Show Notes
There are four areas to apply Iterative Marketing to your existing marketing, without starting from scratch. They are through Discovery, Setup, Reporting and Iteration.
- Discovery is laying the groundwork. Make sure you have a defined and documented brand, vision and target audience. Most importantly, develop a persona for the key decision maker in a majority of your sales. Reference our B2B and B2C buyer persona templates and customer journey map template and customer journey podcast episode.
- Setup includes having infrastructure in place to measure your marketing and define your KPIs. Measurement is essential because you cannot create this data later. Use the See, Think, Do format to organize your KPIs based on the customer journey stage your prospect is in. Reference podcast episode 4.
- Within setup, align your content and channels with one persona. Having a customer journey here helps you further personalize your marketing to an individual persona. Reference podcast episode 5 on how to align content and channels.
- Finally, establish an on-going program. Iterative Marketing does not work with a time-boxed campaign. Programs are on-going marketing activities that can be continuously improved. Reference this blog on minimum viable marketing programs or this podcast.
- Reporting is connecting the dots between marketing and revenue. This is an important topic for marketers to prove their value to the C-suite and executives. With KPIs and measurement in place, you can format your reports to prove ROI. Also make sure you include long-term assets in your reporting.
- Iteration is the continuous improvement of your marketing. It is done by executing A/B experiments to identify opportunities for improvement. Review podcast episode 7 on designing an effective marketing experiment and this blog how to ensure your A/B testing get results.
Charity of the Week:
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 podcast@iterativemarketing.net, 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
Steve Robinson: 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!
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast. I am your host, Steve Robinson, and with me, as always, is the charismatic and insightful, Elizabeth Earin. How are you doing today, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: I am good, Steve. How are you?
Steve Robinson: I am doing wonderful, absolutely wonderful. I am kind of curious. Do you have pets?
Elizabeth Earin: I do. I have two very large dogs, a chocolate Lab named Yokes, which is short for a beach in Hawaii, and a wolf-Husky mix named Leroy.
Steve Robinson: Wow! Wolf-Husky mix, that’s going to be a beautiful dog.
Elizabeth Earin: Beautiful and he’s the biggest cuddler in wintertime. He’s like a dog blanket just laying over me, keeping me warm.
Steve Robinson: That’s awesome.
Elizabeth Earin: What about you? Do you have pets?
Steve Robinson: No, unfortunately, I have allergies that prevent us from having any pets, at least of the four-legged varieties, so…
Elizabeth Earin: Do you have pets of another legged variety?
Steve Robinson: No, but we are talking about getting some fish, maybe, so we’ll see how that goes.
Elizabeth Earin: Big, big commitment there.
Steve Robinson: I know, I know. So what we are talking about today?
Elizabeth Earin: Today, we are talking about applying the Iterative Marketing methodology within an existing marketing organization. And I’m really excited about this, because everything that we have been talking about the last few weeks, we are kind of tying it all together and giving some actionable insights as to how this can be applied within your organization today.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, it’s not like most marketing organizations can just stop and hit a reset button and kill everything they are doing and then reintroduce it in an Iterative manner, although some might wish they could.
Elizabeth Earin: I was just thinking that sounds pretty nice.
Steve Robinson: But yeah, we all have a lot going on. And so if we are ever going to start implementing Iterative Marketing, usually it means bolting it onto existing marketing activities. And so today, we will cover that. We are going to cover in kind of four sections. The first section will be kind of lumping several of the actionable components into discovery phase, so the things that you can do more or less to help document and understand the components of your marketing. The next thing is the setup components, the things you need to do before you can really introduce Iterative Marketing. Then we will move into reporting and then backtrack, actually, to the fifth component and talk about how iteration, the experimentation and optimization fit into an existing organization.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think it’s important to note that we kind of need to warn our listeners that this is going to be the show of links in the show notes. Pretty much everything that we are talking about either refers back to a previous podcast or a previous blog, so be warned. And also if you haven’t already, now is a great time to subscribe to the show notes so that you don’t miss out on these in future links.
