May 22, 2019
Your marketing team writes thought provoking blogs, creates educational webinars, and polished white papers, but what good is all that content if it’s not being activated? Have you considered how your buyers are interacting with your content? Is your content organized by format or by the problems your buyers could have?
A Speaker, Author, Host of the Content Experience, and Co-Founder & CMO of Uberflip, Randy Frisch, challenges marketers to be intentional about the content experience they are creating for their customers. Don’t miss this episode and learn how to activate your content marketing!
Takeaways:
- The goal of content marketing is to drive profitable customer action.
- A content marketer needs to consider what type of content experience they want to put in front of their buyers. The buyers are already having an experience with the content, whether the marketer is intentional about this experience or not, is the difference.
- “70% of the content that we’re creating is going unused.”-Randy Frisch referencing Sirius Decisions
- Think about the content as a nurture campaign. After the buyer interacts with your content, what is the next piece of content that they should be looking at to move them along in their buyer’s journey.
- How do buyers experience content in real life? For example, if someone is watching a Netflix show, they are not waiting for a week before seeing the next episode. How can your content be a series of information to help solve the buyer’s problem?
- There are three areas of content marketing: content creation, content distribution, and content experience.
- The difference between content distribution and content experience is that distribution is just about sending out the content. The experience considers where people will see the content and what content they should be given next.
- There are three keys to creating a good content experience: structure, environment, and engagement. How is the content structured to give to the right people, at the right time? Is the content visually appealing and easy to navigate? How do we personalize the content and serve the next piece?
- There is a five-step framework to creating a good content experience: centralize, organize, personalize, distribute, and generate results.
- When organizing content, do not categorize by format, sort by the solution that your content solves, for the problem the buyer has.
- Earn your way and make sure that you understand what your customers are experiencing first, before diving too deep into the marketing world.
- “The more that we can start to solve with content the same way that we solve for people those real life problems, versus, ‘Here are my products, what do you want?’ That’s really how we have to start shifting our thinking.” - Randy Frisch
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Busted Myths
- Content marketing is simply creating content. The concept goes beyond this, a content marketer has to consider how the content is valuable, relevant, and consistent to the audience they are trying to reach. Does the content help to solve the problem the buyer has?
- Organizing content by format is best practice. The format is not what solves the buyer’s problem. The buyer should not have to search and sift through a company’s blogs, webinars, and white papers to find information about the solution to their problem. Consider your buyers and their journey when deciding how to organize content.
Shout Outs
- Ann Handley - 3:27
- G2Crowd - 19:26
- Drew Davis - 24:49
May 20, 2019
Marketers are used to rocket launching the message out to their buyers, creating eye catching explosions with their brand, and nurturing their prospects by sharing, sharing, sharing. Sometimes, marketers need a reminder to listen.
An award winning Marketing Leader, Brand Strategist, and the CMO of SignalFx, Tom Butta, reminds marketers to listen to prospects and customers, learn the pain points, and own the problem. This episode is filled with “nuggets” of wisdom, that will challenge, encourage, and guide marketers on their journey.
Takeaways:
- Be concerned about what your prospects and customers think of your brand. Be open to what the other groups think, but compare it to your buyers’ concerns.
- Be open and curious to what others are suggesting. Think about what they say. People are often too concerned with waiting to be in the conversation that they are not listening to the ideas in front of them.
- Listen, listen, listen! When creating a marketing plan, listen to the executives of the company, to the clients, and prospects. Compare what they are all saying and search for the “nuggets” that could be ideas for your plan.
- Consider the emotion that your product and/or service is trying satisfy with the solution you are providing and then market to that emotion.
- Be the guide on the buyer’s journey rather than the advisor. An advisor provides suggestions but then they are not there with you in the process. Guide your customers in their journey, empathize and be with them.
- Own the problem that your buyer is facing to market how your product and/or service is the solution.
- Gather customer references that want to share their positive experience. In today’s social media age, it’s not about what “we” say, it’s about what “they” say. Prospects look at the reviews and testimonials before going directly to the source.
- Mobilize the believers in your brand. If your brand has a huge following. Provide a platform for your believers to communicate why they love your brand.
- People never forget how you make them feel.
- “Don’t be afraid to take on something new or try something new because you’re going to learn something.”-Tom Butta
- Be open to learning about the experience that is in front of you, and look at it as an opportunity.
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Busted Myths
- A lot of people know a lot about marketing and you should heed their opinion about your branding, strategy, and logo. This is not necessarily true. Everybody has an opinion and they have the freedom to express it, however, you should be paying attention to the opinion of your buyers and future prospects. What do your customers think of your brand?
- In marketing, it’s best to give your prospects an information overload and tell them all the good things about your product and/or service. Giving your buyers information overload sounds salesy and just creates noise that does not allow them to pinpoint how your brand could truly help them. Get to know your buyers first, learn their pain points and then inform them how your product and/or service can help.
May 7, 2019
Are you a marketer feeling discouraged that your department is thought of as the cost center at your business? Or perhaps your department is respected and you are dreaming about someday having that CMO position, but you may feel intimidated about where to start?
Ever thought of marketing as a game of chess? A Lecturer, Public, Speaker, Radio Personality, and the CMO of VanillaSoft, Darryl Praill, turns on the lights for the match and provides professional insight on how to plan your strategy for victory among the many moving pieces of marketing.
Takeaways:
- Marketing now owns the technology stack of marketing automation software and CRM. They have earned a respected seat at the table and can report the ROI on every campaign.
- The sales funnel has shifted. Buyers are getting smarter and they do not want to talk to sales representatives until the very end when they are ready to negotiate. Now, marketers have the buyers for two-thirds of the sales funnel.
- When you close a big lead, consider: where did the lead come from, what was the campaign, how many touch points did they have? Then celebrate those touchpoints. They DO make a difference.
- Marketing can be viewed as a game of chess. No one piece will win you the game. Consider taking one bigger piece of content and running smaller campaigns from it. Look at how all your pieces can work together.
- When strategizing marketing, consider: What’s the category that our business is in, where do we fit?
- Keep the answers of what you do simple.
- Once a marketer knows their business category, they know the influencers they need to be reaching and who they should be following, the pain points that their buyers are facing, and how their messaging and propositions should be defined.
- “The whole point of [creating] notoriety is making sure that you’re in the conversation.”-Darryl Praill
- When influencers are mentioning your brand in conversation, you are now a trusted player.
- Every single sales cycle starts with a pain point the prospect has.
- When nurturing prospects, do not spray and pray! This only dilutes the frequency that you are in front of your target market.
- “Learn to listen to your gut it is an important input into the decision making process.” -Darryl Praill
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Busted Myths
- Marketing is about picking the right color, producing awesome parties at trade shows, and press releases. These activities are NOT what marketing is about. These are simple tasks done in the pursuit of what a marketer is mandated to do.
- Marketing is not held accountable and does not generate revenue for the company, they are a cost center. Marketers now have the technology to track the success of every touchpoint to determine the level of ROI for each activity. They are held accountable for the leads they generate and the amount of return they get for their efforts put in.
Shout Outs
- Revelation Technologies-51:27
May 1, 2019
You’re on a boat, headed towards a waterfall and there is nothing you can do about it. You see your doom ahead and want to do something about it, but your boat just keeps sailing forward.
What if you reacted as soon as you saw the waterfall approaching? What if your were agile?
This episode is filled with strategy, history, and thought provoking questions of incorporating an agility mindset to marketing. An Author, Podcast Host, Agility Marketing Advocate, and the VP of Marketing at Pantheon Platform, Roland Smart, is our captain on the marketing ship that will keep it from diving down the waterfall.
Takeaways:
- When you put a name on a concept or a process, it gives people the opportunity to rally behind it, build a community, and then create content to support it.
- Agile is designed as a philosophy or approach where it’s difficult to predict the future. In marketing it’s difficult to predict many factors for example, market conditions and consumer expectation.
- Waterfall is a project management method that is opposite to agile. It’s a linear process where a detailed analysis can be used to predict an outcome.
- Agile starts with iterations of a process, then a demo is released of what was created, then a retrospective analysis is done of the process itself.
- The retrospective considers: Was this the best way to execute this process? Should the process be changed? It causes the planners to be intentional about improving their processes.
- With agile, the idea is to make small changes along the way to your process when you see the need for improvements.
- Agile is a mindset that companies as a whole need to adopt in order to fully implement the model when managing projects.
- The mindset allows employees that are involved in the day-to-day operations, the opportunity to come to the executive level managers, and propose ways of improving processes to better achieve the executive end-goal.
- A waterfall mindset is a full top-down approach where the executive end-goals are given, the processes are dictated, and all hands keep driving towards the end goal with the same process.
- You have to get used to failure if you are going to make changes to improve your processes.
- It’s difficult to embrace agility if you cannot drive down the cost of making changes.
