Category: Blog Post

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Ron Villacarillo Named Head of Creative at Dotted Line Agency

Independent, award-winning marketing agency Dotted Line has hired ad agency veteran creative leader Ron Villacarillo as Head of Creative. Villacarillo reports directly to Lauren Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Dotted Line.

Villacarillo brings a wealth of experience, having worked with agencies nationwide, shaping brands from Fortune 100 companies to non-profits. His diverse portfolio reflects his deep industry understanding. While his background is in visual storytelling, he takes pride in collaborating with teams to discover and express the soul of a brand through any medium. He believes in creating work that is authentic, entertaining, and culturally resonant.


“I’ve watched Lauren and Dotted Line grow since their early days as an agency, consistently impressed by their tenacity and evolution. I’m thrilled to unite our efforts, aiming to enhance creative excellence and ensure ongoing success, said Ron.”


See full coverage in Little Black Book.

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DLA earns Bronze Award from Advertising Club of Richmond

Honored to share that our rebrand work for Shades of Light has earned us a bronze award in the Design category at this year’s Richmond Show! It’s humbling to stand among such creative giants in the Richmond community. Thank you Advertising Club of Richmond. Massive thanks to Shades of Light for trusting us with their vision, and to our team whose dedication brought it to life!

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Optimize your marketing efforts and watch your ROI increase

Every successful company focuses on attracting new customers or deepening relationships with its existing customers. One critical way to do that is with effective marketing – of your product, your service or your people.

But are you spending enough time and energy analyzing your data? Your aim is to determine if you’re getting the best return on your marketing spend. We see it time and time again: Marketing teams think it’s easy to pluck that out of a sea of data, but they jump in without knowing what they truly need to look for.

Here’s why 83% of marketing leaders at top companies say it’s hard: The information you need to gauge marketing efficacy often requires culling a combination of data points and, perhaps, their interrelationships. For example, you might see overall stagnant sales, but a deeper dive might reveal an uptick with a new product or in a geographic region. You need to peel back another layer to understand what’s driving those gains and assess how you might apply learnings to replicate that performance in another product line or market.

A results-oriented business recognizes that marketing drives the company toward immediate and stretch goals. But your leaders need to look beyond why marketing is important to how it plays a part across your enterprise. From the initial business strategy to onboarding a new client, you find a marketing expectation – and opportunity.

marketing across the sales journey

Connected data points point you in the right direction

Integrating and understanding the impact of your marketing efforts across your organization creates levers that you can push and pull to make meaningful change. That’s because you now are analyzing the data to know precisely what’s working – and, even more importantly, what’s not, because that is wasting marketing dollars, which nearly 40% of companies today have reported experiencing.

With these new insights in hands:

1. Understand your consumer’s journey.

Our previous post spoke about the importance of a research-based consumer journey, which helps you set up different marketing tactics that support every stage of that buying experience. Research-based insights provide a solid foundation for future decision-making.

2. Create paths that drive sales.

You must dig into that data to ensure you’re capturing the right information that can point you to the right actions. Make sure you understand the impact of your marketing activity across earned, paid and owned across the various stages: awareness, interest, consideration and purchase.

3. Calculate ROI by mapping conversions.

You’re looking for the bottom line on your marketing efforts. Weigh how much you spend against the volume of business growth to determine how much each new customer costs you. The better you tell your company’s brand story and promote your product, the higher your return on your marketing investment. Of course, other factors come into play – the uniqueness and demand for your product and the caliber of your sales team, just to name a couple – but conducting these simple exercises on a set frequency will help you map trends over time.

When you break down your sales processes into what your prospect experiences at each moment, you can develop tailored marketing that serves up exactly what they need to take the next step forward. You also can then go back to your performance data to break down what tactics are working and where you can make your limited marketing dollars work more for you. 

Many of the clients we serve are growing in midmarket status, with burgeoning full-spectrum marketing programs in step with their organization’s growth. The more you grow, the more pressure they face to improve your ROI. With larger marketing budgets come large risks – and rewards, which is where we prefer to focus. With every new creative campaign, we return to the analytics, as we help businesses align your customer’s journey and marketing touchpoints to quickly close gaps and seize opportunities to maximize your spend. 

Image credit: Jamie Street 

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How the right teams help you reach your marketing growth goals faster

By Lauren Sweeney

Emerging companies often focus on developing a silver-bullet marketing approach or a proprietary process or product to help sell – important elements in the scaling journey of a business. But many of those companies fail to invest energy or resources into where ideation starts.

An effective marketing formula draws in both art and science. Creating engaging ideas that grab attention or educate customers about your offer begins with expertise before you even start thinking about those concepts. Many different disciplines come together to create this magic formula.

