MarketingSherpa Blog

Marketers say they have money problems.

According to research from Conductor, lack of budget is the biggest internal challenge that could negatively impact online performance. Securing budget/investment is the most extreme challenge for marketing teams, according to KoMarketing research. And here at MarketingSherpa, you’ve told us the size of your marketing budget is a barrier to growth time, after time, after time.

Hey, I hear you, marketers. I want a bigger budget as well.

But if you can’t simply throw more money at the problem or outspend the competition, you can still beat them — with a better approach. In other words, a more effective value proposition.

I recently came across the perfect example when I talked to a marketer who likely has far fewer resources than you do.

This article was originally published in the MarketingSherpa email newsletter.

A value proposition based on customer-first marketing

Dean Porter is the development director at Hunger Fight, a small local nonprofit organization here in Jacksonville that helps feed Title 1 elementary school students as well as seniors.

Dean and his wife founded their charity in the teeth of the Great Recession. And they quickly learned that organizations were not so keen on simply stroking a check to a charity, even when it was doing noble work like feeding the hungry.

They didn’t have a big marketing budget they could fall back on. They couldn’t just spend their way into more leads.

So they had to come up with a better idea – a value proposition aimed at giving to their ideal customers, not just taking from them.

They created a model with a value proposition that coupled corporate employee engagement with community involvement by holding meal packing events, which they describe as “two ½ hours of organized chaos to feed children and families.”

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We frequently receive questions from our email subscribers asking marketing advice. Instead of hiding those answers in a one-to-one email communication, we occasionally publish edited excerpts of some of them here on the MarketingSherpa blog so they can help other readers as well. If you have any questions, let us know.

Dear MarketingSherpa:  I have a question for you. In this ever more increasing digital age — where pressing palms and getting face time is getting harder and harder. How do small businesses find clients?

I am a graphic designer/marketer whose business model is to contract with other small businesses. Much like a General Contractor hires subs when they build or remodel a house.

When I get together with other contractors in the marcom field (web designers, marketers, other designers, branding specialists, etc.) the first question is generally ‘So, how do you find new clients?” The answer is generally referral, but that only provides so much to the pipeline.

We don’t have trade shows where the public can come in and meet us and get to know what options they have in terms of marketing their small business (like a home and garden show where the public comes in and meets the companies that offer home improvement — and all the new tech that goes along with it).

Our local AAF chapter did one about 7 years ago. It was poorly attended and never repeated. I presented. It was a fabulous idea.

We don’t have a Marketing Channel where people ooh and ahh over the latest couple who comes into businesses and turns their branding around and makes it all shiny and new and hands them a marketing plan and clients ready to purchase.

Marketing is the slow burn and a mystery how some succeed and others don’t. People like Shark Tank because it’s a Cinderella story — where the prince bestows upon them the money they think they need to succeed. Success overnight!

Everyone thinks it’s social media — but really that’s just more ad buys. And it’s left to the algorithm to determine how successful you are.

So how do small businesses that are in service industries especially find new clients? Sure we all know to go where our audience is, but our audience/ideal clients are in front of their computers looking for their own ideal clients. Or on the job, or at shows selling their own goods. They don’t scroll Instagram looking for business advice. They aren’t on Facebook reading funny memes. Generally. I mean they are definitely on their phones though.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts on the matter. I mean even your own website when it gives examples, it’s usually really large companies with really large budgets and a full agency behind the A/B testing and research and metrics. Not really applicable on a smaller scale, in most instances. Even people that know they need to content market are buying their content, not generating it themselves or through an agency (buying it from a service that caters to their industry).

OK — thank you for listening, and we all await your response.  🙂

Thanks!

Deanna Taus
Owner
Full Circle Creative, LLC

Dear Reader:  Hi Deanna, Thanks for reaching out.

We get this question quite often from small businesses who are engaged in marketing.

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We frequently receive questions from our email subscribers asking marketing advice. Instead of hiding those answers in one-to-one email communication, we occasionally publish edited excerpts of some of them here on the MarketingSherpa blog so they can help other readers as well. If you have any questions, let us know.

Dear MarketingSherpa: Hi, Daniel Burstein. I appreciate it that you are so warm-heart and nice to offer to help.

