Coverage of Marketing Leap Conference Waterloo
Marketing Leap Conference brought a whole panel of experts from Toronto and Waterloo to fire up the discussion on marketing. Some of the panels were marketing gurus including April Dunford, Christina Ellwood and more! This event was organized by FunnelCake. For those of you who haven’t heard aboutFunnelCake, it’s a customer B2B analytics discovery platform. It’s all about the buyer’s journey. Here are the biggest takeaways from the conference:
Marketing is more than a revenue generation function. Marketing is becoming increasingly essential especially at early stage startup companies. Building the lead machine and getting traction is all part of the game. Smart brands create a whole experience around YOU as a user at every contact point!
Demographic changes in B2B buyers is happening. This translates into different messages and approaches. Gen-X era now in C-Suite and millennials now in the buying seat for B2B.
There is no time for misalignment of Marketing & Sales. This isn’t about going head to head. It’s collaboration and alignment. Christina Elwood mentioned that she “is bored of your internal squabbling between sales and marketing. Your goal is to serve the buyer.” How do you ensure alignment? Clear communication and having shareable metrics between sales and marketing is important for measuring ROI.
People buy experiences, not products or services. Create fantastic experiences at all contact points from awareness to consideration to sales and post-sales. Strive to build an experience around your product to make it insatiable.
Building communities is still a modern marketing tactics. This all falls under inbound marketing. Build an audience around your brand and mission.
Personalization is key. But you need to find the balance between creepy and annoying when personalizing marketing.
Does Product Manager fall under marketing? This was a big question. Since Product Manager’s job is delivering the right prod, at the right time, to the right segment. Should this fall under marketing?
You can learn more from someone who doesn’t buy than those that do. This was probably the best message of the conference. Figuring the why and working on your product positioning and market will help you tackle new marketing territories.
Next session shifted towards storytelling and content marketing. We all heard about how our startups have to become great storytellers. Let’s recap some key points:
Storytelling and Content Marketing
The basic principle: make sure you know who you are telling the story to. This involves knowing the audience, market and your product inside out.
Match content to where the buyer is in the buyer journey. Before even figuring this out being with the detailed buying personas and go from there!
Get your customers involved in the story to gain their trust. Adding testimonials and client affirmations are huge! It adds more credibility.
Avoid content overload with too much crappy content. Focus on addressing a problem. This was by far the most compelling message of the conference, ”Why does everyone keep creating crappy content?” by @aprildunford. You have to “Just make better content. Be better.“ We know having good content on a consistent basis is hard. Don’t just pump it out!
Your conversion point isn’t always ‘buy my product now’. Conversion is moving your prospect down the funnel. The goal is to get the customer on a journey!
Social Media Marketing & Advocate Marketing
Don’t be afraid to unfollow brands you don’t care to engage with to clear up a noisy feed. Is your brand feed getting noisy? Try unfollow, as this isn’t Facebook.
Social gives you the chance to humanize your brand. Show the behind the scenes and bring out the human and the unique voice!
Brands tend to be playing it too safe on social. Be bold. Stand out. Standing out is absolutely necessary when it comes to social.
The average life of a tweet is 18 minutes. Think about when you post, and the context around it. Fun fact indeed!
Don’t be afraid to post the same thing multiple times. Use rotating schedule so older posts don’t get lost. Great idea to recycle posts!
Imagine your customer is on your marketing team. They can be an advocate for you. Leverage your customers to bring in more customers!
Recruiting Marketing Talent
User peer to peer coaching to train new marketers. People come out of school with marketing theory but not ready for the job. Use peer coach to learn fast!
“Sales reps are coin operated”. Extrinsic and intrinsic motivation is huge to keep your sales team crushing quotas and targets. We wrote a post a while back on recruiting sales team. Check it out here!
