James and David Lawrence: Episode 319

Transcript

[0:00:17] RW: Hi, everyone. It’s Rae Williams, host of Author Hour, where I interview authors about their new books. If you’re an in-house marketer today, the digital world can be a scary place, but it doesn’t have to be. The basic principles of marketing have not changed. It’s still all about using the right methods at the right time to reach the right people. Our next guests are the authors of Smarter Marketer. Brothers David and James Lawrence and they’re here to talk to us about some of the 11 golden rules in their book.Rules that provide actionable insights and provide powerful tools for in house marketers challenged with developing effective campaigns that demonstrate their personal value within the organization. Here is our conversation with David and James Lawrence.

[0:01:04] James and David Lawrence: I think probably two years now in the making, as agency owners, with over time put a lot of work into writing blogs and writing content and thought leadership and a lot of that was all kind of often kind of very short term. It was kind of responding to things that had happened in the moment, things that Google had changed, things that Facebook had changed and collectively, we had a bit of an aha moment probably about five years ago now where we realize that essentially, it’s impossible to keep up with the speed of change in digital and by the time that blog articles had been written or a book on digital has been written that’s pretty much obsolete due to the speed of change and something that would definitely finding with clients, most of whom are in house marketers. And we started to realize that the only way to approach digital marketing was to actually go back to a lot of the principles, foundations of more traditional marketing, obviously with a slightly different slant on them. I felt that given we had 20 years’ experience each in digital marketing and growing digital and web-based businesses. I thought the time was right to knock wood down, put some time into putting a book together that essentially codified all that experience and putting to claim language for in house marketers that we do feel struggle with the speed of change and don’t know which sources to trust and elements of their more traditional training and education are still relevant in those which aren’t. We felt that putting something down that would be a marker and kind of this is the point where marketers, particularly, in house marketers can rely upon as they move forward with building out campaigns and also, their approach to their career.

[0:02:38] RW: All right. For the people that don’t know or for the people that are interested in finding out more, what would you guys say is the biggest difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing and what do you guys think is the future of marketing in terms of the direction that you see things going?

[0:02:56] DL: We’d see that there’s actually not much difference between digital marketing and marketing and we certainly think that in the coming years, the differences and even the labels that describe them will collapse completely and will just be marketing. When we talked in house marketers, we see them struggle massively because they might be experienced and really accomplish with traditional marketing. I spend far too much time trying to identify the differences and trying to understand too much about the differences but at the core, we’re still talking about finding the right message, taking it to the right people at the right time and that’s completely ageless when it comes to marketing.

[0:03:33] RW: What would you guys say is the main focus or the crux of your book that people can take action on?

[0:03:41] James and David Lawrence: Yeah, it’s a good question Rae, we’ve tried really hard to have the book at a point where it doesn’t become obsolete the moment that it goes to press and we want people to be able to pick it up in five years and 1- years’ time and for it still to be relevant to them as marketers at that point. But equally, we don’t want it to be so theoretical that there aren’t practical takeaways from the book. The conclusion of the book, we very much break down the different challenges or problems that an in-house marketer might be having and then point them towards individual chapters or rules. It's definitely the kind of book where if you’re struggling with media budgets, whether online or offline, you can turn a particular chapter. If you are having issues with content messaging, there’s a particular chapter you can turn to. We’ve provided really practical ways to develop our persona and buyer personas within the book itself and because we’re real enough to know that things will change, we’ve directive, we’ve created a page where we’ll keep up to date, different resources that are relevant to in house marketers. So, as those resources and tools change over time, we’ll keep that page up to date so that people that have bought the book can check in at those pages and find the latest tools, whether it’s in a year’s time or five years’ time.

[0:04:57] RW: So, what would you guys say is the biggest challenge that you see facing marketers today that you talk about in this book and talk about overcoming?

[0:05:06] James and David Lawrence: I think because challenge we see with in house marketers is them knowing where to draw the line between becoming a genuine expert in the day to day in the different digital marketing channels and where they say a little bit further back and be more focused on the big picture and we see kind of tearing themselves to pieces in these areas. Trying to get too deep into things, realizing it’s impossible to maintain that level of knowledge, but feeling like if they pull back, I don’t think they’re somehow failing.

