#and i get analysis paralysis when it comes to communicating topics i invest a lot of time/energy into

[vermillioncrown]

not to toot my own horn but it feels so jarring to reblog the anniversary of the moon landing and also be doing irl research to support current cislunar activities

[painted-crow]

Secondary Toast Revolving Door, Part 2

On what it’s like when I burn Bird secondary

Usually, when I burn either Bird secondary or Badger secondary model, they’re down for weeks or months at a time. I know they’ll come back, which isn’t always true of burned Houses in general but that’s just how mine work. Right now Bird is having a minor upset and it’s been out for a few weeks; it was about to come back when life stress happened and smacked it down again. This time I can predict that it’ll be back in maybe two weeks when everything’s settled down, but usually it’s not that tidy—I don’t always know why it’s having problems or what to do to get it to recover. Usually I just wait it out.

The burned state looks different for Bird vs Badger, of course. I’m probably going to struggle with writing the Badger side, either because I’ve forgotten the details of what it looks/feels like or because it’s actually simpler. I lean towards the “I’ve forgotten” angle. My memory is very bad during depressive periods. (You’d think this would leave my brain goblins fewer cringey memories with which to taunt me at 4am, but no.)

But that doesn’t matter right now because today we’re talking about Bird.

Tipoffs I’ve burned Bird

Sometimes it’s hard to tell when you’ve burned one of your Houses. It doesn’t always have a clear start or end, and you might not notice the gradual slipping into exhaustion and lack of confidence in your House. Here are some things I catch myself doing or thinking when my Bird peaces out on me.

I start thinking I’m not good at things I’ve spent years studying.

I get a panicky feeling of resistance when I think about working on projects that wouldn’t normally give me problems.

I struggle with self-doubt about my ability to learn new skills.

This one’s complicated: the society I live in holds Bird up as the way it thinks intelligence should look. So, in burned-Bird!Paint’s mind, that makes it arrogant to assume that you're better at using Bird than others, because it suggests you think you're smarter (and thus better, because society says that too) than them. Therefore, if I’ve learned how to do something, my impulse is to assume that anyone could. Anything I’ve already learned is obviously easy, because I learned it, and so it isn’t rare or valuable.

Weird analysis paralysis cocktail: I feel perpetually unprepared to do stuff and too afraid to move forward, but I’ve also internalized the “you’re never going to feel ready so just start now” advice—which is supposed to spur you into action and probably works if you’re a Lion, but it just gives me something else to beat myself up about.

Sometimes Bird secondary starts feeling more like a toy than a tool that can actually be effective. If that's happening, using it feels kind of self-indulgent and not terribly useful--it seems good for entertainment, but not for anything else.

That last one is really fricking weird and it took me months to figure out what it was and put it into words. It’s obviously flawed—it’s circular logic sitting on top of societal prejudice—but when you’re depressed, the kind of clarity you need to verbalize and pick apart something that complicated is often nowhere to be found, especially when your perception in general is skewed due self-hatred.

I can’t do that “just start now” thing Lions do—it terrifies me. But that’s fine. Other people don’t casually pick up new skills or binge-read nonfiction or hoard resources like I do—maybe that’s intimidating to them—and that’s fine. Both approaches are useful and powerful, objectively, and philosophically I “should” be okay with owning my abilities. That’s harder than it looks on paper, though.

There’s one more.

The value of skills is subjective, circumstantial, and easy to underestimate.

I’m a jack-of-all-trades style Bird. Lots of things interest me. But every time you decide to invest in a new skill rather than continuing with an old one, you sort of start over. Not completely; some skills transfer and there’s a lot of value in having a range of knowledge, especially in terms of creativity.

Still, though: you enter each new field as a total noob, you stay long enough to become a kinda competent noob, and then when you’ve learned what you want and maybe built the thing you wanted to build, you leave. Rinse and repeat. Usually you don’t stay long enough to become super-skilled, and people in your community don’t specifically ask you for help.

…Until they need something other than the thing they specialize in, and you happen to know it. Suddenly you’re the expert in the room. You know how to get the project started. You know where to research, who to ask about advanced topics, what all the search keywords are, and where to find the supplies. Suddenly you're valuable, and maybe you're not used to feeling valuable. It can be kind of a jarring experience.

It's especially jarring when someone you know needs something and you're like, "oh I can take care of that, I spent six months studying how to do it and I have the resources already" and the other person gives you a look of deep skepticism and you try to convince them that no, really, it's not a big deal, you can have that done in a weekend or two if they give you the right information and... they don't believe you can do it, you guess. It's easy to misinterpret a "this sounds too good to be true" reaction for "I don't believe YOU can do it.”

