One Agency, Full Spectrum:
What the eMa + JET Merger Means for Your Marketing

Courtney Kehl: Yay! Okay, I love it. Thank y’all for joining. Bear with me while I get the slide. It’s, kind of… working out of a straw right now with my laptop. Great. Well, thank you for joining us wherever you are in the world. One agency, Full Spectrum, and we’re here to just talk about bringing two companies together and how that really, what the benefit is for your… for you guys, for… for those of… those of you that work with us. Tongue tied. We’re just gonna go through our hosts, of course, myself and Lisa. We’ll do a quick introduction there, and then just really what happened when bringing these two companies together, and what that means, of course, for you in today’s state of marketing, today’s world with AI, and how we can be full spectrum to make sure that you have all the support you need. So there’s certainly some takeaways there, and I really want to dive into some live Q&A. Encourage you to enter Q&A, any questions now, throughout, anything that comes up, and then we’ll kind of recap on what your takeaways are. So, with that, let’s meet Lisa. Lisa, do you want to introduce yourself?

Lisa Moline: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Courtney. My name’s Lisa Moline. I am the VP of Marketing with JET Advertising and Expert Marketing Advisors. I’ve been in the marketing realm for about I don’t even know now, 18 years or so, and I’m really excited about this next step forward with eMa and, coming together with JET.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, this last month has been really fun. I’m obviously the founder of Expert Marketing Advisors 10 years in, and really looking to continue the growth, at a whole new accelerated rate, over the next couple… couple years. So what does this mean? Expert Marketing Advisors, we are primarily focused on B2B tech companies. We’re full service, end-to-end. Our background really goes back all the way to the late, like, some of us, the late 90s, so we’re really dating ourselves. But we have seen all of it. We’ve seen tech through all the different formations and… before cloud and on-prem, now, of course, we’re in the AI era, and what that looks like and what that means. And then… and then, Lisa, maybe you can kind of give us the overview on JET.

Lisa Moline: Yeah, absolutely. It’s kind of the same story for us at JET, except on the B2C side. So we have the experience to have been around from before Twitter started, before Facebook was a thing for anybody but college kids, and so we’ve kind of grown in the marketing aspects of all of those things. So we have the experience in everything traditional, from TV, radio, print, direct mail, trade shows, all of that, but then we also have the experience on the digital side with the websites using local SEO and how that’s different than trying to target customers Nationwide, as well as the paid aspect of any type of the digital advertising, from social media to, search engine, paid advertising, and why that’s important to kind of integrate both. With your marketing plan.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, yeah, and I think there’s a lot of overlap there between, obviously, the two companies now being one. It really just allows us to have that deeper expertise, more channels to be creative with. We are seeing a lot of the consumer businesses have so much personality, and we’re seeing that actually coming across on the tech side as well, in the era of personalization. Okay, so… oops, I’m on the wrong… there we go. Bear with me. Why does this matter? I’m gonna throw this back over to you, Lisa.

Lisa Moline: Absolutely. It matters, especially for the customer journey, that our clients start to realize that there’s not going to be just one way to reach people now. We have, and what we’re seeing is that people are experiencing the steps of, I’m going to go on and search for whatever it is I need, and they’re then faced automatically with AI answers. And so, we’ve been making that adjustment to be able to have our customers come… our clients to show up in those AI answers, and then what happens in the handoff process? We don’t want anything to be disconnected. We don’t want to drop the ball in any way, or that handoff between the AI answers to things like social channels, and even offline when it comes to, like I mentioned before, that traditional marketing, and then all of that eventually translates into sales.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, it’s very much the right hand needs to talk to the left hand, and I think a good point there, the offline piece, needing to take that into account when we go across all the different channels and campaigns that are not just digital marketing, there’s also this component that’s more physical. Which is a… we’re seeing as a big opportunity. People really want to bring the human piece back, certainly now that we’re in this AI area… era, we call it human in the loop. Cool, okay, so I think I… Keep losing my little… there we go. Okay, the market reality. So, today in the world, we’ll just double down on this, what we’re seeing and how things are kind of being reshaped. It’s… it’s… I will say there’s, yes, the buying committees, there’s more… more folks deciding… making decisions, there’s the AI component, which is… is the newest curveball, of course. And then the ROI, I think the pressure is really amplified, because of, obviously, inflation and just how much more things cost every single year. So everything that we do certainly needs to tie back to… I say we all work for sales. It all needs to tie back to that pipeline and the closed revenue. So Lisa, what are some of the thoughts around where the market’s sitting today?

