Podcast: Maximize Your Results with Minimal Time Marketing
I said live on a podcast to forget about social media for your marketing plan. Is my reputation ruined? 😱
No. 😘
Here's why.
There are MANY other things you can do to maximize your results with minimal time spent marketing.
But how do you know which of those things to do?
I joined Nicole Gallicchio-Elz on the latest episode of Not Your Average CEO: Lifeline Podcast, and we dug deep into marketing for CEOs and business owners that have limited resources (my specialty ✨).
Listen to the full episode below.
Episode Description
In this episode, we delve into the world of marketing efficiency and success with our special guest, Xand Griffin. Xand, a marketing strategist with over a decade of experience, shares valuable insights on how to achieve outstanding results with limited time and resources.
Discover the importance of maintaining your sanity in the fast-paced marketing world and why focusing on the customer experience and journey is key to avoiding reactive marketing. Xand's unique perspective challenges the common belief that you should be everywhere on social media. Instead, she advocates for a strategic and measured approach to marketing efforts. Learn how to map out your customer's journey effectively and why staying in front of things is essential for business growth.
Podcast Transcript
Nicole Gallicchio-Elz: Welcome back to another episode of Not Your Average CEO: Lifeline. Today, we are talking about Maximizing Results with Minimal Time Marketing Spent. We have a special guest, Xand Griffin with us. Xand, welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Can you tell our audience a little about yourself and your background?
Xand Griffin: Thank you so much for having me. My name is Xand Griffin. I've been working with companies for over 10 years now on their marketing strategies.
Alot of the time I've worked with resource strapped marketing departments or been in a department of one which leads to efficiency and understanding exactly where you need to focus your efforts so that you can find success with not a lot of time, money, and sanity.
Overcoming Overwhelm in Marketing Plans
Nicole Gallicchio-Elz: Yes, that’s a key. Not a lot of people mention that on our podcast but staying sane through everything is really important. Can you tell our audience what you have experienced that people are doing wrong with their time and marketing?
Xand Griffin: I want to tell you a little story about this entrepreneurial program I was a apart of. This program was through Cornell University and they asked you to focus on one area of your business and I was pretty much shocked that 75% of those participants said my marketing plan. I need to put together a communication plan, a marketing plan, a social media blast.
I was shocked because it was such a blocker for all of these really really smart and successful CEOs and business owners.
And so I took the time to talk with them and I asked, “Why, what is the issue? What is blocking you with these marketing plans?”
And a lot of the time they said that they felt overwhelmed and stressed out. This is where I talk about the sanity part. They have so much going on that thinking about marketing and all the different efforts that they had to do, it was really hurting their business because they weren't able to get to that next step.
So that's when I became really interested in saying “Okay, I have this ability to understand what works because I've been through the experience of it.” I really sat down and thought hey, like how do I take that experience and understand where I start so I can help others with that?
That is really where I started thinking about the customer experience, the customer journey, and how you move into understanding your customer before you start marketing so you can avoid being a reactive marketer and just throwing stuff at a wall and see what works.
The Unpopular Opinion on Social Media Marketing
Nicole Gallicchio-Elz: I know that a lot of our listeners, because I was talking to one of our listeners this morning, have this mindset that being a CEO they have to think about social media to market on LinkedIn and Twitter and Facebook and maybe TikTok and Pinterest and posting everywhere and tagging people and then working in groups and blogs and Google reviews. It becomes a beast and putting it, even to paper, I think becomes really overwhelming for our listeners and the typical CEO who is maybe or solopreneurs doing it by themselves.
So I am very interested and I know our listeners are to hear what solutions you have to spending less time in this space.
Xand Griffin: I have a very unpopular opinion: I usually don't recommend social media for people that have really really resource-strapped marketing departments or no marketing departments. To do it well, you have to have focus and time and effort on it.
If you do see that that is where the majority of your customers are living. Yes. It can absolutely be a tactic that you would want to add into your marketing plan.
I was just talking with someone the other day where they said, “I want to get on social media. I want to be on all these platforms, but I have to develop all this different creative and all this different content and I am not focused on that. That's not my main priority.” And I'm like, just don't do it. Don't do it. It's unpopular but it's really about figuring out the places where you can put the least effort into getting the maximum return.
I find on social media you have to work really, really hard to be able to build that audience up to be able to reap the benefits of it.
