Tag: marketing

F Content Marketing – Don’t Just Create Content, but Leverage It!

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Why Uberflip Says “F*** Content Marketing”: How to Best Leverage the Content You’ve Got

If a tree falls in the forest… You know the rest. But, if Randy Frisch doesn’t attend a conference, did people there still talk about content marketing? It’s quite possible—but perhaps not with the same enthusiasm, and likely not from the same angle.

On this episode, Randy Frisch, the CMO & President of Uberflip, a content experience platform for marketers, talks about cutting through. Randy shares that you have to “Trojan Horse” your idea with ideas that are already being talked about to be heard! Don’t just preach some crazy idea—change the narrative. Content marketing has to cut through and get attention. If not, in the words of Randy himself: F#ck content marketing. To learn more about properly leveraging marketing materials, creating provocative content, scaling personalization, and more, listen to today’s episode.

This episode is especially relevant for today’s marketers. Listen in!

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What You’ll Learn

Why Uberflip’s marketing isn’t all about Uberflip

Randy shares that when he is booked to talk, no one wants him to talk about Uberflip’s technology. Instead, he needs information and a story to drive people to his product. He tells people about the best framework for content creation and does not push his product.  Instead, he shares the things that businesses must do to do content creation well such as centralizing and organizing all content so it can be leveraged. Be sure to listen in to hear more on what Randy says!

Common mistakes content marketers are making

Marketers are falling for the trap of not wanting to overwhelm consumers with information. They are following the “send 7-9 emails over the course of a few weeks ideology,” but by doing this, they are creating dead ends for consumers who would like to know more. Randy says don’t wait for the next email to share more information and most certainly do not create a dead end on information. Send people pieces of content and make sure there are several interesting paths forward from this content. Similar to Netflix series, consumers often want to binge information, and marketers are doing themselves a disservice by not providing a path for them to do so.

Randy also notes that content marketing needs to be personalized. He says that Spotify does an excellent job of curating music to individuals’ tastes. In the same way, content marketers must also create an experience for different individuals’ tastes. By delivering more custom content via email or a website, marketers will be able to connect better with people!

Five takeaways from Randy Frisch on content creation

  1. Have a strong point of view! Be the CMO that leads the way, disrupts the market, and evangelizes for his product.
  2. Make sure your content is personalized!
  3. Create content that the consumer can binge. Allow the consumer to choose his own adventure and follow a path of content as far as he would like.
  4. Keep everything focused on your brand!
  5. Focus on technology last, not first. Make sure you have your team and process in place before you implement technology.

Timeline

  • [2:40] Who is Randy Frisch
  • [7:36] Top priorities as a CMO
  • [18:01] President and CMO: how this affects marketing
  • [25:37] More on Uberflip’s marketing
  • [29:32] Most common mistakes content marketers are making (and solutions!)
  • [43:05] What happens when you scale
  • [48:04] Episode overview

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Eating At Their Own Restaurant: How SurveyMonkey Powers The Curious Internally and Externally

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Eating At Their Own Restaurant: How SurveyMonkey Powers The Curious

“Eating your own dog food” didn’t sound so appetizing, so folks started “drinking their own champagne.” SurveyMonkey didn’t want people thinking they were sipping too much bubbly on the job, so now they “eat at their own restaurant.” Put simply, they lean heavily on their own offering to strengthen their marketing, grow their company and—as they like to say—power the curious!

From finding out how much a person uses technology, to determining how a company’s culture is developing, the options are endless on what info you can gather with SurveyMonkey, and their marketing efforts put that to test. Leela Srinivasan, SurveyMonkey’s CMO, chats with Drew on how everything at SurveyMonkey—from campaign development to internal culture—is about creating and supporting a world of curious people.

Don’t miss what Leela has to share!

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What You’ll Learn

Power the Curious campaign

Prior to going public, SurveyMonkey did a brand refresh with its Power the Curious campaign in 2017. The company defined its mission as Powering the Curious. SurveyMonkey’s products and solutions enable organizations everywhere to measure, benchmark, and act on feedback. If these organizations can listen to this feedback and have a curious attitude towards it, then the feedback can drive growth and innovation.

Leela shares that she loves the notion of curiosity for two reasons. One, the notion of curiosity was one that their audience was leaning into. The smartest people display curiosity. Secondly, if you think about the idea more broadly, the value proposition for employees is massive. This campaign not only set SurveyMonkey up to market to the business realm but to employees and potential employees. SurveyMonkey could be the place where the curious come to grow, which is exactly what bright minds are looking for in a workplace.

How to build a culture of curiosity internally

SurveyMonkey uses its own tools to build a culture of curiosity. Leela shares that SurveyMonkey leverages its own platform to obtain living feedback from its employees. These surveys measure employee engagement and to find places that can be improved to make a company with more inclusion and belonging. All leaders in the company are given scores for their departments, and they are shown how their scores stack up against other departments in the company. All of this information pushes SurveyMonkey to be curious internally. They are given results and scorings that can drive its leaders to be curious and search for solutions on how to how a healthy organization.

Big drivers to marketing SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey partnered with 4 influencers to show that curiosity is self-defined. Serena Williams, Arianna Huffington, Draymond Green, and Jeff Weiner each created concise surveys to engage different audiences. These surveys were advertised on social media, billboards, and more to let the world engage with these influences. Curiosity was at the top of the whole thing. Success was measured by the volume of responses, and there was a lot of engagement. Throughout this campaign with these four influencers, a conversation was generated that said, “you can do this every day of the week by using SurveyMonkey. Find an idea you want to tap into. Bring these ideas to market and explore the things where you are involved in the world.” Be sure to look below in the resources mentioned for the findings from the influencers surveys.

Timeline

  • [3:07] Who is Leela Srinivasan
  • [9:07]] Launching the Power the Curious campaign prior to going public
  • [15:42] How to build a culture of curiosity internally
  • [21:00] How to teach curiosity
  • [26:05] Big drivers for marketing at SurveyMonkey  
  • [29:50] The Curiosity Conference
  • [32:35] Lessons learned from rolling this campaign out  

Connect With Leela Srinivasan:

Resources & People Mentioned

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Not Your Grandma’s Banking – How to Market Banks When Everything is Going Digital

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Not Your Grandma’s Banking – How to Market Banks When Everything is Going Digital

Whether you’re a small business catering to a consumer, or an enterprise tech company targeting fortune 500 giants—the changes in how banks are approaching branding and marketing can provide a great template for successful marketing in the modern era.

When most people have a banking issue to resolve, they usually open up their mobile app, or visit a website—in-person banking is starting to take a back seat to digital mediums. That’s the shift Paul Kadin and Sarah Welch, of analytics and advisory firm Novantas, are wrangling. In this episode, they discuss how banks are evolving, and how those banks are championing new, universal principles of successful B2B and B2C marketing.

Listen in! You won’t want to miss this episode.

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What You’ll Learn

What banks need to do to succeed?

Paul and Sarah share that successful banks have three things in common. They satisfy what people expect from them. A bank will not succeed if it does not offer basic customer service or features. Secondly, successful banks are distinct. They answer the question, “Why should I choose this bank over another bank?” Their products and service must set them apart. Lastly, successful banks make their voice heard in the marketplace. Banks can have all the right feature but must spend sufficiently enough to raise their voice enough to be heard.

Banks that are distinctive and why

Paul, Sarah, and Drew discuss multiple banks that are killing it on being distinctive.

  • Huntington Bank markets itself as being on the side of the customer. They are living and breathing their value proposition on products, pricing, marketing messages, and customer experience.  Banks are known for nickel and diming customers, but Huntington extends a 24-hour grace window, allowing customers 24 hours to write a check to cover an overdraft, before incurring a fee.
  • First Republic is a bank that goes above and beyond, helping customers. This bank is very specific on what companies and individuals it takes on as customers, and focuses on the more affluent. Because it has a more niche customer base, First Republic is able to serve its customers how they would like to be served.
  • USAA is a bank with extreme intimacy around one focus group – those who have served in the military and their families. If you are in this target group, their service is unbeatable. They also hire retired service people, so they hire from the target demographic they serve.
  • TD Bank has branded itself as America’s most convenient bank. Everything they had decided is based on convenience. For example, they are open on Saturdays and Sundays.

Marketing banks: finding an emotional pitch and making it real

Marketing banks is hard. Banks have thought about things in terms of creating new features and improving functionality, but there is a whole other dimension: emotion. Money creates emotion: anxiety or satisfaction. Banks have to appeal to the emotional side of the customer, but this must also be lived out in experience. As banking moves away from person to person and towards digital, banks must figure out how to be emotionally connected through a digital relationship. To make this happen, Sarah and Paul share that banks must have a clearly designed core target, and then drive experience around it. All experiences, whether in person or digital, need to be serving the bank’s brand.

Timeline:

  • [1:55] Introduction to Paul and Sarah
  • [8:50] Bank branches are decreasing, but brand, marketing and digital are increasing
  • [10:24] What banks need to do to succeed
  • [14:19] Which banks are distinctive in today’s market?
  • [17:43] How focussing on a designed target can help banks
  • [21:33] How banks (and other businesses) can distinguish themselves
  • [24:30] The need to find an emotional pitch and make it real
  • [31:07} How to make media spending cut through the noise
  • [35:51] B2B vs. B2C marketing for banks
  • [40:54] What is state of the art in attribution modeling

Connect With Paul Kadin and Sarah Welch:

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Spotting Terrorist Plots and Rental Car Scratches: How This Startup Stays Flexible

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Spotting Terrorist Plots and Rental Car Scratches: How This Startup Stays Flexible

UVeye is putting together technology that has an immense range of uses, is wildly innovative, and is—putting it plain and simple—cool! The company produces under vehicle inspection systems, that use deep learning—a sort of AI-derived machine intuition—to say “hey, something about this car doesn’t seem right” and flag it for inspection. This can help stop dangerous contraband or weapons from being smuggled into secure areas, but the use cases don’t stop there.

Though in an ideal world these scanners wouldn’t be needed, Ohad Hever and David Oren understand the importance of having this sort of capability. As COO and CSO, they’ve had to figure out how to market this product in a fairly private industry, while leveraging a bunch of partners, and all on a meager budget. Learn how they do it on this episode of RTU:

Don’t miss out on Ohad and David’s experience. Tune in!

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What You’ll Learn

Raising awareness of a challenge your company can solve

Imagine this: it is 2019. Acts of terrorism are on the rise worldwide. Protection is a need, but how? Drew reminds everyone of the B2B marketing technique called the “FUD factor.” Creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt is a way to raise awareness of a challenge your company can solve. UVeye does just that by reminding its audiences of this issue of safety. UVeye also positions itself as the company to solve this problem. Through demonstrations and videos, UVeye shares how it can detect abnormalities under cars, such as a car bomb or even an oil leak. This technology can be sold to government agencies or individuals. No longer do you need to rely on a security guard crawling beneath a car to see if it is safe to drive, this surveillance of a car’s undercarriage is efficient and able to detect abnormalities as small as a USB. It can also protect the average person by detecting when car maintenance is needed.

How to foster brand engagement

As a brand, UVeye has several audiences. They must foster brand engagement with each. For governments, UVeye provides security. When approaching governments with its product, UVeye looks for a local partner. These partners are already in communication with government and are known companies in distribution or sales.

Currently, UVeye is focussed on breaking into the market of car manufacturers. Its technology can help provide data and preventative maintenance on cars. To create brand engagement, the company is focused on implementing a brand that provides a competitive advantage. What can UVeye offer to the manufacturers to make their lives easier? David and Ohad explain that their goal is creating a brand around “certified by UVeye.” Meaning “certified by UVeye” provides protection of having a vehicle inspected completely from the inside out. They want this term to be a stamp of approval, known by the average Joe.

 

Marketing on a limited budget

David and Ohad explain that as a startup technology company, the majority of their funding went to creating the product. 14 million was spent on developing the inspection system and distributing it to other countries. There was little money left for marketing. However, UVeye has found that its team can attend conferences even without having an exhibit. These conferences have been a lower budget marketing tool that can create lead generations and partnerships. UVeye has been a part of large security conferences, which are very niche and cost-effective. UVeye has also attended CES. CES has been so effective in the past – even with a tiny display – that David and Ohad used their small marketing budget to have a larger exhibit and demonstration. Prior to the conference, they generated a lot of buzz around the fact that UVeye would be at CES and what they would be sharing. This created engagement prior to the event.

Timeline

  • [2:03] UVeye’s beginnings and how the product works
  • [5:22] The process of development and going to market
  • [7:52] Brand engagement: targeting governments
  • [10:22] Running a successful pilot
  • [14:55] Where UVeye chose to spend its money as a new company
  • [20:47] Target audiences: who will buy the technology first?
  • [24:45] Lessons for those wishing to start or run a company

Connect With Ohad Hever and David Oren:

Resources & People Mentioned

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A Former CMO-Turned-CEO’s Approach to Strategic Marketing

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SMS SOS — Text-Enabled Business, and Marketing With Your Own Solution.

When you have to reach out to someone quickly, what do you usually do? Exactly! Send a text. So why aren’t more businesses text-enabling their phone lines? That question is at the center of Brightlink’s text-enabling solution, designed so that company phone lines—usually reserved for saying ‘no’ to pesky cold calls— can handle informative text conversations with prospective clients. Given the nature of their product, Brightlink has also been able to utilize it as their own marketing tool, a simultaneous demonstration and use case—a real situation of killing two birds with one phone!

On this episode of RTU, Drew chats with Rob Chen, Brightlink’s CEO, and a former CMO. They chat about how Rob’s marketing background informs his current role, how to put their technology front-and-center in their marketing, and why a clear company culture is king.

Be sure to listen in – this is a valuable conversation!

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What You’ll Learn

Using your own technology as a marketing vehicle

Rob is a believer in drinking your own champagne. To that end, Brightlink currently uses its own technology of text enabling any phone number as a marketing vehicle. The company is able to override and enable any phone number to receive text messages, which is an extremely beneficial feature for the millennial generation. Brightlink is currently taking a traditional email campaign and offering the customer the ability to respond back by phone, by email, or by text. Through its own technology, Brightlink text enables sales and corporate phone numbers. Using key-word prompts, the sales team at Brightlink is able to respond via text to answer questions, provide solutions, and much more. Not only does this connect the Brightlink team with customers, but it also highlights the technology they can provide. Listen in to hear more on how Brightlink uses its own product as a marketing vehicle!

Your target audience affects your marketing

Rob shares that Brightlink utilizes different strategies depending on whether the primary target is a small business or large enterprise. For a small businesses, Brightlink focuses on co-branding and a partner with the ability to add value. They rely on a partner who knows the needs of each small business because use cases tend to be more specific. This allows Brightlink to market to and speak to the individual needs of small business. For large enterprises, Brightlink takes their product directly to the company because their needs are broader and many times the entire product is used.

3 key lessons for CMOs

Guest Rob Chen and host Drew elaborate on 3 important lessons for other CMOs.

  1. Have one key, very focussed story. Know what your company is about, and be able to say that succinctly.
  2. You have three target audiences: employees, customers, and prospects. Make sure to have your employees on board with core values and your product. They will be advocates for your brand and remain loyal. Create content that is valuable to your customers, and it will also be intriguing to prospects.
  3. Simplify your plan. It is hard to do everything. Brightlink’s plan is integrated around its own product. It is a demonstration and a use case at the same time!

Timeline

  • [1:55] Rob Chen: Bridging the gap from CMO to CEO
  • [5:40] What Brightlink is and does
  • [10:47] How to use technology as a marketing demonstration
  • [18:36] Who Brightlink targets in its marketing
  • [22:55]  Successful marketing examples
  • [26:33] Key lessons from a CMO turned CEO

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The Need to Fail, Cars That See, and Defining Market Needs

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Renegade Thinkers Unite recently moved to renegade.com! As a subscriber, you should have received an email with the subject line ‘Activate your Email Subscription to: Renegade Thinkers Unite’. It may be buried in your inbox, or even the spam folder, but if you click the link in that email, you’ll continue getting notifications when each week’s new episode is published, only now it’ll be to renegade.com.

The Need to Fail, Cars That See, and Defining Market Needs
CES never fails to be a revelatory experience, but this year marked a significant step closer to one of humanity’s longest-held dreams (or at least, one of Drew’s longest-held dreams): A Jetsons-style flying car! A key component of these tech-driven marvels is an astoundingly impressive “LiDAR” system—think radar detection, done with laser technology. In simpler terms, a new way for machines to see things. Granted, the implications are much broader than a flying car, but it provides an interesting way to demo this new system.

On this episode of RTU, Drew speaks with Louay Eldada, CEO and co-founder of Quanergy, the company helping cars “see”. They chat about the range of potential uses for such powerful tech, and the why to market it, they had to first understand the problems that people need solved. Don’t miss this tech-heavy episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, recorded at CES 2019.

 

Louay shares various ways Quanergy can creatively solve problems! You won’t want to miss this episode!

 

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What You’ll Learn

 

A virtual wall – an effective way of protecting the border

 

Quanergy is proposing the creation of a virtual wall on the border of the United States and Mexico. Currently, a physical wall is being proposed to the country. Louay points out that this kind of barrier could disturb the environment. Quanergy has targeted the United States government as its audience to market their technology to, speaking with politicians on both sides of the border protection debate. Using LiDAR, Quanergy creates a dome of protection by setting its giving computers eyes to monitor the border area. LiDAR uses its “eyes” to see anything coming to the border and can allow authorities to be dispatched to the area. A virtual wall addresses the issue of protecting the border but does not create more problems as a physical wall could.

Quanergy’s is a leader in effective technology marketing

Quanergy tells and shows customers what they need. They allow customers to observe the product, so they know they want it. Quanergy provides a vision of what customers can do, and how they can solve problems. This creates new markets for its technology.

Quanergy’s technology, LiDAR, is marketed to many different industries. Each market has its own experts, so Quanergy uses partners to improve solutions. For example, Quanergy partnered with 6-Watch to help create a virtual surveillance partner for Boston’s police vehicles. 6-Watch was an effective partner because the company is well connected in the law enforcement space, helping Quanergy break into that market with its technology.

Creating a culture where it is okay to fail

Louay says if your company doesn’t run into things that don’t work, then you are not trying hard enough. Everything is not feasible until someone does it. If a problem is worth addressing, try until you find a solution. Louay creates a company culture where failure and bad news are okay. This gives his employees the ability to take risks and be creative. In order to lead a company where there is the courage to take risks, Louay says he must have an open door policy to hear about issues and ask what can be done solve problems, what have the employees learned and what can be changed. This culture of risk being okay has helped propel Quanergy to the frontline in LiDAR technology as well as marketing technology.

Timeline

  • [1:13] Louay’s inspiration and Quanergy’s technological core
  • [2:23] Technology for a flying car
  • [6:08] Reasons and opportunities for attending CES
  • [8:08] A virtual wall – an effective way of protecting the border
  • [11:30] A CEO’s take on marketing
  • [14:10] Quanergy’s most effective marketing
  • [17:58] The importance partnerships
  • [19:24] Biggest lessons to share with other entrepreneurs
  • [20:53] It is ok to fail!

Connect With Louay Eldada:

  • Louay’s bio on Quanergy’s website
  • Connect with Louay on LinkedIn
  • Follow Louay on Twitter

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew