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Marketing is changing (again). Susan Wenograd explains why.
207 Plays2 years ago
An information-packed convo with fractional marketer Susan Wenograd. From the advent of the abandon-cart email to the highs and lows of paid media, Susan has seen it all - and she knows how to fix your marketing problems.
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Check out Susan's website: https://susanwenograd.com/
Check her out Susan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanwenograd/
Listen to Susan's podcast That's Marketing, Baby!
https://www.thatsmarketingbaby.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Hosts
00:00:04
Speaker
Hi, and welcome to Content People. I'm your host, Meredith Farley. I'm a former chief product officer turned chief operating officer turned CEO and founder. My agency is called Medbury. At Medbury, we work with founders, execs, and companies who want to tell their stories and grow. But Content People is not about me or Medbury. It's about the creative leaders and professionals that we interview every week.
00:00:28
Speaker
We'll delve into their journeys, unpack their insights, and ask them for practical advice. If you like it, please rate and subscribe. I really hope that you enjoy. Let's get started.
00:00:39
Speaker
Susan, thank you so much. I'm really, really excited to get to chat with you. I'm a huge fan of you and that's Marketing Baby. I think a lot of folks coming in will know who you are, but for anyone listening who doesn't, could you enjoy yourself and a little bit about what you do? Sure. I'm Susan Winograd. I have been in marketing now for, oh God, I hate saying it, like 20 years.
00:01:00
Speaker
I'm primarily, I think, sought after most for paid media, but my experience actually really is in demand gen in general. I actually started in the writing, editing, and email marketing space before I made my way into the media world. So I've had my hands in a bunch of different pies at this point, and that's just what I enjoy doing, kind of helping fix everything at this point. So that's where I'm at. But I work as an independent consultant. I do some fractional head of marketing work, and I still handle paid media for clients as well.
00:01:27
Speaker
I didn't know that about your writing, editing back in the day background. Yeah, I think it's part of the reason why Jess and I get along so well. We both write fast and edit quickly, so we've always had that in common. Yeah, I can totally see that. Okay, so I want to talk a bit about that's marketing, baby, and then some of the work you're doing in marketing and your thoughts on everything that's happening in the landscape right
Alternative Career Paths
00:01:45
Speaker
now. But before we do, a question I like to ask is that if you weren't in or couldn't work in marketing, what would you do?
00:01:52
Speaker
If money was no object, I'd probably work in animal rescue all the time. Ooh, okay. We have three dogs. We used to have three cats. I've always been a complete sucker for animals. It would probably be something like that, but if it was like, you know, along the lines of a, you know, quote unquote serious career, I'd probably still be a writer, honestly. I've always been able to write really quick. It's always been easy for me to synthesize my thoughts in writing. And it comes very naturally to me. It's something I enjoy. So I don't know if it would be fiction necessarily or where it would be, but I would probably still somehow center around writing.
00:02:21
Speaker
Oh, that's awesome. Not answers I expected for some reason. I don't know what I expected. I hope you weren't expecting doctor or anything similarly complicated. I would not be good at that. I'm not patient enough. No, no, that's good. So that's marketing, baby. I absolutely love the podcast that you. Thank you.
00:02:38
Speaker
are doing together.
Birth of 'That's Marketing Baby' Podcast
00:02:39
Speaker
It's so cool. One thing I think is unique about it. You're two women in this space and you're getting really into the weeds. It's very actionable and it's really data focused. And I think that's actually pretty, really unique right now. I love it. I love listening to you guys. What made you and Jess decide to start it?
00:02:54
Speaker
Well, we were former coworkers and where we were before, we had been doing a podcast there. A lot of people have said, oh, your podcast sounds so professional. I'm like, we had practice. We didn't just start out with that marketing baby and kind of learn the ropes there. So when we did our previous podcast, it was just very easy. We really, I mean, we're friends anyway, but we enjoy talking with each other. We really appreciate
00:03:17
Speaker
the difference in each other's perspective and kind of what each of us brings to the table and how that fits together so we found that once we had both left the company we were at we really missed just talking about that stuff and we would still you know slack about it and have conversations amongst ourselves and then
00:03:33
Speaker
people mentioned, Hey, we really were starting to like that, you know, the podcast you guys did and we miss it. And so we said, well, why don't we just keep doing it? Like we don't really care if anyone listens or not. We just enjoy talking about the stuff. And one of the things that we noticed was what you mentioned was that there was a lack of tactical information in the space and there really are not a lot of women that do it. Most of the podcasts in marketing are by men and there's nothing wrong with that, but it was just, we felt like there was a gap there.
