The Full-Stack Marketing Playbook That Actually Works w/ Mary Bevins

Hey, what is up? Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast. As always, I'm your host, Brian Lofermento, and I know that all of you, your favorite topic and maybe sometimes your least favorite topic is marketing. Well, today you are in for an absolute treat because you cannot ignore marketing. And in fact, we have found an incredible guest and fellow entrepreneur who is a full stack marketer. When we talk about a holistic view of marketing, you're going to see just how much today's guest really digs into all the different corners and components and facets of marketing to actually help it work in your business. So let me introduce you to today's guest. Her name is Mary Bevins. Mary is the founder of Memora Marketing, which is a strategic marketing agency that helps small and mid-sized businesses grow with clarity and intention. With over a decade of experience in marketing and business development, Mary is known for her strategy-first approach and her ability to see the full picture Trova business, not just the marketing pieces. She partners closely with business owners to simplify complexity, build confidence, and create sustainable growth. Outside of work, Mary loves being outdoors, connecting with her community, and spending time with her family and two dogs. And I'm so excited because we're all going to learn so much from her today. So let's dive straight into my interview with Mary Bevins. All right, Mary, I am so very excited that you're here with us today. First things first, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. I'm happy to be here. Heck yes. I'm so excited to geek out about marketing for the entirety of our conversation. But before we jump straight into that stuff, you've got to take us beyond the bio. Who's Mary? How did you start doing all these cool things? Yeah, so I was a stay-at-home parent in my early 20s and was just responsible for taking care of my daughter, which I'm grateful I got to do for a very long time. um but i just i felt like there was something more i wanted to do get back in the workforce so i was able to when she was about 10 i started working for a local software company at that point i lived up in the salt lake area in utah and just started in their marketing department as analyzing data for press releases things like that and just kind of got my foot in the door with that aspect after a couple years i worked my way into management but kind of got capped out and i was really excited to really just go full into my career So I was able to find a job at a local company which I had actually never heard of called Legends Boxing. It was a boutique fitness gym and they were hiring for a marketing manager at the corporate level. So I was grateful enough to get that position. It was right before they started to launch into franchising in 2017. So there was a lot of opportunity with that company. So I started, like I said, as the marketing manager. But it kind of moved my way over to operations as they launched into franchising. There was a lot of kind of gaps in the operations that I saw. So I wore a lot of hats. And the founder of that company really couldn't sit still. So he started a lot of companies. So over the years. The more companies he started, the more I worked with him on those. I grew up in the leadership position. I was his chief operating officer the last couple of years that I was there. And there was five different companies that we ran. So I have a lot of experience with business development and how marketing plays into the success or lack of success in that entire capacity. So that's the approach that I take to marketing for our clients now. So we launched our company. Next month is our one-year anniversary. um and it's been wonderful so i was able to for my own business take all the experience growing his businesses over the last decade and kind of apply that to my own business and not make a some of the mistakes that other business owners might make just with the experience that i had so grateful to have learned from him Yeah, I love that overview, Mary. And I'm really grateful that you had that well-rounded experience in all facets of business because I love it. To me, that's something that really makes Memorial Marketing different in the way that you approach it is we often throw that word around in business. And I know it's a bit of a buzzword now about holistic, but I prefer full stack because it's so clear to me that you embrace the full stack of marketing. And even zooming out from that is that you have full recognition of, hey, marketing is going to be successful. or not successful based on all these other things going on inside of your business as well obviously speaking to your operational background on top of that talk to us about that approach because oftentimes and we hear from a lot of listeners marketing is such a hot topic with our audience we hear from them a lot of times where they'll say oh my marketing isn't working and they don't look at all those other pieces lay out what all those puzzle pieces look like for us Yeah, absolutely. And we kind of, when we started this, I didn't realize we were choosing an uphill battle, I suppose, with our industry. But having been on the flip side of it, I was on the client side working with agencies previously for many years. We often ran into the same issue or similar issues rather is either we started out really strong, got the results we wanted, and then slowly they faded, right? They're a large agency. They're kind of catering to the client who shouts the loudest, right? they were only doing one piece of the marketing right so they weren't seeing the full picture so if we had three different vendors providing three different services no one knew what was going on so it wasn't as efficient as it could have been so that's the approach that we bring with our with our marketing services we like to take a step back we start every conversation with our clients as a strategy call even before there are