Business Innovators Radio - Rai Cornell Reveals the Psychology Behind Effective “Demand Generation” Marketing

Episode Date: November 26, 2024

In this episode, Nina Hershberger talks with Rai Cornell, a marketing expert who specializes in using psychology to build genuine relationships between businesses and their ideal customers.Rai Cornell has a unique background, having started her career in the criminal justice and mental health fields before transitioning into marketing and content creation. This diverse experience has given her a deep understanding of human behavior and decision-making, which she now applies to helping companies transform the way they connect with their target audience.During the interview, Rai breaks down her “ELITE” methodology – a five-step process that involves examining a company’s current marketing strategy, learning the psychology of their ideal customers, implementing a psychology-driven approach, transforming their brand reputation, and enhancing their sales and marketing efforts through a continuous feedback loop. She emphasizes the importance of moving beyond traditional “lead generation” tactics and instead focusing on “demand generation” – creating content that builds trust, empathy, and a genuine desire in potential customers to engage with the brand.This episode is a must-listen for any business owner, marketer, or entrepreneur who wants to break free from the “icky” feeling of traditional advertising and instead create marketing that resonates on a deeper level with their target audience. Rai’s insights into the psychology of decision-making and her practical, step-by-step approach provide a roadmap for building long-lasting, profitable relationships with customers.To learn more about Rai Cornell and her demand generation strategies, listeners can visit www.cornellcontentmarketing.com/demandgenkit to download her free brainstorming kit.MegaBucks Radio with Nina Hershbergerhttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/megabucks-radio-with-nina-hershbergerSource: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/rai-cornell-reveals-the-psychology-behind-effective-demand-generation-marketing

Welcome to Megabox Radio. Conversations with successful entrepreneurs, sharing their tips and strategies for success, real-world ideas that can put Megabox in your bank account. Here's your host, Nina Hirshberger. Well, welcome to today's show. I am excited to welcome my guest today. Ray Cornell is a marketing strategist with a fascinating background. I love it because her background is in psychology.

and she works with business to business companies to help them create marketing that magnetically attracts their ideal clients by doing things non-traditionally, I think is probably a good way. Excuse me, she has a graduate degree in psychology, marriage and family therapy, and criminology. So welcome Ray to today's show. Thank you. so much for having me, Nina. So let's go back in time. I always like to do that. Tell me a little bit about your back time story. Sure, yeah. So I was actually originally on track to be a counselor in the prison system. That was kind of my professional goal as I was going through high school and college. I come from a long history of family in law enforcement and military, and I

always had a knack for psychology and reading people. And so I kind of married the comfort zone that I came from, which is the criminology side, and my passion and interest for psychology. And that's where I was headed. I worked in drug rehab facilities. I worked in community counseling centers. I worked in mental hospitals. did a lot of work with people who were on probation and parole.

And after, unfortunately, burning out in the mental health world and just this revolving door of the very bureaucratic system that we put mental health patients through, especially those in the criminal justice system, I was really just craving that human elements in my professional life, which, surprisingly, you don't get a lot of that in the mental health world, even though we're talking about the mental health of a human being. It's very ironic that there's really not a lot of human connection.

It's all very clinical and sterile. And so I just burned out on that whole world and threw myself full-time into what I had been doing to put myself through college, which was freelance writing, freelance web development, content creation, things like that. And I, over the years, have married the two. My understanding of the way people think and how they make decisions and the way their behavior evolved over time, whether intentionally or non-intentionally.

And marrying that with marketing and content creation in particular has really turned into this thing that I never expected. But I'm so glad that I get to do this every day for companies. because it's really transforming the way that businesses talk to and form relationships with their ideal customer. So that makes it really unique, doesn't it? Because, you know, the traditional way of marketing is try a bunch of things, throw it against the wall, see what sticks. You'd take a different approach. Yes, and oddly enough, so it's funny, because when people think of marketing, a lot of the examples that come to mind,

for them are not actually marketing. They are branding or they are advertising. And I think that is indicative of something that's really lacking in the marketing world, which is that we're not doing actual marketing. And that's what I aim to fix. You know, when you think of marketing and you think of a logo or a gorgeous design or something like that, that's branding. And when you think of a deal or a sale or a flash sales, or a campaign, things like that.