00:03:58
Speaker
some people might find women more approachable versus feeling like they're talking to, you know, two guys that their perspectives just might be different. So we thought, you know, there's probably space for this. There's probably room and desire for it. So we decided to go ahead and just, you know, sort of start throwing it together and jot down topics we were interested in. And it's done better than we, I think we anticipated if we would
00:04:17
Speaker
We didn't really know if anybody was going to want to listen or not. We kind of just did it for us to stay in touch and trade stuff. So it's worked out great for us though. You guys do have such like a nice, easy, natural chemistry. I feel like it's certainly unique and so tactical. Sometimes when I'm listening, I pause and I'll like write things down and I'll almost have to pace myself.
00:04:36
Speaker
that though. It's like we'd rather it be useful. I mean it's funny you say that because that was one of the things I've spoken at conferences a lot over the years and it's hard when you do your own material and content because you don't really know what hits and what doesn't. It's a large group of people and they don't necessarily get feedback but one of the things that I've heard over the years is people will come up to me after and say I really felt like I left with stuff I could do.
00:04:58
Speaker
And I know I always thought to myself, like, what are the other sessions teaching? Like, isn't that the purpose of being here is to get ideas for doing stuff differently? So I think she and I sort of approached the podcast the same way. We're like, there's enough, you know, theoretical talking. Let's just talk about the stuff that we know we're doing every week, stuff that we've seen and created together, you know, that we know people could benefit from.
00:05:16
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's so, so useful. The episodes are so actionable. They're really focused. I also like that they're kind of short. They're like 20 to 30 minutes. And was that really intentional or does that just kind of organically the type of content that you ingest create?
Crafting the Perfect Podcast Episode
00:05:31
Speaker
It's.
00:05:31
Speaker
interesting that you asked that. I really think it's both because it's so actionable. We know that an hour is too much, right? So a lot of times we'll have a larger idea. Like right now we're, we have one that we actually turned into three different podcast episodes because it each deals with a different area of how you measure success.
00:05:47
Speaker
And so sometimes we'll have like these much bigger ideas and then realize, Hey, this really needs to be broken down into three separate things. Or here are the different facets of this. And it's always just sort of naturally worked out that way. That's how it was when we did our previous one together to always wound up being around 20 minutes. And that just always felt about right. And people have mentioned the same thing. They're like, we really love the length. It's just enough. So once we got that feedback, we just kept sticking with it.
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah, it makes sense. Well, for anyone listening who hasn't listened to that's marketing baby, check it out. It is so good. I love it. I'm so glad you guys are putting that out there. Thank you. We have a good time doing it too. It's fun. It's like a good chance for us to catch up every week and have like a marketing cleanse.
00:06:25
Speaker
I do want to talk just a little bit too about you because the podcast was how I got introduced to you and started following you. And I'm really curious for you to talk a little bit about your career journey thus far. I know you touched on the highlights before.
00:06:40
Speaker
and how you eventually started your own consulting and got into smart spark.
Susan's Marketing Journey
00:06:45
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So like I said, I've been doing marketing for a long time and I feel kind of lucky because I started in e-commerce at Circuit City back when they were around.
00:06:55
Speaker
But we were kind of the strange department that no one knew what to do with because it was the early two thousand so we really had almost like no oversight, which was a blessing. I mean, they they were all about the stores. So we were a very small team. No one really micromanaged what we did. So it was great because we could just kind of do and test whatever we wanted and there wasn't really anybody there to say no.
00:07:14
Speaker
So we really ended up learning a lot about interdisciplinary marketing because there wasn't these very clearly defined lanes. So when I'd started, I had been a writer and editor for the video gaming and PC category. And then the email marketing team wanted a dedicated writer to help them start testing things. So at that point I was a GOG. I'm like, Oh my gosh, you know how many people opened an email and you know what they clicked on? Like I just thought it was so cool that there was data behind
00:07:41
Speaker
something that had traditionally just been very subjective, right? So it's like I'd write something, people are like, I don't like that headline. But there was never any data or something concrete to say that it wasn't okay. So I really liked the combination of the creative and the data. I've always been a very right and left brain, evenly divided person. So I started working with the email team and then their person that handled the retention marketing, so like the ongoing newsletters and retention and upsells and all that kind of stuff, they had moved on and they offered me the job. So I said, sure. I mean, I was like 25.