Lisa Moline: We are definitely seeing, like you said, those… just more people making decisions, even from small businesses, local businesses, to the bigger tech clients that everybody is weighing in. Excuse me. And they are… we’re trying to find, just different ways to reach people, and to sometimes be the first person to reach those people, or to be the most memorable. We have seen the drive for just being discovered through AI and making sure that your marketing channels are being read by AI, being indexed by AI, and becoming part of that reality. Like, it’s not going away, and it’s something that you can’t function without it, you can’t pretend it’s not there. You definitely have to address it, and so I think that, trying to guide clients and customers to that realization and understand that there is a process behind it, and that there is a way to do it correctly, do it so that you’re not being seen as AI, because that’s the funny thing, right? Like, AI recognizes AI and realizes that it’s not a real person, it’s not a real thing coming out. So that’s something that we try to convey to our clients. And then, of course, that pressure to just make sure that every dollar that you’re spending on your marketing is coming back to you in some way, and hopefully in multiples, right? Two, three-fold on that return on investment.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, yeah, I think one of the things out of what you’re saying there with the AI-driven discovery piece, it’s, if you’re not using it, you need to lean into it type of conversation. But one thing I’m seeing here is just that you need to be on a part of that answer, and I think there’s a lot of opportunity for local businesses to show up in people’s searches and people’s queries that they do. Certainly, what’s the best pizza place near me? And that’s where there’s a lot of opportunity around making sure that visibility’s there. Cool. So, obviously, buyers don’t live in one, one channel. We do find that the buyer journey is very, it’s not just a straight line, it’s not linear, it’s a… kind of comes in from all different directions. So with that, we certainly bring why now for eMa and JET to be stronger together is actually even more pertinent for us to make sure that you’re not splitting across separate pro… separate departments, separate teams, separate agencies, separate… We really like the idea of working with, all just one team under one umbrella, that right hand talking to the left. So it’s… not as siloed. What does that mean? What does it look like for our teams combined in all of the different areas? Over to you, Lisa.

Lisa Moline: Yeah, absolutely. So basically, anything that you can imagine, that’s needing to be a part of your marketing plan, and probably some things that you don’t know, that need to be a part of your marketing plan, can all be accessed under this one agency. So we have that combined toolkit of strategy and brand, getting out there your name and what you should be putting yourself out there as, all the way through to then translating that into the digital and search realm so that people are actually finding you. So that people are actually able to purchase your product, purchase your service, interact, and become that client in the digital realm. Website development, social media, we cover all of that. And then shifting over to the traditional side as well, like we mentioned, that offline piece, though it’s not as prominent as it used to be, it’s definitely something that shouldn’t be ignored or shouldn’t be left out of a marketing plan. And then, I think the biggest thing, in terms of the expansion opportunity available for JET clients and people that are coming from that realm is the pipeline and operations. We have now, working with eMa, a bigger capability to just, offer those services in which we can be that exact lift and shift, like, you don’t have to worry about managing your CRM because we can do it, because we can make sure that your public relations is on point, and that your tech stack makes sense, and that you’re not overlapping the different things that you need to run your business. And I think that piece is going to be huge moving forward.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, I would absolutely agree. In fact, just this last week in talking with one of the local businesses here, there were all these different, oh, I’ve got this, I’ve got this, I’ve got that, and if you take a closer look, there’s a lot of overlap, and rather than, so bringing that together into one consolidated tech stack is really a specialty of ours, and it’s important to queue these, cue the conversions and cue the activity up, like, basically on a silver platter, so that the business owner can focus on the business, and we make sure… All the inquiries and customers and clients and opportunities, are… are right in front of you at all the right times. Sometimes we’ve seen where it just kind of goes into a deep, dark hole, and we’re like, okay, if we don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes and in your plumbing, then it’s hard to do the external without really tying that back to actual pipeline and ROI. So how do we work together? I’m gonna also hunt this over to you, Lisa.

