Show Notes
- Iterative Marketing came from frustration with “big campaign” thinking.
- It is a compilation of best practices within marketing, just in a package and with a name.
- The methodology is based on six fundamental truths (level-setting beliefs/understandings of marketing) and six actionable components (the actions you take to apply Iterative Marketing).
Six Fundamental Truths are the shared beliefs of the Iterative Marketing community. They are:
- Persona-First: Marketing is most impactful when every idea is approached from a persona-first mindset.
- Programs (Not Campaigns): Programs produce the best ROI when they are indefinite (not time-boxed), continuous and repeatable.
- Measurement & Feedback: By making measurement and feedback part of the planning process, we ensure we have the data needed to make business decisions and allow for continuous improvement.
- Minimum Viable Marketing Program (MVMP): Beginning with a minimum viable marketing program maximizes opportunity to apply insights as a program grows, minimizing investment in unsuccessful ideas.
- Data-Driven Decisions: The best decisions are based on data, rather than bias or sunk cost.
- Create Insight: Experimentation is most valuable when it not only leads to improvement in program results, but also drives insights into our personas.
Charity of the Week:
St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital
Six Actionable Components are the actions we take as marketers to implement Iterative Marketing. They don’t have to be implemented all at once. They are:
- Brand Discovery: Uncover how your buying audience feels about your product or service and how they rationalize the decision to buy.
- Persona Discovery: Document the individuals involved in the buying process in a way that allows us to empathize with them in a consistent way.
- Journey Mapping: Plot the stages and paths of the persona lifecycle, documenting each persona’s unique state of mind, needs and concerns at each stage.
- Channel and Content Alignment: Align every piece of content and marketing channel/activity to a primary persona and primary marketing stage, identifying new channels and content needs where opportunities exist.
- Experimentation and Optimization: Conduct thoughtful experiments designed to produce statistically significant business insights and apply the results to optimize performance.
- Reporting and Feedback: Report and review data and insights to drive decisions in content and strategy, as well as information to be used by the organization as a whole.
We hope you want to join us on our journey. Find us on IterativeMarketing.net, the hub for the methodology and community. Email us at [email protected], follow us on twitter at @iter8ive or join The Iterative Marketing Community LinkedIn group.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste.
Producer: Heather Ohlman
Transcription: Emily Bechtel
Music: SeaStock Audio
Onward and upward
►▼Transcription
INTRO: Hello, Iterative Marketers! Welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast, where each week, we give marketers and entrepreneurs actionable ideas, techniques and examples to improve your marketing results. If you want notes and links to the resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. Now, let’s dive into the show!
STEVE: Hello everyone, and welcome to the very first Iterative Marketing podcast. I am your host, Steve Robinson. And with me, as always, is Elizabeth Earin.
ELIZABETH: Hello.
STEVE: How are you doing today, Elizabeth?
ELIZABETH: I am good. How are you?
STEVE: Oh, I am doing great today.
ELIZABETH: Well, I am excited. It is our first podcast.
STEVE: It is. It is. And what are we talking about today?
ELIZABETH: We are talking about Iterative Marketing.
STEVE: I suppose it makes sense to introduce what Iterative Marketing is to our audience tuning into the Iterative Marketing podcast.
ELIZABETH: I think they would appreciate that.
STEVE: I guess it probably makes sense to talk a little bit about the history of where the heck did Iterative Marketing come from, right? So Iterative Marketing, I guess, is technically my brainchild, although I think that there’s a good number of people that are along for the ride at this point, and that’s exciting. But Iterative Marketing came out of my time at traditional ad agencies where I got a little bit frustrated, because my background came from the digital side where everything is measurable, right? And so, when everything is measurable, you want to measure with everything – measure everything. And I got into some more traditional agencies and was frustrated when I asked the question, “Well, are we going to measure this?” And the answer was, “Well, sure. Just don’t tell the client we’re measuring it because we might not want to publish those results,” right?
And it became apparent that the way that marketing has traditionally been done is: Let’s come up with a really big idea, let’s throw a bunch of time and money at producing some assets behind that big idea. Let’s go out and spend a bunch of money on some media, line everything up. And like a set of dominoes, press them and hope they all fall down.
