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Mark Evans: I've written three marketing books. As a writer, writing a book is a labor of love. They're a lot of work, but they're extremely satisfying. Today, I'm talking with Louis Gudema, who just published the second edition of Bullseye Marketing, which offers strategies and ways for small and medium sized businesses to grow. His book delivers hundreds of tips and best practices for almost two dozen marketing tactics such as social media, email marketing, and search advertising.
Louis is a fractional CMO for b to b startups and growth stage companies, and he mentors startups at MIT and leads an annual marketing boot camp for the MIT community. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Louis.
Louis Gudema: Hello, Mark. Thanks for having me on.
Mark Evans: Before we jump into bull's eye marketing and your approach to marketing, I'd like to talk a little bit about books and book writing. As a writer, I appreciate that, as I said, books are a labor of love. Talk to me about why you wrote Bullseye Marketing and, as important, decided to create a second edition of the book.
Louis Gudema: So I decided to write the book in part, obviously, for promotional reasons. Some people say a a book is the new business card, But I thought I had something important to say. And as we get into bullseye marketing, I'll explain it more, but I felt that there was a whole lot of chatter and noise around marketing that wasn't helpful and that I had kind of developed an approach that could produce results and could produce success for companies a lot more reliably and a lot faster. And in fact, when I was developing it, I decided I should give a talk to a group and see what the feedback was from a group to kinda do a little test, arrange to give a talk to a business group. And when I was done talking, the very first person who stood to ask a question said, Why has no one come up with this before?
And in a positive way. This is such a good idea. So I felt I had something useful and important to say. And that's those two combinations. I felt it could be good for the industry, for the people I work with, and it could be good for me.
Mark Evans: I'd like to discuss your approach to the book once you realize there was demand for a different type of marketing book. I read a lot of marketing books. I get tempted by what people write about on LinkedIn and Twitter. So I go to the local public library, which is awesome here in Toronto, get the book. And I get about twenty, twenty five pages into the book, and then I get bored.
The thesis has been talked about. I understand what they're trying to say, and the rest of the book, it just loses steam. It just seems like the other 175 pages, and these books are typically about 200 pages, are fodder and that the book could easily have been an ebook or a long blog post as opposed to a book. And I'd like to get your take on when you were thinking about writing bull's eye marketing and you looked at the other marketing books out there. How did what was your approach in terms of making sure that it captured and as important held people's interest and attention?
Louis Gudema: Well, when I first wrote it, I thought I was writing a book for newbies and and that really experienced marketers wouldn't be the ones who were reading it, people like yourself. And so I I thought that a lot of information, lot of detail, you said, to go into something like 20 channels with information on how to best execute on them, I thought that would be very useful for newbies. It turned out some very experienced marketers said this is really terrific. Now, the book operates on two different levels. And in the introduction to the second edition, which is focused exclusively on b to b, I talk about you might approach the reading of the book in two different ways.
But first of all, it's marketing framework. It operates at a 30,000 foot level. And so, for the people who are interested in that high level strategic approach, there's about seven chapters or so throughout the book that kind of do a deep dive and explain it and would help them. Not just with three chapters that go into bullseye marketing, but chapters on how to create a successful marketing team using analytics and data, agile marketing and a few other things. So some people may just wanna read that part of it and I get it.
Other people may read that part and then go to particular chapters and say, oh, now we're really starting to ramp up video or display ads or email marketing or whatever. And then they'll dip down into those chapters and then there are some people who are very operationally oriented, very tactically oriented, who will wanna read it straight through. I had one reviewer on Amazon describe it as an encyclopedia of marketing, and not everyone reads encyclopedias cover to cover.
Mark Evans: At a high level, how is bull's eye marketing different from a lot of the other marketing books out there? It sounds like it's a book that you could use depending on what your needs are or your interests or your priorities. So you could go to a certain part of the book, get the information and insight that you need, and you don't necessarily have to read other sections of the book. Is it it sounds a little more something that's more tactically oriented than high level big picture thinking? Is that an accurate way to describe the book?
Louis Gudema: No. I think it's both. I I think the the the real strategic insight was the bull's eye marketing framework, and I think that's the big value. That's the big takeaway. And and so people who do only think of it as tactical insights or tactical tactics are gonna miss the big picture.
The bullseye marketing framework that that person responded to with the why has no one thought of this before and that I've gotten feedback from, frankly, all over the world, people saying, I love this. Douglas Burdett, who's the host of the Marketing Book Podcast, wrote the foreword for this. He's read something like 500 marketing books. Like yourself, he reads a lot. And he was very enthusiastic about it when he interviewed me on the first one and encouraged me to write the second edition and was very gracious and very willing to write a forward for it.