clients we take a step back for example if they say hey we're really interested in social media management can you do that for us well yeah absolutely we can do that but let's learn more so let's talk about your business how long have you been around what's your operations day to day what's your vision for the future and is social media in fact the best place to spend your time and money at this point in time and then often it isn't right because maybe they haven't established their their branding or they have a website that's not converting and you know if they're looking for a return for leads or you know volume for clients chances are other places might be more effective rather than perhaps what they initially thought it was Mary, I'm glad that you also face the brunt of people wanting specific marketing tactics. We certainly hear about it from listeners, which by the way, listeners, please never be shy. We love hearing from each and every one of you. But Mary, it really sounds to me like that is a very common conversation that you have as people walk in tactically. And I'm also going to call out because we hear it a lot from listeners. And I just hear it from entrepreneurs in general about specific marketing channels, even where they'll say, oh, TikTok is very hot right now. I want to start a TikTok channel and all of those types of things zoom out for us and walk us down that path of what is the correct way because you talk about strategy and i don't think we differentiate strategy from tactics often enough in business conversations what does it look like in your world So a lot of it does depend on the client, their business, and what their goals are. Like if they're a personal brand, for example, and what they offer can be delivered to, you know, worldwide or nationwide, then sure, TikTok might be a place for them to get traction and awareness and benefit from that. If they, you know, provide a local service that isn't available online, chances are TikTok is not the best place to be because, for example, TikTok is more... um interest based rather than meta which is instagram and facebook which is location based right so there's there's different places to be depending on what you offer and what you're wanting to gain so social media it's generally best for referrals and awareness not necessarily getting a lead or a client directly but again depending on what you provide if you sell something online then that's a good opportunity for you um but yeah kind of looking back what is the goal so if they're looking for lead volume okay fantastic then we probably need to put a bigger plan into place and create a strategic campaign for intentional like running meta ads or google ads again depending on the service and what they're wanting to get out of it social media is a nice place to be but it's it's one small piece of the puzzle Mary, whenever someone on air on any show talks about ads, I know how many listeners jump straight to, well, that's expensive. I can't afford that. How am I supposed to be advertising? Talk to us about the realities of what paid ads and social ads especially look like in 2026. Yeah, so it's definitely a crowded space, right? So 10, 12 years ago, Facebook, you used to get so many leads for so little price because it wasn't crowded. Now it's very used, right? There's a lot of competition out there. um and meta let's face it if you say a thousand dollars is my budget for these ads they're going to take a thousand dollars so you better be very strategic and intentional with those campaigns on meta that you're running and be certain of what you're offering them the message you're providing and then what's the action you're wanting them to take to maintain either volume or quality whether you're leading them through a custom landing page which you know provides further education or if you just want volume going through meta and using their lead form um versus let's say google that's a pay to play right so you you run your campaigns and if someone's not clicking on your ad you're not spending money so that's a little bit more conscious of your budget right there but they work well together too so meta for example can be used to kind of warm up the audience And then once you've planted those seeds over and over and over, then when the day comes that they're looking for your service, they find you on Google, you have your website there ready to convert, your Google ads ready for them to see, and it's just all gonna kind of piece together because those seeds have been planted down the line with all those different marketing outlets and channels that you've been on when the time's right for them to take action. Mary, hearing the way you talk about this, it almost feels counter to what the natural inclination is, is that when us as business owners, when we launch a Facebook ad, for example, we think... that's it i've done the thing i've launched a facebook ad that's gonna be the thing that delivers results we don't necessarily think as much as you do about our landing page and our opt-in process and our follow-ups and of course all the things that will inevitably inevitably get into in today's conversation but it sounds to me like you're actually viewing truly it's that marketing mix that we talk about traditionally about facebook ads is one component but let's supplement it let's be omnipresent across so many different platforms again coming back to that word of holistic talk to us about that approach because a lot of people think it's merely about checking some sort of marketing box but it seems to me like you have this more overarching approach that you nurture and you have so many touch points built in yeah it there's a lot of factors in play and again it's no not one of our clients has the exact same service package that that another one does and again it's because their business is unique their goals are unique and their budget is unique right So all these factors need to come into play. For example, we were meeting with a potential client last week and he came to us and said he needs