Authentic Growth through Attracting New Audiences with Josh Becerra
A podcast collaboration between Authentic and System & Soul
In this episode of the System & Soul podcast, guest host Jennifer Zick — CEO and founder of Authentic Brand, a community of fractional Chief Marketing Officers — is joined by Josh Becerra, founding partner and CEO of Augurian, a boutique digital marketing agency. Together, they explore what it truly means to grow a business through attracting new audiences in the digital age.
Josh walks through Augurian’s four core focus areas — paid media, organic search, strategic content, and analytics — and explains why clarity about what you don’t do is just as valuable as what you do. The conversation covers how to set realistic digital marketing budgets, why empathy for the buyer is the real foundation of effective marketing, and how the soul of a brand directly affects the ROI of every digital investment.
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Key Takeaways
- Not all digital marketing agencies are the same — ask about a firm’s founding story and core expertise before engaging. Knowing what an agency doesn’t do is as important as knowing what they do.
- Empathy for the buyer is the true starting point of effective digital marketing. Understanding a prospect’s underlying motivations — not just their surface-level needs — is what separates brands that win online from those that don’t.
- Digital marketing requires a testing mindset before results become predictable. You can’t reach confident budget decisions or reliable projections without first gathering baseline data through real campaigns.
- Brand clarity is a force multiplier for digital investment. Companies that know their purpose, their audience, and their values get more out of every marketing dollar because their message stays focused and resonant.
- Unlike traditional media, digital marketing offers measurable attribution — from the first click to closed revenue — making it possible to refine strategy, optimize spend, and scale what works with confidence.
- A long-game content strategy that meets prospects at the awareness stage — before they even know your brand — can expand the top of the funnel in ways that paid media alone cannot.
Podcast Transcription
Introductions & Setting the Stage
Jennifer Zick: 3, 2, 1. Here we go. Welcome everybody. I’m Jennifer Zick. Grateful to be here as the guest host on the System and Soul podcast. I’m the CEO and founder of Authentic Brand — a community of fractional Chief Marketing Officers that works with growing businesses to help them overcome random acts of marketing and confidently take the next right step in growth. We’re big believers that building healthy brands that fuel healthy growth means connecting with the heart and soul of buyers. And we’re really big fans of the work that System and Soul and their coaches are doing to help entrepreneurial businesses articulate their mission and purpose and vision for existence — honoring not only the process of how a business operates, but the soul of the organization as it relates to values and people.
At Authentic Brand, helping fuel healthy growth means honoring both sides of that equation: process and people. In this miniseries, which we’re calling the Year of Authentic Growth, I’m bringing in some of my favorite people and friends who are business leaders, marketing leaders, and growth leaders to help us understand the elements that drive healthy growth. Today I could not be more excited to be joined by my friend Josh Becerra. He is an expert in digital marketing, and I’m going to turn the virtual microphone over to Josh to let him introduce himself and his company before we jump in on this topic of authentic growth through attracting new audiences. Josh, thank you for joining us.
Josh Becerra: Thanks, Jennifer. It’s great to be here. Augurian is a boutique digital marketing agency. We’re really helping companies with their online presence — getting found, aligning around their goals, and then helping them achieve those goals. We’re a company that believes in both strong operations and our people, and we’re very values driven. Love Authentic Brand and System and Soul.
What Digital Marketing Actually Means
Jennifer Zick: I know you and I travel in communities of connected relationships, and we’re often talking with clients who are wrestling with the same kinds of marketing topics. I recently joined Vistage, so I’m in a community of CEOs and builders of businesses. They throw around the term “digital marketing” like they’re excited and scared of it all at the same time — mystified by it. You and I have been in marketing long enough to know that digital marketing can encompass many different elements, and not every digital marketing agency does the same work. So tell us: what specifically are the problems you’re helping clients solve?
Josh Becerra: There are agencies in the digital marketing universe that do all sorts of different things. For Augurian, there are four things we do really well: paid media — Google Ads, pay-per-click, paid social; organic search, or SEO; strategic content; and analytics. Strategic content is really about understanding the online customer journey — what topics and questions are important to your prospects as they move through their journey — and helping you create great content that answers those so you can be part of that conversation. Analytics is the data science side: understanding how people arrive at your website, how they behave, what group moves into your CRM.
We don’t do websites, we don’t do email marketing. Strategically, we made the decision not to try to be everything to everybody. We go very deep on those four key areas. Marketers need to be asking their agency partners: how did you really get your start? Were you a web shop that started saying yes to Google Ads and SEO because clients asked? Or did you actually get your start doing that work? The founding story is important — where is the real core expertise?
Jennifer Zick: That’s a brilliant question. In my own career, I was part of a fast-growing company that started as a web development company and began saying yes to everything — web hosting, email marketing, banner ads. We became 35 employees doing 35 different jobs, stunted in our ability to grow with depth. It was when that company put an operating system in place that we had to ask the hard question: who are we trying to become, and who are we really trying to sell to? That crystallized everything. I love that you’re a digital marketing firm that knows what it doesn’t do.
Josh Becerra: That level of clarity also translates into who you hire. We don’t have cultural creatives doing fun little posts that get lots of likes. We have data wonks — people who love understanding what’s working and what isn’t. Having clarity of purpose really does help drive a business because you make a lot of other decisions based on it.
The Buyer Journey & Setting Realistic Expectations
Jennifer Zick: A lot of clients are saying: we’ve done some marketing things, we’re known by the people who know us — but now we need to be known by the people who should know us and don’t. We need to be growing through unknown audiences. But often expectations don’t align with what that journey requires. A lot of business owners say they want to turn on digital demand gen like a light switch, because they’re the best-kept secret and once the world knows they’re here, the leads will just flow in. From your vantage point, what’s wrong with this mindset, and how do you help educate potential buyers on what digital marketing requires?
Josh Becerra: The biggest piece is understanding who that prospect is and having empathy for them — understanding what their needs really are. The companies that have the most success are the ones that can really articulate that. People may not be aware of your company today, but they are aware of their needs or their problem. How can we as a company understand what that need is at the earliest stage? That’s what helps us understand the topics, the questions, what’s inside the prospect’s mind in that awareness stage.
Our job as an agency is to help clients understand what that journey is, what topics and questions fall within each stage, and then — who’s winning right now? What is the number-one answer on Google, and do we have a point of view that could be better? We really challenge ourselves and our clients to be the best answer. That’s where you win at broadening the top of your funnel: by empathizing with the customer and articulating answers to their needs in ways that resonate.
Jennifer Zick: I appreciate how you start with empathy and human connection — which is what great marketing is ultimately about. You then stitch that into the real technical environment where these conversations first occur. Buyers, B2B and B2C, are educating themselves through search, through content. I love the idea of not just answering ‘what do we sell them’ but ‘how do we serve them’ — how do we become the answer early in their exploration, before they even know they need our solution?
Josh Becerra: Part of the problem I see is that marketers have this plethora of tools, and many times their heads are in the tools-and-tech-enabled-solutions space — and they forget their prospect is a human with wants and needs beyond the features and benefits of their product. It goes to: I want to get promoted. I want to make a decision that impacts the business positively so people see me doing a good job. Those underlying motivations — the people who connect to those are the ones having real success.
Jennifer Zick: Marketing is simple, it’s just not easy. It’s changing at warp speed, but also it hasn’t changed at all. It’s about human-to-human relationships — conveying that emotional connection, that soul-level impact. How does my product or service change your life for the better?
Budgeting for Digital Marketing
Jennifer Zick: Another tactical question I’m asked a lot: how much should I spend on marketing? Let’s say I’m a founder of a growing business. I haven’t invested much beyond a basic website and some sponsorships. I’m now starting to understand buyer journey and digital content. I want to do digital marketing. How do I even think about budgeting?