Steve Robinson: So let’s jump into Discovery. When we look at Discovery, we are really looking at laying that groundwork in making sure that you have your documentation in order so that you not only clearly understand your own brand and your target audience, but you have it written down on paper so that you can share it with others.
Elizabeth Earin: If you don’t do anything else, we can guarantee that you are going to get a huge value out of going through these processes and documenting your brand, your personas and your customer journey map. And unfortunately, I feel like a lot of companies, you take a look at your available resources and you take a look at time and you get excited about implementing something. And a lot of times, you kind of leap past these discovery pieces, and I think that we are missing an opportunity when we do that.
Steve Robinson: That said, we are sort of going to give the audience your permission to skip, if necessary, two out of these three components before implementing anything else. And so we would definitely love it if everyone took a look at their brand, dusted that off because we know that that brand definition probably is sitting in a drawer somewhere. Make sure that it is really up to snuff and ready to be communicated outside the organization, because that will come up later. And the same thing with buyers’ journey which we will talk about in a moment. But the key component is to make sure that you have personas buttoned up, because if you don’t have your persona, at least your primary target persona, the key decision-maker in all of your sales or the majority of yours sales buttoned up and defined than the rest of this will be for naught.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think that’s an important distinction too, is you don’t have to jump in and document everyone at once. Start with that primary decision-maker first. Create that persona and we have got – we talked about that in Episode 3 of the podcast, but we also have a really fabulous blog post that outlines – offers a template and kind of outlines the process for both B2B and a B2C persona template. So, definitely check that out if you haven’t had a chance yet or you are in the process of developing personas because that can be very useful. But really focus again on that primary decision-maker and start small.
Steve Robinson: And then if you have the time and the effort, you’ll get a lot of benefit out of documenting that primary persona’s user journey. It will make everything else we talk about today a whole lot easier. And again we will have resources that will link in the show notes including episode – was it Episode 4, where we talk about the user journey as well as some wonderful blog posts and another template created by Elizabeth that we will link to in the show notes as well.
Elizabeth Earin: Perfect. So that kind of summed up discovery, but once we get through those documents and we have got this done, in a perfect world, we have been able to do all three. What’s our next steps in getting this set up?
Steve Robinson: Well, you are going to want to make sure that you have a couple of things in place before you can really implement Iterative Marketing as a practice. The three things that you need to have in place before you can start your iterating and your continuous improvement is that you need to be working with a program that is continuously running versus just campaigns. You can’t do this with campaigns. We will talk more about that in a second. You need to have some rudimentary measurement and KPIs set up, because you can’t continuously improve if you aren’t figuring out where you are, right? And then finally, you need to start aligning your content, your channels with that one persona that we asked you to develop under Discovery, so that’s why that was key, and we’ll talk about that. So, do you want to dive in first into campaigns versus programs and how our listeners can go about converting maybe campaign-driven marketing into more program-driven marketing?
Elizabeth Earin: Definitely. So converting campaigns to programs, this is one of the Iterative Marketing fundamental truths, it’s our second fundamental truth, and it’s really important that we get out of the campaign mindset and, instead, move into looking at everything that we are doing as a program, with a program being something that’s ongoing and repeatable. And so when we start taking a look at our current campaigns, how we have been doing it since the beginning of time, and transferring these into programs, we really want to look for and identify ways that are what is consistent from campaign to campaign and to kind of put this into a little bit of context and see if it makes a little bit more sense when we are talking about a B2B business. If you have been running white papers quarterly, so each quarter you are switching out, you always have a white paper, but each quarter it may change. You may be putting something new out there, you can look at combining those white paper campaigns into one continuously running content marketing program. And so rather than timeboxing that and saying it’s going to only run for a specific amount of time, we are kind of looking at it being something that’s going to continue over time.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, and by taking those individual white papers as individual campaigns and looking at it, instead, as a continuously running program, now you have the opportunity to apply those same mechanics to the white paper to maybe some other gated assets that you could put out there, like maybe a tool that would be of huge benefit to your audience. So you take one set of tactics and now you can use them over and over again, possibly in another context.
Elizabeth Earin: That is right.
