The MultiThread Marketer. Doug Mitchell
demand by engaging sweet spot customers and adapting to remain relevant forever.
This process either results directly in a sale or provides access to a sweet spot customer so a sales person may close the business. If marketing does a great job, there’s a natural transition to a sale or engagement. Sometimes a sale is a direct result of excellent marketing with no intervention or assistance from a sales person or process.
You probably purchased this book based on the excellent online marketing and infrastructure provided by my publisher FastPencil, my marketing via the web, hearing me speak at an event or conference, or reviews by previous readers. Either way I didn’t hand off a lead to a sales team to close your business. You bought based on my marketing.
Don’t Know Everything - Just Know Where to Find Answers
I’m not sure at what point in our careers or in company life we become threatened by the falsehood that everyone must know everything to be valuable and valued, but it’s reality. I see this most in the marketing profession and it’s crippling. Be comfortable with what you don’t do well and either learn the skill (if that makes sense) or use an external resource who has it.
I built my small company on the premise that the sum of its amazingly skilled non-employee “parts” creates WOW! well beyond what individual pieces can achieve. Take pride in not knowing everything because it demonstrates maturity of thinking and self-realization/actualization. Do you believe that the CEO of Company X, Inc. thinks she knows it all? If she does, then why does she have a CMO, CTO, COO, and myriad other acronyms to help her lead and run the business?
Increasing Velocity of Disruption
Market velocity is accelerating and the very definition of marketing is being reshaped as I type these words. Topics like search engine optimization (SEO), keyword targeting, online reputation management, and content outposts have entered the realm of the marketer, no longer reserved for propeller heads in the IT department. It’s impossible to separate online and offline marketing functions into distinct chunks because the functions are so intertwined.
For example: Company X engages someone on Facebook and provides a printed coupon that drives the customer into a store where she signs up for e-mail updates, a paper catalog, and an in-person follow up appointment. She may provide some feedback on Twitter that immediately reaches 10,000 other hyper-connected “digi-moms” in the Twittersphere:
“Had an amazing experience at Company X store. Go see Jane. Amazing #productX prices. Coupon code XYZ for 25% off one item”.
Just yesterday I read about an amazing customer service experience that a prominent blogger had with Adagio Teas (www.adagioteas.com). I was moved by the experience, the product, and its simplicity. In about 4 minutes I had:
Read about a company I’d never heard about before.
Followed them on Twitter (www.twitter.com/adagioteas).
Received a $5 off coupon code back from the company in a Twitter Direct Message (DM).
Placed an order for their starter set at $19 and purchased even more sampler packs to reach their $50 order free shipping threshold.
Tweeted about how impressed I was with their firm.
“Liked” them on their Facebook Fan Page.
This is of course more likely in a B2C environment where a passionate impulse buy is possible, but this kind of passion, conversion, and organic promotion is absolutely possible in B2B environments too.
We no longer have the ability to escape the wrath of a disappointed customer nor can we decide absolutely what our brands will become in the market place. We can provide fuel to power the marketing engine but the steering wheel has the hands of each and every one of our customers (and potential customers) on it. Don’t fall asleep at the wheel.
The Incredible Shrinking IT Department
Do you even have an IT Department at your firm? The small business economic engine in this country is increasingly being driven by hosted or “SaaS” (Software as a Service) applications removing the need for expensive licenses and hardware. I ran my company on about $200/month worth of hosted software including accounting (Quickbooks Online), specialized invoicing software (Freshbooks), project management/collaboration software (Central Desktop/Basecamp), content hosting (Amazon S3/Dropbox), blogging and company website (Wordpress hosted at MediaTemple), and I’m even writing this book using the amazing hosted publishing solution FastPencil.com (Not a paid endorsement. I wish.)
So instead of being held hostage by IT, most small and medium sized companies can spend a much smaller monthly amount per person or per user and bypass barriers like hardware and infrastructure management that held them back in the past. Thus we can test technology-based marketing and campaign-management tools without even asking permission.
What used to be an “enterprise roll-out” and typically a very expensive and painful plunge into over-promise and under-deliver is now a cheaper, safer playground. For more stories and insight into the Enterprise Sales process, you can read my free ebook, “Confessions of an Ex-Enterprise Salesperson: What I Really Meant When I Said________” (Available at www.douglasemitchell.com)
I Know Half of My Marketing Works - I Just Don’t Know Which Half
Marketing metrics are very easy to gather today, yet most businesses we encounter don’t know how to analyze and make decisions based on the data. If you’re a small-to-medium sized business (SMB) you must have marketing leaders who can make sense of the numbers and who know when a deep dive into more complex analytics is needed. My createWOWmedia team leveraged metrics to show the effects of our actions. We also used data to help our clients spend far less on marketing activities that yielded little return on investment (much to the disgust of on and off-line media salespeople). Your marketing leadership must have a bit of 6 Sigma statistical nerdery in it to win this game.
Agile Candidates for Agile Companies
For the purposes of this book, we’re going to look at hiring marketers for agile companies: Small and medium sized enterprises with few layers of management and bureaucracy.
Wonder which one you are? Ask yourself:
“Can someone propose a change in our business and within a very short period of time a decision is made, the proposal is funded, and execution is begun?
If committees and endless meetings are required to do things at your firm, and if thwarting progress via policy and management road blocks is the norm, then please read on — but don’t tell your boss.
Large companies are welcome to read this book and apply its thinking to their practices. But large company hiring is often so far removed from reality that my approach may cause temporal explosions (think about the movie “Scanners”).
Maybe someday I’ll write, ”How to Make a Marketing Hire for the Massive Enterprise” that will include a case of beer, some photos from HotorNot.com, and a dartboard. But for now, we’ll stay distinctly in the realm of agile companies.
As a framework for each chapter, you will navigate:
1 A personal story or anecdote of my own.
2 Creating your own personal story.
3 A lesson from a third party story.
Now Let’s Break Down The MultiThread Marketer Into Component Parts.
Section One: Finding Your MultiThread Marketer
The MultiThread Marketer’s skill set is a moving target, but we’ll take a snapshot of it in the pages that follow.
No position has transformed more rapidly