Jump Satori offers highly experienced senior marketing and operations executives on a fractional basis, providing companies with top-tier expertise at a fraction of the cost.
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of MarketingLego. My name is Harshit. Now, I have Mike with me today. He’s the founder and President at Jump Satori. Let me know if I pronounced it right. He is consulting for offering companies highly experienced senior marketing and operations executives for a fraction of the cost. Plus, they have multiple digital marketing service offerings as well. A big welcome to you, Mike. Happy to have you with me.
Brilliant. Let’s start with your journey, Mike. In the field of marketing, what led you to start your consulting back in 2015?
Yeah, it goes further back to graduating from college with a degree in computer science. I had a first stint selling door-to-door sales, which is always a good experience. But eventually, after a couple of odd jobs, [I] started exploring search advertising. This was very early on. I landed a job at a mortgage company, and we were doing paid ads on Overture. So Google was alive at that time, but it wasn’t big. And then eventually, we were running ads on Google. And then we started doing things like SEO on top of the paid ads. So I’ve been in the game for a long time, over 20 years at this point. That experience lent itself to taking on my freelance clients and eventually joining an agency. From that agency, I was recruited to a company called Quality Smith. Quality Smith did home improvement leads, primarily in HVAC, siding, roofing, and windows. I started in the marketing department. They had just rolled off using the agency for Search, and Search was their biggest channel, so I took it over and pushed PPC and SEO. Eventually, Quality Smith was probably the second or third-largest producer of HVAC leads in the country.
We sold that to a network of 800 contractors that we had developed through our sales team, but we also sold it to all the other big lead as, Service Magic, [which was] then known as HomeAdvisor, [and] then known as Angie’s List today, and other big companies like that. So that was an internal job. I eventually took over that company. We took it to market. We were bought by a company called Reply, which is now known as BuyerLink. They own contractors.com and that’s their big home improvement site. But they did leads across many verticals. I ran paid media for them. We were spending about 2 million a month on Google, to give you an idea of the size. And I also ran the SEO team there as well. I did that for a couple of years. And then a friend asked me to join his agency to help clean up the profitability and take it to market and sell it. And that company, a year later, was bought by a public company. Since that time, which was about 10 years ago, I have been doing this consulting under various names: MW Consulting, my initials, and then CurveLine, and most recently, Jump Satori.
But it’s been 10 years. I call it fractional CMO and CEO today. That’s a name de jure. But it’s been called other things, [like] Growth Consulting, Growth Partner, [etc.]. I think agencies are great. They’re fantastic. This is just a bit of a different approach, this is focused on senior people. So at agencies, a lot of times, you push work to junior people who are overseen by fantastic senior people and you get economies of scale there. For my firm, the focus is on people with 20-plus years of experience working from an executive level. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 10 years.
That’s brilliant. That’s great. I believe in many industries, the market is quite shifting towards having fractional CMO. I would love to understand what’s your main ICPs, your main target industries, and who is the perfect fit for your consultancy?
The number one thing is, I focus on small businesses, and I’m defining that as 500,000 a year in revenue, up to 30 million, to sometimes 50 million, in revenue. That seems to be what works well for me. I’ve worked with much bigger companies and growth companies that are VC backed. The issue there, for those types of companies is, they’re looking for interim help. But if you’ve raised money, you’re not going to say, “Hey, our CMO is fractional. Don’t worry about it, Mr. And Mrs. Investor.” So the companies I work with, they’re longer term. I would say the average length of an engagement is about three years plus. I have clients I’ve worked with for six years plus and ongoing. As far as vertical, pretty agnostic. I do have a couple in the home services space, because of that experience I just talked about. I also work in the auto services space. I used to be a fractional GM of Glass.Net. We took that company into the market. It was purchased by Safelite, and now I work with Glass.Com. So, I have some [experience] in those services space, B2C services space, but I also work with a fantastic company, Piva, in the pet space.
