Alexandria marketing business helps others understand marketing strategies
When Ugly Mug Marketing founder Wayne Mullins first started the business, he didn’t have an office. He was working out of the Hastings Hardback Cafe in the Hastings Entertainment Superstore that used to be on MacArthur Drive.
“I would go there to work. We had small kids. I didn’t have an office. I couldn’t afford an office,” said Mullins at Ugly Mug’s 15th anniversary celebration held last Friday.
Once he could, he leased a small space in the building behind Tamp & Grind Coffee House.
Now, Ugly Mug occupies a much larger space on the corner of Desoto and 4th Streets in downtown Alexandria. It’s the colorful building with Ugly Mug’s mascot, a bright pink octopus with outstretched tentacles holding an umbrella and a megaphone.
Starting out, Mullins had no employees. Ugly Mug was just him. Then about two years later, he hired his first employee. Since then, the staff has grown to include 12 full-time employees, and depending on the time of the year, they about 3-4 part-time employees.
“Right now we have 4 interns as well,” said Mullins.
The fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed but the tools available have drastically changed over the last 15 years, said Mullins.
“For us it’s been about how do we attract people with specialized knowledge who can become, or are interested in becoming, experts in that particular area or with that particular tool,” he said.
Ugly Mug came about because of another business, a lawn and landscape business, that he owned and operated. He didn’t originally set out to start the media marketing services business.
“Over the course of three years, we grew really quickly. And we went from just me to multiple crews, multiple trucks. A lot of our clients were mostly commercial,” he said. “And lot of the clients started asking me, ‘How are you growing? What are you doing to grow your lawn and landscape quickly?’”
His answer to them – the way they did marketing.
“I started doing consulting just on the side for free,” said Mullins. Most of the people he consulted for were friends. “Basically, helping them with their marketing.”
After three years, he sold the lawn and landscaping business.
“At that point, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do. I was still doing some consulting, marketing consulting, on the side,” said Mullins. “And I just decided, based on the number of people I was working with, that it would probably be a viable option to pursue and decided to give it a go.”
According to their website, Ugly Mug got its name because it “stems from the belief that the results should never be compromised – not even for the sake of ‘good’ design. We would rather an ‘ugly’ design that delivers results, than a ‘beautiful’ design that doesn’t.”
How Ugly Mug helps clients varies from one to another, said Mullins, but they tend to help business owners who understand the importance of marketing or advertising but don’t have the time to do it.
“They’re just so busy trying to survive. They bring us in, in those instances, just for time,” he said.
They also help businesses who have been doing their own marketing but realize that they have limited knowledge and abilities.
“When they’re ready to scale, they’ll bring us in because we have specialization in a lot of different areas,” he said.
Ugly Mug not only has clients in Central Louisiana but in other parts of the state.
Meredith Waguespack owner of Louisiana T-shirt company Sweet Baton Rouge has been one of Ugly Mug’s clients for about a year and a half.
“We work with Ugly Mug for our Pinterest strategies. We focus a lot on online business, so we want to be able to find other channels to bring sales in,” said Waguespack, adding that they also have a store in Perkins Rowe in Baton Rouge. “We reached out to them to see if they could help us drive more sales from our Pinterest into our online business.”
She said it created a “whole new funnel for that customer experience if it’s their first time finding us on Pinterest and then coming into our scope of work through our e-mail campaigns and all of that kind of stuff.”
Waguespack said she follows Mullins personally on social media and feels like he has taught her a lot, especially having a deeper-rooted understanding of the customer experience that he wrote about in one of his books.
“I can see that as it flows into through the company Ugly Mug, through the Pinterest strategy work that we do in our business, because at the end of the day it all circles back to the customers in how they experience purchasing from you,” she said. “If you can know and understand that better than you can have a better way of making sure that customer experience is everything positively.”
What does the future hold for Ugly Mug Marketing?
“People often ask me, ‘What’s your big goal? What’s your big thing?,’” said Mullins.
He’s a firm believer in incremental growth.
“What I’m most passionate about is us as a team, as individuals getting a little better each day.”
He envisions a future where Ugly Mug team members, as individuals, thrive in their work and personal lives.
“As a result of those things, Ugly Mug succeeds,” he said.
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