IAM2689 – Marketer Provides Streamlined Purchasing and Procurement Tool for Businesses

• 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

Previous Episode: https://iamceo.co/iam410-marketer-provides-streamlined-purchasing-and-procurement-tool-for-businesses/

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:

Kyle Strong 00:00

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 kind of 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 00:49

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

Kyle Strong 00:58

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

Gresham Harkless 01:05

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 and Kyle is fairly new to the marketing focus with no formal marketing education and only two 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 Tradergram, 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?

Gresham Harkless 01:52

Oh, I definitely am. That was a bit of a mouthful for the intro there, but yeah, for sure. That's definitely ready to get started here.

Gresham Harkless 01:58

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

Kyle Strong 02:09

Yeah, for sure. So again, just to reiterate, I have no kind of formal marketing education, which is I think kind of a unique thing because a lot of people, they, I would assume go through like an educational career path to get to where they want to go. And for me it was the complete opposite. It was basically the. I found my educational background kind of 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, really liked the multimedia stuff. But coding for me was really bad when it came to like coding the websites and stuff like that. So I'm like, you know, this is, this is good hobby material, but it's not good focus material for me. So what can I do? So I decided, you know, let's just go see what we can find for employment. That led me to a really great organization called Startup Canada. They're kind of a cross nation entrepreneurship community within Canada. They run really great events and I was fortunate enough to get to work alongside with them as a communication specialist and kind of 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. Right. It's about delivering messages. So I think it was kind of a natural transition. Then when I went into my current position as a marketing sales coordinator, I was able to kind of pick and choose what I wanted to focus on and that has naturally gravitated more towards the marketing side of things.

Gresham Harkless 03:33

Nice. I definitely appreciate that. I appreciate you because you're bringing light to something that a lot of people 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, of our lives doing it. But in reality, most people are not actually working in the profession that are the edu 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, you know, everything that's going on within your current job or position or wherever you're at in industry because there's so many changes as well.

Kyle Strong 04:10

Yeah. And everything is just moving so fast these days. It's like something that you learn this year could be obsolete next year. You have to pivot at a moment's notice. So you need to be a little bit cautious, you know, 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 you is relevant? And is it going to be relevant next year even?

Gresham Harkless 04:27

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

Kyle Strong 04:34

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're, 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 project, 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 are 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 too, because if you implement one of these things and implementation goes wrong, you end up having wasted tons of time, tons of money. And so what we're providing is kind of a really like laser focused approach to procurement as the problem to solve. 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 05:55

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 kind of at a price point where it could be like mass appeal, so to speak, that's really where you have something special. So it kind of sounds like you guys are building something like that.

Kyle Strong 06:15

Yeah, it's something like that for sure. And then again, in those big ERP enterprise resource planning systems, they sometimes come with procurement tools, but they often lack a lot of the features and like 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 have the stock ERP procurement feature. So that's kind of our niche. And I'll tell you though, one of the challenges as a marketer in the space is man procurement is really boring. It's like, it's like business money. It's almost as boring as talking about like accounting and financials and that kind of stuff. Right. So it's challenging to find ways to make it entertaining and engaging for people to reach that audience, you know.

Gresham Harkless 06:55

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

Kyle Strong 07:15

Yeah, well, I think basically our main brand, we do try to keep our main brand on kind of the, you know, more business professional side. We do try to keep it clean because we do end up having typically a lot of mid to large size organizations kind of prospecting us and seeing, you know, is this a good fit so we can't be completely goofy and cartoony, you know, like fully engaging. As much as I would love that for, for that to be our main primary brand, we do have to consider that there are some like very critical stakeholders coming in. So it's not something we want to do. But on the social media end of things, you get a lot of room to kind of play around and have more kind of flexibility with how you tackle the marketing objective of engagement. So that's kind of the approach I use. I try to use a lot of, you know, fun gifts, fun images in the content marketing side of things, trying to be kind of loose and playful on the social media side of things and trying to build up kind of a, a personal platform where people can engage with me as a person Ra engaging directly with the brand, which is kind of sometimes a little bit harder for people to engage with just a logo or something. Much easier, more appealing to engage with an actual person.

Gresham Harkless 08:16

Of course, yeah. Especially with, you know, this day and age, there's so much accessibility, so to speak, that you can directly connect with people. So it is, it's only right that marketing kind of touches on that. And I love that you kind of touched on it earlier on where you talked about how marketing and communications kind of 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, you know, the GIF is the big part, it's just a way to kind of communicate that.