And that didn’t make sense to me coming from software development where the modern methodology is called agile and it’s all about doing things in small ways and improving. And that didn’t make any sense to me coming from digital marketing where we measure everything and try to improve upon it. And the idea of a big campaign just didn’t really mesh. And so, as much as I was working, you know, combining digital and traditional media and doing neat things, it was still unsatisfying from the standpoint of, “Can we do this smarter?”
And so I convinced a few clients when I was with the traditional agency to do that, to start smaller and set aside some budget for improvement, and not buy all the media at once. Instead, let’s test some stuff and iterate and improve. And it worked really, really well. So well, in fact, that I decided that I wanted to make that my life’s mission. So, now, I’m on a quest to rid the world of marketing waste as I — as I like to say it. And part of that is documenting this process and getting it all kind of contained into one methodology or movement or something that everybody can understand, and then getting out there so that other people can apply it.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, and you’ve brought us along on your journey of ridding the world of marketing waste. And as a former marketer, I can appreciate that. One thing I want — I want to go back to, though. You had mentioned that this was your brainchild. And I think it’s important to note that this isn’t something that you’ve invented are created. It’s — it’s more a compilation of successes from other market — other marketers and different industries that you’ve now applied in a systematic way to marketing.
STEVE: Yeah. Yeah. So as you said, it’s not something that I just created out of thin air. A lot of the stuff comes from other best practices within marketing. I think the only thing that’s unique is giving it a name and packaging it in a way that’s — that’s hopefully easier for people to understand. It’s not — none of this is obscure or strange or out of the ordinary or things that other people aren’t doing ad aren’t doing successfully. I don’t want to say it’s stolen, but a lot of it was, you know, take — take what’s working for other people and test it and try and apply it for yourself and figure out what does. And then even after that, since we’ve been applying it at Brilliant Metrics, the team at Brilliant Metrics has really added a lot to getting the system sort of refined and pulling in other external ideas and sources and best practices.
ELIZABETH: Now, you said it’s not obscure or strange, but it does differ from modern marketing in a few different ways. And, you know, can you talk a little bit about — about where those differences are?
STEVE: Sure. I think the biggest difference is really getting rid of that big campaign mentality. It’s starting small and measuring everything you can. Baking measurement in from the beginning and improving. And I think — you know, a little bit later we’re going to get into what the — when we say Iterative Marketing, what we mean. You know, what — what — the components of that. The truths and then the actionable components. But really, it’s just a little bit of a different mindset and approach. I’m sure you’ve seen it. What would you say is the biggest difference?
ELIZABETH: I think, for me, having — having come in and sort of being introduced to Iterative Marketing, the way I see it is: It’s asking us to change our way of thinking. And to throw out kind of what we’ve just assumed all along and go at it from a different standpoint, and I think that’s really where the six fundamental truths come in. I think that it helps kind if give a frame of reference as to how you should approach each — each of the problems.
STEVE: Yeah, and I think this is a good time to get into those six fundamental truths. I mean you’ve mentioned it. I’ve mentioned it. To take a step back, the way that we’ve sort of packaged this and system — systematized it is that we’ve – we’ve broken it down into six fundamental truths and six actionable components. And the fundamental truths, the goal of those are really to level set some of the beliefs or understandings about how marketing works best, so that we’re all approaching marketing, as a practice, from the same mindset. And then based on — if you don’t see the world this way, then the rest of this doesn’t make as much sense. And so it helps getting everybody looking at — looking at marketing from the same perspective.
The actionable components, on the other hand, are the actual steps, the things that you do. And, you know, steps kind of implies an order, and there really isn’t an order to them. But they’re the actions that you take to apply Iterative Marketing to get continuous improvement into your marketing processes. So I guess without further ado, let’s — let’s talk a little bit about the fundamental truths. Do you want to kick off the first one?
ELIZABETH: Sure. The first of the six fundamental truths is a persona-first mindset. And that’s really based on the concept of a customer-centric marketing, meaning that your marketing is designed with the needs of your target audience, or persona, in mind, rather than the needs of your brand.
