Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Radical Podcast - Ryan sits down with Logan Brown From GVL TODAY ( 6 AM CITY )

Episode Date: October 8, 2019

In this episode of the Radical company podcast... Ryan had the pleasure of speaking with Logan Brown the growth manager for 6 AM City, They speak about marketing and email targeting tactics, alongside whether if in a fast paced digital world print and old fashion newspaper can hold up against immediate email newsletters. They also spend time diving deep in what it takes in regards to the groundwork to create a successful team and business. - If you enjoyed listening to Logan Brown be sure to follow him at @logan.b.brown and check out @GVLTODAY and sign up for Daily information and news and keep updated on the rest of the publication team and our city! If you enjoy this episode please check out the rest of our information and nugget filled episodes on our channel. Please share, review, and subscribe so we can continue to bring the radical ideas from our amazing guests for both your #business, #marketing and #lifestyle needs. . Have a great weekend Rad Fam! #NowThatsRadical🤙 #YeahThatGreenville 🌿 - Radical Podcast is always looking forward to meeting both aspiring, and grounded professionals across the country! Feel like you have something to say? Slide us a Dm and let's make it happen! @radical_results @ryanalford www.radical.company [phone] [e-mail] 25 Delano Drive, Greenville, SC 29601, USA Do you need an amazing co-working space, filled with like minded passion driven individual who value community and passion!? Then look no further. Radical has now created its very own HQ located right off the swamp rabbit trail and is inviting every scrappy, aspiring, and driven creative individual in the Greenville area to come be close, interact, and learn from the fastest growing marketing agency in the upstate. You can learn, schedule, and contact us all at Comraderycowork.com If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. 

Hey guys, it's Ryan Alford for the Radical Company podcast. Really excited to be back. It's been a few weeks on the podcast. We're here at Camaraderie in our new podcast studio. Camaraderie is our agency location where Radical is housed, but it's also a co-work space here in Greenville. So if you are looking for someone where to work and want to come work with some cool people,

you need to look up camaraderiecoworked.com and check everything out. We're actually, Logan and I, who I'll introduce shortly, are having a tasty beverage here straight from the kegerator. Another benefit of camaraderie. Shameless plug all around for the co-work space. But Logan Brown, really excited to have you, man. all around for the co-work space. But Logan Brown, really excited to have you, man. Growth marketing manager at 6AM City.

Really excited to have you here, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. This is awesome. Yeah, so I'm actually really excited. Logan emailed me a couple weeks ago. It's like, hey, man, you know, following stuff, have a few topics. I think this would be cool for a podcast. And it was really kind of near and dear to my heart as far as just trends

and different things that I'm following with local news and marketing and journalism and is journalism dead versus, you know, you see the decline of newspapers and all these things. And, you know, it really kind of hit at a core, I think, a really interesting topic. So really excited to kind of get into that. And really, you know, Logan, I think people in Greenville know GVL Today, which is one of your core foundational products,

and the newsletter and things like that. So I know that, but 6am City, I'd love to kind of start there. You know, let's give everybody that's listening, you know, kind of that historical background, you know, what problem were we trying to solve? Why was 6am City started? Greenville today, I think, was one of the first markets, but maybe not. That shows not all of my knowledge, but maybe just give everybody a little bit of that background and maybe some of your background, you know, previous to 6am city. Yeah, totally. So I kind of came on board almost three years ago. Now, um, GVL today was started under 6am city as an umbrella. The whole idea was delivering email newsletters that aggregated and curated local news and events. Um, the whole idea there is that local, local news and media was a little fragmented and

broken. Um, we kind of have this idea that everyone, uh, creates content in some way and they share it in all different forms. Um, so some people read the newspaper, some people watch local TV and some just stick to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Uh, we thought what we could do is kind of listen on all channels, find the best of the best, and then bring it to you in one certain channel, which right now is email and a cool, succinct newsletter. Yeah, for sure. So talk to me about, you're not just in Greenville. What cities are we covering

right now besides just Greenville? Yeah, it's actually a really fun time that you brought me on because we're, so now we're in seven cities total um so we're all in the southeast everything from Lakeland Florida Charleston Columbia here in Greenville Asheville Chattanooga and now we're in Raleigh North Carolina as of this morning so definitely a southeastern footprint for the most part right now yep but ambitions further uh west and north I imagine kind of you know I think the furthest west we've looked at currently is maybe like in Austin. Yeah. We kind of like what's going on there, but there's still a lot of opportunity here in the southeast.