And I've had other people who read in-depth many books on marketing and find it very helpful. So I think it's the big insight is that strategic framework. And then for the people who need help on the tactical level, that's there too to be called on when they need that.
Mark Evans: It's ironic that you just published yours the second edition of your book because I recently published the second edition of my book, Marketing Spark, which unofficially I advertise as being fewer spelling mistakes, better grammar.
Louis Gudema: I was so when I picked up the book with the thought of writing a second edition, I I read it through, and I thought, usually, as a writer, six months later, you're like, oh my god. How did I ever write this? This is terrible. And so I read it through and I was like, No, this is not so bad. There's actually something here.
But then when I started to go through paragraph by paragraph and sentence by sentence, then I got into the, my God, how did I ever write that level? And, hopefully, it's better written.
Mark Evans: Well, that's the perils of being a writer is that everything you publish soon afterwards, it's terrible. You look at it, you cannot believe that you wrote it. Because at the time, you think it's great stuff. But when you actually reread it and reread it and you get feedback, you recognize that there's so many room so much room for improvement. But I think I think we overanalyze our own writing.
We're overly sensitive to our own writing. So when I did the second edition of the book, it actually was exciting because it allowed me to take a fresh perspective, a new approach to the book. I didn't get away from the book's overall philosophy, and a lot of the content was the same, but I did find it interesting to have a second chance at life again. It's like having a near death experience, and then you survive that and you go, well, this time I'm gonna do things differently. And that's what I found exciting about the rewrite.
Louis Gudema: Yeah. And and hopefully, the second edition, it is focused. It is on just b to b. It is updated. Like in the first edition at the end of those tactical chapters, I I listed some of the top marketing software for that particular tactic.
And I've just stripped those out because there's just too many good ones, and it changes way too fast. Chat, GPT, and AI are happening now and the rate of change has just exploded. So that became something that made no sense at all in the current environment.
Mark Evans: You've hinted at the bull's eye framework, and, obviously, it underpins the book and your philosophical approach to marketing. I'd love you to walk me through the framework, the the key pillars of it, and how you think it's different from some of the other marketing frameworks that are being evangelized on LinkedIn and other places?
Louis Gudema: So the bullseye marketing framework has three stages to it. Just like a bullseye, you start in the center of the bullseye. And the bullseye is where you take advantage of what I call marketing assets that most companies have, but many companies don't take full advantage of. You get a lot of traffic to your website, but if your website doesn't have good messaging, people come and I see this all the time, You're a positioning guy. You see this all the time.
There's nothing that explains even just simply what it is you do in a way that people would remember or how you're different from anyone else. So, nailing that positioning, having conversion offers and opportunities on the website, and optimizing those because if you don't do that before you start your other marketing, you're just trying to fill a bucket that's full of holes. All the time when I work with small and mid sized companies, I'll say to them, How many email contacts do you have? They say, Oh, we have 10,000, we have 20,000, maybe more. And I say, So how often do you send out an email?
Around the holidays. A hugely impactful channel that costs almost nothing to use, that should be used regularly, and they're not taking advantage of that asset that they have. Things like selling more to existing customers, not just looking for new logos, having better collaboration between sales and marketing. All of these are things, mistakes that I've seen companies make over and over again, not taking advantage of those. I had a client which was a size of like a $200,000,000 software company and the head of marketing told me it took a week or two for sales to follow-up on a lead from marketing.
It's like, well, that's a dead lead. That's wasted. That collaboration between sales and marketing, that's critically important. So, all of those cost very little or nothing to implement, and they can have significant impact in just a matter of a few months. And that, for a new marketing leader, for a consultant, that kind of impact and for the company gets people's attention.
You say, for very little money we start to have some results. Then you go to the second ring of the bull's eye which is using intent data to sell to people who want to buy now. And that's often search ads, but it may be your first party data from your own website and other materials like your emails, or it may even be third party intent data. Companies like Bombora or TechTarget or others who are accumulating intent data from hundreds of sites. But, and this is very key, is that probably only 5% of your market is interested in buying at any time.
The vast majority of any company's market is either not interested in what they're selling or has a vendor and is not looking to change. And so that's where the third phase of of bullseye marketing comes into play and that's in the long run, the most impactful, which is building your brand and what's called mental availability. And this is a concept which most marketers don't talk about, but it's critically important, which is that people will think of you, this goes beyond awareness, they will think of your brand when they are ready to buy something in your category. And in fact, from the experience I've had and the research I've seen, probably half or more of deals, the the customer does not look at more than one vendor, two at the most. So if you have that top of mind position, if you've established that mental availability, you have a huge number of opportunities in the future in which you have no competition and are very easy to close.
