Episode 327: "Marketing Made Easy: Unleashing the Power of commonsku + PromoPulse (with Jason Nokes)

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Commonsku.

We've created a strategic partnership with Promopulse, and today we want to tell you all about it, plus provide some tips for best email, social, and video marketing tactics, and explore how you can make your marketing faster, easier, and automated. The Commonsku partnership with Promopulse allows Commonsku customers special pricing and access to powerful tools to amplify your marketing. Key features include AMP automated email, AMP Automated Social and Video, and the AMP Ideas Generator powered by CommsCue Suppliers. Today I'm joined by Jason Noakes, founder of PromoPulse. Jason has over 30 years experience in the promo industry. He's been on both the supplier and the distributor side of the business, but most of his career has been as a technology service provider. So he's contributed to a significant amount of tech growth and maturity in our business. And we unpack that on today's episode as well. What Jason foresees for tech growth in the future. He also has some fantastic book recommendations that I especially loved. Jason's a voracious reader. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Chief Content Officer at Commonsku. Before our chat with Jason, I have two quick mentions of events coming up. First, we have a webinar interview with Mikkus Agrawal. He's the Chief Digital Officer at Akron Marketing, and Mikkus and I are going to talk exclusively about how Akron uses Commonsku's in-client tools, shops, portals, presentations. It's all about winning new opportunities using tech. Join us for that webinar on November 7th at 2 PM ET. Also, registration is now open for our signature event, SKUCon, held in Las Vegas on January 12th. For over a decade, SKUCon has been the gathering place for the industry's most creatively ambitious minds. If you want to kick off your year with a healthy dose of optimism and smart inspiration, come learn how to be brilliant at a moment's notice with creative coach Todd Henry. He's the author of the bestselling book, The Accidental Creative. And join us to hear Kyla Scanlon, who the Wall Street Journal called the 27-year-old economic advisor for Gen Z. Jared Bernstein, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, considers her an impressive thinker about the economy. Also, don't miss our closing keynote, our friend Ben Higgins from The Bachelor fame, as he shares how to build a generous business. SKUCON is the best of high-level inspo and streetwise business tactics. There's limited seating. Tickets always sell out. So if you're thinking about it, grab those tickets today. Skucon.com. Now here's my chat with Jason.

Jason, thanks for joining us on the SkuCast, my friend.

Hey Bobby, thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah, I'm glad we finally got you here. So tell us a little bit about PromoPulse so we can jump right, just right into it. What does PromoPulse do?

Yeah, definitely. So we aggregate all the sales and marketing content from the industry. Primarily comes from suppliers, but it's also from associations or service providers or thought leaders like you, Bobby. And so we bring it into one spot a lot. And we have tools for distributors to, to find the content to share with clients. Uh, our flagship product is called AMP, which stands for Automated Marketing Platform, and it's very cool because it makes marketing effortless for distributors.

That's cool. Can you explain the Idea Generator?

You have a couple—

you have, you have these different products within PromoPulse, right?

Yeah, sure. Then there's a story behind the name too. So, okay, yeah, idea— when a distributor signs up for AMP, we create a custom landing page for them, and so it has our contact information and all their marketing campaigns go back to their landing page. So email, social, video, or whatever. And it's nice because customers can ask questions. It's got an infinite scroll of product ideas. But what we noticed is customer— customers were linking to their landing page from their website. They were putting in their email signature. They were even embedding the infinite scroll. And so one day I was on the on the call with Kara Keister, our mutual customer for Social Good Promotions. And she goes, yeah, I send people to our Idea Generator. And I go, I go, what's that? It's your landing page. And she goes— and I go, oh my God, that is the most amazing name. And so Kara graciously said we could use the term. And so, so that's kind of the story behind that.

That's fantastic. That's fantastic. Can you give us an example of how PromoPulse leads to sales? I mean, do you have like a customer story that sort of exemplifies that?

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And so, yeah, so the whole AMP kind of works in tandem from the idea generator to email to social posting. And so, I mean, I've heard all sorts of stories. One, I mean, most basic distributors are just thrilled that they don't have to do marketing, you know, it takes it off their plate. But, you know, we've got reports of big orders coming through. We had one customer that got 6 orders from their first email, so that was awesome, you know. And then Christine Marion with Cool Stuff, she's a common SKU customer. She was one of our early adopters, so she she signed on a long time ago, but she was thrilled because her first email she got an order. And she was doubly thrilled because she uses CommonSKU. She said within like 4 hours the order was already into production. So it's kind of an example how both of our platforms can work together and really increase sales.

