Tag: marketing

Story-Driven Content Marketing That Drives Leads

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In her role as CMO of Tungsten Network – a leading global supply chain enabler – Connie O’Brien has taken on a huge task: she’s spearheading the first content marketing campaign for the company in a very long time, and she’s focusing on friction to do it.

How so? Through the collaborative efforts of a handful of agencies, including Renegade, it was discovered that one of the main places the accounts payable process experiences difficulties is through the friction that exists in the systems and processes involved. So the team Connie assembled set out to discover, from customers and prospects alike, where the key points of friction were and what could be done to smooth out those problems. THAT positioned Tungsten to custom-tailor solutions to the exact problems the marketplace was experiencing.

This conversation is a quick but deep dive into the process the team at Tungsten spearheaded to discover what customers really felt about the frustrations they were experiencing in their accounts payable process, address those concerns effectively, then use content marketing to get the word out about those solutions.

Connie’s brilliance is obvious in this conversation, as is her humility and desire to give credit where credit is due – to her team. Enjoy.

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What You’ll Learn

  • [0:30] Urban gardening and content marketing: both require experimentation & work
  • [2:54] Who is Connie O’Brien?
  • [8:43] What Tungsten Networks does and what got them onto their current content marketing approach
  • [12:18] Engaging employees as advocates for the company on social media
  • [14:56] The decision to talk to customers in an unfiltered way
  • [17:32] The creation of the Friction Finder customer feedback and diagnostic tool
  • [19:51] How Connie manages a multi-agency team for content marketing
  • [23:10] Integrating storytelling into her content marketing strategy
  • [25:03] The difficulty of measuring the value of the campaign effectively
  • [28:23] The primary lessons Connie has learned: Listen & Watch Results
  • [30:02] A quick summary of what Tungsten did and the results so far

It’s not easy to get unfiltered feedback from customers or prospects, but Tungsten Network figured out a way to do it.

One of the primary things that enables effective customer analysis is the power of an honest answer from the end user. Those kinds of answers aren’t easy to get because not only do people simply want to be “nice” when asked direct questions about service and satisfaction, they also can’t always remember the details of their frustrations on the spot. That’s why Tungsten Network went about it a different way – by creating a free tool that offered real value to people they wanted to hear from, whether they were customers or not. It’s called the Friction Finder, and in less than 2 minutes it allows you to assess the extent of the friction in your accounts payable process and provides actionable insights into what you can do about it. That saves you time, money, and eliminates a lot of stress. Find out more by hearing Connie’s description of how Tungsten’s extended team came up with the idea, how they implemented it, and the kind of results it’s provided.

The “official” social media marketing your company is doing may not be enough. Here’s how Connie O’Brien engaged employees to compound the company’s efforts

When you stop to think about the way social media marketing works you’ll quickly realize it’s about a couple of things: compelling content, shared broadly. Each of those has its own challenges, but the broad sharing feels like something you as a CMO or marketing leader can’t really control. Or is it? Connie O’Brien realized that some of her best advocates for the company’s new campaign were the people working on it – her employees. In this conversation, Connie shares how employee involvement on social media helped the campaign’s reach and how she was able to get them to buy-in and be involved. As a result, the company’s ability to do effective customer analysis was increased dramatically. You don’t want to miss this part of the conversation.

Managing a multi-agency team effectively in order to reach the goal of better customer analysis is tricky business

As part of the team that came alongside Tungsten Network to build the Friction Finder content marketing campaign, we here at Renegade saw first-hand what it takes to manage a multi-agency team, and Connie O’Brien did so beautifully. During this conversation, she admitted the challenge but also pointed out that it’s much easier when you work alongside true professionals who know their piece of the puzzle backward and forwards. The end result? Tungsten was able to do the kind of customer analysis needed to create the solutions their prospects needed, and sales are climbing. Listen to the entire conversation. There’s a little bit of something for every company that’s looking to up its content marketing game.

Connect With Connie:

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Drew

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The Power of Crystal Clear Positioning to Turnaround Your Brand

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Retail is not exactly rich with turnaround stories these days but that’s exactly what’s happened at Pearle Vision. CMO Doug Zarkin provides a step-by-step review of how the brand has gone from stagnant to revitalized, indicated by same-store sales growth, new store openings and a jump in ranking from >100 to #24 among best franchises to own.

