Marketing is about educating your prospects such as what makes your company different from the rest, how can your products and services help them make their lives better and solve their problems, and why they should trust your company over your competitors.
As a part of my Marketing Strategy Series, I’m talking with my fellow marketing pros at the top of their game to give entrepreneurs and marketers an inside look at proven strategies you might also be able to leverage to grow your business. Today I had the pleasure of talking with Stan Tan.
Stan Tan is the digital marketing manager at Selby’s, one of Australia’s largest printing company who prints for Fortune 500 clients such as McDonald’s, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz.
What advice would you give other marketers to thrive and avoid burnout?
Trust the process.
In digital marketing, results don’t come immediately. They take weeks and months to be able to see any meaningful results. When marketers set the wrong expectations, they get demotivated which leads to burnout.
For example, you might be executing a content marketing strategy and you are creating content day after day. It can take days and lots of creative energy to just write one piece of content and to execute on a successful content marketing strategy, you need a library of content. You need to do it day in and day out creating content consistently.
After your first month of hard work on creating content, you are most likely not going to see any result. You might not even see any meaningful result in your 2nd, 3rd or even 10th month.
However, you have to keep at it. You have to trust the process.
Great advice, patience is so important! Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion. What “3 Non-Intuitive Marketing Strategies” have been most effective for you in your industry?
Email signatures — As a B2B company, emails are the most common channel when communicating with clients. Why not make use of that by promoting a product or service in the sales reps signature? It doesn’t cost anything and it promotes your brand in front of highly relevant audiences.
Trade magazines — As a B2B company again, you’d be surprised how many companies still order trade magazines because they can’t be bothered to cancel their subscription. Most importantly, decision makers and managers still read them to keep up to date about the industry. You can Google your way to stay up to date in your industry but trade magazines are a more efficient way of doing that.
A big banner outside our office. Here is an image of it — and to see how big that banner is compared it to the size of the building the banner is on. The cost to print the banner and to install it is a one-time cost. After the initial cost, anyone who drives past our facility will see that banner with our brand on it.
If you were only allowed to run paid ads on 1 platform (in your industry) over the next 12 months, what would it be and why?
LinkedIn. As a B2B marketer, LinkedIn’s platform is a gold mine for data and you can use these data to create a highly targeted campaign to a specific set of audience.
For example, when we looked at our top clients they came from a select few industries. Secondly, we mainly deal with their marketing department.
Based on these two datasets alone, we can craft a LinkedIn campaign that targets (i) clients from specific industries and (ii) employees in their marketing department.
Next, we can run one campaign for each industry. For example, when targeting automotive clients, our ad can show them a project we did for BMW. This immediately builds trust as opposed to showing a project that isn’t relevant to them.
As a professional marketer, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Honest marketing.
Marketing isn’t about outsmarting your prospects with psychological tactics.
To me, marketing is about educating your prospects such as what makes your company different from the rest, how can your products and services help them make their lives better and solve their problems, and why they should trust your company over your competitors.
What quote would you say has inspired you the most in your life or career?
“Begin with the end in mind” — Stephen Covey.
Thank you so much for these fantastic insights!
