Momentum Taigmarks
Elkhart, IN Elkhart, IN
574-203-5993 574-294-8855
info@momentumboost.com Comrades@Taigmarks.com
Shane Frost has been working in media since January 6, 1996. He studies mass communications with a business backup at Indiana University South Bend.
I was on the newspaper staff there [IUSB] and enjoyed the press passes one would get to go to concerts and thought I would try my hand out at being a real journalist. I always liked writing and telling stories.
I really liked journalism and appreciated being to tell authentic stories and realizing that everybody has a story. And so I really enjoyed being able to retell people’s stories, whether it’s news or sports or anything.
Q: Studying mass communications, was being in media something you always wanted to do or did you have some goals maybe before college that you thought you might go in a different direction?
I was a part of a high school class like my sophomore year, we resurrected our high school newspaper, me and a hand full of other people. I just loved writing stories and I think that’s where I thought about journalism, because the local newspaper, The Elkhart Truth, actually borrowed student writers at the time from high schools and made a youth paper... But I always enjoyed writing or telling a story whether it would be with video (or it was more film at the time) but I just liked telling stories and it was fun to do that. I liked people paying attention to me, and it wasn’t about me it was about somebody else.
They [The Elkhart Truth] had a weekly, every Saturday morning, an insert in the newspaper that featured local writers, and so that was my introduction. And then in 2002 I actually got hired at the Elkhart Truth but it was on the marketing side of things. So 2002 is when all my journalist friends said I sold my soul and went to the marketing side of the business, because I had been a journalist. I was a features writer, I utilized my photography skills and then moved up to an editor and a special sections at The Papers Inc., which at the time had six different publications that I wrote for. And it was around the pre Y2K time... Mac, Apple, had a really cool computer at the time so I bought the first iMac and I started making web pages through mac.com. And so all the stories and pictures that I didn’t put into print I put on a website. I would put the website in the newspaper and then people would go to that, and it was great because I covered a lot of high school sports at the time and parents would be like "well my son didn’t get in the newspaper but he’s on that website," so that was kind of cool. That’s actually where my multi-type media started when I was doing that. And then in 2002 when I went to The Elkhart Truth, we hired a TV producer to turn our written stories into videos on our website, and that was right around the time when YouTube first got started. So that was kind of cool that we were doing things like that.
Q: How did you work your way up to the position you’re in now?
I really enjoyed taking the principles of journalism and then...when I became marketing director at The Elkhart Truth, I turned that into telling stories for The Elkhart Truth; The business, the history of it, how it started, how we reach people. So that was my job. And I also assisted the advertising department by doing research on their perspective clients, and then we would help them build a marketing strategy for people who wanted to advertise. Eventually I went to WSBT…so going back to my very first job, I mean back pre Y2K, I started to mesh journalism and the web. And then when I was at The [Elkhart] Truth, even my son, he was seven years old at the time, he did a show called Five Things to Do with Your Kids. So every Monday we would green screen him and say "go tubing" and we would show the tubing hill in the background, or "go to the zoo," and so it just kind of turned into me wanting to make sure that I jumped on the next wave of mass communication because I could see the newspaper industry kind of going away. Like when the airplanes started hitting the market, everybody who was in the train industry…if train company owners would have bought planes and become transportation owners, some of those businesses would be alive now because because they would be focused on transportation and not just trains. So what I tried to do was not necessarily focus on being a newspaper person but being a communications person. So all these new technologies, I would adapt them... Sometimes the traditional media I worked for didn’t pick up on that fast enough, so I started my own agency. It was a part-time agency for a while and then for the last six years it has grown. And now what’s great is I work for TaigMarks, which is a branding agency. They focus on branding and PR and then I rent office space for my Momentum Marketing team which focuses on digital, and we work so well work together and it’s really cool… I just remember somebody saying "you can’t see the forest for the trees," so that little idea has always been in my brain. Looking at the newspaper industry or even television, I mean I Hulu now, I Sling, I Roku, I don’t tune into broadcast except maybe for the news, so journalism is still important but I’ve tried to be more of a communications person.
Q: What would you say some of your achievements or turning points were that got you where you are now?
Realizing that I loved telling stories… So going back to the newspaper days, I met a dude in Fort Wayne who worked at a horse barn where they gave people with special needs horse [riding] lessons and I was assigned to go write a story on this guy… I did a story on Bill, who was 69 or 70 years old, who told me he had owned a furniture store in Fort Wayne ever since he was young, and he didn’t dream, I mean who as a kid dreams to be a furniture salesman? So he told me that his dream was always to become a cowboy because he grew up in a generation where cowboys were always on TV. So he says after he retired, some of his friends gave him enough money and bought him a trip to a dude ranch in Colorado. And while he was out there he had so much fun and enjoyed it and he was really good at it. And he was so good that the dude ranch invited him back out to be a paid hand the next time they took out a bunch of cattle on a horse from one divide to the next. And so he went back and when he came back he found out that he had cancer. And so now he wanted to be able to help kids with special needs and horses and that’s how he got his job. And I was like wow, what I thought was going to be a boring story became good. So I worked extra hard on it and quite honestly I had an editor that I really trusted who would hand me back my stories with lots of red ink, and I was okay with that because I learned how to turn those stories better. Well about three months later, my editor came in and said "wow, that story must hav been really popular because somebody came in and got 60 copies of it," and I was like "oh really?" And she was like "yeah the family loved it so much that after Bill died they came and got a bunch of stories." And this was just three months after it was published but cancer had caught up with him. But that story stuck with me and…this was 1998 or '97. But he had written me a letter….that said "thanks for the great article, best wishes to you and your career, and someday let's go west." And he signed it Bill. And I was like that’s cool he really liked it, but then a few months later when the family came in and bought all those copies because they wanted to share that story that I had written, not about me, that my editor helped me make better, you know it’s a team effort.
And then when I was at The Elkhart Truth and we produced the TV show that featured my son and people were watching it. And it was before YouTube was out there and in fact, people were afraid of us doing videos online... but that was a turning point that "hey, I need to focus on telling stories digitally." And then later, after learning Google Analytics and advertising through Google and Youtube and then learning Facebook advertising and Linkedin adverting, having clients say that was awesome and that worked... I knew I wanted to retell stories, whether it was for people or for businesses, especially after the story with Bill. I still think about that guy often and I probably spent maybe two hours with him and he just made such a big impact.
There are six team members at Momentum and 10 members at TaigMarks.
I've got a great team... I’ve made sure to surround myself with people who are smarter than me at different things and we all complement one another.
Frost's daily tasks at Momentum
We will look at website performance to make sure nothing is stopping traffic from flowing. I’ll review the Facebook ads. We don’t like to do daily Facebook posts for our clients but we will take some ads and then through Facebook ad manager, we’ll target them to specific audiences. So I’ll check that out and I’ll do the same thing with our Google ads and Youtube ads and Linkedin ads and I just make sure that everything is performing well. A big part of what we do is writing. We have a person who is SEMrush certified, so we’ll go into all the pages to make sure that the content is updated and works good for SEO. And I’ll be in contact with my team. And then for TaigMarks I do a lot of writing still. We’re creating an annual report for one client that needs to have certain articles in it, so I’ll make sure that gets done. I’m writing a radio script right now because we’re doing on the Spanish radio station a notification for a local health group that there’s free COVID testing, but we have to make sure that we reach this large Spanish audience. I’m writing a couple video scripts right now, so we’ll turn those videos into YouTube pieces or pieces for their website and then break them down into 15 second ads that I could use through social media and Google. Basically it's that every day….that’s the bulk of it.
Q: How does analytics fit into all of that for you?