- “Making small mistakes in a public way and correcting them, actually has a more significant impact on attach rate than doing something that’s brand consistent on a big scale.”-Roland Smart
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Busted Myths
- Agile Marketing is just the latest trend. There has actually been a very long tradition which started in the early 2000s with the Agile Manifesto, but software developers had already been working with the model for 10-15 years. Around 2011, marketers saw the Agile Manifesto and they adopted it to become Agility Marketing.
- Taking a risk and doing an action that may be slightly inconsistent with your brandi is bad. This is not true when the risk is small, buyers react poorly, and then the company responds quickly and appropriately. It becomes an exchange between the buyers and the brand and the buyers’ attachment is greater. They are involved.
Shout Outs
- Bain & Company
- McKinsey Consulting
- Boston Consulting Group
- Drift
- Peter Drucker
- Business Agility Institute
April 26, 2019
Bueller...Bueller...Anybody? This episode is anything but the teacher at the front of the classroom hoping that students are still paying attention. As this guest will take us to school on how to hold our prospect’s attention, featuring a Speaker, Author, Storyteller and the Founder of Marketing Showrunners, Jay Acunzo.
This episode calls marketers to come to a new level to answer the question, “Okay, now that I have my prospect’s attention how do I keep it?” Acunzo shares his expertise on using shows to hold attention, how to be consistently creative, and why NOT to think of content non-negotiables as shackles.
Takeaways:
- Marketers need to be focused on the next now, meaning that once a prospect’s attention is captured, how do you hold it?
- “A marketer is in the business of holding attention.”-Jay Acunzo
- It is more expensive to keep acquiring customers, than it is to nurture the loyal customers that you currently have. The lifetime value increases while the cost of customer acquisition decreases.
- Referral engines start as customer retention increases.
- A show is one of the best ways to hold attention. When a show is framed like a journey and each episode leads to another, the audience will want to subscribe to view that cohesive flow, to find out what happens next.
- When creating a project, extract the framework from a model that you admire. Then make it your own.
- Once your framework is established you have to master the art of reinvention.
- A framework’s non-negotiables allow the creator to chunk their creativity and really hone in on what specifics can be changed to take the project to the next level. How can we dig deeper?
- It is “far better to use a signal of stagnation to reinvent something then instead of after it’s too late.”-Jay Acunzo
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Busted Myths
- Marketers are in the business of capturing attention, but this is no longer. Marketers are in the business of holding attention. This is more difficult but it builds trust, loyalty, and more revenue.
- If we only serve the people who already believe what we believe, our company will not benefit. You need to build a foundation first with your current customers before you exhaust all your efforts on only acquiring new ones. “You want a higher value out of your existing audience and a lower dollar amount that it requires to get the next group to come your way.”-Jay Acunzo
- To be consistently creative, the creator needs to be constantly inventing new ideas before a framework is established. However, the framework needs to come first to establish consistency with guidelines, referred to as anchors. The creator can then dig deeper. Without the framework, there is little room for consistency across the product.
Shout Outs
- Drift
- Marvel Comics-Iron Man, Tony Stark
April 23, 2019
Stop driving your data analysis in the wrong direction! Get the latest scoop on predictive data techniques with analysis entrepreneur, author, co-founder, President and CTO of Squark, Judah Phillips.
This episode talks all about the difference between leading and lagging business indicators, how to use predictive analysis to make better decisions for the future, and how AI is used as an augmenter to help us focus on the data and the outcomes that matter.
Takeaways:
- Pay attention to your leading and lagging indicators. Familiarize yourself with the difference between the two and the types of data each one can give you.
- It’s okay to use dashboards and KPIs but don’t expect them to give you the best, most in-depth data.
- Descriptive and diagnostic analysis are backwards looking indicators and predictive and prescriptive analysis are more forward looking indicators.
- If you can predict, you can make better decisions. Keep your eyes fixed straight ahead in the right direction.
- There are two types of machine learning: supervised and unsupervised.
- Any technology can be used for bad, but AI will be an augmenter that helps us make better decisions to focus more on the data and outcomes that matter.
- Machine learning can help you identify where you need to clean up your data.
- Don’t forget the ethics in AI. If you are in the AI industry it is important to communicate the positive benefits of AI because some people have a negative perspective of it.
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April 18, 2019
Attention all marketers, networkers and professionals! You won’t want to miss this explosive episode featuring marketing professional, documentary filmmaker, CEO & Marketing Strategist at Scandurra Group, Jane Scandurra.
In this episode, we talk all about the effectiveness of employee advocacy groups for your company’s promotion and engagement, how to develop successful, long-term networking strategies, and discuss the do’s and don’ts of social sharing in an attention economy.
Takeaways:
- Activate your employees through an employee advocacy program. Employee messages get shared more often than corporate messages.
- Make an effort to be present across your social platforms. Use it as an opportunity to network and show what you know. There’s so much value to putting yourself out there.
- Employees want to work for companies that have a purpose. You can use social outreach as a purpose.
- It’s everybody’s job to market. All employees should have opportunities to promote your company. Marketing shouldn’t be the only ones driving it.
- Social media is all about engagement, don’t just share content you see. That’s no different than spam. Add a comment or note to address in your post and put your own spin on it.
- Share personal interests or hobbies in your account profiles rather than just work stuff. You never know what kinds of connections you can make with others.
- In a day with such short attention spans, you’ll only get attention if you earn it. Set yourself up as an expert or go-to person in your field and people will be more likely to pay attention to your content.
- Networking is extremely important. Your network is your net worth.
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April 16, 2019
Get ready to bust some massive myths with demand gen leader, entrepreneur, and Co-Founder of InStereo, Adam Post.
Think you know it all when it comes to creating the perfect marketing strategy? Think again! Marketing automation is a process that takes intention, planning and a lot of effort. This episode is loaded with pro tips you can use to become a Marketing Automation Mastermind!
Takeaways:
- Take an active role, not a passive role in your marketing.
- Make your customer feel heard. Listen first and make sure you understand their needs, wants and pains.
- A great marketer has great empathy. Put yourself in their shoes. Understand what they’re going through and respect that.
- The best marketers have that sales drive and they leverage the marketing tactics to make it happen.
- Define the plan. What are you trying to accomplish and how will you do it over time?
- Tailor the approach to deliver value. People appreciate tailored ads more than generic ads.
- Be in the business to make your clients successful.
- Sales engagement is an authentic one-to-one personalized message from somebody who should own the relationship.
- Get the right tool that fits the needs of the business and the needs of the users in the business.
Links:
April 11, 2019
Refine and perfect your marketing for a seamless customer experience. We’re talking with entrepreneur, marketer, Facebook ad guru, and Director of Business Development at Classic Photography, Keith Phillips.
Developing a successful marketing plan takes time and effort. This episode provides insight into the many aspects of the marketing funnel from initiating interactions to nurturing and to finally closing that deal.
Takeaways:
- Don’t try and automate everything possible just because you can, some things don’t need to be automated.
- Use conversational marketing. Try the 8 word email or text. Start by asking an open-ended question.
- The real goal of your interactions should be the number of sales you can make and how to provide the best experiences for everyone involved.
- Automation should always look authentic.
- The point of email is to initiate real human interaction. Click through rates are great, but reply rates are even better!
- Marketers need to understand the end game of closing the sale by working in sales from time to time. Relationships aren’t just about data.
- You can start conversations via Facebook ads. Use the tools or programs within Facebook to initiate and continue your conversations.
- Match your funnels across all platforms. Make the journey consistent and seamless for the client so they get the same impression of your company throughout the entire process.
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April 4, 2019
Even small companies can make a massive impact with their marketing. Learn how to crush it with Marketing Technology Leader, Storyteller and CMO of NetNumber, Kim Gibbons.
There’s no reason why your company can’t get as much attention as the big guys. In this episode you’ll learn all about the value of being disruptive, how to give your small team a big voice, and strategies for planning epic marketing events.
Takeaways:
- Small businesses have harder decisions to make because they have smaller budgets and smaller teams.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for discounts or breaks if you have a limited budget to work with.
- Don’t let the big brands drown out your voice. Smaller companies can still get their voices heard. Be creative, pull in resources and collaborate with partners.
- To be authentic, you need to ground your story in reality. Be truthful and honest and back it up with customers who can testify in favor of it.
- Don’t be salesy. Be informative and educational.
- When doing presentations, don’t call out errors on your slides. Stay focused on your content and message.
- After running or attending a conference, take time to decompress, discuss what you learned, and what you could incorporate into the next one.
- Be creative and find new ways to draw attention to your brand and booth when attending conferences.
- Marketing’s role is to bring creativity forward. It’s a mix between an art and a science. Use that blend to tell stories in a compelling way.
- Whenever an opportunity comes to you, take it. You’ll learn so much about yourself and your career that will make it completely worth it.
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