This episode dives into the challenges of attribution in marketing, the benefits of content repurposing, and what’s new in Salesforce’s spring AI updates. Mike and Hannah also cover Marketo’s improved email designer and share a quick tip on boosting engagement with more creative CTAs.
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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
[00:00:42] – Attribution vs. Incrementality
[00:02:40] – Repurposing Content
[00:05:02] – Salesforce’s AI Agents
[00:07:45] – Marketo’s Email Designer Updates
[00:10:41] – The Insightful Tip of the Week and Call to Actions in Marketing
[00:12:36] – 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/
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Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript:Â Challenging Attribution, Repurposing Content, and Elevating Email
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Wehrly
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 Whirly.
Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard.
Hannah: Today, Mike rants about the problems of attribution.
Mike: We discuss making marketing content reuse a little bit simpler.
Hannah: The launch of Salesforce’s AI agents.
Mike: We’ll talk about Marketo’s new email editor.
Hannah: And whether call to actions really make a difference. Hi Mike, welcome back to another episode of Market Automation Moment. How are you doing?
Mike: Hi Hannah, it’s great to be back and good to talk to you again.
Hannah: Definitely. Now, I’ve got a few things I want us to cover today, but I’ve been doing a little bit of a stalk of your LinkedIn, and I’ve seen that you’ve been actively talking about attribution versus incremental increase. I’m really interested. Do you just want to take two minutes to explain what is that? And you know, what is it that you’re actually talking about?
Mike: Well you’ve obviously noticed one of my hot buttons. I think you know one of the issues we’ve got is that actually attribution is one of the biggest cons that’s ever been sold to marketers. Yes it can be useful if you design a campaign to be measured by attribution but there’s so many ways that you can increase your campaign ROI using attribution. The classic example I said was if you simply advertise keywords around your online shop. So if you’ve got an online shop with a brand and you’ve just put Google ads there, you’ll suddenly find great ROI. And the reason is, is people were going to go to your online shop, they would have clicked that organic result you had that’s top of the list. But because you put an ad in front, they click on the ad and suddenly it looks like the ad has changed everything. The ad gets attributed value doesn’t mean that it’s increased any sales and i think what’s going to happen is more and more people are actually going to run experiments where they’re going to measure whether their campaigns are actually increasing sales or not and to me that’s a great thing perhaps something for another marketing automation moment because one of my big frustrations is is that marketing automation platforms don’t actually offer a good way to measure incrementality. They’re all about A-B testing between two different things rather than testing whether sending an email or not really makes a difference.
Hannah: Definitely, Mike. I’d be interested in talking about it in a bit more detail. And it’d be interesting to see how these campaign measurements do change and whether marketers can then actually look at return of investment in a realistic way that matters and impacts them.
Mike: I hope it works. I mean, to be honest, incrementality is super hard to measure in B2B. So there’s lots of problems. I’m very good at kind of ignoring the problems, just moaning about, you know, attribution. But I think, you know, it’ll be an interesting thing to see.
Hannah: Interesting, Mike. Let’s move on and kickstart the podcast episode. I really wanted to kickstart and talk about a webinar I recently saw from Acton. Now it was about repurposing content and don’t get me wrong it wasn’t anything that was out of this world but for me it was quite a nice surprise because we’ve talked about a lot of content the last few episodes and they’ve really been going hardcore on choose us, pick us, we’re the market automation platform of your dreams. And so it was really nice for them to actually provide some content that I would view really valuable to marketers and to their users. And especially around this kind of concept of, yes, you’ve got your content, it’s running, you’ve got your automations running great, but don’t let your content get stale. I don’t know, what did you think?
Mike: I actually thought it was a really good webinar. And the reason I liked it was they weren’t actually trying to do too much. I think one of the things that happens is people look at content and they believe repurposing needs a complete rewrite or recreation of different format. And actually sometimes that’s just not the case. A bit of a refresh can actually make the content look and feel very different, but doesn’t require a lot of work.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I mean, it’s one of the things that we, you know, preach a lot at Napier. We’re always saying to our clients, content is the most expensive thing. It’s really time consuming. And actually you don’t need to be creating everything from scratch. Things can be repurposed. They can be refreshed. And I think it’s nice to look at that from a marketing standpoint as well.
Mike: Yeah, and I think as marketeers as well, we can also be super guilty of imagining that our whole audience has seen some content, read it, understood it and remembered it. And there’s this great story about Ford, where apparently Henry Ford walked into the advertising department many years ago. and said, when are we gonna stop running this ad? I’ve seen it so many times, I’m really bored of it. And the poor ad manager at the time had to say, actually, Mr. Ford, we haven’t run it yet, it’s just been seen internally. And I think we get that same impact when we are marketers. We’ve worked on content, we’ve seen it so many times, we’ve been through the third revision, and I’ve had issues with the 20th revision. Hopefully nobody’s doing that, but if you’ve seen it so many times, you imagine that everybody in your audience has seen it, And the answer is probably the vast majority of your audience haven’t seen that content. So doing something to refresh it, you know, maybe changing the cover, you know, something really simple can actually get a much wider audience to see your content. So I think it’s a great idea. It’s a really good webinar.
Hannah: I love that story, Mike. Let’s move on because we have actually had some updates from the other mass automation platforms in the landscape. And one I came across was Salesforce. Now they’ve just released their spring 25 updates. And I was interested. I was like, oh, is there going to be some really cool stuff? Let’s have a look. And actually, it’s all about AI agents. So they’ve got this one web page that just lists different AI agents for all different areas. Now, I’m not disappointed, but, you know, they’ve spoken about Einstein a lot. That’s really their brand. And I get that it’s new, but to me, it doesn’t seem really exciting, really fresh. But I might be being a little bit cynical. I always hold my hands up if I am. What did you think about it?
Mike: Are you sure you’re not disappointed just because it had the astronaut cartoons rather than the Einstein cartoons?
Hannah: It always affects my view.
Mike: Yeah, I think actually, in all seriousness, it’s interesting how Salesforce are managing their branding of AI because it is outwardly a little confusing, a little inconsistent. You know, what they’re trying to do, I think, is trying to give the impression that it’s much bigger. And so they’re using multiple characters. But you’re absolutely right. The Einstein brand is very clear. And then the astronaut appears. I don’t quite know what they’re doing and whether it’s actually going to make people understand or not. You know, it may be diluting, I think, the strength of some of their branding. Do you agree?
Hannah: I do agree. And, you know, often we like to argue on these podcasts, but I can’t do it at this point, Mike. We’ve spoken about AI several times in the podcast and we’ve spoken about everything that they can do. But to me, it’s almost come across, whether this is true and whether it’s just how they’ve marked it, but it’s almost a bit like a crux. So it’s their crutch of, oh, well, look at us, we’re laying this out, we’re doing this. And in my head, I’m like, but weren’t you doing that already?
Mike: It’s interesting. I think there’s a lot of hype around AI. And, you know, really what Salesforce is saying is that they’ve got agentic AI. So they’ve got agents that will actually do things using AI. And that can be really interesting, but it can also be really challenging. And I think one of the things that’s really important is not so much the technology that they’ve got, which without doubt is pretty cool, but it’s whether people can actually use the technology to implement customer service or marketing activities that are consistently better or at least as good as using humans. I think the whole question about whether AI is going to take jobs of humans is, you know, something different. But clearly from the marketing of AgentForce, which is all about digital labour, I think Salesforce is definitely pushing the fact that you’ll need fewer people if you use our AI.
Hannah: I think that’s a great point, Mike. And I think I’d be really interested to see some use cases, because at the moment, you know, it’s all theoretical. We’re not quite sure how it’s going to impact people. So I think it’s definitely something to watch.
Mike: Yeah, be interesting to see. I think you’re absolutely right. The use cases are really what’s going to define what happens.
Hannah: Well, let’s move on because I want to talk about a platform we actually haven’t spoken about for a while, and that’s Marketo. Now, Marketo is often quite quiet on the marketing front, but I did come across quite a good blog that talks about some changes they’re making to their email designer. Now, you’ve got a bit more experience with Marketo than I do, Mike. Do you think this is actually going to make an impact to users?
Mike: Do you know, I think it’s interesting. So one of the things they seem to be trying to do with their new email designer is ensure that emails consistently look the same across all platforms. Anyone who’s run big email campaigns knows that there’s always platforms where your beautifully designed HTML looks a bit squiffy and off. And so I think that that’s quite exciting. You’ve obviously had the same problem with, you know, marketing for Napier. The question is whether they’ll be able to do it and whether they’ll be able to keep up with changes in different email platforms.
Hannah: I think that’s a great point and it’s the risk that they go from being clunky, you know, email designers are often a bit clunky, they fix it, updates get made, the landscape changes and they’re just back to being clunky straight away again.
Mike: Yeah, I mean I think the other thing that also is interesting is that clearly email’s still a thing. I think for anyone who’s actually active in marketing, that’s the least surprising news in the world. There is a perception that email’s going away. It certainly isn’t. And I think if anything, really good email is here to stay. If you can get into the inbox and not into that kind of, whether you call it other or clutter or junk or whatever, if you can get into the main inbox, email is awesome.
Hannah: Oh, that’s such a good point, Mike. I think I’ve heard nearly every week since I started my career, is email dead? I think email’s dead. This is going to be the year that email is dead. You know, for Napier, for us, it’s one of our most effective channels. And we spend a lot of time, and as you said, it’s finding that balance of getting actually into that inbox, making sure that your system settings are set up right in the back end, making sure that you’re testing, A, B testing subject lines, that it’s not too long, it’s not too short, and finding that balance, spending that time is so important.
Mike: You’re so right, Hannah. I mean, I think people have been talking about the death of email forever. And if you do it right, and clearly you’ve done it right because you’ve talked about all the things to do, then it’s really powerful. The other thing I think to say is that increasingly brands are realizing that to get into that primary inbox, one of the ways to do it is not to use over-designed HTML emails and just use plain text. That is a bit of an issue because obviously the Marketo designer is designed to make those beautiful emails that look wonderful. So I wonder what you think about that. I mean, do you think more and more people should be going to plain text?
Hannah: I think so. I’ve always been a massive fan of plain text. I think you can spend a lot of time. I don’t want to say wasted, but I don’t think it’s the best use of time in making this beautiful header, making it look so lovely, having the layout. But really what it comes down to is if you do all that, but actually your writing isn’t very good, the point, the value, it doesn’t matter what it looks like, people are still going to click delete.
Mike: Absolutely. I totally agree. That’s a great place to leave it and move on from email. What’s the next thing on the list, Hannah?
Hannah: Well Mike, actually it’s our insightful tip of the week and it links in quite well because I wanted to have a chat about call to actions and whether call to actions really make a difference. And now I’m talking about call to actions obviously in our emails but also on things like our website. We’re a classic, we use our Discover, Learn More, Find Out. I do think there is quite a difference in the way landing pages can perform, for example, based on what you use. What do you think about it?
Mike: I absolutely agree. I mean, call to actions are super important. Anyone who’s A-B tested it obviously will find people aren’t clicking through to what you want them to do unless you ask them to actually do it. A strong, clear call to action is clearly important. And I think also it’s really important to get the wording right. I mean, one of the greatest crimes against call to action is probably committed by LinkedIn. Sorry, LinkedIn, love you really. But just having a limited list of call to actions that you click from a dropdown, that’s not great. I think what the HubSpot article made the point about, and really, you know, what as marketers we should look at, is honestly, learn more is not the only call to action.
Hannah: I think that’s a great point, Mike. And I think sometimes being a bit creative with it. Yes, we’re limited, but let your creativity come through. Think about what it is that you want to communicate and don’t just fall into those same old tick boxes.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, you know, some of the calls to action in the HubSpot article, I mean, they gave a whole list of things, but some of them were actually quite cool. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever used an upgrade call to action, but upgrade’s a great active verb to use in a call to action. Claim is another one if you’re offering content behind a registration wall. I think claim is a great call to action. So it did bring home to me that actually we all understand calls to action are good but maybe we sometimes sit a little bit in our comfort zone of CTAs and perhaps what we should be doing is being prepared to be a bit broader and certainly get them on those A-B tests and see whether they work or not. Find out.
Hannah: Well, I think that’s a brilliant way to end the podcast, Mike. I couldn’t agree more. Thank you so much for another interesting conversation. I know we’ve covered a real variety of topics today.
Mike: No, thank you, Hannah. Great topics, as always. Thank you so much for digging them out. I look forward to talking to you again.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
