Christina Inge is a best-selling author on digital marketing, digital strategist, and marketing teacher.
Christina Inge has two decades of experience leading digital strategy and managing complex marketing technology projects. She specializes in articulating effective, efficient digital strategies for organizations using the latest channels to drive results.
Her areas of specialty include go to market strategy, marketing analytics, SEO, inclusive digital media, and data-driven marketing.
if you enjoyed the show be sure to check out my info:
https://app.wingcard.io/ROB3SA64
Christina Inge is a best-selling author on digital marketing, digital strategist, and marketing teacher.
Christina Inge has two decades of experience leading digital strategy and managing complex marketing technology projects. She specializes in articulating effective, efficient digital strategies for organizations using the latest channels to drive results.
Her areas of specialty include go to market strategy, marketing analytics, SEO, inclusive digital media, and data-driven marketing.
if you enjoyed the show be sure to check out my info:
https://app.wingcard.io/ROB3SA64
Welcome to the Josh Bolton show. interesting and inspiring conversations. And now your host, Josh Bolton. Thank you. So I'm just curious. So how long have you said you've been doing reach See, like 10 years, right?
Christina Inge:Eight and a half years formally incorporated a spotlight LLC, who started out in 2014. Before that I was in house for a little while. But prior to that, I was freelance, and did some did a lot of consulting work. So all told, in my current incarnation, it's been since 2014.
Josh Bolton:Wow. Wow, that's impressive.
Unknown:It's been a blessing to
Josh Bolton:us that the opportunities and the clients you get to work with him must be fun.
Unknown:It absolutely is. We've been blessed to work with everybody from, you know, major consulting firms and fortune 500 companies, all the way to individual authors in the local area doing great work. It's been I mean, so far, it's been an amazing ride.
Josh Bolton:That's awesome. So I'm just curious on a side note, well, how would it is, depending on the author, they don't make enough, how do you work out the pricing with them? Or is it like for customer kind of thing?
Unknown:Um, well, you know, I have a standard publishing contract I, I basically, I work with two different publishers and your right author, royalties are a fraction of what you actually pay for a book, when people go the traditional publishing route. And I thought it would be a good idea to go the traditional publishing route, just for my first couple of books versus self publishing. And you're right, I don't have any control, by the way, either of the price. And royalties, you can certainly negotiate but they are everyone, you know, everyone knows it's a fraction of the cover price of the book. And yet, I got one, I got one book review on Amazon, by the way, the book has like a 4.7 rating on Amazon. But one person said, I'm taking this down one star to four stars, because the books too expensive. And I felt like saying, I have no control over that. It is available at a discount. And I can actually share that discount with, with listeners so that I can do something about giving a coupon to your listeners.
Josh Bolton:That's awesome. I'm gonna say, look it up on my I need to get to that book. I've just been so busy. Like, hopefully, there's an audio version, I can just listen there.
Unknown:You know, there isn't. But I'm going to talk to my publisher about I will, I will read this book. And it'll be because I will be the audiobook believer to like I literally, almost all the reading to its body.
Josh Bolton:Same unless it's like something very technical, like math that you really should see it. I don't read like paper books anymore.
Unknown:I don't Yeah. And you know what, I'm a huge fan of paper books. And I'm thrilled that books are not not gone. One of the schools I teach at Brandeis University has this wonderful library, and I walked past it yesterday, and we're doing a campus coat drive. And I donated two coats to the community. And I walked past the library, and they had that library smell. And I was like, ah, that is a great smell. But at the same time, I got my Kindle here. In fact, I literally have two 90% of my libraries here now. I actually do enjoy reading paper books, but it's just it's just more efficient, right?
Josh Bolton:Yeah, it's more efficient, because like for me, I can be working. I'll just pop in one headphone. I could be driving for an hour blast through like two or three chapters. Kind of thing. Yeah, this was normal reading. I'd be like, Oh, shit, there's a car
Unknown:kind of mistake. Exactly. Exactly. And you get it done on the train. And yeah, no, I think I think that, you know, ebooks are the way to go. And the Kindle version of my book is also available at a discount. Plus, it's cheaper. Anyway, so you it's a win win.
Josh Bolton:Rice is awesome. So what are the books so I can look them up? And I'll add it to my wish list to like, okay, audible. When does this come out kind of thing.
Unknown:Oh, so yeah, I'm gonna actually ask about doing an audible book. But the book currently is available just in print and Kindle version does. The second book that's out right now. It's called marketing metrics. It is from Kogan page, the full title it's it's an earful, marketing metrics, leverage analytics and data to optimize marketing strategies. And that's truly what it's all about. Okay. And the first book is with flat world. And it's a textbook that will teach you everything on just like the basic level, presuming no prior knowledge about marketing analytics, which is a little bit different from marketing metrics, it's more on the data and how do you do the data? And that's a marketing analytics A Comprehensive Guide from Flatworld. Also available on Amazon.
Josh Bolton:It definitely after this chapter, I'm gonna go pick one up because I want to everyone's been yelling at me about is like, Yo, you need to get into marketing, do this, this and this, and I'm like, ice cream. But how am I supposed to interpret this to this? Like, I get it, like, you get so many impressions to move so many clicks through just so many purchases. But there's other moving parts that can be like, even though it's not good, because this is Hi, you doing fine kind of thing? Or am I did I interpreted all that wrong? You did not say your face was like, What was he talking about?
Unknown:No, no. So I'm trying, I was trying to formulate a response that would apply in as many situations as possible. So let me let me take it back, left a step. There's no one metric that tells everybody every fight, depending on your industry, depending on your goals, depending on you go to market strategy, there's a bunch of metrics that do tell you an enormous amount, I would say if there's such a thing as a universal metric, it's going to be your your advertising ROI, your return on adspend, and your marketing ROI. So for every dollar or pound or euro, or whatever your currency is for every everything I invest in marketing, how much of that comes back in profit. Now, in my books, I talk about revenue. And the reason I focus on revenue versus profit is that I also want this to be useful to the agency world. And when you work in an agency, you often don't have the insight into the profits that your clients are generating, you can only look at the revenue by looking at the list price, for instance, of what they're selling, et cetera, et cetera. So I use revenue, a lot of marketers rely on revenue. It's ideal, of course, if you look at profit, and I talked about that in my book about how that's where you want to get to, but frankly, even if you're just looking at dollar for dollar, how much am I investing in my marketing, and if that how much is coming back and what people are spending, it's a good sign that marketing is helping you get to the right customers. So if there is a universal metric that says you're doing great, it's going to be that there's there's other metrics, and they really depend on you know, are you an E commerce business? Or are you a b2b brand? Are you a b2b brand that has a long sales cycle, a short sales cycle? Are you brick and mortar primarily? So lots of nuances come in after that? But that ROI, that's that Universal Golden metric, you got to be tracking?
