How Laura Cole and Todd Renard are turning digital marketing for small business on its head

Welcome to another episode of Action & Ambition with your host, Andrew Medal. Today’s guests are Laura Cole and Todd Renard. Laura Cole is passionate about helping businesses connect with their customers. As Vice President of Marketing for Vivial, she uses her entrepreneurial spirit to lead Vivial’s marketing functions, including internal communications, research, branding, public relations, advertising, sales support, go-to-market product strategy, and corporate brand vision.  Todd Renard is the Digital marketing executive for Vivial with an established performance track record for innovation and execution, balancing strategy, tactics, and logistics. Developing innovative digital products that help organizations grow their business is his passion. Todd had spent the last 20 years identifying, evaluating, and bringing to market product and partnership opportunities for leading advertising technology companies.  You’re going to love this episode. Let’s get to it! What has kept Laura and Todd at Vivial so long? (2:13) A lot of their clients also ask this question.  It is not abnormal when they are sitting in a boardroom talking to a potential client for them to receive this question.  They then go around the table, and all employees would mention their tenure with the company.  Most employees have very similar tenures with Vivial. Vivial has won Best Places to Work several years in a row for many of their locations, offices, and honestly, the whole company.  Vivial’s employees are a happy bunch, and they love what they are doing. It’s turned into a culture that breeds innovations and autonomy.  They are fortunate across the board to have employees that have been there a long time and are dedicated to the mission.  For Todd, another thing has been that the people he works with, although the company refers to themselves as an agency, they are also a development and solution shop.  They build many of their products, and they can only use other products and services only to use different products and services reinvent what they are doing.  How have they been able to leverage COVID-19 to be advantageous for the company? (11:11) They do not think that they have leveraged COVID much.  Unlike many businesses, they were not impacted in the same way by the pandemic.  From a product road mapping standpoint, they have been thinking about the product set well before the pandemic hit businesses hard.  They are always thinking about the value that can be provided over just building out features.  When the pandemic hit, it became much more critical that they did not focus on the less meaningful things and instead focused on the things that could make a difference.  In the DNA of Vivial employees, they have a focused need to help small to medium local businesses.  So when the pandemic hit, the company was thinking about what they could do to help everyone struggling.  They did things like predominant advertising programs, for example;  They approached many businesses that they knew were hit hard and said that instead of canceling their program, they offered to reduce their plan until they found themselves back in a position to continue their original program. So they retracted without canceling or pausing client programs during the time, so they were continually invested in their success.  Vivial has reacted well to the environment, and their clients have appreciated that.  What is the biggest obstacle when it comes to customer retention? (22:02) You have to find ways to figure out how involved a customer wants to be.  When you get that wrong, and you believe a customer wants to be engaged, but it’s apathy, and they aren’t engaging, it’s because they don’t think there is value. For some programs that Vivial runs, the client needs to be engaged, and if you don’t have that voice of the business owner, you can miss something.  Misjudging how engaged a client is and wants to be is an essential factor in customer retention.  Vivial Vivial has been providing marketing products and services to small and medium-sized businesses across the U.S. for over 100 years. Vivial's mission is to help you grow your business, whether with our easy-to-use and affordable local online marketing technology or a custom marketing campaign that we create, implement, and monitor for you. Resources Connect with Laura: LinkedIn Connect with Todd: LinkedIn Vivial: Website Connect with Andrew: LinkedIn