Speaker 1: The real secret to going big with your marketing is when you start to think of yourself like a portfolio manager. So for example, in the investment world, a manager may be allocating budget towards large companies, towards high growth potential companies, they might throw in some bonds, they have a smorgasbord of different investments that they're playing with. The idea is let's get the allocation right. The problem that I see with a lot of marketers is they don't really think like portfolio managers. They're more interested in figuring out what channel's best, how do I fully optimize a given channel, and generally there's heavy, heavy emphasis on the bottom of the funnel where they're just trying to either generate leads in business-to-business, particularly marketing qualified leads, or they're trying to generate sales when they're doing something like business-to-consumer e-commerce. But sophisticated marketing doesn't work like that. That's not how you achieve economies of scale. That's not how you achieve efficiency. You achieve those things by doing integrated marketing communications. Integrated marketing communications means that you need to allocate time, resources, and budget towards each stage of the funnel, and then synergized together, you're able to get the outcomes that you want, which is going to be things like pipeline revenue in B2B or sales in B2C, customer acquisition, user acquisition, etc. So generally speaking, based on empirical research, the optimal allocation of your budget is going to be around 50% top of funnel and 50% bottom of funnel. Now, I like to break this down further, and I have the top of funnel, the middle of the funnel, and the bottom of the funnel. And then if you want to get even more granular, these are the stages of awareness that I want to appeal to at each stage of the funnel. So at the very top, we have brand unaware people, people that aren't familiar with your logo, they're not familiar with your brand name. So what you should be doing is you should be taking a percentage of your budget and allocating it purely towards brand awareness. And you're not going to measure success based on sales, clicks, etc. You're going to be measuring it based on things like reach, brand recall, brand awareness, brand fame. Are people associating your brand with the buying situation or with the trigger event? So perhaps if they get sued, do they think of using your legal software, for example? Or if they have a new website, do they think about using your ecommerce integration or your live chat? So the way that you measure success of brand awareness is often not that easy. It might involve things like survey research, or potentially qualitative interviews talking to people that visit your website, things like that. So behavioral metrics aren't necessarily that definitive when you're dealing with the top of the funnel. So because things are unclear, because it's a bit wiffy waffy, that's why a lot of product marketing managers don't bother doing it at all. But you do need to do it and you should be allocating a large budget towards it. So now the second stage is problem unaware people. So these are people that are not aware that the problem that you solve, that your product solves is actually worth prioritizing. It's worth paying attention to. So you need to spend marketing convincing them that that problem needs to be focused on, and it needs to be prioritized over other problems. And you can do things like using research to do that. Now, one of the reasons that I have brand unaware at the far left here is because when you're doing brand marketing, pure brand marketing, and I'm talking about marketing the brand that's pegged to the product, separate from the product itself. So there's the product which has its features, and then there's the brand which creates value over and above the features of the product. And that's something that you kind of slap on as a label. So that's going to be things like your mascot, your logo, your brand name, etc. So there's this brand marketing as an asset that needs to be treated differently. Now, one of the reasons that is very different from these other stages, generally speaking, is because brand marketing is something that you do for the long term. And long term marketing often revolves more around things like emotions, and maybe loose affiliations with things. Whereas when you're marketing something like your product, it tends to be much more straightforward and rational, talking about the justification for buying you, talking about specific use cases, etc. As we move into the middle of funnel, there are people that need to be convinced that whatever product category you're in is something that they need to engage in to solve their problems. So for example, if you're a live chat plugin, you need to convince them that live chat is the solution to their problem. Not necessarily your product or your specific brand, but just the category in general. For example, I was marketing dictation software for veterinarians. And because this was fairly new that a lot of veterinarians don't use dictation software, the marketing is really about selling dictation itself. The virtues of dictation is kind of minor as to what specific product or brand is being pegged to that message at that point. Now next, what does matter is your specific product, how it's different, how it creates value over and above the competition, why they should choose you specifically, and making sure that people actually remember your specific product. Now one of the big problems I see when you go to websites that product marketing managers have worked on is the website's 100% focused on getting the conversion, like a demo request, a free trial signup, a free consultation, et cetera. But really what ends up happening is 70% of those leads, according to Dr. James Anderson, basically get ignored or thrown out by the sales team. So what's happening here? I think one of the big things that's happening is these people are being pressured or cajoled into signing up for demo requests, but they haven't even really gotten any product education. So one area where I think product marketing managers could improve is using the website as an education tool, less as a conversion tool, so that we have some asset that is focused on creating product awareness, product education. Okay, now moving into the bottom of the funnel, we have people that are free offer unaware. So your free offer is like your free trial, your demo, your consultation, et cetera. Now, a lot of people do focus here and they focus here too much. One of the reasons they focus here too much, I believe, is because it's not really scalable. There are only so many people that are willing to show up to a sales meeting, to contact you, to engage one-on-one with the salesperson, or in the case of e-commerce or business consumer, maybe sign up to get coupons or something like that. So in this case, there are things you can do that can optimize your marketing that a lot of people don't. So for example, you can incentivize people to show up to meetings. And despite what a lot of people might say, this is actually very effective. There's tons of case studies to show that you can generate million dollars plus by doing campaigns, promoting things like gift cards, or giving people money to show up to something like a demo. Now, the last stage here, we have paid offer unaware. So people that need to be educated about your contract terms, they need to be convinced to pull the trigger. There needs to be some sense of urgency to get them to sign up for your product and not competing products. Now, fundamentally, this is where sales plays a role, but there is a role in marketing. So here, what we're doing is we're helping with sales enablement, we're helping with battle decks, we're helping by doing competitive comparisons, and we're helping by doing always on marketing. So always marketing to people, even before they become customers, even when they're in this sort of bottom of funnel stage, familiarity with your brand and your product is really gonna help seal the deal. So the big decision you really need to make is, allocating budget to each of these stages, or maybe you use different stages, that's fine. But the point is that you need to commit to putting budget towards the top of funnel, the middle of funnel, not just the bottom of the funnel. And you need to do that from the get-go. Because if you don't make that commitment from the get-go, what's gonna happen is you're gonna start looking at the data, and you may have ran a campaign that was designed just to create brand awareness, but then you're like, oh, it's not getting many clicks, it's not getting many purchases, let's kind of pause that campaign and put more budget here. That's the wrong way to do it. You need to commit to doing things that is purely about education, purely about brand awareness, purely about things that are gonna set the stage for more scalable bottom of funnel conversions, ultimately down the road. And down the road, I mean, in six plus months, not just focused on what's gonna happen to meet quota this month.