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The Next CMO Podcast: Best Practices for In-Sourcing Your Marketing with John Readman

Peter Mahoney
October 11, 2021
Podcast, TheNextCMO

 

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Next CMO podcast, Kelsey and I have a conversation with John Readman, the CEO of Modo25, an innovative agency based in the UK with offices in Leeds and London.

John specializes in helping companies in-source their marketing, instead of relying completely on external agency partners

We talk about the roles that are most important to bring inside your company first, issues and opportunities with in-sourcing your marketing, and about BOSCO, a benchmarking tool that Modo25 created to show you how your marketing stacks up to your competitors.

Useful Links

Full Transcript

[00:00:00] Peter Mahoney: Well, thank  you so much, John, for joining us on the next CMO podcast today. I know you’re calling in from a York. Share out in the UK would love to learn a little bit more about you and what you do for Moto 25. So, first of all, thanks for having me on it’s a pleasure to be here.
Um, so I set up motos. My background’s always been in marketing technology and agency services, uh, particularly digital marketing. And I noticed one of our biggest competitors was actually, um, Brands and specifically retailers bringing their digital marketing in-house. So I was sort of some thinking around after we edited our last business and we were going through the earn how to, and everything I was thinking about what we’re going to do next.
And I thought, well, how can we create a business? That enables brands and retailers to act today in-house themselves properly, but at the same time, actually make some money in the process and build a business around that. So Moto 25, um, enables brands to have a strategy to overtime. In-house their digital marketing talent that helped them resolve.
Recruit and retain that talent over a period of time. So it’s a very different type of services business. Um, but we’ve been, um, growing a lot. We’re just about to launch into the U S and, uh, uh, lots of brands and retailers and e-commerce companies seem to really enjoy what we talk about and what we do.
[00:01:35] Peter Mahoney: I’ve seen John some really interesting evidence and some data presented recently about the fact that more and more. Brands are looking to insource, at least part of their marketing. What do you think is driving
[00:01:47] John Readman: that? I think there’s so I was involved in email marketing. Years and years ago, before we even e-commerce and it was a bit like, well, we’ve got to get an agency under platform, we’ve got to do this.
And it was a bit like voodoo. And then I got into SEO and PPC many years ago, and that was a bit like black magic. And, and I think people over time have started to realize, well, A are we overpaying the agency, whereas the transparency, particularly around things like programmatic or around SEO and people have wanted to understand, and they’re thinking, well, hang on, I’m paying an agency, an overrated price.
The performance may or may not be good. I’m struggling with trust. I’m struggling with transparency. I’m finding it hard to explain. Uh, if I, they can’t explain it to me, how can I explain it to my management and leadership team? So I think the drive is cause people want to take control. They want to take ownership and they want to demonstrate and have access to the sort of metrics themselves.
So I, to transparency and control. Um, and I also think there’s, um, a historical bias. And what I mean by that is some agencies in particular. Uh, bias in two ways, one way, based on the relationships they’ve got with the ad networks or the media networks, maybe based on the behaviors, kickbacks or commissions structures or commercials, but also they’ve got a knowledge bias.
And what I mean by that is if you go to them and say, oh, well, where should we spend our money? Or where should we invest our time? They may only recommend what the. But the maybe other skills and other opportunities for your business or the marketing channels that they’re not skilled in that they’re not going to recommend.
So what we’ve been trying to do is have a sort of completely. Client focused platform, agnostic view to helping people in-house and take control of their digital marketing, uh, over time. So it’s
[00:03:50] Peter Mahoney: interesting that you brought up the idea of bias, cause you definitely see that. And it’s the, I’ve got a hammer.
Everything looks like a nail. Kind of approach that that happens. It’s and it’s natural for everyone. If you study and really understand something in a detailed way, then you’re going to find ways to apply your knowledge to solve problems. And that’s that’s okay. And I don’t think it’s nefarious in any way from people perspective, but that’s just how human nature works.
