Driving local demand with automated marketing

Matthew Marx
Hell of an intro. Justin, love the lab and thankful to be on it finally. This is going to be great.

Justin Ulrich
It should be at of fun. You know, I talk to people a lot about your energy and how it’s infectious and what you see is what you get with Matt Marx. So this is just another vehicle for us to get your personality out there and let people know just exactly who you are.

Matthew Marx
For better or worse, my friend.

Justin Ulrich
So, Matt, when we first started talking about me joining the team, I was excited about it, but the opportunity seemed like it was a great opportunity. But when I spoke to you specifically, I got more than just the big picture. For the first time, I think, ever in an interview process, I was really inspired. And your energy and your passion really for what you’re leading here to Evocalize made me realize, like, this is the place that I want to be.

Matthew Marx
That’s great, man. Thank you.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure.

Matthew Marx
Try and do right as a founder and as a CEO, you’re trying to inspire super bright and the best people in the world to come join you on your quest. And I think we have a pretty noble quest that we’re going after. We’re really thankful to have you as our marketing leader, and I think you’re doing a fantastic job bringing the word to the industries we’re attacking. And I think we’re doing a pretty good job in the early days of helping folks.

Justin Ulrich
No, I really appreciate that. Those kind words is why I brought you on the show. I just wanted the world to know that’s what you thought about me. I think that should wrap up the episode.

Matthew Marx
You know what? We can create a transcript of that and put it at the top of our website.

Justin Ulrich
I could send it to my parents and “See mom, people like me.” So I guess we could kick things off with you telling us just a little bit of how we kind of came to be.

Matthew Marx
Yeah, it sounds good. So the seeds for the concept that became Evocalize were kind of planted in the last couple of places that I worked before starting the company. 

The most recent one was a company, or is a company called Bazaarvoice. And we kind of helped them go public. The founders, brilliant entrepreneurs, I was on the leadership team there, but the founders were really brilliant, Brett Hurt, Brant Barton, there did a lot of groundbreaking work around customer voice and word of mouth of the customer, built a marketing tech company, took it public back in 2012.

And then I was running a lot of innovation, new venture innovation and growth within the company. During that time, some of the things we were experimenting with became the seeds that we ended up with at Evocalize. And most prominently, we thought about paid digital marketing, right? And so when we thought about, if you rewind time ten years ago especially, and it’s still true today in a lot of ways, but a lot of paid digital marketing is run by big advertising agencies at the corporate level that hire a lot of folks out of college. 

And these people are pressing buttons all day long in the Metas and Googles and other places to try and run campaigns. And the advertising campaigns, even the word campaign, as you know, Justin gets me agitated, right, because the concept comes back from the Mad Men days, right? Which is like a bunch of people get in a room, come up with a know, do a bunch of print, flyers, and tv work, and it’s not real time. It’s not using the data of the business in a real-time way to inform the marketing that’s going on. It’s periodic, right? 

We thought we could potentially replace those humans pushing buttons, lift them up a level to be able to seed the machine or the technology layer that would then take the data that a business throws off every day just by existing. Every business, every location is churning out data, inventory levels, and sales data, and all kinds of customer information and reviews and all that, right? So it’s generating data every day. 

If we can pipe that into a machine and have humans seed the machine with the right ingredients, we could come up with kind of a real-time marketing machine that was more responsive to the business needs. And so that’s what we set out to do and build. 

And we focused really on local marketing because we felt like they were underserved. They don’t have enough money in terms of marketing spend to wire all their data together and hire the best marketing agencies in the world. They just can’t spend enough money to do it. So technology was the only way we felt like we could address that need.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I’ve been a marketing leader for a while now and I didn’t come up in PPC or any sort of really paid digital. We always relied on agencies to do it. And even as a marketing professional, for me to go into a platform and try to activate a campaign, it is kind of a nightmare. 

And then you multiply that across every different platform that you want to potentially get your ads out there on. And it is such a time suck. And I cannot imagine that any local operator in any industry has the chops to effectively do it on their own.