You know, places like Birmingham, Richmond, Knoxville all have vibrant communities that are growing and a lot of people are flocking there. So I think we'd probably stick to that first if we're going too far away. Yeah. there. So, um, I think we'd probably stick to that first before going too far away. Yeah. What's, um, what's been, you know, some of the, you know, being a new, newer concept, uh, business, maybe talk a little bit about some of the ups and downs, you know, both thought, you know, the great things coming into a new city, you know, maybe just some of the challenges of a new business model.

You know, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, totally. I mean, the cool thing about being close to all of our cities, Greenville being the center of the hub and spoke model of sorts. The founders and members of our team can go and kind of be boots on the ground there, meet the community, make handshakes that need to be made. And a lot of hype kind of gets built right there. When you go meet with the Chamber of Commerce and you meet the mayors of all these cities and you kind of get them behind the product and let them know what you're trying to do

and the success stories that have happened already in Greenville and Columbia and these different cities, that's probably a lot of fun. I would say what's a struggle on my end is, you know, for marketing is how do I get as many people as possible to know about this product and get them amped for it, especially pre-product? Because as you know, there's always product launches

in marketing and for any business. So when we decide 60 days we're going to go to some new city and we're going to launch the newsletter, well, how do you get somebody hyped about a product that doesn't exist yet? And how do you get them excited to sign up? And then when it does launch, get them sharing with their friends and get the entire community behind it. So the good there is that we can be there, our boots on the ground. The bad is that, or the struggle is that, how do we make this the coolest thing possible so that on day one, we're sitting in a good spot.

It's interesting. Mine went down two paths. I'm going to try to remember the second one as I go down the first. But I see it from a marketing perspective. You've got B2B and B2C, don't you? I mean, it seems like for you guys, any media company survives on working with businesses and selling advertising in some way, shape, or form. And then the content side, which is consumed by consumers, the local people. So is it, in fact, a two-fold marketing challenge of B2B and B2C at the same time when you're kind of coming into a new market? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think the positive where we are currently as an organization

is we have a lot of existing partnerships that have gone really well. And we have all of this content and we have all these case studies that we're able to kind of curate and make so that when we go to this new city, it's not just this brand new thing that no one knows how it's going to happen. We just know that we have a playbook. This is the content we make for our partners. So on the B2B side, we can really prove to them and show them how we've worked with others in their industry. And on the B2C side, we create content up front to kind of get them excited about what we're doing.

And we have other newsletters we can show them. So there's other models out here like this where they understand the concept. They just need to see it for their city. So that's how we kind of try to tackle the B2C side of that. Yeah. What are the tactics, if you will, you know, when you're coming into a new market and trying to get consumers and trying to, you know, it's all about reach and frequency in marketing. you know, it's all about reaching frequency in marketing, you know, as far as telling the messages or telling, conveying to them what, you know, what's in it for them a number of times.

What are some of the marketing tactics that you kind of, you guys deploy or, you know, how do you get in front of people? Yeah, totally. So, I mean, you're kind of hitting on the spot. I think for the growth marketing side of things, what we try to do is create more of like a strategy overall, because as you know, there's a zillion different buckets you can kind of go into. So we develop a strategy with certain buckets and there's tactics within all of those. I would say that the core ones that work well for us is that especially in a city like Raleigh, we'll use them since they're the newest market. We know that there's a lot of young folks that are on social media already there. So first thing we do is a content strategy that gets distributed organically and paid through the social platforms, right?

Because we know that's where they're spending their time. We had Boots on the Ground film a video. I know that you guys are really into video content. Kind of push that through the social networks as well to build buzz. An organic referral is a huge thing. And then we have, like, more giveaway referrals. So that's incentivized a little bit. And that's not to mention the partnership. So when we go boots on the ground, we're meeting with the movers and shakers and trying to get in touch with their

networks. A lot of those folks, the major businesses, if you think about a Michelin or BMW here in Greenville, we can go talk to those folks. And we feel that there's an impact when their employees are reading GVL today or some major company in Raleigh. When you get your employees kind of investing in their city, they're happier and they want to be here longer and there's retention. So those are the kind of partnerships we try to work on and utilize as a growth mechanism for us. Yeah, I love that. Is there any blowback from other local media outlets when you guys come into a market? You know, media is competitive.