00:08:10
Speaker
I was in charge of like $60 million of revenue or something crazy. Like it would never happen today, but it was great. I mean, it was, it was nice because like I said, there was, it was the wild West. I mean, we built the first abandoned cart email and it took us like nine months, right? So now you just, you sign up and it automatically just works for you.
00:08:26
Speaker
So it was very different. Things took a lot longer, but I learned a lot. So that was kind of where I was used to. And then there was just such a humongous demand for paid media that I started doing freelance work and I was doing project management for a small agency. And they're like, do you know anything about those ads that show up on Google? And because I'd been a writer, it was kind of this perfect blend of like keywords, ad copy, data, it had all the things I liked.
00:08:49
Speaker
So i started doing that back in two thousand seven on a freelance basis and there is just so much demand for it i mean huge demand for it for over a lot of years. A lot of my work just wound up being there just because that's what was needed more than anything and then i worked in house for home decor retailer for a while and they were very interested in facebook ads and this was twenty.
00:09:10
Speaker
13, I guess. So I taught myself Facebook ads off the back of what they were trying to build. So that was my introduction to sort of the paid social space back when it was really easy compared to what we have the past few years. And so I just kept kind of getting deeper and deeper into that. And I found it was very hard to find people that were good at paid search and good at paid social. So that wound up being a pretty huge demand point is that people kind of bring me both.
00:09:34
Speaker
and not have to deal with separate people or agencies to handle that. So then I started getting asking to speak at conferences and kind of teach what I learned. And so that snowballed into just lots of, you know, I wrote for several industry publications. I spoke a lot. I always kind of bounced back and forth between agency and in-house. And then
00:09:50
Speaker
I'd always pretty much had consultancy clients on the side, and I just got to the point where I was like, that's really what I enjoy. I enjoy the variety. I enjoy fixing problems. I'm kind of a fixer. It's easy for me to look at something at a 30,000 foot point of view and say, here's why these things aren't working with your marketing. And I just found I didn't get to do that as much in-house. It was very much a pigeon-holed role. And even in agency life, it's like that you're hired to just do this one thing.
00:10:13
Speaker
So the consulting I enjoyed more because I was finding so many places were hiring me saying, we need to fix our paid search. And I'm like, I'd get in there and go, paid search is not your problem. You know, your problem is you don't have good email flows. You don't have engaging content. Like I find all these other problems that were contributing to what they were seeing. And so being in the consulting role, I'm actually more empowered to help them fix those things. So that's how I wound up doing that.
00:10:36
Speaker
That is really cool. And Circuit City, like what a throwback, but what a really cool experience that sounds like. It was fun. When you say you built the first abandoned cart email, do you mean like you guys sent the first abandoned cart email? Well, we built the first one that Circuit City had ever had.
00:10:54
Speaker
I think up until that point, there was like maybe two or other three retailers that had done it, but you had to have like a custom coded thing. Like there was no plug and play, it just didn't exist. So we had to work with our email service provider to like hook into our database and write all this custom logic. It was crazy. I mean, it took forever. Yeah, it was nuts. So it was fun though. It's fun to look back on now and be like, wow, everybody has it so much easier. Yeah. I feel like you may be responsible for some of those things I've bought online. I might've been, I don't know. If you bought an Xbox 360, I probably helped.
00:11:24
Speaker
So as you talk about it, it sounds like a really organic career path and journey to me, where it's like you had a special skillset at the right time, and you were good at it, you were interested in it, and just like opportunities kept popping up for you. Yeah.
00:11:39
Speaker
feel very much like that or were there ever any moments where you're like, I don't know what I'm doing, or I can't really find opportunities. Did you ever feel stuck at times?
Fluctuating Demand in Marketing Skills
00:11:48
Speaker
Yeah. And some of it really is more with the ebb and flow of how places have preferred to handle their marketing. So, I mean, for, it's funny now because you know, everyone's like email, email is the most important thing. And like for years, all we heard was email was dead. Like this all week, you know what I mean? It's like, you're not going to need email. Everyone just buys everything on social. And so I had gotten away from email marketing then because there was just no demand for it.