Steve Robinson: If you were a B2C, say you are a hotel, and you are running monthly pricing specials, right? So now you can take those pricing specials and you are probably looking at these as your monthly campaign that you kick out. But you are following a lot of the same tactics. Well, why not turn that into one continuously running program? The only thing that changes is the details of the given offer that would change on a monthly basis.
Elizabeth Earin: And so in both of those cases, again, we are looking at what’s consistent from campaign to campaign and then finding a way to take advantage of those and turn that from a campaign into a program.
Steve Robinson: And if that’s not the way that your organization operates, but you have that recurring type of campaign, that makes sense to just turn into a program because it kind of is a program. You may have an upcoming campaign that could have more shelf life if it were just given the opportunity, and then if that’s the case, all you need to do is remove the timebox. So, for example, if you are planning an upcoming contest or promotion, how can you create a framework for all contests and promotion and create an ongoing program of contests and promotions where the contest might change out on a monthly/bi-monthly/quarterly basis but the mechanics are going to stay the same continuously?
Elizabeth Earin: I think it’s important to note, regardless of which kind of way you are going about this, it’s important that you document the personas. And that’s one of the reasons, at the beginning of the podcast, we said that if you don’t do anything else in the Discovery phase, make sure you document your persona. And that’s because we really want to make sure that we are targeting the persona to our program, and that gives us the ability to, then, personalize our content, personalize our media channels to the best of our ability so that we can identify areas where we can make improvements in the future.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, and then it also gives us the opportunity, as we introduce experiments and iteration, the insights that we glean will be based on those personas, whereas if it’s a scattershot program applied to just the general audience, then we don’t know who we are learning about as we learn insights.
Elizabeth Earin: And if we have got two very different personas, they may be taking very specific actions, but because we have lumped them together, they have now cancelled each other out so that experiment loses its value.
Steve Robinson: The other thing I think is important is to figure out, how can you scale things back or how can you start small? One of the tenets of Iterative Marketing is the idea of starting with a minimally viable marketing program, so how can you start with the smallest successful marketing program and then build on from there? So if you are taking a look at a future campaign and wanting to remove the timebox and turn that into a program, what is the smallest set of tactics that you can apply at once at the beginning and then bolt things on as you learn more? We have a great blog post on this, we will link to it in the show notes along with the rest of the world apparently. But when you do this, it’s also important that you reset the stakeholders’ expectations, because if they are coming in thinking that this is going to be another great big campaign and now you have said, “No, we are going to start smaller and then iterate and improve from there,” that’s a very different mindset. And so they are going to automatically be disappointed if they are setting themselves up for a big bang and you are coming in with a small trickle that’s going to turn into a flood.
Elizabeth Earin: That’s a really great point. And I think setting clear expectations from the beginning is really one of the keys to success of these programs.
Steve Robinson: The second component of setup is making sure your — that you have measurement KPIs in place. If you don’t do this early enough, you can’t go back and create that data later. And I can’t tell you the number of times where we have said, “Man, I really wish we were measuring this, because now we are stocking, we don’t have this KPI that would be really valuable.” And so it’s important at the beginning or before you start trying to design experiments or improve, that you figure out what are the most important things to measure and how you are going to go about measuring them.
Elizabeth Earin: So, Steve, is there a way that we can structure these KPIs and these measurements?
Steve Robinson: Yeah, absolutely. I think that it comes back to — and I know we’ve referred to this in past shows and we will refer to it in future shows — but using Avinash Kaushik’s See, Think, Do methodology. Because your KPIs are going to be very different depending on what stage your persona or prospect is in at any given moment, and so I’m not going to review the details of See, Think, Do. We have a link in the show notes. If you are not familiar with it, please go and check it out. But if your prospect is in the See stage, you are not going to be able to measure any actions that they are taking directly. Instead, you are going to be looking at what is your brand awareness and how is that changing over time. And the metrics that you are going to want to make sure that you are able to capture are how many impressions am I getting in to the persona that I’m targeting? And what am I paying for those impressions? And how certain can I be that they are being delivered? So, you are really looking at how effectively am I able to get my message to that audience? Now if you are in Think and Do, in those instances, usually we have a lot more of direct response type of tactics where we are asking that audience to do something. So in this case, you just want to make sure that you have a measure, both for the quantity of people that are doing it as well as the quality of the people that are doing it. So, if you are asking people to visit a particular landing page, you want to not only measure how many people got there, but how much do they engage with that page. Did they follow through? Did they convert? If you are asking people to make a purchase, you want to make sure that you understand, not only how many people converted, but what was the dollar amount of revenue on each one of those sales, so that you are getting not only a quantity but the quality. And again, we have a great blog post on this we are going to link to in the show notes. You can go and learn more and dive in on KPIs and how to apply them, but the key is to make sure that you put some forethought into this.