Local media can be hyper-competitive. You think about the news wars of, I mean, they still do it, but of the 70s and 80s, you know, like news channels back and forth and trying to get the story and all those things. you know, like news channels back and forth and trying to get the story and all those things. What's the temperature, if you will, with other media outlets when you guys kind of come into a market? Yeah, sure. It's a good question. And actually, the founders are pretty good. They've had a really good success rate just reaching out to all the major media players in a city, and they go meet with them face-to-face and kind of explain the product.

I would say the good thing is if you think about Greenville News keeping it local, those guys are doing really good investigative journalism and trying to create stories about the community. When you think about GVL Today as a newsletter and an email product, we kind of send a lot of traffic to them. You know, we're not a social platform in the sense that people are maybe engaging right on it like you would with a Facebook or Instagram, but since we're sharing these stories and aggregating them, someone who may have not seen a Greenville News article because it was lost in their feed, we're putting it right there

front and center. So at the same time, we're not kind of competing with them on the content play. We're giving them a place to push their content. Yeah. What's funny, I think of that push-pull. to push their content. Yeah. What's funny, I think of that push-pull. You are more of a pull medium because you aggregate it and you put it in a newsletter form and you put it in an email box.

And yeah, if I'm on my phone or computer desktop, people still do that. Yeah, 80% of all our analytics, all our clients says it's all mobile. Yeah, it's all right. It seems probably right for you guys too. But it's really just kind of there that – because I go look at it every day. I get it.

I'm a subscriber. I'm a proud GVL Today subscriber. And it might be funny enough, and I know it's a lot of today's stuff and news, but it might be 4 o'clock in the afternoon. And I save it. It goes to, like, one of my folders of stuff that I actually still read, you know, and I do want to get to that,

the jail mail of email topic here shortly. But interesting enough, in that push-pull aspect, it is kind of more of a pull. You guys aggregate it, you put it there, and people can kind of go to it when they need it. Whereas other medias, you know, they're kind of push-push, you know, radio, TV, other things. But I did wonder, you know, maybe just some of those dynamics, you know, as you go into a market. But it's probably smart getting in front of them, you know.

You can only talk about it so bad when they're face- face with you no yeah i mean sure i i think all those funny enough all those folks are trying to better themselves and everybody's trying to work together towards a common goal yeah um you know we've talked to folks here in town like we've talked to some major players in the media or like world that want to partner with us. We want to partner with them because they have an audience too and they have people that are paying attention. I think anytime we can all come together, I'll kind of get to that. I know we're going to talk a little bit about the local media space, but I think some consolidation.

I think it's happening nationally, so it's definitely going to happen on a local level. Let's go down that path as we're kind of getting right into it. I'd love to know your perspective. You know, they've said forever newspapers dead. I'm not here to crush anyone's media. If you're listening and you're a newspaper journalist or anything like that, but newspapers almost dead if it's not dead. I mean, the numbers don't lie. When my parents aren't getting it in the driveway anymore, it's real close. Not that they don't have online products and other ways to get media. I'm not saying there's an entity of bringing news in some format, but the printed media of local news seems to be fading fast. It's interesting to me.

It seems like on one hand it's going away the printed media local media but then on the other it's like hyper local stuff seems to be still relevant so you know I get like Augusta Road you know journal in the mailbox still I read that so it's like it's gotten real hyper local but I'd love to know what you guys' perspective and your perspective just on, I don't know, the overall media landscape of local. Yeah, totally. I mean, I have a lot of opinions on it that are definitely mine rather than somebody else's.

All right, let's go. We get on a couple of different paths. Like I was thinking about this question, and maybe 30, 40 years ago, it was someone having this exact same conversation when the eight track came out, you know, his sets and are in the cars and it's like, Oh my gosh, am I going to do like vinyl? And, uh, and now you see, you know, Jack White in Nashville creating a vinyl shop that he can't even keep up demand with. So on one side, I do think there's, there's going to be like a come up of this. Like people are going to want the nostalgia of the paper in their hands.

