The Crucial 12

Powerful Insights for Marketing Leadership

Steve Wolgemuth

• Publisher: BookPress Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781947305052
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Liderazgo

Get Marketing Traction with Twelve Questions. Why do some organizations get brilliant results from their marketing and others don't? Is it the people or agencies they engage or some secret marketing techniques they use? This book provides an unexpected answer to those universal questions: Better leaders get better marketing results. Are you that leader, and will your organization grow from great marketing under your direction? It can! Your success is just a few chapters away. This book will give you a unique, structured approach that even leaders without marketing savvy can employ, one couched in a powerful communication style by asking 12 crucial questions. Transform your leadership impact, identify your organization's weaknesses, uncover game-changing marketing opportunities and insights, and bring accountability and growth to your organization year-over-year.

What’s Our High-Level Strategy?

Karl was hired three years ago to be the marketing director for a prominent HVAC company. The business served a local market within a 30-mile radius, and they were one of the three largest providers in their territory, specializing mostly in residential heating and air conditioning services.

Lately, Karl was feeling pressure from the company’s owners. The competition seemed to be growing faster than they were.

Karl was smart and an excellent communicator. He understood technology, too, and diligently kept their website up-to-date with new and interesting content. In fact, when he first started, Karl had led the implementation of a comprehensive lead-generation system that used written content to attract new customers. Each week, Karl would write helpful articles related to the industry, answering questions customers would commonly ask as they explored HVAC options.

From all of the key performance indicators, it was a success. Tens of thousands of visitors from across the United States were reading Karl’s blog posts and articles each month. Some of his articles were re-posted in national publications online. Traffic to their website was off-the-charts compared to their local competitors.

But as they reviewed the number of new leads generated each month, they weren’t seeing the business growth they had hoped for. Readers were learning from Karl’s articles and, ironically, Karl had even become known as the expert in HVAC marketing. However, Karl’s company was simply not doing that well at getting new customers.

One of Karl’s competitors was Bonnie, a 30-year-old entrepreneur who started a competing HVAC business just five miles away from Karl’s employer. Her company was growing incredibly fast because of some good marketing decisions she was making. In fact, she was taking on new customers at such a rapid pace, she could hardly keep up.

Bonnie spent one-tenth the time and money on her marketing as Karl did, and she had no in-house marketing employees helping her. She had decided early on to outsource that part of her business, but she didn’t do it haphazardly. She knew that her business was serving a local audience, and she needed a strategy that leveraged the proximity she had to her audience. With this basic mindset, Bonnie hired a firm that specialized in local business marketing, local SEO, and local websites.

Bonnie had them build a website that would appeal to her local audience. It had pictures that would feel familiar to her clients—her location, her trucks, and her team. She closely monitored how people were navigating the website, which pages they visited, and what actions they took before leaving. From those observations, the marketing company was able to make ongoing adjustments. Within two years, Bonnie began referring to her website as “the conversion machine.”

Early on, Bonnie’s marketing agency was able to help her dominate local search results. In fact, within a year, Bonnie’s company had a great presence on search engine results pages for anyone nearby making HVAC-related searches. She had also outpaced Karl’s company in garnering local reviews online. Bonnie’s business had a professional presence on every local directory for HVAC companies. Her company had joined local organizations and had their logos on her website as trust symbols. She also had a regular stream of testimonials, both written and video, from local residents who consistently mentioned great customer experiences.

Bonnie implemented a local marketing strategy. Her approach was to create awareness of her company only when and where people were searching for it. She leveraged that awareness with her ubiquitous web presence, designed to get visitors to take action.

In short, her strategy was to capture relevant search traffic and direct those users to her website where they could easily learn about and contact her business. The strategy paid off. Leads were pouring in. Why had Bonnie outpaced Karl’s business development? It’s simple. Karl chose a valid strategy, using content to position his brand as authoritative. But it wasn’t the best one for reaching his local audience. It was a valid strategy, just not the right one. Bonnie chose a strategy that was most effective for her business type.

Most business leaders I encounter are not intentional about strategy. While many leaders insist their companies have written mission statements, few leaders today demand written marketing strategies. In fact, most companies end up unintentionally using a strategy that happens to come along with the marketing company they retain or the marketing director they hire. If a branding agency is hired, a branding strategy is used. If a content marketing company is engaged, a content marketing strategy is deployed. If a social media company is hired, a social media strategy becomes the approach. Most leaders back into strategy.

To be truly effective in leading their organization’s business growth, a leader must be intentional about strategy. Backing into a strategy, as Karl’s company did, is a formula for spending too much money on long-term disappointment.

What’s a Good Strategy?

After more than a decade of marketing consultation with hundreds of leaders, my single most significant and consistent disappointment is that I’m never asked, “What strategy will we use?” I find it disappointing because this, in effect, is an important responsibility a leader has when they consider hiring an agency or when they meet with their in-house marketing staff.

I’m convinced leaders truly believe they are being served with strategy when they aren’t. It’s understandable because “strategy” is nearly always used in conversations with marketers. They say things like, “We’re going to use an email strategy.” But email is not a strategy; email is a thing you send to people. I’m sure what they mean is they’re going to put careful thought into writing interesting content and sending it to a targeted audience, but that’s tactical, not necessarily strategic.

A brilliant marketing strategy is always built on a core insight or insights about the marketing challenges any business or organization is facing. This is why leaders must be involved in high-level marketing conversations; the leader typically ends up discovering key insights that revolutionize their organizations. In Richard Rumelt’s excellent book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters, he says a strategy needs to be simple and obvious and able to be described coherently. He advises that, “A leader’s most important responsibility is identifying the biggest challenges to forward progress and devising a coherent approach to overcoming them.”

Unless your tactics are designed around an organizing strategy, you may not have a great approach. In a competitive world where marketing money and time need to be used as effectively as possible, leaders need to find leverage, and that comes from the hard work of strategy development. A committed leader can learn to discern between a winning strategy and a bad one (or worse, a random execution of tactics) if they start by asking their team to explain it to them in simple terms. If their team can’t do that, or if the strategy doesn’t align with the business case, the needed timeline, or the intended audience, it isn’t the right plan. If it sounds exactly like what everyone else is doing, it’s probably not a strategy, and certainly not a great one.

Leaders who abdicate their involvement at a high level often hire “marketing people” to do this part. More often than not, those delegates simply dive into tactical marketing execution. They build a website, they post on Facebook, or they put up a billboard. In the end, the results are mediocre and leaders are justifiably reluctant to increase their marketing budgets.

Rushing into tactical execution, in my experience, is a very common mistake made today, especially in small- and medium-sized business marketing. Experienced marketers and agencies have pet approaches they’re accustomed to executing, and they tend to dive right in. Tactical trial and error is not a valid strategy, but in my experience, it’s the most-used approach.

Rumelt says, “The core of strategy work is always the same; discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”

Strategies are simple. If they can’t be stated in simple terms, they need more thought, or they need to be scaled back to a few core insights. I recommend leaders insist on keeping written strategies in front of all marketing stakeholders as each blog post is written, with each iteration of a website’s development, and during each monthly review of metrics. Leaders must demand clarity around strategy.

Three Problems

You might think marketing strategies are complex or difficult to create. They’re not. Good strategy always addresses common marketing problems and creates solutions for the three key areas of marketing: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. To devise a good marketing strategy, a leader must first reflect on the overarching challenges facing their company in these areas of marketing:

1. Awareness. How will strangers discover the brand’s product(s) or service(s)?

2. Consideration. What do people need to know, feel, and believe in order to move forward?

3. Decision. What does the conversion step look like?

Understanding the challenges of these three parts of the marketing funnel is the key to developing and evaluating a successful marketing strategy. A good plan will have a solution for each of these problems. It might even involve three separate strategies, one for each part, or it may implement one overarching strategy that solves all three marketing problems.

Solving Our Problem

My digital marketing agency is in a competitive industry. We coexist with a lot of smart-sounding, aggressive competitors who are constantly reaching out to the same businesses that are also our potential customers. These businesses don’t trust most of what they hear from agencies which, to them, look and sound very similar. In our industry, creating awareness with these companies in a way that leads to “consideration” is extremely difficult using traditional advertising and direct outreach.

Articulating our problem as such was the key to developing our marketing plan. We clarified our guiding insight—trust was the main issue from which to create a strategy. If a lead comes to us with a momentum of trust, they are far more likely to become a client. Rather than using direct marketing or responding to RFPs (Requests for Proposals) as many agencies do, we used other tactics. Our two-fold plan for creating awareness was hosting educational events and building referring partnerships. Both of these approaches not only generated leads, they built trust in our capabilities.

We arranged speaking engagements, lunches, and marketing lectures to our local business community. We also published blog posts and videos to support this educational outreach. Beginning a relationship through education to a targeted audience of potential clients is a great way to establish a level of trust that may lead to a business relationship.

We developed referral programs to be more intentional about meeting potential clients. Clients who already used us were encouraged to make introductions to other potential clients. We forged deeper relationships with other professionals who were able and willing to introduce and recommend us to company-owners and decision-makers when they were looking for digital marketing services.

Getting Started

It’s okay if you feel like a deer in the headlights. If you don’t spend time in this space, it isn’t easy to come up with the best ideas. It’s even more difficult to imagine possible scenarios for those less familiar with the internet and the marketing landscape.

The good news is a leader doesn’t have to become a marketer to be involved in strategy development. They simply need to make sure the right team is around the table and the hard work of good strategy development is done before tactical discussions get started. Leaders who aren’t accustomed to having these conversations might benefit from asking the five questions I’ve outlined below. I’ve often used these to reveal pivotal insights, especially when sitting down with leaders, their marketing teams, salespeople, and other stakeholders familiar with business development and marketing.

Assuming you have narrowed down a specific business problem or opportunity you’d like to focus on, and you have clarity around the marketing problem or problems, these questions will help guide a productive conversation.

1. What have we learned so far? What’s working?

By default, marketing discussions typically aim to explore new, untried opportunities for business development. Teams want to ask, “What new and unknown thing can we try?” But a smart leader may choose to divert that line of discussion by asking “What is working so far?”

Encouraging businesses to spend time studying their own success may be the single most effective coaching approach I’ve discovered in marketing consultation. I simply ask, “What’s working?” and then, “How can we do more of it?” or “How can we do it better?” This approach comes from my underlying admiration and respect for successful business leaders, especially founders and entrepreneurs. The fact is, they’ve beaten all odds and stayed in business when others haven’t. They wouldn’t have grown or sustained their companies unless they had some way to attract new clients.

What’s most interesting to me about these same leaders is they are typically unaware of how they’ve become successful. They really have to think about it. But once they do, they find some profound insights. Often core ideas that companies are built on seem like basic common sense to founders. I’ve found them to be incredibly valuable for developing marketing strategies that are a natural fit for the company and destined to succeed.

For example, when my company realized referrals from trusted sources were our key driver of new business, we leaned into the idea of getting leads from them. From there, we became much more intentional about growing through providing education and building a referral network. The blog writing and social media work were in service to this overarching strategy.

2. What pathway did our customers take?

I sometimes ask clients to envision an ideal customer or a few ideal customers. Then I encourage them to tell a story about how they became customers. How did they first hear about the company? Did they know any other customers? What did they need to know? What did they experience online? What circumstances were driving their decision? Who influenced their decision?

The answer is never just one thing. For example, if they saw an ad in the newspaper and called, that’s not the only answer. They probably looked at the website, heard of the business from an existing customer, drove by some business signage, went to an event the business sponsored, and investigated the business last year after finding it on Google. Companies are well-served by doing research and looking for patterns. What seems to work over time? Do you notice any recurring themes? What can you learn about how, when, and why customers choose you, and what experiences do you need to provide for them?

While this line of questioning is similar to the first question—What is working?—it will tend to uncover more tactical successes. It should focus more on users’ behaviors and the layers of experiences they h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Why?
• The Epidemic of Bad Leadership
• Question 1: What’s Our High-Level Strategy?
• Question 2: How Are We Different?
• Question 3: What Do Our Customers Experience?
• Question 4: What’s Our Marketing Problem?
• Question 5: What’s the Thing That Sells the Thing?
• Question 6: How Will People Hear About Us?
• Question 7: How Do We Assemble the Right Team?
• Question 8: How Can We Bring Out the Best in Our Marketing Teams?
• Question 9: How Much Should We Spend?
• Question 10: How Will We Track Progress?
• Question 11: What Are We Learning?
• Question 12: Where Do We Start?
• Final Thoughts Marketing Leadership Matters
• Congratulations!