How to Best Approach Marketing with C-Suite with Aaron Aigus

James Lawrence: I'm joined today by Aaron Agius. Welcome to the pod. 

Aaron Aigus: Thanks for having me. 

James Lawrence: So Aaron is a contributor to Search Engine Land social media today as well as HubSpot. He's a member of the Forbes Council and contributes to the Content Marketing Institute. When he's not busy in those roles, he's also co-founder and managing director of global marketing agency, Lounder Online. As MD of Louder Online, he has worked with a range of brands including Kellogg's, Volvo, Unilever, VMware, Lendlease, Facebook, Tony and Guy… the list goes on, Aaron!

James Lawrence: We've known each other for a long time and I wanted to get you onto the pod. Essentially, we've both been in this industry for a long time. We've worked with small brands. We work with big brands. You're currently in Singapore? I'm still in Sydney, but I think collectively we've got (showing our age a bit) around 40 years of experience working with in-house marketing teams, working with business owners, C-suite, and I think also observing the dynamics between those two teams within businesses. So, I think just a discussion around what the best performing marketers do in terms of managing internal stakeholders, how to deal with C-suite boards, etc.. Let's just keep it fluid and look at our observations. And because we've probably got some, some similar perspectives, but also hopefully some different ones as well. So yeah, I think, Aaron, just to you first, general observations around the dynamics of C-suite and/or business owners with in-house marketers from your experience? 

Aaron Aigus: Yeah, I often see I wouldn't say friction, but a definite gap between marketing and the C-suite. Now we're sort of mentioned before, but they are much more sort of tied in with sales than marketing and not seeing the gap that exists there and the requirement on marketing to actually feed sales in the first place. Typically, from our experience anyway, I see that's because of old school heads of businesses that have been driven from direct sales and that kind of thing as opposed to what exists now, which is, you know, multi-touch point environment, an online multi-channel digital approach that needs to be fed and funnelled in the right way through to a sales team before it can actually get to a point of revenue. 

James Lawrence: Yeah. Great. 

Aaron Aigus: Just that gap, and essentially that the topic of this conversation is, is figuring out how to bridge that gap in an effective manner, which we've seen quite a few ways that have been successful and many that aren't. I feel like at least for a bunch of years, till that group of owners or C-suite transition out and newer ones are progressing up the ladder, We're still going to see a bunch of this friction and a bunch of those problems exist. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, great. I was at a conference years ago, and the analogy was in the seventies and eighties you're selling insurance door to door or you're selling a car. Someone comes into the dealership, the salesperson has the control, right? You've got the collateral, you've got the information, and you go to a consumer and go, well, here it is. We know it's different with digital. Google's research - 900 touchpoints before you go into the dealership to purchase a car - the consumer has a lot of control around the buyer journey. And the role of sales is therefore different. And I think you're right. I think you see this kind of legacy approach to the consumer journey is often C-suite managing directors board level and that is the source of the friction. What do you say the marketers that you've worked with over the last 15 to 20 years, what are the things that they're doing to kind of try to educate or bring on the journey, the C-suite? 

Aaron Aigus: Yeah, well, I think you hit the nail on the head. Education, internal education, which is still tough because you're educating something people these kind of people aren't really akin to and have no real exposure to. And I think that's the other side of the coin as well, is that if you want to be effective and get your message across and convince and persuade the C-suite, the big part of that is understanding what success is to them. And success to them is driving real numbers and KPIs and value, not the how of what you're doing necessarily. So it's cool if I have to explain how we're doing what we're doing. Keep it really simple, really basic, but you tie it into hard core numbers that are going to actually be meaningful to the team. That is how they win. So that is how you have to deliver whatever convincing message you're delivering. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, I was kind of jotting down some of my own thoughts on this before the pod and the number one thing for me is often it's just alignment, which is success looks like X. I think marketers that are down at the tactic level and talking tactics and impressions and posts and whatever, you're missing the point because the reality is that your boss or the board doesn't actually care. They're trying to hit a quarterly or an annual target and you need to look at that number first and go, Well, actually, with the budget I've got and with the current state of play, I feel we can do that. And if you can't, you've got to set expectation immediately, right? 

