[Podcast] Big Business Marketing for Your SMB: Unlocking Potential

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Ryan
Big businesses often grab the headlines. It’s not hard to understand why: big money, big data equals big stories. But what if there was a world where businesses of all sizes had access to the same advantages? There’s good news, and it’s happening right now. And we’ll keep the good vibes rolling as we saddle up next to one of the most impactful bands of the last forty years.

Welcome back to On the Record.

Today, we’re joined, Michael and myself, by the wonderful Michaela Mueller, who comes from TRIA as our senior marketing manager. Michaela, welcome to the program.

Michaela
Thank you for having me.

Ryan
Today, we’re going to talk a little bit about big-business marketing and what it takes to get it down to the SMBs, and then what it looks like to unlock that potential. And we’re going to tie that all together with Radiohead’s In Rainbows, a critically acclaimed record, one that was massively successful and has a lot of underpinnings to today’s topic.

Michael, tell me why this beautiful album cover has any place in today’s discussion.

Michael
I think there’s actually a couple tie-ins. I mean, one, you can’t talk about In Rainbows without talking about its release. So this was at the time of LimeWire, Napster, right? Music …the value of an album was declining. But Radiohead, they were on a major label, they had access to all of the distribution, right? But they decided instead of going through the stores first, to release it directly to their fans as a digital download where they could pay what they wanted.

And that actually became the headline for the album. For the album release, it wasn’t a slick video, it wasn’t all of the in-store pop-ups that they were doing at the time. It was really the story around this very online and direct-to-fan distribution that they were able to do, where fans could pay whatever they wanted in order to access the album. Then they later, about a month or two months later, actually did a physical release of the album. So it was very different for the time.

Ryan
From a band that didn’t really need to, but they chose to get closer to their fans and kind of meet the moment of where we were at. Wildly progressive, way ahead of their time. You say that in 2025 and say, “Well, yeah, of course.” But rewind the tape back: it’s progressive stuff.

So, Michaela, thoughts, feels about In Rainbows and maybe some correlation to today’s topic?

Michaela
I think it’s so cool how you can have such an established model like the music industry, that you’re a part of a record label, you do a release party, you have your endcaps at all your big stores. And they were like, “No thanks. We can do this better. We can do this our own way.” Which actually, I think, is very Radiohead in terms of their vibe as a band.

Even more interesting, the types of evolution of music: where their music started from and moved through. In this album specifically, the sounds that came through …I was really excited about the percussion that came through. And so what I like is that they could take something that was, you know, corporate, if you will, and kind of spin it in their own way to really do something different, something better that created a new infrastructure, I think, for music of the future.

Ryan
This wasn’t the wildly experimental Radiohead that we’d known. It became wildly consumable, and it just happened to align with giving it to their fans in a way they hadn’t done before. Really interesting timing from Radiohead, and it actually aligns almost synergistically with today’s topic, right? They had all the resources of a big business yet took a small-business approach to its release.

That probably shook the record-label executives: “Why wouldn’t you tap into all of our great resources?” And they said, “It’s more about the experience created between us and our fans.” Hard not to love that, right?

Michael
Yeah, pretty progressive stuff. Again, I love Radiohead and this record specifically because of what they adopted here.

Ryan
Let’s talk about big business, right? You come from TRIA, big business as a whole. Take us through just a little bit of the background so we can contextualize your perspective today, Michaela.

Michaela
Sure. So, I started at HealthPartners, which is a big healthcare organization. They have both health insurance and a care side in the Twin Cities. And I was there for seven, eight years. Got my MBA, took a break, and moved to Medtronic, an even bigger business. One hundred thousand people, right? Big, big business.

But, you know, in my part-time life, I’ve been doing a lot of support in the nonprofit space. So, I’m the chairperson of the board for an organization called Family Enhancement Center, which supports primarily young women who have been sexually abused or had some sort of traumatic experience.

