A cherry tree in full bloom is one of the most visually striking sights in the world.
The soft and fragile beauty of the colors juxtaposed with the impermanence of the moment never fails to take my breath away. I have long wanted to travel to Himeji Castle in Japan to witness the majesty of the cherry trees in person. Even a digital image brings to the surface a torrent of complex emotions.
As I was looking through a set of these stunning photographs, I realized that a cherry tree can provide us with yet another gift: providing a powerful analogy to help business owners and leaders better understand the process of creating effective marketing.
Naturally, everything that attracts people to these trees exists above the ground. The otherworldly colors of the blossoms, the start contrast of the slender-yet-sturdy branches, the irregular-yet-ordered patterns on the trunk. These features are what people will mention when they talk about the trees, and that will always be the case.
It's also the case that none of these features are possible without what lies underneath the ground. Too often, when we're creating our marketing plans as business owners and leaders, we're focusing only on what's above the ground. What people see. For those things to resonate and land, we have to build the root system first.
Evan Gillespie, in an article for Weekand.com, writes: "A cherry tree's (Prunus spp.) root system serves two critical functions. First, it pulls water and nutrients from the soil and directs them upward so that they can feed the trunk, stems, leaves, flowers and fruit of the tree. Second, it holds tight to the ground and supports the rest of the tree, allowing the tree's superstructure to perform its own functions."
A well-articulated assessment of the function of a cherry tree's root system, and one that can just as easily be applied to marketing. To be healthy, your marketing must be constantly fed from below. An ad without a relevant message is a dead leaf. I also love the concept of how important the root system is to supporting the tree. In the marketing analogy, that's the importance of consistency in how you talk about yourself and your products and services. It's incredibly tempting to try to be all things to all people, and without a strong foundation, marketing can easily devolve into "marketing for marketing's sake" (delivering volume without parameters and substance).
So how do you go about setting up the marketing root system that will support your business? To help simplify the process, I envision it as a 5-tiered system, visualized in the image below. In the remainder of this post, I share the elements of each tier, starting from the bottom of the root system and ending with the blossoms we know and love.
TIER 1: Your Core Story and Messages
Tree Area: Root System
Choose whatever analogy you like; all foundation building starts at the very lowest point. For marketing, I call the work that happens in this phase Crafting Your Story.
The two items you must have in place, even before you get to your core product or service, are your market need and the movement or change your business is driving. There are so many products out there that nobody needed or asked for (looking at you, generative AI). You can probably get away with selling a product to people who don't need it for a short period of time, but it always ends the same way.
Your market need is the hole you and your product are filling for your customers. You launched your business because you saw a gap in the market and you knew how to fill it. It's the first part of your answer to the all-important "Why" question.
The second part of the answer is the movement or change your organization will be tied to. Square isn't focused on selling a piece of plastic with a credit card-sized hole in it; they were bringing digital payments to small businesses who had no other way to accept money. Patagonia isn't focused on selling high-priced fleeces; they are focused on saving the planet with nearly every cent of profit they make. Identifying what you want to change and how you want to change is a critical part of your story. It might sound harsh but, otherwise, should your organization exist?
The last part of Tier 1 is your core product or service, which fits in directly above the market need you're filling and the change you're driving. The card reader or desktop stand for Square and the apparel for Patagonia. It's what you do that helps you make your why a reality.
In Tier 1, you've defined your core story and message. These are the pilings that you hold onto when the storm is raging around you and the elements that all of your marketing will tie back to in some way, shape or form.
TIER 2: Understanding Your Customer
Tree Area: Root System
Ain't it always the way that the most important things quickly become the most tired tropes? Spend more than four seconds on LinkedIn and you'll see an engagement farming post telling you the amazing growth hack of "getting to know your customer."
No business owner or leader disagrees with the sentiment. The reason many companies fall down in this area is that it takes time and resources to do well, and those resources are being used up in other important areas. Like selling a product nobody needs, you can get away for a while without a good understanding of your customer, but that lack of knowledge is always going to get you in the end.
There are so many different ways to go about learning about what your customer really wants, needs and values. I see these efforts as existing in three buckets.