Matthew Marx
That results in what, right? Either they’re not doing anything at all, which happens a lot at the local level. They’re too busy. There’s not enough time in the day. There’s too much stuff to do. They should be working with their customers, managing their business, managing the operations, what they’re doing at the local level, right, to become a marketing expert. 

So often they don’t do anything at all. They do things like boost posts in Facebook that don’t bring performance. They get frustrated, so they’re doing it poorly. Or they spend extraordinary amounts of money hiring really expensive experts to do it for them, and so much more money than they should be spending at the end of the day. 

And so I think that’s the answer. Right? It’s like everything else in technology, right? How does technology save you time and make you more efficient so that you can do the things that you need to be doing, like meeting and shaking hands with your customers. Right?

Justin Ulrich
Exactly. That’s what drives local business, is engagement. When you get folks in there creating a solid experience and ensuring that they want to come back. And if you’re busy in the back office trying to launch campaigns and you’re not out there engaging, you’re missing opportunities for sure.

Matthew Marx
That’s right.

Justin Ulrich
I guess talk a little bit about we started in real estate, kind of cut our teeth there and what was the purpose there? And now we’re getting into other industries. You want to kind of dig into that a bit?

Matthew Marx
Sure thing. So we kind of happened into real estate when we founded the company. Our first venture capital partner, Madrona Ventures in Seattle, had a deep relationship with Redfin, and they were a large backer and investor in Redfin. And so also a Seattle company, we were formed here in Seattle, which is still our headquarters for Evocalize. 

And so we kind of matched up with Redfin and a couple other real estate portals and started building an automation layer on top of all of that rich data. And if you think about real estate, the real estate industry, it’s interesting in a number of ways. It’s kind of a quintessentially local business, right? Like, what’s more local than the home you live in or the home you want to buy or sell? There’s nothing more local, right? So it’s very local. 

And then the industry is interesting. They have a lot of data, right? So if you ever go browse a Redfin or a realtor.com or a Zillow website as a consumer and see all the data that’s there, you have pictures of homes, you have geolocation where the home is, you have crime data and school data and all this information about a home. 

But it wasn’t really used much, right? So that data was just kind of put on a website for you to go see. And so there’s a lot of data, even beyond what you can see, that lives under the covers in real estate. There are CRM database and customer lists and profitability numbers and lots of other data. 

And so what we started out doing is wiring all that data into our machine and figuring out if we could match the right homes with the right buyers and sellers all across the nation. And that became foundational layer for us. That allowed us to work very well at the portal level, at the large kind of scale, millions of dollars a month kind of level of spend. 

And so now our quest has been bring that down to the franchise location, franchise groups. How do we make that available to everyone? And I think, again, we’re off to a pretty good start in doing that beyond real estate.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. We’re in tons of different industries, and I guess it really is a good fit for any type of company that has a distributed model. Right. They’ve got corporate headquarters and they have locations all over the country. And those locations need to do their own marketing in a way that drives traffic from a local perspective, rather than relying on just branded campaigns at the national level to hopefully spend in their market to potentially drive people into their locations.

Matthew Marx
Yeah, no doubt. I mean, if you think about, like, okay, so if you don’t agree that as a location that digital is important, right. I think there are very few people these days or very few business owners that don’t agree that digital is important. 

But I would think about usage statistics and how much people are on their phones every day and how much time they spent, how large these audiences are out there digitally. You have to be digitally present in your local area if you’re a location-based business. Right. Or if you have geography as a component of what you do, whether that’s a restaurant, whether that’s a fitness location, whether that’s a real estate agent or mortgage loan officer. 

It’s all the same thing. At the end of the day, you need to be digitally present and reach your customers and your potential customers in the area and the new consumers who are growing up. My daughter is a 16-year-old high school student. She’s on TikTok. She’s not going to read the bulletin board or the local flyer. Right. She is looking for a video for her local restaurant to come to her. And she’ll order from it right there. 

Smoothie King is a good example. I walked into my kitchen the other day and there’s an empty Smoothie King glass there, right? And it’s just sitting on the counter. I’m like, how did that thing show up here? Right? And she had seen an advertisement on TikTok from the local Smoothie King, done an online order, and all of a sudden the smoothie shows up. 