There’s Google Analytics, there's website analytics, there's advertising analytics. It’s important to see what messages are working [and] cut off the ads or campaigns that aren’t working well. [We] look at the websites, see which ones have the highest bounce rate, why is it that people are leaving right away, [and] try to fix the content on there. Other analytics then at the end of the month are reviwing how much we spent and how much revenue a client brought in. And then are we working this client correctly as far as are we spending too much or is the profit margin too high and we’re not getting enough results for them? So that’s where the analytics of the job come in. So there’s the campaign report, website report and then on the business side, what’s our P&L for each of our clients.
Q: What insights are the most valuable for your clients?
It depends. One of the most popular is in Google Analytics, we’ll look at behavior, site content, and then the next tab is landing pages... We make sure that every campaign that goes out, whether it's via Facebook, Linkedin, Google Ads, Youtube, whatever, for a particular campaign, we have it come back to a specific landing page. So when they look at the landing page number they can tell...how someone first came to their website, so we look at that number first. I am a PPC agency for one client who has somebody else doing their social, so I like to pull out the acquisition overview in Google Analytics. That allows them to see how many people came in through PPC, how many people came in organically, and how many came in via social. So that’s another tool… and actually I send our clients for the most part with a unique automatic weekly generated Google Analytics report so they get it directly from Google Analytics. But if I’m dealing with a competitive agency, I love to make sure that they see the acquisition report so they see how many people I’m bringing to them. If it's somebody that has an e-commerce site, I make sure that we put the dollar conversions. So at the very bottom of the Google Analytics page, there’s a conversions or goals button and it allows…one particular client the $3,000 they spend every month they’re doing $7,000 to $10,000 in sales, [so] I like them to see that report. It just basically depends on who the client is, but I like to use the Google Analytics, except for SharpSpring. I have some people, like the doctors office, we have three forms built on their website: one for careers, so there’s a form on their careers page, then there’s a different form for general practice and then there’s a form for dental. And as people fill those forms out, the managers of those departments get that contact information and then we automatically do follow-up. So for them and for some of our RV dealers or RV manufacturers, they’ll get actual leads. So when the person actually gets the name and phone number and email address of an actual lead, that’s like the ultimate [goal].
Momentum currently has about 16 clients. Their monthly marketing budgets range from four to five figures. Some clients are local while others are national.
Q: How are the contracts structured?
We actually set up expectations early on... there’s two ways we describe it. One, we've got to get your car working efficiently. We've got to tune up the motor – so your website, your social media presence, we have to tune all that up. We've got to make sure the carburetor is clean, spark plugs changed - so that’s the work we do in making sure the content on the website is SEO positive. We don’t want to start paying for pay-per-click, we don’t want people to be getting to that website until it's fine tuned because that changes your gas mileage. You don’t want to get five miles to the gallon, you want to get 55 miles to the gallon. So once we do that...we have to put gas in the tank, and that’s the advertising dollars. So the first month we’re going to make sure everything is good and we’ll start advertising, but you have to garantee us a certain amount of ad spend so we can get the word out and target people. So we tell them it takes about three months to get them up and running. So then I have our projects manager trying to contact all of our people at least once a month and we send them reports. And more of them have more than just that overall project. So Heart City Health, they have several locations. It’s a client that is shared both by Momentum and TaigMarks. So TaigMarks works on the branding for them, Momentum is doing digital stuff, but we’re also doing their annual report or this COVID testing thing or we’re helping them reach out for new employees. So we have an overall sytem but then we have several projects in between, so we’ll at least talk to people once a month but sometimes, and most frequently, it's more than that.
Q: How much overlap would you say is between the two businesses?
I think we have three or four clients that we share at the same time. And sometimes the bigger clients might be working already with an international huge digital firm, but...because we’re mostly in the B2B realm, some of these manufacturers they grew up making deals with buddies and started their company with "you buy my widget to put in yours." But now they’re realizing they need digital. So some of the traditional clients that TaigMarks has had, they’re now saying "do you guys do digital?" And that’s when Steve [Taig, owner of TaigMarks] says "hey Shane, let's figure out how we can help this guy." It's growing, so we’ll be overlapping more because people need it.
Q: How are you able to manage all of that data on a weekly basis?
