Jump-start Your Content Marketing through Better Market Segmentation with Monique de Maio

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology Digital Marketing Webinar. I'm Mike Moran, founder of the Biznology blog and a senior strategist at Converseon, a leading social consultancy. I'm also co-author of Search Engine Marketing Inc., sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, and a former IBM Distinguished Engineer. Today, you'll be hearing from Monique DeMaio, who will help you jumpstart your content marketing through better market segmentation. Before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. Barnraisers, a full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GagaAmp, empowering companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try GagaAmp for free today. MENG, Marketing Executives Networking Group, New Jersey Chapter. We aren't just about networking to land a great job. We're about staying current to grow in our careers. On Demand CMO. Marketing expertise on demand. Unison, the unagency. Your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. As we wait for more attendees to join, let me review the format of our webinar. Our Biznology webinars last just 30 minutes. You can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar and we'll email you that link later this week. During our speaker's presentation, you can use GoToWebinar to ask a question. That orange arrow opens and closes your controls. If you have a question, simply type it into the box labeled Questions at any time during the event. and press the send button. I'll select a few questions at the end of our webinar and pose them to Monique. While we're waiting for our last few attendees to join, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology newsletter and blog are available for free at biznology.com. So if you're not already a subscriber, we hope that you'll sign up now. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is, so let's introduce today's speaker. Monique DeMaio is the founder of On Demand CMO, a marketing consultancy that provides marketing expertise to companies needing strategic and tactical marketing services since 1998. So if you've ever struggled with improving your content marketing, this is the webinar for you. Monique, take it away.

