Why Brand Differentiation Matters More Than Ever: Peep Laja

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Mark Evans: You're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight, tools, and tips for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in twenty minutes or less. I've known Pep Laiya for about a decade, back to when I was organizing a marketing conference in Toronto. Pep is the founder and principal of CXL in Austin, Texas. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Pep.

Peep Laja: Hey. Thanks for having me.

Mark Evans: Let's start with CXL. Since we've known each other, the company has evolved and changed and become a multifaceted organization. I'll put you on the spot. What's the elevator pitch for CXL?

Peep Laja: It stands for two things right now, but we're spinning one of these things out. So my pitch for CXL Institute is that this is where you come learn from the world class practitioners on how to do data driven marketing.

Mark Evans: And what about the other parts of the organization?

Peep Laja: Well, we also have a conversion optimization agency, CXL Agency. We're spinning it off as its own separate brand because it's very hard to be two things in somebody's mind. So we're gonna just, yeah, spin it off. But CXL Agency is is the company that actually started the conversion optimization agency where we work with mid to large enterprises helping them to, you know, convert more customers.

Mark Evans: You spend a lot of time on LinkedIn and Twitter like a lot of us do these days. As someone who's been involved in the marketing landscape for many years, what's your take on how brands are approaching marketing given the fact that many of them can't meet face to face? There's no conferences. There's no meetups. What do you think they're doing these days? Are they doing is there anything new and interesting, or are they just going back to the fundamentals?

Peep Laja: I think for the most part, companies are doing what they've been doing for for a long time. You know? SEO and content marketing still works. For us at CXL, it's 95% of money is is all inbound marketing, mainly mainly through content. Of course, it's content we've we've written over the past ten years. It's not like it's something we did last week. So I think that's still working. Pay per click is still working for some companies, not us, actually, because, you know, cost per click is is getting higher and higher and and so on. So some products are better fit than others. I think the the marketing fundamentals are still as they are, But it there is one thing that is happening, I think, which is that a brand as a differentiation is becoming more and more important and mainly because the market saturation and nudge the sheer number of competition. You know? And, like, name a company, and they have, like, 100 other companies doing the exact same thing. And often, there's no, you know, actual functional difference. It's it's all about a brand brand difference. And, you know, you you brought up Twitter and LinkedIn. And for for b to b brands, that's increasingly where where brand building is happening. And not not through not through the, like, the official handle of the company, but through the people who work at the companies.

Mark Evans: You know, I've been talking about brand positioning and differentiation and storytelling for the last few years. At times, it feels like a Don Quixote kind of exercise tilting against windmills because I understand the value of differentiation and brand positioning, but many companies have sort of took it for granted and they focus more on tactical execution. How many posts can we create? How many videos can we make? Do you think this is a the pendulum is swinging back to differentiation and brand positioning because of the current marketing landscape?

Peep Laja: I do think it's it's having a moment. It's having a moment, you know, like, we have, like, many many niche celebrities popping up, like April Dunford with her excellent book on positioning. Like, she's making making rounds. The the message is getting increasingly heard. Companies are increasingly thinking about it. And also the fact that, you know, let's let's look at the marketing technology landscape. In eight years, it has grown, like, 5000%, and there are more than, like, 8,000 more tech tools out there. So if you're an email marketing software, maybe, you know, a start up just getting getting started now, you just cannot win by doing the same things by, oh, let's write a couple of blog posts on, like, what to write good subject lines, and then we'll run some PPC ads. It just doesn't work. You know? You just people don't people have very limited consideration sets. And so if you wanna get into their consideration set, differentiation is is kind of a must have.

Mark Evans: So the question is, how do companies differentiate themselves? Like, I have said for many years that your competitors, they talk like you. They walk like you. They have the same benefits and features and probably the same pricing. So it's slightly different versions of a flavor of ice cream. How do you stand apart? How do you differentiate your brand when you've got dozens, if not hundreds, of competitors who walk the same and talk the same?

Peep Laja: Yeah. Well, I think you're absolutely right. And then why that is is it's because real differentiation is hard because it's not enough just to be just a little different, be another flavor. I mean, differentiation needs to be in big enough to tell the decision in your in your favor. So and and then it's the radical part of differentiation that's that's hard for most. And I think a lot of it is it's because it's scary to be different. You know? It's tempting to be a safe and boring company. And you say safe and boring stuff because it's inoffensive, and thus nobody will call you out. You won't get criticized. You won't get hit. You're just like everybody else. But, of course, the problem is that nobody will care either. So it's a it's a double edged sword. So how do you differentiation? I mean, it's it's difficult. You know, there's the old classic differentiator die, which is now, like, 30 years old or something. So I think a lot of the things that they were said thirty years ago are still valid today. Like, things like, you know, be first or attribute leadership, like, you focus in on just one particular aspect. Like, when WP Engine, the the hosting company launched, like, they were, like, speed, you know, like, attribute. We're we're all about speed. Now there are, of course, you know, so many clones for WP Engine that are using the exact same argument. We're the fast WordPress hosting. Now the WP Engine is is, of course, large enough, and they have big market share. It's less differentiation is much less important to them because, you know, market penetration, market share is by far the most important thing. If people know you, it's much easier for you. So differentiation is first and foremost important for smaller companies that don't have big big market share. And I think every everyone should invest in a customer experience as a differentiator because it's just easy to do, easy to be different through customer experience. Most companies are doing the bare minimum. And and two, brand. And by brand, of course, it means that you have certain set of values that you stand for. You know, you attract a group of people, and at the same time, you repel another group consciously. And that means that you need to be polarizing and people, you know, feel uncomfortable polarizing people.

Mark Evans: I like the idea that you mentioned the fact that it's easy to be safe and boring because I think there's an analogy that if a herd decides to run over the side of a cliff, everybody decides that that's the best thing to do as well. So we all jump over the side of the cliff. At the end of the day, that's not such a good thing. But I'm curious about why marketers and companies are afraid to be different, to think out of the box, to really stand out in a way that may strike people as offensive or strikingly different. Is that just because of a lack of confidence or there it's just the way that things have always been done? So that's the first part of the question. The second would be, is it a necessary evil these days? And then maybe the evil is the wrong word, but is it something that's necessary to differentiate and carve out a competitive edge?

Peep Laja: I think one of the hardest thing to do is to be original. You know, very few of us are legit, authentic, original thinkers. You know? Copying is easy. Being original is hard. It's just much easier to to just you know, you see something and then you, oh, let's take that, but, like, add something. You know? Like, let's be a little bit better. It's just what most I think so the creativity is is one one one big part of it. It's just most people are not just able to imagine something that they haven't seen before. So that's one. Two is that differentiation is not just marketing, you know, because it's not like a line of copyright because it's it's the whole DNA of the business. So that means that also CEO or the the the senior leadership as a whole needs to be bought in. And, you know, if the company is big enough and there's, you know, maybe a legal department then whose whose job is to, you know, cover their ass, they'll be less interested in doing something more more radical. If there are investors involved, doing something more radical might, you know, affect their finances so they're, you know, more risk averse. So if if your if your CEO gets marketing, then maybe it's bootstrapped or at least, like, healthy coffins of full of money. I think you're you're more more likely to take some risks because ultimately, it is it is a risk. Because any strategy and differentiation is a strategy. Any strategy is a hypothesis. You know, you might have good inputs, data inputs of why the chosen path might work, But it's still a risk. It's still a gamble. It's it's it's an experiment, and and and it's one that you need to play out over a long period of time. You know? Maybe two years two years of testing your your your messaging.

Mark Evans: I think you're right. I think I often tell clients that marketing in general is an experiment or a hypothesis. You've got you use the data. You use your market research to talk to your customers. But at the end of the day, you're putting something out there that you believe will work, but the only way to find out is actually to do it and see kinda see what kind of response you get, what kind of traction you get, what kind of conversions you get. I mean, there's no certainty in marketing and certainly some of those certainty in sales. I was curious about your take on how companies can take a better or different approach to marketing. Things like outsourcing and using consultants and agencies because what I've seen post COVID is that a lot of brands have scaled back on their internal marketing resources, and now they've discovered that they've still gotta do marketing. You still gotta make things happen. What's your take on using third party suppliers?

