Why does every marketing campaign start with a strategy.
Short answer: a campaign is a set of decisions about execution, and it can only be as good as the decisions made before it. Who this is for, what we want them to do, why they would care, and how we will know it worked. Skip that and you are buying media against a guess. Diego Oquendo walks through how he handles that in practice.
What the conversation covers
| Topic | What the interview covers |
|---|---|
| Personal brand and team | How he built a personal brand, a reliable team and long-term client relationships |
| Process | A concrete example of how he runs a campaign from strategy to execution |
| Career | What he sees as the next big step in his own career |
| Learning | Where he studies today and how he keeps up |
| Knowledge sharing | Whether marketers share enough of what they actually know |
| Advice | What he recommends to the people who follow him |
The full interview follows, in his own words.
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, how we do marketing campaigns, 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.
This week we’re talking with Diego Oquendo, a B2B Marketer that helps SaaS companies build their marketing engine to accelerate revenue growth. Diego is the founder & CEO of Vulkan Marketing, a full-service B2B marketing agency, and today we have an opportunity to learn more about him and his views on marketing, branding, and business.
How to build a personal brand/reliable team/continuous quality/long-term satisfied client?
Building a personal brand is no easy task, it requires serious dedication and time investment from the creator at least in the first stages.
In the beginning, the focus should be on 3 things:
– Your Offer
– Your Audience
– Your Message
You probably have an idea of what are you offering, what audience are you targeting and what message are you communicating to them, but execution will be the only way to nail these 3 things down.
If you don’t know where to start – focus on what you’re knowledgeable about and go from there. Share what are you learning on a daily basis and engage with creators who are in a similar industry. Eventually, you will start attracting a crowd and some pieces of content will resonate more than others.
Is your content about paid ads resonating more than your content about copywriting?
Are you attracting an audience that specializes in this area?
If that happens, you might have something there. You can start nailing down from there.
What aspects of paid ads do you do exceptionally well? Is it TikTok Ads? Is it Google Search?…
Combine this with your audience and you might have an offer to begin working with.
From this point, it’s all about consistency and tweaks. You have to keep creating content, connecting and engaging to find the right message, to the right audience, with the right offer. It might take you 3, 6,12, or 24 months – but when you get to that point, nobody can stop you.
You will have a strong personal brand that is growing, and an offer that’s selling well.
______
On delivering a great experience to your clients:
Transparency, boundaries, and communication are the key to successful relationships with clients. Be transparent about the process, what it takes to get the desired result and how much time it can take
Sky-high expectations will kill every great relationship with clients – don’t promise them the world just to get the sale, they will become the most demanding clients, and it never ends well.
If you tell a client the truth about what it takes to win and they don’t want to work with you, that’s a client you don’t want to work with anyways.
Boundaries are needed to succeed too – If your clients don’t understand that you have limited bandwidth or they ask for things outside of the scope of work, you will end up burned out. And it goes both ways, our clients need to invest in the relationship too, but we have to remember they are running a business too.
Communication – always talk about where you’re standing, the good and the bad, outline a clear execution plan and next steps, and don’t be afraid to have feedback and those hard conversations.
These 3 things are the foundation of every great relationship long-term between marketers/agencies and clients (and of course, deliver great results for your clients too!)
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*
Every great marketing campaign starts with a strategy. Many people miss this step because they obsess over tactics and execution. The strategy helps you understand where you’re standing today, and where you’re heading for tomorrow.
It starts with 2 aspects:
– Business
– Customers
Business:
Analyze the existing data, decks, and industry to see what’s the current situation of the business
– Where is the business standing?
– How is the funnel doing?
– What are we doing for marketing?
– How’s the competition?
– How are we positioning our offer and value to our audience?
Customers:
Talking to them through interviews, listening to calls, reading emails, support logs, communities, social media…
This will help you understand:
– What’s your buyer’s current situation?
– What are their currently held beliefs?
– What problems are they having?
– Are they aware of these problems?
