Master Audience Research + Segmentation
We continue our deep-dive into the essentials of campaign planning + strategy. James and Andy explore the crucial step of mastering audience research and segmentation. Learn how to identify and target the right audience for your ad campaigns by understanding who they are, where they spend time, and their pain points. Discover techniques for defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and buyer personas, finding out where your audience gathers information, and leveraging those platforms. Gain insights into addressing audience challenges, overcoming objections, and timing their decision-making process. Don’t miss this episode as we break down the art of targeting the right audience to ensure your campaign resonates and drives results.
Podcast Transcript
What’s up everybody. Welcome back to digital banter. So we are continuing on our six part series around campaign planning and design. Last episode, if you guys missed it, we talked about what we would consider table stakes, goal setting, alignment of strategy towards go to market motions, things that may seem like common sense to many out there, but are commonly overlooked.
And James, I feel like today’s episode hits another one of those foundational points that should be table stakes. But a lot gets superficial overlooked and highly generalized. And that’s audience development and planning.
James: Absolutely. It’s [00:01:00] the, the crux of everything at the end of the day.
So
We focus so much on messaging and creative. And when it comes to paid media, 90 percent of it is hitting the right people. And it’s, when we take on new accounts and we audit accounts, the first thing that we look at before we start thinking of creative strategy, creative planning is, are we targeting the right people?
so that’s what we’re going to dive into today.
Andy: And. We like to start off each episode with that creation of conflict, jumping off some of those points that we just talked about
A lot of people out there talking, say, Oh, you need to talk to sales. And you need to talk to customer service.
You need to talk to your customers. And all of those aspects of data collection and understanding your market and your audience certainly ring true. But here’s the thing that people really struggle with. When you get to the point of silos, [00:02:00] when that information is either disseminated or not, you continue that silo of information.
And what that ends up with is watered down versions of who your actual audience is. I think a great example of that James is how many times have we seen personas that… the classic marketing Mary, whatever you want to call it. Where it’s just, again, very high level of what job title they have, what they Assume the pain points of those individuals are. But what it lacks is… so many different aspects of things where they sit in the buying decision, what they ultimately care about as people, and how whatever the solution to their problem is, it’s going to ultimately impact them as people.
James: I, personally don’t mind.
Personas and ICP decks and stuff like that. Cause I do think it is table stakes as far as what we need to get started. I think what I want to dive into a bit [00:03:00] more today is, trying to have a better of who those individuals are going. you’ve heard every thought leader on LinkedIn say, Oh, you gotta, have marketing and sales alignment.
You have to listen to sales call. Do this, but nobody actually yells of, what are you actually supposed to ask them? So what do you do? I’ve, set this meeting with our sales department because I want to learn more about our customer, but what are the questions I’m actually going to ask?
And I think that there’s quite frankly, a laundry list of questions that you could ask, and you don’t want to ask them all because that’s, Sales people have selling to do right. And, hopefully today we’re going to dive into what are the questions that you should ask to what people and where you should gather all of your customer [00:04:00] information from, because it is pretty complex and there’s a ton of different channels where you can actually get information and.
not everybody has time to necessarily talk to customers, talk to sales, and you have to be very cautious with your time there and make sure you’re asking the right questions.
Andy: Yeah. So let’s, dive into that a little bit. So
When we talk about effective audience research channels, we talk about a couple of different layers here.
We’ve got our internal data, we’ve got our channel data, and then we’ve got our types of research. We’ve got our primary research and secondary research. And what tends to happen as we see it is many marketers, or marketing departments, pick a lane and that’s the lane that they stay in. So what you were saying, James, what are the questions that you take to sales?
That’s only going to round out certain aspects of who your audience is because of the information that sales has at their disposal or can collect. But when you round that out beyond into other areas of [00:05:00] data collection. Again, things like customer service, which is going to have a different viewpoint and understanding of what those audiences care about. Or the customers themselves, as well as the tools and data sources that exist out there that aggregate so much industry level data that you can cherry pick from.
James: Yeah. And I can give you even a quick example there.
So sales, right? What’s one thing that they’re going to see more than anybody else? The common objections, right? They’re going to have a very clear understanding of what the sales cycle looks like. What are the things that are blocking deals? To be honest, like they do understand like the customer’s pain points to an extent.
