Ryan Cote is the Director of Digital Services and Partner at Ballantine, a third-generation family-owned direct mail and digital marketing company based out of Fairfield, NJ. Ballantine has been serving small-business clients since 1966, when it was founded by Ryan’s great-uncle. Ryan has been with his family’s agency since 2003, and today he manages the growing digital marketing division.
From lead generation to marketing strategy for small businesses, Ryan and his company rise above the get-featured-quick schemes so often attributed to digital marketing. He loves to geek out on technical marketing talk as well as work with real-world business owners about growing their book of business in today’s online world.
Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Ryan Cote about lead generation and marketing strategies for small businesses.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
- How personal development can upgrade your life and your business.
- Why pursuing new endeavors helps people grow and achieve future goals.
- How there are many different ways to write a book that can lead to success.
- How direct mail’s death has been greatly exaggerated and can help your business.
- Why it’s important to have an integrated approach in your business’s marketing plan.
Connect with Ryan:
Links Mentioned:
ballantine.com
morningupgrade.com
Guest Contact Info:
@ballantinecorp
@ballantinecorp
facebook.com/ballantinecorp
Rob Kosberg:
Hey. Welcome, everybody. Rob Kosberg here. I have another great guest for you for our Publish, Promote, Profit Podcast. Ryan Cote is the director of digital service and a partner at Ballantine.com, which I particularly like. It’s a third generation, family owned, direct mail and digital marketing company out of New Jersey. Ballantine has been serving small business clients since 1966, although Ryan himself has not, as you can tell by his age. I guess it was your great uncle that started the business way back, and now it’s primarily family members, which I think is very, very cool. You are also the author of an upcoming book on personal development for entrepreneurs. I’ll ask you some questions about that, Ryan. I’m really excited to have you on because I do have a number of questions regarding digital marketing, direct mail perhaps in particular, and of course, your expertise with entrepreneurs and personal development. So, Ryan, great to have you on the podcast today, my friend.
Ryan Cote:
Yeah, Rob, thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk to you.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, I think we’ll have some fun. Some would say that I’m really good at direct and online marketing, others might not. We’ve certainly spent millions of dollars of my own hard money. I’m not talking about as an agency where people have given me millions to spend. I mean it’s come out of my own pocket. So, I do know a thing or two about it just by the school of hard knocks, as you might imagine. But maybe let’s start. Tell me about your upcoming book, the title, the topic, because it is outside of the sphere of what your business is with Ballantine.
Ryan Cote:
Yeah, so Ballantine is my career. On the side, I have a passion project that I’ve been doing, actually, since the start of COVID. Around then, I started the site. I used to publish articles on LinkedIn. I would do marketing and I would do personal development articles. I really enjoyed writing about personal development, cold showers and all that stuff. I would write in Medium too. Then I had a thought, I should just create my own brand out of it because I really enjoy this. This is my attempt at helping people and creating something that’s of value. It’s a blog and it’s a podcast. It’s been an interesting journey because I’ve always been in the marketing world. I’ve never tried something like this where I’m trying to create a brand and having podcasts. That was completely new. I had the crazy idea to try to write a book as the next step. That’s all new to me as well. I’m almost done with it. It’s a book for entrepreneurs on using personal development to upgrade their life and their business because it’s all very intertwined. It’s everything that I’ve learned. I’ve been doing personal development for many, many years. It’s the journey that never ends. It’s just everything I’ve learned. I even throw in trying to inject personal development into your company, based on my experiences of what I’ve been trying to do, my own strategies for growing myself. I have three daughters, and just trying to pepper them with life lessons the best I can, and what I’ve learned there. I’m trying to make it almost like a handbook, and I’m almost done with it, so I’m excited to get it out there.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, the fact that you have three kids means you really are going to need personal development for yourself. I have three sons, so I completely understand. Once you get to three, you’re outnumbered, and it is exponentially more difficult. That was my experience. You are certainly someone that’s going to need your self-development, my friend.
