Customer-First Marketing: Every click is a wish (podcast episode #85)

How I Made it in Marketing

I remember sitting next to someone at a conference, eating lunch, making small talk. And it came up that his brand had no competition.

And I said, ‘wow, what a dream position to be in.’ I was used to working with a competitive sales office, hyper-focused on differentiating from competitors. You know, us vs. them.

He said, ‘No, no, no. It’s not a dream position, it’s horrible. When you have competition, you know you’re going to get into a set amount of RFPs or bakeoffs, and win a certain percentage of them. When you have competition there is a line item in the budget to choose some vendor, you’ll get a certain percentage of those. We need to start from ground zero and tell them why they should even care about this category.’

Which is why I loved a lesson I read in a recent podcast guest application – creativity matters for category of one. I talked to Gary Stein, CMO, Virtuo (https://www.virtuo.com/), to learn the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson-filled stories.

Virtuo has raised C$7 million (in Canadian dollars) to date, with the latest round led by ATB Private Equity and Telus Ventures.

Stein manages a team of ten, including agencies. He manages them remotely and he says they're a team that punch above their weight.

Stories (with lessons) about what he made in marketing

Here are some lessons from Stein that emerged in our discussion.

• Creativity matters for category of one
• Tell a compelling story that demonstrates the product
• Get your data sorted
• Always ask ‘what can we do with this’
• Every click is a wish
• Think like a challenger

Related content discussed in this episode

MeclabsAI.com can write your headlines, value prop, competitive analysis, and more – based on 10,000 marketing experiments. Totally FREE, you don’t even have to register (for now).
Data Pattern Analysis: Learn from a coaching session with Flint McGlaughlin (https://marketingexperiments.com/digital-analytics/data-pattern-analysis-coaching-session)

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This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages (https://meclabs.com/course/) free digital marketing course.

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