Ali Schwanke with Simple Strat

Intro: [00:00:05] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Saint Louis, Missouri. It’s time for Saint Louis Business Radio. Now here’s your host.

Phillip Hearn: [00:00:17] Hello, everybody, and welcome to Docs discussions. My name is Dr. Phillip Hearn, and I am so excited for my guests today. Usually, I get to talk to very smart people in general, hopefully smarter than myself. But this definitely is without exception. And I’ve been looking forward to this meeting here for the last few weeks myself. This is an interview with Ali Schwanke from Simple Strat. Ali, how are you today?

Ali Schwanke: [00:00:46] I’m doing great. Excited to be here.

Phillip Hearn: [00:00:48] Good. Good. Well, we’re happy to have you. I got a chance to dig more into your information, so I’m extremely excited for the opportunity to talk to you and kind of pick your brain before we get into what simple shred does everything that you have going? Because it seems like a ton from what I’ve been able to research. Give the viewers and the listeners a bit more about your background. Tell us a little bit more about Ali.

Ali Schwanke: [00:01:12] Sure. Well, I’m the oldest of four, which tells you a lot about the type a type of person that I think I am. And my whole life has been spent solving problems. And I think that marketing that’s what I do in my my day job is marketing. But really it’s it’s helping people solve problems. So I went to college thinking I was going to be working in medicine and really just kind of fell out of love with the idea of school. And little did I know that being a marketer means you’re in school every single freaking day for the rest of your life because everything changes about every 5 minutes. But yeah, I own a company now and kind of work my way up from an employee to eventually then obviously owning my own firm. And now we help people with growing their business through marketing, helping individual people become more thought leadership driven and create a presence online and use that to drive leads. And then ultimately, I love to have fun with video and audio like this. So I experiment with my own YouTube channel. We’ve got a channel where we teach people HubSpot, and then I’ve got, you know, Tik Tok and LinkedIn and all sorts of fun stuff where I could just create content and kind of see how people engage.

Phillip Hearn: [00:02:16] So you cover the full marketing spectrum basically from what this sounds like. So this is awesome. Yeah. So with simple Stretch, how long has it been around? Share a little bit about your mission, your vision, and your purpose of what you and your team do.

Ali Schwanke: [00:02:31] Yeah, simple. Start with started in 2016, I would say officially. And prior to that I was doing a little bit more of like CMO consulting. So going into businesses, helping them figure out their strategy, help them determine resources, you know, how are we going to execute, what’s the system, who are the people, what are the roles, what’s the tactics, and then ultimately helping to hand that off to them and move on. And in doing that, I discovered that sometimes actually a lot of times doing the execution is the hardest part. And it gets hard because the shiny kind of, Wow, this is new wears off, and then you’re in the throes of it just like you are in the middle of a marathon or the middle of a house building. There’s that kind of just dip where the the results aren’t there yet and you just have to keep pushing. So we launched our I guess I launched a company in 2016 to somewhat help the clients that were needing that execution and was hoping that I remember actually writing the name Simple straight down and writing what I would call the manifesto that was on my kitchen table, and I just kind of brain dumped all my thoughts into a piece of paper and it was Marketing is changing marketing. Isn’t this push sort of relationship? It is a it’s conversation. It’s a give and take. And helping is the new selling. And that really was the presence for us. Launching this company brought in a minority business partner about a year into it. And ever since then our philosophy has been selling is really just helping people identify their problems correctly, leading into the solutions that, you know, makes it easy for them to make a decision and then have a good experience and make sure they get that problem solved. And that’s really what we do every day.

Phillip Hearn: [00:04:06] I love it. I love it. I like something that you mentioned and I want to make sure I’m saying the phrase correctly. Would you say helping not selling? Is that was that the kind of part of the manifesto, if I heard that right?

