Go-To-Market Plan feat. Tony Bell

Tony Bell, Executive Director of Client Services and Media at Innis Maggiore, joins Mark for this week's episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast to discuss the topic of go-to-market strategies. Tune in to learn how to develop an effective go-to-market strategy, the “bothism” approach, common go-to-market strategy mistakes, and how to dramatize your position. 

Join Mark and Tony for 30-ish as they discuss all things marketing, advertising, and of course … positioning

Transcript

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Mark Vandegrift 
Welcome to another episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Vandegrift, and with me today is a very special guest, Tony Bell. Tony, you have one of the longest titles in our agency, so I'll try to get it right. Executive Director of Client Services and Media. Did I nail it?

Tony Bell 
Yep, you did. Great job, Mark.

Mark Vandegrift
Thank you. Well, Tony's joining us again. You may remember him from a past episode, and we're going to discuss the topic of go-to market strategies. Tony, why don't you give us a little introduction to yourself and to this topic.

Tony Bell 
Sure, thanks for having me back, Mark. In my role at Innis Maggiore, I work very closely with our client services team and all of our other disciplines within our full service offering to help develop and really kind of stay on strategy. It's important to collaborate with the whole team as you know, looking forward to develop a comprehensive go-to-market strategy for our clients. Really, it provides a roadmap aligning sales, marketing and the product teams to give them more of a competitive advantage in the market. So that's my job working very closely with those teams to get that done.

Mark Vandegrift 
So that all sounds like fancy schmancy marketing talk, but the phrase go to market is being used a lot lately. And why do you think it's being used a lot lately and yet we see so many people getting it wrong?

Tony Bell 
Well, I think it's trendy because everyone is looking for that silver bullet to win market share quickly. They want results right now. But where people get tripped up is by treating it like a simple flow chart or a checklist of ads to run. They focus so much on the go part of it and you know, they forget about the strategy. A real go to market plan isn't just about selling. It's about having a coordinated plan to win specific share of the prospects mind and get them to act on that. Let's look at it a little differently. You know, I know we talked in the past podcast that my weekend job as tailgating dad for my son's lacrosse team. Well, it's very similar to planning a successful tailgate. I take it back to that. You have a plan or you spend a lot of money, no one shows up and you have 25 bags of chips and more dessert than anybody can handle. Our unique position, I would say as a leader in the tailgate dad section, but it's because we are always there two hours early, ready to go, and we always provide a main course. But you have to do your research. Where can we tailgate? What are the rules? You don't want people showing up with things they're not supposed to have. What are we going to cook? And that matters a lot too. This weekend we did brats. I simmered them in amber beer, garlic and onions. But I had two batches. I had one that was a habanero and one without. But similar to developing a media strategy, I couldn't just go all in on the habanero. You know, our web team, they have these hot sauces and I'm always down there they're always trying to trip me up. And they can't because I just, I think my tongue is completely numb. I had to curb my heat sensors back a little bit to cater to my audience. It was one of the best tailgates we had. We're going to keep it very simple tomorrow with the burgers and our pregame in Holland, Michigan for the second round of the playoffs. But it's a lot of fun, but it takes a lot of planning.

Mark Vandegrift 
Okay, so let's go to this idea of the strategy side. So in developing a go-to-market strategy, what's the most important thing in developing the strategy to ensure that it is effective?

Tony Bell 
Okay. Well, I think it's no surprise to you or our listeners to hear me say that it starts with positioning. But seriously, if you look behind you, if you don't have a solid bridge between your product and what's already in the prospect's mind, you're adding to the noise that's already in the market. You also have to assign a purpose to every dollar instead of just trying to be everywhere you need to define specific roles for each one of the channels, whether that's building awareness, nurturing consideration, or closing the sale at the point of conversion.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. And you know, you, you mentioned building awareness and people want the media results. Like you said, they're focusing on the go part of go to market and they don't realize that it takes time. We had a client recently that we just said, you know, you're doing all transactional media. Nobody knows your brand yet because they were a small outfit. And we said, just run a small CTV campaign. It was, they dropped 1500 bucks a month and we said, now you have to understand it's going to be about two months before it really kicks in. And they said, okay, we'll trust you. Well, about three weeks in, it was what's going on. And we're not seeing anything. I said, give it time. Let's, I'll tell you what, I won't even make you wait two months. Let's wait six weeks. Okay. So you have three more weeks, put it on your calendar, give me a call and we'll chat about it. Well, six weeks in they were having their best month of the year and they had three subsequent best months ever. And so the idea that brand building takes a while is one of those things that work into a go-to market strategy. So having said that, you know, we talk about on this podcast all the time about dramatizing a position, but how do you do that without looking like you're trying too hard?

