Episode 90 – People’s attention spans are getting shorter.

My guest on the show today is Courtney Kehl. Courtney is the Marketing Manager for Enterprise Networking and global campaigns...

The post Episode 90 – People’s attention spans are getting shorter. appeared first on Sideways8.

My guest on the show today is Courtney Kehl. Courtney is the Marketing Manager for Enterprise Networking and global campaigns for Cisco Systems. She is a proven B2B enterprise growth leader with $4.3 Billion in company acquisitions over nine years, and currently a marketing advisor for early stage startups with expert marketing advisors.

Adam: [00:08] Hi, and welcome to the Good People, Good Marketing podcast. A podcast about digital marketing and how to make it better so that good people and good organizations can have good marketing as well. I’m your host, Adam Walker, co-founder of Sideways8, a digital marketing agency and 48in48, a nonprofit dedicated to hosting events that build 48 websites for 48 nonprofits in 48 hours.

[00:28] My guest on the show today is Courtney Kehl. Courtney is the Marketing Manager for Enterprise Networking and global campaigns for Cisco Systems. She is a proven B2B enterprise growth leader with $4.3 Billion in company acquisitions over nine years, and currently a marketing advisor for early stage startups with expert marketing advisors. Courtney, welcome to the show.

Courtney: [00:51] Thanks for having me. That was a great little intro.

Adam: [00:54] Yeah, you’ve got two jobs, how’s that going?

Courtney: [00:58] Well, you know, advising on the side is really just fun, because I’ve been doing it for so many years, so it’s great to help folks along their path to success and insert some experts along the way. And in Cisco of course seemed to be where all roads were going to lead. I had APP dynamics roll into Cisco and more recently [01:20 inaudible] on the SD WAN side roll into Cisco. So it seemed like that was just sort of my destiny at one point, and we’ll see.

Adam: [01:28] Well thanks for joining me on the show. I’m excited to chat with you and hear a little bit about your experience and expertise. So if you’re ready we can go ahead and dive in.

Courtney: [01:35] Yeah, let’s do it.

Adam: [01:37] All right. Question number one, related to digital marketing. Can you tell us something that has worked well for you?

Courtney: [01:43] Yeah, absolutely. So, digital marketing in today’s world, I feel like the real estate is really across the digital space and the digital footprint that a company has. You really need to put your efforts there. Traditional marketing folks really lean toward field events and physical events. If you imagine taking that physical event and making it into a virtual event, that transcends across the concrete walls, and across a physical barrier and now you’ve got the digital footprint that you can actually go from east coast to west coast to Europe and even over to APJ. It really allows you to have that impact and long lasting impression. So I’ve been really finding a huge result with virtual summits. It’s essentially sessions and keynotes and track sessions across three or four days, that just take over the industry for that moment in time.

Adam: [02:48] Well, that’s fantastic. I’ve actually thought about doing that sort of thing for nonprofits because of my work with 48in48, which is my nonprofit – we do hackathons to build 48 nonprofits websites in 48 hours, and I thought about actually doing a virtual nonprofit marketing summit essentially, just for that kind of things. That’s kind of interesting that you’re talking about that maybe we’ll have to talk more about that in the future.

Courtney: [03:13] It would be great for that and it’s really interactive as well, so folks are really engaged, especially with a hackathon, there’s a live twitter feed and then there’s the chat rooms and people can really just kind of jump online and feel as if they’re a part of something. Know it’s all happening in the digital space, in a digital arena I should say. So definitely love to talk to you more about that.

Adam: [03:38] Yeah, that’s fantastic. I’ve not run into anybody in hosting this show that’s really doing much of that. And so I’m kind of excited to hear about it, because I think you’re right. I mean it’s not nearly as limiting as a physical conference. It’s a lot less cost prohibitive. You can do it from anywhere in the world, but you can be just as engaged and get just as much information and you can really even network just as well as long as you’re intentional on social media, and on the different platforms that the summit’s using.

Courtney: [04:03] Yeah. No, I’ve had huge results over the last four years of doing these. I’m now queuing them up almost every other month.

Adam: [04:10] Oh Wow. That’s fantastic. I’d definitely love to hear more about that. Okay. Well I’ll put that in my back pocket and we’ll circle back to that in a little while for sure then. Question number two, can you tell us something that has not worked well that we can learn from?

Courtney: [04:24] Sure. I’m finding that videos, so people’s attention span is getting shorter and shorter, which I understand there’s a lot of noise out there. There’s a lot of folks, there’s a lot of choices so people can really just come to you in their own time and in their own way. So what was, ten years ago, the buyer journey was really linear and you could really map the assets to the right time, and when they were buying and when they were educating and so on and so forth. Now folks are really kind of coming to the brand and coming to the actual company in their own way and in their own journey, so to speak. So it’s really not as cookie cutter as it once was. Videos as an example, four minute videos where people are falling off at the one-minute mark, they’re taking a look and then they’re moving on. Whether that’s a top of funnel asset or whether we need to look at, okay, maybe change our scoring system to look at how much time engagement people are giving your actual company. If somebody’s spending an hour with you, if they’re spending 30 minutes with a demo, if they’re spending the entire four minutes of the video, they’re actually interested far more than the one minute and then they dropped off a different [05:59 unclear]

Adam: [06:01] Wow. I kind of like your statement. It’s not as cookie cutter as it once was. I feel like that’s exactly where marketing has just continued to go. I mean there was a point at which you do this one thing and it sort of works for everybody and you can really ramp up everything. And now it’s just so much more nuanced, so much more targeted. So much more niched, or however you want to pronounce it. You have to be a lot more intentional about all of it, right?