But you also have internal bias. So if you develop those skills internally, you’re going to have your own internal view. So how, how do you avoid. Building up too much internal bias for your own, because there’s always this balance, right. There’s okay.
[00:04:34] John Readman: Is this is, this was so everybody is saying, well, once you’ve in-house these people, aren’t you going to make yourself redundant?
And where’s the value in what you do. So we offer this service and some of it’s people-based where most of it’s people based on there’s an element of software in that as well. Index and benchmark people against their competitors a bit like the former Hitwise used to do. And we’ve got a sort of new digital marketing index tool to keep sort of the people, a lot of people integrate that into other different platforms and dashboards and things.
So, but what we, what we find there is we, we run, uh, and sit in the background also. Um, help them with like a quarterly strategy or we will help them with a review or we will, Hey, say, this is what we’re seeing across the rest of your industry. So you get this sort of light touch agency, exposure and experience without having to pay the heavy monthly retainers.
Um, and also the big thing. Uh, Peter, a lot of people have about in-housing as well. What happens if they leave? What happens if they go on maternity or what happens if they go on holiday? Cause some of these companies, aren’t the big Goliath of the world. So the targets, for instance, who’ve got hundreds of marketers.
They might be one, two person operation. So they’re worried about. My resource leaves or these off. So we provide a sort of help desk and support service, uh, where you can call in and we can jump in and help you set takeover for a period of time. Or even just, if someone’s got a question, you could have a set amount of our guys’ time, uh, where you don’t have to Google.
You don’t have to watch your video. You can just speak to an expert and they can give you help and advice. Uh, normally if we’ve helped them already in house, We understand the accounts. We understand the product, the product, we understand the setup. We probably set it up to our best practice so we can very quickly dive in their spot opportunities and help them.
So it’s a bit like, um, an insurance policy for in-housing, um, to give people that sort of reassurance.
[00:06:39] Peter Mahoney: It’s really interesting because it seems like there’s this, this bridge that you’re trying to help people make. I assume that if you’re a. A target of the world, if you’re a big, giant brand marketer, as an example, and you have lots of internal skills, you’ve developed that capability over time.
And it’s, it’s just a choice you make at some point about which pieces you insource versus outsource. But as you get a little bit smaller and down, down that scale, then. You probably wouldn’t have been able to insource in the past and maintain a level of quality. I suspect because one of the advantages obviously of bringing in a specialist agency is they’re a specialist agency and they have some deep skills in a certain area.
So it sounds like what you’re doing is helping people. Maybe in-source slightly early. Uh, than they could have before with some insurance in place. So that if, if there’s, if there’s turnover, like you said, if someone needs to, needs to take a holiday every once in a while, you can.
[00:07:44] John Readman: Yeah, no, absolutely. And it almost means they could have a general marketer or digital marketing person.
Who’s got a broad understanding of SEO, PPC, and affiliates or whatever. Uh, but if they really need that deep technical understanding, they can just pick up the phone to us, but they’re not paying that sort of agency rates. And because we would have set them up in a. In a best practice way and probably trained their team and maybe even recruited them.
So that’s the other thing we’ve been doing a lot of recently, which has been fascinating because we come from a digital marketing and technology background. We’re not recruiters, but brands and businesses seem to really like that because we can validate whether or not these people actually know what led up.
Um, one of the biggest problems people are finding now with the sort of shortage of digital marketing talent for brands is they might recruit a head of SEO or head of paid search. And it takes them three to six months to realize, actually, they’re not quite as good as they said they were. Uh, and that opportunity cost is huge.
So then recruitment side of our business has really been booming. And then once you place the person in. The opportunity to build and grow that relationship to the agency support and everything else just sort of flows from that. And we, we seem to be. Because of our transparent approach, there’s a huge amount of trust, which I think in the past, people probably haven’t had the most trust for their agency.
They’ve always been worried about, well, I get an invoice, I get a report and I get this. And then I get a quarterly review where it’s not quite transparent of what is actually going on. So we’re trying to sort of demystify all that. Ready.
