MarketingScaleurs

28Dec

How to Delight Your Customers at Scale

28 December 2020 MarketingScaleurs 324

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about how to delight your customers, click here to check out the book now.

In today’s marketing and sales, it’s not enough to achieve customer satisfaction. Standard practice is to aim for delighting customers. This means that instead of just meeting expectations you are exceeding their expectations. And going above and beyond to help them.

We aim to delight customers because of the outsize reputation it can generate. it’s really hard to beat excellent word-of-mouth marketing from loyal fans. When one customer tells their colleagues, friends, and family about how great their experience was.

To delight customers, you need to listen to your customers and understand their needs. Then take this insight and systematize it into your workflows. So that customers are regularly delighted no matter how big your business grows. Delighting customers can easily become one of your strongest strengths and differentiators.

It will take time to identify your ideal customer, but this step — and its inevitable mistakes — will move your business toward sustainable growth and devoted customers.

Attract, convert, close, and delight: We know from Hubspot that these are core pillars of the traditional inbound marketing strategy (https://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing). It’s easy to get caught up in the “attract” stage, creating content for lead generation. It’s important to attempt to reach the “convert” and “close” stages and see those leads turn into customers. But are you remembering the importance of the delight stage in your marketing strategy? Success in scaling is not just about customer satisfaction, but about creating a powerful emotional reaction that results in happy customers. Who wants to continue using your company and become your best promoters.

Do You Understand Your Customers’ Needs?

When developing content, for your website, your blog, or through social media networks. You have to listen to customer needs, so you must design this content with the customer in mind. Social media and blog content comprise the “attract” stage of your marketing strategy, leading to the ability to convert leads. Delight should be present in each stage, beginning when they are still visitors through the customer stage and never-ending. Social media networks and blogs allow you to interact with your visitors. Delighting them through multiple channels, ensuring that visitors view you as a trusted advisor.

A delighted customer is a customer who would circle a “totally satisfied” option on a survey. Did you know that “totally” satisfied customers have a repurchase rate that is three to 10 times higher than “somewhat” satisfied customers? A delighted customer will be happy to reuse your business and to recommend it to their family and friends. Referral leads convert roughly 30% better than leads generated from other marketing channels. Focusing on delighting your customers in your marketing strategy can increase your revenue and improve your relationship with your customers, which leads to referrals and social sharing, as well as an increase in customer retention and loyalty.

When I was an export manager at Unibake, one of the key things we did to scale the department was to focus on delighting the customers. The customers in this case were not individuals but foodservice distributors, retailers, and sister companies, but even though we were working with high-budget entities, individualized attention was just as crucial.

Build a relationship with your customers

We had three bakeries mass-producing baked goods in Belgium. We would give customers tours of the factory (including a chat with the chef), followed by dinner in the evening. Over several days, we’d spend a lot of time with representatives of the companies and get to know them on a personal level.

We also repeated this approach in our visits to customers on their home turf. For example, we were persistent in pursuing Ledo Croatia as a new client. To woo them, I visited Croatia several times. I got to know the point person there on a personal level. As time went on, she told us about her wedding and later sent a notice about her pregnancy. Clear signs that although we had a business relationship. There was an undercurrent of friendship that helped us seal the deal.

These kinds of “delight the customer” practices are enormously helpful in scaling a business or its marketing department. They helped bring in more business and deeper loyalties. The personal touch is not scalable — you may need to meet with each individual customer in person — but you can automate and standardize the process of how many customer visits you make through the sample selection, agenda, or presentation. Doing so will win time by making it easy and efficient to repeat the processes. Once in a while, you could enhance the personal aspect by holding a group customer demo.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue.

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!

16Dec

How to Define Your Marketing Strengths and Differentiators

16 December 2020 MarketingScaleurs 383

Be the black sheep

The article below is just a small glimpse into our new book. If you want to learn a lot more about Marketing Strengths and Differentiators, click here to check out the book now.

Many entrepreneurs attempt to define their competitive advantage, their secret sauce. What makes them different from the jump when they are just at the beginning of their business journey. In reality, most entrepreneurs misidentify this and through trial and error and meeting and learning from challenges. Along the way are able to more accurately define what differentiates them from the competition.

Reflection can keep us motivated and help us push for our dreams. It’s good to have high self-esteem, but we also must be realistic in what we want to achieve. For example, at some point, a marketer — whether the owner of a business that provides marketing services or a member of the marketing department of another type of business — will figure out that they are better at providing after-sales email services rather than general content writing. That marketer will then focus on maintaining staff and specializing in the tools needed to provide after-sales email services instead of writing generic content. That can provide the reality check that strengthens the business in general and its marketing process in particular.

Just like focusing on one main goal can help you increase your results. Understanding what your marketing Strengths and differentiators are can be transformative for your business. Use the information below to help you more accurately identify your top two or three differentiators. The factors that make your business unique, so you can use them to stand out in a sea of competitors. Competitive differentiation is a process that helps buyers distinguish your firm from similar ones. And gives them a compelling reason to select you.

Find your differentiators

You don’t have to be radically different from your competitors (although if you are, so much the better). Rather, you need to find something about your business that you can own and make a distinctive part of your brand. To engage with your clientele, you have to provide and promote differentiators that they care about.

There are multiple ways to find out what your customers really think to find your differentiators and where your customers think you stand out.

Create a short survey.
The areas you want to focus on are improving the customer experience, product and service satisfaction, and what inspires customers to come back and refer friends. As you craft 10 to 12 short questions, keep in mind that they should lead to answers you can’t easily get in person or online.
Analyze your marketing results.
Customers leave behind digital breadcrumbs that offer insights into what they want. In email, look at your open and click-through rates to see which content strikes a chord and what’s falling flat. Most of the popular social media networks offer free insights into performance, so take advantage of Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, and other such tools to see how you’re doing.
Ask customers how you’re doing.
When customers are at the cash register or come to your website on a regular basis, don’t be afraid to ask for feedback. When you do, be explicit by letting them know that you’re looking to grow your business and would love their honest feedback about what you can do to improve their experience and keep them coming back to your company.
Get internal feedback.
A lot of knowledge is in the brains of your colleagues. Ask them questions and challenge them to help you make your marketing better.

