Building our Systems – Marketers are Creative Builders

Building our Systems And, to be creative, we have to be “into” systems thinking & working hard, and regularly “out of” our comfort zone. “If solid goals are established, and the majority of time spent manipulating systems toward those goals, great results will materialize naturally.” and “Your task is to optimize one system after another, not careen through the day randomly taking care of whatever problems erupt. Your job is not to be a fire killer. Your job is to prevent fires.” Sam Carpenter, Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less Our job as a marketer is to figure out the success systems that get results. Then, it’s to make them scale. Marketing isn’t throwing random stuff on your social media and expecting to get results. Marketing is about building a system that helps the business achieve its main goal. We can’t stay within our comfort zone. If we like TikTok, as a marketer, you can’t just do TikTok. We will never get anything done. And, as we do it, our comfort zone will change. It’s the good marketer’s job to figure out the steps to success. And, to figure out the smallest cost to perform those steps. Marketers build machines Machines that make magic happen. A machine that creates, builds, distributes, and amplifies our ideas and efforts. Every machine consists of repeatable patterns–the same steps taken over and over again. A machine is a sequence of repeatable steps. We need to figure out the necessary steps and remove the unnecessary ones. We need to build a way to see data about our work. Data helps us identify the right steps, and make improvements in each step. Small processes can be built up into big ones. Think of our steps as atomic. We can’t break them down into smaller steps. Then, we combine these smaller steps into larger processes. Each smaller step can be focused on. It can be improved by a split test. And, because a process can be mixed into many processes, one action can improve more than one system at a time. A process can be automated. Or not. Even though automation feels like the answer, it’s not. We should only automate investments when we already know what our system is, and if it works. Automation scales what already works. If you don’t know if it works, you will scale something that doesn’t work. Working systems are the thing that makes great things happen. The best tools, the greatest ads, will not work at the wrong place and time. Understand the system, build our system, and make sure it works. I do not believe in 1 campaign. I believe in the marketing system. P.s. Don’t let “but I’m not a..” keep you from achieving greatness. I know a lot of marketers that are like “I’m not a graphics designer” or “I don’t write well.” Well, if you have to get a graphics designer involved, get them involved in building templates. So, you can take the quick action you need to take. If you have to write the copy, start by building out detailed research. Build templates. Use them. Modify them based on experience. Create a system. Resources Work the System A book on Amazon that explains the methodology of building processes and then managing those processes to get results Built to Sell – A book on Amazon about the things you have to do in a small business (even if you’re a marketer in a big department) to make the business run without you Do things that don’t scale – An article from Paul Graham Ready to supercharge your go-to-market strategy? Discover our consulting, training, and software for go-to-market growth businesses. Click below to transform your approach and drive growth today! Discover here

