How to Science the Shit out of Marketing and Why It's Slowly Becoming The Future

Marketing Cupcakes

Summary

In this week's episode you're going to learn 7 ways on how to boost your marketing by throwing science into the mix.

The internet has made super easy to experiment, analyze and improve your marketing by taking small, incremental steps validated by data.

If you want to stay competitive in the field of marketing, creativity alone just isn't going to cut it anymore. You'll have to bring the science into your marketing.

And with all the amazing technologies available that allow you to do that, now's the best time to science the shit out of marketing.

Highlights

00:30 - The future of marketing: science the shit out of it.

01:46 - 7 Things to bring science into your marketing.

02:15 - #1 Fail fast.

03:30 - #2 Track everything that matters.

04:03 - #3 The right technology in place.

05:56 - #4 The right people in the right place.

06:45 - #5 Help first, sell second.

08:16 - The power of adding that human touch.

08:40 - #6 Know your data.

09:22 - Adding that human touch to your data analytics: the power of an inside sales team.

09:49 - #7 Be customer-focused.

09:54 - Quick recap.

10:08 - Tying it all together.

Links / Resources

• Google Analytics: https://www.google.com/analytics/
• MarTech Conference: http://martechconf.com/
• ENDUUR: http://enduur.com

Intro: Chances are your company's marketing efforts could be producing better results. We're here to help make your marketing smarter. Welcome to Marketing Cupcakes, bringing you the latest in marketing analytics, data science techniques, integration challenges, guerrilla marketing techniques and more. Here are your hosts of Marketing Cupcakes, Dave and James Gilbert.

Dave: Hey guys. Welcome to another episode of Marketing Cupcakes. I'm your host, Dave and this is James.

James: Hey guys.

Dave: So today we're talking about a topic that's really interesting, how to science the shit out of marketing and why it's slowly becoming the future. So we've seen a few articles out there with that title and you know, it's actually a title from Matt Damon's movie, The Martian where he is actually on Mars, he is stranded and he is wondering how the heck he gets home. And so today we're going to talk about what he did in the movie was use science to make a way for him to return to earth, to prolong his life, to make food on a planet that's never had food grown before.

And so today we're going to talk about how you can do the same thing with marketing. Because marketing traditionally was a lot about – was focused heavily on the creative, really heavily on the communication and the branding. And that's just as important today. But with digital marketing now we also have the availability of really making marketing into a science and not only focusing on those things but actually making a science out of the creative and the messaging and how we do campaigns and which campaigns we do and where we do those. So that's what we're going to be talk about today.

And we've come up with 7 themes that we think are really instrumental in making sure that you can create marketing science instead of just thinking of marketing as a creative....

James: Output.

Dave: Creative what?

James: I don't know. Creative output, creative channel.

Dave: Instead of thinking of marketing as just creative, okay? So the first thing we're going to talk about is failing fast.

So what do we mean by failing fast? Well, if you follow any of Silicon Valley and startups they talk about how startups should fail fast or entrepreneurs should fail fast. And I think that same mentality should be adopted by marketers. And the reason being is because every company and every industry is different. If you talk to some of the vendors in your industry they'll say “You know what? Our best channel is through Facebook ads” and then you'll talk to another vendor and they'll say “You know what? We have our most sales through email campaigns.” And then you'll talk to another one and it'll be different. And on and on and on. And that's the same for companies in the same industry. It's the same for industries; they're all going to be different.

And so as a company what you need to do is you need to determine which channel is the best for your company. And you know, it's obviously not just one channel, you're going to have multiple channels. But there's going to be a hierarchy of channels and which one is the best. And so the best thing that you can do as a marketer is to fail fast and so you can try all these channels and see which one doesn't work and just get it out of the way so you can get to the ones that do.

So #1 is fail fast. And James has #2 which is track everything that matters.

James: Yeah, you've got to be able to track the things that matter but more importantly, don't track things that don't. So many times marketers get caught up into tracking everything and they forget about what really matters. Your methods of tracking your marketing efforts should always tie to your company goals whether that's revenue, whether it's ROI with marketing technology. You should track the things that ultimately are going to move the needle and if you're tracking things that aren't going to move the needle then you should reevaluate that model of how to track.

So #3, we got the right technology in place.

Dave: So when we're talking about the right technology in place, I think a lot of times it's really easy if you follow the MarTech space – go look at the MarTech Calendar put on by the MarTech Conference and they look at the last few years of how marketing technology has just grown and grown and grown and it's just huge. There's so many companies out there doing different software from marketing automation to predictive analytics, to databases to CRMs. It just goes on and on and on.

And the key is to not get overwhelmed by technology but to know what technology that you need at the point in time you are in your business. So for example there's a quite few marketing automation systems out there. And they range in price from almost free to several thousand dollars a month, up to tens of thousand dollars a month. And if you jump right into one of those really expensive marketing automation systems as a new company, you might really struggle to see the value out of that. But over time as a large enterprise company like many of you are you're going to see the real value in that marketing automation system that's more expensive because there's a lots of bells and whistles that you're going to utilize.

