Carla is a superstar marketer. And that’s not all, folks – she’s also a global keynote speaker, an author, storyteller and has worked with a huge amount of brands, making her one of the top 50 global female marketers. Awesome work.
Watch this and other Lately Live vids here.
“The buyer’s journey is no longer a guided tour”, Carla came up with this pearl of wisdom and she believes that marketers need to get a handle on understanding what buyers do in their decision process. What happens in their world?
Businesses have to expand their relationship with buyers. There’s so much more to the buyer journey than them being aware of a product and purchasing. What’s the entire journey that you’re not involved in? You’re pretty much missing out on 2/3rds of decision making.
Buyers are complex. They don’t just go from one step to another. Some might – they could be on their phone looking for an instant purchase, but a lot of customers aren’t. Carla says you’ve got to work on understanding triggers for behavior. The journey is hardly ever linear and there are so many entry points - you can inspire but it’s not always logical.
Always think from customer point of view. What does your customer need? What is the day in the life of a customer? Get your marketing, sales and product people in the room – they all have different perspectives and pivot everything towards customer more.
As a business, journey mapping is super helpful. Think about your customer and how they behave. Carla used the example of a credit card company and how they can create a journey for a user. They could imagine their customer planning a vacation. Where does a customer start – how much money are they going to spend, where are they thinking of going? How are they going to get there? Where will they stay? What will they do? A company can turn their credit card from a transactional commodity into an opportunity for a loyalty experience.
This is where a business can add value to customer journey and create valuable content i.e posts about how to plan a vacation, things to do etc. Think about what your customer’s world looks like.
Marketers tend to focus on a product, but focus on customers instead.
Carla looks to the Edelman Trust Barometer every year to see who customers trust. At the moment, employees are looking to their employers, because of fake news, corruption etc in politics. Employers are becoming like mum and dad, so they need to step up to the plate and become a strong, cohesive and emotionally strong status symbol.
When you have more engaged and qualified employees, you’ll have happier, more productive employees. Having a purpose at work is better for everyone as it causes less tensions. So, Carla believes that it’s a great idea to focus on work culture and this will create sustainable growth over time. When you have internal champions, you’ve got advocates for your business.
Employees will tell other people about their bad experiences at dinner parties and the like, so if you can switch that, you can attract talent. You can get people inspired when people talk about how fab their job is. It makes it easier to recruit top talent when people love their job and you can rely on existing employees giving tangible expressions of what good work culture is.
Internal values can totally be expressed in how a company functions.
Content is your ‘stuff’, web pages, webinars and marketing collateral. Storytelling is about bringing characters into play i.e the customer and their journey and storytelling is so much better when a company is customer-focused.
Every piece of content should have a focus and a grand purpose for every piece. How do we build an audience in and win them over to a brand? Talk about your brand but grow your business with customer-focused content and value you can add to their lives. Don’t bombard people with your brand in content, as Carla says this can end up like a “bad first date” where someone’s jumping the gun before you’ve even got to know them!
Our date with Carla certainly wasn’t a bad one and her insights were fantastic and offered loads of food for thought.
