IAM410- Marketer Provides Streamlined Purchasing and Procurement Tool for Businesses

Kyle is fairly new to the marketing focus, with no formal marketing education and only 2 years of experience in the profession. Despite this, he's been able to find a great deal of success by leveraging his past experience in multimedia production, and the skills from his previous role as a communications specialist. Originally filling both a marketing and sales role in his company, Kyle has been recently appointed as the head marketing coordinator at Tradogram, an online software-as-a-service startup seeking to provide a streamlined purchasing and procurement management tool for businesses of all sizes.

• CEO Hack: Positioning myself through content marketing and SEO
• CEO Nugget: Be ready to learn new things and focus on what you're passionate about
• CEO Defined: Defining and generating value

Website: https://tradogram.com/

My personal handle for Tradogram: https://twitter.com/TradogramKyle 

Tradogram on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Tradogram
Tradogram on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pibci-platinum-integrated-business-connections-inc- 
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc7AtskzT2p2F2bbx7vhduQ

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Transcription

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:29

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, we have a very special guest on the show today. We have Kyle Strong of Trado Gram. Kyle, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Kyle Strong 0:39

And Gresh. So happy to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me. I'm really happy to have a quick talk today about some entrepreneurship and marketing stuff.

Gresham Harkless 0:45

Yeah, absolutely. And it's always time at least in my world for entrepreneurship and marketing. So I appreciate you for taking some time with us. And what I wanted to do was just read a little bit more about Kyle so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Kyle is fairly new to the marketing focus, with no formal marketing education and only 2 years of experience in the profession.

Despite this, he's been able to find a great deal of success by leveraging his past experience in multimedia production, and the skills from his previous role as a communications specialist. Originally filling both a marketing and sales role in his company, Kyle has been recently appointed as the head marketing coordinator at Tradogram, an online software-as-a-service startup seeking to provide a streamlined purchasing and procurement management tool for businesses of all sizes. Kyle, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO Community?

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Kyle Strong 1:32

Oh, definitely. And that was a bit of a mouthful for the intro there. But yeah, for sure that definitely ready to get started here?

Gresham Harkless 1:38

Yeah, definitely practice makes perfect. That's what I always say. And perfect practice makes perfect. I should say. I wanted to kick everything off here a little bit more about your background, and what led you to your current position now.

Kyle Strong 1:50

Yeah for sure. So again, just to reiterate, I have no formal marketing education, which is, I think, a unique thing. Because a lot of people, I would assume go through an educational career path to get to where they want to go. And for me, it was the complete opposite. It was basically, I found my educational background that led me astray from where I am today, which is something I really love doing. So I mean, I've been to university, I've tried out different courses in college, I really liked the multimedia stuff. But coding for me was really bad when it came to coding the websites and stuff like that.

So I'm like this is good hobby material, but it's not good focus material for me. So what can I do? So I decided, let's go see what we can find for employment. That led me to a really great organization called Startup Canada. They're across the nation, the entrepreneurship community within Canada, and they run really great events. And I was fortunate enough to get to work alongside him as a communication specialist and fill that niche.

And I think if anyone is interested in getting into marketing, I think if you can find a way to navigate and position yourself in a communications role, that's all marketing really is, it's about communicating, or it's about delivering messages. So I think it was a natural transition, then when I went into my current position, as a marketing sales coordinator, I was able to pick and choose what I wanted to focus on. And I just naturally gravitated more towards the marketing side of things.

Gresham Harkless 3:15

Nice, I definitely appreciate that. And I appreciate you, because you're spinning, you're bringing light to something that a lot of people will often forget is that, sometimes we'll go to school, and we'll study something, and we think we're going to spend the next 50 years of our lives doing it. But in reality, most people are not actually working in a profession that is on the edge or with their educational background. Sometimes they're using them as tools.

But I think it does take regardless of what position even if you do continue on with what you studied. In school, it does take that time and work ethic really to put in to learn a lot about everything that's going on within your current job or position wherever you're at in the industry because there are so many changes as well.

Kyle Strong 3:53

Everything's just moving so fast these days. It's like something that you learned this year, it could be obsolete next year, and you have to be ready to pivot at a moment's notice. So you need to be a little bit cautious. when you're shelling out so much time and money to go into an educational facility. It's like, Well, are you sure what they're teaching us is relevant? And is it gonna be relevant next year even?

Gresham Harkless 4:09

Yeah, absolutely. That makes perfect sense and a great question to ask. And so I wanted to hear a little bit more about Trado Gram, can you tell us a little bit more about what you guys are doing?

Kyle Strong 4:16

Yeah, definitely. So we are a software as a service procurement software provider. And man, I'll tell you procurement software is a bit of a mouthful here. But basically, to sum it all up procurement is the practice and discipline of how businesses acquire things for their business. So I mean, if you have monthly subscriptions to different tools that you're using, if you need to purchase physical inventory, if you need to buy equipment, if you're like a construction company that's ordering products and services to complete their projects, stuff like that, that all has to do with procurement.

So what our product does is it provides a streamlined platform for that entire purchasing process to take place on one platform for all of the stakeholders and employees who we're involved in that process. And kind of the niche that we're filling in the demographic that we're marketing to, is we have a lot of competitors out there that offer things called ERPs, which are enterprise resource planning systems, these really big complicated systems very, very expensive, very risky to implement to, because if you implement one of these things, and implementation goes wrong, you end up having wasted tonnes of time tonnes of money.

And so what we're providing is really like a laser-focused approach to procurement as the problem solution. And we're trying to offer at a really low, really affordable rate for people to have really good accessibility to these kinds of tools.

Gresham Harkless 5:38

Nice, I definitely appreciate that. And I always have heard, and I've read that a lot of times when you have a problem, and you're able to solve that problem, that's great. But if you're able to solve that problem, and make it at a price point, where it can be like mass appeal, so to speak, that's really where you have something special. So it sounds like you guys are building something like that.

Kyle Strong 5:58

Yeah, it's something like that, for sure. Again, those big ERP enterprise resource planning systems, sometimes come with procurement tools, but they often lack a lot of the features and the details that people need for their workflows. And so we often get a lot of those types of people coming in to look at our service and say, Oh, hey, this would be a good replacement for kind of the stock ERP procurement future.

So that's our niche. And I'll tell you that one of the challenges as a marketer in this space is man, procurement is really boring. It's like business money. It's almost as boring as talking about accounting and financials, that kind of stuff. Right? So it's challenging to find ways to make it entertaining and engaging for people to reach that audience.

Gresham Harkless 6:38

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And then it might be along the lines of what I was going to ask you next, I guess, how do you make it more exciting? Or I usually ask for like your secret sauce? And that could be for you personally, or for the organization? But what do you feel sets you guys apart? How do you make a lot of that marketing exciting and engaging for people?

Kyle Strong 6:57

Yeah, well, I think, basically, we do try to keep our main brand on, a more business-professional side, we do try to keep it clean. So we do end up having typically a lot of mid to large-sized organizations kind of prospecting us and saying, is this a good fit? So we can't be completely goofy and cartoony, like, fully engaging, as much as I would love that, for that to be our main primary brand, you do have to consider that there are some very critical stakeholders coming in. So it's not something we want to do.

But on social media and things, you get a lot of room to play around and have more flexibility with how you tackle the marketing objective of the engagement. So that's the approach I use, I try to use a lot of fun gifts, and fun images in the content marketing side of things, trying to be loose and playful on the social media side of things, and trying to build up a personal platform where people can engage with me as a person, rather than engaging directly with the brand, which is sometimes a little bit harder for people to engage with just a logo or something much easier to more appealing to engage with an actual person.

Gresham Harkless 6:57

Of course, yeah, especially in this day and age, there's so much accessibility, so to speak, that you can directly connect with people. So it's only right that marketing touches on that. And I love that you touched on it earlier on, where you talked about how marketing and communications go hand in hand. Because I think a lot of times when you are thinking about marketing, definitely correct me if I'm wrong, or you have a different perspective, you are taking those gifts in order to communicate the messaging that you want to that target market. So it's not so much that the gift is the big part. It's just a way to communicate that.

Kyle Strong 8:23

Yeah, for sure. And I mean, we're really shifting away from the era where people even have the patience or even the time to read full blog posts, in many cases, and you're seeing a huge shift towards visual marketing, things that are engaging, and videos, podcasts, things that people can almost multitask on the side. It's like, okay, let me scroll through this, what can I pick out of this piece of content that's visual, so I don't have to spend 20 minutes of my day reading this blog post, right?

And of course, if you find a topic that you're really into Sure, you might invest the time, you might stop reading the full thing, and see what kind of info there is. But again, those gifts and look, infographics as well, for sure are ways that you can communicate a great deal of information in a very short amount of time. And that's really what it's all shifting to digital marketing these days.

Gresham Harkless 9:17

Absolutely, absolutely. And time is the most precious resource, and we only have so much of it. So it's only right that we try to understand that as marketers and people who are trying to brand our company. So I appreciate that. And what I wanted to do was switch gears a little bit. And I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This could be an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Kyle Strong 9:39

Yeah, for sure. So I've had the unique opportunity of being able to entirely shape my career from the ground up in my position. I started off again as a marketing sales coordinator. So I was doing a little bit of sales, a little bit of marketing. I was also doing a little bit of product support at our life support desk. So out of those three things. That's really another thing to do, there isn't enough time, of course, to laser focus on all of those. So as I've been developing focus a lot on marketing, we're a startup company.

So again, the challenge of any startup company, and probably any business at all is finding the resources to be able to position yourself and leverage the results that you want to get on a low budget. So that's where the hack comes in. And I think, pretty much my go-to resource for that. This might vary from platform to platform and industry to industry. But for me, content marketing has been working really well.