So make sure that you have the right technology in place to be able to track all those things but also make sure that you're using technology for the point in time you are in your business.

So you know, I would say at the very most or at the very least you want to have some sort of marketing automation and some sort of CRM and some sort of analytics like Google Analytics. I would say that's kind of the base starting point. And then from there it will grow and you'll have predictive analytics, you'll have predictive lead scoring, a whole host of other things but make sure you have the right technology in place for the point in time you are in your company.

#4, is the right people in the right place

James: #4 is the right people in the right place. And what we mean by that is all this technology that you put into place the core 3, you know, your marketing automation, your CRM and your analytics; you need to have people that understand how each one of those technologies are going to talk to each other. You may have an expert that's in your marketing automation platform, more like a marketing automation specialist. Or you might have an analytics crew, or an SEO person. Or you might have a sales force admin or a CRM admin. Each one of those people that are in place need to be able to understand how each one of the systems are going to talk to each other. And the best way to do that is to make sure that those 3 people all have experience in all 3 of those core categories.

So #5 is help first, sell second.

Dave: So what we mean by help first and sell second is time and time again, and this is an age old process, the harder you sell it's likely the less attention that you'll get from your prospects. And so if you just focus on helping your prospects and your clients rather than just hard selling them they're a lot more likely to be interested in the message that you're conveying and when you do have something to sell, if you help them before you start selling them they're going to be a lot more likely to listen because you've already helped them, you've already helped them overcome some of the problems they're having. And ultimately that's what our companies are built on. They're built around solutions to problems that the markets are having. And if you're not selling a solution to a problem you probably don't have anything to sell.

And so focus on just helping them with their problems. You know, free of charge if you can. And if you focus on that then the sell will come automatically. But the problem is I think a lot of companies historically focus on such a hard sell, that what would happen is you'll have consumer remorse. And so they buy something out of being pressured into the sell and then you see a huge chunk of the customer base that would fall off overtime. And the way to avoid that is just like we said, help first and sell second.

One other thing I wanted to touch on that James was talking about with the right people in place is just makings sure that you have someone in your workflows that is having the human touch. So in addition to having the people to understand the technology, also make sure that you have someone that's reaching out to your customers or your prospects. And make sure that they are talking with them and understanding their problems and how they're using your systems so that you can better develop your products and so that you can understand how to make your communication better.

#6, Know Your Data

James: Know your data. This kind of goes back to #2 and also fits into #3 as well with tracking everything and the right technology. If you're tracking the right stuff and the things that matter, then it's going to be a lot easier for you to analyze what really is ultimately driving the needle. You need to be having people that are in place that are looking at your data and to Dave's point, having that human touch.

You know, just to give you a quick story, one of the things that I've done in the past is implemented what we would call today as a sort of an inside sales team which enabled us to sort of qualify our leads. But it also enabled us to understand our data a lot more and what are customers were thinking about our processes and how we could get additional data that we knew were going to be important to help us track everything.

So it's important to have that human touch in place with your data as well and having people that are looking at it, analyzing it and doing something with it so that you can drive the needle.

#7, be customer-focused.

Dave: So really at the core of what we're trying to get at, let's just recap real fast. #1 is fail fast. #2 is track everything that matters. 3: right technology in the right place. 4: the right people in the right place. 5: help first, sell second. 6: know your data and 7: be customer-focused.

And what that really means is tying all of these things together. So if you aren't focused on your customers’ problems, if you aren't focused on helping your customers get a solution to their problems, none of our other stuff is going to matter.

So I would say I had a step-by-step procedure that I came up with a while back and it was basically how to test marketing hypothesis that you're having. You know, you kind of come up with this idea and you brainstorm the best way to implement that idea and then you try one and you fail at that. And then you try the second approach and you fail with that. And you try that until you get it right. But how many times you actually do that until you realize that it's not your marketing, it's your product, right? Or it’s something else in your mix. Maybe how you're talking to your customers.

And so don't ever lose that focus of being customer-focused because it's just such a critical part and you can spin your wheels all day on all the marketing technology or analysis that you want to do but at the end of the day if you not focus on solving your customers’ problems it's not going to matter.

James: And to add on to that, about the customer focus it's important to also make sure that – you know, a lot of people think that they're being customer-focused and that they're driving to the needs of their customer but where are your touch points with your customer to make sure that that is truly driving their need? That's what's key is always have your touch points so that you can make sure that you're actually getting real feedback from them.

Dave: All right guys. That's all the time we have today so thank you for joining us on Marketing Cupcakes and we'll catch a next time.

Outro: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Marketing Cupcakes, an ENDUUR podcast with your hosts David and James Gilbert. For more great content and to stay up-to-date, visit http://marketingcupcakes.com/. If you enjoyed the show please subscribe and rate the podcast. We'll catch you next time on Marketing Cupcakes.