You know, an interesting perspective, though, is a lot of these newspapers locally don't really control their own destiny. If you're a Gannett product or, you know, locally like Gateway or something like that, Gatehouse, sorry. like that gatehouse, sorry. I mean, that company in general could be sitting at their headquarters and just say that they're going to close Greenville and Asheville and whatever paper products they have because it's just not working for the bottom line. So that's when local communities kind of struggle

and it impacts us pretty hard. But I do think the niche thing, you're on par with that. Even if it were to shut down across the board and more and more local cities lose their paper, I think that brings on independent people who can sustain something that's not this massive product that needs to make millions and millions of dollars. They can create little niche products and have people on the ground that help push it for them.

And all of a sudden, you've now got a paper that talks about your neighborhood and your street, and you kind of get excited for that talks about your neighborhood and your street and you kind of get excited for that and want to go pick it up again yeah it could work it could live in a digital world you know with apple news aggregating all the paper products and putting them into a digital marketplace it's helpful as well yeah but still you know and you guys i think are living and breathing this i want to talk about how you get your you know some of your content and those connect you know with journalists. I know they're not probably called journalists with you guys.

I don't know what you call them, content curators. Sure. They're editors, but that's fine. Editors, okay. Well, all right. And that's pretty standard in industry terminology. But, you know, to get that local news, you still have to have boots on the ground. You know, like all these national entities and all these, you know, back to the newspaper discussion and, you know, AP News and all this stuff,

but you still got to have feet on the ground and connectivity to that local community. Yeah, I think that's important. I think it's just one of those things where, like, how big of a team do you need to accomplish it, maybe? I think it's interesting. Me. I'm not a journalist. So you come into this world and you kind of start to see how it works and you see the funnel. It's like,

so there's information from someone that gets sent through some sort of like PR push to another. Now the newspaper gets all the exclusive rights to a story when it breaks. Um, now this is not talking about investigative journalism, but when a development like Topgolf comes to Greenville, do we need a major company to break that story? I don't know. You probably need some people on the ground to be relevant,

especially in these smaller cities. But, yeah, I don't know if local media shutters if a newspaper goes out. It's definitely impacted, but I think that we can all work together to come up with other solutions so that people stay informed. You guys have gotten to a scale now in Greenville. It's one of your more seeded markets and things like that. I would think where does the machine feed itself? Like are you guys, people,

they want their content to be seen and heard, you know, whether it's events or local things happening, or is it now to where the machine kind of feeds itself because people are sending you things? And so versus, I guess, back to that, I guess we'll go down that push-pull analogy again. Like, are your editors, how much pulling are they having to do

versus the community now feeding you? No, because they know that you can help get their stories out. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think it takes a little bit of time for all those cities, each individual city, to get to that point. But like I was talking about, those playbook that we go into each city with, that's a part of it. So all the teams try to make their partnerships.

And that's not an advertising thing, but they're going out and working with the who's who of each town and letting them know who we are and how you can contact us and yeah it becomes that because they have that relationship and people are sending us stuff and yeah it takes it takes a while to create a relationship like that but the good good thing is that over time it develops, and we end up getting some great content out of it, and we're bringing value to the end user and those folks as well. Speaking of value to the end user, right now we're newsletter-based, but we've got some new things we've talked about that I'm aware of here in Greenville, but let's talk about like, what are those future products? What are those future added value features that, you know, 6am city's kind of bringing to both the consumers and the businesses in the market? Yeah, definitely. I mean, so the values of the company, it's always educating

the market, number one, right? So we want to give them the information they need. We try to stay as positive as possible. We think that specifically in somewhere like Greenville, where we've been for three years, we've been able to accomplish that. So part of my job is kind of working on special projects. How are we going to develop our product further and do different things? So that kind of brings along GVL Plus. And the idea there is it's like a separate subscription product. And the other side of our value proposition is activating the local community. So how do we activate these folks and getting them spending money locally, learning about new things? And the idea with this product is that you pay $10 a month

or $100 a year, and we give back $20 towards local restaurants and a free gym class trial. And so what we found out is that a lot of people kind of stick to their neighborhood. And so if you live over here, you have your spot. You know, your wife says, hey, I want to go out to eat tonight. And you say, well, let's just go across the street. We got our tried and true. Our whole goal is to kind of push people out of those little neighborhood pockets and get to try something new.

Worked with Del Thrifty next door. Not that this is out of the way, but for someone who doesn't live on the side of town or doesn't frequent the trail, it's just not something they may have gone to before. So that's kind of our goal with GBO Plus. So is that in every one of your markets, the Plus feature or the one that are live? Not yet. It's kind of working as a beta in Greenville. We're trying to figure that out and understand what the value prop is

and do people understand it as the messaging right. How are we going about onboarding partners and are they getting value out of the program? Once we nail that, we'd love to scale it. How do people learn more about that product in specific? I know that's specific to greenville right now but if someone has interest in that that's just gbl today the typical outlets but how does people kind of learn dig into more of the plus product oh yeah totally if you i mean gbl plus

dot com plus.com is a site on its own um but yeah i mean we've been trying to grow it through our own owned and operated uh channels but yeah if you want to check it out, gblplus.com is the spot. That's cool. Um, I know we've had a couple of clients at Radical that have utilized it and saw good pops from it. So a lot of new customers and different people, which exactly what you said, you know, there's kind of your everyday trying to get new people in. I think it's a great outlet

for that it's great for businesses to kind of get people sampling you know something different because it's so funny you talked about the local thing my i mean my wife and i and boys when we live downtown and we're the worst at that like you know but but our excuse is you know we have uh four boys under the age of 10 so uh you know our excuse for not venturing out might be greater than most but uh but but we try to do we try to at least push it you know once a month go somewhere different you know i think it's good to do that i mean we all kind of get stuck in our neighborhoods but every now and then it's nice to uh pop in another side of town and do something you've been wanting to, but just haven't had a chance.

Absolutely. So what, give a little bit about your background, you know, on the marketing side, you know, what got you into marketing? What do you love about marketing? What's, you know, just a little bit of background on you. Yeah, definitely. So classic marketing major in college. Right. But from Virginia, I went to school in Mississippi, right. But, um, from Virginia, I went to school in Mississippi, found my way here through the clothing industry, uh, local spot called coast apparel. Um, this is back when they were independently owned. And so I kind of helped manage some of their social, I was doing sales. We were a three man band, so everybody was kind of holding different hats. Um, but in college I was an ambassador for a company called Chubby's.

So we have something in common. I used to work for the most radical shorts company in the world. You own a company called Radical. I knew there was a connection. Absolutely. So, yeah, well, I tried to stay in contact with those folks pretty regularly. And so we kind of reached a point where they wanted to build out their customer service team. And so I was like, I wanted to jump on board with those guys. So that's what I started doing

for two years. I was still living in Greenville, but I was working for them and they were based in San Francisco. And that's when like the marketing thing started really ticking. I mean, they were doing crazy cool stuff on the content side and just really understanding how their team was thinking was very different than what I'd seen before. And unfortunately, just like I didn't really have the opportunity to go much further with that company without moving. So I tried to find some something locally is that's when GVL today came around, started writing for them. We were only three people deep at that point. Now we're at 28. So it's wild. But, um, so yeah, I was writing for them and, um, then slowly moved into this marketing role because we were trying to expand all these

different cities. Um, I needed to understand the data behind the subscribers are bringing in and the churn and the acquisition strategy. And, um, so yeah, that's been a lot of fun. I think what I love most about marketing that maybe doesn't get talked about as much as the user psychology. Yeah. I just love trying to do tests and learning how people think and using science that's decades old, centuries old, that still holds true with the way that people interact with anything, even though it's media wasn't around back then in digital form. Oh, yeah. back then in digital form. Oh, yeah.

