[Top Agency Series] Unlocking Marketing Secrets With Marc Binkley of Calgary Marketing Association

Marc Binkley is the President of the Calgary Marketing Association, a hub for Alberta’s top marketing professionals to gather, connect, and broaden their horizons. With a rich background in B2B tech, SaaS, and more, he serves companies as a Fractional CMO through his firm Quatical. Passionate about market orientation and strategy, Marc is dedicated to elevating the marketing community to a global standard of excellence. He also hosts The Sleeping Barber Podcast, where he delves into pressing marketing topics and interviews leaders in the field.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [03:26] Marc Binkley discusses the evolutionary growth of the Calgary Marketing Association and his role within
• [06:12] The importance of market research and predicting future marketing trends
• [09:06] The key aspects of creating a world-class marketing association
• [18:16] How to challenge the traditional methods of marketing with market orientation
• [21:12] Marc talks about Quatical’s 595 rule and how it applies to capturing and building market demand
• [25:25] How Genesis Builder Group effectively implemented the 595 rule
• [29:30] Insights on differentiation in the B2B SaaS market 
• [35:29] The concept of evidence-based marketing and its importance in making informed decisions

In this episode…

In today’s competitive landscape, building a marketing organization that excels on a global scale requires innovative strategies and a deep commitment to community engagement. So, how can one leverage the power of community involvement and strategic thinking to elevate a professional association? And what would it mean to shift from traditional methodologies to more evidence-based practices in marketing?

Marc Binkley, an innovative marketing executive, delves into the essence of elevating the Calgary Marketing Association beyond a simple networking group to a beacon of world-class marketing. He reveals the five themes for achieving greatness and the unexpectedly simple shifts in perception that can catapult an organization to the forefront of its industry. With a unique perspective influenced by science and experience, Marc illustrates the power of market orientation and the pitfalls of benchmarking competition.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Marc Binkley, President of the Calgary Marketing Association, about shaping marketing communities and evidence-based strategies. Marc discusses the evolutionary growth of the Calgary Marketing Association, the key aspects of creating a world-class marketing association, and Quatical’s 595 rule and how it applies to capturing and building market demand.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Marc Binkley on LinkedIn | Website
• Calgary Marketing Association
• Quatical Fractional CMO
• The Sleeping Barber Podcast

Special Mention(s):

• Mark Ritson
• Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon
• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dr. Dan Ariely
• Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things by Dr. Dan Ariely
• How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know by Byron Sharp

Related episode(s):

• “[Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments: 

• “In any given market, at any given time, there’s about 5% of the market who are currently buying today.”
• “If you want to be known as world-class, then call it out and be world-class.”
• “It’s really hard to maintain differentiation — it’s really hard to hold on to that.”
• “General awareness actually is not important, what does matter is situational awareness.”
• “There’s a misconception that we can just turn on the taps, put a campaign in the market, and generate demand.”

Action Steps: 

1. Adopt a market orientation approach: By viewing your business through the lens of the customer rather than your company, you can better understand your real competitors and opportunities. 
2. Focus on building both current and future demand: Implement the 595 rule by allocating efforts to capture immediate demand while also nurturing future demand. 
3. Emphasize distinctiveness over differentiation: This approach addresses the challenge of the “herd of sameness” and leverages the power of brand recognition to stand out in competitive markets.
4. Utilize evidence-based marketing strategies: Ensure that marketing strategies are grounded in reality, offering a more reliable path to achieving desired outcomes.
5. Engage in thought leadership and education: This not only positions your brand as an authority in the industry, but also addresses the opportunity to differentiate through meaningful content that resonates with your audience.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:01 