Aaron Aigus: Yeah. And a big part of that is that during those conversations, understanding what success is - what do they want to say, what's the goal? But using the exact same language and vernacular and echoing how they are talking about the goals and the achievements in your own presentation to them and in your own discussions with them. So you're speaking their language. Like you said, they're not going to care about impressions and clicks and all the other stuff that comes with it. They're going to care about what success is to them. So I think, you know, it's kind of sales 101 - empathise and understand and mirror back to the language, the vanacula that they're using as well. 

James Lawrence: Something I wanted to dig into is the classic - we're falling short of our quarterly sales targets. Sales is doing their thing. It's an absolute generalisation, but I think often the head of sales, senior sales people within organisations have the ear of C-suite MDs more than marketing, not always, but in my experience. It's probably 70/30 or 80/20, I don't know. What happens to us is clients will come to us - we’ve got great news. We've got this budget approved for a massive campaign, a burst because sales aren't quite there, and we've got to run for three months and these are the sales targets you need to hit. And you'll look into and you go, hang on. It's a complex B2B transaction. It's a it's a 24 month, 36 month, you know, lead time to generally go from first touch to purchase. You just not naturally going to generate the leads. So just tapping into, I think, misconceptions around sales or C-suite expectations around marketing and how to deal with that. 

Aaron Aigus: I wish I had good answers on that one. I see the exact same thing and you know, trying to manage evergreen always on campaigns versus quick bursts. It just it doesn't operate that way. It never operates that way that you're going to get the results in that short period of time. And again, it's just an upwards education process to get to that point and to continue to continually push the agenda of evergreen campaigns so you don't get in these situations. Yeah, I completely agree. There is a gap that, again, always exists between we need this by January because January is, our big month, where are we at, and here is a bunch of money to throw at it and marketing just doesn't work that way. 

James Lawrence: Yeah. Yeah that's right. 

Aaron Aigus: Yeah. Because of the complexities of your commercial intent keywords that you're targeting, unless let’s say you’re doing ad campaigns, they're going to improve based on the fact that you’re putting more spend towards branding. Branding can’t be done in a short period of time only, and that's trying to hit all these touch points over time and work them down a funnel. And it's just not realistic. But that has to be explained in a way that makes sense to these guys. Often a theme that's often considered rather abstract, like branding, and the impact on sales to someone in the C-suite is quite tough. That's quite the challenge. 

James Lawrence: Let's go down that rabbit hole, because I think we'll be in agreement on this. We've known each other for 30 years. Like, bizarrely, we went to school together. But I remember we caught up. We hadn't seen each other after leaving school and we bumped into each other at a game of soccer. And I thought, What are you doing here? Like, I'm running a marketing agency. And I was like, me too. But we've come like, we have come at this from a performance viewpoint where everything for me was dollar in dollar out - Google ads, SEO, quick turnaround. We were selling against Yellow Pages and against offline advertising where it wasn't measurable. In my experience it was very much, we would look at a kind of branding agency and above-the-line stuff and go, it's complete B.S. You know, they're just hiding behind results. And I've come around on that now, which is that's actually not right. Like our best-performing campaigns for clients in any space of any degree of complexity have brand campaigns. And I'm not talking about clicking on a brand name in Google. I'm talking about brand-building activities, content marketing, top-of-the-funnel, SEO, and long-term SEO, not talking about, you know, bottom-of-the-funnel type queries. The clients that have those campaigns running well are the ones that actually then have demand gen working. And is that echoing your experience? 

Aaron Aigus: 100%. But it has to be happening at the same time. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, exactly. 

