The Revenue-Driven CMO

Today's guest has been mastering their marketing and advertising skillset since they started their career at Proctor & Gamble, and they've kept learning ever since, even while serving as the CMO for Microsoft US. Grad Conn is the CMO of PROS and is a prolific producer of amazing B2B & B2C marketing content. In this episode, Grad shared career advice for new marketers, why knowing the history of marketing and advertising is so valuable, and how to never stop learning.

Takeaways:

• The freedom offered by start-ups and smaller firms is appealing to young marketers that are fresh out of school, it's better to start out working at a larger marketing company so you can establish a strong marketing foundation.

• Treat everything you do as a learning engagement and never let yourself stop learning. If you don't keep up with the context of each iteration, you won't be able to understand how to interface with whatever great innovation is eventually created.

• Advertisers and marketers need to study the history of their own profession so they understand the building blocks of their discipline and what advances have been made by those that came before them.

• Part of the beauty of advertising is that no one can copyright an advertising idea, which means that you can apply the same idea to your situation and update it with the correct context. To discover these ideas, start reading old advertising books and don't stop.

• With the world moving at a breakneck speed, consumers feel overwhelmed making even trivial choices harder to make. If your brand simplifies the decisions that consumers have to make, they will greatly appreciate it and reward you with their loyalty.

• While you can't watch every ad campaign ever created, if you love advertising and marketing, you'll make a point to consume more ads and do so thoughtfully.

• With where the economy is heading, businesses won't have the luxury of easily increasing their growth through mergers and acquisitions. They will have to rely more heavily on organic growth and invest more in their sales and marketing operations.

Quote of the Show:

• "As soon as you sort of stop investing in learning and being interested in the future, I think the future passes you by" - Grad Conn

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gradconn/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/gradconn

• Company website: https://pros.com/

• Blog: https://www.copernicanshift.com/

Shout Outs:

• Satya Nadella - CEO of Microsoft

• Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella

• Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins

• Ogilvy & Mather - Advertising Agency

• Bill Richardson

• Advertising Pure and Simple by Hank Seiden

• Mad Women by Jane Maas

• A Big Life (in Advertising) by Mary Wells Lawrence

• How to Advertise by Jane Maas and Ken Roman

• Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy

• Jasper.ai

• Copy.ai

• Think Bigger by Michael W. Sonnenfeldt

Ways to Tune In:

• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5f9c8c1a-fbf5-43c7-b7eb-958674860156/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic

• Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic/id1444680950

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OCuYchAG8TlGv82YARRhy?si=c4050290cbb54c65

• Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9tb3JlbWFya2V0aW5nLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz

• Listen Notes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic-rdU1oESluqs/

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/tU2fXeddzU0

Performance Marketing Insiders is sponsored by WebMechanix, the performance marketing agency that makes you smarter. Learn more at https://www.webmechanix.com/

Performance Marketing is produced by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through B2B podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/

Today's guest is a longtime marketer that has been recognized as one of 2021's Most Outstanding Women in Business and is flipping marketing's position within organizations on its head. Esther Flammer is the CMO of Wrike. Esther discusses the role of marketing, how to get a seat at the table to make strategic decisions, and why you should highlight your customers.

Takeaways:

• Marketing is not just a support function, marketing can and should be a strategic driver for any organization. Marketing should have its finger on the pulse of the market and understand how the organization needs to position itself to capture the market.

• For marketers to earn a seat at the table and be able to make a bigger impact, they need to understand the organizational priorities and build relationships of trust to ensure that they can have the appropriate conversations if they disagree with the priorities.

• Marketers need to build their point of view based on data and their analysis of that data in order to properly evaluate strategic options. Marketers need to be able to build a business case around why their idea is good for the business.

• For product-led companies, the "land and expand" go-to-market model can be extremely successful.

• Highlight your customers' success stories. This will endear them to you even more and by putting the spotlight on their organization it will reflect well back on your company.

• Because many companies will have their own use cases and best practices, your marketing should reflect a certain level of segmentation and you need to ensure that you're producing the right content to help them get to the next level

Quote of the Show:

• "Marketing is not just a support function" - Esther Flammer

Links:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/estherkflammer

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/estherkimflammer/

• Website: https://www.wrike.com/

Ways to Tune In:

• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5f9c8c1a-fbf5-43c7-b7eb-958674860156/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic

• Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic/id1444680950

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OCuYchAG8TlGv82YARRhy?si=c4050290cbb54c65

• Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9tb3JlbWFya2V0aW5nLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz

• Listen Notes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic-rdU1oESluqs/

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/5YJUt_N4X7o

Performance Marketing Insiders is sponsored by WebMechanix, the performance marketing agency that makes you smarter. Learn more at https://www.webmechanix.com/

Performance Marketing is produced by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through B2B podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/

Today's guest is a serial entrepreneur, B2B marketing thought leader, frequent podcaster, and U.S. Marine Corps Veteran. The Ringmaster, Casey Cheshire, is the Founder & Podcast Architect at Ringmaster Conversational Marketing, the author of Marketing Automation Unleashed, and the host of The Hard Corps Marketing Show & Creating The Greatest Show. Casey shares how B2B companies can use podcasts to listen to and learn about their customers, generate an endless source of marketing content, and create stronger relationships.

Takeaways:

• Marketers have a tendency to get overly creative with their copy, but unless they represent their ideal buyer, they're appealing to the wrong person. Instead of trying to invent the words that drive action, listen to your customers to find the right words.

• A great way to engage and listen to your customers is to invite current, past, and potential customers onto a company podcast and ask them about their successes, their challenges, and what keeps them up at night.

• Listen back to the recorded episodes of your podcast to identify the exact terminology that your customers use when describing challenges that your solution can help them overcome. If you put in the effort to listen, the results will show in your revenue.

• Regardless of your position within a company, anyone can start a podcast. If you're hesitant about having to talk a lot, as the podcast host, that's not an issue. Hosting an interview podcast means you get to ask the questions and the guest does the talking.

• As the host of a B2B podcast, you get to build relationships with customers and prospects that can extend far beyond work and also help you build more robust customer profiles based on the qualitative data you generate on the podcast.

• Beyond gaining a better understanding of your customers and their needs, B2B podcasts can generate sales, word of mouth, and rich content for every step of your buyer journey. For example, Casey turned a year of podcasts into his book.

• Although 2 million podcasts may sound like a lot, compared to the over 200 million blogs in existence, new podcasts are still in the early adopter stage of their growth cycle.

Quote of the Show:

• "It's less about being creative and inventing, it's more about listening, hearing, and then giving it back to people." - Casey Cheshire

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseycheshire/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/CaseyChesh

• Company website: https://ringmaster.com/

• Marketing Automation Unleashed: https://a.co/d/i77Csjr

• The Hard Corps Marketing Show: https://www.hardcorpsmarketing.com/

• Creating The Greatest Show: https://www.creatingthegreatestshow.com/

Shout Outs:

• Traction by Gino Wickman

• The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell

• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

• Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

• LMNT - flavored salts for water

• Dan Sullivan

Ways to Tune In:

• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5f9c8c1a-fbf5-43c7-b7eb-958674860156/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic

• Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic/id1444680950

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OCuYchAG8TlGv82YARRhy?si=c4050290cbb54c65

• Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9tb3JlbWFya2V0aW5nLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz

• Listen Notes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic-rdU1oESluqs/

• YouTube: https://youtu.be/0XAPalUqKZM

Performance Marketing Insiders is sponsored by WebMechanix, the performance marketing agency that makes you smarter. Learn more at https://www.webmechanix.com/

Performance Marketing is produced by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through B2B podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/

Marketers need to tie their efforts to revenue. This episode features an outstanding revenue-driven marketer with almost a decade of experience in the industry. They are a renowned strategic leader and thinker with extensive expertise in lead generation and direct response marketing. Today's guest is Patrick Manser, the VP of Marketing at GoHealth. Patrick discusses how to lead a team of marketers in implementing a direct response funnel, why your team needs to be immersed in direct response, and how to find the leaks in your customer journey.