Elizabeth Earin: So after you have checked out the blog, you have kind of figured out what those KPI should be, your next up is making sure that you are able to measure that. And so there are some great tools out there that allow you to measure these different metrics that you have identified, and Google Analytics is one of them. And one of the important things I think is you want to make sure that you have got Google Analytics set up and working correctly for you.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, yeah. You definitely need to get the geeks on this, because Google Analytics, out of the box, is a great tool, but it’s probably not measuring exactly what you need to have measured to know that you are guaranteeing success. So make sure that somebody who knows that tool inside and out is able to get it giving you the information you need. If you need to know how long people are spending on individual web pages, you might not know that Google Analytics actually does a really crummy job of measuring that out of the gate. You have got to geek on that to get the actual numbers you need in order to be able to make educated decisions.
Elizabeth Earin: So once we have converted our campaigns into programs, we have set up your KPIs and applied the measurement from the beginning so that we are able to track the results and the success, sort of the next area we want to focus on in terms of set-up is channel and content alignment. And this is where we want to take a deep look at our content and re-evaluate it and figure out if we have an opportunity to further personalize it to meet the unique needs of our target persona, again tying back to that. If you don’t do anything else, make sure you do your persona development ,because it is so important to this process.
Steve Robinson: And once you have tweaked your content and made sure that it aligns with an individual persona, now you have another challenge of, well, what about my channels that I was using to deliver this content? Do those actually allow me to pinpoint a persona to deliver that now personalized content to an individual persona that it’s been personalized for? And so your next challenge is now to audit all of your channels and make sure that you have maximized your targeting abilities within each one of those channels so that you can deliver your content down to a one-on-one level with your personas.
Elizabeth Earin: And this is where having that documented customer journey is so helpful. We said that’s one of those areas that’s optional, but having tried to do this with a customer journey and without, I would almost argue that it’s not possible to do it or not possible to effectively and efficiently do it, but your customer journey is going to allow you to match your content and your media channels to that persona. And not only match it to that persona, but match it to where that persona is in their buyers’ journey. And without that documentation, there’s an opportunity that you can definitely get off track with that.
Steve Robinson: And we have got a whole episode of this podcast, Episode 5, that’s on mapping your content and channels to your buyers’ journey. We will link to that in the show notes, along with a couple of supporting blog posts, so you have got plenty more resources on this topic as well. I think now we have kind of covered the discovery components which you can do at any time, but persona definitely needs to be done before you get started on anything else. And we have covered the set up, the stuff you need to have in place. Before we get into reporting and the actual act of iterating and that continuous improvement, I think now would be a great time for us to talk about how we might help some people.
Elizabeth Earin: Before we continue, I would like to take a quick moment to ask you Iterative Marketers a small, but meaningful favor and ask that you give a few dollars to a charity that’s important to one of our own. This week’s charitable cause was sent in by Josh Arter of the Zizzo Group Solutions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Josh asks that you make a contribution to Pathfinders, an organization providing housing and education programs to at-risk youth in the City of Milwaukee. Learn more at pathfindersmke.org or visit the link in the show notes. If you would like to submit your cause for consideration for our next podcast, please visit iterativemarketing.net/podcast and click the Share a Cause button. We love sharing causes that are important to you.