Through a number of small but ultimately significant changes like renaming customers to patients, employees to eye care professionals and stores to eye care centers, Pearle Vision has been able to shift the conversation from deals on glasses to professional eye care. Most significantly, Zarkin and company figured out that people who come in for eye exams are far more likely to buy glasses and become repeat customers than those that are just shopping for new glasses.

 

On this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, Zarkin tells Drew Neisser about the methods by which Zarkin and his team embraces customers and keeps them in the fold.

You can listen to the episode here.

These are some of our favorite moments from the episode:

Drew: When you first got to Pearle Vision and recognized the need for a new positioning, how long did you give yourself?

Doug: If you know anything about retail there’s a sense of urgency. I essentially had six months to crack the code. In fact when I joined the company my predecessor actually remained on the team to essentially keep the business going while I was working on crafting the future state. And so within six months we had to find what the brand was going to stand for. We identified that we needed to update the iconography, that we needed to update the store design and we began the journey. But by no means does the journey begin and end in six months — it’s a journey that you have to continually press on every day. 

Drew: So that gives you three months to research and three months to execute. Talk about the positioning that you landed on.

Doug: The positioning became “genuine eye care from your neighborhood doctor” which came about from a philosophy that I learned from my first client-side job at Avon – you have to go out in the field. Any marketer worth his salt knows that a positioning that doesn’t make for great execution is just words on paper. And so looking inward to what we stood for as a brand required me to look outward from the boardroom and get into our locations, talk to our doctors, talk to our franchisees, understand what we really were embodying in a three dimensional way and then bringing that back and looking at what we as a brand could really own. As a brand founded by a doctor, Dr. Stanley Pearle in 1961, we had a heritage that we could stand for – eye care. We needed to do it in a way that was authentic. We wanted to be that brand that owned the neighborhood–that could win the battle for patients at the 5 to 9-mile level. And so every part of ‘genuine eye care from my neighborhood doctor’ means something. It most importantly means the art of sacrifice — there’s a lot of things we couldn’t do.

Drew: Some brands worry about circling back to their founder because it makes them feel old-fashioned. How do you keep your brand from appearing outdated?

Doug: A founder brand has inherently an authenticity to it. Some of the best in class marketers are always looking for that emotional connection point. We’re storytellers. We want to connect with the consumer on an emotional level and present them rational reasons to believe. When you have a founder brand like Pearle, if you actually do what many marketers don’t which is to have the humility to realize that sometimes taking a step forward is taking two steps backward, what you actually have is something that you can build a plan off of. Ralph Lauren is a great example of a founder-led, founder-driven brand. Ralph Lauren has a very distinct look on fashion. When Ralph started to go awry as a brand was when it got away from its DNA. Pearle did the same thing. Dr. Stanley Pearl was not there talking about buy one get one free. Dr. Stanley Pearle’s vision started with that best in class doctor and I see my job really is to a degree getting out of the way and allowing his legacy to continue in a way that’s modern, in a way that’s contemporary, and in a way that resonates. But why fight it? If you have it, embrace it! Leverage it; lead with it. That’s how you win.

Drew: Let’s talk about Pearle’s social media philosophy. What is your execution strategy?

Doug: For us, social media is really an opportunity to continue the conversation. It’s turned actually into one of the most effective platforms for driving exam growth. If you look at the marketing ROI in our category there are few things that are as efficient as search (trademark search as an example). Social media is really up there in terms of efficient ways to drive people to schedule their eye exams. We’re talking about paid. We’ve got a fantastic agency on board, Energy BBDO out of Chicago, who handles our social content for us. The healthy balance between leading the conversation, listening to the conversation, and actually having a conversation. Facebook is not a one-way communication platform. It’s actually an opportunity to do what you and I are doing right now, which is to talk. And so you’ve got to think about that as a dialogue. It’s a tennis match. Not every point in tennis, not every forehand or backhand is a winner. It sets up the next shot. We look at social media as an opportunity to essentially engage our consumer in a tennis match. Sometimes we’re going to win the point; sometimes we’re going to lose the point. Sometimes the points just go on and on and we’re going to wish that it would just end. The respect that we have for social, in particular, Facebook leading that charge, it is one of our strongest marketing platforms.

Special 50th Episode: Lessons from 200+ CMOs

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If all CMOs thought alike, Renegade Thinkers Unite wouldn’t stand a chance at reaching 50 episodes. The vast diversity of marketing approaches is part of what makes the field so interesting. After interviewing 200+ CMOs over the years, Drew Neisser has learned a thing or two about perspective.

