Jennifer Couch is a marketing and communications expert with over 25 years of experience under her belt. A proud Idaho native, she has worked with a diverse range of industries, including finance, education, resorts, online retail, and wineries. She is currently launching a nationwide marketing campaign for Caprock, a multi-family agency that offers individualized wealth management to over 300 affluent families in the United States.
Jennifer has a degree in Business Communications and has worked with everything from small startup businesses to large international corporations, developing a passion for creating brand awareness and connecting people and businesses on a deeper level. When not busy devising marketing strategies, she can be found running the surrounding foothill trails, golfing, skiing, or cheering on her soccer-playing daughter.
She is passionate about creating 360-degree interactions with brands and has a wealth of knowledge in both digital and traditional channels. You will undoubtedly gain valuable insights and advice on how to elevate your marketing game.
Well, instead of being awkward up here, all by myself, I'm going to start by asking you to all join me in an awkward activity. All right? So if I can have everybody stand up. It's almost lunch. We all need to get our bodies moving, right? All right.
I'm going to ask you all to give me your best Andi smile or whatever's most comfortable that best reflects who you are. We're going to do a little exercise. I'm going to count to three, so wait till I count. But I'm going to have you spin in a circle, a complete circle as you go around. I want you to make eye contact with at least four people as you do that. And then you will go back to your seated position. Are we ready? Okay. 1, 2, 3.
All right, you can be seated. Again, a little awkward, a little funny, I hear some giggles. I saw some people maybe go a little bit more than 360, but congratulations, you've just completed a 360 marketing plan. <Laugh> I have a few questions for you. How many people remember the four that they saw? Do you remember details? Like, do you know what they were wearing? What color eyes, were they smiling? All those details.
How many people do you think also looked at that person? Do you think that they remembered you specifically? Do you think that they're going to engage you after this and come up and ask you all about you and your business and what you're doing? Kind of crazy to think that you could start something like that from such a small, quick, little conversation, right? Or not even a conversation at this point. This is the thing that marketers are facing right now.
When we think about 360 degree marketing, there are a lot of people out there and there's a lot of different channels where we're engaging and we may only have a few quick seconds to catch their attention. There's been some really great speakers already and a lot of information that we've had. So today I'm just going to focus on two areas since we're in such time and I'm sure I'll get the five minute call down. So today I'm going to talk about personas and how they fit into the 360 degrees. Chryssa talked a little bit about this. I'm going to go a little bit deeper and then I'm going to talk about full circle marketing and how to maximize each of those touch points.
Let's start with personas. As I said, Chryssa talked a little bit about an ideal customer persona, client persona, and some thoughts there. How many in this room actually have gone through an exercise or your company has some sort of persona developed for your customer? Okay, a few. If you haven't done this, I suggest this is a great place to start. It may look something like this. So this is one that I've developed and it's got a lot of detail here. It's an eye chart. You don't need to look in and read it, all of that, and I don't have time.
But essentially what you're trying to do is really get to know who that customer is that you're trying to reach. There's some key attributes that you may be looking at that are more kind of like demographic information. And then really getting into behaviors.
And then you'll look at their needs and challenges. This is really helpful in understanding does your company, can they address those? Maybe it is a need that's maybe more positive than the aspect, or maybe to the question earlier. It's a challenge that really you can drive, drive home with there too far.
I know I should practice more with this thing. I get click happy. I can't have a pen either with the clicker on it because I drive everybody crazy. There's people that have worked with me in this room that know that about me.
All right, so let's talk about the persona of your brand. What I want to talk about is, who's your Kevin? Who's your Andi at your company? And can we really focus in on that?
Customers and people that you engage with from your brand are already developing some sort of profiling of you anyway. They may be thinking about your personality.
Those are things that people are thinking about as, as it would relate to, are they going to have a good experience with you? Does that match right with their personalities? And then associations - not only what your logo is and your colors and your taglines, but who do you associate with from that?
I would like to have you guys think about not only developing this customer profile, which is critically important and I think Chryssa talked about how to do those. But when I started with Caprock, I interviewed 50 clients, I had hour long conversations with them to really get to know them. I'm working for a company that's been around for 17 years and has never done marketing. I needed to learn and I needed to hear it from them. It's a great way to do it. And I built these personas based on the people that I talked to.
The next thing that I looked at was developing a persona for our brand. Who is Caprock? If we were a person, what does that look like? I started with our values. Values are very important and a lot of companies do this as part of their overall branding, their mission, their vision, their values. These are things that you should hire to. So you're bringing around all the right people and everybody's working towards the same goals and really helps emulate that CEO or founder vision there.
