Marketing = Customers + Heart
By Judy Celmins and Eriks Celmins
()
About this ebook
Stop wasting your advertising money!
It's easy to feel frustrated and disheartened when you're trying to grow your small business, pouring precious cash into advertising channels and funnels with little or no return. But you can change your business's fortune with a marketing plan that places your customers at the very heart of your business.
Marketing = Customers + Heart is more than a marketing book, it's your way of business. If you follow this clear, practical, and proven formula you too will win in small business. Join Judy and Eriks Celmins as they share the 7 Stages for building a solid growth strategy – stages you can implement immediately, and every day. Developed over their three decades of experience challenging conventions and problem-solving in a wide range of innovative businesses and industries, this formula will help you:
- Build a solid foundation to create, understand, nurture, and retain customers.
- Tap into your hidden reserves of creativity for new and exciting ideas.
- Feel confident that your marketing decisions are finally on target with your goals and aspirations.
- Discover how stronger customer relationships lead to deeper insights and greater growth.
- Expand your mindset and easily identify new opportunities before your competitors.
The Marketing = Customers + Heart formula comes at the very first, critical step of your marketing strategy – a step that too many businesses skip over. This book is a must-read, before you waste one more cent sending the wrong message.
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Marketing = Customers + Heart - Judy Celmins
Bonus Content
As a special feature, you’ll find QR codes¹ at the start of each Stage, simply tap or scan to link to landing pages we are constantly refreshing with new resources, including entertaining and informative videos. This is a living book that’s always up-to-date!
QR code scanners are built into the cameras of iPhones, otherwise search in the Apple App Store. For Android, head to Google Play.
First published 2022 by ThriveableBiz®
Produced by Indie Experts P/L, Australasia
indieexperts.com.au
Copyright © ThriveableBiz® 2022 – All rights reserved.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of study, research or review, as permitted under the copyright act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without the written permission of the authors.
Every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright material; should any infringement have occurred accidentally, the authors tend their apologies.
Product and other names used herein may be trademarks of their respective owners. The authors disclaim any and all rights in those marks.
Cover design by Daniela Catucci @ Catucci Design
Edited by Anne-Marie Tripp
Internal design by Indie Experts
Typeset by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane
ISBN 978-0-473-61420-1 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-473-61425-6 (epub)
ISBN 978-0-473-61423-2 (kindle)
ISBN 978-0-473-61426-3 (audiobook)
Disclaimer: Every effort has been made to ensure this book is as accurate and complete as possible. However, there may be mistakes, both typographical and in content. Therefore, this book should be used as a general guide and not the ultimate source of information contained herein. The authors and publisher shall not be liable or responsible to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damage caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by the information contained in this book.
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
Stage 1 Everything You Do Is Marketing
Chapter 1 Create a Customer
Chapter 2 Lay the Foundation
Chapter 3 Change It Up
Stage 2 The New Mindset
Chapter 4 Solve Problems With Joy
Chapter 5 Reverse the Momentum
Chapter 6 Take Happiness to Work
Chapter 7 Dare to Dream
Chapter 8 Embrace Your Difference
Stage 3 Assume Nothing, Challenge Everything
Chapter 9 Ask Sticky Questions
Chapter 10 Kill Assumptions With Questions
Stage 4 The Art of Building Relationships
Chapter 11 Add Humans and Stir
Chapter 12 Speak Customer Language
Chapter 13 Make Trust the Heart of Relationships
Stage 5 Gather Insights, Not Just Facts
Chapter 14 Tell Me Why
Chapter 15 Engage for Insights
Chapter 16 Develop Your Insights Story
Stage 6 Creativity Starts With Your Customers
Chapter 17 Exercise Your Creative Muscle
Chapter 18 Bust the Myth
Chapter 19 Jump-Start Ideas
Stage 7 The Magical Power of Stories
Chapter 20 Own the Oxytocin
Chapter 21 Inspire Engagement
Chapter 22 Thicken the plot
That’s a Wrap!
Build your own Growth Strategy
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
Foreword
As we move through the shock, fracture, and uncertainty of the global COVID-19 pandemic, many business mindsets are deep in recovery. However, how do you recover in the new world of disruption?
Marketing = Customers + Heart lays out the answers and defines the foundations of success today, with marketing techniques on how to not only recover but thrive in the ‘new normal’.
I first worked closely with Eriks and Judy to build the highly successful National Nova Radio Network in Australia. Nova was the first FM station to launch in the lucrative Sydney market for 20 years. Conventional wisdom and radio truisms of the time dictated the format and direction. Or at least, that is what the competitors thought!
Through careful research and an open mind, Eriks and Judy spotlighted potential audiences and customers. The focus was on what the customer wanted and needed, what they loved and did not, and the possibilities rather than the competitors and marketplace norms.
By looking at the broader market outside of radio and media, we were able to identify critical foundations for a new and ‘different’ brand through the eyes of potential customers.
However, research and science often do not provide all the answers. At this juncture, ‘art and creativity’ come in and this is where Eriks and Judy excel. Their expertise diverges from most strategic research experts. They are innovators and problem solvers. Their unique mix of art and science, EQ and IQ, and a sixth sense for people is at the heart of their success, and what makes this book so compelling.
