Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Category creation – Why a messaging pivot is frequently essential. By Peter Zaballos

February 19, 2018

Part Three: The fallacy of “Everything is working, we just need to tell the story better”

So your CEO has articulated a bold vision of what is possible for your customers. Fundamentally different from what they have today. A change so dramatic they can’t imagine it. But you can.

This all got written down. And these words matter. A lot. They didn’t come easily or quickly. At the beginning they were directional, not precise. Intensive scrutiny and many iterations produced the exact set of words that describe the change you envision, and the category you’re creating.

Now you shift your focus to putting those words into action. And those words will inform and bring to life the go-to-market orchestration that will position you as the leader, the creator of this new category. They will inform the demand generation, the events, the company communications and training, and most important, the experiences customers have when they use your product. Let’s call this your category story.

The category story is the collection of words and visualizations that tell the market, your customers and prospects, and critically your employees about your role in bringing the bold future to reality. It’s the core creative idea that fuels any of the forms of the media you will deploy.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral

The story can and should live in lots of people’s hands. It’s what gets amplified through marketing. Evangelized through events and workshops. It fuel’s the virtuous circle of adoption. It informs every step of the buyer’s journey. It creates the triggering events that makes someone open to switching from what they’re using now, to the future you inspire them to join.

The reality is that a lot of companies formalize their category vision after they’ve shipped their product. After they’ve sold it. After they’ve figured out how to create demand.

When I was a venture capitalist, I lost track of the number of Series B and Series C financings I was pitched where the CEO would sheepishly admit that they’d “shipped their demo.” It worked well enough to get traction and funding. And that part of the next financing was to finish and fix what had gotten them started.

So a lot of companies need to make this pivot to build their category while running their existing business. With demand gen working. Salespeople selling. Customers using the product. Going back to what I wrote in Part One, category creation is for the bold and means you’ll need to make some pretty scary choices to leave the familiar past behind to realize the category’s potential.

It’s crucial that you amplify the category value proposition. Not the tactical value prop that got you here. The chief warning sign that’s you’re falling into that trap is believing…

“Everything is working we just need to tell the story better.” 

But that’s the wrong story. The old story is made up of well thought through campaigns and tactics, but without the purpose of creating your category dominance. The old story may produce near term success, but it sure won’t build your category.

This is the “make or break” juncture for the business. You can certainly amplify the tactics that got you to where you are today. Increase the paid search budget targeting potential buyers of today’s tactics. Scrape for more organic visitors by tuning the search performance of your pages to the value prop of today. Train your salesforce to sell what got you to where you are today.

You’ll just dig the hole you’re in a lot deeper. You’ll acquire customers and partners who aren’t aligned to your category vision. Who won’t evangelize it’s potential for you. Whose product and service feedback will be a distraction from your category progress.

So when I’m asked by executives and CEOs about how to scale their growing business and how build awareness of the role their solution plays in the market, I always go back to “what is your category and how is that aligned with your growth campaigns?”

This is where the CMO’s marketing organization needs to carry the responsibility to transform words into bold actions. If you start from anything else, you’re applying bandaids to a wound that won’t heal, and will instead get worse. And more bandaids won’t fix that.

With category alignment you can build kickass marketing campaigns. Your events will bring your ecosystem together and send them off evangelizing your value. Your paid search and your organic search will be aligned and fill your demand gen funnel.  The C-suite at your prospects will see the value in standardizing on your solution.

That’s the kind of foundation durable leadership can be built. Category leadership.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in brand development, Business planning, category creation, fear of not succeeding, Intellectual curiosity, Venture capital | 1 Comment »

Data is our copy editor | Peter Zaballos

February 12, 2018

There has never been a better time to be in marketing, and to be a CMO.

That’s because a CMO has never had more data to drive decisions. And marketing today is all about orchestrating digital experiences – if you aren’t leading with a digital strategy, well, then you simply aren’t leading. And the best part – digital experiences are fundamentally measurable. Or can be. And should be.

I remember the day this was made blindingly obvious. I remember the day like it was yesterday, but it was really close to three years ago.

data-science-illustration-_Feature_1290x688_MS

The woman that ran search marketing on the demand gen team came into my office – which she only did when she had something really important to share – not because she wasn’t welcome, but she had no time for fluff. She loved what she did and what she did was figure out how to optimize what we did in marketing. She started telling me a story.

