, because we talked about our geeked-out our favorite productivity tools and softwares.
Another good one was Duncan Alney. Duncan Alney specializes in food and beverage companies, and they do social media-related activities for food and beverage companies and more mission-based. And so he’s been doing this for probably over a decade now. So he kind of shared his learnings in that realm as well, and that and many more on [email protected] this episode is actually brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We actually do that by helping you run your podcast, or an easy button for a company to launch or run a podcast. We do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. So Lisa we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host and the company so they can develop amazing relationships and create amazing content and run their business.
For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, whether it’s introducing my guests to each other or I’ve had people, guess, Lisa, I’ve gone to two people’s weddings. I’ve gone on family vacations with people and just formed these amazing relationships through the podcast. So I’m always looking at ways to give to my network, and I found no better way, over the past decade, to profile the people and companies I most admire and share the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, go to rise25.com or email us support@rise25 to learn more.
I’m excited to introduce Lisa Genovese. She’s president of BottomLine, they can be found at wearebottomline.com. And BottomLine, I get think you describe yourself Lisa as one part research firm and one part marketing agency. They’ve helped clients such as Pure Encapsulations, Caldwell Banker, Commercial, Home Depot and many, many more. And BottomLine wins market share for brands through key insights that come from actually in depth research. And we’re going to talk about research and the process and how you think about that, but this could mean changes to business models, pricing and even market positioning. So Lisa, thanks for joining me.
Lisa Genovese 0:21
Oh, thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to this.
Jeremy Weisz 3:19
So just tell people a little bit more about BottomLine and what you do.
Lisa Genovese 3:27
Yeah, happy to. So kind of, as you said, we’re like this hybrid model between the two worlds of research and implementation. Most people put us in that marketing agency bucket, but we firmly believe that till you’ve done your homework and you’ve done that deep dive into research, you’re kind of just like chucking spaghetti at the wall and hoping that it sticks. So we help our clients utilize those research insights to either develop go-to-market strategies in new geographies, or sometimes it’s more about taking market share back in their current markets. And then once plans are in place, we do have an implementation team that handles anything from visual brand identities, web design, development and creative but really it’s, it’s all about making sure that there is some data and some research to support why we’re doing something instead of just like picking a cool idea out of the sky and hoping that it works. I firmly believe that the best strategies are rooted in research.
Jeremy Weisz 4:28
I want to talk about the evolution a little bit and when BottomLine first started, what were the service offerings you started with? Because I know companies evolve over time.
Lisa Genovese 4:39
Yeah, absolutely, that’s such a great question. When I first started out, like any startup, it was very just like widespread anything marketing, so we would help with, well, it was mostly me doing a lot of strategy work, work, working with clients to develop new messaging. Sometimes. It was new creative, you know, a new website, new pieces of marketing collateral. And you know how that really evolved was that the agency I worked for before starting bottom line, they didn’t do research, and they only focus on one market vertical as well. They were fine selling the same strategy to competing. In this case, it was it firms, and I just wasn’t.
And I really, I firmly believe that there had to be a better way, and that’s why I left and started BottomLine. But as we kind of got into projects, I started to realize that kind of my nature, I always was going back to do my homework before I would tell the client why they should do something or to make a suggestion within their business. And so it was kind of just my innate way of doing things. And one day, fast forward, gosh, probably five to seven years after starting the business, I realized we’re doing the same process for every single client. Why are we not charging for this work, and why is this not like a formalized process that all of our clients go through? I laugh about it now, but it feels kind of silly. It wasn’t like that right from the beginning.
And so we set out for a whole year to do a study on answering the question, what really separates small businesses from becoming those big legacy brands? What separates the wheat from the chaff? And we did a really interesting thing internally where everybody gave their hypothesis on what they thought was going to be the outcome of this study. And I am very happy to say I was wrong just as much as my team was wrong. So we all guessed that it was going to be access to opportunity or capital fill-in-the-blank, and it wasn’t any of those things. It really came down to what we now call our impact principles, or our impact pillars. And those things don’t cost money at all. It’s more about changing your mindset, changing your positioning, around those five things. And so, yeah, that’s kind of in a nutshell.
Jeremy Weisz 7:08
Talk about the impact pillars.
Lisa Genovese 7:10
Yeah, no, I’d be happy to and so with those impact pillars. So the first bit of the study was qualitative research, just to understand what were businesses challenged with? Why were they finding that they weren’t getting to the next level? And then we had to prove that “why?” And it came down to things like remarkability. So what made them drastically different than their competitors? And it couldn’t just be price-based. It had to actually be something drastically different that they did. Greater purpose was the next one. So when I talk about greater purpose, people often think I’m talking about giving back to charity, or social impact, or B Corp that’s living your purpose.
What your purpose is really what gets you out of bed to do what you do every day. Why do you do it? What’s your “why?” So helping them define that and really work that into their messaging and into their culture. Value. So I teach a class on this now, which is your customer decides your value, not you, but it is so true. So what do your customers find of value in your business, in your services or your products? Immersive experience is another one. So immersive experience is a bit of a tricky one as it relates to b2b, but it can be applied to both b2c and b2b, where we’re looking at what habits or rituals does your ideal customer have in their day-to-day life, and how do you either create a new habit or break an old one, and you pair your brand alongside that trigger. And then the other really interesting one is brand attachment. So most marketers will track brand loyalty.
The problem with brand loyalty is that it doesn’t actually correlate to sales and revenue on a if you look at it on a graph, brand attachment, on the other hand, does it’s based on the same psychological principles that you’d find in an interpersonal human-to-human relationship, except for it’s human to brand and how you create it is three things, affection, connection and passion, and you do that through helping your clients build well with their clients, with their customer base, shared and common experiences, a feeling or a sense of belonging. Really, you have to create that feeling that that brand gets me, they understand me. So it’s those five things, and I know I ran through it super-fast, but those are the five things that really do separate the wheat from the chap, and if you can work those into your positioning, I can promise you that your brand will be better off because of it.
Jeremy Weisz 9:43
And then, by the way, if someone’s listening to the audio, there’s a video version, and you’ll see us kind of poking through, poking around wearebottomline.com and we’re looking here at the impact assessment page. So this is kind of it. Looks like, kind of the roadmap of where they start when they finish, and you’re walking them through some of these things. What are some of the key pieces in this journey?
Lisa Genovese 10:10
Yeah, so this is like a typical roadmap of what a typical one looks like. I will say we do a lot of custom engagements now that have other additional pieces in them. But the key things here are the research. So when you look at the kickoff, the impact pillars we just talked about, and then you’ll see a bubble there for market research. And so that’s that deep dive into just empirical analysis to start with. But then we start to get into more qualitative research, where we would do customer interviews, sometimes that would include focus groups. Mystery Shopping is another really big one that we do on the competitive analysis side. And when I say mystery shopping, I’m not just talking about b2c mystery shopping. We do an equal amount of b2b mystery shopping as well.
You fast forward through your typicals of SWOT analysis, audit results, things like, web content, social audits, all kind of piecing the picture together to look at. Okay, well, what are we actually looking at here? Is there something that’s missing? And it almost always, once you’ve gone through all of these steps, it like screams off the page, what the issue is, whether it be a positioning problem, whether it be a pricing problem, so on and so forth. And so we deliver that in the first big delivery in this process is a positioning delivery, and it’s showing the client. Here is the summary, because there’d be 1000s of pages long if we didn’t summarize it. Of all the research, here’s what we found. Here is who you have told us your ideal customer avatars are, and then we will also make recommendations on changes to that. Lastly, we will also show here’s New positioning for your brand.
If that’s what makes sense. Sometimes it’s not a reposition, but I’d say that more often than not, is and then off of your positioning delivery, we run clients for business goals budgeting exercise, and we really take a look at, well, where are they spending their marketing dollars, right down to printing business cards. And when we talk about budgets, it’s not about what money is paid to BottomLine, or to their agency for implementation. It really is all-encompassing of everything in their marketing department, what? And then we’ll talk about goals. So now that we know all of this from the research, what could the goal be? And I find that that is an important distinction. A lot of people do business or, sorry, the goals at the beginning of an engagement. The problem with that is, is you haven’t even uncovered where the challenges are and what could be possible. And we need to know that before we set a goal. So once we’ve got goals and budgets, then we write the plan.
And so with plans that can be anything from like I’ve mentioned, a go to market strategy, a new geography. Sometimes it is more of a traditional marketing plan. And then we have variations of this engagement where we’ve been hired by, say, a large, big box brand that wants to launch a new sub-brand in a new market. So maybe it’s a market validation study. So we’ve done quite a bit of that work, too. But with the plans, it’s always you get a summary of what are the most important things that you need to know. So kind of the executive team has a digestible chunk, and then we accompany it with what we call this marketing details, which is usually a 100-plus page document of how to execute on everything that’s in your summary documentation.
Jeremy Weisz 13:43
And then after that, they can execute on it, or your team will help them?
Lisa Genovese 13:48
Absolutely so we’ve got clients that have full in house marketing departments that just come to us for the impact assessment process. And then we have others where it is a mix of their team and our team executing, and then we’ve got a third option, which is clients that don’t have any form of an internal marketing department, and they want us to do everything.
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