#104 - The Jeff on F'in' Research, Rob and Kennedy are Email Marketing Heroes and Robert Measures a Cocktail Episode

Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated by a machine, and as it becomes sentient it may have its own ideas of what we said....

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"

Rob 0:00
pandemic I bought a new mattress and I've never I've never bought a mattress before actually, I'd always just hadn't one that I got from my parents

Kennedy 0:10 dirty

Ian Truscott 0:18
Hello and welcome to episode 104 of Rockstar cmo F. M M is a marketing an F is so well you decide as you're probably wondering, that's the world need another effing Marketing podcast. I'm your host Ian Truscott. And this weekly podcast serves as my excuse chapter marketing friends, old and new that I've met through my career from techie to cmo and hopefully share with you some marketing street knowledge that my guests and I picked up along the way. Come say hello, we are Rockstar cmo on Twitter and LinkedIn, and a proud member of the Marketing Podcast Network. This episode was recorded on Friday March the fourth apologies for my voice. I've a mild case of the vid. But I hope you've had a good week and you're well safe and staying the same as you feel you need to be. And to echo my sentiment from last week. The b2b tech industry has strong links to the Ukraine. I'm sure like many of you I former colleagues and friends who remain in my thoughts. This week, Jeff Clark and I will continue with five effing marketing fundamentals. I chat with the email marketing heroes Robin Kennedy and we wind down the week in the Rockstar cmo virtual bar with Robert Rose and a marketing

but first, we need to pay the bar tap. I'll be back in a moment.

Right on to our first segment my charm Jeff Clark is a former research director at serious decisions Forrester and is a sought after marketing strategy advisor. Two weeks ago we introduced the five effing marketing fundamentals. Last week, we chatted about brand. And this week, we dive into market research.

welcome Jeff back to Rockstar, cmo FM How are you my friend?

Jeff Clark 2:23
I am doing very well on a sunny late winter day here. Lovely.

Ian Truscott 2:26
Lovely. Nice. Yeah, I think last week, you're shovelling snow when

Jeff Clark 2:31
I was yeah, it's still out there too.

Ian Truscott 2:36
As it does in, in your part of the world it hangs about for a bit, isn't it?

Jeff Clark 2:41
Does it does? Yeah, I was actually I had the discussion with a for another client, we were talking to these people were taking a vacation in Vermont, and they had friends coming over from the UK with their family. And, and they have like, you know, like a little inch of snow. And these kids from the UK were just like, oh my god, we're gonna go. Whereas her kids were like, today, whatever.

Ian Truscott 3:09
I think I said to you before that when we were living out there, and we're in Stanford, you know, the kids were smaller. And the the first time the snow came, it was really exciting. The next day, still excited that day. And then when you can't leave your house without boots on, but for a few weeks starts to wear Yeah, it starts to go even for the kids. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, so good luck with your snow, then it was something that burns somebody away. But you're not here to do the weather report. Although, although we always do, because I'm English. And that's what we do. And we're here to talk about the five effing marketing fundamentals. And last week, we covered the first of those, which was branding. Thank you for that. And then this week, if we remember the fundamentals that we discussed in show 102, I think 1011 Or two. The the next one we're going to discuss is market research, which is a pretty big topic. So can we can we cover market research? And well, we'll

Jeff Clark 4:15
make it bite size.

Ian Truscott 4:17
Oh, hi. So What say you, Jeff? Well,

Jeff Clark 4:20
so I mean, the first thing is, and maybe the, you know, potentially repeating myself from the last couple of weeks, it's just that it's like research is so important to know. It's like you just can't go in with the assumptions that marketers often go into or even anybody in the company goes into, it's like, we think we know this market. We think we know customers, blah, blah, blah, but you just can't assume that because you got a product or service and a list of customers and their emails or target account list. You can't assume that you actually know how to engage them effectively. And so often, we tend to lean on our past experience. In my last company, you know, we held this campaign and we had an Amazon gift card. And you know, it took a meeting, you know? And, and it's, it's like that just, you know that then you realise that didn't work. Okay, so what do we do? And I was really, you know, how we know that the past experience applies to a new customer with a different set of products, a different, you know, a different set of needs, different time, you know, things change, you know, and gosh, we're going through a period where it's like, seems like everything's changing, you know, every month or so. So it's like, so I just, it's, to me, it's one of the things that the CMO should free his budget, his his team up to say, hey, if we need to go find out information about something, some aspect that's going to make us more effective than let's let's do it.

Ian Truscott 5:50
I agree. I mean, I agree, toughen you up and just jump straight on the hamster wheel don't even stop and start writing. Without doing that thought and doing that research. And I actually forgot at the beginning that to do the, you know, the incredibly funny music analogies that I was come up with for these things. So this is this is our muse, right? This is our reason,

Jeff Clark 6:09
our show? Yes, yes. What's inspiring us?

Ian Truscott 6:14
All right. So so where do where do we start with that? So we want and we need to know who our audience is, right? And what they want? So how do we start with that?

Jeff Clark 6:22
Yeah, and I think it's one of the things that, you know, as I said, to make this kind of bite size is, I mean, I just, I thought of, like, off the top of my head, just like five things that, that I've had some personal experience with, I know work. And, or, and are seen as being important and other other clients. So there's, you know, obviously, as you said, this is a gigantic category, we could get into all kinds of things and, and our audience should feel free to chime in with whatever research that they found particularly effective, you know, in their own careers. But to start with, you know, your, to go to our music analogy, it's like, you know, we got to understand our fan base. And sometimes, you know, I mean, if, if we're doing our rock star thing, I mean, sometimes it's organic, and we kind of grow out of our fan base. But oftentimes, that's not necessarily the case. And oftentimes, as you get bigger and things, you know, your fans change, whatever, it's just really important to do some sort of research and so needs I will, when I was at Forrester siriusdecisions, we we kind of generally categories categorises, as Needs Assessment research. So who's who are the customers that we want to be talking to, from an account perspective? What are their needs? How do they how do they talk about their needs? What's you know, what's kind of the language? What are the key personas like? So who's involved in making decisions is a decision maker, there's a champion, there's approvers influencers? You know, you can give different names to the personas, you know, and where do they get their information? And so, a lot of at least, I think, in my experience, and probably yours, as well, as the like, you know, at this point, it's like, you often go to the analysts are covering your market. You know, I mentioned Forrester, obviously, there's Gartner there's, you know, CMR, there's, I mean, there's all these companies that are out there, do research in terms of understanding what what buying interests and patterns are. So, you know, go to them. They may have, you know, you can talk to them, they may have reports, you can bounce ideas off them. I know, when we were at STL, which has been renamed, but was called STL. And we were we were entering this area of customer experience. I mean, there were a boatload of analysts who were following customer experience. And yeah, and it's like, so this is what we're thinking of doing. Does that work? You know, how I think people receive the message stuff. And, and you can also do you know, your own first party research, I mean, surveying current or potential customers, you know, and certainly we actually, at the same time, we were doing some surveys that was helping to set up some of our marketing message about finding out how people thought about campaigns or what people thought about translation, localization, etc, etc. So yeah, so you can do your own research is kind of the combination of doing your own first party research with third party research. I think that helps you paint a a good comprehensive picture.

Ian Truscott 9:23
Yeah. And so when you talk about need assessment research, then this is also from a content perspective. You know, my background is about, you know, what are the what are the, what are the top questions, you need to answer that they're going to be asking right, during that process? So that's a part of that as well. Yeah. I mean, I had Stephen at the CMO of dream date, Ron last week, and he was talking about how he wants his website to answer every single question somebody might want to need to have answered and I think they're where you're talking about third party information from analysts and from your own research and first party data. I think also the sales team can be quite useful. Absolutely. company because they're the ones standing up. And they know, I get asked this question all the time or this thing's missing from the website or this, these are the guys that are actually making the decision in this particular deal, that kind of thing.

