The Subjective Approach to Marketing

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sales systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis,

Chris 0:32
welcome everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L Davis, and in this episode, I wanted to talk about how one size fits all marketing, and how it’s not a reality. And it’s really revisiting an open conversation around marketing and the reality of it, and this is coming from the vintage point of taking all the years that I’ve witnessed personally other companies as well as myself, and try to distill and compile this thing into something meaningful in the next 15 to 20 minutes to guide your decision Making and potentially execution with marketing and and so I’ll start off by saying this marketing is hard. And the reason why marketing is hard is because Relationships are hard and, and that’s just a known fact. There’s just, there’s no way that that anybody who’s breathing has fully healthy relationships in every area of their life, right? You don’t have to look past siblings, parents, people closest to you and realize just how hard it is to keep, to build, keep and maintain healthy relationships, right? And really, that’s what market. Marketing is. Marketing is relationships at scales, multiple relationships that you’re creating and nurturing at the same time. And that’s what makes it that’s what makes it so dynamic. And you have what we call pushy marketing, and that’s essentially people think of the relationship in your life, that friend, that person, that all they want to do is have you do something for them. Hey, can you give me this? Hey, do this for me. Hey, can you run over here? Do that? Right? That that’s pushy marketing. They just want you. Hey, give me this. Give me that. You don’t really get much value in return. You’re just giving, giving, giving, and then you have a more balanced approach relationship based marketing, which is, is, is, are the best relationships, where people give, they lead with providing something of value, and in return, you get value. And there’s a time, there’s a time for both. I’m not here to really say one is greater than the other. You just have to be able to just to discern when to use one over the other. There are times you need to be direct and pushy and say, hey, look, you need to do this because people are stuck. People are stuck in their comfort zone, and sometimes the discomfort is what holds them back. So you got to push them, be pushy, right? But, but you’ve seen that in your regular relationships too. You have that friend who just keeps making the same mistake. Is like, hey, look, I love you, but you got to stop. You. Got you listen, you’re you are self sabotaging this thing you just got, I don’t know how, but you need to stop doing this, right? So there’s a, there’s a space for both, and you, you really are in the art of balancing the dynamics of the two when it comes to marketing, and that’s that’s what makes it, makes it difficult, aside from the fact that it’s strategic, and most people struggle with strategy and and that’s not a knock. I’m not I’m not trying to downplay people, but it’s the reality that folks, they’re they’re just more prone, you’re more prone to get more out of people in general by making a request for them to do something, right? You, it’s much easier. I mean, you can get a child, hey, go run and grab me this Hey, can you get that for me? Hey, clean this up. Hey, do this for me, right? That’s a lot easier. What’s harder? We’re talking about strategy, and why strategy is difficult is because you’re really strategy is a process of barring someone’s brain. You’re, you’re you’re allowing someone to think for you, or think or think with you, which is much harder, much harder. I mean, you can probably count on half a hand you. So if you’ve got a good community, maybe one or two the amount of people that you can call on and reliably get good guidance, you can truly lean on them with for a type of of guidance and wisdom that will actually help you, that will actually help you. So these are all the dynamics that are happening in in marketing and everybody’s everybody’s not just not their strong suit. People really do struggle with relationships, which is why businesses are entities where you have multiple people, you bring people in to shore up those weaknesses. It’s not all about you, but you have to be aware of it, right? And for instance, for instance, everybody’s not good conversations. People. People aren’t inherently just great conversationalists, right? They, they some people are dry, right? You talk to them and you’re you’re looking at the clock. You’re waiting for a moment to jump in and interject, right? But these are all the dynamics that make things very unique, I’ll say very unique. So it requires all of that. It requires a lot of maturity. You can get offended easily as a marketer, extremely easy and throw everything thing off. But I would also you just have to understand that marketing, it’s just not monolithic. It’s multifaceted. There are marketers in industries that relationship building looks totally different. So I may be telling you here, hey, you’re being pushy, but in another industry, you fit right in. In fact, they would say you’re soft. You’re not pushing enough, right? So this is, I guess we can call all that the foundation to my my point is that Mark marketing is really all about subjectivity, right? It’s, it’s, it’s very relative to your business, your goals and your people. And a good example is staying in the realm of dating. Is speed dating right up staying in the realm of relationships, relationship building. It’s speed dating. If you’ve ever done speed dating, I have not. I’ve seen it, though, I’ve seen it though I went to a conference recently and they were doing it was kind of cool. In fact, I think, I think I know a couple that met and got married, like, a year later. But anyways, the context is, you’ve got three to five minutes. Well, listen, in three to five minutes, I’ve got to be a lot more direct. I’ve got to be quicker. I don’t have the luxury of a dinner out with you where I can take my time. Hey, tell me about your life. Tell me about your upbringing. What was high school like for you? What college did you