The 5 Steps to Define the Job to be done

What is the job to be done? Remember the quote I left you with at the end of my last blog post? Here is a quick reminder: “People don’t want to buy quarter inch drill. They want a quarter inch hole!” Theodore Levitt What does it mean? It means that if we want to know what the job to be done is, we need to define our customer’s needs. It means that we as marketers need to define our innovation based on the needs of our perfect buyer. And, we need to communicate to our perfect buyer not only what the emotional, financial, strategic, etc. benefits of our innovation are to them; we also need to communicate to them how the benefits of changing the status quo outweigh any associated costs. According to Clayton Christensen, the core tenets defining innovation, based on the perfect buyer’s needs, are the following: Breakthrough innovation happens where there is a clearly identified need or gap. Your innovation improves the job “experience.” It’s an emotional, experiential thing. Put another way, you don’t “do” the job, even if you do it for them. You don’t prepare food for them, you improve the eating experience. All jobs are experiential. Define the job-to-be-done (JTBD), not the product to solve the problem. Lots of entrepreneurs and innovators focus too much on the solution. He calls this a product-centric company. Product-centric companies don’t produce true innovation. Why? Because their work doesn’t align with a job-to be-done (JTBD). An innovation is only an innovation if a buyer can make progress with it. Define how your innovation makes progress for the perfect buyer emotional, socially, financially, and functionality. You don’t have to define the improvement as 100%. You don’t have to totally fix it. You need to give the experience of substantial progress. You need to make it worth the hassle of changing the status quo. You have to make your way of making progress the obvious, simple choice. But, you can’t expect customers to tell you what that is. They don’t know, or they would have solved it. Instead, you have to listen and understand what progress they are trying to make. Essentially, you have to figure out the job to be done. And, then give them a solution that helps them make it. The innovation and education has to come from you. For the job, you must be able to define and measure the % of concrete improvement of the job function. If you don’t know the specific steps of the job, and you can’t quantify how you make that process better, then you’ve not yet defined the job to be done correctly. Innovation quantifies how much improvement it makes on the job to be done. To be the obvious choice, your innovation has to be at least 2x as good for a person to switch. Why? Because of anxiety or inertia and gimmickry. How are you 2X better? I think that it often needs to be higher than this actually. 5x? 10x? Why is the defining the job to be done so tricky? Defining the job to be done is tricky because for most businesses it is an afterthought. If you define your innovation (your product or service) before you define what the job to be done is, then you will struggle to connect that innovation to your perfect buyer in a meaningful way. Remember from my previous blog post, it all starts with a struggle. Your customers struggle with a need that is going unfulfilled. So, it is only an innovation if it meets the needs of our customers to do a job they’re struggling to do. Our innovation must be the reason someone hires us to do the job to be done, to produce a beneficial outcome for our perfect buyer. Our innovation must give them an advantage. Why else would they deviate from the status quo? But, the reality is that few businesses are blank slate businesses that start 100% customer-focused. We usually have some idea, and go execute that idea. Then, we try to figure out how to sell it. That’s OK, as long as we don’t lose sight of the job to be done. Our job as marketers is to take this raw “innovation” and transform it into digestible, manageable bites. Meaning, we need to communicate to our perfect buyers why our innovation gets their job done. Our perfect buyers need to understand why it’s valuable to them and how it helps them make progress. When we connect the dots between the customers, their needs, and our innovation, we make life better for everyone involved. So, we have to be very customer and job-centric. We must define our perfect buyer’s job journey. Layout what the steps involved are. And, by doing so, we can better define how our innovation provides a real improvement to the perfect buyer’s status quo. The five steps to define the job to be done  Step 1: Define who is your job customer. Before you can define your customer’s needs, you need to define who your job customer is. Yes, you are adding another level of understanding of our perfect buyer. But, now you are defining what they’re struggling with—the job to be done. The progress they’re trying to make. And, how you can help them get there. Chris Christensen calls this the ‘job executor’. And according to Tony Ulwick in the ‘Jobs to be done Framework’, all customers boil down to three main, role-based categories. These categories are based on functions done with the innovation. Each of these functions has a weight in the decision-making process related to the job to be done. Each of these roles has unique jobs associated with it which have to be performed in service to the greater progress. Btw, these categories work for both B2B and B2C situations. Generally, in B2C, one person can do every function while in B2B, these functions are distributed across many people. The three functions are ‘the job

Our Marketing Tribe – the 3 steps to creating a marketing tribe attention map

While it’s nice to think that our voting decisions are based purely on how well the platforms of each of the candidates aligns with our own individual set of beliefs and values, it is far more likely that our ballots are cast based on the outcomes of carefully targeted and optimized political marketing campaigns. Initially, understanding that our actions are likely prompted by the calculated promotional efforts of external entities may be uncomfortable, but consuming the marketing of any product, service, or idea is how we make decisions about many things in our everyday life-from what peanut butter to buy to what clothes to wear-and that’s not a bad thing… especially in a country where every decision comes with so many choices. Political marketing is the process by which political candidates promote themselves and their platforms to voters through masterly-crafted communications aimed at gaining public support. As a business marketer, you may think that political marketing techniques and strategies don’t apply to you, but while the entity being marketed is different, there are many parallels between political marketing and the marketing of goods and services. Both business marketers and political marketers use media outlets to inform, remind, and alter the attitudes and behaviors of potential clients and voters (respectively), and they both employ similar tools when structuring campaigns, such as market research and statistical analysis. The primary and most important difference between business marketing and political marketing is that the latter is used to raise awareness and inform members of the public about critical issues and leadership choices within their community, state, and country. The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all John F. Kennedy Despite the presence of 24-hour news stations and 24-7 online news coverage, the general public remains under-informed on political issues and news. According to a Pew Research Center survey of 3,147 randomly-selected American adults, only 33 percent were aware that the U.S. Supreme Court has three women judges, only 52 percent knew the correct number of Republican and Democrat seats currently held by the U.S. Senate, and only 51 percent could correctly identify Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democratic Senator and former Special Advisor for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is why political marketing is so important-to raise awareness on current issues so members of the public can make informed decisions about what and who to support. The modern political marketing landscape provides myriad opportunities to connect with potential voters and shape public opinion, including cold calls, email campaigns, direct mail leaflets, radio spots, social media outreach, and television news and talk show appearances. There are also many tools available to gather data on voters and craft campaigns, such as factor analysis, discriminant analysis, conjoint measurement, and multidimensional scaling. In a nutshell, the importance of political marketing is how effective it is at spreading messaging and informing the public. Campaign messages and ideas are very easily and quickly consumed and shared, and this facilitates a better more organic way of raising awareness and generating a call them to action, whether that action is to join a campaign, lobby for a bill, or cast a vote at the poll. Ready to supercharge your go-to-market strategy? Discover our consulting, training, and software for go-to-market growth businesses. Click below to transform your approach and drive growth today! Discover here