I think you can get into some of that information, but CS is going to have customer service is going to have a way better understanding of what are the things that are being used the most in the product? What are the integrations that are used the most? And some of the more technical nuance where as a marketing [00:06:00] person, you want to know all of that stuff, right?
You want to know how to position and highlight certain features of a product. But you also want to understand how to talk to the full buyer’s committee to shorten deal cycles. You have to weigh out the questions there that you’re going to ask each of those departments. And the same thing goes for like customers, right?
Customers. that’s, an open book as far as what you can get from them. and that one’s really more about Access to them, which can be really hard. The challenge
Andy: there though, is then scaling that information because every customer and every account is going to have varying degrees of complexity, varying degrees of pain points and features that they latch onto.
And I think that’s where we need, and we especially look at tools and other secondary data sources that are industry level or Persona level to an extent that scales that up. one of those tools I think that we’ve been using a lot lately has been spark Toro, right?
James: Yeah, [00:07:00] that could spark Toro goes with any of the other like social listening tools.
so one of the things that we’re trying to find out and we’ll go into the whole process behind this a bit is like, where do they actually hang out online, which is really tough, right? And B2B, we always assume it’s LinkedIn and paid search. And if you fall into that trap, you can easily lose track of.
A lot of different channels that are better opportunities, less competitive, and are going to have a much bigger impact. And when you use some of those social listening tools, like you’ll have a good understanding of where your customer actually hangs out. Like you can say Oh, I’m targeting dental hygienists and they hang out on these channels or in these communities, yada, yada, which is crucial for, Setting up targeting and step one, choosing the channels that you want to be on.
Andy: And then pairing that with review sites, comments being [00:08:00] mentioned on organic posts. And you start to get that well rounded picture of what somebody cares about, who they are, and to your point, where they hang out, which feeds into. Something that’s going to come down the pike as far as our series is concerned with developing a media strategy.
Yep. So
James: I was just going to, so like round this out, there are really six different channels that you can collect. Say your internal data, sales, customer service, and talking to customers. Then you have your list of external tools, which can be used for a variety of different reasons. spark Toro, other social listening tools, Google analytics, SEMrush, Google trends, all great pieces on the search side too.
Cause we cannot forget about that. review sites like. you actually want to see how you compare versus competitors for the third party, right? So review sites are a great, [00:09:00] third party piece of data that can tell you a lot of the things that maybe you’re hearing from sales, customer service, or actually talking to customers, but in more of a, Anonymous view and then private groups and communities.
I think that those have just blown up. Like it’s, if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of even set seed people within the organizations to ask questions on their opinion on certain things, I’ve seen a lot of stuff they’re done and you can get a lot of. Unbiased opinions from groups and communities.
Andy: What would you say the, the top, I don’t know, three to five questions that should be asked. Of, I don’t want to go into each of those like stakeholder groups, but let’s stick with customers. because I think a lot of the times when we ask clients of ours, Hey, we’d like to interview your customers.
There’s always like a, backing away hesitation of Oh, the customers. Whoa. Or if we say, Hey, can [00:10:00] you ask your customers these couple of questions? There’s always Oh, we have never actually talked to the customers directly. We have to go through, I don’t know. XYZ person over here because they’re the account executive, which just waters down the reciprocated information.
So I guess where I’m going with this James is are there a standard set of questions that we feel are important to understand who those people are and what they care about?
James: Yeah. So there is a, Very simplified way of looking at this. And we can go into how we answer each of these questions.
But there are six things that you are trying to figure out. And, this is going to come off really basic, but who, what, where, why, when, and how, right? So one, who are they, again, we’ll get into this, where do they hang out? What are their pain points? Why haven’t they made a change yet? What is their timeline and budget for some sort of, for this type [00:11:00] of purchasing decision and how is really like, how is your product going to actually make their day better?
so again, you have to pick and choose which of those. You’re going to ask your customers, you’re not going to be like, Oh, Hey, who are you? but you might want to find out sort of things like, what are their pain points? What are some of the things that they took into consideration when making a change?
you have access to timeline and budget because they’re already your customers. You don’t really need that information. but getting an idea of what their purchasing committee looked like. and then current customers, I think it’s like really important to figure out like how they’re actually using the product.
And
Andy: why they’re still a customer.