go to? Right? Speed dating. Hey, are you doing? What’s your name? Are you married? Are you this? Are you that? Have you been married? Are you divorced? Are you quick hit? Right? So context matters, industry wide, industry specific and business specific. So then your marketing, your marketing changes, right? Your marketing morphs because the the context is totally different than that, that night out, that dinner, that night out on the street. What is it? Night Out on the school, out on the street. Anyways, you a nice night out, candlelit dinner, regular dinner, whatever the case may be, where you have a little more time, right? So, so you’re you’ll see that because of that, can you imagine if you’re only a speed dater? Well, that limits in a whole variety of people that you would never be able to connect with. But guess what? That’s okay. That’s okay in business, because as long as if it works, as long as it works, and that’s what I’m saying. There is no one size fits all and and it’s just too many possibilities in life. I’m reading a book. This book is so great, and it says, naturally, life produces more opportunities than we can handle. It produces more than we can handle, if you think about and it was talking about Facebook friends and, you know, just other things in life. A lot of times we’re thinking of monetary and provisional things, and we’re like, I don’t have enough. But if you think about it, life does produce, usually, more than we can handle, right? And it’s those that set boundaries and say no and start eliminating possibilities that start achieving a greater value in life. So as marketing is complex in itself, and guess what, we haven’t even talked about technology yet. We haven’t even. And added the technology piece. You bring in technology, Oh, my Oh, my goodness, we, we’ve got an impossible puzzle to piece together. So what you want to do is you want to start eliminating as many possibilities as possible, as quickly as possible, right? Because you’re really trying to cut through it all and find the one thing, the one or two things that work for you, right? And if, if,

Chris 10:33
if you can somehow get through the marketing strategy of it, the next roadblock is the technology. Right? The technology is what slaps you in the face. And as much as I would love to not focus too much on the technology, it does matter. The vehicle in which you use to get to your destination does play a major factor in whether or not you ever arrive at your destination. And that’s just the reality of it, right? So you’re the tools that you use to get you from A to B are important. They’re not so important that you should not move right, that you get stuck with analysis paralysis. That’s why you have people to help you. But yeah, it’s a it’s another level of complexity that brings in a total new set of possibilities while we’re trying to eliminate them. Just purchasing one set of software just adds a whole bunch more onto your plate. So it’s this ongoing tug of war of more possibilities. Prune possibilities. Get down to keeping this thing simple, because every time I prune a possibility, I make things less complex. And that’s what we really want. That’s what we really want. So when you when you start to put in marketing and technology, the whole purpose is scale. The whole purpose of scale. But I want to talk about scale from a different vintage point, and I want to say that you should start to think about scale relative to your business. And now I know you’re thinking, Chris, what? What other way would I think about it? But, but hear me out if there’s a strategy that that works in your business, and it does not scale to other businesses. It’s still a good strategy. In fact, it may be the best strategy. And this, this may be a bit tough. It may be a bit be a bit tough for like agencies and automation service providers, things of that nature, because you want to, you want to leverage the victories of the past bring them into the future, to shorten your time of execution and produce more results. I understand that, however, there is going to be a time it’s inevitable that the approach of yesterday or another approach, is going to only get you so far, and you’re going to need something else to get to the next level, to get to the next step, right? So it, it. It doesn’t matter if it works in another business, it doesn’t it, it. It gets to the point where specificity is is the scale factor, because we’re talking about relative to your business. If I’m doing some a tactic that scales my business, but I take that same tactic elsewhere, and it just doesn’t work. That doesn’t I can’t throw away the tactic, because as businesses mature, the marketing is going to mature, and be more specific to that business, which is one of the reasons why I’m a strong proponent of having an internal marketing team. When I when I consult with founders of SaaS companies around their marketing and technology, that’s one of my first question is, do you have an internal team? Because you’re going to need somebody in that’s growing with the evolving needs of your marketing. Every time you bring a freelancer, every time you bring a new agency in, again, you’re bringing on all of these complexities and unknowns. It’s extremely hard to get down to the thing that’s working, because everybody’s doing a thing differently, okay? And what I’m saying with all of this is that there’s going to be some point where you’re going to have to break from the norm, and doing so requires knowledge of what’s worked in the past, knowledge of what we’ve done, to know that. Okay, now it’s time we’re getting real specific with what we’re doing. You’re gonna have to be able to create strategies and system in systems and execute them in a way that is specific to your company and. May not scale other companies this. Listen, that’s why I said this is this takes maturity, because business owners, what you’re looking for is a consultant, automation service provider with that level of maturity to know, hey, look, I’m gonna come in with the proven process, but at some point, this thing is gonna work only for your business, right? That’s what it is and and it’s the minutia, it’s the nuance that’s that’s what we’re really talking about, is that your your business can