Jeff Clark 10:12
Absolutely. Absolutely. And also having sales introduce you to customers, so you can do your own interviewing process, which I think is absolutely one of the things I used to do throughout my career was do customer success stories. And it's like, yeah, it's like, but actually talk to a real customer and find out what really motivate them. It's like, oh,

Ian Truscott 10:30
yeah, absolutely. And I think, um, yeah, and I think I might be going a little bit head head, because you've mentioned case studies, but also when loss analysis also forms, some of that needs, we'll talk about win loss analysis. Right. So we so we've sort of the needs assessment research, we know what the customer, we believe we know what the customer needs, and what it is that they're looking for. So now, where do we look next? What how, what's the next stage in this research?

Jeff Clark 11:01
Well, we need to build the the songbook I mean, it's my, my catchphrase for not necessary. That's a song or, you know, the next record, but it's just kind of like, you got to build the What's your so what is it you're creating, that that is going to connect to people. And and I think buyer journey analysis is, is a really key element here. And one of the things I had the fortune to release, right, when I was at serious decisions was these buyer insight guides. So, you know, if you, if you if you we would we would focus the both kind of on an industry sector level and also on a on a persona level. So it's like, okay, you've got a persona, the head of it. So, you know, what is he? Where does he go for information? How does he do it? Well, how does he interact with, you know, online versus in person engagement? And where were you in a buying cycle? So where's he involved in the buying cycle, or her involved the buying cycle? And then, and then what are the types of things that they would like to, you know, that that they use the most. So this gets into kind of the, where they go for information, but also how they like being interacted to because I mean, that was the eye opener for me was, you know, we all talk about how everything goes digital, and then you find it in industry, like in manufacturing, or in the utility sector where it's like, certain personas are just they just particularly as you get higher up in a decision making realm. They just they like dealing with people. So it might be it might be the the sales guy, or it might be the the product marketing manager or product or product management, they want to talk to people who are sort of on the inside, maybe they want to talk to technical people. Yeah. And so it's really important to get that so that because that really, as you're doing your tactical mix of your campaigning, it's just important to understand why works were in a bind cycles. So that yeah, you can start to, you know, schedule things, if you will, you know, it's kind of loosely because everything, people don't actually, they're not gonna follow the journey that you you intend them to. But you just, you know, like, what works late stage, what works early stay, yeah, it works in the middle. And I know, one of the things that we did when I was at pega systems that was really interesting was that we, this is the early days, I mean, now days, you know, they have buyer journey analytics tools out there that can actually paint these pictures of how people interacted with you, once they have aggregate all the data, but we actually aggregated all the data into the data warehouse, and then we would pick a particular win. And then we would go through and say, Okay, what was the journey of the several people involved in that in that decision process? Oh, you know, they, they download the paper, they we saw them at a conference, we did this, we did this, we did this, there's the sales call there. There's the dove into the development network. Okay. So now, you know, you get a sense of, of, particularly the volume of interactions it takes, and then the types of interactions that drive somebody over the walk.

Ian Truscott 14:16
Right. And a lot of the times we're doing that sort of thing from an attribution perspective. But what you're saying is we use that data to map the buyers journey. So we know, at what point they were touching us, and when, during that process, and in particularly in b2b where we have the longer buying cycles, I guess, long and you're able to do that

Jeff Clark 14:33
longer buying cycles more and then more individuals. Right. Yeah. You know, it's like, how many people are involved? I mean, that's actually back to the either the DS assessment or this buyer journey analysis is how many people are involved in making that decision?

Ian Truscott 14:47
Yeah. Yeah. And then And then where do we go? So we've, we've put together a hypothesis at this point, I guess, haven't we, we've we've kind of come up with who the personas are, what they need each stage of the buying Journey, we've mapped out the buying journey based on our experience of previous customers, and we've got acid ideal customers and folks like that. Then what do we what do we do then? Do we start to look at what what's happened in the past now effective we've been before?

Jeff Clark 15:15
Yeah, I think this is the part where you do start to measure. You know, it's like so so now you've was setting up your songbook or whatever, to the fan base. Now you've sort of like, you're, you're, you're executing on things. And you need to see how effective is this? And certainly last week, we talked about brand research, which, you know, is certainly something that that I've used at a number of different companies, where you try to get a sense of, you know, are people aware of you? What do they what's their perception? Do they put you in this market? Do they not put you in this market? And they, how do they what attributes do they provide or apply to you? If there if you said, you know, Company ABC is in the customer experience space, and they might say, laggard, or they might say, Oh, those are cutting edge guys, or it's like I didn't even know those people were in that space. And then also just, you know, are, what is the preference for you versus competitors. And this is another one of these areas where there's a lot of ways to, to approach it. That mean, you can do the big broad surveys, you can do interviews, focus groups, you can do social monitoring, you know, particularly the idea of like, do people associate us with a particular attribute? Well, it's like, so SDL, web content management system? Do they associate with us? Or not? Or do they, if we inserted a different like a product name, all of a sudden we pop up? So there's, there's lots of lots of ways to do it. And again, we we did touch on a little bit of this in Episode 103, I believe that was the number. And but it's basically you're just trying to answer are they? Are they buying our story? Right? We think we know who we're talking to, we think we've we've we've put out a good message, are they buying it? Right? So

Ian Truscott 17:05
But if we're, if we're going through this journey of, you know, your new CMO, you've decided to re Energise your messaging and marketing, and we've gone through that journey, we're talking about, about figuring out our why, you know, that and, and, and doing this need assessment research, and, and then and then doing this brand research, how do we are we are we thinking about what what we've done before, whether that works or not, and what people associated with, we then building up a picture of where we need to go, so we're intent on this strategy, but people nurses, this other things. So therefore, this informs where we need to focus our budget.

Jeff Clark 17:44
Yeah, where where your budget budget, or where you need to bolster your your messaging? Because, you know, you know, again, you know, like a brand attribute is, is a very simple, you know, certainly for companies that don't you know, you it's this very simple equation, it's like, do they associate us in a market? And with what particular attribute? It's and and it's, so if if they don't, then what is the messaging pyramid, we're going to create underneath where we're trying to go? You know, as long as you know, we feel from the needs assessment work, we're on the right track, it's just that the market, the rest of the market hasn't caught up to that. So what do we need to be doing? To change ourselves? And, you know, again, this is really focuses more on what we're saying to the audience, as opposed to the colours in the Yeah, I'm the visuals and all that, obviously, you're gonna help but it's like, this is not about this is not about cosmetics. This is all all about, about words.

Ian Truscott 18:43
So we understand. So we believe we now understand the customer's needs, and we believe that we have a solution to those needs. What with what we're doing here is saying, Have we at the moment got validity in the market to deliver on that? And how do we how do we set that expectation? How do we change people's minds that we are the solution with that particular need, particularly if we've changed or we've acquired something? Or we've got a new product coming out over a startup? Something like that, right? Yep. Yep. Yeah. So So then, how do you how are you that we're now sort of I think we're getting ready to take the show on the road? Right. So what once, what do we once we start down this process, right? So we've done our research, we've set this thing up, we're off, what do we what do we, what do we what else do we do? What are the little levers and things can we pull?

Jeff Clark 19:30
Well, I think this this is where you get into understanding the you know, so the, your demand benchmarking, I'll just say this in a better broad category, but it's kind of like if we, you know, we got the band, you know, we're putting out the music we hit the road. So what are the royalties receipts coming in? You know, what way are we making money on the music, and are we making money when we actually, you know, hit the hit the arenas, we get to the arenas. But, but you know, And I mean, this is where there are so many different things. And actually, this is an area I think, perhaps where more marketers are comfortable and aware of some of the options, you know, whether you're doing like your, your website benchmarking, you know, are we doing acquiring, you know, visitors? Or what's the behaviour? Like on the website? Are we converting people into customers that are known? We put it into some sort of demand process like a waterfall or whatever, where we're, we're tracking them as they go through and handoffs from marketing to sales and back to marketing and over sales again. Are we doing well in terms of hitting whatever goals if we've got, if we've got revenue, engagement, customer satisfaction, things that are quantifiable? How are we doing on hitting those goals, but, and, again, we could dive in a lot of these things. But I think one of the key things is to try to see where you can compare yourself to appear set. Right? I think we'll get into more of this in subsequent episodes, but it's like, it's really important to say, you know, I mean, we can compare ourselves to our work historically, which is certainly important. But it's, it's, it's even better to say, companies like us in our market, right? Going after customers, like we're going after, you know, they get results like this, and here we are. And can we rationalise why that is and then determine what we need to fix in order to?