Before sharing her story, let me tell you a bit more about her. I’ll call her Mollie to protect her identify (I use Mollie because I think that’s simply an awesome name).

Mollie is the kind of person you dream about being on your team. Profoundly curious. A voracious learner. No ego. Lets data and learning drive her decisions and behavior. I have lost count of the number of times she’d pulled me aside to disclose (a) she’d identified a significant source of opportunity or risk, (b) she’d spent a fair amount of time researching how to unlock this opportunity or address the risk, and (c) she’d run enough experiments to confirm the plan she’s proposing will work. All I had to do was ask a few questions (which she had answers to) and say “yes, let’s go.”

So on this day, Mollie mentioned that she had observed that some of our best trafficked awareness and engagement pages had been benefiting from heavy SEO-based revisions. That seems kind of obvious. But here’s where she demonstrated true insight. She’d asked herself “what if every page we developed began first with the SEO strategy – not with a talented writer using Word offline to create what we publish – and then we let performance testing tune (edit) the copy?”

She’d taken the initiative to find out. She’d picked one of our pages written solely by a talented copy-writer (and was destined for future SEO optimization) and created a substitute page, which she herself had written from scratch on the same topic, but started with the terms we wanted to optimize the page for. Then she let the data tell us what to do next.

What she learned was that the SEO-originated copy outperformed the traditional “write first, optimize later” page by a factor of 10x.

What she proposed we then do was to convert all of our copy writing to “SEO-first.” Which meant cycling through our contractor pool to determine who could do this, and replace the ones who couldn’t. It meant changing the process for all the in-house copywriters.

It meant, as Mollie put it, that “data is our copy editor now.”

It was one of the easiest decisions I had to make as a CMO. The curiosity, the experimentation, the data made it obvious.

It fundamentally changed everything we did. Not only did this improve the search performance of the new pages we created, it changed how we curated all of existing content. We no longer had “static” copy on our website, of any kind. White papers are now routinely revised for SEO performance.

Every page is a living document, revised for search performance as algorithms and search term popularity evolves. Every page has data as its copy editor.

Tags:, ,
Posted in brand development, Intellectual curiosity, machine-driven methods, Self-knowledge | Leave a Comment »

Failing in Style – Guest post by Jenny Hall, former CEO of Trendi.com

March 16, 2009

Jenny Hall has graciously agreed to a guest post.   Jenny was the CEO of Trendi.com, a social networking destination focused on young women’s fashion that was shut down in October of 2008, and discusses what she learned as a first-time CEO through the startup and eventual failure of Trendi.

This blog focuses on this juncture of success, failure, and finding the meaning from each.  I think you’ll enjoy what Jenny tells us through her first-hand experiences at Trendi.  Thank you, Jenny, for being OpenAmbition’s first guest writer.

——————-

I really don’t like failure, but I know it’s one of the best sources of learning. I learned a lot the past few years working at a startup, and I learned even more as a result of it failing.

I joined Trendi.com in March of 2007 as the head of marketing and I ended at Trendi in October of 2008 as the last employee and CEO. We had investors, a smart team, a fabulous domain name, a popular blog and so much more going for us- so many reasons to succeed– yet we failed. 

When people ask me “what happened?” I usually say we ran out of money. That’s the cop-out answer- running out of money is a symptom of the underlying issues. I think our underlying issues were communication related (unclear communication with each other, of expectations, and with our customers) and experience related (being young, excited, wanting to do it all and getting nothing done.)

I learned lessons from the mistakes we made as a company and my personal mistakes. Of the many lessons learned, these are the ones that stand out the most to me.

Your target audience should be so excited about your product that they’re pushing you to launch, even if it’s crappy when it launches.

I joined Trendi after the founder received funding for his idea. (I know- that never happens! We were lucky.) I talked to my target market occasionally, but didn’t seek their regular input for 2 reasons- 1) I trusted the investors and founder were right in their beliefs that the idea was a winner and 2) I was afraid of the reaction if I discovered we were wrong and proposed changing the concept.

