Empathy-Driven Marketing for Agencies | Daniel Burstein

Ann Kraus: Hi, and welcome to Simpli.fi TV. I'm Ann Kraus. Our guest today is Daniel Burstein. He is the content director for MarketingSherpa. He is also the host of the How I Made It in Marketing podcast, where he talks to other marketers about lessons learned throughout their careers. MarketingSherpa also reports on successful marketing campaigns from marketing departments and various agencies. Its parent organization, MECLABS Institute, tests successful practices that have been identified through MarketingSherpa reporting. Daniel has 23 years of experience in business journalism, content marketing, sales enablement to name just a few. Daniel, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Daniel Burstein: Hey, thanks for having me here, Ann. Ann Kraus: So good to meet you. Now, you've mentioned that content is your specialty. And if I'm an agency, I want to know how is your approach to content different than just the standard class on say, SEO or SEM? Daniel Burstein: Ann, it's not just my specialty, it's my passion. And I wish that for everyone, whatever they're doing, SEO, SEM, whatever it is, and I would say here's the main difference. The thing... SEO and SEM are wonderful, but I worry sometimes they're a little too keyword driven, right? They're looking at the algorithms a little too much. You're looking at the bidding a little too much. Those are important. I'll get to those in a second. But you've got to start with the customer because when we start with our own self-interest, when we start with some of those technical things, it blinds us to what the customer actually needs. And I'll give you a specific example for agencies, right? So MarketingSherpa, as you mentioned, our parent organization's, MECLABS Institute. It's well known for the MECLABS, conversion heuristic. This is a simple thinking tool based on... We have a patented methodology for it. It's based on decades of customer research. And then I won't go through the whole thing, but the number one factor that affects the probability of conversion, which getting someone to read content or engage with content to watch this, that's a conversion, too. Let's not forget that the number one factor is motivation. So if we can tap into the motivation of a potential customers... So real quick example. MECLABS, we have something called the AI Guild. We guide people through a specific methodology on how to build a super funnel. And something happens every time with agencies. I'll say 90% of agencies, even though we're professional marketers. We have something called a customer first objective, which guides the whole funnel. And the customer first objective, they always start with selling their service in some way, selling their service. And then as they work over time, they really try to get into the customer's head, which is really hard to do. They realize, wait a minute, they don't want to buy a service right away. They just want to learn something. They want to get better at something. So once we give them that, once we start with our content focused on the customer, then, oh my gosh... yes, SEO, SEM, all these important ways of getting it from the customer. Then we get there, but we can't start there, Ann. Ann Kraus: So using your approach then for your research, how would you guide an agency who wanted to say, get up some PR pitched to a particular publication, how would you approach that agency? Daniel Burstein: I'm glad you asked that because at MarketingSherpa, I get hundreds of pitches every week. So this isn't just a possibility. This is what I see. And so here are a few things the agencies do that I noticed real quick. One is, quantity over quality. I mean, they're just sending out... We call them press releases, but they're really spam. Another thing they do is because they're just sending all those out, they're not really focused on the motivation of the individual reporter or the individual publication. So as we would want to do with our customers, get to know that publication, read some of those articles, listen to some of those podcast episodes, get to know what that reporter's doing. So then when you pitch, you understand that motivation and you can tie into that motivation. You can say, "Hey, I see you reporting on these things. I appreciate this about your style." And then this ultimately is what's going to help your readers, right? 'Cause that's why I'm going to publish something is because it's going to help our readers, not because it's going to help the agency and also to make that pitch effective, right? Once you've got that right motivation, it comes down to specificity. The same thing we should do with marketing, the same thing any good storyteller author does, show don't tell. I'll give you one specific example from an agency. I can't tell you how many pitches I get from SEO agencies, right? They all want the back links from MarketingSherpa, we have a high DA, DR, whatever it's called. And they just tell us, they did this SEO campaign, and it's the same best practices every... A hundred other SEO agencies just sent us. They did internal linking and the right title tags and keyword research and all that. And it's almost like they're trying to prove to me that it's like a job interview. Like, "Oh, we did this." But the reader doesn't care. The reader doesn't care about what the agency did. What do they care about? They care about themselves. So here's a great example, and here's how you get specific. We reported recently on a Mazda dealership in Australia and worked with the SEO agency for that Mazda dealership, and they changed the title tags. And so most of the pitches we'd get, boom, that was a bullet point. We changed title tags. But we dived into it with them and they showed us specifically, here were the title tags before, here were the ones after. Here's why we changed it. For example, the previous title tags were only focused on this suburb, but these title tags were focused on the entire metro area 'cause we could bring all customers from there. There was a rebranding, so the previous title tags didn't work. So again, get specific, show, don't tell. Because at the end of the day, yes, you want the back link. Yes, you want the publicity, but what you really want to do, most of all is help the reader of that publication or you're not going to get any of that. Ann Kraus: Okay. All right. So I would imagine that some of this information that you're getting here is also coming from the many people that you've interviewed for your podcast. And has there been, other than the content and other than getting to know that person, has there been one common thread that you've heard in terms of lessons learned with working with agencies from the marketers that you interviewed? Daniel Burstein: Yeah, absolutely. And I worry, I've primed this common thread in a way, and I'll tell you why. Because there is an actual application that you fill out to get on the podcast. We've had about 2,600 applications so far, and about 65 episodes. So this is why I made the application 'cause I was specifically looking for this, but they've all been empathetic, right? They've all been empathetic. They've