– How can we shift their beliefs and show there’s a solution to their problems?
– Where do they hang out regularly?
– What do they truly desire in life, or at their job?
After you heavily research these two things, you can start taking steps for your strategy.
– How do we communicate the value of our product?
– Are we fundamentally different from our competition, category?
– Are people resonating with our offer and messaging?
– Do we have a brand narrative that appeals to our buyer’s situation and takes a bold position / POV in the market?
– How will we communicate this message?
– Is our product fulfilling our buyer’s desires? – What do we do exceptionally better than our competition?
– How we will measure success? What will be some leading indicators and metrics to consider?
After all of this heavy research and strategizing work, you have the foundations to run a strong marketing campaign, but, these things are just a hypothesis. We have to go out there to the market and test if we’re on the right track and make changes along the way.
Then execution is all about consistency, analyzing your performance based on the metrics and objectives you’ve set. And making the necessary changes along the way.
What do you consider the next big step in your career? Why?
Growing my consulting business and traveling around the world.
There are so many great humans around the world, that traveling becomes a no-brainer for me. Understanding new cultures and connecting with other humans, learning their perspectives about life. Like in marketing, being stagnant will eventually lead to failure even if you are winning today.
Getting out of your comfort zone, experimenting with new things and learning is what makes life exciting.
Where are you studying today?
Psychology, Mindfulness, and Management. Learning psychology hasn’t only helped me understand other people better, but understand myself better. Influence by Robert Cialdini is a must that I’m revisiting right now.
For mindfulness, meditation has been a game-changer that helps me stay on my track, and focused.
When it comes to management, knowing how to manage yourself is key, but also how to interact with other people and align everyone to a single big vision.
Wooden on Leadership & How to win friends and influence people are two foundations for this.
What do you think, are we sharing enough knowledge? Why? And how is it impacting the way companies think of marketing today?
There’s too much noise in the industry but not enough knowledge. It’s great to see how many companies are adapting to this new digital world, but if we step out of our marketing community. The vast majority of companies are still outdated, running old playbooks that aren’t serving them or their customers at all.
We have to do a better job of educating the community, and understanding there are nuances and context to everything. Every great marketing advice starts with “It depends” – it’s great that we all have strong POVs and opinions – but they aren’t one-size-fits-all.
What do you recommend to those who follow you? What is it that helped you to be where you are?
Always be learning, experimenting, and investing in yourself – knowledge and health. Consistency and persistency are kings, it took me over 2 years to see any meaningful results in my business. I was doing everything wrong in the beginning, but I was always proactive about experimenting and failing.
Failing is something you must encounter in your journey frequently, it helps steer you in the right direction for success.
Is there anything we haven’t asked you that you’d like to tell the readers?
The compound effect is the biggest driver of business and life results. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t see results in something after 1-3-6 months. Without you knowing it, those efforts are compounding in the back, day after day. Then suddenly before you know it, you start getting outsized results thanks to the investments you’ve been making.
You won’t get jacked going to the gym for one day, but if you repeat it 3-5 times a week for years. You will be a completely different person.
Great things in life take time, trust the process.
FAQ: campaigns and strategy
What is the difference between a campaign and a strategy.
A strategy is the choice of who you serve, what you stand for and where you will not compete. A campaign is one attempt to act on that choice within a window of time. Campaigns get replaced often. A strategy should not.
What has to exist before a campaign starts.
A defined audience, one message you can defend, the offer, the channels and the number that tells you whether it worked. If any of those is missing, the campaign will produce activity you cannot read afterwards.
How do you tell a bad campaign from a bad strategy.
Swap the creative and run it again. If the results move, it was execution. If the results stay flat across several different attempts, the problem sits above the campaign.
How long should a strategy hold before you change it.
Long enough for the market to answer, which is usually quarters rather than weeks. Changing it every time a campaign underperforms is how companies end up with no position at all.
Related reading: take your B2B marketing strategy to the next level, content marketing strategy for B2B, and why your process should stem from understanding your customers.
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.
