Podcast

In this candid conversation, Solspace founder Mitchell Kimbrough talks to Director of Growth, Mel Connolly, about the fundamentals of marketing that often get overlooked when shiny new tactics come along. Drawing on real client stories and her own experience, Mel breaks down how to identify your target audience, craft messages that resonate, and create a consistent content plan, even if you find marketing “boring.” Whether you’re a business owner juggling a million tasks or a marketing director trying to do more with less, these insights will help you cut through the noise and build a practical, sustainable marketing engine. Listen now to discover how to set up marketing fundamentals that support your business for the long haul.

Full Transcript

[Music] Welcome to the Solspace Podcast. Thanks for listening.

Mitchell: Everybody, welcome back to the Solspace Podcast. This is Mitchell Kimbrough, founder of Solspace, your host. And I'm cheating today.

Today on the podcast, one of my all-time favorite people, Melissa Connolly, everybody calls her Mel. Mel is the director of growth at Solspace. She's also one of the primary project leads on our client engagements.

And Mel, I've known you for, I'm just not going to talk about years anymore with anybody because I'm starting to get old and make people feel old, but we've known each other a long time.

Mel: Yes. I can't even imagine how long that is. So we'll leave it at that.

Mitchell: We know one another like a lot of people in this community, in the web developer community. You know each other from a platform that we all worked on called Expression Engine. And then a lot of us moved over to one called Craft CMS. And we both still work on both of those platforms. Today our topic is what I'm calling the fundamentals of marketing. And the reason I think this topic is relevant is because there's so much that a marketer can do in the year 2025 that we sometimes lose track of the fact that the clients that we're serving don't necessarily feel like they're in command of what they would consider the fundamentals, like the very basics of marketing. What things must you do that you must always do and can't forget about?

So I wanted to get you on the podcast so we could talk about that. And to sort of set the context, I had a couple of conversations in the last week or two with prospective clients and an existing client. They kind of brought all this into high relief.

So the first quick story is I was speaking to the president of a construction company, relatively small but not insignificant construction company in a specific region in Canada. And he was referred to me because he needed to get his website back up and running. He had a website but something happened technically, it's offline.

And he came to me with a set of questions that were a lot like, not only do I need to get my website back up and running, I need to redesign it, rebuild it, relaunch it. And I also don't even know how to drive traffic to it. Like can you not make fun of me when I ask you what are the very basics that I need to be doing at the digital marketing level to support this business?

And that story is relevant because it's like a lot of our clients. It's a B2B type of a client, which is to say the kind of marketing and sales work that they're doing is long tail. Like there's a long sales cycle, a year or so more.

In his case, they respond to RFPs for construction projects. So they're not necessarily using the website to drive in new business from construction clients. They're using the website to foundationally support their reputation in their community to say, yes, we are a viable contender in this RFP.

This is a legitimate company, here's what we've done before, here's why we matter. There's another story that is somewhat related and it's with an existing client who is extremely wealthy, came about their fortune by having a successful tech company build and launch IPO and is building another business, but seems to not necessarily have a connection to what I consider some of the business fundamentals are. What are the basic things you need to be good at to build a business again?

So I've been thinking about, wait, I feel like if something bad happened to Solspace, I have all the fundamental capabilities as a business person and sort of knowledge and experience to do it again, like I could rebuild if I needed to. I don't know if this person that I'm talking about, I think they got lucky the first time. I'm not sure what's involved in becoming a billionaire, but I don't know if this person could repeat that again.

So these two things fit together for me because I want to know what the fundamentals are. It's like having a good golf swing or a good basketball shot. What are the fundamental mechanics that you have to get right in order to reliably and consistently over time succeed at this type of thing?

So Mel, with that as the context, what are the very basic marketing fundamentals that you keep in mind all the time when you're engaged in that work?

Mel: Yeah, that's a great question, Mitchell. I would say that when I first start out, I'm always looking to understand the target audience, what their goals are, what their pains, when their problems are, and then crafting compelling messaging that speaks to them, that where they can picture themselves in that messaging and say, hey, I identify with that, that pain, that problem, questions that they're asking, how they're articulating it. I can see myself in it.

And then from there, I always want to have kind of consistent content creation. So whether that is posting a blog at least once a month, if more, that's great. If that's all you can do, that's fine.

Building your email list and sending an email regularly, if it's only once a month, that's all you can start with, then start with that. And then we want to be able to draw people into your website externally. So that can be through social media and going back to who your target audience is, where are they?