Ian Truscott 21:21
Right, right, so that research really has got come from industry analysts really, hasn't it?

Jeff Clark 21:25
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And, and yeah, analysts, particularly analysts that that do some sort of aggregation of data so that they can help track their clients against against the peer sets.

Ian Truscott 21:40
Yeah, cool. Well, and then, of course, there's the thing we mentioned just a moment ago, which is win loss analysis, which is a great source of this stuff, isn't it?

Jeff Clark 21:49
Absolutely in and I know, Ken Schwartz, or former my former colleague who was on Episode 100, so not that long ago, who I listened to that I think it did a great job just talking about kind of the benefit of win loss analysis. And, and this is typically, you know, more geared towards the sales team. That is, it's like, if somebody is gonna say, Yes, we're going to do this, it is going to be the head of sales to do that. But often, product marketing or product management are the ones who are champion are doing it and or are managing the process. And what marketing can get out of it is is, you know, is priceless. I mean, obviously, sales can get something out of it. And but you know, marketing can understand, you know, are we going after the wrong set of customers? Are we are somehow do we set the wrong impressions, are we not arming our sales, people with good content and messaging for when they're, when the customers are getting to the stage of talking to the salespeople, so to speak, you really, I mean, and ultimately, you find out what you win on or what you lose on because a good win loss analysis will rank these things. And yeah, and I remember one of the things that I don't, this is one way that Ken and I talk about this thing, it's like, we always come back to this one where we were at progress. And we, we won on our proof of concepts, and we lost our proof of concept. And all the executives are scratching their head, and then you realise it's like, oh, we have some people who do it really well. Yeah. And it's like, Ah, so that's, that's the problem. That's not a that's not as much a marketing problem. But but it is, it is good to have that insight. Just find these things. They're like these girls that you otherwise you're just dealing with anecdotes. And oftentimes, you're dealing with anecdotes from sales or people around sales, who are who may have taken a bias or their whatever that's been or something like that. And so you want to make it as objective as possible.

Ian Truscott 23:49
Yeah. And that's the whole point of this particular effing marketing fundamental, isn't it that you've got to spend some time doing some proper research, otherwise, you do tend to get led by the highest paid person in the room or some anecdote from sales that this is working, or that's not working and, or the customer needs this until you get a good body of research together, then, you know, you are firing blind, aren't you? You're executing blindly. Yeah, yeah.

Jeff Clark 24:13
And you want your highest paid person in the room to be asking for the third party attribution or the objective analysis. I mean,

Ian Truscott 24:21
absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. demonstrates them the value of doing that. Yeah. All right. So we didn't manage to talk about market research in 20 minutes. Little bit. So but there's one more agenda item that we need to cover off. We've done the weather we've done marketing, marketing research in 20 minutes ish. We need a song from you right? Or do we go on with

Jeff Clark 24:45
well, you know, you had cast this episode is The Muse. Yes. So I went right to the muse. And they have a great song from 2001 I believe it's called feeling good. And there's a line. I think it's in the chorus, which is, you know, it's a new dawn. It's a new day and I'm feeling good. So hopefully it's like, you've done that deeds assessment. You've talked to all the right people, you've done your benchmarking, you're saying, wow, you know, we are armed and we're ready to be dangerous in the market. I'm feeling good.

Ian Truscott 25:17
That fix and I love that song. Thank you very much, Jeff. And we'll and next week, you kind of come back, right. And we're gonna talk about communication and influences.

Jeff Clark 25:28
Yes, yes. Is that us?

Ian Truscott 25:33
Is absolutely. And then we'll do I think, by the lifecycle of their marketing ops if people are hanging around for the next few episodes as well. So we've got three more effing marketing fundamentals together, and we'll pick it up again next week. Thank you very much, Jeff. And enjoy the snow.

Jeff Clark 25:48
Thank you very much. Feeling good buddy you know, it's a new dawn. It's a new day

Robert Rose 26:15
for me,

Ian Truscott 26:19
and I'm feeling. Thank you, Jeff. And that was the rather fabulous news and their cover of feeling good from 2001. Let us know what you think of this new series on the socials or contact us via the website at Rockstar cmo.fm, where you can also find all of Jeff's contact details right onto my guests. You might know them as hosts of the very entertaining podcast, the email marketing shows, or as the founders of the survey platform and makes you sales response suite. My guest this week, our email marketing heroes, Rob and Kennedy. Redhead Rob, is a comedy stage hypnotist and platinum head Kennedy, a psychological mind reader or mentalist as he would be called in the US, who have spent almost 18 years relying on their skills of getting into other people's heads to carve out successful careers in show business. Now as founders of email marketing heroes.com Rob and Kennedy's mission is to save the world from that grubby old fashioned email marketing we've grown to love. And wherever you happen to be in your relationship via email marketing, Rob and Kennedy are here to help grow your business by sending more emails that people love receiving, what a mission that was fabulous.

Welcome to Rockstar, CMN FM gentlemen, how are you?

Rob 28:04
Good at good.

Ian Truscott 28:06
So today, we're joined by Kennedy and Rob are the email marketing heroes. For the listeners that don't know you tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, so

Rob 28:16
we've got a really weird backstory which is I'm Rob by the way, I'll be using this voice for the rest of the episode. Because the the the alien good look and one of these the other one, let's say the other one. Our story's a little bit weird. So I'm actually a stage hypnotist. Kennedy is a mind reader, psychological mind reader. So I get up on stage and hypnotise people make them do crazy things. And Kennedy can get inside their heads by using body language, statistics, reading, people influence and that kind of thing, basically, the closest real thing to being able to read somebody's mind, we've been doing that for like 18 years or something now, all over the world built a really cool business out of it. And completely by accident, we literally came out of Sixth Form for me and university for Kennedy. We both just knew we wanted to do this thing. We didn't want to have a business, we just wanted to do this thing. And that led to us having to figure out how do we do things, all the stuff you do, you don't want to do in a business, like marketing and branding and positioning and accounts and all of that stuff. And so what we ended up doing was using email to get booked for gigs and get rebooked and then get referred and that kind of thing, mostly because I mean, I'm a huge introvert, I hate talking to people generally. So I didn't do like sales calls or any of that kind of thing. And so we just found email independently didn't even mention it to each other we just made it didn't mention it to each other. We're working together didn't have a business together. And as we one day, just casually in conversation, we both said, I've got this email marketing thing going and we talked about it. Also why and it was just this weird little thing. And so we sort of started to swap notes about it. And we talked I mean, emails changed a lot in the last 15 years. And that's how long ago this was that we started doing it. And so we've just sort of constantly kept in touch with what we were doing and trying new ideas. And we ended up making frameworks that we could both use that would serve us going forward that led to other entertainers, asking us how we were doing what we were doing. So we started coaching and teaching them whilst Performing because as a performer, you spent a lot of time travelling and a very little amount of time on stage. And then much more recently than that we got asked to go and speak at a marketing event for general businesses. And we were like, Okay.

Kennedy 30:12
I'll stand on it. Exactly.

Rob 30:14
Why but okay. And that led to a whole bunch of other businesses. So now we've been lucky enough to help 1000s of businesses of everything you can imagine b2b, b2c, small businesses, massive businesses, huge, like global lobbying organisations to use email in a more effective way. And that's, that's

Ian Truscott 30:31
nice. And you're speaking for both of you, there Kennedy is anything you can add to that.

Kennedy 30:35
I disagree with everything you just said. thing, I mean, and that now now, like we find ourselves like two or three years in now of helping other types of businesses with email marketing and using psychology to do better email marketing that basically doesn't make you want to throw up in your own mouth.

Ian Truscott 30:54
I love it. That's a high bar isn't an email, it doesn't make you want to throw up in your own mouth. Yeah. See that? Is that your tagline? Yeah. So I was gonna ask you, why did you pick email? Because you guys when I was doing my research, you know, and all the cool kids are doing social. But I can see what inspired you from being an introvert and feeling that's the best channel for your own business, right?

Kennedy 31:17
Yeah, the cool kids are doing social. So when the cool kids base, I mean, the thing is, everything goes back to email as well. So every time remember, when used to get your, your first Facebook account, and every time someone poked you or tagged you on Facebook, what do they do, they send you an email to tell you about it, to sign up to the latest, whatever platform that you've just, you know, clubhouse, whatever it is this way, you have to have an email address, it all comes down to that. And the reason we find it really effective is because now people are checking their email on their phone, which means it's another app snuggled in between tick tock and Tinder, what that people are checking on a regular basis. And if you get closed down on one of your social platforms, there's nothing you can do to save that audience. Whereas if you follow up with an email marketing provider, guess what you can download that CSV file of all the data, and you can go to a different email marketing provider. So you've still got that data, you're basically not building your entire brand new ability to reach your audience. On borrowed land, you're doing the platform you actually own?

Ian Truscott 32:24
Yeah, I'm a big fan of Joe Pulizzi. And he writes about content marketing, and he's always talking about not building on rented land, which is what all the social platforms are on the email. Is that thing you own? Right? You own no subscribers? Right? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. So that's what inspired you to get into into email. Now, I can't resist asking. Yes. What's your top tip for the listeners on email marketing? What is it you're always telling your clients that they should be doing and I see a success with,

Rob 32:53
I think one of the biggest things that really makes an impact is to start treating email like a content channel rather than like a sales channel. So what most people do, we call it email marketing. And then what most people implement is actually email sales. And they just send emails, they either do one of two things, they either just send emails about their products and services and say, Come and buy come and buy would you like to buy it? Here's another reason to buy. Here's Jeremy he bought isn't Jeremy good. Be more like Jeremy come and buy this. Here's Carol. She bought Carol did well, isn't Carol Awesome, got hit like be like Carol. And it's just more and more reasons to buy. And the problem with that is you very quickly if you just send emails that are opportunities for people to buy, your emails very quickly become the emails that people only open when they're ready to when they're ready to buy, right. And that's a bad thing. Because that means you get generally low engagement. And we hear this all the time people are talking about nobody's opening my emails anymore. Nobody's clicking the links in my emails anymore. Like the engagement levels, nobody replying, saying thank you for my emails, of course, they're not because all you're doing is emailing them saying you want to buy yet you want to buy it you want to buy it, we started to do is to realise that actually, if you use email, like a content channel that you can also sell through. And therefore if you take a more marketing approach to it, if you like, literally send content people want to read that's useful and interesting and inspiring. But the other side of that spectrum that most people are on, is they just send like their free newsletter once a month, sort of, I've got an email newsletter. So email this, I probably should email them every now and then. And then when they feel inspired to do it, or they force themselves to do it. And that's on long email. That's a million miles long. I think of our accountant with this, you know, an email that's like, I don't know, a month long. Yeah, you know, nobody reads it. He hates writing it. Nobody's winning in that arrangement. Yeah, what we do is we send emails people want to read, we talk about that if you like, but we send emails that people want to read, that also makes sales. And if you do that, you can send emails as often as you want to as often as every day. So we email our list everybody, Hope everyone's sitting down right now. Park the car if you're driving, right, Sandra, put the baby back in the cart. Listen, we email our list every day, 365 days of the year, even on Chris. But those emails take less than 10 minutes to write like four five or six minutes to write, consumable in one of Kennedy's businesses even puts like the reading time at the top of the email, it's typically like less than a minute, a minute and a half, right? So super quick to consume. And they just give somebody a little burst of inspiration, an idea, a tip, a story, something that's gone on in our lives that relates to what we teach in some way, or what we sell in some way, and then gives them the chance to buy as part of that. And if you do that, you kind of create content that for the right audience, is super addictive. And what that means, of course, is that we don't need to build the biggest list in the world subscribers are not Pokemon, we don't have to catch them all. Build it, we in fact, we intentionally work to keep our subscribers quite small, we run email marketing heroes calm, our list is just under 5000. People very intentionally, like we clear out the sort of those No offence to those people, but we clear out the duds regularly the people who are not paying attention anymore. And that way, that's what we want to do is you want to send emails that people want to receive, that are valuable and interesting and inspiring. They can read them really quickly. You can write them really quickly. And they continue to deepen relationships with us.

Ian Truscott 35:59
I mean, that's totally taking a content marketing approach, isn't it and using it as a channel, I love that. And, you know, I'm thinking about people like Seth Godin, and folks like that, who blog every day. And it's the same thing. You're just using email as that channel of connecting and reminding people that you exist, that they get engaged with the continents that testing and how what metrics do you tend to see your customers using in terms of you know, how successful that is? Because there's a lot of doubt about whether open rates is really the great success metric that it used to be? Well, how do you? How do you rate success of these programmes?

Kennedy 36:34
This is really interesting, because I will talk about some of the information that's out there about this. One of the the ultimate metric that we go for, is what we call earnings per subscriber per month, that thing so because that's what we care about, we don't have an email list because we don't know want to collect people or because your email is no, we've got an email list, because you've got a commercial intent with it, we want to make sales from a channel that we own, the most successful ROI channel on the planet, according to a much smarter people than hopping up. Almost everybody, so the number of earnings per subscriber per month is really simple to calculate, have a look at your system, how many active subscribers have you got lovely number, let's say it was 1000. Just to give the numbers easy for my simple little brain. Because we focus, we focus on the psychology, so we don't have to think about the technology. So let's say you got 1000 subscribers. And let's say, in January, you made $1,000, you'd have number by the other $1 per subscriber in January, and then you do it again in February. And you might have made $1.20 or 120. For every subscriber. What's nice about this is it's completely relative as you grow your email list. And as you do more or less promotions with different price point items, you can see how that's actually affecting the bottom line of what is the effectiveness of everything. And that tells you your top line KPI, your top line metric, like how good is your relationship with email subscribers? Well, if it sucks, it's in the toilet. People are not gonna buy from you. How good are you at making offers? How often you make it offers? Is it enough? am I presenting things to my subscribers enough? So that can actually happen? So have a look at your own personal account per month and have a look at when's it going up? When's it going down? What are the what are the sort of things that are going on? What's the activity that's going on? That's causing that?

Ian Truscott 38:32
Yeah, and that's a magic word, that revenue isn't it? Because, you know, if you work in larger organisations or b2b organisations like I have, we as marketers tend to talk about our vanity metrics, and the rest of the C suite doesn't give a shit, right? What they care about is revenue. So if you start linking your metrics to revenue all of a sudden, yeah, we should be doing this email thing you love that

Kennedy 38:51
you elevate you sort of grab yourself from the pretty pictures department. Yeah. revenue generating department. What a concept.

Ian Truscott 38:59
Yeah, no, that's excellent. And that marketing is actually an investment. I love it. And what do you think? What are people not? What What's the thing you're always telling people to stop doing when you when you start your advisory?

