![A Trailblazer’s Guide to ABM - Nate Skinner - Hard Corps Marketing Show #97]()
September 19, 2019
Everyone is talking about account-based marketing. It has become a trend and one that has been made out to be complex. It’s time to simplify it to its core.
A Multi-Industry Marketing Leader and the VP of Product Marketing at Salesforce, Nate Skinner, unmasks the notion that ABM needs to be more than what it is, which is just marketing to accounts. Have you read countless articles on ABM, but just want the simplified guide? Then check it out!
Takeaways:
- Account Based Marketing is a way to focus marketing efforts rather than to spray and pray. Decide on the strategic accounts your business wants to reach and then think about the people at that account that you want to market to.
- Sales and marketing alignment is more of a partnership now. The two departments speak two different languages, but they need to be focused on the same goal, revenue.
- “It’s a big opportunity for us marketers to think about the language of sales and then incorporate that into our way of doing things.”-Nate Skinner
- As a marketer, go to a sales meeting prepared to give marketing updates, but start with the sales number. Speak sales in terms of sales to build that partnership. Make them understand that you have the same end goal as them in mind.
- None of the metrics that are green for marketing matter if the revenue and sales targets are not also green. Marketing and sales own the responsibility of driving revenue together.
- Look at your audience and think about where they are spending their time. Consider how you can maximize your marketing on those platforms for a better reach.
- Podcasts allow people to learn anywhere and everywhere that they are, but it also allows a business to expand their brand reach.
- Trailhead is a free training tool that tears down the barriers for people to learn the skills needed to be successful and makes professional development accessible to everyone.
- Understand your business’ product or service and how it makes people feel. If the buyer does not have your product or service, what do they have?
- If you are a marketer and you have never been in sales, listen to a half-day of sales calls. It will give you a picture of what sales goes through on a day-to-day basis and you will get to see how your messaging is coming across to prospects.
- If you are in a stage in life where you are changing careers every few years, do not change anything. The skills that you learn with each experience will only make you better later in your career.
- Don’t be afraid to dream. Be future minded and think about where you want to be down the road and then execute the steps you want to do to get there.
Links:
Busted Myths:
- ABM is not new and it is being made to be something that is very complex. In simple form, it is just marketing to accounts. It focuses marketing to target strategic accounts and then strategize how to market to people at those key accounts.
- ABM is not binary, where if marketing does ABM then they can get rid of all their other strategies. Most companies use ABM to augment their marketing. Targeting specific accounts allows teams to customize the customer’s journey according to their persona and behavior.
Shout Outs
- 47:02 Greg Shotland
- 1:01:04 Arizona State University
![The Content Marketing Troublemaker - Robert Rose - Hard Corps Marketing Show #96]()
September 12, 2019
If you stopped contributing to your company’s blog tomorrow, would anyone miss it? Why are you writing for your blog? What stage in the buyer’s journey does it contribute towards?
These are all questions that if you have not asked yourself regarding your content marketing...it is time you did.
A Keynote Speaker, Podcast Host, Best-selling Author, and the Founder & Chief Troublemaker of The Content Advisory, part of the Content Marketing Institute, Robert Rose, stirs up trouble by challenging marketers to consider the point of their content marketing. Has it been awhile since you created strategy around your content? Then it is time to make some trouble. Check it out!
Takeaways:
- If you were to stop all your content marketing tomorrow, who would miss your content? If the answer is no one, then you have a problem.
- Is your content as good as the product or service that your company provides? If it is, then think about how you can make it better, because your content should be even better than your product or service as it is what draws your ideal customer to your offering.
- When considering your content, think about what makes your content different from your competitor’s. What does your content offer that there’s does not?
- It is not that the attention span of your audience is the same as a goldfish. It is that their patience is reduced for what content they are willing to spend their time with. For example, your blog article versus an entire season of Game of Thrones.
- Content goes unused because there is so much out there offered to consumers that they are more selective about what they will dedicate their attention to. You need to consider, why should your audience spend the time consuming your content?
- Consider how long it will take before your content generates profitability. It will not be the day after it’s released, but think about 6 months from now or a year from now.
- To track ROI on a podcast, the podcast needs to capture the audience as prospects to then be nurtured. A way to do this is to have a newsletter that the audience can subscribe to.
- Prior to starting a podcast, build an audience first either with a blog, newsletter, book, videos, etc.
- Where does your content fit into the buyer’s journey? Does it assist buyers that are at the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, or at the end?
