How Insights into Your Target Audience Can Lead to Success

A deeper understanding of your target audience – who they are, how they buy, and their challenges, pain points, and aspirations – is instrumental to everything B2B marketers do. It will help them develop better content, have a more user-friendly website, and develop marketing campaigns that generate better results. 

That’s why we’re talking to B2B digital marketing expert James Hipkin (CEO & Founder, Inn8ly) about how avatars of your target audience and buyer’s journey maps are crucial to B2B marketing success. During our conversation, James elaborated on the pitfalls that marketers should avoid and what important aspects of customer research they should focus on. He also provided tips on how to get internal buy-in to conduct the relevant research and explained how the customer avatars and buyer’s journey maps can help with B2B content and marketing campaigns.

https://youtu.be/p8M_ao0DtW0

Topics discussed in episode

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• [2:29] Why target audience avatars and buyer’s journey maps are crucial to B2B marketing success
  
• [8:53] Why some companies and B2B marketers often skip customer research and planning steps
  
• [20:55] Important aspects of customer research that marketers should be focusing on
  
• [25:57] The importance of not just talking to current customers, but also past prospects (lost deals)
  
• [28:46] How often should companies review their avatars and buyers’ journey maps?
  
• [30:31] How to deal with push back on developing customer avatars and buyer’s journey maps
  
• [32:05] Actionable tips:
  
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  • Start to compartmentalize your marketing into major funnel buckets
    
  • Do some message matching
    
  • Shift your mindset from “Call to action” to “Pathways”
    
  
  
  

Companies and links mentioned

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• James Hipkin on LinkedIn 
  
• Inn8ly 
  
• Marketing Sage Advantage 
  
• Book a Meeting with James 
  
• Create Better B2B Marketing Funnel:
  
  • 
    
  • Part 1 
    
  • Part 2 
    
  • Part 3 
    
  
  
  

SPEAKERS

James Hipkin, Christian Klepp

Christian Klepp  00:01

Welcome to this episode of B2B Marketers on a Mission, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today I’m going to be talking to James Hipkin. He’s the founder and CEO of innately, and helps B2B companies to scale by providing professionally designed, built, hosted, secured and maintained websites that are built with a customer centric strategy. Tune in to find out more about this B2B marketers mission. All right, Mr. Hipkin, I’m gonna say, welcome back to the show. It’s always a pleasure to have you.

James Hipkin  00:37

Christian, it’s always just an absolute blast to chat with you and share our experiences. And I mean, I’m just looking forward to this.

Christian Klepp  00:47

Absolutely. I think it was something that you said, and in response to something I posted on LinkedIn this morning. It’s the quality of the people that you connect with on LinkedIn and the conversations, but it’s also the fact that no matter how many times you connect and engage in conversation, it’s always amazing how, with some people, you just never run out of things to talk about, and you happen to be one of those people. So um, (laugh), and I mean, I mean that in a good way, of course, absolutely delighted to have you back, and let’s dive right into the topic, because it’s not only highly relevant and pertinent to B2B marketers, but it’s also something that they actually should be doing, right? But here we go. So you’re obviously quite the expert in when it comes to B2B digital marketing, because you help companies rise above the increasing noise out there. And I know that you talk a lot about digital noise when you post on LinkedIn, but for this conversation, let’s focus on a topic that I think has become part of your professional mission, how a deep understanding of your target audience will lead to better results. On the surface, that kind of sounds like something that’s table stakes and pedestrian, but you and I both know that there are so many companies and so many B2B marketers out there that don’t do this, right? So I’m going to kick off this conversation with the following question, why are avatars of your target audience and buyers journey maps crucial to B2B marketing success?