Josh Bolton:Cool. So I wouldn't say you, you mentioned in your pitch and the listing, you had like eight metrics that you you work with and teach people about?
Unknown:Yeah, I absolutely do. And I would say that those are the ones that I recommend that everybody focus on as much as possible. So I talk in my book about the core four, which is the four major types of metrics. But going beyond the types of metrics, there's also the specific data you want to look at. And here's how I how I envision them. Number one, again, we just talked about it, you want to look at your return on adspend. Or you want to look at your marketing ROI more broadly. You know, if you're looking at that, you are golden. So look at both of those metrics, if you can, then you want to take a look at your customer analytics. And that's, that's absolutely critical. And that can be everything from what, what gets your customers excited. In other words, what are they clicking on on your website? Is it let's say, I'll give you an example. And I'm big on I'm big on having products on my desk. So let's say your lip balm, lip balm company, like you make chapstick. And you it's organic, and it's hypoallergenic and I know gluten free. I just make buzzwords are the buzzwords right. And let's say you have blog posts on your website, some of which talk about oh, how to make your personal shopping more sustainable, how to have a lower carbon footprint. Have you also blog posts on how to manage having, I don't know, gluten allergy. And you know, which is a very serious thing for people who have it. And then you've got other things talking about, just, you know how good this stuff is like how high quality the formulation keeps you from, you know, freezing, when you're out skiing, or something like that. You're gonna want to look at the metrics on Well, what are people clicking on, because let's say I've got 50 blog posts out there, a third of them are on our sustainability, a third of them are on our quality of our product. And a third of them are on how it's hypoallergenic. So it's even, and you're equally promoting all of them, then you can look, though, are people equally reading that, because let's say everyone is really more focused on reading about your product quality, you don't get a lot of traction on the stuff that's about it being hypoallergenic, maybe then that part of your value proposition is not as exciting to customers. And maybe the thing that's sort of in the middle there is the fact that it's sustainable. That's incredibly valuable information that you can gather, just from your web analytics, and only from one small part of your web analytics, which is the analytics around what people are reading on your blog, like, that's enough to start to give you an indicator of what your customers interests are, doesn't mean it's definitive, right? I mean, you're gonna have to do more analysis, more research, but it's pointing you in one direction. So number two, after you're looking at your ROI, is look at your customer analytics broadly. But specifically, look at your top content on your website. Top content is really critical. And by the way, I'll put together a cheat sheet on all of this as well. So you've
Josh Bolton:got to listen here writing everything down, if like I
Unknown:feel free to do that, but I will also pull together a cheat sheet for all of your all of your readers. So
Josh Bolton:be sure to put in the description for everyone. Perfect. Absolutely.
Unknown:Next up, what you want to look at is who are your top segments? Are the customers who are the ones who are the most loyal? Who are going to spend the most money with you? Or who are the highest growth, it doesn't have to be all three, what matters to you. If you're at a place where you're not really looking to grow exponentially. Let's say you're a mature company, it might be loyalty or might be spend. If on the other hand, you're a new brand, you might be wanting people to be the ones who have the highest growth potential. So look at your top segments. Also make sure that up segments is defined for your organization, right? What do we want? Our what do we want our customers to look like? What customer segments do we want to reach? So that's number three. Number four is your traffic sources. So where are we getting traffic from? Because first metric return on adspend that's looking at where are we investing that we then end up getting customers from but you could be getting customers from places you're not even investing maybe there's an influence out influencer out there talking up your organization, or maybe you're doing really well in organic search. Without even realizing it. It was through this that for instance, for one of our clients analytical answers over Massachusetts, which is a scientific lab, we discovered literally the coolest things. It didn't end up having any real impact on their lead generation b2b business, but it was a really cool sign that our content strategy was giving them buzz. They're they're an analytical lab, which means they use very high powered scientific instruments to analyze materials for a variety of industries from pharmaceutical to defense tech. And we decided to do a just for fun series around the holidays where we had them use the super high powered state of the art microscopes to look at Sugar, salt and flour under microscopes, and then explain how different types of sugar salt and flour impact your baking. We just a lark, it was so much fun. We had a wonderful I would in turn wrote the blog posts who was studying chemistry at BU, and this got picked up by Buzzfeed.
Josh Bolton:Oh, that's huge. If that's the case,
Unknown:it was immense. And suddenly we're getting all this traffic. Of course it was non converting traffic because almost nobody was baking chocolate chip cookies,
Josh Bolton:but they're like, oh my god if I put a certain flower and that can be this. I don't want that.
Unknown:Exactly, exactly. So we all got Get out of it. And we would never have known that if we hadn't been looking at our truck top traffic sources. Now had we been with a b2c brand, we would have been all over it for, you know, pitching BuzzFeed with more and more stuff, it was certainly a big win. And so that's the sort of thing you want to measure is what are your top traffic sources? Because then you can leverage them for understanding where you could potentially be getting even more traffic or generating even better buzz. So that's for, again, I'm really trying to focus on like, what are the things you can get started with right now? Right, you want to look at response rates across different sectors. And those are actually going to be my next three? My next three metrics. So your marketing, automation, email, open rate and response rate? How are people responding? And by the way, if you're not doing marketing automation, it's going to be your email open and click through rate?
Josh Bolton:Thank you so much for that clarification.
Unknown:Yes, absolutely. So in some email platforms call it the open rate, which is the proportion of people opened an email, who then clicked on it, we also want to look at the open rate, because that's going to tell you is my message interesting to my existing loyal customers. And if so, which of my messages like let's say you send out one email, that's a Bogo, buy one, get one free, and it gets like a tepid response. But then you send out something that has a free recipe or some, let's say your sporting goods store, some exercise tips, and that gets an outstanding response, then you know, what your existing loyal customers care about and what they want from you. So that's really, really important. Look at the patterns, look at what gets the best response from your existing audience that if you have marketing automation is going to be in your marketing automation data. In Email, it's going to be your open rate. And your either click rate or clicked open rate depending on how your platform finds it. response rate is equally important elsewhere, but I think people miss measure it. So on social media, people look at likes. But like so cheap, right?
