Why your company maybe guilty of lying, and how to fix it.

Okay. Welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. I've got Gina Ballarin, who is joining me from Australia. Gina, you have written and given a TED Talk saying Confessions of a Liar: Marketing in an Era of Authenticity. You're gonna talk to us today about that on the show. Welcome.

My pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

Gina, what did you mean when you gave a TED Talk saying we're all liars, marketing people are liars? And how do you help entrepreneurs to not be liars?

Well, the challenge with marketing has been that we have a bit of a bad smell hovering around the name, but it shouldn't be like that, and it doesn't have to be like that. When marketing first started, it was about selling everything we possibly could sell to whomever would buy it. And that was a problem with the distribution method that was used at the time, is you put an advert on TV and you yell at everyone. The thing is, we live in a completely different world now where it is possible to listen to our customers at scale. We don't just have to pick up a phone and call them or do a survey. We can use the internet to ask them almost any and every single question. And that means that marketers can't afford to lie because they actually just need to understand what their audience wants. And what ends up happening when marketers do this right from the beginning is that we actually start with the fundamental problem that we're solving for people. And when we are solving a problem, it means that the product or service that we're providing is great if they're happy with it. And that means that by the time comes to collect the information about whether we've done that right, it's super, super easy to get customer stories, customer references, customer testimonials, quotes that say, I love this product. And in fact, it's a no-brainer and it becomes a circular world of goodness where you start with an expectation, you meet that expectation, you get, hey, that was great. That was what I expected. And it builds back into the circle of creating the new product or the new service, the new thing right at the beginning of that wheel again.

Talk about it like that. It makes absolutely great sense as an entrepreneur. You start something, you get feedback, and then you refine the product and put it back out there and it gets better and better. So why is that not happening? Do you think people are liars? And it's not just marketing people, right? It's the entrepreneurs that run businesses that have marketing take place.

I think there's a lack of confidence in people in their own ability to serve their audience. And let's face it, a lot of entrepreneurs when they first start aren't super clear on the value that they have to add. And sadly, you know, trial and error is required. We don't necessarily all have either the confidence or the capacity to do the audience research that we need to do. Depending on whether you look at entrepreneurs who've kind of designed an intentional product or service in mind, or whether you look at someone who's just fallen out of traditional workplaces and into working for themselves, you see a different attitude and a different approach to work and to your audience. I'm looking and investing in product design at the moment for the first time in my life, and I'm doing this very intentionally. It means I'm looking at audiences, looking at whether this product has a market, looking at whether there's a service for it. But I'd been an entrepreneur for 5 years working for myself as a content marketer, as someone who helps people understand words, what they mean, and how they can use them intentionally. To be honest, when starting a job that was me as an entrepreneur individually rather than me as a corporate borg, it was a very different process. And that's when you start and go, well, I'm not going to lie about what I do because there's no need to, but you aren't really that clear on who you're helping until you know who you're not helping. Right.

And you know, the second most common reason for a company failing, of course, is providing a service or a product that people don't want, right? Actually, first one is running out of money and the second is not knowing what people want. So how do you help people, Jeannie? You talk about getting feedback at scale, and I love on this show to talk about technology. Are there some tools that you know or that you use that can help people to get feedback at scale for their products and services?

That's a fantastic question, and really it depends on where your audience is hanging out. So you have a raft of tools that are usable, everything from free tools, including SurveyMonkey, which actually is quite advanced and sophisticated, nothing like the SurveyMonkey that first originated, you know, is this a yes/no answer, rate this on a scale of 1 to 5. But there are also paid-for tools. And in fact, a lot of product marketers who I know at the moment use Facebook to test hypotheses. It's even possible to use the little polls on LinkedIn to test hypotheses as well. But bear in mind that a lot of your answers depend on who you're asking. One of the great things about using a targeted methodology like Facebook, for example, is that you can be very specific about who you want to ask those questions of, and you can do the same thing to a certain extent with LinkedIn. When you use the paid-for tools, they're specifically looking for the audiences that meet those criteria. In other words, the people who is your— who are your target audience in the first place. Bear in mind that if you're an entrepreneur and you're doing this on a budget, and you want to target or you wanna poll the audience that you have access to, that you're going to get a biased sample. So if I reach out to my friends on Facebook, they're gonna tell me what I want to hear 'cause they're friends of mine, which is why it's so important to get a less biased perspective on things. Now, my experience is less in the research side of things and more in the comms side of things. So by the time I get involved or have been involved in a traditional marketing, B2B marketing and content marketing perspective, I'm assuming that the people that I write for know and understand their audience. Sadly, and this leads us back to the perception of marketing and what marketing is and what it does and what it's supposed to do, sadly, not everyone knows who they're talking to and why they're talking to them. And you'd expect that entrepreneurs would start being less clear about this and figure it out over time, but you'd also expect that larger organizations and enterprise-sized organizations would know the answer to this question. And the sad thing is that they still don't decades later.

And is that, you think, because people are focused on what they're building and what they've committed to build rather than what they sort of have been told by the audience that they want to be delivered?

Well, let's go back to models of communication. Now, initially, The idea was that you had a sender and receiver and noise in the middle. But initially, you were only talking about sending messages one way, right? And when you think about the original marketing and advertising mediums of communication, media of communication, they were all shouty media. You know, you've got television, you've got radio, you don't have the opportunity for feedback. If you look at a communications model that has evolved, you've got the sender, and the receiver and the noise and the feedback, which then has its own noise. And what ends up happening is that you were able to listen to people more effectively. Social media fundamentally changed the nature of marketing communication so that it was no longer possible or no longer advisable for organizations just to have one-way communications. And what happens is that often marketers sit in that distribution method. They think about how they wanna get their message out there, and they don't necessarily pay as much attention to the information that comes back, which can almost be more important than the message that's getting out there in the first place. And there are, in fact, much better ways of listening to your audience, one of which is simply testing your marketing campaigns. If you're gonna do an A/B test, you test one version against another version, see which one performs better, and ironically, you are actually listening to your audience when you're sharing those messages in the first place.

So from a practical point of view, Gina, you say an A/B test. For an entrepreneur who may not be that familiar, that sounds like twice the work. From a simple practical point of view, how do you do that? I mean, people say, you know, I'll do an A/B test and then you'll find out, but how? Different headlines, different pictures? Do you need to write 2 different email newsletters? What do you have to do to do that test?

From a practical perspective, one of the best ways to do it is not to do an A/B test before you send out a campaign, because more often than not, entrepreneurs don't have enormously large databases. Which means you can't necessarily get a meaningful, reasonable sample size if you split them in half and do a true A/B test, or if you send out 10% on one instance and then 10% on the next, and then 80% to the one that does the best, because we just don't have databases that give us a meaningful response. But what we can do is test over time. So for example, if you have a newsletter, you try out a certain format, and then the next time you might try it out with images instead of without images. And the next time you might try it out, well, you found that more people responded to the image version, then you'll try changing the headline format or structure. Look, a lot of it comes down to iterative stepwise refinement, as they say in software terminology, which is basically step by step, get better and better. And isn't, to be honest, isn't that what we all do, right? As we learn, We learn what to do and what not to do. But I wanna come back to the point about failure and fear, which I actually think is something that drives a lot of entrepreneurs. Either the fear of failure drives us to try and make it perfect the first time, or the fear of failure prevents us from actually doing things in the first place. So one of the most important lessons I think I can share with anyone who's trying to communicate effectively with their audience Is rather try something, anything. If you get it wrong the first time, that's great because you can learn from it. If you get it wrong the second time, even better because it means you can test and see, oh, what did I do differently between the first and second time and improve.

So, Jean, this sort of idea of sort of at least getting out there and trialing and getting feedback is really, really powerful. I know that, and thanks for sharing that now, but you think as well, that we have a fundamental problem that people can't communicate meaningfully, don't you? So what do you mean by that? Because presumably if we keep failing repeatedly, we'll just end up upsetting people. So can you give us some insight into how we fail to communicate at a kind of a basic level? Because we could solve that, right? If people are aware of it and have a mindset change.

There's an old phrase that we have Twice as many ears as we have mouths in order that we might listen twice as often as we might speak. And I think people forget that. 2 ears, 1 mouth. Listen twice, speak once. And part of the problem with that is that when we're communicating, more often than not, we're communicating to be heard. We're not communicating to listen. I know I've been guilty in the past of waiting for a gap in conversation simply so I can put my point in rather than actually trying to hear and understand what the person is saying. And one of the biggest problems is that we assume that people hear things in the same way that we are communicating them. So I spoke earlier about the problem with noise in communication. Well, noise can be the background noise on a podcast, or noise could be the stuff that's going on between people's ears that you actually can't interpret. And it's much harder when you're not face-to-face with someone, when you can't see them, or when you're relying on cues. For example, that's why email can be so misunderstood so often. But it also happens when people have different intentions when they communicate. So I'm going to mention the DiSC profile. It's quite an old tool, but it's a helpful way of categorizing people into 4 quadrants. Traditionally, they're thought of as the Ds, the dominant, groups. I's are influential, S's are steady people, and C are compliant. Now, if you look at these categories, dominant tend to be the CEOs of the world. On the opposite end of the spectrum are people who are steady, stable, supportive, and sincere. When they communicate with each other, the D's who are direct and decisive are in fundamental opposition with the S's who are slow, and sensitive. It means that no matter how well they communicate with each other, the chances are they're looking to get something different out of that interaction. And so a D might feel that they've communicated really effectively if they've made a decision and if it's going ahead and processing something, whereas the S's might feel really, really disconcerted by that conversation because they don't feel like they've been supported. They don't feel like they've been able to have the steady and consistent interaction. They don't feel like they've been heard. And so what ends up happening is a fundamental miscommunication because people don't actually understand that what they're saying is not necessarily being understood by the person who's listening to them.

Right, Gina. So is that something that with your company, which is Verbalistix, if I pronounced it correctly this time, Verbalistix, Is that what you're helping with, getting people to understand who they're talking to and what would be then, I guess, an authentic message? Is that how you're helping people?

It is absolutely fundamental to making communication happen. Verbalistics is a content marketing agency. What we do is we make sure that people hear the right words and that the words are in the right context. But the evolution of Verbalistics is going to be about how to help people understand what meaning is for them. Fundamentally, whether I'm talking to people on a TEDx stage or whether I'm listening to people in an interview or whether I'm turning their words into a case study or using my team to help them build website pages or emails or blog posts, it doesn't really matter because at the end of the day, any marketing is only good when people are able to reach their audience in a way that touches hearts And minds. And that can only happen when we listen to what people are not saying and when we ask our audience what they think. And the problem with a lot of marketing is that we just don't actually want to listen because we're so busy trying to get messages out that we think are gonna influence people. And the lesson I can leave for the people on your show today is actually don't just listen, but actually listen with your hearts. And there's a very big difference between wanting to solve a problem and actually understanding whether people need that problem to be solved, whether they even have that problem in the first place. So with Verbalix— Verbalistics, we try to help people communicate more meaningfully, whether you're looking at actual content production for your organization, whether you're looking at trying to speak better, listen better, or build communication skills in your team. That's what verbalistics stands for, genuinely meaningful communication.

Okay. And then presumably that's starting to think about the kind of language that your audience is gonna be familiar and willing to listen to your message in.

That's a really important point. You're absolutely right, 'cause it comes into the tone of voice that people use. One of the things that marketing agencies often do when you first bring them on board not that entrepreneurs necessarily want to bring a marketing agency in right at the beginning, but they might over time as the business grows, is to define who you're talking to and how you want to communicate with them. You might have a tone of voice that is very vibrant and vivacious. You might have a tone of voice that's very formal and a little bit process-oriented. The important thing is to think of your brand as a reflection of who you are and who you want to appear to be. And that really comes down to defining how you want to talk to people. I find that I really enjoy doing ghostwriting for CEOs of organizations because there's nothing that makes them prouder than to see their own voice in writing and go, wow, that's amazing, Gina, did you write that? And I'm like, well, actually you did. All that happened is I was listening as you wrote, And this is really a reflection of you, your personality, what you believe, who you are. And I think if we come back to the question of honesty, really great entrepreneurs are able to be honest enough about their brand and what it stands for right at the beginning. And that honesty shines through in their marketing. That honesty allows them to touch the hearts and minds of their audience. And as a result, when they ask someone, hey, what did you think of our product or service? They get that honesty reflected back at them in a way that allows them to attract new audiences in exchange.

So Gina, then if I can say that's about authenticity, right? About being authentic as a person, as a leader, as an entrepreneur. And Gina, what about you as an entrepreneur? How do you get your own business noticed? Obviously you're very skillful at that. So how have you as an entrepreneur gone about getting your business noticed?

Well, a lot of entrepreneurs in the software as a service space or in the B2B world actually end up working for organizations where they're part of an extended team or part of an extended marketing team. I'm fortunate in that I have clients across all of the world, and what happens is when they're delighted, they tell other people. So word of mouth is, of course, a very important way of reaching new audiences, but so are things like newsletters. I use LinkedIn extensively, and the book actually, The Secret Army: Leadership, Marketing, and the Power of People, is a really great way— people call it sometimes a really thick business card. That's a great way of introducing people to the thoughts and the thought leadership that I try to put in front of people. And I regularly post on relevant publications, including the Content Marketing Institute, where I have a quarterly column called The Content Therapist. So all of these are ways that I use to reach out to people, and of course, podcasts. And so it's a delight to be able to share the knowledge that one accumulates over time, to be able to help others feel less afraid about sharing their own voice. And I think if there's one thing we could teach entrepreneurs, it is to be brave and to realize that who you are and what drives you is going to drive the success of your organization. And the world, quite frankly, needs to hear more from people about what drives them, what makes them happy, what makes them angry, why they run their businesses, why they create this brand new thing in the first place.

Wow. What an inspiring and great way to follow that up then, Gina. Gina Valorin joining me all the way from Australia, from Verbalistics. Thank you so much for sharing this idea that one needs to be authentic and to take some risks, but also to be listening as much as speaking. Gina, thank you so much for letting me listen to you today.

My pleasure. Thank you for having me.