[00:09:21] Peter Mahoney: If you had to stack rank roles. What would be the first thing that you insourced and what would be the last thing that you in source?
[00:09:33] John Readman: Wow, that’s a very good question, Peter. I, it really depends on the size of business, but I would say if it’s a scaling up e-commerce type business, They really need somebody who really understands paid media and analytics and their metrics. So somebody who really understands the bright leavers to Paul in order to drive performance.
And why, because we often see companies that have scaled up and could become successful, but then when they then don’t understand the value of which media at which time to really take growth to the next level. So I would say somebody. Who really abroad e-commerce specialists, but with a, with a focus on the sort of performance media on the analytics side of it is a, is a must, um, so that they can then start taking control of their own budgets, um, and actually understanding the ROI and the return on ad spend.
So I want to hop in here cause I’m a little curious for my own personal reasons. I’m one and a half to two marketers, uh, you know, here at Plannuh. And how do you go through defining and figuring out, you know, that agency process of whether or not they’re pulling their weight and they’re doing what they said that they should do.
What’s kind of your process of identifying. And then what do you do after. So that’s it. So what we tend to do is we spend it sort of like a deep dive with the, with the brand or with, uh, with the, with the company to understand what are their goals and objectives and what are they actually trying to achieve through their digital marketing.
And then we analyze that and then through, and as far as it depends on how aware the existing agencies are about the ambition to move into. Okay. So we’ve had some really interesting examples where we worked hand in hand with the agency. We’ve transferred accounts over, we’ve worked on it all together and it’s been fine.
We’ve had other ones where everybody was really upset and it was really nervous. So depending on the levels of communication and relationship between the brand and the agency, uh, but we would then do a level of audit, a level of stress. And then from the back of the audit of all the work that has been going on, Versus the desired outcomes and strategy of the brand, we would then put together our recommendations and within that is also a skills assessment of the team.
So we can set a Stripe. Well, have you got the right people in the right places? What does the perfect team look like? Because one of the biggest things we’ve seen with a lot of brands who want to sort of accelerate their business and moving houses, maybe marketing owns the budget, but e-commerce. Uh, own the skillset and the people spending the boat yet, but marketing wants to spend the budget on something different to what he commerce wants to spend it.
So we’ve got to make sure everybody’s aligned around the numbers and around the targets and the plans. So it’s a combination of strategy and people is where we’d start and assessing the existing work that’s been going on with agencies and, and people. Does that answer the question is that absolutely.
Yeah, it definitely, it brings in the operational marketing of, you know, that your team and what you’re working with. So
[00:12:46] Peter Mahoney: yeah, one of the things that we’ve been touching on a little bit is the idea of benchmarking your own capabilities and that you guys have some experience in that area. Uh, obviously in, maybe you can share a little bit about your, your thoughts and your approach around how you might benchmark your digital marketing capable.
[00:13:06] John Readman: Uh, so well, so we’ve got, um, a thing called the Basco index. So I used to get really. Frustrated, um, where people get obsessed about their competitors and they’re like, well, and then they’re saying, well, they are ranking number one for this. And then you have, and they’re doing this, or how much are they spending?
Um, and there’s so many different metrics, right? So you could lose days of your life. In asset in sandbox, you could lose days of your life in Google analytics. And we used to, they used to be a tool called Hitwise and Hitwise would give you a one metric. And it would tell you the direction, like almost like a north star of where are we going?
How do we rank against our places, pears and, and Hitwise is no longer. And when we’re trying to do this, Process to help people in-house we also need to benchmark them against their peers, and then we need to analyze their peers and go, well, how do you stack up against your competitors? So what we’ve done is we’ve built a tool that has over 16 different data inputs and points, as well as.
Looking at your overall visibility, the visibility versus demand in the market. And that’s both on a paid organic social. And then we’ve devised the Bosco school, which is a score out of a thousand, which you would then get scored. Then you track your performance over time and there may be some legitimate reasons why you’re never going to score more than 750, because you may have made a commercial decision.