Oftentimes, that's advertising. There is a blurred line between marketing and advertising, but when it's predominantly advertising, that's when people start to harbor resentment towards brands and feel this kind of icky, oh, they're trying to get one over on the feeling anytime they see your advertisements, your campaigns, whatever the case may be.

And my goal, my aim is really to flesh out the marketing side of a business, which is all about explaining what it is your company does, building brand awareness, building genuine authentic interest from your customers into what you're offering. And then guiding them on this path to deciding you are the right solution for them and allowing them the feeling that they chose you. rather than feeling like, oh, you got one over on me. So do you have a favorite way that you describe marketing as far as the definition of it? I mean, I know you said a lot of things just now, but is there a good definition? Yeah, and you can't tell I'm a word person. I'm very wordy. I'm all about the word.

Well, but that's what I have about you, Ray. They have some great editors on my team who are keeping you in check. But yes, my short definition of marketing is it's relationship building. That's all it is. And when you think about the relationships that you have in your life, the ones that you want to have in your life and you want to continue nurturing, they're all based on trust and this lovely, like, symbiotic give and take where you're both, it's a win-win situation, you know,

and that's really what marketing is, is creating that win-win relationship. relationship between a business and the target buyers they want to connect with. Well, you are absolutely right. I mean, I would have thought of marketing being the next campaign, the next flyer, the next whatever, but you're coming from a psychology point of view, which means almost you've got to understand, first of all, who the client is and what keeps them up at night, I suppose. Exactly. And the thing is what people often think of as marketing is really the mechanism.

So, for example, you just said the next campaign. Well, if we're doing a campaign on, let's say, LinkedIn ads or an email campaign, that's simply the mechanism by which we're trying to reach our ideal people. But that's only one third of it. There's the method, which my method is very psychology-driven. It's demand. generation, it's creating that relationship. There's the message, which is actually the content of what you're going to be sending out there. And then there's the mechanism, whether that mechanism is SEO, paid placements, organic, email marketing, retargeting ads, LinkedIn outreach. You know, there's a zillion mechanism.

But unfortunately, a lot of companies only focus on the mechanism. They say, oh, we need to create a campaign. We need to create a series of social media posts, or we need to create this ad funnel, or we need to create this kind of like email outreach that trips people into booking calls, you know, things like that. And when you focus only on the mechanism, what ends up happening is you start putting things out there that are very hollow and that rings true for the people on the receiving end. And it becomes all about the sale.

Instead, if you focused first on your method, second on your message, and then third on your mechanism, you end up having this very rich content that forms relationships and shows the people that you're trying to reach, that you have empathy for the situation that they're in, and you want to make their lives, whether that's personal or professional, better, and your company has the solution to do that. The mechanism is simply the method of connecting. Okay, so I always like specifics. Let's pull out of the air a theoretical company,

Company A, and they make widgets. And they are a $5 million company, and they are tired of doing the same-o-same-all, and they heard you speak on stage and they're intrigued. Tell me the process you would take Company A through. Yes. So the very first step is looking at who is their ideal customer and what are the pains that that customer is going through on a day-to-day basis. Now, this is not something new. A lot of companies do this, but what a lot of companies end up with are superficial, quote-unquote, pains that relate only to the product or service that they are selling. That's not enough.

