What Drives Marketing Performance with Brookney Chamberlain, CEO Asen Marketing

Zach:
Brookney, thank you so much for joining us on The Marketer Exchange. It’s so good to have you.

I know you’ve had a lot of time in agency land, and I’m really excited to talk to you and for the audience to get to hear from you as well. So thanks so much for coming.

Can you start by just introducing yourself and telling us about the work that you do?

Brookney:
Sure, absolutely, and thanks for having me.

I am Brookney Chamberlain, and I’ve been in the world of advertising and marketing for 17 years now. I got my start as an intern, as many of us do, and I’ve been with the same company for that period of time.

So I’ve seen a lot of change in technology and people and strategies and brands and companies come and go. I know what works and what stands the test of time.

I’m excited to talk about that in detail with you today, especially because I know that your focus is digital marketing, and a lot changes in that world specifically. So I’m very excited to dive into that discussion.

But I help brands and people that I work with find fulfillment in their work beyond the tactics, and I will hang my hat on that every day.

Zach:
That’s amazing. What a story too. Seventeen years in the same agency, and you went from intern to CEO. That is a really impressive ascension, if I could use that term, no pun intended.

One of the things that I hear from clients that I work with and businesses that I talk to is, “We’re spending money on marketing, but nothing’s happening.”

So what are the first few things that you see and suspect about a company when you hear that?

Brookney:
I’d like to know if conversations were held in the beginning of a partnership, whether that’s an internal marketing team or with an external partnership with an agency like myself.

Were objectives discussed? What are our objectives? What do we want the results to be?

Because oftentimes those aren’t discussed or people aren’t on the same page. Marketing campaigns and programs are launched, and then there’s frustration after the fact and points of friction because, “Well, I thought it was going to do this,” or, “Well, I thought it was going to do that.”

But the conversations were not had in the beginning as they should have been.

So to me, it’s just alignment from the get-go.

Zach:
Right. So people are focused more on the tactics, and they haven’t started thinking about the objectives early on, thinking about what it is that we’re really trying to do.

They get busy with the tactics, but they’re not thinking about what’s the overall goal here.

Brookney:
Right. Yeah, it happens oftentimes.

A lot of times executives have in their mind what they think a successful marketing program should be. Then the marketer also has a perception of that as well, and they’re in misalignment.

So from our perspective in the agency world, we like to have raw conversations from the get-go so that we make sure that we’re avoiding points of friction down the road.

Zach:
One of the things that we’ve had now is social media for 20 years, and you’ve seen all this proliferation of content in those two decades.

Now we’ve got AI. We see AI slop everywhere.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing that OpenAI has gotten rid of Sora 2, but there are other platforms like that that will also make it easy to create this AI slop.

So with all of this noise, with all of this clutter, what can brands be doing to cut through that and really make a mark?

Brookney:
Well, I want to start off by saying I am pro-AI.

I see the advantages that it can bring in marketers’ hands and businesses’ hands, but I can also see the danger that it can deploy as well.

So my answer to that is that brands should be genuine and authentic, and they need to know their ideal customer profiles so they can connect with them in real ways.

Customers are smart. They know when they’re trying to be fooled, and you just need to be genuine.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t use AI technology to generate some forms of content and still be genuine and authentic. You can.

But just like with anything, you can have good marketing and you can have bad marketing.

So it’s just a matter of being real with whatever you do.

Zach:
That’s a good segue.

As you look at the companies that you’ve worked with over the years, what are the things that separate the ones that actually get results from the ones that don’t?

Brookney:
That’s a good question.

The ones that get results are the ones that have transparent and real relationships with their marketing team or marketing partner.

So what we were talking about previously is having those conversations. What are our goals? How are we going to get there? And not being afraid to pivot along the way.

Just because you deploy one program doesn’t mean that’s going to be what’s going to work for you.

You have to be willing to say, “Okay, let’s pause. Let’s look at this. Let’s adjust and go for Plan B.”

So being flexible, nimble, and having open conversations is what’s going to drive success.

Those that don’t do that and think very black and white, unfortunately, are probably going to fail.

