Jess
Welcome to the theory of marketing relativity podcast. I'm Jess Burton, a marketing specialist here at Epic Marketing Consultants Corporation. Let's talk all things marketing and merchandising with our Epic team. Today, we have our CEO and head cat herder, Nancy Dibert on the podcast. Hey, Nancy, how are you doing today?
Nancy
Hi, Jess. I'm very well, how are you?
Jess
Good. Enjoying the nice sunshine before it gets a little humid up in here. We decided we're going to kick off our podcast by talking to you our CEO. So let's just get started with the questions. The first one that I have for you is What?
Why did you start your own agency?
Nancy
Great question. And just as with most things in my life, that's a little bit of a convoluted story. So my husband Don and I worked at another agency and didn't get along terrifically well with the owner, he had a tendency to be a little bit overbearing and didn't want to hear anyone else's opinions or thoughts or what, even at times was best for the client. So there was one night, late fall, early winter of 2007, I believe it was. And we were all at this, this big company wide meeting in Manhattan. And he took an opportunity in front of everyone to mansplain to me something that really didn't need to be mansplain. So here's massage and he was really showing that night. So I held my tongue as best as I could. And on our way back to our hotel room, I hissed at my husband. I'm going to own this. And Don looked at me and knowing me said, I have no doubt. So it's just not much longer after that on January. First of 2008, we sat down at our kitchen table and we decided that we were going to change our own stars and we weren't going to be dependent upon someone else. We had experienced our clients not having the services that they needed, the response time that they needed in working at another agency, and we really wanted to make their needs forefront in our vision and what we wanted to bring to marketing, especially for credit unions. So we sat at that table, and we started our plan of marketing domination.
Jess
Now, is that where the name Epic came from? Or is there some other secret behind it?
Nancy
Well, there's a little bit of a secret behind it. My husband Don came up with the name Epic Marketing Consultants Corporation. He is not shy to tell people that his wife is a card carrying genius as a member of Mensa, and he really believed that we needed to somehow say that to let people understand that they're not just going to be getting okay. Yeah, I've done a little bit of marketing or I'd like to call myself a marketer, but someone who understands the science behind it. He's also a really good, proud guy. So he wanted something to do with Einstein's emcc,E=MC2. And he worked on that and worked on that. And then in true light bulb, Einstein fashion, he looked at me and he said, I have it. And I said, what, what do you have? And he said, Epic Marketing Consultants Corporation, E=MC2 And I just did that kind of the tilted my head and the dumb dog look. And I said, Are people going to get that? And he said they don't have to. He said, we know what it means. And over the years people have gotten it and they've gone. Ooh, very clever. We know that we found our people when they say that.
Jess
That is super creative. I working at Epic. I think that's probably one of my favorite things. When I get to explain to people, well, this is what our company's called, this is our logo, and then you kind of watch that light bulb go off, so to say, they understand E=MC2. And then as they kind of dig into our website and all of our stuff, how we've kind of how you and Don have definitely built that branding into the whole company. I definitely think it is something that you guys did a phenomenal job of.
Talking about Don, what's it like to work with your husband?
Nancy
Great question.
It's good. It's bad,
it's ugly. It's everything in between. I would have it no other way. We both made the decision, Don suffered a severe head injury or work related his head injury quite a while ago, and we almost lost him. The doctors said that, that first they didn't think he was going to survive. But that if he did that he would be a different person. They didn't. They couldn't tell me what his cognitive functioning would be like afterwards. So during his recovery, and it did take about five years, we made that conscious decision that anything we were ever going to do from that point forward, we were going to do together because we saw what life would be like without one another. And neither one of us ever want to do that. So we decided, Okay, we're going to work together. We go grocery shopping together. We did. We play golf together. If you see one of us, you see the other to the point that people would say that we were connected at the hip or codependent. They don't know the whole story. They don't understand why we've made that conscious decision. And part of that decision is working together. So we don't even have separate offices, we have a really great office that we work in, we have a huge double desk. So we work right next to each other. And that's the way we like it. And it is not that codependency and it's not even that security. It's just that connection. We also believe that we are so much more together than we are apart. The creativity, the the mind trust we bring together when we are physically, emotionally, mentally, together is so much more than with one of us. And we see that throughout all of Epic that we have actually formed this brain trust. And together, we are just so much more than all of our parts combined.