It's, you know, we talk about it here, radical, and it's like equal parts art and science. And, you know, all the art kind of gets the buzz, and, you know, we're pretty good about putting our own art out there. It's harder to put the science out there. We've tried to crack that code a little bit of making the data interesting data interesting beyond saying oh we had more sales and that's good and that's shows it but there is and josh and i one of my digital media managers we're probably the marketing geeks of the company overall i mean and so we geek out on

you know facebook data and all the analytic stuff, looking at why time on site go up here and this go down there and trying to get behind it. But there's a lot to it. Totally, just understanding how they're behaving and then how you can alter that behavior just on small tweaks and changes. And that's a lot of fun to do any uh podcasts books uh forms or recommendations for things or people you keep up with that kind of keep you sharp or of interest yeah well i listen

to a lot of stuff and consume a lot of stuff i would say that um so last year i was able the company put me through this cool program called refforge. The guy who's behind it was the former growth marketing lead at HubSpot, which a lot of people use. And then his partner, Andrew Chin, is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a pretty well-known VC company out of Silicon Valley. So following both of them in general, you're going to learn a lot. There's this guy named, I'm probably going to butcher his name. His name's Gualame.

They call him G. He was the growth marketing manager at Drift. Follow any of his stuff. Listen to as many podcasts from him as you can. And for anybody listening, Drift is a chat. It is. They do a lot of things now, but they started, I believe they started, that's how I know them at least,

is website chat uh kind of really making it more conversational more interesting uh used to just be you know hey you can ask a question and hope you get an answer and I think they've made it a little bit more conversational both in UI and in I guess application yeah so yeah interest I've followed a lot of his stuff interesting it's really cool and drift i got to see him talk at this conference last year and uh one of the coolest things from a growth marketing perspective he was basically at a team a sales team and they're very b2b so they're trying to sell their product to other businesses that might need a chat bot to help with their sales kind of

meta there uh but he actually built a bot that would mimic what the sales team would do physically as a human and he would kind of compete them together and so as the if the bot were to actually get more conversions he would increase the amount of leads that come to the bot versus the sales people um so on growth side you think b2c a lot but um it's interesting like as people are trying to sell a product on their website how can you use you know technology to help with that and he's a he's a pretty smart guy when it comes to that yeah it is funny i um i joked with logan a little bit uh um on you know we're talking about topics for for the podcast and you know i see the the growth marketing you know lobbied about a little bit and i'm like isn't all marketing trying to grow

something i guess i, but I've never understood exactly what the difference between growth marketing and marketing in general, but. Yeah, totally. It's a buzzword for sure. I mean, but at the same time, when you look at the marketing landscape right now, you kind of have your performance marketers, you have your content marketers, you even have just like your media buyers that simply know every place you can buy and they're trying to figure that out as best as possible for a company. But on the growth side, I've learned a little bit about it over the last couple of years, and I think Facebook might have been the first company to kind of build this team,

which started the buzz. Does it just mean you're responsible for sales? Well, maybe the opposite. For me, you can definitely focus on the B2B side. I mean, for us and for gbl today and all the other brands that we operate i'm way more b2c um and i think a lot of people just think of you can call it top of funnel but now they're trying to push loops what they call it so there's like linear channels and there's loops for acquiring customers and i think with

growth it's all about it's thinking holistically about maybe the customer, the subscriber, like what's leading to churn? What's your churn rate? People talk about, it's great, hey, I'm getting all these new leads from whatever channel, maybe Facebook's bringing all these folks in. A growth marketing manager is going to look at the cohort analysis to understand how valuable that channel is because up front, you may get somebody on your site for two cents. What's the value of

that over time yeah lifetime value and you know that's why the funnel went away and then mckinsey's you know customer loop or circle or i don't know the exact i can't remember i use different stuff exactly yeah exactly but it's true though because it doesn't end at purchase it almost begins it's true, though, because it doesn't end at purchase. It almost begins. It's not supposed to. It's not supposed to unless you're selling, I don't know, not to be morbid, but coffins. That's right. I thought about the same thing. Yeah, exactly.

Talk a little bit about day-to-day for you. You know, like, what's the day in the life? Yeah, totally. Well, right now it's been a little messier than normal, I guess, from someone who I try to be as organized as possible, but I kind of manage a little bit of tech support for the company. So I am managing the relationship with one of our agencies in Charleston who manages the website.

Everything's on their server. And so if anything's ever wrong or down or we need to make a change, I'm working with them. I help manage our creative folks. So we have somebody in-house that does all of our creative. So day-to-day for me is basically trying to figure out how is growth, how are we performing, right? So we have all these different channels that we're utilizing and people are coming in and they're working with, they're in the product and we want to learn more

about how they're using the product. And if there is churn, why is there churn? And so I'm kind of analyzing and then coming up with a strategy to say,, fix that or we're going to improve a certain piece today. So I'm doing a lot of analyzing there and trying to come up with a strategy that will fix that and then working a lot on GVL Plus recently. I'm kind of doing that on my own because I feel pretty passionate about it and want it to kind of scale. But that means I've got to go get the partnerships and try to acquire customers. So it's a true test to marketing for sure, what my capabilities are, I suppose.

Do you guys segment your customers at all as far as like within a market? I imagine now that with the Plus product and other things, some of this becomes more relevant. But, you know, you get, relevant. But you have a newsletter product. You've got your subscriber base. Is there any, back to that kind of lifetime value and different ways of looking at customers, are you guys doing much segmentation within that subscriber list? Yeah, that's a good question.

There's a lot that's possible. I would say that I'm analyzing a lot of or is it just so is it just we gotta get more to the top of the i mean you know you guys gotta have so much sometimes you don't have headroom like in a market or like in a industry and it's like that back you know obviously churn's important in any business but like sometimes it's just feeding the top as fast as you can because you've got so much headroom available and i don't and maybe that's more the focus well you bring up an interesting point i would say that because we're so hyper local there may not be as much headroom yeah um greenville and let's just use greenville as an example there's only a finite number of people who live here now we have new people moving here all the time and

that's a whole new marketing thing on its own how do you actually get in front of those people immediately you know um but then there's people leaving town as well i'm sure moving away um so i would say that pouring the top of the funnel is maybe not my first priority um i think you might have mentioned it in one of your other podcasts about um retaining what's already there um i think that if we could retain a higher percentage of people that come in, then you don't need to fill the top of the funnel as fast or as frequently. Um, so as far as back to your question about segmenting, we're always segmenting the ways that people came into the top of the funnel, right? So the, the best growth strategy, in my opinion, that you can get to, here we go. You never know.

It's a good song. I know. That's my Skype thing. Just tell them to leave. No worries. It's all good. Yeah, so of course you're always segmenting where people are coming from at the top of the funnel.

But I think it's understanding where they came in, how they came in, and who sticks around the longest. And so that's a segment of its own, right? What channel you came in. But then there's an activity channel. So immediately, as soon as you subscribe, I've already segmented you based on whether or not you opened the welcome email.

Did you even take an action within the welcome email? A week later, have you opened an email from us in the seven days? So we send daily. So have you opened one? Have you opened five? That's great. You're a power user. What happens after three months? I'm sending you a follow-up campaign to make sure that everything's going well. Maybe a survey involved. Did you take the survey? Now I've got all this interesting data on you because I know how you want to interact with the company or with the brand who you are what makes you tick so all those things are possible um and kind of what we're that's that's I guess how we're segmenting but we're not sending campaigns based on any sort of data and changing the content within your campaign um and a little bit of the reason behind that is

kind of these um what are they calling it on Facebook now, the different, you get in these pockets of information that you can't ever get out of because you don't like certain things. We don't want to let people decide what they like because we want them to be open to anything we can find, even if it's maybe not their interest today. We think it could be of interest to them in the future. And if we let them decide they don't want that, they'll never know about it. So anyway, that's kind of how we're using it currently. Love it. I love it.

What's, if we kind of wrap up, I mean, you know, talk about, we talked about some of the future products, the here products with the Plus. What's the future, like, you know, hold for 6AM City? You know, and you're growing, privately held, you know, where are we headed? Totally. I mean, right now, first and foremost, it's new cities. So next year, we're kind of, we're working towards four, six, eight,

as many as eight. And like I said, we're sticking of we're working towards four six eight as many as eight and uh like i said we're sticking to the southeast so i think that right there in of itself is a big task for us next year that we want to tackle um and i think the team's worked really hard to create a playbook that'll allow that to happen it'll be it'll be fun to um to activate on um but yeah i mean i think you asked a question about is email dying and do we you know what's what's happening within email because there's a lot of people playing in that space and my email is getting full i i don't want to say i don't email is our first distribution method but i think what we do is as a newsletter

