Why do you have to have innovation in your business?

Within one internet minute there's a million people logging into Facebook. There’s been 18.1 million texts sent, there has been 1 million views on Twitch that's a, that's a marketing thing for young people and it's a video programme. There's been 2.1 million Snapchats. There has been $996,000 spent online. This is just in one minute. 188 million emails sent and there has been 3.8 million search queries on Google. 

Now from a marketing manager's perspective when I first started out in marketing many, many years ago, and we didn't have the internet, we didn't have the pressure of all of these things happening in a minute. You know, and it's an interesting thing where people say the Internet's made it so much easier for us to reach our target audience and to a degree that's right. But it's in such a cluttered environment that you have to stand out.

You've got to be so specific about the target audience you're reaching and what motivates them. What's going to rock their world. That's the big challenge, you know, it's not just good enough to have, you know, a nice campaign or a good campaign or, you know, whatever else it's got to really rock their world.

There’s a template that's often talked about, which is the ‘jobs to be done’ framework and that talks about the cost, the standard process there is that, you know, you're trying to sell a drill and the need for the customer is the quarter inch hole that they need the drill bit to do. But it goes deeper than that. It goes further than that because the really the basic principle now is that products come and go.

People may be buying products, but they're only the means towards the end. And the ultimate goal is what is going to make a difference in their life. What's going to make their life better. Because that is ongoing, but products come and go. And with this rapid change that we all need to keep up with, you might think about adding a whole bunch of two features to your product, but they may be outdated by the time you get round to implementing them.

Whereas the need is there and people's basic emotional drivers are still there and what they want to achieve in their life. But that's the added challenge now is to really understand what those motivators are, which comes back to understanding about people's life. Talking about that, not products. Whereas in so much marketing and in so much marketing research and so on it's all about the product. And people do campaigns around, well, our product now has X number of features. Well, that, that's not the point.

The point is what need are you filling in someone's life? So I guess that's, that's why to me, the internet minute is quite interesting because yes, there's so much going on and you have to break through, you have to show people that you're worth the time.

And you've got so little time, I remember listening to another stat where so, if you're on a website, people will give you three seconds.  In three seconds you've got to prove that you're trustworthy, that you're targeted towards them. Basically you've got, you've got three seconds before they'll decide to scroll down further on your page.

And that's certainly in our ethos, why we start with engagement and why we talk about things like having EQ and being able to relate to people because people sense that right? Are you there on just a functional and transactional basis and therefore disposable because there might be something better down the road or is there something, some X factor about you that I can actually trust and that I can actually relate and engage with them.

And one of the theories about around ‘jobs to be done’ or more like a principal actually is that you, the people want to progress in their life. That's human nature that we all want to make progress. So yes, you are trying to move forward, but you have a bewildering amount of choice, of course and with all this messaging coming at you. But the only reason that you're in engaging with what businesses are offering you is you are going to make life better in some way.

You know, as humans, we actually really love to communicate. We want to be involved and that's where social media just exploded and I think we underestimated, you know, in the early stages of social media, was how much people want to share what they're doing. And that's what of course what we can harness now, when it comes to helping people innovate.

It's in those opportunities to find out what is motivating, what is their real need? What, what is it that would make them pick up the product? And it's the opportunity that we have through now, this connectivity, that, that makes it so much easier for us to develop these products. But we can't be complacent in business we can't sit there and go, I'm going to open the corner shop because there's no other let’s say pet shop, um there's no other pet shop in, in our suburbs. So I'm going to open one.  It’s just not as simple as doing that anymore. You've got to have a real reason.

You've got to come up with a real major point of difference that's going to excite people and engage them and keep them coming back as part of future proofing. It's not a one off, you have to find a way to keep providing value.

So marketing that tells a story and there are the famous campaigns that have, really do have an emotional trigger that people talk about that still work. What has changed are the means of communicating that. The technology for communicating that content has moved and will continue to change.

But what has been mistaken particularly in more recent times, is that, well, this particular technology, like, you know, you mentioned Snapchat before, well, let's make all marketing Snapchat friendly which, what is it going to disappear in a few seconds? Like, do we really say that everyone's got the attention of a goldfish? Not really. If you have the right emotional message, no, it doesn't have to be transitory, but using each channel properly has changed and that's, and that's where you do need to keep up with the technologies.

But to sort of go back to what I said earlier, human emotions don't change, our emotional states and our needs to keep progressing in our life, to improve ourselves don't change. So marketing that appeals to you in a way that says I have a solution for you, or here's a way to save some time in your day, make it easier, an easy way to entertain you, all of those kinds of things they don't actually change.

Um, just again, just the methodology. Although also I actually quite like the idea of using the old fashioned snail mail now because no one else is using it. I actually think that there's a bit of a lacking in possibly some of the traditional marketing teachings that are critical to understanding your audience and you need, you need that foundation. And then absolutely get, get in with the program when it comes to the digital side of it, because you have to do that as well.

Yeah I was challenged at a conference I went to, I was there speaking on, on podcasting of course. And, um, one of the things that that came up was using digital marketing tools like tick tock. And I said, tick tock, a digital marketing tool? And this young girl got up and challenged me and said, actually, I think you'll find that it can be used as a marketing tool. Now, for those who don't know what tick tock is, it's a 15 second video that gets created and most of the time it's lip sinking or something to a song and you know, it's very much targeted towards the, eighteen, well even younger 14 plus market. And so she went away and came back with a marketing campaign using tick tock and I have to say it was bloody brilliant. But it was targeting a market that was using tick tock.

And I think this is, this is probably the key. If you're going to use any sort of digital marketing, you have to know your market. You have to know who you're going to be hitting using that tool, correct?

And understand the emotional triggers that you're after. So that even, you know, in a great new, medium, like tick tock, that it doesn't become just entertaining for the sake of it and just move on and there's no memory of the message left at all.

So of course, remembering that marketing is only marketing If it actually sells product, otherwise it's just noise. Um, and going back to innovation, everything you do has to be specifically targeted towards that audience but you can't do that until you understand them deeply. And you know, there isn't a single person that talks about innovation without saying, you have to understand what the customer wants. And of course the other thing is that innovation starts with an idea, but an idea is not innovation.

So innovation is when you've actually turned it into a profit and it's similar to marketing in that concept. So, you know, marketing is just a campaign that only works when, when it actually brings in bums on seats or whatever the motivation is to selling. So it's understanding that difference and what the outcome is, and being quite clear on the outcome goals.

If I was a marketing manager and I really could see what could happen with innovation bought into the business you'd use that as your first test case. That’d be your first marketing job, to convince the boss that, that obviously a path to innovation is going to bring sustainable growth for the business. It's going to increase revenue, make customers, you know, the million things that are obviously gonna motivate somebody who owns the business.

So that's your first task. And, and quite frankly, there’s a lot of stuff online and including our ebook that walk into the reasons why you have to have innovation in your business and how to do it. It's critical these days. You just are not going to get ahead, your’e going to get swallowed up by a bigger competitor or just, just become obsolete if you don't embrace it, it actually must be part of every business's culture. And you just need to come up with a program, which we could help you with of course.

So we know that things change rapidly in marketing. What do you feel are the hot marketing areas, uh, for 2020. Like, if you're not doing this in marketing, then you're, then you're, you're missing out. Is there any particular area that, that you should be focusing on?

I actually believe it's different for every situation, for every business and I don't think there's one thing that you should absolutely have to do. You know there are those that say send out lots of emails, build your list and you have to do this and you have to do that but I don't actually agree with that. I think part of innovation, part of evolution of your business of everybody's business is working out what's right. What are your customers actually wanting from you? Work that out, find out from them and then develop a program. Don't go in with preconceived ideas and formulas because you went to a conference or you listened to a podcast with some crazy woman telling you how to do this, don't do that, just think about what's right for you in your situation.

Technology will keep changing and get smarter and slicker and all of that sort of thing, but underlying, it needs to be the human connection and that will drive a lot of things that will happen now in quite what form I think will be fascinating because of this need to humanize business, which is becoming quite the thing.

So substituting IQ with EQ, which doesn't mean you, you just become, you know, very soft in your approach to life it still means you need the IQ to be structured and do all the things to function, but in terms of actually reaching people and how you actually touch people's lives.

Thinking is clearly important from a strategic overview, but think of your business, like, um, you know, most of us, whether we like to admit it or not our businesses are transactional in shape, which is an IQ process. So they come in, they purchase a good, you hand your credit card or whatever, they pay say thank you and they've out the door. And or you might even send them a link to a survey. That's all. That's all very much transactional. There's no emotional connection with your audience there at all. So what is it that makes them want to come back and do business with you in the future? What is, what sort of emotional engagement, what sort of emotional journey did the customer go on to purchase your product or use your service?

Systems and getting that right that's critical. You lose trust and you lose that emotional connection as soon as you fail on the transactional side as well so I'm not discounting that transactional trust. But the, the ability to connect on that different level to make them feel so excited about their purchase or doing business with you so that they talk to others so that they’re happy to help you out so that you can improve that service or improve the whole experience and develop even more exciting things that will solve even another level of their emotional need. That is actually when you get to that level of communicating with your customer and potential customers, that's when business goes to a whole different level, that's when the team gets really excited about working there because they know It's a fun place to work.

So it just builds a whole new dynamic where you’re building a stronger relationship with customers, you know, a relationship with customers that strong will obviously weather competition coming in. It will, it will make it harder for them to want to disappear and try something else, but you've got to still deliver in every single way. And you've got to keep in touch and, there are many ways of doing that. And of course, again, just another plug for our ebook is that's what we share in the ebook we give you all of those, we give you the framework to communicating with them and helping you develop your business.

You know, I think a lot of people also forget that customers actually want you to succeed because they want to be part of that journey. So it's making them feel part of that process. These are all really important, critical elements that bring and paint the total picture of your audience.

There has to be that added value and that segues very well into saying that a product isn't just a product. It has a value in people's life, no matter what the business is or what the product is, is thinking about the context of someone's life. What value are you adding to it? Because people are buying that, not the product.