And yeah, that's fantastic.

I love that.

I love that synergy of all your services. So we have automated email, automated social, idea generator. What gets most used by distributors?

I would say email is the most effective only because it gets, you know, it goes directly into the inbox of your customers. And so, and it drives conversations. It's your, your name shows up, so you stay top of mind. Yeah. Um, and we started with email because that email is hard. A nice email is hard to do, and it takes a lot of effort and time. And especially if you're trying to use branded product content to go find the content and build the email and do all that stuff. And so, so we started that because I knew it was going to of it's going to be effective, but then it's also, it's so difficult. So we kind of made it all simple.

Yeah, it's the seemingly simple things that are actually much harder, especially in marketing, right? Can you share, since you— email marketing is in your expertise, can you sort of share some best practices for email marketing? Have you noticed some of the most successful distributors doing certain things more than others?

Oh yeah, sure, definitely. Well, the most common question we get is, you know, when should I schedule my campaigns? You know, when's the magic time to send? Everybody looks at it. And so, you know, if you go to Google Google will tell you answers, but if it's 10 AM on Tuesday and everybody sends it 10 AM on Tuesday, then it kind of nullifies that. So our, our typical— we ask if, if a distributor has a certain client type, like if they do, if they work with restaurants or construction or something like that, there are probably times when those, those customers are working on their business instead of working in their business. So, so it's, it's kind of wise to try to match that if you know when they're going to be there. But we have, we have distributors that run their blasts at night, their campaigns at night. And so, which I would never think of, but it works for them. And so, but beyond that, you know, if, if, if distributors have beyond the email address, if they upload client, their customer's name, then we can personalize the email. Another thing that works really well, if you have multiple salespeople, to put— to have emails come from the salesperson, because oftentimes the client's more familiar with the salesperson name than their brand. Yeah. And even if— and this applies for big distributors with multiple salespeople, but even the, you know, this, the one-person shop, they may still know your name more than your company name. And so that, when we launched, I thought you could— with AMP, you can send every week. And I thought that when we launched, it sounded aggressive, but we have a lot of distributors that send every week and it works well for them. And, and I know personally, like, I get emails every day from Stitch Fix, and one thing that I think sometimes people don't think of with email. So they may not open your email, but if they see your name in their inbox, it still keeps you top of mind. So I'm not buying clothes all the time, but when I do need clothes, I'll probably think of Stitch Fix because I see their email. That's a great point. Yeah.

Oh, it's a great point. And email is still the sacred space. I mean, we have— as much as we've grown where we're using Slack and we're texting clients now, email's still the sacred place where people are kind of doing business. And I love your tip there about segmenting your audience because distributors have audiences of all kinds. They work with industrial companies, or they work with B2B service companies, or some of them might work with consumer-based businesses. So it's very important to segment that. What about social media?

How—

what are you seeing distributors— how are distributors making an impact on social media through PromoPulse?

Yeah, so social media is interesting. It's not a silver bullet. So sometimes, you know, you can't sign up and start posting and just expect orders to flow in, you know. So, so if, if that's what you want to do, it takes, you know, engagement, and you have to ask your customers to follow and follow them and and share. But I think another thing social media plays a big importance for distributors is establishing credibility. And so a lot of people will research a company on social media, so they, they'll go to social to see, to read about, to learn more about a particular distributor. And if your posts are kind of here and there and about different things, you know, it doesn't reflect very well on your company. And so what we do We post branded product ideas, and that's what we do. And so we can help build a consistent base of content, and then we don't— when a distributor signs up, they don't share the passwords with us. We don't take control of their accounts. They just click to connect, kind of authorize us to post, and so they can still post themselves too. And so the distributors I see that are most successful using AMP also post other things on top of that, and so events or about employees or new ideas or whatever. And so when you— we take the heavy lifting of branded product content out of the way. So we, we post ideas consistently, and, and that kind of, to me, seems to be the nice, nice fit.

So yeah, and that's the hard part about social is what, what to put in that container, right? You can talk about these things all day long, like you're using an M or using TikTok, but put— putting— being consistent with content is one of the hardest things, as we both know.

Yeah, and everybody, you know, I know nobody wants to be a promo peddler, right, and just be shoving products, but, you know, distributors do sell product, right? And so I think that they're, you know, their customers are looking to them to be the experts on products. And so, so it's, you know, it's important to still show product.

Yeah, I agree. I actually have gotten even softer on that idea that, that a distributor's clients trust them for the newest and for the freshest ideas and for what they're doing with their customers. And so that's their channel of trust. And so it's— you can do a lot with a channel of trust, and that's what a lot of that is.