And then I have a couple of B2B clients that are in the medical device and pharmaceutical space, respectively. I definitely would say B2C is a specialty, but plenty of experience in B2B. It’s more about where they are as a company and their journey for the fit. A lot of these companies may have been doing marketing with a founder, and then they grow and they need someone to take over, or maybe their head of marketing left, or maybe they have a junior team and they need a senior person, usually they have some traction, and they’re looking to scale and they want someone with a ton of experience. But, they don’t necessarily want to pay someone a full-time salary that has 20-plus years of experience. For those small businesses, that’s why I’m a good fit and they’ll stick with me. [For] A lot of those clients, I’m one of the longest-tenured people there. I know all the ins and outs of the business, and I truly am a member of the executive team. I just happen to work a little less hours, but I try to have a full-time impact.
Got you. I would love to just have your take on mostly consulting and marketing agencies and niche down into one specific industry, that’s the trend that’s been going on. I’m sure you must have tried multiple things during your journey of building this firm altogether. What’s your take? Whether niching down is the way to go, or going broad is something that works better. What do you feel?
I think for any agency or consultant, niching down is probably the advice I would give, but I’m not necessarily following that advice myself. But I would say I do have a niche a bit in the consumer services space for sure. So I do think there’s a bit of a niche. I also would like to say not all my clients are this way, but I do have a lot of high-touch, high-energy, high-emotion clients. And I’m thick-skinned from the Northeast, and I am used to dealing with intense people. And I love working with intense people. This is a negative way of saying it, maybe not the best way to put it, but I think for businesses to work well, it’s like you’re putting your boot on the neck of the business and you’re pushing. Maybe a nicer way is like you’re helping a friend over a fence and you have to constantly be pushing. So, I love working with executive teams that are constantly pushing. I get bored otherwise. I think for me, I want to rapidly make changes. I want to rapidly test things. I want to rapidly try to move the needle.
So I would say my niche is unique. It’s a bit of consumer service. It’s high-touch, high-energy clients. But I would definitely recommend that consultants and agencies try to find a niche or an angle because it’s so crowded out there, especially in the agency space, especially now in the fractional space. A lot of people are getting laid off from tech jobs, and they have a lot of good experience, and they’re going out and saying they’re fractionals, which they are, and I’m sure they’ll do a fantastic job, but I think it’s just getting very crowded. I do think the world is obviously moving in that direction. COVID sped things up, but the idea that people can work remotely, I work fully remotely. Some of my clients I’ve never even met in person, so I work fully remote. People are used to using things like Upwork and things like that, so they’re used to that fractional thing. So, I do think the world is moving in that direction to use agencies in fractional more, but I think they’re getting crowded. I think the take to have a unique niche or angle or differentiator is important. I’ve also seen people do different things.
They work on one task at a time as a differentiator. They’re just different pricing formats and schemas. So there’s got to be something that makes you stand out.
That does make sense. Can you please tell us a bit more about the service offering? I see on your site there are quite a lot of them. So, can you please describe those? SEO, affiliate, etc
Our engagement usually comes in three flavors. One is agency-like, where I’m managing one specific channel or two. My deep experience would lend itself to being paid search for Google, Microsoft, or SEO. If we’re going to manage channels specifically, those are most likely the channels it would be. But that’s a small portion of my clients. Most of my clients really are a fractional executive-type approach. The two flavors there are I came in and I took over founder as I said, or there was just no one internally really owning marketing, and I’m going to own all channels and develop an integrated marketing strategy cross-channel. I’ll bring in people from the outside that I’ve worked with and agencies I’ve worked with to take over different channels. Like, here’s a PR firm, here’s an SEO firm, here’s a paid one. I might run some of those channels directly, depending on the budget. I might say, “Hey, we’ll bring in a PR firm because that’s not my expertise, but I’m going to run the paid ads.” That’s one flavor. The other flavor is that they did have internal employees and/or agencies, and I’m just taking over, and I’m going to manage those teams as if I’m a full-time person.
