Author: Grant Duncan

Categories
b2bmarketing gtmstrategies

5 Proven Strategies to Enhance Your Marketing Team’s Customer Insights

Our whole Marketing team has better insights 💡 on our customers than almost every employee outside of our Sales & CX team.

That’s because every Marketer at Zingtree meets with 10 prospects, customers, or ICPs per quarter.

These insights guide our writing, our design, our strategies.

Want to implement this in your org? Here are some ways:

1)
Take amazing notes during the meetings, esp. when joining Sales & CX calls. 
Now you are an asset b/c you give the rep great notes, rather than being a burden for joining the call.

2)
Make it an OKR for every Marketer every quarter

3)
Join relevant Slack/FB communities so you have access to ask ICPs to chat

4)
Look at Sales & CX calendars and ask to join meetings and be a fly on the wall

5)
Build trust with Sales & CX by being an asset with meeting notes AND by being responsive to many of their requests in general.

How are you getting insights and upleveling Marketing’s value in the company?

Categories
experimentation marketing

Unleashing Marketing Potential: Innovative Experimentation Strategies for Success

Marketers should always have some of their time and budget dedicated to experimentation. Here are some ideas for ways to experiment:

>> Change the company size parameters

>> Broaden the countries or languages you target

>> Go after a different industry 

>> Try new job titles
Either include them in your existing ad campaigns or break it out separately with job title specific messaging. 

>> Test new messaging and see if it resonates better with your audience. 
You can use organic or paid social to do this, you can change website copy, or you can use a tool like Wynter to get feedback behind the scenes. 

>> Work with a partner to test a joint solution with a few prospects. 

>> Test a new channel for organic or paid and see the engagement you get. 

These are just a handful of examples to get your brain thinking. 

What other experiments have you tried? What have been some of your most successful experiments?

Categories
marketing soilscience

Demystifying Marketing Jargon: A Soil Scientist’s Guide for Non-Marketers

My wife made a “glossary for non-Marketing folks” & sent it to my family after I shared a Marketing podcast I was on.

She’s a Soil Scientist so I’m amazed at how accurate her jargon decryption is!

Here’s what she sent: 🔥🤯

-ICP = ideal customer profile

-CAC = cost of acquiring customer

-pipeline = sales/marketing pipeline from potential customer (lead) to sales-identified great fit (opportunity) to closed-won (customer chose Zingtree!)

-OKRs = objectives & key results (to define goals/track outcomes)

-keywords = company selected words/phrases for paid search ads (ex. Someone types “customer support software” into Google, & if it’s a Zingtree keyword phrase, the algorithm may show an ad based on the bid settings ($))

-demand gen = creating awareness/demand for your product & the problem it solves for customers

-demand capture = getting potential customers into the sales pipeline of your specific brand/solution

Pretty impressive for someone not in Marketing, right?!
I guess we’ve talked about my job a lot 😅

You should use this when teaching your family what you do!

Categories
1

Revolutionize Your Business: Unleashing Modern Demand Gen Strategies to Break Through Plateaus

Most companies are going to hit a plateau at some point. What do you do when that happens?

My #1 suggestion: switch to a modern demand gen strategy

Thanks to Sam Kuehnle and Sidney Waterfall for a great podcast conversation!

Categories
1 2 b2bmarketing contentstrategy copywriting

Master the Art of Content Creation: A Comprehensive Guide to Never Miss Deadlines Again

Most teams miss content deadlines frequently.

No planning & incorrect time estimations are common issues.

Use this process flow for creating content and backing into estimated due dates for content:

Think of each of these as sub-tasks for creating one piece of content. Put a due date and owner next to each sub-task.

1. First draft created

2. Review #1 by manager (and maybe others who have good domain expertise to give input)

3. Incorporate feedback (if there is any)

4. Potential: Review #2 by manager (and maybe others who have good domain expertise to give input)

5. Incorporate feedback (if there is any) (add more cycles here if needed)

6. Send to Design (if necessary) (note: ideally, design has already been aware and influenced the project)

7. Content creator review design

8. Design incorporate feedback (add more cycles here if needed)

9. Post final files to Google Drive

10. Publish (internally, externally on web, etc. depending on use case)

11. Share with GTM team

What steps would you add or change?

Categories
finance marketingstrategy

Slash Your Expenses: 4 Effective Strategies to Streamline Your Budget

4 ways to cut your budget ✂

1. Talk with your team and colleagues.
They probably have ideas to reduce costs that you’re not aware of.

2. Analyze data and results to see what’s working and what isn’t
If programs have been given enough of a chance, and they’re still showing no positive signals, end them.

3. Find duplicate functionality and consolidate the tools to have a lower TCO
Getting rid of vendors that have overlapping functionality is such an easy win for money savings.

4. See if the value provided by a tool > cost
If you’re not getting value, then is it really worth the $?

Categories
b2bmarketing marketingstrategy

Smart Budgeting: How I Reduced Zingtree’s Marketing Costs by 30% in Just 2 Months

I cut the Marketing budget by 30% just 2 months after joining Zingtree without anyone asking me to do so.

Why? I try to think like a CEO. If this was my money, I wouldn’t spend it all yet, or I’d spend it differently.

How did I do this?

– Cutting budget from items that weren’t performing for Zingtree

– Delay investing heavily in new initiatives until we proved them out with a smaller budget (early positive signals, early revenue results)

– Reevaluating the agency, freelancer, and vendor list

——–
To all the Marketing leaders, don’t invest too heavily before you can prove results (or early positive signals) of new initiatives.

To all the CFOs and CEOs out there, tag your Marketing leader so they can get some inspiration 😉

Categories
careerdevelopment marketing

2 Proven Strategies to Skyrocket Your Career: Mastering Job Performance & Social Media Presence

The 2 best things people can do to advance their careers: 

1. Crush it in your current job
2. Post consistently on LinkedIn or Twitter

Great quantitative results are what hiring managers care about A LOT.

Posting regularly is vital to building your personal brand, and it brings awareness to the company you work for.

Now you have a simple career plan:
– Crush it
– Post on social

Agree/disagree?

Categories
marketing prioritization projectmanagement

Master Your Project Prioritization: Unleashing the Power of the Effort to Impact Matrix

Feeling overwhelmed with projects? Don’t know what to prioritize?

Use the Effort to Impact Matrix.

Cut or deprioritize the high-effort, low-impact projects.

Prioritize the low-effort, high-impact projects.

Decide what’s next btwn the major projects & incremental work. Probably choose major projects, but your situation might be different if you have some mid-level effort and impact projects.

Have you used this before? How has it helped you?
Haven’t tried it? Does it already give you some ideas for what to deprioritize & others to focus on?

And yes, I drew the matrix this morning 😅

Categories
b2bmarketing productmarketing teardown

Maximizing Sales and Minimizing Costs: A Deep Dive into Zingtree’s Innovative Marketing Assets

Here’s a teardown of a marketing asset that Zingtree recently created for the Sales team. 

Headline:
Shows benefit while speaking to cost-savings.
In today’s economic uncertainty, speaking about cost savings is more important than normal. 

Middle boxes:
Heading: gives specific outcomes they can expect, based on what we’ve seen from actual customers. E.g. Ramp agents 85% faster
Description: Describes features & benefits related to the outcome
Icons: Related to the text, break up the text to make it more digestible

Lower boxes: 
Social proof: descriptions from customers achieving great outcomes related to the middle boxes.
Customer logos: eye-catching brands people may recognize

Bottom sentences:
Use social proof of the # of companies. Include a CTA to take the next steps.

What other insights do you see here? What would you change in it?