[0:05:38] DL: Insane amounts of pressure put on them by whether it’s by the management or whether it’s by sales department so they kind of shifting blame around. It is literally impossible to be across everything in marketing they say but those are expectation that in-house marketers should be across it and should understand everything from Facebook to Google to display to traditional life line marketing. The book is very much about take a step back from all of this and elevate yourself form it and get a seat at the table with management and talk at a way which better positions you within your organization.

[0:06:14] RW: What are some of the things that you guys have seen happen if people aren’t taking that step back and if they are trying to kind of pressure themselves to you know, “I got to know Facebook marketing, I know Instagram’s popular now so Instagram marketing. I don’t even know if there’s such a thing as Twitter marketing but if there is that, you know, I had to know it too.” What would you say is the downside? What do you see people losing out on or falling apart on when that happens?

[0:06:40] DL: Yeah, I mean, I think you run the risk of not seeing the forest for the trees, being down in the weeds, obsessing over vanity metrics, trying to stay on top of things, pushing, if you work with an agency, pushing an agency on metrics that just don’t actually matter that. The story that opens the book is essentially a real story about a client that came to use quite a marketer who is explaining that her boss who was managing director of pretty big business down here, putting all of this pressure on her to know insane levels of detail about changes in Google Ad words, called Google Ads now. To the point where the director himself eventually jumped in to Google Ads one night. Made a bunch of changes to the account which totally messed with all of the optimization and progress that have been happening within the account. Essentially, a lesson where as an in-house marketer, you don’t want to be down in the weeds, you want to be strategically driven. You want to know enough about different topics that you know, whether it’s an in house or agency partner that’s working in those channels that you know enough to keep them honest but you definitely need to be looking at things that are more top level view so you can actually talk about growing organizations and not being a position where it’s – you’re reactive to chaos and organization, you need to be looking at things in a quarterly annual cycle. Be able to have the buy in of senior stakeholders.

[0:08:03] James and David Lawrence: One of the things we then see from these marketers who often quite experienced and really comfortable with the TV campaigns I used to run on the radio campaigns and the print campaigns, when they start to struggle with digital at the same depth, they reach out to us to get some advice about sort of person they can employ in house to take over a lot of these day to day responsibilities and variably, what they’re describing is what we refer to as a marketing unicorn, someone who can do everything, someone who can execute brilliantly across every channel. Understand how the channels fit together and understand how those channels can move towards the big marketing goals. These people don’t exist, if you can find someone close to it, they’re even quite rare. We’ve had a lot of in-house marketing teams go through this cycle of thinking one person to fit into their problems and then typically ends with a lot more frustration for those marketers.

[0:08:54] RW: All right, I want to touch on a couple of chapters that I found that just the titles and concepts to be interesting. We talked about a little bit our first chapter talks about how digital marketing is just marketing, so we touched on that a little bit and why the two are not as different as one would think. One of the chapters that I saw that I was like, is the only value is value as it is perceived by your prospects. What does that mean exactly and what kind of value are we supposed to be communicating? I’d love for you to break that down for us a bit.

[0:09:23] DL: It’s an interesting chapter, right? There’s a real temptation for marketers, for sales, representatives to basically look at how much it costs to deliver a product or service, to load 10% or 20% margin on to that product or service and basically say that’s the price that it costs would generate, to sell a particular product or service. When we try to get up clients to totally reverse that out and very much think about the product or service that you’re offering. What value does it represent to your particular customer or you know, segments of your customers? And we talk about it in the book, how some people out there who have large amounts of money around you are willing to pay $15 for black T shirt, others you know, will spend $400 on essentially the same thing. There’s people with loads of money that will just never fly business class or first class because for them, the 400 or 600% increase doesn’t to them represent value. In the book, we talk about and it was based upon actual client campaign, where for this particular client that would really try and tap into the corporate hotel market for a particular location of theirs, but none of the wording on their ads or on their actual hotel landing pages spoke to what a corporate traveler would actually be interested in, which was about having super-fast internet, having a desk in every room, having access to the finance channels on the pay TV within that particular location. If you’re reaching out to a family market then having a desk and having a desk and having cable, finance TV doesn’t provide any real value. If you speak into a corporate traveler then those things do actually provide value and allow you to charge a premium. For us, it’s all about understanding who your customers are and understanding the value to drive from your particular offering. That’s what the types of features that you should be speaking to in your marketing but that should also lead your price discussion, super important.