- “Figuring out the function you want to do is way more important than the form you want to do.”- Robert Rose - What do you want your activities to be on your perfect day of work?
Links:
Busted Myths:
- Content is easier, cheaper, and more efficient than ads. - This is NOT the case. Content marketing done well, is more expensive, time consuming, and more difficult. It is everyone’s job, but no one’s strategy.
![The Key to Rehumanize Your Business - Ethan Beute - Hard Corps Marketing Show #95]()
September 5, 2019
Videos are everywhere. You may be thinking, videos are great, I love watching them, but I do not want to be the one in front of the camera. Are you a marketer, salesperson, in customer success, or anyone in business? Then it is time to be on video.
A Marketing Strategist, Author, Podcast Host, and the Chief Evangelist at BombBomb, Ethan Beute, delivers a breath of fresh air to the audience to say that videos do not have to be overproduced, to be great. Do you have doubts about video? Then check out this episode!
Takeaways:
- The Shiny Authenticity Aversion - We are all so familiar with marketing that is produced and well package, that now a consumer’s guard is up when they experience something like this. The trend is going towards that people want authenticity.
- “Sometimes the simplest videos get the most engagement.”-Ethan Beute
- The quality of the video that needs to be made, can be determined by the context that video product will be in. Think about the audience volume it will reach and the longevity that the video will be accessible.
- Videos can be worked into marketing automation. Think about what part of your marketing is lacking that human touch?
- “[Videos] are about leading with your very best sales asset, yourself.”-Ethan Beute
- Your first video may not be great, but accept it is a normal part of the process.
- Get over the fear of being vulnerable and just start taking videos. Have confidence in yourself and your sincerity to the topic of content you deliver.
- You cannot fake the time and attention that a video communicates. Taking a video shows that you care.
- Text can be interpreted in several ways but with video, the tone and message are clear.
- An example of using video for your business could be in your customer experience department. Take the top five tickets that department receives and turn the solutions to those top five, high volume tickets, into videos. This then makes a scalable process.
- “Ultimately we come to life in connection with other people.”-Ethan Beute
- Call to action by Ethan: If you are a fan of the Hard Corps Marketing Show, you have listened to several episodes and have learned a lot, go on and leave a review.
Links:
Busted Myths:
- To do video well, you need to have a producer and the right lighting. - This is not the case. You do not need to outsource a video for production as a lot of the videos that get the highest engagement are the ones that are authentic without the glossy finish. People want to connect with what they can trust, something that is real.
![The Buyer Persona Game Plan - Shannon Prager- Hard Corps Marketing Show #94]()
August 29, 2019
Do you understand the buyer personas you are marketing to? Do you have the data on these personas? Do you think the data you have has all the answers?
A Marketing Leader, Mentor, Author, and the President and Founder of Leadit Marketing, Shannon Prager, delivers a call to action to the audience to dig deeper to get the full picture of your buyers in their journey to form personas.
Have you just been relying on data? Check out this episode and get to the root of your buyers’ decisions.
Takeaways:
- Don’t simplify a detailed issue like understanding your buyer personas.
- “Just because something makes sense at the company you work for doesn’t mean that the buyer is using that same terminology.”-Shannon Prager
- A good way to start a B2B buyer persona interview is to first understand how their organization is set up, who does the buyer report to, what matters to the higher-ups, then ask about the trigger for their original need, then go into the evaluation process.
- Once you have conducted several buyer interviews, you will start to be able to see common language, triggers, and pain points, with which you can then form segmented groups.
- Be curious and dig into the full buyer experience when conducting buyer interviews.
- Understand what your business needs are first before hiring an agency to help you with them.
- To create a demand gen strategy, first understand your customer, then consider how you relate to them. What content can you use to reach them at different stages of the buyer’s journey?
- Getting your “always campaigns” off the ground is a good start when you are just beginning your marketing journey. These campaigns could include email marketing, social strategy, a nurture program, and a web experience targeted towards the personas.
- Use your weaknesses to grow your strengths. Get out of your own way and do not let that weakness keep you from achieving your goal. Go about reaching your goal in a different way.
Links:
Busted Myths:
- All businesses have a firm understanding of their buyer personas.-This is not the case. Often times, companies have data that they think gives them a firm understanding of their buyers, but buyer personas are so much more than the overall data. It’s about asking the right questions and getting into the details of understanding their organization, what matters to them, what triggered their need to start the search for their purchase, what was their evaluation process like and so on. This is not an area to cut corners.