And a lot of what my role has been, and my experience there for the last six years on the board, is taking what I know as a marketer, as a businessperson, and asking: how can I apply those thinkings in support of this organization that doesn’t have the resources, doesn’t have the big front-office infrastructure, and give them that support in a new, fun way?

Ryan
That’s incredible. It’s a wonderfully aligned thing, to give back to the community in that way, but also to take all this massive information and learnings you’ve had over the course of your career and simplify it so that smaller teams can act on it as well.

So let’s talk about that a little bit further; how you’ve taken that. Michael and I have some experiences we’d like to share as well, but when we think about big business, there are often these great frameworks and methodologies and principles in place.

When you look at the SMB sector, what are the most commonly overlooked things? And maybe, Michael, I’d start with you on this.

Michael
What we see is that there are just fewer resources. I’m sure you run into that. There are things you’d like to do as a smaller or medium business that, until very recently, weren’t as accessible because you just didn’t have the people to put these robust processes together.

So oftentimes, the processes kind of need to be translated – which I’m sure you’ve found – you can’t necessarily take what we were doing at the big company and directly apply it. But there is a correlation between what you’ve learned at those big businesses and how it can be applied to a much smaller team.

But I don’t know if a lot of people talk about that. We often talk about them as very separate problems. And so I’m really curious to hear, what was your experience taking from, like, a 100,000-person company and then applying it to a much smaller organization?

Michaela
You know, I feel like the things that you think about in a big business, all the resources, all the dollars, the principles of the types of activities you’re doing are still super applicable at a small scale.

So it’s taking, from a marketing perspective for example: what is your value proposition? What is your core audience? And how do you then direct resources to make sure that you’re hitting those key points and you’re maintaining the essence of your brand but in a smaller and more meaningful way.

I think also from a marketing perspective, there often has been a focus on direct media — out-of-home perspectives, billboards, advertisements in papers and magazines, and things like that.

But I’ve seen the most successful small- and medium-sized businesses really leverage the online space – digital ads where you have super direct targeting.

Because the infrastructure now, in terms of what you’re able to do, is just really specific and unique. And while yes, your cost per click or your cost in terms of an investment to get a client or a customer out of that might be more substantial, it really is going to have a better throughput for you as an organization.

Ryan
Yeah, no question. We talk a lot about data centricity this season because it’s so important. Everybody’s compiling data, and we’re trying to give them insights on how to act on that.

And I think a lot of SMBs might be guilty of this, not all, certainly, of collecting data without a clear strategy.

What are some of those questions they should be asking themselves before they perform an analysis and then try to take action on that data?

Michael
Yeah. Um, who is the customer?

Ryan
Good starting point.

Michael
What is the problem that we’re solving and correct for that? Not, “What is the solution that we provide?” but “What is the actual problem?” Why would a customer come and seek us out?

And I think what we’re trying to do with data is to better understand: what does their day-to-day look like? Why would they need your product or solution in their life? And how do we convince them that we are better than some of the others?

And so I think oftentimes we set out to solve a problem, but we don’t always ask, “Is that the problem that we’re still solving?”

I think larger businesses have access to more of this data, they’re able to evolve over time.

Even Radiohead, right? They had the label’s approval to do this, right? The artists are still beholden to the label once you sign that contract.

And so they were able to convince the label that this was a better way to connect with the fans than maybe setting up these big in-store experiences that were very expensive, costly, and also one-to-many, right?

So like, anyone that walked in that store was getting that advertisement, versus a message that would really reach the folks that they knew would be interested in it.

And so I think what we often do is we stop looking at the problem that we’re solving, and we assume that it hasn’t evolved over time — whereas I think larger institutions are able to spin off different products, spin off different solutions, evolve their messaging over time through testing to better meet the demand of the market.

Ryan
I love that you’ve kind of highlighted a couple seemingly simple questions, but ones that tend to yield the biggest, most impactful answers.

Michaela, a little bit of your version of that. Do the questions you ask at the big-business level apply to the smaller business? And if so, great. And if not, why?