Tony Bell 
Well, you have to earn attention because you can't buy it anymore. You know, consumers have become immune to all that noise. As I talked about earlier, I always point to brands like Nike or Aflac. They don't just explain their product. They move people. They get people to move. Nike leads with belief. And we've talked about Aflac a number of times. Aflac used a duck to give their brand personality before they ever put it on a billboard. So people wouldn't understand it if they didn't. Dramatizing is simply about taking that core position and making it human. Sometimes with a bit more humor or swagger, like Old Spice, no pun intended, well actually I didn't intend that. They reinvented its declining brand by breaking the category norm with humor and somewhat absurdity if you've seen some of the commercials. They turned a forgettable product that your dad used. I have to be careful now because I'm a dad, so it's different into something that was more memorable and something you would you would want to use as a younger person. I do use it. So even though I am a dad, I do use it.

Mark Vandegrift 
Well, you're a hip dad, so that makes it easier. Well, yeah, we throw a lot of brands out there and our clients don't tend to have the budgets of an Old Spice or Nike, definitely not Nike. That would be a wonderful client to have to be able to spend billions every year for them. But a lot of times we're talking about budgets that are 50 to 100,000 in media in a given year. And I think the patience of building that brand over time is so critical because they want those immediate results that transactional media can provide. And I think that speaks to what people are obsessed with today, and that's data and algorithms. And they look at it as, well, isn't the creative just like pretty packaging? How does that, what we're doing and understanding go-to marketing and the strategy behind it, how does it actually save money?

Tony Bell 
Yeah, this is a trap I see markers fall into all the time. It's paralysis by analysis. They think that if I have enough data, the creative doesn't matter, right? I I know what I who I'm targeting and what's happening. Well, it does. The creative significantly increases the effectiveness of the campaign. The buzzword for that is it's the force multiplier. We're talking about buzzwords. You can use data to find the exact right person. But if your creative is generic or boring, you've just spent a bunch of money to be ignored. I mean, they're not going to pay attention. Creative strategy saves money because it makes your media dollars work 10 times harder than they would if you didn't have that message. When you dramatize a position, as I mentioned earlier, Aflac, I know we talked about smaller clients and we do with our clients as well. But Aflac use that duck to give its insurance a personality. You earn attention instead of trying to buy it, as I said. You know, high impact creative is rooted in a solid position. It's the difference between a million expensive clicks and a brand that people actually remember when it's time to buy.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. Yeah. You know, Lorraine and I talk on the podcast all the time about the both and right. So the strategy, the position isn't always sexy. You know, what's sexy about overnight delivery or what's sexy about a safe car. So to your point, the creative side of this is what really is getting into the mind and grabbing hold of the emotion so that you can file that position in the mind that sits in the logical side, but is access by the emotional side. So, going to the dollars that you mentioned about dollars being wasted or spent effectively, you hear the famous statement that half of every advertising dollar is wasted. We just don't know which half, right? How can a solid go-to-market strategy help with that?