![The Customer Abundance Formula - Peter Fader - Hard Corps Marketing Show #93]()
August 22, 2019
How do you prioritize your marketing efforts for customer retention and then use that to find your ideal customer? It’s more than just the profile. It’s more than the cost of customer retention vs. acquisition. So how is it done?
Step through the door and have a seat because class is in session with Marketer, Author, Entrepreneur, Co-Founder & Director at Theta Equity Partners, and Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of Business, Peter Fader. He educates the audience on what it means to start implementing customer centricity and how to change your mindset from cost to value.
Takeaways:
- Customer heterogeneity-The idea that customers are wildly different from each other. There is no ONE customer, they are all different.
- Each customer is the unit of analysis. What do the customers respond to? How can your company build relationships with them? They need to be a business’ focus.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)- “The future projected profitability for each and every customer.”-Peter Fader
- To consider CLV, the marketer needs to think about how long the overall relationship with this customer will last, how many orders they will buy, what is the size of those orders, and what is the profitability margin of each one?
- The Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value (RFM) of purchases, that each customer’s history has, all influences their customer lifetime value.
- Recency, frequency, and value only apply to non-contractual purchases, this outlook is best used with one-off purchases.
- Taking into consideration RFM, allows business owners to decide whether they want to prioritize their efforts towards a customer that is threatening to not purchase again or if they should place their focus on a customer that just signed on.
- Consider an abundance vs. scarcity mindset, are you more concerned with the cost of customer retention vs. acquisition, or are you concerned with the value that the customer will have overtime for your business?
- Being an entrepreneur provides for an exciting educational experience. Do not be afraid to take a risk and see if your business model will work.
Links:
Busted Myths:
- Businesses need to be concerned with THE Customer.-This is not so, there is no ONE customer. Businesses need to be concerned with understanding all the different customers they might have and prioritizing their efforts to the right kind of customers. Customers are all different, therefore companies need to consider how their product or service should be marketed to these different kinds of customers.
Shout Outs
- 9:27 Lester Wunderman, Father of Direct Marketing
- 50:43 Leigh McCallister
- 54:04 Zachery Anderson, Electronic Arts
![Preparing for the Context Revolution - Mathew Sweezey - Hard Corps Marketing Show #92]()
August 15, 2019
Is your marketing limited based on principles of the past? Is it shackled by reducing your day in and day out efforts to ROI alone? It’s time to realize what’s in the past and what marketers need to realize and implement for the present and future.
Author, Marketing Leader, Podcast Host of the Electronic Propaganda Society, and the Principal of Marketing Insights at Salesforce, Mathew Sweezey, urges marketers to recognize what’s going on in the present versus the past and the importance of looking at the whole picture of the value that marketing brings.
Takeaways:
- The length of a buyer’s consideration process when weighing risk and making a purchasing decision, depends on the level of the risk that is involved.
- Be careful to adopt the ways in which other companies are doing their marketing. We often assume that other people have done their prep work to make sure what they are doing is effective, but you could be blindly following the blind.
- “We should not think about ourselves as manipulators, we should think about ourselves as community builders, as helpers, enablers.”-Mathew Sweezey
- Create what you love, if you like what you are creating then you’ll be consistent which is important.
- When creating content, keep in mind, the execution of the idea is what matters, not the format.
- There is power in community. If there is an area or areas where you lack knowledge, surround yourself with experts in those particular areas. Create a relationship of sharing expertise.
- “ROI is not an effective measure, it’s an efficiency measure.”-Mathew Sweezey
- ROI does not prove the value of marketing, consider using a weighted pipeline in addition to show value.
- Weighted Pipeline - How much is in our pipeline that is actually ready to close? When is it going to close? At what degree of predictability is it going to close?
- Weighted Pipeline measures the volume inside of each stage of the buyer’s journey, the velocity of people moving from stage to stage, and the efficiency that people move to the next stage.
- A weighted pipeline shows the value of marketing because it shows the total amount of demand, when that demand is going to convert into actual revenue, and the efficiency and speed in which it’s going to convert.
- Career advice: Don’t sweat the small stuff, be intellectually curious, and find a way to maximize the thing you love most in life.
Links:
Busted Myths:
- You will get conversions if you hit the right person, at the right time.-This is not the case. This notion came from a time when marketing could not hit the right person at the right time, now, that is no longer the case. The average conversion rate of a Google Ad that is placed for the right person at the right time is 2.35%. This means that 98% of the time, they are not working.
- B2B and B2C buyers are different.-B2B and B2C buyers are the same in that they both are having to consider and mitigate the risk of their purchase. B2C buyers are researching now more than ever before they purchase and are considering the weight of their purchase. B2B buyers mitigate risk that can affect their whole company. They both are doing risk mitigation in their buyer’s journey.
