Episode#12: Weave’s BGS Webinar Series
About the speaker
Weave’s former VP of Marketing, Kortney Osborne, spoke at the 2020 Business Growth Summit on simple ways to do marketing that increase your impact. Prior to working at Weave, Kortney was a founding member of the marketing team at Qualtrics. As part of their global marketing campaigns and events team, she helped lead the company to an $8 billion acquisition.
Too many people are mystified by marketing, says Kortney. In reality, there are simple programs and actions you can take to maximize your marketing outcomes. Kortney’s presentation goes over three steps for improving your marketing: simplify your target audience, simplify your promotion channels, and simplify your life.
Webinar | Simple, Impactful Marketing
Simplify your target audience
Who do you think should buy your product? Answering this question will aid you in defining your target audience. Kortney defines a target audience as a specific group of customers most likely to respond positively to your promotions, products, and services.
Kortney lays out her top 5 factors for defining a target audience. They are: age, gender, income level, geography (for service-based organizations), and relationship status. To really drill down who your target audience is, Kortney recommends getting out a spreadsheet and following three steps.
Data-free definition
First, Kortney tells marketers to take a stab at defining their audience without looking at any data. Give yourself five minutes to state who you think your target audience is. This definition should be purely intuitive, leaning on your experience and your expertise.
Data deep-dive
Next, use your data sources to dive deeper into who your target audience might be. Review useful websites, financial data, customer contact information, and analytics. It’s also important for marketers to understand the revenue side of their target audience. Weave is literally the one place for every customer interaction.
Thousands of offices have already discovered tremendous success with Weave.
Study the competition
Be sure to study your competitors as you’re defining your target audience. Check out their website, their social media accounts, and their online reviews. Kortney once had a friend study the competition by staking out on a bench outside the competitor’s building. This exercise helped him decide not to compete in that market, and the competitor folded nine months later.
After going through these three steps, sit down and look at the patterns. As different age groups, genders, incomes, locations, and relationships begin to jump out at you, you’ll be able to come up with a clearly defined target audience.
Simplify your promotion channels
Kortney defines promotion channels as the ways the message about your goods and services are made available for use by customers. Remember, you don’t have to be everything for everyone. That’s why you went through the process of identifying a target audience.
List organic and paid channels
Write down a list of all your current organic channels and your current paid promotion channels. These channels include reviews, your website, your Google My Business page, social media accounts, and your blog. You don’t have to have every single one of these channels; just jot down those that exist.
Don’t forget about communication channels. Your emailing, texting, phones, and financial invoices all count as communication channels. Word-of-mouth promotions from your employees and customers are also incredibly valuable.
Talk to new customers
Your new customers are crucial for understanding how your messaging is being received by the public. Ask your new customers to fill out intake forms. In person, ask them questions like: How did you hear about us? What made you decide to come in? Where do you find out about services like ours?
Talk to existing customers
There are a few different ways to approach your current customers. You can talk to them when they come in the door, through your organic communication channels, or with a survey. Kortney also advises businesses not to be afraid to talk to customers they’ve lost in the past.
Using these three tactics, you can build a solid marketing tower. Kortney compares this process to stacking up Jenga blocks. She shares a quote that she’s particularly fond of: “Never half-ass two things, whole-ass one thing.”
Simplify your life
After simplifying your target audience and your promotion channels, what’s left to do? You’ve got an amazing product or service, a clear target audience, and a top marketing channel, but frequently this leaves marketers with no time seemingly. Kortney gives some tips for creating time and simplifying your work life.
Map out your week
Take some time to map out and analyze your current work week. How are you spending your time? When Kortney tried this herself, she found that she was spending huge swaths of time moving between meetings. To become more efficient, she responded by scheduling as many of her meetings as possible in the same room.
Another trick for identifying inefficiencies is to look at the screen time analyzer on your phone. Doing this can be a frightening prospect. Kortney discovered that she was sometimes spending two hours on Instagram in a day. How much time are you logging on your smartphone?
Find holes in your schedule
The second step to simplifying your work life is finding holes in your schedule. Kortney realized she had plenty of downtime when she was traveling on airplanes to get some work done. Everyone has these sorts of windows; identify them and take advantage of the free time.
Build momentum
Kortney has discovered that it’s usually easiest to check off low-hanging fruit first. What are the easy things you can do to improve your marketing? For starters, try updating your Google My Business page, posting on your social media accounts, or delegating to your employees.
Don’t tackle the big stuff first, but also don’t always stick to the low-hanging fruit. If you find that you truly don’t have the time for certain tasks, consider hiring someone. Ask your friends for help, search in your social network for solutions, or hire students as interns.
If you want to see how your marketing efforts can create more impact on your business, watch a demo and talk with our team.
