Hannah Wehrly and Mike Maynard explore Acton’s innovative AI web agent and examine the often overlooked potential of SMS marketing in B2B communications. The discussion also highlights findings from the Liana State of Marketing Automation Report, including the surprising prioritization of newsletters over advanced tools like A/B testing. In addition, Napier’s A/B testing eBook is mentioned, offering valuable strategies for optimizing your landing pages and emails to boost performance and achieve better results. Finally, the insightful tip of the week offers practical strategies for pitching marketing automation to your boss, focusing on the benefits of increased sales leads, improved efficiency, and significant time savings.
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About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Wehrly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
[00:00:00] – Introduction
[00:01:12] – Acton’s New AI Web Agent
[00:04:02] – Exploring SMS Marketing in B2B
[00:09:10] – Insights from the Liana State of Marketing Automation Report
[00:15:31] – How to Sell Marketing Automation to Your Boss
[00:17:06] – Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Wehrly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wehrly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing Automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We’d also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: From Newsletters to Automation: Maximizing Your Marketing Efforts in a Digital World
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Wherly
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I’m Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard. This is Napier’s podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I’m Hannah Whaley.
Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard.
Hannah: Today we discuss the new AI web agent from Acton.
Mike: We debate whether SMS is one way to reach B2B audiences.
Hannah: We discuss a market automation trends report.
Mike: And Hannah explains to me how to sell the concept of market automation to your boss.
Hannah: Hi, Mike. Welcome back to another episode of Market Automation Moment. How are you doing? Are you feeling as tired as I am from Germany last week?
Mike: Yeah, I’m certainly feeling tired, Hannah. It’s great to be talking to you, but we did have a whole week last week traipsing around an enormous trade show. I mean, it seems amazing. Here we are talking about market automation, and yet in marketing, you still have to do things like trade shows.
Hannah: Oh, definitely. I think we all thought it was going to die out after COVID, but unfortunately, that wasn’t quite the way.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, we did some amazing calculations as to how much money was spent on trade shows. If only a part of that was spent on market automation, I wonder what the results would be.
Hannah: Oh, absolutely. Well, let’s dive in, Mike. We’ve got a few updates to discuss in this week’s episode, and I actually want to have a chat about Apton. Now, Apton is a marketing automation platform that we haven’t mentioned for a few episodes, but I thought it was really interesting because they’ve announced some news about their new AI web agent. Now, this is a really fancy way of saying that basically it’s an upgrade from chatbots. It’s something that can be embedded into their customers’ websites. I think it’s going to be quite cool. I think they are really promoting kind of like the ease of being able to set it up. You don’t have to do all the background stuff that you normally have to do for chatbots, but do you think it’s something that customers will use?
Mike: That’s a great question, Hannah. I mean, I think definitely people are going to use it. One of the biggest problems with chatbots is all the training. I do notice that, you know, with Acton’s materials, they said setting up is a few days, so it’s clearly not all automatic. And I think everyone’s going to worry about hallucinations. We did recently a webinar on AI, and we had two of the three AIs randomly generating product availability in a sample press release we got them to create. You know, that’s going to be a worry if you’ve got the risk of these hallucinations. Potentially the chatbot might give the wrong answers.
Hannah: Oh, I think that’s a great point, Mike. And I mean, I guess it depends on how they are going to program it, because chatbots are programmed for very specific responses. And then it was, you know, reach out to a person. But if this is going to be next level, then are they perhaps going to set up parameters or is it possible to set up those parameters to avoid these hallucinations, to avoid these wrong answers?
Mike: Yeah, I think it’d be interesting to see. I mean, normally, ragging, so looking up data and then the generative AI responding, doesn’t generate hallucinations. In fact, I mean, overall, when we tested five different chatbots, we found that it wasn’t that bad. But I think for, you know, particularly B2B companies, the potential cost of even one wrong answer could be huge, you know, a loss of a major customer. And so I think people have got to look at it, and I think they’ve got to be very careful in terms of the testing. I’m not saying don’t do it. I think AI is definitely going to drive a lot more interaction in terms of chatbots and websites. And that’s not just inevitable, that’s a good thing. But I think, you know, the important thing in deployment is to be very careful and to do very controlled testing until you know you can be confident that what the chatbot is saying is correct, and then start rolling it out more broadly.
