7 Min Marketing With Pam Didner

Hello, this is Pam. Welcome to another pandemic episode of B2B Marketing and More.   IN this episode I am going to talk about a question I received after attending the Social Media Strategies Summit “Ask Anything” webinar. Here is the question from Lauren:   I work for a non-profit organization. In the current situation, what’s the appropriate way to ask for donations? or is it not at all?   Lauren, I love your question. Frankly, I can modify this question for salespeople: I need to reach out to prospects to build up my sales pipelines, is it appropriate to do cold prospecting or not at all?   So the truth is, we are all asking ourselves the same questions and trying to figure out what is appropriate for our own target markets and audiences. We are all looking for answers and trying to figure out appropriate actions.   We’re asking what is the right thing to do, even myself.   So before answering Lauren’s question I shared this blog post with her. The name sof the blog post is 5 Media Principles Guiding Googl

Hello, this is Pam. I hope that everything is safe and sound and working from home has not driven you completely insane just yet. It’s certainly added a lot of pressure to those who not only have to work full-time but also have to homeschool their kids and deal with the various aspects of home confinement. I get it. We all do what we can. In the meantime, ttay healthy and be safe.   Today I’m going to talk about something different. 52 Limited is a Portland-based marketing recruiting firm. They launched a virtual get-together that they call ‘10 minutes with 52.’ Three days a week they invite different experts to talk about various topics for 10 minutes at a time before you start your day. What a lovely idea. I was invited to talk about "Personal Branding."   Based on my experience building a digital presence for my personal brand, here are the five key lessons I shared to help you build your personal brand.   Personal branding on the Internet is not about a logo or the name of your company. It's really about

Hi, everyone. Just want to mention that I recorded this episode before the Coronavirus pandemic. I know that it’s going to be a stressful time for all of us. I do hope that you’ll find time to relax and get a sense of normality from listening to my episodes. Be safe and stay healthy, my friends.   Hello everyone! Today is Sunday. Sunday is both lazy and busy afternoon. It’s a lazy morning and buzy afternoon kinda day. Sunday is the only day that I allow myself to sleep late and wake up whenever I want to wake up. It means that I don’t usually get up until like 10 am, so a very lazy morning of doing nothing. I love it! Then, I start working again on Sunday afternoon, like writing podcast or video scripts or recording podcast and video. Blah, blah blah!   I was interviewing a marketing director of my clients a few days ago to help them build a collaboration process between B2B Marketing Group and Sales Enablement Team. During the interview, the Marketing Director made it very clear to me that B2B marketing shou

Hi, everyone! I'm doing something different for this episode in light of the effect of the coronavirus pandemic in our industry. Today, I'm sharing an excerpt from a webinar I did on March 18, focused on how to keep your marketing moving in times of uncertainty. I teamed up with Ryan Lewis, a good friend of mine at Bonfire Marketing. At the end of today's episode, I will have details on what else you can learn in the webinar and how to watch it.   Before I get started, just want to let you know the sound quality may not be as sharp as what you're used to. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoy the episode.   Webinar excerpt: From my perspective, now is actually a perfect time to actually start engaging with sales. If you are working with your sales team closely, fantastic! They are your BFFs! Try to actually enhance that relationship, if you will.   And they are three things I want to talk about and just to share with you in terms what are some of the best option to actually work with a sales team as a marketer. The

Hello, everyone. In the past several episodes, I’ve been discussing AI’s role in Marketing. As I’ve been talking about all the wonderful magic of AI, you might ask, “What’s the catch?” Well, there is a dark side. If you use machine learning as a way to implement AI, you need to make sure you have high-quality data first.   Whenever I mention data, marketers are like “WHAT?” I was like “WHAAAAT? I know, right? Data is really the marketers’ nemesis. So the quality of data: you need to define in terms of the quality of your data and also your data sources.   You need to know the quality of your data. And here’s an analogy from Wilson Peng, CTO of Appen (and I love the analogy!). He said, “If you train a computer vision system for autonomous vehicles with images of sidewalks mislabeled as streets, the results could be disastrous. In order to develop accurate algorithms or predictions, you will need high-quality training data.” And I 100% agree with that.   Amazon famously scrapped its AI recruiting tool because i