and i think there's something about the way that people create content um that email newsletter has become synonymous with but it's really about the way that you're writing and how concise it is and how it flows how it feels and who the writer is behind it um so we try to take out the fluff and just give you what you need and make it fun and so i think we create a newsletter right now but to that question email's working currently i don't think it's off the table that it could live in a different medium in the future. I'm kind of high on, not high on anything, but this beer. I'm talking about one beer. We're playing around a lot with Facebook Messenger and chatbots kind of leaning into that and just the notion that everybody has it on

as a medium for information and for another type of inbox of both content and um we're looking heavy in that and and heavily into text because the text is really opening up as a marketing vehicle people are getting more accepted like you know it's been around for 10 plus years but it was really taboo like nobody wanted you in your tech in their text chain or text box it seems to be loosening up uh is as long as you can send them relevant you know relevancy is context is everything you know that's that's why you know people hate advertising because it's not contextual if you make make it contextual, they suddenly like it.

And so we're playing around in those spaces so I could certainly see those being channels for information and content and other things. So there will always be a place for delivery. So it sounds like you guys are at least staying. I tell people, I have clients all the time, they're always looking for like, they want to go farm somewhere else.

I'm like, dude, let's farm right here. Evil's not dead. Keep sitting on the newsletter. We can still serve a lot of tacos. We don't need to focus on enchiladas yet. No, I get it. I think as bad as this may sound, I feel pretty strongly that folks like to be distracted at work. As long as email is their primary communication and as long as businesses allow emails like ours to come through and others like that,

I think people will continue to subscribe to email products just because it's an easy way to remind yourself. There's not a lot of programs out there, platforms, where you can mark unread and kind of come back to it later. So that's kind of a nice feature. But I'm kind of into this product. It may be a whole different subject, but there's a product called Stoop and a product called Substack. And Substack's making it very easy for people to create email newsletters

just like they are for folks who are doing for podcasts. And Stoop is becoming a platform to house all of those emails or the newsletters rather without having to worry about inbox deliverability or anything like that. So I think if you think about the world of podcasting and how many platforms and networks have been created to house podcasts, there's not really anything that lives yet to house your newsletter. And if something catches on, you no longer really need your inbox anymore. You use that platform and that's your go-to space to consume and deliver newsletter products. Interesting. Yeah. Check those out.

The one thing I do love about email is you don't have to have an app or you're not locked into a platform you know it's just it works it goes to one mailbox you know that's whether it's even if it's gmail or different brands of it you're just you have an email address and it goes there and you're not it's kind of like the problem now sometimes i have some of my friends we message all the time in instagram yeah and then i've got friends that aren't even on Instagram, you know, and it's like, you know, some messaging within, you know, six platforms. There's something about the greatness of email, just being able to jump on and know it goes

without someone having a platform or different things like that. Everybody's got an email. Exactly. Well, Logan, man, really enjoyed having you on. Thanks for having me. Let's do it again. Let's wrap on some of the latest marketing stuff maybe down the road. Sure.

Really, you know, GVL Today is growing in Greenville. It's been a really good part of the community. It's really informative. So if you haven't checked them out, I definitely recommend subscribing. You can find them on all the social channels and online through 6amcity.com. Yeah, gvltoday.com if you're local, but if you're not, we're, like I said, we're in seven cities, so just go to 6amcity.com and you can find all the places that we're living. Logan, where can people follow or keep up with anything that you're into? Yeah, well, I'm pretty heavy on LinkedIn these days, even though maybe that's not preferred channel.

It's growing. Logan Brown on LinkedIn and just Logan B. Brown on Twitter. My Twitter sphere is a little different, but it's fun. A little business, a little sports. I don't know. I love it. Thanks, though. Cool, man.

Well, appreciate Logan being on and really appreciative of the partnership that we've had with GVL today and these guys, and we'll continue to have. Really enjoyed today's podcast. Keep up with everything Radical at Radical.company online. At Radical underscore results on Instagram. We're active there all the time. You can find me at Ryan Alford on Instagram.

That's probably my biggest channel there or LinkedIn. And would love to hear any feedback on the podcast or tips, recommendations, or just if you want to come have a beer here at Camaraderie with Logan and I. Check us out. Thanks.