So, let me give you an example. After I had a marketing agency for a dozen years, which I pivoted into a SaaS company, and after I sold it, I was VP of Business Development at another marketing agency. And the first call I got, which makes it very memorable, was a guy who said, I've been following you for like three years. I've seen your CEO talk, I read your blog, I really like your approach, we're finally ready to do something, so let's talk. That was an easy deal to close.
And that wasn't because I was a brilliant salesperson. That was because of the marketing that the company had done before I was even on board that had established that mental availability. And that happens all the time. I sometimes refer to it as kind of the dark market. It's the part of your market, the opportunities that you're never even aware of.
And that's the biggest opportunity, and that's why the third phase of bullseye marketing, which is probably the least appreciated, is in the long run the most important.
Mark Evans: It's an interesting take because we live in an instant gratification world. We live in a marketing world in which people, entrepreneurs, CEOs expect a direct correlation between if I do x, then y is gonna happen right away. Couple thoughts here. One is how do you marry intent data with a lot of the activity that is happening on the dark web and the dark social and the other sort of dark places that you mentioned where you can't see what's happening, there's no direct attribution happening. What's the balance between the stuff that which is around intent and the stuff that you don't know?
Louis Gudema: So, yeah, one of the things that's happened in the last ten years plus is this explosion of MarTech tools. And Scott Brinker has documented his infographic in 2011 had a few 100 companies in it. Now, there's over 10,000. Has create each one of them, more or less, provides a ton of data, a ton of analytics, and it has produced what some people call short termism. It's what's this campaign doing for me this month or this quarter at the most?
And that's unfortunate because if you go back in marketing fifty years, it was all about the big idea. If you read David Ogilvie and other masters of marketing, they understand brand. So, what the research shows is that you need a fiftyfifty balance roughly between your brand and your lead gen marketing. And that the brand marketing actually makes your lead gen more impactful. So in the book, I quote Jalay Rizai, who was the CMO of Gusto when it grew from 500 to 50,000 customers.
And the Augusto is a big online payments platform. And she says that when she was the CMO of Gusto, her brand ads, her brand campaigns didn't produce hardly any leads or sales directly. But whenever she would stop the brand marketing, six months later, her customer acquisition costs would go through the roof and her lead gen performance would tank. And so she learned that she had to even for a startup, she had to spend at least 20% of her budget on brand to support the direct response. So she had very good proof of it in a way that because she was working at a very large scale, she had very good proof of it.
Unfortunately, for smaller companies, often they don't have enough data to prove it. There's a degree of going on faith, but there's also ways in which you can see the impact that you're having. You see it in organic search traffic to your site because the biggest search term for most companies is their name. And so if your organic search traffic is going up, it's because more people are searching on your name. You see a big surge in links to your site, in backlinks.
You get anecdotal information from your sales team. I had the VP of sales at a company I was working with who told me later he was generous or gracious enough not to tell me at the beginning that he thought my ideas were terrible. But three months later when he was getting a lot of leads, he said, all these enterprise companies we want to get in the door of are saying, I'm seeing you everywhere. You guys really have it going on. I figure I had to talk to you and find out what you're about.
So there's a lot of different ways that you can Let me tell you a analogy that I use. So there's if a person exercises, and you look fit, you look like someone who exercises, if a person exercises thirty minutes a day, five times a week, there's a ton of evidence that that has tremendous impact on your health. People tend to live longer, they get sick less, if they do get sick, it's not nearly as severe, etcetera, etcetera. But you can't say, I went running last Tuesday and that's what made me healthy. It's because you do it week after week, month after month, year after year that you have effect.
Now at the same time, there's other things like getting your COVID vaccine shot, getting a stent if you have a heart attack, getting radiation therapy if you have cancer, which are tremendously impactful in the short term. They may save your life, but they don't produce long term health and wellness. And so you need both of those. They work very differently. One is very measurable, but they are both very important.
Mark Evans: It's an interesting approach because as someone who leans on the brand side of the house, who I do a lot of work around brand positioning, messaging, trying to figure out how to take that strategic narrative and amplify it to the world. It's a very frustrating landscape to me right now because there is so much focus on tactical execution. Many CEOs and entrepreneurs are, for for lots of good reasons, obsessed with lead gen and sales, and that their tolerance or appetite for brand building has been reduced. And if you look what happened in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one, a lot of b to b SaaS companies, b to b companies were flushed. The market was roaring ahead.