STEVE: And so often, we, as marketers, feel like there’s things that we need to say. They need to know this stuff, right? And this is flipping that around from a statement of they need to know that our product is the best, you know, the fastest or whatever, to flipping that around to what do they need to know?
ELIZABETH: It’s figuring out what it is that your customer needs and your customers wants. And then it’s — it’s putting your product or service into that context.
STEVE: So the second one is the idea of programs and not campaigns. And this is where we really try to shift that thinking away from that big campaign mindset. And what is inherently wrong with a big campaign? Because, certainly, big creativity is not wrong. Big creativity is awesome. It’s more some of the way that marketers traditionally have structured their marketing programs based on the constraints of the media that they were working with.
So traditionally, we, as marketers, would create a campaign that would be time-boxed. It would have a fixed start time, a fixed end time. And then we would put all of our marketing activity in between those two dates. And then, if — depending on budget, depending on timing, we would probably, you know, flights and media. So we would run TV spots for weeks one, four and seven of the of the campaign. And then we would do other activities around that. And then the campaign would end, and then we would start the next big idea, the next big campaign.
And the idea of programs, not campaigns, is doing something that is not time-boxed. It runs until it’s no longer effective, because we’re measuring it. We know that. And we avoid flights. We want to keep it as continuous as possible so that we’re constantly generating feedback and that feedback is consistent. Finally we want to — if we’re forced to do something based on timing, like, say it’s a conference or another event or a seasonality of your business, we want to make sure that it’s at least repeatable so that we can take the lessons that we learned from the last one and apply it to the next one.
ELIZABETH: So I want to make sure I get this. Kind of the core component of programs, not campaigns, is that they’re indefinite, they’re continuous and they’re repeatable.
STEVE: Exactly.
ELIZABETH: And then the third component is measurement and feedback. And measuring and then having a feedback — feedback loop in place becomes a vital part of the process. Why is that?
STEVE: The whole idea of starting smaller and then growing and improving implies that you know where you need to go next. And if you don’t have data or feedback on what you just did and where you’ve been, then you don’t really know what did and didn’t work. So I think it goes beyond just — just having that feedback. It goes to the core of when you’re deciding what it is you’re going to do as part of this marketing program how can we bake measurement in so that it’s not an afterthought.
ELIZABETH: And I think that’s the key, is planning ahead for those measurement opportunities as opposed to after it’s all said and done, trying to figure out how you’re going to go back and prove to your executive team that what you’ve done actually was successful and makes sense.
STEVE: Exactly. And then the next one is, we kind of talked about this with the whole idea of starting small. It’s the minimally-viable marketing program. And this is stolen directly from the — Eric Ries and The Lean Startup, and the whole idea of a minimally-viable product. Applying the same sort of methodology to marketing, how can we test and make sure that the strategy, the approach that we’re taking from a marketing standpoint is going to work before we throw a whole bunch of resources at it. And I know, personally, this is an area that I struggle with. I don’t know. Elizabeth, you know, how does it play out with you and your work with clients?
ELIZABETH: Yeah. We just — it’s funny because we just talked about this today, actually. You know, you want — you want to come in with the big, flashy campaign. And you want to solve their problems. And so, you really — you’ve got to be cognizant of taking a step back and saying, “Can I make this a little bit smaller?” Can I test this first? Is there an opportunity to not throw all this money at it?” And I think that’s — that that’s the way to look at it. Starting small with a limited, yet strategic use of your marketing budget, and then carefully selecting those – those channels that allow you to test and determine those insights. And the key about this, and one of the things that really appeals to me about it, having been on the corporate marketing side, is this is an opportunity to become the marketing hero. Not only do you get to deliver on what you promised, you — in a lot of cases get to exceed expectations. Who doesn’t want to be that person at the end of the day?
STEVE: Absolutely, because you’re — you’re not setting the expectation at the beginning of the marketing program that this is going to — this is going to be the greatest thing we’ve ever done. And we’re spending all this money but we’re gonna get all of these returns and — and just wait until this thing is in market. Instead, it’s — you know what? This is an experiment. This is a trial. We’re going to start — we’re going to throw these sparks out there and see if they catch with the tinder that’s out there. And if not, then we’re going to learn something along the way. And that’s a lot lower bar that you’ve just set yourself up to jump over.
ELIZABETH: That’s a great point. And I think that leads well into, you know, we talked about the data. Data-driven decisions. That’s — you know, I think all the fundamental truths are important, but this is a really big piece of it. And it centered around the idea that the best decisions are based on data, not emotion. But there’s one thing, a word you use a lot, and when we first started working together, I actually had to have you to define this for me because I didn’t really understand what it was. But what are sunk costs, and how do you factor those in?
STEVE: So when you’re a marketer, often times you have this idea of, Well, we’ve already built up these assets. We’ve already gone down this road. We spent some money on media. We’ve accomplished a little bit, but it’s really not — not working. How can we — how can we tweak this in order to make it better?”
And the idea is, you don’t want to throw away everything that you’ve invested so far into that given program, campaign, creative, whatever it is, because you feel like, to change at this point means that you aren’t going reap any of the benefits from that investment. The reality is that if it isn’t working, you’re not going to reap any benefits from the investment anyway. And so that’s what’s called a sunk cost. The cost has already been sunk. It’s been spent. The money has been spent. You’ve made the creative. It’s not an asset for you. It’s not delivering. It’s time to forget that you even did that. And figure out, okay, starting from today with what we do have, what is the smartest way to go from here to getting new business or building awareness or whatever your objective is.
ELIZABETH: And I like that: It’s the smartest way. You know, we’re not talking about every day, you have to start over from scratch. It’s really trying to identify, based on the data, what is our best option for getting to where we need to be, given everything that is or is not available to us.
STEVE: And the data will tell you if, you know, if this idea isn’t going to work. And sometimes it doesn’t.
ELIZABETH: And then that leads us into our final truth, creating insights. And the Iterative Marketing methodology really supports the idea that experimentation is most valuable when it leads to improvement in short-term program results that drive insights that can be applied to, not only what you’re testing at that point in time, but your strategy moving forward in general. Can you talk a little bit what you’ve seen in the past with this and how this is different?
STEVE: Yeah, absolutely. So, if — part of the whole Iterative Marketing philosophy comes right out of a practice called conversion rate optimization. And if you Google conversion rate optimization, or CRO, you’ll get tons of information on how to execute tests and experiments, A/B tests or multivariate tests. There’s a whole discipline around this, right? But what you don’t get a whole lot of is what should those tests be testing. And the classic example is the green button or red button test. Should our buttons be green or should our buttons be red and the surprising thing is that if you test button color, you know what? It turns out different on a lot of different sites on which one actually performs better. But you walk away from that knowing what color your button should be on your website. That doesn’t really tell you a whole lot about the people that are clicking on those buttons. That doesn’t tell you anything about how your videos should look, because you don’t have green or red buttons on your videos. It doesn’t tell you what your next print piece should do.
So instead, focusing on testing which messages resonate, which features and benefits actually matter, which emotional triggers evoke emotion. And then that gives you some greater insight into your audience. You can test where you can reach them. But those are all things that help you across other channels. They help you in other mediums. They help you better understand your people so that you — your audience so you can better sell. There’s lots of other ways you can apply that knowledge outside of simply the website, the color the color of the button.
ELIZABETH: I think that’s a great point and I think, you know, as someone who has purchased billboard advertising in the past, that’s one of those mediums that you’re just kind of like, what do you do with it? It’s really hard to test the effectiveness. And you know, using this idea, you can test these digitally, and then transfer those results to your billboard campaigns. And so you do get that, a little bit of a level there of insight into it. With that being said, I am going to say I have possibly run a experiment in the past testing website button colors.
On that note, we are going to take a quick break. And we want to talk about some people that we would like to ask your help in helping.
Before we continue, I’d like to take a quick moment to ask you Iterative Marketers a small but meaningful favor. We don’t have sponsors for this podcast. Instead of asking you to get a free digital scale or enter some code for 10% off your website, we ask that you give a few dollars to a charity that’s important to one of our own. Since this is our first podcast, we have selected a charity that is important to both Steve and I. This week, we are asking that you make a contribution to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, the only pediatric cancer research center where families never pay for treatment not covered by insurance. As parents, this is something that we value. Your donation will go toward understanding, treating and defeating childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases. Learn more and make your donation at stjude.org or visit the link in the show notes.
