Digital Talent Attraction with Toby Teeter

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability and to correct obvious transcription errors while preserving the meaning of the original conversation.

Episode 69 — Digital Talent Attraction with Toby Teeter
Clean Speaker-Labeled Transcript
Guest: Toby Teeter
Automated QA: Passed

00:00.108 Brandon Burton
Hey there, just real quick before we get into this episode, this is Brandon, and I just wanted to share a quick message. If you are listening to this, chances are good that you are a chamber professional. And guaranteed, if you're listening to this, you also listen to podcasts. Have you considered creating a podcast for your chamber and all the benefits that that can bring? Check out my free chamber podcasting guide at chamberchatpodcast.com/slash podcasting. to learn how you can get started with your own chamber podcast. Now let's get into the show. This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.
00:48.766 Brandon Burton
And now your host, his favorite baseball player was Ricky Henderson. He's my dad, Brandon Burton. Welcome to Chamber Chat Podcast. This is Brandon Burton, your host, and it is my goal to help introduce you to people and ideas so you can better serve your chamber members and your community. We're here today with episode sixty-nine, and my guest today on the podcast is Toby Teeter. He's the president of the Joplin Area Chamber of Commerce. And he's he's been the president of the Joplin Area Chamber since December of 2018. Toby's also the founder of Urban Cycling Apparel and LocalRaces.com. Previously, he was a lead investor and developer of the Griffin Building Development. Prior to that, Toby was president, general counsel, and founder of Litmus Media, which is a DBA valid click. A twenty seven million dollar online ad network based in Kansas City. After Inuvo acquired ValidClick, he served as Inuvo's VP of Strategic Partnerships and Corporate Counsel, heading mergers and acquisitions. Prior to Valid Click, Toby was a business development manager and corporate attorney at Ad Knowledge, an online behavioral marketing pioneer. The Balance of his career includes stints as a lobbyist, litigation attorney, and a corporate attorney. Toby earned a B.S. in insurance and risk management from Missouri State University and a JD from the University of Missouri School of Law. Toby is married to Ashley Teeter, and they have a blended family of six children. He enjoys cycling, running, and volunteering at his wife's endurance event productions, including the Joplin Turkey Trot. Joplin Ugly Sweater Run and the Joplin St. Patrick's Day 5K and 15K. Toby has competed in both triathlons and marathons, including the 2012 Chicago Triathlon, 2013 Chicago Marathon, the 2014 Boston Marathon, and the 2015 New York City Marathon. Today is we have Toby on the show. He is kind of a digital ad expert.
03:14.58 Brandon Burton
And our topic that we'll discuss today is around digital talent attraction. And we'll look forward to getting into this discussion as soon as we get back from hearing from our sponsor.
03:29.326 Brandon Burton
During this time of uncertainty, most chambers are looking for ways to replace funding from events and programs that either been canceled or postponed due to social distancing that does not allow for us to meet as large groups. Another topic that is top of mind for chambers is how to help their member businesses recover from the financial impact their businesses experienced. With these considerations in mind, I want to introduce you to Swipe It. Swipe It offers a credit card processing affinity program for Chambers of Commerce that can help answer your questions about how to replace some of your lost revenue while also allowing for you to serve as an advocate to your member businesses by introducing them to a resource that can save them money on their credit card processing fees so they can become more profitable. Swipe It has been a supporter of Chamber Chat Podcasts from the beginning. And they are the best in the credit card processing business. Visit chamberchatpodcast.com slash cc, which stands for credit card, to learn how you can get swiping with swipe it. All right, Toby, we are back. If you would take a moment to say hello to the audience and share something interesting about yourself so we can all get to know you a little bit better.
04:52.896 Toby Teeter
You bet. Hello, Chamber audience. well, one tidbit is I am a former White House intern. people get a kick out of that. I was there with Monica Lewinsky back in ninety six and two years later during law school I had a visit from the FBI and the rest is history.
05:11.182 Brandon Burton
Wow, it is history, right?
05:14.562 Toby Teeter
Very poor scrumpy, yes.
05:16.832 Brandon Burton
Yeah. That is that is interesting. I asked for that interesting fact about people, but that is that is one I would not have expected. So if you would tell us a little bit more about the Joplin Chamber, so we can all get an idea of the perspective that you're coming from and kind of how you're managing things there at the the Joplin area chamber of commerce.
05:40.994 Toby Teeter
Yeah, so the Joplinary Chamber of Commerce has been around for 103 years. It's an institution of our community. Joplin is about 52,000 people that sleep here. About but we have about 250,000 people live here. It's kind of hard to explain, but we have a lot of feeder bedroom communities into Joplin. So during the day, you'll see about a quarter million people here on the grid. And the Joplinary Chamber of Commerce operates with about a staff of 10 people. we have a budget of around 1.2, maybe 1.3 million a year. we function as a typical chamber, but we also operate an incubator where we have space for startups. And we also have a training center that we are also the landlord of, where our anchor tenant is a local trade school, as well as a number of other affiliated businesses there that that that do. advanced production of of of of manufacturing items. And so that's in essence kinda how we operate. Again, about a quarter million in population we serve, it's an area chamber, ten employees and about one point three million in budget.
06:55.134 Brandon Burton
All right. I like that. The the incubator and the the training center kind of kind of flows over into our topic today of digital talent attraction, focusing more on the talent part of it where you guys are helping to develop talent at the training center and kind of having them as a anchor in that building, as well as the the incubator you talked about. But with your background, obviously with digital media and advertising, I'm excited to to get some of these insights that you have to share with the chamber world about digital talent attraction. I know chambers all over the country are trying to attract talent and showcase their city and why their their place is a place for workers to want to be and to live and work and and all of that. So if you would, let's let's kind of dive into that topic and tell me kind of what you guys are doing in Joplin to take advantage of talent attraction digitally.
07:54.082 Toby Teeter
Yeah, absolutely. So my my background is online marketing and you know I've always marketed physical products. and now that I'm the chamber president here in Joplin, our product that we're trying to sell is Joplin, both for business attraction and talent attraction. so what we've done here is we developed an online portal. It's not the chamber website, although the chamber beh is behind the curtain that that put it together. But we developed a a a website called choosejoplin.com. So choose Joplin.com is simply a talent and business attraction portal that gives us an opportunity to tell our story, explains why you should move to Joplin, why you belong to Joplin. it's it's heavy in graphic videos and photography about our community. And we highlight the livability here, the restaurants, the active lifestyle, the hiking, the fishing, the lakes. the cost of living, and so on. And we've also developed a deep library of video vignettes in the 30 second to two minute range where we talk about different livability objectives. We talk about our our religious faith-based communities here, our active lifestyle opportunities, our educational opportunities here. We have several universities in in our city. and we we're doing very very strategic ways of distributing this content. and what's what what people get really excited about, what makes this project different, is our ability to retarget. How that works is we do cooperative advertising campaigns, partially funded by the city of Joplin, as well as large employers in our community. And what that entails is when people are looking at job opportunities in Joplin. they're being retargeted, meaning during the next two or three weeks, on their Facebook and in that's about Joplin. so simply being a physician in Cleveland, you're looking at a physician opportunity at a local hospital here in Joplin. And then for the the the following weeks you'll start seeing video vignettes about Joplin and why you belong in Joplin. And we also target
10:18.156 Toby Teeter
by your demographic data and your interest groups. So if you are a cyclist or a runner, we'll talk about our trail system. if you are a a Muslim, we'll talk about being the smallest city in the United States with a mos. and and so we're able to pull these content based on your demographic data and do really, really targeted data. And the bottom line of the messaging here is is we have everything you want here. We just don't have you. And and so we we kind of fire all these kind of micro targeted ad campaigns based on your demographic data and and your background. And we work with our largest employers by simply adding two lines of code on their their their job portals. so when people are looking at the positions in our town, it activates the marketing campaign that we're we're managing under the choose Joplin banner.
