The old marketing playbook is dead — at least for the winners

It’s harder than ever to successfully marketing products and services.
Most markets are incredibly competitive. Buyers have more choices — and more noise — than ever before. Plus, customer acquisition costs are through the roof. The bottom line is that it’s tough out there.

Most companies are still running the same tired playbook from a decade ago — and it simply doesn’t work anymore.
Gone are the days where you can succeed by writing keyword-stuffed blogs for SEO or running traditional “lead generation” search and social ads that provide you with a bunch of bad (and expensive) leads that never close.
The new playbook is built around demand generation — helping buyers understand and name their problem, building trust and authority as an expert source, and guiding them on how to solve their problem through your product or service.

Our Process

Positioning

Positioning and messaging are often clumped into one category. Big mistake — they need to be treated separately. Positioning is the macro view of your business and how your product fits into the market. It’s the first thing you need to do as you develop your marketing and product strategy. It’ll help shape your target audience, web and ad messaging, go-to-market strategy, customer success process, and more. We’ll help you understand your product positioning using our Positioning Pillars framework

Messaging

Your website, landing page, and ad messaging must resonate deeply with your target audience — you might only get a few precious seconds to attract and capture their attention. There are three things you need to accomplish to be effective with that time: 1) hook their attention, 2) tell a good story, and 3) make a compelling offer. Our team designed a messaging framework we follow to ensure your messaging resonates.

Testing and Validation

The only way to really know your messaging resonates is to test and validate it with your target audience. We can collect feedback from your target audience before your messaging goes live. Services include:
– Message testing for websites, landing pages, ads, emails, and sales decks with a focus to see how target audience feels about your product and content.
– Buyer intelligence surveys for your target audience to get insights into their biggest problems, nagging pain points, and key objectives.
– A/B tests to find out which messages resonate best.
– User tests to see how potential buyers using a competitor’s product evaluate your pitch.

Demand Creation

At any given time, only 4-6 percent of your ideal audience in an active buying cycle. The remaining 94-96 percent are not. However, companies typically focus their marketing efforts only on the active buyers. This makes no sense as it leaves the largest pool of your target audience underserviced. Demand creation is the process of building interest in your product and accelerate sales cycles with ideal buyers so when they’re ready to buy, they don’t consider anyone but you!

Our demand creation playbook builds awareness, trust, and authority for your brand while accelerating sales cycles by educating buyers the big problem and how you solve it, engaging them with value-add content, and delivering the right messaging at the right time to drive high-intent prospects into your funnel.

Examples of tactics our team produces and manages include:
– High-quality blogs/content hubs
– Podcast
– Video series’
– Guides/eBooks
– SEO strategies
– Organic LinkedIn strategies
– Top of funnel paid LinkedIn strategies

Demand Capture

This is sales at scale!

Demand capture is all about getting the buyers that are in a buying cycle to convert into a high-intent opportunity for your company. Between the existing 4-6% of in-marketing buyers, plus the new champions we’ve accelerated into a sales cycle from our demand creation efforts, there should be plenty of high-intent prospects for us to convert into highly qualified opportunities for your business.

The best part is demand capture allows you to scale your sales operation without adding additional salespeople.

Examples of tactics our team produces and manages include:
– Search campaigns with high-intent keywords
– Bottom funnel paid social campaigns
– Remarketing campaigns
– Targeted outbound sales campaigns

Branding & Marketing