B2B Marketing and More With Pam Didner

143 - ft. Darrell Alfonso: Marketing Automation, a Modern Marketer's Must-Have

142 - ft. Michael Brenner: Marketing in the Age of Disruption

Today I have a very special guest: Jeff Coyle. I'm not going to tell you why he does. I'm going to have him tell his story and we will be talking about AI-based content management tool and let's get started.   So welcome, Jeff! So happy to have you on my show. Why don't you tell everybody, who you are and what you do? I know you have awesome, awesome product. And I have seen the demo in the past and I loved it. I can't afford it, but I love it.   Jeff Coyle: Well maybe we'll talk about that today too. I'm Jeff Coyle. I'm the co founder and Chief Product Officer for Market Muse and a little bit about my background. I've been fortunately or unfortunately in the content strategy, content marketing lead gen and search engine optimization game for about 21 years.   Pam Didner: All good things. I love everything you said: lead gen, the content marketing, the demand gen. Yay. My favorite topics. Hard to do it well, but you have a lot to share.   Jeff Coyle: Yeah, I worked at, I’m one of the first people who were selling leads to B2B technology companies before he believe in that people even had content. You know, we were convincing large multinational B2B companies to write white papers and syndicate them like, cause they even have them at the time, you know.   Pam Didner: They probably focus on sales, collateral. That's only thing (laughs)   Jeff Coyle: A lot of white papers and that's it. Right? And so we kind of enhanced that space. And then we were acquired by a major publisher. I worked with them in house for a number of years and during the late phase of that, I was doing basically editorial teams, content teams, product marketing teams, and SEO teams don't always work together. Pam, are you aware of that? They don't always work together?   Pam Didner: My God. Don't talk to me. Whenever you talk about those topics in terms of how to create a good content and the multiple teams that needs to come together. Yes, I understand. I understand the pain so well. Jeff Coyle: And so I went through that, right? And I knew, that there was a better way to provide insights from research. And I found my cofounder at Market Muse had taken one of those workflows and automated it, the workflow researching topics. So truly telling the story about what it means to be an expert on a topic. And when you turn that and you integrate that information into a research process that speaks the language of the editorial leadership, that speaks the language of the subject matter expert, because you're not giving them a word because of some esoteric data point. You're saying, “Hey, if you're going to cover this topic comprehensively, you want to make sure that we have pages about this, sections about that--the language of the user” and that became Market Muse was the solution that brings those teams together by providing insights that are going to be awesome, exciting amplifiers for editorial leaders, writers, but also have the same benefits that SEO want--traffic conversions, leads engagement. So everyone's happy and everyone's working together towards the same data driven goal for the first time. So we've created an objective measure of content quality and comprehensiveness. So because, hey Pam, I can look at your site and I can say “you are obviously the expert on sales enablement, but here's a few things you haven't really covered comprehensively. And you're like, “Oh yeah, those are obvious that I should write about, but I just shot you a spreadsheet with words in it it’s like, “yeah, I'll get to that next year.” That's the difference?   Pam Didner: I hear you. So I actually, for listeners, I have seen the demo is actually pretty impressive in terms of taking SEO, taking the initial preparation that you need to do to determine a topic and also create a draft and then move your content along the production stage, if you will, not necessarily like when I say production and it's not video production, but like creating that draft to get to the finish line.   Jeff Coyle: Yeah. So if you are the person who's coming up with, what should we create or what should we update today that's going to have the biggest impact on a business? or let's say you have a business goal: I want to own this topic by the end of the year. Market Muse can tell you what articles need to be built or what articles need to be updated. And then we follow through with the content briefs. So we actually build the content briefs at scale. We have teams that get thousands of content groups and they basically provide an outline or a single source of truth for the writer. So when the writer produces, they can focus on being creative. They can focus on being the expert that you're paying them for, not doing stuff that they don't want to do.   Pam Didner: Like SEO, like doing a lot of research and finding the title. What works whatnot.   Jeff Coyle: Yeah, exactly. So then when they give you that draft, it's highly likely, because you built the brief, you ordered the content with the brief, they're going to give you something that's going to have less feedback cycles. And it's likely going to meet the guardrails, the guidelines that you've set. That's what a brief does. It creates a point of reference. We automated all of those processes, so you can say, “okay, the best article I can write today, Pam, is on how do you make the best product marketing materials for events. I just made that up. Maybe that's not a good idea that it is, and we will build the outline and you can write it and you know that it's going to be successful.   Pam Didner: Awesome. Love it. Love it. And one of the key product features is to use artificial intelligence, AI, to build content planning, optimized content. Like you said, such as your blog, white paper, your thought leadership pieces. So, can you elaborate a little bit how Market Muse uses AI and how does that help, uh, the content marketers?   Jeff Coyle: Sure thing. So we built our own natural language processing platform effectively. One of the components is in a branch of AI called topic modeling, in natural language processing. And we are a machine learning think tank. We have our own data science lab in Montreal called the M4 Lab. Those are spending nearly all of their time on back in engineering on this platform that can assess effectively what it means to be an expert on a topic. We tell the story that if you were to cover this topic comprehensively and truly be an expert, how would you do it on one page? How would you do it in one cluster of content? How would you do it across the entire site? And then we're able to overlay that information into common workflows. So we can take that model and map it to your page and say, “Hey Pam, here's a, here's a page level audit of thing you wrote. You had a few blind spots.”   Pam Didner: Okay, we'll fix it.   Jeff Coyle: Or we can go up to the competitive dynamic and go, “Oh, across the 20 competitors who you're researching, here's the stuff they did and here's the stuff that Market Muse says is very relevant and no one's done. And there's your area of differentiation. So we don't just tell you how to do everything like everybody else. We tell you how to differentiate yourself from them. That's very special. That's unique to Market Muse. At the site level, or the network level if you've got a lot of sites (we work with a lot of large publishers) we give you basically an on-demand content inventory and audit and all the value that goes along with that. And it's all personalized. So we're the only in-market application that can tell you how hard it will be for you to rank for a topic. Not just how hard it is, cause that's not valuable to me. If I have a brand new website and I go write the best review of the new iPhone ever. I have no chance of getting any traffic from market, but I've seen that, I go write that article and I win. Market Muse answers the question of why behind that dynamic. So Pam, if you go write sales enablement tactics for first year BDRs, it's going to rank.   Pam Didner: Your platform or you are tool can actually identify some of the gap   Jeff Coyle: Areas of opportunity as well.   Pam Didner: That's what I call it a niche, but you say “areas for opportunities.” I like that term much better.   Jeff Coyle: And the gaps and the gaps, too. And the gap could be a variant. So you covered this with a great long -form thought leadership piece, but you missed a few details or it could be vice versa. You wrote a, something that answered one question and you never spoke to the big picture. So we tell a story of what that true user intent profile is and everywhere you've done it everywhere you haven't. Where are you the most important pages to lean into for links, uh, to point new pages to, what are your, um, your risk areas? So we, this is a big area for us. It's risk. You have a page out there it's doing well, you don't even know why, and you can need to support it. You might have a page that's out there--I call it the arm, a hand without an arm it's just out there. It just gets a bunch of traffic and you have never supported, you never built the foundation. You’ve gotta build that foundation.   Pam Didner: Yeah to amplify and expand that. So it sounds like that your are using artificial intelligence to do kind of like a very holistic assessment, identify the areas for improvements, identify the gaps that you need to do you look at a site level at a page level, or even at a specific content. Is that correct?     Jeff Coyle: Any level of specificity, even networks we can say, like we tell our publisher, if you're going to write an article about this TV show, right? And you're going to write about the actors on the TV show. You put that over here, and if you're going to write about ways to stream it, you know, put that over on the other side, right? So we can even get into that level of detail. We set guidelines for content. We set guardrails for intent. We build a topic model. The next step is obviously to start to build out drafts.   Pam Didner: It's a virtual editorial assistant, in a way.   Jeff Coyle: Absolutely. Giving you the inspiration so that you know, if I focus on this and really put my energy towards it and I write it, great production value, high quality, wonderful narrative that meets these guidelines, it's going to be so successful. And now we're building out drafts that give you inspiration form of completely original drafts.   Pam Didner: Yes. Yes. With that being said, you kind of touched the topics I want to ask you next. Obviously the latest buzz in the field of AI is GPT3. And I read article, or a blog post you guys wrote about expose GPT, in terms of what it can or can't do. And the GPT3 is this very powerful language model that uses machine learning to generate human-like text. Are you leveraging GPT3 at all? Or you are doing stuff on your own?   Jeff Coyle: All of our natural language processing and natural language generation is all proprietary, built by us. All the models built by us. GPT3 is one of the most amazing innovations in artificial intelligence, of all time!   Pam Didner: Yeah. Up to date. Yeah. There may be something that's coming in the next year, but as of now, yes, it's quite amazing.   Jeff Coyle: It's, it's amazing. And it, the amazing scale that it works at in the applications out of it are significant.   Pam Didner: I 100% agree with you. I address that a little bit at my general session at Content Marketing World 2020. And I specifically talk about content pretty much can be written for you if you use artificial intelligence.   Jeff Coyle: Yeah. And so that's the thing. It can be written. But is it telling the story you want it to tell?   Pam Didner: Yes. Does that meet your objective? Does that resonate with your audience? You know, does that bring a hook? Yes. I hear you.   Jeff Coyle: It's a general purpose language model. And so it's not a solution. It is an API. It requires, you know, now in its current form, a lot of programming skills. It lacks structure, it degrades over time. It is, you know, not considering your workflows. It suffers from degradation. GPT2 suffered from degradation, a severe rate, right? It was, it was “Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam” and makes some really kooky stuff. GPT3 is shockingly better. And there you can begin to work with it, but it is still subject to that degradation in long form content and a short form content.   Pam Didner: I do agree with you. I think having a machine generate say a draft, just like you said, is a draft that humans still needs to take over and to do conduct the quality checks. Still need to edit as you see fit. You still need to make sure that you read it, that aligned with your objectives and what you want to accomplish.   Jeff Coyle: Yeah, exactly. And that's where, so the solution Market Muse First Draft versus of GPT3. First of all, you know, like you were, you mentioned, I believe that, you know, the Guardian post. That is an output of eight generations and it's curated by editors.   Pam Didner: They provided, they brief GPT3, they provide a specific instruction, you know what they want GPT3s to write at the same time, they also provided the opening paragraph. So they provide kind of like in depth instruction for the machine. So machine can process and determine how they want to write it.   Jeff Coyle: Yeah, what I'll tell you, though, is if you saw all eight of those generations back to back, you wouldn't have been all that impressed. The outcome's amazing. It's curation, right? You had to do work on it. So the human brain now has never experienced the outcome of generation at this level. Washington Post--these are the problems that content marketing people need to solve, or like Washington Post solved with Helio.   Pam Didner: Right. I was, and they did that back in 2016 and 2017.   Jeff Coyle: Right. But the thing about the problems, right? The problem was: I can't cover the election.   Pam Didner: On the local level, right?   Jeff Coyle: Right. I cover 8%, but now Heliograph lets us solve all of it. That's solving a business problem. You've got platforms out there that can do data-driven template content. It's not this right. But GPT3 isn't doing either. It's not producing content that is meeting specifications. It's not producing content that is connecting with your goals as a content marketer. aAtemplate might even do a better job than that, but you're not hitting targets for tone. It's not training it, training on your content either. So Market Muse First Draft’s value is we can train it on your blog. It can write like Pam. Pam Didner: Yeah, understood.   Jeff Coyle: It can write on spec.   Pam Didner: There's another question I would like to ask you. Can you tell us what features your teams are working on in the next six to eight months that you see is additional features that you want to add? I understand that’s a product roadmap tend to be confidential and, uh, but if there's anything that you can share, that would be fantastic.   Jeff Coyle: Yeah. So the big things that we will be, first of all, Marketing Muse First Draft, it's in private alpha right now. It launches into public beta, most likely, Q4 it’s coming out. That's a big splash for us. Also for the first time Market Muse is putting new offerings for at a couple of lower price points.   Pam: Yay!   Jeff Coyle: I know. I know. Pam Didner: Jeff I remember I was talking to you guys last year and you will tell me like, “Oh, we focus on enterprises and our average price is this.” And I was like “I thank you so much. It's very nice talking to you” and that quiet walk away. (laughs) I love your product. I still went and did a demo to me. I was like, “Oh my God, this is amazing.”   Jeff Coyle: Yeah, it'd be, so that's going to be a big deal. So we have those things. That's all happening in October. So many people who, you know, we have some demand and we didn't have a place for a solopreneur, or a small team, even, you know, a startup or a small agency. Now easy decisions are there for you. We're also upgrading a lot of our current clients based on that. That's exciting. So those are huge things.   Pam Didner: What are two pricing points? Can you say that again? 79 and …   Jeff Coyle: $79 a month, $179 and $499 a month are our self-service agreements and then we have our premium product line, which will remain at those price points. One of the exciting things, there are some options for going annual, which makes us even more attractive. And so some of those features that I'll mention: we're going to have the most accurate measure for potential upside with content and topics.   Pam Didner: So you can actually forecast how the content will perform?   Jeff Coyle: Yeah, we're going to have to get where to basically say you are here. Here's the estimated traffic and value that this page has. And the value is if you had to buy that traffic. We're going to have some customization for getting even more specific into the actual return on investment, right in the application. And you're able to see what Market Muse thinks your potential upside is right now. And then what's your upside is if you were the best. So we don't think you maybe might not think you can be the best, yet. But this is where you could get with an easy, quick win. So we're basically trying to get into predicting your likelihood of success, because then that tells the story of when you using it you can justify the expense very easily.   Pam Didner: Yeah, exactly. So you actually quantify that ROI?   Jeff Coyle: Direct quantification of value. We already do it for our clients with things like QBRs--quarterly business reviews--through custom reporting. But we need that in the self-service offering, right? It has to be automated. And so we've really focused on that. You know, it's so fun to go in and look at your content and go, “Oh, wow. Like, if I had to go buy the same traffic that this page generated, it would cost me 10 grand a month.” Holy cow, right? So all of that is those are our big, our big moves. We're really stretching the market down market as well as releasing innovation for the generation side.   Pam Didner: Very, very good. Jeff is so wonderful, so wonderful to have you on my podcast and the show. You know, I hope to see you soon, hopefully at Content Marketing World or like in a physical events.   Jeff Coyle: Yeah, I did my Content Marketing World presentation. I think we're going to be one and two in the best. I’m the second best one, you obviously the best one. (Pam laughs) We'll see how that goes. Yeah, Content Marketing World going to be amazing. The lineup, I'm so excited to just veg out and watch all the recordings, frankly.   Pam Didner: Very, very good. I'm going to see you at the virtual event.   Jeff Coyle: Thank you so much, Dan. We really appreciate it.   Pam Didner: I hope you enjoy the podcast. I’d appreciate that you leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or my website, pamdidner.com. If you think this is useful, please share with your colleagues and friends. I also love to hear from my listeners. So join my Facebook community, Build Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. I'd answer any marketing questions you may have. I mean, any marketing questions you ask? I answer. All right? See you there. Have a great week.  

