Natalie Swan Podcast Transcript
Natalie Swan joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Natalie Swan. B2B company leaders hire Natalie and her team to turn business objectives into strategic actionable marketing. Her firm, Swan Associates, provides fractional CMO support to 5 million and up to B2B companies.
As long-term partners for their clients, Swan Associates offers high touch transformational marketing strategy services. Marketing is always an experiment. So, Natalie’s team champions an iterative approach while making marketing strategy doable and actionable. They collaborate closely with leadership in cross functional teams, allowing them to deeply understand the business and drive impactful results.
Well, good afternoon, Natalie. Welcome to the show!
Natalie Swan: Thank you so much for having me, Brian. I am excited about our conversation!
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Me as well. Love doing these things every single day. If you listen to previous episodes, that’s all I talk about is my joy and passion of serving others and getting to hear their awesome stories.
So, Natalie, jumping into the first question here, can you share a bit about your background and what inspired you to start Swan and Associates?
Natalie Swan: Yes, absolutely. So, I started my company in 2017, and Swan and Associates is a fractional CMO firm. My love of entrepreneurship started when I was quite young, my parents owned a preschool together.
My very first business was with my dad. We sold candy bars together at that preschool in the staff room and my dad taught my siblings and I a lot about just business and negotiation. And this was one of his things that he always just instilled in us growing up. My first job out of college was at a company in Chicago, and it was incredibly fast growing.
It was founded by two young entrepreneurs who scaled the company to tens of millions of dollars quickly. And it was very much a sink or swim, scrappy, figure it out environment. And so that paired with, you know, the lessons of, of my dad growing up really led me to this Love of entrepreneurship. And not only that, but just sort of this attitude of I can’t imagine it being different.
Like, it’s, it’s not easy and it’s, it’s a lot of learning and it’s a lot of pivoting and, and, you know, making assumptions and then making changes, but it’s so much fun and my team and I learn every single day and we get to work with incredible clients and that’s how I enjoy spending my time and what I enjoy bringing to other people as well.
Brian Thomas: I love that story. And, you know, we get inspired or that we have some sort of experience typically positive, right? Sometimes people have a traumatic experience that changes their trajectory in their career, their business. But I love the story and the fact that you were influenced by a great figure for you as your father.
So, I appreciate that. Natalie, next question I have for you. Swan Associates is known for offering high touch transformational marketing strategy services. Can you elaborate on what makes your approach transformational for your clients?
Natalie Swan: Yeah, absolutely. So, there are a couple of things that make my team and I quite different than a lot of what’s out there in the marketplace when it comes to hiring marketing support.
So, a lot of growing companies, and we typically support B2B companies that are 5 million and up and they’ve found success. You know, they have happy customers. They’re doing what they do really well, but they’ve reached this point where they realize. In order to take things to the next level and in order to get where we’re going, we know that we need to be more sophisticated in our marketing and really be intentional with our strategy and invest in that.
And so, what we do is incredibly aligned with our clients businesses and what they’re seeing success with. So, a lot of marketers will either be very strategic, right? You bring in a marketing consultant, someone who can tell you a lot about frameworks and you know, here, here are the ways that you can do things.
And here’s maybe what we’ve seen in the marketplace. Transcribed But it’s super high level, right? That person’s not rolling up their sleeves and getting in the weeds with you and actually doing a lot of the work, the implementation. Or you have marketing agencies that are really good at what they do tactically.
So that might mean, you know, they’re an SEO agency or they run Google ads or Facebook ads or something to that effect, but they’re doing the implementation of what the, the founder, the owner, the leadership team is asking of them. Which may or may not be the right thing, right? And it was very expensive. And so, what my firm does is we sort of marry those two things, right?
We’re providing the strategy, but then we’re also helping our clients on an ongoing basis, not only providing the quote unquote marketing, but we’re working with their sales team. We’re working with their operations team. We’re working with company leadership so that we deeply understand their business and their customers.
So, we’re able to be that much more effective.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. I know that when you do truly understand the customer and their business, you’ll be much more successful, and you’ll have a longer collaborative partnership. And, you know, being in it and being a technology executive for all these years.
