Lessons - Your Marketing Sucks Because You’re Not Curious Enough | Charlie Whyman - Host of The Curiosity Key Podcast

In this episode, we're unpacking customer-centric marketing, how to center every interaction around driving value for your customers, and whether it's selling more to existing clients, attracting new ones or creating new products, it starts with asking the right questions and solving real problems. Join us as we dive into a powerful framework that turns curiosity into action, helping you grow your business with intentional marketing strategies. Now, walk me through customer-centric marketing because that would be the, I guess, customer-centric marketing across everything you do, every interaction, every engagement you have with a customer, that's sort of the end goal, correct? I just think the more you can understand how your customers behave and the more you strive to better sell and better serve, that's going to come out in your marketing. And as long as you have that purpose to make a difference to somebody else to be useful, again, you can start being more intentional with your curiosity because you're trying to understand how to make the lives of your customers better. That's intentional curiosity. So describe it to me, but that's like what you just said, focusing on always making the lives of your customers better, that's intentional curiosity. For me, yes, in a nutshell, because I think my, I believe that it's through business that we're going to make a positive impact in the world. And I think that if you have a business, is your responsibility to think of more than just yourself and think of more than just making profit? I saw on, I think it was either your website or your podcast. There was a point. Most businesses don't have a marketing plan. So what do you mean by that statement? So just in my experience, most businesses don't have a marketing plan. And also, I think when I started my business, I originally set out to help people with events and trade shows. I didn't want to do it for them, but because I had a lot of experience doing events and trade shows, I saw so many opportunities to help people and businesses be more effective, more purpose driven, and you know, get more from their activity because it was very much seen as like, I've got to do this. I've got to go to this other event. I hate it. I don't like speaking to customers. I don't know if they're interested or not. We can't measure the ROI from this event and, you know, all of the above. So I did a piece of research and the conclusion was that people didn't want to pay to learn how to do events and trade shows better. They just wanted to pay somebody to take it off the hands and do it. So I was like, mm, okay, what do I do then? And that's where I got to the LinkedIn training because everybody kept asking me about the successes that I had had and my team had had on LinkedIn. And then that just kind of snowballed and it just happened. But what I found was that everybody wanted to know how to leverage LinkedIn to get more leads, more sales, more referrals, but they still didn't have a marketing plan. And I found that a lot of the training that I was doing focused on right, okay, let's have a look at your marketing strategy and then let's use LinkedIn as a tool to help you achieve your marketing objectives. And for me, marketing isn't just lead generation, it's sales, it's customer service, it's referrals, it's the whole mix. So I think that, you know, if you look at your overall business objectives, so beyond just what do you need to do in order to survive? But also what do you need to do so that you can thrive and grow? And then think, right, okay, well, what marketing do I need to do to help me achieve those objectives? And I love that. Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. No, no, no, gone. I was just going to say, so I'm just so now I'm for the listener, I'm sort of laying out this framework. So like, first of all, we have to understand what marketing is and what marketing isn't. And of course, when, you know, what we're talking about this, we're talking about people that don't have huge teams, don't have resources, they may not understand, you know, that marketing is much more than just going out to LinkedIn and getting some new leads, like it's a holistic view of how you approach your customer. So now we have, we have that definition, that's a great definition to start from. We lead with curiosity. So that's, you know, you're intentionally curious. Now walk me through customer-centric marketing. Yeah, absolutely. I don't think if you pull it back to the, what is the purpose of marketing, purpose of marketing is to drive revenue in the business. How are you going to drive revenue is to find new customers to sell to, to sell more to existing customers, or to develop new products and services so that you can, you know, tag the first two points. So when you look at the purpose of marketing, look at those different areas, you can be intentional with the curiosity to say, right, okay, so we've got this existing customer base. This is always the easiest place to start. How can we sell more to them? What can we do to make their job easier? What can we do to make their business go smooth, what can we do to solve more of their pain points and challenges? And leverage the relationships that we've got already. Then it's like, right, okay, so these are the people that we're targeting. How can we attract more people into the business? How can we make the lives of more people or more businesses better? And it's start asking those questions and call like reverse engineering the process. And then when it comes to developing new products and technology, it's okay. So what are our customers asking us for that we do not have right now? Or what are our customers talking about that we need to look towards in future to help them with their business and their future as well? So it's not being curious just because you just want to sit there day dreaming all day thinking what's the next big thing? But it's thinking about right, okay, what problem are we trying to solve? How many different ways can I think of doing that? And then which is really going to help us achieve those specific objectives that you set within your own business? And what do you see? So this is this is this is great framework now. So what do you see or what do you advise when when companies are doing this? How how do they sort of action on on those steps? Some sort of like high level tactical takeaways for reaching out onto LinkedIn or to reaching into an existing customer base maybe conducting customer interviews. I don't know what what are some things that you sort of your I guess your framework without you know laying it all out because obviously you don't want to to speak with you and to pick your brain and to reach out to you but what do you what do you recommend just to get started? So my framework is sort of behind me which is otter and so yeah yeah not just the classic animal version. So it's hilarious because I use a lot of mountain climbing analogies and metaphors and you don't see otters at mountains but they're very curious creatures and so yeah the first thing is to start with the objective so like you know if you look at your long term vision of the company let's say for example you and want to launch new products in service because you're you want to launch a new product because you're a service based company and your future vision is to sell the business for a certain amount and in order to do that you need to have the physical product but you're two maybe three years away from doing that. You then have a look right okay so T in otter tools. What tools are sets and resources do you need in order to achieve those objectives? And it's if you want to launch a new product and you don't currently have an email list you want to make sure that when you're at the point of launching that product you have an established audience in order to do that. So it's that kind of you're building about full-site into it but also if your objective is okay I just want to go from one to two million pounds in revenue you then have a look at what tools are sets and resources you already have and then you can start asking questions around right okay what can I leverage further? What can I squeeze more out of? How can I optimize that and make that better? So in the context of you know like a lot of people think tactically when it comes to marketing so you know you've got another marketing expert or agency saying you need to do webinars webinars are the next big thing webinars are going to help you achieve your objectives rarely do they ever say that or put numbers against it but it's like okay so you're going to run a webinar so you're going to need a landing page you're going to have to get people to that landing page you need to get people to actually join the webinar when it starts you want to get people to state at the end there are lots of different touch points or breadcrumbs as I like to call them along the way so if you've run webinars in the past more often than not you can have a look at those different breadcrumbs and you can say right okay well we've only got 50% of people that view this landing page actually opt in so how can we increase that? Okay so we've only got 30% of people that opt in actually showing up to our webinar how can we increase that and it's just looking at each of those touch points and thinking right okay what can we optimize what can we leverage what can we make better? So I always say that everybody every business is already sitting on a mountain of value and every business is already doing amazing marketing whether they realize it or not and the missing pieces to bring it together into what I call a curious marketing system which basically just looks right okay how are we generating curiosity in our in our market a lot of marketers call this awareness I think in today's day and age it's not enough to just make people aware of you because it's so noisy online and in pre-chose you need to make them curious you need to make them want to find out more but that's not enough you then need to make them curious and turn that curiosity into action so how are you going to take curious people and turn them into a lead and that's like you know development of lead magnets making sure that you've got book a call making sure that you are leaving those breadcrumbs so that your audience knows what step to take next and then after that we all know not all leads turn into sales so you need to sort of branch them out so right okay so what happens to the high quality leads that you need to have a sales conversation with or you need to do a demonstration what are those breadcrumbs that you need to leave so that you can turn those leads into sales and then on the other branch it's okay so these leads that are curious but not yet ready to buy how can we nurture that curiosity build that excitement and give them reasons to then and take that next step and go down the sales route and then the sales route is like okay so from a marketing point of view how can you make their experience super special how can you take advantage of each touch point each opportunity so that their experience is incredible they want to tell others about it they want to keep coming back for more and they want to turn into referral partners and I think this is well I love again the engineer in me having a system and a process each different step of this system you know because if you assume your best clients are going to give you a testimonial or become a referral partner you using what I call hope marketing which is really difficult to track and it's just a bit you know you hope is not a good marketing strategy whereas if you say okay so I'm going to put a checklist in place so that every client that goes through my system I ask them if they know anybody that would benefit from our services or that would benefit from using our products you ask them for those LinkedIn recommendations you ask them for the case studies that you build it into the process so you're not wasting any any energy in doing the things that you should be doing anyway and you've got that free energy to be curious and to kind of like heighten your spidey senses to pick up on the things that I'm saying I love that thank you for breaking that doubt I appreciate it and do you think like do you see a shift in in businesses being forced to market this way do you see that more businesses are being curious or do you still see just from your perspective many people still default to the fact that Tony two suits use car salesmen outbound sales you know kind of kind of strategy I think I think both are always going to be around I think the old-fashioned way of doing sales is never going to go away but I think companies that adopt that old-fashioned approach to sales are going to get left behind and are going to struggle to keep up what's what's the they'll go out sorry no but no it's just it's just more that I think I I host a marketing club we call it the curious marketing club and we were having a discussion about innovation earlier today and we were we were talking about tips and strategies about how you can stay on top of the game and always be looking forward and not getting left behind and a lot of that is just to be curious to be asking and you know if you work within a team to be asking the team what do you think what's your experience how can we add more value here to be going to your customer base asking them you know what's your biggest challenge you know where do you see yourself in a few years time how can we help you get there and you know and supporting them on that journey thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one