SNM213: How to Make Marketing Human Again with Jurgen Strauss

0:00 And what I've seen is, a lot of people that had businesses that were reliant on in-person training rooms, or in-person speaking have been really hit hard initially, and they're all looking to pivot their programs. And as they pivot their programs to online, they suddenly realized that, Hey, I've got access now to a much bigger audience. Hello, everyone. I'm so excited to have you guys here for a very special episode of the Serve No Master Podcast. We have an amazing interview with Jurgen

1:21 Strauss and he's someone who's amazing. He's the founder and chief innovator in InovaBiz. He's passionate about helping businesses achieve exceptional results through innovation and modern human marketing. As the host of the InnovaBiz Innovation Podcast, your gut has been privileged to interview entrepreneurs from all around the world. And we're certainly having an international interview right now. He's also a mentor for the largest global community of websites and digital marketing consultants. And prior to founding InnovaBiz, he worked in the science and chemical industries, leading large global multinational

1:49 teams across Asia, Europe, Indian, north America, and even Australia. He spent years at the intersection of technology science, who behavior marketing and business management. You're going to use this as considerable skills and talents as specialized in innovative digital strategy marketing, particularly making marketing more human again in online marketing and lead generation strategies, as well as the podcast development and project management. Wow. That's a whole mouth that you've got so many things you've accomplished, but the thing I want to dial into

2:14 is: you called making marketing more human again, and that's interests me. Cause when I first decided to work at online businesses, I said, you know what, I'm never going to speak to another human again. I'm done. I'm going to do it all online. It's going to be magical. And I started my business in my mom's basement and I was like, I'm never leaving. I got fired from my last job. I never want experienced this again. And it turns out it's not really

2:35 possible, even though I'm working online it is a lot about human connection. So, tell us exactly what you mean by making it human again? Yeah, that's exactly right, Jonathan. It is about human connections. First of all, let me say, it's a privilege to be on this show with you and share some thoughts and hopefully a meaningful conversation with your audience. But yeah, coming back to making marketing human, again, it is very much about human connection and relationships and that's the key to everything around

3:07 business and marketing in my mind. So, when technology came along, there was this tendency, particularly for us that are a little bit introverted that perhaps feel intimidated by going along to a large networking events and having to speak to total strangers. We were all brought up to say don't talk to strangers. It could be dangerous. So, we still carry that in our unconscious mind. But the key thing to remember is that if you have a service or a product that you're wanting to sell

3:38 to somebody else, it really is the human connection that is first and foremost in all of that interaction. And in this day of modern technology, we can use technology to have these human connections like we're doing now. And that's where I think the things have gotten a little bit derailed with modern technology. We have things like automated email marketing systems and various other automated tools. And people think that they can abdicate all the relationship building to those tools. Whereas what I encourage everyone to

4:14 do is use those tools to free up your time from the mundane, repetitive tasks and allow yourself to spend that time you gain on building and deepening those human relationships again. I think that's really good because a lot of times, especially as you get a larger following, it moves and people start to become statistics. You start to think about what percentage of people open an email, what percentage of people clicked something? And you only look at like total numbers or stats and you stop thinking about,

4:48 if I'm selling a product, whether it's $7 or 7,000, this is a person making a real decision with real money. That's really gonna affect their lives. And it does become easy to and personalize or depersonalize your audience, especially once you get to a certain point where it's hard to reply to every email you get every day, I'm still at the point where I can reply to everyone individually. And that is really where we start to form the connection, because otherwise

5:12 you forget who's who or you forget what people and different things. Okay, this is my main demographic. This is my secondary demographic and use words like psychographics. And you look at people's interests, but it is easy to forget there's no group listening to this podcast. It's all individuals who have their own lives and hopes and dreams. And it becomes almost sometimes like a guessing game, like trying to guess what they want or what the majority of them want. And sometimes I get emails from people

5:38 like, oh Jonathan, I didn't like the last thing you emailed about. And I'm like, it's very hard to please everyone. So, I say, some people like that and some people didn't and you don't have to like every email. Overall there's enough messages or nothings I teach about that you find interesting. And it is, you're exactly right. I meet a lot of people who have much bigger followings. One of my friends is following is literally 100 times the size of mine.

6:04 And yet I get almost as many clicks in my emails or almost as many responses. And that's because he really has such a big audience that they're totally depersonalized. And so very few of them respond. That's the thing. I always say, people always say, oh, I want to have these really cool email templates. I don't want to email it just like Amazon or email, just like E-bay. I'm like no one likes them. No one is friends with Amazon. When people buy from me it's

6:26 because they like Jonathan. And I think that connection is so important. And that's why it's unfortunate that sometimes you want to get to the level where they depersonalize. It decreases your response rate or your connection so much that your sales plummet and you have to get 10 times or a hundred times where people follow you even to do that, even to catch up to where you were, when you had a personal connection. You seem to use a different marketing framework than other people.

6:53 And I'm interested in learning about that. How do you see marketing compared to a lot of the other agencies out there that are just like, we run Facebook ads, we do demographics and we get you a certain number of opt-ins that we charge this much money? It's so depersonalized, are you doing something different? Yeah. There's a lot to unpack in what you've said there and, the first thing in my mind is to transform the mindset from selling a product or a service to taking

7:18 your ideal dream client from their problem state or their before state, we call it, which is where they've got a problem that you have something that can solve that problem to their after state. So, it's not about selling them the thing that will solve their problem. It's about actually solving the problem. Helping them enabling them to solve the problem. So, that's a little bit subtle, but it is quite a dramatic change in mindset. And then if you, in the example you

7:46 gave where somebody comes back to you and says No, I didn't really resonate with that last email you sent. That's an opportunity to get some feedback and to learn more about your audience. That doesn't mean to say you have to have a one-on-one conversation with everyone if you've got a large number, but again, if you focus on deepening relationships with the audience, with the ideal client, that your targeting, rather than just building up a really large list for your email list.

8:18 That's again, a very subtle shift. We've got a 12-step marketing framework that is predicated on those. Philosophies. And it's also focused around the concept of a journey, a customer journey. It's based on a little bit, the hero's journey, the monomyth by Joseph Campbell and the variant that Jonathan Vogel put on that, which is a 12-step hero's journey. He did a lot of studies around, how movies and stories were created based on the work of Campbell. And we take that and we say,

8:54 the business and the customer of that business are essentially going on this journey together. And the journey starts with the business being really clear about who they are, why they're in business and then, what they actually do and who they do it for. And then going through the various customer journeys, because, there's been a lot of work done recently and a lot of articles published by Google, people at Google. If you check out think with Google, there's lots of really great articles

9:27 that are about how convoluted the customer journey is these days that it's not just a linear thing. There's the funnel theory of marketing, which, I have a problem with anyway, because it's not leads and so on its people and the funnel is very linear. Whereas the customer journey is actually much more complex than that. If you try to break it down into a simple framework, what we look at it is there's at least four types of customer journeys. So, there's people that kind of,

9:55 they don't know anything about you. They discover you and they say, no. That's not for me. So, they leave again. So, that's one customer journey. There's people that come into that journey. And so, this looks interesting. I want to know more. So, they're looking for information. There's people that come in and immediately resonate with what you have though. They say, this is exactly the problem. I have. You have the solution for me. So, tell me more, how can I buy? So, they're ready to buy.

10:25 And then there's people. I'm not ready to buy, but they do what you do. So, they say. Follow you. Can I jump into a community that you run? Can I get on your email list? So, there's four different journeys there in four different people. Now, most automated systems then are set up in a way that those four people will all get the same email. That'll all get the same responses and yet they're in different parts of that journey. So, it really is important.

