The Next Phase of Marketing Automation: Lessons from Dreamforce and HubSpot
In this episode of the Marketing Automation Moment podcast, Hannah Kelly and Mike Maynard explore whether marketing automation as we know it is truly over. They break down Salesforce’s decision to cut 4,000 support roles while adding 5,000 sales positions, share key takeaways from Dreamforce, including AI agents and deeper Slack integration, and take a closer look at HubSpot’s new loop marketing concept.
The episode wraps up with guidance on recognizing when a campaign isn’t working and how to adjust.
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcast
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Kelly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Introduction to Marketing Automation Moment Podcast
00:01:10 - Active Campaign's Bold Statement on Marketing Automation
00:03:00 - Salesforce's Controversial Staffing Changes
00:05:50 - Insights from Dreamforce: AI and Slack
00:08:06 - HubSpot's Loop Marketing Concept
00:11:01 - When to Give Up on a Campaign: Insights and Tips
00:15:27 - Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Kelly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-kelly-b0706a107/?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_miniProfile%3AACoAABriH7cBjOKakLTry2oZpPzoqKYXgLp0ttY
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing Automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We’d also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: The Next Phase of Marketing Automation: Lessons from Dreamforce and HubSpot
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard.
Hannah: Today, we talk about whether marketing automation as we know it is over.
Mike: Salesforce cutting support roles but hiring more salespeople.
Hannah: The top takeaways from Dreamforce.
Mike: HubSpot, inventing the concept of loop marketing.
Hannah: And when you should give up on a campaign.
Hannah: Hi, Mike. Welcome back to another episode of Marketing Automation Moment. How are you doing?
Mike: Hi, Hannah. Good to talk to you again. And we've managed to connect despite the outage with Amazon Web Services today.
Hannah: I know. It has been a bit of a busy morning just trying to get things to work. And I mean, is everything back up now or not? I'm not sure.
Mike: Well, I hope so. I haven't had a chance to play Fortnite, but I'll definitely get to try that later on.
Hannah: Damn, but at least I can log my lunch on FitnessPal now, so it's OK. That's OK. Well, let's kick off, because it's been a little while since our last episode, and we've got a lot of news to get through. And I want to start with Active Campaign. You know I love a good marketing headline. And they've actually come out with a really strong statement that the days of classic market automation is over, and they are viewing that as a good thing.
Mike: Yeah, I saw this and I thought, what a great bit of marketing hype, actually. It's true. Marketing automation is changing. AI is definitely having an impact, particularly in some markets. And so for sure, we're not doing marketing automation like we did 10, 15 years ago, when the technology was just starting. But that was changing anyway. And I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to get some attention around their AI tools. But realistically, does it mean that market automation is radically different? I don't know. I think it's going to be easier. I think it's going to be quicker to run. I think it's going to be less painful to manage campaigns, but I'm not entirely sure it's really changed that much.
Hannah: I have to agree, Mike, and I think I'm going to be the cynical one for this time around, but they talk about new agents, and they talk about, you know, helping with segmentation, personalization, goal setting, channel selection. But to be really honest, this is something that we've seen the last six months. Like the last six months, we've seen lots of multi-automation platforms do this. We haven't heard loads of stories raving about the capabilities. And I actually think it's just the norm now that actually, even if you aren't using it within marketing automation platforms, you're probably going to chat GPT to help you with goal setting or segmentation. So, I do love how they've tried to do the story. I just don't think it's actually talking about anything new.
Mike: I agree. I think it's great PR, but actually, if you're a marketer, it's just part of a trend and everybody's following that trend.
Hannah: Absolutely. Well, let's move on because you've got a couple of points to talk about Salesforce. Now, Salesforce have been a little controversial in the headlines recently. And their CEO actually came out and announced that they were making redundancy. So, I think it was about 4,000 support roles were being made redundant to bring in AI. But at the same time, they're also looking to hire 5,000 sales staff. So, I'm a little bit confused. I mean, what do you think?
Mike: Yeah, actually, I don't know if you can hear, but it's raining really hard here. So, if any listeners are wondering what the background noise is, we're OK. It's just raining hard. We're in the UK. No, great story. I mean, my first thought was, you know, hiring all those salespeople, can't they get themselves a decent CRM system? Who knows? I mean, I think some of this is hype. Certainly, for sure, I think one of the things AI has done is it's really, really helped in terms of self-service customer support. So, people more and more can get answers without having to go to customer support agents. And maybe this is what's driving the Salesforce move. To be fair, video helped an awful lot as well. So as video became more and more accessible, you know, you actually had walkthrough videos. I'm sure that dramatically reduced the requirement for support. Now AI is, you know, the next stage along there. So, I can understand, maybe, that they don't need as many people. The interesting thing is, though, if you hear anybody, they're cutting support people for current customers, hiring more salespeople, doesn't sound like they're doing particularly well. And I'm not saying that's the case with Salesforce. I'm just teasing Salesforce before you get upset. But, you know, it does feel like they really need some more customers.
Hannah: Yeah, I have to say, I do agree, Mike, because it's interesting, you know, we have clients in this space who are providing these kind of like AI chat support services, and they are really great. But, you know, when it comes to the level of support that people actually need with market automation platforms, I do wonder how much support these AI services are going to be. I mean, we work with a market automation platform, and we're constantly going to them for help. And actually, I think if I wasn't speaking to the human, I'd be like, please let me speak with a human. So, it's really interesting. And, you know, we could look at it that they're actually there's so much business to chase. There's so much opportunity. That's why they think they need more salespeople. But I guess we won't really know until more information comes out.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, it'd be interesting to see. I mean, the other thing is, is who's not bought Salesforce who might be in the market for it? I mean, it strikes me as, you know, these guys have done pretty well. Maybe that market's becoming saturated. Maybe it's becoming a lot harder for them to sell because there's fewer potential customers.
Hannah: I fully agree. And I also have to say, I wonder again, if it's more of a PR marketing ploy, because we have actually just had the Dreamsforce event that sells Force Hold. I think that actually took place last week. So, all of this news has come out of it. But I wonder, are they just doing it to maybe boost some more PR around the event? I don't know. What do you think?
Mike: I'm not sure layoffs necessary is a good thing, even if it's trying to hype the benefit of AI support. So, I don't know, maybe it is. It doesn't, you know, excite me. I mean, obviously, one of the big takeaways from Dreamforce was the fact that it's all about agents. It's all about AI agents now, particularly in the enterprise. And I think that's definitely true. So maybe there is a case that, you know, there's a link between Dreamforce and the announcement.
Hannah: Absolutely, Mike. But let's dive in a little bit deeper into what actually came out of Dreamforce. And one of the things that stuck out to me the most, and I guess this isn't surprising seeing as that Salesforce owned them, is that Slack was really being shouted about as that platform to use AI agents with. Now, you know, we as a company use Microsoft Teams. We know many of our clients use Microsoft Teams. So, do you think that there's a disadvantage that if you're using Salesforce, you're not using Slack? What do you think?
Mike: Well, considering a lot of Salesforce's clients, they're big enterprises who probably are Microsoft houses, I do think this push towards Slack is interesting. Obviously, Salesforce is basically trying to get people off Microsoft, trying to get them more onto the Salesforce platform. So, in some ways, it makes sense. But in others, you've got to look at it and think, well, perhaps you'd be helping your customers a bit more if you more proactively supported teams. So, I do think it's an interesting question. And obviously, Salesforce has made a strategic decision. It'd be interesting to see how it goes for them. You know, as I mentioned earlier, they've got a pretty good market share. And so, they can probably afford to do things that maybe smaller vendors couldn't do.
Hannah: Oh, 100%. Because I mean, one of the things I'm actually looking at now is that Dreamforce really took center stage and talked about pricing and the pricing of Salesforce. And one of the claims that they actually made was that 12,000 customers are experimenting with AgentForce. and so, they're creating this agent for Citi. So, to me, it really seems like they are taking that money, you know, and they are really experimenting. But I would be interested to see if they are even struggling with that saturated market, as you mentioned earlier, where actually they're like, no, we're good. We're just going to keep plowing ahead and see what picks up.
Mike: Yeah, I think you've got a really good point there. I mean, probably where Salesforce see a lot of their opportunity, maybe this goes back to the hiring of the sales team. Maybe it's all around getting existing customers to adopt more features and more capabilities. I mean, I did have to smile when I saw one of the case studies is Dell, who are using AgentForce to cut supplier onboarding. And apparently it took 60 days to onboard a supplier previously. I mean, that's kind of incredible for anyone who doesn't work with, you know, large enterprises or in a large enterprise, because clearly, actually, the amount of work is probably a couple of hours, you know, it's not like, but it gets strung out in these long, complex processes. So maybe it's all about getting big enterprises to take advantage of some automation that can then speed up processes that have been kind of drowned by bureaucracy.
Hannah: Definitely, that would make sense. And I actually want to relate this to our next point because I want to talk a little bit about HubSpot. Now HubSpot I think are doing that exact thing and basically positioning something to overcome these long strong out processes where decisions have to be made. And they have introduced what they call the loop marketing. Now I have to say I did laugh a little bit at this because we've been through HubSpot, we've both been to Inbound throughout the years, Mike, and we've been there where they've talked about customer journeys. I've sat front row when they've talked about Flywheel and that this is the newest thing, and this is what you've got to follow to be successful. And now they are talking about loop marketing. Now, the general consensus of loop marketing is that it's basically how you combine what you are doing as you, as a marketer, with the efficiency of AI. What did you think about it?
Mike: I think in a way it's kind of interesting because actually it's very specifically marketing. If you look at what HubSpot did with the flywheel, that was much more around customer lifecycle. And now Loop Marketing is really focused on marketing. I mean, I'm not convinced it's necessarily revolutionary, you know, the idea that you don't just say who you are, but you also tailor it to your audience. I mean, it kind of doesn't feel like it's the most stunning insight ever. And I'm not entirely sure why they have to do this in a loop other than the loop looks cool. But I think, you know, HubSpot's great at producing these systems and selling them and marketing them, really simple processes. And, you know, we were HubSpot partners for a while and you kind of get into that HubSpot cult and you really believe in it. And I'm sure that if anybody listening here talks to a HubSpot agency over the next couple of years, they'll get this whole loop marketing pitch related to them, because those agencies really take on these HubSpot approaches. So I don't think it's a big deal. I don't think it's a massive change. But I do think it's kind of interesting that again, HubSpot is trying to create a process and then market that and brand it.
Hannah: Definitely. And I think as well, you know, they're trying to be leaders and they're trying to be the leader of like, okay, AI, we've talked about it. We've got this, we've got all our competitors. What can we do different? Oh wait, here's a process that you can follow that's going to help with AI. And as a marketer, I do love that because even though we aren't hub sport partners anymore, sometimes I do still fall into the cult and I'm like, Ooh, this is really cool. And then I realized it's not teaching me anything new.
Mike: Ouch, that's pretty brutal, Hannah. I think it’s; you know, I think they're good at doing it. I also think that one of the big issues we see with a lot of marketers and agencies is the lack of process. And I think if you're able to use process, that can actually make you more creative. Most creatives are not short of ideas. It's more about whipping down to the best one. If you have a process, it's much easier to get down to one that's going to be most effective. So I think, you know, there is some value in HubSpot trying to do this. I just, I've got to be honest, I don't really get how loop marketing is so related to AI. But hey, I'm sure we'll hear more from HubSpot and they'll explain it.
Hannah: I'm sure we will. Now let's move on. I'm conscious of time, Mike. So let's talk about our insightful tip of the week. And I want to talk about when you're running a campaign. So, say you're running a campaign, you're running a campaign for the right reasons, but it's not working. Should you just give up? Should you just say, no, okay, I know this is a really good idea, but we're not doing anything. It's not working. We should just give up on it. I mean, personally, before I hand over to you, I think there is, you know, let's relate back to process. Part of our process is enhanced, and that's all-around optimizations. Now, I think companies can fall into the great, this is such a good concept, the messaging's right, the audience is right. Okay, I'm running it. Damn, it didn't achieve anything. Okay, I'm just gonna stop. But are they actually listening to the data? Are they actually optimizing what they're seeing? Actually, is the audience becoming too broad because they've actually maybe put in a sector that isn't quite, right? I think there's lots of things that companies give up with because they just don't understand that what they're actually doing is wrong.
Mike: I mean, that's an interesting perspective. I think you're right. If you're doing something for the right reasons, you probably should try and make it work because it's obviously important or it was important. Sometimes circumstances change. You know, if you work for a large business and you're promoting a particular product and that business unit gets sold, I mean, clearly, give up on the campaign. Don't promote it anymore. But I do think that you can potentially get too hung up on trying to, you know, flog a dead horse. and keep trying to optimize a campaign that doesn't work, the first thing to do is, if you feel the campaign's not working, take a step back and look at why you're doing it and whether that is the right thing to do and whether your assumptions are correct. So to me, first, I'd actually stand back and take a big look at the campaign before I then really dive into whether or not I decide to cancel it.
Hannah: You do make some good points there, Mike. I think there is that level to it. I also think sometimes, though, you could take a step back, you can see everything is right in that picture, but without actually digging into that data, you still don't figure out what you're doing wrong. And then you run that risk of also it being wrong for your future campaigns.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I guess you're right. At some point, you know, you've got to look at how you're optimizing it and improve those optimizations. I think everybody, you know, is tweaking campaigns. I mean, one of the things that really interests me is you can kind of go down a dead end of optimization. And if you head off in the wrong direction, sometimes it's not obvious how to, you know, re-optimize the campaign and actually need to make quite a big change rather than just a small tweak or a small optimization. You know, again, it does come back to again, taking a step back, but a different level here, you know, more at the actual tactical level, and just make sure that actually the tactics you're running really do fit with the campaign goals. So, I guess you're convincing me that we shouldn't give up quite so quickly. But I do think that, you know, really making sure you understand the reasoning behind what you're doing, that that's super important.
Hannah: I think that's a really good point, Mike, and you know, I can't resist. I'm in sales. So I am going to say, you know, we do have experts at NAPI that do this really, really well. So if you're listening, you're thinking, you're relating to a campaign and going, I just don't know, drop me your micro in email. We're always happy to have a look at the data and see if we can help.
Mike: Well, I love that sales pitch, Hannah. That's great. And if anybody's got any comments about the podcast or anything that they'd like to hear us discuss, again, feel free to drop us a note. You can always get hold of us on the website, napierb2b.com.
Hannah: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much, Mike. It's been a great conversation as always.
Mike: Thanks so much, Hannah.
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.
Success for First Microelectronics UK Event
Last week, the first Microelectronics event took place at the Excel in London.
Featuring exhibitions, conference sessions, workshops, and product showcases, the event aimed to bring together the UK's microelectronics, semiconductors, photonics, and embedded systems communities in one place.
A few members of the Napier team attended the show. Although the official number of attendees has yet to be released, many exhibitors we spoke to said the event had been busy and that attendees had travelled from across the globe to attend. There was also a consensus that the quality of leads received from the show was good, and many exhibitors had already signed up again for next year.
It's always great to see the industry growing as more and more events are taking place in the UK. Microelectronics UK has already been confirmed for 2026, alongside a Microelectronics US event.
Congratulations to everyone involved, and we look forward to seeing how the event will evolve next year!
IoT Insider Welcomes New Editor
IoT Insider and AutomationNews has welcomed a new Editor to its team: Lucy Barnard.
Lucy will be leading the direction of both publications, covering the latest developments and trends in the IoT and manufacturing industries.
With over two decades in journalism, her experience spans key roles at Estates Gazette, The National, and Construction Briefing.
Lucy is passionate about how technology intersects with major global challenges, from climate change to gender equality and social justice.
Congratulations to Lucy on her new role. It’s always great to see editorial teams expanding, and we wish Lucy the best of luck.
For more information about Lucy, please click here.
Why AI Won’t Do It All, Adobe’s AI Agents & Dreamforce
In this episode of the Marketing Automation Moment podcast, Hannah and Mike dive into the latest trends in MarTech. They kick off with Act-On’s new Marketing Technology Insights report, unpacking why small teams are struggling with complex tech stacks and why ease of use now tops the priority list.
The conversation moves to AI, with a debate on whether the hype has peaked, discuss the realities of implementing AI effectively, and explore Adobe’s announcement of specialized AI agents designed to enhance customer experiences.
Finally, they touch on the upcoming Dreamforce event and wrap up with Mike’s tip of the week on GDPR compliance, reminding marketers of the risks of outdated data and the importance of clean databases.
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcast
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Kelly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Introduction to Marketing Automation Moment Podcast
00:00:53 - Act-On’s Marketing Technology Insights Report
00:01:15 - Insights on Small Marketing Teams and Tool Stacks
00:03:15 - The Importance of Ease of Use in Marketing Tools
00:04:34 - AI Capabilities and Marketer Priorities
00:06:13 - The Reality of AI in Marketing
00:08:40 - Adobe's New AI Agents Announcement
00:10:02 - Specific AI Functions vs. General AI Solutions
00:12:11 - The Future of AI in Marketing Platforms
00:13:35 - Discussion on Dreamforce Event
00:15:52 - GDPR Compliance and Data Management Tips
00:17:27 - Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Kelly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-kelly-b0706a107/?miniProfileUrn=urn%3Ali%3Afs_miniProfile%3AACoAABriH7cBjOKakLTry2oZpPzoqKYXgLp0ttY
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing Automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We’d also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: Why AI Won’t Do It All, Adobe’s AI Agents & Dreamforce
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard.
Hannah: Today we talk about Act-On's new Marketing Technology Insights report.
Mike: We cover an analyst who thinks AI will do everything for marketers.
Hannah: Adobe's AI agents.
Mike: Hannah asked me for a ticket to Dreamforce.
Hannah: And Mike talks about the legal implications of poor quality data. Hi Mike, welcome back. We've taken a little break for the summer but we're back now. How are you feeling?
Mike: Well, I'm feeling pretty good and as you know I've actually got a conference in Spain next week and I've just come back from a conference, so it seems to still be a bit of a holiday for me.
Hannah: Well, let's kick off because we've got loads to cover. Now, Act-On's has released a really interesting report. It's focusing on marketing technology insights, and they interviewed around 100 marketers just to see what the state of the landscape was, how marketers are finding their kind of world, market automation platforms, their technology stacks. And it's released interesting insights. Now, I think the real caveat to say here is that it seems to be focused on small teams. I think about 84% of respondents were from small marketing teams, so bear that in mind. But I think it released some really interesting data, and I know you have some thoughts. So what are you thinking?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I quite enjoyed it, and you're right, it's focused on small teams, but I actually think it's really applicable to everybody. You know, how many clients do we have moaning at us that they've got too many people and too much resource? It never happens. So, I think what Act-On, you know, really was saying was that there's a lot of small marketing teams, a lot of teams pushed for time, and actually the tool stack needs to reflect that. You know, what they're saying is it's not really about capability of tools and getting the best, most powerful, most complex tools you can. But ease of use is really important. And also keeping the number of tools to a reasonable level is important. I mean, we just ran a project internally, didn't we, looking at the tools we used. And I was putting together the slides, and I added a column and shrunk the text. And I had this incredible list of tools. So, I think we all have more tools than we recognize. And that actually can be quite time consuming.
Hannah: Absolutely. I mean, when you showed it to us, we were like, wow, what does this platform do? What does this platform do? And it's really interesting because I think the report said it was 92% of teams have 20 or fewer tools in their tech stacks. And I think to me, that screams that one, maybe they don't have a lot of budget, so they are trying to condense, consolidate. But two, are these marketers just more efficient than us?
Mike: Well, or maybe they just haven't counted the tools and made a guess. I mean, I think there's a possibility. You know, I do think that rationalizing of tool stacks is important. I mean, it's one of the things we're doing is we're looking at a quite a big integration and rationalization program to get, you know, things more automated and more efficient. But I think if you look at what people need to do, they need things that really deliver ease of use. And maybe that's going to be the next best thing in marketing automation. I mean, what do you think?
Hannah: I think that's a great question about ease of use, Mike, because to me, I would say that's really important. And I actually think it's more important than other marketers realise. I mean, one thing in the report that really shocked me is that marketers were asked the question, how do you prioritise AI capabilities? Now, I would have expected, you know, 80% to be like, it's really important, this is our focus. The largest group, 33%, rated it as really important. So, to me, I'm like, oh, okay, AI actually isn't their focus. And they are looking at these other functionalities of a marketing automation platform. So, I think sometimes we get lost in the, oh well, you know, AI's important, this is it, this is what we need to focus on. But ease of use, something really simple, seems to be really important.
Mike: Yeah, and we've talked a lot in these podcasts about people who've got incredibly powerful marketing automation platforms and use only a tiny fraction of their capabilities. So, I do think there'll be a bit of a rationalization. It's easy to add features. It's not necessarily easy to add ease of use. And clearly, some of the platforms are well ahead of this. And I mean, I guess we've got to mention HubSpot at this point, haven't we? We've both used HubSpot a lot and it's certainly in terms of ease of use; I'd say one of the leading platforms. What do you think?
Hannah: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we moved away from HubSpot a little while ago. That was a decision we made internally, but I love it as a platform. And I think the functions of how it divides what you focus on. So, I mean, the SEO function of HubSpot is one of the best that I've ever seen. You know, I learned everything around content clusters, how to look at our content, content recommendations from HubSpot. So, I think it's not a tool to be underestimated for sure. But then I also think, you know, there are the bigger platforms like Salesforce, like Marketo, and they also do have some real good benefits. They aren't as clear and ease of use, I would say. I know several of our clients can sometimes be like, look at the platform and go, I have no idea what I'm doing. So, I think it does vary. Again, you know, we've talked about this a lot in the past of what you're looking to do. But HubSpot has been a key favorite of mine in the past.
Mike: Yeah, and they certainly get a premium for their ease of use, I think. I just want to go back to what you talked about on the AI there, because I found that interesting as well. I thought we'd see most people caring about AI features, and they don't. I mean, do you think maybe the AI bubbles burst? I mean, we did see also a report by an analyst called Tony Hayes, where he was talking about how AI-driven market automation strategies had improved campaigns. And it's a little bit difficult because some of the headlines he generated actually don't reflect what he said. But it's quite clear that there are companies using AI and are companies getting real benefits out of this, and we've certainly seen that to ourselves. But then there's other projects that are just a disaster. Do you think it's AI works sometimes and not other times, or do you think it's just people are not setting AI up correctly?
Hannah: I think it's a really good question and I'm going to be a bit mean, and I don't mean this against anything of the marketers out there in the world, but I think sometimes marketers just don't know how to use it properly. I also think that they believe AI can do everything and it can't. There are limitations to AI and what it can do and how successful it can be to help with your marketing capabilities. And I think marketers have to go in with an understanding of that first, before that they can then accept it's helpful or it's not helpful. I also really like what you said about, have we burst the AI bubble? And I think a little bit, yes. You know, there's been such a push this year, you know, the first six, seven months of the year where it was. We've launched this, Salesforce have launched Einstein, HubSpot's acquired this company. You know, every time we have one of these podcasts, we're talking about some type of AI. But truthfully, I think marketers are bored of hearing of AI. And I wonder if they just sense that we've got some bits working. We know that's great for us. Actually, we're a little bit scared of all the other capabilities that can happen. One, we don't have the investment to do these big Salesforce Einsteins to get it working. And so that's why, you know, they're kind of backtracking a little bit to be like, we're using it, maybe not as much as we should, but we're comfortable where we are at the moment.
Mike: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting time. I mean, we're seeing at the moment AI plateauing in terms of its capabilities. It's not doing a crazy increase. Now what gives the real benefit is intelligent use of AI. I mean, I find it interesting, you know, the analyst Tony Hayes, he said that traditional agencies will be obsolete in 24 months. Obviously, I don't believe that. And actually, I find a lot of our work now is around AI and helping clients implement and use AI or helping clients build strategies around, for example, GEO. So, I mean, to me, yes, AI is going to have an impact and yes, a lot's going to be done by AI, but I just don't see there ever being a marketing system where you have a single button that has super auto on it, and you click that and all your campaigns work magically. We just know that doesn't work.
Hannah: I fully agree, Mike. And, you know, we don't know what the future holds, but there's many elements of marketing that can't be done by AI. And I think sometimes we have to accept that that is the future. We're going to have to change. We're going to have to evolve, but we're not going to go obsolete.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. And if you dig down into Tony's report as well, some of the optimizations were down at 4%, which is important if you're running a big campaign, but it's not necessarily changeable. And it's certainly not always going to be what a human can do. So, I think as long as we remain a bit paranoid, there's always going to be work for marketers and always be work for agencies because There's just not the ability in AI to get everything you can get with a human. What we are going to see is that I think our clients are going to demand more and more from us because of AI. I mean, in fact, that's a conversation we're already having.
Hannah: Absolutely. Well, let's move on, Mike, because I do want to talk about AI once again, but a slightly shift to a different platform. And this is Adobe. Now, Adobe actually announced last week that they are going to introduce a general availability of AI agents. And it's really focusing on optimizing two areas. It's customer experiences and marketing campaigns. Now, I've not used Adobe much in the past. It's not a platform that I've been very experienced with. But what about you? Do you think it's really going to be able to make an impact? I also think, you know, I'd like to add that they do seem a little bit behind the times. This is probably the last platform we've seen announce suddenly an AI agent. And it seems like a lot of the big players are actually ahead of the game.
Mike: I think it's difficult. I mean, obviously, putting new features into a large platform is much more difficult than putting them into a, you know, a small, more dynamic start-ups platform. So I don't think we can really give Adobe a hard time for, you know, perhaps being behind some of the smaller platforms. I actually like what Adobe's done. And I'd be interested to hear your view on this, Hannah, because rather than create like a magic AI agent that does everything, you know, if we go back to this previously, you know, one AI is going to take over everything. Actually, what they've done is they've got AIs to do very specific things. So, for example, understanding and orchestrating customer journeys. And there's an AI just for that. There's an AI just to build better audiences. And to me, that's where AI can really work. If you look at where AI is delivering great results, I think it is where it's tweaked to specialize in a certain area. Because then you can put the guardrails on, and you can stop AI going crazy. I mean, what do you think?