I should have let my market share what they value, even if it differed from what we wanted to create. Sometimes we get caught up in what we’re building, fall in love with it, and fail to realize other people don’t see it the same way. It’s like parents with ugly babies (hey, there ARE ugly babies) that filter out all negative comments because they’re so in love with what they created. Trendi was, in some ways, my ugly baby.

Launching a product your market is begging to use, even with a few rough edges, will have more success than a fully developed site that doesn’t add any value. Plus, you’ll tie your market emotionally to the product. They feel invested and valued and voila- you have your first product evangelists. Furthermore, their input is the ammunition needed when confronting a team, investors, or a board about why a major change needs to take place.

Keep the focus simple and narrow.

Once you know what your audience values, keep your focus only on the features you need. Trendi started out (on paper) as a simple 8-page design. We quickly escalated the site to include a robust back end, picture management system, full social network, etc.

Extra features added time to our launch, increased the burn rate and made the user experience…fragmented. We assumed the users would like what we built only to find out they didn’t like or use all the features and it was difficult for them to figure out the ‘point’ of the site when they arrived.

We over-built Trendi for one main reason: We didn’t have a plan.

Sure, we had some general milestones, but we didn’t have an actionable, communicated business plan. When there is no plan, startup employees turn into hormonal 13 year olds with severe ADD. Anything catches their attention and can change the intended course of action. What are the competitors doing? Why don’t we have this cool feature? Let’s make it pink! No grey! We need a YouTube video STAT! (Get the idea?)

People often ask where our board was during this process and I’m embarrassed to say we didn’t have a formal board. We had our investors who would give us time when they could and we had some friends we would call on informally…but no board to help us keep focus.

Don’t do it just because all the cool kids are doing it.

There were an onslaught of “social shopping” sites in 2006 and early 2007. We jumped onto that trend and while it’s important to know the trends and competitors, it’s more important to figure out what your substantive differentiation is, how that difference adds value and how to make money because of it.

This is a mistake businesses and people make all the time- doing something because everyone else is doing it. Why do we feel more comfortable when we’re doing what everyone else is doing?

I now know questioning the trends and value proposition needs to be done regularly- at least monthly- to ensure the choices made are in the best interest of the company.

Hire only when it’s absolutely needed.

Everyone should be fully utilized before anyone else is hired and increasing the number of employees doesn’t always speed up the launch. For a company like Trendi, we probably only needed a CEO, two developers, and a designer. Ideally the CEO would have been someone who deeply understood the target market, could raise money, inspire the team, and was a stellar marketer, writer or able to contribute another key skill.

Instead, we were almost a year into the project and 15 employees deep before our Angel (who owned the majority of Trendi at that point) stepped in and made a drastic change that involved laying off most of the employees.

Yowza. Hard lesson learned. The team stayed lean and more productive after that.

If it won’t matter in 3 months, don’t spend too much time on it.

We could spend a whole day talking about how our rating system would look or a week bantering back and forth about a press release. I should have asked myself – will this matter in 3 months? If it won’t matter then, why spend too much time on it now? Time is a precious commodity in a startup and should be spent on what matters the most- quickly building a product your customers love.

——-

Funny how our resumes show our successes and we take full credit, yet we leave off the failures and if they come up, we blame others. I wish I could blame Trendi’s failure on other people and circumstances, but I can’t. No startup has it perfect- we all deal with difficult employees, investors and economic strains. I have to accept that as a company we made mistakes, but I also have to look back and accept my personal contribution to those mistakes.

Accepting the personal mistakes hurt my ego. I screwed up and it made me question my ability to lead others, my knowledge as a marketer and my future ability to start another business. But somewhere in facing my failure and accepting these mistakes, I was able to learn how I can be a better leader, new things I can try as a marketer, and that I do have the strength to try again.

I always hope for success and aim high, but I now face failure with a humility and thankfulness I didn’t have before. Ignoring failure only hurts you later- you can stuff it away and try to pretend it didn’t happen, but it’ll bite you in the butt at some point. I know that if I face failure as a teacher (a harsh one, but still a teacher) I’ll become stronger and smarter.

I like tea, Thai food and good happy hours. If you want to join me in Seattle for any of these, email me at jennymhall@gmail.com.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Business planning, chicken killer, Failure, fear of not succeeding, fundraising, meaningful failure, Self-knowledge, Success | 4 Comments »