Join us in the latest episode of Room 301, as Rob Twells, co-founder of The Digital Maze, sits down with Nina Alexander, a seasoned Marketing & Sales Automation Strategist at CPD Standards Office.
They just head first into the increasing importance of automation in today's marketing landscape, sharing real-world insights on the tools and strategies that drive success. From the power of nurturing leads to the intricacies of understanding customer behaviour (as well as the pitfalls of ignoring it), this conversation is packed with practical tips for businesses looking to stay ahead.
Whether you're a seasoned marketer or just starting out, this episode offers valuable advice on automating for survival in the digital age.
Don't miss Nina’s unique perspectives and actionable tips!
Some of the resources mentioned in the podcast.
Disclaimer: These resources shared are based solely on the experiences of the podcast guest. This is not a sponsored segment or an endorsement.
Rob Twells (00:04)
Rob here from Room 301. Today I'm joined by Nina Alexander. Nina is a great marketeer and she was a great guest for today's episode. Nina talks about how if you don't automate, you could die and also why innovating isn't always a good thing depending on the audience you're marketing to. Let's get into it.
Rob Twells (00:26)
Welcome back to Room 301. I'm joined by the very lovely Nina today. Nina, how are you?
Nina Alexander (00:33)
Good. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Rob Twells (00:36)
Good, good. Well look, I'm really, really appreciative of your time today. I you're a busy person. We've just had a bit of a pre -chat to this recording. It sounds like you've got a lot of things going on. But before we jump into the key questions for the podcast, tell the listeners a bit more about you, your background, how you got into marketing and how you got to where you are now.
Nina Alexander (00:57)
Ooh, that's a very lovely story. I got given a book when I was 16 years old and the book was called The 11 Immutable Laws of Branding and then I got given another book which is The 11 Immutable Laws of Marketing and I read those books and I thought that's exactly what I want to do and I reread those books a couple of months ago from the perspective of today having been in marketing for like 20 years now. Those books are cringe.
Right? are so, yeah, they're so great. They are so very basic having read them now. But back in the day, I thought they were the most fascinating read ever. So that is actually what got me into marketing. It was.
Rob Twells (01:28)
really? Are they out of date?
Nice, so tell me more about your current role. What do you do now? Who, for what, do do day to day?
Nina Alexander (01:47)
Day to day, it's, God, there's a lot of it. There is managing people, there is planning automations, there is content creation, lead magnets, project improvements, like product improvements, service delivery. There's a lot, a lot that happens, I'm not gonna lie. Yeah.
Rob Twells (02:06)
Awesome. We were talking before we started recording about automations and so on, nurturing and things like that. And that's, I find that really interesting personally. I was telling you as we were, before we recorded that something that I think we need to do better as a business as well. it's not something that I see a lot of marketers specializing in. And I think it's certainly something that's becoming more and more important from a marketer's point of view. There's a lot of top of funnel content that happens from a brand perspective, but it's how you.
get sales and revenue and leaves out of that. And it sounds like that's where your expertise lies. So tell me more about your thoughts around automations and how important you think it is to the marketing matrix.
Nina Alexander (02:48)
frankly it is absolutely inevitable for any business that wants to survive I'm not even going to suggest that they will try it
Automation is a matter of survival at this point, simply because as you see how society progress, it's your customers that start expecting it. So unless there is automation behind everything that you do, you're not really going anywhere. And I'll give you a prime example. I did a couple of days ago, purchase a course on a technical skill, and I have been subscribed to that person's email list for coming over close to six years now.
Rob Twells (03:25)
our first purchase.
Nina Alexander (03:28)
First purchase from that person after six years. It is a big one. but it was the sheer fact that I was subscribed to their emails that, managed to actually get me to first of all, believe what they say, see true value in what they sell and actually become a, become a customer, paying customer after so many years. And had I not been subscribed to them, I wouldn't have remembered their name. There was absolutely no chance.
Rob Twells (03:29)
six year sale cycle as a big one.
Absolutely,
I think that's a really good example.
Nina Alexander (03:57)
that six years later. Yeah, I know it is a really good example, but the thing with marketing automation that's happening at the moment is that you have a lot of tools popping left, right and center. People get bombarded with tools being sent, it's automation is effectively just tying a series of sequence of events happening one after the other.