Currently, I am a graduate, major in Social Media and Mobile Marketing. I want to seek a Summer Intern in the field of Marketing or Digital Marketing, either full-time or part-time. I am an International student from China.

According to my current situation, do you have some advice to give me? When you are free, could you let me know your suggestions. I am so grateful to hear from you.

Regards,

Dear Reader: Congratulations on your academic achievements and thanks for writing. I assume you are looking for an internship here in the US?

I’ll be honest, the fact that you’re a non-native speaker could be a challenge.

So …

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What is an impactful way to increase conversion?

Or …

How do you grab your customer’s attention?

See, I could have led with either statement. Both statements describe our conversation in the latest MarketingSherpa podcast. But my hypothesis was that the first statement would grab your attention more.

Customer attention is a scarce resource. There is only space for one headline in the print ad, only a set amount of characters in a paid search ad, only six seconds that will be the opening six seconds of your TV commercial. And yet, your product likely has many value attributes.

So what do you lead with? To elucidate (and other fancy words) yourself on this subject, you can listen to this episode below in whichever way is most convenient for you — or click the orange “Subscribe” button to get every episode.

More About Episode #4 — Value sequencing

The initial question of the podcast leads to a bigger topic — value sequencing.

What do customers need to know? And when do they need to know it during the buyer’s journey? In addition, which customers need to know which things about your product?

This is true for their entire macro-journey with your brand but equally important at the micro-level within each customer interaction. For a landing page or an email, what do they need to know in the beginning, middle and end?

These are topics Austin and I dove into. Here are the show notes from this episode:

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Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.

Ad blockers are software that, as the name suggests, allow web users to block the ads on websites. Ad-blocking software (also known as ad filtering) can take different forms — from a web browser extension or plugin like AdBlock Plus to a standalone browser like Brave.

According to MarketingSherpa research, the top reason American consumers block online ads is because “I dislike large ads that pop up over the entire webpage,” followed closely by “Ads make the webpages load too slow” and “Rollover ads are intrusive.”

While ad blockers have gotten more attention lately, they are not new. For example, MarketingSherpa published a story on them back in 2001 — Should Publishers Worry About Ad Blocking Software? SaveTheFreeWeb.com’s Bill Dimm Explains Reality.

Ad blockers have been a difficult phenomenon to deal with for publishers.

For publishers, ad blockers threaten to steal advertising revenue. Some online publishers have adapted by either forcing visitors to allow ads or pay for a subscription to see their content. Here is an example from WIRED magazine.

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You think your product is great. Your service is top-notch. And personally, I have no reason to doubt you.

Your ideal customer, on the other hand … let’s face it, they don’t live in the four walls of your office. They aren’t thinking about your product every moment of every day like you are. They — and I hope this doesn’t sound harsh — really don’t care.

This disconnect is normal, of course. But here’s where you’ll get in trouble.

The next time you hire an advertising agency to create a campaign, when you redesign your website, when you launch a product — if you use that same insider thinking, you will undercut your marketing investments. Because those advertising and marketing creatives need to be armed with an essential reason why the ideal customer should buy your product.

Without that core reason — that marketing creativity isn’t being put to its most effective use. Just like a painting without a viewpoint isn’t really art, it’s just nice colors on a canvas.

Without that core reason, all you get is “we’re the bestest, greatest, amazingest [product type] you’ve ever seen.” You can buy all the media you want and blast that message out into the world but really … c’mon … how many customers will truly believe it?

Your product needs a value proposition. In our latest podcast, Austin McCraw and I have a robust yet light-hearted conversation about pitfalls marketers can get into when crafting their value prop. You can listen to this episode below in whichever way is most convenient for you or click the orange “Subscribe” button to get every episode.

More about episode #3 — consider the competition

A value proposition created in a vacuum is no value proposition at all.

And this is what makes crafting a value prop so difficult. You’ve got to take a good, hard look at what other options your customers have. Even when it isn’t direct competition. For example, customers taking a short trip aren’t only considering which airline is best, they are considering if they should drive instead. Or take a train. Or perhaps not go at all.

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Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.

