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What are the best brands doing to stay relevant, build trust, and create content smarter?
At Share Your Genius, we have the same questions, so we're tapping the best in the space for their answers—one voicemail at a time.
Join us each week for quick hits of insights from b2b marketers and leaders.
Adam (00:09): James Bishop understands the basics of marketing. In addition to being a vice president of marketing for Vanilla Soft, he's also a professor who teaches digital marketing and marketing management. He works at a company focused on moving quickly, speed to lead, connect rates, and the importance of using technology to get salespeople in touch with their prospects as quickly as possible.
Now with the need for speed comes a potential idea that you should also chase trends. You should follow what's going on. What platforms are the most buzzy right now? But because of his background, James understands that being a dog chasing that new shiny car isn't always the best thing to do. So I asked James, how do you stay focused? How do you avoid chasing trends? How do you avoid not being reactive? How do you stay the course?
James Bishop (01:13): Yeah, thanks Adam. That's a really good question. And that's hard, right? These days there is so much going on around us in the marketing world where pace, pace, pace, faster, faster, faster, reacting, reacting, reacting to technology channels, platforms, the world. It's hard to stay the
If we were face to face or on a video call you'd see enough gray hair on me to know I've been around the block a couple of times and I remember organizations saying things like We need to have a website because everybody else does. We need to be on Twitter. We need to be on tick-tock. We need to be on whatever.
We need to go and do this. We need to go and do that. We need to go and do whatever. Or even as, you know, junior marketers that are coming up through their career and through the ranks will want to be, you know, creative and interesting and do things, which is amazing. They'll want to hop onto, we need to do this. We need to do that. We need to say this. We need to say that. And I think that can actually slow us down and stop us from staying the course.
And the course needs to adjust and as marketers, we react to what's going on around us. But there's certain fundamental things that need to stay the course more than others. And this is I pull out my little wooden soap box and I stand up on it and put one hand on my hip and say, okay, y'all have we forgotten marketing 101?
Almost all of us that have been to school for marketing, we sat in our first year, we cracked open a saying something like "marketing fundamentals." What every marketing 101 instructor says is you start with the basics. What's our marketing problem? What are we trying to achieve? That's probably tied to a business problem. Our pipeline's too slow. We are not getting the awareness that we want. There's a marketing problem we need to solve. What is that?
Second thing, what's our customer? Who are they? What are they doing? What do we think they know and believe today that we want them? How do we want them to behave differently? That's the second thing.
Third thing, what's going on with our competitors, our environment? Things that might be changing things. It's not like there's anything weird going on that's affecting any of us today with technology, politics, the economy, anything else. What are those? Let's think about them a little bit. What are our metrics? What's working well? What's not? What's our product? What's it do differently? All that comes together. That's where marketing strategy comes out. If I'm probably missing one or two things there, but marketing 101 fundamentals and those things turn into our strategy. based on all of those. Think about all that. Okay, there's a reason, this is what we say. This is where we say it. And this is what we measure to see if our customers are doing the thing we want them to know and do differently. That's how we stay the course. Because then little things like, Hey, we need to be on TikTok comes up. A lot of no, do we, is that where our marketer is that where our customers are? Is that where they're paying attention? Is that what's going to make them think or believe something different?
Maybe let's figure that out. And it gives us a framework more so than anything else. Cause when we want to stay the course, either as marketing leaders or when we were junior in our career, we're figuring things out, having a framework to stay that course and say, well, this is what we're trying to achieve. And why does this thing fit it? Here's this idea that someone threw across our desk. Cause that never happens. Does that fit the framework that we have? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Is that a good idea? Is it not? Let's see how that fits in. Say that you want to stay the course, come back to the fundamentals, create a framework. That's probably what your marketing 101 class called the marketing strategy. That's what you do first and the tactics apply to it.