I might make changes to the agency or the internal personnel. But first, I’m obviously going to come in and try to work with them. That ideal engagement for me is, where I think I could be the most impactful is, when I am sitting above a team. I’m used to building teams and doing that. I can certainly work with a client, like I said, and be hands-on and in the weeds on the channels. But eventually, we’re going to want to be in a position where I can delegate some of that and touch other channels. Ideally, I’m truly a CMO, and I say COO as well, because a lot of them, we’re going in and, “Hey, I can do this for marketing, but I think we need to change the business or your operations in these various ways.” So, I get pretty involved. For some of my clients, I run all the sales ops. I’m in deep with those clients where, as I said, usually I’m the right-hand person to the CEO in those engagements and running the business alongside them.
Got you. And Mike since your forte has always been the paid ads, as well as a SEO. I would like to understand, how you align the PPC and SEO strategies effectively to enhance the outcome. What are your go-to strategies?
Yeah. So if they’re not already doing either of those, and we’re starting fresh or they’re only doing one of them, what I like to do is lead with paid [ads]. The reason for that is because I can have your paid ads running in 24 hours and have you up at the top of the search results. I think the best keyword research for SEO is running paid ads. So my SEO, I know a lot of SEO folks who like to throw everything at the wall, and we’re going to rank for everything related to this, even though it doesn’t lead to conversions. So, I want to rank for words that are going to lead to conversions, that the client has a product to sell or service to today because I’m focused on ROI. One of the big things I focus on is within three months, I’ve increased the business enough that I’m paying for my fees. One of the best ways for me to do keyword research is to start with keyword research on PPC, run ads, see what drives conversions, and then I know what to focus on with SEO. And as you well know, SEO is a longer-term game.
So I want to make sure I’m focused on the right keywords. Now, if they don’t run paid [ads] and they don’t have the budget for that, and we’re starting with SEO alone, it’s a little bit more difficult. But obviously, you can have your keyword research or standard keyword SEO research, and then try to prioritize the words that you believe to be the best converters. But ideally, I would recommend to people, if they have a little bit of budget, to test your theory. If you’re going to be building links, writing content for these 50 SEO key terms, see if they actually drive business because I’ve seen it way too much where an SEO person or agency comes in, they get rankings, we’re getting a lot of visits, but it’s not people who will ever turn into dollars, and that’s useless for the client.
I think there’s a good hack as well. There’s the same case for the client is, if you don’t have the budget for the paid ads, you can still see what keywords tools and competitors are targeting through paid ads and try to bank on those too through SEO. That’s also one of the ways to study what’s working, and what’s not, right?
Some other people in Autoglass may try to rank for words on every car model out there. And not saying we didn’t do that at phase three, but our main focus was ranking for words that are going to convert. Because if we rank for an Accura Integra, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be someone who’s ready to get their Windshield replaced. So I think that’s a different approach that some SEO folks go after, but some shy away from. They don’t want to go for the big ones. And again, I think you have to consider competition. But you have rank for words that are going to convert.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense as well. Eventually, you might end up ranking for short-tail keywords as well because you’re building that authority in your niche. But it makes perfect sense. At the end of the day, you have to deliver RON which needs to be done quickly. Yeah, makes perfect sense. Now, because you’re working with basically companies scaling from, you just mentioned, 500K to maybe 50 million. I would love to understand how your approach changes concerning SEO, a big versus a small company altogether.
So I do think setting lofty goals is important, but you have to be realistic, and that sets the tone. So if someone is doing 500 grand a year and they want to double it, and I think you can for that type of business, double in the next year, I think we have to be realistic of what’s going to impact that. So SEO is a long-term play. It certainly could impact a thing a year later if we’re planning for next year. But likely, if you’re going to be predicting heavy growth, you’re going to lean more into paid ads while you’re still doing SEO, but understanding that might be impacting year two or three more than the immediate next year, if that makes sense. I think the best business leaders are planning multiple quarters ahead and not just flying by the seat of their pants. So I think that impacts a lot of how you deploy resources against paid versus organic. Organic is the long-term play. Organic, you want to invest in because if it hits, you can grow the business so much. In a lot of the paid campaigns, you may only get an impression share, of 20%, 10%, and sometimes much higher.
But if it’s a competitive term, you might only be getting a 10% share. All of a sudden, you rank in the top three, and you’re getting a 100% share of search, essentially. I’m not ever someone to ignore SEO. All my clients are like, You got to do SEO. If you ignore it, you’re going to kick yourself three years from now. But I do think you have to be realistic in understanding what’s going to impact the next quarter and the next quarter and be real on your projections. That’s what I think about the balance between paid and organic and other channels out there as well.
Got you. And do you plan, also because we just mentioned SEO and the landscape has been changing, Generative AI, all of those things, Google, SGE, Microsoft, Bing have got it. So all of these things happening, do your clients worry about the future of SEO? Or you, as a person, do worry about it. What are the things that have changed? Maybe your approach changed when it comes to optimizing or in fact, just having that generative thing optimization, in mind.
I think there’s going to be opportunities. If more of these AI companies, I’ve heard rumors of ChatGPT search coming out. I know the perplexity of AI is people are more and more. I think there’s time. I think that’s the answer. I’d be lying to say I know what’s going to happen next, but I think there’s time. I think folks like you and I who live this life every day, I’m very active. I’m more from reading, but I do post on Twitter, X, or whatever you want to call it today, you live in a bit of a bubble. I use my parents who are in their 70s as an example. They’re still using Google. They’re not going to complexity AI right now. I think change is coming. I think Google is trying to figure it out because we’ve entered this landscape where I could write 20,000 articles overnight. So the world has changed. Ultimately, the baseline idea of search hasn’t changed. That people are searching for good, unique, true information for whatever they’re searching for. And I don’t know how that’s going to be delivered five years from now. Will It be all through AI, and you might make money by licensing that content to AI?
Will it be still in a search-like format? Will you just be working with ChatGPT and running ads, and then you make money, will there be organic results there? I don’t know. I think stay the course. Don’t do anything crazy. Continue to produce unique content. I would lean into reusing content as much as possible. We record this podcast. We already talked you’re going to cut this up into short segments for people to consume in different ways. You’re probably going to make a transcript of this and make content out of it. So I think lean into that stuff, lean into experiences. So like we talked about my Autoglass client, not just writing an article about a specific thing in Autoglass, but can we shoot a video? Can we go to one of the shops we work with and have a video experience of that? So I think you have to think of it that way. What can make you unique and stand out? But I think people are lying if they’re saying, I know ABC is going to happen because Google doesn’t even know what’s going to happen. And it is a weird world we live in where Google is becoming more weary of AI content.
They said it’s okay if it’s unique, but they also have Bard, which produces AI content. So it’s a weird world right now. You’ve seen the trend where user-generated content sites like Reddit and Quora have moved up a lot in the searches, which I get because they’re saying these are real people, but I also don’t get it because half of that stuff is not factually accurate when someone posts something I read in Quora. So Google is struggling with this right now. Some great sites have lost a ton of traffic with these Google updates. I think there will be balance at some point, but we’re not there. We’re in the middle of this very tumultuous period in SEO. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be investing in it, but they should be really careful about how they’re doing that, and make sure they’re following Google’s guidelines. And I know sometimes Google rewards people who don’t follow their guidelines, but they’ll correct it. It will get there. So put out good content, get good organic links, and ride this wave out a little bit. But don’t be too scared. People are still going to need information. I think paid search and organic search will have a place in the future.
I don’t know in what format exactly.
Got you. My current question is do you take any measures just when you’re doing content optimization for your clients? Any measures, like having that generative engine optimization in mind, just to be the favorite of these AI-based search engines altogether? Maybe it could be just taking care of the NLP altogether or something, some pointers. Or is it something that you still waiting for and then moving forward?
I think that was some of our thinking behind the key takeaways and FAQs on almost every content we do for some of our clients.
