E17 Revolutionizing the Marketing Landscape: Scaling Growth

Claire Price, a marketing strategist, discusses how marketing has evolved over the past few decades, with the internet and social media playing major roles. She also explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on marketing, highlighting its use in content development, research, and analytics. Price emphasizes the importance of using AI as a tool and not relying on it entirely, as human creativity and context are still crucial. She also touches on the ethical considerations of using AI in marketing and the need to disclose its use. Understanding customer behavior, including their needs, wants, desires, values, and motivations, is key in crafting effective marketing campaigns. Welcome to Coachonomics Presents Podcast, a part of the ECS Network. This is the Masters of Leadership Teachable Moment Series. I'm your host, Laura Perez Erhart. I'm the CEO of Epiphany Consulting Solutions, a management consultant and executive coach. Today, we have the pleasure of hosting Claire Price, a renowned figure in the realm of marketing. Claire is the driving force behind Octane Growth Systems, a dynamic company headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. With a focus on systems, processes and tools, Octane Growth Systems specializes in crafting business-to-business marketing strategies that fuel scalable ten times growth. Claire, welcome to my podcast. I'm looking forward to learning about your expertise as a marketing strategist. I want to hear more about the shifts, the trends and strategies for scaling business. Let's talk about the foundation of any successful marketing campaign. Knowing your audience inside and out is crucial for crafting messages that resonate and drive action. Whether selling a product or offering a service, a business should know their marketing efforts that speak directly to their clients' needs, desires and pain points. Right, Claire? Absolutely, Laura. Thank you so much for having me on your show today. I really appreciate it. I'm so looking forward to this and I know our listeners are going to be glued to your words of wisdom. So, today's business landscape looks vastly different from just a few decades ago. Rapid technological advancements, changes in consumer behavior and globalization have all contributed to this transformative journey. Let's talk about how marketing has evolved over the past decades. What's changed? Well, so much has changed, Laura, that I think I'll sort of zero in even in the last five years or so or ten years. I think the first biggest key change of the last several decades started, we'll do a little history tour, 1994 when the Internet was born. That changed marketing completely from being a direct to the consumer through direct mail and all of those kinds of things to a full digital presence. So, fast forward to the last couple of years and what we've seen is the real explosion of web-based and social media-based marketing. And now, in the last year, as we all know, that's been completely turned on its head with the introduction of the generative AI capabilities. Internet to social media and web and now to generative AI, it's really challenging for any marketer to keep up with the changes that have happened. So, one of the things that is constant is change. And we've seen so many trends and innovations shaping the world of marketing. Today, we're diving into one of the most transformative technologies of our time, talking about artificial intelligence, AI, and how it's revolutionizing the marketing landscape. So, since you started talking a bit about AI, how has AI transformed the marketing scene in recent years and what trends do you foresee? I think that there are three areas that AI has really transformed the marketing landscape. The first is in doing any kind of content development. And, for example, you can put a one-paragraph prompt into one of the AI bots, like the chat GPT, and come up with 500 words in less than two minutes. That's remarkable. I mean, that's something that, you know, I've been blogging since blogging started in the early 2000s. And most blogs in the old days would take several hours, if not a couple of days, to write for research and an organization of thoughts and everything. These blogs that the artificial intelligence puts out are not perfect. And I think it's important that what I say to people is use AI as a tool and don't let it think for you. It's a companion. It's a great research tool. It's great for automating tasks and capabilities. It's great for producing content. It's great for giving you a different perspective because it can pull across from the universe of content that's out there that you couldn't do even if you wanted to. And at the same time, the mistake that a marketer would make, especially someone who's maybe younger or under pressure or getting started, is just to grab it and plop it into their content. You really need to take that what's generated by AI and put it in context of your audience. And you mentioned in your beginning conversation, you need to know your ideal audience. You need to know what they're looking for so you can put it into the context of what you want to deliver to your particular audience. Now, one of the great tricks of AI is you can start with one result or one return on the prompt, but you can keep refining it. You can say put it in a different tone, put it in a different style of writing. One of the great things that I do and a lot of other people do who do a lot of content writing is put a blog in that you've written and have it learn your style of writing. So the next time you go to create a blog, it knows how you write, what your word choices are, what your sentence cadence is, and it will mimic that. So I think those are some of the things that it's done on the content side. On the research side, it's also very important because you can find out a lot of facts and figures that you may not have known or may have slipped your mind. Just be careful. And even in their disclaimer, they say AI can make mistakes. If a fact sounds or something sounds odd to you, it probably is. Don't let it think for you, but do use