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22 

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today, is no different. I have Marc Binkley. You can check him out. He’s president of the Calgary Marketing Association, calgarycma.com also runs Quatical. You can check it out, quatical.com. And Marc, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast. People should check out. Since this is part of the top marketing and agency series, some of the other episodes, I had Kevin Hourigan on of Spinutech. And Kevin started an agency in 1995 so interesting to hear the landscape of the internet business and agency life then. So that was really good one. We had Todd Taskey on. Todd talks about how he helps, basically connect private equity with agencies. So he helps sell agencies. He is a Second Bite Podcast. So he finds that, agency owner will sell, and sometimes that private equity sells again. Sometimes those owners make more on the second bite than they do on the first. So it’s really interesting to hear about the M&A space evaluation space and also the agency world as well, and not many more on inspiredinsider.com.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. And we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. So Marc, we call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for the host so they can create amazing content, amazing relationships, most importantly, run their business. For me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. And I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships, and I have found no better way, over the past 15 years, to profile the people and companies I most admire, and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you have questions, you go to rise25.com, and you can email us at [email protected].

So Marc has a podcast too, which we’ll talk about. So I believe you have a business, you should have a podcast, period. And so I’m excited to introduce Marc Binkley, is president of the Calgary Marketing Association. The CMA was founded in 2001 it’s a nonprofit that supports Calgary’s thriving marketing community. He also runs Quatical, where he’s a fractional CMO, serving companies in the B2B tech, SaaS, transportation, utilities, retail and professional services. He, as I mentioned, has a podcast called The Sleeping Barber Podcast. Marc, thanks for joining me.

Marc Binkley 3:08 

Thanks for having me on Jeremy. It’s fun sitting on the side of the mic.

Jeremy Weisz 3:12 

Yeah. I actually like this side better, because I get to ask the questions. But talk about it for a second. I’ll have you just talk about the Calgary Marketing Association and what you do there, and then we’ll talk about Quatical.

Marc Binkley 3:26 

Yeah, sure. So the Calgary Marketing Association is, I believe it’s the second-biggest marketing association in Canada. I mean, relatively speaking to my place in the US. I mean, Canada is kind of a rounding error, so it’s small by other standards, but in Canada, it’s a really sizable organization. I think we’ve got about 1600 individuals that are members now, and really is a reflection of the Calgary Marketing Community or Calgary Business Community. And we’ve got lots of people in agency, lots of people in B2B, typically, they’re, I would say, mid-career. And we’ve got different forums, we’ve got different levels of sponsorship. We run a whole bunch of different kinds of events and so it’s been really, I started in this role in April, and it’s been a really interesting ride over the last few weeks.

Jeremy Weisz 4:22 

How did that role come about?

Marc Binkley 4:26 

Well, the original president that had been in this position for 10 years retired, and she did an amazing job building this up to what it is today. And literally when she took over, her name’s Sydney, she had inherited this event, inherited this organization, and at the time, was essentially just a golf tournament. And so they did that once a year. And then from that, she built it into all these different things. So I was thinking about it as like I inherited this house with great bones, and so now I’m, as a renovator, looking at, you know, how, what can I do with this, and how do I improve it, and how do I enhance it?

So it’s really, it’s been very exciting, because we’ve got a really engaged community and lots of great people, lots of people, are making some really big contributions, not just to our community, but globally, to a lot of different things in marketing. And so, big part of what we’re trying to do, I mean, the vision behind the CMA is actually to make Calgary known as a world class marketing community, and so my role is to help make that come to reality.

Jeremy Weisz 5:36 

I mean, some of the same principles apply, right, growing a company — growing an ssociation as members. What are some of the things that you are doing with the CMA that, I mean, people can apply to their business also? And, by the way, there’s a video piece to this. We are looking at the calgarycma.com here, and we can see some of the stuff that obviously, has grown from a golf tournament, like you’re saying, to other benefits for people. So talk about that piece.