Michaela
You know, I think from a big-business perspective, you can get really granular about, like, “Why does this customer experience this in this journey?” or “Why did they make this decision when they were in the product experience?”

And I think sometimes at a small business, you want to get that granular, but you have to start with the basics first.

You have to make sure that the first level of product experience is really solid before you can kind of unlock that next level of questioning.

A lot of the offerings that you talked about that exist today for small and medium businesses sometimes can jump to that second level.

And if you just start there, you might miss part of that core audience or part of that core strategy in terms of data that you need to collect as an organization before you kind of go through that marketing funnel a little bit more.

So I would really encourage people to make sure that you’re asking really basic questions like: “What type of data do I want to learn about my customer?” and then, “Do I have an infrastructure to be able to answer that question?”

If you’re skipping to “This is the question I want to answer,” but you don’t have that back-end data to support anything before that, you might be missing something.

Ryan
Yeah, 100%. I think that’s a great point.

We often talk about the balance between subject matter expertise and data and kind of the strength of the partnership when the two are put together. They look relatively similar sometimes in B2B, big business, or small business.

Can we talk a little bit about, again, there’s great domain expertise inside of businesses, but when it’s paired with data, the power of that multiplying factor of the two?

Michael
Yeah. And I think there’s an interesting time now where we actually have an AI assistant that can help us, right? Understand what’s happening and do some of that analysis, as long as we’re asking the right questions of it.

That’s why we had large data teams. And that was why oftentimes SMBs weren’t able to leverage it, because they didn’t have the time and the space to do the analysis, whereas larger companies were able to employ large data teams to do all of that research and analysis.

The gap is shortening though, and now we do have at least the start of a research assistant to help us make sense of what’s happening within the data of a business.

Michaela
Yeah. And I think we’re seeing small businesses start to leverage that, which then evens the playing field a bit.

Ryan
One hundred percent. Totally.

You can think about what Google offered as a search engine fifteen years ago, where you could think of a question, instantly type it into a machine, and it would give you an answer.

But that’s evolved to a place where you can get more granular, right? If you have that basic knowledge about your consumer, about whatever question you want to have asked, the AI assistant can give you a deeper look or also take into account kind of the “why.”

What is the context of the market?

And some of that has to do with your prompts, for example. Do you understand how to use the assistant to be able to give you the data you need?

Michaela
And then layering onto that what you talked about, Ryan, that personal subject-matter expertise. Because you can take anything that’s spit out, but if you don’t have any context or personal understanding of what your business can offer, it’s taking both of those and making sure that it answers the “why” on top of the data, which is the “what.”

Ryan
Exactly. Michael and I were talking earlier off-camera about the evolution of marketing. We’re talking about the speed at which change is occurring right now. And in marketing, I think we’re feeling it probably more so than other areas.

Michaela, I’d like to understand: You have two unique perspectives. You have big-business Michaela, who’s showing up there with a large team and a lot of resources. And you’re also applying your expertise to a business that maybe has smaller resources.

What does evolution look like on the nonprofit side, from what you see, and then maybe in your bigger business? How are you guys evolving with this rapid state of change, and if it has much to do with AI’s involvement, really.

Michaela
So in the big-business space, you know, our online and web support as a marketing organization has grown tremendously.

We used to be a marketing team of maybe like fifty people and twenty of them were true marketers. And now it’s 160 people, and seventy percent of them are doing something web-related.

So it’s really that inverse in terms of where that focus is on true marketing.

At a small scale, you know, we don’t even really have the resources to be a marketer. So it’s a lot of kind of “and other duties as assigned,” where if someone is pretty good on social media in their own personal life, how can we take those subject practices and apply them in the business today?

But I would also say, just in terms of what the marketing is, we are focusing so much more on everything from a web perspective.

But that also has to be layered on the community aspect, which small business really thrives in, that brick-and-mortar aspect or that really local aspect of it.

