Fundamentals of training marketing. Interview with Tatiana Trippmacher.

Tatiana Trippmacher

Thank you for inviting me.

Tatiana Trippmacher

Yeah, for sure. I'm Tatiana, I'm 26 years old and I've been working in digital marketing for the past 4 years in different companies.

I also studied in London and I did a bachelors in advertising in media. This is what created my passion for these fields. I've been through a lot of different areas within digital marketing: social media management, website management, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, social media promotions, basically everything. So I know my way around a bit of the whole umbrella that is digital marketing. Yeah, that's basically it.

Tatiana Trippmacher

At the moment I'm working in digital marketing, in a startup. My job at the moment is improving website and social media performance. What I do exactly at the moment is literally looking up all the small errors on the website, learning how to improve a website speed, all the error 404, trying to delete them as well. Then I also have a more creative part of the area, which is the social media management where I create the posts, I create the copy, I schedule them. And I also try my best to have the whole image of the company that goes through the website and the social media. And so that's basically it. I'm also doing email marketing, which also allows us to create a better community with our consumers and our customers.

Tatiana Trippmacher

Yeah, that's for sure.

Tatiana Trippmacher

What we do at the moment where I work is we have different courses, different academies, where we try our best to not only have just a course handed up to you. We try our best to create a community out of it. So that comes a lot with the marketing: how we represent ourselves, what’s our tone of voice, what do we want to give to the people, and how do we want to include them into the community as well. That goes through a lot of courses and training that we do in the company. So it's a lot of work, but it's quite satisfying because we can see a community come together and that comes a lot through marketing and digital marketing.

Tatiana Trippmacher

It’s kind of a bit of both, I think. If you want to start, just go right at it, but I think you still need to work a bit on who is your audience, first of all. I think something that we do a lot is we try to sell a product to people who don't want to buy it. Try your best to find your audience, to find the people who actually want to buy it, who actually are interested in your courses, in your training. Because, again, we most of the time try to sell it to people who don't want to buy it. If I have a course in, let’s say, Scrum, but I’m selling it to someone who wants to do marketing, does this make sense? I don’t think it does.

So taking a step back and saying “Is this the person who wants to buy my product?” — that's a good first step. Try to have a good understanding of your audience and who actually wants to buy your product. I would say, that's the very first step.

Once you already have your product, once you already have how you want to communicate, again, your tone of voice, and then when you have all this together, just try to understand where your audience is. Are they in the UK? Are they in the US? Are they in Asia? It's very important to understand where they are coming from, because your way of communicating is going to be a lot different since there's a lot of different cultures.

For example, if I'm communicating to the UK, I probably won't do the same communication to people in Portugal. We have a very different mindset. And again, do people in Portugal really want to buy a course in Scrum? Probably not. We don't know. It's a very cultural thing as well.

For me, that's where I try to start when I want to put a new product or a new service in the market. Try to see where your audience is. Try to see who your audience is. I think that those would be the two first important steps.

Tatiana Trippmacher

I think I understand what you are trying to say. I think that often we try to reinvent the wheel, and it's not really necessary. I think even if your product is not a hundred times ,a thousand times better than the next person next to you, just make sure that you have a really good product or service, even though you already have like a hundred in the market. If you truly believe in your products, try to see what differentiates it. For example, everyone is doing Scrum courses or everyone is doing X courses, it doesn’t matter. Try to understand or try to see where your different point is.

You already have something that other people have, right? Let’s say, you already have a Scrum course, but you know that you have the best speaker or the best trainer because X and Y. So try and go with that. Let’s say, other people have this course, it takes 16 hours a week, but the speaker or trainer isn’t that good, they don't really have a lot of ratings, but yours does or you do. So try to go with that and again, try to go to the people who want to buy it or the company that needs it. It's also kind of a salesman job as well.

But yeah, try to see what differentiates you. Not necessarily why you're a lot better than other people or other companies, but what's the one thing that actually differentiates you from everyone else. Even if it's a small thing, just make it a big thing.

Tatiana Trippmacher

Yeah yeah, for sure. Definitely. In my experience, what's been working very well is definitely that. You already have your product, you're selling it to everyone, but not everyone wants to buy it. So you're wasting time, you're wasting money and you're wasting your product with people who are not really interested.

I think that what's been really working out for the biggest companies or the biggest startups at the moment is “ Yes, I do have my product, it probably isn’t the most innovative or most anything in the market, but I truly know who wants to buy it. So I go to that person or I go to that company and right there I'm not wasting time, I’m not wasting money.”

Just niching out your market eases your job a lot, for sure.

Tatiana Trippmacher

Yeah, yeah, data is very important at the moment.

Tatiana Trippmacher

For you to understand your market or for you to understand the people who want to buy it, you also need data. Especially in the digital area where you can see. It’s almost creepy, it’s almost scary. You can literally see what everyone sees, what everyone clicks, who you are, what’s your age, what’s your gender, sometimes, what’s your eye color, what’s your hair color. You can see everything.

And the data is very important because it actually gives you something that’s not a “maybe”, it’s “I know that this works for this audience, for this market because I have the data that proves it.” For example, especially with a website or social media you can see who is clicking on your website, why are they leaving, where are they leaving from, are they actually clicking on my button to buy it, are they not. You can see a lot of things with data. From this, you can niche it a little bit more and have a bit more of a concise persona.

Tatiana Trippmacher

That's a really good question actually, because that happens to me a lot. It’s something that oftentimes you don't really have time for it — to see, to go to your Google Analytics or to your social media analytics. You just put your content out and then you don't forget, but you kind of put it aside because you have things that are more urgent to take care of. So that's for sure a really good question.

What I try to do is see the big metrics. Who is visiting your site? Who are your unique visitors? Try and understand if you have new people coming into your website, which is quite important. And then, the bounce rate — for me it’s also very important to see if people are clicking by mistake or if they are just not interacting with the page. And then from there, anything from where are the most visited pages, try and understand where they are leaving from. For example, I enter in the home page, but then I leave in the My Product page. That means I need to work out on My Product page because I don’t want people to leave from there.

I think those would be the biggest metrics for people who don't have that much time, because it gives you quite a clear understanding of what people are seeing, if people are seeing and interacting with your content. I think those are the biggest ones.

Tatiana Trippmacher

As you said, there's a lot of different tools, a lot. If you're working with a website where you use WordPress and you have Google Ads, for me, that's one of the best ones. It is very straightforward, super user-friendly. Once you have a deeper understanding of who your audience is, like a funnel, when you have understanding if people are buying, where they are clicking, you can also do that by programming. You don’t have to because you already have a lot of things in Google Ads.

But then, if you're using, for example, Squarespace, it is also a very used platform for websites. They have their own analytics, which is also very user-friendly, and you can also incorporate it with the Google console and many many others.

Also you have Adobe Analytics, which is often used for different platforms.

And if you are using social media, for example, Facebook has their own analytics metric, Instagram, LinkedIn also have it. Again, there's a lot of platforms that allow you to schedule your social media and usually they also have their own analytics.

Just use what you have for free, don't pay for anything, basically, if you don’t want to pay for it. Because you already have a lot of good stuff out there that is free.

Tatiana Trippmacher

And again, very good question. And it's fairly easy to answer.

You want people to feel like they're part of something. You don't want them to feel alone. If you just give them the course, it's done. They have the course, they move on with their lives. That's it. But you want something different, right? You want people to be a part of something, have exclusive content. People love exclusive stuff, especially if it's free. And most importantly, you want people to also share insights with other people. It makes you feel a part of something, and you can also learn from others who might have liked the same issue or are experiencing the same thing. That makes it a lot easier for you to sell your product.

Let’s say, I am a part of the community, a Slack or WhatsApp group, whatever. And it’s being mediated by me, let’s say. I go “Oh, here is this article, here is this post, here is this, here is that.” And then, after a while you go “You know what, we have a new course, we have a new academy. It will be very useful for you because you already have this previous course.”

It eases your way into also selling your products as well. It makes other people feel a part of something. Especially in the Agile community, which is still fairly small in Portugal. It gives them a place where they can share, they can learn from others. And it's a lot easier for you to keep customers as well.

Tatiana Trippmacher

Yeah, we just started. I'll be waiting for your invite for sure. This was a quick, but very good talk with you and thank you so much.