The thing that a lot of people don't think about at this point is that it doesn't really, it's really that important which tool you're using. Cause ultimately at the end of the day, they do the same thing more or less. You miss a feature here or a feature there, but ultimately they do the same thing. It's the concept. It's the logical thoughts that you put behind it that makes the, that makes a difference. So if I can give one advice to, people that deal with automation is get a diagramming tool. Honestly.
Rob Twells (04:49)
Okay.
Nina Alexander (04:50)
If you can diagram it, even if it's a pen to paper, if you can diagram a process, you can automate it. Everything is possible. Yeah, you can build it. But you have to diagram it, and you have to make sense when you diagram it. If you can't diagram it, you can't automate it. It's just as simple as that.
Rob Twells (04:58)
You can build it, yeah.
That's a really good piece of advice. One I'm going to take on actually as well. It's interesting, particularly B2B, we're a B2B business and it's from a sales point of view and a lead generation point of view, it's very difficult to find a sale or a lead who needs your help right at that exact moment. I think a lot of B2B lead generation and sales is waiting for the right moment where they need your service or product. And that's where the automation and the nurturing calls in for me.
Nina Alexander (05:31)
Yeah.
Rob Twells (05:36)
You can capture their attention with a white paper, a download, a webinar in January, but they might not need you until June. What are you doing between January and June that's going to capture their attention? And when they do want your products, you're the first person they think of. That's the bit that I find really fascinating. And I think that's why clearly you're adding your value. But, introduction. Thank you again for joining us, Nina. First question.
Nina Alexander (05:41)
Mm
Rob Twells (06:03)
What's in your toolbox? So the what's in your toolbox part of our episodes is not always about a piece of software, although it certainly can be. I'm personally very interested in, you know, I speak to a lot of people, very busy people managing teams, managing different businesses, side hustles, so on and so forth. Lots of stuff to do, lots of tasks to get through. I'm very interested in the tools that people use to get through those tasks efficiently, how they think about it, work in frameworks, so on and so forth. Over to you, tell me how you…
Nina Alexander (06:03)
Yep.
Okay.
Rob Twells (06:31)
be so efficient how you get through your work.
Nina Alexander (06:35)
Well, when it comes to.
frameworks. I do have one framework that I use the most with almost every business that I ever engage with. And that's the Ansoff matrix. It's old school as you would have it, but it's probably the most efficient thing. a lot of times I'll just give you a quick overview of why I'm using it. So the Ansoff matrix is basically something that shows you which direction you can go in terms of, in terms of existing and new products and in terms of existing in new markets.
So I don't know if you recall what the matrix is, it's basically four quadrants and you have products on one lane, markets on the other one. And effectively you get to sit down against it. There's a lot more that goes into the analysis. But if you are sat as a business at a specific position and you go, okay, so I have reached the possible top of the market I can reach.
then the answer matrix can actually help you find out whether you're expanding towards new markets or new products. And it's just a very easy way to visualize that. So when it comes to decision making about how to grow businesses, the Ansoff matrix is my absolute go to. When it comes to tools, I obviously I have a diagramming solution I'm using. is the… I do some, I use something that's not very popular. It's called…
Rob Twells (07:55)
What's your chosen diagram in solution? You're have to tell me that.
Add paper.
Nina Alexander (08:03)
No, no, you know why I don't use pen and paper anymore? I used to when I first started, I would do everything on pen and paper or whiteboards. But then over time, you realize that you start editing stuff a lot more. And some diagrams are really simple. My diagrams are insane.
Sometimes, because I work a lot with business to business as well. when it comes to business to consumer, it usually is a straightforward, easy process. When it comes to business to business, there is a lot of intricate detail that you get with your nurturing sequence. And you find a way to get people to give you answers without asking them questions through automation. Happy to tell you more about that in another case. But.
My diagrams are humongous. So I actually need a tool that will allow me to zoom in, zoom out, and edit things easily. So I use MyDraw for automation. Yeah, not a very popular tool, but it works perfectly for me. And I'm used to it. Honestly, when it comes to software tools, it's what you get comfortable with. So other tools that I use is obviously a CRM or an automation tool.
Rob Twells (09:01)
My job.
Nina Alexander (09:20)
and my favorite at the moment is Go High Level because it has everything under one price point. That's what I love about it.
Rob Twells (09:28)
Okay, that's presumably that sort of email flows that integrate with LinkedIn or anything like that.
