Today's Guest

Kristin Zhivago founded Zhivago Partners in 2017, after decades working as a coach helping CEOs and entrepreneurs to better understand what their customers wanted to buy and how they wanted to buy it. Kristin has done marketing and sales department turnarounds for companies of all sizes. She and her ZP team work with mid-size companies that have built solid businesses but need help with their digital marketing. Kristin provides tips on how to create a successful marketing campaign that produces results.   

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Episode Summary

The primary clients we serve today are established businesses that are struggling to figure out how to generate a return on their digital marketing. I’ve been in tech for decades and ran an advertising agency with my husband for a decade before becoming a revenue coach. Over the years I’ve helped companies of various sizes find success through digital marketing and position them for growth. We typically work with businesses that have $2m to $10m in annual revenue.

Mindset driven marketing is a concept I coach clients on frequently. You hear a lot of people talk about buyer personas but truthfully an 18-year-old guy is likely to buy a blender for the same reasons an 80-year-old guy would buy it. What I realized through my work is there is a gap between what the seller thinks the buyer wants and what the buyer truly wants. To me, the mindset of the customer is a combination of their desires, concerns, and questions. These are critical to know when thinking about any marketing because you want to address those immediately and show the customer how your product or service is the answer.

Running a successful business today requires that your systems and processes be cloud-based. Every business has to build a digital infrastructure to support its operations or it will fail. The key to a successful system is that you can easily capture the needed information and that each system integrates with the other. Even if you’re a small business with a limited budget, there are dozens of platforms out there that are affordable that can help you start to automate your processes.  

The foundation of any good marketing campaign is measurement. We set up dashboards for our clients that they can access anytime to see where their money is being spent and what it is producing for them. Digital advertising is the quickest way for most businesses to generate leads but a good content marketing campaign with great copy will deliver you the most cost-effective leads over time. However, it takes time to build up a lead funnel from content marketing so you need to recognize that you won’t see immediate results like you would with digital marketing.

Resources Shared

• Zhivago Partners
• Roadmap to Revenue by Kristin Zhivago
• Thryv

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