Marketing for Startups – Insights

Updated March 21, 2021 / Growth Marketing / Jaime & Patrick

Marketing Insights for Growth Marketing Within a Lean Marketing System

Continued…

Jaime: 50 years ago, gaining these customer insights was probably a lot more laborious. You would have to do focus groups, and it was a different type of research. Info and data wasn’t as available or as accessible as it is nowadays with social media, community sites, and other insight “tools”.

Patrick: I totally agree with you. We’ll interview clients. We’ll interview a company. We’ll talk to them about all these issues we’ve raised. But we used to call it a batch balance. We would do another test check to compare, let’s say, opinions. We’ll use different tools to look at competitive factors, look at industry factors, look at penetration factors within an industry, even within a particular channel like SEM or SEO. And so we can do that, and then at the same time, we talk to the customers to make sure that we understand what the truth is about how we move forward. Because opinions are everywhere. Assumptions are everywhere. And part of what we add to our client experience is that we are here to de-risk those assumptions, to not make them as risky for your cost, and not as risky for your failures. Small failures, they’re not really failures. They’re experiments to determine which thing was better, for a failure. But if we don’t do this type of pre-sight work, the company will potentially fail because they are pointing their efforts in the wrong direction. And the further you go in the wrong direction, the further, obviously, you are away from your goals.

Jaime: Examples of what’s available to us now include Facebook groups as well as communities like Reddit, Quora, blog comments, store reviews, forums, etc. I always love to isolate app stores reviews by the one- and two-star ratings because you’ll get the honest-to-god truth on why people don’t like your product or what they’re having problems with. And I love getting certain input like that because then I’m on the lookout for what I call a “wedge”. I look for the potential wedge positioning where we can insert ourselves into the market because you can’t be everything to everyone. If you’re trying to be everything to everyone, you’re going to be nothing to no one. Over the course of twenty years, we’ve collected many types of tactical ways of executing this.

Patrick: Right! Right. We really have. Across industries, right?

Jaimes: Correct.

Patrick: One industry informs another.

Jaime: Quite frankly, one of my favorite times is when I first step onboard with a company. It’s the time when I’m getting to understand what competitors are doing, how they’re positioning themselves, what the customers and communities are out there saying. I love looking into all of this.

Startup Marketing – Insights with an Eye on Brand

Patrick: I agree. I enjoy it too. I think it is a must-do. People don’t think it is so much. They talk about their brand as colors and a logo, but I’d still go back to what Marty Neumeier said, when people ask what a brand is: “It’s not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is.” meaning your customers. And so, by you going in and looking at comments, looking at the 1 or 2 stars to see a counter perspective, I think it really does speak to what other people see the brand as. Not everybody, but some people. And that could reveal something that could be detrimental for growth, but it’s scale. That type of analysis is key. And that leads us, I think, to how we look at data. We look at it from different perspectives. When you put data in front of five different people, if it’s just a descriptive report, most people will say “Oh, it meant that this test produced this output or this for us.” That may be true in a descriptive way, but from a perspective analytics position, we want to look at it “How does it de-risk an assumption throughout the sales funnel?” It may have been a lead tactic in awareness building or to get a first step lead-in.

But we need to look at its impact throughout the sales funnel. We need to focus on value-add for the customer. Because that’s what we’re all about at the end of the day in marketing. How do you add value to the customer experience? As opposed to just merchandising products by listing what they are and how they work. We need to learn more quickly. That’s what perspective analytics also helps us do. And what works and what doesn’t, and discard what doesn’t, so that you don’t have to repeat things. Create an adaptive lean marketing system through these perspectives that you’re getting in this analytics process. And ultimately, what you’ll end up doing, you can really flip the marketing department, from being historically a cost center or reviewed as one to being a revenue center.

Because what you’re doing with this perspective analytics is now connecting at a very important level with your sales department, across product and brand. Because if you’re looking at taking away assumptions that may be in your sales team, because they’re been working off these for so long and not really having a perspective as to how they’re impacting their closure on sales, you have now helped boost revenue, if you’re able to impact that factor. And so perspective analytics for us is a big deal. It’s at the core of how we build our insight machine.

Patrick: Is there anything else you want to share for this piece around insight?

Jaime: I think this is really where the de-risking becomes relevant. This whole process of what we’re seeing — coming in, being able to tell what could potentially work and what may not work. Because I think it’s just as important to know what may not work as early as possible, so you don’t go down that path. You’re not wasting money. You’re not wasting resources. Because in a high-growth, high-momentum environment, all of these little things that add friction, with time sucks here and resources sucks there, the risk gets higher and higher.

Patrick: Because if you think of the latter, meaning what doesn’t work, it leads you to what does work. And you bring up a good point. What does it mean that it works? Does it mean that you achieved an ultimate goal of you got more clients in the door? That goes back to knowing: What is your goal for that test? What was it there to tell you? What perspective did you bring to formulating that test and then reviewing the analytics obtained from it? Because it may give you a win in one column but not a win in another one.

A Lean Marketing Framework

Jaime: And this is where it’s important to have a hypothesis in the beginning that will drive the test itself or the design of the test of the “why”.

Patrick: Yes, this is where a lean marketing framework helps create an organized set of perspectives around a particular company’s KPIs and knowledge growth, becoming more of a learning company.

Data isn’t always just a linear 1:1 thing. And that’s another thing about our perspective analytics in a lean agile marketing approach that’s so important. Most everything we do is not done only for itself but it’s done also to help inform about other things. And that applies for SEM to SEO. It could be a demographic issue. It could be a brand representation. Or it could be a CTA flow of acquisition. By making one little change in our intake structure, we’re able to grow leads 10 times. And you and I have seen that in a number of companies we’ve done. Modest changes, but we wouldn’t have understood the change that was needed if we didn’t have multiple perspectives on a single test. So, I agree with you. I think it’s really important.

Jaime: I think what it all comes down to, and it’s really good that you brought up the perspective analytics piece, there’s data everywhere. I think we have such massive amounts of data. It’s all available to us now. What it comes down to is: What is the context of that data that you’re looking at? And pinpointing what can be turned into actionable insights. Because that will inform your next steps of, for example, if you start going into your acquisition plan. You’ll start figuring out: Where are my customers at? Where do they usually reside? How are they thinking? That will all drive thoughts around acquisition. And we’ll go into acquisition in a separate discussion but it’s really about the context of the data and what actions you can pull out of it. Because, at the end of the day, if you can have three actionable insights, [it’s] much better than having a hundred insights but not being able to do anything with it.

Patrick: Yeah. I get you. I totally agree. It is the context. It is the context, the perspective around the data, and what you do with it to do something else with. Meaning it’s not that you do the data to talk about things or you have the data to show that you received so many leads, but it’s what the data need you to do next in terms of growth. Whatever the growth need is, whether it’s a small piece around traffic generation or it’s a larger one around the actual closing of a client, you need to get the actionable insights or you are not going to be running a lean marketing system. And without a lean marketing system these days, you’re not going to be effective. There’s too much overhead without them. It’s a slow process without them. And you’re not going to find out where you were wrong in assumptions as quickly. And that’s really the key. How do you de-risk what you think is going to happen so that you can have the truth? And the truth will set you free to move on to the next actionable item.

Jaime: Amen, brother!

Patrick: The truth is out there! All we’ve got to do is continue to look for it.

Jaime: So, our next discussion will be around acquisition. And we’ll go into that. Thanks a lot.

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