141 - ft. Jeff Coyle: AI-Based Content Management with Market Muse

Hello, everyone! A listener, Ron, sent me a question. He asked me, “Hey, my company doesn't have sales enablement group. Do we need one?” Well, Ron, that's a great question. The need of sales enablement really depends on your sales team and who is doing what to support sales. Chances are, I would say that you already have sales enablement type of functions in your company, but it's really not called sales enablement. Does that make sense? Probably it's part of sales, operations, it's part of marketing or it's part of the product marketing team. They are jobs being done, but it's just not necessarily calling it sales enablement. For example, most of the sales enablement is about training sales how to sell and to know the products or even onboard them when they start. Someone or a group of people are probably already doing that. Right? In some cases, marketers are working very closely with inside sales to supply them messaging, sales collateral, a sales deck, or email templates to enable the sales team. Maybe you have marketing people pretty much stay on top of that and doing a certain function or portion of a sales enablement job, but they are not part of the sales team. Part of sales is about making sure that sales have necessary sales tools and the processes so they can do their jobs. And that can also be part of a sales enablement or sales operations job. Possibly somebody is already working on sales tools and sales process sourcing and also implementation. I suggest that you check who is doing what and how the sales team is supported to determine if you need a sales enablement group. Like I said, sales enablement is defined differently by different companies. Also many companies have sales supports being done by different internal groups. Right? Kind of like a virtual team: marketing is working on collateral finance, maybe helping on sales forecast, HR is working on sales incentive. They are all doing their job to support sales. You need to identify the gaps that the sales need help and then determine who should do it. If you can get other stakeholders to do it, great. If not, do you need to hire someone or build a team? And that's pretty much a head count and budget discussion with the management. So I hope I answer your question Ron. Do you have a sales enablement team in your company? And what do they do? Share that with me. If you enjoy my podcast, I’d appreciate it if you leave a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts or my website: pamdidner.com. If you think this is useful, please share it with your colleagues and friends. I also love to hear from my listeners. Join my Facebook Community Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. I’d answer any marketing questions you had—I mean any marketing questions. You ask, I answer. See you there. Have a great week.

140 - SOLO: Does My B2B Company Need a Sales Enablement Team?

I have a special treat for you today. So rather than listen to me talking, I invited a special guest to join us. Priscilla McKinney, founder of Little Bird Marketing and joining us from Galena, Kansas.    Pam: So there's one thing before we get started, I want to have a chat with you about. I love your LinkedIn title. It says Annoying Truth Teller Powered by My Husband's Homemade Bread. So, you know, I don't really care about the truth teller part (laughs). You know, I really care about the homemade bread! So talk to us a little bit about your, I don't know, your husband's baking skills and what kind of bread does he share with you.   Priscilla: Well, see, this is where we're already off to a great point about social selling, but we're going to go back to bread because the reality is, is that nobody who really knows me, doesn't know that my husband for the last 17 years has been a stay-at-home Dad, Homeschooled our kids, and basically does everything you could imagine for me (laughs). And so, you know, they say behind every woman is a great man and that's all I have to say. (I usually say behind every woman is another bunch of her great women friends!) But in this case you can’t know me without knowing that I really have an unfair competitive advantage, and that is that my husband helps me with so much. And then there's just treats, he's an amazing cook. And, uh, you know, and his bread is just, uh, just above par. And I grew up in Spain and lived in, around France and limited Germany. And let me just tell you, I think I'm a little bit of a snob and he makes the most amazing French baguette. So I'm very sorry and it doesn't travel well, otherwise I would be giving it away.   Pam: Wow. Okay. One day I have to go to Kansas to visit you. Just to try his bread.   Priscilla: You’d would be most welcome!   Pam: Excellent. Speaking of telling all the marketers about the truth for today I want to talk about the topic you are incredibly passionate about: social selling. Yeah! So talk to us. What is your definition of social selling and why is it important?   Priscilla: Well, I think there's some of the age old adage is like “people buy from people they know like and trust” and all these, like things were like. You know, just cliches that we've used over and over again. But sometimes when I talk about social selling, what I like to remind people is what it's not, and it is not actually taking some of the same old school slimy salesy, always-be-closing-approaches and just moving them onto social. Instead, Social selling might use the technology of social media, but it is first and foremost, you know, it's human and it's collaborative and it's connective. And at the very root of it, it is saying, “I am a person, first, and I'll connect with you.” Now, I'm not saying that I have to sit and we have to know each other personally and be best friends. We can get right down to business, but I want my humanity to be the first thing that comes out. And I want someone to know something a little bit about me and how I see the world. And the last thing I'll say about that is, you know, I am who I am, whether I'm selling to you fire hydrants, or I'm selling marketing plans. I can't help, but be Priscilla and see things a certain way. And I want to explain to you, if you're going to enter into business with me or a professional relationship where we're collaborating, or maybe I'm referring to you, or you're referring to me. Socially, I want you to understand where I'm coming from and have a grasp of being able to talk with me as a human first and foremost,   Pam: Obviously before digital, you know, the sales people build the relationship with their prospects or with your potential customers first. So is something very similar to that, but we are doing that digitally? Is that how you see it?   Priscilla: That is, but I tell you one of the stats that should make everybody shutter is that we know at this point that the average buyer is now 57% of the way through their buyer's journey before any sales person ever knows about them, before they come on the radar of a company, or a lead generating system before they hit a top of the funnel, anything. And so this kind of idea of like, there's this streamline, you know, even, even the notion of a funnel was funny. But, you know, because as we all know it zigzags all around and we use these constructs in order to try and understand the journey as if it's just this linear thing going on, but it's not. And social selling understands that people are not out there having a linear experience in selling, that they go zigzag around, they need to know people and things build on each other in a far more organic way. And so if you come into things, knowing that, then you actually can start building the foundations of social selling.   Pam : With all that being said, typically, who is responsible for social selling within the company?   Priscilla: That is the best question to be asking. And I think the reality is that people think it's one of two people: it's either the salesperson or it's the marketing person.   Pam: No kidding! No kidding!   Priscilla: And then we have the WWF smackdown about which one it is. (laughs)   Pam: (laughs) I know! “It's your job.” “No, it's my job!” “No it isn’t your job!” “Oh, ok.” (laughs)   Priscilla: And then there's the blame game. You know, sales says that marketing didn't give them good leads. And marketing says that they give salespeople good stuff and they don't close it. And then the thing just goes on and on. But I think the reality is that the job is far more complicated and far more open to a lot of other players than people perceive. Right?   Pam: Yeah, I agree.   Priscilla: So this idea of this duality of sales versus marketing to me is really kind of an old issue that needs to be put to bed because I think the job is everyone's and here's another stat that should scare people to death. And that is that we know that people are reading 12 to 14 pieces of content, at a minimum, before they make a decision. And I guess my question is, to anybody who's out there trying to sell, how many of the 12 to 14 pieces that they read belong to you and your brand?   Pam: That's a good question. That's a very thought provoking question and we just need to be addressing the multiple different level. Right? So when the content is being served, can people find it? Right? And is the content in the right format. There's probably additional and thousands of questions that needs to be addressed before we can give an answer to that, but keep going.   Priscilla: Yeah. So what, you know, the old model is that it's either sales or marketing. What social selling really promotes and challenges is that same notion. It's like, no, there is an overarching strategy for the brand and it involves sales, it involves marketing, it involves HR and that's in recruiting. It also involves HR in terms of employee advocacy. It also can employ customer care, Customer experience. There’s so many layers of social selling that needed to be happening. And so when we only put it towards sales and marketing, what we're saying is all we care about is revenue.   Pam: We do care about revenue Priscilla, come on!   Priscilla: But that's short view, short view of revenue because don't you want people on your team in terms of social selling really out there and pulling the messages about the brand and the culture of the brand across all of the channels. For example, talking about how great it is to work at this place so that the company can attract the best and brightest, which then in turn in the long run actually delivers revenue.   Pam: Understood. So now you hit another cord and I think there may not be a clear distinction, say between, say brand advocacy, that's done by employees and also social selling. Do you see these two are the same thing as well?   Priscilla: Well, you know, more people would call them something different. And I do think they are one of the buckets, but I think the skills and the tips and the tricks and the, and the mindset that needs to happen for both of them are the same. And we know that the technology is the same. And so for me, it's about saying people who are doing the social, selling, doing the marketing the HR recruiting the customer care, all of these people need to have the same skill and the same understanding about how social is a hub and every single aspect of the business comes around.   Pam: Got it. So you are looking at in a more holistic view. And, uh, because everybody's on some sorts of social channels And if you are employees representing the company, you'll even just yourself, that how you present yourself does matter.   Priscilla: Absolutely. Yeah.   Pam: So with that being said--that how you present yourself does matter--what should people pay attention to when they do social selling? And what are some of the tips and tricks that you would like to share with everyone?   Priscilla: Nobody likes to be sold to.   Pam: True.   Priscilla: We all know that we hate that feeling, right? We get there's this reason why our culture has this association with like slimy sales. But then we go, we come in and we get out of our car, come up to our office, sit down and all of a sudden, as marketers or salespeople or HR recruiting, now all of a sudden we get slimy. Wait a minute. Why don't we just write and behave the way we want to experience out in the world. And this is the proverbial crap, LinkedIn message you get when someone connects to you. And this is, you know, you and I are very heavily in the B2B space and so we do talk a lot about LinkedIn, you know, so much about account based marketing and how to actually get this done smarter. But this is where this age old dumb slimy message that is completely irrelevant to you didn't even consider you. And in the end, actually half of the time, they actually ask a favor of you when they reached out and it's so ineffective, but it comes from that original mindset of “I'm one person when I'm wanted, when I'm, you know, and then I'm a different person when I'm marketing or selling” and that needs to stop.   Pam: Got it. So what is your advice specifically when people would like to engage or embark on the social selling?   Priscilla: It's about putting the other person first and it's also about doing it in the right place. And so that kind of slimy salesy approach I just talked with you about, we all are very familiar with that over in LinkedIn mail. Get out of LinkedIn mail jail and get over into the comments and the juicy bits. And, you know, you have such a great depth of wisdom about account based marketing and how to actually use the social channels for real, real sales revenue--like KPI's like we're not joking around and just. Being friends with people.   Pam: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. I totally agree. Yeah. We have to hear the core, man.   Priscilla: Yeah. Yeah. And you wrote the book on how to do that globally and there's, there's something very powerful about that, but you don't get that done by staying in LinkedIn mail jail. You have to get out and you do two things when you, when you do that. First of all, if you have a wishlist or you have, even existing clients or a group of friendly, you go out and you see who is actively talking about the things you want to talk about and you just like a cocktail party come on up and you, you get involved in the conversation. And you, let the stuff happen and there in a more organic space and you do two things: not only do you start a more organic conversation, that's not jarring like this other crap, but you have just completely removed everybody from the potential dumb conversations who's not active on that channel. They would only be in those conversations if they're on that channel every day or every other day, or they find it meaningful So you just muted out a crap ton of people who have a profile somewhere, who don't even ever, you know, take a look at it. And so the prospecting or running, creating the relationship through the, I think is a very, very important, but often missed point when people are social selling.   Pam: That's actually a very good point. I missed that one completely (laughs). I comment on people's post, but I didn't think through. A lot of times it's very random. Maybe I should comment on the potential customers and especially the one I want to reach out.   Priscilla: The first thing I do when there's someone that I want to really do business with is I go out to their page, I go to their activity, I look at their posts and I see what they're interested in and I strike up that conversation. Other people would be like,“Oh, that's a gimmick or that’s salesy.” No, not if you show up and you be yourself and you just, you're interested in what they're interested in. And we all do this in society. It's called etiquette.   Pam: Yeah. I like that a lot. You hit the core. I liked that a lot. And, another question I would like to ask you specifically: are there, by default, social channels that people should use? I know that this is probably depending on your audience and depending on your personal preference, whatnot, but do you have any recommendation that there is a specific channel, or channels that people should use?   Priscilla: Where are their eyeballs are, that's where you need to go. But I think we all know, you know, just the truth about business when it's B2B, is that number one, you need to be on LinkedIn. Number two, you need to be on Twitter. And the big difference between the two of those. That's very, very important to understand.   Pam: I agree.   Priscilla: You ready? (laughs) Linked In is a closed network and therefore it cannot be scraped by Google. Whereas Twitter is a public channel and it can be scraped by Google. And so when, if you want to be famous for something, if you want the recognition of an influencer in a particular field, then you better get out on a completely public network that can be scraped and looked at, regardless of whether they've actually connected to you. And so if you're really looking for that exposure, and building your influence, then you really cannot leave out Twitter.   Pam: Okay. Got it. So it's really depends on your goals in terms of communication and also what you want to accomplish.   Priscilla: Exactly.   Pam: And also, you know, where your audiences are and then you can determine what are the right channel that you would like to engage.   Priscilla: Yeah, exactly.   Pam: So that’s a wrap for our podcast.  If you enjoy the podcast, please don't forget to leave comments or like the podcast on your favorite channels. As you venture out everyone, please continue to stay safe and healthy. Talk to you next time. Take care. Bye bye.  

139 - Social Selling: An Interview with Priscilla McKinney

A big hello from Portland, Oregon. I interviewed Neal Schaffer on my past week’s podcast. What do you think? Like I said, I am planning to juxtapose the episodes of me talking for 7 minutes at a time with guest interviews. Just want to try something new.   If there are guests that you want to hear from, please send me a quick email at hello@pamdidner.com and add the questions you want to ask them. This way, I get a chance to meet new people and you get your questions answered. #winwin I am more than happy to do all the logistics to reach out.   For today, I want to talk about a topic that is not getting much of the spotlight in the marketing landscape: processes and automation workflows. You are like: “Ugh, Pam, can you talk about something that is more sexy and fun? Like how to select creative that will pop? Or what are the tips and tricks to writing catchy headlines? How to run Facebook pay ads that will convert?” Well, if you Google those topics, you’ll find many, many outstanding blogs and videos out there that cover these topics.   One thing I do want to share with you, though: you can read forever, but at the end of the day, you need to practice and implement. That’s the best way to learn. So if you have budget and don’t want to do the work, that’s OK. Once you’ve done your reading, internalize the takeaways well enough to provide clear guidance to your agencies and the contractors so that they can do a great job for you. If you don’t want to do it, you are still responsible to convey your marketing visions and ideas clearly.   Creative, design, writing, and anything content related is what you see on the front-end. I get it. We, marketers, tend to focus on the front-end and leave the back-end to IT and operations. However, for digital marketing to deliver a seamless customer experience, you need to plan out how the back-end will integrate with the front-end. So you cannot separate: “well front end is my job and the back-end is someone else’s job.”   For instance, when people click “contact us,” what is the next step that needs to happen? IT and operations cannot tell you that. That’s your job to figure it out. When people sign up for your app, what email notification should they receive the first hour, the 2nd day, and the 7th day. Again, IT and operations cannot tell you that. You need to figure that out.   How should their data be captured? That has a lot to do with how you are going to get your analytics. Will that be part of CRM, marketing automation, or the customer data warehouse? You need to make a decision about how the data will flow. You need to make sure that all these systems can talk to each other. For that, you need to get involved on the back-end to understand how data flows and what steps are manual or automated. You need to make that call.   I’m not saying you need to code, but you do need to design the customer experience. You need to answer such question as When to send the registrant email out? When to contact the customer when they sign up for the event? How to further engage and nurture them after the event?   When you address these questions, you need to set up steps and process in your systems so that actions are taken when the customers act or engage. All these require some strategic thinking to ensure a smooth online experience. From on-site events or webinars, to post-event follow-up, timely email outreach, to sales engagement, you need to visualize the process and pave the journey for your customers. Then you can have someone either code it or build a workflow to connect various systems to ensure it happens the way you envision.   None of this just happens magically. It requires you to plan, think through the permutations and work on the back-end and front-end integration. I am doing that for myself and my clients. It’s tedious: testing, retesting, constantly changing the workflows, and anticipating problems. And the systems they don’t just work themselves out. Once you start going live, trust me, you run into a new of set of user issues that you don’t expect. That’s the type of tedious, detailed work that no marketers want to talk about. I hate telling you this but those processes and workflows will make or break your digital marketing.   You are like, “Pam, you are stressing me out? So, what can I do?” Well, it actually depends on your job. For some of you, you probably never have to deal with the back-end. Lucky YOU! I know some content marketers just need to write the content, upload content to WordPress and check on Google Analytics. That’s it. Great!!   I also know some event marketing managers that only need to worry about everything on-site, but nothing pre- or post- events. They have other members who will take care of that for them. Well, you know what, with no physical events at this time, many of those event marketing managers are forced to change and they need to build something online for events to work! And that something is really the back-end--sourcing the different platforms, integrating the process with a different system. It’s a lot of work!   So regardless of your current responsibilities, I strongly suggest that you make an effort to learn how marketing as a whole works in your company. Your marketing departments may run paid social, events, email campaigns, create blog posts and videos. Try to understand how everything works. Try to understand what tools are used and how they tie together (or fail to tie together.)   I encourage the marketing managers I coach to draw workflows as a way of putting their understanding of the back-end to the test. The way I see it, if you can explain your understanding in a logical flowchart, it means that you understand how things work. The biggest benefit of understanding how things work is to help connect the different dots and give you the ability to think strategically. Workflows will help you see the good, the bad, and the ugly of your digital marketing. You know where to go to get the data and you also know where the gaps are.   Yes, it’s tedious and boring, but make an effort to understand the backend. You won’t regret it. The understanding of the processes behind-the-scenes will help you identify what you can do to improve the front and back-end together.   Again, thank you for listening to my podcast. Podcasting is one-way communication. I don’t necessarily know who you are, but your support means a great deal to me. Feel free to ask questions on my FB community: “Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.” And when you join, you can get a free Tall Starbucks on me. I added a gift card with a barcode. You can find that in the announcement page.   Again, love to hear from you. If you venture out be safe and stay healthy. Take care. Bye-bye!

