EP352: Stand Out From The Crowd With Persona-Driven Marketing With Eric Holtzclaw

Stacy Jones | May 24, 2023 at 10:00 AM

Time To Stand Out From A Crowd

Think about your brand. How can you successfully revolutionize it to where you know your identity and are able to elevate your message to stand out in front of the crowd?

Hollywood Branded's Founder and CEO, Stacy Jones, got to sit down with Eric Holtzclaw, Chief Strategist of Liger Partners, to unravel the truth of the world of marketing and what steps to take to transform and help your brand to reach its full potential. In this blog, Hollywood Branded shares highlights from the interview on how businesses can find their own identity and develop unique personalities that enable them to stand out.

ep352

A Little More About Eric

Liger Partners is a full-service marketing firm focused on guiding businesses to find their identities and core values, craft their visions, and establish their brands. Eric's startups have included one of the first profitable internet enterprises and a company that appeared on the Inc. 5000, the Fastest-Growing Private Software Companies, three years in a row.

As an author, he has contributed to magazines and online publications, one being his book, Laddering, which unlocks the potential of consumer behaviors. He's also a host, of the Cloud podcast, where he interviews business owners and entrepreneurs to discuss their insights and expertise.

Interview Transcript Highlights

Stacy: First of all, I love the fact that your company's name is Liger. Can you explain where that is and what is that?!

Eric: Liger is a combination of a lion and a tiger. From the movie, Napoleon Dynamite, that is his favorite animal. And so, essentially we are named after Napoleon Dynamite. We have a lot of Napoleon dynamite isms within the company. One of our conference rooms is named tater and the other is tots because he loves tater tots. If you work for the company, you would see a lot of Napoleon Dynamite in here!

But we formed this company by combining two companies. One company that did strategy and then the other that did execution. And when we were bringing those companies together, it being a marketing firm, we wanted something that stood out and was a little bit of fun and so someone mentioned Liger from the movie Napoleon Dynamite, a movie that you either love or hate and with that being marketing anyways, we thought that would be the perfect name to use.

Stacy: When you're working with a new company, how do you peel back those onion layers of figuring out where to dive in and get started with identity? And where do you need to actually build that framework of technology and marketing?

Eric: That is a good way of looking at it. First, we want to come up with what their identity is and what their authentic identity is. That doesn't mean they can't be aspirational. But, you have to start with where they are.

You have a lot of companies that say " Oh, I want to be this thing!" But they're not that today. So how do we get them to really own and understand who they are and embrace it?

We have a proven process that we take them through that is very similar to them going through an M.A. process and emerging acquisition. We send them a list of things that we want like: Who your best customers are? What does your sales look like? And from there, we dig beneath and peel the onion back and just understand the business to its core.

Stacy: You're helping the brand because you are smart enough to figure it out! What do you do next? You've gotten dirty. You've gotten their information again. You're figuring out the technology. You're figuring out the marketing side. Where do you encourage them to go?

Eric: I mean it really depends. The answer is in consulting. So we're looking at the marketing ecosystem overall and making sure they have the cornerstone pieces in place.

Is their website functioning correctly? Is it a magazine, not a brochure? Can we really pull people there? Because you do all this marketing, and if you don't have good endpoints for people to show up, you truly don't have ways of measuring it and at the end of the day, it is just sort of fluff, and you not going to be successful with it.

So I look at it. I feel like I'm a housebuilder. I'm looking at the house like does it need to be renovated? Do we need to tear it down from the to the studs and start back over? To be able to build all the right things, so the systems are in place. They're modernized. They allow us the flexibility to pivot. So when something does happen, what do those things look like and can I fix it?

Then we're putting the boring calendar in place. So this is what's gonna happen over the twelve next months. Here are the lightning events of things that we want to hit. In reality, we are really going to kind of snowball to the lightning events and make sure the brand is in front of people and they are seeing it as something that is a big deal.

" What can you do today that yourself is going to thank you for?"

- Eric Holtzclaw, Chief Strategists of Liger Partners

Stacy: Here is the true glory of your love of pop culture, because we should talk about all your boring B2B that you're talking about because Breaking Bad, that meth lab needed actual real equipment!! It needed real B2B usage. You know, when you're watching Driving Miss Daisy, when you're watching Thelma and Louise, which is really what I was going for right there, and she hits the car, and you need insurance!! There's your insurance plug. All you have to do is name-drop at that time, so you can make B2B sexy.

Eric: Well, our mission statement at our company is saving the world from boring broken marketing. B2B Marketing is either boring or it's broken, or it's both. Right! And it doesn't have to be. That is the thing. Marketing doesn't have to be like that.

Tune In!

This is just a sneak peek of the insights Eric shares about how to help brands stand out from the crowd with persona-driven marketing. To learn more, check out the podcast below!

Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:

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