Market research gets a bad rap.
We’ve all heard that research is the best way to know our markets. But we tend to put research, the activity, into its own corner. We often avoid it. It’s not something we do all the time, every day.
Or is it?
In this clip from B2B Forum 2023, Dorien Morin (social media strategist and founder of More In Media) reveals how your daily activities already include research. You just have to find the patterns behind your research.
This November, hundreds of B2B marketers are gathering in Boston for the next B2B Forum. With dozens of inspiring sessions and insightful speakers, plus workshops and networking, the pattern is clear: marketers who want to grow their results and careers attend B2B Forum! Limited tickets are available. Discover what’s waiting at B2B Forum and get your ticket now.
Alright, this is the C3 formula.
We’re going to learn how to consume, communicate, and collaborate the right way so we can get better ideas and implement them better.
So what does that mean?
Consuming content. Now, I’ve been in a lot of sessions here this week and I hear the word research.
Who loves research? Raise your hand if you do. All right. Five people, six people who love to consume content.
Everybody, it’s the same thing! It’s just a different mindset.
And my friend Anne’s in the room. She said that to me three years ago during Covid.
We had to do some reels. Anna and I worked together. She has a brilliant Facebook agency. She’s a brilliant person.
And she’s like, “Doreen, if we have to do more reels, we have to consume more reels.”
The light bulb went off in my head. I’ve been doing the research and not enjoying it.
But consuming content is fun.
So I’m going to show you how to do that. Then we’re going to talk about how to communicate.
You have an idea at the table. You all wrote down one idea.
What if we shared all these ideas amongst each other? What can we do then?
So I’m going to show you that in a minute, and then we’re going to learn how to collaborate.
And actually, what does it take to create content together?
Consume ferociously.
But what does that mean, right?
I love this quote: “If you put this for content creators, if you want to be a content creator, you must do two things above all others. You need to consume more content, and then create the content. And it’s that consuming piece that a lot of us forget.”
So how do we do it?
The first thing that you’re going to do—and you can get your paper ready—we’re going to do this exercise in just a second.
We’re going to look for patterns.
So when you think about the content you consume, the patterns you’re looking for is, you’re looking for things that are the same.
As far as patterns, it might be something like all of a sudden everybody is flocking to a new platform or everybody is doing reels.
Now that’s not necessarily a trend, but everybody’s doing reels because reels are working really well.
It could be that everybody in your industry all of a sudden is doing mastermind classes in the marketing industry.
About a year and a half ago, I started seeing all these thought leaders doing masterclasses instead of selling courses. That was a pattern that I noticed. I’m like, okay, that must be working because I see him doing it. I see her doing it. I see her doing a six-week live masterclass.
That’s a pattern that I noticed.
So once you detect a pattern, then you need to go see if it’s in other places as well, right?
Can you continue that pattern and can you then find it?
That’s a great question actually.
So the next one is then trends.
And the perfect example, what Anne did on the stage yesterday with the Barbies, right?
That’s totally trendy.
Barbenheimer, the two movies came out the same day.
There was all kinds of wonderful marketing, and that trend is still going.
One trend that I noticed, I have a friend who started a brand new business. She has a non-alcoholic mobile bar, and she’d asked me what to do.
I said, “consume content.”
And she came to me and she said, “I found a trend!”
She was very excited. She had been looking at Oktoberfest.
But there’s also hashtags and there’s a trend going on that people are doing a Soberfest, or Soberfests, saying that they’re not going to consume alcohol.
And so if you’re anywhere, if you’re in a restaurant industry, if you’re anything that touches food or drink or alcohol, you could jump on that trend and create content that goes with that.
So the next slide is, I’m going to give you about a minute or two this, again, this is kind of for you, but you can talk amongst yourself if you want.
What are some trends or patterns that you see? Like everything pumpkin, right? That’s a trend.
What else do you see right now? Just talk and just write some of those in there. You can save this if you want or otherwise do that.