The 8 Types of Brand Advocates

This blog post is about brand advocates, specifically about the eight types of brand advocates that I have identified on social media. Yes, I am afraid, that we are not done with archetypes yet. There is so much more to say. I have spent a lot of time figuring out how archetypes can be useful to me in marketing. In my messaging on social media and how to chose to communicate with my customers. This time I want to focus a bit on different kinds of archetypes. We are not talking Jungian archetypes here. But, how the idea of archetypes has been used to create categories of brand advocates. Specifically, categories of social media brand advocates. What is brand advocacy? A little refresher. When we talk about advocacy marketing, we are talking about the process of harnessing the positive voices and experiences of our current customers in our marketing outreach. Advocacy marketing is considered more authentic because it is real people sharing their positive experience and thus amplifying the voice of your brand. Dictionary.com   Advocates can be powerful advocates of your brand because they are powered by real human connections. Social media networks have amplified the importance of brand advocates for businesses. And, by extension, the influence of brand advocates both with their own followers and with the brands they promote. Using the right kind of incentives can motivate these brand advocates to really amplify the voice of your brand. It is a great way to expand your marketing outreach by reaching the brand advocate’s followers. But, on the flip side, it is possible for influencers to torpedo your own marketing efforts. Sometimes a negative review can create an avalanche of bad publicity. Such is the power of social media.   The Eight Types of Brand Advocates There are a number of different categorizations for brand advocates out there. The one I am using has eight different types of Brand Advocates: the Accidental Tourist the Tweeter the Advocate the Flag Planter the Analyst the Anonymous One the VIP the Detective           Type one is called the ‘accidental Tourist’ because this kind of brand advocate does not set out to advocate your brand. They stumble onto something in their casual browsing and think it is worth a re-tweet or an Instagram shoutout, a Pinterest tile, or that it looks pretty in their Facebook timeline. They did not seek out information about your brand, care about it, or want to promote it. There is little you as a brand can do to effectively target these kinds of accidental brand advocates.                     Type two is called ‘The Tweeter’ with a capital T. This kind of brand advocate is very eager to share anything and everything with their followers. They are not attached to your brand, they just might find your marketing interesting. Their followers tend to be numerous and hanging on the Tweeters every word. Like the Tourist, the Tweeter is not seeking to keep himself or his followers informed. Instead, they want to entertain their followers and keep them engaged. You can keep these kinds of brand advocates engaged with your brand by providing interesting and entertaining tidbits in your social media messaging that are easy to share with your followers.                     Type three is the Advocate. This type of brand advocate is in love with your brand. Unlike the Tourist and the Tweeter, the Advocate has used your product or service and is now a loyal customer. But not only are they committed to your brand, but they also want to preach about it to their followers and the world at large. They will spread the word because they honestly care about the brand, even if they don’t have a stake in its success. Because they are committed to your brand, there is no need to provide digestible marketing morsels.                     Type four is the Flag Planter. This type of brand advocate was an early adapter or discoverer of your brand. For them, it is as important to promote your brand as it is to let everyone know that they were there first. They will search high and low for products and services that rock and they will be tireless in bringing what they find to their followers’ attention. They get their cache from being cool and first.                     Type five is the Analyst. This type of brand advocate will not promote anything without having done detailed research. Their bread and butter is data and analytics, charts, and graphics. They will not rest until they know everything there is to know about a subject. Their cache is built on knowledge, on bringing information to their followers. On being able to advise them on products and services. Be aware that this kind of brand advocate cannot be won over with entertaining tidbits or cool ideas. They rely on just the facts, please. They will do their due diligence before sharing with their followers, and their verdict can be critical.                     Type six is the Anonymous One. This type of brand advocate does not seek the public validation that the Flap Planter strives for. Instead, the Anonymous One works stealthily and chooses to post anonymously. They will search out secret brand deals and share them on their chosen social media network. Their cache rests on being in the know and having credibility. Despite posting mostly anonymously, they can be an influential brand advocate.                     Type seven is the VIP. These are the celebrities with big follower counts who share loudly about anything and everything. Whether they know anything about it or not. They might have great things to say or they might not. Their followers follow them because of their celebrity, not because of their

