So What? Business Strategy

Well, hey, howdy. It's just me and John this week. It's always a little janky when it's just me and John make sure we start the show off correctly, hit the right buttons. Um, so welcome to So What, the Marketing Analytics and Insights Live Show. It is me, Katie.

I'm joined by John Wall. Chris is off site today, uh, making magic happen with the digital customer journey and Google Analytics 4. How's it going, John? Good, good. There's like a panic.

I couldn't find the magic wand here, but I did manage to get that out. This is like our behind the scenes people are I just have this thing where I always wave the magic wand when the pre-roll is running, and I couldn't. It's one of those pre-show rituals that we've developed that now out of superstition, you can't not do it. You have to do the pre-show ritual, which is as the music is playing, John has to wave the magic wand behind the scenes. It's cruft, yeah.

It's a I've burdened myself with this now where it's actually a problem if I can't do it, and it actually delivers no real value of any sort. So no, it's a superstition. It satisfies the superstition, which is perfect, which is gets us on the road we want to be on. That's right. Um, so today we are talking about business strategy.

You and I are talking about the traction model. And so we're gonna talk through the 21 marketing tactics to power your strategy, uh, determining your marketing maturity, and putting together a business strategy. So as we're talking about business strategy, John, you always kind of come back to the traction model as your gold standard of you know figuring things out. So can you just sort of talk through what is the traction model? Yeah, the traction model originally came from the work of uh Justin Weinberg and Gabriel Maris.

They did a book called Traction that came out probably like five years ago now. And um it was just the first time I read it, it's a fantastic model because it's comprehensive. It really covers all the marketing tactics that the average organization runs across and does. And they studied a couple hundred VC back startups and were able to come up with some guidelines as to how to employ these tactics that will work most effectively. So the thing is anybody can come in, and even if you're at that, you know, one founder in a garage, you can at least give yourself a map that companies have succeeded have used in the past.

So, you know, your situation may be different, unique. And if you're an existing organization, you may be doing things very different from how this works. But if you're at a point where you're not really sure where to go next, this is a map that again has you know proven success and can get you on the right track and at least give you, you know, the right things to start testing to figure out if you're going in the right direction. Um, go ahead, go ahead. No, no, no.

Go ahead. Well, I was gonna say there's three main points to it that we'll hit. Um the first is the 50-50 rule, which has came out of the um the realization that all organizations um want to be doing half their time on product and half their time on either marketing or product development, but half their time being in front of customers and prospects and getting feedback because the biggest gaps they saw were you know, the build it and they will come. People that just sit and toil away on a product and then throw it over the wall and hope it will fly and it doesn't. And then the reverse of that is actually, and this is an old adage that people say is like nothing will kill a product faster than good sales and marketing.

You know, if you're out in front of the customer all the time and they burn your product down, then that's fine. You actually that's the fail quick and you can move on. And so there's that kind of golden number of if you're you know, and this is easy for a startup if you're just you know one to five people, you can map out your week and just be like, okay, let's make sure two and a half days are going towards you know, staying in front of customers and figuring out where we should be versus actually working on the product and polishing it. Um, it's it's funny you say that because as you're describing that sort of 5050, I've worked at organizations that weren't even close to that kind of a distribution. And so I've worked in organizations where there was a hundred percent emphasis on the product and zero emphasis on sales and marketing and talking to the customers.

Uh and quite honestly, the organization wasn't interested in hearing the customer feedback. Um, they were just uh no, I know best, I know what the customers need, but then all of these millions of dollars into the product and it wouldn't sell. And so it was always I know for always it was always kind of like a head scratcher of like, oh, I wonder what's going on. I wonder what's wrong. Why can't we make more money?

We've spent all of this money into it. And then absolutely I've seen the flip side where all of the emphasis is on sales and marketing, but then it's almost kind of like a bait and switch where like once you get the person into the organization to buy something, there's really nothing there to buy. Um, I think I saw, I don't remember who posted it, so I apologize uh to the original poster, but someone had put on Twitter almost like a quick poll of you know, which is worse. Um really good marketing of a bad product or really bad marketing of a good product, which one is gonna succeed. Yeah, you're both in trouble, you know.

That that's the thing. Because the we'd like to believe that a poor uh a great product with poor marketing will still survive, but the market has shown us over and you know, it's yeah, Mac is easier to use, but Windows dominated the PC space, you know, it was just like cheaper, easier, you know, better market stuff flies. So yeah, it's um and I you you totally it's just so cliche that group where the founders think they know what the customer wants and they spend millions of dollars and they end up not being able to sell. And the irony in that is that a lot of times it's because the customers are not as smart and understanding as the founders, like the founders do get it, they understand what's going on, but when they go make that argument to customers, the customers are just like, I don't even know what the heck you're talking about. You know, I have this little problem here that's on fire, so I'm not interested in your academic argument that's going to change the world, and it probably will change the world eventually, but you know, you have to prime for the mass market because they're um you know, if they were visionaries and really cutting edge people, they'd be doing the startup, right?

They wouldn't be sticking in their same job. So um that that kind of gets proven. Um so yeah, so from 50-50, the next big thing that they learned out of that was this idea, they call it the bullseye strategy. But this idea that of all the marketing tactics out there, when you start, you want to start with three. You pick three tactics and test them because the huge mistake so many organizations make is they try 10 things, you know, they have a hundred grand to spend and they spend 2,000 and fifty different channels.

And, and you know, they end up burning 98,000 of it, if not 100, if they're unlucky. And so this idea that you just pick three things, you do those three, and hopefully one of them hit, and then you rotate out the other two to other things. Um, because the big learning was that for every marketing channel, the returns are not linear. They're you know, they're more exponential. It's um having four people on your team all doing an hour of Google Ads on the side, is has no chance of success compared to one person that sits down for two days a week and does nothing but Google Ads.

You know, that one person is gonna learn so much that by their seventh or eighth iteration, they're gonna be miles ahead of the people that are just, you know, that's just one of 10 things on their list to do. Um, so that bullseye strategy is a big um part of that too. And so that just scales. The idea with that is you kind of do the three, and when you have three that win, then you do add a fourth, but you've got to start adding headcount at that point. And you keep kind of ratcheting that up, where ultimately the end game is when you're at, you know, 150 million or higher, you've got 21 different people who are covering each of those 21 different channels, and you you have specialists and everything.

And that's uh, you know, that's kind of the academic idea of where it will end up, and it doesn't always end up that you're there a lot of for a lot of organizations, there's certain channels that just are never gonna work for them and they know that and they avoid them or whatever. But um, yeah, that kind of gets them at least to the list of stuff that they can be working on and make sure they're not spreading themselves too thin. So, how does an organization get to that point of knowing this is where the readiness comes in, and this is where the traction survey comes in. Is that right? Yeah, and even well, this is like the big reveal here.

Let me throw this thing out here if we can, uh if you can kick up that Adobe diagram for me there. So this is the traction model. These are the 21 channels that you can look at. You know, if there's one screen you're going to steal from this today, this is the one because this is the map of of what the world can do. And so they're broken out into four subsections.

And you know the primary one is the awareness section where you've got advertising, conventional PR, social content marketing. And over the years we realized that that maps perfectly with Ginny Dietrich's peso model. And so we have stolen that she's given us permission to do that as long as we always trademarked. Yes, trademarked. And the key is the most important thing is that we say that if you need any of that stuff, you need to go call Ginny and you know go get the SpinSucks Slack group.

If if any of that stuff is in your bellywick, you want to get over into the Spin Suck Slack group because they're always talking about that kind of stuff and those are your peers are over there and to get in. But so that's the meat of it there. Most of the classic marketing tactics are over there as far as you know content marketing, getting your email marketing set up your website, all of your social activity that's its own channel right now, conventional PR stuff, what you know the stuff you'd hire a PR team for, and then all the advertising stuff. That all falls under that branch of awareness. So that's a big chunk of it.

Sales does also fall into that can I hide that there we go. Sales falls into that um completely too. You know your direct sales team the other branches on that are business development. So if you have sales people whose entire job is just to work with other vendors who are selling your product for example HubSpot does have staff whose sole job is to work with these other agencies that do HubSpot installs. Like there are people like that's their marketing duty is to help third parties be able to sell the product and make money off that.