11:12.344 Brandon Burton
So I love that you're partnering with the the major employers and that they're working with you to get that code on their websites to then, you know, reinforce what Joplin's about to bring the sport talent there. how have you guys gone about developing those relationships to be able to say, you know, here's the idea, here's how we implement it? How do you take them through that process?
11:33.506 Toby Teeter
Yeah, so we we mapped out our largest one hundred employers. So we're kinda doing a top down approach. we we mapped out on a spreadsheet our largest hundred employers. we did our digging and and found out where the job path you know, basically the the funnel, if you were to look at job opportunities at those hundred employers, what which web pages you're landing on. And then we worked through their HR departments, through our their contacts and and simply give them a a packet of information. where they can better understand this opportunity to partner with us and give them the content they need to pass to their technical teams to implement this remarketing pixel. the the the the technology we're using is very typical to e-commerce where you install a remarketing pixel it's it's basically one line of code that allows us to kind of target abandonments. the The e-commerce equivalent of this is when you're looking at golf clubs on a website and then those golf clubs follow you around for two weeks. We're doing the same thing with our city, the city of Joplin, with this, you know, with the graphic content and videos. and then the learn more, the basically the follow-up takes you back into the choose Joplin portal.
12:48.172 Brandon Burton
So when you do these these tracking pixels, are you choosing specific I mean, Facebook seems pretty obvious. Are there other tracking pixels? And for someone who may not be as familiar with tracking pixels, how do you get Where do you get from? I mean, just yeah.
13:06.486 Toby Teeter
Well if you s if you set up an advertising account on Facebook, you have the opportunity of getting a a pixel assigned to you. and they Facebook is very good at explaining how how to install it. but if you have a an ad account on Facebook, the your distribution is across the Facebook network that includes Instagram. So your advertising can go to both Facebook, Instagram, and their offline network, basically an ad network across across the web that that technology supports. The other large bucket is Google itself. Again, you can add one line of code from your Google ad account, and that gets you on Google search and display networks. So the the two major networks that you want to play with are is Facebook and Google. But between them that'll get you coverage and on hundreds of websites.
13:59.382 Brandon Burton
So earlier you had mentioned the the demographics. You know, if you're a runner, you'll highlight the the trails. If you're a outdoorsman, you'll highlight the lakes. If you're Muslim, the mosque. I mean, so how do those demographics get pulled in? Is that from their social media page or are you needing to collect information somewhere else?
14:19.638 Toby Teeter
Facebook and Google has all the information that we need. so how this works is is Facebook itself knows what websites do you visit, your demographic data, your age, your gender. and so we're able to piggyback on that data. so so that's how that works. it it's it's the same how e-commerce works with with those ad networks. you know, besides doing the remarketing pixel, there's other types of advertising campaigns that we've initiated. for instance, on holiday weekends, whether it be Easter, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, what we do is we ramp up an ad campaign where the target is people visiting Joplin but don't live in Joplin. So the ad target is people that are within a 10 mile radius of Joplin but live outside of a 50 mile radius of Joplin. We are purposely targeting people coming here to visit family. again, the lowest hanging fruit, the highest conversion is is people that grew up here and moved away. And if we can get them to move back to Joplin to grow our economy, th that is a that's a low hanging fruit. And we particularly are are targeting holiday weekends with that out of campaign.
15:37.102 Brandon Burton
That's a great idea. I love that. Fo I mean, I've seen that before with the the certain radius, yeah, if you're ten miles within or or fifty miles out. But to be able to focus that down to holiday weekends, you are going to get those people that are there to see family and kind of the maybe the sense of nostalgia if they've, you know, lived in the city before and they wonder how they can get back and then they start seeing these ads about how they can do it.
