7 Min Marketing With Pam Didner

A listener, Ally, working in a small software company with 2 marketing people doing everything from marketing to sales support. She is working on a brand guide to standardize not only the look-and-feel of outbound communications but also create the consistent layout for different formats of content output. Her sales team thinks the brand guide is a colossal waste of time. They feel that she should spend the money and budget on creating sales collateral. She asked how to demonstrate the value of a brand guide to her sales team. Well, Ally, let me share with you a known ‘secret’: if the sales team had their wishes, they would love to see all the marketing budget focused on the bottom of the funnel and demand gen. But before we get to there, marketing needs to somehow find a way to make sure that people are actually aware of our products. Even for referrals and word-of-mouth, it starts with someone becoming aware of your products, using them, then referring or sharing with others. A good chunk of marketing’s job

One listener, Lisa, knows that I am writing my second book. She posed a question, “how did you come up with the subject and title of your book?” Well, it’s hard. In the US, more than 90,000 books get published every year. Chances are whatever I want to say is likely to be said already. There is truly nothing new under the sun. However, don’t let that discourage you from writing about your topic. It is all about how people relate to their readers. When I think about Lisa’s question, I find that selecting a title is not much different than creating a marketing message. Your message needs to identify the unique differentiation of your products. At the same time, it needs to be relevant enough to your customers, so they can get ideas on how to address their pain points or solve their challenges. When I select a book title, I follow that same thinking process. I try to identify a topic that is unique to my own experience and knowledge and, at the same time, is relevant to a specific segment of marketers. Coming up

A friend, Erick, was tasked to conduct a content audit and asked me if I have a template that he can use. I sure do. In general, content audits are conducted for three reasons: Some audits just have a grasp of what content is out there and share that with the whole team so that everyone has a holistic view. People who are responsible for outreach can pick and choose what to share. In a way, you create a master list content. In this situation, you may only need top 50 most popular content pieces or the most recent content in the past one year.  It's time to redesign the website. You need to have a comprehensive view of content to determine which one to keep and which one to toss. You can also need to know what additional content which needs to be created. Some clients want to understand if it's possible to map existing content to different purchase journeys, then determine if there is any content gap in each stage. The audit result will guide the future editorial planning. In this case, you map content based

Today, I want to share a little story about me. Since I am a marketer, I have the tendency to see everything through the lenses of a marketer. When I go to a website, I’ll immediately start evaluating the design, copy writing and Calls-to-action. When I am reading an email, I start thinking, “What is the intent of this email from the sender and does he or she achieve the objective?” One day, I was having a casual conversation with my dentist about this. Apparently, he does the same thing. At any social gathering, he doesn’t pay attention to people’s attire or their appearance; he is fixated on their teeth. It’s funny how our jobs and professions affect how we view things outside of work. Here is me in the beautiful valley in France, surrounded by beautiful French country, and yet I couldn’t stop being a marketer. Let me share with you my Da Vinci story. Visiting Chateaux in the Loire Valley has always been on my bucket list. On one of my business trips to Europe this year, I made an intentional detour to Loir

Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable takeaways. So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges. At my last episode, I shared the exciting news that I started writing my 2nd book. The book is going to examine sales enablement and I explained why I picked this topic. My friend Amy asked me what sales enablement is, anyway? Like everyone else, I turned to Google for answer. There are only 2 million results, but I like this one: CSO Insights, a research company specializing in sales research, articulated a definition that is widely recognized and accepted in the sales enablement field:  “A strategic, cross-functional discipline designed to increase sales results and productivity by providing integrated content, training, and coaching services for salespeople and frontline sales managers along the entire customer’s journey, powered by technology.” This definition centers on providing essential technology-based training, onboarding a

Happy New Year! Can you believe it? It's 2018. I don't know about you, but I have this love-and-hate relationship with New Year's resolutions. Here is the "hate" part: New Year's resolutions frustrate me because I have what I like to call a "one-month curse" that I can't break. I spent a couple thousand dollars buying a treadmill once. I used it for about a month, and now that treadmill just sits in our bedroom collecting dust. I pass by it every day and tell myself that I need to get on it, but I always end up doing something else instead, like eating… I bought an expensive and beautiful diary with the intention of writing every day, but again, that one-month curse. That expensive and beautiful diary is situated nicely right next to my monitor. I see it every day, but I end up doing something else instead of writing, like binge-watching TV! Just I've just finished watching the first season of the Orville by Seth McFarlane, the creator of Family Guy. I don't like his humor very much, but I have a huge respe

Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable takeaways. So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges. For today, I want to share some exciting news. I signed up with a publisher to work on my 2nd book. No, it’s not about content marketing. No, it’s not about anything global. So, what is it? OK, drum roll, please! It’s about sales enablement! When I told my friend, Amy, about the news, she was like, “Whaaaaaat? What’s that? And why did you choose a topic that is so, um, unpopular! Oh, I mean, niche?” Amy, I feel your love. Let’s talk about why I chose that topic. I am a firm believer that marketing’s role is to grow business and drive sales. Everything we do in marketing should directly and indirectly lead to a conversion. Two interesting challenges prompted me to write the book. 1. I want to help sales and marketing teams understand that there’re more and more marketing elements that can be used for sales efforts due to digital integ

Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable takeaways in 7 minutes or less. So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges.  This week, I want to share something I read from the book of Verne Harnish, “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.” This is a how-to book. Verne shares templates and specific processes that you can follow when you grow your company from 1 person to 50 people to 100 and more. At each stage of the growth, you need to make significant changes in people, strategy, processes, and tools. If you are growing your company and your processes and tools are setting you back, this can be a great book to get ideas on how to put your hiring and internal processes back on track. By the way, I am not affiliated with Verne. I just like his book and I thought I would share with you.  There is one thing he mentioned in his book that caught my eyes. He talked about the importance of establishing “core values” for your company before a

Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable takeaways in 7 minutes or less. So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges. This week, I have the following question from Benjamin. He asked:  “What digital roles/skills/capacities focus areas will large brands need to master in order to effectively market to today's customers and provide great customer experiences?” Ok, that’s a loaded question! I remember a discussion with my VP when I was in the corporate world: “Should a future marketer be a generalist or a specialist? Should the marketer focus on having a general understanding of each marketing discipline or drill down to be an expert in a specific field?” My take on this. I want to talk about from the perspectives of technologies. When technologies get involved, things get complicated. A natural force will gently nudge us to specialize in a specific marketing field. Think about the evolution of computers: back in the 80’s, computer

Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable takeaways in 7 minutes or less.  So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges.   I got the following e-mail from one of my students, Laura.  Hi Professor, I had you in class a few months ago. I was wondering if you had any examples of a content strategy that you could share with me? I have to create one for work and I'm just overwhelmed by the format. So I thought I would reach out to see if you had anything to share.  Hope all is well. Thanks, Laura Here is my email back to Laura: Laura, Good to hear from you. I totally understand that it can be overwhelming.  Here are a couple steps to get you started.  I’d recommend that you sit back and have a cup of coffee or tea.  J  Write down 1-3 bullet points on why you’re creating the plan and whom is it for. Are you creating this as part of the overall marketing plan? As part of a sales plan? Or as part of a product launch plan? Is this a stand-

On this episode, rather than addressing one marketing question, I’d like to share a conversation I had with the sales and marketing team at Curata.  Curata is a platform that can help you curate, plan and measure your content marketing efforts. It has a very nice, solid platform that allows you to select relevant content and quantify the ROI of your content. BTW, I am not affiliated with Curata at all, but I love their curation platform and analytic capabilities.  You should check it out. Curata is still in the startup phase. They have a full-time sales enablement manager, Sasha Laferte, who resides in marketing.  Her job is to use content to educate prospects and help the sales team close deals. I asked Sasha, what is the secret sauce of building alignment between marketing and sales? What she said resonates with me: the “Holy Grail” is to think of sales and marketing as one team and share the same goal.  She also mentioned that it’s important to sit down with the sales team to understand what their challeng

Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable take-aways in 7 minutes or less. So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges.  During my recent workshop, “7 Ways to Increase Conversions with Digital Content”, I tried to hone in on the fact that increasing conversions is not about replies to your customers’ angry tweets on Twitter, or drip e-mail for nurturing. Don’t get me wrong, these tactics are important. But it’s even more important to see the forest for the trees.  Yes, see the forest for the trees!  What I am trying to say is that you need to focus on understanding different touch points that you use to engage with your customers. For example: if you have an integrated campaign using banner ads, paid keywords, Facebook ads, email and Twitter outreach to drive traffic to your website, can you articulate each channel step-by-step that your customers come to your website and from which channel? Put all of the touch points on a bi

Every week, I’ll pick one marketing question and attempt to address it with actionable take-aways in 7 minutes or less.  So send me your questions. I want to help you take on your marketing challenges.   I was speaking at Social Media Strategies Summit recently and decided to pop into my friend Mike Brown’s workshop to say “hi”.  I learned a new term from Mike that day (via Kodi Foster at Viacom): E.I.E.I.U. He said that the content we create should fit in the EIEIU categories: Entertainment, Inspiration, Education, Information, Utility. He is very clever to coin the term EIEIU. Your content needs to make your customers feel that they receive tangible or intangible value. By classifying your content in this way, you’re able to understand what kind of value your audience might get out of it – tangible or intangible.  It doesn’t mean that every piece of content needs to be Entertaining, Inspirational, Educational and Informational all at once. If you look at all of the content you create, chances are you have a

Today, I want to do something different! I want to share a term I’ve learned, it’s called situational fluency. That’s right, situational fluency. Recently, I read a book about Collaborative Sales by Keith Eades and Tim Sullivan. With pretty much almost all human knowledge on the Internet and at our finger tips, buyers know more about us than we do ourselves. They talk to everyone, except sellers, to get ins and outs about sellers’ companies, products and services. For big ticket purchases on B2B, buyers do their homework! More than 50% of buyers contact sellers when they are half way through the purchasing cycle. With that being said, sales can’t just follow structured scripts and rote steps. You still need training, sales scripts and sales methodology when you sell technologies or complicated products. That’s still very important. What’s changed dramatically is that you need to improvise based on what you know about buyers and what buyers know about you. BTW, buyers know a lot about you. Rather than sellin

Standardizing content How do we standardize content if localization and personalization drive better engagement? - Juliet This is something that we struggle to find a balance in scaling content across the region. There is no right or wrong answer per se, so let me address that in these ways: Products and personas, budget and resources, common editorial, and common creative. Juliet, in a perfect world we want to personalize and localize content as much as we can.  However, we are all limited by budget and resources. It’s better to create a set of standardized content.  Let the local team pick and choose which one to use, also, allow the local team to create their own content for local usage. It’s a matter of finding a balance between standardization and localization.  Be sure you are testing and measuring the impact of your content approach so you can learn what is working for your audience. That is this week's 7-minute Marketing with Pam.  If you have a question for me, you can reach me pamdidner.com or @pa

What is the best way to open a presentation? I am doing a session at a conference.  How do you make a compelling or fun opening to get people’s attention? - Kerry I tried several different approaches for my own presentations.  Here are my 3 suggestions: Articulate very clearly what you want to talk about Start with a story or an observation related to your topic Start with an alarming statistic data or a quote Really, there is no right or wrong way to approach your opening, the most important thing is to BE you!  Start from that first.  Share with audiences what you think and how it is beneficial and useful.  Respect their time and make their time worth it by speaking from your heart as if you are having conversation.   Oh, and remember to smile.  This is something I should do myself. Good luck Kerry.  Let me know how your presentation goes.  Send me your marketing questions via Twitter (@pamdidner)

Question: Hey Pam, how do you make a living as a personal consultant? - TOM Answers: If you ask different independent consultants, you’ll get different answers  But for me, here are the 4 categories of my revenue stream: Speaking - Speaking opportunities at conferences. People reach out to me organically via my website. Teaching- I teach an online course at West Virginia University. It’s a lot of work and doesn’t pay a lot, but I really enjoy it. Consulting - Marketing planning and execution. I work with clients and help them create marketing plans. I also work with them to implement tactics such as email marketing content creation or campaign execution. Another aspect of consulting is facilitation, I facilitate workshops and do 3-6hrs workshop focusing on ‘how-tos’ and setting up the processes of content and digital marketing Coaching - I receive requests from young marketing professionals who reach out to me via Linkedin.  I give advice on their career planning or work with them on marketing plans I’ve be

Building close relationships with your teams in other countries Question: What is the best way to build close relationships with my team? - Sarah Answer: The best way to build close relationships with your team is having regular face-to-face meetings. If your travel budget allows, it would be great to have a face-to-face meeting every 6 months or so.  Have a 2-day meeting in which you provide updates and the team shares best practices and discusses challenges and solutions.   If you can't do it face-to-face, the alternative is to conduct a regular bi-weekly or monthly meeting virtually. Below are possible topics to discuss and share during the meeting: Business and sales updates Status of the company Success matrix and reality check Product roadmap and launch timing Messaging, product positioning, and content planning Marketing research and insights Best practices and updates Budget discussion Tools and processes Co-marketing plans with partners Building close relationships require time and effort.  There a

What does a CPA have to do with marketing Question: What is a CPA? What does it have to do with marketing? - Thierry Thierry and I were having dinner in Paris. He listened to a podcast interview I did and I mentioned a term, CPA (Certified Public Accountant), during the podcast. He didn’t know what CPA stands for and wondered if that is a new term for content marketing. Because of his question, I realized that I violated an important rule that I told my clients not to do, I used an abbreviation without an explanation.In my blogposts, I am usually very careful not to use abbreviated terms and make an effort to explain any I do use. And I always tell my clients to explain abbreviations or use a local equivalent for specific geos. Yet here I was, making the same mistake that I told my clients to avoid. But podcasts are fast, conversational and engaging, so we are liable to use local references without realizing it. Be cognizant of using abbreviations or local references during podcasts and make an effort to expl

Topic: Marketing Plan 2-pager: Part 2 Senior executives are very busy. They may not be 100% up-to-date about your plans. Before presenting a marketing plan, it’s important to have a two-page summary to guide them and get them up to speed.  The 1st slide of the summary contains: Sales goals Business objectives Marketing objectives Marketing Strategies The 2nd slide of the summary includes: Personas Marketing Tactics Success Metrics Personas: It’s a marketer’s job to determine personas for marketing outreach. Different product divisions have different personas. You can’t support them all. You need to prioritize based on your limited budget and resources. So identify the appropriate personas that you want to reach to drive revenue. Be able to articulate why you chose the ones you did as opposed to others.   Tactics: these are specific actions and deliverables which need to be accomplished to support objectives. Here are some examples of how objectives, strategy and tactics are tied together: MKT objective: