MarTech Edge Interview with Sarah Kicinski, Chief Marketing Officer, PostcardMania

You have been leading PostcardMania as its CMO for 14 years. Brief us on your journey.

I started working at PostcardMania in 2004, straight out of college. I was originally hired to run a project to partner with franchises and then was promoted to launch all new products as the Vice President of Business Development. Five years later, our VP of Marketing gave notice, and Founder & CEO Joy Gendusa asked me to fill his shoes (which I have to admit was a bit terrifying). At that point, we had a $4 million marketing budget, and I didn’t want to mess it up! It worked out, and I was able to outperform existing metrics and was eventually promoted from Vice President of Marketing to Chief Marketing Officer. It’s now been 19 years, and I feel very lucky to have been part of this company’s journey as we surpass $100 million in annual revenue. We continue to evolve our products around an unwavering commitment to helping small business owners grow their businesses and contribute to an expanding US economy. Currently, my team is made up of 10 marketing professionals who are all experts in their fields and generate more than 2000 B2B leads each week.

Please walk us through Everywhere Small Business, PostcardMania’s flagship marketing product, and the recently added features.

Everywhere Small Business is our multichannel marketing campaign package that gives small business owners the opportunity to target prospects with postcards and coordinated digital ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google, Gmail, and YouTube. As the postcards are mailed out, digital ads are displayed to prospects on these platforms, and not only do they amplify the client’s reach and exposure and make it seem like their business is everywhere, but they also give prospects an easy way to get to clients’ websites to convert.

The recent features we added to Everywhere Small Business expand the reach of those coordinated digital ads by targeting prospects based on their online behavior and the physical locations they visit. So, for example, a vet could target people nearby doing research online on why their cat might be throwing up at night or people visiting a local dog park.

The best part about the new Browsed-Content Targeting and Visited-Locations Targeting is that small business owners have access to premier technology previously only available to large brands. And at prices that a small business can afford. By leveling the playing field with bigger brand names, small businesses can achieve success and grow bigger and better than before — and that’s PostcardMania’s driving mission.

What major alterations have you made in marketing strategies to sail through economic downturns like the current one?

PostcardMania was founded in 1998, so we’ve been through our fair share of tough economic times. We had our first major economic challenge in 2008, which ultimately gave us the experience we needed to be better prepared for any economic downturn.

In 2008, 46% of our revenue came from clients in the mortgage and real estate industries, and we lost thousands of clients almost instantly when the housing bubble burst. Against our gut instincts, we cut our marketing spend significantly based on advisors’ recommendations. By 2009, we were struggling to make payroll and were down 15%. It turned out that reducing our marketing budget had made everything worse. So we decided to restore the marketing budget back to pre-crash totals, and our numbers recovered quickly — 2010 ended up being an all-time high revenue year for us at the time.

We learned the valuable lesson to never stop marketing regardless of economic conditions, and we applied this principle when the pandemic hit in 2020. We never cut our marketing or even laid off a single staff member despite our revenue crashing over 40% for several weeks in March and April 2020. But we recovered more quickly than most. July 2020 became the new highest-ever revenue month for us. In the final six months of 2020, we increased our leads by 9.24% without increasing our marketing spend. Our competitors all cut back, which ended up making our marketing efforts more effective than ever. Every year we get a little bit smarter and more efficient with our marketing efforts, but consistency is something we have kept in since day one. It’s honestly our biggest piece of advice to clients, and it doesn’t change even during an economic crisis.

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Originally published at https://martechedge.com.