Episode transcription 

Voiceover:          In today's episode, we share highlights from the first half of 2019, including our conversations with Steve Aguiar about digital marketing strategy, Leigh Kessler on brand voice, and Laura Hahn about semiotics.

Voiceover:          This short addition features snip-its from those episodes, because who can absorb a full version when you're poolside, and soaking in some rays? We'll be back soon with a fresh new sun-tanned edition, with Ruby Apps Insights. Happy summer everyone.

Voiceover:          From our talk with Steven Aguiar on kick-starting your digital marketing strategy.

Steve Aguiar:                Digital marketing can be, is a lot. I mean, it's a very general term, and I think the main way that I break it down in my head, is this difference between inbound marketing, which companies like, HubSpot have really evangelized, and become the thought leaders around, and Outbound marketing. And the real difference in the way I think about it is, inbound marketing is someone searching for your, for your solution, so just think Google, think you know, raking organically through blogging, running an ad words campaign against a really important search term that's relevant to your product. And then on the other side of the coin, you have outbound marketing.

Steve Aguiar:                And that's more think, social or display advertising, where you're proactively getting in front of people who could be your potential customers. And, you know, when you think about it in a really high level, that's sort of why Google and Facebook have this duopoly on digital advertising right now. They complement each other really well for that reason. One is more about search, and one is about more proactively going out, and getting in front of your target customer. In terms of B to B, account-based marketing has really evolved or emerged, as the gold standard for, in particular, outbound marketing. And it's just this idea that you're running ads against a specific list of target accounts that you want to work with.

Steve Aguiar:                So, there's this sort of classical attention between marketing and sales at a lot of companies where, marketing says were bringing in leads, but sales can't close them. And sales says, you guys are bringing in leads, but they're not the right fit for us. And with ABM, it's a really integrated approach, where both you, both the marketing and sales teams can come together, put together a list of specific companies they want to work with. Marketing runs advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. against that list of target accounts, and then leads are generated and passed to sales, and sales already knows that they are pre-qualified and relevant.

Voiceover:          From our conversation with Laura Hahn on the topic of semiotics.

Laura Hahn:                  I have always been a language enthusiast. I studied languages all through high school and college. Like the romantic languages that you tend to study, so a lot of Spanish and French. Also studied Japanese and Tamil, so yeah. I love languages. A.

Laura Hahn:                  And I started thinking a lot about the inter-play between language and culture, and the inter-play between language and meaning. I think doing an art history undergrad paired with more of a linguistics undergrad, that started to meld a lot, as I was doing like, readings of different pieces of artwork. So, how do you take a painting and then read it lots of different ways?

Laura Hahn:                  So, semiotic theory was one way to think about that stuff. So what are the different signs and symbols that you're seeing? How do you interpret those things? What do they mean, and also the subjectivity of that reading. So, I think a lot of postmodern art history theory, you're thinking a lot about, okay, the author may have some intent, but the real magic happens with the viewer, and how they're reading whatever that thing is.

Voiceover:          From our interview of Leigh Kessler on the topic of brand voice.

Leigh Kessler:                Everybody talks about the customer journey, right? In our case and non-profits, it's the donor journey. And what you want to do is identify over time, how people are interacting with you, right? What do they like about you? Where are you relevant to them? Which of your messages are the ones that pertain? And you very often, the mistake that all kinds of organizations make is using side-load technology, right? You're focused on the front end experience, but you're not thinking about how that data's going to transfer into a database, that you can attribute data points to, that you can use in the future for segmentation. So you can talk to people about the things that are relevant to them. I mean, I would say you make the leap to stand up is, you want to talk about the stuff that's personal to you, and that you care about, but at the same time, it has to be relevant to your audience.

Leigh Kessler:                The beauty of today's technologies, you don't have to just broadcast. You can be very purposeful when you're talking to specific groups. The concept of AB testing is almost unnecessary because you know that this person, you know, the general idea of, do they li-, you know, 53% of the people like cats, verses 47 like dogs, so we're going to give everybody cats. Well, what if you knew the 53 who liked cats, and the 47 who liked dogs, then talk to them about the thing that matters. It's got to be in your voice. It's got to be relevant, but you still need to be able to pinpoint a message.

Voiceover:          Ruby Apps Insights is recorded at Studio 55, and is hosted by Alexander Kotler. For more insights, and detail on RubyApps, an enterprise software developed by RubinsteinTech, visit RubyApps.com. Until next time, have an awesome every day.