Tony Bell 
I can't tell you how many times I've worked with clients like John Deere or Rheem and Ruud dealers, you hear that quote all the time. We called it shotgun approach or spray and pray. And a lot of times when they work with other agencies, they would they would say, they have me on everything. And I'm just I don't know where I'm going or where I'm spending. A real go to market strategy fixes this by assigning a specific role to every dollar. Instead of you buying reach or frequency, you're buying a specific outcome when your message is tight and on strategy. You aren't wasting money talking to people who will never buy or worse, talking to the right people with a message that they'll never remember.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. You know, that's always a challenge, I think, when we work with clients, because for us, even getting through the process of developing creative, after we have the strategy or buying the right media, you know, we, divide everything up into kind of the, the discipline of position, right? So get that right. And then what does the creative strategy look like? But then we have the distribution of the message and all those things have to work together or if any one of those falls down, then you can have a problem on your hands, which is ineffective marketing. So I think sometimes that's part of the problem is that with go-to-market strategy, people get lost in the process, but we do it all the time to the extent that now, even as we're choosing media, we're able to think about the metric, the KPI and the ultimate goal and connect that back to the media so that we can say, okay, here's this that's going on and this is what it resulted in. Talking about a different client now than what I did before with the programmatic, they were seeing a bunch of stuff work, but the director of marketing, was a little frustrated because he goes, I'm not sure what works and what doesn't work. And we said, no, we can actually show you, you did this and it resulted in this. You did this and it resulted in this. You did this and it resulted in this. And he goes, well, I'm not sure you can show me that. So one of our account people here, Carson, really good with data, pulled all this stuff in, showed him for about a couple months exactly how the data was tying back to the marketing that we have been doing and how that marketing connected back to the creative, which connected back to the position. So he was going in reverse order. And after about six weeks, the director of marketing was like, well, I don't want to go over this stuff anymore. And of course it was like, well, that's what you've been asking for. What do you mean I want to go over it anymore? He goes, well, I know you guys know how it's working and I trust that you know how it's working and it is working. So we don't need to review it anymore. As long as whenever I need a report, you can get me one. So in other words, he had wanted this for so long. We give it to him and then he goes, okay. Well, you know what you're doing. You know how to use it. So I feel confident in it. So that was kind of a key moment, I think, especially for Carson, who was like, okay. Yeah. So when it comes to the execution of a campaign, basically the media, how do you actually make a plan come to life without destroying your budget?


Tony Bell
Yeah, and I think that I might sound a little bit like a broken record, but it's really that purposeful allocation. You don't destroy your budget when you stop buying general awareness and start assigning a specific measurable measurable. There it is. Roll to every media dollar. Most people waste money because they buy media like a blanket, trying to cover everything at once. Not even that one leg out of the covers, right? But a smart media strategy targets specific stages of the journey. So if you look at the customer decision journey, you know, by giving every channel a distinct job to do, you're not just spending, you're investing in a coordinated strategy overall.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, and that's another angle to that too, is if you're just testing into the market something, then use test markets. So let's say your region is the entire United States. Well, if you want to see what's working, then go to two, three markets and you always have to have a tight control. But it might be that you're testing, if you want to test message, then you have to have all your media the same. If you are confident in your message, then you can alter the media slightly to see which media is working better. But why go to the entire country with a go-to market strategy when you could test it out to start, assuming that time isn't completely of the essence, right? It gives you that you have time to test and see what the optimal deployment is. So I think that's, you know, some insight that a lot of people don't think about. They're like, well, I can test something in brand building. Yes. You're not going to one radio station or one TV station or one media outlet and buying their entire region anymore. We can literally buy things at the zip code level. We can buy things on drive time level. So always keep that in mind before you commit to something. There is that opportunity to test. Going back to, you made a comment about the budgeting again and this idea of doing a blanket coverage. And we sometimes say you're taking too little resources and trying to do too many things. And I think that's called spreading ourselves too thinly, right? So aren't we all doing that or what's your take on that?

Tony Bell 
Well, I mean, the biggest mistake is the FOMO approach. You know, fear of missing out. The idea that you have to be everywhere. That's a one way ticket to failure or a huge ineffective budget. You know, if that's something that's concerning you, that's not the way to go. There is pressure to be on every platform sometimes. You know, you have TikTok, LinkedIn, TV, search. There's so many things out there. But a go to market strategy isn't about like I said, being everywhere. It's about being somewhere that matters. And like you talked about with those test markets, it's a great example of just saying, hey, let's make sure this works here before we spread out. And that limits the risk that we would have. You know, I'd rather a brand own one or two channels in a market or then have an extremely small and unforgettable presence across 10 different channels. You know, strategy is about, it's just as much about what you don't do than what you do.

Mark Vandegrift
Yeah, you wrote a blog recently on this and in the blog you were talking about bothism and I think that ties into this a little bit. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit more about that and why it's important for go-to market planning.