Marc Binkley 6:12 

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we have done since I took over, and it’s not unique to me by any stretch, but I think a lot about market orientation. So I took a course from Mark Ritson a bunch of years ago. It was probably the single best marketing program I’ve ever taken, of course, and I’ve taken lots of them. So that was a huge influence on how I see the world. And so I really wanted to start, I mean, there’s also this other idea of, you’re flying a plane while you’re fixing it, and so you’re keeping things running as best as you can, while you’re also trying to understand how the machine works and what does this button do, and what’s under this lever and all those kinds of things. So, I would say market orientation is really what I have been focusing a lot on, first, the strategy of how we’re going to achieve on that vision, getting the board aligned, and then from there, over the course of the summer, and then more so in the fall, is doing a lot of market research to try and understand what would it take, or what would have to be true for us to become known As World Class Marketing Association.

We just did a really cool session with 50 hand-picked people within. They weren’t even all exclusively from the Association, but just people that I met in my first period of onboarding that really want to make a bigger contribution to the community. And so invited all of them to this session and talked about what would have to be true for us to become known as a world-class association. We piped in some friends from Sweden who are in a similar organization and agencies out there with the really interesting perspective and mindset to give the global perspective. And then we also are running a survey in market right now that is asking marketers about trends that they’re seeing in their roles and their positions from a budget perspective, channel perspective, but also from an ROI perspective. Because you probably heard the water maker dilemma that half my advertising is wasted, Trouble is, I just don’t know which half.

I mean, that was about 125 ish years ago that he said that, and that’s still the number one issue plaguing most marketers. So we’re trying to dig into that question a bit more and figure out, how do we know which half is wasted and what are the challenges with solving for that? So that’s been a big focus, I would say, on what I’ve been working on for the last few months anyway specifically.

Jeremy Weisz 8:42 

I like the exercise of thinking of that question, actually, that you brought up, which is, what would make us world-class? In this case, fill in the blank association for a company, asking company, partners, clients, other people, what would make us world class? What’s some of the feedback you got on how to become a world class in this case, association?

Marc Binkley 9:06 

Yeah, and it’s been interesting. I actually just, I was going through some of the feedback we had everybody write cue cards. And there’s a whole moderated session that we had this woman named Erica that was helping us out. Did an amazing job. She runs a company called Good Seed, and so she was awesome, helping us coordinate, like, all these people. So the idea was, Calgary just went through a rebrand. We introduced Calgary’s new branding as Blue Sky City. So we wanted to create this opportunity of like, this is a blue sky kind of conversation. And then we had the people from Sweden that were there talking about, well, here’s how we kind of see world class marketing, and here’s what it means to us. And here’s our journey over the last 100 years, because they’ve been around for a lot longer. And here’s how we implement some of those ideas. And then from there all the 50 people in the room going writing down ideas they had on cue cards.

And collaborating and sharing ideas, exchanging ideas and building out like stories around how this could come to life. So I just started going through all the cue cards today from the event that happened last week. And so there’s five big themes that came out of it, one of them. And actually, just give me a second, if you don’t mind, because I actually have this hidden somewhere behind my screen. Yeah, go ahead. So one of them was positioning, is how I framed it. Now, like interpreting the categories of all these handwritten notes, I just did it arbitrarily. So I did that arbitrarily, because I, you know, it’s hard to exactly classify these things, but the positioning is a really important thing. So there’s somebody else who said this to me once when I was working in retail, we, there’s a whole bunch of us that were sitting around the table, and this consultant came in and said, essentially, it’s almost like you guys are ashamed of being retailers. And it might be a Canadian thing where, where there’s an inferiority complex, or we just think less of ourselves than we maybe should.

But there’s a positioning thing where some of it is just, if you want to be women as world class, then call that out and be world class, right? So there’s some of that, you know, messaging came out of that from the group. There’s another one around thought leadership, like a category around thought leadership, things like having someone to drive the message, having a focus on the future and not just on the past, communication, having it planned out thought, being thoughtful around it. One of the other categories was education, and that’s an interesting one, but of particular interest for me, partly because of my background, partly because of my podcast as well, but we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There’s a lot of good stuff out there, but there’s also a lot of junk. So it’s a matter of sifting through a lot of that stuff and being the curator of a lot of great things.

Jeremy Weisz 12:15 

So with education, it kind of bleeds into curating from different great sources. The thought leadership is kind of what you were saying, the thought leadership of people, members or leaders of the organization, but the education kind of bleeds into the curation of other content out there.

Marc Binkley 12:36 

Yeah, and like, as an example, I mean, you and I both have a bit of a science background, and so, if I say to you, like, a big part of science is having the ability to have a predictable, repeatable outcome, confidence interval of, like, 95% and statistical significance of 5.05 like, those kinds of things matter lots. What that means is that if you do a study and you get a result, if you have a confidence interval of, say, 95% it means that 95 times out of 100 you should get the same kind of result. So when we’re talking about education and thought leadership, some of it is just talking about the things that already exist. And on the education side, some of it is, there’s a resistance to accepting things that didn’t come from here.

So you don’t have to reinvent the wheel either, which could just be, let’s redo the study, and if we get the same result, like they’re telling us we should, then that actually can be something that’s unique to us, and is puts our flavor on it, whether, like a B2B angle, which is something that the B2B Institute has done with a lot of B2C studies, or Calgary based angle, or Canadian based angle, or North American based angle, for studies that have been done that were focused on, say, a Chinese market, or a European market, or, you know, something like that, where people go, No, that’s different. That’s not the same as us.

Jeremy Weisz 14:11 

So we have positioning, thought, leadership, education. What was the next theme?

Marc Binkley 14:18 

The next one celebrating community, and then the last one was reach. So the celebrating community is around making it known that we have a great group of people, and we can talk a little bit about some of those examples that we have, but there’s a lot of people that have done really cool stuff, and we don’t need to, like, manufacture stuff, like, we’ve already got really cool members that are doing amazing things and delivering incredible results and being recognized for it globally in a lot of cases, but aren’t recognized for it locally. So there’s that. And then the last one, yeah, talk about reach. So. Yeah, that’s just, I mean, we can call it awareness, but it’s really about reaching more people than you ever had before. And there’s a whole bunch of reasons why that matters a lot. I was thinking about in terms of like, there’s anyone that’s followed Aaron Berg Bass institutes work, they might recognize it as mental, physical availability and the law of double jeopardy, and there’s a whole bunch of marketing laws that exist out there.

But another way I would think about it is, let’s say you’re because I had a former life as a sales guy. Let’s say you’re a sales guy and you’ve got a list of 10 clients, and for whatever reason, the manager that you are working with says, you can never add any more clients to your list, but you can upsell them. So okay, maybe you get one or two clients in the first year, great, and then you can upsell them. And maybe you get a third client in the second year, but then maybe one of those 10 clients goes out of business, maybe one of them just decides to shut down for whatever reason. Maybe one of them moves locations. And so your 10, all of a sudden becomes nine. The next year, maybe it’s eight. The year after is maybe it’s seven. And so if you arbitrarily set limits on who you can talk to and who you can do business with, then you’re restricting especially if it’s just customers that you already have, you’re restricting your potential for growth. So reach is a really important part.

Jeremy Weisz 16:32 

Do you feel like some of the business you talk to have these restrictions they’re putting on themselves?

Marc Binkley 16:42 

Yeah, to some degree, and I think a lot of it has to do with the way you see the world. And so this is the market orientation part. If you see the world through the lens of your company, then you look at, in my cases, with the Calgary Marketing Association, I might look at other competitors in Calgary who is another association that’s based in Calgary. Let’s say there aren’t any. Then I go, look at me. I’m winning. I don’t have any competitors. If I then go to 180 and look at the landscape from the point of view of the customer, I might see that there’s actually 14, at least, associations in Canada. There’s an infinite number of YouTube gurus and ninjas out there that are all claiming different things.

There’s people from around the world, like the Aaron Berber Bass Institute, the B2B Institute, the Mark Ritson, the work, there’s all these kinds of associations, A&A the ACA like, there’s all these kinds of associations that are and even like people within my office that I might consider to be influential in helping educate and doing the same things that me as a business owner, I’m trying to do for my customers, but I had never thought about them as competitors before.

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