51: Mastering ROI-Driven Marketing- with Chris Peer

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[00:00:18] Erin Courtenay: Fake holidays. I've got to ask.

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[00:00:36] Erin Courtenay: National Breakfast Ice Cream for Breakfast Day?

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[00:00:40] Erin Courtenay: Yeah, I get it. I get it. But I just, in the defense of Valentine's Day, Legit. 100 percent legit. And it ranks, it ranks really highly for me. I'm going to put it up there because I just love the idea of celebrating relationships.

That's how I think of Valentine's Day. So that one is a winner for me. I'm also like Halloween and Christmas, if you don't like those, you know, we have more to explore, but my Valentine's and 4th of July really do it for me. I love the whole 4th of July, like picnic, party vibe kind of thing. And you know, America and all of that.

Yeah, what about you?

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Having witnessed the pain and frustration caused by ineffective marketing, Chris and his team developed the great eight pillars to transform the marketing department from a corporate expense into a profit center. He has helped hundreds of companies scale through world class marketing best practices.

Chris's perspective on marketing operations transcended tactical methodologies and focuses on people, strategies, systems, and software to move the needle. Today, Chris's focus remains on helping B2B manufacturing companies scale through his companies, consulting, and speaking. Chris, welcome to the show.

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[00:03:14] Lori Highby: Yeah, I'm excited because you and I are very much in the same world, so I'm sure we could talk for hours upon hours, but we'll just, you know, we don't have that long. I know. We'll be nice to our listeners. I'm really curious though, the, the great eight pillars, what are they and why did you build this framework?

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And he's like I think we need to figure this out. So we spent a good 18 to 24 months looking at every single client we'd ever had and what gave them great results. Why some of them failed, why some of them, you know, were super successful. And what we came down to was we, we had like a hundred different marketing categories that we looked at all the different tactics and all these different areas.

And when we finally distilled it all down, we ended up with these eight categories. And to our surprise, they had nothing to do with marketing tactics. They're all marketing operations related. And so we realized we were onto something different. It was kind of after being in marketing for 20 years, it was kind of an aha moment for me that, Oh my gosh, like there is a rhythm and a system to performance marketing, and I think we just figured it out.

So we coined it the Great Eight Pillars of ROI Driven Marketing. And we started using it for our clients. And then when we realized it was working, I'm like, we got to write a book about this. So we wrote a book.

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[00:04:58] Chris Peer: Yeah.

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So it sounds like you really focus on the principles of, you know, the core functional components from a strategic standpoint, and that's amazing.

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[00:05:49] Chris Peer: You know, I do have a favorite, but it's it's not necessarily the most important. I think all the pillars work together in a manner that the system works.

So I'll mention, Erin, the top two.

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[00:06:12] Chris Peer: Yeah. I'd say number one, you have to have goals. Yeah. You have to have ROI driven goals. Over 20 years, we've worked with hundreds of companies. Not a single one came to us when we first started working with them and said, our other agency had these goals and here's the marketing strategy that align with those goals, not a single one. And some of our clients are international, large clients, some of them are mom and pop shops.

So goals, KPIs and industry benchmarks, I would say is you've got to have goals or then you don't know where you're going. Number two, which is my personal favorite is value proposition, messaging and branding. Without a strong value proposition, that's well articulated and differentiated against your competitors in the market, all the marketing and sales in the world isn't going to get the potential ROI that you could get. So we start with value proposition, messaging, and branding with almost every client that comes through our door.

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You know? And they don't even know how to answer that question themselves. I'm like, well, how are you going to gauge our success if you don't even have a target that you're looking for? So yeah, that's fantastic. I love that approach.

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Those are two really important ones. I'm going to encourage our listeners to read the book and find out what the other six are.

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[00:07:43] Erin Courtenay: I'm, you know, one of the things I really like, Chris, just, writ large, even though I understand how complicated it is to, to develop and deliver a certification program.

I've been involved in a couple of them and I know it's not easy, but it is such great shorthand for knowing that you, you've done something. And I understand that you have a certification program. And can you tell us a little bit more about it and who it's for?

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You can find it at G8P. CO. So it's the letter G, the number 8, the letter P, dot CO. The certification program is, is a certification in the Great 8 Pillars. And when we started implementing the Great Eight Pillars, and after we wrote the book, we were like, man, this would be great if everybody could know this. It would just make marketing so much better. And our mission has always been customer focused.

So the certification program, it's an online training program. You can either do a voice directed program, which is me basically narrating the entire course, or you can do the written editorial version. It's got some tests and quizzes built into it. It's got all the training on all the Great Eight Pillars. And then the really cool thing, I think the biggest value you're going to get from it, is you get access to our dashboard. And we have an executive G8P dashboard, which not only gives you access to all of our tools and templates that I use at our agency for customer success, but you get this tool called a diagnostic and roadmap. And it's part of the certification fee, and you get access to this for a year.

So you can assess your company against over a hundred different gold standards across the Great Eight Pillars and your current marketing operation. And then it basically, once you complete that online, it'll tell you what to do and what order to do it in.

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[00:09:46] Chris Peer: And then if you need, you can hire a G8P coach that'll actually help you implement it.

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Is that certification then awarded to an individual or is it awarded to a department, a company? Who holds the actual certification?

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It's a great resume builder. And the way we thought about it was when you read the book, you're going to get the general principles of ROI driven marketing and how to become that marketing superhero at your company. But putting it into practice can be a little overwhelming. You know, it took me 20 years to figure this out.

So you know, putting it to practice of the certification course is another way to add onto it. And then the dashboard, as I mentioned, with all the tools, gives you the resources and walks you step by step through every single piece of the system.

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You built this program internally, kind of your proprietary, this is our, our, the Great Eight Pillars. And then you are bringing it to the masses through the certification. That is just so brilliant and amazing. You've definitely piqued my interest into diving into it a little bit further.

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It's, it's really for any marketer that is looking to drive, you know, more ROI. We focus the book and G8P as a company on manufacturing firms, but the methodology works for all B2B companies.

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And I think there's also a lot of misinformation on the difference between, if there are any, if you believe there are any, between B2B marking and B2C marketing. And if you could sum up how that B2B piece really, where, where you put the emphasis in terms of what a marketer should do when they're in a B2B environment?

If, if you think that is different than B2C?

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Oftentimes with B2B, you have multiple buyers at the same company. So you have to satisfy the needs of the end user buyer, of the strategic buyer, of the financial buyer, and decision making isn't anywhere near as emotional. But you really have to speak about how your, your products and services are going to help a company to survive and thrive in the future.

And if you can't do that and do it in a way that differentiate your product or service from all the other companies out there trying to do the same thing, it's tough.

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[00:13:56] Lori Highby: Yeah, I was going to say the other thing you touched on was like, there's multiple buyers involved, like multiple decision makers, and you have to ultimately appease all of them from different angles, as opposed to, like you said, buying them up. The majority of the time, it's one person that's involved in that buying decision.

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[00:14:35] Lori Highby: Okay. I'm going to bring up my favorite topic. AI.

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[00:14:44] Lori Highby: know it's either Elon Musk, which is not, it just happens that I talk about him a lot, which is weird, but yeah. I mean, they kind of tie together, but it's the future. Yeah, there's a lot of work being done to really make sure the general population is aware of what is AI generated content versus like real authentic content.

There's definitely a lot of work to still be done in that space, but there's, you know, some guidelines that are being pushed out, but I guess the challenge is how do they really, truly police these guidelines? Like there should be some sort of watermarking for synthetic content. Meta has said that they're attempting to identify and label all AI generated content on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

And Google is putting some time and energy into kind of leading and participating in this. The FCC has banned the use of AI generated voices in robocalls, so that's a positive. But again, how are we policing this? You know, how can we really truly verify at this point, whether something's authentic or AI generated? So I I'm kind of, you know, keeping tabs on this to see what's happening.

And it's a constant moving, changing, evolving target right now. So.

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[00:16:17] Lori Highby: Yeah.

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[00:16:23] Lori Highby: So what about you?

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I'm going to admit it. Those prices are amazing. And one of the things that I learned when I was doing my research is their shipping strategy allows them to do a sort of a workaround, they use a loophole so that the the duty is not applied because they ship directly, which seems very simple.

But as you look at their entire business model, it's really about cutting out middlemen here, here, wherever they can, they just scan the horizon and cut out middlemen. And so de minimis is the, is the rule that how, you know, how much a product value has to be before duty is applied, and they endeavor to ship products that fall below that value.

I thought that was, that was really interesting.

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[00:17:29] Erin Courtenay: Yeah. Controversial.

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[00:17:38] Chris Peer: Oh, jeez. I wasn't prepared for this like you guys are, so I learned oysters can make you really sick this week.

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[00:17:48] Chris Peer: No, that wasn't in a fun way, no.

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[00:17:52] Chris Peer: But no, I don't have anything really insightful to add here to this conversation. Recent learnings in marketing or business. I mean, there's always so much, but I, I need some time to think about this.

You guys, you got anything else to let me start?

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[00:18:16] Chris Peer: No.

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So people are going to want to talk to you, Chris, because this has been such a great conversation and your book is really filled to the brim with a high quality information that certification program also sounds really valuable.

So how do they find you?

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So the value of that dashboard is over 7, 500 hours. That's of the value you get from using that tool. So it's definitely something I highly encourage and it's really inexpensive. Yeah. And then reach out to me through that website. If you have any questions or needs. And always happy to help. I love marketing. I love manufacturing companies. So even if you're just like, Hey, Chris, I'm struggling with this, reach out to me through the website. All of the forms will eventually get forwarded to me and just include contact information and we'll set up a call.

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So make sure that you take a look at that. Chris, so much. Thank you so much for being on the show today. This is a lot of fun.

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[00:20:24] Lori Highby: Well, we'll include that one in the show notes too. All right. Well, thank you so much. This is a lot of fun.

And I hope all of you have a great rest of your week and we will see you next time.

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