James Hipkin  02:29

Well, I’ll tell you, they’re crucial because in this world, the average person is exposed to between 6 and 10000 marketing messages a day, and I have what I like to call the world’s most boring slide that I use when I’m speaking about this. It’s a white field with a big gray blob in it, and what that’s representing is this is the marketing landscape from your customers point of view, they get exposed to so much information that everything’s just becomes digital noise, and if you’re going to break through that noise, you need to have deep insights into two sides of the customer and you mentioned the both, the avatar and the buyer’s journey. The avatar is more common. Lots and lots of marketers will tell me that, oh yes, I have an avatar of my customers. Awesome. Can you show it to me? Much fumbling around while they try to find it because they haven’t looked at it in months. So there’s problem number one. Then I’ll say, Have you mapped the buyer’s journey? And I usually get a blank stare, and that buyer’s journey in conjunction with the avatar as two sides to a coin. That’s what you need in order to craft marketing that supports the the old direct marketing axiom. Everybody’s gonna nod their head when I say this, because they’ve probably all heard it before. Doesn’t make it any less valid. Get the right message to the right person at the right time. The avatar helps you with the right person. The journey map helps you with the right time. Because when they don’t have a need for what you’re doing, it’s just part of the gray blob. But when something happens in their life, suddenly their awareness increases, and suddenly they start seeing the advertising and the marketing for your category. They see yours, and they see your competitors. What was the thing that happened? What stimulated them to go from uninterested and uninvolved to aware. Now, if you craft marketing that resonates with that point in their journey, they’re going to see your marketing and engage with it. But it doesn’t stop there. The journey goes through four distinct phases. There’s sort of the unaware, aware phase, top of the funnel. Then there’s the two phases in the mid funnel. And the mid funnel has two phases. It says consideration, and that tends to be where they’re doing research work, exploring what their alternatives are, investigating what’s going on these days, into prospecting, where they’re actually making decisions about who they’re going to go with. And then the fourth page was, which is the decision phase, if you can understand the kinds of things that are going on in the minds of the consumers, the confusions they have, the questions they’re trying to overcome, the obstacles they’re trying to get around, all those things, then you’ve got a way to craft your marketing messaging so that it’s resonating with those folks where they are, and that’s how you break through the noise, and that from a B2B marketers point of view, my God, you know, which would you rather be some guy standing on the top of a building shouting at the world at large about, My God, how awesome we are. Or would you rather be the confidant, the person who’s there with them, who’s giving them the information they need who’s supporting the journey. The Holy Grail here is that the purchase decision shouldn’t be a sale. It should be the next logical step in their journey. And when that happens, you’re getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and you’re building a relationship through through value and trust that’s going to generate customers who are loyal, customers who are like more likely to buy from you again, customers who are, you know, going to be telling their friends and colleagues about what an amazing experience they had.

Christian Klepp  07:19

Absolutely.

James Hipkin  07:21

Now, you can’t do that if you don’t understand their journey, if you’re just shouting at people randomly from the top of a building. Yeah, some of it might work, but you’re missing so many opportunities.

Christian Klepp  07:35

Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s go back for a second. Run the number past us again. How many marketing messages people are exposed to?

James Hipkin  07:45

6 to 10,000 is the what you hear when you sort of sort of common practice, people talk about 6 to 10,000 marketing messages a day.

Christian Klepp  07:56

Yeah, that’s…

James Hipkin  07:59

And I tell you all, the best marketing in the world is not going to change a customer’s need state. If they don’t need what you’re selling, they’re not gonna see what you’re doing. That’s just accept that. But when they do have a need, you want to be there, and you will be there if your messaging resonates and it’s something that they can relate to.

Christian Klepp  08:27

Absolutely, absolutely. I had another follow up question for you, James, why do you feel, at least in your experience, why do you feel that companies, marketers skip this part, like, why don’t they do it? You talked about the clients that you talk to that don’t have a customer avatar. They say they do, and then they can’t find it. They can’t find it. They’re like, Where was that thing? It was in here somewhere, right?