Rob 39:09
I love this because this sounds like a wild thing to do. In fact, people are gonna think that I'm more drunk than I actually am right now when I give you this answer. Honestly,

Ian Truscott 39:18
it is lunchtime on a Friday you

Kennedy 39:22
Coco Pops

Rob 39:26
then I would rather have the the answer to what what you should stop doing is talking about the birth your products and services in your emails, or rather emailing about your products and services. You do need to talk about products and services. You should email about them though. That's a different thing. So what we talk about in our emails every day is 95% of the time, the random inane stuff that's gone on in our lives. I write most of the emails for this business. And so most of the time, it's about my life and the stuff that's going on. And I want to I want to preface this by saying this is true regardless of whether you're saying Then b2b or b2c, because ultimately what you are selling most likely is you're selling to a human within a business rather than you want the business most of the time. And if you're not, you're still communicating with other humans, and they want to know that you understand them, they want to know more about you, and they want they want to connect human to human. So what we tend to do is we tend to write emails that take care of what we call the emotional needs of our audience. And those are basically the things that sit on the periphery of what it is that you actually sell. So if you look at like, for example, so we sell to small and micro businesses, usually one to two people, mostly working from home, having a great time, that's who most of our customers are. And so when we think about what those people have in common, those those people have a bunch of things in common. They are all working from home and trying to deal with the battles of that like having kids and dogs and partners around. Yeah, they're trying to deal with the fact that I've just gone on this really important zoom call and the Amazon delivery driver turns up the fact that I get to the end of the year, and suddenly I've got a tax bill, I sort of should have seen coming, but I didn't, I definitely didn't look we definitely didn't save for it. That's why the banks have now introduced that little thing that automatically stick some money in a savings account every month. That stuff, right. So we care about all of those things. And the more bizarre things like for example, I read, I wrote an email about the fact that during the COVID 19 pandemic, as if there was another one, during the pandemic, I ordered the Great. During the Spanish Flu I was doing during the COVID 19 pandemic, I bought a new mattress, and I've never I've never bought a mattress before actually, I'd always just hadn't one that I got from my parents was

Kennedy 41:36
dirty.

Rob 41:39
Least of all, I'd never bought a mattress on the internet before. And it's a very, like, it's a very tactile thing. You've got to know is it comfortable? Do I want it firm or soft? I don't know. I don't know whether the one I've got now is firmer or softer. No, I'm not. And it's knackered. So I don't know what I'm looking for

Kennedy 41:52
vary by now. I wrote an

Rob 41:56
email about the fact I bought a mattress to the point. And the interesting thing about that was the sort of what I tell this little story. So I bought a mattress, I'm trying to buy a mattress. And we go from a story which is sort of interesting ish into, but nothing to do with what you sell into a lesson about that story. So for me that was the fact that we sell stuff on the on the internet. And actually buying anything on the internet is quite hard because people can't really feel it. They don't know what the quality is, might look nice in the photo. But it might be like a McDonald's burger when it looks nice enough. Sat on by every member of staff. So like that's difficult to buy stuff on the internet. And so we use email to build pictures and build trust and deepen relationships so that people even if they don't, even if they can't trust the product, they can trust you to sell them. Yeah, yeah, that's really cool. And then there's a little lesson, we say, if you want to learn how we do that, with all of our campaigns and strategies come and join the League of email marketing heroes here and the league. And so all of our emails, they do talk about our products and services, but they're like an afterthought. Every single day, there's a little story and a little lesson, typically, we got four frameworks. That's the main one, a little story, a little lesson, and then some sort of little call to action, which could be come and buy a thing. It could be listen to the latest episode of Rockstar CMO, it could be on somebody else's podcast, it could be you know, whatever it's gonna be. That's one thing. The second bit is that so that then when the mattress arrived, I sent another email about the fact that the mattress arrived in it came in different packaging to I expected a mattress to come expecting to burly people carrying a big mattress, but it's just a weedy look about my build with a little box on his shoulder going as your mattress, right. And so I wrote an email about that things aren't always what you expect and kind of unpacked that into a thing. What we end up doing, as I said is we end up looking after what we call the emotional needs of our audience, it becomes addictive content because people can't wait to find out what's happening next. And those emails got replies from people saying, Oh, I'm looking for new mattress, what mattress did you get? And acting with people on a much higher level than just we teach email marketing? Do you want to learn email marketing?

Ian Truscott 43:50
Yeah, and I think you've said a key word there that I love, which is trust, right? And a little bit corporate trust is bandied around a lot at the moment around marketing and authenticity, right, that you don't want to hear anybody say that ever again. But it sounds like that's what you're

Kennedy 44:03
doing is you're silly and unprecedented.

Ian Truscott 44:06
I know. But I'm gonna say them anyway. Because I love that, that you're telling these authentic stories about yourself. You're building trust in that audience. And then they're going to stick with you and they're going to and you're going to be their preferred supplier, aren't they? They're just going to come to you. And then they're going to start coming to you for things you don't sell like advice about buying mattresses.

Kennedy 44:23
I mean, when Rob told the story about how he started running during during the pandemic, people in Tim like high vis jogging vests and stuff like it is amazing within it within a b2b thing. What's really interesting if you're doing b2b marketing is these can be stories about you, the person who writes the emails, it could be stuff about things that are going on in the organisation that could be to do with the figureheads are the faces of the organisation that could be to do with your customers and things that happen that there are stories everywhere.

Ian Truscott 44:56
Absolutely. I mean, the stories that you tell suit your audience wants to person Hello organisations now that's not going to work if your SAP send you emails, but your point about being human to humans absolutely dead on, right? Because you're a marketer writing an email, probably to another marketer wanting to buy your software or your services. So what are the two of you got in common? And I think some of the things she talks about there about trust and the fact that people are feeling this risk about something in their business, we all know what those things are, why don't we talk about them, rather than just go buy our products?

Rob 45:26
It's basically the same stuff. You know, if you took you took you and all of your subscribers and put you in the pub for a night beauty conference somewhere, the stuff you would end up talking about is the stuff Yeah, your emails?

Ian Truscott 45:38
Yeah, yeah. No, I love it. So that's it. So we should stop talking about our products is that I think the question I asked a little while ago, but also onto your podcast, because you run your own podcast, don't you Email Marketing Show, you would just set mentioning mine. And so tell us about that. Has that helped your business? Also? I mean, how does that work alongside your email campaigns that you're doing?

Kennedy 45:59
Yeah, the podcast is an interesting thing. For us, we have a real mission that we want to genuinely transform the way that people do email marketing, for two reasons. One, we want you to get we want people to get better results from it. Because while social media has changed the way we all consume content, you know, marketing content hasn't developed in that same way. So you want to change that. And we want to change that. So you get better results, we always also want to change so that we can all receive better email. The stuff that we all receive is terrible. So yeah, not how can we do that. And actually, it's about leaning into what you're naturally good at and what you naturally enjoy doing. Rob and I have been friends for like 18 plus years, we enjoy getting on a call and having a bit of blather about something. And so we thought, which channels should we get into where if you're having a bad hair day, and has very important to us? Have you ever seen us

Ian Truscott 46:53
I should be sharing the video because we've got a shock of red hair and shock of light hearing to Windows I'm looking at,

Kennedy 46:59
right? So we we want to lean something that we find easy to produce on a regular basis. So we we release a new episode of the email marketing show every week, and sometimes on something important happening, we'll do an extra episode like on a Friday thing. But right very rarely, and that the way that works for us is allows us to tap into the knowledge of other people and actually learn like there's not an episode, basically our rule is, who do you want to speak to, to learn how to do something, let's invite that person on the show. Yeah, and that means we always end up with another document, open our screen writing notes about how we're going to apply the stuff that's been taught. Right. That's one of the great ways. The second thing, what really works for us is is that networking thing of meeting people who are doing the same sort of things, or serving the same sort of community that that were serving. But of course, for building an audience and be able to share this knowledge to impact email marketing throughout the world, I think you'll be able to get people on our show like the founders and CEOs of a Weber of the email marketing platform of Omri Infusionsoft, like the the way we're able to do this and get like, sort of from the top knowledge is because we've built this amazing audience of people. And of course, we move people from the podcast to join our email list where our email marketing obviously is pretty good. So that that turns into into leads into sales to members of our programmes, members of our membership and and also of our email writing agency as well.

Ian Truscott 48:26
Yeah. So it's basically part of your content marketing strategy, and that informs the content you might use in other channels. Yes, because the conversation you're having, but also it gives your audience another opportunity to learn about buy mattresses is simply about exactly yeah.

Kennedy 48:41
And the thing is, I don't know about you, but for us, the podcast, is we initially thought of it as an audience growth channel, and a bit of that, but actually, we find that a lot of our members, a lot of our clients also continue to listen to it. It's not like just a top of the funnel activity. It's, that's everyone's weekly check in while they're doing whatever they're doing right now on a podcast, they also get to hear they get to hear that as well. It's a really good way of having some timely content and some evergreen content as well. And connecting with us. Yeah, so we, I mean, we just love producing honestly, if even if it wasn't making sales, I think we'd still produce it.

Ian Truscott 49:16
Yeah, no, I mean, this is a was a lockdown project for me at the beginning. And just to get out there, talk some people from my network and get something going like that. So I haven't got the same laser focus that you guys have had around, you know, the content strategy around it. But definitely, you know, once you start doing it, and you get that momentum going, it's great, great,

Kennedy 49:37
but what it's what works really well for us is we our content strategy is all based on the fact that you reverse engineer everything. So it's like, Okay, what's the promotion? So we do it quarterly planning promotion, so we I get most people I think, so we look at okay, what's happening this month? What are the things is gonna be happening on that particular month of that quarter? Great. What's the content out of that alternative on the podcast that allows people to start leaning into and thinking about that topic. So if we We're talking about batching emails because we have a batching course coming up or whatever it's going to be, we'll start doing that. And from that podcast episode, what do we produce, we produce content for our fee free Facebook group, which we called the Email Marketing Show community. So it's like a Facebook free group off the back of our podcast, which is one of our best lead magnets. So we do that. So the posts that go into that free Facebook group are derived from the content of the podcast, what goes on our Robin Kennedy, Instagram is also derived from what we talked about in the podcast. So everything comes out with that core piece of content.

Ian Truscott 50:35
Nice, nice, and it all joins together that this has been fascinating just realised the time this has been really enjoyed talking about email. But finally, and your podcasts are finally, we have a regular feature on Rockstar cmo called the Rockstar cmo simple in tribute to all the rockstars that threw things in hotels, pimples, and for some of my younger guests, I've had to explain it to them that they used to do. But it's our portal to marketing health overhyped trends, Bs and snake oil from this marketing industry we love what would you guys Chuck into our pool?

Rob 51:04
I think I'm gonna go with misleading subject lines, which sounds like an obvious thing to throw into a swimming pool. Nobody wants to do misleading, but just don't ever so slightly. Really quickly, I promise that we see a lot of people using subject lines to try and get attention. They do things like put ri on the front or forward on the zip it's a reply or a forward. And then sometimes they'll use really spammy sort of subject lines, like you've got it, you know, re quotes, you've got a new client. And when you open it, it says, Wouldn't you love to have a new client every day? And you think, oh, yeah, get on the subject lines, the thing that gets your emails open is not the subject line. It's your name landing in their inbox and their relationship with you. And if the one spammy subject line is enough to screw up that entire relationship. So yeah,

Ian Truscott 51:44
you might get you might get a lot of opens on that one email, but you won't get any more off. I love that spam, emails, spam. Sorry, misleading subject lines straight into the swimming pool. That sounds great. So gentlemen, when people spin the dial on the interwebs, where they're going to find you both.

Kennedy 52:01
Yeah, if you want to check us out on Instagram, or posting a load of stuff and content on there. So that's Adam, Rob and Kennedy. If you're like listen to podcast, wherever you're listening to this one right now, we have a as you can probably imagine, quite upbeat, weekly podcast called The Email Marketing Show. So you can grab that wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to come and check out our community. It's called the Email Marketing Show community. It's on Facebook.

Ian Truscott 52:23
Nice. Nice. And you're both presumably on LinkedIn, and Twitter and all those sorts of things as well.

Kennedy 52:29
We aren't we don't use them that much. I think actually, well, we could we could help people out with them getting more clicks on their emails, I guess.

Rob 52:35
Yeah, one of the things you really want to watch for is people getting clicks in your emails, as we don't really care about opens that much. We care about clicks, because when people click to look at Yeah, but yeah, we've got a really cool free resource, you can grab called click tricks, it's 12 really creative ways to get more people clicking on the links in the next email you send and every other email you send going forward. If you want to grab that just go to email marketing, heroes.com forward slash CMO, and you grab it from that email marketing heroes.com forward slash CMO. That's fantastic.

Ian Truscott 53:00
Thank you very much. And I'll of course include all your links, the links to your podcasts and links to your website to community and to that particular resource in the show notes. Thanks very much, gentlemen. Enjoy the rest of your Friday Have a great weekend.

Thank you, Robin Kennedy enjoyed that conversation emails so often overlooked as a creative way to connect, and they're quite right. It's an excellent own content channel. And I will include all those links that we discussed in the show notes that you can find on Rockstar cmo.fm But time to wind down for the weekend. We're better than the Rockstar cmo virtual bar with a man once described as a likeable Mark Ritson and to join my friend and content marketing guru Robert Rose, the chief troublemaker at the content advisory to be transported away with a cocktail and other marketing

even robots What do you drink? Oh,

Robert Rose 54:09
hello my friend. Welcome to the end of the weekend. The very noisy pulleys bar is that a heavy metal band that's by the heavy man what does it I don't think you had heavy metal here in the in the bar before but

Unknown Speaker 54:27
no

Ian Truscott 54:28
Well, that was a mistake in the book in my thought was getting another mariachi band.

Robert Rose 54:31
Yeah, it's you know, usually there's some soft jazz playing or the one time that there was a mariachi band, but this is like heavy like, this is like some golf, you know, sort of dark metal. Like, you know, are they from Finland? They must be from Finland, right? Aren't they aren't all those bands from either Finland or Norway or? Possibly, yeah,

Ian Truscott 54:55
hopefully we'll find one. Just Yes, it was trying to finish off. And yeah, I think that's,

Robert Rose 55:05
I have hopefully haven't made it too difficult for you

Ian Truscott 55:08
to understand. I'm sure it's a breeze.

Robert Rose 55:12
Yeah, no, that's probably well, it's much easier to find. Let me put it this way, it's much easier to find a finish goth band and it would be, for example to find a Brazilian one.

Ian Truscott 55:24
Well, maybe saving that for now. Yes, you

Robert Rose 55:26
show. Well, we have a wonderful cocktail for to celebrate the end of the week here. Yep. And, and it goes to, you know, a tequila drink, of course, because I'm feeling very tequila II. And it's there is a drink in Mexico. They call it a ver dita. And this is what we will be drinking. And I have also discovered this and it's, again, as last week a little more complex to make. But just as rewarding and maybe even more so if you're a tequila fan. Now, you do need to be a cilantro fan. And I understand there's a lot of people who aren't cilantro fans out there, which baffles me because I absolutely adore cilantro,

Ian Truscott 56:16
I'm in that same camp,

Robert Rose 56:18
it's one of my favourite spices. So anyway, so this is what makes this drink is so this does require a blender. Right and so you're going to need a blender here and so you're going to get pineapple juice and then lime juice so a good amount of pineapple juice in order to make the drink it will be the base of the drink your your pineapple juice, and then you'll want lime juice to taste freshly squeezed always better. You'll have some mint leaves, you'll bring in some cilantro, a couple of handfuls will be will be fine a good you know to again to taste but you know what you want to do there and then a jalapeno which you will harshly DC now the Cesar where the heat is, so you don't want to completely deseed it. But chop it up. Put that into your blender and basically blend that up into like you were making a smoothie or something but of course there's a lot of pineapple juice in there. So you're really making more of a juice than you are a you know like a smoothie or something like that. So it should have the consistency of a of a thick juice as it were and then of course, add your favourite reposado tequila. To that again to taste you can add a lot which is always and you have yourself that the lovely thing about this is the jalapeno as just enough heat to make you want to keep drinking it to try and cool your mouth down. And then but the cilantro and the mint and the and the lime and the pineapple all mixed together to make a very, very lovely taste refreshing at the same time with a little heat and you've had about you know so my advice is make a good amount of this maybe even better because you're going to you're going to drink quite a bit of it.