My old draft had a note about how I should build myself a portfolio site to demonstrate stuff like this (except that my tastes develop faster than my actual skills in most fields, so I tend to dislike my own work and don't want to display it). But actually I’m wondering now if Badger secondary isn’t part of the problem. Sometimes I just volunteer to do stuff for people I only kinda know, without naming a motive or a price tag, and seen through that lens it’s hard to blame them for feeling awkward or skeptical about accepting. It’s not a big deal to you, but it is to them—too big to be just a favor. And then the people who do accept freely given help tend to take advantage of you… I guess I need to cultivate more Courtier Badger if I want to give my Bookkeeper Badger model stuff to do.

(Bonus bullet point: “I don’t know if I can really say my House is burned... it’s just not totally there right now? The stuff I’m dealing with isn’t THAT bad” is another tell that you’re burned. I’ve had to stop myself from writing that sort of thing several times over the course of this post. I’ll let myself bring it up for the opposite reason, though: if you’re thinking this, you may be underestimating the damage because you’ve forgotten what you’re like healthy. This goes for mental illness in general too. Don’t undermine your own experience.)

What I do instead

I’ve learned to be flexible and work around times when my Bird isn’t at 100%.

For example, this is why I have three novel projects running at once, with varying levels of complexity. The least complex of the three is new—I started it back in February, and working on that one instead of the others has let me stay productive and continue using Bird without pushing it past its limits. Plus it lets me keep making art, which as I’ve mentioned, is important to my general wellbeing.

If I’m able to section off my work like this and focus on the things I can do, and selectively procrastinate the ones I can’t (that aren’t super urgent), I’m usually fine—as long as I stay on top of my mental health enough for things to swing back around so I can catch up. It’s very, very difficult to recover if your needs aren’t being met.

I can be kind of a productive powerhouse when I can get my brain to actually process dopamine correctly (thanks, medication!) so if I can manage to work on something useful, I don’t always have to be too picky about what it is. That also means that if I can’t work on the things I’d normally use Bird to do (whether it’s burned or I’m just worn out), it’s a good excuse to catch up on more menial things like paperwork and laundry and whatnot. If I’ve let those pile up, dealing with them will improve my environment and my mental health and get Bird to recover faster.

What I shouldn’t do is continue to press on with my normal work, if I can avoid it. There have been times when people needed me to deliver the creative or technological thing I was using Bird to work on before it burned, and I had to push through and get it to them anyway, and it’s not a good situation for me.

*cue flashbacks to the three or four times that’s happened for months on end, dissociates for 10 minutes*

ugh okay brain can you not do that right now? trying to write a post here

Where was I? Oh, right. I was making a point.

Take the pressure off your burned House if you can.

I think when you burn one of your Houses, it's injured and you're actually worse at using it than people who just don't have it as one of their Houses. Say you're a bowling champion but your dominant wrist is broken. You can choose not to play at all until you recover, or you can try to play with your other hand but you're probably going to be worse at it than a lot of casual players, and that feels really bad because being good at this matters to you.

^ copied from the old draft of this post. I was going to write a smooth transition into that point, but it didn’t work and I’m not going to try to rewrite it and get “ERROR 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR” from my brain again.

In any case, this post has been sitting around for a week already and I should probably just publish it now. ^^;

[vroenis]

Board Games, Adulthood, Mentorship

Yeah yeah I’m still short of time but I wanted to write a quick word about board games.

Here’s a cut’n’paste from my collection from the BGG aka the cursed place;

There’s still a lot of colonialism and cultural appropriation in my collection that I haven’t purged yet. That’s going to have to wait as almost all of our games are in storage so I had to just get as good a screencap as I could this late at night. And yea howdy well Condottiere still gets a showing with the good ol’ Pope an’ all but I wanted Core Worlds and Cosmogenesis in the image so there was nothing for it. It’s a funny culture, board gaming - what we have accepted for a good mechanism - and still are. I really wish Condottiere would get a retheme. I guess Gwent was it of a fashion but I’m not into the rest of it.

I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about board games here before but if pictures help, I am about this many Board Game Things involved in the hobby/activity/etcetera;

I did mention a purge. At least half of that Owned number will be going. I’ve just come back from about a two year break from playing super regularly - not only playing but also teaching games and organising and running game groups and often events. Event as distinct from a normal regular game day, I guess we’d call them because even if it’s just at our house or someone else’s, it would involve inviting enough people to run three or more tables and game sessions simultaneously. That involves some logistics, from confirming a date convenient for all to feeding everyone.