- ROI is the best way to measure the impact of marketing. - The value of marketing cannot be boiled down to just ROI. How do you attach a dollar amount to brand awareness and word of mouth? The best way to measure the value of marketing in addition to ROI is a weighted pipeline.
Shout Outs
- 11:47-Marshall McLean
- 28:25-Tom Webster, Edison Research
- 47:28-Aaron Ross “Predictable Revenue"
![Multi-touch Attribution vs. Lift Study - Andrew Krebs-Smith - Hard Corps Marketing Show #91]()
August 8, 2019
Is your company gathering a lot of data? How much extensive analysis do you do on it? Do you then make business decisions off of it? What happens when the data you get is not 100% reliable?
A Social Advertising Strategist and the CEO of Social Fulcrum, Andrew Krebs-Smith, challenges marketers to pay attention to purchasing behavior and to not rely too heavily on all the data they receive. Is multi-touch attribution really the answer to seeing what’s making the most impact in your marketing efforts? Listen and find out!
Takeaways:
- A company may not capture reliable purchasing behavior data across their market because it’s difficult to understand a user’s behavior across electronic devices. They may click on an ad on their phone, but not their laptop, or vice versa.
- Consider asking yourself, is it worth gating content, or product, to have an increase in data capture, but a possible slight decrease in conversion because a small portion is not willing to give up their email?
- Multi-touch attribution is difficult to be relied on because buyers are interacting with marketing materials before they click. For example, an event could happen that triggers the buyer to have a need. Then they might see a few ads, which leads to an idea of doing a search. Then they click on your ad or fill out your form. How do you track that?
- Consider who the influencers are in the buying decision. How can you market to those influencers?
- Higher education is not preparing marketers for what they need. The industry is changing too much. Having real-world experience will give them the tactical knowledge they need to compete and succeed.
- Lift Study-When you have two groups, a placebo and a control group with a hard separation between the two. You run your usual ads to about 80% of your prospects where the 20% receive ads that having nothing to do with your product or service. Observing what happens between the two groups will allow you to see the impact that your ads are actually having.
- When you are starting out in your career path, do not compare yourself to others around you. Encourage yourself and trust your instincts that you are right where you need to be.
Links:
Busted Myths:
- All the data that you get is reliable and therefore you should do extensive analysis on it.-This is not true. Often companies are spending time and resources to analyze and draw conclusions based on unreliable data. There is too big of a distance between advertisers and the actual consumers to ensure that all the data coming in is completely accurate.
Shout Outs
- 36:54 lululemon
- 1:03:08 Tim Ferriss - The Four Hour Work Week
![Identifying the Fake Gucci Buyers - Kevin O’Malley - Hard Corps Marketing Show #90]()
August 1, 2019
You’re a marketer and just put together some beautiful content, a webinar, a blog article, and a white paper. You see that a certain individual interacts with all three of your marketing materials. You notice this same person has attended every webinar you ever had.
This person must be really interested in buying your product or service right? Think again!
A Marketing Leader, B2B Strategist, and the VP of Marketing at TOPO Inc., Kevin O’Malley, cautions marketers to beware of the “fake Gucci buyers” and to reconsider who you are marketing to as the buyer and who you are marketing to as the influencer. Check it out!
Takeaways:
- “Fake Gucci buyers” are people that will engage with all your marketing materials, they love your brand, they love all your content, but they do not have the purchasing power, so they will never buy.
- ABM is a great marketing strategy, but marketers need to remember to market to the correct people on the purchasing committee. The lower tier roles may be your influencers where their boss is the decision maker, go after the boss.
- Separate out the fake buyers from the real buyers by looking at the actions the person is taking after they interact with your marketing materials. If there is no action, but they are consuming all this content, you guessed it, fake.
- Marketers need to work closely with sales development. This will bring them closer to revenue, allow them to monitor the messaging, and learn faster from the SDR conversations about what their buyers are saying.
- Marketers should not only focus on the top of the funnel but the customer experience as well. Both customer experience and marketing are thinking of optimizing messaging and building a relationship with the brand.
- Marketing from customer experience needs to be careful that they are not just taking from the customer, for example, customer referrals and case studies. They also need to be adding to the customer’s experience with the brand through useful content.
- SDR phone conversations are a great resource for marketers to be able to draw conclusions of common pain points and questions that buyers are having. Then they can personalize their website and their content towards those pain points and questions.
