How to do marketing that's not just for show: Markéta Jílková (#199)
- Martin Hurych
- 1. 7.
- Minut čtení: 21
How much is your marketing actually costing you? And how much does it really bring in?
If you feel that marketing just looks nice, but in the end it just complicates your life, this episode is for you. Because even though a lot of companies don't want to hear it - until you have your business lined up, marketing will only add to your workload.
Markéta Jílková, founder of the marketing agency MARWEA, says it perfectly ...without a doubt. Marketing is not meant to be for decoration. It's supposed to deliver. And if it doesn't work? Maybe it's not just his fault.
We discussed it together:
Margaret runs a 100% online agency of 18 people that does things not by effect, but by performance. And she not only knows B2B marketing in tech companies, she understands it more than many marketers. So if you want marketing to finally help growth, not hinder it, listen to all of this..
"Marketing is not just about social media and what a logo looks like"
Markéta Jílková | CEO @ MARWEA Agency s.r.o.
How to do marketing that's not just for show
(transcript)
Martin Hurych
If the word marketing gives you hives because it doesn't work for you, costs you a ton of money and you have a strange relationship with it, don't run anywhere. Because today I have a lady here who says that B2B marketing specifically is not supposed to be for decoration, it's supposed to work and it's supposed to support sales. Hello.
Markéta is also the head of my marketing, so if you like or dislike something, you can write to Markéta and give her a proper praise or give her a hard time. What's playing in your ears when you're figuring out my strategy?
Markéta Jílková
Whoever stood still for a while is standing still, our hit.
Who is MARWEA?
Martin Hurych
That's right. MARWEA, who are you, what are you and why were you created?
Markéta Jílková
We are primarily an online marketing agency, we are fully remote, but we are not a bunch of freelancers. That's important to say, because a lot of people who join us say they haven't experienced that kind of system with us, because order makes friends and it has to be. We mainly do 4 industries, social media management, advertising, content marketing, copywriting and content creation like graphics or just even podcast editing and content publishing. I used to have a tendency to go into web production as well, but I found there are much better people here. Something else that's important to say is our primary focus is B2B, but we don't do e-commerce because I think there are much better agencies that are more into that performance marketing and have that workflow of those e-commerce stores much more in place. So we're primarily about those relationships and brand building.
What brought them to tech companies?
Martin Hurych
We have the same alma mater, we both graduated from the Czech Technical University, and you, in the context of marketing, have taken a fancy to one of the most difficult bubbles for me, and that is technical companies. What brought you here?
Markéta Jílková
I'll add that I graduated from the Faculty of Civil Engineering at CTU and you have a degree in mechanical engineering. The very beginning of my journey through engineering was some 5th grade, when I was on my grandmother's terrace and my dad said I was going to be an architect and I got hooked. Even back then in elementary school, I took technical drawing, math, I took bombs, and then I went to a traditional civil engineering school with the idea of tunneling. I wanted to call it official and even then I was playing with words. Then in school I was part of the student organization IAESTE and there I was a girl for everything. I took care of the office, I did HR, I did some PR here and there, I made some calls to companies and sold some services. That was quite interesting because that's when I tried cold calling and there was a smart person there a long time ago who told me to do one thing. I was sad that social media was such a sad thing and I saw potential in it and I got interested in promotion and that's where my journey as a marketer started.
Martin Hurych
What is it about tech companies that appeals to you?
Markéta Jílková
That I understand them. It is something that is tangible for me, something imaginable. To see the process of making it or the thinking behind it of these people is something amazing to me that never ceases to fascinate me.
Martin Hurych
Now I'm going to say something that should probably be obvious, but unfortunately I don't see it often in the market. Should a marketer know not only the client in detail, but also, for example, the processes of that particular client?
Markéta Jílková
Yes, I agree.
What makes technical companies different?
Martin Hurych
From a marketing point of view, how are technical companies different or maybe the same as the rest of the corporate world, than e-commerce companies or fast moving consumer goods?
Markéta Jílková
When I take classic technologies, not taking the IT segment, which I perceive as very fast, things take a longer time there. Unless you're making a thing that sells like bolts, you're selling an elephant at that point, and you don't just sell the elephant. You sell it once a month, but the company is going to eat off of it and finding that person to buy that elephant is hard. There are some things you can do to speed up the purchase, some preparation, but it usually takes a year, three years. You're going around, wooing, figuring out if it's the right fit, and if you're not right and the customer doesn't need the problem solved really quickly, it's a really long process. If you don't have well done internal processes, where the customer came from, what steps you took, when you met with the customer, you're not going to see that process in regular analytics, for example, on the web where you see some six-month tracking window. You have to have it somewhere in your CRM or some other system and really track that history of that contact with that customer.