Hannah: I have to say, Mike, I do agree. I love it. And maybe I was being a little bit harsh on Adobe at the start. I mean, if we just drill into a couple of their agents, you know, they talk about data insight agents. We're using AI internally at the moment to help some of our clients with data enrichment. We know that works. You know, things like journey agent, they look at how to simplify the creation of customer journeys and the touch points and the content that needs to go along with it. We know that this is really going to help marketers. I would be really interested to see if it is a, you get access to all the agents, if they're going to put paid walls behind each of them. So that it's, okay, you can have access to this, but you want access to this really great one? We'll have a bit more money, please. But I have to agree is a really good way of doing it and actually different. I mean, Salesforce and Einstein is similar, but Einstein seems to be this big hub where these seems to be really specific based on, as you said, you know, specific marketing activities.
Mike: Yeah, and it's obviously difficult to know how these are going to play out in the long term. I mean, I do think we've talked a lot about AI today. I don't know if you saw MIT released a research report that said that 95% of corporate AI initiatives failed. They weren't actually carried on. I mean, I think if we look in marketing, we're way ahead of that. A large percentage of AI initiatives, I think, work. And they may work at 4% uplift, they may work at 60, but certainly AI is definitely benefiting marketing. And to me, it's interesting. I think for all the questioning, and everyone hypes it up and then thinks, oh no, maybe it's overhyped. Actually, it's starting to deliver real results. And I think that's really important. I think we need to get to the point where we're not talking about AI improving a marketing automation campaign. We're talking about the platform improving it. And you're right, it'd be interesting because obviously you've got all these fragmented agents in Adobe. You know, you could see somebody in Adobe in a board meeting going, yeah, we need subscriptions for each of them. And we need to charge people for everything they use. And that could be an interesting model. And we talked about ease of use and simplicity, maybe people only want to see what they want to use and turn off stuff they don't need. But I suspect that Adobe is going to follow the route that most people have gone, which is to bundle everything into the platform, you pay a platform fee. So, it'll be interesting to see how this all works out. But I think more and more, we're going to see these features actually be less AI, and much more just the platform and what it does.
Hannah: I couldn't agree more Mike, absolutely. But I'm really conscious of time so let's move on because I just want to do a little bit of a shout out to Dreamforce. Now this is Salesforce's big event that's happening in October, and I'd be really interested because we've obviously never been as an agency. I don't know quite what it's like, but I have to say I had a scroll on their webpage and the first thing that stuck up to me was that Metallica and Benson Boone are playing, so that would be great for the attendees. But in all seriousness, I don't know, what do you think about the event?
Mike: I think you're teasing me because you know I've never been a Metallica fan. But yeah, I mean, it's interesting. We've never been. I think it's really hard. You know, COVID has meant that actually going to these events, they probably have less value because so much more is available online. I remember going every year to Inbound. And now I'm going maybe every three or four years. And you still get value from it. And they're great events, but it's just hard to justify all the travel time and all the time at the event where, I'm going to be honest, some of the presentations are awesome. Some of them are a bit Metallica. Sorry, Metallica fans. So, you know, I think it's interesting to see that Dreamforce has really, really succeeded. Inbound has grown. We talked about this earlier in the year when Inbound moved across to the West Coast. But still, there is a group of people that want to spend that time, despite the fact that this is all about tools to do digital marketing. I mean, you're younger than me. Do you think that events are past it and have had it? Or do you still see that people are going to want to go to Dreamforce? Do you want to go?
Hannah: See, I would love to go, just for Metallica, obviously. No, I think in all seriousness, it's harder for us. We're obviously based in England; we're down on the South Coast. You know, if we were perhaps in America, it might be easier for us to get there. I would be really interested to know the demographics of the audience. You know, where have they come from? Is it loads of people are traveling from across Europe? Or actually, is it a big audience just from the USA? I think they have some real benefit. I do think... these events and I actually saw it for the HubSpot Inbound event as well recently is they're getting all these big speakers or these people that you're like they have nothing to do with marketing and you're like are they really having to go this far to actually encourage attendees so I'll be really interested to hear feedback and you know if any of our listeners are going or when you listen to this episode you've already gone please do reach out because we'd love to know your thoughts.
Mike: Yeah, I'm not sure you can really criticise them for getting the entertaining speakers, the speakers that people want to go to personally. I do remember you being rather excited one inbound when Michelle Obama was talking.
Hannah: That's very true. I have fallen prey to that before. But let's move on, Mike, because I know you have quite an interesting, insightful tip of the week around GDPR and data. Do you want to share a little bit more?
Mike: Yeah, so it's interesting. I mean, with a lot of our clients around their market automation campaigns, we've actually been doing some data enrichment. It seems to be something people want to do. I think it's a reflection of the fact it's harder to get form fills now. And a lot of the form fills tend to have fake data in. So, we're doing a lot to clean up incorrect data and also to add new contacts to databases. And before people freak out, this is all GDPR compliant. What isn't GDPR compliant, and I think this will be a shock, particularly to some people in the States, is that there's actually a legal requirement to keep your data up to date. And if you leave old data in a database, you are technically breaking GDPR and risking fines. And I don't think people understand that. Everyone gets worried about, you know, sending emails when they're not allowed to or people have opted out. But GDPR is much broader than that. And data protection is much broader than that. So, to me, my insightful tip of the week is clean your data up and don't go to jail.
Hannah: brilliant tip of the week. And we're even doing that internally. So, we're following that as well.
Mike: Yeah. And obviously, I mean, if people are listening, it's unlikely you go to jail for this. But there is a risk of fines, particularly for large corporations. So, I would say that it is quite important. And I think at some point, there will be issues with companies who get hacked and have data they should have removed. And when that happens, there'll be fines dished out. And then the other thing, it comes back to ease of use. I've worked with clients that have held a lot of obsolete data in. And when you do that, it's really hard to segment. You've got a lot of rubbish; you're trying to look through things. And so actually having a much simpler set of data that's clean and accurate and has all the information you need. So, spend money on making a smaller amount of data be more effective. I think that's a great way to go and it really helps, you know, manage your marketing automation campaigns.
Hannah: I think that is a brilliant bit of advice to end the episode on today, Mike. So, thank you as always for such an insightful discussion.
Mike: Thanks very much, Hannah. Looking forward to talking to you again very soon.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
The Power of Gifting in B2B Marketing: Insights from Ben Smith of Reachdesk
Ben Smith, Marketing Director at Reachdesk, shares his journey from professional ice skater to marketing leader and dives into the power of gifting in B2B. He explains how Reachdesk helps businesses source, personalize, and automate gifting at a global scale, and why combining physical and digital experiences creates deeper customer connections.
Ben also discusses Reachdesk’s marketing strategy, the role of AI in modern marketing, and why personalization, creativity, and genuine relationship building are key to successful outreach.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Ben
Meet Ben Smith, a dynamic marketing leader with a passion for driving strategic growth and creative impact. As a seasoned professional at Reachdesk, he’s helped brands build stronger connections, unlock new opportunities, and deliver customer experiences that truly engage. Known for translating big ideas into measurable results, Ben shares actionable insights on outbound and allbound strategies — from sparking pipeline to scaling engagement. Join us as he brings fresh perspectives and stories from the cutting edge of modern marketing.
About ReachDesk
At Reachdesk, we believe that strong relationships fuel success. Whether you're engaging prospects, celebrating customers, or recognizing employees, our platform makes it simple to deliver personalized moments that resonate at scale. As the only fully integrated gifting and swag solution, we empower go-to-market and people teams to:
- Strengthen connections with prospects, customers, and employees.
- Remove operational headaches with a seamless global fulfilment network.
- Measure the impact of every send, so gifting becomes a strategic advantage, not just a nice-to-have.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Introduction to Marketing B2B Tech Podcast
00:00:18 - Guest Introduction: Ben Smith from Reachdesk
00:00:41 - Ben's Unique Career Journey
00:01:42 - What Reachdesk Does
00:02:31 - Challenges of International Shipping
00:03:15 - The Importance of Physical Gifts in a Digital World
00:04:30 - Customer Use Cases for Reachdesk
00:05:55 - Navigating Gifting Mistakes and Concerns
00:07:36 - The Philosophy of Gifting in Marketing
00:09:02 - Marketing Strategies at Reachdesk
00:11:35 - Building Brand Reputation vs. Driving Leads
00:13:04 - Influencer Marketing in B2B
00:15:05 - Understanding the Buying Committee
00:18:00 - Identifying Gifting Touchpoints in the Customer Journey
00:22:04 - The Impact of Technology on Marketing
00:25:21 - Advice for New Marketing Professionals
Follow Ben:
Ben Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bensmith-reachdesk/
Reachdesk website: https://www.reachdesk.com/
Reachdesk on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/reachdesk/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We’d also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Ben Smith at Reachdesk
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Ben Smith
Mike: Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Ben Smith. Ben is the Director of Global Marketing for Reachdesk. Welcome to the podcast, Ben. Thank you very much for having me. And we always like to start off by letting you give a bit of background about yourself, your career, and why you've chosen to work for Reachdesk. So, tell us why you're there.
Ben: Yeah, absolutely. I've had an interesting career, jumped around a little bit. So, I used to be a performer for Disney on Ice, so a professional ice skater before transitioning into technology sales and technology marketing. I guess why I've gravitated towards Breach Desk and towards marketing is I've always had a passion for creativity, performance, people. I really felt marketing was the perfect fit. I did a short stint in PR and that really gave me my first glimpse into marketing and I joined Reach Test as the first employee starting out as a BDR and I was that person going to the post office, having to ship those direct mail sends out, you know, doing three, four trips a day. And when I heard about Reachdesk solving that challenge, I thought, if I'm ever going to market or sell something, this is a real pain point that's stopping me get ahead in my career. And I imagine this is a challenge for a lot of other people as well.
Mike: So, you've kind of alluded to what Reachdesk does, but can you just explain exactly what it does and how it helps people?
Ben: Yeah, absolutely. So Reachdesk is the one-stop global solution for gifting, swag, direct mail. Essentially, we work with companies to help them with the logistics that comes with sending out physical gifts or e-gift cards. We help them with the sourcing, so the creative part of coming up with what to send, who to send it to. And then we help them be able to track and measure it all through the platform and automate it with the integrations into that technology, so CRM, marketing automation tools.
Mike: That's interesting. I think there's a couple of things I find particularly interesting. The first is shipping the gifts. I mean, it sounds very easily, but obviously, as a PR agency, we've tried to do this at Napier, and we've realized it actually gets quite hard, particularly when you're dealing with international shipments. Is that one of the big reasons why people come to Reachdesk?
Ben: Yeah, absolutely. We work with a lot of companies who have clients or prospects based globally. And it could be challenges with logistics when you're doing an event shipment. So, you're based in the US, you've got an event which is out in the UK, for example, or it could be in Germany. You know, there's always friction which comes with shipping internationally, and we help support that. But we also help on the personalization level. And it's so important to really be personalizing everything that you're doing. And what works for somebody who's American won't necessarily work for somebody who's based in France. So, by using a platform, you're able to give that extra layer of personalization and really send something quite meaningful that's going to create that moment that you're looking to with your prospects and customers.
Mike: If you think about gifting and swag, and you obviously talk about being the global gifting and swag platform, aren't we all digital? I mean, are physical gifts still important in today's business environment, do you think?
Ben: Yeah, it changes a lot, right? I think we put a lot of focus on digital and then we come back to needing some human elements and humanisation and levels of personalisation. I think where the two meet really nicely is when you combine the physical with the digital. So if you're doing email campaigns, you know, adding in that gift to your email campaign where somebody can input their address, and we all work remotely, a lot of people now, so it's not even just being able to send it to someone's office, but being able to reach them wherever they are in the world, whether that's their hotel room because they're at an event and you want to make a special moment whilst they're there, if that's where, because they're on an off-site and they're visiting another office in a different regions where they might be based more often. I think it's about finding ways that you can combine the digital approach and then really humanise it and create an amazing experience by adding something physical and tangible and something which saves the people for a lot longer time.
Mike: That's interesting. Can you give me some examples of how your customers use Reachdesk?
Ben: Yeah, definitely. So, there's many different use cases across the customer journey, whether that's that you're trying to launch a new product or you're entering a new region, you might want to focus on more branded items. One of the customers that we work with, they had a partnership with Aston Martin. So, they sent out toy Aston Martin cars, Aston Martin cars with their branding on it and their logo on it and Aston Martin, and they were showing that partnership and collaboration and really just giving a unique way of creating that experience. One of my favorite campaigns ever though is when an up-and-coming new technology platform was trying to take on the heavyweights and the bigger companies that have been around and established more often. So, what they did was they sent out one boxing glove with content, messaging, and the call to action was to try and book a meeting, and when they booked a meeting the second boxing glove was sent out as well. So really finding unique and interesting ways to combine the messaging and then telling that story through something really physical. But you know, gifting is also impactful at events, having a flag that really stands out and creates those moments that matter. Those passing interrupts, whether through SAOs and BDR outreach, perhaps too. Maybe you know something personal about your prospect or customer and you want to celebrate a milestone, reward them for usage within the platform or something like that. So, there's many use cases that you can use gifting and swag for.
Mike: What happens when things go wrong? I mean, for example, people are concerned about being seen as bribing or trying to influence others by gifts. And maybe people are also worried about sending the wrong thing. I mean, do people make mistakes and upset customers? And if so, how can you help people avoid these common mistakes?
Ben: Yeah, like any outreach, there's always going to be preferences and things can go wrong. I would say our rules and what we teach customers to do is follow the law of reciprocity. Gifting is just a great moment to give without asking. It's all about sparking that relationship and building stronger relationships through using the power of gifting. And we teach people actually not to ask for something in return. So gifting is there as a great way to support your other channels and your other efforts. It can be also used as a standalone, but think of it as a way of really, really standing out. That's why it works really well with account-based marketing motions and works really well with, yeah, ABM motions and really developing those human relationships. So, I'd stay away from those plays, which is, here's a $50 gift card if you take a meeting. If you are going to do that, send the gift card before the meeting's even happened, right? Let them know that this is a relationship that's really valuable to you and that you really care about and go a step further. You know, maybe it's you're sending out something really personalized. I think that's where gifting platforms do help, to offer that level of variety and ultimately allow the recipient to choose a gift that's going to resonate the most with them, rather than thinking of it as a bribery issue.
Mike: That's great. It sounds like the message is don't use it as something that's transactional. You know, don't imagine that if we give you this gift, you'll do something for us, but actually just genuinely give a gift and use it to build relationships. Is that a good summary of what you're saying? Absolutely.
Ben: I mean, we spend tons of money on digital marketing. in the hope that somebody's going to reply to us and remember what we're saying to them. But the most impactful way that you can start that relationship, have that conversation a lot sooner, is by showing them just how valuable that conversation, how much that relationship means to you.
Mike: That's great advice. One thing I think that would concern people in these days of hybrid and remote work, though, is how do you know you're sending the gift to the right location?
Ben: Yeah, sending the gift to the right location through Reachdesk, and I don't want to make this a podcast all about Reachdesk, but we do have ways of verifying addresses and using address confirmation to make sure that the right gift is sent to the right place. It can be challenging without having a gifting platform to do that. If you're not using a gifting platform, then I recommend calling up the receptionist at the office, seeing if the department or the person that you're wanting to get in touch with if they are in the office or if they plan to be in the office. Tying it into your event strategy, so if you know that you're going to meet people out at events, then taking them with you to the events or shipping them to the events and creating those moments in a slightly different way, I guess.
Mike: I love that. I'd like to move on though and understand a little bit more about how you actually market Reachdesk yourself. I'm interested, at a high level, what kind of challenges are you trying to overcome with your marketing campaigns? Is it awareness or is it more about convincing people of the value of what you're trying to do, or the pain points you're trying to address?
Ben: Yeah, great question. So high-level strategy is that we follow an all-bound approach, which what that means to me is it's really demand generation and account-based marketing. We have sales, business development, marketing, partnerships. all working really closely together to ultimately drive pipeline and revenue. That's what we're all targeted on. It's very clear that those are our key goals together. The challenges, if they come with it, is that we don't do data content, we don't do lead generation activities, we're not really focused on MQLs. So, what we really care about is within our gear counts and our target counts, is progressing them through the funnel as efficiently as we can and staying top of mind. So, when they do have a problem or a challenge, they're really aware of Reach Desk and they're aware that we're the company that can help support them through that. And there's many different challenges that we can help people with. So, I think it's just about being relevant through different campaigns that we're running and making sure that they're really timely. We're optimizing and learning through those wider campaigns so that we stay top of mind and that we are ultimately improving our conversions. And it's not just 95% that aren't ready to buy now and 5% that are, but it's 10% that are ready to buy now and 90% that aren't perhaps ready to buy right now but are still aware of us.
Mike: And is there a particular profile of prospects that you're looking for? I mean, is it based on company size or industry? I mean, how do you decide what the best prospect is for you?
Ben: Yeah, so we have a really defined, well-defined ideal customer profile. And then we break it down into segments, which for us is based on headcount, so enterprise, mid-market, and commercial. And then we run different plays around each of those segments. For us, we market two markets, which I think is potentially the best persona to market so you can do your marketing to yourself, you can have a lot of fun, you can be really creative and ultimately give marketers an experience which they're quite often putting on for other people that they don't get included in themselves. So, I personally love marketing to marketers and selling to marketers and creating experiences that ultimately stand out and go that bit further.
Mike: And it sounds like, from what you say, you're one of those marketing directors that's really focused on building a brand, building the reputation of a company, rather than just driving as many leads as possible. I mean, is that a good summary of your approach?
Ben: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's working with the team that we have. We have a large business development team. Business development rolls up into marketing. They're a part of the marketing team. It's really working effectively on those outbound campaigns and those outbound plays. And ultimately, marketing is there to support sales and help them achieve their goals as well. So, we apply different tactics to different parts of the funnel. We create different journeys for different parts of the funnel. But ultimately, we're trying to understand where people are and tailor that experience to them. Because if somebody is in a purchase stage, what they need is going to be very different to somebody who isn't aware of us just yet or aware of the problems that we can help them solve. So, it's really about bringing that personalization and using the team around us to create a great experience for the prospect, but ultimately progressing through those stages as well.
Mike: I'm interested, you know, you've talked a bit about marketing to marketers and how that lets you have a bit of fun. It sounds like you're really at this convergence between B2B and B2C, and you're not using the tactics that are your standard, dull, boring B2B tactics. Do you want to talk to me about some of those things you might be seeing as more customer focused, but are working for you at Reachdesk?
Ben: Yeah and I've really taken inspiration from this I think from my time in working in PR and working with consumer brands and it was kind of the boom at that point of influencer marketing within B2C and we've seen how well that's taken off on platforms like Instagram, now it's TikTok, video content is really coming into the fold and into the play there of how people consume content these days. We haven't got long attention spans. It's very different to producing huge reports. We're not a very technical offering either. It's gifting. It's direct mail. It's not cyber security and something very technical and wordy that can be bundled up into a pretty chunky eBooks. So, it really is the experiences that we're playing on. One of my favorite experiences that we invested in more recently was an event out in Arizona. It was called Chili Palooza. It was with one of our partners, Chili Piper. It was three days in one of the best bars in the world, where we invited influencers along with us to create content whilst we're there. that can be repurposed for use over social, on a website. Ultimately, it's about finding different ways to build trust at an earlier stage. And working with these influencers and working with these companies that are in a similar space to us and creating fun, engaging content, I think allows us to do that. I mean, who doesn't want three days out on a spa where you're getting massaged, you're going on hikes, you're being able to network with leaders in the industry and your peers and ultimately get to know people on a deeper level.
Mike: Yeah, that sounds like a tough life to me. Seriously, just digging into, you know, you mentioned inviting influencers, and I think a lot of people in B2B would like to access more influencers who they think could help their brand. So how do you go about this? How do you pick influence? Did you look for those that are specifically marketing influencers, or did you maybe pick people who are outside the normal marketing world? I think it really comes down to the goals that you're trying to achieve.
Ben: So, at Reachdesk, for example, we market to marketers, but that's only one part of the buying committee. You know, there's the chief financial officer or the people in finance. There's the sales teams that ultimately might become the users of using Reachdesk in their day to day. So, there is a wider audience that we have to consider and we have to think about. Marketing might hold the purse strings, and they might be the decision makers within the technology and the tools that they're bringing in and the strategies they're implementing. But you still need people to adopt it and to understand it and really get behind it from that wider committee. So, when I think about influencers and the people that we partner with, I do think about leaders in the space that are really going to resonate and really have that trust with the marketers. But I also want to be working with influencers that appeal to the wider buying committee and the wider range of people that would be adopting our tool and solution as well. So, for this one in Chilipaliza in Arizona, it was a combination of both marketers, but also somebody well known that has a great influence within the sales community as well.
Mike: Fantastic. That sounds really interesting. I think, you know, just related to that, obviously you're helping marketers do things that are very much directly engaging with individuals. It seems like you know that what's happening with marketing in terms of taking up more of this customer journey and people spending less time with sales and more time engaging with marketing. So, do you see corporate gifting as a reflection of customers not engaging with salespeople and therefore maybe not going out for lunch with them and then getting gifts instead?
Ben: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we'll come on to this more a little bit later as well. But the influx in AI is allowing people to do more with less. And quite often, when you do more, and you add more and more, it becomes spammy, it becomes less personalized, and it becomes less human. So gifting is a solution that isn't chain-bringing, but if anything, it's really helping people to stand out and to humanize the digital efforts that they might be doing. Whilst a lot of companies are doing more and more and more, I think it's about finding those impactful moments and the right moments. A buy-in journey isn't linear anymore. It looks more like a plate of spaghetti is the analogy that I always like to use. And it's about finding those moments and understanding the relevant triggers and the relevant hooks and the relevant signals, and then making those moments really count and being impactful within them.
Mike: That's fascinating. I'm interested, you've talked about some of the times when it makes a lot of sense to run corporate gifting, you know, events for example, but if I was looking at a customer journey, how would I identify the touch points where corporate gifting makes sense along that journey or maybe signals that, you know, a customer's ready to receive a gift?
Ben: Yeah, great question. So, I always talk about the customer lifecycle, and I break that down into three parts, essentially. The first part is your targeting. The second part is engaging, and the third part is growing. So, if we look at the first part of that funnel, it could be that BDR, and sales teams are working from key accounts. There's great platforms and tools out there, ABM tools like Demandbase, Sixth Sense. some modern ones as well that are coming up that give the buyers the signals that an account could be in a better place and more ready to buy. I also think it's really important to be looking into your CRM data. There's so much more relevant information in your CRM data that you can use to leverage gifting well. Whether that's a customer that's then changed jobs and gone somewhere else, rather than just reaching out and trying to to hope that they come back as a customer. It's a great way to recognize that milestone and celebrate their new job with them and congratulate them with a gift to make sure that relationship is staying strong and continuing. And ultimately, you're able to continue doing business with them wherever they might move on. So new job triggers, they're a huge one for impactful gifting moments. It could be funding triggers. It could be that you're doing a more wider, broader campaign. You've identified a subsector of key accounts which have really struggling with a particular pain point, perhaps, and you want to put together a more branded campaign to really tell that story. Whether it's on the engaging side, perhaps somebody said that they would like to take a meeting with you. So why wouldn't you send them a lunch voucher? Thank you for taking this time to meet with us. Here's lunch on us today. perhaps it's that they're going away on holiday, and you've had a call with them, you know they're going away. The last thing we all want when we get back is to go to the shops and have to stock our fridge up. Why not send in a food voucher so you can say meals on us tonight so that you can really get back into the swing of things. Perhaps people are going out on maternity leave or paternity leave. It's a great way that if you have a branded bundle, and I know one of our customers throughout social, they do this really well, is that they have a branded baby bundle. They're injecting their brand into a moment in that person's life. It's really, really human. Maybe it's that somebody has just signed up for the platform for the first time, or maybe they've just become a customer. It's a great way to send a congratulations gift and thank you gift all the time that's gone into becoming a customer, because it does take a long time and sometimes these deals can go on for years. So, there's definitely different moments within the journey that gifting makes sense and ultimately is just very impactful.
Mike: Thank you, there's some really good ideas there. I'm just noting down some actually, because I think we miss them at Napier. And I particularly like the idea of tying gifting to an event, as it seems much less needy than begging for a meeting. So, I love that, and I also love the idea of tying the gifting to something related to the life of the prospect. I mean, is that the sort of thing you see?
Ben: Yeah, absolutely. And I'll come back to this, because I said it's all about the Laura's Post team. One of the campaigns that we ran recently that had worked really; really well is we were going out to Adobe Summit. We didn't have a booth there and we weren't spending tons of money on having a booth, but we still wanted to book in quality meetings with our sales team and educate people at the event. We've all been to events, walking around three days is exhausting. So, what we did is we said, if you take a meeting with us at the event, then we'll send you a spa voucher so that you can treat yourself to the spa, take yourself off and get pampered either at the event or when you get home. But when people replied, we sent them a voucher straight away. So that's where the law of reciprocity really, really comes into it. But if you can tie gifting to an event or a milestone, then it is really human and it's really common. It's just a nice touch point that definitely goes that extra mile, goes that longer way than constantly just asking for something.
Mike: Definitely. I completely agree. One of the things we'd like to ask people as well is how they see technology impacting marketing. So, from your viewpoint, Ben, how do you see the change in technology, whether that's AI or anything else, impacting marketing over maybe the next five years?
Ben: Yeah, I think it's a question that gives a lot of people anxiety at the minute, I feel, and I think for sometimes good reasons, but it's here and technology is always something that we have to embrace. I think markets have got very good at embracing technology and I know that every year we're kind of being asked to review our tech stacks and look at new solutions and new offerings. There's always new technology being developed as well. I think where I see AI being really impactful is helping people with their processes, helping people to improve efficiencies, helping people in general, because we are being asked to do a lot more and take on more responsibility. People still feel a lot of blame from marketing if revenue isn't being generated, and I know that can be frustrating, but I think when it comes to technology, we can't be short-sighted about the way we're looking into this. It has to be developed into longer-term plays and long-term strategies. Where I see it working really well at the minute is definitely on the research phase, helping us to scale content and leverage content in different formats and different ways that would just take such a long time in the past to be able to do. Where I don't see it working so well currently is replacing humans. I've had horror stories from organizations which have completely let go of their SDR team and they've worked with ghost market specialists to implement AI SDRs. And what they found out after three months of trying this is that they're just not able to generate the pipeline that they were able to previously when they had a human reaching out to a human. I think it can really help us with understanding the right moments to reach out. But when it comes to a key account and a hot account and something that really does matter to you and to your business, then it should be a human driving that motion.