Are they spending time on Instagram? Post on Instagram. Are they spending time on LinkedIn? Then start consistently posting to LinkedIn.

That's where I would start.

Mitchell: So the first part of the system that you have in mind, first part of the fundamentals is the target audience. For a business like a regional construction company, how would you imagine figuring out what the target audiences were? Is there just one audience?

Are there multiple? Do they need to be generating content to support those multiple audiences?

Mel: So there could be multiple, but I would always start off with one. You can always look back to who have you worked with previously? What are some of those really, really great projects that you would kill for to have every single month going forward?

Who were those clients? Start putting together a pattern around who they are to build out who your target audience is. Of course now, if you want to start fresh and pick a different target audience, that can be much harder.

But if you have existing clients looking back on who they were, what they needed, the problem you solved can really be a quick start.

Mitchell: Okay. So start with one, but at what point do you feel like it makes sense to be targeting more than one audience with more than one type of content? Is there a signal that you pick up on that?

Like, do you wait until you succeed with one and then go to the next?

Mel: No, if I'm succeeding with one, I would probably just go harder. I think it's more difficult to have more than one because now you are maybe splitting your message, splitting your time, splitting your resources to focus on two different audiences. So if you're already limited on resources, pick one.

If it's working, continue to go all in on that one. Now if it's working and you've grown your business and now you've got more resources and you want to start targeting somebody else, I could see maybe bringing in a second. But until you've really dived deep into that one and have done all you can there, I don't see the need necessarily to go to a second.

It just makes everything harder for you.

Mitchell: This reminds me of one of the things I try to keep in mind as we focus on improving our own marketing at Solspace. When you say, find something that's working and then go deeper into that, double down on that, do more, put some gasoline on that. For me, that's boring.

And that's my problem with marketing is like when you're doing marketing well, you're finding the message that works, you're finding the audience for whom that resonates, and you're just doing it over and over again, nice and consistent. You're just repeating yourself over and over again. That's so boring.

Right? So this is my allergy to it, but that's one of the signals that you're doing it right. And it doesn't seem exciting to say, oh, that worked.

Let's do a whole bunch more of that. It's not as fun as let's try the next thing. Let's see what else we can do.

Do you have any advice for people like me, other than hiring someone like you who's not bored by it? How do you get clients who need to start to embrace this? You can't completely outsource your sales and marketing.

This is a fundamental part of a business. They have to find some way to get into this mindset, at least from time to time. Is there any help that you can offer to clients so that they can embrace that boringness and really turn it into something valuable?

Mel: Look at your bank balance? Look at the number of leads it's generating. Look at other types of stats or analytics that can show you the progress that you're making and how it's working for you and let that be your driving factor.

Because yeah, it's cool to have shiny new objects, but find that outside of marketing. And remember that your marketing, that consistency, that boring-to-you process is what is sustaining your business, and you need that in order to have a business. So yeah, I'd be looking at other ways to have those new shiny objects and those fun things than in marketing, unless you have unlimited budget.

Then you have unlimited budget and unlimited time, have all the fun you want and experiment all the time. But for most businesses, that's just not the case.

Mitchell: I haven't met any such person. So in the spirit of boring, imagine some of these clients who come to us who need this kind of help. They come and they say, can I just hand it off to you?

Is it rational to even think that you can fully hand off this marketing problem as a business owner or sort of a lead in an organization? How much is that possible?

Mel: I think the bigger your organization, the more ability there is to do that. But when the CEO is the front facing person, the person that's doing sales and communicating with potential clients, we need that voice. So we can only outsource enough for us to still be able to get enough of the CEO's voice in the messaging, in the marketing.

So there can definitely be some outsourcing of it, but I think the CEO still needs to be involved in it. They just can't set it and forget it and hope that somebody else gets their business.

Mitchell: I've made the argument several times in the last few weeks to prospective clients I was talking to that on this very question, I've said to them, you don't have to inhabit the marketing mindset every day, especially people who are principals in a business who are sort of juggling. It's like, okay, I got to do sales and marketing, but I also got to do finance. I also have to touch ops.

I have all these things. You don't have to do it every day. And I was making the case of what we do, which is to say a couple of Fridays a month, I will devote two to three hours to sitting down and sort of getting in the rhythm of creating LinkedIn posts.

And I'll drop them on what we, I call it the conveyor belt. I'll just drop it into JIRA, say, here's my idea for a post. It'll go to you.

And a few days later, sometime later, you'll say, that's, that's dumb. Don't do that one. However, do this one.

I like this one over here. Or if we changed it this way as we did. So I get into a rhythm a couple of days a month, few hours on those days.