grow generally, by just doing, do broad strategies will get a business to a certain point, and then a little more targeted strategies will get a business to another point. But then you’ve got to get to the point where you have specific strategies that Take That business home. And that’s where the difference is made in consultants. You have to know what kind of consultant you’re getting everyone. Are you getting the foundational consultant that’s going to come and just get all the low hanging fruit for you just make sure everything’s in place? Are you getting the intermediate one that can leverage what’s been built and help you get to the next level? Are you getting that expert that can lay the foundation, leverage off that foundation and then see that minutiae, the small tweaks here and there that need to be made specific to your business to get the scale in your business that you need. They’re not focused on, oh, well, I can’t do this across the industry, so I’m not going to try it. No, and they’re not looking for industry specific strategies. I shouldn’t say industry specific, industry wide strategies. I’m not against the funnel events and the grow your business and growth hackers and all that. I’m not against any of it, because, along with everything that I’m saying you have to experiment. There has to be a culture of experimentation and testing, because how else would you know what works or not? What I’m saying is what works does not what works for you does not have to be what’s worked for someone else or what hasn’t worked for someone else, right there. There are commonalities between all businesses, but at some point you’re going to have to break free, I call them. You’re going to have to either be the person or know somebody who can do the subjective tweaking. Subjective tweaking. These tweaks only work for you is fine tune they you know, the mechanic Wouldn’t your car and say, Look, I got this, this compound stuff. I put it right here. Plug the hole your engine’s good that he that molded you can’t take it off and put on another car, plug, another another leak. It’s specific to your business, and that’s not a bad thing, as long as your foundation is laid right. The foundation is proper. What we don’t want is somebody coming in doing everything specific. We don’t want to see. Oh, you don’t, we don’t. We’re not going to use WordPress or web flow. We’re going to build your own website from code, from scratch. No, no, no. We just talked about lay the foundation first. There are some broad, basic moves that need to be in place to create the environment where you can scale with specificity. You don’t start with it. Definitely don’t start with it. Please do not misinterpret what I’m saying. Hey, Chris said, We need our business needs a specific solution after you have the foundation, which should be more general, after you’ve got some intermediate results, which, again, is leveraging a more general foundation. Then we get to the specifics. We don’t start with those everyone. If you’re working with somebody right now and the first thing they want to do is build you something super special for your business, don’t do it. I often view software as specification identification. That’s how I view software. If you look at any

Chris 19:26
community software, you you may need a your own app. You really will. You very well may need your own app right now, but what you don’t know is why you need your own app. So go use software that’s already built for you. Circle, mighty network. Circle, anyways, I don’t want to get into naming them, but you’ve got software out there and use it, and in using it, what are you going to do? You’re going to start to figure out, through its limitations or its capabilities, what you like, what you don’t like, what it needs to do, what it isn’t doing. What you wish you could do, you’re creating your specifications. So now, if you were to build your app, you know exactly what it needs to function as. So now you can give that developer, hey, you see this application, I love this flow, however it’s missing this. And then this application, I love this flow, however it’s missing this. So this is the core functionality I need you to put together. Can is that? Is that doable? That’s a total different conversation. Y’all total different conversation. But let me get back. Let me get back. I’m all software development and how you software to create your specifications so that you don’t waste time building apps or building custom solutions. But the custom solutions do have a place. They do have a place. Okay? They have a place after you have the foundation that is producing results. Okay? So, so, I hope by now, this is freeing you’re freeing yourself from the follow the crowd, do what everyone else does, and who cares? Who cares if it’s not sexy? Who cares if it doesn’t look like the next person’s marketing and all of that, as long as it produces results in and that’s the downfall. Is we’re often comparing our lack to those who have and because they have. We a note there we anoint the their strategy that they’re using as the strategy to use. Okay, so we’re comparing what we don’t have to what someone else has, and because they appear to have we anoint that strategy as the one we have to use no no because it may be specific to their business, even though they’re selling it like that. Download my framework. It’ll work with anything. No knock, because that framework may be the foundation, or the intermediate step or the advanced step, I don’t know. And that’s what’s unknown until you get into it, because most people are not going to be that specific on the front end because they want to, you know, generate the sale. And sometimes being too specific on the front end and sales adds confusion. So I get it. It’s up to you to get in that thing and make it work, right. But, but, but I would, I would be steering you all wrong if I didn’t just encourage you and let you know that whatever works for your business is, is it works? That’s it. It only has to work for you. Back to relationships. If there’s something that works in your marriage, who cares if you can’t tell other people to do the same thing? Right? We know. We know couples. The husband cooks all the time. Wife can’t even if she attempts get