Decoding Agile Marketing With Andrea Fryrear

Welcome to the Marketing Growth podcast. I’m your host, Shane Barker. My guest today, Andrea Fryrear, is the president of the Colorado-based company AgileSherpas. Her team of specialists helps organizations implement agile practices to boost productivity and performance. In today’s episode, she’s going to talk about what agile marketing is and how it benefits organizations. She also discusses her professional journey and how she entered the marketing industry. I’m on a call here today with Andrea Fryrear. I’m super excited about the interview today. We’ve been trying to connect for the last few months, and because of the busyness of business and everything else, it’s been a little hard to connect. But here we are today. I’m excited about the interview.

Absolutely. So why don’t you tell the audience just a little bit about yourself, how you got into the space, and where you live? I just want to get a little background on you.

Yeah, Ooh, Boulder. I’ve only been out there once, and it’s phenomenal.

Right: to all the Texas fans, no hard feelings, but I would have to say Colorado. It’s like, I’m in Sacramento, California, and I tell you, Colorado is one of those states where I’m, to me, that would be an even, if not maybe, a move up. I love California, but Colorado is just…I don’t know, just everything about it is awesome.

Well, you can tell from my white skin that I’m not a huge beach fan. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the beach or enjoy the sun. It’s that it doesn’t enjoy me. Like I can literally talk about the sun and potentially get burnt. So that’s about…you know, I’m Irish, so that’s what happens sometimes.

The good old default. It’s so funny because I would have never thought about this in college, but having that English background is so beneficial. You wouldn’t necessarily think of that at first, but especially in the content space it’s huge. I’ll be honest—I am not an English major, and you can tell from the first post I wrote. I used to send it to my wife, and she’d say, “Oh my God, did you write this in crayon?” English is obviously my first language, but I’m just not that. I’m an okay writer, I would say. I can’t compare it to some of your stuff that has a degree in it. I think it’s such a nice foundation to have.

“Mom and Dad, I told you.” Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s cool. So you did. And what college did you go to?

Nice. And then, so when you say you were in Texas, was it Austin, Texas?

I like the name because it leaves a little mystery, since I’m from California. I’m highly confused, but I get it. It’s the reason why I asked about Austin—I’ve actually never been to Austin, which is crazy because I have startups I’ve worked with there. I have a lot of friends that live there. In fact, one of the instructors I teach a class with at UCLA actually lives there, and she got to come out to Austin. I was going to ask you about Austin a little before you jumped into the content side of things. But Dallas, I’ve heard, is me. I’ve been to Dallas a few times. I love Dallas.

Yeah, yeah. And that’s why I can’t believe I haven’t been to Austin. Anyways, I’m gonna go up by the next time this podcast goes live, I will have visited Austin. How about that? That also pushed me to go to Austin, so that’s a good thing. So cool. So when you’re in college, you obviously worked on the English side of things, and then you got into content marketing by default, right? You had a company that said, “Hey, she seems really intelligent—we think she does the English side of things, and now she can maybe start doing this PPC thing.” And it was kind of like, “Hey, this isn’t your background, but you kind of grinded it out, looked online, and educated yourself.

Well, that’s the thing—it’s funny. Most people I interview have been in the space for 10-plus years, and really nobody has a background in content marketing because it wasn’t around for the most part, right? It really wasn’t. I mean, it was a concept, I guess, but now it’s obviously become very popular. Last, 7, 6, or 5 years, whatever that is.

But you know, that’s what’s funny about the evolution of us as marketers. When I started doing marketing about 20 years ago, content marketing wasn’t even a thing—we were doing SEO when it wasn’t even called SEO, right? And now, with content marketing, you’re like, “Oh, thank God I got the English background.” I’ve been writing some content, and it was just one of those things. We started investing in my website, probably about seven or eight years ago, on the blog—just saying, “Hey, I just wanted to write on the blog,” even though I wasn’t a phenomenal writer. And now it’s because of those early days and doing that that content marketing is obviously a huge thing.

A lot of you know, B2B and B2C companies want this as a service, and so we have that background now. Once again, there’s not too many people who went to school for content marketing, because that’s more of a now thing—right in the last probably four or five years—where somebody’s like, “Oh, I can go to…” I don’t even know if there’s even a school that teaches content marketing, necessarily.

Yeah, see, down under. So that’s what it is—Australia always has the stuff that’s awesome. It’s kind of interesting to me because, like I said, I kind of stumbled into it the same way you did, and it’s like, “Okay, this is kind of awesome.” You have that background, and now it makes sense to move forward with your clients. So tell me a little bit about your company. What’s the name of your company? And give me a little background there, because obviously you’ve been around for a while.

Now that’s awesome because it’s a really interesting angle— a lot of people don’t understand that, especially when it comes to creating stuff. There are efficiencies you can put in place: if you get to a certain point, this happens, that happens, and you probably shouldn’t go any further, right? But if you go this way, then it makes sense to continue on. I talk a little more about that because I think that’s probably a place where a lot of people, first of all, find it hard enough to produce content.