Hannah: I think that’s a great bit of advice, Mike. And I think it’s something that companies definitely need to take on board. I mean, even us at Napier, we wouldn’t do anything without some thorough testing. So, you know, it’s definitely a topic I’d like to pick up maybe early, middle of next year, just to see how it’s gone, how this rollout has gone and how people have been finding it.
Mike: Definitely. I think it’s a good idea to come back and see some of the success stories. It’d be great to hear how it has helped people.
Hannah: Absolutely. Well, let’s move on to something slightly different because I actually came across a webinar from MailChimp and you know, to be truthful, the webinar was a few months ago. It’s not something new, but I thought it would be a really great piece of conversation for us because the webinar was actually on the power of SMS marketing. So basically texting, you know. And I wanted to have a chat because I think this is a very B2C thing. We have conversations all the time about how B2C tries to encroach on B2B and perhaps the tactics and the activities that B2C use. aren’t successful in B2B. But what do we think of texting as part of a marketing tactic? Is it something that’s really going to take off in our industry? Is it something that people are just going to ignore? I’m actually on the side of that I don’t know how successful this would be, but what do you think?
Mike: I thought you were the young person in this podcast that was supposedly into texting. I still use phones for actually making calls. I’m told people your age don’t. I mean, in all seriousness, Hannah, I think it’s an interesting question. My personal gut feel is that there’s a bit of a problem. because a lot of the time you’ll be trying to reach out to people and it’ll be their personal mobile that you’re reaching out to. So I think that could be an issue for quite a long time, certainly outside of certain groups like, for example, trying to reach salespeople who typically have a company mobile. I think that there is a bit of a a barrier if you try and do some business on somebody’s personal device. So I can definitely see that being a problem. I also think probably the biggest issue is, and us B2B marketers have to admit, a lot of B2B campaigns don’t have anything that really justifies a text. you know, hey, do you want to read our next white paper? Just put it in email, that’s absolutely fine. I’m not going to read your white paper because it’s on a PDF. It’s so it’s clearly not going to be usable on the phone. A text doesn’t really work for. So I think it’ll be interesting to see where people find use cases. I mean, to me, you know, there’s some obvious things we can be doing. And some things people have already started doing, you know, texting people before meetings to remind them. And I think, for example, particularly at trade shows where we’ve just been, sending an SMS just to let people know that they’re due for a meeting, that’s probably a very sensible thing to do. And marketing can definitely help sales by doing that.
Hannah: Oh, I think that’s a great point, Mike. I guess what you’re saying here is that it really depends on the messaging. You know, you send an e-book and sometimes you could send an e-book via email and that gets deleted straight away. But you’re right, doing this kind of to their personal phone numbers, you could really risk, you know, upsetting people and really ruining your brand perception. But I think it’d be interesting to see what type of use cases people use it for. You know, I love that trade show idea. That’s helpful, but that’s not really, in my opinion, I really use an SMS for marketing. So maybe what we’re saying is that it’s not really necessarily marketing your content out. Maybe it’s for real specific uses to support what you’re already doing with the contact you’re speaking with.
Mike: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right, Hannah, it’s a really good summary. I mean, the problem is, is most of marketing today is driven around content. And if we’re honest, most of B2B content looks pretty terrible on a phone, particularly the PDF format content, of which there’s a lot. So, you know, generally speaking, the classic, you know, B2B campaign is promote some content, put it into a PDF, put it behind a registration wall. that doesn’t really work on mobile unless your content is super friendly to mobile. And that’s really hard to do on PDF. So it’s going to be interesting to see what people do. I certainly think there’s an opportunity for some creative things, you know, around events, as we talked about, and maybe around follow up as well. So in terms of when people download content that’s gated, perhaps, you know, SMS is one route to follow up. But it’ll be interesting to see, you know, which campaigns actually use SMS in B2B and which of those campaigns are successful. And indeed, you know, which markets it works in and which markets it really doesn’t succeed in. And I’m sure there’ll be markets, you know, and possibly engineering is one where, you know, engineers can be quite protective over their personal devices and may not want marketing materials sent.