You need both to be able to do those well. And you have humans that can do the boots-on-the-ground work and leverage that networking aspect of it.

And then, how do you take the internet – the infrastructure of that, the web, AI assistance, etc. – and run kind of your other marketing needs in parallel with that?

Ryan
Yeah, makes sense. It’s interesting to hear kind of the speed of the way you guys are adapting to change.

Michael, you know, runs a business that’s a little smaller, much nimbler, and much more quick to market with things.

You see evolution probably differently. And, Michael, I’d like to hear kind of your approach to what marketing has looked like and what maybe you see into the future based upon the nimble nature of Leadpages.

Michael
I think it depends on the business, but I mean, where we’ve really focused is data, right?

What can we learn about our customer? What can we learn about the problem that we’re solving?

And how do we better understand and leverage that so that, with the lighter resources that we have than a large company, we can best use them, right?

Because there are all kinds of things that we could take on. But honestly, at our scale, we have to say no more than we say yes.

So we want to make sure that when we’re saying yes, that it has an impact, that it has value to the business, and that we’re using our time wisely.

And so that’s where we’re trying to leverage the data insights that we’re collecting in those decisions — because there are only a couple of things that we can really take on at a time.

And I think that is the challenge of a small business: that whatever you take on needs to grow.

Ryan
Yeah.

Michael
And anytime that you miss, it’s more painful than it is at a large institution.

Ryan
Yeah. The part of the value and the opportunity that Leadpages has is speed to market, right? Like, you guys can spin things up quite quickly and at least have these small iterative tests — did it work or did it not work? Abandon ship, or all in on this?

Michaela, it’s probably a little different for you guys. You have an idea, you have a spark, and go, “Man, that’d be cool.” And it’s probably a bit of time before it actually hits the market.

Do you see AI or something like that allowing you to achieve maybe speeds that smaller businesses are able to do?

Michaela
You know, I think one of the things that we’re trying to do is more of that A/B testing — in terms of running with an idea, and if it is successful like you talked about, moving through that quickly.

It’s also about using data to leverage a hypothesis you might have and sometimes that’s even to, like, convince your boss of, “I want to do this thing,” and they’re like, “We don’t have money for that. We don’t have capacity for that. We have to say no.” We have to make those trade-offs.

But you know, spinning anything up as a pilot or something like that, often you can do something once with limited budget and prove if it’s successful or not.

And then I would also go back and make sure you’re doing kind of that retrospective of, “Why did that happen?”

I find often in a big business, we just move right on to the next thing, where I feel like small business actually does a better job of learning from it and being like, “But should we do this again, or why?”

Because you’re having to make really kind of essential choices specific to your dollars, where big business is like, “Yeah, move on to the next.”

And coming back to, “Why did this happen?” or maybe, “It wasn’t successful because your hypothesis was wrong.”

Maybe it had to do with the timing of the ads. It was during a political campaign, and so ad prices were too high, and you couldn’t get that success because of that.

So I think it’s contextualizing it with that subject-matter expertise we talked about earlier.

Ryan
Yeah. No, I love that. Well, as we approach the end of our episode, I’d like to ask you guys two very unique questions.

We’re talking to marketers, that is the audience we serve here, and we tend to activate them in a variety of ways.

One of the things I’d like to hear from you, Michaela, quickly on is: a lot of marketers go from an SMB career to a B2B career to B2C, whatever it might be. Could you take them through a few things they should be critically aware of if you are a B2B marketer or soon to become a B2C (or inverted)?

What should they be thinking about as they approach their work and maybe as they look into the future as well?

Michaela
Yeah, you know, I can’t emphasize enough – you talked about this earlier, Michael – but the idea of “Who is your audience?” Like, you have to start there. If you don’t understand that, and you’re thinking the B2B space is exactly like a B2C space, you’re going to miss the mark. And it’s not going to be accurate.

And so really taking the time to understand that, digging into what data you have about your customer, and then maybe some questions on what data you want to learn about to be able to better inform what decisions you need as a marketer.

