365: Melea McRae—You Know Content Is King. Here’s How To Make It Work For You

• My two award-winning books: Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Business and On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights
• Our new book, Women Mean Business: Over 500 Insights from Extraordinary Leaders to Spark Your Success, co-authored by Edie Fraser, Robyn Freedman Spizman and Andi Simon, PhD
• Our website: Simon Associates Management Consultants

Read the transcript of our podcast here

Andi Simon: Hi, welcome to On the Brink with Andi Simon. I’m Andi Simon, your host and your guide. And as you know, my job is to get you off the brink. And I love to do that by bringing you people who are going to help you see, feel, and think in new ways. People often ask me, why do I say that?

We decide with the eyes and the heart, and then the head gets involved. And unless you realize that, then you really don’t understand how we make decisions. And sometimes we overanalyze the data and we think we know we’re making wise decisions. Melea is laughing and she’s smiling at me.

So I brought you a wonderful woman today who’s going to help you understand the new age of marketing. It’s a time of fast change, but the old issues about how do I tell my story and how do I create a brand and how do I get to the customers who need me, whether it’s through inbound marketing or online search, or is it the website or is it social media? And how do I know that the dollars I’m spending are being used wisely by this collaboration I have with my agency? That’s her story. Let me tell you who she is and why it’s important to listen to her.

Melea McRae is founder and CEO of Crux KC and co-founder and CEO of Crux-Accelerator. Now she’s going to tell you where KC is as well. She’s a marketing strategist, 25 years of B2B and B2C experience in leading client-facing marketing departments where she earned the reputation of an insightful brand strategist. She’s formerly the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at the Greater KC Chamber. I’m assuming that’s Kansas City. Yes, it’s Kansas City, one of my favorite places to work, and she’s led the organization’s marketing and business development offices.

In 2016, she made the entrepreneurial leap and launched her own marketing firm, Crux KC, a certified women-owned business providing in-house marketing for small to midsize clients, combining the leadership of a fractional CMO with a marketing department as a service model to provide simple, smart and affordable full funnel marketing solutions. She builds marketing, communications and business development strategies for clients and positions them for sustainable growth. She also, in 2019, co-founded its sister company, Crux Accelerator, with an emphasis on sales, coaching and leadership development paired with marketing to positively impact revenue growth.

I don’t think I have to tell you much more about why I’ve selected her to come on today, other than the times they are changing and it’s time to think about very important subject marketing and sales. And Melea, thank you for coming today. I appreciate you being here.

Melea McRae: Andi, thank you so much for having me. Lovely to be a part of this.

Andi Simon: Would you tell the audience about your own journey? I can read the facts, but you know, this is about the feelings and I have a hunch you can give it a personality all of its own. Who are you and how’d you get here?

Melea McRae: Great question. Great setup. So I made that entrepreneurial leap in 2016 with a belief that there had to be a better way to service small to mid-market companies. Since then, we have really evolved in terms of working with larger companies as well. I’m a firm believer that all the marketing roles apply, as long as you really understand the audience that you’re trying to reach, right? So we do consider ourselves to be industry agnostic here at Crux.

We work with all shapes and sizes, from startups to global companies. We are fractional. I would say a fractional chief marketing officer meets an in-house team to execute on that strategy and provide additional bench strength, if you will, for marketing departments that are pretty well staffed or if they have certain gaps in their abilities, knowledge gaps, we will come in and fill those holes. But in many cases, Andi, we are the marketing team outsourced, where these clients simply hand us the keys and we drive.

I was doing my executive project during my executive MBA at Rockhurst University here in Kansas City and I really wanted to research the trends that were happening in the advertising, the traditional advertising industry. When I left the Greater KC Chamber as our chief marketing officer, I did a brief stint with a local, what I call traditional ad agency. And I’ve always been on the client side. So I saw red flag after red flag on how I would do it differently if it were my own, how I would lead with transparency, about transparency and billing.

For example, transparency and communication. Wait, wait, how much would you say that was gonna cost? We actually like our clients, we cheer for our clients. Nothing brings me greater joy than when a client fills out their org chart and they write their client’s CMO is the Crux fractional CMO that’s working on their account. So we really have this mentality because I’ve been that client. Like I said, I think like the client, I don’t think like the agency.

