Dr. Cherie Rains: Human Connection is Still Key | Episode 007

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Dr. Cherie Rains Show Notes Page

Show Description

Dr. Cherie Rains expounds on the vital importance of human connection in today’s hyper-connected digital world. With technology moving forward faster and faster, companies are becoming dehumanized and are losing its human touch. Despite the advances in modern digital marketing, customers still want to connect with real people – the human aspect is still the most important element of any successful digital marketing campaign. According to Dr. Cherie Rains, human connection is still key.

Before joining Lander University, Dr. Rains spent several years working in business and non-profit organizations. This included being the VP of Client Services and Research as well as the Lead Research Director at two customer care consulting firms in Virginia.

There she specialized in diagnosing the customer experience, enhancing customer satisfaction and increasing loyalty, and turning Voice of the Customer data insights into actionable intelligence for organizations.

Similarly, she served as the Senior Research Director for two non-profit organizations, including SOCAP where her focus was bringing research resources to the membership and completing several benchmark studies for customer care centers.

Through her leadership, a landmark research report was conducted to give customer care centers actionable data to improve business strategies. After receiving her Ph.D. from Purdue University, she spent several years teaching and consulting throughout Europe, including serving as a lead researcher in the Academic Center for Services Research in charge of multi-national customer satisfaction studies for Global Fortune 100 companies.

Her focus has always been on bringing the Voice of the Customer into organizations through actionable consumer behavior insights, both quantitatively and qualitatively. She also advises organizations on ensuring their focus remains on the human element of their customers, not just their digital personas. Over her career, she has published over 30 business and academic articles.

 

Timestamps/Outline

01:30 – Dr. Cherie’s background in digital marketing

04:03 – What is exciting in B2B digital marketing?

06:27 – Standing out in a noisy digital environment

08:16 – Leveraging the power of analytics

12:44 – Qualitative vs. quantitative data

14:10 – Getting customers to engage with you

17:06 – Why Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence is overrated in digital marketing

19:03 – The importance of human connection in digital marketing

21:06 – Utilizing digital tools to build a relationship with the customer and becoming a disruptor

24:22 – Telling better stories in digital marketing

25:26 – Allocating limited resources to the right channels

28:21 – Investing in high quality videos to reach your customers

30:39 – The one question every B2B digital marketer must ask themselves

 

Key Takeaways

“In order to understand the numbers, you have to understand the consumer.”

“People want a connection to other people; people don’t want to talk to technology.”

“Storytelling is a huge piece in data and marketing. People resonate with stories, and it’s all about connections and relationships.”

“You don’t have to do everything. You have to do what’s important really, really well.”

Ask yourself: “Would I respond/use/open the content that I put out there?”

 

Links and Resources

Dr. Cherie Rains’ email: crains@lander.edu

 

Show Transcript

Click to access unedited transcript

Unedited Transcript

Jim Rembach (00:00):

Okay. B2B DM gang. I have somebody on the show today who I’ve known for a very long time and I just reconnected with, and it’s fantastic because she is actually a professor of marketing at the university level at Lander university, dr. Cherie Rains. And you may find her, if you do some research, um, on dr. Cherie keen, uh, because she has been responsible for writing several research studies on the customer experience, uh, for a number of years with a couple of different associations as well. We were with a former employer called customer relationship metrics. And that’s one of the things that I think that’s really important for us to talk about when we are talking about digital marketing companies. Ultimately it comes down to the customer, right? So Cherie, if you could tell us a little bit about your background and some of the work that you’re doing right now in regards to digital marketing and how we can leverage that in the B2B space.

Dr. Cherie Rains (00:55):

All right. Well, Jim, thank you so much. Um, yeah, I’m thrilled that we have reconnected after quite a lot of time learning that you’re just right up the road there in North Carolina as well. So that’s pretty exciting. Um, yeah, so my background really has all been in the customer experience realm, I would say. And while it’s, it’s hard for me to say, um, when I started this, um, going for my, got my masters in consumer behavior and decided I was going to get my PhD and swore that I would never teach and here I am a professor. Um, but I, I think what happened, um, when I went to Purdue was I really saw, you know, the area of internet was becoming really popular. And so he retailing, this was back when everything was, he, you know, now it’s like digital and no, this was E so there was really an opportunity to see how would people behave in the environment.