And then affiliates is kind of a is related but different in that with most affiliate programs, you're putting a program out there and you just let the whole world sign up and they'll get their 10% or 20% or whatever. And that's a whole nother branch. There's a lot of um dark arts that are in that path that you know, if you're into that stuff, you know where those things are and what those events are, but rarely do we go down that route. Um and then the last two product marketing, you know, that's no surprise. That's the you always want to try and you know, people talk about stickiness or making their product uh have viral components or whatever.

If there's something in your product that makes it easier for other people to buy it. Um I saw a killer example of that um this week. Threader was a Twitter tool where if somebody had done like 20 tweets in a row and you can't even figure out like where to start reading, you would forward it to Threader and Threader would have a web page with it all clean for you to read. And but of course, the big win with that is anytime anybody does one of these huge long rants, there's 50 replies underneath that tweet saying threader, you know, threader post, threader post, third post. And so anybody else that was looking at that, they're like, oh my God, I have that problem.

And look, threader right here solves it and it it feeds itself. Um and the last one over on that branch of the product marketing side is just existing platforms. There's always these plays where if you have a product that perfectly fits within another organization. Uh, for example, we have this um uh there's a startup here that does tw testing for swimming pools. Well, they just work hand in hand with all of these large hotel groups.

Like they don't have to go to the general public, they just work within these hotel groups because all these hotels have pools, and so they can go in and talk, you know, go to all the hotel events and the business just comes in and they don't do any traditional marketing. They just do this through an existing platform. And then you always see that with SaaS, right? The Salesforce app exchange is a classic example of that, right? You could build an app on the app exchange, if it lights on fire, you end up getting acquired by Salesforce five years later, and you've actually never even talked to anybody of the general public, you know.

Um, you can get away with that. Um, so yeah, that's like the the huge uh, you know, show up and dump the whole cart and the stuff on the floor here. This is a ton of stuff to throw out there. Um, yeah, I don't know. What would any questions on that or where do you where you want to go next with this?

I mean, I always have questions. So, my question, you know, I guess the big question is if I'm a startup, or if I'm, you know, an organization who's just trying to reevaluate my uh business strategy. How do I know where to start? Like, how do I figure out, okay, I need to start with conventional PR, or I need to start with SEO, or I really need to double down on my business development. I mean, you could make an argument that you should start with everything, but as you were sort of just talking about at the introduction, like you can't do that and have it be successful.

You can't just spread all of your resources out over everything and know what's working effectively. So how would I, as the end user, figure out what three things of all of these 21 to start with? Yeah, that's a great question. And so, you know, the original traction framework talked about that, and a lot of it is just workshopping. I mean, you get the whole team together, you do have to sit down and do an inventory of what you're doing.

And of course, you know, self-serving plug here. I mean, we do this, and to have us come in, the great benefit is we're doing these surveys all the time, and you don't have to put any effort towards it. Like you just show up for a half day and we can pull you through this whole thing. And the other plus with that is we've worked in all 21 channels. So if you're on a team that's a startup and you've only worked in a few of the channels, we can at least you know be able to say, okay, you know, you're not doing anything in this channel.

We've worked with four or five other companies that have been successful for this one. So maybe you want to check this out. Um, but yeah, it's just that process of going through all the channels that you've got. And with most organizations, you're gonna, you know, when you look at what you're currently doing, you'll fill the three right out of the gate. I mean, the kind of standard one we see is uh on the publishing side, having your website, you know, you've got to have a website up there, and you've got Google organic traffic, which is really the best uh ROI marketing that pretty much anybody can do.

You know, it doesn't even matter if you're a tiny company, if you've got some content that answers questions, Google will start throwing you traffic for free if you're unique and and hot. So website email marketing always has high engagement. And then for a third one, it's usually direct sales. You know, you as a startup, you've got somebody that's out in front of prospects talking to them, trying to get real feedback to understand, you know, if you've got your product market fit correct. Um and so then you know, normally for a startup, and they've even gone into this, is they usually throw three out, and usually one of three, they're like, Yeah, we absolutely have to do this, and maybe the other two aren't doing as well.

