Q&A with J2 Marketing Experience Director Austin Loveing
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In the four years since joining J2 Marketing, Austin Loveing has rapidly risen through the ranks at the boutique marketing firm headquartered in South Bend.
From humble beginnings leading the studio team, Loveing’s drive, passion and initiatives helped him make partner. With over a decade in the creative world, he helps animate his client’s ideas with measurable impact.
Loveing spoke with Inside INdiana Business on his move back to the region, actions that helped him advance quickly in his career and also gave personal branding tips for young professionals.
This article has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How did you come to be in South Bend?
I actually grew up in Niles and lived there until I was about eight years old. My family did a lot of traveling. We traveled nine months out of the year all across the U.S. At around 18, I moved to Louisville, Kentucky, for six years. I moved back into the South Bend area about five years ago, and that’s something that’s crazy because when I left, I never planned to come back. But while I was in Kentucky, I kept noticing South Bend and seeing the momentum. My wife and I also decided to move back to be closer to family and to build our own family.
How did you get into marketing?
I’ve got over 10 years of experience in the creative world and with managing teams. Marketing and creativity is just something that I love. I started off as a graphic designer. I got into Adobe software really young and just continued to teach myself. I also grew up with a lot of exposure to the studio industry, so I loved cameras, photography, videography, figuring out how to tell a story on a screen was really exciting to me. I spent a lot of time in actual production when I was in Kentucky. I have a degree in business administration and so when we moved back here, I looked over multiple agencies, reached out and connected with them. I really fell in love with J2 Marketing, they gave me the opportunity to explore and dive into more.
How did you go from being a part of the team to managing the team?
A lot of its ambition and desire. The other part of that is also having a vision for what you want to accomplish. When I started at J2, I actually came in as the studio guy. That was the foot in the door moment, and from that point it’s really about going above and beyond. My dad did a really good job nailing initiative into me, so that’s something that is constantly running in the back of my head. So outside of my studio work, I kept ironing out bottlenecks and working on our sales and strategy, built up the department and started doing bigger projects.
One of the biggest parts of leadership is understanding the team dynamic and a lot of companies miss that. About a year into my time at J2, I had a conversation with Eric to talk about my desire to someday own a marketing agency. Over the last four years, I played a big role in restructuring our organization. We started to set up leads over our departments, making sure that people are being taken care of and that projects are happening on time.
If you want to be a part of something at a foundational level, startups are absolutely amazing for that. There’s a level of energy that we get to explore at J2 because we’re only 13 years old that you just don’t get when you are a big, institutionalized firm. You don’t get that level of autonomy, you don’t get that level of creativity, you don’t get that level of buy-in from the team. All of our team members are so locked into this company, which is really exciting. And that’s happened because there’s a level of ownership that Hugh, Eric and myself have given to the team. As a company, we’re either going to live or die by the team.
Loveing speaks about his career at J2 Marketing and the traits that helped him get where he is today.
What services does J2 offer?
We have four main departments: marketing, studio, design and a web department. Our goal is really to be a marketing firm for our partners. If they want us to just run blogs, or help with a rebrand. If they are looking for a more comprehensive approach, the same way any company would have a legal firm for their legal representation, we do the same things for businesses marketing-wise. Our web team handles websites and landing pages. Our design team handles branding, rebrands, visual identities, print design, digital design. Our studio team does everything from digital ads to TV commercials to headshots. Then our marketing team handles everything from social media management to traditional and digital advertising.
We’ve recently acquired a research company called Thrum Analytics. So we can now infuse our marketing with a lot of research and data to help back up the decisions that we’re making. Informed marketing will always do better than guessing. So our marketing strategists pretty consistently become business strategists. Thrum allows us to deliver more than just marketing for our clients. So that’s been a really exciting acquisition for us.
Are most of your clients based in the South Bend-Elkhart region?
The majority are in this region. It’s probably a 70/30 split. We have partnerships in Colorado and Florida, so we’re spread across the nation. But our big focus is maximizing our opportunity here. A big part of our heart is South Bend. How do we elevate the standards of South Bend? How do we bring a higher level of design and creativity and ingenuity into the businesses here and help support them? We want to see this city do really well and we want to support the other people who also believe in this city and decide to build their businesses here. That’s something that’s really important to us as a company.
Have you had any problems finding talent?
No, our employees are local. Some of them have even moved to the area. Our director of operations moved from Louisville, Kentucky, with his family. Everybody else, for the most part, has come from this area. So building our company culture has been very important for us. We’re one of those companies that’s not very keen about remote work. And the reason I specifically use that word culture is because I think every business is kind of a little cultural experiment. How do you make that something where people get off work feeling fulfilled? So understanding the balance of work, creating culture and a community is important.
Can you share any personal branding tips for young professionals in the region?
If I were to do an endeavor for this myself, the first thing I would be asking is, what am I trying to accomplish with this brand? If it’s brand awareness, to get myself out there to as many people as possible, then there’s a whole slew of strategies that you can apply. Make sure your content is updated and professional, along with a good headshot. If the goal of the personal brand is to get hired by a big company, your strategy would be completely different than if the goal of your personal brand is to become a thought leader in your industry.
For example, Chris Do is a thought leader in the creative world. He’s putting himself out there because he’s an industry expert with 20+ years of experience, and wants to help other businesses. All of that’s accurately communicated in his brand. So the biggest goal is understanding why you are pursuing a personal brand.
Question number two, my audience, who am I trying to appeal to? If I’m trying to get a job and I overly brand myself, that’s not going to help me get that job. In that case, your audience is the hiring manager, so you want to align yourself appropriately to that. And as much as you love or hate algorithms, if you start watching a couple videos on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok on personal branding, you’re going to start getting fed with content on how to build a personal brand for that specific audience that you’re going after.
Looking ahead, what does the next decade look like for J2 Marketing?
There’s this book called, “Win without Pitching Manifesto.” It’s a small book, but it’s one of the best reads ever on marketing and understanding your audience. In the book, the author says one simple line that’s stuck with me: “Healthy things grow.” The difference between a business and a plant is that a plant will grow as long as you just water and put it in the sun. Businesses take a lot of work to grow and so our plan and our desire is to grow and to do that in a healthy manner.
Over the last four years we’ve experienced what healthy and unhealthy growth looks like. That’s a really hard but really important lesson to learn. We’ve come to understand the value of looking at the numbers to inform what we are allowed and not allowed to do. So that’s been a big part of our focus, setting up a system that allows us to scale and grow in a healthy way.
But the goal is growth. The goal is to continue bringing people along on this journey, fostering collaboration, and building something that’s bigger than any one of us. Growing is scary because you’re constantly walking into new territory and the amount of times that you have to tear down a process to build a new one. What we’re building now is really amazing, but in five years, when we’re two to three times bigger, we will have to tear it down and rebuild it again, because it’s a different company.