00:12:07
Speaker
And it made me sad because I really enjoyed so many aspects of email marketing that there were those times where I'm like, oh, I hate letting go of that as something that I do, but there's just no demand for it now. Of course, it's all the rage again. So there's ebbs and flows with that stuff. Same thing kind of happened with Google ads for a while.
00:12:23
Speaker
And I actually went through about, I think, two cycles of that. One was that there was once, you know, people figured out that not that it was simple, but it was a simpler time where it's kind of like, if you just bid a penny more than the next guy, you'd win the auction, right? Like, it was very simplistic. So there was a whole stretch of time, for I'd say about two to three years, where a lot of places were just outsourcing to the cheapest countries and contractors they could find.
00:12:45
Speaker
And so a lot of US-based people that have been doing it for a long time lost that business. And I can't say that I necessarily blame them because it just didn't require great marketing necessarily in its infancy. So that kind of happened there. And then Google was pretty stagnant for a few years when Facebook was on the rise because Facebook took so much of their budget. So it seemed like the demand for paid search people went down and also Google just kind of had stopped. I don't want to say they stopped innovating. I think they were busy building what they have now.
00:13:12
Speaker
But they were just very quiet for a few years with not a lot of changes, not a lot of updates. It just felt like paid search was pretty stagnant. So there really wasn't a high demand for expertise. So there's definitely those feelings that I think you go through of like, is anybody still going to need this? Is this still a thing? Is it still something I should even say that I offer or specialize in? I've definitely experienced that with a couple of different things, but I've also found everything cyclical. So it eventually usually does come back.
00:13:36
Speaker
That is really interesting. Is there anything you think right now that everyone's really down on, that you're like, give it two years, people, you're going to be good for XYZ? I don't feel like there's anything necessarily where people are like, this thing is dead or it's over. I think mostly what I get is there's just a lot of trepidation around how everything is kind of moving to that black box AI environment and people that have been doing it a certain way for years are very uncomfortable with that.
00:14:02
Speaker
So I feel like it's more just the discomfort at the rate of change and kind of the C-level changes that are happening as opposed to just a tweak here, a different ad format there. Like these are very big changes that have happened fundamentally in the way these things work and the way we're going to handle them. So it's really just more discomfort with that. I'm glad that you brought that up because one thing I know you and Jess have talked about on the podcast and I wanted to ask you about is.
00:14:25
Speaker
that things are changing right now across so many platforms and data sources for marketers. Stats that we could get really easily around attribution or analytics in general are disappearing. So from Google analytics to Facebook ads manager, is there specific advice you have for marketers?
00:14:45
Speaker
about how to navigate this new environment or like how do you think that the changing data that's available to us might change marketing over the next several years?
Adapting to Data Changes in Marketing
00:14:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think there's a few things. So the thing about attribution is that whether you're looking at it in Facebook ads or Google analytics, none of it was ever really real. It's the way the platforms would take credit for stuff. And they all did that in different ways, right? So it's like Facebook used to be, you know, by default, it was like, Oh, I'm going to set it to the attribution to be a one day click or 28 day view through or whatever, wherever you had it set up.
00:15:20
Speaker
So it was just a lens at which you look through things. It wasn't necessarily the truth. So Facebook would say, oh, we've driven this thing for this cost. And that's great, but it doesn't mean that those people weren't seeing you other places. But Facebook wouldn't account for that in their numbers. So it created this very myopic view from a lot of brands about how to actually build a long-term brand.
00:15:45
Speaker
How to build brand awareness like brand awareness got completely abandoned for many years and people felt the repercussions of that when. Facebook lost a lot of its data from the ios fourteen privacy update right so all of a sudden all the state that used to feel these things is gone and so the black box that we had relied on.
00:16:04
Speaker
that we felt like we had some control over didn't exist the same way anymore and it couldn't produce the same way that it used to. So I feel like in some ways we're kind of going back to how it used to be where, you know, you'd have to buy TV commercials and then people watch and see over the following weeks did something happen. And that's always really been more how marketing actually works, you know, more so. You can say this channel drove this, but there are so many things that
00:16:27
Speaker
they probably encountered your brand a lot of other times that they don't even necessarily consciously recall before they clicked on that ad and they purchased it. And so the problem we always had with the platforms was that it wouldn't account for any of that. And so the minute that you would turn off the paid media, the sales would stop. And that's not a brand, right? That's basically media arbitrage.
