Community-driven marketing for real local growth

Justin Ulrich
You bet. For those who are listening, they have no clue that we’ve already recorded an episode together, but because I fat-fingered the record button, we didn’t get to capture that. So between you and I, there’s a really awesome episode sitting out there in the ether. But hopefully, yeah, let’s try to give some value again. 

And why don’t you start with you telling our listeners where you started and kind of how you got to where you are today and what you’ve been focused on lately.

Christin Marvin
Yeah, I think in that last episode we came up with some really crazy marketing strategies, right. That we’re going to have to kind of think about again today. 

No, I started in the restaurant business when I was 15 as a line cook and worked my way up to managing partner by 30. I’ve spent the majority of my career in the independent restaurant space. So started serving and bartending at Outback Steakhouse back in the day in the late 90s — and dating myself a little bit, but loved the structure and the training and the systems that I learned really early on out of the gate. They really impacted my entire career. 

And then I went to work for the Broadmoor Hotel, which was a five star, five diamond resort. When I was working my way through college and graduated college and realized I absolutely loved what I was doing in hospitality and ran to the food and beverage director and said, how do I do this for the rest of my life? And he said, well, you got to take our management training program. So I did that. 

I was hell bent on being a GM by 24, so I did that. I fell flat on my face being promoted internally with the same group of people that I had been managing. So I was doing all the things you shouldn’t do, favoritism on the schedule, partying with your staff every night, all those wonderful things that come with the business. 

And had the opportunity to open my first fine dining restaurant with the hotel and started studying wine to become Assam. Studied mixology with some mixologists out of New York, learned about craft cocktails and worked for just a wonderful human that used to work for Union Square Hospitality group and just learned how to manage and lead and be a servant leader and just loved everything about that experience. 

So I was there for about five years and met my husband in college studying wine. We were both marketing majors and decided to — when we graduated, he got a job with Southern Wine and Spirits as a distributor wine specialist for restaurants. And we decided to move to Denver and just knew that there was more opportunity for both of us there. 

And I became a GM with an independent restaurant group there and eventually raised my hand to work my way up in the company and started wearing the hats of human resources, training new restaurant openings. And so we had opened five restaurants in the course of five years, all different concepts, fine dining, speakeasy, casual. It was just a blast of creativity and just innovation and autonomy and empowerment. 

So I did that for five years. And then the restaurant, my husband and I had the opportunity to invest and failed miserably with that group. And I kind of had a moment of, oh, shit, this is real. This can really happen. And failure was never something that I really saw as even a possibility in my career. 

So that really kind of, you know, spun me out a little bit and decided to get out of that partnership with them. And then when worked for a really fast growing brunch concept that was locally owned by two brothers called Snooze AM Eatery, we had…

Justin Ulrich
I love Snooze.

Christin Marvin
Yeah, yeah. Great food, great company. And they had six locations. They were owned by two brothers locally. And then two weeks after I got started, one of the brothers took me to lunch and said, we’ve sold the company. Private equity money is coming in. We’re going to grow to a national level. I’m moving to Barolo. My brother’s moving to Australia. We’ll see you later.

Justin Ulrich
Wow. Wow, really?

Christin Marvin
Yeah. And then we grew from six to 48 locations in seven years.

Justin Ulrich
Holy cow.

Christin Marvin
It was insanity. And I learned a lot, and everything changed, so. Yeah. And so I was a GM with them and then worked up to regional. And unfortunately for me, where I was kind of with my mindset at that point and some leadership, I completely burned myself out. 

And I realized — it took me years, I didn’t know it at the time, but it took me years to kind of realize that opening the same concept over and over and over again was not fulfilling my values and what I really loved about the business. And so fast forward, you know, I left them after seven years, spent two years during the pandemic managing Gen Z in the ice cream local ice cream space, which was just wild. 

And it really kind of hit a point from an unhealthy perspective where I was drinking really heavily and needed some help, my husband as well, and started working with a coach and had a huge moment of insight that I wanted to start a coaching company and become an entrepreneur. 

And so I did that a couple of years ago, and it just completely reignited my entire spirit around creativity and adaptability and was able to take all the things I learned from the industry and apply it to my own business. So here we are.

Justin Ulrich
Oh, very cool. Yeah, it’s a tough industry, you hear. It’s actually a pretty common struggle for folks within the industry, what you went through. So to be able to take your growth and your learnings and the empathy you have for that type of situation and apply it to others and help coach others through it is a pretty, that’s a pretty cool thing to do, for sure.