Ali Schwanke: [00:04:18] Yeah. I mean, the way that I tell it to to clients now is helping is the new selling. Like people just do not want to be sold to. Everybody is allergic to ads online. Don’t show me ads, whatever. But somehow we’re still getting ads shown to us. They just don’t look like ads anymore. Because again, we we know when we’re being sold to. And so we want to be helped. We want to be entertained. We want to be educated. That’s really where we’re at today.

Phillip Hearn: [00:04:41] Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, I love that philosophy. And kind of digging into what you talked about within your site and everything else, That’s part of the reason I was so excited about the interview, because it’s just a fresher way of thinking about marketing. So let me ask this. People hear the word marketing. And truthfully, if you’re. Business owner that, let’s say, doesn’t focus on marketing. That sounds like an overwhelming word or concept. So how do you and your team approach it to with all the ever changing landscape that takes place, how do you and your team help to almost smooth that process out?

Ali Schwanke: [00:05:19] Yeah, it’s I like to think about things logically. And so marketing to me has never been about finding the best idea to pitch and get overwhelming amounts of insight because really it comes down to what problem are you solving, Who are you solving it for? Where do those people go to look for solutions for that problem? And then what is that journey to conversion look like? So let me give you an example. When people are coming up with a concept for, let’s say, a startup or a technology, they often interview a lot of people about how they’re currently solving that problem. And they run into a couple of challenges, like people don’t even know they have this problem. It’s kind of like yesterday, my son and I watched The Little Mermaid for the first time, like it’s my favorite childhood movie, and he’d never seen it because he’s little. But, you know, she if you’ve seen the movie, she picks up a fork in the bottom of the sea. And she is told by the seagull that it’s a hairbrush. And so she believes that she has a hairbrush because she has a dingle hopper, which is a fork.

Ali Schwanke: [00:06:15] Little does she know that the fork is being used to eat. Humans use a fork at the table, and a lot of people are solving their problems in ways that make sense to them, which would never, ever make them go look for your product, look for your solution, whatever. So understanding the journey that someone goes through psychologically to solve their problems is actually the bigger piece of marketing that a lot of people are missing. They think I have solution. I put it in front of customer and I barrage them with messages till they get it in their head that we should help them. And that’s an archaic way of thinking about it. So when it comes to how we walk people through that, logically it’s again, what are you, what are you solving? How do the customers that you’re trying to reach talk about it. Let’s find the places that they have those conversations online and let’s be part of that community so that we can eventually invite them into quote unquote, our funnel or through a conversion opportunity and then nurture them toward a conversation.

Phillip Hearn: [00:07:08] I love it. I love it. I’m not going to lie. I think this is the first time that anybody’s ever hit me with Little Mermaid. Follow the example on how to do good business. So that’s the first. I mean, I’m in though, and it makes complete sense to so. Here’s a little bit of almost a piggyback to that previous question that I asked. What’s the most rewarding aspect of what you do on a day to day basis? Because again, it sounds like you and your team are doing a lot for clients, but what’s the most rewarding aspect of all of that?

Ali Schwanke: [00:07:38] Yeah, really clarity. I mean, I think I find so much joy when the the vague kind of, let’s call it like I’m going to trick you veil gets gets pulled out because too many times and anybody that works in marketing and sales, we are all going up against the previous baggage that someone has had with that particular word or concept. So if you hired somebody and you hired them to do marketing for you, let’s say, and it never produced a result for you, you have this baggage that thinks marketing doesn’t work or all marketers are cheaters or whatever. And so I’m up against that and you might be up against that if someone had a poor deal and they think that all people like you are terrible too. But I think clarity on you are really connecting people with solutions to their problems like that is what you do. And if you can look at marketing in that way, we can start to be logical and creative together as opposed to just trying to be this adversarial relationship, hoping to eventually see a dollar dollar come to the bottom line.

