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John DeBevoise:

Greetings everyone and welcome to another serving of Bizness Soup Talk Radio, if it’s in business, it’s Bizness Soup, I’m your host John DeBevoise.

Today, we have Kendra Dickson from Gold Buckle Barrel Horses, and she’s going to be joining us. She is a member of the Women’s Professional Rodeo Association, she’s also the host of the Women’s Pro Rodeo Today’s Show on RFDTV. She’s bringing her skills to the table and we’re going to be talking about tradigital marketing. Tradigital marketing, yes, that’s the combination of traditional and digital marketing and she’s going to show us how she’s combined her passion with horses, her barrel horses, and how you can do it to. Kendra Dickson is going to be turning and burning and bringing it home right here at the table on Bizness Soup.

Kendra, welcome to this serving of Bizness Soup.

Kendra Dickson: Thank you John, it’s an honor to be here.

John DeBevoise: You and I share a common interest in that is of the equestrian and rodeo background and you have a skillset that has taken your business, that is of rodeo and barrel horses, and you’ve brought it into a business of marketing. So you’ve combined the two and you also have taken the combination of what’s called tradigital marketing. That was a new one for me and when I heard about this, I’m going, wait a minute, this is what I’ve been doing. I just didn’t know there was a name for it. Let’s talk about what is tradigital marketing and how you brought that into your business, your passion of barrel racing and rodeo.

Kendra Dickson: I’ll tell you what I’ve been in the saddle, my entire life. My dad was a trainer, he made his living training and selling horses. That’s how I grew up on a large ranch, working ranch in East Texas. I bought my WPRA permit in 2004, filled my card in 2007, so I’ve been training and selling barrel horses for the bulk of my career. I’m also a speech pathologist. I did do a four-year stint in the public school system.

When I stepped into social media rolling up on a year ago, now I’ve been using social media for several years and really been a strong supporter of social media for the rodeo community, for the horse community. I thought because we had 154,000 followers on one page alone that we were doing pretty good. I mean, I really thought we were knocking it out of the park. But the problem was, I didn’t really know what to do with that audience. I didn’t know how to convert that audience or how to monetize those loyal followers. So that part was really vague to me. Last year, when I stepped into what I was calling social media marketing, I realized that it’s a whole different field of paid advertising and digital marketing. It’s been fascinating. It’s been frustrating.

It’s been the most tedious thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve had to really push my own personal horses to the back burner, to the largest extent and focus entirely on digital marketing, learning what it is, how it works, how to construct

a campaign, start to finish. And what I’ve learned is that it’s very powerful, digital marketing is so dynamic, the abilities and the capabilities to really drill down on an audience is just fascinating to me. But that said, even though it throws a tremendous amount of fuel on any marketing dollar, any marketing goal, it is never going to make traditional relationships obsolete. So the traditional part of marketing boils down to relationship.

When we have an opportunity to speak in person like we’re doing today, and we have a moment to really get to know each other and build a rapport when there’s synergy, that’s when two people or two businesses can really team up and work together to accomplish amazing things. That’s why I call it, tradigital marketing.

John DeBevoise: With your social media marketing, how do you rate your successes? Is it engagements? Is it click throughs? When I hire you or when somebody hires you, what should someone be expecting from a social media manager marketing company? That’s a mouthful in of itself.

Kendra Dickson: It’s quite a question. It can have several different answers. I was actually asked the same question recently from a consultant. She said, how are you going to measure success for the launch for what you’re doing? For me personally, success is different. It’s not necessarily mathematic, it’s not the click-through rate, it’s not always the conversion. For me it is how effective am I at provoking the feeling, the emotion. If I’m promoting our western heritage and trying to take our industry forward, how well am I doing that? Am I influencing? Am I pre-influencing the younger generations? How many smiles have I put on someone’s face today? That for me is extremely valuable, it’s more than money. When you can provoke someone to thought and then to action that many times is way more valuable than a monetary transaction.

