10MINMC.Ep.18.V1.AUDIO
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Trey Sheneman: [00:00:00] Growth marketing without the right personnel strategy will become the most expensive endeavor in your business. In today's episode, I'm gonna teach you how to fix it.
Welcome to 10 Minute Masterclass, your weekly mic drop for Business breakthrough. My name is Trey Sheneman. I'm your host here on this podcast, your lead MC, as we like to say. It's our goal every week on 10 Minute Masterclass to help teach you timeless business principles that translate into solving today's.
Business problems. Now we do that through a filtering system, we call the core four drivers of growth, where each week we dive deep into one of those core [00:01:00] four drivers, marketing, sales, ops, and leadership. And in today's episode, we are drilling down into that marketing bucket again, probably my favorite bucket.
If you followed me for any length of time, you know that marketing is one of my first loves of business. Um, and today we're gonna talk about. Uh, and we're gonna pick up in, and I should say we're gonna continue our series on the Compass Method, which is our unique growth marketing framework that we teach here at Herald.
And we're gonna pick up on the P in the word compass, and we're gonna talk about personnel. Now, what today's episode is not gonna be is a, is a diagram of org charts or a sort of look down into office politics, nothing like that. But we are gonna talk about some of the, uh. Standard approaches to marketing that I see people have with their team when it comes to who is responsible for growth, who's responsible for marketing, and why?
I think most of the time it is backwards. Um, and that the standard business is really approaching marketing the wrong way. They're approaching it [00:02:00] in a way where those people that they're using to do marketing ultimately become a drag on the business rather than a thrust. In the business, and if we're trying to drive lift, we actually have to have the right balances of drag and thrust.
So let's talk about that. The two problems that I tend to see, uh, really with earlier stage businesses, you don't see this as much in some of the more mature organizations that we consult with or that I've worked for in the past, but definitely early stage businesses, the way they approach marketing is normally one of these two situations.
They've hired one person and they've expected that person to be a unicorn. And they expect them to be able to be good at every kind of marketing and do it all. Um, and or the other situation is they've hired a single agency and they've expected that agency to be a unicorn and to be world class at every single kind of marketing that that, that they are.
And the other truth in both of those situations is once they've made that decision to either hire that person. Or hire that agency. They've kind of just given over the reins to whoever that is, and they have no way of tracking [00:03:00] it, no way of holding them accountable. They just know they want to grow and they're not really sure how to get there.
And they're kind of expecting this person to figure it out. And then the funny thing is, is they end up calling us or someone like us and they say, we, hey, we have no idea why our growth is stalling while, while things aren't improving. And the truth is, is in my life. It is rare for me to have met single human beings that are generalist enough to be effective at every kind of marketing there is, or even agencies that are mature enough.
Even at Herald, even though we do a lot of different kinds of marketing for people, I would not say that we can just sign up to be the only answer for marketing all the time. For a brand, we could be the answer for most of what they wanna do, but not all of it. So. What ends up happening though is we have to change our thinking.
We, what we end up doing is helping brands change their thinking towards marketing and ultimately trying to communicate this big idea. Really great marketing is two parts. It's a both a magnet and an engine. Okay. The [00:04:00] magnet. Pulls it, it, it gathers attention and trust it. Uh, it drives curiosity towards your business.
It's pulling. The engine is pushing in, in cycles. It's turning, it converts interest into acceleration, into revenue, into results, and it's those two forces. Working together that ultimately drive what it is you're looking for. And so I like to think about them as functions inside of an organization. But for today's episode, just for teaching purposes, we're gonna call them teams.
Now, if you get to a maturity level where you can eventually afford to have teams doing each of these functions, I do think that is. The ideal place to be, and the organizations that I worked for that were able to get to 20, 30, 40, 50 million in revenue or above, had teams doing both mag magnet work and engine work, but let's call 'em, let's call it brand work.
That's the pulling of the trust. And revenue work or growth work, that's the turning of the engine. So let's break this down. In the [00:05:00] brand team, the primary focus of the magnet team, the brand team, is demand generation. What demand generation is, is it's creating gravity in the market. It's creating. No, like, and trust.
It's creating people that are very familiar with who you are and what you do, even if they're not in the market yet to buy what it is that you sell. So this team is focused on being, having the brand, be respected and remembered. Those are their outcomes. How do we measure that? So they're, they're focused on creating really great content that people can agree with and engage with.
Uh, they're trying to position the brand that they're working for as the trusted authority in the space. Brand teams tend to use channels like organic social or YouTube or a podcast like what we're, what we're doing right here, or a blog, maybe they'll run some ads, but if they're running ads, they're running ads for a recall or an an awareness objective.
They're not running ads because they want people to convert today. Uh, they're doing earned media opportunities like getting people in their company chances. Speak on podcasts or ad events on stages, they [00:06:00] might be putting out a book and selling the book for free. The, the metrics of knowing a good magnet is working is email list size is increasing, follower accounts are going up.
When you put pieces of content out, people are really responding well to it. Um, you have great brand sentiment. There's a ton of good tools out there in the market that measure brand sentiment, how people feel about your brand. And so all of those are the. Functions of the brand role of the magnet role on the team now as you, um, as you excel.
Again, I think it is an entire team, but at minimum, I think this should be a single person on the team's function, the magnet function, the brand function, and so. If you're gonna hire for this, their primary skillset that you would look for as a small business owner in order to staff for this is probably content strategy is, is sort of the, the best way I could describe what this person should be good at.
And they should be good at creating that content in a bunch of different ways, bunch of different mediums, whether that's, again, short form content on social media or you know, mid form or long form content on a [00:07:00] podcast, so on and so forth. So. The, the main focus of this brand team, this magnet team, is building the trust that it takes to be able to get the sale in the first place.
Um, because it's gonna be really hard to close someone into becoming your customer if they don't know, like, and trust you. So again, that's the brand team. Now, team two, role two, function two, that's the engine. This is the growth team. So if the brand team was responsible for demand generation, the growth team is responsible for demand capture.
Okay, now. I don't, I've seen stats on this. I'm not sure exactly what the math is, but let's just say there's a very small portion of the market that is actually ready to buy what it is you sell at any one given moment of time. But, so we want this team hyper-focused on identifying that slice of the market and driving them to action.
So what they're doing is they're, they tend to be building funnels. They tend to be running retargeting ads. They tend to be running conversion ads. Their whole focus is to take visitors that the brand team is dri uh, dri has been driving over the last few [00:08:00] months, and to convert them into buyers. So they might be doing things like Google Meta.
The big thing that I hope that they're doing, it's a, it's a real sweet spot for us at Herald. It's one of my most passionate areas of marketing is what's called CRO conversion rate optimization on the actual funnel its Self. Huge part of the engine team of the demand capture team. The metrics that they're looking at here.
If brand team's looking at list growth and follower count, the the growth team is looking at rate of return on ad spend. They're looking at revenue over time. They're looking at the conversion rate of the funnel. So this team, if a content strategist is the primary specialist inside of a brand team, a paid media buyer, or a, or a performance marketer, what we would call a performance marketer is probably the leading seat inside of the revenue team.
And so this team isn't about clever. They're about conversion, right? They are about, they are the ones that are keeping the lights on the business today. The brand team might be building the business that you want to have tomorrow, but the engine team is running the business that you have today. They're paying the bills.
So [00:09:00] teams end up struggling though because they mix these two functions together and expect one person to be able to do all of this well, it's just not gonna work. It's just not gonna work that way in my experience. And what happens is, is really good people who would be really good brand people or really good results, people end up getting burnt out a lot faster than they would because they're flexing into an area where they're uncomfortable.
So what's the fix? The fix here is as soon as you can. Have two teams, even if those two teams are single people on each team to start with and give them very clear goals of the magnet. Its job is to build the audience and the engine's job is to close the audience and together those systems of drag and thrust are gonna be able to create lift in the business and it's gonna scale.
So your questions for this week is, you're reflecting back on this content are, do you have the space to actually split those roles apart? If so, I would do it. Are you? Once you do that, then are you measuring their results in the right way? Do you know what winning looks like in each one of those roles?
And if you have a breakdown, where is it? Because at the end of the day, growth marketing isn't magic, [00:10:00] but it is about momentum. And the way that you build momentum is when a magnet pulls and an engine pushes together, that kind of, uh, centri force that's created there is gonna actually spin your flywheel.
It's gonna grow your business over time. So make sure that you're really thinking about this. This week in your business, you have a game plan for it. And if I can help you in any way, make sure you shoot me a DM on LinkedIn. You can always email me. I hope you got a lot outta this episode. My goal is always each week to drive enough value that's actionable for you in this week.
So if this helped you this week, leave us a review. Smash that subscribe button. Give us a, give us a recommendation on LinkedIn. Just make sure that you let us know that you got value out of this. I hope you did. As always, thank you so much for listening to 10 Minute Masterclass. And until next time, we'll see you on the flip side.