In responsive design, a breakpoint is where the layout of the webpage changes based on the size of the device. Mobile breakpoints are the sizes for mobile devices.

For example, a responsive design may have three sizes — desktop, tablet, smartphone. In that case, the mobile breakpoints would be the tablet and smartphone size. Here is a GIF created by MECLABS Institute Senior Designer/Web Specialist Charlie Moore that shows a website with three breakpoints.

Choosing breakpoints

You can choose which and how many breakpoints your website has. For example, instead of just the three referenced breakpoints mentioned above, you can add in a fourth breakpoint for small laptops.

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You might be reading this blog post on a smartphone. Or perhaps you’re about to listen to this podcast on your phone. Because mobile has taken over. We have all become cyborgs now — part human, part machine.

Don’t believe me? Just trying going without your phone for 24 hours. Go ahead, I dare you.

As a marketer, these societal changes should spark some curiosity questions. How do these customer behavior changes help you help the customer make the best decisions? How can you better serve customers on mobile devices and increase marketing performance?

And really, what is mobile anyway? Is it a device — just the same people we’re trying to reach on the desktop but with less screen space? Or is it a segment — people’s behaviors (and perhaps even the people) are so different when they’re on a smartphone that we need to approach them in an entirely different way.

We cover this topic in MarketingSherpa Podcast Episode #2. You can listen to this episode below in whichever way is most convenient for you or click the orange “Subscribe” button to get every episode sent right to, let’s face it, your phone.

More about episode #2 – You must consider the human behind the device

Mobile marketing is a hot topic, but don’t just think about it in terms of technology. Or usability.

As with any other human communication mechanism — from the caveman grunt to the printing press to the secret handshake to the telegraph, radio, email, you name it — using the mechanism correctly is just table stakes. It’s all in the nuance of how you use it.

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Marketing and technology go hand-in-hand these days. And the addition of technology has created some incredibly powerful abilities for marketers.

But…

We’re still just human beings trying to get a message out to other human beings.

So what role should that human connection play in your marketing? It’s a topic we cover in MarketingSherpa Podcast Episode #1 — you can listen to below in whichever way is most convenient for you or click the orange subscribe button to get every episode.

Listen to the podcast audio: Episode 1 (Right mouse click to download)

Welcome to the new MarketingSherpa podcast

I can’t say this is the first MarketingSherpa podcast. Long-time readers know that MarketingSherpa has been publishing and producing helpful content since the early days of marketing and has had a podcast before. In fact, MarketingSherpa has written about marketing for so long that our first article about podcasting was published three months before Apple added formal support for podcasts in iTunes (If you’re curious, see Integrated Ad Campaign Results – Podcast + Avatar Banners + NYC Bar Coasters published on March 22, 2005).

But this new iteration of the MarketingSherpa podcast is our latest attempt to provide you the insights and information to help you do your job better. Plus, we attempted to make this a fun and lively discussion.

We’re not sure if we’re going to do a podcast long-term, but we figured it was worth a 90-day experiment (so if you have any feedback, please let us know).

A little insight into our thinking

Since you’re marketers as well, we thought you might be interested in some of our thinking behind the reason we are deciding to experiment with this format for our audience.

When deciding what channels to embrace, it is important to understand if your ideal customer is there and using it already. It’s all too easy to follow the hype. After all, even if a channel is “free” like social media or podcasting because it doesn’t require an immediate monetary outlay, nothing is ever truly free. As MECLABS Institute Managing Director and CEO Flint McGlaughlin said in a recent MarketingSherpa blog post, Burn your “also(s).”  Every new channel you invest in, every new social media account you open, every new content type you create diverts your team’s limited time and attention from something else. (That’s why we’re launching this 90-day experiment to gauge if the podcast is a worthwhile investment of our time and attention long term).

In MarketingSherpa’s case, we have a business audience (marketers), and the data says that a large group of business people listen to podcasts. Most notably, 44% of business people in a senior role who know what a podcast is are listening to podcasts, according to LinkedIn data published on MarketingCharts.com (only 8% of respondents didn’t know what a podcast is, so this constitutes a lot of senior role department heads, VPs, owners and C-suite execs listening to podcasts).