If you're just starting out on a marketing strategy, the more effective thing is going to be picking the thing that you can stick with and be very consistent with. Also picking the thing that you can measure and actually see if it's going to be working for you or doing the thing that you want it to do. A lot of the time people look at social media because everyone's doing it and they say I want to do that, but it might not make sense for your business. It really depends on going back again to understanding your customer and where they're living and where they're getting that information from.
Nicole Gallicchio-Elz: I'm so glad that you brought that not popular opinion to our audience because that's why we're here right? The average marketer may say, oh you need a bazillion social media platforms and you have to post three times a day at 11 a.m. Or 2:02 p.m. It is not suited for everyone.
My advice typically to our clients is where are you engaging the most? Where are you finding your referrals? Where your clients coming from?
Before I ask you about how to map out that customer journey, how do you think that not posting on social media or not spending all of this time would affect the customer experience in general? Do you think that it affects engagement if they're not everywhere all at once?
Xand Griffin: It's about trade-offs and understanding where that customer experience is the most affected. If you have a bunch of your customers reaching out for help on social media, 100% get on social media and monitor that. If you don't see that people are engaging with you, it might not move the needle much. To be able to focus all this time and effort on social. You might see that people are emailing and calling you more often, say from a customer service perspective and you want to focus your efforts there instead of saying like responding to them on social, if they're not there.
I definitely think all of the decisions that you make as long as you're being thoughtful and understanding what is happening to your customer, what they're feeling, and the touch points that they're going through. You can definitely be able to design your journey with them and understand where they're at.
I do believe there is a mindset shift you have to make to truly start to see things from their perspective. Once you do that mindset shift, you can make the decisions that are going to benefit the customer and see it come back tenfold in your marketing plan.
Mapping the Customer Journey
Nicole Gallicchio-Elz: Can you talk about how you actually map out the customer journey and what that means?
Xand Griffin: So the easiest way to start with mapping a customer journey is to simply draw a line on a piece of paper, a horizontal line, and then put different points on the line. Then start to write the different ways that people engage with you or interact with you.
If you know that when someone signs a contract with you or signs up for your product, that is their first touchpoint as an “official” customer. You'll put that somewhere around the middle because you don't want to forget about the experience that happens before. Alot of people when they do talk about customer journey mapping they talk about the customer service aspect of it or the customer engagement side of it. But really the customer journey starts all the way when they’re a prospect and when they haven’t even heard of your company yet.
What are the very first touch points there? So I would do a simple line put dots on that line and then start to brainstorm those things. Have an idea of the order that things go in.
And then from there what you'll do is you'll validate those reasons and understand if that's even correct. Some people don't know all the steps that happen prior or after becoming a customer and they only discover that when they start either talking to customers or surveying customers or even talking with your employees as well and understanding it from their perspective. The employee experience side of things.
My advice on that is to just brainstorm, dump it out, and then start to figure out the best ways you can engage with the people that are around you. They're really the best kept secret in businesses to engage with the people you work with both on your employees side and your customers side.
Nicole Gallicchio-Elz: That’s really helpful. Is that something that you see often, that they are not really understanding all of the points in the various journey, and that’s not something that they’re necessarily aware of?
Xand Griffin: I do see that I think that people before doing the validation steps, sometimes people can say “Oh I 100% know how and where our customers are getting engaged with,” and then you talk with a customer success rep or a sales rep and you say I didn't even know this was part of the process.
When you're starting out as a CEO or business owner and it's a smaller company, you might know all the steps, but once you start trusting those people that know how to do things in a way that's going to benefit the customer better.
They might modify the process and of course you're trusting them to do that. You might just lose track of where that journey is going. And so keeping those lines of communication open is definitely something that is necessary and needed and not only on the customer side and the sales side even on the product side and any other part of your business, they all contribute to this journey of the customer and that's where you need to keep those keep those lines of communication open.
Revisiting Passion and Staying Proactive
Nicole Gallicchio-Elz: Thank you for that advice. I think that's a great tip for our listeners and would love to hear what your other tips are to our listeners on shifting their mindset from all things marketing just to focusing on their businesses.