00:16:46
Speaker
You're figuring out how to smartly buy media in a way that makes you profitable, which is great as long as the media keeps working the same way. But I just look at some of the stuff we used to be able to do in Facebook ads and it blows my mind. I'm making decks now and I'll pull up something from 2018 and I'm like, I can't believe we used to be able to do that. It's crazy to me. But in a lot of ways, I feel like it's really starting to sort out who's a good marketer versus who is just a smart media buyer that
00:17:14
Speaker
could ride one channel into the ground. And when it worked, it worked great. I'm not going to say Facebook ads weren't great and easy back in the day. They totally were. But it's not a long-term thing to build a company that has staying power. It's a tactic. It's not a strategy. So there was so much movement away from strategy around how you build a company that's going to be around in five years that it sort of felt almost like a necessary market correction, I guess, in a way, where it's like,
00:17:40
Speaker
You can't subsist like that forever. And especially as everyone started to realize, Hey, I can put in $5 and make 50 back. That's not going to last because everybody figures it out. Right. So it's like the supply and demand can't keep up. So I think what we're seeing now is there's a lot of kind of friction. I feel like it's already happened more so on the Facebook side because iOS 14 has been out for a bit now, but it definitely, you know, called out kind of who's a good marketer and understands how to take a brand long-term through these types of seismic changes versus.
00:18:09
Speaker
you know, fly by night place that would just put in 50 bucks a day, make 500. And then, you know, when that data wasn't there, they stopped producing. It's sort of through a lot of that. I think it's going to be longer term. The marketers that are going to make her the ones that understand that all these channels work together and they understand how to sort of mitigate client expectations around that. I think that that's going to be the biggest thing as marketers who can actually coach and guide clients through this. I don't see a lot of that happening as opposed to just, you know, being an expert in one channel.
00:18:39
Speaker
Thank you. That is so interesting. Do you expect that as a result of everything you're talking about, we'll see a bigger investment in things like brand or kind of like longer term content strategies as opposed to kind of the quick wins we used to be able to get or how do you think it might shape the way that brands try to grow?
Future of Brand Building and Strategy
00:19:01
Speaker
I think that brands are going to realize they have to do that. I think a lot of them are still in denial. I still have to talk with a lot of companies and CMOs and VPs where, especially I'd say more so in the B2B world, ecom has a much faster feedback loop. With ecom, it's like you know within a much shorter span of time if what you're doing is working or not.
00:19:21
Speaker
B2B is a bigger challenge because the sales cycles are longer. There's things like if you're dealing with enterprise level, there's procurement that can slow things down. So there's so many other things that impact whether a deal gets signed, but I am definitely finding there's just still some denial where they're kind of like, well, what if we just spent more in paid search? Could we get more demos in the next week? And it's like, no, it doesn't work that way. Right?
00:19:43
Speaker
I feel like a lot of them don't want to hear it. They know deep down that it's true. The thing that's compounding this right now is because we're in this weird economic thing right now where it's like, everyone's like, is it a recession? Is it not a recession? I don't know. There are a lot of companies that are not hitting goals. So they're trying to balance like, we need short term wins.
00:20:00
Speaker
to keep up with where we have to be, but we also need to make sure that we're setting up the people that will become customers six months from now and trying to do both of that. If you have a reduced budget is very hard. There've been a lot of layoffs. So you're doing it with reduced staff or doing with reduced money, but you're still trying to keep up with the short-term wins and lay the pavement for the longer ones. And it's, it's a serious challenge. I mean, it's, I empathize with the companies I work with because it's not easy and it is easy to go back to the New York, like.
00:20:27
Speaker
How can we just get demos tomorrow? And it's like, that's not going to, I mean, even if we could, that doesn't solve your problem six months from now, you're not creating any new demand. You're just picking up what's already there. So eventually that's going to dry up. Right. So you have to be able to figure out how to balance those two things. That is so.
00:20:42
Speaker
So fascinating. And as you're talking, I mean, correct me if you're like, no, this is a strange conclusion for you to draw Meredith. But I feel like so much because I was in B2B marketing for so long and always it was how can we think more like B2C marketers because they're so good at tuning into the audience, like really nailing that.
00:21:01
Speaker
And I wonder if actually B2C will have some things to learn from B2B in this new landscape when it comes to, as you say, nurturing a longer funnel. Yeah, I think Jess and I have actually talked about this before because she and I both had B2C backgrounds. And I feel like there is a lot of cross-pollination there that should happen that would make them better marketers.
00:21:21
Speaker
A lot of times B2B wants to hire people with B2B and B2C wants to hire people with a B2C background. But a lot of times having a background in both can be really helpful. So to your point, and it is actually a very good conclusion to draw is that with B2C, because there's always been such a focus on, well, this is my ROAS for this week or this is my MER for this week or whatever it is.
00:21:43
Speaker
It's very short-term metrics, whereas it would probably help some of these companies if they had some leading indicators of, are we also doing things that might produce customers three to six months from now? They don't really think that way. And then conversely, B2B could learn a lot about how to be human from B2C. I mean, it's the biggest thing with B2B is it very much relies on product marketers.
00:22:05
Speaker
And there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, it's like you have to have someone that's an expert in the product, but there's something that usually gets lost in the translation to humans, right? I've worked with so many companies where the marketing team winds up being order takers from what product marketing says has to go into the market and it doesn't connect well or it just doesn't do much and no one can figure out why. And it's like, because you still need an interpreter.
00:22:26
Speaker
that can look at these product features and say, no one cares about the product features, they care about what it's solving for them. And being able to be that mouthpiece to translate it is still a very lost art, I think, in B2B very frequently.
00:22:38
Speaker
Yeah, no, I agree totally. There's so much on the product front that B2B can learn from B2C. So if you're working with a company now and they're in this painful moment that you're talking about, we used to be able to get demos. We used to hit our goals via this really reliable funnel with consistent metrics and it's appearing on us. How are you advising them?
00:23:04
Speaker
So a big untapped source of data I find is usually just talking to the sales team.
Utilizing Sales Insights for Marketing
00:23:11
Speaker
They usually get much more direct feedback that you're not going to see in your data, right? So you could look in your data to your point and say, okay, we're seeing these metrics falling, or maybe all the metrics look the same, but you're just not getting the demos. You're not getting the purchases.
00:23:24
Speaker
That's where I feel like the sales team is usually an untapped wealth of knowledge. And a lot of times it's because I feel like the input they get on why things aren't selling, either they're rolling up to a sales leadership that's like, you must be doing something wrong. You're not closing right in and asking the right questions.
00:23:41
Speaker
Or they're trying to give this feedback, but it's somewhat anecdotal, right? They'll be like, I didn't get this deal because they said X, but there's not anybody looking at the larger patterns of like, okay, this other company, this guy was talking to, what was their reason? Was it the same? There usually isn't pattern recognition with that.
00:23:58
Speaker
So a lot of times, what I'll try and figure out is talk to the sales people and be like, are you getting different questions than you used to? Are you getting different objections than you used to? Or is there an objection you used to never get like price or contract time or something that like now it seems to be an issue, right? Might not have been before, but economic pressures, whatever it might be, are you starting to see patterns of why people aren't signing?
00:24:19
Speaker
So usually I'd like to try and find the root of the problem first because otherwise you're going to waste so much time and money trying to like, maybe we just need to test different messaging and maybe it's like you're trying to fix something. That let's say, you know, if the problem is everyone's like, it's just, they don't have the budget and they're having trouble getting anything approved. That's much different than being like, Oh, our message is just stale and our competitor sounds more interesting. Right? So that's the kind of stuff that bottom of funnel feedback that you have to take back to the top to say, okay, so.
00:24:47
Speaker
in our marketing push now, maybe we need to talk about what's the cost if you don't use this thing, right? It's like, how much does it cost you to do these things manually versus us automating it? So you have to kind of draw back what is causing those, I don't want to say failures, but that reduction in what you're seeing, what are the main reasons that might be happening? And then taking that back to the start of when you're creating the demand to begin with, to make sure you're addressing that. So otherwise they're getting all the way through this process and, or you're still paying for the media and they're just not turning into anything.
00:25:17
Speaker
That sounds like such great valuable advice. As you're talking to, I was thinking about how complex it can be like to do that well in that talking to the sales team who might have their perspective on the types of blockers.
