Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The marketing pendulum is swinging back to fundamentals: Zineb Layachi
60 Plays3 years ago
Can you feel the marketing pendulum swinging back to the basics?
For years, the focus has been data, KPIs, and quantifying anything under the sun.
But marketing success happens in different and sometimes mysterious ways.
Some of it is measured while other marketing isn’t directly attributable.
Many marketers have embraced data because there are so many tools to access analytics and insights, scale, and automate processes.
When technology makes it easy to reach a global audience, it’s easy to not spend as much time on fundamentals or first principles.
But it appears like marketers are starting to focus more on fundamentals. In my business, I’m seeing more interest in positioning and messaging.
Zineb Layachi said technology makes marketers forget about the reality they are trying to connect with people.
While tools allow marketers to amplify their efforts, she says the marketing pillars are important.
“How can you connect with target audiences and do marketing? What makes an impact?
People are at the center of that. I keep talking about the fundamentals when you get the fundamentals right, you scale on solid foundations.”
Recommended
Transcript
The Marketing Pendulum: Channels and Approaches
00:00:03
Speaker
Hi, it's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Imagine the marketing world as a pendulum that swings back and forth. The pendulum takes marketers from channel to channel, social media platform to social media platform, and approach to approach.
Fundamentals vs. Data-Tech Optimization
00:00:21
Speaker
One of the most interesting, at least to me, pendulum swings is from marketing fundamentals to marketing technology and data. On one side, you have marketers who believe in first principles, positioning, messaging, storytelling, and planning. On the other side are the data analytics geeks who believe that optimizations and hacks are the keys to marketing success.
Over-Reliance on Marketing Technology?
00:00:48
Speaker
On today's show, I'm talking with Zineb Laiatchi, CEO of Raise the Runway in Barcelona, which happens to be one of my favorite cities. Zineb teaches entrepreneurs how to talk to customers so they have more marketing success. Welcome to Marketing Spark. Thank you so much, Mark. It's really happy to be here. I'm excited for the conversation.
00:01:10
Speaker
I reached out to you because I feel like you're a kindred spirit. We're both on the side of first principles when it comes to marketing. I've seen a huge focus on marketing technology and tools to drive efficiencies and market at scale. And I guess the obvious question to you is whether the focus on technology has caused marketers to forget about the fundamentals.
The Role of Foundations in Effective Marketing
00:01:36
Speaker
Actually, I love this question. I think when we start out, it's important to have a solid foundation. And that foundation is very people, prospect, customer oriented. Before we start talking about automating anything about technology, what's the best tool out there, we should really
00:02:02
Speaker
make sure that the the foundations are solid so that whatever you want to scale is not you're not scaling crap for for lack of a better um phrase no you're not you're not you're scaling the good stuff i think that i think marketers get obsessed with technology because there's so many tools i mean you look at the mark tech landscape and there are thousands of tools out there to drive efficiencies for just about any channel any
Connecting Beyond Technology: Impactful Marketing
00:02:32
Speaker
about marketing activity you want, but my sense is that marketers lean too hard on technology, and they forget about the fact that you're marketing to people, and the tools allow you to amplify your efforts, to scale your efforts, but it really comes back to what are the pillars of marketing? How can you connect with target audiences and do marketing that makes an impact? Of course. I think the way you just explained that, I think you did a better job than I did. That's brilliant, Marc.
00:03:02
Speaker
No, no, I'm with you. I'm with you 100 percent. I mean, tools are, you know, like just to use the word that you use, they amplify, they're supposed to amplify something that actually works. And how do you find what actually works? People are at the center of that, whether it's B2B or B2C, you're selling to people. You know, it might sound like cliche at this point. It's been said and said again, but I still keep
00:03:29
Speaker
talking about the fundamentals, because I feel like there's still room to improve for all marketers, all founders, all entrepreneurs, because it's just too easy. It's much easier to think tools, technology, what's the hottest tool.
Positioning as a Foundation in Strategy
00:03:46
Speaker
We spend hours asking around for recommendations on how to get this specific thing automated, et cetera.
00:03:56
Speaker
But that's easy for us. The other part is the hard part. And that's what you're also trying to do is make all this as easy as possible so that we can all get the fundamentals right. When we scale, we scale on solid foundations.
