Marketing With Purpose Kit: Aligning Marketing with Business Growth

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Mike Liwski** (0:17)
Yes, and welcome back to this episode of Marketing With Purpose. As you know, it's a segment of The Bliss Business Podcast where we really love to explore what it takes for marketing leaders like Travis, who's with us today, to create impact that really has to go beyond just the numbers. I'm your co-host this week, Mike Liwski, and in each of these episodes, we sit down with a marketing expert to really explore their leadership approach, strategies that drive performance, and really how they resonate with our audience. Together with Travis, we'll really do a deep dive into, for example, what's working, what's not. As we love to discuss as well, how purpose and empathy come into play in the work that we do, and really try to transform the way brands connect with people. We'll just jump right in and get started. Today, I'm so excited to have joining with me, Travis Arnesen. He's the Vice President of Marketing with the brand Service Experts. Now, Travis brings more than 20 years of experience in brand strategy, performance marketing, and omni-channel campaigns, really being able to help organizations connect marketing with the super important measurable business results that at the end of the day, we want to make sure that we're delivering. At Service Experts, he leads the enterprise marketing strategy, the brand development for that incredible franchise, and then as well, customer engagement for one of the nation's leading residential HVAC service companies.
He does this really through drawing on leadership experience with brands that he's had previously, like Harbor Freight Tools. His pro bono work, I loved reading this, Travis, your pro bono work that you do through the Taproot Foundation. Travis really believes because of that, that marketing can drive both business growth, but also meaningful community impact, which we love to talk about. Today, we're going to really explore aligning marketing with business growth. I'm super excited to dive into how Travis does that and really creates the strategies and be able to strengthen the organization and the community that they serve at the end of the day.
Travis, welcome to the show. We are delighted to have you here with us.

**Travis Arnesen** (2:48)
Thanks so much, Mike, for having me. I'm excited to be here.

**Mike Liwski** (2:51)
Yeah, and I'm really excited to hear more about how you're doing things there with Service Experts. Now, Travis, before we really dive into a whole bunch of other topics, marketing related, I'd love to hear, why was aligning the marketing with the business growth, really the topic that you chose for us to explore today? Why is it, I guess, so important in today's world?

**Travis Arnesen** (3:15)
Yeah, great question. It's probably the one I get asked the most, particularly from leadership, is connecting marketing to impact. What impact is marketing having? Really, at the end of the day, marketing needs to be measured by business outcomes, not just marketing outputs.
I think as marketers, we often fall into the trap of sometimes communicating vanity metrics, reach and reach of followers versus really measuring what type of impact each marketing action is having on our organization and really driving growth. At the end of the day, every dollar should connect to growth, revenue, retention, or customer value. I think that's really what we're tasked with and why I was so interested in this and really help communicate our strategies. Today's CEOs and CFOs expect marketing to be accountable, and to do that as marketers and as a marketing team, we need to be brutally honest and transparent as an internal team and adopt that same mindset. Everything we're doing needs to have a measurable outcome.

**Mike Liwski** (4:25)
Yeah, for sure. I think definitely, one of the days of the famous quote of, well, I know that 50% of my budget is working. I just don't know which 50% I couldn't agree with you more. And I feel as marketers, we owe it in a way to the rest of the organization to really be able to build the kind of marketing that does that.
So I guess maybe digging into this topic a little bit more because I know it's obviously important to have strategy to help lead that growth. But we fall into the challenge of sometimes having to demonstrate short-term business results or even results for a particular campaign. And then balance that with the kind of brand that we're trying to build, the kind of impression that we're trying to make with our target audience. So how is it that with your marketing and your leadership, that you're able to still sort of keep the marketing strategy aligned with the company growth goals?