Rand Fishkin On Creating Demand, Being Helpful, And Playing The Long Game
Our guest this week almost needs no introduction!
Setting aside the fanboying from us, our guest share some real marketing wisdom that we’re sure everyone can benefit from!
Rand Fishkin, probably well known to most of our listeners, is the founder of SparkToro – an audience research tool that we’ll get into more in the episode. He’s also the Cofounder of Moz, one of the world’s largest SEO companies.
He and the team at SparkToro are doing amazing things to help the little guys when it comes to audience research and doing the type of marketing that just doesn’t work for the big boys in town. And that’s a good thing!
He generously share some of his view points, which we couldn’t agree more with here at The B2B Playbook.
Some key highlights:
- Paid channels’ incentive right now is attribution, not conversion!
- Demand generation is infuriatingly hard, if not impossible to measure. So that’s why most marketers don’t do it, and as a result it’s a huge opportunity because costs are low and inventory is high.
- Personas can be limiting, as they often don’t reflect the breadth of people within a collective group. They should be broad and diverse, but they’ll still allow you to understand where they get their information from and how the groups are made up. That type of personas are truly useful.
- When you change the fundamental question at the core of your marketing strategy, you open up the possibility for a more effective, long term and valuable relationship. When that transactional nature fades into the background and a value giving relationship is had, lots of things improve. Think of a tinder relationship vs meeting someone through friends.
- A ton to learn from classic marketing thinking, but the world is nuanced and requires a tailored approach.
- Value building events offline, particularly small ones, are immensely satisfying and rewarding.
Some Highlights From The Episode
Some of Rands’ Key Points
- Marketing paid channels’ incentive right now is attribution, not conversion! So people might have bought from you anyway, regardless of ads they saw. Maybe we need to look at paid ads differently as a result.
- Demand generation is infuriatingly hard, if not impossible to measure. So that’s why most marketers don’t do it, and as a result it’s a huge opportunity because costs are low and inventory is high.
- Personas can be limiting, as they often don’t reflect the breadth of people within a collective group. They should be broad and diverse, but they’ll still allow you to understand where they get their information from and how the groups are made up. That type of personas are truly useful.
- SparkToro, just like Moz, is trying to put incredibly valuable information that everyone should have, democratised at their fingertips. So the big boys don’t have the advantage over you.
- What I love about it is this kind of marketing doesn’t work on a big scale. It’s amazing for the small guys though and transformative. That’s who I really want to help and where this [SparkToro] idea came from.
- When you change the fundamental question at the core of your marketing strategy, you open up the possibility for a more effective, long term and valuable relationship. When that transactional nature fades into the background and a value giving relationship is had, lots of things improve. Think of a tinder relationship vs meeting someone through friends.
- When the thinking is short term, as tenures in marketing are short, the tactics and focus becomes transactional to show their impact as soon as possible. But this misdirects the focus to a race to the bottom. So you need a mental shift to focus on building relationships over the long term to yield better results.
- A ton to learn from classic marketing thinking, but the world is nuanced and requires a tailored approach.
- Value building events offline, particularly small ones, are immensely satisfying and rewarding.
Tune into this week’s episode for more!
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