Napier's Account-Based Marketing Benchmarking Assessment
Account-Based Marketing (ABM), is a technique that ensures your marketing budget is focused on your target accounts, cutting marketing spend and increasing your return on investment.
But with many tactics available to implement ABM campaigns, getting the balance right between spend, messaging and execution can be hard for companies.
That's why we've built our own ABM Benchmarking Assessment. Our survey identifies strengths and weaknesses, tells you where you rank compared to other companies in the B2B industry, and shares tips on how you can improve your campaigns.
With just 10 questions, the survey is quick and easy to fill in and provides a PDF report with the results.
Try it out by clicking here, and reach out if you have any questions or feedback, we'd love to hear from you.
A Napier Webinar: How to Spy on Your Competitors' Ads
Have you ever wondered what ads your competitors are running? Or how you can view their ads via platforms like LinkedIn and Google?
In our on-demand webinar, we share how you can spy on your competitors' ads, and cover:
- The tools to access your competitors' ads
- What to look for when spying on your competitors
- How to use the intelligence to create better campaigns
- Analysis of some B2B Tech/Industrial ad campaigns
- When to stop spying
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘How to Spy on Your Competitors' Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the latest Napier webinar. We're just going to give it a minute or two because there's a couple more people joining, and we'll get started. So if you can just give us a minute, and then I'll start talking about spying on your competitors.
Okay, we've had a couple more people join, so we're going to start, thank you all for taking the time, for joining this webinar. I'm really interested to present this. I'm particularly interested in knowing your feedback, whether that's questions on how you can spy on competitors more effectively, or alternatively, whether you simply have an opinion on some of the techniques we talk about, or some of the benefits. So at any time during the webinar, please feel free to throw things into chat, and if you throw something into chat, I very much welcome it. We will deal with the questions at the end. So please put questions into chat at the end, and I'll answer them at the end, right? So we're going to get straight into spying on competitors. This has been a really popular webinar, and quite a few have registered for it, so obviously there's some interest in getting people to or getting an understanding of what your competitors are doing.
So let's have a look at what we're going to talk about today. Here we have a figure that chat GPT assures me is nothing like James Bond, because clearly, James Bond is protected by copyright, so we have a spy, and this spy is looking at finding out things about their competitors. And we're going to go through different stages. We're going to look at why we should spy on our competitors. May seem obvious, but we're also going to talk about some of the disadvantages. We're going to talk about spying on different platforms and the issues around that. We're going to look at the issues around display ads, talk very briefly about some other marketing activities, and then have a quick summary.
So we should rush through. We'll have quite a few examples of how to get information, and also, I'll discuss some of the things you might learn from spying on people. So why spy on competitors? I mean, there's lots of reasons to do that. You know, at the high level, it's understanding their strategy and understanding their priorities. So you know where companies are spending their money on advertising is a good indication of where their priorities are. And so it's always really useful to know whether your competitor is focusing on a particular product category or maybe promoting a podcast, or perhaps trying to get people to a webinar, so trying to understand what works for them. And obviously, if something continues consistently, it's probably a good indication that it works. It's not always the case. You know, so often we do see people running ads that don't work for long periods of time, but generally speaking, a consistent long term approach means that that approach works.
The other thing we want to do is learn best practice, or put it bluntly, still, their ideas. And for sure, that's very, very useful. But I think, you know, there are some issues in that you do want to be differentiated, and we'll talk about that in a minute. We want to try and predict what they're planning to do. You know, quite often the time that you know clients are really worried about what competitors are doing, is a lead up to, say, a big trade show. And a trade show, obviously, you're investing a lot of money, not only in the booth and the floor space, but also in the time to actually man that booth. So it's important to have some idea of what you think competitors might do. Now, sometimes that's very easy. Other times, competitors come to the show with a big announcement. They've not said anything beforehand. They want to make a splash at the event, and it's impossible to predict. So, you know, it's a useful thing to do. It's certainly not 100% reliable. I think you know that there's some interesting areas around pitching for money. So clearly, one of the things that you want to do is show your bosses that you're competing effectively against your competitors.
But if it turns out that the companies you're competing against are spending. Significantly more money. Quite clearly, it's hard to be competitive then, even if you're running better, more effective ads. And so one of the useful things for spying on competitors is to get an idea of commitment and spend to different channels, and to use that to try and leverage more budget. So that's always very helpful. There are some other things that are very useful. I mean, we recently did a project for a client that was promoting to the data center sector, and we actually found that more than one competitor was using the same image in their promotional materials, so in their LinkedIn ads, in this case, as our client, all shows at random, but obviously we'd all gone to the same image library, and we'd all chosen the best image for data centers.
So you can get some other benefits as well, particularly in terms of making sure you're not copying you're not taking this best practice, as you might call it, but actually you're doing something different to stand out. And I think that brings us on to a very important point. There are reasons not to span your competitors. Quite often, people that span their competitors end up copying what the competitor does. And obviously, anytime you copy, you tend to be somewhat behind, just for the lead time of waiting till the ad runs, then you start creating something, then you launch it, you're inevitably going to be a slow follower, and being a copycat follower is never very good for differentiation. The other thing you can end up doing is reflecting your competitors strengths.
I'd love to pretend that our clients are the strongest in every aspect of every product they make, but quite clearly, that's not the case. And so if you start copying the competitors too much, you might end up focusing on things that when a purchaser comes to evaluate, they actually find the competitors better at. So don't focus on your competitors' strengths. And ultimately, I think one of the things that really makes sense is to focus on what you're good at really play to your strengths in marketing, and to some extent, that means ignoring what the competitors do.
So whilst I would definitely recommend you know, understanding what they're trying to do, I would strongly recommend not getting too hooked up on trying to be your competitor. Try and be individual and unique. Okay, so let's move on to spying on competitors. One of the things you'll find throughout this webinar is that actually finding information about your competitors is remarkably easy. This has been driven by a lot of ad transparency campaigns, particularly in the EU, but also to some extent in America and particularly around political ads, although this has subsequently resulted in companies opening up databases of all ads that run on their platform to ensure they don't miss anything.
So let's look at LinkedIn. LinkedIn is possibly the first platform you'd want to go to. It's one where most companies in the B to B sector are active, and it also lets you target fairly effectively. So viewing competitors ads on LinkedIn is really easy. You search for the competitor. In this case, we've got a semiconductor company that's competing with analog devices. You go to posts and then you click on ad library. So the ad library is that little text link at the bottom of the left hand column, and that takes you to the ad library. The ad library shows you all paid promotion on LinkedIn. So one of the things that can be revealing is the number of ads people are running. So here interestingly, you know, we see that analog devices are running 78 ads. That's not a huge number. We see many companies with active ads running into the hundreds or even 1000s of ads. And those of you who've been on previous webinars with us will have seen when we looked at some of the advertising theory, there were management consultancy companies running literally several 1000 ads. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about exactly what's shown, but basically, recent and current ads are shown on all of these ad libraries. The dates are all slightly different.
So the analog, sorry, the LinkedIn ad library shows ads that have appeared after June the first 2023 and one year after the last impression. So those are two rules. Effectively now we've gone past a year, so it's one year after the last impression of the ad, the last time it was shown. And so you can look at the ads that are running. And here you can see, you know what? What do Analog Devices care about the moment, or battery powered devices, is fairly obvious. They're talking about battery powered devices, and they're also doing some recruitment as well, which is interesting. Could be saying that they're growing and being successful. The neat thing, though, is that we can get more information so we can. Click on view details, and View Details brings us details about the specific ad. And here you can see the advertiser analog device in this case, and who paid for it. So in this particular case, Analog Devices paid for it. That doesn't necessarily mean they haven't given agency access to run their campaigns, but it does mean that agency is not paying quite often. You'll see an agency name there saying who's actually running the campaigns, and it talks about all sorts of useful things. So the timeframe that the ad ran, and you can hear, you can see it's basically been running for 10 days. Recent ad still running. You can look at the total number of impressions. And here we can see that it's running somewhere between, say, 500 and 1000 impressions a day, so reasonably good.
We can see the targeting in terms of language. We can see the location targeting, and we can see some information about company targeting. So here we're basically excluding companies. So annum device has gone and excluded a bunch of companies, presumably, I would guess around industry, but I'm not 100% sure. We can't know that. What we do not get from LinkedIn is we do not get the amount that's being spent. We do not get cost per click or cost per lead or any other data, and we do not get any details on exactly how the companies or the individuals have been targeted. So there's very big limitations around what we get, but it gives us a good idea. However, as we're acting as a competitor of analog devices, we're going to try and be smug here.
So if you look at the location in the bottom right, we're actually targeting 19 different countries, Slovakia, Hungary, and 17 others. And interestingly, although there's 19 different countries, which you'd expect, you know, average out the countries, maybe an average of 5% of the impressions goes to each country. One country dominates. Turkey dominates, with 64% almost two thirds of the ads are going to Turkey. This may have been the intention of analog devices. I suspect it isn't. I suspect they wanted to spread roughly equivalent to size of the economy. And although Turkey, you know, will be one of the bigger economies here. It certainly won't be the biggest. You would think something like Hungary would also be important. It's got a significant electronics industry too. So I'm interested whether anyone has an opinion on why there are so many ads in Turkey. You know, if you've got an opinion, feel free to send it into the chat. And I'll give you a couple of seconds to do that. But if nobody can understand, I will certainly reveal why it is.
Yeah, unfortunately, we don't. Here we go. So we've got one suggestion that's to extend the market. So looking at Turkey as being a key market, that's actually not correct. The reality is, is that there's very little you can do to control where the ads appear. But one thing that does determine where the ads appear is the targeting language. And if we look down the bottom right, we can see the targeting language includes English. Basically, is only English. And an important thing to understand about LinkedIn, which is different from many other platforms, so this is really super important, is that LinkedIn will run local language adverts only. So if you want to target Hungary and you want to hit people that have their preferred language set to Hungarian, you have to run the ad in Hungarian. So there's a lot of people in Hungary who set Hungarian as their their preferred language. In Turkey, people tend to be more open to English, and so the Turkish users of LinkedIn are much more likely to set their language to be English than any of the other countries. And this is why the Analog Devices is disproportionately spending money in Turkey. And as I say, it may be the case. They've got a whole bunch of countries. They know Turkey is the most important. They're quite happy. It's almost certain that Analog Devices is sat there scratching their heads, wondering why all these other countries have so little in the way of impressions. And the reason is because if they want to generate impressions at those countries, they've got to run ads in local language, because people will have selected that as their preferred language.
So just an interesting little aside, does it tell us that Analog Devices is not sophisticated? I don't think so. I mean, there's lots of reasons why you'd want to do that. For all we know, they could be running translations at the moment and looking to roll this out in local language next week, so I don't think we can make too many assumptions, but it's. Always nice to know that a competitor is perhaps not doing things as well as they could. If we go back to the library, when you get to the library page, you actually get search options here. So up the top you see that we can put in some search terms that can either be that can be a company which the left hand box, and it can be a topic. We can limit the search for certain countries. We can limit to certain dates the ads run, and then we can search. So here I've set up a search where I'm looking for Texas Instruments ads that contain the word battery, or focus on the topic of batteries, and I'm running this to search in France, I believe it was so we've generated a number of ads in French for the French market here. Again, the smart people will know that we've actually seen non local language ads here, so they'll have limited penetration. And obviously we can do a different search. So if we look on the right hand side, now we've actually searched for ABB as ads, and we'll see in France, ABB have a slightly different strategy.
So they have different language strategies for different campaigns. Some of them are all run in English. Some of them are running local language, my gut feel is that probably tells you one of the more important campaigns versus the least important. But as these are actually running for different divisions, there could be other reasons as well. Maybe it's budget, maybe it's time something like that. But we've certainly learned a little bit about what ABB is doing in France, and we know that they're investing quite a lot of effort because they're translating the ads, which is obviously not time consuming. One thing to mention on the search is that it is really trivially simple in terms of putting companies in and topics. So you can see here, for example, down on the bottom right, we've got completely irrelevant ads coming through just because the company's name begins ABB. So we do have to apply a little bit of logic to searches on LinkedIn, because otherwise we end up with spurious results. I've talked a lot about LinkedIn, I've talked a lot about what we can learn.
The reason is, is that actually, when we look at what everybody's doing, people have typically very similar approaches. So if we look at meta, so Facebook and Instagram, we've got a ads library here. We can select different categories of ads, almost certainly, I guess, the audience here will be looking at all ads, because we're not in politics or in the special categories, and then you just enter a search term. So here again, I've searched for another of our clients, a client called fluke. It suggests a particular account which is Fluke Corporation, their main account, and so we click through and look at what Fluke is doing. And this will then give you, again, in a similar way, all the ads here, the default filter is active ads, so it doesn't show you ads that have run recently, but you can filter and select More recent but finished campaigns. So we can go in and we can look at the ads and understand what are flukes, priorities. One of the interesting things that I think is worth looking at is we also have a lot of filters. So not only whether it's active or not, and not only when the ads run, so the impressions by date. But we can also look at the type of media, if they're doing an image or a video. We can look at which platform, so this is the meta platform, so where they're running on Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram or the Audience Network, and also which language they're running in.
So we can get some nice cuts of different data here when we're looking at the ads as well, we can get some nice data about the ad. It doesn't tell you estimated volumes. So you don't get that information that you do get, but we do get information on platforms. So we can see here, Fluke is running across Facebook, Instagram, the Audience Network, and also Facebook Messenger, and we can also see the ad has got multiple versions. So those multiple versions might be different images or it might be different languages. So we can see quite a lot of information, very much different to LinkedIn, but still useful. One of the things, you know, for example, we've noticed is that face, sorry, is that Fluke has been doing some testing. So they've clearly been testing some ads with Audience Network and some ads without. When we went to have a look, very interesting to see that, you know, there, there's a company, if you're one of flukes competitors, you'd have to recognize these guys are pretty switched on. They're looking at. Testing the various platforms and looking at what gives them the best results. So you definitely want to up your game to make sure you keep up with Fluke Google ads.
Again, very, very similar. You go to something called Google Ads Transparency Center, and in some ways the most difficult thing of all this spying on competitors is knowing the name of the platform you need to go to. And so we can go in, we can look at timescales, we can look at countries, and we can look at different platforms. So we can look at whether people are advertising on Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Play, Google Maps, all the rest of it. Typically, I think most people want to search on all platforms only, because if there's ads outside search and YouTube, it's kind of an interesting thing to know unless, of course, you're maybe a channel partner, you know, distributor, where, clearly all your competitors will be very active on Google Shopping. So here we can see, you know, what's running. Here, I've looked for Texas Instruments, and we can see there's very little information. So we know who runs it, we know what the ad is, we know when it was last shown, we know the format, but that's it. We're not getting any information about any kind of volume. We're not getting related ads. We're getting very, very little. And one of the things you can do is you can employ tools to go and get you information about competitors. Now, before we talk about tools, I would say there's a real issue in terms of quality of data, and the reason is these tools are basically running searches and seeing who advertises against them. So they're kind of sampling what's going on. And we have two problems in our industry. One is the volume of search is very low, so they may not even be looking at a lot of the searches that our customers are making.
And the second is is being very niche, you may not get very good information, because, again, they may not do a high volume of searches, but we can see here we ran a tool called SEMrush. SEMrush, it's a very effective tool. It not only tells you know what's happening and gives you ideas on the trends in terms of how much is being spent by Ti, and again, we filtered by UK and on the desktop, but it will also tell you things like how much it estimates the traffic cost and how much traffic you generated. So basically, the number of clicks and the cost per click, or the total cost, these numbers are not super accurate, again, in our industry, because we are very specific, but it's always useful to see it as a first pass estimate.
So you can see here, I've highlighted the filters to let you identify what's being run and then also highlighted the results. I strongly suspect that during this period, TI was probably running against more than 22 keywords, and probably a lot more than 22 keywords, but you know, this has picked the more common ones where SEMrush is searching for those terms. There are other tools as well. SpyFu is another very popular tool for looking at Google ads. So do feel free to try different tools and see which one makes the most impression on you. Which one gives you the best results. The next one is x, or Twitter, as it used to be called, Twitter is really interesting. It has possibly the most painful Search feature to get ad data that there is. So what happens is, is you have to enter a an advertiser, you have to put the country, put the dates, and then click create a report, and then I would strongly suggest going away for lunch and possibly a few post lunch drinks, because the interface is incredibly slow and incredibly clunky, almost like X. Didn't want to give this information away, but it will ultimately give you a download. You can download and see what your competitors are doing on x.
Tiktok also offers a similar thing. You go into creative center and search for ads. You do have to have a login for Tiktok, which is, I think, the one tool that requires a login. But one of the things about Tiktok, I wanted to highlight is Tiktok, within their creative center, has a top ad spotlight, and they'll highlight some of the ads they think are doing really well, and that's obviously based on volume of likes and where they are in terms of click through rates. So. You'll also probably find that the best performing ads all have high budgets as well. I don't think that's necessarily a cause of the performance things as a result of the performance doing well and the the ads being run a lot, and also possibly Tiktok picking the ads with high budget.
But anyway, the interesting thing about Tiktok is it actually puts in some commentary about the ad. So it's actually giving tiktoks opinion of why ads are successful on the platform. Now, clearly, with us being a B to B Tech, you're highly unlikely to see any B to B Tech ads in this top ad spotlight, but still, particularly if you're new to tick tock or maybe, dare I say, you feel like you're a little older than the typical Tiktok user. I think the top ad spotlight is an underrated feature to try and understand what you can do with your ads to make them more effective. So those are really all the social platforms. We simply look at a couple of other areas. One is display ads. You know, who's running ads on different publications websites, or indeed, you know, maybe even in different publications in print. And the answer this is really hard. There are some tools that go out there and try and sample it. It's very difficult to do quite often this is done through manual sampling. So people will go and manually load pages just to see which companies ads appear. And if you do that on a frequent and regular basis, you'll then get a profile of which ads are running and which ads aren't. Don't forget, it's always important if you do this, then you think about things like time of day as well, and split your analysis across different times of day. But we can see here, you know, for example, electronics weekly, they're running a house ad for their women electronics Awards, which is the wallpaper ad behind and then one of our clients, Tria, is making a real splash by taking over the homepage. And their their bright color scheme is definitely making impact, making those ads really jump out. So although it's very low tech and it's very straightforward, it's certainly something worth doing, and it gives you an idea not only necessarily feel direct competitors, but also companies in the market as well.
So it might give you some ideas that perhaps are more easy to steal because they're not from a direct competitor. We aim to get these conversations complete. So sorry, these webinars complete in about half an hour. So we're nearly there just a last slide to talk about other ways to spy on competitors. So, you know, one of the things you can do is, obviously use media monitoring services that will give you information on PR and social media. So meltwater, I think, is probably the most popular that I see in the electronics industry, although decision is very good, but it's a great way to see, you know, what companies are promoting. If you want to spy on direct marketing, you really to get on the database. It's, you know, quite hard to make sure you get a large percentage, because segmentation means that you almost certainly won't get all of the direct marketing communications. But we've done some studies in the past where we've signed up to a bunch of companies, you know, content offers. So you basically sign up to download a PDF, and then some companies ignore you. And you look at that, you think, this is kind of crazy, you know, I've shown the intent. There's nothing happens. Other companies can be really, really effective, and they will start sending you really thoughtful nurturing campaigns, and maybe even contact you outside of where we are in the B to B tech market. So if we look at the IT sector, there are companies that will actually pick the phone up to you within 15 minutes of you registering on a website. So looking at what other industries are able to do in terms of really fast contact is always, you know, both a little bit challenging but also inspiring in terms of what we can do in the B to B tech sector. Trade Shows are an easy place to competitors. Frankly, the information is pretty limited because all of it is public, so it's hard to get, real great insights. And lastly, there's a whole bunch of really simple tools that are worth doing, so that's from just following competitors on social media, through Google Alerts, Google News searches, searching on social media, and particularly searching on YouTube or subscribing to YouTube channels, all really useful ways to get information on competitors. Don't underrate them. It's always cool to see what somebody's doing, and they think that's, you know, kind of secret on the ad campaigns, but it's not. But actually, some of the more simple stuff works really well.
So in terms of the takeaways, I mean, there's lots of ways to spy on competitors and indeed, on partners, something I've not mentioned before. But it may be the case that if you're working with, say, a distribution partner who is promoting not only your products, but some of your competitor products, very typical, for example, in electronics, you might want to see how much effort that distribution partner is putting into your products versus your competitors. To see if you're getting a fair share of voice, you can certainly get lots of useful information ideas. I mean, it's, I've got a picture of span our ballet. Those people who are fame, you know, who are familiar with the New Romantics of the 1980s will realize that this refers to the gold of the data, but definitely getting information ideas is really good idea, a really good approach. Ad transparencies helped, particularly the EU regulation, but it really only shows you what is being run. It doesn't give you a lot of accurate data, even the tools that claim to give pricing and volume data on Google ads, they're not accurate in niche markets, like the ones that we're typically in. And then the last thing to say is, you know, whilst this is all good, it's all very interesting, it can certainly help you build better campaigns. Don't obsess over it. Don't become a stalker, because that always ends badly. Have a fairly healthy relationship with looking at your competitors and then also spending time thinking about what your company does and making sure you're differentiating and not just following.
So thank you very much for listening. A quick plug for our next webinar. Our next webinar is going to be about the Napier digital advertising playbook. I could assure the Europeans listening on the call who know me that I've not become American, but we do have a number of American clients, and for them, what we do is we actually build playbooks how we run campaigns, and quite often, where we work with an international client, we might build the first campaign in for example, it could be America or any other country, and then we'll build a playbook that shows local offices how they can take the materials and implement the campaign themselves. So we build real playbooks for clients that help them run campaigns. And what we're going to do is we're going to show you some of the playbooks, sorry, some of the plays that we do for our clients. So we're going to talk about exactly what we do to make things work really effectively, whether it be on LinkedIn or PR or anything else. So definitely sign up for that if you haven't already, get your phone out and scan the QR code and register, and obviously, if you can't make it register anyway, because we will tell you about the rebroadcast so there'll be an on demand rebroadcast version. Thanks again for listening. We'll now go and see if there's any questions. I'm interested to know. If anybody's got any questions, let me just have a quick look. I don't have anything particular at the moment, so if anybody has anything to ask, please let me know. Just give you a couple of seconds to type.
Okay, we've we've got something here. So there's a question from somebody who's obviously a very experienced marketer. They're asking about research on things like print, and they're absolutely right. There used to be reports where companies literally went into print publications and they looked at who was running ads, and they estimated ad spend and share a voice and things like that from print publications. I guess, not surprisingly, those days are long gone. Those reports simply don't sell. People can't make money out of them. We have, however, run one off custom projects for clients where we've targeted particular markets or particular groups of trade publications and looked at print coverage. It has been a little while, to be fair, since people have cared about what others are doing in print, but it's certainly something we can do, as well as doing the sampling of the online display ads on trade media, where, again, we're getting an estimate of what, who's spending, what and what they're talking about. So they're key messages. Well, I hope that's interesting for you. I think you know, just to summarize, it's not difficult to get the data and look at what your competitors are doing, it is quite difficult to get the insights.
So one thing I would urge everyone to do is, if you're interested in finding out what your competitors are doing and getting some analysis on what that means, please do feel free to get in contact with us. My email. Is on the screen at the moment, and we'd be more than happy to talk about building out a small project where we do some research and then give you the insights about what we think it means, so what we think your competitors are doing, and how we think you could best counteract it. So do feel free to talk to us about that. I hope see you in October for the next webinar. If anyone does have any questions they think about after the event, please email me. Mike at Napier, B to b.com. Thank you very much for your time. I hope you found it useful. Thank you.
Editorial Changes at AspenCore
AspenCore has announced editorial changes to two of its key publications, with Nitin Dahad being named Editor-in-Chief of EE Times and Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio being appointed Editor-in-Chief of Embedded.com
Nitin joins the EE Times team with an extensive career as a journalist and technology industry expert spanning over four decades. Prior to joining EE Times, Nitin held senior editorial positions at several industry publications and has been a regular contributor to EE Times for many years.
In his new role, Nitin will oversee the editorial strategy, content creation, and audience engagement efforts of EE Times, working closely with the rest of the editorial team to ensure the publication remains at the forefront of industry trends.
The second editorial change at AspenCore will see Maurizio join the Embedded.com team, he has a wide range of experience and a strong background in the engineering and technology sectors. With over 15 years in the industry, Maurizio is a highly respected engineer and is known for his deep technical expertise and ability to make complex subjects accessible to a broad audience.
As Editor-in-Chief, Maurizio will oversee all editorial content, and spearhead new initiatives to expand the site's offerings. He will continue to serve as Editor-in-Chief of PowerElectronicsNews.com and contributor to EE Times.
Congratulations to both Nitin and Maurizio on their new roles, and we look forward to seeing the future direction the publications take.
A Napier Webinar: How B2B Advertising Works
In our on-demand webinar 'How Business-to-Business Advertising Works', we explore the world of advertising, sharing how marketers can make their advertising even more effective, from building a brand to running search ads. We will share:
- How advertising has changed
- The key theories that matter
- How to use the theory to make better adverts
- Why great adverts worked
- Review of modern industrial ads
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘How Business-to-Business Advertising Works’ Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard
Hi everyone, and welcome to the latest Napier webinar. We'll just give it a couple of minutes as people join and get started fairly quickly, talking about B2B advertising.
Okay, so I see a few more people have joined. I think it's probably time to get started with the webinar. First thing to say is, if you have any questions, if you can put them into the chat as we go through, and then what I'll do is I'll address the questions at the end of the webinar, but it'd be great if things crop up as we go through, if you could just highlight them in the chat so we can then address them as soon as we finish the webinar.
So we're gonna talk about B 2 Advertising Secrets. This is a slightly longer webinar than we normally do. We're normally aiming for about 20 minutes. This is probably gonna last about 30 but there's quite a lot to cover in terms of B2B advertising. So if we look at the agenda, we're going to cover the history of advertising. We're going to look at some marketing theories. We're going to look at, you know, really, I guess, what was the original Golden Age of advertising, the age of madman in the 1950s and then what we're going to do is try and look at some of the science of actually creating an ad campaign. In fact, we're going to ask whether it's a science or whether it's an art to create a campaign. I'll provide you with some frameworks which will help you develop ads in the future, and we'll give you some examples of how people have used those frameworks, and indeed, how people have created some other ads. And lastly, we'll have a brief discussion of what we can expect from an advertising campaign. And I think that's very important, because we have to be realistic about what can be achieved and what is unrealistic.
So what is advertising? Well, Wikipedia said it's the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. But this is a hugely wide definition. This really is marketing as opposed to advertising, in my opinion. And so what we're going to talk about with advertising is we're going to look at paid promotion. So this is particularly where you're creating something and then paying to have it displayed. And I think this is generally what people think of as advertising. Now, advertising isn't new, if we have a look. You know, way back when, in ancient Greece and Rome, you know, papyrus was used to highlight lost and found items. You know, in the 1670s people started printing flyers and price lists were called a dangerous practice. Back in the 1670s people didn't approve, necessarily, of sharing your pricing publicly. They thought you should always negotiate it. In 1840 the first advertising space broker. So probably the first agency came into being where someone was selling advertising space, so paid space. But you can see it's taken a long time to really evolve, and then things start speeding up. So 40 years later, people started using slogans, the first slogan being good morning. Have you used pairs? So probably not the greatest advertising slogan ever, but certainly the first. We then started seeing people using behavioralism 40 years later, so trying to, you know, basically generate emotion as part of their ads. That was a big change in advertising. And at the same time we saw radio advertising come into being. Well, at least we saw radio advertising come into being in places like the United States. Interestingly, because of the UK's British Broadcasting Corporation, we didn't get radio ads until 1972 so you know, what's that just about 50 years ago, that radio ads have actually been in the UK. So a relatively short period of time, in 1934 there started to be more academic research, and there was a launch of the American Marketing journal. So a lot more research around advertising and marketing.
Interestingly, as we'll see later, a lot of the theories predate the first marketing journal. 1941 was the first TV ad. 1978 was your first spam email. 1994 was the first banner ad, and you can see not the most beautiful banner ad in the world. Search advertising didn't actually happen until 1997 so here, you know we're looking at some. Um, you know, a little over 25 years ago, and social media advertising, sorry, and Google AdWords launched in 2000 and then social media advertising, we didn't see that until even more recently. So not until 2006 for the first social media ads.
So I'm although I think a lot of people listening will be very active on social with ads. You know, probably a lot of us with B2B will be active on LinkedIn. Actually, this is something that's only existed for less than 20 years, so quite new technology. But the reality is, is the channels are new, but the theories are old. And so here we have David Ogilvy on the left, probably the one of the most famous advertising experts, and John Wanamaker, you know, David Ogilvy, you know he's actually, you know, quite old, died last century in 1999 and John Wanamaker, who was one of the most famous people, famous, I think, particularly for saying that half of my advertising Budget is wasted. But I don't know which half. You know, he died over 100 years ago. So a lot of these theories are very old. And if we look at them, you know, the theories developed from, you know, a theory of, basically advertising is about getting attention, so it's fundamentally like shop signs by here. Then people started thinking about conditioning. So, you know, the Pavlovian response. They started looking at the impact of repetition. Then ads became very rational, so rational arguments, and then finally ads became emotional. And really, in terms of advertising science, we haven't seen a huge transition in the underlying theory.
Since then, we've seen a massive change, as we saw earlier, in terms of channels, but very little in terms of advertising theory. So let's have a look at some of these advertising theories, some of them, I guess you're probably using today. So the first one is the ADA model, so awareness, interest, desire and action credited to a guy called East and Elmo Lewis, fantastic name, and he came up with this theory in 1898 so, you know, way before all these modern channels. And he talked about, you know, getting attention or attracting attention, maintaining interest and creating desire. And then later decided to add action, which created this four step funnel that a lot of us still use today. But as I say, was built a long time ago. In 1970 there was a lot of work on repetition, and Daniel berline really the expert on this, and he came up with this curve here, which basically says that the more you repeat something, the more likely people are to be aroused, as he put it. So that's to get interested, and therefore, ultimately, to remember it until you get to a point. And then after a point, you will actually see that performance drop off as you overdo the repetition. And so he's, you know, the person who really came up with this concept of of wear out. So he said increasing frequency increased liking. So this is the wear in bit. But eventually we get bored and we get wear out. Now I would argue all this is an interesting theory, very few B to B brands get the kind of frequency that's going to get anywhere close to wear out. So I think we are generally working on that upward slope on the left hand side, and more frequency generally means better results. This is one of the reasons why we see techniques like ABM working so well in business to business, because what it's doing is not only personalizing, but it's also increasing frequency to a more specific audience. So I think, you know, it's an interesting theory, something to bear in mind, but probably less appropriate to B2B.
The thing we really need to know is we're on that upward slope, and more frequency generates better results, so that wherein phase in 1984 was the very first customer journey in a book, oh, sorry, in a paper for Harvard Business Review. And then people started talking about touch points. And then in 1998 the very first customer journey map, which was a company at the time called Oxford corporate consultants who developed this customer journey map for Eurostar. Hence the name customer journey is stuck. Now there is some debate as to where this was the original customer journey map, but I just love the story that it was linked to a train journey and then has generated this kind of journey title. So I'm going to stick with Wikipedia, even though some people disagree.
So customer journey is newer, but it's still not that that new. I mean, we're still talking about something that's that's over 25 years old as a theory, and then, if we jump back. Back. You know, a lot of people look at this emotional side of advertising, and one of the classic models is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And there you can see things, you know, at the top level. So just to explain, you know, the idea behind Maslow's hierarchy of needs is, if you can satisfy your lower levels, you can work at the top level. So the top level self actualization is things like in a consumer world, selling education or courses. But you need to feel good about yourself to actually go and spend money on sort of self actualization. So you need some esteem, and that might relate to say, luxury cars.
But if you don't feel belonging, you won't be able to build a steam. So you need to build belonging. And so something like Facebook is a classic belonging type. Brand. Belonging is hard to work on. If you feel unsafe and insecure, you're not going to stay. You know, historically with with the tribe, if you feel very unsafe and in danger, so safety is more important. So selling insurance is fairly basic, and then physiological you're down to things like food and drink. So the idea is, you build these things up, and generally, it's true. You know, people with more money tend to spend their money at the higher end, so they feel like they've satisfied their physiological safety and belonging needs, and maybe they're trying to meet their esteem need or self actualization. Now Maslow's hierarchy of needs can be applied to B to B advertising. So self actualization, that might be something around environmental issues, people feeling good about themselves. Steam might be using a high end consultancy like McKinsey, belonging might be something like HubSpot, a brand that's created a very strong, you know, culture of community safety might be something like IBM. Nobody ever gets fired for choosing IBM, arguably one of the great taglines of B to B marketing. But interestingly, working at a fairly low level, that safety level and physiological level. Hopefully we're not marketing to people who need food and drink. So hopefully that's not relevant
It is interesting. I think that, you know, one of the most famous lines really focuses at quite a low level. So people feeling insecure in their job and wanting to feel like they're not taking a risk, and obviously, if you feel insecure, you're not going to be activated by messages at a high level. There's also another interesting thing, you know, I put this together and then did the research afterwards, which is clearly a bad idea, and one of these items is actually wrong. One of the companies doesn't operate at the level, and I'll talk a little bit about that when we analyze their advertising. The amazing. There's also models about the differences of people. So one of them is the process communication model. It's a great model. It says that people have different approaches. And I think it's great because it says, you know, one of the groups is people who think they're thinkers, and logic is their currency. That's what they think about. It's really important to know this is not the entire population. This is only a proportion of the population. And actually the reality is, is B to B, we quite often fall into that logic based argument. And so you know what I think we need to do is we need to make sure that we don't just advertise to people who drive all their thoughts and all their decisions through logic, but what we do is we look at some of these other people. So you know, people who look at the world through opinions or emotions or things like that. We need to make sure that we're when we're communicating. We actually have a variety of communications, so we'll appeal to a wider range of people. And obviously, you know, it is true that some industries will be more full of one type of person than another. And so, you know, as an example, thinkers, you know, really do dominate the engineering sector. And so that does argue that predominantly logic based ads are good to target engineers. However, if you look at, you know, marketing then quite often it's rebels and promoters, so very different kind of person you need to advertise to, and logic is much less effective then. So we've looked at some theories here, and we've seen some of the things that underlie how B2B marketing works. Let's look at a real case study, and I'm going to be the real case study so many, many years ago, I was given the job of choosing an FPGA vendor for my company. It was my first big project. It was super, super exciting. You know, I felt really proud that I'd been given the responsibility. I was learning a lot. My career was progressing, you know, it really at that high level of self actualization. And the company I chose at the time, I. Was Xilinx. And this is Xilinx is press release, which, even as an engineer, I'm going to admit, is undeniably dull. You know, for something that, for me, was a turning and pivotal point in my career.