00:25:34
Speaker
conversations that they're having and then sifting through that and then sifting through like, all right, you know, to your point, it's like, are we just stale? And is there an aspect of the product or a feature that's stale or is it the branding and the value props around the product? There's just so many different moments where it's kind of like sifting and sifting and sifting to arrive at the right conclusion. And I think for so many organizations, it can be so challenging to
00:26:00
Speaker
set up the teams and the dynamics in a way that allows that to actually happen the way it needs to. Agreed. And they also don't usually have the patience for it either because it does take time, right? So I think also part of it is, you know, departments are incentivized different ways, right? So a lot of times they're not, even though obviously it's like, yes, the North Star is revenue. Okay, great. But that's broken into different day-to-day metrics by department. And sometimes they're not mutually compatible, right? They're sometimes they're competing against each other.
00:26:29
Speaker
is that type of work that you do in part of your consulting would you be interviewing the sales team and helping to sift through this or is it something that you're kind of advising teams to approach themselves typically it's something they're gonna have to approach themselves just because there are so many things that are involved in setting like why are the sales quote is the way they are what
00:26:48
Speaker
You know, it's like, and it just gets to be so in depth that unless you're someone that's like contracted to work with them for six months to a year to clean out all that plumbing and figure out where the breakdowns are. It's very hard to do it within the context of being like a hired gun for the marketing side, right? Like I might find some things where I'm kind of like, well, marketing is just incentivized to get leads that are not incentivized to get SQLs.
00:27:06
Speaker
Right. So you can sometimes find quick wins or you're kind of like, Hey, these two things aren't the same. And so I recommend that you're incentivizing them the same way, like that they have to do this. But unless it's something that's very obvious like that, sometimes it can be really hard to uncover why things are the way they are or why they wound up that way. Cause it involves so many different departments that I don't even wind up talking to.
00:27:24
Speaker
Yeah. Like as you were talking through that process, I was starting to feel a little stressed, even though I have absolutely no reason. I'm like, Oh gosh, this is going to be a big challenge. So to maybe zoom out a little bit, you've worked with companies of all shapes and sizes. And I'm curious as to what you'd say, what are the most common mistakes that you think businesses make in their digital marketing strategies?
Common Marketing Mistakes
00:27:45
Speaker
How can they avoid them?
00:27:47
Speaker
I really think the brand awareness is a big one. I feel like it's more so with paid media. They do this, but they ascribe the same goal to everything they do. So it's like, if it doesn't produce a demo, they automatically are like, it's not worthwhile. Or if it doesn't produce a sale, right? Then it's not worthwhile. That was just so conditioned because of how easy and quick paid media used to be. And it was cheaper. So it's like you can spend more and get a lot more.
00:28:11
Speaker
So i feel like a lot of companies don't. Look at these different channels and tactics with the nuance they need to evaluate if they're good or not and that was one of the reasons just and i just in recently an episode about how do you measure success short term right so if it's something where it's like it takes six months. For something to become a sale from a demo.
00:28:30
Speaker
how do you know what to do in between that? You can't just sit and wait six months and be like, oops, that didn't work. There are guideposts that pop up along the way as to whether you're on the right track, and so many companies don't have the patience for those. Well, yeah, but it didn't get a demo. It's like, okay, but it's showing that we have the right people that will eventually become one.
00:28:49
Speaker
I just feel like there's so many instances where companies don't think further out than the next 30 days. They're so beholden to that 30 day quota that they never think about what they're doing to make subsequent 30 day chunks easier. So it's like six months from now, what can we do today to make this easier so we're not sweating bullets because it's the 30th of the month and we haven't hit quota. I feel like that's the biggest issue that I run into at almost every company. And then inevitably,
00:29:17
Speaker
towards the end of the month, they're like, here's a whole bunch of money, like go bid more and paid search. And I'm like, that is not going to solve your problem. You know what I mean? It's half the time I'm like, this isn't even something somebody searches for, right? Or if they do, they're an SMB and you guys cater to enterprise, right? And that's always the challenge is it's like, there's still this over-reliance, I think, on the tactic piece and not a lot of acknowledgement in the fact that a lot of humans market for you. I mean, if you go on Twitter or LinkedIn and you're dealing with something B2B,
00:29:46
Speaker
Most times people are like, Hey, what's everyone using to do blah, right? And then there's like a hundred and some comments of people recommending companies and vendors that do it. That's how a lot of B2B happens. And that's never accounted for in plans. There's still this denial that that's important, but that's just all brand awareness. That's just putting in the hard work that takes a long time and no one wants to do that. They want to make it, they want to hit the easy button. Yes. I think that things like.