138 - Strong Digital Marketing is About Processes and Automation

I interviewed Neal Schaffer who is a social media and influencer marketing expert.  Neal recently published his fourth book, The Age of Influence. He is already thinking about his fifth book! #Amazing Here is the quick summary of the podcast: Neal shared the definition of influencer marketing. It's about social media users who have built a community around publishing content frequently about a specific topic. Over time, these users build a certain level of following. With many people having much to say, it also creates a democratization of information in recent years. He also touches on the differences between employee advocacy and influencer marketing. You can be an advocate of your company and an influencer at the same time. Starting at the CEO level down to employees, you can not only be your brand's advocate, but also have different levels of influences depending on your social media following. There are different spheres of influence. Neal also pointed out that influencer marketing is a long-term play. It's about building relationships. Many brands invite influencers to their customer events and provide sneak-peek of product reviews. Help influencers understand the company, the product, and the culture better. Sourcing the right mix of influences is also critical. Work with the team on the selection criteria. Understand your objective and KPIs. Make sure that there is a natural alignment between influencers' expertise and your products and services. Also, broaden your definition of influencers to customers, partners, and followers as well.   Listen to the podcast and check out Neal's book, The Age of Influence. Find out the habit that he picked up that he would have never expected due to COVID 19!

137 - Should Influencer Marketing Be Part of Your Marketing Mix (Neal Schaffer interview)

Hello from Portland, Oregon! During the pandemic, many people turn to podcasting or video recording as a creative outlet. I, on the other hand, moved inward and started to focus on my mind and my emotions. I haven't completely shut down or gone off grid. I still work on my client projects. I continued to get on Zoom for business and the personal gatherings. I still create content, but only limited to my monthly webinars and the pre-committed speaking engagements. To manage my emotion and my stress, I made an intentional effort not to worry too much, even though the business has been down. But following that premise willing too much, I took very proactive look of the overall financial health of my business and created a plan for the worst case scenario, such as what if I didn't meet my revenue goal for second half 2020. What should I do? Right. Once I have a plan in place and I know what to do and what I can control, I stopped worrying. Now, if it happens, I have a plan. I know exactly what I need to do. Then subconsciously, I just decided to let go of that podcasting goal, that video recording goal, that my writing goal, just for a little while. Like I said, it was not planned, it just happened and I kind of went with that flow. Speaking of focusing in where I spent a lot of time thinking, thinking about my business, thinking about where I want to be in next several years, thinking about what type of content to create moving forward. And thinking about whether I need to modify my current value proposition--and if I do, how do I pivot, what do I need to change? And I also think about the work and life balance, and I've been spending way too many hours working in the past six years. So I kind of just let my mind wander here and there without much direction. Oh, by the way. I also think about what I want to eat every day (laughs). I'm not much of a cook, but I love to eat when I'm sad. I eat when I'm angry, I eat when I'm depressed, I eat when I'm happy I eat. When I'm with my friends, I eat. All right. And I love to try different restaurants. So when the restaurants were closed, doing COVID, man, that was hard for me. Thank God. My husband started baking and cooking. I don't know what happened to him and I'm not going to ask, but I'm so happy he started doing that. And I am his worst critic. Like if he creates something and I was like, “Oh my God, this is not good. Can you just go back to a kitchen and fix that? Otherwise don’t come back.” No, I'm kidding. I did say that occasionally, you know, in a very joking semi-serious type of way. But either way, I'm very grateful that he cooks and I'm just being a critic. It's fantastic. Oh, by the way, we love, we love “Great British Baking Show.” Have you seen that show? It's fantastic. We watched 10 seasons straight and you can say that I stopped creating content and then stopped consuming massive, I mean, massive amounts of content on Netflix and Amazon Prime—aka: binge watching shows. I guess that's kind of like the trends like everybody's doing. I certainly can check off binge watching shows on my 2020 list. But, you know, even though I've been thinking a lot and thinking is nothing without execution, right. Because I can think all the time, but if I don't on it, it's kind of like a fart or thin air. So here's one thing out of this whole, let-my-mind-flow-randomly process. I came up with one idea and this is related to a podcast. So I'm thinking I've been doing the seven minutes kind of podcasting format for about three years and you'll be hearing me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Thank you so much. Moving forward. I was still sharing my thoughts and my ideas, but I like to juxtapose that with guest interviews--the length will be around 15 minutes with three to five questions. You can hear other people's point of view and we can all learn together from them. What do you think? I want to try that and to get your feedback. All right. So you are going to hear several interviews in the next several weeks, so check it out and I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback. Another thinking ideas that I did is I started to reevaluate my own website and I look into my current value proposition is a clear enough is anything I need to be fine. And also I need to change due to the current environment. And there are a couple of things I made changes. And they are changed to accommodate the current situation at the same time optimize for SEO. For example, I offer strategic planning, account based marketing, content marketing, and the Martech integration and evaluation, so I create a separate page to talk about what I do for each of this topic. And that that will make it very clear. It's articulate, again, my offering in a way that people can understand at the same time optimize for search. Another thing I did is for my book page. So in the past I listed three books on one page. So that very long page. Now I broke that down into three separate pages for three different books. Again, you know, articulate my positioning a little better at the same time optimize for SEO. Another thing I did is the speaking page, which is obviously it was tailor for face-to-face conferences and trade shows and events. Now all that has stopped. And so I changed the heading and add it online and also virtual a virtual events as a part of my offering. Again, looking into the current environment and optimize my website accordingly. And you know, to be honest with you, many brands are changing that they are onsite rule to accommodate or comply with social distancing. And you should talk about what your stores are doing or your brains are doing on the specific situation like this. And make that very clear and does share that on your website, so you people know that you are doing everything to keep them safe. That's another form of a content marketing. So here are some of the changes I made and by thinking and let my mind wander around. So what about you? What have you been doing in the past 10 to 12 weeks? And you're working hard. Are you hardly working? or are you enjoying your time with your family or you just want to get away from them for a long period of time? I get it. Or you’re just spending way too much time, like me watching Netflix and Amazon Prime. Some of my friend actually went off grid. They literally just take a break away from computer and not really looking into a social media stuff. And I really admire that. So whatever you did, I hope you are healthy and safe. Thank you so much for listening to my podcast. Podcasting is a one-way communication. I don't necessarily know who you are, but your support means a great deal to me. If you want to chat, reach out to me on any social media channel. Not Tik Tok top. Okay. I'm not on Tik Tok. You can also join me on Facebook community Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you can get a free tall Starbucks on me. I place a gift card with a barcode on the side. You can find that in the Announcements page. Please use it. Right. Love to hear from you. If you venture out, be safe and stay healthy. Take care. Bye bye.