There was lots of marketing dollars, lots of venture capital being raised. So it was easy to justify a brand positioning exercise or a brand awareness focused campaigns. Now marketing budgets have been pulled back. Some companies have reduced their marketing staffs in a big way. I think that a lot of companies are cutting off their noses despite their face because they've they're not doing brand building.
They're not focused on brand building at all, and my take is that's a major mistake. In the short term, it'll save you some money, but in the long term, it's gonna cost you. And you'll lose out to companies that recognize that brand is important and that you have to continually and going back to your exercise related analogy, you have to continually invest in brand. Otherwise, you're undermining your business.
Louis Gudema: Yeah. Totally. And there's some mistakes that just keep getting repeated, and one of them is cutting your marketing during recessions. It's well established that the companies that maintain their marketing during recessions come out with bigger market share, and it's cheaper to keep it going during a recession typically than it is during those flush times when everybody is marketing and and bidding on ad space and so forth.
Mark Evans: That story is told again and again. You have empirical evidence that says that if you continue to invest in marketing even when down periods, when things rebound, you're gonna be better positioned than if you pull back than if you see marketing as a discretionary area of investment. Yet many, many companies, first thing first gut reaction to a slowdown is, let's pull back on marketing. Let's get rid of some marketing people. And history repeats itself over and over again.
Why does that happen? Is it just the emotional reaction as opposed to logic?
Louis Gudema: Yeah. Sure. We were talking about the value of exercise in the long term. But the data I've seen is that only about twenty percent of people do exercise regularly to that point where it's going to have that great long term effect. So most people are not rational.
They are driven by short term comfort rather than long term. They're not going to defer gratification. That's just the way of the world.
Mark Evans: I think this is the first podcast that has combined my two biggest interests, marketing and physical exercise. So I thank you for that. And and I have to be honest with you is that physical exercise is a big part of my life. I spend lots of time in front of my computer, lots of time consuming information digitally. I'm overly obsessed with the Internet and LinkedIn, and I think for a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of business people like ourselves is that you have to have a balance.
You have to allow yourself to disconnect from the wired world. At the same time, you need to invest in what's happening online, and the marketplace is evolving so fast, so quickly. And it's a nice little segue into what I wanna talk to you about next, which is this marketing landscape that is troubling and fascinating and exciting and terrifying at the same time. And if you could argue that a year ago, it started with the economic downturn. But since November with the emergence of ChatGPT and the fact that it put AI in front of people tangibly, I just feel that it's a whole new frontier, and a lot of marketers are trying to figure out how do I adapt, how do what do I do strategically and tactically.
And do you have any thoughts about how ChatGPT has disrupted the marketing landscape, and how does a marketer move forward? How should we think strategically and tactically so that we're staying abreast of technology and that we're not simply relying on the things and the skills that we've we've depended on before? Loaded question.
Louis Gudema: First of all, I don't think it's a whole new landscape. I I think that chat g p yeah. I'm sure you're familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle, and ChatGPT is at the top of the Hype Cycle. It got there faster than anything ever has. It's probably at a higher point in the Hype Cycle than anything ever has been.
And fine, but the fundamentals of marketing never change. So, when I give a talk on marketing, I often start with a picture at the cover of a book called Scientific Advertising. And it's a book that sold millions of copies, it gets great reviews, it's highly recommended by top marketers and such. It was written in 1923. And because marketing and positioning is certainly part of this, at its foundation never changes.
Marketing is about understanding your customer, understanding your market, bringing to market products that will benefit them, that will appeal to them, communicating why and motivating them to be interested in checking it out and buying it. That's at the essence of marketing. All the channels, that channel explosion of the last fifteen years, that's just other ways to do that fundamental role of marketing, that fundamental purpose of marketing. Thirty years ago, there were maybe eight major channels. Now there are dozens and seemingly a new one every year.
So ChatGPT to me doesn't change anything because most marketers were not strategic to begin with. They were too focused on short term. They weren't concerned enough with brand. They didn't understand this balance. Mark Ritzon wrote about this a few weeks ago where he said some survey of agencies, I think, was that the majority of accounts didn't even have readable creative briefs when they were bidding on doing work.
So that hasn't changed. Good marketers who understand strategy, who understand positioning, who understand brand, who understand that the most important marketing is on the on the emotional side, not on writing second rate blog posts, which is what I see coming out of ChatGPT, they're still gonna be doing the most valuable and successful work. ChatGPT will accelerate in the short run. Who knows what it'll be like in three years or whatever? It may dramatically change content creation.
But I haven't seen it understanding the customer better or developing marketing strategies or positioning better than a person does?
