In this episode, Brian Mattocks and Sean Boyce discuss why marketing is often underestimated and dive into the continuous discovery process in marketing. They emphasize the importance of understanding the buyer’s journey and problem space to create effective marketing strategies and tactics. They also highlight the significance of focusing on the right problem and using customer insights to tailor marketing messages.
Sean Boyce has run his consultancy firm NxtStep Consulting for over 10 years but found he wasn’t able to grow his network effectively and efficiently through in-person marketing or lead generation services.
To solve this, Sean founded Podcast Chef, a full-service podcast management platform that helped him grow his network while making awesome content at the same time.
Seeing the effectiveness of podcasting at reaching new people, Sean opened it up to others, helping people to start a podcast and delegating the management from post-production to booking guests. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Hard to Market:
- Marketing is often underestimated and misunderstood, especially in the B2B SaaS software startup space.
- Continuous discovery is crucial in marketing and should inform all marketing efforts, from copy to conversations.
- Understanding the buyer’s journey and problem space is essential for effective marketing.
- Focusing on the top issue and identifying patterns among target market customers helps prioritize and tailor marketing strategies.
- Building a systematic process based on goals and objectives ensures meaningful progress.
- The discovery process in marketing is ongoing and requires constant adaptation and learning.
- Balancing the customer’s perceived problem with the actual problem is key to delivering the right solution.
Resources:
Connecting with Sean Boyce:
Connecting with Brian Mattocks:
Quotables:
- 00:17 – Why is marketing so hard? And I think this is something that a lot of people have misconceptions about. I think people underestimate how difficult marketing is going to be. And from my world, that comes from like the B2B SaaS software startup space. There’s conventional wisdom that I would say is largely incorrect in terms of like protecting your ideas and not sharing them with people and stuff like that because they’re going to steal them, run with them and become overnight billionaires, which pretty much never happens.
- 10:54 – It’s not the customer’s job to be thinking through the better solution. That’s your job, right? You are providing a better solution, but you, you need to understand what the proper problem is and how it manifests. And when I say, I mean how they think of it in their head.
- 01:25 – Marketing is as much a practice as any of the other professions that require years and years of degree work. And the reason I bring it up in that context is even if you understand the basics, even if you know how to use all of the tools, even if you know the right, the exact right time and place to put advertising together, what you’re always doing is discovery with your buyer and the buyers for the same, ostensibly the same service across different companies are different because every buyer persona that you’re going after is different.
- 09:59 – Oftentimes the customer misdiagnoses what they need and so their search queries and their demands are going to be different than what they tell you in discovery, right? So in the discovery process, you’re going to get to whatever root cause or or or whatever meaningful deep-seated pain you’re trying to solve, you’re going to get there, but it’s not gonna change what they do on, you know, Monday morning when they start typing in those, what they perceive their issues to be on Google. So how do you connect those dots through that content conversation to get folks from that maybe suboptimal search query to your product or service?
- 02:09 – Brian: How do you take that discovery process and systematize it in a way that you’re not reinventing the wheel every single time?Sean: Yeah, this is a good point. And so getting comfortable with the continuous discovery process is critical for the work that I do and people that are trying to build B2B Seth type businesses. But it influences everything. I call it copy to conversations. So anything that you might write anywhere, this is like marketing content, right?