James Hipkin  08:52

Why they don’t do it? Well, it can get hard. Back in the day when I was managing large budget, multi, seven figure marketing budgets. I mean, we get market researchers to come in and help us with this. And the typical charge for one of these avatar journey map exercises might run 50 grand because you’ve got focus groups involved, and maybe some quantitative research and some confirmation testing, and, you know, just lots of stuff to do it properly. And so a lot of times, people don’t. The other thing that often happens is they may have an avatar or a journey map, but it’s not of the right people. It’s a very common mistake that’s made where marketers just, you know, they use demographics to define their audience, and they go out and do research amongst those people. But the reality is, in virtually every business, 80% of your sales is being generated by 20% of your customers. The specific numbers might change, but the concept is, is sound rock solid. What you need to do is you need to understand who that 20% is, because they’re not going to be the same as the average consumer. They are likely to be heavy category users, and heavy category users are better informed. They’re more knowledgeable, they have more experience. They better  understand your product, and they better understand your competitors products. So you need to speak to them in your marketing like you know this, so doing the avatar work and the buyer’s journey work is important, but you also need to do it with the right people.

Now, the other reality is, in this crazy, crazy world that we live in, Christian people are all over the damn map. You know, it’s not the linear journey that maybe existed 20 years ago. I mean, people pop around. So you need to craft your marketing in a way that anticipates and accommodates that so it can get, it can be hard work, but I’ll tell you the results are spectacular, if you can…  imagine for a second your competitor’s customer base sort of reflects the market in total, 80% of their customers are occasional buyers and 20% of their customers are frequent buyers. But your customer base, because you’ve done this work, 40% of your customer base are frequent buyers, and 60% are occasional buyers. You have the exact same number of customers as your competitors, but you’re generating 2, 3, 4x revenue from the same number of people. That doesn’t happen by accident. That happens when you understand who those best customers are, what they’re like demographically. Demographics help you set your media strategy, what their like, what their characteristics are, what they’re like as people that helps you understand how to talk to them in your marketing. And then, what’s their pain? What are they struggling with? What is the what are the problems they’re trying to overcome? And then what’s the gain that they get from you? And so you need to understand the mindset and the details at each of these phases in order to craft, you know, marketing, one of the other things that I talked about is the hub and spoke strategy.

Christian Klepp  12:52

Yes

James Hipkin  12:53

Where the website is the hub, the media channels are the spokes, and the content and messaging strategy is the rim that holds it all together. Well, the avatar and the journey map help you with all of that

Christian Klepp  13:09

Absolutely and we’re going to get into the research aspect of it in a second. But before we do, you already brought some of them up, but let’s dig deeper into some of the common pitfalls that marketers should avoid when they’re thinking about customer avatars and buyers journey maps.

James Hipkin  13:29

Well, a common thing, again, it’s the issue, the issue between best customers and regular customers. If you’re talking to the middle of the bell curve, yeah, there’s lots of people there, but they’re not heavy spenders, and all the marketing in the world is not going to change that. That’s the nature of who they are in their situation. The other common mistake that’s made is in the how I remember being in a meeting in Chicago and we invited our client up from Kansas City. It was a large telecommunications company, and the creative director had placed all of the work we’d done over the last 24 months up on one of the boardroom walls. And she turned to them and she said, Do you see the problem? And of course, they didn’t see the problem. They they’re like, Well, it all looks great. So she took a ribbon with two push pins, and she pushed the ribbon into the wall at a certain point, and she said, Now, do you see the problem? And they said, Well, no, no, we… I don’t understand. What are you doing? She picked a piece up off of one side of the ribbon, and she read it out loud. Then she picked a piece up off the other side of the ribbon, and she read it out loud, and she said, Do you see the problem now? And they’re like, no, they both sounded great. And she said, Exactly, that’s the problem. Everything to the left of the line is acquisition marketing. Everything to the right of the line is customer marketing. We are talking to our customers with exactly the same tone of voice as we’re talking to our prospects. Our customers have a relationship with us. We’re not talking to them like we have a relationship with them. That is a really common problem.

Christian Klepp  15:22

Yeah, and hence the reason why this kind of research is so important, right?

