Marketers use key messaging and positioning to connect with target audiences and create personalized customer experiences. Design is a strategy that requires collaboration between marketing and designers to make content visually appealing.  

Today’s guest is Megan Otto, marketing design lead at CoSchedule. She describes how marketing design drives brand engagement. Great marketing with poor design is poor marketing.

Some of the highlights of the show include: 

• What makes an unforgettable brand? Relevant and consistent experiences through design to make a connection with customers across all mediums
• Why is design a go-to-market strategy? Design allows marketing and messaging to be seen and understood 
• Team of Teams: CoSchedule’s marketing and design teams focus on specific areas of expertise and effectively support other teams to ensure consistency
• Kickoffs to Handoffs: Determine strategy, objectives, goals, roadmap, and in-progress demos to track projects and tasks
• Translating Strategy into Design: How you’re presenting the message to the audience is as important as the message
• Work Assignments: Depends on capacity, expertise, and interests
• Purpose of Design: Understand goal and over-communicate to reach completion
• What do marketers need to know about designers? Design involves strategy, ideation, graphic design, illustration, Web development and much more 
• Design is in the Code: Web design and development should be a strategic role within marketing teams
• Evolution of Brand, Design, and Marketing: Always new challenges and unique value to be better 

Links:

• ROI Calculator: Build Your Case for CoSchedule
• Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days 

Marketers know that the value of data from the past helps them strategize for the future. However, it may be time to gather data in a different and proactive way. Why not try an organic and mathematical approach?

Today’s guest is Susan Baier of Audience Audit, a marketing research company. She describes how attitudinal research can be more effective than demographics research. Susan explains the difference between audience and customer research.  

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Audience Audit: Attitudinal audience segmentation research that gains quantitative insight into audiences trying to be reached via marketing efforts
• Attitudinal Research: Understanding how opinions, assumptions, perspectives, and preconceived ideas affect purchase decisions
• Qualitative vs. Quantitative Research: Each offer value, including quantitative statistically significant insights of things affecting some of your audience
• Marketers need to answer ‘Why?’ by providing reliable data
• Audience Research: Only listening to customers, can create skewed perspective
• Who is your sample? Talk to past, present, and potential customers in the market to solve a problem that you understand
• Where to find your audience? Don’t rely on a single source; understand audience via email subscriber list, customer files, and social media platforms
• Why are people here? What kept them from getting help sooner? Focus on what problems your company’s products and services solve, not on what they do
• What does CMT stand for? Write compelling content using existing customers language/lingo to attract a similar audience
• What method(s) to use to gather research? Survey of connotative data; avoid pushing your assumptions that artificially stratify people and don’t make sense
• What doesn’t matter? 95% of studies that identify attitudinal segments reveal that company size, gender, household, and other factors aren’t important
• Crafting Questions: Remove bias from data gathering and analysis processes to improve product positioning, audience targeting, and personas 
• Segmentation: Understand, implement, and use information/data

Links: 

• Audience Audit
• How To Do Remarkable Customer Research With Rand Fishkin From SparkToro [AMP081]
• Gartner 
• Magic Quadrant Content Marketing Platform
• SurveyMonkey
• SurveyGizmo
• Qualtrics
• CoSchedule Marketing Software Suite

Is your marketing workflow bogged down with urgent requests, inefficient software/systems, undocumented processes, and manual tasks that could be automated? How can marketing leaders implement work management solutions to help high-performing teams, especially when it’s a matter of life or death?

Today’s guest is Erin Koschei, digital marketer at Laerdal Medical. Erin describes how to efficiently and effectively manage the "Grand Central Station" marketing analogy.  

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Resusci Anne: Laerdal Medical creates, manufactures, and sells resuscitation mannequins and medical simulation trainers
• Saving More Lives: No one should die or be disabled unnecessarily
• Grand Central Station: Laerdal’s marketing teams communicate and collaborate on content campaign components
• Plan ahead by prioritizing projects based on company goals, initiatives, products, and providing the right information to customers at the right time 
• Flexible and Supportive Team of Friends: All hands on deck to help when needed
• CoSchedule: Best option for teams to communicate, plan, get organized, meet deadlines, and increase visibility 
• S.M.A.R.T. Success: Set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely goals that show value contributed by teams and individuals to stakeholders 

Links:

• Laerdal Medical
• Gartner’s Marketing Work Management Article
• CoSchedule: Marketing Management and Strategy
• CoSchedule: State of Marketing Strategy Report 2019 
• CoSchedule: Marketing Strategy Guide
• CoSchedule’s Blog