Devising a successful strategy is one thing; executing it brilliantly is another. In the following pages, you will learn the ‘secret sauce’ recipes that have seen Eriks and Judy at the top of their game for years, and perhaps more relevant now than ever.
Eriks and Judy are the Yin and Yang of marketing, a perfect creative combination of strategy and execution. They are big picture thinkers who challenge the status quo. Their focus on consumer insights has helped drive incredibly successful outcomes for many media clients and businesses globally.
There are many marketing books; however, only a few have the power to make a real difference in your professional and personal life immediately and into the future.
Marketing = Customers + Heart details cornerstone techniques through seven stages, with the clever use of QR codes linking to real-life anecdotes and stories.
Learn to understand, engage, and unlock the psychographics and behaviours of your customers – the bedrock for any successful business – to create a winning strategy.
You cannot sell a secret
, and through modern marketing, this book will show you how to break out of your comfort zones and not just recover, but become a thriveable business.
Dean Buchanan – Founder DRB Entertainment
Introduction
Whatever your business, whatever your size, everything you do is marketing!
Contrary to popular belief, marketing is not just advertising and sales, but the heart of your entire business.
Boiled down, this is the process of creating customers and markets for your products or services at a profit. If you don’t have a customer, you don’t have a business.
This book is about helping you grow a Thriveable Business on a solid foundation of creating, understanding, nurturing, and retaining customers.
We call this foundation strategy The 7 Stages of Customers + Heart because
It’s a practical pathway through the multi-dimensions of being genuinely customer-focused. It’s not just paying lip service to what’s unfortunately become a devalued wallpaper phrase.
We tap into the emotions of Why you’re in business in the first place, and Why your customers purchase – it runs much deeper than price.
It’s advice from the heart you can use today, sourced from our decades of challenging conventions and problem-solving in a wide variety of innovative businesses.
These 7 Stages are presented in a mix of anecdotes, tips, case stories, quotables for presentations, and templates, with Action Points at the end of each chapter to get you started.
At the same time, we also reference enduring marketing fundamentals that are even more relevant as we go back-to-basics in disruption and uncertainty.
We start with why everything you do is marketing (Stage 1), followed by the importance of today’s new mindset. EQ (emotional quotient, or emotional intelligence) and happiness are must-haves in connecting with customers and thinking differently for competitive advantage (Stage 2).
Asking the right questions and challenging your assumptions set the scene for new discoveries (Stage 3). Then, developing long-term, human relationships beyond the transaction (Stage 4) leads to gathering warm emotional insights, not just cold data. This allows you to unearth new opportunities and shape your messaging (Stage 5).
Creating new ideas is a lot easier than you think (Stage 6). And finally, we bring it all together to help you tell your unique story and bring customers with you on your adventure (Stage 7).
This is our joint effort, but there are places where we identify whoever’s ‘voice’ is speaking at the time, to keep things personal when we share our experiences.
Whether you’re stepping out on your own or want to progress to the next level, The 7 Stages of Customers + Heart is your spirit guide.
Break with a past that no longer exists. Break through to a new life of inspiration and prosperity. Enjoy the growth journey to your Thriveable Business ☺.
Judy & Eriks
Marketing is the heart of Business.
Customers are the heart of Marketing.
Trust is the heart of Customers.
Stage 1
Everything You Do Is Marketing
Chapter 1
Create a Customer
from Judy
Marketing is not just a business function
Why are you in business?
Operations support the customer
Where’s the customer benefit?
Marketing is more than just Advertising
Marketing is also not Sales
Ready, Fire, Aim!
The untapped resource
What’s that knowledge worth?
Busting the digital marketing myth
Digital speed kills strategy
On the road to the Holy Grail
Marketing is not just a business function
A businessperson once told me he wasn’t into marketing. Why? Because he knows his clients so well. To clarify, this is in the small yet very lucrative market of supplying equipment to the resource mining sector.
I’ve heard this before, and many think it makes total sense. Why bother? His customers tell him what they need, and he supplies it. Simple.
To strip this back, customers are essential. Let’s face it, you don’t have a business without them. And as customers are the focus of marketing, then like it not, he is in the marketing business.
To quote the great business guru Peter Drucker, Marketing is not a business function, but a view of the entire business seen as the economic organ to provide goods and services.
¹
Why are you in business?
Stop for a moment and think about that.
Most likely, your first thought will be to make money. But then you might come up with inspirational words like passion, freedom, achievement, or pride. I’m sure there are others. And all of them are right. But let’s keep drilling down and identify your real reason for being.
Again, as Peter Drucker so eloquently put it, "there is only one purpose for a business, and that is to create a customer … the customer is the foundation of the business and keeps it in existence. They alone give employment."²
Making a profit and meeting your personal goals depend on how well you look after your customers.
Therefore understanding what motivates someone to purchase from you is your number one priority. What are their needs, how do you solve their problems, how do you surprise and delight them?
The overarching theme throughout this book is asking and answering these questions.
Operations support the customer
Accept that the customer is the real reason you’re in business.
In that case, you can only attract and manage a customer through your marketing efforts. That’s why marketing is at the heart of your business.
But the problem arises when you see operations as your