I think what I’ve noticed is what happens with a lot of agencies, Andi, is great people, great creatives, right? And I know several of them that have built really amazing agencies and businesses, but they are creatives and they lead with creative. So part of  what we say at Crux is, there’s no fluff. Our tagline is “Everything you need, nothing you don’t.”

We jump in, we understand that client’s business. We understand their business goals. We build a marketing strategy to align with those goals, and then we hit the go button and we’re off and running. And so there isn’t that creative fluff with us. We just get to the point, that’s the name: Crux.

Andi Simon: A client can have a lot of hope. Hope is a lousy strategy. I’ve been there.

Melea McRae: Hope is a lousy strategy. I have worked with so many CEOs. I belong to CEO peer groups through my background with the Chamber. I’m pretty highly networked in Kansas City with a lot of various civic organizations and CEO peer groups and things like that, and I find myself doling out a lot of free advice and I’m happy to do so because I’m very pro business, I’m really pro small business. I feel like we have to stick together. Small businesses make up 99% of all businesses in the US. I think it represents about 44% of the total economy. So they’re the backbones of our communities.

And I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had phone calls from friends that are business owners and they’ve made maybe not a wise marketing investment. They found themselves without a lot of money and with very little traction towards their business goals. So I do a lot of free education with those individuals. I simply tell them, If it sounds too good to be true, first of all, it probably is.

Do you really feel like the people that you’re working with understand your business? There’s no such thing as a one hit wonder. We know that the key is consistency. Content is still king, as you and I know in terms of fueling your digital presence and storytelling. It’s all about how do you differentiate your message so that you’re standing out of that sea of sameness. And let’s face it, there’s so much competition in every industry. It’s really easy to start a business, but it’s really hard to grow it to that next level and to start to scale that business if you’re not making a wise marketing investment.

I actually launched Crux-Accelerate for that very reason. I was working with a lot of startups. I’m really embedded in the startup community here in Kansas City. And I would watch if they would be funded. They get that first round of angel investment funding and they were out of money by month six or seven because nobody was building the pipeline from a sales perspective. We were building the marketing machine behind the scenes. But if you’ve got nobody following up with those leads, and nobody that can really even tell that story of how their brand is differentiated, it’s really hard to close up sales. So that was really the genesis of the sister company to Crux called Crux-Accelerate.

Andi Simon: Well, you know, I’m laughing because many, many years ago I was an executive at a hospital and we did marketing. I had marketing under me among other things. And we did a big campaign for some new doctors only to discover, because we created a separate telephone number so we could measure the calls coming through, if there weren’t any appointments being made. So I went to the office manager and she said, Well, we don’t answer that phone because we don’t have any time for a new company. And I said, Oh, the 450 calls came through so he’s going to wonder what marketing has done. And actually you have to pick up the phone and answer it. Now, those were the days where the phones were still phones, and we could still measure what it was.

But, you know, without measures, without data, you can’t evaluate anything. And it is a big empty hole that you’re putting money into for what now. I’ll also be honest and transparent that we were HubSpot partners for many years; now we’re Inbound Marketing folks. We understand that Google has changed the way people search and buy things. So we’re content mavens, like you said. And while I love social media, I love my website, I love the content, and I love picking up new clients who find me, download my white papers, do my YouTube stuff, and come and say, I need you.

So marketing, yes. Is it the world that we’re in? Yes. But you also have skills and services that take a young company that needs to build its story and help you get there. Talk to us about a typical kind of client, either an early stage or a maturing one.

Melea McRae: Yeah, I would say, typically we’re working with entrepreneurs. So they’re at some sort of a growth stage, an inflection point within that company’s journey. And so, yes, sometimes it’s a newer company that they’re ready to push the gas in terms of a marketing investment to really start to fuel sales leads. Sometimes it’s more of a legacy brand that has maybe been stagnant for a while. And again, they’re ready to pour some gasoline on the fire and increase their marketing efforts as well.

So really any age and stage of the client is the right fit for us, as long as they’re open-minded to understanding what a smart marketing investment can do for them. So we bring that chief sales or chief marketing officer to the equation that’s going to build a strategy based on what does the competitive landscape look like? How is their website currently performing for them? How is digital performing? Are they getting any PR hits? PR  is that kind of secret sticky factor sauce for us and clients.