First and most important is customer conversations. These are, and always will be, your best source for what customers are getting out of your product, how they're viewing your products and services, and what it's done to improve their lives (e.g., spending more time with my kids vs. automating workflows). The most underrated part of these conversations is the language your customers are using to talk about you and your solutions. Some of the best marketing is as simple as turning around and using these words in your communications about your business. The key components to being successful with customer conversations are:
Recording and Transcribing - Don't try to remember what they said. Take detailed notes or use a tool, then transcribe every word.
Refining Your Questions - Like any interview, a conversation with a customer will always be more valuable if you do the prep work. Ask better questions, get better answers.
Gathering More Than Intelligence - Yes, these interviews are your best source of intelligence. They can also be a lot more than that. When you're setting these up, especially with your top clients, make sure you also have the go-ahead to gather testimonials and information for case studies. If you're getting video, make sure the quality is usable from a sound and picture standpoint. These interviews can be marketing gold, and you don't want to waste any of the content because you didn't plan ahead.
Customer conversations fall under a category called zero-party data (a weird term that sounds like an event that's not any fun), representing any data that a customer proactively and intentionally shares with a company. Other examples: a customer fills out a quiz or survey, a customer creates an account, etc.
Your second source of customer understanding is first-party research and data. First-party data is also collected through direct interactions. The difference between zero- and first-party data is that first-party data is not shared proactively with an organization; it's simply available to the organization based on interactions. Examples of first-party data include demographic information, actions that customers (or prospects) take within your ecosystem, customer account data, social media conversations, purchase history and online chat transcripts. While a customer conversation is the best way to gain insights directly from customers, first party data allows you to see what customers and prospects are saying when you're not in the room.
The third source is third-party research and data. This is data gathered by an organization that doesn't necessarily have any direct ties to your customers. Think studies from organizations like Gartner or McKinsey. Like first-party data, third-party data can be used as a way to validate or invalidate what you've heard in your customer conversations and on sales calls. Third-party data is a complement, and should not be used on its own.
Your work in Tier 2 is an important step in the Crafting Your Story phase. It will allow you to refine your messages to fit what you know will attract prospects and customers, get to a deeper level of understanding when it comes to what's really causing your customers pain, and help you understand where your customers spend their time so you can find authentic ways to meet them there.
TIER 3: Bringing Your Story to Life
Tree Area: Root System
Your story is ready. Now it's time to start bringing it to life.
That means creating the content that will serve as the core of your strategy for years to come. "Content" is such an industrial and, frankly, trivial term to use here, and we're only going to use it because it's part of the vernacular. Try to remind yourself that what you're really doing at this stage is storytelling, as you don't want to get into a situation where you're creating a bunch of "content." Nobody wants or needs a larger volume of mediocre "content"; quality over quantity, always.
If you're not careful, this stage can get very overwhelming, very fast. So let's simplify it. The three main categories of stories you need to be able to tell your customers, prospects and stakeholders are: your strategic narrative, your educational/helpful stories and your product/service stories. I've included a bit more information on what falls into each category below:
Your Strategic Narrative
Andy Raskin, the godfather of the concept, defines a strategic narrative as "the category-defining story that guides our strategy—what we build, how we go to market, how we interact with our customers and investors." If that makes it sound important, it's because a strong strategic narrative is the most critical component to the long-term success of your marketing. It brings to life the items from Tier 1 and ties every marketing and sales effort to the core purpose of the business. Every story, every message, every tactic grows from the foundation of the strategic narrative. Is creating one easy? Of course not, otherwise everyone would be doing it.
Educational/Helpful Stories
From the foundation of your strategic narrative come the stories you will tell your prospects and customers to help them begin to solve their most important problems (with or without your help). Done well, these stories:
Show your expertise without hard-selling any part of your products or services
Build credibility for your brand and solutions by placing you at the head of your specific category in the minds of your current and future target buyers
Remind your audience that your first passion is in helping them be successful
Again, not an easy task, but there are few more worthy of the effort. I love Seth Godin's definition of marketing primarily because it gets to the heart of why organizations must focus on doing this well: "“Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem. Marketing helps others become who they seek to become.”
Yes, all marketing efforts will eventually be a part of driving purchases. To gain the trust required to get people to make those purchases, you need to help them first.