Courtney: [06:29] There’s no organic process to it, you just  really want to keep things more industry focused. People have a tendency, because they’re living and breathing in their own company, in their own day to day is centered around that. They forget a lot of times that leads to naval gazing, is what I call it, but it’s, you really want to have it 80% about the industry, about the problem, and then 20% comes back to the company and how that inserts itself. You’ve got to kind of fight against that as well.

Adam: [07:06] So you said in your marketing, when you’re talking 80% about the problem and 20% about the actual company, that being the solution, right?

Courtney: [07:14] Yeah. Don’t worry so much about, of course you want to find who your audience is and ensure that they know who you are. But more importantly, just know that you’re discussing the industry. You’re discussing the market, you’ve got a voice, your conversation at the table. And your audience will almost organically naturally come to you in various ways. The buyer journey is, again, not that straight lined.

Adam: [07:45] Great. That’s fantastic. And last question, question number three, related to digital marketing. Can you tell us something that you’re excited about?

Courtney: [07:53] Well, I’m actually, I’m sitting here on this podcast. I’m actually really excited about podcasts. I have seen an uptick on podcasts in the last year. I think that even in the last six months. It’s sort of this untapped resource that marketers really when they’re done right, they have a huge opportunity to help companies if you kind of make them a regular part of your cadence and regular part of your programs. And folks sort of don’t realize the value of them until they really see it from soup to nuts. I’m so excited about podcasts.

Adam: [08:35] Well, I’m excited about podcasts too. That’s great. It’s interesting that you say that. For me, podcasts are really fascinating because number one, it’s a really easy way for me to create high level content and valuable content very quickly, because I can talk a lot faster and a lot more effectively than I can write. And so I can create this good content sort of as a mine dump that way. But the other thing is I get to meet a lot of interesting people in doing it, and that’s never a bad thing for business, right? It’s kind of an indirect benefit, but I get to expand my network broadly because I get to talk to all these interesting people that have these interesting perspectives. And then lastly, I get, it’s almost like market research, I mean I’m learning things that are working from people that are actually in the trenches doing the work, versus just picking up a book or whatever else. And so, I’m learning, I’m getting better, my audience is learning. They’re getting better. I’m producing content that’s valuable to me, valuable to the audience, everything else.

Courtney: [09:31] It totally comes full circle. People were much more willing to hop on a call and chat and talk shop, and then you take that and you transcribe it as well, which increases the SEO value when [09:44 inaudible] their website, and of course the podcast goes out across the social channels and it can actually be repurposed into a blog as well, which is a secondary result of it that’s even more goodness and even more SEO value. And if you actually even roll it into a second series, which would be a Webinar, then you’re really starting to create a build and a momentum. I think there is an absolute opportunity for podcasts to fit into a regular part of every company’s programs.

Adam: [10:18] Absolutely. Yeah. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed doing this one. And then I’ve also got another one as well that’s all about technology and that sort of thing, so I’ve really enjoyed it a lot. It’s been a lot of fun. Both of them have been. Well, Courtney, let me see if I can recap what we’ve learned so far. So related to digital marketing, what has worked well? You said taking physical events and putting them in, and changing them into virtual events works well. You create a digital footprint. They can span the globe, and it creates long lasting impression. So you host virtual summits, which is basically like a conference online, which I think is really fascinating and kind of amazing.

[10:54] For question number two, what has not worked well that we can learn from. People’s attention spans are getting shorter. There are lots of choices. You mentioned that ten years ago the buyer journey was linear, and it’s not linear anymore and that marketing is really no longer cookie cutter. And so we have to be very specific, very engaged, very nuanced in our approach to marketing. We have to recognize that 80% of our marketing needs to be about the problem that we’re solving, not necessarily about the company that’s solving it. And so we really need to be careful that we’re not tone deaf and just talking about ourselves the whole time. And I think that’s increasingly important from a marketing perspective. And then a question three, what are you excited about and excited about podcast because they are an untapped resource for creating content, doing networking, SEO value. I think all of the different things that we talked about, when done right, they provide a huge opportunity for organizations. Did I miss anything in the recap?

Courtney: [11:42] That’s wonderful. That’s great. This was fun.

Adam: [11:45] Yeah, this is fun. Yeah, I love that. I get to talk to great people that are really, really smart and you’ve got me really interested in virtual summits now. So this can be dangerous.

Courtney: [11:55] Virtual summits are a lot of work, but they are cost effective and the results are huge. I mean all kinds of follow up on that, but it’s definitely worth the conversation and to identify if it’s the right time for any individual company. There’s a few things that are needed, but at the end of the day, it’s definitely worth the time.

Adam: [12:18] I’m gonna make a note as soon as we’re done with this conversation to follow up with you about that for sure. There’s no doubt about it. Well, do you have any final thoughts that you want to share with our audience?

Courtney: [12:26] No, no, this was wonderful. I appreciate it. If folks want to reach out, I’m happy to talk shop anytime, feel free. Also there’s an entire team of experts that are also passionate in all their various areas, from anything from the programs to text act messaging and branding and you name it, they’re behind expert marketing advisors.

Adam: [12:48] Fantastic. Well, Courtney, thanks for being on the show. I’d love to have you back and stay tuned so we can talk virtual summit. Thanks for listening to the Good People, Good Marketing podcast. To get more resources about digital marketing, make sure to go to goodpeoplegoodmarketing.com, where you can find more podcasts, blogs, and other fun resources. Also, if you want to find me your host, you can find me on Twitter @AJWalker, and on my blog at adamjwalker.com, where I blog about leadership productivity, habit building, and the craziness of having five kids. Thanks and tune in next time.

The post Episode 90 – People’s attention spans are getting shorter. appeared first on Sideways8.