Empower Your Team with a Nurturing Marketing Strategy for Teams

How to create outlook signature

in this video i'm going to show you how to build a complete marketing strategy from start all the way to finish and i'm going to show you by doing it in real life with a completely random example one that i had no control over no say over what i think will be a whole lot of fun and hopefully a very valuable learning experience as well so here's how this whole thing started this past weekend i asked my kids to go through the house and to try to pick any single thing that they wanted without really any idea of what i was going to do little did they know i was gonna create a marketing strategy around it which is where they quickly lost interest but this helped to keep them from being too biased with their decision anyway trying to get them to pick and then decide and actually agree on one specific thing was a whole other ordeal unto itself but ultimately they ended up deciding on a single product probably because we'd just eaten it for breakfast earlier that day but the product they decided that they wanted me to use was kodiak cakes now couple quick things before we head into the video number one this video is not sponsored by kodiak cakes this is legitimately a completely random product number two i happen to quite like kodiak cakes as a breakfast food a nice treat on the weekend however i know basically nothing about the company about their marketing or about anything behind it so this really was a neat opportunity for me to sort of apply my marketing master plan process to kodiak cakes and to create a strategy what would i do if i was the ceo or the cmo of kodiak cakes to try to reach more people try to deliver the brand message so here's what we're going to do next first i'm going to go through what i believe would be the appropriate strategy the right marketing campaign the right ideas the thoughts and apply them through my marketing master plan in order to come up with sort of a guideline for how i would go and market this product then i'm going to do a little bit of research after the fact and see what kodiak cakes is actually doing see how much of this is in line with the things that i believe or if there's any things that i may have missed or some other ideas and all of this will hopefully not only give you ideas and a way of thinking about and approaching your marketing but also give you ideas and inspiration for some takeaways that you're going to be able to apply to your business regardless of what market or business or industry you're in and that's what makes marketing so interesting is that while every business every market every industry is different there are nuances there are sort of unique characteristics the fundamental principles of marketing are universal they stay the same and the way that consumers and customers and your clients the way that they buy things the way that they make purchasing decisions well these criteria really haven't changed that much in thousands if not tens of thousands of years they're based on very strong emotional reasons and then they're they're backed up logically and rationally later but more on that later for now let's start marketing all right so the way that i create marketing for any client the way that i teach all of my students and the way that i've been doing it in one way shape or form for the past 10 years and more is to go through a very specific and very strategic five-part process each one is sequential each step builds on the next one every step is important and it all starts with step number one which is all about the model all right so the very first thing when it comes to marketing any business is figuring out well what's the business model what exactly are we selling what are our price points where do we fit in the market what is the way that we're going to present our offers all of the things that go into it now again admittedly i know very little if not pretty much nothing about kodiak cakes other than they're kind of kind of a tasty pancake but on that note well it's safe to draw some pretty natural conclusions that all right so what we're dealing with here is not only a breakfast food but a breakfast food that is probably going to be sold not only through big box stores because i'm pretty sure i remember that we picked this up at costco but also i think you can also order them online which is a direct to consumer model so they're using different retailers they're using direct to consumer they're definitely in sort of a lower priced bracket i guess of all of the kind of different products being sold but probably a higher price bracket if you compare them to say other pancake brands even though i can't think of a single other pancake brand but i guess that's where research comes in later also i'm gonna back this up in just a second with a little bit of due diligence and research but my understanding of most food-based services most products and services of any kind well they tend to start with one core product and then they branch out testing different things and seeing what other areas and what other products and services they can also offer so we're going to say for the business model right now it's a combination of both retail stores as well as direct to consumer they're selling primarily lower priced food consumable objects so once that part is covered and we've got all our notes and all of our details on that well it's time to move on to the next step which is all about the market now in my humble but incredibly accurate opinion the market is the single most important element of all of your marketing success this is because the word market well it's baked right in the word marketing itself this shows just how fundamentally important really understanding your market is who they are what they like what kind of things they buy what other things are going to influence their decisions and the better you understand your market the better you understand your customers your clients the people you're trying to serve the better your business is going to do period full stop there's a great expression that i love that says the customer doesn't buy when they understand they buy when they feel understood now i appreciate we're talking about pancakes here so we don't have to get too emotionally deep but you better be sure there's still some kind of connection some kind of emotional appeal some kind of draw that is pulling people towards these pancakes in fact even just a quick look at the box itself can already tell you a number of things about the brand about the business look at how they're going for kind of a rustic appeal look at the color scheme a mixture of kind of earth tones and red tones and things like that look at how it's kind of rough and kind of almost like this frontier element of the wild west and gold panning and things like that not to mention the name itself kodiak cakes they're not calling them pancakes which sounds a little bit i guess lighter and nicer they're calling them cakes don't even get me started on kodiak i mean this is a massive monstrous grizzly