Hello everyone! So, I wrote a little eBook about AI—Artificial Intelligence--which is available on Amazon. Simply type “Pam Didner” or the name of the book “The Modern AI Marketer”. Download to your Kindle and check it out. Love to hear your feedback!   I mentioned in my past podcast that I wrote this book to help myself and others understand how AI fits into the field of Marketing. In the eBook, I mentioned six use cases. For today’s podcast, I want to talk about three or so that you can get a sense of it of how AI applies to Marketing.   So one specific case I want to share with everybody is the chatbot. Whenever you go to the website you will see a little bot at the bottom of the right hand corner, waving it’s hand and wanting to talk to you. So a lot of times I will try the chatbot and ask specific questions and see if they can answer them. And a lot of time they are not giving me the answer I need and I end up talking to real people, which is fine.   But there is one website which I go to all the time tr

Hello everyone! Last week, I shared with you that I wrote a little eBook about AI that you can purchase on Amazon Kindle. Just in case you missed last week’s podcast, the name of the book is called The Modern AI Marketer: How to Leverage Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing.   The book was written for marketers to understand what AI is and how marketers can apply it in the work they do. Like I said last week, modern marketing is grounded on using technology to reach out to your audience digitally.   You can’t scale, segment or personalize your marketing without technology. That’s why technology plays a critical role in marketing. In this eBook, I touched on many things, from definition of AI, a bit of history, benefits, and use cases to expectation that you need to set if you for implement AI.   So for this podcast, I want to pique your interests on the marketing-specific benefits of AI.   When people talk about AI benefits, they tend to mention AI benefits in very generic terms. For example, AI can:

Good morning, everyone! I have super exciting news to share with you. I wrote a little eBook about AI—Artificial Intelligence. Yeah!   Here’s the thing: when I’ve spoken at conferences in the past, it’s been clear to me that marketers are intimidated by AI and don’t know what to make of it. AI piqued my interest when I was doing research for the Technology chapter of my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement. Ever since, my fascination has skyrocketed.   To help marketers and sales teams better understand AI, I wrote a 9000-word Kindle ebook: The Modern AI Marketer: How to Leverage Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing to Get Ahead.   I am a strong believer that modern marketers need a firm grounding in relevant technologies so they can use it to their advantage. I am not saying that you need to write code or implement AI initiatives at this time. But as a starter, it’s nice to understand what it is and have some ideas on what it can do for you as a marketer.   The book starts with simple definitions, hi

Good morning, everyone! I’ve been doing several webinars and podcast interviews in the past 5 weeks. I found one question particularly interesting. That was from Jeff, CEO of MarketMuse. He asked me: “What are some examples of questions I ask to understand my salespeople?”   If you are working with your sales team and don’t have a good relationship with them just yet, here are some questions that you can ask to get to know them. It’s worked well for me and I want to share with you.   For a starter, here is the top question I ask frequently, and it always gets them talking. How do you handle rejections to salvage the potential lost deal? OMG, it’s like giving them a free therapy session.   They would talk about the different types of rejections they encounter and the frustration of almost getting the deal closed and losing it at the last minute. Interesting enough, they can always recount specific deals they’ve lost and what they did before and after that. It’s a question that gives them an opportunity to tell

Hello from Portland. This week is one of those weeks when I have several pressing client deliverables. On top of that, I also need to create several podcast and video recordings. Creating content to build my personal brand and working on client projects are two full-time jobs. Ugh… What is the take-away of this: Don’t do what I do. It’s too much work.   Speaking of creating content, here is a LinkedIn message from Queenie who lives in Hong Kong.   She said: Hi Pam, I continually read your blogs and find them useful as I am in the B2B marketing field and specialize in the Asia Pacific market. Shall we connect so I can be informed about new articles.   Of course, Queenie! I’d love to connect, I answered. In response, she added one quick question:  When it comes to content marketing, I understand many in-house experts can contribute content but they might not write it in a customer-oriented way. For a tech startup company, what is your take on outsourcing the content writing vs getting a copywriter in-house?   