Josh Bolton:Honestly, that's, I can really pay guard Thailand 10 bucks, and I get like 100,000 likes,
Unknown:you know, you could literally like you can have people just randomly like things. So instead, you're looking at real sentiment, what are you? What are the comments like? What's the common sentiment? How many shares how much engagement does a social media post get? So that's an another really, really important metric, social media engagement, really, because that tells you again, that your message is resonating. Now it's resonating at a much lower level than an email, or in an email open, it requires much less commitment to the brand doesn't necessarily signal intent to buy, right, which is why you want to look at the next metric. And that is your click through rate. Now click through rate applies everywhere. And that's simply the percentage of people who see something who then click on it. And you can easily for most of your reporting platforms, but the click through rate tells you how many people saw this message actually decided to take action. And I think a lot of times people misunderstand this, I would report on click through rate, even 10 years ago, we had CEO saying things like well, clicks, don't turn me on Well, I'm glad to hear that. But so then you tend to think that there's going to be an immediate conversion, a lot of people. And that's not what it's about, you want to capture those micro conversions you want to, you want to give people something that gets them to commit to the brand in some small way, like, I'm gonna sign up for the email, or I'm going to follow them on social media. And so that's the next metric you want to look at, obviously, you're tracking your conversion rate. But if you just look at that, especially if you're in his long sales cycle business, you're gonna lose 90% of your customers to your competition, because you're expecting them to come in the door, even when they're in like the first day of a nine month sales cycle and be waving you a check. And that's not on the go. So if you ignore those little early signals, like somebody clicked on your website, that's a sign of interest. So you want to have a mechanism for micro conversions, whether it's an email, whether it's a social media sign up, it might even simply be a return visit. I wouldn't go so far as to call that a micro conversion. But you certainly need to be doing retargeting ads and measuring whether you're getting return visits, especially If you're b2b, and in a long sales cycle, so I would say micro conversion rate is much more valuable unless you're selling like a cheap commodity item that people just buy. Right off the bat, you need to be looking at your micro conversion rate, because otherwise, you're really not getting the full story. And then finally, there is a metric that I just referred to where you need to look at your return visit, you want to figure out how can I see those visits with Linsay retargeting ads, even if you are not seeing those return visits, that's my bonus one, though, ROA as return on adspend, or ROI, your top 10 Your top segments, your traffic sources, your marketing our automation, or email, click rate and click to open rate, social media engagement, your click through rate and your micro conversion rate are the top eight. And then I would say if you want to look at a bonus ninth metric that's going to be your percentage of returning visitors, because that's a sign that people are seriously considering doing business with you, and a sign that you are reaching the right audience. Now's not the time to rest on your laurels. Now is the time to rope them back in get them to engage with your brand.
Josh Bolton:Yeah, that's really good. I really liked how you presented that because a lot I've had other people try to pitch this to me, but they don't add up all the angles, like you just did. Yeah, I
Unknown:think that's so important. You want to hit all the angles, because, again, there's no magic metric, you want to look at all of your metrics together, because what does, let's say you have a high click, click rate or click to open rate on your email. Great. But if that if you're not reaching the right segments, if it's a segment you're not terribly interested in because they're, they're unprofitable, that's doing all the clicking, then you might be losing money, you can't be like, Oh, yay, we have this great click rate. If it's people buying stuff, that's your lowest margin product. And so that's just one example where looking at two metrics, instead of one metric changes the whole picture. On the other hand, you could be sending out an email that's got a mediocre click rate. But the clicks are all coming from your most profitable segment. In which case, you need to look at improving that versus looking at the email with like this wonderful click rate. But it's not. It's genuinely not getting you anywhere, because you're not making any money off of those transactions. So again, you've got to look at all of your marketing holistically, you cannot rely on a single metric ROI is, you know, an important metric. But most of the time, you're not going to know that for a while, especially in b2b. You need to look at intermittent metrics, not not intermittent intermediary metrics. To know whether you're on the right track, you can't just sit around and say, Okay, well, I won't know my ROI for two years, because that's how long it takes, you know, for the sales cycle to complete itself. And then we know how profitable customers because if you're dealing with like, the higher end of b2b, that is often the case, you don't have two years to sit around waiting to see if this was a profitable campaign. So you want to look at all of those other metrics to see, is it trending in the right direction? Are we making good progress? Is it looking like it's going to deliver high ROI? And that's, that's the way you win.
Josh Bolton:That's so interesting. Yeah. Especially with b2b, you could spend 10s of 1000s, even hundreds of 1000s dollars in ads, and promos and all that. But they may be like, Yeah, but we like so and so's sales guy better, we're gonna go with them. And you're like, I can't. But you didn't know until like the two years edge.
Unknown:Exactly, exactly. You got to be purposeful and thoughtful about it in a much more organized way by looking at a wide range of metrics, not just one or two.
Josh Bolton:So for the traffic source back to, as you were mentioning, influencers is that a big one you're seeing especially if you're your customers, like hire, go into like influence, a fire, whatever, kick talkers, that kind of thing.
Unknown:It depends on a lot of times, what we'll do is influencer outreach that's a little more organic. But when supply can be really valuable, any of these influencer platforms can be excellent. I would say especially if you're on Tik Tok, you really have to work with creators versus just relying only on your brand presence or on advertising. And you've got things like Spark ads that genuinely are both With influencer marketing and advertising, I had the privilege of having Susan Winograd from a Search Engine Journal guest lecturer my class earlier this week. And she talked about for Tiktok. For instance, the extreme importance of doing spark ads and spark ads are like a hybrid, obviously between insulin influencer marketing and advertising. And just so you know, for folks who are listening, I'm sure you know, Josh, it's about paying to promote content by a creator, not by your brand, that happens to mention your brand. So that is, I think, where the trust factor is now with consumers, you really want to do it in a way that's respectful, respectful of people's time, respectful of individual creators. motives and the type of work they do. Don't have people do stuff that's not authentic to who they are. They probably won't agree to it anyway. But Nothing's worse than cringy influencer marketing, but when you do it the right way. It's fantastic.