Josh Becerra: There is no silver bullet answer. From a paid media perspective, what influences that answer is what industry you’re in, how sophisticated your competitors are, and how much they’re spending. You’re participating in auctions. If your top competitors have deep pockets, it’s going to cost a lot to play in that sandbox. That’s where a company like ours does industry research to understand the level of sophistication you’re up against. If you don’t have a huge budget and you’re competing against people with big budgets, maybe you win on organic — SEO and a long-game content approach.
The ‘we can do SEO and pay-per-click and content for $500 a month’ — run in the opposite direction. The problem with those engagements is they leave clients with the impression that they ‘tried digital marketing and it didn’t work.’ The right approach is a testing mindset. Put what you believe is a good enough budget in, start testing, and you’ll receive data back that helps you make smarter decisions. After three months we can show clients: this is your cost per acquisition, this is why, and if you scale your investment, here’s what we can expect to replicate.
Jennifer Zick: You and I can’t give clients a promissory note on how many qualified opportunities we can get them at what cost until we start doing the work. You can’t get to predictive analytics without baseline analytics. You have to experiment to draw conclusions, then sharpen results from there. Marketing is both a long-term investment strategy and a short-term checkbook strategy — you have to hold a portfolio of assets working at the same time.
Josh Becerra: Unlike outdoor advertising, where it’s hard to tie impressions to business outcomes, with digital we can literally trace this person clicked on this ad or piece of content, came to your website, completed the form, took that meaningful action — and connect it through into your CRM. When that person purchases, we can say: the value of that purchase came from that click on that ad. That’s how it becomes much easier to predict: if you increase your budget, you will increase leads by this amount, or attribute this much revenue back to that investment. It does take time, but that data loop exists.
Jennifer Zick: The machine requires feeding. You don’t only need a brilliant digital marketing agency architecting the strategy — you need great content and production behind all of it.
Josh Becerra: Depending on the business — if you’re selling a $5 widget versus a multi-million dollar B2B deal with a six-month sales process — the strategy is very different. Maybe we brought someone to the website and they downloaded a piece of content. Now what is our digital strategy to keep bringing them back? How can we align the content we put in front of them with their next step in the customer journey? Think of five rocks a prospect needs to step on to cross a river. They’re on rock two, we know what rock three is, and they don’t — so through digital marketing, we put that next rock in front of them.
The Soul of a Brand & Why It Matters
Jennifer Zick: We could talk about digital systems and platforms and the science behind it, but let’s talk about something just as important — the soul of a brand. A lot of business owners have an illusion that they can fully outsource their brand. Some agency is going to come, create a logo, write the blogs, drive the leads. Talk about the difference between a business that isn’t fully owning its brand versus one that has clarity about who they are, who they’re marketing to, and how their values shine through. How does that affect your team’s ability to succeed?
Josh Becerra: It goes back to empathy. The companies that have this figured out — that know intrinsically what they’re about, what their motivations are, and are really connected to what their prospect’s motivations are — have that alignment. It’s uncommon, and it’s a beautiful thing. Operational frameworks like System and Soul that help you define your purpose and understand your ‘why’ — those companies have a better shot at using digital tools to capture the imagination of their prospect.
When companies aren’t aligned on that, you end up sending multiple messages into the marketplace. Too many messages dilutes your presence digitally. And on that budget question — now you’re cutting your budget in three or four directions because you’re unclear about what will resonate. When companies come to us with clarity and can transmit their understanding of their prospects to our team, our work is much easier.
Jennifer Zick: Having a clear handle on the soul of your brand makes your marketing investments go further and brings more clarity to the market. Absolutely.
Connecting with Josh & Closing
Jennifer Zick: Our time flew. We’re going to wrap up — how can listeners connect with you to learn more about your capabilities?
Josh Becerra: Augurian is on just about all the social channels, so check us out. If people want to connect directly with me, I’m at josh@augurian.com — I am the person who responds to those emails. I love having these conversations, and I’ve loved having this one with you, Jennifer.
Jennifer Zick: Thank you. It’s been a lot of fun. Take care, Josh.