Now, whether that delivery fee is a wise use of her limited funds or not, I’m not sure, but as her dad, but that’s pretty cool. And that’s what every local business really needs to think about. And then from a brand franchise perspective, if you’re not helping them do that, you’re really not enabling them the way that you should and you’re not monitoring how they’re representing your brand at a local level. So all of that Justin factors into why we do what we do and why we’re excited about it.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. It’s such a funny story. And it’s the same like my kids. I dread the day when they realize that it’s an unlock where they can just order whatever they want. We live in the middle of nowhere and a delivery fee here is going to break the bank.

Matthew Marx
We don’t live in the middle of nowhere and the delivery fee still breaks the bank.

Justin Ulrich
That’s right. Oh, man. Yeah. So what are some common problems or use cases that you see that the technology solves for?

Matthew Marx
Yeah, I think first and foremost, what we’re trying to do is let the franchisor, the parent organization and all of their partners, their franchisees, work together to market. Right. And so the franchisor is pretty sophisticated generally, they have creative and imagery and price sheets and lists and promotional data. Sometimes they have audience data. 

And the zee knows their local market and needs to drive their own business. Right. And so the right solution bridges the gap between the two of them and lets the franchisee operate with their knowledge and data and the benefit of the franchisor support. Right. 

But at a core, what we’re trying to do is, and I think what we’re doing is we’re letting automation do the heavy lifting so the franchisee doesn’t have to spend a bunch of their time. 

And there are some examples I can give around that. But inventory levels, for instance, so if I have an excess number of chicken wings, for instance, and I’m a restaurant, and those are going to spoil. The system can automatically, without the franchise owner doing anything, the system can be configured to automatically go and market chicken wing specials and promotions within the tolerances that have been set up by the franchisor by that franchisee to draw people in for chicken wing specials to be able to move that product. Right. 

The same concept exists in just about every industry. Right? So inventory level, sales data, all this stuff can feed the marketing machine and realize the promise of automated marketing, which is really the goal at the end of the day. Automated, sophisticated marketing. So you don’t have to do anything, but the system just works.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, I love that. I love the example. I think one of the things that was so inspiring for me to come over was with regards to what the tech could actually do. The example of knowing that, let’s say your sales are going to be down, your sales are slow, and you’re not going to hit your goal on Saturday and you see it now on Wednesday. That’s a hard feeling to have. Like you’re constantly fighting against the current as an operator to still show up short of your goal. 

But with tech like this, we can instantly see that you’re off track, off pace, kick out some promos, drive some traffic all automatically without you having to do anything. And you just continue to worry about servicing the influx of guests that are now coming in because of the marketing. It’s incredible.

Matthew Marx
Yeah. Again, that’s the goal. Right? That’s why I like to use the term demand generation, because it’s not really about advertising. Advertising is what you’re doing to get a result. Right. To me, I think about generating demand when and where you need it is really what we’re trying to do for everyone and we’re trying to democratize that. 

So now the local franchisee can do the same sophisticated demand generation as Amazon does and their marketing team. How do we make it that sophisticated without them having to know anything about anything in terms of digital marketing? Because you know as well or better than I do, digital marketing is moving really fast. 

I mean, the number of new things that even Meta and Facebook introduces on a weekly basis. We get lists because of our partnership with the TikToks and Googles and Metas of the world. We get lists of their coming enhancements and they are fast and furious. There’s no way a local business owner can keep up with that level of that pace of change. It’s impossible.

Justin Ulrich
They are literally day in and day out. They are working extremely long hours just keeping the business running. They don’t have time to research all this stuff and stay up to speed. It’s not possible. So I guess, Matt, I’d ask you, who do you know that is doing it the right way?

Matthew Marx
Well, so I knew you’re going to ask that question, Justin. So I have a couple thoughts in a couple different industries. One, we’ve talked a little bit about restaurants and the restaurant chain. 