That’s brilliant. I would love to, because I do see a mention of link building on your site as well. I would love to understand how do you do when it comes to your link-building strategy for any one of your clients? Like what are the basics of it. The other thing would be, what are the quality parameters that you look after while approaching any site for a guest post, or could be a link insertion or getting a mention or a sticker? What are those quality parameters that you seek?
I do have assistants who help with our reporting and stuff, and I guess we could have them outreach for link building. I don’t think that’s an efficient use of our time when there are companies that do that all the time. But I have tried, in my career, probably around 100 different link-building companies. And so I have my favorites that I trust and we know how to communicate with each other and agree on what those quality factors may be. The true answer is I outsource a lot of it, but we keep a very close eye on it and we give them very clear guidelines. But we look for qualty, and relevancy. We want to make sure that their whole site isn’t littered with just link-building articles. That’s not the main way they make money, which on some sites, they sell links to. I ran a parenting blog and I made all my money by selling links, so I’ve been on the other side of it. But we want to make sure that they are offering their services and products, too. It’s not always perfect, but those are the preferences that we give to our partners.
That’s brilliant. I would love to know. I’m sure you must be doing this PR as well. You do have some of the SaaS clients also on board with you. What are you doing much more of a content syndication for them? How exactly did it overlaps with the rest of your efforts?
It’s more just us doing the work, our team.
Are you also, for any one of your clients, maybe leveraging Hello, Helper, Reporter, or such platform to maybe secure high authority, mentioned on basically high authority sites and stuff?
Typically, it was well for the B2B space compared to B2C, but yeah, I know.
What are the main SEO KPIs that you look into? To make informed marketing decisions.
We keep a close eye on things like visitors and rankings and number of links and things like that. But I think of those as contributing metrics, not the main metric.
Got you. Now you have the mindset of a brand, an agency, altogether, because whenever I talk to agency owners, ranking are the number one thing and tons of other things. But yeah, I get it.
Yeah. It makes sense. How’s being intrigued by your affiliate marketing mention on your side? Another top to understand is how exactly affiliate marketing management service, is going to be approached?
If it’s an e-commerce site, you might do a percentage of a sale. The affiliate gets most of that. ShareASale takes a small piece. So that is a very risk-free way. I think it’s 600 bucks, something like that to get started on share a sale. And then there’s a very small monthly $25 fee if you don’t generate X number of sales. And then it’s whatever you agree. So there’s no risk, “Hey, I’m going to invest 100,000 in Google and no guarantee I’m going to get a return on that, or I’m going to put 100,000 into SEO work.” With the affiliate stuff, it’s very low risk, and it’s a good way to get started. But obviously, those direct relationships with bigger players are the more valuable ones, but it takes time. They don’t want to work with the smallest person in the room. So you have to understand what’s going to work for you, and then you have to have a big enough business that you guys can form some partnership. In the lead business, in my former life working strictly in the lead business, we thought about affiliate networks, and then we also thought about publishers.
Publishers are essentially direct relationships, but big companies. So maybe it was a media company that had a lot of home services, traffic, and things like that. But those were more direct. We had people who ran just those publisher relationships, and we had separate people who just ran the affiliate networks. But for my clients, we keep it simple. We’ll start with a ShareASale. We’ll go to other affiliate networks, and from there, we’ll try to get direct relationships. I love it. I think, again, it’s going to be one of your most cost-effective, least risky ways of starting to get some inbound traffic and some conversions.
Any best specific tool that you use to manage the affiliate platforms that you get on loan for any of your clients? Because I’m sure most of the companies that you work with, that’s small to mid-size, might not have their in-house tool to manage the affiliate partners.
Interesting. Do you influence your marketing as well for any of your clients?
We already know what their rates are and how to work with them, and we already have those relationships. So I think you can go out and source your own. There are tools to source your own. But if you’re not an expert, I think the influencer agencies, if you have the funds to pay for an influencer agency, are really helpful because they’re experts at dealing with these people and negotiating I understand.
For sure. But then again, your idea of having ROI because you prioritize that, everything else, and branding’s tough. You understand that.