16:02.134 Toby Teeter
Absolutely. And everyone, you know, like many towns, Joplin has really transformed over the last fifteen, twenty years, our downtown and and and so on. but what happens is when you have people that grew up here in the eighties or nineties, their their view of Joplin is very dated. They don't understand how you know, the food truck scene and the coffee culture scene and all these things are happening here and they just assume i it's not. and it's that It so we also can adjust the content that we're displaying on those on those weekends. So if you're a thirty year old coming back to Joplin to visit your parents on Thanksgiving, you know, we can show the new Joplin, the the things that are really relevant to that demographic and that age group. to we can talk about our food truck scenes, our live music scenes, the the coffee culture, kind of all the hipster stuff that's now happening at Joplin that that they assume isn't. so it's it's a great opportunity again to to rebrand Joplin.
16:59.288 Brandon Burton
So I'm just curious, at any given time, how many different ad campaigns do you have going out with how customized you get with some of these? Do you have an idea off the top of your head?
17:12.582 Toby Teeter
Yeah, so it the we we can have dozens of ad campaigns running at once at very low volume. you can control your budgets by by day or by month. but we we have numerous campaigns running at at once and then we ramp up some other ones on the holiday weekends. as we film this, we're heading towards Easter and we're we're actually ramping it up for this Easter break, for for the the retargeting, targeting people visiting Joplin.
17:43.412 Brandon Burton
So you'd mentioned you have a a staff of ten. how is it staff that are coming up with the ad campaigns? Are they are you partnering with member businesses or how are you doing the development of these campaigns?
17:59.032 Toby Teeter
Sure. So the job the city of Joplin outsources its economic development to the chamber through a contract. we have convinced the powers that be that economic development is both business and talent attraction at this point. so we've successfully budgeted with city dollars our ability to co fund the development of this campaign on the front end. And then we outsourced to a couple of local ad agencies the video production we're using to use for for content on choosejoplin.com and for these outbound advertising campaigns. And so we we're outsourcing kind of the the the the the content creation and the video creation, but we do have a communications team in-house. That includes obviously with my background, I'm I'm directly involved in this effort, but we also have a communications director that's quickly learning these kind of e-commerce rebranding of Joplin ad campaign projects. And we also have two interns that we've kind of trained up that help us with both some of the graphics, some of the cop copy and the the paid ad campaign management.
19:21.44 Brandon Burton
All right. as you were talking about that how you go about outsourcing it, I was reminded, I don't know if you're familiar with with Dane Maxwell. He's kind of a marketing wizard himself, I guess, but he's he's got a a podcast that I listen to and he talks a lot about new businesses as they develop, and a lot of people start a business with an idea and they aren't thinking about the customer so much, but they've got this new widget or service or something, and they want to push this idea, but they don't really know who the customer is. And he has this kind of a three-step process for a new business. He says first you need it to find the customer, then you need to define what the desired outcome is for the customer, and then create the mechanism to to provide that desired outcome. And he says that he outsources so you find the the customer, desired outcome, and then outsource the mechanism. And then you're able to turn out, you know, over and over, which is Kind of what you're doing with this digital marketing campaign is your customers, you're saying if you're 30 years old, if you used to live here, you're visiting on a holiday weekend, you know, you're very defining, very definitive, I should say, of who the customer is, what the desired outcome would be is for them to move to Joplin to become employed in Joplin, and then you're outsourcing that mechanism to be able to get those ads in front of them. So I mean, as you were saying this, I'm like, you guys you're following Dane Maxwell's formula and you don't even know it.
20:52.686 Toby Teeter
I guess that's true. You y you know what you know and you outsource the rest.
20:57.058 Brandon Burton
That's right. That's right. so how good is this choose Joplin dot com website? Like if we go visit it, are we all gonna in about two to three weeks find ourselves with a a job in Joplin and finding ourselves loading a UHL?