Now, for some people, obviously we’ve got bills to pay and we want to scale and we want to do the most with our marketing dollar and with our business. Marketing, I don’t know, some of the conversations I’ve been having like if you invest in a great product, it’s kind of like investing in a very nice outfit, either a tuxedo or an expensive gown, for women, we get our hair done, our nails, our makeup, what good is it to have all the expense invested in that and the time, and then go sit in the backyard or stay local. You want that outfit to be seen. You want to really get the most for your investment on the look and feel of that. So we only dress like that more times than not when it’s a large event and we’ve got motivation to do that. So there are many facets to answer that question.

It can be done as far as monetary, if you want a higher click-through rate, if you want a higher ROAS, return on your ad spend, you want to actually see on paper with a dashboard where every dollar is going and how many people you are reaching and how many new people you’re reaching. That’s easy to do in today’s age with digital marketing.

John DeBevoise: It is, whereas, before the show we were talking about in my 20 years in broadcast we didn’t know who was listening unless we gave something away, make the phone ring is what we tried to do. We didn’t know if there were crickets or if somebody was really interested. Digital marketing, which last week folks you remember, we had Dave Miles from Strategists talking about connected TV, being able to connect the television through the internet and be able to understand where you’re at and be able to, as a business, target specific industries or businesses by zip code or by industry within that zip code, through that connected TV. Because if you’re sitting in where I’m, down in San Diego in my hometown, what good is it to have a restaurant advertised in Texas on a national program if I’m in San Diego? But that restaurant in San Diego can target me right there just as the one in Texas where you are sitting can target through connected TV by utilizing the traditional television medium.

My many mantras is that distribution is the most important part of business because without it you’ve got nothing. If nobody knows you exist, you will sell nothing. So advertising the distribution of your material is key.

Kendra. If I walk in your office and say, Kendra helped me with my business, what kind of business am I and what am I looking for you to do for me through your social media or tradigital marketing concepts?

Kendra Dickson: If you reach out to me and you need help with marketing, you’re probably a cowboy. You’re my people. You wear boots and a cowboy hat. You’re either somehow related to the rodeo market, you’re definitely in the horse industry, maybe you’re a farmer, you have an Ag business. Somehow it is centered around the horse.

John DeBevoise: So your business is centered more around the rodeo industry and the horse. So if I had a product that I wanted to get into that niche market, the rodeo, the equestrian market say it was a supplement or something new, or a clothing line of rodeo gear. I’d come to you and say, Kendra, you are in that space because you also host a program that relates to the rodeo industry. So I would come to you for that, that’s your niche market.

Kendra Dickson: That’s who I can most help and that’s who I’m most confident in helping, just because of my lifetime of experience in the saddle.

John DeBevoise: Well you are my people.

Kendra Dickson: It’s fun to be able to help my people because we’re so busy being us and doing what we do we spend more time in the saddle, in the barn, in the truck, on a tractor than we do sitting at a computer. At the end of the day, there really aren’t any hours left, if there’s 30 minutes or an hour, that’s devoted to our family. We’re not thinking about other industries, we’re not looking out. We’re so focused. It’s very laborious, we are still hands on boots in the dirt kind of

people. We work from sunup to sundown. So there’s very little time left for marketing and that’s where I come in.

John DeBevoise: With your skillset in the equestrian market, you know the language, the vernacular, so that when you walk in to the perspective purchaser or the distribution point, whether it’d be tractor supply or somebody or whatever it might be, Purina, you know how to speak to the right people because you have those connections and that’s why people would come to you to get their product into the market, perhaps even get the spokesmodels. What’s better than having a barrel racer, the turn and burn girls as your spokesperson and give them free clothes.

Kendra Dickson: Well, I can definitely help save time. Time is money, because my natural language, my entire life has been western. I speak the language of the horse. Cowboys and Cowgirls. Many times that’s an unspoken language. For example, the hat I’m wearing today if I turned this hat around and put it on backwards, I could not walk into any authentic horse crowd and be taken seriously. So for a digital marketing agency that comes from outside of our industry, that maybe doesn’t understand that unspoken code and how extremely important it is to us.

We can size someone up at first glance. Are the spur straps on the right side of the boot or the wrong side of the boot? Are their jeans too short? Is the fit upside down? Those are things that I don’t have to think about because I’ve spent my life learning them. So I can really speed the process for marketing, just being able to bridge the gap between digital and western. But it’s been so crucial, it’s been so important that we get this done, it’s more important to me right now than winning a Gold Buckle.