[0:11:23] RW: All right, awesome. Another chapter that of course caught my attention is the chapter six, whatever the question, a single channel is never the answer. What do you we mean by that?

[0:11:36] James and David Lawrence: Yeah, there’s a real temptation in house marketers, I think often as a response to the serious budget constraints, they often operate under to find the one best performing channel and to invest all their money into that and we see a lot of clients come to us because of the down sides of that approach and it falls apart in a couple of ways. Channels in the digital environment are controlled by a really small number of companies. So, if you put all your money for instance into Google Ads and an algorithm changes or particular policy of manufacture product or service changes, then you can literally lose your market overnight. We had an example of I think is one of our clients but a woman who had a really successful business built around her Facebook group. It was a huge product, hundreds of thousands of people in her community and literally overnight, Facebook made the decision that her content wasn’t appropriate and they simply blocked her, entirely. Her entire business died overnight and there was nothing she could do about it. We also see clients who focus on individual channels, forgetting that customers in the real world do their research across all kinds of devices and across all kinds of channels, often across a fair bit of time. If you’re putting all your money into say, a paid social on Facebook you’re going to be missing out on the people who see you in Facebook but then, browse other websites were then might be potentially missing out, on seeing Google display ads or they might be missing out on seeing your ad if there were to do a search for competitors in Google. Or being one or the other many search-based platforms. So, absolutely regardless of budgetary constraints and we understand that they’re in the real. Marketers have to make sure they understand where their prospects are and they have to understand the risks that they’re taking if they either don’t appear in front of their prospects in those channels or if those channels suddenly do something that harms their campaign overall.

[0:13:27] RW: All right and so you just touched on another one last chapter because this one I think is particularly interesting, understand data but never forget its limitations. But I feel in marketing, a lot of people it is data driven. It is that we are looking at okay what is working and what’s not with the dataset. So, what are the limitations that people need to be looking for and how does that affect the overall product?

[0:13:49] DL: It’s a great question Rae. It is really interesting. We’ve been in digital marketing for more than a decade now working with clients and if we go back to the beginning and even back to probably five years ago, we would have been the first people to say that one of the huge advantage of digital marketing is just how brilliant the data is and how much insight it gives people into the effectiveness of their spend and there is certainly some truth to that. There’s brilliant data that can really help and I would never would have said it there’s more great value in it. But we see more often than not people trying to make decisions based on limited data, inaccurate data almost ready the data itself. We had a really stark example, it is quite a few years ago and I don’t think this mistake would be made today, but it was a client of ours that had a series of real-world retail stores. They were doing quite good business with us through Google Ads and Google display campaigns. But they noticed that the traffic they were buying on mobile devices wasn’t resulting in any sales on their website and so they asked us to decrease the budget as low as we possibly could and we did that under some protest, but what they discovered pretty quickly thankfully with the mobile traffic where people are actually out on the road looking for a physical store where they can buy furniture from. So, by killing the traffic on that channel they effectively killed off their store traffic and it really cost them a lot of money. But we also see lots of examples where people look at more conversions, our goals or our activity in platforms like Google analytics and they don’t take into account the quality versus quantity type issue. So, it could be very difficult if you are B2B company or company with a long sales cycle to perfectly attribute final revenue that you may get from the actual actions that we’re taking online and we see a lot of clients making some pretty costly decisions there when it comes to trimming marketing budgets that they want to be able to attribute to sale. But they find out eventually that by turning off marketing in these areas their overall sales drop maybe three, six, nine months’ time.