Before Covid-19, I’d already taken a step back entirely from my engagements with board games. At one point I was producing an amateurish podcast with R which we really enjoyed - it was a lot of work but rewarding in a lot of ways. I could have invested more money into it but life always has competing priorities. It’s not just the money, it’s always also the energy.

The best thing for me is the break has been fantastic, and playing games again with J and a dear friend of ours recently was an immensely positive experience. All of us are seasoned board gamers, we all know what we like and learn mechanisms and dynamics quickly. As for me personally, while I effectively disengaged from a lot of high-impact aspects such as keeping up with newest reviews in my sabbatical, I still always continued to reflect on game design, art, culture, behaviour, the things we can do better, and the things that are really - really good about board games.

In my professional work, I do a lot of teaching. Sometimes it’s more formal - we deploy a tool or process and I share that directly with my team or interdepartmentally with staff throughout the company. Sometimes it’s informal and very often in bursts, micro-learning if you will. Because of my tenure, I’m experienced in process and detail so staff will check in with me about things and I’m happy to share my knowledge. As adults, these opportunities for teaching are quite rare, and I’ve mentioned this on Twitter in a board games related discussion. One of the few areas we see this is in video games which I really love - for a wider audience, we can observe this behaviour in streams and vods but I think most of us who play video games will have had this experience long before streams were a thing. It’s when one person shares a game with friends, either by passing a controller or sitting at a PC together, or joining a session online together with other friends and introducing them to the game - because it’s one of the group’s new or old favourite, or we’re all learning it together. Either some players engage in teaching straight button or keybinds to the others, or everyone learns together and there’s rapid sharing of knowledge.

In the past I’ve been critical of some of the truly heinous and abusive aspects of nerd and geek culture that we are still struggling with to this day, but this is one of the best aspects of it that I feel we don’t praise enough. As youth who embraced and mastered technology and esotericism, we shouldn’t denigrate the quirks of our culture either, I really don’t like the diminutive self-effacing cliché of the weird nerd whose hobbies are strange. Our cultures can be intelligently explained, as much responsibility to comprehend them falls to us to communicate them as does society to accept us and have the patience to listen.

Board games provide an opportunity for mentorship and teaching among adults that’s rare and unique, for me that’s distinct even from video games. I adore video games, as it were, and would also love more humans to play them with but alas, the humans I know all have diverse tastes which is great, but we don’t video game together. Nevertheless - board games allow adults to engage in teaching, learning, experimentation, failure and mastery in a uniquely safe space with people they hopefully are comfortable with. OK that sentence is super loaded with assumptions and presuppositions and they’re a whole other discussion, so I should stipulate that I’m talking about established board game groups. 

I do want to be careful not to paint Board Games Culture as something that is Good And Only Good All The Time And Everyone Who Does It Is Definitely Wholly Good Yes You Can Trust All People Who Play Board Games This Definitely Doesn’t Sound Like A Cult 

because as you can imagine wow there are people who make the hobby sound like a cult and I was bordering on being one of them just now. It’s easy to paint anything as pure when you get trapped in the Positivity Only bubble mindset and there is a massive dark-space in board games that I don’t want to go into here but it is very real, painfully and unavoidably so. Before opening up a game group to strangers, even a friend-of-a-friend, there are some really basic ground-rules that need to be established that for some might seem to be common sense but may be surprisingly difficult to understand. Again, I don’t want to go into that here and some folks may read that and think “nah you’re overthinking it” and I’m telling you I’m not - I am here to tell you that yes, it’s as simple as 

sometimes you actually can’t assume you can bust out a social game about lying on a stranger when you don’t know them for reeeeeally good reasons and there are really easy things you can do in preparation for that or simply not do it at all 

but again, that might be a discussion for another day and you know, I might just get around to writing that one in particular.

Anyway - gaming with people you know (*and even then!!!*) and people you don’t (the boundary conversation feels too important not to have but I keep interrupting myself so I’ll stop) being two super interesting topics for nuanced exploration, teaching games again recently and also the discussions I’ve engaged with online have felt really good.

What has also felt good has been my personal focus on other people. I think that’s what I like so much about teaching board games. As a games teacher, your primary concern is oversight of the session. The game itself is almost secondary, although of-course you never intentionally want to play a bad game. The quality of the game is measured by how well it facilitates the enjoyment of the people playing it, but the same is true of the facilitator, and that’s you - the teacher and ambassador. 