True differentiation takes place in the mind

It happens when a person connects your firm with an idea; when they think to themselves, “Ah! [Your company name here] — they’re the firm that’s known for ________.” If your prospects fill in the blank with something that’s both relevant to their businesses and not associated with your competitors, then you have created a powerful competitive differentiator.

Armed with this information, you’re ready to put a plan in place that not only scales your marketing strengths, but also scales your business. Since repetition is the key to remembering, reiterate your main differentiators in your social media profiles, website, and newsletters.

A matrix can help you determine your differentiators. In the columns, list your competitors; in the rows, enumerate the differentiators. Here are ways that businesses find their strengths and turn them into differentiators. Consider these three categories and how you might be different from the competition within these parameters:

Focus.
Maybe your company has a global foodservice operator data set. Lots of competitors have a global database (not dedicated to foodservice) or foodservice data for certain regions.
Simplicity.
Your competitors might have elaborate, fancy websites, but some are hard to navigate, and it can be difficult to understand what they offer. Keep it simple and logical — this makes it easy to convert leads. Use only one call to action on the landing page instead of 10.
Scalability.
Maintain a focus on the things that can be scaled up by providing access to a monthly data set such as recurring revenues.

Use the above to help you more accurately define your marketing strengths and differentiators. Once they’re clear to you, lean into them and leverage them to make your business stand out from the pack. There is a lot of competition and noise out there but not many people say something truly different and interesting. So go ahead, be different!

Become a Successful Scaleur

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!

09Dec

4 Principles for Identifying Your Ideal Customer

9 December 2020 MarketingScaleurs 429

Perhaps the most common mistake in marketing is thinking that the objective is to describe your product. But that’s wrong. The objective is to describe the solution to the problem your ideal customer is having. And how do you know what the solution is? By understanding the problem. And how do you understand the problem? By understanding your customer, really getting to know your ideal customer, who they are, what their hopes and dreams are, and what makes their lives easy and what makes them more difficult.

So how do you identify your ideal customer? What goes into defining who will want to buy your product or services and how do you determine not only who will want to buy them but which types of customers are the best suited to buying your offerings? These four principles below will help you identify your ideal customer.

1. Provide real-time support

Have you ever thought about how your customers feel about spending time waiting on hold in a phone queue?

Does it really have any worth to say, “Your call is important to us”? An American Express survey found that the maximum amount of time customers are willing to wait is 13 minutes. Your customer expectations align with reality when your business adopts new technology to provide real-time support to your customers. That puts customer experience on pace to exceed price and product as the number-one differentiator for companies.

Great customer experience can be achieved by using live-chat software and engagement tools that boost customer satisfaction rates. Live chat has been found to be preferred over other communication channels, such as phone and email — the real-time support it delivers to customers makes it popular. Ecoconsultancy reports that 79% of customers prefer live chat because of the immediacy it offers compared to other channels. Consumers just want answers as quickly as possible and are often too busy, or even too lazy, to navigate your website.

Live chat connects you with your customers instantly and lets you address their issues in real time. It triggers proactive chat messages to guide customers in their buying journey and improve their experience with your business.

2. Analyze customer feedback

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.”

Customer feedback is the core of any business and one of the main factors in growth. It is the one thing that gives a business a clearer view of how it is doing. Collecting feedback requires asking customers to share their opinions about the product, service or overall experience with your business. The right moment to ask for feedback is right after a customer service conversation. You are already in a conversation with the customer, so it feels natural to ask for feedback.

CHD operates in the foodservice industry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the landscape of this industry totally changed, and so too did customer interests and demands. It was necessary to conduct a survey asking about the inconveniences brought about by the disruption of the pandemic. Surprised by the results, we had to change our direction. What really counted was that our customers appreciated that we took their pain and hardship into consideration.

You think you know your customer because you speak with them and their colleagues regularly, but do you truly understand their needs? During these turbulent times, CHD made an effort to understand the main problems our customers were experiencing — without trying to sell them our products. That resonated with them.

To do this, we called or emailed our five top accounts and asked, “What will be the main pain your company will see after the COVID?” We did this without linking it to a company offer. Based on the feedback, we created a survey that incorporated their responses to gauge the impact on the rest of our customers. As a result, we discovered we had to go back to our foundations. Instead of selling an advanced lead-scoring model, we had to return to the basics: just data.

3. Personalize your communications

Today’s customers expect business interactions to be customized to their needs and preferences. Because they get frustrated when they receive information that doesn’t resonate, especially when it comes from trusted advisors.

With the right technology to collect customer data and turn it into actionable insights, you can personalize each customer interaction. And provide unique messaging for each of your clients regardless of their preference in channels.

Start with the basics: Make a list of your top 10 customers and your prospects to create dedicated emails to send to those groups. That way, you avoid sending products or services to customers who are already buying your products or services.

If you know that 20% of your top customers drive 80% of your revenue, it’s good business to send them something special. At Unibake, we took the time to do the little things that can set a company apart in a crowded industry; efforts such as sending customers “hygge” socks during the holidays (a tradition in Belgium) or a thank you postcard can achieve miracles. It shows customers they are genuinely appreciated. An old-fashioned gesture of gratitude never goes out of style.

4. Solve one problem for one customer

People don’t buy products; they buy solutions to problems. Startups can’t hope to solve all the problems for a whole market — and they shouldn’t want to. For a startup, the opportunity to narrowly focus on one specific problem and build the perfect solution to that problem is an advantage that must be exploited.