James Hipkin  15:29

Right

Christian Klepp  15:29

Because, and I don’t know who said this, but like, you know, not all customers are created equal, right? They are all different in their varying degrees, different. To your point, they have a different relationship to the company or to the provider, right? There are different stages of that relationship, sure, and as such, they need to be treated accordingly with the respective messaging that that is appropriate.

James Hipkin  15:57

For where they are within their journey.

Christian Klepp  16:00

Correct.

James Hipkin  16:01

Another example. I was helping a woman who was a paid keynote speaker. People pay her $10,000 to come and speak to their event, to their group or their business, and when we got right into it, she had three distinct target audiences. In her 20%, there were event project managers whose primary motivation was, don’t make me look bad, right? There were corporate HR directors who are bringing her in to help so that she could help their senior executives be better communicators. And then there were solo senior executives, mostly women, who’ve been promoted to a position and were finding themselves on stages and they didn’t really know how to, what to do, other than the gender being the same, those three groups are very, very different in terms of their motivations, in terms of their needs, in terms of their pain, etc. If you have avatars and journey maps for each of those sub segments in your audience, then you’re going to be able to craft marketing that’s going to support them, that’s going to build a relationship, that’s going to generate trust. You know, one of the more controversial things that I talk about is, I’ll say to people, I want you to stop saying call to action, which makes everybody go, wait what? Because they’ve been told for their entire career, you’ve got to have a call to action. It’s vital that you have a call to action. It needs to be above the fold, okay, a call to action is a marketer shouting at a customer and telling them what to do. Customers don’t want to be shouted at and they don’t want to be told what to do. If you create people like you, pathways that call out to the sub segments in your audience and visually with headlines, maybe a sentence or two, that communicates the benefit of what’s going to happen if they select that pathway and they click on that “Learn More” button, two very powerful things have happened. They’ve told you exactly who they are, and they’ve given you permission to give them more information. Which would you rather have? People being shouted at and randomly clicking on buttons or people selecting pathways? Effectively, they’re exactly the same thing, but the mindset shift is really important. And the mind set shift is when you start to recognize that your audience and your target audience has personalities. They are… there are distinct subgroups, and they have different needs, and your if you support that, you’re going to get purchases that are the next logical step in their journey, as opposed to being tricked into buying something. As a marketer, which would you rather have?

Christian Klepp  19:12

Of course you want to guide them, yeah, right, down a path, right, help them to make an informed decision, because we all know that most of the time in B2B, people are not ready to buy.

James Hipkin  19:24

No,

Christian Klepp  19:25

Not yet, not yet. They need a lot more proof, a lot more evidence

James Hipkin  19:31

Exactly

Christian Klepp  19:32

That you’re the right fit.

James Hipkin  19:33

But if you, but if you, rather than regurgitating everything you can think about on your homepage, your website, which is what people do, right? How many websites have you seen? It’s like, Oh, my God, where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to look at? Where am I, you know, versus a big call out. That’s, you know, people like you. And then you choose that path, and you get to a landing page that’s full of information that is just completely relevant to who you are and where you are in your journey. That’s… and so that’s where, why I say the avatar and the journey in combination is extremely powerful.

Christian Klepp  20:16

Absolutely, absolutely. I know you brought up some aspects of research earlier in the conversation, but I’m going to move us on to the next question, which is focusing on how, or I would say, the recommendations that you have like walk us through some of those important aspects of customer research that marketers should be focusing on to develop those relevant customer avatars and buyers journey maps, because, as you said earlier on in the conversation, it can get pretty overwhelmed.

James Hipkin  20:47

Yes, it can,

Christian Klepp  20:47

Right? It can be a lot of work, and it can be a lot of data, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to do all this work, and not much is going to come up.

James Hipkin  20:56

Well, sometimes I like to tell the dad joke. Now…

Christian Klepp  21:02

All right, here we go.