[0:15:49] James and David Lawrence: That is right like it is in the latest data from Google suggests that in the car, the retail car space, car manufacturing, I think over 900 interactions before going into a dealership and buying a car. So, that relates to first of all you’ve got more than one person typically involved in the buying decision. A husband and wife, two partners, whatever it might be. You are looking at searches in terms of manufacturers, review sites, watching reviews on YouTube, potentially display ads following you around. You then are looking at who your closest dealer is, playing dealers off across each other, price comparison websites and although reporting analytics is getting better in terms of attribution and multi device, where you’ve got some on route searching on desktop, on their mobile, on their tablet, it is virtually impossible to ever close the loop on that. So, I think as Dave touched on 10 years ago it was a lot linear. It was more linear where you’d spend a $100,000 on buying Google ads. You’d get 50,000 visitors. You’d make 5,000 sales and you knew what that was worth, in a lot of environments particularly in B2B environments where you might have a panel of 10 people making decision on an expensive piece of software. Very, very difficult to make your decisions based purely on your Google analytics instance or reporting that you are getting from LinkedIn or Facebook.

[0:17:15] RW: All right and just curious, each of you have not necessarily a chapter but a topic that is kind of your – you know most interesting, something that you love to get involved if there is any instance of that or a client comes to you at a certain piece of marketing or marketing target that you guys like to take on?

[0:17:34] James and David Lawrence: Yeah, my favorite one is nothing is more important than the message. We find this a lot with in house marketers and pretty much anyone that has a solid say in a digital marketing campaign, which is that once upon a time, traditional marketing was very message and offer driven. People understood that they had to understand the people that was communicating with them and get that message out in a way that people would care. But in digital marketing because it was originally a very technical pursuit that got lost somewhere along the line and we find a lot of campaigns that are absolutely fantastic to a technical point of view they are executed brilliantly and they can even be very appealing from the visual point of view but when you really strip the campaign down, you realize that the message just doesn’t appeal to the people that’s been talking out to and there is no compelling offer. There is no clear call to action. So often when a campaign comes to us and it’s been struggling, we go straight to that and we look into the message and we look into the offers that they are making as part of the campaign and we find that it’s weak. So, I find that is the place we get the biggest up tick with campaigns that people have been running and have many more than several.

[0:18:42] DL: Yeah and I think my baby is chapter one, digital marketing is just marketing. Where I think it is so easy for agency side marketers, for in house marketers to get lost in just to speed of change, how quickly Facebook is changing, how quickly Google is changing, how quickly buyer journeys are changing that it is impossible for anyone to stay on top of everything and as a result of that, I just think courage, our clients and our staff to focus on the overriding principles and the foundational work. I think we are all smart enough to then slot in the technical changes, which we need to stay on top of course, but you need to do it with a solid foundation and the opening to that chapter is a real world story where we had an account manager a few years ago walk across the agency floor and he came up to me and said, “this is insane,” and started talking about these quotes from this book all about slip testing ads, reducing the costs of ads, understanding the cost of headlines in writing ads. Talking about just putting yourself in the shoes of your buyer and making sure that the copy was worth their time. how it is really important for marketers to understand psychology, the importance of testing campaigns, which is such a something that either way was still very digitally driven and then he showed me what year the book was published and that was in 1923. It just shows that as much as things have changed tremendously in the way that marketers can reach prospects is so different to what it was even 15 years ago. All of these principles have been around for a long time and if you can put yourself in a position where you are absorbing the really good stuff and we do reference five to 10 books that we love that were all written before the internet started, I think if you can get yourself across those and put you in a really good position to succeed in this digital world.

[0:20:26] RW: All right, awesome and then out of curiosity again to each of you, what do you think is the number one – I hesitate to say source of marketing because as we have discussed, you know each has its merits and it also depends on what you are going for but I would say more, what is your favorite outlet for digital marketing these days?

[0:20:45] DL: So, do you mean which of the channels we like the most?

[0:20:48] James and David Lawrence: With resources you mean?

[0:20:49] RW: Yeah, what channel you like the most like I know I like to see my ads almost. For instance, I for some strange reason, maybe it is on Instagram more but I tend to click. I don’t know what they’re doing but whatever ads they run on Instagram are always things that I am interested and click on. Whereas I don’t see that in a lot of the other platforms. So, I would say that is my favorite as a consumer I guess, they get a lot of clicks out of me but as a marketer, what is your favorite to put your stuff on?