Yeah, we pull directly from supplier social feeds and other places, and so that content that goes out on Distributor Social is the, is the freshest of the fresh.

Yeah. And you look at suppliers who are making such inroads with sustainable products, and you begin to make a partnership with that supplier, and you trust their network of manufacturers, and that's a great message to send out. I mean, there's lots of good there.

Yeah.

Out of all of the things— email, social, the idea generator What gets less used but still has a super high impact? Is it, is it fair to compare that, or are these just not fair comparisons?

Well, it's the one you didn't mention. It's, uh, oh, video. And so, so we— and the only reason it's probably not used as much is because it's our newest product or newest service. We launched that last year. Okay. And so some of the customers are already signed up, haven't maybe turned it on or whatever. But so they all pretty much get used quite a bit. But I'd say video. But video is interesting too because it, it, it— we can help distributors get out on TikTok and YouTube Shorts and, yeah, and Reels. And so video just surfaces content in a different way. It's a different algorithm. And so sometimes you don't even need followers, it just gets, gets right there.

So since we have a listening audience largely for the podcast, we have some video too, but what types of video products are distributors producing through PromoPulse?

So we create the— we take the supplier content and create video for them. And so it takes— it— there's not a lot of video in our industry predominantly, so, so we create our own video basically.

And YouTube surpassed Netflix as the most streamed service just this last year. And so it's, it's huge. It's like, it's— we all know that with TikTok, but it's really made a huge difference in the algorithms. What benefits do CommerceHQ customers get with PromoPulse?

Uh, well, first and foremost, any customer, whether it's CommerceHQ or not, just benefits from having consistent, beautiful email. So I mean, marketing— you just need to do marketing. So that's my— yeah, plug for that. But beyond that, CommerceHQ customers, the biggest perk, you get an extra free month when you sign up. So instead of 30-day free trial, you get a 60-day free trial. So that's plenty of time to get started, to get a feel for it with no obligations or anything. We have— you can get higher— CommonSKU customers get higher email rates per month than our normal plan. We have free account setup discounts if you want to have all— if you have multiple sales reps and everybody, you want them to manage their own lists and have the email come from them, we have discounts for that. If you don't want to do that, then we can even— we could set up set up free idea generators for all the salespeople. So we'll set up the main company idea generator, but then each salesperson can have their own with their contact.

That's cool.

Share that to clients and, yeah, and see, see if there's anything else in there. Oh, too, if you're listening kind of right when this podcast comes out, we're doing a promotion to kind of kick things off. So there's some extra, extra things you can save, and if you sign up soon.

So, okay, all those details will be in the show notes and our links. So we'll link to all of that as well. What do you wish more people knew about PromoPulse that doesn't get as much attention?

Yeah, there are a few things. I think the biggest thing is, you know, all we do is marketing software for, for promo. And so that's all I think about. I mean, that's all I am always just thinking about— how to make the product better, how to add new features, how to do new things. And so our total focus is taking content from suppliers and getting and allowing distributors to have easy marketing out to their end users. And so, so there's just a focus that maybe isn't there for other services. Beyond that, yeah, I, I like to think of AMP as almost like magic because it, it literally takes minutes to set up and we'll do the work for you. And after that, you don't— it's completely set up, you don't have to do any more work. And so it's like within just a few minutes you can have a full-blown marketing department on your behalf. And so that's cool. And then the last thing, I won't— it's not a misconception, but I think they're, they're just from what's been in the industry prior. Every campaign that goes out is unique for every distributors, so whether it's social or video or email. So we have the system that's highly scalable, and it does all these magic behind the scenes to make every campaign unique. So those are probably 3 big things.

Jason, I'm sure you're surprised like I am that distributors underutilize marketing. And it's always a shocking thing because we work in the marketing business. A lot of us serve marketing clients, we sell a marketing product, and yet I'm still shocked that it's the, you know, 2024 and we're heading into 2025, and people still don't have an active of ongoing active social. It's gotten better, but as an aggregate, we've really still struggled to make marketing a priority. And that's not even an option anymore. Like, if you want to be relevant in the customer's minds, it has to be a priority.

Well, more and more it's becoming my mission in life to make sure all distributors have access to marketing. So it's just—

it's great heavy lifting. That's, that's huge. Let's talk a little bit about the industry. You have very deep knowledge of two things: tech and our industry. And for those that don't know, you and our very own Dave Schultz built cutting-edge technology in the early days, and you've now developed PromoPulse. So you've always stayed on top of that, and people may not realize just how tuned in to the tech landscape you've been through the years, and promo specifically. So how has it changed? How's the tech landscape changed over the years? Has the demand increased? Have you— what have you noticed probably over the past 3, 5 years that's really changed for the business?

Well, I'll answer this actually from the development side. So back when Dave and I were coding and doing things like that, that it was all server-side development. So, so you wrote code and developed code on the server side, but now everything switched to client side. And so, so those of us that were on the server side had to level up their skills and stay relevant. And so, so that, that's a big— just the way development— because you people just got used to software, you know, things doing things immediately. Like, if you remember the day you had to hit a button and it would have to refresh the screen for things to happen, now it's just automatic. Yeah. And then I think the other big thing— was a switch from server-based computing to serverless and cloud-based. I think CommsCue came in right at the right time, but some of us were still— had developed with servers. And so just getting rid of servers was wonderful. I don't know how else to put it. And having your access, I know that that's CommsCue's big thing. You can access your account anywhere. That's just a wonderful thing if you were used to the past where you had to be in front of a computer to get your information.

You touched on something too that we're both passionate about, and that is the end client. So this PromoPulse and Commskey partnership is so powerful because of the end client focus. So at Commskey, we have shops portals, we have our smart presentations. Those are all client-driven tools. And so we all seem to be developing more toward client and client tools, uh, today than we were, as you said, in the past, which has been mostly on support side.

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's— there's a lot of effort put in. How do I put this? From suppliers trying to market just to distributors to get to do, you know, I think the path that you just mentioned to where there's a synergy, where everybody kind of works together, it just benefits all of us. Yeah.

What are you most optimistic about, and what are you worried about for our industry when it comes to tech and development?

Uh, well, AI, of course. That's what everybody's going to answer. AI. But we, we were using AI before AI got cool, so we— AMP was built, right, uh, using machine learning and AI to, to curate content, to create or augment content. I mean, it allowed me to do something that, that is this scalable with a very, you know, small set of team. And so it's just, it's been so, so wonderful. I don't know how to describe it. I will note though, we do— while we do use AI for some content generation, everything's still approved by humans. As we all know, AI can hallucinate and make things up. And so there's still a human in the loop at the, at the, at the end here. So, and just some of the things, not only cost savings and the ability to do things, some We're working on some new ideas that just— it's, I don't know, it's just so exciting, I think.

Yeah, that's cool. Let's talk a little bit about Jason. Of all the tech you've had a hand in developing through the years, what are you most proud of? Like, I'm sure you'd say PromoPulse, but specifically within PromoPulse, what are you most proud of having achieved?

Well, yeah, I'm definitely proud of PromoPulse. Probably most proud that this is our 5-year anniversary, so I made it 5 years, which is, uh, majority of companies and businesses don't make 5 years. And so that's been a big thing. But I thought about this, and actually I'm going to talk about my very first promo tech project in the industry. And so, so my background, I was a production artist at suppliers, and I, when I was at Tradenet Publishing, is when the internet kind of started to blow up. And so, so I bought a book, learned how to code, and I built the, the industry's first online ordering system. And so where you can configure products, so set up charges, pick colors, and the order goes straight into production. And so this just did not exist in our industry. And it was— the website won awards. TradeNet grew rapidly without adding customer service, so they saved millions. And then really that led— ended up leading to Distributor Central. So that's how that came about, because we had so much success with that configurable product ordering that we rolled that out for the whole industry. And so that's— that is— that was a big one, definitely.

I'm glad you mentioned that. I remember those days, me being a former distributor. TradeNet was a big customer of ours, partially because you were just like next-door neighbors our state, and so it was easy to get orders shipped quickly from TradeNet. But TradeNet was also on top of things just like that with the tech. So I do remember those days.

That's fantastic.

Yeah. What do you enjoy doing when you're not working? And how in the world did you— and by the way, I keep dropping Dave's name. For those that might not be familiar, Dave Schultz is our VP Supplier Partnership, and Jason and Dave cut their teeth together in the tech and tech promo world through TradeNet and through their partnerships there and with— and the work they did at Distributor Central. But what do you enjoy doing when you're not working?