00:30:12
Speaker
Some of the metrics and the signposts that, okay, we're on the right track from a strategy perspective are so, I mean, I'm sure it's not like I'm drawing any like
00:30:27
Speaker
genius conclusions here, but there's just so much fear and the quins that will give you a bit of short-term security, even though it's not serving your longer term goals. It's not even getting the right clients that are going to stick around. At least the business hit its quota for the month and they were like, fight another month. Spoke stuck in that fighting mode. But things like brand awareness, I feel like take
00:30:53
Speaker
It's almost an emotional, like it takes a bit of faith. It does. Absolutely it does. And I think that's the hard part too, is because marketing, it is an art and a science, right? So there, it's like you, everyone wants to really over index on the science side, which I get. Cause it's, and I mean, like I said, I'm, I'm a right and left brain person. I'm right in between.
00:31:13
Speaker
So the faith part can be hard. And I think that's, you know, you see a lot of public fails with that, right? Where you'll have some like, you know, JCPenney hired the guy from Apple and it went spectacularly terrible, right? I mean, it's just like you, there are companies that do take those big leaps of faith and they make wholesale changes and they don't work, right? And all that does is reinstall the fear of like, see, like, you know, we tried to do something that was a little more cerebral and it didn't work.
00:31:39
Speaker
I get why. I mean, it is scary to kind of have to scribe all this faith and all of this money and all of these things to something that might not work, right? And it might take a while and a decent chunk of change to figure out that it doesn't work. But unfortunately, that's just the way it's done. But it's like you said, it's like when people don't even look at the guideposts, that creates a problem. So if a business was willing to do six months to 12 months of heavy lifting for the brand building for the
00:32:08
Speaker
longer pipeline of the ideal client.
Creating Valuable Content
00:32:12
Speaker
And they were willing to like put in the money without the immediate quick wins. What are some things you'd be like, all right, great. Here's some stuff you can do. Yeah. I think the first thing they have to understand is the content and the problems that they're helping people solve too many times, you know, at companies they're like, Oh, our product does this. I'm like, no one cares. They want to know that you understand what they're going through every day.
00:32:35
Speaker
And any advice or information you're giving them is not self serving so you just need to endlessly. Provide value and be a resource for them and then you naturally become a trusted source of whatever your thing is if you're. Constantly telling people how to make the perfect paid social creative and you're not requiring them to sign up for your platform to do it.
00:32:55
Speaker
You've built a ton of goodwill. You've proven that you know exactly what you're talking about. They come to you for that information anyway, and it shows them you're like, you know, if they built this thing, it obviously must address all this stuff really well because they know this world very, very well.
00:33:10
Speaker
So, you know, and it's like that way with consumers too, like consumers have gotten wise to, to be asked about, you know, e-com products, but it's becoming that way in B2B2 where it's like, you can't just gate something behind an email capture and say it provides all this value and have people blindly say, yeah, sure. Here's my email. I'll take a five page report. People just don't trust that stuff anymore because it got abused. So you have to be very willing.
00:33:33
Speaker
to set aside some of the things that you used to kind of earmark as a success and be willing to just give away a little bit more than you used to, I think would be my way of putting it. But the best way to do that really is to produce things that are valuable. I mean, whether that's content webinars, how-to instructions, anything that lets those users know that you understand where they're at, then it makes it so much more seamless for them to believe that you've created something that would help them long-term.
00:33:57
Speaker
So really, really understand your audience and their problems and then invest a stomach churning amount of time and money to content that serves them for free. Yep. Yep. And just be aware that you're probably going to have to pay to amplify it.
00:34:13
Speaker
Because social reach is not wonderful at this point. So when you're a paid media person is like, yes, we need to spend some unsponsored content. Don't start evaluating it on whether it drives demos. That's not its purpose. Its purpose is to make sure the right people are seeing the helpful content you've created. So you also just kind of have to reframe anything that you then take forward using that for. You have to reframe the metrics you're using to judge it.
00:34:34
Speaker
All right. Thank you. That's really, really valuable and it makes a lot of sense. Susan, thank you so much. Is there anything that I didn't ask about that maybe you would have wanted to share in the combo? Not at all. This was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right, folks. I hope that you enjoyed that episode. Thank you so much for listening. If you liked it, please subscribe or review us. And if you want to check out our newsletter, Content People, it is in the show notes. See you next time. Bye.