Good Morning from Portland, Oregon.   I have a confession to make. I travel a lot and most of my clients are not in Portland, Oregon. The truth is that I don’t know many local marketers. So, I attended a networking event the other day and I had the opportunity to talk to several local marketers.   One of the young marketers I met, Ken, asked me an interesting question: How do I know if a marketing career is right for me? He received a marketing job offer after he graduated from college. The job is not exactly what he expected; therefore, he started questioning whether this is right career path for him. The question he poses is perfectly legit, especially if you don’t particularly enjoy what you are doing.   Pay attention and be in tune with you likes and don’t like. I asked him if he knows what he wants to try next. He said that he is not sure. I also asked him if there are any specific parts of marketing that he enjoys. He said he loves creative and copywriting, but is really not much into data analysis. Yet

Good Morning from Portland! It has been super chilly lately, and RAINY. It’s cold! My husband was like, does it matter to you? You are always inside working anyway. True! But…who doesn’t like a ray of sunshine shining through the window, right?   Question: What if you could define your own sales enablement role? I received an email from Kate. In her email, she mentioned that she’s been an account manager for several companies. She started as a Sr. Account Manager with a new company a year ago. From her perspective in this role, she’s identified a large gap in marketing and sales collaboration; so her manager asked her to create a new role to address these gaps. She read my book and loved it. Thank you, Kate! She wanted to have a chat to discuss how to better define her new job.    If you can define your own role, that’s GREAT news!! Kate. Congrats. It’s wonderful that your manager asked you to define your own role. It’s an endorsement that says you’ve been doing a fantastic job. And you earned enough of his/h

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope that you had a great holiday and are well-rested. I was on the road from 10/14 to 12/21. I am so happy to spend the holidays at home and just chill . . . and eat. As a marketer, if your company’s marketing plan for the new year is done, I’d strongly recommend you do one thing, tie your job contribution to your Company’s business goals and marketing objectives and do that in one page. This is especially important for a marketing specialist, an individual contributor or a first-line manager. Obviously, we know our roles and responsibilities. There are many things we do on a daily basis, such as answering email or attending meetings, that don’t really contribute to achieving our business goals and marketing objectives. When I mentor marketers or even work with my clients, I always encourage them to document what they do and tie that to the company’s business and marketing objectives.   Here is a simple one-pager I want to share with them. On this one-pager, there are six componen

If you are a long-time listener, you know that my episodes tend to focus on marketing and business, not so much about me. I am going to be up close and personal today as I record the last episode of 2019, I decided to do a little self-reflection, a look back to my 2019.   Frankly, this year didn’t start very well, business-wise. I didn’t tell many people, but my pipeline was bone dry the first 5 months. I had speaking engagements and small projects here and there, but nothing steady or substantial.   I was so scared that I started considering going back to be a full-time corporate citizen. You know how you are hitting a wall and can’t break through and you don’t know what the next steps are. That’s how I felt earlier this year for several months.   The key was that I had a good run for the first 4 years, and I didn’t do a good job to continue developing my sales pipeline. I got cocky and thought the business would just come. Well, it didn’t come in the first half of the year.   So, I started investing in busi

If you listen to my podcast on a regular basis, you know that I am not affiliated with any tools or platforms. Occasionally, I mentioned certain tools and platforms for my listeners to check out if they are dealing with specific marketing or sales challenges.   For social media, I’ve been using ‘Buffer’ for several years. However, a good friend, Lisa, introduced me a tool called ‘Lately’ to me. This tool has the functionality of Buffer, but at the same time, it uses AI to autogenerate social media posts for you. You can quickly pick your favorites or edit the posts, then schedule. You can choose how and when you want them to post, or have Lately’s AI schedule for you based on your audience engagement history. You can seamlessly stockpile your post with hash-tags and short-links. Lately will send them as scheduled to help drive traffic back to your website.   In addition, they have built-in dashboards, the graphs are visually compelling and similar to what you see on Tableau or Power BI. As you are publishing

