Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Why Brand Differentiation Matters More Than Ever: Peep Laja
56 Plays4 years ago
In an ultra-competitive marketplace, brand differentiation can be the difference between attracting customers and going out of business.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, Peep Laja talks about why brand differentiation matters and why companies are afraid to stand apart from the crowd.
He also looks at the growing attraction of outsourcing marketing, something Peep describes as "vendor management".
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark
00:00:02
Speaker
You're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 20 minutes or less. I've known Peplya for about a decade, back to when I was organizing a marketing conference in Toronto.
Meet Pep Laya and CXL
00:00:17
Speaker
Pep is the founder and principal of CXL in Austin, Texas. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Pep.
00:00:24
Speaker
Hey, thanks for having me. Let's start with CXL. Since we've known each other, the company has evolved and changed and become a multifaceted organization. I'll put you on the spot. What's the elevator pitch for CXL? It stands for two things right now, but we're spinning one of these things out. So my pitch for CXL Institute is that this is where you come learn from the world-class practitioners on how to do data-driven marketing.
00:00:54
Speaker
And what about the other parts of the organization?
Evolution of CXL Agency
00:00:57
Speaker
Well, we also have a conversion optimization agency, CXL agency. We're spinning it off as its own separate brand because it's very hard to be two things in somebody's mind. So we're going to just spin it off. Uh, but CXL agency, uh, is, is the company that actually started the conversion optimization agency where we work with me to large enterprises, helping them to convert more customers.
Marketing in a Virtual Era
00:01:23
Speaker
You spend a lot of time on LinkedIn and Twitter, like a lot of us do these days as someone who's been involved in the marketing landscape for many years. What's your take on how brands are approaching marketing? Given the fact that many of them can't meet face to face, there's no conferences, there's no meetups. What do you think they're doing these days? Are they doing, is there anything new and interesting or are they just going back to the fundamentals? I think for the most part, companies are doing what they've
00:01:51
Speaker
been doing for a long time. SEO and content marketing still works. For us at CXL, it's 95% of money is all inbound marketing, mainly through content. Of course, it's content we've written over the past 10 years. It's not like
00:02:10
Speaker
It's something we did last week. So I think that's still working. Paperclick is still working for some companies, not us actually. Cost per click is getting higher and higher, and so on. So some products are better fit than others. I think the marketing fundamentals are still as they are. But there is one thing that is happening, I think, which is that a brand has a differentiation.
00:02:37
Speaker
is becoming more and more important and mainly because the market saturation and the sheer number of competition.
00:02:46
Speaker
name a company and they have like 100 other companies doing the exact same thing. And often there's no actual functional difference. It's all about a brand difference.
The Rise of Employee Advocacy on Social Media
00:02:58
Speaker
And you brought up Twitter and LinkedIn. And for B2B brands, that's increasingly where brand building is happening. And not through the official handle of the company, but through the people who work at the companies.
00:03:16
Speaker
You know i've been talking about brand positioning and differentiation and storytelling for the last few years at times it feels like a donkey hoity kind of exercise tilted against windmills because i understand the value of differentiation and brand positioning.
00:03:33
Speaker
But many companies have sort of took it for granted and they focus more on tactical execution how many posts can we create how many videos can we make do you think this is the pendulum is swinging back to differentiation and brand positioning because of the current marketing landscape. I do think it's it's having a moment it's having a moment.
00:03:53
Speaker
We have many niche celebrities popping up, like April Dunford with her excellent book Compositioning, like she's making rounds, the message is getting increasingly heard, companies are increasingly thinking about it. And also the fact that, let's look at the marketing technology landscape.
00:04:14
Speaker
Uh, in eight years, it has grown like 5,000%. And they're more than like 8,000 more tech tools out there. So if you're an email marketing software, maybe, uh, you know, a startup just getting, getting studied now. You just cannot win by doing the same things by like, Oh, let's write a couple of blog posts on like, well, to write good subject lines. And then we'll run some PPC ads. It just doesn't work. You know, it just, people don't.
00:04:44
Speaker
People have very limited consideration sets. And so if you want to get into their consideration set, differentiation is kind of a must-have.
00:04:54
Speaker
So the question is how do companies differentiate themselves? Like I have said for many years that your competitors, they talk like you, they walk like you, they have the same benefits and features and probably the same pricing. So it's slightly different versions of a flavor of ice
Challenges and Strategies in Differentiation
00:05:14
Speaker
cream. How do you stand apart? How do you differentiate your brand when you've got dozens, if not hundreds of competitors who walk the same and talk the same? Yeah. Well, I think.
00:05:25
Speaker
You're absolutely right and then why that is is it's because real differentiation is hard and because it's not enough just to be just a little different be another flavor. I mean differentiation needs to be in big enough to tell the decision in your in your favor.
00:05:44
Speaker
And then it's the radical part of differentiation that's hard for most. And I think a lot of it is because it's scary to be different. It's tempting to be a safe and boring company and you say safe and boring stuff because it's inoffensive and thus nobody will call you out. You won't get criticized. You won't get hit. You're just like everybody else. But of course, the problem is that nobody will care
00:06:08
Speaker
either so it's a double edged sword so how do you differentiation it's difficult you know there's the old classic differentiator die which is now thirty years old or something so i think a lot of things that were said thirty years ago i still.
00:06:26
Speaker
things like, you know, be first or attribute leadership, like you focus in on just one particular aspect. Like when WP Engine, the hosting company launched, like they were like speed, you know, like attribute, we're all about speed. Now there are of course, you know, so many clones for WP Engine that are using the exact same argument. We're the fast WordPress hosting.
00:06:48
Speaker
Now the WPA engine is of course large enough and they have big market share. Differentiation is much less important to them because market penetration, market share is by far the most important thing. If people know you, it's much easier for you. So differentiation is first and foremost important for smaller companies that don't have big market share.
00:07:12
Speaker
And I think everyone should invest in a customer experience as a differentiator because it's just easy to do. It's easy to be different through customer experience. Most companies are doing the bare minimum. And two, brand. And by brand, of course, it means that you have a certain set of values that you stand for. You attract a group of people, and at the same time, you repel another group consciously. And that means that you need to be polarizing in people
00:07:42
Speaker
feel uncomfortable polarizing people. I like the idea that you mentioned the fact that it's easy to be safe and boring because I think there's an analogy that if a herd decides to run over the side of a cliff, everybody decides that that's the best thing to do as well. So we all jump over the side of the cliff and at the end of the day, that's not such a good thing. But I'm curious about why marketers and
Risk Aversion in Marketing
00:08:06
Speaker
companies are afraid to be different, to think out of the box, to really stand out in a way that may strike people as offensive or strikingly different. Is that just because of a lack of confidence or it's just the way that things have always been done? So that's the first part of the question. The second would be,
00:08:28
Speaker
Is it a necessary evil these days and maybe the evil is the wrong word, but is it something that's necessary to differentiate and carve out the competitive edge. I think one of the hardest thing to do is to be original. You know, very few of us are legit authentic original thinkers. You know, copying is easy. Being original is hard. It's just much easier to, um, to just.
00:08:55
Speaker
You know, you see something and then you, oh, let's take that, but like add something, you know, like, let's be a little bit better. It's just what most, I think, so the creativity is, is one, one, one big part of it is that most people are not just able to imagine something that they haven't seen before. So that's one. Two is that differentiation is not just marketing, you know, because it's not like a line of copyright.
00:09:19
Speaker
because it's the whole DNA of the business. So that means that also CEO or the senior leadership as a whole needs to be bought at. And if the company is big enough and there's maybe a legal department then whose job is to cover their ass, they'll be less interested in doing something more radical. If there are investors involved, doing something more radical might affect their finances, so they're more risk-averse.
00:09:45
Speaker
So if your CEO gets marketing and maybe it's bootstrapped or at least like healthy coffins of full of money, I think you're more likely to take some risks because ultimately it is a risk. Any strategy and differentiation is a strategy. Any strategy is a hypothesis. You might have good inputs, data inputs of why the chosen path might work.
00:10:12
Speaker
But it's still a risk. It's still a gamble. It's an experiment. And it's one that you need to play out over a long period of time, maybe two years, two years of testing your messaging.
00:10:24
Speaker
I think you're right. And I think I often tell clients that marketing in general is an experiment or hypothesis. You've got, you use the data, you use your market research, you talk to your customers, but at the end of the day, you're putting something out there that you believe will work. But the only way to find out is actually to do it and see kind of, see what kind of response you get, what kind of traction you get, what kind of conversions you get. I mean, there's no certainty in marketing and certainly something in sales.
00:10:49
Speaker
I was curious about your take on how companies can take a better or different approach to marketing, things like outsourcing and using consultants and agencies, because what I've seen post COVID is that a lot of brands have scaled back on their internal marketing resources.
The Shift to Outsourced Marketing
00:11:05
Speaker
And now they've discovered that they've still got to do marketing. You still got to make things happen. What's your take on using third party suppliers? Mm-hmm.
00:11:14
Speaker
In general, my mindset has become more and more that the new game companies need to play is vendor management, becoming really good at vendor management. Because if you think about what is it that you do as a company? And what's uniquely different about your company where you have some competitive edge? And that's mainly only about 10% of what you do.
00:11:43
Speaker
Because the content marketing side of writing articles and doing content distribution, every company does that. Your SEO, every company does that. Running PPC ads, every company does that. That's not unique about you. So anything that is not unique about you is better outsourced because having employees is also a cost because you need to manage them, hold their hand, make sure they're happy, think about their career goals.
00:12:08
Speaker
talent management aspect of it, but then if you hire an agency, there are experts at that one thing. So maybe it's PPC, maybe it's content or messaging, whatever it is, they are doing that every single day. And then they take care of upskilling and so on. And also the beautiful thing about agencies is that they work on so many diverse use cases and they've seen it all. And I know because
00:12:32
Speaker
nine years of running a CRO agency, any company that comes in with their optimization challenges, we've seen it. We have a library of what works for this use case, this kind of company. So, agencies, obviously, there are bad ones out there, but if you pick the right partner, I think that's the way to go. Also, in these economically, let's say turbulent times,
00:12:57
Speaker
Nobody likes to lay off people if times get tough, but it's getting rid of or pausing agencies is easy. It's not emotional. You know, it's like, okay, we just need to put this budget on hold for now. And maybe we'll pick it up when things get better. So I'm all for it.
00:13:14
Speaker
As a consultant, that conversation that we don't need you anymore is painful, but it is a reality of the work that we do. If that's the case, then what kind of marketing resources should companies have internally? How do you have a team that is high value, that it's not something that you necessarily want to get from a third party?
00:13:34
Speaker
You, I think, as a company, if you outsource bits of your marketing, like as I said, vendor management is a skill. So you, as let's say the marketing coordinator, hit a marketing at a company, you know the strategic goals. You know the customer the best, like who you're selling to, which pain point you're addressing, and so on and so forth.
00:13:57
Speaker
Don't know so you know the customer you know your company you know the competition and where you fit in and you know the strategy of your company how you're trying to compete which game you're playing and how you gonna win this game.
00:14:10
Speaker
your job as an in-house marketer is to then, basically you're like a capital allocator, like every employee is a capital allocator and same with agencies. So your job as a head of marketing maybe is then to allocate the company's capital, money, budget, also time to the highest potential return. And so that's, you coordinate all this third-party experts. I mean, you can obviously have in-house people as well. I'm not saying don't hire anybody.
00:14:40
Speaker
but I think it's just in many cases you're better served by outsourcing activity. So vendor management does a skill, ability to select and manage vendors, you know, like if in the past the skill was to ability to recruit, manage, retain and grow talent, marketing talent maybe, you know, so now it's the same with vendor management.
00:15:04
Speaker
One final question, as hard as it is to imagine what the marketing landscape is going to look like going forward, any thoughts about what marketing will look like in 2021?
Technological Impact on Marketing
00:15:14
Speaker
What will the smart companies be focused on?
00:15:17
Speaker
Well, technology is still rapidly growing and you know, technology is an enabler and amplifier. So a lot of the things that people were still doing manually is just going to be taken over by machine learning because it's just way better at it, you know, like things like.
00:15:35
Speaker
Predictive analytics is going to go mainstream. Predictive analytics for everybody, like no code predictive analytics is already here. Things like Squark and so on where you can just upload all your email lists and the list of companies that have bought from you and then you enrich the data with Clearbit stuff that gives you like 50 data points per
00:15:57
Speaker
email subscriber the prediction will tell you who will buy what what should you sell them next at which price points it will make this very accurate predictions and then that is a data you know for you as a marketer to make better decisions you know if you're still taking decisions like 2011 you know you're just falling behind learning how do you work with these new technologies and i'm not saying that you need to be
00:16:23
Speaker
writing any machine learning code, but you need to know how the algorithms work and how to leverage these technologies to your advantage. So I think marketers need to just become more technical and not only in a code writing way, but just to learn how to utilize the evolving tech.
Conclusion and Next Steps
00:16:43
Speaker
This has been great insight. I mean, we barely got into all the things that I wanted to talk about. So maybe I'll have you on marketing spark part two of a podcast. Cause there's a lot to talk about these days. Thanks for the time and good luck with the evolving CXL empire. It's going to be an exciting 2021. Thanks for listening to another episode of marketing spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe by iTunes or your favorite podcast app.
00:17:07
Speaker
If you like what you heard, please rate it. For show notes of today's conversation and information about PEP, visit MarketingSpark.co slash blog. If you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guess or want to learn more about how I help B2B companies as a fractional CMO, consultant and advisor, send an email to Mark at MarketMarketingSpark.co. Talk to you next time.