Today we’d like to introduce you to Bob Klausmeier.
Bob, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’ve been blessed to have a lot of great opportunities in my life. My resume looks like it was copy and pasted from different people. My career started in finance as a stockbroker. I then got very interested in house flipping. This lead me to get a real estate license and walk away from my Series 7.
It was a great career for a while…..until 2007, when the real estate market crashed. I lot everything and was devastated. In the end I’m now very grateful for the experience. I was in my late 20’s still and it taught me some lessons about myself that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. It made me who I am. It also put me on my path to a career in advertising.
I worked for companies who manufactured LED displays to billboard companies. This is what really sparked my interest in the various technologies being created for the purpose of reaching advertisers in more innovative and personal ways. So when I noticed that ads followed me from website to website, it wasn’t an ick reaction. It was “Wow! I have to find out how they’re doing that.”
There were quite a few relocations along this journey. From my home of Indiana, to Orange County (CA), Las Vegas, Manhattan, Chicago, Milwaukee (surprisingly cool), and then (my forever home) Savannah. I came here to be a VP of sales for a billboard company called Renfroe Outdoor.
Renfroe Outdoor was the perfect opportunity to practice using some new ad-tech and blaze a different kind of path for an opportunity like this. Renfroe already had fantastic billboard sites across the board. There style of doing business was appreciated by their clients as the competition had a more corporate vibe.
The Renfroes allowed me to begin introducing some digital media services into their product offerings and it ended up being a pretty transformative move for their company. First, it gave their clients a lot more from their relationship with them.
In today’s media environment, the average American sees up to 7,000 advertisements per day. “Buying ads” isn’t a reliable marketing strategy anymore unless it’s part of a media mix with some intentionality. In other words, it helped their clients see that a good media plan changes the math to 1+1=4.
I spent over 6 years here. I got to see the before and after of hundreds of campaigns per year across more industries than I can count. This view from the inside of so many industries was priceless. In particular, being able to work with competitors in the same industry, see who’s winning, and why? I can’t think of a book I’ve read that has given me more actionable experience than that.
That’s what brings to now. I own a young marketing firm called Rise & Flow. I would describe us as data driven marketers with a human, and often humorous touch. We specialize digital marketing that helps us understand who our client’s best customers are on the deepest level possible.
The tools we use allow us to know and target up to 1,500 data points about our audience. From their demographic info, the media they consume, where else they shop, how they tend to vote, and what social media trends they will engage with. The list is too long to name and probably would make you hate me and everyone else in this industry if you really knew how much is out there.
Creepy? Probably. Effective? There’s no question. Just like in our organic conversations with friends, what we know about them already provides the context of how we communicate with them. The same is true for businesses. The goal isn’t invade privacy. It’s to engage on a more personal level. Meeting them where they’re at and showing that we are taking the time to get to know them before communicating with them.
Once our messaging resonates with this audience, the rest of the advertising formula is just math. The best way I believe I’ve heard it described is creative multiplied by frequency equals results. We define the audience that is your best fit and delivers the highest returns. Refine the messaging to be more appealing to them specifically. We then find out where else this type of client exists and develop a media and PR strategy to be in those places at just enough frequency to be remembered and eventually engaged with.
We love working with any business that is referred to as a practice. Their proprietors tend to very smart educated people. While being very bright, they often don’t know what’s the right story to tell and who’s the right audience to tell it to. Often their marketing strategy looks like what I call “shiny object syndrome”. They are buying sales pitches and things that “sound cool” rather than developing a plan. We tend to be a great fit for these businesses because we are so data driven. This really speaks to their academic side as it’s something they can see for themselves in a more quantifiable way.
Along with practices, I will work with (about) anybody who will task me with coming up with a funny commercial. A better name for my firm would have been C student media as we are all reformed class clowns who get excited at the opportunity to make about anything funny. Laughter is such a great path to the heart of your target audience. The end journey we strive for with our clients is not converted to customer, but converted to brand ambassador. A funny brand isn’t a company. It’s “one of the guys”. It’s more personal to their customers because a subconscious switch has been flipped that associates that brand with joy.
Outside from work. I have a 6 yo daughter, and 8 yo son, and 10 yo daughter. My house probably sounds like an elementary school fight club when our windows our open. My beautiful wife Dawn works as a Child Life Specialist at Childrens Hospital. In my spare time, I serve my community on a few boards (UWCE.org, gilliardandcompany.org, and the Pooler Chamber of Commerce). I do a little woodworking, but mostly my hobby is my career. I love what I do and feel like the luckiest guy that I get up and get to play with all of these neat advertising toys everyday.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
In 2008 I lost everything in the real estate market crash in Las Vegas. It was devastating, but it forced me to look at myself more honestly. I have always been a natural salesman, even as a young man.
I was in my late 20’s when the crash happened and up to that point, most of the jobs I had I received a lot of praise from all of my bosses. The effect this had on my ego put blind spots in my vision where I should have seen that I still had a lot to learn. Eventually, I realized that while I was a victim of the market crash, there was still a lot of immaturity of my own that got me there.
It took a couple years to figure this out, but it helped me see the importance of continuously learning. We are all malleable when it comes to our personalities and skill sets, but we have to go find the information. Fortunately, there’s places that have all of the most tried and true ideas on anything in the world, book stores. Reading other people’s ideas became my secret weapon. If you are outlearning your competition, you will eventually outperform them too.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Rise & Flow ?
Along with being a full service marketing firm, we assist our clients beyond lead generation. We get in the weeds with them and find out how to close more business. Often, marketing firms get the lead to the doorstep of the client, and it’s the client who fumbles the handoff. I personally have implemented technology as a sales leader myself, but also for clients to help create a more transparent and efficient selling process through modernization.
Too many companies today have not evolved their sales processes. We combine the marketing tools we use that help raise awareness of a brand with automation tools for the sales lead generation. The beauty of these tools is they give the owner of this business a more clear picture of what’s happening to the leads when they arrive. We write strategies for them to know when coaching is required, sales messaging needs refined, or when someone needs coached out the door.
Usually business owners have to make these decisions with only partial data sets. We help generate more data from the selling process to make these decisions while relying less on intuition and more on the straight facts.
What are your plans for the future?
Along with marketing I’ve owned other businesses. Up until recently, I owned two stores called Avni Farms Dispensary. I sold them to my partners, but I’m always on the hunt for more opportunities like that. I love little simple shops that sell something different that people get excited about.
I’m always working on concepts in this space. I try to find things that are new and expanding quickly in larger cities and get them to market here in Savanah. So far it’s just been cannabis, but I will be doing some other businesses of this type that I think people will really enjoy.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://riseandflow.tech