That would have been a nice segue into the piece I’ve been yearning to write for about the two years I’ve been on sabbatical, which is Playing In Good Faith, and I mentioned it in the tweet thread discussion - that every participant in a board game signs an unwritten contract to facilitate the enjoyment of every other person sitting at the table. Board gaming is a social activity. Yes, we do more or less have an interest in the game we’re playing, we usually wouldn’t really play a game we don’t want to play except for ambassadorship reasons which is understandable, but ultimately we gather together for one-another. Sometimes in-between playing board games we eat food together, one of the oldest and most cherished social activities humans engage in. I want to write in a bit more detail about whether looking for rules exploits is playing in good faith, and also how we might as teachers and ambassadors seek to address Analysis Paralysis - when players take a lot of time to play, from a teaching trajectory perspective, which is to say, from a long-term view in how we teach individuals and groups specific games and also how we introduce games to people and groups.

Again - a lot to that, so it has to wait for another day, or days, when I can draft and write it. It’s late and I have to go to bed.

[bettydgunter90]

Presidents’ Circle: Aaron Norris

Not many real estate investors can say they started their career in real estate when they were in preschool. But Aaron Norris can. He began rehabbing houses with his dad before he could tie his own shoes.

“My first memory of flipping was being armed with a vacuum sucking up roaches all afternoon after the carpet was ripped up from the house,” Norris said.

And while some might consider this his first real job because it did eventually lead to his career as a real estate investor, his first paying job was a box boy at a local grocery store in California. Later, as a young adult, he waited tables in NYC. These experiences taught Norris customer service and the importance of working with people.

“I think everyone should have to be in a service career. From body language to listening, you learn a lot about yourself and to communicate effectively with people,” Norris said.

Now, as Vice President of The Norris Group, which specializes in California and Florida hard money lending, note investments, and real estate investor resources, Aaron is a national speaker and writer specializing in topics like technology and its effects on real estate. He also hosts a weekly vlog, radio show, and podcast. Norris has also been directly involved in raising more than $2 million for local charities through events like “I Survived Real Estate” and Give BIG Riverside County. But aside from all his to-dos, it’s working with people that inspires Norris to keep doing his best each day.

“I love people. There’s nothing better than getting a letter from someone who has worked with us over the past few decades telling us we’ve changed the trajectory of their family. Helping more Main Street investors succeed in financial freedom gets me pumped,” Norris said.

Clearly armed with a wealth of REI experience and a thirst for staying busy, Norris, like any successful investor, had to endure his share of trial and error. He adapted to what worked and learned he is more conservative than he might have once thought. His preferred REI niche? Buy and hold.

“Coming from a family of flippers, I thought I had to be flipping a hundred deals a year for success. I’ve been slowly acquiring and upgrading a rental portfolio over the past decade from so-so inventory in California to new construction rentals in Florida. I’ve learned I don’t like major rehabs and much prefer new homes that don’t have ticking rehab time bombs,” he said.

Technology Blended with Mindfulness

In an industry as widespread and evolving as real estate investing, there are bound to be both exciting and concerning changes ahead. Norris, an avid “techy,” said he is excited about the future of construction with 3D-printed housing and prefab manufacturing especially for the affordable housing issue. But, he does worry that the real estate industry is not tech-focused enough.

“I worry that we aren’t working together collectively to do what’s best for our industry and the consumer. Being protectionist won’t help our industry, it only makes us irrelevant faster,” he said.

Norris is an avid goal-setter but, ironically, has found that limiting technology use has helped him achieve his goals. 

“As a technology guy, most are surprised I’ve gone analogue over the past year. I spend far less time on the Internet and more on my Full Focus Planner. The planner is quarterly and forces me to look at what I want to accomplish four times a year and monitor progress. Turning off notifications on my phone from apps and spending more time reading and thinking have made a huge improvement in my stress levels. It’s helped me be far more mindful.”

What works best for Norris when it comes to goalsetting and achievement is the old-fashioned write-it-down method. He finished his MBA in 2009 and adopted Tony Robbins’ approach, which he said helped him clarify different types of goals and identify potential fears and roadblocks.

“Never in my education journey from high school to MBA had I learned this method of writing goals! What if I had learned that in high school? It felt amazing and I achieved more in a decade than I thought possible,” Norris said.

Before 2019 is over, Norris plans to sit for his Florida broker’s exam and reach a number in his rental portfolio that he thought was several years down the road.

“Hitting goals early is always very rewarding,” Norris said.

Norris understands how easy it can be to get overwhelmed in this industry because of the multitude of ways to participate. He shares this advice with those looking to enter the REI space:

“I see a ton of analysis paralysis. Be very mindful of taking the skillset you have and applying it in a way that fits into your lifestyle and your personality. You’ll launch faster and easier that way. You can always grow, but it’s easier to start small and build,” he said.

The post Presidents’ Circle: Aaron Norris appeared first on Think Realty | A Real Estate of Mind.

from Real Estate Tips https://thinkrealty.com/aaron-norris/

[dorothydelgadillo]

OK, So You Created a Brand Messaging Strategy -- Now What?

