In this episode, we’re joined by Terri Hoffman, founder and CEO of Marketing Refresh, a seasoned expert with nearly three decades of marketing experience. From her early career in professional sports to leading a firm that empowers industrial B2B companies, Terri has seen firsthand how modern marketing can transform businesses.

We’ll explore how foundational elements like a solid brand identity, effective CRM integration, and tailored digital strategies can help B2B brands scale successfully. Terri shares insights into avoiding common pitfalls, leveraging modern marketing tools, and aligning marketing with broader business goals to drive sustainable growth.

Whether you’re grappling with long buying cycles, uncertain budget allocations, or a need for scalable solutions, this episode is packed with actionable advice to help you position your brand for long-term success in today’s competitive B2B landscape. Let’s dive in

Podcast transcript

Kerry Curran, RBMA (00:01.524)

So welcome, Terri. Please share a bit about your background and experience and introduce yourself.

Terri Hoffman (00:08.039)

Yeah. Thanks for having me on today, Kerry. This is, this is fun. so I've, I'm nearly approaching 30 years in the marketing industry, which is like, it's a great feeling to say that. And also not a great feeling to realize that I've reached this age, but, I started my career working in professional sports. So I was really lucky. I had played college basketball and kind of dreamed of working for a professional basketball team.

One day, so I did not start in the marketing field. I worked for the Houston Rockets and then I worked for the Houston Comets. And it was a really fun, kind of personally gratifying way to start off my career. And once I got that out of my system for a few years, I dove into the marketing field and I've, I've had a diverse experience in that I started marketing before there was the internet, as part of our commercial lives. Right. So I got to learn a lot about traditional marketing.

Tactics and strategies from direct mail to print advertising billboards and the whole nine yards in the traditional sense. And then I was fortunate enough to end up at TD Ameritrade right during the timeframe when online trading became an open market activity. So individuals got that access. Ameritrade had a $200 million annual marketing spend, and I was lucky to kind of land a spot on their partnership marketing team.

Got to see how a fully integrated marketing strategy worked. So everything from branding commercials to the digital ads that were in all the different sizes and formats, optimizing those campaigns, doing those in partnership with United Airlines, or it was Continental Airlines at the time, lots of hotel partners, and seeing how that all fit together.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (01:48.282)

Yep. Mm-hmm.

Terri Hoffman (02:00.549)

Especially with the direct mail campaign just gave me a really good understanding and baseline for where my career has gone forward. I started my firm called Marketing Refresh 15 years ago. At the time we started, WordPress was very new, and HubSpot was new. The ability for an entrepreneur or a smaller business to get access to the same types of tools that an enterprise branded was just beginning.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (02:18.88)

Mm-hmm.

Terri Hoffman (02:30.003)

15 years ago, and that was right at the same time I was starting marketing refresh. I saw an opportunity to try to bring enterprise-level marketing services to small and medium-sized businesses. And that was like the heart of how we started. And that's still really what we do today, right? Maybe the size of the company is a little bit larger than what we started working with when I originally founded the company. There are 12 of us now and

Our whole mission is to show B2B brands in the industrial fields that they can get a return on their marketing investment. Marketing is not just about how many boxes of donuts I dropped off and how many golf tournaments we sponsor this year. Those things are important to building relationships, but they shouldn't be the only things that you categorize under your marketing spend anymore.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:18.026)

Definitely. So you've seen the evolution of the industry and especially, I think nothing is more rapidly evolving than digital marketing. And I love your point of your story of bringing that enterprise capability to smaller businesses. Because I think we continue to see that evolve and become more accessible. But then here you are working with …

Terri Hoffman (03:18.951)

Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (03:45.152)

… big industrial companies. thinking about knowing that the buying cycle for B2B is usually very long. Talk a bit about what your clients ask you when they call you and or, what their needs are when they reach out to you and say, need to partner with an agency. What are the of the trends there?

Terri Hoffman (04:11.795)

Yeah, I would, you know, it's usually a couple of different things. One is they've got some main foundational pieces already figured out in their digital marketing program, and they want to add something more specialized. So that could be something like, Hey, we're ready to embrace LinkedIn ads or Google ads, or we want a more advanced SEO strategy. Right. So they're trying to add on to competencies they already have on their team, or they're in a position where they've realized, wow, we've …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (04:27.36)

Thanks, Mm-hmm.

