Your Marketing Isn’t Broken — Your Process Is: Juliana Weiss-Roessler on the System That Grows Small Businesses

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I’m Jeremy Rivera, and on this episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast I sat down with Juliana Weiss-Roessler of WR Digital Marketing. She has spent about fifteen years working with small businesses and nonprofits — attorneys, a florist, a cruise company, two Parkinson’s nonprofits, and a lot of work in the dog space, because she started her career with TV’s Dog Whisperer. Her reason to trust her is refreshingly unpolished: as a small business owner herself, she has made the same mistakes she watches her clients make.

Nonprofits Are Businesses, and They Serve Two Audiences

Juliana’s first nonprofit client was the one the Dog Whisperer started himself — a fledgling organization trying to figure out what it wanted to be. What stuck with her is a distinction most people miss.

“It is a nonprofit business you’re registering,” she said, “not just an organization, as people tend to think about it. It needs to function as a business or it ceases to exist.” Mission first is admirable, but without funds to fund the mission there is no mission. And a nonprofit is serving two distinct audiences at once: the funders — donors and grantmakers — and whoever the mission actually serves, whether that is dogs, Parkinson’s patients, or the unhoused. In some ways that makes it more complex than a for-profit.

The offsetting advantage is goodwill. Send two emails by accident as a nonprofit and people stay; a business doing the same thing gets flagged as spam. There are also more free tools and more free information available than most organizations ever claim.

We got onto community work from there. I told her about the precast concrete wall company I worked with where we set up a cleanup partnered with Keep America Beautiful — a nonprofit every small business owner should know, because you can get gloves, bags and grabbers for a cleanup of any size and turn it into an Eventbrite listing, a press release, a community subreddit post, and real links. That whole model is now something we run for other businesses at Community Clean Links. Juliana had organized a local Walk for Peace and brought her team, and made the sharper point: often the visibility a small business earns by getting active in its own community beats anything an agency can do for it online.

Email Is the Only Channel You Actually Own

Ask Juliana about channels beyond SEO and she goes straight to the one everybody skips.

“Your email list is the one place where you have the greatest ownership over the conversation.” — Juliana Weiss-Roessler

Her reasoning is control. Post on Facebook and Facebook decides who sees it, then decides you should pay more for the privilege. When she started her career, most of a page’s followers saw a post. Now it is maybe one or two percent without spend. With email, as long as you protect your sender reputation, you land in the inbox for the cost of the tool — and even an unopened send earns awareness, because the subject line and sender name still get read. That is also where the conversions happen, and building the relationship there is far cheaper than developing it through paid social.

She has been seeing increasing success with SMS as well, carefully — it is easy to be annoying, and the bar is whether you are genuinely being helpful.

Local First, Because You Are Picking Your Pool

When I asked what changes for a regional company that wants to go national, Juliana said she loves it when clients want to stay local, because it puts the work in a smaller pool of competition. At the national level the constraint is budget: if you do not have it, there is a bigger fish who probably should outrank you, and forcing your way into a position you have not earned is expensive and slow. Her current example is a physical therapist who is the only one in her city and should be dominating the top five results.

That got us to aspiration versus reality. My friend Matt Brooks at SEOteric talks about the fronting inherent in brand marketing — you put forward the face of who you aspire to be, because you will never become it if you never say it. But you have to then prove it through reviews, PR mentions and links, or the claim stays a claim. Juliana’s addition: twenty years ago you could play algorithm games with keyword ratios, and some businesses that have not taken marketing seriously since then still think that is the game.

The Soapbox: Stop Treating Marketing Like a To-Do List

I handed her the soapbox and asked for the one thing small business owners should change today.

“Stop thinking about marketing as a to-do list and start thinking about it as a process — the engine for bringing in and converting leads.” — Juliana Weiss-Roessler

Most owners treat marketing as a pile of tasks: twelve social posts, two emails, done. You do not have to do everything. You have to think about it differently — plan what you believe will work, implement it, measure it, then loop back and improve. And it has to be consistent. The businesses that only market when things are slow build their own feast-and-famine cycle, and eventually the famine wins.

Ten People, One Conversion — Then Eight

Her best client story is a dog training company running in-person demo events. Ten people showed up, everyone seemed excited, one converted, and the event ended without profit. Looking at it, Juliana’s read was that something was working — the excitement was real and one person did convert. The failure was at the handoff: attendees were walking away with a flyer and a QR code to sign up later at home.

The fix was to get the commitment in the room. At the next event, roughly ten people again — and eight converted. They upsold dog walking and dog care on the spot, and a marginal channel became a sustainable one. That is what treating marketing as a system instead of a sequence of activities actually looks like.

The Disconnect That Kills Good Work

I told her about the agency engagement where we doubled the leads, declared victory, and got told by sales that it had been the most dismal quarter in two years — the new leads were much further up the funnel and were meeting a hard-close sales process. Total mismatch. I wanted a date and they were picking wedding venues.

Juliana’s answer is why she meets clients twice a month. Earlier in her agency life she did not, and the disconnect had a predictable ending: if the client is not making money from the work, they cannot afford you even when they think you are doing a great job. Sometimes the conversation is simply “I sent you ten leads and you haven’t followed up with any of them.”

The related problem is information. Owners project where they want to be instead of where they are — she has had clients describe a goal of reasonable growth and then turn out to have zero sales, which is a completely different marketing problem. The more honest you are with your marketing agency, the better the results, and building enough trust for that honesty is a real part of the job.

Skilled Help vs. Strategic Help

If you are hiring marketing help, Juliana splits it cleanly. Skilled help — a developer, a copywriter, a designer — executes what you direct. Tell a skilled hire to build a website about XYZ and they will build it about XYZ whether or not it is a good idea, because that is not their job. Strategic help gives you both the strategy and the skill, costs more, and comes with someone telling you what you should be doing and why.

Her advice if you are paying for the second kind: take advantage of it. Listen. Ask questions. Give them information. Then listen again. The counter-example she offered is a client who kept taking the SEO work back in-house and was thrilled to rank number one for the term “elderly” — useless at a business level, no matter how good the ranking looked.

The Low-Hanging Fruit Is Always the Same

I closed by asking what the fast win is when a new client walks in. She did not hesitate.

“The most valuable people you can market to are the ones who already trusted you once — your existing customers are always the low-hanging fruit.” — Juliana Weiss-Roessler

Most businesses take someone all the way down the funnel, make the sale, and then let the relationship stop. Re-engaging past customers — usually email, sometimes SMS, sometimes retargeting — is where the easy wins live nine times out of ten. A lot of small businesses are not using email at all.

Connect with Juliana

Juliana runs WR Digital Marketing at wrdigitalmarketing.com. She built a free marketing strategy toolkit out of education work she does for a local CDFI, and it lives with a stack of other free resources at wrdigitalmarketing.com/smb.