7 Min Marketing With Pam Didner

In the last episode, I talked about how to be a strategic thinker in the context of B2B marketing. I shared three ideas: Think from the perspective of “why and what”, not “how” Help senior managers understand why you recommend specific initiatives. Why are they important to the company and customers? Then, dive into the ‘what’, and finally ‘how’. Lead with benefits to explain why. Communicate in a way that senior managers can understand Explain marketing’s impact to revenue, cost or efficiency. I shared one example in Episode 106 Help senior managers connect the dots Most senior managers are not native digital marketers. They didn’t grow up with digital. You need to explain the challenges of digital marketing. I recommend that you use an analogy that they can understand to explain the complexity of digital marketing. For this episode, I want to talk about how to cultivate that strategic thinking capability. I truly believe that skillset can be acquired. I am using myself as an example. I wouldn’t consid

A big hello from Portland, Oregon. How can I think strategically? How to cultivate strategic thinking? Strategic is a such big word. Whenever I think of the term “Strategic Thinking,” I picture a politician or policymaker in a Think Tank trying to craft big initiatives to tackle issues like climate change, unemployment, boosting the economy, etc. For the sake of today’s podcast, I want to narrow the definition of strategic thinking a little bit in the context of B2B marketing. Let’s keep it concrete: how can you carry productive and interactive conversations with your CEO, VP of marketing, and other senior staff? I want to discuss the ability to think strategically in 3 very concrete ways that you can implement right away.  Think from the perspective of “why and what”, not “how” This is derived from my personal experience. My background was finance, accounting and operations. When I was told to do certain things, my first intuition has always been to think about implementation. How can I make it happen for

So, I spent several episodes talking about how to create a solid messaging framework and I shared templates on Ep 101, 102, 103 and 104. For today, I want to share a personal story and talk about how to prioritize your workload when you and your team are overworked and understaffed?  A friend called me up several days ago. Let’s call my friend, Mary, and I haven’t heard from her for over 2 years. I was so happy to hear her voice when I picked up the call. I said: “OMG, I am so happy that you called. How are you doing?” Before she can answer me, she started crying…  I was like did someone die or get hurt? Was she fired? What happened?  At that moment, I had many questions, but I decided not to ask and let her cry. After 3-5 minutes, she apologized that she hadn’t called for a long time… I told her I had been a bad friend and I hadn’t called either. This is literally what she said to me:  Pam, I see you creating content, speaking, taking on client projects, promoting yourself… You are doing several persons’ job

For today’s episode, I want to continue the series of how to create a solid messaging framework. I know that this is a niche topic in marketing. Not everyone is creating messaging or talking points. This may not be your job. As a modern marketer, I think it’s important to have a holistic view of marketing is done. Messaging creation, in a way, is as important as content creation or storytelling. On EP101, I talked about what is a messaging framework and the process of crafting a framework On EP102, I shared a product-specific template On EP103, I went through a thought leadership messaging template. For this episode, I want to talk about messaging framework for secondary or low-cost/low volume or low-cost/high volume products. I have several listeners asked me: “Pam, my company sells many products. Do I need to create a messaging doc for every product?” No, you don’t. The messaging framework I shared with you on EP102 is for hero-products. The primary products that sales and marketing focus on to bring the mo

Messaging and positioning are the most under-rated tasks in marketing. Worse, crafting messaging is just not as much fun as creative development, story-telling, or content creation. I know.  Yet, messaging is the crucial and vital foundation for external communications and internal sales training. You may not create a messaging framework, but it doesn’t hurt to get a sense what it is and what elements should be included in a messaging template. The more you know about different aspects of marketing, the more you can connect the different sales and marketing dots. On EP101, what is a messaging framework and the process of crafting a solid messaging framework? On EP102, I shared a product-specific template For this episode, I want to talk about a thought leadership messaging template. Thought-Leadership Messaging Framework Template  Brands love to be perceived as thought leaders. Before creating a thought-leadership story, you also need a messaging framework.  I shared the product-specific template on EP102.  T

In the EP101, I talked about what is a messaging framework. A messaging framework is a logical and structured representation of your products’ and services’ unique promises and differentiation. For today’s episode, I want to talk about a messaging template. It’s very hard to talk about a temple on a podcast because I can’t do a show-and-tell in front of you. You can’t really see the template. This is probably not your job, but it doesn’t get a sense of how it’s done. So, you need to visualize it and follow along, OK? For a messaging template you can create, you need to start with a product.  Product-specific Messaging Framework Template Product Name  In general, a messaging framework is product-specific, not company-specific. Think about it, we buy “things” to solve our needs.  Here is an example, when we are thirsty, we think that we want to drink some water. We are not necessarily thinking that I want to drink Fuji or Aquafina. As a marketer, that’s what we strive to achieve. When a customer needs something

Messaging and positioning are the most under-rated tasks in marketing. Worse, crafting messaging is just not as much fun as creative development, story-telling, or content creation. I know.  Yet, messaging is a crucial and vital foundation for external communications and internal sales training. What is a Messaging Framework?  A messaging framework is a logical and structured representation of your products’ and services’ unique promises and differentiation. It’s an essential document to guide creation of creative briefs, content, and sales training.   So, if messaging is done right, it provides strategic guidance and consistency to PR, external marketing communications, sales, and can even be used for internal sales and employee training.  As boring as it may sound, I absolutely LOVE creating messaging frameworks for clients! How to Create a Messaging Framework Here are the steps you can take to create a solid messaging framework. Step 1: Engage with your product team  You need to engage your product team an

A neighbor kid asked me What is B2B Marketing? B2B Marketing used to be called Trade Advertising or Industrial Advertising many years ago. Overtime, marketers changed the term to B2B marketing, which sounds a lot classier. Business-to-Business refers to products that people buy for their companies, not for themselves, while Business-to-Consumer focuses on selling products for personal use to individuals. Many people may think that marketing is just marketing. Basically, we are marketing products and services, so why does it matter if it’s B2B or B2C? Well, marketers use the same channels to promote products regardless of whether it’s for business or consumer products. Marketing channels are the same, but the approaches to business and consumers are different. There are 5 differences that guide the approaches:  Product Complexity: Business products, such as machinery or software, tend to be more complicated. It’s not just shampoos, clothes, or blankets which are pretty self-explanatory. For business solutions

Hi, everyone, thank you for tuning in to my podcast. So, I received a question from Manjunath. He sent me an email and told me that he has a solution that he wants to market to farmers, but there are too many middle men. He wonders if there is any way to educate the farmers directly about his solution and cut out as many such as dealers and distributors as possible. Understand how farmers receive information I completely understand your frustration. It would be great to talk to buyer about your products directly. Let’s hit the core and going to the decision makers who can make the buying decision. That sounds like a great approach. Well, there is one thing you need to do first. You need to know is how your farmer audience receives their information. You need to understand the paths they go through to receive the knowledge or get themselves educated. Some questions that come to my mind that you need to find answers: Can they easily access the Internet to get the information they need? Do they go to some sort

I decided to attend VidCon in Anaheim this July. It was one of the few events that I went to as an attendee, not as a speaker. VidCon is short for Video Conference. I first read about VidCon several years ago and thought it was such a genius idea to create an event that brings YouTube Celebrities to their fans, a niche that was not being fulfilled. Someone was quick enough to seize that opportunity and created an event for it. It turned out that that someone and his brother are Hank and John Green. You may have heard of John Green who is also the author of the book I love, the Fault in Our Stars, a NYT bestselling book and a popular movie. In 2018, they sold this event to ViaCom. I am sure that Hank and John are doing very well financially.  Here is the key reason I attended the event: I’m always curious about how consumer brands market to younger generations. VidCon is a great option for me to understand younger demographics, to see various brands’ approaches to reach out to the next generation of millennial

A listener of this podcast, Chris, posted a question: What is the best way to integrate branding and messaging into sales? How can marketing help sales stay 'on brand'? Define brand and branding First of all, let’s define what brand is. What does brand or branding mean?  A brand is beyond a logo. It’s how a company as a whole presents itself, how employees behave, and how customers perceive the company. In a way, a brand is a business, organization, or entity’s identity. Branding is the act of creating that brand. Jay Baer said it nicely: “Branding is the art of aligning what you want people to think about your company with what people actually do think about your company. And vice versa.” If brand is everything a business, organization, or entity does, then sales represents that vision of the company in a personal way. Therefore, they need to thoroughly understand the essence of the company’s brand. The best way to train sales on the company brand is to incorporate that as part of sales onboarding and contin

I have huge respect for sales people. I do! Personally, I don’t think that I am cut out to be a sales rep. The reason is that I don’t take rejection well, I take it personally, as if it’s my fault. So being told “no, thanks” 20-30 times every day is going to crush me. Needless to say, I haven’t been doing cold calls. It's time to increase my sales pipeline My leads tend to come from referrals, workshops and organic outreach through my website. It has worked well for me. But I want to increase my sales pipeline so I decided to give virtual cold calls a try.  There are many ways to do that. I decided to use LinkedIn Sales Nevigator and InMail, since many of my prospects are on LinkedIn. Find an expert to assist me I couldn’t do this alone. I knew that I needed someone to help me out. Sean Anthony found me via virtual cold call (InMail) on LinkedIn. I didn’t respond to his email right away, but I liked the content he shared. He is salesy, but not too salesy. He is the founder of GrowthResponse.io and specializes

A client I haven’t talked to for 2 years texted me on Monday. She asked me if we can get together for a cup of coffee. I am so glad to hear from Harriet. She was the chief of staff and operations manager for a business unit in a global enterprise.  I helped her create keynote presentations for her general manager, Jeff, and I even helped her build the internal communications process. Once I created several keynote presentations and established the internal communication process, she just ran with it. Through the grapevine, I know that she is doing well. Jeff promoted her to be the director of marketing several months ago. I sent a short note of congratulations. She was super-excited about the opportunity, even though Harriet doesn’t have marketing experience. However, Jeff was willing to coach Harriet and help her ramp up on sales and marketing. Plus, Harriet is a fast learner. With proper coaching, she should be fine.  Unfortunately, Jeff left the company right after he promoted Harriet. So a new general man

I was asked a question the other day. How do you know that you are a true digital marketer? That’s a great question. The truth is there is no way to measure your digital knowledge per se. There is no test that you can take. The breadth and depth of your digital knowledge and expertise is based on your personal experience. In addition, digital technology is changing every day. There is no baseline that you can gauge against. To make it more complicated, digital knowledge can also be categorized into different fields from website design, search optimization, paid social media buy, retargeting paid ads down to personalization and data analytics. No one person can be an expert at all of it. Personally, I’d evaluate a person’s digital knowledge based on an ability to ‘connect the dots’. Digital is about connecting the dots in the past, if you wanted to create print collateral, you knew there were specific layout templates that you could use. You would use that design template with some modifications and fill it wi

Hey, it’s Pam Didner here. So happy to do another episode of 7 Min Marketing from Portland, Oregon.  About a month ago, Carter Hostelley, President of LeadTail, hosted a dinner for his friend, Ted Ruben, who came to Portland to emcee a marketing event at Intel. He invited me to be part of that dinner and asked me to share my thoughts on overall content marketing trends. Just an informal chat. It was a very intimate dinner gathering with 8-10 marketing professionals. We talked about marketing trends, shared personal stories or just whatever topics that happened to come up at that time. Delicious meals. Great wine. Excellent conversations. Just what a great dinner party should be! It was fun to see Carter again as I haven’t seen him for almost 2 years. The last time I met him, he had just moved to Portland from San Francisco. I asked him how he’s been doing. He told me that he has been super-busy. It turns out that he’s been doing quite well in the past 2 years and has grown his agency to almost 20 people. Dang

Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.    One of the mandatory requirements for modern marketers is to understand the technology side of marketing, or martech. Modern marketing can’t function without technology. There are technologies and platforms behind any digital communications and even for offline marketing. Just take Facebook ads as an example. They have evolved so much, from simple banner ads to processes like using messenger to share content and timely updates with your subscribers. Social media platforms are continually evolving and coming up with new and creative ways to sell ad space. To help manage those techniques, new platforms and tools are being created all the time to manage the new capabilities. You require technology upon technology to manage your marketing efforts. You can’t just launch one tool, check it off the list, expect everything w

Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam.   My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.   Chris asked me this holy-grail question: how can marketing help sales and vice versa?   Well, the question is very abstract. Let’s bring it down a notch. Marketing can do many things to help sales. The question is what marketing wants to do to help sales and whether sales agrees that it would be helpful.  In many cases, marketing helps sales build a pipeline, which means getting potential leads or marketing qualified leads for sales.   Marketing can also help sales on messaging, what to say and how to say it, about new products and offerings. From messaging, marketing can naturally extend its help to content creation for the sales team and even incorporate content into sales onboarding and continuous training.   Marketing tends to be on the digital forefront way before sales or any other organizations in a company.

Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.  Ok, this is Episode 90. I can’t believe that I am only 10 episodes away from 100. It’s certainly been a journey. Here are 3 big lessons learned from doing 90 episodes: 1.     Unlike blog posts, it’s much harder to edit podcast episodes after publishing I consider myself a writer, not a podcaster or a voice professional. Like many people, I don’t particularly like the sound of my own voice. Vocal recording is not something I do naturally. From my perspective, blog writing is so much easier. If I find myself unhappy with a blog post after publishing, it’s a simple task to change it at any time. No sweat!  For podcasting, when I finish recording, there is post-production to finalize the recording, so changing is a much more involved process. Producing a podcast is also more expensive than writing a blog post. 2.     Podca

I received a question from Keri. She just joined a big tech company. Her job is to enable sales. sales. But there is a catch: she is not part of the established sales enablement team. She is part of the corporate marketing team. When we talked, she was 3 weeks into her job and was not sure what her job is. She feels that there is duplication between her role and that of the sales enablement team, even though her manager assures her that this is not the case. Here is what I told her based on a quick 15 min conversation: First of all, there is no duplication between her and the entire sales enablement team. Sales enablement, in general, focuses on onboarding and training. Their job is to “train” sales and makes sure that sales is ready to sell. Their job is all about training. I told Keri that her job is to enable sales from the marketing side, not about training. And there are many ways marketers can help sales: Content: Marketing creates a lot of content. She can suggest and recommend marketing content which

What is the main requirement to be a digital marketer? I’ve been asked that question often by traditional marketers. The way I define traditional marketers is that they are marketing professionals who are not digital natives and didn’t start their marketing careers on the digital side. I usually tell them that the key difference between traditional and modern marketers is the ability to think in multi-channels in a sense of integrated marketing and to understand the technology behind-the-scenes. By the way, these two are related. If you understand how technology works and integrates, you’ll have a holistic view of your company’s marketing and can think strategically by connecting different marketing dots.  Here is a great example Say, you are a content creator by writing weekly blog post for your company. And you use DivvyHQ, a platform to plan, workflow, and collaborate with a team, to brainstorm and create content from beginning to the end. Your blog posts are then uploaded to your company’s website using W