00:04:14
Speaker
One of the things that I spend a lot of time focused on these days is positioning. Jack Trout and Al Reis come up again and again. I mean, this is a book that came out decades ago, yet it remains almost the Bible for many marketers. I'm curious about...
00:04:28
Speaker
your take on positioning because there are people who believe it is the core to marketing and i'm one of them and there are others who think that yes position is important but then the key is how do you leverage that in terms of your messaging and your marketing activities curious about where positioning falls into your world and how you deal with your customers.
Shaping Perception through Positioning
00:04:50
Speaker
To me, positioning is one of the very first pillars, so you have your strategy. Positioning comes way before messaging, for sure, and of course, way before copywriting because copywriting is just the how
00:05:04
Speaker
You're going to say what you've decided you were going to talk about, right? So that's to me. That's That that's one of the most important pillars and if we just just to go back to what we're saying previously Which is all people so if these people are making decisions on whether to try your product or Download a resource by your product or service. These are all people.
Understanding Customer Needs and Motivations: Marketing 101
00:05:27
Speaker
How do they make decisions? We have to think about
00:05:29
Speaker
When I hear Spark, for example, what comes to mind? You have to understand what comes to mind for me when I hear Spark or when I read a certain sentence. There's a lot of that in positioning. I think I'm a big fan of April Dunford. One of the examples she uses in her book is if you say you're selling a cake on a stick versus you're selling a lollipop made out of cake, there are two different things.
00:06:00
Speaker
The cake on a stick doesn't feel right. It makes me wonder, well, do I need a fork to eat it? It just brings up all these questions that add friction to the whole buying process. But if you say it's a lollipop made out of cake, all of a sudden,
00:06:19
Speaker
There's a lot of calm. There aren't so many questions that come up. How do you find that frame of reference? I think it's one of her phrases, the market frame of reference that makes you the obvious choice.
00:06:35
Speaker
Yeah, I love that phrase the obvious choice because good positioning is so powerful that there are no other options. The value proposition, the fact that they talk to you specifically at a time when there are many, many products out there is so powerful that you cannot help but embrace positioning as a pillar for marketing. I think that's really important. On
Challenges in Interviewing Customers
00:07:01
Speaker
LinkedIn, I see a lot of posts about
00:07:05
Speaker
interviewing your customers, knowing your customers, understanding your customers. And I look at them and my first reaction is, this is Marketing 101.
00:07:15
Speaker
If you don't know your customers inside out then how are you going to develop marketing and for that matter sales that are going to resonate because if you don't know their interests or their pains or their problems or even their aspirations then you're making at best at best educated guesses and as someone who works with entrepreneurs to show them how to
00:07:38
Speaker
connect with customers why are we seeing marketers talk about this so much is it the circle that were in on linkedin or is this part of a bigger picture challenge that many marketers are struggling with.
00:07:51
Speaker
Two things come to mind here. And it's true. I have seen this a lot. And I myself, in certain posts, I've talked about talking to customers, which is inherently incorrect because it's not like a normal conversation. Going back to a couple of things that come to mind. Talk to customers. It's so easy to say, but it's not as easy to do.
00:08:19
Speaker
So it doesn't mean that it's not doable. It's just that it's not easy. And we talked about technology tools, people that have that tools-first strategy. It's because that's easy, the hacks. We have to be on this podcast and talk about hacks, right? We have to bring up hacks. Hacks are easy. Hacks are, you know, I'm going to look for someone else to solve my problems, to give me the answers. What's the latest hack?
00:08:45
Speaker
you pay attention to examples that have worked for others but won't necessarily work for you because you don't have all the context. Yet, we don't even pay attention to that. We just take that, no? Just take as an example, Ahrefs $7, the paid trial. So many entrepreneurs have told me, oh, I'm going to try that. Okay. But you have to think about the context when they came up with that idea.
00:09:11
Speaker
they were four years and three to four years and i don't remember exactly work you know that the new cmo. He came in he did loads of interviewing influencers customers prospects etc they knew they had they had a good product that's the main difference.
00:09:27
Speaker
Do you know that you're actually delivering value that you can't just apply something and put a price to something if you don't even know that you have value so all this ties back to having interviewing your customers having that those conversations to reaffirm.
