It's Marketing's Fault

Welcome to It Is Marketing's Fault.

Let me try that one again.

Welcome to It's Marketing's Fault, the podcast where we discuss how to do marketing the right way.

I'm your host, Eric Rutherford, and today I'm thrilled because I have with me Kirk Duke.

He is a consultant, a long-time marketer who has helped companies of all shapes and sizes grow their business.

From enterprise level to startup companies, he has managed nearly every area in marketing.

Kirk, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Eric.

It's great to be here.

I'm a fan of the podcast and I'm delighted to be able to spend some time with you today and talk about all things marketing and maybe a little bit not marketing.

I love it.

Yeah.

I was so, I was pumped when you accepted the invite.

Uh, so everybody listen, I had a chance to work with Kirk for a while, uh, at wax a previous company and it was, it was a great experience.

And so, uh, as I was looking for people who I thought would be a great fit for the listeners, I thought Kirk is just, and he is right there in that sweet spot.

So yeah, I was just glad to be able to connect.

Awesome.

So before we get into all of the pros and cons of marketing, let's just, let's jump in the way back machine a little bit.

We don't have to go way, way back, but let's go back a few years and talk about your experience at the Baltimore sun.

So for everybody listening, uh, the Baltimore sun is a genuine newspaper where they use paper and ink still to this day.

Uh, so well, that's true.

As far as we know, a lot of it's digital.

We're assuming it's still paper and egg.

So what did working at a newspaper teach you about marketing?

A lot, and I think the key takeaway here is that any job, any job at all can teach you a lot about marketing.

Because fundamentally, marketing is communication, right?

So when I think back to my days at a newspaper, the big things that I think of are first and foremost, deadlines, right?

Every night at a newspaper, you're going through a series of deadlines and the stuff that you're working on.

has to be done.

There's no pushing the deadline.

It has to be done.

Generally, in marketing, we have a little more wiggle room than that, but not always.

You have events that are date tied.

You have announcements that are date tied.

You have product launches that are date tied.

So learning how to work within a deadline structure was a really important thing for me, very, very young in my career.

And I think people have said this in a lot of different ways, but it's something to the effect of the amount of time it takes to do something expands or contracts into the amount of time allotted to do it.

And I think that's if you can kind of keep that in mind while thinking about deadlines, you really can amp up the focus for short periods of time and get like 10 times the work done that you normally could do in that amount of time.

You can't sustain that over a 40, 50 hour week, but you can you can amp it up and deliver when you said things would be done.

And again, in those critically important times.

when there is no Wilga Room in the deadline.

So that's one big one.

And then following on the heels of that, this is very true in the digital world, but it's also true going back to that hard deadline, but there were multiple editions.

So if the story hadn't quite been developed yet, the next edition will get an update or a correction.

Hopefully not a lot of corrections.

But if you think about digital marketing, websites, landing pages, they're all iterative, right?

You get it out there, and then if you realize something could be better, you can make it better.

So always thinking about, does whatever this thing is I just made, whether it's an email, landing page, website, anything, how could it be better?

How can we iterate it to make it better?

Then in terms of copywriting, I spent a lot of time writing headlines for the newspaper.

And unlike today, those headlines were in a physical space.

There was no ultimate scroll down the page.

The page ended.

It was finite, unlike on a website.

So you had to fit.

You had to write a headline that was six words that captures the essence of the story.

And that really helped me subject lines.

Headlines on a website, even though you have infinite space technically, you don't have infinite space in the reader's mind.

So saying what you can say, saying everything you need to say, and the absolute minimum amount of words possible is critically important.

And then finally, just back to the beginning, it's communication, right?

So in a newspaper, you're communicating with an audience, right?

You learn how that audience expects you to speak and that sort of thing.

And then you're also communicating with teammates who are also on a deadline.

So you get very good at sort of, maybe a good analogy is a tightly packed, actual like restaurant kitchen, right?

where everyone's crammed in, they all know what everyone's doing and everyone's sort of working in conjunction.

Sometimes not even verbally communicating.

It's just, you just learn how to work with people and what you can rely on them for and what they can rely on you for.

And as a team, you're able to deliver.

And in most marketing efforts, not all, and I've done several stints where I've been the solo marketing team, but when you're working with other people.

either within your marketing team or other people in the organization who aren't in marketing, that communication with teammates is Man, you just laid out a ton of stuff.

I want to kind of circle back on one of them.

You were talking about constraints.

And a lot of times I think we hear constraint and sort of this, I'll call it restriction or narrowness of what can be done as a as a negative.

But really, it sounds like.

It's in many ways, it was a positive, both in what you're able to learn and then.

applying that to that information.

Could you would you elaborate on that just a little bit?

Because I think that's a benefit.

I think I get it.

You know, sort of think about the modern world.

Think about whatever business you're in.

Think about your audience.

They're busy.

They're used to doing this on their phone, right?

Even that meme had too many words.

I'm not going to read the whole thing because it had four words on the top, four words on the bottom.

I wasn't interested enough.

So if you if you take a crack at a subject line, a headline, even a full paragraph.

Whatever you just wrote can probably be conveyed in about half as many words.

So spend the time to chisel that down to just the most important words.

Do you have the right words?

Can you use a single word to replace these three words?

Because you do not have time with your audience.

Your audience is moving fast and you better get your point across like that.

No, I appreciate that.

And that is so true.

And you know, that's something that I've learned over the years that it's like, okay, the fewer the words to get across the same information.

And that comes from practice that comes from just doing the job over and over again, it also comes from really just working with some people who've done the job before.

And I, I gotta ask, because you and I were talking beforehand, I read it on your LinkedIn and It was, it was a fascinating story, especially as I, as I Googled and did exactly what you said.

I dug in and I read about John Stedman, uh, who would, yeah.

So John Stedman, one of the, who, and an amazing, uh, sports writer, just incredible breadth.

What was it like working for him?

And I got to ask you about, about the squishy ball.

So when I started at the Sun, I was on the very, very bottom rung.

I was literally like a stats guy.

I eventually became a copy editor, et cetera, but we're going back to the very beginning.

My responsibilities were answering the phone from high school sports events and taking down the information and building the little box score.

And one of, so I was one of a team of people who did this.

And...

one of our core responsibilities was the nightly food run.

So we would take everyone's orders and order from the sub shop, the pizza shop, whatever.

But as we went through the night, and again, this is sports happens at night, so it's very active in the evening.

Again, going back to those additions where certain games are over by this edition, certain games are over by this edition, et cetera, et cetera.

And so as the night would wear on, you'd kind of have less and less to do between editions until you're just waiting for those last couple games to end.

So towards the end of the evening, we would have some downtime where we needed to just wait for those last two, three West Coast games to finish, and we'd put them into the final edition of the morning paper.

So John Stedman was a pretty well-known, famous sports columnist in Baltimore, originally at the Baltimore Evening Sun, and then they merged the papers, and then at the Baltimore Sun.

And most of the writers weren't around when we were working.

They were either at a game getting ready to file their story, or the columnists were usually done writing during the day.

But sometimes John Steadman was off in the corner somewhere writing up something for the for the next day's paper.

And as we had our downtime, one of the things we did is we would spread out into an area of the office where they were the people who worked there were kind of daytime workers.

And so there was there was room and we had this little we called it the squishy ball.

It was one of those tension balls that you're supposed to work if you're tense.

And we would throw we started just kind of thrown it around the room playing catch in the corners or whatever.

And over time, we started to.

we started to play baseball in the office.

And we would, it'd be two or three of us.

And you know, you'd have, you can ball that thing up and you could throw a wicked curve because it's not a sphere anymore.

And then we would like slap at it with our hands and you know, hit line drives.

And the guys working on the sports desk would tolerate us cause they know we basically did a good job.

And they, you know, every once in a while squishy ball would land on their desk and they'd toss it back.

So one day, John Stedman, we don't even realize he's there.

He's over in his corner, he's typing away, and we're playing full on squishy ball baseball.

And we played, I don't know how many, probably playing for 10 or 15 minutes.

And all of a sudden, John Stedman, who was known to be somewhat erratic, and not like mean erratic, but just emotional and erratic, and just full of personality and vim and vigor, and he stood up.

And he walked over and he looked at us.

And he reached to a coat rack.

And he pulled a wooden hanger off the coat rack.

And I was pitching.

My friend John was catching and another friend Kevin was batting.

And Kevin started slowly backing away.

And I thought, oh my God, John's going to kill them.

He's going to kill us all.

But instead of coming at us, John Steadman stood in.

and he waited for me to pitch and he hit like two or we played squishy ball baseball with John Stedman for about 10 or 15 minutes and he hit some pretty solid line drives over my head.

It was amazing.

Oh my word.

What a, that's a fabulous story.

That was, that was just being able to interact with, with a, with one of the greats just on a very relaxed, uh, I say relaxed, but you know, that doesn't sound like it was, it was, it was a fun level.

That's what I was thinking.

It was, oh my word.

What an experience just to be able not only the ball game, but just being able to hang out and learn from these people.

Oh my word.

if anybody wants to look him up.

He wrote a book called The Greatest Game Ever Played.

It was about the Colts and the Giants back in 1960 something, but check it out.

John Stedman, Greatest Game Ever Played.

Excellent.

I'm going to drop that one in the show notes as well.

So people can check it out.

I love it.

And just as we as we kind of transition more into marketing, let's just talk about the difference between large enterprise companies and small startups, because you've worked at both.

What's the biggest difference between marketing at each type of company?

So that's pretty easy thing to lay out.

It's the biggest difference is in a small company, you have to do many things pretty well.

In a large company, you typically have to do one thing extremely well.

And if you know, and there's a continuum between the two, of course, but the smaller the company, the more hats you have to wear.

And the less important it is.

to do any of those things like super fabulously, right?

It's not gonna help you to boost the result of this little thing from here to here over here when you haven't even turned any of these things on yet.

Right?

In a big company, you know, the volume is so large that incremental improvements of a direct mail piece or an email campaign, you know, squeezing out 0.2% better results.

actually turns into revenue and maybe a decent chunk of revenue if it's a large enough company.

In a startup or a smaller operation where you're pretty much doing everything and the total revenue is a minuscule fraction of that other scenario, then squeezing an extra 0.2% out of something doesn't really matter because you probably have three or four other things that are sitting there at zero.

And if you could get them to 50% of good, that's more important than squeezing this little one over here.

So when you're in that larger sort of scenario, it doesn't mean you can't be successful if you're the type of person who would rather spread out over all the disciplines.

But in a larger company, that typically means you're managing those specialists, right?

But you still need to know.

you know, the core fundamentals of all of those disciplines, even if you yourself aren't going to spend like all day, every day working the Google ads.

In a smaller company, you're doing all of those things.

And again, you need to do them well.

I don't want to mean that you can just totally stink at it.

You've got to be good at it.

But you don't have the time to spend all day doing one activity.

So you're better off sort of figuring out what are the big things I need to do and how do they fit together?

Now that makes sense.

Is it easier to go from a large company to a small company or from a small company to a large company or is it just they each have their own challenges?

They each have their own challenges.

And I think it probably has a, you know, it's probably, that's more of an individual question, you know, it's more about the person who's making that move, probably than the actual organization.

Um, I find that in a larger.

I sort of like both in a larger organization.

I really liked managing people.

I liked sort of being the you know, the conductor and like Understanding how these things relate together and setting those people up to be as successful as they could be but in the smaller Organizations I've worked for I actually do like rolling up my sleeves and doing it too.

So for me, I think either way of kind of laying out the Doing multiple being able to do multiple things well, but maybe not being the very best at any of them.

That suits me better than being in one of those large organizations as a single function individual specialist.

That's probably the least desirable place for me to land.

But again, that's me.

There are a zillion people that are super good at that specializing.

They don't want to manage a team.

They don't want the hassles of a small company where they have to wear 27 hats.

They like being in that slot and they kick butt at it.

So I think it's very much an individual sort of preference kind of thing.

I know that makes sense and I appreciate you kind of breaking that out and defining that.

And that kind of leads a little bit to our next question because you've been in marketing a while, just like I have.

And for everybody listening, if you're new into marketing, just be warned, you're going to get blamed for a whole lot of things that you may actually be responsible for, but you're going to be blamed for some stuff that you aren't responsible for either.

But so Kirk, in your opinion, what gives marketing a bad name?

So I think there are a couple of things that can give marketing a bad name.

One is you, you sort of a little bit alluded to it, the possibility that sometimes as marketers, we do a bad job and that's going to happen to anybody in any field.

So put that aside for a second.

Then in addition to that in any field, there are going to be people who don't just have the occasional bad thing happen.

They are actually bad at their job or they're bad people.

Right.

And, and, you know, they might be.

you know, they might have bad attitudes, bad work habits, bad inability to manage a budget, whatever it is, those people are going to exist, right.

And in marketing in particular, which is typically very high profile in an organization, and typically has a pretty decent size budget, that profile in that large budget shines that light even more on that stuff.

So even if everything I've already said is the same for every discipline, right?

You're going to have, you yourself are going to mess up once in a while, and then you're also going to have some bad actors in the mix, but in marketing the spotlight is brighter.

So that just comes with the territory.

And then I think there's also, to put it on the rest of us, who hopefully aren't in that category, right?

We usually don't do a good job of educating the rest of the organization what we're doing and why it's important.

And in many cases, that's a simple matter of us not pointing to the data, because the results are there, we just need to showcase them.

But there's also the scenario where not everything is actually measurable properly.

So sometimes there are things that we know that we've learned over time that as part of a mix will lead to success, because we've seen it happen over and over and over.

But it's really hard to measure and point to the data that says this action equaled that.

So it's a hard story to tell when you don't have the data.

But at the very least, we should use the data we have to tell that story and to champion our successes so that people understand what we're doing, that this chunk of money that we had in our budget turned into this much business.

And that's something I don't think that marketers in general do a good job.

Wow.

And all of those things are spot on.

I want to touch base.

I'm going to touch base more on the data here in just a minute.

Let me circle back on this one question that popped up in my head as you were sharing.

Marketing is broad, right?

Especially, and the bigger the company, as you said, it's like the more fine-tuned and different areas of marketing.

And so like when somebody says marketing, A non-marketer might just think one, one thing, but when you're in marketing, there's like 27 different flavors and, you know, focuses and options.

And, and yes, I'm speaking in hyperbole for all you listeners.

Just forgive me.

I'm a marketer.

I speak occasionally in hyperbole, but, um, do you think sometimes that sometimes we get a bad rap because maybe we're in the wrong spot?

Like, because I don't think every person does.

There's sweet spots in marketing for different people.

And I know I'm throwing this question out there just on a whim, but I'd love to hear your take on that too.

Have you seen where it's like somebody could be in the wrong spot?

We just need to move them.

So in the wrong spot within marketing in general?

Yeah, that's definitely possible.

I think that's I believe that every person in every job, A, the management has a responsibility to put them in a position to succeed based on their talents and skills.

And B, at the same time.

try to give them the skills that they don't already have so they can be successful in other things.

So as long as you're keeping those two things in mind, hopefully what you're talking about doesn't happen that often, right?

But absolutely, people can be, people can be really successful at one aspect of marketing, but not at all in other aspects.

Again, that's probably all.

Disciplines, right?

At least all disciplines that have a breadth of sort of specific skills inside of them.

So I think that's probably a fairly common scenario.

But again, one that hopefully, if you have solid management where you're working, they'll be able to recognize that, they'll be able to move you to something you're better suited for while trying to get you the skills that you need to do more than just that.

No, and that makes sense.

And then, so let's just kind of this next question.

We talked about where marketing gets a bad name, but sometimes marketing does things really well.

And it's like, doesn't get credit for it, or it's just not, I'll say not notice.

Like, what, what are some of those things that marketing does well, but doesn't really get credit for doing?

I think it actually goes back to what we already talked about a little bit, and that is data.

So data, everyone in the C-suite, they want their data.

They want their dashboards.

They want to be able to connect A to B to C to D to revenue.

They don't want anything fuzzy and squishy and leap of faith kind of stuff.

They want data.

But not everything can be measured.

You should absolutely measure everything you can, but not everything important can be measured.

So for example, picture like a trade show type event, right?

So you've got your little 10 by 10 booth, you got your backdrop, you got your TV set up, and you will engage with people at an event like that, and you will collect business cards or digital business cards these days more likely.

And you will be able to tie success of that little group of people back to that event.

But there are also hundreds of people walking by your booth who have never heard of you before.

And now they've heard of you.

Some of those might even stop and kind of half listen to what somebody else's conversation is.

They might read your backdrop.

They might slide by and grab a brochure or whatever else you're giving away.

And none of that is captured.

Right.

There's no way to capture that.

Unless you're going to set up, probably only a couple of years away, facial recognition cameras in your booth, right?

We know everybody who glanced eyeballs at our booth.

It's probably not that far away now that I say it like that.

That's scary.

But anyway, you get the point, right?

So there's even though you can only tie so much business directly back to that event, that exposure of that event may well be incredibly valuable if it's the right audience and you're catching them.

at the right time, you know, three months from now, they might hit a pay point, they might Google, they see your Google ad, but they remember back to the event, Oh, yeah, I saw those guys.

Now, Google's getting the credit for that, right?

Not the event.

So data, it's always with a grain of salt.

And I guess I kind of wondered off your question there a little bit.

But I think it's I think every bit of marketing has the purpose of that measurable.

you know, success.

So get a business card at a trade show, get somebody to click on an email and fill out a form.

But in the email scenario, as long as that person is an unsubscribing, and I'm sending them a lead nurture drip over time, I'm educating them as long as they're opening the email and looking at it for three seconds, and digesting that six word headline that used to be 15 words and out six words, right, they now know a little more about what we do.

They now know, you know, and over time, they get a bigger, broader picture of what we do.

But those email campaigns aren't gonna get credit for that because again, all they did was open it.

And an open data point is, yeah, you want people to open the emails, but you're not gonna give that email any credit just for an open.

They gotta at least have a click to really start saying, okay, this is a valuable action.

But that doesn't mean the opens are not valuable at all.

They're very valuable if that person is scanning the emails.

And I appreciate that description because that attribution of like a sale to that whole process, I know we as marketers, we want that to be nice, neat and tidy.

And I know executives want it to be nice, neat and tidy because it's much easier to attribute budget and everything like you said to If I can show a to B to C, okay, I'm happy to, to spend that money.

It's when the other part is out there where it's murky sounds sort of gives it an ominous tone, but I don't mean it to be, but it is murky it's, it's just, it it's, it's foggy and you don't really see, as you said, all of the touch points, but all of those touch points lead to the sale.

Right, exactly, exactly.

So eliminating those just because you can't point a direct finger at and say, this equals sale, man, to eliminate that would eliminate the sale ultimately.

Right.

And that's when you need to, you know, kind of lean a little bit on your experience and the experience of others, where you know that, you know, if I look back at when I've been super successful and the product I'm marketing has been super successful, there's these things I could measure.

And yes, they were important.

But there are these other things that I couldn't measure, at least not measure well.

that seem to always be around when I was successful and they weren't around when I wasn't successful, right?

So in a sense, it's still data, it's just more anecdotal data, but it doesn't mean that it's not relevant.

Yeah, it's that qualitative just being, and it sounds like too, that rolls back to what you're talking about as far as that education, right, of being able to educate.

It's not simply a spreadsheet, it's being able to tell that story and that narrative with the information and educate the people involved.

to be convincing of what I just said when you're saying it to somebody who introduces themselves as, I'm so and so from finance, I'm a data guy.

Right?

OK, great.

I'm a data guy too, but we've got to expand this conversation a little bit.

And so it takes time.

You have to build a trust with people.

You have to build a relationship with people.

so that you can have those deeper conversations.

And over time, hopefully they'll understand.

But if you're having your first engagement with somebody that you're trying to justify things to, and they're just show me the data, show me the data, maybe don't even go down that road yet.

Save that for another conversation.

Talk about the stuff you can point to first, and then hopefully build that relationship and then expand it over time.

No, that makes sense.

And that kind of rolls into kind of this next question.

What is like one or two areas where marketers are not adapting to the changes in the marketplace, because I know marketing is both cutting edge and sometimes behind the times it's this great dichotomy.

So where, where are we just not adapting?

So I think it's actually more of the same conversation we're having here a little bit.

And it's about data.

And it's not that marketers aren't adapting to data.

It's that they're too blindly adapting to data.

And actually, I think back a little bit to the fact that we're not adapting to data.

an earlier episode that you had, I think it was over the summer, you had Dr.

Elena Schlachter on and she was talking about net promoter score and how it's basically bunk.

Think how many companies blindly do everything to affect their net promoter score.

And it might actually be meaningless, right?

So hopefully your marketing enterprise or organization isn't quite that far off the mark.

But Back to what we were talking about is the data is often fuzzy.

Most organizations do not collect it well.

So it's not even, you know, it's not even just like the particular marketing channel is hard to measure.

It's just even the things that aren't hard to measure, maybe they've been measured poorly.

Right.

So it's fuzzy.

There's gaps.

It's messy.

And you can't just blindly follow the numbers without trying to take a step back and say, what are these numbers mean?

And sometimes, sometimes the numbers don't make sense.

Right.

And you can't just keep going on that.

You have to stop and say, these numbers don't make sense.

Why don't they make sense?

If you're really lucky, it doesn't make sense because the reality is actually different than your assumptions.

And now you've learned something.

And that's awesome, right?

So that's like the whole goal of the data is to learn.

So if you have a moment where the data kind of corrects or updates your view of your customer or the market in some way, because you actually.

looked at the data and proved it out.

And yes, it was solid data.

That's wonderful.

But fairly often it's like, oh, we're not measuring that right.

Look what we did here.

We're ignoring this whole group of people because of the way we set the system up.

It's not capturing that.

And that happens all the time because it's complicated.

And there's a lot of data.

And there's all these different systems that collect the data and they talk to each other.

And the integrations work well sometimes, and sometimes they don't.

So.

Always being vigilant about is the data solid?

If it's not solid, why isn't it solid?

What's the real story here?

And I think marketers are not adapting to that reality because you just, it's been a good 10, 20 years now, right?

Where big data, big data, big data.

We're all about the data.

I'm a data person.

Make database decisions.

100% yes, but pay attention to the data.

Don't just blindly trust it.

No, and I like that distinction that distinction of both the data is not always clean.

It's frequently messy.

I'll say more often messy than clean.

And then there's the how do you apply it?

And that's that ongoing iteration thing where you're like, am I measuring something and is it helpful?

Or am I just measuring it because we always measured it?

And so I appreciate you that.

Yeah.

Well, because of it, yeah, having all the numbers doesn't matter if you're measuring the wrong thing.

And it's maddening.

So how about, let's talk about underutilized, how are businesses, I'm sorry, let me try again.

What is something underutilized by businesses which could help them improve their customer engagement, which...

then improves that brand loyalty, that marketing.

What's something that we just aren't doing enough of?

I think the biggest thing that many marketers don't do that they should be doing is any form at all of talking to their customers.

We tend to, especially in larger organizations, you tend to start to see the market as this sort of abstract thing that is data, right?

It's not people.

It's these numbers we've been talking about, but they're still people.

You need to talk to them.

If you can, if you can go to events like trade show type event, like I was talking about, it's a great place to talk to potential customers, not just to get them as potential customers, but to learn how they speak, see what thing, you know, what, what are their facial reactions when you say certain things about your product?

What lights them up?

What do they glass gloss over, you know, with an out of boredom because they really don't care that your product does that.

And it doesn't have to be like a big, expensive trade show either.

It could be.

Depending on your business, it could be a local chamber commerce event.

It could be anything at all where you can be in a room face to face, or even on a Zoom face to face with your customers.

Now, let me just kind of piggyback off that because I think that's, that's true.

Cause you don't know what the customer is feeling.

You don't know their experience.

You don't know anything if you're guessing or if you're assuming.

Now, is that something you can sort of, can you get to the customer through like salespeople?

Uh, is that like an introduction?

How do you, how do you get in front of the customer in that respect?

Does that question make sense?

it does.

And absolutely, my number one go-to when I can't talk directly to the customer is to talk to sales because they're talking directly to the customer.

And I should say that most organizations have a picture of their customer, right?

They have personas of certain types.

They've developed an ideal customer profile.

So they do have some sense, even if they've never spoken to a customer themselves, they should have some sense of who that customer is.

But that is night and day different than actually speaking to a real customer.

Right.

And sales is not is night and day different than speaking to nobody.

But customers still better than talking to sales.

That makes sense.

I appreciate that distinction too, because yeah, I've, I've talked to a lot of, uh, I try to talk to sales to hear what they're hearing and get that customer experience, but yeah, when you can ask the customer directly, what's keeping you up at night and you get to hear the, I don't want to say sales would filter it, but you get the sort of that, that raw unfiltered rough cut.

communication is always better than filtered through somebody else, right?

Sales is going to have their own, whoever that individual salesperson is, is going to have their own individual bias filters.

And they're going to tell you things.

But I will also say about sales.

And I'm glad we kind of touched on this, because this, I think, is critically important.

If you're in an organization, you're that's large enough that you have a marketing team and a sales team and they're kind of separate.

Don't let them be separate.

You have got to be best friends with sales.

Sales is both the people who are gonna prove out your efforts, right?

Because if they don't close the deal, there's no revenue and there's nothing to tie back to your marketing lead.

but they are a wealth of information, not just who is your customer, but they have great ideas.

They have terrible ideas too, but guess what?

So do I.

We all have terrible ideas, right?

Listen to sales.

Even if the sort of implementation of in their head of how their idea would work might be off the mark, there's almost always going to be a nugget of something you can use in what they're proposing.

So be friends with sales, be an ally to sales.

They'll be an ally to you.

And I think that's...

That's like, anytime I've walked into a new organization as the new marketing guy, my number one first step was meet and befriend the sales team and genuinely not like just, yes, it's also it ends to means to an end, but it also makes your job easier.

It makes it more pleasant.

I have worked in organizations that shall go nameless where where those were very siloed enterprises and they don't get along very well and that's a problem.

So if you take nothing away from this whole conversation, be a friend, be an ally to sales and they will be the same for you.

I will echo that.

When sales and marketing are running in step, magic happens, right?

But I'm like with you, I've worked at places where sales and marketing are just at loggerheads with each other.

It feels like that's the hard thing too.

I think so too, because at least if you're having disagreements, you're at least...

you're talking about something.

Yeah, but yeah, when, when everybody's doing their own thing, it's, yeah, it doesn't help either group.

Oh, so I'm really glad.

I'm really glad you, you mentioned that.

And just as we wrap up here, one takeaway you'd like to leave with the audience.

Yeah, I do have one and I think it's super, super important.

Um, and that is don't overcomplicate marketing at its core.

The fundamentals of marketing have never changed.

Yes, we've gotten new technologies, new ways to measure things, new ways to reach audiences, the world has changed, but if you go all the way back.

If it actually You go all the way back, but if you learned about it in a marketing 101 class, most likely, there's the idea of the fundamentals of marketing are AIDA, and that's either awareness or attention.

I think originally it was awareness.

Some people say attention, awareness, interest, desire, action.

That was first coined in like 1898, right?

Literally 100 plus years ago.

And that is the fundamentals of the sales funnel, right?

If they've never heard of you, of course they're not gonna buy your product.

So awareness, step one.

Beyond step one, interest, right?

Okay, I've now heard of you and you've hooked me with something so you've got me looking, right?

Desire, okay, yeah, maybe I do want this thing.

And then action, I guess I'll buy this thing, right?

So that's sort of, that's the sales funnel.

It's the foundation of any customer journey mapping, right?

How do you go from, I never heard of you to I bought your product, right?

It's AIDA.

A lot of people will make that a lot more complicated and that's useful too, because in different industries you can identify smaller subsets and I don't mean to disregard any of that stuff, but it all does boil back down to AIDA and that can be a customer journey follows those steps.

It can be a marketing campaign of a new product launch.

So hey, we're announcing this new product.

Here's what it does.

A couple of weeks later, here's some more stuff to make you interested.

A couple of weeks later, ask for the sale.

And it can be an individual piece.

Like, just think of like an individual ad, right?

You've got a headline.

That's your attention awareness.

The body, the image, the hero image maybe is where the interest starts to come in.

Somewhere in there, there's copy of a benefit, right?

That's the desire.

And then there's a call to action, right?

Action.

AIDA.

It all goes back to AIDA.

I love that.

And I think it's so important because we do have this tendency to make things complicated.

And we, and like you say, you can, you can go deeper on those different aspects of it, but at the end of the day, that's your baseline, right?

That's, that's the baseline.

So if we, if we lose sight of that, we lose sight of really what the core of marketing.

Absolutely.

So I appreciate you sharing that.

So as we wrap up, if listeners want to know more about you and your work, where do you want them to go?

Just find me on LinkedIn, whatever the LinkedIn string is, slash Kirk Duke.

Or you can email me directly, KirkwoodDuke207.

So my first name is actually Kirkwood, for those wondering why that's my email address.

K-I-R-K-W-O-O-D-D-U-K-E-207, at gmail.com.

And also those wondering, 207 is the single area code for telephones in the state of Maine.

I love it.

So everybody listening, make sure you check out Kirk on LinkedIn, connect with him, reach out to him.

He has a, a wealth of information and experience and, and just a man, it just a wonderful conversation.

Kirk, thanks for, for joining me today.

I know I learned a ton and I know the audience will too.

And thank you, Eric.

It's a pleasure being a guest on your show.

Like I said, I'm a fan.

I love the work you're doing.

And I'm just delighted to have been able to be part of it.

Oh, me too.