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Actionable Marketing Podcast

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Now displaying: June, 2019
Jun 25, 2019

Are you dependent on technology? Rely on it to get you through the day? Suffer from shiny object syndrome? What would marketers do without technology? The hope is that technology helps marketers connect with customers in a more personable way. In reality, it’s killing marketing productivity.

Today, my guest is Mark Schaefer, author of Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins. Mark shares how marketing should create amazing experiences at specific moments to help customers authentically connect with brands.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

  • Ready for a wake-up call? Traditional marketing strategies don’t meet customer expectations today
  • Customers Takeover Control: Marketers are losing control of a brand’s story, voice, and customer journey
  • Where the action is: Shift focus from relying on technology and automation to actually talking to customers
  • Human-centered Marketing Approach: Resonate with consumers and remove barriers by remembering what it’s like to be a customer
  • Purpose of Marketing: Build emotional connections by bringing people together
  • Experiential Marketing: Create encounter worthy of consumers giving brands their attention and sharing their story
  • Testimonial Stats: Content about a brand created by a consumer gets 600% more engagement than content created by a brand
  • Taking Social out of Social Media: Easy button for automation and technology is the opposite of what customers want; marketers have a way of ruining every medium
  • Hurdles to Overcome: Organizational, cultural, leadership, and measurement
  • Meaning is the New Marketing: Consumers want brands that represent values
  • Levels of Loyalty:
    • Shared Values: Take a stand to connect in a way that pushes loyalty
    • Show up and Represent: Unifying and uplifting to display beliefs
    • Dangerous Territory: Not every company needs to take a stand/political view
  • Words of Wisdom:
    • Remember what it's like to be a customer
    • Be more human in everything you do

Links:

Jun 18, 2019

Who’s on your short list of marketing influencers for thought leadership and mentorship? Which company brands do you gravitate toward because of their unique value propositions and authentic connection with customers?

Today, my guest is Ken Moskowitz, founder and CEO of Ad Zombies. Ken shares insights on brand creation and challenges marketers to bring entertainment, humor, and storytelling into their content.

 Some of the highlights of the show include:

  • Passion for Production: From creating commercials as a child and dreaming of being the best disc jockey to turning into a zombie
  • Conversions and Reconstruction: Ad Zombies came to life by accident after discovering need to rewrite ad copy to connect with specific customers
  • Origin and Evolution: Ad Zombies’ brand positioning of world’s best flat-fee ad copywriting service changes to writing words that sell anything
  • More than 103,000 Ad Zombies followers on Facebook attributed to mix of wordsmithing skills and engaging audience to evoke emotional responses
  • Missing mark to make memorable ads: Stories and visual noise connect and convert consumers through brand awareness
  • Where to start: Consistent messaging peppered through channels; view consumer’s perspective, and take the plunge to try something new

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Jun 11, 2019

The success of your company depends on the marketing you do, how you choose to present the benefits of a product or service, and which audience to target. How you position a product or service can make or break your company. Stop right there. Forget everything you thought you knew about product positioning. Connecting your product or service with buyers is not a matter of following trends, selling harder, or trying to attract the widest customer base.

Today, my guest is April Dunford, who has launched more than a dozen products and shares some of the biggest mistakes that startups, marketers, and entrepreneurs make with product positioning. Also, she’s the author of Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning So Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It. April’s book describes her point of view on positioning and offers a step-by-step process to perfectly position your product or service.

 Some of the highlights of the show include: 

  • Career Change: Fake it till you figure it out. How hard can it be?
  • Do it right, and the company grows quickly, gets acquired; you get bored and do another startup
  • Definition of Positioning: How to win at doing something that a well-defined market cares about
  • Perfect marketing execution won’t save you from weak positioning; marketing execution and results are only as good as positioning that feeds into them
  • Who should decide the positioning for your product? Everybody
  • Siebel Story: Too small to buy out beyond a billion dollars
  • Positioning Pitfalls: People don’t do positioning deliberately; and when they try to fix it, they don’t follow a process but wing it or write a “Positioning Statement”
  • Positioning Statement Components:
    • Who’s your competitive alternatives?
    • What are the unique capabilities or features that your product has?
    • What’s the value that those features can enable for customers?
    • Who’s my target customer?
    • Is this a market that I’m going to win?
  • Signs of weak positioning include:
    • How a customer reacts to your product/service
    • They compare you to a non-competitor; not in the right market
    • Customer knows what you do, but not the value or why they should care

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Jun 4, 2019

What does “strategic ambiguity” mean? Marketers, politicians, and others use it all the time. It’s the art of making a claim using language that avoids specifics. So, you can be purposefully vague to derive personal organizational benefit. On the other hand, it creates an environment at companies where employees try to avoid blame.

Today, my guest is Karen Martin, president of TKMG and author of Clarity First. She describes how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and leadership on marketing teams.  

Some of the highlights of the show include:

  • Definition of Clarity: State of something being easily and accurately understood; similar to transparency, but different from certainty
  • Conveying and receiving information can cause ambiguity or clarity for employees and customers
  • Primary reasons for lack of clarity all come down to fear
  • Ramifications of lack of clarity: Takes time, builds frustration, and creates inefficiencies
  • Five Ps for clarity:
    • Purpose
    • Priorities
    • Process
    • Performance
    • Problem-solving
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Visual of the marketing team’s health
  • Profit is not your purpose; profit is the outcome of delivering high value to customers, and purpose is to solve a customer’s problem
  • Are you a clarity avoider, pursuer, or blind? Take Karen’s Clarity First Quiz
  • Where to start to focus on clarity: What do you do? What do you really do? Why does that product, and not something else, to solve a problem?
  • Fearless Workplace: Multiple perspectives, but not a single understanding; feel comfortable having difficult conversations

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