bear that weighs i don't even know hundreds and hundreds of pounds i mean these things are terrifying now based on my experience and my understanding of the market and the different markets that are out there right now i'm probably pretty safe to say that the market that they're appealing to right now is probably a mixture of millennials around the ages of if i had to guess i'd say like 28 to 38 maybe putting them somewhere in like their early 30s would be the ideal demographic of this possibly either people that are thinking about starting a family people that have a family and young kids that they need something relatively healthy for higher protein content that kind of thing also again you'd of course want to back all of this up with appropriate customer research as well as competitive research but again my gut's going to say that we're probably steering more towards a female demographic at least making the purchase now this is typically just because of the split of who makes this kind of buying decision however even though the branding looks like it might be going for a more male demographic you can be sure that the vast majority of say their followers or the people that engage with their content are going to be female but again i want to back all of this up later with research alright so now that we've got that covered it's time to move on to step number three which is all about message so the message of your marketing is all about really figuring out what kind of stories what kind of words what kind of language your customers use what are their pains their problems their fears and their frustrations all the things i call their miseries as well as what are all of their goals and their dreams and their desires and their aspirations what i call their miracles and then finding a way to help them bridge the gap now of course we're going to do research like i keep saying later to figure this out but for now there's a lot of information we can gain simply by looking at the box itself simply by looking at the product that's being sold i mean seriously we've already talked about the fact that it's kind of rugged looking and it's got a bear and it's got some red and dark earth tones and things like that but just look at the wording on the box right here i mean the very first thing that it leads with is protein-packed which shows that what we're doing here is we're appealing to a more health and possibly fitness-minded individual next it uses words like 100 whole grains but not only that it's using crafted with which in itself is telling you a certain kind of sort of a certain kind of underlying tone about just the wording that they're used and the tone and the emotion and the attitude that they're trying to convey i mean crafted is very different than made with or added or it's got this stuff in it i mean this is crafted of course we have the name kodiak cakes itself but also right below that you'll see power cakes which in itself is a very powerful word literally and of course they're not just pancakes they're flapjacks and waffle mix which just sounds a whole lot more cool and once again they're putting that protein content on it which is reinforcing kind of the unique selling proposition or the value of what it is that they're delivering so from a messaging standpoint i kind of like all of it i mean really if i'm going through the model and i'm going to sell it retailers and direct to consumer which is definitely where i would start and i'm thinking through my market of millennials probably young families typically it's trying to appeal to say a male demographic but we know that the female is going to be the primary shopper so i'm going to be gearing a lot of the language around that and then i start moving into my messaging about protein and health and 100 whole grains and making it powerful and all of those things well a very clear image is starting to form in my mind about what direction i'm going to be pushing this campaign the kind of metaphors that i can use the kind of uh images that i'm going to want to develop the kind of branding and messaging around it as well as the calls to action and the appeals and the real the real push for this being a more filling a more substantial a more sort of a better way to start your day in fact i'm pretty sure that's already somebody's slogan or tag line a better way to start your day but if not i'd be using it maybe the best way to start your day or maybe something like a better way to be ready for anything life throws at you there's a lot of ways we could go with this one okay so at this point we've got model pretty much dialed in i'm gonna definitely be gearing towards more direct to consumer just because of uh the complications involved with going through retailers we've got our market pretty much figured out millennials young families we've got our messaging figured out now it's time to move on to media where are we going to be advertising this where are we going to be marketing this what kind of marketing and advertising are we going to want to do if you've made it this far congratulate yourself because you've gone through all of the hard stuff now this is where we get to have a little bit of fun we get to sort of polish things up and put them out to the world make them creative make them irresistible and really connect with our market in a way that's going to give them a ton of value and make them desire and want what we have to sell now fortunately when it comes to choosing different media sources for this product it's actually incredibly simple because we've already done the mental heavy lifting of identifying our ideal target market we're going to say millennials early 30s men women probably more women well this is pushing us towards platforms like facebook like instagram we might run youtube ads although the cost required to sort of get a conversion may not make sense given the lower price point of the product i'm also probably going to be running some kind of google ad there's no reason that i wouldn't want to appear for a branded search term around my product so for example if someone is searching on google for protein pancakes definitely kodiak cakes anything like that i want my brand to appear so we're gonna run probably facebook ads facebook organic marketing we're gonna run instagram ads as well as instagram organic marketing we're going to run google ads as well as probably have a decent search engine optimization platform built around different recipes and different lifestyle things that would be interesting to my market so just for fun i figured hey why don't we put together a really simple social media campaign probably take the logo maybe animate a little bit make some kind of a video find some b-roll or stock footage of a bear coming around and making some sounds and seeing if we could put together something that i'd be proud of to advertise my company so the first thing that i did just headed over to photoshop now if you're not familiar with photoshop you can probably have this done on fiverr or upwork or get somebody else in your company to do it it's really