Terri Hoffman (04:38.641)

… never done anything to develop a digital strategy. ready to get started and we don't know where to begin. We don't know how much we should be budgeting. We're not sure how to allocate that budget. We're not sure if there are systems we need in place. We're not sure how to hold this team accountable. And a lot of times they've just gotten an investment, right? They've got a PE firm backing them who's just invested in them. They might have a board.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:03.55)

Thank you.

Terri Hoffman (05:06.109)

who's overseeing things, they maybe just hired a new CFO. And so now there's this need for accountability and measurables that actually show what is happening with those marketing dollars and how the marketing is supporting revenue growth.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:20.928)

So it's really interesting that they kind of call you with a tactical challenge. Like they have an idea of, okay, I need to start doing ads or, you know, like you said, LinkedIn, but to your point, it gets much, much further or deeper than that. how are you kind of, how do you help them identify that, okay, you need to take a step back and do more than just start buying ads on LinkedIn. Talk about that kind of.

Terri Hoffman (05:31.784)

Mm-hmm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (05:47.264)

How do you get through that discovery process and get them to buy into a larger strategy?

Terri Hoffman (05:51.921)

Yeah, I'm sure at the beginning of building a relationship, I probably drive people crazy because I ask a ton of questions, right? But the reason I'm asking a lot of questions and that's so important to me is because I want to make money. I care about helping people spend their money the right way. And we care about making sure they're going to get the most out of their investment. And so we want to understand who their buyers are, right? Like what, who is your buyer? How complex is the buying decision for you? Do you have … 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (06:06.079)

Right.

Terri Hoffman (06:20.423)

… you know, five or six stakeholders who are part of a decision-making team who are part of this process, and understanding the differing needs that each one of those groups and stakeholders has is very important. Understanding what their competitors are doing because, in the absence of that competitor information, you don't have any idea if the brand you're talking to is far ahead. If they're way behind, if

And then even just slicing it down in a more detailed way, maybe there are parts they are way ahead or there are parts they're way behind. you have to dissect what's going on in that competitive landscape to help them determine the proper starting point. And then there's just some marketing fundamentals, like what is your brand experience like? Do you have the right message in place? Do you have the right visual representation?

Of your brand in place, is it going to resonate and help your company come across as a modern, thriving, innovative brand? If that is in alignment with what your brand actually is, you just want to make sure they've got all of those fundamentals in place first before they start diving into things that are tactical. You could spend a lot of money on ads, and if you don't have the right foundation in place, that could just be money you're throwing out the window, unfortunately.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (07:43.016)

Yeah, no, that's a valid point. And do you find that, so it sounds like you're helping them at a very foundational level, taking it back to just brand identity, brand strategy, and target audience kind of fundamentals.

Terri Hoffman (08:00.145)

Right. Yeah. We follow a lot of the HubSpot foundations here in this regard. And so there's a process that they call the buyer's journey and put together the mapping about how the different target customer profiles that you're going after know, what motivates them, what drives them, what challenges are they facing? What's triggering them to take action? And it's more than just the things they're dealing with in their day-to-day job life. It's like, what are the emotions …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:08.917)

Mm-hmm.

Terri Hoffman (08:29.139)

… pains that they have, right? Like maybe they're under pressure from their CFO or their operations because they've got people that need to stay on two shifts in the facility and they've got to hit a certain revenue mark, right? And that's a lot of pressure. So there's a variety of pieces of information that we're trying to get and gather at the front end to help them put the right strategy and message together so that their tactics are well thought out …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (08:30.162)

Right. Yeah.

Terri Hoffman (08:58.415)

… and prioritized when they're ready to go out to the market.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:02.957)

Do you pull in with that buyer's journey? Are you talking to their field sales agents and getting a better qualitative take on what they're looking for as well?

Terri Hoffman (09:14.64)

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think it's got to be a combination of qualitative information and quantitative. So fortunately, because we're in the field of digital marketing, there are too many tools at this point, but we've got our preferred tool set that we use to do research. So we can see your site, your competitor's site, how often is it getting visited? What keywords are you ranking for? Are you running ads? Are your competitors running ads? We can pull data …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (09:19.665)

Mm-hmm.

Terri Hoffman (09:43.131)

… until the cows come home and we've got that. But talking to people and maybe picking a selection of three or four people from each of those buyer audience segments that we can interview and just verify that what they're saying they're struggling with matches what our client or the brand thinks. And it also matches with what we can see the competitors emphasizing and prioritizing in their brand message. Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:10.713)

Now it's so important to have that real messaging, that narrative that's really going to resonate and then bring that into the strategy. So from there, I said sometimes you need to do the basics like updating website content, right?