it to the best of your ability. And now there's a lot of other marketing things it's doing in terms of analytics, in terms of helping you plan goals. A lot of AI is being integrated into a lot of the productivity tools we use. I know Zoom now has an AI component. MailChimp has an AI component. Take advantage of those. It will shorten your workload as a business owner or as a marketer. And definitely want to use the tools that are available. Now, AI is definitely an incredible tool, as you state that it is. That's exactly what it is, is a tool. We still need to, business owners like myself and those who are listening, we still need to put in the effort, due diligence, do our research to make sure that the information and content that we're putting out there is legitimate and it's credible, right? Absolutely. I would also say one of the things that you can do and would be a good practice for business owners to do would be to keep an eye out on the new tools that are being developed. You know, ChatGBT was kind of the first one on the block. There's a lot of different AI tools that are coming out that are specializing in different parts of the business environment. For example, AI-driven inventory management and other kinds of things. Keep your eye out for some of the new things that are coming out and don't necessarily get wedded to one tool because it is something that is continually being improved on and changing. Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of different platforms evolve. When I'm doing my research, I will go into a certain platform and notice that it has AI embedded in it and it's pretty cool. It's very interesting, but it's remarkable what AI is helping a lot of businesses achieve, especially those chief marketing officers who are very strategic. They're working with their teams to expand and broaden their marketing messaging. It's amazing where I'm seeing it go in so many different industries, both public and private sector. How do you see the relationship between automation and human creativity evolving in marketing? And what's the potential benefits and challenges of this collaboration? I think I'm going to start with what I said before. I think the most important thing is don't let it think for you. Don't take it literally word for word. Always put your own context and human intelligence on it. Now, this is my personal approach. Others will tell you differently. There's actually, I would say, two schools of thought on human creativity and AI. And I've had this discussion with other people in the marketing world and in the business world. Do you start with the AI and then add your creativity to it? Or do you start with your creativity and then let AI amplify, add, and maybe expand what you're doing? And that's a very interesting discussion. I'm not saying there's a right answer or a wrong answer. I personally like to start with my own creativity and use AI in kind of the second seat. Let it, you know, I'll write like a quick blog post or I'll write one of the things that I used it for recently with a client was helping to write the customer profiles, customer avatars. We did a sketch and then we had the AI go ahead and fill that in, that avatar in for us and add more detail and add a fun element to it. And that does bring me to something that I think is important. If you are somebody who's in the consulting seat, as you and I both are, in working with clients, it is important to disclose that you are using AI as a tool in the work that you're doing for them. If you don't disclose it, especially in the marketing end, because there's so much around marketing and AI, that's a suspicion that maybe you're not doing the work as much as you're letting the AI tool do the work for you. So, and I actually had a client ask me, are you using chat GBT for this? And I said, yes, this is how we're using it for you. He said, oh, okay. So, I think that's something that, you know, you have to be mindful of. Yeah, I was saying it's the ethics and AI, how it's being used and where we're using it. Absolutely. I could see how that would be something that is necessary to disclose. I think it's important to disclose it in any field. Let's talk about demographics and understanding the factors that influence customers' buying decisions. What exactly drives consumer behavior? Needs, wants, and desires, values, and motivations. That's really the core. And I think that there is a, especially in the agency world, there is an over-reliance on demographics. And by demographics, I mean your basic profile of person or company, industry, size of company, revenue, income, whether you're a consumer or B2B. There's an over-reliance on that basic data. It kind of gives you the skeleton of who is this company and what do they do. And we get that a lot when we ask clients, okay, who is your ideal target? Okay, my ideal target is a CEO of a manufacturing company that's X revenue with X employees and they're doing XXX. That's demographics. I wrote an article recently, Laura, that says, was titled, I Don't Really Care Who Your Customer Is and You Shouldn't Either. Because to me, and because in reality, demographics is the least important thing. You need to know it. It's a baseline. But it's more important to know your customers want, why they buy, and why they're going to buy from you. So we really focus the demographic part of the work that we do. Classic demographics is very minor. It's one assessment that we use. We spend a lot more time on what are their needs, wants, and desires, and what are their values and motivations, and how can we connect the customer's why to the company's why. There's countless factors that play into this, and it's not always a straightforward equation. Exactly. How does demographics play a role in shaping consumer behavior, and what are some critical demographic factors that businesses need to consider when developing their marketing strategies? I think one of the key factors that they need to consider is, and I think you brought it up in the earlier part of the discussion, what is the buying behavior of the client? I think it's really important to understand what the customer journey is as they're