James Hipkin  21:03

You know the dad joke about the two guys in the forest who run across a bear, and the one guy says to the second guy, Hey, man, we got to run. And the second guy says to the first guy, we can’t outrun a bear. And this first guy says to the second guy, I don’t need to outrun the bear. I just need to outrun you, right?

Christian Klepp  21:26

Okay

James Hipkin  21:27

An awful lot of marketing is the two guys in the forest with the bear. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to be better than what your competitors are doing. And it doesn’t even have to be a lot better, because most people are pretty forgiving. If they think that you’ve got something that they can relate to, and they understand that they’re going to gravitate towards you, it doesn’t take much, because they’re on a journey to solve a problem, and if you even hint at the fact that you’ve got a solution to their problem by just talking to them about things in their language, they’re going to be all over that, because this is hard work for them. They do, you know. So when you’re doing this work, pick up the phone and call your customers. I know it’s a shocking thing, but ask them, you know, tell them, you know, this is… that by itself, even if you just do that, you know what happened to get you thinking about this to your life? What you know? What? What kind of steps did you go through when you were researching a solution? So how did you come to, you know, choosing your sort of final, top two, top three, and then why did you choose us? Get into those conversations, and you will start to gain a tremendous amount of insight into what your market, what your clients are looking for, because most people are nice, right? They’ll answer your questions, and they’re probably be thrilled that you called up, called them up and said, hey, you know, I’d really like to know more about you and about your process and what you went through it. You know, it doesn’t have to be all smarmy. They will value that. So, yeah, you can spend money on research, and a lot of big brands do, and it’s valuable getting focus groups and a professional researcher to help guide the conversation, that sort of thing, but anybody can pick up the phone and call their customers, because if you spend a little bit of time in your data, you can pretty quickly identify who the best customers are. Have we talked about RFM in the past?

Christian Klepp  21:32

Not that I remember.

James Hipkin  23:06

Are you familiar with RFM?

Christian Klepp  23:57

Yes, but I’m pretty sure you’re gonna help remind me a little.

James Hipkin  24:04

Okay. RFM is an old analytics technique out of the direct marketing and catalog industry. It’s an acronym. It stands for Recency, Frequency and Monetary so if you go into your customer base and you find first of all, do a filter for all of the customers who’ve bought from you in the last two months, one month, whatever’s appropriate for your business. Okay. And then do a filter for all of the customers who’ve bought from you two times in the last year, or three times the last year, whatever the frequency is that is appropriate for your business, and then do a filter for who’s spending the most with us. And if you score your customers based on recency, frequency and monetary you will very quickly identify who are the 20% of. That are generating most of your revenue. So that’s step one. Is figure out who it is you should be talking to, and then, you know, pick up the phone and call some of them. It’s, it’s amazing what you can learn from just conversations with people.

Christian Klepp  25:20

Yeah, no, I totally agree. I mean, I do quite a bit of that customer research myself, so I do not only understand, truly appreciate the value of going through that process. I have two follow up questions for you, James on the topic of customer research, or just market research in general, where you also focus on customers. The first one is, what’s your take on the importance of not just talking to current customers, but perhaps even talking to prospects in the past that you would park under perhaps lost deals.

James Hipkin  25:56

For sure, because their life is dynamic. It’s not static, and you don’t know when, when things are can change. This is one of the reasons why email marketing is so valuable and so important, because that sort of lazy river sequence of emails that you just generally send out to folks that have been in touch with you, it’s full of valuable information, etc. You just never know, but you want to have the metrics in place so you can track what they’re doing if they click on a link and go to a landing page on your website. You want to have a plan to do something about that, because they’ve just told you something, right? So, yeah, past prospects are valuable. You want to understand look alike audiences are really valuable. You know where you if you use the RFM technology to identify this particularly important for E-commerce businesses, because then you can use those look alike audiences to help you with your media buy, right? So, yeah, absolutely, talk to your existing customers first and foremost. But definitely talk to your prospects, the folks that didn’t choose you, and find out why. But it’s the same kinds of questions. You know, what got you thinking about the category? You know, what were the steps you went through when you were researching options? What were the factors that you used to to identify your top two or your top three choices? And then, why did you choose the people you chose, the resource you chose, the product you chose, the software you chose, whatever it might be. You know those that… it’s the same phases and sometimes people go through these phases really fast. I mean, in a, you know, consumer packaged goods world, it’s still valid, but it’s, it’s literally gets done in 30 seconds at the end of a grocery aisle. But consumers still go through the same steps. They’ll see the grocery aisle and they go, right, do I have, you know? Do I have cereal for the kids? And you know, then they’ll walk down the aisle and go, You know this. So what are my choices here? What am I looking.. Yeah, well, normally, I’m gonna buy this brand, but this other brand sometimes, so awareness, consideration, prospecting, I think I’m gonna grab this one this time. It can happen really fast, or it can take six months, but the process is the same.