What does marketing that's not for show look like?
Martin Hurych
So what do you think B2B technical marketing that's not for show should look like and should help sales?
Markéta Jílková
I've seen salespeople in my company say that marketing spends money and they make money. Marketing had a hard time getting information, feedback from sales and even customer support. It was about, we need to do some flyers here, we need to do some promotions here, we need to secure this from you. But the feedback was no longer there, whether the activity that was being done actually worked, whether it brought any business and what the customers were saying about it. The second thing, it was done blindly according to the brand of the foreign mother, it was not adapted to the Czech market. If things are taken over from Anglo-Saxon countries, if not from America or even from Asia, where the mentality is completely different, so many times it came across and it was more for laughs. So it should be exactly the opposite. There should be that dialogue between the shop and the customer support and if possible the mother should just be inclined to adapt some things to local customs.
Why shouldn't a company do marketing if it doesn't have a store?
Martin Hurych
You go into these companies as an outsourcer, as an external supplier, how do you manage to pull that off? Because you even said somewhere in the preparation, and I loved it, that a company doesn't deserve marketing unless it has a well-built business.
Markéta Jílková
Yes, because I perceive that marketing opens the door to the business and if we are running leads hot and we lack the capacity of the salespeople, we lack somebody to process those leads, evaluate those leads and somehow move them forward, then we are in a bottleneck. We're filling that funnel, but nothing is coming out of it, and that's happened to us a couple of times.
Martin Hurych
How do you check from the outside how that customer is built and if they will even allow you to deliver the results they expect from you?
Markéta Jílková
If we have trust, the customer will tell me directly how things are going for them, which ties in with the fact that the marketer should also know the processes that are inside and outside the marketing department. It's important for me as an agency to communicate with the decision maker. It can be a high-level marketing executive or it can be the owner directly, the CEO, who has the ability to push it through. But most of the time we come to a lack of accountability there, and that's where I tend to put my hands off or point out that there's a problem here and it's only addressed when it arises.
What is marketing failing to deliver?
Martin Hurych
Communication and that sort of, here you go, do something for us and I'll tell you whether it was good or not, I think is the struggle of most external suppliers. What do B2B companies make as the second most common mistake, or maybe what do they wrongly assume that marketing will deliver and by definition can't deliver?
Markéta Jílková
For me, it's a downright business opportunity, a downright client on a golden platter. We can get him warmed up, we can explain something to him, we can create a need and he'll start thinking about it, but we can't influence whether or not it sells. We're not outside salespeople to even call and really qualify those leads.
What is he supposed to deliver instead?
Martin Hurych
Turning it around now from the perspective of business owners and directors, what's a realistic expectation and where maybe I should set KPIs for my outsourced marketing vendor to see that it's working and have a clear interface where marketing is still delivering and internally it's squeaking or vice versa?
Markéta Jílková
For me it's qualified leads, it's leads that fit the profile that we want to have as a customer. Marketing then asks if it worked out, it didn't work out, or what was the reason that it didn't work out, or what did that customer like and what did they hear the most. For me, it really comes down to the lead.
Martin Hurych
Now we could talk for 3 hours here about what level of qualified lead, because I see a lot of companies where the qualified lead is at the marketing qualified lead level. That means somebody in the company downloads the first thing you put on the website for them to download and that's where it ends. Is that a good optic? Because you're saying technical B2B is long, it takes 2, 3 years to convert somebody, you have to track their stuff. I see a lot of marketing agencies deliver that first signal 2, 3 years in advance at the level of, we downloaded the calculator, we downloaded the e-book. Very often it's a person who's in charge of some preparation, so they're not going to have that decision power. Is that what I should want from marketing or should I pull marketing further into the process and have marketing help route that person to a sales qualified lead?
Markéta Jílková
Even with the routing to the sales qualified lead because the moment somebody downloads something, it's just an email for me. I don't know if they really had that need or not, but if that contact starts to open a follow-up email, I see that they click on it, that they then go to the website, that somehow they're interested in something else, then it's up to me as a marketer to go after that sales lead. This person has done this and that, they've gone through this, we've offered them maybe a webinar or some next step and that sales person has that door open. For me, it shouldn't end with that first step. Of course, if we need to reach the whole database quickly and we have a business developer who can call it in to speed it up, see how hot it is, they can pick out those first interests that are much closer in that sales phase. He can, for example, find out what contact is hot and send them on to the deal.
How do they define SQL at MARWEA?