So for sure, starting around that perspective of: Who is your audience?

The second part of it is your business, like, your idea of a value proposition is the same in a B2C space as it is in a B2B space. You have to have that unique identifier to be able to appropriately sell to your consumer. And I think making sure you understand that in and out and up and down is essential to be able to leverage it.

And it’s the same type of learning in both sides of the business.

Ryan
I love that. No, really great.

Michael, let me give you just a little different twist. We talked about democratization of data, right? Big guys got it, little guys either haven’t or don’t know what to do with it.

We talked about leveling the playing field, how do you see that evolving in the next six to twelve months? I bet there’s more parity. And maybe if you agree or disagree, take me through what you might leave the listener with.

Michael
Yeah. I think we’re going to see a lot more democratization of what types of campaigns, where ideas come from, how fast we can get ideas out, how we analyze the quality of what’s coming in, what’s a good campaign, what’s a bad campaign, where we’re misspending money.

I think all of those questions can be answered faster now.

And I think smaller companies will have access to the tools that they need because of AI, because of the different data visualization that’s coming out on the market, because of the access to data.

Where it’s not warehoused and only available to the largest players, it’s now more accessible to the smaller players. And as they start to leverage it, I think we’re going to see some actually really interesting things come from it.

And so, I don’t think there’s a downside. I think what we will see is smaller players being able to look like some of the bigger players – and probably the bigger players starting to try to look more like the smaller players, who are going to be faster and more nimble in the market.

Ryan
Totally agree. I was actually going to ask you a follow-up question just in that regard.

We see the middle class changing in a variety of ways and right now, this gap is closing.

Do you see the small players catching up to the big players? I think it’s going to happen, right?

Michael
Absolutely. And the authenticity piece too, right? The small players are going to win because they’re trustworthy, because they have that close-to-the-ground authority. They have the passion, because they’re the ones that chose to pursue this problem.

And the big businesses are always going to suffer from a little bit of that. They’re a bit more disconnected.

They have more reach, they have more access, they have more tools – but they’re going to continue, and I think we’re already seeing this – they’re going to try to find that authenticity piece within their campaigns.

Much of that will become very natural to the smaller players, part of their brand story as well, right at the end of the day.

Ryan
Couldn’t agree more.

Yeah, I love it. Well, think about the trust required of Radiohead’s record label to allow them to do the things that they did with this record.

And I think a lot of this is getting back to that. You need trust to be able to take these big frameworks, these big thoughts, and apply them to a business that may not have the resources as well.

So I think Radiohead would agree with us in that regard: Get some trust, but also big business can look like small business, and in return I think that can happen as well.

So I think it’s kind of a cool parallel we drew today between the record and our topic of choice.

Michaela, on behalf of Michael and myself, thank you immensely for your time with us today.

You have a really interesting perspective that I know Michael and I were excited to kind of break into: your nonprofit work. Would you like to just shout that out if there’s any resources or places we can point toward? I think it’s a fantastic bit of work you’re doing.

Michaela
Yeah, sure. It’s called the Family Enhancement Center. It’s in South Minneapolis.

And, you know, like lots of small nonprofits in today’s political climate, it’s challenging in terms of garnering dollars and making sure that everyone stays afloat.

So any donations, we’d love that, in terms of keeping that support.

But really, I think the last call I would say is just continue to shop local and support those small businesses. I am guilty of clicking and adding to cart and getting it in five hours. You think, “It’s so easy.” I mean, it’s pretty great.

But, you know, as much as we can, I think making sure that we’re also supporting that small space, because they’re working their butts off and they’re leveraging the right resources. Especially as a marketer, there’s so much to be admired, so keeping that up as well.

Ryan
I love that.

Leadpages has always had a community vibe at its core, going back twelve years ago. Now, seeing there’s a lot of alignment and just another reason we were so excited to have you.

So, Michaela, thank you.

Michael
Yeah, thank you.