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Marketing isn’t about who arrives, it’s about who stays.
You can follow the best practices that other marketers have already worn thin, but it’s unlikely that you will make any real headway in your industry with a well-worn approach. It takes more than faithfully adhering to these so-called “rules.” Anybody can do that. And so many people do.
At the same time, it’s unwise to take uncalculated risks. So, how do we find a happy medium to attract audiences and to keep them engaged?
The founder Marketing Showrunners and the author of Break the Wheel, Jay Acunzo, recently joined me to share marketing techniques that are actually worth your audience’s time.
Jay has worked for a variety of marketing giants, including Google and HubSpot. Now, he’s focused on creating great customer experiences while educating others along the way. With Marketing Showrunners, he’s focused on serialized content, original episodes, and networks of shows – rather than one-off efforts. Think: podcasts, documentary series, video shows, and beyond.
A few of the key points we touch on are:
- Defining your brand and linking it to customer experience
- Keeping your audience’s attention
- Building a showrunning function in your organization
- Defying best practices
Enjoy the conversation!
Increase Lifetime Value and Decrease Acquisition Cost by Holding Attention
To hear this episode and dozens of other great conversations, subscribe to The Customer Experience Podcast in Apple Podcasts (click here).
If you listen to podcasts elsewhere, we’ve got you covered! Listen to any or every episode in Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Stitcher.
You can also listen to the episode with Jay Acunzo right here…
Your Brand and Customer Experience
People are experiencing your brand whether you’re shaping that experience or not.
Hopefully, this doesn’t take you by surprise. Jay describes this in his definition of customer experience in the 43-second video clip below …
(click here for more on Andrew Davis, who Jay mentions)
What this revelation should move you to do is define your brand and live it out everywhere, especially where customers are interacting with it. A working definition: your brand is how others experience the collective behavior of your people.
This means anyone from potential business partners to future employees to investors to longtime customers is – in some capacity – interacting with your brand.
The good news: You have the power to be proactive when it comes to your employees. These are the people on the frontlines and in the trenches, doing the work that directly affects a customer’s buying journey.
How are your employees delivering, talking about, writing about, tweeting about, and representing your brand? Are all of these components creating a cohesive and positive experience?
It all starts with people. And it’s made better through alignment and leadership.
How to Keep Your Audience’s Attention
The cost of customer attention is rising dramatically. It can be daunting to think about all the resources that went into acquiring a customer and now you have to worry about keeping them. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Jay explains that grabbing people’s attention is moving to the backburner. Holding customers’ attention is where energy should be invested. Jay explains this shift in the video embedded below …
By offering resources and genuine content to your current clientele, a marketing flywheel can be set into motion. As a result, all of the energy that’s put into acquiring one customer will be reused to attract more. It’s up to you and your team to continuously generate valuable content that potential customers are attracted to and that current customers are excited to share and promote.
The method Jay has found to deliver the most value is via serialistic and episodic content. Building worthwhile podcast episodes into their own series gives listeners value on top of value. Plus, it keeps them coming back because they trust the next episode will be as engaging as the last. This is what Jay calls a journey arc and it’s essential to foster a trusting relationship between your brand and your audience.
Think about how much your brand’s customer experience could improve if you translate Jay’s serialistic method into your own offerings.
Here’s a graphic from the Marketing Showrunners website that breaks down Jay’s take on the importance of holding attention to increase customer lifetime value (LTV) and decrease customer acquisition cost (CAC) …
Your shows don’t just build top of funnel (grabbing attention), it also increases velocity through the funnel as trust and relationship are built (holding attention).
This changes your view of the metrics that matter. Jay explains in this video clip …
Best Practices Don’t Always Know Best
As Jay’s book title “Break the Wheel” suggests, you shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel to begin improving customer experience. In fact, you might not even use the wheel at all.
Jay recommends thinking about how your brand can be the “only,” not simply the “best.”
For instance, you might have a podcast that interviews the most famous influencers in marketing. But, so do hundreds of other people. How is your podcast different? How are you producing the only podcast that delivers the special sauce your audience craves? How do you take your unique brand attributes and run those interviews through that filter or lens?
Don’t be afraid to veer off the beaten path. As you become more confident and practiced in your unique approach, it will continually feel like less and less of a risk.
In Jay’s podcast series Exceptions, he goes inside some of the top B2B companies to find out what they’re doing differently. From these experiences, Jay has found that successful marketers who seem to be making risky moves actually have some of the most methodical and intentional plans in place. While it may appear that these teeming companies are swimming against the best practices current, they’re actually pioneering the new industry norms.
To start thinking like a marketing visionary, first consider these three components:
- Your team
- Your customers
- Your resources
By thinking logically about these three matters, creative initiatives won’t appear so rebellious.
How do the “visionaries” among us pioneer the new norms? By acting more like investigators than experts. Jay explains …
Next Steps
To increase customer lifetime value and decrease customer acquisition cost, you must develop a well-defined brand, train your team to deliver it, turn it into episodic content that builds on itself, and make learning and innovating a habit.
Remember: People are going to have an experience of your brand whether you control it or not. Make it a good one!
This post is based on an interview with Jay Acunzo, founder of Marketing Showrunners.
Want to continue the ongoing CX conversation? Subscribe to The Customer Experience Podcast (click right here). When you get there, take a moment to rate or review the podcast – it’s very helpful.
If you don’t use Apple Podcasts, listen to The Customer Experience Podcast on Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Stitcher.
More from The Customer Experience Podcast
Marketers You Can Hear Right Now:
- “The Holy Grail of Connecting with Customers” with Ann Handley (Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs)
- “Balancing Automation, AI, and Human Relationships” with Samantha Stone (founder and CMO, Marketing Advisory Network)
- “Why Content Experience Beats Content Marketing” with Randy Frisch (co-founder and CMO, Uberflip)
- Explore more listening options by clicking here
Great Guests Coming Soon:
- Chief Education Evangelist Jaime Casap (Google)
- Marketing leader and brand strategist Kristy Krueger (Revel Health)
- Venture investor and startup advisor Dave Knox (Predicting The Turn)
Email Ethan(at)BombBomb(dot)com to send me podcast feedback or guest recommendations.
Video Isn’t Just For Shows (And It Doesn’t Always Require Production)
Episodic and serialized video content is awesome. If you were excited by Jay’s ideas and experiences shared in this episode, you should pursue it.
But there’s another style of video that’s more about relationships than it is about marketing. It’s about conversation, connection, and even conversion. No lights, scripts, green screen, casting, or editing required!
Learn how to implement simple, personal videos in your business from the Amazon #1 bestseller in Business Sales, Business Communication, and Customer Relations, the 800-CEO-Read #1 bestseller in its opening week of release, and a Barnes & Noble bestseller it its opening week of release.