not too complicated all you really have to do is make a selection of the main part that you want to remove or to animate and then you can simply cut it out so you can see what i've done here is i animated or cut out the bear here which allows me to then bring him back in later we can use content aware and simply replace the background but you can see that i sort of did this in different layers starting from that main logo and that then gives me the freedom to go into in this case final cut pro which is my video editing software and start to animate a bit of a commercial around it alright so then what i did is i took that over and i moved it into final cut pro and you can see that all i've done is i've taken the box i've animated it so it drops in with a little bit of smoke and then i've got the bear rolling through and i added just a little bit of a b-roll of uh of sort of a bear walking through in the background as well as those uh those ever important bear sounds to make it that much more real and in the end this is what we get [Music] so what i tried to do there is stick with kind of that frontier theme try to make it a little more interesting i went with the tagline of eat healthy even though after we've just talked about this through i might go with something like preparing yourself for the day or whatever it is there's got to be some kind of bare cliche pun metaphor or something something i'm barely able to think right now all right so with the media section out of the way it's time to move on to the final piece of the puzzle which is all about the machine this is how you're actually going to go about selling these things now given the price point it simply doesn't make sense to have some kind of elaborate campaign with all kinds of multiple steps i mean these are not decisions that someone needs a lot of time to think about sort of evaluating the pros and cons of different protein packed pancake brands however still gotta be smart about it which means that i'm still really in love with this direct to consumer idea selling them from my own website taking control of as much of the distribution as possible until it doesn't make sense logistically later on so for my machine what i'm going to do here is i'm probably going to run those facebook ads facebook organic content instagram ads instagram organic content as well as my google ads direct to a sales page for a product now one of the biggest and most important things to consider when you are running ads or running any kind of content to a landing page selling anything is you want to stick to one single thing at a time meaning i'd want to identify what my best seller is in this case well i've only got the one kind of kodiak cake in the pantry so that's what we're going to be going with but if i had all kinds of different products and offers you want to do one at a time you don't want to send them to your home page and overwhelm people with a ton of different options they're just going to get confused they're not going to buy anything and they're going to leave in fact there's countless studies being done on this it's a psychological phenomenon known as the paradox of choice where essentially when you give people way too many different decisions they don't make any they just walk away and actually even worse if they do happen to make a decision they're overall less satisfied with the decision that they made they second guess themselves they think it's worse long story short sell one thing at a time all right so now that i've got my complete marketing campaign built out from model to market to message to media and machine well it's time to put this to the test let's do a little bit of research into kodiak cakes themselves let's figure out how much of this was sort of in line with what they're currently doing maybe it'll spark some ideas for other things that they could do or maybe there were some areas that i missed and the best place to do this and the best place to start is to simply go to their website and see what they've got going on so let's hop into the computer now take a look alright so here we are on the kodiak cakes website and in fact we're going to be able to get some pretty good information here right away about the model the market the message the media and the machine probably just from this one website alone so starting off let's do a quick scan through and we can see that there are a number of different products so in fact if we go to open uh and see all these different products holy moly we got a bunch we got muffin cups and power cakes and all kinds of other stuff baking variety packs i mean they've got a whole bunch of different stuff so this is clearly sort of the different product line but you can see the price point five dollars ninety cents five fifty two dollars forty cents uh this baking variety pack is thirty dollars so we're not talking about massive massive amounts of money which means that it's very likely that their success of their business model is going to be built on retention and on recurring revenue on people getting hooked on kodiak cakes which which admittedly our family kind of is so it's like this is something that you buy and you eat every single weekend is uh or maybe even every single day based on all of the different kind of things that they have they're showing a lot of good social proof with 50 reviews and 40 reviews on that one and 14 reviews and so on and so forth so the model seems solid from that point and of course you can buy them all online it obviously doesn't show here that they're sold in different stores but i know firsthand that they are so we are using a couple different distribution strategies we're using direct to consumer selling through the website as well as through retailers all right now figuring out the exact target market based on a website is a little bit trickier rarely is a company going to say out uh just come out on their website and be like we're for this kind of person and this kind of thing especially with mass market appeal like this so let's go over to google and it's amazing sometimes what you can find when you type in like who is the target market of this brand or who is the target market of this business or anything like that i mean google's got a ton of info so let's see what they got all right so a quick search for kodiak cakes target market shows us that uh the most part their average age is 31 they are the target market um looks like this is based on the average age of the person on the team and it's showing that all right well this is the age of the target market which kind of fits in line with what my guess was what my hypothesis was i'm kind of a millennial between the ages i can't remember what i said exactly it was say 28 to 38 28 to 40 somewhere in that range early 30s that's really what we're going for i mean just the tone and the style and the branding alone kind of guides you in that direction but this kind of really uh really solidifies that backs it up all right and to do a little bit of a deeper search we'll also type in kodiak cakes demographics to find out what are the