Terri Hoffman (10:32.027)

Yeah, for sure. So websites are, I think in the field of marketing, one of the most challenging projects you can take on because it combines every skill set. So you've got to have the overall strategy set. What pages do we need to have? How do we organize it? What does the user experience look like? How, what are the calls to action that we need to ask people so that it's, they're not overwhelmed with pop-up windows and

Kerry Curran, RBMA (10:38.912)

Mm-hmm.

Terri Hoffman (10:59.897)

different buttons and all these different colors. We want to have a very clear user experience that we've mapped out. And then you've got to have somebody who helps you come up with the design that matches the company branding. That's very simple, elegant and modern. You've got to have the right message. You've got to have the right platform that you're building that on, whether that's HubSpot or WordPress or one of those are probably the two most popular B2B platforms for very good reason.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:01.209)

Yeah.

Terri Hoffman (11:28.519)

They need to be fast. needs to be high-performing. You've got to have the right onsite SEO strategy in place. So I kind of outline all of those because I think something that I see a lot of companies in this space do is they know what they know about buying a website. And most of the time you think about the design, right? You think, well, I want this to look good. I'm going to hire a designer. Not a bad idea, but make sure you've got those other skill sets filled and that you've got a fully comprehensive

Kerry Curran, RBMA (11:47.018)

Right. Mm-hmm.

Terri Hoffman (11:59.071)

Solution put together so that you've got the right foundation in place that you can, you can build from a five-page. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm sure you, I'm sure you've seen that same thing because it will come in and audit websites like that all the time and say, wow, the platform you're on is very outdated. Unfortunately, it can be WordPress and the team implementing WordPress.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:05.62)

Yep. And that your content strategy aligns with SEO and it's robust.

Terri Hoffman (12:26.179)

The WordPress solution is only going to be as good as the team who implemented it. We see HubSpot implemented incorrectly. We see WordPress implemented incorrectly all the time. It's not the platform. It's probably the team or resources you chose to have implemented. Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (12:43.614)

Yeah, and you started to say five-page websites, that's something that you come across.

Terri Hoffman (12:48.975)

No. So what I was going to say, it would be better to do a very high functioning, high-performing small five to 10-page website than it would be to do a 50-page great looking website with maybe misaligned content that's slow and doesn't perform well. Of course, I think most sites need to be bigger than five or 10 pages for the types of companies we work with. just to make a point, do it well. Do it well across all those categories and then expand. Yep.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (13:15.998)

Then expand, yeah. Yeah. And so how do you help them then kind of think about their budgets and their channel allocation and kind of what's right for their audiences?

Terri Hoffman (13:29.137)

Yeah. So if they don't, if they're at a point where they're just not, they have no idea where to start in developing a marketing budget, I would say we begin with industry standards and there's multiple sources that are reliable that publish that you should be budgeting between three and 8 % of your revenue for your marketing budget. So that's a good starting point. And then I think they can also, and we can help with this, is help them do some research about what competitors their industry are spending? Of course, it's going to have a lot to do with where they are as a company. Are you in a high growth period? Are you investing in some new lines of equipment and you've got to commercialize them and start to build revenue for that? What's going on in the company itself and what's going on in the industry that helps you determine if we should be at the more aggressive end of that spend? Should we be on the more conservative end?

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:00.746)

Mm-hmm.

Terri Hoffman (14:25.285)

And those are all conversations that you've got to talk through and you've got to be on the same page with the CFO and the whole executive team to make sure that there's support for that budget and there are reasonable expectations about what that budget can do. Right. That's where I think the relationship between marketing and the rest of the organization falls apart a lot. There are, maybe misaligned expectations and false expectations about …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:30.474)

Yeah.

Terri Hoffman (14:52.859)

… And it's sometimes marketing that builds those false expectations, unfortunately, right? Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (14:57.236)

Yeah, because we're ambitious. But I think you're spot on about ensuring alignment, right? Especially as we talked about the long sales cycle, and long buying cycle for such large investments. If it's a six to nine to 12-month buying cycle, your new marketing campaign is not going to start driving sales for a while. And I think it's important to lay that out.

Terri Hoffman (15:28.679)

Yep, exactly. think too, you know, we, unfortunately, see a lot of there's, there's a couple of big problems that I think that happened with B2B industrial companies who decided to invest in marketing. One, they don't resource it the right way, right? So they leave an experience after six months or a year and say, marketing doesn't work for us. it may have been missed, you know, not resourced correctly. And that could be the team, but that could also be the budget. If you don't …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (15:39.328)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right.

Terri Hoffman (15:57.593)

… spend appropriately, you can end up just, unfortunately, throwing a lot of money out the door because you didn't spend enough to make a difference. And that's where I think finding a team with experience would really help to ensure that you're properly allocating the right numbers and then also measuring it and holding whoever's got that responsibility accountable in the right ways over time.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (16:25.438)

Right, right, and not spending enough, but or going back to some of those initial requests you get, or just going tactically and buying ads without having that foundational strategy in place.

Terri Hoffman (16:37.267)

Yeah. Yeah. The real tension comes in with, now, let's take a company that got an investment, maybe just was purchased by a PE firm and everyone is excited about this investment. They're ready to get started. Let's put a new, you know, go-to-market strategy in place, right? Like who wouldn't be excited about that and be ready to go? But it …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:00.148)

Right.

Terri Hoffman (17:01.683)

… just taking some time, whether that's, you know, typically three, four or five months to make sure the proper research and allocation are done is so important. so that you're sure the next six to nine months after that, you're putting the right foundation in place so that another year from then you are starting to see the fruits of all that, that time is spent. I just see it too often that you get that excitement. You don't have a strategy and you just go right to the tactics and …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:31.146)

Yeah.

Terri Hoffman (17:31.591)

… You can get lucky and have it work, but that's not common. Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (17:37.706)

Right, yeah. And so one of the things too that's so important is to your point if you're doing the ads now, you have that strategy and that activation going, but bringing that all in into a centralized CRM to manage that relationship building, especially for repeated customer prospecting and contact relationship building over that buying cycle. So talk a bit about the importance of the CRM in that context.

Terri Hoffman (18:07.261)

Yeah, great, great question. That's another area that I think it's overlooked a lot, right? And it's usually because in these businesses, the number of people they're trying to sell to isn't huge, right? You're talking sometimes hundreds and sometimes thousands, but you're not talking tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of potential contacts usually.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:25.449)

 Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Terri Hoffman (18:32.291)

The numbers are small and a lot of times those contacts live in people's emails in a pile of business cards in a drawer. They're in Excel spreadsheets and that's not scalable. That's not shareable, or scalable. You can't plan around managing your contacts and your projections that way. You can make sales, you can make profitable sales, and you can have successful salespeople, but …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (18:39.518)

Yep. Right.

Terri Hoffman (18:57.747)

… it's not something you can build a system around that is then scalable unless you've got a CRM. Salesforce and HubSpot are the two that we work with the most frequently. And again, for good reason, they're the market leaders. depending on what you are trying to do with that CRM, one or the other is probably going to be a better fit for you. 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:21.47)

Yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I think your point that the scalability that comes with a CRM is what's going to help you shorten that sales cycle. You talked about how marketing doesn't sell, but it equips the sellers, but having that CRM that's marketing ops, sales ops functionality to the, tracking that and to create that automation, right? It does take a lot of time to …

Terri Hoffman (19:37.703)

Mm-hmm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (19:50.762)

… keep those relationships warm and those leads kind of your brand top of mind if they aren't in the market yet. And that's where a lot of that, the benefits come in as well.

Terri Hoffman (20:02.439)

Yeah, you're 100 % right. I think there's just human being problems behind most of the things that prevent people from taking on marketing. The human being problem with the CRM is that salespeople are busy. They're busy. So the last thing they want to do is enter data into a database. takes time. If you're doing it well, you're putting in detailed notes and detailed information about the next steps and discussion points …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:07.583)

Mm-hmm.

Terri Hoffman (20:32.179)

… time that they're spending doing that, that they're not out making phone calls or meeting with their customers or attending events and networking. And so it's a tough trade-off, but if you don't invest that time, you're never developing a scalable system that can live beyond that one salesperson. Yeah. And you can't plan scale for the rest of your company around that, right? Like, how am going to know how many orders …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (20:53.034)

Yep.

Terri Hoffman (21:00.167)

… could be coming through. How do I know how to staff for that and budget for materials? And yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:02.91)

Right, the measurement of, yeah. Yeah, I know that's a really important aspect of that as well, it helps to inform your broader business strategy as well.