all had this idea of, okay, marketing isn't just, yes, it's my paycheck, it's paying my mortgage, it's meeting business results. Yes, it's all those things. And then it's technical things like we said, SEO and SEM and creativity. But at the end of the day, what marketing is, where it's exciting and where it works is it's empathetic. There are human beings out there in the world that we can best serve with our products, and we need to make sure that they perceive the value our products offer. And I'll give you one quick example. This was brand side, not agency side. We interviewed both, but it was a key marketer from Bark. They make BarkBox. She was with, I think, employee number three at the company. They're now a big public company. And one of her key lessons was around AI. And I'll read it specifically, use artificial intelligence and your marketing budget to make your customer's lives more fun and interesting, right? And what do we notice from that? I hear AI talked about a lot. We're studying AI, it's talked about efficiencies, right? It could be part of your headcount, right? It's talked about how to... You can decrease your media spends because of AI, all wonderful things. But what was she talking about? How to make your customer's lives more fun and interesting. Let's start there. Let's start with how we can help our customer's lives. Ann Kraus: And as an avid... I used to be an avid subscriber to BarkBox until my dog started eating all of the toys and we ended up having surgeries. So that's [inaudible] that relationship. So that was kind of a bummer. You have said in order to succeed in marketing or any communications at any agency, you have to put the customer first. And you've talked about this with the empathy with the people that you've interviewed. But that customer-centric thinking has been around for a while. Is there an added perspective that you have on agencies now that your research has provided? Daniel Burstein: Absolutely. Yeah. Customer-centric... It's funny in marketing, we're not like science. We use all these different terms that can mean a similar thing. Customer-centric, I worry we're putting the customer in the middle. We're targeting them like crazy to get something that we want, right? That we want. Versus putting the customer first. Actually, a lot of decisions are clear in business and in marketing, but when there's a 50/50 jump ball, what does it come down to? Does it come to our own needs or does it come down to the customer's? So we one day decided, let's study and see actually how effective this is. So I'll tell you briefly this data. We conducted research with 2,400 consumers in America to represent all consumers. We have the right demographics and 1,200 we said, "Hey, tell us about a company that you like that you've had a good experience with." 1,200, "Tell us about a company you've had a bad experience with." And the biggest differentiator we noticed was not necessarily what the customer did, but was this feeling that they put the customer first. And now here's the great thing. If you're just a business man or woman and you're like, "I don't care about helping anyone. I want to help my bottom line." Here's why that matters to you. Because we learned, not shockingly, when people were satisfied... And again, putting the customer first was a key thing that made sure they were satisfied, not necessarily how the company performed. When they were satisfied, they were a lot more likely to do all these activities we would want, you would expect. They're more likely to purchase from us again. But when we saw the actual numbers, it was mind-blowing. They were 713% more likely to say that they're very likely to purchase from the company again. Can you imagine any other tactic you could use? 713% more likely to say they're very likely to purchase from the company, again. That's where customer first marketing and a customer first business comes in as being successful. I'll give you just a key anecdote to make sure... Why would this even work? Even if a company failed us, they would still say they were satisfied. Give an example from my personal life. I'm married, my wife asked me to take the garbage out and I haven't been doing things lately. I've been slipping and whatever, and I don't take the garbage out. She questions my motivations. It's not the action I did, it's the motivations. "What? Does care about me anymore? Thinks he's too good? Whatever's going on there, he prioritizes his job over mine." However, things are going good in that relationship. She sees I'm prioritizing her, doing all the right things. I don't take the garbage out. The same activity like a website failing, like a product failing. Motivation being different, and her saying, "I just see he's busy. He's got his heart and right place. He forgot about it. He's busy." Right? She's still satisfied. It's the same with our customers. I'm sure we can all think of those experiences if we think that that company is really acting in our best interest with his marketing, with his business. We'll give him more leeway when something goes wrong. Ann Kraus: Interesting. Okay. Leeway for the garbage ticking out. We'll see how that goes over with my husband. I'm going to give that one a try. Do you have, as a producer of a podcast and a host of a podcast yourself, is there a podcast or a book that you would recommend that you think that kind of helped drive where you are today? Daniel Burstein: Well, if there's a book, I would mention the Marketer's Philosopher by Flip McLaughlin, right? So this is our founder. I work with him every day. So I'm a little biased. I don't know if you can see it. Really interesting book here, 40 Brief Reflections on the Power of Your Value proposition. Two things I'm not related to. Early in my career I wrote Being Direct by Lester Wonderman. He was talking about direct marketing. But my gosh, it's so true in the internet today. It's a really helpful book. My favorite podcast lately is Big Shot with Harley Finkelstein and David Segal. Harley, if you know, is the founder of Shopify. I love that podcast. I've just started diving into that. It's really interesting conversations with business leaders. Ann Kraus: Interesting. Okay, great. Thank you for sharing those. And what is the best way for our viewers, or our listeners to learn more about you? Daniel Burstein: Well, they probably don't care about me. I'll say they probably care about themselves. So the best way they can see the things I work on that help them, just go to marketingsherpa.com. Marketing S-H-E-R-P-A.com. There's tons of free case studies, we have marketing data, we have the podcast interviews to help you with your career, get customers, your campaigns, all that stuff. A lot of free stuff there for you. Ann Kraus: All right, great. Thank you so, so much. And I really appreciate you being part of Simpli.fi TV. Daniel Burstein: Hi. Thanks for having me. Ann Kraus: And thank you all for watching. We appreciate it. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying workflow solutions. For more information, visit simply.fi, that's S-I-M-P-L-I.F-I. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Ann Kraus, and I'll see you next time.