A Recap of the Last Four Episodes on How to Build a Strategic Marketing Plan

In this episode, Lee catches you up on the last four episodes. He gives you a taste of each conversation he had with his expert guests about vision, mission and understanding your buyer. This episode serves as a comprehensive recap of these episodes. Join Lee as he condenses the key takeaways, actionable strategies, and expert tips shared by his guests so far this season.

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Connect on LinkedIn:

Lee - https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehmurray

Tim - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marketing-consultant-tim-parkin

Dan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/digitalmarketingdan

Brooks - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brookssze

Manny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manny-de-la-vega-bb754321

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Speaker 1 (00:00:02) - Welcome back to the Exploring Growth podcast. If you've been following this last series, you know that I'm building a course called How to Build a Strategic Marketing Plan. And over the last four episodes I have touched on each module. That's the first part of this course that we're building out. And so, you know, what I wanted to do now is sort of hit pause and use this episode as a recap for anybody that hasn't seen those previous episodes. So they can quickly get caught up before we move into the next probably 4 to 5 final episodes. So let's recap. You know, the first thing that we talked about in this plan was to understand your buyer, right? This is a really important thing, possibly the most important thing. And for the first episode, I had Tim Parkin, a global marketing consultant and coach on his, a colleague of mine, and I've had him on before actually. He was our first episode of the entire podcast, which was kind of cool. And we talked about understanding your buyer and what was cool about what I liked and the clip I pulled that I want to show you is Tim really came at it from the psychological or emotional state, you know, not just knowing the demographics on the surface level, information about your buyer, but more so knowing how do they buy emotionally, you know, what is it, what are the needs and desires and pains that we're really getting to? How does it move them emotionally? And then backing that up with logic, I thought that was such a really good insight.

Speaker 1 (00:01:33) - So this first clip is Tim talking about understanding your buyer. Putting yourself in the buyer's shoes about what's happening in their role. You know, what are what it's going to. It's going to show you the needs. It's going to show you the pain points. It's going to show you the inroads. It's going to show you how to speak to them, how not to speak to them, timing. So I love that idea of triggers and thinking about those first, because it does it opens up so many other possibilities. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:02:02) - And then let me expand upon that, if I may, because I think the other thing is people buy an act based on emotion and then they justify with logic. And this is really important to understand when you think about your buyer, that often we think about our features and benefits of our product or service, what it can do. Our case studies, our results, all that stuff. And none of that actually matters. First, what matters first is the emotional investment and the belief that the buyer has.

Speaker 2 (00:02:29) - And so if you think about your buyer, you want to figure out what are their aspirations, what are the things in the future that they really want to become and to have not necessarily the features and benefits now? And also, what are the fears that whatever pain they're experiencing, whatever problem they have, if that gets worse and in six months, in a year, in ten years, you know, what is the fear that they desperately want to avoid? You can think of it kind of like heaven and hell if you want to. What's the heaven want to achieve? What's the hell do you want to get away from? And if you frame it like that and start there, then you can uncover the emotions and emotions drive everything. And so I would start from an emotional perspective and then figure out how to address those emotions with the logical side, which is the features, the benefits, the case studies, the results, you know, all that good stuff, the reviews, you have, all of that.

Speaker 2 (00:03:17) - But start with the emotions and understanding your customers, your buyers at an emotional level.

Speaker 1 (00:03:22) - Okay, that was great. I always love talking to Tim. He's got such great insights and you should look him up on LinkedIn. Tim Parkin Consulting if you want to follow more of his his insights there. So this next episode, this the second episode of the four that we've done so far, I had the chance to sit down with Dan Sanchez. Definitely follow him on LinkedIn. He is a beast on LinkedIn, very engaged and very intentional as he's working on building audiences. A lot of really good expert insights there on demand gen and audience growth. And in the second episode, we talked about audience kind of more plural. So if you start with the buyer, understanding your buyer is a really good thing to do, but also understanding the stakeholders and how they have influence to your buyers. So we talk specifically in this clip about how to understand the stakeholders through how you can add value to them through the pipeline marketing funnel and sales pipeline.

Speaker 1 (00:04:22) - So this is a really good clip. This is where marketing gets fun for me. I think you're you're, you're doing good to sell something to someone that's great. And you know, it's the VP of whatever. But what about the rest of it, You know, what about the rest of the people that need to be addressed that are influential to your buyer? And how personalized can you make your message to them that then adds value across the organization? I feel like that's the beginning of retention because you're going, you know, on the front end and and saying, Hey, we just want to love on you and be friends with you and have you, have you trust us. And you may not even even bought anything from us at this point. But, you know, if that's what their vibe they're getting in the messaging. And it's also valuable whenever they do sign on. Now, you know, retention and success is going to be so much higher. Yeah, definitely. Think about it.

Speaker 1 (00:05:19) - If it's a big product again in the tens of.

Speaker 3 (00:05:21) - Thousands at least, then you have to think about it in the whole funnel. Okay? Like identify their three most influential stakeholders and just start with the three. You can build out website web pages personalized for them that address their concerns. There are things that they ask and showcase how the product best helps them, right? So you could do that and then you think about like that's pretty bottom of the funnel, but they even go farther down. You create sales enablement to arm the sales people who are getting on calls with these people so that they can effectively address those stakeholders. And then you got to think about customer service when you're first kicking off this relationship. How do you how do you include those relationships and the onboarding for the product so that everybody's successful, not just the stakeholder that made the decision, that's the main person, but the state, but the other peripheral people that have to also see this implementation through, how do you onboard them correctly? So you can kind of see it all the way through there.

Speaker 3 (00:06:16) - Now, if it's a small product like you probably just need a like have some support docs that are addressed there for if they need help. But like a buffer, like a social media tool that just doesn't cost a lot of money a month. Like it's kind of overkill for them. Um, it's, it's not a big enough purchase to be of concern to those stakeholders usually.

Speaker 1 (00:06:38) - And again, if you haven't gone and found Dan Sanchez on LinkedIn, please do that. There's so much really good content he puts out every single day. So in the third. Episode. To recap it, I had the chance to sit down with Brooke Chick growth marketer, demand gen marketer, really good at branding. And it was great because we had this conversation about vision. You know, it's one thing to understand your buyer, but it's another to understand yourself or your company's identity. What is the vision that you have that you want to have an impact on the world or in your industry? We had an amazing conversation about vision and how if you don't aren't playing towards strongly held beliefs, then you're always going to run into challenges.

Speaker 1 (00:07:27) - So enjoy this clip.

Speaker 3 (00:07:29) - Vision seems like something that comes out of like a business textbook that you would see in getting some kind of business degree. But it doesn't seem like something that translates into the real world. But they would need to be told that that could not be further from the truth. When we've worked with people who are struggling to build an audience in general, are struggling to make their message resonate, the first thing we do is figure out what do you actually believe and what are those? What are those strongly held beliefs? What do you what do you believe with some strength of conviction? And almost always like if I'm acting like a doctor, my diagnosis is, well, you're not creating anything compelling and you're not growing an audience because you don't care about anything and you think you shouldn't care about anything because you're a brand. What? That doesn't make any sense. And so the first step always to get a message to resonate is to go back to what's your vision? That's that's step one.

Speaker 3 (00:08:20) - And then based on that, what are your strongly held beliefs? And then based on those, how can we develop some type of IP that we can defend care about? And when you have those three things, then you can then you can start to build an audience and you can start to to do something real with with your marketing. But if you're a marketer and you're working under a leader who doesn't have a vision, then you have to go back and answer those questions for yourself. Do a lot of hard work, do the research? I would say go talk to every major leader in the organization and just try to dig into why they're doing what they're doing, where they see the product going, where they see the company going. Go talk to your customers and figure out why they're excited to work with you, why they chose to work with you. Go talk to people who are in your pipeline or in your market and ask them those same questions. What are they looking for? What problems are they experiencing? And based off of that, come up with some kind of de facto mission and vision that you can own and then build beliefs and IP off of?

Speaker 1 (00:09:17) - I really enjoyed that conversation with Brooks.

Speaker 1 (00:09:20) - I always like talking to him, but you know, we're thinking about vision. It's one thing to have a vision, but it's another to be able to practically take that, take that to the front lines with your team and execute on a plan of how to bring your vision to fruition. So then we get to this idea of talking about how your mission, the practical nature of a vision, aligns with your vision. And in this fourth and final clip to kind of round us out in this recap, we have had the opportunity to sit down with Manny de la Vega, who's a seasoned entrepreneur, such a great advisor, coach, mentor. I've seen him do wonderful things with entrepreneurs and we had a great discussion about aligning your mission with your vision. So enjoy this clip.

Speaker 4 (00:10:14) - Your mission is not aligned with your vision. Then there's a disconnect and then the statements get lost in just the piece of paper that nobody ever looks and all that. And, you know, that happens a lot in businesses.

Speaker 4 (00:10:26) - I found that the main reason why those get misaligned is because the entrepreneur doesn't spend enough time not only writing the mission statement, but getting to know themselves to see if they're aligned with that mission. Because if what is about actions, your actions ultimately are going to be determined what by your values and what you believe and what you do, that that's what you're going to end up doing anyway every day, whether you want to or not, because it comes with you, with what you believe, what you, what you, what you think. And if you don't spend enough time seeing what you are about, then you're not going to be able to make a connection between your mission and yourself to carry out the vision. Does that make sense? It does. So one of the ways we help entrepreneurs answer these two main questions one is what are you really passionate about? You know, because they want to sometimes they want to carry out the vision, but they don't really know what their passion is exactly. I mean, in a construction company, you can take that in many different areas.

Speaker 4 (00:11:35) - You can take it to commercial, residential, you know, And what is really your passion? Do you want to help this small, you know, residential customers? Do you want to help the big companies commercial? What is really passion? And then the next one is. Are you really good? What? Can you be the best in the world at? You know? And once you get a little perspective on that, then you can align your, your your mission.

Speaker 1 (00:12:00) - Okay, now you're caught up. That's the first four modules of the course that we're building, and we have probably 4 to 6 that are coming down the pipe. So this was a good little intermission. I appreciate you following this series. Whether you just watched the recap or you've watched all the previous four episodes. You know, I wanted to kind of give you a little bit of a framework to think about how we're building. If we do the who, what, when, where, why and how the who is your buyer, The why is your vision, the what is going to be your mission? And now we're going to move into the how when the next couple episodes where we talk about the buyer's journey, how to build effective campaigns in a core narrative story.

Speaker 1 (00:12:42) - So we have a lot of good content coming down the pipe and we have a lot of really cool guests. I'm really excited about our next one that's very central to buyer's journey creation, So stick with us and if you haven't signed up for the email newsletter, please go to Harvard. Murray, Click on Exploring Growth. Enter your email and you'll be able to get even more insights than what we have on here.

Speaker UU (00:13:07) - Thanks a lot.