136 - Business Benefits of Taking a Break

Hello, everyone. Back in October 2019, I recorded a podcast episode. Episode 107: How to Cultivate and Expand Your Strategic Thinking. What I want to do today is to share with you an example of what I did with a client to help her explore more ideas to expand her team’s charter and scope which is one way to help her think differently and drive strategic conversation with VP of her group.   So let’s do a quick review in terms of what I shared with you in EP 107 on how to cultivate strategic thinking. There are a couple thing I mentioned--3 points, if you will.   Think from the perspective of “why and what,” not “how.” Explain that to your management well before you go into details.   Communicate in a way that senior managers can understand. So obviously senior managers care about costs and efficiencies. Or they care about success metrics. So whatever you discuss you need to tie with that so that they can understand how you make an impact to their metrics.   Help senior management connect the dots. Especially in the digital world, all the back end, or technology are inter-related. For many traditional sales and marketing managers, they didn’t grow up with digital natively. It’s very hard for them to understand how the back end are connected and you need to explain it in a way that they can understand and help them connect the dots.     Now, here is an example I worked on with my client. She is a director of content for a large SaaS-based service platform company. Even though she is a director of content, she doesn’t really focus on content marketing within the agency, she more focuses on providing content marketing training and workshop for customers. So it’s kind of like a post-sales, contract fulfillment type of things that a lot of their customers when they sign a contract with this specific company, part of the contract is for the company to provide content marketing trainings and workshops for these customers. So her team is basically trying to fulfill that contract commitment.   Her manager constantly asks her on how to scale without increasing her team’s headcount. She is struggling to come up some ideas to drive the conversation with her management.   After several conversations, here is what I suggested her to do:   Option 1: (This is probably the pie in the sky) She can productize her workshop offering as a profit center. At this time she’s a cost center. And what if she can standardize some of her workshop offering and make that a paid program? So she can standardized a package and make it a certification program—she can certify facilitators and then it's a train-the-trainer approach. Because she has a proven methodology why don’t we turn that into some type of certification program, It could be a 3-day workshop to be certified trainer and then those trainers can actually train or provide the workshop for their own companies. So it’s a pay program.   So I mentioned that her and she was like, “oh, that’s kind of interesting,” I told her she doesn’t have to take a big initiative initially. What she can do is take a small step: I told her that she doesn’t need to start big on this. Start with a discovery project. Define the types of workshops that can be customized or standardized. Then she can publish a recommendation to determine if it's feasible to create a certification program or identify the types of workshops that can be standardized. Because once you standardize, your team can do more workshops to actually support more accounts.   Option 2: Continue to be a value-add part of contract agreements, but scale fast and furiously. What I am trying to say is look into workshops she’s already done. And I mentioned about standardized package. She can have her team act as a coach to work with these trainers. So the team doesn’t have to do a lot of workshops, but have the team work as a coach on the sideline and work with the trainer so the trainers can do the workshop on their own for their companies.   Basically, this can help your team scale to support more accounts. It’s a slightly different business model than option 1.   Option 3: Outsourcing. So her team is currently at full capacity and I recommended outsourcing some of the workshops to trained and experienced facilitators. And also use existing materials that she uses to train new hires to train these contracted facilitators or agency so she doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel.   She took my suggestions and made that part of the annual planning discussion. According to her, the chances of turning her team into a profit center is pretty slim, but she wants to mention to her management to continue to think about how she can morph and expand her offering and also her team’s capabilities. However, the outsourcing model is certainly a great option to expand her team’s to support more accounts.   I work closely with multiple clients to help them on their marketing plans and identify potential areas that their groups can expand to get additional headcount and budget. If this is something where you need help, please reach out.   For the time being be well and let’s connect again next week. Take care!

135 - An Example of How to Cultivate Strategic Thinking

A big hello from Portland, Oregon. I want to talk about something totally different this week. I’ve been going through a lot of changes lately on both the business and the personal levels. Well, all of us are going through a lot of changes. Heck, our country is going through massive change to try to co-exist with COVID-19 safely, and even on how to reform our policing structure after recent protests.   All of us are stressed in our own way. If you have a job and your company is doing well, your managers are asking you to take on more. If you have a job and your company is not doing well, your managers are asking you to do more with less. If you don’t have a job, you are working hard online and offline to find a job. If you are working for yourself like me, you are hustling even more to get additional businesses, because we just don’t know what else is going to happen next and how that will impact our cash flow.   And I am only talking about the professional front that we all have to deal with, I haven’t even touched on the stuff that we have to deal with in our personal lives! Many of us have children and aging parents that we care for while working full-time at home. On top of it, everywhere we go, there are new rules and new processes that we need to follow.   I went to see my dentist. You know what? it was not an easy walk-in anymore. I waited in my car until my appointment. Then, they took my temperature, I needed to wash my hands and clean my mouth with mouthwash for 60 seconds. My hygienist wore a full-on face shield, in addition to a N95 mask, to welcome me. I couldn’t even see Barbara’s smile. There is a new safety procedure for everything we do now. Everything that is familiar is eerily unfamiliar.   When things are tough, most of us want to hold on to something familiar to help us cope. Ever since the beginning of March, there has been no familiar daily routine (I’m speaking for myself now) that I can hold on to except possibly the routine of getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night. Sounds sad, doesn’t it.   Most of my listeners, I call you my B2B marketing peeps. You guys tend to be on the quiet side, incredibly professional and all about get-things-done. I’ve rarely heard any B2B marketers complain (except me! I complain A LOT!). Even when headcount and budgets were tight, you guys tend to tough it out and do what we can with what we have. I love B2B marketers.   Now, I am coping. You are, too! We are all coping. When you are stressed or frustrated with the situation, always remember that you are not alone. Don’t get fooled by all the perfect FB or Instagram photos. Privately, they are also doing the best they can to cope mentally and physically.   But there is one thing I am completely tired of. I am tired of virtual happy hours, virtual dinners, virtual workout, and non-stop virtual meetings. I am tired of the pizza commercials showing various family members eating pizza together on Zoom—and happy! You know they’re not. I actually prefer just eating my pizza and watching Netflix. Am I venting?   This is episode 134, but it’s the first episode I’ve ever recorded in which I am not addressing a marketing topic. I hope you are OK with that.   At this point, I am longing for the day when I can meet my friends; that we can casually sit next to me, we can hug each other freely, and talk trash without masks. I am sure that day will come. While we are impatiently waiting for that day to arrive, unleash your stress and frustration and let it out. You’ll feel better and I’ll feel better for you.   Again, thank you for listening to my podcast. Podcasting is one-way communication. But I’d love to carry a conversation with you, online of course. You can do that by joining my FB community: “Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.” And when you join, you can get a free Tall Starbucks on me. I added a gift card with a barcode that you can use.   Again, love to hear from you. Meanwhile, stay healthy and be safe.   Take care.

134 - A Reminder That You Are Not Alone

I received an interesting question the other day: “Hey Pam, what is your approach of creating a sales enablement plan?”   Great question. I actually have a workshop on how to create a scalable global content marketing plan. So there are some similarities between creating a marketing plan and a sales enablement plan. The bottom line is certain kind of element, or what I call “the skeleton” of the plans stays the same. So let’s talk about this a little but more.   The first thing I want to get clear is the purpose and the audience of the plan. This is something you should always know. Who are you creating the plan for? And also what is the purpose of the plan? Any plan tends to be for internal communication and usage. We create a plan to get buy-in from management so that we can get budget and headcount and/or we create a plan to rally the internal and external teams so we can move toward the same direction to achieve the same goals.   And most of us create the plan to let management know what we are going to do and to accomplish the overall company goals. So, with that in mind, your plan should be short and get-to-the-point. And here are some things I would include in my plan.   Make sure your sales enablement plan ties in with the company’s sales objectives. Let’s assume sales enablement is part of the sales operations. You need to be sure that you are able to show the connection between your objectives and company business objective. The key is to show management what you do does has an impact on sales as a whole.   Categorize your tasks into initiatives or strategies. We all have tasks that we do. I’ve come to realize that management doesn’t want to understand the laundry list of things we do on a daily basis. Is it possible to elevate them to a higher-level strategy? For example: the task you do is customer event management. But the key strategy is to scale ABM efforts to top 50 accounts. And the event management is actually one of the tactics underneath that. So Focus on communicating your strategies and initiatives with management and nest your tasks under that. So, don’t give them a list of the task that you have to do. That would just overwhelm them. They’ll literally shut off right there. “OK, that’s way too much information for me.”   Provide high-level key deliverables timeline. Management wants to see the deliverables you get done. Please don’t show that you are doing a campaign from April to June. Show when they will see your first campaign result; is it on 4/30 or 6/30? So show the high-level key deliverable date, not just a bar to show “oh, I’m running a campaign from April to June.”     Identify metrics for each initiative and strategies. For key strategies, what are the key results? What are the key success metrics? For example: to scale ABM to 50 accounts. Well that’s good. Maybe your key results are 35 customer events, two ABM-specific campaigns that generate 50 leads. So you need to be very specific in how you measure success. And you make sure that your metrics can be tied to the initiatives and the strategies.   Communicate proposed budget and headcount. Depending on where you are in terms of your planning stage, if you are at the initial planning stage you probably will need to propose the head counts or the budgets needed to do your job. But if your plan is approved, I still recommend that you share your actual spend information with your management as a part of a planning update to show them not just the results and how much money you spent (are you over the budget or under the budget. It depends on which stages of planning you are in.   That’s my suggestion to create a sales enablement plan. Tie your objectives to sales objectives. Craft your strategy and initiatives. Articulate your key measurements and provide timely report outs.   So what does your sales enablement plan look like? I’d love to showcase your plan. I would love to share that on my podcast and or video. YouTube is the place to go and find my channel by typing “Pam Didner” and I’ll mention your name and give you credit.   Be well. And let’s talk again next week.