Phillip Hearn: [00:08:43] I love it. I love it. So adding to that particular piece of it, what is the process look like with your ideal clients or sets of clients? So I know the end result can be different, right? So of course you can run a marketing campaign, you can help them with YouTube. It sounds like. It sounds like you can help them at their end product with a lot of different functions. But tell me a little bit about how that process, how that relationship starts on your end, because again, it seems like you have a clear, logical concept of, Hey, to get to where you want to go, we need to do these, let’s say 3 to 5 steps. So take us take our listeners through what that looks like.

Ali Schwanke: [00:09:22] Sure. So I’ll give you the the process you’d go through regardless of whether you work with us or another agency, because I think that you’re going to find that there are two types of people in the world. One of them is they have an educated awareness about what they need to do. Now, when I say educated awareness, I mean you’ve been in the space, you understand marketing, you understand what I’m talking about from like I could use all the marketing buzzwords and you and I are on the same page. And that is, that’s not as common as people would like to think it is. And then the other side of that is they don’t know what they don’t know. They read one post once upon a time and they’re somewhat like the people that go to the doctor that read, Oh my God, I have cancer. I read it on WebMD. And the guy is like, No, you’re just dehydrated. So, you know, the the self diagnosis and everyone, quote unquote, is an expert these days. That’s really tough because you have to be willing to admit that you don’t know what you don’t know. So back to how we help people. There’s kind of two ways that they that you come into a conversation when you’re looking for results from marketing. One is, again, you know exactly what you need to do. So let’s say that you have had some success going to trade shows and converting people from those events. Now you know that you need to double your exposure at events like that. You can’t do it internally. You need a team to help you. Great. We know exactly that. You need to create a better digital strategy and enhance the overall number of events that you do a year.

Ali Schwanke: [00:10:43] Perfect. Okay, we can do that. The other one is we don’t really know what to do. And if you don’t come in admitting that you don’t really know, then you might end up hiring someone to do, let’s say, a YouTube campaign for you. And then at the end of the day, there’s no leads from it because you hired the YouTube campaign thinking, I’m going to get leads. And what they did was they got you awareness and awareness is not the same thing as cash in the bank, which is fine. They all fit together. But if you happen to not know what you need to do and you don’t have a written down strategy, we help you create that. So that is that is our job is helping you nail down what channels to be on, why you should be on them. What is your conversion mechanism? How does a person who’s cold and that means they’ve never talked to you? I’ll say people will say we have lots of leads in our database. And I’m like, No, you don’t. You have names on. You have names in a record. That’s all you have. So in that case, if you just have cold leads, what’s it going to take for them to move from? I have no idea who the heck you are to. Yes, stranger, I would love to give you my money. That’s a big journey and there are lots of touchpoints along the way. So we design that journey with you and then ultimately how that’s going to transact and move them into your funnel.

Phillip Hearn: [00:11:55] Awesome. And I love the WebMD analogy, right? Because somebody happened to read something one time and they go there hiring you with all of a sudden they become the subject matter expert. Not quite. We love we love the enthusiasm, but not quite so. And I think that’s important, too, that you talk about. If you just have a record in your CRM system that is completely different than a lead, Right. And I think that’s a key component to that. I love that you and your team focus on of going. If we’re talking about a record, we’ve got to do some work to get it to a lead, right? If it’s a lead now, you’re talking about actual conversion opportunities and going from there. I think that is that’s powerful because again, I think it starts to break down some of those those pieces about marketing that folks think they understand. But just that little bit of change and thought is extremely huge.

Ali Schwanke: [00:12:46] Yeah, there’s ADD one quick thing there. So one of the things that seems I talk a lot about the unsexy parts of marketing and one of the unsexy parts that is absolutely necessary and you don’t realize it until you realize the life on the other side is we have to have shared understanding of what each contact, let’s say, milestone in their buying journey is. When I say lead, if I go into any company, their definition of what a lead is is going to be different. And then when I talk about people who registered for a webinar, are those sales qualified leads or those marketing qualified leads? What’s happening with them? All of that’s different to an organization. And if you have not standardized that and everybody can repeat that on the spot as to what it means, there’s some clarity issues there, and your marketing certainly could be more effective if you knew exactly what it meant to be each place on the journey.