But then think about archetypes. I'm going to talk a little bit about archetypes. How many people have done personality tests, whether it's Meyers-Briggs, there's so many different ones. Most people. Yeah, so if you haven't, it's like a survey. It asks you questions, it tries to help you get to understand a bit more about yourself, maybe the people that you're interacting with so that you can have better communication. You can think about how you build out your team more holistically.
The same goes for if you're building out an archetype for your brand. Again, this is about a person. So it's not always just one type, right? We are made, we're individual, we're unique. There may be a few different personality types that come through, especially if you are a large organization. You have a lot of people in a lot of geos, you'll have some uniquenesses. But what we found is that there's three main ones and they're a little bit different percentage, but we have what we called the Hero. We're always looking for a challenge and trying to improve. The Sage. This is where we're really detail oriented and we're always trying to find the truth. And then Caregiver, which is a really big percentage of what we do. And what's so important is that our team really cares about nurturing relationships.
From there, think about your strengths and your challenges. Again, I'm going to bring this back to you as more of a person. Some people may tend to try to do a SWOT analysis, which is where you're looking at your strengths and your weaknesses. If you're looking at that from a company perspective, it often becomes more about the strengths and weaknesses of your products or your operations or something that you're doing or not doing against the competition.
But from this point, again, bringing it back to be more personal. Because this is meant to help you with your messaging positioning. And as your 360 marketing, how are you being perceived? So those are things obviously like we're thoughtful and resourceful as a strength and we're also approachable. Some challenges, we may be in analysis paralysis sometimes because we go too deep, right? And we may struggle to set boundaries.
So now you have your persona for your customer and you have your brand persona. How do they meet? Well, obviously doing a quick little 360 is probably not going to work. Do you know that on average Americans are exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 ads a day? That's a day. And on average it takes seven touchpoints before somebody will take action from being introduced to your brand. That's a lot.
So it's really critical to think about where you're at. If you're in front of the right audience and you're saying the right thing. I'm not going to go through this whole thing, and this is definitely not an exhaustive list, but the digital and traditional that we've talked about is important, right? Digital is everywhere. We're at an event. This would be considered what? Traditional by way, but how many people have been on their phones at least a dozen times since they've walked into this room?
Yeah, come on, be honest. I definitely have. We're always engaged in multiple touchpoints and it's about leveraging and considering that and thinking through that.
So I want to share an example with you about this. I worked for a brand that had multiple brands. One of the brands that we worked with, events were really big for us, right? And so we joined to be a sponsor of a big conference. So we did marketing of that conference on our side. We were involved in all the marketing that the conference sent out. They sent out direct mail pieces, they did a big email campaign, they had digital ads running. It was at a big venue and there were thousands of people. So we had, once we got to the event, we had our banners up, we had one of our speakers going, we had a booth.
So we had all our pretty banners, all of our stuff that we were handing out. And our main goal was really to generate leads for this event. So all the way through we had multiple touchpoints and exposure of our brand going on.
So at the end of the, the event, it was I think a three or a four day, they had a huge party at the end, which is like the whole like, woohoo, we made it right? And so our team went to that event and we thought it'd be fun to wear our branded t-shirts. And they were these really bright, super red, it was almost kind of like a bowling shirt because it had like white stripes on the arms. It stood out because it was very dark in this space. They had the music pumping and stuff like that. Felt like more like a nightclub than, than a party at a conference.
But we could see our entire team everywhere we looked, we would be able to spot them like, oh, there's Jennifer, she's over there. It was really great, especially when we were ready to leave. We could get everybody together and leave at once.
So post event, we did a call around, we followed up with people that were at the event that we had had engaged with. Tried to ask them, always getting feedback of where did, what did they remember? Did they see that? Trying to track some of that stuff.
One thing we didn't think about, a lot of the people that we talked to when we did that follow up were like, oh, you guys were that group at the party with the bright shirts? We didn't even think about that. That was not a planned activity that we were trying to monitor and think about. So I'm just saying every touchpoint is important and bringing it full circle there.
Okay, I want to talk about the dark or the lightning rod. One that isn't really traditional, isn't really digital, it's just what happens. It is word of mouth. It is referrals. It is the thing that somebody else out there is acting on your behalf. Andi's talked a lot about this through the Chamber and how she's connecting. Those are the resources.