Thank you so much, Mike, for that warm introduction. Hello everyone. I'm glad to be here and share with you some ideas about how to jumpstart your content marketing. Basically, what we're going to talk about today is making sure that our content marketing is segmented to the customers that we're serving. And part of the first thing I'm going to do, we should be on slide 6 now, Eileen. Just for those of you, we were having a little technical difficulty on my end, so we're going to have Eileen forward the slides. Let's go on to slide 7. Let's talk about who are our customers. Basically, the first thing about content marketing segmentation is to identify and ensure that we are looking at everybody who is a potential, or current, or future customer. End-user customers, or is it a business-to-business customer? Are they technical? Are they creative? Financial? What industries are they in? They can be in multiple industries, multiple vertical markets. What is the makeup of those industries? And do they have things like compliance issues? Like financial services and healthcare, they have all sorts of complexities Not only in the vertical market industry that they are in, and the position that they're in in those companies, but these are all content considerations. Next slide eight. Vous devez parler une langue différente avec chaque client. What does that mean? Well, really not literally a different language, but you have to be communicating with different customers in their language. Consider the person's role again in their corporate function if they're marketing finance technology as well as. If there is an indirect channel, remember what that an indirect channel will be: that if your product or service is being represented by other people other than your company, you are in an indirect channel model. Whether you're selling through distributorships or resellers, that's what I call indirect. So one main criteria when developing segmented messaging is what pain am I solving? If you're in luxury goods or cosmetics or beauty, you may not be solving a pain, but you may be solving a need or a desire. What does What desire am I fulfilling? What pain am I solving? Next slide. Part of finding out who your customers are is something that's actually having a resurgence in the marketing arena today, and that is building personas. People build personas, which I'll talk a little bit about here, to segment your customers. You break down who they are, what their pains are, what their motivators are, and what they care about, what's keeping them up at night. Because that will intrinsically help you develop content that's on message and on point with their needs. Also, another thing to look at when you're looking at this presentation and you would like to request a copy of it, the resources at the bottom of the slide link back to some blogs that have been written by On Demand CMO in the topic areas that I'm talking about in each case. Next slide, 10. Who are we selling to? Again, I think we talked about that, that you have to segment your audiences specifically in order to create that content that is relevant to them. Next slide. Let's talk about personas. So the persona, for instance, in our world, we focus on the benefit first, and then the features later. So in the case of finance, the person who is is in a finance role who you may be selling to, their role is cost-benefit analysis, negotiating pricing and terms. They're motivated by numbers, by hard data, by facts, ROI analysis, total cost of ownership or TCO. This is a person that you want in your messaging and sales strategy to be supporting their typical existing behaviors. You need to present a very analytical, numerical cost-value proposition to this person. That's what's going to motivate them. So when you're thinking about segmenting your messages, not only where you say it, where does that person find their leisure reading or their trade reading, what kinds of newsletters would this person be subscribed to, but also the words that you use. A lot of fluff is not going to go well with this type of person. A blog that is full of very jargon-filled marketing speak is not going to go over well with this person. So keep to the personality of that person. If you are looking for this person to be a buyer or an influencer in your product, solution, or service, bear in mind what makes this person tick. Next slide. I'm not going to belabor the personas aspect of the segmentation, but I do want to go through like a CMO role, a C-suite person. A C-suite CMO is interested, is motivated by vision, mission, values of that brand or that company. They love to hear who else is using what you're selling successfully. Tell me about people. They are storytellers. They like to respond to what's going on with other brands or other companies in their space and outside their space because they can learn from that. Typically visual, and they will resonate to things like, what's your roadmap? What do you have in mind for your product or service or solution down the road? Will I be able to scale with you, Mr. Supplier? Am I in good hands? Tell me about people who are happy with what you're selling. Less about the numbers, more about the story, more about the holistic view of what you are presenting as a solution or a service. So, when you're creating content for that CMO person, bear in mind that that's the tone and the approach and the verbiage you want to be using to talk to that person successfully. Because if you come at them with all numbers and all analysis, it's too dry for them to really get excited about it. So if you're selling to 2 of these people, imagine the benefits of segmenting your messages. Next slide, please. The thing you want to also remember to do is make sure that you talk about, that you are looking at and monitoring the engagement in social media that your brand or your product has. Do you know what these people are saying about you online? If you haven't already done it, Mike and I highly recommend HootSuite as a tool to track all of your social media channels, and what people are saying, and how they are saying it, in the language that we've just talked about is appropriate for that key audience. Next slide. In the case of channel marketing or indirect selling, you have to remember to treat your channel partners with, with love. Typically, when you're going through distributorship or channel marketing or what we call the indirect channel, you're not the only brand that that company or that distributor is representing. that person is carrying in your space typically. So you have to remember that your tone and your voice and your benefits and your value propositions are not about the end user, for instance. That's a big mistake that a lot of people make, is that they try to feed content to the reseller channel in end user customer speak, and that's inappropriate. You need to keep 2 things in mind. Your job is to enable them to sell more of your product or service, so you need to Talk to them about the benefits of doing that and make it easy for them to do that. And give them go-to-market tools that they can rebrand or co-brand and use in the marketplace so that your product and solutions messaging is consistent with what you want to see. You don't want to have a situation where a reseller on the West Coast or a partner on the West Coast has different marketing materials about your product or service than somebody on the East Coast. That would be really brutal. So you want to make sure that your tone and your voice talks about Remember the old WIFM in marketing school? What's in it for me? Make it very clear what the benefit to them, both monetary and market share and all of that, to representing your brand or service appropriately. Next slide, 15 we're on now. Meet your customers where they are. Well, that's metaphorically speaking, but back to what I was saying is don't use all of your marketing dollars on the same people. Overuse jargon. Speak to them, engage with them, give them an opportunity to speak back to you through social media and other channels, blogs. You know, tailoring is great, and be very, very careful with automation. Today we have great tools such as Aprimo and Eloqua and Marketo, but I'll share with you very quickly 2 really big faux pas. We have a marketing associate here at On Demand CMO who is 26 years old. He recently got a series of emails and direct mail pieces from the AARP. That's not a great thing to be witnessing as a marketing consultant is how off marketing automation can get. I got very excited when I got a happy birthday card from MINI USA, a car company. I was like, oh, that's so sweet. They remembered my birthday. I'm so excited. Until of course, I opened the email blast and And it talked about a car that I had returned 3 years prior. So that kind of, you know, it was excitement and then it was like, wow, these people are so out of touch. It actually caused me to have a negative thought about a brand I really loved. So marketing automation, as wonderful as it is, be careful. You're only as good as your lists and your segmentation. So bear that in mind as you feed the marketing automation channel. Next slide. Showrooming. I don't know if all of you are familiar with that term, but it's when people are going into an in-store and they're doing research, comparisons, price checking, and even ordering on their mobile devices. That's called showrooming. The problem that I would bear in mind for you is in that market segmentation that you're doing and that channel strategy that you have, make sure that your brand, your messaging, and your position and your pricing is consistent on all of your channels. That means Don't offer something online and have a different price for it in store. It's going to really make your customers angry. Remember that your Gen Y and your millennials are digital omnivores. They are in your stores. They are on your website. They're comparing online, offline all the time. Don't fight it. Just join it and be consistent and authentic in how you present yourself. And lastly, Remember, even in the segmentation exercise, you must have a mobile responsive web design, mobile site. Responsive, as you know, or those of you who may not know, is the ability to take the website's design and it automatically resizes and rejiggers itself regardless of the size of the device that you are on, whether it is an iPhone, a tablet, a laptop, or a full screen. So that is responsive design. Make sure that if you don't already have that, you do have it, because people are judging how cool, how with it, how appropriate they think your brand, or your product, or your solution is based on what you're putting out there. And if you're not looking good on a mobile device, you're kind of in trouble right out of the gate. Next slide, let's put content in content marketing. Creating content is actually easier than you think. And I'd like you to think about content as storytelling. If you simply did something like listing the top 5 objections that your customers may have, and you help them overcome that, that's fodder for a blog post. If you interviewed some of your best customers, that's fodder for a blog post, or a content piece, or an eBook, or whatever the case may be. I'd like to share with you some examples of of what I think are potentially boring products that have been made interesting by this storytelling exercise. Insurance, there's the Allstate Mayhem Man, which I find very interesting, and GEICO's GEICO. As sick as you may be of Mr. GEICO or not sick of Mr. GEICO, he is entertaining and he definitely has put GEICO on the map. Financial trading, there's E-Trade. Who doesn't love the talking baby? And lastly, satellite TV, Dish Network. The Hapa. Gotta love the Hapa. But I mean, even, you know, we could go on and on about examples like this. But the point is, the more you personalize even a brand that is boring, the more people have the ability to engage with you and connect with you and look for the content that you're going to be developing for those customers. Next slide is slide 18. We're talking about Quality versus quantity. More is not better if it stinks, right? Everyone, I mean, that's pretty much it. So quality, it has to be relevant. It has to be current, compelling, useful, and consistent. I always like to tell clients, if you're not solving a pain or helping them achieve a desire, your product or service will not make it. So just bear that in mind. And in your content developing development, bear that question in mind: What pain or what objective am I trying to help solve in my content? Next slide, 19. How do we create enough content? Well, the word repurpose is big in our vocabulary. So if you write a white paper, you can repurpose it into a blog post. If you've written several blog posts, why not package it all up into an eBook, brand it, and send it out as a valuable premium content piece of collateral that you could have as an incentive for people to sign on to a webinar, sign up for a free demo, all the things that will get them down that funnel. If you've written an eBook, why not promote it with a blog post? Or I didn't list this, but I think it's just also relevant, a video. Link your videos to your blogs and blog link to your video. Very important to do both. Creating a bank of evergreen content that can be deployed at any time in used again and again is really the secret to it. Have an editorial calendar where you segment your audiences, whether it's the finance guy or the marketing person, however you see your customers. And create content. Keep a repository. When you see something that's interesting in the trade press, when you see something that's interesting in the consumer press, pull it out. Save it. Put it in a folder or put it on your computer or scan it. Do whatever system works for you so that you can pull it back up and even comment on it. Create a blog about why you think it's a great or not such a great thing that's going on in your specific industry that's serving your specific clients. So again, share the existing content that was created by industry experts. Maybe you want to share something that Forrester recently said, or Gartner, or one of the major analysts. And then create that value for your segmented customers. Next slide, putting content, the content in content marketing. There are a couple things that work. Again, back to the storytelling and the value added. Infographics have been such a big deal in the marketing sphere. And it helps tell a story because I feel like everybody today has a little bit of ADD. We all have attention spans that are getting less and less lengthy. I think the average now is you've got 6 minutes— 6 seconds, excuse me, to get somebody's attention on your website. And if you don't do anything that is compelling in those 6 seconds, or tell a story, or hook them into wanting to see more, you've lost them. They are moving on to something else. So infographics help you keep that stickiness. There is a website called Fiverr, F-I-V-E-R-R, which has a slew of really talented people that create infographics for very, very little money. So if you have a story to tell that is complex, or you have something that you want to show, we did an infographic for a supplement company that was showing the before and afters of taking this hair loss prevention supplement. And it was— the left side was what you look like before, and the right side was what happens after you take the supplement. We've done it for technology clients that are trying to show what happens in a cloud services SaaS model solution, you know, where the technology goes in and out of the network and so on, or the cloud. So create infographics. Make it visually interesting. Ebooks are the same thing. You want to create the opportunity for people to engage with your brand, and your story, and your position, and create a little bit of a personality. Videos are another effective way to create a repository of assets. Think about it. You know the expression, a picture is worth 1,000 words? Well, how many words do you think a video is worth? We actually just put a video up on our website that that was an interview with me trying to explain to somebody outside of the sphere of just words on a page, what is our value proposition? How do we help customers and clients? And what is our best type of client? So by showing a video, you personalize the story and you are able to segment it a little bit. And you can really go a little deeper into the the idea of creating that storyboard and connecting with those key customers in the segmentations that you've identified are appropriate to your brand. Next slide. Basically, the best thing about today's marketing tools that we have, especially the online ones, is that you can make it right quickly. As one of Mike's One of Mike's favorite— my books, my favorite of Mike's books. Thank you. If you don't get it right on the first try, you can correct it mid-flight and make the adjustments you need. Between the marketing automation and the segmentation I talked about before, there's an opportunity to mix it up and try different things. Now, I realize that I've gone pretty quickly because our webinar is rather short in this timeframe. Like most of you, I might be left with at least 1 or 2 questions after hearing all this. How do I know if the questions I'm asking my customers are right? How do I know if my messaging is in alignment with my target customers? How do I know what the pain points are of my target customers? So I would open it up and say, if you do have any of these types of questions, please do call me. There is going to be a Q&A session right after this. I'm happy to give each of you a 15-minute free consultation on the phone. So you can email me or ping me. Through Eileen or directly, whichever works for you, and ask me the questions that are most pertinent. So in summation, remember that content marketing is definitely the way to speak to customers, but you've got to do it through better market segmentation. And hopefully today I've given you a few ideas as to how you can go about doing that. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Biznology. And thank you for being here. We have— we're going to wrap up and open up to Q&A. Thank you.

