Michael: Welcome to the HaBO Village Podcast. This show's dedicated to helping business leaders like you grow Passion and Provision companies. That's where companies and the people in them thrive and experience life to the fullest together.
Michael: Well, welcome back, everybody, to the fourth episode of HaBO Village Podcast. We're excited, today we're talking about marketing.
Kathryn: Marketing.
Michael: And we're going to start in on a series on marketing, since you remember last week, the nine areas of business, the very first chunk is all about marketing. You know, when we created the nine steps and nine areas of business to kind of codify and understand business better, especially the way we do it, the way we see it, we debated between nine and 12, because there's several different pieces that go into marketing. And so we chunked it, so if you look at our pie chart, at some point we're going to post that on the website, if you look at our chart, a quarter of the entire chart goes to marketing.
Kathryn: And we own a marketing company, so we're kind of passionate about this piece.
Michael: We are passionate about this piece. But one of the things that's important is just, there's so many aspects to marketing, and I think it's important that we just kind of talk about it. So today, what we're going to do is we're going to talk high-level about marketing. We're going to really define four major terms for you that can radically shift the way you see marketing and how effective it is for you. We're going to talk about the big picture and how we define it, because it's amazing, how you define something can radically change the way you see it and perceive it and understand it.
Kathryn: Absolutely.
Michael: And then interact with it, and that's significant for people being successful. I mean, it starts with the definition. So, one of the things I want to start with right off the bat, Kathryn, is to talk about the big-picture umbrella, and the way we describe it to clients. Go ahead, why don't you talk about that just a hair, about how you see the umbrella of marketing?
Kathryn: Certainly within marketing, first of all, as an organization, we are going to say and believe deeply that marketing impacts every area of your company. So just right out the gate, we're going to say that marketing is not just what you present to the world, but it's also what happens behind closed doors, because we talk about working to present and tell your story, to craft it, tell it, and live it, and marketing impacts every part.
Kathryn: So, for example, if I start talking to you about the kind of company that I am, and we talk about the fact that we have integrity, and we have customer service, and we're amazing, and we do this, that, and the other, and we present that picture out to the world, then when a customer comes in the door, if they don't experience the follow-through on all those promises I've made, then that's a big deal. So, how your employees interact with people, everything impacts marketing. So that's the first thing we want to be able to say about it, and marketing isn't just telling your story to the world; it's really how your company lives its life from soup to nuts.
Michael: Yeah. There's a lot of different ways people understand marketing. We've experienced it a lot with our clients and talking to people, but what I want to... Here's what I wanted to have you share today a little bit, was when we first started Half a Bubble Out Marketing, what was your perspective of what marketing was?
Kathryn: I think when I first started... So, I worked for a company where sales and marketing were pretty bifurcated, they were just separate departments, and so I saw marketing as those people who just created pretty stuff for trade shows, and just made stuff look pretty. That's really all marketing did, and sometimes it was helpful, and sometimes it wasn't helpful, and sometimes they knew a little bit about what we really needed, and sometimes they had no clue and didn't care, they were just making stuff. And there was never a marketing budget, it wasn't big enough, and yeah, it was just this really... And the company I worked in, it was a really small and really separated-out department.
Michael: That happens a lot with a lot of companies, right?
Kathryn: We had a VP, and... Just to clarify that, we had a VP of Marketing and Sales, but he was very strong in sales, he was this fully sales background, and so everything was about selling the product, but when it came to the actual marketing or storytelling, or whatever we're going to define here as marketing is, it was like it was just kind of a secondary piece.
Michael: Yeah, and he had a real strong sales background, he was phenomenal at it, and it was really hard sometimes to figure out how to cross over. Funny thing is, now he teaches marketing over at the university, and we guest-speak in his class periodically, and he's still a really good friend of ours. But, I mean, you started selling almost 20 years ago, probably 16, 17 years ago you started selling, and that was a significant difference, and when we started marketing and advertising and doing that kind of stuff, you know, it was like, "Is that a good thing? Is that a healthy thing? Do people like it?" And there was just a lot of that kind of misunderstanding, and that's a great perspective of people looking at marketing from different angles and having different definitions, because-
Kathryn: Well, it's kind of the necessary... People see it as like the necessary evil, right? It's like, "I have to spend money on marketing, ugh. Why can't people just know what I do and tell other people about it? This thing that I have to spend money on, it's so frustrating." And so, to allocate a marketing budget is really, really difficult for people.
Michael: Yeah, and that's why we start talking about the complaints that people have about our marketing. You know, "It's a necessary evil." There's an old quote that runs around that says, "I have to spend money on marketing. 50% of every dollar I spend on marketing is a waste, it's just thrown away. I just don't know what half it is."
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: Which actually comes from an old quote, I actually did some research and dug that up at one point. Don't remember exactly who, but it was a woman who'd done some writing, and it was totally misinterpreted, which happens a lot in this world, somebody grabs a hold of something. And the woman never intended to say that marketing was so vague that you didn't know what you were doing; she was talking about something completely different. But people grabbed hold of the fact that this thing that's mysterious is, "What are we doing with it, and how do we spend money, and why should we spend money?" And it's almost as if everybody knows you're supposed to spend money on marketing, or marketing and advertising. That was one of the first things I tried to define differently, what the difference was in that. We'll talk about that in a minute, because I think that's really important.
Michael: But here's where marketing, when you start looking at marketing, one of the reasons it's important. First of all, marketing touches everything. Second, if you... Well, if you think about this as an illustration, everybody talks about a business plan. A business plan is important. We talk about this with our clients all the time. It's amazing how many people go, "Well, I don't know if I want to spend time on marketing or not," and they don't think about it touching everything in the business. And then I said, "Well, have you ever heard of a business plan?" And they're like, "Yeah, I've heard of a business plan." "Do you have a business plan?" Well, it's amazing how many small businesses have never created a business plan. It's a whole 'nother subject for a whole 'nother podcast, but let me just put a shout-out to... Business plans are incredibly valuable, and they statistically show that they will improve your business, even if you go through all the process and then put it in a drawer and never look at it again.
Kathryn: Just the exercise of thinking through.
Michael: It's huge, and we'll spend a whole episode down the road on that. Then we talk about this fact of, okay, what's part of a business plan? If you look at any business plan book, except for maybe some of the modern things that are trying to reinvent or something like that, the bottom line is a business plan has two parts. It has the marketing plan and the financials that explain it. Well, what does that mean? Does it mean you only talk about what you're going to... assets you're going to create, and how you're going to get customers? No, in a business plan, you have everything from the beginning of defining what your business does, what's the product, how are you getting it, how are you finding clients, who are the ideal clients, all the way through the entire process.
Michael: And it's funny how a business plan talks about marketing, and it's amazing how we can talk in business planning about a marketing plan and financials as a business plan, but we go into actual functioning of business, and we don't realize what marketing is, and we say, "Oh, we don't have to do that," or it gets relegated to this little corner. And oftentimes, it's the necessary evil of where I have to spend my money, as opposed to a really important part of the entire experience that has to... You have to invest in all the different aspects. I mean, how's your experience been as we've even looked at that with our clients and ourselves, Kathryn?
Kathryn: Yeah, I mean, the question people always come in the door asking is like, "Well, how much am I supposed to spend on marketing to be successful?" And when we start talking about marketing as an investment, and the reality that no matter what you do, marketing isn't always going to have an immediate return on investment. So when we talk about marketing being invested over months, and we'll talk about the importance of frequency and repetition, and some of the things you have to do when you actually move into the advertising part of the world. But the reality is, people want to see a return for their money, they want a dollar in, two dollars out. That's really what they want to see in marketing and advertising, and while that sounds ideal, the reality is it's not as simple as that, it's not as straightforward as that, and so people get really terrified about investing in marketing.
Kathryn: But if you don't talk about, define, explain, and reach out to potential customers, you're not going to have a business. You know, people have thrown around the 10% mark, you should invest 10% of your marketing, or of your gross-
Michael: Gross revenue.
Kathryn: ... revenue in marketing, and people just have a heart attack, like, "There is no way I'm ever going to spend that much money." And we have a hard time getting people sometimes to even hit the 2% mark.
Michael: Yeah, and that's an important thing, if anybody's just thinking right off the bat right now, "How much money am I supposed to put in there?" And you mentioned 10, and they're having a heart attack at the moment.
Kathryn: Absolutely.
Michael: That is a general rule of thumb, and if you can invest 10% of your revenue, if you have a budget where you can invest 10% of your revenue in marketing, you're going to have a very effective, healthy marketing budget. Now, a lot of companies, really what you can do is you can look at around 5%, but it really depends on the industry. For instance, there are companies out there that have to spend 30% of their revenue, of every dollar that comes in, revenue, on marketing. That's just the industry, that's just what it is. If you are in the online car business, one of the organizations out there, TrueCar, I believe it is, they're advertising on television now, they're doing a bunch of different things. Recently, I heard that they're making about $250 million a year gross revenue. Their budget, their marketing and advertising budget, is $200 million.
Kathryn: There's some perspective, right?
Michael: Right? Their expenses to run the company are about $50 million. They're making $250 million a year, and they're barely breaking even. They're teetering on the profitable/not profitable. Costs them $50 million a year to run it, costs them $200 million a year to generate enough business to generate that kind of revenue, and that's the design there. That is, what, I believe that's 80% of their budget, is that right?
Kathryn: Yeah, four-fifths.
Michael: $200 million is 80... Four-fifths, so that's 80% of their budget is marketing, which is way different thank 10%. Okay, that's a tangent that's relevant as we talk about business and marketing, and just to be thinking, I want you to think, "I need to invest money." Wherever you start is a good place to start, but in the 2% to 5% is what we've found that is really a healthy place. If you can spend at least 2% of your budget and then grow it from there, it's like having a savings account for anything else in life, putting money away for retirement, you've got to think ahead.
Michael: So, let's talk about the definitions, and we're going to talk about these four key definitions, the first being marketing, and then brand, trust, and branding. It sounds like we're talking about brand twice, and there's a really good reason for that. But as we define these things, it's going to hopefully really set you up to think differently about marketing, and actually get better return on your investment out of it, and it's possible, because we do it all the time with clients. The more you... Right thinking leads to right actions, which allows you to generate the most out of your work.
Michael: So, as we jump into that, probably the first thing that we always tell people in our office is we talk about a concept called fuzzy terms. Why are we going into this definition stuff? Because words are fuzzy, and that fuzzy term came from when I went back to college at 30, and I started studying instructional design, which is in the communications department at Chico State, University of California, Chico. And one of the things that is really important about that term that came out of it is we talk... Well, in instructional design, we were talking about peak performance in adult learning, and that always happened specifically in the topic for this type of career, is in business performance. So you're always walking in and you go, "How do you evaluate a company's performance, and then how do you evaluate how you can improve it with the folks that are there?" And fuzzy terms are one of the first things you have to learn, because you can tell somebody you want to do something, or you want them to do something, but there's so many different ways to understand a very common term.
Kathryn: An easy example would be if you are working with an employee in your organization and you say, "I really need you to be more friendly." So, that sounds simple, friendly, well, everyone knows what that means, right? Everyone understands friendly. Well, it's amazing, if you actually were to say, "What does friendly look like? How does it demonstrate?" People are going to describe it differently based on their understanding of friendly, and so what you mean by friendly may not be the same thing that they mean. So sometimes you have to be extraordinarily specific and clarify, "When I say I want you to be friendly, what I mean is, when somebody walks in, I want you to smile, I want you to stand up, I want you to make eye contact, I want you to shake their hand and greet them warmly." What is warmly?
Michael: Warmly? Yeah.
Kathryn: "Well, warmly means you have a welcoming tone in your voice, you're happy to see them." So there's... You see, you can begin to just almost imagine how even the simplest of terms like friendly or warmly, people can interpret those differently, and then not meet your expectations because you're not being clear enough, the term's fuzzy.
Michael: Yeah. And that's really what we're on about, right in here in the midst of all of this. So the first, we're going to define marketing, and this is how we're going to define marketing.
Kathryn: Wait, I have to tell the story, though, about the hot tub first. I have to tell this story.
Michael: Okay.
Kathryn: So, I first learned about fuzzy terms on our 10-year anniversary, and my husband, God bless his soul, thinks about business and our work and our world a lot.
Michael: I like to learn, and I'm studying all the time.
Kathryn: 80%-90%. So, we are on our 10-year anniversary, we have left all work at home. At this point, we don't own the business that we currently have. I'm working at a software company. It was the first time I'd ever walked in to my boss and said, "I'm going on vacation, I am not taking my computer. I will take my cell phone, but if you call me, something better be on fire, because I'm literally not going to do any work." It was my first... the first time I'd ever done a completely non-working vacation.
Kathryn: So this is my mindset, it's our 10-year anniversary. We're in the hot tub. There's whales in the ocean, because we're on Kauai, and we're supposed to be whale-watching in the hot tub. But Michael, who's in the middle of learning all this stuff, decides he wants to initiate a conversation with me about fuzzy terms, and teach me about this concept of fuzzy terms. So, Michael, tell our audience how you did that, and how that went for you.
Michael: It didn't go well. It just didn't go well. So, okay, I feel a need to defend myself right now, this overwhelming desire in the midst of this. Some of you, and hopefully it's not just men, but some of the women listening to this today might understand, but I was super excited about this concept. There's a way to evaluate fuzzies. One of the tools you use when you go into this deeper is actually talking to people about... Well, you ask this question: "So what did you mean by that?" And they give you an answer, and oftentimes people answer a fuzzy with a fuzzy. So, you said you're supposed to be happy or friendly, actually is... You know, you tell the receptionist, "Please be friendly when you're greeting people." "Well, what does friendly mean?" "Well, it means you greet people warmly." "Okay, well, what do you mean by warmly?" "Well, I mean that you have a kind tone to your voice."
Kathryn: "Well, what do you mean by kind?"
Michael: "What do you mean, kind?" And this is this-
Kathryn: So he initiates this conversation with me and walks me through this-
Michael: It started-
Kathryn: ... and every time I answer, he says, "Well, what do you mean by that?" And by about the-
Michael: Third or fourth.
Kathryn: ... I don't know, I might've even made it to fifth, I'm not sure.
Michael: Maybe, I don't think so.
Kathryn: But by about the fourth or fifth time he used the word "fuzzy," I was done.
Michael: She started getting more irritated-
Kathryn: I was like, "Seriously? We're supposed to be watching the whales. We're in a hot tub, we're relaxing, and you're drilling me for clarity." So, we drive our clients crazy too.
Michael: All right, we need to move on in this topic so that you all get something out of... I don't think we need to dwell on this story much longer. One of the things that we're going to talk about, because you now have a fully in-depth briefed idea of what fuzzies are, and I think you have a feel for it, and you can relate to it maybe in your own marriage or relationships, is the first thing we want to talk about is marketing. This is how we're going to define marketing. If you go and look at it, marketing is basically summarized as this: You want to create a customer in a market. Go all the way back, back, back in history, and you actually had a village, you had a market in the square, people had their little stalls out. You see them at farmers' markets and things like that. You're in the market where people are looking for certain things, and you create a customer.
Michael: Translate that to today's world, a market usually means a topic or an arena in which goods or services are traded, so you might have the stock market, where they trade stocks, you might have the grocery store market, where there's food and everything else. Any kind of area like that, you can... And it's generically, you can talk about a topic, but the idea and process of creating a customer. There's a lot of things that go into creating a customer. Part of that is you have to have a product or service, so all... That's why all of the marketing [inaudible 00:19:53] has to think about, "Where does the product come from? How is it created? What does it look like? What do I have to sell the product for? And when I sell that product in our pricing, is there enough that covers all of our costs?" Over at TrueCar, you know, you just barely have enough, and they've got to figure out what that looks like.
Michael: So that's our first term, is marketing, and it's as simple as to create a market, or to create a customer in a specific market. The second one is brand. Brand is something we call... We equal brand to reputation. Brand gets used all over the place. It's one of those words that is... You can totally see, after we've defined "fuzzy," that it's a fuzzy term.
Kathryn: Hugely fuzzy.
Michael: It gets used as an adjective, a noun, a verb, and it... We throw it around, and we have to try and understand what it means based on context. But you can have a conversation, and you hear people talking about brand this and brand that, and brand reputation. Well, brand reputation is a term that gets used in the PR world, but you got to build a strong brand, or you got to do this, or you got to do that. And we just basically back up and say brand is not a bad way, but it used to be brand would think about... People would think about a brand as just your logo, and the way you looked, and that actually comes all the way back from cattle branding, because you took your mark and you branded your cattle, you put your mark on them.
Michael: And that's some of the origins of this concept of branding, but it has splintered in meaning in different ways, and so what we've done is gone back and just said, okay, brand... If you think about brand as reputation, then you can start to really handle the word "brand" way more about your company, and you can translate it. Do you have a positive brand image? Translate: Do you have a positive reputation in the marketplace, or do you have a poor reputation? How do people see you?
Kathryn: It's kind of like if you think about, each one of us has a name, so my name is Kathryn, and depending on what you know about me, my name associated with my brand, my look, who I am, you have a response or a reaction to that, and it can either be one of trust and good will and value, or it could be potentially the opposite if I've done something to damage or hurt you, and if so, I'm quite sorry. But your name, what does it elicit from the audience? That really is your brand. Does it elicit trust, does it elicit respect, does it... What does that elicit? So that's what we mean when we're talking about brand.
Michael: Yeah, and it's... So, different people with the same name can have a different reputation. Now, the third word we're going to talk about, so we've talked about marketing, we've talked about brand, and the third word is trust. Trust is a completely fuzzy term in our market, in our world, because it can mean so many different things. And we've realized through a lot of work with customers, customer psychology, employees, and even different things that Kathryn and I have done over the years with counseling and pastoring with people and stuff like that, we've really seen the impact of how people define trust and what they see trust as. That's huge.
Michael: Well, there's a lot of myths around trust, and one of the best books, I think, on the subject is written by Stephen M. Covey called The Speed of Trust. Huge, huge piece. And here's what we mean by trust. Basically, trust can be defined as... Well, first I want to say trust can be quantified, and it can be measured at some level, both at a qualitative and a quantitative level. You can start to think about that. But trust is a combination of competence and character, competence and character, and it is subjective, or trust can be isolated to specific subjects.
Michael: So, for instance, a human being, Kathryn and I, we trust each other. Well, we trust each other in a lot of places. We trust each other with our emotions, we trust each other with making wise decisions at business, we trust each other to respect and honor one another, and to protect one another and catch each other's backs. And there's deep, deep, deep trust in the 23 years of marriage and all the different things we've done over the years. I would never trust Kathryn to do brain surgery on me ever, ever, ever.
Kathryn: Tempted though I might be.
Michael: If she gets a drill and she starts coming at me, there's no trust at all in that.
Kathryn: You would also not trust me to take anything apart in our house and put it back together again.
Michael: And why? Why don't I trust you to do that?
Kathryn: Because I'm not good at it. I have no competence.
Michael: You have no competence, and that's a very important thing in the midst of this. If we're talking about trust in business, and trust in the marketplace, and trust in marketing, what you want to do is you want to build a reputation that is based on trust and grows trust, but you're going to build the trust in an area that you're competent.
Kathryn: Yeah. It's not just black and white. I think sometimes when we think about trust, we think, "I either trust you or I don't trust you, period." And part of what Covey has done, he's done a really good job of separating out behaviors of trust, and really understanding that I don't 100% trust anyone, because there's nobody who is going to be able to meet everything that I would need in the course of my life fully. It's just not even possible. So, trust is always a combination of what a person has put themselves forward, or a company's put themselves forward at being good at, and then the character that they bring to back that up.
Michael: And when we translate that over to a business, you want the customer to look at you, and whatever area you do your business in, you want them to trust you in a sense that you want them to believe at a high level... And think about trust on a scale of one to a hundred. You want to see them grow and increase in their trust in you, meaning that they less and less have to worry about whether you're going to produce or not, and whether you're going to produce a quality of product or service that you have promised. Let's face it, the best hamburgers in the country are not at McDonald's, but I have a high degree of trust that that quality level that McDonald's promises, if I ever need to eat there, is going to be consistent everywhere.
Kathryn: Cheeseburger's always going to be that cheeseburger.
Michael: Always. But it's not the best, but it is definitely consistent, and consistency is one of the attributes. So, one of the things that he did is he actually, Stephen Covey actually said, "I'm going to define trust in these two major categories, competence and character." He defined it around five different arenas, from self-trust out to societal trust, and several different areas in between, and then he defined it by 13 different behaviors. I highly recommend the book so you understand the concept of trust even deeper. It will radically, radically help you in all the different areas, the nine areas of business. It will help you grow a Passion and Provision company, because trust is at the core of consistency, and you want customers coming back again and again and again. And if they can trust that you are going to be true to your word, your promise, your value proposition that you give them, and the quality itself is consistent, you can grow trust.
Michael: The fourth word is branding, and while we said brand equals reputation, Kathryn, what does branding equal?
Kathryn: When we talk about branding, what we're talking about is... The other word we'll use is bonding. It really is, how well-connected has your customer become to you? How well have you been able to bond them to your service, your product, your reputation? Right? So, bonding is really the way that we would define... A good brand has created a bond with their customers.
Michael: That's really significant, because bonds happen over time. They don't happen right off the bat. So, unless it's an impulse buy, you need to make sure that you're planning time to develop a relationship, and depending on the cost value, how much it costs or how much energy is taken into making that decision to purchase whatever you have. If it's a big-ticket item, this process is just stretched out longer. The smaller the price and the less difficult in time that goes into making a purchase, the more important it is to understand... People can make those things fast, right? That's a really important concept, so in branding, we want to make sure that we're walking people through a bonding process.
Michael: Now, on the technical side, if you're really into studying and everything else, I want you to look up the 12 steps of intimacy. The 12 steps of intimacy. I won't talk about it on here, it gets very intimate, it goes to the deepest intimate level, and it starts at "I don't know who you are," and it takes it all the way through to a very intimate level, and the process there. The concept is really translated, if you will, over into dating. You meet somebody, then you get to know them and you do small talk, "Would you like to have a drink? Would you like to have a cup of coffee?" "Oh, nice to meet you," we get to know each other a little bit more, maybe you go have lunch, then maybe you go have dinner. You evaluate these progressions in commitment to the relationship and progressions of intimacy in the relationship. I can have coffee with you, less commitment, less intimacy, less suggestion that we're serious than having lunch, but dinner seems to be a more serious step than having lunch.
Kathryn: Right, much less of an investment to have coffee, and less of an investment of time, less of an investment of money, so it's a safer encounter. And oftentimes, what happens in marketing is that we make the mistake of kind of being the person who walks into the bar and meets somebody for the first time and says, "Hey there, nice to meet you. Can we name our children?" That's like, that's asking for the buy, right, before you've even had a chance to take any of the steps. And when we just are presenting people with nothing but a decision process, it's no reason we get rejected all the time. I mean, it makes sense, right? Because if somebody walked up to you and said, "Hi, it's nice to meet you. Can we name our children?" you would run out of the room screaming.
Michael: Creeper.
Kathryn: That's just gross and scary and stuff.
Michael: But that happens, right, in marketing all the time. And think about bonding like this: The difference between a post-it and welding. A post-it is, it sticks, but it so easy comes on and off, and if you pull it off after a couple, three or four times, it's hard to even put it back anymore. But the amount of weight and tension that that stickiness can hold is radically different than when you weld something together, but you have to take time, preparation, you have to have the right environment, the right tools, everything else, and over time, that stickiness can be... can literally, in some cases, people are lifelong buyers, lifelong purchasers.
Michael: And so that branding or bonding process, the way we define branding is bonding and building, the process of building that bonded relationship between you and your customer. And if done right, you can actually... In the right order, you can actually accelerate the process, you can actually create more people to bond with you, and you actually want to have people who are building relationships and connecting to you, and returning as customers, becoming wow customers and referring you, as opposed to just being transactional, where there's no relationship or bonding. "I gave you a buck, you gave me the product, you offered a 20% discount, I came in just for the 20% discount. Yes, it's convenient, but I can get it from anywhere else, or I can get a look-alike product anywhere else." No, you don't want that. You want people to say, "I have a need. There's a product that I have that you offer. I am aware that that would fill my need. I decided that I want to fill my need with that, and then from there, I realized that you have it, and I want it from you."
Michael: You've got to walk people through that process, because you might get them three-fourths of the way through the process, and then they go somewhere else to buy it, because they don't feel like you care. They feel like you're indifferent to them as a customer. And none of us wants to be treated with a sense of indifference; we want to be valued and appreciated.
Michael: So, that really kind of wraps up those four terms today, and in the next episode, we're going to move into talking about a system that we call Craft it, Tell it, Live it, and how that can refine and work through building a model. It's a way of thinking through this. Now that we've defined these terms, how do you start putting them together and thinking through what that looks like? And we're going to, over the next few episodes, we're going to talk about the different aspects of marketing, or lead generation, lead conversion, and how do you think through building a strategy and a process that allows you to deal with that progression of bonding, how to make people aware of you and everything else, and build trust in the midst of it? How do you market or create a customer so that your company can grow?
Michael: The more efficient and effective this process is, that is one of the key pieces towards having a Passion and Provision company. The smoother and easier this is, the less hassle you have, the more you can enjoy work, the more you can experience fulfillment in what you do in your craft, because you don't feel like you're toiling. Bad marketing can make you feel like you're just doing all this work, and you're never getting anywhere. Good marketing is like labor, you're doing all this work purposefully, and the right things, and you're actually generating an effective end product.
Kathryn: Yeah, and the more that you develop relational trust with your market, the faster customers come back and spend more money with you. It's just the process becomes faster and smoother. They're no longer questioning, they're... When they think of a need, they come right back to you, because you've met that need before. So that value of building trust is really important, because it speeds business, and we'll talk about that more in depth later, but it's just a very cool concept. If I can do something on a handshake, and you're not looking at me for every jot and tittle on a contract, it's going to be a much faster process than if I don't trust you and I have to send everything to my lawyer, for example.
Michael: So in our next episode, we're going to talk about Craft it, Tell it, Live it, and those aspects of the model that we use in marketing, and it will impact not only your marketing, but your entire company. And the reason to do that is so that you can attract more people, sell more stuff, and wow more customers, so that they become raving fans of your brand.
Michael: Well, that concludes today, and the only thing I want to finish up saying is we're going to have... If you go to habovillage.com/blog, we're going to have the episode, you can click on Episode Four, you'll be able to click on a link of those definitions and get a download, and the only thing we ask is your name and your email so that we can continue to sign you up for all the different free offers and different things like that that we're going to have in this podcast, and anything else that you see of value on our website on the free downloads.
Kathryn: We'd also love to ask you to subscribe and rate the podcast on iTunes so that we can reach more people, spread the love. We would just appreciate your feedback.
Michael: We really, we count on you helping us spread the mission, the message of Passion and Provision, and we're pretty excited about it, and we're committed to continuing to help you as leaders grow, and learn how to create a Passion and Provision company, so you and everyone in your company can thrive. Thanks for coming, thanks for listening today and giving us the honor of tuning in, and we will see you next week.