And I think it will play into it more as Google will better dial in the algorithm to take into account the brand. Again, my background is more performance than brand, and I’ve done plenty of brand marketing in my life, but I think it’s becoming more intertwined than ever with the changes we’re seeing in the marketing landscape.
Mike, let’s talk about you. You were named Portland’s Boss of the Year quite some time back, but I would love to understand what leadership principles or practices you believe contributed to this recognition?
When I was running internal teams, if we were going to have a team-building exercise, I tried to make it during the day as much as possible. I think little things like that, it’s not a big deal, but I don’t want people to take away from their personal life. Now, if we were going to have a really fun Christmas party at night, I think that’s a different thing. But we tried to keep work to work. I’ve always said to my teams, that when I worked in an office, I had teams, if they needed to go out and run an errand, I think I was ahead of the curve. I was like, Go out. You got a doctor’s appointment. You have to take care of it. I don’t care. I trust you to get your work done, and you’re going to hear from me if you don’t get your work done. You got to take a personal phone call. Just walk out and do it. I don’t care. I want to work with adults who are mature enough to get their work done. I think I look for that in hiring. If you can create that environment where everyone knows they’re going to get their stuff done, and then if they don’t get their stuff done, they’re going to get talked to, put on a performance improvement plan, and eventually be showing the door.
People respect that. I don’t think you have to be a jerk about it, but give people as much freedom to live their lives, work hard, and deliver. I don’t want to be a micromanager. I think those are my principles about it. I think to keep working, and let people handle life. Sometimes you have to handle life during the day. Sometimes you have personal stuff going on. If people are going to get their work done, I don’t care. Go do what you need to do. All that dough feeds back into what we talked about earlier: having projections, having a plan, and knowing what goals we have to hit. If you don’t know what goal you’re contributing towards, that’s a problem, and I’m doing my job as a manager. If you don’t know what you have to accomplish this month or this day, which leads into this week, which leads into this month, which leads into this quarter, which leads into this year, if you don’t understand that, then we need to have a conversation. So I think, again, if they know what they have to do to contribute and they stay on that plan, that’s great.
And I do believe when we put out plans and projections, I let every team member have a say in that. Do you agree with this number? Because you can’t hold someone accountable for something that they think is completely out of whack. We force them, yeah. Yeah. If my plan has this growing 400% this quarter or this year, that’s your segment of the company. That’s your organization within the company. And you’re like, Mike’s crazy. I think we’d be lucky to grow 50%. We’re not going to grow 400%. So I think that buy-in, you have to have buy-in. Okay, you think it’s 50, I think it’s 400. Let’s sit down. Let me show you my thinking. You share mine. Let’s agree on a number. And when we work out of it, that’s great. We agreed on a number. I’m going to hold you accountable to that number. I believe in all that is saying is I believe that people are mature enough that you can give them that independence if there’s a plan, and you can let them run with that, let them have fun with things, let them try things as long as they’re within budget and plan.
And it’s very easy then to say, have conversations, the tough conversations when they fall out of that plan. “Hey, Bob, you agreed to this plan. You’re falling behind it. How can I help you?” That’s the early conversation. But the conversation could get tougher from there. Maybe it has nothing to do with Bob. It’s not his fault. Something went wrong in manufacturing or the engineering team didn’t ship fast enough. But I think you have to have a plan and hold people accountable and let them have the freedom around that.
Makes sense. Mike, we’re coming to an end here. Let’s have a fun quick rapid-fire session. Are you ready for that?
If you had one social media platform for the rest of your life, what would it be?
All right. What’s the most bizarre marketing tactic you have ever seen work successfully?
Okay. And what’s the weirdest place you have come up with a brilliant marketing idea?
That’s great. If you could magically increase one of your, say, let’s pick SaaS, client’s marketing budget tenfold, what would be the first thing that you would do with that extra funds?
I’m certainly not an expert at that. I’m learning as I go, but I would put a lot into video.
My very last question, what’s your last Google search?
All right, Michael. I learned a lot of things from your experience. I’m sure my audience will appreciate this. Thank you so much,. I appreciate your time here with me.