Startups have the ability to zero in on one problem for a very specific, small, and defined audience. Don’t try to “boil the ocean” right out of the gate with a mass-market product (unless, of course, you think competing with massive companies on a level playing field is a good strategy).

Remember:

Facebook started by focusing on one dorm at Harvard.
Mailchimp was created to design emails for the clients of one design consultancy.
Shopify started as a shopping cart solution for a snowboarding website.
Groupon was created for one office building in Chicago.

If you’re aiming small, your laser-focused launch is only going to require one rocket — but that rocket has to showcase one awesome attribute. Trying for more than one product or service will drain important resources and will distract from the necessary process of perfecting your number-one offering. Such a lack of focus is also a tell-tale warning sign for investors.

Perfecting your one killer rocket means ensuring it has something that lifts it far above your competition, so you’d be smart to focus on giving one product something special. In the beginning, you are better off doing one thing really well and focusing on that one thing; later, you’ll be able to use customer feedback to add new features and broaden your market reach.

Case in point: Most people think that consumers want choice. The reality is consumers don’t want choice; they want freedom from choice. If you can solve one problem proficiently for a customer with one simple feature, those consumers telling all their friends is the only marketing you’ll need.

One thing I learned over the years is that you not only have to sell one thing at the same time; you have to sell a solution rather than a product. CHD, the global foodservice database provider, doesn’t sell data. We sell the solution that companies can increase their market share. In addition, by accessing the database, they have access to millions of new leads they can start targeting, so their market share will increase as well.

Conclusion

Using these four principles above, you will be well on your way to identifying your ideal customer. The concepts of being responsive to your customers’ inquiries, analyzing the feedback they give you, customizing your interactions to make them feel appreciated, and solving the customer’s real problem will bring you a long way towards a successful, scalable marketing plan.

Once you’ve identified your ideal customer, your next step is to build a marketing funnel that orbits around your needs as a business (i.e., a prospect fills out a form on your website, your marketing team immediately schedules a demo, and the prospect becomes a customer), study your buyer’s behavior. Would your demos be more effective if you had a discovery call first? Is a 90-day sales cycle more realistic for your buyer than 30 days? Consider these things as you’re building your funnel.

Become a Successful Scaleur

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!

04Dec

How Marketing and Sales Are Connected

4 December 2020 MarketingScaleurs 358

Marketing Scaleurs Founder Jolien Demeyer with Sales Scaleur Founder Shima Zeroual

Today’s marketing and sales landscape look vastly different from that of just a few decades ago. With the advent of the internet, blogging, social media, and a myriad of digital communications channels. The path to purchase is not a simple straight line. But a complex and varied web of twists and turns — and touchpoints.

Fundamentally, sales and marketing have always been intrinsically linked. Simply put, if marketing brings in inbound leads, sales need to chase them. But through the modern complex web of channels, Sales and Marketing have never been more closely connected than today.

So what is that connection? How do both sides work together to create an efficient, well-oiled machine of a sales funnel? That’s what we’ll explore below.

What’s the difference between Sales and Marketing?

But let’s back up and first define the difference between sales and marketing. Before looking at the flow from one to the other. So clearly stated, what is the difference between sales and marketing?

Marketing does the educating and advertising, attracting new leads with relevant information to get them interested in your offering. Sales close the deal, reminding the prospect of the value of your offerings. And helping them follow through with the purchase, converting the lead into a customer.

Often sales manage relationships with customers or clients. And marketing manages the processes that make people interested in becoming a customer or client.

linkedin-sales-navigator-YDVdprpgHv4-unsplash

The Setup

Today’s consumers are also increasingly immune to traditional advertising and sales methodologies. Meaning they conduct more independent research and take more convincing before they’re sold on making a purchase.

That’s why the buyer’s journey may differ from one consumer to the next: They’re not all listening to the same radio spots to learn about your company. They’re not even being exposed to the same information about your brand from the same sources. Some may have discovered your company on the web, while others learned of your products or services through word-of-mouth recommendations. Some may read online reviews before engaging with your marketing team or filling out an online request for more information. Others will visit your website, read your blog, and evaluate your competition before engaging with your company.

What’s more, when leads are passed from marketing to sales, they’re expected to be “sales-ready,”. Or at the decision-making stage in the buying journey. The myriad paths to purchase makes it increasingly challenging to qualify leads effectively as sales-ready.

It takes 18 touches on average to generate a viable sales lead. That means it takes multiple touches for a consumer to make the choice to request information. And even more to gather the information to determine whether a lead is ready to be passed to sales.

At the early stages in the buyer’s journey. Consumers are often merely gathering information and building awareness about your products and services. Often, these interactions are not in-depth enough to provide the information necessary to qualify as leads.

The Handoff

Often in marketing we talk about the sales funnel, which, confusingly enough, is actually the marketing funnel. All the touchpoints described above – digital marketing activities like email, SEO, and social media – help to introduce or move the lead through the funnel to the point of making a decision.

But once a lead is qualified, it’s important that the handoff from marketing to sales is coordinated and smooth. From here, it’s up to the sales team to to close the sale, and often, to maintain the customer relationship.

A lot of this stage of the sales process can be automated with various tools, but ultimately it is still a personal process. A personal call to check in with a customer can still work wonders, and this is the job of the sales team.

What to Consider

Scaling your business obviously assumes you will get more in-bound leads, which leads to more calls, which can lead to more sales. Do you have the structure in place to generate more leads and sales from end to end?

Ask yourself, do you have:

A sufficient lead flow to generate the desired number of leads?
Marketing systems to track and manage leads?
Enough sales representatives to follow up and close leads?
A robust system to manage sales orders?
A billing system and receivables function for follow-up to ensure invoices are collected on a timely basis?