Ian Truscott 58:00
I love it I love it and again is this is this something you discovered because I know you do experiment and create your own cutouts

Robert Rose 58:06
I you know I have this this I did not invent this the very detail definitely exists out there in the world. I have played around with the quantities of things. I loved all the ingredients and some of the recipes that I saw but I don't like the way that they divided out. And so it either becomes too minty or too cilantro or too so all so you have to experiment for your own taste in all of that and I prefer a little more heat than less and so I find that most of the recipes of this have very light jalapeno and I add a little more in there because I I'm a fan of the of the of the spice I hate

Ian Truscott 58:48
Yeah, nice. Well, I shall attempt to make that using the ingredients in my desktop bar. Now I'm going to put some ice in I'm gonna start off with some ice is that did you put ice in yours?

Robert Rose 59:02
Yes, there is ice ultimately your blend it and then pour over ice? Yes.

Ian Truscott 59:07
Oh good. And then I'm going to use the most English of reposado tequilas. If I get open some Hendrick's gin, you'll be shocked to learn some Hendrick's gin and then as you know I'm a bit lazy and I can't really be asked with all that making stuff so I get the good people at fever tree to make my to make my mixes. I think I think they've got a blender. I don't have a blender here on my desktop. And what they've done is they've blended cucumber tonic.

Robert Rose 59:39
I see. Yes. Yes cucumber is is is probably the most English of jalapenos, I think is really

Ian Truscott 59:49
it's great just the cucumber is the most English of many things right? But you put

Robert Rose 59:54
the fact that there are sandwiches complete sandwiches made of them. That was all we need to know.

Ian Truscott 1:00:00
Yeah, yeah, I know. People say that English food is bland. I mean it gives cucumber sandwich I'll give you just give this a taste. What's that? Oh, yeah, there you go. I'm just gonna give it a taste. That was delicious, Robert. So that was really worth all of that effort I put into it too, as you say yes, indeed a good thing that comes to those.

Robert Rose 1:00:20
It's It's, uh, you know, refreshing and hot and good. All this. You drink a whole picture of those, I'm sure.

Ian Truscott 1:00:27
Well, I tell you what, I'm going to have one of these every week, I think you probably

Robert Rose 1:00:30
should I loaded with the finish. We have one of those every week with your finish heavy metal going on in the background.

Ian Truscott 1:00:40
I wouldn't be calling this one this week.

Robert Rose 1:00:41
Well, this time we're calling it a ver DITA, which is a which is not my name. That is a name that is out there. So if you want to Google recipes for this, you can just Google ver DITA ve, R di TA, and you will find the recipe. Nice.

Ian Truscott 1:00:56
And where would one drink?

Robert Rose 1:01:01
Well, I have a craving for Hawaii. And it's probably because it has been cold here in Southern California. I guess I have Yes. Immediately disclaimer. And the asterisks come out, you know, with the footnotes at the bottom of the page. Yes, all of those things come to play here. Yes, cold here is I can never do the Celsius math properly. So low 50s. Here has been is is is considered very cold. Right. So and and a little cooler at night maybe into the you know, low 40s at night. So

Ian Truscott 1:01:38
yeah, well, that's maybe code this because it's obviously morning, your time and evening. Nighttime. It's dark and cold here. It's crisp and fresh. And it's not raining and there's no no clouds. So it's good. But it's significantly less than 15.

Robert Rose 1:01:51
Yes, I can imagine. It is after all, yes, that the right time of year for that.

Ian Truscott 1:01:57
So we're in Hawaii with drinking needs for details. And once we've exhausted all other compensation, and we are under Content, we want about thing, what are we going to be discussing this week? What's out?

Robert Rose 1:02:10
Well, we're going to talk about measurement. And, and marketing measurement specifically. Because it's it's top of mind for me these days, especially is when I'm starting to notice now is more of this focus on first party data and how we're measuring success and all those kinds of things. And what I you know, I said something that I didn't consider all that provocative, but I guess is relatively provocative. And it just comes from my experience of having done this marketing thing for now 30 years. And basically what what I said, and this was I said this to a marketing leader, colleague, CMO, and I said that basically, agreement on measurement is much more important than accuracy. And I didn't think that was that provocative or controversial. But But apparently, it is a little bit, you know, in terms of that, that idea. And here's what I mean by that is that so when I was talking with this CMO, he was asking for their direct reports to get sharper, basically, to improve the approach on measuring content marketing, in this case, contribution to the business contribution to the to the marketing success. And the interesting thing was that, you know, in the so I met with the team, and the team's first response to that, you know, that that sort of directive of get sharper on measurement was, as I see a lot of teams doing, digging into the numbers to make sure that they're accurate, right to make sure that they're, you know, they're precise. And that they you know, that they're indicating what it is that they are purporting to indicate. And I told the team, I said, No, I think that's actually the last thing you need to do. I said, it's not it has nothing to do with the accuracy, you know, defining what a web page means of whether it means that they viewed half a page or three quarters of a page or, you know, all that is, is silly, unless, unless you've got agreement on what success means. Yeah, and that's the real key here. And the example I used is I use the example of television ratings, which is my background, which is where I came from. I came from that. And my first job in marketing was in television. And my job was to convert television ratings into PowerPoints that the ad sales people would actually take out to the world and sell advertising on. And so I have direct experience with this and I learned everything there is to know about Nielsen ratings at the time. And everything like viewers per viewing household, we call them VP VHS and you know, all sorts of things about TV ratings. And TV ratings have never, ever, ever, ever in the history of anything ever been accurate. They're just not. They're just they have zero relationship to accuracy of what actual number of people are watching a particular show or watching a particular network or for how long? They just haven't. And so, you know, even back to the early days, the early days of TV ratings were people literally writing like handwriting into a diary, what they watched and for how long? You know, uh, you know, would you be shocked to learn that some of them actually didn't write it in the moment, they actually went back when it was due on Friday afternoon and sort of said, Hey, why don't we watch on Tuesday. And

so, and the other thing was this, and this is really the most sort of, you know, the dirty secret of TV ratings, if you will, is that up until just a few years ago, that was 20,000 households, right, you know, that basically determine what the household ratings were. And when you consider that there's more than 100 million homes just in the US? Well, that's the equivalent of walking into a basketball arena with 10,000 people in it, and trying to figure out what everybody wants for dinner by asking to have them. And so to allow, that's the difference, right? I said, the team, I said, Listen, the television advertising isn't a $60 billion a year industry because the measurement is accurate. It's a $60 billion industry, because everybody's agreed that this is the best we got. And this is what success looks like. And once we're all in agreement with that, great, now we can all go forward. And that's the same principle. So it's not the accuracy of your web visit, it's not the accuracy of your open rates, it's not the accuracy of your number of downloads, all of those things can be fine tuned and gotten and etc, it's just a matter of, of designing and engineering, the most important thing is to go back to the CMO, I said, and start agreeing on, here's our objective, and here's what will define that objective being met, right? So there's no ambiguity there. That's what getting sharper on measurement is getting sharper on measurement is getting agreement with your boss on what defines success, not what the accuracy of those definitions are, that will come later, that will come much later. And so once we started to do that, we changed the project, from basically looking at technology and looking at the data and looking at how accurate it was. And we changed it to rather saying, let's find and understand what the objectives of this content marketing programme are, let's come up with seven or eight different key results that actually define that objective. And then we'll go to the boss and say, Is this what you mean? And what will define it as and if we meet these key results, then we will have thus made the objective thus, we're getting sharper about our measurement programme. That's the difference.