Zach:
So having a really strong objective, a really clear objective up front, but being willing to pivot when you need to.

What are some of the other ways that you would define what good marketing strategy looks like?

Brookney:
Good marketing strategy is also built upon research.

If we’re talking about a brand that we would work with, we need to understand their industry. What does the competitive landscape look like? What is their ideal customer profile? What is the narrative that we need to develop to connect with these people?

Then we deploy all of the different brand assets that carry out that narrative.

On top of that, where is our ideal customer living? Where are they engaging? That’s where we need to be.

And that is different per brand, per market.

So again, going back to the initial research, a sound marketing strategy is built upon good research and a good understanding of who you are as a company and who is our customer.

Zach:
So a client comes in to Asen and meets with you guys.

Talk us through what the process might look like from meeting a client, maybe a discovery session. What does that process look like all the way through to kicking off a campaign and execution?

What’s that look like for you guys?

Brookney:
It varies depending upon the market that a client may be in.

Sometimes they’ll come to us and it’s a market that we’ve worked in for decades, so we know exactly what to do.

But sometimes it can be more of a complex situation.

The B2B world can be a little bit more complex than B2C, and a lot of agencies steer clear of it because they’re not sure how to find success there. But it’s something that we really love.

So it might be something that we need to pause and try to understand better ourselves.

We go through deep research and learning so that we can be caught up to speed with the client, so that we can speak their language and understand how to best serve them.

There’s a lot of fact-finding in the initial phase.

We ask a lot of questions, and not just about their industry, but about their business.

Because at Asen, we want to be fully integrated with them, not just as a third-party vendor or partner, but we see ourselves as one and the same.

So we have a seat at their table and we have conversations about, okay, what’s the end game? What are our goals?

Then we orchestrate a plan.

We understand that everyone has a budget. Budgets are variable, and it is our job to be a good steward of someone’s budget.

So we work backwards from, okay, what do we have accommodated to achieve your marketing goals?

Now let’s work backwards from that and lay out the framework for a marketing plan.

The way that we work at Asen, it’s not just short-term. It’s a long-term plan too.

We put together annual, multi-year calendars that really help clients see beyond just tomorrow.

Here’s the framework for the next few years to help you achieve your goals.

That is subject to change. It will. There are so many variables that’ll come in and just take us for a ride. That’s life.

But we like to have a framework so that everyone involved knows where we’re going.

In our marketing calendars, we have all of our different tactics set up and all the different budgets that are associated with that.

And we delegate too.

We work a lot with internal marketing teams, so we say, “Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s what you’re doing.”

Everyone knows the framework and is working together.

I think a lot of times when things don’t work, people are duplicating efforts and it’s almost fighting against one another.

So having that framework is really a game changer for a lot of companies.

They see marketing as this golden ticket when it’s not. It’s more complicated than that.

Can you drive success with marketing? Absolutely, when done right.

But you have to be willing to walk the walk before you can run.

Sometimes people want to just get in and start running when the foundation is not ready for that.

So we have to have some hard conversations like, “Okay, yeah, you want to do digital marketing, but your website is not optimized for digital marketing, so it’s going to fail.”

Every situation is unique when someone comes in our door, and we handle it as such.

Zach:
That’s great.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that framework?

It might be helpful for you to just visualize a client that you’ve worked with. You don’t have to give us details about that client, but what does the framework actually look like?

What does it involve? What are the pieces of that framework?

Brookney:
It’s essentially a calendar. It’s a spreadsheet, right?

It is laid out month by month, week by week, and is divided upon different services that we offer.

There’s digital marketing. There’s branding. There’s website development. There’s marketing tools. There’s strategy that we overlay on everything that we do, where we have ongoing conversations with our clients.

We carve out intentional time monthly or bimonthly to have strategy sessions, and we assess everything that is happening in their marketing program so that we can pivot proactively if we need to.

But yeah, it’s nothing fancy. It’s nothing out of this world.

It’s a standard calendar, and it works because everyone is accustomed to that format.

Zach:
So having worked with all these clients over the years, or even just looking more broadly at marketing right now, what is one tactic that you see consistently getting overused?

Brookney:
I want to change the word “overused” to “abused.”

Zach:
Okay, I like it.

Brookney:
Everyone wants to do social media.

I agree that it has a place for most businesses, but you don’t need to be on every platform.

I see a lot of companies doing it wrong and just contributing to, as you said earlier, the noise and the slop.

So I see social media being something that can be highly effective that is oftentimes abused because everyone thinks they can just post on social media.

“I can use ChatGPT to generate a caption. I can pull a stock image, and boom, there it’s done.”

No. That is not how it works.

There’s a lot more strategy involved in that.

You need to understand, again going back to the initial things we were talking about, the ICP. Who is my ideal customer? What do they care about? What is the content that’s going to resonate with them? How often do I need to be posting?

Do I need to post 10 times a day? No, you don’t.

Quality over quantity, as they say, and it’s true.

I just see so much noise on social media as a marketer and as a mother, and just as an individual. It’s offensive, and I’m concerned about society.

If I may take it a step further, attention spans are diminishing at an alarming rate.

Social media is the number one factor driving that.

And as marketers, we have an opportunity to take a stance and fight against it.

Even though the digital reporting and the algorithms are going to be in favor of supporting short-form content, we need to look at the bigger picture and see what is really happening here and try to take a stance as a brand and be more genuine.

Going back to the whole conversation, how can you be successful?

Be more genuine. Be more authentic and intentional with what we’re doing, not just social media, but across the board and in every way that we’re representing our company.

Zach:
Yeah, I say fairly often that the great and terrible thing about social media is that everyone has a voice, right?

It’s great that everyone has a voice, but it’s also terrible that everybody has a voice because we just end up creating this.

There’s a book, The Chaos Machine. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but they talk a lot about how the polarization that we see within politics and within society today is driven by the social validation feedback loop.

We create content and people respond in a way, so we go even more to the extreme next time to get more engagement again.

So you’ve already talked about several things that really drive success for clients.

But if you had to boil it down to three or four things that consistently drive marketing performance for your clients, what would those three or four things be?

Brookney:
Strategy.

Real strategy, like having a strategy before you start.

Not just running and getting going, but stop, pause, have a strategy.

Identify what makes you different. Differentiation, right? That’s important.

Everyone’s online. How are you different? Why should I care?

Identifying that, owning it, and carrying it out in everything that you’re doing.

Then being a real, connective storyteller.

People make decisions based on their emotions, and you need to be able to connect with them through stories. Again, real stories.

Lastly, I would say this applies to an internal marketing team or a partner: having the real conversations, transparent communication with everyone involved, is really going to be what makes or breaks your marketing program.

Zach:
Because you started with strategy, how much of marketing success comes down to marketing strategy versus execution?

Brookney:
One can’t exist without the other. So to me, it’s 50-50.

Zach:
That’s a great answer.

You mentioned in this conversation already about marketing partnerships.

How important are those, and how can companies or your clients or marketers best set themselves up for success in that area of partnership?

Brookney:
It’s crucial.

There are so many marketers out there, and not everyone is created equal or has the same values at hand.

So to me, it is crucial that you identify the right partner for you from the get-go.

That can be your internal marketing team as well, not just a third-party partner.

But you need to have shared values.

A lot of companies talk about values, but to me, I’ve seen it fall apart later on. It’s like any relationship.

You have to have a solid foundation and common points of interest and values that are just critical for success later down the road.

So to me, the number one thing is shared values, people and companies.

You have to find a partner that is willing to get in the trenches for you, admit when they’re wrong, and also learn to pivot.

And that goes for the company too.

I see a lot of execs that come in and they don’t want to open up their books. They don’t want to be transparent about things.

But we have to have an understanding of what’s working and what’s not.

Not just by the numbers, but processes and people.

We need to look at your org chart. We need to have inside access.

If they’re not willing to do that, then that’s a sign that it may not be a successful marketing relationship.

So it all boils down to relationships.