If you are focused only on the pains that are directly related to your product or service, you are missing 98% of the pain points that you could speak to, connect on, empathize with, and ultimately solve or provide some sort of value add to the life of the person that you're trying to connect with. So it's not just a matter of going through a pain point brainstorming exercise, but it's a matter of really putting yourself in the shoes of the person you're trying to connect with, asking yourself, what is their daily life like? When they clock into work, what are the things that they struggle with? What are the frustrations they have? What are the things that are holding them back from hitting the goals that they are accountable for? completing and what keeps them up at none and when you brainstorm all of those

things then you can create content that meets people at every stage of change that they may be in and this is the thing that a lot of companies are to realize probably because it's a painful realization which is that not everyone that you are connecting with and want to connect with is ready for your solution. Oftentimes, the people that you're trying to connect with don't even realize that they have a problem. Or they may not realize that there's a better way. And so you have to really guide them through understanding, look, the way that you're doing it is a problem, helping them become aware of that problem, and then helping them gently through the process of contemplating, changing the way that they've been doing things. to solve that problem and come out the other side better for it. And as much as we humans tend to think that we are ready for change and we want change

and we want to do it better, the actual process of going through change and solving those pain points is very uncomfortable for us. And so if you can create content in these little itty-bitty stepping stones that helps them overcome all of that resistance to change, you're going to end up with buyers who are 80, 90% sold. Okay, so that makes sense. So how does company A figure that out? Do they, you know, does the salespeople, are they able to give them that information, or do they have to talk to some of their potential customers? How does that work? Yeah, there are a lot of ways to do it. So in my opinion, the best way is to identify which customers you have are ones that you actually want to have more of.

So a lot of companies that I work with are in a situation where they have plenty of customers, but the customers that they've acquired over the years don't exactly fit the ICP, the ideal client profile or customer profile, of where they want to go. And so that can be an uncomfortable exercise in and of itself, where you look at your existing customer base and you say, okay, of these people, these companies, which ones stand out as the perfect client that we would want to just duplicate ideally? Sometimes you don't have any of those customers because your company is evolving and heading down a different trajectory. You've gotten smarter over the years. If you do have an ideal customer that you're already working with, interview that company. Ask them about what it was like for them before they started working with you. How did they shop?

How did they stumble upon your solution? What were they experiencing that sparks the idea to even go, go, to Google or a colleague or wherever the conference where they may have encountered you. You have to dig into the history that got them there and really listen to the words that they're using. The more exact match words that you can use in your marketing that match what your happy ICP customers have used, the better you're going to connect the more of those duplicate ICP customers. Now, alternatively, if you're a company that, like I said, is evolving, you may not have any of those existing customers that you want more of, then there are a lot of other things

you can do, like audience polling. There's a great tool that I love to use called pollfish that allows you to send out polls and surveys to very specifically parametered ICP profiles in terms of setting demographics, spermographics, psychographics, and collecting information from those people who potentially are an exact ideal fit for your brand. Another option is data mining your competitor's reviews. So let's say you have a competitor who is kind of knocking it out of the park and you're a little jealous and you want more of what they're succeeding in or at least appearing to succeed in. you can go to anywhere that they have reviews, whether that's Amazon, Glass Store, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, anywhere, even their website.

Yes, they're going to pick and choose which testimonials show up on their website, but go there and see if the testimonials appear authentic, what words are standing out? How are their happy customers describing the impact that that competitor has had on their business? And you can take some of that language as well to start tapping into that ideal audience. There are a lot of ways that you can really mind for this. And another key point is sales and marketing have to talk to each other because marketing is the tip of the spear. But sales is the gatekeeper. And you want to make sure that the people that are getting to sales and that sales is having easy time closing

and is really happy to close because those customers are a perfect fit, you want to understand everything you can about those accounts so that you can fuel your marketing with more of those specifics. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, okay, so now for Company A, we've got our ideal client all mapped out. We know a lot about that client. What's our next step? Then it's a matter of creating content that calls attention to the pain points that you discovered

and shows that you really empathize with your audience. So one mistake that I see a lot of companies make, and actually I was just talking to a company yesterday that I'm a customer of. This is not a client of corner of content marketing. This is a company that I purchased products from, and they have a couple of, features within their business that are meant to be communities. They have a Facebook community, they have a text list where they try to send you, you know, motivational text every Tuesday. But what actually happens in those communities is just a ton of advertising. It's constantly,

hey, we have this on sale, or, hey, there's this limited edition flavor, or, hey, you know, we only have so many of these left. You get them all you can. And, you know, And I sent them a message because they did one of those soliciting feedback sort of emails. And I told them, look, you've already got me as a customer. Instead of bombarding me with more advertising, which just makes me feel like the only thing you care about is my wallet, then why don't you provide some value? Like, tell me more about things that you guys aren't expert in. So I really feel comfortable here.

And, like, you're adding value to my life, not just taking cash. out of my wallet. And I got the most wonderful response from them. They said, wow, you're right. This is actually something that we need to work on. Thank you. We didn't realize that our community was making people just feel like they were being oversold to. And that's really what companies need to do with their content is set aside the feelings of desperation and eagerness to sell because the sale will come. But the sale will only come if people feel like they trust your brand and they get a lot of value out of what you provide. And if you focus on those things first, you focus on being altruistic and selfless and just

trying to solve the problems that happen in your ideal customer's daily life, they're going to love you. And the thing that blows people away is that when that customer gets to the sales team and the sales team quotes them out a package, oftentimes the customer will say, wow, you know, you think they're a little bit more expensive or sometimes quite a bit more expensive than this other company that I was considering. But I really like you guys and I've had a great experience with you. So yes, let's go ahead and do it.

So even if your prices are higher, you can win that customer if you've given them all of that support and human compassion that people are really crazy. Because ultimately what everyone wants is to feel understood and validated. And when you do that through your content, whether that's blogs, landing pages, ebooks, white papers, social media posts, email sequences, videos, whatever you're creating, it needs to provide that sense of we see you, we hear you, we understand what you're doing with. We want to make your day a little bit easier and brighter. Here you go. Well, I just interviewed a guy and his take is how to dignify your business. In other words, how to have an experience.

And I kind of hear you saying that if this is a friend, if it's somebody you want to be with, they understand it's just have a nice conversation with them. They tell you things. They're not just always trying to do. Of course, Disney is all about the experience, the magical experience. So we now know the ideal client. We know their pain points. We write copy that talks to those pain points, talks to them in a certain way.

What's the next step, Ray? So the next step is to figure out where are the people that you want to connect with going to find solutions to all of their pain points. And this is what brings me back to that importance of understanding the stages of change. So a lot of companies think of the same process. They go, okay, so when our ideal customer is looking for the solution that we provide, what do they type into Google or who do they go ask for recommendations? or where do they go for solutions and answers.

But the problem is, especially if you are a B-to-B solution in technology, staff, anything like that, your ideal customer is rarely shopping for your solution, either because they already have a solution, even though it may not be nearly as good as yours, or because they don't even understand that your solution, technology, your innovation exists. So this is why doing that first step of understanding all of the pain points that your customer is experiencing day to day is really important because then you can meet them with the keywords that they're searching for or in the Facebook or LinkedIn groups that they're hanging out in or at the events and conferences that they're going to or in the audio books and podcasts that they're consuming, you can meet them there even when they don't even

know yet that they need what you have to offer. So understanding where people are going to get help for anything that they're struggling with, that is how you can start to fill your pipeline and feed that long sales cycle, which for B2B businesses is often a killer. You know, we set goals at the beginning of the year of, hey, let's sell this much. But the fact of the matter is, everything that you're selling this year has probably been seated by conversations from sales team members or marketing campaigns that happened six months, one year, even two years and more ago. Yeah, that's absolutely true. In fact, I think you have a particular methodology that you kind of lay out. Why don't we talk about that for a second? You call it the elite method.

what that means. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So the term elite is a bit of a double entendre for us at Cornell because one of the things that we are known for is having extremely high standards for the content and copy that we create for our clients. So everything we do goes through a very rigorous process. We're very fast at it after doing it for so many years. We've been doing this for about 17 years now, but that's the thing that we are an elite copy and content creation team. We create the highest quality that you're going to get. Now, the double meaning of elite is also that it's an acronym for examine, learn, implement, transform, and enhance.

So that process starts with examining your strategy, your systems, your sales assets, to see where are we starting, where are we strong, where does. do we maybe have gaps in creating that bridge from your ideal buyer to your door set? And this is something that I find a lot of people need that third party person to come in and tell them where their gaps are as much as they don't want to hear it. Because when you're inside the bottle, you can't see the label. And so you don't know exactly what's missing from that label to really attract people in because you're inside of it, you're in the bubble. So this is where we spend a lot of time really looking at everything that is being put forth

under the name of a brand. The second step is to learn the psychology of your ideal buyer. So if you're going to build a really successful demand generation strategy, you have to figure out what drives your ideal buyer and you have to profile your target psychologically. Because as much as we like to think that we humans are logical decision makers, that's not at all true. We are very driven by emotion and feelings and gut feelings and instincts. And if you can understand those inner mechanisms and the way that they present outwardly as logical arguments, then you can really connect on so many more levels than what your competition is doing. The third step is implement. So you need to implement your psychology-driven marketing strategy. And that's a lot of the

process that I just explained about. Really diving into those pain points, really creating content that calls attention to those, kind of pokes the pains a little bit, gets people aware of them, and guides them through those stages of change. The fourth step is transform your brand reputation. So a lot of the companies that I work with, they have a brand reputation similar to that of the company I was describing that I'm a customer of where it just seems like all they care about is sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. If your company is putting out social media content and email campaigns and lots of ads, whether that's ABM, you know, display ads or LinkedIn ads, Google ads, whatever the case may be, then the personal thing of your brand is that all you can. care about is the sales. Really, you have to transform your brand reputation into one that shows that you care about your customer's experience, about their quality of life, and that you want to add value even if they don't choose you. And when you take that attitude of, I just want to help you,

even if you don't buy anything from us, ultimately they end up buying from you. So transforming that brand reputation and the connotations that customers have with your brand and your name goes a long way, but it takes time. And so that fifth step is enhance your sales and marketing with a feedback loop. And this is the part that I really love to dig into with our clients. It usually takes about four to five months to set up those first four steps. And then from then on, it's a matter of constant input. improvement, constant learning and digging into the words and just getting better and better

to create that J curves of inbound leads and people really seeking you out instead of your sales having to do outbound efforts. And so when you can create that feedback loop between sales and marketing and get this really kind of harmonious relationship going between those two departments, you start to see that j curve and you start to dramatically increase the percentage of MQLs that become SQLs that become customers. So there's a couple things you said. One is you've said it a couple of times.

You called it a demand generation. Tell me what you mean by that. Yes. So there are a couple different philosophies in marketing. And demand generation is this one that I've been doing for years, but it just seems like maybe it's just in circles that I am in and I talk in a lot. But it seems like demand generation is really starting to become a buzzword nowadays. And it's a difficult concept for people to wrap their head around

because demand generation is content marketing. It's creating content that increases your brand awareness and starts pulling people in. But where a lot of people get lost is they go, well, how is that different from the alternative method, which is lead generation? And the thing is, lead generation is all about capture people's contact information, capture, capture, capture, or capture the sale, pressure people into the sale. Lead generation is focused on the result, which is capturing the contact information or making the sale. And that is very short term. And oftentimes the techniques and mechanisms that are used in lead generation leaves customers feeling

duped or, oh, that had got me, or they just feel like they are one of many as opposed to one special person. On the flip side of that, demand generation does not prioritize the sale or the conversion. Demand generation prioritizes planting seeds of knowledge and feeling into people's brains and experiences that leave a much stronger, long-lasting impression and a positive relationship. So that it's not a, imagination is not a short-term strategy. If you want something short-term and you just need it to work for the next three months, then do advertising, do lead just.

If you want something that's going to sustain a business over years, decades even, and help you grow in a really healthy way that increases in efficiency year over year, you want demand generation. It requires patience, and it requires appreciating the psychological impact that your marketing has on the people you're trying to reach. And ultimately, demand generation may, people feel like they are choosing you, not that you reached out and got them. So they want to buy at that point instead of feel like they're being sold?

Exactly, exactly. They are seeking you out. Even though you may have put 15 pieces of content in front of them over the past six months, and that's a very deliberate marketing effort, they, their experience, of all of your marketing touchpoints is that they are drawn to you and they choose to come towards you, which is why I say that our elite model method, that gets people 80 to 90% sold before that customer ever even talks to a sales representative. Because they are choosing, yes, I like this company. I just need to have a few questions answered, and I'm pretty sure

I'm going to go with them anyway. So when you talk about the J curve too, then, since you've got a lot of that analysis and that digging in the start, maybe what you see, I mean, I'm thinking of the J, I'm thinking kind of goes down a little bit for a period of time, and then just really goes up fast. Is that what you're saying when you say, the J. Yes, because oftentimes when I'm working with companies, they already have these kind of menace, or high pressure advertising tactics going on. And if we decide to stop those, which I recommend if you're going to transform your brand reputation, you stop those, yes, the leads are going to go down. Your traffic is likely going to go down.

Everything from a paid advertising and media perspective is going to go down while we work on all of the organic. But then, once that organic content is live, live, it gains traction every single day that it's out there. And once you can produce more and more and more of that, it compounds like a snowball. So I have companies that I wrote content for them and copy, like, email sequences and things like that for them back in 2018. And now, six years later, they are still making sales on that thing that they paid me to create once.

They don't have to pour money into that month over month. It just exists. They paid for it once. It lives online, and it is generating more and more returns month over month. Whereas if you were to do something like Facebook ads, Google ads, LinkedIn ads, you have to pour thousands of dollars into that every month. And it actually declines in efficacy over time. Well, it goes back to the we only have eight left.

You know, got to get it by Friday, whatever. So it does go away. And you have to keep innovating new ways to hook people, manipulate people, pressure people into buying. And I think a lot of companies underestimate how smart and savvy their buyers really are. And when you use those high pressure, bomo tactics, customers wise up and they don't like it. And so the more people you give that impression to, the smaller your brain, pool of potential customers becomes over time. Demand generation and this J curve works because you're doing the exact opposite.

Over time, you're building trust, you're gaining interest, you're gaining the desire for people to come, people have that desire to come closer to you. And so your pool actually gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Ray, this has been fascinating, but I'm looking at the time. It's always my energy. But I bet you there's going to be some that are very interested in exploring more with you, particularly what you're meaning by the demand generation. Before we got on the call, you said that you're going to make an offer for the people listening.

Please tell them what that offer is and how they might be able to get it. Yeah, absolutely. So I know all of this stuff is a very heady concept, and it's quite different from what you're used to in the marketing world. There are some similarities that it's hard to tease out. Okay, how do I actually do this differently and get those J-curve results? So I've put together our demand generation brainstorming kit

to help walk you through. And it's something that you can download, you can do with your own teams, and you guys can start getting these results, you know, within that, it's usually about six months if you implement this and then you start to see that traction really take off. So you can do this internally.

Download our demand generation, brainstorming kit. It'll walk you through all of those steps. It'll help you brainstorm and it'll help you really understand the psychology of the people you're trying to connect with. And you can get that at www.cournell contentmarketing.com slash demand gen kit. Well, that's very, very generous. And thank you so much for your time. This was fascinating. As a fellow marketer, I've been taking lots of notes. I mean, it's really fascinating. and I've been able to watch you and watch what you've done with companies. So I'm very honored that you were on today's show.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Nina. I can tell you it all riled up about this. That's been excited about it. So I appreciate you letting me nerd out for a bed, and it's always a pleasure talking with you. Oh, my pleasure. So until next time, this is Nina Hirshberger, saying go out and make it a great day.

Thank you for listening to Megabucks Radio with Nina Hirshberger. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or to listen to past episodes, visit megabucksradio.com.