00:09:46
Speaker
One of the things is to reaffirm that there is value there. That's number one. It takes time. It's not something that you just turn on and off. It takes time and you need to know how to actually do it because sometimes it could just feel like, well, there's a certain way of running the interviews. It's not like a conversation, having a coffee with a customer. But then after that, how do you make sense of everything that comes out? Because it feels like you just open Pandora's box and
00:10:14
Speaker
How do you make sure it doesn't just explode in your face and then you desist and leave that box that just stays on your to-do list because you just don't know how to make sense of
Strategies for Valuable Customer Interviews
00:10:25
Speaker
all that. I think there's a lot of talk to your customers, talk to your customers, but not enough of how to do it.
00:10:31
Speaker
I was reading a post this morning about the reasons why companies don't talk to their customers and there was a long list and it kind of scared me because if you have marketers who actually admit to why they don't talk to customers, then we've got a serious problem. So if you fall into the camp of talking to customers is important.
00:10:50
Speaker
Depending on how you look at it, it's a necessary evil or it's a joy to do because you're connecting with your customers. So how do you do an interview with customers? As you say, it's not a coffee conversation. It's not a casual conversation. So how do you approach them for one? And then how do you structure the 20 minutes or the 30 minutes that they're going to give you to provide the insight and to get the insight that you need to do better marketing and sales?
00:11:16
Speaker
I think step one is to understand where you're at right now. This is where you're at and where you think your gaps are. That's really important. One of the interesting exercises at this stage is to ask everyone in the team why they think their customers buy from them. Each one responds to that separately and you keep that information for after the process.
00:11:45
Speaker
because it's also at the end show them why customers actually buy and just be like, hey, can you see there's a disconnect here? You yourself don't even know, but it's not just you as in one person.
00:11:58
Speaker
It's you as in someone in sales versus someone in marketing will have two different answers, right? Knowing what, and then it's, okay, so who am I going to, who am I going to talk to? Who do I want to interview? So you might have customers you would you want to talk to the ones that signed up for a free trial that haven't paid yet. So you have to group decide which, which group you're going to, you're going to actually talk to. Then once you're, you've decided on the group or groups within that group,
00:12:27
Speaker
who has, for example, purchased or signed up in the last maybe two to three months, the ones that purchased from you last year. So that's key because that information is fresh. I mean, if you ask me why I bought my green screen six months ago, I probably wouldn't be able to give you as much information, right?
00:12:46
Speaker
so the more recent, the better. Then you decide, depending, I've worked with entrepreneurs that had 2,000 customers in their database and others that have had 30 to 50. It all depends. If you have 2,000, you can add on an additional filter and just say, okay, in terms of maybe stickiness, repeat purchases, you can add on filters to make the different groups. Now then you decide on
00:13:17
Speaker
Are you going to give a reward generally the best best customers will be more than happy to talk to you without any reward but that's not the general that's not that's not to say it's the case for everyone so decide on the reward i mean and that depends on the on the on the business.
00:13:34
Speaker
If you have a SaaS, for example, it's five euros a month, does it make sense to give away two months free? Right. That's 10 bucks. Does that make sense? So just asking ourselves, what would be a value to them? Not just the automatic, I'm just going to get a $20 Amazon gift card. That's too easy. No, we should really think about what could be a value to them.
00:13:59
Speaker
What about the questions themselves? So it's not a conversation. So I'm not trying to have a casual chat.
00:14:06
Speaker
I'm looking for specific insight and I have to structure my conversations in the right way. And admittedly, most customers, if you can connect with them, if they give you 20 minutes, 30 minutes, count yourself lucky because they're busy. They've got their own priorities. Helping you is really not top of mind for them, but they may love you enough. So they will help. How do you come up with the questions and how do you get the answers that you want in a limited period of time?
Identifying Behavioral Triggers for Switching
00:14:33
Speaker
So once you're in the interview, you have the first part, which is just making them feel comfortable, doing a little bit of small talk, making sure before that you get there okay to record it. That's really important to be able to record it.
00:14:50
Speaker
so that you could be 100% present in the conversation and you could do the analysis, the extra layer of analysis afterwards. So first of all, it's just a little bit of small talk and then you just get into it automatically, get into going back to when they actually performed that action, right? So no transition as in, okay, now we're going to start the interview, no? Just go get into it, right? You want to really go back to, if it's a purchase, go back to the time
00:15:21
Speaker
right before them, what happened? Tell me about the time when you said enough is enough, I have to solve boom, right? Or I have to get to this. Obviously, they're not going to get into the nitty gritty, the good details in the first two or three phrases.