Josh Bolton:Oh, yeah. And then your whoever they're following is there's the diehard, like, anywhere from 10 to 20%. They're gonna just go over and be like, alright, with you. We're with you. Because same kind of thing.
Unknown:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. That's so important. So important,
Josh Bolton:and really is Yeah, especially with tick tock. It's funny, I've moved it. There's a little gray pouch right here. And it's a gimbal. And I was watching Tic toc. And this lady with Parkinson's saw her hands like shaking like this. It was she had the gimbal. And the camera didn't move at all. And I'm like I said, Because I hate to be that guy. My hands are kind of shaky when I hold my camera, not as bad as yours. But it's noticeable, Mike, but your gimbal is perfect. What is it so I can buy it kind of thing. And then she's like, Oh, this and that. But but it's this, here's a link and she sends it. And then afterwards, she is all freaked out, like, oh my god, that was an affiliate link. And I literally just was like, I don't give a shit here. Here's like 10 bucks can that they?
Unknown:You know, I think people want to support creators, right? We've been getting so much good stuff, I'm happy to click on your affiliate link. If I support you, as a creator, I want I want you to give me those affiliate links, because I know how much work goes into it, you need to monetize. So give me that affiliate link, I'll click on it, I'll buy directly from that. I'll even go out of my way. And people will click on that affiliate link, if it's from a if it's from somebody they support.
Josh Bolton:And that was a big one in this podcast I followed for a long time, what he would used to do is say hey, here's a general link to Amazon hits an affiliate link. So he's a cool shop at Amazon. Just bookmark a click it in your web, it's gonna bring you up in the app. And then just go about your day, and I get like, three bucks off each versus purchase no extra charge CEOs. I was smart. I was like, I didn't think about it pretending like that. If we don't do it anyway, just press it, it'll send you back to the app, and I'll get like two $3 off each purchase.
Unknown:I think that's I think that that's really helped more and more people are going to monetize. And I think it's more help people are going to support obviously supported artists on Patreon. And that's great, but it's like I have to go through more clicks I have to sign up for another thing. So I believe that if you do influencer stuff, right? The Influencers community is going to rally around it. They're not going to be bothered far from it.
Josh Bolton:Yeah, and an influencer hopefully knows, understands that you want as little pages to come up like okay, you've clicked Patreon. Thank you. Here is your name and email. Did you click that? Okay, now you had some created an account like Dan, I just do that earlier. It's like alright, whatever, fill it out, like now you have to fill punch in your payment by then you lose everyone.
Unknown:And you really do. I know only really do Patreon for and I know this is awful. I really do it only when I'm actually like purchasing a serialized comic book or something like that.
Josh Bolton:Yeah. But for me, it's like if it's someone I believe in, they put the latest ces really selfish is they put the link they put the time to put it in the description on YouTube or podcast and I can click it it takes me straight there. John, you got my money. I have to go to Patreon find you sign up make it account punch in my info. I'm done.
Unknown:Yeah, no, no, I'm done. I'm not I'm not here for this. It's too much for me my exhausted. Yeah. Yeah. And I so I think you know what, that's that's where we're at as a society and brands need to get with the program and leverage, leverage what you can leverage what you can and that's going to be the affiliate marketing and I think that that is it's wholesome. Honestly, it's the way people support their favorite creators,
Josh Bolton:right. They get something they Why, and they know also the person gets a little kickback from it too. I, I've been really trying to edit videos on YouTube and all that. And this one guy I follow on YouTube, his name's Finn bizarre. He's all about editing and make it engagement. And he tries to make everything funny. So I watch on my phone with a web browser that blocks ads. So though, I watched like, 17 of his videos back to back, and unlike the final two, he was pitching his precess. And so I went on a whole, like, what are the presets? What's the value kind of thing that he's selling for 50 bucks, I realized what he's selling, he could easily ask for 600 kind of thing. And he's just like, it's not realistic to sell at that rate. So I'm just gonna sell it at 50. And the throat, I can't I bought it. And I said, Okay, I watched like 17 New videos, you probably lost like 50 bucks on me, somebody presets.
Unknown:I, that's that's exactly how I would recommend people work with influencers, find those people who have real value that they're delivering, who are giving real value to their consumers who are giving real value to their community, and help them deliver more value. Right? Don't I completely understand like some fashion influencer types of deals that I see people do where it's like, I'm going to style this cardigan and then give you my discount code. And I'm definitely seeing people click through on that. And we've done that kind of thing in the past. But how much better if you, for instance, talk about how to pack for a trip. And I'm not an influencer, I'm not being paid to endorse this jacket. But I gotta tell you, it's one of those jackets that looks like a suit jacket, but it's warm. And also it's crushproof. And if I were an influencer, I would pull this together in a blog post around how to pack for a trip with like a guide of exactly what you need to wear exactly what you need to have. And that's going to be so much more value than okay, here's a cardigan or here here's a here's a sport jacket or a suit jacket. And so make it easy for the influencer that you work with, to get that kind of value from the influencer content that you give them.
Josh Bolton:Yeah, or a big one, a lot of like, viewed ticked off YouTube, whatever, has been saying, like, advertisers are very strict on how do you present it? And one of them, he said, he's like, I know, my humor is not the most politically correct, but it works for my audience, and I can get you a higher conversion is like just lets the Creator be creative. Like this in the name kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, as long as they don't like directly talk shit about the company, I don't care.
Unknown:You know, I say as long as people align with your values, right? I, you know, politically correct means different things to different people. Obviously, we as a, we, as a company have some very specific values around diversity, inclusion, sustainability, social impact. And as long as people say that, I do not care if they swear. I do not care if they don't have you know, it's like, don't have it be corporate. Don't have to be too polished. Everyone knows that. That's fake.
Josh Bolton:When it's like, I'm on tick tock in YouTube to escape corporate kind of thing.
Unknown:Yes, exactly. Exactly. So don't have to be too fake. Don't have it be. Yeah, do not have it be something that people are like, Oh, this, this went through like 16 different degrees of legal and 12 different people making sure that you use the brand correct adjectives. And other it's like, no, no, you've taken all the life out of the piece.