Dr. Cherie Rains (01:50):

And so it started off for me really in shopping and the retailing, because at that point, the sky was falling and, Oh my gosh, the malls, nobody would go shopping. Right. I mean, everybody would buy everything online and nobody would do that. Um, so that’s where I started my research and what it showed was no people wouldn’t do that, which has come to fruition, which is great. So thumbs up for dissertation research got me somewhere. Um, but then that really kind of, I mean, Hey, um, so that really got me excited in the consumer realm. And I started really thinking about behaviors and wanted to go into consulting. And I had a great opportunity to go to the Netherlands, um, after my PhD for three years. And I did a program extensively for Mercedes-Benz in contact centers and how people, you know, were using the contact center environment and how we could change that because at the time, you know, the contact center was seen as something way outside the box and something a company had to do, but didn’t realize the satisfaction, right.

Dr. Cherie Rains (02:53):

That research was just starting to come up. So I spent, you know, three years over there doing international research on customer satisfaction and contact centers. And then I brought that back. Like you said, I went to a couple of different, um, nonprofits and then also consulting companies, which brought me back to hi. I reached a point in my life where I said, I’m either going to go into teaching or I’m never going to do it again. And I went back for a year and loved it and came on down here to South Carolina, I’m teaching the young minds all about digital marketing. So it’s been really exciting.

Jim Rembach (03:27):

Well, and I can imagine when you see, you can go back to that whole EA tailing days and thinking about all this transformation and transition, you’ve got, gotten an opportunity to experience what is often referred to as you know, the Omni channel experience. You know, I’ve got some of the brick and mortar, I’ve got some of the tailing and now, like you say, it’s all involved to digital and the whole customer journey. And all of those things are all over the place for a lot of organizations. Now we are sitting here right now and just so kind of date. This is, you know, um, admits of the easing of the lockdown of the COVID-19. Uh, and so we have been forced to do more digital and more [inaudible] than we ever have before. And some of that will go back to the, to the brick and mortar, because there’s just certain products and services that are important to that. But I think marketing now has to play a very different role. And so when you think about B2B digital marketing specifically, and we can, we can take some of the benefits and insights and work that’s being done in the B to C space and leverage it for ours. We just, we can do that. But if you start talking about B2B digital marketing, where do you see excitement?

Dr. Cherie Rains (04:38):

I think the most exciting pieces are kind of intertwined. One is really the mobile environment. You know, again, like you said, w we see it in the BDC zone, but when you think about the applications that would have everybody has their phone, everybody’s using their phone and be cause of COVID, we’re even using it more than we probably ever thought before, or for things we never thought we would do. So at this point now, you know, did we shop a little on our phones? Maybe, did we look for information on our phones maybe, but once COBIT hit and we were forced to be inside. And that goes to all the people who are now working from home. So it translate into the B2B space really easily because that’s where people are going first. Right. You asked me a question, I whip out my phone, I put it in, where does it, where does it go? So I see that really being leveraged. And I really see the video marketing piece of it, you know, not just necessarily on YouTube, but putting, you know, the face to whether it’s the products or services, you know, and, and having that interaction with the consumer, whether it’s B to B or B to C, so that you feel like you have a relationship, it’s still about relationship building. It’s just shifting a little bit at this point.

Jim Rembach (05:51):

Okay. So you bring up a really interesting point, uh, in regards to the whole. Now I’m forced to do some, I didn’t do before, both from a producer perspective, content creator perspective. If we’re talking about B2B, digital marketing, as well as from know one, one that is doing all of that searching, right? So if, if everybody is now cranking out things, items, snippets, you know, and I mean, webinars and it goes on and on and on. And so now there’s significantly more noise online. How do I actually differentiate in that world?

Dr. Cherie Rains (06:27):

Yeah, I think, um, you know, part of it is again trying to build that relationship and it’s also utilizing the tools that we already have. So when you start talking about SEO and SEM, you know, now that I have, I’ll say live content, although it’s, it’s not live, but, you know, you’re trying to get that environment from them. It’s where do I go in terms of analytics to see where my customers are so that I make sure that that is what I’m promoting, you know, in the digital space so that they can find you, it goes back to kind of, it kind of goes backwards to where we’re trying to get people to find us online, you know, on a website, but now we’re moving that to a, more of an interactive fashion and how, you know, how do you do all the phrasing and the language that you use and things like that do, um, get people to those videos. So it’s a little bit different, cause we don’t want it to be static, right? We want it to be able to, you know, have momentum and build on that. So it’s kind of like, you know, two step forwards, one step back, I’ve got to do all this engaging content and then I need to step back and say, Oh, I got to go back to SEO SEM and how to make that work to get them to the right places.

Jim Rembach (07:41):

Okay. So now you bring up things that I am getting more insight into in regards to the opportunity that exists to stand out. Okay. And that is the whole analytics element. So as being, you know, somebody who is a researcher, I mean, lot of data, you know, you have to validate data, you’d have to make sure data is scrubbed. I mean, in the whole integrity piece and then leveraging it. I mean, the data is so vitally important. However, what I see is that a lot of B2B digital marketers really don’t do anything in regards to our very little in regards to data, even so much when we start talking about it from an SEO perspective, is there was one website that I reviewed for a B B2B company. They didn’t, none of their photo photos had all tags. None of them had had meta-tags, none of their pages had any, any information I’m like, how do you expect? And they were yet cranking out a lot of blog posts and articles, which had good thought-leader content, but I’m like, how do you expect anybody to find things? So, I mean, what are, what are you, what are you able to teach people and tell people about leveraging the power of analytics?

Dr. Cherie Rains (08:52):

Well, I think the power of analytics is changing, and this is something where I’m, I’m really outside the box on this. Now my, my background and trainings and marketing research and focus groups. So I’ve always kind of been a qualitative person. The quantum numbers that come with analytics are useful, but as we saw 20 years ago in context center, okay, I’m, I’m scoring my agents on four things and I’m measuring 4,000, well, those 4,000 things, right? We didn’t really look at it. It was just pages that came up. It’s the same concept with big data. And I think what’s going on now is everybody is saying big data is the disruptor and big data is going to solve the problem. Me personally, I don’t believe that. I think that there’s power in smaller analytics, that you can find simple analytics because what happens is people hear that word analytics.

Dr. Cherie Rains (09:46):

It’s just like saying regression in a consulting meeting, your client’s face goes white, right? They’re like, Oh, I don’t know what she’s talking about regression. Oh my gosh. But you want simple things that you can talk about. A lot of times what it is is with the big data who does that really well, Amazon, Amazon was built on big data. Nobody else can harness the fact that I’m purchasing. And again, when we go back to COVID, everything I’m purchasing is now going through Amazon. So they know me better than they, than I know myself. Right? They’re pushing out products to me. Same as that. They can use those analytics and use it. Well companies who are not based off of that, as simple as it sounds, it’s going to very simple analytics that you need to take and talking to your consumers, right? B to B, you have in some ways, a more defined customer.

Dr. Cherie Rains (10:37):

And then you do B to C because in B to C you could go across any demographics. And you know, your, your customer journey is really different. B2B. You have a little bit of a tighter space and it’s all really going back and saying, you know, what? Talk to your customers, where are they? What are they spending their money on? You know, w what are the types of things they want to see? And so when you hear analytics, it’s a little bit jarring because once people hear big data, I already I’m like, Nope, can’t do it. It’s big data. It’s too much. It’s too overwhelming. That’s true. But if you go to simple and I mean, you know, as simple as it sounds like, go to Google, get somebody in your office, certified in Google analytics, you will have all the information that you need to make really good decisions based off of the Google platforms, which most people will do. So that’s, you know, it’s free, it’s easy. And it’s going to give you the information you need to really push your, your data and then make really good decisions about what you want to do with the SEO and SEM.

Jim Rembach (11:38):

Well, but wait a minute, it’s just too easy to pay for certain, right?