Jess
My gosh, I'm over here like getting choked up.
I love a good love story.
So, Nancy, do you think that working with Don, who said to I'm sure sitting right at the desk next to you, or at least watching from a closed door where the windows are? Do you think that that is a benefit that Epic has?
Nancy
I really do. I think that having your principles physically connected, as well as all of the other connections that a married couple has, I think that brings value to our clients. We don't stop at five o'clock. Our conversations continue throughout all of the time that we're together. We could be sitting there playing backgammon discussing a client's needs. So I really think that it brings something more. And on top of that, we really consider our clients part of our family. And that gives us that feeling of responsibility.
Jess
Love it. I know, with all of us on your internal teams, we definitely find all of our clients are kind of an extension of our family. We love wishing them happy birthday and celebrating all their victories with them, but also helping them like dig out in the trenches. So more of a marketing question for you. In the last 12 and a half years, how has Epic Marketing Consultants evolved to keep up with the fast paced world of marketing?
Nancy
Great question. So we started like I said at that kitchen table, back then, it was right as print was dying, but print hadn't quite died yet., so we were still very entrenched in traditional marketing, our clients were still looking for traditional marketing. But individually, we were very active in social media and in in the digital sphere. So it was a very easy transition for us to come over to be seen as the experts in the digital world because we had that personal experience. So here we were 10 years ago, pushing the envelope of organizations being on social media, and that just as your website replaced your yellow pages ad, if you weren't going to be on social media, you're not going to be found. So even if you have that website, we were making that analogy, and it's finally started to resonate with people. We then started speaking publicly, we were invited to multiple organizations. I spoke with Constant Contact. We spoke with University of Delaware for the, the SBDC at that time, Pand we started teaching social media. And that really segwayed into being seen as the authority for social media for medium sized organizations. And it gave us the opportunity to meet people, the thought leaders in the industry, when you get to meet Chris Brogan and when you get to meet Chris Penn, when you get to meet Peter Shankman, Jason Falls, C.C. Chapman, and you learn and you see what they're doing. You just get better by association. And through that we were really able to leverage our knowledge and then bring that to our clients. So how have we evolve we evolved from a traditional agency working with traditional media to now working with both traditional and digital media to be seeing to be seen as a leader, a thought leader in the industry. We now also have brought onto staff Peter Shankman. He's our futurist in residence. So now we're not even just looking at the now what what our clients could be looking at doing now. We're bringing in this huge global thought leader on what should they be working towards in the next two, three and five years as well.
Jess
Awesome. So you mentioned the digital world. And you mentioned the now so obviously, I have to bring up everything happening in our world, pandemic wise. How does owning a marketing company compare to from 12 years ago to these last four months of just the pendulum swinging really hard in the other direction?
Nancy
Well, there are some similarities. So and when we started our business in 2008, that we were headed into what we weren't headed into. We were in an economic downturn. And so there is a comparison there to what we're seeing in the financial markets, what we're seeing with businesses really struggling right now. And what's the first thing they do they cut expenses, what's one of the first expenses they cut? Marketing. Well, I can show you statistics from the 2008 downturn, where companies that did not cut marketing, those companies that realize that marketing is the lifeblood to keep your organization going to keep your pipeline full. They not only survived but they thrived from the 2008 2009 downturn. So while we're seeing that again now, we believe that our clients in particular are well positioned to face what might be an economic downturn for them. And they're going to be keeping their marketing strong because they understand that to come out the other side, they really do need to keep that pipeline open. Also for as we're seeing in the last three, four months, not only with the economic downturn, we've seen everyone having to go digital. So as a company, we started with providing help for Delaware businesses. Free help. We created an online portal that then was offered nationally, to small businesses, to help them go digital, help employees how to work digital. All of that was a huge success. And then we followed that up with a digital marketing conference. We had attendees from three different continents, five countries and over 30 states. So I think that that was very successful, we had a really good response to it. And it was talking about this new COVID-19, post digital world that we're all finding ourselves in. And now most recently, we're seeing the the Black Lives Matter movement. And we really want to get involved. So as an agency, we have seen over the years that trying to find stock imagery and stock video and stock illustrations that are diverse, is just, it's just next to impossible, especially if we're looking for illustrations. So we are working to create a panel discussion, where we're talking about as an industry, how we can address this problem. What are we going to do because we can't do this anymore. More, we have to start effecting change in our industry. So yes, Epic Marketing is this small boutique agency. But we're ready to throw in and help be a leader to say we need to get this conversation started. And yes, it's going to be a difficult conversation. And people might not want to have it, but it must be had. So those are some of the differences that I've seen over the last 12 and a half years.
Jess
Amazing. I know that I personally, I can't speak for the rest of, well I probably could speak for my colleagues. I know that we all love working here at Epic. And talking about my colleagues, your teams are almost all female. Is that something that you've done by design or is that just to quote Bob Ross a happy accident
Nancy
Well, our females, we are mostly all female and you are all my sheroes. And it is not by design believe that or not, it really isn't. So other people have said does Don just want to harem? No, it's just the way it is I'm I'm a massive type A personality and I am drawn to other type A personalities. And it just happened to be that those that I've been drawn to the most and that have been drawn to us have been female. I can tell you that we have had some guys work for us and they kind of need to go in and in a different direction because we are pretty intense. And I don't know if that's just a female thing or what. But we are intense, in a good way.
And
I think that male or female that as long as you can handle the intensity and the fire we're good at oh and yes, we do sometimes our hair is on fire here. So you do have to also be okay with that.
Jess
That is I can vouch for that statement.
Are there any Epic tips that you have for people looking to? If they're looking to change careers since maybe they've been laid off during the pandemic? Or they're just realizing they're not happy with their job? Do you have any tips for people who want to work in marketing or angling to work in marketing that will help distinguish themselves now that we're in this and I'm using air quotes, this next normal?
Nancy
I think the most important thing is really look at the skill set they have and flesh that out where they might find that they might be lacking in something. Marketing previously was about creative. You know, whether it was video, whether it was art, whether it's graphic design, that's what marketing was. That's not what marketing is any longer. Now you must have content marketing skills, you must have social media skills, you must have video editing skills, you must have SEO skills, you must have SEM skills, they are no longer siloed off to someone who just has those skills. To be successful in marketing and to get a job in marketing you have to be able to say, I know how to do these things. You have to know some coding skills, you have to be able to say, well, this, this is great, but I need some Open Graph tags in here. I need some Twitter cards. You need to be able to understand what you're those parts of the website that you need to be able to do your job, whether that's going to be social media marketing, whether it's going to be different other types of digital marketing, or if it's going to be even traditional marketing. It's all part and parcel now under marketing. There is no more segmentation between traditional and digital. It's all now should be just marketing and everything should flow together, get your messaging to your audience on all of the different places they are. If they're listening to the radio, if they're reading a magazine, if they are listening to podcast, if they're on social media, wherever they are, that's where you need to be with this cohesive messaging. And if you don't have those skills, now is the time to get them.
Jess
Cohesive is always a good way to go. I think I tell everybody that branding should be your best friend when it comes to tying all the assets of marketing together. So for my last question, what do you think makes Epic different from other marketing agencies?
Nancy
I think that it's a laundry list, but the top things are is that the principles, Don and myself that we are husband and wife and we've been married for 36 years. So we are in this together. And that this is our life, we're not doing this for someone else, and that we are only as good as the success of our clients. So our success is based on their success. And that gives us skin in the game if it were. We also go to the mattresses for our clients. And I know every agency is going to say that, but like literally, we will go to the mattresses for our clients. Their needs come second. And what is the first thing that fit? What What would they come second to that would be the needs of our employees, our employees, our associates, our colleagues. They're our family. And again, I know that a lot of organizations can say that, but I think that at Epic we truly have that. We are a family. And just like families, we we laugh together we love together, we cry together, we fight. We get along, we pick on each other. But it is just like a family and
I think those things really help differentiate us.
Jess
Amazing. I feel like I've said that like 17 times already today. Well, Nancy, if our listeners want to find you in the digital world, where can they find you and Epic.
Nancy
I am one of those OG people on social media. Since I've been there for so long. And you can find me @epicnancylee on all of the channels. Please feel free to reach out and say hi and connect. For Epic. We are @epicmc2 on pretty much everywhere. Facebook, I think we're @EpicMarketing though.
Jess
Thank you so much for joining us today, Nancy.
Nancy
Thanks Jess for having me. And I'm really excited about our epic podcast.
Jess
Thank you all for tuning in this week, we hope this theory is relative to your marketing needs. Make sure you subscribe to get notified of our latest episodes.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai