Transcript lightly edited for spelling and punctuation. The conversation is unabridged.
Mark Evans: Hi. It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. Imagine the marketing world as a pendulum that swings back and forth. The pendulum takes marketers from channel to channel, social media platform to social media platform, and approach to approach. One of the most interesting, at least to me, pendulum swings is from marketing fundamentals to marketing technology and data.
On one side, you have marketers who believe in first principles, positioning, messaging, storytelling, and planning. On the other side are the data analytics geeks who believe that optimizations and hacks are the keys to marketing success. On today's show, I'm talking with Zineb Layachi, CEO of Raise the Runway in Barcelona, which happens to be one of my favorite cities. Zineb teaches entrepreneurs how to talk to customers so they have more marketing success. Welcome to Marketing Spark.
Zineb Layachi: Thank you so much, Mark. I'm really happy to be here. I'm excited for the conversation.
Mark Evans: I reached out to you because I feel like you're a kindred spirit. We're both on the side of first principles when it comes to marketing. I've seen a huge focus on marketing technology and tools to drive efficiencies and market at scale. And I guess the obvious question to you is whether the focus on technology has caused marketers to forget about the fundamentals.
Zineb Layachi: Actually, I love this question. I think when we start out, it's important to have a solid foundation, and that's, you know, that foundation is very people, prospect, customer-oriented. Before we start, you know, talking about automating anything about technology, you know, what's the best tool out there. We should really make sure that the foundations are solid so that whatever you want to scale, you're not scaling crap. Mm-hmm. For for lack of a better phrase.
No. You're not, you're not, you're scaling the good stuff.
Mark Evans: I think that I think marketers get obsessed with technology because there's so many tools. I mean, you look at the MarTech landscape, and there are thousands of tools out there to drive efficiencies for just about any channel, any marketing activity you want. But my sense is that marketers lean too hard on technology, and they forget about the fact that you're marketing to people. And the tools allow you to amplify your efforts, to scale your efforts, but it really comes back to what are the pillars of marketing? How can you connect with target audiences and do marketing that makes an impact?
Zineb Layachi: Of course. I think the way you just explained that, I think you did a better job than I did. That's that's brilliant, Mark. No. No.
I'm with you. I'm with you a hundred percent. I mean, tools are, you know, like just to use the word that you use, they amplify or they're supposed to amplify something that actually works. And how do you find what actually works? People are at the center of that.
Whether it's B2B or B2C, you're selling to people. You know, it might sound like cliché at this point. It's it's been said and said again, but, I still keep talking about the fundamentals because I feel like, you know, there's still room to improve for all marketers, all founders, all entrepreneurs because we're it's just too easy. It's much easier to think tools, technology, what's the hottest tool. We spend hours asking around for recommendations on how to get this specific thing automated, etcetera.
But that's that's easy for us. The other parts is the hard part. So, you know, and that's what you're also trying to do is make all this as easy as possible so that we can all get the fundamentals right when we scale. We scale on solid foundations.
Mark Evans: One of the things that I spend a lot of time focused on these days is positioning. Jack Trout and Al Ries come up again and again. I mean, this is a book that came out decades ago, yet it remains almost the bible for many marketers. I'm curious about your take on positioning because there are people who believe it is the core to marketing, and I'm one of them. And there are others who think that, yes, positioning is important, but then the key is how do you leverage that in terms of your messaging and your marketing activities?
Curious about where positioning falls into your world and how you deal with your customers.
Zineb Layachi: To me, positioning is one of the very first pillars. So you have your strategy. The positioning comes way before messaging, for sure, and, of course, way before copywriting because, you know, copywriting is just the how you're going to say what you've decided you were going to talk about. Right? So that's, to me, that's one of the most important pillars.
And if we just go back to what we're saying previously, which is all people. So if these people are making decisions on whether to try your product or download a resource, buy your product or service, these are all people. How do they make decisions? We have to think about when I hear Spark, for example, what comes to mind? So I have to understand what comes to mind for me when I hear Spark or when I read a certain sentence.
Right? There's a lot of that in positioning. I think, I'm a big fan of April Dunford. One of the examples she uses in her book is the, you know, if you say, you're selling a cake on a stick versus you're selling a lollipop made out of cake. There are two different things.
Right? The cake on a stick doesn't feel like it doesn't feel right. No. It makes me wonder, well, do I need a fork to eat it? It just brings up all these questions, right, that add friction to the whole buying process.
But if you say it's a lollipop made out of cake, all of a sudden, it just, there's a lot of calm. There aren't so many questions that come up. So how do you find that frame of reference that, and I love, you know, I think it's one of her phrases, that the market frame of reference that makes you the obvious choice.
Mark Evans: Yeah. I love that phrase, the obvious choice, because good positioning is so powerful that there are no other options. The value proposition, the fact that they talk to you specifically at a time when there are many, many products out there is so powerful that you cannot help but embrace positioning as a pillar for marketing, and I think that's really important. On LinkedIn, I see a lot of posts about interviewing your customers, knowing your customers, understanding your customers. And I look at them, and my first reaction is, this is marketing 101.
If you don't know your customers inside out, then how are you going to develop marketing and, for that matter, sales that are going to resonate? Because if you don't know their interests or their pains or their problems or even their aspirations, then you're making at best educated guesses. And as someone who works with entrepreneurs to show them how to connect with customers, why are we seeing marketers talk about this so much? Is it the circle that we're in on LinkedIn, or is this part of a bigger picture challenge that many marketers are struggling with?
Zineb Layachi: Two things come to mind here. I think, and it's true. I have seen this a lot. And, I myself in certain posts, I've talked about talking to customers, which is inherently, you know, incorrect because it's not like a normal conversation. Going back to a couple of things that come to mind.
Talk to customers. It's so easy to say, but it's not as easy to do. So it doesn't mean that it's not doable. It's just that it's not easy. And we talked about technology tools, people that have tools for a strategy.
It's because that's easy, the hacks. We have to be on this podcast and talk about hacks. Right? We have to bring up hacks. Hacks are easy.
Hacks are, you know, I'm going to look for someone else to solve my problems to give me the answers. What's the latest hack? You pay attention to examples that have worked for others but won't necessarily work for you because you don't have all the context. Yet, we don't even pay attention to that. We just take that.
No. Just take as an example, Ahrefs, the $7 paid trial. So so many entrepreneurs have told me, oh, I'm going to try that. Okay. But you have to think about the context when they came up with that idea.
They were four years in, three to four years in. I don't remember exactly, Mark. You know, the new CMO, he came in. He did loads of interviewing influencers, customers, prospects, etcetera. They knew they had a good product.
That's the main difference. Do you know that you're actually delivering value? So that's, you can't just apply something and, you know, put a price to something if you don't even know that you have value. So all this ties back to having interviewed your customers, having those conversations to reaffirm one of the things is to reaffirm that there is value there. That's number one.
You know, it takes time. It's not something that you just turn on and off. It takes time, and you need to know how to actually do it because sometimes it could just feel like, well, you have to, there's a certain way of running the interviews. It's not like a conversation, you know, having a coffee with a customer. But then after that, how do you make sense of everything that comes up?
Because it feels like you just open Pandora's box and, you know, how do you make sure it doesn't just explode in your face? And then you just get, you desist and leave that box that's just it stays on your to-do list because you just don't know how to make sense of all that. So I think there's a lot of talk to your customers, talk to your customers, but not enough of how to do it.
Mark Evans: You know, I was reading a post this morning about it was the reasons why companies don't talk to their customers, and there was a long list. It kind of scared me because if you have marketers who actually admit to why they don't talk to customers, then we've got a serious problem. So if you fall into the camp of talking to customers is important. It's a depending on how you look at it, it's a necessary evil or it's a joy to do because you're connecting with your customers. So how do you do an interview with customers?
As you say, it's not a coffee conversation. It's not a casual conversation. So how do you approach them for one? And then how do you structure the twenty minutes or the thirty minutes that they're going to give you to provide the insight and to get the insight that you need to do better marketing and sales?
Zineb Layachi: I think step one is to understand where you're at right now. Right? This is where you're at and where you think your gaps are. So that's really important. One of the interesting exercises before you at this stage is to ask everyone in the team why they think their customers buy from them.
So each one responds to that separately, and you keep that information for after the process. Right? Because it's also to, at the end, show them why customers actually buy and just be like, hey. Can you see there's a disconnect here? You yourself don't even know.
But it's not just you as in one person. It's you as in someone in sales versus someone in marketing will have two different answers. Right? Knowing what and then it's okay. So who am I going to talk to?
Who do I want to interview? So you might have customers. You want to talk to the ones that signed up for a free trial that haven't paid yet? So you have to group decide which group you're going to actually talk to. Then once you've decided on the group or groups, within that group, who has, for example, purchased or signed up in the last maybe two to three months, the ones that purchased from you last year.
So that's key because that information is fresh. I mean, if you ask me why I bought my green screen six months ago, I probably, you know, wouldn't be able to give you as much information. Right? So the more recent, the better. So and then you decide depending.
I've worked with entrepreneurs that had 2,000 customers in their database and others that have had 30 to 50. So it all depends. If you have 2,000, you can add on an additional filter and just say, okay. Who are, you know, in terms of maybe stickiness with repeat purchases, you can add on filters to make the different groups. Now then you decide on, are you going to give a reward?