21:11.874 Toby Teeter
Joplin will suck you in. I I will I will take a minute to talk about business attraction and how we use the this. So we're doing very traditional economic development as well, using the choose Joplin branding to attract businesses. Very similar process. We operate other websites that actually talk about things like our industrial park. If you hit our industrial park website. Or if you're looking at industrial listings, sites, the qualified sites in our region, we can actually turn on and and talk about the videos that talk about br you know why you should have your business in Joplin. We talk about our distribution network, our access to markets, our interstate, our rail, our our commercial airport, our cost of living, the least expensive place to have manufacturing workers. and so you know the you know what we're really talking about here is we're talking about what makes your community different, talk talking about branding your community and then creating webs web assets to tell that story.
22:25.814 Brandon Burton
I love it. I mean it's the same very similar to what you're doing with the the the talent, the workforce you're trying to bring in, but just targeting the different websites, right? That these businesses would be looking at.
22:38.87 Toby Teeter
Our just case in point, the big story in the last couple of weeks with Joplin is I had a little give and take on Teslas looking at the Midwest for a site to have their next gigafactory where they'll be manufacturing both the batteries and the trucks themselves for the Cybertruck project. I had a tweet that was liked by over a thousand times. It kind of went viral. And it evolved into a formal presentation to Tesla. And so we're kind of in play now, competing against much larger markets across the Midwest for the new Gigafactory. Again, how Choose Joplin comes into play is we actually do our throwdown publicly. if you go to choose Joplin.com/slash Tesla, you'll actually see your offer. it's a billion dollar package. we're talking about a thousand-acre site, we're talking about a low-cost workforce. we're talking about incentives. and we compare ourselves to Nashville on that page and we show that Tesla would save over eight hundred million dollars just in payroll over the first twelve years as part of our proposal. And so it's an opportunity to kind of thump our chest a little bit and and allow us to tell our story directly to Tesla on the web and reference that that landing page.
24:03.778 Brandon Burton
That is really cool. And that's a a big name too to thump your chest over. So congratulations. so I know, you know, before people go too far down a rabbit hole, they were gonna want to know what's the what's the return on investment, both the monetarily and the time to to implement some of these strategies. What kind of success are you seeing? And I mean, the Tesla example is is is good, but what other maybe success stories can you share from From these efforts you're making. Yeah.
24:34.486 Toby Teeter
Absolutely. So the the development of the website and the initial videos were on Chamber Dollar and the City of Joplin Dollar. But going forward, and it's already happening, we're working with our major employers to actually co-fund this cooperative ad campaign. How I explain this to our employers is we allow we tell them you focus on selling your job opportunity and your in your institution, your your business or your hospital or your university. but if you want to sell Joplin, reference chooseJoplin.com. And so it it's truly as a partnership where we're allowing us to to sell the the the city. You know, what what economic development is to the city of Joplin is we we have a medical school here. So we're trying to attract med students from all over the world to Joplin. And we're competing against much larger markets. So if you're a 25-year-old looking at med school opportunities, we're competing against you know, much larger markets, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, just in the Midwest, for instance. and it's really hard to explain why they should choose Joplin without showing them. And this is just kind of a way to explain that. But back to your question, it this is very, very cost efficient. we are reaching hundreds of thousands of people that are actively deciding whether or not to move to our community. They're looking at school opportunities. employment opportunities, they're visiting family here. There's so many buckets where y you can actually qualify to start seeing this content. It's very, very timely. dollar for dollar, it's by far the most efficient way of branding and telling your story at the right place at the right time to the right people that are activing whether or not to move to Joplin or move their business to Joplin.
26:21.944 Brandon Burton
That's awesome. I just the the world we live in today with the technology and being able to to focus advertising like this is something else. I mean, for somebody that comes from a a background, you know, before maybe 10, 15 years before now, it's a whole different world as to how you can target these these ads that you put out there and really tell this tell the story of your city. I mean, I think this is a a great example of how you guys are doing things there in Joplin. so one thing I like to ask is kind of based on our discussion today and kind of the experiences that you're having, what would be maybe a piece of advice that you could encourage the chamber professionals that are listening that they could do to help take their chamber up to the next level and and maybe showcasing their city?
