Paul Watkins: Get Inside the Mind of Your Customer Paul Watkins is a marketer’s marketer. He believes that marketing shouldn’t be about continuing on practices of habit, but instead constantly finding new ways to forge ground and deliver better results. To do that, he says, it’s all about understanding motivation. As a marketer in the education sphere, he’s all about knowing why people want to go to or return to school. When he ran some […]
Paul Watkins: Get Inside the Mind of Your Customer
Paul Watkins is a marketer’s marketer. He believes that marketing shouldn’t be about continuing on practices of habit, but instead constantly finding new ways to forge ground and deliver better results. To do that, he says, it’s all about understanding motivation. As a marketer in the education sphere, he’s all about knowing why people want to go to or return to school. When he ran some tests on the matter, he found a statistic that he didn’t necessarily expect. Approximately 75% of people who go back to school are prompted to do so because they hate their job or career. It wasn’t to get a degree, it wasn’t to get experience; above all, it was to find fulfillment. When he started working with that motivation in mind, he started seeing insane results. In this podcast, Paul explains how to get this kind of insight, and how to do it without breaking your company’s budget. In fact, he claims, if you’re not making space for it in your budget, you’re missing out big on opportunities to see major improvement.
Paul doesn’t just work in marketing, he’s become a thought leader in developing strategies to interact with customer motivation and developing a personal brand. He knows that every marketer is not just marketing a product, they are marketing a lifestyle and a way of being. Marketers often get a lot of flack, and often it’s because many people don’t understand how creating a brand works, and how difficult it is. Paul gives tons of insight into creating a cohesive image for your brand, and yourself as a career-minded individual. Here are a few awesome topics we delve into:
• How to get the number of hits you usually get in a week in 1 morning
• Why your product doesn’t need to be that remarkable
• The best speaking groups for up-and-coming professional speakers and thought leaders
• How to construct a DIY focus group for $200 or less
Here’s what I learned:
1) Get into the mind of the customer
a) “Hate Mondays?”
i) Paul works in the education space, so it was highly relevant to get to know why people decide to back to school
ii) A study showed that 75% of those who go back to school dislike their job
iii) Ran an online ad that simply said “Hate Mondays?”
(1) It offered alternatives to hating to go to work every Monday, several involving classes in changing careers
(2) They launched it at 930 on a Monday morning
(3) By lunchtime, they had the amount of hits they expected to receive by the end of the week
(a) Paul spent the time finding out what the real motivation was
b) Finding the ideal customer
i) You aren’t trying to target everyone
ii) Facebook makes it easy to find and target a hyperspecific demographic of exactly who you want
iii) Have a mechanism that gathers their name, email address, and cellphone number (if applicable and possible)
iv) Then, move them down the sales funnel
(1) Paul uses a downloadable ebook
(2) Then, they start a dialogue with the customer
(3) Remember that they may not be ready to commit right away
(a) Just be with them as they become ready to make that switch to you
(b) A 90-day contact frequency is recommended
(c) As long as there is an opt-out opportunity, as long as the information is continually new and relevant
(d) Try to omit jargon and sales speak
c) “Let’s all blame the Marketing Director”
i) There’s a common sentiment that if something goes wrong, it must be marketing’s fault
ii) A lot of people don’t understand marketing, so it becomes easy to blame
iii) MarketingSherpa’s famous campaign “Let’s all blame the marketing director” plays off this sentiment
(1) Contracted a barbershop quartet to write and record a song around the concept “let’s all blame the marketing director”
(2) Mailed sheet music of the song to marketing directors with a reply envelope to receive a copy of the cd
(3) Awesome response rate
d) Your product doesn’t need to be that remarkable
i) The product is the result of trying to get into their mind, not why you want to get into their mind in the first place
ii) There aren’t that many remarkable products
iii) It’s more important to get them to interact with you and take them down the line of what their choice might be, especially if a big ticket item
e) Creating a focus group
i) Focus on questions about your groups’ lives
(1) What do you do in your spare time?
(2) What is your living arrangement?
(3) Are you still living with your parents?
ii) You can do focus groups for cheap
(1) “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug
(2) Get 5-10 people in a room, pay them $30-$50 for a few hours or half a day’s time
(3) Get insight into how customers interact with your site
f) Can do it with retail and local
i) Have a wine and cheese night an evening at 530 after your store closes
ii) People love being asked for advice
(1) “Tell me 3 things I can improve”
iii) The amount you pay will be trivial to what you gain later
g) What you can learn from Seth Godin
i) Paul’s favorite thought leader and author
ii) “Permission Marketing” – you’ve got to get your client’s permission to talk to them
iii) Paul got permission by finding their true motivation and asking them to give their information
iv) You have to give your business a personality
v) You buy an item based on the reputation built around that item
(1) Excite the customer enough that they want to talk about you
vi) 40% of Paul’s university’s students are referrals from current or past students
vii) Remarkability
(1) Does not need to be the best or the most valuable or the most interesting
(2) Just what makes it worth remarking about
h) A great remarkable campaign
i) An oven cleaner campaign from New Zealand marketed itself as the only oven cleaner that stays on overnight
(1) However, basically any oven cleaner could achieve the same results if left on overnight
(2) Didn’t make its benefit faster, it made it slower
(3) Still got a 90% share of the market because of the ad series
ii) Workout machines
(1) A consumer magazine tested dozens of them
(2) Concluded that all of them worked if you used them
2)Professional speaking and brand building
a) Write a book
i) You’re considered an expert if you’ve written a book
ii) Having a book will get you more speaking engagements
iii) Doubles your income
(1) Paid per seat filled, and then paid per book bought
b) Recognize your niche
i) The smaller the niche, the bigger the fish you can be
ii) Paul’s book “How to be a Big Fish”
iii) What smaller niche are you prepared to be an absolute leader in?
iv) If they ever need an expert in the field, you’re the only one
v) Needs to be big enough to sustain you a whole career
vi) Some seem too small, but turn out to not be
(1) ex.video seo, local seo, image seo, product ecommerce seo, news seo…
c) Speaking groups and speaking skills
i) Toastmasters
(1) Teaches who how to stand in front of an audience
(2) The mechanics of speaking
(3) Also a social and networking event
ii) National Speakers’ Association
(1) Learn the fundamentals of speaking first, then go to National Speakers to refine your skill
(2) Many members are already speakers as a profession
iii) Watch other speakers
iv) Speaker training from an expert
(1) Ted McGrath, Brian Tracy, Brendan Bouchard, etc.
(2) Paul did a 1-on-1 with a speaking expert
(a) Quite expensive, but huge benefits
v) neurolinguistic programming
(1) Using the way our brain processes language and speech so attendees can register it on a subconscious level.
(2) Say all the negative or in-progress elements and the left side of the stage, and the positive things to the right
As a last bit of wisdom Paul closes with:
“People choose you now, you don’t choose them. You used to run ads in the paper and they’d walk through and go, “Wow, look at that ad!”. Now, people are searching for you. Or your product, or your service. So they control it. I think that’s a mindset we really have to grapple with. The customer is looking for you now. You are not looking for a customer anymore. I know that sounds a bit global to say that but, the more I finally got that into my mind, the more I finally clicked with how we, depending on the industry, go about doing this. Practical steps – run a focus group. It may not be to anything, but I’d be stunned if that was to happen. Get a bunch of your customers together, there are many ways to do that. And then run another one. And then run another one. And then run another one. One result is not a population; it may not be enough to tell you what you’re trying to do.”
A ton of great tips here on learning to create your own focus groups, creating remarkability, and really stepping into the mind of your audience and customer base. Paul really understands marketing at a theoretical level that I find fascinating to discuss. At its’ core, the true marketer has the ability to create something out of nothing, but when you have a great product to work with already, you should be able to create magic.