We do really well internally at just mining for what are those newsworthy stories that we can pitch on their behalf and that fuels social, that fuels the website. That’s with content. If those are little golden nuggets when we can nail those, even case studies. Sharing those success stories through email marketing, you know. So yeah, things like that just really work to fuel business growth for clients. And that’s our vision statement honestly: fueling business growth for clients and opportunities for our team. And we live that motto every day here at Crux.

Andi Simon: Thank you. Tell me a little bit more about has the intersection or the adversarial relationship between marketing and sales changed?

Melea McRae: Yeah. So it needs to change. I would say in many organizations, they’re still on two different paths. The sales team tends to go rogue, and the marketing team tends to abide by the brand guidelines and all the rules that apply and try to reel them in. What happens when marketing and sales can align however, is magic. If you can get them rowing in the same direction, singing the same song, they’re sharing information back and forth, the salesperson is saying, Hey, this is what we’re hearing out in the field, and it’s really this message point is really resonating with my audience.

Then the marketing can fuel that internally with social campaigns or email campaigns or do a blog, a thought leadership piece on why this particular company does this thing really well. And again, just hit those points with an explanation point, quite frankly, and put it out there in terms of content. So if they can work hand in hand, it really is magical in terms of what can result. And so that was really the genesis of Crux-Accelerate.

We come in with Chief Sales Officers that become sales coaches for internal sales teams. So they’ll coach the teams up through a six month curriculum where it’s a group training session followed by individual executive coaching with a chief sales officer. There’s a lot that goes into this, but we infuse a lot of marketing tactics, understanding what marketing is really doing behind the scenes to help you generate those leads. We’re explaining to them the difference between brand marketing and building that awareness with demand marketing and generating those leads and then show: are you appropriately following up with those leads.

There’s an old saying for marketers: we can lead the horse to water, but we can’t make the horse drink. We’re teaching the sales team how to make the horse drink. And we’re infusing things like personal brand and the art of networking. I do a presentation for Rockhurst University and some other organizations called the Art of Networking: just teaching them that networking equals connections and it’s building relationships and how you can help them so that you’re paying it forward and they’re going to return that favor and it’s the long play. So there’s a lot of that infused throughout this curriculum, but we’re pretty excited about really where Crux-Accelerator is headed right now.

Andi Simon: Well, you know, I had a client in Texas and he had great sales guys. Only problem was that the folks they sold to retired and the two who were replacing them were 35 year olds and they don’t pick up the telephone, so the outbound sales call folks had nobody to sales call because nobody picked up the phone. So when we did our research, the new 35 year olds said, Don’t they know that we don’t answer phones? We’re not going to buy over the phone, we search. Or we talk on our forums, or we go to our network, but our buying journey is a different one than the old guys who retired.

So my client says, So what will I do with my great salespeople? I said, They should be lead follow ups. You need to get a website that isn’t a brochure. But it’s full of reasons why and that turns into interest in qualified leads who your sales guys can now follow up with. It’s different, but the leads should be coming to you as opposed to you, because nobody is going to answer those telephones. That’s not the way it’s going to work anymore and until you come to terms with them, you don’t realize the integration between the web and the social and the sales.

Those four sales guys knew what they knew and the habits were great, but that’s not the way it was going to buy and it was flooring to him. Really? How many people are coming to my website? Yes, but they’re not staying. I can tell you how many are actually staying, where they’re staying, what they’re looking at. I can tell you a whole lot about your website and it’s not functional. It was very unsettling. Like welcome to the whole new world, welcome to the digital age.

We coach CEOs all the time on the days of cold calling are dead. You know, there are Sierras out there that are still holding their sales team accountable for KPIs that are, how many daily phone calls have you made? Well, you’re right. No one. Do you pick up the phone? I don’t pick up the phone anymore. I don’t even know why I have a phone on my desk. I never answer it. Quite frankly, nobody buys that way anymore. They are in charge of their purchase pattern, and they are influenced.

So by stories, I want you to talk more about stories, because the human being lives a story in their mind. It’s an illusion of their reality, welcome to the world. And they only relate to things that match that story. And if you’re out of sync with them, they don’t even see it. So tell me about your branding and your brand storytelling, because I think it’s an essential part of a marketing campaign that’s often overlooked.