Martin Hurych
How consistent are you in taking on a new client in defining what a sales qualified lead is? I'm currently preparing for an introductory workshop and I do a survey before the introductory workshops to save us nerves, time and investment at that particular point. As I was preparing, it struck me what a disparity there is in the perception of the activities of a marketer who has thousands and thousands of leads and thinks they're doing it right, and a business. If you ask marketers, on a scale of 1 to 10, they rate the work of marketing somewhere around a 4 as total chaos and totally unusable because they don't really consider those leads to be qualified or of adequate quality. When you're taking on a job to protect yourself, how do you work at that job and to what level do you have to describe what you have to hand to that company?
Markéta Jílková
I first qualify if the problem that the customer has is actually the problem that they have or is there something else hidden behind it. If he does have that problem, I determine if we are able to deliver and help him in the quality and need that the customer has.
Martin Hurych
You're a pro, and like very likely a lot of outsourced contractors, you've got to have some internal metric where you say you've been successful and you've got that protection against the client. In my perception, that should be my metric as the owner of the company that hires you so that I know that the money is bringing me what I want. What flows into that business afterwards is of sufficient quality and I'm not throwing money out the window. How do you spend the described sales qualified lead that you then give to the shop or the shop takes from you?
Markéta Jílková
This is always individual. We've even gone to a client and said that after a year of working together we had really bad results, that the cooperation wasn't worth it and that we would end it. But he told us after a year of working together that we were evaluating the data that was current at that particular time, but we were no longer taking into account that the next year those clients would be paying and it would start to pay off after a year and a half. So we were evaluating the wrong data and the client told us that they were de facto happy with us, which was good for us.
But it's always about how we agree individually what we track and then we have that as internal KPIs as well. It can be sub-steps as well, it can be not just directly the sales qualified lead like the name, the last name, the company, where they're from, the ID number and that history that they've shown some interest. It can be really just a list of addresses with phone numbers where we know that they've gone through some sort of email automation and where those leads have dropped off, if they've run out and possibly what their open rate was. It depends on what phase we're always evaluating, if we're just evaluating classically advertising, how many people we brought to the site and how many of those were inquiries from the site, even that we're just evaluating purely numerically and we don't care about those leads anymore.
How do we translate the technical language into a story?
Martin Hurych
I see that we techies are very bad at engaging a non-technical person, we fall into depth very quickly. How difficult is it for a marketer, even one with a technical background, to turn boring technical parameters into a sexy story?
Markéta Jílková
I always sweat at it, to be honest. But it's often much more difficult for me to get the technician across from me to do it, because he needs to have his words in there. We recently did a video in healthcare and we had to say something like radiological and nuclear medicine and it was targeted at high school and college students. In fact, the average person can't even imagine what it is, whereas if we name it something like oncology and radiation therapy or X-ray, suddenly you have an idea of what it is and you know where to put it. It took about 5 minutes of struggle on the call to explain this, but it was done.
Now we are still making method videos for children's education and I just finished transcripts for the reading device yesterday. Also, there were long complicated sentences that one couldn't even breathe if one were to read it on a teleprompter. It was more in the imperfect gender, but if the other party is going to listen and learn something, it's far better to throw it into the continuous active gender. I'm glad I have copywriters on my team who can translate it, and it's really more the struggle with the technical brain of the person on the other side.
Martin Hurych
I've heard somewhere that even for a very senior audience, one should write like a 5th grade elementary school kid. What is the truth in that? Should I type into ChatGPT, write like an 11-year-old kid?
Markéta Jílková
I don't think it's okay because you're communicating a little bit differently to that child. It's more of a mental exercise, and I'm more saying how would you explain it to a grandmother, because the grandmother has had a life and somehow understands. I don't know whether to type it directly into ChatGPT, anyway we use ChatGPT at MARWEE, it really simplifies a lot of the work and what I would have done in say a week, I have done in 4 hours. We have a chatbot already set up there, where we take some principles of Cialdini, Kotler, we have the know-how and plus we need to give it the background of the client. For the reading device I was doing now, I found a beautiful thesis that's publicly available, I uploaded it there and suddenly it was able to even stick to that expertise and not make up stuff that wasn't true.
Martin Hurych
If we were to sum up the topic of marketing not being for show, how would we frame it with two or three recommendations for business owners?
Markéta Jílková
Marketing is not just about social media and what the logo looks like.
How do they function as a virtual business?
Martin Hurych
I would chisel this, underline this, it's true. You've already snitched here that you're 100% virtual, you're remote, so you're scattered all over the country, home offices, you're 18 and you're primarily ladies. How do you keep that bag of fleas together?