Nina Alexander (09:34)
Yeah, it integrates with a lot and it's developing so rapidly that almost every single day when I open it there's something new. But unlike some other tools, used to be a HubSpot expert in the past, worked a lot with HubSpot, but they broke down pricing so much that for some growing businesses at the moment, it's just not sustainable to use HubSpot. It's just too expensive.
Rob Twells (09:43)
well.
It's very expensive, yeah.
Nina Alexander (09:59)
It is very expensive. Yeah. Go High Level actually kills all that. And it's a wonderful tool to use. It's got everything that you need in there, including like membership options, the option to have courses on your website, like all in one platform. Obviously, Zapier because who doesn't love a good Zap?
Rob Twells (10:14)
Okay.
Yeah, so that's how you're getting your data from point A, which is maybe a download or a sign up to Go High Level, presumably.
Nina Alexander (10:27)
Really? Yeah, sometimes. And to be honest with you, I mostly use Zapier to get ChatGPT to do stuff. whenever you want, so one of the things that I'd automate very often, for instance, for businesses is whenever you have customer service enquiries and you have a large volume of those, it
Rob Twells (10:36)
well.
Nina Alexander (10:50)
often isn't sustainable to hire the number of people that you actually need to answer in a timely manner to all of these customer service enquiries. But if you can get a ChatGPT to draft an answer and any of your customer representatives to actually review that before you send it over to a customer, that makes life easy. So we do a lot of that with Zapier where we send the obviously train a chat, train ChatGPT.
Rob Twells (10:57)
Yeah.
Nina Alexander (11:18)
gets a question sent over to it and it prompts it just pops over a draft response in your mailbox. You get to review it and then just send it over to the client.
Rob Twells (11:28)
And that's hooked up via Zapier's driving that, right? That's awesome. And does it ping it into Slack or Teams or something like that?
Nina Alexander (11:36)
You can, depends on the platforms that you use, can pretty much type Zapier with anything that you want these days.
Rob Twells (11:44)
awesome. I need to do more with ChatGPT. I need to do so much more with ChatGPT.
Nina Alexander (11:45)
Yeah, you do need to do more. The thing that we're working on right now is with my team, we're developing an automation sequence that we can just deploy directly into businesses, which basically allows you to grab content from your existing database, whether you're using Google Drive or OneDrive or whatever it is, and it will search through all that and create social media posts for you, design the images.
and pop them over into a scheduler. So you just go, yeah, like that, yeah, like that, yeah, like that post it.
Rob Twells (12:21)
That doesn't exist.
Nina Alexander (12:23)
It does exist. There are some solutions. you have currently there is no one one solution that does all of that You kind of have to you kind of have to tie a few things together and some people have already started But I've not found anything so far That doesn't require a prompt to be done for every single post and I'm trying to go promptless basically
Rob Twells (12:30)
Go ahead.
Yeah, I am.
Well, look, if you need someone to test that when it's in beta phase, do reach out and give me a shout. I'm well up for that. Well, look, Nina, I always think when it comes to people who are successful and have gone far in marketing or any role really, they've had to fail a number of times to get there, to learn from it and improve. So one of the things we like to ask our guests is give them the time where you failed that was either really funny,
Nina Alexander (12:47)
I can't
Rob Twells (13:15)
spot a smile on our listeners face or just something that had a really big learning curve for you and you took a lot away from it.
Nina Alexander (13:22)
You know, I have a ton of these. A remarkably sad number of failures, but I think that's… Well, depends on how you look at it. Some of them have been financially sad, some of them have just been sad. But that's, honestly, that is how you learn. What I find to be the funniest case from recent times was we were running a campaign that was…
Rob Twells (13:26)
there we go.
Hey, that'd be sad.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Nina Alexander (13:49)
Quite successful. It was a Google Ads campaign. It was having roughly about like 87 % of exposure shares. So generally, it was getting the most number of views that it could get. It was running really well. The thing is, with marketing, you always want to improve stuff, right? So we looked at the landing page one day with the team, and we said, ooh, that's a little bit old school. We kind of need to change this. We need to make it better.
So we sat down, we conceptualized, we designed, we went back and forth, edited the copy, edited the titles, edited absolutely everything and made a really, really fancy modern landing page. We first launched it responsibly. We launched it as an A/B test against the current page that looked really, really boring. A week later, something was really off because the new very fancy, very modern page was not performing.
So we thought, something must be wrong with the A/B test, right? Something with the systems must be wrong. So let's just, you know what, let's remove the old page and run the campaign with just a new landing page, which is so amazing. We nearly killed the campaign. Nearly killed the campaign. So conversion rate just dropped to the ground.
Rob Twells (15:08)
This based on the new landing page, right?
Nina Alexander (15:10)
based on a new landing page. Even though it was far better, it loaded better on mobile, graphics were more modern, it had the information in a better way. But the thing is, sometimes you think that you are ready for innovation, your clients may not be. So when you serve your audience something that they are not quite ready for and that looks a little bit too futuristic for them, they fall back.
Rob Twells (15:37)
So was this in a particular sector that wasn't ready for that, do you think?
Nina Alexander (15:41)
Yeah, yeah, that was in education and I can tell you straight up education sector is not ready for innovation, at least not visual one.
Rob Twells (15:52)
No, I get that 100%. Well, yeah, I mean, we design a lot of landing pages here. A big part of our business is PPC and typically they work and, you know, small tweaks here and there can have massive impacts on conversion rates. But yeah, for sure, if the audience of the business you're trying to optimize for is not ready for it, they don't take well to certain things looking visually quite striking. They like to keep things very simple and readable and digestible and it's going to have the opposite effect, I guess, isn't it?
Nina Alexander (16:21)
Yeah.
Rob Twells (16:22)
I suppose the foundational point from this, guess, is, and we've had this a few times, understanding who you're trying to market to. What do they want? What are their preferences? What's familiar to them? Because you don't want to go outside of their comfort zone, you? And I guess in that instance, I guess in that instance that you did.
Nina Alexander (16:36)
Exactly.
we did and can I be frank with you a month later we tried again because that wasn't a good enough lesson we tried again and it flopped again so we just left it
Rob Twells (16:43)
Go for it.
Sometimes you think it's unbelievable, you think, no, it must have been a one -off. It's gotta have been a one -off. Let's give it again, but no, no.
Nina Alexander (16:57)
Yeah.
No, it wasn't a what -off. When the audience speaks, you quite frankly shut up and listen. think some marketers, myself included, may have become a little bit arrogant, thinking that we know what's best for our clients, but at the end of the day, the maths is always going to win.
Rob Twells (17:04)
and
Yeah.
Yeah, and what works in one industry or one campaign is not going to work in another. It very much depends on who it's aimed at, who it's being sent to. The older generation may not like something that's too many bells and whistles, keep it simple, but the younger generation might want the bells and whistles, the vibrancy, the colours, the things flying in the page and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, you've just got to listen, as you say, shut up and listen. I like that. I could be the…
Nina Alexander (17:29)
Absolutely.
you
Yeah, honestly, it's one of the most
Rob Twells (17:48)
Maybe that's the name of the podcast. Well, onto the main event. So for anybody that doesn't know, and I keep saying this, maybe I shouldn't, but Room 301 is, it was born out of the, what's called a 301 redirect, which is an SEO term for redirecting a page to somewhere else on a new website or an existing website. It tells the search engine that it's located in a different place. Now the idea behind the Room 301,
Nina Alexander (17:50)
Yeah.
Rob Twells (18:15)
podcast is that we are redirecting something that we don't like in marketing, something that really annoys us a pet peeve of ours into a room never to be seen again, hypothetically. If only, if only. So Nina, what are you putting in Room 301? What really annoys you about marketing?
Nina Alexander (18:27)
if only.
God, this is how we met, right? You published a post on LinkedIn and I answered with 10 different things. I did tell you that one of my pride and joys is that I do not fall into Samuel L. Jackson modes. I only single day, I usually do. When you published it, that was one of the days I did. There are a lot of things, but my key thing these days is that a lot of people…
Rob Twells (18:37)
I did, 10 things.
I saw that, yeah.
Nina Alexander (19:01)
think that marketing equals promotion. And I'll give you an example to that. That has happened to me, unfortunately, with more customers than I would care to admit.
You sit down as a marketer with the business owners or the board of decision makers or whoever is responsible for that business and you look into data and you see that the clients are pulling back because the service is either inadequate, it's old school, it needs a little bit of editing or something else can make it better by just enhancing it ever so slightly.
and you bring that over to senior leadership of any sort and they go, no, no, we don't want to change the product. The product is fine as it is. Let's just promote it a little bit more. Thinking that a marketer shouldn't get involved with the product, but at the end of the day, I think the whole concept is forgotten that marketing is about positioning a product. That's effectively, marketing is positioning a product in front of the audience.
This is what the word means. But when you have to do that process, you also have to take into account what the audience is. And if the product doesn't fit the audience, well, there is one obvious solution to fix it. So that is one of my key things I would like to put aside the idea that marketing is promotion and actually get marketers ever so slightly, at least, involved with the actual product.
Rob Twells (20:38)
No, I totally agree. I totally agree. Even from the very beginning, brainstorming ideas, so on and so forth, it's very, very important that the product has a position in the market, it has a plan around it. can't just, just because the campaign's worked before doesn't mean it's gonna work again. You can't just make a product and apply the same campaign strategy you did for another product on top of that and it'll work. It just doesn't work like that. It needs its own positioning, et cetera, et What's the price point?
Nina Alexander (20:38)
or the actual.
Mm.
Rob Twells (21:06)
Why is the price point like that? You only got so much space in your ad copy or campaign to put that out into the world. It needs to be very simple and very clear as to how that pricing strategy got there, just as one example.
Nina Alexander (21:20)
Another thing that I would like to put in that room is just entrepreneurs that go, we need big picture thinking.
Rob Twells (21:27)
Corporate lingo.
Nina Alexander (21:29)
If I hear one more big picture thinking, I'll probably bang my head against the wall. This is quite dangerous to be honest with you because big picture thinking at the end of the day means that you have a zero understanding of the small detail that needs to get done in order for your marketing campaign to be successful. So you want big picture thinking, you want something to go viral, but what is the process behind that?
Rob Twells (21:59)
100%. What do you think big picture thinking actually means? I think sometimes it's said without any substance to
Nina Alexander (21:59)
One of my favorite -
Well, what it should mean is the understanding of the place that a specific product or service takes within the market right now and in the future. So a big picture thinking would include somebody who actually has some understanding of sociology and mass psychology in which we can all agree it doesn't happen.
Rob Twells (22:35)
I agree. And there's lots of corporate lingo that we weren't going to today that I find really funny. Like the word, the word circling back.
Nina Alexander (22:41)
Yeah, we need… Like, marketing… Yeah, marketing these days needs far more Indians and far less chiefs.
Rob Twells (22:52)
Okay, what do you mean by that?
Nina Alexander (22:54)
Well, there are a lot of people out there that go, I'm very good at seeing the big picture. Are you? Are you? How many people are really good at seeing the big picture? And how can you have gone into marketing two years ago and all of a sudden you're very good at seeing the big picture?
Rob Twells (23:13)
Yeah, totally agree.
Nina Alexander (23:14)
But then there are at least where I operate, I see a lot of meetings where ideation is done and then there's no one to execute it. So we see that.
Rob Twells (23:26)
Yeah. That's the hard bit there, right? That's the hard bit there, right?
Nina Alexander (23:32)
Yeah, that's why you need more Indians, less chiefs, because you need a little bit less ideation, actually more work being done.
Rob Twells (23:34)
The execution.
100 % 100 % Well look they're both firmly in room 301 and Neil look I appreciate your time. Thank you very much for jumping on and replying to my LinkedIn post which was probably four or five weeks ago now. Look if anyone wants to know more about you where can they find out more?
Nina Alexander (23:54)
flashing.
well, my agency's website is successfulsetup .com and that's a lot of S's and a lot of C's, but I'm sure people can find it. With a simple Google search because Google will correct you even when you type it wrong. And I will be changing the name.
Rob Twells (24:17)
There we go.
always change it.
Nina Alexander (24:21)
I will be changing the name to something that people can actually spell easily. See, that's the one marketing mistake I made.
Rob Twells (24:28)
That could be the funniest failures. Well, feel free to reach out to Nina on LinkedIn as well. Any automation questions? Nina's your person for that. Nina, thank you very much for jumping on today. Very much grateful for your time and we'll see you all again soon.
Nina Alexander (24:31)
Yeah.
My pleasure. Thank you,
Rob is the Founder of an award winning digital agency (since forming a digital agency group The Digital Maze with Boom Online) specialising in eCommerce, SEO, PPC, CRO, digital strategy and web design. With over 10+ years in the marketing space, Rob has been involved with hundreds of marketing projects and campaigns with some of the best known brands.
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