Takeaways:

• Marketers can turbocharge their consumer acquisition engine by creating a direct response marketing engine. It's all about tying your marketing activities to revenue.
• Direct response allows you to share the results of a campaign in concise and precise ways that people outside of marketing can understand. This way, you can share what exactly you do with your marketing budget and what revenue point is attached to it.
• Because direct response marketing is all-encompassing, to find success using it, your team needs to immerse themselves in every aspect of it. This needs to be top of mind while creating ads and writing copy and it requires careful tracking of the funnel.
• It's vital that your team is focused on the same metrics and that they understand how to improve those KPIs from multiple angles. This starts with having a clean funnel to provide good data to base decisions on and help you avoid long-term issues.
• To set up direct response, understand and document the funnel. Use sample customers to find leaks in the customer journey. Solve one funnel issue at a time. Dedicate parts of your team to fix the top, middle, and bottom. Start a rapid test and learn process.
• It's important to include the entire team in the performance analysis. Every member needs to know where changes need to be made and why they need to make those changes based on the analysis of the team's results.
• Although they can be hard to find, marketing teams need someone with an analytical background that can apply that to marketing. These individuals can supercharge the learning process and keep creative employees focused on optimizing the process.

Quote of the Show:

• "If you don't have a backlog of creative that you have ready to test, you're probably not doing the job right" - Patrick Manser

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patmanser/
• GoHealth Website: https://www.gohealth.com/
• Open Positions with GoHealth: https://www.builtinchicago.org/company/gohealth

Shout Outs:

• Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
• Neil Patel
• Hacking Growth by Morgan Brown and Sean Ellis

Ways to Tune In:

• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5f9c8c1a-fbf5-43c7-b7eb-958674860156/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic
• Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic/id1444680950
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OCuYchAG8TlGv82YARRhy?si=c4050290cbb54c65
• Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9tb3JlbWFya2V0aW5nLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz
• Listen Notes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic-rdU1oESluqs/
• YouTube: https://youtu.be/y5yrVqdP_qA

Performance Marketing Insiders is sponsored by WebMechanix, the performance marketing agency that makes you smarter. Learn more at https://www.webmechanix.com/

Performance Marketing is produced by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through B2B podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/

Today's guest is a strategic marketing thought leader and has held roles at Fortune 100 companies as well as start-ups delivering profitable growth. He speaks insurance and digital fluently and has a deep understanding of MarTech.David Drotos is the Vice President & Head of Marketing at Equity Trust. David discusses where to start with your marketing strategy, how to reach conclusions using micro-testing, and why direct mail is such a tantalizing channel for marketers.

Takeaways:

• Before deciding on the marketing tactics you're going to use, you need to really understand who your customer is and what your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is. You need to know what you're looking for before setting out to find it.
• Once you know your customer, start micro-testing your marketing. This means you need to iterate rapidly by making small changes which allows you to learn and fail fast. Don't let great get in the way of good.
• Focus on changing one variable within each iteration of micro-testing, such as ad creative, channel, audience, CTA, colors, etc. The more variables in a test, the harder it gets to find a statistically significant conclusion.
• Where you start with your testing will depend on your situation but it should all be done in service of finding statistically significant results as fast as possible because you can then remove components that negatively impact your ROAS (Return On Ad Spend).
• For companies that rely heavily on paid search advertising, most of the people coming into their funnel through that campaign already have high intent, and they already familiar with your company or service and the leads are more likely to become accounts.
• Middle funnel advertising can include Facebook, Linkedin, and YouTube to an extent. An example of middle funnel advertising would be a CTA that drives traffic to a lead magnet that provides some value and can be accessed by entering a name and email.
• Due to the limits of different platforms, it's important to build audiences outside of walled gardens such as Facebook or TikTok. The insights these platforms can provide into building lookalike audiences to advertise to can be restricting for marketers.

Quote of the Show:

• "The folks who have less to spend have to be more creative and have to be really more judicious on how they spend their dollars and where they spend them at" - David Drotos

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daviddrotos/
• Equity Trust website: https://www.trustetc.com/
• Robbing Mary: https://www.robbingmary.com/about

Shout Outs:

• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
• 11/22/63 by Stephen King

Ways to Tune In:

• Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/5f9c8c1a-fbf5-43c7-b7eb-958674860156/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic
• Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic/id1444680950
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1OCuYchAG8TlGv82YARRhy?si=c4050290cbb54c65
• Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9tb3JlbWFya2V0aW5nLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz
• Listen Notes: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/3-minute-marketing-with-chris-mechanic-rdU1oESluqs/
• YouTube: https://youtu.be/32wWCna4zsA

Performance Marketing Insiders is sponsored by WebMechanix, the performance marketing agency that makes you smarter. Learn more at https://www.webmechanix.com/

Performance Marketing is produced by Ringmaster, on a mission to create connections through B2B podcasts. Learn more at https://ringmaster.com/