Josh Bolton:Yeah, what little life it had you just chopped it
Unknown:up? Just absolutely try. So I have a big old geek, right. And so I used to kind of hide that side of myself when I was lecturing when I was giving talks at conferences. And people would be you know, I would get very pleasant responses. And then once and this is this is a little bit of a it's an emotional story. That was taken care of my mother she she had a terminal illness, which she lived much longer with. Thanks, thank goodness than anyone expected. And I had a night where I had like, not slept. And I had to give a talk at an international conference. And I was like all my words. There is not enough coffee in the world because I'd been up all night taking care of this is gonna go so badly because I don't have my filter. As on I was talking about SEO and I shared with you like, my unfiltered opinion of some best practices in SEO that are not really best practices. I think there may have been some, some, you know, some swears thrown in there. I think I express my opinions very forcefully. And I heard people literally like tears of laughter were running down their faces, and I got the first standing ovation of my life. And that's what I realized, you know what, people respond to authenticity. And I'm totally fine. Um, honestly, you got to know your audience, right? I'm not gonna get up at like a White House dinner or something. But, um, you definitely do not have to be like this corporate buttoned up citizen. I currently have developed a, unfortunately massive obsession with ancient history. And I now use that as analogies when I'm explaining complicated like Mark martec topics, and I thought, Oh, God, people are going to be cringing. What a big old dork I am. And I send out an anonymous survey after every class and every talk. And people are like, you know, those historical analogies were not only very helpful, but I learned things about history. And I'm like, Okay, let that keep flag fly. It's
Josh Bolton:working. Right? Some of the stuff. I've I don't even know what they're talking about. But the fact that the person's like, super authentic on YouTube, or whatever I just described, because I'm like, I just like to he's super passionate, or she or whatever. And it's just like, the energy. It's like, Yes, I don't know what the heck you're talking about, though. But I like the energy.
Unknown:I mean, that's just it, give, give your chin give your genuine energy. Give you genuine real energy, to the extent that it's okay. In that environment. Yeah. And self, be careful. 10 Swear. But do you know, do what is right for you?
Josh Bolton:So I do have a question for you. Because you would definitely know this much better than me. Let's say I do have a good concept of what I'm doing. A general gist of who I'm talking to you, but the data is not. There's not enough to fully painted a picture is the more talking like YouTube and podcasting for me to help you out? I know, like, generally, we're everyone is, but I don't know who they are, what they like, I just know kind of where they're at. How would I extrapolate that information? Like, oh, because of this region? I should be talking more like this to them. Convert to here. Okay,
Unknown:I'm, I'm gonna say I am. I think you asked a question that has become the topic talk about history geeking out. That I think is where what we were taught in school about marketing leads us so down the wrong path. When you talk about like, should I gather my messaging and change it based on the region? I'm not a big believer in targeting by demographics, versus psychographics. I wish I had my slide deck in front of me, but I do this slide presentation to my students. And let's say, I say okay, you are trying to target teenage girls for a makeup company. You have one of those college savings plans that you want to target parents with multiple children. You're a pet company and you want to target people who travel with their pets. And then this is based on one of my students, real life stories. You are LGBTQ travel packages to Hawaii and you on El alkaloid, LGBTQ millennials. Okay, got it. Got it. So then I'm like, here's a cute girl and I show them Joan of Arc. Then I'm like, Okay, here's a parent with multiple children, and I show them gearing as costs. Great. And then I'm like, here's a gentleman traveling with his pets, and I've got Hannibal crossing the Alps. And I'm like, here's an LGBTQ millennial and I show them Alexander the Great and I'm like, Are you going to walk up to any of these people be like, dude, or mme? In the case of Joan of Arc? Would you like to buy my lip balm? My package tour my pet carrier, you're gonna put the animals elephant into a pet carrier? So the answer here is we're gonna look at demographics and you see people they tell us all the time Well, yeah, our target demographic is teenage girls. And like really, you would sell this to Joan of Arc, would you? And I'm not saying I mean, obviously, these are outlier individual. You know, I would say adultery so anything to dangle Time, but you're, you're losing the ability to target people based on the use that they have for your product. When you say our target audiences, moms, well, you know, where do what it's much more useful to say our target audience is people who need a child safety seat. There could be dads, it could be grounds, right. And I think it's extremely reductive is to target by demographics. And I think it's a product of where we didn't have such good data about people. So we had to just assume, okay, if I want to sell lip balm, it's something teenage girls like, so I'm just going to target like 17 magazine back when that was the thing. Because that was the proxies we had for audiences, we can never actually know who's in the market for lip balm. And then you can avoid trying to sell Sephora to Joan of Arc. And again, at all attempting to sell anything, again is gone. So that's my history geek analogy. So to back to your question, Should you be targeting people differently, depending on their demographics or their region? Only if the region is germane to what they want? Okay, right. And like, I'm not going to try to sell snow shovels in Alabama. But that's not because I think people from Alabama will never want a snow shovel. It's because it's useless to them most of the time. So I'm gonna look at people's demographics only in the basis of is that something relevant to what I want to sell to them? And if it is, yeah, if it's not, and you can also look at people's demographics from the wrong lens, if you're looking at like age, gender identity, maybe even income level region. That's not the salient point. You know, what you could sell to all four of these individuals and they would want it siege engines, right, you could sell them armor, you could sell them spears, because the demographic that matters is where these people are warriors. And that is actually also a demographic but it's an occupational one. And again, now I'm really going down a history rabbit hole. Oh, I like it. Or that the demographic that you are going after is actually the demographic that motivates the consumers behavior and not something incidental, that oh, we only sell this to tall people or whatever.
Josh Bolton:Okay, so then it's more in a less elegant way. Be broader for specific is what I'm hearing
Unknown:and understand your consumer to that customer journey map. So to extend this now into the world of fiction, we did this in my class recently, I was like, Okay, do create a PPC commercial for like, totally fictional historical examples of what you would be selling to people and some of my wonderful delightful students came up with dragon fire proof shields that they would have been selling to the characters in Game of Thrones
Josh Bolton:that would everyone would want to find out when I was like
Unknown:it and the ad was like perfect. It was like guaranteed dragon fire proof for your money back. Just absolutely. For my students. That's what they were looking at the right demographic and understanding the customer need and the customer journey is all my shields been like singed by some dragons. I need another one. It's gonna have to be dragon fire proof. That's my motivator there. Right? And it doesn't matter their age doesn't matter. You know, the gender doesn't matter whether they're Millennials or boomers. They need that dragon fireproof shield. Whenever anyone says oh, it says Millennials suitable they're usually wrong. They just mean people in their early 30s or late 20s weren't actually Millennials at this point anyway. Or I want boomers by which they mean gray hairs. They've completely forgotten me and Gen X even exist. You know people who have gray hairs? No, no, you want people who need a dragon fireproof shield, I don't care if they're 16 or 67 They're buying your product. That's the demographic that matters to you.