Melea McRae: Oh, completely essential. In fact, when I launched Crux, we were really known as a content shop, and storytellers really followed by strategy. Over the years, over the last seven years, we’ve really established bench strength and all the other marketing tactics and expertise that we’ve needed, but we started out as storytellers, so huge advocate of storytelling working. And it goes back to content being king.

So let’s take thought leadership for example. People are going to follow you on your LinkedIn network or whatever channel, Instagram, whatever you prefer, based on the fact that they’re relating to the content that you’re sharing. So for Crux, for our voice, for example, I do a lot of blogging, a lot of thought leadership, and I always try to tie it back to some sort of an analogy or some sort of a story that’s happened to me in my past, and then I relate it to a topic or a trend, and I have garnered a really nice following as a result.

Well, we do this for all of our clients. I have CEOs that will say to me, You know, it’s not leadership that’s really important. Oh my gosh, it’s the most important thing. Because again, it’s establishing that CEO’s brand or whichever leader in the company, it doesn’t have to be the CEO, and it aligns their brand with the company’s brand. This is who people do business with: people. This is who I’m doing business with, and this is what makes them an expert on this particular topic. And then when you’re telling it in storytelling form, you know, 800 words, it’s a fun quick read, and you can pull quotes out of that and use it in your social media posts, you can maybe tie a PR story that relates back to the thought leadership piece and you can pitch that to the media.

Maybe it came out of a case study, a success story and something that went really well successful with your clients. Let’s capture that. Let’s grab their testimonials, let’s push that out through a case study that might also spawn the idea for a thought leadership piece on that particular win. What made that a win? So there’s so many ways that you can repurpose that content as well, but it truly is what differentiates a brand. It’s what makes you stand out. It is what those younger purchasers are looking for now. They want that content and they’re going to do their research. And how are they going to do their research? Online. They’re going to look at your website. They want to read those blog articles on your website. They want to look at what recent PR have you garnered. How do you describe your services on the site? And does that kind of align with the perception that they had? Is there consistency throughout?

And then they’re going to follow you on your social channels. Really oftentimes anymore, Andi, they care as much about, new potential buyers of your products and services, care as much about your culture and how you treat your employees, your social responsibility. How are you giving back to the communities that have helped you be successful, in terms of what it is that you’re offering in terms of a product or service. So social media is just another way to reflect your brand through your culture, through your philanthropic efforts, through how you care about DEI, how do you incorporate that into your brand?

We do a lot of work with our clients now around what we call employer branding, because recruitment, we’re all still searching for and finding the best talent. And it goes both ways. You’re trained to reach those potential clients, but you’re also trying to reach those potential candidates.  So this is how you can use thought leadership. This is how you can use your culture in terms of attracting both of those audiences.

Andi Simon: I’m curious, I was interviewing someone today for a podcast who’s an expert in LinkedIn. With the Twitter changes and Instagram’s growth and Facebook’s role, the common question I get is, Well, which ones do you do? Which ones do you look at? And I figured I might ask you, the marketing expert, which ones for which people to do what things, because they aren’t identical by any means.

Melea McRae: And they should not be identical. It depends on the audience. The audiences that you’re trying to attract, where are they? So if it’s a younger demographic, maybe it’s TikTok, it’s definitely Instagram. Twitter has kind of lost its appeal for a lot of B2B businesses, but I look at Twitter as headlines. So if you’re just scanning headlines, that’s a good way to use Twitter. Facebook is still really powerful, many demographics in terms of various audiences, and it always performs better than I think it’s going to. That’s really the power of using one’s own network as well. Like, I’m in a lot of Facebook groups with women who mean business in Kansas City, the Casey Chambers and civic organizations that I’m in. So that’s a great way to get certain messages out where my brand is tied back to the company brand.

But my number one network for Crux is LinkedIn. We do a lot of business to business marketing. And so that’s what I would recommend for anyone that’s doing a lot of B2B marketing, but you have to really look at the other channels and how they can benefit you in terms of reaching the audiences that you’re trying to reach.