Phillip Hearn: [00:13:35] Awesome. Yeah. So, so basically what you’re saying is internal processes and internal milestones are going to be key for you and your team to come in and be as productive as someone would want you and your team to be. Am I hearing that right?

Ali Schwanke: [00:13:51] Yeah. Well, we’ll often help people set those things because again, back to the you don’t know what you don’t know. It often doesn’t come up until we start saying, Hey, we’re going to do a webinar campaign. And they say, Great, and we’re going to call everybody after the webinar. And we say, Is that is that the best is that the best way to follow up with those folks? Well, I don’t know. What do you think? And that’s what we start talking about intent signals and buying signals, because just because I happen to I’m going to use an example of, let’s say, dating websites. Just because I looked at someone’s profile doesn’t mean that I’m ready to go on a date with them. So we if we look at relationship building, which is what sales is, is that person ready to have a sales conversation if they haven’t raised their hand yet? Probably not. So if you follow up, you might want to be saying, Hey, thank you for joining the webinar. I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Ali. If you have any questions, I’m here, but we’d love to see you on the next webinar. That’s far different than trying to get them into a sales conversation, if you see what I mean.

Phillip Hearn: [00:14:45] Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, if they’re not ready, they’re not ready, right? So you’re not going to force them into something that they’re not prepared for and really are not looking for in that particular case. I love that analogy. That makes complete sense. So here’s something that I know. It’s come across your desk. So there’s the rise in all the AI apps and the tools and different marketplaces. So how is this affected your business? How is this possibly even enhance your business? And how does this help you work with your clients? With all there is? That’s I again, I feel like a couple of people have read some articles about AI and now they know everything, right. So and it’s going to be difficult for us to know everything because I feel like it’s just now getting to that critical getting to those critical mass points. So how does this affect your business? What are you seeing with everything that’s going on in the AI apps in the marketplace?

Ali Schwanke: [00:15:36] Yeah, there’s a lot of really wonderful and exciting things that are happening and we are benefiting them from them as content creators. For instance, I’m now a chat GPT subscriber. Like if you haven’t, they have a wait list you can join in. They’re releasing it slowly, but I’m using this AI to help springboard some of the initial ideas that come into a blog post. But I think the for those that are on the outside saying great, I now can have I write my blog post, I don’t need to have an agency anymore. Why don’t you guys focus on something more effective? And with that thinking, it’s it’s basically what it’s going to what it’s going to do. And what we’re seeing already is we’re seeing the rise of just because you can doesn’t mean you should. So they’ve got double the blog posts. Well, to be honest, it reads like a robot wrote it because a robot wrote it. And so there’s still the need for editing and there’s still the need for context. And quite frankly, what it’s doing is it’s increasing the importance of what you and I are doing right now, and that is bringing the human expertise in a way that you can’t use A.I. over top of it. So you’re seeing more people doing things with video. They’re recording their podcasts so we can see their faces because we know when their faces are there, we can trust them explicitly when their voices are there. We know we can trust them explicitly. So we’re seeing the rise of what we call thought leadership content. And that’s you can’t talk about marketing like I am if you haven’t worked in it. So there’s no way to refute that. I know what I’m talking about and you’re going to see a lot more of that in the very mediums that we’re using right now.

Phillip Hearn: [00:17:11] Yeah, and I think that’s the thought leadership content piece I think is huge and. From what you’re talking about, even with all the growth and additions into the marketplace when it comes to AI, that human expertise doesn’t get lost. Right? Right. So have you started to see clients come to you and go, Well, I’ve already got I can do the blog post. I don’t need you or your clients still looking to you and your team to go, Look, I understand we can maybe help with some of the brainstorming, but we still need Allie and her team’s expertise to come in and do what they do. Well, what are you seeing within your customers and your clients and even prospects of how they’re looking at your agency versus the AI game?