Josh Bolton:It's lost as a result of losing all your money back well if it doesn't work
Unknown:which brings me to another thing in marketing has a really dirty reputation that we make promises that we know you're not gonna hold us do. Not gonna get your money. packet patch shield didn't work. So I'm the spotter that circles back to things like affiliate marketing influencer marketing targeting by demographics which again, you know, clarify my position on that pick the right demographic children. What your lip balm she wants that flameproof, she'll, well, okay, she's not fighting dragons, but you want to think about? I have this problem arguments sometimes with clients or students, marketing is not an inherently dirty practice. It's how you do the execution on it. And we've had debates internally around like, is this SEO tactic spam, like in YouTube? We've had some luck with really heavily tagging specific videos with, I would say, almost like, repetitive tags, and yet they worked great. So then they're like, Well, is this spam? I'm like, Are we hurting anybody with this? No. We're using the right tactics. And I think people outside of marketing or in fact, many of us in marketing, who just don't want to do things that are spammy. They were reluctant to use all of the tactics at our disposal when I want to circle it back to marketing. Why are we targeting people by very basic demographics that often have nothing to do with their motivations as a consumer, like how old they are, or what zip code they live in? It's because we don't want to use the more specific data saying, Oh, these people are all in the market for really good shields. Because that would involve, you know, Cookie based technologies in the past. Now, it involves other kinds of tracking technologies. It's, it's personal data around people. And there are privacy aware ways of doing that ranging from looking for proxies for your audience, like people who subscribe to, you know, Dragon proof shield monthly magazine.
Josh Bolton:I want to make that the title of the show, Dragon Fire true sealed or your money back.
Unknown:That's the title of the show.
Josh Bolton:That's the title of the show.
Unknown:So you can find out what people want consumers pretty heavily telegraph what they want. They're like, You know what, man, I'm gonna conquer the known world, or I'm gonna cross the Alps. With my elephants, you can be fairly sure they're in the market for your dragon fireproof shield again. Now I'm mixing real history with Game of Thrones, but fun. People are telegraphing what they want from you. It's not intruding on their privacy to notice, hey, I couldn't help but notice you're crossing the Alps with all these elephants, you need some shields.
Josh Bolton:Right? That's not That's not hard. No, no brainer, intruding
Unknown:on that person's privacy, you definitely do not want to use things that do violate people's privacy, when they could have a whole other conversation around that. But at the end of the day, consumers want to be targeted with things that are relevant to them. And they're telegraphing that to us, they're buying patterns, they know we're tracking their buying patterns, they're buying the stock, we want to sell them and they would welcome us coming up to them with offers that give them the things that they want to buy. I mean, when you're busily you know, crossing the Alps with your elephants are conquering the known world. Do you have time to shop on Amazon? No. You need the ads to target you.
Josh Bolton:Right. Now that's true. So then, okay, you were talking about the proxy and the less invasive way of collecting this information? What is some of them, you tell your clients? Just a side note on that? How long do I got you for? Because I feel like we can go at least three hours.
Unknown:I know we could go at least three hours. I've got a hard stop. Right? Well, I mean, do you want me to talk for more than an hour? Would people want to listen to that?
Josh Bolton:The energy is so great. I try I actually looked down was like, oh, shoot, I might have a meeting next.
Unknown:Okay, well, I can go to like what I can definitely go to one or a little little after one. So I'm proxy audiences are I think the thing that I feel most comfortable recommending to the widest range of clients because it once again, again, it goes back to I am telegraphing my intent by by subscribing to this YouTube channel, by purchasing from this company. I don't think any consumer today in 2022 and beyond. And you know, I don't want to date this video, but I don't think any consumer in today's society expects that their purchasing habits are a secret. And so
Josh Bolton:I'll leave that by the way. as well. And suddenly, it's not a secret anymore.
Unknown:It's not. And especially if it's public behavior, like what kind of creators you're subscribing to. So if you're subscribing to a Twitch streamer on dragon slaying, then you're saying I am interested in these shields. I do not consider that to be the kind of information that you can't wildly use in your own marketing, provided you obey all applicable laws and you maintain your ethics. But if you look at, for instance, the audiences for specific creators for specific media, that's a good proxy audience that is privacy aware in most cases. So go to, again, what we talked about influencer marketing, there's got to be an influencer in your space, no matter how niche, it you know, elephant harness monthly might be a thing.
Josh Bolton:I don't know. I will, it was,
Unknown:it really would be. But you know, no one else has ever tried that. So it is a very niche audience. But there's gonna be maybe somebody Twitch streaming something that's related to that niche interest. So what you want to do is you want to go and look at those proxy audiences. That's number one. The second thing is leverage your first party data much more than you already have, you have so much good data locked into your CRM system. And even if you don't have a CRM, yeah, it's in your email marketing, it's in your ecommerce system, it's in all of those things that should be part of your CRM, all of the data on the people who've done business with you already. Most companies don't even have that as organized as they'd like it, let alone are they leveraging it to make the sales that they need to make. So first things first, get a handle on what data you have on your existing customer, it can cause from 2x to 5x, to more than 5x more to acquire a new customer than it is to upsell and develop a deeper and better relationship with an existing customer. Rather than send your sales team out into the field and say, You know what, find us more conquerors. And by the way, I'm not endorsing any kind of colonialism with this. I'm just stretching a metaphor. Invading people don't do it. Um, but wouldn't it be better to just upsell the customers you have? And you're doing it? And no one's doing that well enough, except the few companies that have absolutely gotten a handle on their first party data. But no, in all seriousness, I am not, you know, not glorifying colonialism. I'm just getting caught up in my own metaphor here
Josh Bolton:to say it's your metaphor in its history, it happened you can't say that. And,
Unknown:and it's it's going it's rolling, because it's a nice way to keep it separate from any other like any industry, because if I say b2b or b2c people will think, Oh, this is not relevant to me. But if you go into like this total fantasy realm, it makes more sense, because you can see the core topic, which is you have more first party data than you think you know, what people want from you who've already done business with you who are potentially satisfied customers, they should be satisfied customers. Nobody is organizing and leveraging that except a very small percentage of companies that heavily resource it most small to midsize businesses. Even a lot of nonprofits that live off of donations and should be building much better relationships with their donors and supporters are not doing enough with it. And so first party data, proxy audiences, both of those are very privacy aware. And I guarantee you you're probably only realizing 75% of the ROI from either one of those unless you've been systematic about both your CRM and about your data driven targeting and marketing
Josh Bolton:Sorry, I'm just writing that down. Let's first try to predict Crux and let's that's really good because that's been a big one for me. It's like, oh, I want to start running ads for different products. I have but on my idol, here like saves me so much money because I'm like, Oh, I'll run it for this person who really likes martial arts and dragons and watches Van Helsing kind of thing else totally by now here again, like that's a terrible waste of $500 they maybe get one or two T shirts from
Unknown:Yeah, yeah. And and you in the meantime, got a huge amount of first party data customers who haven't bought from you and longer than you typically have repeat customers like first of all know how often your customers come back to you. How often do they need a fresh set of helmets or spears or whatever and what bulk and it If they are not making those purchases with you why are they not making those purchases with you? Or they will locked in? Are they going over to your competitors? Or have you simply failed to stay on their radar? Once you know that, I think a lot of people are hesitant to over message. They don't want to be seen as obnoxious. Half the time. There, you're not being obnoxious by being proactive. I think you are actually probably probably not marketing enough.
Josh Bolton:And especially nowadays, yeah,
Unknown:yeah, yeah. And you know what, I honestly think that's another metric that I didn't even dig into enough, which is, look, when you're looking at, for instance, your open rates, your click through rates for your email or for your CRM, look at whether it's starting to drop off or whether it drops off in response to a specific type of messaging. And if it's not dropping off, and I know this is almost a game of chicken. But if it is not dropping off, you're probably still well within the sweet spot of how often you could be reaching out to your mailing list and how much you can be reaching out to your existing customers. Because people will tell you when they are fed up with your messaging by unsubscribing, or simply not opening. If they're not doing that, then you probably could push a little further. And probably be doing a lot more with reaching out to your existing audience.
Josh Bolton:That's true. Yeah. This especially with the emails, I was using Karcher. That's my next question coming up. Is it a recommend CRM, just so you can think about that? I was using kartra. And this guy was like, oh, free templates. Just give me your email. I'm like, okay, small price to pay. He blew me up within 10 minutes with 25 emails. Yeah. I was like, I got my one thing. And I was just like, I'm like, get me out of this thing. Like, quick. What am I does he not see it as one of those I set them right to see not to see that? Does he not care?
Unknown:You do. I'm always astonished when companies do something like that. And I've actually talked to people who, you know, we're using those practices about why and they say, Well, if it works with like, 1% of people, we really need to make our numbers so we really, really have to push, you have to push in a way that smart,
Josh Bolton:though? I would say I would say I would buy targeted retargeted ads instead of going if your email.
Unknown:Yeah, it's just, um, I think people just were too wedded to old fashioned tactics.
Josh Bolton:Well, well, my one mentor, he helped me with a lot of my business then I realized that he was teaching people how to spot a charlatan and an outlier and a grifter. And then in teaching that he I've like, Wait, you're exactly what you're preaching against kind of thing. It was a whole paradox in that but the one he because everyone was saying, Oh, I subscribed to so and so. And he woke me up like, three to 10 messages a day. And he's like, Oh, it's whoever this one of the email marketing godfathers it was Nigel Carnac it's not because that's mindset. But there's some someone like huge and he pretty much says you keep slamming it so harder so consistently they have no choice but to click and he's gonna and that's recent that's been the President's for email ever since he said then early 2000s I don't like no that does not work.
Unknown:That does not work that is again again and I'm a very peaceful person believes that but I'm gonna get back into my metaphor and say that is the siege warfare mode of marketing of like, I'm just going to stand out here with my counterpart of email, keep flinging things at you. Like okay, people get mad when you do that since
Josh Bolton:you produce throw rocks in my room. I'm gonna be a little mad
Unknown:I've got archers and it's like I'm not gonna and it's called reporting you as spam. Right don't do that.
Josh Bolton:When that's where then cuz the guy was like, what is the sweet spot and like you said he he's like, three emails a week, kind of like a start of the week like a pep talk and newsletter made one like a reminder like, Hey, we're doing this event later on in a couple months. And then on Friday, like I have a great weekend and whatever funding you want to add, that will best for cute you're in their mind, and I'll bother either when one of them you actually make a pitch, because you're not too much of a bother, they'll click and actually read it is the too far off,
Unknown:I would say three times a week, if you don't have a if you're a salesperson, and you've had good conversations with somebody, and they're a warm lead, and you're in a long sales cycle, yes, three times a week is totally fine. If, on the other hand, you are a brand, and you're sending out a mass email, even if it's to a targeted segment, I think three times a week nowadays is getting a little bit much I would say 10 years ago, when people were less busy and had fewer media choices, you could do that, I would take that three times a week messaging, and I would shift it over to LinkedIn, I would shift it over to tick tock, I would be doing it as Instagram reels. Because that's more of an opt in situation where you're not pushing into the inboxes of people. You're You're honestly better off doing that than abusing your email list. And again, every department, every organization, every department within your organization is going to have different mileage, some people, that's fine. Some people, you're gonna get unsubscribes, you need to really look at the unsubscribe rate and the open rate on that. I mean, if people are opening your emails, it's working for you. But if you've got like a 4%, open rate, that's a sign nobody wants to hear from you three times a week, via email, go do that on tick tock, you will probably grow your brand you'll reach people you don't yet know. And you will not be annoying your existing mailing list.
Josh Bolton:And that's kind of what I was mentioning to him. I was like, Howard, for some hosting, keep my feet in people's mind have a little piece of their mental real estate. But we don't want to harass them or bullying him into it. How we're supposed to coax somebody. So to say that because like social media, hazing, I don't personally use it, because he's like, I use affiliate marketing to get my leads. But he's like, social media is a great way. Because if they really want to see you, they'll just click it. They're annoyed to click off, but it doesn't affect you directly. Exactly, exactly. And that's
Unknown:a much easier way of doing it. And again, it can help you reach folks who you don't have first party data on because they haven't done business with you yet.