00:15:40
Speaker
But if you keep asking questions like aha and and and how so and tell me more And no, so you you start digging. That's why you have to be president It's also why recording it is super important so you could just be in the conversation Extracting as much information as possible leaving. Don't ask any any any close questions. Don't assume anything
00:16:04
Speaker
And then that takes you, you have the format of a very short interview where you can go through the, you know, six, seven basic questions. If you have a bit more time, you can start digging into questions like, what is it? One of my favorite ones is, what do you know now? That's valuable. Had you known before, would have made you sign up faster, for example.
00:16:29
Speaker
It's an idea. It's an example of value that is misplaced. It's not communicated. So you're like, okay, fantastic. And then take that and make sure that's visible at the beginning. But then you have the typical questions, which are, if you had to recommend a product or service to someone else, what would you say?
00:16:51
Speaker
One of the questions or one of the things that I wanna know when I interview customers is what I call the trigger. If you're a customer and you're doing the job using a tool, at some point in time, you decide that you want a different tool because no one goes from, well, very few people go from using nothing to actually using a product. There's always switching and they're always thinking about what their alternatives are. And some of it comes to performance and price. And I'm always interested in what is that
Understanding the Entire Buying Journey
00:17:17
Speaker
trigger? What happened that made you wake up one morning and go,
00:17:20
Speaker
This video editing tool that i'm using is no good anymore i have to find a new one and that's what i want to find out i want to find those fine motivations and. Do you see that as a core part of customer reviews when you're trying to get the inside you need. Absolutely if we look at the understanding the whole the full buying journey.
00:17:40
Speaker
Most marketers are at the stage, they only half understand that last part, the buying, where the buying is going on. Even the using after that, they're not really fully understanding that, to be honest. But if you go, as you said, and understand the triggers, the two, three triggers, well, there's the very first one. Of course, that's the one that made you say,
00:18:09
Speaker
something is not right and i gotta start passively looking. For something but it's it you know the level of urgency just grows and grows as you move along the buying journey. What's the next one.
00:18:23
Speaker
the next trigger that makes you go into the active-looking face. That's a really important one too, mainly because if you can get in front of those earlier on, in front of these people earlier on with either any type of collaboration with other brands, that's for one, a bigger opportunity.
00:18:46
Speaker
cheaper channels. That's actually a very good opportunity. But yeah, it's much easier to get into people that are in the deciding phase. It's just easier for marketers, especially if they haven't run the customer interviews, they don't have the information to be able to, how can I say, move their marketing to the rest of the buying journey to the very beginning of the buying journey?
Future of B2B Marketing Post-COVID
00:19:12
Speaker
Let me ask you a loaded question. This goes back to the original premise of first principles of marketing versus technology and data, and to get your take on the marketing landscape for the rest of the year. So for the last year, we've seen a lot of marketers either double down on digital marketing or embrace digital marketing for the first time.
00:19:34
Speaker
hasn't been conferences and people have published a ton of content and done a lot of webinars and some people have embraced podcasts and ebooks. As we come out of COVID, hopefully come out of COVID, how do you see the B2B marketing landscape changing? Do you see it flipping back to pre-COVID where we all go back to conferences and we
00:19:56
Speaker
pull back on content and digital marketing or has the landscape shifted in a way that we're not going back and you can't go back even if you wanted to. That's an interesting question i mean i.
00:20:10
Speaker
I can only give you, of course, my opinion. I don't know what's going to happen. I think we've been given a taste, or B2B marketers have been given a taste of something that there's no going back to 100% of what they used to do.
00:20:26
Speaker
It's not a B2B example, but I think it was Airbnb that when they shut down their ad spend, nothing really changed. When they realized that with or without it, they weren't seeing a huge difference either in visits or sales, so it wasn't really moving the needle. So you're talking about millions and millions being spent, but for no reason.
00:20:54
Speaker
I think when it comes to B2B, we have the in-person events, we have the conferences, we have all that. I think they're going to ask themselves, is it really moving the needle?
00:21:06
Speaker
I think that's what's going to change. It's not just, okay, we're going to go back to doing conferences or automatically. I think there's going to be a step before that where we ask ourselves, is it really moving the needle? And in terms of content creation, I think that we've been given a taste of something that's actually pretty cool, whether we had been forced into that or not.