social media. And then in the discovery call, we're learning that he's expanding his business. He's going to scale. He's potentially wanting to create the marketing playbook for these new locations that he's going to be opening up. And so we always take a step back, kind of do our research, all the things, and we regroup and present him with the proposal. And knowing that he wanted us to take social media off his plate, mainly because it was a time suck for him. It's not the best use of his time, although it was being done. So that was included as, okay, this is the priority. However, the next step that we want to layer on, and if you can do everything at once, fantastic. If budget is a consideration, usually it is. Then step two is, okay, let's start running meta ads. And this would be for awareness only, again, to soften the market. And then step three would be, let's turn on Google ads. And that's kind of the funnel that we built specifically for him. Again, knowing his budget restraints, his desire to take social media off of his plate. And then with the intention of scaling and growing his businesses and creating this playbook so that it's rinse and repeat the next time he opens the location, so on and so forth. But the expectation is set that, Okay, we're taking social media off your plate and we're adding this to our plan because this is a burden for you. This is something you want to pass off. Do not expect to get a ton of leads from social media because of your service. That's not the intent. It's there to show trust and longevity and credibility and to back up the people who find you on meta ads and click over to your page to show that you're an active business, trustworthy, and that you, you know, are worth contacting that's the whole point so making sure that we you know kind of lay things out strategically based on all those variables and then set the expectation for here's what you can expect and here's the reason why we're doing this All right, Mary, you're talking about expectations. So I've got to go into one conversation that I'm sure you hear of all the time. And that is how impatient all of us business owners are. And we all want results today. What are reasonable? And obviously you have a full stack of marketing services. So right now we're talking about paid ads, but you also do SEO. You also do email marketing, SMS marketing. You've got the full extent of all the things in your marketing toolkit. So Mary, I know that there's no one answer to this, but walk us through a healthy way to approach timeline of results when it comes to marketing efforts? Generally speaking, we let our clients know, give us two to three months fully to start learning and collecting data and optimizing and making changes here and there until we really hit our stride. That doesn't mean you're not going to get a lead for three months. It just means things haven't really met capacity or really... built to what we're wanting to get until that three to four month mark. I would say meta is a little bit different than Google. And again, it's variable depending on what you're offering and how competitive that space is. One of our clients, for example, they're a law office for personal injury. It's a crowded space. That's an expensive company or service to market, right? So, you know. The results are likely going to take longer. They're going to cost more. And that's just what it is. But also, it's a bigger ticket item. They're going to make a lot more money if that lead turns into a client and they are able to resolve that case for them. Mary, talk to us about costs because that's such an important disclaimer that you just called out. I don't think we've explicitly gone there in 1400 plus episodes here on the show is the fact that every industry is different. Every geographic region is different. It kind of kills me when I scroll through Instagram or Facebook and I see people saying, oh, my friend was getting 30 cents per click on Facebook ads. Well, sure. When I had a business in the soccer space, I mean, the soccer space doesn't have that many online businesses. It was so much cheaper for me to do marketing back then. Why? For people who don't understand the mechanics of that and the bidding platforms, why is it that all of these things truly depend on a lot of circumstances? Yeah, there are a lot of variables to consider. So let's take a service-based business, right? So let's say you're a car dealer or car detailing company, right? So chances are in that industry, what I've seen, at least in the areas that we've looked at, let's say North Salt Lake area, That industry, there's a lot of companies that A, don't have a website. They're not really running things very professionally. So it's very easy to stand out, right? Because your competitors aren't doing what they should be doing to be seen, found, and find clients. So if we were to sign a client in that industry specifically, great let's build them an awesome website let's manage their google business profile so they have reviews and weekly posts so they're they're doing those things to stay top of the google results and if we turn on google ads for them and someone's searching car dealer car detail you know services in my area they're going to be at the top because no one else is doing it whereas like i said that their personal injury for example every law office is running ads and doing everything they should be doing so You need to have a really strong strategy to stand out or to find that thing that makes you different from your competitors, as well as you need to have a large budget. Because again, the more competition there is for people who are using your same terms, so people in your space, competitors, the more people there are, the harder it is to be seen, to be the one that jumps to the top of the page when someone's searching for your service or your product. Mary, when you talk about personal injury lawyers, I've got to call out where my mind goes, which is instantly to every single billboard, especially living here in Florida. I feel