And how in the world did you and Dave both develop such an affinity for Yeah, well, so my kids are now in college, so I have a lot more time to work on other things. My passions, you know, business obviously is a big passion, just being able to create new businesses and things like that. I am a, I guess you'd call it a serious amateur poker player. And so I've been playing specifically no-limit hold'em tournaments. So I play in the World Series of Poker every year, and it's like a lifelong learning project because it's an infinite game. You just never can master that. So that's, that's really appealing. And then, and like you said, music. Music's been huge part of my life. I— and Dave plays live a lot. I, I do. I've been in bands and, and done that, but I pre— I more— I enjoy writing songs, recording, releasing, producing. If— I'm sure a lot of the listeners for this have probably actually heard some of my songs. I've done a lot of promo podcast theme songs like Promo Up Front, Delivering Marketing Joy, Tacos with Jay and Jeff, Sam Kabard's podcast, and more. And so, yeah, so that's fun. So if somebody's listening, needs a promo podcast theme song, I'm your guy.

That's awesome. I love it. And, and yeah, your music— Dave did share with me some of the music that you've done too. It's pretty amazing.

Yeah, yeah.

I, I—

it's funny, I talked to another supplier out of India who is also, um, dabbles in the professional gambling world and poker— poker world, I should say. And he was unpacking to me over dinner just the similarities in business, right?

The—

oh yeah, the calculated risks, not the wild risks that you think of and just kind of those intense things that are related to business and poker.

So there's a lot of— exactly the same to me. I mean, people don't understand that a lot of times, and I don't really think— I, I understand it as gambling, but I don't really think of it that way because you have a lot of control over what happens. But just like business, you know, there's ups and downs, there's lucky breaks, there's unlucky breaks. And then in particular tournaments are— it's like a big long, you know, business. You're trying to do this and things happen. You have to duck and weave and do different things. And so I— there's— to me, it's exactly the same, you know, whether you put, you know, money down on a marketing campaign or money down on a poker tournament. You still think that both times you're going to succeed with that whatever allocated for the budget.

So yeah, and very calculated risk. It's not nearly the risk— just, just, it's not nearly the crazy game that people think it is. It's a very calculated game. Yeah, right. Everyone loves this question. What's a book, movie, podcast, or article that's really changed the way you think lately?

Yeah, I've got actually a few. So podcasts, I think Alex Hormozi does an amazing job of breaking down complex business problems into frameworks. And yeah, I'm very jealous of that guy because he's 20 years younger than I am and has it all. Seems like he has it figured out. Also Founders by David David Sinra is like— I call it like crack for an entrepreneur. So if you want to get motivated, he reads books and he talks about them. And it sounds simple, but it's just— it's such a— the way he does it, and he ties different biographies to different, you know, different founders, different ideas over here and there. And so it's, it's great. Yeah, it works every time. So if I need a motivation, it just gets me fired up. I read— I read all the time. I read The Six Types of Working Genius by And so it's like the personality test things that people have taken, but it's, it's more geared around in business and projects. And so, so if you're working on a project and it doesn't work out, or if you maybe are working at a company that you love but you're frustrated all the time, it's, it's usually because you're not in your area of genius, you're not doing the right thing. And so that was pretty cool. And I had a kind of a unique thing happened too. And so I'll read anything that somebody recommends to me, or at least start it. Maybe I don't finish if it's not appealing to me. But yeah, so I was recommended Never Finish by David Goggins, and then Invent and Wander by— that's like the shareholder writings of Jeff Bezos. And so I was reading both those at the same time. I typically have 2 or 3 books going at the same time, so I'd go back and forth chapter by chapter, and it just led to all these ideas in a different way and, and ultimately led to some realizations about, you know, even PromotePulse, how things that we could do and how we could do it quicker and, and things like that. So that was pretty cool. And then finally, the movie we watched, Will and Harper, the other day, that was a great movie. And so it really shines a light on, on all kinds of things.

And so pretty cool. I can't wait to see that. Those are such great resources, Jason. My gosh, I mean, I, I want to— there are 3 of these I want to jump into right away. We just had a management retreat, so we're using some of Patrick Lencioni's work there too. So I'm really curious about the 6 Types of Working Genius.

So he's got an assessment you can take.

So I've had—

that's cool— my team take the assessment. And so Kirby Hasselman actually told me about this, and he did it for his team too. And you just, you see what's missing. And if you're too top-heavy, you know, my, my strengths are Invent and Wonder, right? And then, but you know, there's other things I'm not good at. And so if you have too many in this section, you know, you're not going to go anywhere. You just have a bunch of people inventing stuff that goes nowhere.

Awesome. No surprise that came from Kirby. That's really cool. But Jason, thank you, my friend. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for the partnership with PromoPulse. It really is the perfect partnership between Commscue and PromoPulse, particularly because we're both passionate about technology, but we're also both building in-client tools that are going to reshape the industry in the way we go to market. Thanks, Jason. Thanks for doing this, my friend.

Yeah, that's great. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SKU Cast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKU Cast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.

Mm-hmm.