Dr. Cherie Rains (11:42):

Right. Yes. That is the other. But, but again, if you’re paying for all the wrong words and you’re paying for all the wrong things, it’s a waste of money. Would it be better if you, you know, we go back to insights, insights used to be a big word for us. That’s kind of deteriorate. We want insights out of the data, not just data. So if we can garner that, yep. We push it forward. We move it more to the digital platform. It makes a lot more sense for the organization,

Jim Rembach (12:08):

But even part, partly of what you explained right. There is the need in order to do some of the qualitative. So he’d get a better understanding of the quantitative. Cause you were talking about talking to your customer, you’re talking about getting engaged and understanding and well, that makes those numbers come to life. So you still need qualitative and quantitative. It’s just how you’re collecting it. Right?

Dr. Cherie Rains (12:29):

Yeah. And I mean, you know, you know, and I teach marketing research. So for me, I see it as a process, right. You go out, you do your secondary research. What’s going on. Then for me, you’re really doing the qualitative piece first. So you’re talking to people and finding out what’s important. And then like you said, then you go to all the data and you say, alright, I know that out of these 20,000 things, if I pay attention to these 20, it’s gonna, you know, make, we’re gonna make way better investments, no matter how we use that, then what we would do if we started out with those 20,000 and tried to make decisions off of not talking to anybody. So, you know, it’s kind of a balancing act. And I think what, what happens is companies don’t see the value in qualitative, right? Because I mean, even you’re saying you got to go back to the numbers, the numbers say everything in my research and what I’ve seen, that’s not necessarily true, but you do need a balance of both. So in order to understand the numbers, you have to understand the consumer. And again, that’s B to B or B to C. So it’s a balancing act for sure.

Jim Rembach (13:35):

So for me, what I, I mean, I, I come to the thinking of customer wisdom in that is if I don’t, if I’m not wise, you know, and we can all talk about avatars and things like that. But what we’re talking about is something, even, whereas we’re talking even about getting an understanding of those avatar now and the B2B world, one of the difficult items of all of this or elements is being to get the opportunity to have people talk to you, to talk to them. So for me, I’m thinking about, I can’t get, you know, 20 observations. I can’t get people to talk to me. I can’t get them to complete surveys. I can’t get, I can’t get that information. And in order to get wise about my customer so that I can leverage for data. So how can I hijack it if I can’t get them to talk?

Dr. Cherie Rains (14:21):

Well, I think it’s, it goes back to, you know, basic research online is really, you know, who you want, you know, you know, who you want your top customers to be. When I take my students through a project, it’s really okay, go out there who are the five or 10 top customers that you wish you had? You know, again, if there was no constraints possible, who are they? You go out, you research them, you research the trends. We are gifted with an internet, like never before, right? I mean the amount of information I type it in, I get an answer. Well, if you leverage something like that in your organization, you talk about learning, you see learning from a different perspective. And what happens is the trends that you see over those 10 websites. I do the same thing for job search for students. It goes hand in hand.

Dr. Cherie Rains (15:09):

It doesn’t sound like it. What job, what is your perfect job? Who is your perfect customer, go out and find 10 or 12 job listings or customers. And you basically do like an analysis of their websites. After that. You see, these are the however many keywords that match up for all of these, either job postings or websites. And those are the keywords, you know, you have to hone in on to get there. And then you’re able to, you know, you say hijack, you know, that’s really easy to do now in, in terms of, you know, in terms of digital marketing and kind of going off that feed, it’s hard to know what the answers are without knowing how your customers are finding it. Because I think what we see in the B2B space, which is really unusual and, you know, everybody’s spending money on is email marketing.

Dr. Cherie Rains (15:58):

They still go back to that know, that’s where we started. If you send somebody an email that says, dear Jim, would you please consider us? You were like, Oh, personalization, this is great. But B to B companies haven’t gotten out of that trend. And I think that’s where some sort of mobile technology, the customer interaction piece, you’re, they’re missing that piece in order to get both data and to get leads and sales, which I think you can convert a lot easier than if you just, you know, again, like you said, randomly you’re out there in space.

Jim Rembach (16:31):

Okay. So that leads me to think about all the things that you’ll see from a promotional perspective of what you need to do. Hey, this is now going to actually increase your lead capture by X percent. This is going to do all of these, you know, we just bang things in, as you especially see it now because so many or B2B organizations, which we’re having to go to shows and events and things like that, and do the face to face for their lead capture on are getting forced to be digital. And so they’re searching for answers in order to be able to fill their sales funnels. So what do you think is really overrated with B2B digital marketing?

Dr. Cherie Rains (17:04):

Um, I think the one thing that’s overrated across the board is really virtual reality and artificial intelligence. You know, again, we go back to a few years ago, everybody was like, people are gonna want this. I really think, you know, for, for lack of a better term, it’s freaking people out. Right. They don’t want that. And, and, and I think we will, it’ll be interesting to see what happens after COVID because after COVID, it’s like, you know what, Jim, I really wanted to see you. So let’s do a zoom call. Cause I don’t feel like I’m connected to people. When you talk about AI and virtual reality, you see you’re taking the people out of all those processes and it may be cheaper, easier for companies, right. With their bots or AI or any of that. They set it up and it’s kind of like, Oh, I set it up, put it on the shelf. And hopefully everything goes great. We’re going back to that human connection that we actually need. So how can you utilize that in a digital environment? And I really think that that launch for AI and, you know, virtual reality, like it’s not really grabbing hold. And even now I think that, you know, we’ll see, I, I think that personal connection that people want is, is something that now we want even more. And that really is probably gonna fall off a lot more than it has right now.

Jim Rembach (18:27):

Okay. So that’s really interesting. And that is that out of box thinking that you were talking about even a moment ago is that, you know, most people would think, Oh gosh, everybody’s gone and now they’re remote. And so therefore now is our time to turn up those things. Um, and, but you’re saying just the opposite. I mean, people are gonna really want more human connection because of what we’re going through.

Dr. Cherie Rains (18:48):

Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, if, if you even go back to some of the research, you know, AI, if you look, I think, you know, probably you could go back 10 years and it was like, when you go with, you know, you talk about going to the big conferences that we used to go to, you know, 20,000 people, Oh, the new thing, AI VR, you know, and then we saw it the year after, and the year after, and here we are 10 years down the road, nobody’s got it. And I really do think that whether it was COVID or not, I think COVID really brought it to light. People want a connection to other people. People don’t want to talk to technology. And if I’m doing some sort of service interaction, I want somebody to, you know, I want to feel like somebody really cares about me.

Dr. Cherie Rains (19:34):

So if I’m in a chat with somebody I know even from personal experience and some research I’ve done, if you know that the person you’re chatting with is a real person. So let’s say they say something like, Oh, you know, how’s the weather in South Carolina, or today is my birthday. I’m talking to your real person. This is awesome. They understand my problem. They can solve it fast. And Oh, by the way, we can have a nice, nice little chat while we do that. I think people want to see that they don’t want to be like, Jim, I have a problem with my bill collection and something comes back and you’re like, no, it’s just like the cost center tree. Right? No, that’s not what I’m saying. I want to talk to a person. I think we’re still in that frame of mind for our customers, that they want that interaction and they want that relationship. And, and now I think we’re really kind of starving for that with COVID, but you know, again, we’ll see, I still think it’s going to push it out though.

Jim Rembach (20:30):

Well, and maybe that’ll lead to my next, you answering. My next question is I need to be able to stand out. All this noise is happening right now. Everybody’s being forced to do digital marketing that at a much higher percentage than they’ve ever been, have to do it before. So how can I stand? How can I be a disruptor

Speaker 3 (20:48):

In this space?

Dr. Cherie Rains (20:50):

I think going back, you know, the destruction piece of it. Um, in some ways, again, kind of like I said before, it’s almost going back. It’s, it’s getting to be that, um, more direct kind of personalization that we’re seeing. So the disruption to me is really being able to, um, kind of go back to let’s say the live streaming, right? So there’s a lot of noise and a lot of things like that, if we can identify the people we want to be most connected with and where you can have a relationship with them. So again, this goes back to the whole idea of live streaming, even, you know, webinars, the virtual conferences. Okay. So we’re used to doing all these things virtually, how do I build that relationship as with a customer? Right. So how do I utilize that? I think that’ll be the, kind of the key there as well, and then being able to take it, if you can, you know, if you can get your, your customers on phones and be able to, um, I guess kind of swim with the sharks in the mobile environment, you’re, you’re going to be a bigger disruptor than you probably even realize at this point in time, because, you know, apps and everything are really easy to do.

Dr. Cherie Rains (22:04):

And if you think back to going to these shows so that you’re able to, you know, grab information from people as they walk by on their phones, that hasn’t really been implemented very well. And I think we can take kind of that technology and use it in terms of, you know, building things for the mobile technology. And, you know, again, trying to get people excited and involved while you’re doing it. I think what you’ll see from students or what, from what I see from students, you know, at this point in time, they they’ve never been without their phone or very, very rarely been at without their phone. These are the people who are going out into the job environment. And if you think about anything from B to B, B to C, they’re going to have those, you know, kind of entry level jobs. This is what they’re used to.

Dr. Cherie Rains (22:56):

They’re going to force us into the mobile technology. They’re going to force us into live streaming. Hey, I’m not in a, I’m not in an event because we can’t have events, but Hey, here I am at a customer we’re installing our new system, you know, look at this as great. What do you think of this? It’s a building that excitement that they’re used to personally, right? Like, Hey, I’m, you know, I’m at the tennis match, whatever, you know, that we see from our students putting that there, they’re going to drive that change, whether we’re ready for it or not. That’s why I think it’s going to be a huge disrupter, even though it sounds basic, but the people who are coming behind, that’s what they’re used to. And, and they’re, you know, that’s where they get their information. That’s how they communicate with people. And I think, again, going back to COVID, we’re going to see that that’s also going to launch that a lot forward. Well, also

Jim Rembach (23:46):

For me, what you just said right there is that we have to learn how to be better marketing journalists, right?

Dr. Cherie Rains (23:52):

Yes. I’m all about, you know, and it was interesting. I got something right before we came on. I I’m a huge storyteller. Right. And you know, when, when somebody asks me, what do I do for a living? I said, I tell stories. I mean, you are, I go to the data and I say, the data says this, but what does this really look like? Well, these are the types of customers you want. This is the story. This is how they’re going to purchase it. Right. Storytelling is a huge piece of it. And you want to get that story out there. But then I got this thing for a conference and it was like, Oh, the myths of storytelling. It’s not the way you, you know, it’s not the investment you want to make in digital marketing. And I just want to scream and be like, actually it is right. You want to tell the story all the way around. So that’ll be another interesting thing is it’s the journey, it’s the story. Those things are going to resonate with people. And, you know, again, going back to where we’ve been talking, it’s all really about people and connection and relationships.

Jim Rembach (24:50):

Okay. So you and I had the opportunity to talk a little bit about, um, something associated with the whole scarcity element. Um, like students, you know, even when they’re doing their projects, they don’t have funding in order to be able to, you know, test and apply and do all that. And a lot of us are in that position. But if so, if I was sitting there and saying, all right, I’ve got this budget and it’s currently allocated in these places, where would you say I should pull from and apply to where should I reallocate resources to?

Dr. Cherie Rains (25:21):

Yeah, I think so. We’re probably going back to that email. And I don’t know if it’s just something, you know, B to B, it’s like, well, we’ve always done it that way. We’ve always gone to email, or we’ve always gone to talking to people at the trade shows. That’s what we do. It’s really taking that piece of it and saying, you know what, let’s not spend all of our money over there. We really need to go into content creation. We need to go into, you know, the social media realm, but what they need to make sure is that they’re going to the right places. So one of the things, even with the students, right? So yeah, so for their projects, it’s like, you got nothing, you got no money, figure out how to put a campaign together. You can do it. And it’s really, really usually right on the money in terms of that.

Dr. Cherie Rains (26:08):

So even if companies have some sort of resources, they can pull in that, the thing is, you’ve got to figure out where your customers are. So people hear social media and they instantly think I need to go to Twitter. I need to go to Snapchat. I need to go to Instagram. I need to go to Facebook. Now, if you’re allocating, you know, let’s say 50% of your budget to online to social media, but where is it going? You need to make sure that it doesn’t all have to go to Facebook or it doesn’t have to go to everything you need to put it, which makes most sense for your business. So I think you’re going to be moving more towards social media, but I want to put a little asterix on that. That’s like, just, it’s not social media, everything. It’s like, okay, it’s really targeted social media.

Dr. Cherie Rains (26:55):

Again, going back to that storytelling, going back to that relationship building that you can do through social media, you see a lot of companies are really good at doing certain areas, but you don’t have to do every, that’s the thing, you know, you don’t have to do everything you have to do. What’s most important, really, really well. And that’s where you put your money in. Instead of, you know, across the, you know, across the board, let’s just put the money in social media and email management and some content marketing here and there, it doesn’t make sense, you know? And I think that’s what a lot of companies do again, cause it’s overwhelming. And again, because they say social media, I’ve got to be, you know, I’ve got to be on all these platforms. Otherwise, you know, our business will implode. If we’re not there and customers can’t find us, that’s not necessarily true. And I think we’ll see that maturing as we go forward.

Jim Rembach (27:46):

Okay. So let’s look at it from another lens. I have unlimited budget. I mean, I, I can spend wherever I want to spend and do whatever I want to do. What would you go after?

Dr. Cherie Rains (27:57):

I think the things that I would go after really, um, would be in terms of, um, trying to do a little bit more and again, in terms of the live streaming and the webinars, you know, if you’re able to put together kind of, um, movie quality videos, those types of things really start to pick up noise. Like you said, not noise. Not always, let me go back to that. So if they really start to pick up, you know, having people view them and go through it, cuts through the noise in order to get people to go there. So I think that if you had, you know, unlimited, you would really be talking about how do I go back to that Omni channel? You know, we go back to the same concept from before, how can I reach my customers through the mobile environment, through the computer environment, you know, through iPads, there really, haven’t been a lot of companies that have figured out this whole internet of things and how they’re connected.

Dr. Cherie Rains (28:52):

How do I connect my customers in every single aspect, right? I mean, you know, some companies again, do that well Google, or if I do a search, all of a sudden I go on my pad and I’m getting advertisements for whatever I searched for. We haven’t harnessed that really well. And B2B, I don’t think from what I’ve seen and from what research has shown. So it’s really, if I had unlimited budget, I want to see where my customers are, how to take that internet of things, put it all together so that I can reach them. However they want to be reached. And at multiple touch points again, that’s something I think B2B is really missed out on.

Jim Rembach (29:32):

Well, Sherry, I’ll tell you, um, you know, I’ve, I’ve had a ton time, uh, I mean really a wealth of influence from you for years and this, this particular episode right here just even takes it over the top. But you know, I have to come back to the person who’s actually listening and who’s that digital marketer. Um, and they have to ask themselves some questions, um, that are important. What is one question you think that all B to B digital marketers need to ask themselves?

Dr. Cherie Rains (30:03):

Okay, this is the simplest of the simple and nobody probably acid would I? Okay. So now we go back to, I’ve spent a million dollars. I’ve done all this now, would I, whether it’s respond, use, open the content that I have just put out there, it’s a simple thing that we never ask. Would you use that? Would you buy that if that content came to you, is that, does that stir enough in you that you’re going to make that purchase? We sometimes forget to go back to the, to me that’s like the core of the simple marketing. Would this marketing work on me? If it’s, yes. You’re probably doing a pretty good job if it’s no, you may want to go back because most likely you’re close to your target market or, you know, your, your customers more than anybody else. So it’s an extremely simple question, but it could probably save companies, a lot of money doing the wrong things.

Jim Rembach (31:01):

Well, thank you so much for meeting with us today and I appreciate you sharing your knowledge and wisdom and from the classroom and beyond, but how, how do B2BDM digital marketers get in touch with you?

Dr. Cherie Rains (31:13):

Oh, well, you know, again, now I’m back at the university. So, um, the easiest thing is just, you know, email me, crains@lander.edu. Nice and simple. And I love to have any comments, any feedback, and you know, I’ve got students so we can ask them to do a little work too, if you need it.

Jim Rembach (31:31):

Doctor Cherie Rains, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom. We wish you the very best.

Dr. Cherie Rains (31:36):

Thanks, Jim. This has been awesome. I appreciate it.