And I emphasize rhythm because it matters that you get into that marketing mindset. And when the marketing mindset, what I'm saying is, who are you talking to? The target audience?

What's the persona? Like what's, what's their fictitious name? Where are they fictitiously live?

What kind of headache do they fictitiously have? Well, then what am I going to talk to them about based on what I know for my expertise? When you get into that mindset and you can start to generate that content, turn a flywheel, you're actually making some progress, but you hand that off.

And that's the key thing for me. And the case I was making to my construction friend, hand it off, create that content as the person who has the expertise in the business, but then hand it off to people who can finesse it, finish it off, reword it. Like in your case, Mel, I'll hand you a LinkedIn post.

And when I see it end up on LinkedIn a couple of weeks later, it's more LinkedIn-y. It's been formatted in a way that is more compatible with how people on LinkedIn expect to consume content. But my point still comes across.

So I don't know if I just kind of blurted out a bunch of stuff, but what do you think about this idea of how does someone participate in marketing without having to completely own it?

Mel: So I love this because you do participate regularly, but not daily to your point. So being able to schedule a specific time, which is for you Friday, as it could be for someone else Tuesday mornings, where you focus that time and attention, I would put it on my calendar, focus that time and attention, create the content, or even if you don't even have all of the content, create the ideas, put down all of those ideas. One of the things I love the concept of is the idea of building in public.

So what was your recent sales calls about? What did you recently talk to a client about? Take those ideas and bring them now to the content that you're going to write for new people.

So you're reusing some of that. And then you can outline what you want and let it sit. If you have no one to send it off to, let it sit for a week, then come back to it and fill it in a little bit more.

Once you have something that's ready to go, and it may not be perfect to start with, but you're just starting. You're just putting it out there. You're going to learn as you go.

Put it out there and repeat that process. And if you have somebody that you're going to work with, such as maybe a copywriting agency, that could be helpful. They may not be a marketing agency, but they may be a copywriting agency that can use what you've provided as a framework to build out actual LinkedIn posts, full blog posts, and even newsletters.

But it still has your voice. It has your tone. It has your expertise.

That's not being lost in the process at all. So that, like you said, when you come back to this and you read it on LinkedIn, or maybe you get that email that was the newest newsletter, it's like, oh, this was all of my stuff. This is everything I said, but it's just got a little bit of refinement.

It just has a little bit of, of zhuzh, you know, going on to maybe refine it a little bit more for the target audience. Maybe dive a little bit deeper into that pain so that they can have the emotional connection to it. That's so important in marketing, because you may not know that we need that little piece, but somebody that you hand it off to that knows about marketing and what needs to be done can add that to it.

And if you don't yet have that person, or you're not comfortable yet handing that off, just start now. Start, and over time, the more content you're creating, the more you're thinking about this user. And I, and I loved when you said you picture who they are and where they live and what they're going through.

That makes writing so much easier because you're just right to that person. Don't think about, man, 200 people might read this on LinkedIn. And, and is my friend Joe, who works over at the coffee shop going to care about this?

That's not the person you're talking to. Talk to that persona that's been created. Dive into really what will speak to them as if you're just talking to them on the phone and, and instead of on the phone, just write it out.

Mitchell: One of the things that blocks me from doing the marketing that must be done, as you pointed out earlier, is all the possibilities. So not only the multiple possibilities of channels and ways of delivering and reaching people, but also the vast number of possibilities of things I could talk about. So something that helps me a lot is to box it in.

We already talked about how I box it in schedule wise, how I'm required to do this amount and no more per month. Oh, I can live with that. I could do anything for three hours in a month.

The other thing that helps is within the constraints of the identified target audience and the messaging strategy. I'm looking for themes, me personally, just themes that I can write about. There's just too much to talk about.

And I get lost and I get writer's block because there's just too much to say. If I find a theme, like one of our recent themes was you and I were going back and forth on what emotionally, what does it feel like when you're abandoned by the web developer who's supposed to be taking care of your website? What does it feel like when they don't answer your email and answer your phone calls?

How does that feel? What does it feel like to not even know whether you need to go look and find someone new or if they're going to respond to you tomorrow? Like, how does that feel?

So that was a theme that all of a sudden unlocked a bunch of content for me and I could write it out. And the other freedom was I could write a bunch of stuff and I trust you and Missy to say, we don't like that one. We're going to throw that in the garbage.

I know if it's bad, I won't be punished because it's bad. Somebody will see it and allow it to not live, right? It won't, he won't see the light of day.