Ali Schwanke: [00:17:58] Yeah, we’re seeing it the same way we saw when people and now like we help people with HubSpot. So if they come in and they’ve heard about HubSpot but they don’t really know what to do, I compare it to, to go into the Home Depot and you’ve got a lot of tools you could buy and you just end up being loaded up with tools and for a hot minute you think you’ve got things like, Great, I’ve got all these tools. You still don’t really know what to do with the tools or how to use them together. And so the need and the things that we see people is it’s not about the tools. It’s about knowing exactly what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and whether or not it’s worth your time. And that’s difficult to understand when you don’t work in the industry. Every day there’s there’s a company that releases changes to social that come out every day, and they have a laundry list of changes that just happen on platforms on social every day. So if you’re going to expect to keep up with all of the things that you need to know to be an effective marketer and a financial person and a business like whatever. Good luck. Good luck with that. So with with AI, it tends to be this. If they bring blogs to us and say, Hey, we already have a bunch of blogs written, the challenge is a lot of these companies that are doing that don’t really even know what effective content looks like. And that’s a challenge because effective content looks like really helpful, insightful, different point of view driven information. And it’s not a five tips to get more out of LinkedIn. I mean, like we’ve read those articles, those are terrible ones to read that nobody like if you’re, you know, have a profile picture, well, duh, have a profile picture. Like if that’s the type of information you’re putting out, you’re not really helping anybody.

Phillip Hearn: [00:19:39] Right? Right. So bringing a higher level of content is going to be important, even though great, like a robot can write this. But that human touch element, bringing that to a higher level is going to be extremely important from what you’re saying.

Ali Schwanke: [00:19:55] Yeah. And we don’t even know yet of the implications of this coming forward when we don’t know what Google is going to be doing with content that you might be able to be flag that that’s only AI generated. We see students that are writing papers using Chat GPT and now there’s people that are developing apps that are helping flag whether or not that’s actually original content. So in the same way that we have plagiarism in issues from copying and pasting from other websites, we’re going to have issues in this area. I think the bigger question tends to be tools aside, what unique value do you bring to the marketplace? What do people look to you about what content topics and really start there first before you say these are a lot of cool tools, where do I put them into my process?

Phillip Hearn: [00:20:40] Yeah, makes sense. Yeah. Don’t don’t pick up a hammer when you need a pair of pliers. Right. The Home Depot reference. So making sure that you’ve got the right tool for the right time. I love it. So let’s ask a forward look from you. So you’re are marketing subject matter expert. What do you think? Marketing. For not only your organization, but just in general in the marketplace. It’s going to look like in the next year, three years, five years, because there’s so much going on. And I feel like there’s almost a groundswell of everybody’s now focused on marketing. I know that sounds kind of maybe goofy, but I feel like it’s a different conversation than it even was five or ten years ago for the masses, right? There’s of course been the marketing agencies, etc. But where do you think that the industry is going to go marketing wise? And how can your contacts and clients go with you into whatever that change may look like?

Ali Schwanke: [00:21:37] Yeah, there’s a couple of things that we’re seeing and depending on the industry excuse me, these look a little bit different, but one is the importance of human connections, driving a lot of community type of marketing. And what that looks like is there are, you know, I belong to seven different communities for revenue or they call it rev ops would be the name in terms of like sales and marketing alignment together, people that work in those industries and want to share best practices and just feel like they’re in alignment with one another. So there’s there’s those communities. There’s definitely a rise in the amount of content that’s being created, period. So just like this podcast seems like everybody in my network starting a podcast, why are you different? Who is it for? Can you be specific? So even though I’d say ten years ago, I would still say this then is you can’t be all things to all people, even more so today. If you pick a vertical in a niche, that’s the person who sees that content can say yes. So let’s say, for example, we help folks with HubSpot.

Ali Schwanke: [00:22:42] And if I said this whole campaign is how professional service companies use HubSpot, I’m a professional service firm. Great. I know you’re going to be talking to me, so I should pay attention. So that relevancy and context I think is going to be important to your marketing, which is tough because I’ve met a few executives and sales people that are like, Oh, when I say no to this market, I’m letting go of opportunities. But when you tighten your focus, the ability to execute and clarify that, that definitely leads to faster, faster lead generation, then it’s like the opposite effect happens. So we’ll see a lot about a lot of that. And then I think we’ll see, just like you’re doing here, is we’re going to see a lot more individual voices come out of the the, I guess, realms of companies because we’re just becoming like disillusioned with brands and we want to identify with other humans. So I think we’re going to see a lot more of that here in the next couple of years.

Phillip Hearn: [00:23:37] Well, yeah, it’s funny, as you say, as we’re sitting here doing a podcast, right? But those podcasts that are going to stand out even are going to be the ones that are almost more thoughtful in nature as opposed to just like you said, backed by this massive corporate brand, just to make a bunch of noise. So it’s interesting. It’s definitely interesting. So let me ask this. What would an ideal client look like for you and your team? Right. So you talked about being able to drill down in your focus and and lock into those clients or that audience that is of benefit to what you’re trying to accomplish at the end. At the end of the day, who’s an ideal or what types of industry verticals? Who are your ideal clients that you’d want to talk to?

Ali Schwanke: [00:24:24] Sure. Before we get to verticals, I usually discuss three core problems that we solve. Okay, great. One of one of those core problems is, you know, you need to scale your business through technology in a sales and marketing capacity, but I have no idea what that looks like. So you’re doing things by hand. You’ve got a sales team in the field who’s not maybe operating off of the same source of data, whatever that is. We we definitely solve that problem. The second one is you happen to need to increase your awareness in the marketplace. You’re an unknown name, unknown brand unknown person, and you need to be in those. Call them warm conversations before they’re ready for a sales call. That is certainly a problem that we help with. And then the last one is there’s some sort of a thought leadership opportunity in your market, and you can solve that with content, whether that’s a video series, a podcast series, blog series, LinkedIn, whatever, that that medium looks like. We do all sorts of mediums depending on your industry. And if that’s you need, you need to be able to execute faster and need a partner that can consistently do that for you. That is a problem we solve. So where that boils down to is we do operate solely on the HubSpot platform when it comes to technology. If you’re not a HubSpot customer yet and you’re thinking about it like people, HubSpot got a very aggressive sales team.

Ali Schwanke: [00:25:37] So if you’re being called by HubSpot and you’re like, I’m not sure we’ve got free calls where people can just like ask us a bunch of questions. We have a YouTube channel with 80 plus videos about it. You can go just soak up a wealth of knowledge from us there and then we’ve got consulting on that side, what that looks like from company size all over the place, all over the board, but primarily most of them are driven by having somewhat of a. Presence in sales, whether that’s the founder or a sales team. And then either you have an internal marketing person or someone who’s maybe part time that needs some extra support. So that’s that’s one side. The other side is larger B2B brands that have, let’s say, sales teams that are doing a lot of really good things in the marketplace. We see this in software, we see this in professional services, we see this in health care. They’re doing their work, but there’s a long sales cycle and they really need to stay in front of those people during that sales cycle. That’s a good, really good fit for us because we can help them align their content and their delivery of those awareness pieces during that journey to then again see in front of them and ultimately close sales faster.

Phillip Hearn: [00:26:45] I love it. And I love that the three core problems that you solve, right? Because again, as we talked about earlier, the idea of marketing for a lot of business owners, no matter how big or small, it almost becomes analysis paralysis, right? Correct. There’s so much information. There’s so much going on. So to have someone who is a subject matter expert and their team that walks someone through from start to finish, I think is potentially invaluable for most companies. So I love what you solve and how you get to it. So here’s a little something that might be off of the beaten path. So you have so much going on. It sounds like you and your team are doing such great work. What do you personally do to recharge and stay sharp? You’ve got a ton going on. How do you do it? I mean, are you reading or are you working? Not like what? What are those things that allow Ali to say, This is my chance to recharge so I can go be great for the clients that I’m working with?

Ali Schwanke: [00:27:40] Yeah, there’s a couple of things that I believe, and I have believed them for a long time, and that is one you have to be where people are having conversations about innovative things and ideas and that I mentioned. One is a slot community. So I do participate in a lot of online discussions and places where I can even just observe conversations that are happening. I don’t have to be in them, but I can. When you’re in a slot community, for example, you can just go and read the dialog happening in a specific channel about a certain topic, and it’s like eavesdropping on conversations in the industry, which is super helpful. Secondly, I go to events. I make it a point. Yes, you can do everything virtually now, but I’m going to tell you what you cannot replace the amazing insights and relationship. I’ll say it currency that you get by being in person at an event. And you and I are definitely like, I think we all align on that because we spend a lot of time traveling. But those people that are willing to do that, those things escalate faster than they ever have. And I’m seeing that as a result in my life. And then two other things. One is I definitely stay active. I’m I run and my running is kind of my meditation because I just kind of let my brain go and I have all sorts of ideas that come from that. And then thirdly, it’s definitely making time to put together a, let’s say, a list of experiments. So if I’m not testing something and experimenting with something, I’m not sharpening my own skills and sharing that with clients. So even today, like on LinkedIn, I released a video that I put on Tik Tok. It was talking about a specific kind of marketing principle, and my test is will I get more TikTok followers by simply posting this on LinkedIn? We’ll see. But I can now talk about that and talk about that strategy because I’m also testing it.

Phillip Hearn: [00:29:23] I love it. Yeah, and that’s the fun part, right? It kind of puts us back into what was that middle school where we have all those science experiments, right? Yeah. What they don’t tell you is, hey, you’re actually you don’t have to be a scientist to do science experiments or experiments in general, so that that’s a lot of fun. I love it. So last question for you. What is the best way for our listeners, if they’re interested, if they think you can help you and your team can help solve the core issues that you mentioned, how do they connect with you? How do they stay in touch? Give us all your your good stuff.

Ali Schwanke: [00:29:55] Absolutely. Well, if you Google Ali Schwanke, there isn’t another one of me that I know of yet, so you’ll be able to find me. I have a website, Ali Salon.com, where I’ve got an email list and some resources there. If you go to YouTube and search for HubSpot hacks or even if you just search for YouTube and see the kind of first female face with like light brown, blondish hair, that’s probably me because we have a YouTube channel there. But if you search HubSpot hacks, you will find us over on YouTube. And then Simple STRATCOM is the website of the company that we operate and we’ve got a variety of free resources on that website. And then there is a new podcast and channel coming out called Marketing Deconstructed. I’ve got a newsletter over on LinkedIn. You can join now and when that goes live, you’ll you’ll know about that as well.

Phillip Hearn: [00:30:38] Awesome. I’m so excited. I’m glad we got a chance to get together. Like I said, I’ve been looking forward to this for the last couple of weeks because I’ve been reading up on your stuff, taking a look at the videos. I mean, you, you and your team provides such amazing content to kind of break down some of those myths and the mystique of marketing, right? We hear so much about marketing, especially today. And you guys make it a simpler process, which is impressive and and not an easy to think thing to do. So thank you so much for all that you and your team are doing, and I’m really glad you got a chance to come hang out with us today.

Ali Schwanke: [00:31:14] Yeah, thanks for giving me the opportunity to share. And likewise, I’ve enjoyed learning more about what you’re doing and can’t wait to see where it takes you.

Phillip Hearn: [00:31:20] Absolutely. Thank you so much. So that is the end of our show today. We want to give a special thanks to our great guest, Allie Schwanke. So much good stuff about marketing and all the industry trends, where we are and where we’re going. But that’s been it for DOCS discussions. I’m Dr. Philip Hern and we thank you so much for listening. Take care.