We’re living in a world where the demand for marketing services is high, but the results aren’t there. Mostly, it’s because of how we think and do marketing, but also because there are, because of the high demand, many companies and “professionals” that do things in a way that won’t bring desired results.
That’s why Funky Marketing ran this series of interviews with worldwide professionals doing marketing and business in a different way, the right way, with a bit of funk, to help the wider auditorium get to know what great marketing is and how it is done.
In this interview (2022) we’re talking with Jessie Lizak, CMO at BDEX where she gets to help B2C marketers and programmatic media buyers embrace first-party data, machine learning, and identity resolution. Jessie is Co-Founder of Reveting and Co-Founder of Marketing Collective. She is also a Co-Host on BDEX’s Deconstructing Data Podcast as well as Reveting’s Whiskey Wednesday and today we have an opportunity to learn more about her and her views on marketing, branding, and business.
How does personal branding create differentiation?
Short answer: because a company can copy your features, your pricing and your website, but it cannot copy how a specific person thinks. In markets where every vendor describes itself with the same three adjectives, the people who say something recognisable out loud become the thing buyers remember. That is differentiation you own, and it moves with you.
Company brand and personal brand, and what each one can do
| Company brand | Personal brand | |
|---|---|---|
| What it carries | Trust in the product | Trust in the judgment |
| How fast it builds | Years, with budget | Months, with consistency |
| Who can build it | A team | One person, publicly |
| What it opens | Consideration | Conversations |
| Where it breaks | When the message is generic | When the person goes quiet |
Here is the conversation in full.
How to build a personal brand/reliable team/continuous quality/long-term satisfied client?
When it comes to personal branding, I only see it getting more and more important especially when you consider the future with web3.
Building your brand is so important to close the trust gap with your audience which is why some of the best salespeople out there now are marketers.
When everyone within one organization are free and encouraged to be themselves online and offline, it only helps the brands that employ them.
Personal branding creates differentiation because people are unique and people connect with people. Additionally, helping your team build their personal brand helps them build trust with you which is part of building a reliable team.
When you establish a personal brand with your audience, you become their go-to person.
Most often, we think of LinkedIn when we think of personal branding and that’s critical, but there are other channels to consider as well: podcasts, video, TikTok, Instagram, etc. Where is your audience? Where do you want to be if your primary channel goes down?
Let’s talk about processes. Give us an example to help us understand how you think about marketing campaigns with a specific example or examples.
I think of marketing campaigns as scientific experiments. Getting my master’s in sociology only fueled this behavior. I’m highly data-driven but with qualitative and quantitative data, so I’m always looking for ways to test, measure, and optimize.
For example, when I did actual research in grad school, I used mixed methods to always supplement quantitative survey results with interviews to help piece together the real story.
I did the same thing when I worked on a human trafficking campaign in Oakland, CA for the District Attorney. Our goal was to raise awareness about human trafficking of little girls locally so of course, we got the statistics to show the percentage makeup of the age as well as whereas the children were from which was locally and regionally (not just internationally as a lot of Americans used to think).
In addition to the quantitative statistics, we would also collect qualitative feedback from inter-agency collaborative meetings as well as court hearings. Interviews with girls who made it out of “the life” truly made a difference. While statistics alone may not justify specific programs, one quote from one young lady who was able to find her way out kept these things going. The same in marketing. Stories matter!
If I were to talk about a marketing campaign, the one that comes to mind is BDEX’s Omni IQ product marketing campaign.
We launched our new app on April 20th, 2022 and we had certain revenue goals projected, but also the number of users we hoped to see come in. With the immediate goal to first get users on the app, the app launch to our existing audience was a big piece of the planning. Of course, that was where we saw the first initial sign-ups as well.
People often forget about marketing to their own people and going after the low-hanging fruit first.
What do you consider the next big step in your career? Why?
Working 100% for myself. I’m really excited about some of the things my partner Eddy Bahnam and I are working on at Reveting. At the time we were about to promote our first sponsors on Whiskey Wednesday and looking forward to building out the show, while also building in the background.
Where are you studying today?
Honestly, I feel like I learn so much on the Deconstructing Data podcast these days.
As Co-Host, I get to interview so really interesting people in all walks of the marketing life including B2C, B2B, Product, Communications, SEO, data science, and more from enterprises to smaller companies.
It’s the Deconstructing Data podcast of course so the conversation always stayed geared around data in one form or another which is fascinating. Additionally, it’s interactive so I’m actively learning.
The same is true for Whiskey Wednesday.
Each week, we bring on two guests and actually talk about some of the trending topics we see on LinkedIn. Talking and listening to people can truly help you learn.
I follow people like Nemanja Zivkovic, Chris Walker, Dave Gerhardt, and Amelia Sordell with Klowt in the marketing space. I also appreciate Jesse Ouellette and Ricky Pearl from an outbound perspective. Additionally, I really appreciate HYPCCCYCL and the GTM Games for some awesome experiences and education too.
What do you think, are we sharing enough knowledge? Why? And how is it impacting the way companies think of marketing today?
Clearly, there are still a lot of businesses that don’t get it.
We get pitch slaps all the time or what feels like a pitch slap because people are not researching who they’re reaching out to.
There’s still so much product feature over value and education so there’s still a lot of work to do. I think it is making an impact. It’s been fun to see B2B marketing grow in creativity in the last few years.
What do you recommend to those who follow you? What is it that helped you to be where you are?
Keep asking questions and finding answers from multiple sources. Listen to podcasts to learn from people who did it before you. Pick a single framework and a single KPI and focus on it. Keep it simple. Keep failing fast and everything will be okay.
FAQ: personal branding and differentiation
Why does personal branding work better than company branding in B2B?
Because B2B buying is a series of conversations between people, and people follow people. A company page publishes announcements; a person can hold an opinion, disagree in public and answer a question in the comments. That is what makes someone worth following, and following is where the trust is built.
Does a personal brand help the company or only the person?
Both, as long as the person is talking about the problem the company solves rather than about themselves. The risk companies worry about, that the person leaves and takes the audience, is real but smaller than the cost of nobody in the company being recognisable at all.
What do you post about if you are not a founder?
The work you actually do. What broke last week, what you tried, what you would do differently. You do not need a title to have a point of view; you need enough repetitions in the job to have seen the same problem several times.
How do you measure a personal brand?
By who shows up in your inbox and who visits your profile, not by impressions. Reach is a lever; the result is the right person starting a conversation with you already knowing what you stand for.
Related reading: The secret to building your personal brand, B2B differentiation, Creating content and building your personal brand.
This article is from the Funky Marketing blog archive. The work continues at Funky Enterprises: positioning, demand generation and commercial systems for B2B companies.
If you want to look at your own commercial system, book a 30-minute needs assessment. New conversations with people who build revenue are on the Funky Enterprises Show.