This special RTU episode takes bit of a twist, as Drew sits down for the first time as the interviewee. Marketing Today podcast host Alan Hart asks Drew about his experiences speaking with a wide array of marketing professionals. You’ll learn about some of the common themes many of Drew’s guests have discussed, as well as several marketing strategies that have stood out to him.  Click here to listen to the episode. [Show notes by Jay Tellini.]

Here are some of our favorite moments from Drew’s interview with Alan:

Alan: The role of CMO is challenging. What do you think about the role? Why is it challenging?

Drew: Well it’s challenging for several reasons. One is that they don’t really speak the language of the CEO. The CEO rarely comes from the Marketing Suite. They come from finance, they might come from law, they come from operations, COO or something. And the marketing person has often dealt with ethereal as well as measurable things but they don’t have control over everything. And so the CEO says, “I want revenue and I want profit.” The marketer says, ‘Well I want awareness and I want engagement. You can have your revenue and your profit but we’re going to need proxy measures.’ They’re disconnected. So that’s one.

Alan: What else?

Drew: And then there’s this other whole frickin’ issue which is, there’s nothing like a great marketing campaign to kill a bad product or service. And we had several times where we had clients who we were killing it on the front end and then their customer service was so bad that they would lose them on the back end. So churn was really high. Is it the CMO’S job is to fix that? It could be. One of the guys that I interviewed that I loved was Manny Rodriguez who totally understands storytelling. This was after I interviewed him but he told me that he started to notice that customer experience was a problem in UC Health. And they said, “Great Manny, you fix it.” So he’s doing customer experience too. He was already doing brand story, was already doing positioning and marketing and now he’s a responsible customer experience.

Alan: What do you think it’s important for a CMO to be doing or focusing on?

Drew: Let’s talk about strategy for a second. I think for a CMO, this is the unfortunate part of their job. When you hear the words, “I’m building the plane while I’m flying it,” I get worried about it because a really brilliant marketing campaign can live for 20, 30 or 40 years. We were talking about this earlier that Geico’s “15 minutes will save you 15%.” How long have they been using that? Forever! And guess what? They’re not going to stop and you know why? Because it really works. We don’t have the capacity to remember 20 things and we don’t need to. We like them and we remember them and we know their value proposition. If you’re going to invest 20-years worth, you better spend enough time on the strategic foundation.

Alan: We talked a lot about story. Tell me your perspective on brand story.

Drew: I think that it is the most overused word in our business. Everything is a story. Every brand has a narrative. Every CMO is using the term and I’m guilty of this, so I apologize to you and all of the listeners that we’re even using that term. We’re using that term because we can’t come up with a better one. Unfortunately at our shop we talk about Big S and Little S. Big S storytelling is when you really boil down your brand to an essential conflict like Georgia-Pacific did with Angel Soft.  For Angel Soft the essential conflict boils down to how something can be both strong and soft. That’s a conflict. We now have conflict and we can build stories around that may or may not have anything to do with the product but you get the idea of strong and soft and that’s the benefit of the product. That’s Big S storytelling. And then you have to take that essential conflict and then you have to execute it everywhere. But the good news about it is if you do, it’s consistent. But it’s not necessarily the same 30-second video as a social media post. If you get it right and you have an idea that will hold it all together, then it really works effectively. So far, it is the only way that we have seen to hold content marketing and social media together is by having an overall story idea.

Alan: What’s Little S?

Drew: Lowercase S is, “hey did I tell you about the time that we hung out together at the bar?” It has nothing to do with anything. It’s just a story. And that’s to me what is confused between the two. It’s very tricky. And I know many brands don’t like “conflict,” so they can’t even use that term. It’s a very complicated issue and I can’t wait until we have a new word for it.

Alan: I want to talk a little bit more about you, Drew. What drives you?

Drew: The notion of courage drives me. I feel like I can help CMOs think a little bit differently about their jobs. To me, that’s the most exciting part of what we’re doing right now. We’ve gotten to know all these CMOs. And this is the thing – the CMO is in the position, they have all the levers. If you can get them to pull all those levers as not just a force to cut through the crap, but as a force for good, I feel like that’s a good day or a good week or a good year or a good life.

The Intersection of Marketing & Storytelling

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A little tenderness goes a long way when trying to reach an audience. If you want to develop a brand message that has meaning, emotional storytelling could be the key to your next marketing campaign. As bestselling author Chris Bohjalian illustrated in Part I of this Renegade Thinkers Unite episode, storytelling is all about touching the audience on a personal level. [Show notes by Jay Tellini.]