133 - What is Sales Enablement Planning?

Hello, welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. Last week, I said that I had one marketing takeaway from the pandemic. Well, I actually have two.   Let’s talk about what I said last week. I shared that it’s important to update your marketing plan when the economy is opening up. This time around, it’s important to re-evaluate your customer’s behavior changes, understand what behavior changes are permanent, and how they affect customers’ buying decisions and the usage of your products and services. Use that insight to update your buyer personas.   Another element which goes side-by-side with buyer personas is your messaging frameworks. Since the customers’ behaviors have changed, you need to review your messaging frameworks and determine if the value propositions, talking points, positioning need to be changed accordingly.   In the previous podcast, my key marketing takeaway was that you need to refresh and update your buyer personas and messaging frameworks before revising your marketing plan.   So here’s another takeaway that I want to address in this episode is the need of building a marketing continuity plan. We’ve heard of a Business Continuity Plan.   So, what is a Business Continuity Plan? I like this definition from IBM’s website. “A business continuity plan (BCP) is a document that outlines how a business will continue operating during an uncertain disruption in service.” In the IBM’s blog post, it goes on to explain: “It’s more comprehensive than a disaster recovery plan and contains contingencies for business processes, assets, human resources and business partners – every aspect of the business that might be affected.” That sounds complicated!   If we have a Business Continuity Plan for our company, why shouldn’t we have a Marketing Continuity Plan? So, naturally following the definition above, I crafted a definition for a Marketing Continuity Plan. “A marketing continuity plan is a document that outlines how marketing will continue operating during a sudden disruption in service. The plan should address every aspect of marketing that might be affected. The plan should contain a checklist to evaluate creative, copy, and communications in owned, earned, paid, and social media channels. It should also include key decision-makers and representatives from each marketing function. And a frequent huddle will be activated for the duration of a crisis.” Do you like that definition? I like it very much! Of course, I created it!   During the pandemic, many marketing teams started a daily marketing huddle to ensure close communications. Key players or representatives from management, social media, PR, email, paid media, product marketing, web, content, demand gen, or data analytics work together to address any urgent issues.   The initial daily huddles tended to last for hours since many issues needed to be addressed at first. The team would discuss the current issues of the day, such as: Share what social media content is going out? Discuss currently running ads and proposed replacement ads Brainstorm creative outreach Modify talking points or messaging Review data analytics to see what worked or didn’t work Address “help needed” from team members at the tactical or execution level Communicate key initiatives and adjusted priorities    And over time, the number of issues declined, and meeting times could be reduced to 15 or 30 minutes.   Here is what you can do if you have a daily huddle. Take the time to observe what you did and document it. Answer the following questions What were the key topics addressed during the crisis? How did the team reach certain decisions? What data was needed to make these decisions? Who were the decision-makers? What help was needed at the tactical and execution level? What templates worked the best to communicate with upper management or to convey tactical information? How did we decide on budget allocation?   You can turn it—your whole process during the pandemic--into the documented marketing playbook for crisis management, which is the marketing version of a Business Continuity Plan.   Viola, now you have a documented process to help marketing move forward and faster next time. Well, let’s hope there is no next time.   If you need help creating a Marketing Continuity Plan, please reach out. On several occasions, I’ve worked with clients to modify their existing marketing processes and help document actionable marketing continuity plans so that they could focus on important priorities such as creative, marketing planning and outbound executions.   Again, if you have any questions, reach out to me via pamdidner.com   As you venture out, please continue to stay safe and healthy. Talk to you next time, take care.    

132 - Prepare for Future Disruptions with a Marketing Continuity Plan

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More. I talked to many marketers in the past 6-8 weeks. All of us are looking forward to the re-opening of the economy. Yay! #can’twait   Update the buyer personas and messaging frameworks In the previous episode, I talked about the need to update your marketing plan to align with the reopening. I called out that don’t revise your marketing plan for the sake of revising; you need to understand the behavior changes of your customers which leads to the need to update your buyer personas. B2B customers don’t usually change our behaviors that often so we don’t usually update our buyer personas.   However, I think it’s important to evaluate your customers especially after the pandemic. Understand if there are any behavioral changes you have to take into account. And by the way, the behavioral changes may or may not have an impact on how they use your products. And if there’s a change in how they use your project, another factor you need to look into is your messaging framework. You need to determine if your value proposition and talking points need to change or not. So, evaluating your messaging framework and buyers personas are critical pre-requisites before updating your marketing plan.   Another capability that’s important for marketers to possess is to be nimble and move quickly. You need to develop the ability to think strategically so that you can connect the dots swiftly and identify what needs to change when a crisis strikes.     To help marketers think strategically, I created the “think strategically” series for my monthly webinars from May to August. The whole four months!   In May, I did a webinar on “How to Change Your Marketing Plan Again: Continue to Plan for the Unknown.” I summarized the key points of the webinar in my blog post: Important Templates You Need to Update Your Marketing Plan. So check that out if you are interested. You can check it out on my website, pamdidner.com, and download the templates.     In June: I’d like to talk about the 7 Elements You Should Include to Your Marketing Plan   In July: I’ll touch on the topic of How to Create and Deliver Impressive C-suite Presentations   In August: It’s all about How to Sharpen Your Strategic Thinking Skills     I want to talk about the June webinar a little bit. The topic is about how to create a marketing plan. This is the topic, to be honest with you, that comes up most often during my mentoring sessions with marketing professionals. I thought I’d take a webinar to address it.   If you already have a marketing plan template, GREAT! If you don't, well, it's the time to create one. I simply want to share some critical elements that should be included in the marketing plan, and I'll explain why these elements are vital. If you have an existing template, you can compare my recommendations with your current templates and determine if it's necessary to refine it. If you don't have one, you can check out my template as a starting point, then customize it based on your company's needs. To me, one way to judge if a marketer can think strategically is his/her ability to create a solid marketing plan. After this webinar, you'll be able to: - Identify the objectives and audience for your marketing plan - Determine the elements to include in your marketing plan   You can register for any of the webinars by going to my website: pamdidner.com, click on webinars under the Resources tab. You can see the detailed descriptions of each webinar. I hope to see you there.   Many marketers work hard to learn marketing disciplines such as SEO, content marketing, video production, email marketing and more which I call “hard skills.” However, it’s the soft skills such as how to communicate with C-suite and how to ask strategic questions that are hard to possess unless you have numerous opportunities to present in front of senior managers or have an experienced marketing coach to work with you.   I’ll share many key tips at my webinars. Oh, by the way, I recently launched the FB community, B2B Marketing and More. One thing I want to do on the Facebook community is to have some virtual face time to work with a small group of marketers on soft skills or how to use my templates correctly. I am still working through the details, so stay tuned. If you are interested in joining, just go to Facebook and look for B2B Marketing and More.   Again, if you have any questions, reach out anytime. Don’t forget to register the webinars!   Stay healthy and be safe. Talk to you next week. Take care.

