CFD 483 – Digital Marketing For Small Businesses

October 18th, 2018

Kade Wilcox is the owner and CEO of Primitive Social, a digital marketing agency focused on helping companies grow. Primitive Social works with clients all across the country to craft digital solutions that help them meet their objectives and reach their goals. Kade’s career started as both the Executive Director of a children’s camp and serving on staff at Redeemer Church where he managed operations, leadership development and church planning efforts.

In 2011, Kade and his wife Lacey started Primitive Social, providing social media support to small local businesses. In 2013, Kade and Lacey connected with Jerred Hurst (now co-owner of Primitive Social) to focus on growing the company to help others grow their businesses. Over the past three years, Kade has helped transform Primitive Social from a 2 person team into a multi-million dollar company with nearly 50 employees!

Podcast Highlights

  • Who is Kade Wilcox?

Kade grew up in a small town of only 350 people and a lot of his experiences in sports and the local community shaped the way he viewed the world. Learning how to work hard and rely on the people around him taught him many valuable lessons on the way to his entrepreneurial journey.

When you are part of a small, tight knit community you share the good and the hard times. This means you learn how to depend on other people.

  • Developing a Vision

Kade was always a dreamer and no one tried to squash his dreams when he was young, this fostered his ability to develop a vision of the way things could be. Having people that support your vision and dreaming is crucial as well as having the opportunity to try to make your dream a reality.

The self made person is a myth, to be successful as an entrepreneur you have to be able to lean into other people. That ability is one of the most important things an entrepreneur can do.

People want to love their work, if you as the entrepreneur don’t nurture them as individuals and foster the environment that enables them to work, you won’t be able to run a successful company.

Leadership is superior to managing. Management is organization and structure and it’s very important, where leadership is more about helping people be the best they can be in their work as well as the rest of their life.

Kade’s business originally started out as a side hustle but eventually grew into a real full time business. When you have a small team, everyone is doing everything. When you grow your business, everything changes including the culture.

Every dynamic of an organization changes at each different life stage of a company.

  • Digital Marketing for Small Business

Primitive Social can support a business on nearly every element of digital marketing including custom software and websites, inbound and content marketing, and video marketing.

The common element between Kade’s clients is a clear set of goals and a focus on digital marketing that they can measure.

Digital marketing has changed the marketing landscape, stop doing things that you can’t measure the impact of. Digital marketing can be measured dollar for dollar on the direct impact to your business.

The people who are not successful are the ones that focus on tactics over strategy. Who is the audience, how can you add value to them, and where are they?

Prioritize your goals and your budget, there is always a new platform to explore but you don’t have infinite resources to spread out to every platform. Focus on the basics, develop a strategy and then stick with it for a few months.

You may not like Facebook, but it is still the number one platform to reach your ideal audience.

The first step is to have a helpful website, then focus on the basics of social media and email. Email is another channel to be over-the-top helpful. Even if you’re only doing the basics, measure your results and data.

There is a big difference between content that is helpful and content that is spam. Segmenting your data and speaking to your audience about the things they want to know more about is key. If you’re just getting started out, Mailchimp is a solid tool to begin with. If you’re a little further down the road, Hubspot is a great choice too.

  • Kade’s Takeaway

Evaluate your website, most people when thinking about a service go straight to Google. If you’re going to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be resilient which means you can’t quit at the first failure or resistance. Use obstacles to learn more and become better.

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