When you partner with an agency, you’re not partnering with a business: You’re partnering with talent who possesses refined, specific skills. This talent, when built for the right team and challenge at hand, is poised to deliver great creativity, which, in turn, generates results. And the best agencies hire top talent, which is a core ingredient of their success.

Dotted Line takes this one step further because we’re in invested in your growth to drive our growth. Our model starts by having the right A-level talent engaged in a business problem up front to develop work that makes a measurable impact on your business.

But talent is only part of the equation. We also bring together the right “fit” of team members, who demonstrate positive energy and shared values. Then we give them the freedom to do what they’re great at: shine for our clients.

How effective are your marketing teams?

We believe you should start with your people and how they work together, peeling back the layers to understand what energy is going into your marketing efforts.  After all, consumers ultimately buy into stories and momentum above all else. Forming and nurturing high-performing teams with design, branding, and content experts – who care as much about the business impact as the creative output – is the first step.

But you need to keep digging, by asking yourself questions to analyze your marketing team’s performance:

  • Does your team understand the global picture of what you are working to accomplish? In simplest terms, do they get it?
  • Does your team buy into and work under the same shared values?
  • Do you see healthy working dynamics, such as collaboration and communication?
  • Is the development of your marketing pieces flowing seamlessly across the team? Or do things always seem to be coming off the rails at the handoffs?
  • Do your weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports show forward progress?

Partnering to hit shared goals

Our niche at Dotted Line is working with emerging companies, many of whom likely have growing in-house marketing teams. We come in as a partner to augment those internal capabilities, as we work together to reach your business goals more quickly.

To us, having high-performing teams both within our client and agency is the secret sauce that positions your brand to lead your business in growth.

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How purposeful creative solutions turn attention into measurable growth

By Lauren Sweeney

My daughter just celebrated her 4th birthday. As a parent, I’m enjoying this time because many of the small moments we often look past as adults come as a big deal to her. Her latest fascination is staring at the night sky and counting stars. She points out the moon and draws lines in the sky with her finger. Amid the vast, dark evening sky, she loves to figure out what shapes she can create.

Her experience parallels DLA’s own story, as we looked at today’s complex and, frankly, messy media landscape and thought there had to be a better way. And there is. We step in with our clients to plot and unpack opportunities across a strategic path that delivers measurable growth for their business.

Everything starts with understanding your customer. If you’re not reaching them where they are and telling them what they need – not want – to hear, then you’re wasting what might look like great creativity and setting it loose in uncharted skies. Not convinced? Research shows that 26% of marketing spending fails to hit the mark.

No matter the state of the economy, companies say they have limited dollars to invest, but marketing is critical to building awareness and engaging with current and future customers. As they mature, their marketing needs evolve in lockstep. At DLA, we always start with strategy and wrap it with storytelling at every touchpoint in the customer journey.

Taking your marketing to that next level begins with asking yourself some critical questions.

1. How well do you understand your target consumer and their buying preferences and journey with your brand?

You’ve long heard the customer’s always right. When it comes to marketing, that’s never been truer. Understanding your customer’s expectations, objectives and interactions is essential to crafting a marketing strategy that hits those goals. DLA’s research team focuses on your business, of course, but we learn just as much by studying your key competitors.

We use those insights across the full buying experience because no single customer action occurs in a vacuum. Effective marketing transitions seamlessly with the customer through that journey. By defining your target persona, we help you step into that person’s shoes to consider their experience. 

2. Is your message telling a story?

Effective brand storytelling weaves together facts and emotions. For DLA, this is when we begin revving our creative juices. Armed with strategy and customer insights, we weigh how different messages and channels will best meet and connect with your audience. We believe in leading with emotion rather than a cut-and-dry sales pitch. The more you engage with your target, the deeper you build the relationship and the closer you advance to creating an advocate – not just another customer.

Tie in the story behind your brand. Help customers buy into why you’re here and why it matters.

3. Do you have clear key performance indicators for your marketing mix at each stage of the buying journey?

We recommend setting at least one key performance indicator at each stage. Align that to the message your customer needs to understand and takeaway from their interaction with your brand. If you aren’t tracking progress, you don’t know if you’re advancing or retreating from your goal.

As an agency designed for emerging brands, we have built our business in helping our customers generate sustainable growth. We help our partners refine their internal brand and self-understanding, gather unprecedented levels of insights on their customers and markets, and pursue the appropriate-to-them marketing mix that aligns with corporate goals. We believe in rolling up our sleeves, digging into research, and then arming our creatives with a strategic plan that gets them thinking in the right way to deliver for our clients.

Stayed tuned for our next post, which will look at how we assemble A-level players to deliver creative that sizzles and delivers growth.

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Mind Over Mountain: Five Lessons I’m Taking into 2023

By Lauren Sweeney

In late August, I stood at the base of a mountain in Utah.