Christian Klepp  28:30

No, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. In your professional opinion. How often would you recommend that customers or companies look at these avatars and these buyer journey maps to see if anything’s changed, and if they need to update them

James Hipkin  28:46

That’s probably worth checking in on a yearly basis. These are big picture things, unless something radical has changed in the marketplace, chances are at this kind of high level, principal level that we’re talking stuff doesn’t change that quickly. You know, beware of boardroom boredom, just because you see the stuff all the time. Remember the gray blob on the white screen? Right? You may see this stuff all the time, but for all your best intentions, if they don’t have a need, they’re not seeing it at all. It’s just part of the noise. So you don’t have to change things nearly as often as people think they have to change them. And these, these segments in your audience, don’t change all that quickly either. So once a year, maybe even once every two years, depends on your market, depends on your sector. If you’re in a very volatile sector where there’s a lot of technology changing very quickly, then you might want to do it even… you might want to do it every six months. But so the classic diplomatic answer, it depends.

Christian Klepp  30:00

Fair enough. Fair enough. We talked about this earlier in the conversation, but I wanted to go back to it. Lord knows, you and I have probably come across clients like this. What do you say to people, or how do you deal with that pushback from clients that say, James, we don’t need all this stuff. We don’t need to do the expensive research. We don’t need to do the customer avatars and the buyer’s journey maps. We know who our customers are. What would your response be to somebody like that?

James Hipkin  30:31

Well, sometimes they’re right. Sometimes they really do know who their customers are. But the reality is, this is where you get a lot of what I call inside out marketing. This is where the marketer is shouting at folks and with all the best intentions, because they think they know what they’re looking for. The shift in perspective is really important. And even if all you do is reach out and talk to people, it’s going to change how you think about your messaging. It may not change what you’re saying, because your product is your product, and it does what it does, but it may absolutely change how you say it, because, you know, people don’t want to be shouted at. They don’t want to be told what to do, but if you reach out to them with information that’s germane to where they are, resonates with what they’re searching for, they’ll pay attention.

Christian Klepp  31:36

Absolutely, absolutely okay, my friend, you know the drill. We get to the point in the conversation where we talk about actionable tips, and especially on the topic of customer avatars and buyers journey maps. It does take time. Yes, it does. But if some if somebody were listening to this conversation between you and I. And you wanted them to walk away with three to five things that they can take action upon immediately. What would those be?

James Hipkin  32:05

Well, the first thing I would suggest is start to compartmentalize your marketing into those like major funnel buckets, so that you’re clearly understanding what marketing is doing at each stage. One of the principles, I mean, your digital marketing agency probably talked to you about this. They’ll call it message matching. When you’re doing a Google AdWords campaign, you want the headlines in your Google AdWords to take people to a landing page that echoes what that headline was. You want that those messages to match so that people aren’t struggling with Am I in the right place? They’re instantly comfortable. This is what I clicked on. I got to a page. This is what they’re talking about. So that message matching is vital, and you can’t really do that if you don’t understand what part of the funnel you’re attracting. You know, if you’re doing email marketing to folk prospects who’ve already engaged with you at the top of the funnel, you want them to go those links, to go to a landing page that recognizes that they’re likely in the consideration phase or the prospecting phase. So you know that that message matching is a is an important part, and you can only really do it if you understand who you’re talking to. What is it that they’re looking for? What is it that you’re offering? And then where are they in their process? And then invite them to join you on the journey, or for you to join them on their journey. And that’s where I talk about, stop saying call to action and start saying pathway. Effectively, they’re exactly the same thing, but the mindset shift is really important. A pathway is the marketer supporting their customer on their journey.