John DeBevoise: Heaven forbid.

Kendra Dickson: I said it, it takes a lot for me to say that.

John DeBevoise: Kendra Dickson is joining us, she has a tradigital marketing expert, distribution of the same content using traditional and digital marketing. As I mentioned earlier from Strategists, we talked about the connected television experience.

Kendra, in your pursuits with this, you are driven to bring the rodeo scene into the tradigital marketing, for what reason? Was that your barrel racing? Was that your other marketing experiences? What brought the two of these industries together for you?

Kendra Dickson: I see the need, John, there’s a tremendous need. As a profession I believe a horse trainer is the least paid professional in the United States. We work so hard to make a living it’s time we do more than tread water. It’s time that we do more than just pay our bills. We don’t need to make a paycheck, we need to turn a profit. Training horses and selling horses that’s the tough way to make a

living quite frankly. There’re highs and lows and over the years, I’ve kept so much of my own money and my own cashflow tied up in four legged stock. It’s a very risky way to make a living and quite honestly, it’s not rational, but we do it because it’s how we’re hard wired, it’s in our DNA.

John DeBevoise: It’s a passion.

Kendra Dickson: We don’t think twice about it. It is our passion. So I see such a tremendous need for us as an industry to promote ourselves to the world. I am of the belief that we have values that the rest of the world could use right now. We have work ethic. We still value the solid gold traditional relationships. We are still people of our word in a handshake, that is amazing that we’ve retained that. I want to express that, I want to be able to display that. I want to be able to bring us up to speed with other industries and I believe we can even surpass many industries when we work together and when we throw fuel on the fire with digital marketing.

John DeBevoise: Well, when it comes to the horse industry, I’ve never known anybody that got into it for the money. It was always the passion. I have used my horse and cattle business throughout my life to show people how you can convert the ordinary expenses, those things that you pay for anyway, by turning it into a business. As we know from my tax guy, you don’t have to be profitable, but you sure have to give it your all best try and the horse business has always been traditionally very difficult to make money. Because you know what I have never been married to a horse trainer that had a lick of sense about business. It was a passion of the horses.

Kendra Dickson: Well, if we had any business since we seem to let it fly out the window, you know what I mean? God alone we smell a horse that just does something to our logic. There is something so captivating about the smell of a horse and the movement of a horse, the feel of a horse. Quite frankly, that’s why we do it. We know that horses are therapeutic, it’s a no brainer why we do it, even though it doesn’t make sense on paper, I’m trying to help it make sense on paper.

John DeBevoise: It’s a passion. It can be anything. I know a friend of mine who is into high-speed boat racing, and he turned that into a business and uses his boat for promotion. I think he’s nuts, but he likes offshore boat racing and he uses that to compliment his business. He’s not in that business, but he uses it and competes and promotes in his insurance industry. Hats off to him to know how to use the tax code. It can be anything folks and as Kendra is talking to us on Bizness Soup take your passion to learn how to utilize it, to drive home a business and treat it as a business.

Kendra, you also are on a television program. I saw you were riding your three-year-old into a studio, and you’re talking about the business of the business of horses and rodeo. Where did you land that gig?

Kendra Dickson: Years ago when I was in the top 15 on my red roan horse Dover, if I was at a rodeo and performed well, if the show was there, if the crew was there, Women’s Pro Rodeo Today, they like to interview the winners. For several years, those guys would always say, hey, you’re pretty good in front of the camera. Would you ever consider hosting the show? I’m like, well, yeah, of course I would. When the opportunity came about five years ago, they asked if I wanted to host the show Women’s Pro Rodeo Today on RFD and the Cowboy Channel. Well, I didn’t have to think twice, I was honored. So it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a tremendous honor to be a voice for our sport and for women in rodeo.

John DeBevoise: Getting back to the marketing aspect of it, do you use that in your business with your barrel racing business, you have a side hustle or a gig, you have barrel horses that you sell?

