DOYO Live Brings Marketing Experts to Youngstown

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio — Dennis Schiraldi is giving back to his city by bringing his marketing expertise to the professionals of Youngstown.

The idea for DOYO Live, an interactive marketing conference, came to Schiraldi in the basement of a hotel in Rochester, Minn,. during a business conference seven years ago. He figured that if hundreds of people would travel to Minnesota to learn about social media marketing, they would do the same for his hometown.

“I was looking at Youngstown, and I was like, ‘Man, we have some amazing resources. We can do this in our town,’ and that really inspired me,” Schiraldi said. “The time was right — Youngstown is in this revitalization mode, and I wanted to figure out what my “giveback” was to the city, and it was taking my marketing knowledge and trying to bring it to the masses.”

Schiraldi hosted his fifth conference Thursday. DOYO Live is an immersive marketing experience, featuring speakers presenting on the how-tos of modern-day marketing and sales strategy.

This year’s conference featured guest speakers such as Devyn Bellamy, senior marketing manager for HubSpot, a Massachusetts-based provider of marketing and sales software; the Servpro and iSynergy marketing teams and a surprise special guest — Youngstown boxing legend and entrepreneur Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini.

Mancini shared the top three things he’s learned about marketing: know your product, take risks and don’t be afraid of collaboration. He said he first learned about marketing during his time in boxing. “When you sell a fight, you’re selling yourself,” he said.

HubSpot’s Bellamy spent his 20-minute time slot explaining the company’s flywheel model. The flywheel is a model adapted by HubSpot to explain the momentum a company gains when it aligns the entire organization around delivering a remarkable customer experience.

“It’s a big, heavy wheel that gains inertia from applied forces. Once it’s spinning, man, it just wants to keep going. The only thing that can stop a flywheel is friction or force applied in the opposite direction,” Bellamy explained.

“It’s a series of small wins that gets momentum going in your business from the beginning – from the first point of contact with the customer through engagement, sale and beyond.”

Friction is anything that slows down the flywheel. For example, poor internal processes, lack of communication between teams or misalignment between customers and employees, he said.

The flywheel is split into three stages: attract, engage and delight.

“Attraction is about using your expertise to create content conversations that start meaningful relationships with the right people,” Bellamy said. “Attraction isn’t just the role of the marketing team – attraction happens throughout your organization.”

Examples of attraction include content marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing, social selling, targeted paid advertising and conversion rate optimization.

The next phase is engagement, which focuses on opening relationships, not just closing deals.

“Engaging is about collecting information that you’re going to be working with and then answering questions and providing solutions for those people that you’re gonna be working with,” Bellamy said.

Examples of engagement include website and email personalization, database segmentation, marketing automation, lead nurturing, multichannel communication (chat, phone, messaging and email), sales automation, lead scoring and try before you buy programs.

The last phase, delight, is often the most forgotten, Bellamy said. “Delighting is about providing an outstanding experience that adds real value and empowers people to reach their goals and become promoters of your company,” he said. “What you should be doing is putting delight into every interaction that you have with everyone. Someone should be ecstatic when they talk to your salesperson because they feel that they are that much better for having spoken to them – they’re that much closer to solving their problem.”

Examples include offering self-service (knowledge base, chatbot), proactive customer service, multichannel availability (chat, messaging, phone and email), ticketing systems, automated onboarding, customer feedback surveys and loyalty programs.

The flywheel works well because it’s focused on the customer, Bellamy said, who is the most important part of a business. “You’re turning them (customers) into promoters, advocates and evangelists for your brand in order to keep the flywheel going,” he said.

Bellamy was one of 11 speakers or panels who shared some of their marketing wisdom. Schiraldi said that DOYO Live has three main objectives: “We want them to walk away with something they can implement their business today, we want them to make a meaningful connection with somebody, and the third component is that they have an amazing experience,” he said.

Schiraldi said that marketing is the key to business growth, and every company needs to invest and employ a solid marketing strategy, whether that’s through an individual or a team.

“Marketing is the lifeblood of your business, it’s getting customers and there’s no way to attract and delight people without putting out information that’s going to help them get better and grow,” he said.

Pictured above: Dennis Schiraldi founded DOYO Live to give back to Youngstown.

Copyright 2024 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.