Product/Service Stories
These are the stories you tell to explain your products and services in your customer's language and through the lens of the problems they're trying to solve.
In my life as a corporate marketer, the biggest mistake I saw companies make was conflating product content with sales content. Product marketing meant creating product sheets, competitor comparisons, sales decks and other "enablement" tools for sales to use with prospects. These items can all be useful, but without the right story, creating them is a waste of time.
The other big mistake we make in talking about our products and services is failing to use the language of our customers. So often, we think we know best because we created the product, so we talk about them how we want to talk about them, and if people aren't responding, we need to jam the knowledge down their throats. Then they'll get it! Wrong.
If you have a product team, they'll have a certain way they think about what the product does. If you have an executive team, they'll have a different perspective. Sales team? Different ways to represent the products and services. Marketing team? Yet another perspective.
The only perspective that matters is how your customers are viewing the product and service. This doesn't mean you shouldn't tell the truth about the product or service. It means that you need to shift the way you present your core offering and the features that surround it in a way that resonates with how prospects and customers are thinking about it. Kleenex is a great example. Kimberly-Clark's original concept was a disposable towel to wipe off makeup, and that's what they went to market with. The product was selling, but instead of wiping off makeup, they were using the darned things to blow their noses. So the company pivoted, sales skyrocketed, and the rest is history.
You will find as you go through this process that storytelling is a muscle. As you continue to work on it, your story will get more concise, more resonant and more powerful. So don't give up if it's not working at first.
TIER 4: Building Your Presence
Tree Area: The Trunk
In Tier 4, while you're still building the foundations of your marketing, you've made it above the ground to the trunk of the tree. Here, you move into what I call the Building Your Presence phase of marketing. You have the underlying principles, stories and messages refined and ready, and now you're ready to share them with the world.
At the most basic level, marketing is a drumbeat. A consistent flow of the right messages to the right people. Building your presence can be boiled down to being in the right places (where your prospects and customers go to get their information) and in saying the same things a thousand different ways.
The most cadaverous mistake you can make here is to immediately try to do All The Things. Let's be on Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, LinkedIn and Be Real, launch a weekly podcast, build brand partnerships, publish eBooks, run social ads, pay Google for SEM (search engine marketing), write 10,000 pieces of SEO content. Please. Don't.
Remember, way back in Tier 2, we identified where your customers are (and aren't). Start there. Walk before you run. What so many organizations tend to forget is that every medium and channel you choose to use requires content. And exceptional content takes time and great thinking to create. Unless you want to fill these channels with slapdash garbage (again, please don't), you don't have the resources to use them to their full potential (much less manage the "social" aspect of many of the channels, which is a full-time job).
Before you do anything else, make sure you're doing everything possible to take full advantage of the following channels. In priority order:
Your Website
If I have a marketing pet peeve (just kidding, I have about 50), it's companies with bad websites that are spending money on any kind of advertising and paid search. Your website is still your most important owned land (vs. the land that you rent from social sites). It's still the place you're sending people from ads, emails and other push marketing mechanisms. It's where you're most likely to convert interested prospects to actual buyers. Yes, structuring a website in a way that makes sense to your users, writing content for all of the pages, choosing images, and testing it is a lot of work. If your site isn't doing what it's supposed to do, it's likely hurting every other area of your marketing and business. Fix it yourself, or pay someone else to fix it as soon as you possibly can.
Your Blog
This is likely part of your website (unless you're using Substack or Medium), but I'm including it as a separate item because I see it as a strategy separate from your overall website plan. Most areas of your website are relatively static. Your home page, your About Us section, your services, your contact form - these should all be tested, refined and optimized, then left to do their jobs for a certain period of time. Your blog must be a living, breathing machine that's constantly fueled and updated. It's one of the primary ways that you deliver the content you created in Tier 3; you will always need a place to house that content, and it's best if that place is your website so that you have the chance to entice those visitors into areas like Services. The content on your blog also serves as the primary fuel for most of your push marketing efforts; the insatiable maw of your email, newsletter and social media programs will never stop needing new or updated content, so plan accordingly.