Mike: Yeah, I think that's fascinating to see how we're going to end up, you know, balance between technology and humans. And I guess it's always going to be changing as technology develops. But I guess the good news is, is that us humans at least still seem to be adding some value.
Ben: It does, yeah. I mean, I don't want to be talking to an AI. I use chat GPT all the time and it makes me better as a person, but I don't want chat GPT to be talking to another chat GPT. It becomes a bit silly, and I think I've heard this concept of people feeling already that they need AI to be checking their AI.
Mike: Yeah, it's unbelievable people are checking AI with AI. But actually, I think most people have seen AI get things obviously wrong. I really appreciate your time, Ben. It's been so interesting. Before you go, there's a couple of questions we always like to ask our guests. And the first is, what's the best piece of marketing advice that's ever been given to you?
Ben: I've got two for this one. The first one is, if the messaging isn't resonating, change it. You should always be A-B testing and changing your messaging and making sure that it is resonating. But I didn't get it the first time when I heard it. And then I read the book, obviously, and it makes a lot more sense. But be a purple cow. Do those things that make you memorable and stand out. And if you're having fun, then other people will have fun with you and enjoy it too.
Mike: Perfect. And the second question we'd like to ask is, if you were talking to someone who was just starting a marketing career, what would be your advice to them?
Ben: My advice would be a sponge. It's going to be a lot of work. It's going to be hard. But my recommendation is be that sponge. Speak to as many different teams as you possibly can. Get involved in as many different things as you possibly can. Bail as fast as you can and make sure that you're in an environment that allows you to do that. Experimentation is a wonderful thing. And I lean into my team so much to help me experiment and help me come up with different ways of doing things because you might just stumble across something which is absolutely gold, and you won't do that if you're not experimenting. So, failing fast is a good thing, learn from it, keep improving, but ultimately just come back to my motto and the team's motto is be kind to yourself, be kind to each other and be kind to your customers. With hard work it can take a toll sometimes but just keep going with it. It's going to be a great career.
Mike: I think that's an absolutely brilliant way to end this discussion, Ben. It's been fascinating. If people want to get hold of you or maybe learn more about Reachdesk, what are the best ways to do that?
Ben: You can look me up on LinkedIn, Ben Smith, and I'm with Reachdesk, obviously. I'm always out and about at events and trade shows, so hopefully you can meet me at one of those as well.
Mike: Thank you, Ben. I really appreciate you being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology. Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Electronic Specifier Launches New Website
Electronic Specifier has launched its redesigned website, introducing a refreshed look and improved functionality to enhance the user experience. The update brings a modern, streamlined layout with clearer navigation, making it easier for engineers and industry professionals to access the latest news, product launches, technical articles, and podcasts.
Optimised for desktop, tablet, and mobile, the fully responsive design ensures users can conveniently engage with content wherever they’re working. Among the standout improvements are a more powerful search function, topic-based categorisation, and enhanced content recommendations, helping readers quickly locate the information most relevant to their needs.
The Napier team explored the new platform and shared their views:
“The overall layout feels much fresher, more user-friendly, and easier to navigate – whether you’re browsing via the tabs at the top of the page or using the drop-down menu on the top left-hand side.”
Another notable improvement is the ‘About’ tab, which now offers direct access to magazine archives and media kits (available on request), making it easier for users to find valuable resources. The Napier team also commented that the ‘ES Network’ feature, introduced into the navigation, provides quick and helpful links to Electronic Specifier’s other titles, including Procurement Pro and IoT Insider.
Congratulations to Electronic Specifier on the new site; it's always great to see a publication enhancing and improving user experience.
Datateam Introduce Webinar Offering for Electronics Sector
Datateam Business Media has announced the expansion of its webinar offering to clients in the electronics industry.
With a portfolio of more than 50 B2B publications and over 35 live events annually, Datateam's webinar platform is already trusted across several verticals and is now available to electronics clients on a quarterly basis.
Webinars hosted across Datateam’s existing B2B brands typically attract between 30 to 130 registrants, depending on the subject matter and frequency of promotional activity. Designed to foster industry discussion and insight, each session is guided by a specialist from the web team and the brand’s Editor, who will moderate and prompt discussions using a pre-agreed set of questions and topics.
The webinar package includes:
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Full access to the webinar across all platforms
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A promotional e-cast campaign to drive registrations
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Access to opted-in attendee contact details
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Hosting and platform costs fully covered
To amplify reach, activities also include social media promotion via LinkedIn and X, features in EE's weekly e-newsletter, and the potential for coverage in the corresponding print issue.
Following the live event, the recorded version of the webinar remains available on demand, continuing to generate new registrants. Companies will have the opportunity to access post-event leads.
It's great to see Datateam continuously providing new ways for B2B tech companies to engage their target audience. Webinars offer a valuable format in engaging target audiences and enabling companies to position themselves as thought leaders.
For more information on how to get involved and pricing, please reach out to the Napier team.
Future Horizons to Host Autumn Industry Update Webinar
Future Horizons has announced the date for its Autumn Industry Update Webinar, which will take place on Tuesday, 16th September 2025 at 3pm UK BST.
The webinar will cover the 2025 chip market enigma, exploring how traditional sectors such as smartphones, notebooks, TVs, and wearables are facing sustained headwinds, whilst AI server-related markets are experiencing explosive growth. Sharing details on what awaits the industry in the rest of 2025 and beyond, the webinar will answer:
- Is it actually ‘different this time’?
- Have AI servers really changed industry dynamics?
- Is the chip market now ASP not unit driven?
- What happens if the AI server market tapers off or crashes and burns?
For further information on the webinar and how to attend, please click here. We look forward to learning the insights Future Horizons will share around the Global Semiconductor industry.
The Real ROI of AI Agents, Quizzes & Strategic Thinking
In this episode of the Marketing Automation Moment podcast, hosts Mike and Hannah record from a professional studio in London, enjoying a change of scenery and face-to-face conversation. They dive into the latest in marketing automation updates, starting with HubSpot’s Breeze AI agents. The discussion explores the effectiveness of AI in B2B customer service, the challenges of training AI for complex queries, and the importance of balancing automation with human support.
The episode also touches on ActiveCampaign’s use of quizzes and interactive content for customer profiling, as well as Salesforce’s latest backend AI developments. Mike unpacks the technical side, while Hannah brings it back to what matters for marketers.
They wrap up with a reminder that strategy is still at the heart of successful marketing automation, emphasizing the need for clear goals and alignment between sales and marketing teams.
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcast
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Kelly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Introduction to The Marketing Automation Moment Podcast
00:00:20 - HubSpot's Breeze AI Agents
00:04:27 - Using Quizzes for Customer Profiling
00:07:45 - Salesforce AI Updates
00:10:12 - Importance of Strategy in Marketing Automation
00:13:01 – Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Kelly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wehrly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing Automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We’d also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: The Real ROI of AI Agents, Quizzes & Strategic Thinking
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Whirly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. Today, we discuss HubSpot's Breeze AI agents, using quizzes to profile customers, Hannah lets me talk about geeky updates from Salesforce.
Hannah: And we discuss why strategies are a must for marketing automation. Hi, Mike. Welcome to another episode of Marketing Automation Moment podcast. Do you notice anything different about your surroundings today?
Mike: Oh, it's so exciting. We've actually gone and hired a proper podcast studio to do some recording face to face rather than being remote. So it's great to be with you, Hannah, for this. And I'm really looking forward to this episode.
Hannah: Me too. I mean, it's a bit unnerving to have three cameras facing us, but I'm getting used to it. Well, look, let's kick it off because we've got some really cool things to discuss today. And the first is an update from HubSpot. Now, it was really interesting because HubSpot basically released this article talking about their Breeze agents. Now, it's classic, doing a different type of title for what is basically an AI agent, but we love Market Automation's platforms trying for it. Now it was quite interesting because the thing that they were really driving hard in this article was that actually 50% of conversations can be solved by their AI agents. I mean, you had a read, what did you think?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, thanks for sending through the article. It was really interesting. Obviously, HubSpot's not alone. Everybody's trying to generate these AI agents that take work away from humans, make it to be done by AI. I think, you know, always the question is, is how effective are they? And certainly, talking to our clients, who tend to be B2B companies, they tend to have very technical products, they are usually quite cynical about the ability of AI agents to solve problems. And I think the perception is, is that quite often AI agents are great at solving simple problems, for example, quite often with consumer brands. But when it gets to much more complex things, you know, particularly if someone's, for example, coming onto a website and asking for recommendations about which semiconductor to use, maybe an AI agent isn't the right way to go. I don't know. I think, you know, increasingly, we are going to see B2B companies starting to use these agents. And I think, you know, the more B2B companies that experiment, the better. But I mean, the problem is, as you and I know, there's such a huge cost that's involved in training the agent. Don't you think that's really one of the biggest issues for B2B?
Hannah: I think that's a brilliant point, Mike. And actually, you know, we talk about HubSpot, I actually use the HubSpot AI agent, which they use in their own platform the other day. And I got so frustrated with it so quickly. In the end, I had to be like, speak to a real person, speak to a real person. And I was actually asking a really simple question around their different packages and the pricing of things. And so I think it's a really valid point that yes, they can help. Yes, maybe they can cut back so it's 50%. It helps 50% of conversations, but it has to be those easy ones. And even then to get it trained up to that point is going to take a lot of work and it is going to take a big time commitment. Once that time commitment has been made, then absolutely, you know, I'm sure it will help. But I think there'll be some frustrations from customers if these companies are just straight away switching to these AI agents and actually they're not getting the answers they need.
Mike: I mean, I completely agree. We obviously work with a client in the space. And I think, you know, one of the most insightful things they said to me was there's actually two types of companies when it comes to deploying AI agents for customer service. The first is all about saving money. And so, they just want to move conversations from humans to AI, and they want to save money that way. And they said that generally doesn't work. What works is if companies are focused on using AI to actually make the customer experience better. And I thought that was really insightful, because then what you do is you actually have your AI agents, and they're really focused on doing the things they do well. And then also the company is not trying to hold customers like you were with HubSpot, hold them on the AI agent. They're very happy to let them go to human if that's the best customer service. So I agree with you. I think it's an interesting trend. It's certainly something I think B2B companies should be watching. But I think, you know, in the long term, probably what we're going to see is we're going to see a fairly slow rollout in B2B, because it does tend to be more challenging.
Hannah: Absolutely. Well, let's move on because I want to have a quick chat about Active Campaign. Now, I was scrolling through their webinars, I do this when we're looking at our podcast recordings, and I came across a really interesting one. Now, it was talking about using different ways to basically get data. And I mean, it had the basic things like, you know, gate your content, if you're on your Contact Us page, maybe use a form there. But the one thing that I found really interesting is they actually talked about using quizzes. So, using quizzes that are maybe a bit more fun, that have a resource at the end, but actually help provide the data in order to be able to personalise. I mean, what do you think about that type of concept?
Mike: So, I think it's really interesting, you know, I mean, when we started with marketing automation, everybody was super excited about progressive profiling. Let's keep asking more and more questions, and then we can personalize. I think the idea of active campaign to kind of gamify it. Yeah, I mean, that's not a bad idea. Although, haven't you seen too many quizzes on Facebook? I mean, I'm kind of bored of them. I don't even go on Facebook that often. I think, you know, if you're going to create a quiz, the challenge is not how it's going to help you as a marketer personalise the content, but much more how that quiz is going to help your customer or your prospect learn something. I mean, we do something slightly different at Napier. And we're very into creating, you know, complex analytical tools that really understand customers problems, and then produce customized reports. So we've done that quite a lot, you know, from an ABM evaluation tool to decide your ABM maturity, all the way through to helping some of our clients develop tools that lets their customers see, for example, how well they maintain systems.
Hannah: Yeah, I mean, I think the thing I would add to that, Mike, is yes, maybe we've seen too many quizzes, but I think me as a marketer, it's sometimes just a little bit of a relief. You're like, OK, cool, something just to take off this hard work, you know, that I've got going on during the day. But I think also as well, it can be done in smaller ways. So, I mean, one of the things that we do is we use Turtle. So Turtle is an interactive content platform. And similar to quizzes, but we actually put in polls. So we put in polls within the pages related to the content to say we're talking about marketing automation. It's like, you know, what percentage do you have of people that convert from your emails? You know, maybe something like that. And we actually get people to fill in the data. And again, it's progressive profiling, but it's actually a really easy way where they probably don't even think twice about doing it. And so I do think there's actually something not unique, but just a little bit different that makes you go, OK, I'm going to give you my data. Why not?
Mike: Yeah, and maybe the other thing I think you you know, you kind of alluded to it when you said quizzes are quite nice to have a break. I think the problem is, is that as b2b marketers, we're always a bit too serious. And we always want to know technical information and data about your plant or whatever it is. And actually, sometimes we should look at, you know, being a bit more fun. I think it's interesting Cambridge Analytica and obviously, what they were doing was not necessarily a good thing. But the way they were approaching profiling people through questions like which Game of Thrones character would you be? I think having that fun is the way to do it. So maybe what we need to do as, you know, marketers in B2B, is we need to be thinking ways to create fun quizzes, rather than necessarily always be too serious.
Hannah: I think you summed it up perfectly, Mike. Now, let's move on because I want to have a chat about Salesforce. And this is going to make you laugh because I read this Salesforce article and it's basically an update on what they're doing to their AI, their more technical specifications in the back end. And I didn't understand a word of it. And I think that solidified that you are the geek and I am the marketing expert. So I don't know, do you want to have a quick chat about that? Because I think it has some really useful things in there. I just do wonder if it's going to go over B2B marketers' heads a little bit.
Mike: Well, I mean, I think anyone who listens to this podcast knows that you are really the market automation expert, you're finding all the stories, and I'm just here sort of, you know, giving my opinion on them. But I really appreciate you finding a geeky one for me. I think, you know, this is really interesting. I was actually listening to, you know, somebody else on a podcast, and they said that they don't believe that AI, in terms of large language models, are really going to move forward very much. And actually, if you look at what's happened, you know, honestly, the jump between chat GPT 3.5. And four is way bigger than 40. And all the other 4.1. And all the other different versions we've seen now in chat GPT. So So yes, it's true, you know, large language models are definitely plateauing. And what they said was, the way things are going to improve is that you're going to have software around the AI to kind of control and manage it. And if you look at what Salesforce is doing, it's doing a lot of software around its agents to really monitor, evaluate and control. And I think that's the idea behind it. Super geeky, totally agree with that. But I do think it makes sense. And I think it actually reflects really the trend of what's happening.
Hannah: So let me clarify that, Mike. So if we're going to take it out of the geeky terms more into marketing terms, are you saying that they've put in this software that's going to manage the AI and then that's going to help basically how to improve the AI as the platform moves forward to involve?
Mike: I think you put it perfectly there, Hannah. I mean, another way to look at it is at the moment, anyone who uses AI knows AI needs a boss because it can be lazy, it can get things wrong. It's not really very reliable. And typically today, that boss is a human. If you can put software in to kind of make sure that the AI stays within certain guardrails, then actually that boss can be a computer. So I think what they're doing is they're installing, you know, certainly at least the line manager to be a computer for the AI. And that's really going to help improve the quality of AI and reduce the amount of work people need to do to actually get results from AI.
Hannah: Oh, I love how you described that, Mike. And I think it's something that marketers are going to absolutely love. So thank you for explaining it in not geeky terms. But let's move on. I really want to talk about our insightful tip of the week. Now, we've talked about this, and I would say many, many months ago, and I think it was due a refresh. So I want to have a chat about strategy. Now, strategy is something that we always talk about in APR. We have a four-step process. We have our first two steps that are literally focused on strategy. Who are you trying to reach? What are you messaging? And I really wanted to talk about when it comes to actually working with a market automation platform, why do you need strategy in place? Why should you have a strategy in place of how you want to use that platform? Because we've unfortunately seen many companies just spend thousands of pounds a month and not get any return of investment for it. So what do you think?
Mike: Well, strategy is easy, isn't it? It's just two emails a week. I mean, in all seriousness, you've seen it, I've seen it, you know, people who really don't think about the strategy. So they've invested in marketing automation, or they've bought in a marketing automation team. And then the goals are all outputs. You know, what are we going to do? How many emails are we going to send? How many form fills we're going to get? And they're important, but they're not strategy. And I think strategy is always the why, you know, why are you doing it? What do you expect to get as a business result from it? And so, you know, you pointing out the Napier four step process. Absolutely. I love that. It's a great point. Because what you need to do is sit back and understand the situation that determined phase we do at the start. So understand what you want to change and how you want to change it. And then you've got to do the focus stage, you know, looking at who you're talking to and what you want to say to them. So the audience and the message. And do that before you rush into the tactics. So really, it's simple. Take a breath, step back, don't think about what you're going to do, but think about the strategy first.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I want to add something to that, Mike, because I think one of the things that gets overlooked is that relationship between the sales and marketing teams. Now I love how you describe the determined and the focus stage there, but I think the key thing as well is that when you take that breath and you take that step back, you are working together as one. Because as a platform, marketing automation platforms are amazing to support both sales and marketing teams. If you've set up a platform and it's just for marketing's goals, it's not going to work. If you set up a platform on the other side and it's just for sales goals, again, it's not going to work. So I just want to put that point because it's so important that actually when you take that step, make sure you're working well together internally because the results you will see will be double because you're all going towards that one unified goal.
Mike: I think that that's so insightful, Hannah. And I think if you're looking at it from both the sales and marketing point of view, inherently, you've moved above an individual department's KPIs. And you're absolutely right. It's a great way to start off is to make sure you're covering that whole customer journey.
Hannah: Absolutely. Well, thank you for another interesting conversation today, Mike. It's been so great to do it in person.
Mike: It's been fun. Let's hope we do it again like this.
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.
The Future of B2B Marketing: Trust, AI & Human Connection
We welcome back Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing and a leading voice in the industry. Four years after his last appearance, Joel shares how B2B marketing has evolved – impacted by COVID, political tensions, AI, and tariffs.
From the lasting power of podcasts to the shifting balance between brand and performance marketing, he explores the rise of human-centric strategies in B2B, the real impact of AI on MarTech, and why trust, influence, and advocacy are emerging as the new pillars of marketing success.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About B2B Marketing
B2B Marketing is the premier provider of insight and intelligence for marketers across all B2B sectors. Its Propolis community intelligence platform helps marketing teams become more effective and successful. The B2B Marketing Awards are the gold standard for excellence in B2B campaigns, while Ignite and the Global ABM Conference are among the most respected events on the B2B marketing calendar.
B2B Marketing’s offerings include an extensive content portfolio, such as the B2B Agencies Benchmarking Report, the B2B Marketing Podcast, and a suite of industry-focused training courses.
About Joel Harrison
Joel Harrison has spent over 20 years at the heart of the B2B marketing industry — as an editor, keynote speaker, ambassador, and evangelist — playing a pivotal role in shaping the dynamic sector we know today.
Today, Joel focuses on podcasting, public speaking, advisory work, and his upcoming book on thought leadership. He co-founded B2B Marketing magazine in 2004, establishing key industry events and the Propolis community. He remains co-owner and director of B2B Marketing (www.b2bmarketing.net), though he is no longer operationally involved.
Time Stamps
00:00:17 - Guest Introduction: Joel Harrison
00:00:44 - What Has Joel Been Doing Over the Last 4 Years?
00:02:54 - The Future of Podcasts
00:06:28 - Creating Valuable Conferences
00:08:40 - How Has the B2B Marketing Landscape Changed?
00:12:30 - Making B2B Marketing Less Boring
00:16:30 - The Impact of AI on the Marketing Stack
00:18:29 - The Rise of Influencer Marketing in B2B
00:24:20 - Best Marketing Advice and Career Tips
Quotes
“In the 22 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve never seen a period that even compares remotely.” Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing
“The only thing you can be certain about is uncertainty.” Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing
“B2B marketing has definitely got more human. And that’s a good thing.” Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing
“AI isn’t the reason to buy a platform. The platform should solve a specific job — AI is just part of how it does it.” Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing
“We can’t really envisage what the midterm future looks like right now — we’re just so early in the AI journey.” Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing
“It’s not about being boring or not boring — it’s about being human and relevant.” Joel Harrison, founder of B2B Marketing
Follow Joel:
Joel Harrison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joelharrison/
B2B Marketing’s website: https://www.b2bmarketing.net/
B2B Marketing on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/b2b-marketing/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Joel Harrison at B2B Marketing
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Joel Harrison
Mike: Thanks for listening to marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today,
Welcome to marketing B2B technology, the podcast from Napier today, I'm joined by Joel Harrison, who's the founder of B2B marketing and probably one of the best known voices in B2B marketing as a whole. Welcome to the podcast again, Joel.
Joel: It's love to be back. Mike, can't believe it's been four years.
Mike: Yes, it's been four years since we last talked in the podcast. Do you want to tell us you know a little bit about what you've been doing and what's been happening at B2B Marketing and Propolis?
Joel: Well, I guess four years ago was kind of early stage COVID, right? Like that. So yeah, the business, our businesses, um, business, BT, marketing as a business, has been through a lot of change in that period of time. We launched Propolis about four years ago, I think we launched in 2000 Oh, one, and we launched what we launched what we launched as minimum viable product, and it's evolved an awful lot since then. It's much more sophisticated and rich and and it's proving a massive success in parallel with that. You know, many people listen to this may know me from, you know, having launched B2B marketing magazine and then post magazine, we still had a kind of positioning as a voice of the industry that's kind of retrenched a bit as from the brand's perspective, and it has become very much focused around Propolis, which is a closed community for B2B marketers, a really valuable community, and it's proving really successful for its members. And then also the events as well, like the Ignite and the baby ABM conference and the BQ marketing awards. So we do less as a brand, as a business. We do less of those things, those kind of market outreach things. Well, personally, I've actually stepped back operationally from the business, and I'm finding time to do a lot more of those things myself, and be out in the market, going to events. I've got my own podcast as well, and then doing all kinds of things like that. So a slight kind of realignment in terms of, personally, how I'm involved in what I'm doing.
Mike: And that sounds quite exciting. I mean, you've always been, you know, one of those voices talking about what's happening in B2B marketing and where the industry is going. I mean, presumably that's really playing to the areas that you enjoy.
Joel: Yeah, it is. It's kind of like getting back my job as an old magazine editor again, except without the crushing production designs, so and also new set of tools to play with, so things like podcasting and video, which are really, really interesting, and social channels as well. So it is great. It's good fun. And I get to be agile. And I had, I've had spent, I've spent 22 years everyone else's problem being my problem, and it's refreshing for that not to be the case anymore.
Mike: That sounds like a lot of fun. I'm just going to ask you a quick question about the podcast. Actually. You know, it seems like everybody's got a podcast. We've got a podcast as you're on it. What do you think's the future of podcasts? Do you think this is a media that's here to stay, or are people just going to get swamped with too many different podcasts?
Joel: It's a really good question. There are loads of them. I just think it's such an incredibly powerful medium in itself. When you think of just core audio, but obviously you have video as well. You have atomized content as well, and you have the ability to embed that content and use it to pull out streams together as a someone who comes from a journalistic editorial background. What I love about it is that there's your ability to reuse it creatively, particularly in the world of AI, for example. One of the reasons, the reason I started my podcast, is I very publicly said, is I very publicly said I'm gonna write a book, and because that was my kind of posts, my new world projects, what I realized the reason I was gonna write a book is because I wanted to get speaking engagements and other projects of interest to do. And whereas I didn't actually need the book to do that, the book would take a long time to do that. But the podcast was suggested to me as a means of kind of populating the book. So the podcast has stayed, and the book's gone, and the podcast is giving me an ability to kind of explore some of the more pressing themes I was going to look at in that book, but in a more agile way, and also more transparent way, where you're having those conversations with people and are making the whole thing available and then repurposing it. So I think it's a really dynamic medium. And I think from a point of view, listen, I'm sorry this is a long answer, but if you can get into someone's literally into their ears when they're doing things that aren't Mark job related, like walking the dog or gardening or washing up or cooking, then that's incredibly powerful, much more so than sat at our desks trying to read something because we know we ought to.
Mike: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things is, you know, we used to have printed magazines, you know, arrive on our desk. We've now got podcasts. I mean, they're two examples of, you know, what for the reader was free media. But actually, if you look at what's happened with B2B marketing and Propolis, particularly, you're building a lot around a, you know, paid for community. And also, you know, conferences which aren't cheap. I mean, do you think marketers, or maybe their companies are investing more in their future and their development than maybe they were 20 years ago?
Joel: That's a tough question. I think there is a there is an understanding that people need to invest in a structured way. And conferences. Do conference sit into that structured learning process? Not sure. It's a tough one. I know you get value out of them, but it doesn't fit into what an HR person might necessarily see as a structure development program. I think that Propolis is designed to provide a lot more of that structure and provide and be very strategically goal orientated around what you're trying to achieve as a team and what the function where the function needs to improve, and then deploy the resources against that. So I think that that that we're seeing much more of that there were people in the market who did that, people like Forrester who but they often it was very expensive what they provide, they didn't still provide, and often they prevent. Presented you with a kind of an idealized version of what you could do, which no one could really relate to, because actually wasn't very achievable, whereas what we're trying to achieve with properties, and I'm sorry this sounds like a sales pitch, is something which is very customized, more orientated around you, what you particularly want, but also we need rather and also, then what we're exploring now, which is really Exciting, is using AI to deploy insights generated from other members of the community in that in anonymized fashion to answer your questions immediately. So there's some really exciting ways you can get such a level of value from it, which you just couldn't get anywhere else.
Mike: It's really interesting. I think mentioned value about five times already in this this discussion. I mean, maybe look at the conference program, because that's that's quite isolated. How do you create conferences that really are valuable to people and keep them coming back?
Joel: Well, it's worth saying, I'm not no longer involved in the I used to be the producer for about 15 years. I produced all of the conferences, and I sweated on those things, and I, you know, took passion out of it. I don't do that anymore. And I, like I'd say it's been time off for good behavior after a long period of time. So how does a team do that? Well, I think it's about trying to understand the themes at top level that are important, and then trying to surface the stories and the brands are doing interesting things, and work with partners to do that. And then you have to work quite hard, as all conference producers should do. Most of them do do, to make sure that people understand what good looks like, and then then they propose something that aligns with that, and then actually come from deliver it, because they can fall down at any one of those stages. You know, the one of the biggest challenges our events have is the model that we exist in marketing for better or for worse, where people don't want to just sponsor and turn up and have a stand they want to present, and that means you have to work even harder with people to make sure that what they deliver is actually genuinely objective and useful, because sometimes they don't know they're selling, even in wheaton when they are so that's a tough gig. And you know, I think no matter how hard we try, somebody at the end of it will say, Well, that was more of a sales pitch. Should have been, and there's only so much you can do. We have to balance that with sessions that are genuinely objective and have nothing, no, no pitch at all. I think it's about 60% Unsponsored to sponsored. Well, a lot of the sponsor sessions can be really good, yeah.
Mike: And I guess a lot of the sponsor sessions bring in real life case studies, which you know is super important.
Joel: Absolutely, absolutely sometimes, I mean, sometimes even you get, you'll get an uncurated session actually been produced by agency, and agency did all the hard work and created the story, and just give them the slide deck to the to the CMO. And so in some ways, what you're doing when you're getting a it doesn't have all the time, but sometimes you're getting a sponsor session. It's just the same thing, except they're putting their name the top of it, and they're going to get the data people in the room, that kind of thing. So so you know, it's not it's probably less delineated than you might think from the outside.
Mike: I could talk a lot about, you know, what's happening at B to marketing a Propolis, but I'd like to talk about things more generally. I mean, you know more about some of the broader stuff you're doing. I mean, the first question is, you know, we talked four years ago. How do you think B2B marketing has changed in the last four years? And what does that mean for the future?
Joel: Wow. Well, I mean, in the 22 years I've been doing this, I've never seen a period that even compares remotely. I mean, 2008 2009 was a bit, was a bit tricky. But, you know, there's absolute roller coast the last four years. I'm sure you've experienced this as well. First of all, she had COVID, and, you know, all events canceled, they were online. Then we thought we were getting out of that. And you had Ukraine, and then they had a cost of living crisis, which, which put, you know, the kibosh on the economy. And then things are starting to stabilize. If AI arrives, you know, with chat GP launch, that was, that was the moment where it starts to hit home, and then everything seems to snowball from there again. We seem to feel like we're getting a handle on what's happening. And then you have tariffs coming, you know, and that and that, then that impacts on sentiment and huge amount of challenges. It's kind of like, you know, you feel like you're just getting over one blow and you get hit by another one. I'm not saying it's all bad, because it's been very exciting and very dynamic, and we've all had to be more agile, but it has been, has been a difficult period to live through. And I think what the thing where we get to now is we live in this age of more pronounced, and the only thing you can be certain about is uncertainty, I guess, is the situation where change is going to be ongoing, and AI is really driving that change. I don't think, and I know that's a cliche. I know we hear about AI every day, and everyone's bored the sick of it, but you can't understate the importance of it. And I think that we can't really envisage we're just, we're so, we're so. Early in the journey towards what AI is going to do and what it can do, we can't really properly envisage what any kind of midterm future looks like right now. And it's interesting that the economist just called it the trough of despondency starts here, and they we barely must started.
Mike: I'm not going to delve too much into AI, I think a lot of people are talking about it, and also it's something that's going to change very quickly. I mean, one of the things I'm interested about in B2B is, how do you deal with this massive changes that are going on and very rapid changes? And one of the big discussions, I think, particularly around the fact that it's harder to get data in digital and privacy is going to make that harder and harder, is this balance between short term performance marketing versus longer term brand building. Where do you stand on that? In B2B? Where should companies be?
Joel: Yeah, I think it's an interesting conversation, and it's definitely signed maturity that we're able to have that conversation. Whereas I think if you asked it five years ago, it would have been very hard to make a case right now brand building. But I think LinkedIn and the B2B Institute have made a lot of noise about this. And to one extent, it's good, because people have to be because long term is the right web for marketing to behave ourselves as short term marketing is long term, or at least medium to long term. But at the same time, I don't think anything's changed that dramatically, because you can, you know, people are going to say, Oh, you need to invest in long term branding and forget everything else. That's nonsense that doesn't work. And, you know, our data from the beat marketing world proves that we spent a lot of time, and we use AI to analyze the entries that we get in, and you can see the campaigns where they use brand and demand together in a meaningful way, are the ones that are most effective. And I think that there are, you know, there are a lot of people have seized on some of the data that LinkedIn have produced. LinkedIn have produced, and I think they're disingenuous and a bit naive, deliberately around around what it actually means. In that respect, nothing's really changed. We knew that we needed to build our brands at the same time as we drove demand. We need to be to commercial and be linked up to the sales team. Anybody who's saying that is crazy, marketers have to be more commercial, rather than less commercial, and the idea of resolving the responsibility from brand is just ridiculous. So yes, how to build a strong brand, but do it in a way that drives brand, and do it recognizes that there are multiple touch points in B2B journeys, and need to do all the way along.
Mike: I think that's a really strong message there, and I've got to follow it up with one of the other controversial topics in B2B. You know, if people are building brand, does this mean that actually B2B is going to stop being so boring, I guess, and become more exciting and more creative?
Joel: Mike I'm pretty sure you're asking a controversial it really winds me up when people talk about B2B being boring, because it's really complex, right? And that's why I love it. I suspect that's why you love it as well. You know, it's not simple. It's not like selling fish fingers on Mars bars, right? It's a very, very complex product, and tech particularly, has it got less boring, it's certainly got more human. And that does align with boringness or lack of it. We're talking to people as human beings, rather than as buyers, and that is definitely a good thing. And if you think again about the BT marketing awards, we we did an analysis this year using AI, I'm sorry to use that word, those two letters again, because that, because that's the only way you could do it, right? You can't look through hundreds of entries as a human being. You just can't consume or see the patterns in that that information. And the, you know, the five trends we identified were all, or four of them were certainly around humanization, right? And then it's the five we ended up got. We've got to go, we've got a download on this if you're interested. One is anti corporate messaging. The second one is physical and digital integration, and that's less about humanization, but there is a dimension to it there. The third one is consumer grade entertainment, and that's the strongest one. The fourth was an employee centric messaging, and the fifth one was radical transparency. So there's four of those five are really strongly about humanisation, and that's what came through. And I think that's the journey that we're on, and that's a really good thing for the industry.
Mike: And do you think there's risks? I mean, obviously the example that is easy to quote is when British Airways painted their tail planes. And without wanting to trivialize what happened, the research said that British Airways find themselves being seen as boring. They then did this whole funky tail planes tried to be cool, and actually people went, No, no. If I'm on an airplane, I want it to be boring. An exciting flight is really a bad idea. I don't want to be diving down. I mean, do you think there's a risk? Because people are so concerned about the potential downsides of decisions in B2B, that actually they are conservative. They do want it to be boring. They don't want to, you know, buy something and then it be an exciting and stressful discussion with their manager.
Joel: I mean, that's a really good question, I but I think ultimately, it's about attention and then engagement and getting noticed. Because we're in this world where we're bombarded with hundreds of messages for hundreds of channels, and we just tune out most. We don't see them. So you need to work harder. It's not just that your journey has been on evolution. It's just a response to the situation. And so you need to be engaged, engage people. I need to recognize that there are, that the nature of media is that it's coming at you in your consumer life and your your work life. Was there a work life thing? I'm at home. I'm not sure if you're at home, but there's still. Room and necessity for the technical bits and pieces, but it's probably somewhere down the line. There's another brilliant example, which was from one of the airline manufacturers, or engine manufacturers, rather, airlines. It's interesting. This is a coincidental analysis that you'd mentioned airlines as I'm mentioning it, but it was, again, did very well at the awards, where they were actually the whole whole issue was around engine noise, and they turned the they used the engine noise to compare the noise of this engine versus this engine, and they were sent that in. They allowed engineers and specifiers access to that in multiple different formats, and they tuned into the geekery, but it didn't entertaining but also technical way. And that's brilliant when you can do both of those things. You could cater for the entertainment value, but also provide that detail.
Mike: I think that's fascinating. And I think, you know, maybe the definition of entertainment is slightly different with different B2B audiences. If you're targeting engineers, what's entertaining for them may not be entertaining for other people, don't you think?
Joel: I think that's probably true, and people in professional services as well, right? I think there's, there's, there are aspects of marketing in those professions, where you don't want to look too frivolous, but at the same time, you've got to look human. You've got to look human.
Mike: Yeah, you don't want your lawyer turning up in a clown suit just to be remembered.
Joel: It's an interesting idea, though, isn't it?
Mike: Yeah, I guess we're going to have to touch on AI. I mean, four years ago we talked about marketing tech stacks. I mean, how much is AI changing the decisions people are making around their tech stacks, and what should people in B2B be looking for in a tech stack to future proof against AI?
Joel: Well, you know what actually things one area AI actually hasn't had as big an impact as you might think it had, or has in other areas. I think what's happened between now, certainly four years ago, probably, is that we had, there was a, there was kind of a golden age of martech, right? And it was more, more more, buy more, buy more platforms. Plug it together, you know, build this huge, towering edifice. I mean, some it's a bit of a, you know, kind of metaphor there. But the, you know, the kind of, the gloss has worn off a lot of that vision, despite what Scott Brinker is best efforts. You know, Scott Brinker, the guy who does the martech landscape every year. Every year it gets 30% bigger, and there's 1000s of platforms and solutions. So I think we're in a much more mature place now, and there's much more scrutiny being applied to what you buy. That doesn't absolve you from still having to have a fundamental martech infrastructure. Martech spine is the best way to describe it, and you defer that one to Adam sharp, so you doesn't defeat from doing that. Most of those platforms will have aI built into them. But AI isn't the reason to buy the platform. The reason to buy the platform was because it's doing a specific job, like your CRM or your marketing automation or your demand gen platform. I think the interesting bit is probably less around that kind of the stack aspect of because a lot of AI technologies are quite kind of point tactical solutions. They may not even plug into your overall, your overall infrastructure, and they can and should be deployed in a kind of relatively Footloose way. It'd be nice to have them rolled out in a consistent way, but I've kind of helped feeling that often they're quite orientated towards particular use cases and particular functions within the organization. And I certainly wouldn't worry the person saying you shouldn't be exploring AI kind of content or production tools, because they're not part of the overall strategic plan, because I think we just all got to be so onus on all of us to experiment every way we can.
Mike: That's interesting. So I mean, tech stacks are not quite as hot. I think one thing that I don't think we even talked about it four years ago is B2B influencers, and to me, I'm hearing more and more about people looking for influencers in B2B. I mean, do you think this is a trend that's gonna have legs?
Joel: Yes, undoubtedly. Influencer Marketing. I've lost count of the number of times over the last 15 years, everyone said, bitch, this year's with the Air B2B influencers. But I think it really has broken through now, and I think there are two, two primary reasons for that. The first is that actually, and Ogilvy did a really good piece on this. They actually kind of said, well, I mean, they probably, I think we've already done this, but this is the piece that I saw that resonated with me. Influencers is it's not just about professional influences, like the ones you would see on YouTube for skincare products, for example. It's a very broad church of individuals who are involved in being influential in B2B, and that includes employees, includes analysts, includes thought leaders in organizations, includes partners, you know, there's, there's a whole and includes journalists, you know, like me, shock horror. So it's not just, you know, the model, the kind of the reframe and frame reference point you might have in B to C is just not the same. In B2B, it's less likely to be paid. It's not impossible, but it's less likely that financial transaction influence you provide is probably more around micro or influence, rather than broad, rich influence. So the different there's a whole different framework to think about. So to forget what you know, what you think you know about influence marketing from B to C. It's a different world here. So that's one part of the equation. The other bit is that I'm usually starting to see development tools, and I've skipped sketch Wellington earlier on, but they're, you know, they they've done, they've got their thought leader ads. It's not really thought leadership, it's influencer ads. But at the same time, they're very powerful. They're very effective. They're a great way of ramping up your impact via their platform. You know, it's a really effective tool. Yeah, there are other ones out there as well where you can go and recruit influencers or use it to kind of help understand your influencer kind of portfolio. So it's kind of, it's definitely hit critical mass now, in my opinion.
Mike: I think it's interesting though, because you pointed out how different it was to be to see influencers, and I think a lot of brands are struggling with that, because, you know, in B to C, you send the influence of the product, hopefully the influencer loves it, and, you know, features it. If they don't, you send some money, and magically, it all works. It doesn't work like that in B2B at all. So how do you think B2B companies can start building relationships with influencers when you know, there's not something obvious that the supplier can give the influencer.
Joel: Well, most of the time, well, they're also, they're all the other thing to point Mike is that you can't in a lot of situations. There's a bribery rules around this, right? If you're a corporate executive, you can't take money for preventing a product this, and just not able to do that. But you use the word relationship, and that's exactly right. It's about finding somebody who is aligned with what you're doing and has a similar, similar perspective. And that's as one of the many profiles of influence you could use, and often about shared social cache. You know, it's about them having a message similar to yours, and you being able to give them a stage at conference, for example, that kind of thing. So there are lots of ways you can demonstrate reciprocal value. People do have egos, allowing providing them with a means to facilitate their visibility and value is a really, really good thing. Employees are great influences as well. So you can cultivate that channel as and allow them and facilitate them to be voices, because it plays back to that trend in the awards I mentioned earlier on, and using employees as the voice for the company. So there are many, many ways of doing it. There are also, you know, there are emerging ways of finding people who have reach and visibility, where you do have to pay them. That's that is starting to be a thing, but it's never going to be as as binary or as dominant a thing as it is in consumer in my opinion.
Mike: That makes a lot of sense. I mean, Joel has been, you know, really interesting. And obviously I'm very aware of time there is something that I'd love to know. I mean, you see a lot of activity across different B2B companies. What do you see happening at the moment, whether it's, you know, particular campaigns or particular organizations that really impresses you.
Joel: Well, that's, there's so many different aspects to that that you could, you could pick up on. I mean, you know, I love it when you see, I think this trend towards consuming great entertainment is fantastic. You know, when you're really starting to get people, give people something which they would willingly consume in their spare time. I think that's a really, really powerful thing. There's other trends you could pick up as well. We're using, you know, using visualization, but I think one of the biggest challenges that we're seeing that there's a kind of macro issue across B2B is the issue of trust, and that's the kind of focus of my podcast. And I think we're in this situation where people are there's a trust issue going on across society. I think that where campaigns are seeking to address that and build that trust is vital. And there's three, three pillars to that for me, which is the first one is thought leadership, which is the ability to play out to actually, it's the only function really that can only marketing tool at your disposal where you can actually has a has a compliant contribution at the top and the middle and the bottom of the funnel, because it can and should be used at all those levels. That's the first one. The second one is influencer marketing. We've talked about that. And the third, which I think is fascinating, but really, really underutilized, but again, we're starting to see something happening in this area, is advocacy, and we know that advocacy is tremendously powerful, which is that most companies, most brands, doing in a kind of piecemeal, half half hearted, half assed, last minute bolt on, kind of a way. Again, we're starting to see really strategic, considered, structured advocacy efforts going on, and a part of that is driven by the development of tools to do this. It's not the only reason it's happening, but, but when you have tools, it formalizes the whole thing. So I'm sure it doesn't quite answer your question, but those are the things I think are most interesting right now.
Mike: I think that was a great answer. It really talked about those, those key things that are high level. So I love that. Before I let you go, there's always two questions we like to ask people so quick fire round. What's the best marketing advice that's ever been given to you?
Joel: I'm not a marketer, so I have to answer this in a bleak way. But I think that this is applies as someone who is seeking to be visible in the market and also to be effective within an organization. And I think that I just say, be yourself everyone else has taken. Because it's very easy to look at people and to look at other people you think are successful and try and emulate their their themes, but their trends, other ways of behaving. But it's not it has to be true to you. You'll be most successful if you're true to who you actually are, and you develop that, and you you're you're comfortable in your own skin, and you recognize what you're good at and what you're bad at.
Mike: love that. It's great advice. And you've also talked about, you know, how rapidly things are changing. Changing. So what would you say to someone who was just starting their career and wanted to start a career in marketing?
Joel: Well, I think I say that it's a rapidly changing industry. It's exciting, it's dynamic, and it's creative, but you do have to be financially and commercially savvy to be successful as a marketer today, and if you're not, if you haven't got those attributes potentially within your skill set or your attributes, then it's probably not the right career for you. It doesn't mean you can't be creative. Doesn't mean you can't do really exciting things with technology and digital services, but you've got to have a commercial head on your shoulders.
Mike: That's great advice. I love that. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people listening to this podcast probably already follow you and are well connected, but if people are not, what's the best way to, you know, follow what you're doing and keep up to date.
Joel: Well, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love you to do that, but you can also love you to subscribe to my podcast, which is trusted inference and B2B. You can get that anywhere you get your normal podcasts, or you can just follow my YouTube channel, where you get all of the podcast stuff as well. And you also get, I do, I go to a regular beach marketing events, and I do videos, I interview people, so you get all of that stuff as well. And if you really want it's really feeling particularly exciting, you can put on Instagram as well. So I'm trying to use all of these channels as best I can. You know, I am an old dog, and yes, I am trying to learn new tricks.
Mike: That's awesome. I really enjoyed this. I feel like, you know, we've left probably enough discussions for at least another two podcasts, so hopefully at some point we'll have you back. Joel,
Joel: I'd love to thanks so much for inviting me on.
Mike: Thanks for being a guest on marketing B2B technology.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode, and if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierB2Be calm or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Why AI Falls Short on Strategy and What Marketers Miss About Customer Journeys
In this episode of the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast, Hannah and Mike tackle the limits of AI in marketing strategy, reacting to a recent MarTech article that questions whether AI can truly plan campaigns.
They debate Adobe’s position in the marketing automation space and discuss the rise of AI-generated creatives.
Also in the episode, they break down why simplified customer journeys don’t work in B2B, and share a smart tip for improving your data quality over the quieter summer months.
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcast
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Wehrly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Introduction to The Marketing Automation Moment Podcast
00:01:01 - AI and Marketing Strategy
00:02:12 - The Reality of AI in Marketing
00:03:28 - Adobe's Digital Experience Update
00:05:31 - Dynamic Image Generation
00:07:44 - Customer Journeys vs. Funnels
00:09:52 – Data Quality Improvement Tips
00:11:36 – Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Wehrly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wehrly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing Automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We’d also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: Why AI Falls Short on Strategy and What Marketers Miss About Customer Journeys
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Wehrly
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Whirly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. Today, I talk about how AI struggles to do marketing strategy.
Hannah: We discuss AI-generated customized adverts.
Mike: Hannah tells us all about customer journeys.
Hannah: And Mike gets all excited about data. Well, hi, Mike. Welcome back to another episode of Marble Automation Moment. How are you doing?
Mike: Hi, Hannah. Great to talk to you again.
Hannah: Well, I mean, you are doing me the biggest favor right now, Mike, because I know it's nice weather, and I think I've had to literally drag you away from the cricket for you to be here today.
Mike: Well, clearly cricket is way more important than anything to do with marketing automation. No, it's not. I'm really excited to be with you. And we've got some good things to talk about on marketing automation. So looking forward to it.
Hannah: Definitely. Well, let's kick off. And I think you're going to have some opinions about the things we talk about today. Not that you never have opinions, but I came across a really good article from MarTech. And I think it was really interesting because it talks about how, you know, AI is reshaping marketing. We've read a hundred articles on how great AI is. But the real crux of this article was actually, but is it? Is it actually reshaping marketing? Because if you actually dive down, AI is great in doing that basic stuff, but it actually can't do that strategy and that planning that marketers are needed for in order for it to be successful. I don't know, what did you think about it?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think anyone who's actually tried using AI is going to be completely unsurprised by this, probably. If you look at AI, you can ask it to generate marketing strategies and marketing campaigns, and they're all very generic. I mean, you may as well just Google 10 steps to creating a marketing campaign and go read an article, because that's effectively what's happening. It's pulling generic content from the website. So the fact that AI is good for some implementation, but really hasn't yet got there on the strategy, personally, I didn't think it was much of a surprise.
Hannah: I totally agree. I think for me, though, it was nice just to see a bit of honesty. We see so much hyped nonsense, I guess, kind of in the press, in the media about how amazing it is, that it's nice to have a bump down to realities once in a while.
Mike: You're absolutely right. I think, you know, in AI, everything's focused around, isn't it amazing, it's going to change the world, you know, the robots are here to take over, which, to be fair, if the robots get a lot smarter, may be a great move to start being overly nice to them now. But I think, you know, realistically, in MarTech, people struggle. I mean, we've done a lot of experimentation on AI, haven't we, Hannah? And if you look at it, even generating, you know, small phrases within an email, you can actually end up with AI generating content that you look at and go, I really don't want that going out. What do you think?
Hannah: Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, we had a conversation earlier this week and we were really excited and we were like, yes, this is going to make our campaign so much easier. Use ChatGPT to really pull in this information. And we were really simple as well. We were just focusing on markets and target users. And actually the data it pulled through was terrible. And I would never send an email out with that data. So we were actually really disappointed that it wasn't going to change my world at the moment.
Mike: No, well, it looks like you've got a job for the next week, at least, Hannah. I thought the other funny thing, though, was if you look at the report that you pulled out from MarTech, the research said that marketing teams say that it's increasing productivity by 44%, which they equated to saving 11 hours. Now, you know I'm a bit of a maths geek. I want to know what's happening, because that means that basically 25 hours were productive for marketers. What were marketers doing the other 15 hours that clearly were completely unproductive? Otherwise, those numbers don't add up.
Hannah: No, I completely agree. I read it and thought, well, I think I'm working too hard, if that's the case. One of the other things that we came across, and this is a little bit different, because we had a bit of a chat about this and whether we wanted to include it. But Adobe has basically come out and provided an update for its digital experience segment. Now, I had a little argument with you and I was like, I'm not sure that we can count Adobe as a market automation platform. And you slightly disagreed. But I think it was interesting because they're focusing on customer experience. So they're combining the creativity, data and AI. And in their real marketing phrase, they've done it as to help brands deliver personalized and real-time engagement. Now it was interesting because the article really positioned them as trying to compete against SAIL forces and Apton's AI capabilities, but I've always just viewed them as not in the same wavelength, we're in the same race really, but what do you think?
Mike: Yeah, I think it's interesting. I mean, Adobe bought Marketo, obviously, to give themselves the market automation platform. But then they have all these other platforms that kind of are sort of a bit related to it. And certainly the Adobe announcement. I mean, that's all about automating the generation of images for advertising, which to me feels very marketing automation, even though it's not a market automation platform. I guess the question is, you know, firstly, do we think it's a good idea to have automated image generation? And then secondly, I'm really interested to know whether you think people are actually going to use it.
Hannah: Oh, wow. That's a couple of great questions, Mike. I think for me, it's what is the ease of use in actually using Adobe to generate images using AI? Because I think a lot of people instantly go to things like ChatGPT, they've maybe got the prompts down now, they know it's going to be really helpful. So what is the benefit of using Adobe actually over something that's more accessible to everybody on a day-to-day basis anyway?
Mike: Well, I guess it depends on whether you're actually customizing the images for individual audiences. So I totally agree. I think a lot of people, when they're generating images, they probably go to Chat GPT. You know, maybe some of the design teams are using Firefly from Adobe, but I actually think the truth is, and I think this is what you're hinting at, most people don't use these features. I'm pretty sure when I'm on the internet, I'm not getting served customized images. I'm getting served generic images that are served to, you know, huge numbers of people, whether that's B2B or whether that's consumer. I think it's the same. And it's really fascinating because for a long time, we moaned in marketing automation that people just use marketing automation systems as an email system, rather than really taking advantage of all the capabilities. I think now we're seeing that change. But equally, we're seeing all this new technology like dynamic image generation. I'm not sure that's being used yet. I think people are buying it because the demos are cool. And then, you know, gut feel, I'm not seeing a lot of campaigns running using this technology.
Hannah: I think that's a fantastic point, Mike, and I 100% agree. I think as well, you know, it comes down to, do people actually know how to use these tools? You said it yourself, they buy it, it looks cool. Do they understand how to do this dynamic image creation? Because as well, I'm on all the platforms, I don't have anything personalized to me. As I think the companies that get up to speed first and actually really start to implement, no matter what industry you're in, are really gonna be, you know, the leaders in their market.
Mike: Obviously, if the technology works. And I think that that's going to be the interesting thing. I know that there are designers who probably listen to this who are saying, yeah, you can use AI to customize an image. But if I generate an image, it's going to be more effective, it's going to be a better image. Who knows? I think we're going to have to see what happens as we go forward.
Hannah: Definitely. Well, let's move on because look at the time and I want to have a chat about Acton. Markton have actually used my favourite phrase for this week, so we've had several pitches this week, I've written a lot of blogs this week, and it's all been about customer journeys. So I saw it and I was like, this speaks to me, I want to talk about it. But really, they spoke about how market automation links into the customer journeys. But the real interesting thing about this is that if you look at the web and you look at what they're talking about, actually, this is talking about building funnels. Did you notice the same?
Mike: Yeah, I agree. Actually, Hannah, I just want to jump in there. Firstly, you are genuinely the queen of customer journeys. I'm so impressed at what you're doing with building them. And I think the problem is, is people talk customer journey, and then they have very simplistic customer journeys. Acton is basically engage, convert, connect three stages. That's not really describing a customer journey. It's absolutely describing a funnel. And I think if we're going to be effective, particularly in B2B where the journeys can be very complex, we've got to go beyond these simplistic three, four, five stage journeys and really understand how a customer behaves and what happens throughout that whole buying process. Don't you agree?
Hannah: Oh, I definitely agree. And I think this is often where marketers go wrong. They don't actually do the job properly and then wonder why their campaigns aren't working.
Mike: Yeah, and simplifying stuff is, you know, it's always a terrible thing. I mean, convert is, it's a really difficult thing to get someone from being interested in your product to actually get them to be a customer. And just to call it convert, it trivializes it. And I think it means people actually don't think about what they need to do to get someone to become a customer. If you build a proper customer journey, it really makes a difference. Now, obviously, even a simplistic customer journey is better than none. So let's be honest, it is a step forward for a lot of people. But for high involvement products, it's really hard to simplify.
Hannah: Absolutely. Well, Mike, let's move on to our insightful tip of the week. Now, I know you wanted to talk about levering up our data. Do you want to have a bit of a chat about that?
Mike: Well, exactly. I mean, I think it's something, you know, we do quite a lot of at Napier and we quite often see companies perhaps not taking advantage of some of the tools that they've got that they can use to really improve the quality and the detail behind their data. And as it's summer, I believe that some people don't spend all the summer watching cricket. So it's a great time to actually, you know, when things are quiet, to think about how we can improve data quality.
Hannah: Definitely. And I mean, it's something we do internally here. It's something you should be looking at, I would say, more than once a year, at least once a quarter, if you can. But take advantage of those summer months and do the work on your database so that when you are ramping back up for the autumn, you've really got a higher chance of being more successful.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, we're doing some projects for clients at the moment. You know, the work ranges from literally looking at where they've got data that's bouncing. So people have left, get rid of those people who've gone away from a company. And if you're in the EU or other areas with data protection legislation, that could actually ultimately land you in hot water if you're holding old and out of date information. But it's much more than that. It's about adding to the data you have. There's lots of ways to enrich the existing contact data through databases. And it's super cheap. I don't understand why people don't do it more because it really doesn't cost very much. And then finally, of course, the important thing, this is where marketers have the biggest opportunity, is growing the contact base in key targets. So it's acquiring more contact names. And all of those things, if you add them together, they can make your market automation campaigns after the summer so much more effective.
Hannah: Well, I don't think I could have summed it up any better myself, Mike. Thank you so much for another amazing conversation today. It was really insightful as always.
Mike: Thanks, Hannah. It was fun as always. Great to talk to you.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
A Napier Webinar: Make ChatGPT Your Best Salesperson
Register for Napier's webinar and learn how you can make ChatGPT your best salesperson and boost AI visibility for your brand. We will cover:
- Is SEO dead?
- What is generative AI visibility?
- Measuring your visibility in generative AI models
- Improving AI visibility for your brand
- 5 Steps to AI Success
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: ‘Make ChatGPT Your Best Salesperson’ Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard
Hi everyone. Welcome to the latest Napier webinar. We're going to give it a couple of minutes just as people join, but I'm looking forward to talking to you about ChatGPT and how ChatGPT can be your best possible salesperson.
Okay. Thank you very much everyone for joining the webinar. Really appreciate you all coming along and listening to the presentation today. Today we're going to be talking about ChatGPT and making it your best salesman. So looking forward to talking about that and also talking about generative AI in general. Let's kick off.
What do we mean by making ChatGPT your best salesperson? Well, basically what we're seeing is AI is becoming a bit like search. People are going to AI to find things out, with ChatGPT probably being the best known. But let's not forget there are a large number of AI models that are all important. What you really want is for those AIs to start promoting your brand, your products, your technologies.
So we're all hearing about AI helping, but the question is: does it really help to sell, or do you find you're not actually listed in some of the results? Let's have a look at what we're going to work through today.
Firstly, we're going to talk about what we want to achieve—and apologies to anyone who might not be a speed skating fan, but you're all going to discover my fascination with the sport. We'll look at what we can use AI for and how people are beginning to use AI today. We're then going to consider how important AI is—whether it's more important than search, or less. We’ll discuss GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), how AIs find information, and how you can appear in GenAI results. We'll go through a process to improve the number of times you appear in AI results and finish with five top tips for GEO, followed by a Q&A.
Let’s start off with a little diversion into short track speed skating. Here's a picture taken at the end of the 500 meters race in the last Olympics, where a Hungarian skater beat a Russian skater, who beat a Canadian skater. For those who don’t know, I am a speed skater. I love getting involved in speed skating. I would love to be at the Olympics—probably won’t be—but maybe one of the ways I could do it is by being involved in the equipment.
Just out of interest, the two medal-winning skaters used skates from a Chinese manufacturer called Li-Ning. But let’s assume I didn’t know that and I go to AI and ask: “What are the best skates to buy if I'm a great short track speed skater?” AI doesn’t tell me I’m not great—it just answers the question. It gives me a comprehensive result, talking about boot and blade combinations and identifying vendors.
AI recommends boots and blades separately, which is important because you buy them separately. It explains why we should buy certain products, which feels more informative and smarter than search. To compare, I searched “Best Short Track speed skate boot” in Google, which gave me shopping results and even a roller skate boot by mistake. So while it does okay, most people would agree that the AI result felt better.
More and more, B2B tech customers—whether they're in industrial automation, semiconductors, or other fields—are using AI to find information. Initially, AI was used for informative queries, but now people are asking more factual and decision-based questions. Modern AI combines generative capabilities with web search, making it far more powerful than early versions like the original ChatGPT.
So does this mean we give up on search? Not yet. ChatGPT processes about a billion queries a day with around 125 million users, mostly under 25. In contrast, Google handles 9 billion searches a day and has 3.5 billion daily users. It’s still the largest source of web traffic. However, AI is growing rapidly. Even Google is changing—searches are becoming more conversational, like ChatGPT prompts.
This shift means SEO is still relevant, but its dominance is fading. We need to focus on GEO—Generative Engine Optimization. Sometimes called AIO (AI Optimization) or LLMO, GEO is all about making sure your content appears in AI-generated responses.
To do that, we need to understand how AI finds and uses information. AI converts words into tokens, maps relationships, and generates likely next-word sequences. AI models are trained on vast data sources—web pages, books, Wikipedia, and even Reddit posts with enough upvotes. Most AI tools also now search the live web, so fresh, authoritative content is key.
To appear in GenAI results, your content must be part of the training data or be indexed during web searches. You must be seen as authoritative, and your content should be structured in ways that help AIs understand it.
That includes using question-and-answer formats, bullet points, tables, and clear summaries. Structuring data and using schema markup also helps. AI prefers expert content, kept up to date, and relevant to your site. Like SEO, freshness matters. A special file, llms.txt, helps AI understand what's on your site—this will likely become a best practice.
You should also track when your brand is cited by AI and tweak your content to improve performance. Generating Q&A content and using bullets is easy. The harder part is analyzing AI results to refine content based on what performs best.
So here’s the process:
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Build AI-friendly content.
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Think about what prompts your audience might use.
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Test those prompts in AI tools.
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Analyze why some brands appear and others don’t.
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Do better than the brands that are currently winning.
For example, I asked ChatGPT about speed skates and added “include citations” to see where the information came from. This helped me identify that sites like CBC (Carpenter Boot Company), Reddit, YouTube, and specialist e-commerce stores are important. The same applies in B2B—your distributors or trade publications might matter more than your own site.
This analysis is time-consuming if done manually, especially across multiple prompts and AI models. Fortunately, tools are emerging that help automate and analyze these AI-generated results. We’re using a tool (soon to launch) that we believe is the best available, and we can offer access or demos to interested clients.
Remember, prompts are key. Slight changes can alter the AI’s output significantly. It’s crucial to generate a wide variety of high-quality prompts to get a true picture of your presence in GenAI.
Let’s wrap up with five top tips for GEO:
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Use tools to analyze GenAI results.
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Structure content in Q&A formats for AI readability.
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Get featured on authoritative third-party sites.
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Keep testing and learning—models evolve continuously.
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Understand the customer journey and optimize content for top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel queries.
Bonus tip: Tailor content for different customer journey stages. Top-of-funnel queries are often informational, like comparing boot types. Bottom-of-funnel ones ask directly which product to buy. Customize accordingly.
Finally, a fun note: when I asked ChatGPT which skates to buy, its recommendations included products that don’t exist or are incorrectly identified. For example, Maple ST is a Doc Martens boot. Some brands were bankrupt or misattributed. Still, it shows the power and pitfalls of AI responses.
For the record, I skate on Apex skates, which are excellent and weren’t mentioned. Marques makes the best boots in my view.
Thanks for joining! Our next webinar will feature Shoko Maki, CEO of ISB Marketing, discussing B2B tech marketing in Japan on July 10. It'll be held at 9 a.m. UK time / 10 a.m. CET. U.S. attendees can register and watch the recording.
If you have questions, feel free to drop them into the chat or Q&A. One came in asking whether you need a premium subscription for ChatGPT—you don’t, but the free version has limitations. All our demos used the premium version.
Another question asked how our agency helps with GenAI optimization. Short answer: we handle everything from prompt analysis to content optimization and third-party coverage. This is similar to PR work and crucial for AI visibility. If you're interested, drop me a line at mike@napierb.com. We'd love to help.
Thanks again for listening. Hope to see you on July 10!
From Data to Decisions - Lars Grønnegaard - Dreamdata
Lars Grønnegaard, COO and Co-Founder of Dreamdata, joins Mike to discuss data utilization in B2B marketing and the importance of understanding what truly drives sales.
They talk about the complexities of attribution in B2B marketing, particularly with long buying cycles, and highlight the importance of collecting and analyzing data, even though multi-touch attribution can be controversial.
Lars explains how Dreamdata addresses the challenge of data overload in B2B marketing by building robust data models that connect various data sources, enabling marketers to analyze campaign effectiveness and make informed decisions.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Dreamdata
Dreamdata is the leading B2B Activation & Attribution Platform that provides the most complete customer journey map anywhere. We gather, join, and clean all revenue-related data, transforming it into transparent, actionable insights about what truly drives B2B revenue. Dreamdata empowers businesses to optimize their go-to-market activities, ensuring they can produce faster, better-performing customer journeys and deliver more revenue growth.
About Lars Grønnegaard
Lars Grønnegaard is a passionate problem-solver focused on revolutionizing B2B go-to-market strategies. As COO & Co-founder of Dreamdata, he's dedicated to empowering B2B companies with holistic, actionable data to drive smarter decisions, optimize customer journeys, and accelerate revenue growth. His journey from VP Product at Trustpilot (where he was instrumental in its product growth to unicorn status) to building Dreamdata stems from a deep understanding that B2Bs are rich in data but often struggle to turn it into actionable insights.
Time Stamps
00:00:43 - Lars's Career Journey and Founding Dreamdata
00:03:13 - Startup Environment in Denmark
00:05:30 - The Challenge of Data Clarity in Marketing
00:08:22 - Attribution vs. Incremental Sales Testing
00:10:39 - Long Buying Cycles in B2B
00:16:12 - Maintaining Data Models Over Time
00:19:17 - Freemium Model and Customer Trials
00:22:44 - Ad Spend and ROI Considerations
00:28:49 - Best Marketing Advice from Lars
00:29:39 - Advice for Aspiring Marketers
00:30:34 - Where to Learn More About Dreamdata
Quotes
"You can probably cancel somewhere between 25 and 75 percent of your ad spend and see no impact on your pipeline performance." Lars Grønnegaard, COO and Co-Founder of Dreamdata
"The fundamental problem here is not lack of data or tracking... but the problem is all this data doesn't really connect." Lars Grønnegaard, COO and Co-Founder of Dreamdata
Follow Lars:
Lars Grønnegaard on LinkedIn: https://dk.linkedin.com/in/larsgroennegaard
Dreamdata’s website: https://dreamdata.io/
Dreamdata on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dreamdata-io/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Lars Grønnegaard at Dreamdata
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Lars Grønnegaard
Lars: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Lars Grønnegaard. Lars is the COO and co-founder of Dreamdata. Welcome to the podcast, Lars.
Lars: Thank you so much. Very, very happy to join the podcast. It's great to have you on.
Mike: So before we talk about, you know, what you're doing, we like to get a bit of background. So can you tell us a little bit about your career and why you decided to found Dreamdata?
Mike: Yeah, I started my career in what was back then known as web agencies. So back in the late 90s, early 2000s. And then I worked through different web agencies and advertising agencies always sort of lived in the advertising space, you can say. And at some point I drifted into what you call software development, product management of software and worked both on some sort of big, say, internal advertising platforms. I worked at a company called Ad People, which was like a WPP agency. So we ran all of Dell's print ads on the product we built. And then later I went to a company called Trustpilot, pretty well known in the UK as well. and ran product there. And then in that role, became quite involved in the go-to-market of Trustpilot. So kind of back to, you know today, Trustpilot is in many ways also like a marketing product for the customers of Trustpilot. So drifted back into sort of working with marketing and go-to-market and found, basically we found in Trustpilot that, it was like, And it is still like a super successful business. So selling quite well. So how did Trustpilot make money? Well, we signed deals with customers. But when we sort of went one step back and said, OK, but where did they come from? We you know, there were a lot of opinions, but honestly, like nobody really knew. So we went sort of looking for answers is like, OK, where do all these customers come from? We had a free product. Did they come from there? We spent tons of marketing dollars. Did they come from there? And of course, we had like not a million, but quite a few salespeople, cold calling. And we basically, you know, collected the data, built a big data model and did the analysis, came up with answers and saw that it was hugely beneficial for the business to actually know where to invest. And the other side of it was maybe that, you know, there wasn't a product that could solve this. It was a ton of very, very tedious work to get to those answers. And we felt that it was something that should be a product. So we went looking for whether it could be a product, and that was sort of the genesis of this company. So that's how I ended up where I am, being a co-founder of a MarTech company.
Lars: That's awesome. I mean, before we dive into what Dreamdata does to help people understand what drives their sales, I'm just interested to know, what's it like founding a company in Denmark?
Mike: Founding a company in Denmark, I think you can say like, what's the startup environment? It's quite good. It's easy to found companies in Denmark. So there's not a lot of red tape. So I think that's good. Used to be quite hard on sort of capital, like funding, what used to be hard, but is now, you know, your access to capital is fairly globalized. So it's not an issue raising capital anymore. I think the biggest sort of pitfall is building it, if you build a product for the Danish market, it's not very big. So at least then you need either a very expensive product or you need to cover a lot of the market. So that can be sort of a pitfall. On the other hand, for many companies, it means that the first thing you do is that you sell somewhere else. And that's also what we did. So we never went for, say, the Danish, like maybe first five initial customers were in Denmark because it was a network. But since then, we have more like the size of a Danish segment is outsized, but 50 percent of our revenue and customers in the US and Canada and 35 percent are in non-Danish European countries, including the UK. So I think that that's sort of like some of the stuff around founding companies in Denmark. But in general, Copenhagen is a good place to hire tech talent as well, I think.
Lars: I think that's really interesting. Whenever I talk to Danish companies, there's always this view that Denmark's very small as a market, so they have to be international. I think it gives Danish companies or Danish startups a much more international view than maybe if you started in a large market, Germany or the US. So I think, in a way, it's an advantage.
Mike: Definitely. I mean, I think the old recipe in Denmark was like, oh, win Denmark, go to the UK, win there, then go to the US. And there's definitely a lot of successful Danish startups that are now going like, look, go to the world.
Lars: I love it. So we talked a little bit about Dreamdata earlier. So you're helping your customers really understand what's driving sales, which I think is, quite honestly, the holy grail in marketing to understand what works and what doesn't. So can you talk about how you do it and what the technology is behind Dreamdata?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So you can say, in general, I'll say most marketers would agree that they are not suffering from sort of lack of data. The big problem is actually sort of clarity and getting some answers from the data. So most companies have like, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of dashboards. Like we sold to a fairly large enterprise customer recently, and they told us that in their data warehouse, they had 200,000 tables. Which is a lot. It just means that there's so much that nobody knows where to look. So I think that is like the fundamental problem here is not lack of data or tracking or like all the products we use, you know, your marketing automation, all your ad platforms, your CRM, your web tracking, it all generates data. But the problem is we are exclusively for B2B, I want to say. So I only think about this from the B2B side. But the big problem is that all this data doesn't really connect. So you're looking at your Google Ad Spend data over here, your LinkedIn Ad Spend over here. LinkedIn is saying, oh, we generated $100,000 last week. Google also generated $100,000. You go and ask sales and they did $150,000. Okay, so it doesn't add up, right? So how do you sort of make that into something meaningful? That's a fundamental problem. And I think the job you want to do is get all the data together and build a data model where you can ask questions like this campaign. What did it actually create in terms of pipeline or revenue or all the revenue we had? Where did it come from? How much can we track back to our of content initiatives or our conference or whatever you're doing as marketing channels. So that's the job of the product. So collect all the data, build a data model, and then provide sort of a layer on top of it where you can do analysis. So you can get those answers. That's fundamentally what it does. Then you can say this is also back to the story from Trustpilot because this data set, once you have it, of course, it's great for answering questions. But usually the next thing that happens is that people say, look, oh, but can I get all the ones that are like this? Like you have all this data. So can I get a list of everybody that's you know, not in my sales pipeline, but they fit our core segment and they're in the US and they're actually looking at our website. Can I get that list so I can send it to LinkedIn and do some ads for them? So we also have like what I call like a big activation product where you can use the data to build audiences and send to ad platforms or even say, track the engagement on target accounts, send them to sales if they engage. So a lot of what you'd see in, in, in ABM platforms as well.
Lars: Yeah, I mean, I think it falls into this kind of category of customer data platforms, although I don't really like that category because it's so broad. It's so many tools there. One of the things that products in your category do is they tend to be focused on attribution data. And that's becoming a little bit controversial because obviously attribution relates to effectively touching the customer at some point on the journey. it doesn't necessarily mean that touch was positive. It could actually be negative. But overall, yeah, the customers going through and buying. So I mean, what's your view on attribution versus, you know, running tests where you try and measure whether you can generate incremental sales by activating marketing?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, incremental lift and that type of statistical analysis is super exciting. So we don't do that. It doesn't mean that we don't think you should do it. It just means that for our segment of customers, which I would define as, say, mid-market to small enterprise, true lift analysis is you need a certain size, you need a certain budget. You need a lot of things before you can actually do this. I would say, ideally, even if you're buying consultants or products for sort of statistical lift analysis, you probably also should have a data scientist on your team that can help you understand the results. I think statistical lift analysis is exciting, but it will answer certain things, but there's also a lot of things you can't do with it. So we focus on, say, attribution is great for saying, I'm running campaigns in a bunch of different ad platforms. Now compare them against each other. So it might not be that the individual number is the truth, but They are apples to apples. You can compare them. So if one apple is bigger than another apple, it is actually bigger. It doesn't tell you necessarily that the apple is big enough. So I think attribution data is, I would say, all the digital trackable events that you can associate with the customer. And you should, no matter what, even if you don't believe in the attribution part of a product like ours, you should still collect that data, have that data model, because you still want to send an audience to LinkedIn of all your ICP customers that viewed your documentation last week, right? So I think it's the collection of data and the focus on data and the dedication to tracking as much as possible and having a strong, robust data platform, as a modern marketer, you need to do that, even if you're not going to communicate, let's say, multi-touch attribution to your board or whatever, which is maybe where multi-touch attribution sometimes plays in. It's like to manage reporting, you're going to say, look, marketing contributed 25% of pipeline last month. I also think that even in those cases where it might be like, OK, but was it actually 25 percent? Well, maybe it wasn't. But if the following quarter you did 22 percent, then it's still less than 25, which means that, you know, maybe you should change what you're doing.
Lars: I think that's a brilliant answer, actually. I think it's really important to understand that when you look at attribution numbers, and as you say, you can run Google and LinkedIn, they both claim to have done 100k, you've only sold 150, so something's wrong. But actually, if next month Google claims to have done 200k and your sales have gone up, actually Google's got better. It doesn't necessarily mean 200 is the right number, but it definitely shows the trend. So I love that answer.
Mike: Yeah. And then I think like when you then layer on something where you can sort of actually aggregate all the data. So now you'll never have the situation where you get like 100 from Google, 100 from Meta, 100 from LinkedIn and 200 from actual sales, because it will actually always be sort of a meaningful number, that makes it even better. But I think the focus on dedication to data is super important. I recall people, they go like, I don't really believe in attribution. What about, you know, somebody's steak dinners or meeting people randomly in the supermarket? Like, that's a catch. I'm like, that's true. But if you throw out the idea of data and the importance of data in marketing, then you're positioning yourself very poorly to win, right? Because let's say, of course, everybody is doing AI at the moment. So if you are applying AI to something, what do you apply it to? Well, you're going to apply it to data. So if you don't have data, you're not going to be able to leverage AI for anything. So if you don't have something, let's say, that can provide the context of your customer to an AI, well, it's not going to work, right? Then you're just going to get super generic output that doesn't really do anything for you.
Lars: Absolutely makes sense. I mean, I think one of the other challenges with data that people in B2B often have, and as you're a B2B specialist, it's great to ask you this, is what about the long buying cycles in B2B? It's often hard to use data when perhaps somebody is not going to actually buy for months or even years.
Mike: Yeah. And I think that just goes back to the importance of a robust data platform where that is what's going to solve this. Basically, the way a product like ours works is that maybe the spine of it is actually the CRM data. And then you're building everything from the different other sources. You're attaching that in a way to that. So at the end of it, you end up with a sort of a data structure, which is, here's all my accounts. Here are all the contacts. Here's everything that we know that these contacts did. Here are all the business results associated with each company. And once you basically just, every time you know something, you put it into data model. That's the goal, right? LinkedIn tells you that somebody from this company engaged with your ad. Well, OK, then you attach it to that account in the data model and then, you know, OK, somebody from that account actually engaged with my ad last month. And if somebody attends a conference, you make sure that, oh, this person who was also in my CRM actually attended the conference. So it is like, It's the robustness of the data that enables you to then look at the account over a long, long, long period and go like, yeah, it's great. We won this contract and the sales cycle was 60 days. you know what, I can actually look back and I can see that somebody from our marketing team talked to them on this conference 12 months ago, or they were actually in this webinar we ran eight months ago. So the dedication to building the most robust data model you can, But then, so what's technologically feasible and legal? I think those are the two sort of components you need to look at. There's also like legality. In data collection, there's a ton of things you can't do. So you can't do that. There's a lot of things that you might want to do, but it's illegal, so you can't do it. There's a lot of things that are hard to do, but you should try to do them anyway.
Lars: I mean, that's interesting. I think a lot of people understand a lot of the legal issues, particularly around GDPR. But what about the technical issues? I mean, how complicated is it to build this data model that has all these different sources of data? I mean, are you going to have to allocate teams of IT pros to actually do this?
Mike: Our product aside, that's what the product does. So we are a solution for it. So then you don't need that. But building this yourself, I think it's super tough as a company. It does require, I would say, a data team. So it requires one or two data engineers, data scientists, and some data analysts. So you need a bunch of people. So one thing is building it, which is time-consuming and takes, I don't know, when we meet customers that sort of have done it and then give up or have done it and then are scrapping it, it will typically take you like a year or something like that for a team to get to something that's meaningful. But then comes the problem that now you have these smart data people and they were super excited about building the data model because building stuff is exciting for engineers. Like engineers love building stuff. That's what engineering is about. Now what? Now you have this thing and it's running, but you need to maintain it. So you actually need to retain a team of data people to maintain your model. And that can be super hard, right? Because, you know, is it exciting enough? Like the first build was exciting. So a lot of people, then people leave. and then you're stuck with this data model that nobody can maintain. And then like after 18 months or 12 months, the new VP, like a CRO walks through the door and says, hey, I really love that we're using Dynamics for sales, but I only work in Salesforce. So we're gonna rip out Dynamics and use Salesforce. And then you're kind of like, oh, who's gonna fix the data model? Or like more like this, probably like a new VP demand chain joins and says, Yeah, I mean, I know you're really happy about Pardot, but I only use Marketo, so we're going to switch. The same problem, right? Unless you are a massive, like I would say, like if you are like true enterprise, you're sort of stepping into 50,000, 100,000 people, then I think this is a kind of project that might make sense for you to take on. But if you are sort of mid-market or small enterprise, I don't think it's worthwhile taking on. Or at least a product like ours offers at least the robust foundation. And then if you want some data people to build other stuff on top of it, it's great for that, right? Because you get the data model in a data warehouse where you can continue working on it. So it's not like you're locked down to what we did. But at least we did all the boring stuff and the stuff that you don't want to retain people for. But yeah, I mean, back at Trustpilot, we built this ourselves for Trustpilot. And we got somewhere in six months, but it was not done, right? It was starting to be something. We could have continued maybe 12 more months and then we would have been done. And then But then we were gone and we created the same problem for Trustpilot. Like, now what? What about the model last built? Who's going to maintain that? There was no answer, right?
Lars: That makes sense. And it's really, you know, nice to hear that you can actually get up and running without complex engineering projects to integrate everything. I mean, it's quite interesting. So I look at your business, well, you've basically got a freemium model, which is interesting, because your first price point is almost $1,000 a month. So do people really get, you know, valuable use from the product, trying it for free, and then switch? Does that work well for you?