When you’re tracking the right things, growth becomes much easier. Focus on metrics that make you a customer-centric organization, so you get actionable data and timely user feedback that pushes your company forward. Find out which marketing initiatives are creating value by improving results, boosting ROI, and delivering mature leads to your sales team. Being able to attribute revenue properly through each of your marketing activities is key to knowing where to place your resources to fuel growth.

What to Track

Basic metrics like lead volume and website traffic are important, but failing to dive deeper means you could be missing out on key insights into your marketing performance and valuable opportunities for improvement. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) to Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) ratio, unengaged subscribers, and other advanced marketing metrics will give you deeper insight into what’s driving your success and where you should focus your attention.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) are generally defined as bottom-of-the-funnel prospects who have indicated they’re ready to purchase, or at least talk to a salesperson, by downloading buying guides, requesting a demo, or signing up for a free trial. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) are those potential customers whom sales determines are ready for a direct follow-up.

Looking at the percentage of MQLs that are accepted as SQLs is a good indicator of the health of your pipeline and your marketing team’s ability to qualify and screen leads. It’s also a great indication of how well your marketing and sales team are aligned and communicating with each other, since a low ratio raises a red flag that there’s a disconnect between marketing and sales.

How to measure it? Divide the number of SQLs by the number of MQLs to calculate your MQL to SQL conversion rate.

More Resources

If you’re looking for more top-level coverage, a great starting resource is Hubspot’s Sales & Marketing Service Level Agreement, found here. But if you’re looking for a deep dive with tons of actionable insight, check out our book, Think Big, Scale Fast.

We’re here to help with all your marketing needs, but if you need help scaling your sales, our friends at Sales Scaleur should be your first call. Founder Shima Zeroual and her team are experts in helping businesses grow their sales processes and teams, in a modern, integrated manner.

Become a Successful Scaleur

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!

24Nov

How to Create a Flexible Strategic Roadmap

24 November 2020 MarketingScaleurs 333

Having a proper strategic roadmap is the key to scaling successfully. After you’ve collected insights about your business, gotten your team together, and evaluated your marketing business from top to bottom, it’s time to start building a strategic roadmap for scaling.

It’s very much like taking a family road trip: You need a map of where you’re going before you start gassing up the car. The strategic roadmap for your business has to include the milestones that you want to achieve at reasonable intervals: here’s when we hire a digital marketing manager; here’s when we expand our marketing efforts. It should also be flexible enough to accommodate the unknown and unexpected.

Keep your scaling roadmap at the forefront of every decision you make. If a new move or decision doesn’t contribute to hitting your strategic milestones, don’t spend money just because you can.

Remember: Every decision you make while learning how to scale your business should be aimed at building long-term growth. Keep checking in monthly to evaluate whether revenue is on track, your operating costs are staying low, and your teams are achieving key initiatives.

The Three Phases of Scaling Up

There are three main phases to scaling up (see above) that you can use as touchstones for progress. In Phase 1, you start a company and make sure you have a product fit. At Phase 2, once you have the right product-market fit and you have scalable systems, scaleurs, a strategy, and a success panel in place, with a steady income stream, it is time to start to scale up. Finally, in Phase 3, you acquire a new business, you are acquired by another larger company and/or you expand internationally.

The Three-Part Foolproof Marketing Roadmap

Once you pass the startup phase, it is time to build your roadmap to success and your scalable strategy. When I start at a company, I start drafting the marketing strategy plan, based on these three parts.

1. What is the current blueprint? What does the company have as of today in terms of:

1. Tags & Pixels — do we have the right tracking systems in place and can we trust the data? Tags will help personalize, target, track, analyze, and report on data/performance of visitors to our website.
2. Website Performance — is the website optimized enough to convert leads into customers?
  1. How we are ranking in Google? How do customers find us?
  2. Once at the website, how easy is it for prospective customers to navigate it and find their way? Do we have the right content, and do we bond with them?
  3. How can we become friends with our visitors and convert them into customers once they fill in the contact fields?
3. Email marketing — email is still the #1 communication channel. Do we have an email plan in place? What does our lead magnet — something we give for free in exchange for their contact details — look like?
4. Social media — are we putting our message where our audience hangs out most of every day? Are we using it for both organic (free) and paid advertising?
5. PPC (pay per click) — are we using paid tactics to gain visibility? Do we have the right keywords in place to be found on the web?
6. Dashboard — how do we visualize our results to make better decisions?

2. What are the must-win battles you want to achieve in a given year?

What are the success drivers you want to see at the end of a successful year? Thinking about whether you have a great foundations in place. Plan to increase the customer experience by X% and grow your leads by Y%.

3. Draw up a plan with milestones of what to achieve by when.

This will make your objectives as smart as possible. Set them for a whole year, but cut them into monthly and even weekly goals to make them easier to manage and achieve.

Conclusion

Before moving ahead, make sure you also understand your organization as a whole. Ask yourself these questions:

What is the budget for your team?
Which are the strengths and weaknesses of the company and where do you want to focus when scaling up?
What do your customers need and how you can delight them?

In future articles, we’ll cover budgets, understanding customer needs, and more.

This is an edited excerpt from our new book! Get yourself a copy today here.

Become a Successful Scaleur

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!

18Nov

How to Know if Your Business Strategy Scales

18 November 2020 MarketingScaleurs 307

Once you’ve decided it’s the right time to scale, your team is in place, and your goals are set, it’s time to look at your greater business strategy.

Growing to scale will put your business strategy under more pressure than ever before. It’s not the time to gloss over issues and assume the kinks will work out as you grow. Take a closer look at every variable: infrastructure, operations, systems, products, services, and — especially — your budget.

If there are any weaknesses in the way your business runs today, scaling will only magnify them. Set aside the time to turn your business inside out and make sure you can truly support sudden growth. Before you even consider how to scale, your marketing should already run like a well-oiled machine.

