Marketing Coaching and Training for New Levels of Success
Refine marketing skills to attract and convert more customers
First off, let me reward the time you are taking to read about our marketing coaching and training with some bits of marketing success wisdom about the creative process. These apply to both strategic planning and content creation.
Speed up Content Creation with Patterns
What’s a pattern? We see them every day. They help us make sense of the world and predict possible outcomes. Traffic has patterns. We know that traffic lights follow a particular pattern, and we can predict what comes next. When we see a yellow light, we know that a red light will soon follow. When you see an open lane ahead on a highway, you know to look for cars from adjacent lanes moving into that lane, so you anticipate lane changes. Comedians have time-tested patterns for the setup and payoff of jokes. Patterns are also handy for creating content the allows people to quickly orient to what’s going on.
Patterns allow us to follow expected lines of communication to setup and payoff within our content. The proper setup holds a reader’s attention through to the payoff. Consider these examples for capturing and holding interest.
Humor – If you intend to write a humorous ad, you often start with a pattern of misalignment, to let the audience in on the idea that you are going for humor. This can be done through irony, hyperbole, or an obvious mixing of worlds that don’t belong together – like a talking gecko.
Empathy – If you’re promoting a more serious topic – like cancer research – you need a different pattern, like sympathetic, first-hand stories.
Problem and solution – Problem and solution is a pattern that for the purposes of attraction marketing states the problem and then hints at the solution. The external blog article can also be a good medium for this pattern.
Awe or amazement – A jaw-dropping statistic followed by a link to why can show high click through. The key is to make sure you have both quality statistics and payoffs.
Story – Thousands of years of oral storytelling tradition has baked in a desire to hear, as Paul Harvey put it, the rest of the story. By using the setup of different types of storytelling, you can quickly create a hook that gets readers or viewers to pay attention to what happens in the rest of the story. This does lend itself to longer types of content, but don’t underestimate the story teaser, where the headline and couple of lines start the story and the reader needs to click to hear the conclusion.
You’ve probably seen dozens of patterns that work for different situations. You don’t…let me rephrase that…you shouldn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to these patterns. Find a pattern and work within it, even bend it a little to suit your needs. Patterns are ways to aid the prospect to understand what you are trying to say.
About coaching to success with defined roles
Our coaching programs are divided into discrete areas of focus to help you get concentrated guidance, feedback, and improvement in areas that matter most in your role. Marketing activity is divided into three progressive parts:
- Attract prospects
- Convert leads
- Retain customers
You then have three content-related jobs within each part:
- Create
- Deliver
- Measure
Put in a grid of marketing roles, it would look something like this:
| Attract prospects | Convert leads | Retain customers | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create | Creative role | Creative role | Creative role |
| Deliver | Operational role | Operational role | Operational role |
| Measure | Analytical role | Analytical role | Analytical role |
The very first thing we do is determine which of these nine areas to focus on first. Because we know that most marketers work across these areas and roles, we don’t limit coaching to one area. As you meet your improvement goals, we help you determine where to focus next to build skills and gain added expertise.
Skill building according to marketing principles
We help you identify the right time-tested strategies and tactics adapted to your unique marketing processes, and work with you to develop a set of habits for evaluating new technologies and approaches in your marketing. The world’s most successful marketing teams aren’t the ones jumping onboard with every new plug-and-play technology, but the ones who use technologies according to foundational principles, sound strategy, and proven tactics. We help you build a principle-based foundation to assess circumstances and make decisions about how to create and optimize your strategic and content marketing.
The following marketing principles, properly applied, serve as strategic and creative considerations within marketing.