How many times have you gotten a gift card for your birthday or Christmas and then completely forgotten about it? Maybe it was left stranded in your junk drawer just waiting to be spent. Maybe you lost it in the depth of your purse. Maybe your toddler thought it was a fun toy and it was lost to the abyss that is his toybox (never happened…).

That’s never fun right? Who wants to leave money on the table? But it happens all the time. Something like $1 billion in gift cards go unused every year.

That’s some serious value just being thrown away and neglected! And, honestly, it is strikingly similar to something we see all the time with brand messaging strategies.

The process of creating a brand messaging strategy for your organization can be really, really fun. People love that part. They are willing to spend thousands of dollars on projects to get it just right. They are willing to invest hundreds of hours of their team’s time to ensure the right people have gotten a say in it.

Then once it is done, they set it to the side and completely ignore it. Like it never even happened.

Wait, what? Am I serious?

Absolutely. We see it all the time. It’s really easy to get people pumped and involved for the fun part. But then nobody wants to do the hard work to make sure it is actually implemented.

So, to help you avoid dropping your carefully crafted messaging strategy into the abyss, this article will give you some great ideas of what you can do with it. Keep in mind that the sky is the limit, and this list is nowhere near exhaustive.

Get Your Team Bought In

The first step you must take after your brand messaging strategy has been built is to get your entire organization bought-in to it.

Every single person that works for your company is a representation of your brand in some way or another. If they don’t know the brand strategy, how can they live it and represent it accurately for you?

So, what is the best way to ensure everyone is on the same page? Get them in a workshop. This should be a highly interactive session rather than a boring, dry lecture where you simply read the strategy to them.

What is the best way to ensure that your team will truly retain the information you are sharing with them? Get them to use it in action! People learn far more by doing or interacting than they do simply by reading or watching.

Some great exercises to do here include role plays. Group your organization by role (ex. Sales, customer service, etc.) and have them practice using key parts of the messaging strategy in scenarios they would actually encounter every day.

There are two key things to remember here. People will only retain this information if you continue to reinforce it, and the organization will only view doing so as a priority if the leadership of the company leads by example. So, make sure to continue to find ways to get your staff to be reminded of the brand strategy and make sure leadership has both initially bought in and proves to your organization it is a priority to them that they live by it.

Only once your brand strategy is a living, breathing part of every employee in your organization will it truly start to deliver. When this finally happens, it is like pure magic, and those results will be more valuable than you ever could have hoped for.

Build Sales Scripts

One of the most important places your brand messaging must be on point is with your sales team. Often, they are the first people someone will interact with from your organization. As such, they are the most important people in your company that must own and use the messaging strategy you’ve created.

A great way to start this process is to build out sales scripts with the messaging built right in. Most salespeople, at least the most effective ones, already follow a general script as they move a prospect through the sales process.

Now, there are two ways to do this: the right way and the wrong way.

The wrong way would be to simply hand them a script and say “follow this.” If they’ve had no hand in creating the script, they’ll immediately find reasons why it doesn’t work and throw it out the window.

Instead, the leadership of your sales team should work collaboratively with key members of the sales organization to build the script together. If you challenge the team to find ways to incorporate key brand pillars into their scripts, but let them actually write the scripts, they’ll be far more likely to use them. They’ll also be far more effective. Your sales team knows what messages have worked on prospects in the past and which have fallen flat, so use their experience!

Now, don’t simply walk away and hope it stays in place. Make sure to keep a pulse on how sales is messaging and ensure maintaining the brand strategy is part of performance reviews and measurement.

Update Your Website Copy

While a salesperson may be one of the first humans a person interacts with from your brand, we know that 70% of a buyer’s decision is usually made before they ever talk to one.

So how can we control that 70% of the conversation, and ensure our potential customers are seeing our brand the way we want them to? Through our marketing!

When it comes to controlling the conversation about our brands, one of the most effective ways to do this is through our websites. So, your next order of business should be to revamp your website messaging to ensure it is on-brand and matches with your new messaging strategy.

Be careful in this endeavor not to get stuck in “analysis paralysis.” We see so many people who take forever to actually get their website copy updated, or never do, because they are so obsessed with getting every tiny detail perfect. Or they are so concerned with every word choice that they end up frozen.

I cannot say this strongly enough: DO NOT DO THIS!

Your website is a living, breathing thing. You can update it every day if you want. You can change words as you test and see what is resonating and what isn’t.

The worst thing you can do is leave your website sitting stagnant with off-brand messaging because you are trying too hard to have the perfect on-brand messaging. Done is better than perfect and a website that gets your messaging strategy even partially right is far more useful than one that ignores it altogether.