Scale back before you scale up. Examine your current processes to see where you can streamline, and determine which marketing efforts are generating a positive ROI. You have to audit what is taking place and where the strengths and weaknesses are. Being able to scale successfully means knowing what attracts and retains the customers you’ve already acquired and leveraging that knowledge for growth that’s sustainable. Identify process gaps that already exist and come up with a business strategy to address these before they turn into process chasms that cause you immense problems farther down the line. If something isn’t working with 10 staff and 50 customers, how will you cope with 100 staff and 5,000 customers?

It is time to take a hard look inside your business to see if you are ready for growth. You can’t know what to do differently unless you take stock of where your business stands today. Try to think of everything. You’ll need to do some hard thinking and research to come up with proper cost estimates, but doing so will improve your plan. Spend time looking at the marketing systems and processes that are working for you, as well as those that aren’t, because extra strain will be felt across the board. Cut back on what’s not working. If you are scaling up, it’s time to get serious about processes.

The stages of scaling. Learn more here.

Some businesses are easier to scale than others. A truly scalable business is one that keeps low marginal costs while increasing revenue and works efficiently with less involvement from the business owner. Here are some examples:

Software — A classic and obvious example of a scalable business. Once the product is ready, additional copies can be released with minimal extra cost. By adding monthly recurring revenues to your pricing model, you will set yourself for sustainable growth. For example, you could let customers buy your service every month, at a rate per user. They will use the software and you will have a monthly income stream
Social media — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. It seems like any new platform for sharing photos and impressions is welcomed. Social media platforms/apps help with reaching lots of people or potential customers.
Downloads — Digital music, books, games, and applications are similar to software’s scalability. An app, once launched, can be downloaded thousands of times a day. A white paper can be created once and added to a website landing page for downloading. More and more people will pay for such products, but you only have to put time and energy into creating them once.
E-commerce and events — Any product or service provided via the internet is scalable. Because of their digital (and hence easily reproducible) nature, information business, webinars, and many kinds of consulting services can be delivered to a mass of people using only a computer’s camera and microphone and an inexpensive program such as Zoom, Skype, Facetime, etc. Potential and current customers subscribe to attend a webinar and pay a fee for it. You only spend an hour or two to create the event, and profit from hosting it.
Line production and franchising — Most processes of line commodity production are automated. The net cost is relatively low (although you always must keep an eye on the quality). Never let down client expectations — that would undermine their loyalty. When a person comes to McDonald’s, they want the same Big Mac they had the previous time. Ray Kroc set a standard down to the smallest specifications, including weight, sauce amount, and fat content in every burger. You can set similar standards for your business that makes it both manageable and scalable.

Become a Successful Scaleur

Scaling is a business strategy that can only be mastered by a scaleur who is a dedicated learner and considers real-time business priorities. I hope the article above has helped! Marketing Scaleurs is a scaling company that helps entrepreneurs scale their marketing efforts. We’re experts in growth marketing, product development, and more, creating custom growth plans for startups, entrepreneurs and scaleurs in order to help them gain traffic, generate leads and increase their revenue.

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!

10Nov

Go for One Big Goal: On Goal-Setting, Focus, and Productivity

10 November 2020 MarketingScaleurs 308

Once you have found your team, it’s time to focus on a common team goal-setting. You need a bridge between creating the team and being able to track their success in accomplishing goals. To do so requires setting and paying attention to goals (often thought of as quotas). Be realistic in terms of what you expect from your new hires and employees; it may take time for them to adapt to your business and marketing plan.

Tracking your team’s marketing performance guarantees a smooth transition for both current and new reps. “Stack” your team members side-by-side to make sure everyone is on the same page in terms of performance. Keeping an eye on your marketing analytics can help detect bottlenecks and other problems that could be holding your team back.

If your marketing organization isn’t productive, how can you realistically expect to scale? Productivity is about maximizing your time and tasks within a reasonable time frame. Depending on who you ask, priorities vary. A healthy knowledge of productivity tools shows that you’re motivated and skilled at time management. Popular tools include Slack, Trello, Google Drive, and Dropbox.

Too often, people assume that you should only focus on one thing in your life, period, but that’s not what this strategy is about. It’s about being smart about what you pursue. Yes, you can achieve a lot of things … just not at the same time. You can’t build a career, get in shape, compete in marathons, write a book, invest in a business, have kids, and travel the world all at once, but you can do all those things over a lifetime.

Goal-setting tips

I stick to one major priority per area of my life. I’ve categorized my life as follows: career, health, learning, money, and relationships. That means I never work on more than one major project per category. I either write a book or create an online course. I also learn only one skill at a time, and I am either saving my money or looking to invest it (naturally, I’m saving most of the time). But what’s important to understand is that when there’s no structure, there’s chaos.

The natural thing for most people is to start a goal-setting or picking one priority to focus on. But unless you have trained your mind to focus on one thing, it’s not a smart thing to do.

Scaling up a business with a strong marketing component does require that you are able to set, focus on, and accomplish your goals. That is part of having that scaleur’s growth mindset. As a business owner, you may have to go from “I want everything” to “I appreciate what I have.” It is about controlling your desires to achieve a greater outcome.

Instead of having lots of small goals that are mostly meaningless, go for a few big goals. Try knocking off one every few months or even once a year if you have to. My current goal-setting is to pivot my career in a new direction. Then straight after that, I’m going to knock off some big speeches to up my public speaking game. Other than those two items, that’s about it. This strategy puts the primary focus on only one or two goals, so you get results faster.

You may find that as you gain momentum and see results quickly, you don’t need the motivation to reach that one big goal — your results become your motivation, and that requires all your energy and focus.

Not yet convinced? Take these two-minute tests:

Test 1
- Set your alarm for 1 minute.
- Write out the alphabet from A to Z, followed by the numbers 1 through 9, as many times as you can.
- Example: a – b – c – d – e … – z – 1 – 2 – 3 – … 9 – a – b –
- How many characters did you draw?
Test 2
- Set your alarm for 1 minute again.
- Alternate writing the sequential letters and numbers.
- Example: a – 1 – b – 2 – c – 3 – …
- How many characters did you draw this time?

I bet you have fewer characters in Test 2, right? It has been proven that multitasking is hard to master because you have a lot of interruptions. Focus on one thing, and do it right. Apply this same principle when scaling up your marketing. Find that one goal-setting, and track your teams as they move toward achieving it.

Become a Successful Scaleur

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!

04Nov

9 Roles Every Successful Marketing Team Has

4 November 2020 MarketingScaleurs 535

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Taking your business to the next level means making tough choices and asking yourself what functions you can perform (or not perform) internally. For a primer on how to plan your team to scale. Check out our previous post, “How to Get Your Team Ready for Scaling.” Once you have your overview clearly mapped out, you’ll need to figure out, who to have on your marketing team and/or what areas of expertise to cover.

A small company with fewer than 50 employees may find it unrealistic to have nine different people fill their marketing team positions. Being nimble is certainly a strength for a small business, but it’s worth mentioning that lack of structure can be an impediment to success. A small company’s team structure might consist of fewer players, and in some cases, only one person. Whichever way the company integrates its team, though, the essentials for success remain the same.

Each one of the following nine positions needs not all be separate individuals. It’s okay to have an overlap of duties, as long as the structure is clear. Just consider that certain skill sets (and personality types) are more compatible with certain positions than others.

1. Marketing Manager

The marketing manager is effectively the coach of the marketing team. This is an essential role that, depending on the size of your team and expertise, an owner could take on or otherwise, hire for. This person is responsible for managing budgets and communicating the value of the marketing team’s efforts to management.

Core tasks:

Team performance
Setting and tracking weekly marketing quotas and KPIs based on team performance
Communicating the success of the marketing team to management
Building relationships with external partners (like agencies)
Managing the budget

2. SEO/SEM Specialist

Let’s face it: Google is still king when it comes to potential customers searching your business’s offerings, and no matter what business you’re in, SEO is going to be a big part of your marketing game plan. As online customers turn to search engines to find information and content before making a purchase, organic search has become an essential marketing channel. 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. A SEO specialist can not only help you rank your website better, but also help you discover new opportunities. The SEO/SEM specialist will provide recommendations and guidance for content strategies to increase organic traffic to your site.

SEO strategists handle a number of responsibilities, including:

Tracking and developing campaigns
Determining target keywords and analyzing data based on how users are discovering what you offer
Understanding your audience and communicating these audience trends
Promoting content
Finding new opportunities within search engine results pages
Auditing changes made by development for possible SEO downside, and analyzing analytics and reports. (If your ranking on Google goes down, you need to tweak your SEO to get you back on track. By looking at conversion rates of keywords, you can identify why you are going down.)

3. Content/Community Manager

If Google is king, then content is the queen, prince/princess, and probably court jester of your marketing portfolio. Having an exceptional writer on your staff is a must if you plan to have a website, publish a blog, participate in social media, offer long-form content, do PR, or advertise– in other words, if you plan to do any marketing.

Once you have a strong writer in place, you can look at hiring freelancers to supplement and help you scale the quantity of content. Content is a valuable company asset, and this position is the voice of your business by promoting your content to relevant and targeted audiences. They create new content and find ways to repurpose content for different media and advertising campaigns.

The skills needed to grow and develop your online communications are:

Ability to identify the audience(s) you want to target
Genuine delight in engaging people in conversations
Finesse in asking questions to learn more about a customer’s needs/identify their greatest interest
Solid grasp of company brand identity
Patience
Professional communication skills
Ability to deliver quick, thoughtful responses
Ability to recognize leads in conversations and set up meetings

4. Paid Search Role

The paid search role, or pay-per-click (PPC) specialist, is often outsourced to agencies, but more and more companies are taking this role in-house. This person is your ROI time-traveler. While some content and SEO campaigns can take months to drive revenue, paid search and other advertising channels can often create a much-shorter timeline to ROI.

When hiring a PPC specialist, look for individuals with a strong financial background who understand return on ad spend and how businesses operate on a cash basis. Here’s a sample checklist that a PPC team uses on a daily basis:

Asks consultant if the client is making money or getting quality leads each week
Reviews spending and makes sure it’s on budget
Checks for conversions and optimizes keywords and landing page
Reviews Quality Scores
Adds new keywords and adds negative keywords while pausing losing ads
Checks ad copy performance, and adjusts and writes new ad copy
Makes bid adjustments
Analyzes landing page results from radical split tests
Launches a new campaign or test
Writes weekly PPC update

5. Social Media Manager

Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat are great places to introduce new audiences to your business and make sales, so you need a social media manager to curate your brand’s social channels. Posting content is important, but you also need your social media manager to monitor and respond to comments since so many consumers also use social media for customer service.

Social media isn’t just a place where people share silly GIFs and photos of their kids. It’s a place where your brand can promote your own content (and some curated content) to engage with your audience on a personal level. It’s also a high-stakes customer service channel. If people aren’t happy with your social customer service, it could drive away some of your existing customers and won’t help you bring in new ones.

A customer-centric social manager can be one of your best customer retention assets. The duties include:

Creating a social media strategy
Proposing budgets for your social media activities
Managing social media campaigns and change
Creating and uploading posts, images, and videos
Monitoring, analyzing, and evaluating your social media campaigns and strategies
Monitoring trends in social media

6. Website Designer/Webmaster

An entrepreneurial business doesn’t necessarily need someone with the traditional “webmaster” title but rather, someone who is a master of website design and/or development. Whenever possible, I’m a believer in managing your website in-house as much as possible, instead of outsourcing to an agency. It’s just too important as the primary face of your company to put this role in the hands of outsiders. Having your own website designer/webmaster also means having control over timing — not having to wait in line for an agency to get around to your updates, news, and revisions.