James: I’m just like how they use the product is so huge too. Cause every, all these different SAS companies now are trying to create this do it all solution. And this is something we’ve talked about before and it’s like a, big con when it comes to positioning, but as you build out additional features, like you have to always come back [00:12:00] to what is the one thing that you’re actually known for and what is the one thing that you’re being used the most, because that’s usually going to be the.
The piece that is like the most compelling thing to talk about in your advertising.
Andy: So let’s jump into kind of some of those sub levels of those. To your point, generic questions that you threw out there, understanding who they are to start with. What are some of the things that we want to understand about that
James: level of detail?
All right. So we talked about ICP and personas and like those decks before, I do think that those are important because they’re going to tell you who we’re targeting at the end of the day. So we’ll start with some definitions. ICP is. Companies that fit your ideal customer profile. Personas are the people within those companies that make up essentially the buyer’s committee.
So with that, the main thing that we’re trying to learn, and this is where I think some of the persona decks can get a, like a little out of [00:13:00] hand. whenever I see a persona deck with procurement people in it, I just roll my eyes. Like you’re not like no procurement person ever needs to see your ad in order to see whatever, but that’s funny.
We see that all the time. but the way we need to make sure that’s broken down is essentially champions versus the rest of the buyer committee champions being typically the person who is. the end user of the product and the person that you’re going to sell into first. And then the buyer’s committee, again, something we’ve said before, everybody else who’s just trying to kill the deal.
Usually the person who actually signs off on it is not the same person who is going to be the champion, pushing the product through. and then using that information, Coming up with your total attainable market and understanding the size of that. there’s a lot of different tools out there that you can use for that, like zoom info is probably the most generic, easy one to use, or you can put in company size, personas, industry, all that stuff.
And you, [00:14:00] the, reason you go through this exercise. Is so that when it comes to ad targeting, you’re essentially trying to identify your reach on the ad platforms versus what your total attainable market is. And this is where a lot of brands will have a disconnect between, we, Our TAM is really small and we’re reaching way too many people versus, or vice versa.
for us, it’s a big indicator of what your budget should actually be, right? Your budget isn’t, nobody’s budget is endless, but their budget should fit the size of the market that you’re trying to reach.
Andy: What would you say are some of the key data points that indicate whether somebody is a champion versus a buyer committee? Remember data points. Yeah, because I think what people struggle with, Is they hear, [00:15:00] Oh, we need to talk to sales. sales is going to have the decision maker and the person that’s agreeing to move forward.
They may not necessarily have who the champion is internally, because it might be something in the AP department as a manager or director, but it’s scaled up to the point of, Hey, my last calls with the Chief financial officer. And they’re the ones that actually are signing the check, but that data gets lost in all the mix of Salesforce or HubSpot or wherever it’s kept.
James: You want to know where the easiest find that access is? So people like most SAS platforms are cloud based where you log in with the email, like you can essentially enrich. you have, access to your current dust customer data and you can. if you want to be, you could just ask them, that’d be easy enough.
But the other thing is you could just enrich that data with their job titles and figure out exactly who they are. I mean that when you do that, like you’re going to get a ugly set of data. It’s going to be helpful. Don’t get me wrong, but you could also [00:16:00] just. when you sign up, ask for your role, like when you log into the platform, that’s going to give you a really good idea of who the champions are, because the champions aren’t always going to be the people who are using the product and it’ll work its way up to who their manager is.
But, Their manager will also have a log into the product if they’re a champion at the end of the day.
Andy: So now that we understand who these individuals are, how do we figure out where they hang out?
James: Yeah. So this is the tough, I don’t want to say the toughest part. I can definitely, I’ll walk through some tips and tricks per channel.
So I’ll start with. The basics, right? So there are the basics being search and LinkedIn, because that is right now where I think 80 plus percent of B2B advertising spend is [00:17:00] on the search side. The thing that you really have to look for here is your, it’s your standard keyword research, but there are a lot of software companies that are doing something new for the first time.
So there’s not a lot of Search volume behind whatever the actual software does. Cause maybe there’s one or two competitors in the space and they’re actually not even solution aware at that point. So you can look at search volume around certain, problems that you are trying to solve and try to get an idea of is there a fit there generally speaking, like if you are not in established space, like search isn’t a channel that I would start with.