[0:21:16] James and David Lawrence: I would probably be biased you know but back when I was uni student I was running Google Ad words, I actually was running paid search before Google Ads was in Australia, still essentially just advocate that every business in Australia should be using Google Ads, the extent to which you use it. Obviously, it differs tremendously but I still think it is incredible that there’s nothing more intent driven than Google Ads. Where people have self-selected, they are going to Google, they have searched for something related to your product or service and you get to determine how much you are willing to pay to push that person into your website or to give you a call and it is a number’s game. It brings in the creativity of messaging all the fun advertising marketing stuff of good landing pages. I think for me it is just a no brainer to run it and it’s just kind of my bias there.

[0:22:05] DG: I’m going to be a little bit difficult. I think for me, if I’m being completely commercial, my favorite channel is the one that’s going to make money for a particular client. I think most in house marketers will have a favorite channel and hopefully our favorite channel is the one that’s given them the most success for their clients, but we find that often, when people come in with the favorite channel, that’s a really bad place to start. That often means they skip those really important research steps and the really important strategy steps that they jump straight to something. We had a brilliant example of this a couple of years ago. We had a client that was in the education space and we’re launching a new course which was going to be aimed at young people and we put together a strategy for them about the digital channels that we thought would be really effective. And our suggestions got vetoed by the board and decided to pour my hundred percent of the project into radio. Obviously, radio was their favorite channel and they were going to go and work and listen to it, enjoying the ads. We thought that would be a pretty bad idea with young people not really listening to radio as much as they used to, possibly not at all in many cases and that was exactly what happened, they sort of made the mistake of going with their favorite channel. We’ve discovered that it absolutely wasn’t their favorite channel of their key persona. And they had to come back and run a digital campaign which was fantastic but yeah, I like to start with really non sentimental research on the start of campaigns.

[0:23:24] RW: All right, awesome. For each of you, if you had to issue a challenge. Whether that’s to future marketers, people reading your book, just people in the industry, clients. What would that challenge be?

[0:23:37] DL: For me, it comes back to one of them, it comes back to one of the core values we have in the agency. We have a got a value, go get it done, which is that we’re finding digital marketing where there’s so many pressures and so many temptations and there’s so many shiny, new objects. That success typical are on to find the one thing that’s likely to work the most and they’re doing everything you can to make it happen. What I would encourage listeners to do is to grab the book or work through resources that already rely on and find one thing to dedicate time to making that a reality for them and that’s typically near the other more successful venture on the knowledge and waiting for good things to happen.

[0:24:18] James and David Lawrence: For me, it’s actually rule number two in the book, which is understand your customer before you market to them. Probably no exaggeration, maybe 90% of clients that would come to us have not got adequate buyer personas in place. And that’s not just trying to work out gender skew and geography and age, it’s actually understanding what the drivers are, what the motivations are, what are the absolute deal killers, in the mind of the perfect customer. So many marketers kind of work within a vacuum, they don’t work very well with the sales team within the organization. Never been at the coal face, they don’t actually understand the real world application of their product or service, particularly if it’s in a more kind of technical space, but you need to understand who you’re actually trying to reach and how you’re trying to move them because if we don’t do that, then you’re basically just throwing what’s on top edge, what’s on to the screen and hoping that the numbers fall your way. Typically, if you spend the time to truly understand your customer, truly understand their challenges and their pain points, makes it a lot easier to r un successful campaigns.

[0:25:23] RW: All right. How can people contact you if they’re interested in learning more?

[0:25:27] DL: That’s a good question Rae. rocketagency.com.au. More than happy to have a chat with people that are yeah, I think those things in the book that they’re not particularly doing well, Agency support in terms of how to run effective digital marketing campaigns. Always happy to have a chat, always happy to give feedback and advice, whether or not someone does come on board to be a client or not. Typically, we have a saying here that if we can’t help someone, we want to be able to direct them to someone that can. Yeah, reaching out through the website is definitely the best way.

[0:25:57] RW: All right, awesome, thank you so much guys.

[0:25:59] DL: Cool, thanks Rae.

[0:26:00] James and David Lawrence: Yeah, it was great Rae.

[0:26:02] RW: Smarter Marketer is available now on Amazon.com So great to have David and James all the way from Australia here with us. Listen out for a new author and a new episode next time on Author hour.