27:15.148 Toby Teeter
Yeah, one thing that we've done here at the at Joplin is that's really, really resonated is we changed who the hero of the story is. we had a an institution here, you know, this chamber where it's very, very proud of the history of winning awards. and we really shifted the focus away from the chamber and started really celebrating the entrepreneurs, the risk takers of our community as the heroes of the story. So we've really downplayed the brand. Joplinary Chamber of Commerce, and we upplayed Joplin, business leaders, and really shifted and tried to tell their story. ChooseJoplin.com is actually a perfect example. This is a chamber initiative, but you do not see our name or logo anywhere on that website. We are talking about the heroes of the story are the entrepreneurs, the business leaders, the risk takers that really have have defined the city of Joplin. And so the one one takeaway I would like to give is is really think through are you painting yourself, your institution, your chamber as the hero of the story, and maybe rethink that. and really, you know, use this as a your your institution as a platform to tell their stories and shift the focus and let them be the hero and let the chamber itself be the guide.
28:35.226 Brandon Burton
I think that's that's sound advice. I know it's y you hear the one argument about how chambers need to brag more about themselves, which I think there's a way of doing that without necessarily putting the spotlight just on you. which is, you know, things like going back to choose chopin dot com is you're able to to showcase the city itself, you're able to showcase those business leaders and they know It's the chamber that that's driving it. So I think that's a that's good piece of advice. so th this question I ask everyone that I have on the show is as we look to the future of chambers of commerce, how do you see their purpose going forward?
29:22.77 Toby Teeter
That's a that's a great question. You know, my background's unique because I am not a traditional chamber president. I'm actually an entrepreneur all up until about eighteen months ago. so I come from the trenches of of owning a business. and I I've now seen kind of you know, the chamber both from the point of view as as a a chamber member and and now a a leading a chamber. I I think the chamber institution is going to change over time. and it already has. economic development is is about adding dollars to your community and getting more of those circulated. and so I I I think the transitions you're gonna see is I think online presence is gonna change. the the educational series, we're we're we're we're developing a thing called Chamber Academy here. and we are doing more Zoom classes even before the COVID crisis happened. we're doing more and more online things as far as online EDU. We're recording all of our content and distributing it freely online. we have a lot of education business education classes that you can subscribe to as a member for free. we we're we're really focused on talent attraction and business attraction, which is another pivot that's happening across the United States. where more and more people are understanding that it the the the great migration of jobs is following young professionals. and so we're really, really focused on bringing back our young professionals to Joplin or bringing more young professionals to Joplin. And so I think those are kind of the the the shifts that we're seeing is leveraging technology, branding your city, and and focusing both on talent and business attraction.
31:16.438 Brandon Burton
Yeah. I think that's good insight. I think especially with a younger workforce coming, I see that shift, you know, more of the the the Zoom and the the young professionals and kind of making that be a focus for sure. Yep. Well, Toby, I wanted to thank you for spending time with us today here on Chamber Chat Podcast. if anyone listening wanted to reach out and get in contact with you or maybe dig in a little deeper about how you're doing some of these retargeting and and digital marketing campaigns there at the Joplin Chamber. How might they reach out to you?
31:52.735 Toby Teeter
you can reach me directly at via email. It's Toby T O B Y at Joplincc dot com. So it's Toby at Joplincc.com and I'm also easy to find on LinkedIn.
32:03.064 Brandon Burton
All right. And I will get those updated in the show notes page for this episode as well, which will be found at Chamberchat Podcast dot com slash episode sixty nine. But again, Toby, thanks for spending time with us today, sharing your insights and some of your digital marketing expertise. I think it it provides a great value to the other chamber professionals listening and I hope they take action and start implementing them at their chamber.
32:27.288 Toby Teeter
Thank you, Brandon, for happening.
32:30.55 Brandon Burton
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