LinkedIn is probably the easiest to understand whether or not your audience is there. LinkedIn sales navigator is actually a fantastic tool for this. So certainly in any of the ad platforms, you can build out your audience and it’ll tell you what the reach is or how many accounts or how many people fit [00:18:00] that reach.
Now on LinkedIn, the problem is that Not a lot of people are active on LinkedIn. Everybody, a lot of people who are professionals have LinkedIn profiles, but they log in when they’re looking for a job or they are in sales, right? So there’s a lot of people who just aren’t that active on LinkedIn and you can take your account list, build it out in sales navigator, and it’ll tell you essentially how many of those are active in the last 30 days versus What that total market size is on LinkedIn.
we’ve done a couple of one stuff of six out to me, like in the medical space, Oh, we’re targeting doctors or nurses or stuff like that. yeah, sure. They have LinkedIn profiles, but when you actually look at the usage of LinkedIn, it’s like a fraction versus. if you’re selling Martek and sales tech, like that’s just a great place to do it because marketers are active on LinkedIn because they have to be in sales, people are [00:19:00] trying to sell you.
So they’re always there. now getting into some of the other channels, like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, this is where looking at some of the social listening tools are going to be a really good thing to look at. So you can look, they essentially, these tools allow you to look for. People who are having conversations around problems that you’re.
Product may solve. you can also upload first party data into any of these tools and get an idea of what the match rate is. so that’ll give you an idea of the level of activity that’s there. That’s going to be more profile based. And then the social listening tools, they’ll give you a more concrete answer of are they on this platform?
Are they on this platform? And. Talking about the problem that we’re trying to solve. generally speaking, most people have some sort of meta profile and are active on it at this point. [00:20:00] so it, it is a good channel. The thing you just have to worry about there is targeting, which is the, another piece that’s layered in this, do they hang out on that platform and are they targetable?
So that’s one thing that you have to figure out too. And at this point. Anybody’s targetable. It’s like how you go about it. It’s whether or not you need to bring it, you need to purchase data or bring in your own first party data, or if they do have some sort of native targeting in the platform. I think the other thing with like meta specifically is like.
From a targeting perspective, it’s okay to be a little bit more broad because they have the best algorithm out of any of the channels. everyone here who’s a B2B marketer, you’ll probably have noticed that even in the last six months, like the ads that you’re seeing in the B2B space on meta are far more relevant than they were six months ago.
Andy: it’s also because your phone’s [00:21:00] listening to you, but that’s besides the point.
James: Oh, for sure. Yo, have you heard the, The, fact that wifi can scan your house and stuff. Did you see that recently? Essentially they can, it’s like a, it’s like an X ray for your house. They can use it for that government conspiracies.
If you guys are interested in more of those, you can turn into tune into my other podcast that hasn’t started yet.
Andy: Or, as
James: tick tock,
Andy: But I think you bring up a good point and it goes back to what you were saying before at a tactical level of. If you have a product or service where there’s a deliberate login of user credentials, and they’ve agreed in some capacity that, their data can be used for marketing efforts.
you’ve got a great, solid seed list of first party data. That you can then scale into data points [00:22:00] and other predictive audiences, not to use the LinkedIn terminology directly necessarily there, but similar audiences that are the same data set by loading it up into a first party audience tool.
metadata or versium or things like that. And then to your point, James, taking that data set and seeing, okay, what’s our reach and opportunities that exist on X, Y, Z platform. predictive
James: audiences are like, definitely like a game changer right now. There’s a lot of cool stuff. You can export all of your current customers.
exclude them from this audience from the eventual audience, but create a predict, like just take the logins that you have created predictive audience based off of that. if you’re an RB to B user, you can take all of your ICP profiles that you feel that have visited your website and sales has marked as fitting your ICP.
As long as there’s 300 of those, you can create a predictive audience off of that. [00:23:00] And they’re actually working well. I like, was it for the longest time? I feel like we used to just shit talk any sort of like audience expansion or look alike audiences as it pertains to B2B. But I don’t, the tools are, getting better.
I would still always like layer in some skills and geography and company size and stuff like that. But, it’s better than it has been.
Andy: The point is relying on native targeting is a outdated strategy and merging together tech and audience data points is how you win in today’s environment and to segue then into other data points.
So we’ve understood who they are, where they hang out. Now we need to understand what drives them and what are they pained with? So how do we understand what their pain points are, James?
James: there’s a million questions that we’re trying to ask here, right? this is a. This is marketing, but again, a quote that I will [00:24:00] give all the time is that people buy on emotion and justify with logic.
So the first thing that you need to dig into is the emotional elements that are drive driving this decision, right? am I currently on Monday morning have to do this manual data spreadsheet that takes me 14 hours and my. Boss needs it at the end of the day, every day. And it’s just a pain in the butt, right?
Like you need to really get, understand like what the current situation is and where, you end up fitting into that. So some of the things is, what are the tasks that they are specifically trying to accomplish? And these are like, we already talked about where you can start to all the channels, you can find this information.
So I’m going to. Focus on the questions, but what are the tasks that they’re actually trying to accomplish? You have to figure out is the problem worth solving. I feel like this is a huge one where [00:25:00] a lot of, especially in startup SAS, like you’re, there’s a lot of problems that are being solved that like really aren’t a big deal.
so is the problem worth solving, get gauged that level of emotion with those customers. what is their desired outcome? what, is worth, you have to figure out what the trigger point is of what makes them, at what point is it worth paying for a solution? So example, talk about that spreadsheet that takes me 10 hours every Monday morning that I need to like, If I cut, just cut that time down by three hours, is that really worth it to me? Probably not. If I cut it down to 15 minutes, now we’re talking, and trying to figure out exactly what those inflection points are.
Cause that’s going to make a huge difference. You can use that in your messaging. I’ll tell you one thing that works really well in messaging is like when you can, give a finite amount [00:26:00] of time that something takes, Oh, create this dashboard in three minutes. was that a hockey stack?
I feel like does a really great job of this where they’re, they take things that used to be really complex, require a data center and reaching out to five different people and they’re just like, boom, Look how easy I could do this like that. That’s something that sits well with a lot of people.
Andy: I think a lot of brands struggle with articulating that though. And you’ve said this so many times, both on this podcast and just as we’ve worked together is clarity matters. A lot in B2B and there’s a true inherent struggle to articulate what you do and who you do it for that so many brands struggle with.
And as a result, their campaign struggle because end users have no idea what’s being sold. What it can do to address their pain points and how to move forward. And I think as you start to build out a list of questions, those questions as you were alluding to James, like they’re somewhat [00:27:00] generic and they can be lengthy, but as you start to customize them towards your end solution, your product, you’re going to start to uncover and identify ways in which you can get to the true pain points and opportunities that lie ahead of you rather than just having.
Again, the generic personas with broad save time and money, benefits that so many brands put out in the market.
James: Yeah. And this is where you really have to, you met, I mentioned before, Oh, what metrics do you look at? this is all like qualitative data too. When we’re starting to dig into the pain points, like by the, if you take, I don’t know, say you interview a hundred customers and you try to break it down into a spreadsheet, yeah, you are going to land on Oh, the commonalities is This person saved time and money. cool. That’s, great. Like you need to take the stories that they are telling you and transition that into messaging and say it in a way that [00:28:00] is more relatable than save time and money. That’s that’s what you need to get out of this.
Andy: And as you build that story, understanding one of those key data points is why haven’t they made a decision yet?
Or why haven’t they made a change yet? And. To your point too, it comes back to understanding a couple of key things, right budget that solves the problem that they’re seeking and whether that budget fits within how you’re selling it, your price points and your offering. Are there cheaper alternatives that exist in the market?
And how does that relate back to your positioning and, the category in which you operate? And then lastly, Is it a true problem that they have that can solve and impact their, bottom lines, the business’s bottom lines, their personal, ambitions, or is it just something superficial that it, the, buying what you offer doesn’t justify it from a cost benefit perspective.
James: Yeah. I think one of the things that we really see there is competitively with these companies that are [00:29:00] trying to, just, build out, like different features. there’s always like a cheaper alternative that just does fine. and I think that’s something that you really have to have an understanding with.
I’ll give an example. This is like a really small example. We did a project with Snagit recently, right? The Snagit is a screen capture tool. And we had to build this whole campaign showing how it’s more than just a screen capture tool. Where the person what they’re competing against is the snipping tool that’s built at the free snipping tool that’s built into your site.
you have to understand, what the margin of difference is there. And there is a certain audience that. Your unique selling point is going to work really great with, if you’re trying to snag it, you’re trying to do something that’s a lot more complex. You’re trying to do video recordings.