Generally, the best customers will be more than happy to talk to you without any reward, but that's not to say it's the case for everyone. So decide on the reward. I mean, and that depends on the business. If you have a SaaS, for example, it's €55 a month. Does it make sense to give away two months free?
Mark Evans: Right.
Zineb Layachi: Right? That's $10. Does that make sense? So just asking yourselves what would be a value to them, not just the automatic, I'm just going to get a $20 Amazon gift card. That's too easy.
No. We should really think about what could be a value to them.
Mark Evans: What about the questions themselves? So it's not a conversation. So I'm not trying to have a casual chat. I'm looking for specific insight, and I have to structure my conversations in the right way. And admittedly, most customers, if you can connect with them, if they give you twenty minutes, thirty minutes, count yourself lucky because they're busy.
They've got their own priorities. Helping you is really not top of mind for them, but they may love you enough, so they will help. How do you come up with the questions and how do you get the answers that you want in a limited period of time?
Zineb Layachi: So once you're in the interview, you have the first part, which is just making them, you know, feel comfortable, doing a little bit of small talk, making sure, you know, before that, you get their okay to record it. That's really important to be able to record it so that you could be a hundred percent present in the conversation, and you could do the analysis, the extra layer of analysis afterwards. So first of all, it's just a little bit of small talk, and then you just get into it automatically, going back to when they actually performed that action. Right? So no transition as in, okay.
Now we're going to start the interview. No. Just go get into it. Right? You want to really go back to if it's a purchase, go back to the time right before then.
What happened? Tell me about the time when you said enough is enough. I have to solve. Boom. Right?
Or I have to get to this. Obviously, they're not going to get into the nitty-gritty, the good details, in the first two or three phrases. But if you keep asking questions like, uh-huh, and how so, and tell me more. No? So you start digging. That's why you have to be present, and it's also why recording it is super important so you could just be in the conversation, extracting as much information as possible, leaving don't ask any close questions.
Don't assume anything. And then that takes you, you have the format of a very short interview where you can go through the, you know, six, seven basic questions. But if you have a bit more time, you can start digging into questions like, what is it? One of my favorite ones is, what do you know now that's valuable? Had you known before would have made you sign up faster, for example.
It's an idea, it's an example of value that is misplaced. It's not communicated. So you're like, okay. Fantastic. I'm going to take that and make sure that's visible at the beginning.
But then you have, you know, the typical questions, which are if you had to recommend a product or service to someone else, what would you say?
Mark Evans: One of the questions or one of the things that I want to know when I interview customers is what I call the trigger. If you're a customer and you're doing the job using a tool, at some point in time, you decide that you want a different tool because no one goes from well, very few people go from using nothing to actually using a product. There's always switching, and they're always thinking about what their alternatives are. And some of it comes to performance and price. And I'm always interested in what is that trigger?
What happened that made you wake up one morning and go, this video editing tool that I'm using is no good anymore. I have to find a new one. And that's what I want to find out. I want to find those buying motivations. And do you see that as a core part of customer interviews when you're trying to get the insight you need?
Zineb Layachi: Absolutely. If we look at the understanding the full buying journey, most marketers are at the stage they only half understand that last part, the buying, you know, where the buying is going on. Even the using after that, they're not really fully understanding that, to be honest. But if you go, as you said, and understand the triggers, the two, three triggers, well, there's the first very first one. Of course, that's the one that's, you know, made you say something is not right.
No. Mm-hmm. I've got to start passively looking for something, but it's, you know, the level of urgency just grows and grows as you move along the buying journey. What's the next trigger that makes you go into the active looking phase? That's a really important one too.
Mainly because if you can get in front of those earlier on, with, you know, either, any type of collaboration with other brands, that's, for one, a bigger opportunity, cheaper channels. No. Mm-hmm. That's actually a very good opportunity. But, yeah, it's much easier to get into people that are in the deciding phase.
It's just easier for marketers, especially if they haven't run the customer interviews, they don't have the information to be able to, how can I say, move their marketing to the rest of the buying journey, to the very beginning of the buying journey?
Mark Evans: Let me ask you a loaded question. This goes back to the original premise of first principles of marketing versus technology and data and to get your take on the marketing landscape for the rest of the year. So for the last year, we've seen a lot of marketers either double down on digital marketing or embrace digital marketing for the first time, and there hasn't been conferences and people have published a ton of content and done a lot of webinars, and some people have embraced podcasts and ebooks. As we come out of COVID, hopefully come out of COVID, how do you see the B2B marketing landscape changing? Do you see it flipping back to pre-COVID where we all go back to conferences and we pull back on content and digital marketing, or has the landscape shifted in a way that we're not going back and you can't go back even if you wanted to?