Andi Simon: And for LinkedIn, it has become a marketplace that I’m finding, excuse me, not particularly pleasant. If I have one more person who wants 15 minutes of my time to sell me one more thing that I’m not interested in. I’m trying to remain true to my brand and my story. That’s what my client this morning, who was doing a podcast with us, said, If you turn it into a marketplace, go for it. But it is not a good marketplace. You’re better off investing in content on your website and attracting people who are searching for you, as opposed to trying to push it out like a cold call. And that’s what it feels like. And they don’t know if I’d be interested or not, but I’m sure you would be. And here’s 15 minutes of my time. Hit, click this link. No, no, no. And I say, LinkedIn, what have you become?

Melea McRae: Yeah. That is unfortunate. I would agree with you. I’d probably get hit up by 15 of those a day, but the power is to the user. So I can go and just x on all of those and not accept them. It’s making it harder and harder to lead through. And for an old school networker like myself, it kind of encourages me or re-encourages me to go to more of those networking events, having more of the face-to-face content.

I was probably at six different networking events just last week, Andi, and got a stack of business cards. People still use business cards and still hand them out. I try to make networking events a game, and I try to give myself permission to leave after I get three business cards. That’s something I teach my students as well. And then you follow up with that personal email. You kind of jot something down on the back of them, a memory point. Maybe they’re traveling to Costa Rica next week or whatever it is, and you send them that little follow up or don’t ever underestimate. I almost find that a bit joyful, you know, it’s a real person with a business, a business card. It’s like real, it’s tangible.

Andi Simon: Which reminds me to redo my business cards. I’m almost out.

Melea McRae: Can help you with that, Andi!

Andi Simon: I will get back in touch with you. I could use a fresh look. It’s been three years since we were out enough to worry about them. And, now I gave them out at an event I was at all weekend and I realized they’ve getting awfully old-looking, time for a fresh look. But in any event, this is such fun as you look to the future. Somebody ranked our podcast among the top 10 futurist podcasts. So I’m a futurist now and I am a futurist. Well, the question is, what do you see coming next?

Melea McRae: You know, I think that we’ve had a lot of people try to knock off this model of being that marketing department as a service, as you will. I think that the traditional ad agency model is dying. I think that they’re having to rethink, again, how you partner with the client, how you really dive in deep and learn their business and use marketing to propel that growth for the client, customize those marketing strategies and those engagements. There is no such thing as a one size fits all. So I definitely see that changing.

I think what protects Crux a little bit in that regard is, it’s hard to bring a fractional chief marketing officer to the equation if you’ve never been a chief marketing officer. And I have, and I’ve homegrown this talent and a lot of agency owners have been creative. And so I think it’s hard for them to make that switch. You can’t just put on a CMO hat and say, I’m a CMO today.

So I think that we are going to see more of that probably. Fractional CMOs is a very highly searched word on the internet. So that’s a buzzword that’s really taken off. I will be interesting to see what happens with AI, ChatGPT, and you know, how people are utilizing that for writing versus kind of more of the old school. Really understand your brand voice and write to your brand voice. I think, you know, AI can get people maybe 60% to 70% of the way there, but you still need that writer and editor that’s going to polish it and put it in that brand voice. But I know that’s definitely on the horizon.

Podcasts are huge, what we’re doing today. We’re doing a lot of podcasts for our clients. We’re doing them ourselves internally at Crux. And it’s another way in live video, audio form, to tell those client success stories and let your client or your prospect or your key stakeholder get their message out, just like you’re doing for me today. So that is definitely a hot trend that we’re seeing with clients.

And video, video, video, video. Use it. You have to use it on social, you have to use it on your website. Google loves video so it’s just utilizing, kind of pulling all of those marketing levers in the way that it’s really going to fuel growth and attract those audiences for the clients that we serve or for your own company. If you’re a CEO listening to this, how are you making sure that you’re working with a partner that’s pulling all those levers in the right way for you? And that’s definitely a trend, because clients are getting more sophisticated as well about marketing techniques, as they should, which is great.

Andi Simon: One last question before we wrap up. The buyer’s journey is taking, in some cases, longer and longer. They are spending more time evaluating and evaluating and are most uncomfortable from what I’ve seen in making a quicker judgment. That buyer’s journey that we used to look at in terms of filling the funnel and how long it took to get down to an actual purchase. The discomfort people have come from. Many of them are buyers who are younger and the management system isn’t clear.