- In your career, don’t just think of your position’s responsibilities but think of the top role at the company. If you were the top person, what would you do? How do you help this role where you are at currently and how can you continue to think big picture?
Links:
Busted Myths:
- People that are engaging with all your marketing materials are your ideal buyers. - Not so, there are plenty of people that are interested in the content that you are marketing, but they will never buy. Similar to “fake Gucci buyers”, these buyers will buy all the fake Gucci products in the world, but there’s no way they will spend the money to acquire a real Gucci product. You may have a business analyst that is highly interested in your webinars and blog articles, but they are not the ones at the company that will make the decision to purchase your product. You should be marketing to the higher tier decision makers above them as the buyer and look at people like the business buyers as influencers.
Shout Outs
- 29:21-Sydney Sloan, CMO of SalesLoft
- 40:00-Pardot
- 42:29-Qualified.com
![Marketing Experiments - Brian Massey - Hard Corps Marketing Show #89]()
July 26, 2019
Some of the greatest baseball players have the highest strikeout rate. Why is this? They tried and went for it. Do you feel like your marketing has become stagnant? Do you need some inspiration to try something new?
An Author, Speaker, THE Conversion Scientist, and the Managing Partner of Conversion Sciences, Brian Massey, returns to the Hard Corps Marketing Show to give marketers the encouragement to go forth and test! Test out your crazy idea and see if it makes a difference for your brand! Check it out!
Takeaways:
- If you keep doing the same thing you are going to get the same results.
- Go do an experiment and see if your crazy idea will have an impact on your brand.
- Focus group data can guide you but it is not reliable to make changes solely from those results. Run a test to get a larger sample size.
- You do not have to have a PhD or be a scientist to do testing in marketing.
- Get comfortable with the idea that a lot of experiments will fail. Learn from the failure and work through it.
- Consider testing causality. For example, are people finding your business from the search bar or are they buyers that know what they want, so they use the search bar and type in exactly that?
- Have a measurement of your campaigns all the way through to the CRM. This will better assist with understanding what efforts are driving conversion.
- Aim to optimize your marketing campaigns that are performing.
- Consider doing a podcast, it builds trust with your audience and it builds relationships with your guests.
- Conversational marketing can increase credibility with site visitors and grow lead generation.
- The best time to ask someone to do something, is right after they have done something.
- Consider asking your buyers after they have made a purchase, what almost kept you from purchasing today?
Links:
Busted Myths:
- You should always do the same thing in marketing, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. - You can always be optimizing your marketing. If you keep doing the same thing you are going to get the same results. Testing allows you to see what you can do to get better conversion rates.
Shout Outs
- 16:32 - Dr. Diane Hamilton
- 46:59 - Michael Greenberg
![Content Marketing World - Cathy McPhillips - Hard Corps Marketing Show #88]()
July 18, 2019
Content is everywhere, so much that without strategy, it will be under utilized. How can marketers maximize their content marketing to get more buyer data, track ROI, and prioritize their efforts? What if there was an event that a marketer could go to, to get armed with practical strategy for maximizing content marketing?
A Marketing Leader, Digital Strategist, and the VP of Marketing at the Content Marketing Institute, Cathy McPhillips, lights the path for marketers to find Content Marketing World, an event where marketers can grow and learn to better their content marketing. Check out this episode for all the details and a marketing executive’s strategic approach.
Takeaways:
- Create content that is valuable to your prospects. Content should be helpful and educational, does it solve a question the prospect has along the buyer’s journey?
- Build out your content marketing process, so it will provide you data on prospect engagements.
- What content topics do you have for your blog that could be categorized under bigger themes? Use those bigger themes to dedicate your reporting to and see what topics are getting the most engagement.
- Marketers can draw the conclusion of implied interest when a prospect interacts with multiple pieces of content on the same topic. Use this implied interest to engage with the prospect and build a personalized experience.
- Use the data from prospect engagement with your content to create segments based on content interest. Then deliver targeted calls to action based on those interests. For example, people that want to know more information about content marketing, could receive an email with a link inviting them to attend Content Marketing World.
- Content Marketing World is a conference in Cleveland, Ohio this year from September 3-6, that will have around 4,000 attendees. There are 14 different tracks that attendees can choose from to get the most out of their session choices based on their learning and growth goals.
Links:
Busted Myths:
- Content marketing IS marketing.-This is not the case. Content marketing is not general marketing. There are so many different pieces of marketing such as product marketing and advertising. Content marketing is just one piece of overall marketing.