You don’t want to sell on Amazon, but you’re never going to get more than 750 in that scenario because we believe maybe our, our system has said, well, there’s opportunities and demand themselves. For your products on Amazon, so that you’re missing an opportunity. Um, but it gives, everybody’s measured with the same yardstick and it gives the board, um, some data and some information to hold either that team.
Or the agency accountable. Well, why are we going up? Why are we going down? What’s going on? What would we have to do to move that up? So that sort of a benchmarking tool, and it’s free to use, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, if you just want to compare yourself to competitors yourself and three competitors fee. So you can just go online and look@askpasco.io.
Um, put in your domain, as it tends to work very well for e-commerce companies and brands and retailers, because you need to spend a certain amount so we can see the data. Got it.
[00:15:40] Peter Mahoney: And we’ll, and we’ll put a link in the, in the show notes for people to, so they can, uh, they can check that out. No, that’s, that’s great.
Uh, what do you think if you kind of lean back and look over your landscape and obviously you’re pretty specialized in e-commerce market. What do you think people are doing well? And what are people doing? Not so well these days.
[00:16:03] John Readman: Um, well, how long have we got, I, I could talk about this for a long time. I
[00:16:10] Peter Mahoney: think you can talk as much as you want.
I can’t guarantee what will add it.
[00:16:14] John Readman: Uh, I’ll be gone cutting room floor. No, I think, um, the main thing people have got good at, which then leads to. Why things have become poor. I would say people have got good at spending money with Google, right. And people have got good, uh, PPC and performance marketing, but because it’s a P we put a dollar in and we get $10 out and it’s a very easy to understand concept.
Uh that’s then I believe, uh, led to. A reliance on performance marketing, amend that people have become too complacent about quality, copy, quality, creative, and quality proposition. And what was traditional marketing of? Like, what are my piece? My, all the different price promotion, et cetera. And product
marketing podcast. I thought people would know. Um, but I think what’s happened is people got so reliant on performance marketing that suddenly when the ROI stops working. People don’t go, oh, I maybe we need to improve our proposition. Mean maybe we need to have better copy or better calls to action. Or maybe in Facebook, we need to focus a bit more on the creative.
So I think, and this sort of is a bit contrary to what I was saying, but I think we talked about the first person who had houses, the analyst die, but actually the people who have got the analytics analyst person, all the numbers. Right. And sort of over-reliant on that and not then thinking, cause we’re becoming blind.
Post on Facebook. Now it’s an ad, right? So how are you going to stop that school? Right? And then if you’re in charge of your brand and you’re trying to take that, in-house now that becomes quite hard and it’s probably some elements of creative. You may be, shouldn’t bring in house, right? I’m not saying you should bring all marketing in house, but.
Over there. The people are good at that. It took performance marketing. That’s become an overlay, which means they’re now poor at their creative and above the line and, and doing, trying new things. People seem very reluctant to try new channels and new things. And I’d give an example of I’m surprised how long it’s taken.
Some of the great bands to get into tech talk. So if we’d have sat here three years, four years ago, I said, oh, there’s going to be this music based video streaming platform. And it’s going to come from China and it’s going to take over. People would have probably locked me up as a madman. Um, but actually.
There’s some huge opportunities there. Some treat very cheap traffic. There’s some high engaged consumers, uh, and it’s not just eight year old girls doing dance moves. As you said, it’s a really interesting opportunity for brands. How do you, why do you think that is, um, you know, the fear of, of trying out new channels?
Why do you think brands, these big name brands when something is clearly trending in the right direction? Obviously, video being another fabric? I, I think there’s, there’s twofold is the agencies don’t understand it. So they’re not recommending it. I think they’ve not got onto it. Quick enough. There’s too many.
Y middle-aged men running the businesses and the brands, and they don’t really probably understand that actual consumer, um, if we’re brutally honest about the whole thing. Um, and I think everybody thought he was going to be against. So everybody’s waiting and waiting and waiting. And then suddenly it’s like panic.
It’s not a gimmick. How do, can we find somebody who knows anything about Tik TOK to help us? We need tactile now. And, and it’s, and then it’s certainly they’re sponsoring, they’re sponsoring the world cup football and they’re sponsoring this and they’re sponsoring that. Um, is that.
[00:20:02] Peter Mahoney: Yeah, we had a, a guest on about a year ago now Jason was his name and he was a, he had a Tik TOK agency and he was probably 14 years old or something, you know, it was, it was amazing.
But to your point, John, that you get someone who’s closer to the demographic who really understands it. And, and th they really can, can move much more quickly. And by the way, it’s one of the advantages of. Keeping some capability to, to reach outside the organization, to tap into talent. I mean, as you said, I mean, you just said creative is a great example where you might want to look externally because you can always come up with, it’s hard to come up with really brand new, innovative approaches and ideas.
If you’re within your same four walls all the time, uh, and, and bringing something from the outside and it’s this kind of thing, looking at new ideas and new. It’s something that’s really important. So that’s the
[00:21:02] John Readman: go ahead. No, sorry. I think the other thing just to finish off Kelsey’s question is people are scared, right?
So it’s a lot, there’s a lot of money relying on this now. And especially since the pandemic. E-commerce isn’t 10% or 5% of the business. It’s 90% because all of our shops are closed. Right. So everybody’s like, well, we don’t want to break the Google machine or the Facebook machine. So it’s sort of working.
Why fiddle with it. Um, and I think what people need to look at is either testing budgets to actually do some forecasting and go, well, what could we get back from these new platforms? Um, but so I think people are nervous and scared of the unknown, uh, and because of the size of the money now, people are spending millions on their digital marketing.
Um, they want to know because it’s very easy to go in Google and go, right. I spend this and I get this back. People go well, what’s, my hour is digital. I want an exact number back, but Tik TOK is probably a bit more like TV to start with. So that’s where the disconnect happens.
[00:22:12] Peter Mahoney: Yeah. And we’re big advocates of sort of measuring it the right level.
And in part of the problem is that I think people often are, they’re so focused and so used to sort of optimize. Within the tactic or sub tactic that they’re, they’re missing the forest for the trees. And they don’t understand what the broad campaign theme is doing. And it may be that the brand campaign or the broader campaign that may include influencer marketing, which is harder to directly measure.
But in aggregate, you should be able to see how it moves the needle, and you should be able to add up what it costs and figure out what the performance.
[00:22:52] John Readman: Yeah, no, I, I, this sort of brings me on to you’re absolutely right. This brings me onto the sort of a, sort of a really interesting conversation we have with a lot of brands and retailers and e-commerce businesses is, is sort of attribution.
So everybody’s talking about. Yeah. I sometimes talk about, it’s a bit like teenage sex. Um, everybody’s talking about it, but nobody’s doing it. Um, so it said it’s just one of those things that it’s, we’ll get with. We’re going to do an attribution project, or we’re going to get some consultants in and we’re going to analyze all the best.
But I think the challenge is. Uh, at multiples on all of that, I think the board don’t really understand about how attribution could work. And I think this is a big education piece, a lot of digital marketers get the concept that most. Paths to purchase may have seven plus interactions and which one is the most valuable.
And we don’t actually know. And I, and I think we need to, as a, as an industry, educate the wider leadership team to go, well, actually that clicks worth this, this collects worth. And it’s not all on last click because. That last click may have never happened if they didn’t see the ad on Facebook or the on programmatic or the influencer talking about it on their tech top.
Um, but it’s hard, right? Attribution’s hard and it’s wrong. Every single attribution model is wrong. And it’s a case of trying to find the least wrong model. The is my business and that’s why people tend to give up and go too hard. I’m just going to look at last click, and then you’ve the other thing that muddies the waters.
You can press buttons and Google analytics and just apply there that generic models, which may be completely wrong for your business. Um, Because every business is different, unless you sell one product to exactly the same person all the time using the same channels, you can’t really have an exit. It’s not an exact science.
[00:24:57] Peter Mahoney: Yeah. It’s, what’s known as false precision. So you get a, an answer. Down to four decimal points, but it’s completely fundamentally wrong and makes no sense. And it’s, it’s a huge issue. So we, we advocate for the approach that I was just talking about, which is aggregating your, your plan into campaign themes.
And at least being able to understand how these campaign themes are performing, because you can certainly get a lot more active. If you are, uh, if you’re looking at inaccurate and maybe six of those seven interaction points are within a campaign, uh, and at least you’ll be much closer than you would before versus the alternative.
And that ultimate look looking at what I call. Return on marketing plan, right? What’s your entire spend and what’s the entire return on the, on your marketing investment. Uh, and that’s useful to know because what a lot of people do is they’ll say, Hey, this keyword generated a 14 X return on event. But they’re not pointing out, is that all the other stuff that they’ve done was in support of that.
And they’re not factoring that into their investment at all. And they may be underwater with their spend.
[00:26:14] John Readman: Yeah. Okay. You could, you you’re absolutely right. And I think the other thing people often goes over paid search is doing this. We’ve spent this much money and they might include their agency costs.
And then they’ll also go on the hairs with the outputs and then they’ll go, oh, SEO is our best performing channel or this, something like that. And they don’t take into account. The two peak content writers and they’ve got loads of people, PR there’s something there that they don’t have to factor that into a cost.
Uh, and yeah, so it’s that, that whole, I agree having, having a solid total, fully expensed up plan can really help people, um, in-house their business or run their marketing better. Uh, but it’s all that putting in all those costs.
[00:26:55] Peter Mahoney: Yeah, huge, huge issue. So if you look at the, if you look at the e-commerce space overall, so lean back and squint and look at the whole thing, there, there’s a lot of big things happening in this space right now.
And I’d love your perspective strategically on, on where you think this is all going. What are the important themes to look at for our listeners who are in the e-commerce space, or at least e-commerce. Fans out there, because if you think about it, you’ve got, you mentioned there’s this huge shift due to the pandemic that’s semi-permanent now.
So obviously we’ve changed consumer behavior. They know how to shop now. Uh, retailers are now getting much more capable at handling mixed commerce kind of models and curbside delivery and things that integrate digital into their whole experience. You’ve got the, uh, the significant significant share in gaining share that that Amazon has, that you mentioned.
And, uh, and then you’ve got sort of the upcoming in the really exciting work that you’re seeing out of the Shopify network. How does this all come together and how, how do you, how do you think, how do you figure out what’s the most important set of things to focus on over the next few years as any e-commerce.
[00:28:16] John Readman: So I, I, I, we spend a lot of time talk about this. The thing kit, the, the e-commerce world is focused. On acquisition, everybody’s focused on acquisition. What’s my cost of acquisition. What’s my average revenue per user. What’s this, what’s this for assess. And everything’s all about putting things in the top of the funnel all the time.
Everybody. Well, more things at the top of the funnel. Um, however, that’s great. And what will people have found over the pandemic is they’ve acquired loads of new customers, right? What we need to do now. And what the commerce or aspiring e-commerce professionals need to think about is, well, how can we delight and retain these customers so that I don’t have to pay to acquire them again?
I think in lots of people are missing this because they’re just focusing on performance marketing and they may be even paying for the same customer. And actually they’re not focusing enough on retention. They’re not focusing enough on, uh, ensuring they’ve got the right message to the new customers versus a different message.
So existing customers across social or cost, how they’re setting up and how all the is everybody tracked and cook it properly. Um, so I’d say a big, big focus right now needs to be on a quality service because I think the one thing that Amazon has taught at all. If Amazon can want to, can deliver it tomorrow.
Uh, you are expected to deliver it tomorrow. Amazon has become the new normal, right. Even though it might not make any sense of money. And I think something poor, if they are losing money on their first transaction and they’re aiming for this customer lifetime value, then they need to really focus on CRM.
They need to really focus on that first party data, and they need to really focus on. Overall retention. And then I’d say the other thing we, we work with a lot of our clients on is they need to become obsessive about conversion rate because then everybody gets obsessed about. Traffic, but actually, um, the biggest and most important lever you could pull is optimizing your conversion rate.
So if you could double your conversion rate from the same amount of traffic, that’s huge. Um, and arguably it could be achievable if you went from, uh, a 2% to 4% or 1% to 2%. Um, but he’s going to be a lot harder to WTF. So, um, yeah, those would be the two things I would say is the retention of the new clients you’ve got, because I completely agree with you.
If, if we’re now 80% online and 20% and high street, we’re not going to go back to 80% on the high street and trips in the line. It’s probably going to be maybe 60, 40, 40, 60. But, um, I do still think. Um, if it’s a blended retail is giving people the option to show room and then order online to have it delivered home.
I don’t want to walk around with all my bags with stuff, and that’s something that people already doing in the UK a lot where you can order in-store and just have it delivered home the next day. Um,
[00:31:24] Peter Mahoney: I, I agree. I think there’s some really interesting, uh, blended commerce models that, that we’re going to see, and it should be a distinct advantage for.
For, uh, for retailers, if they have a, if they have a physical presence and it’s, so one of the big frustrations for retailers like best buy was that they, they, they were a, they were the showroom for Amazon, uh, and, and they’re, they’re price shopping and trying to figure out. And so they’ve tried to develop some strategies to deal with that, but that’s, that’s a difficult thing to do, but it’s just a reality.
And I think you need to sort of. How, how to, how to take advantage of the physical plant that you have and, and build the right kind of experience. I want to go back to also the, the, the other point you were bringing up, John, around the idea of, of, uh, customer loyalty customer experience selling to the same people.
One of the big challenges that I think marketers have. It’s fundamentally a, a personalization problem in a lot of cases and personalization starts with segmentation. Meaning you need to understand your customers, you need to put them into groups or cohorts and then figure out the message and to, to those different segments.
And I, it was funny. I I’ve been, I was involved in personal personalization technology now, 20 years ago. Uh, and, and it, the technology was there, but the marketers weren’t in, in the issues, the issue was that the marketers didn’t really have the deep understanding of their customers, or even worse, the ability if they understood them to have the discipline, to build out the, the messaging frameworks that are targeted toward those different kinds of.
It’s funny, Kelsey and I were just talking about that earlier today, right? It’s a product marketing bandwidth challenge. In some cases, we know we can target banks versus software companies versus retailers, but it means you need to actually have messages. You need to have references. You need to have all those things that are tuned to the specific target audience that you’re dealing with.
And of course the easy. Easiest personalization for you to do. Is, are you a customer? You’re not a customer. Uh, and that’s what people really struggle with in mind.
[00:33:57] John Readman: I think it, where we were talking to a client actually only the other day. And my background, my first proper marketing job was working with a company that specialized in address money.
Okay. So we, that sounds a bit strange in the UK. We have postcodes and emote. You have zip codes in the UK. Postcard is like 30 houses, zip codes, a bit bigger to see every zip plus four. And if you have a zip plus four that can tell you who’s building. And we used to work with mail-order companies sending out.
And it would mean that that mail order was more likely to arrive. The parcels were less likely to get returned. Their brochures would arrive or they could take more bookings in a call center. So it was this software where you typed in your zip code and you brought back and address. And at the time it was revolutionary.
Uh, this is about 20 years ago, plus, um, but what was interesting about that? People would spend a lot of time and effort curating and thinking about the moccasin because the cost to put it in the post was quite high. Yeah. Right. So what’s happened is because sending an email or sending an SMS or saying what’s up is cheap.
People don’t spend as much time and effort ensuring the quality of the message. And the content is like, oh, well, we’ll just send them that. If it doesn’t work, we’ll just send them something else. If it doesn’t work, we’ll just keep spamming them to death until, until they give it. And I actually. I think if we almost got some old fashioned direct mail creatives and copywriters and got them into our marketing funnels and sequences that we now have in our CRM, which we probably, uh, do a lot better.
[00:35:41] Peter Mahoney: It’s back to your point, John, that everything should be about conversion optimization and right now, because there is a cost. Of sending an email that you just highlighted, which is the, the, the cost of the brand erosion that you’ve created by annoying that person by sending them too many messages and irrelevant message, et cetera.
And so that, that is a real cost that you’re incurring. And, and you should think about every single one of those as a potential conversion moment. And how, how do I figure out. You’re right. It’s it’s about, I think one of the biggest under-invested areas in most marketing organizations now is content or product marketing.
Uh, and it is that the idea of, you know, the, the best marketers that I, I know from a e-commerce marketer folks are, are copywriters because they can tell an amazing story in four words and, and that kind of efficiency is wildly.
[00:36:45] John Readman: Yeah, no, no, I completely agree. And I think arguably the, the rise of digital marketing as enabled marketers to become lazy, because actually you can spend some money on a digital marketing media platform and some results start happening quite quickly.
Uh, so it’s like, well, why should we go over there and spend loads of time thinking of a new idea when we could just go give Google some more money. Yeah.
[00:37:07] Peter Mahoney: And people use that as an, in a slightly different way where you say, I want to run a hundred experience. And see what’s going to work, but the problem is they never really take it and taken the learnings and stop doing the things that don’t work in are annoying to people and, and do that level of refinement.
And I think that that discipline in, in your right, uh, you, you ought to go, go out and hire someone who. Who was a direct, a direct marketer from the 1990s. You can find them. They’re still around. I bet. If you had them go look at your marketing plan, they’d pull whatever remaining here they have out. Uh, and say, you gotta be kidding me.
This is crazy. You know, you’re, you’re wasting all these opportunities.
[00:37:50] John Readman: Yeah, no, completely agree. Completely agree. So.
[00:37:54] Peter Mahoney: Great. Okay, good. Well, we’re we are, uh, coming up to the end of our time, John. Uh, I know that went pretty fast, so, uh, but, but I do want to, um, Kelsey has one more question to ask, but just remind our audience how they can, uh, learn, uh, learn more, uh, about you in learn about Moda.
Yeah.
[00:38:13] John Readman: So Modo 25 is Modo 20 five.com a D O uh, two five.com. Uh, and I’m John Redmon on LinkedIn. If people want to connect with me and, uh, Yeah, we have our measurement, um, benchmarking tool called Basco as well. So that’s just us pasco.io and yeah, thank you very much for having me,
[00:38:36] Peter Mahoney: right. It was great to have you, and we’ll put all those links in the, in the show notes.
So if you’re listening to this and want to take a look at the show notes, you can find all that stuff about John and Moto 25 in Bosco. So I think with that, we have one more question from.
[00:38:50] John Readman: Yeah, John, this has been a great conversation. I know I’m definitely going to relisten to all the topics we discussed today, but our favorite question is what advice would you give to those that are CMOs or aspiring to be one someday?
Um, I’ll ask a question. So I, I would say it’s, um, we may, if you’re an aspiring CMO or CMO now, Treat the team around you, how you wish your CMO was, would have treated you when, when you were a junior. Because one thing I see a lot is certainly when everybody gets in the big seat and biz is the big boss, they suddenly change and they, and I think.
The most successful marketing teams we work with, it’s a combined team approach. And actually with these new evolving channels, we need to be empowering some of the younger talent and giving them the opportunity. So I suppose it’s yeah. Just think about the people and treat the people, how you would liked to be treated.
Maybe when you came out of grad school,
it’s all about the people. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time today, John. This was an excellent conversation. Make sure to follow the next CMO and planet on Twitter and LinkedIn. And if you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can email us at the next CMO at Plannuh dot com. Have a great day, everyone.
[00:40:18] Peter Mahoney: Thank you for having me.

 

 

 

 

 

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