So, just get it out there initially, and continue to refine over time.

Use Messaging As The Foundation For Content Creation

Once you’ve got your website messaging updated, it's time to think about your regular content creation cadence. You already know you should be producing new content about 3 times per week, and hopefully you’ve been doing so for some time already.

If that’s the case, just make sure you are creating content that supports your brand messaging strategy. Most likely, you learned some key information about how your audience makes decisions when you conducted the audience research that went into building your messaging strategy. There are usually plenty of goldmines for blog topics to support different decision-making styles just waiting in your messaging strategy.

Make sure to use it to inform your editorial calendar! Work with sales to answer the key questions that come along with each of those decision-making styles.

Answering all of those questions will fast-track you to becoming the thought leader in your space.

Use It In Your Product or Service Teams

We’ve already talked about sales and marketing, but what about the people who have the most interaction with your customers? Make sure your product or service teams are well versed in the brand strategy as well (using that workshop method we talked about before!).

You can start by building brand messaging into customer service scripts and incorporating it on physical packaging. What you do in this step is entirely specific to your business and how it interacts with customers. The key takeaway is to ensure each customer touchpoint is on-brand and any communication with customers reinforces the brand message.

Measure Whether You’re Living Up To It

The companies that really get brand messaging right are obsessed with living their brands and the result is customers that become passionate evangelists.

Having a loved brand is literally priceless. So, ask the people who matter most if you are doing a good job.

Survey your customers, and build that survey to specifically find out if you are living out your brand strategy and if the messaging is truly resonating with your customers.

Bonus points if you can ask your customers about it on video and then use that video on your website!

Find Ways To Show It

Typically, a brand messaging strategy is mostly about the words you use to communicate about your brand. But, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Once you know how you want your brand to be perceived, and have detailed what your brand promises are, it is time to find ways to show those promises.

This is where video comes in. People will only believe words for so long, but show them something tangible and real that proves those words -- now that is powerful. In this case, you are looking at creating what we affectionately call a “Claims We Make” style video (number 7 in this list).

Show people your brand in an authentic and honest way, instead of just telling them about it, and I promise they’ll love you for it.

Final Thoughts

If I can leave you with one thing, it should be this: building your brand strategy isn’t the finish line, it is just the starting line.

Once you’ve finished creating that fantastic messaging strategy, go make sure it is used (and used well), otherwise you’ve just wasted a lot of time, effort and money. And who wants to do that?

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/so-you-created-a-brand-messaging-strategy-now-what

[martechadvisor-blog]

Science-first Customer Marketing Basics with Amit Bivas, Head of Marketing at Optimove

Amit suggests tips for brands to maximize customer lifetime value through meaningful and emotionally intelligent communications. He explains why marketers should embrace AI to help uncover what’s most relevant to their customers and stresses on the need for unified communications across channels for today’s omnichannel customer. Amit enjoys going to food markets to learn marketing 101 from the merchants. When he is not busy executing B2B and B2C marketing strategies from the ground up, Amit binges on bow ties. Amit believes that marketers should be more Don Drapers than Albert Einsteins

Ginger Conlon:

Hello and welcome to MarTech Advisor’s Executive Interview Series. I'm Ginger Conlon, a Contributing Editor to MarTech Advisor and joining us today is Amit Bivas who is Head of Marketing at Optimove. Welcome Amit!

Amit Bivas:     

Thanks for having me, hi, how’s everything going Ginger?

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Great, we’re so glad to have you here to talk about trends and opportunities with marketing automation, especially, on the customer retention side which is a favorite topic of mine. So, Amit, let's briefly introduce Optimove and tell what makes it unique to kick us off.

A- Amit Bivas:

Sure. So, thanks for having me today, I'm more than honored to be with you. Optimove is a science first customer marketing hub and what it does it helps brands communicate with emotionally intelligent with their customers. So, the idea is to maximize customer value by creating very meaningful and emotional intelligent communications with them.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Love that, it's so important to understand your customers and interact with them in that way. So, let's talk about marking automation and customer retention and how that emotional intelligence aspect gets in. So, if you think about it, when it comes to marketing budget there seems to be a never-ending battle between acquisition and retention, both are essential but retention efforts can really lead to added benefits like maximizing spend and increasing lifetime value. So, how can marketers get the most from their retention efforts today, what’s some advice you have?

A- Amit Bivas: 

That's a really good question. We're all familiar with research from Bain and Company from ages ago that the smallest increase in customer retention can bring to huge increases in profit, the number is 25 to 75 percent. I think that it's just not intuitive to invest in retention because who is going to invest in an existing asset that they have, it’s just not intuitive. With that being said, we all know that today the entrance barriers are very low into the digital market.