And so for a smaller org, you just go down the list and cherry pick two or three others that you want to test and you know, come up with your list and then just do short iterative cycles. I mean, kind of classic agile marketing and say, like, okay, for this month, we're gonna work on these three. And at the end of the month, you come back and say, okay, how did these three do? Do we want to pour more money into any one of them? Do we need to shut any of them off?

And are there some that are on the bubble? Do we see if we can fix it or do we swap them out? You know, you just set yourself up on a monthly or weekly cadence, whatever works, and figure out where to go next and which ones to try. And so I think that that, you know, uh I think that's a smart way to think about starting your business strategy. And with that, you know, my little soapbox that I always get on is making sure that, you know, as you're starting any one of these tactics that you have some kind of a plan around it.

And so that's where the five Ps that we have, our framework comes in. So purpose, people, process, platform, and performance. And so I would apply that framework to every single tactic that you're trying. And so, what is the purpose of SEO for your organization? Who are the people who are doing it?

How are you doing it? What tools are you using? And how are you measuring success? And repeat that process for every one of those things because the worst possible thing that can happen is you're like, okay, we're gonna do PR. And then you never put a plan together to measure the effectiveness of it.

So then the month, you know, lets up and you've spent $20,000 in resources into PR and you have no idea if it worked. So that's just my little soapbox that I like to get on is like you can try any single one of these, but you have to have a plan that covers why you're doing it, how you're gonna measure success, and who's doing the thing. Yeah, absolutely. Right? You Chris talks a lot about, you know, if you don't have 20% of your budget set aside for measuring, you're not doing it right.

I mean, you just have to do that. You have that plan. And uh as a startup or as a smaller org, you can kind of get away with that. But as soon as you get to the point where you have more than one employee, you've got to do that five piece thing because you want to have you know a paper trail and documentation of here's what we thought we were going to do, and these are the things we're testing, and this is what we'd consider success. Because yeah, as soon as you get beyond kind of the the folks that have enough equity to chain them there, you've got to worry about churn in the marketing department.

And you know, if you have two or three branches here that are doing great, but the person that runs those, you know, got a better offer to move to the Bay Area or whatever, you know, you're gonna be at ground zero and just lose that business unless you've got your plan written together so that you can then you know, at least hopefully start off at 40% as effective as you were, if not 80%. But the worst case scenario is you know, branches of the tree just die as people leave and you're stuck having to, you know, grow back from scratch. So one of the things that you wanted to sort of talk about was determining your marketing maturity. So is the traction model something that can help you figure out your marketing maturity? And what in this context, John, is marketing maturity?

Yeah, so the marketing maturity, as far as how we're defining this is to run this model against your existing structure in your org, you know. So if you know you're an eight-person marketing department, um, you know, hopefully at that point you're um you know, by eight people, you do in theory have enough to cover all 21 branches. So then it comes down to how successful are you at them. And you know, you can come up with gaps if you're only a four-person department, um, you know, you really shouldn't be working on more than 12 branches, right? Because you don't have the bandwidth.

And in fact, um, with four people really, you know, if you were had incredible luck or great alignment, you'd only still be working on four branches with four people, you know, or maybe six. Um, so yeah, just kind of doing the the math as far as both staying within your three per staff guidelines. Um, and then but at that point, effectiveness comes into it, right? There's no one size fits all rules on these because for some organizations, you know, they'll get into three channels and they'll just be killing it, you know, that their return will be there. And so really those organizations usually don't feel like they're in trouble evil, even.

You know, they're like, our marketing programs are going well, we're generating a bunch of leads and sales and things are going really well, but they actually may be leaving money on the table. You know, if they added staff and picked up two or three more channels, if they had the same success in those additional channels, um, you know, they could again get you know double digit growth or whatever. So yeah, the maturity model takes a look at okay, how much have you bitten off and how well are you doing with it? And you know, do you either need to pare down and get more effective, or um, are you more effective in not taking advantage of that and need to just take on more channels to uh to grow faster and get more out of it? So yeah, and it we again that's part of kind of the rollout process for us is as we do that, we can do a full audit of where you're at and basically give you a report back of like, okay, here's based on what we see, you know, what we think you should be at and whether you're overextended or underinvested and be able to adjust to increase results on that.

It's just insane how you know we've seen stuff where, you know, Chris is looking at social and display ads where or search engine ads where companies are bidding against themselves and wasting millions. And you know, to be able to not only get twice as effective in a channel, but then how also have a million bucks to pour into two other channels, like that's a complete game changer for a lot of organizations. Right. Well, to paraphrase Ron Swanson, don't half-ass a bunch of things, whole ass one thing. And it sounds like uh David, you know, agrees with us and sort of there's he's right, there's only 24 hours in a day, you know, it's not realistic for any one person to try to tackle all of it.

So really picking and choosing where you can focus your energy is gonna make the most sense. And so, you know, when we get into things like our attribution reports, our digital customer journey reports, a lot of times, especially the larger organizations, we tend to ding them if they are focusing too much on one channel. The reason we do that is because the larger the organization, the more likely they are to have teams that are focusing on every single one of the digital marketing channels or all 21 of these uh points here. And so there should be diversity in their digital marketing. And if we don't see it, then that means that you know, one team's not pulling their weight or things aren't working, they're not tagged correctly, whatever's the case.

As a smaller organization like ours, it's risky to be doubling down on one channel like email, for example, but if you know with confidence that nothing is going to change with that tactic with your email, it's absolutely acceptable to focus solely on that because it's working, you're doing it well, and you're doing something uh of quality. And so you have to work within the constraints you have of your people and your budgeting. And so if you can only do one channel well, do that one channel well. Don't try to spread it out across six different channels that are going to be kind of subpar. Yeah, absolutely.

That's you know, this is startup land, like it's not about minimizing the risk. If you've got something that's delivering return, you keep doubling down on it until the return starts to drop off. Um, until you've got a proven channel that's gonna delivers fast, you know, especially if you're bootstrapping and you know, you're having to make payroll, you you just don't have time to play it safe. You've really got to, you know, again, jump on the channels that deliver and keep keep driving those. Again, it's that whole thing of the more you dig into a channel, the smarter you get about deploying within that channel, too.

Like an example of that is with all search ads, right? It's like, yeah, people start to get good at just key phrases and getting the content right, but then when you start tuning with negative keywords and making sure you're not bidding against yourself and things like that, your returns continue to beat the general, the general masses, the folks that are just shoveling money on the pile. Well, and that's why the measurement plan is such an important element of all of this is you know, so you're talking about companies competing against themselves. Without that kind of in-depth analysis, they may not know why their SEO strategy or their search engine marketing strategy isn't working at all. Um, because they may not realize they're bidding against themselves, because you may have two different teams who are not working together, who are not talking to each other, and they're come they're both bidding on the same kinds of things.

They're both competing for the same keywords. We we actually have a client where this happens, uh, because just the nature of the organization is so large where they have different branches of the organization. They have, you know, their branch, then they have a national branch, and then they have teams within each of the branches. And again, the organization is so large that they're not communicating in such a way that they know they're competing against each other. Um, and so you know, it's not reflected on here, but that is a big part of this process, is you can test and try any of these, but make sure you're measuring what you're doing and that you have that communication plan set up internally, even if you're a team of two.

I mean, I mean, John, you've seen this with me and Chris. The amount of times that things kind of go sideways because Chris and I didn't talk to each other, even though we're such a small organization. And one of us goes, What the heck is that thing? What are you doing? How did this happen?

And it's just we didn't have the conversation about it, and it happened so easily. Yeah, and that's always a a war because you you're basically you trade off, you know, compliance versus agility, right? That's the challenge. It's like because you could easily make the argument that every branch on this tree should ultimately have one person that's ultimately responsible for it, like email marketing. You would have one person in the org who is the the final say on what goes out on behalf of the company and what doesn't, and just to avoid the kind of problems that you were talking about.

But then there's also the reality that if you get to the point where you know it's gonna take you three months to get your email out because you're one division of 20 and you know, you're just waiting for your shot. Um, but uh, you know, part of me is that is the reality of it. Like I it would be much better to have to wait three months to drop an email than have 20 departments just doing a free-for-all, pounding your customers and prospects. I mean that that's how CEMOs lose their job, right? Is it's you know, they have shadow IT or or other stuff going on and they're not in control of the message and where things go.