Really great set of restaurants based out of Pennsylvania called Primanti Brothers. And they have automated their local marketing and they’re using real-time demand signals to drive things like sports based on the local team’s performance, sports scores and sports results. They’re driving people into their local stores based on what’s happening with the local sports team in moment. 

So it goes beyond even data that they have. It’s third-party data and third-party signals. I think it’s a really cool use case for their type of business that really hinges and pivots around this camaraderie engendered by the local sports team. So give a shout out to Primanti Brothers. They’re doing an awesome job. 

And then you mentioned real estate, where we started, I would say Keller Williams, one of the largest real estate companies in the world, has built an incredible solution. They call Keller Williams Command, where they’ve integrated lots of different technologies together in one. So it’s their CRM database where your customer lists are. They allow tagging and segmentation. You can segment new home buyers. 

As a real estate agent, I can go in and segment my customer base in a lot of ways and then I can use that to fuel marketing specifically to that type of customer base in the paid arena automatically. And then I can tag those folks and bring them down. When I get new leads and new people interested in new houses that fit their needs, I can automatically filter them down into downstream chat sequences and email sequences that are tailored to that home builder’s journey or that home buyer’s journey, rather than just generic messaging. 

And so they have done some really cool things, invested a lot of time and money in building some premier tech. And so I’ll give a shout out to the Keller Williams folks as well.

Justin Ulrich
Awesome. Yeah, huge shout out to Primanti brothers and Keller Williams. That’s great. Those are awesome examples. 

Matt, I want to switch gears a little bit. So something I’ve learned through past conversations about you. I mentioned earlier that you like to do like epic hikes and stuff, which is awesome. And you love the outdoors, but you love tractors. And to me, that was like one of the funniest, oddest trivia nuggets that I’ve heard yet about somebody. But what’s behind the fascination with tractors?

Matthew Marx
You remembered that. I don’t know, man. A tractor is awesome. If you think about a tractor, it’s like the inner kid in me. At least get on. And I’ve generally owned Kubotas, which are the orange ones, like everyone tractors by color, right? And so I’m an orange guy, Kubota tractor guy. 

And so you can dig a hole, you can plant trees. I’ve ripped huge trees out of the ground. When we lived in Boston years ago, we had some acreage just outside of Boston, and I would get up at five in the morning and plow our long driveway myself. My wife thought I was crazy. And then I’d change into my suit and go down to the private equity firm in downtown Boston. 

Every day I’d go up on my hill and use a tractor to haul around logs and split all these logs so that I could feel this wood burning stove. Like, I don’t know, something primal. To me around tractors, they’re just like great enablers.

Justin Ulrich
They are really cool and it is fun just to get in there and get your hands dirty. They have actually have out in Vegas, I can’t remember what the facility is called, but you can do, like, I’ve had different partners and stuff do events where you can go test out backhoes and you do activities and stuff with them in the middle of Vegas. Like you’re digging these big pits and stuff. Super cool. Well, hey, I thought it would be…

Matthew Marx
Future company outing.

Justin Ulrich
There you go. Oh, I would love it. I would love it. One thing I do worry about, though, is if we did happen to do an outing like that, it might end up a little like this.

Matthew Marx
Oh, you got to be kidding me. Oh, man. That’s amazing, Justin.

Justin Ulrich
Oh, man, the glasses on top of the head and on your face. So cool. Yeah, I was playing around with AI and cranked this image out and I almost lost it because your face looks like you’re stunned that there’s such a blaze behind you. You’re like, whoa.

Matthew Marx
That’s amazing. I need that. I need that tractor.

Justin Ulrich
Yes, we’ll get you this tractor ordered. It’ll be digital, but you’ll have the tractor. Well, hey, Matt, it was a ton of fun having you on the show. Great insights and background as to who we are and how we came to be. Love working with you personally. Looking forward to seeing where this continues to go. Next year is going to be massive for us.

Matthew Marx
It’s going to be massive. Thanks for having me on the lab, Justin. And I love what you’re doing. Love listening to it. Listen to it every week.

Justin Ulrich
You bet. Awesome having you here. We’ll see ya.

Matthew Marx
Thanks, Justin.

Justin Ulrich
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 at 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.