Tony Bell 
Yeah, and I think you alluded to it a little bit earlier, you know, we can, we can thank Mark Ritson for that. And I thank Lorraine for introducing me to his work. If you can get past the language. He's a little, he's a little, little on edge, but he's really smart and has a lot of great input. It's the idea that you shouldn't have to choose between brand building and performance marketing. We hear this all the time. You know, when people say, we can't do too much of this or too much of that. Well, you know, brand investment actually makes your performance ads work better because it lowers customer resistance. If they already know that and trust you, they're way more likely to click buy now. You know, I mean, they're more willing to go forward with the purchase. It's a strategic mix. The bothism approach means you're playing the long game and the short game at the same time that makes for a much better game overall, at least in golf it does. Something I can't seem to master as you know, but you know, it's one of those things that the long and short game make the difference. You need both brand building and performance media, a good go to market plan, you know, marries the two to be more effective and efficient overall.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah, we've had a lot of clients come to us and they're playing maybe just the short game, that performance marketing game. And I recall a client that came in and Cheryl, our executive creative director said, I noticed you have 17,000 followers on Facebook, but you only get like two or three engagements on each post. Like how did you get to that point? And he goes, I don't know. We had an agency at one point and they did this whole thing and they got our followers way up. And, you know, we were really impressed with that. And she goes, well, if you have 17,000 followers, you should have much more than two or three likes on each post. And that really hit them. So, you know, let me ask the question this way. If a client came to you like that, right. And was already self-aware of that and said, I have a million clicks or I have a million followers, but zero sales or conversions, where did that go-to-market strategy or that go-to-market plan go wrong?

Tony Bell 
Yeah, I would say it's most likely means that the measurement is not aligned with the strategy. As you said, clicks are great, but they don't always pay the bills. You have to move beyond the data and look at the business outcomes. We work closely with our clients to get their feedback on leads, close rates, ticket size, anything they're looking at there to make sure that, you know, we're both seeing success. Because success on the data side doesn't always mean success on their end. If you have clicks, but no sales, you're likely, you likely have a positioning gap. You're getting people to the door. But once they peek inside and see what's in there, it's not come it's not it's not giving them a compelling reason to stay and they either run the other way or worse yet, go to your competitor. You need to work with a team that can really help you monitor and optimize the entire funnel, not just the top of it. Our digital team is constantly in our clients' campaigns monitoring and optimizing so that at the end of the month, when we sit down and talk to them to discuss performance, our clients know that we're doing our job. You get these retainers where they're supposed to be doing something for the whole month or doing stuff on your campaign, but they have nothing to tell you at the end of the month. They can't explain the optimizations they made. They have no recommendations for what you should do differently. But we also want our clients feedback at that time as well. You know, strategy remains an exercise until it shows up in real life and actually makes the market change. So you want to make sure that you're following through with it.

Mark Vandegrift 
Yeah. And that's a good, there's a good insight there too. And that is if you are working with a marketer or an agency, whatever your relationship is, you have to get it, give insight clear to how sales are going because we can only peek so far into the organization. You know, we can tee up the leads. We can see how the leads are moving through a funnel. If you have a CRM that we have insight into. We can see where the close rates are. We can see who's closing the vest. We can see a lot of things, but if we don't get a peek into all of that, we can't necessarily help you with your entire spectrum of prospecting to converting the sale. So I would say make sure if you are one of those customers that likes to hold things close to the vest, that's not going to be a good relationship with your marketing team or an agency if you work with them. We're up at time here. Why don't you give me a final thought. If you wanted listeners to take away one thing from this podcast or from your blog about go-to-market plans, strategy, et cetera, what would that be?

Tony Bell 
Always a great question. I would say change the market or stay home. Don't just try to be, you know, 10 % better than your competitor. Try to be unique or fundamentally different. If your go to market strategy doesn't shift how people think about the category itself, you're just competing on price and that's never a game you want to be in. That always ends in a bad place. And so I would say just, you know, make sure that you change the market. That's what you need to do.

Mark Vandegrift 
Good advice, thank you. Well, let's wrap up today's episode of the Brand Shorthand Podcast. Thanks, Tony, for joining us. And thank you to our loyal listeners for tuning in. Don't forget to like, subscribe, share with a friend, shout out from the mountaintops, subscribe. Did I say that one yet? And until next time, have an amazing day.