The company that launched it was entirely logic based. It was undeniably dull. I would argue that in some ways, B2B, tech companies have got better at communicating things and better at moving away from purely factual releases. But I think the difference between the press release and how I'm feeling as someone who's choosing the product is a really good example of where we can be just too dull and just too factual in ADS. So I know that some people from Napier listening, and they all think I'm really old, but let's go back way before I was even born. So back to the late 1950s and David Ogilvy, as I mentioned, is probably the best known marketing expert and advertising copywriter, and he had an absolute classic style. And we can see here, you know, one of the most famous motoring adverts at 60 miles an hour, the loudest noise in this new Rolls Royce comes from the electric clock. And you can also see the David Ogilvy style, the picture at the top, the big headline, the sub headline, and then lots and lots of text. And he did lots of similar ads like this, so you could change the shock absorbers, and also every corporation should buy its president a rolls. Royce, so I'm hoping Napier's going to buy me a rolls. Royce, I think that's kind of unlikely. So it's really interesting. He also looked at B to B advertising as well as advertising for Rolls Royces. So cover the whole gamut, and he actually created an ad which tells you how to create industrial advertising, which is amazing. There is a slight downside, though. I think, you know, the advertising advice is a little bit out of date. It was actually produced in 1974 probably wouldn't work today. I mean, I think most people looking at this ad is going to, are going to say, I'm just not going to read this. And I think the world has changed.
So I'm David Ogilvy's view is you should use logic in B2B prove your case. You should use case studies. Now, I think that's still very valid. You know, testimonials and social proof is very important, and we see a lot of people using reviews as well in a similar way. He recommends engagement quizzes. I don't think many people are doing that in their B2B ads at the moment, technical diagrams. A lot of people are still doing those. He strongly recommended including prices. Interestingly, in his ad for Ogilvy and Matha, he didn't include prices, and went against his ad his advice. He said, You should concentrate and focus. I think that's still good advice. He recommends smaller ads and two colors. I think the idea of, you know, two color ads to save money and cost has gone away with digital. And he was a strong believer in long copy. And I think looking at this, there are a few things that still work without doubt. Case studies are important. I think focusing and getting frequency on a smaller number of publications definitely produces better results. But, you know, just using logic, I don't think necessarily is that effective anymore. And you know, some of the other things, like long copy, I think are very dated and not really suited to the world. So my message is, is that even though we're going to talk about how to design great ads, today, advertising has changed dramatically. And from the heyday when advertising really made its money and people really believed it had an impact, it's massively changed. And going back to this Rolls Royce, that I'm still hoping we get, modern advertising looks much more like this. It's much more emotional. It's, you know, much less direct, and certainly not into the massive, long copy. But there's not a science. And in fact, if you look at the science, if you look at the research, you read the academic papers, there's a lot of research and a lot of theories around how people communicate. There's a lot of theories around measurement and impact, but academic research doesn't really ever answer the question, how do I create a great ad? And there is a famous ad, and hopefully some people remember this.
It was a gorilla, and it was a very long, very slow advert of a gorilla drumming along to Phil Collins. And you talk about this, and people are, you know, sort of looking if they didn't, they weren't around for the ad. What on earth is this about? Well, this was an advert for a chocolate bar, but it wasn't just an advert for a chocolate bar. It was an advert that moved the confectionery mask. It more than any other ad has done, as far as we can tell, in the history of the confectionery market, and certainly in terms of modern history, by far more than anything else, a gorilla drumming. I think that's really important because, you know, I don't think there's any academic or theoretical approach you could use that says, if you want to sell chocolate, dress someone up in a gorilla suit, get them to play the drums, have Phil Collins in the background. It'll be amazing, but it was amazing, and in fact, it was so amazing that, famously, a lot of consumer brands actually went and asked to buy a gorilla. And it ended up with somebody, David Merkel, who was an agency side person, who literally wrote a book on how to buy a gorilla because of the success this had. Now that was pure creativity. I think the challenge we have in B to B, if we're to be honest, is that, firstly, we quite often don't have access to the world's best creatives. And secondly, our corporations are very, very cautious, and so corporations are unlikely to want to do something in the same way that Cadbury's did. And indeed, there's lots of examples of consumer businesses that turn down, you know, similar edgy ads that may have been as good.
So not just B to B, but I think, particularly a problem with B to B. So one of the ways we can do it is to use some advertising frameworks. And there are a few standard advert frameworks that are quite, you know, widely used, and we'll actually see them being used in some of these slides. So what I'm doing is, I'm actually going to pull out some digital ads that follow the frameworks to give some illustrations, but whatever the structure, a great ad should end on a proof point and a call to action. So that's really important to remember. You should always try and have this proof point and call to action at the end. That doesn't always happen, but we'll look at how these ads fit the frameworks. So one of the first items is features advantages, benefits. We hear this all the time, you know, and it's classic. We see people, you know, trying to talk about features advantages, benefits. So here we've got, you know, an advert that talks about highlights, which are really the features and then some advantages or benefits there, and we can see, you know, similar ads with John Deere and wima as well, not necessarily really structured around that create the features, explain why they're an advantage so better than the competition, and then what benefits they give you. But all kind of talking about features and advantage benefits. It's quite a useful, simple framework, but they're not necessarily the most inspiring ads. Perhaps a better way is what's called pas problem. Agitate and solve. So you highlight a problem, you then make it a bigger problem. You emphasize why it's an issue for the people reading it, and then you solve it. So one of the problems is, as Honeywell highlights here, is that, you know, in a building, the energy consumption from plug outlets, so sockets on the wall isn't thought about, but that can represent nearly half of a building's energy use. So there we've got the problem. We don't think about it, we've agitated it's half the energy use, and then we solve it. And Honeywell suggests their connected power as a smart solution to solve it. So a really nice way to actually work through that, I think, is much more engaging than just features and benefits. Salesforce do a similar thing, although you can see here that Salesforce, actually, they may be a bit of a devotee of David Ogilvy, because they have quite a lot of copy around their ad.
So there's definitely some long form copy here. I mean, interestingly, David Ogilvy argued that although the vast majority of people won't read all the copy, if you have long form copy, the people who are likely to be customers will, and it will have a bigger impact than than less copies. So, you know, I think there's some merit in that, but I think there's also a lot of merit in the feeling that today, you know, most people don't want to read huge, long copy, particularly in ADS. The next one is identifying a buyer objection, addressing concerns, and introducing the product. So here we've got Airbus. They're highlighting a number of acronyms. What's the solution? Well, the solution is the Airbus summer school. So quite a neat one. You know, Siemens, getting better results faster is difficult. Well, if you use a digital twin, you can actually speed up design and engineering. So another nice one there, and a similar one around sensors. And then the last one is storytelling. And. Now, these aren't the only advertising frameworks, but these are four of the most common. So typically with storytelling, you introduce a character, you have some sort of issue, they go through a journey, and they achieve resolution. And so, you know, one of the examples I found is Boeing, highlighting people who work for Boeing, so really highlighting the benefits. And, you know, here we've got diksha, who loved math and physics.
So I think that's, that's great. You know, they're talking about a story, and in terms of, you know, promoting the business. And this is a recruitment type ad, so it's looking to engage people, recruitment. It's incredibly effective. So those are four key frameworks. I just wanted to pick some things out about, you know, some companies in B to B and have a look at what they're doing. So some of these will be competitors to people listening. Some of them might be in slightly different sectors, but I think it's really useful. This is Schneider, and on the left, we start with, you know, fairly boring copy. I mean, it's great to know that white paper, 133 explains how. I'm not quite sure why, telling me it's white paper number 133, is really important. I can click on the link and go straight there, but it's a fairly dull ad here. You know, AI use is growing. Learn how to adapt your cooling system. Then they ask a question, which is a bit more engaging, and then they actually bring in people. So we can see Schneider, it's interesting. They have quite a range of ads that they're running, and we can't know, you know, which of the ads is most effective, but my guess is, the more emotionally driven ads and the more engaging ads are going to generate more clicks. GE is very interesting. Hopefully nobody's listening from GE here, because we'll start off with this ad 2023. Was a momentous year for GE aerospace and ge vannova. And actually GE is pretty ego driven, because everything they do talks about ge. It's all about me, me, me, me, me. I'm interested to know how it works. GE is clearly a brand that people respect and has a lot of equity, but my feeling is is GE guys talk about your customers, pay attention to your customers, rather than you know, always talking about yourself, you'll almost certainly get more engagement from your ads. McKinsey's interesting. I think McKinsey is fascinating. You know, firstly, we had a look. They're running over 2000 ads on LinkedIn. I mean, that's a massive amount to run. So they're putting a lot of effort in, and it's all around customizing the ads for both audience and also location.
But McKinsey, I said, was about esteem. Earlier on, I was so wrong when I looked at the ads, hear from your peers, collaboration, partnering. McKinsey is all about belonging, which I found very, very interesting. You know, they build some really good ads, but they're very consistent about their belonging message. And there's some more ads here. You know how to prepare for the CFO role. So it's bringing in CFOs community. And I think they also do some great ads as well, you know. So this is one around promoting a podcast, and there they drive this incredible quote from Ken Fraser, who's the former CEO of Merck, the CEO's job is to be a compass, not a GPS. I mean, absolutely brilliant quote, I think, really compelling. Hopefully you like it as much as I do, because that drove me to want to download the podcast and really listen. So I think they're being really creative here. And you'll see there's very different styles. Not everybody does this, and a lot of people do fall back into a very formulaic approach. And again, I hope there's nobody here from this company, but if we look at Analog Devices, Analog Devices ads are somewhat repetitive.
Unlock efficiency, unlock precision, save energy, very logical, very factual, no emotion, exactly the same style. And whilst that might work with a lot of logical engineers, it's not going to raise, you know, any level of excitement. So I think that's that's a real problem. And I think, you know, a lot of companies, if they looked at their ads, they would have to admit they can be quite formulaic. So getting companies to have variety is not only going to have an impact over a bigger proportion of your audience, but I think it's also much more likely to engage the core audience you're trying to reach. So absolutely appreciate. We've had a slightly longer webinar, unusual. I'm just going to finish off talking about what we can expect. Advertising. And the first thing is, I think, you know, and particularly for you know, people listening on this call, you're probably in an industrial engineering or, you know, electronic sector that kind of matches our clients. There's no magic bullet. You know, if advertising drove sales, we'd all spend more money on advertising, just like SaaS companies. But the problem is is most of our B to B customers, they have a long and complex journey, so one ad isn't going to make a massive difference. So be realistic. Design your ads to drive small steps.
Be very mindful of the situation you're in, and don't try and copy from other industries, because it doesn't work. On the right hand side, we see a classic SaaS product, a Google Ads reporting tool. It's really interesting, because running Google ads around this sort of tool is incredibly effective, and people will click, they'll trial the tool, and they'll buy with credit card, and you can manage that through one ad. That is not the same as if you're selling an aircraft engine or a semiconductor that needs, you know, design in, or anything else that's a complex B to B product. So you know, it's really important, and it's very interesting, because most people on the call, I'm guessing that you know, your marketing budgets are in low single digits of the total company turnover. SaaS companies 30 to 40% of annual revenue, not profit. Revenue, can be spent on marketing, and most of that will be spent on things like these Google Ads aiming to drive immediate trials. It's a completely different industry. If we were all in that same industry, we'd all have a very different business model, and we'd always be spending a lot more on advertising. But it's much more complicated for high involvement purchases in B to B. Measuring the Impact is really hard. I mean, we talk about this a lot, and anyone who's listened to our previous webinars will know that I bang on about the fact that vanity metrics are not great. They can absolutely mislead and you know, we've seen clients who've massively increased click through rates on ads, and as a result, their number of people who are actually converting falls. So they're massively increasing the number of people coming to a landing page, but fewer people convert than when they had a small level of traffic, and it's because they're looking to optimize around the wrong metric. Click through rate is not a great metric. It's all about what's a business metric. And again, if you've listened to these webinars, looking at the numbers you can directly attribute to an ad is not always a great thing. So running an ad on Google, around your brand, you know, is not a great thing.
Here's an example, you know, Danfoss. When you search for Danfoss, there's a mass of organic results. They've done a great job on SEO, but I know if I ran a Google ad, it would appear at the top of the page, and people would click the ad, and they'd turn out to be high value traffic because they wanted to go to Danfoss. But I've done nothing to increase the number of people that go to the website, because the reality is, if my ad wasn't there, the first organic result would drive people to website. So what I've done is, I've done something that generates a lot of traffic by attribution, the ad click generated the traffic, but has done nothing to increase the amount of people engaging with Danfoss, or ultimately, you know, Danfoss revenue. So attribution is not incrementality, and incrementality is where we need to be. So just to summarize, no, no one person has the secret to advertising, apart from maybe Taylor Swift, who you know, genuinely is incredible in terms of generating that community of people who love her, keeping them emotionally involved and particularly bringing that feeling of belonging. I mean, if you think back to, you know, the different ways that people market McKinsey markets around belonging, you know, be part of that kind of McKinsey cult. Um, Taylor Swift is exactly the same, and I'm reliably informed, and the people who are Swifties from the company are going to love this, that people even dress up in specific clothes to go to a Taylor Swift concert to reflect one of her eras. So I mean incredible feeling of long, incredible amount of effort from her fans that ultimately make the whole experience even better.
So other than Taylor, we don't have that secret, but I think you know, the important thing to say is, there's a lot of frameworks. They're still relevant, the ways of thinking things, even though they're they're somewhat old. That the psychology has not changed at the same rate that the channels have changed. It's really important to go belong beyond logic. And hopefully I've got that across. It's. Also important to recognize that in B to B, we're not leading. So we have an opportunity to look at what consumer companies are doing and see whether we can take some of their great ideas and bring them into B to B. And if you do that, you'll really stand out. And then the last thing to say is, you know, if you want to make sure something is working, testing is important, proper AB testing. And lastly, be realistic about what you can achieve if you're running one ad. Most of us say are in a high involvement, long sales cycle, B to B sale, and it's very, very different from selling something like a reporting tool for Google ads. I hope that's been okay. We will go on to talk about, you know, some of the questions. So please, if you've got any questions, put them in the chat. I'd love to hear them and ask them. But before we do the next webinar is actually going to be related. So if you found this webinar on advertising useful, you'll have noticed that we've pulled out quite a lot of ads from quite a lot of different companies, and very, very few of the ads are actually, I think any of the ads are actually our own clients. They're all our clients competitors. So our next webinar is going to be how to spy on your competitors ads. So we'll talk about a few really simple techniques to pull competitors ads and find out what they're doing and get some idea of how well they're working. So if you're interested in that, it's on Tuesday the 17th of September. It's going to be one hour earlier than the webinar today. We've tried different times. I said testing is important, and we believe that the hour earlier makes more sense. It seems to get better attendance. So we're going to move back. And please, you know, do feel free to scan the QR code or use the short code at the bottom to go and register. And obviously, if you can't make the live webinar, we will send you a link to the recording. So thank you for listening. As I mentioned, this was a slightly longer webinar than usual, but hopefully you found it useful. And what we'll do is we'll now go and take a look at some questions. So hopefully we've got some questions in the chat just having a look. If anyone's got any questions, please put them in.
Okay, I just have one question that's come through so there's, there's not a huge amount of questions there. And yeah, let me just check this. Yeah, so it's actually asking about where we've got the ads from. So this is actually something we're going to talk about next time. And what you can do is, in many places, you can go and track ad. Sometimes you need a tool. So in the next webinar, we'll talk about some of the tools to spy on Google ads. But other times, you can actually access the ads directly. One of the reasons that we use a lot of LinkedIn ads, for example examples, is that you can actually pull LinkedIn ads from your competitors, directly from LinkedIn, and a similar thing from Facebook as well. So great question. That's why we've we've done it. That's why we use a lot of LinkedIn ads. And we'll show you how to do it next time. I can't see any other questions. So hopefully this has been a interesting and useful session. If anybody would like information about you know, either some of the other frameworks people used to build ads, we only looked at four frameworks, so there are more standard frameworks that people use, or would just like help understanding how they can make their ads more effective. Please do drop me a line. My emails there, Mike at napierbe to be.com and hopefully I will see you all again on the 17th of September for our next webinar. Thank you very much.
Electronics Excellence Awards Returns for electronica 2024
Electronic Specifier has announced that its Electronics Excellence Awards will be returning for electronica 2024.
Initially launched at electronica in 2022, exhibitors can submit their most innovative and show-stopping products, which will be independently scored by a judging panel of industry thought leaders and electronics specialists, selected by Editors at Electronic Specifier.
All submissions will be included in a series of exclusive newsletters in the weeks leading up to electronica, as well as being featured in Electronic Specifier's printed issue which will be distributed at the show.
Entries will be shortlisted in the following four categories, with the winner receiving a marketing package worth over £8,000:
- Test & Measurement Product
- Power Product
- Passive Product
- Electromechanical Product
Entrants will be invited to a short presentation at electronica, where the winner will be announced on Thursday 14th November at 12.50pm on the Visionary Stage in Hall B4.
Submissions are now open for entry, and companies have until 11th October 2024 to submit their entries.
It's fantastic to see Electronic Specifier provide an opportunity for companies to celebrate their product achievements in a different way at electronica, and we look forward to seeing the submissions, and finding out who the winner is in November.
Wireless Congress Announced for 2024
The Wireless Congress: Systems & Applications, organized by WEKA Fachmedien, has announced that it will be taking place on November 13th-14th 2024 in Munich.
As a leading event that brings together developers and users of wireless systems, the show is held in parallel with electronica, offering a platform for visitors to share knowledge and experiences in the world of wireless communication.
The show will present the latest developments and innovations in the industry, ranging from consumer electronics and smartphones to industrial applications of the Internet of Everything. Topics such as smart metering, smart cities, environmental monitoring, and factory and process automation will be key topics, with lectures and workshops covering the following:
- Narrowband IoT/5G and LPWAN: Technologies that have quickly established themselves in the market and form the foundation for future 6G networks.
- Bluetooth and Wi-Fi: Proven technologies that are continuously being developed.
- Emerging Technologies: New trends such as resilient networking and information-centric networks.
- Integration of OPC UA in 5G Networks: This session will highlight how OPC UA FX can be integrated with the 5G system to enhance connectivity and automation functions.
- Matter and Thread: The Thread Group presents an open and global wireless network protocol that extends the IP infrastructure in homes and buildings, enabling seamless interoperability.
Each category had three winners which were equally ranked. Pictures and winners from the day can be found here.Â
A Napier Webinar: Segmentation Secrets: 9 Ways to Target the Right Audience
Do you struggle to target the right audiences with your campaigns? Or find it difficult to reach your target audience in the most impactful way?
Check out our on-demand ‘Segmentation Secrets: 9 Ways to Target the Right Audience’ webinar, as we explore 9 ways to identify the right audience for your next campaign and deliver better results with lower costs. We will share:
- Why segmentation is important
- When and where you should segment
- The 9 strategic segmentations you should use
- How to implement these segmentations
- What to do if you can't segment an audience
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘Segmentation Secrets: 9 Ways to Target the Right Audience’ Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the latest Napier webinar. Today we're going to be talking about segmentation. And we're going to discuss nine different ways to target the right audience. So what we'll do is we'll get on straightaway and we'll start looking at, you know, some of the details around segmentation. So, I think one of the first things to say is that there's lots of different ways to segment audiences. But really, the result of segmentation should be improved performance of your marketing campaigns. And so I personally like the quote, that I believe originally was from John Wanamaker. But it's been attributed for lots of different people since, which is half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half? Well, the answer is, is the money is not being wasted, because you're doing the wrong thing, that money is being wasted. Because you're showing the ad to the wrong people. I your segmentation isn't very good. So hopefully, what we'll do in this webinar is help you understand how to better segment your audiences, so that you don't waste half your marketing budget. And actually, what you do is you send great ads, and you send them all to the right, the right people.
So I guess we need to look at how we've segmented this webinar today. So what we're gonna do is initially do some very quick poll. To understand how you segment your audiences will then start we'll talk about why segmentation is important. We'll talk about when and where you should segment. The main part of the webinar is obviously the nine that's segmentation. So you should always use, we'll talk a little bit about how to implement the segmentation as we go through as well. Finally, we'll cover what to do if you can't segment an audience if you've got any questions, and I'd really encourage you to put them into the chat. So please do that as we go along. And then what I'll do is I will cover those questions at the end of the webinar, we'll aim to get this webinar done in about 25 minutes. So should be relatively short, which will leave us time for questions. So please do put anything in that pops into your head. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to understand how you segment and I'm going to do that by basically setting up a poll.
So what I've done is I've launched a poll, I think you should see it in your interaction section. Please look at the poll and click on how you segment you know, do you segment by job title by market? Or do segment by behavior? Or do you just not segment at all so please do fill in and let us know how you segment and what I'll do is I'll just leave that poll running for about another 30 seconds just so that you can tell us how you segment. We still just got a couple of other people voting but I think we're we're pretty much there. And it's interesting. Okay, I've closed the poll now. If we look at the results, hopefully you can now all see them. Most people are segmented by market or industry. Some people segment by job title some people segment by behavior. Nobody seems to be segmenting by company in terms of ABM. But the good news is is that everybody is segmenting. So that's a good start. So everybody understands the importance of segmentation and they're not just blasting out all their marketing materials to all of their customers on the list.
So, why is segmentation important? Well, I alluded to this earlier If you're marketing to the wrong people, you're basically throwing away money. So what you want to do is you want to be sending your marketing materials, your adverts and other content to people who buy. And that's the right company, the right people in the company, ideally, companies that are in market, so people who are actually actively buying at the moment, rather than necessarily people who might buy in the future. And then most importantly, we need to send the right message to each segment. So you might have different messaging based on market based on persona, which were two of the things that were identified that oh, you might segment and have different messaging by company size, as an example. But basically, good segmentation means that our campaigns are more likely to succeed. So when should you segment? Well, I think it's pretty obvious, you should always segment wherever you have an opportunity, you should actually focus down on the people who are gonna be really interested in your content.
So whether that's through advertising, email marketing, running social campaigns, or indeed even going to trade shows, you know, you need to be thinking about how you segment and how you give a different experience to different people who have different requirements. And I think, you know, it's always good to include a classic Dilbert cartoon here. And I think it's important to make sure that you really think about segmentation. Unlike Dilbert, you don't lump ratbert into the same segment that includes wild funghi. And penciller, raises, probably not a great segmentation. So you need to think about the right approach to do it. So what we're going to do is we're going to talk about nine different ways to segment audiences. And we're going to look at ways that you can actually implement those segmentations as well. So the first one is firmographic, and demographics. So these classic segmentations, based upon, you know, who people are and who they work for. So, this could be on job title, and that job title could actually be seniority job role, you could also look at time at the company, you can look at industry and company size. So that might be targeting a particular industry vertical or a particular size of company.
So you might only want to target enterprise companies, or you might only want to target SMEs locations, obviously another important firmographic Segmentation as well. And then lastly, customer tearing is really important in terms of segmenting. So strategic importance of revenue potential based upon their demographics, and firmographic. So, what you're trying to do is look at the data about the company. And from that elicit how good a customer they're likely to be. There's a number of different ways you can do this. But really the big player in the market is LinkedIn. If you're doing campaigns based around, you know, companies that people work for, and their position within those companies, other than your own internal data, LinkedIn is probably the best source of information and a great platform to run campaigns. Another way to look at segmentation is behavioral based. I think one or two people mentioned, they were using behavioral based segmentation in the survey. So this can be things like activity based, if people come to your website and they look at certain pages, they show interest in certain product families, then you should send them content about those products and not about others. A very simple activity based segmentation. But you can also segment based on usage. So don't forget you should be marketing, to customers that are already buying from you as well as prospects. And one interesting thing here is, you know, really good marketing campaigns around software as a service tools actually use the data that they get, where they understand what different customers are using the tool for. And then they market relative to that. And typically a SAS marketing campaign, very simply will aim to increase that range of features that customers use of their tools, because obviously, the larger number of features they use, the more sticky that tool is likely to be. And lastly, you can actually look at buying behavior, how people buy. And so that could be roles that individuals take during the buying process. If you're involved in selling a small number of very high value products.
You might want to model what various customers do when they buy and then market to those specific individuals to reflect their role in the buying process. Typically a lot so you could be looking at the customer lifetime value, or the annual reoccurring revenue if you're selling something that's more subscription based like a service. So for example, some thought or system management, you can look at profitability. And I think that's really important to remember that actual revenue doesn't necessarily reflect profit. So it's often more useful to actually segment based upon profit. And then lastly, length of relationship is hugely important. I'm not going to get into the economics of it. But typically, if you're looking at relationships over multiple years, most companies will discount the value of future years. So that actually make that value slightly smaller, because you've got to wait for it. And so and also, potentially, it will be lower value anyway, because of inflation.
So the big calculation that you really want to look at when you're thinking about this is your average order value, times the frequency of purchase, times the likelihood to retain a customer and that will give you a customer lifetime value. And ultimately, if you know the value of the customer, you know how much effort you want to put into them, to both retain them, and grow them as well as acquiring new customers that are similar. And so typically, with value based segmentation, you have a model for existing customers, that might generate a number of different groups. And then you'll allocate prospects into those groups based upon their characteristics. technographic is very interesting, if you're selling, particularly software, but also to a large extent if you're selling engineering products as well. So the type of technology people use. And you can use this in a number of ways you can use this to identify opportunities, so where you have integrations with a particular technologies, or you can also use it to eliminate so if somebody you feel is locked into a competitor's technology, there's probably less value in you chasing them than someone who's not locked in. And in some markets, it's really, really important. So in particular, in the enterprise software market, it's usually bought, if you want to sell, for example, marketing automation platforms, it's really important to know what products the prospects are already using. Because you'll have a different pitch and a different set of benefits depending upon where that prospect is.
And there are tools like built with that will give you really quite detailed information on some of the systems that are installed on companies websites. Our fifth one psychographic segmentation. That's really understanding the decision maker. So it's really a classic way to segment that. And to put this very simply, it's all about building personas. So great personas, they don't just talk about the person in terms of their demographics, how old they are, what their job title is, things like that. And they really look into what the challenges are in that person's role, how they feel they progress in their job role, how they get recognized. And, you know, really helped you understand what how that persona is thinking, and what you can do to help them do a better job. So I would say if you're using personas, that's a great start on psychographic segmentation. But what we do a lot with clients is really enhance those personas, to get an understanding of what you as a vendor can do, to really make that person have an easier life, remove their challenges, or potentially get recognized for doing a great job and therefore potentially promoting them.
And you know, one of the great things in marketing is if you can offer a product that gets someone promoted, there's a lot of incentive for that customer to then buy it. Related to psychographic segmentation is data driven segmentation. And so there's lots of algorithms that will generate clusters of your customers based on certain characteristics. And this is different because what you're not doing is working from trying to understand the customer. And then build the segmentation. What you're trying to do is you're trying to gather data, and then just let the machine crunch the data and see where it can see groups. And sometimes these groups are fairly obvious. And sometimes it can be unclear, you know, why groups both behave in different ways. You've got to be careful that there's no spurious correlation in here. But it's often very useful to be able to do some data driven segmentation. And then you can test you know, messages and benefits on a small sample of each segment. And understand what the optimal messages even if you don't understand why that segment has been created by the computer. If they all behave the same, they're probably all going to respond similarly to the same messages.
Customer Journey segmentation, I think here's something that is often very underrated. And it's because it's often hard to understand where people are in their customer journey. And we often hear of, you know, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel bottom of the funnel content, which is very simple journey segmentation. But the more granular you can get, the more your campaigns will perform better, because you can really address where people are, and what you've got to do to move them to the next step. It is difficult, it does require, you know, building of customer journey models, and understanding you know where customers are, and what micro journeys they're taking to take them from one point to another. So often, we do see people just reverting back to top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel. And alarming frequency, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of funnel refers to content, and not to segmentation. So I really say you know, one of the things when you're generating content that's targeting people at different customer journey stages, try and get it in front of people who are at that journey stage.
Rather than just throwing out top of the funnel content, everybody you can find and assume everybody you know, is really just at that early awareness stage. Whereas the reality is there will be people further down that journey in the general population. Our penultimate one is needs based segmentation. There's a classic theory called jobs to be done theory. And Put very simply, what it says is customers don't buy products, they buy a solution. So that effectively and the academic language is hiring products to solve a problem. So as an example, people don't buy a drill, what they're buying is the ability to create holes is the classic example there. And that can be quite interesting, because you can actually find that there are customers that maybe would have been separate segments actually come together when you look at needs based segmentation. So sometimes it can be an interesting way to look differently, how you segments, different audiences. The last one, and any of our clients are on the call will not be surprised at this, because we talk a lot about it is Account Based Marketing. And this basically means that each customer is a segment. And so that allows you to be very personalized in your communication. It allows you to really understand each individual customer. And it's generally speaking one of the most popular segmentation approaches for b2b today. Interestingly, nobody's actually doing it, who responded to the poll earlier as their primary means of segmentation. But it's certainly one of the most effective, which is really driving its popularity. If you've been on one of these presentations before, you'll know that we always like to give a bonus idea. So what you can do is you can actually look at interest based segmentation.
And a classic example is PR. So what you do is you target people who are interested in particular topics, based upon the publications they're reading. So people who are really into concrete, probably read concrete, you know, it's a fairly obvious thing to do. But equally, you know, design engineers will generally read slightly different mix of publications, for the publication's read by senior managers, electronics companies. So, interest based segmentation, it's an easy way to do it, it's a great way to a great approach to use with PR, most of the other segmentations are very difficult to use with PR, which tends to be a very broad approach. But you know, it's maybe not the best if you're working on your own data. So what do you do if you can't segment an audience? And so quite often, we have clients coming to us saying, well, we've got data, but we really don't know how to segment it. We've got very little information about any one contact. You know, a lot of contacts, we just have the name and email address, what do we do? And, you know, the first thing to do is start gathering data. So think about the future. It's very much a case of being like the Chinese proverb, The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the next best time is today.
So if you haven't been building the data in your database, to profile prospects and contacts, and allow yourself to segment, then start today is really important. And generally speaking, progressive profiling, where you engage people and where they see a form, you will autofill the data you have, and then you'll ask them questions about data that you don't have on them. That's an incredibly effective way to grow the profiling of contacts in your database. Third party databases are also very useful. LinkedIn is incredibly useful for pulling data about people's job titles, for example. And there's lots of third party databases that offer data sources that are pulled from LinkedIn and other places that let you enrich data. So you know, one thing we do at Napier is we have a third party database we use to enrich data, and we use it on our CRM system. And the reason we use it our CRM system is it saves people typing. So if you just enter an email address for a contact, then the system will populate that contact with as much information as it can get hold off. And that can be very useful to help salespeople speed up the process. I'd certainly recommend building models and building customer journeys. And I definitely recommend testing.
So build some segments, make some hypotheses about what they care about, and test to see if you're right or not. Because you know, the one thing about segmentation is, if you've got the data, you can actually split your database into different segments, but then your hypothesis about what they care about maybe right or maybe wrong. So testing is really important. And that whole part of the segmentation process. So in terms of key takeaways, obviously segment your data, that's the first thing to say is, you know, don't send everything to everyone, you'll end up with a high level of unsubscribes. And also, you'll really struggle to know what different parts of your audience are really interested in. There is no perfect way to segment and there's lots of different approaches. Some of them are hard, some of them are easy, you know, don't go for the hardest approaches, I would suggest starting off and segmenting in a more easy and simplistic way. And then gradually build as you enrich your data, keep testing different approaches and keep gathering data.
So that's really our view on segmentation. I mean, hopefully out of the nine or 10 different ways I presented to look at segmentation, and split your audiences up, there'll be a couple there that you can see, will really work with your clients. Sorry, with your customers. And if you're interested, please do contact us. And we're very happy to work with you. And help you you know, enrich your data, improve your segmentation, and ultimately increase the performance of your campaigns. So before I open it up for questions, just a little plug for our next webinar. Our next webinar is going to be on the 20th of August, same time. And it's going to look at business to business advertising. And we're going to look at how business to business advertising works. So this is going to be slightly different, it's going to be focused very much on some theories about how advertising works. And hopefully it's going to get you able to think a little more clearly when you start designing any kind of promotional copy, so that you can create adverts and content that actually is more effective. So if you're able to do that, please scan the QR code, or go to the URL below. And we'd love to see you at the next webinar.
So thank you very much for listening. What I will do now is I'll take a couple of questions.
Okay, so we've got a couple of questions from Carla, thank you very much, Carla. Nice to see you on the call. So the first one is if we had to choose between quantitative and qualitative, when your budget limited, which is more useful in b2b. So I'm not quite sure what you're asking here. But I assume you're asking about whether we've got quantitative data to segment or we're trying some quality of data, you know, so, for example, where we think are going to be our top accounts, which tends to be quite qualitative. I think the answer is it depends very much on what you're going to do. Both of them have their pros, both them have their cons and so to say, one is better than other will be wrong, generally speaking, the more mature and the bigger resource, so the better resource companies become, the more they can do quantitative segmentation, because they're able to gather more data quite early on. You know, and particularly for small companies, it's likely you don't have a huge amount of data. It's likely that data is not very deeply profiled.