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STEVE: Okay, welcome back, everyone. So prior to the break, there we talked about the six fundamental truths, and about how —- leveling of the beliefs so that we’re all approaching marketing from the same standpoint. But we didn’t —- none of that explains what you’re supposed to do, right? And so if you want to be successful with Iterative Marketing, the steps that we’ve been practicing that have led us to success are what we call the six actionable components.
ELIZABETH: I like that we call it the six actionable components because I, you know, I feel like steps may make it seem like these are small little things that you can just do quickly and checkbox, and I don’t want to create the wrong impression here. That is definitely not the case. These are actionable components that require some time and investment on your end, but are going to have long-term benefits to you and your organization.
STEVE: Absolutely. And as components, they’re individual things you can plug in and you don’t have to plug all of them in at once. As a matter of fact, I think it would be impossible to plug all of them in at exactly the same time. You can choose to plug in the ones that are going to have the greatest impact on your organization, and then, you know, ideally because they do work together, you get to an end state where you have all six of these things running and they’re all firing on all cylinders. And now you’ve got a fully-implemented Iterative Marketing program. But in the meantime, you have to pick and choose which of these are you going to chip away at first. And I think one of the ones that we’ve seen the most benefit at chipping away at is actually the first one. And that is, you know, discovering your brand. Elizabeth, do you want to talk a little bit about what you’ve seen with discovering your brand and maybe around the process?
ELIZABETH: Yeah. You know, when we talk about brand, it’s so much more than just your logo or your typeface. We’re really looking — when we talk about brand discovery, which is what this first component is referred to as, we’re really looking to uncover what it is that your buying audiences’ perceptions are about your product or your service. And the key word there is your buying audiences’ perceptions.
STEVE: Absolutely, because you don’t really have control over that. A lot of us think that we own our brand. No, our audience owns our brand. We own, perhaps, the visual identity that they might associate with that brand, but at the end of the day, they control their own perceptions of how it feels to work with us and what emotional triggers that they attach to our corporate name and logo and colors and fonts and all of that, all that fun stuff. Which, you know, is part of your brand. And that kind of brings us to half of discovering your brand is making sure that you have that visual identity locked down. I know, Elizabeth, you recently wrote a great post on this on the Iterative Marketing blog. What would you say are the key components to a visual identity portion of your brand?
ELIZABETH: I think consistency. And to have consistency, you really have to make this document more than just about your marketing department. Yes, they’re going to be the ones that are using it, but you really want to communicate this out to the rest of your organization so everyone understands, not only what these components are and why you’re doing them, but the importance of it and how that is helping to establish your brand in the eyes of your target audience.
STEVE: And we’ll get into a lot more on brand discovery next week with our next podcast, but the key is just getting it written down and getting it documented.
The next actionable component, then, becomes the persona. So the brand is talking about you as a brand and making sure that you understand what that means. Now we’ve got to flip the table and talk about the persona. And so we —- in the second actionable component, put together a process for understanding who it is you’re marketing to, and then creating a straw man, an individual that you’re going to hold up as being that target audience. And it’s not representative of everybody, because they only have one age, and one background, and they want to one college, and they live in one city. And we all don’t market to that narrow of an audience. But it allows you to really empathize with that individual. Would you say that’s kind of a good gist of it?
ELIZABETH: Yeah, I think that’s a great gist. And really, the key where you see that different —- that separation between target audiences and personas is that —- the persona just takes it a step further and really brings your target audience to life, giving you the ability to empathize with them.
STEVE: Excellent. What’s our next component?
ELIZABETH: The next one is journey mapping. And this is the one where I, personally, feel like, if you’ve been able to go through brand discovery and you’ve gone through persona discovery, then journey mapping is a lot easier and a lot more fun. And really, what you’re doing here is your identifying and documenting your prospects’ or customers’ path as they move through the sales cycle. And you’re looking at how their needs change along each point of that path.
STEVE: Yeah, I think you hit it with fun. I really do enjoy this part of the process. It’s a lot of fun to a) make —- you’re writing a story, and you’re getting inside of your target market’s head like you wouldn’t in any other way because there’s an action component. You know, they’re in different states of mind, they’re in different states of the buying cycle. And it’s almost like scripting a play. It’s fun.