Christin Marvin
Yeah. I’m grateful. It’s amazing.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, very cool. So I guess let’s switch gears a little bit and talk about maybe some things that you’ve seen work really well from a local marketing perspective. I know you work with a bunch of different clients, you work with folks in hotel as well as in restaurant and other spaces. 

So I don’t know if you want to talk through maybe a couple examples of maybe some challenges that you had that you needed to overcome with some marketing efforts at a local level, and we’ll kind of dig in from there.

Christin Marvin
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I think I’ve learned a lot over the course of my career, and, gosh, I got a marketing degree in 2004, so social media wasn’t even a thing or on the radar. So I feel like I’ve been having to, you know, especially having my own business and working with clients in different spaces. 

Marketing is just ever changing, and it’s so personal. We kind of talked about that at that point. When we spoke, you know, when I worked for Snooze, I think their marketing strategy was absolutely incredible because they were really focused on building community relationships, so working with local vendors where they could, growing those relationships as they scaled. 

We had a really great partnership with Polidori Sausage, and Snooze had a commitment to sustainability. And so they went to Polidori and said, we want our products to have all of our food products to have zero preservatives, and you’ve got caramel coloring in your sausage, so it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t stay pink. 

Is there any way that you can change your product and try to figure out, you know, tweak the recipe and try to figure out how to get rid of caramel coloring in your food so we can continue to grow together, which is great. When you’re partnering with somebody like that, you’re collaborating, you’re co-marketing. Right. It’s amazing. And they were able to do that, which was incredible. And so they’re still partners today. 

You know, from a local, like, nonprofit community perspective, every time that Snooze would go into a different market for their soft opening process, they would identify three nonprofits that kind of fit with their core values and their mission. And every day they would do a different soft opening featuring one community partner. 

The community partner would invite a ton of guests into the restaurant. So again, that collaboration, that co-marketing, they would have them in the restaurant, they’d be talking to other guests, you know, about what the organization was, had a really heavy educational component. And then, you know, Snooze would donate some tip, the tips and food beverage sales to that, to that organization. 

And so it was just a really great way to establish yourself in a new place and show love to existing, you know, companies that you work with and community partners.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. And if I could add to that, like, as you’re forging those relationships and your co-marketing efforts, you’re doing things together, you’re doing food drives, whatever it may be, it gives tons of opportunity for you to capture content from each one of those efforts and give people a little bit more insight into the brand. 

I think a lot of times folks will lean more heavily on just pushing branded content, and in many industries it’s an issue because a lot of times it just doesn’t resonate. Even I worked at Polaris for a couple of years, and the content that we pushed out from a brand perspective was super expensive. It was really cool. It showcased the vehicles and it was really energizing and stuff like that. 

But the content that performed better was the stuff that our users created, how they were using the vehicles and doing XYZ. And it gives a little bit more perspective into what’s behind the brand, the people behind the brand. And those stories, what really gets people bought into wanting to support you at a local level.

Christin Marvin
Yeah, absolutely. I see. You know, I love what First Watch does on LinkedIn, too. They’re constantly telling stories about their people, and I love that celebrating promotions and, you know, those people that have worked their way up through the company, those are wonderful, wonderful stories. 

We’ve got a local granola brand that I work with here in Tucson, you know, and again, like local marketing in Tucson, looks way different than local marketing in Denver. Tucson’s a very small town, small community, but we’ve got gorgeous weather eight or nine months out of the year, coming off the hottest summer we’ve ever had.

Justin Ulrich
This is brutal, otherwise.

Christin Marvin
Brutal. Yeah, we have farmers markets and events all year round, and it’s very much a small town vibe here. Radio is a hot place to market, which I’m learning and I was very surprised about. Newspapers are still hot here. 

You know, it’s very much a retirement community, so. Yeah, but our farmers markets are just, you know, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, they’re groans and just drones of people that go out and support. 

And so those, you know, this granola company Better Than Provisions that I work with. They’re at every event. Their booth is consistent. Their setup looks great. Their marketing is super professional. They’re great at capturing emails, nurturing people through their email list. They have a five-nut granola, which is really healthy. 

And one of their owners is a nutritionist. And so they’re constantly educating and nurturing through their email list, which is great. They’ve got a subscription model and they’ve got some accounts, coffee shops where you can order their granola on the menu and then turn around and leave and buy a package on the way out the door. 

So they’re crushing it in terms of local marketing, and they’re the big game in town. You know, in a city of a million people, when you say granola, everybody says, Better Than Provisions, which is great.

Justin Ulrich
No, that’s very cool. Yeah, there’s tons of opportunities. I think from a collaborative perspective, you just have to think outside the box. Like, most people running a granola company probably wouldn’t say, hey, what are the coffee shops that we can get into? 

But when you get down to it, it’s like you can find commonality between all sorts of types of businesses. And it doesn’t even have to be food to food match. It can be like, you could have, like, dinner and a movie, like, collaborate with a movie theater, or you could do some sort of, like, smoothie in a fitness brand collaboration. 

There’s all sorts of things that kind of go hand in hand that appeal to the same demographics, that in many instances, it’s one plus one equals three or more because you’re able to leverage your energy to drive an exponentially better experience, drive more impact, drive more revenue for both parties. 

A great example of this could be if you have two folks collaborating on pushing ads. Well, the ad only needs to be purchased one time and you could split the cost together. So now you’re getting advertising for half the cost.

Christin Marvin
Yeah, it’s so true. Yeah, we were talking yesterday, actually, about one of the owners is super passionate about cycling. It’s like, okay, they’re trying to pitch themselves more as a lifestyle brand. So can you sponsor — and cycling is huge in Tucson. 

And so we were talking about, you know, can you sponsor some races? Is there opportunity to, you know, again, find the local coffee shops that have a huge cycling community, you know, and what can you do with them, too? You know, an REI or something like that? Right. There’s all kinds of opportunity. Yeah, yeah.

Justin Ulrich
Bike repair shops or. Yeah, I mean, all, yeah, all sorts. Very interesting. Have you seen anyone try something or maybe you’ve tried it in your own career as a marketer that maybe didn’t work well or kind of failed, and you were able to take that learning and kind of fell forward from it.

Christin Marvin
Yeah, I think, you know, when I was in the independent space and we had, you know, working for the Bonanno group, we had six or seven concepts at the time. We were really spending a ton of time, time and energy trying to do cooking classes and cocktail classes. 

And we had the old school paper postcards, you know, that we would give out with every single check in all the restaurants. And we were collecting these emails, and then I’d get a stack of, you know, all these postcards, and I was entering, entering them into Constant Contact every single week. 

And we were doing so many classes. We were using all of our concepts. We had combined them all into one, one giant email list because we were trying to let, we’re trying to let the customers or the guests know that we had multiple concepts because we weren’t good at that. Some people just didn’t realize that we were a group. 

And so we constantly blasting out these cooking classes and cocktail classes to the point of exhaustion. It was just overload way too much. And so I think, you know, learning from that is really about, like, again, knowing your target audience, because a fine dining diner is going to be a lot different than somebody that’s going to a speakeasy for, you know, for a cocktail class. 

So separating those out, knowing your target audience, really speaking to them individually, because every single time I would send out an email, I’d get five or ten people that would unsubscribe. So it was just kind of like spinning our wheels there.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, that’s a — I think that’s a trap that a lot of folks fall into. Not necessarily trying to promote multiple concepts across your list, but just fatiguing your list by communicating messaging that just doesn’t resonate because you haven’t taken the time to segment your audience.

The data typically isn’t that difficult to come by. It does take, you know, some effort and looking at the data to see who aligns with which segments. But if you can segment your audience into a couple different personas at least, and then send differentiated messaging to those different segments, that’s going to resonate. You’re going to be a lot better off. 

You’ll have a more active list that you’re marketing to, and you’ll be more effective at driving folks to your restaurant or your location if you’re not a restaurant. And revenue.

Christin Marvin
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there was so much opportunity in what we were doing from a marketing perspective, too, in terms of quality. So because we were pushing out so much content so quickly, the quality was really lackluster. 

And I think, you know, I’ve got a great client restaurant, Olivia, in Denver, which is just magical fine dining. They do pasta making classes, but when you look at their website, their website matches the experience that you’re going to get inside the restaurant, and then they nurture and educate you beyond that, beyond the four walls. 

So when, when you’re talking about the food pictures that you’re putting up on your, you know, for your marketing, your social media posts or those cooking class invites that I’m passionate about that quality really matching the experience that you’re going to get inside the restaurant. And I think we really missed the mark on that.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, that makes sense. I’m sure that your team got pretty exhausted, too, having to try to juggle all these different events. And to me, it feels like you’re also fatiguing your employees. 

And if they provide a crummier experience or a less than ideal experience, then folks typically aren’t going to come back for that added activity that you have kind of ongoing, but they’re also likely not going to come back for dinner, which is why you try some of these marketing tactics to bring your doors.

Christin Marvin
Totally. And it’s so true. It was like pulling teeth to get the chefs to be excited about doing this. They weren’t comfortable out front speaking. Some of them didn’t really care about the educational component. It was a lot of work to get four to five people to come to a class. 

But you know, we had completely different experience when you’re promoting a wine dinner and you can sell it to 30 or 40 or 50 people or sell out the restaurant in a night when you’re not open. I have the winemaker come tell the stories behind the marketing, behind the, you know, the family history, the stories of the grapes and things like that. 

It, again, like I’m not poo pooing on events or classes, but I think it’s really important to be strategic about the intention behind the class, what you’re hoping to get out of it, and then again, how you’re going to continue to nurture people beyond that and keep those guests coming back.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. If you were thinking about, or if someone came to you who’s listening and wanted to know, hey, you know, I’m struggling to drive people through my doors today, you know, what’s something that I could do or maybe to drive online orders, you know, what’s something I could do today or maybe this week to try to turn that around? What would you say?

Christin Marvin
Yeah. From a restaurant perspective specifically?

Justin Ulrich
It could be restaurant or it could be any sort of retail if you’ve got like a massage or a fitness brand or something like that.

Christin Marvin
Yeah, I think it’s really taking a look at what they’re doing and where they can really double down because a lot of the independent owners that I work with are a one person show. And so it’s really looking at, okay —

For example, I’ll give farmers markets here, if they’re at the farmer’s market, are they actively engaging people? Are they saying hello? Are they making eye contact? Are they standing out amongst the competition? One of our farmers markets has 60 vendors at it. Why are people coming to your booth? Are you handing out samples of your product, just something of value to offer them immediately? 

Are you, and then again, how are you nurturing people? Are you getting to know them? Are you asking them questions about what kind of food they like to eat? What kind of — I’ll use chocolate, as an example. What kind of chocolate they’re looking for? Are they buying for themselves? Are they buying a gift? 

Are you constantly collecting those dots as Danny Meyer talks about? Right. And collecting that data as to how you can make the experience better? And then how are you going to continue to build those relationships and foster those relationships afterwards? 

Can you do a class for them? Can you do, again, an email list, maybe offer a seasonal product to get people coming back? You know, it’s difficult, I think, when restaurants say, we had a friend that just went through this a couple months ago. My sales have been down. They’ve been down for six months. I think I’m going to lean into social media a little bit, and they hope to see an immediate impact. 

And that’s not the case with social media. Right. We know it’s consistent. It takes a long time. So I think, again, it’s really understanding from an independent perspective who your guests are, what your experience looks like in your four walls. Is your team engaged? Are they burn out? What’s the service look like? What’s the quality of your food look like? 

Making sure you’re doing everything from a really great perspective inside your four walls before you start to kind of branch out and look for other ways to build, because you’re going to potentially burn yourself out and kind of be grasping for straws, and there’s no immediate gratification except for taking care of that person that’s right in front of you right then and there.

Justin Ulrich
And not to mention, if you’re — if things aren’t in order within your four walls, you’re dry. You’re spending your energy, and in many cases, dollars towards marketing and driving people to a less than ideal experience, which is really just. You have to plug the leak in the bucket before you start filling it with water. 

Otherwise, you’re gonna be spinning your wheels. So do you have someone that you’d like to get a shout out to that you think is doing local marketing, like, really, really well?

Christin Marvin
Yeah, I would say Golden Mill in Denver or in Golden, actually, just west of Denver, is an incredible food hall. Have you been there?

Justin Ulrich
I haven’t. I haven’t. I love Golden, though.

Christin Marvin
Yeah, Golden’s great. So they are. They have such a strong community presence. The feel of Golden is incredible. But one of the owners, Susan, is like, the mayor of Golden, so she knows everybody. They’re very involved in nonprofits and community organizations, so they’re constantly hosting parties, giving back to the community. 

Their social media does a really great job of capturing what the experience feels like at Golden Mill. They co collaborate with all the stalls in there and co market, which is beautiful, too. They do all kinds of events there. And she’s working really, really hard with the city to think about how to make that business sustainable and grow the city of Golden. 

So she actually took me on a tour this week when I was out there and showed me about all the revitalization that they’re doing in that area of Golden with the Coors tech facility and what exciting things are happening in the next five or ten years. So she’s actively playing a part in giving back to the community and helping, helping it thrive, which is incredible.

Justin Ulrich
I love that you said she’s like the mayor. I probably mentioned it on probably 15 to 20 episodes. We had one of our guests, Eric Knott, at the time he was at PDQ. He’s now CEO at Tiki Taco. But he talked about throughout his entire episode just being the mayor and the importance of engaging with your community. 

It’s not like with, yes, you’re trying to establish connections, right? Of course. But you’re not doing it in a way that seems self-serving. Like truly get to know people in your community, get to know the other businesses, share their stories on social, engage with folks, see how you can help them. Right. And in turn, you will build almost cultish following of raving fans that want to do everything they can to support your business.

Christin Marvin
Yeah, it’s so true. We’ve got in Denver there’s an amazing organization called EatDenver and they’re a membership based organization for independent restaurants. They have 300 members. They do monthly programming to educate restaurants. They work on partnerships to offer vendor discounts. But it’s just a beautiful place to network and build community and support. 

And they do two or three marquee events every year which draw in thousands of people and again, co-market and just give people an opportunity to collaborate on events outside of that too. And build that community and relationships together and really work together to strengthen the independent restaurant space in Denver, which is really, really important.

Justin Ulrich
That is really cool. No, I appreciate you sharing those examples. Speaking of working together, as I understand, did you help your dad restore a 67 Chevelle when you were younger? Did he do it for you?

Christin Marvin
He did it for me, I think, you know, when I was in high school, so my whole family are just classic car buffs. My little cousins have cars and they restore them still to this day. My mom had a 67 Chevelle. My dad had one. I had one. We used to show them together on the weekends. I’m from a small town in Missouri, so it was all the rage. 

I didn’t appreciate the craft of or the hobby my dad had of restoring cars. I totally do now and he still loves to do it. But that was his gift to me, which was great. And I would call him every once in a while and say, what do I do about this? What do I do about this? The car won’t start. Yada yada, yada. 

You know, he would help me through that. I’m much more of a. Yeah, much more of a DIY person these days, thank God. With, you know, YouTube and things.

Justin Ulrich
YouTube, yeah.

Christin Marvin
But not from a car perspective. I leave that to the professionals. I like doing little stuff around the house.

Justin Ulrich
But yeah, I mean, I’m with you. YouTube is like, it’s a marketer’s best friend because there’s so many things that you think, oh, I want to do this thing. It’s very unlikely that it’s not a brand new idea. So someone has typically done it, done something like it already. So YouTube is definitely helpful. 

I thought it might be cool to show you maybe in a little small town setting with your 67 Chevelle. I don’t know if it was red or not.

Christin Marvin
It was red. Yeah. I have my actually in my closet in the studio here. I’ve got a senior picture of it with me standing in front of it like this. I had really curly hair and a chevelle muscle t-shirt on, which is hilarious.

Justin Ulrich
Should have done that.

Christin Marvin
Yeah, I love it. I love it. Thank you.

Justin Ulrich
Awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thanks for joining us. Before we let you go though, you know, how can folks follow you, follow your brand, follow your podcast?

Christin Marvin
Yeah, absolutely. So everything is available at christinmarvin.com. My name is spelled a little bit differently. It’s Christin. So you could find links to the podcast there. Any blurbs about coaching, consulting, and then my book just came out this week, the Hospitality Leader’s Roadmap Move from Ordinary to Extraordinary. And that’s available on the website as well at Christinmarvin.com/book.

Justin Ulrich
Awesome. Check it out. Christinmarvin.com. If you’re not following it on social, go ahead and follow her. I’ve seen on LinkedIn, Christin, your following has like shot through the roof. You like came out of nowhere. But you’ve got lots of great tips, tricks, insights that you post in your feed. So it’s, it’s valuable content, which I can see why people follow you. 

So if you’re listening and you’re not following Christin, check it out. Thanks to those of you who are listening. Hopefully we’ll see in the next episode. Christin, hopefully I won’t see you on the next episode and this is the last time I have to record it. But thank you so much for bearing with me and joining again. This is awesome.

Christin Marvin
Absolutely. My pleasure. Thanks for your time.

Justin Ulrich
You bet.

As always, thanks for joining us in the Local Marketing Lab. This podcast was sponsored by Evocalize. To learn more about how Evocalize can help you grow your business, visit evocalize.com. 

If you learned something from today’s episode, don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and follow us on LinkedIn and Facebook @Evocalize. That’s Evocalize and on X at Evocalize. 

And remember, keep innovating and testing new things. You’ll never know what connects with your customers best unless you try. Until next time. Thanks for listening.