like every billboard is for personal injury attorneys. And along those lines, I've actually never really thought, you talked about metrics earlier, and I know how important that is to you, but I've never really thought about the fact that all these personal injury attorneys are paying for these billboards, and it doesn't seem to me, I've always done business on the internet, it doesn't seem to me like the billboard game is explicitly about a call to action. It's not explicitly for us to say, oh, hey, right here, right now, I'm going to go to their website and engage with them. It really is that awareness plane. It's earlier on in this conversation, you've brought awareness up and it's clear that that's an important part of it. For us business owners, how do we think about that? Because I feel like oftentimes when we have a marketing need, we view it as an immediate need. I want to generate more leads. I want to generate more customers and clients. How does that awareness piece play into this whole mix? Yeah. So for example, the billboard specifically, right? Like that's a nice to have when you have the budget and you're doing everything else that should come before it. Because you're right, there's not a direct return on investment for that. It's generally meant for awareness and often it's not even trackable. um because someone you know they they drive past the billboard 10 times you know every month on their way to work or whatever the case is eventually they're going to get into a car accident they're not going to remember the billboard necessarily they're going to go search you on google and then likely that's going to trigger that that memory like oh that looks familiar i think i've seen them so they're a little bit more likely to click on your website versus someone else's but again it's it's a nice to have it's that awareness and everything that you can do with marketing the more you do intentionally and the more you're tracking the the better outcome it's going to be everything kind of compounds the more you do but again you need to be intentional and strategic in the in the way that you start to do everything so factoring what's what's the lowest hanging fruit for a law firm you need to have a strong website obviously you need to have a lot of google reviews showing how credible and trustworthy you are and that you're able to get your your clients you know cases one um and then what's next okay you should probably have a social media presence is it going to drive leads likely not but again it's one more place it's going to help kind of a little bit with your seo and referrals and that validation and the in the event that when the day comes you start running meta ads you have that established page and again that longevity and credibility is there Mary, when I hear you talk about all these different channels, part of me smiles and laughs at the fact that I know how many people here in 2026 are going to say, all right, well, then I'm just going to fire up ChatGPT and I'm going to tell it to post on social media for me and I'm going to tell it to write blog posts for me and I'm going to have it do all of this work. Obviously, we are all using AI in different ways these days. What's your take on effective ways that AI can factor into our marketing efforts and then... Mary, stage is all yours. If you want to call out some mistakes that you're seeing business owners making in AI, don't be shy. Yeah, we use AI. We used ChatGPT for a long time. We've recently switched over to Claude, which we really like. But we use it as a tool, not a crutch. So we're the ones running the show with the AI tool, and we're telling it what we want from it. And we're tweaking it and trying to make sure that we are working together to get a quicker answer because we have that resource. but we're the ones telling it what to do and making sure that it's aligned with our strategy our intention our our brand voice all of the things that we need to make sure are in place from what we created earlier in our marketing plan um i see a lot of a lot of companies people everyone everyone's using ai of course it's it's fun it's amazing it's it's a great resource um but it's not being used to its fullest potential so it's it's very rinse and repeat template hey you know chat gpt uh you know create 30 social media posts i'm a i'm a hair salon go right and then you're gonna get 30 posts back and sure you have 30 posts fantastic but what's the purpose of those posts what are you wanting people to see or to do when they see that post right so what's the what's the strategy behind all of this and unless you're working with it to build all of that in it's not going to give it to you it's just going to give you a cookie cutter answer and you're going to look like everyone else that's doing the same method Yeah, so well said. And it's important for all of us to think about that. Can we do it? Absolutely. But that barrier to entry being so low means that it's less effective these days. If you and I could rewind 20 years and be the only people on planet Earth with AI, holy cow, we can absolutely crush in that context. Yeah, absolutely. We all have it these days. And so the fact that it is that easy means that it's not going to differentiate you in a crowded market. And it's fun whenever we have the AI conversation is everybody worries about what is being replaced, what is dead. And it's so funny for me looking back at I started my first business in 2008 and 100% of my business was built thanks to SEO. That was our only marketing channel. And Mary, it's been really fun for me all the way since 2008, hearing how many times people have said SEO. SEO is dead. And now because of AI, everyone is saying SEO is dead. Email marketing is dead. All of these other avenues are dead. Of course they're not. Give us your insider vantage point on all these industries that are so-called dead and what they look like now. Yeah, SEO is not dead. It's a very important piece of the puzzle. That's, you know, a service within marketing or a strategy within marketing. It's the marathon, not the sprint, right? It's the long game, something you do consistently for a long time to get those ongoing results. And of course they matter. So AI has to pull its information from somewhere, right? So if you're not putting your information on to Google or other search engines, where is it going to pull your information from? So think of it that way. It's not pulling the information out of the sky, it's pulling it from wherever it can pull it on the internet. Yeah. And that's why part of me thinks it's probably going to become even more important as 2026 and 2027 arrives. I think that it's really important for all of us to continue on that train, especially the more people are saying something is dead, be the one who continues to show up there. And Mary, that's why something that I really love about what you do at Memorial Marketing is I don't often see people with a strong emphasis on direct communications with our audience, email marketing, SMS marketing. But I also know how many business owners are hesitant because they say, oh, I don't want to spam people i don't want to pop up in their in their inboxes walk us through that especially for people who have talked themselves out of it i have found that it's it's the most effective channels across my business portfolio so mary please be that voice that talks directly to our audience about why it's not spam and how to do it correctly so people actually welcome it Yeah, email marketing should not be spam. If you're sending spam, then reconsider your plan and your messaging. You should always be providing value to the person on the end opening that email. So think of, you know, your whole annual plan of whatever it is your business offers so for us right we sit down in december look at our whole calendar year coming forward and every month depending on the month the holiday the season the time of year whether we know it's slow or not slow based off of last year's numbers we're building out these monthly initiatives right so every message that we send out in the month of february is consistent across all platforms because that's what we've already mapped out including email right so we're not just sending an email to send an email people generally don't like to hear us just talk about ourselves so we make sure that we are sending out information that benefits them right so we're our audience and our email database is of course business owners or business professionals and so we're sending out marketing tips and education and new ideas or you know new ways to utilize ai or whatever the case is so we're sharing them free information that hopefully gives them a reason to want to answer that email so open that email and of course take action if that's if that's the ask but it needs to be intentional and it's kind of the most obvious low-hanging fruit area of marketing to do if you already have the database. Those are already leads or clients that you've paid for. So why not leverage them and nurture them, keep them warm and in your system. And that way, when the day comes that they're ready, you're the top of mind because they've been receiving your email every month or every week or however frequent it is. And so it's not dead. It's very valuable. Track the data. So use a platform that you can pull the delivery rate, the click-through rate, the open rate, all of those things. And so you can test what type of email header or email subject lines are getting people to open. Like, are you phrasing in a way that's engaging, getting someone interested to even click, right? Everyone does get a lot of emails, of course. So you need to find ways that stand out. Don't be blah, don't be boring, don't be basic, and don't mislead. And so... Just being intentional about all these different things and then tracking what's working and where you can make improvements and then make those adjustments going forward and keep tracking, keep trying. Mary, all of those insights allude to the fact that obviously you use really great marketing tech to power so many of these efforts and to track so many of these efforts. For listeners who are tuning in saying, wait, you think I have a database of my audience? You think I have these things? What do you recommend as a basic tech stack, a non-negotiable tech stack that every business owner should have? Yeah, for email marketing, we use Klaviyo. It's very affordable. It's very easy to use. I know a lot of people are familiar with MailChimp, but quite honestly, Klaviyo, it has a lower entry point for price. So you can use the free plan for up to, I think, 500 contacts, and you're able to do everything pretty much as easily as MailChimp, maybe a little bit more technical as far as building pretty visual emails, but the reporting capability is really there. So definitely having a way to to communicate emails effectively track the results on that and then we use a scorecard for everything so tracking you know for every client we have we have a scorecard so depending on what services we're providing if we're running emails that we're tracking every single campaign that we're sending so we have the the send date the title the open right click through if we're running meta ads okay here's the daily budget here's what it's spent here's the leads we got here's how they converted so that we know internally right that's not where our job ends we want to make sure that leads we're providing to our clients are actually good quality and they're able to turn that into money. If not, then we need to readjust on our side. So we're tracking every single data point that we can so we understand the full picture. So if we did poorly last month, we know where to make adjustments to do better the next month. So those two things, email and then a scorecard. Absolutely have a scorecard so you're tracking data month over month and year over year. So again, you also know your highs and lows for every season. So if you're in the fitness industry, for example, perhaps your slow season is in the summer. That means you need to get more creative