Christian Klepp  34:08

Absolutely, absolutely. I’m just going to throw this in here like a shameless plug, but this is for the benefit of the audience. I had the pleasure of hosting James on the show previously, and there was a three part series about the different stages of the marketing funnel with Kylie Lang, if memory serves me well, and I’m gonna just drop that into the show notes and the description of this episode for the benefit of anyone that’s interested in listening to that those conversations. Okay, my friend, I’ve got three more questions before I like, okay, all right, so I know that you have many, but James, I’m only going to ask you for one. All right, a status quo that you passionately disagree with, and why.

James Hipkin  34:58

I sometimes get pushback on the buyer’s journey map, because people say, in the digital world, people are all over the map, and they bounce around, and, you know, it’s no longer a linear journey. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Yes, people absolutely are bouncing around, and they might be moving very quickly, but if your marketing is crafted to support where they’re at, they will find it and they will appreciate what you’re saying. You just need to recognize that you need to be ready for them however they engage with you and whenever they engage with you. You know that one of the things that we’ve talked about in the past Christian, which is a good example of this, is the quiz funnel, where you do, like, an entertaining, little fun thing at the top of the funnel that that resonates with people, where they are, and they’re just the beginning of their journey, and then you draw them along, and then at the bottom of their funnel, you do a much deeper and more involved assessment survey that may take them 15-20 minutes to complete, but if you’ve done that assessment survey correctly, by the time they’re done the assessment, they’ve talked themselves into buying your product.

Christian Klepp  36:24

And that’s the objective of the exercises.

James Hipkin  36:27

And that’s a great example of, you know, the journey exists, whether, however and whenever they jump in, you need to be ready for them.

Christian Klepp  36:40

Okay, My Friend, here comes the bonus question. All right, I have it, I have it on good authority. All right, I got this information from a guy that knows a guy, right, that you have a passion for cooking.

James Hipkin  36:52

Oh, yes,

Christian Klepp  36:53

Right, yes. So the question is, if you suddenly, if your wife suddenly came in and said somebody famous was coming over for dinner tonight, right? Could be a celebrity. It could be somebody that you follow on social media, the mayor of your town, whatever. If you found out that this person is coming to dinner tonight, what would you cook them? And why?

James Hipkin  37:19

Probably a leg of lamb. Oh, most people don’t know how to cook lamb, but earlier in my career, I had the opportunity to live in Spain for four years, and they know how to cook lamb in Spain, and I got some really good coaching from some folks there that I met, and it’s, it’s a really, it’s an absolutely wonderful meal. I remember when we were in Spain. I’m going to make your mouth water here, Christian.

Christian Klepp  37:53

I’m already…

James Hipkin  37:55

My main client. It was Rover cars. We were building a Pan European database marketing system for Rover cars. And the executives came down from London to Madrid, and we booked them in to a restaurant in Madrid. And this restaurant, you have to book like months and months in advance to get into this restaurant.

Christian Klepp  38:16

Was one of those. Yep.

I’m trying to picture it now, while you were talking. I’m trying to, like, envision what this restaurant looked like and the meal, and you guys sitting on the floor and whatnot, right?

James Hipkin  38:18

They brought a whole lamb spread out on a giant platter. It is a Moroccan style restaurant, and they set the platter down on the table. We were all sitting on the floor. It was set up for Westerners because we had a place to put our feet so we didn’t have to sit cross legged, because most of us probably couldn’t but and then this guy came, and he had two large sharpened spoons. The tops the spoons are razor sharp, and he just hovered over this lamb. And with these two spoons, he deboned the lamb, and when he stepped back, there was a pile of bones sitting on the side, and the lamb had a slit down its back, and it was still basically intact. And I’m telling you, that was the most amazing meal I’ve had in my entire life.