So, if you want to be a retailer and enter the market, it's fairly easy and then what this leads to is the very first competition in that space and when it comes to competition, in the age of Amazon where you can find anything there,

you do need to justify your existence and one of the main ways to justify that existence is having a very unique standpoint or a very different or standing out brand

The way our customers see it, one of the ways to create that differentiation is fostering those types of conversations that are meaningful and that are in context, it's almost like intimate type of conversations with the customers.

The problem is, doing that at scale and that's where technology comes into play but I think that for most brands it's not intuitive to invest in existing customers. However, we do see that it's a game changer once you decide to invest in it strategically.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Absolutely. It's interesting that you said that technology can help because that reminds me of how much of a hot topic AI has become and I think part of it is for that reason, it can really help you do that personalization at scale. So, where can marketers use it today in their analytics, their segmentation and personalization efforts?

A- Amit Bivas: 

Probably if you search Google Trends for AI, I think in the past year it's booming. Interesting to say it's a term that exists I think since the late 90's and back then it was a big no no to say that because it used to relate to the Terminator type of movie, so people would fear it and then something happened in the last year or two where it became a huge buzzword. The thing with buzzwords is that sometimes they're overused.

So, I think, that today it's overused but let me try to sort out the big hype around it and I think that today if I'm looking at it from an analytic standpoint, AI could help marketers because there's just too much data out there and today you must know how to curate and over analysis leads to paralysis and all that stuff. So, I think that AI could just help you better understand what's relevant, what's less relevant and where to drill down into. So, instead of getting lost in that mess, it will just help you find the valuable points and where to drill down into.

From another standpoint, let's look at segmentation personalization. So, Rome wasn't built in one day, so, when a marketer starts understanding different segments, usually, they won't start with hundreds of segments, they will start with a few segments and then

the idea is to try to understand and fit the best message for that segment or the best method of communication with that segment, AI can help doing that at scale, to help understand exactly which subgroups exist within each segment and which communication will work best for each sub-segment

Am I making sense?

Ginger Conlon:

Yeah, absolutely.

Amit Bivas:     

So, I think that generally it is a big buzzword but in marketing terms it's an enabler, it helps do the marketers job much more easily, understanding which data is insightful and take those insights and translate them into actions and how to further segment and treat your segments better and more accurately.

Ginger Conlon:

Right. So, it sounds like it's important to get past the shiny object syndrome and look at what it actually means in marketing and what it can do for you in terms of better understanding and reaching out to your customers.

Amit Bivas:     

100%.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Excellent. So, another hot topic in marketing is customer experience and I feel like that's quite the buzzword as well, but I also feel like marketers can use marketing automation to positively impact the customer experience, even from the point where customers are still prospects. So, what's some advice you have in terms of using marketing automation to make a positive impact on customer experience?

A- Amit Bivas: 

I think that's a really good question. As you said, CX, customer experience is another big buzzword. I think that in terms of marketing automation impacting the customer experience more than anything it's creating a unified communication across multiple channels. So, everyone's talking about that big problem today, customers are omnichannel, they're everywhere and I think that

if a brand is able to engage a unified conversation across multiple channels that's a huge advantage and obviously technology is a key enabler here

I think that also another very important aspect is the speed, customers change very quickly and marketers must move at the speed of their customers. So, in that sense they have to be agile and obviously technology is an enabler for that agility and

I think that more than anything it's minimizing the time frame between ideation to execution

Usually a marketer thinks about a campaign, it takes him or her a week or two to execute, so, we’re trying to minimize that gap because once it's smaller, marketers are much more agile and they are able to move at the speed of their customers and obviously, automation technology is key for that.

Generally speaking, I think, there are a lot of challenges in using marketing automation but then again, if a marketer embraces change and they're able to adopt new technologies and do it successfully, a good marketing technology is an enabler, so, choose the right technology and make sure to embrace change.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Absolutely. So, one of the things that you said was that marketing automation has its challenges, as does any type of technology. But since you are an expert in marketing technology, what's some advice you could share on what's one challenge that you see coming up maybe a little bit too often in terms of using marketing automation and how can marketers overcome that challenge?

A- Amit Bivas: 

My background is industrial engineering and somehow, I found myself in marketing. As an industrial engineer, what we do is streamline processes and optimize them and I think that when you take a new technology and implement it in an organization, number one is that usually you have to embrace change in order to successfully adopt the technology.