10:54 You can set up automated email systems, but you set them up in a way that you segment people according to where they are in their journey and you meet them where they are on their journey, so that the people that want more information, you give them the information that you're prepared to share without charge. And that information needs to be focused again as I said at the beginning, the mindset of helping them or enabling them to solve their problem, to reach their goals, whether they

11:23 ended up becoming a customer or not. And then the other, the third kind of segment of our 12-step framework, the four steps are all about after the sale. So, a lot of the marketing programs out there, they get to the nice eye beauty, that's it we're done. But at that point, if you think of a book you've bought or you think of a training program you've purchased. How many of those have you then put on the bookshelf or filed away in your hard drive

11:56 without having completed them and without having achieved the result that program promised you and not because there was something wrong with the program, simply because you haven't actually followed through, something else has come up. Your attention has been diverted to something else now. Imagine if those books or those training programs had a follow up program. They held you accountable, they provided you more assistance and more information after they've had the sale as part of the whole program to take you to

12:26 the goal that you want to achieve. So, that's part of marketing in my mind, the next step. And then once you've satisfied that customer, there's two other things that are really important as marketing I think, and that's turning those people into raving fans. They've now had a great experience with you. So, they're your biggest marketing assets right now, they're going to go and tell people what a wonderful experience we've had. We've achieved this goal with the help of this product or service.

12:56 And the other part of course, is as you grow your business and have more things to offer, they're your ideal clients. They already love and trust you. So, they're the first people you should be offering that to. Whereas, most companies that I see, they offer specials to new customers. They're focused on getting new customers on board and the typical one is here's a special deal but it's only for new customers, so they even penalize existing customers. So, to me, that's all part of the marketing journey.

13:29 And then of course we talk about how do you scale the entire process, the entire journey. How do you take that and grow your business by just repeating the same processes and systems tightening up your systems as part of that? Yeah, I think what you said is really interesting. Cause that happened to me last week I was using the software. And they said, oh, you only get access to the special upgrade. If you're a new customer, I said, cool, close my account.

13:56 And I just opened the new account with a different email address, and took that because I wanted that additional help with the setup, with the software tool, they go, oh, we'll help you set it up if you're a brand-new customer, I was like, oh, because I tried it a few years ago I don't get that. No, thanks. And now I haven't set up on a different email address, which is annoying. Eventually I'll switch it back right to my main email.

14:14 But I do find it interesting that people are always ignoring their existing customers when that really is where the best businesses that's where the relationship is. And then I know you talk about something that's called transformational marketing. And I'm interested in that idea because we often, I know for me, especially that it is hard to keep track of where everyone is on their journey and to meet people where they are sometimes. Especially because sometimes you don't know, like trying to find out where

14:40 people are and trying to keep people unless they respond to my emails. I have so many issues, like many of my friends, like how do I get people to go through the course once they bought it. And we try all of these techniques with whether it's gamification and badges or sending follow-up emails, or even having a phone call. And sometimes people, even who buy my most expensive products, they're like not answering the phone. They won't answer their emails. So, I am curious how we can take

15:01 someone on a transformational journey when it's so challenging for me, I'd love to get better at that. Yeah. That's definitely a challenge for everyone. And it comes back a little bit too, there's so much noise out there on the internet. And the idea of the transformation comes back to what we call the actual process or the whole journey. So, if you think of the focus on delivering an outcome for the customer, delivering their desired result, transforming them basically from where

15:35 they are now, there'd be four states with the problem that you have something that will help them self to the after state, which is, their problem solved. They never have that problem again. And they know, in fact, if it's something that comes up again and again, they know how to deal with it in future without your help, because you've taught them something or you've given them a tool. So, that's the idea of the transformation. Now in terms of how do you keep people

15:59 engaged and keep them accountable and help them along the way? Again, everybody's going to be different. So, everybody's at a different place in their journey once they buy your product, or let's say a training program, they're all in different places as well. And I know I'm thinking of any experience I'm having right now, where I'm in a fairly large training program. It's an awesome program. Massive value and I'm getting great value out of it, but I'm not progressing through it at a right.