Mike: No, no. I think in that sense, like who runs truly successful freemium models like Miro, like the type of products where you have like individual contributors picking up a product and then you have sort of building up a team inside of an enterprise. And then the enterprise reps reach out and say, look, you've got 200 people using this product. Don't you do contracts? Don't you have a legal team? Don't you want like enterprise level support? So I think we're not that type of go-to-market. I think what works well for us is that we can spin up a trial for anybody and sort of demonstrate that they can get to a very complex and robust data model in less than two weeks and see maybe not that it is done, but at least get to a point where they can believe that, OK, we could work a couple of more months on this or maybe two weeks or whatever time it takes, and then we would be there. So I think that works very well for us. For some customers in the sort of like we have customers sort of ranging from, like I said, we have two enterprises as well. So we do have those like 50,000, 60,000 person companies as well. Our sort of sweet spot segment, I would define a sort of small enterprise mid market. So maybe 200 to 5,000 people types of companies and Some of those companies can actually self-service into a great product, and they can set up the trial and make it work on their own. Most can't. So we do, in that sense, a more traditional sales and CS motion for them and help people. The free product, I think, offers a couple of advantages. So one advantage for us is, you know, let's say we initiate a trial with someone and they like the product, but they're not going to buy it out. Or they're not convinced or maybe it's not the right timing or the person making decision gets fired. Happens a lot in marketing, unfortunately. And then, you know, they can't make a decision. Now we have a place to sort of put the customer. They can stay in that free product. They do get some benefits from it. We're not sort of disconnecting that data. So they will continue to build up data and their data platform. So if they come back, they actually have a product that works. So that's a part of it that does work for us. And then the product has like the free part has sort of some, a few features that are quite exciting, which means that it can be exciting to be in that product for a mid-market customer, not sort of the small enterprise. For this type of product where you're integrating a lot of data, no enterprise is going to just connect the CRM to Dreamdata without having the legal team look at it, right? So, yeah, I think it's not a freemium model in that sense. I would call it product-led in the sense that we lead with the product and we let people try the product before they buy. So that is product-led, but it's not like Miro or let's say Dropbox or like the classical ones you bring up as product-led.
Lars: I mean, that's fascinating. I love the thought that if people stop paying, they can still keep accumulating data. So in effect, your product becomes more valuable to them. Yes. And is hopefully an easier sell. I love that idea. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. I mean, I think one of the questions also probably, you know, you've talked about the typical size of companies, but in B2B, I think people have very different marketing budgets. So, you know, it's always a question for marketers, how much do I spend on analyzing performance versus how much do I spend on actually running the campaigns? So typically, as I mentioned, you're looking at a price starting from about $1,000 a month. Where do you see customers in terms of their ad spend to get sufficient benefit that they can actually get a positive ROI from Dreamdata?
Mike: I think getting a positive ROI is very easy. But I think the big question when you're building a business is like, what's the ROI relative to other projects I can do? And most people will be looking for something that's paying back, I don't know, three, four or five times or something like that. So to get to those levels, you would want to see your ad spend Let's say you're doing an ad spend of 20,000 euros a month. That's sort of a very small mid-market ad spend. That would be like a 100-person company or maybe a little bit less. How much can you then pay for a product like ours and have a reasonable return? Well, you can maybe pay 2,000 a month, so 10% of that, and then you'll still have a good return. It depends a bit, but if you're advertising on LinkedIn and Google, there are some sort of very fast returns in just being able to feed back data to those two platforms and connect that with sort of their AI. And that drives some immediate benefits. And that pays back more than the price itself. And then you do optimizations on the rest of campaigns and typically, unfortunately, fortunately for us, you can probably cancel somewhere between 25 and 75 percent of your ad spend and see no impact on your pipeline performance. That's sort of the unfortunate truth. But that's a hardcore ROI there. It's not even about sort of buying more of your best campaigns. It's not about whether this super good campaign is better than that super good campaign. It's more about like those five or four campaigns down here that actually have never touched anything in your sales pipeline. So there is no way that they can have had any impact. So just cancel them. I would say like ad budget starting at maybe 20K monthly and up. Of course, like most of our customers would be a lot higher than that. I would say that the thousand euro a month starting price is for a very like we're sort of like 50 percent, 75 percent company there. I get company of say, if you are a software company of maybe four or five hundred people, hopefully you're doing around one hundred million in AR, so annual revenue. your paid budget should be in the 10 million, let's just say a million a month range, right? Then you will have a super nice return on a product like ours if you're not doing anything in this space before.
Lars: I find also that comment about 25% to 70% of campaigns can be cancelled, that goes back to that famous quote that I think everybody in marketing has claimed to have invented, which is, half my budget in advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half. Well, you're telling people which half, which is an amazing saving.
Mike: Yeah. And I think it's like sometimes people get over-focused on sort of like, what's the good stuff? But hey, let's just look at all the complete crap that's out there and just get rid of that, right? You clean that out and that will in itself drive a huge sort of efficiency in a marketing budget. You'll see someone say, this is actually really working well for us. And of course, some of what's working really well, maybe it's impossible to do more, but some of it will have scaling potential. And then you can reinvest there and, of course, see more ROI then.
Lars: Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating. I feel like I could talk to you for ages on this, Lars. And I think it's really interesting that despite the fact we have a lot more advertising data, we don't necessarily have the insight as to what's working. And I think a lot of marketers can confuse data for insight.
Mike: I agree, totally agree. And I think a lot of people are sort of blindsided by, they think of B2C e-commerce. B2C e-commerce It's extremely data-laden that go to market. But a lot of B2C e-commerce, like think of Amazon. What is Amazon? Amazon is a logistics and marketing company. That's it. So that's all they do. So they have like half of their team is doing logistics. The other half is doing marketing. So they have a lot of data people, but that's not the case in B2B, right? So in B2B, there is a lot of efficiencies to be found in, I would say like 98% of companies can go out and find gigantic efficiencies in their paid budgets and in general in their marketing budgets.
Lars: I mean, that's great. That's a little bit scary, but also very inspiring, I think. I think it's great.
Mike: It means that most people listening to the podcast can go out and generate gigantic efficiencies for their company, which I think is great. Who doesn't want to be the hero who does that?
Lars: That's awesome. Lars, this has been amazing, really interesting discussion about data, which you don't often say. So it's great to have had this chat. I'm very aware that, you know, you're busy. So we normally like to ask just a couple of questions before people finish in the interview. And the first one is, what's the best marketing advice that has ever been given to you?
Mike: So I think best marketing advice would I would say is about is around focus. It also sort of goes very much back to like founding a company experience, like the importance of focusing, zeroing in on an ICP. And I would say once you have focused, then discovery, you can focus even more and then even more. So go from we started by saying, oh, we're B2B, B2B tech, B2B tech, some geographies, B2B. But you zero in and in the end, you end up with something with a lot of focus and that drives efficiency and makes the work much easier. That's great. I think that's really good advice.
Lars: The other thing we'd like to know is if you're talking to someone who is just starting their career, looking to build a marketing career, what advice would you give them to have a successful career?
Mike: I mean, I could give the advice I was given, but I think the other piece of advice I could give would be to sort of acknowledge that marketing today is heavily sort of engineering and data influenced. So I would say either pick up some data and engineering skills yourself, or make sure that on the desk next to you, there is somebody with those skills so you can leverage that in your work.
Lars: I think that's great advice. And as an ex-engineer, I'd certainly support that. So I love that. Thank you so much, Lars. This has been fascinating. I'm sure people want to learn more about how they can save half their advertising budget. So if people want to learn about Dreamdata, where's the best place to go?
Mike: I mean, the website, try the free product is one option. You can always talk to sales. They're very happy to do that. Connect will be on LinkedIn. I'm happy to chat on LinkedIn as well, for sure.
Lars: That's amazing and very kind. Lars, thank you so much. It's been fascinating. Thanks for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology. You're welcome. It's been a true pleasure. Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Salesforce Summer Updates, Partner Tools and AI Workarounds
In this episode of the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast, Hannah and Mike explore the latest trends in partner marketing automation platforms, featuring insights from Forrester’s recent report. They also break down Salesforce’s Summer ’25 release and what it means for marketers.
The conversation continues with Microsoft’s new email marketing restrictions, DotDigital’s surprising rise in email volume, and growing SMS engagement across global markets. Plus, they share a clever way to integrate AI, even if your platform doesn’t support it.
Want to go deeper on AI in marketing? Watch our webinar: “How to Integrate AI Into Your Marketing Campaigns Today.”
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- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
About Napier
Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.
About Mike Maynard
Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.
About Hannah Wehrly
Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.
Time Stamps
00:00:00 - Introduction to The Marketing Automation Moment Podcast
00:00:21 - Partner Marketing Automation Platforms
00:03:11 - Salesforce Summer 25 Release
00:05:37 - Email Marketing Restrictions by Microsoft
00:09:38 - DotDigital Email Marketing Report
00:10:53 - SMS Engagement Trends
00:12:46 – Insightful Tip of the Week: Integrating AI
00:14:45 – Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Follow Mike and Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Hannah Wehrly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wehrly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing Automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We’d also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724
Transcript: Salesforce Summer Updates, Partner Tools and AI Workarounds
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Wehrly
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 Market Automation Moment podcast. I'm Hannah Whirly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. Today we're talking about partner marketing automation platforms, Salesforce's Summer 25 release, Microsoft adopting restrictions around bulk email senders.
Hannah: A new email marketing report from Dot Digital.
Mike: And we also talk about how you can integrate AI into your systems, even if they don't support them directly.
Hannah: Hi, Mike. Welcome back to another episode of the Market Information Moment. How are you doing?
Mike: Yeah, it's great to talk to you again, Hannah, although we spent all day yesterday together, so we're spending a lot of time.
Hannah: We are indeed. It's been a good week, but a busy week.
Mike: Yeah, and it's always good. Yesterday, we were out at a conference with a lot of other marketers from agencies. So, I think it's always good to talk to other people, get other views. So, hope you enjoyed the day as much as I did.
Hannah: I definitely did. Talking about sharing views of other people, let's kick off the podcast. Now, I know we came across an article together, so I'm going to hand over to you to talk about it, but just to give it a little bit of introduction is that we actually saw an article on Business Wire, and they're actually talking about a new analyst report on partner multi-automation platforms. Now, do you want to share a bit more detail on that, Mike?
Mike: Yeah, it's interesting. Forrester have just issued their report on partner marketing automation platforms. And I think it's something that we haven't really talked about in the market automation moment, is platforms designed specifically for working with channel partners. And it's actually an important area of marketing automation, I think something we could forget quite easily.
Hannah: Yeah, I mean, definitely. It's an area that I personally haven't really explored a lot before. And when I actually read the article, and actually it's Structured Web, so it's the multi-automation platform Structured Web, they've been basically recognized and ranked as the highest possible in the kind of exceptional growth in AI innovation. And it's really interesting because I guess without them, there are these partners and channel partners that wouldn't really be able to optimize and add things like AI into their automations. I don't know what you think.
Mike: Yeah, I think it's really interesting. And maybe we should do a bit of a session about different partner marketing automation platforms. I mean, I think a lot of marketers here, particularly those that don't work a lot with the channel, they won't know brands like Structured Web or Mind Matrix or in partner or anything like that. And what it's trying to do is it's trying to make interactions with your partner companies be more effective. I guess the question is, how much benefit is there to have a dedicated platform to that versus actually just using your existing marketing tools. And obviously, one of the things that something like structured web will do is enable you to share things that maybe you wouldn't want to share with a lot of your customers.
Hannah: I think that's a great point, Mike. I'm so up for doing a separate episode where we can delve a little bit deeper into it. But I actually want to move on, and I know I'm moving on fairly quickly, but I really want to have a chat about Salesforce. Now, as you know, I'm always a big fan of Salesforce. I bang on about Einstein. And so, I saw that they'd released their Summer 25 releases, and I was like, oh, I'm really excited. What are they going to talk about? And I've never been so disappointed. Now, I get that there is an element of, okay, we've got to keep the platform running. And I think if you look at the releases as a user, I bet there's something in there you're really excited about. But I do think it's a shift in pace because it's gone from, you know, look at Einstein, look at our AI agents, look at all this cool stuff we're doing. And now it's back to the real basic use of the platform. I don't know, am I maybe being a bit too harsh?
Mike: I don't understand what you're saying, Hannah. I mean, you can now maintain and support the authorization model with a who sees what Explorer. It sounds really exciting to me. In all seriousness, I think this feels like it's a bit of a under the bonnet kind of update. Lots of things that you need to make your Salesforce instance run efficiently and manage it well, but nothing that's any of these, you know, glitzy bells and whistles that we all love as marketers. Actually, I for one, and you know I'm an engineer at heart, I think they've done a great job. With everybody getting excited about AI and people wanting more and more features, actually sometimes you've got to take a breath and just make the underlying product better.
Hannah: I can't believe I'm saying this, Mike, but I think you might be right. You make a really great point. Sometimes as marketers, and I am definitely that type of marketer that's like, Ooh, look at this shiny new feature. Ooh, what does this do? But if the functionality and the basics aren't working right, you're going to be so frustrated with the platform. You're not going to care about the shiny things. So, I think that's a really good point to make.
Mike: I think the only thing I'll throw out there is, maybe as a question, do we think marketing automation platforms have reached peak features at the moment and there's not going to be more features coming out? I mean, we're not seeing a lot of demand, you know, channels are actually pretty static compared to how they've been previously. And I'm sure there'll be more integrations and more support in the future, but maybe actually marketing automation platforms are becoming mature. And that could be a big issue for some of these guys, because if you don't keep moving forward, then obviously some of those smaller guys are going to build up more and more features. And maybe we're going to see this market compress. And I think that would be interesting. It could perhaps give companies the opportunity to look at more vendors and have a broader choice.
Hannah: Now, I think that's a very interesting question. And listeners, please get in touch if you have an answer. But I think personally as well, its market automation platforms are going to be forced to look at how they market these. So, if, as you said, we have reached that peak, there's not much else they can introduce. then these basic updates and the releases that they do, they actually need to learn to package them up slightly differently and make them exciting to people who aren't perhaps a Salesforce, for example, user at the moment.
Mike: Yeah, and to be honest, if I'm running a large enterprise, I actually care about controlling who can see what, who can do what in the platform. And so, updates that we're actually dissing as being not very exciting, they can be really important to enterprises. I think it's going to be an interesting environment for the next couple of years where maybe the features in terms of delivering capabilities, they kind of equalize out, but actually we see more and more in the underlying capabilities for managing the systems that mean platforms like Salesforce and Marketo actually get further ahead in the minds of enterprises than perhaps some of the smaller vendors because they're doing all of these less exciting but very important features.
Hannah: I think it's definitely one to watch, Mike, for sure. Now, let's move on because I have some news for you, which I think you're just going to be shocked at, and that is that we are once again at the death of email marketing. Now, in all seriousness, I came across a news article, and I'm sure a lot of marketers have seen this by now, but Microsoft has announced that they are joining Yahoo and Google in their email marketing restrictions. So, they are aligning with the new guidelines, so with both emails, you know, marketers could be seeing more emails get rejected or put into spam. Now, I think it'll be interesting to see the perception of this in the market, but I'm intrigued. What do you think?
Mike: Well, I mean, clearly, it's the end of email. Again, I think it's actually quite interesting. It's really easy for people to freak out. Yes, you can end up with maybe some more emails being rejected or going into spam. However, as a B2B marketer, let's look at what Microsoft is saying. So what they're saying is people who send more than 5,000 emails to any of the outlook.com domain, so that includes things like live.com, Hotmail. Does anyone have a Hotmail address anymore? I don't know anyone who has a Hotmail address. Anyway, it includes these addresses which are primarily consumer. Now, for marketers, I think the concern is that there will be some customers that you're marketing to or prospects that actually use one of these free email addresses, whether it's Microsoft's domain or whether it's Google, to route all of their marketing information to. We see this happen quite a lot. And it's going to be harder to get through to those people. But actually, and I think, you know, you and I know this, and maybe no one wants to admit it. If someone's using a free disposable email address, when they register for things to receive all the marketing information, actually, they're probably not looking at it, they're probably not someone you really care about. What do you think?
Hannah: I mean, I couldn't agree more, Mike. I think it's really going to come down to the use of emails. And I think marketers as well will start to blame that, you know, God, my emails are just not being read. We're not getting the results. And they'll forget to look at the content and they'll forget to look at their subject lines. And this will be the blame of what everything is going wrong but it's really the people that you care about and the people that are filling in and often when people are filling in content and they're sharing their information actually you know they're serious if they're sharing their work email and that's very different than as you mentioned these yahoo emails these Hotmail emails if they're out there still so I think my word of advice would be to marketers is don't blame it, still please look at your emails, still look at optimizations. Just because this happened doesn't mean that this is the blame for your results.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, maybe we could invent some new theory here. 20% of the email addresses in your database that are active are going to give you 80% of the results. We could call it, I don't know, the 80-20 rule, something new.
Hannah: Well, let's move on, Mike, because, you know, we've just spoke quite a bit about email and actually related very well into this is a new report from Dot Digital. Now, this is focused solely really on a bit of email, bit of SMS engagement. But what I thought was really interesting is that the results actually revealed that email send volumes have increased year on year. So, the report actually said it's increased globally by 23.9%. And I thought that was really interesting because even with these guidelines, actually we're seeing a growth and you're still seeing marketers use email as their main function of contacting the people they want to work with.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, obviously, the email is dead story has kind of been debunked by this. But yeah, I think it's interesting to see the emails growing. It does also say that email is becoming more and more competitive, getting people's attention is harder. And I think that means we've all got to work harder to create great emails. And that's going to be a big challenge. You know, with more and more emails being sent, you've got to do more to stand out.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I mean, another thing in the report that I did want to have a bit of a talk about, which I found quite interesting, was that the report revealed that SMS engagement is low for Europe, but there's actually a huge growth for it in the US and APAC. Now, I don't know what you think, but this has surprised me a little bit because what is it with Europe never really wanting to really take that change compared to the rest of the world?
Mike: I thought we were all on WhatsApp in Europe and moved past SMS. So maybe I'm just ahead of my time. I don't know. I think clearly, it depends on what you're doing with SMS. And one of the issues that we have, because we're focused on B2B, is that the Dot digital report doesn't necessarily represent our industries, because it covers consumer as well. So, I think, you know, what's happening is that maybe in areas like the USA, people are actually being more creative. There's probably, you know, more companies or more service providers using it for consumer type emails. And that's getting engagement.
Hannah: I think that's a really good point, Mike. And I think you're completely right in saying, you know, how are they using it? What are they using it for? As always, with these reports, you do have to take them with a little bit pinch of salt.
Mike: Yeah, and also on SMS, I mean, I learned something from this, you know, we don't do a huge amount of SMS marketing, but obviously, you're not allowed to do SMS marketing at night in countries like the USA and UK. But in France, you're not allowed to do SMS marketing on public holidays, for example. I think one of the things about SMS is that you've got to be really mindful of what you're doing. You know, there is a lot of regulation. But frankly, if you're not getting a response, particularly if you're not getting a response in Europe, maybe you're doing it wrong. Maybe you should do it better. Maybe you should look at the right time to do it. Maybe you should be more mindful about what people want, rather than what you're trying to send.
Hannah: Oh, fantastic point, Mike. Well, I'm looking at the time and so I want to move on to our insightful tip of the week. Now, slightly different approach because I normally bring these to the table, but actually, I believe you've got one for this episode.
Mike: Yeah, well, I think one of the things that I'm seeing is, you know, we talked a little bit about features and hype around features and systems. And a lot of things that some of the bigger market automation systems are talking about is the introduction of AI. So, you know, using AI to personalize emails, for example. And just recently, I've been talking about integrating AI into existing marketing stack. And I think one of the things that a lot of people don't realize is that even if your marketing automation platform doesn't include AI features, it's actually very easy to integrate that in. And I think more people should be considering using AI to personalize emails to get better results, even if their platform doesn't do it by using external integrations.
Hannah: Amazing information, Mike. And actually, I think we need to do a shout out for our webinar, because you actually just recently hosted one focused on this topic.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. This is where it came to, we talked to a couple of clients about it, and then decided we needed to run a webinar because we're getting more and more questions. So, if anyone's interested, there is a webinar available. And it's called how to integrate AI into your marketing campaigns today. It certainly does what it says on the tin. So, if anyone's interested in that, I think, learn how to use your API and talking about things that are going to get people excited. APIs probably aren't those things. But learn how to use the API in your marketing automation platform, because it lets you add features on and in particular, adding on AI capabilities, I think it's become more and more important. as a lot of recipients are going to start demanding, you know, much more personalised email, as marketing automation platforms integrate it. If your platform doesn't, you're going to be left behind.
Hannah: Great advice to end on. And Mike, we've already got a meeting next week. So, I watched that webinar was like, gosh, we need to be doing more within Napier to make sure we're utilising this.
Mike: Oh, I've got lots of tasks for you, Hannah. We'll keep you busy until the next episode of the podcast.
Hannah: Well, thanks so much, Mike, for that insight and for a great conversation.
Mike: Thanks, and I'll talk to you soon, Hannah.
Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast.
Mike: Don't forget to subscribe in your favourite podcast application, and we'll see you next time.
Navigating Social Media Chaos - Emerick Ernoult - Agorapulse
Emeric Ernoult, Co-Founder and CEO of Agorapulse, talks about how the company grew from a Facebook contest tool into a full social media management platform. He shares the ups and downs of keeping up with the fast-changing world of social media marketing and how B2B marketers can the get most out of their social media platforms.
He encourages B2B marketers to focus on providing value through educational and entertaining content and offers practical advice for leveraging team members and influencers to enhance social media engagement.
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Agorapulse
Founded in 2010 by Emeric Ernoult and Benoît Hédiard, Agorapulse is a leading social media management platform headquartered in Paris, France. Designed for businesses, agencies, and marketers, Agorapulse streamlines social media workflows by providing tools to schedule posts, monitor conversations, engage with audiences, and analyze performance across multiple platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok.
About Emeric Ernoult
Emeric is the co-founder and CEO of Agorapulse, a leading social media management platform he grew to $20 million in revenue without external funding. Under his leadership, Agorapulse has distinguished itself in the competitive landscape by ranking #1 across top software review sites like G2, GetApp, Capterra, Appvizer (France), and OMR (Germany). Emeric's strategic vision and commitment to innovation have set industry benchmarks, including the first-ever social media inbox in 2014 and pioneering ROI tracking and analytics features for social media—patented innovations that help marketers prove the value of their investments.
Time Stamps
00:00:17 - Guest Introduction: Emeric Ernoult
00:02:07 - Differences Between the Bay Area and Europe for Startups
00:04:19 - Agorapulse: Solving Social Media Chaos
00:09:29 - B2B Marketing: Beyond LinkedIn
00:11:02 - Measuring Social Media Success
00:16:21 - The Challenge of Entertaining vs. Selling on Social Media
00:21:47 - Tips for B2B Marketers to Create Engaging Content
00:25:59 - Best Marketing Advice Received
00:28:34 - Advice for New Marketers
00:31:47 - Connecting with Emerick and Agorapulse
Quotes
"Social media is probably the most chaotic channel in the whole marketing world. Compare that to email, super simple... Social is not simple, not easy." Emeric Ernoult, Co-Founder and CEO of Agorapulse.
"If there's no proof that this works, it's not going to get budget, it's not going to get human resources, it's not going to get attention." Emeric Ernoult, Co-Founder and CEO of Agorapulse.
"In order to measure anything, you have to have an analytics framework in place. If you are not defining what are the CTAs you want to track on your website, you're not going to be able to track anything on social media." Emeric Ernoult, Co-Founder and CEO of Agorapulse.
"If you are not in constant learning mode, you're going to be out of place in six months. The assets to learn and to stay on top of your game are here, free, in abundance." Emeric Ernoult, Co-Founder and CEO of Agorapulse.
Follow Emeric:
Emeric Ernoult on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ernoult/?originalSubdomain=fr
Agorapulse’s website: https://www.agorapulse.com/
Agorapulse on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/agorapulse/
Follow Mike:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing B2B Tech and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We'd also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.
Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast - The Marketing Automation Moment: https://podcasts.apple.com/ua/podcast/the-marketing-automation-moment-podcast/id1659211547
Transcript: Interview with Emeric Ernoult at Agorapulse
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Emeric Ernoult
Mike: Thanks for listening to Marketing B2B Tech, the podcast from Napier, where you can find out what really works in B2B marketing today.
Welcome to Marketing B2B Technology, the podcast from Napier. Today, I'm joined by Emerick Ernoult. Emerick is the co-founder of Agorapulse. Welcome to the podcast, Emerick.
Emeric: Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to have this conversation with you today.
Mike: It's great to have you on. So we always like to understand a little bit about our guests first. So can you tell us a little bit about your career and why you decided you needed to found Agorapulse?
Emeric: Yeah, so to make this, to connect this with what the audience will be interested in hearing from my career, First of all, I'm an eminent lawyer by trade. 25 years ago, I was doing merger and acquisition in a big U.S. law firm, and I moved to entrepreneurship. And I failed and hustled and struggled for many, many years, but eventually made something out of it. So all of you out there, you can change careers. It is possible. It is hard, but sometimes it's worth it. Agorapulse is the result of several pivots from a previous business that didn't work out for almost a decade. And it is in itself several pivots, meaning we started by doing contests and promotions on Facebook, and we evolved to a full-blown social media management suite that was not only Facebook, that was everything. We're not doing contests and promotions anymore, we're doing inbox management, engagement management, content publishing, analytics, employee advocacy, social media listening, like the whole nine yards. Yeah. And we moved from very, very low touch SMB inbound led go-to-markets to a very much more marketing and sales led go-to-markets, more touch, more demos and white glove treatment and CSMs. We made a lot of changes in our go-to-market, which was very, very challenging, but also very interesting.
Mike: I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. But one thing you didn't talk about was location. And that really interests me, because you moved to the Bay Area to found the company. And now you've moved back to Paris. So I'm interested, what's the difference between, you know, the Bay Area and Europe? And actually, can people run startups in Europe and be successful?
Emeric: Yeah, so you need to know about me as well. I didn't want to go that far in my life history, but I was born in New York. I was raised in West Africa. I went back to France, then I moved back to Washington, D.C., then I moved back to France, then I moved back to the Valley, then I moved back to France. So I am a citizen of the world. My sister lives in London. She's married with an American. My parents had lived in New York for seven years, in North Carolina. So we are a French-French family, but we've been open to the world very early on. And for me, I could live here or where you live or in Miami, I would not feel a foreigner. My brain works like this. And that's the first thing. The second thing relating to the question you asked, yes, you can absolutely launch a startup and a tech business from anywhere. In 2025, you have to be there to raise money, you have to be there to be with the people, with the networks. I network with American and Canadian SaaS CEOs all the time. I'm members of several SaaS CEO groups from the US, from France, from Canada. I've been coached by a Canadian SaaS coach and an entrepreneurship coach for three years. Yeah, of course, if you have a free mind, you can connect with anyone and start a business anywhere. Are there more regulations and laws and some issues to do business in Europe than there are in the US? Yes. But is the US a perfect country for everything? No. So, you know, with what you have, you can do amazing stuff in both countries.
Mike: I love that. I love that really open approach to networking to people around the world. I think that's a great lesson. Let's focus on the company now. So you mentioned a little bit about, you know, how Agorapulse is helping people on social. I mean, what problems are people solving by using the product?
Emeric: No, it's very easy. The first problem that we solve and every other social media management software will solve, like the claim is not unique to us, is to turn social media chaos into something that's manageable. Social media is probably the most chaotic channel in the whole marketing world. Compare that to email, super simple. Well, you have delivery issues and mailbox warming. There are a couple of tactical and technical stuff that you need to know, but it's quite simple to understand. I need to build a list, and I need to email them with interesting stuff. Podcasting, also quite simple. I need to find interesting guests, interesting topics, invite them, and spread the good stories to the world. Ads, also simple but easy, but it's a simple concept, but it's not easy to succeed at. Social is not simple, not easy. It's not simple because there are so many channels. Which one do I pick? Why? How do they work differently than the others? Do I need to create different types of contents for all of these different channels? How do I measure if it's working? What kind of time horizon do I set for myself for success and so on and so forth? And once you've decided all these things and you start investing, then you have to create all these profiles or grow them. engage with people there, and they're all different, and they all have their own sign-ups and their own accounts, like you have one email, like you have one HubSpot or one market or whatever you're using for emails. You have many profiles, so eventually, without a tool, It is a mess. You can't work without a tool. In the early days, I would actually advise people who are starting in that journey of trying to find value being present on social. But if you have already started the journey, and you have some level of success, and you have some level of engagement in a team, and more obviously, if you're a large brand, and you have several brands, several countries, several team members, it is an obvious thing that without a tool, you're dead. But that's the main number one problem we're solving. It is very, very chaotic. We turn this chaos into something you can actually manage in a reasonable time frame. And with AI and all that kind of stuff, it's getting easier and easier.
So we're adding more and more peace of mind into the process, especially when there's teamwork. So that's problem number one. Obviously, if you start looking at what makes you unique in that, I'm not going to get into that because we do some things that others do, but others do things that we don't do. It's becoming complex. It's really the keys to define what is the actual need and the specific needs and make sure that you address those well and not some other tools. The other problem that we started to look at is how do you measure success? How do you make sure that this thing is worth your time and your money and your team members' time and so on and so forth? So for the past three years, we've started to be very, very obsessed about how do you measure ROI? How do you measure business impact? And that's the one thing that I think we do better than anybody else, because we are very focused on this. As a founder and CEO working in social media, I am very, very acutely aware that if there's no proof that this works, it's not going to get budget, it's not going to get human resources, it's not going to get attention. And it's not going to get C-level and exec team time and priorities. So that's the thing that I really wanted to push the company towards. And yeah, that's it.
Mike: Something there's an awful lot to talk about there, an awful lot of chaos to kind of unpack. But I mean, let's just start off with platforms, because I think we're all guilty of going, yeah, it's social media. But actually, TikTok is very different from Facebook, which is very different from LinkedIn. So which of the platforms do you focus on at Agora Posts?
Emeric: Well, as a software, it does all of them. We don't do one better than the other. We do all of them with all the APIs that they offer us and everything that you can do through the API of YouTube and TikTok and LinkedIn and Thread and Blue Sky and so on and so forth. It's something that we offer. But obviously, it's not because we can allow for comprehensive coverage of all the social networks that you should be present on all the social networks. There's definitely an audit and a brainstorming you should do before deciding which one you're going to be present on because As with everything, if you're not laser focused on where you believe you can get the most value, especially as long as you have not yet nailed the value and the value measurement, it can be quite risky to go too broad and spread yourself too thin.
Mike: And I mean, that's an interesting challenge. And I think if you look at B2B, which is where our listeners will be, you know, quite often, B2B marketers, they gravitate to LinkedIn, because I think partly it's less chaotic, it feels more controllable. But obviously, you offer great capabilities on platforms like Facebook. Do you think B2B marketers should be looking more widely across more platforms? Or is it just LinkedIn in the only place they should be?
Emeric: Yeah, we're probably kind of an exception. We're also heavily invested on Facebook, but that's because our ICP is on Facebook. Our ICP and personas, the people we talk to and we want to help, are champions in the accounts. They are on Facebook because they're social media managers. They spend their time on Facebook and Instagram and for their own job. So they have to do that. It's a requirement of the job. So for us, it makes sense. But if you're selling nuts and bolts, it probably does not make too much sense to be present on Facebook or invest a lot on Facebook. So it's going to depend on where are the people you're trying to reach? Where are they spending their time? For us, they're kind of spending their time in all these places. But for you, probably, I'm not sure. For an agency, I'm not sure Facebook would be a good place. If I was an agency, I would heavily lean on LinkedIn, but I would also lean on video, giving advice, providing useful, practical advice through video and probably short form videos. And maybe Meta could be good for retargeting, but that's a paid play. That's not an organic play. For an organic play, I would probably go podcast, which you're doing amazingly well. And I will use the video of the podcast to go short form videos on YouTube. And why not TikTok? I am not a big heavy user of TikTok, but I have a lot of friends who are heavy users on TikTok and they consume B2B content on TikTok. So it is not to be entirely discounted. It's something that's worth testing.
Mike: And I mean, that's really interesting, you know, that there's lots of options. I guess one of the ways to work out what's best is to actually test it and see where you get return from. So you talked a lot about measuring social media. Perhaps you can, you know, go into a little more detail about the kind of things you measure, the metrics you're getting to help marketers understand which of their social campaigns are working the best.
Emeric: Yeah. So when it comes to measuring, A couple of things I want to highlight. Number one, in order to measure anything, you have to have an analytics framework in place. If you are not amazing at measuring everything that comes from your email campaigns, from your ads, from every other type of marketing activities, if your website is not equipped with Google Analytics 4, or Adobe Analytics, or whatever types of analytic framework. If you are not defining what are the CTAs you want to track on your website, using Google Tech Manager to create those CTAs and track them. If all I've just said is Chinese to you, you're not going to be able to track anything on social media. Because the problem is not social media. The problem is you have not equipped yourself to track what's happening on your website once you've sent traffic to it. If you have done that, then social media is no different than any other channel. The main difference between social media and email, for example, or advertising, of course, is that the purpose of email and advertising is to drive the biggest purpose. The most obvious purpose is to drive traffic to the website for some kind of specific value or specific event or specific download or specific content or go to my website and do this. This is not going to be the case all the time on social media because if you go on social media and behave like it's an email and like go to my website and check this out or download this or register my webinar or go listen to my podcast and that's all you do. you're going to wear and tear your audience is going to say, OK, that's it. You know, I I don't I don't want to like this. I don't want to share this. I'm not interested by this from what I see here. And social media will require you to have an approach where people on social get enough from you without having to go to your website. And once in a while, like 25% of the time or 30% of the time, there will be something that leads them to the website. But they will be so much more likely to go on your website and download that webinar or subscribe to that webinar or watch that video or download that white paper or whatever that is. If before, for like a week or two or three, they've seen super interesting insights and content and you've shared value with them directly on social without asking them to go grab it on your website.
But you have to combine both. I mean, be the entertainer, be the educator on social, be all these things that are of interest to the audience, 75% of the time, 70% of the time, and those 25, 30% say, hey, You've loved everything I've shared with you for the past two weeks. We are organizing this webinar. Go ahead, go on my website, and make sure you register, because we're going to share so much more there. And it's one hour. It's a full thing. It's exactly what you need, and so on and so forth. And if you're a B2B, that's basically what you're going to measure on social. You're not going to measure revenue. We can measure revenue generated from social media. But if you're selling a $15, 15 euro, 15 pound pop, small thing that people can buy in, you know, in a in a snap. So I want this buy. OK, then you can measure revenue. But if you're buying a 500 a month or 800 or 1000 a month piece of B2B service or B2B software, there's no way you're going to generate a ton of revenue from Snapchat. It's not going to happen. It's going to be a lever of influence for the eventual purchase. And that's how you need to consider your presence on social media. You're on the educational phase and helping them to make the right decision as to what they need to choose when they are ready to choose for the solution or the product you're selling. And what you're going to track and how you're going to measure business impact in a B2B environment with social media is like leads mostly. It's going to be, okay, how many MQLs did we drive from our social media activities? And that's why your analytics framework needs to be really, really nailed. and connect it to your CRM and so on and so forth. So that way you can measure precisely, we got that many webinar subscriptions, we got that many e-book downloads, we got that many blog posts read, that many YouTube video of you or podcast downloads and so on and so forth. And that's how you're going to track business impact in a B2B environment, not through revenue. We do have customers in the e-commerce space who are tracking revenue and are doing amazing at allocating revenue to social media activities. But in the B2B space, it's going to be very rare.
Mike: That absolutely makes sense. And I really love this idea of, you know, spending three quarters of your time being the entertainer rather than 100% of your time being the salesperson. I guess the question now that marketers will be asking is, so I've got to stop selling on every post, I've got to start entertaining. How do I know if those entertainment posts are any good? Because they're not going to drive people to the website for registrations. So how do I know they're going to make people be more likely to click on that webinar post in the future?
Emeric: That's why you're not gonna like my answer. And most people are not gonna like my answer. It is really, really hard. And in order to convince yourself that it's really, really hard, be honest and look at the last time you watched a B2B company entertain you on anything, a video, social media, or a B2B consultant, or a B2B agency, or a B2B marketing guru, or whatever, like someone talking about B2B. When is the last time that person blew your mind? and made you feel like, wow, that's great. I want to follow them. I want more from them. I will subscribe to whatever they're selling me next. And when you do that, you're not going to come up with a lot of people or a lot of companies. You're just going to come up with a few. And those few will have something in common. What they have created to trigger that into you will be out of this world. And usually you will be unique. You will be intrinsically linked to their experience and their deep knowledge of the ecosystem or the deep knowledge of whatever they blew your mind with. And that means that you have to have built that expertise and poise and experience and examples and use cases. It has to be something that feels like, oh my God, this person knows what she's talking about. And that's hard. It is really hard. And that's why there are so few brands and marketers who are doing amazing on social media, because this is really hard to do. But let's not lie to ourselves. It's also really hard to do in email. It's also really hard to do in paid. I mean, paid is going to give you the mirage of it's easy. But it's not easy. What's easy is to waste your money. What is not easy is to make it work for you. Being good at any kind of marketing channel is always a huge, humongous challenge.
Mike: And I think this leads to a very unfair question, but I've got to ask it. So, at Agora Pulse, what are you doing to actually entertain and engage and do those amazing pieces of content that make people want to follow you?
Emeric: So first of all, go check our social profiles to see for yourself. We have an amazing social media manager. It took me a long time to find her. The ones I had before, I was not crazy about. The one we have now, I absolutely love her. She's amazingly funny. She constantly comes up with those crazy, fun video ideas that she does at the office with other people. Frankly, if you ask me, she's entertaining. I actually watch her because she entertains me. And she really delivers a good mix of, let's have some fun. And of course, I'd say, you could do that. We're talking to social media managers. I think what we do is really okay with social media managers. We can be a clown from time to time. That's okay. If you're talking to Fortune 500 CEOs, my content is probably a little bit too funny. But for the audience that we have and the target that we have, she's doing an amazing job. And in that example, the goal and the mission that we gave her is like, we want you to be really enjoying yourself doing this. If you're not enjoying yourself, it's not going to last. people are going to feel it. Do something you really enjoy. It has to be something fun for you. If it's fun for you, it's going to be fun for them. And as you think about what you want to do fun-wise with this social media content, try to think about at least 20%, 25%, 30% of the time, how can you connect that to the problem we solve. Because that's one of the things that I've learned in marketing. If you're not connecting your marketing with the problem you solve enough, then everybody will know who you are, but they will have no idea why they should care. And that's a problem eventually.
Mike: I love it. I mean, I know, you know, on your LinkedIn post, for example, there's lots of short, really fun videos, perhaps, you know, a little bit edgy, but certainly very fun. But I think the great thing I see in Agorapost's kind of feed is the social media marketing manager, the person you're selling to, they're actually always the hero, and they're always the star. And I love the way you really boost up that role. So it's a great feed. I think your social media manager is doing a great job there. Yeah, she's lovely. So I guess, you know, do you have any tips? I mean, you've talked a little bit about what you're doing. But if you're sat there in an enterprise, you know, working on the social media feed for a big b2b company, what can you do that, frankly, isn't going to get you fired tomorrow, that's going to make your feed a little bit more entertaining, that's going to start, you know, getting people more engaged? Is there a process or an approach that people could take?
Emeric: Yeah, We've talked a lot about being entertaining and being fun. You don't have to be entertaining upfront. You can be educational. You can be interesting. Interesting and serious is okay. As long as people are like, Oh, I want more of this. What you want to trigger is I want more of this. So I'm going to like, I'm going to share, I'm going to subscribe. I'm going to be a follower, whatever. And. You can get that trigger into people's brain in different ways. You don't have to run a circus all day long. I follow a bunch of people in the business space who are business people and share their business knowledge that they've acquired through hard-earned experience and expertise. And they are not funny, but they're so good at what they do that I'm following them and I'm listening to every of their YouTube videos. And a couple I like very much are Alex and Leila Hormozy, which I was lucky enough to meet when I was doing my coaching in the US three years ago. And their YouTube content is just out of this world. It's crazy, amazing. And they're not funny, but they are really, really good. I think you have to think about what can I deliver to an audience that's unique to me and that nobody else can really deliver as good as I will. And for Evic, our social media manager, it is that because she's really good at that and she enjoys it. But for someone else, it's going to be something different. And obviously if you're in B2B marketing and all you can think about delivering to an audience is how you do gardening, it's probably not going to be super helpful with your business. Even though that's a passion of yours, then you probably should do that, you know, for personally, but not as a, as a marketer for the B2B company. So think about what do I know? Or what do I master or what do I enjoy that I can share with the world in a way that's fun for me or interesting for me so it can last? Because if it's not, it's not going to last. You're going to give up quick because you run a podcast. You know how long it is to get to a place where you have dozens of downloads and subscribers. It can take a year. It can really take a lot of time. So you have to feel like, I enjoy doing this podcast. I'm going to keep doing it. I'll do it for me. And if you do it for you, then you've already won something, that you're having a good moment. And obviously, if you cannot come up with any of that, then don't force yourself. There's no obligation to be present on social media, you don't have to do something else, which leads me to another thing that I've seen a lot in B2B. Sometimes it's not you, the B2B marketer for social media, on social media for your company. Sometimes it's your team. It's the other employees. Sometimes it's influencers that you work with. Sometimes it's people you invite to a podcast who can be that for you and so on and so forth. And one of the things that we've discovered and kept developing in our software is the advocacy piece. It's like, as a B2B marketer, how do you use others to be your ambassadors, to represent your brand, to be the ones who will do the thing that will make people think, wow, that's interesting. I want more of this. That's not coming from you because you're not the best person to do that. So thinking outside of the box of, OK, I don't feel I'm going to be that guy or that girl. think about who else in the company can be that and I'm going to make them work. I'm going to be the orchestra chief and I'm going to make sure that I'm making this like a project manager.
Mike: I think that's amazing. I think if there was a record for the number of great ideas in one answer, you've probably just broken it for the podcast. That was, you know, so good to see there's so many ways. There's not a fixed way you have to do this. Emerick, this has been fascinating. I feel I could talk to you, you know, all day on this, but we're limited on time. And I know you're busy as well. So we'd like to finish with a couple of quickfire questions. And the first one is, you know, really simple. What's the best marketing advice that's ever been given to you?
Emeric: The best marketing advice that I have ever figured out, eventually, after having seen a lot of mistakes around me and from my own team, was something I mentioned earlier, which is don't do marketing to create noise and to be visible and to be seen and to have views and reach and all that kind of stuff. Do marketing to connect the dots between the pain your customer have and what you do. Always think about how does my marketing help connect the pain that I've identified, that I know because I've done my discovery, I've done my market research, I've talked to a bunch of customers, obviously mandatory. I'd connect that pain with the solution. And I remember telling my team a year ago, it's like a triangle. You need to know the pain really, really well and be an expert on the pain. You need to know the solutions, all of them, not yours, all of them, really, really well and be able to talk about them, write content about them, go on social media and share insights about them, do webinars about them, create e-books about them, podcasts about them, all these things, and then introduce yourself in those solutions. All these solutions are possible. You could use a spreadsheet to manage social, but that's going to be really painful. It's going to be free, but really painful. Or you could use a piece of software, and we are a piece of software that can help you do that. Embed yourself in the solution. So identify the pain, help them with the solutions and embed yourself with the solution. If you do that, if you keep that simple triangle framework in mind when you create your marketing strategy, you're always going to be ahead of the pack, like 90% of marketers are not even doing that. And it felt crazy to me that most people I've seen doing marketing were thinking about creating noise. And like I said earlier, people knew who they were, but they didn't know why they should care. Because those people had not connected the dots between my pain, the solutions to my pain, and actually yours feels really great. Really, probably the best among all these solutions. So that's the best. I have many, many, many more, but we don't have time for that.
Mike: That's brilliant. I love that concept of the triangle as well. The other question we always like to ask is if you're talking to someone who's just starting in marketing, just starting their career, what advice would you give them?
Emeric: Invest in yourself, read books, listen to podcasts. I have spent the last 18 months listening to three podcast episodes per week during my gym sessions, 45, 40 minutes, 45 minutes each. There is Marketing Against the Grain from Heffat CMO. There is the Exit Five from Dave Gehart. There are plenty of good, really good marketing podcasts that are either from the host, because the hosts are really good, like marketing Instagram, they're very obsessed about AI right now. If you want to know how you can leverage AI for marketing, go listen to them and try to take notes for every episode that you're listening to. And do that for like a full year. I can guarantee you 100%. In one year, you'll be 2x, 3x as good as you are today in terms of understanding. This is what the best people in the market in that space. This is how they talk about their marketing. This is how they describe how they achieve results, how they build a team. how they prioritize. And this is people underestimate how much we have to invest in ourselves in our own training in this day and age where chat GPT 4.0 is a hundred times better than chat GPT 2.5. That was like six months ago. And if you are not in constant learning mode, you're going to be out of place in six months. I'm not going to say you're going to be useless, but you're on your way to be useless in a year or two. So the assets to learn and to stay on top of your game are here, free, in abundance. They're very easy to get.
Mike: I think that's probably great advice to everybody in marketing, not just people starting their career.
Emeric: I've learned so much by educating myself. You have to understand, I'm a marketer by trade. When we started the business 25 years ago, my co-founder was a CTO, a product builder, and I was the everything else doer. Finance, accounting, marketing, and eventually sales. The job I kept the longest before I stopped doing any kind of operational job in the company was marketing. And I did marketing for, like I said, InBel, PLG go to market, no touch, no sales, and so on and so forth. So SEO, influencers, like all these things, driving traffic to the website and converting them into free trials. And I haven't learned how do you do marketing when you sell to the enterprise or you sell to mid-market or you sell to larger businesses. And that is something I had to learn. And I was amazed by how much I've learned to be better at that in the past 12 months, because all the stories, all the experts are out there for free waiting for you to listen to them.
Mike: It's great advice and such a positive piece of advice as well. You know, everyone can learn. It feels great. Emre, this has been amazing. I'm sure people would like to know more and perhaps learn more about Agorapulse. So where would be the best place for them to go next?
Emeric: Well, obviously, if they want to connect with me, they can find me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to accept LinkedIn invitation. If there is a note that says, hey, I heard you on Podcast X, loved it, love to connect because I get dozens of invitation per day and I disregard most of them. I don't want my LinkedIn to be a zoo of strangers. But if they came from a podcast, at least they know who I am and they know why they want to connect with me and what I care about. So that's the way to connect with me and ask me questions or if they have any follow-up questions, that's the place to go. And if they want to learn more about Agorapulse, there's a free trial. The product starts at $79 a month, so it's really, really affordable for a user. And they can go to the website and start a trial and see what's in there for them.
Mike: That's amazing. I mean, Emeric, I really appreciate it. It's been a fascinating conversation. Thanks so much for being a guest on Marketing B2B Technology.
Emeric: My pleasure. Thank you.
Mike: Thanks so much for listening to Marketing B2B Tech. We hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you did, please make sure you subscribe on iTunes or on your favorite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Sad Goodbye to Georg Steinberger
Napier was saddened to hear the news that Georg Steinberger, Chairman of European distributors organisation FBDi has passed away.
Georg was well-known within the industry, having previously held the title of Editor-in-Chief at Markt&Technik, before becoming VP of Communications at Avnet from 1988 to 2022.
Our thoughts are with Georg’s friends and family at this difficult time.
Unlocking Marketing Success: Metrics That Matter and Metrics to Avoid
In today’s data-driven world, marketing metrics are the lifeblood of any successful campaign. But are all metrics created equal? Too often, marketers focus on numbers that sound impressive but fail to deliver real business value. In Napier’s recent webinar on "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Marketing Measurement," we explored the fine line between metrics that drive results and those that can steer your strategy astray. This blog aims to take a deeper look on how to differentiate between the metrics that matter and those you should avoid.
Understanding Meaningful Metrics
Before we explore the importance of understanding meaningful metrics, it’s important to define what a marketing metric really is.
A marketing metric is a quantifiable figure/value used to assess the performance/execution of a campaign. However, not all metrics are created equal, and it can be tricky to understand which metrics are appropriate or inappropriate that provide relevant valuable insights. While it’s tempting to highlight figures like impressions, clicks, and page views, these “vanity metrics” don’t necessarily reflect real engagement or impact on the bottom line. Instead of merely chasing numbers, marketers should focus on metrics that contribute to optimizing their strategy.
As Mark Twain famously said: “If the metrics you’re looking at aren’t useful in optimizing your strategy, stop looking at them.” It's important to look past surface-level stats and dig deeper into what truly moves the needle for your business.
Metrics to Avoid
Some of the most common metrics used today offer little to no actionable insight. These can include:
- Email Opens: With the rise of privacy-focused technologies like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) that hides people’s IP address so that the email author/sender cannot see if the recipient has opened the email, determine their exact location, link it to their other online activity or access the auto-preview features; open rates have become unreliable. Just because an email registers as “opened” doesn’t mean the recipient engaged with it.
- Impressions and Clicks: While they may seem like good indicators of reach, impressions often don’t correlate with meaningful engagement, and clicks can be misleading. Clicks often come from bots or irrelevant users, skewing your data and offering little insight into user intent.
- Page Views: Bots and irrelevant traffic can inflate page view metrics. A high number of views doesn’t necessarily mean that your content is resonating with the right audience or driving conversions.
Effective Metrics to Adopt
To truly measure the success of a marketing campaign, it’s important to shift the focus to metrics that deliver business insights. Some of the most important ones include:
- Incrementality: Instead of looking at raw attribution, incrementality measures how much a marketing activity genuinely impacts sales. This is achieved through testing, such as running a campaign in one region and not another to solely determine how much sales increase where that particular campaign was active.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This metric helps evaluate how much it costs to acquire a new customer compared to the value they bring to your business. CAC is particularly useful for long-term strategy, ensuring that marketing spend aligns with customer value.
- Time to Conversion: Understanding how long it takes for a prospect to move through the sales funnel is critical. Effective campaigns often shorten the conversion timeline, helping you close deals faster and more efficiently.
- Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI): Linking marketing activities directly to revenue can be challenging but invaluable. ROMI ensures that you’re not just tracking engagement but also attributing revenue growth to your campaigns.
Avoiding Attribution Pitfalls
Attribution models can be misleading, often crediting marketing activities that played little or no role in a customer’s purchase decision. For example, if someone clicks on a Google ad after already deciding to buy your product, the ad may get undue credit.
Incrementality testing is a great way to avoid falling into the attribution trap by determining if your marketing activity is genuinely driving results. Typically, incrementality links marketing activity to an increase in sales or conversions. It can be very difficult to measure and is typically achieved by testing.
Testing can be done via groups and running marketing campaigns to one of the selected groups (who are pretty similar). This test allows marketers to see if the group of people that are seeing the marketing campaign ultimately engage, or download and buy more from the company.
The Customer Journey
Marketers should have a focus on aligning metrics with different stages of the customer journey. For instance, during the awareness phase, metrics like engagement and leads are more relevant, while conversion metrics become crucial later on in the funnel.
Measuring success isn’t about focusing on a single number; it’s about tracking a set of metrics that align with each stage of the customer journey. By doing this, you gain a comprehensive view of how your campaigns are performing and how effectively you’re moving prospects through the funnel.
Tips for Effective Reporting and Dashboards
A well-designed dashboard is essential for clear and actionable reporting, but many dashboards focus on the wrong metrics. Rather than gravitating towards easy-to-measure numbers like clicks or impressions, design your dashboard around meaningful business metrics.
A great framework is to model your dashboard on the customer journey. This allows you to see how each marketing channel contributes to moving customers from awareness to conversion. For example, track the effectiveness of awareness campaigns at the start and measure sales or qualified leads at the final stage.
Conclusion
In the fast-paced world of marketing, success often hinges on choosing the right metrics. Vanity metrics can make you feel good, but they don’t necessarily drive business growth. Instead, focus on metrics that reflect true performance—incrementality, customer acquisition cost, time to conversion, and ROMI—to unlock long-term success.
Above all, remember that testing is key. Continually refine your measurement strategies and adapt to what works. With the right approach, you’ll be able to demonstrate real value and drive meaningful results.
To watch our webinar in full and find out more, please click here. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
A Napier Webinar: Which AI Should Your Boss Hire?
Large language models (more commonly known as AI) have provided marketers with a wide range of opportunities to improve and make their marketing/PR activities more effective.
But which platforms should you be using? And how do your goals or priorities shape which is the best for you?
In our on-demand webinar, 'Which AI Should Your Boss Hire', we explore how different AI and large language models (LLMs) perform and compare the results for different LLMs for a range of B2B marketing tasks. We will cover:
- What are LLMs?
- How LLMs work
- The differences between LLMs
- Our tests - a comparison of different LLMs
- How to get the best out of AI and LLMs in marketing
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: ‘Which AI Should Your Boss Hire?’ Transcript
Speakers: Mike Maynard
Okay, good afternoon, and welcome to the latest Napier webinar. Thank you all for attending. It's great to have you here today. We're going to have a bit of fun, and we're going to talk about artificial intelligence, and in particular, we're going to try and find out which AI your boss should hire to replace you. So hopefully we're going to enjoy this, and it's going to be quite entertaining. I would encourage you, if you've got any questions, to put questions into the Q and A that's a tab by your chat window. So if you select Q and A and let me know whether that's whether you've got any questions that would be perfect. Thank you. What I will do is I will cover the questions at the end, so if you could just let me know that you've got questions, and then we'll pull them out from the list of the Q and A, okay, so what we'll do is we'll kick off and we'll start looking at AI. So this is an interesting question. What we really wanted to do was to find out how close we are to replacing marketers with AI. I think there's a lot of discussion, and certainly, we see different opinions.
So some people will say AI can replace a large percentage of marketers activities. Other people today are much more skeptical, and to be honest, what we've seen at Napier is there are areas where AI work and areas that AI doesn't work, and in particular when it comes to generating technical content, AI struggles quite a lot, particularly content around new products where there's no existing training data. So obviously, AI is effectively coming in, as you know, almost if you think of it as a person, like someone who doesn't know anything about a product, and then we're asking it to write about a product without really giving it training data. So we're going to talk a little bit about how we can address that and maybe what we can do. But I think the most important thing about this webinar is really that we're going to actually benchmark a number of different AI tools so you can see you know, what the level of differences between those tools are and also which tools are working the best for us.
It's a somewhat arbitrary test, but hopefully it'll prove useful. So before we start, let's have some fun. And the first thing we want to say is we're not actually going to go out and sack all the Napier people that are listening to the webinar at the moment, hopefully we're going to keep you all there. And AI is not brilliant. It can do some amazing things, and it can really struggle. So here's a good example for the last webinar, which was an API digital playbook. I wanted to create a kind of playbook image for American football. So this is a classic image I've taken from an image library, and we thought we'd just ask chat GPT to create it. So I said, you know, could you draw a picture of a play from an NFL playbook? And it came up with this, which doesn't really look like that, Oz and x's play at all, you know. And also it has some issues, you know, one of them being 20 players on a team, which, if you can get 20 players out there on the field for American football, probably is a great way to play. But I'm sure there'll be lots of penalty flags being thrown for that. So anyway, so we don't want the images of the players. So let's ask chat GPT to remove the players. Make this picture much simpler with that image of the players. Fairly simple prompt, yeah, that didn't work.
So then we thought, well, let's try and explain it. So we had a prompt, draw a football play in the style of this image and provide an image that was a good example image, and it still didn't work. So then we said, well, just use the OS and x's style. That's got to work. It's got to understand that it still doesn't work. And I think, you know, here we're up to, like, 22 players on the team, or something. So you know, more and more players, less and less realistic. So eventually we start getting frustrated, and we start telling chat GPT what we think your diagrams are nothing like we're asking for. Suddenly, there's a moment of illumination, and chat GPT responds and says, I understand you want something more in line for the OS and xs. Clean, minimal, yes. This is it. This is fantastic. Exactly what we want, and then it created exactly the same thing again. So whilst AI is amazing, and a lot of those diagrams are quite fun and quite impressive to be created by AI, to be quite honest, and sometimes it doesn't get what you want. And in the end, for the last webinar, we gave up and we just took a stock. Image as being the best approach. So anyway, there are there are issues, but I think there's also some things that AI can do quite well, and one of them is generating content around topics that AI already understands, or topics that you give information about.
So we're going to have a look, particularly around written content. For this this exercise, we're going to have a quick look at what llms are, how they work. We'll talk a little bit about the difference between llms, and we're going to do some tests so comparing different llms, and ultimately, we're going to summarize with how to get the best out of AI and llms. Now, in this case, llms, if you don't know, are large language models. So what are large language models? Well, they're basically AI models that are trained on lots and lots of data, actually, vast amounts of data. I mean really huge amounts of data. So literally, the internet, all the public domain books in the world, you know, social media sites, Wikipedia, all of this is fed into the into the neural network, so a mass amount of data, almost all the written data that's available. But what happens is, you generate a model that understands and can generate natural language as well as others types of data.
So how do they work? I mean, it's pretty complex, but let's try and get a bit of an understanding of how they work. Well, the first thing to say is, there is an amazing tutorial on how generative AI works on the Financial Times website. It's not behind the paywall. So if you want to know how AI and particularly large language models, work, I recommend going to this web address here. We're going to pick out a couple of key concepts. We're going to talk about tokens, we'll talk about mapping and vectors, and we're going to talk about prediction of the next word. And I promise this is a typo from me and not a typo from Ai. It's not the next work, it's the next word. So tokens are really important. So the first thing to say about large language models is they actually don't understand words. They understand tokens, and a token is quite often a word. So as an example here, we've we've typed in was Mike Maynard, an international speed skater, into the tokenizer that chat GPT uses, and it shows you how it breaks it up. And it's very interesting, because has Mike and international and speed are all tokens in themselves.
So they're all considered single tokens, but may and nod are split into two separate tokens, and SK and ATA are split into two as well, which is interesting. So I have no idea why it splits like that. That's how the algorithm works and but you can see some words are tokens of themselves, and some words are split into multiple tokens. And this token tokenization allows processing. So you know, you can much more easily process compound words because you split them into tokens. So you build these maps of words by using or maps of tokens by using these words and working out what's related to something else. So we put the tokens into the system, and it tries to map the words. It tries to say where words are related. So this is, you know, an example of the sort of thing might happen. We've put in the section on the top right, ride, cycle, fly and drive. They're all fairly close together.
Obviously, ride and cycle are much closer than drive is to ride or fly is to ride and cycle. You know, equally, car taxi, bus and train would all be together, because they're all kind of ways of creating, effectively the same sort of thing. So car bus, taxi and train are all forms of transportation. So you get these groups. So this is how, if you like the large language, Your Honor, begins to understand what things mean, because it understands how one word relates to another. So now we've built a model. Very quickly we understand how it works. Now the real thing is to predict what's most likely to happen. And so you know, as an example, you know, if you're predicting words, ride and cycle could be options in the same situation, but also similar words would follow ride and cycle in a sentence.
So as an example, we could enter into chat. GPT Mike Maynard is a speed skater who and the question is, what would be a likely word to follow? Now don't forget chat. GPT is not as such, looking up facts. It's trying to work with probabilities. So if you start saying Mike Maynard is a speed skater who quite often you know Mike Maynard might have represented. Represented a team. And so, in fact, it might come up with represented then Canada is quite likely as somewhere to represent in speed skating. And then you might have actually represented Canada if you skate for Canada at several World Cups. So anyone who knows me knows that I'm a speed skater, but I am definitely not an international speed skater. And so these words all feel quite likely, but factually they're wrong. And this is the issue that we see with large language models with AI generated content, is you get what people call hallucinations. And genuinely, this is a hallucination that previous versions of chat GPT actually had, and because these algorithms don't just produce what they think is the most likely web but it was a little bit of randomness as well, around 50% of the time with older versions of chat GPT, and it used to claim very confidently that I was an International speed skater who represented Canada, sadly, now with chat GPT four and four, oh, I just get back Mike Maynard, who never heard of him, so my opportunity to fame has gone. But you can see how we get these hallucinations, but you can also see how words are predicted, and so this prediction is how content is generated. If we look at, you know, the differences between large language models, there are some things that are really key at differentiating so the number of parameters, which basically the size of the model. And we're talking about, you know, many millions of different vectors that are used within it to create the model. So these are different floating point numbers. So the parameter size is very important. The context window size is basically the number of tokens that a large language model can take in at one go. So that represents how much data you can give it to process. The bigger the context window size, the more complex the prompt you can generate, and also, generally, the longer the amount of content you can produce that's effective. The training data is very important. The producers it, you know, and in particular, we're starting to see some large language models being trained on synthetic data.
So as I said, we basically used all the real data in the world to train these models. So one of the approaches is that AI is being used to generate training data to train AIS, which is very bizarre and has huge potential problems. The geeky people will immediately be saying, there's a potential over fitting problem here, it's very difficult to train AI on AI generated content and get good results. And also I mentioned parameters. So effectively, a model is a very large number of floating point numbers, and so this requires a huge amount of storage. And actually, what people do is they'll take the model they generate and they'll compress it, or they'll do what's called post training quantization. And for those who are a bit mathematical, literally, what it's doing is taking a very precise floating point number and it's rounding it and it's rounding it to a certain number of decimal places, so it's getting an approximation. And this actually works. So it actually keeps most of the data, but it compresses the size, so you're not keeping, you know, exactly the same level of information in the AI model, but it still works effectively, and it means you can run it on a smaller system. And then, of course, one of the other big differences between large language models is whether they run in the cloud, something like a chat GPT, or whether they run locally. And the important thing to remember, if it's running in the cloud and you're sending data to the cloud, is that potentially, the AI can train on that data. And there are various opt outs with different systems, but there is a risk, once you start providing data to the cloud, that your confidential information will then be used by the AI and become part of the AI's knowledge, and that, obviously, is potentially dangerous in terms of protecting trade secrets. So a lot of people like to use local AIS, and a lot of companies now are mandating the use of local AI. So that's a really quick run through about how large language models work. I appreciate it's a very, very simplistic I'll once again refer you back to the Financial Times and their very interesting, interactive presentation. Let's go on to the main bit of this webinar, which is really to talk about how we tested AI and compared some so we're going to look at the different ais that we used.
So we used five different models. We used chat, GPT, the latest version, app, four. Oh. We use the latest version of Claude, which is anthropics AI, and the latest version of Gemini, and all of these were run within the last week or so, so all very much up to date. They're all cloud based AIS, so they're all ais that potentially have some degree of security risk. We also ran a couple of local models. So these are models literally run on my laptop. If anyone's interested in learning about local AI models and being able to run your own model, please do ask me. We used a tool called GPT for all, which is great, and we use basically two AI models, Lama, which is a Facebook model, and five, three, which is a Microsoft model and a very small model. So if we look at this, the cloud based models are much, much bigger than the local models. And the reality is, is that the world of agency is not hugely profitable. So it's run on a very old laptop with pretty moderate specifications. It's about a five or six year old core. I seven model. It did have 16 gigabytes of RAM. One of the challenges is these models, as I mentioned, are quite large. If you try and run them, for example, on you know, a Mac Mini with eight gig, you will run into trouble. So running on a laptop with decent specification. The memory is quite important. And as I say, the most important thing is to make sure that you understand you're running smaller models locally just because of the limited processing power. If we look at the speed, I mean, llama RAM is considerably slower than the cloud based models in terms of interaction time. And obviously these cloud models, they're being run on very high performance server farms. Lama ran on my laptop. It ran much slower. Phi three actually was fairly similar in terms of speed, but as we'll see, is not as good in terms of what it produced. One last thing to mention is that we did do some processing of data sheets, and one of the big issues was running locally, is incorporating documents into your models. And actually we uploaded a very large data sheet, around 300,000 words, and it took about two and a half hours to process on the laptop. So some things do take quite a while to process locally.
So let's move on, and let's find out which of these models is going to be replacing us tomorrow. So our first test was fairly simple to write an 800 word blog post about how variable speed motor drives will increase energy efficiency in the future. One thing worth mentioning is, obviously, this is a presentation about AI. The images are all AI generated, apart from when we get to one of our clients, images, and this was a low voltage variable speed drive, according to chat GPT in terms of image generation, those of you who know anything about variable speed drives and motor drives will know that maybe there's something around this, but there's a lot wrong with this image, from size to number of breakers to All sorts of things. So this is not a great image. It shows again that once you want to do something specific and technical, AI sometimes isn't the greatest thing.
So anyway, we want an 800 word blog post. That's the first thing we wanted to do. Should be fairly simple, variable speed drives as a pretty generalized product. All of these models will be trained on content about variable speed drives. So it should be okay. Well, the first thing we came with, up with is an obvious love for bullet points, Claude, which is quite often recommended as the best AI for writing content, pretty much just writing bullet points. There's almost no pros. It really wasn't like a blog post. Interestingly, Gemini, at the other end, actually wrote directly in prose from the first one. It was the only one to not fill the blog post with bullet points. So Gemini came out best on that in terms of the style, more of a blog style, but certainly some issues with that first pass, none of the models really discussed the future. All of the models were pretty high level and pretty non technical. And actually, for something, you imagine, computers were good at generating a right the correct word count. Only fine Claude were within 10% of that 800 word word count, and Gemini was like your lazy writer on a Friday afternoon looking to get home. Then he gave us 477 words for us for an 800 word blog. So a little bit disappointing there. Fay also had a thing where it seemed to like inserting word count. Accounts that were random and completely wrong for sections. So there were some bad artifacts going on here. So what we did was we actually went through another two revisions.
So the first revision we asked to remove bullet points and make the article more prose. The second was to then take the content and to target variable speed drive experts, and we have mixed results. Fi, basically just produced an outline, not a blog post. At the end of this, we were still way off the target word count. Gemini was still the laziest. AI, producing only 40% Oh, sorry, producing 60% of the words, 40% below the target count. And chat GPT was super enthusiastic. Actually produced a third more. So not necessarily good for what we want, because you want to know 100 words. But you know, chat GPT was again, way out, but the other way. And the focus was, was very bizarre. It was kind of all over the place. So 20% of chat GPT blog post was around harmonics, which is not a particularly major factor going forward. And also the articles can contradict themselves. So depending on which section of the article that Claude wrote, you'd either be reading that drives that don't need sensors are absolutely the most important thing, or you could read that the development of sensors for drives that need sensors was the most important thing. So again, this, this is something that quite often we see with AI, is that the overall narrative is kind of, you know, not very well structured. And I think this is a good example where it talks about senseless drives and also pregnant sensors. Both are great, but Claude was unable to create a narrative that explained, you know, why some would would go for sensors less, and some would use censors, and it kind of just put two opposing opinions in the same article. So not exactly the greatest blog post, I would say. However, the content wasn't terrible.
So if we look at the chat GPT one, which I personally found the best and was generally seen to be the best quality article, it produced a pretty coherent, pretty good article in terms of talking about some of the trends going on. And, you know, really gave you a bit of a background. Claude also did a pretty good job, as I say, overall, the structure wasn't great, you know, and it was really almost as though you had random paragraphs just banged together. But the actual content of those paragraphs was pretty good, and it identified, again, a lot of the most important things. So we had some reasonable results. I mean, whether anyone would want to put the blog post either of these, you know, two better blog posts out on their website without having a, you know, a sub edit by someone who's human, to improve some of these issues is a question. And certainly we're seeing with SEO, and particularly where people are looking to rank on SEO queries where AI gets involved, it's all about ranking at the top, and frankly, the quality of the blog post, it's okay for someone to read, but it's not going to be seen as the most authoritative blog posts. And so, you know, there are certainly issues in taking blogs directly and not editing them. So one thing you can do is something called ragging. So ragging basically, rather than training an AI on something that lets the AI look things up, so we can provide content for an AI, and then that AI will actually use it as a reference. So what we did was we took a family of three products, the fabulous NRF 50 4l series, which are new products from our clients, Nordic, and we provided the full data sheet. As I mentioned, it's a big data sheet, around 300,000 words, and we asked the AIS to write a press release about the date sheet. Now, press releases are fairly standard in structure, but unfortunately, it didn't produce a press release that could be used again. Jake chat, GPT and Claude went bullet crazy, and this time, Gemini also just absolutely flooded the press release with bullets as well. Now it may be because the data sheet has a lot of bullets in it kind of copied that style, I don't know, but certainly it wasn't the sort of thing you would say looked really like a press release. That's basically three key messages that need to be pulled out. And if you look at the human written press release that's been done for this product, it pulls those out really clearly, performance, efficiency or low power and security.
Only one of the AIs really did a good job of identifying which was chatGPT, Lama and phi three. These are the smaller, locally run ones. They missed the security message completely. Claude almost missed security it was buried towards the end. It just about squeezed it in, but not very well. And then Gemini completely missed the performance message, which is interesting, they're missing different things, even though they're processing the same content. Bizarrely, Gemini also talked about the structure of the data sheet and gave kind of a summary of the table of contents of the data sheet, which seemed a bit weird. And then we had some hallucinations. So chat GPT and llama invented availability of the products, and literally wrote, you know, these products available, or these products are sampling now, with absolutely no reference to whether they were or not. So completely made it up. And then Lama made up a spokesperson as well, which I thought was awesome. So Sven Norden. Sven Norden Toft, apparently, is their spokesperson, so completely made up. Person doesn't exist within Nordic but Lama decided to create this person to give quotes, so hugely risky in terms of creating false information. So what we decided to do was do another test, and we thought we'd do something a bit simpler, so we'd write a LinkedIn post about the launch of these products. So taking the same products again, the NRF 50 4l and writing a LinkedIn post. Interestingly, all the LLN choose quite long posts. I mean, Gemini was the shortest, at nearly 1000 characters. That's quite long for a LinkedIn post. So that's kind of an interesting thing. I would have expected some of the produce much more shorter, succinct posts.
Chat GPT and Claude had rather dubious attention electronics engineers type openings. I can't remember that those words were literally from chat GPT or Claude, but one of them literally started out with a post which felt a bit cringy. I'm not sure I'd be posting that on my LinkedIn. One positive thing, though, was clap chat GPT and Claude included emojis, so that did look quite cool. Llama started well and really crashed and burned at the end. Just basically wrote an ad at the end. Fi obviously continued its focus on completely the wrong features and interesting. Llama didn't have any hashtags. The others did, so it was okay if you wanted a longer blog post. It's not too bad. But you know, and this is the chat GPT blog post on the left, they weren't great again, not something you'd necessarily want to use directly without some editing, but certainly you might want to pull some of this content directly into a post. So lastly, we thought we'd go and we do Google search ads, because that's got to be an easy thing to do, right? So it's shorter, it's easier, hopefully we can get some good results.
So first thing that happened was all the llms ignored the maximum character count for Google ads. Now this is interesting because Gemini actually told us what the maximum character count was and then promptly ignored it on the content it generates it. So it's kind of interesting. None of them did well, it is correct that you can actually go in and then ask to recreate those headlines and descriptions under the character count if you re prompt it normally. That works with these AIs. But for first pass, it wasn't great. Claude was probably the best. The headlines were okay, but some of the descriptions were too long, as I said. That also highlighted the maximum characters. We also got some bizarre extras as well. So Gemini actually gave us a short tutorial on how to optimize Google ads. Claude talked about Call to Action phrases, which I would have hoped was actually in the ads they wrote, rather than something separate, Lama started talking about the audience we should target, and also gave some not particularly great keywords, and then fi, and poor old fi, I mean, the smallest, least comprehensive model. They actually gave us an ad for different Nordic products as well. And I'm not entirely sure where that came from, but their power management ICS got a free ad there. And also, interestingly, Gemma and fight only gave three options for each of the headlines and the descriptions, which is relatively small for for Google ads.
So we've done that. I mean, one question that I, you know, I know people who ask is, yeah, okay, so you're criticizing this. But can you jet, you know, can you genuinely tell it's AI? Well, the answer is, there's lots of tools to tell whether content is AI. And interestingly, we looked at the LinkedIn post, we used a tool called. Copy leaks, which uses Open Source AI generator and Claude, Gemini, Lama and faiz, LinkedIn post with detectors being 100% AI, only 66% so two thirds of chat GPT post was detectors AI, but again, the vast majority of it was so quite clearly, if people are penalizing AI, or if you're submitting to a publication that's not happy to take AI generated content, do be warned, because people can detect this, and it is scarily good, much better than humans at detecting AI. And the other risk, of course, is plagiarism. Interestingly, we had very little plagiarism identified, and in fact, the only plagiarism we had was the first draft of the chat GPT blog post, and 11% of that was identified as plagiarized. So one good thing that does seem to be happening is these tools do seem to be moving away from dumping phrases and sentences that are directly copied, and they do tend to be generating much more things in their own words. So that is certainly a positive.
So anyway, I know I've covered a lot, I've talked about a lot of data. I think you know, the easiest way to summarize this is to basically score the different AIS and give them a rating. So what we did was we looked at rating. So basically we rated based on privacy, ease of use, and then on the first test the blog post, which was quite a long exercise, we actually measured based on quality and whether it met the brief and then the three subsequent tests, we just gave an overall score. And it's quite interesting. We looked at this and almost went back and changed the numbers so they weren't also similar. But what we got in this particular test I mentioned a couple of times, chat GPT did quite well in generating content that's not that common. Generally speaking, most people testing for written content, flying Claude generates great results. In our case, it didn't. So it may be different for you, but we found chatgpt slightly better than the others. Fi being slightly worse, which is not surprising. It's the smallest model by far. So I wouldn't be I wasn't surprised that that works less well, and then really nothing to choose between the others.
As I said, almost went back and edited this to make it look less like a dead heat. But the reality was, Gemini Claude and Lama all have pros and cons. Do well some places less well in others. So you know, really the answer is, is that there's not one that's winning in that group. So overall, I mean, what do we think? Well, I mean, it is amazing when you see content being written. It is less amazing when you try and optimize it, or you see content from multiple llms being produced. That all sounds pretty much the same. It begins to feel a bit bland when you see multiple pieces of content on the same topic, from from different llms, or from the same LLM so it can become bland. It becomes samey, but it's still impressive, and it's still good for ideas. I mean, that certainly is the case in terms of picking up a structure, identifying main points without doubt. You know, the AI tools today are incredibly powerful and useful, but I think if we're really trying to get the best out of AI and lions, you know, we've got to be honest, they're incredibly useful, but probably not today for producing the final copy of technical content. And I think that's important. You know, an early draft, a structure and outline some ideas. They are awesome, but trying to produce a final copy, and the more technical you try and get, the less good they are. Because it's more specific, they aren't particularly creative, as I say, you know, everything began to feel the same. You began to see similarities. When you looked at what happened. Hallucinations absolutely do happen, and we were quite surprised at how many, how much, you know, problem we had with hallucinations. They're terrible at writing to word counts, which is surprising. You'd think computers would be good at that, but they are terrible at that.
There are other ways to get around that. We'll mention that in a minute. But I think the most important thing to say is they're incredibly fast. The speed they can produce drafts is, you know, many times quicker than a human. And so their use as kind of a brainstorming tool, or as an ideation tool, or as a, you know, basically just a tool to get over writer's block, I think is going to be essential for a lot of people. And then the last thing I'd say is, you know, we've tested general purpose, large language models here. We haven't tested specialized tools. So there are specialized tools, for example, for generating Google. Lads and those tools will guarantee to hit the maximum word count. So specialized tools can give better results. Also, there are tools such as market mate, which are designed to help you create much more complex prompts that should, in theory, produce much better quality output. I mean, as we saw, Ragging is another way to do that, where you provide files that are used as reference. And that didn't always work very well, but generally speaking, these specialized tools will produce better results. So hopefully that's helped. Hopefully it's giving you some insight into the effectiveness of AI tools.
If you're interested in other webinars, the next webinar we're running is all about B to B research, so completely different topic. And if you're planning for next year's marketing campaigns, this could be a great webinar, because we'll be talking about how to get customer research that really helps you understand what is the thing that should be guiding your marketing for the next year, so it'll help you with your annual planning. So I'll leave that up there for a minute. It'd be great if you're able to attend. Just scan the QR code or put in the short code at the bottom, and hopefully I can talk to you at the next webinar. So thank you very much for listening. I know this has gone a little over our 20 minutes target that we normally 2025 minute target. I'm really interested to know if anyone has any comments or questions. I'll just leave it open for a couple of seconds to see if anybody's got anything,
Okay, so the first question I've got is around cost. So the question is, were any of the tools we used free? And the answer is yes. Actually, everything we used was free of charge apart from chat GPT. And the only reason chat GPT is paid is because I just have a paid account already, so I use existing paid account, but all the other tools were the free of charge versions. So it's something you can definitely use yourself. It's not expensive at all. Okay, let me just see if there's any other questions coming through.
We've got one question here. This is a good question. So are there any tools that could potentially outperform those tested today? I think it's a great question. If you talk to anybody in AI, the answer is, is there are amazing tools that are so good that they will terrify you, that are just around the corner, but this has been the case for, you know, really a couple of years, I think the answer is, is that what happens, generally speaking, is with any AI tool, and for simpler tasks, this has been mapped and documented very clearly by academics, the improvement in performance tends to be pretty fast. So a tools improve very, very quickly, and then they hit a plateau, and they round off and almost stay flat. They don't improve, and they stay flat just below what academics call the average person. Now, the average person writing content around, for example, variable speed motor drives is not the average person. They're clearly someone who's specialized. They've got knowledge. They're a good writer. So, you know, just below average is still going to be scarily good. But I think what we're seeing, and most will probably agree, is that we've seen this rapid ramp up to, you know, what feels like almost human qualities, but now we're not seeing a particularly big increase. So unless there's something that we can do to either change the way that AI works in terms of the models, or somehow find masses of new training data that doesn't exist, or to find training data that's of much better quality, I think we're going to stick it at a bit of a plateau. So my gut feel is, what's going to happen is that actually it's going to be much less around the improvement of the AI engines themselves, and it's going to be much more about how AI is embedded into specific tools. So I mentioned earlier, for example, Google ads, you know, a standard, general purpose, large language model like chat GPT isn't great at writing Google ads, but if you use that engine and do some very specific coding around it and generate some very specific prompts and embed that into a Google Ads tool, then it can become incredibly powerful. And to me, that's where we're going to see some of the biggest improvements. Is AI that's embedded and optimized to do particular tasks, and I think that's going to be the most exciting thing for marketing over the next year.
Well, thank you very much everyone. I really appreciate your time on the webinar. If anyone is interested in more information about what we did or seeing some of the content we produced, please contact me. My email address, Mike at Napier, B to b.com. Is there on the screen, and hopefully we'll see you all for our next webinar in December. Thank you very much. Bye.
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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: 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: 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.
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: 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.