And so saying you want to do really in depth quantitative segmentation, that's wrong, because you don't have the data to do it, it's just going to be too hard. And you're far better off doing a qualitative segmentation, where you look at a few things and decide, you know, this is how I'm going to split the database up. So I would say it's probably more life cycle anything else in terms of company. But we use both we use both with companies of all sizes. And as I say, it's about picking the thing that works, and the particularly picking the thing that works given your situation. And then we've got another question. What do we see as the differences between segmenting for b2b and b2c? I think the answer to that really comes down to decision making units or what Americans called buying committees.
So very crudely in consumer marketing. If you're doing consumer marketing, you're almost certainly marketing to women. Because women spend a lot more than men, they're responsible for doing a lot more of the household purchases. And also, it's no longer the case that men dominate a lot of what was traditionally seen as male purchases. So women actually make more decisions around buying cars than men do today, as an example, something that, you know, probably 40 years ago, it was seen as a male decision that's now very female driven.
So you're looking at fundamentally a person you're targeting, and you're looking typically at a female, if you look at b2b, although, you know, fortunately, things are getting better, there's still quite a male skew towards purchasing a lot of industries, particularly the tech industry where a lot of you guys work, because it's very engineering driven. And you're also looking at a situation where no one person really makes a decision. There are people who might initiate the purchase, people who might influence the purchase, people who might make the decision and people who might place the order. And that is very different from b2c. Because you need to make sure you cover all of the people who can impact that decision.
Otherwise, it's gonna be much harder for you to win the business. So I think that's the biggest decision. And looking at that, I've got one other question. So somebody has asked me a question where they want to know about our database that we use for filling in data. So when people fill in data in our CRM system, we actually do a lookup on a product called Apollo. We've got no relationship with it. It's not a naked product by any means. We have no partnership with them. But it's one of the better databases for data enrichment, and it's also very cost effective.
So that's the tool we use. I know people have a lot of other tools that can be used for that competence. And there's another one. So you know, there are lots of tools that allow you to do immediate lookups. But our particular tool is Apollo. So thank you for that question. Okay, we're at the half an hour. I really appreciate your time. I hope we can see you all for the advertising webinar in August. If you do have any questions or anything you know, comes to mind after the webinar. Please do email me my email address Mike at Napier b2b dot com is on the slide. And I'd love to hear from you. And also if you've got ideas for future webinars, we'd love to hear that as well. So thank you very much. Thank you all for attending, and I hope you found it useful.
A Napier Webinar: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Marketing Measurement
Are you struggling to impress the board with the results of your marketing and PR campaigns? Would you like to align your marketing KPIs to business metrics?
In our on-demand webinar, ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Marketing Measurement,’ we share how you can impress the board, and explore 5 metrics that will get you promoted and 3 that should get you fired.
We cover:
- Meaningless marketing metrics
- The difference between attribution and incrementality
- The importance of the customer journey
- Why you should care about prospects that are in market
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Marketing Measurement’ Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard
Good afternoon, or good morning, everyone, depending on where you are. And welcome to the next Napier webinar, where we're going to be talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly of marketing measurement. It's going to be about 20 minutes. And we're going to run through some of the metrics that we think should get you fired if you use them. And also, talk about some of the metrics we think should be getting you promoted. Obviously, it's not always easy to get the right metrics. So one of the things I would say, before we start is that it's very easy to sit back and go, yes, but getting this data is difficult. For sure, it's difficult, but it's definitely worth it. If you're listening, and you have questions, please do feel free to plug questions into the chat. If you put a question in the chat, whilst we're going along, we'll make sure we answer it at the end, we'll try and get to as many of those questions as possible.
Okay, so let's crack on and find out about the good, the bad, and the ugly of marketing measurement. So I'm for those who've seen the film. You know, clearly, they care about marketing measurement. In the good, the bad, the ugly. As you can see, blondie felt six was the perfect number. And the reason is, is that Blondie had six bullets in his gun chamber. So one useful approach to measurement. Another one, perhaps, you know, it's a bit more useful is Mark Twain, Mark Twain said, if the metrics you're looking at aren't useful in optimising your strategy, stop looking at them. And I think that's a really great place to start, is when you're looking at metrics and looking to decide what you want to measure, and what you want to be using to drive your campaign.
Those metrics should be things that really inform your strategy. So high level, so are they making a difference to your business or not? And I think that's one of the challenges that people have with metrics, is they sit there, and they're looking at this, you know, a huge number of metrics. And they're kind of thinking, you know, people must think I'm insane, because what you're doing is you're looking at labour metrics and labour numbers, but none of them really mean anything. So the goal of this webinar is to really focus on what are meaningful metrics. So in terms of the agenda, today, we're gonna start off with the metrics we think are less important. We're going to talk about things like attribution, and incrementality, which I think are two really important concepts that often get missed when people are measuring marketing campaigns, and often for good reason.
So we'll explain why. We'll talk about the customer journey and prospects that are in market and non market. We'll talk a little bit about how you measure things that are apparently unmeasurable. And then we'll get down to the three metrics, we think that should get you fired, the five metrics that will get you promoted, will summarise them. And obviously, hopefully, you'll all have some questions that we can cover at the end, to dig a bit deeper into the topic. So one of the bits of research I found from another agency was actually the importance of measurable impact on the bottom line. So CEOs want marketing to have a measurable impact on the bottom line. And I think that's important because a lot of marketers shy away from metrics that relate directly to revenue. And this will be a theme as we go through, trying to find metrics that are business metrics, rather than marketing or vanity metrics are really important. So let's have a look at some of those meaningless marketing metrics.
So, you know, like some follows, they can be easy to obtain valueless if not a relevant contact. A little while ago, several years ago, in the UK, the Lake District Tourism Organisation was very pleased to have grown its number of people who liked their page on Facebook. As it turned out, 100% of the growth was people who lived in Bangladesh. And whilst some of those people may be coming to the Lake District, and maybe planning a holiday there, it seems unlikely they obviously bought clicks or rather their agency bought clicks. So likes and follows can be absolutely meaningless. pageviews absolutely meaningless.
You get bot traffic, you get people who come on to the page and bounce off. None of that necessarily indicates people who are engaged with your business. impressions. I mean, impressions are one thing, impressions in front of the right audience or another. So, quoting impressions is always a very difficult thing to do. open rates, open rates become less and less reliable, as a measure of whether or not an email successful. Previously, it was certainly the case that some people had auto preview. So even if they paid no attention to the email, the email reader would download the images and register and open. Now we have the technology from companies like Apple, that will actually send an open to every single email you receive, to hide which emails you're opening which emails you're not. So open rates are not very meaningless. And in fact, even clicks are not very meaningless. So you get a lot of bot clicks. So particularly malware bots, checking for malware, when you send emails, you get a lot of accidental clicks, you can target the wrong audience. It never ceases to amaze me how many people will click on a Google search that is totally and utterly irrelevant to them. And we see companies bidding on terms that we know are generating searches that are completely unrelated to what that company is doing. And yet those searches still generate clicks.
So measuring clicks is really a bad idea. And then lastly, contacts. And contacts are okay, if they're actually people who are going to buy. And we're talking a little bit about the value of contacts and why. Sometimes contacts are much more valuable. If you actually jump straight to the three worst metrics, we we tried to do some research on this, in our opinion, the three worst metrics are email opens, impressions and clicks. They're all very easy metrics to, to measure, they all feel like they're vaguely relevant. But as raw numbers, if you look at them, they give you very little detail about how well your campaigns running how well you're targeting people, and things like that, I did actually ask on LinkedIn, to vote the winner. And the price went to impressions. So the LinkedIn audience and this may have changed because the poll was still running when I put these slides together. But the LinkedIn audience very strongly felt impressions was the least useful metrics.
So it's one thing we need to look at. Having said that, I do know that a lot of boards want to know how far marketing campaigns reach how many people they reach. So I know people are still using impressions. And sometimes still, they have to, but certainly these very simplistic metrics, whilst they're easy to measure, and you get all of that data. You know, I think trying to obsess over these very simplistic numbers, is a way to make people think that you know, you've gone insane on just getting the numbers. What we really care about is incrementality. And let me explain this, because I think this is a really important concept.
At the moment, if you look at most of the marketing technology products that are around, whether that be at one end Google ads, or other ends, you know, systems for analysing marketing performance, that are designed for enterprises, and you know, costing 10s, or even hundreds of 1000s of dollars, they all look at attribution. And attribution is kind of a very simplistic concept. So what it does is it basically says that somebody who was touched by marketing activity, actually, you know, gets attributed an element of a sale or an action, maybe that's a generation of illegal whatever. So it could be someone clicks a Google ad, and then perhaps, you know, week later they buy from your website. If you offer online sales, you can attribute an element of that sale to that Google ad. And there's lots of different ways to do it. There are lots of models. So you know, very simple one, the last thing you recognise someone doing could get all the credit, the first thing you recognise someone interacting with, you get all the credit. So you know, if the Google ad is the first thing, you might give it all the credit if you've got first touch attribution. But if the person you know, interacts with, say, a display ad or something in between the Google ad and buying, and you're using first touch Google ad gets nothing. So it's very arbitrary. There's models.
And basically, and this is obviously one of my favourite phrases. Being an engineer. It's looking for correlation, not causation. So it's basically looking to see whether someone has been touched by marketing and then bought. There are lots of ways where you can generate a lot of attributed sales that make campaigns look good, that have virtually no real impact on the business. One example of that is is running Google ads around your brand or if you've got a particular brand for your online shop around that, if people are searching for your online shop, and you're running Google ads that target that keyword, your Google ads will be above your organic result, there may be nothing else in between. So nothing is going to stop this person getting to the shop.
But because the Google ad is above the organic result, someone who is going to buy because they're searching for your shop, will click on your ad and suddenly say, that's all down to my ad. In fact, the ad did absolutely nothing to increase the sales. So what you've seen is attribution and no incrementality incrementality is linking marketing activity to an increase in sales or conversions. It's very difficult to measure. And it's really achieved by testing. So quite typically, you'll have a group of people that you're testing, you're running a marketing campaign to a group of people you aren't. And you see if the group of people that are seeing the marketing campaign, ultimately, you know, either by more, download more data sheets, or whatever.
So quite often, particularly in America, which is a much larger market than Europe, you'll see people running ads in city A but not city B. If the sales in city a grow quite clearly the ads have had an impact. But testing can be very challenging, because what you need is you need to separate cohorts. So whether that's two separate cities, or whether it's different approaches, the you know, a fundamentally seeing the same situation, so they're not seeing anything else that might drive them to either increase or decrease sales. So, you know, large metros in America work very well. But it's very hard, for example, in Europe to run it, because if you run ads in the UK, and not in Germany, there's probably a lot of other factors that are determining the growth of sales in the UK in Germany, not just your ads, so it could mask the impact of the ads.
So measuring incrementality would be a whole another website, sorry, a whole another webinar. But certainly, it's something I think that you should bear in mind, it's all about measuring how much you impact the business, rather than trying to claim that we touch this person on the way to, to making a purchase or on the way to downloading a datasheet. And therefore it's all down to us. Because although sometimes that can be correct that your campaign impacted it, you really have no idea whether the campaign had a positive impact or not. I think one of the things that's also very important is to understand the customer journey. And when you're measuring, you want to achieve different things. If you've got people who are right at the start of the customer journey, they've realised that they need a new widget, they're looking for widget vendors, they're looking to understand those vendors offering offerings. So having someone come to your website, maybe download some information, you know, perhaps look at a product brochure, if you've got digital product brochures, all of that is really important at the start of that customer journey. At the end of the customer journey, you know, if you're looking to, for example, get on a prototype board, you've got to sell those prototype or deliver those prototype quantities.
And actually, downloads don't make any sense. So understanding where all your prospects are in terms of the customer journey, are really, really important. And actually, what you really want to do is you really want to get people to move along that journey. And the one thing I can say is that with this journey, clicking on a Google search ad is not going to take someone from the position where they realise they're going to research vendors to buying volume. And this is a great example of where you know, attribution can be completely wrong, quite clearly where someone's making involved decision, they've got an evaluation stage, they're in the research stage, quickly, they're not going to enter production and buy by volume straightaway, it's going to there's going to be a period of time a process to do this. But if that person happens to click on a Google ad, because they're researching and then perhaps buy something else, they'll immediately get attributed as being driven from, you know, this research stage through to the purchasing stage. By that Google, it's quite clearly meaningless. It's correlation.
But the Google I did not cause that production, it was unrelated. So what you really have to do is think about driving people through the process, moving them from step to step. And that process with a lot of our clients and a lot of our clients in b2b involves, you know, design processes, product selection, and therefore it can take months so it's not an immediate thing. One of the things we do need to look at as well is when we're marketing is whether we can actually drive a sale. So we looked at that customer journey, and quite often, people at the start of the customer journey, they're not ready to talk this very friendly and rather charming looking salesperson. They're still researching, in this case, what car to buy, rather than actually, you know being in the process of being prepared to put money down. So you've really got to decide what you're doing. And you know, if you don't drive as an example, it's no good the salesman talking to you because you're not going to buy a car because you don't drive.
Apologize as well AI generated images you've probably seen and some very interesting texts, AI still struggles with text and images. So there are people who come by and people who can't. And this is something called being in market. So let's look at a simple model of most people's markets. So typically, when we talk about marketing, we talk about the available market. So the total available market, so if we're selling widgets, there's a total market for widgets. And that might have a value of, let's say, a billion dollars. But the widgets we make don't actually meet everybody's needs. So we might make, you know, high performance, high end more expensive widgets, or we might make the low cost, but low functionality widget. And so within that total available market, there's what's called a serviceable available market, the market you can actually sell to. And that's really, really important to look at, because that's the market size that really matters to you. And that matters to you over a period of time. So one example I would give would be, for example, one of our clients who sell baggage handling systems. So these systems go into airports, they move your bags from when you check in to the plane, and then also bring your bags back when the plane lands. And the market for that, you know, is potentially pretty big, there's a lot of airports, the systems are quite expensive.
But the reality is, is that very few airports are actually in the process of buying a baggage handling system. And the reason for that is you've got to build a terminal to be able to put the baggage handling system in. So within that you've got a small percentage of the market that is in market the classic number that everybody quotes. And it's absolutely a rule of thumb, it's not an accurate number, don't don't take put too much faith in it is that, you know, in the average b2b market, around 5% of your audience will be in market and ready to purchase. And 95% will not actually be in that stage of evaluating and purchasing products. So when you run your advertising, and in this case, your advertising might hit that whole market for widgets, you've only got a very small percentage of the market going to hit because it's 5% there in market and not all of those people in market are actually in your serviceable market.
So you might only be hitting say 3% of the people who see your ads could be in a position to buy. So it's very hard to drive immediate sales. Of course, you know, in three months, or maybe three years in the baggage handling context. There'll be bigger, there'll be more people in market. And so what you need to do is think about how you address the people who are not in market. If you're measuring, measuring people who are in market, there could be very, very valuable. They're the people you can potentially convert. But determining who they are can also be very challenging. So it has an impact both for campaign strategy, and also for measurement. So we want to try and measure people who are in market, but we know that's very hard. The other thing to do is measure some of the things we try and achieve with our marketing. So PR particularly tries to achieve you know reputation. But you also might want a simple question of you know, how valuable is a billboard or how valuable is a story that I've got promoted? Well, the reality is it's very hard but we know it's got value. Some of the people here based in the UK will recognise Jared Ratner.
Jared Ratner famously ran a jewellers called retinas and decided to give a speech and he gave a speech about three times talking about how they managed to sell jewellery so cheap and his message was the reason we sell jewellery That's so cheap, is it's crap. And literally, those were his words. And he even compared earrings to prod and sandwiches and said that prawn sandwiches might last longer. He presented the presentation in small business environments. It went down really well everybody loved it. And then he went to the Institute of directors where the national news media also go And within months Ratner's had actually gone bankrupt, closed down, because he destroyed the reputation overnight, so impossible to measure reputation. But important to understand that it really has an impact.
And equally in terms of measuring anything of these intangibles, really the only thing you can do is testing. And so what do you want to do, again, is look for that testing for incrementality. So if you're building a reputation, and you invest money in one country or one city building that reputation, then perhaps you can compare the performance in other cities. But it does get very difficult. And it gets particularly difficult in b2b, where we have a lot of media that is either national or global, very little, that's local. So one of the things you do have to do is think very carefully about building campaigns, you can get some information from digital campaigns that are hyper targeted towards local areas. And that's something that's worth doing. But then many of us have got very, very small markets in terms of number of customers. And so the variation between market is quite difficult to account for. So how do we measure the the unmeasurable? Well, the answer is sometimes we can't, sometimes I think we just have to look at are we generally moving the needle forward? Are we genuinely growing sales? And if so, let's look at what we feel is working, what's not, let's bring that in and out of the mix. And then let's try and work out what is actually making the difference. So it's about testing rather than about a magic bullet to measure the unmeasurable. So, let's have a look. Three metrics to get you fired. We've mentioned these impressions, cost per click, and website page traffic. So lots of different metrics that can get you fired, let's look at the metrics we think should get you promoted. Oh, sorry, one thing I was gonna say was another bad metric is allocating arbitrary monetary values. I mean, Google and Google Ads love you to do this. So you've got a conversion, which is, for example, a PDF download, and Google wants you to act to allocate a value to it. Well, how valuable is a PDF download, it's completely meaningless.
So I think that's one thing we need to be very careful of it is, and it's true possible to measure the average ratio of PDF downloads to sales, the average value of sales, and then you can arguably attribute and this is not incrementality. It's attribution. attribute all the value of your sales if you want to PDFs and give a value for PDF downloads, but it is still fairly meaningless, it doesn't mean that increasing those downloads is going to necessarily increase sales. So another bad metric is these arbitrary monetary values that people allocate. And as I say, you know, some of the systems want you to allocate, because they're trying to sell you ads, they're trying to make you feel like you're getting something valuable.
Okay, now, let's have a look at the metrics we think should get you promoted. These I think are more important. So we've talked about incrementality, the ultimate metric, I think, is how much you're increasing revenue, or how much you're increasing return on investment. We know it's key, we also know it's very difficult to do. But aiming towards that perfect metric, I think, is really the key thing to do. I think customer acquisition cost is a much underrated metric in a lot of industries. So in software as a service, customer acquisition cost is widely used. It's a very widely used metric, as well as customer lifetime value. And they use that to calculate, you know, how many ads to run, how much to spend, and whether the customer acquisition cost is less than the customer lifetime value. That's relatively easy in SAS, and that actually, the incremental cost of taking a customer is generally fairly small. So it's a very easy calculation. It's much less common in a lot of more engineering environments. And customer acquisition costs can be very important.
So one example I would give is if you're in a semiconductor environment, and you're selling for example, FPGAs. Once you get locked into a particular suppliers, FPGA, you tend to reuse them, you've got inherent knowledge of how to use them, you've got a code base, you can reuse, you've got development tools, so customers become very valuable, their lifetime value is quite high, because they don't just buy the products for first design. They keep designing with your product, so we definitely recommend using customer acquisition cost. Another metric that is really important and very much underrated is the change in time to convert Shouldn't measuring the time it takes for someone to go from evaluating a product to, you know, maybe meeting with a salesperson, if that's your conversion in buying prototype quantities or even buying production quantities, speed matters, it really is important. And good campaigns will generally reduce that time to conversion. So generally speaking, campaigns that increase ROI, an incremental level will also decrease the time to conversion speed up the conversion funnel. return on marketing investments, if you can measure that, that's great, it's one of the most difficult things to measure because you really need to measure incrementality. So that incremental revenue, and it's about the amount of money you grow, versus the amount of money you invest, not the amount of revenue that's actually attributed to your campaign. And lastly, qualified leads now, we've gotten to some easier metrics here. And certainly getting qualified leads is a much better way of measuring things than simply trying to see who touched the customer last before they paid. So qualified leads is generally a very good metric. The important thing to say about qualified leads is they are only good, if you've got a very clear definition of what a qualified lead is into you share that definition with sales, prior to during and after your campaign.
So you make sure that you have this consistent focus on what you consider valuable and what you consider not valuable. Of course, qualified leads is not a financial metric. So that is one thing to mention is that you can't attribute financial value to particular qualified leads. Again, you really need to measure that incrementality in terms of how many new customers you generate, and how much additional sales you can drive. And then the last one, and it's not really a metric, which is why it's our bonus metric, is the customer journey model. And one of the things that's really effective in terms of metrics, is understanding how you move people through the customer journey. So for example, you got a target audience, you want to make more people aware of your product, if you can run a PR campaign, that increases awareness of your product, that's a very positive thing, it's a very measurable thing, you know, people are being moved along, you might then want to have a LinkedIn campaign to drive people to the website.
So people are aware of your product getting into research. Once they're researching your website, you can have a white paper off a pop up. So this is moving people into evaluation that download the white paper, they'll read the white paper, but also that's giving you an opportunity to drive sales leads. Once you've got the contacts, you know, you might then also email them through your marketing systems to try and drive a sales meeting. And there's lots of ways you can measure these activities. So you know, one example is is you know, looking for engaged visitors for research. White Paper downloads is another great one, the number of sales meetings is another good metric, and the number of people trialling products.
So if you, you know, for example, are in the semiconductor sector, and you offer demonstration that or evaluation boards, or alternatively, you know, if you're more into infrastructure, offering demonstration equipment, all of that is ways to measure the impact on the customer journey. And ultimately, what you're aiming to do is to try and measure revenue and profits. And if you can keep moving people down this stage, or the stage of this customer journey, you'll ultimately grow revenue and profits. And as I mentioned, the one thing you don't want to do is try and take people from an unaware of your product straight through to purchase, that's completely unrealistic. It's not going to happen. And it really is a result of people using simple attribution models. So I can skip these, because I've talked about all of those.
So what are the key takeaways? Well, lots of people who aren't vanity metrics, these really simple, you know, impressions, clicks, pageviews. They're very simple, they're actually quite easy to gain and manipulate. And it's a terrible idea. So give up the vanity metrics and use business metrics would always be our recommendation. And business metrics typically have this advantage that they've got a monetary value. So metrics of monetary values generally are better. Of course, they're not better if your metric of monetary value has an artificial monetary value. So they need to be real money. Perhaps the most important thing is to think incrementality Am I increasing sales? Or am I just advertising to the people who would buy anyway I And the only way to do that is through testing. So Test, test and test. Really important to do that. So thank you very much for listening to the webinar. Hopefully, we've given you some interesting ideas and things to think about. If you enjoyed this, or alternatively, you didn't want to have a webinar on something, that's a different topic.
Our next webinar is going to be on the 10th of July, four o'clock UK ATM, San Francisco, 11 o'clock in the East Coast of America, five o'clock on in Europe, or most of Europe. And we're going to talk about segmentation. And we will talk about nine ways to segment audiences. And so you can get really, really good targeting. So please do attend that there's a QR code there. If you want to take the QR code and register now. And we'd love to see you on the webinar. If you do have questions, or comments, please put them in the chat now. And what I'll do is I'll go and open up the chat and see if I can respond to any of your questions.
Okay, so we have one question so far, obviously, please do feel free to add one. If you do, do have something you'd like to ask. But we've got a great question here. So do we have any tips for building a reporting dashboard for multi channel campaigns that use and display marketing measurement effectively? I think it's a great question. And lots of people like to rush into building dashboards that they feel are going to work that give them lots of lots of information, you see lots of lots of data, all this data spread about. And generally speaking, the problem with these dashboards, is they usually gravitate to the simpler metrics together, and the metrics that are going to apply it across a range of different channels. So if you're running, for example, some paid ads and a trade magazine, you're running some social media organic campaign.
And, you know, perhaps you're doing some search, you can measure clicks, you can measure impressions. And these easy to measure things work really well. So they tend to come into the dashboard, you get the number of clicks, and you'll suddenly find that, you know, your cost per click in search is way lower, perhaps than your cost per click for a trade publication doesn't necessarily tell you anything, because you're trying to do different things with those different approaches, search is approaching, you know, the group of people are in market, who are actively looking for a product today, typically, whereas trade media is generally looking for people who perhaps are, you know, earlier in that customer journey at the research stage, and potentially could be more valuable, you know, if someone's looking to buy today, and we're running a competitive search campaign, you know, against our competitors brands, there is a real risk that we're going to struggle to convert those people, because they've already decided they've already picked the competitor.
Whereas if we can get them earlier in the customer journey, we're much more likely to convert them. So I think the answer is to try not to think about the dashboard as the first thing. But to try and think about how you can measure the impact on sales growth, or you know, whether if it's Leeds or some other business metric, and try and look at the contribution of each of your channels to growing that cell, then that could be through, you know, perhaps having a customer journey model and building a dashboard around the journey model.
So what are we doing at the start to bring people in? Who perhaps got low awareness or, you know, get them to start evaluating us? All the way through to how do we close that sale? How do we get people to actually trial the product and then buy it? So I think, you know, my recommendation would be think about the process of purchasing, rather than necessarily just rushing and trying to get a dashboard with lots of numbers. I don't have any other questions. So thank you all very much for listening to this. I hope you'll join us on the webinar, where we talk about segmentation.
And if anyone does have a question that they'd like to ask or don't want to ask, you know, during the webinar, obviously, my email is on the slide. So you're very welcome to just email me directly. And also, if you've got any suggestions for topics that you'd like us to cover in the webinar, or indeed feedback on this one. We'd love to hear it. Thank you very much for listening to the webinar. Have a great rest of your day. And look forward to seeing you when we talk about segmentation.
Editorial Promotions at Startups Magazine
Startups Magazine has announced the promotion of two key members of staff, who will be taking on new roles within the organisation.
Anna Wood has been promoted to Editor and will manage the editorial content for both the website and the magazine. She will be focusing on collaborating with industry experts to provide insightful views to readers and to stay up to date with the latest developments in the startup ecosystem.
Paige West, Managing Editor, at Startups Magazine, commented " I am confident that Anna will excel in her new role, bringing fresh insights and high-quality content to our readers. We look forward to seeing the continued growth and innovation under her editorial leadership".
Rachel Boswell has also been promoted to Marketing Manager, taking her role to the next level with added responsibilities and greater influence on the magazine's development.
A Napier Webinar: GDPR: What the Hell is Legitimate Interest?
We see many companies running marketing campaigns that are held back by their approach to GDPR and other privacy legislation. The biggest problem is failing to understand legitimate interest, and what it means for B2B marketers.
In our on-demand webinar 'GDPR: What the Hell is Legitimate Interest?' we explore legitimate interest, and how you can use it to deliver better marketing campaigns. We cover:
- How does GDPR affect B2B companies?
- Does GDPR really require opt-in?
- What is legitimate interest?
- How does GDPR treat sales and marketing differently?
- How can I use legitimate interest to run better campaigns?
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘GDPR: What the Hell is Legitimate Interest?’ Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard
Good afternoon, everyone. And thanks for joining us for another Napier webinar. I'm Mike Maynard. And we're going to talk about GDPR and legitimate interest. So what we're going to try and do today is we're going to try and investigate, you know, how restrictive GDPR is, and where the options are, or the ways that you can potentially get around some of the perceived restrictions. This is not legal advice, of course, and I will talk about this as we go through.
I'm not a lawyer, and we certainly wouldn't pretend at Napier to be giving legal advice. So please do take legal advice, you're gonna make any decisions based on this. But this is to give you an overview from a high level sort of marketing level as the regulations, and really the importance of legitimate interest. So any of you that follow Formula One will know Adrian Newey, who is currently looking for a new job. I know we have various fans at Napier, of Formula One, that are hoping he's gonna go to their team, but agent who is famous for taking advantage of regulations. And, you know, one of his quotes was I do enjoy regulation changes for sure. So we're going to have a look at regulations and see where actually the regulations perhaps aren't as bad as people think. So let's have a look very briefly at you know, what we're going to talk about, we're very briefly talk about, you know, GDPR, and beat the b2b.
We're gonna talk about opt in, we're going to talk about sales and marketing, which I think is very important. We're gonna talk about legitimate interest and how we can use legitimate interest. Then finally, a summary and questions and answers. So if you do have any questions whilst we go through the presentation, then please do put them into the chat. This is the best way to do it. And if you can put them in whilst we go, that means that there won't be that awkward silence whilst people are typing in questions. I can't promise to better answer everything. And obviously, as we go into more depth in the regulations, that is, you know, where we can't give advice. So we're not lawyers, this isn't legal advice. And so, you know, this is designed to give you a guide to the regulations to help you understand a bit better, but it's not designed as legal advice. And as I said earlier, we're not an agency is in a position to give legal advice, because we're not registered lawyers.
So let's have a brief look at GDPR, how it impacts b2b, and maybe some of the other privacy legislation that's around the world. So a lot of people got very freaked out about GDPR. It was one of the first bits of privacy legislation passed around the world. But this is a map. This is a map from a company called DLA Piper, they provide advice and information on data protection, very much recommended if you want to get more data. And they show where there is regulation. And you can see that today, there's actually a lot of regulation around data privacy. And if you look in terms of population centres, there is a huge amount of heavy regulation in the biggest population centres. So we're looking at North America, we're looking at China, we're looking at India and Europe. So areas where there are very heavy regulation, South America to be fair, there's less regulation, they're less regulation in Russia. And then obviously, in Africa, the rules are not quite as mature. But even in Africa, we're beginning to see some heavy regulation come in. And I expect that trend to continue. Now, the issue is, is that there's actually now lots of legislation.
So if we look basically, in Europe, we've got the GDPR The General Data Protection Regulation, we've got pecker which came before it, but still has some things that apply, which is Privacy and Electronic Communications regulation. The UK has a Data Protection Act, which effectively is enacting GDPR in the UK. And then the USA has a whole range of different acts that impact privacy, some of them directly privacy legislation. And then some of them are much broader. The Federal Trade Commission Act of 2022 actually has implications for privacy. add on to that a lot of states. You know, other states that are in addition for California ones have privacy laws. It's a very complex picture.
But what we're going to talk about is GDPR. The reason why going to talk about GDPR is, it's not only probably the one that is best known and most talked about. But it also provided a template that was adopted by a lot of other regulators. So there's a lot in the California legislation that reflects GDPR, for example. So the first thing to say about GDPR is that GDPR actually isn't a law. GDPR is a directive from the European Union. So this directive is then implemented in law by each different country. So if you look at it, it's actually quite different when you go from country to country. And this is super, super important. So for example, in Spain, if you break GDPR regulation, it's not a criminal offence. In UK, it's a criminal offence, and then in Germany is a criminal offence. And there's quite a lot of things you can do that make you end up in prison. So very different penalties from country to country for breaching GDPR. And more importantly, there's very different interpretations by the courts. Now, the European Commission is trying to get consistency, or at least more consistency from country to country. And ultimately, some of these appeals are going to the European Court, like the Dutch Tennis Federation. But it's very hard to know exactly what the law will be from reading GDPR. Because every country has implemented the law slightly differently. And of course, Germany, is pretty renowned as one of the countries that have taken the strongest approach to privacy.
So most pro privacy approach and some of the strictest penalties. So we can't tell you, and no one can tell you, you know, what the penalties are for breaching GDPR, or indeed what the law is because it does vary from country to country. And typically, depending on the size of company, you know, you might have one location, or a primary head office location in Europe, or you might actually be governed by multiple locations across Europe, if you've got multiple offices that are all responsible for sales and marketing. So it's not even a case that necessarily you can always easily be accountable to just one legislation. So GDPR, the main thing it did was it established certain rights. And these are the rights that had to be implemented into law. And these are the rights that in some cases are implemented slightly differently. So perhaps the most important is transparency. And that's linked to providing information as well. So this is all about being open about how you're going to use data. So we can see here on the right hand side, the screenshot I've grabbed.
This is from the UK, Information Commissioner's Office, we hope that they're pretty good at following the regulations, because they're the people who effectively enforce it. And they say, well use this information to process your payment, and maintain the public register will publish all information you provide, except where we tell you otherwise, it's going to privacy notice there. And so they're being very clear about how they're taking the information, the fact they're storing it, and the fact they're publishing it. And that probably is the single most important thing I would say about a lot of the data protection regulations is particularly when you're looking at b2b, which is considerably more straightforward than for example, gathering data on consumers under 18. Then, it's very much about transparency and clarity about how you're using the data.
There are a number of other rights as well, that GDPR gave data subjects, so people whose data is being collected. So that includes like the right of access the right to rectification. So you can see your data, you can correct it, you can ask for it to be deleted, and so on. And so there's lots of things they're interesting, there's a right to not be subject to an automated decision. This applies to certain situations, where actually in some cases, you can't completely automate decision making based upon data. So really lots of rights and really quite broad ranging. But of course, as marketers, one of the things we we find very, very difficult is that GDPR treats, sales and marketing differently. You know, we've all seen our company's policies and the policies are very restrictive, around marketing, and then much more flexible around sales. So GDPR treats us differently, or does it actually, the truth is is that there is no difference in terms of the rules between marketing and sales.
So if you've got rules that are different between marketing sales, like marketing can only email contacts that an email in the last year, but anyone in a salespersons outlook is fair game, or marketing can only email people who opted in, but sales can email anyone that actually is not reflecting either the letter or the spirit of the law. GDPR is about processing personal data. It's not specifically about marketing. There are some details when you get right into it about email marketing and electronic marketing. But in general, marketing and sales are governed by the same rules. And if you want your company to be compliant, your rules should be consistent across both marketing and sales.
Now, actually, what people tend to do when they have different rules for sales, is effectively they're assuming legitimate interest for sales. And they're not assuming it for marketing. And this is crazy, because there's no reason why you shouldn't assume marketing has legitimate interest. And you shouldn't assume why marketing professionals can't actually follow the regulations around legitimate interest. But the single most important thing I think we need to remember is that GDPR does not relate to sales. It's about the processing of personal data. And it's about the movement of that data. It's not about different functions in your organisation. It's so now we've established that we actually should have the same rules for sales and marketing. And you know, one of the other questions people always ask is about opt in and opt out. And the question is, do you require opt in? Well, the answer is within the GDPR legislation, you are required to have explicit consent, ie an opt in unless you have what's called a legitimate interest.
Now, you always need to offer an opt out that's compulsory, no matter how you're dealing with things. But you don't necessarily need an opt in now, just as a caveat here, these laws are implemented slightly differently from country to country. But where we look in the UK, for example, absolutely using legitimate interest is a valid approach. And there is no issue in terms of breaching any of the regulations for not requiring an opt in, provided that you're actually using that for just my interest. And we'll talk a little bit about that as we go through. So legitimate interest, one of the things you can do is you can actually process data under GDPR, if it's necessary for the purposes of a legitimate interest. And this is the interest of the person who has the data so that she was the data controller or the marketer. And you always have rights to follow your legitimate interest, except when those interests are overridden by the interests or the rights of the person whose data you're protecting your processing, sorry.
So and this is particularly important when the data subject is a child, obviously. So this is a very difficult thing to look at. Because, you know, what you're trying to do is balance your rights to effectively in our case, do business and market products against the people who you're marketing to their rights to have privacy. But there are some very easy cases to look at. So one of the legitimate interest cases is around medical data. So if I'm unconscious, and in the ambulance and being rushed to hospital, and you're aware of a medical condition, under GDPR, you probably shouldn't release that, particularly if you're an employer. However, clearly GDPR is not going to say you mustn't release it, and you must let me die. Thank goodness for that, you are going to look after me. So GDPR has an explicit and legitimate interest around medical data to allow that to be released for emergency treatment.
So it's really important that you understand that, although there are restrictions, even with medical data, which can be highly sensitive. If there's a need a legitimate interest, you can actually release that data without permission. Now, that's important. And you guys have obviously released the information to help me as I'm being whisked to hospital. But some other good news is that in GDPR, and in the UK legislation as well. There is expressly the statement that the processing of personal data for direct marketing purposes may be regarded as carried out for legitimate interest. So there is explicit language within GDPR that says you have a legit legitimate interest to run marketing campaigns using data And obviously, as long as you balance your legitimate interest against the rights of the data subject, you're able to do that without opt in. And, as I say, some caveats in some other countries in Europe. But fundamentally, that's what GDPR says. Now, one of the things that is really important is when you do actually run your legitimate interest campaigns, you need to know why you're processing that data. So you know, why you've gathered the data, how you've got it, and why there's just an interest to process it. And so very, very simply, it's all about selling, it's all about communicating with people who are likely to be interested or relevant.
So this is the balance that generally the courts seem to have followed, you know, spamming out to 40 million people to sell them, you know, I don't know, some high end piece of electronic test equipment is clearly not reasonable that most of those people have no interest in the product, you're just sending spam, that's not balancing your rights out. But to market to 100 engineers in companies that you target that you know, responsible for test equipment, that clearly is going to be a legitimate interest that people are going to understand that the reason you're targeting them is because they are very likely to be interested in the product. So basically, you should make use of legitimate interest. And you can use it for some very, you know, straightforward things. So, you know, selling related products to customers clearly as a legitimate interest, clearly, there's likely to be interest from those customers. And it's explicitly discussed as one way to actually use legitimate interest equally, you know, contacting ex customers, or even using contact databases in a sensible and mature way. So, don't be that Sharky salesman who's just blasting out to everybody.
If you're selecting people who you really believe are relevant, you're opting a completely transparent and effective opt out system. And then there is just an interest for you to market to those people via email. But obviously, you've got to avoid some things, you know, if you don't give the option for opt out, or don't respect the option for opt out, you're going to be breaking the law, pretty much, you know, large untargeted lists, almost certainly not going to be considered legitimate interest. Large volume of contact details. Again, you know, collecting unnecessary data, you know, isn't going to be good. You know, as an example, asking, you know, customers of your test equipment, what religion they are, probably isn't going to be seen as a very good thing in the eyes of any of the regulators. And lastly, the the last mistake that actually a lot of people make, is not identifying that purpose and needs. So how you collected that data, why you collected it, and why you have an interest is really important on your database. So hopefully, this makes you feel a lot better. As I say, in some countries, particularly Germany, you will need to take some advice on what is possible within German legislation, it is more strict than pretty much anywhere else in Europe. But in most other countries, you're able to use just the interest absolutely freely. And there is no problem at all, in marketing out and using, you know, emails, for people who haven't explicitly opted in. There is one other thing that probably is worth mentioning, which is keeping your database up to date. So there is a requirement in GDPR to keep your database up to date, you should be cleaning it all the time. And one of the reasons that companies do implement there, you can email someone if they hadn't responded in the last six months is they feel that's a way to to keep the database up to date.
In theory, of course, because as we've talked about before, the focus of GDPR is processing data. If you're not emailing them, you should also be deleting that contact, because otherwise it's still sat in your database and still being processed. So you need to think about your policies there. In reality, I think the email Bounce Back System is a pretty good and reliable way of knowing whether someone has left the company. And so I think you know that that normally is regarded as a fairly effective way to keep your database clean. But if you've got a lot of people, and you've got a lot of bounce data, you should again be removing that from the database because you're not meeting a requirement to keep the data up to date.
So, final takeaways, I mean, firstly, this is not legal advice, as we said. We have as far as we can, giving you accurate information but we're not lawyers. The second is GDPR is not a law. There is no one European GDPR law. There are moves in the European Commission to try and harmonise data protection across all the countries. But that seems to be dragging its feet. And not only do it does each country have its own laws, but each court, each country's court may interpret those differently. There really is from a GDPR point of view, no difference between marketing and sales, sending out emails, they both process data. And lastly, to just meet interest is an opportunity to run campaigns on an opt out basis from many European countries. So legitimate interest is a huge opportunity for people to expand their audience. So hopefully, this has been useful.
If you have any questions and haven't typed, type them into the chat, please go ahead and do that now. And whilst you're just thinking of questions, and typing them in a little promo for our next webinar, and our next webinar is Wednesday, the 12th of June it'll be four o'clock UK five o'clock cet ATM for those of you in California. And it's all about the good, the bad, and the ugly of measurement. So it's talks about five metrics that will get you promoted. And three, that should get you fired. So if you want to know about marketing measurements, anything from meaningless marketing, measurement metrics all the way through to how you measure the measurable. And the next webinar, hopefully will be useful.
We're trying to shorten our webinars a bit, some of our webinars ran to about 40 minutes with questions, we're aiming to get them down to below 30. So hopefully, it gives you a bit more time as well, and won't take so much out of your day. So that's covered our very brief overview of legitimate interest, and why it's so important. I'd ask if there's any questions, if you can enter them in now.
So Fran has asked how often do we need to carry out a legitimate interest assessment. And this is really interesting, because there's not really a process in GDPR that I'm aware of anyway. And again, not not a legal person around legitimate interest assessments, the law says, you can only use legitimate interest if you have a legitimate interest. So there's no defence saying, Oh, we looked at it three months ago, and we thought it was just legitimate now, then, so we're now doing the same thing. So you should always be keeping your assessment of what's legitimate, and what's not up to date. And so, you know, trying to do it as cycles may be something you choose to do. But I think, you know, whenever you run a campaign, and you're using legitimate interest, I think, having a thought about you know, Is this fair? Does this in our opinion, balance, you know, our rights, to, you know, pursue our business, versus the people who are going to market to their rights to privacy. And I think it's important to do that, you know, really every campaign unfortunately.
We've got another question from John. Thank you, John, for the question. A clear purpose and evil one of the things specifically given in the GDPR legislation, is marketing products. So a legitimate interest for a business is to, you know, want to market and promote your products to potential customers. So that is absolutely example of Purpose and Need. Typically, what people do when they're gathering data around legitimate interest, is it's much more around why they think that contact is relevant to their company. So why they think they've got a legitimate interest to that contact. So as an example, you know, there's lots of clients here, I think, that are from the electronic components business, we have a big show coming up called electronica. It's a reasonable assumption that anybody who comes onto your booth at electronica is probably in some way interest in your products, certainly relevant and recording that you obtained.
The contact details at the electronic trade show would be a great example of showing why there is legitimate interest for that particular person, and why your interests might outweigh their need for privacy. If you go into Munich and go to the Hofbrauhaus get drinking and then pick up a few business cards off the floor. You know, whilst there's a chance some of those might be relevant to your business, unless you can show specifically that you know, the companies they work for a relevant and It's unlikely you could really convince any court that you had a legitimate interest in emailing them, because they were in the Hofbrauhaus in November. So I think it's about, you know, understanding why those contacts are relevant to you, rather than necessarily defining your need at the time of data collection.
So I think we've covered all the questions there. As I said, we're trying something a little bit different. We're trying to complete the presentation for these webinars in about 20 minutes. And make sure you don't have to spend more than half an hour listening to us. So we give you some time back. Hopefully you like these slightly shorter webinars. If you don't, obviously, tell us if you do, please definitely do tell us because we'd love to hear if you'd like something around the webinars. And I hope to see you all for the next webinar, where we'll be talking about marketing metrics, and the metrics that should get you promoted as well as the ones that might get you fired. Thank you very much, everyone, and look forward to speaking to you in June. Bye.
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A Napier Webinar: Media Training 101
Are you getting your messages across effectively when speaking to the media? Or worrying about saying the wrong thing? Do you know how to engage journalists to ensure they come back for more?
In our on-demand webinar ‘Media Training 101’ webinar, we explore key principles of being a spokesperson and communicating with the media. We cover:
- What journalists are thinking when they interview you
- How to prepare for interviews
- How to get your message across
- Using presentations
- What to do when things go wrong
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘Media Training 101’ Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard, Hannah Wehrly
Mike: Hi, everyone, welcome to our latest webinar. We've just been messing about with some of the technology behind this because we're doing something different today, I'm actually joined by Hannah Hannah Worley is our business development and marketing leader. So she runs the theme there. And she's not someone who's normally a media spokesperson. So I thought it'd be really useful to have Hannah on to chime in and come in with some questions, that maybe someone who's perhaps not so familiar with being a spokesperson. Thank you so much.
Hannah: No problem, Mike. Hi, everyone, I'm really excited to be here today. And as you mentioned, you know, I'm not a expert or specialist in PR, or media. So I'm looking forward to learning a lot.
Mike: Fantastic. And I'm looking forward to your questions, too. Okay, so we're going to kick off, we're going to run some media training here. It really is sort of a very brief overview of some of the key points that people need to understand immediate training. I'm very aware of the time I know that, you know, we try and keep this to about 30 minutes as a webinar. So we're trying to do that I've only got about 175 slides to get through. But you know, basically, what I'm saying is, this is a very short overview. Actually, when we run media training with clients, we'll do much longer presentation about the principles. And obviously, we'll also do some interactive sessions where people can actually get to practice what we're teaching as well.
So this is really just a sampler. But hopefully, you know, if you're either gonna give training, to people who've got to be spokespeople, or you're a spokesperson or new to it, this will actually give you an introduction of some of the key things to bear in mind. Obviously, this isn't general media training, this is specific to people who are in the b2b technology sector. So the areas we work in, so typically talking to engineering trade publications, we'll talk a little bit about more general publications. But actually, you know, it's really focused on this kind of editors and journalists, you'll be talking to as a b2b spokesperson. So that's just a bit of background. Hope you're ready to go, Hannah, please chime in with any questions as you have them. And I'll kick off and start going through the slides.
So, I mean, very simply, you know, why are we doing this? Well, you know, I actually really like this, quote, public relations is the art of arranging the facts. So people will like you, trust you, believe you and care about what you're saying. But good public relations is making it as easy as possible for journalists to write stories that they want to cover. So you know, clearly what you want to do is build this relationship with your audiences. But actually, you know, as part of that, you want to make it easy for journalists to write stories. And one of the ways to make it easy is by talking to the journalists or having interviews. So what are we going to try and achieve in this webinar. So what we're going to do is we're going to talk a little bit about what journalists want, talk about preparation, talk about controlling the interview, we'll talk quite a bit about messaging and how to get your message across how to keep the interview on track. And in particular, how to keep the journalist on your side. And lastly, you know what to do when you finish to make sure that the media so your journalist wants to come back for, you know, another discussion or another interview, because they find you valuable helpful, and you're helping them actually write the stories that you want them to write.
Hannah: So Mike, I actually have a question right off the bat. So I'm really looking forward to it. I'm really interested. But if I do an interview with journalists, will that guarantee me coverage?
Mike: Oh, that's a great question. And something everyone should ask. The answer is no. If you want to guarantee something, you've got to pay for advertising in a publication. journalists don't have to cover you there is no requirement for that. Clearly, there is occasionally some sort of agreement with journalists, when, you know, with some publications, you pay for advertising that guarantees you some interviews that will guarantee you coverage, but 99% of the time, no, there's no guarantee. Now, gotta remember, journalists are very busy, they're very time pressured. They're being asked to do more and more as publications fill the squeeze financially.
So there's a really good chance they're going to cover you, they're not going to waste their time, if they don't feel they're gonna get something useful. But to be honest, if you have an interview, and the journalist doesn't find it useful, there's no reason why they should cover you. And actually, that brings us on to the rules of the game, you know, first rule of the game, there's no guarantee of coverage. Second rule, the journalist gets to decide what What is written, you don't get to control this. This is editorial is based on what the journalist thinks important. Another rule, and this is really important is some journalists are very reluctant to share articles in advance, though they won't share the article. And actually asking can be a real issue when it comes to your relationship with a journalist. So don't feel you should go out and always asked to see the article before the editor publishes it. You know, some editors feel that that's, you know, not only trying to influence them to write something that's more marketing and less editorial, but it's also a lack of trust in their ability.
And then finally, probably my least favourite role, particularly when I was a spokesperson, you know, it doesn't, journalists can make mistakes, they do make mistakes, and you've got to accept that and you've got to be prepared to live with that. You can't make mistakes, if you make a mistake, the editor has absolute right to use what you said. So it's really important you get this right. So let's have a look at you know, before we started, so we'd start off by looking at what journalists want. So let's have a look at the role of the media and what they want. So firstly, there are different sorts of journalists. And we've kind of segmented this into basically five key areas. So you've got the mainstream news, people listening to this in the UK, that might be something like the BBC, you know, people listening to this in the US, you know, something like CNN or the New York Times, very broad, mainstream news.
They're interested in things that impact a wide proportion of population. So they're not going to write stories that are very niche, very focused, they have a small audience, business publications a little bit more focused. They're typically, you know, looking at financial management, marketing kind of topics, they can be very good for getting corporate kind of coverage. But again, you've got to make it relevant to their entire readership, trade publications, you know, without doubt, the easiest publications, and generally for most of our clients, the vast majority of publications, they actually have interviews with, they're covering a particular industry. And so they're interested on developments in that industry, if you're in that industry, you're almost by definition, someone that they're interested in.
And so they really care about covering you. So quite often, they're the most common. And then there's two other kind of categories that we've put in this media landscape. They're not really classic media. The first one is bloggers and influencers, you know, and they're very different. They're about getting views. They're about, you know, boosting their ego and b2b. They're about boosting the reputation. So they're driven by very different things. And then analysts are much more driven by technical analysis of companies and markets. And so they want to dive very deep. So again, different from your classic journalist.
So let's go and look at what the journalist one I was, I mentioned that different journalists want different things. But most of them actually want to help you. And I think particularly when you look at trade media, journalists actually want to help you they, they recognise that it's a somewhat synergistic relationship. You know, if they make the sector more interesting and help boost sales, then companies are going to do better, which is going to then subsequently drive their revenue and their readership. So actually, most of the journalists, you'll talk to, if you're a b2b spokesperson, they want to help you and they want to promote either you as a personality, the technology, you've got the products you've got, or even the industry as a whole.
So it's going to be a positive relationship, you shouldn't go in thinking it's going to be adversarial. Of course, they want to, you know, validate their interests. So they'd like their ego being boosted. And they want to write things. So you know, we mentioned earlier, there's no guarantee of copy, but actually all journalists want to write, because that's, you know, what, basically is their job, fill those pages online. And obviously, within that now, increasingly on trade media, there's also wants to create video. And obviously, if you're looking at, you know, more mainstream publications, there may be video content there as well. They want to have a story that, you know, pleases their audience particularly. And I think understanding the audience and the way the journalist thinks about the audience is very important. And they can be biassed. And you know, a great example could be a journalist that is receiving a lot of advertising and their publication from one of your competitors is likely to be more positive about that competitor than about you if you're not spending much money.
But generally speaking, none of the journalists is out to get you. They might favour somebody who they see as fundamentally paying their salary if they're big advertisers, but they're not out to go and get the companies that are not they're actually, you know, actually quite willing to help you grow and support you with the intention that ultimately you get to the point where you want to advertise as well. So don't feel that just because you don't advertise or that the journalist has a favourite. It's not worth talking to the journalists. It always is. And as I'm mentioned before analysts and influencers, they're different. And we're not going to talk about those in any detail.
Hannah: So, Mike, before you move on, I do have a question you obviously spoke about, you know that journalists are not out to get us. I wouldn't say they are, you know, wouldn't think that negatively. But what happens if journalists are creating problems? What do you do, then?
Mike: I love that question. I've actually got a slide on that coming up. So that's great. I think that's really important to remember that journalists can get upset. You know, one of the ways you can do that is by refusing to engage with the journalists, if you just say, no comment to questions, that's one way to get a journalist to be hostile. And so we do have a little slide on dealing with hostility. We don't see it very often. And particularly in the trade media, it's not of the interest of either side to make it a hostile interview. If the journalist is asking questions that you find difficult to answer, it's probably around, you know, either wanting to understand something they don't understand, or maybe even just wanting to show that, you know, they've got deep knowledge about your product or your market. So don't feel it's about you. It's probably more about the journalist. However, if there is a bit of a disagreement, you know, the first thing to do is try and look at where you're agreed.
Go back to, you know, a point where you and the journalist were together. If you feel the questions difficult, you don't feel you can ask it, ask them to clarify it. And often, as the journalist clarifies it, they'll move that question away from you know, what's a difficult topic for you to talk about. But if the journey is ultimately disagrees with you, then you've got to have those facts, those statistics, and those examples that validate what you're saying. So if you're saying, for example, you have a microprocessor, and that's the fastest microprocessor in the world, make sure you've got the facts to back that up. Because if a journalist questions it, you need to provide the facts. Try and avoid what if scenarios. And so if the relationship, the discussion breaks down, try to stick to facts, try not to stick to a supposition or hypotheses, and then be able to reinforce your main point. Be firm, be polite, don't get angry. And I think the worst thing you can do is get upset with a journalist. I think it's entirely fine to, you know, spend time with a journalist to disagree, but never get upset.
You know, the journalist obviously has an ego, some of those aren't going to be honest, have bigger egos than others. And you want to make them feel important. You want to make them feel like you care about them. So be careful not to be confrontational, even if the journalist is. journalists do sometimes use some tactics. And again, we see this less in trade media. But it's sometimes happens, you know, you might see journalists asking rapid fire questions one after another, not really letting you get your answers out. You might see them repeating questions. You know, maybe even you asking accusatory questions, quite often journalists will plead ignorance.
And this is a great journalist tactic, where they'll sort of say, I'm sorry, I don't understand what's going on with here. I'd say it's technology. Can you explain it to me? And they could do that as a test. They're actually doing that to see if you really know and you can explain it. So when a journalist please ignorance, don't think that actually they don't know the topic. Be prepared for the fact that they really do understand. And journalists can sometimes paraphrase, and if journalists paraphrase something you've said, and it's not correct, then again, feel free to re clarify what you're saying. So gently, politely, but very firmly say, actually, what I meant was this and paraphrase in the way you want, not the way the journalist did. Journalists can obviously change direction they can try and get you to answer yes, no questions, typically tied with rapid fire questions. Or, you know, the classic thing and I think if anyone's been in sales, they know that this is the most powerful thing to do. When you're asking questions, just sit there in silence. Don't feel compelled to fill a gap in silence, unless you've got something to say. And if you've got something to say, make sure it's on message.
So lots of things to be aware of, I don't think anything to be afraid of, because actually, there's some best practice in terms of managing the media. And we'll talk through some of the tactics and some of the approaches that make it easier to handle journalists. So the first thing is always in shoot. Sure you have something that's worth writing about. I'm sorry, I can see there's an error on the slide here. So think about it that journalists are talking to you not because you're interesting not because your products amazing, but because they want to write a story and news nice to have something new and interesting. And so always make sure you bring journalists something new that they can talk about that's gonna be of interest their writers. Always treat editors and journalists fairly, always follow up on commitments. If you say I'm going to find something out For the journalists, make sure you do that.
And lastly, I think, never not the competition, not from a point of view of, you know, it's difficult to criticise the competition. But just from my point of view that it's very difficult for the journalist to write negative copy, particularly in b2b trade media. And so they don't want negative information, they actually want something that's positive. So focus on the positive, don't try and be negative about the competitors. So if you're going to use this good practice, one of the most important things with good practice is to prepare for the interview. So you bring content that's useful for the journalist, information that's going to help them. And the thing we like to say to clients when we're doing media training is, Don't forget you're a spokesperson, not an answer person. So as the spokesperson, as the person being interviewed, you should be driving the interview. It's not something where you sit back and just let the journalists ask questions.
So you need an agenda. And you need a single main point, the news that what is the headline of the story you want to write, you can have two or three key messages that support that. And you can have proof points below that, that actually demonstrate that that is all correct, and gives the editor confidence that you're not just making random claims. But it is, you know, really important about having that single main point, a bit like being a hedgehog. Hedgehogs bless them famously don't have very many talents, but rolling up into a ball, so nobody can attack them as a major talent they have, they're really good at it. And they focus on it. And I think the same with, you know, journalists interviews, you should focus on being really good at the communicating the single main point, because that's what you want to get across. And that's what you want the headline to be. Obviously, when you build your agenda, you know, make sure you think about the kinds of questions you'd like to be asked, and how you can answer them and make those answers concise. So we recommend, you know, typically three or four sentences for an answer is generally enough, a long answer is very difficult for journalists to take normally. And lastly, try not to be pretentious, the journalists probably understand your industry jargon, particularly and be in b2b trade media. But actually, keeping the language simple and clear, is much more effective in terms of getting your point across.
Hannah: So Mike, obviously, you've just emphasise the single main point quite a bit there. But I'm interested because does that mean that the interviews just focus on one story? So is one main point meaning one story? Can you like? Establish the difference between that for me?
Mike: And that's a great question. And in an ideal world, absolutely, you would have one interview about one story and you do a separate interview. But another. In the real world, that's not always possible. You know, for example, a trade show, you've got two big announcements, you want to cover them both with a journalist. That way, you've really got to focus on segmenting the interview. So making it clear that you're doing one session on this particular product, where you've got one clear, new set one clear message, and then you're doing another section that talks about a different product. And that's a different story. You've got to remember that journalists are going to write a limited number of stories when they meet you. So don't imagine that just by segmenting into five different sections, you can have five different stories, journalists are not going to do that.
And in fact, they hate that because they see that as you're the interviewee not being able to prioritise. And they don't feel necessarily, they're the right people to prioritise. So you end up basically spreading yourself too thin. So, yes, you can make sure you segment the interview. But really, you know, you shouldn't be talking about more than a couple of key stories with a journalist in one session. Love that question how that was really good. And again, you know, the classic thing is the inverted pyramid. So you know, don't think about detail, think about your main point, make it first, make it clear, and then work down. So you start with what's most important. And he worked down to the least important things, which are the other points, the details, the supporting facts. So, you know, think like a journalist does, because the journalist works from that top down, what's the main point? And then how do I justify it?
Perhaps a quick note on PowerPoint presentations and things. I'm blasting you with a load of PowerPoint slides here on the webinar. You know, not all of these actually would fit perhaps a great journalist briefing. The first thing I would say, though, is that the presentation you give when you're out selling to customers, is not the presentation you need to give to a journalist. They're two completely different audiences with two completely different leads. So when you go to the journalist, the first thing you should do is kick off with that headline or conclusion the key point you want to make and generally speaking, shorts, presentations are better. Don't do anything fancy effects, transitions, music.
You know, that's important. It's obviously, you know, like an all presentations, you don't want to read the bullets, you actually want to go and explain what's going on and try and talk around it. These are quite text heavy slides. And now I'm feeling a little bit embarrassed about my slides and Hannah's taking notes, I can see about how I can improve them. You know, and then don't don't make mistakes do do the basics as well. So you know, one clear basic is don't put anything into a slide presentation you don't want the journalist to write about, that happens when you use the customer presentation. And don't think about it. So write a separate presentation for the journalists, handouts are still useful journalists still like paper handouts, not all of them. But still find that useful. So always have some handouts available.
And also consider how you're going to present slides. Because sometimes journalists meetings, particularly trade shows, for example, can be very informal, you could be around a coffee table or at a bar or whatever. And maybe presenting from a laptop screen is not ideal. So you know, we even see some situations where paper copies are the best way to present. So just think about the environment you're going to be presenting in and make sure you have something suitable for that. So now we can jump to the interview, we're finally there, we're meeting the journalist, let's have a look at what we need to do. And talk about a couple of key things that can help you manage and control that interview. So preparation, we've talked about all of this before.
So start with a conclusion, raise those key points several times, don't be negative about competitors. And another thing I mean, we've seen, you know, occasionally, people say things that are a bit negative about the journalist, some journalists will not be experts in your product, or your market or your technology, they won't actually no, very much. Don't worry about that. They're there to write what you give them. And in fact, the less technical journalist will quite often be a better interview for you, because you're much more able to control that interview. And then lastly, you know, journalists are always interested in things that are broader than just your company.
So do feel free to discuss things like market trends, market trends are very important, and have a more open discussion with a journalist. When you're dealing with questions, you know, I mean, do feel free to, you know, acknowledge your good question. And Do feel free to actually go and rephrase a bad question. So, you know, one of the great techniques is when someone asks you a question that's difficult to answer, to actually come back and say, That's a great question. Thank you for that, that gives you a few seconds, just to think about how you're going to approach the answer. And if someone asks a question that you don't like, it's fine to go back and say, Well, I think actually what the real question is, is this and then rephrase a question that is related, but slightly different.
Hannah: Mike, what about if it's a question you don't want to answer at all? So I get that you have the answer the questions that you don't know the answers to, but what if the question you want to avoid completely?
Mike: So there's a couple of techniques for that? And it's a really good question. It's something that does crop up a lot. And there's two ways. I mean, one way is to basically take it offline. And you see the last bullet, you know, it's a great question, I'm not the best person to respond. Let me take a note and come back. And that might be if you're not super technical, and the journalist has asked a technical question, you can get an answer from someone else. So that's a great way to do it. And actually, you know, sometimes actually plays to the journalists ego, because they feel that, you know, they've been shown to be smart and ask good questions. But we actually have a slide on a technique coming up, called Bridging, which is a very well known technique. And so basically, what you try and do is you respond to the question, but you bridge to another answer.
So I'll give you some examples of this. So somebody might ask a question. And you could say no, or yes, very briefly answer the question. But then you say, let me explain. And then you go to a new key message, and what's important is and then go for key message, or, indeed, look, I honestly can't talk about that. There. You know, for example, sometimes, you know, journalist might try on it might ask you about stock price, you know, where do you think the stock is gonna go? Can't talk about that that's obviously regulated by the SEC. But what I can say is, I'm really excited about this new product, because I think it's very, very important for this particular market.
So using bridging is very important. And actually using flagging as well, which is similar technique, where you say, what's important is this. So you're trying to highlight a point within your answer. And doing these things can take the focus away from what's actually in the question to what you want to say. So, some good examples here is, you know, with bridging phrases, you can look at things like the real issue is or what we're talking about. All these kinds of phrases work really well. And it lets you move from what the journalist asked to what you want to say. And that's a very key part of it. Interview management is being able to do that. Another key part of interview management is making sure you don't make big mistakes. And one of the biggest mistakes is talking about confidential information. And the simple, simple answer that is, just don't talk about it. If it's confidential, it's confidential. Most trade journalists will respect off the record or background, but you cannot guarantee it, and they will always know what you've said. So I would absolutely avoid discussing anything off the record.
Or as background, I would always assume anything you say, Can and possibly will be printed. And also, I think, you know, we've mentioned this very briefly before, but no comment is not a great answer. Because no comment sounds like you're basically been arrested. You're under suspicion for murder, you're completely guilty. There's nothing you can say. So therefore, you're just going to say no comment. Your worst assumptions are true, do not say no comment. So be really careful about this. Feel free to highlight reasons why you can't talk. So you know, legal or competitive or ethical reasons as to why you can't talk about something. So trying to explain why you can't. And particularly with finally, financial information, please do feel that you can say, I can't discuss that that's something I'm not able to discuss. And journalists will understand that. They'll ask the question, you can't blame them for trying. But you need to feel confident to be able to say no.
So we're moving towards the end of the presentation here. We do have a few do's and don'ts. I'm not going to go through these individually, they will be in the slide deck that will be sent to you. But a couple of suggestions as to how to make interviews better, both were things you should do, like being prepared, obviously, and things you shouldn't do. So you know, don't dwell on negatives or mistakes. Don't be negative be positive. So that's really the key things there. Sorry, Hannah, did you have a question?
Hannah: Yes, sir. I was gonna interrupt Mike, because you might be moving on to this. But obviously, you've spoken quite a bit about the interview. But what's the process for post interview? How should we be reaching out to journalists? Should we be thanking them? How much should we be bothering them? Basically?
Mike: Yeah, great question. So we do have a couple of slides on that. And I think looking at, you know, what you should be doing, actually trying to keep contact with journalists is really important. Journalists have a name and I apologise to Americans here, but certain journalists in the UK use the phrase albatross for some American spokespeople. And the reason they do that is apparently the spokespeople they fly over, they make a lot of noise, and they leave a mess. And then they just disappear. And so don't be an albatross, keeping contact with that journalist, build up that relationship. And so you know, if you have a good story, thank the editor. You know, if the editor writes a story, you think it's great, it's really positive. Just saw my quick email, really enjoyed the interview, thank you very much, don't need anything more than that. And it says love that they feel that, you know, at least the person who's a spokesperson has read the story. You know, if you don't reply, they never know if you read it. Of course, you can get bad stories and dealing with bad stories can be difficult. So in general, only try and correct factual information that's wrong. So if there are, if there is factual information, it's almost certainly a mistake. Journalists will probably be happy that you corrected it. So just very politely say you've said this in the interview, actually, your numbers wrong or I wonder if you've cracked it to this. And most journalists were very happy to do that. Other mistakes we made as well journalists, break embargoes, you talk to somebody you say, Look, this is embargoed for another week, they publish it the next day, you're, you know, incredibly frustrated, everybody shouting you because it needs to be confidential. However, it's almost certainly accidental. So generally speaking, our recommendation is to forgive journalists that break embargoes, you may choose not to brief them under embargo next time around, but don't make a big scene over it. Almost certainly, it's accidental. If it's opinions, you know, just remember, editors can write what they want. And basically, when the story is published, it's very hard to change it.
So if the editors opinion is not what you wanted, I think unfortunately, gonna look to yourself. And what you've done in the briefing is simply not good enough to convince the journalist last, lastly, if there's no coverage, lots of things could have caused this. Don't go and ask the journalists why they didn't cover the story. Putting the journalists on the spot is not going to help. The thing to do is keep trying and keep building that relationship with the journalist. So we're going to move to some key takeaways here. You know, the first thing I'd say is, despite all these do's and don'ts, actually, most of the journalists are there to make you look good. That's what they want to do. So you can be a spokesperson It's not that hard, just follow the rules. Jonas can write what they want. So it does and will go wrong from now and again. And so you know, what you need to do is prepare well follow the rules we've given. And in particular practice dealing with the questions that you think might come up that will be difficult to answer and practice techniques like bridging. To be able to move from a question you don't want to answer to a question you do. So that's really covered our whistlestop tour of how to be a media spokesperson. Hopefully, it's been useful, Hannah, I don't know if you've got any more questions.
Hannah: It's definitely been useful. Thanks, Mike. I actually have a difficult question for you. Because, you know, I like to keep things difficult. But have you ever had an interview that went wrong? And if yes, how did you handle it?
Mike: Oh absolutely. So when I was clientside, in the early days of publication called the register, anyone in the IT sector will know that the register very early on was a little bit wild west. And their founder was somewhat willing to make things up. And in fact, he called me up and he said, I need you to tell me the roadmap for this particular product family. I said, Mike, really appreciate this. We'd love to be in the register. I can't tell you that that's not something we're talking to Jonas about. And he said to me, you've got to understand Mike to Mike's is very confusing. You got to understand, if you don't tell me I need to write a story about it. So I'll just make it up. And I said, I understand that. I can't tell you. So you just made it up. And you know, that was a horrible situation. But what can you do? It's how the publication worked. And in reality, did that cause long term brand damage? Not really, it was not a big deal.
Hannah: That's good to know. Thank you. I mean, we have had a couple of questions in the chat. But I just want to get one more question in from me in first, and I have put my bizdev hat on, like, you know, I have to So how does an agency help you with the process that you've described in the presentation today?
Mike: I love that. I mean, agencies are great at helping people. So typically, you know, where you've got a PR agency, you've got people that spend, you know, pretty much all their time speaking to these journalists. So you've got great relationships, great understanding that go way beyond your company. So they may understand things about the journalist that you don't understand, and perhaps couldn't, as a spokesperson. So agencies are absolutely amazing at preparation, they can give you all the details about the journalist, you know, if you want to have a chat with, you know, journalists, I'm thinking some of the journalists we work with, you know, about their model railway, they can tell you about the model, railway and trust, you can get an introduction there. And I've genuinely had a client who was into model railways as well. And they had this most amazing discussion for about 10 or 15 minutes, about model railways, I was sat there, I had no clue what was going on. And never realised that topic was so technical. But it built an amazing relationship. So it was super powerful. So they can help you there, they can help you in the briefing.
So agencies are very good to sit there as a third party, and just be able to come in and say, well, actually, what I think you meant was this, if they feel you said something, which either should be confidential, or perhaps didn't quite, you know, come across with the right messaging. So if you make a mistake, they're there to catch you before you actually fall. And then lastly, agencies are great at following up, they want to maintain the relationship. So they're really good at not only talking to the journalist, but also letting you know what the coverage was, and helping you come back and respond to that journalists. So it shouldn't be that the agency is just there to build their relationship, the agency should be really focused to build your relationship with the journalists to. Great,
Hannah: Thank you. So if I just read you out one of the questions from the chat. So if a journalist doesn't want to share their thought full article before release, will they give you the opportunity to review any direct quotations they plan on using in the story?
Mike: Oh, great question. I love it. And by the way, if anybody's got any questions, feel free to put them into the chat. And we'll try and ask them as we, we just wrap up here. So typically, if a journalist doesn't want to share their article, they probably don't want to share the quotes they're using. And this is very difficult. But if you said it, you said it, and a journalist can put it into the story. And if you feel it's taken a little bit of context, that is really a problem with, you know, how you've built that interview, and how you've built the relationship with the journalist.
So I think, you know, you have to accept that when you're interviewing with a journalist, they can take anything you said, and you've got to accept that that's something they can do. Now, we did say earlier, not all journalists will refuse to show you articles. And often, particularly when it's a technical topic, journalists will actually come to you and say, Look, I've written this up. I think I understand the technical topic. I you know, I think I've got everything, but can you just let me know If there's anything that needs tweaking, and so sometimes you will get the opportunity to input. But generally speaking, where the journalists just simply write it up, you won't see it. And that will include a quote, the journalists will do their very best to make sure it's accurate verbatim. But there's no guarantee they won't make mistakes. Great.
Hannah: And you've just answered another question, which was, what was your view on asking the journalist if you can read the complete story before publishing it? And so you've actually answered that in your answer. So thanks, Mike. I also want to share Don's mention Dawn is one of our senior account managers at Napier. And she said, it's a good idea to use predefined questions. So the client has an idea of what questions will be asked in the interview. I
Mike: Love this. Doran is one of our best media relations people she has such good relationships with with journalists, that she's actually able to talk to the journalist before a meeting. And she's able to then say to that journalists, I really think you should ask this, I really think she has a great example of what an agency can do. So she's putting the questions that you want answered into the journalist mouth. And that is, you know, absolutely kind of ninja level PR. But it's really, really good. And if you can talk to journalists and suggest some of those questions, it definitely works really well. You know, the only challenge is, in some situations, it's quite hard to do that, for example, if you're meeting at a trade show, that journalist is probably bashing through an interview every 30 minutes running from one booth to another, and so they may well forget. So, you know, it's quite likely that, you know, in that situation, maybe not all those questions be answered. But I think it's a great input from Dora. And it's something she does, and it works really well to help get that message across from our clients.
Hannah: So I don't see any other questions in the chat, Mike. So I think we can wrap up. It's
Mike: Great. So you know, I know how to you're a bit nervous about doing this live. I think you've done an amazing job. You are some brilliant questions. Thank you everyone for listening. I will obviously share the slides with the do's and don'ts after the the event and if anyone's interested in you know more detailed media training, or finding out what we do when we run a full media training course. Please do message me my emails on there. And I'd be more than happy to help out. Thank you very much for everyone for listening. I really appreciate it.
Electronics Weekly Introduces Advertising Targeting ExecutivesÂ
Electronics Weekly has introduced advertising opportunities around the influential 'Mannerisms' blog for electronics companies looking to target top-tier executives in the industry.
The 'Mannerisms' blog is written by David Manners, one of the best-known and most experienced writers in the industry. He covers a range of subjects and isn't afraid to express his views about important topics as well as having fun with his posts. This combination of wit and insight resonates with some of the most senior leaders in the electronics industry, and the blog counts many influential members of the C-suite as subscribers.
Advertisers will have the opportunity to influence this important audience that reads and interacts with David’s blog across print, online and email.
It’s interesting to see Electronics Weekly specifically offering this opportunity as a route to reach executives in the industry. In the past advertisers might have simply chosen news titles (like Electronics Weekly) to reach the senior influencers in their customers' and prospects' decision-making units (DMUs). The broad readership of these titles, however, meant that the targeting was imperfect. The Mannerisms blog, however, seems to have a much higher proportion of these high-value individuals than the site as a whole.
From our perspective, it’s great to see a publication being creative in how it allows targeting. It's definitely a step up from just targeting news by product type! However, it is hard to know who is reading the blog and the emails, so it’ll be interesting to see how this approach is received by advertisers. We definitely look forward to seeing data on the results.
For more information about the advertising packages available, please send me an email.
A Napier Webinar: LinkedIn Lead Gen Tips and Tricks
With so many ways to generate leads on LinkedIn, how do you ensure your tactics and budget focus on the right areas?
In our on-demand webinar 'LinkedIn Lead Gen Tips and Tricks', we share tips and tricks on how to be successful with LinkedIn lead gen. We cover:
- Organic posting
- Engaging organically with contacts
- LinkedIn automation tools
- How to be successful with InMails
- Using advertising to generate leads (tips and tricks)
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘LinkedIn Lead Gen Tips and Tricks’ Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard
Hi, everyone, and welcome to our latest Napier Webinar. Today's webinars can cover LinkedIn and talk about LinkedIn lead generation tips and tricks. I would ask if anybody has any questions or anything they'd like to ask. If during the webinar, you can just put that into the chat, put it in public is probably easiest. And I'll try and answer those questions at the end. Okay, so we're going to start the webinar and look at how we can generate leads on LinkedIn.
So I have to say, I mean, one of the things that really struck me when we first started putting this webinar together was really the range of opportunities you've got on LinkedIn for lead generation. So, you know, LinkedIn is well known as a source of leads for a lot of b2b companies. And so we want to talk about why LinkedIn is so good for b2b lead generation. And then talk about really the two main ways there's organic ways to generate leads, and there's paid. And obviously, inevitably, the paid gives you a lot more in terms of things like reach and also features. But we don't want to roll out these organic lead generation tools as well. We'll go through we'll look at you know, some of the key ways that you can generate leads with both these, these approaches. And then we'll follow up with just a couple of tips and tricks and ideas that hopefully will help you make your lead generation campaigns a little bit more effective.
We'll also talk a little bit about how maybe you can help and summarise the webinar, and then obviously, cover your questions. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go straight into this and start talking about why LinkedIn is so good for b2b lead generation. Well, one of the primary reasons that LinkedIn is so good for b2b generation is It's big. It's really big 900 million accounts 100 and 80 million in the US. So great penetration into the workforce in the US, and covering globally, about 58 million different organisations.
So LinkedIn has got great penetration, both for small and also large accounts. LinkedIn supports 26 languages, which helps make it truly go global, and claims that about 16% of us users actually log into the platform every day. That's a very high percentage for something that's really a business tool. Having said that, I mean LinkedIn is around, it's been around for a long time. And private message conversations are still growing very rapidly 25%, year on year, in 1922, sorry, 2022 versus 2021. So we can see that actually, the engagement on LinkedIn seems to be going up, as well as the usage of the number of subscribers.
There's various claims from LinkedIn as well in terms of performance. So you know, one of the things they claim is that sponsored content is typically twice the performance of email. I think one of the things we will talk about here is is that as we go through the webinar, we'll see that results can be very different depending upon what you're trying to do and who you're trying to target. And so, trying to take broad metrics can be dangerous on LinkedIn, it can either lull you into a false sense of security thinking you're doing amazing, where there's opportunity to improve.
Alternatively, it can make you think the campaign's terrible. And actually, in practice, it's targeting a very tricky audience to reach. So I think, you know, looking at benchmarks is going to be difficult. But we'll talk about this as we go through each of the different activities. One of the things that LinkedIn has also done recently, is its launch newsletter subscriptions. They've been around for a little while now. But they're still generating a lot of subscriptions. So 150 million subscriptions to newsletters in the first quarter of 2023. Newsletters are a great way to drive engagement, but they do require quite a lot of work and effort from your side. So we're not actually going to talk too much about newsletters. But again, in terms of building a database, sometimes users are a great way to do that. So LinkedIn is great. And actually, you know, one of the things that quite often you hear about LinkedIn is Oh, no one in Germany uses LinkedIn. It's not true, it's certainly the case that the level of engagement in Germany is lower than some countries.
But actually, there are more LinkedIn users and there are users of zing, the other popular business networking platform, the users on zing, probably a still more engaged than LinkedIn. But definitely LinkedIn is doing very well in Germany. So don't imagine that LinkedIn doesn't reach globally. However, it is true that LinkedIn has very different levels of penetration. In different countries, I talked about the US being very strong. But maybe Japan, for example, is much weaker in terms of penetration. And in fact, there are some issues with LinkedIn. One of the competition. So next year 2024. The forecast is that LinkedIn will do just over $9 billion in display advertising, which represents about 50% of all business to business display advertising spend next year. So a huge amount of competition. There's also some requirements as well for audience size. So you can run campaigns with just 300 people. But LinkedIn recommends 50,000 people to allow the the algorithm to work efficiently.
Now, if you're producing something that has a very large audience, this is clearly not an issue, you'll be very keen to reach as many people as possible. But if you're targeting a very small and niche audience, then quite often you'll find that hitting a large number is difficult. So you either have to compromise on the targeting, or you have to accept that the algorithm is not going to be working as effectively as it could be, because you don't have that large audience size. And honestly, LinkedIn generates on average, about seven minutes a day per sorry, so minutes per visit, on average, seven minutes is not bad, it's a reasonable amount of engagement. But that just, you know, looks pretty poor when you compare it to something like Tik Tok or Instagram, where people are spending, you know, roughly an hour and a half an hour on each of those platforms. So LinkedIn has some great engagement, but it's not quite the same as you know, something like a tick tock today. The real thing though, about LinkedIn, I'm sure everyone listening to this webinar is going to be familiar with it is the targeting. And so the targeting can actually pick a huge number of different activities. So you can target people through Sales Navigator and also through advertising. And you can target you know, things from location, through to company to industry, job roles, seniority, job title, you know, groups that people are members of, and you can also do retargeting on LinkedIn. And this ability to target particularly around firma graphics and demographics.
So details of the company they work for, and details of their job role is super, super powerful. You know, if you've got a product that you know, sells to retailers that employ over 1000 people, and is bought by IT managers and IT directors, you can build that audience within LinkedIn. And I think this is what's really driving LinkedIn and making it you know, more and more, the place where people choose to spend their advertising budgets. So what we're going to do is we're going to start off and we're going to look at organic lead generation. So this is how he generate leads without actually spending money on advertising. Now, clearly, the cynical amongst us, and perhaps the more realistic are gonna say, Well, you know, LinkedIn is not going to want you to do this. It's not going to be a great approach. But actually there are some things you can do that are very effective. One of the most common things is create Seeing connections. And you probably see this a lot with people reaching out to you, and offering to connect, and you look at them and you go, I don't know who you are.
And actually, if I look at, you know, my recent connections, I just pulled this off my personal LinkedIn fi nominee who does growth and marketing, I've got somebody that helps growth hungry agencies, I've got somebody who's doing some health, and I've got someone who's going to cycle 30,000 35,000 kilometres around the world in February. I mean, Ben respects you absolutely amazing. But I know you're probably trying to approach me for sponsorship, I mean, it's probably not something that's really a business opportunity. And I think this is one of the issues with these organic connection requests, is that people do actually look at them. And if they don't personally know the, the person that's approaching, they can feel a bit spammy.
So if you do that, you do need to write a great message. And I've not dug into these messages, most of the messages I think you receive, you know, along the lines of, we're both interested in an extra we connect. And it's something very vague, like, we're both interested in agencies or marketing or something, it's not really very compelling. So if you want to create connections, I would certainly recommend making things as personal as possible. Another way to generate leads is look at who you who viewed your profile. So if you have the premium accounts, so paid accounts, you can actually have a look at who's come along and looked at your profile. And, you know, this can be good, it can actually identify people who could be relevant customers. But you know, more and more, it's people who are likely to pitch you to try and sell their services. So as you can see here, I mean, I've had a few profile views over the last week. But actually, you know, the main people viewing my profile, are people looking to sell me things. So Daniel is back again, you know, he's a copywriter, he clearly wants to find agencies that he can sell his services to. So it's not always a good source. But certainly, if you have a premium account, it's definitely worth checking in, you know, on a fairly regular basis, just to see if there are any interesting visitors looking your profile.
And lastly, posts are really important, you can post on both your own personal page and company page. And those posts can link to pages off of LinkedIn. So here we see something where Schneider has posted on to their company page, and the link through is to a webinar. And so what they're trying to do is get people to sign up for the webinar. So very simple lead gen campaign. Very straightforward. I pictured either for a couple of examples, because I think a lot of people on the webinar will actually know Schneider. And hopefully, there's nobody on the webinar from Schneider. So if I say anything negative, they won't get upset. So posting is really simple. Couple of things you need to be aware of, in general, the algorithm fail favours posts on personal pages over company pages.
So you'll almost always see a higher number of impressions, if you post on an individual's page, rather than a company page. So if you're you're posting on the company page, it's really good idea to encourage your sales team to amplify your posts by posting either something of their own word, or at least at minimum reposting your company page post. The one thing I would warn people here is there are some platforms available that are designed to give you know pre prepared posts. So basically text an image, people can just click and it gets uploaded into their LinkedIn or other social platforms. These can be effective, but they can also be disastrous. And one of the problems is, is if you have multiple people in your company connected to a customer or prospect, which is very likely that customer or prospect sees these individuals in your company supposedly posting their personal views, but they're word for word the same. And it then begins to start looking very inauthentic and becomes less effective. So I would say that trying to automate this can be kind of difficult on a company wide scale.
Events. I think events are possibly one of the most underrated things on LinkedIn. Anyone can listen to event. And that event doesn't even have to run on the LinkedIn platform. LinkedIn has a great platform if you want to run a live event. It works really well. But you know, absolutely. events don't have to run there. So we can promote our webinars for example, on to which are held on our own webinar platform. We use something called webinar gate But actually, we can promote that on LinkedIn, you can see here, there's a couple of promotions of one of our previous webinars that I've cut and pasted from, from my own LinkedIn feed as well as other webinars I've visited. And of course with events, you can actually share them organically as well. So you don't have to pay for promotion. So it can be a purely organic, so completely free way to generate leads. And certainly, if people are not using events on LinkedIn, this is I think, one of the great secrets and definitely well worth looking at.
And lastly, their emails. And again, like looking at the people who view your profile is a little bit of a cheat, because you do need to investigate, invest in a paid account. So like a Sales Navigator account. But when you have very highly targeted campaigns, one of the most effective ways to reach people can be through personal LinkedIn, in mail messages. So this is very much like creating sales, emails, writing one to one emails, or taking a template and tweaking it for each person. And we're talking here in the you know, 10s of contacts, typically, that make this work worthwhile. But having an email that's personal, that's not standard that comes from an individual can actually be a very effective way, we've run a number of campaigns for clients, where we've, you know, effectively hand crafted emails out to contacts and had some very, very good response rates, the one thing you do need to do is you need to consider whose account you're going to use. And obviously, what you want to use is use the appropriate accounts. So if this is a, an email that is highly technical, you might want to use same engineers account on apps engineers account. If it's something that's much more obviously sales, then perhaps one of the sales team would be better or the, you know, account manager for that particular customer. But obviously, if we're doing that, and we're having either a marketing team or agency, that individual has to be prepared to give up their LinkedIn credentials and control of their account, which can always be an issue. So that can be a challenge with these accounts, these these campaigns.
But it's certainly something worth looking at in mails can be very effective, particularly if they're personal and genuine. Now, one thing worth mentioning is LinkedIn automation tools. And so you know, here we have a tool called expanding, which basically reaches out automatically to engage people, and that's through contact requests and messages. But as you can see here, there are lots of these systems. And these systems all claim to allow you to automate and make your LinkedIn outreach more effective. And they do.
There is however, an issue that people need to be aware of using automation on LinkedIn is actually against the terms of service. So if you actually run an automated campaign, you can end up ultimately having your accounts closed down and banned. And I'm talking for experience because we did some testing of LinkedIn automation tools. And I received a message basically saying, If you don't stop using the tools, we're going to close your accounts. So you do have to be very careful on that. There are two key types of tools in terms of automating the outreach. So one will work in the cloud. So that will sit there and run it, it's great. It's very easy to use. It's not anything that's intrusive, the other work in your browser. And so literally, it will be automating things in your browser. The ones running in your browser are much less likely to be detected by LinkedIn as automation, but obviously require you to open up LinkedIn run the add in etc, etc. So they can be more of a pain to run, really down to you to choose. But I think these tools are getting smarter and smarter. And we're getting better at avoiding LinkedIn penalties. The last one to mention is tools like LEM pod, and LEM pod is really focused around trying to get more likes and comments on your posts. We again tried LEM pod and what happened was we got way more likes and comments on our posts, and virtually no increase in views or genuine engagement. So if you want to have a lot of you know, fairly bland and meaningless comments, getting involved in one of these, and they tend to be called pod pods, these group of people where people automatically comment on each other's posts.
You know, they do look good, they do make it look like your posts are engaging. Although if you dig a bit deeper, you realise that actually a lot of people are posting exactly the same thing. And it's not very exciting. But it's unlikely to actually improve your results or certainly from our testing. We didn't feel that So we got any more genuine engagement or genuine reach. So those are the options when we look at organic. So several different things you can do. And as I say, you know, don't underestimate things like if you have very targeted campaigns using InMails. And certainly my recommendation for everyone is, if you have webinars and events, make sure you use the LinkedIn events page will now move on to paid lead generation. So obviously, this is what LinkedIn wants to do. LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft would love a bit more money. As we saw, Microsoft stands to get about 9.2 billion. In terms of display advertising on LinkedIn, that's a huge sum. But actually, there's many more ways you can spend your money on LinkedIn. So the first option is sponsored posts and other forms of sponsored content doesn't have to be a post.
And that's really the simplest option. You take something you post normally, you pay to promote it, you get a little promoted tag. And you can reach people who are outside of your followers. Now, the first thing to say is that when you post organically on LinkedIn, it doesn't necessarily mean that only the people who are followers or connected to you will see it. So when he posts a standard post organically on LinkedIn, if it gets a lot of engagement, LinkedIn will actually show it to people outside of your direct network. So straight to second degree connections, and potentially further. So actually, you know, using organic doesn't stop you reaching a new audience. But obviously, organic tends to focus, and tends to be shown to people who are your first degree connection, so either people following the company, or connected to or following the individual. And that can be crudely seen as basically talking to your own fan club. So the results might look good. But whether it's actually making a material difference to your business, clearly is a questionable. And so there's a number of other paid options we're going to talk about when we talk about lead gen ads, document ads, and InMails. So the first one is a lead gen ad. And it's really simple, we have a post that can look just like a standard post. And when someone clicks on it, rather than going to a landing page, this post will then route through to a lead gen form that is actually embedded within LinkedIn. So it will pre fill all your details.
So you can see here, it's prefilled. With my details, interestingly, picking up the last thing I added to my my CV on LinkedIn, which is my role at Eurocom, rather than my Napier row, but it will pre fill all those contact details. And it will also allow you to ask additional questions. And you can see here, I mean, I know this is in French, but obviously you can, for example, you can talk about what role you're in, what industry you're in. And whether you'd like to receiving those, you can get some explicit opt in as well. So it gives you a lot of flexibility. And the idea is because you're in this, you know, gated or walled garden, where you stay within LinkedIn. And also everything's auto filled. The idea behind lead gen ads is that will be much more effective than running a sponsored post that routes people to an external landing page outside of LinkedIn. So the theory is that this should generate a higher conversion rate than a standard landing page. Document ads are very similar, but what you do is you basically tease a document. And at some point, you actually ask the person to register it. So here you can see a document ad we've run, we get to a point where it says Click the button to learn more to unlock the document, you click the button, and you go through to a lead gen form again. And so this is a very simple way to teach people with a couple of pages of content, and then hopefully persuade them to register, because they've seen some of the document. If you had a standard, you know, PDF behind a lead gen form, the person who's filling the form has no idea of the quality or the usefulness of that document until they actually fill in the form. And so the theory behind this is that people when they've had a taste of a document, if it's good quality, there'll be more likely to give up their contact details. And in practice, it seems to typically work you know when we've seen this, in general document ads can generate is a better conversion rate than standard lead gen ads.
But one of the things I will say is, with all LinkedIn campaigns, there is a caveat that it depends on your audience. And it depends on what you're trying to do and what you're offering. Message ads are interesting message ads are basically sending an InMail. And LinkedIn stats say that that's in mail is likely to be open about 38% of the time. So typically, you know, as good as some of the best email mailing lists. But the problem is, is a lot of quite spammy services use in mails. So the message ads can feel or be seen as a bit spammy. And also, we have the focus and other inbox. And a lot of the paid message ads will actually sit in the other inbox, and basically go there and die and not be seen. So it can be, you know, an effective way. But in general, we see the performance has been quite poor. And it's the cost per message is quite high, certainly compared to email, it typically isn't something we see a lot of clients running campaigns with. Conversation ads are a lot more fun. And this shows someone building up a conversation ad. And you can hopefully see on the right hand side in the image, you create a message that's put in as a message to an individual that feels much more like a typical LinkedIn message. And I think one of the the issues with message ads is people make them you know, much more pitchy, and much more salesy, whereas actually having a conversation being much more relaxed. So you can insert, you know, various fields in so for example, the individuals company name, who put in or job title, whatever. And what it allows you to do is basically create a conversation sequence. So you can have responses to click on, the person clicks on the response, you then send a follow up message, they can then click so you get this conversation, conversation out ads work in general, way better, the message ads, the people who click on them tend to engage, it tends to be a much more flexible way of doing things.
Because you don't have to do that complete sell in the first message, you can walk people into the process very gently. And so they tend to be much more effective. And that's fantastic news. Unless you're running campaigns in the EU. LinkedIn restricts a number of features in the EU. And one of the things it doesn't allow you to do is run a conversation ad in the EU. And this is around GDPR legislation. So unfortunately, you know anyone targeting Europe is going to have to find a different tactic. But if you're out there targeting America, or many other countries around the world, we'd absolutely recommend playing around with conversation ads. They're very, very effective. So when we run all these ads, we actually have to build an audience to reach reach people. And this is, I think, one of the most critical things about LinkedIn advertising. Its LinkedIn superpower, the way you can build the audience. But it's also one of the challenges. So if we look at how we build an audience, there's lots of different ways we can do that we can actually save audiences and reload them. We can use LinkedIn standard audiences. So we can say, Yeah, we just want to reach HR professionals. We can target people by location. We can target people by language. Note that you need to actually generate local language ads if you're targeting different languages other than English. So if you're running a French targeted campaign, the ad should be in French. You can target based on saved audiences.
So things like retargeting and look alike audiences. You can use, of course the firma graphics and demographics, that key LinkedIn superpower. And you can also use something called Audience expansion. Audience expansion, I always think of the most controversial feature on LinkedIn. It's really interesting. What LinkedIn does is it takes the audience you define, and it tries to find more people like that audience. So there's several things you got to think about. The first is, how does your budget match the size of audience. So if your budget is much, much smaller than LinkedIn is telling you you're likely to spend, then clearly expanding the audience probably makes no sense. But you also need to think about how important it is to be specific about the audience. So if you're looking to target a very, very specific audience, you know, your product is for example, only bought by CEOs because it's a CEO membership club, for example. And so, people have to be a CEO, and they have to be in a particular industry, then clicking audience expansion is probably not a good idea, because almost certainly what's going to happen is LinkedIn might try and target, for example, other roles within the C suite, or people in different industries, neither of which you'd accept into your CEO club. So you need to think about whether it makes sense. In general, we see a lot of clients not ticking audience expansion, because they want to be specific about the audience. They know who they want to target, they don't want anyone else. But equally, we see some campaigns where all this expansion has been used, and actually has generated really, really good results. So it's one of those things where you absolutely need to test to find out whether it works or not for your particular campaign. You can also optimise an audience. So once you've created your audience, you've created your campaign.
And you'll notice I'm skipping over the details on how to do a lot of this, your campaigns running and here you can see a simple document ad test that we ran,you can click on something called demographics. And this is an awesome thing to do in LinkedIn, this was a test that we did, and deliberately put some things in that revealed some very interesting results from LinkedIn. So we ran this campaign. And I should just go back one, it was all about developing a marketing plan. So developing a better marketing plan in less time. And if you look at the demographics, you look by job function, and there's a range of other options, but generally speaking, job function is is one of the bigger ones. Company is another big one. There's geographic ones as well. If you look at what we've got, we've got a lot of people in engineering, a lot of people in sales. And actually, this is really interesting, because this is a marketing plan, how many engineers really write marketing plans. And so what this revealed was that, actually, LinkedIn doesn't exact match job titles. So we had sales engineering as a target. And that also matched against people who had engineer as a job title, clearly not what he intended. So when you're optimising an audience, you need to look at the demographics. And then you need to go and typically make exclusions. So a great example here would be, you know, where we were targeting people, we obviously wanted sales, we don't want engineering, so we can target that as an excluded job function. We didn't want operations, so we can exclude that. We didn't want it so we can exclude that. So you can see it's very easy to pick and choose what you want, based upon what you see actually happening. And it's important, because LinkedIn, when you build an audience doesn't necessarily deliver exactly the audience you expect. And that can be for a number of reasons, you know, it can partly be the propensity of people to log on and use LinkedIn in different roles. It could be the way LinkedIn does some matching and job titles a great example. Or it can simply be that your know your job, your your audience specification is broad, and it's therefore bringing in people that you didn't intend to, or don't want in your audience. And I think, you know, to this, it's really interesting to think about how you measure performance. And we talked about audiences. And one of the things about audiences is very crudely, the more precise you are about the audience, the more you're going to pay.
So a simple example is if you specify a job function, typically your cost per click is going to be less than if you specify a job title. And this is a very crude rule. But it definitely seems to be borne out fairly consistently in practice. And so if you want to be super precise, then you're actually going to pay more to reach that audience than if you're going to be broad. But the question is, is what you need in terms of leads. So if you really need people who fit this very precise definition, and anyone outside of it is never going to be a good quality lead, then you should be paying more. However, if you can broaden your audience and still receive good leads, then making it broader will probably give you a better ROI. But the most important thing to say is the only way you can really measure your lead generation campaigns, is by looking at how many good leads whether you define that as an SQL and MQL or have some other qualification. It's important to look at the primary measurement of being a lead because it's so easy to move the cost per 1000 the cost per lead cost per click. And do that by reducing the quality of leads or increasing the quality of leads. And so you look at the number the number is going down but the quality is going up. So, absolutely. It's all about what leads you're getting, how good they are, and whether you believe they're ultimately going to convert to customers. You know, the CPM CPC, they're useful but they only tell you part of this or, and that is really due to the fact that you can be very precise on LinkedIn and get exactly what you want. Or you can be broad and get, you know, something that's close ish, but not always what you really need, but at a lower cost.
And one thing to mention about this is, we see quite a lot of clients doing very targeted campaigns, you know, they've got 500 people in the world 2000 people in the world that they really care about, because they want to sell something to a very specific person. And this is made more difficult if you actually run geographic campaigns or language campaigns. And when you have small campaigns, it does mean it can be very, very hard to optimise, because you're only generating a small number of leads, you might be generating a lot more clicks and a lot more impressions. But you're generating a small number of leads. And so it's hard to get that data. So sometimes it is very hard to optimise campaigns. But you shouldn't feel alone, because one of the reasons LinkedIn says you need to target 50,000 people is because that's really where it needs to get to, to make its own internal algorithm effective.
So again, you know, larger audiences will get more effective targeting, because LinkedIn will learn better, the sort of person that clicks and engages and fills in a form. But it does need a reasonable volume of people, and therefore it needs a very large budget. So again, if you're super targeted, the LinkedIn algorithm probably isn't gonna do a lot to help you, it's really not gonna be able to learn based on a few 100, or a couple of 1000. Contacts. So that's a very quick whistlestop tour of things you can do to generate leads on LinkedIn, hopefully, it's produced some great ideas, we've got a couple of tips and tricks, some of the things we've we've learned through, you know, some painful experiences that we think are really useful sharing. So the first thing is, is LinkedIn offers something called the LinkedIn Audience Network. Now, this sounds great, and it sounds like it must be a really business orientated network. What it is, is LinkedIn is going to run ads on other sites to people, it believes that interested in your in your ads. So that's either through your targeting, or through audience extension. But actually, if you have a look, and I've downloaded the list, and you have a look at where these ads are placed, they're not necessarily placed on sites where people are thinking about business. So Rotten Tomatoes, you know, Natasha's kitchen, apartment therapy, I'm sure they're all great sites. But it's a very different situation to someone being on LinkedIn and being in a business frame of mind, versus, you know, wanting some apartment therapy and wants to do up their apartments. So you need to think carefully, whether you want to hit that audience network or not.
The reality is, is again, because those impressions are quite cheap, and they're targeting your audience, it can be quite effective. So you might see things like the click through rate go down, but the cost per click go down as well. Because the overall cost of saying, so it's really worth, you know, experimenting, if you have the budget to see if LinkedIn Audience Network will help. And one of the things you can do is you can go to the LinkedIn brand safety section in the LinkedIn advertising tool. And that will actually let you control where ads on the audience network is shared. So if you want to be a bit more specific, you can actually get some control over where ads are shared. And certainly, you know, if you have a very small audience and and significant budget, then audience network can be great because it will take you a long time to spend that money on the LinkedIn platform, because you're waiting for people to come back. And actually there's a small audience, you might see that, you know, some of those very rarely visit LinkedIn. So your niche network can be a good tool. But test it, find out and make sure you monitor it. And be aware it's probably not appearing on necessarily the site you'd expect your ads to appear on. My next step is don't bid the recommended amount.
So typically, people click on the maximum delivery. And it's basically saying Knock yourself out LinkedIn user algorithm give me the best results. And that can be quite effective. It does need a significant amount of data to really optimise those. So again, for very small campaigns. It might be worth considering cost cap on manual bidding. They might produce worse results they might produce better. But the trick here is when you click on something, so manual bidding for example, it will give you a recommended bid. In our testing, we found that actually changing that bid and just bidding you know, as low as you can $1 or something. It was then tell you what the minimum bid is, in many situations, putting the minimum bid in, will give you the same kind of results, but at a much lower cost. So don't always feel like you've got to go into manual bidding and use the recommended, we will absolutely say, if you don't want to use maximum delivery, and that is something you might want to consider on small campaigns to test, then when you go to manual bidding or cost cap, make sure that you put the lowest value in first, just to test it if you're not spending a budget, and you'd like greater reach. So LinkedIn is not showing your ads, because it feels you're not bidding enough, then obviously move that bid up. But as a first step, you know, putting in that lower amount, you might find you can get a bargain.
I alluded to this before, but I think it's really important. Job Titles are not matched exactly, or in some cases even closely on LinkedIn. And this is obviously necessarily think about it, people typing their own job title, they can put whatever they want. There's a huge range of titles. But problems exist. And so engineer can match as a job title with people who have sales engineer, for example, that's not good, you don't necessarily want that. So you may be targeting technical engineering decision makers and get loads of salespeople and vice versa. And the way to do this, as I mentioned before, is to use the demographics, and then use exclusions to eliminate any spurious matches. I lost last tip, and I think you know, one of the best is to build retargeting audiences. So using engagement to build an audience. And you can actually create some really good retargeting audiences with relatively little budget. You know, one of the best uses is if you know roughly who you want to target, but you're not sure. So let's say for example, you know, it's it's in engineering, and it's in this industry, but we're not quite sure what sort of engineers, you don't want to spend all your money on lead gen, which is inherently an expensive form of advertising on LinkedIn. So one of the ways you can do it, and one of the very effective approaches is to run some kind of engagement ads, so maybe a content ad to see if people will click on it and engage with it. The people who click them become your audience. They're your retargeting, and it's because they've been interested in the content you've offered for free. And you can then offer them some more content, using Lead Generation ads. And this two step approach, particularly where you're not exactly sure of you know, who's in your audience.
So you can use the engagement to find out who's interested. And that can actually ultimately result in lower cost per lead than just running a single lead gen. You can also retarget on a number of other things as well, not least on people who visited your website. So if you have LinkedIn tracking, you can actually run LinkedIn ads to people who visited pages on your website. So I would always look at building an audience. The one caveat to that is you have to build an audience of at least 300 people to run it may not be an issue on your website may be an issue if you've got limited budget, and you're trying to run content ads, and then lead gen ads. So just be be mindful that you need a significant budget to run that two step process on LinkedIn.
So hopefully, this has been helpful. It's been slightly longer than normal for one of our webinars. And I think I've covered quite a lot of different lead gen opportunities. One of the issues I know is people are going to say, well, this is just too much, or I haven't got the resources, or I really need more information. So we actually have, you know, three levels of service to help people out and help clients with LinkedIn. We run bespoke training. So we sit teams down, and actually run through how they can build LinkedIn campaigns in house. We obviously do campaign reviews, where clients are running campaigns, and want to know how they can improve them. And we also offer lead gen campaigns or service as well as all other LinkedIn campaigns. So if there is something you want to know, or to find out, you know, do feel free to contact me.
So lastly, let's look at what we see. You know, the key messages from this, I mean, the first thing to say and I'll get back to this is, there's a reason why half the display advertising budget is being spent on LinkedIn is a great source of leads is a great, great place to advertise. It can be expensive, but it can also generate very good quality leads. And so measuring the quality of the lead is super important. We mentioned that there are many different ways to generate leads, and depending on what you're doing, and if it's a content offer, for example, what that content offer looks like, you know, one or other of the different approaches might make more sense. Audiences are clearly critical. But ultimately, you know, you need to Keep testing. And I think this is super important with LinkedIn is there's so many options and so many variables that if you're not testing, you won't be optimising. So you will be missing out.
And lastly, I think this is the most important thing is in LinkedIn, particularly, I think you have to measure what matters, which is the leads and the leads that are actually of good quality. Rather than trying to measure it, you know, some of them are vanity metrics, like click through rates, they're an indication of whether things work and whether the ads engaging. But ultimately, what you care about is the cost per high quality lead. And you have to be pretty ruthless about focusing on that, that and just measuring that metric, if you really want to understand what's working, what isn't. So thank you very much for listening. I appreciate your time, we do have a little bit of time that we can actually cover some questions.
So I'm gonna check with questions. Okay, so Okay, we have a question here about LinkedIn events, which is great question actually love this. So if you use LinkedIn events presuming the registration process is handling outside of your website, and CRM? And the answer is no. So LinkedIn live webinar, basically, if you're running that, that's on LinkedIn, but as soon as you promote a webinar, or anything else, where you manage it with your own platform. So for example, this webinar here, as it says, managed on webinar geek, and then you run your LinkedIn events, promotion, but that event links through to your registration page. So it's only if you're using the LinkedIn live feature, that you'd need to actually upload data from LinkedIn into your system. Otherwise, it will almost certainly feed in directly, just as you'd normally do for any other event. Okay, if anyone's got any other questions, please feel free to ask. I do have one here, actually, which is about lead gen ads, which a great question.
So somebody has asked about lead gen ads. And they've asked whether the lead gen is always better than rooting people to a landing page. I mentioned that, you know, it should be better it usually is. The answer is it's not always better. And it's a very interesting situation where every so often we see, generally, because there's a reason for having a much more detailed landing page. So you're putting content on there that people care about, then sometimes the landing page can be more effective than a LinkedIn lead gen ad. So certainly don't feel if you're generating leads on LinkedIn, everything has to lead lead to one of the LinkedIn forms, it can lead to your own landing page. But I would think about, you know, whether it's important that you have that that landing page with the extra information, or whether the campaign is likely to work better if you have a much more simpler and straightforward process. So, again, you know, I think the answer is it's really something you want to test. But it's a great question there. We have another question here, which is another fantastic one. So I understand it does depend on budget and audience. But how long would you recommend running a paid lead gen campaign for?
So obviously, the issue here is that people have different habits and how they use LinkedIn. So some people will be going back and checking LinkedIn, you know, depending on their role, maybe daily, certainly a lot of people in marketing or on LinkedIn daily. Whereas perhaps if you look at the, you know, engineering sector, you know, some of those engineers, if they're not looking for a job, they may only be on LinkedIn, once a month, for example. So I think it's really important to understand your audience, and monitor the results. And generally, what we see is if people run lead gen campaign, or indeed any LinkedIn campaign for a longer period of time, then what happens is the results tend to drop off as people tend to see the same ad over and over again. So you can then look at either refreshing the ads, or doing another campaign. But typically, what we see is clients running campaigns for generally the one to two month timeframe. Anything more than two months, you're almost certainly going to see the people who are frequently on LinkedIn seeing too many of those ads, and dropping out. You can also do things with exclusions so you can build audiences around people who've engaged with your ad, and then exclude them from seeing the ad in the future. So that helps a little bit with the drop off but it's not super useful. Um, but generally speaking, there is definitely a timeframe.
The other thing to mention is, of course, it depends on budget. So if you, you know, if you have the campaign that targets, you know, 100,000 people, and you've got a $5 a day budget, you're gonna run that campaign for a very long time before you see it starting to drop off. But if you've got $100 A day budget, and you're targeting 300 people, that campaign is probably going to drop off very, very quickly in terms of performance, you're actually almost certainly not going to spend the budget, but it's going to, you know, saturate, and it's not going to be as effective. So I think it's a real balance.
So thank you very much for all your questions for listening to the webinar. If anybody does think of a question afterwards, or they just want more advice on LinkedIn, my email address is on the screen. So it's Mike at Napier b2b dot com. And I'd welcome a chance to have a chat with you about LinkedIn and how you can use it. Thank you very much and have a wonderful Christmas.
What is the Importance of Data Enrichment in B2B
Mike Maynard and Hannah Wehrly address the benefits of data enrichment, the recent acquisition of Clearbit by HubSpot, and how data enrichment can enhance marketing campaigns and increase campaign success.
They also discuss how survey findings aren’t always the reality of the B2B industry, how marketing automation can help marketers and sales work together, and how it can aid social media and KPIs.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcasts
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Marketing Automation Moment Episode Eleven - What is the Importance of Data Enrichment in B2B
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Hannah: Welcome to the market 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 Wehrly. And I Mike Maynard. And this week we discuss Hubspots AI trends marketers report,
Mike: the acquisition of data enrichment company Clearbit, the best part automation KPIs, how marketers and sales can work together by using marketing automation platforms,
Hannah: and how market automation can help with your social media. Hi, Mike, welcome back to another episode of Market automation moment. How you doing?
Mike: Well, it's great to be back. It's been a while since we've talked actually I've done a lot of travelling, and we've had a few technical problems as well.
Hannah: We definitely have Well, I'm really excited about our conversation today. Because although we have got, of course, a little bit to talk about with regards to AI. We've also got some really interesting elements to talk about today. So I'm just going to jump right into it and HubSpot have actually released an AI trends for marketers report. Now this was really interesting, because I have to say, I don't think I agree with all the data, because hospital actually reckons that AI gives marketers 12 and a half hours back per week. Now that sounds wonderful in theory, but actually in reality, I don't think that's quite true, especially when it comes to b2b Tech and the line of work that we're in. I mean, they've stated that 48% are using AI to conduct research 22% to get ideas and 32% to learn how to do things. What do you think about this?
Mike: Yeah, and I think a lot of people are using AI now. I mean, we use AI a lot. You know, I used it this morning. To give people a definition of something is great for certain tasks, but the HubSpot report, it seemed to make claims without really backing up and I think this is where I became a little bit nervous, particularly, you know, when it started talking about 12 and a half hours per week as the likely timesaving?
Hannah: Absolutely, I mean, one thing that came across, which was quite interesting was that 37% are using AI to automate time consuming tasks with regards to SEO. So things like keyword mapping, and ternal link building, and actually to support them in building their content strategy. Now, it's interesting, because as you said, you know, you use it this morning, of course, as elements to this, but what are the risks and advantages of using AI to support SEO?
Mike: Well, I think, you know, AI is great as a tool. I mean, you know, I personally love what Microsoft had done in calling their AI tools that copilot something to help. It's interesting to see that 37% of marketers are actually automating time consuming SEO tasks with AI. I'm not entirely sure 30% of marketers are really particularly active doing SEO. So it does make me wonder quite what the sample was. And I think we need to take away some of the numbers. You know, the claim that marketers spend five hours a day on menial tasks, I think was HubSpot word. And that, you know, using AI is going to automate that away to be only two and a half hours. I'm not sure many of us marketers are putting on our, you know, inputs to our annual appraisals, that actually more than half our day is menial tasks. And equally, I think some of the numbers are quite high. Having said that, without doubt AI is super useful, and is really being deployed by a lot of marketers today. So I think let's forget about the numbers somewhat. And maybe let's talk about how people are using it. And you mentioned earlier, some stats on ideas, and research. And I think this is what marketers should be doing. They should be focusing on, how can I help? And what can I use it for rather than necessarily trying to tally up exactly how many hours a day it saves?
Hannah: That’s a great point, Mike. And I really like that, you know, as a marketer myself, I don't look at my tasks as Oh my God, I need to save two hours, but being able to get that insight, that inspiration sometimes, that's really where AI has come to help.
Mike: Uh, definitely, I mean, the whole blank play paper syndrome where, you know, if you're not careful, you can be sat there for a whole day staring at a piece of blank paper and not knowing what to do, whether it's, you know, SEO, keyword research, or whether it's, you know, trying to come up with some content. I think AI could save, you know, a huge amount of time there. And it's almost a bit pointless to try and work out exactly how much I think it's much better to go and actually change the way we work because, you know, let's be honest, looking forward. Nobody's gonna care about what you did a year ago. People are actually going to care about you being efficient and effective and using the tools today. So I think let's focus on finding the use cases, rather than trying to come up with some artificial quantification that perhaps isn't so useful.
Hannah: Absolutely, you're completely right. Mike, I actually want to move the conversation on a little bit because a couple of days ago, you sent me an article. It's something really interesting. And I'd love to get your thoughts about. And it's that HubSpot has actually just announced an acquisition of clear bit. Do you want to talk a little bit about what this means?
Mike: So this, I think, is super interesting. And it's really frustrating. I mean, some of the older listeners will remember something called Plaxo, which was like, a way to update your contacts. And that company kind of fell by the wayside. But now, it seems to be the hottest area in martec is actually data enrichment. And so HubSpot, clearly, they've got this philosophy of being a single platform, people buy everything from them. So they need a data enrichment facility. So they bought Clearbit to do that. But also, it was only a couple of months ago that Apollo to IO, got some more investment, I think it valued the company at something like one and a half billion. We're seeing more and more of these data enrichment companies becoming hugely important in b2b. And I think what HubSpot has done is really buy someone so that they're able to offer that within that HubSpot package, which is their philosophy in their approach. Many other people using other marketing automation platforms will tie in different systems. And they'll pick the best system for the data they need.
Hannah:
I think absolutely. And actually just want to take it back a step back and go back to basics, and maybe just for our listeners who aren't as advanced in market automation, what are the benefits of data enrichment? Like what can this do for you as a marketer?
Mike: Well, I know you're an expert on this, because you do a lot of data enrichment for our business development, the hammer, so thank you for asking me. But I think you know, the main thing that people are doing is they're taking data that is either incomplete. And let's be honest, most people, they look at their marketing, automation databases, they know that maybe they got the address, perhaps they've got the name, right. Hopefully, they've got the company, right, maybe they've got the job title, but company size, postal address, maybe mobile phone number, all of those things are typically missing on a fairly large number of accounts. And so what data enrichment offers is the possibility of actually adding that data automatically. And in fact, what typically happens is once people set up a system, what you do is you maybe simply put in the email address for somebody, wait a couple of seconds, and then the data enrichment system will then fill in all the other details. So whether you're entering contacts into a database for marketing, or more likely sales into a CRM, it really saves time, because it fills out all those forms, or those name and phone number and fields that take a long time to complete. And I know you've been working on trying to use this in Napier's marketing as well.
Hannah: Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm so enthusiastic about this, because I have a basis for our database where I have to have the set fields filled in from the get go. Otherwise, I can't sleep at night. So knowing that this can be done automatically. I mean, I love this. And it's definitely I'd say a point in HubSpot corner because it's gonna save marketers so much time, but also the benefits of it. And personally for me as well, you know, being able to not have to do all this research to get that data is going to be so beneficial.
Mike: Absolutely. And I think the question is unclip is a good a good system today, can HubSpot keep that data fresh going forward. And as HubSpot adds more and more features, they're spreading themselves broader and broader across more and more functionality in their tool chain. The challenge is to be great at everything. And obviously, some of their competitors will say, well, actually, what we're doing is we're allowing you to bring in best in class vendors. And I think it'd be interesting to see who wins. I mean, both sides have fairly compelling arguments as to what they're doing. Both sides have great strategies. And ultimately, I think both HubSpot and also the marketing automation vendors that effectively recommend you use a third party data enrichment. So they'll both actually be great solutions going forward.
Hannah: Absolutely, completely agree, Mike. And I think this is a good segue into our next part of the podcast because focusing on data, I want you to have a conversation around the best marketing automation KPIs. So, for example, if we take NAPEO the kinds of things that I look at when we run a campaign are things like landing page conversion, so you know how many people are visiting our page and actually filling in the form? You know, for us, we look at our website traffic, but we know only a real small percentage of that website traffic is actually relevant to Napier. So it'd be good to get your insight and what you think are the most important metrics to look at. So for example, is cost per lead a good metric to be measuring. What about customer lifetime value? Where should marketers be focusing their efforts? When looking at market automation KPIs?
Mike: Well, obviously, I mean, you're a smart marketer, you're not looking at the kind of vanity metrics so much, you know, things like impressions and click through rate, and you're really trying to measure things that are closer to our business objectives. And I love that about what you do. And I think people should really You take a leaf out of your book and be looking at that, I think it's very difficult. You know, landing page conversions is really interesting when you look at conversion rates, for example, typically, somebody's running a campaign, they might run a campaign out to their database, which could have a large percentage of existing customers, and also have quite a few prospects that have already been warmed up. And you might see quite a high conversion rate on your landing page, where people are willing to enter data, frankly, you know, they've got an email from you, they know, you know, their email address, they're happy to put it in again, you're probably auto filling it to make it easy. I think the risk is, then when you then roll that campaign out to a broader audience where you're trying to bring in new prospects that you want to nurture, that conversion rate is going to go down. And so I think trying to look at individual metrics and apply them across a whole campaign is very difficult. What you need to do is start looking at what you're trying to achieve, and then how much it costs you to achieve that. And that typically will involve, you know, splitting campaigns into different phases or different stages. Because as I say, you know, it's very different mailing around database versus, say, running a Google ads campaign to drive people to your website, and your landing pages. What do you think about that?
Hannah: Oh, I completely agree, Mike. I mean, we've fallen trap before where we've been like, no, we want to achieve this conversion rate, or we want to get this open rate from our emails, but knowing the difference of what the goal of your actual campaign is, before you get started, is so important to your success. Otherwise, you're just setting yourself up for failure. I mean, we have a monthly newsletter that goes out to our database, and we got a 16% click through rate last month. So for us, that's absolutely amazing. But if it was perhaps going out to people who don't know the name of your name, I wouldn't ever be aiming for a click through rate that high?
Mike: Absolutely, I think it's pick the metrics and pick the goals based upon the audience you're reaching, and the campaign you're running. And I think it's about you know, trying to understand what's realistic. I mean, within our newsletter, for example, we have a lot of journalists who subscribe to our newsletter, that's fantastic. I love the fact they do that. They're quite often quite engaged on the newsletter. And maybe what we care about is actually a subset of our total newsletter audience, which are the prospects, or perhaps we also care about our clients as well, because if we're sending our clients newsletters, they're not clicking. That's not a good sign. Clearly, we don't understand what clients are interested in. So I think it's about picking those metrics and working them out. I mean, the one thing I don't like is people coming up with industry benchmarks, they're always useful as a start. But almost invariably, your campaign is different from everybody else's. So again, you know, use them as a guide, but don't use them as gospel.
Hannah: Don’t use them as gospel, what a way to end that's a brilliant like, I mean, let's move on. Because, you know, my role, I sit half in marketing, I sit half in sales. And we talk, obviously a lot about marketing in this podcast. But I'm really excited just to give sales a moment to shine like we deserve. And this is focused on using market automation to support sales. So I mean, a lot of automation platforms have the capability for things like pipelines, so we can track the deal, the stages our deals are at, we have visibility of what marketing is doing, which is amazing. We know what communication is going out. And we can actually see exactly what our prospects are viewing on our company's website. And for me, I think it's not talked about enough. I think companies know it's there. But you know, we talk about all the time that sales and marketing need to work together. And sometimes I think Martin automation is that glue that does it, because we get such an insight as a sales people to see what marketers are doing what we're communicating. But also marketing can come to sales and say, what should we be talking about? How are your deals going? Is there anything I can help you with? I can see that this there's this many in the pipeline? I mean, are you as passionate about it as I am, Mike?
Mike: Well, I really love the fact that marketing automation brings it together. And I think, you know, it's interesting, you have two types of solutions. I mean, internally, we use a SharpSpring platform. And they're the sales CRM is integrated in with a marketing automation system. However, you know, a lot of our clients, for example, use Marketo and Salesforce, but either way, you're able to share data between both the sales view and the marketing view, whether it's the same platform or a different platform. And I think there's a lot of data marketers can provide to salespeople that's going to help them engage when they call the customer, you know, whether it's what's been downloaded, whether it's what's been viewed on the website, or perhaps it's even just what we've sent to the prospect and they've not responded to. And to me, there's kind of two things. I mean, one is marketers need to provide that data. And I think marketers are getting better at that. And the tools are definitely getting better at you know, encouraging that sharing of data. But also, I think there's a need for marketers to help salespeople and explain what they're sharing. And I've seen with some clients, you know, salespeople get a lead list of URLs, they don't really know what they are what they mean. And that's really not a good way to do it. So I think it's not just about the technology and what the technology can do. But it's about, you know, really engaging and talking between the two different departments. Obviously, at Napier, you know, we're small, we've got a department of one that includes both sales and marketing. So I assume your communications are pretty good. But clients with big departments in marketing and sales, that communication is much more difficult. And I think helping sales understand what information you're giving them. That's super useful.
Hannah: Oh, definitely, Mike. And I think the one thing I would add to that as well is that there's simple ways to do that. And there is the function of dashboards of a mouse automation platform. So you know, have a talk of sales, see what they're interested in and see what we could help them, but then provide a platform where they can quickly just go in, have a look, see what the updates are, without constantly having to have that conversation. So I think it's two levels, I think, absolutely explain what it is have a discussion about, you know, what sales should be looking at, but then also provide that really easy access so that they can sometimes just go in quickly before a prospect call?
Mike: Yeah. And ultimately, it's all about qualifying leads. And I think this is always the big battleground between marketing and sales is, when do you handle lead over to sales? And how does sales qualify it? And I think today, we're moving away from what was the case 510 years ago, where pretty much marketing through these leads across the sales, they weren't necessarily particularly well qualified. And sales just looked at them when they're all terrible. And clearly, the truth was somewhere in between. So things like scoring, but also more importantly, nurturing and assessing work. Contacts are on that customer journey. I think that's super important to improve that quality and that conversation between marketing and sales. Because we know, you know, and I don't want to be the hippie here. But when marketing and sales work together, it's always better for both sides.
Hannah: Â Oh, absolutely. And it's a great point, Mike. And it really is all about education.
Mike: It definitely is. And I think if anybody wants to understand how to do that, talking to you is a great education. Because you're doing both sides, you see the issues from both sides, you see the the challenge of how do I qualify leads from a marketing point of view? And then from a sales point of view? Am I actually gonna get any money out of this? And that is often quite a very different question.
Hannah: So whether it's an MQL definitely is unique perspective to have, I would say. So just looking at time, Mike, I'd like to move on to our insightful Tip of the Week. Now, this is more, you know, maybe a basic tip. I'm sure a lot of our listeners know this already. But I think it's always something great to drive home. And that is that some market automation platforms, not all, but the majority do have the capabilities to support your social media platforms. So this is things like scheduling posts, so Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn in advance, but also have social listening tools. So you can look and see when your company is being mentioned, when you should be commenting, you can track topics. And I think, you know, as a company, perhaps for Napier, we've not use it to its full capability. But it can be a really great way to ensure that everything is being tracked on the platform to see how your campaigns are being successful. What do you think about the social media capabilities?
Mike: Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, actually, I know you're running a lot of social campaigns organic, and paid social campaigns, and you're tying them into our marketing automation. So I think that's really important. I think the other thing that people need to remember is that marketing automation platforms can understand when traffic comes from social media. So you're not just you know, looking at social media, and using those on platform metrics, you know, things like likes and shares and clicks. But you're also able to take the data and work out how many of those people that click through, actually then convert to leads. So tying social and marketing automation together, it's great because you can be more effective on the social platform. But you can also understand much better what's going on and work out which of those posts are really driving the leads and the things that are going to move the needle in the business. What do you think?
Hannah: I mean, that's a great point, Mike. I mean, sometimes social media in the best way it can feel a bit like a slog, you know, we have to be active, we have to have a high quality of posts, but being able to have that data to look in and say okay, case studies perform really well. But this one where we're too salesy, doesn't work at all, it just saves so much time for the future and understanding what's going to be successful.
Mike: Yeah, for sure, I think, you know, social media, it can feel like a slog, but also, if you can actually see real results coming from it. And not just as I say clicks and likes, but actually leads and opportunities. I think that really helps, you know, understand that it's worth the effort. Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for your time today, Mike. It's been another fantastic conversation. Thanks, Hannah. And I look forward to talking to you next time.
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.
International Press Cuttings Bureau Ceases Print Monitoring Service
We were sad to hear the news that The International Press Cuttings Bureau (IPCB) will cease its print monitoring service at the end of this year.
Although there is still a market in print, it's clear to see that the cuttings market is getting harder. This is, in part, due to competition from companies that only track online coverage, such as Meltwater. The online-only publications have the advantage that it's much less labour intensive than monitoring print coverage.
As a company that was launched in 1920, we are sad to see IPCB closing their doors on the print market, as it has been a service we've used for our clients over the years.
A Napier Webinar: 5 Reasons Your CEO Rejected Your Marketing Plan
As a marketer, it can be hard to get your first draft of a marketing plan signed off by management. In fact, in a recent survey we undertook, over 50% of respondents shared that management either asked for cuts or changes to the proposed strategy and spending.
So how can you make sure that your marketing plan doesn’t get rejected?
In our on-demand webinar '5 Reasons Your CEO Rejected Your Marketing Plan', we explore the reasons why CEOs often reject marketing plans and share tips and tricks on what to consider when building one. We cover:
- How marketers can fail to understand available budget
- Why presenting measurable business results is vital
- How to explain how leads will turn into business
- How to change the mindset of thinking and planning in silos
- The importance of getting support from the sales team
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘5 Reasons Your CEO Rejected Your Marketing Plan’ Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard
Well, good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for your patience, waiting for the webinar to start. And it's always kind of stressful when you go to log on to a webinar and suddenly find that your internet is down. But fortunately, I managed to get some internet connection. And hopefully some of you are still around.
So thank you for your patience. And what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about marketing plans. And I think marketing plans are very interesting. So I'm just going to start and go straight into the presentation, obviously aware of your time. And, you know, let's talk about how people think about planning. And I think there's a couple of ways that people view planning. So people see it in a somewhat different ways. So there are definitely people that see it in the military way of you know, proper planning and preparation is what it's all about. And if you don't do that, you lose your performance.
So I think there's some people who absolutely love planning, and they're really into it. And those people probably don't need to listen to this webinar. There are some people who see it as the TPS report from office space, you know, that actually plans get written, nobody ever takes any notice of them. And they're kind of pointless. And that's a bit disappointing, I think, you know, generally, having a plan definitely helps. But sometimes there can be a fairly time wasting, pointless exercise of writing and rewriting plans. And this is what this webinar is about. It's about trying to avoid the problem where you have to keep generating the same marketing plan with slightly different parameters, until your CEO eventually signs off the marketing budget. And then hopefully, we're not going to end up like that, will Britain where whatever we do, the computer says no, or in this case, the CEO says no.
So let's have a look at what we're going to talk about. So today, we're going to discuss, you know, several things. We're going to talk about understanding the available budget. We're going to talk about measurable results. And clearly, I think, you know, particularly as we enter times that are tougher economically, we're going to see more and more pressure as marketers to deliver results that are tangible. But what you need to deliver is think about business results. And we'll talk about that. We'll talk about explaining how leads turn into business and really telling a story around your marketing plan. We'll look at how to change the mindset of thinking and planning in silos into a mindset of thinking holistically. And lastly, we'll look at the importance of getting support from the sales team.
So let's have a look. Why should we plan? So there's a couple of things here that talk about planning. So behind him we see like lots of people running off in different directions vectors, I think Elon Musk was the person who said that people are vectors, the organisations are some of the vector the messages. If everybody's running in the same in different directions, then actually, somebody's got to run really hard and push hard to get the company moving forward, because everybody's going in different routes. If we can get everybody moving the same way, it's much easier to move forwards and plans are great to get people aligned and moving in the same direction. And this has been studied.
So the organisational behaviour and human decision decision processes journal, as a mouthful, actually published articles way back in 1990, where they actually demonstrated that plans produce better results in organisations. So definitely organisational situations, plans produce results. And lastly, planning lets you focus on what's important. And I think more and more in marketing, what's important is showing those business results that help the business grow and succeed. And so what we're going to do is we're going to explain how to build those plans, and how to use them to actually drive you know, more engagement from the senior management or particular CEO, and ultimately more budget, which is, you know, typically what marketers are looking for.
So, why was your marketing plan rejected? You know, why is your CEO or Lisa Simpson sat there, crying, feeling upset because the marketing plan hasn't met her expectations? And I think this is really crucial. You know, it's all about looking at how we meet the CEOs expectations, or whoever's assessing the marketing budget. And that requires, you know, a little bit of psychology and understanding about, you know, what the person needs and what's going to excite them and interest them.
So let's try and avoid our CEO crying over a marketing plan. And let's look at these five reasons that we feel marketing plans get rejected. Well, the first one, this is a classic marketing mistake that hopefully people don't make as marketers is ignoring the audience. So whether you're providing your plan to the CEO or the CMO, they care about different things to you. And actually, the CEO and the CMO probably care about different things themselves. So it's about trying to understand what their priorities are. It's about understanding how much time they have available, if you're submitting a marketing plan to a CMO, they're almost certainly going to spend a lot longer looking at than if you submit a marketing plan to a CEO, who's inherently busy and has a much wider remit. And so we strongly recommend, you know, creating plans for your audience.
So for the audience, that's going to sign off the budget. And this quite often results in two marketing plans being produced. One is a plan for the department that really focuses on how things are going to be executed, and how the results are going to be achieved. And the other is a plan for senior management, that really talks about the benefits of the marketing approach, and why the investment is going to generate a return for the business. So think about the audience, that's really important. The next step is to think about the detail of what your boss cares about. I mean, if it's, if you're talking about a CEO of a publicly funded company, probably number one concern is keeping their job. So keeping a job is really, really important as a CEO. And that basically means delivering on those quarterly results.
When times are good when revenues coming in CEOs can be much more relaxed. But at times like now, where we're seeing a lot of pressure on businesses, the economy, whilst not terrible, it's certainly not great. CEOs are much more concerned about revenue. And it's not just you know, how much are we going to sell. And I think this is important, it's about understanding the different ways you can drive revenue. So you could clearly drive more revenue, ultimately.
But actually, what might be more important is having a shorter time to revenue, is there anything you can do in marketing, that can actually speed up the conversion of a prospect to a customer, if you can do that and bring revenue in sooner? Certainly, in tough times, that can be a very compelling reason to invest money in marketing. I think you can look at things like customer acquisition, how much does it cost to acquire a customer? So what's your CAC or customer acquisition cost? Or how can you increase the lifetime value of the customer how can make customers more valuable, talking about things like this. So these are business metrics, rather than marketing metrics, it really helps CEOs and non marketing specialists understanding and equally, you know, whilst you might be submitting your budget to a CMO or CEO, I'm sure that your chief financial officer will also be looking in and trying to investigate, you know, whether it's worth investing the money in marketing or not. And so therefore, clearly speaking in their language makes a lot of difference.
It's not just speaking in their language, I think, you know, as marketers, sometimes particularly people from a sort of PR background, like words, they like to write things, reality as your audience doesn't have time to read things. And so I think, you know, looking at how you can actually tell people what's going to happen using pictures and diagrams is really important. I mean, one of our favourites is talking about positioning. And if you look at, you know, brand positioning, one of the easiest things you can do is actually position a brand on a perceptual map.
So, here's an example, where we're talking about a very simple thing. So we've got two axes, reliability and support, which we, you know, assuming are two of the major axes of this particular company's market. And you can see, there's a mix of companies around, and that company is doing okay. I mean, the support is not great. The, the reliability is not fantastic. But you know, we're not far off. I mean, we're actually pretty competitive. But what the marketing plan is, is to move that to a perception that a were more reliable, and actually just inching ahead to be the most reliable of these four companies. But particularly focusing on our support and selling our support. So that ultimately, we're going to have a situation where we own and occupy a space in customers minds, that's gonna really make a difference, because they're going to see us as the people to go to, if they want some a supplier they can trust they want somebody who's got great support, and good reliability. So pictures are great, and using various marketing models and frameworks is strongly recommended. The second reason is unexpected surprises. I mean, budget planning is hard.
And so you need to make it easy for the CEO. And really, you know, One of the things that, you know, I'm sure everybody's doing is pre wiring these discussions. So you're going out, and you're finding out what the expectation is. So how much budget is expected to be allocated to marketing? Now, all too often we see marketers going out and saying, Well, I expect there's going to be, you know, amount X allocated to marketing. So I want to put in a little bit more of that, let the CEO cut it down, it'll all be fine. And generally, that leads to marketing plans that are designed to be cut. And that's fine if you'd like rewriting your marketing plan and wasting time doing that. But in reality, there is flexibility in those budgets, yes, there is a number they're aiming for. But there's also an opportunity to identify actually finding additional budget, which can often be moved around. And I think more and more, as we see the customer journey, you know, extending more into the marketing area, and less into sales, marketers should be thinking about how they can access more budgets.
So what can they deliver, that that creates a compelling return, that means that CEOs are prepared to move budget from one area into marketing. And a great way to do this. And this is a secret, you know, anyone who's a client of Napier, or has had a quote from us, we'll be very aware of this, it's choices. And choices make a huge difference. So, you know, setting you know three different levels of budget is the classic way to do it, is generally a really good way to help avoid rewriting plans and actually present three choices. And then your CEO or your CFO, whoever's looking at it, can then pick the choice that they feel is most appropriate. And typically, what you'll find is, most people make a choice plus, so pick a level of activity. And then quite often, they'll pick some extra activities, they want to bundle into enhance, that they like from one of the more expensive options.
So definitely feel free to, you know, look at rather than writing a marketing plan with one option for the CEO, give the CEO three different options, three different levels of expenditure and three different returns. And that's a really good way to speed up this process and avoid the back and forth. A classic reason for getting marketing plans rejected is lack of support from other parts of the business, in particular, from sales. So, you know, we all know CEOs talk to salespeople before they talk to marketing.
So salespeople actually want good marketing, great marketing makes their job easier salespeople know that. But you need to involve them, you need to engage salespeople. And I think more and more we are seeing that. And it's much better than maybe you know, 20 or 30 years ago when I started and sales and marketing didn't really speak together. And actually now it's much better sales and marketing and much more closely engaged. And activities like Account Based Marketing help encourage that. I apologise the animation doesn't appear to have worked on this slide.
But the fourth reason is not explaining the benefit. As marketers, we're all too keen to use terms and to use metrics that we're familiar with. So we're talking about engagement, we're talking about cuttings, we're talking about followers, MPs, content awareness, website, traffic, blog posts, reach clicks, click through rates. That's not what the CEO cares about. You know, if you look at what the CEO cares about, they care about revenue, as we talked about, we talked about customer lifetime value, they care about margin and profit, they care about share of wallet from their customers, how many customers they've got, they care about sales and opportunities, competition, return on investment and reputation. And so by taking the things that you talk about, and moving them into more business orientated language, you can massively increase the the chance of your proposal or your plan being approved the first time round. And so within that, we're trying to actually leave the CEO through effectively a process of what marketing is going to do, how marketing is going to change things.
I mean, hopefully, as marketers, we all understand the importance of credibility. And here we've got you know, David, who's about to slay Goliath. And, you know, he followed the classic sort of hero's journey. Start off as a shepherd went to see his brothers who were fighting in the war, heard about Goliath, you know, and things were getting worse and worse, he volunteers to fight Goliath. That's not good. The armour doesn't fit him. I mean, this is this is really bad, you know, the guy is struggling, and then he comes out the other side by using his slingshot and ultimately defeating Goliath. And I think when you tell a story, you know business contexts, just saying we're going to do this, it's going to be awesome is often a very bad thing to do. You know, quite quite honestly, you need to be honest about the journey and what you've got to do. And if we're in a situation where, for example, we have low awareness, we need to get new customers, we're going to have to build awareness, that's going to be a downside for the business, there's going to be investment required without immediate return. And being really clear about what you're doing, why you're doing it. And telling the story is really important.
And you know, just as David and Goliath way back when was an ancient story based on that, I mean, equally, it's very much the same story, when we look at, you know, my modern source of literature that I like, like Monsters, Inc. So these classic storylines are being replayed, over and over again, successfully, don't be afraid to use them, to walk your audience through the process, and tell them how you're going to have to invest and how you're gonna have to work, those tough times, that are ultimately going to produce the good results at the end. That story is very compelling. And whilst we're talking about stories, don't think in silos. Ultimately, with the people who are allocating the budget, they don't think in silos, they think in terms of business results, and they really don't care whether your PR departments is different to your email team or your paid search team. They want to know how you're going to bring marketing together and impact the business.
So when you're telling that story, make sure that story cuts across those silos. And avoids that technical difference that frankly, nobody at the senior executive level is really worried about, they don't want to hear about all the technical issues and who does what they want to understand how you put together a plan that's coherent, that's holistic, and delivers results. And we mentioned models before, when we talked about presenting ideas. We talked about the perceptual map. Napier uses a model is a very, very simple model that to walk people through campaign ideas. And literally, we start off with a situation analysis determined, we move on to focus which looks at the audience and the messaging, we look at deliver the tactics we're going to execute. And then lastly, we move on to enhance which are the metrics that we're using to tweak the campaigns and keep that marketing engine firing at optimum efficiency. It's a very simple structure, you don't have to use it, you can build your own structure. This is actually based on slightly more complex structures from PR research.
But I strongly recommend as you walk people through marketing plans, you have a structure that, you know, builds on each section. So again, you're telling this story or explaining what's going to happen. So those are our five reasons. And hopefully, you know, you've looked at things, you're going to move ahead very quickly, you're going to, you know, very quickly, take notice to the audience, understand what they care about, you're going to avoid unexpected surprises, you're going to make sure you've got support and buy in from sales, you're going to explain the benefit in the language of the audience. And you're going to tell it as a story. So a logical sequence that makes sense. And by the end of it, the audience believes is definitely going to happen, deliver that ROI that you really want. But things can still go wrong. And one of the things that can happen is your CEO didn't read your marketing plan. I've kind of alluded to this before, your CEO is a busy person, he or she needs to have something that's short, sharp and clear. So make sure that as you create these marketing plans, you're not burying things in lots of words, you're not using lots of jargon and technical terms, you're being very clear about the business results you're going to generate and how you're going to do it.
So to summarise how to write a great marketing plan, you know, go talk to your friends and sales. Hopefully, they're friends already. Build a structure, do some situation analysis, some strategy, some tactics, and then talk about the results. Make use of models for illustration, so people can actually see as well as read what you're trying to achieve. Make sure everything you talked about is measurable business objectives, rather than marketing objectives. And lastly, put it all into a story arc. So things flow very smoothly and very clearly. And if you do that, hopefully you'll find that your marketing plan gets approved first time. And particularly if you put those three levels of pricing and or costs in that I mentioned, I think you'll find that it makes it much easier for the people allocating budget to decide where to put that budget. It also gives you good feedback.
If your SEO is always picking the lowest level of budget, you know that you're not convincing them that you're going to deliver, you know, tangible and impactful business results. So think about how you talk about results. Well, I hope you found this interesting. And I hope it inspires people to write marketing plans differently. If you do have any questions, obviously, please feel free to put them into the chat. If you would like any help or any information from us, we're always very ready at Napier, to talk about marketing plans, whether that's right at the start helping people structure those plans, or whether it's later on, you know, reviewing plans and giving inputs and helping people look for efficiencies. So thank you very much. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your patience earlier when my internet was down. And please do feel free to post some questions into the chat.
Okay, so I do have one question here, which is building on these metrics. So what type of metrics do you focus on in a plan? And I think the answer is, as you build that plan, you want to really focus on trying to talk about the metrics that are closest to the business, and inevitably furthest away from what you're actually doing.
So I think in marketing, you know, most people understand that there's some easy metrics, you can get things like email opens, clicks, advertising, click through rates, they're really vanity metrics, they don't really measure impact on the business, they can be a good indicator of relative performance. So they can be great for AV testing. But they're not necessarily the right metrics that you want to use, when you're talking to someone who's really thinking about the business as a whole, rather than marketing. So it very much is, you know, revenue driven, reputation driven. People in PR, you know, I would say, don't sit here and go, This is a disaster, you know, I've got to talk about, you know, decreasing the, the time to sales, the time to revenue, I've got to talk about increasing customer lifetime, how do I do that with PR. Now, reputation is also very important as well. So talk in those kinds of terms. And if you want to, either in the marketing plan you share with your CEO, or more likely and an internal marketing plan, you know, build those models where you talk about, you know, click through rates and number of registrations and things like that, to try and get to that goal. But I think it's always important that you start from a business goal, rather than from a marketing metric. So great question. I love that.
What else do we have? I don't have any other questions here. So I'm not sure if anybody's got anything. If you do have any questions, please feel free to, you know, contact people at Napier. Or just email me directly my email Mike at Napier b2b dot com is on the slide there. So please feel free to email me ask me some questions and I'd love to see some of your marketing plans. Thank you very much everyone for listening. I hope you found it useful. And I hope it helps you get the marketing budget you're looking for, for 2024 Thanks very much.
AEEmobility Information Hub Continues to Grow
Franz Joachim Roßmann and Klaus Oertel, two experienced electronics and automotive editors, have worked together to pioneer a new path in the media landscape, with the development of the Information Hub AEEmobility.
Designed to target automotive electronic developers and e-mobility specialists, the hub provides readers with a unique way to gain knowledge and information, with all content categorized and tagged to support readers in finding information relevant to them.
The hub focuses on providing relevant content from the developer community, including a media review with summaries and evaluations of articles from companies and industry magazines, webinars, whitepapers, videos, technical books, podcasts, presentations, and blog posts.
Klaus Oertel, Co-Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder said: "We examine interesting and relevant publications and content for developers, whether in industry magazines, on company websites, conference presentations, or on social media. We write a summary and provide an evaluation of the content, linking to the original source. This saves the reader a lot of time and provides them with a quick orientation. This is a unique offering in the industry".
Co-Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder, Franz Joachim Roßmann added: "We deliberately avoid online advertising to ensure readability. Our readers appreciate that our pages are completely ad-free."
Partnership packages are available for companies, and unique content is also being created and featured on the homepage of AEEmobility.
We always love to see a publication doing well, and it's great to see that AEEmobility has grown since being founded a year ago. We look forward to seeing how AEEmobility will continue to evolve moving forward.
A Napier Webinar: The Top 10 Marketing AI Tools
Although AI can be over-hyped, today, you can get real benefits from the technology. In fact, there is a wide range of marketing tools available now that use AI to help you complete tasks in less time, with better results.
In our on-demand webinar 'The Top 10 Marketing AI Tools', we explore the AI tools marketers have available to them, and how different tools can support different areas of marketing. We cover:
- What AI can do
- The risks of using AI
- The top 10 marketing AI tools
- How tools can support different areas of your marketing
- The future of AI tools
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘The Top 10 Marketing AI Tools’ Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard
Hi, and welcome to the latest Napier webinar, I hope you're looking forward to finding out a little bit more about some of the AI tools that we use. And that we've seen our clients use successfully, it'd be great if someone could just pop a note into chat just to let me know that everything is working, okay. And that you can hear me. So someone could do that, that would be brilliant. I'm actually presenting this from home today.
And we'll crack on and we'll start talking about some AI, and some of the tools that that we've used.
Okay, so first, let's look at the agenda, what we're going to talk about.
So we are going to start by covering you know, a bit of an overview about what AI can do.
And make sure that, you know, everyone's you know, at the same level, what we think the expectations are. But also we're going to take a breath and make sure that we know, you know, what actually isn't practical.
So, you know, I think there are some things happening with AI and some hype that is perhaps over egging the ability of AI to do things that we want it to do.
We're going to talk about GPT models. Now. GPT is the model underlying chat GPT, but also used by a lot of other tools. So it's very important to understand that, once we've done all this, we'll get straight into the top 10 AI tools, which I know a lot of people are very keen to see. So what we're going to try and do is we're going to try and cover what we think are the most important tools that people can use today in marketing. So this isn't going to be a webinar that in two years time is going to be relevant. This is about what you can use today.
But lastly, we will look forward and we will wonder what is next and what's going to happen.
So let's start and let's start by thinking about what AI can do what we all kind of know what AI can do. We've all heard the stories, you know, AI is great with chat GPT giving advice.
It was certain whether I should give up my career in marketing or not. So I decided to keep going on. But you can ask chat GPT all sorts of things. You can also use generative AI to create images. And I thought that Spaceman dancing and orange is an image that the world really needs. So we can actually do more than create images, we can create videos, this is a training video here. And it's actually created by an AI avatar. So what we're seeing more and more is companies using AI to create avatars. For things like training, this can be really effective, because all you have to do is feed the text into the AI system. And it will generate a high quality recording of someone presenting some training material. So that's clearly good. And I think you know, as avatars will start seeing more and more going forward.
Images again, I mean, we had to put a couple of images in. So here's some ketchup bottles created by Heinz that basically is AI versions of ketchup bottles for bottle a campaign. We thought that was fun. And of course, you know, we've mentioned chatting before, but chatbots are a particularly big area for AI. And a lot of companies are deploying AI chatbots. And I think those of us that have used them have sometimes been really impressed. And sometimes we're really frustrated by the ability of AI to actually deliver the answers we need. And I think this is it is that, you know, there's some really cool stuff that's going on with AI, it certainly does a lot of amazing things. But sometimes there are things that it doesn't quite do.
So let's take a breath.
AI is really good at taking content and putting it together. And people have called it the ultimate plagiarism machine.
If you happen to be super geeky, like me, it's a stochastic parents or a parent that repeats things, based upon probability. But the problem is, AI is not that creative, much of the content is very similar. And I think this is something that we're all beginning to realise, you know, the first time I saw AI generated content, I was blown away, I just could not believe how good it was. And I thought, you know, this is it's the end for content generation, you know, we can't tell the difference, but very quickly, you begin to spot AI content, you begin to get a feel of what's AI generated and what's not.
And perhaps I think, you know, one of the best examples of this is, you know, could AI generates a Shakespeare sonnet? You know, let's have a look at the first line, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Well, no, AI is not going to do that, because a summer's day is 24 hours long, and you're five foot six. And I just can't do that comparison, because I'm very literal. So I think what's going to happen is, we're going to increasingly see that at the top end, where people want high quality, very creative content, AI is going to continue to struggle. Of course, at the low end, where maybe people have been using low cost content farms, just to churn out material that covers a particular subject. Absolutely. I mean, I can see AI taking over from that sort of low quality, mid quality content. But at the moment, we're not seeing AI really generate things that are truly creative, unless you have someone spending a lot of time doing what people call prompt engineering.
So actually asking the AI to generate specific things. So what I think is going to happen is AI is going to have a role, but it's going to have a role in certain areas. And let's have a look at another thing. You know, one of the things that AI is great to do is to give you ideas, and perhaps ideas for marketing campaigns. So I asked it for a couple of marketing campaigns make a marketing plan for an electrical infrastructure manufacturer. And here's its ideas, you know, goes from market analysis and target audience all the way through to actually sending a sales goal of 20%. And you can see that it's not quite perfectly it thinks of infrastructure as being construction rather than electrical infrastructure. And fundamentally, it looks ok, you think, well, that's quite good, it's really thought about it.
But then I asked it to generate a marketing plan for a semiconductor manufacturer. And you can see it's incredibly similar. In fact, it's a very formulaic marketing plan that's going to come out and look similar to every industry. So clearly, we have an issue that AI is not generating something creative. I'm intrigued, it thinks the electrical infrastructure manufacturer is going to get 20% sales growth. You know, that's an interesting number, it seems like a reasonable number. But you know, without knowing the the amount being invested, or the current market share, that's hard to know. And then the semiconductor manufacturer is going to get 15% market share increase. So effectively 50% growth in the first year, why it's 15% or not 20%, who knows, he seems to be random numbers plucked out there. But then given a sort of veneer of authority, by the confidence in which AI tends to present text. So I think we need to be careful about thinking AI can do everything, because sometimes it's just not great.
I mean, there are also other challenges as well, you know, particularly around the fact that AI fundamentally is taking things that's been trained on and reciting them again. So copyright plagiarism, or an issue, we've talked about bland content, some of the data is out of date. Obviously these AI models take a long time to train. And whilst open AI is building models that can be continuously trained. A lot of people are still using the AI models that were trained on a certain date. And so we see this classic art. So you know, that says that chat GPT was trained on a particular date doesn't know anything more recent I'm sure we've all seen that. And ultimately, you know, the thing that everyone's worried about is hallucinations and inaccuracy. And this you know, the researchers think appears to be an issue.
That, actually AI makes stuff up. And it's inherent in the way AI works. So these neural networks work. And here's an example. There's many, many different examples. But here's an example where two lawyers and law firm were fined because they got chat GPT to write a submission, and chat GPT that just literally made up some cases that didn't exist. So it's very easy to use check GPT you see that very confident presentation of what you think of facts, but unless you check them, it's very risky.
So AI has got some drawbacks, but it still has that potential. And I think, you know, we need to look at how people are using AI, in different tools, to, you know, give you the potential of AI without giving the downsides.
So firstly, let's try and understand, you know, what AI is doing. And we're gonna look specifically at the text based models. So this is GPT. So GPT was created by Well, she wasn't created by open AI. But the most recent models were created by open AI. And they are a neural net. So basically a network of connections that tries to mimic how we roughly think the brain works.
The most recent ones are GPT, four, or GPT, 3.5, if you don't want to pay for it, the cost to create these models is huge, you know, potentially 100 million dollars or more in terms of energy and compute time to build GPD for so they're very, very expensive, very complicated. So we're not seeing lots of people create these models, some people are beginning to, but many applications use the standard models. And so many of the AI text applications will use GPT models. And so what we're seeing is underlying, effectively the same brain the same model, but with a different wrapper on it. And so a lot of what we see in tools is people placing wrappers around it, to make it easier to use the API or to make the API deliver better results.
So now we know that, you know, sometimes we're looking at the same thing, just with a different cover. Let's go into what we really care about. And let's go and have a look at the top 10. So this is an absolutely subjective, completely unreasonable and probably not entirely accurate selection of the top 10 AI tools that we felt should be featured in any marketing toolbox.
So the first one is chat GPT. Now, a lot of people talking about chat GP to generate content. And that is exciting and getting chat GPT to write blog posts and things like that is pretty cool. But that's not why we're excited about chat. GPT. I mean, really, there's a couple of things that chat GPT is great at, it's great for helping you answer questions, explaining things. It's fantastic for summarising content. So if you've got meeting notes, you want to summarise it is really good at that. And it's fantastic at analysing data.
And this is something maybe people aren't aware of is chat GPT actually can do some incredible things. So I'm going to try and demo this, and we'll see how this works with with our webinar tool. But hopefully I can do a quick demo of chat GPT doing some analysis.
So what we've got, oops is we've got chat GPT here. This is a painful version. And I think if you see this and you hate Excel, and let's face it, most people in marketing do, you'll suddenly see why people pay for chat GPT. So in the GPT, four model, there's something called advanced data analysis.
And what I've done is I've enabled that advanced data analysis, which lets me upload files. So I'm going to upload a file.
And then I'm going to ask it to do something. So this is a file taken from our Google Analytics data. So it's Google Analytics data. And I'm going to say which sources produce the highest engagement time and have at least one conversion. So those you know, Google Analytics, you know, that typically you set a goal and objective, which is the conversion, and you can measure things like time. So this is gonna say, which sending traffic that not only converts to something we think is valuable, but also has the highest engagement time.
This is something you do in Excel. And as I said, typically people are not super excited about trying to do these sorts of analysis in Excel. And so what it's doing is it's going to churn through it's going to try and work out the data set. You'll notice I haven't told it anything about the data. So what it's doing is it's reading the data. And it's trying to understand that you can see here chat GPT tries to understand the data. And then hopefully, in a couple of seconds, it's going to give me an overview of what are the most engaged sources. So what's driving web traffic to our site that is very engaged when it's on our site, but also creates a conversion.
So here we go, sorry, I can't make GPT run any quicker, it actually tells you how it's going to do it, it's going to do some filtering and sorting. So you actually understand how it's working this out, which again, is really useful.And we just have to wait a second.
And here we see chat, GPT has done the analysis. And it's found out what sources produce the highest engagement time. And this is kind of interesting, because actually being is producing slightly longer engagement than Google, whether it's enough to actually be significant is something we need to dial, dial down into, and find out. But you know, first thing we've learned from here is actually being produces traffic that stays slightly longer on our website than Google.
And then we've got, you know, systems that are sending out our press releases, we've got referrals from websites, we've got some direct traffic, etc, etc. I can stop this going now. And I can also show something else. So what I can do is say, well, actually, you know, I love the fact Excel draws graphs, but I don't like Excel. So I'm just gonna see if I can say, create a bar chart of the top 10 engagement times. You can see again, it's going to sit there and work for a little bit. And then all things being equal, we should be able to see the top 10 engagement times.
And chat GPT is not being quick today, which is not helping in the webinar.
And there you go. So you've now got a bar chart, you can cut and paste into a presentation, you haven't had to do anything complicated, you've literally just got to tell it what it wants, and chat GPT produces it. So hopefully, this has given a few hints into what Chappie GPT can do. That is a bit beyond the standard chatting.
We have some other applications as well. So you know, one of the things we really like is the tools that place wrappers around the GPT model to make it easier to generate content. So chat GPT tends to generate, you know, very similar very bland content, you can write longer queries, but products like Jasper, or writer or Freezy, they all have a structure. And I will just very quickly show you that structure now from Jasper. So if I jump into Jasper, you can see that Jasper here I've logged in. It offers a range of different templates. And so obviously, you can type into chat GPT, you can ask it to generate different pieces of content. But if for example, I wanted to generate some Google ads, I can click on ads, I can click on Google ads. And what it's going to do is it's going to be able to generate some different content. So I could, for example, say marketing, AI tools webinar, and it pulls best for b2b marketers to use. And you can have any sort of tone of voice you'd like.
I'm going to actually pick something I've custom done, which is tone of voice that is similar to our website. This is one of the things that's really neat about these writing tools is they can match your tone of voice. We could have some examples, but I'm just going to click generate content. And in a second, you'll see that we've generated both headlines and descriptions, all compliant with Google in terms of number of character counts, and just a little bit easier and quicker than trying to use chat GPT to do the same thing. As I mentioned, you know, these these are typically tweaked versions, the GPT model anyway, so they're basically the same content, but it's just going to make it easier for you. And if you're looking to try these writer is one of the ones that has a really good free trial and free tier. So it's a very easy thing to try.
Okay, we've done a couple of demos let's actually crack on and try and look at some more of these tools and move a bit quicker.
Grammarly is a tool that actually has some AI in it. And I'd also recommend trying Hemingway, which is an online tool as well Hemingway app.
And what it does is they just help you write. So sometimes we have to write ourselves, check GPT isn't gonna do it, nor is Jasper nor is writer, but we make mistakes. So how can we fix mistakes? Grammarly is obviously great. Hemingway is really good at aims to make content more readable and more impactful. Based upon the way Hemingway wrote. However, it doesn't necessarily mean it picks great content.
So you know, a little bit of Charles Dickens here. And you can see that Hemingway just basically highlights the whole lot saying it's hard to read. It is true how that Dickens isn't necessarily the easiest thing to read. And maybe in business, we want to do this, but obviously use these tools, with a little bit of common sense.
However, they are great for using if you have written something, and you just want to get it checked.
The next one is Dall-E. You know, we all need a picture or an image every now and then, even if it is a bitmap image of a painter painting a painting, as I've asked for, here, from Dall-E. And one of the interesting things as well as Adobe is really getting into AI for image generation. And if you have a design team, Adobe, Firefly is a fascinating product to use. It can do things like, you know, effectively expand a photo beyond the frame. You know, obviously, it's making it up. It's trying to imagine what it is. But it's got some incredible capabilities that I really recommend using. So definitely look at Dall-E as being, you know, or stable diffusion or Firefly as being a tool. One thing to bear in mind, of course, is that there is a risk of copyright breaches in the images just just as there is in text when you generate. And actually I mean, the CEO of the company that runs stably fusion.
He actually said they don't know how many copyright images they've used and absorbed into their model, but they know it's in the hundreds of millions. So there's a huge amount of copyright material in there. And there's a real question of what happens if you do get some content that uses copyright content.
Also, in the US, it's been decided that AI Generated Content can't be copyrighted See, can't own the AI generated image in other countries that something's still going through the courts. And I think we're going to see a lot around copyright as we go forward with AI.
The next one, I've picked his Salesforce Einstein partly because our Head of Business Development and Marketing Hanna loves that little cartoon Einstein they use both on the page and in their promotion. But actually, I think it's indicative indicative of what's happening with a lot of tools. So they are applying AI in Salesforce, to do all sorts of things. So this is an example of actually a prediction of what the engagement is going to be like on an email you send. So it's actually predicting whether people are likely to open the email or click on the email, and how effective it's going to be. You know, the other thing that people are using a lot of AI around is scoring leads and CRMs to try and decide whether people are showing intent based on their behaviour, whether it be clicking emails or behaviour on the site. And then rank who are the most likely contacts to become customers. And I think, you know, this is something that's going to be embedded. Basically, it's every CRM and marketing automation platform we see going forward.
I mentioned chatbots. I mean, we all love or we hate, you know, a good Chatbot. You know, chat base is one that's very heavily involved in using AI to have an automatic chat bot. So it's drift. That's another very popular platform. But we're also seeing marketing automation platforms. You know, HubSpot, for example, has put a lot of effort into its chatbots and other platforms beginning to offer this chatbot functionality. So I think more and more, we're gonna see chat bots being deployed. I did find an article on the top five AI chat bots, in b2b. When I was doing some prep for this. It was written about 18 months ago, so it's a little bit old. And interestingly, I think four out of the five websites had actually taken the AI chatbot off the site. So one of the things we are seeing is training these chat bots is difficult. And I think the tools to train the chat bots. There'll be something that's developed over the next, you know, couple of years. But at the moment, it is hard to deploy an AI chatbot in a b2b situation where you've got complex products and lots of things to cover.
Chatbase seems to be one of the hot b2b marketing tools at the moment. And it's all about trying to understand which of your accounts are showing intent. And looking on the public internet as well as on your marketing, to find out which accounts seem to be doing things that suggests they could be a customer. And it's a great way of prioritising your accounts. And we were talking about this earlier in our podcasts that Hannah and I was, we're recording. And if you don't subscribe to the marketing automation moment podcast, and you use marketing automation, I'll just put a little plug in for that podcast. Now. Of course, one of the issues tools is that inevitably, marketers focus on the contacts that are labelled as either in decision or purchase phase. So almost by definition, they're going to have a higher conversion rate because they get more focus. But even so, having said that, tools like six cents seem to be pretty good at identifying, you know, which accounts are likely to buy, and which you can probably leave and just nurture in the background.
Contents, obviously another area. And we've talked briefly about generating content. But there's some fantastic AI tools, market news and surfer SEO, the both use of SEO, both use an AI to identify opportunities. And here you can see, basically, market news has tried to look at, you know, opportunities for generating content to rank for search terms around telescopes. And what we're seeing now is actually more and more of these tools are important, because they do so much analysis of the competition, and actually helps you generate content where you have a reasonable chance of ranking highly. So these tools, I think, are going to become more and more popular as we go forward.
Once you've got the content, you've ranked high in SEO, you've got someone on the website, you want them to convert. And there are a number of tools that will sit on your website and help people to convert by popping up when they think someone is interested and ready to engage. Our favourite is path monkey is actually run on the Napier website. And it's great for website engagements. And it also generates some good leads. So we've actually seen, you know, potential customers come through path monk, because something's popped up and said, you know, would you like some more information about this. It's a very complicated tool in terms of, you know, the way it works the way it tries to analyse customer journeys through the website. But in terms of ease of use, it's really easy. You just create what they call micro experiences. And then Pathmark tests, the different micro experiences to see what works, at what point. So it's a very, very easy way to do it.
Once once you've done all these you go on the website, people are now wondering, I think you know, where are we going to go next, what's going to be the number one AI tool for marketers. And this might be a bit controversial. But we've rated Google ads as number one. And the reason we've rated Google ads as number one is Google has put a lot of AI behind Google ads. But it's all kind of hidden, you get these recommendations, Google will run the headlines, the descriptions that it reckons works best.
And it's all kind of magic in the background. And I think this is where AI is going to go is there's going to be more and more AI and systems. But it's going to be less obvious. It's just going to be sat there doing things helping you be more efficient.
And you know, the interesting thing with Google is there's clearly some rules, and whether they've been worked out through experience or whether they're rules that the Google engineers have put in, you know, that they're pretty obvious, you know, longer headlines are better. And if you run Google ads, you'll find the closer you can get to that 30 character limit, the more Google's gonna like that headline. So, you know, it's interesting to see what what happens, you can kind of read those rules and make them simplistic, but there's a lot of AI going on in the background, to test different headlines and find out what works. So we really, really like Google ads, we think it's an indication of where AI is gonna go. And probably a lot of you are happily using this AI without worrying about it.
Now, of course, we've had our number one, our winner, the number one of the top 10 of marketing tools. But those of you who sat on a presentation will know that a Napier we always like to do something to give you a little bonus. So one of the things we wanted to talk about is building your own AI tool.
Putting around AI. So this is all about trying to use AI to create things that are going to be more human. And so what we've got is we've got an example here, where we will have a look. We go to our spreadsheet. And initially we've just got a few contacts in here that I've put in. But actually, if we unhide, these rows, you see, we've got a huge number of contacts. And our boss has told us, I want to know the industry, the employees and the CEO of each contact. Now there is an extension, that will actually take chat GPS API, and interface it into Google Sheets. So we've configured this extension, and we could do some cool things. So we can type in briefly identify the industry and then obviously, just like any other spreadsheet, we give it a cell to look at.
Hopefully, it's gonna tell me the industry, technology electronics. So that's not bad, it's pretty good. We can also do things like say estimate, number of employee per company. And again, we'll give it the company name. Hopefully, it will tell us roughly how many employees are there. It's interesting, actually, it's come back with 137,000 employees written out not very helpful if we want to process and sort.
So what we can do is, we can actually do a more detailed inquiry and say, provide it as a number without commas. And that should just give me the number of employees. And it does. And then lastly, we can actually say, who is the CEO of this company. With any luck, Tim Cook will pop up here.
And there you go. So you can see that this is a fantastic use of chat GPT. And obviously, once we've done this, we can just drag it down. And we are loading data.
And we can see there's some errors coming up. But slowly, what it will do is it will populate all the chat GPT answers here. So if you've got data processing, it can be really, really useful to actually go out and get data and find information, just simply by using chat, GPT and a spreadsheet. So hopefully that save some people some time in the future. If you're interested in it, you just need to Google GPT for sheets, instal it on your Google account, and it will work.
So hopefully a nice little tool if people are going to do some data analysis of customers.
The last thing to say is what's next? So I think the biggest question is what's going to happen to generative AI performance, we saw an unbelievable leap in performance in the space of about six months, with chat GPT. And now we've seen, you know, perhaps a few months of stability. The question is, you know, can AI keep getting better and better? Or is it only going to sit at the current level? And I don't have the answer to that. There's lots of arguments to say it can get better. There's lots of arguments that say, you know, we're using basically all the training data that's available, and the performance will stall and it won't keep getting better, I suspect we're going to see the rate of increase slow down. It's been crazy over the last few months. But I think equally, we're going to see some ongoing performance improvements. So these AI tools are going to become better and better.
But even if it stalls, I mean, even if we look at the worst case, and we're at PKI, at the moment, nothing's gonna get better. Hopefully, you've seen that AI tools can be very helpful. Hopefully you understand that you're going to have to experiment and try different things. And if you want some information on any of these tools, or you want me to go through how we did some of the demos, you know, feel free to contact me. But the last thing I think is, you know, even with the abilities that AI has today, AI is going to be embedded everywhere in different marketing tools. I don't think we're anywhere close to having an AI Marketing Robot, you just say go creating a campaign. As you can see, they tend to be very formulaic from the eyes at the moment. But in terms of you know, accelerating what you do, making things easier, you know, just that example of the spreadsheet where we found the industry, incredibly useful thing to do. So, AI is going to be everywhere. I think people use it, they're going to get much more out of their marketing than people who don't
Don't use AI because they're going to have that little help. The ideas, the content creation, the suggestions about you know, where the leads are coming from, all of that is going to boost. So hopefully, I've excited you about AI, you feel like, you want to try some of the tools. What I'm gonna do now is open up for questions. So I'm really interested if anyone has any questions, and they'd like to cover them on the call, please feel free to put them in the chat. And I'd be very happy to answer any questions and cover anything you'd like me to address.
So I'm just going to have a look at the chat. Okay, so we have a couple of questions. So the first question is, that is a great question. So it's really good. It's from Rachel. And it's, you know, we've seen some great AI tools. But the reality is, is most people don't have time to experiment with hundreds of different tools. So what are the top three tools that people should use at the moment?
I think that's a really interesting question. It depends upon what you're trying to achieve, and what your objectives are. So if you're somebody who's very heavily into content, I would absolutely look at some of the AI tools that help you with SEO, help you, you know, identify the keywords, generate content, find those opportunities for content. And they'll also help you write the content as well, they're starting to introduce generative AI in there. I think if you're somebody who processes a lot of data, I would probably at the moment, LOOK AT chat GPT. So chat, GPT can not only do the data analysis, I showed you, you know, pulling information out of big data files, but chat GPT can also help you in Excel, you know, enrich data. So I think, from data that that would be really important. And then the last thing is, I think if I was, you know, more focused around marketing automation, or CRM, then probably what I'd be doing is I'd be spending time looking at the AI features that my CRM platform or my marketing automation platform had.
Because I think, you know, we are going to see a lot of different features. I mean, Salesforce announced that Dreamforce that they were introducing Einstein one with all these features, including, you know, the AI lead scoring, and within a couple of weeks act on was talking about very similar AI lead scoring in their their tools. So I think it's about you know, using the tools you have, and not necessarily, you know, going out and trying to find lots of other tools.
And have one other question here.
Okay, really simple one. Will there be a recording of the webinar? Yes, absolutely. We do always make a recording of our webinars. So our webinars are on demand. So if anybody has any thing they'd like to look at, again, you will be sent a link with the information of how to access the on demand webinar.
So I'm very aware of time we try and keep these webinars to about 30 minutes or so we're run over time now. So what I'm going to do is, I'm gonna call it a day, I'm gonna say, hopefully, I've helped you understand some AI tools. If anyone does have any more questions, or think of anything that they haven't asked yet, please do send me an email, email addresses Mike at Napier b2b dot com. And I'd be really happy that walk you through how to set up some of these tools, or just chat and answer questions. So thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. And good luck. I hope AI helps you do your job. In less time you get maybe a little bit more break or a longer weekend over the next few weeks from using AI thanks very much.
Future Horizons Shares Report into State of Semiconductor Market
As B2B technology marketers, it's important that we stay up-to-date with the trends and outlook of technology markets. It's always great to be able to share positive news, and so we were delighted to receive the opportunity from Future Horizons, to share an extract from its report on the state of the Semiconductor market:
Executive Overview
August’s WSTS Blue Book showed Q2-2023 sales rebounding strongly, up 4.2 percent vs. Q1, heralding the end of the downturn and welcome news for the beleaguered chip industry.
The really good news, however, was that the downturn bottomed one quarter earlier than previously anticipated. This pull-forward only added a modest US$11 billion to Q2’s US$ 244 billion sales but this was enough to swing Q2’s growth from minus 5.0 percent to plus 4.2 percent.
A small change in the numbers at the start of the year makes a huge difference to the quarterly growth rates and hence the final year-on-year number.
Market Detail
The market turnaround was driven by a dramatic change in the Asia/Pac region, with 5.4 percent month-on-month growth, followed by the US (plus 3.5 percent), Japan (plus 2.1 percent) and Europe (plus 1.8 percent).
On an annualised basis, Q2-2023 was down 17.3 percent vs. Q2-2023, with Asia/Pac down 22.6 percent, the US down 17.9 percent, Japan down 3.5 percent with Europe, the only region showing year-on-year growth, at plus 7.6 percent.
The near-term market outlook is starting to look a lot stronger, driven by the positive impact of the inventory burn, stronger than expected resilience in the global economy, especially in the USA, and a seemingly robust demand boost from the emerging AI market.
Forecast Summary
Looking ahead to the second half of the year, the overall industry consensus has now (mostly) acknowledged a likely double-digit decline for 2023 vs. the ‘positive growth’ positions predicted this time last Year.
Future Horizons stood alone in the crowd when we first published our 2023 double-digit decline forecast 15 months ago in May 2022, likewise too when we stood by that number at our January 2023 Industry Update Webinar when all others, bar one, were predicted a very mild downturn followed by a sharp V-shaped rebound in 2024.
The stronger than expected second-quarter results will now push our 2023 forecast beyond the bull end of our January 2023 forecast scenario, but our longer-term concerns, re the still ongoing uncertain economic outlook and the excess CapEx spending, show no signs yet of abatement.
Over-capacity is the industry’s number one enemy, depressing ASPs and condemning the industry to low dollar value growth. An economic slowdown will nip any recovery in the bud.
As one of the most respected semiconductor industry analysts across the globe, Future Horizons report provides some fantastic detail on what's currently happening in the semiconductor market. Future Horizons will be hosting a webinar on Tuesday 12th September at 3pm BST, covering the full report, with an update to their outlook for 2023-2024. Registration for the webinar is currently open, and be accessed here.Â
For any further details, please reach out to the Future Horizons team.Â
Eve Holland- The View of a Student Joining Napier for Work Experience
Napier recently hosted Eve Holland a student from Havant College, who joined us for a week to experience the world of B2B PR and marketing.
Find out how she got on during her week of work experience placement and the key things she took away. Â
As encouraged by my college, I ventured into the business world and secured myself a summer work experience placement at Napier. I had no idea what to expect but was pleasantly surprised when I received an email the week before outlining my entire itinerary for the week. Sufficiently organised and supported by the Head of Business Development and Marketing, Hannah, my time here has been both informative and enjoyable. I have received constant support and contact with everyone working at Napier, whether that is online via teams or in the office. They have kept me busy by providing tasks to write in various formats, attending teams calls with team members, sitting in on weekly training sessions and interacting with other members of the team.
What have I got up to?
During my week here I have completed a variety of tasks such as researching Napier’s competitors, writing case studies and press releases with the support of the team. I have also practised creating content, such as writing an article on B2B formatting, designing landing pages on SharpSpring and writing social media posts. I also had the opportunity to join Mike and Hannah on a trip up to London for a business meeting and a Turtl event. Throughout the week I have also been given guidance on creating my LinkedIn profile and expanding my contacts within the industry both from Napier and beyond.
What have I learnt?
By being surrounded by hardworking people in a new industry, I have expanded my language and knowledge of the B2B world, purely by being in the presence of people who have expertise within it. For example, the term lead generation is thrown around often, a concept I never knew until this week. I have also learnt skills that can apply to the wider world, such as strategy vs tactics, establishing the difference between the two. In terms of industry skills, I have spent time navigating CRM software such as Sharpspring and the process of creating and editing a podcast through programs such as Squadcast, descript and audacity. I have also encountered Turtl’s interactive, analytical software that is super effective for creating visually exciting content to personalise to any audience. With Napier’s Creative Services Manager Rob, I’ve also been able to develop my skills and knowledge on different Adobe software, learning new features and programs I didn’t know even existed, something I will definitely be playing around with in my own time!
What has been the most interesting?
I have found my day out in London to be the most interesting part of my week as I was able to see the interactions between different industries within B2B. Turtl’s event fascinated me as I got to hear how different businesses and industries use their software and interpret the tool in different ways to market to different audiences, known and unknown. I found the whole day to be an enlightening experience as I was able to speak to multiple people, many of whom were strangers, about my future, whether that regarded university, career choices or life generally. I received varied pieces of advice that have really opened my mind to the possibilities of my future.
Do I see a future in marketing?
I enjoyed my week in the B2B industry and could see myself doing this in the future. Marketing provides an opportunity to implement varied and exciting tactics, and I particularly enjoyed the side of the role that involves graphic design, social media, podcasts and journalistic writing.
Thank you, Napier, for a great week introducing me to the world of marketing!
Mike in the News - Business and Marketing Advice
Our managing director, Mike, has been sharing his advice in several articles recently. He has been asked by a number of journalists to give advice about marketing and business. Some of the highlights include:
- Discussing the importance of having a business plan in the Venture Smarter article about How to Fund Your LLC?
- Giving a shout out to the benefits of email newsletters in the Forbes article 15 Agency Leaders Share Go-To Marketing Channels For A B2B Business.
- Being selected as an "agency pro" by Forbes to give advice for younger people in the marketing industry in 19 Agency Pros’ Tips To Help Rookies Reach Their Same Level Of Success.
Keep an eye on this blog for more of Mike in the media!
Napier Shortlisted For 2023 Electronics Industry Awards- Vote Now!
We are delighted to share that Napier has again been shortlisted for the Electronics Industry Awards (EIA) in the 'Most Outstanding PR Agency’ award category, and has also been shortlisted for the Instrumentation Excellence Awards (IEAs) in the category of ‘PR Agency of the Year’.
As a team, we love the work we do and strive to design, develop and implement award-winning campaigns for our clients. Voting is now open for both awards, and we'd like to ask for your support in voting for Napier. It only takes a few seconds to cast your vote, and can be done by:
- Clicking here to vote for Napier in 'Most Oustanding PR Agency' category at the Electronics Industry AwardsÂ
- Clicking here to vote for Napier in 'PR Agency of the Year' category at the Instrumentation Excellence AwardsÂ
Thank you so much for your support, and we'd also like to congratulate several of our clients who have been shortlisted for award categories this year.
Good luck to everyone shortlisted, and we look forward to attending the award ceremonies later this year.
Will AI Kill Your Website?
Ian Poole, Editor and Owner of Electronics Notes shares his views on how AI could affect website traffic and content marketing in this guest blog post.
There is a lot of talk about AI and chatbots like ChatGPT, as well as AI-based search that's being introduced by Bing and will be introduced by Google.
There is a lot that is unclear about how this new search technology will affect the Internet, but what is clear is that it will revolutionize the Internet and provide a cataclysmic change to the way we all use search and websites.
It will undoubtedly present an existential threat to many websites and it is clear that in a year's time, many of the popular websites we have come to rely on will have ceased to exist.
It will also have a major impact on search marketing, and many of the currently held views will have to change.
We've already started to see small changes. Over recent years, there has been a growing trend for search engines like Google to improve their search experience. One major element has been in giving a short answer at the top of search results, albeit with a link to the website for further reference.
This provides many people with the answer they want, so there's no need to go any further to find out any more. This has resulted in many top websites seeing significant falls in traffic, mine included. This is not the only reason by far, but it has been a significant reason for large drops in traffic seen by many sites.
AI takes this a huge step further. Already ChatGPT, and other websites like phind.com give extensive and complete answers to queries. I did a search on Phind asking what a superhet radio is and it returned a 700 word answer giving a very good summary. Sadly, it did not reference my Electronics Notes website which is ranked number 3 on Google behind Analog Devices and Wikipedia, but interestingly Phind used a few video descriptions as the sources for its answer.
Having answers like this is far more convenient for the searcher who only has to perform the search, and there is then no need to go to a website that may or may not provide the answer that is needed. Using the traditional approach to perform a search, the search engine would provide a variety of websites that were appropriate and the user would visit these and synthesise their own answer. With AI all of this will be done, and only very few people will need to visit any websites.
In their recent presentation in May 2023, Google showcased what their new AI-based search will look like - it is expected to be launched later this year, but no date has been given.
Again, this new technology presented a much fuller answer to the queries, and as a result many people will not want or even need to go any further. Interestingly Cathy Edwards from Google who was giving the presentation stated that Google will put lots of links to relevant websites so people can easily click through. She said they wanted to keep the overall ecosystem strong and healthy. But let's face it, who is going to click through to a website when they already have the answer!
It is interesting that even Google, which says that the introduction of AI to search will have a huge impact on the Internet, cannot predict the outcome and the effect it will have on websites.
However, one conundrum for the search giants is that they rely on a vast number of independent expert websites from which to draw their search answers. However, if they kill them off because they don't refer visitors to them, then ultimately the answers they give will not be able to draw on such a wide field of expertise and information and they will be less informed.
Leaving aside the problems for the search giants, the main issue is about the existential threat posed to all websites by AI-based search.
With many publishers already finding it difficult to return profits from their digital outlets through advertising, this will be the final straw. News publications in particular have had to put paywalls in place in order to try to gain sufficient revenue to keep their sites viable.
Many smaller publications will not have this option and it is certain that very many will go to the wall.
The issue is particularly important for websites that rely heavily on search for their traffic. In fact, many websites keep a very keen eye on all the Google search algorithm updates and many report huge changes in traffic as a result. So, it is very important to them.
The main challenge is to know what to do. At Electronics Notes we have been trying to prepare for this, and we are experimenting with a variety of new ideas. Although the outcome of these cannot be confirmed until after the Google AI-based search engine is released (most sites get the majority of their search traffic from Google), one of the clear messages is that all websites will need to rely less on search traffic and more on other sources.
In order to maximise what little traffic might come from search engines, all the pundits say that the best options are to have high quality content that is well written and properly optimised.
Although it is difficult to predict what will work and what won't, it is clear that all websites should look very carefully at what will happen in the near future. Also, the concept of content marketing might need to be updated. Whatever the situation, a good, well thought through plan is needed to ensure that the effects of this cataclysmic change can be weathered, and hopefully they might even bring some benefits to websites.
A Napier Webinar: Will AI Take Your Marketing Job?
AI tools like ChatGPT have received a lot of attention lately. From social media to blogs, AI tools and the capabilities they have is being discussed everywhere you look. But will AI tools truly change the way we approach marketing? Could they even take your job?
We address this in our on-demand webinar 'Will AI Take Your Marketing Job?', as explore the advantages of AI, but also the limitations marketers can face when using these tools. We cover:
- AI technology for marketing
- How to take advantage of AI
- How good at marketing is AI today?
- Overview of the best AI tools
- What the future might hold
Register to view our webinar on demand by clicking here, and why not get in touch to let us know if our insights helped you.
Napier Webinar: ‘Will AI Take Your Marketing Job?’ Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard
Hi, and welcome to our latest webinar from Napier, where we're going to ask whether AI is going to take your marketing job. So it's great to see a lot of interest for this webinar. And what we're going to do is we're going to do a very quick whistlestop tour through AI. And look at how it's affecting marketing, and really trying to understand the implications for people who are involved in marketing.
So, in terms of our agenda, we're firstly going to ask whether we should worry about AI. I mean, maybe it just isn't that big an issue. We'll then do a little bit of a dive into what AI actually is, and what we mean, when we talk about AI. And in particular, I think a lot of the hype at the moment has been around generative AI. So we'll talk about that. We'll discuss whether AI works, I think that's very important. Depending on who you talk to, there'll be very different views about the quality of the content that AI generates. We'll spend a little bit of time talking about chat GPT. And then other writing tools. Obviously generated text is one of the areas where AI has been incredibly successful. And this is very broadly applicable across a wide range of different marketing disciplines.
So we'll take a look at some chat GPT. And writing will give you a little word of caution about some of the issues surrounding AI. We'll look at what I can do that's beyond, you know, generative AI. So this is going to look at some of the things that you can do with AI, that perhaps is going to help speed up other aspects of your job other than creating content. And lastly, a summary. And I would very strongly ask anyone who's got questions, please put them in the chat as we go along. And we'll deal with all the questions at the end, if that's okay. So firstly, I mean, there's obviously been a lot of hype about AI. We've all seen, you know, the news about how massively important AI is. But the question is, you know, should we worry. And I guess, you know, one of the things we can look at is the impact on jobs. And AI, according to Goldman Sachs could replace equipment of 300 million jobs. And if we look about what they were saying, it was saying that the report that they wrote was saying about a quarter of the work tasks in the US and Europe could be replaced. And interestingly, the US and Europe are in line to get hit worse than most other areas in the in the world. And that's because there's far fewer manual jobs. And obviously, AI is not going to take over manual jobs at the moment, although robotics is doing a good job of, you know, coming in and doing similar disruptive things to manual jobs.
But I think what was interesting was as part of that report, when the BBC reported it, and they talked to some experts in AI, and they pointed out that actually, it might not be a case of fewer jobs, it might be the face of the case that there's more competition, so you've got competition from other people, and competition from AI. And here we see a professor suggesting the journalists will face more competition, and that will drive down wages. And the analogy they gave was the introduction of GPS, and platforms like Uber, and that actually resulted in lower wages for taxicab drivers. Not fewer drivers. In fact, if anything, it resulted in more drivers over a period of time. So it's going to be very interesting. But clearly AI is going to have a very big impact on what we do. And that might be in terms of reducing the number of jobs it might be providing competition to what you do. And that competition clearly can drive down wages. Now, I'm actually okay. Because I don't know if people listening to this webinar know but one of my hobbies is short track speedskating. And I asked chat GPT about short track speed skaters, he gave me an excellent response, listing some of the best short track speed skaters ever. But of course, I had a bit of an ego. So I decided I was going to tell chap GPT that I should be one of the best short track speed skaters in its list. Now, this doesn't happen every time if you want to go and try it sometimes check GPT claims and it's never heard of Mike Maynard and however much I try and persuade Chet GPT that I am a good speedskater It completely blanks me. But other times it comes up with his completely made up story about this Canadian short track, speedskating called Mike Maynard, who, as far as I can tell, never existed only exists in chat, GPS, memory, and yet, you can see, chat GPT has very confidently given details about my career as a Canadian short track speed skater.
And I think this is something that's very important before we, you know, really rush into AI, and all get panicked, AI makes mistakes, and actually AI probably makes worse mistakes than people do. Because AI is always incredibly confident. And so whilst Unfortunately, my career as a Canadian is short track speed skaters entirely false. The reality is, is that AI is not going to be able to completely replace humans, because there's a risk that AI gets it wrong. And in fact, there's even a term for this, it's called hallucinations. So AI is hallucinating something that really didn't exist. So now, hopefully, we're a little bit less worried. Although we've been told it can impact jobs, we know that AI is not perfect.
So let's have a look at what AI is. And basically, AI or it's also called machine learning is really simulating human intelligence. And typically, what it does is it uses a neural network. So you feed this network data, the network is modified based upon the data. And then it can process new data in the same way. And the reason we do this is it's modelled on a very simplistic understanding of how the brain works, where the brain house neurons, and those neurons are connected together. And those connections are made stronger or weaker, depending on our experiences. And that's what learning is, very crudely speaking. So neural networks attempt to replicate this mathematically. And basically, a neural network is a number of nodes or neurons, as they will be in the brains. And there's input layers, output layers, and then there's a hidden layer in the middle. And there can be multiple hidden layers. So if we look at chat GPT, one of the big things that chat GPT did was when moving from GPT, to GPT. Three was they massively increased the number of hidden layers, and that gave a much more powerful neural network. And all you're doing is you're feeding numbers, which represent anything from text to images in one side. And the other side is outputting numbers, which can then be turned back into text and images.
So it's a very abstract thing. And this is one of the challenges of neural networks and machine learning is that actually, when you build a neural network, you don't have a deterministic understanding of how it's working. And so it can be very hard to know exactly what's going on. And this is one of the reasons why you have these hallucinations. And they're very difficult to deal with if you're building a neural network. So that's all very technical. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get my friend Shrek to explain it. And Shrek had a conversation with Donkey and talked about ogres and tried to explain that Ogres are like onions. And it's not that ogres make you cry, or ogre stink, or indeed that they go brown in the sun. Really, the thing is, is layers, onions have layers. Ogres have layers.
So they both have layers, and layers in Shrek mind was complexity. And that is exactly the same in neural networks. So basically, a neural network, the number of layers is very important that impacts the complexity. Although not everybody likes onions as Donkey pointed out, and probably not everybody likes layers as well. And one of the things we're talking about is why those layers make it difficult to build these complex neural networks. So let's get into what a neural network can actually do. I mean, we've had a very brief theory around how it's built. But let's see how we can use AI. And so AI that creates things is called generative AI. And what you'll see is you'll see throughout some of these slides, you'll see images and most of the images in the slides from now have actually been created using generative AI. So I've used darly, which is an image generator a lot of people are familiar with. Obviously, there's other ones like stable diffusion, and you can see it generates some interesting images as we go through But although we've generated images, it's interesting, this looks at funding for European AI startups. And if you look at it, the vast majority of startups have been funded around text generation.
And the reason for that is, it's now relatively simple to generate text that is more or less equivalent to human quality text. And that text can be used in a very wide range of different applications. So you can, for example, create blog posts or articles from Ai generated text, you can also generate sales emails. And you know, something that people involved in PR may have seen is there's already PR systems offering to do AI pitches to journalists, I'm sure journalists have seen it as well and feeling terrified about the onslaught of spam they're going to get from machines, which of course is going to be one of the challenges is that creating volume with any of these AI tools, whether it's volume of text or volume of images, is trivial. It's the quality that really matters. So anyway, most people are focused on text. And a lot of startups are focused on tax because they're using the same model as chap. GPT. So, for those of you that don't know, there was an organisation formed called Open AI, very crudely formed to make sure that AI didn't do bad things to humans. And, and they created these GPT models started with GPT.
One, we're now at GPT. Four. And these models are basically what's called large language models. So they're very big neural networks that can actually create text. So a large language model is a neural network that's typically been trained with large amounts of data has many parameters. And it basically does self supervised learning. So you feed it data, the neural network kind of learns from that data. Or, to put it more simply, what the neural network does, is it takes a lot of data, so a lot of text. And it tries to use that text to predict what the next most likely word is if a human was replying. So if you put in a query, the neural network is trying to predict the next most likely word, and then the next one on the next one. Interestingly, though, if you do that the responses sound very automated. So actually, what happens with neural networks, and this is exactly what happens with chat GPT is it will produce the most likely word around about four out of five types. And then one out of five times approximately, it'll produce something that's, you know, likely, but not the most likely, and that produces a much more natural response. But crudely speaking, chat GPT, and any of these GPT based models, they're returning what they think or what they aim to be the average response.
So one of the first things to say is, if you're concerned about your job, and whether AI is gonna take it, if you're above average, you've actually got an advantage over AI, so you should feel confident. So hopefully, at least half of the people listening to this webinar are now feeling a little more relaxed, a little more confident about the situation. So large language models are very important and a chat GPT. And the GPT models that underpin it are probably the most talked about models, in terms of AI today. So one of the issues we've had is that open AI has gone from being open as it named suggested. And actually, it was designed to be a nonprofit to being a company for profits, basically driven by the success of chat GPT. So we know how GPT three was trained. And in fact, there's a table here on the slide that explains exactly where that data came from. So if you look at it around about 85% of the data that was used to change, chat GPT was from the web. So that's something called common crawl, which is a database of text from the website, from websites online. It's something called Web text two, which is a smaller database of website information, and Wikipedia. And those three things formed about 85%. And then about 15% of the training data came from books, there were two book datasets, book one and book two. As you can see, whilst AI people create very, very clever neural networks, they're not great at branding and naming. And this was the GPT three training set. And it allegedly cost around about $12 million in terms of computer time to train GPG, three GPT four, as I say, open AI has now become for profit, they've not revealed how they've trained GPT four. But Sam Altman, who's the CEO, has actually said it was probably over $100 million to do that training. And this is very interesting, because anyone who's used chat GPT and asked for up to date information will have found that chap GPT says, oh, no, I was trained about a year ago. And I don't know anything that's more recent. And obviously, any of these neural networks, it's difficult to keep retraining them, because the cost of doing that is incredibly high. So you're talking $100 million. That's compute time.
And obviously, a lot of compute time actually is electricity to power those computers. So it's not necessarily particularly environmentally friendly. And it's not cheap to keep retraining. So it's likely moving forward that what we'll see is we'll see a lot of these large language models being trained on a periodic basis, rather than being continually trained. If anyone's use Bing, and use the chat tool on bing, bing does something slightly different in that it actually runs a web search and feeds the data into the chat into the GPT engine, which then produces the Bing chat output. So we're seeing basically, what would be if you like the first half of a page of big results actually being presented as pros, rather than being presented as a list of websites. So it's really using that GPT engine as much as possible to present results, rather than necessarily to go find that information. That's different from asking Chet GPT a question where it relies on its training. So hopefully, we've not gone into too much detail on AI and what's happening with AI. Let's look at how it can be used in marketing?
Well, the first thing is, is there's been a lot of issues with using AI. And whether that's Amazon realising that they took all their prejudices, when they were hiring, and programme them into the AI they used as a recruiting tool, all the way through to CNET, using AI to generate articles on personal finance, and getting a lot of plagiarism identified in that article, or in those articles. So there are problems with using AI. And a lot of people have tried to use AI and failed. But what I'd like to try and do is I'd like to try and investigate whether you can spot AI. And so what we do is we've got a n, two images of the dog here, and I've popped up a poll. So you should see that in your right hand side. So please go to the poll on the right hand side and tell us which one is real. One of the dogs is real. And one of the dogs is generated by AI. And we'll run this for about another 10 seconds or so if you can put your your votes in.
So thank you very much everyone. This this is very interesting, because the one thing we can say is that people are certainly struggling to work out which dog is real and which dog isn't. So 45% think the dog on the left is real. And 55% think that dog on the right is real? Well, the good news is, is that the hive mind of everybody on the call has actually identified the right dog. So just 55 to 45% we actually got the answer, right. So that's good news. But clearly, it's not obvious which one is real and which one isn't. We can do a similar thing if we look at text. So what I'm gonna do is I will get a pull up again for the text. If you can just have a quick skim here. There's text on the left text on the right, so two columns. And one of the columns is real text and one of the columns is AI from chat GPT and I will give everyone about 45 seconds to read the text and try and predict which one is real and which one is AI.
That's great everyone's voting, we've got about another 15 seconds for people to finish reading and work out, which is which.
This is very interesting, we're a little bit more confident here. So 58% of people actually has gone to 6040. Now it's gonna last voting 60% of people think the text on the left is AI. And 40% of people think the one on the right is AI. And I can tell you, I put this search term into Google. And so one of these is actually the top result in Google. And the other one is AI generated. And the good news is, again, we've got this right, so 60% of you thought that the left one was AI. And you've got that absolute right, the left one was AI. This reflects exactly the results. I've done this same test three times now. And generally speaking, it's about 55 to 60% of the audience, know which one is AI generated, whether it's the image or the text, but you can see that the quality of AI is actually very good, it can fool a lot of people. To be fair, the quality of the human text in this example, perhaps isn't the best quality, but it was at the top result. So now we know it can fool people it can work. Are people using AI in marketing? And the answer is absolutely. I mean, for sure. I think anyone who's been on LinkedIn recently has seen some LinkedIn posts that are maybe less well written or they'd expect, and they're clearly AI generated. But if you look at it, some people are doing some really good work. So on the left hand side, there's an example of an agency.
There's using AI to generate backdrop images. And also, what we're seeing is particularly around programmatic ads, a lot of focus on AI for generating headlines, and body copy, to make it quicker to generate ads. So we're definitely seeing people use this both in terms of releasing products, and also using more general products to drive AI. So this is not coming, this is something that's actually happening now. So let's have a look at some of the tools you can use. So, chat, GPT, I'm sure most people on the call will have at least seen it. It's really good. Because you can do an awful lot of things with chat GPT, it's not great if you want long form or detailed copy. So if you want it to write an essay, it's not fantastic. It can often be a bit simplistic. You know, if you ask it for an agenda, it's probably going to have, you know, opening, it's probably gonna have closing, you know, and a prep two or three bullets that are related to whatever the agenda is for. But it's not necessarily hugely insightful, but it is great, fun and great for generating ideas. And so we asked him to write 10 Google Ads headlines, promoting a webinar that discusses whether AI will take marketing jobs.
And you can see it's actually produced, you know, a really good selection of, of headlines there. So I think it's, you know, clearly able to write good effective headlines, you might not want to use all of them. So future of marketing with AI question mark, probably not the best headline. But certainly in terms of removing writer's block and speeding up the process, we can see chat GPT is really, really effective. And it's definitely a tool that can be used for many different content creation projects. I mentioned it can also be fun as well. And so here we have a press release in cockney rhyming slang, promoting a webinar that discusses if AI will take marketing jobs, so Iliev and generate a Cockney style, sort of East London, press release, great fun, not quite sure how you'd ever use it. But again, it can be kind of amusing. It's also excellent writing songs as well, if you want to get some fun, some song lyrics written. So chat GPT is great. It's probably not great in terms of writing in depth articles. And if you think about it, what chat GPT is doing is it's trying to predict the next word. It's not really thinking in terms of structure of an article. And so what's happened is there's a number of different products that are now available that are designed to help people write long form content. And so two of the most well known are writer and Jasper and what they do is they introduced this concept of structure. So, you know, very simply, you can go to the tool you can say, I want to write an article about out whether I will take marketing jobs, initially, the tool will produce a list of bullet points. So the key points you want to make, you can then edit those bullet points. And then what it will do is it will write paragraphs or sections around each bullet. So you basically build a structure by working with the AI tool. And then you produce the content. And this produces much more engaging and interesting content, then you get if you just asked chat GPT to produce an article.
So the question is, do people actually read it, though, so we decided to try it. And what we did was we actually posted a range of content on our blog. So we posted content that was written by experienced writers. So basically, some of our PR pros, we posted content that was written by people who don't normally write. So typically our design team, and we posted AI articles. And we measured the time on page for each of these articles. And you can see this kind of a grouping. And the orange ones are to the, to the left, or the least time on page. And the red arrows to the right tend to have more. So clearly, the red is typically better quality than the orange. Now, interestingly, if we actually look at what those arrows mean, the inexperienced writers performed worse than the AI generated content. Now, to be fair, we didn't take raw AI generated content, we use Jasper, it was an interactive process. So we were guiding them the AI. And we also sub edited the content afterwards to make it read better. So in fact, because of the editing and the interaction, it took us almost as long to generate the AI content as it would just write from scratch.
But doing that work makes the AI content more effective, more engaging, than someone like a designer writing and our designers are not, you know, terrible writers. I mean, there's some good content there. And experienced writers starting from scratch still, on average did better than AI. But you can see that whether an experienced writer starts from scratch, or starts with an AI, it's actually getting very close. And I think that's very important. One of the things I would say is these numbers would probably be very different if we just use the raw AI output, because in long form content, there's always sections that really don't read well. And the AI models, the large language models are still progressing. So today, it still does need sub editing. And as I say, to do a good job, it takes about as long as writing an article from scratch. So it's not quite there in terms of accelerating, although if you have writer's block or don't know how to start, it's absolutely fantastic. One thing that is worth mentioning is we left our blogs up for a couple of months before telling anyone they were AI generated, and no one noticed, which I think, you know, certainly, you know, highlights the fact that the quality of the article was pretty decent, it wasn't a poor quality article. Of course, one of the challenges we have is whether these AIs are actually able to do what they're doing. And what they're doing is they're taking the information they're given.
And they're using it to learn and then they're regurgitating it as outputs. And here you can see, I mean, this is an AI generated image that still has a Getty Images watermark. So this article talks about Getty Images, claiming that stability, AI unlawfully scraped millions of images from their site. And obviously, pulling in copyright images is a breach of copyright. And anyone who's dealt with Getty will know that Getty is incredibly proactive and protecting its copyright. So there is a huge risk of using this content. And the same thing happened with CNET, where plagiarism was found in the articles that they wrote using AI. So in terms of protecting a brand, I'd say that using AI is potentially a very high risk at the moment, because of the potential to actually include copyright material. It's stable diffusion, for example, their CEO, was asked whether they used any copyrighted images in their training. And his answer was, well, we're pretty sure it's in the hundreds of millions of copyrighted images, but we can't be certain how many so clearly, you know these these tools are very definitely trained on copyright content. And there is a real potential risk and that this is something I think that companies looking to rush into using AI needs to be very careful about and particularly with images because quite often with things like watermarks, you know it can be easy for able to track that. And I think we'll see more and more lawsuits around ownership.
Another thing worth mentioning is whether you actually own the content. And this is fascinating because there has been one court ruling in the States. And that first court ruling, which was a lower court, so it's not necessarily going to stand. It says that if you use AI to generate content, you don't own the copyright because you didn't create it. So if you use AI, you can't claim copyright in the US at this stage. With anything you create, there hasn't been anything to set precedents in the UK. And I'm sure this is something that's going to play out in the courts over many, many years. But you know, looking at AI, there are certainly going to be issues around law, and around IP, that are gonna take a long time sought out. But the good thing is, even if we're not gonna use AI as generative AI, it could do more things than generate images and text. So AI can have an opinion. And this is something we tried at Napier, we wanted to see whether it could predict more effective or less effective headlines. So he asked it, whether get your free sample or free samples will be more effective. And actually, the answer that chap GPT gave was really very good. I mean, it was very clear. It used sensible logic. And it did pick get your free sample, which is more likely to perform better on Google ads, than free samples.
Obviously, it does depend on a lot on context. But, you know, it's great, you can ask chat GPT and get an opinion on the quality of headlines. You can also take the pain out of data analysis and, you know, people I know, hate these, this sort of stuff, you know, is a click through rate of 1% better than 2%. If the sample sizes are 1000 2000, you want 95% confidence. So this is a statistically significant difference. So are we saying that there's a 19 out of 20 chance that the click through rates are genuinely different, and 2% is better. And it's not driven by randomness. So we can ask chat GPT lists, and chat GPT loves this because it can produce lots of lots of content. And it will come out and it will walk you through the process that you need to do for analysis. And you can see it's got the formula, it's got the calculations. But most importantly, the last sentence says, with 95% confidence, we can conclude that the click through rate 1% is better than 2%.
So this means that if you're a B testing, you can actually have you know, a very easy way of testing to see whether your two ads one is better than another. And that's a really important part of a b testing, because a lot of ads get picked as being better, although in fact is randomness. And you could be going down the wrong routes. So it could do analysis. It can also do things like answer complicated questions. So one of the things you can do is you can get a plugin for chat GPT that sits in Google Docs. And so here we have an extract of a spreadsheet. And this spreadsheet had a bunch of customer names. And we just asked chat GPT to identify which of the following industries communications, industrial automation, security, agricultural or other is served by this company. We then give it the next cell we drag it all down and chat GPT very quickly will categorise the industries. As you can see on line seven, it's not perfect. It's categorise something as other because it didn't know. But basically check GPT has done a very good job of categorising the majority of companies. So if you're looking for example, to run a campaign, you want to cluster by industry, chat. GPT is a great solution. If you've got this Excel, if you've got the sorry, Google Docs plugin, Google Sheets, plugin, sorry. And you also are probably using AI anyway in marketing. So whether it's programming, programmatic advertising, whether it's text to speech or speech to text, whether it's editing, spoken content, or video content, whether it's recommending content on your website, or even chatbots. Typically, AI is now becoming embedded in a lot of tools. And we actually think this is going to be one of the things that's going to be a big trend.
The interesting thing is the general AI models, the GPT models, they weren't really well, they weren't actually probably better than specialist advertising language models. But they can be embedded easily into tools. So they almost disappear into the background. And you've kind of got this wizard or helper that's going to help you use either, you know, Google ads or whatever. and optimise it and make it better. So we see this as being a big trend. And it's certainly something to watch with any martec tool you're using, because I'm pretty sure they're looking to invest in integrating AI. Some other uses of AI one is summarising, you know, in marketing, we all have a lot of content. And Microsoft, if you're a Microsoft company, they've already said that they're going to produce tools to summarise meetings, and produce different summaries of meetings. So it's definitely something that that's happening, a lot of people are using it. And you can actually also have tools that will write summaries of web content. So if you're writing newsletters, for example, there's tools like glass that will pull in multiple articles from the internet, summarise them and create your newsletter automatically. Generally speaking, these generative API's are very good at summarising.
So they do tend to produce pretty reasonable summaries, although again, they can't be relied on to be perfect. It always needs a proofread. And certainly, you know, if you've seen some of the experiments where people have asked for summaries of books on which the AI's had been trained, then often book summaries are not so good. So definitely summaries are something we think is going to happen. editing video, is another thing that looks like it's gonna happen. If you look here, this is a tool called Content fries. And what it does is it takes long form videos, and it pulls out highlight clips. So that's really exciting, really interesting, and could potentially help with repurposing quite significantly. And you can even have artificial people. So this avatar is called Emma. And we're using her for some outbound marketing. Now, although she is a real person in real life, she never says any of the things. She says in our videos, we literally type a script, and we get a, you know, very realistic human moving and talking with the words that we type in. So AI powered avatars, I think are going to become a very big thing. And I'm pretty sure that you'll start seeing a lot of videos coming into your inbox, that are AI avatars that look like that they've recreated a personalised video.
But in reality, the AI is generated, and it's all been automatic. And then lastly, I mean, as an agency, we're always on the lookout for threats. And there are tools that claim to effectively replace agencies. So digital first is an example which claims you can log in and create an execute marketing plans in seconds. We have tested this, I would say it's a long way from creating and executing marketing plans. With AI. It's not very creative. It's very limited in what it can do. But certainly, I'm pretty sure that they're working hard to find ways to actually help drive campaigns. And I certainly think if we look forward in AI, things like Google search campaigns, increasingly, what we'll see is a lot of AI acceleration around that. That's a fairly formulaic approach. And I think what we'll do is we'll we'll see for a lot of campaigns, you know, some of the keyword research being done by AI, and also some of the ad content being generated by AI, at least the first pass. So, in summary, we think current AI technology has its limitations. But it is going to be massively important. If anybody is working in marketing, they should be looking at AI and looking at how they can use it.
If you're talking about creativity, I mean, just be above average, and you'll be okay. So, you know, hopefully, we should be able to all manage to maintain our jobs in marketing, by introducing creativity and innovation. But I think, you know, imagining that because AI doesn't completely replace you, it can be ignored, it's completely wrong. And using AI to accelerate work is definitely something that needs to be done. Obviously, be careful. And particularly Be careful if you're taking AI generated content, that you're not plagiarising either images or text. And today, you know, I'd be really clear on this. Napier is not using AI to generate content. And there's a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, you know, if you look at our business, we're not at the content farm kind of level, we're at the higher quality level. And it's probably the case that AI is not quite at that level yet.
In terms of is offering the ability to write deeply technical specialist articles for our clients. And I say yet rather than it won't be, but also, we wouldn't want to expose our clients to risks of being seen to have taken content from other copyrighted sources. So, you know, please use AI, please make it part of your day. But the good thing is, is I asked Dali, to create an image of a robot holding a sign saying you're fired. And it didn't quite manage to make you're fired. It was honestly the first attempt it came back with. And so I feel that although AI is definitely something that's going to change our jobs, as of today, it's still got some limitations. And I think the future is still bright, particularly if you're creative and innovative in marketing. So thank you very much for listening. I very much appreciate the time you spent. I'd be really interested to know if anyone has any questions. So if anyone's got any questions, please type them into the chat.
Okay, I've just got one question. So the question has been asked whether the Add In for Google Sheets is free, or if it's a paid for it. And so obviously, chat GPT has a couple of options. Most people know about the fact you can access check GPT for free. And you can pay for an upgrade that gives you access to the new model, the GPT four model, which produces better content. There's also something called an API the interface for computers to talk to. And this is what the Add In for sheets actually uses. And that API is also paid for. But the cost of using it is pretty small. So unless you're dealing with huge datasets, it's a pretty trivial cost.
So it is paid for, but it's not expensive. And I think that's something we're gonna see a lot of with AI is that using AI more and more, I think will become paid. But the reality is, is those AI queries don't cost a lot to run. And so the actual cost won't be too big. Well, thank you very much for listening. Everyone. Obviously, if anyone does have a question, and they haven't. Oh, actually, I've got got one other question here. Are writer and Jasper free? Or is there a charge? Both writer and Jasper are companies and they are paid for products? They do have free trials. And I can't remember exactly what the deal is. I think Reiter has a free tier. And Jasper has a free trial if I'm right. But but don't quote me on that. But they're, they're definitely paid for tools, if you want to use it. And I've also got one last question here about whether I'm aware of any ad or campaign done by AI that's been super successful? And the answer is I'm not, it's not something we've particularly looked for. I'm sure people have done campaigns out there.
I know recently, there was a I think it was a Sony, or it could have been a Canon photography competition that was actually won by an AI generated image. And it was won by a photographer who generated the image, specifically to highlight the potential impact of AI on photography. So I really appreciate everyone listening. I think I've probably still got a couple of questions that might be coming in. But what I'll do is, if anyone's got any questions that I haven't covered, please feel free to email me. And what I'll do is I'll send an email back and if I do have any coming through on chat afterwards, I'll send those through as well. Thank you very much for listening. I hope this was useful. And as I say, please send me an email, Mike at Napier b2b And I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you.