ELIZABETH: And not only that, but it helps to identify opportunities. Because again, this is a document that is not just for the marketing department. The entire organization can benefit from it. If your frontline team has an understanding of the person who’s walking up to the counter, what’s going through their mind at that point in time, if your research and development team has some insights into why the prospects started using your product or sought out your product in the first place they can build that into the design. There’s so many opportunities for the entire company to benefit when you look at customer journey mapping. And so, again, it’s one of those really fun things and I always get excited when a client says that they are ready to go down that path.
STEVE: And then the hard work begins, right? Because the next actionable component is, now, aligning all of your collateral and all of your channels with the personas you developed, the brand that you’ve discovered, and this journey map. So that you can make sure that you’re getting the right message to the right person at the right time. And that’s often a lot of work, and it’s often a lot of uncovering. “You know what? We didn’t really think a couple things through in the past when we were setting this up before.” What’s your experience been kind of reconciling the stuff with the future direction here?
ELIZABETH: Yeah, this is where —- this is kind of where you’re like, “Wow, I did all this great work and now I really have to dig in,” because you do. You’re looking at past creative, past collateral, you’re looking at your website, you’re looking at every little piece. And you know, with insight comes great responsibility. And the responsibility is now you need to kind of rework what you have, or in some cases, you know, throw it out completely. And sometimes, that can be a little overwhelming. But I think if we continue to balance that with the opportunity that we now have, and we look at it from that standpoint, you know, the whole world has opened up to us.
STEVE: And yes, it does seem overwhelming. The key is to bite it off in small chunks. And I’m sure we’ll get into this in more detail in a future show, but if you just focus on one persona and one journey, it’s really not that big of a deal. And because you don’t have to implement it all at once, you can, again, start small and get bigger.
ELIZABETH: Yep, that just takes it right back to our fundamental truth of starting small.
STEVE: The next one is experimentation and iteration. Do you want to take this one, Elizabeth?
ELIZABETH: Sure. So experimentation and iteration, again, a major part of the Iterative Marketing methodology, and it’s really designing thoughtful experiments that are meant to produce statistically significant and relevant business insights that extend past the button color that you referred to earlier. And the key here, really, is there’s two portions: It’s statistically significant and relevant.
STEVE: We are so prone, as marketers, to immediately jump on whatever story comes in through customer service or sales about this — you know what? This collateral just totally knocked out, or you know, I just had somebody come up to me and tell me how great the TV commercial was. All of that stuff, because of the way that our brains are wired, there’s way too much weight in our decision-making in the future. And so the key is, how can you — how can you bake in the ability to get real feedback, test things in ways that are going to produce enough data that it’s not just, “Well, So-and-so said that that commercial was great.” It’s, instead, you know, click-through rate or the conversion rate on people who are exposed to this particular message was 1.25 times what it was with the other message, and that’s at a 90% statistical significance, or 98% ideally, statistical significance. That’s a whole different world. And it’s not — it sounds geeky and complicated, but it’s really not too hard to get your head around, once you dive into it. And once you do, now you’re able to back up every single decision you make based on the data and it becomes irrefutable, which can actually really help you with your stakeholders.
ELIZABETH: It can, and the graphs look really pretty too. So there’s always that.
STEVE: True. Which kind of gets us to the last actual component. Then we’ll be through all twelve points that we had to talk about today. And that is reporting and feedback. And this is really key, because, if you think about it, as a marketer, whether you’re on the agency side or on the corporate side, one of your biggest challenges is getting enough budget to really do your job, right? If you’re —- if you really knock it out of the park with reporting and you’re able to give the stakeholders and the people holding those purse strings the data that shows you exactly where their investment has gone, what the return on that investment was, what assets you built, everything else that you’ve done to really apply that money in a way that is safe because you’re applying Iterative Marketing. You’re starting small and you’re continuously improving. Now it becomes a whole lot easier to justify any additional budget you want to get to. It also really proves your value to the organization, especially when you start throwing in those insights, right?