So if I'm up here, if I say something about Caprock and after today Andi goes and talks about Caprock, did she get the message? Is she saying the same thing and is my message coming across? And I think this is something just to always challenge yourself and read and ask and continue to watch that because that's one of the greatest marketing tools that you have.
All right, bringing it full circle here, the multi-channel approach. So this is an example, when I worked for Balsam Brands. This brand in particular, Balsam Hill, was through multiple different countries. We had multiple different channels. We had employees on every channel and we were very concentrated.
Obviously being a holiday decor company, we had a very impactful tight schedule that we operated against. We did everything from mass reach to, you know, having commercials running on Hallmark. We were in the Macy's day parade. And then we had really targeted ones where we were doing catalogs and, and you know, stalking you on Facebook and whatever else, right?
When, when I first started, every channel was doing their own thing. They didn't talk to each other. We didn't have an overarching campaign; we didn't have time. We were like throwing it together and getting it out there. We brought in branding and we said, nope, let's, let's do the one thing or the five things at the right time, right? One thing at a time. But having it be consistent and that brand, that visual being there and that message being reiterated, that can increase your revenue 33% just by doing that, by bringing that consistency. Again, coming back to that idea that it takes seven times.
And I will tell you, we tracked, and this 4.26 may look great when you're thinking about 7. I'll give the caveat that this is the peak of season. Like, we are concentrated and a lot of these people are already exposed to our brand. It still took over four times of us giving them something, the exact thing, before they were able to reiterate that.
So that just goes to show you that it's, it's very important to bring that all full circle there. Okay, and I finished early, I timed myself and I must have talked really fast, but I will open up for questions. And it's funny, Andi, that you said this, and this was not planned, but this is my mantra. Evolve and follow the energy. I do not have near the energy of Andi, but she can be my idol and we all have ways to grow for that.
Questions. I’m the only thing between you and lunch, yes.
He's asking if I've ever heard of dark social. Yes. Yeah, it, you know I think that when you're, when you're referring to it, there's a few different things that, that occur within the dark social. I'm assuming you're talking about like the negative space and like how people are like going, what?
Oh, okay. No, so you're talking about tracking to be able to understand which touch points every, yeah. So yeah, it's pretty common, but it's also being cracked down on. So you probably have, has anybody heard of cookies? Not just with what's coming with lunch here? Yeah, so that's a big movement and actually when I was at Balsam Brands, we had multiple locations. So Europe did their GDPR, and it was like they cracked down on being able to track people. That's pretty prevalent in California if you're marketing in California. But I do anticipate that being more and more, which does make it a little bit more difficult to track, but you can still track that information in some ways.
Yeah, that's a great question. So he's asking again about, you have messages, right? There's multiple things that you do well and you can market to, there's great messaging out there. How do you know which one to go with?
This is the great thing about digital that we can do, we can test and we can test fast. And so you can put out messages and you can actually, even if you're running a programmatic, you can ask Google to optimize to that. So you can do automation in that. It will start pushing the ads that are performing better. You set what you want those performance measures to be, but that should help you hone in your message.
Yeah, so the question is about client testimonials, which is absolutely fantastic. And as we talk about referrals and things, those are great to have. But she's asking about, they don't know, they want to say something but they don't know what to say. Is that what you have there?
There are multiple different ways that I've found helpful to do this. Sometimes it's conversations. When I did the interviews with our customers, I actually asked them at the end, I was like, Hey, and we're very regulated. I was like, the SEC apparently has now opened up the use of testimonials. I don't know how we're going to use that right now. I don't know all the details, but can I follow up with you? And a lot of them said, yeah, absolutely.
So what I did is made note of some of the things that they talked about and then I sent that back to them and I said, Hey, when we were in our discussion, you mentioned this, would you mind sharing that in a testimonial or tweaking it if, however it makes sense to you.
Because sometimes when we get mad at people, it's really easy to go online and leave that review, right? You have to be really purposeful in asking for the good reviews. I'm horrible about that too. If I had a good experience, I'll tell somebody, but I don't automatically think, go online and leave that review right now. I'm trying to be better at it.
Any others?
So you're talking the, the 360 when you stood up and you kind of went around and he's asking how do, how do we bring that forward? The point of that exercise honestly was really to consider how fast that's happening and how many other things are impacting that as well.
So the point to that is, coming back to your personas in your message, it's about getting out and it's about consistency. If I had asked you to do that exercise seven more times, you probably would've remembered a few more. Now, I didn't do that cause I didn't want to make everybody dizzy before lunch. But if we want to, we can check it out. <Laugh>