So,

I think that successful adoption, first of all embracing change and understanding that yes, this new technology is here to make my life easier and enable me to do my job better is the first stage

and usually, especially with a lot of AI, people fear of losing their jobs, people fear from a lot of different things that this technology would do to them and once you're able to make the point where this technology is here to help you do your job better then that's exactly the game changer because most of the integration projects fail on adoption, people don't believe in the technology, don't embrace change, don't want to take it and then it fails.

Another thing that I also want to address here is that Rome wasn't built in a day, and I already said this, but, I think that people sometimes expect when they take on a new technology it's going to be a miracle, it's going to generate miracles, it's not like that. Change starts from small steps and it's an iterative process. So, start small, don't expect miracles, work hard and the technology will work for you. People in technology work together for a greater meaning, so, just understand that relationship between yourself and the technology and it's like a very 30,000 feet statement, but, I think that having that paradigm shift would help utilize technology for your benefit.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

That's such great advice. Think about back 10 and 15 years ago when CRM technology was the hot topic and all the buzz and too many people thought that they could flip the switch and all of a sudden their customer relationships and their cells, processes, would be perfect and improved and like you said, it's not how it works, you've got to have your strategy first and then baby steps, start with one use case and then add and add as you get your successes. So, great advice.

So, speaking of processes, one of the great things about marketing automation is that it can bring all kinds of efficiencies to marketing processes. So, what opportunities do you see in terms of marketers using technology to improve maybe some specific processes, perhaps blending art and science more effectively and as a result increase their performance?

A- Amit Bivas: 

That's a great question and I'll try to address this from two different angles. One angle is, and I touched this point, is shortening ideation to execution. Marketers have to move at the speed of their customers and once the process from ideation to execution is minimized you're able to be so much more creative, you’re able to offer your customers such a much better experience, we’re talking about orders of magnitude, we're talking about initiating of campaigns in a few hours, so, think about how much more agile and quick the marketers are or that brand is. So, that's one point.

Another point which takes me to the end of the 90’s and the 1990’s was where digital marketing was born. Email was presented for the first time as something that the people started using and then email marketing started and the whole era of digital marketing started to ramp up. Up until that point, a marketer was a Don Draper, a creative freak, they used that right hand side of their brain much more than the left hand side and then at some point when digital was presented, so, the definition of the marketer or the role of the marketer shifted towards an Albert Einstein and marketers are expected to be somehow scientists or artists like hipster scientists, god knows what, and that doesn't necessarily work and I think that streamlining that process of ideation to execution helps the marketer become a Don Draper again.

The natural marketer is a Don Draper, it's a creative freak, let the technology take care of the science and the marketer be able to shine with his creativity

So, I think that processes that are streamlined correctly and that shortened ideation to execution enabled the marketer to flourish from the right side of his brain which they're probably more talented in using.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

That’s excellent, thank you. So, let's wrap up with a look forward, what's coming up that you're excited about in two areas. One is, is there a trend or a tool that's coming out that you’re really excited about and on the other side, anything within Optimove, any new features or upgrades we should know about?

A- Amit Bivas: 

Future, a prophecy is always something nice to deal with. I think that what we're seeing mostly now, and we already spoke about this earlier, is that more and more companies and more and more brands are understanding the importance of investing in retention and customer marketing, CRM, it's not intuitive because why would you invest in your existing assets, they're already there, they're already generating revenues, so, why would you invest in them, but more and more brands are understanding why this is so important.

I think that in terms of the future we're going to see more and more budgets taken from acquisition or acquisition and retention ratio will balance out. So, the competition is fierce, more and more brands are out, Amazon and Apple and Google are swallowing all the small fish and then the brands that will exist this big World War III, if you will, will be the ones that are able to be unique and create meaningful interactions with their customers and with emphasis on their customers we're talking about technologies that will be able to create those type of communications, that’s from a market standpoint.

From Optimove, we're definitely going that way, that's our belief on how the market will look moving forward and that's what we're going towards. I think that more than anything, in terms of Optimove, we look at fostering those emotionally intelligent communications with customers, but, the focus on the customer is something that's debatable and the definition of customer is something debatable. When does a customer start to be a customer, so, when does CRM even start and our future plans or future releases, without being too specific because this is still undercover in a sense or still under the radar, is redefining the term customer, when does a customer start being a customer and when do you start treating him with your CRM strategies.

Ginger Conlon:

I like that, my interest is piqued to see how you're going to define or redefine customer coming up. So, Amit, thank you so much for all the great information and insight and advice and I want to thank everyone who joined us on the video today and say that Amit and I had another great conversation about the skills that you need to succeed in marketing today, so, be sure to check out that video and also check out MarTech Advisor’s YouTube channel for more Executive Interviews and thank you so much for being here.

Amit Bivas:     

Thanks Ginger.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor