Breaking the Marketing Mold: Lindsey Carnett Of Marketing Maven On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before
An Interview With Chad Silverstein
Leverage a social influencer for a live Q&A on behalf of your brand. Make sure you secure the rights to the content so you can repurpose in your newsletters, social media channels, PR and digital ad campaigns.
Traditional marketing methods are no longer sufficient in today’s dynamic and fast-evolving market. To truly engage and captivate audiences, businesses need to think outside the box and adopt innovative and non-traditional marketing strategies. What are these strategies, and how can they transform audience engagement? I had the pleasure of interviewing Lindsey Carnett.
Lindsey Carnett, CEO and President of Marketing Maven, is a two-time honoree of Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Independently Owned Companies in America, as well as an Entrepreneur 360 Most Entrepreneurial Companies In America award recipient. She has also received a Top Women in Business Award from Pacific Coast Business Times, a Silver Stevie Award as Female Entrepreneur of the Year, was named a Top 25 Largest Women Owned Business in San Fernando Valley Business Journal, and received multiple 40 Under 40 Awards. Carnett has taken her business expertise globally to enlighten marketing peers, clients and students about best practices in using PR to drive sales, improve organic SEO, and grow a positive online reputation.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! To start, could you share when and how you got started in marketing?
I started in marketing more than 20 years ago when I was an intern at a public relations firm in Los Angeles. I researched media contacts, developed media pitches, and secured media interviews for a variety of companies in a variety of industries. After my internship, I was offered part-time work. As I kept delivering great results for clients, my part-time work increased to a full-time job! While in college, I secured a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal that ran on a Monday morning above the fold. After leading nationally recognized PR stunts, writing byline articles and growing the revenues of many companies, I was recruited to be the VP of Marketing for a Scandinavian bioscience company where I could combine my PR skills with other marketing strategies and tactics. I regularly secured media interviews for Jennifer Garner’s personal trainer, Valerie Waters, as she was the brand spokesperson. And it was in this role where I learned how to successfully navigate Direct Response marketing, commonly referred to as DRTV. From this role, I joined a large Direct Response advertising agency and started a PR division where I worked with Billy Mays from OxiClean, the Kardashians (tied to the launch of a wellness product they were endorsing), and many other recognizable direct-to-consumer brands. In hopes of saying goodbye to a 3-hour daily commute, and bringing metrics and accountability to PR, I launched Marketing Maven. Fast forward 15 years, and here we are today!
What has been the biggest shift in the marketing industry and can you give us an example of how it impacted you?
The biggest shift has been consumer buying behavior. From DRTV with calls from landlines to call centers, to drive to retail for in-store purchases, then a push to DTC via e-commerce via desktop, then Amazon purchases via mobile, marketers are forced to stay on their toes. From navigating sales tax for e-commerce sales, bad actors with affiliate marketing, new privacy laws and FTC disclosure, the stakes are as high as ever.
Can you explain why it’s essential for businesses to break away from traditional marketing and embrace new strategies?
One word: Blockbuster. If you keep doing the same thing in marketing, you will get left in the dust. The same social media platforms don’t even exist as they used to. Remember MySpace or Vine? Neither does the GenZ working professional that you’re attempting to convert into a customer. It is imperative that marketers meet consumers where they are and anticipate where they will be in the future so you can be nimble in your transition to meet the next consumer-buying behavior.
Could you share and briefly explain the first major change you made to break the trend of traditional marketing that was not so common?
PR for DR is a term that I coined in 2010, which means Public Relations for Direct Response. To many, this was an oxymoron as, historically, PR has been difficult to measure. With a background in DRTV advertising that assigns metrics to nearly every step of the process, I was able to architect the PR component to integrate into this existing accountable infrastructure.
What specific results did you see after implementing this change?
As more companies that initially only cared about a quick ROI fix began focusing on their brand, large M&A activity started to happen. Once these former DRTV brands began selling to CPG giants for hundreds of millions of dollars, everyone in the industry took note. In business, money talks. And the ultimate ROI was building enough positive brand equity to merit an extremely lucrative exit.
How do you ensure that these new marketing strategies resonate with your target audience?
The best way to ensure marketing strategy alignment is to first clearly understand your client’s business objectives. Are they ultimately looking to exit? How about transitioning from brick-and-mortar retail supplier exclusively to selling direct-to-consumer via e-commerce? How about growing a B2B channel of distribution when it’s been focused only on B2C to date? Perhaps they’ve been marketing to one target demographic successfully, but they have blinders on to additional marketing approaches that would allow them to grow revenue streams via new channels? For example, a company is marketing via TV advertising but after market research, we discover from the persona development exercise that there are audiences with a high propensity to purchase if we executed an influencer marketing campaign followed by digital amplification utilizing edited influencer content.
Can you share an example of something you tried that didn’t deliver expected results or ended up becoming a financial burden, and what you learned from that experience?
Something we tried with a client who was looking to cultivate leads for a machine that aids in the recovery of TBIs and stroke was A/B testing the patients themselves versus caregivers of the patients. We were far more successful with the caregiver digital outreach than with the digital outreach to the patients directly. We quickly learned that the messaging really needed to be tailored to the caregiver to get the best results.
Great. Now, let’s dive into the heart of our interview. Could you list “5 Innovative & Non Traditional Marketing Strategies That Can Engage Audiences Like Never Before”?
- Polling on social media channels. We’ve leveraged this polling function to learn about customer preferences for fabric pattern styles for a national baby gear brand. These polling results were then shared with the retail buyers for national retail stores and ultimately helped substantiate the fashions chosen by our client based on their consumer audience of 350,000+ moms for which we had built and continued executing community management for.
- PR stunts. If you want to secure massive visibility quickly, PR stunts are a method of making your brand known. It should be tied to a specific marketing objective and message.
- Leverage a social influencer for a live Q&A on behalf of your brand. Make sure you secure the rights to the content so you can repurpose in your newsletters, social media channels, PR and digital ad campaigns.
- Develop a contest! Be sure to leverage this contest to obtain consumer contact details and grow your organic reach among your target demographic, all while building brand affinity.
- Find your blind spots and capitalize on the missteps your competitors make. In terms of finding a blind spot, perhaps your competitors are beating you with a greater share of voice on forums since you don’t have a forum presence at all. Conversely, the nuggets from a competitor sentiment analysis are simply gold when looking at your unique selling proposition. When you identify negative consumer sentiment about your competitor, your brand can highlight the positive aspects of your brand that are the inverse of what is being said about the competitor, without dragging anyone through the mud.
What challenges might companies face when transitioning away from traditional marketing strategies, and how can they overcome them?
The biggest resistance typically comes from staff who are uncomfortable with change or operating systems that have been in place for years. It is also more difficult for a large company to be nimble. This is why we vet our clients through the lens of our core values: growth mindset, futuristic, mindshare and client-centric. If a client is not futuristic or does not want to be futuristic, they might be more difficult in the transition from traditional marketing strategies to new marketing strategies. The trust factor between the company and the outside service provider must be high to ensure a seamless transition.
How do you measure the success and ROI of these new marketing strategies?
The KPIs tied to these new marketing strategies might look slightly different than the prior metrics. More than likely, there are more data points and fine tuning necessary in the new marketing strategies. But those data points allow for precision.
Looking forward, how do you see the role of innovative marketing evolving in the next 5–10 years?
Innovative marketing over the next 5–10 years will be a trifecta of AI, big data and privacy doing a delicate dance where marketers will be testing and recalibrating based on what works best, how consumer buying behavior shifts and how new AI governance and privacy law gets more sophisticated.
What advice would you give to business leaders who are hesitant to move away from traditional marketing methods?
If the business leader wants to stay in business and keep growing, it is imperative that they keep planning for what’s around the next corner. Just remember, don’t be Blockbuster which kept doing things the way they’ve always done it. Consider enlisting a third-party with a “blind spot finder” like the Insights360 piece of The Marketing Maven Method!
Can you share any upcoming initiatives or plans you have for further innovating your marketing strategies?
In The Marketing Maven Method, after the first step which is Insights360 (finding opportunities via marketing research), it is followed by Strategy360. This allows for a marketing roadmap to be built from the initial data pulled. It’s a data-backed marketing blueprint that is implementation-ready!
How can our readers follow your work and learn more about your approaches to modern marketing?
To learn more about The Marketing Maven Method or purchase the book, visit: www.TheMarketingMavenMethod.com. To learn more about the services that Marketing Maven offers, visit: www.MarketingMaven.com. To inquire about speaking engagements or Board work, visit: www.LindseyCarnett.com
This was great. Thank you so much for the time you spent sharing with us.
About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein, a seasoned entrepreneur with over two decades of experience as the Founder and CEO of multiple companies. He launched Choice Recovery, Inc., a healthcare collection agency, while going to The Ohio State University, His team earned national recognition, twice being ranked as the #1 business to work for in Central Ohio. In 2018, Chad launched [re]start, a career development platform connecting thousands of individuals in collections with meaningful employment opportunities, He sold Choice Recovery on his 25th anniversary and in 2023, sold the majority interest in [re]start so he can focus his transition to Built to Lead as an Executive Leadership Coach. Learn more at www.chadsilverstein.com
Breaking the Marketing Mold: Lindsey Carnett Of Marketing Maven On 5 Innovative & Non Traditional… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.