- Intelligence – including marketing intelligence needed to move forward, building intelligence into marketing processes, and processes for analysis and action
- Target – identifying and avoiding the wrong markets, assessing target efficiency, methods for establishing targets early, and refining targets
- Alignment – aligning your marketing with targets, aligning marketing across the customer lifecycle, maintaining internal alignment in your marketing
- Breadth – how to reach more customers with breadth of content, when to use different media types and channels, and capitalizing on winning media efforts
- Depth – setting the right targeting and timing to keep prospects engaged, essentials for progressing buyers toward purchasing, and accelerating buying with a tightly targeted conversion path
- Review – how to run reviews that get results, gathering group input into action plans, and the right way to challenge assumptions for maximum effect
- Iteration – how to engage the four points of iteration that lead to better results, methods to make realistic iterations toward improving effectiveness, and how to achieve greater conversion by eliminating gaps and redundancies
- Curation – how to keep your marketing lean and relevant, avoiding content fire drills, and the long-term benefits of warehousing your content
Marketer coaching programs
Basic Marketer Coaching
Basic Marketer Coaching for an individual includes hour-long calls on a weekly basis to establish and review goals, look at specific strategies, or review specific content, all under NDA.
Pricing varies based on your business needs
Team Marketer Workshops
Team Marketer Workshops for up to 10 people are 1- to 3-day in-person workshops at your location. They include 2 separate hour-long preliminary calls to establish the focus of the workshop. Length of workshops depend on team requirements.
Team workshop pricing varies based on your company needs
Most Popular additional marketing resources
A message from Bob Shawgo, Founder:
"Not every small business or startup has the money to bring in a coach or consultant to ramp up their marketing. This is why I wrote the following books to help individuals, teams, and small businesses set a foundation for doing their own marketing. I was tired of seeing promising ideas disappear just because of a lack of practical, foundational understanding of marketing and content. Good marketing isn’t the sole domain of big companies and funded startups. It can work for anyone willing to apply the principles that make it work. I’ve been adapting the principles and processes in these books for companies big and small since the 1990s."
Building Blocks of Innovative Digital Marketing: Principles that Drive Digital Marketing Success
Learn the principles that drive successful digital marketing regardless of technology. People doing the most innovative digital marketing work push the envelope based on principles. They create a vision of what they want to accomplish and apply sound principles regardless of technology. They then adapt technology to their advantage, flying past the competition.
Within these pages, you will find principles for building a lasting, evolving digital marketing machine. You’ll find time-tested strategies and tactics for managing digital marketing processes, and hopefully, you’ll develop a set of habits for evaluating new technologies and approaches in your own digital marketing. Learning about and implementing new technologies is a big part of digital marketing. However, the best marketing organizations aren’t the ones jumping onboard with every new plug-and-play technology, but the ones who use technologies according to foundational principles, sound strategy, and proven tactics. Gain the foundation to assess circumstances and make decisions about how to build and optimize your digital marketing.
This book is also for marketing leaders who may not do hands-on production and creative tasks, but need to understand the foundations that go into good digital marketing practices. Leaders may delegate the investigation of new technologies, but they ultimately have to make decisions. Make those decisions according to time-tested principles to greatly improve the odds of choosing wisely.
Available for Kindle at $6.99
Available in Print at $12.99
Available in audio through Audible
Extra-Strength Marketing Content Creation for Attracting Prospects
This field guide focuses on creating extra-strength marketing content for attracting prospects. As a marketer, your objective is to create content that doesn’t just attract prospects – it grabs their attention, looks into their soul, and makes them feel an unfulfilled yearning for your offering. This is not a stroll along some flowery forest pathway. We are climbing a mountain, with switchbacks, dead-end side trails, and narrow rocky ledges. Getting it wrong has real, and often expensive, consequences. Getting it right means breathtaking vistas above your competition, experience to climb bigger mountains, and unquestionable bragging rights – what corporate people call a kick-ass resume. Within it’s pages, learn the 7 steps for creating extra-strength marketing content to attract prospects, and gather hard-earned, time-tested tips to seeing success at each step.
Available for Kindle at $4.99
About the Author
Bob Shawgo started writing marketing copy in college more than 30 years ago and went on to lead successful marketing teams and efforts in publishing, software, wholesale, education technology, media, business services, and bio-tech. As both a consultant and in-house marketer, he’s applied his marketing skills and mentored talented marketers in companies from start-ups to international brands. He currently runs Shawgo Group, a Utah-based firm, and writes articles and guides to help marketers and business builders find greater success in their marketing and sales.