And SEO is something that over the past two years, again, with no formal education, I've managed to, I would say, probably gain a full understanding of the full scope of on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and also the technical elements that go into making that work.

Gresham Harkless 10:44

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I know you probably already touched on this. But did you have any other CEO nuggets or things that you would say if you had a time machine that you would tell?

Kyle Strong 10:55

CEO nuggets, I mean, this content marketing for a budget, of course. And I guess, for us, we have been using like PPC channels as well, I think actually, when it comes to SEO, I really don't want to get too technical here, of course. But there's a concept called domain authority, where it's like if you basically network a lot with a lot of other websites, and they're pointing to you, search engines love it when your website has a lot of sites pointing to you when you're starting out as a startup, you're not going to have a lot of domain authority, Google is not going to really see you as an authority source.

So I think it's important that when you're selecting what topics to focus on, focus your efforts on dividing your strategy and pick more competitive terms that you can't organically rank for. And maybe consider using Pay Per Click programs for those tougher terms. And then find out the terms that you can kind of rank for organically as a smaller website, and then use that as kind of your organic focus. And kind of like, from a CEO perspective, there's, there's been so many things on this journey, it would be really hard to pick just one, I guess, always this really generic thing, but just always be learning, always be ready to learn new things.

And I guess if you are fortunate enough to be in a position where you can pick which way you want to go with your career path, focus on what you're really passionate about, and try to make moves in your organization that indicate, hey, I'm really passionate about this, this is what I'd like to focus on. And I think you'll find a lot of the time that your team will help you move in that direction.

Gresham Harkless 12:21

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I think that it goes back to this idea of overnight success, where a lot of times people think that you just do something for maybe a day, and then all of a sudden you become successful. But there's a lot of time that goes into that. So because you have to put that work in why not put it at work into something that you're extremely passionate about? Because sometimes cheating to be able to be passionate about something and be working very hard on doing that. So I appreciate those nuggets.

And now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is a definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEOs on this show. So what does being a CEO mean to you?

Kyle Strong 12:56

For me, I mean, I guess being a CEO, again, I'm not exactly the CEO, but basically CMO kind of close, and I've been working very closely with our CEO on making this stuff work. I think too, it's almost akin to the role of an entrepreneur because I've been thinking about it a lot lately, actually, I think there the capitalists who are out there to make money for the sake of making money, I think the role of an entrepreneur is to generate value. And I think it's almost a lifestyle, that you generate value for the sake of generating value. And the money comes as a secondary factor because of the value that you're generating.

Now I don't want to go so far as to say I'm an entrepreneur, I would consider myself more of an intrapreneur. At this point, I have the fortunate safety net of having a team around me so I can play around and experiment without the risk of like, oh, man, my whole livelihood is based and staked in this right. So I think being an entrepreneur is a very prestigious title that gets thrown around, sometimes incorrectly in today's world, I would maybe consider myself an entrepreneur in training.

But I wouldn't go so far as to say yeah, I'm a full-on entrepreneur, look at me, right? The intrapreneur for sure. But I think it's all about generating value. Value is a very broad term. So to define and understand it a little bit better. I think being a CEO is defining what are your values. What value does your product and your business fill? What niche can it fill, to deliver value to your customers, and also understanding what value customers are looking for in the market and then matching what you offer with that value that they're looking for?

Gresham Harkless 14:30

Nice, I definitely appreciate that definition and that perspective, because I think a lot of times, especially in all different types of businesses and stages of businesses, and especially in startups, I feel like you have to be tapped into that value. Whether you're hiring somebody, whether you're doing marketing, or whether you are the quote-unquote CEO, the CMO, or the COO, you have to understand and be tied to that value. So I appreciate that definition because it taps into what everybody should be on one accord about and I think that is something that we can sometimes forget Yeah, but I appreciate you for reminding us of that for sure.

Well, Kyle, I truly appreciate your time. What I wanted to do was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional, you can let our readers and listeners know. And then of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you guys are building.

Kyle Strong 15:15

Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, feel free to check out our website, tradogram.com can trip people up a little bit. If you're looking for a super affordable procurement solution, just a little bit of the shill here, of course, but it really is valuable, really affordable. It's $15 per user per month, on a monthly plan, if you just want to check it out, see, and we actually offer a free account as well. So you can just come in at no charge, just make an account, check us out, and come hang out. We have live chat support. You can say hello, you might even get a response from me. So you can come and say hello, say hi.

And of course, you can find us on social media at Trado Gram on Twitter. I believe it's in the Trado Gram pile was my personal Twitter use on there. If you want to come say hello to me, drop me a message. I'll be happy to engage. Compare some fun gifts around get a little bit of engagement going. But yeah, other than that, I think this is a great time. Gresh thanks so much for having me the on the podcast. It was a pleasure for sure.

Gresham Harkless 16:10

No problem. The pleasure is all mine. And we'll make sure to have those links in the show notes as well too. So that you can just click through and go to the website and check it out of course on Twitter to see all those gifts. But Kyle, thank you so much again. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Outro 16:22

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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