That’s why we have a team. That’s why I count on a couple people to help me out. So usually every day is just digging in, briefly looking at a snapshot, digging in where I need to. But the platforms we use make it really easy to go in there and in just a few minutes look and see how things are going. We have a tool called SharpSpring that’s a lead generation tool. It's kind of like HubSpot but it offers some other features that HubSpot doesn’t and it's like a third of the cost. So we’ll look at that, we’ll look at...each of the platforms linked in Google, so we’ll look at Google Ads and Google Analytics and then our Facebook ad manager and those platforms. Now we haven't found an aggregate tool that works really well yet. We’ve tried several out but we all still have to manually look at those to decide what content needs updated next or new opportunities or where we need to cut a campaign.
Q: What makes your current job unique or different from some of your past jobs?
I don’t care whether you’re newspaper or TV or radio, even if you're in some kind of online platform, you cannot measure audience engagement any better than through using multiple platforms on digital, and that’ the big difference. I remember being at The Elkhart Truth helping some of the ad reps work for an automotive [company]. They would have somebody walk into a car dealership with the newspaper classified ads tucked under their arm looking around. And then he’d pull the ad out and stick it back under. And the next day if the ad rep went in there the car sales manager would be like "we love advertising, we saw somebody come in with an ad in the newspaper." That was so not authentic. And TV can say "oh, we have 20 percent share market in 35 households, but they don’t really know. And now [with] digital, we can tell how long somebody stayed on the website. We can find out if they give us just an email address to download a coupon or a PDF. We can track how many times they’ve opened our emails, how many times they went on a certain page, how many times they interacted with our social media. And then we can send an email to the sales manager saying "John Smith identified himself as an RV dealer and he spent eight hours this past week on your stuff, you should give him a call and tell him that you care about him." The detail that we have available is just amazing. And I love it because when I worked in TV…they’re ruthless. And I didn’t like their sales tactics, so the experience I saw was that...they would take somebody's $5,000 a month and about $700 of it went to the actual campaign. The rest of it was commissions and overrides and production, and that’s why I like what I’m doing now. I can be transparent and I can walk into a client and share with them the actual numbers and I can say "this month it sucked, we have to change the message." And I’ve got clients that appreciate that honesty. And that’s the big difference is people can trust and verify what I’m saying. And it's all because of analytics.
Q: How has some of the analytics software changed and improved over time?
There are lots of robots out there, so being able to determine whether or not it was a real person vs a robot…that’s important. But the biggest thing is there is a level of anonymity that the internet says you cannot give out this much information. But if a person gives you an identifying piece of information like a phone number or an email address, you can actually track that person's engagement with your property. And SharpSpring helps us do that. We don’t get that information through Google Analytics. But when you layer all those things over, you can see what's working. But to be able to individually market to somebody, that’s cool. And it's dangerous because we also know in the hands of people who aren’t responsible with it and people market to us and it gets sick but the clients I work with they appreciate being able to target people like that and have an authentic conversation.
Q: How do you think analytics and data management could be more efficient in the future?
It would be great if everybody allowed their API in their program to work better. The digital world allows so much sharing, you know you’ve got Wordpress that opens all their code so you’ve got people who can write all kinds of cool things. But I haven't found a really good piece of program or or an app that allows me to pull in and all my data and present it in the same way. You know I could pull in unique measurable into one report but I can’t customize it the way it would be good for a client, so that’s why right now we’ll go in and do screenshots from different things because they measure success differently…it's not all uniform. And I don’t expect it to be, but it would be great if I can manipulate it in such a way that a customer, a client, could look at it.
Q: What would you tell students or people who want to transition into a media career? What have you learned?
Being prolific. That’s probably the most important. I tell my new graphic designers, including my son, if I need one graphic I want you to make me 10. I want you to make them 10 different ways. And I tell my writers this...the more I wrote the better I was, and so being prolific is important. If you say you want to help somebody out, you want do something, then do it more. I hope that’s not too corny. But prolific is the key.
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