Xand Griffin: The biggest tip I have on shifting your mindset is to revisit why you are doing this. Like what was your original passion. Remembering that and understanding the different pieces that go into that are: you're trying to create change in the world and you're trying to do something that's different and out there. Remembering that and remembering the reason behind it. You're able to hire the right people to focus on those things, then you're going to be able to give them good direction and help them move forward in a way that is going to ultimately serve your passion and why you decided to do this.
Revisiting that passion is definitely one. Another one is to stay in front of things. Make it an intentional part of how you are doing business every day.
Another client I worked with previously had set up an NPS or net promoter score survey to inform pretty much everything to understand like okay, “how are people feeling about about the company?”.
This CEO reviewed these every time they came in and understood and reached out onto the customers when it was good and when it was bad to really understand the difference of experiences. From there you're able to once you have this mindset shift going, you're able to really put into action the things that you know are going to impact the touch points on this journey.
A big part of this mindset shift is also about automation. That net promoter score, depending on the actual responses from the customer, it would automatically send a message directly from the inbox of the person who is going to be responding to them, different messages that were personalized.
Seeing all these different touch points you're able to say “what are the patterns that are happening here? And how can I make this more efficient for everyone involved and make this a part of our daily life? Instead of being very reactive and saying “Oh a customer was mad now, what do we do?”
Put in the work up front to say okay, here are the steps that we're going to take if a customer gives us a three on an NPS score. Here's the steps we're going to take if we get 10. We're going to ask them right away. Hey, would you be able to review us or would you like to be a part of a testimonial video? There's ways of capturing that in that time frame that you'll be able to make better decisions on when you have that mindset shifted.
Nicole Gallicchio-Elz: Very interesting. I know a lot of our listeners, even the clients that I work with they're always reactive. They're stuck in this loop of “I need to market everywhere”. I want to ask you if you see that they're stuck, that they feel they need to do all these marketing efforts all at once and I know that you said to look at their customer Journey, but do you feel like they still get stuck like they feel like they're missing out if they're not doing everything all at once and in marketing?
Xand Griffin: The way that I would respond to that is that when people tend to market reactively like you said in like be everywhere all at once a big part of that is because their fear base they and they're scared really because they don't understand where their customers are and what they need in certain time frames. So instead of being very surgical in your marketing plan you're more saying okay. We’ll just lay cover fire because we don't totally get them right now.
I do see people even after customer Journey Maps saying, we need to do all of these things. Yeah, because we're we're laying down cover fire.
The way you get around that is to have the continual influx of customer feedback and make it a part of your day. If you're continually told your phone system is so irritating you need to fix this. Even operational process things like you are going to focus on that and understand that you can't kind of split your time in between everything.
That’s the other part of things which is if you're spread so thin you're not doing one thing well. I would prefer people pick one thing that they can be consistent at and and truly make change with.
I'll take a short diversion, I started out this year on a health journey. I was just ready. I was very tired all the time. And so I started out with a 7,000 step goal everyday. I wasn't even getting to 7,000 steps because I was being very sedentary and so by doing that focusing on just one thing. I have already felt better and healthier. Increased my step goal, been more successful with it. I'm at 12,000 steps every day now.
Just feeling better in general and that's really how you can approach your marketing. It's just take one thing that you're good at and keep doing it well, if you're getting the results you need.
Nicole Gallicchio-Elz: I thought it was really important for our listeners to hear it because I hear it from my clients and hear it from people I network with so I really wanted to hone in on your advice. I I think it's really important for them to realize that it doesn't have to be everything all at once in order to achieve success in the marketing space and like you said in life in general. I have a standing desk now that I got a couple of months ago and it was my small step for the summer.
Our last question like always is can you explain to us What Not Your Average CEO means to you?
Xand Griffin: I love the name Not Your Average CEO because what it means to me is a wanting to be better and to do better as a business leader. To explain what that means is that you don't want to just be standard, you want to be able to reach new heights, to learn new things and to be able to impact the world in this very positive way and to do it in a way that is different and unique. So that's what that means to me.
Nicole Gallicchio-Elz: I love it. I love it. Can you tell our audience where they can find more from you?
Xand Griffin: The best place to reach me is on my website. www.xandgriffin.com you can find me on LinkedIn at Xand Griffin as well. I'm more than happy to talk with anyone about marketing because I'm a super nerd and I love this stuff.
Nicole Gallicchio-Elz: It was wonderful hearing from you. Thank you so much. You've been listening to Not Your Average CEO Lifeline.