131 - Webinar Series to Help You Think Strategically

Hello, welcome to another pandemic episode of B2B Marketing and More. We are finally seeing the light at the end of tunnel as many states are reopening. Yay! So, are you out and about yet? If you are, have a great time and shop until you drop dead. It’s our official responsibility to stimulate the US economy. I am just having fun with you. But definitely shop, but follow the social distancing rules and stay safe. OK?   So, from this whole drama, there is one giant, giant marketing takeaway out of this unfortunate event. It has to do how I help my clients approach marketing planning.   Many of my clients asked me if they should update their marketing plans, Well, now the states are opening, the economy is probably going back to normal and they just went through a round of marketing plan headcount and budget adjustments during the pandemic.   Now people will start spending again, plus, our company’s business objectives and goals have not changed. Can we keep the marketing plan as it is?   Well, the answer is NO.  Hear me out!   For the longest time, I have always advised my clients that marketing plans needs to follow the business goals and objectives to the T. Marketing, ultimately, is about growing the company and helping sales. The business direction certainly guides marketing’s creative, outreach and its overall strategy; the whole nine yards. After strategies are set, marketing works on identifying buyer personas, creating customer journeys, content creation or what not.   But with this pandemic, it made me ponder the validity of my approach. If I think about it, this pandemic has forced all of us to live our lives differently. Everything we’ve taken for granted, like giving our loved ones a hug, going to school, meeting friends for happy hour or going to a graduation ceremony, was completely taken away in a moment.   It has had a huge impact on us mentally and psychologically. Well, I wouldn’t say that it scarred us but, for business professionals who have full-time jobs and need to home-school their children, this whole situation has traumatized them. Just kidding. I have huge respect for people who were doing both. Seriously, you deserve a medal. You are like: “I don’t want a medal, I just want my kids to get out of my house for 8 hours and go to school so that I can sleep!” I get it. I agree with you wholeheartedly.     If you think about it, some behavior changes are permanent. For example, face-to-face customer meetings may be reduced to virtual calls. Less face-to-face to calls and on flight travels. And the physical demos may be moved to online demos.   Our buyers may use different options to communicate with us and the features for our products may be different as well. Therefore, buyer personas need to be updated with our customers new preferences.   Before updating your marketing plan, you need to refresh your buyer personas. And by the way, this is a great standing topic to discuss with your internal teams and agency partners. Everyone will have their point of view and perspective from reading many COVID-19 posts and some have probably talked to sales and customers and will have some great insights. I suggest my clients hold several virtual meetings over virtual happy hours.  Talk about the buyer persona changes. Here are some of the questions you can ask.   What are some of the new normal behaviors for them?  Do these new normals work for us or against us?  Most importantly, how do the “new normal” behaviors shape customers’ purchase journeys and their decision-making processes?   If you refresh your buyer personas, you certainly need to re-evaluate your messaging frameworks. You may need to dial up different features of your products due to customers’ behavioral changes.   For example, some product features are great for face-to-face communications but, with remote work, it’s better to emphasize other features that allow quick access on the cloud through mobile devices. So here’s is my big takeaway from the pandemic:   The refreshed buyer personas and updated messaging frameworks will guide your marketing plan changes. Business goals and objectives are important, but your marketing plan needs to reflect the changes of your customers and the talking points.   I know it has been stressful for all of us marketers. By talking to many of you, I know how challenging your situations are. Some struggle to get clear direction from management, some have lost their jobs. Some have no budget or resources to help them.   I am in the same boat. If it’s hard on the client-side, it’s equally hard on the agency or consultant side.   I created templates to help you sort out your new buyer personas and messaging frameworks. Send an email to hello@pamdidner.com  I’ll send you the templates right away.   In the meantime, I mentor individuals and provide training so teams can revise their marketing plans faster and quicker. If you need help, please reach out! If you venture out, stay healthy and be safe. Talk to you soon. Bye bye.

Ep 130 - One Big Marketing Takeaway from COVID-19

Hi, everyone. Just want to mention that I recorded this episode before the Coronavirus pandemic. This episode is about working with sales on account-based marketing. In the current situation, it’s even more important than ever to align with sales to demonstrate marketing’s value-add.   Yes, it’s been more than a month of shelter-in-place for all of us. I didn’t know that staying-at-home could be so exhausting… I am not going to say that we are in this together. Let’s tough it out together. Enjoy the episode. Be safe and stay healthy, my friends.   Good morning from Portland. I had a coffee with a friend yesterday and she asked me what I’ve been working on. I said that I’ve working with a client on the collaboration between sales and marketing, especially on the account-based marketing (ABM). She asked me how to get that started. Her marketing organization doesn’t work closely with sales and it makes sense that she posed the question.   First of all, ABM is a lot of work. There are plenty of things that marketing is doing keep themselves busy, especially with digital marketing integration, marketing research, most importantly, demand generation.   So here are the five steps that you can work with sales to get ABM started.     Marketer needs to do is to make this as a priority as part of overall marketing plan. This works the best if it’s top down driven. Make sure that senior marketing managers are in conversation with VP of sales and they agree to put resource and headcount to support it. Basically this needs to be a priority between the two groups.   Sales and Marketing agree on accounts that marketing will support. This can be existing accounts or new accounts. It’s important to agree who these accounts are. I may make this sound easy on the podcast. Trust me, salespeople spend a lot of time identify the top accounts. Frankly, there are AI-based tools out there to help companies identify key accounts to focus to maximize potential revenue. Lead Crunch is one company that uses AI to identify look-like accounts. So agreeing on accounts is also critical before you can move forward.   Marketing needs to spend time to under these accounts. Marketers focus on personas, but sales focuses on accounts. This is something that Marketing needs to do their homework to understand account-specific intelligence such as: What kind of products are the companies buying from us? Who are the decision makers? Who are the influencers? What are some challenges they encounter? What are their pain points? Their pain points may not be the same as a buyer persona’s pain point. They may be very specific for them in terms of the technology they use. And what is our sales teams game plans to overcome that or drive the conversation with them. So all this is very much account specific. You need to study and understand that. You need to have a conversation with sales about that. Or if they have a platform they use to gather all the email exchanges or some of the information you should go there and check it out. So make an effort to understand the account. This was something I didn’t do very well, when I was supporting sales. Hindsight is 20/20!   Recommend to Sales what you will do as part of ABM and success metrics: What are you going to do to support them? Are you running hyper-targeted campaigns for them? Are you customizing and creating specific content for the accounts? Or are you doing a customer event? Be clear on what you will do. Whatever you do, please create your success metrics. Be very clear how you want to measure it. I think it’s very important to set up expectation on your key metrics and have sales agree with that.   Set up a process to implement your ABM effort. No matter what you do, you need a process. It takes time, effort, and money to set up a process to do them. There is no shortcut. If you are doing retargeting, you need to make sure that the back-end from CRM, analytics, content syndication, media buy, to landing pages are all integrated.  If you are doing customer events and you need to scale that to 35 events, again you need a process. If you are working on customized collateral, you need a process to make sure that happens. It’s important for you to actually know what needs to be done. And again, everything in terms of ABM, it takes time just to get it started and set up the process to launch it. So be sure you allow the time to do that. And what does that tell you? You have to start your planning early! .   Ok, I covered 5 steps that you need to do get started to work with sales with ABM. The reality is that it takes a lot of time, and a lot of time going back and forth on each of the steps and especially set things up and in the implementation stages. So make sure that you have the time and effort to do it right. A lot of time we are under deadlines and we tend to skip steps or not setting the expectation or try to launch anything in haste and do not have the metrics in place. So make sure that you take your time and have the metrics and process in place when you do your ABM.   So, I hope I answered my friend’s question in terms of how to get ABM started with a Sales Team. What about you? How do you get yourself started on ABM with your sales team? If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear from you.   If you enjoy my podcast, subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform or visit my website at PamDidner.com/podcast.    Again, if you prefer watching video, simply type Pam Didner on YouTube and subscribe. One new video every week.   Be well. Let’s connect again next week.  

129 - How to Start ABM with Your Sales Team

Do you want actionable marketing tips? In every episode Pam Didner will answer one specific marketing question that will help you in you business.

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B2B Marketing and More With Pam Didner

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