If you want to have a solid marketing partnership, make sure that you’re going to have a good relationship from the get-go.

Zach:
I guess there are other providers, third-party providers, that you guys have made decisions not to work with in the past.

I often say to people that there are customers that you don’t want. There are some people that you don’t want to work for.

Are there clients, obviously no specifics, but are there clients and customers that you’ve made that decision not to work with in the past?

What were some of the drivers of that?

Brookney:
Yeah, we have.

It’s sad to say, but it was an important decision for us as leaders of the company not to bring in someone that we knew would not be a good partner for us.

Because if we had brought them in, it would have created all kinds of friction for our internal team.

It’s really hard these days to maintain a positive, healthy working culture, especially in the world of remote working.

So we’re very careful about whoever we bring in, whether that be a new teammate or a business partner.

And history, we can learn a lot from history, right?

I’ve been with Asen for 17 years, and unfortunately there have been times when we’ve had to dismiss clients because they presented one way when they walked through the door, but later down the road it was quite evident that we didn’t have shared values.

It was just not going to work for either party.

So we thought it was best to part ways, and ultimately that ended up being the right decision.

From that, we’ve learned how to better qualify and vet prospects before they ever enter our doors now.

I think that’s important for every company to consider, not just for partners, vendors and business partners, but your own internal team.

Zach:
As clients come in, I’m guessing you guys are thinking more about how you can help them going forward rather than picking apart maybe what they’ve been doing or what other agencies have been doing for them.

But I’m guessing there are probably some glaring common mistakes that businesses make when they invest in marketing.

Are there any of those that stand out to you?

Brookney:
Yeah. They started without a strategy, right?

Zach:
Ha ha ha!

Brookney:
They’re like, “We should be on social media. Let’s get on all the platforms,” or, “We should be doing digital marketing.”

But my website’s not ready for it.

So they started before they were ready.

I appreciate the enthusiasm and the willingness to dive all in, but before you do that, make sure that you’re ready for it because you could be wasting serious money and causing more problems than it’s worth.

Zach:
What’s something that’s working right now that enough businesses aren’t paying attention to?

Brookney:
User behavior.

This may come as a surprise to some people listening, and probably not to a lot of people, but a lot of users are defaulting to having conversations and doing all their search queries on their LLM of preference, whether that’s Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, whatever.

Businesses need to make sure that their websites have enough rich content and are continually adding to that rich content so that they are showing up for those opportunities of personal conversations through LLM chats.

I do my own shopping via LLMs now.

I want my LLM to tell me, “What product should I choose based on all this research?”

Because I don’t have time to go do that. Just tell me.

And it tells me in a matter of seconds.

Why I say that is that it is pulling from information online and their website.

So people need to be looking at their websites and all of the information they’re putting online and make sure that it is continually being optimized for these conversations that people are having.

This is called GEO, Generative Engine Optimization.

It is not new, but it is happening, and a lot of businesses are unaware of this right now.

It’s huge.

Zach:
I’ve got to guess at what your answer might be to this question.

But if you were able to give one piece of advice on how businesses can get better results from marketing, what would it be?

Brookney:
Well, strategy. Have a better strategy.

But I’ll go a little bit deeper.

Marketing is cumulative.

So it’s really important to have a comprehensive plan.

Don’t just deploy one tactic. You need to layer on different tactics because they all work together to drive that funnel action.

Creating awareness and driving someone through a decision phase to ultimately choosing our brand versus another when they’re ready to make that purchase, whatever it may be.

So having a comprehensive marketing program is crucial.

That is built on sound strategy.

Zach:
All right.

As you know, this podcast really is targeted at folks who are either looking to get into marketing or they’re young in their careers and getting into marketing.

So what advice would you give somebody who’s looking to break into marketing right now?

Brookney:
Be genuine, be diligent, and this may be shocking, but follow through.

So many people submit résumés or they submit inquiries, and we as businesses get inundated with that.

But when we choose to engage with someone and they ghost us, it’s like, you missed out on the golden opportunity.

You’d just be amazed at the amount of people that don’t have communication skills.

Genuine communication skills are crucial if you’re trying to make it into business.

So be humble, be diligent, follow through, and be a forever student.

You’re not ever going to know it all, and just be willing to admit that.

But if you come in and you’re like, “Hey, teach me. I want to learn. I want to grow,” you’re the candidate that we’re looking for.

Zach:
Okay, humble, diligent, forever student.

What are some of the other things that you’re looking for when you’re looking at new graduates specifically?

People who are just graduating, coming in and looking for agency work. What are you looking for?

Brookney:
All of those apply.

I don’t expect you to know it all.

I know that you probably don’t have the real-world experience yet.

But if you come in and you’re humble enough to be like, “Hey, I want to learn. I’m willing to grow. I want to be with a company for a long time,” that’s a biggie.

Then we’re willing to give you the opportunity.

Unfortunately, I don’t know why this pattern has become a trend, but a lot of younger generations are job hopping like crazy.

As an employer, that is a deterrent for us.

It’s something that is off-putting, especially as a small company.

We take a lot of time and energy onboarding a new team member, and when they leave in six to eight months, that’s detrimental to our company and our culture and our partners too.

So if you’re willing to dedicate yourself, commit to growth, and to be with a company for a good amount of time, then you’re a great candidate for us.

Now, we’re a small business. We’re different than a corporation. I understand that.

But just be genuine, be authentic, be willing to be taught.

You don’t know it all. I don’t know it all. We have to learn together.

If you have those skills, you’re a great candidate.

Zach:
Yeah, it’s a huge investment, right?

For any company hiring somebody new, it’s a huge investment, especially for a small business.

Having people come in, you train them, especially out of school, they don’t have a whole lot of training.

So you’re taking this raw ingredient almost and processing them into something that is more usable and trained.

Then they leave after six months or eight months.

That’s really difficult.

Brookney:
Yeah.

And to get your foot in the door, I’d recommend trying internships.

School is great. I know you’re a teacher.

But you learn real-world tactical experience on the job. That’s where you get most of your learnings.

You get the foundation at school, but you get everything else for life in a job.

So if I could give any piece of advice, if you’re having a hard time finding a job, start with an internship.

Get your foot in the door with the right company, and you can find yourself in a full-time position pretty soon.

Zach:
Or the CEO!

Do an internship and you can become the CEO. Amazing story.

Eventually, after several years of hard work and dedication to the company.

I’ve asked this question of a few people.

Where do you see the balance between certificates and experience?

What are you looking for more in someone who’s applying for a job with you guys?

Brookney:
I think it boils back to what I was saying before.

It’s great that you’re certified, but I’m really looking for those human skills.

Can you be teachable? Are you a collaborator?

If you exhibit those traits and you have some foundational experience through certification and whatnot, then to me that beats real-world experience when you’re coming in our doors, especially if you’re starting out in a junior position.

We’re looking at: Are you moldable? Can you be taught?

Are you willing to expand your thinking beyond digital marketing?

Because it is a small company. We wear many hats, and you have to be able to see the big picture.

Oftentimes, if you are service-driven, like, “I’m a digital marketer,” it’s hard because that’s your world.

You have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture and understand that there are other layers to a marketing program too.

They all have to work together.

So I don’t know if that answers your question or not, but yeah.

Zach:
Yes.

You also mentioned earlier that you’re a proponent of AI, so I want to dig a little bit deeper on that and just ask you about how you guys are using that at the moment.

Brookney:
That changes by the day as technology shifts too.

But just to give you the groundwork of our company, we have a copywriter on staff. We have an art director on staff. We have a digital marketer. We have strategists. We have web developers.

So we all have different lanes that we’re in.

Different AI tools serve us differently, which is why I kind of wanted to give that framework.

But we use our LLM of preference.

We have ChatGPT users, we have Claude users, we have Gemini cheerleaders.

Beyond just giving us ideation and helping us with jump-starting a lot of deep research, I mean, that’s a huge time savings in itself and has been a game changer for us.

We are actually developing our own AI tools that we’re offering as services for our clients now, and I’m just so stoked about that.

We work with a lot of smaller to mid-sized businesses where it can be cost-prohibitive to have certain services or technological tools to better your business.

But since we have been open-minded enough to learn as much as we can through agentic technology, we are finding ways to bring new tools to our company to offer our clients that they would not have had access to just a few months ago.

So I’m super excited about it.

Not just from the creative standpoint, but AI is helping us create new services, new tools for our clients so they can do their job better.

And we’re not just siloed within our own company.

We are learning from thought leaders in a variety of markets.

My husband is at UT as well, and he’s a huge AI innovator.

We have conversations all the time in this household about how we can utilize this technology.

He’s in teaching, like yourself, but I’m in marketing. We have conversations and we learn from one another.

I think that’s what’s missing right now.

A lot of industries are just siloed.

But if we can open up and learn from one another, there are so many opportunities that we could achieve together and better ourselves.

So long story short, we’re using AI in a lot of different ways, but I’m most excited about how we’ve been able to harness it and create new services for our clients that are giving them a new world for their own business.

Zach:
What’s one of the most expensive mistakes that you see businesses making with their marketing mindset?

We’ve talked about tactics.

What are some of the things that they’re not doing from a tactics perspective, but what are they doing in terms of mindset?

What’s the most expensive mistake you see them making?

Brookney:
From a business perspective, the most expensive mistake that you can make in marketing, from my perspective, because I’m an outside partner, is hiring the wrong partner.

We have a lot of companies come to us where they’ve had failed attempts at marketing, and it was pretty clear that they were aligned with the wrong partner from the get-go.

So from a business perspective, if you are using someone third-party, it is crucial, going back to having those shared values and good relationship, that you have those foundational tools in place so you can avoid those expensive mistakes down the road.

Zach:
What is one mistake that you see junior marketers making that holds them back?

I know you guys have some junior folks in-house, maybe not at the moment, but you have had and trained some junior people.

What are some of the mistakes that you see them making that keeps them from progressing in the way that they should?

Brookney:
Being siloed in their thinking.

They come out of school and they’re a designer, or they’re a digital marketer, or they’re a website developer.

But when you’re going into a small and mid-sized company, you’re going to wear many hats.

If you just see yourself as such, “I’m just a designer. I’m just a copywriter. I’m just a developer,” then you’re missing the big picture.

And you’re missing out on an opportunity to really learn some exciting things and learn how maybe your hard skill could be applied across the board.

Maybe you could pick up some other skills along the way.

So just being open-minded is critical and not being so siloed in your thinking.

Then just going back to the communication skills.

We live in a digital era. It’s easy to hide behind a screen.

But having and trying to have real, genuine relationships with your coworkers and with your partners is crucial.

It’s huge at the end of the day.

I’m a natural introvert, right? I love to hide in my little hole, but I can be extroverted if need be, and I know that it’s important.

We’re humans.

We have this innate need for connection at the end of the day.

So just be willing to put yourself out there a little bit and create real relationships because that’s networking.

Don’t burn bridges.

You never know who you’ll need down the road.

Zach:
What’s one thing that we haven’t talked about today that you feel like potential clients or businesses who are looking for a partner need to hear?

Brookney:
Do your research.

Do your research on a partner.

Don’t just take what we have to say at face value.

Do your own research. Talk to people that have used a marketing partner. You will hear real stories.

It’s just like vetting anyone when you’re hiring a new employee, right?

But do the same thing.

Do your due diligence when you’re hiring a partner too.

Zach:
Brookney, this has been so great getting to talk to you today.

I’m so excited for people to hear this and for people to get insight into real agency life and what it’s really like.

Where can people find out more about you and the work that you do?

Brookney:
Yeah, go to AsenMarketing.com.

Nobody can pronounce our name. It’s A-S-E-N, Marketing.com.

We’re on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, all the places, TikTok.

And if you want to connect with me personally, I’m on LinkedIn as well. I’m very active there.

But yeah, looking forward to future conversations.

Zach:
Brookney, thank you so much for coming. I really appreciate it.

Brookney:
Yeah, likewise. Thank you.