In Part II of this episode, Bohjalian talks about the mechanics behind some of the deeply emotional themes he has communicated to his readers over the years. The author’s eloquent words are sure to inspire your marketing team, as he provides narrative advice that can help your brand convey a powerful story. You can listen to the episode here.

Here are some of our favorite moments from the interview:

Drew: How do you market your books when you’re on the road?

Chris: First of all, the book tours changed a lot in the last 25 years. And it’s changed a lot because of the digital era. The digital era has done two things to the book tour. First of all, it has dramatically decreased the number of hardcover books you will sell on a book tour because so many people will buy the book digitally from either Apple, Amazon, Kobo, BN.com. That means that each event is likely to sell fewer books. Secondly, it is meant—tragically—that there are fewer book stores. We all know that independent bookstores lost a lot of bricks and mortar faces when Amazon started in the late 1990s. We all know that Barnes and Noble is beleaguered right now as it tries to manage these beautiful superstores that were built in the 1990s, pre-Amazon, pre-BN.com with how many books they can really move in a 200,000 square foot store. A book tour is different now.

Drew: How is it different?

Chris: You have different expectations in terms of how many books you’re going to sell, but you’re doing two things. You’re being an ambassador for your publisher. You’re being an ambassador for yourself or your brand. You’re getting a chance to connect one-on-one with your readers. And yes, you are getting a chance still to sell books because I sign a lot of napkins, Kindle cases, posters, flyers at book tours now by people who read on a tablet. And that’s fine. It’s all reading. It’s all savoring stories, but it’s different. The days when you might sign four, five hundred books at a book event are waning. At least there are for me. I know that there are authors out there who will sign 400, 500 books at an event but those events are pretty rare for me.

Drew: You’re teaching master classes at Yale and Rutgers. What are you teaching your students?

Chris: I believe television and the digital age have changed how readers approach novels. You need to immerse them fast into what the story is, why the stakes matter, and why it’s emotionally relevant to them. And so what I like to focus on is, how do you begin? What’s your point of view? What’s your tense, and what’s going to create either that sense of dread or momentum or enthusiasm to cause your reader to pick this book up off the table or download it when there are so many other choices? What’s going to hook them on page one.

 

Diversity Matters for Marketers – Not Just HR

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Inclusion in the workplace has been on the agendas of companies for quite some time. Rarely, though, do the potential marketing benefits of diversity get addressed when taking on the initiative. After all, a rich assortment of team members provides unique insights into the various demographics your brand may be targeting.

Award-winning entrepreneur Jennifer Brown preaches equality to business professionals, explaining why this social issue must be addressed and outlining the path to change. Jennifer understands that we live in a fast-changing world and many organizations may not be ready to take the bull by the horns. Although inclusion cannot be achieved overnight, she believes companies can take big strides by instilling themselves with the will to change.

Jennifer dishes on diversity in this Renegade Thinkers Unite episode. She tells Drew about some of the ways enlightened companies are working to diversify their employees, citing the importance of inclusion to the younger generations as a major driver for change. You can listen to the episode here.

Here are a few of Jennifer’s inspirational responses from the interview:

 

Drew: Is there research that shows having a diverse workforce actually helps the bottom line?

Jennifer: Yes, there is a ton of research about it. There are studies that quantify, for example, the number of women that a company may have on its board or in its senior executive team correlating to bottom line results, better shareholder returns, better eBid. They get very very technical about it. They’ve actually linked the representation to the way the company shows up in the world and the way that the company succeeds. It’s not just optics, but it’s actually bottom line results that these companies that tend to prioritize diversity and inclusion as a corporate value and as something that they are targeting in terms of hiring. They have linked it to company performance. There’s a lot of studies, and I won’t go into those, but you can actually Google it and there’s more than you could ever know what to do with. Even though that’s been out there though Drew, it’s still hard to make the case for why this is important and to help companies or urge companies to put this on their radar screen and really take it seriously. It’s interesting notwithstanding what we might call the business case over and over again, which I have to communicate and teach about. When I called my book The Will to Change, the big question mark for me is – what does motivate people to change? I think there’s still a lot of resistance to change.

Drew: If you’re part of a marketing department and you’re struggling to add diverse talent to your workforce, what should you do?

