 And in this lecture I will use, I don't know how to call myself a third father in marketing, for which I will choose. Thank you all, in principle, the lecture is in English, I suggest that you don't have a problem with the other language. This is my first time actually being a speaker at work camp. My first work camp conference was three years ago. I was sitting way up there and I was passionately waiting for NullTalk's presentation on content publishing to the game. Little did I know that three years later I would nervously be standing in front of you guys. But the good thing is that I think that this nervousness will pass in like two minutes or by the end of the presentation we'll see how it goes. I'm really, really thankful for all of you who chose to come to my presentation today and to spend your Saturday afternoon with me. I will be discussing a topic that is very new and dear to my heart and that is strategy building. Today we will be discussing the pull approach. Why it's important for you to change your game and to amp up your game in this ever-changing marketing landscape where millennials and generation G users are actually dominating the playground. But before we continue I would like to formally introduce myself. There we go. My name is Yana Lambreva. I'm a multi-passionate woman. I'm a lifestyle and beauty blogger. And as I was presented I'm the co-founder and digital PR strategist in Flumen, which is a small... Oh, okay. Give me a second. Sorry about this. Which is a small company that we work with social media and creative. We've been working. We've been established for three years now I think. With my partner who's right there sitting. So we created Flumen three years ago. And ever since we had the opportunity, the amazing opportunity to work with brands such as Absolute Vodka, Pharma Swiss, and Shed, which is a NASPR's venture-backed product. It was actually an app for selling pre-loved fashion goods. Now my career jump started in 2012 when thanks to my blog I was invited an interview at Fashion Days. I had the amazing opportunity to work with the people who actually helped pave the way for e-commerce in Bulgaria. It was really an amazing experience. After that I went on to work in different agencies. I worked for companies like the Coca-Cola Company, Lenovo, IG, Mercedes-Benz. The list is long. If some of you guys are from the agency life, you know how it is. So another thing that I actually want to say, even though most of you are men, but if you have girlfriends or friends who are curly, I established a curly movement which in Bulgaria is called Vorkotriti. And in English it's Team Curly. And actually it's rapidly growing and it's all about community. It's all about women with curly hair. Oh my God. Sorry guys, really. This is my first time a little bit nervous, but we'll get through this. So as I said, today we're going to be talking about changing your marketing strategy and actually introducing the three A's of marketing. Now before we continue, if somebody wants to tweet at me just to let me know that this presentation was there, okay, you can do so at Twitter. My handle is at Ms. Vendela and everywhere else you will find me as Yanalo. Okay, so there we go. I don't know how many of you have heard about the push and pull approach. These are very trendy marketing words that have been thrown around a lot. Now today we'll be focusing mostly on the pull approach because this is where we see more and more brands struggling. The pull approach is something that is very, very trendy today. And not only today, but still. Okay, there we go. In order to actually discuss one of the approaches, we need to get familiar with the two just so that we know what are differences. Now the push approach is a promotional strategy where a business will attempt to take their product to the consumer. Typical marketing channels include TV ads, radios, newspapers, catalogs, sales promos, standard PR and direct mail. But please don't confuse direct mail with newsletter subscriptions because that's different. Now what is key in the push approach is that the buyer may not be aware of the product or the service until the information about it is actually pushed to them, hence the term. The pull approach is different and actually we like it better because it's a little bit more, I don't know, diplomatic. Now the pull approach focuses on getting the customers to come to you. The common sales tactics here include word of mouth, referrals, blogging, PPC, SEO, storytelling, the good stuff. The interesting thing and the one that actually, the difference between the two is that the target buyer is aware at least of the type of product that is being pushed at them. Now what are the takeaways? From a branding and PR perspective the aim of the pull approach is to draw people and create a loyal following, create a follow base and just turn customers into brand investors whereas the push marketing is more concerned with sales and actually the short term sale. So you actually do need both approaches in order to one, make money and to build a sustainable brand that will actually get you more customers that will pay you more money. In order to see how the two actually work together I would like to very briefly go over the five steps of the buying process. The five steps of the buying process include establishing a need, searching for information, evaluating the alternatives, purchase decision and post purchase behavior. Establishing a need. Now I really, when I was writing the presentation I really wanted to talk about shoes and where you can buy them and the whole process but then I started thinking that selling and buying shoes is actually really, really easy. What's not easy is to sell a service, your service, your brand. That's the most, that's the difficult part. Because if we're talking about a physical product it is easier. If we're talking about a service people cannot touch the service, they cannot feel it. They're not going to physically use it from one day to Friday. So it's a little bit tricky. And to make it even worse I show something that I have no idea about and that is mathematics and financial services to give you as an example. So imagine this, imagine that you're a mathematical and financial genius who it really, really wants to help small businesses win. You don't want to work for a big company, you want to help the little man because you're actually tired of seeing more and more grants fail and you don't know how to work their finances. Now the tricky thing here is that you actually need to get to the person and you need to sell yourself but what do you do? Do you go to a person and say, hey, do you know that you're going to lose money in like three months and your company is going to go bankrupt? You don't do that because you're going to insult them. You're going to insult them, you're going to insult their financial intelligence. So what do you do? Do you hope that the customer will come to you? Not exactly. Well, you do hope that the customer will establish some sort of a need, a need of a financial advisor who will be there who will help him with his business. Now it is our job once a person establishes some sort of a need to be there and to take him on a very well thought out path that will lead him to your product or to your service. Then what happens? Well, people start searching for information. Where do people start searching for information? Online. So once a person starts looking for the solution of his problem, he will go on different websites, he will go on to Google, he will see if there are some ads about a different product, it may be a website, it may be another person who does the same thing that you do, remember you're an accountant, and he will start to wonder, will this product, service, service me? And in what way? Will the scriptures benefit? And in what way? Is this even going to be helpful? Is it worth my money and my time? How will I even know? So by now, I think you know that you need to have a really well built website that is SEO optimized, that is running ads, and that has those answers. Then we go on to step three. Now there are a little bit of role block there. There is a little bit of role block there because at this point, it is crucial for us to get ourselves up there and to get our product, but we need to check our ego because it's not about us, it's about the customer. So what is crucial here is that you need to do it in a very, very smart way. You need to let them know why your brand or your product or your service is better than the competitor and how it serves them. These points must be meaningful to the customer and by that I mean that they need to answer the questions that he previously asked and said too, but also refer back to your mission, vision and goal. Then we come to point four, to step four, which is the purchase decision. If you do the things correctly at step three, you will be closing the sale. But what happens after point four? This is my favorite part because most of the brands and most of people actually dismiss it. They dismiss the post purchase behavior because they have already closed the sale. So what do you do if let's say your customer comes to you disappointed? Do you dismiss them or do you help them? Basically, you have two options in the post purchase behavior. You can have a client who is very, very satisfied who can either come to you and say you did a great job or they can tell you nothing. Or you have the second one which is disappointed. You have to be prepared for both. You need to bathe in the admiration and the positive reviews but if a customer comes and tells you this is crap, I don't like it or you didn't do a good job after the deal has been closed or after you have signed some sort of contract, you need to come from a place of service, be human, talk to them, ask them questions. Just try to see what they actually need from you and what they need to be fixed. Okay, so as I said, step five is crucial when it comes to building a sustainable brand and a positive word of mouth. I know that a lot of marketers actually dismiss this because they don't care about word of mouth but believe me, this still works. This is still human behavior. We do talk to our friends and we do say, hey, I love those shoes because I got them on a sale and I got them from that store or they will be, if we use our instance or if we use our example, they will be like, I have this amazing guy who is like a mathematical genius and he helped me win money and