Spotlight on Marketers
Marketers are often "behind-the-scenes" people. We mine data, design beautiful images and experiences, coordinate tradeshow shipments, and post on social media. And more often than not, Marketers are happy to have our Sales counterparts take the lead when it comes to being in the spotlight.
At the same time, it's becoming more and more common for brands to use their people as there competitive advantage. Which means, if no one sees your people during the marketing part of the buying process (which, according to Kerry Cunningham and the team over at 6sense is 70% of buying processes for B2B services today), what are they seeing?
Corporate brochures? Swag? Social posts that get scrolled right by? Emails no one opens? Demos no one books?
All of those things DON'T have people at the center of them.
Let's look at what a NEW version of marketing might look like, with people at the heart of it 💖
People Connecting With People
It's not news that people would much rather connect with people than with brands. Nike has been capitalizing on this for years.
Number of people who follow Nike on X = 10M
Number of people who follow Cristiano Ronaldo on X = 110M
That's 11 TIMES more people who follow ONE person who represents the Nike brand than who follow the entire brand.
Let's look a little closer to home:
Number of people who follow ME on LinkedIn: 10,811
Number of people who follow TLB Coaching on LinkedIn: 146
That's an even bigger multiple.
The point is, people are more WILLING to connect with people. Especially when they don't think it HAS TO end up in a sale.
Which is precisely where marketing lives.
Marketing is out telling a story. A story that some people will resonate with, and some people won't. The entire way of BEING in marketing is based on curiosity.
What campaigns resonate? Which don't? Who are we attracting? What do they like about the brand? What part of the conversation is most engaging for them?
So, what if you took the people who thought those👆 things out from behind the scenes to thinking them WITH your audience? Maybe, just maybe, those people would start connecting with your community in a more meaningful way...for all parties involved.
Controlling Your Brand
Now, when I present this option to most businesses, the primary concern is about being able to "control the brand". But here's the thing, peeps.
Your brand has been, and will always be, people's EXPERIENCE of your people.
It's not a color. Or a tagline. Or having everyone say what the business does in exactly the same way. Or being identical. Because you never WERE that.
It's the complete experience that a PERSON has with your company, combined with ALL the experiences every person has of your company.
THAT'S👆 your brand.
You were never able to control it, FYI. It was always experienced this way.
And in a SWOT Analysis, there are WAY more opportunities than there are threats. Especially, if your current team weren't hired to be public facing.
But what do we do when we need our current teams to do something different to have a bigger impact on the business? We TRAIN THEM of course.
ASIDE: now, if you're reading this and you're saying to yourself that your marketers are behind the scenes, and they'll always be behind the scenes, you can stop reading now. BUT, if you don't seem to have the funnel you desire bringing leads into your business, you might want to consider exploring this as and option with a very low budget💡
Re-Training Marketers to be...
OK, so, if you know me you'll know that there are LOTS of different ways you can train your people to make them more effective in a public-facing role. You could sign them up for public speaking training (I'm a Toastmaster, myself). You could send them to some sales training (personally, as a marketer, some of my favorite training was in Sales at Sandler in Calgary).
You know your team best, but today I want to talk about the thing that was the most impactful for me: Digital Influence & Social Selling Training with DLA ignite.
Now, some of your Marketers might not like thinking of themselves as Social Sellers. Honestly, I couldn't think of myself like that for a long time.
But here's the thing.
It's likely already part of their responsibility to post on social media. So, if they're going to be on social anyway; why not simply turn that into an engine that generates leads?
In a SOCIAL way. Not a SELLING way.
I mean, yes. The goal at the end of the day is to find qualified clients. BUT...
What else can you find along the way?
Brand relationships that otherwise wouldn't have existed.
They might be with future team members. Potential vendors. Heck, even investors.
And with a team of people, showing up authentically, building genuine relationships with other people, that NEVER looks bad on your brand.
✅ You differentiate yourself in the market
✅ You have MORE people attracting leads
✅ You don't have to depend on PRICE to win deals
✅ You have employees who are more invested in the company
And honestly, it's going to cost you WAY less in the long run than continuing to hire people who rotate out within 18 months. And way less than continuing to invest in digital ads that aren't working. AND way less than replacing your people with cheap AI options that don't feed your funnel at all (can you say impending layoffs?)
Sure, it's going to cost you something. All training does. BUT once it's done, your people own all of the skills needed to bring it to life for your business on a daily basis. Your brand owns the skills.
There are people who see value in that, and people who don't.
But if you're one of the people who DOES, we should chat about exploring what it looks like to train your marketing team as Social Sellers.