Thanks, Monique. So I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of how to jumpstart their content marketing using segmentation, but you didn't answer every question as you surmised. I've got several good questions teed up from you, and I'd like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own question by typing it into the questions box in your GoToWebinar controls. Before we get to the questions, I'd like to remind you that the Biznology team provides jumpstart workshops for companies who want to apply what they learn directly to their own businesses and have their team create a plan for executive approval right in the workshop. Our instructors will guide you step by step and help you persuade that executive to say yes. Go to biznology.com/training for more information on all of our offerings. We're about to start firing questions at Monique, but we need to thank our sponsors once again. BarnRaisers. A full-service digital and social media solutions company that builds brands using proven relationship principles and ROI. GaggleAmp, empowering companies to amplify their social media content by leveraging employees, partners, and resellers. Try GaggleAmp for free today. Meng Marketing Executives Networking Group, New Jersey chapter. We aren't just about networking to land a great job, we're about staying current to grow in our careers. On Demand CMO, marketing expertise on demand. Unison, the unagency, your secret weapon in the noisy world of 21st century brand communications. Now on to your questions. Our first question is actually from me, Monique.

Okay.

As you mentioned, HootSuite is great for engagement, but Conversant clients often find that researching audience needs better technology. Are there other ways besides social listening that you use to research an audience without expensive focus groups?

Yeah, I mean the first thing you do, Google is our friend, right? As much as people love to pick on Google, Google is the way that I try to find out who has made it a point to be in the space that I'm looking to be in. and what they're saying in that space. So I can kind of create a white— is that the answer to your question?

Yes.

It's creating a white space as to where people are and where they're not. Because by doing that between HootSuite, listening to what people are saying, Google what people are posting or saying or trying to say in my competitive set or my ancillary competitive set, I can figure out for the brand or the product or the service where we need to target. If there's a vertical market industry that's open that no one really is paying attention to that's underserved, that's an opportunity. You can do a lot of SWOT analysis between social media and traditional media. Trade publications are a phenomenal place and very underrated. And I'm not saying that because I was publisher of Brandweek. I'm saying that because trade magazines, trade publishing, trade newsletters are phenomenal places to understand the pulse of the industries you're trying to get into.

Terrific, terrific, very helpful. So next question, big companies are all using marketing automation and they're making a lot of the mistakes that you pointed out in the presentation. How can we get back into control?

Well, I think at the end of the day you have to kind of ask yourself, you know, is it important, is it quantity or quality? And a lot of companies are reticent to clean their databases because they're like, no, no, we can't get rid of these 5,000, 10,000, 50,000 names, whatever it is. Sometimes that's actually working to your disservice. So be judicious about what you are willing to give up, if it is the number of records you have or it is the quality of the records you have. And I always pick quality over quantity.

Terrific, terrific. Let's see, I think we've got time for one more question. So let's use this one. It costs so much to personalize a website. Are there other ways to deliver the right message to the right person so that we're not just delivering the same content to everybody?

So I'm not in favor necessarily of personalizing websites per se, but I am in favor of making the website organized such that every type of customer you have is reflected in the website content. So if you're serving 3 different— like we just did a website for let's say a university. We were talking to both professors and students and potentially other districts that are referring students into that school. So, you have to make sure that in your website you're not necessarily personalizing everything, but you're personalizing it in the sense that they see themselves in your content. So, if I'm an end user, I see myself. If I'm a reseller, I see myself. I can easily get to that section, and that section is all about me.

Terrific, terrific. Monique, that's all the time we have for today, but thank you so much for these great ideas, and thanks especially to our audience for your participation and for your questions. If any of you had questions that we did not have time to answer, you can email your questions to Eileen— that's E-I-L-E-E-N— at mikemorangroup.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Monique for the answer.

Great.

As Monique also offered, please also email Eileen at mikemorangroup.com if you're interested in that free 15-minute consultation that Monique offered you. I have to tell you, if I were you, I would be taking advantage of that for sure. So you could— if you want that consultation, please send an email to Eileen at mikemorangroup.com. Later this week, we'll send you all a link of the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, Top 10 Tricks for Sales Lead Generation with Ruth P. Stevens, scheduled for 11:00 AM US Eastern Time on April 8th. We hope to see you all back here then. Bye everybody. Bye.