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HomeNewsAd-Mar-TechRyan Riggin, of Inuvo, on content, creativity, influencers, and omnichannel marketing

Ryan Riggin, of Inuvo, on content, creativity, influencers, and omnichannel marketing

Ryan Riggins is an industry veteran who wears a bunch of hats. He’s an partner/investor in Omnibrands — a DTC product studio that partners with influencers & creators to convert their audiences to DTC brands. He’s also currently Head of Growth at Inuvo, Inc., a Little Rock-based agency billing itself as “a market leader in artificial intelligence, aligning and delivering consumer-oriented product and brand messaging strategies online based on powerful, anonymous, and proprietary consumer intent data for agencies, advertisers, and partners.”

I caught up with Ryan for a discussion about how he sees the seismic changes currently bracing the digital marketing ecosystem, his philosophy toward omnichannel marketing, his company’s origin story, and his company’s experience using influencers in its marketing campaigns.

We found ourselves in agreement on many issues, including the role that critical role played by good creative messaging, the power of creative collaboration, and the need for agencies and brands to recognize that influencers often perform best when granted creative freedom.

“Influencers are expensive,” said Ryan. “Someone who has a massive, massive audience like that is going to be expensive, and they should be. They should be compensated for having a massive audience. What we’ve found is that advertisers can equally be as successful by focusing on this mid- to micro-influencer market, and scripting the creative more like you’re hiring talent. And then map that creative to a media buy. And then you can crush the audience because you can just buy it.”

Ryan and myself also agreed on the critical role played by good content in any marketing program. “The simplest way to do content marketing is to answer customers’ problems at the bottom of the funnel,” said Ryan. “And I’ve been saying this thing lately… I feel like the content is the ads. If you just make content, then you can flip that content into ads and use it however you want. I’m a big believer in making content the core of any marketing program, and then taking the content you’re making anyway, and turn that into ads. It should be part of your ethos.”

Our interview covered many topics, including the need for marketers to have access to good data providing cross-channel insights. “I do see CMOs getting caught up in the dashboards and in the reporting, and having too much data. I love all that stuff but at the end of the day I’m more interested in zooming out and seeing directional signals between my programmatic media buys — my top-of-funnel/mid-funnel paid search/video engagement type of stuff, and my Google Shopping. So if you have good data, if you can see things through that kind of a lens, I think there’s a massive opportunity for brands who want to scale and do it fast this year.”

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