Ryan Cote:
I have had moments of, “What have I done?” If I could be honest, but there’s more good moments than bad moments.
Rob Kosberg:
No doubt, children are a wonderful legacy. I love my kids. I was just out in California myself, seeing my two older boys who are living in California. I’m in Florida. My youngest son works for me, and is here in Florida, so we get to spend a good deal of time together, which is incredibly rewarding. So, congratulations on that. Talk to me about your passion project a little bit more. You obviously have the book upcoming. You’re writing a book, not because writing a book is easy, because it is not easy to write a book. You’re obviously writing a book with something else in mind. What is your goal for the book? What are you trying to accomplish using the book to grow your audience, grow your business, get speaking? What’s your plan for it or your idea for it?
Ryan Cote:
Yeah, great question. Keep in mind, I haven’t done this before, so this is my perspective on just trying to learn something, learn a new skillset. So, A, to learn a new skillset, do something I haven’t done before, which I talk about a lot in my blog, doing something that makes you uncomfortable. I’m like, “Well, if I write about it, I kind of have to eat my own dog food here.” How am I going to use it? That’s a great question. That’s what I’m trying to figure out right now. I’m leaning towards using it to get speaking gigs. I’m going to put it on Amazon and try to make sales with it, of course, push people back to morningupgrade.com so they can see what I’m doing there, to get more on podcasts. On Morning Upgrade, I talk about Ballantine. We have had some opportunities there. The book is for entrepreneurs, we usually work with entrepreneurs. I’m trying to interweave it all. If I had to boil it down to one main thing, it’s to boost the awareness of Morning Upgrade and to get me more podcast speaking gigs as a starting point. I’m not sure with Morning Upgrade, what the backend offer would be there. Is it a mastermind? Is it a course? Is it something else? These are all things I’m trying to figure out as I go down this new journey.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, this might be a little different for a normal podcast, but I can give you a couple of suggestions if you like while we’re talking, seeing as it is what I do. The book is your foundational piece, at least from my perspective. I’ve seen this in my own businesses because I wrote my first book for my financial services company back in 2009, and then that led to me starting this ghostwriting, publishing, PR, et cetera, company, Best Seller Publishing, in 2011. If you do something high ticket, if you’re selling a coaching program, or even a $2000 or $3000 product, program, six-week thing, eight-week thing, whatever, then you can use the book in conjunction with all of your skills in digital marketing and media. You can even use it in conjunction with direct mail. I’ve got some questions for you about that for me and for the audience. But a free plus shipping funnel, which we shared briefly, Publish, Promote, Profit, which you see behind me, I mentioned to you before. It’s a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and we certainly sell books, and that’s great, but at five bucks a pop or whatever the number is, that’s not going to give you the kind of lifestyle generally that you want, authoring a book. However, our programs range from the low four figures to over six figures, depending on what a client wants us to do for them. We use the book to generate leads, specifically buyer leads, in self-liquidating offers, something where there’s a number of different upsells and down sells on the front end, audio book, various courses, et cetera. The leads are free, because the cost of acquiring a customer is liquidated by what we’re earning, or they’re very close. It’s very cheap to get a very, very high-quality person into the funnel. That’s led to about $3 million, not including all the other funnels that we run, challenges that we run, webinars that we run. That one funnel has added about $3 million to the bottom line of Best Seller Publishing just in the last 18 months. If you do have high ticket, I’d highly recommend a book funnel, even if you just sell courses. You can get it to cashflow positive on the front end, even if you sell a $1000 course, or something like that. Look at Russell Brunson with ClickFunnels and what he’s done basically selling ClickFunnels on the back end at 97 bucks a month, or 297 a month. You’ve got a huge audience. I mean, you’re talking about entrepreneur obviously is a big audience. Self-help is massive, massive audience. Your book can do really well in that regard.