The risks are high, they’re not quite sure. It’s not IBM. You used to buy IBM because it was IBM, and there is no similarity in many things that you’re purchasing. I have one client who keeps buying software that doesn’t work particularly well and I laugh after a while because he buys on a less expensive side and the more innovative side, but not necessarily the more functional side. But he takes a long time to decide and then is sure. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz’s book, about the paradox of choice. So many choices we don’t make, and then when we make them, we return them or we’re unhappy with them or we should have bought something else. And I do think it’s part of the culture of today, which makes buying and managing and measuring challenging. Is this similar to what you’re finding?

Melea McRae: It’s interesting, we have a really good close rate with our prospective clients. It runs around 70%. Now, I will say in Q1 of this year, we saw people signing contracts less. Q2 though, it’s been bubbling up again. I think back to your IBM analogy, it really speaks to the brand reputation that you have developed. And so, for us, PR, and awards and that recognition has gone a really long way in terms of elevating the Crux brand in and around Kansas City. And we have clients all over the country. But, when they’re searching for us, because everybody’s out there researching, and it can delay a decision or it could speed up a decision.

So they’re researching Crux and they’re saying, Oh, Inc. Magazine, best workplaces, that’s cool. Um, champions of business with the Kansas City Business Journal, based on things like how you treat your employees. I always encourage our clients to take a look at those awards in their area, and it’s kind of like a great way to get some PR, through the award recognition as well. That really elevates that brand and builds that brand trust with your potential buyer. So if you’re really placing an awareness on that in terms of your marketing solution, I do think that can go a long way to speeding up that buyer’s decision. They trust you, they’re going to buy from you.

Andi Simon: Well, you know, in some ways it credentials you as being a third party that says you’re great, and even if the product isn’t great, you have a great place to work. So that must mean the product is good. I mean, there’s sort of all kinds of interesting links to it. This is such fun. My last question for you, usually I say that people remember the end better than the beginning. So are there one or two or three things you’d like our listeners to remember so they can find Crux as their solution? What would it be?

Melea McRae: I would say, remember the power of storytelling in terms of elevating and differentiating your brand in your marketplace. I would say content is king, so make sure that you are utilizing fresh content on your website, understanding those keywords that people are using to search you and you’re incorporating that into your digital presence. You’re incorporating that into your blog post. You’re understanding the importance of thought leadership.

And I would say when you do make that marketing investment, make sure that the organization, the agency or marketing firm, or we call ourselves a UN agency that you’re partnering with, really takes that time to dive in and understand your business. They’re not going to be able to build that customized marketing strategy for you if they don’t.

Andi Simon: This has been a lovely conversation about something near and dear to my heart, but I don’t get to talk about it very often because nobody talks about marketing very often, I must tell you. But here’s a wonderful woman in a wonderful agency. Might be in Kansas City, but it takes care of the world and it would help you see, feel, and think about yourself and your business in new ways. And so give them a call. Where can they reach you?

Melea McRae: They can find me at cruxkc.com or findyourcrux.com.

Andi Simon: Terrific. Terrific. And I bet we can find you on the internet, on social, on the web. It’s going to be fun to see what happens. You’re gonna push this out and I want to know what the data tells you about a podcast and what it can do for you. I’ve had too many podcasts. We have a lot of data. It’s been fun. Let me say goodbye. Thank you for all of you who come.

Remember, pre-order my new book. It comes out September 26th and the more pre-orders Amazon loves. So it’s called Women Mean Business. And it’s on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And it is going to be a great book. It looks gorgeous. There are 102 women in there who give you their wisdom. And some of those wisdoms are, we say, as we look at the book, turn a page and change your life. So you ask yourself, what could Lily Ledbetter tell you? Or what could Christie Hefner tell you? Or what could Carol Toll who runs UPS share with you? What can successful women help you do in ways that you might not without hearing them? And it’s a beautiful book. So I thank all my folks who are in it, but I’m really happy to share it and a little pre-order would make me happy. So we’ll see whether this podcast can generate some. In any event, goodbye. Have a great day and take care for all of you who have come. Thanks again. See you soon. Bye-Bye now.