GarthBox

When it comes to the best email marketing campaign teams, you can bet they have a small list of customers they send a test email to. Perhaps they ask for direct feedback or perhaps they track specific metrics that they use to make final updates prior to sending out the email to the full list.

As for the best content marketing teams? Yea, you guessed it. The best put the content in front of a few of their prospective targets – even before they share it with more potential customers or even, say, the leadership team.

The same can be said for the best of any marketing team.

Getting feedback from actual customers not only gives you better insights and opportunities for improvements prior to distributing the work to a larger group, it gives you a tool to use to combat less-than-stellar recommendations from internal or non-customer, external folks.

We all know it’s hard to say no to a boss or CEO, so we don’t. But when you can pivot and say “We actually ran this by X customer and they said they liked it this way” …. Magic happens.

Stay Positive & Make More Magic Happen (Create A Pilot Group Of Reviewers)

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Marketers are damn good at knowing what story they want people to tell themselves after they use their product or service.

Take a gander at any 10 commercials and 9 of them will descriptively state the benefits and what life could be like for the viewer.

The damn good marketers, however, are great at knowing what the story is the potential customers are telling themselves before they pay for their product or service.

People want to be seen. They don’t just want to be told where point B is, they want to be told “It looks like you’re at point A, this is how you get to point B if you want.”

Stay Positive & Start With The Story Before, Not After

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For the most part, people don’t care to see what you do to keep something in tip-top shape.

If anything, watching you do it, say, during normal business hours, makes them second-guess how much you care.

And we all know as marketers, that when people see you care, they come back again and again.

The trouble, there is that confusing lie we tell ourselves that doing the grunt work and letting people see you do it shows them you care.

The reality is the opposite: when they see things so effortlessly, when the cooler is stocked, when the balls are filled with air, when the machines work as expected… that’s how they know the place is run by someone who cares.

No, you won’t get a high five or a compliment from a guest at the work you’ve done, but you can build a business that they want to come back to.

Stay Positive & Do What You Need To Do In The Dark

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Here’s the frustrating truth about attendees: they’re terrible at telling you what they want in advance.

You can try to organize a conference based on asking people for suggestions, but you usually hear crickets in return.

That said, people are incredible at sharing their thoughts about an event. (Just look at twitter why don’t you.)

So there’s a challenge for event organizers: how do you more dynamically pivot to create the best experience possible?

Here are two suggestions:

1. Instead of asking what people want, give them two options to choose from and snippets of the presentations before they choose. This mitigates the chances of them bashing on a session (after all, they chose it AND had a good understanding of what they were getting themselves into).
2. Have a team in place to add situations or elements of the conference that weren’t planned, but are obviously getting requested. This might come to fruition from people saying they want to learn more about “x” or that this event is all well and good but it would be great if they had “y”. The key is to build the resource in to make this happen. They have one job. That’s it.

The strategy here – and the root of why some events are incredible and others fall short – is that the organizer designs an event in such a way that – really – the attendees designed it.

Tangential riff: Consider your favorite coffee shop or restaurant. There’s a greater chance that the owner engaged with and listened to a community and built their ideas than the owner just built what she wanted.

Same strategy works for newsletters and work meetings and friend gatherings, not just coffee shops, conferences and conventions.

Stay Positive & Help Them Help You

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There’s nothing more exciting to find than inspiration.

No other emotion has as lasting of an impact.

Not even surprise.

(Cool you found $5, which maybe MAYBE you think about again later in the day, but meh.)

Here’s the thing about inspiration: someone has to give it.

It doesn’t exist without someone putting it there. Even if you’re on a nature walk and inspiration hits… have you wondered who built the path you’re walking on?

That leaves a particular choice for you, for me and for everyone else reading this: Are we the ones looking or are we the ones giving it to others?

The sad current reality is that we have more people looking for it than providing it.

Stay Positive & Perhaps It’s Time To Flip It

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Most emotions are contagious. Anticipation being one of them.

As you’re working on your muse, it’s worth leading with, building, and maintaining anticipation.

It keeps you feeling positive about the work

It forces you to continuously consider how to raise the bar with each decision that arises.

It helps maintain your accountability.

But it also benefits others.

It reminds people that they have something to look forward to.

(Quick aside: You know how great it is to have a vacation planned and instances leading up to it that remind you about it? What you’re creating is essentially a vacation for someone else. A break from their reality that they long for. It blows my mind how so many people don’t keep reminding others of the projects they’re working on and will soon ship. They don’t build anticipation.)

It encourages others to reach out and share their advice, requests, suggestions if they desire.

It begins to position your product or service in a positive light.

All to say, more anticipation, please.

Stay Positive & Are You Stoked? Are They?

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There are so many tactics out there. Lots of shiny ones, too.

Time and time again I’ve seen marketing firms, agencies and departments talk about tactics that simply don’t align with the strategy.

It not only hurts the bottom line and reporting structure; it not only hurts the team for trying to work through something that will have little impact; it’s also a bad experience for the intended customer or prospect.

It’s a vital gut check moment when you get to the real work of doing rather than ideating because sometimes ideating spans beyond the original strategy (regardless of a project brief, an opening comment at the start of a meeting, etc.,).

More tactics not tied to the strategy end up happening than you’d believe.

We owe it to a lot of people to make sure we stick to strategy.

Stay Positive & It’s There For A Reason

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