Ryan Cote:
That was helpful. Even if it’s a complete failure, I’ll have learned something new. I’ll have learned how to put a book on Amazon, how to write a book, how to promote it and all of that. At the very least, I’m going to walk away with some new skillsets. I’m sure it won’t be a complete failure, but that’s kind of what I’m thinking.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s the self-improvement person inside you, looking at the bright side because of the self-discipline you’ve had to exercise to do your book. Trust me, if you use your book, it will produce incredible rewards. We basically give our clients three foundational focuses. Use your book for lead gen, and that could be 100 different ways. I don’t need to tell you that. That can be direct mail. That can be all kinds of online stuff. That can be referrals. That can be networking. Use your book for speaking engagements, or use your book for PR and media, which grows your platform and then circles back around to lead gen, et cetera. Those three foundational elements, if you just plug your book into whatever your efforts are, in one of those three areas, then it’ll supercharge your efforts. It’ll supercharge your efforts to get speaking engagements, lead gen, et cetera, et cetera.
Ryan Cote:
I’m definitely going to mail it to clients. It’s the great thing about writing a book, there’s so many different ways you can use it.
Rob Kosberg:
Your authority goes off the chart when you publish a book, let alone publish a book that’s done well, a bestselling book with good reviews and that sort of thing. Maybe we can talk about that for a few minutes because I’m intrigued by what Ballantine does. Obviously, I love marketing, personally and specifically. I know some people hate it. I love it. Marketing is different than sales, of course. I was a hard-core salesperson from a teenager, basically I got my real estate license when I was 18. My dad taught me; this is how you get listings. You hammer the phones. You call the FSBOs, you call the expires, et cetera. When I learned that I could turn it all around and instead have people coming to me and hunting for me, I was like, “Oh, man. I’ve got to learn this. What is this witchcraft and sorcery? I’ve got to learn that.” That’s what you guys do at Ballantine, which I think is really cool. Everybody’s interested probably, or most people, in digital but I want to talk about the direct mail aspect for a minute. What are you seeing in a general sense regarding your direct mail business and the kind of results that people are getting with direct mail right now?
Ryan Cote:
It’s an interesting dynamic at Ballantine because on the digital side, we work with small businesses that are using us for lead generation and driving traffic to the website through SEO, paid search, et cetera, et cetera, and then trying to get people to pick up the phone and call them or fill out a form. On the direct mail side, it’s completely different. We work with very large companies that do a lot of mail and need us to do it for them. We’re basically a production company, so they come to us to produce all this mail. It’s very, very complicated, and they hire us to get it done cost effectively and deliver it on time. What we’re seeing, it really depends on the industry. We are heavy in travel, which hasn’t been great for everything that’s been happening but we’re also very heavy in other industries like nonprofits, which have been doing fine. We’ve had a very strong last few years. Everyone talks about direct mail being dead, but it really isn’t. It’s just like anything, like digital, it’s just changing. I wasn’t in the business in the ’90s, but I hear all the stories. We used to do all the AOL mailers, the disc mailers, and the Columbia House tapes. That was us. That was us just blanketing the entire US.
Rob Kosberg:
So much of that went in the garbage, but it obviously made AOL money. I mean, they sold for hundreds of millions of dollars or something like that, billions, perhaps.
Ryan Cote:
Back in the day, that was just a spray and pray, whereas now, especially as data has become much more sophisticated, you can target really specifically the person you want to reach, so the campaigns are smaller but more targeted. We don’t own any printing presses. We’re a broker production company, but we’ve got a network of 25, 30 plants that we use. A lot of them are family owned like us. A lot of these plants, they invest in new technology. You think of a printing press, it’s like anything. It’s like a car, every couple years, they try to make it more advanced and do new stuff with imaging and personalization, and the way it prints. If my brother, Matt, was on here, he can get really nerdy with you in all this stuff. I just told you everything I know. The pieces that you could do, the personalization, it’s much more sophisticated, the formats, clear envelopes, the video mailers, really high quality, high speed personalization, or you can go really simple with just postcards and get it down and dirty. Direct mail, it seems simple on the surface, you open up your mailbox and you’ve got all these pieces of mail in there, but what it took to get that piece of mail into your inbox, it’ll blow your mind if you knew all the steps.
