CAIR 22: Blast By Your Competition WITHOUT BEING A MARKETING GENIUS

Running your business AND being a MARKETING GENIUS AND hiring AND training AND selling AND delivering AND...well, you get the idea, is a challenge.

How would you perform differently if you could have insightful guidance on WHERE to FOCUS your MARKETING activities WITHOUT BEING A MARKETING GENIUS?

Hi Everybody, welcome to another episode of ClickAI Radio. This is Grant Larsen. All right. So today we're talking about blasting, blasting by your competition without becoming a marketing genius. I remember when I was in college, and I was taking my classes in computer science and business, all those kinds of things, economics, etc. And then I had a marketing class, and I was like marketing, Holy smokes, why do I need marketing? And it turns out, I never did become that marketing genius, you know, is like oh, marketing. Wow. Okay. So the question is, are you a marketing genius?

So you and I've had the opportunity to, to help build and run multiple startup companies and marketing such a critical role. You know, in your college, you're like, gee, do I really need this in my life? But the question is, if you're a small to medium business owner, are you a marketing genius? And if not, why not? Right? It actually is, we know as you know, takes a lot of time, to as a small to medium business owner, to of course, run the business, but also to do marketing itself in when you wear so many hats, it's actually really difficult to pivot constantly back into that role, or to never leave the role, and yet still take care of other things. I was looking recently, I was looking up recently, some material on how to become a marketer. I thought, Oh, this will be interesting, you know, because you hear you know, people like Russell Brunson, or Steve Larsen or others, right, talking about what it means to be a marketer. And I ran, I ran into this particular book, I think, I think it's like 30 years old. It says here, learn how to be a marketer. In five steps. You're ready. These are the five steps number one, complete high school.

Number two, obtain a bachelor's degree number three, complete a marketing internship. Number four, gain work experience. And number five, obtain a graduate degree if needed. I thought it was joking. But they were actually serious. That Nah, I don't I don't think that's what we're after. Really, what, what I'm really thinking about is most of us aren't marketing experts coming from business, right? We're not graduating from college with a marketing degree. But what we're really interested in what I'm interested in, is how do I apply marketing to my business? Right, even though I'm focused in other areas, how can I really be effective at marketing with my business, so I was looking at this other less than they had eight steps that I thought was kind of interesting. So I'm gonna I'm going to use these eight steps. And then I'm going to show some techniques for applying these so here are the eight steps one, conduct marketing research again, don't forget this is about applying marketing to your business. Alright, so number one, conduct marketing research. Alright, to profile your target market. Three, identify your unique selling proposition for develop your business brand. Five, choose your marketing avenues. Six, set your goals and budgets. Stay with me, seven, nurture your loyal customers and eight, monitor and review. I was like, Alright, that's a little closer again. That's nothing you'd perhaps really hear from someone like Russell Brunson, right.

Here's what I did with the list though. I looked at those eight steps that they just articulated. And I said, I can identify four areas where I would apply artificial intelligence. In other words, here's really the point. When I'm running my small and medium business and am super busy, it is a benefit and a real it's gold to the business, if I can get insights from AI at certain places where I'm making marketing decisions. So I'm going to show how those apply AI for these, the four that I chose is step two, profile your target market. Step three, identify your unique selling proposition. And then step seven, nurture your loyal customers, and then eight, monitor and review. So I'm going to break those down, I'm going to start here with step two, profiling your target markets.

Alright, so when, as you know, when when you apply at least one we've been applying AI to a company, we look at the business information, and we identify key subgroups for those customers. So let's say let's say you're looking at your at your customer set, what you're really interested in knowing is of that customer set, which which ones actually break down into markets or sub markets, and what are the most profitable ones there, this is a critical activity, because you want to be able to understand best how to reach those customers in each of those sub markets. The AI examines the good and the not good behaviors within each target market. So when we apply it, we're going after a breakdown of sub markets across that that customer set, our experience has been this is gold to your business, right.

So for example, one company that we are applying this to, you're ready for this, this is kind of a unique one, but as an example, but the their market segmentation was based on customer behavior before, during and after a US holiday. And their business was directly affected by this segmentation. And it turns out that it was actually a different group and segment of customers that would get involved before, during and after their marketing was best served, we discovered through the AI by promoting seven days or more before the upcoming us holiday. And this permitted them to reduce their post holiday spend, and then redirect them to pre holiday spend. Now, there are certainly other target market segmentations, right, other than holidays, but for this particular example, when you're profiling your target market, ai does a great job at helping you to understand the nuances between those different profiles of the market. And that helps you to redirect your spend. Now, here's the key point. You don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this. So this particular group we were working with, it's not like you know, they were massive marketing people. In fact, they looked at that and said, Wow, we never would have seen this right. So AI really shines in this area.

All right, let me go to the next one. So this was in that list. This was Step three, it was called identify your unique selling proposition. Here's one of the key ways that we've seen to apply AI. It's actually a very timing based approach. And by that I mean, I've seen this work best if a company is willing to pivot, one of the most expensive things you and I know that a company can do is to continue down the wrong path too long, right. And so if you can reduce the amount of time that it takes to discover, hey, I'm on the wrong path, obviously, that's beneficial to business. So identifying your unique selling proposition often comes with some intentional planning, and some trial and error. So the cycle from what I've experienced goes like this, number one, connect your business activities to AI. Number two, apply your unique selling proposition number three, the AI monitors this, and they gives you early feedback much earlier than then most of our brains can do it right. And then number four, This, of course, saves you time and money as you pivot away from the pain and then into the money or into things that are more profitable. And so finding the unique selling proposition requires trial and error sometimes, right. And so AI being connected to this allows us to do that trial, discover those things very quickly with AI, is this going to continue to be a positive thing or not?

Now, the good news is, you don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this AI really shines in this area. right let me go to the next one in the list. This one was number seven in their list is called nurture your loyal customers. Now, what I found is one of the most insightful features, let me say that again, one of the most insightful features of applying AI in this area is the ability to analyze scenarios. Here's how it works. The AI gives us insight to the customers and the markets, right that you're working on. And you know, specifically those that are performing well. Typically, what you want to do is when you find those golden veins of customers that are performing well, you really actually want to drill more into that and discover nuances, where you can really exploit and build out because you really want to get your services and your products into that customer set. So with this, what what happens is you execute a series of AI scenarios, and it does some analysis that looks at and provides predictions. So building on the previous example, right of the company had mentioned a moment ago, where they were segmenting, based on us holidays. It turns out in that situation, right? Again, this is just the example unique to them, not saying it's for you, it turns out that the better customers that ultimately did not refund and got more value, were the ones who purchase before the US holiday. And you're ready.

Now here's a deeper scenario, right where the AI identifies this. And what it did is said, Look, it goes deeper into that and says, Hey, there served better by those that you talked to that were later in the day, can you believe that in the time of day, and when they were using a specific salesperson with a specific product. So now the AI got very specific and says, have very high probability that in the situations before you, you know, seven days before, this us holiday with this particular salesperson in this product, to have a very high probability of producing X amount of percentage increase in sales, not only but also to get customers that are truly loyal, that don't refund and that actually get value from it, that combination performed higher loyalty and greater value. Now, that's obviously a very unique situation. And there are many other scenarios as well. The key point is, typically, it's hard for our brains to see all of those connection points. But the ai ai picks that up. Now, this enables us to raise the level of service to our loyal customers, and also, to course, grow the loyal customer base. Because when you think about it, if there's any base that I really want to grow, it's not just that I want to bring in more revenue to my business, it's, I want to bring in more loyal revenue, I want to bring in customers that understand and appreciate the value of what it is that the business is providing. Here's the key point.

You don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this. So AI really shines in this area. All right, so let's take a look at one other here. So this was step, excuse me, this was step eight in their list. And so what I found here, this one was called monitor and review. And you know, it's easy when you read a list like that, and you go Okay, sure monitoring review that's on almost every list, right? here's here's the critical aspect, though of applying AI. The basic premise is this. What we've seen is over time, your business context changes, right. All I all I have to do is say COVID. And we all nod our head. Yeah, business context has changed. But it's always certainly not you know, anything as large as a pandemic, could be new competitor could be new products, new technology, changing your customer base, new laws or regulations, all sorts of things occur, right, which changes the business context. What this means is that your assumptions and the patterns around those change, which means having AI continually monitoring for these adjustments, and making you aware that it's time to make your own adjustment that's actually worth gold, right? Not waiting too long to continue down the wrong path.

The AI In fact, starts to pick it up before our brains do and says, Hey, this is going outside of the patterns here. Need to make you aware of it. Now, the key point is and you probably know what I'm going to say now, you don't have to be a marketing expert to leverage the benefits from this AI really shines in this area. So I know in my years of running different small startup businesses is it doing marketing? You know, it's always a challenge. On top of everything else you're doing, heck, I'm taking out the garbage, right and helping to deliver the services and products and trying to find the next customer to sell, looking to hire and so forth. You know what that means. But having AI to help fill in and fine tune the scarce resources, fine tune the scarce resources that we have in our small medium businesses, in the ways that I just articulated those four steps, right, there is huge benefit to businesses.

So we've looked at these four areas. And what it does is it reduces the need for you to be a marketing expert. I'm not saying it doesn't reduce the need for marketing at all. What it does do though, is it reduces the amount of expertise that I need to have to help pick the right places to go focus or to move away from the AI applied in these areas really helps a lot.

All right. Hey, stay tuned for some upcoming webinars. We're gonna host right to bring more information to you on how to apply AI to your business. Thanks again for joining. And until next time, use AI to help your marketing.

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