I'm not bankrupt now. So think about that. Think about the way to implement all those steps and how you need to be present in every one of them. So the takeaways from here are, sorry, I missed my slides. I do apologize but my laptop's not working correctly so I need to use my phone for this. It's a very professional. So be present every step of the buying process. Give the answers the customer is looking for. Don't shy away from that. Check your ego and always come from a place of service. And last but not least, have a user-friendly website that is running Google Ads, that is running Facebook Ads and is SEO optimized. Now, how to do all that? It's easy as one, two, three. Introduce the three eyes of marketing. The three eyes of marketing stand for assist, attract and affiliate, but not in that order. It's actually attract assist, affiliate. Now, attract is my favorite part because we get to talk about you. We get to talk about your brand, your mission, your goals and your vision. Think about what actually pushed you to go and jump into the deep end. Think about what actually motivated you to start doing what you're doing now. I can guarantee it's not only the money. I can guarantee that you have a mission. You're like, I can do this better than this guy or I know that I can do it even for less money just so that I can get it started. So this is what will bring the customer to you. This will actually close the deal, as I said in step four. This will attract them to you and you will be able to build your brand better. Then we come to the assist. Now, once you've actually attracted your customer, you need to assist them and you need to assist them in order to close the sale if you still haven't done that. So turn your own and social media platforms into a safe space where your customer, potential or not, feels safe, feels understood and where he or she can find the answers they're looking for. Also, again, have a really, really good website. Beautiful, make you user-friendly, have it be SEO optimized, run Google ads. Just make it nice. Make it nice for the customer. Then we come to affiliate. Now, you already have your customers and you need to actually start working with them. You need to start communicating them. But don't do the one-to-one approach in marketing. No, it's not simple. No way, I'm not saying that. But it's kind of boring. I think we can do a lot better and by that I mean work with others. Introduce people who can actually be of benefit of your customer. Work with bloggers, work with brands, work with influencers, or better yet, turn your customers into brand ambassadors. I will give you an example from my work back in 2013, I think, when I was working in Fashion Days. We have this topic in the forum, BG Mama, which I presume all of you know. It was horrible. But it was horrible for me because I was the one who pointed to actually answer and speak with everybody and talk to everybody. We have this lady who hated us. She despised us. But then she continued buying stuff from us. Every time she received an order, she would go out on to pay Mama and be like, this is crap or I don't like it or this is too small, yada yada yada. So it was my job to actually service her and assist her. From that Monday to Friday for three months. Something happened after three months. This lady turned from our biggest hater to our biggest supporter because we assisted her. And actually she started helping us. She started answering questions when we received, if we couldn't answer in like five or ten minutes or five or ten days, she would be there and she would be on our side. She would say to people, yeah, I know. I know this sucks. I know this isn't cool. But trust me, they're working on it. They will get better or this is not fixed. So from our biggest hater, she turned it to our biggest supporter. This is what I'm talking about. This is what I want you to know. If you act like a human being with your customer who is also a human being, you will have better relations. And actually a person will be willing to pay you more just because you're there and you're listening to them and you're assisting them. As I said, these steps are crucial. Companies and businesses need to move away from a method that has gotten them to where they are today. And that method is the one-to-one marketing sale. So we need to move forward. We need to actually be aware of who is our customer. Our customer is a millennial. Our customer is a generation G user. Even if our customer is a baby boomer, that doesn't matter because they're not currently, well, it does matter, but they're currently not dominating the playground. And actually in the USA, a survey was made and 82% of customers said that they would purchase a product or a service based on values, communication, and quality. So they're putting values first. But if let's say your values don't actually and don't necessarily speak to the values of your customer, well, you can communicate with them and you can give them a good quality product. So the takeaways are attract people with your mission, your vision, and your statement. Use beautiful images because that is important. And use the power of storytelling. Always, always come from the place of service. Invest into a user-friendly and SEO optimized website. Assist, answer questions and be present. Educate directly on the apps. If you're using social media, don't post just for the sake of it. Don't post just because of an algorithm. Don't use hashtags like crazy just because you have 30 of them. Have a goal. And your goal can be to educate people directly. This will actually service you and this will help you not only to assist, but to attract new followers because the three As are actually linked together. Affiliate, as I said. Step away from the one-to-one marketing approach. Collaborate with others. Be open. Convert your customers into branded ambassadors while assisting them. I'm hoping that you actually get that the three are really linked together just as the five steps are linked together. Now, I would like to get you inspired with two of my favorite brands, which are the USA brands. The first one is Glossier. I'm a beauty blogger, so if I don't talk about Glossier, it's like, I don't know, the mother should call me back and punish me. This is Glossier. It is a brand that started from a blog. It started from a WordPress-based blog into the Gloss. Its founder is Emily Weiss. Now, Glossier is a venture-backed, data and tech-driven company and it is indeed a people-powered beauty ecosystem. It is a customer-centered business where actually the customer helps decide what the products are going to be, what they're going to look like, how they're going to smell, if they're going to have some kind of, I don't know, aroma, whatever. Everything is linked with the customer. Now, their main goal is to facilitate a digital conversation via their website, social media. They've also started using Slack and FaceTime. For Slack, they actually have a channel which is dedicated to their most active buyers. So it's like 100 people, or maybe a little bit more, who actually can tell whether or not they like a product, what they like changed, if they like it, if they want a moisturizer cream to be in a tube or in a bottle, and people actually listen, people from Glossier listen. Also, they do consultations via FaceTime, which is really cool, because I don't know how many businesses you know that actually go to these extents to actually service their customers. So what do they do? They attract. They attract their customers with a transparent business that actually states what their goals, mission, and visions are. They assist. They assist directly on the app. They assist on Slack. They assist on FaceTime. They assist everywhere. Their social media is not only focused on promoting their product. Actually, no. Their social media is focused on promoting other people using their product, which is brilliant, because it's not about us. It's about the customer. And they affiliate. I really love this, because this is a custom landing page that Glossier creates for, I think, about 100 people. Some of them are bloggers. Some of them are just standard people who have no interest in the beauty world besides using Glossier products. Now what Glossier do is they actually affiliate and they work with those people. They create special landing pages and they turn them into sales reps. So this is one of my favorite bloggers, though. This is, she's called Amy. So she has quite a big following on YouTube and she is a sales representative for Glossier. She has her own website. She has her own landing page where you can actually see what she likes, what are the products that she recommends. And Glossier give you, I think, 10% of your first order if you shop through her. So that's brilliant. That is using your customer as a random massager and selling through your customer. Another thing that they do, which is more, it has to do more with the branding and with the pretty part of the actual brand, is they repost a lot of customer content, especially the one that is pretty and goes with their social media and Instagram feed. When they do traditional PR, because this is a traditional PR, this is an event in New York, they do this. They talk about the customer. Who looks good? Well, you look good. But they're not saying why. We obviously know it's because Glossier is there. But no, nowhere will you see the brand. You will see the brand only like a couple of girls are holding like the Glossier packages. But you will not see the brand because it has nothing to do with the brand. It has everything to do with the customer. This is what I wanted to discuss also. Please, if you are running a brand or if you are a freelancer and you want to attract people, do not plaster your logo all over Instagram. It's not trendy. And nobody cares about our logos. I can tell you that. The next example is Warby Parker. I don't know how many of you have heard about Warby Parker. They are, I think, a USA-based business. They offer designer eyewear as a solution to a particular product. So they have a customer whose main pay points are that they need glasses, but they're students, so they cannot afford a lot of, they cannot afford trendy glasses. They don't have a lot of money, but they do need them, because otherwise, what are you going to do? So Warby Parker offers this. They can offer a home try-on service, which is basically a subscription. So they send you, I think, five or six pairs of glasses that you can actually try at home. You will see which one you like, which one feels good, and then you ship the other four back and you keep the one. And not only that, but they actually service their customer. They service their customer in a really, really nice way. They do it via their WordPress-based blog, where they actually give a lot of information. They have the eyewear A to Z, gloss... Sorry. Jeez Louise, you can tell I'm a newbie, right? So, yeah, they have this. I don't remember the word. I'm sorry. This is just, yeah. It's a cringe-fest, I know. So they assist. They assist on their blog and they assist on social media. And you can see that right here. They do the same as well here. They answer questions on the app. And they don't shy away. They will never tell you, well, write us an email and we'll get back to you in like 42 hours. No, they assist directly. They even say, slide into our DMs and we will help you even more. This is what we should be doing. Even if you're a freelancer because everything we're talking about today can be put into good use in order for you to build your brand and marketing strategy. You need to attract and assist. And by doing so, you will win more customers. And you need to focus on them and on their main points. Just get to know your customers. Get to know your potential audience. This is what Warby Parker does as an affiliate. They worked with Taylor Oakley, who I think you probably know. He's also a very famous YouTuber. They actually created a special design with him. And they, I think, if I'm not quoting wrong, it's sold out for like two weeks or so. So this is affiliate. So again, I just want to show you. This is what Glossier are doing. They are working with influencers and with bloggers, but they're also working with their main consumer. And this is what Warby Parker is doing. They're working with influencers. So who are definitely their consumers as well. So even if you don't remember anything from today, remember this. The most important thing is to always come from a place of service. So you can go out there, out there and crush it unlike me today. I'm free to answer them on the spot, maybe. If not, you're free to go. Okay, I have a question. How do you gather feedback from the other clients? Oh, this is a good one. Well, you can do Q&As on social media. It's actually really, really easy now especially with Instagram stories. You can basically make them, you can ask them a question and they can answer. You can do that. You can do surveys. You can send them out emails. Hope this answers your question. Yeah, but what do you do? What I do. Well, in our business, because we work with a lot of different companies, because we work with a lot of different companies, if we are actually interested to learn what our customer is thinking about our job, we basically ask them. We ask for a meeting and we're like, hey, do you have 30 minutes on a Friday? We want to know how we can make this contract better. How we can actually help you with your product even more. And they're really, really open. But this is, I'm talking agency client. So, I don't know if that helps. Yeah. Okay, maybe. I will think of a better answer and come back to you. Anybody else? Nope, no, okay. Wow, okay. Hi, hi. From a company point of view, what is the good way to approach and search for influencers? A lot of these. This is a good one. I think I can give you a better answer. Well, first of all, you need to know the niche. Are you looking for beauty bloggers? Are you looking for lifestyle bloggers? Are you looking for somebody who is into sports media? Now, once you make a list, because that's where you start off, you make a list and you contact them. But don't do it in a very salesy way. Don't do it as a salesman. Hi, I'm from this company and I would like to work with you. No. Imagine it like you're pitching your services to a blogger. Say, I'm a really big fan of yours. Even if you want, this is a dirty trick. This is a dirty PR trick, but we do it and it works. You can go back and you can go over their website and check out different topics that they have written. Actually, read their blog, see what you like that you wrote about on December 2nd, 2015, really got to us. It really spoke to us. We love it. And do the sandwich technique. The sandwich technique is basically saying something positive, then selling yourself and then closing on something positive. So, make them feel like they're special. Woo them a little bit. Ask them questions. Ask them are they interested? Are they interested in working with you? Have they done this before? No way. Don't approach them. Company to an influencer. Imagine that you're the influencer. What is the way that you would like people to talk to you? Well, you would like to know that the person who's actually contacting you knows what you're writing about and actually reads your blog. And social media. You can do that too. Hopefully that answers. Cool. Anybody else? Nope. I think not. Well guys, thank you so much for spending your afternoon with me. And thank you for being so kind to my gentle newbie soul. I hope that next time, if I get invited next time, I will do a better job. If not, I will just do it in Bulgaria and just bring it. Thank you. Again.