16:32 I want, and I'm sure that the person that's provided it to me, who very much has this philosophy of helping me achieve my goal is probably frustrated that I'm not more engaged and progressing more rapidly. And that comes back to, I've got so many other things going on. And so, I just deprioritize this a little bit. What I've seen people doing really, it's it comes back to that human engagement. So, having conversations with people and this doesn't need to be one-on-one in those instances with training

17:01 programs, it could be a webinar with the whole cohort going through that training, if it's a time training. So, you might have a cohort going through that started a month ago. And so, you have regular conferences or webinars with those people, or just zoom calls that you kind of part and people up as accountability buddies, you engage people by, what are the problems that are common here. And then you try to address those problems from your point of view, but

17:33 you also engage with the community to help one another solve those problems. Because what I find in some of the examples that I've been involved in that were really good. Yeah, this has happened to me. I've gone on there and I've given advice to other people in the program and I've been a trainee of that program. And then I turn the mirror on myself and reflect back and I think that's great advice. I should take that myself. You can have these community events,

17:56 if you like, where people will actually help themselves by helping others. And if you structure that in the right way, you start to get some engagement where people perhaps are reluctant to engage one-on-one, reply to emails or so on because they're perhaps afraid to put up their hand. And like me say I've been slow on this program. I haven't done my homework that we agreed to last week or whatever it might be. Whereas in these group things, if you set up an environment,

18:30 it's safe to ask questions here. It's okay. Put your hand up and say I haven't actually done the last module like we agreed on, because there's a whole lot of other things going on in my life, but how can we support you? How can we support you to get to the result again, focused on, we want to get you to the result, the goal that you're wanting to achieve with our program? That's really powerful because I'm always working on community ideas and connection and letting

18:56 people know that it's okay to say that they are a little bit behind and not feel bad is really good. When I go through courses, I never do the live version. So, I went through a course. I was really excited by it. I said, I want to do the live version. I want to be able to watch the videos at 1.5 speed because I'm so busy. I got three kids. The wife is pregnant. I already run a big business. I'm working all the time,

19:17 but I do want to learn this. I do learn in my own way. And I know some people learn that. So even though I watch, I said, whenever someone's oh, we're doing a live training. I'm like, oh no. Cause I'm not going to be there at a certain time. And because I live in a different time zone, there is always a challenge, but there is so much more connection. Whenever I teach a lesson live, it always becomes something different because I get so much feedback

19:35 and I go, oh, people are stuck. Not where I thought they would be. So, I love to know. In my programs where a lot of people get stuck, cause then I can change or fix it or figure out how to overcome that hurdle. So, I definitely think that's really powerful. And also, it's interesting cause we're going through such a massive worldwide kind of business change where everyone's trapped at home. I was actually not allowed to leave my garden for three months, even

19:57 though I haven't had a single stick person on my island, they still locked up one of their houses. I said, but no one is sick. And, they go door to door, take everyone's temperature. I'm like, yeah, but we've been here for six months. You don't allow anyone to leave the island. No one's sick, but we still have restrictions everywhere. Even if you live the smallest place in the world or the most populous city, how have you seen marketing and online marketing,

20:16 especially change as more and more people are at home, more and more people are using zoom, just like we are right now. How has that market shifted and how is it going to impact how we do business this year and going forward? Yeah. That's a great question. And certainly, we're experiencing a massive second wave here and we're just going back into a more serious lockdown. So, the face masks are now compulsory and no visitors allowed in the house. So, that's pretty drastic.

20:47 And of course, Places a pretty strong restriction on in-person business. What I've seen is, a lot of people that had businesses that were reliant on in-person training rooms, or in-person speaking have been really hit hard initially, and they're all looking to pivot their programs and as they pivot their programs to online, they suddenly realized that, Hey, I've got access now to a much bigger audience. All of a sudden, we're doing this halfway across the world, we're in a similar

21:18 time zone, but a lot of my podcast, I speak to people in the US or there's no restriction doesn't matter where they are. We just have to get the time zones, right? And so, this is not possibilities for people that weren't used to working online. What I'm seeing happening as a result of that is all of a sudden my inbox is being filled up with, oh, we're running this webinar tomorrow morning. Jump on it this time, here's the link. Or we're running this free training.

21:43 Here's the link. So, everybody, all of a sudden, is sending out mass emails with their offers of live events. And the other thing of course that's happening. And this is in some ways is a positive because I'm attending Podthon this year, which was scheduled to be in Dallas, Texas in October. And now they've turned it into a virtual event. I wasn't planning to go to Dallas, Texas this year in October. I hadn't budgeted for that, but I've always wanted to go to Podthon.

22:14 So, when it went virtual, I said that's it, I'm in, it makes it really easy for me. The bottom line from people trying to get their message out there is that it's gotten much noiser now because all of a sudden there's a lot more people now putting out offers that involve jumping into a virtual event. So, what that means for every marketer, I think is you've got to find ways to stand out from that noise. And again, I say, the first thing to do

22:42 there is really understand who your dream clients are, who your ideal audience is. And just deepen the relationship with that audience, because if you have a really strong relationship, a deep relationship with your core audience, then when you send an email to their inbox, they'll be looking at your email, even though it's in amongst a thousand other emails. But because of that relationship, they'll be looking at that. And the other thing I think is really important and we're seeing some really

23:18 great examples of this, but we're also seeing really bad examples is doing the right thing by people now. And having some empathy with people. So, some people are losing their jobs. Some businesses are suddenly finding their cash flows dried up. If there's ways to help those people, I've had customers that have had cash flow dry up. And so I've said let's put the program on hold. That you're doing now. I'll continue to support your, in fact, you can stay in the program

23:45 and you can catch up on the payments when COVID is over and your revenues back to some sense of normality. And to me, that is the right thing to do, because if I were in that position, I liked to think that my suppliers did that for me. There's examples of people that have done that. For example, there's a coffee shop in, I think it's San Francisco might be Los Angeles though that, and it's an Australian that runs this coffee shop. That's why I was alerted or

24:11 I've paid attention to it. And instead of closing down and instead of charging for the coffee, they basically kept all later employees on. They did take away coffees, but delivered them to all the businesses and particularly to the healthcare workers that were in an area where there were a lot of healthcare facilities. So, they delivered that coffee a couple of times a day for free. Just for you, thanks for doing what you're doing to help. And I thought that's a great example.

24:42 There's a cost to that, obviously, but after the pandemic, if they're geographically located in that area, where would those people go to get their coffee? That, the loyalty that builds up is just so strong. So, it's putting those investments into long-term relationships by just doing the right thing by people. Which to me is human marketing again. Yeah. I think that as people start to shift to the corporate mindset, they often forget the value of good will. Whether you call it good will or positive

25:13 energy or karma, like I've always found. And definitely it's a core tenant of my business is that giving is one of those powerful ways to form a relationship like over-giving over delivering is how you can start to separate yourself from the noise because so many people's idea is let me give the bare minimum. And then I've always believed, let me give as much as I can, because then I'll be the person that when they're ready to make a purchase, when they're

25:39 ready to go to the next level, I'm the one who's given them so much value. And so that's why I do this podcast. That's why I do Facebook lives every day. That's why I put out so much content and blog posts content. I was putting out more and more free content because you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. And yet it's amazing how many businesses are like, we just had an issue now, actually they cut off one of our internet connection.

26:01 Because they go, oh, you didn't make the last payment. No, we sent them the receipt yesterday, proving that we'd sent it right. They're like, oh, we'll check within 24 hours to get back to you. I'm like, guess what? I don't want to do businesses with you guys anymore. You made a mistake. And especially right now, and it's the same thing. All these, there's all these people that are just being really miserly are really tough right now on everyone. And it's like, all you're doing is

26:18 building up a lot of ill will and that's not a really good model. They forget that chasing a penny today can cost you dollars in the future. I think this has been an amazing presentation. I did want to ask you one last thing. You have a podcast called Tales of Marketing Transformation. I'd love to hear a little bit about that as we wind down this amazing. interview. Yeah. It tells the marketing transformation is all about, the whole philosophy of

26:42 what we talked about, but what I do there, and I'm challenging myself a little bit to use stories and metaphor to explain principles around marketing. So, I talk a lot about personal experiences I've had, and they may be personal experiences that are totally unrelated to business. Like I talk quite a bit about my photography or my bicycle riding passion. They're my two kind of non-business passions and I relate experiences or stories I have there, or it might be a business experience.

27:13 And then use that to illustrate a lesson as part of this whole transformational marketing. So, it might be, for example, I did one recently on customer experience and I talked about focusing on doing the right thing at every touch point with a customer, because and these are contrasted two experiences I had with two different companies where I was an existing customer I'd purchase products, and I was using the product. I had issues in both cases, there was a product failure and the experiences

27:45 that I had in getting the product repaired were chalk and cheese. And I contrast those. And then I talked about the entire customer experience and every touch point that we have with the customer, how that either can create a heightened level of certainty, or of loyalty, like your example of the internet service provider. That experience, that one touch point, if you like, took away from the trust bank account, whereas it would have been very easy to actually contribute to the trust bank account.

28:18 It wouldn't have cost them much to say, Jonathan, we made a mistake. We're going to credit you one month, one month service to compensate for that mistake. That would have cost them effectively, nothing. And yet it would have turned you into a loyal fan. So, I talk about those kinds of things in tales of marketing transformation, where I take a real-life experience like that one, generally ones that I've experienced personally. Talk about my emotions and feelings that I have coming out of that experience and

28:49 then relate that back to a marketing. So, that's, and I'm finding that quite challenging in many ways, because coming up with that connection, connecting those dots is something that I'm learning by doing this and also doing a solo episode. I'm finding it quite easy to have a conversation like this on my other podcast, where I have people on as guests like you do. A solo podcast is quite a different challenge. So, it's in one way, it's a growth thing for me, but hopefully I'm actually

29:18 contributing to my listeners as well. That's really fascinating to me because this is primarily a solo podcast out of 220 or so episodes. There's only 10 interviews, we're trying to add this, but these are the challenge for me because. There's always a tech issue. That's why I'm in the garden today. That's why the water pump went off. The dog started barking. This it's almost like if there's no one there for me to like annoy, I'm always afraid that the zoom won't

29:39 start, the internet will go out. Cause the internet goes out all the time here right now. The Internet's out. That's why I'm on my cell phone. Cause the main internet conks out, it's only works a couple hours a day right now. It's a fun season. And last night we had no power for six hours. So, it's interesting. You're having the opposite challenge, but it is a good. Learn something, master something and teach it to get to that highest level. So, by doing and teaching, it's

30:00 definitely helped me to expand my wings as I try new things. Where can people connect with you? It's on tilesofmarketingtransformation.com. So, it's pretty simple. The website's there and it's got all the episodes and blog posts there associated with it. And then my main website is Innovabiz.com I N N O V A B I Z.com.eu. And that's got the Inova Biz podcast. Perfect. Thank you so much for being here Jurgen, we really appreciate you adapting to my surprise garden situation. Thank you so much for being here.

30:35 Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, it was wonderful to have you. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy today's episode. As much as I do, copywriting is a passion of mine and getting started. Doesn't have to cost a penny. I've put together a collection of some of the greatest ads of all time. And some exercises to get you started. You can get my Ultimate Swipe File right now @servenomaster.com/ultimate.