Steve Robinson: Okay, and we are back. So before the break, we talked about Discovery, getting your documentation in line. We talked about the setup, the things you need to have in place before you can really introduce continuous improvement. That stuff is really followed in order of the actionable components of Iterative Marketing. So we have basically covered on one through four of those actionable components. Five is where we get into the continuous improvement components of iteration and experimentation, but we are going to skip over that briefly, because the lower hanging fruit, the easier thing to implement, is actually reporting. So what are we talking about when we are talking about reporting, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: Reporting is connecting the dots to the revenue. And this is something that is a hot topic among marketers. I know it’s something that our executive teams and our C-suites are asking about. And to your point, there’s some low-hanging fruit here where we can really connect back what we are doing to the revenue.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, especially if you put in place those KPIs we talked about during the setup, you now are armed with the data. So now, it’s just a matter of putting that into a format that your stakeholders can really digest and proves your value. It’s important, though, that you don’t just look at connecting the dots to ROI, but you also look at how you are building up assets towards long-term growth of your marketing department. So, where are you setting yourself up for success in the future? And we have got, again, a whole podcast episode on this and a bunch of supporting blog posts that we’ll link in the show notes, but the key is you have got the data now, so use it to your advantage and show them what you are worth.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think if you are not currently reporting on your long-term assets, this is a great opportunity to really highlight what it is that you are contributing to the organization. It’s something that your marketing efforts are doing to help set the company up for future success. And like I said, if you are not currently reporting, this is a really great opportunity to get in front of your C-Suite, or your executive team, your leadership team, and show them what it is that your hard work has been resulting in.
Steve Robinson: So, now we are going to get into the meat of Iterative Marketing, and actually start applying the iteration and the continuous improvement to your marketing. If you have been following along with us today, you have a documented persona and you have taken a look at your existing campaigns and figured out where you can convert a campaign into a program so that it’s going to run long enough that you can actually iterate and improve upon it, right? And then you have also set up your measurements so that you have the metrics to be able to do any improvement in iteration and know when you are doing better than you were last month. And then finally, you have aligned your channel and your content with that one persona so that you know that when you are making improvements, you are making improvements that impact that persona’s journey, right? So, now we start getting into actually executing experiments so that you can identify those opportunities for improvement.
Elizabeth Earin: And to set up a successful experiment, you really have to start in an area where your channels and your content are unique to a single persona, so that anything you learn, all of the insights you gather can be applied to your knowledge of that persona. And we touched on it earlier, if you try to target too many personas at one time, a lot of times, the experiment that you are running is going to come back as being inconclusive. And it’s not necessarily that it was inconclusive, but you have got two very different people or three very different personas who are motivated by taking actions on different things. And when you combine them all together, we aren’t able to see those insights and see that proof in what they are doing. And so it’s very, very important that you make sure that the content and the channels are targeted to one single persona.
Steve Robinson: And if you need a review on Experiments, you are going to want to take a look at Episode 7 or one of the blog posts that we link to in the show notes. But basically, an experiment is an A/B test. So it’s two different versions of creative, two different attempts at targeting an audience through a channel, and then figuring out which one is performing better. Some examples of easy ones to implement right out of the gate are headlines. We love headline tests because headline tests not only give us usually pretty good bumps in performance, but they are also great for generating insights on personas. You can also test your calls to action and make sure that you are asking the audience to do the next logical thing or the easiest thing for them to do, and figure out how motivated that audience is or what actions they want to take within their journey. And then you can also mess with graphics and look and feel and make sure that you are really creating an environment that is not only true to your brand, but also evokes the right emotions and feelings in your audience. And it’s amazing what you can learn by swapping out graphics and changing the focus visually of your content on where the audiences’ focus needs to be as they move forward.
Elizabeth Earin: So we want to hear about your successes or your challenges in applying Iterative Marketing. There’s a couple of different ways that you can connect with us. We’d love to hear your feedback on the LinkedIn group, or you can tweet us with how it’s going for you. And if you run into any difficulties, we are here to help, so we’ll do our best to point you in the right direction. Just reach out to us and we will get back to you.
Steve Robinson: Please join us next week when we talk about breaking down the silos between marketing and sales. And I want to thank you for your time in joining us this week. We hope to see you next weekend. Until then, onward and upward!
If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube or on your favorite podcast directory. If you want notes and links to 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. You can also follow us on Twitter. Our username is @iter8ive, or email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a 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. We will see you next week. Until then, onward and upward!
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