So these are things to unblock the writer's block. So I'm asking about marketing fundamentals and we're conflating two things right now. We're conflating strategy and tactic.

So strategy, finding your target audience, obsessing about them, caring about them for real, knowing them and understanding them better every day. Finding messaging, just the, the connective tissue to reach out and establish a connection with that target audience, that strategy, as far as I'm concerned. But then there's tactic.

So we, you've mentioned tactics. You're big on what I consider the fundamentals, which are do the basic stuff first, and then come talk to me about whether you want to spend money on ads, show me that you have blog posts consistently, show me that you have some kind of newsletter because newsletters are basically free and you control the audience that you own the list, those are your people and you need some sort of thing that'll hook people from the outside world in to come learn more about you. So those are the tactical things. So let's talk more about the tactics.

You've emphasized content marketing and you've emphasized blog posts. What are some other forms of content marketing that you consider to be fundamental?

Mel: Another option would be guest posting. So still blog posting, but you're using someone else's community, someone else's network to get your ideas in front of them. So find similar, maybe organizations, conferences, publications where you can offer for free contents via blog posts, or some even do maybe video content and you can use their audience for that content.

Similar to being a guest post on someone's podcast, right? You're utilizing their audience to be in front of and sharing your expertise and knowledge for their benefit. So those are two ways that you can continue with content marketing, but not necessarily just within your own orbit.

You're kind of reaching out a little bit further.

Mitchell: So this idea of borrowing someone else's audience, you know, when I started my business and there wasn't social media for the most part, this was not even a concept, but it is now, you know, the idea that when you're on LinkedIn and you're always on my case to comment on other people's posts on LinkedIn, I'm very bad about it, but when you do that, you're borrowing other people's audience. You are participating in a, in another community that's adjacent to yours, that's somehow related enough that you're able to join in there. So there's different versions of borrowing somebody else's audience and you can do it ethically and it's free.

So this is the thing that really turned me inside out with marketing all these years was there's so much that's free, but I keep being told by all this incoming messaging that I need to be paying, like got to pay Google, got to pay Facebook, got to pay LinkedIn, but there's a lot of free stuff that we need to be doing that's fundamental included in that is participating in and borrowing other people's audiences.

Mel: Absolutely. And if you're not ready to invest in paid, why not use free for now? So one of the significant differences is that it can be a bit slower for growth.

So, you know, you may need to do a lot of content marketing in order to see a return on that. If you are looking for more sales immediately, paid is certainly a way to go. But if you go down that road, you really need to have a clear understanding of your audience.

You need to have a really, really good offer and a really great landing page and a budget to invest. So if you can say, Hey, I know all of those things, I have a budget, then you may be ready for paid. But a lot of people who may not even have those core fundamentals aren't ready to go to paid yet.

You would just be wasting your money. You'd be just tossing ideas out there, hoping that they will work. And they likely won't.

So when you start with the free version, understanding that audience, really figuring out your offer that they want, right? You could have a great offer, but if no one wants it, it sucks. Understanding how to reach them and where they are and building your own authority around that offer and that topic.

Those are just slower burns, right? Long tail, like we said, same as SEO is, but it can eventually work for you. So it depends on how often or how quickly you need to get new leads in.

And the other option besides paid is to actually schedule calls with people, talk to people. And that might be scary at first, trying to build those kind of immediate conversations and, and those relationships. But that's another way to bring in more leads quickly, but it's a numbers game.

You can't just expect to call five people and have two of them turn into leads. You would need to invest your own time. It may not be money you're paying to an ad, but your own time to be reaching out, building those connections with people on LinkedIn, and then trying to get into a call with them to get them to the next level of a sales pitch.

Mitchell: What I've learned over the years with regard to this big picture question of marketing, like what are you supposed to do? What I've learned is if you're combining the word marketing with some, any idea of quick, you already lost, you're already in a lot of trouble because the kind of marketing that's been working for Solspace is the kind of stuff that you've started us on many months ago. It's just a nice, steady drumbeat, nice, consistent cadence.

And it's not a quick win. It's a slow, very slow drip, but there's results that come out of that. On the product side of the company, we have the very same attitude.

We're not looking to release a feature on Freeform that's a quick win that puts us ahead of the competition. We're looking to always and forever build long-term, reliable, steady, consistent, stable value in a product so that you establish long-term multi-year loyalty.

I tell Kelsey all the time, he starts to tell me nowadays, excellence always wins in the end. And this is somebody, I'm talking to you from very close to Silicon Valley here in California. This is not the mentality of most of the people around me.