So yeah, it's it's always a fight. But it and another thing that um is a great point that ties into what you said earlier is if you have a 5P document for any of these branches, at least everybody else in the org can go to that document. And if they are kind of outside of the you know, the directly defined area of where they can work, at least if they stay on track with the five Ps, they're not gonna do something that's completely off brand or going to screw things up, you know, more than if they were just to be Wild West shooting up the whole saloon when they got there. It really a lot of organizations, even if they've been around for a long time, do feel like that Wild West uh scenario, which is I mean, I I get how it happens, but it's still I don't know why I'm surprised every time I come across it. Um how how do you start to use this information to put a business strategy together?

So we've talked about what this is and sort of determining your marketing maturity, you know, if you're a startup or if you've been around for a long time, if you have new teams or everything is how do I then take this and put it into action? What is my so what here? Yeah, in a perfect world, you know, this is matched also up against um your digital customer journey. You know, you're actually have a report that you can run and you can see every week or every month that okay, these are the channels that are delivering and how they're doing. So then you can make that decision as far as okay, for this month or this quarter, these are the ones we're gonna crank down on and you know, spend more.

These are the ones we're gonna shut off, and you you know, ultimately you would understand what's going on in in each of these places. Um, you know, one other point too, I do have to say any large organization is going to reach that wild west stage, and that is another benefit to bringing in somebody from outside to look at this stuff because they're they don't have a political vested interest in you know explaining what's going on or where the gaps are in the data. Um, and so having a third party that can look at this and give you the the truth, you know, about what's gonna go on and where things need to be patched and are broken can really kind of get you in trouble. And by the same token, too, it can serve as a lightning rod. You know, you your team doesn't have to take the beating, you can have uh a third party deliver the bad news and you know, and work around it or fix it.

Um yeah, this is it, you know, this ends up just kind of being a cycle of okay, you've you know, this is what we're working on for this quarter. We loop back, see what worked across all the channels, figure out which ones to test next, and just continue rolling the cycle. Um, and what you'll find is as the business, the overall business strategy changes that will affect the five Ps, which then affect, you know, kind of which channels may work, and you're again it's just always adjustment, right? This is the part of marketing that's the is my surfing analogy, right? It's like every day is different, and you know, just because you show up today, don't expect it to be anything like yesterday.

You've you've always got to be on the move. And that's where that agility comes in. And so it's funny. Uh, you know, we talk a lot about frameworks and process, and for some reason, those terms get associated with slowing things down and more of that waterfall uh approach to project management, where in reality, using those frameworks gives you that repeatability, which allows you to find that agility. And it allows you to pivot very quickly as you're seeing that something that's not working.

And so while this chart may feel overwhelming and daunting, and talking about the five Ps and other frameworks that trust insights might apply, in reality, it actually speeds you up. Doing business requirements up front speeds up the whole process, even though it feels like you're slowing down. And so that's something that you know we can absolutely help with because we can facilitate all of those conversations and gather that data. John, to your point, we don't have that political or emotional investment in an organization. We're coming in like just the facts, ma'am.

Just tell me, tell me the facts. Like I'm I'm not concerned about, you know, if you know Barbara stole your coffee and now you're not talking to her, so you cut off the Google Analytics access. Like we'll fix that stuff, but we're not going to get involved in the politics of it. So I think bringing in a third party to help you evaluate your readiness, your marketing maturity, and where you need to, you know, tighten up on some of your processes even processes and governance is an excellent idea. I mean, I'm totally biased, and I'm totally going to say that it's always a good idea, but it really is a smart way to evaluate what's going on.

Yeah, and the thing that has just blown me away over the past, you know, five years now, as we've gone through all this stuff, is the number of orgs where we've become the repository of knowledge for the marketing department. You know, there's so much churn with employees and in departments that a lot of times, you know, one of these branches, somebody will leave and the new employee comes in, and we're actually training them and getting them up to speed on what's going on and what how you know why it was built this way, why why this works, what were the things that they were working on trying to fix and having some kind of institutional memory as opposed to that info just walking around. It's just been nuts with the great resignation over the past six months here. We've just had so many orgs where people have fled and you know, the CMO is just stuck with not able to report or do anything. You know, they had all this um ability to execute, and now suddenly they're scrambling just to get back to where they were six months ago.