with your offerings or your communication or whatever it is in the summer months to combat that. Mary, you called out an important distinction there. And I feel like this is both strategic and tactical about generating leads is one thing, but converting leads is another. And obviously part of that onus and responsibility lies on your clients, but you obviously are equally invested in seeing them succeed in that regard. Where do you see most business owners and businesses drop the ball when it comes to nurturing, following up, and then of course converting? Yeah, so one area we really like to push is speed to lead and how are you communicating? What methods of communication are you doing, right? It's not enough to just send a text and call it good. I contacted this lead within an hour. They didn't answer my text. We're good, right? There's a whole follow-up that we advise our clients on. We don't necessarily create that for them unless that's a service they pay us for. But as a marketing partner, we want to make sure that, yeah, we're not just giving them leads that they can't do anything with because they don't have the right processes in place, right? because that's when we could get fired. So if we're not helping them convert them, turn that into money so they can reinvest that back into marketing, that ultimately falls on us. So we do kind of take that extra step to make sure, okay, what is your lead process? How do we make sure that this is effective and is there room for improvement? And again, that's why we do track the conversion rates. So if we know that the baseline for a lead to sign up should be 70% and this last month they run 50%. okay, let's evaluate what happened in there so that we know what tweaks to make to improve that for the next month. Mary, that right there, I feel like so many of your answers reveal that holistic approach coming back to that is looking at the business, not just the marketing, because there are so many moving parts and it's not about, you can't just get a marketing campaign right. Your business has to be ready to support all of this. So I'm really grateful the depth in which you not only go here in this conversation, obviously, but especially with your clients, it's also got to feel fun for you because for a lot of people, they have been burned by marketing agencies in the past. And a lot of those marketing agencies will say well we did our job we had you know x number of people opt in from a facebook form and the fact that you follow it through holistically again i it's a it's a buzzword i don't typically use but i feel like it's really applicable to your approach so huge kudos to you i'm really excited to see how you answer this final question because it's super broad and you can take in any direction you want and that is what's your best piece of advice for listeners knowing that we're being listened to by both entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs at all different stages of their growth journeys and knowing that you or one of us, a fellow entrepreneur, what's that one thing you want to leave them with today? Marketing related, I would say track everything, track every outlet of marketing, organic referrals, paid, different platforms. So billboards, paid ads, whatever the case is, track it month over month, as well as the return so that you know how better to use your money or your time for the next quarter. um as far as for building a business something that i've really leaned into even just this year and have seen a huge return in value and in just exposure and clients and just so many good things even being able to pour myself into other business owners is networking like i can't even express enough how important i feel like networking is to a small business owner um and i absolutely love it i'm able to find my peers and to be able to vent or celebrate or brainstorm or troubleshoot whatever the case is with like-minded individuals who have gone through what i'm going through or you know who might need help based off of my services that i can provide and vice versa Yeah, so well said. And listeners, this is a natural segue to the fact that when you hear someone like Mary appear on a podcast, this is not just someone who is speaking on podcasts and that's it. Mary is a real life business owner who wants to talk to other business owners. This is the ecosystem that we really aim to build. And that's why one of our founding principles is a rising tide lifts all boats. So if you're tuning into all of this and saying, gosh, nobody's ever examined my business to the depth and breadth of the lens that Mary has looked at here in today's conversation reach out to her and along those lines mary i'm looking forward to kicking it back over to you for listeners to go find all the great work that you're doing drop those links on us where should listeners go from here Yes, thank you. So our website is memoramarketing.com. That's M-E-M-O-R-A marketing.com. And there's our contact information on there. Reach out. I'm happy to always set up a free strategy call and just kind of brainstorm and troubleshoot whatever it is you're running into and how we can possibly help. And I'll tell you, oftentimes we just give free ideas and free advice because that's the right thing to do. And then follow us on social media. So Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, Memora Marketing. Yes. And listeners, you already know, we're making it as easy as possible for you to find all of those links down below in the show notes, no matter where it is that you're tuning in to today's episode. We're also linking to Mary's personal LinkedIn. So if you want to reach out and have an amazing entrepreneur in your network, she puts out a lot of really cool things. And also you can connect and have a real life conversation with her. So do not be shy. Most people are. Very few people actually take action. So Mary, on behalf of myself and all the listeners worldwide, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Thank you so much. I had such a great time, Brian.