Ian Truscott 1:07:56
Yeah, I love that, especially as I mean, we, it's so easy, isn't it as a marketer to get caught up in the in when you get these data dashboards and you start piling into the data, and you start getting obsessed of how do I define this particular metric and all that kind of stuff. And you've forgotten the why, of why you measuring and know that and that's what you need to get agreement on, don't you and those can be quiet, much more broader things that you're you're being measured on, that somebody else cares about, and the minutia that you tend to get lost in, right, if you when you're going to these tools,

Robert Rose 1:08:33
I've just been in so many meetings where, you know, we're the A team, not even, you know, the marketing team, but it can be really any team is presenting what success looks like, I've had these literally where a senior management team is presenting it to the board. I've seen it where it's being presented to the public, as part of, you know, the, the ultimate, you know, the quarterly earnings, I've seen it with marketing teams presenting to, you know, to their boss, and they present analytics and metrics. And they say, We got x therefore, we are successful. And the first question out of the other the audience, in this case, the, you know, sort of the board or the boss or the you know, the the analysts listening on the earnings call is how do you know that that's successful? Because they don't understand they have not agreed that X number of visits, X number of dollars, X number of growth is six months. And so, when you haven't agreed on what success means, you know, without standards, there can be no measurement. And and so, if you've not agreed on what the standard of success equals, then it doesn't matter how successful you were because you the the audience, either doesn't believe it doesn't know or doesn't understand. And it in any of those cases, it does, ultimately you fail to show that you've achieved what you've achieved. Now there, obviously, you know, some binary things there, right? I mean, you know, like, you know, if I, you know, if I come in and I say we just made a million dollars, and we had $0. Yesterday, obviously, we were successful. There are, you know, what I'm, what I mean here is, is that this is measurement over time, where incremental improvement over time is a justification for effort. In other words, you know, it's not about whether you won the lottery or not. And whether that's considered a success, it means I'm putting forth a plan that's going to cost effort and time. And therefore, I'm going to define success of that effort and time and money that I'm spending as this. And if we don't get agreement on the ones that have afforded us the effort and time, then it's, it's all it doesn't matter how successful or accurate you are. So that's why I always say that agreement on measurement is much more important than accuracy.

Ian Truscott 1:11:06
Yeah, I'm not in so hard while you're talking about this. I'm going to spill my drink. But the that conversation also, I mean, there's all this, all this talk about the CMOS relationship with the C suite. And you know, how, you know, marketing isn't understood and how, you know, the CMOS got a short tenure, those the very conversations aren't like the anchor marketing into the business, in that you're talking about tangible metrics. And that you're, you know, you're not talking about your MQL, blardy, blar. Whatever the marketing language. You're, you're talking about?

Robert Rose 1:11:42
You love that. Yes. Reading it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Ian Truscott 1:11:47
Yeah. And I think when you were saying that what I heard from what you were saying about people not understanding it was actually people not caring about it, right. You're, you're telling people something they don't care about?

Robert Rose 1:12:00
Yes. And or what's happening is, is that you get the reverse where they do care, and they shouldn't. Yes, you know, in other words, when I back when I was the CMO of a small software company, one of the things that I was successful in doing was sort of getting agreement on the important things, right, the important measurements that I wanted to be measured on which were typically revenue and cost, right. And so when I would show my measurement to my audience, which in this case was sort of the the venture capital team and my management team and my boss, who was the CEO, it would be around, here's my cost. Here's my savings. In other words, here's my you know, here's my costs, here's my savings. And here's the revenue that's being generated, you know, new, new customers, new value, all those kinds of things. And then when they would care about stuff like, well, how many visitors? Did we get to the website? Or how many tweets? Did we get retweeted? Or how many email subscribers did we get? Those are all numbers that I cared about and my team cared about. But I would say in the meeting, you don't care? Yeah, you don't care about all of those kinds of things. And so yeah, that's the that's, I mean, now, trust me, that's easier to say than it is to do, because a lot of bosses they share quite deeply about how many Twitter followers our brand has. And so, you know, your mileage may vary there on saying you don't care but but the point being is that they really shouldn't, that if you've got an agreement on what success looks like, that's what you're showing, that's what you should be reporting on, is the, you know, the the key progress, you know, the key, literally the KPIs, your key progress indicators have toward that objective, and toward those key results. That's, that's, and that's all you should be showing, because what that does is it gives you much more flexibility in order to get there. In other words, I want to kill the traffic to my website, because I find that moving them over to my blog gives me more revenue, I should be free to do that. But if I have to make sure that every graph is going up into the right, then I'm always going to be mediocre at best.

Ian Truscott 1:14:05
Yeah, I've saved in there. I mean, I've seen I've seen marketers that have used PPC in order to drive up pageviews completely pissing the money away. But they felt that that was a metric their management team were interested in and, and there's nothing more dangerous than a management team getting data out of context and thinking it's important, you know, and then and that drives crazy behaviour. So I think it's such a good thought about love it. And where, where if people wanted to find some sort of thoughts around this thing, and they and they were looking to, to measure the success of their day, where would they find them?

Robert Rose 1:14:46
Well, they would really find it in their own sort of inner conscious dream. Probably. If they're if you're at all interested in In what I have to say we've got a little website we call content advisory dotnet where we put up some of our of our thinking occasionally. And yeah, that's that's that's is place. I think. I've actually

Ian Truscott 1:15:13
got a question to ask you because I keep introducing you as the chief troublemaker, the content advisor, you still the chief troublemaker I am.

Robert Rose 1:15:19
No, no, I am indeed, I've kept it. I like it. Every time I go to change it. Yeah, somebody tells me how much they appreciate it. So I'm like, alright, you know, I always thought it was a like a little like, Chief ninja or, you know, that sort of thing. Yeah. Which I typically kind of rail on, but my fine, I'm gonna keep it,

Ian Truscott 1:15:36
I think. And then if people want to spin the dial on the interwebs and find the chief troublemaker wherever they

Robert Rose 1:15:43
are, you'll find me on LinkedIn for sure. And would love to connect with each one of you every one of you there. I'm a big believer in a big network on LinkedIn. And has become my favourite social network. And then of course, I'm on the Twitter because I love sort of the sort of add nature of it so on Twitter as well.

Ian Truscott 1:16:01
Splendid. All right, and let people know that you heard it here chaps. Thank you very much. And more importantly, well, I see you in the bar you

Robert Rose 1:16:12
will with probably fewer Finnish Gothic

Ian Truscott 1:16:17
thank God for that

thank you, Baba. He mentioned finished golf in the bar and there was a tiny snippet of lordy hard rock hallelujah. The 2006 Eurovision Song Contest winner so that's a wrap on episode 104 the Rockstar cmo effing Marketing Podcast thank you for dropping a diamond your podcasting jukebox selecting our track and driving along with us. I've been your host Ian Truscott. Thanks again to Jeff Rob and Kennedy and Robert for sharing their insight please say hello, follow their work and check out all their links in the show notes which you can find on your favourite podcast app or at Rockstar cmo.fm also find all our previous episodes does the world need another effing Marketing podcast? Please let us know and help others find us by dropping a rating or review in your favourite podcast app or just keep listening. I'm glad you're here. Next week as you heard Jeff and I will continue with the effing marketing fundamentals. My guest is carried Cunningham Product Marketing at six cents. And Robert will be back in Rockstar CFO virtual bar. Until then, have a great week. I hope my voice is back. And you will again join us here next week on Rockstar CMM F

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#104 - The Jeff on F'in' Research, Rob and Kennedy are Email Marketing Heroes and Robert Measures a Cocktail Episode

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#104 - The Jeff on F'in' Research, Rob and Kennedy are Email Marketing Heroes and Robert Measures a Cocktail Episode

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