In talking to many of my clients, I’ve found that there often doesn’t seem to be a nurturing stream to address leads rejected by the sales team. In some cases, these leads are not even routed back to the marketing automation system. When they are routed back, they are just treated like any other leads as part of regular email campaigns.   During one of my workshops, an attendee asked me if we should have a separate nurturing stream for rejected leads. If we do, how should we segment rejected leads?   I told her that we should segment rejected leads based on the rejected reasons or causes identified in the CRM tool. Say, the causes in the CRM tools are “chose competitor,” “lack of budget,” “not ready,” or “lack of response.”    We can drill down more with our sales reps to understand each cause better. Then, we can craft our email stream based on these causes. If the prospects sourced from our competitor, the recommendation may be to add them to the regular email campaigns. One of my clients simply deletes the

I did an 8-hour long workshop for a new client of mine. The CMO of the company, Sara, is an incredibly savvy marketer in the B2C segment. Anything about marketing a luxury brand, she is on top of it. One of her key initiatives in 2020 is to work and enable sales. In the workshop, we identified sales stages, mapped content from marketing to sales, created a series of email campaigns to help outside sales engage with SQLs. We also created a drip campaign to continue engagement with prospects after events.   She asked me what is the different between the Drip and Nurture campaigns.   Here is how I explained to her:  Both Drip and Nurture campaigns use a series of marketing communication channels, mostly email or a combination of email and phone calls, to reach out to prospects.    Drip focuses on presenting buyers information so that they become familiar with your brands and products. The email series is more top of the funnel focused; the message is more general intended for a broader audience. A great example

  In the last episode, I mentioned that I met Danny Harris at Content Marketing World. He’s a regular listener to my podcast. Thank you, Danny! We did a Zoom meeting a couple of weeks after the conference. Danny is amazing. He created several nice frameworks to tie the customer journey, marketing channels and sales stages together. I am very impressed with his work. Thank you for sharing, Danny. I asked him if he had any question that he wants me to address in my podcast. He had a fundamental question: “Why do we need to invest in B2B marketing?” I totally understand why he asked that question. I work with many manufacturing clients and senior management of these companies are not too fond of marketers. For the longest time, many B2B companies were able to grow with minimal or no marketing support at all. That was, obviously, before the digital era. Sales made calls and closed deals with personal visits and phone calls. They also provided information to help buyers make decisions.  However, things have change

A quick story to share with you: People listen to my episodes and send me comments or questions privately. Well, I was at Content Marketing World and trying to get ready for my session. A big and tall gentleman, Danny Harris, approached me and said, “Pam, you’ve changed your podcast title and logo.” I was like, “What?” Someone actually noticed that I changed my podcast title from "7 Minute Marketing with Pam" to "B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner."  Wow!! I was shocked. Danny said: “Yeh, I listened to your podcast.” OMG, I actually met a listener in person the first time. I was jumping up and down in front of him and gave him the biggest hug. He probably thought I was crazy. Danny and I started chatting and he asked me why I decided to make the podcast title and branding change. Now, since he asked, let me take a moment to share with you why I decided to make the change.  I feel that my listeners tend to tune in for my content. The change of podcast title and image are not why they focus on, plus, I am n

Cindy is a newly promoted VP of Marketing for a manufacturing company. She knows how to get things done, but she tends to get deep into the weeds. That’s because, for a long time, her job was about getting things done. You can give her any marketing tactics and she would find a way to implement them. Now that she is a newly minted VP of Marketing, she is unable to pull herself out of the tactical level and instead focus on structuring a high-level budget plan discussion with her manager, who is the VP of Sales. So, she purchased a 10-hour consultation package from me and asked me to work with her to create a plan to get more budget. Her company’s revenue is a little over $200M, but her budget is less than 1% of the total revenue and her team is small. She feels that she can do so much more for sales and her company, if she has a bigger budget. She is right. The first thing she sent me was her budget file with a laundry list of marketing expenses. Ok, that’s not the thing I want to see. The first thing I wante