Over the next 36 hours, I hiked it 13 times up and down, struggling each time to gather the energy to repeat my ascent. By late afternoon on the second day, I had hiked 29,029 vertical feet — roughly the equivalent to the height of Mount Everest.

This was Everesting. It was my misogi challenge for 2022: one in which I set an impossible goal designed to uncover what I’m capable of. I’ve learned a lot from this form of goal setting over the last four years, with an eye on applying these lessons to push Dotted Line forward.

My experience on that Utah mountain gave me much more than anticipated. Here are the lessons I learned that I’m carrying into 2023 and beyond.

1. Tackle your goal with grit and perseverance.

Any challenge comes with unforeseen problems, so we shouldn’t be surprised when these issues surface. Working through problems and adversity often separates those who will achieve their goal and those who won’t.

The difficulty of the challenge is what makes your success that much sweeter. That conviction when reaching the goal fuels a mindset of greater confidence and mental fortitude.

2. Attitude means everything.

As a mentor has shared with me about agency ownership, “Your attitude determines your altitude.” That’s because our thinking and beliefs drive our behaviors.

In our eight years, Dotted Line has ridden that coaster of highs and lows, ups and downs. If we believe we can tackle a pitch, we can. If we believe we can answer creatively to the toughest client test, we can. Positivity makes everything come together in magical ways.

3. Break it into bite-sized pieces.

Scaling a team, a product, or a company is an uphill challenge. Breaking the effort into individual steps focuses you on smaller pieces to complete and then move on to the next.

You control the pace of that progress, including if you need to break down one step into micro-steps. The important thing is that you don’t stop but simply keep moving forward with progress.

4. We are the stories we tell ourselves.

In agency ownership, there are seasons when we have momentum, and every move feels like a win. Then there are years when we don’t achieve our goals. This happens in business.

You can’t succeed if you don’t try. I’ve learned the hard lessons of remaining optimistic, learning from our misses, and keeping focused on my purpose and ultimate desired outcome.

5. The journey is the ultimate success.

Part of the mantra at Everesting is, “The journey isn’t about winning or losing; it’s about winning and learning.”

This past year at Dotted Line, we saw success with notable new clients, award-winning creative work, and business expansion. We learned about our shifting culture and people priorities to align with where we’re headed next. We learned about operating in our sweet spots and how to focus our talents.

No matter the season – whether it be a year of peaks or valleys – there is support, growth and much to appreciate in life.

This article has been edited for length. Visit Little Black Book to read the full version.

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Tuesday Thought: The Power of What We Say

Last week, I took off on another training hike in preparation for the 29029 Everesting challenge, now coming up in less than a month. Our group, which included my colleague Emily Shane and two others, selected an 18-mile trail, which we covered in about 8.5 hours. This was a big step toward our Everesting experience, where we’ll hike more than 30 miles over 36 hours.

About 7 hours into this strenuous hike, our legs were tired, some of our crew had run out of water, and we couldn’t wait to just stop. We’d hit the point when doubt starts to creep in. Our small crew started talking about what motivated us to sign up for this type of challenge. Each of us shared details of our personal stories, what drives us and what we hope to gain from this experience.

I quickly noticed a trend in our conversation. Collectively, we recognized the life lessons we all learn when we aim to accomplish an outsized challenge. We also spoke about the personal influences in each of our lives: great mentors, coaches, friends – and the mantras we pick up along the way from these people.

As we were hiking a 20-40% incline on mile 14, our small group started voicing these positive mantras out loud in a round-robin type of fashion to keep the energy up and positivity flowing.

If it doesn’t challenge you, it doesn’t change you.

Growth and comfort do not coexist.

The hard is what makes it great.

I didn’t come this far to only come this far.

No matter what, remember tomorrow.

We are here to empty the tank. Leave it all on the mountain.

A few years ago, during training for a half-marathon, I kept getting stuck at mile 8. I started studying mindset coaching with retired Navy SEAL Chadd Wright, now an elite ultra-endurance athlete. One of his recommended tactics is a practice called thankful miles. At each mile, you say out loud something you’re grateful for. “We aren’t going to be negative,” Chadd says, “We aren’t going to give our pain a voice. There is power in what we articulate out loud.”

I am not good enough.

I don’t have enough experience.

I don’t have what it takes.

These are dangerous lines to feed our minds.

These important lessons have profoundly impacted my life, and it’s simple. This week, I’m paying attention to what I say out loud. The power in what we say defines how we see ourselves and what we can accomplish.

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Tuesday Thought: Why you should set impossible goals

Every year, I set a big personal goal. A goal so large that it seems impossible to reach. But then, when I succeed, the impacts of crossing that threshold brings benefits I’ll reap the other 364 days of the year. 