Rob Kosberg:
Well, I have some questions. You brought up a couple things that I was absolutely thinking about. I’ve used direct mail in my various businesses to great success. You get lazy, or I can tend to get lazy. When you have digital at your fingertips, if you know what I mean, and can produce results, that has sidetracked some of my direct mail efforts. I want to ask a couple of specific questions and even give you a scenario and find out what you think about this. I’m going to use myself as a guinea pig because I want to learn, but I think it’ll also be helpful for other folks. If I was targeting a very specific kind of individual, say a member of the C-suite, a certain age group, you were talking about data and really honing in on the right target, so let’s say I’m trying to target somebody in a specific income range, in a specific type of business or career, C-suite, and in a certain age group and I wanted to focus on those individuals writing a legacy book, and I wanted to send them a video, or I wanted to send them a copy of Publish, Promote, Profit, with a letter that is addressed to them, et cetera. Number one, is that possible and how specific can you be with the data? Number two, do you have any examples of situations like that where people have done small batches, 100, 500, 1000 because they’re selling something to a very, very high-level individual at a high price? Do you have some examples of that? I hope that’s not too specific a question.
Ryan Cote:
I can answer it. So, in terms of the data, and offline, I can connect you with who our data partner is. It’s not an in-house service. We use someone that we’ve known for 20 years. Yeah, they’ve got, data now you’ve got compiled. Actually, right out of college I worked for two mailing list companies. That was actually my first job out of college before I went into the family business, little side note there. You can buy compiled data on age, industry, job titled, there’s a whole bunch of stuff. You can buy data that’s based on survey questions. You take surveys for prizes. Well, they’re giving you something because they’re going to then sell your data. They’re going to sell your data to someone, a mailer, a marketer. You can buy responsive data, so someone that subscribes, or they buy, they’ve taken an action, and so you’ve got responsive data. It’s more expensive, but you’re mailing to someone that’s shown in the past that they will make a response. They’ll take action. You’ve got the compiled or survey data where you have countless different selects. I’ve seen requests come into our data partner for very, very specific targets and they’ve been able to get it. The question is: What’s the quantity going to be? Are you going to have a few hundred? Maybe for something like you just described there, where you’re going to mail them a book, that’s fine. If the client wants something sizable to send out, five, 10, 25,000 mailers, and sometimes we run into a problem with the quantity of the targeting being way too specific. In the more manual, lumpy type package you described, that would be fine, 300, 500 could be all you need. The second question you asked about examples. The one thing that came to my mind when you were asking it is, we’ve done work with this, it’s like a visiting nurse service, Visiting Nurse Service of New York. They wanted to reach doctors’ offices, like the reception area, to get referrals. What their approach was, they were mailing out premiums. This was many, many years ago, five years ago, so I’m just trying to remember. It was basically like a cube box that we got for them. Inside, we put a flowerpot type of thing, not with dirt, but a fake flowerpot with a pen inside, with a little card, with a little note on it. It stood out. I don’t remember the quantity, but it was very small because it was very expensive. It just got the door open for them. In that case, it was premiums. It was a lumpy box with a pen inside and a flowerpot, and they did it over and over again.
Rob Kosberg:
I would say to a client of mine, and I’ve said this many times regarding direct mail, if they’re selling a premium priced product, program, coaching, consulting, et cetera, something that’s $10,000, $20,000, maybe $100,000, that’s a beautiful place to be because you don’t need a list of 100,000 or a million people. You only need a list of 1000 of your ideal clients, maybe 500 of your ideal clients. If you can start attracting one, two of those clients every few months, you very, very quickly get a massive return on investment, especially if you can build a relationship over and over with them. I don’t know. What would it cost to send a book, five bucks, $10? I know what it costs us to do it. Including list data and all that, it might be 10 bucks. For a $5000 campaign, you could send 1000 of them and reach 1000 of your absolutely ideal prospects. I think it’s massively under-utilized for people in the specialty niches. I don’t know if you’re seeing any changes there, or what your vibe is in that business.