Also, I have a company that is like that, right? I mean, I know that, like Toyota or some other ones, their methodology was, “Hey, we go to a certain point and if it doesn’t make sense, we just cut it.” And it was more like, I said, there was a system—there are processes for that.

Yeah, well, that’s interesting to me because I’ll be honest—my team doesn’t do that. We don’t do that, and I really think it’s an area where we could improve. For us, we look at content, keywords, and some of the stuff people have put out there. We obviously consider the keyword difficulty and how competitive that keyword is. Not every blog post we do is keyword-driven, but I think that’s something we could improve upon as an agency—going and testing some stuff ahead of time. So that’s interesting.

So I might have to talk to you off-camera about that, because that’s definitely an interesting thing. That’s something I think we need as an agency. So tell me a little bit: how does that work when you guys bring in clients? Give me a kind of rundown of who would be your perfect client, someone you can bring in and say, “Hey, this is the type of company we work with here and what we look at is their processes.” Can you give me a little more breakdown on that?

And then you guys actually meet with the client in person. Is it like a two-day intensive type of thing? Or how do you guys run things?

Yeah, I was gonna say because I can only imagine if you did something remote—how difficult that would be—because people are going to be kicking and screaming a little bit because of change, right? So that’s never right. If you’re not in there, whipping them—not really ripping them, but, you know, in there, saying, “Hey, you got to do this,” showing them how to do it, and educating them— I think that’s really the key to this whole thing, because you’re really going in and revamping everything they’ve done, reevaluating and redoing it.

So that change is not always comfortable for people. In fact, it’s usually uncomfortable, right? That’s interesting. You guys usually do a two-day thing—it just depends on the size of the company.

Yeah, well, that’s the thing—it’s a behavioral thing, right? It’s only a process, but it’s the idea of, “Hey, when you come in on Monday, this is gonna be totally different than what you were doing on Friday.” And I just think that’s always so difficult for people because a good amount of people want to stay complacent—like, “Hey, this is okay, even if results aren’t as favorable,” because it’s easy to come in on a Monday and just do the same stuff you do when you’re, you know, disrupting that.

I think it becomes a situation where people are like, “Oh, this is uncomfortable.” But obviously, I’m sure after a few weeks or a few months, they start to see that change and start to see a different whatever-it-is on things, the process being in place and improving things. I think that’s when obviously the value happens.

And that’s, I think, a great point, because a lot of people take their work personally. But what they feel is that you’re coming in and saying, “Hey, this thing’s all messed up, and we have to revamp it,” instead of saying, “Maybe there are some processes and some things we can help with to make things more efficient.” It’s not something to be taken personally.

It’s like the whole idea at the end of the day is we just want to improve things, right? Isn’t that what everybody can agree on? We all want to make things better. So we’re going to look at some of these processes that can be tweaked, and that’s what we’re here to do—not necessarily to say this was wrong. Don’t take it personally; it’s that kind of thing.

So I totally get that, but I see that a lot of times—if we do joint ventures and sometimes work with other marketing companies, when we were a younger agency, it was always like, you don’t really want to step on anybody’s toes. You want to tell them that’s wrong. But we’ve seen this work a little better, and we don’t do that anymore. Now it’s like, “Hey, we have to have the reins,” because you can’t have two chefs cooking the meal, right? You gotta have a sous chef, you gotta have some people doing desserts and stuff. It’s the same kind of thing—I was raised in the restaurant and service industry.

It’s always like, you know, it doesn’t make sense to have that many people. And it’s like, really, who’s in charge of this? You guys come in and say, “Hey, I’m going to give you the reins for a few days and then help educate you,” just knowing that what we all care about is making the process better, increasing sales, and improving efficiencies. I think everybody should agree with that, right? At the end of the day, your bonuses might be higher, productivity increases, and there are all kinds of benefits if we work on this together.

Yeah. And I think if they can’t take it personally, the idea is that you’re also growing as an individual, right? So you can take this on to any company. That’s obviously a valuable resource—to know that, “Hey, we worked in these kinds of conditions, and this is what I learned,” and it’ll take you forward. I mean, really, you’d have to think of it as, “Hey, this is huge value.” It’s like the company is investing in me to be a better person for this company and maybe for a future company as well, which, if they can think about it the right way, is beautiful, is awesome— that someone’s willing to do that.

How long have you been doing it for?

Wow, that’s awesome because I understand the value in it and what you guys are doing, but I haven’t heard about it that much. You said it’s up and coming, but I think this is really cool—you obviously got in a long time ago, and you’re one of the first people doing it, or at least that’s what I heard, which is awesome. So, that’s cool. Are there a lot of other companies doing things like this when it comes to the agile methodology?

That was an engaging discussion, but we’re only getting started. Stay tuned for more. In the next episode, we’re going to talk at length about AgileSherpas’ work approach.