Aaron Aigus: We experience that firsthand in our agency. And you know, while it's not exactly the topic that you're discussing, I'll explain how we experienced that. So initially when we started our agency, we were very, again, dollar in - dollar out. We needed for our own business, we needed to be able to get clients. We needed to get a return for any marketing that we were going to be doing to attract those clients. And we were getting to a point where we're really good at what we're doing, which is content marketing at the core of what we were doing. We knew that we were better than most people out there. We're going up against other companies and losing the pitches and had no clue why we were losing. We've seen their work. We saw that they were doing dodgy stuff. We knew how to beat them and we kept losing until the point where we were like, all right, the reason I think we're losing is two things. One is that someone Googles their name, they've got a footprint, they've got a brand, have got case studies and examples of work everywhere on the Internet. And the other part was that they seem to have flashier decks, nice slides and things that looked better. 

Aaron Aigus: And so both of those are kind of branding in two different ways. And we were like, all right, let's spend a bit of time doing branding. So we jumped on, you know, in your introduction, you said I write here and I write there and all these kind of places. So that for me was like a core thing that we were going to do. How do we do our own branding and content marketing and eat our own dogfood? So started contributing to bottom-tier publications and worked our way up and up and up and been writing for those for years. And the whole point was that if someone Googled my name or the agency name, you'd be able to have a footprint. And examples like you write in Forbes, written up in Fortune magazine and Content Marketing Institute in a bunch of places, there's implied credibility and trust behind that. So that was one avenue that we went down and never stopped. As well as speaking on stage, we wrote a book just like you wrote a book. We did a bunch of these branding exercises. On top of that, we were like, okay, same deck, same inclusions. Let's just pay a designer once off to make it really flash and nice. Like we literally went from closing $60,000 a year deals to million dollar deals. Didn't change anything about our presentation online, our conversations, our sales approach, nothing but pure branding. And for me that was like - pennies dropped. I'm done. I wish I did this from day one, but you just don't have the money to do from day one. So it's a hard balance. 

James Lawrence: Yeah. I think because digital has changed, like digital was the space that you went to to solve a very discrete problem. And we built our agency on Google ads, SEO agency, PPC agency, spend X amount of money, you'd get X amount of leads, you make the sales keep doing it. And we still do that because the bottom-of-the-funnel stuff does exist, but it's not what it was. And the podcast, the book, speaking, similar stuff that both of us do, and it's what works for our clients as well. It's not how to market an agency that's just, that's marketing. And I think for me, business is often run on a quarterly cycle - monthly, quarterly cycle. You got quarterly targets. And it's tempting for C-suite to kind of go, well, marketing is a dollar-in-dollar exercise. I spend 40 grand a month on marketing and these are the outputs. But I think it's fair to say that what we're doing for our clients and what we do for ourselves, you're talking about doing things today which might not yield even an inquiry for 12 months, 24, 36 months. And so I think that is something that marketers are probably starting to get their head around. But then how do they then feed that back through to their reporting line?

Aaron Aigus: Exactly. I mean, I am in the position of the C-suite, not just for our own agency. We own a couple of marketing agencies, a couple of mortgage broking businesses, an education businesses, a few businesses that were involved in at the moment. And my job as not being the marketer in those other businesses, it's a very numbers driven approach anyway. I'm saying the exact same thing that these guys have said to me, I don't care. Find a way. We need these leads during this quarter. We need this sales target. 

James Lawrence: You sound like our nightmare client.

Aaron Aigus: I am, I am a nightmare client myself. And yet I understand the intricacies better than most because I have to deliver on the other side. It's still the way that you kind of need to drive things. You need to be hard line drive, set numbers from the C-suite down. And the sooner that people can talk that language going back up the chain, the sooner that things get solved properly. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, and that's it. I think looking at my most successful clients from an actual revenue profitability viewpoint, the clients we deal with who have just made tremendous money in business, they're ruthlessly numbers driven, right? That which doesn't get measured doesn't get done. You're not going to change that mentality. That's how businesses operate. That's how successful businesses operate. If you're in a Saas scale up, it's going to be all numbers driven. It doesn't actually matter. You need to come on to the journey with them. 

Aaron Aigus: But then nothing matters but the numbers. You're in here for the money. It's great, have a nice impact on people and change lives and all that abstract stuff. But a business is there for commercial intent, commercial reasons. If the numbers don't work and they’re doing everything right, it's pointless. Off the back of that, sales is the only thing that matters in the business. The sales can’t operate without marketing. You can have an absolute terrible product. Your sales and marketing is on point. Yeah, you can run any business. 

James Lawrence: You see it, right? Often the best product is not the one that succeeds, it's the one that's marketed and sold best. 

Aaron Aigus: Exactly. And like I say, we're seeing that. We also run the education business, teaching people how to buy businesses, seven and eight figure businesses, for no money out of pocket. And we're saying the same thing. It's just continually it's sales, operations and finance is all you need. Those pillars running any kind of business and everything that we bring from our experience in our marketing businesses, but also from learning from clients that have they c-suites and how they operate, all gets put into these other businesses as well. It's the same thing again and again. If the numbers aren't there, you're done. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's it. 

Aaron Aigus: So I get it. I empathise with the C-suite and the markets. 

James Lawrence: So my next kind of question is what should you do? You're a marketer. How do you get on the same page as the CEO or the managing director or the board if there is a disconnect between what they're expecting and what the numbers look like with what you can deliver within marketing? 

Aaron Aigus: So what marketing role are we talking about specifically? 

James Lawrence: I think senior marketers, senior in-house marketers. 

Aaron Aigus: Someone who reports directly to the C-suite.

James Lawrence: Yeah. 

Aaron Aigus: I mean, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done based on current numbers, understanding current numbers and what they're delivering, and showing how much it costs to be delivering that. And then looking back at what the C-suite are asking for and saying, well, look, we scale up this. You can see the math doesn't work. We're not going to hit those numbers scaling what we're doing. You want to try new campaigns, new channels, new anything else, you've got to understand - and there's the education piece about branding and about buying data in those channels and failing less and less and less out of time till times positive - speaking their language, proving with data, showing documents and evidence based on current successes and failures that they're seeing. 

James Lawrence: That's right. The two things I'd add to that; one is competition. I think often we'll have a client where they're just not getting the budget they need or something isn't quite working. And it's often pointing to the competition in that industry, in that vertical, will kind of put these up of CEO, MD, board, which is, yeah, you're expecting miracles, but look what the competition's doing because it kind of takes it makes it a bit more objective.

Aaron Aigus: It's huge. Showing estimated budget spends that these guys are spending to dominate those channels, especially ad based stuff. We do the same in SEO as well. What are you mainly buying an SEO? It's technical content and links. We show a number of index pages on your client side and say, look, and here's the guy you're trying to dominate and he's got ten times as much content. What are we doing to bridge that gap? This how much content costs. Same as link profile analysis. You're sitting there with a thousand links and they've got 10 million links and you think you're going to be able to overcome that with this kind of budget? It's not going to happen. 

James Lawrence: The good thing about that is I think also it's objective, like it's numbers. We know they’re numbers that the C-suite are probably not generally across. But to say how come I'm buried on the third page of Google for a key search term? It's like, well, actually, you know, we've got 100 of these types of links and the competition has 7000 and this is the way to do it. And this is the time it's going to take to do it. And until those things have happened, don't come back to me and say why we got the third page of Google. 

Aaron Aigus: Yep. And that's why, you know, I don't know how you do it in your agency, but when sign agreements with companies, we're doing proper broken down cost documents with line items based on technical content and links and broken out further. And so we're able to say that, hey, you're spending 20K a month here. You can see what portion goes to link acquisition, you can see it roughly gets this many links per month. It's going to take you X amount of time unless you increase the budget. 

James Lawrence: Taking a bit of the greyness out. 

Aaron Aigus: Yeah yeah, exactly. Speaking the language, that's it. 

James Lawrence: And the next misconception for me and I suspect you'll say the same thing, which is, you know, we spend 100 grand and we generate a thousand leads. Therefore, if we double our budget with double our leads - not always how it works in terms of the lowest hanging fruit. So maybe just let's discuss that. 

Aaron Aigus: And certainly not in SEO, right?

James Lawrence: *laughs*

Aaron Aigus: It's the super hard channel to manage. Part of it's doing brand exercises or how you're going to manage and measure that. Part of it's going to purely content. And even though it's not going to see results now, it's going to come through later. And there's a range of things that are hard to measure and manage there. But yeah, if you're talking on the ad front, you're sitting there flooding a potential audience that's not large enough or you're showing the frequency of ads to the same people and it's just not impacting on them. You're just not going to scale up in the way you want. And if you did go, okay, cool, then we need to try new audiences, new angles, new books, new creative and copy, then that's great. But you're testing and buying data and failing for a while before it turns around, so you cannot expect the same response. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's it. So speak the language, make it data-driven, numbers-driven, but the numbers that actually, you know, the stakeholders themselves care about. 

Aaron Aigus: How they measure and manage themselves. Yeah, yeah, that's it. 

James Lawrence: I think the piece around expectation setting’s huge. Pushing back, right? That's hard when you're dealing with your boss or someone senior, but otherwise you’re creating a rod for your own back, right? 

Aaron Aigus: It's massive. And interestingly, we find it varies when you're looking at the different countries as well. So a lot of our client base is U.S. based and we find that the US comes a lot more pre-educated and take a lot less convincing to do things and are a lot easier to have expectation set. We found that Australian-based clients, even during the sales process and everything else, takes a lot of educating a lot more saying this is what's going to happen, this is how it's going to happen, this is why this is what to expect. There's a lot more rigour that has to go into it. And it's not because I demand more rigour, it's because I feel like the less educated or just behind the US in many ways. And maybe you'll find if you looked at average ages, perhaps of the C-suite in some of these companies, there could be just a lot of young C-suite, young executives in the C-suite in the US, because coming through Silicon Valley and all that kind of stuff, versus some of the older generation in Australia. I don't know. 

James Lawrence: Interesting. That's an interesting, interesting observation. I always finish the pod by asking what's one piece of advice you'd give to an in-house marketer? The best piece of advice you can give to an in-house marketer - doesn't have to be on this topic can be on anything. 

Aaron Aigus: Yeah, I've got a good piece of advice. I have found many times that despite all logic, all numbers, all data, anything that you provide to the C-suite… there is always going to be some kind of campaign or requirement that we call ego ‘stroking’. You're a tire sales company. They don't care if it makes money or not. They want to be seen on the front page for ‘buy tires’. That's all they care about. So in doing all of this, even though you could disprove them, even though you probably will disprove them, they do not care. Make sure that there is some kind of budget or awareness going to giving them that ego stroke they want. Otherwise, they're going to put you aside for another guy that's going to come in and say, I can do that. I'll get you there. I don't care about the numbers. 

James Lawrence: I remember we were pitching a project years ago and digital was clearly the way to reach the target market. Pitched a great pitch, didn't get the work. We were like, how come?  They said “we're going above the line”. And I was like you’re mad, why? And basically, the decision was made to put most of the budget into billboards and most of that budget to go near the airport because that's where the board were going to fly through. And it just made absolutely no sense. But, you know, I don't know. I'd be pushing back on that if I had the choice. Aaron, where can we find you online? 

Aaron Aigus: You can find us at louder.online. You can see me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there. Or reach out by email aaron@louder.online. 

James Lawrence: Doing similar stuff to Rocket, but probably doing more stuff globally than Rocket where most of our clients are in in Australia. You're doing a lot of work. You're based in Singapore now. Doing work in America. What kind of regions? What kind of focus of work? 

Aaron Aigus: Yeah, it's mainly the US, it's mainly to mid to enterprise companies and sticking with our core which is the CEO and content marketing side. I mean we run all ads and demand gen and everything else on the side of it, but I'm competitive and I've always enjoyed having to beat someone. 

James Lawrence: Legend. Well, thanks for coming on the pod. Hopefully, we have you on again. Thanks for sharing your experience. 

Aaron Aigus: Thanks, James. Anytime.