Ryan Cote:
I think about my own marketing, when we get a direct mail lead, we’ll mail out a simple kit in priority mail, which is a lot more money. We’ve had some clients in the wealth management space where they’re targeting really high net worth individuals, they’ll mail FedEx envelopes. We’re not talking about a lot of people, and it’s expensive. You know that’s going to get opened. We work with a very high-end insurance company, and they did video mailers. It was 200 of their leads, their best leads. They sent out these video mailers You open up the folder and it started playing a video. They were sponsoring on of the golf, like Pebble Beach or something like that, and so it was about their sponsorship and what they can do. The person opened the video, the folder, and the video started playing. When you have a really small group, or a high-ticket product, it makes sense to do that kind of stuff. You do have to stand out. The normal postcard, the cheap letter packages, it’s just noise at that point. You need to stand out.
Rob Kosberg:
I love it. Talk to me a little bit more about what you’re seeing that’s working best at Ballantine when it comes to digital marketing. Obviously, the people that are listening to this podcast, my clients, they want to sell books. They want to use their books to sell whatever is the thing that they’re ultimately selling, which will be the case with you in your personal development business also. What are some of the best ways, the best bang for the buck that they can get? We’ve kind of beaten the horse of direct mail. Talk to me about the other stuff that you guys do and what you’re seeing.
Ryan Cote:
I’ll answer this from our perspective. Every agency has a different skillset or a different recipe of how they do things. Our approach is not to rely on one channel. We very rarely take on single service work now, where someone just wants SEO or something like that. Clients come to us because they want an integrated approach. We basically become their marketing department or an extension of their marketing department. They’ll use us for a variety of services. I think that’s actually a good lesson for everyone because you really can’t rely on just one channel nowadays. First of all, buyers, they use multiple channels. They’re a lot more sophisticated. They have a lot more options of where to look, social, Google, et cetera, et cetera. And so very rarely are they just using one channel. When you use one channel, like SEO for example, they just came out with their page experience update, where they looked at load speed and how your site shifts when you scroll and all that stuff. If your site wasn’t buttoned up there, you’re going to rank, your rank is going to drop. Now you’ve relied on SEO, and now all of a sudden, you’re in trouble. We’ve seen it work better too. A rising tide raises all ships. You need to get all your channels in check, like SEO, paid search, social media, content, they all kind of feed off each other. If you want me to give you a more specific answer, we’re really bullish on content right now because we’re seeing Google rank more blogs and articles and information. It makes sense, their job is to answer questions when someone’s going to Google. Not that they’re always asking a question, but they’re looking for information. Blogs do a great job of answering questions and providing information. Think about the way Google’s search results are changing, like featured snippets, and their search results page is much more complicated and dynamic. Blogs have a better chance of ranking, we’ve seen especially in the featured snippets, which is all the way at the top of the page. It’s something you can do and use it in other ways. We create a blog post, I do sales, I’ll send it to prospects. I’ll put it on LinkedIn. Our team will put it on social. If a piece of content’s doing really well, we can create a video out of it, the topic. You do a piece of content, and then there’s multiple ways to repurpose it, and it’s kind of neat.
Rob Kosberg:
It’s hard to disagree with. You can’t have just one channel. There needs to be multiple channels. That’s a little terrifying at the same time. I mean, for some people maybe listening, like you said you work with small businesses, but I don’t want to put you on the spot with, okay, give me some pricing, but a small business that you’re going to work on their SEO, their content marketing, their paid search. It’s like, “Holy cow.” I mean, can that be affordable? Is that how people get started with Ballantine? Is that what the suggestion is?
Ryan Cote:
We work with mainly small businesses on the digital side. We’ve got some that are a little bit bigger. They fall into the mid-size. By small business, I’m talking they have 10 to 40 employees, 15 to 40 employees, so they’re not a solo-preneur but they’re still a small business. I won’t give exact pricing, but we’re the cost of bringing an entry level person in house.
Rob Kosberg:
That sounds like 4000 or 5000 bucks a month, 6000 bucks a month, something in that range.
Ryan Cote:
Yeah. It depends what they need, but yeah, that’s a good ballpark.
Rob Kosberg:
That’s not bad, especially if the focus is so multi-dimensional. I totally agree with what you said. I mean, you’ve got to have multiple channels that are bringing in because one channel will break. Like you said, SEO changes. They’re always changing the target. You’ve got to be up on that stuff.
Ryan Cote:
Even paid search, you’re paying to play. You get the ads up and the traffic starts literally within hours. I remember back in the day, I was really big into affiliate marketing, maybe 13 years ago or so. I was very big into affiliate marketing, driving traffic with Google ads, doing very well with it. Then Google decided they didn’t like affiliate landings pages as much, and they started really slamming that, canceling accounts. You’re playing in their sandbox, and so you have to really be diverse, and collecting emails. I don’t think it’s smart to be everywhere unless you have a massive team and a massive budget. Even when I say we’re in multiple channels, with social media, we have a very specific way we use it. We’re not on TikTok and all this. It’s just not our specialty. We just don’t do it that way, but we work with multiple channels. With paid, it’s usually Google, and DuckDuckGo, and Bing. That’s just our way of doing it. We try to use multiple channels, but we’re not like, “Yeah, we’re going to put you everywhere in the world and on every single platform.”
Rob Kosberg:
You need to write a big check for something like that. That’s good. I love this topic. I really believe and teach my clients that there’s proactive and there’s reactive. Unfortunately, most authors think, “Well, I’ve written the book, and now I’m just going to wait for the phone to ring. People are going to come to me. That’s reactive. You need to take control of your destiny and be proactive. That’s why I’ve enjoyed talking to you because that’s obviously what Ballantine does. You do that through a number of different channels and ways, which I think is terrific. Any last thoughts? What should people think about when they think about if they have never paid somebody for these types of services, or they’re maybe trying to do some of this themselves, or whatever? What should people think about when it comes to being proactive, using digital direct mail, et cetera? Let’s also give them some links where they can reach you, both at Ballantine, as well as your self-improvement for entrepreneurs business.
Ryan Cote:
I would say if you’re considering using an agency, check their reviews. Ask for their reviews. If they don’t have any, that’s a red flag. Ask for case studies, if they don’t have any, that’s another red flag. Try to verify the case studies by speaking to the clients. I would also say something that is not as discussed often, is speak to them a few times. Do you like them? Can you see yourself working with them? Oftentimes, at least with the right relationship or the right engagement, you’re speaking, the client and the agency are speaking often. It goes both ways, you have to like the person, want to work with them. Our best client engagements are the ones where we really enjoy each other. We’re sort of friends. You have to like the person you’re working with. Go with your gut on that. Then you need to check their references and all that stuff. If they’re trying to do it themselves, I would say it depends on what your budget is. You can’t go wrong with content, and creating content is the first channel that you work on. You can’t rely on just one channel, so make sure you’re also putting the content on social media, and you’re also optimizing it for search and all that and sharing it with your network.
Rob Kosberg:
Great advice, my friend. Thank you. Some links where people can learn more about both Ballantine and your stuff?
Ryan Cote:
Ballantine is ballantine.com. Then my personal development passion project is, morningupgrade.com. It started off talking about morning routines because that was my serious introduction to personal development and still is, but the site has blossomed into all thing’s personal development beyond just morning routines.
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah. Great domain. Love that.
Ryan Cote:
Surprised it was available, right? I saw that. I’m like, “This is a sign. I’ve got to buy it.”
Rob Kosberg:
Yeah, that’s a good one. Ryan, great to meet you. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. Obviously, for those of you listening, comment below. Any questions that you have for Ryan, you can certainly ask them, whether it’s YouTube or the podcast. Connect with Ryan if you have any needs regarding digital marketing or self-improvement. Thanks so much for being on. Great to have you with us.
Ryan Cote:
Thanks, Rob. Thanks, everyone.