Hannah: Yeah, I think that’s a great point Mike and I think the only thing I would add to that is perhaps it is the next stage of outside of marketing and that is sales and maybe SMS marketing can be used to support kind of that sales process and that sales journey and speaking to your prospect to try and close the deal rather than people that you don’t know.
Mike: Yeah, you’re so right. I think what will happen is absolutely we’ll see more and more SMS being used in sales and then that eventually will roll out to marketing and we’ll start seeing it impinging on some marketing later. So great point Hannah, love that.
Hannah: Well, Mike, I want to hand over to you because you actually came across a report and I know you had a few views on this. So why don’t you share some of the figures and data that you saw and we’ll have a chat about it.
Mike: You’re talking about the Liana state of marketing automation report. I mean, I think that was a really interesting report for a couple of reasons. It’s hard to know exactly, but my gut feel is that probably this isn’t necessarily that applicable to a lot of listeners because it’s not so enterprise driven. It’s much more SME driven. But there’s some interesting findings. So, you know, the first thing is, is they asked people who weren’t adopting marketing automation, what was holding them back, you know, number one was cost, number two was resources, and number three was skills. But then when they asked people who chose a marketing automation tool, what drove the choice, only about a quarter were driven by price, which I find very interesting. You know, marketing automation is not a cheap tool, you know, particularly if you look at HubSpot, which even for an SME is probably going to be over £1,000 or $1,000 a month. You know, what mattered to people was ease of use and the features that were offered. And then actually third, data visualization analytics, the kind of, you know, pretty eye candy you get from marketing automation. So kind of an interesting message there to marketing automation vendors, really around, you know, they need to be thinking about ease of use And I think although, as I say, the sample here is probably SME driven, perhaps this is something also that buyers in enterprise should think about. You know, buyers in enterprise, I think, look very much on features and integration. And we hear a lot of people talking about that. But actually, ease of use is important in enterprise too, we’re all short of resources.
Hannah: Oh, I love this viewpoint, Mike, because I think there’s two categories here. And it’s really interesting because as you said, you know, the cost is really important and people choose the market automation platform. But once they get over that hurdle, and you know, we’ll talk a little bit later in our insightful tip of the week about how to sell market automation to your boss, then it really comes into those nitty gritties. And the truth of the matter is, is that, you know, enterprise companies typically go for someone like Marketo. But actually, I think I’m fair in saying that ease of use isn’t probably Marketo’s top benefit. And sometimes they get lost in the platform where their activities of what they’re doing will be much suited for something like a HubSpot. So it’s interesting to see because I don’t think people actually go based off of these type of priorities at the moment.
Mike: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. The enterprise decision sometimes is driven by an ideal situation that doesn’t exist. There’s some other cool stuff in this report as well. Actually, because we do a lot with clients, this isn’t a surprise to us. But they asked, what were the activities people did using market automation workflows? And number one was newsletters. And newsletters was so far ahead, the biggest one. I mean, it was two and a half times more frequently used than the next one, which is segmenting contacts, which is a bit scary because it does say that, you know, actually less than half the people who send newsletters bother with any segmentation. So that’s a bit worrying. And then if you look at something like A-B testing down at 20%, So 90% send newsletters, only 20% do any A-B testing. And I think, you know, one of the things that we have seen a lot with clients is people buy marketing automation platforms and then they use them as though they’re email systems. And so they’re paying an awful lot of money and possibly going through a little bit more complexity of use to do something that could be done a lot simpler and a lot cheaper.
Hannah: Well, I think the first thing I’ll say, Mike, is we shouldn’t knock newsletters. It is a bit of a scary figure, but we run our monthly Napier News newsletter, and I think it’s one of the best things that we do. So I do see why that’s so high up on the list. I agree. A-B testing being down at 20% scares me as well. And actually what we’ll do is we’ll drop a link in our notes, but people should check out our A-B testing ebook because we do share some really cool ideas about how you can A-B test your landing pages, your emails. And I think people think it’s scarier than it actually is, but it’s really simple and it can be really easy. But I think that also relates to what you said that people are just using this as a mass email system. They’re not using it with the creativity and really like the benefits that it can provide. And I think people need to be reminded of that every now and again.
Mike: Yeah, and you have a great point on newsletters. You got me again. You know, absolutely. Our newsletter is one of the best marketing tools we have. So yeah, I’m not knocking newsletters, but the fact that it was, you know, basically the one thing everybody was doing, it feels a bit depressing. I do also wonder whether, you know, people realize they’re doing things and those things, you know, could be achieved quite a lot more easily. You know, one of the questions that was asked was, you know, how long people have been using marketing automation. And around about a tenth of the people that had used marketing automation for a year or more had actually stopped. It was a little bit less. But that’s interesting. I mean, there is definitely now a group of people that have used market automation, and for whatever reason, felt it hasn’t worked, and have stopped using it. And I think that’s got to be a big concern, not only for the marketing automation vendors, who clearly have lost customers, but for the community as a whole where For some reason, we’re not getting people getting the value out marketing automation systems. And that’s sad, because, you know, I know you believe it as well, marketing automation could be amazing. It’s absolutely magic when it works. I feel sorry for the people who’ve, you know, clearly felt that it hasn’t worked as well as they hope.
Hannah: I really have to agree with you there, Mike, because it is scary and I think maybe it does relate back to our previous point of if people aren’t choosing the right market automation platform, then they don’t know how to use it. They’re scared by all the different things it can do and so they’re giving up. So I agree, it is worrying because We know how great market automation can be. We know what it does to enhance our activities and it is sad to hear that people are just giving up rather than giving a try. So if you’re a listener and you’re one of those people, then please do your research, reach out to us, but choosing that right platform I think is key in then making sure that you’re not scared away and you know how to use the platform.
Mike: Absolutely. I think that takes us on to our insightful tip of the week, because we were going to talk about how to sell marketing automation to your boss. So Hannah, I mean, you’ve obviously had to do this to me and sell marketing automation to me. So what’s your view on this?
Hannah: Well, no pressure on my side, but I think the key thing is, is that when you’re selling the market automation to your boss, you need to sell the benefits to the business. Now there can be a hundred benefits of market automation. So if we looked at it for Napier, there’s really three key areas. It’s sales leads. Market automation can help us increase our sales leads. It increases our use of automation so it helps reach a larger amount of people, it helps monitor our database, our contacts and then it also helps with time. So if you’re a one-man band, you’re trying to do everything, you know you can do so much more and be so much more effective if you’ve got a system in place that is effectively, you know, automating some of your actions.
Mike: I completely agree. And I actually think that time argument, it’s really important. It doesn’t just apply to smaller marketing teams. Larger marketing teams as well in big companies are very pressed for time. So I think that’s a great point. I really love that. And I think it’s important to buy the marketing automation system that does free up time and not buy something that’s overly complex and actually cost you more time than it saves.
Hannah: Oh, absolutely, Mike. I think that’s spot on.
Mike: I think it’s been great, Hannah. It’s been a really interesting discussion. I’ve really enjoyed it. And hopefully people are motivated to do a bit more than their newsletters on market automation and thinking about how they can, you know, perhaps sell market automation to the boss if they haven’t already got a system.
Hannah: Absolutely. Thanks for such a great conversation, Mike.
Mike: Thanks. We’ll speak soon.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
Mike: Don’t forget to subscribe in your favorite podcast application and we’ll see you next time.