Tired of throwing money at marketing tactics that don't deliver? This episode is your antidote to marketing frustration. Full-stack marketer and agency founder Mary Bevins breaks down why a "strategy-first" approach is the only way to achieve sustainable growth. She dismantles the chaos of modern marketing and provides a clear, holistic framework that connects all the pieces—from paid ads and SEO to email marketing and lead conversion. For any entrepreneur who feels like they're just checking marketing boxes without seeing real results, Mary offers an invaluable perspective on how to build a marketing engine that is intentional, measurable, and highly effective.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

- 🚀 Strategy vs. Tactics: Why jumping straight to social media or ads without a foundational strategy is the fastest way to waste your time and money.
- 💰 A Smarter Paid Ads Playbook: Understand the different roles of Meta ads (warming up an audience) and Google ads (capturing intent) and how to make them work together.
- 📊 The Power of a Scorecard: How to track every marketing effort—from organic reach to paid campaigns—to know exactly what's working and where to invest your next dollar.
- 🤖 Using AI as a Tool, Not a Crutch: Learn how to leverage AI for efficiency without losing the brand voice and strategic intention that makes your business unique.
- 📈 Realistic Timelines for ROI: Uncover what a healthy timeline for seeing marketing results actually looks like (hint: it's not overnight) and how to set proper expectations.
- 💌 Email Marketing Isn't Dead: How to use email to nurture your most valuable asset—your existing audience—by providing consistent value instead of spam.
- 🔗 The Holistic Funnel: Discover why your website, social proof, and lead follow-up process are just as critical as the ad that gets the click.

📝 About Mary Bevins

Mary Bevins is the founder of Memora Marketing, a strategic marketing agency dedicated to helping small and mid-sized businesses grow with clarity. With over a decade of experience, Mary’s journey took her from being a stay-at-home parent to the Chief Operating Officer of five different companies before launching her own agency. This diverse background in business development and operations gives her a unique, full-picture perspective on how marketing must integrate with every facet of a business to truly succeed.

🎯 Mary’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Track everything. Track every outlet of marketing... track it month over month as well as the return so that you know how better to use your money or your time for the next quarter."

📢 Memorable Quotes

- "We use AI as a tool, not a crutch. We're the ones running the show with the AI tool... If you just tell it to create 30 posts, it's just gonna give you a cookie-cutter answer and you're gonna look like everyone else." – Mary Bevins
- "Do not expect to get a ton of leads from social media because of your service. That's not the intent. It's there to show trust and longevity and credibility." – Mary Bevins
- "Email marketing should not be spam. If you're sending spam, then reconsider your plan and your messaging. You should always be providing value to the person on the end opening that email." – Mary Bevins

🔗 Links & Resources

- Visit Memora Marketing’s website (https://www.memoramarketing.com/)
- Connect with Mary on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/mary-bevins-6b7bba144/)
- Follow Memora Marketing on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/memora-marketing/)
- Follow Memora Marketing on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/people/Memora-Marketing/61572697356403/)
- Follow Memora Marketing on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/memoramarketing/)