Markéta Jílková
Quite well, because as we are fully remote, we put a lot of emphasis on the responsibility of the individual. I've learned over the 5 years that remote is not for everyone, not everyone gives it and there have been people who have left even because they didn't give it, even though they were very high quality. But again, there are some others who are giving it. I have such a compass in me that if I don't like something and I'm not willing to tolerate it for a long time, I'm going to address it.
How did they handle recruiting for the company?
Martin Hurych
So how do you test in recruitment straight away if there's accountability on the other side?
Markéta Jílková
Luckily, I hired an HR agency to do the recruitment and they did a really good job on the first recruitment and then gave me the recruitment process. We currently have a 3-4 round recruitment process, the first one is the classic CV collection and if there is a need, we already put the first task into that collection, that's the first selection.
For example, when we were hiring a copywriter, a proofreader, we put the mistakes in the ad, but not the obvious ones, but Ivet put the spots in. It was like 12 mistakes, somebody made it, somebody didn't, somebody who didn't make it didn't meet the brief. A proofreader is supposed to read in detail, so we already knew we didn't want these people.
The second round is a questionnaire, where we have some personality questionnaire, we talk about how they function, what their idea of an hourly job is, where they are educated. Plus there's 4-5 simple tasks that they'll realistically be doing in that position, but at the same time it doesn't take them more than 2 hours of time because there's no point in them doing a marketing strategy. No more than 10-15 people go into this second round. We have it scored, we also evaluate personality and then for example specifically with the design engineer, where I didn't know how to evaluate if she could do time management online, so I hired a psychoanalysis at that time.
There were some online games that evaluated how quickly they responded, there was a consultation with a psychologist and a referral and it was down to 3 people who came to me for an interview.
Usually we just have that third round where 3-5 people come to me because I don't want to have decision paralysis and we just talk, they ask questions, I tell them how the company works, they tell me how they work. I might ask some interesting questions, but I already know that these people have a resume, so I tend to just ask about some of the highlights from the resume or maybe from the questionnaire or some of the life situations. I need to understand that maybe they're in Spain and they travel back and forth once every six months.
We talk about the money, we negotiate and I always write 5 reasons why and 5 reasons why not after the second round. I give those 10-15 people the energy back so they know and can move on in some way. For the 3-5 that go in for an interview, I completely evaluate the whole selection process, how they did, why they went, why they didn't, and this pays off a lot in recruiting because people get back to me asking if we happen to have a job.
What does it mean to operate in 7 year cycles?
Martin Hurych
I like this a lot because I often see in young companies that whoever has arms, legs, two ears, one mouth is usually accepted. Another thing that struck me about the preparation, the standard firm works in quarters, you work in 7 year cycles, can you explain that?
Markéta Jílková
I got this from Thomas, who said he'd send me a book in English about cycles and I really liked the fact that there's prestige building at the beginning. First of all, they're 52-day cycles that count from either the founding of the company or a name change or something big that puts a different energy into that company. We're counting it now from the name change and we have the prestige first. I should be seen now in the coming months, going to conferences or interacting with high profile people. It always builds on that foundation, it goes through building a deeper relationship, we go visible, marketing, active sales to performance sales, that's kind of the fifth cycle.
The sixth cycle is rest because you need to rest after that performance and the last cycle is reconstruction where you look at how the year went and you chop off what didn't work and what might hold you back in the next year. It's a start-stop-keep from the scaling up methodology and I think it works pretty well for us and it helps me to really put some order into the business of when, what, how to do. The promotion part of it comes out in the fall, which is a great time for us, and the sales part of it comes out after the New Year, and it's true that I closed 4 new clients this year after the New Year.
Martin Hurych
So that means that you put what, 2 of these longer sprints into a quarter, that you're prioritizing something within that particular sprint?
Markéta Jílková
Exactly, and we always focus on a maximum of 3 things we want to improve, we don't do more.
Martin Hurych
What are you doing there now?
Markéta Jílková
I've got 3 things there now, the first thing we did was reviewing Freela, the processes and templates that we have there, cleaning things up before a new designer comes in so that it's not a mess and when new clients come in so that we know what we're managing it by. It was preceded by discussions in the different teams about what's important for my work and what I need, there's the copy team, graphics, social media, advertising. I wanted an output, it was 2 months where after half a month I put a check on the call so that they could also inspire each other on how the communication runs and based on that we cleaned up the process. I figured out where the loopholes were, where we were getting stuck and now it's not going to hold us back.
The other thing that will be is Notion, the internal Wikipedia, because we already have a lot of things, a lot of information that's recorded as processes including instructions. The moment a person drops out, both myself and the project manager need to show another person clearly how to do it. Here's the process, here's your recorded screen, this is how you set up accounts and go by templates, unify it.
The third thing that is still under discussion and we have already tested it is the deployment of the Front system, which is classic client management and customer support. In other words, the client will have one email address with us that they'll go to, and the team there will have already broken it down, so we'll take away that bottleneck of the key account manager.
How to keep a virtual company together?
Martin Hurych
It looks a bit like a virtual corporation from the outside, but it obviously works for you. What else do you think the owner, the boss, some inspirational head or leader of a virtual company needs to do to keep it together? I mean, I see a lot of companies that are 100% remote, there's a ton of reasons to think that in the future that will be the standard company model, but there aren't that many that handle it with grace.
Markéta Jílková
There are 3 things. The first thing, the simplest one, listen to people. Then you said it looks like a corporation. If you take for example the spiral dynamics theory, the different levels, you have family, power, rules, business and then community. When you have that business, that orange level where you have to make money and you don't have that power embedded, you don't have those rules that you're riding on, how can you make money properly, systematically and know where you can scale it. That's why those rules are important and insisting on them and sticking to it yourself. You have to lead by example because the fish stinks from the head.
The last thing is remote access. If you have a classic office, you have coffee, people have a personal relationship there, they go for a beer after work, but if you have someone in Frýdek-Místek, another in Liberec, the third is Prague, then Brno and then somewhere around České Budějovice, it's not possible after work. In our company, even the meetings that we have on a regular weekly basis are partly dedicated to that. On Mondays we talk about how the weekend was, on Tuesdays I ask what made them happy or what really went wrong in the last few days and it doesn't have to be just work, it can be personal life. Then the Meaningful Conversations cards help us a lot, where there are really deep questions.
Martin Hurych
So this is all running virtually? Do you see each other every day?
Markéta Jílková
In online conversations we see each other, or at least we see the icon, but we hear each other.
Why introduce a regular rhythm?
Martin Hurych
Just like we closed the first circle, can we close with some 3 recommendations for young owners, female owners, founders, founders, how to build a stable virtual company and not have it be a trickle?
Markéta Jílková
For me, the biggest step that has been is to establish a rhythm and stick to it. At MARWEE, we have Monday to Wednesday stand ups at 12:12, Tuesdays are mandatory, Mondays are kind of quick stuff, who needs to get what done, but we see everyone on Tuesdays. Wednesday tends to be the one that people don't tend to join, again that's not mandatory, so it's more about getting some things done. Then there are the big Thursday weeklies, which are for an hour and a half, and we really maybe have a system of topics that we discuss.
Once a fortnight we have a project synchro, once a month there's an embedded MARWEA company where I talk about how the company is doing, what we're going to do, what are the priorities, what do I need the team to do to move the company forward. Then there's internal training where someone from the team presents their topic and presents it to the others. The first one was, our lady was on PPC and a colleague said thank you, but it's a thing she'll never do. It's funny, but de facto for people who are wondering if they shouldn't be doing something else by chance, it's an amazing realisation.
There are some people who have come to me, for example, based on that, and said they would like to learn something else. That's how I taught one of my colleagues more mailing, so there's starting to be some substitutability in that team. The only thing we have quarterly is quarterly 1:1s with me and there we have a quarterly questionnaire where it's really debilitating at times for those people to fill that out, but then I have a 1:1 call with them afterwards and we talk about those things. There's also a question about whether they feel valued enough or what kind of honest feedback they would they gave me. You could always see that when I started not following up and I started alerting the team and I was the stopper, they put it in nicely as feedback. Establishing a rhythm to the company will help speed everything up and make such regular checkpoints.
Martin Hurych
That's great. I wish you rhythm both internally and rhythm in bringing on new customers and that you enjoy those tech companies even more than you enjoy them today and I wish you success.
Markéta Jílková
Thank you.
Martin Hurych
So you see, we've discussed not only marketing, where you have some key recommendations, where I'll pull out some bonus from Markéta specifically. We've also managed to discuss the internal culture of a virtual company, which I think especially the younger ones of you who are building startups might find conventional. If anything Marketa and I have dug up and said here has resonated with you, consider whether it deserves a like as a reward for both of us, sharing or pushing this piece where it could theoretically help.
Be sure to check outwww.martinhurych.com/zazeh , where the aforementioned bonus is already hanging around at the moment. If you want to join the more than 1,500 owners and directors of companies like yours, be sure to sign up for my newsletter atwww.martinhuych.com/ newsletter. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed for you, not only in building your business, working with people, but maybe even in the marketing we're discussing today, thanks.