Evaluating Marketing ROI Critically
00:21:28
Speaker
But I think that's going to stay.
00:21:30
Speaker
Yeah you find it interesting that a lot of marketers have done marketing because every other marketer does the same thing we go to conferences because the competitors go to conferences we publish content on our blogs because that's just the thing that you do it will be very interesting to see whether people do things differently and really as you say start to scrutinize the ry of all their marketing activities and how it
00:21:54
Speaker
moves the needle because if you're doing marketing for the sake of marketing, that's not marketing. That's just keeping busy. One final area that I wanted to talk to you about is just your presence on LinkedIn. And I think for a lot of people over the past, you're a lot of marketers in particular have really embraced the platform and seen a lot of ROI. And I'm curious about how you see yourself using LinkedIn going forward when people do go back to the office and they do get busy and they have less time to spend on social media.
00:22:23
Speaker
Any thoughts on how the platform evolves and how yourself, you will change how you use LinkedIn. I think to me, I started to really be, be more active on LinkedIn end of 2019. And so this is pre pre COVID even, I don't see it changing for me in the, in the next year, year and a half. I don't see that changing. However.
00:22:48
Speaker
I mean i can't remember exactly how many monthly active users there were in maybe maybe you know in on linkedin but in terms of content creators i believe we're now we started during when it started was at one percent.
00:23:03
Speaker
And now we're at three, 4% that are actually creating. And then a big chunk is they're just lurkers. And then there's another chunk that's just not there at all. So I think the more LinkedIn has a good organic reach for now, it's been a bit fickle, to be honest, for me personally over the past two, just three weeks. So the algorithm there just
00:23:27
Speaker
those funny things here and there, but still, there's a good organic reach on this platform today. What's going to happen when we have more content creators and the same number of eyeballs? Is LinkedIn going to bring in more users so that it evens out?
LinkedIn's Evolving Role in Content Strategy
00:23:48
Speaker
Because if not, that'll mean less reach for the rest of us.
00:23:52
Speaker
One thing I wanted to ask you about LinkedIn is a recent announcement that they're going to expand the number of characters in a post to 3000 from 1300 and curious about how you feel that will change your use of the platform and how the platform could evolve because the nice thing about LinkedIn posts is I call them snackable.
00:24:11
Speaker
They're quick hits, they're succinct pieces of insight, and I can scroll and really get a lot of value quite quickly. But 3000 characters to me, first impression seems like, man, it's going to be a lot of long content. Some stuff is going to be stretched out. And I'm not so sure the user experience is going to be improved simply because people can write more words.
00:24:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think I remember that. You posted about that a couple of days ago or yesterday. I really enjoyed that post, especially the snackable part. When you give the snackable, by snackable, it doesn't necessarily mean short.
00:24:50
Speaker
It doesn't necessarily mean one sentence or 200 characters. I know that that's not what you mean. But I'm thinking of it from the point of view of someone that doesn't make the effort to make it readable or enjoyable or just easy to read for the other one. Can you imagine if that person is given more than double the number of characters?
00:25:14
Speaker
So I'm just worried about the clutter that's going to be working. If we're already selfish, and I'm not saying this about you, Mark, but in general, we're selfish. We just push everything as is and we make the audience, we expect the audience to sit down and filter out.
00:25:33
Speaker
through this clutter and find something of value for them. So there's a lot of that in the LinkedIn posts today. If I do that, it's not intentional. So this is a work in progress. But if you give me 300 characters and I have no idea what I'm talking about,
Using LinkedIn for Engagement and Strategy
00:25:52
Speaker
then that's just more bad content, I think, in my opinion. Now, how can this be used for good? Well, like you said, I think you mentioned it, replacing articles.
00:26:06
Speaker
even blog posts, that could be a, again, it's an opportunity if there's value. And even then, if there's value, I don't think that I want to read 300 character posts all day long, every day. So I would like to read one of your posts as, you know, maybe a video, change things up, you know, a video, a short one, a thousand character posts, a podcast, a
00:26:33
Speaker
one liner once in a while, just changing things up. Well, thanks for all the great insight. Where can people learn more about you and raise the runway? LinkedIn. We're just talking about LinkedIn. That's where I spend most of my time. Yeah, so happy to connect there.
00:26:49
Speaker
Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you'd like to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.