So yeah, you know, kind of think of this as having a data backup off site that can save what you're doing. Well, and with that, you know, we know that consultancies like ours, not exclusively ours, but like ours, we tend to stay up to date on the latest and greatest techniques and platforms and those kinds of things that your internal team just may not have the bandwidth to do in terms of professional development and you know, their own research and innovation and development. And so turning to an outside organization to get that information in terms of what's the latest information on social and display ads? What should I know that I don't currently know because I've been so focused heads down on just doing the thing that I haven't had time to look up and see what's new. And so that's another really good benefit of bringing in an organization like Trust Insights to help you evaluate this kind of information to see, you know, is are the tactics that I'm deploying working, or are there other things that I haven't even thought of?

Yeah, and that's a great point because that really applies to all of these branches, right? I mean, there are in large orgs, you know, there's somebody who does the messaging apps for, you know, name any Fortune 50 company. Now, do you want to grab somebody off the street and let them work by trial and error for the first six months to figure out how that works? Or do you want to, you know, find somebody who specializes that and hire them for you know two weeks to come in and give you some of the best practices and get you off the ground and save you all that pain. And yeah, it's you know, until you have the resources to specialize in these channels, you getting some outside help is always a great way to um, you know, you just you don't want to learn by banging your head against the wall, you know, it just gets to be too tiresome and painful.

And really the big one is the pitfalls, you know, because so many of these programs, uh if we had a dollar for every client that, you know, their first run with Google Ads was throwing $10,000 at something and coming back with absolutely nothing to show for it. I mean, that's just it's not even cliche. That's pretty much like what happens to the majority of people that try that. Um, so yeah, don't go there. So as we're starting to wrap up, it sounds like if you are looking to either put together fresh or or refresh your existing business strategy, a great way to look at it is using this traction model, which is sort of a major 21 points of your marketing, uh, how you're gonna bring people in, uh, how you're gonna keep them, and determining your maturity with each of these things.

And so if you want help with something like that, then trust Insights is a great option, you know, to help with that. You get to talk with John, you get to talk with me, maybe talk with Chris, who knows. But definitely, you know, look at using the traction model in terms of helping determine your business strategy. Again, whether it's a brand new strategy or something you that you're refreshing. You know, there can be a lot of benefit to that.

You may find that you're spreading yourself too thin and you really need to tighten up and just focus only on a couple of different tactics to really you know hone those skills and nail them and demonstrate performance. Yeah that's that comes down and the thing is we can easily drop this you know 20 years of marketing knowledge on you in 30 seconds but the reality is you know as soon as you do this doing the measuring and all the systems that need to integrate to make this all work there's just a ton of work that goes on underneath the scenes here. And so and that's where we can you know that's our specialty is is getting you to the point where you can make these decisions and help you out. So John, any uh any parting thoughts as we start to wrap up this week's so what? Yeah I'd definitely give a plug for analytics for marketers who want to check out our Slack group we've got people always talking about the programs they're running over there and it's if you want a a third uh party view or opinion on programs you're running or at what the results should be come check us out over there.

We would love to talk to you there's and even if you're not into what you're doing today you can tell us about the movies or music you're listening to the now playing channel gets a lot of action over there. So we would love to see you. So before we before we run before wrap up John we did actually get uh a question, see if we can tackle. So Lori's asking, there are some sectors that are unlikely to find an outside marketing PR data provider. So, how do you advise a CCO to fill in uh to fill in until that case can be made?

Um what do you think, John? Yeah, you know, I mean, if the reality is you can't, then you've got to do it inside. And now you have the real struggle of when you're looking at your budget, you know, can you afford to hire somebody who's got some experience already in these channels, or do you only have the ability to hire a junior person that you're gonna have to train? And so you kind of need to um to juggle that. And there's a lot of different approaches to that.