Jennifer: It plagues tech. A lot of other industries are struggling to get engineering talent of color, for example, let alone women. So it is a pain point that’s felt across many industries. How you set your founding team really really matters. When you’re an early-stage organization, I would recommend being very dogmatic about who you recruit because the optics and the message of who is particularly in the leadership or the founding team or that original group really matters. It sets the compass a certain direction and makes everything that happens after that easier to attract, especially diverse talent when they see themselves on a company’s masthead and they see that it’s a priority that the company talks about throughout its marketing and its outreach when it comes to recruiting. All of that are elements that people, particularly diverse talent, pay a lot of attention to. So what you say and the decisions you make and whom you hire matters – especially at the beginning.

Drew: What does it mean for a company to take a stand for diversity right now?

Jennifer: Brands are being judged by the stances they take and the conversations they jump into or not. For example, both the ACC and the NBA pulled games out of North Carolina saying we’re going to deprive you of revenue and we’re going to get all the teams behind us and we’re going to really make it hurt because of the transgender bathroom bills that were going on in that state, and there’s some similar ferment that’s going on in Texas. We see corporations banding together and watching what each other do. There’s strength in numbers, so it’s not even like a company has to necessarily stick its neck out alone. There are families of brands that can make these decisions together, and it’s interesting to watch the dominoes. It’s almost like the companies and the CEOs who walked away from the Trump business councils. The news is happening so fast. I watched which companies went first and then which were in the second round. I was noticing that and I was putting myself in the position of the employees of those companies watching their CEOs say, “Not on my watch. I’m not going to be party to something that I think is harmful for our society.” I was imagining how good that felt and how reassuring that felt in particular, not just for diverse talent that works for that employer, but even I’d say the allies – the people who believe in equality and inclusion.

Drew: How are millennials impacting the workplace diversity initiative?

Jennifer: One of their top values is inclusion, regardless of what their own demographic is. This is not just important to people of color or female talent. It’s actually important across the board generationally. I think we’re entering a day and age where what brands do really matters. Is it risky? I have to tell you, I’m not sure the boycotts that have been threatened and the bottom line impact has really been felt. There’s a lot of bluster and a lot of social media activity for a while, but I have to say I don’t think that brands have really paid a negative price in my experience for standing up and being counted when it comes to social issues that impact equality.

Why Marketers Need to Think About Cyber Security — Now!

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Although the Equifax hack put cybersecurity on the priority list for over 140 million Americans and scared the heck out of many others including yours truly, it is hardly a new issue for consumers. Major hacks at Yahoo and Target a few years back put many on high alert. So, you might ask, “What is new here and why should cybersecurity be a priority issue for senior marketers?”  Well, as it turns out, all that marketing technology senior marketers recently brought into their companies has created even more exposure for company data and the consumers with whom they do business. Sure enough, the pursuit of big data to optimize sales, marketing and customer experience efforts, has put companies at risk, in a remarkably big way. And of course, a data breach will inevitably become a brand breach as the folks at Equifax can attest. So batten down the hatches and have a listen as Norman Guadagno, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Carbonite, a data security company, shares his thoughts on why this is such a big problem and some of the steps that marketers can take to prevent or at least mitigate the impact of a security breach. (You can listen to this episode just by clicking on this link.)

Guadagno discussion with host Drew Neisser yields a number of recommendations for marketers:

  1. Assume you will be hacked and prepare a crisis plan;
  2. Befriend your CFO, CTO and Security experts within your company;
  3. Recognize that with each new marketing technology that you bring in, you will need to make sure that resources are allocated to secure that technology;
  4. Consider bringing in an outside security expert to identify and address your biggest points of vulnerability;
  5. Continue to make “deposits” in the “goodwill bank” with your customers by offering extraordinary customer service (this goodwill will help you weather a security storm);
  6. If you are hacked, be as transparent as possible about the problem and how you are going about addressing the problem.  That said, make sure that your efforts themselves are tough to hack!

Also, early in the show, Drew mentioned a few resources to check to see if the Equifax hack had an impact on you personally and if so, what to do about:

  • Equifax resource– To see if your data was compromised, Equifax set up this special site at which you enter your last name and the last digits of your SSN.  There are only two answers, Yes or No.

  • If Yes — You don’t necessarily have to enroll in the program Equifax offers BUT you do need take some action steps right away.  Here’s a link to Steve Faktor’s thorough post on what to do which we found to be particularly smart and useful.