Kendra Dickson: Yes. Actually digital marketing has been so helpful in promoting my barrel horses, the ones that I train and ones that I advertise for friends that they’ve already trained and some of them have a wind record already. I’ve got one horse listed right now with a tremendous win record on the WPRs PRCA circuit. So being able to take a horse’s ad to the people who are most apt to purchase that horse is amazing. The computer and the artificial intelligence does a lot of that screening for us, so that we again make the most use of our day and the time in our day and we know when we follow up with a phone call, we’re already talking to someone who is very capable of riding and purchasing that horse and they’re very interested. So it really weeds out a lot of tar kickers.

John DeBevoise: We’re talking with Kendra Dickson, we’re talking about marketing and of course we have a combination love and the rodeo and the equestrian arena. We all in the rodeo industry give back in some capacity. I help horses that are rescue horses and I help the veterans through helping them with PTSD through the interaction of a ranch life, primarily out of the Las Vegas facility. We bring the veterans and we teach them to ride along with their family. You have a passion and it is Rodeo For A Reason. It is a ministry. Let’s talk about how you give back in a ministry called Rodeo For A Reason.

Kendra Dickson: Well, you hit the bulls-eye my heart right there. So Rodeo For A Reason started in 2007, just one free barrel clinic, one free saddle, that was my way to get people’s attention and get them to the arena and through teaching and sharing horsemanship tips, and you know how to simplify the barrel pattern and go faster on the clock that was my opportunity to actually share my faith. So one clinic led to another clinic, one saddle led to a horse trailer to another horse trailer. Bits, boots, t-shirts buckets, Bibles, whatever we could scrounge together over the years is what we’ve given away.

Three years ago, we started giving away a saddle a day during the National Finals Rodeo and it has been an online campaign. Very, very powerful, very effective we’ve reached, oh, I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands people. The first year we reached 254,000 people in 10 days. Last year, we

reached well over a 400,000 people and the interesting thing was the engagement. So the first night of 2019 National Finals Rodeo on the Rodeo For A Reason Facebook page, we had an engagement of 6,700 comments and by the end of the run, the last two nights we had over 15,000 comments with people interacting with us, trying to win the saddle of the day and also giving us feedback. They tuned in to try to win a saddle, but more times than not people said, wow, what you said or what that guest speaker said really got me in the feels. This year, we’re going to pivot instead of a saddle a day, we’ll be given away a K a day. So a thousand dollars everyday online during the National Finals Rodeo.

John DeBevoise: Well, it should be a spectacular event as it always is, but in a new venue.

We’re talking with Kendra Dixon Rodeo For A Reason is her ministry, her reason to give back, and obviously everyone who wants to know more about Kendra and the tradigital marketing that we’ve been talking about, all of that is available at BizSoup, where you’ll get the transcripts and the links to connect with Kendra, if you so choose.

Kendra, do you recommend with all of your customers, your clients, to try and capture everybody, go to the website and give information? Is that a good sound strategy before you give them something?

Kendra Dickson: I think it depends on your end goal and who you are, what is your offer? Are you trying to promote a message, then we’re going to create something called a lead gen. So we’ll do a lead generation campaign and try to collect data on your people. If we can get them to answer a survey, tell us some information about the topic or themselves, and then collect their contact information, we can retarget them and we can create a lookalike audience that allows us to reach and influence people just like them.

If you’ve got a product that you need to sell, maybe it’s a cowboy hat, maybe it’s a bit, maybe it’s a pair of boots, anything in the horse world or horse related, that would be a different kind of campaign, that’s more e-commerce. So we want to make it very convenient for that consumer to see it, learn about it and buy right now.

So instead of a learn more button, it’s a buy right now button, and we present everything to them within seven seconds. So it’s extremely convenient and powerful. It goes right to their phone. They don’t have to wake up and think about, I wonder which cowboy hat I’m going to buy today, chances are that’s not happening. Artificial intelligence tracks our interest and that’s how it knows which ads to send to us. That’s quite frankly what I’ve learned to do and what I’m watching unfold right in front of my eyes. The result is just tremendous. And being able to help people, help people in my industry that are working so hard and they’re so passionate about our western lifestyle. That feels good at the end

of the day, to bring in a high ROAS, a very high return on their ad spend and a bigger return on their investment, that’s fulfilling. That’s a great day.

John DeBevoise: So if I have a product, I’m going to go back to the supplements, and let’s say it’s aloe based and I have it prepared and designed for the horse industry, and I want to get that message out and get distribution. If I look up the word aloe, all of a sudden I’m getting all these ads that are selling me different aloe products, not necessarily the horse product, but I may have just looked up aloe. How does that work when I search for something and then suddenly my screen blows up with related product. Are you looking to blow my screen up? Is that how it works?

Kendra Dickson: Well, it’s not magic, but it is math. So these computers log all of that information, they store data. So when my team, when we go in to create a digital campaign and we tweak the demographics, when we look for the right age group, when we look for the right location, when we look for the right buying income level, that helps point the way. When we run testing, when we run multiple ads within one campaign, we start low and slow, we start with a very, very conservative ad spend because we’re in the testing phase.

Now when one ad starts to perform well, we can see it through that dashboard of results, through the metrics. Obviously we watch it, we watch it, we watch it and then we ask, why is it performing better here as opposed to a different location or the same ad but different copy or same product, different age group. That’s part of testing and refining the campaign to find the honey hole, to find the ad that is performing the highest, well at that point we end or we’ll kill the ads that are not performing as well, so that we don’t waste money. Then we channel the funds and the ad spend into the ads that are bringing the highest profit, bringing in the best return.

John DeBevoise: Traditionally we couldn’t do that, put an ad in the magazine or the newspaper or on the billboard we had no idea what the conversion was. If someone rang the phone, we didn’t know where it came from.

Kendra Dickson: Correct and it was still us. You can only be you in so many places and you only have so many hours in the day. So for you to talk to people personally, even if you do it well, even if you just set aside time to take sales calls, that could be a full-time job. So if the computer can pull weight for us and free up our time, we can either invest that with our families, stop and take a breather, get refreshed, have the next great idea or improve what we’re already doing.

John DeBevoise: Kendra. My last question to you is do you specialize in the business to business, or business to consumer?

Kendra Dickson: Business to consumer is going to be probably most preferred, I’ve been getting a lot of athletes reaching out to me saying, I need sponsors, I need sponsors, welcome aboard, don’t we all. Even in a good year, it’s very challenging to get a

sponsor on the pro circuit. They get bombarded by requests and because so many people want to put a patch on their shirt just for the clout, for what it looks like, the appearance of it, they’re willing to give away a sponsorship for product. Well products don’t put gas in the truck, they don’t pay vet bills, they don’t pay the entry fees.

So I’ve been telling those guys even on a good year, it’s challenging to get finances from these sponsors because so many people are bombarding them. This year, because of COVID, everybody’s clipping coupons, so it’s not a good time to hit them up for that. It is a great time to be an innovative thinker. I’ve been asking these guys, instead of thinking business to business, you’re trying to reach out to a business in hopes of a sponsorship, what do you have to promote? What product do you have, or could you have that could start generating dollars for you today and maybe make more than a sponsorship that you think you’re seeking?

John DeBevoise: You can also use your background, and this could be anything from BMX bicycle motocross, to rodeo, to horse shows, to offshore boat race. It could be anything, take a passion and turn it into profit and you can utilize these same strategies regardless of the industry and capitalize on something that you’re already doing. There are people within that industry that would be interested, you do this in any industry, just do it and it doesn’t matter what industry it is because you’re giving an example, as we both can appreciate, the industry of the equestrian and the rodeo world where we both grew up in. Doesn’t matter what it is, but treat it like a business and you will be rewarded.

If you’d like to reach out to Kendra for helping your marketing, she’s a specialist in the equestrian go to BizSoup, You can hit us up for the entity and we will help you across the finish line if we have to drag you across the finish line. Make it a business.

Kendra. I could go all day in the rodeo world with you. I want to thank you for being on this serving of Bizness Soup. Folks this is Kendra Dixon Rodeo For A Reason, barrel racing and the host on the RFD television program All About Rodeo. Kendra, thanks so much for being on this serving of Bizness Soup.

Kendra Dickson: John. I loved it. Thanks again for the invite and thanks for keeping us in the loop.