Mark Evans: I'm in the same camp as you. I believe that ChatGPT has ignited an arms war, a marketing a Martech arms war. Right now, companies that can successfully leverage ChatGPT, they can use prompts in sophisticated and interesting ways, are gonna be able to gain an advantage. I read a LinkedIn post. Somebody said, well, our company is using ChatGPT to write SEO optimized content, and our traffic has risen from zero to 750,000 views in the last few months.
And he was obviously advertising the power of the platform that he works for, but at the same time, he highlighted that he's got a short term advantage. And my comment to him was that, yes, that's fabulous. Congratulations. But that's gonna disappear. That competitive edge is gonna disappear because everybody will arm themselves with the same tools.
And then what happens? What happens if every single company can produce high quality, and I put that in in quotation marks, high quality content at scale, then we're all gonna be selling the same same flavor of ice cream. And to your point, I think that brand matters. I think that strategy matters. It may not be top of the of the heap right now for many CEOs and entrepreneurs, but I think in the long run, the best brands are have the strongest the best companies have the strongest brands.
The Nikes, the Patagonias, the Amazons is that people remember them regardless of what kind of marketing that they're doing. And that's just my point my view of the world right now.
Louis Gudema: Well, and that marketing, that brand marketing comes, a, from a great customer experience, and ChatGPT is not gonna change that. And b, it comes from brand marketing, which is essentially based on emotion, not on logic. There's a fundamental difference between the brand marketing, brand messaging, and lead gen messaging. Lead gen messaging tends to be very logical. 10% off, download our white paper, sign up for our webinar.
You either do that instantly or you forget about that ad ten seconds later. Brand marketing is emotional. It has characters, it has humor, it has situations. You probably remember TV commercials from when you were a kid.
Mark Evans: Of course. Yeah. I used to watch a lot of TV when I was a kid. Now Right. Not so much, but
Louis Gudema: Right. Every time I ask someone that, they're like, oh, I remember TV commercials from when I was a kid. That's great brand marketing. There's this meme in content among content marketers where they say, when you put up a great blog post, that's an evergreen. That will get you traffic forever.
But the moment you stop advertising, it stops working. No, great advertising works for decades because it's in your mind and it sticks with you. But there are some people who say you can't even have the same team doing your brand marketing and your lead gen marketing or your performance marketing because the skills are so fundamentally different. And because creativity is such a central part of brand marketing and not a central part of lead gen marketing.
Mark Evans: Marketing world fascinates me because it continues to evolve and change. And just when you're getting complacent and fat and happy, it all shifts on you. I think it's really interesting right now. I wanna thank you for your perspective your insight into the marketing landscape, and thank you for telling me about Bullseye Marketing. Sounds like a great book for any entrepreneur or marketer who is looking to raise their game or or take a different approach to marketing.
One final question. Can you recommend a book and a podcast for our audience?
Louis Gudema: I will certainly recommend the marketing book podcast because Douglas does a terrific job, one book and one author a week. And I can tell you from experience, he reads every one from cover to cover because you go on there and he's like, now on page a 179, you said. I'm like, woah. Let me see if I can remember why I wrote that. So the marketing book podcast is a great podcast.
A book an author that I like is Morgan Hounsel. I don't know if you're familiar with him.
Mark Evans: I am not.
Louis Gudema: But he wrote one of my favorite essays, which is called Universal Laws of the World. And so just start with that. It's a great essay and he has like these 11 laws of the world. And then he has a book called The Psychology of Money, which is very good and has a new book coming out in a few months. But, for example, one of the 11 laws of the world is that miracles will happen.
That's the first one. And it's because he says there are seven, now 8,000,000,000 people in the world. One in a billion things will happen. I'm someone who plays poker a lot, which has given me a very intuitive sense of probability and improbability. So and you see these sort of one in a thousand things happening in poker, and you're like, yep, that happens.
And it happens in the real world in many fields too. So he's a very interesting author and The Psychology of Money and that essay on the universal laws of the world are both very good reads.
Mark Evans: One final question. Where can people learn more about you and what you do?
Louis Gudema: Louiegudema.com, and the book's available on Amazon. And, of course, I'm on LinkedIn and less than before, but still on Twitter. But we'd love to communicate with people.
Mark Evans: Thanks, Louie, and thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, rate it and subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. If you're a b to b SaaS company looking for more sales and leads but struggling to do marketing that makes an impact, we should talk. I use a three part methodology to diagnose, fix, and optimize your marketing strategically and tactically. Reach out to me via email, mark@markevans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn.
I'll talk to you soon.