demographic details of the market and it looks like at least based on social media following 68.6 of the followers are female 31.4 percent are male again this kind of backs up the the demographic the thought that i had around who is it going to be it's going to be kind of an even split between male and female females typically are more inclined to be making these kind of purchasing decisions for the household especially with younger families this is just sort of stereotypical behavior that we see with different demographic profiles so again it kind of backs it up they're also more likely to engage on social media so it may not be the most accurate statistic but at least again points us in the right direction for the market all right next up we have message what are they trying to say now of course we were able to deduce a number of very valuable takeaways just from the box of kodiak cakes itself however when we come to the website this is all reinforced right i mean again we've got the branding we've got kind of this old-school heritage um almost hipster vibe to it we've got the way that the logo looks with the kind of wood paneling background we have snack adventurously that's a good tagline i like that one should use that one uh we've got their call to action here or they're sort of sub head being short on time to whip up a snack grab it on the go granola bar again totally sounds like i'm working for kodiak cakes this video is not sponsored but um but i do like their pancakes so again those are decent call to action shop flavors whole grains taste better uh they're they're talking about their unique selling proposition here again 100 whole grains protein packed non-gmo all things that their demographic would care about um really cool imagery again i really like the the imagery and the branding do more with your meal wildlife conver conservation that's good how do you conquer the frontier oh yeah so there we go some frontier actual admission of the word which i like get news and deals without having to forage so they're really really doubling down on this whole bear theme which i like i mean if this is your brand this is what you're going for they're based looks like you're out of park city utah so of course everything like that is going to line up all of that works fine and in fact while we're down here this will lead us nicely to the next point which is all about media so if you remember from just a few minutes ago when i was talking about media thinking about kind of our millennials in their early 30s mostly female bit of a split between men i mentioned facebook with um organic and paid talked about instagram organic and paid talked about possibly running youtube ads as well as google ads well a simple look down here and you can see that all right they're linking out to a facebook profile which is very common pinterest didn't think about that one especially with a female demographic and recipes that's kind of a slam dunk uh instagram yes twitter and we'll open that in just a second my gut would say that's probably not their most lucrative marketing channel based on the demo that they're trying to go after but it's still there but there's another little trick that i've got up my sleeve as well to find out if they're running facebook ads and if they're running google ads and that is through something called the facebook pixel helper and then google tag um assistant here so let's start with google tag assistant right at the top this is a free chrome plugin that you can just under browser and it'll show you what tags are visible or what tags are installed on different websites and you can see that on kodiak cake's website we've got obviously their google site tag we've got conversion tracking we have ads remarketing tags we have analytics of course and google tag manager which makes sense but it's these remarketing tags that are interesting because what this means is it's a very smart strategy to not only be advertising to people who are searching for your brand and business but also running remarketing ads meaning you're targeting only people who have visited your site before and have then been cookied with the pixel on your site so this is good to see and it also kind of confirms they are indeed running those google ads and then of course using facebook pixel helper and we can see that yes indeed they do have the facebook pixel installed on their site that's what this little green thing here is and you can confirm one pixel found on kodiak cakes so again they at least have their facebook pixel installed now we could double triple confirm this by going over to facebook looking at their facebook page looking through page transparency and seeing it if they're running ads and what ads those are as well to really back this up all right well on that note there's no way that i'm not going to let my curiosity get the better of me so let's head over to facebook and uh and we'll look up the kodiak cakes page now to see if they're running ads alright so here we are on the kodiak cakes facebook page now you can do this with any single company any competitor that you want to do research for to find out if they're running ads and what those ads say as well all you need to do is go over to the page scroll on down to this section here called page transparency click see all and right here you'll see ads from this page this page is currently running ads but it gets even cooler we can go to add library and it's going to open up the ads that are currently running now it looks like we've got just canada selected so we'll select all and it still looks like it's not showing in this case so no ads to take a look at or gain any information from but definitely feel free to use this for any other competitors that you want to be taking a look at all right so at this point we've backed up their model we've talked about their market their message their media the last thing is the machine and of course this one is also hard to deduce just from a website but again we can see that they are using a direct to consumer model based on the fact that they have this shopping ability to add to cart to make the purchase right there on the website so clearly we know that they're available in different retail stores but they're also selling direct to consumer and they have a number of different products available just like that all right so with all that said that is a literal complete marketing strategy and that marketing master plan framework of model market message media and machine is something you can apply to everything that you do moving forward so in order to make this even more effective and in order to set yourself for even more success in the future the next thing you're going to want to do is check out the video i've got linked up right here on digital marketing so make sure to check that out now and i'll see in the next video alright the next thing that will really help you become a better digital marketer is to understand the differences between strategy and tactics and when to use them strategy is all the big picture stuff and this is really where you want