Entrepreneur and business leader Jesse Itzler calls this kind of endeavor a Misogi Challenge. By design, it helps us uncover what we’re capable of and tap into possibilities we don’t see now.

Over the past four years, I’ve learned a lot from this perhaps extreme form of goal setting.

Taking on my Everest (literally)

This year, I challenged myself to an endurance hiking event, set for late August. The event is to hike the equivalent height of Mount Everest over 36 hours. My initial training started lightly last November and kicked into high gear three months ago.

A few days ago, I went for one of three lengthy training hikes to help prepare for the event. As with any intentional goal setting, I identified a desired future state: the right hike in terms of distance, elevation gain, and time that aligned with my training plan. I prepared driving directions, gathered supplies and got a good night’s sleep the night before.

But the first few hours of the journey didn’t go as planned.

Our driving directions took us to the wrong side of the mountain, and we lost an hour just getting to our designated starting point. About a mile and a half into the hike, we took a wrong turn due to poor trail markings, costing us another 45 minutes as we realized we were hiking in the opposite direction. With no cell service, we couldn’t rely on GPS. And our fuel supplies didn’t suffice for the added time on the mountain. I had to stop and rest at one point because of unexpected cramping due to dehydration.

I threw my hands up and said out loud, “Let’s just go home.” After all those setbacks, maybe it just wasn’t the right day and under the right conditions to complete that training hikes.

But we stayed and finished the hike. And, as you’d expect, the trek back down the mountain was much easier and more efficient than the hike up.

A universal roadmap for big goals

These types of challenges have taught me numerous lessons over the years. This specific challenge is so large that it is equal parts terrifying and exciting. Because of it, I’ve been studying how to overcome big business or endurance challenges.

According to Itzler, setting a roadmap to accomplish big goals is the same no matter the challenge:

  • Identify and visualize what you want to accomplish and what it looks like when you get there.
  • Acknowledge the personal fear created by the goal.
  • Recognize your internal doubt over your ability to reach the goal. 
  • Define your plan to achieve the goal.
  • Do the work and execute the plan.
  • Solve the right problems when you face unforeseen gaps, setbacks, and challenges. (These problems will happen. Expect them.)
  • Demonstrate optimism and confidence in your mental resiliency.
  • Succeed.

Too often, the problem phase stops people in their tracks. They become so overwhelmed by obstacles in their path that they can’t find the energy to overcome them.

What people don’t recognize is that they’re so close to accomplishing the goal – much closer than they believe and can see. And success is likely just on the other side of that challenge if they can persevere.

My recent training hike was a perfect reminder of this principle put into action. My ultimate August hike is a big challenge. Problems, small hiccups, and setbacks will arise, and we should expect this. But we can’t ever forget that success often is closer than what we might be thinking in the moment.

So, ask yourself: “Am I setting goals that scare me? What am I doing to overcome those fears? And am I closer to succeeding than I tend to believe?”

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Tuesday Thought: How your core principles can drive results

When teams put their core principles into action, they find themselves on a clear path to achieve desired results. Whether we refer to them as principles or values, these guiding tenets come alive in people’s daily conversations, decisions, and choices.

If you need further convincing, just look at Cheryl Bachelder, former CEO of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen – a brand she helped rescue from a serious slump.

I’ve recently had the privilege of getting to know Cheryl and learning more about her mastery of brand management and servant leadership. From working on brands including Domino’s Pizza, Nabisco, Gillette, and Procter & Gamble, she knows how effective leadership can drive a company’s revenue performance.

Cheryl often talks about the need for a bold destination and a compelling strategic plan – a roadmap that gives clarity as to what a team will accomplish. While the roadmap is essential, Cheryl notes that it can’t drive superior results on its own. Rather, the roadmap is the what; teams need to decide how to work together to accomplish a plan.

This is where core principles (the how) come in. Popeyes’ six core principles are:

  1. Be passionate.
  2. Listen and learn continuously.
  3. Be fact-based and planful.
  4. Coach and develop people.
  5. Be personally accountable.
  6. Value humility.

Popeyes had suffered from declining revenue, a tired brand, low employee retention, and other issues for years. But look at what happened when Cheryl came aboard as CEO and rallied the company around those core principles: Popeyes’ share price grew from $8.90 to $61.31 from February 2008 to December 2016, and its stock outpaced the S&P 500 restaurant sector.

Does your business have bold goals you hope to achieve in the next year or three or 10? That’s great – it should! But you can’t reach those goals with a compelling strategy alone. Your values determine how you will work together to accomplish that strategy. Get aligned on your company’s core principles, and the work will speak for itself.

So, ask yourself: “What are my company’s core principles? Is my team aligned on them, and are they driving the results we want to see?”