Most of the people around me are like, I'm going to do a startup. And then three years later, IPO, and I'm going to be wealthy and I'll go buy my island. No, I mean, maybe, maybe you're going to be 0.0001% and you'll hit it. Why don't you just play the lottery? Cause this is ridiculous. So one of the most important things about marketing that I try to remember is the work we're doing today is for next year.

I've tried to bring in the client 12 months from now by writing the content today. And that works. What doesn't work is, oh my gosh, I really need some leads.

What can we do to get leads tomorrow? You've already failed. It's not going to work.

Unless like you said, unless you're so clear on your fundamentals, your messaging, your target audience, the content that resonates, the deal, the offer, the landing page, the channel that works to advertise, unless you've got all that dialed and you flip the switch, maybe it works, but otherwise, if you haven't done the proper long-term, put a penny in the piggy bank every morning, forever, you're not going to see the return.

Mel: Absolutely. And you'll see that pretty quickly. So that's when your clue is, alright, we need to stop this and we need to go back and we need to figure out what we're missing and the missing are those core fundamentals.

Mitchell: I tell people who, you know, whenever over the years I've met someone who's interested in starting a business, I try to tell them that part of your compensation is that running a business is going to change you, should personally change you, your psychology. You're going to be a different person. And this is part of what I mean, like I’m not wired for this sort of long plotting, boring thing every day.

I'm just not set up for that. I build software on the web, you know, like I want to try the new thing and I want to see it work and I want to launch it and I want to do the next one. But running a business has changed me and changed me to kind of compel me to see that you build value slowly over time, the old fashioned way, the, the old 200 years ago method is the one we use today.

And it's interesting to see how it changes you. Have you found that at all? You've been, you've been running your own business for a long time too.

Mel: I think it does change. I mean, I didn't do a lot of marketing for a number of years. I wasn't really sure, I worried too much, but I think as I've been in it longer, I realized that this works when you are consistent, you show up, you show up and maybe do it wrong a lot and that's okay because you're doing it and the majority of others aren't, and that's what keeps me going.

It was really, really hard in the beginning though, I will say that. Like when, when I really started to focus on doing the marketing and the fact that it can be boring. I think my main obstacle was less so that it was boring, but more so whether I was getting it right.

And when I let that go, knowing that I'll probably get it wrong, I'm going to fail, but I'm going to fail fast and I'm going to learn from it and I'm going to do better the next time, that helped a lot. And then for me, putting everything, even all those boring things on my calendar, as if it were a client that needed it, as if it were that important, because it is, that helped me move away from putting it off and getting tired of it and wanting to just move to something that would be more exciting because there are a lot of times we may have to do things for clients that maybe not be that exciting.

We've got to do it and it helps them. It moves the needle forward for them. And so we need to do the same thing for our own businesses.

Mitchell: I think we covered the fundamentals. You keep coming back to saying we should be creating content. Isn't there enough content already?

Like isn't, haven't we already flooded the zone? Do we really need to create more? Is that not a criticism you get sometimes?

Mel: Absolutely. But have you created the content? Is it out of your brain, Mitchell, that all of this content's been created?

No. And just, we are all unique human beings with our own unique experiences and journeys in life and positions on things that if Mitchell hasn't written about it from his experience, it's never been written before. And if I haven't, it's never been written before because the way we see it and the lens in which we've experienced cannot be copied by anybody else.

So yeah, have I written about webpage speed a lot? Certainly, you know, and the importance of creating a brand identity. Absolutely.

And has everybody else done that too? Probably. But they haven't done it from my view.

It hasn't been said through the words that I use, the experiences that I've been through and my unique weirdness in the way I may tell a story or tie it into something. So there's still room for everybody's voice. There's still room for you to be heard.

If anything, the world needs more of that.

Mitchell: I just feel guilty putting more stuff out there when there's already so much.

Mel: I think that it just is a mindset change because someone else may not have heard it yet. What we know every day, our common knowledge, someone told me this once, our common knowledge is not common outside of our own sphere. So what we may have heard a hundred, two hundred, three hundred times, someone else will be hearing from the first time.

And wouldn't it be cool if they heard it from you? Wouldn't it be neat to know that you made an impact on them because of that? You change something for them because of that?

I think that's pretty neat.

Mitchell: That's a good note to end on.

Mel: Cool.

Mitchell: Thanks for being on, Mel. I appreciate this.

Mel: Alright. Thanks so much for having me, Mitchell.

[Music] You've been listening to the Solspace Podcast.