ELIZABETH: Having worked in marketing for different companies and in different industries, one thing that was consistent along with, you know, every path I’ve been down is that marketers have a tendency to be undervalued within the organization. And it’s, you know, because no one really understands what marketing does. They’re kind of assuming that it’s this touchy-feely, you know, my creative are off in their, you know, own world doing what they do. We’re often given limited information and limited resources, yet we’re expected to perform miracles. And you know, to top it off, when — we often get blamed when a campaign falls short of expectations, but if the campaign does well, a lot of times, that success gets attributed to customer-facing departments and our role gets downplayed.
STEVE: Right.
ELIZABETH: And so, coming back to what it is that I love about Iterative Marketing is that it really helps to reposition marketing as a business insight generator, and it allows us, as marketers, to take control of the data and deliver tangible insights that guide the growth of the company, and you know, kind of reinforce the value that we, as marketers, are bringing to the organization.
STEVE: Absolutely. I would say that you summed up exactly where my passion comes into this. The only other thing I would add is that it really hits home on my whole drive to get rid of waste in marketing, right? Because it makes the process of determining where you’re putting your resources 1) based on data and logic, and 2) it doesn’t kill the creative component but it keeps you safe and where you’re spending money and doesn’t put your way out on a ledge where, you know, you’ve just spent crazy sum of money on some big campaign that we think it changed everyone’s ideas.
ELIZABETH: And, you know, I think that’s — you said something that’s really interesting and I think is important to touch on. I think so often, people think I can have — I can have analytics or I can have creativity but I can’t have both, and that’s not the case. We are arming our creatives with better information and we’re giving them the power to really go out and explore. You know, we’re giving them, you know, brand discovery. We’re giving them personal development. We’re giving them the customer journey. They now have this unique insight into the heads of who it is we’re trying to reach and they can run wild with it. And then once they’ve developed that creative, we can say, “Yeah, this worked,” or “This one didn’t work. What variation can we try? How can we see if we can make this better?”
STEVE: The worst thing you can do to a creative mind is give it a blanket canvas, right? Because ask any artist, ask any designer you know. If you give them an assignment with no direction and no constraints, you can’t do anything with it. This not only gives you just enough constraints, but there — it’s telling you exactly where you’re — where the rubber’s going to meet the road in your creative, where is this going to have an impact and how. And so, the person who’s creating it feels like there’s so much more a sense of impact, of this is going to — this is going to do something, because you can see exactly who it’s going to impact and how.
So I think now is probably a good time to talk about, you know, kind of looking forward. This is our first podcast. What else do we have going on? What do we want our listeners to do at this point? I think that, at least for me, and you can speak for yourself, Elizabeth. I would just love it if everybody came away from this intrigued and interested. And what is Iterative Marketing? Is it a good fit for me and my business? And wanting to — wanting to learn more, and ideally subscribing to this podcast to do so.
ELIZABETH: Yeah, definitely. We —- you know, I think we really just want you to join us on our journey. Getting back to Steve’s point earlier, that we are really focused on ridding the world of marketing waste. The best way we can do that is to get together and share best practices and talk about what’s working and what’s not working. And that’s where, you know, we’re really looking forward to having you not only listen to the podcast, but join us on some of our other channels. You know, you can find us on iterativemarketing.net, kind of the hub for Iterative Marketing. And we strongly encourage you to join us on our journey by subscribing to the podcast, like Steve said, which can be found anywhere that you find podcasts, as well as on YouTube.
And then, we’re also looking for your feedback. You can either e-mail us at: [email protected], you can find us on Twitter at — sorry, Twitter at @iter8ive. Or you can join us in our LinkedIn community, the Iterative Marketing Group.
STEVE: I want to thank everybody for their time today and please do subscribe to the podcast. Be sure to come back and check us out next week, where we will be talking about brand discovery. So until then…
ELIZABETH: Bye!
OUTRO: The Iterative Marketing podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, the consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste. Our producer is Heather Ohlman with transcription assistance from Emily Bechtel. Our music is by SeaStock Audio Music Production and Sound Design. You can check them out at: seastockaudio.com If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube and/or your favorite podcast directory. Visit iterativemarketing.net for more Iterative Marketing goodness. We will see you next week! Until then… Onward and upward!
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