Marketing To Win

I'm finally doing more of what many marketers say you need to do.

Getting to know prospects by actually talking to them.

Here are 5 big level things I learned:

1. We make plenty of assumptions we make about our audience that probably aren't true. In my case, I may have over estimated the amount of content that our ICP consumes related to their job... Which presents greater challenges as we build that content out.

2. People are willing to help, especially when there's no sales pitch involved. Even though the person I talked to doesn't use CloudApp, I made it clear I was not there to make any sort of pitch about our product. I was genuinely only interested in understanding their professional life better. Doing that helped, hopefully, break down some barriers so I could get the truth of how these professionals actually work.

3. Our efforts to "personalize" might show how out of touch we are with the market. What do I mean? I'm spending time learning more about customer success teams, and one of my bad assumptions (see point 1), was that most success teams would be rolled up in with support. But the org chart and responsibilities can vary SO much from company to company, that if I write content like that when the success team is actually rolled up under the sales org... my positioning could be way off, and my personalization would show that.

4. People really do spend time doing things that they think are valuable, and if there isn't enough value, they aren't going to do it. (see point 2)

5. The dynamics of my first point actually go even further than I thought... so in the case of customer success, many professionals are using that as a stepping stool to get to another organization at the business, like sales, marketing, product... whatever. So they actually might not even have a full interest in the type of work they're doing because they're focused on a different path.

Fun challenges to discover, think through, and figure out the answers for.

So take the time to talk to prospects and customers.

#marketing

So my new content process broke down last week.

Didn't stick to the process I needed to.

But it's ok, it's testing me on a few of the following things: 🤔

First, do I maintain the habit now that it's been broken?

I didn't get videos uploaded, podcast episodes created, or tweet threads scheduled.

I was too busy, there were too many things at CloudApp and home life that I ended up prioritizing over content distribution.

So do I bounce back and get into the groove again? Or does the lost momentum continue?

Second, am I aware enough to understand why I fell short?

Sure, the easy answer is that I was busy, but really it just came down to how I prioritized my time.

Maybe there really were things that were more important than distributing the content... or were there?

Did I actually just make excuses to myself because there were other things to do?

That's something I have to decide.

Third, depending on how I analyze why I fell short, do I make adjustments that set me up to succeed better in the future?

Was it just bad prioritization? Or have I bitten off more than I can chew?

Whatever the answer may be, now I've got to figure what I DO about it.

And that's where the adventure continues.

#marketing

Ask me anything today. 👇

I want to see if I can spur some ideas, provide some insight, help people out.

Anything marketing related.  You put something in the comments, then I'll respond.

(so long as the volume doesn't get insane... but I don't think it will 😁)

#marketing

The most difficult discipline in marketing is understanding what tactics will drive the most demand even when you might not be able to tie direct attribution to those tactics.

Agree?

#marketing

Chris Walker always talks about splitting out the funnel.

It's a simple exercise. Here's how I did it:

Bam, funnels for every key interaction.

I can now see which forms lead to the most opportunities, the largest opportunities, and the fastest sales cycles.

And now I know how much they're worth, and can start researching how people got there.

Which is going to directly impact what I choose to do each day.

#marketing

What do marketers do too much?

Try and prove their impact rather than IMROVE their impact.

So here's how attribution models can bring you down:

Let me preface this by saying, attribution models are necessary.

Executives need high level numbers to understand how well marketing is influencing revenue.

However, as marketers begin pulling that data for executives, they find that there are plenty of creative ways to pull that data.

Marketing attribution models are inherently ambiguous, and are prone to marketers choosing activities they prefer to weight the most.

If you're an SEO manager, you'll always be pull for a first, early touch weighted model.

Running events and field marketing? You're likely wanting your team to pull last touch.

Soon, you might realize that neither tells the full story, at which point you start looking at martech vendors for multi touch.

But multi-touch can be manipulated even further....

How granular are your activities you're assigning revenue to?

Which activities are your favorite, or that you think personally influence the buying decision more?

There are dozens of out of the box MTA models, and you can even build custom ones to add endless possibilities.

Sure, there IS value in this. HOWEVER, the motivation and principle behind coming up with that number eventually leads down a bad path.

Because you're just trying to prove, not improve, your work.

Sure, put together a model of some kind together (none of them are perfect) so that your executives have a number that you can reference.

Then INSTEAD, spend most of your time splitting out your funnel, looking at data and rates that give you information to change your work and improve your conversions.

You do that, then regardless of whatever model you choose, that overall pipeline number is gonna go up.

And that's really the whole point anyways.

#marketing

The biggest mistake early in my career:

Not understanding how to model the impact I'm driving for the business.

Real impact, not some fluffy marketing metric.

If you think through it right, almost all of your actions can be tied to business outcomes (revenue) in some way.

This doesn't mean that there is direct attribution, plenty of marketing isn't going for the immediate conversion.

But the understanding of the impact can still be there.

Here's an example:

If you are writing content for a blog, you can certainly estimate how much traffic you can capture after you write and get your post to rank at a certain point.

You can then make estimates on what % of that new traffic might convert.

And those conversions (however you define them), can likely be tied to an eventual purchase point.

Which then you can bring back to the original post and assign an estimated value to that activity.

Then all you have to do is execute.

Many of us are probably using the right tactics, but our inability to understand their real impact on the business limits our ability to innovate and focus on the things that really matter.

#marketing

I used to be just a consumer of content, and I had plenty of reasons that kept me from posting online everyday. I wanted to share what some of those reasons were for me and how I overcame them as I made the commitment to build a personal brand. 

There are plenty of reasons you SHOULD post every day, and I walked through those on a previous episode, but today I wanted to share one of the big reasons that led me to post every day, and it might not be what you think. 

On my pseudo anniversary of making it a year of posting content on Linkedin every day, I wanted to walk through the simple principles it took for me to start posting every day. Don't be underwhelmed... while the ideas are simple, the magic is in the discipline.