out of here. Slap the hand. That’s my job right now. Go try to tell that to every other marriage. Hey, look, you know your husband need to be cooking more. You fool around and get them jokers divorced, right? It works for them. What works for you, and that’s really what we’re trying to do. This is why you have to have a culture of experimentation in your business. Is because that’s all you care about. That’s all you care about, is what works for you. That’s it and and I want to share this because I do a lot of consulting with SAS, SAS teams, marketing teams in other departments and corporations, and they’re dealing with the same thing. Everyone they are dealing with the same thing. They are no more advanced than you. In fact, I will go out to say some of you all are doing more complex marketing than enterprises in larger corporations, small enterprise and large corporations. You with all the landing pages, and they go here, then this, and then I want this email to go out, over complicating it and producing nothing from it. And when I tell you, nobody has this thing clearly figured out, because the landscape of Technology is always changing. Marketing is a constant relationship, building living mechanism that’s always changing. Nobody has it figured out. Nobody has it figured out, right? But you’ve got those who are committed to figuring out, figuring it out for themselves, for themselves, right? And they know that if it works, if it works for me, I’m good, I’m good and and that’s one thing I will say, that I find a difference with working with corporations, is that they want. Yeah, they, they will double down in a minute. Everyone, they will double down in a minute. And I wish I saw more of that. I wish I saw more of that sooner. And maybe some of this is where we’re not focused enough, where we’re too spread out, but I my desire, my desire for all of you listening, is to find that thing that works and to double down on it. And sometimes it’s data. A lot of times it’s in the data. This more recently, I’ve been showing everybody how I’m using airtable as a data lake. Because ecrm software’s systems, they like to hold your data as hostage. They collect it. Don’t let you visualize it in a way that you need to. But I build my own, and I replicate the data outward, and it allows me to see it in ways, and now I can start to see my people and understand who they are and how to talk to them. And guess what? It doesn’t scale always. There’s certain emails I can send. I wouldn’t send or recommend anybody else send, right? But that’s because I know I’m in the I’m in tune with, and these are the same things that you come on board and you help these corporate I just, I say, we, I come on board and help these corporations with. So just want, want to help, you know, help you understand that you’re you’re not, you’re not that far off if you’re willing to just stop doing everything right business. I’m reading this book, and it talks about how life inherently produces more than we can handle, and that achieving a higher level of success is really about saying no and and getting rid of more than it is accumulating. And this is what you’re this is what you’re seeing in marketing, is that there’s so many possibilities, especially with technology, that it is the process of pruning, the process of elimination, that gets us to that point. Right? We have to be able to start to eliminate these possibilities. Stop looking at these gurus. Stop clicking on every ad, or opt in into everything, and really get in, get in front of the data. What is the data saying? What? What’s the nature? Right off, always tell people you need internal marketing. You need internal marketing always, right? So you have to be able to to execute marketing in this way that that is very specific to you, extremely specific to you, but for the sake of success, all right? Because, again, successful corporations, it’s not that they’re doing something better than you. They’re just not doing as much as you. You’re just all over the place, and it’s usually because you’ve adopted some marketers strategy or some way, right? You just need to have the thing that works for you and your company and your team. It could be word of mouth, maybe it’s strategic partnerships, maybe it’s cold outreach, maybe it is paid advertising, maybe it’s organic, I don’t know. Maybe there’s a particular platform that’s not popular, like YouTube and Facebook, but it works for you, but then work it that’s perfectly fine. It again. It doesn’t need to look like everyone else for it to produce what you need it to produce for you. That’s it. It’s okay to turn the blinders on. It’s okay to look for a time and say, Hey, what is everybody doing? Let me try this. Let me do that. But at some time, yeah, block it out and heads down. Okay,

Chris 29:26
so I hope this episode was freeing and gave you the permission to do just that, be more free in your marketing. Understand what works for you and have that confidence. Right? I have given you permission. Crystal Davis has spoken right, even if nobody else seems to be doing it, and even if they are doing it, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is your success in marketing with technology. That’s it. Just because they’re doing it or not means nothing. Did you do it? Did it work for you? If yes, keep doing it. It simple. Keep it simple, everyone but, but thank you for your continued listenership to the to the podcast. It’s greatly appreciated. You could have spent this 20 minutes, 2030, minutes with anybody, but you spent it with me for that, I’m grateful. So thanks for tuning in, and until next time I see you online, automate, responsibly. My friends, thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcast, Google podcast, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts, new episodes are released every Thursday, so make sure you’re subscribed, so that you don’t miss out. And while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love, but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value and goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly, and you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com. Thanks again for listening, and until next time I see you online, automate responsibly my friends.