going through the buying decision. They're going to go through some classic stages. They're going to go through awareness. They're going to go through consideration. They're going to go through problem solving. They're going to go through the evaluation. And at each of those stages, the demographic of your customer and certainly their focus is going to be changing. And when they're in the awareness stage, they're kind of like, oh, well, I have this problem. Who might be out there to solve it? So you would want to provide them with a marketing campaign or activity around this is what we do, and this is how we can solve that kind of problem. Then they would get to more of the real pain point part of it, which is I really have this pain. I have a toothache. I need a dentist now. How can you address me today? That's a good analogy. Yeah, they need a different kind of approach, a different kind of content. And then when they get to the evaluation stage, they want the details. They want a demo. They want a white paper. They want a case study. Giving somebody a case study when they're at the early awareness stage or even in some cases the problem solving toothache stage, they're not going to take the time for it. They're not ready for it. So those are some of the real key considerations that you need to do for customer buying behavior along the way. The other thing that's really important, Laura, that often gets overlooked particularly by smaller businesses, you need to know who influences the decision that they're going to make. Who do they go to when they're like, oh, I'm trying to decide, you know, like you use a car analogy. I'm trying to decide between the Prius and another car. There are people and there are places they're going to go to do, to have that discussion. You need to know who those are because that's where you want to put your marketing activity and your marketing dollars, where those influencers can help you, you know, do the assist for the sale. There's just so much to consider when we're trying to align services or products to serve clients. These are really good strategic points for business owners or, you know, anyone in marketing to really consider awareness, problem solving, helping, you know, how we're going to help the clients solve their problems. Right. Speaking to their pain, what we have in product or services, how it's going to help them solve their problems. And why now? Right. So I think the marketing campaign that you're talking about needs to speak to the why. Why now? And yeah, I love the case study example that you just gave. I'm seeing more and more case studies out there and we started diving into that as well. And it's been it's come in very useful. Yeah, I love case studies, Laura, as you were just saying, for the point that a case study helps the customer put themselves in that customer's shoes. I do work with a lot of manufacturers. If you're a manufacturer and you see a case study on helping a boutique shoe store sell shoes to fashionistas that are 20 years old, you're probably not going to relate to that. But if you do get a case study that's from another manufacturer that's in your industry and you've seen how that company was shifted and changed and made more profitable, that's going to resonate. Applying your case studies to your audience in terms of industry, in terms of focus, in terms of the pain points you've identified is a critical component. Are there any other emerging trends in demographic-based marketing that businesses should pay attention to now? I think the other big trend, in addition to AI, is video. Shifting from text-based or even video supplemented by text supplemented by video to much more video. Video testimonials, video case studies, video email messages. LinkedIn now has an opportunity with direct messages that you can do a video instead of a text message to people. This is going to continue to explode. I would say to every business owner out there, if your company does not have a good YouTube channel and it does not have good core information about your company, about your team, about your products and some customer testimonials or customer case studies, you are definitely missing the boat. Because people who used to go to Google, this is a true trend, particularly for the younger generation. People who used to go to Google and do their research now, more and more, I think it's over 50% now, I don't have the exact number, start at YouTube. Not on Google. How has the digital age and the rise of online platforms influenced how businesses analyze and target specific demographics in their marketing efforts? I think there's only good news there. Oh, great. Yeah, really, because the amount of data that is available to you now to understand your customer's behavior is stronger, higher, and more accurate than ever. It's very, very important for every single business owner out there to have a full Google Analytics implementation, to have key analytics data part of their platform. There are other tools that people can use, particularly, and this is a favorite of mine, Laura, if you do proposals for clients, if you're in a construction industry or some of the other industries where you're typically doing a proposal, please invest in proposal writing software. It's not just to help you develop the proposal, it's because that software will tell you who is reading the proposal, how much time they're spending on every page, what they concentrate on, and what they're most interested in. So, for example, you send in your proposal through a proposal writing software or something like a bid sketch, right? They start looking at stuff, and they stop at the team page, and they're reading everybody's biography. They're really interested in seeing what the background is, what the education is. When you follow up with your sales conversation, you can then say to them, hey, I want to tell you a little bit more about our team. We really invest in our people. So you can start your sales close with what they're most interested in because it's not always price. Fascinating. This is some pretty juicy and insightful information, and as you're speaking, I'm taking notes. This is just something that any business owner, savvy marketing folks out there that are listening to this podcast can really wrap their arms around. What role does brand loyalty play in different demographic segments? And how can businesses build and maintain loyalty among diverse customer groups? Laura, that's a fabulous, fascinating question. We could spend the entire podcast on that. But we'll try to do like five minutes or so. Brand loyalty definitely varies from generation to generation. And we'll kind of start with like the boomer generation. Boomer generation tends to be very brand loyal. They have chosen their brands, and they stick with them. And I remember talking to, a couple of years ago, talking to a really high-end agency that worked with huge consumer product companies, including I think they did a stint with Procter & Gamble. And he's saying, well, we want to get these. We have different groups. We want a core group, 25 to 40. And I'm like, well, people older than that have lots of money. Why don't you market to them? And he goes, they don't change the brand. We could spend tons of money and tons of coupons, and they might try something. But they're going to like, like they have that commercial with the gal who they try to take away her tide and give her something else. And she's like grabbing the tide and hanging on to it. I think it was a commercial a few years ago. That's the boomer generation. Okay. Other generations going closer to our new generation alpha, which is, I think, our 10-year-olds, less and less brand loyalty, more and more influencer-focused. If they're using something and one of their top influencers that they follow suggests a different brand or starts wearing a different type of shoe, they're going to switch very quickly, typically, to that brand. They're not going to see the brand loyalty in terms of a consumer product. Now, when it comes to some things that they really like, like maybe their social platform, they may be a little more loyal to that. But in terms of consumable goods, they're a lot less loyal. And they're more demanding. They do not want to, they're not like, oh, I'm going to take whatever you offer me. I want this change or I want this. If you want me to stay with your brand, then I want to see a different look, a different style. Not necessarily pricing, but just something that drives my influencer market or who I want to influence. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. You had mentioned something earlier about who is making the decision when it comes to pulling the strings as far as the consumer and their decision to go with the product or the brand or the service. What issues do you see when working with decision makers around effective messaging? We typically work with the B2B market. So the business-to-business as opposed to the B2C consumer market. And they are very different streams and different decision focuses. And I can talk about both, but most of our personal experience is B2B. And what I would say in terms of decision making, you have to look at two different champions. You have to look at the external champion or the external influencers. Those could be, for example, for a business owner, a mid-size growing company. They might be their peer group like a Vistage. They might be other CEOs that they can network with or golf with. And then there's the internal champions. And the internal champions are the people within their own organizations who help make the decision. For example, if it's a larger company, there may be a purchasing manager. Depending on a hiring decision, it might be an HR person. Engineering and tech companies have a huge amount of power and influence over the different kinds of things that are purchased as outside services, including consulting services. Just kind of keep that in mind. There's the external champion that you have to be aware of and the internal champion. When we work with clients, we do make sure that we're messaging effectively to both of those groups. I could see how marketing has evolved even throughout the decades of owning my own business. How we target business to business, how we focus on digital marketing today, what that means to us. How we track trends, the demographics. Just strategically, how we make our decisions with our marketing planning for the entire year to 18 months has evolved so much. Expand more on that. What should our listeners be aware of in the next year as they continue to work on their strategic marketing plans at that high level? If you can talk at that high level to these CMOs who are going to be listening in, what they need to be aware of, some food for thought. First of all, there has to be a baseline strategy and you shouldn't necessarily take that for granted. Because in most of the clients that we work with, they don't have a strategy. A lot of them, they jump in, they want results, so they hire an agency. There are some strategic agencies out there, so I'm not painting a broad brush, but a lot of the younger digital agencies will just dive in and start doing stuff. Without a strategic foundation, without a real understanding of the company, of the customer, and of the message, they'll just launch campaigns. Their approach is to sort of learn as they go. That always costs the business owner and the company money. The other thing that I think often happens, and I was talking to the CMO of a Fortune 10 company yesterday about this, companies tend to do what they've always done. They find a comfortable lane and they stay in it. In this environment, you cannot afford to do that. You should always be looking at a broad number of alternatives. Now, when we work with clients, we actually have what I call a predictive growth metric where we can benchmark marketing campaigns before they're launched to find out what the likelihood of return on investment is. It's a metric that I developed. It's part of my system that we work with our clients on. You want to look at the alternatives, Laura. It's very, very important not to do two things. What I've always done in the past or what the hot new thing is. I'll give you a great example. A client that I worked with a couple of years ago, they were spending a fair amount of money on social media and on digital advertising, standard stuff, not getting very good results, not getting too many doors open for their sales team. We did a market audit for them and we found out that that client were school administrators, public information officers. They were not making their buying decisions on any of those digital platforms. They made their buying decisions at trade shows. We worked with our client to triple the number of trade shows they were going to from about two or three to over 12. As a result, saw revenue increase in, I think it was about two and a half years from 3 million to 7 million. That's brilliant. Don't rule out some of the old time strategies and just go for the hot new thing. Consider all of your alternatives. Know where your clients are making their buying decisions. Again, who do they go to? Where do they go? What kind of journals do they read or websites do they read? And that's where you need to show up. Why is that so relevant? Because where they're showing up is where they have interest. And where they have interest, they have consideration. And where they have consideration, they, again, on the buyer's journey, they will consider an evaluation. The other thing, too, is it's creating atmosphere of trust. They're at an association. There's an implicit trust factor there. So if you're showing up at someplace that they already have a level of trust with, say it's a peer group that they have a level of trust with, that's going to extend to you and your company. That's a very good point. You've mentioned campaign throughout this podcast. Can you give an example of a really good campaign that benefited your client? How did they use it? What did it do for the client? Email marketing campaigns, even with this whole AI-generated environment, are still a very strong way to go. And we did have a deal close. I worked with one of our partners where we did one send of 1,000 emails, and the result was a $100,000 deal for them. And the email campaign was going out to people who had recently closed their accounts or had shifted their money to somewhere else or had a deposit expire. That's an example of one of the campaigns that was really effective. So a marketing campaign used correctly can really drive end consumers to either bring them back. Like you said, they've never renewed. They've dropped off. It's a great way to remind folks that we want you as a client or a customer. I think that's the biggest mistake most companies make is not investing in their current clients or in recently passed clients and always going for the new lead, the new lead, the new lead. I can give you a great example. A realtor I worked with several years ago, big-name realtor, big team, had lots of emails to feed and was always like, I need leads, I need leads, I need leads. And I said, well, how many people do you have in your database? Starting out with the engagement. And she said, I think I have about 500 people in her database. And I said, okay, what I want you to do for the next couple of weeks is get you and your team to get on the phone or get on email and talk to every single one of those people. And I came back three weeks later and I said, well, how did it go? And she had this look of horror on her face. She was literally ashen-faced. I lost $4 million in commissions because I had not kept up with these people. And, you know, it's California. They bought and sold homes, and California homes have big commissions attached. You know, big lesson in don't ever take your current client for granted. Make sure they still love you. Make sure they're having a great experience. And think about ways that new services or products that you've developed might benefit them. Because you're always inventing something new. Their lives are always changing. Their needs are changing. Don't assume because they bought XYZ from you a year ago that that's the only thing they'll buy or they'll only keep buying that. Think of other ways that you can support them in their life and their business. Valid point. What I'm also hearing you say is find a way to be creative. Stay in front of our clients. Whether they're past clients or newly acquired clients, it's always important to demonstrate what's new within the company. Whether it's a new service, a new product, a new skill that the company's acquired, find a way to link that new product or service to that client. Is that correct, Claire? Absolutely. We're about to launch an email marketing campaign for one of our clients. Probably do it in the next two to three weeks, which is basically, hey, did you know we also do these things? You know, we have seven services. You've only bought this one. What about these other things we can do for you? Just remind them of other things you can do for them. Very easy to do. Claire, thank you so much for your wisdom and your expertise. I know that listeners are going to get so much out of this. I know I did. I've been sitting here diligently taking notes for myself. This is just fantastic information. Claire, thank you again for sharing your expertise with us. Thank you for having me, Laura. It's been delightful to spend this time with you. Claire's latest publication is Smart Marketing Execution. This is a game changer for companies transitioning from frenzied marketing activities to more sustainable operations. Her book equips scaling businesses with the knowledge and tools necessary to accelerate profits, performance, and productivity. To learn more about Octane Growth Systems, go to their website, www.OctaneGrowth.com. That's it for this episode of Coconut Presents Podcast. If you're interested in being a guest or you're a subject matter expert, please go to my website, www.EpiphanyConsultingSolutions.com and submit your request on the Let's Chat link. You can also find me on LinkedIn under Laura Perez Earhart or my website, EpiphanyConsultingSolutions. We hope the content and conversation will give sparks of inspiration. If you love and learn from the show, pay it forward and share my podcast with your colleagues and friends. I'm Laura Perez Earhart. Until next time, stay safe and live well.