Lisa Moline: Yeah, that’s fine, absolutely. Like, it’s the running theme, right? It’s one connected plan. So we have the ability to set those things, those goals from the beginning, determine the audience that’s necessary for the marketing plan to reach, and then that translates to all the other things. So design, how you are integrating all of those different strategies, whether it’s your brand, whether it’s your marketing plan in paid advertising, and the digital realm, and then after that’s all set up and going, then it’s activated, and we’ve got those campaigns that are being monitored for the results necessary and adjusted, and then taking those measurements that we’re seeing and creating that, those engagements, those leads, and translating into the pipeline. And so, all of that being connected under one agency is gonna be the best way to measure Or to achieve the success that you’re looking for, and not have those gaps, or anybody dropping the ball in any situation.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, yeah, definitely more streamlined. And again, the experience goes way back. So we know, of course, coming around the corner is November and Black Friday, although it’s not Black Friday anymore in its own way, but it’s retailer season, and we’re going into that, if we’re… if we’re not already thinking about it, we’re too late. So, there’s certain things that are definitely part of industry, sort of know-how. At the beginning of the year, there’s other things that happen around, like, sports, and March Madness, and other… and so it’s the… bringing that all together across your campaigns, and then, of course, with your look and feel, and the design side, and then, full circle to actual audience and engagement. Great. So client experience. What stays steady? What expands? Okay, so over to you again, Lisa.

Lisa Moline: Again, this is… the most change that we’re going to be seeing is more opportunities. The continuity between the clients and their customer service managers, their account executives, that’s going to stay the same. All of the same people have remained with JET to be that contact point to all of the people that we’ve been working with for years and years. And then it just gives us… working with eMa and being partnered with them is giving us that more opportunity to just expand on our capabilities. So, when you have an idea to do something, we’re able to say, absolutely, we can do that, and turn to a number of different people to help that situation, or to help that come to fruition. We are able to lean into the experts at eMa for things like demand generation and sales enablement, as well as doing things like events. That’s something that, as a smaller team at JET, we didn’t necessarily have the capabilities to function as running a whole event for you and doing that, but now we do. And we have the expertise to then translate that across your marketing platform. So, it’s just a lot of different ways to increase your presence in the marketing world, as well as get those… that same service that you’ve been used to.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, I think that that’s 100%, and the creativity that’s coming across now is, we’re seeing that more so, or even more, and that stands out. So I’ve got a vanity slide here, certainly, like, I always bring things back to numbers. That’s the demand gen and the sales side of me, but, just collectively, we have supported well over 200 customers. I would actually say it’s probably close to 300. But I wanted to be modest there. And, 18 years, so 18 plus years, this is… we live and breathe marketing, and have seen it all, and all the different trends. Again, AI is kind of a cool new one, or newish. We also really focus on helping companies increase their valuation. Which of course, the more sales you have, and the tighter your operations are, the more margin… the better your margins, and actually the value of your company. It’s like real estate. And with that in mind, we’ve also helped companies through exits when they get acquired by other folks. We help with the integrations. We’ve done two acquisitions of our own, so I kind of felt like, well, if we’re going to sell the house eventually, we need to buy a house first in order to sell a house. In the same sort of, same sort of methodology there, or mindset. The 15 support areas, I will say that’s also modest, because that’s our core competency, but we do have sort of these outliers that come across, and we are able to say yes because we lean in so much with partners. I’m a big, big advocate of partnerships. So our network is certainly deep enough that if we don’t have the expertise in-house, we certainly have the ability in finding the right people for you. Great, so what does this mean for you?

Lisa Moline: Absolutely, I can… we can jump in here. So, again, this is… it’s kind of the… kind of a repeat, right? But just to… to bring to the forefront some of these things is that we are connecting the brand to the pipeline. So it’s, your customer engagement, what does that mean? What does that look like, how are… are things being targeted and translated to them, and meeting them where they’re at. So we’re looking at hitting all of those different avenues and having you be searchable everywhere. So, especially for local businesses, we want to make sure that when somebody types in, like you mentioned before, glass repair near me, I want to be able to say that my client comes up at the top of the list because of the steps that we’ve taken. And we have a large, experts, a large range of experts that know how to make that happen. And that supports the market presence, then, across not just the digital realm, like I mentioned before, where we have the TV, radio, print, all of those things. And then we are also able to offer that better measurement from those things. So, we have ways that even if you’re sending a direct mail piece, how can we come up with ideas to measure how effective that piece is? Because everything that you do in your marketing plan, we want to be able to say, this is the benefit from it. Here’s where you have generated X amount of leads, more interactions with people, impressions, etc. And then in terms of the creativity scale and reaching those new audiences, we are able to extend those campaigns, whether it’s, you need somebody on hand to take some videos and put together some reels for Facebook and Instagram, or come up with, what was the real cool video that we just did with the, the wrapping, with the two, the two people from the company. It was just fun.

Courtney Kehl: Generation. Yeah.

