Before Kevin Whitmer pitches a client anything, he likes to take the business apart. He looks at website performance, who’s opening its newsletter, how the social posts land and how paid ads are really performing.
Then he and his team build what’s missing: a new website, better search visibility, targeted ad campaigns, a brand guide or a steady stream of content – all intensely focused around storytelling.
The former Star-Ledger and NJ.com editor said digital marketing should look different for every client, which is why his firm has no playbook, no rate card and no hourly billing.
Whitmer spent 36 years in New Jersey and New York newsrooms and the last five running his own firm, which rebranded last month as Cardinal Marketing Partners.
Here are nine tips he says businesses need to know:
- Know who’s doing the work
Whitmer said his firm is often brought in after a client hires an agency, gets sold a package by a senior name and is then handed off. His advice is to know who will be answering the phone and doing the work after a contract is signed.
“I am intimately involved in somewhere between 95% and 100% of the work that we do for every client,” he said. “So, when somebody has an issue at 5 in the morning or 11 o’clock at night, they get me and they get a response.”
- Understand what happened to the media
Earned coverage is harder to win than it used to be, and Whitmer said most people don’t fully understand why.
“Probably 75% of the journalism jobs in New Jersey have disappeared in the past 20 years,” he said “What remains is evolving daily, and there’s intense pressure on certain newsrooms to focus on revenue, which limits their ability to cover what once was covered.”
The flip side is volume. Even with smaller staffs, outlets such as NJ.com and BINJE publish a large amount of content every day, and that means there are still openings for businesses with a good story to tell. Whitmer said it’s also more important than ever for clients to support those publishers with ad dollars and event participation.
- Get some brand guardrails
Whitmer has built brand and style guides for clients, and he said many companies still don’t have one in place.
“It is surprising how many firms don’t have branding guardrails out there,” he said. “When it’s guardrails – and not handcuffs – brand equity and creativity peacefully coexist.”
- Search isn’t what it used to be
Getting found now means more than ranking on Google, or what Whitmer calls traditional blue-link search. It means showing up in AI-driven answers, which is the work behind the alphabet soup of SEO (search engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization).
“The search environment is changing in real time,” Whitmer said. “AI summaries are gnawing away at traditional search. But there is good news: It’s easier for us to move a client into AI summaries than it was with traditional SEO.”
- Use a rifle, not a shotgun
Today’s ad-targeting tools can reach very specific audiences, so use them.
“Are you going to let a client just pick up a shotgun and start shooting at anything? Or are you going to hand them a rifle and say, ‘OK, you want people in this demographic with these interests within a 10-mile radius or a set of these ZIP codes’?” Whitmer said. “The tools and data are amazing.”
- You have about one second
Attention spans are short, and they keep getting shorter.
“I used to tell people you have five seconds on social media for somebody to decide whether to spend time with your post, open it or click a link,” Whitmer said. “You might have a second today.”
- Don’t let content live in a silo
Whitmer said the digital reading experience is nothing like the newspaper experience many business leaders grew up with.
“We don’t read websites the way we grew up reading newspapers,” he said. “It’s OK to repeat and repurpose content. The biggest sin of all is allowing one piece of content to live only in one place, in its own little silo.”
- There is no playbook
Be wary of anyone who walks in with a one-size-fits-all plan.
“Digital marketing is different for every client,” Whitmer said. “We do not have a playbook. We do not have a pricing sheet. We do not bill hourly. Instead, we work like a true partner to understand what’s possible and what works best to deliver them to their ‘why.’”
- Start with your why
Before anything else, Whitmer asks every client the same question.
“My first question is always, ‘What’s your why?’” he said. “And what do you want to accomplish if you’re going to spend money?”
He said some clients can answer with seven or eight bullet points. Others have no idea, and that’s OK. Figuring it out is part of the job.
It all comes back to No. 1: Know your why before you spend a dollar.