Josh Bolton:100%. So, back to the other question that started to solve what is the CRM you recommend your customers to use? Oh,
Unknown:I don't like to endorse any particular CRM I do want like, so I'll break it down as I'll talk about. Because I'm not an affiliate of any of them. And I do try to keep neutral we work with so many we do work with a lot of companies that are invested in HubSpot, we also work with a lot of folks who do MailChimp, which frankly, is close to being a pretty robust CRM at this point that is our needs. So But that said, I'm also a fan of Salesforce, we've done a fair amount of work with that the the CRM you need is the one that has the features that you want. And that your folks within your team can use easily. It may not have all the bells and whistles, it may not have every single feature because most of the time, people don't use every single feature in their platforms, but it's going to be what your consumers want. And you know, in terms of gathering the data around what your consumers want, and it's going to be what your your community of users within your company is going to feel comfortable with. The number one CRM to use is the one that's not going to get a lot of pushback from very confused people who are going to be running that CRM within your organization. Definitely give people training, but do not. Again, with the elephants, if you need a pony, cuz you're like a pizza shop on the corner, do not get an elephant CRM
Josh Bolton:it's interesting because I'm, I'm shopping around for one, but through the sustain, I was using kartra earlier, but that one got really weird dealing with them. And I finally would just cut my money. It was like, Okay, I'm done. That's the guy blow me up like 20 times in 20 minutes. But it's one of those like, I'm trying to people have been asking me to a place to like, kind of like kind of like you like how do I do this kind of marketing like Well, let me call Christine. The thing
Unknown:with our clients as we sit down, we do a needs assessment and then we give them a choice of like two to three CRMs we think would solve their problems that we have them do a demo of each day. And then you their gut instinct is going to tell them what they want based on the user interface. Like there's, there's two or three CRMs for every need. And the deciding factor is does this user interface instinctively make sense to me? The way I like to work? That's it. Like that's in a nutshell.
Josh Bolton:Perfect. So kind of my analogy I wrote down is the simpler, the better. Also powerful, okay. Because Carter was so complicated for me. I'm pretty tech inclined, I like my computers. I like software. I've been learning coding, so I get it. And I'm looking at this, like, what the heck am I supposed to do with this kind of thing. So that right out of the gate, I should listen to my gut and just be like, this is a bad idea. Just get your money and go.
Unknown:Absolutely. Absolutely. That's awesome. I am gonna go going. You know, it is. It's 109. We don't absolutely have to like get going. But we could certainly I mean, if you want any questions, I'm here for that.
Josh Bolton:Oh, boss. I was thinking you were central. Sorry. That sounds like wow, we have plenty of time.
Unknown:No, it's one o'clock my time.
Josh Bolton:Yeah, then my only three going out questions is really simple. I live in work. What have you been doing to keep yourself busy during these COVID times?
Unknown:Well, when I'm when I'm not reading up on military history, or trying to figure out how to sell package tourism, lip balms to history's greatest warriors and succeeding very little. What I do is I am in a habit I kid you not I have three dogs and a cat. So I rescue, rescue these animals, and they keep me busy. I like to go hiking on all of the local trails around here to exercise my pets. For several miles every weekend, it depends like I might do 810 20 miles a weekend with the dogs. I'm an avid knitter I love to bake when it's cold out, which hopefully will be soon. And I really just enjoy spending time with friends and family.
Josh Bolton:That's awesome. Second question, someone inspired by you wants to walk down a similar path, what are some tips, tricks or advice you give them to get going,
Unknown:I'm fine. Find the area of marketing that that feeds your soul. I know that sounds a bit cheesy, but find the part of marketing that doesn't feel like a slog. It could be graphic design, it could be front end development, it could be marketing automation, I find that what makes me tick is solving really complicated tech stack problems, but doing it with an eye to what the marketing strategy is like, how are we going to gather this data about customers? And how are we then going to make it operational so that we're targeting people, and we're not selling elephant harnesses to gang ISKCON.
Josh Bolton:That's very important. But he's like it, there's no use for me, though.
Unknown:I don't need this. You should have sold it sold these tangible. And so you think to yourself, that sounds like a boring job. But I really love data. And I found that being just into the data is what makes me happy. So find the thing that makes you happy. Don't let people say Oh, well, the jobs in that are drying up, find the aspect of that where the jobs are plentiful. Right,
Josh Bolton:because there was only so much AI can do correctly, at
Unknown:least only so much. Exactly. There. There's something for everybody in marketing, find your passion and then find the most likely job descriptions, maybe identify three or five that will allow you to do more of that and less of what you don't want to do. And then, for instance, if you're like, I totally wish to cross the Alps with large animals, you're going to join Hannibal's army if you're like I want to say France to join your works army. So in other words, figure out where you can go with that passionate enthusiasm where you're appreciated, there's companies that will will absolutely love you. And if you're not in a place where you're doing your best work, get an exit plan, but it's also an insurance plan to the place where you will do your best work. So that's my advice.
Josh Bolton:Wonderful, I love how you hit like all angles of that to work and everyone contact us.
Unknown:You can go to my website, it's thought light.net t HOUGHT. Thought as in thinking light li gh t. So t h o u g h t li ght thought like dotnet and you can hit the Contact Us button and that will eventually quickly make its way to me. And you can go on Amazon if you want to buy my latest book marketing metrics and And that's under my last name Christina inch img II. But I if you go to the Kogan page website, que OGANPAG, the discount code that I'm going to provide is going to work there to get you 20% off. And that's discount code metrics. So, all due respect to Amazon, you go to my publishers website, you'll get a little you'll be able to use the coupon code.
Josh Bolton:And that's fine. That's awesome. Thank you so much. Absolute pleasure. This telehealth went the hour for the
Unknown:Well, I hope people got as much much geeky joy out of it as I got out of having this conversation with you, Josh. It's been wonderful. To see
Josh Bolton:energy alone. I'm sure a lot of people don't like you, dude, you should listen to this just fun. Hope so.
Unknown:I hope as long as they're laughing with you and not at you. It's a good day. It's a very good day.