Emails and Newsletter
Email and newsletters are still somehow the most undervalued tools in marketing. I honestly can't figure out why. For most businesses, these are going to be your most important marketing mechanisms, and the race is not even that close. Think about it from the perspective of who you're talking to. On social media, anyone and everyone can engage with your posts, but it's not always clear whether any of those users are in your target market, much less whether they have any intention to buy from you at any point in the future. Your email and newsletter list, on the other hand, should be filled with people who took an action to sign up because they're interested in what you have to say.
Any prospect on those lists should immediately be elevated above most others that come in through the door, with the exception of those elusive diamonds in the rough who fill out your contact form and beg you to pitch them your product. Treat your email and newsletter lists as sacred and craft a strategy around them that prioritizes helpfulness and value. Nurture these prospects, show them you understand them and care about them, give them every bit of value you can, and watch them come back to you when it's time to buy.
Social Media
My diatribe above was focused on being on too many social platforms at once and not delivering value on any of them. Rented land though it may be, social media can be incredibly valuable as a tool to showcase your business, especially as it relates to awareness. My recommendation for companies just starting out with social media or for those who are living in the "Wasteland of No Engagement" is to choose one platform. But which one? Whichever platform is most valuable to your customers.
One of the most impactful uses for social media as a business is to show your point-of-view. Most platforms have already become a floating trash island of AI-generated nonsense, and that's only going to get worse. To stand out, use it to consistently and constantly show who you are and what you believe. Take your point-of-view that you built in Tier 1 and bring it to life on your chosen channel. You may not get a lot of engagement at first. I've found it helps to think of it like a kind of journal for your business or company journey. The posts should be designed to engage, but they're also for you.
Each post helps you refine your message and get closer to what people want to hear from you and how they want to hear it. And the most underrated benefit of posting on social media is the ability to take posts that are either top engagers or your favorites, and build them into longer-form blog posts.
I'll give podcasts an honorable mention here given the incredible utility they can provide in generating quality video to be used in your other marketing efforts. The challenge with podcasts is that they can be a significant lift, especially if you want to do them well.
My recommendation if you're considering a podcast as a foundational element of your strategy is to focus on the quality of the content generation instead of the number of people who are viewing it, at least initially. Invariably, if you treat the podcast content as fuel for other areas of your business, the content you create is going to be better and you'll worry less about "competing" with the glut of other podcasts out there and more about the topics and themes that are resonating with your current and future customer base.
Focus on building your presence in these areas first before you even think of being anywhere else. Remember, quality over quantity. If you cast too wide a net, you won't catch anything.
TIER 5: Expanding Your Reach
Tree Area: Stems, Leaves, Flowers and Fruit
We're finally to the parts of the tree that appeal to our senses! Look at the splendor, feel the texture, smell the sweet scent of "marketing!"
The journey to reach Tier 5 is long and full of the most important substance of what makes your business unique, and yet so many choose to start here and work backward. I can tell you from experience that this makes everything 1,000 times harder.
Tier 5 includes all of the items that organizations can use to expand the reach of their brand and products:
Paid search (advertising on Google or Bing)
Paid social (advertising on social platforms, boosting top organic posts)
Radio spots
TV and connected TV (smart TVs, gaming consoles with Internet access, etc.) advertising
Sponsorships and events
Brand partnerships
All are tempting, made even more attractive by the metrics that salespeople will place in front of you. "A zillion impressions? Sign me up!"
I'm not a Tier 5 hater. I've been part of running all of these different tactics in the past, and some were quite successful relative to the goals we set at the beginning of the project. Done well, every single one can be valuable.
My issue with Tier 5 tactics is that I believe most companies, especially many small businesses, should avoid them until Tiers 1-4 are as effective as they can be. If any of your foundations are the least bit shaky, it's going to impact the performance of any Tier 5 tactic, and you'll be left wondering why you wasted all of this money on "marketing." The reality is that you started at the stems, leaves, flowers and fruit instead of starting with the root system and building into the trunk.
Without a strong root system, your tree will become unhealthy. Eventually, it will die.
Conversely, with consistent and intentional nurturing, a tree with a strong root system can exist for many, many years, bringing happiness to so many who cross its path. And, deep down, isn’t that why we’re all doing what we’re doing?
When you're ready to start building your marketing root system, or you feel like yours could use some nurturing, fill out a form on the home page and let's talk.
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