Peep Laja: Mhmm. In general, my mindset has become more and more that the new game companies need to play is is vendor management, you know, becoming really good at vendor management. Because see, if you think about what what is it that you do as a company? So and what's what's uniquely different where about your company where you have some competitive edge? And that's mainly only about 10% of what you do because, like, the content marketing side of writing articles and doing content distribution, every company does that. Your SEO, every company does that. Running PPC ads, every company does that. You know, that's not unique about you. So anything that is not unique about you is better outsourced. Because having employees is, like, is also a cost because, like, you need to manage them, hold their hand, make sure they're happy, think about their career goals, you know, like, the whole talent management aspect of it. But then, like, if you if you hire an agency, they are experts at that one thing. So maybe it's PPC, maybe it's content or, you know, messaging, whatever it is. They are doing that every single day, and then they take care of, like, upskilling and so on. And, also, the beautiful thing about agencies is that they work on so many diverse use cases, and they've seen it all. You know? And I know because, you know, nine years of running a CRO agency, any company that comes in with their optimization challenges, like, we've seen it. I mean, we have a, like, a library of, like, what works for this use case, you know, this kind kind of company. So agencies, know, obviously, are bad ones out there. But if you if you pick the right partner, I think that's the way to go. Also, in these economically, let's say, turbulent times, nobody likes to lay off people if times get tough, but it's getting rid of or pausing agencies is easy. It's not emotional. You know? It's like, okay. We just need to put this budget on on on hold for now, and, like, maybe we'll pick it up when things get better. So I'm all for it.

Mark Evans: I as a consultant, that conversation that we don't need to anymore is painful, but it is a reality of of the work that we do. If that's the case, then what kind of marketing resources should companies have internally? How do you have a team that is high value that it's not something you can that you necessarily wanna get from a third party?

Peep Laja: You, I think, a company, if you if you outsource bits of your marketing, like as I said, vendor management as a skill. So you, as a as a let's say, the marketing coordinator or head of marketing at a company, you know the strategic goals. You know, like, you know the customer the best, like, who you're selling to, which, you know, pain point you're addressing, and and so on and so forth. That the agents just don't know. So you you know the customer. You know your company. You know the competition and where you fit in, and you know the strategy of your company, how you're trying to compete, which game you're playing, and how you're gonna win this game. Your job as an in house marketer is to then basically, you're you're like a capital allocator. You know? Like, every every employee is a capital allocator and same with with agencies. So your job as a as a head of marketing maybe is is then to allocate the company's capital, money, budget, also time to the highest potential return. And so that's you you coordinate all these third party expert. I mean, you can all obviously have in house people as well. I'm not saying don't hire anybody, but I think it's just in many cases, it's you're better served by outsourcing activity. So vendor management does a skill, ability to select and manage vendors. You know? Like, if if the in the past, the skill was the ability to recruit, manage, retain, and grow talent, marketing talent maybe. You know? So now it's the same with with vendor management.

Mark Evans: One final question. As hard as it is to imagine what the marketing landscape is going to look like going forward, any thoughts about what marketing will look like in 2021? What will the smart companies be focused on?

Peep Laja: Well, technology is still rapidly growing and and, you know, technology is an enabler and amplifier. So a lot of the things that people were still doing manually is just gonna be taken over by machine learning because it's just way better at it. You know? Like, things like predictive analytic analytics is is gonna go mainstream. Predictive analytics for everybody, like no code predictive analytics is already here. You know, things like Squark and so on where you can just you upload all your email list and the list of companies that have bought from you, and then you enrich the data with, like, Clearbit stuff that gives you, like, 50 data points per email subscriber. The prediction will tell you who will buy what, what should you sell them next, at which price points. It will make this very accurate predictions, and then that is a data, you know, for you as a marketer to make better decisions. You know, if you're still taking decisions like 2011, you know, you're you're just falling behind. Learning how to work with these new technologies, and I'm not saying that you need to be writing any machine learning code, but you need to know how these the algorithms work and how to leverage these technologies to your advantage. So I think marketers need to just become more more technical and not not in a code writing way, but just to learn learn how to utilize the the evolving tech.

Mark Evans: This has been great insight, Pat. I mean, we barely got into all the things that I wanted to talk about. So maybe I'll I'll have you on marketing spark part two of a podcast because there's a lot to talk about these days. Thanks for the time, and good luck with the evolving CXL empire. It's gonna be an exciting twenty twenty one. Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. If you like what you heard, please rate it. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Pep, visit marketing spark dot co slash blog. If you have questions, feedback, would like to suggest a guest, or wanna learn more about how I help b to b companies as a fractional CMO, consultant, and adviser, send an email to Mark@marketmarketingspark.co. Talk to you next time.