Kyle Strong 08:52

Yeah, for sure. And I mean, we're. We're really shifting away from the era where people even kind of have the patience or even the time to read a full blog post in many cases. And you're seeing a huge shift towards, like, visual marketing. Things that are engaging and like videos, podcasts, things that people can almost kind of multitask on the side. It's like, okay, let me scroll through this. What can I kind of 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, read the full thing, see what kind of info there is. But again, those GIFs and like 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 with digital marketing these days.

Gresham Harkless 09:34

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 that are trying to brand our company. So I appreciate that. And what I want us to do was switch gears a little bit. And I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And this could be an Apple book or a habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Kyle Strong 09:56

Yeah, for sure. So I've had the very unique opportunity of kind 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 kind of doing a little bit of sales, a little bit of marketing. I was also doing a little bit of product support, our live support desk. So out of those three things, it's a really broad thing to do. There isn't enough time, of course, to the laser focus on all of those. So as I've been developing, focus a lot on marketing. We're a startup company. So again, challenge of any startup company, and probably any business at all, is finding the resources to be able to kind of position yourself and leverage the results that you want to get on a low budget. So that's kind of 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 kind of go into making that work.

Gresham Harkless 11:00

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I know you probably already touched on this, but did you have any other kind of CEO nuggets or things that you would say if you happen a Time machine that you would tell yourself?

Kyle Strong 11:11

CEO nuggets? I mean, does content marketing for a budget? Of course. And I guess for us we have been using 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, if you basically networked 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, kind of divide your strategy in two picks more competitive terms that you can't organically rank for and maybe consider using pay per clip programs for those tougher terms and then find out 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. I don't know, there's been so many things on this journey, it would be really hard to kind of 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 kind of 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 12:37

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And I think that it kind of goes back to this idea of overnight success where a lot of times people think that, you know, 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 that work into something, you know, that you're extremely passionate about? Because it's kind of sometimes cheating to be able to be passionate about something, to be working very hard on doing that. So I appreciate those, those nuggets. And, and now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're open to have different quote unquote CEOs on this show. So Kyle, what does being a CEO Means to you.

Kyle Strong 13:11

for me, I mean, I guess being a CEO again, I'm not exactly the CEO but, but basically CMO kind of close. And I've been working very closely with our CEO on kind of making this stuff work. I think to me it's almost akin to the role of an entrepreneur. I've been thinking about it a lot lately actually. I think there's 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 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. Kind of I have the fortunate seeking it of having a team around me so I can kind of play around and experiment without kind of the risk of like, oh man, my whole, my whole livelihood is kind of based and staked in this, right? So I think being an entrepreneur is a very prestigious title that gets kind of 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, you're in the entrepreneur for sure. But I think it's all about generating value. Value is a very broad term. So to kind of 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 kind of niche can it feel to deliver value to your customers and also understanding what kind of value customers are looking for. In the market and then matching what you offer with that value that they're looking for for.

Gresham Harkless 14:44

Nice. I, I definitely appreciate that, that definition in that perspective because I think a lot of times, especially you know, in all different types of businesses and stage of businesses, and especially in startups, I feel like you kind of have to be tapped into that value. Whether you're hiring somebody, whether you're doing marketing, whether you are the quote unquote CEO, the cmo, the coo. You have to understand and be tied into that value. So I appreciate that definition because it taps into what everybody should be kind of on one accord about. And I, I think that is something that often we can sometimes forget. But I, I appreciate you for reminding us of it.

Kyle Strong 15:16

Yeah, for sure.

Gresham Harkless 15:17

Nice. 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 15:29

Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, feel free to check out our website, tradergram.com it can trip people up a little bit. It's spells T R A D O G R A M if you're looking for a super affordable procurement solution. Just doing 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, no charge, just make an account, check us out, come hang out. We have a live chat support. You can say hello. You might even get a response from me. So you can come say hello, say hi. Of course. You can find us on social media at Tradergram. On Twitter, I believe it's at Tradergram, Kyle, is my personal Twitter that I use on there. If you want to come say hello to me, drop me a message, be happy to engage and pass some fun gifts around, get a little bit of engagement going. But yeah, other than that, I think it's just really great time. Gresh, thanks so much for having me on the, on the podcast. It was a pleasure for sure.

Gresham Harkless 16:24

No problem. Definitely. 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 gifs. But Kyle, thank you so much again. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.