Engaging with your perfect buyer

… with the help of the perfect buyer archetypes! It is my firm belief that the trend in marketing is to move away from manipulative seller-buyer relationships to a more organic and healthy long-term marketing relationship. What do I mean by that? For quite some time now marketing has been all about triggering the right kind of emotions and responses in your buyer. Making the buyer believe that what you have to offer is not just exactly what they need, but what they want. As marketeers we wanted the buyer to see themselves in the brand: the brand as the personification of the buyer’s personality. As a brand, it was your primary goal to form that emotional connection between you and the buyer that would have the latter return to your products again and again, regardless of quality or features or other alternatives available. Here at Growmance, we don’t want to feel like we manipulated a buyer into choosing our product or services over those of our competitors. Rather, we want to nurture an organic long-term relationship between us and the buyer that is based on fit. What we offer should fit the buyer’s needs as determined by the buyer himself. Our product or service should help the buyer achieve his or her goal, as set by the buyer himself. And we should function as the guides that help the buyer address his problem, achieve his goal, and take care of his needs. But, even the buyers that are a perfect fit for the services or products that we are offering, we still need to connect with them to establish this kind of long-term marketing relationship. And to connect involves connecting emotionally. So, we don’t deny that we as humans buy based on emotions, and only afterward justify our purchasing decisions with facts. Buyers have more choices than ever. Through social media, they are bombarded with messages about what they supposedly need. We have to find a way to get through all the noise to engage with our perfect buyer. We cannot establish a marketing relationship if they do not notice us. This is where the Jungian Archetypes come in: as a shortcut that allows us to create this organic connection. Here the Jungian Archetypes are in service of the perfect buyer archetypes. The Perfect Buyer Archetypes Before you delve into the use of archetypes to connect with your perfect buyer, we need to take a slight detour. To the original archetypes as defined by Jung. And how they found their way into every branding effort of the past two decades. The Jungian Archetypes A little refresher, according to the dictionary an archetype is defined as “a collectively inherited unconscious idea, pattern of thought, or image, universally present in individual psyches.” Carl Jung developed his archetypes to better understand and illustrate what it is that subconsciously drives and motivates us. Over time his archetypes found their way into literary analysis, art critique, dream psychology, and yes, marketing and branding. Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson in 2001 introduced Jung’s archetypes to the marketing world in their book “The Hero and the Outlaw.” Using Jung’s theory, they listed 12 archetypes that are now widely used for marketing and branding The 12 Archetypes The overview of the archetypes is often presented in a circular fashion, see below. The outer ring names the archetype, the middle ring states the dominant personality trait and the inner ring describes a connecting theme. Each archetype has its own set of values and personality traits associated with it. Below is a quick summary. There are twelve archetypes: The Innocent, Everyman, Hero, Outlaw, Explorer, Creator, Ruler, Magician, Lover, Caregiver, Jester, and Sage. The Innocent: Identified with happiness, goodness, optimism, safety, romance, and youth. The Everyman: Defined as being supportive, faithful and down to earth. Looking for forging connections and finding a place to belong. The Hero: Recognized as courageous, bold and inspirational with a missionary streak to make the world a better place. The Rebel: Defined as a rule breaker, someone that questions authority and longs for revolution and rebellion. The Explorer: Identified as someone that years for travel and discovery, a risk taker that thrives and is inspired by new experiences. The Creator: Seen as an inventor and builder. Someone that uses imagination to create things imbued with meaning and value. The Ruler: Recognized as someone that creates order from chaos. The flip side of the ruler’s controlling and stern behavior is responsibility and organization. The Magician: Seeks to make dreams a reality and turn the ordinary into something special. Seen as a visionary. The Lover: Defined as being passionate, devoted to love, romance and commitment with a focus on creating intimacy. The Caregiver: A protector and carer of others who is seen as compassionate, nurturing and generous with his time and emotions. The Jester: Recognized as a mischief-maker who seeks to bring fun and irreverence to joy the world. The Sage: Seen as a trusted guide and advisor who is described as thoughtful, wise and committed to helping people gain a deeper insight.   Brands usually try to position themselves as one of the archetypes (or as the dominant archetype in an amalgam of traits). All their marketing and advertising will be in service to that archetype so that their customers can identify themselves with a particular brand and its products. But this is not the way we at Growmance are thinking of the Jungian archetypes. We are not trying to create unmissable branding, we are thinking of connections. Your Perfect Buyer The road to your perfect buyer begins with a journey. Not yours, but your buyer’s. Remember, in his mind, the customer is always the hero in their own story, whereby the ‘hero’ in this case is not the ‘hero’ as defined in the Jungian Archetypes. But because buyers perceive themselves to be the hero, you (as a brand) should think of yourself as the guide that helps them get to where they want to go. The destination in this case is the solution that the buyer seeks for a perceived