Because our audience is professional marketers, they tend to like visiting our website from the workplace. In fact, looking at our website analytics reminds me of the gently rolling waves of Jacksonville Beach (which is where I prefer to spend my weekends rather than reading marketing content online, so I can’t blame you for reading more during the week). Look at the clear dips in pageviews on the weekend.

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I hate to admit it. But as I’ve advanced in my career, I’ve become a little cranky.

Sometimes I can be like a marketing version of Grandpa on “The Simpsons” — “I remember when everything was print so there were real deadlines, not like a landing page which you have to constantly optimize. And we’d write ads for The Wall Street Journal, not for phones. Phones were actually for making phone calls. And another thing …”

But when I look outside my office this month, I see the Thank You Box.

It’s an effort to show appreciation for others in the office here at MECLABS Institute. Simply write a note about why you’re thankful for someone.

So, in this month of gratitude, here are 12 elements of modern marketing I’m thankful for:

1. That email is a two-way street — It’s a feature that can be overlooked in email marketing, but the customers you serve can reply to your email messages. Let them. Don’t send “no reply” emails. When we email newsletters and content from MarketingSherpa, we always allow replies.

   This is customer intelligence we learn from. These are email subscribers we can help. There are even people who reply to inquire about services from MarketingSherpa’s parent research organization, MECLABS Institute. And we even get nice replies, like this …

   “I love your stuff. I share it with my small business clients.”

   I’m thankful for those notes. Numbers matter. But hearing from humans you’re serving is especially fulfilling.

2. Digital A/B testing — Sure, you could test with direct mail as well. But not this cheaply. And not this quickly. It’s a great way to learn from your customers’ behavior.
3. Content marketing — Another tactic that didn’t start with the invention of the internet. But it sure has exploded with the growth of digital — from blogs to videos to push-button publishing — partly thanks to the power of social media and organic search. No longer does marketing only have to be an “ask.” Now it can also be a “give.” A very effective tactic.



1. 4. The “Referrals” tab on Google Analytics — I love to see who thinks our content is valuable enough to send us traffic.
   5. LinkedIn and Twitter — A great way to interact with and learn from other marketers I’ve never met. Especially helpful for an introvert like me.
   6. Marketing memes — C’mon, how fun are they?

   

   (The above meme is from the article Ecommerce Marketing Research: To be truly successful, you must step out of the ecommerce bubble)

   7. The democratization of marketing — Large brands still have a huge advantage over smaller brands thanks to their massive budgets, but not the dominance they once enjoyed when they were the only ones who could truly afford significant media buys. Never before has a truly great idea that can serve a customer need have a chance to break through and disrupt an industry that has overlooked serving the customer for too long (mattresses, landline phones, movies, grocery stores, the list goes on).
   8. Transparency reins — It’s harder to mislead customers when every customer is also a publisher. Which means the truly customer-first brands are the ones that succeed.
   9. Marketing automation platforms — What a great way to get a better understanding of the customer and their journey with your website and brand.
   10. Online customer reviews — There’s gold in here for copywriters. You can hear how customers talk about your brand and products in their own words.
   11. The big idea — Brainstorming and concepting aren’t new to the digital era. But they tap into the heart of marketing and feed a marketer’s soul. This is why I’m in marketing. All the technology is just a means to an end. There is nothing as fulfilling as coming up with that core concept that taps into an essential truth of a brand and helps customers perceive its true value.
   12. Measuring and testing the big idea — Because, learning what works leads to even better ideas.

   What are you thankful for?

   I created a post in MarketingSherpa’s LinkedIn Group so you can share what you’re thankful for as well. Do it! Gratitude improves physical and psychological health and increases mental strength, according to psychologists. And that leads to more effective marketing. Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.

   You can follow Daniel Burstein, Senior Director of Content and Marketing, MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute, on Twitter @DanielBurstein.

   You might also like …

   Lead your team to breakthrough results with A Model of your Customer’s Mind: These 21 concepts and tools have helped capture more than $500 million in (carefully measured) test wins.

   The Last Blog Post: How to succeed in an era of Transparent Marketing

   Marketing Career: Can you explain your job to a six-year-old?

   Why You Should Thank Your Competitors