Lisa Moline: And so that creativity scale has increased, I think, tenfold when it’s the two companies coming together. And I think that we’ve given everybody just the opportunity to reach those new audiences in new ways.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, yeah. Ultimately, for each client and each customer, we can be that end-to-end with a tremendous amount of confidence, and we’ve got the experience and background to pull in all the right components, because what’s happening with one industry is likely happening in others, and we just kind of make those comparisons and know when to be where, basically. And I do like to say what’s old is new again, because the physical events and the direct mail, TV, those are… those are back, and we can certainly target certain areas, certain regions. If we know that there’s a trade show that has a high, propensity towards security guys, or what have you, and so we can certainly make sure we… those guys are getting all the campaigns and all the ads, and the… Just getting that larger reach. Sorry.

Lisa Moline: Yeah, the streaming platforms make that so much easier, too, to be able to target exactly who it is that you want to show things to.

Courtney Kehl: There we go. Well said. Okay, so the role of AI. It’s a topic that is pretty much every day. It’s almost exhausting, but at the same time, you gotta lean in, and we certainly leverage AI to move faster, be more efficient. Every now and then, we find ourselves trying to put something together, and I’m like, hold on, why haven’t we asked AI this yet, or why haven’t we ran this through one of our agents? So yeah, just with that, we bring a lot of that to the table. Anything else on this one?

Lisa Moline: Just that, not to be afraid of it, and that we always, we always integrate the human piece to it, right? So if we are running something through AI, we’re… we’re looking at it ourselves, we’re checking on what it’s giving back to us to make sure that it makes sense for the client, for ourselves, as JET and eMa as well.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, yeah, and definitely, I mean, we have witnessed the AI slop, and once you kind of witnessed AI slop, you, now you’re always like, okay, hold on, let’s… let’s make sure this is really what we need and what we asked. Yeah. Great, so it’s coordination. It’s a coordination across a larger team, highly focused, all experts, with a tremendous amount of skill and background experience. These are not junior experts, these are not junior marketers. So yeah, that’s… that’s kind of the takeaway there from our point of view. I know we’re maybe, might be a little biased. I might think we’re the best. So, where could this marketing work harder for you? What opportunities would make the biggest difference for you? What do you think, Lisa?

Lisa Moline: I think that definitely that these are questions that anybody in business should be asking themselves, and so, to take that second and say, what opportunity is going to help my organization, what’s going to help me grow, where are some areas that I can relinquish some of the things that I’m doing to be able to become more effective? We always… as business owners and people who are… have the entrepreneurial spirit, right, you feel like you can do everything yourself, and you can get it done, and it makes more sense, and it costs less, and blah blah blah, but what you don’t necessarily take the time to think about is, how valuable is my time? Because if you’re sitting there, and you’re creating a page for your website, or setting up your Google search ads, or your Facebook marketing ads. You are using your time, and yet you could be out there making a sale worth 3 times of what it’s gonna save you to set that all up yourself. And so, I think that it’s really important for our clients to ask themselves that question, because where can you use the help to reach more of the right buyers, improve your measurements, and again, that big piece of AI, improving your AI search visibility, because it’s not as straightforward as you might think, and the time it takes to understand it, you could be leaning on us as the experts to do it for you and more efficiently. So being that end-to-end marketing that we can provide for our clients is something that is pretty valuable.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, I think… I think these are absolutely the right questions to be asking yourself as a business owner and as a, somebody that’s looking at revenue and pipeline as a priority, and their KPIs, their key performance indicators. Yeah, but it’s not a good use of… how many times have I seen this? Where it’s just not a good use of somebody’s time to be sitting there working out the operations in the CRM or the website, when we have folks that literally do this all day, every day, and across multiple different instances, so they can execute at a much higher level, and of course, apply best practices and make really educated recommendations. Anyways… Over to live Q&A. Let me navigate here, bear with me. And see what questions have come in. We’ve got… What are your biggest marketing priorities right now? Well, Lisa, that’s a good question for the VP of Marketing.

Lisa Moline: Absolutely. I mean, right now, we’re, like we’ve mentioned a million times now, that we are looking to see how, becoming visible in AI and coming up in those searches, what we can do for clients to make that happen, because, it’s being… we’re not… we don’t have a choice, right? It’s being done for us. Anytime you’re looking for something, you’re getting those AI results. And so it’s just… for us, it’s just staying on top of the trends and the things that are happening, so that our practices are the best practices and are the most up-to-date.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, yeah, I would say the other piece, that goes back to a little bit more traditional is just really refining our playbooks, in a way that we can then scale even more efficiently, and scale not across just one audience, but the multiple audiences, and at the right times, and just having that repeatable playbook, and that’s been tried and true and tested. Proven. How do you currently measure the impact of your marketing efforts on pipeline and revenue? Well, that’s not a straightforward answer, but…

Lisa Moline: Not, is it?

Courtney Kehl: Because I think you measure everything at the end of the day, like, I mean, go ahead, go ahead.

Lisa Moline: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I think that’s where sometimes a lot of the myths lie, right? Because if I’m spending money on something that isn’t necessarily generating the return on investment in and of itself, but is more of a back… back way to it. So, for example, when we’re talking about that operations piece, if I’m investing in somebody managing my CRM, of course that specific task of managing the CRM isn’t what’s getting me the revenue. It’s the fact that I don’t have to do it, that it’s clean and it’s usable and productive, and then I can use it for sales, and then I’m the one who’s going out and getting that revenue. So it’s, keeping an eye on those sorts of pieces is, it takes you to the next level in business. Of course, I can measure how many times somebody interacted with my Facebook post, or on LinkedIn, or things like that, or how many times I got a conversion in my store, my e-commerce store, and sold a product. Those pieces are extremely measurable and straightforward. But it’s looking at the more behind-the-scenes way of measuring things. How much time did I free up to give my salesperson what they needed? How well did I construct the tools to be able to tell my story, to sell my brand, those sorts of things, and that return on investment is not as directly measurable, but it’s definitely an important piece.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, I would say that we always had more information than ever before, and so we can piece together all the data points. Ultimately, I will always steer folks toward what this means for revenue, and what does this mean for your cost per acquisition, or cost per customer. And cost per lead, those types of things. And then does that translate to better margins? And increases the value of your actual company. So I kind of kind of bring it to, like, what are the big things? And then there’s all the little levers that will impact the big things, but let’s look at those big things and see what can be tightened up, and are we going in the right direction.

Lisa Moline: Well, and I think it’s important to get that other viewpoint into the perspective as well, because, like, when you’re in the thick of it, right, you can’t see the forest through the trees type of deal, where, somebody, if we’re coming in, we’re taking a look at your operations, or taking a look at your marketing plan, we’re able to say from a perspective, like, hey, this is where there’s a downfall, or this is where it’s sucking money that you should be putting someplace else, and I think that would absolutely be more beneficial.

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, yeah, it’s a good exercise. We actually have our quarterly business review tomorrow with our CPAs, and I’m going to say it’s probably the first time in a while I’m a little nervous, but it just keeps us honest and keeps us, again, trending in the right directions and paying attention to all the different pieces. So, great! Let me go forward, and if anybody has questions afterwards, you know where to reach out. We’re coming to Chicago, so if you’re in Chicago, I’d love to meet you. I mean, obviously we already have a presence in Chicago, we’re global, but I will be there hoping, shaking hands and getting the lay of the land. I love Chicago. Okay, I sidetracked. Key takeaways.

Lisa Moline: I mean, I think we hit on this quite a bit. I mean, there’s just the broader experience, right? If you want to do something in your marketing plan, we can execute it for you. That’s the bottom line. And then having that connected execution over all the platforms, using our network of experts to execute that. And then also, our thoughtful transition on how we’re going to move forward as saying JET and Expert Marketing Advisors is a mouthful, so what do we look like moving forward into 2027 and having our own focus on accountability and moving our brand into the best position to help you?

Courtney Kehl: Yeah, yeah, I will say that we are being very, methodical about that transition, and also putting a lot of space to just kind of let some of the organic transition take place as well. So it is really, intent around not being… not forcing something. So that is probably, definitely a 20… Great. Well, that brings us to the end. I put our contact information there. You can actually click on the link, too, and that’ll take us to our… to the Calendly and the scheduler. We also have our next… Cadence, our playbook. We also have our next webinar coming around the corner. One playbook, double the impact. So really where we can identify those, opportunities to scale and make things repeatable. So I just wanted to plug that. Reach out again, we’re here, and I love talking shop. So let’s dig in. Great. Anything on your end, Lisa, as we’re closing out?

Lisa Moline: No, thanks for the opportunity to share with everybody, and I’m looking forward to next steps.

Courtney Kehl: Sounds good! Alright, everyone, have a good day!

Lisa Moline: Thank you.