“In today’s day and age, you have to pick your market and stick to it because otherwise you’re just not going to get anybody.”
Adel Strauss and Kevin Vitale work in the Sales & Marketing Department of Integris. Adel is the Director of Marketing while Kevin is a Senior Managed Services Account Executive. Integris has undergone a transformation over the last year and a half by aligning sales & marketing to effectively communicate our brand, message, and service offerings to our ideal customer in the marketplace. This episode focuses on sharing those tips and tricks to help other businesses understand how to implement this sort of strategy.
How do you find your ideal client base?
Anthony: I think there’s a lot of companies out there that have that established client base already and what they want more of is this human to human relationship of: I want to connect with you as a brand. It could be you as an individual, in Integris’s perspective, it’s an entire 43 person company. and how do we get to know you better? The way we approach it, Adel and I especially over the last year and a half, is we need to talk about who we are, what are our personalities, what are the personalities of the clients that we want to attract? What is our culture like? How do we get involved in the community? These are things that in today’s commoditized world I think truly change things.
Adel: The natural inclination of every business owner is that you want to appeal to everyone because you don’t ever want to alienate people or risk losing business or miss out on opportunity. Right? But in today’s day and age, you have to pick your market and stick to it because otherwise you’re just not going to get anybody. You’re just going to get lost in that noise.
How do you create meaningful content to attract these customers?
Kevin: I was talking to Anthony this morning about it, but everybody knows they have to post a lot of content, right? You know that’s very obvious, but it’s part of kind of a bigger conversation and the very start of that is, what are our business goals? What’s our purpose as a business? And then from there you have to build out, does all this content we create whatever, wherever it’s going to whoever – does that align with our business goals? Does that align with our purpose? Does it say what we need it to say about us? And once you have all those down, which I think we do a really good job of, then you have to worry about scaling it, what are the policies we have in place? Who’s going to be able to post? What are we going to do if something happens?
Kevin: And what I also mentioned was who is better? And this is what HubSpot mentions also, but who is better to talk about your brand and the people that work in it? You know what I mean? That content that those people are creating are what you really are. That’s your culture. That’s your message. Assuming you have the people on staff that align with that message, which you do in the hiring process, that’s what you look for, right?
What goes into the process of creating content?
Anthony: Kevin, why don’t you talk on this because you’re now I think three months into kind of coming over to the sales and marketing side of the organization. But yeah, I’d love to hear your thoughts on coming on over from the account managing side to our side and now truly seeing every day of social media and getting things out there and creating content. What are the positives of it? What have you seen that’s going well? What are some things that are like we could be doing better here and here?
Kevin: Right. I think for me the most mind blowing part of all of this is that you see things going out every other day, or whenever it is, but you don’t know all the work that goes in behind it. You know? And you don’t know that the message is so clear from the top of the organization to the bottom to when that content goes out that it’s all the same message and the work that goes into that, formulating that message, figuring out who you’re talking to, what you’re going to give to them that day. It might not be about you, sometimes it shouldn’t be about you.
Kevin: And that’s what I’ve probably found the most interesting. I feel like we’re ahead of the curve talking about things like that because we understand these things and I think that’s a big part of why I wanted to move over to this department. As far as challenges, it’s kind of early for me to kind of know what those are, but of course it’s just narrowing down even more. That client persona is going to change, that buyer persona is going to change over time. So you’ve got to kind of adapt with that. I think that’s probably the biggest challenge.
How does Integris use messaging to drive content?
Anthony: Yeah. So I’d like to switch back over to Adel who’s in charge of this entire circus that we got going on over here and it has to reign me in. But from your perspective, what have you seen in terms of … you could go the data route with us, you could go just the overall feel, your gut feel, but what is the overall opinion over the last year on where we are, and this whole branding versus just pushing stuff?
Adel: Yeah. Well, I take what Kevin says, based on what he just said, it sounds like we got it, which that says a lot because I don’t always feel like we’ve got it. But I think that yeah, it comes back to that the strong messaging coming from all directions, not just the top. Compared to most businesses, Integris has a very clear sense of who they are. Even in the last year, that has honed in even more as we’ve kind of had more conversations and continue to develop the branding and the messaging and who we want to talk to and what we want to talk about. But that at the core of that is that Integris does know who they are and that makes it very easy to drive the vision then for all of these pieces.
Adel: Because if Integris as a business was trying to appeal to all people all of the time, then it would make it impossible to hone that conversation in. But it’s, I would say even since the day I started, it’s always been very clear who our market is. It’s just been what do we say and how do we reach them? That’s been the struggle. And where do we reach them? Over the last six months, the data really shows that we are finding them, we’ve found the right market and we’ve found the right place to talk to them and we’re getting the right message out there. It’s starting to really resonate with people.
Takeaways:
1. Understand the clients you have.
2. Once you know who you’re talking to, figure out how to talk to them. And it needs to be so simple, so clear. It’s not a complex package, you’re not writing about everything that you do. It’s that story of how do you get people to start listening to you and that’s what’s going to set you apart.
3. Don’t be afraid to ask them what you’re doing right and wrong. You’ve used us for 10 years, there are a thousand providers out there. Why do you continue to use us? Get that and then post it on your wall.
4. Remember that all you want to do is start the conversation.