Just want you to start thinking about the content you’ve consumed in the last couple of weeks or months. What patterns or trends have you seen?
All right, communicate continually.
Who communicates daily? Sure. Let’s find out if we communicate with the right people at the right time in the right place.
I love this advice:
“If you want 30 pieces of great content, you need to come up with a hundred ideas.”
Say all say yes, you agree, right?
Not every piece of content you come up with is going to be good. So you need to create a lot of different ideas.
What does communicating look like?
Now, I’m a certified agile marketer. Anybody here familiar with the agile space? Some of you are. Okay.
Agile comes from the software space and we work in iterations. That’s really explaining it in a nutshell when there’s a lot of stuff to explain, but I’m going to explain it very simply.
Everybody here has an iPhone or has an Apple product. Those software updates, those are called iterations. Every time either a bug comes up or they have a new thing, they update. That’s what we do in agile marketing. We put out a minimal viable product, the smallest thing that works, and then you go and fix it.
If I put that in a context of a piece of content that you can create, if you want to make, say you go into an event and you wanted to create something about the event, a lot of us are tasked, go to the event, take pictures.
It’s a trade show on Monday morning. You bring it to the team and then you produce a video or a piece of content. Agility would mean that you’re at the conference creating stories, reels, sharing it, asking questions, getting feedback. People saying, oh, I see Anne Handley is there, can you get a picture with Anne? Or can you ask? So-and-so a picture.
Now you’re getting feedback on your content and you’re creating better content. That’s an iterative process in Agile that you can use with your content creation. So the daily standup is a piece of communication that comes from Agile.
Anybody ever done a daily standup? Yes.
Now, who works alone? Who is the marketing department of one?
When I first got into Agile, it was during the pandemic and I was a marketer of one, and I would have a daily standup meeting every day with me and myself. This is what it looks like, and I’m honest, and I stand up and I go, “what did I accomplish yesterday?” And I write down the things, or I say the things that I did. “What do I want to accomplish today? And where am I stuck?”
And I can tell you exactly—by day three—if I get stuck on the same thing, I didn’t want to make the phone call or I don’t want to do this sales thing, or I have this video that I really don’t want to do, I realize I’m stuck. Because it’s either I don’t want to do it, I can’t do it, I don’t have time, or I have a block, a mental block. And that’s a really helpful communication piece.
But if you are a team of two or three or four, and you start doing a daily standup, it’s no more than 15 minutes a day. It could be through Slack, but it could be through Zoom.
“What did I do yesterday? What am I working on today and where am I stuck?”
When you do that with your colleagues, you can start helping each other. There’s a lot of listening going on.
If I said I’m stuck because I’m supposed to make this YouTube video, but I don’t have the thumbnail because Susie was supposed to give me the thumbnail, but Susie’s out because the kid’s sick now, then Johnny might hear that two days in a row and say, “well, guess what? I have access to the account. I can finish the thumbnails.”
Now you start working together and the communication gets better. So a daily standup meeting is one way to communicate with your team.
Another way to communicate is with your community. When we start communicating with our community, we’re getting a lot of ideas. Who does social listening?
Oh, guess where a lot of your ideas can come from. When you listen to the words that your customers say about your products and your services, when you do social listening, when you hear the good things and the bad things, not only then do you know what they say, and you know what words to use, but you can also be part of the conversation.
One easy, simple way to do that for your products, your services, is to put a Google alert out.
Then when people are talking about you… anybody here has Google alerts out on the brand name, business name, product names? Then you can be part of the conversations.
I use a scheduling tool called Agorapulse that has a listening tool in there so I can go see if people tag us or talk about us, right?
You want to know what people are saying.
Published May 08, 2024
B2B Forum is packed with marketing insights, strategies, and tactics taken from the real world experience of over forty industry experts, packaged into context you can actually put to use.
Join us in Boston for B2B Forum 2024 this coming November 12-14, 2024. Early buyers get B2B Forum tickets at their lowest rate, and discounted hotel rooms are available while they last.