I figured that out early on. The more you know about the customer’s business. The better off you’ll be. So, I really do appreciate that. Natalie. Natalie, next question I have for you, you emphasize an iterative approach to marketing. How does this methodology work in practice and what advantages does it offer compared to the more traditional marketing strategies?
Natalie Swan: So, I like to say that all marketing is an experiment. And, you know, I mentioned we have best practices. Everyone has sort of their approach and the tools that they like to use. But when you are either investing in marketing for the first time, or you’re trying something new, there needs to be a bit of a hypothesis.
And then what you have to do is you have to go; you have to take action and get data to learn from what are we seeing what’s actually working? Why is that the case? And how can we continue to do it better? So, with our clients, we typically start with. How do you get your best clients? And who are those people?
And can we talk to them? Because we want to hear from them, you know, what, what works really well, what they appreciate about your product or service, you know, what sticks out to them and how do we build trust, etc. And so, no marketing campaign, you know, whatever is going to be perfect from day one, especially if you’re new to it, you really need to have the expectation that we’re going to be super intentional.
We are going to be strategic. And we’ve thought through this very well. But we’re never going to see what happens until we act on it. And we get the data to then say, okay, here’s the piece of it that we think worked. Here’s the piece that we maybe didn’t do what we thought it was going to do. I see a lot and Brian, I’m sure you do too, just that you connect a lot of business owners.
It’s, you know, oh, we tried webinars, and they didn’t work for us. Oh, we launched a podcast, and it didn’t work for us. And that’s such a broad blanket statement. Well, what didn’t work and what were you trying to do and who was the audience and what were the titles that you went with and how was that messaged across social media?
And, you know, so there’s all these different elements of it that if you. Don’t understand how they play together and what you should be looking for at different points. It becomes. Very easy to say, you know, we tried everything and nothing worked, whereas I bet pieces of it did work. You just got to know what to look for
Brian Thomas: for sure. And I’ve been down that road. And if you don’t ask or engage with the company vendor partner, then yes, you’re going to be left with. Well, gosh, what did I get for that? Didn’t work and that engagement and asking the right question. So, I appreciate you highlighting that. I really do. And Natalie last question of the day.
Looking ahead, what trends do you see shaping the future of B2B marketing? And how is Swan Associates preparing to stay ahead of these trends?
Natalie Swan: Yeah, so I’m actually going to share something a little bit different because this is how we tend to approach things with our clients is everyone wants to talk about, you know, the trends and what’s new and, you know, the newest platform and do we need to be doing TikToks or should we be on this social media platform now?
But what I found is in those moments, people are very worried about the tactics. They’re very worried about this one thing or this, you know, we just did short form video. That would be the thing. Or if we just did webinars, that would be the thing. But if you take a step back and you just think about the basics, that’s what a lot of companies need to focus on before they worry about the trends or how to stay in front of things.
Because if you don’t even have the basics in place. It doesn’t matter what trends are going on, right? You first need to understand, like we talked about, understand your customers, you know, deeply understand your brand and your messaging and how that’s resonating with the people that you want to attract to your business.
And once all that’s happening, how are you actually getting in front of people, right? Just because you have a nice logo and a nice website. Doesn’t mean you’re going to get any traffic to it, right? You need to have a plan for actually driving traffic for getting in front of your ideal customer for nurturing those people and staying top of mind, which is a huge part of what my team and I do.
You know, we work with these B-2-B clients that have high price points is a very relational business. And When your business is built on relationship, the trends, I’m not going to say they don’t matter because, because it’s always important to stay relevant and understand what’s going on in your industry, but you’re going to call the person that you trust that you’ve had a good experience with that you’re, you know, your buddy referred you to, et cetera.
And so that matters so much more for our clients than what is the latest and greatest in marketing.
Brian Thomas: Thank you for highlighting that. And there are a lot of buzzwords, a lot of hype around some of the new trends or the technologies, you know, AI, I can tell you the last 18 months of podcasts have been all AI.
It didn’t matter if you worked in AI or not, the conversation ended up in the AI space, but you’re absolutely right. It’s, it’s more about focusing on the fundamentals, the basics, and really being, you know, very collaborative with your partner and sharing those things that really matter the most, not always the shiny gadget.
So, I appreciate that. I really do. And Natalie, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Natalie Swan: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Brian. I appreciate it.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Natalie Swan Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