I did kind of one of the big mistakes people make is you know, the first marketing higher than firing uh then hiring like three junior people, and then that that senior marketing person just ends up spending their entire life, you know, training and cleaning up after the junior people. Um, you'd really be better off maybe you know, hire even a little bit out of your budget if you can prove it and figure out a way to make it work. One way that's great to do that is hire somebody on you know, on a project basis, you know, get just say this is part of our employment process, like you're gonna be on for 90 days, at which point we're gonna reassess where things are at. So you don't have to fully commit, but at least maybe you can get somebody in the door with more experience because you know, the ultimate goal would be somebody who, yeah, you need to train them up on your business line and what you're doing, but you don't need to train them on here's how Google Ads work and here's you know, here's how you run an event, and you know, it's just things that would be brutally uh challenging to teach somebody how to do. So, yeah, that there's a there's a lot of challenges that go into that.

If you're not able to kind of think creatively on the hiring side, um, it can definitely um be more of a headache. And the a huge mistake people make on that front is then they delay the hiring, you know, they're like, well, we can't afford a person with some experience now, so let me just double down and do more work. And that's the number one source of burnout that we see. I would add to that, you know, if you don't have the ability to hire someone from the outside uh to do this kind of audit and evaluation, it definitely needs to be a commitment internally from the organization, and it needs to be a top-down commitment because it will take time away from your existing resources to do this kind of an audit. And so making sure that there's buy-in from the organization to say, all right, if we can't hire an outside marketing PR data provider, we have people internally who can do this, but here's the trade-off, here's what won't get done as we make this a priority.

And so that can kind of help you make that business case to say, you know, here's the list of things that won't get done, or conversely, if we brought somebody in, we could uh you know have them work on this thing, and then all of these other things over here could continue to get done. Um, you know, if the and if the answer is still we can't hire someone from the outside, making sure that it's a hundred percent crystal clear, okay, that's what this means. We can have John focus on this audit of our marketing programs to see are they working, are they not? But here are the five things that John won't be able to do during this time. If we're all okay with that, then we can go ahead and move this forward.

And so it's just making sure you're also having that conversation of this is a big commitment. So if we're gonna do this, here's what that looks like for the organization. And a lot of organizations are okay with that because it means that they're going to continue to learn and grow and get better. But if they're not okay with that, then it starts to become easier to make the case of bringing in an outside party. Yeah, okay.

So for the hardcore fans too that have stuck with us here, this is where you're going to get the real inside the extra tips. And the mistake people make is looking for the subject matter experts. What you really want to be looking for are the people that are the wannabe actors and comedians, the people that want the stage time. That's the important thing. Because you'll never convince a subject matter expert to take four hours out of their day to do a blog post.

If like if that's not something that they love to do, they are just never going to do it. They're always going to blame their job and their mainline responsibilities. Whereas if you find somebody that does want to do that case study so that they can go to some show or just enjoys hanging out on the social media channel to answer questions, you got to find those people because those are the ones that can win. Because yeah, it's just the you know, fledgling VP of marketing trying to coerce people to do blog posts is just an old tired trope that nobody wants to see or have to live through. And so with that, any other, you know, I want to make sure we don't get too far up topic because this is something that we could probably talk about for a long time.

So maybe it's going to be an upcoming episode. Uh, so any other final parting words, John, on the traction model and uh how organizations can be thinking about their business strategy. Yeah, that you know, if you if you haven't picked your three most important, you don't understand what those are, go do that. And yeah, if you want to throw them over in the Slack group so we can talk about it and kick them around. We would love to um compare notes on what's working and not working, but at least understand your three.

That's that's where you need to start, and best of luck with that. I think that's a that's solid advice and probably a great place to stop uh for today, because again, we could sort of rant forever about this topic. Um, so thank you for joining us today. Join us next week, where I believe we're talking about social media marketing, um, which should be an interesting conversation uh since the three of us are not necessarily social media marketers, but we do know a lot about uh the specific topic. And we get to influencers, all influencers all the time.

Uh and with that, let's see if John and I can figure out how to properly close out the show. Nope. No, no. Nope. Wait, we got it.

Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights Podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash TI podcast and a weekly email newsletter at trustinsights.ai slash newsletter. Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free analytics for marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers.

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