If you can find someone who is a hybrid of a designer and a developer, you’ve struck gold. Otherwise, figure out which side of the coin you value more and target the best talent you can find in that area. Nearly all of your potential customers will visit your website — most begin their journey at that point. Your company’s website should be an absolute priority investment, so make sure a skilled person to create and manage it is one of your first hires.

An exceptional developer is the secret weapon for marketing success. The quality of your website’s digital experience has a direct impact on your bottom line. Ideally, with a quality developer, you can go from ideation to execution on any digital campaign in months, not years; sometimes even weeks or days.

True conversion rate optimization from your website goes beyond simply changing button colors and instead involves analyzing the entire layout of a page and onboarding process. Some tools that can help inform decisions and empower website designers include Hotjar, Optimizely, Google Optimize, and Unbounce. (See Part 3 for a comprehensive list of tools.)

Website-related tasks that affect your bottom line include:

Designing split tests for landing pages
Creating interactive content
Fixing site speed issues and finding bugs that hurt conversion rates
Adding quality creative material (content, images) to blog posts
Reviewing user recordings and improving functionality
Rethinking form processes and improving with better design or creative

Never underestimate the power of good design. Many businesses gloss over this fact and resort to do-it-yourself Photoshop disasters.

7. Analyst

The marketing world has undergone several changes in recent years, but the most important development is an obvious one: the rise of Big Data. Businesses have started to adopt data-driven strategies to inform their marketing initiatives. Recent statistics illustrate just how critical data has become to the modern marketing team:

64% of marketing executives “strongly agree” that data-driven marketing is crucial to success in a hyper-competitive global economy.
66% of marketing leaders have seen an increase in new customers as a result of data-driven initiatives.
63% of marketers reported that their spending on data-driven marketing and advertising grew over the last year.

Of course, a single employee can’t handle the entire implementation of a data-driven marketing strategy. That requires the input and cooperation of the entire organization, from senior executives down to individual team members. But a data-driven team does need members who specialize in data analysis and can contextualize data to fit their business’s objectives.

Data-driven marketing strategies yield several benefits for your marketing team, all of which a data analyst can help facilitate.

8. Brand Manager

Modern marketers leverage many different channels to reach customers, which has made today’s marketing landscape more competitive than ever before. It’s increasingly important to develop a recognizable and trustworthy brand. Consider these statistics:

It takes an average of five to seven impressions before someone will remember your brand.

Business-to-business (B2B) brands that connect with buyers on an emotional level earn twice the impact than brands that sell business or functional value.

B2B decision-makers consider the brand a central element of a supplier’s value proposition.

Unfortunately, many businesses fail to create a distinct brand vision or strategy. They simply rely on their combined marketing efforts to naturally build a strong brand. But as branding becomes more important to B2B buyers, businesses must prioritize initiatives that contribute to brand-building and awareness.

A brand manager is responsible for shaping the image and reputation of your business among your target audience. This role leverages a combination of customer feedback, market research, and competitive analysis to assess the status of a business in an industry. From there, a brand manager defines and implements a branding strategy throughout all marketing functions, from content creation to design to PR.

9. Outside Expert/Architect

An expert architect sees the big picture. They listen to and interpret company business goals and thoughtfully educate and guide the players through the process. They glean the most potential out of a marketing plan and interpret company aspirations.

Architects are trained problem-solvers. The value of an expert architect lies in their pragmatic ability to balance design, construction, and cost. With an expert architect in place, your marketing efforts become more fluid, and you achieve desired results more quickly.

The expert architect position in your winning modern marketing team can be thought of as someone who ensures marketing compliance: an overseer of a less-formal audit component to make sure your time, effort, and budget are spent wisely.

Conclusion

With these 9 roles or areas of expertise, you will be able to handle most marketing needs, projects, or challenges that come your way. Remember that it may even be preferable to cover multiple roles with one team member, just be sure they are both suited for it and not spread too thin. After all, you want you have the space to scale so that your team can grow with your business.

Become a Successful Scaleur

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!

29Oct

How to Get Your Team Ready for Scaling

29 October 2020 MarketingScaleurs 324

In early-stage companies resources are limited, so employing the right people with the right skill sets is absolutely crucial to be ready for scaling. As they say, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. This article will walk you through how to get your team ready for scaling. From assessment to strategy, to action, you’ll be ready to build an ace team that can really keep up.

Assess Your Team

Start by looking at your current workload and responsibilities. Is your current team equipped to handle a ramp-up in projects without neglecting current customers, products, and services? If your marketing coordinators are also supporting other departments (such as PR or customer service) while analyzing performance data and implementing new marketing tools, they’re doing too much. Go back and streamline efforts and processes so your team has the bandwidth to be ready for scaling — or consider adding staff to balance your team’s workload and responsibilities.

Next, ask yourself: Does your team have the expertise needed to launch successful campaigns in the new regions or industries you’re targeting? If not, you should hire new staff now, or contract out until you have a better idea of the kind of expertise your team needs. Evaluate your current team to identify each member’s strengths and expertise, identify where your talent gaps lie and hire for those roles.

If you need to hire, employ generalists. Marketing is a broad, multifaceted area, and you might need someone who can do PPC, SEO, and content at the same time. Instead of hiring three different people with expertise in each field, you can hire jack-of-all-trades. While this may seem like a loss in quality, it’s going to help you long-term. A generalist can set up the framework for company operations and lead the rest of the team when you end up hiring for individual roles. Outsource remaining specialized tasks to a third-party organization or freelancers.

Invest in Your Team

Some companies, notably big tech companies like Google or Zappos, invest a great deal of money in their employees for good reason: It helps them grow by retaining and attracting top talent. When employees feel valued, they’ll passionately share your vision and dig deep within themselves to help your business thrive. Surround yourself with the best people you can and give them an opportunity to do what they love to do best.

Talk to employees and find out what resources they need to work better and more efficiently. Invest in the resources that will help them today, and be ready for scaling with operations as your business grows.

Next, you need to train new hires rigorously. Your first new marketing rep should go through the same training process as your fifth or tenth hire. You can of course tweak your approach to onboarding over time, but your new hires should all have the same opportunities to settle into your marketing process. Rushing or cutting corners in your training will only hurt their performance.

Finding the right scaleurs — a sample interview for your scaleur A-team

When recruiting your A-team, it’s important that each candidate have the right fit for your company. You want to find people who are hungry, eager to learn and adapt, and have the positive energy to go the extra mile. Having a solid résumé is fine, but you really need them to have a growth mindset.

Here are five of the questions I like to ask:

What do you want to achieve in life? Where do you want to stand in five or 10 years? When you retire? This lets you see how ambitious they are.
How would you measure your success?
This shows you how they value their achievements and failures.
On a scale from 0 to 10, how happy are you, and what would it have been last year?
I like to be surrounded with optimistic, positive people. It’s OK to feel dissatisfied, but you don’t want to waste your energy on hiring someone who complains too much. Everyone gets stuck in traffic jams, but not everyone honks the horn.
What is the most spontaneous thing you did in the last three years?
I want to understand how people feel about going outside their comfort zones.
What makes you happy?
Here, I want to understand their energy drivers.

Overall, these questions relate to me as a person, and I want to have these kinds of energized people around me. Everyone has to make their own questions for the hiring process, but the Gingerbread Tool will help you understand who you are and which kind of people you need to lift you up — and help your business scale for growth and innovation.

Outsource Strategically

One way of assembling your A-team might involve hiring a marketing consultant, which could save you lots of time and money. Since these professionals have mastered the skill of engaging audiences, they can help you scale your marketing efforts quickly.

Outside consultants may have the staff and investment in systems that enable them to be much more efficient in handling a particular function than your company. Trying to replicate that function internally may take too much time or money. Instead, find a reliable partner to outsource this aspect too, which should position your business to scale better, faster, and cheaper.

However, don’t go overboard — “too much of a good thing” can be counterproductive. Find the right balance between in-house vs. outsourcing. When you outsource, it is never a bad idea to tell the team why you need outside help and for how long.

Conclusion

When building your team to be ready for scaling your business, you can’t do it as many businesses do, organically and without real consideration. Instead, you need to assess your current team’s strengths, weaknesses, and capacity, and assess what your needs are and will be at different increments of time. Once you have that clear, you can then invest in your team to ensure they’re trained, supported, and happy. Finally, don’t be afraid to bring in outside experts as needed to keep things moving along!

Become a Successful Scaleur

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!

21Oct

Freelance vs Entrepreneur, Growth vs Scaling: The Crucial Difference for Business Scaling Success

21 October 2020 MarketingScaleurs 301

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Every entrepreneur wants more of two things: Time and money. We want time so that we can find some semblance of a work-life balance. To allow us to spend time with family, friends, and on outside interests. All work and no play will drive Jack crazy. And we want more money so we can keep feeding our business. What it needs to grow (ads, marketing operations, rent, contractors, the list is endless).

Having more time and money would, of course, be great. But they’re both wasted if you don’t make the most of them. That’s why it’s so important to make sure that the time and money you put into your business. Are used carefully, strategically, and with a clear roadmap. This is where the concept of differentiating between freelancer and entrepreneur is so important. The marketing icon Seth Godin has covered this concept at length and it’s worth reading if you haven’t already. Freelancers provide a service to clients and they do it themselves. This, by definition, cannot scale. Entrepreneurs create systems that serve clients. This, by definition, must scale.

Business Scaling “To scale, build systems, not products.”

A simple way to look at it is to ask the question: If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, what would happen to your business? If your answer is that it would come to a screeching halt (unlike that bus), then you, my friend, are a freelancer.

This is not to say freelancing is of lesser value, but if you want your business to truly scale, you need to build a business that can more or less operate autonomously. You need to build systems, not a product. You need to build more than a job for yourself, you need to build a business.

In fact, many successful entrepreneurs are so busy with daily operations that they don’t have the time or energy left to grow and develop the business. Entrepreneurs launch their own businesses to have freedom, but does that sound free to you?

This systems and road mapping mindset of the entrepreneur is where we need to start. But it also needs to carry through strategy as the business grows. When you get to the stage of scaling, this mindset will again be the key to scaling successfully and becoming part of the less than 1% of startups that make it to scale.

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Just as there is a crucial difference between freelancing and marketing, there is a parallel difference between growing and scaling. Many entrepreneurs often confuse the two, but it’s important to get it right.

Growing means a department or entire business adds new resources (capital, people, or technology), and its revenue increases as a result. For instance, a marketing department may gain $50,000 in new revenue, but to do so, they have to hire a new marketing person with a $50,000 salary. The company’s gains and losses are equalized, so although the company is growing — by one new employee and a corresponding uptick in revenue — it really hasn’t gained much value. At least, not at first.

Scaling, on the other hand, is when revenue increases without a substantial increase in expenditures. Processes can be “scaled” in a cost-effective manner. Scaling is the process of growing exponentially. A marketing department that spends $5,000 on automation tools to allow more-efficient marketing to a wider audience — gaining $50,000 in new revenue as a result — is scaling. The company’s gains outpace its losses, allowing it not only to grow but also to scale.

So, do you want more time and more money? Do you want your business to grow while you sleep? Well, here’s our unabashed pitch: We can help you do that. Get in touch below!

Become a Successful Scaleur

If you want traffic, leads and sales, get in touch and you’ll start getting results in no time!