Terri Hoffman (21:16.027)

Right. Exactly. Yeah. But it's tough. Like there's, I have not met a salesperson yet who loves the CRM system, no matter what, and the best salespeople are going to complain about it the most because it's taking them out of what they do. Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:18.484)

Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:26.43)

Yeah. Yeah. But the good news is, yeah, the good news is there's so many, like HubSpot, I know they have these AI tools that they've launched. There's the thing about AI. It will kind of take a lot of the busy work off of it. You know, you can, you can now record your phone calls. Your notes are automatically entered and tracked and your meetings can be set up for you via follow-up emails. But I hear you like, I know when I was, my

Terri Hoffman (21:43.005)

Mm-hmm.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (21:55.912)

The last sales team I was managing hated putting in the notes, like we needed to know the progression there. So it's definitely a barrier, but a needed opportunity.

Terri Hoffman (22:07.707)

Absolutely. It's not having it. The underperforming salespeople can hide a lot of their underperformance, right? If they don't have to log in. The high-performing salespeople, it's taking them out of what they're doing and that's driving revenue for your company. But it's important to just have that baseline. Yeah, inbound, the HubSpot event, just announced so many enhancements to HubSpot that are exciting, including intent data.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:15.858)

Mm-hmm. Good point. Yeah.

Terri Hoffman (22:35.889)

You know, so imagine if you could see, you know, how many, not only what they already have, which is, this person that I've been trying to prospect to has visited my website five times. They never told me that, but now I know that I can see how many times they've opened my emails and you just get a little bit of intent data. And now they've added even more intent data about other things they're doing off of your website and off of your marketing materials that are going to indicate …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (22:57.471)

Mm-hmm.

Terri Hoffman (23:04.039)

… how high of a priority you should make to follow up with them. I mean, that's great insight. You don't have to use it in an icky way and make them feel like you're spying on them. It just better informs your salesperson on how to spend their time.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (23:18.452)

Right, and the other aspect too is the tracking of your marketing activities to be able to see what is driving that engagement, what is driving that response, you know, across the paid media, email marketing. So it is a highly beneficial tool from all aspects and to your point needs to be a core part of the program. And you can start with a free version as well. It's definitely, definitely an important aspect of that overall investment for marketing.

Terri Hoffman (23:53.543)

Right. I actually just talking this through with you, it's making me realize how many just human being problems there are behind. A lot of B2B industrial firms are just taking the jump and getting started. They don't like being marketed to, they don't like, we all get those, you know, probably 10 a week LinkedIn messages where it's like, this makes no sense. I'm never going to buy this from you. And no one wants to be that person. Right.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (24:06.612)

Yep. Right.

Terri Hoffman (24:22.417)

You don't have to be that person to be an effective LinkedIn marketer. No one likes the feeling of being followed around on the internet or having their data tracked. Nobody likes that, but you don't have to market that way just because you have the same tools that other people have. You can do it in a professional and very high-quality way and just be smarter about how you're using your time and resources.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (24:31.669)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

Kerry Curran, RBMA (24:47.23)

Yeah, definitely. Well, and I think there's to your point, there's a lot of evolution that's ahead for a lot of the big industrial B2B companies. And with, you know, strong marketing, maybe they can shorten that sales cycle and that buying cycle and drive that revenue growth with the clear expectation that it is going to take time.

Terri Hoffman (25:10.279)

Yeah, exactly. So I think just a huge stat that I use all the time is that about 70 % of B2B buyers do their research online before they ever talk to one of your salespeople, right? So that could mean they're going to YouTube to look for video content, to help them learn about your equipment or whatever issue they're having in their operation that they're trying to solve. They could be searching Google. They could now be searching

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:22.186)

Right.

Terri Hoffman (25:39.63)

any of the millions of AI chatbot tools that are out there. There are so many ways people are looking for information. They go on LinkedIn and post a question. They're searching on Reddit, right? Have your brand show up so you become part of the conversation when companies are doing that research and buyers are doing research because they're not going to stop doing research even after they've made that short list of the one or two vendors they're going to get quotes from or get bids from. They're continuing to do it even after that …

Kerry Curran, RBMA (25:42.602)

Right, right.

Terri Hoffman (26:09.563)

… and Marketing can help set up that salesperson to have the resources and content support that they need when they're in the middle of the sales process. Yeah. Make it easier on them. Yeah.

Kerry Curran, RBMA (26:17.94)

Yeah, and to shorten that. Again, improving the connections and touchpoints, yeah. Well, definitely. Well, Terri, thank you so much. So much good information here. Thank you for joining us and sharing all of your insight today. So thank you.

Terri Hoffman (26:34.439)

Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having me, Kerry. I appreciate it.