James Hipkin  39:26

Oh yeah. I mean, everybody had, like, little tiny bowls with spices in them. And in the Moroccan culture, they eat with their hands. And so you’re picking up pieces of meat, and you’re dipping the meat into the your bowls the different spices. And it was just amazing,

Christian Klepp  39:44

Yeah, not, not to get too much into the weeds here, but I would imagine there was rosemary in there might have been a bit a touch of cumin.

James Hipkin  39:52

Oh yeah, lots of cumin, lots of oregano. It’s some spicy… You know, the Kashmiri chilis and all sorts of things. It was awesome.

Christian Klepp  40:07

Yeah, no, James. I mean, as usual, right? This, this conversation did not disappoint. And I really appreciate you coming back on the show. It’s always a pleasure to have you. But before I let you go, please, for the benefit of those who have never heard of you, short introduction and how folks can get in touch with you and what you’ve been up to lately.

James Hipkin  40:27

Well, I tell you, I’ve been banging around the marketing and advertising world for over 40 years. I still really enjoy it. I just love helping people. You know, my wife keeps saying, you know, when are you going to retire? And says, I don’t know. I’m still having fun. If anybody wants to chat with me, I love conversation. VIPChatwithjames.com. It’s a great link. You can get some, you know, book 30 minutes on my calendar. We can have a fast chat about marketing, about websites, about food, you know, right? This past weekend, I made some homemade salsa, and I’ve got a whole pile of tomatillos and jalapenos sitting on the counter that need to be turned into hot sauce. So and then on, what am I up to lately? I tell you, we’ve been doing a lot of work in the AI space and harnessing machine learning to help marketers with exactly this kind of problem with the avatar and the journey map. And we’ve developed a product that is in beta testing right now that is going to basically, for, you know, $2,500 you’re going to be able to generate an avatar and a journey map using professionally designed interview guides. You record the conversations with your customers, put the recordings into the system and the AI, which we again, we’re in beta testing right now, it analyzes the conversation, takes the inferences from the conversation, reads between the lines, and outputs an avatar for your customer and a buyer’s journey map for your customers based on 6 to 10 customer interviews that you can do with your existing customers, and that information can help you craft your marketing so that it can be more effective, not with your prospects. Because your best prospects are the people who look like your customers.

Christian Klepp  42:38

Absolutely, absolutely, if you’ve got like a website, or if the platform’s already online, yeah.

James Hipkin  42:44

We have a landing page for it. If you go to Marketing sage advantage. Sage, as in the wisdom interpretation of the word marketing, sage, S, A, G, E, advantage. When I told my VA about this. He’s, she’s like, Is that the kind that you light up and wave around in the room? No. Also sage, but no, we’re not talking about that. So marketingsageadvantage.com is the landing page for this product. We have a beta program up right now, but we’re hoping by sort of later this month, we’ll be launching the product as a minimally viable product. And then, you know, the next logical extension of this is I have an avatar. I have a journey map. I need to have my agency generate a campaign for me. How do I do a campaign brief? And so that’s the next stage of this product development, is to use this data to generate campaign briefs that you know the marketing agency can actually use that. That’s the thing we see most often, is you hire a marketing agency, and they’re lovely people, and they want to do a good job, but you’re not a marketer, and they’re not strategic, and they make your noise pretty.

Christian Klepp  44:10

Nope. It’s expensive, though.

James Hipkin  44:14

It can be very expensive, but strategic marketing that resonates with customers and is pretty. That’s a win.

Christian Klepp  44:26

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. James, once again, it was a pleasure to have you back in the show. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. Thank you. Thank you. Take care.

James Hipkin  44:36

My pleasure as always.

Christian Klepp  44:38

All right.