Zineb Layachi: That's an interesting question. I mean, I can only give you, of course, my opinion. I don't, you know, I don't know what's going to happen. I think we've been given a taste or B2B marketers have been given a taste of something that there's no going back to a hundred percent what they used to do. It's not a B2B example, but just, I think it was Airbnb that when they, you know, shut down their ad spend, nothing really changed.
You know? And they realized that with or without it, they weren't seeing a huge difference either in visits or sales. So it wasn't really moving the needle. So you're talking about millions and millions being spent, but for no reason. Right?
So I think when it comes to B2B, you know, we have the in-person events. We have the conferences. We have all that. You know? I think they're going to ask themselves, is it really moving the needle?
I think that's what's going to change. It's not just, okay. We're going to go back to doing conferences or automatically. I think there's going to be a step before that where we ask ourselves, is it really moving the needle? And in terms of content creation, I think that we've been given a taste of something that's actually pretty cool.
Mark Evans: Mm-hmm.
Zineb Layachi: Whether we've been forced into that or not, but I think that's going to stay.
Mark Evans: Yeah. I do find it interesting that a lot of marketers have done marketing because every other marketer does the same thing. We go to conferences because the competitors go to conferences. We publish content on our blogs because that's just the thing that you do. It will be very interesting to see whether people do things differently and really, as you say, start to scrutinize the ROI of all their marketing activities and how it moves the needle.
Because if you're doing marketing for the sake of marketing, that's not marketing. That's just keeping busy. One final area that I wanted to talk to you about is just your presence on LinkedIn. And I think for a lot of people over the past year, a lot of marketers in particular have really embraced the platform and seen a lot of ROI. And I'm curious about how you yourself will change how you use LinkedIn?
Zineb Layachi: I think, to me, I started to really be more active on LinkedIn 2019. And so this is pre-COVID, even. I don't see it changing for me in the next year, year and a half. I don't see that changing. However, as I mean, I can't remember exactly how many monthly active users there were in, maybe, you know, on LinkedIn.
But in terms of content creators, I believe we started, during, when COVID started, it was at one percent. And now we're at three, four percent that are actually creating. And then a big chunk is, you know, they're just lurkers, and then there's another chunk that's just not there at all. So I think the more LinkedIn has a good organic reach, for now. It's been a bit fickle, to be honest, for me personally over the past two, just three weeks.
So the algorithm there just does funny things here and there. But still, you know, you get a good organic reach on this platform today. What's going to happen when we have more content creators and the same number of eyeballs. So is LinkedIn going to bring in more users so that it sort of, like, evens out? Mm-hmm.
Because if not, that'll mean less reach for the rest of us.
Mark Evans: One thing I wanted to ask you about LinkedIn is a recent announcement that they're going to expand the number of characters in a post to 3,000 from 1,300. I'm curious about how you feel that will change your use of the platform and how the platform could evolve because the nice thing about LinkedIn posts is I call them snackable. They're quick hits. They're succinct pieces of insight, and I can scroll and really get a lot of value quite quickly. But 3,000 characters to me, first impression seems like, man, it's going to be a lot of long content.
Some stuff is going to be stretched out, and I'm not so sure the user experience is going to be improved simply because people can write more words.
Zineb Layachi: Yeah. I think I remember that. And you posted about that a couple days ago or yesterday. I really enjoyed that post, especially the snackable part. When you give the snackable by snackable, it doesn't necessarily mean, you know, short.
Right? It doesn't necessarily mean, one sentence or 200 characters. Right? That's, I know, that's not what you mean. But if I'm thinking of it from the point of view of someone that doesn't make the effort to make it readable or enjoyable or just easy to read for the other one.
Can you imagine if that person is given more than double the number of characters? So I'm just worried about the clutter that's going to be worth, you know, if we're already selfish, and I'm not saying this about you, Mark, but in general, we're selfish. You know? We just push everything as is, and we make the audience. We expect the audience to sit down and filter out through this clutter and find something of value for them.
So there's a lot of that in the LinkedIn posts today. You know, if I do that, it's not intentional. Right? So this is a work in progress. But if you give me 300 characters and I have no idea what I'm talking about, then that's just more bad content, I think, in my opinion.
Now how can this be used for good? Well, like you said, I think you mentioned it, replacing articles, even blog posts that could be, again, an opportunity, if there's value. And even then, if there's value, I don't think that I want to read 300-character posts all day long every day. So I would like to read one of your posts as, you know, maybe a video, change things up. You know?
A video, a short one, a thousand character post, podcast, a one-liner once in a while, just changing things up.
Mark Evans: Well, thanks for all the great insight. Where can people learn more about you and Raise the Runway?
Zineb Layachi: LinkedIn. We're just talking about LinkedIn. That's where I spend most of my time. Yeah. So happy to connect there.
Mark Evans: Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you'd like to learn more about how I help B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor, and coach, send an email to Mark@MarketingSpark.co. I'll talk to you next time.