You’re trying to [00:30:00] do, some sort of like technical documentation. there’s a lot of really good features that, but if, I just want to like screenshot something and highlight it and send it to somebody like the snipping tool is fine for me.
Andy: And you know what? The snipping tool is never going to show up on a Gartner magic quadrant survey.
That says it’s a direct competitor to what you offer. I know that’s an exaggeration.
James: What’s the number one competitor? Every SAS product is Excel.
Andy: Yeah. But does Excel show up on the quadrants? No, because it’s not an actual brand and they’re not, I got to look this up.
James: I wonder, they’re
Andy: not paying to play.
You think there’s
James: a quadrant for Microsoft versus Google first? I don’t
Andy: know. The point that I’m trying to make here is you can’t base your competitive research and. Whether and where you fit in the market against your competitors by some third party, survey or some third party report out there that is ultimately commissioned, like this is where it comes back [00:31:00] to understanding your customers, their buying behaviors, and getting what you mentioned before, James, that qualitative insight that powers through how you position and message yourself in the market.
Now, next question, which we got two left, right? So when, what does when mean in, in respect to audience
James: research? All right. So audience research. So the question that we’re going to get every single time as well, building a paid media program, how long is it going to take us to get results? Okay. that’s, you have to understand like what your sales cycle is.
I do feel like this is like something that everyone should. Not really need to do much work to find out, when they became a contact and, how long it took you to close. there are some great tools out there again. Shout out to hockey stack, which will give you the, from the 1st impression and 1st touch all the way to close.
[00:32:00] You have to remember with any sales cycle, there is the cycle from, awareness all the way down to action. So think about all of the top of funnel to actually submitting a demo. That’s a lot of what we control on the marketing side. And then you have demo to close. Certainly there’s marketing, lead nurturing, all that stuff that takes place there, but that is largely like a sales function.
If your sales cycle of lead to close is three months, like you can pretty much assume that your awareness to a decision is also going to be three months. You have a six month sales cycle. It’s going to take you six months before you really see. You’re in the groove of getting results. Sure. Will you have positive signals in the meantime of, your people are, your content is resonating.
You’re seeing good engagement. there will be leads that come in at the shorter end of your sales cycle. Like that as all happens, but you do need to [00:33:00] understand like what your sales cycle looks like. Some of the other things to, try to get an understanding if you can, is like, when are these decisions made?
A lot of business decisions are made on a cycle, right? agency world, a lot of contracts or yearly contracts. Like we have a lot of work to do from, what’s the October, November, December, whether it’s renewing contracts or that’s when, you start looking at different agencies because your contract is up a lot of software products also have yearly contracts that you have to, to battle with.
I saw. I’m not going to say the brands, but there was a brand recently who offered to buy out another, another partner’s contract, which I think is like a great, of course, a lot of money, but if it’s worth it to you, that’s a great thing that maybe you can use in your messaging campaign.
Oh, like I, I don’t know. Really [00:34:00] don’t like demand base. and I want to move to 6 cents of 6 cents. We’ll just buy out their con. If we didn’t have this year long contract with demand base, maybe I would move to 6 cents. so that’s something to think about.
Andy: I think when also dictates your channel selection, because some channels are going to have a more immediate impact than the long term growth that others will take.
James: Yeah, for sure. capturing demand versus driving demand. I’m not going to go into that whole speech, but
Andy: you got to do both. We’ll leave it at that. Yeah,
James: there’s, They’re in any sort of marketing. There are quick wins and then there are long term place.
Andy: Now, I think the toughest question is the one that you ended your list with before.
And how does what you offer? So your product, I guess we’ll say in this case, better the end customer’s [00:35:00] day and have a direct impact on them. Like, how do you answer that one?
James: How do you, the way I position it, like what, would we need to do to dethrone the current solution? I feel like that’s a question, It’s a gutsy question to ask, but you could ask that directly to people in your market. And I think that you’ll get a lot of very interesting answers. How do you, yeah, but I think,
Andy: how do you frame it in a way where you’re not going to get like a response of, if you would match their guarantee, or if you would reduce your price by X, Y, Z, because that’s like.
That’s not really what we’re looking for in the context of this question.
James: It depends. It could be something that you do need to know. if, listen, if you have guidelines, guardrails, you can state what those guardrails are saying without changing our pricing and our contract length and blah, blah, blah, blah, [00:36:00] blah, like what would we need to do in order to, to dethrone what you have right now,
Andy: I’ve always wondered what it would, and this is rhetorical.
Don’t. Go into this necessarily, but like, how can we frame our questions in a way where it’s a little bit more impactful and emotionally triggering, for example, what’s the cost of. Giving you more time with your kids, right? Putting a dollar point dollar value on that. Like you come back and you say, Oh, if you reduce this by X amount of dollars, then we probably have a deal.
my counter is okay. But what’s the cost of giving you time back to being with your family? I don’t know how many people could answer that directly because they don’t know the answer. But
James: it’s funny, we’ve given that example a lot, what I think the actual reality is with that one.
Yeah.
Andy: they don’t want to be with their kids.
James: No, I’m shutting. I [00:37:00] hope that’s not true. No, I’m shutting off at five o’clock. No matter what, it’ll just be tomorrow. Like the, cause a lot, like the personal emotion to it, I think does end up being more around like personal growth and like how you can grow within your career rather than.
Having time for outside of that stuff. it depends on who you’re talking to. If you’re talking to a marketing manager, who’s like mid level, like nine to five, the nine to five grinds, the nine to five grind, right? If you’re talking to a startup founder who has four different ventures and work is life, like that emotional element is a lot different because you can start to push on some of the outside of work elements for Mr.
Work is life versus. Okay. Whatever my job is, my job, they’re still paying me.
Andy: [00:38:00] Yeah. You bring up a good point. marrying it back to professional growth and how can you become the hero in your organization is the ultimate objective, Yeah.
James: Get them a raise.
Andy: And
James: everybody wins,
Andy: right?
maybe not everybody, but, so as you were going through that, I was, I had my notepad, like I usually do, and I was trying to like, create something where it was a little bit more deliberate as we were going through and saying, these questions inform what, so as a recap to that meat of today’s episode, I want to go for it and say, When we get into the details of who informs our targeting strategy, which is the foundation to everything in paid media, understand who they are, how we go to market against them and, creating those parameters, the next one of where [00:39:00] ultimately impacts and informs platforms and channel strategy.
that is bar none, no doubt about it. It impacts some other things. Don’t get me wrong, but like that defines where you’re going to be in market. Now, when I feel like has a double edged sword here, double edged sword is the wrong cliche, but as a dual purpose, it informs your channels and your platforms.
When we think about it from an immediacy perspective, right? If you have a shorter sales cycle, your channel strategy is probably going to be very different than a longer sales cycle, but when also informs creative content, messaging, and positioning, because a lot of that is informed by, okay, if there’s an immediacy in the market, how do we capitalize on that with certain pieces of creative and content and positioning against the competitive set, the other three questions What, why, and how have direct impacts on how you position yourselves in the market, the messaging that goes with that positioning [00:40:00] and at the end of the day, the content and the creative that is now being developed or refined and put into market to power the campaign, which by the way, teaser is next week’s episode.
I don’t know. Any other thoughts on that front, James? Any disagreements? Agreements?
James: I agree. Next week’s episode is going to be awesome. You guys should all show up.
Andy: Any other closing thoughts on today?
James: I’m good.
Andy: You’re good? You got a
James: sore throat? Yeah. No, I think I’m at the point where I need to blow my nose.
And, yeah, I went camping this weekend, guys, and I think I got too much pollen in my mouth. if I sound a little raspy. I, that’s why.
Andy: So just to bring today’s episode to a complete wrap, when we talk about foundational pillars, as I let off today’s episode with, it is about goal setting, it’s about aligning your strategy with your go to market motion.[00:41:00]
And it’s about understanding who your audience is, where they hang out, what they care about, and how you’re offering. Addresses their personal and professional needs without those key elements. Your campaign is going to falter and it’s going to fall flat on our face. We’ve seen it for the last 15 to 17 plus years that we’ve been in business.
And as digital marketers. So we’ve seen a lot, we’ve learned a lot. And that’s why today’s episode we felt was a great segue into the rest of a campaign planning and designing process that next week’s episode flips into content and creative. So until next time, guys, we’ll catch you later. Tune in next week.
in the meantime, like subscribe and check out dragon three 60. com catch you [00:42:00] later.