A Napier Podcast Interview with Rob May - BrandGuard
Staying within brand guidelines can be a challenge, and as the use of AI in marketing rises, this will become increasingly difficult. Rob May, founder of BrandGuard, explains how solving user challenges transformed his platform from what was initially an advertising platform into an entirely different product that uses AI to identify branding issues.
He shares his career journey, how the rise in generative AI drew him back into the start-up space, how different AI models work, and the impact he believes AI will have over the next five years.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About BrandGuard
BrandGuard is an AI-powered brand governance platform that helps ensure brand consistency in customer facing assets, such as advertisements, generated by both humans and machines.
About Rob
Rob May is the founder and CEO of BrandGuard and is a leading figure in the field of generative AI and brand safety. With his extensive background in entrepreneurship and angel investing, Rob brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to the table.
Time Stamps
[00:43.3] – Rob discusses His career journey and why he founded BrandGuard.
[01:47.5] – Rob goes into detail about BrandGuard, its beginnings and what it does.
[12:33.0] – Rob explains some off the issues with branding in AI content.
[16:10.0] – Who can use BrandGuard? Rob discusses what businesses can benefit.
[18:45.6] – Rob shares his thoughts on how AI is going to change marketing.
[22:59.8] – Rob’s contact details.
Follow Rob:
Rob May on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robmay/
BrandGuard website: https://www.brandguard.ai/
BrandGuard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/brandguard-ai/
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 Rob May - BrandGuard
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Rob May
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've got Rob May, who's the founder and CEO of BrandGuard joining me. Welcome to the podcast. Rob.
Rob: Thanks for having me.
Mike:
It's great to have you on. So, you know, you obviously founded BrandGuard. But let's start off by taking a little step back and finding out how you got to the point of, you know, wanting to found the company. So, can you tell me a little bit about your career journey?
Rob: Yeah, so I am a electrical engineer and a chip designer by training. So that's where I got my start. And I always knew I wanted to get into startups. So I, after a couple years of doing chip design, I joined a startup, then joined another startup, then started my first company back in 2009. And so that in 2014, the first one did really well, otherwise, I don't know that I'd still be doing it. So then I started a second company, the second company did not go well. Then I went into VC for a couple of years. And I saw this generative AI wave happening and decided I had to come back out of VC and do a little more operating. So started my third company, which actually spawned the technology that became BrandGuard. It wasn't the focus initially of the third company, but it led to the creation of Vanguard.
Mike: That's great. And obviously, all the great people started electronics engineers, I don't know if you know, I started my career as an electronics engineer as well during board level design.
Rob: Exactly. That's awesome.
Mike: Can you tell me a little bit about how you decided to apply AI? And what brand God does?
Rob: Yeah, well, we started with the idea that you could use generative AI to create hyper, personalised marketing and scale. So think about the idea that, you know, you're going to sell a pencil, you know, if you were going to sell them a nice mechanical pencil, you have a couple of personas, you're going to write ads for those personas. But what if you could speak to everybody differently, right, a 19 year old college student who's really into mechanical pencils in the Pacific Northwest, may want a very different image and freezing in their ads than a 75 year old, you know, writer who loves to use mechanical pencils for nostalgic reasons, who lives in, you know, southern Florida or whatever. And so, imagine if you could really use your vi as Chet GPT, here's 1000 different personas to buy my pencil write me a different ad for everyone. So that's kind of what we created. And it worked really well. But there were two problems. One problem was that it became obvious that the platforms were gonna do this in cells. So Google and Facebook, were going to build in this functionality. And the second problem was that we would show this to CMOS, and they would say, see, I'm not a brand person, I'm an enterprise software person.
So I didn't realise that, like, if you're a brand person, you obsess over minutiae about how things look and how things are phrased. And so you might say, if you sell bottled water, you might say, we'll say purified, but never filtered. Right? Or you may say, you know, you have a certain imagery of the model that you're using in an ad. And you may say, like, no, no, she can, she can have a wrist tattoo, but not an arm tattoo she could like, are people that were catering to look like this and not like this, and like, these minor things matter, you know, she, she would sit with her legs this way at the table, like all these, all these little things. And so what would happen is we would show our tool to these markers. And they would say, well, that's great, you're gonna create 5000 Hyper targeted ads for me, that's awesome. I have to review them all you've created work for me. So we took a step back, and we were like, well, could we teach machines to understand brands and branding? And it turns out, you can, it's a very hard problem, what we what we did was, we built a series of tools you can think about, it's not like a machine learning model. It's dozens of machine learning models. And we ingest brand guidelines, previous versions of, of content that a brand has produced. And then we built what we call a brand governance platform that takes these things, breaks them down into models, and in the models check, is the stuff you produced on brand is it meet the brand guidelines, you know, it started as a feature of this ad product, like we're going to create ads and the ads are on brand. And it just became the whole platform. We don't do any ad generation anymore. We just whether humans create the ads or machines create the ads, we just run them through our series of models. We provide scores and feedback and analysis and all that kind of stuff. So it's it's pretty cool technology.
Mike: So you're doing that checking of 5000 different ads that the person who's responsible for brand didn't want to do. Yeah,
Rob: or even we, you know, even even people that just are don't have an AI process and are just doing hundreds of ads per month. We frequently hear but so let's say you're using an agency and the agency designers are working on lots of different projects. They don't have your whole Till 10, or 40, or 80 Page brand guidelines memorised in their head all the time that they're working on, you know, they make mistakes. And we constantly hear that about a third to half the time people are looking at content saying like, no, this doesn't meet the brand guidelines, go back and do it again. And what they want is they want a tool that takes that first pass. So now the humans would say, don't send it to me for approval until it's past BrandGuard.
Mike: Okay, so you're actually doing that first pass before it appears with humans? I mean, one of the things that I think is interesting from this is, do you think this world where everybody gets a personalised email is actually going to happen? Or do you think enterprises they actually want to preserve their brand? They want some consistency on brand. And they actually don't want these hyper personalised emails being sent out?
Rob: Well, I think they're, I think they're trying to do both, right. So we'll, we'll see if it works. But the way you can think of it as like, they might use similar phrasing, like, obviously, you know, Nikes tagline is just do it. And they're not going to change that tagline for me and you or anybody else. But a lot of their imagery is like people running in the Pacific Northwest, where there's Nike, or in Colorado, where a lot of athletes train, but might they benefit from showing people running in, you know, the beach, or, you know, I'm in New York and downtown Manhattan, Central Park, you can see that having an impact without changing a lot of what Nikes trying to do. So So I think there's gonna be a lot of experimentation to get there, I think it will move the needle. But there's going to be a counterweight, right, which is, humans get tired of these things. I mean, every time something becomes a best practice, like, oh, man, these notifications, and these NPS scores, kill me. Because the more products you use, the more people have you that just want you to take a one minute survey. And it's like, I can't take 91 minute surveys in a day just because I interacted with that many products. So we got to find better ways to give and get feedback and interact with customers in ways that respect what they're doing. So it'd be interesting to see how these multiple forces evolve in this scenario.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think it was interesting. I've now got visions of everyone in the UK getting pictures of people running in the pouring rain from Nike. Yeah. I hopefully won't get to that. Anyway, going back to BrandGuard. So something you mentioned earlier that I found quite interesting was that you fed the AI system, you trained it on the brand guidelines, but also on past content. So presumably, one of the things you found is that there are explicit brand guidelines, things that, you know, are written down are very clear. But there's also kind of tacit brand guidelines that are kind of held within the heads of people. Is that what you're trying to address and understand?
Rob: Yeah, so there's a lot of lot to unpack in that question. We see people with 150 page, well defined style guides, and we see people who barely have anything written down except a handful of brand guidelines. One of the things we hear a lot of times from agencies is, can you help us help the clients better define their brand, because they know what they want, they haven't been explicit about it. We're building a module into BrandGuard called Brand Builder that allows you to define and capture those rules. But we already do a creative job of capturing three simple rules, like the spacing around the logo has to be displayed, a logo can't be turned this way, right. And there's more complicated rules, I think we've seen some fun ones, like no images can show a child using technology without an adult present. That's a hard brand guideline to teach a machine. And so we have an entire synthetic data pipeline that will create pro and con images that put them into a model so that the model can learn that rule. But yeah, you know, it's one of the interesting things about this space, compared to a lot of other use cases of AI is there a lot of ways where AI is going to get better than humans. But in this case, humans sort of define the brand. And maybe we'll get to the point where AI can make suggestions about how you might want to move your brand, which directions which attributes or values, you might want to focus on more than others. But by and large, humans will define brands, brand values, training and datasets for the brand related models. And so I think it's a really good place to be if you're working in AI for that reason, because like you said, so much of it is in people's heads and, you know, you need workflows to sort of get that out and capture as much of it as possible. We also do it through the regular feedback, right? You could we could score something high or low and you could dispute it you can say no, no, this should have been scored a different way and here's why.
Mike: So it's interesting to continually retraining that model. I'm interested when you try and build that that style guide in the AI if you like in the AIS head I don't know if that's the right way to express it. Does it help to have things that are off brand and on brand or do you just feed it the past content that's been approved?
Rob: It helps to have things that are off brand as well. So a lot of times we'll pull some public competitor data, you know, from Nike, we would pull Adidas, just to contrast because that's, you know, I don't know how deep you go in the AI space, but these things are basically mapped to a mathematical space that focuses on similarity. And so if you can say, these things shall be similar to each other in this mathematical As a nice should not you can think of us as drawing a brand boundary in that mathematical space around what's on brand? And what's not.
Mike: And I mean, you've mentioned a few things. But is there any limit to the kind of content that the system can, you know, assess for compliance with brand guidelines? Can it go through to tweets and, and things like that, as well as articles and images?
Rob: I would say it's built first and foremost for marketing materials, primarily advertisements, but we can do a lot of stuff, you know, tweets, tweets are a little bit harder, because they're so short. And the less information that you have, the less accurate you're going to be about if something's on brand or not. Twitter, social media platforms are also an area where you try to be a little maybe more kitschy than you would be in other, you know, types of marketing materials, you're trying to be funny, you're trying to tie to memes, we can pick up on some of that, you know, is this a meme that your brand should want to tie to or not? We do a lot with some of the Instagram influencer use cases, we've been asked to do some some things we're not we're not working on this actively. But we've looked at doing PowerPoint presentations. If you're a consulting firm or real estate firm, you're doing a lot of presentations to people about things, right, you want to make sure those are all on brand for your firm. And you know how people get in and walk around with PowerPoint and change everything. So even if you have templates, it's not right, we've been asked to do product packaging and, and other use cases like that. There's a big use case around licencing as well. So if your sports team and you're, I'm licencing you my logo so that you can use it, I probably have to approve the product shot and the marketing materials around it. And that's very time consuming if you're doing a lot of licencing. So we've we have some customers that have that use case as well.
Mike: Presumably, what you're doing is you're coming back with a score rather than necessarily, yes, it's on brand. No, it's off. I mean, there's always Shades of Grey. I mean, how do you do that? Do you literally provide a score? We do
Rob: we provide a score and some feedback on specific models. So you can decide what to do with that we give you an overall score. But sometimes it could be like, everything's great. But you know, maybe you have a rule that the logo always has to be in the upper left hand side of the page, and it's in the bottom right. And so maybe it scores at 9%, everything's good, but the logo totally fails, we highlight that information for you. And then you can drill down and see where the asset fail.
Mike: That's interesting. I mean, I'm intrigued, you know, people are starting now to use generative AI to create some content marketing content. Do you see humans as being better at staying within the brand guidelines? Or would AI actually be more likely to stay within those guardrails?
Rob: Probably humans. And the reason is that the way that most of these generative models work, and this may change, right, people may come up with a better way that these generative models work. But today, the way they work is you take this world of information and you compress it down into a space. So you can think about a you can think about a song that's compressed, and it's lost some of its fidelity. So think about these ideas, or these images with these words that have done that. And now when you ask it to generate something, it finds an area in that mathematical space that we talked about, and it expands it by introducing some randomness. And so by that randomness, you can never tell what's going to come out. It's a big problem. One of the one of the early examples that we used to do is we would prompt chat GPT with the Tesla style guide and test the rule number one is do not use the word luxury Tesla's not a luxury brand. It is a high performance brand. And then you would we would ask chat, GBT, right, some ads for me to sell Tesla's to rich people and the first one every time they would come out and be like, blah, blah, blah, don't you love luxury, even when you prompted it with the brand guidelines, because luxury and rich are so tied together statistically, in these models, which is how these models work, it's hard for them to break, you can't make it part of the model generation itself. So you need filters over top of it. And I just we don't think it makes sense for every generative AI company to do their own filtering regarding your brand. Because now as a brand manager, if you have 30 tools in your stack, and you have to go through and be like, Okay, well, you know, I'm using open AI and Jasper and WordPress and HubSpot, and figma and Canva. And I have to manage my brand governance piece at all of them. And they'll have slightly different models. So it's not consistent like this, it's not going to work. It's why we've really tried to integrate it with everything because you need one tool that's like this represents my brand to an AI. So we're very heavy on the integration side. We work with figma and Canva, and a whole bunch of other tools today.
Mike: I'm gonna guess we started that that answer talking about, you know, some of the issues around generative AI and it getting a little bit of peace, you know, partly because of the randomness. I mean, how consistently good can I be at enforcing brand guidelines? You know, we hear a lot about hallucinations in generative AI. Do you have the same problem in brand God? We
Rob: don't because we are not generative models we are what's called discriminative models. So we are choosing between things we are not creating things and the hallucinations come from the randomness sits inserted in the creation process. So that's why we sit on top of all these generative models, we can get really, really good. But we can only get as good as the data that we're given to discriminate. And as you know, like brands, an area where sometimes even people on a company, senior people may argue over some aspects of the brand. And if something's on brand or not, there's somebody you know, we see people that have companies that have like usual, big lovable nerd is a brand voice concept. It's like, well, like what does that mean, that's open to interpretation. So that there will always be a little bit of that, we try to focus on providing easy, quick, automated rejection, for stuff that doesn't meet the brand guidelines, and human in the loop approval for stuff that does or may be on the margins.
Mike: That sounds good. And I thought it was a great explanation of the difference between what you're doing and guarantee of AI, I think it's all too common for people to you know, see my eyes just one thing when it's lots of different things. One of the things I'm intrigued in this, you're actually effectively building custom models for each and every customer, which is obviously time consuming. Does that make brand garden expensive products? Is this like only for the largest enterprises? Or is it something can be used by a broader range of customers?
Rob: Well, that most of the process for training models on a per customer basis is automated. So we've gotten pretty efficient at that. So even though we do build different models per customer, they're based on similar workflows, you input your data, and we can we can sort of get there. So that doesn't really drive the cost as much as how much inference you want to do, which is how many things do you want to test to see if they're on brand. So it's, it's a product that starts at about $20,000 a year for small to mid sized customer, and goes on up to you know, mid six figures, maybe for really big brands that to a lot of stuff have multiple brand hierarchies. I think over the years, this will become best practice for everybody. But right now we primarily see most of our customers are, I'd say, like fortune 5000 brands right there, the brand matters a lot to them, we've had CMOS tell us, they can estimate how much revenue they lose if an ad goes out with the wrong font. So, you know, really big companies with a lot of data on the impact that brand guidelines have on their brand and on and on customer perception. So that is the majority of our market now. But I do think it's coming down market over time. And
Mike: I mean, one of the questions, I think people, you know, interested in the product might wonder is how would they go about evaluating the product. I mean, obviously, you can't just run a, you know, one week test, you've got to build the models, is there a way for someone to experiment without having to commit to a year subscription? We do, we have test
Rob: accounts you can play with. So we use flex brothers a lot, we have a Brooks Brothers demo account where you can read the brand guidelines, you can upload stuff, and that'll give you a general feel for how the tool works. And then what we normally do is we normally move to some sort of paid pilot that might be like 10, grand, maybe a little bit more, depending on how big you are, where we take in some of your data and train up some models, that process normally takes about 48 hours to get that going. And then people can try it out for a couple of months and play around with it. You know, the bigger challenge tends to be internally, how do you build it into your workflows? Your workflows have probably been mostly human based approvals? How do you migrate those over to a tool like this?
Mike: That's amazing, because I mean, 48 hours to get up and running seems very quick. So you know, sounds like it's actually not a difficult tool to evaluate and test and play with them. Certainly, the Brooks demo account sounds fun. Yeah,
Rob: it is, it is pretty easy to get going. And I just mentioned, there's multiple ways to use it. There's a web app, there's a Chrome plugin, there's an API. So we have people that use all those
Mike: awesome. I'm, you know, you're obviously a big believer in AI. And, you know, you found an area of marketing that really benefits from Ai. I mean, how do you think AI in the next five years is going to change marketing,
Rob: I think you're gonna see every marketing stack become more automated and more AI powered. And I think what that's going to do so if you look at a lot of the research around AI, it doesn't improve the top, it brings up the bottom. So here's a very interesting example, think about chat, GPT. Chat GPT does probably not make your world class writers much better. Maybe it'll inspire them here and there with some ideas, but it makes your poor writers average, much, much better, right? So so take the bottom half of writers, it makes them average, take the you know, next quartile makes them a little bit better take your best writers, it doesn't do that much for them. So now, what does that mean? If you translate AI into your automated marketing stack, it means that if you look at your marketing, operational excellence, and your creativity and all kinds of stuff, all the people at the bottom are going to now be up here. And so your, your difference between the best and the worst is going to shrink, mainly because the bottom comes up. Not that not because the top comes down. It's going to be easier to be a competent sort of performance marketer or, you know, brand marketer just from these tools. It'll always be hard to be great because you have to have something special. You have to have a process or an insight or things that other people don't have But I think a lot of what's gonna go away is a lot of your operations are going to be automated, it's gonna do a couple things. Number one, it's gonna make brand strength more important. So focusing on building the brand, really honing those attributes and values and how they connect to the customer. And what they mean in the mind of the customer is gonna be really important, even for smaller companies that maybe thought less about their brand before. And then I think the second thing is, marketers are going to become more and more strategic planners, trainers for the AI models, strategists continually being creative and coming up with new ideas to test and innovate and, and stuff like that, and less of the right me 10 more Google ads for this persona.
Mike: That's fascinating. I mean, one of the things we'd like to ask all our guests is, what advice would they give if someone said, Should I go into marketing someone just leaving college or entering college? I'm intrigued, it sounds like it's potentially gonna be tough, you know, particularly if you're in that, that bottom half of marketing ability to, to really stand out, would you would you say that marketing's a career that's got a lot of opportunity going forward? Or do you think AI is going to make it more and more difficult to stand out?
Rob: I think it's already playing the stack. I think brand marketing and content marketing, PR com stuff like that is gonna matter a lot more. I think your fast turn stuff like social and performance marketing is going to be more and more automated away. So which is interesting, because if you'd asked me, you know, seven years ago, I'd say well, oh, God, you want to be the person who masters Google, and Facebook advertising, right? Like that's drives so many people's leads. Now, I think you'd be the opposite. I think you want to work on being the most creative, the most experimental, the best at using these AI tools to test and experiment and prove or disprove hypotheses about your customers.
Mike: That's, that's such a fascinating way to look at it. And I think a very positive view of some of the opportunities. Another thing we'd like to ask everyone is about marketing advice. And what's the best bit of marketing advice that you've ever been given? Oh,
Rob: that's a good question. I mean, this is a hard thing to pull off. And not every brand can pull it off. But there was a book that was written probably 20 years ago now called Purple Cow by Seth Godin. And he made this great point that like, you know, if you're a farm that for whatever reason, produces this freakish Purple Cow, you don't have to market it, everybody talks about it, because it stands out. Now. There are certain categories that people just don't care about as much. And it's hard to stand out and be remarkable. But if you can make a product that that's, it's that remarkable, it really markets itself, and that, that that matters quite a bit. And so I think when you can find those opportunities, you should really, really lean into them, because they're very special. Great advice,
Mike: I love it. Rob, you've been really generous with your time, you've given us not only a great explanation about managing brands, and how brands can help, but also think given us a really good overview of, you know, some elements of AI. If people are interested to learn more, either about BrandGuard or contact yourself, what's the best way to do that, feel free
Rob: to visit our website BrandGuard.ai. And then you can email me, I'm just rob at brain guard.ai. I can't get to everybody sometimes. But I you know, I do try to set aside a couple hours a month to talk to people that are interested in AI making career transitions, you know, we try to one of our core values as a company is to be helpful. And that includes people in the AI ecosystem and marketing systems. So we, you know, like I say, can't get to everybody, but I did try to set aside some time to answer questions and help us stuff like that for the, you know, even strangers that email me.
Mike: But that's amazing and very generous. Rob, it's been great. And you know, anyone who's struggling, managing content and making sure it meets brand guidelines. I think, you know, going visiting brand garden AI would be a great next step to take. Thank you very much for being on the podcast, Rob.
Rob: Yeah, thanks for having me. This was fun.
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 favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Sara Madison - Outbrain
Sara Madison, Global Head of Product Marketing at Outbrain, an advertising platform, sat down with Mike to talk all things advertising. She discusses the industry's current challenges, why she believes audience attention will become an increasingly important metric and offers her thoughts on whether LinkedIn is a good use of a B2B advertising budget.
She also discusses her passion for product marketing and how her experience in both large enterprises and start-ups has influenced her career.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Outbrain
Outbrain is a leading technology platform that drives business results by engaging people across the open internet. Outbrain predicts moments of engagement to drive measurable outcomes for advertisers and publishers using AI and machine learning across more than 7,000 online properties globally. Founded in 2006, Outbrain is headquartered in New York with offices in Israel and across the United States, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America.
About Sara
Sara, who is the Global Head of Product Marketing Outbrain, is a digital media specialist with experience designing and leading strategic initiatives in startups and large organizations. She has a track record helping organizations solve issues, create value, maximize growth and improve business performance with a highly analytical approach.
Time Stamps
[00:46.1] – Sara discusses her career journey in marketing.
[03:47.7] – Sara talks about Outbrain, what it is and its capabilities.
[06:48.8] – Sara discusses challenges in the advertising industry.
[13:19.2] – Sara shares how Microsoft successfully used Outbrain to support a campaign.
[17:52.4] – Is LinkedIn a good use of B2B advertising budget? Sara shares her opinions.
[26:11.9] – Sara’s contact details.
Quotes
“Approach marketing with an open mind, it's important to be curious and to be open to learning things before committing on a specific path.” Sara Madison, Global Head of Product Marketing at Outbrain.
Follow Sara:
Sara Madison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-madison-21028434/
Outbrain website: https://www.outbrain.com/
Outbrain on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/outbrain/
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 Sara Madison - Outbrain
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sara Madison
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 Sara Madison. Sara is the Global Head of Product Marketing at Outbrain. Welcome to the podcast, Sara.
Sara: Hi, thank you. Thank you for having me here.
Mike: It's great to have you on. And I think we're gonna have an interesting discussion about what Outbrain does, and some of the things people are doing to increase engagement. But before we start, can you just tell us a little bit about you know, your history and how you've got to the point where you're running marketing at Outbrain? Yeah,
Sara: perfect. I've been working in advertising and marketing for almost 15 years now. I started working in Spain, that's where he did my studies. And now I'm working in in the UK. And in those 15 years, I've really done many different roles within the space. So I worked with brands, creating visuals, and creating good looking collateral. I've worked as sales really working with agencies and pitching to clients. And I've also had more technical positions where I've been working closely with engineers, and actually seeing how they were building the products and really needing to understand the underlying technology that my clients were using. And so all of this experience in different companies, you know, small companies, large companies, really brought me into product marketing, that, you know, having a view of sales, marketing, and how product works, really is that key piece of Product Marketing, it's an extremely cross functional area within marketing. And I really love the strategic aspect of it. So really, on a day to day, I'm using all of my past experiences in product marketing. So that's, that's what brought me into Product Marketing. And today, I am heading up the global product marketing team at Outbrain. I've been here for about a year now. And and yeah, I'm really loving it.
Mike: It works with some interesting brands, I mean, both consumer and also B2B, haven't you? Yes,
Sara: the first role that I had was that Coca Cola and the communications teams are really seeing how you build a brand across traditional media and digital media. I've also worked at Yahoo, and seeing how how they did like branded content selling. My most recent role was at Spotify, where I was working in the product marketing team, and I was the first person in the advertising product marketing team based outside of the US. And so there, I was really establishing and landing the product marketing function for the rest of the world. So also working out what international market strategy looks like. So yeah, I mean, I've definitely worked at many different companies, I've also worked for a few startups that aren't as well known. And so I think it was really great to see how, you know, larger companies that have a larger name or a more established name, work, and also working at startups that aren't as well known in the industry.
Mike: It sounds like you've had, like this incredible range of experience. And you've now chosen to come to Outbrain. So maybe a good place to move on to explain what Outbrain has done. And I'm sure you know, people listening probably will have seen Outbrain out there on the web, or if not, you know, if they don't recognise it would have certainly encountered what you do. So can you explain a little bit about what Outbrain does?
Sara: Yeah, of course. So Outbrain is an ad platform. And what we do is we connect to advertisers with over 1.3 billion users across the open web every day. And so the way that the business work is that on the one hand, we partner with 1000s, of publishers, to help them drive audience development, help them monetize their audience. And we also provide them with tools to be able to diversify their own revenue streams. And so this is an extremely hot topic for publishers today. And on the flip side, we work with advertisers and we connect them with audiences, through ads that really coexist with the content that users are consuming on publisher sites. So that's, you know, our ad platform is really connecting the two. And the differentiation or the strength of the Outbrain ad platform is that we're able to understand and predict what audiences are going to be interested in and what content or ads they're most likely to engage with, and then click on ads. And the way that we do this is with our prediction engine. So for, I think it's like 17 years now Outbrain has been, you know, creating its own proprietary Prediction Engine. And it's something that is extremely powerful. And it allows us to connect with, you know, with users with the most relevant ads and content. And the Outbrain ad platform really does do that combination of things. It helps publishers drive revenues, it helps advertisers reach audiences. And at the same time, it allows users or it really brings relevant content to users. And
Mike: you do this with a slightly different approach to sort of, you know, classic banner advertising, you're kind of recommending content on your both organic content and also paid. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing there and why you mix the two? Yeah,
Sara: that's a really key part of our offering, it's it's extremely important for us to balance content or editorial content and ads and finding that that right mix to be able to drive the revenues that we need to drive for publishers and the outcomes that we need to drive for advertisers. But at the same time, we need to make sure that we are engaging the users. And we know that engagement is really driven by content that users are, you know, want to interact with and that they're interested in. So we do really provide that balance between ads and content.
Mike: So it's great that let's look back. I mean, last year wasn't the best year for the advertising industry, a lot of people struggled. But I think also at the same time, you had some high. So do you want to tell me about, you know, what happened last year? And what Outbrain is doing going into 2024? Yeah, definitely.
Sara: 2023 was a tough year for advertising in general, we saw widespread budget cuts. And the cost of living crisis really meant that everyone was really squeezed in the space. So I think that 2023 was one of those years where it just really highlighted the importance of having a strong strategy and really focusing on efficiency. And right now, that's something that Outbrain has really been laser focused on. So, you know, we've seen that in the last year. Roi is, you know, just more important than ever, and advertisers, we want to see real, measurable results. And not just for conversions, but really in every stage of the user journey. And so, while 2023 was a rough year, we also saw it as an opportunity to continue to build on our strengths and start to develop products that are going to continue to address these evolving advertiser needs. And so that's why, you know, in 2023, we launched onyx, which is a new offering that really helps us deliver attention and engagement for brands and agencies. So for enterprise, advertisers. And so with this incorporation of onyx, now, we are able to continue to answer to that growing need for ROI throughout the funnel, delivering cross funnel outcomes with our ad suite.
Mike: And can you just unpack I mean, you talk a lot about attention and engagement. So, you know, what are you doing there? Is it driving people to content through paid? Just explain a little bit about what advertisers get when you talk about those two things?
Sara: Yeah, definitely. Attention, I think is something that that we're really focusing on, especially with our Onyx offering, I can give you more detail into what Onyx is and how we're using attention to drive results for brands. Onyx is really an attention centric offering. As I mentioned, our key segment or the key segment that we're going after is enterprise brands and agencies. With onyx, we're able to allow these advertisers to deliver rich video and display creatives in highly viewable placements with 100% Share of Voice. So Onyx is being delivered in highly viewable placements with experiences that drive great user engagement. And what makes Onyx exciting is our ability to predict audience attention. And so this is where the intention piece comes in. Onyx is powered by our prediction engine or the Outbrain Prediction Engine. So we're using that strength in our ability to look at different data points from across our network and use that to power our prediction engine to be able to deliver outcomes for brands. So what makes Onyx really exciting is that we're able to predict audience attention. And the way that we do this is the backbone or what is powering Onyx is really our prediction engine. It's our ability to look at different data points from across our network to be able to predict certain engagement. And now we are using attention as a data point that we are leveraging to really drive results for brands and agencies. So attention is actually turning into something that we are optimising for, we are measuring and we're optimising attention, the way that we're optimising attention is working with industry providers. So with partners that are measuring attention throughout the open web, and and they are really providing us with these data points that then we can then use to, to drive these, these outcomes. And
Mike: that's interesting, you've got this engine effectively, that is working out what people want to see and trying to feed it the right content, are you building those models, you know, on a per client basis, on a company by company basis, or is it much more about, you know, industries and sectors, the way
Sara: that we that we power our prediction engine is by really collecting all of those data points from across our network. And using that to power, different campaigns that different advertisers are, are setting up. So we will really adapt that prediction based on what the advertisers goals are or what type of content or audience they they want to engage with. So the Prediction Engine will adapt to the needs of the different advertisers and whatever campaign outcomes they they want to achieve.
Mike: That sounds great. I mean, it feels to me a little bit that maybe it's built around very large campaigns, you know, the sort of consumer advertisers, but I think you do work with B2B. So can you talk a little bit about how you can work with B2B and maybe deal with, you know, the fact that some of those budgets aren't quite as big as coke?
Sara: Yeah, definitely. So our brains ad platform doesn't only cater to B2C advertisers, we also are able to deliver solutions for B2B. As I mentioned before, the platform is really able to adapt to different types of advertisers needs. So you know, to give you an example, some B2B advertisers will really prioritise branded content, and this can be very crucial for them. And we can create personalised user journeys that will help attract audiences to that content, and help them you know, using our prediction engine to generate leads, and continue to build brand awareness. And when it comes to the budgets, as you mentioned, we are quite flexible. So it really is, is a platform that can adapt to different needs.
Mike: But I'm really pleased, Sara, you said that you do a lot of B2B because we'd have been trouble if you didn't. But, you know, I think one of the things I'd be interested in is, you know, do you have some examples of maybe how B2B companies have used the platform successfully?
Sara: Yeah, definitely. We ran a very successful Microsoft campaign, Microsoft wanted to to drive leads for their field, one solution. So field one is a service management software that they offer to enterprise. And when they came to us, they were asking to, again, drive leads from their high value audiences. And so for this, they had created a site that was promoting a webinar, where they would provide audiences with information about field one services. So when they came to us, we set up a campaign for them, where we were able to connect relevant audiences to their site and increase their site conversion by 75%. So this was a very effective campaign for for Microsoft. One of the solutions that we use for this was conversion bid strategy. So this is one of our offerings, that does dynamic bidding, to be able to optimise campaigns towards higher performing inventory and audiences so that really was able to drive that growth that Microsoft saw on their sites. One of the most exciting things about this campaign was that Microsoft was running on social media as well. And Outbrain was able to deliver 180% more leads than social and 50% lower cost per acquisition compared to social so we really saw that we were extremely impactful for Microsoft in in that this B2B campaign and also we performs better than their social campaigns.
Mike: That's amazing that that's impressive. And it's good that you're not just talking about driving traffic, you're really looking at conversions. I think that's, that's important for a lot of B2B companies. And I think some people looking at Outbrain see it as being a traffic driver? And obviously a lot more than that. Exactly.
Sara: Definitely, we're not only driving traffic, we're for advertisers, we're generating value for the brands as well. And really looking at that funnel. So what can we do for brands, from awareness to consideration and all the way down to conversion?
Mike: That's brilliant. I'm going to ask you about a potential challenge. Now, it seems like Google, you know, at the time we're talking, is finally starting to block third party cookies on Chrome, having talked about it forever. I know you use a mix of different cookies for tracking. So what sort of impact do you think that's going to have on Outbrain? And I don't know, Sara, maybe do you want to comment on how it's going to impact online advertising as a whole? Yeah,
Sara: I mean, we've been talking about cookie deprecation for a while now, I do have to say that I think that Outbrain is well positioned to navigate this change, we have a data collection system that is coming from our own integrations with publishers, as I mentioned before, we work with 1000s of publishers across the open web. And through those integrations, we are able to collect our own data around the contexts, the interest, the user, even the campaign performance, these are all data points that we are using to be able to drive that prediction engine. So we are able to deliver effective advertising without relying or without having a huge reliance on third party cookies. And so as I mentioned, like, I do think that that's going to be something that is going to help us navigate and continue to deliver true results for advertisers. That said, we are actively exploring additional ways that we can meet advertisers needs and develop strategic partnerships with industry leaders in the targeting space. And we're also looking into developing more first party data solutions. So we are definitely looking into more things that we can do when it comes to targeting. But I would say that, that we we don't have that much of a reliance on third party cookies.
Mike: So that's really interesting. I mean, you're obviously delivering results, as you talked about when you talked about the Microsoft example. Yet we're still seeing in the B2B sector, LinkedIn taking a larger and larger share of display advertising. I mean, why do you think that is? Do you think that's really delivering the results that people want? Or do you think it's just an easy way to spend those advertising dollars?
Sara: I think that many B2B companies are looking at LinkedIn as a space where they could advertise, amongst other things, because it is a social platform. And because a lot of advertising in general is just starting to become very concentrated on the socials. I think that part of this is because a lot of time spent with users is happening on social platforms. And so the market is becoming very concentrated here. And that's not necessarily an ideal scenario for advertisers. I think that it's important to remember that users are consuming different types of content throughout the day, on socials and including on publisher sites on the open web. And the behaviour that users have in each environment is extremely different. I don't think that we can compare the way that users are scrolling through social. And you know, I don't even include LinkedIn, I am definitely scrolling through my LinkedIn feed to the behaviour that a user has when they're on a publisher site. And they are reading through an article, I think that there's an intentionality there, that's not necessarily what you will find on the social platforms. So I think that marketers should think about engaging with consumers in different ways throughout the day. So it's not necessarily choosing one environment over another. It's how can you close the gaps in that user journey and connect with users in in different ways? And, you know, really thinking about the attention that you're able to drive on the open web on publisher sites. And I think that marketers that are able to incorporate that attention from the open web into their media plans, are we going to be able to enhance their overall performance?
Mike: I think that's a great point, Sara, I'm intrigued that she I mean, how the publishers see Outbrain and put particularly interested in the B2B sector because obviously, in B2B, typically those publishers are generating much higher CPMs than maybe some of the consumer sites.
Sara: Yeah, we have great relationships with publishers, and some of our founders are coming from the publishing industry. So it's really part of our DNA. And our success is very tied to theirs. So I wouldn't say that we have issues with integrating with B2B publishers. The reason that I say this is because we have multiple ways that we can work with publishers, as I mentioned before, we work with publishers to drive audience development, monetization, and also revenue diversification. So it's a very flexible suite of solutions that we offer publishers, and so we really adapt to their individual needs.
Mike: That sounds great. I mean, you know, I can understand certainly today publishers being very keen to find additional sources of income. If our listeners are looking to run campaigns, and they want to test something on Outbrain. I mean, how easy is it to run a test campaign on outbound, you have to, you know, spend a lot of time learning and understanding the platform because it's different, or is it fairly straightforward,
Sara: it's, it's extremely straightforward, you can just go to outbrain.com. And choose if you're a publisher, and advertiser and fill in a form where someone will get in touch with you and help you get set up. And for example, for an advertiser, once you have access to our advertiser dashboard, you can go in and set up your own campaign goals, set up different formats, launch test campaigns, our solution is a fully self serve platform. So it's extremely easy to get started, we also have a help centre, and onboarding documents to make sure that the process is a lot easier.
Mike: And presumably, once you're set up, you can run small test campaigns before you start running out major ones, there's not minimum ad spends on those campaigns. Exactly. That sounds great. I mean, you've obviously done a lot of Outbrain to change the way people do digital advertising. I'm interested to know, you know, what's your view as to how advertising on the web is gonna change over the next few years?
Sara: Well, I think that we're all really seeing that the media landscape is fully shifting towards video first, consumption. And a lot of that consumption is happening on social platforms. So I think that open web players really need to adapt to this new reality. And we need to focus on attracting and engaging both audiences and advertisers through video first experiences. So that's definitely something that I think is going to is going to be top of mind for many players in the space. I think that there are also a few trends that we're starting to see that are really landing. We've talked about attention metrics before. But I think that attention metrics are going to evolve from nice to haves to potentially becoming currency. And another thing that hopefully we'll start seeing more of is how we are all starting to reimagine targeting, I think that we'll start seeing more creative targeting solutions that are more focused on things like outcomes, instead of demographics.
Mike: That's great. It sounds like you know, publishers need to pay attention to some of these trends as well as advertisers, I think particularly video is important. Yes. It's been really interesting talking to you, Sara, just like to ask a couple of more personal questions we'd like to ask people well, the first is, you know, what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Sara: I've had a lot of great advice. But one thing that I always go back to is that I remind myself to be data driven, and give myself the time for strategic thinking before taking action. I think it's easy to fall into a trap of simply doing things to go with the flow, especially when workloads are high. And we're really focusing on delivering, but taking time to actively use data to guide your decisions and then take really purposeful actions really does make a world of difference. So I definitely say that giving yourself the necessary time to stop, look at the data review, plan. And then act is is key.
Mike: I love adding as great advice. You seem really excited about the future of marketing. So I think the answer the next question would be quite positive. I mean, what would you tell a young person who was maybe considering marketing as a career, would you recommend it?
Sara: Of course, definitely. I mean, I really love marketing, I would say to that person to approach marketing with an open mind. Marketing is a massive field, and it has tonnes of areas of expertise. And I think that when you're coming into it, it's important to be curious and to be open to learning things before committing on a specific path. You know, to give you an example, when I started, I saw myself brainstorming at a creative agency. And now I'm in product marketing, and I'm loving it. And it's, it's a role that can be very technical at times. So really, my point is, don't limit yourself based on your initial thoughts of what you think marketing is. Spend some time to explore, try things out, and then who knows where you might find your passion within marketing. That's
Mike: great advice. I love that. Obviously, you know, if people want to try Outbrain, you've already said go to outbrain.com. But if people are particularly interested by something you've said or want to follow up, is there a way that the listeners could contact you after the episode?
Sara: Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, and you just have to search for Sara Madison. Brilliant.
Mike: Sara, this this has been fascinating. It's great to hear how much innovation that there is in advertising. So I think you know, this is a particularly interesting episode. I really appreciate your time. Thank you.
Sara: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
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 favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Has Marketing Automation Changed in 2023?
2023 has been a big year in the world of marketing automation with technologies such as AI starting to revolutionise how marketers work.
Mike Maynard and Hannah Wehrly take a look back at 2023, discuss the highlights of the year and share their thoughts on what marketers can do next year to leverage new technologies and level up their marketing automation activities.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcasts
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
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
[00:40.04] – Mike and Hannah share their marketing automation highlights of the year.
[01:56.08] – Mike discusses how he thinks AI will impact marketing tools going forward.
[05:45.08] – Mike and Hannah talk about customer journeys and personalisation.
[10:01.08] – How are customer journey going to change in 2024?
[14:31.01] – Mike and Hannah share their tips for 2024.
Quotes
“I think a lot of AI is going to go and they're trying to bury the AI in the product. So, the product will just be smarter, and you won't think about AI and not AI, it will just all be one thing.” Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier.
“Do these campaigns, but look at the data, see how people are interacting and how you can take the personalization to the next level based on this interest that the prospect has got behind them.” Hannah Wehrly, Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier
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: Marketing Automation Moment Episode 12 – Has Marketing Automation Changed in 2023?
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Hannah: Welcome to the Market Automation Moment Podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Market Automation Moment Podcast. I'm Hannah Whaley.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard.
Hannah: And today we discuss what happened to Michael automation in 2023. Our predictions for 2024. And we count to a seasonal agreement over Tip of the Week.
Hi, Mike, welcome back to the last Podcast, episode 2023. How're you doing?
Mike: I'm doing well, Hannah, it's good to talk about marketing automation. Again,
Hannah: it definitely is. And we've got quite an exciting session ahead of us, Mike, because I really want to take a look back at 2023 and have a conversation around what we think has been the coolest thing that we've seen. And what we're looking forward to seeing in 2024. So I'm going to kick us off Mike, because this is going to be of no surprise to you. And I promise it's not just because of the cartoon character. But I think one of the coolest things I've seen this year is the introduction of Einstein copilot. So we talked about this a few podcast episodes ago, but this is really the AI system, which is going to be built into the user experience within Salesforce. So from drafting customer code, providing sales recommendations, content recommendations, it's gonna be really interesting to kind of see it, unveil and be used in action. Because we've had the hype, we've had that, oh, my god, we're gonna do these cool things, but we've not actually seen it in reality. So I'm actually really intrigued to see what it's gonna look like in 2024. And, you know, by middle of next year, are we also going to be like, This is so cool. Or we come back to earth a little bit?
Mike: I think that's a great question. I mean, firstly, I know it is because the cartoon is to highlight. But equally, I think it's really interesting, what Salesforce is trying to do is, you know, where personally I think a lot of AI is gonna go. And they're trying to basically bury the AI in the product. So the product will just be smarter, and he won't think about AI and not AI will just all be one thing. And if Salesforce can do it, I think that could be super helpful. I mean, the reality is today, I think they're a little way away from it. So it'll be interesting to see how it develops. And, you know, really how much impact it has. And I think also the other thing, and maybe this is the scary side of, of Einstein, is it becomes so easy to generate emails that people are generating, you know, 10 times the amount of emails that they were when they had to manually write them. What's that going to do to our inbox? I mean, that is a little bit scary, isn't it?
Hannah: That is such a valid fortnight I hadn't thought of it that way. I mean, you know, our inboxes are so saturated day to day. And I suppose as a marketer, it's about finding the balance again, because if it's going to be so much easier to create that content, you don't want to get to a level where you're just receiving high levels of unsubscribe, or perhaps you're just going into the junk inbox. So for me personally, one of the things that I'm going to be looking at is, yes, let's use these tools, let's use it to our advantage, but we still got actually look at the results. And we've got a look at the level. So I mean, I always get a little bit nervous. If we send in four emails in one day, we've just launched our advent calendar, you know, I think we just need to be careful that we're not actually going to turn prospects off, and we've been engaging, and we're sending relevant content, but it's not gonna actually have a negative impact on us at the same time.
Mike: For sure, and I think one of the risks of AI is it's fairly easy to generate those emails. But if you actually don't think of what the substance of the email is, then you're going to be in trouble. You're going to be sending boring emails, and maybe nicely written by AI. But the actual contents, not renewing engage people. So we can't turn our brains off no matter what happens, because AI isn't going to completely replace that creativity. At least not in 2024. Yeah,
Hannah: absolutely. I couldn't agree more. But I'm interested, Mike, what is the one thing your highlight of 2023? Well, then
Mike: if it's a highlight, it's more, it's more disappointment. You know, I still see a lot of very simplistic campaigns, people taking very short campaigns, maybe someone gets an email, they register to download some content. And then you send another email saying buy this. And to me, I think what I've really liked to believe is that in 2020, for marketers are going to take a breath and they're going to think about what they're trying to achieve. And they're going to think about what that means to their audience. So what they have to do to walk them from wherever they are today, to where that market wants them to get tomorrow. I'd love to imagine there'd be more thought applied to campaigns and therefore better campaigns developed.
Hannah: Absolutely. I think that's really interesting because we know it's all about touchpoints. And I mean, this is the great thing about integrated marketing. And I mean, we obviously focus on market automation a lot here, because that's the focus of the podcast. But I think is interesting to have a look at what as well as the tactics you can use in conjunction with Mark automation platform. So how are you using touch points on your website? How are using form fields? Are you tracking where people are going? Are you perhaps using pop ups to direct them to certain pages. So that's a really good point, because there needs to be more of a thought process. But I think also just outside of the emails, there's a lot of things marketers could be doing to extend that customer journey and really implement that thought process. That's
Mike: such a good point, Hannah. And, you know, I think it's not just the email sequences that I highlighted, where people are not really thinking through the customer journey, basically. But it's also all the other things and doing things like making content more engaging when people get to the website, personalising pages, where you build landing pages, all of that, I think, is a huge opportunity. So it'll be interesting to see, I think the challenge is, is we know that some of the reason marketers don't think is they don't have time, and people are pushed for time. So maybe Einstein is gonna give us a little bit more time back. And we can be a bit more mindful about how we create and launch campaigns.
Hannah: Definitely. So I think there's a good opportunity to see the positives as well as the negatives of AI next year.
Mike: Definitely. Let's hope so.
Hannah: Do you want to have a bit of a discussion around the trends to watch out for in 2024? So we've already said our personal opinion, but I've had a bit of a research online. And I mean, again, predictive ai, ai generated images, this is a course is going to be a huge thing. Personalization. Obviously, that's not going anywhere. And I think every year I read a blog post where it's like, personalization is important. What ways could marketers use market automation to really take personalization to the next level next year?
Mike: Well, again, it goes back to what I said earlier, I think a lot of marketers aren't really doing much personalization. But for sure if if marketers think about it, I think they can build personalization into the whole journey. So you know, first thing to say is don't just personalise the email, but personalise the landing page as well. Another thing to talk about is, you know, personalising some of the advertising outreach you do, which I get is not really marketing automation, necessarily, quite often, that's to drive leads to landing pages that then feed people into marketing automation systems, but we've seen some incredible results where we've built personalised campaigns targeting, you know, single companies with separate graphics and texts designed specifically for those companies. So I think ABM is going to be the underpinning of personalization. Because you can't personalise everything, you know, to any great extent. So you're going to have to focus. But yeah, I totally agree. I think personalization is important. Do you see an area where we're gonna see more personalization from marketing automation?
Hannah: Well, I think for me, Mike is about taking personalization beyond just that name, and just that company name. I think it's the easy way out for marketers, sometimes you can easily put in those merge fields. It's like, Hi, Mike, you know, you work at Napier. But I think it's taking it to the next level. And I guess it goes back to, you know, which has already been a theme throughout our discussion is getting marketers to think a little bit more. So perhaps there's some content ideas that they could share, perhaps as a case study that the company shared recently, perhaps as a product launch, you know, actually taking it to that next level and taking a step back and thinking, okay, how can I make this really relevant to the person I'm talking to? I mean, the other day, you showed an email from row works, and they were sharing a content piece, but just the way they'd written the email that obviously done the research on who they were targeting, why it would be relevant. And I think just having that thought process and that strategy behind, we're targeting these people, it's not just the company name, this is why we're a good fit for you is going to make all the difference.
Mike: I love that. I mean, you're really talking about getting away from the simplistic stuff of name and company name and going to really understand what your audience cares about and delivering them the content they want. And I think you're right, that is where you need to get to and personalization. And that can be a challenge. Absolutely.
Hannah: And I think it relates quite nicely to the next point, I want to talk about Mike and that's really the kind of change in customer journeys. So customer journeys in the past would have followed a really straight linear process, you know, marketers could see but the landscapes changed this year and you actually wrote a great blog post on it a while ago. Do you just want to talk a little bit more about how you see customer journeys changing in 20 24
Mike: Yeah, and to be honest, I mean, it's not really a new idea, Forrester published their famous crazy funnel image. I mean, quite a few years ago now, saying that people were moving away from these linear journeys to something more complex. So, I'm not sure it's necessarily, you know, a change has happened in 2023. But I think in 2023, more and more, we're seeing it impact campaigns. And people are having to change because different prospects are moving at different speeds and in different directions. So without doubt, what we're seeing is companies trying to build micro journeys. So there's this little stage here, where we get the prospect from here to here, and there's a little stage here where we move them from point A to point B, but they don't necessarily move in this big, long planned out sequence. So I think that is actually a challenge. It does make it harder to create, you know, more thoughtful campaigns. But I think, you know, the one thing that Marquis automation needs to do is not only to feed data out and be a push, but also to get data back in so to understand what your audience wants, based upon their activities and their actions. And I think if if marketers can do more of that, then that's going to generate more and more effective campaigns. Oh,
Hannah: that's a fantastic point, Mike, because what you're really saying there is look at the data. So you do these campaigns, but look at the data, see how people are interacting, and how you can then again, take the personalization to the next level based on this interest that you already know, the prospect has got behind them.
Mike: For sure. And I think one of the things that, you know, really, fairly recently, last couple of years, is LinkedIn has got every marketer talking about, you know, the percentage of prospects that are in market that are ready to buy. And one of the challenges the market automation is, it seems to always be built around trying to drive that sale immediately. So you know, you've got to get to that bottom of the funnel. Well, the reality is, you know, if you listen to LinkedIn, only 5% of your audience are in market ready to buy 95% aren't going to buy no matter what you do. So that I think is what I mean by being more thoughtful about the journey is, you know, doing something for those people who aren't necessarily going to progress, as you say in that sequence through to a purchase, but are actually going to stop, they may get further down their customer journey, they may get closer to becoming a customer, but nothing you can do is going to make them ready to buy. What do you think about that?
Hannah: I think that's really interesting, because what I would add to that is, there's a simple way to do that. So have that thought process behind you. But the key part of Mark automation is the automations. So you know, we use a lot of campaigns where we run the ABM, we run the Google retargeting, but have a sequence that goes out, if they're still not ready to buy, if it's still not the right time, put them into a list, and then in a month's time to another sequence. And I think a big part of it is consistency. And it's being consistent and making sure you're top of mind and not annoying, but a good level of engaging and sharing relevant content. And I think it's understated sometimes how Mark automation can make your life easier in that part. Because I've been for Napier, I run a lot of automations. And I don't have to think twice about them anymore. I know that if that contact isn't interested, they're not engaging, they will go sit in a list, and then in a month's time, they will be entered into another sequence. So it doesn't have to be difficult. But the key message, I would say it's the consistency part. That is what's going to make the difference. Yeah,
Mike: and I think that's actually something you've really levelled up with our marketing automation and Napier is you've really looked at how you can pull out that 5% that are in market that are ready to buy and accept the 95% in any mailing are not going to be you know, immediate customers. And what you need to do is keep them warm, keep them nurtured, and just look at the behavioural cues that say, Yes, you know, someone's putting their hand up, they're interested, there's someone we need to approach, I think you've done an amazing job there. And it's something a lot of market automation users could learn from you. Don't
Hannah: give me too many compliments, Michael won't be able to fit my head through the door when I leave that great. I mean, I'm conscious of time. So I do want to move on to our insightful Tip of the Week. And I want to do a slightly different approach this week, where I want us to each share a tip for marketers to think about when entering 2024 So I'll start us off Mike and I think for me, you know, part of my role, as I'm sure listeners have gathered by now is that I am part sales and I am part marketing. So I have to have a sales hat and a marketing hat on at all times. And I think the one thing that can help companies be more successful, and it's that very, very long old cliche of consulting your sales team. So help them understand how much automation can be used. Encourage them to use it to their fullest. and show them the pipeline's show them the content that you were sharing, show them how they can see the prospects and what they're interested in. And I think if marketers go in with that mindset, they can really focus on building campaigns that will lead to closing the sales.
Mike: I think that's, that's a great point. And you know, what is happening, we know that actually, the amount of time, prospects spend engaging with marketing is increasing. And the amount of time they spend engaging with sales is decreasing. And I don't think that necessarily mean sales is becoming unimportant, what it means is those interactions in sales individually, are actually much more important. And the salespeople need to get all the information and be as fully armed as they can be. So I think that's a brilliant tip. I think people also need to, you know, talk to the sales team, to understand what the market wants, what your audience wants, because they are also very close. So they can also help us generate better campaigns.
Hannah: That's a brilliant point, Mike. Yeah, at the end of the day of sales has got the understanding of the landscape, their their day to day, and so that also be able to inform marketing. So it's definitely a joint effort. Absolutely. So Mike, your turn, what would you share as your tip to think about when entering 2024?
Mike: Well, I mean, the truth is, Yossi shared your tip sometime before the recording, so I got to see it. And I have to say, My tip is listen to Hannah, she's really smart. You know, I was going to talk about something to do with sales and marketing, but I think you just express it brilliantly. So, you know, as marketers, I think we need to go and make friends with our sales team. We need to train them, we need to educate them. And we also need to learn for them as well. So it's a great tip, you had Hannah and I completely agree with it. It's probably the best advice anyone could get. If they're looking to run marketing automation campaigns in 2024. Whoa,
Hannah: what a brilliant note to end on my thank you. I mean, I've loved our discussion today. And I'm really looking forward to seeing how the landscape continues to evolve. And also what marketers and the sales team go up to in 2024.
Mike: Absolutely. And I think you know, the last thing probably we want to do is just wish all our listeners a great break over the festive season. Whether you celebrate Christmas or anything else. Hope you have a wonderful time and very prosperous 2024
Hannah: absolutely have a great holiday. 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.
Succession Plus - Maximising Employee Ownership: A Guide to Implementing an EOT with Mike Maynard
Did you know that implementing an Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) can significantly boost your company culture? Mike Maynard joined the Succession Plus podcast to discuss the transformative power of EOTs for small businesses.
Listen here: https://succession.plus/uk/podcasts-uk/maximising-employee-ownership-a-guide-to-implementing-an-eot-with-mike-maynard/
B2B Digital Marketer - The Intersection of Engineering and Marketing in the Digital Age
Mike joined the B2B Digital Marketer for a conversation into data and creativity in marketing. Mike discuses the importance of quantitative and qualitative data in understanding customer behaviour and driving decision-making and the need for marketers to embrace data-driven strategies rather than relying solely on creative instincts.
Listen here: https://b2bdm.com/the-intersection-of-engineering-and-marketing-in-digital-age/
A Napier Podcast Interview with Matt Swalley - Omneky
Matt Swalley, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at Omneky, an AI-powered ad platform, sat down with Mike to discuss the possibilities of AI in advertising and how businesses can maximise the benefits of AI-generated content in their campaigns.
He also shares why testing is integral to campaign success and why human input is essential when working with AI-generated content.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
About Omneky
Omneky is an AI-powered platform that uses state-of-the-art deep learning to create and personalise creative content across customer touchpoints. Machine learning algorithms analyse designs and messaging and these insights are used to generate the content most likely to drive sales.
About Matt Swalley:
Matt Swalley is Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of Omneky. Matt brings 13 years of strategic leadership experience and has an undergraduate degree from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, and an MBA from Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida.
Time Stamps
[00:46.01] – Matt discusses his career and why he moved from a corporate to a start-up role.
[06:34.08] – What is Omneky? How does it help its customers?
[13:49.09] –Matt discusses the importance of testing ads and campaigns.
[15:22.2] – Matt explains why human involvement is a must in AI-generated content.
[18:02.00] – Matt shares some use cases of Omneky.
[23:23.02] – Matt offers her marketing top tip.
Quotes
“The best part about AI is people's jobs are not necessarily being eliminated. They're being changed. People can think much quicker on concepts and stuff.” Matt Swalley, Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer at Omneky.
Follow Matt:
Matt Swalley on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-swalley-59249533/
Omneky website: https://www.omneky.com/
Omneky on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/omneky/
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 Matt Swalley - Omneky
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Matt Swalley
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 Max Swalley. Matt is the Co-Founder and Chief Business Officer of Omneky. Welcome to the podcast, Matt.
Matt: Hi, Mike, thank you so much for having me really excited to be here.
Mike: It's great to have you on. I'm really interested in about your career. And in particular, you know, you've recently jumped from a very corporate background into a startup. So tell me how you got to AT and T and then why you decided to change and co founder, I'm lucky.
Matt: Yes. Sounds great, Mike. So I spent 13 years at large corporation, at&t and I did a lot of different roles. And what's one of the best opportunities of working for you know, as a fortune 10 company for many of those years with 250,000 employees is, you get the opportunity to a lot of different things. over the 13 years, I did probably 15 different jobs and lived in eight different markets, some of the biggest markets in the US. So Dallas, Atlanta, Southern California, where I lead sales teams, and the earliest days I was carrying a bag is what they called it, where you're picking up the phone and calling you know, 50 customers a day setting up primarily new lead generation through calls and emails. And that kind of will go into my discussion later about how digital needs to be the base today. But I learned a lot about meeting with 1000s of customers learning how to ask questions, selling is all asking questions. And then I took that on and expanded it into leading teams in Southern California across like the biggest territory. And then I took on some leadership roles in mobility applications. So selling software for at&t, like GPS tracking about a bunch of their software services. And I made this decision, I want to get to headquarters because all decisions are made in headquarters. So that was one of my biggest transitions was moving to the headquarters in Dallas, Texas, and get into be around the leaders I led a sales organisation in Dallas initially and then became a chief of staff for the global business officer who ran all the multinational relationships for 18 T communications. And it was a really, really great big picture moment where I was getting to see big, big p&l hiring in every region of the world. We had customers in London in the UK, Japan, every single region. So learning a tonne about multinational companies and how you know how to sell. And then I got my MBA during that. And this was like my second career defining moment there was I made a decision, I want to get into corporate strategy. So I got into corporate strategy day PNP spent two years doing financial analysis, go to market strategy Board of Directors materials, and learning how to work with big datasets and tell stories for senior executives and the board of directors. And during that time, I got really excited about technology and growth stage companies, especially in artificial intelligence. And that's where I met Hikari singe the CEO of Omneky who is the best visionary I've ever seen. He was years ahead, knowing general AI was going to get to where it is today and joined him on that journey. At a early early stage startup at the time, had raised a little bit of seed money, right when I joined, but we primarily bootstrapped and almost profitable in the early days, where Hikari was running most of the different operations from sales to engineering, and I joined as the business leader about two years ago from today.
Mike: Awesome, congratulations. I'm really trying to dig a bit deeper way to this this jump I mean, you're AT and T you at the headquarters, you say presumably in a well paid secure job. I mean, I think a lot of listeners will be interested now. How do you find that courage to jump to something that appears so incredibly risky?
Matt: Yeah, so I always had kind of entrepreneurship in my heart. So like the earlier my job before 18 T, I spent at a small business where I ran an entire territory for a small uniform company in Chicago. But I always had this like business development opportunity where I love going out and making things happen myself, the hardest thing about working for a large corporation, you learn how to execute very well. And you get to sell established products most of the time and you have greenspace customers where you already have the relationships. But a lot of times you're not able to go figure out how to go to market, how to go sell a product, how to grow a business. And then the second biggest thing is is when you look at revenue and future projections, I really want to join a growth stage company where we can make a huge impact and we're a seed stage company with a goal to be, you know, an initial public offering in the next couple years. Some of the other industries are declining industry He's in, when you're in that situation, every decision is made an operational efficiencies instead of figuring out how to, you know, grow that next business unit 200 million or a billion dollars in revenue. And that's where I like, I love startups, because every day you're prioritising on what's most important that will make an impact to help grow this business and, you know, develop our team and find customers that fit our value prop.
Mike: I love that. I think it's, you know, it's absolutely true. Most people find growing, that sales number is far more exciting and far more interesting than shrinking that cost number.
Matt: This role a lot of things I learned in the past, how to organise teams, how to I learned a lot of marketing, channel marketing, for example, how to sell with or sell through customers, we're doing that a lot at arm to keep, they all are mission critical at a startup because a lot of leaders that startups are the most driven individuals, incredibly intelligent, know how to do so many things, but they haven't worked at large corporations and figured out how to, you know, build that operational cadence and structure into the day. And that's where you can immediately bring that knowledge from dealing with eight different levels and figuring out how to navigate the political environment and everything and you can, you can really simplify that all and then start building that into startup.
Mike: That's awesome. I love your enthusiasm around nominee keys. So do you want to talk about what I'm Nikki does, I mean, I got from the website, you're the omni channel creative orchestration platform, which is a bit of a mouthful, I think it probably needs some explaining.
Matt: Let's just say AI powered sales. And when I say that is digital advertising has to be the base for all sales. Primarily listeners here are in the B2B field. So in the past, you used to figure out ways to develop business from meeting in person making phone calls and emails, well, what we do is we tell businesses stories in different ways. So you have all these four different major criteria I keep going back to, you have different audiences for your product, and B2B, it could be a different vertical, like retail, you have different products and services. You also have different geographies with like localization, you could be based in the UK or based in, you know, Dallas, Texas. And then finally, you have different platforms. So this could be websites, or social apps, or a number of different things, people's attention spans keep getting shorter and shorter. So you can go follow your customers to wherever they are on different websites or apps and tell your business's story. That's what Omneky does. We tell your story in a lot of different ways, formatted for each platform. And then you can target and retarget those audiences. And lead generation is a major, major one of our focuses, especially for us, because we use digital ads for our own growth.
Mike: That's interesting. So what you're doing is you're kind of taking that story from the customer. And then you're being able to tell that in emotional, different formats on different platforms, different sizes. Is that really what you're doing? You're kind of doing this? It seems almost like repurposing on this massive industrial scale.
Matt: Right? Yeah. So it's called multivariate testing out there and marketing. And you can learn a lot from the data. So one step back on on McKee is we collect data from a lot of different places. One is third party data from advertising platform. So if you're advertising and have a couple of weeks or months worth of data, we can analyse like how many people are clicking for each of the different things, clicking or buying or generating a lead, or we care about qualified leads the most, so you can go farther down the funnel. But then you can use this tool called Computer Vision, which has been around for a long time, but it's getting better and better as well. It can identify different elements of the copy the image, the video, and then across all the people looking at an ad, you can start to like quantify, like what's resonating? What's the key headline for the audience, what's the key video length, what's and then you you can iterate off of what's working well. And then with testing also, like, you want to spend about 30% of your advertising on brand new concepts and about 70% on iterating off what's working, because the platform algorithms for like the major platforms, meta Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, for B2B are, the algorithms are constantly changing. And so you have to feel it with creative and then also targeting is becoming more restricted with GDPR, California Data Protection Act. So now creative is the major lever for distribution. So a lot of these platforms have really smart algorithms that recognise what people like and it will deliver an ad based on what you've been looking at in the past. And so the better creative you have that hits their needs, the more effective
Mike: so it's interesting. So you're creating these ads, images, text, etc. And you're looking at two things you're looking at how really to get preferred in the algorithm, but also what works in terms of what drives drives leads. Is that Is that really what you're trying to combine?
Matt: That's right. So it's a data based approach. And then also testing of new concepts. And one of the beautiful things with AI is like, is advertising still overall is too general, everyone talks about personalization, but there was broadcast before one ad reaching millions, then it was narrowcast, a little bit more narrow. And today you are entering a place where technology allows you to be so agile, it can be more and more personalised, it's not gonna be exactly personalised yet. But it could fit the audience, the vertical, the, like I mentioned, the platform, the product, they will piece those all together, and then deliver to the right set of small narrow customers that you're trying to get to. And you have to tell it across images and videos, and you go test what's working, and then raise budgets on what's performing well, and continue to iterate off of it.
Mike: So let's talk a little bit about what it feels like to be a user of Omneky then, I mean, how does someone use the platform? How do they they create content? And then how do they control where it goes? Because it sounds like it can be going in a huge number of different channels.
Matt: Yeah, Mike. So this is some of the exciting things of technology is bringing as well. So when you onboard, we have a platform. So you register on Omneky, and we have within our platform, you upload your brand assets. So the first guardrails, our enterprise has very specific brand guidelines, we stay within those. So you give us your fonts, your logos, your brand guidelines, in any raw assets that you have, you could have 1000s of assets, a lot of these big brands have so many assets. And what's beautiful to with technology right now is on Nikki's built a brand large language model that will like categorise and scan all the different assets in the library, and then make it really easy to go pull from them for different ads. So that's step one. The second is we connect to the advertising platforms for data. And then we have an immediate six month history of what's been performing well. So we look at that look at the criteria across all your platforms that you're advertising, Maddow Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, we look at it as a single pane of glass view, figure out what's been working. And then within four days, we're delivering a first set of ads. And that's getting shorter and shorter timeframe, it's a really quick turnaround, from onboarding to like four days out. And then it's a constant feedback loop of within our platform, we deliver ad creatives, once the customer approves them, they're launched into the platforms, we're collecting data and then iterating, in real time off the data.
Mike: I say interesting. So you're building these models? I mean, obviously, an important part of that is defining the audience. How do you do that? Because I think a lot of marketers find it quite hard to go from having an audience definition to seeing what that means really, in Google ads or on Facebook or on LinkedIn?
Matt: Sure, so you want to test two different things. So one is your testing actually defined audiences. So let's just give an example. You could pick different criteria of what you believe it's a good fit on the platform, you launch ads that are uniquely created exactly for that audience. The second one is you also want to use the algorithms that like performance Max and Google, for example, that just optimise on their own. So two different strategies there, you figure out what's working better there. And you know, a lot of times those algorithms that you're utilising with the platform that aren't just making a narrow targeting outperform the ones that are, you know, defined audiences. But really, you understand the customers belief for ideal customer profiles, and then you can go test each one of them. And then you might uncover some new ones based on the data, which is what we you know, we do as a company as well.
Mike: Fascinating. I think you keep coming back to talking about testing as well. And and you came up with this stat earlier, that is 70% of your ad budget should be placed on the on the sort of existing ads and and 30% on testing, I think you said, can you just unpack that and explain why you think that's important?
Matt: Yes, because still, like what we noticed across the market is there's lots of different platforms you can test on. So one of the beautiful things with Omneky is we have integrations with all the major channels. So when I say testing new concepts, it might just be expanding to a new platform even right, so you might want to go test Reddit, or Pinterest or you know, programmatic, like the trade desk, but you only understand the history from what you've tried from data. So there might be new avenues like testing, you know, like I mentioned performance Max with a brand new set of creative that you were before just doing, you know, narrow targeting that are going to outperform and you want to have creative for each one of these. So what I'm gonna keep does is we put like a strategy in place across all the different types of potential going to market and then we have creative that aligns with each one of those and you want to test both video and images for each one of those videos is still like 60% of ad test. And then for companies that are doing it in house, a lot of times they might only have expertise in one place and what are the key does we bring in the ability to go launch and all these different places very Be very quickly with whatever assets you have.
Mike: Awesome. And I mean, you've talked about AI. You know, I think people are imagining that there's, there's some AI just firing out all these different versions. But actually, you also have real humans behind this as well. So tell us, you know, I guess what are the humans do? And then why do you feel you still need human input?
Matt: Sure. So the best part about AI also is, people's jobs are not necessarily being eliminated, they're being changed. People can think much quicker on concepts and stuff. So AI, and we plug it in, in a lot of different areas of the workflow. And, for example, for ideation, for humour, different things like that. So creators could potentially use it to figure out brand new ideas on concepts, we have images, pretty much automated, right? So you can pull in, you can use assets from like four different places. One is from brand assets, you give us all your raw assets, we can use those for ads. The second is AI generated assets. So the technologies keep getting better, we also have an AI team that's refining all these processes and building your own algorithms. And then humans still have to review all the creative because AI is not perfect in any situation. So there's always a finishing touch where human craters can can look it over and also use or scanning for bias, like generation one of these models had a lot more bias than generation two, right. And so it requires a human on the loop on our side. And then also on the customer side, you want to have two different checkpoints. before things go live, we have this approval dashboard, the customer could have, you know, five different approvers in there, including legal and compliance. You don't want anyone anything going live until you know it's got a stamp of approval that it looks ready to go. And then video, there are video tools that are amazing. And we're working with some really, really cool technology we're building. But video cannot be completely done through automation today. It's not it's not there yet. It can though. Plugin inputs help you piece together the story, what assets to use, but it's still going to have to have a human that helps piece it all together. For the most part.
Mike: It sounds fascinating. It sounds like you're, you're using AI as an accelerant to really speed up what individuals can do to be able to scale at the kind of scale you're talking about.
Matt: That's exactly right. So like a lot of enterprise businesses are either like duplicating assets times, you know, 50 within a whatever programme they're using, and then they're changing stuff, or, you know, manually and what we're doing is we're making that whole workflow so efficient that AI can help power the different areas, the content and the images, and then click a button and you have all the different sizes you need and ready to go.
Mike: Cool. So maybe we can dig into some of the uses, particularly in B2B. I mean, does Omneky go as far as being able to do sort of, you know, Account Based Marketing campaigns where you're, you're focusing down on single big accounts or two people tend to use it for, you know, broader campaigns.
Matt: It's typically more broader campaigns today with our success, like we use it for ourselves. So we have a number of different focuses. One is enterprise B2B. One is resellers agencies that are using our product. So each one of those has a specific advertising goal and a specific value prop and messaging, each one of them has different things. That's where we plug in, we tell the stories for each of those specific audiences in different ways. You could, with enterprise, you could take it deeper into Account Based Marketing, where you're focusing on one single account doing the ads, it's just, you're not going to have as much reach and as much data coming back because you're targeting like one very small audience.
Mike: That's interesting. So you need to you need that volume of data to be able to analyse what's working, presumably.
Matt: That's exactly right, the more data the better. So like, we recommend that the minimum like our minimum spend for testing is typically like $10,000 a month in ad spend. That's where you're getting enough eyeballs. And then when B2B that the other thing I wanted to mention is sales has changed a lot like people don't pick up their phone, you're getting 1000s of emails a day might and better say like, you know, schedule a demo, will advertising polls customers to you. And then you can figure out how you're how you can start to refine your demo in your questioning and moving the process through the funnel in a different way. And so, historically, sales organisations had lots of people doing outbound and meeting with customers. Today, you can have a smaller team, that's figuring out how like to deal with the incoming leads, route them in the right way, you know, don't take meetings that don't fit with who you can sell to, and then refining your value prop and pitch and questioning until you start to improve the ratio of sales close. That's really the way we look at it. It's like big deals coming to us. We figure out how to refine the process and prove efficiencies there. tell our story and better ways to drive more and then continually qualify and more Wow, that sounds
Mike: cool. I mean, maybe you can, you know, just paint a bit of a clearer picture. Do you have a couple of campaigns you can talk about that, you know, have really worked on on Nikki and delivered some great results.
Matt: Sure. So one specifically, we have a couple in. One is omni channel, the one you said earlier, Omni platform will call Omni platform distribution, this campaigns worked really, really well for us, because B2B marketers, and anyone in marketing has, as I mentioned, a big big challenge figuring out how to produce content for all these different channels. They might have expertise and just meta or LinkedIn, excuse me, but they don't across all. So we've gotten tonnes of interest from all different sizes of corporations, including lots in the Fortune 1000 range from those add greatest. The second one is if you have any great live, like videos of explaining your product. So another one for us was TechCrunch. We were a finalist at TechCrunch. disrupt the CEO did a demo of that on stage. And you can repurpose all this as ads. So that was focused on really the the mid market enterprise space. And that performed extremely well, any of that content, you can have and repurpose, like right away. When we start having content like that a lot of times we're repurposing his ads, and if they perform extremely well,
Mike: that's great. I mean, I think great content always works well, doesn't it? And any kind of AI magic is going to struggle unless you have that inherent good content start with.
Matt: That's right. Cool.
Mike: I mean, you mentioned people need to check. You know, everyone's gonna be wondering, we've all heard about AI getting things wrong. I mean, what are the main problems you find? When people are rejecting ads that have been generated by the system? I mean, what's the AI doing to get things wrong?
Matt: So some of the things that we see is one is, and this is what we see is one of the major challenges with AI, a lot of times it will repeat the same things over and over again. So you have to figure out how to ask it the prompts and different ways to generate different emotional responses or different ways to, you know, tell your story. So that's one thing we're building there. The second is a lot of the image generations in the early stages are not perfect. So you can train AI on what a product looks like, you could have a, you know, a specific product that has your brand logo on it and everything, when you're just trying to regenerate that in completely new situations, a lot of times, the text on it doesn't show up, right, there's a lot of challenges. So now, you know, what you're doing is you're figuring out how to make that exact product or service appear with whatever the production is you want without production, manipulating the backgrounds in different areas or putting into videos with overlays. But a lot of times the biggest challenge was not getting things perfect. And then you have to figure out other ways of doing it that will make that area of it perfect.
Mike: That makes sense. So so it's it's not necessarily going for some really crazy disastrous failures, it's much more it's not quite perfect. And, you know, clearly brands want it to be perfect.
Matt: The brands want to be perfect. And that's still why you need a human touch point in there for a lot, especially for the enterprise space.
Mike: That makes sense. This, this has been fascinating, man. I mean, one of the things I'm intrigued with is, you know, you're obviously not actually drilling from a marketing background. We're talking a lot about marketing and marketing technology. I mean, what's the best marketing advice you've ever received?
Matt: Yeah, I was actually a marketing major, believe it or not back in the day, and then went into the sales path, and then corporate strategy, and then transition to marketing. But some of the best advice I've heard is just start testing. Like, even with whatever, you know, I mentioned, you have to have a pretty good budget. But you can learn so much from getting 1000s or millions of eyeballs on something that could take a team, you know, months or years to realise your product might not sell the way you believe it's going to so you can just start testing. The second one is with AI the way it is today, try out as many of these tools as you can, that are available out in the market. Like, I'm sure you do this to Mike. But every morning, I review a newsletter I love about AI, I look at the 10 newest products on there. And I go test one or two of them. Because eventually you start to figure out how to piece all these together and figure out what helps us for what we're building but to it helps you understand the big picture of how all these pieces can fit together. Because we're at this stage right now, where AI is the first initial wave of it here after chat GPT got launched in you know, the open initial open API's. It was a cool factor. It was like this is cool. This has never been done. But it wasn't completely solving a business problem. Now we're entering the stage where businesses are getting to the point where they're solving business problems and beginning to learn how to scale those problems. test as many of the tools as possible.
Mike: I think that's great advice. I mean, there's so many AI tools that you look at and you see the script, you think Oh, that's amazing. And then you start playing with it and you go Yeah, I'm not sure how it's gonna help me. And then the cost of
Matt: compute star I'd say add up to with anything with scale, like you can try it with a small scale. But then once you start to like, do it a larger scale cost a lot more money.
Mike: Yeah, definitely. I mean figures? Well, you know, I mean, you obviously started in marketing, you moved out of marketing, you've kind of come back a little bit into marketing. I mean, you're more business than the marketing still. I mean, do you recommend young people look at marketing as a career? Or what would you do? If you were starting again? Would you take that marketing major?
Matt: Yes. So I would, growth is one of the biggest roles if you want to join a startup, it's going to be a role that comes in more like its series, a stage head of growth, but head of growth has to understand marketing direct partnerships channel, they're kind of that overall marketing person that's in your company. And, and I have learned so much in the last two years from talking with eight customers a day sometimes or prospective customers a day might I hear I hear feedback from all these agencies, enterprise companies of what the business problem is. And I look at the world completely differently on how to go to market now. You have to figure out how to synergistically combine all your different direct outreach with retargeting with ads. Otherwise, none of it works. If you're not your PR is not firing away with news, your ads aren't going and your direct is not going. So yes, I believe it's a great base, but you also want to go try out different areas of the business because it gives you a much wider view of strategy.
Mike: Definitely, I think it's good advice. I mean, I'm very mindful of time. I'm in tricks, though, you know, the platform I'm Nikki seems to have so many different capabilities. Is there anything else you'd like to talk about or highlight from the platform that you think we haven't covered yet, Matt?
Matt: Sure. So one of the really exciting things we're working on right now is, is of course video and figure in, there's some really great AI tools that help tell different languages, transcribe what's on it. And then really exciting to is these virtual avatars. So one of the things we're we are working on right now is you can write a script and everything will follow our company's specific product. And then you can immediately create a virtual avatar that tells your story that can go on ads. So I really am excited about this technology, as we're, as we're developing it as another, you know, another area from testing for for ads.
Mike: Oh, that's cool. I mean, we we've been playing with some of that technology as well. And I think it's certainly at the moment, it's very compelling whether people will, in the longer term get to be able to spot you know, who's a real person who's not? I don't know, that's an interesting question.
Matt: Right? I know, it's gonna be interesting, because it went from like, user generated content to you know, there's a lot of different people that can go tell tale product stories to now. Virtual.
Mike: Exactly. I mean, Matt, it's just been amazing. We've we've covered so much, it feels like we've only scratched the surface of Omneky and your experience, but it's been fascinating. If anyone's listening or they'd like to get ahold of you, what's the best way for them to contact you?
Matt: Sure you if you want to get a demo, and on occasion, go to www.omneky.com and schedule a demo and put in the code you heard about in the marketing B2B technology podcast. That would help and then or you can reach out to me at Matt ma TT at Omneky.com. Or find me on LinkedIn.
Mike: That's awesome. Matt, thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge and the information about Omneky, I really appreciate it.
Matt: Thank you so much might been a pleasure.
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 favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
The Future of AI in Marketing Automation
How is AI going to shape the future of our marketing automation campaigns? From the latest announcements from leading platforms in the industry, to how AI could revolutionise lead scoring, Mike Maynard and Hannah Wehrly explore the latest news and developments in marketing automation. They also look at predictions on how marketing automation is expected to grow in the coming years and the role automation plays in customer retention and growth.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcasts
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Marketing Automation Moment Episode Ten - The Future of AI in Marketing Automation
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Hannah: Welcome to the Market Automation Moment Podcast. I'm Hannah Kelly.
Mike: And I'm Mike Maynard. This is Napier's podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment podcast. This week we talk about the growth in spending market automation, the new Einstein co pilot from Salesforce, act on AI, predictive lead scoring. And we talk about how marketing automation can be used to keep in touch with customers after they make a purchase. Welcome back to another episode of modern automation moment. Mike, it's great to be back.
Mike: It's great to be back with you, Hannah. It's been a little while and I think we've got a lot to catch up on.
Hannah: Yes, we have a lot of exciting updates to catch on actually, because it's been a really interesting last month in the market automation landscape. So I'm gonna dive right in. And we've talked about some figures before, but I've actually come across some reports from a marketer and allied market research. And they had some really big figures in there about the future of the mahr tech spending industry. So they believe that there will be a growth from 15 point 31 million USD in 2020, to 27 point 11 billion in 2024. For the martec spent, I mean, a lot of this is going to be through the driver, the growth and the craze of AI tools. But I think this is spectacular that the way the industry is pointing is that the spending is going to increase. And so the advantages to marketers is just going to be amazing.
Mike: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think one of the interesting things they're saying is that actually, you know, around 2023 is going to be a low point in marketing spend growth, and people are going to actually see their budgets increased by a greater percentage over the next couple of years. So it's quite exciting. I think a lot of that, obviously, is people trying to buy AI tools and see how they work. We're still to some extent in a experimental phase. But clearly, there's a lot of people getting benefits from AI, and that's going to drive more investment.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I mean, the next thing we're about to talk about Mike is really going to reinforce this, and this is Dreamforce. So this was Salesforce, his yearly conference, which actually took place last month in September. And not surprisingly, AI was a really big key topic. And the most exciting thing that they've released is a new generation of Einstein. So the Einstein one platform. Now I have to say, I'm a big fan of the cartoon character, it really sells me on the platform. But actually, the capabilities as well is really quite amazing. So they've actually introduced the Einstein copilot, which is basically an AI and system, which is built into the user experience of every Salesforce application. So it can help draft customer code, it can provide a sales recommended steps to close deals faster, propose copy for emails, I mean, the possibilities are limitless. What do you think about it?
Mike: Well, I think you know, me, I have to make a snarky comment. And it'd be great if the people who were responsible for the user experience of Salesforce were, you know, as talented as some of the cartoonists because, you know, we all know Salesforce is a real challenge to us. And I guess this is what they're trying to address. Einstein is actually going to be there to help Salesforce users do the things they want to do, and hopefully overcome some of the challenges you've got around the user interface user experience.
Hannah: I think as well, you know, Mike, you've mentioned this before, but eventually in the future AI is going to disappear and disappear into the sense not that it won't be around anymore. But that will become such a seamless integration, people won't know what's AI and what's not. It really feels like this Einstein platform is the first step to really making that a reality.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think it's still, you know, it's being promoted as something separate. And it's still this, this shiny kind of thing. But certainly my view is more and more AI will be embedded into products. And, you know, to some extent, we won't actually know we're using AI, the product will just work better, it'll work more efficiently. I mean, if you look at, you know, the the claim for Einstein, they cite several customers that are using it. And this is their quotes to improve productivity, drive revenue and create personalised experiences. That sounds like you Salesforce. So you know, there's everything that Salesforce should be doing anyway. And I think having this Einstein layer outside is a first step. As we move forward, I think what we'll see is more and more the AI will just be embedded within the product. And we won't be talking about it so much. It won't be this, this new shiny thing, it will be the entry ticket, everyone will have to have aI within their system.
Hannah: That's a really good point, Mike, and you know me I'm very enthusiastic. I like to look ahead, but I think that it's such a valid point, because at the moment and I mean, when we were looking around for the news The things and updates to talk about in this podcast, everything because AI focused everything's about AI is this really shiny new thing. But eventually, you know, that platform won't be separate. And as you said, it'll just be something that set up from the start from the get go based on these market automation platforms.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think we still have this this concern that as more and more AI is deployed, the opportunity to generate higher and higher volumes of communications, particularly emails are going to increase. I mean, I don't know whether we're going to see a situation where, you know, all these personalised AI messages begin to swamp our inboxes. I mean, my email inbox is busy enough as it is. And clearly, it's gonna be very hard for spam filters, or, you know, the prioritisation filters to actually select our AI generated content versus personal emails. So it's gonna be interesting to see what happens that and I'm really hoping that what we don't see is we don't see the value of marketing automation, and email marketing decrease, because everybody's overusing it. And that clearly is one of the concerns. And one of the potential downsides of AI. I mean, AI has got downsides as well as upsides.
Hannah: That's a really good point, Mike. And it is the upsides versus the downsides. Because one of the key things they're setting Einstein platform in is this generative AI, but as you said, actually, is that not as positive as it could be? It's really going to be interesting to watch and see kind of how it unfolds.
Mike: For sure, and I mean, I'm sure everyone has had experiences like I've had, where we've received emails that are AI generated. And she kind of No, because what they're doing is they're taking a line of description from the website, it doesn't feel real. And I think generative AI is still got a little way to go to write those absolutely compelling emails, if you just want to tick a box and get a marketing email out, then fine. I mean, generative AI does a decent job. But the reality is, is that those stunning emails that really grab attention, there still tend to be human written. And it's gonna be interesting to see how AI manages to close that gap with creativity, and doing things different than actually grab attention.
Hannah: Absolutely. So I want to move on just a little bit. So still AI focused? Of course it is. But Salesforce also announced a Slack AI. So this is an AI programme that's going to enhance the slack platform. So it's all about making the more admin and the more manual tasks more automated. So it's going to enable users to search for answers, it's going to enable them to have fresh summaries. I mean, it seems like a really simple thing, but I think it's actually going to be quite effective. As a company, we don't use Slack. But we know a lot of companies that do so what do you think, do you think just this simple kind of integration is actually going to be really beneficial?
Mike: Do you know I mean, a lot of the hype at the moment is all about generative AI and creating stuff with AI. I think one of the, you know, incredible powers of AI is summaries. And I know I mean companies that are very into Slack, it's impossible to keep up with that flow of information that's going through. And so people, you know, if they've been away on holiday, they really have been left out. And rather than having to go back and read, you know, 1000s of slack messages, to have aI summarise, what's happened, I think is incredibly powerful. We're gonna see it all over the place. I mean, I know that, for example, Mikekrosoft, in a different area talked about when you record a team's meeting, they're gonna bring in AI to be able to summarise that meeting and potentially give you action items. I think as marketers, we're going to start seeing this AI, do sort of that summary, and action point work for us very, very soon. And across all sorts of platforms, that's going to work. So it's not just Salesforce driving that. But I think, you know, if we look at Mikekrosoft and Google, they'll also be providing similar platforms. And hopefully, that's going to save a little bit of pain when it comes to writing meeting minutes. I'd certainly be up for that.
Hannah: Me too. Me too. I think the key point there, Mike is, you know, as marketers, we do get really sidetracked by the shiny items by the really exciting things with the in depth analysis and how they can support the data. But actually, that more admin side is going to help me faster and quicker than that marketing and and that generative AI within the platforms at the moment.
Mike: Definitely. So let's move on. What's the next shiny item you found in the news?
Hannah: Well, the next shiny item is a bit of a controversial one, Mike, because, you know, we've spoken about this before, but I'm a big fan of lead scoring. It's not that you don't like lead scoring, but you're not as into the benefits of it, I would say and act on has actually released an AI predictive lead score, which is basically a feature that's going to work within their act on platform to help marketers narrow the marketing funnel and really hone in on the strongest leads. What do you think about this? Do you think it's beneficial, or is it going to offer more problems than what it's worth?
Mike: It's really interesting. So, I mean, I'm not completely against lead scoring, I think one of the challenges that people have with lead scoring is that you need a fairly high volume of prospects and customers to make it work. So if you're looking at clients that we work with that have, you know, very small number of customers, for example, you know, we've got clients that sell, you know, high value capital equipment, they don't sell, you know, 1000s, or hundreds. So, you know, some of them even have one major customer. Yeah, doing predictive lead scoring on that is almost impossible, because the data is so limited. And certainly AI learning based upon a small number of very high value customers, it's going to take a long time to learn and that AI is then going to lag, the customer behaviour. So AI has got issues when you've got low volume, when you look at moving into some of our clients that have high numbers of customers, then they're I think that's where AI lead scoring is going to be really good. I mean, one of the things that interests me is, I see people generate lead scoring algorithms, and that their rating, you know, what drives people to be a customer. And honestly, they're probably writing the things they think are important, and perhaps even the things they spent a long time generating, you know. So if you spend a lot of time creating white papers, you probably score those very highly, the great thing about AI is it's going to take away some of that bias. And it's actually going to score based upon what really drives people to become customers. Now, of course, you've got to get that data on what actually happened, and how that links to someone becoming a customer. And again, in b2b, that can be very difficult because the purchaser can be different from the person who's actually the decision maker. And we all know that attribution is one of these hugely challenging problems. But I do think it makes sense to introduce AI. And I do think it can have some significant benefits, as I say, particularly around really getting to the bottom of what does correlate with someone becoming a customer, rather than what we think is important as marketers,
Hannah: I absolutely love that. Mike, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said it takes away the bias. I mean, as a marketer myself, you know, I spend forever on blogs. And I'm like, Well, if someone reads a blog, it's got to be important, right. But that's not necessarily the journey they're actually taking. That's important. So I think that's such a valuable point, because it will really help with identifying and digging down and especially in the tech industry as well, is what's actually important, and what's actually driving the people to make the decisions.
Mike: Yeah, for sure. And to some extent, you actually don't need AI because you can measure it and use maths, the AI is going to try and pattern match a bit more quickly. So that can potentially generate results sooner. I mean, the other thing I noticed was, you know, whilst act on made a big thing about the lead scoring, they to also announce at the same time that they've got generative AI to create emails. So, you know, again, that's going to be interesting, because what you potentially be doing is running your run AI looking at what was driving leads in the past, but then having a completely different email strategy, because it's easier to generate personalised emails, because you've got aI within the platform. So I think if you look at what's you know, what's happening, it's gonna be hard to get really good results on lead scoring all the time, because you're always dealing with historic data. And most people develop, expand and improve their marketing campaigns. But for sure, particularly if you have a large number of customers, AI is going to be a key part of actually scoring and prioritising leads.
Hannah: Yeah, absolutely agree. That's a really insightful thoughts. Thanks, Mike. So I'm weary of time. So I do want to move on to our insightful Tip of the Week. And we've spent a lot of time previously talking about how we can use market automation for lead nurturing, and for gaining new leads for the customer journeys. But what I'm really interested in talking about today is about keeping in touch with existing customers. And I think sometimes market is gonna get in the trap of like, okay, great, we've got the customer, we don't need to do anything to them anymore. We don't need to nurture them. But in my opinion, I actually think nurturing existing customers is so valuable to accompany. And so I'd like to get your thoughts on how beneficial is it to use your marketing automation platform to really nurture those existing customers? And how do you draw the line between staying in touch and annoying them?
Mike: Yeah, this is really interesting. I mean, I was introduced to this when I was learning about drip marketing at university. And I remember our drip marketing lecture. He said, If you're selling a car to consumers, only one question you have to ask. And, you know, we tried to guess the question. He eventually said, look, it's how long do you want to keep the car for? And apparently, that's a very accurate thing. When you ask a consumer, how long they expect to keep a car for. They normally give an accurate prediction, of course, what you need to do as a marketer, once you've sold the car is to be talking to them when they're picking their next car, whether that's in three years or five. previous time or whenever. And so I think we forget how important it is when we make that sale, to think about the next sale. And so with marketing, in b2b, it's absolutely the same, you know, quite often we're working with customers who, you know, perhaps have multiple projects running, certainly, we'll have a new project at some point in the future. And what we need to do is we need to engage them to help them in the period where we're waiting for that next project. And that can be all sorts of things that can be providing information to help them use the products that they've actually chosen, you know, great example would be in some of our seMikekonductor companies, people purchase evaluation boards, these complex boards to let engineers understand how to use a seMikekonductor product. Why are marketers not emailing those engineers, to help them get up to speed more quickly, and improve that experience of using one of your products. And equally as they move through the design, we also know there'll be choosing other products. So you know, it's the same thing, if you look at, you know, someone doing a factory automation project, quite clearly, there's a big deployment of products into the factory to upgrade, but then it's all sorts of things around maintenance, that gives you opportunities to go and sell in more services, or indeed, sometimes more products. And I think as marketers, we need to, you know, forget about we market sell, and we're done. And actually think about a much longer relationship with a customer, I think about the customer over their whole lifetime, rather than over one purchase journey.
Hannah: I really like that Mikek. And I think what I would add to that as well is that within the market automation platforms themselves is this sort of communication doesn't need to be hard. It can be really easy. It's it's automations, you can set up a year in advance, you know, oh, we are customer has been this engineers. When we've asked for six months, let's do a check in. It's not something that you necessarily have to think about every day. But having those automations set up for success from the start is really important and being successful.
Mike: definitely agree. I mean, you do an amazing thing, for example, on anniversaries of clients working with us sending them birthday cakes and things like that. So, you know, very simple things can actually make a really big difference.
Hannah: Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for your time again today, Mike, it's been a really interesting conversation.
Mike: Thanks, Hannah. And hopefully we'll talk to our listeners again on the next episode of The Marketing Automation moment.
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.
The Chris Voss Show Podcast - The Napier 4-Step Process
Chris Voss host of The Chris Voss Show Podcast recently sat down with Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier, to discuss the Napier 4-step process.
Listen to the interview here: https://thechrisvossshow.com/the-chris-voss-show-podcast-mike-maynard-managing-director-of-napier-the-awareness-to-opportunity-agency-delivering-results-for-b2b-technology-clients/
Social Media Examiner - Agency Growth Through Strategic Acquisitions
Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier, recently sat down with Social Media Examiner for a conversation about how strategic acquisitions can help agencies grow.
Find out how to scale your marketing agency.
Listen to the interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYRlgo7zFIE
Can AI Really Support Content Generation?
Everywhere you look, everything is about AI. But how can AI actually support content generation? In this special episode of the podcast, Napier’s Mike Maynard and Hannah Kelly discuss the capabilities of AI in marketing automation platforms. They also chat about how email signatures can be leveraged by marketers, what to consider when writing subject lines and how companies can grow their subscriber database.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcasts
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Podbean
Time Stamps
[01:03.0] – Will AI make our lives easier?
[04:44.0] – Can we use AI and generative AI to optimise campaigns?
[10:33.0] – Email signatures – how can marketers maximise their impact.
[12:51.0] – The challenges of growing subscriber databases whilst complying with GDPR.
[17:39.0] – How to write a good subject line.
Quotes
“Do you just want to be average in your marketing automation? Or do you want to create something that is above average? People who are above average will do better than AI.” Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier.
“AI can be a great start but if you think it’s going to replace you, unfortunately the good news is you’re job safe, the bad news is you’ve still got to do some work.” Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier.
Follow Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-kelly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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 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://marketingb2btech.napierb2b.com/
Transcript
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 marketinging automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast.
Mike: Today we talk about AI. And that's probably enough to get most of you listening. But I promise if you do listen to the podcast, there'll be lots more as well, including things like how to write a great subject line.
Hannah: So welcome back. Mike, you just got back from another trip in the US. How was it?
Mike: It was great. Actually, I'm feeling a little bit jet lagged. But really keen to have another chat about marketinging automation. Well,
Hannah: I appreciate you making the time. I've got a lot to talk UVU about. So I'm really excited to just dive straight in. I mean, the first thing that I've seen is actually having a scroll through Actos website earlier this week. And it's no surprise that a lot of content is about AI. Everywhere you look, everything's about AI. But I think one thing that's really interesting, which I'd like to dive into is, how can AI actually support content generation within marketinging automation platforms? So how effective is it for emails, landing pages? Will it make people's lives easier? Or are they going down a path that perhaps isn't right to get that high quality content they need?
Mike: I love that question. Hana. I mean, I think it's really interesting. The truth is, you know, speaking as an engineer, it's actually really easy to integrate something like chat GPT into a product today. And so because chat GPT is the hottest thing on the planet, apparently, I think most of the marketing automation companies are looking at going this is an easy one, we've just got to do it. So they're all integrating generative AI. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I think, you know, firstly, we've got to look at this, you know, people are saying, well, we want generative AI to create personal emails for everybody in my database. Actually, they're not even using basic marketinging, automation, personalization tools. So, you know, for people to suddenly think that personalization is the greatest thing, because they've been really lazy. And now it feels a bit easier. That's probably not the right way to go. Personalization is important. But maybe AI is not the right thing to use. So I think it's gonna be interesting. But I think the thing you've got to remember is that AI and I'm sure I've said this to you before, a number of times, it tries to predict the most likely next word, I mean, that's fundamentally how generative AI works. And so what it's trying to do is be average. So the question is, do you just want to be average in your marketinging automation? Or do you want to generate something's above average, so if you're really good, generative AI might be great for ideas and giving you a start, but actually, it's not going to remove the work of really polishing that email, or really getting that landing page, right? Because people are above average, will actually do better than AI.
Hannah: I love that so much above average. And I think when it comes to B2B as well, having this technical content that we have to write is even more important that yes, you can use this API to draft the first kind of landing page or the first email, but you still need those experts to put that input and put their insight to make it this high quality piece of content.
Mike: You're so right. I mean, it's another great point, you know, generative AI is, is what really geeky people like me call a stochastic process is based on probability. And it's been trained on history. So if you're writing a landing page about something that's a completely new, innovative product, why should AI which is trying to predict words based upon what was said, in the past, generate a great landing page, if you've got a product that's very similar to lots of other products, maybe AI is going to generate a pretty decent landing page. But I think, where we're looking at promoting new technologies and new products, that's where AI is really going to start to struggle. So again, it does come back to the fact that, you know, I don't think it's a bad thing to use it. But I think it's a bad thing to trust it. 100% I think, really, you know, what people need to be doing is using AI. I mean, the classic thing is, you know, if you've got writer's block, you're sat there thinking, I have no idea what to write, then AI can be a great start. But if you think it's going to replace you, unfortunately, you know, the good news is your job safe. The bad news is you still got to do some work.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I guess just extend on that a little bit. Mike Lee, looking at this AI and this generative AI, how can we use it to optimise campaigns, is it something that we should be using more for optimising campaigns or when we're actually trying to break out 20 marketings a new client is a new product, where would you think it fits best?
Mike: So now I feel a bit geeky, because generative AI is the AI that creates content, whereas other AI technologies and machine learning will actually learn from what you've done. And then try and optimise. So you know, what's generative AI might produce, in theory, a good set of copy, what you need is different sorts of AI that are going to measure how well your campaign has been received. And look at how changes can impact the performance. Now the problem is, is what's going to happen is the people going to run AI across previous campaigns, and then try and use those previous campaigns to dictate how to optimise the new campaign. If you're running lots of similar campaigns, happy days, that's going to work. But if you're running something very new, or targeting a new audience, there may be what worked before isn't necessarily optimum for today. So again, I think AI is fascinating. It's something that that's definitely going to help in optimization. And let's be honest, you know, most of us are doing things like running, you know, Google Pay per click campaigns, whether it's search with display, we're already using AI to optimise it, we're quite happily buying into the Google AI world. So we're gonna use it. But I think sometimes the marketinging automation need to take a step back and say, Actually, I'm doing something new. And maybe I need to take a new approach a different approach, rather than replicate exactly what I've done when I was talking to a different audience about a different product.
Hannah: I love that mindset. Mike, I think it's definitely something to consider. And I think it's something that industry will learn, because you'll soon see if the results aren't the same for a similar campaign as they are for new campaigns.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, you're right, you know, if you just let AI run, it'll optimise some campaigns brilliantly, other campaigns, not so much. And I think, again, AI is going to be a tool AI is not the solution. And I think if you look at what happens with technology, technology very rarely replaces complete functions, what technology does, it replaces processes, and little aspects. And my view is, is that where we see this magic marketinging AI that comes in and does all your marketinging for you, you just go run marketinging campaign, I'll see you on Friday. And it all runs, I don't think that's going to be the way I actually you know, has an impact, what I personally think is AI is going to be everywhere, some of the time, you're not even really going to see it. And it will be all over the place in all of the different martech tools, doing little optimizations or creating content suggestions, or, you know, even maybe generating some of the content. And I think it's just going to be embedded everywhere. And that's where it's gonna get really exciting, because you're just gonna get that AI to do a little bit here a little bit here a little bit here, suddenly, you've saved yourself, maybe 50% 75% of the time to run a campaign. But you're still in there, you're still doing that direction, and where it's appropriate, you're still providing that kind of subjective judgement.
Hannah: Absolutely, I think it leads back into a nice point of the next thing I want to talk about. And that is around events. And we know as marketingers that perhaps the companies that we work with, and our prospects, and our clients aren't always the best utilising marketing automation when it comes to events. But as you said, AI is going to be embedded into systems now is going to be there when you don't even notice it. And I think this is going to be one of the key areas that we actually see time saved, where it can be the most efficient is building these event follow ups these fantastic to beat you. webinar follow up webinar registration emails, I think they're I see the real value from the marketinging perspective, or where AI to make a real difference very quickly, within the marketinging teams.
Mike: Yeah, and obviously, you know, you know about this, because you do all the follow up for napery webinars. So, you know, you have this problem of creating these follow up emails, and typically, they follow us fairly standard kind of format. And I think, you know, that's where AI is really going to come into its own, you know, the thank you for attending, here's a replay, we don't need to type that email, again, you know, an average email is going to be good enough for that. So I completely agree with you, Hannah. I think AI is going to have an impact in this event follow up. And hopefully, it's going to mean that people have, you know, more personalised and more thoughtful follow up, because they're not spending all the time on kind of the mechanical basics that you have to do after an event.
Hannah: I think the key thing there, Mike is thoughtful, because marketingers can sometimes be let down where they're rushing, they're just doing these bland kind of mass emails. But we know that personalization makes a difference. And if you can utilise tools to make that difference, and especially I think events have come back. I mean, I was on a meeting on Monday, and we were talking about how we couldn't believe the attendance at the events, you know, B2B or UK across the globe. And I think as the world kind of still goes down that events route, it's just going to be amazing to see the kind of follow up that comes from being able to utilise these tools, and then also them channelling investment from these events because they've been able to do this real personalised outreach was not a lot of effort.
Mike: Yeah, I think you're right. And I mean, if we look at what's happening, there's real evidence people want human to human contact, they want to see people's personality. It's something that's talked a lot about in B2B. And you get that trade shows, you get to meet people, you get to fill their personalities. And I think that's, you know, another reason whilst AI can come in, and it can make a massive difference for our job day to day, it's probably not gonna replace us at least hopefully, it's not replaced. So fingers crossed. So I mean, I know we can speak about AI for a good another 20 minutes, Mike, but I do want to steer us into a slightly different direction. And that is email signatures. And this is something that we've not yet discussed on the podcast. And it's something that I really believe is overlooked. I mean, at Napier, I spent a lot of time working with our IT engineer to build personalised signatures based on the accounts, people work on our case studies, our awards, and HubSpot actually released a blog recently that said that 77.8% of users check their email inbox more than five times a day. And so actually, email signatures can be such a fantastic way to improve brand awareness. What's your opinion on them?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I love the way HubSpot went in and said people check email, therefore, signatures are important. I mean, that kind of was a bit of a jump there. But having said that, you're absolutely right, when you do use email signatures, then absolutely, you can get some really good value. And I've seen clients use automated email signatures for all sorts of things. That Classic is, when you're nominated for award to get people to vote, and the clients that do that get great response. So it's really clear these people checking emails five times a day, actually read to the bottom of the email, and they actually do look at signatures. And the great thing about a signature is if you're interacting with someone on a frequent basis, maybe they don't notice the signature the first time they get an email from you. But when they're getting emails, you know, maybe once a day, twice a day, whatever. Suddenly that signature starts having impacts, it keeps getting repeated. So I'm a massive believer. And as you know, we've got technology and API's that will put in dynamic signatures based upon who's sending the email and, as you say, you know, for example, the accounts they're working on. So it makes a huge difference. And I think it's sometimes a bit unsexy, in a bit underrated in terms of a marketinging tactic. And a lot more B2B companies could actually think about what they put in the signatures, and they could think about changing the signatures, for example, depending upon who they're sending to, or who's sending the email that then lets those signatures feel, you know, really customised and personal.
Hannah: I love this mic. I think it's the first time we've wholeheartedly agreed on something.
Mike: Well, it's nice for there to be a first time I'm sure we've got another story so we can return to normal.
Hannah: So thanks for that insight, like I mean, slightly moving on back into more than marketing automation platforms. And I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts around ways that companies can not only maintain, but also grow a subscriber list of in their databases. And I think there are challenges here with GDPR compliance if you require opt in. So what kinds of things can companies do to overcome this?
Mike: Etc. Interesting, I think the first thing to say is that GDPR is important to understand what the rules say. And in B2B, obviously, with some exceptions, you actually don't need explicit opt in. But a lot of companies choose to go that way. And that is not a bad thing. So they're actually choosing to focus on quality rather than quantity. And clearly, for growing a list, as you said, opting in or requiring someone to opt in, is actually going to make it harder to grow the list. But on the other side, that quality is going to be better. So you know, it's something you need to decide. And we have clients who take both they take the legitimate interest approach, and they take the opt in approach. And I think once you've decided that, that then defines a lot about what you do in terms of growing that list. And you.
Hannah: Absolutely, and I think there are ways that if you do this opt in way that you can still do incentives to encourage people to opt in. So we could do things like popups, you could do things such as all make sure you do tick this box and have a chance to get a discount on one of the products. I think there's more creative out of the box ways that you don't have to be limited to get those people to opt in.
Mike: I totally agree. I mean, one of our best tactics for a client is when people choose not to opt in, we just pop up in Marketingo on the landing page, a little box that just says Are you really sure you don't opt in? And I think, you know, one of the dangers is is that now it's almost a default to say, I don't want to opt in. But actually when people think about it, they go, Oh, actually, I quite like the supplier. They could give me some useful information. Maybe I do want to opt in. So I think that there's lots of things you can do to think about getting people to fill that form in getting them to opt in if you've got an opt in process. And then also, we're thinking about retaining those people on the database and making sure you send them good quality content, so they don't opt out.
Hannah: That's such a good point, the growing is as important as it is maintaining, and you have to engage your contacts in your database. And you have to provide that high quality content, prove that they've made the right decision.
Mike: Exactly. And I think, you know, again, this is this is something that's really interesting, because, you know, some clients will gather more data than others. And the more data you can gather about the people that you're mailing, the more personalised that content can be. And so you know, even me in my my day to day marketinging life, I get emails, you know, telling me about events all around the world, it's like, I'm not based in America, you know, a trip to San Francisco is quite a big deal for someone from Europe. And I really don't care about this event, because I know you're running an equivalent one in London. And that's much closer to me. But clearly, the person who's captured my name hasn't captured the country I'm based in so they're sending me information on everything. So that gathering and that enhancing of the information. That's a really important thing that relates to retention, because the more you can understand your database, the better you can personalise, and therefore the more likely people are to feel that the emails I get are relevant, useful, and not emails they want to opt out from.
Hannah: Absolutely, and it's quite easy to do, because performance within all moto automation platforms have the capability to do progressive profiling. So it's really easy to gather that information, it doesn't have to be a difficult task.
Mike: You're so right when I mean progressive profiling is marked information superpower. But, you know, I think most people use to some extent, but often is underrated. And clearly, what you want to do is you want to try and keep gathering more and more information, not because you know, you're some kind of, you know, freaky obsessive collector of data, or wanting to go in and spam people, but because you want to actually send more relevant content. And the other thing to remember is, you don't actually just need to use forms to do that, you can actually use behaviour. So look at what people are clicking on, if you've got a recipient that only clicks on content that relates to events in the UK, at some point, you're going to hope that sensible marketingers are going to say, I'm gonna make a guess this person lives in the UK, and I'm just gonna send them content around events in the UK. And then you'll reap benefits because you'll get much more engagement, your emails will be much more effective. And also people are much less likely to opt out.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I love that it's the marketing automation superpower. That's the only way I'm going to describe it moving forward. So I'm just conscious of time, Mike. So I do want to move on to our insightful Tip of the Week. And this week, I really wanted to talk about subject lines. Now subject lines are so important within emails, and within ebooks, within ADS, everything like that. But if we focus in on emails, how do you think different subject lines make a difference in engagement rate? And what are some of the best subject lines that have made you open an email?
Mike: I love this question. Because there's, there's so much focus on the minor things. And so little focus on the things that really matter. So you'll read endless studies that have analysed you know, the optimum number of characters in the subject line, or, you know, people talking about you should use title case rather than sentence case. So you have a few more capitals to make people open. And the truth is these, these make a difference. But the difference is really tiny. What really matters is something people care about. And I think the interesting thing is, subject lines are important, but from addresses are very, very important too. And I mean, I've had emails where I know I open it, because it's the from address, it's got nothing to do with the subject line. I mean, do you see the same thing?
Hannah: Yes. What a brilliant point. Yeah, the from email is so important. Because if it's just from a standard marketinging app named your B2B dot com, you know, it's not personalised, you know, no one's made any effort for you. But if you have that real person behind the email, it makes such a difference.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, you know, I give a shout. I just remember one email recently, that really, I think gets a lot of white people open emails. And it was for an organisation called Zen pilots in pilot are a company that helps agencies optimise their processes. So for me, it's really relevant. And in fact, it's so relevant, that I actually downloaded one of their tools. And the tool was amazing. It was really good. So, you know, immediately I was engaged. Everything was sent by a guy called Jeff Cypher. I believe that's his real name, but it's a very memorable name. So he's a lucky guy there. And then the next time the email comes in, I'm already thinking about the tool I've used on process definition. And I'm thinking this guy's got great fun Hmm, last time I opened an email, it was brilliant. I want to open the next email. And then I can't remember he sent me through a worksheet or something that again, was, was really thoughtful. It's a really good tool. And then he sent me through a couple of personalised kind of offers to try and move me down that funnel. And I think lots of things were at play there, the subject lines, they weren't that great. I mean, they kind of refer to what what he said before, but you know, they weren't particularly innovative or creative or, and as I remember, they weren't even titled case of a sentence case. So you know, they weren't going to optimise like mad on the subject line. But because of that history, and that interaction I had, I open the email. And so I think, yes, we can look at subject lines, and we can optimise them, and you can read the MailChimp or whoever's report on, you know, this is a way to structure structure subject lines. But actually, what you've got to do is build trust. If you build trust and engagement, people will open your email. And you can pretty much get away with any subject line. If you've got that trust and engagement.
Hannah: That's some brilliant insight. Like I absolutely love that. It's about trust. It's about the content. Yes, you can do all these optimizations. But if your core content piece isn't delivering the value, then it's not going to make a difference. Anyway.
Mike: That's beautifully summarised. You've summarised about half an hour of my waffling in two sentences.
Hannah: Well, thank you so much for your time today, Mike. It's been another fantastic conversation.
Mike: Thanks so much, Hannah. And hopefully we'll have everybody else listening to the next episode of The Marketinging Automation Moment.
Thanks for listening to the Marketinging Automation Moment podcast.
Mike: Don't forget to subscribe in your favourite podcast application, and we'll see you next time.
Crossover Episode - Can AI Really Support Content Generation?
Everywhere you look, everything is about AI. But how can AI actually support content generation? In this special episode of the podcast, Napier’s Mike Maynard and Hannah Kelly discuss the capabilities of AI in marketing automation platforms. They also chat about how email signatures can be leveraged by marketers, what to consider when writing subject lines and how companies can grow their subscriber database.
Check out this crossover episode with Napier’s sister podcast, The Marketing Automation Moment, sharing the latest news, views and tips from the world of marketing automation.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Time Stamps
[01:03.0] – Will AI make our lives easier?
[04:44.0] – Can we use AI and generative AI to optimise campaigns?
[10:33.0] – Email signatures – how can marketers maximise their impact.
[12:51.0] – The challenges of growing subscriber databases whilst complying with GDPR.
[17:39.0] – How to write a good subject line.
Quotes
“Do you just want to be average in your marketing automation? Or do you want to create something that is above average? People who are above average will do better than AI.” Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier.
“AI can be a great start but if you think it’s going to replace you, unfortunately the good news is you’re job safe, the bad news is you’ve still got to do some work.” Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier.
Follow Hannah:
Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-kelly-b0706a107/
Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/
Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/
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
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly
Mike: Welcome to marketinging B2B technology, the podcast from Napier. Because it's summer and I'm away on my holidays. This week we've got a special episode from our sister podcast, the Marketinging Automation Moment. So if you as a marketinger use marketinging automation tools of any sort, take a listen to this podcast. Maybe it's something you want to subscribe to in the future.
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 marketinging automation.
Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast.
Mike: Today we talk about AI. And that's probably enough to get most of you listening. But I promise if you do listen to the podcast, there'll be lots more as well, including things like how to write a great subject line.
Hannah: So welcome back. Mike, you just got back from another trip in the US. How was it?
Mike: It was great. Actually, I'm feeling a little bit jet lagged. But really keen to have another chat about marketinging automation. Well,
Hannah: I appreciate you making the time. I've got a lot to talk UVU about. So I'm really excited to just dive straight in. I mean, the first thing that I've seen is actually having a scroll through Actos website earlier this week. And it's no surprise that a lot of content is about AI. Everywhere you look, everything's about AI. But I think one thing that's really interesting, which I'd like to dive into is, how can AI actually support content generation within marketinging automation platforms? So how effective is it for emails, landing pages? Will it make people's lives easier? Or are they going down a path that perhaps isn't right to get that high quality content they need?
Mike: I love that question. Hana. I mean, I think it's really interesting. The truth is, you know, speaking as an engineer, it's actually really easy to integrate something like chat GPT into a product today. And so because chat GPT is the hottest thing on the planet, apparently, I think most of the marketing automation companies are looking at going this is an easy one, we've just got to do it. So they're all integrating generative AI. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. But I think, you know, firstly, we've got to look at this, you know, people are saying, well, we want generative AI to create personal emails for everybody in my database. Actually, they're not even using basic marketinging, automation, personalization tools. So, you know, for people to suddenly think that personalization is the greatest thing, because they've been really lazy. And now it feels a bit easier. That's probably not the right way to go. Personalization is important. But maybe AI is not the right thing to use. So I think it's gonna be interesting. But I think the thing you've got to remember is that AI and I'm sure I've said this to you before, a number of times, it tries to predict the most likely next word, I mean, that's fundamentally how generative AI works. And so what it's trying to do is be average. So the question is, do you just want to be average in your marketinging automation? Or do you want to generate something's above average, so if you're really good, generative AI might be great for ideas and giving you a start, but actually, it's not going to remove the work of really polishing that email, or really getting that landing page, right? Because people are above average, will actually do better than AI.
Hannah: I love that so much above average. And I think when it comes to B2B as well, having this technical content that we have to write is even more important that yes, you can use this API to draft the first kind of landing page or the first email, but you still need those experts to put that input and put their insight to make it this high quality piece of content.
Mike: You're so right. I mean, it's another great point, you know, generative AI is, is what really geeky people like me call a stochastic process is based on probability. And it's been trained on history. So if you're writing a landing page about something that's a completely new, innovative product, why should AI which is trying to predict words based upon what was said, in the past, generate a great landing page, if you've got a product that's very similar to lots of other products, maybe AI is going to generate a pretty decent landing page. But I think, where we're looking at promoting new technologies and new products, that's where AI is really going to start to struggle. So again, it does come back to the fact that, you know, I don't think it's a bad thing to use it. But I think it's a bad thing to trust it. 100% I think, really, you know, what people need to be doing is using AI. I mean, the classic thing is, you know, if you've got writer's block, you're sat there thinking, I have no idea what to write, then AI can be a great start. But if you think it's going to replace you, unfortunately, you know, the good news is your job safe. The bad news is you still got to do some work.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I guess just extend on that a little bit. Mike Lee, looking at this AI and this generative AI, how can we use it to optimise campaigns, is it something that we should be using more for optimising campaigns or when we're actually trying to break out 20 marketings a new client is a new product, where would you think it fits best?
Mike: So now I feel a bit geeky, because generative AI is the AI that creates content, whereas other AI technologies and machine learning will actually learn from what you've done. And then try and optimise. So you know, what's generative AI might produce, in theory, a good set of copy, what you need is different sorts of AI that are going to measure how well your campaign has been received. And look at how changes can impact the performance. Now the problem is, is what's going to happen is the people going to run AI across previous campaigns, and then try and use those previous campaigns to dictate how to optimise the new campaign. If you're running lots of similar campaigns, happy days, that's going to work. But if you're running something very new, or targeting a new audience, there may be what worked before isn't necessarily optimum for today. So again, I think AI is fascinating. It's something that that's definitely going to help in optimization. And let's be honest, you know, most of us are doing things like running, you know, Google Pay per click campaigns, whether it's search with display, we're already using AI to optimise it, we're quite happily buying into the Google AI world. So we're gonna use it. But I think sometimes the marketinging automation need to take a step back and say, Actually, I'm doing something new. And maybe I need to take a new approach a different approach, rather than replicate exactly what I've done when I was talking to a different audience about a different product.
Hannah: I love that mindset. Mike, I think it's definitely something to consider. And I think it's something that industry will learn, because you'll soon see if the results aren't the same for a similar campaign as they are for new campaigns.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, you're right, you know, if you just let AI run, it'll optimise some campaigns brilliantly, other campaigns, not so much. And I think, again, AI is going to be a tool AI is not the solution. And I think if you look at what happens with technology, technology very rarely replaces complete functions, what technology does, it replaces processes, and little aspects. And my view is, is that where we see this magic marketinging AI that comes in and does all your marketinging for you, you just go run marketinging campaign, I'll see you on Friday. And it all runs, I don't think that's going to be the way I actually you know, has an impact, what I personally think is AI is going to be everywhere, some of the time, you're not even really going to see it. And it will be all over the place in all of the different martech tools, doing little optimizations or creating content suggestions, or, you know, even maybe generating some of the content. And I think it's just going to be embedded everywhere. And that's where it's gonna get really exciting, because you're just gonna get that AI to do a little bit here a little bit here a little bit here, suddenly, you've saved yourself, maybe 50% 75% of the time to run a campaign. But you're still in there, you're still doing that direction, and where it's appropriate, you're still providing that kind of subjective judgement.
Hannah: Absolutely, I think it leads back into a nice point of the next thing I want to talk about. And that is around events. And we know as marketingers that perhaps the companies that we work with, and our prospects, and our clients aren't always the best utilising marketing automation when it comes to events. But as you said, AI is going to be embedded into systems now is going to be there when you don't even notice it. And I think this is going to be one of the key areas that we actually see time saved, where it can be the most efficient is building these event follow ups these fantastic to beat you. webinar follow up webinar registration emails, I think they're I see the real value from the marketinging perspective, or where AI to make a real difference very quickly, within the marketinging teams.
Mike: Yeah, and obviously, you know, you know about this, because you do all the follow up for napery webinars. So, you know, you have this problem of creating these follow up emails, and typically, they follow us fairly standard kind of format. And I think, you know, that's where AI is really going to come into its own, you know, the thank you for attending, here's a replay, we don't need to type that email, again, you know, an average email is going to be good enough for that. So I completely agree with you, Hannah. I think AI is going to have an impact in this event follow up. And hopefully, it's going to mean that people have, you know, more personalised and more thoughtful follow up, because they're not spending all the time on kind of the mechanical basics that you have to do after an event.
Hannah: I think the key thing there, Mike is thoughtful, because marketingers can sometimes be let down where they're rushing, they're just doing these bland kind of mass emails. But we know that personalization makes a difference. And if you can utilise tools to make that difference, and especially I think events have come back. I mean, I was on a meeting on Monday, and we were talking about how we couldn't believe the attendance at the events, you know, B2B or UK across the globe. And I think as the world kind of still goes down that events route, it's just going to be amazing to see the kind of follow up that comes from being able to utilise these tools, and then also them channelling investment from these events because they've been able to do this real personalised outreach was not a lot of effort.
Mike: Yeah, I think you're right. And I mean, if we look at what's happening, there's real evidence people want human to human contact, they want to see people's personality. It's something that's talked a lot about in B2B. And you get that trade shows, you get to meet people, you get to fill their personalities. And I think that's, you know, another reason whilst AI can come in, and it can make a massive difference for our job day to day, it's probably not gonna replace us at least hopefully, it's not replaced. So fingers crossed. So I mean, I know we can speak about AI for a good another 20 minutes, Mike, but I do want to steer us into a slightly different direction. And that is email signatures. And this is something that we've not yet discussed on the podcast. And it's something that I really believe is overlooked. I mean, at Napier, I spent a lot of time working with our IT engineer to build personalised signatures based on the accounts, people work on our case studies, our awards, and HubSpot actually released a blog recently that said that 77.8% of users check their email inbox more than five times a day. And so actually, email signatures can be such a fantastic way to improve brand awareness. What's your opinion on them?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I love the way HubSpot went in and said people check email, therefore, signatures are important. I mean, that kind of was a bit of a jump there. But having said that, you're absolutely right, when you do use email signatures, then absolutely, you can get some really good value. And I've seen clients use automated email signatures for all sorts of things. That Classic is, when you're nominated for award to get people to vote, and the clients that do that get great response. So it's really clear these people checking emails five times a day, actually read to the bottom of the email, and they actually do look at signatures. And the great thing about a signature is if you're interacting with someone on a frequent basis, maybe they don't notice the signature the first time they get an email from you. But when they're getting emails, you know, maybe once a day, twice a day, whatever. Suddenly that signature starts having impacts, it keeps getting repeated. So I'm a massive believer. And as you know, we've got technology and API's that will put in dynamic signatures based upon who's sending the email and, as you say, you know, for example, the accounts they're working on. So it makes a huge difference. And I think it's sometimes a bit unsexy, in a bit underrated in terms of a marketinging tactic. And a lot more B2B companies could actually think about what they put in the signatures, and they could think about changing the signatures, for example, depending upon who they're sending to, or who's sending the email that then lets those signatures feel, you know, really customised and personal.
Hannah: I love this mic. I think it's the first time we've wholeheartedly agreed on something.
Mike: Well, it's nice for there to be a first time I'm sure we've got another story so we can return to normal.
Hannah: So thanks for that insight, like I mean, slightly moving on back into more than marketing automation platforms. And I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts around ways that companies can not only maintain, but also grow a subscriber list of in their databases. And I think there are challenges here with GDPR compliance if you require opt in. So what kinds of things can companies do to overcome this?
Mike: Etc. Interesting, I think the first thing to say is that GDPR is important to understand what the rules say. And in B2B, obviously, with some exceptions, you actually don't need explicit opt in. But a lot of companies choose to go that way. And that is not a bad thing. So they're actually choosing to focus on quality rather than quantity. And clearly, for growing a list, as you said, opting in or requiring someone to opt in, is actually going to make it harder to grow the list. But on the other side, that quality is going to be better. So you know, it's something you need to decide. And we have clients who take both they take the legitimate interest approach, and they take the opt in approach. And I think once you've decided that, that then defines a lot about what you do in terms of growing that list. And you.
Hannah: Absolutely, and I think there are ways that if you do this opt in way that you can still do incentives to encourage people to opt in. So we could do things like popups, you could do things such as all make sure you do tick this box and have a chance to get a discount on one of the products. I think there's more creative out of the box ways that you don't have to be limited to get those people to opt in.
Mike: I totally agree. I mean, one of our best tactics for a client is when people choose not to opt in, we just pop up in Marketingo on the landing page, a little box that just says Are you really sure you don't opt in? And I think, you know, one of the dangers is is that now it's almost a default to say, I don't want to opt in. But actually when people think about it, they go, Oh, actually, I quite like the supplier. They could give me some useful information. Maybe I do want to opt in. So I think that there's lots of things you can do to think about getting people to fill that form in getting them to opt in if you've got an opt in process. And then also, we're thinking about retaining those people on the database and making sure you send them good quality content, so they don't opt out.
Hannah: That's such a good point, the growing is as important as it is maintaining, and you have to engage your contacts in your database. And you have to provide that high quality content, prove that they've made the right decision.
Mike: Exactly. And I think, you know, again, this is this is something that's really interesting, because, you know, some clients will gather more data than others. And the more data you can gather about the people that you're mailing, the more personalised that content can be. And so you know, even me in my my day to day marketinging life, I get emails, you know, telling me about events all around the world, it's like, I'm not based in America, you know, a trip to San Francisco is quite a big deal for someone from Europe. And I really don't care about this event, because I know you're running an equivalent one in London. And that's much closer to me. But clearly, the person who's captured my name hasn't captured the country I'm based in so they're sending me information on everything. So that gathering and that enhancing of the information. That's a really important thing that relates to retention, because the more you can understand your database, the better you can personalise, and therefore the more likely people are to feel that the emails I get are relevant, useful, and not emails they want to opt out from.
Hannah: Absolutely, and it's quite easy to do, because performance within all moto automation platforms have the capability to do progressive profiling. So it's really easy to gather that information, it doesn't have to be a difficult task.
Mike: You're so right when I mean progressive profiling is marked information superpower. But, you know, I think most people use to some extent, but often is underrated. And clearly, what you want to do is you want to try and keep gathering more and more information, not because you know, you're some kind of, you know, freaky obsessive collector of data, or wanting to go in and spam people, but because you want to actually send more relevant content. And the other thing to remember is, you don't actually just need to use forms to do that, you can actually use behaviour. So look at what people are clicking on, if you've got a recipient that only clicks on content that relates to events in the UK, at some point, you're going to hope that sensible marketingers are going to say, I'm gonna make a guess this person lives in the UK, and I'm just gonna send them content around events in the UK. And then you'll reap benefits because you'll get much more engagement, your emails will be much more effective. And also people are much less likely to opt out.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I love that it's the marketing automation superpower. That's the only way I'm going to describe it moving forward. So I'm just conscious of time, Mike. So I do want to move on to our insightful Tip of the Week. And this week, I really wanted to talk about subject lines. Now subject lines are so important within emails, and within ebooks, within ADS, everything like that. But if we focus in on emails, how do you think different subject lines make a difference in engagement rate? And what are some of the best subject lines that have made you open an email?
Mike: I love this question. Because there's, there's so much focus on the minor things. And so little focus on the things that really matter. So you'll read endless studies that have analysed you know, the optimum number of characters in the subject line, or, you know, people talking about you should use title case rather than sentence case. So you have a few more capitals to make people open. And the truth is these, these make a difference. But the difference is really tiny. What really matters is something people care about. And I think the interesting thing is, subject lines are important, but from addresses are very, very important too. And I mean, I've had emails where I know I open it, because it's the from address, it's got nothing to do with the subject line. I mean, do you see the same thing?
Hannah: Yes. What a brilliant point. Yeah, the from email is so important. Because if it's just from a standard marketinging app named your B2B dot com, you know, it's not personalised, you know, no one's made any effort for you. But if you have that real person behind the email, it makes such a difference.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, you know, I give a shout. I just remember one email recently, that really, I think gets a lot of white people open emails. And it was for an organisation called Zen pilots in pilot are a company that helps agencies optimise their processes. So for me, it's really relevant. And in fact, it's so relevant, that I actually downloaded one of their tools. And the tool was amazing. It was really good. So, you know, immediately I was engaged. Everything was sent by a guy called Jeff Cypher. I believe that's his real name, but it's a very memorable name. So he's a lucky guy there. And then the next time the email comes in, I'm already thinking about the tool I've used on process definition. And I'm thinking this guy's got great fun Hmm, last time I opened an email, it was brilliant. I want to open the next email. And then I can't remember he sent me through a worksheet or something that again, was, was really thoughtful. It's a really good tool. And then he sent me through a couple of personalised kind of offers to try and move me down that funnel. And I think lots of things were at play there, the subject lines, they weren't that great. I mean, they kind of refer to what what he said before, but you know, they weren't particularly innovative or creative or, and as I remember, they weren't even titled case of a sentence case. So you know, they weren't going to optimise like mad on the subject line. But because of that history, and that interaction I had, I open the email. And so I think, yes, we can look at subject lines, and we can optimise them, and you can read the MailChimp or whoever's report on, you know, this is a way to structure structure subject lines. But actually, what you've got to do is build trust. If you build trust and engagement, people will open your email. And you can pretty much get away with any subject line. If you've got that trust and engagement.
Hannah: That's some brilliant insight. Like I absolutely love that. It's about trust. It's about the content. Yes, you can do all these optimizations. But if your core content piece isn't delivering the value, then it's not going to make a difference. Anyway.
Mike: That's beautifully summarised. You've summarised about half an hour of my waffling in two sentences.
Hannah: Well, thank you so much for your time today, Mike. It's been another fantastic conversation.
Mike: Thanks so much, Hannah. And hopefully we'll have everybody else listening to the next episode of The Marketinging Automation Moment.
Thanks for listening to the Marketinging Automation Moment podcast.
Mike: Don't forget to subscribe in your favourite podcast application, and we'll see you next time.
The Business That Story Built Podcast: Guest Mike Maynard
Christie Bilbrey, host of The Business That Story Built podcast recently sat down with Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier, for a conversation about how to ensure you target the right prospects and some of the ways to successfully do so.
Listen to the interview here: https://www.christiebilbrey.com/podcast/kscubuefnh6tqe82sm961lmzjqm25d
A Napier Podcast Interview with Farzad Rashidi - Respona
Farzad Rashidi, lead innovator at Respona, a link-building tool, discusses the origin of the business as an internal tool within the content creation platform Visme. He shares top tips for getting good quality backlinks and creating backlink campaigns that benefit both the requesting business and the providing business.
He also shares how to capitalise on current trends and discusses a successful campaign involving Game of Thrones that dramatically increased Respona's page rankings.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Farzad Rashidi - Respona
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Farzad Rashidi
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 Farzad Rashidi. Farzad founded and is now the lead innovator at Respona. Welcome to the podcast. Farzad,
Farzad: Thank you so much for having me, Mike.
Mike: So far said we'd like to start off by asking our guests how they got to where they are today. So can you tell us a little bit about your career journey?
Farzad: Sure. Thanks. So I started my career in marketing at a company called Visby. Have you heard of vids? Me, Mike before?
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Their presentation tools company.
Farzad: That's right. Yeah. So it's an all in one visual content creation platform. For businesses. We came around the same time as Canva kind of went down the b2c market and they've now become a household name, we took a different approach focus a little bit more on the business side of things. So cater predominantly to SMB, and enterprise. And so I joined as a first marketing hire Bazmee. And we basically grew, the company completely bootstrapped to over 20 million active users. And the way we acquired all these customers and users has been predominantly through our content and SEO. So right now visit means website is getting close to about 4 million monthly organic traffic. And so lots of lots of trial and error to get there. However, what what was really key to kind of help skyrocket our traffic at this meeting was our Off Page promotion tactics, which basically helped us build relationships with relevant authoritative publications in our space. And those tactics were sort of done all over the place by manual work and spreadsheets and whatnot. So we put it together under one roof. And it was sort of an internal software for us for for a little while, and it just worked ridiculously well. And we decided to release it as a standalone product. So that's kind of the backstory of how we ended up with Respona.
Mike: And did respond to spin out as a separate company, or you will the same company,
Farzad: separate entities. However, we are self funded, in a way. So we are funded by Visby. They're technically our investor. But yes, we were kind of incubated out of there.
Mike: So it's pretty cool. So you did so well, with the first company, you were able to fund the second that sounds awesome. Thank you. So you talked about your off page SEO activities, and that was how you grew versus me. So Respona is basically that internal product you built that's now available to the public. So can you give me a you know, just a brief overview of what Respona does and what people would get if they subscribe to it? Sure,
Farzad: I mean, I don't mean this to be a plug for Respona. Most of us responded as really, you can do manually yourself. And that's actually what I recommend everyone to start, if you're not doing any sort of off page, promotion is better to always start manually and kind of get a proof of concept and see if this is something that works well in your niche. And if so then great. And our respondents kind of a gasoline, a floor on that fire and help scaling things without losing that personalised touch. And in that human touch. So kind of what our platform does is very simple. So from a technical perspective, you can find any website and it finds you the right people on those websites and helps you contact them with a personalised pitch, both through email and LinkedIn. So there's a bunch of different components to it. So today, you would normally have to purchase multiple different tools and conducted them together that respondent sort of brings together under one roof and automates a lot of dirty work and a lot of that, that tedious manual tasks that you can focus more on personalising the pitches and actually building relationships versus, you know, dealing with overhead. Now, as far as the use cases for the platform goes, just to kind of give you some examples, there's there's myriad of different ways in how we use this internally. And also different ways that customers find use cases for right. But predominantly, unless you produce a piece of linkable assets and, and you'd like to potentially get other publications to talk about and mention it, and then those backlinks and those mentions from those relevant publications, help your domain authority to go up and, and help that content piece kind of pass on that link equity to other pages in your websites. And now you start coming up in the search results for your own target keywords. So that process though, basically, just to kind of give you some examples, that there's one strategy, for example, what we call the podcast outreach strategy, and this is what I'm doing right now. Right?
So the way we found a you Mike and team got in touch with your team and found you and reached out was all through response. So responding, for example, helps you find people in your space that I've been on auto podcasts and And, and helps you weed out the podcasts and nobody listens to you and, and find you the right person in charge of that podcast gets you the contacts, all of that stuff is fully automated so that you can actually spend the time to do research on a podcast and say, Listen to feel the episode, see if this is the type of podcasts that we can come and add value to, and then reach out to the right person. And basically ask them if they'd be open to hosting a guest because now at that point, we have a pretty clear understanding of what the podcast is audiences and what they're interested in. And then we come on to the show to help the podcast hosts create an episode, but at the same time, we get indirect awareness for our brand. And also at the same time you kind of chopped this episode into no other blog posts or the types of content or repurpose them. So that also gives us a mention or a backlink from your own website. And that, you know, it's a vote of popularity and other search engines. So that's one out of a myriad of other different tactics and strategies that respond to help sweat.
Mike: So that's such a really interesting answer. I mean, we were out guesting on podcasts as well. And it was really interesting, because we found that our SEO was improving. When we started guessing on podcasts, we had no idea why it was improving. And eventually we dug in, we found out what all the new backlinks were. And most of them were driven by podcasts. So I think that's really interesting. A lot of people are excited about podcasts. But there's more benefits than just appearing on the podcast.
Farzad: Exactly. And you know, obviously, it's not to say we're only here, Mike just cannot get a backlink from your website, that that's just a simplistic answer. Obviously, there's myriads of benefits. Number one, for me, at least, the reason why I spend an hour of my time is because I want to meet smart people in our industry, like yourself, building these relationships. And also at the same time, you know, that's advertising to a niche audience helping you create that content piece. So it's a mutually beneficial collaboration that happens. And that's the type of approach that we take when it comes to any sort of outreach tactic, right? They know that, for example, we applied that also to digital PR, which is I know, it's one of your expertise as well as your agency. So like, the way we go about kind of average is a little different than most people were that basically just span the world and kind of hope for the best. It's like very highly mutually collaborative type of approach that we take when it comes to average.
Mike: So I think, you know, a lot of people here, even if they're not SEO professionals, they understand that the more backlinks you get the high quality backlinks, the better your ranking, and Google is one of one of the factors, not obviously the only one. But it seems to be that Link building is is a real problem. And it's kind of got tarred with this reputation of being a bit sleazy sometimes, so I'm really interested to know, you know, why is it such a problem for SEO to build those links.
Farzad: So it's just because it's new. So if you think about like, in the early 2000s, when sales outreach became a thing, like outbound, I know. And then people discovered email, as a broached when it comes to prospecting. Everyone just started blasting emails to everyone, and it was quite spamming. And now fast forward two decades later, now, it's a much more sophisticated type approach, where now the account executives that reach out to you know your dog's name, and, you know, they actually are reaching out with, with a clear value prop, and it's working for some of the companies, not something we're good at at all. But you know, it's working for some companies in some certain industries, when it comes to Link building is just because I feel like that's my personal opinion. It's just, it's simply new. It's become a thing recently in the past few years. And marketers don't really know what they're doing yet. They're still discovering it. So what what happens when you don't know what you're doing is that you kind of resort to simplistic tactics like, Hey, let me just send an email to 1000 people and ask them for a backlink. See what happens. And 99.9% of cases is that answer dot question is nothing, nothing is going to happen. So wasted time, you just wasted your time. So I think over time marketers kind of kind of learn sort of what, what strategies work. And a lot of it has to do with adding value, right? So you don't want to ask people to do something for you. You add value and create value together. And the sort of mutual benefit of collaboration is sort of what we're advocating for. And that's something that respond facilitates.
Mike: That's really interesting. See, you mentioned, you know, that there's a few ways to build those, those mutually beneficial partnerships. So, I mean, it sounds like you believe Link building is not just something that should sit in, in the SEO professionals role, but actually, other people, you know, for example, PR, should be thinking about the impact on SEO, of what they're doing. I mean, you want to talk a little bit about that,
Farzad: Of course, and, you know, I can I can talk some examples. I feel like it's a lot more helpful than just talking in hypotheticals. So when it comes to link building, the way we define it again, I I hate that term, even though that's kind of what our industry is just because so much negative connotations involved with it. And the UK, you folks call it digital PR, and that I like the sound of that more. But as far as the strategy goes, still comes down to the very basics. So one of the biggest mistakes a lot of folks make when it comes to average, that they try to build links to sales pages and like pages that they want to come up in the search results, right. That's the number one thing people think about when it comes to link building. And like, Okay, I built this landing page of my services page, and I want it to come up in the search results. So let's go see if I can build links to it. And that's just the wrong approach because nobody wants to mention and genuinely talk about a sales page. Right? So let me let me give you an example. One of the very successful campaigns are ran at visit me was right before the last season of Game of Thrones came out. Have you watched Game of Thrones, Mike,
Mike: Do you know what falls out? I've not watched Game of Thrones. I think I'm the only person on the planet. Oh, come on,
Farzad: Mike. All right, you got some catching up to do. But anyhow. So before the last season, the cable firms came out. Everyone's talking about Oh, who's gonna win the game of thrones. Yeah, yada, yada. And so this means the data is tool that's one of the unique features that they know helps to create really cool data visualisations. So what we did was just take the data from a betting website of what characters people were betting on winning the game of thrones. And, and put it together in this blog post that we talked about, okay, here's like when we predict or who the public predicts, to be that to be the winner. And what we did then, was that we fired up response. And then we looked up all the latest news articles that were published on the Game of Thrones. And it's something they don't normally traditionally do with a PR database, right? Because it's not a traditional industry, you don't reach out to anybody who's interested in movies, right? So we want it to be very targeted towards people who had just covered like, earlier today, published an article on like a character and give us a response to helps you find those contacts with the author. And that gets through the contact information. And then we reach reached out and say, Hey, Mike, and I just found your article on Forbes about Game of Thrones. And we just put together a really cool DataViz, on whom the public is picking to be the winner. And that brought in by 60 or so press mentions that just one campaign to that content piece. Now, you must say doesn't have any business value? No, absolutely not. Because, yes, those press mentions are not necessarily something that we're directly selling, right? We're not in the movie business. However, those mentions to our website, are a voucher of popular vote to popularity, nice photo searching. And so what we call link equity, which is means basically how much popularity you have gets passed on to other pages on our website. So now our data visualisation software landing page is ranking number one, because of the amount of credibility we built for our website in those topics. So this is not to say this is the one sites you know, everybody should go create DataViz on. The reason why we did that is because we are in the data was business, right? So there's a myriad of different ways on how you can go about this. But I just wanted to kind of paint a picture of an example of a type of campaign that we ran, specifically when it comes to digital PR.
Mike: So that's really interesting, because I know, when it comes to the links that come in, the more relevant the site the links to that, that's also good. So what you were looking to do was, was pitch this story ostensibly about Game of Thrones, but pitch it into articles that talked about data visualisation. And so you've got that credibility for being a database product through the content of the story. Is that Is that what you're trying to do?
Farzad: Yes. And it's not to say this is all we do, right? So we actually do those and batches anytime it would make sense. On a more granular basis, anytime we put out a linkable asset, or any sort of pieces of content that add some value in terms of education. We have other strategies that we follow, for example, we can understand, okay, what are some of the older pages on that topic that have been published? Dad, obviously, we've created a far superior piece of content so we can see, okay, where else they have been mentioned. And so that normally gives you a lot more relevant, you know, websites that are not necessarily news publications, but other websites that we could potentially reach out to, and again, start a collaboration with them to either give us an addition or replacement. And again, I'm just going through different types of strategies. Each one has a different specific purpose. And that's been one of the main challenges. That response has been customer education, right to kind of teach people how to do these things the right way. And so we kind of had to incorporate a lot of these education into the product as well. So now when the users go in there, we don't just put them into this blank canvas and we're like, okay, you should To start your campaign, we'll give you like specific strategies you can click into and kind of walk the user through that different strategies to kind of help kind of do some hand holding to get put them on the right track.
Mike: So that sounds like you're aiming this product, you know, almost open up access to this, this part of off page SEO, to people who actually aren't SEO experts. Is that is that one of your goals?
Farzad: Absolutely, yes. And we don't actually require folks to be an SEO expert to do any sort of promotion. Because when it comes to getting other folks to talk about users, there's several benefits to it. Other than just the backlink you get to your website, for example, one of the first strategies we ever ran for respond to, and actually nothing to do with our SEO, what we did using our own platform was to reach out to other blog post I had listed, for example, what are some of the best tools for link building or some of the best outreach tools? What are some of the best PR tools and secured mentioned in those listicles that basically would potentially drive referral traffic? So the goal of that campaign was actually tirely? Independent of right SEO? Does it help with our domain rating? Absolutely. Because, you know, there's a website talking about us. But that's kind of an indirect benefit that happens after the primary goal. So, you know, these sort of tactics, I think any business has to do, like, even if you, for example, you're in commerce, like we have lots of online stores, they use responded like, for example, one of them. And that was quite interesting, it's quite eccentric was was a CBD gummy company that basically sell like CBD gummies, that just became legal in the US. So they can't do any sort of advertising, Facebook or Instagram. So what they do is basically reach out to other news publications, blog posts that have elicited similar products or whatnot, and trying to send them a free product to get themselves mentioned on there. So again, every day, I find, you know, different use cases, different type of ways and how folks try to make it work. But yes, that's kind of the gist of it. So it's far beyond the scope of SEO.
Mike: I mean, that's an interesting range of customers you've gotten and so you know, markets, I mean, presumably, off page SEO, SEO link building, I mean, that's something that applies to almost any company can benefit from that.
Farzad: Yes, but when it comes to developing a marketing strategy, you can't say we developed this platform for all businesses of all kinds, right? It's just a big mistake. So we had to kind of narrow down our focus on some of the more tech savvy customers that were, they were aware of what Link building is and what they were doing normally themselves manually. So we get to target market we picked to start with the market to again, the product could be used in different ways. But that from a marketing standpoint, where we developed, our messaging was mainly targeted towards marketing agencies, because first of all, you guys are doing this on a daily so and you normally do it at a larger scale, because you're managing dozens of clients. So normally, these are higher value customers for us, because you're gonna stick around for a long run and also, ideally purchase the higher tier plan. And also other software companies, SAS companies that in already had a content team that already have an SEO person, they already know what they're doing. So it's very easy for them to get the value of the platform, not ecommerce bloggers, publications, we have a small percentage of our customers that are from those areas, and they get a lot of value from it. But obviously, you know, we have to kind of pick our battles when it comes to messaging. So those were the two target markets we pay.
Mike: That's interesting. So looking at the people who, you know, obviously everyone could benefit, but you're really focusing down on who's going to get the maximum benefit from that platform is a great bit of marketing in terms of identifying the target market by value and love that. Thank you. I just need to move on. I mean, it's a question. I think at the moment, everybody's got to ask, and that's that's the AI question. There's obviously a lot of hype around AI and particularly, where people are using Respona to reach out to people, you know, I think there's obviously opportunity for generative AI for for emails. I mean, what are you doing around AI? And what do you think the future is for AI in marketing?
Farzad: You know, it's interesting, bring this out, Mike, because we're actually in the development process. Now. I think it may sound like it's tech ro. saying these things, but I think AI is definitely going to revolutionise the way businesses do business. And it's something that's applicable to all sorts of industries, not just software, but law like lawyers, I don't know, real estate agents, all sorts of businesses are going to be impacted sooner, sooner or later. And any company that doesn't keep themselves updated is at a risk of becoming obsolete. So, as far as response goes, there are several stages of phases that we've planned phase one is going to be kind of creating that messaging. So, you know, generative AI has become pretty good at creating very engaging emails and pitches based on campaign objectives, obviously got to train it, modify it. And we have a mass amount of data available to us in terms of what are some of the best practices, what are some of the best type messaging to work best. And so helping other customers kind of getting to that level without having to hire you know, or contact manager or whatnot. And also from second phase perspective is in terms of personalization. So, we actually already utilised a good amount of artificial intelligence in the background of respondents. Like, for example, we have an article summarizer feature where it would actually read the article and summarises the piece, so that you can take that information and personalise your messaging, that process of personalising your message is right now manual. So next phase of our products kind of go live this quarter is automating data as well. So not only it will go and reads the article, and also knows the author and Li reads their LinkedIn URL. So now we have information about the person, we have a lot of information about the content that you have written, and we already have a pit. So it's quite easy to combine this together and create a highly personalised pitch without having human involvement. And so that's something that's coming next and that we're very excited about. So what's going to happen after is predominantly going to be in terms of putting together these campaigns in the first place, right? So right now respond has a lot of automation that helps you kind of go through these campaigns pretty quickly. But coming up with those campaign ideas, and having those done in the first place, is something that a human has to do. And I don't think that's required. So the next phase of that will probably be actually helping you automate a lot of that. So you kind of plug and play your website and help respond to kind of take care of the rest. So that's kind of the direction we're heading to, obviously. And are we going to have to play it step by step?
Mike: And do you think this is going to be a positive thing? Because, you know, I think one of the things a lot of people are concerned about is once AI is being widely used to generate emails, that the volume of marketing emails can be almost unmanageable to deal with the inbound emails you get.
Farzad: Right? Absolutely. And I think there's going to be solutions to help you manage your inbox after they're already sent out there. So yes, you have to kind of go back to the beginning of the interview where I mentioned, when we conduct average, we're creating value. We're not just asking people to do something for us. So what well, we facilitate with respondents is these mutually beneficial collaborations, for example of kind of going back to that podcast, interview, podcast hosts are on the hunt for good guests. And they welcome good guests to come on to the podcast. So if respondent helps you find those podcasts that are a perfect fit and reaches out to them, and actually does the research to know that there's a fit and sends you a personalised pitch. This is something from a podcast host perspective, you get three or four different pitches, good pitches from suitable guests, that's something that you would welcome because then now you have a pool of candidates of interviewees that you can pick from, right. So it's not to say that this is going to necessarily spam your inbox, but also just putting better guests in front of you from that perspective. So, you know, the way I would look at it is as long as it's done for good, it's never a bad idea to do more good. If that makes sense.
Mike: Now, it makes a lot of sense that he's certainly work with us. I mean, we turn down the vast majority of pitches we get for guests on our podcast. So whatever you you did through a spoon, it definitely worked for us. So that's great. I'm interested. No, I mean, I'm aware of your time. And when there's a couple of questions, we'd like to ask people. So I'm really interested to know, if you're talking to a young person today, would you say marketing's a career to go into? Or would you advise them to maybe look elsewhere?
Farzad: That is a very great question. I think it comes down to what you're good at, right? Because marketing could be a great field to be in if you're, if that's something that you're passionate about, and you really like as cheesy as it sounds. And it could be a horrible for a person that may not necessarily like the nuances that goes into it. So if a young person is listening to this, I would say do look at what you're doing your free time and see what you do for free that you it's not for work, it's not for money, you do it out of your own entertainment. And it could be sports, it could be, you know, it could be whatever that you do and see if that's the type of area he tend to look at as a career. So that's what I would leave with that.
Mike: I think that's great advice. I love that. And we also like to steal a few good ideas from our guests as well. So I'm interested to know what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?
Farzad: That there's no one size fits all strategy. You know, when I started my career, I was looking at other companies and how they were doing their marketing. And I would try to copy a lot of his ideas and they'll most of them didn't turn out to bear any fruit even though it worked for another business. So instead of kind of focusing on what other companies are doing, what really worked for us has been kind of talking to our customers understanding how they come across a solution like ours. And having that face to face interaction really directs a lot of our marketing strategy. So I guess that that would be something I would say is that I wish I knew this sooner that instead of looking at Laura's kind of look, and works when it comes to marketing,
Mike: I love that. And that's also a great way to get more creativity into marketing, which I think is a real positive thing. Absolutely. So far, so thank you so much for being on the podcast. I'm sure. There's a lot of people that would like to, you know, maybe ask questions or just learn more about Respona. So, what's the best place for them to go to either contact you or find out about Respona?
Farzad: Well, my name is Farzad Rashidi aren't a whole lot of us out there. So I stick out like a sore thumb on LinkedIn. The best, best way to get a hold of me is just to look up my name on LinkedIn.
Mike: That's awesome Farzad. Thanks so much for being a guest and sharing your insights. I really appreciate it.
Farzad: It's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Mike.
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 favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
Generating Value with Simple Automations
Surveys can provide great insight into marketing impact, but as Mike and Hannah reflect on recent survey findings, correlation does not always mean causation. They also discuss the importance of ensuring the basics of automation are in place and the simple automations' that can generate significant value.
Marketing automation platforms are often the key to marketing strategies, so keeping them organised is vital; Hannah shares some top tips during the insightful tip of the week.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcasts
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Marketing Automation Moment Episode Eight - Generating Value with Simple Automations
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 the podcast from Napier.
Mike: In this episode, we talk about two reports on surveys that have been conducted recently,
Hannah: six underused market automation emails.
Mike: And then Hannah tries to organise everybody's marketing automation platform.
Hannah: Well, welcome back to another episode. Mike. It's great to be here.
Mike: It's great to talk to you this morning Hannah.
Hannah: Yeah, I think we've got some really interesting topics to cover today.
So I'm just going to jump straight in. I think one of the most interesting things we've come across in the last month or so actually, was that Salesforce has released a state of marketing report for 2023. Now, it had some good insights. I mean, we even wrote about it on our blog. So we know that there's been some good insights in there. But I know when we were discussing internally, Mike, you had a few views that Salesforce was perhaps tricking people into view and a certain perception of these results. So for example, often the difference is relatively small between the top and poor performers. So it's not necessarily the case that if you do something that top performers are doing, that's going to be successful for your marketing. I mean, you actually picked out an example referring to the analysed marketing performance in real time results. Did you want to share some further insights on this?
Mike: Well, I think it's really interesting. I mean, these reports are useful. So I don't want to suggest that I don't agree that the reports are worthwhile, or that they're not beneficial. But there's some things to bear in mind. I mean, you work with me, Hannah, you may have heard me say correlation is not causation before. And of course, none of these reports really establish whether any links that you see, between people being able to do something, and getting better results is actually caused by that, or whether people who get better results are actually just better at doing everything anyway. So it doesn't necessarily mean that if you do something, it will generate better results. It does mean, on average, people get better results generally do that thing. So there's a good chance, but it's not always the case. I mean, the famous example that when I was learning statistics years and years ago, was that you saw that the number of electric power stations electric power capacity in the UK, was growing almost exactly at the same rate as car usage was in the UK, which kind of suggested that cars were running on electricity, which clearly back when I was younger, was not the case. Now that might be changing. But I think there's a lot of these things where two things correlate, but they're not necessarily a cause. So being able to analyse marketing performance in real time, I mean, Salesforce push that it's obviously one of the things that Salesforce helped people to do. But the reality is, is that actually 61% of poor performers can analyse marketing performance in real time. So the fact you're analysing marketing performance in real time doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be a good performer. And I think people need to read into these reports a little more in depth, I'm pretty sure if you're a good performer, real time results are going to help. But it doesn't necessarily mean that if you do this one thing, analyse in real time, you'll magically get great performance for your campaigns. And I think that's what we've got to try and get away from. And clearly, you know, what, what companies like Salesforce are doing is they're creating these surveys to generate interest and demand for their product. So they're actually going to potentially push these results that sometimes might not be completely accurate.
Hannah: It's definitely an interesting perspective by them, I agree. I think, you know, one of the key points from this report is that marketers are shifting to maximise value from their existing tools. So basically, Salesforce is trying to create a more demand for them automation systems and everything they can do.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think some of the things that are in the report are quite clearly data that you can rely on. I mean, they had a good sized sample. And it's very clear that, you know, one of the key priorities marketers have at the moment is to get more value from existing tools, rather than to necessarily go out and buy more tools. Now, obviously, we've had a few years of martech craziness where everyone's been spending like mad. So probably, is the time to look at are we making best use of our tools, and maybe even to rationalise the tools that people use? So I think that's, you know, that's a really useful finding.
Hannah: And I personally think it's a great area to be in because, you know, we work with clients and prospects we speak to when we often feel frustrated when they're not using their tools to their full potential. So if this is the focus, then I'm completely on board of it.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, we've all seen the client who's running email campaigns on Marketo. They're spending hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year on Marketo and, frankly, getting little more value than they would get if maybe they ran a campaign on MailChimp. So I think actually making use of tools is really important. And people when they buy these tools, they look at all these capabilities. The reality is, is most companies double down on a few capabilities that really make the difference to their campaigns. And I think, you know, really understanding what makes a difference. And then using those capabilities is the most important thing rather than trying to tick all the boxes.
Hannah: Definitely. So we are a bit survey tastic. Today, Mike, but there was another survey that I wanted to talk about with you. And this was actually by Insightly who surveyed nearly 200, B2B marketing leaders. And actually, they found that five out of 10 say that optimization of the overall automation strategy is the most important thing to them, and that they want to improve their customer journey and increase revenue. So similar results to Salesforce is state of marketing report. But it was interesting to see the focus to improve the customer journey, because I feel that a lot of the work for the customer journey actually has to be completed offline, in the more strategy areas before it can be implemented and marked automation platforms, rather than something you can just build from scratch and you can implement straight away. What do you think?
Mike: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Hannah. I mean, to me, this, this comes back to, you know, the finding we talked about from Salesforce, people want to get more value from the tools. And actually, if you're using a market automation tool, to build clear customer journeys, and to focus on measurable results, and in particular revenue, are both going to help you get more value out of your tools. So I think it ties in very closely. But I totally agree, it shouldn't just be something you think about. From a marketing automation point of view, you should actually be thinking holistically across all your activities.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I think there's some great opportunities to increase the revenue with your opportunities within Marketo Meishan platforms like lead nurturing, is such a simple yet effective tactic to really increase the speed through the funnel.
Mike: Oh, yeah, I mean, I think looking at where people are falling off on a customer journey, so you build your customer journey model, you see how people progress through. And you'll very often see points where people just disappear, they don't continue the journey. We've talked about this in previous episodes. And doing that analysis is really important, because identifying where people leave the journey gives you the opportunity to fix that problem. The people that leave and don't continue the customer journey, they're never going to buy anything, they're not going to get to the end of the journey. So really looking at that and optimising the journey is going to make a huge difference. It's one of the most basic and straightforward things you need to be doing with marketing automation.
Hannah: Definitely. And I think that relates really nicely to Article I saw a martec Recently, and they were talking about the top six automation workflows that need to be used within market automation systems. It was quite consumer ecommerce focused. But I think they made a good point that it's obvious that people are still forgetting the basics, and that there are some workflows that need to be implemented to be successful. What do you think?
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think you're right, when you say that people miss the basics, quite often, there's some very simple automations you can do, that are gonna, you know, really generate a lot of value. So you know, some of the things that the article talked about. And this is, as you say, it's more consumer in E commerce is, you know, sending post purchase emails, or sending account creation and welcome emails, sending abandoned cart emails, I mean, everybody knows that these are the basic things you should be doing. But not everybody is doing them. And they're not very sexy. I mean, they're not very exciting. I think a lot of this does relate to B2B. So even where B2B companies are not doing e commerce and not selling off their website, there are still opportunities to do these kinds of simple, straightforward emails, you know, you've probably got a newsletter, and you probably should send a welcome email when people sign up for the newsletter. And in fact, I think probably if we look at Napier, we're maybe not actually the best at doing that as well. So perhaps that's something we should do too.
Hannah: Absolutely. I think there's always areas to improve. And that's how you always get better.
Mike: Absolutely. I mean, you know that there are other things as well, you know, the the article talks about when people are browsing and abandoned before you get to a goal in terms of a journey through the website. And that can be really important. I mean, interestingly, though, I think the one thing you shouldn't do is to really try and compensate for poor customer journey or poor customer experience, by then sending emails. I mean, I recently tried to buy something online. And I received four follow up emails that were asking me about, you know, how can we help you complete your purchase because I abandoned the cart. The reason I abandoned the cart was the whole user experience was terrible. The amount of data they needed was awful. And I went elsewhere because it was just easy. And so I think again, as marketers, we shouldn't look at one solution, and think that one solution is the only way to fix problems. So you shouldn't just look at marketing automation as a magic solution to fix issues when people drop off the customer journey, you should also look at the reasons why they're dropping off. And whether that's caused by, you know, bad user experience lack of information.
Hannah: Definitely and could you give an example, maybe Mike about how your journey could have been improved in that example, that'd be really interesting to hear for our listeners.
Mike: I mean, this one was really simple, you know, what I was trying to check out, you know, if you're trying to buy something online, as a consumer, you probably just want to give your address, your email and your name. And that's it. And there was this massive, long form, they wanted to know, loads of information. And it was just too painful. To be quite honest. There was also a lot of upsell there as well, in terms of, you know, would you like to buy this? Like, he's like, No, I just want to buy this. And it's difficult enough as it is. So I think, nobody, it almost felt like nobody at that company, had been through the process of like buying on the website for the first time. And they hadn't realised what a pain it was, it may be a fantastic experience once you're signed up. But unfortunately, as a consumer, I'll never know, because I actually went to one of their competitors.
Hannah: I think the key thing you just said there, Mike is a customer buying the first time. And I think that's such a crucial thing to think about, because there are customers who be in different stages. And so their journey does need to reflect that.
Mike: Absolutely. And we see it in B2B as well, it's, you know, how are you giving, looking at the experience for someone who's new to a website, or is not very familiar with your brand, versus someone who's, you know, really experienced, and there's different things you can do, you can on one hand, not really promotes registration, or newsletters and gathering data. And that's not great, because it's not really very effective. But on the other hand, if you over promote to people who already registered, that's going to become annoying. And so you need to really think about the journeys. And you think about the journeys in the context of the individual personas that you've got.
Hannah: Absolutely. Now, I'm just going to take us off to our insightful Tip of the Week, Mike. And this week, I really wanted to talk about what is the one thing you wish you had known when setting up a market automation platform. So for me, my thing is that organisation is key. So you will thank yourself later, if you spend the time setting up the formats and the processes or folders that are easy to read emails that are easy to find. What are your views?
Mike: I'm shocked that someone like you is keen on organisation, you are the most organised person I know. But you're absolutely right. We quite often see clients who have put campaigns into marketing automation system, they've had no naming convention, there's all sorts of names, then you try and find a particular campaign. And it's not too difficult when you've got maybe five campaigns. But when you've been running for a while you've got 50, it becomes almost impossible. And so quite often we see clients having to go back and implement a folder structure or implement naming conventions. And I totally agree that actually thinking about how you're going to structure things, how you're going to name things, that is probably one of the most important things to make your system easy to use in the future.
Hannah: Absolutely. I mean, I have become a bit of a terror, if you like poor Natasha and Holly who I work with, but our SharpSpring platform is set to all our folders, it's all organised as key. And I think that what clients need to remember is, sometimes they don't account for growth. So they start off with four email campaigns. And that could be like that way for six months. But eventually they are going to grow them out automation platform, the business is going to grow. And so they've got to account for that time in the future, and make sure that they're set up properly to be efficient.
Mike: Yeah, and I think understanding you know, what determines a folder structure versus what determines the name. So quite often you might have in a large organisation, you might have folders structured around different divisions that's very common, or indeed different geographies and then different divisions. Whereas the naming convention might do things like identify the date of the campaign, and allow you to sort an order of date. So I think it's important to think about that. And I mean, anyone who's, who's interested in that I'm sure, they can send you an email after listening to the show, and you're helping them out with your opinions.
Hannah: Absolutely. I'm always happy to share an opinion. Well, it's been another great conversation. Mike, thanks so much for joining me today.
Mike: Well, thanks so much, Hannah. It's been really interesting, and I look forward to talking to you again.
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.
Sticky Note Marketing Podcast: Guest Mike Maynard
Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier recently sat down with Sticky Note Marketing to share the marketing secrets of the biggest business-to-business companies and how they can be implemented into your business.
Listen to the full interview on Spotify, YouTube or Facebook or via your favourite podcast app, and don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us know your thoughts.
Leadtail Podcast: How a PR-Led B2B Marketing Agency is Generating Leads For Their Clients
Mike Maynard, Managing Director at Napier featured on the Leadtail Podcast, to discuss how his approach to strategy generates leads for clients and how repurposed content can lead to massive results.
Listen to the full interview on the Leadtail website, or via your favourite podcast app, and don’t hesitate to get in touch and let us know your thoughts.
How Should You Optimise Marketing Strategy?
Find out the role dynamic content plays in B2B marketing, how to build strategy into marketing automation programs and the benefits and limitations of using polls to collect data.
Mike and Hannah also share how to leverage marketing automation to successfully support face-to-face events.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcasts
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Marketing Automation Moment Episode Seven - How Should you Optimise Strategy?
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. Today we talk about dynamic content.
Mike: Marketing automation strategy.
Hannah: A survey that shows B2B marketing leaders are focused on optimising strategy.
Mike: And give some tips on how to use marketing automation to make your events more effective.
Hannah: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of marketing automation moment. It's great to be back, Mike, isn't it?
Mike: It's great to talk to you again, Hannah. I mean, it's been a little while I know you've been incredibly busy. And you're off on holiday as well, next week.
Hannah: I am indeed a nice couple of weeks in Italy.
Mike: I hope you enjoy that. And I'm looking forward to getting another episode recorded when you get back.
Hannah: Absolutely.
Mike: So, what have you seen in the news today about marketing automation?
Hannah: Well, I came across an interesting article on the robotics and automation news site, actually. And it was really talking about dynamic content, and the different ways you could approach it to enhance your results of market automation. And it's quite interesting, because the article in itself, to be honest, is quite basic. It talks about personalization, it talks about the kind of simple things you can do to make things more engaging. But what I want to have a chat about really is about dynamic content, and the different things we can do for dynamic content and market automation systems.
Mike: So I guess here, what you're talking about is not just changing a little bit of text dynamically, but actually putting in, you know, for example, something completely different, like a video or a picture or, you know, some other engaging content on the landing page. Is that what you're thinking about?
Hannah: Absolutely, Mike? Yes. So I'm thinking, you know, if we've got a landing page, and we add something as a poll, for example, what sort of information is that going to be able to provide marketers? And realistically, as well as visitors going to interact with this engaging content?
Mike: Well, I mean, a couple of really good questions there, you know, do you get information that's useful from polls, I mean, a lot of marketers use informal poll information. So sometimes it's the best data you've got, it may not be, you know, mathematically or scientifically accurate, but it's the best data you've got. So I think this sort of thing is useful. The problem is, as we know, a lot of our B2B audiences aren't really engaged with things like polls, they don't want to do that, particularly very technical people. And so I think what dynamic content gives you the opportunity is to run things like this, where you know that a proportion of your audience, and maybe, for example, you might think that the purchasing proportional purchasing segment would be much more interested in engaging in a poll than an engineering segment. So you can place that content just visible to the people who are likely to engage with it. And I think that's a good idea. I mean, there are lots of challenges in terms of doing that, when you look at a lot of, you know, B2B campaigns and some of the limitations around those.
Hannah: So it's been a bit more Mike, what do you mean about the limitations regarding dynamic content?
Mike: Well, I think we're really different from consumer marketing, there's a lot you can do with consumer marketing, because you have, you know, huge volumes, in terms of your audience size. Quite often, when we're looking at campaigns, they're very, very focused, and you know, Account Based Marketing is, it's certainly a thing, right. And, you know, there people can be targeting a small number, or even maybe even one account. So the numbers are quite small in B2B. And actually, what that means is, it can be quite difficult a to generate multiple different pieces of content that can be placed on the landing page, and then be to get enough volume where you're looking for interaction, like for example, in polls. So although it sounds very attractive, sometimes it can actually be somewhat cost and time prohibitive. And it also can be difficult to get sufficient audience size as well.
Hannah: As a really interesting point, my can actually I was listening to our other podcast marketing B2B technology. And we recently had SendinBlue on and and he was talking about how actually, we can take inspiration from b2c campaigns for B2B. But obviously, it's a really good point, because these are these limitations. And so we have to recognise that we are in the B2B industry. And so it might not necessarily be the best path, of course, for companies with dynamic content.
Mike: Yeah, I think sometimes it's just more difficult. And often, you know, in B2B, we sometimes always want to invent new stuff. And if you're looking to dynamically insert content into a landing page, you might be better looking at what you've already got, rather than trying to create something new for that particular campaign. So I think there's there's opportunities to do this and marketers should be thinking about, you know, should they be customising things like landing pages for different audiences, and if they should be customising it, how can they do it? But also we have to remember that sometimes It's not practical to make everything personalised and everything customised in our industry, just because of the balance between the relatively low volume and the relatively high cost of content creation.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I think this links on quite nicely to our next point, because we have to consider these things when we build a strategy for our market automation. So I actually came across an interesting blog, which talks about how strategy fits in with market automation platforms. Did you see it?
Mike: Yeah, I did that. I mean, I thought this was was really interesting. They're talking about, you know, using strategy right from the start before you even get a marketing automation system. And, and that was one of the things I thought was was, was fascinating, because actually, most people in B2B now have some sort of marketing automation solution. And I'm not sure that the strategy is around picking a platform. And let's be honest, most of the platforms can do most of the things you need. I think it's much more interesting when you look at how you can use strategy to create better campaigns.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I mean, I came across this stat that actually 51% of marketers are looking to increase spending on market automation this year. So can you give a couple of examples of where strategy really comes into what you need to implement on the platform?
Mike: So I think it's really interesting. You know, we see people who still use marketing automation tools, you know, much like a kind of souped up email system. And actually, I think what strategy should do is it should be looking at what you're trying to achieve with different segments of your audience. And one of the points that was made in the first article, you mentioned, was actually that it's really important to understand that buyers journey, and we talk about this a lot, we bang on about buyers journey a lot at Napier. But I think sometimes what you've got to think about in strategy is think more than a single campaign. And think how your campaigns can combine together to actually help your prospects move through that buyers journey, and getting those campaigns to work together, that generates synergies that absolutely are going to make your marketing automation campaigns more effective.
Hannah: I fully agree, Mike, I am a big fan, as you know, on the personas and the customer journey, and the stuff we do here at Napier with our marketing automation platform, I would be lost about it, it makes my life so much easier that we have our workflows and our content down to our personas. It's so valuable.
Mike: Yeah, and you do a lot of this, you do a lot of looking at, you know what we're trying to do with particular personas and moving them from step to step. And I think that that's a great example of what people should do. I think one of the challenges you have is particularly when you have a large enterprises, you have lots of kind of siloed groups that are all trying to run their own campaigns. And sometimes that means those campaigns don't necessarily work together. And one of the things that we as an agency can do is actually start helping people ensure that, you know, campaign that one particular team is running is at least somewhat synergistic with what other teams are running.
Hannah: Absolutely. I mean, I was helping out one of our account managers the other day with the development of a plan, and we were talking about the different email sequences that had to be implemented. And sometimes it's not a lot of work. It's just a slight tweak, but he's accepting that they do need slightly different messaging to be able to resonate with them. I think
Mike: That's a great example, Henry love that, you know, it's amazing how many people spend so much time on a sequence of emails, making sure that they flow nicely from one to another, which is obviously important, but then they completely forget that the next sequence should really flow from the previous one, because they deal with those two sequences separately. So I think that's a really important point. I love that.
Hannah: It's brilliant. So moving on, Mike, again, just focus on some stats around the market automation. You know, I love a good stat. I came across a survey from Insightly and they did a survey of 200 B2B marketing leaders. And I think it matches of what we're saying. But they found that five out of 10 of these leaders said that optimization of their overall automation strategy would be a primary goal for this year. And that actually, the areas they're looking to utilise the most are email marketing, social media, content management, and landing pages. None of this surprises me, Does it surprise you?
Mike: We did sound a bit like a laundry list of the main automation tools. You know, I think it's not surprising. I mean, if I'm a B2B marketer, I've got a marketing automation system. You know, I'm surprised of the 13% that are not worried about optimising the customer journeys. It seems to me like everybody should be looking to get their marketing automation system working as efficiently as possible. And clearly, one thing it does say, though, and I'm being a bit facetious about the features, but, you know, you point out that it's those core features of marketing automation that people really need to focus on. And I think that's interesting because what it's saying is, what we need as marketers is we need those core features, but almost the dole things to be optimised and improved and made easier to use, rather than necessarily market automation vendors trying to find, you know, little niche features that maybe don't appeal to a lot of users. What do you think?
Hannah: Yeah, I agree. I think I'm actually pleasantly surprised, because two years ago, we would have had a chat about this. And market automation was still this huge, nobody knows what's happening. Nobody knows how to use it. And actually, this gives me hope that they need these core features, but they know they need it. So they know they're going to use it to be able to be successful in their campaigns.
Mike: I totally agree. You're, you're absolutely right. And I think that learning that you've identified over the last couple of years, to some extent, has been driven by a sort of strategic imperative for businesses, as people work from home during the pandemic, quite clearly, you know, things like face to face sales visits just disappeared. And so marketing automation became very, very important. And organisations, they had to learn, they had to understand and I think the pressure that, you know, pandemic produced, although there was lots and lots of negatives, I mean, one of the positives is, is that a lot of businesses have actually improved their marketing automation game, don't you think? That's right.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I mean, actually, Mike, you wrote a blog about this, about a month or so ago about this change that actually sales have got to rely more heavily on marketing to be successful, because things like sales meetings, that they're not as popular as they used to be. And actually marked automation is becoming crucial to dry people through the customer journey, because sales is, it's not as important as it once was. But a lot of customers and visitors are now building their own customer journey through the systems and the content that they read in.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Right. I mean, you know, analysts like Gartner have shown that more and more, this customer journey is what they call self directed. So the prospects are actually driving the journey. They're not talking to the supplier. And I think this is, you know, a bit of a legacy, again, of the pandemic, where we went from a position where face to face was, you know, sometimes almost the default, it felt to face to face disappearing completely. And clearly, you know, face to face is coming back now. And we're seeing trade shows return. And we're seeing certainly some positivity around conferences, and that's nice. But I still think that feeling amongst buyers and decision makers, that they should be in control of their customer journey. That's a change of approach that I don't think it's going away. And marketers have got to realise that they need to support their prospects in driving that customer journey, rather than trying to dictate a customer journey, because it's just not going to work in the future.
Hannah: I absolutely agree. And it'd be really interesting to see how that pans out throughout the rest of the year.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think it's not just this year, it's going forward. But you know, with more and more data available digitally, it's inevitable that people are going to feel like they want to be in control. They don't need to contact salespeople. I mean, I don't for a minute, think the sales function is going away. Clearly, salespeople are going to remain very, very important. It may be that organisations have fewer salespeople, and those salespeople actually responsible for many more sales, some of which they don't get involved in, because it's driven through an online engagement, which is primarily marketing. I mean, in fact, I talked to one clients a little while ago, and they said, you know, five years out, maybe we only have 10%, of the sales force that we have today, because of the move to digitalization. I mean, I think that's a little bit aggressive. But it was certainly interesting to see clients already thinking about, you know, really quite dramatic changes in the balance between sales and marketing. And this increased importance of marketing.
Hannah: Definitely. So I want to go back to something you mentioned a little while ago, Mike. And that was the return of trade shows and conferences, because we know face to face is back. But for insightful tip of the week. This episode, I want to talk about how to use market automation successfully with events. So can you share what you think the secret is to utilise in your market automation platform to help you be successful when you're going to a trade show or conference? Any kind of face to face events like that?
Mike: That's a great question. And I think, you know, it's really simple. We see a lot of companies doing effective outreach prior to events. So they're activating their database, they're encouraging them to meet at events, it's relatively straightforward. They're sending emails out, they then come back from the event, and they don't really nurture those leads. And the reason for that is that people tend to leave that kind of lead nurturing, post event engagement to after the trade show or after the conference. And the reality is, is they just don't get campaigns created after the conference. And I appreciate it's difficult. I mean, I've done trade shows a run to trade shows is fraught. But if you want your marketing automation to be effective, you've got to build the follow up nurture, prior to the event, that's the only way you're going to do it. Because unless it's ready to go immediately after the event, your emails are going to be late, they're not going to resonate as effectively with your audience. And also, you're going to be stressed, following up the event and tidying up all sorts of other loose ends. And you're probably actually not going to get that nurturing flow done. So, you know, to me, the secret is preparation. And if you can prepare, and get that, that campaign ready, you can then just drop the leads in straight after the event. There's no stress, and people will get that nurturing flow. What do you think?
Hannah: I couldn't agree more, Mike, I have learned the hard way, how important it is to get everything prepped before you go, because there is nothing, you're more thankful for them. When you get back from a trade show. And you're tired. You know, this is really important that you can just press a button on the system, and your leads are being nurtured.
Mike: Yeah, and you've done it really well. And I think one of the things you do well, is actually you realise you don't have to reinvent the wheel. So sometimes you can take existing content, and with relatively small modifications to, for example, an email sequence, create a new email sequence that works for the latest trade show. You don't have to sit down with a blank sheet and start from scratch. And I think that's something that you know, you've really bought into, and it makes that preparing in advance much less stressful.
Hannah: Absolutely do not need to make it complex. And the easier you can make it for yourself, actually, the more successful you'll be.
Mike: That's a great insight. I love that.
Hannah: Well, thank you so much for your time today, Mike. It's been another fantastic discussion.
Mike: No, thank you, Hannah. It's been great. And I look forward to talking to you again on the market automation moment.
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.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Jeff Day - Act-On
When it comes to marketing automation platforms, the choices can seem endless. Jeff Day, Senior VP of Marketing at Act-On, discusses the key considerations mid-market marketing teams should consider when selecting a platform.
He explains the buyer journey, what customers need at each stage and how to create automated programs that encourage a buying decision.
Find out how to use data to identify what is engaging customers and inform where you send them next.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Jeff Day - Act-On
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Jeff Day
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 Jeff Day, Jeff is the Senior Vice President of Marketing at Act-On. Welcome to the podcast. Jeff.
Jeff: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, Mike.
Mike: So what we'd like to do at the start of the podcast is to find out how people ended up at their current role. So do you want to give me a bit of background to your career? And what made you choose to join Act-On?
Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. I think my career is maybe a little less traditional than some other marketing leaders, but without going through the whole trajectory. I started out as a engineer at Intel, many, many moons ago. And as I like to say, I kind of fell backwards into marketing. I really enjoyed being an engineer, but knew I didn't want to be an engineer for life, got my MBA, started doing product line management for Sun Microsystems. And then I really wanted to get into the startup space. And so I joined this startup. And I think on day one, they said, Yeah, we hired you for Product Management. But we really want you to run marketing. And I'm I don't know anything about what we call outbound marketing at the time. They said, Yeah, we'll work together, we'll figure it out.
Great, let's do this. It sounds fun. And then it's you know, so it's been two and a half decades doing marketing ever since. And I've thoroughly enjoyed it, I've really enjoyed the startup or the growth space, and have, you know, been the head of marketing at Aptio, very successful company highspot, an up and coming very successful company, domain tools, many different sort of smaller and startup companies, as well as some really big and great places to learn how people do it at scale, like, I ran partner marketing for technology partners for AWS kind of built and grew that organisation. And that was a great experience as well. Oh, and then you asked me about how, how I got tacked on. And so yeah, just another great step, or another chapter in the story is opportunity to work with this great company, it's been around for a while. So it's not exactly a startup, but they've got, you know, a fantastic product and a really great team, you know, at this stage of my life, I my number one criteria is that, who are the people I'm working with, and the better be fun, smart, driven people, or it's, it's not fun on a day to day basis. And so really great people that act on great product. And I think we've got a great opportunity in front of us to really take what our core charter was in building a marketing automation platform that was sophisticated, yet easy to use, and affordable for the mid market customer. And really living up to that promise and kind of winning that mid market entirety back from from sort of all of these bigger, more expensive players.
Mike: That sounds really interesting. I mean, you know, I think the market information space is is an exciting space, because you've got a couple of really big, well known players in the enterprise. But actually, you know, from my point of view, I see companies like act on actually closing that gap with those suppliers. I mean, is that where you see the real opportunity?
Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. And, and so we have a the sophisticated and fully featured enterprise platform, we have for some time, but we've really focused on delivering the core of those features and making it very easy to use, because our bread and butter or bass has been those customers growing up from maybe the upper SMB, and the lower mid market and growing up into needing, you know, full scale marketing automation platforms. And whereas, the quote, other companies, the more you know, sort of the titans of the industry, they've really done this feature race, to the top of what we like to call the Bloat cycle, right, which is these very expensive platforms that, you know, promised to do all these things. But at the end of the day, the vast majority of marketers are using it for the core features that we are very good at, right, the core of marketing automation and the rest of that stuff you're paying for, but you're not getting the value out of it.
Mike: So I think maybe one thing we ought to do is I mean, we're assuming everybody knows what a marketing automation platform is, is listening, but that's probably not the case. Do you want to explain, you know, what a marketing automation platform is, and what you see as being those core features that everybody needs?
Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. It's good. Good to set the context. Think about how I structure this. So yeah, so marketing automation, I think most marketers would agree that it is the core foundation of martec. For, you know, a mid market or enterprise marketing marketing team, right, there's a lot of stuff in the mahr tech space now, and I kind of laugh, as I think of all of the software that we use. But really, the foundation is this marketing automation, because it is the primary way that you engage with your customer and prospects in an automated and multi channel way. And so multi channel, you know, in this case means email for sure, as a core website, social media, you know, text, and all these sorts of ways that you're, you're engaging with your customer. And so marketing automation provides the ability to reach out your customer through those channels. Automated means that you can set up automated programmes that are multi touch, you know, based on triggers, or activities that that a customer does, for instance, landing on a web page, downloading a piece of content, and you'd say, Hey, you downloaded the five steps for perfect marketing automation.
And, for instance, for example, and you could follow up with another piece that says, you know, hey, we've got this great offer for helping you, you know, optimise your marketing automation. Anyway, I'm digging into the weeds a little bit here. So the core capabilities within marketing automation are these multi channel outreach, the ability to track then what your customers are doing, they land on your website, or respond to an email, or many, many, many other things. And then segment, your customer base, and the content that you want to send to that customer base. And so that you can have more personalised and custom content going out through multiple channels, right. So it takes it from essentially email blast that you would from, say, an email service provider, kind of a one touch, blast everything sort of approach to multi channel multisegment, automated capabilities based on the signals that you're measuring, for customer engagement. I think that reflects the actual power of market information platforms today that they are able to do a lot of, as you say this, this what we used to call the outbound communication, as well as the tracking as well as the segmentation. I mean, there's a lot there.
In terms of Act-On specifically, how would you position act on it in that world of marketing automation? Yeah, well, I guess I'll kind of repeat a little bit of what I said, because it is also how we see ourselves today is, you know, we were founded in 2008, to be a sophisticated and powerful yet easy to use and affordable marketing automation solution for the mid market customer. And that is very much how we see ourselves today and how we play today, our core customer base, we have many customers and sort of the upper end of SMB, very strong in the mid market, and more and more enterprise customers who are recognising the value to benefit ratio that we provide, were very strong and financial services and business services, manufacturing, and of course, technology. And, you know, our sort of our vision as this next inflection point of technology, you know, base foundation technology, namely AI is coming out, right, is that we want to be everything I just said about high value and easy to use. And then, you know, the most intelligent platform to so how can we use AI? bring that into our technology, again, to help those mid market teams realise value out of their efforts?
Mike: So that's interesting. You talk about mid market. I mean, one of the things I think a lot of people when they first start looking at market information platforms is they look at the range of pricing. And they kind of scratch their head and go, yeah, how comes? It's so big. You know, you talk about your strength in mid market. Why do you think the enterprise vendors can justify such a high premium?
Jeff: You're gonna get me on my soapbox here. Yeah, I mean, they've been very good at getting customers locked into not only their marketing automation platform, but their whole ecosystem around, you know, CRM and ABM and analytics and all of this stuff, and then they charge you based on your total overall database of contacts within the system. And once they have you, they're able to kind of keep ratcheting up the price and make it very hard to move. But we've taken an entirely different approach and said, again, just really focusing on the value and recognising that those mid market customers don't have the deep marketing budgets to be able to keep up with those pricing models.
Our pricing model is based on active contacts, meaning out of your whole entire contact database, we only charge you based on the ones that you're engaging on a month to month basis. So if you've got, you know, I don't know, picking numbers out, right, like, if you've got 200,000 contacts in your database, but you're only mailing 100,000 of them, we're only going to charge based on the 100,000. So again, you're only getting charged for, for what you're using.
And that's pretty unique. I think in in this sector, I mean, most people just count the contacts and billing for every contact. Whereas if you've got contacts there that aren't engaging with the website that maybe have opted out, act on, it's actually quite a good option, because you don't have to pay for them. Yeah, for sure. Right. And I, you know, I've used, I've used Marketo. In the past, I used Pardot, very briefly, but I remember, definitely going through the exercise of like, Oh, our contracts coming up, like let's go through, let's go through our database and, and call all the ones that we aren't using, so that we can get into the lower price threshold.
Which is, that's exactly the behaviour you don't want to have to do in marketing, wasting a lot of time pulling a bunch of contacts out, you know, playing games, you may want to go back to those contacts, you know, maybe you just like you're not marketing to them right now. But you know, you'll find a reason to market to them in the future, or you'll want to just see if you can refresh some of them. So, yeah, we hope that our customers don't have to play those games.
Mike: I love that. I think that's a great approach. You mentioned a little bit about, you know, the kind of industries that are benefiting from act on, one of the things that that, you know, interests me is, is what kind of marketer or marketing team really benefits from using a product like Act-On? I mean, do you need a big team? Is it a small team? Is it a team that's, that's driven by a database, I mean, what characterises a great customer.
Jeff: We like customers that pay us on time and are loyal and only say great things about us on on online. being cheeky.
What we've found, and how will we kind of talk about our customers, internally is that we have a great number of customers that we call graduate errs, and they're the customers that are either in growth mode, or growth mode and company size or growth mode and the number of customers they're reaching out to or whatever it is, but they've graduated from, you know, a simpler Mar tech stack, usually around an ESP system, email system, want to move into marketing automation, and need a system that's, you know, easy to use, because they have a smaller team, or they just, they don't have the sophistication or the experience with marketing automation, right. So they, they want a system that's high value, easy to use. And so we tend to play very well in that space, helping people maximise the value and how to use marketing automation tool for people who either have smaller teams or don't have experience with it. And I think part of that goes to not only our product, but we've invested in and take pride in our Customer Service and Support teams as well who are very accessible to our customers. Because our customers often come to us and say, Hey, how do we do this? How do we do that? How do we can you help us with this thing? And we want to be there for him? Right? So to answer your question is yeah, we do get a lot of these people who are moving up into what we call the graduating mode or playing with marketing automation for the first time, and you want to make sure that the AVID system that they can they can really use and get into it quickly and effectively.
Mike: So it's interesting. So you talked about the importance of support? I mean, is there anything else you do to help people train themselves up? Because you know, someone coming to market information for the first time? That's quite a steep learning curve?
Jeff: Yeah. And for sure, right. So we have, we have a very well thought out onboarding process where we meet with the customers, we get them the initial training they need, we have and again, we pride ourselves on this, we have a support team that's actually available to our customers that when you call you can talk to somebody and you can get help. And we can do online meetings to help our customers. You know, if it's a if it's a question on how to or something they're stumbling with, or an integration, or whatever it is. And then of course, we have, you know, our online knowledge base. We have regular webinars and workshops to help people improve and learn how to do new things that they maybe didn't know before. So yeah, we take we take a lot of investment and pride in making sure that our customers know how to get the most out of our products.
As interesting I mean, one of the things we have talked about is the range of features in marketing automation platforms today. I mean, is it the case that most people use a relatively small number of features. Is that what you're seeing? Or are you seeing people using more and more features, we see that most marketing organisations use the core of the marketing automation platform, like the stuff that I was talking about earlier, what we also see is that there are many features in many platforms. And I'm trying not to point fingers, you obviously hear that that you just don't, most marketers don't use, right. Either it requires a level of sophistication to use the product that most marketing teams don't have, or it's a, it's a feature that kind of sounds great, but really isn't in practicality, all that useful.
You know, and so here's, here's an example from my own history. And again, I don't want to name names, but Right, I was using one of the marketing automation platforms. And not only did I have my internal marketing ops team to help me set stuff up, I had my like web and designers to design forms and pages and emails, which was, you know, that's a, that's a pretty decent sized team right there to support this one marketing automation platform. But then I'd also have to get off site contractors to do the very specific, you know, in platform development in that sort of own special language, and how forms are displayed on and like, that's, that's a pretty high level of sophistication that we're asking many of these mid market marketing teams to have. And so, if that's what you need to deploy some of these features, you know, very customised, personalised websites, you know, higher order sort of automated social media, deployment platforms, things like that, like, you know, it's they're not going to do it. And what we're seeing and what we're hearing in the market is that a lot of marketing is like, yeah, we get that, but we actually don't use it at all, because it's just, it's just too complicated.
Mike: I mean, that's really interesting. So for someone listening to this, maybe they've already got a marketing automation system, maybe they're they're graduating up to a buying a marketing automation system. I mean, what do they need to do to run great campaigns? I mean, how can you really get the best out of a marketing automation system?
Jeff: Yeah, I mean, it's, maybe it's a little bit back to the basics. Or maybe maybe it's not basic for for some customers. So maybe that's a poor choice of words. But I think it is that you understand your customer, target with, with how you want to reach that customer based on your understanding, and then execute and sort of build on that a little bit more. It's used the tools that you have within marketing automation and other tools on who your customer is, and how they're engaging with you, and what content is, you know, they're using, right, what are they getting from your website? What are they opening on your emails? What's the what's the content that they're consuming any step along the way. Use that then to for the targeting sequence to build good automated programmes within marketing automation that reaches, you know, that particular segment of your customer base with meaningful content every step along the funnel. So for instance, we do a lot of financial services, outreach and engagement with customers. And so you know, one of the segments that we have within marketing automation is specific to financial services types, and even specific within like insurance and credit union, and brokerages. Right? And so we can give them the content that is relevant to financial services use the financial services, language, you know, even insurance language versus brokerage language, content that is meaningful to them, which would be very different than content that is meaningful to manufacturing customer or a technology customer, right. So I'm diving in, but I'm hoping this is useful to people within your audience. So target, you know, understand your customer, Build Content and automated programmes that reach your target audience where they want to be reached with content that they want to consume. And then execute. And that's, that's using the marketing automation tool to create these automated programmes, reach them through email and social media, and on your website. And then rinse and repeat, like analyse that, see how it's going, what's working, what's not iterate, build out more useful content and keep going.
Mike: You know, I think I think there were some really good nuggets in there. I'd like to just go back and maybe pull a couple of those out. So one of the things I think that people find difficult as they move into using marketing automation is the level of insight you get. And so we still see you know, some clients and that they're using marketing automation as kind of a an email sending tool. And I know that's a problem. But I think what you're saying is actually use the data to find out what people are interested in. And if you could just expand on that a little more and talk about how people can do that.
Jeff: We've got to, oh, yeah, yeah, data, data data, right. We're also data driven, or we should be also data driven. And I love this aspect of it, because it takes it from, you know, hey, I've got this good idea of what I think our customer wants to hear to, well, let's go in and look at how they're engaging with us and what they're looking for and what they're searching on and, and make sure that the data supports our thoughts or guides us in our decision making. So, you know, the data that we collect, specifically in the instance, is all website engagement.
Right? So as a customer or prospect, even an unknown prospect comes to your website, what pages are they landing on? What content? Are they downloading? Where are they going, and then tracks their engagement from any initial point through the whole sort of journey with you? Right? So if you're using marketing automation, they download a piece of content, you send them an email, did they open the email? Did they click on the email? What did they do next? Did they you know, attend a webinar? Did they attend listened to a podcast? Maybe although I say that I don't think we can measure if they listen to a podcast or not.
But we certainly get it if they attend one of our webinars that we host and using that data, not only to see sort of at the cross sectional level, like how well is our content performing? How well is our page performing? How well is our email performing, but then to say, Okay, let me look at my financial services, customers and prospects, or let me You know, I can right peel it down one more sub segment and say, let me look at my insurance prospects. What is their journey? When they hit our insurance page on our website? Where are they going next? What content are they engaging with? Right? So you can really use that data to drill in and see what your customers are doing? And how your output is doing. Right? Your content, your page, your email? I think that's really interesting. I mean, you're talking about using data, you know, not only to work out what's causing the prospects to engage what's exciting them, you know, where they're spending time, but also, you're using it to work out what to send them next. And I think that that brings me to my next question. You talk about automations and funnels. And so maybe you could just unpack that concept a little bit. And explain how the automations in in a marketing automation tool, help move prospects through that sales funnel, the marketing funnel? Yeah, absolutely. And right, and this is the core and the beauty of marketing, quote, automation, over just, you know, email blasting, right? It's the idea that maps to in a sophisticated sale, or in any complex transaction, every buyer goes through that age old process of awareness, consideration and 10 purchase, right? And I will die on that hill for anybody wants to argue.
There's a lot of talk about flipping the funnel and compressing, and I'm like, Yeah, you might compress. And but everybody still goes through that mental process, whether you're buying enterprise software, or a car, or I don't know, you know, a Valentine's Day dinner for a special someone.
And so you want to align your programmes and your content through a multi touch way that aligns to that thought process, right. So your first touch is just trying to attract the prospect with you know, an answer to a problem they think they have, right. And it's really about awareness, hey, we do this, we solve this problem for you. Maybe you didn't know you had this problem. So hey, you have this problem. And like, we're the ones to help you with it. Bring them in, get them engaging with you, then, you know, just deepen the engagement a little bit more, tell them a little bit more about what you do, eventually try to convince them that you are the best solution for that problem, that's when you get sort of into consideration in the intent phase. And once you've, once you've got them into the intent phase, which means they want to buy from you, then it's about hey, convincing them of the economic benefit of you know, the need to do it now give them all of the things that they need to feel good about the purchase and maybe convince their you know, finance team or their manager, whatever, that they need to do this, right. So it's, it's really peeling apart that whole sales process and creating these automated programmes that give them the information that they need to help them make the decision.
Mike: That's a great way of looking at and it's about this idea of giving them what they need to make the decision I think is brilliant. I think a lot of marketers we think they forgetting? How do I work that out? You know, how do I create this this model of a funnel that identifies, you know, what the prospects thinking? And therefore what I need to give them? Do you have any tips or advice on how to do that?
Jeff: Wow, you know, I suppose that is a little bit of the art and science of marketing, a few things come to mind, you know, one, it's, it's goes back to what I said before is use the data to analyse what's working, right, you can put, like, if you're starting totally from scratch, put a bunch of stuff out there, you know, you're probably in your position, because you're smart, and you know, the market. So put some stuff out there, see how it works, measure, tweak, put some more stuff out there, measure tweak, right, another approach, which I am a huge fan of, it's the it's the sales and marketing alignment idea. I like to work very closely with my sales teams, because they are the feet on the street, they're the ones that are usually having the verbal conversation, we're on a podcast, so you can't see me picking up my phone right now. But they're the ones having the verbal conversation with the prospects and getting that immediate and, and sort of deeper feedback on who they are what's working, what they're interested in what they're asking for, whether they're asking for, you know, at this point, they're probably in the sales cycle, right. So, you know, if they're asking for economic justification, if they're asking for, you know, an RFP, if they're asking for case studies, or customer referrals, or whatever it is, use that information to give them what they want.
Offer them case studies, offer them economic justification, you know, whatever that is, right. And so you can, you can start to use both the signals, I guess, three things, you know, your own knowledge and just sort of what you're learning and reading on the internet, and everybody's on knowledge, use the marketing automation to collect the data, and talk to your sales teams, talk to the people that are talking to the customers and, and use that as feedback as well.
Mike: As great advice, and I think a lot of people will feel a lot more comfortable with with kind of that framework, and particularly, you know, leaning on the sales team. And I know, we've done that a lot at Napier. And often the sales team can can really give you good pointers. So I love that advice. I mean, I think, you know, we've talked about the importance of, you know, thinking and the people behind the marketing automation is about, you know, intelligence that drive great campaigns, but actually a lot of hype today, it's all about AI.
And I'm just really interested to know, you know, your view of how AI is going to impact marketing automation. And, you know, I'm sure you can't tell me any plans that have been announced yet. But, you know, equally I'm sure Act-On is looking very closely at how AI can benefit users.
Jeff: Yeah, for sure. And just as you know, the hype cycle is very high right now on AI changing just about everything we do everywhere. It's gonna have a big impact on on marketing automation, as well. You know, we are I said, we wanted to be the most intelligent marketing automation platform. So we're definitely looking at machine learning and AI and how we can use it to help the marketer work smarter, right, provide scoring and insights and intelligence that that helped them improve their own marketing and work smarter and segment better, and all of that, right. I don't think I'm giving anything away there. But you know, I think there's a lot of things that could happen also in the in the generative technologies like chat TPT, right. That could be I don't know, monumental for the marketing automation and for marketing in general, one of the things that was obvious to me, coming out of AWS, where we are generating just a tonne of content that was tuned to each of our segments, right. And as you can imagine, AWS has many, many, many segments that we're working with, well, you know, something like Chet GPT, could be very useful in driving efficiencies and saying, Hey, we want to create this piece of content, please generate this content for all of these different industries. And then, you know, my specialists would go in and instead of spending hours and hours and hours writing original content, they take what we've been given through the generative AI and tweak it in, you know, maybe an hour or two. So I think in the same way that could be applied, you could think that that could be applied in for marketing teams using marketing automation. Like oh, I need a new piece of content, boom, let's let's crank out something quickly. Make sure that it's good and what we want to say in tune I don't think there will ever Well, I shouldn't say that anybody who's ever said there'll never be a time was proven wrong. But I for quite a while now. There's always going to have to be human intervention to say hey, this piece of content really what we want to be saying and the way that we want to be saying it, using the words that we want to use So there'll always be that that editorial overlay. But yeah, I think there's some pretty exciting stuff that that could make our marketing teams more efficient.
Mike: That's fascinating. I think that there's loads of options. And I love the way you've started with actually using AI for more of the data analysis, because I think in many ways, that that's the area that perhaps people find the most difficult. And having help in terms of segmentation and understanding, you know, the intent? I think that's interesting. You know, so I really liked the way you you started with that. Good. Yeah, thank you, I think there is just a tonne of promise there and, and providing real value. You know, in my opinion, I guess you didn't ask for it, but I'm gonna give it anyway. I think there's this
you know, we don't want to think too large and crazy, right? Because that's the natural tendency of like, Oh, what, you know, total out of the box thing? Could we could we think of an innovate, I think a lot of the value is going to come from kind of doing what we're doing mentally today and automating that and driving it through machine learning, right? Like, scoring or these insights around, you know, how could you improve your email? Or what is your financial services segment customers using today? And just presenting that to our customers, as opposed to them having to go and analyse and find it themselves? So yeah, I'm very excited for that.
Mike: It sounds like you're a real optimist about the future of marketing. I mean, I'm interested to know what would you say if a young person came to you and said they were considering marketing as a career?
Jeff: Well, to date myself a little bit, I started that that first job that I told you about where I started, my marketing career was right around the time when like Google Search, Google AdWords was coming out and marketing automation was just being formed. I remember working with those teams on how would you use this right. And so what marketing is, even for me today is so different from what it was 25 years ago, when I started, I guess some advice is, it's twofold. It's to two sides of the coin. One is never forget the basics, right? At the end of the day, as a marketer, you have to engage your audience in ways that provide value to them, right, we had this thing back then called Value Add marketing, which sounds funny now, but it's really just about him making sure that you're giving the user what they want, not the message that you want to push on them, right. So don't tell them about speeds and feeds, tell them about how they could use your system to improve their lives. So kind of get back to the basics that way, make sure you're focused on that, and that you're engaging your customer in ways that help them along the buying journey. And then the flip side is the total opposite and is very much aligned to what we were just talking about about AI. It's like, wow, you better you better be a technologist. And don't be afraid to dive deep into the technology and to get the most out of it. And even to the point where learn how to write a SQL query or learn how to code or, like, the more depth you have in that space, the more power you're going to have at your hands to leverage this technology.
Mike: Oh, that's that sounds like great advice. I mean, triggers well, and I'm actually going to cheat I'm gonna say you can't say us act on has been the best marketing advice. But what what's other than using act on what is the best marketing advice you've ever heard?
Jeff: There was this story I've I've kind of been giving it to you and dribbles a little bit. It's this bit about being value add to the customer. Don't think of yourself as someone who pushes your message onto the market. Think about someone who really helps that buyer get the information they need to make a buying decision. And if you do that, you're going to build credibility and trust with that buyer, and they're going to want to buy from you. So at the end of the day, it is self serving, but you can't start that way. Gosh, other advice, best piece of advice I ever got. Plastics, plastics, my dear boy plastics.
That was out of a movie sorry. Yeah, you know, I think it's been I don't know if it was a piece of advice. I remember working with this. This gentleman, Kevin Joyce has also been in the market for a long time back in those early days. And we really talked about how we use, you know, Google AdWords to test our message and test the market very quickly. And then you know, that that moved into like a B testing with email. And so I think it's, I'll take that as a bit of advice of like, hey, use the technology that you have available to you today to learn and think about how you can do marketing better because it's always the is the process of try something be smart, you know, be a little edgy, try to reach your customers, and then measure it and test it and do a B testing and test another message and see what works and just tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, right, it's very rare that you're going to come in and hit a homerun right off the first pitch, like, go in and put your best foot forward and measure and tweak and improve. And that's, that's always been my path to success is in building really strong and high performing marketing engines is going in there doing your best work, and then and then adjusting stuff to improve.
Mike: That that's awesome. And I think, again, very optimistic advice. You know, you don't have to be perfect first time. I think that's a great bit of advice. You know, people listening to this, I mean, if they're not using a marketing automation platform, or maybe they are and they feel that it's time to change. I mean, how would they go about, you know, evaluating act on it? Do you have any advice as to, you know, what they should consider when selecting a platform?
Jeff: Great question. I guess I'm gonna reflect on how I've done similar technology assessment and purchases is, you know, you start with really being honest with yourself on what you need, and what you're trying to accomplish. Because it's, it's so easy to get sucked into the shiny object mentality, right? Like, oh, that feature sounds really cool. Oh, that feature sounds really cool. Oh, yeah. Wouldn't it be great if, when, you know, that might not be something that you even have the capability to skill set in house? Or the resources to do? Right? So go in with a very clear list of, hey, what's most important to me? What are my nice to haves? What's the price point that we want, and then you talk to a lot of vendors, be sure to you know, get demos and really get an understanding for how easy it is to use the system, right? Because how easy it is use the system at the end of the day is a sense of how much use you're gonna get out of it, and how efficient like if you can get the whole team trained up on using a marketing automation platform, because it's it's pretty straightforward and easy to use, then you're gonna be very efficient, leveraging that marketing automation platform. If you know, CMA is really complicated. And you've really got one expert in house, that person then becomes the bottleneck, right? So again, don't I guess the point is, I get in, understand the usability, make sure that is a level that you believe that you've got the skill sets in house to make use of it. And then you know, test and demo and also look at the other what we used to call the intangibles, which is outside of the product, the support of the online resources for learning the sort of knowledge base, the ecosystem of people that outside of the company that are available to you all of that that's the entire package. And it's all worth assessing, and making sure that you are getting what you want going into it.
Mike: Thanks. I mean, Jeff, you've been great as a guest, it's been fascinating to hear you talk about marketing automation, I think you've done a wonderful job of avoiding being, you know, too much of a salesperson for your own platform. And it's a very competitive industry. And there must be a temptation, I really appreciate that. I'm sure there's people who'd love to know more, whether it's about Act-On marketing automation. If anyone listening wants to get in contact with you, what would be the best way?
Jeff: Yeah, I think if you want to get in touch with me personally, find me on LinkedIn, reach out, I'm on there at least a couple of times a day. If you want to learn more about act on as a company or as our product, best to reach out through those various channels through our website, something like that, because because otherwise I'll be a bottleneck to getting you in touch with the right people.
But you know, thank you for you know, this this time, Mike, and thank you everybody for listening. And yeah, this has been fun. I'm obviously very passionate about marketing and the space because it's it's just a fun world that we live in right now.
Mike: Thanks, Jeff. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for being a guest.
Jeff: Thanks so much.
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 favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with William Hearn - Sendinblue
William Hearn is the Sales Director for EMEA and RoW at Sendinblue, an all-in-one marketing platform.
The marketing automation market is increasingly crowded, and William discusses how Sendinblue positions itself to stand out amongst competitors. Find out some of the different requirements for B2B and B2C marketers and how B2B can benefit from replicating B2C campaigns.
William also discusses some of the most effective campaigns he has seen and some of the simple techniques that can have a huge impact.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with William Hearn - Sendinblue
Speakers: Mike Maynard, William Hearn
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 Will Hearn, Will is the sales director for EMEA and the rest of the world for Sendinblue. Welcome to the podcast. Will,
William: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Mike: So I'm really excited to talk a little bit about Sendinblue and marketing automation. But before we do that, can you just tell me a little bit about your career journey and how you've got to involved with and in blue?
William: Yeah, sure, probably to start with, as every salesperson says, I didn't plan to be in sales, I plan to be in marketing, which was a lucky twist of fate in the end, but I'm now saying a marketing solution. In retrospect, if we look at it, I always had a bit of a sales mindset, trying to turn my weekly pocket money into well, candies, and donuts, and so on to sell at the playground and end up with a lot of extra money at the end of the week. And so after that, all entrepreneurial background, helped my sister and a brother as they launch their companies, and went to university, studied marketing, really enjoyed it and thought, Okay, this is the way forward for me. And I joined a startup called open play in London, fantastic team, when I joined, they hired me to do PR and marketing. thing is they made a seed round, it was like 100k. And we didn't have any clients. So there was a very low income stream. And after a couple of months of doing some PR and marketing, working a bit on the product design and development, we realised if we didn't sign some deals, and get some clients in, this wasn't gonna last long. So I started doing some sales just to help out like to say, I was so good at marketing, they moved me to the sales team. But in the end, I really enjoyed it, stayed with them for a while, and had started to use Sendinblue, in that experience. So then, my partner's from Paris, I started to move over to Paris, then in blue, as headquartered in Paris. So I applied for a job with them. And what's kind of Right Place Right Time, I had the chance to join as the first salesperson after our series, a 2017. And we started building this sales team, out of what had originally been a pure product lead growth journey. So here, I joined them, we start focusing on customer goals and seeing where we can help really more than small business I start with. And we very quickly see that there's this inbound demand, because our tagline at the time was we help small businesses compete with enterprises. And we started having enterprises coming to us and saying, it's quite a nice tool you have, could it work for us? And so that's when we started exploring that topic. And that's a bit how I got where I am today.
Mike: That's interesting. And you've actually been there five years, as you said, so, I mean, there must be something you love about the company, is it the way the company has matured and developed, because you've changed quite a lot from, you know, helping small businesses compete with enterprises?
William: Yeah, exactly, I'd say there's probably three pillars of what I really like about Sendinblue. The first one is the solution focus is what attracted me in the first place, I understood a bit of pain, I'd use some other tools, wanted to set up automations and follow ups and so on, and wasn't very convinced, let's say by what I'd used as either way too complicated, or way too simple. And so there's a solution focused on my side, but from the company as well, we've got a real ambition to continue growing. But for instance, we've acquired seven companies the last couple of years, to really build on our feature and solution set to add really advanced capabilities around ingesting data, creating automations, delivering messages across multiple channels. And this, in the end has been very fun, because we have a lot of customers that come to us wanting to do exactly this, and it's very buzzword. But it really is what we're doing. And so there's a strong fit for me and for the market. The second part about the company that says culture, another buzzword pot. Everyone likes to use the word culture and the phrase I love, do things at scale. Well, one person says, and the next person says, do things that don't scale? Well, who knows what the answer is. But I'd say it's an in blue, there's a strong culture, that trickles down from the CEO, I've been humbly open about having an impact first. So we build tools will have an impact for our customer. We approach how we work day to day and sales team on the marketing team about okay, what will have an impact on our business and our clients business. And this whole philosophy is very strong. And then like you said, opportunity, the opportunity to be around some very smart people who are building a really nice tool to grow with the company. In the five years, the company has grown a lot we were at when I joined and we're now 700 going on 800. So it's been quite a nice journey. And with that there's also some personal opportunity that I'm in a startup that's growing fast. Now scale up with hardware didn't make the definition. And we have a lot of customers with very interesting use cases and the opportunity to really help either enterprises on my side or on the company side, for businesses really grow and become more agile.
Mike: That's really interesting. I love the bit about culture, particularly I'm interested because Sendinblue is French, which is, you know, France is not necessarily renowned as the centre of startups, although I know that there are some really good startups in France. But do you think the Frenchness impacts the culture?
William: It's a great question. When I joined Sendinblue, it was definitely somewhat of a culture shock. So I'm a South African, but I grew up in the UK. And when I was going to France, everyone said to me are the French, they're very different. When I get here, to be honest, I think we're 70% the same. There's a little bit of cooking skills that the French have made, and in the end, in meetings, that some things are handled differently. But I'd say France is also undergoing a change in a structure I call on the government here is very focused on the startup environment has been since around 2016, which was a good timing for me again. And then I'd say Sendinblue, was actually co founded out of Paris and Noida, our founder had been running an agency in Noida, and kind of that's where his, let's say, pain point and realisation came to create Sendinblue. So it was always quite an international company from the start. And I think we have nearly 14 nationalities in Sendinblue. So it's quite a fun team.
Mike: Sounds awesome. So we've talked a lot about you and the culture. But maybe let's talk a little bit about the product. You know, do you want to just explain very briefly, what Sendinblue does, and how you'd position it because you're obviously in quite a crowded market?
William: Yes, no, it's a very crowded market. I remember when I first had been attending with maybe a year, I was speaking to somebody and I said, Okay, well, effectively, you're an email and emails done, not just an email, an email is definitely not done. So probably the easiest way to explain us to tagline that give us is a customer relationship stack. So what we do at the core is to help our customers access the data, what we see is most B2C and many B2B companies, as well have huge amounts of data that they can't access or don't know how to leverage on a day to day way. So we help them access to this data, activated in segments and automations. And then deliver messages, whether it's email, SMS, WhatsApp, push, so on, and so forth. But really this customer relationship stack for managing the conversion and retention of customers. It's probably two parts of the business, which is where it gets more complicated. We have our classic product led growth stack for small businesses. Here, you can buy a plan online sign up, and you get access to much of the same feature set as an enterprise customer. But you just have to use it yourself. And there's help articles and a support team. But it's self service solution. And then we have the enterprise side, which we have some technical differences and multicast solution, let's say high scalability for message volume, and so on, as well as customer success team for onboarding and training people and dedicated customer support team for those enterprise lines.
Mike: That's interesting. You know, and obviously, one of the things you do is you cover both business to business and consumer marketing. I'm intrigued to know, do you find a big difference between what your B2B customers want and what's required for consumer marketing?
William: Sure, I always have an interesting take on this. I think that it's it's a good definition but not a great definition to say B2B and B2C. You know, if we took an ultra luxury yachts sale cycle, and technically that's B2C, but acts very much like a B2B sales cycle, the times, SAS, often if we're talking about low ticket value, SAS, it'll act quite similar to an E commerce, especially how you market it and how you manage those flows of data and messaging. So I'm a bit reticent to always say B2B is like that, or B2C is like this. I think that there's a lot of crossover, what I do see quite heavily, and it's not always true, but I find it more true is that B2B Customers maybe are not as digitally mature in their channel usage, and in the growth hacks they're willing to take for building those relationships with their customers. So E comm has a list of definitions as long as your LTV CAC RFM segmentation. If you ever go to a ecommerce agency talk, it's just acronyms.
Whereas on the B2B side, I feel often brands are missing that onboarding flow product recommendation aspect. You know, even if you're giving white papers and documents, you can still do recommendations of the next white paper you should read based off your engagement. There's a lack of flows. Often email is the only channel used, which other a great channel it's a shame to only stick to that one. In the end, there's also legal differentiators. GDPR clearly in our blacklisting, talking about email is different technical and legal challenges. So in short, I'm always a huge fan of looking at where are you positioned as a B2B brand. Looking across the aisle at a B2C brand that might have a say and kind of target market behaviour. And what can we copy and steal from the B2C side replicate for B2B brands.
Mike: I love that I think that's that's a really great way to position you know how B2B brands should be thinking, and actually just falling onto that I'm really interested because there are some things that consumer brands are using a much greater volume than B2B. So, you know, example might be SMS or WhatsApp, where quite a lot of consumer marketers are very active on those channels, but actually relatively few B2B companies. Do you think that B2B could gain a lot by using more of these channels?
William: The short answer is yes. The long answer is, you have to be careful how you use them. I think also on the B2C side, often brands use them without much thought into the real reason or tactic behind it. And that's a bit the double edged sword for B2B brands. Yes, they should adopt them. But they really need to consider it. I mean, about a week ago, I was giving a talk at the E commerce Expo in Berlin. And I spent about 45 minutes after this chatting with the guy who's working at a very large German enterprise group, were really concerned, how can they use whatsapp in their funnels? And we were talking about okay, roundtables, dinners, white papers, these are all things which you can create communities. Even in B2B, there's a lot of communities you can create. And WhatsApp is an amazing tool to manage a community glaring use cases could also be customer support, whether that's for a SAS brand, who really wants to have like a ticketing done via WhatsApp, maybe.
But also top tier accounts, probably can benefit from managing delivery tracking, depends on the goods you're selling on the B2B side, or returns Management Events and services industry for programmatic updates about okay, yeah, you're registered to be at this event tomorrow. Here's the location and link to the Google Maps. These are all I say experience wins, you can have on the B2B side, which are not used currently, but would have a big impact on loyalty retention, in the endless the same game for B2B. That's fascinating, because I think, you know, a lot of B2B companies shy away from asking from for a mobile number. And actually, more and more with people working remotely, the mobile number is much more important than just getting a switchboard number. But you're saying that, by getting that mobile number and being able to engage on you know, through SMS and through WhatsApp, actually, you can make the right audience more loyal and more engaged by using those channels, which, which I think some B2B marketers might actually feel a bit surprised about they tend to shy away from what seen as more personal data. Yes. Also, the definition of personal data is quite an interesting one. Williamette Sendinblue.com is personal data in some aspect. So I think sometimes we create wars between datasets at the wrong point. Yes, as soon as you have a phone number, I'm not at all advocating that you send everyone an SMS per day. Yeah. But we do have some clients who are sending annual renewal reminders via SMS. And what they see is, in general, a really positive experience. If my contract is about to renew at the end of the month, I would prefer to be reminded about it. Some people are great at checking their inboxes I wish everyone was, but a lot of people have an inbox, which they only cherry pick what they're going to read. Whereas this one SMS a year can be quite a nice touch point. Obviously, it's a slippery slope. But if you pick the right messaging, at the right moments, it can have a very positive impact.
Mike: Yeah, that sounds like really good advice is right messaging right moment. I love that. We're actually recording this podcast in March. I know it's gonna go out a little bit later in the year. But you know, the hype at the moment is all around AI and chat GPT. I've got to ask you the question. Are there any plans to incorporate chat GPT and have aI generated emails or messages within Sendinblue?
William: Yes, because I'm a big fan of chat. So I'd like to really push that topic. To be honest, the one use case we're testing right now is to use it in app chat functionality. So conversations, to provide a summarise Sync feature, I think summarise this chat, and find action items. The way we see this is a lot for customer experience and care teams to be able to say, you know, have the long conversation chat. And then before they maybe elevate the discussion to a JIRA or whatever their process is to summarise it, log into the CRM, log in whatever tool they need to and also create those action items of okay, I need to followup with the prospect on the client or ABC. So that's the first use case but we actually have a couple of channels internally dedicated to just experiences. We're having an idea as we have with chat GBT The opportunity is truly endless.
Mike: And do you see us ending up in a situation where most of them marketing messages we get are from generative AI? Or do you think people are still going to be the ones who who deliver the best and most effective messages?
William: Yeah, again, strong opinion on this. I'm dyslexic. So it writes better than I do. That's for sure. But no, I don't think you can replace humans. At least we're a long way away from it. I haven't seen it get there yet. And the short thing is that it's about usage of generative AI as well, you know, you're the first people are very early adopters.
We get in there we play with it, it's fantastic. And you have a few, let's say influences or some B2C cycle here, who will pass it over LinkedIn, a lot of pure usage. We're in that phase for me right now, where people are taking too many shortcuts, just creating content with a few prompts on the UI. And the problem with Chad GBT, or, or what is there to do, really, is that it generates the aggregate median, let's say of information. So that's fantastic for research. It's fantastic for kind of unblocking writer's block on your content. But I've already started to see some some brands who are not doing it well. And you can kind of sense this is a little bit of the brand DNA and how it's written the terminology. It's, it's not quite the same, which is quite normal. So I would say, be careful with it, use it. But use it as a way to build your story. You know, marketing is always about a story. You have a hero, a villain and a journey that they're going through. Well, I'm not convinced that chat, GBT can build that story and paint that picture for you. It can give you some, some cool chapters called outlines. But you have to colour it in, you have to make the story pop for your brand.
I like that. I mean, one of the other things. I you know, someone said to me earlier today was one of the great things chap GPT does is it lets you know what you don't like and you can get checked GPT to produce, you know, a bunch of headlines, and very quickly go That's wrong. That's wrong, that's wrong. And it really helps you focus down on where you want to be. So I think, as a guide, AI is certainly working as a human replacement. It's, as you say, it's really quite a long way away.
I've been to use the paint a picture analogy. I do love the dolly interface. But you can recreate a mani in there, but it can't create them on it for you. That's the difference. Prompt are very important as well. And I think it's incredibly interesting to see how many versions you can go through in prompting to get something that's quite good. But even that, I mean, I've played with it quite a lot. I've never seen something which I've thought Yeah, exactly right. For submission. I don't need to touch it.
Mike: Yeah, no, absolutely. It's definitely going to help us but but hopefully not take our jobs in the next few years.
I I'm interested to know, I mean, obviously working at Sendinblue, you must be exposed to some really good campaigns. Do you have some examples of some really effective B2B campaigns you've seen run and explain why you think they worked? Well?
William: Yeah, quite a few. I think one I mentioned earlier with a very simple campaign. So it's really not amazing. But the impact was huge love energy savings, UK brand, started sending their reminders via SMS. And I mean, just the renewal rate, the increased customer satisfaction rate. And it's a very simple thing. Huge impact. So it doesn't always have to be an elaborate campaign that takes six months to build. Sometimes it can just be as simple as would I enjoy getting this message? Would it improve the customer journey? Is it easy to do? Can we have that quick impact? Let's do a test. And that's what I did. There's another one which I quite like another UK brand. They do both B2B and B2C. That was quite interesting, because they quite instinctively are copying or translating their B2C automations into their B2B. So they decided to add WhatsApp, and I think chat as well. So conversations as a whole as a way of dealing with their B2B partners and providing a B2C service. They really have this second relationship. They're integrating WhatsApp and for multi channel communication, and it's having a nice effect.
Mike: That's awesome. I mean, it's interesting this, people talk a lot about omni channel, but actually don't necessarily do it. I think you know that the interesting thing you're saying is actually use those different channels and make sure you get to two people through the channel they prefer or through the most effective channel.
William: Yeah, exactly. You know, in the end, I will engage on my personal email address because I'm paid to do that. But if you want to really speak to me, a LinkedIn message or WhatsApp is, is where I'm going to be very reactive. It's where you're going to catch me in the moment I'm truly open to thinking. And it's also where I go when I have a problem to solve. I get my phone out almost as a reflex. We have to be careful with legal opt ins and all this jazz. It's very important as well, but I do see a big shift towards mobile, B2C is probably further ahead than B2B. But in the end, you're always dealing with another human. We're all experiencing this shift in our personal lives when we engage with B2C brands. So I think we're starting to now expect it on the B2B side as well.
Mike: I think that that's really interesting, really good advice that people need to think about. I'm aware of your time and, you know, we have a couple of questions we'd like to ask people, generally, I mean, the first one is, what's the best bit of marketing advice you've ever been given?
William: Probably just test test test, you can write the best campaign copy you want. If you're not delivering it in the right time, the right place, and by channel, it doesn't resonate. So whichever channel you're going to try and adopt whichever methodology tested as much as you can these days, we have so many tools, so much data available to us that yes, perfect is the enemy of good. But that's not a good enough excuse to not to not test your messaging and your channel.
Mike: That's great advice. I'm not sure I should ask this to someone who's moved from marketing to sales. But, you know, if a young person came to you was thinking of a career in marketing, what would you say to them? Would you recommend they did it?
William: Yeah, tell themselves? No, sorry. What I would say is that marketing is a very rewarding career. And I think the reason I enjoy being Sendinblue, is I still get to touch marketing quite a lot. I'll probably always stay in the marketing field in some way.
My advice for them would be do it, but get your hands wet as soon as you can. Marketing is a very broad field. And I think it's broader than you realise when you're young. When you're young, you think of marketing as billboards, or as TV ads. And those are very legitimate forms of marketing. But there's actually a lot more to it. There's the SEO, the PPC, the emails, the SMS, this whole journey orchestration, that's also changing quite quickly over time. So yes, intentions are great. But what's even better can be to access a tool that has a free version, build your own website and start really trying to consider how are you engaging with the brands you're purchasing with a young age? So my answer would be yes. And there's nothing better than practising it.
Mike: And I guess the obvious thing I've got to ask if if somebody wants to practice is looking for a free tool, or, you know, if maybe a professional marketer wants to experiment with SMS and WhatsApp as a channel? I mean, how do they get to try Sendinblue? And how much is it going to cost them?
William: Sure, we do have a free version of the platform. no credit card needed lifetime free. So you can push your jump in style using the interface testing, we give some free emails, SMS or WhatsApp, people, there's a press electron on the page.
But in general, you can jump in and start experiencing quite a lot of the interface just by yourself to see what we do. And if you want to really go in depth, there's a sales form you can reach out book a meeting with us or ping me a message. It's been amazing. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I I love your thoughts about hitting people in the right channel at the right time? I'm sure lots of listeners would be interested in contacting you and finding out more if people want some more information or have questions about what you said, What's the best way to reach you? Sure. The best way is LinkedIn. I can also get my email address, it's will.at Sendinblue.com. I generally like to tend to be very phone oriented. So LinkedIn messages are the best way. But feel free to reach me on either channel.
Mike: That's fantastic. Well, I've really enjoyed this conversation and appreciate you being a guest.
William: No it's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
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 favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Ruben Vardanyan - Joomag
Ruben Vardanyan, Founder and CEO of digital publishing platform Joomag, shares how the traditional PDF has evolved in a more mobile-focused world and how interactive alternatives benefit both marketers and their customers.
He discusses the increasing requirements marketeers demand from their content, and how thoughtful personalisation leads to higher conversion rates. Find out how to optimise content based on reader behaviour and why we must educate businesses on how the digital world works.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Ruben Vardanyan - Joomag
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Ruben Vardanyan
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 Ruben Vardanyan. Ruben is the founder and CEO of Joomag. Welcome to the podcast.
Ruben: Thanks for hosting Mike.
Mike: So, Ruben I mean, tell me a little bit about how you got to found Joomag. You know, what, what was your career version and what inspired you to start the product?
Ruben: Yeah, that's an interesting story. So Jumeirah was founded back in 2010, during the ad of blogging, when platforms like Blogger and WordPress, as you recall, were incredibly popular. So our goal at this time was to create a platform that would enable people to create visually stunning authoritative content, essentially, digital magazines. And that's how we get started. At first, we focused on working with self publishing and small businesses. But over time, we grew to serve a wider range of clients, eventually amassing over 1 million customers. And as we've all we discovered that our platform provided the most value to the established companies. So we pivoted to focus more on serving that market. So right now we're more or less working with a mid market enterprise companies in B2B space.
Mike: So fundamentally moved from that that SME type product into something that's, you know, much more mid market, maybe, you know, much bigger customers, but perhaps slightly fewer them.
Ruben: Exactly, because we see that the biggest value they're providing, we have a huge plasma and the biggest failure we're providing or more for an established brands, where they already know have the strategy, they know what they are doing. Or they have this big initiative, and they just need the right tools and the right expertise to get off the ground. So that's why we concentrated where we are the best at and as basically the larger companies.
Mike: So you're you're creating effectively a magazine type platform. And can you talk about exactly what GMAC does and what problem it solves?
Ruben: You know, enables companies to effortlessly create, distribute and measure interactive publications that perform. We like to use the term perform because it basically highlights the ultimate goal of grading conducive content. Right. So our approach is twofold. We focus not only on simplifying the publishing process and enhancing the workflow for companies, but also on providing readers with a smooth experience on how they receive and zoom, absorb and interact with content. This is like a crucial point on differentiating for us before, no matter how well crafted the content is on the company side. If it fails to resonate with the audience, it will not achieve its desired results at the end of the day, right.
Mike: That's interesting. I, you know, I totally appreciate that you've got to eventually got to customers, the paying customer, you're going to help create the content. But if the readers don't engage with the publication, that that's gonna be a problem. I mean, how do you find the attitude towards online publications? Because we're all kind of used to, you know, downloading PDFs in B2B. So how do readers respond to a Joomag? Publication?
Ruben: This interesting question. So Joomag publication is basically a visually immersive publication, right? So it's like a specific medium. So digital publications or OLAP publication, I'll recall them, they are not here to replace, let's say, a website, or they are not here to replace a blog, they are not here to replace any other already creative medium. And nowadays, in this small world, there are a bunch of millions, right from even the Tick Tock movies up to any other minute. So they're here to stay. And if we compare with PDFs, that's another equation. So while ease of use and time efficient, reporting the goals you see, but the ultimate objective is to basically ensure that the PDF files remain relevant and perform effectively in today's diverse digital landscape. Right. So therefore, our focus is not simply on converting these PDF files, to new formats, but on delivering engaging content that resonates with the intended audiences. And whilst the PDF is converted, you can further enhance the content by using our online editor or make updates as needed using our powerful online editor. So basically, we are in that vertical. And that's how we look at the things and PDF is still there. But I think PDFs became less relevant in today's mobile first world, as consumers increasingly prefer more user friendly digital mediums for reading. And I'll say that the show the PDF format was originally designed for offline use, while modern technology has shifted towards more cloud based storage and accessibility.
Mike: I mean, that's interesting. And you know, we've had a couple of other guests on the podcast who've got other pros arcs that are aiming to provide something that's really the evolution of the PDF. I think one of the interesting things I'd like to understand is, you know, you do have this automatic conversion, you can basically give Joomag, a PDF and get a, an interactive publication from a couple of clicks. I mean, how would you feel that works? And then how much effort do people have to put in to really get the publication interactive and engaging,
Ruben: It's pretty much effortless. I mean, when you convert the publications for generic just takes a couple of minutes to get it converted. The biggest thing is that you just don't care about reading the digital replica, I would call them, your ultimate goal is to make sure that they are mobile first as well, in this mobile first world, right. And it basically means you still have to put more efforts in creating an engaging content at the end of the day, it includes creating even either the adaptive version, so that it works on all devices, or software automatically does it but you still have to tweak it a little bit, because the PDF is not the best format. When it comes to the conversion. At the same time for adding interactivity, as you mentioned, it's just takes a few clicks. And it's a no cost solution. So anyone, no matter where we are designer or marketer, or sales rep, you're able to easily do it effortlessly, just with a few clicks using our online editor. So in sense of that, it's pretty much easy to use. But I would say that target should be not just by converting PDFs, but just making sure that those are usable. For the end consumers, you will be delivering the ultimate content.
Mike: That's interesting. So I'm interested, Are there features that people see and Joomag that, you know, they'll convert a PDF? And then a lot of people say, well, we need to add that is that is there something that that really is the magic to get people engaged when they're reading?
Ruben: It was yes, like five years ago, like, people were just converting PDF files and just putting videos on top of that. Nowadays, people are more demanding. And I would say they are not just demanding in terms of having more interactivity, like animation. So that kind of stuff is still nice to have, but it's not a necessity. But they are more interested in having something more personalised, I would say. Because nowadays, consumers have high expectations. It was not like a generic content they used to read before, let's say five years ago, three years ago, nowadays, they want everything very personalised. So there's how social media channels social media platform basically change, right? So you follow something, some kinds of topics, some kinds of people just get whatever you subscribe for. So it works the same in this modern economy. And I'd say the expectations of consumers these wish from just nicer actions with this full ethics, just like when iPhones came out, right? So they have multi touch, which was a big surprise for a bunch of consumers. But nowadays, like it's a regular thing, and everybody has it. Same with these digital publications, I would say they are expecting to have more personalised content, and of course, more visual content, because the idea of publications is not reading, but see. So I would say yeah, having more gamification more visual content. That's what makes it different. And it has to be personalised.
Mike: That's really interesting. It sounds like you know, what you're saying is the online publications of when you're creating them, that it's moved from, you know, looking at all the bells and whistles and the clever stuff, and actually trying to understand now, what the audience wants and really customised for the audience. So it sounds like, you know, what people are doing with with these publications has changed a bit over the last few years?
Ruben: Yeah, yeah, that's correct. And that's what makes helps publishers with to understand how the sentiments of the consumers are changing. So this is why like, we're trying to cover the entire lifecycle, not just the creation portion, not just the delivery portion. But also the measurement portion that we have to weigh measurement is not just the analytics, which is get a behind the scenes data on user behaviour, or user engagement with you. We also get direct feedback from the consumers. So we have a feedback tools. And let's say you can see on page five, a, what do you think about the content on this page? What do you like what you dislike, and the system basically merges all those feedback together along with the analytical data. And that's what we provide, eventually to the publishers to make the content so that they can show the future content and make it better.
Mike: So that's really interesting. You're trying to understand what the readers are actually, you know, enjoying and, and what they find less helpful. I mean, is there then a process that somebody would go through to optimise a publication once I've got that data to make it more engaging.
Ruben: Oh yeah, of course. So that's it for marketers, right? So marketers can leverage this reader behaviour reading variety ways. And one example of this is sending the retailer's YouTube platform to create catalogues. The ultimate goal of these catalogues, of course, is to sell products to their existing customer base. In the US, we typically see you have this threat email being shipped to our house, right? So that we see hey, like, there is a brand, ABC, they're selling this stuff, this is the catalogue and they're still even sending 40 Page printed publications to the recipients based on the zip codes or your targeting for their existing customer base. It basically the ones who sell more, right, so who understand how we are, but we also have to understand the back office, all the processes weren't there. So team creates a selection of products from the retailer's inventory, and categorise them in the catalogue. So this is a process when they have a dedicated team dedicated people who are syncing all those items, right?
By analysing the behavioural data insights provided by Joomag platform, retailers can start to identify patterns in how different cohorts of customers engage with the catalogue, and which product categories resonate with them. So basically, this allows retailers to personalise the content catalogues for different customer groups tailoring the content to better meet their needs, and interests. So the end result of this personalization to produce higher conversion rates, of course, as customers are more likely to engage with, and purchase products that are relevant and interesting to them. Right. And this is just one example of ultimately platform can help marketers to better understand your audience and optimise that content search for maximum results. And we have many other examples in corporate communication we have for many other examples in training and development, we have a bunch of other examples in lead generation, lead nurturing silver, so he's basically ever because there's a person who are we spreading on you're spending time spending resources on creating the content, right. And in traditional obligation is not just tax, it's everything, to lay out the photos, the photography, you have to create the videos, you have to hire photographer to do the photo shooting get right the writer to pay this tax, so bunch of pupil and bunch of voice and bunch of resources spent on just trading one piece or a few pieces of content. So that's why our ultimate goal is to make sure that those resources are efficiently span, and at the same time supporting these with the reader engagement.
Mike: I mean, that sounds really good. It sounds like you know, there's so much opportunity to to build this personalization around different personas or groups of audience. When you see customers doing that. I mean, how much uplift you see in terms of personalised version versus a generic one. Is there a rule of thumb? Or is it something that varies from customer to customer?
Ruben: With question varies from customer to customer, but the rule of thumb is the following. First, big compliment, let's say they just want to move from claim to digital, just the initial the first baby step they're doing. And the biggest difference is that when they were in print to process, the print lifecycle manager is completely different stuff. You have an internal team who is doing design and they have to produce the print ready publication, then to send it to the printers along with the customer details with the shipping addresses. Then you have the production team who's making sure that quality assurance to make sure that the prints are being with the right quality with the right papers and stuff like that, then you're sending these information to the FedEx or whatever shipping company these who get the chips. And then you're done.
Yeah, you just get the confirmation of receipt, the end user received the publication to print publication. And that's right. When they move this through digital, like we call it digital transformation from print to digital, right. It's a completely different beast. And the way the team the structure the team you had it completely changes, right? It completely changes everything.
And the first step is to educate companies. How the digital world works, right? What do you have to keep track so that you know like before, you just had a few metrics, number of recipients, number of deliveries, and that's it. And then the ultimate result let's say they have some coupons with the QR codes they can track how many people are scanning the QR codes that is nowadays in the digital area. You can track everything and then say delivery is replaced with something else delivery equals sending emails, sharing on social media and utilising as many channels where your readers are is not just using one channel because you know like especially when people are switching from print to digital, there are various age groups involved. And some of the age groups they prefer, let's say email channels, other Millennials are channels that they prefer even Tik Tok, you know, so you have to make sure that you distribute the content with those relevant channels. And then when it comes to content that will just start reading the content, and then cause the measurement. Right. So the first thing is that basically, the rule of thumb is number one, we help them to just transition from free to digital, that's number one. At that stage, the, they have these big expectation, but they don't know what you're looking for. They're just getting used to. The next step is professional bass probably think of recorded, we already were into this for a year at least, and didn't really know what they want to measure and what they want to make it better, or they want to make it better. And typically, that's when they start personalising the content.
And it's very natural process, you know, like in data science are the same, right? You have this big data, you have this analytics. And let's say hypothetically, you have three minutes reading time for the publication, right? Let's say you want to make sure that it goes to six minutes, because the more they read, the more engaged they are, the more engaged they are, the more as they see, the more as they see, the more money you make, or the more engaged they are, the more clicks they click. So whatever it is, so the the ultimate result, the performance equals, the more the engagement with the publication rate, it means the more time they spend on the publication, and how data analysts do it. So first, they start breaking down based on the course and see, is there a target audience? Let's say Is there a cohort who spent 90 minutes on the publications? And typically the answer is yes, that, that three minutes average time equals, like us small cohort, which is spending seven minutes on the publication and another board, which expenditures, one into the publication, and the average of those two segments comes up to three minutes, let's say.
So you try to figure out hey, for those people who spend just one minute, how could they do it better? What could I have done differently so that they spent also seven minutes rather than one minutes, right? And if you change the entire content, typically keeping one universal content to basically make all of the cores happy, it's almost impossible. So what do you do you branch out your content, you keep the same content for the cohort, which has seven engagement, and you create another version of the publication for just the adult cohort, which has 1.5 million, the same engagement. And you do this evening experiments, and the more you drill down further, the more personalization versions you create. So it doesn't necessarily has to be personalization doesn't equal the number of recipients you have equals the number of publications you should have.
And personalization is always confused with just a customising the name or the company name in the publication. This is not the case of personalization, personalization means that the end recipient receives the content, they desire to engage with the desire to read. That means personalization for us. And so that's why like, the more proficient with the platform, the companies become, the more they start branching out the company, the more they stop, crystallise it so this will be so and the more years they are with you make the more personalised versions we see.
Mike: That's fascinating. I think. Personalization is definitely something that people are realising makes a huge difference in terms of engagement, whether it's a publication or response rate, or whatever. And it's interesting to hear how you're, you're looking at not from an individual point of view, but from a cohort point of view. So you're grouping people together. And I think that's, that's something a lot of marketers might be quite keen to hear. Because it's less challenging than trying to think I've got to create completely custom versions for every single recipient.
Ruben: That's right. Yeah, that's right. And so we pride ourselves on our ability to provide deep insight into the reader behaviour offering this unparallel granularity and analysis. So that that's why like, this level of detail is one of our biggest selling points, actually.
Mike: I mean, that's great. I'd like to jump almost to something completely different. I mean, you've talked about a lot of applications here from lead generation to lead nurturing to to catalogues. But also, I mean, you have you have an ability and Joomag to actually sell publications. I mean, do you have independent publishers using the platform? And are they using the platform because they can get better results or better revenue than other forms of distribution?
Ruben: That's right. Yeah. So we have individual publisher, like, we will not have small publishing houses working with us. The rule of thumb is that you have to be serious about that. So it's not just something you're doing as a side project, but it has to be your primary project. Because small companies are doing this as a side project or just doing this in a hybrid model of say they have print and digital or just doing this digital bit like a small initiative, they are not willing to aid and invest money in this kind of solution. On the other hand, like work with us, it requires investment not in the sense of the funds, because we're not that expensive, but in the sense of like spending time working and using the data which we provide to make the content better. And this is something they have to do on their own. Like, we're not in the position of changing the content or writing the content, we're producing the content, because that's their job, not ours. But our job is to just provide with the writing sites, right recommendations and situations based on the industry, the use case in the vertical area. But yeah, we have many associations using us for various purposes, those who are making money out of the ads, or those who are just gaining more subscribers, have many brilliant, good use cases, who brought with us, let's say they grew from just 5000 subscribers to over 100,000 subscribers. We have very good use cases here. And yeah,
Mike: That sounds great. I mean, the yet another use case for Joomag. I feel I have to move on. And I don't think we're allowed to do a podcast about anything to do with content without asking about AI. So I have to ask you have you? Have you seen customers using AI to generate content on Joomag? And if you have, you know, have you been able to determine a difference in results versus using humans?
Ruben: Good question. Yeah, we've seen customers use engage, we also started experimenting with AI power content generation ourselves. I'd say while AI does not completely replace human input in the content creation process, we have found that it can significantly expedite the process, like more efficient content creation and faster time to mark types. So we recognise that the EMR content generation is still in the early stages, and there is much to learn and exploring the result is potential application limitations. But yeah, it's definitely there. It's going to revolutionise everything, the way we create the way we consume content, and it will be part of our daily life. We must soon
Mike: So it's interesting. So if we're writers, we definitely need to up our game because the competition's there from the machines?
Ruben: Oh, yeah, it is. It is. And it's not just for the writers for everyone. Marketers sales, like literally, the support reps, I know, are all in danger. Elon Musk said, Well,
Mike: I really appreciate your time. I mean, there's so many other things I could ask, but is there anything else you feel we should have covered or anything you feel people should know about the product?
Ruben: I believe we try to car things. So hopefully, people are you happy with our podcast? Oh, that's that's all? That's great.
Mike: I mean, obviously, Joomag is a relatively low cost product to try. Particularly if you're in a you know, midsize company or an enterprise. Presumably, they just go to Joomag.com if they want to try the product.
Ruben: Exactly. Yeah, you really love comm they can request the demo and give you the site.
Mike: That's fantastic. And if people have got any questions about what you've said, and you know, things you've talked about today, what would be the best way for them to actually get in contact with you? Oh,
Ruben: feel free to send me an email ruben@gmail.com.
Mike: I mean, Ruben, thank you very much. It's been been very interesting, very insightful. And I love all our discussion about personalization. I think that's going to be really helpful to people. Thank you so much for your time.
Ruben: Thanks, Mike. Thanks to Thanks for hosting.
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 favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Mark Williams-Cook - AlsoAsked
Mark Williams-Cook, the Founder of SEO tool AlsoAsked, explains how users can maximise the data provided by Google’s “people also asked” feature and how this information can be useful beyond just SEO.
He shares his journey to founding AlsoAsked and the advice he would give to someone just starting out in marketing or communications.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Mark Williams-Cook - AlsoAsked
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Mark Williams-Cook
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 Mark Williams-Cook, who is the founder of AlsoAsked a tool for SEO professionals. Welcome to the podcast, Mark.
Mark: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Mike: It's great to have you here. I really appreciate you taking the time. I mean, I think let's start off by talking about your background and how you ended up founding also are so you know, I look to your LinkedIn, it's very interesting. You've done a lot of different things. Do you want to, you know, just give us a potted history of your career and how you ended up where you are today?
Mark: Yeah, sure. So I've been working in SEO for around about 20 years now. I'm 39. Now at the moment, almost 40. And I think for a lot of people that got into SEO, that amount of time ago, I kind of stumbled into it. Because there wasn't really much in the way of even online courses, let alone SEO being covered in like any kind of marketing syllabus or anything like that. So a lot of the information was kind of on forums. And I fell into it after making some of my own kind of just passion websites, and then realising, hey, I'm starting to get traffic here. And I'd had friends helped me set up like little affiliate schemes with Amazon. And as it happened through complete luck, and chance, absolutely no skill or effort whatsoever. One of those sites started earning like 50 6070 pounds a day through affiliates. And that started this investigation of, well, where's it's coming from? And I think it was Aw, stats at the time we had to use because there was no Google Analytics. And we found a lot of that traffic was coming from Google. And that really started kind of my interest of well, how does Google decide who should be top of the search results and who should be second and third?
So I started teaching myself a bit. And I was fortunate enough that there was an agency at the time, local to me hiring for an SEO role. So I'd been sort of amateur practising for a couple of years, myself, and I moved into an agency role that was really helpful. And, you know, to fast forward many years, I've worked at various levels that four or five different agencies in the UK have always been agency side, I've really enjoyed it, because you're constantly surrounded by people who are very good at what they do and constantly learning. So you're never, you know, while I've thought about getting in house roles before, I think a lot of the people that I know work in house sometimes get a little bit isolated, because they don't have that big team to work with. So I've worked my way up essentially, through through that and actually released some of my own SEO tools along the way as well. So very spammy ones to begin with, that were helping throughout YouTube videos and kind of game Google AlsoAsked came about as kind of a shadow IT project in that weird started to build some tools internally to fix issues we have. And then it was, you know, just, I think this might be useful for other people as well.
Mike: so I mean, just tell me a little bit more about what AlsoAsked does and why you built it.
Mark: Sure. So AlsoAsked, essentially, is a very easy, convenient way to harvest what's called people AlsoAsked data from Google. So if you do a Google search in English, approximately 50% of the time, you will get a little box below, normally the first result that says people also ask, and it'll give you four sets of questions. If you then click on those questions, you will get questions related to those questions. And we've been using this data for content for SEO purposes for for a couple of years. And I'd originally done that just through using like local Python scripts where I've programmed something to grab this data and use it. The reason why I was kind of attracted to this data in terms of this, it's helpful for content is it's one of the very well a couple of reasons, actually. But one of the most interesting to me is it's one of the only sources of data you get where Google has done a lot of the clustering for you. And by clustering, I mean, if you do a search term, Google is giving you insight into what the closest intent proximity is. So if someone searches for this, this is very likely going to be the next question that they ask. And that's really powerful when it comes to the overall strategic goal of making your content as helpful as possible, which is having that information.
There's lots of things but the other main thing that makes the data particularly interesting for me? Is that a lot of those questions that Google gives you, if you look at them in standard keyword research tools, they will normally incorrectly come back with that they have zero search volume, zero monthly search volume. So actually, it's very hard to sometimes discover this information and these links anywhere else, but Google. And yeah, our tool essentially helps people get this data at great speed, map it out, allows you to do all different countries and do it at scale. So we can get you 50,000 questions in a few minutes and have it all out in CSVs. For you with what's ranking, what's not.
Mike: So you're effectively doing a Google search and seeing what Google says other related queries. I mean, you're literally scraping this off the Google search.
Mark: So we we also, we do that by simulating the click on the question, which we're the only tool to do it that way. And why that's important, as opposed to the other method, which is essentially re googling. The question is, I discovered something really interesting when we're doing this research, which is, if you do a Google search, and you get your four people also ask questions, if you click on one of those questions. So the top one, the questions that Google will then show you are different to if you just Google that question. And that's got to do with Google's understanding of intent, the journey, what knowledge you already have, as it affects the like probability of what you're going to ask next. So by by simulating these clicks, firstly, we actually get more than just four questions. So you get more data this way. But you also get a much better view of what that intent path is, because that's really what we're trying to, to help people understand, which is okay, if someone is interested in this, what is the nitty gritty specifics of what they need to know, what do we need to be providing them in answers in terms of value? And that as well, I think from a purely SEO algorithmic point of view, statue up very nicely of Google can say, well, when people search for this, they search for these 10 Other things, and this page has answered nine of them. So that's quite a good from a probability point of view that you're being helpful there.
Mike: And that's really interesting. And the way you present it is in this this really neat kind of mind map format. So you can you can see that flow of what what is directly related. And then also what's related to those, those secondary questions. So you actually get to see visually what the questions are.
Mark: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's important because it naturally, I think it naturally blends into how we can structure content for the web in terms of you know, people read webpages, we know very different to say like a magazine or a newspaper. It's not this just we start at the beginning. And then linear linearly read, a lot of the time people are looking for specific information or their scan read, which is why, you know, we've got this all this encouragement about using like headers to let people know what that section is about. And having the intent kind of group that way, gives you an idea, firstly, of maybe how you should lay that content out. And secondly, there comes a point because you can continue clicking on those nodes essentially, forever. Until you'd have a huge web of questions, there does come a point where this needs to be a new article. And the other interesting thing that you see from that data is maybe where the intent is completely different to what you expected. So working in any particular industry, you get a little bit blinkered vision on well, people search for this, they're obviously looking for something in our industry. And then you realise when you do this research that that word also means something completely different. And it shows you how that branches off. And just the number of questions that fall into one of those two categories also gives you an idea for the overall intent if you like, so if actually, your business is only, you know, related to 1/10 of the questions have that root keyword or root query, it's actually unlikely you're going to rank well for it. Because Google knows nine out of 10, people are actually looking for something else.
Mike: And this is really interesting, because what you're doing is you're, you're giving people ideas for content effectively, you know, if you're looking to rank for a keyword, and then ranking for the related searches, typically will be the right thing to do. But you're also telling people when you've got a keyword that's going to be really tough for you to rank for, because it's more frequently used for something else. I mean, I remember an example where we were working with a client, and we're talking about coding standards for software. And we thought that nothing in the world is going to have a coding standard because it's got to be software. And as it turns out, coding standard is a very common term that is used in the medical industry about blood
Mark: I've worked with a company that runs coding courses. And this was my surprise as well, coming from that bias background on the word coding just means computer coding, and then you get I think you actually get the Google Knowledge Graph come up, that it's a medical thing. I was like, Oh, okay. Yeah, yes. Brilliant example.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, it's, it's also really interesting in terms of coming up with ideas. I mean, I've just, I've actually literally just put hardware learn cricket into AlsoAsked, I thought I'd better try this whilst we were talking. And it's interesting, because, you know, I would think the related questions would typically be around, you know, what skills do I need and things like that. But you know, one of the related questions is, what's the best age to start cricket? And I think that's, that's interesting, because maybe you wouldn't have thought to write an article about what's the best age to start cricket. But clearly, if you want to attract people who are looking to take up cricket, this is a great term.
Mark: So there's two sets of tools that we'll use very regularly with content planning. So one's quite famous. It's called Answer the public that uses Google suggests data, which is very different people get them confused. A lot of the time are two tools, because the output looks similar. But a tool like answer the public using suggest data is a really good way to get an overview of different topics you want to write about, because it's using Google Autocomplete at the actual article levels, you've decided I want to write about learning cricket, that's when you might use also OS and as you say, yes, there's probably a whole separate article you could do about, you know, examples of people that started later in life and became really good at cricket. And you know, the benefits of starting young, that's like a whole, even, you know, you could dig deeper into that as an article itself.
Mike: And so this is great. And obviously, SEO professionals, I can see how they're going to use it. But I think a lot of our listeners are probably not specialist SEO is that they're looking to generate interesting content that's relevant to their audience. And to me, this is perhaps where, you know, we, as marketers should, should look towards some of the SEO tools, because this is a great way of not only finding relevant questions to answer, but But surely, it's also a great way to get ideas to write content that actually resonates with your audience as well.
Mark: Yeah, 100%. And I think it's, it's been marketed a little bit as an SEO tool, just because I'm ingrained in the SEO industry. But from speaking to people that have actually used it, the use cases have been surprisingly wide. So even things like product designers, people are getting a view on how people perceive their brand. Just understanding your customers, pain points, their insights, all of this, you know, even if you're not writing content, it's helpful to know, okay, if someone is looking to solve this B2B problem, these are the kinds of things they're Googling and that they're that they're worried about. But yes, absolutely, I would hope it's used by anyone producing content, let alone you know, even if they're not involved, even in SEO, but I've even had people do pay per click. So it's been really useful for them again, to even in writing their ads, their ad copy, so not just what questions they're targeting. But if they do a search around a product, and they see lots of comparisons to another competitor brands, they know they need to focus on that.
Or if there's lots of, say, searches that are price sensitive, then they know that's a particularly big thing for customers. So that yeah, there's there's all kinds of value you can get from getting this insight from from people's searches. So just unpack that analysis of what people think your brand.
Mike: So you'd actually put your brand in as a query and see what the related queries are. Is that what you're saying? So larger brands?
Mark: Yes. So you have to have a brand that's kind of understood by Google as an entity. But most most of the larger brands, when you put them in, you'll get people also ask questions. And some of them which I won't name have questions like, you know, is Brand X a scam? And why is this so cheap, and then direct comparisons to their competitors, and it gives them insight into? Firstly, well, if people are asking those questions, maybe we should produce content. So we own that space to answer that question, because there's a good chance as the brand if you produce that content, Google will pick you to answer that question. Rather than leave it to some other random website or blog to tell the world it's piggybacking on your brand search, which might have hundreds of 1000s of searches a month. So it gives you that visibility about again, what people are thinking and asking what questions they're asking you about your brand.
Mike: And that's fascinating. I mean, I've literally just done this with one of our clients ABB, you know, he's an absolute total business to business company of a very large company, but you know, got back some very interesting questions. So, one of the big questions is what does ABB stand for? Which
You know which key I guess people want to know, what does the company do? But then there's a question is Abb owned by Siemens, which I think is very interesting because it shows that people don't actually understand that ABB and Siemens are direct competitors. So that's an amazing tool to get some insight as to what people are asking about clients. A fascinating use, I'd never thought of. So I mean, yeah, the question there? Well, in my mind would be, you know, why do they want to know that? Is that affecting their kind of businesses? Usually they're making if it was a was not owned by Siemens, why are they why is that important to them? And how can that be covered in our kind of content, even if we don't directly answer that.
Mark: So I can immediately see some, some opportunities to create content. And it's interesting what you say, as an SEO professional, it makes sense. You know, if you ask, answer a question about your brand, you're saying that Google is likely to rank your answer quite highly, because you're considered authoritative about your brand. Yeah, absolutely. So generally, for branded search terms, you know, there's there's high a high probability, you can control the search engine result page for that. There are some exceptions, when it comes to things like reviews where Google wants a third party. That's, that's non bias. But certainly, again, for larger brands, I will try and own as much of that space as I can, because you know, that's, that's your brand, you want to convey the truth and control the information that goes out if you can.
Mike: And it's fascinating. I mean, I love the idea, I love the idea that someone who's who's a real practitioner has come up with a concept and made it into a product. I guess one of the things you know, a lot of people will be asking themselves listening to this is, are you as a software engineer by training? And if not, how did you manage to get something coded? Because it's obviously a very polished, very professional product?
Mark: Yes. So I wouldn't say I'm a software engineer by profession, very much amateur. So I have coded for many, many years, I've released like games for iPhone and stuff like this. So I'm okay, at kind of a hobbyist level, but I do work at an agency as well. And we've got coders here.
So essentially, as I said, the way this tool emerged was I made the kind of local version as a proof of concepts that we were using getting value from. And then it occurred to me that we could possibly make this as an available tool, because the libraries to do this did get released. And I was aware that while it was kind of plug and play written in Python, that still quite an entry barrier for a lot of people that aren't comfortable with like command line stuff. And it just seems all a bit techie. So we had a very kind of brittle version, put online as a would you like to use this. And essentially, it was phenomenally popular. To the point, it got so popular, it was like many sites just breaking. So we ran a beta for a year and a half, which allowed us to get feedback from customers, it allowed us to stress test things, because we were just running it for, for free.
And this is where we had to get Professional Coders involved. Because, you know, we had to start using AWS have to have things scale. And even during the free trial of this, we were handling around about a million searches a month. So even the database size as we were caching the results was growing very, very quickly. So there needed to be a lot of planning and testing in terms of how does it scale? How many concurrent users can we have? How much does searches cost, because when you're interacting with Google that way, they tend to like blocking you. So like, you know, like many of the major SAS tools, you have to use proxies. And then that's got its own cost and complexity. So it did take longer than I thought it would.
But it was around about a year and a bit development to get something really solid to where we are now. So we launched the paid version in March, we still operate a freemium model, which means people can go in and they can do 90 searches a month for free, which is three a day. And they're tapered like that to allow us to make sure there's no like spikes in demand. Because if everyone gets 90 Free whenever they want, and you get lots of people pile on, it can be difficult to maintain the service. But then there's a subscription model for people that do want to get slightly heavier use, there's more features as well, if you pay for a subscription, and essentially everything at the back end like scales as we get new people sign up so we can meet that demand. And we've just put status kind of checking lives. It's publicly available now the status of the website and the back end. But yeah, it's Touchwood been super reliable so far.
Mike: Yeah. And I think that's very cool. And a lot of people probably listening to this are working. You know, with Napier on PR perhaps as a PR pro three searches a day is probably more than you need. So, to me it's fascinating. You can access this kind of technology and insight, but you can do it basically for free. I mean this is not an expensive enterprise product or not something you need to go cut a purchase order for Yeah,
Mark: That's true. Yeah, it's very interesting. So I did some pricing research at the beginning on what people would pay and how much they expect for free. I got hundreds of responses, but no parity in some people were very angry about the fact that it was ever going to cost anything for anything. Other people were saying they would pay hundreds of dollars a month, other people were saying, you know, five bucks. So it's, I think we settled essentially on a model that I don't think is greedy at all, it scales with our cost. Even on the most basic plan, you can have unlimited users attached. So we just scale on on the certain number of searches, which is where our cost basis.
Mike: I've got to ask this, and it might be hard for you to answer but you know, is it a nice profitable part of your business?
Mark: Yeah, it's working well, now. I mean, I guess on a, on a monthly view, like starting from now, yes, it's profitable, like a lot of SAS tools are? Probably not if I dug into the couple of years of development and head scratching and time spent on it. I don't think we've recouped that yet. So as of wide view, we would still be in the red. But that, you know, that's the that's the thing with SAS tools that yeah, once they're up and running, if they're stable, if they're providing value, it's been growing naturally itself very strongly. Every single month, we've had more users sticking with us than the month before, with without any type of paid marketing, it's all just been kind of word of mouth and me demonstrating it to various people. So that that gives us confidence that at least it's a good product, people are enjoying using it. They're, they're getting value from it.
Mike: That's very cool. I mean, you did mention before that, you know, your day job, if you like, is it an agency, but you're also running this business? Or? I mean, I'm intrigued to know how you balance your time between those two competing roles.
Mark: Yeah, that's the million dollar question, isn't it. So I've worked at a couple of agencies where they wanted to do side projects, and it's inevitably ended up in disaster, because you just never get time to do your own thing. The key here, all stems back to when we founded our agency, we did this on the premise of trying to make it a very nice place to work, because there are some agencies where, like burnout and staying late and unreasonable expectations are kind of the norm. And this has had a cascading effect, I think, in that we've got very good staff retention, which has meant we've been able to train and have people stick with us and promote them to positions of responsibility, where I've actually been able to take a step back, and we've got a brilliant, you know, head of marketing. Now, we've recently taken someone on giving them shares as a director, so it's given me more time to try and run these projects and, and peel off time for them. So we actually run an E commerce business as well. And we started some different content sites. And that's all been from essentially, I think, through staff retention and unhappiness, which seems kind of abstract in the, you know, how did we implement a system to divide up this time? It wouldn't have been possible if we didn't have the right people there to do the work that was left over. But I honestly think that's what it was. And it wasn't easy, and it took a long time.
Mike: Yeah, I think that's awesome. I mean, it's interesting, there's been a couple of really great products actually come out of UK agencies. I mean, obviously, also ask is extremely well known, particularly in the SEO industry, and I think should be more broadly known in marketing. But you know, we also see products like coverage book, which again, came out of propeller net, which is another great product, it seems actually search agencies are really good at doing this.
Mark: I think it's got to do with the, the age of the industry, and that, as I saying, nothing existed in terms of specific tooling. So probably the most famous technical SEO tool is one oddly named one called Screaming Frog. And, you know, this came from an agency, because before that, there was only one piece of software I could think of that did anything similar. And lots of agencies just kind of half bake, you know, make their own solutions. I think we're still in a, even from a digital PR point of view, to be honest, you know, we've got things like rocks Hill, which cost quite a bit of money, and all respect to them, even things like adding and removing users, you still need to email them to do that, which doesn't seem very 2023. So I think there's definitely in the kind of digital marketing industry still spaces where the demand for certain types of products exceeds the supply of good up to date. Products that that make things easy.
Mike: That's awesome. It makes me feel we should be doing something as well. Yeah. Well, I've got a list of ideas always. It's just like you say, trying to find time to do them. Well. I think my favourite phrases though, is ideas are easy, execution is hard. I mean, the fact the fact you brought an idea to a product, a real product that's, you know, not only being used but also is commercially viable. That work is really tough. And it's amazing. You've done it.
Mark: Thank you.
Mike: I'm really interested, you know, so you obviously started, you started, you know, relatively early in the world of SEO, you stay there as a career. I mean, if you were talking to a young person today, who was looking to start a career in, in marketing or communications, I mean, what advice would you give them?
Mark: I don't know how good of a person I am to ask that question. Because I came into SEO, from a very technical background, having no clue about marketing, I was essentially hired by an agency because I could get things to rank well in Google. And it took me many years of sitting next to people who knew about marketing to understand, you know, concepts about brands and, and things like this. My advice would be from being an employer as well. And obviously talking to people coming straight out of uni, and people that want to work in, in marketing, especially digital and such, I think there's still a big gap between maybe what you're taught academically and theoretically, in marketing, versus when you go into even very big companies, the reality of what's happening, and who's doing what. And in between those two realities, there is a lot of room for you to teach yourself to try things yourself, it's the bar to set up even like basic websites is very low. Now, there's no code solutions that cost no money, you know, if someone can come to me interested in a job in search, and they can say, Here's my blog about my hobby, I got it to ranking Google, because I did these things. That is hugely impressive to me that they've gone and had that real exposure.
You know, I've spoken to many, like graduates that come out of courses. And they've never, for instance, even looked in how to look at Google Analytics, which is one of the main tools, you know, that our industry uses. So you can really give yourself an edge just by getting some hands on experience, even if it's just playing around with it, again, like Google Analytics, completely free, you can set it up yourself, and you're spoilt for choice in terms of videos as well. Even if like me, you've got a very short attention span, you can put the YouTube video on times to speed and whip through tutorial and you can learn something new that you can you can demonstrate. So the actual application, I think, of what you're learning, if you are getting that education, and I don't even think that's, you know why it's good. I don't think it's necessary. So I don't, I don't have a degree, I didn't go to university. I'm self taught. So there are ways to get there. So don't think if you're sitting there maybe thinking well, I didn't go to university that this rules you out at all, because it certainly doesn't.
Mike: I think that's a great point. I love the idea of getting some, like, you know, practical experience. I think that's really important, often underestimated by a lot of students. I think that's, that's awesome. You know, I'm aware of the time and we need to wrap up. I mean, I think the first question is, you know, if people want to actually try using also ask, I mean, how do they go about that? How do they get on the system?
Mark: What made it as super easy as possible. So you can literally just go to also ask.com, and you'll see a big old search box there just like Google, and you can just start typing away. As a head, you've got three questions a day, you can use three queries a day, you don't even need to sign up for anything, it will just give you the results. There's live chat on there. So if you get stuck whatsoever, you know, you can ping me and pretty much no matter where I am, it probably be me answering it. This is the bootstrap nature of a SAS. Yeah, it's meant to be super easy. There's an inbuilt help system as well. And if anyone does use it, and has any feedback, I always love to hear it. Because there is always, you know, the, when you're building products like this, people encounter friction. And it's the right expectation to have that everyone tells you when they get problems or errors, because most of the time and experienced they just leave. So if you do think of you know, this is very good, or I wish it did this, just let me know, because I can probably do it.
Mike: That's brilliant. I mean, in terms of people contacting you whether they got a question about, you know, something we've discussed today, or, or have some feedback on AlsoAsked what's the best way to get ahold of you.
Mark: If you want to kind of just talk to me, I'm very active on Twitter. I'm also fairly active on LinkedIn. If you just Google Mark Williams-Cook, I think I'm actually the only Mark Williams-Cook on the internet. So if you just Google me, you will find all my social profiles and creepily everything I probably posted online. But yeah, I'm super easy to find.
Mike: Oh, that's awesome. I mean, Mark, it's been absolutely fascinating. I think it's great, you know, that not only have you been able to take an idea and produce a tool that works really, really well and it's certainly something we've used. It's also a tool that's got a whole range of uses, you know, may have been designed for SEO but as we talked about, you know, the the ability to find out what people asked about brands is super helpful to lots of people in different marketing roles. So, really appreciate it. Thank you ever so much for your time, Mark.
Mark: Thank you for having me. I've had a lot of fun. 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 favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
A Napier Podcast Interview with Abhi Godara - Rytr
AI has become the hot topic across marketing, raising questions about its potential impact on the industry. Abhi Godara, CEO of Rytr, an AI content generator, shares his thoughts on the future of AI, and explains the technology behind Chat GPT and how other platforms, such as Rytr, build on this technology. He also shares how to get the most out of AI-powered content and why being aware of its limitations is important.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- Marketing B2B Technology on Apple Podcasts
- Marketing B2B Technology on Spotify
- Marketing B2B Technology on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Interview with Abhi Godara - Rytr
Speakers: Mike Maynard, Abhi Godara
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 Abhi Godara. Abhi is the founder and CEO of an AI product called Rytr. Welcome to the podcast. Abhi.
Abhi: Thanks for having me, Mike.
Mike: So it's great to have you on I mean, I'm interested learn about Rytr but first, you know, can you tell me a bit about your career journey? And how you got to the point where you decided to found Rytr?
Abhi: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like most good things in life, nothing is like a linear path, I guess, to where you get to today. But I started my career as a professional consultant working in London in one of the big four companies back in 2007. Eight, did that for about five years, mostly in strategy consulting, bit of private equity work as well. And then I moved into startup space, pretty much for the last 10 years, that's where I've been working and started as an early stage investor in one of the leading seed funds in India, worked with more than 50 startups, 150, founders across product marketing, fundraising growth, you name it, all those areas where founders need help, and then started my own sort of venture studio based out of Valley, late 2015 16. And that's where I've been dabbling with a lot of homegrown ideas incubating quite a few product companies, mostly SAS companies, over the years, you know, some, I would say outright failures, a couple of moderate successes and a few whole brands. So that's how pretty much the journey has been over the years. But yeah, you know, it's my passion to work with entrepreneurs, who are, you know, solving big problems with innovative ideas. So that's basically what I love doing.
Mike: That's awesome. And I love the fact you've done this in different countries. So I think that international view is really interesting.
Abhi: Sure, absolutely.
Mike: So you founded Rytr, I mean, Rytr is an AI tool to help people write, unsurprisingly. And if anyone's listening, it's spelt ry T R. So that's the product. What inspired you to build a tool to do AI generated written content?
Abhi: Yeah, that's a great question, Mike. So as an entrepreneur, you know, I've always found content generation to be a pain, especially when you're a small team that is just starting up. And it's a fact that many startups and professionals fail because they don't possess effective marketing and copywriting skills. And moreover, a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, potentially give up on the idea, due to the overwhelming nature of content creation. And I've been in the AI space, you know, for the last five years, started working on a chatbot platform for influencers and creators, which, you know, scale to millions of users at one point. But we didn't have the technology like Chad GPT at that time, right, or GPT, at that time. So when GPT three came out, I think this was back in 2020, you know, so we realise the potential of this technology and the market, it could race, you know, copywriting, creative writing was one of the first use cases which kind of emerged from this, this tool.
So we looked around evaluated some existing writing tools, and we're not the first ones in the market, we were definitely in the first, you know, few players, you know, who built something like this, but there were other players out there. But we found the experience very frustrating tools for delivering you know, subpar outputs, it was very overwhelming in terms of UX and UI, there was a lot of cognitive overload for users to get started. So at that point, we decided, okay, let's give the market what it deserved. An intuitive a writing assistant, which offered the best quality of output at a very sort of fair price. So although we were slightly late to the party, but with limited resources, and small team we launched in April, I think 2021. And since then, we haven't looked back Currently, we are serving close to, I think 5 million customers globally, with almost perfect ratings pretty much everywhere, and recognised as one of the market leaders in the space. So yeah, that's that's been kind of a journey that we've had over the last couple of years.
Mike: That's a huge number of users. And I'd like to go back to that. But first, I think it might be worth for some of the the less technical listeners, you talked about chat GPT. And you talked about GPT. Three, can you explain what the difference is? And the technology that actually underpins Rytr?
Abhi: Yeah, so I mean, technology is pretty much like if you go to the really fundamental get a level that technology is called a transformer models. It's called Bert, which was pioneered by Google back in, I think 2017 18. So all the sort of future evolutions that you've seen in terms of GPT 123 3.5. And now chat GPT is based on that underlying principles. And I would say model language model so to say, so that's pretty much I think, powering all the applications in writing applications that you see around us. So charge GPT is just an evolution of Jack GPD. Three, which was like one of the, I would say, more mainstream models, which, which a lot of AI lighting companies started using, you know, bank starting from 2020 till the end of last year, and GPT 3.5, or chat GPT as this call, it's just a more refined, sophisticated version trained on even bigger datasets than than its predecessor. So that's essentially, you know, the difference between the two. So obviously, it's, it's trained on one data, it's more powerful, it can give more sort of, I would say, better outputs, higher quality outputs than its previous versions. But yeah, the underlying nature of the technology language model is still the same.
Mike: And I think we've all you know, played with chat GPT, and been been impressed by its ability to communicate it in what feels like very natural English. But but I'm interested, you know, you're obviously using, you know, this model to build a tool that specifically for writing. So what are you doing differently to what's been done, for example, in chat GPT? To make it, you know, better suited to writing blog posts or adverts?
Abhi: Yeah, absolutely. So we have our own sort of training data. And this is what we have refined over the last couple of years, you know, again, with Chad GPT, or any other sort of piece of AI writing technology, it's, you know, the basic principle of garbage in garbage out is still true. So if you, if you just throw some random inputs are sort of ill defined prompts, you know, the output that you might get is probably less than optimal, right. So we do a lot of pre formatting, you can see at the input level, and kind of post formatting at the output level, to make sure the output is aligned to the intended use case, or if it is, social media posts, blog posts, you know, your job descriptions, or song writing anything, there is a level of I would say intervention that we have to do from Rn, to make sure the output is customised. The second thing is the reliability of charge up like the the UX, the UI, whole sort of experience of people getting used to it, you know, it takes a little bit of time in the absence of any sort of education. So that's where we have created this very seamless interface, very easy to use navigate, so folks can get started immediately, right, without having to learn the ABC of, you know, AI copywriting techniques. So I think that those are two things we have done. So we have abstracted away all the complexity that users have to go through to understand and use this technology, and to obviously, making sure that the use cases are aligned to the sort of intended needs of the end users. And the third is obviously, you know, the pricing and the value for money aspect. So we are still one of the most, I would say, value for money products out there in this space. And that's how we've kept the whole proposition. Very, very oriented towards, you know, early stage users, smaller teams, you know, who do not have necessarily have the bandwidth and maybe the budget to go for, like, you know, more expensive solutions out there.
Mike: I think that's that's a really interesting point. I mean, you're giving people quite a lot, because, you know, you talked about the underlying data, you're adding extra data. So so your product understands adverts better than maybe chat GPT does. But you're also, you know, almost providing this structure, this kind of wizard to help you create content. So I mean, what are your users really looking for? Is it the quality? Is it improving the speed of generation of content? Or, you know, what's really driving the way that you're introducing features for the product? Yeah,
Abhi: I think I think it's a bit of both, actually. So I think if you if you just say, Okay, well, it's about speed of content creation, with compromising the quality, I don't think it works. You know, people want everything, you know, they want faster content generation, higher quality output, at a very affordable price point, right. So you have to take all those boxes. And, you know, luckily, nowadays we have, we've been doing all three of them at the same time. So you know, things like just a document management, the workflow management, again, going back to the point that we abstract away all the complexity, so you can, as a Rytr, you have to not just create content, but you have to manage the content as well. So creating documents, you know, sharing those documents, downloading that content, managing your team, allowing your team members access, seeing the analytics, history, all that stuff, is what you need if you're running a proper business, right. And those are the things which you cannot expect in a standalone are sort of chat GPD kind of platform, which is more geared towards, let's say, just casual use cases and, you know, end users who are not necessarily entrusted into those kinds of workflow management tools. So we provide that suite of features so that users can get the maximum value while at the same time they can create really high quality content with the least amount of time it takes to get there. So yeah, so you know, we have to balance out between those things. We are constantly adding features which can improve that workflow management for smaller teams, freelancers, agencies, and of course, keeping an eye on how can we improve the quality of output, you know, Every day, even if it's like point 1% improvement, we try to make sure you know those interventions are added so that the quality gets better over time. So it's a compounding effect.
Mike: I mean, presumably one of the biggest challenges you face is where you see a lot of AI generated content, you can begin to feel particularly from something like chat GPT, you just get a sense that it's not a real human. So what are you doing to really develop the product to make it feel much more human when people are reading the output?
Abhi: Exactly. So I think this is more of a philosophy question like and that's, that's a good point here is because as a company, as a team, as a product from day one, our philosophy has been, we don't want to encourage content factories to be built on top of this era, I think platforms, you know, the world doesn't need more content, it needs better content, and motivated content. So if you if you look at how it works on Rytr, when you play around with the tool, you will notice that we don't mindlessly allow people to generate content by pressing like just, you know, keep writing keep writing kind of button, it only takes in a limited amount of input, and then gives out a certain amount of output so that people can review the outputs when they come out. And they can edit and then refine it as they go along. So it's not like you press a button, you have like a 5000 word blog post ready for you to be published. And I think that's where a lot of people are getting it wrong. I mean, unless you spend time effort and reviewing and refining outputs, it will feel very mechanical nature in some shape or form. The second thing we do is we provide a lot of these granular controls, like we have a feature called readability score, which gives you the idea of how readable the content is. Second is we have an inbuilt plagiarism checker as well. So you can check the authenticity of the content. So you can just select any piece of text and then run it through our plagiarism checker, it will tell you whether it has any piece of copied content or references that you can edit. So we give all these controls. And again, this is this is what's this is something which adds up to me that will won't provide you out of the box, right? So all these things make the content writing experience much more, I would say emotional and practical for the real world use cases.
Mike: It's interesting. I mean, what you're describing is a product. That's that's not really designed to write content, but to accelerate that content writing. And I think it's really interesting, you talk about pleasure, and I think a lot of brands are going to be very worried about plagiarism with with AI. I mean, certainly some of the early AI, generative text that we've seen, has has had plagiarism in it and has caused a lot of problems. I think CNET got into a lot of trouble recently, didn't they?
Abhi: Right. Right. And yeah, again, I think you have to make that clear to the end users, and you have to give them the right tools so that they can address those things as they go along. So I think it's ultimately responsibility, the platform to encourage, you know, the right kind of writing behaviour, I would say.
Mike: And I mean, another thing I think that people are concerned about is where, you know, AI generated content has data or facts inserted by the AI and whether the AI is actually correct or not. And I know, you know, Google recently ran an ad where they actually had something that was wrong. So, you know, I mean, treated me, Sam, when, you know, said that chat GPT wasn't designed to be right. Are you doing things to try and make the output factually correct? Or do you see that as being something where really, because it's somebody's producing it for a project, it should be driven by the human and the human should be driving those facts and information?
Abhi: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, so like, again, I mean, we encourage people to use it as a bit of creative Rytr's block, kind of tools to end the Rytr's block. But at the same time, you know, when you get the content out, there is no guarantee that it will be 100%, you know, factually correct. So we encourage users to spend some time cross checking the facts and stats which are thrown at them. And, you know, again, let us this is part of some of the feeling that we do, like, on our site, the, you know, the prompt engineering, so to say, is to avoid throwing exact or specific numbers as much as possible, and leave that task to the end user. So they can decide what is the best, that are number of figure that can fit into that particular piece of content. But inevitably, you will come across cases where still AI would probably, you know, generate on its own some of the stats, which could be fake. So we encourage users to review and that's another reason why we ask them to you know, go through things, you know, with a fine tooth comb to make sure there are no sort of random figures. And one thing which we are working on internally is called Fact Checker. So we are trying to work on, you know, these tools and features, which can allow users to fact check some of the numbers which are thrown by AI or generated by AI. So that could potentially really address this issue. Big time.
Mike: That's interesting. I love I love the fact check it out. I think a lot of people would fill you know, reassured if there was some degree of checking, you know, what's claimed in an article. I mean, another interesting challenge I think people have is Is that when you're using AI, the AI is fundamentally trained on a training set, and kind of produces the average of what the training set is. Are you looking to, you know, somehow train the AI on the very best marketing material, the very best blog posts? Is that something that people in the AI sector are trying to do? Or is it all about volume of content?
Abhi: I think that's an interesting question. So yeah, I mean, we, you know, some of the copywriting use cases that we have, we try to give those best, you know, kind of best practices, so to say, the swipe file kind of examples, so that AI can produce content, which is aligned with that, that sort of examples and samples we have shown, but still, there is a high probability that it will just generate based on the earnings, it has had, you know, based on the underlying data set. So it's difficult, but again, you know, with a lot of fine tuning a lot of examples that you can provide, it obviously gets better and follows the guidelines that you have provided, and tries to stick to, you know, those kinds of examples, one of our sort of sister companies, Poppy Smith, they have a very unique approach to addressing this issue, where they only work with like bigger companies, enterprises, instead of taking their existing content and trying to fine tune the AI models. So the content that is generated is very customised to their brand, voice, their sort of product and description that is already out there. So yeah, so there are ways to do it. But again, we want it to be a little more open ended, and less, I would say, one particular brand or sort of use case focused.
Mike: One of the things I'm interested in, you know, just moving on to some of the applications. Is there an area you think that that generative AI today is doing really well? I mean, do you think, you know, using a tool like Rytr is best for, you know, short form social media posts for ads, or for blogs? I mean, where do you think it really shines?
Abhi: I think you've hit the nail on the head, like when you say, you know, creative writing, content writing, I would say, and I think that's what Simon was alluding to, maybe in the quotes that you mentioned, it's not meant to be like 100%, factually correct. It's meant to remove that writers block that you face, in your creative content generation process. So if you're writing blogs, if you're coming up with video ideas, or add ideas of social media posts, I think that's where AI could really help you as an assistant, to throw new ideas and new sort of direction of thinking, you know, so to say, and I think that's where it really excels. So whether it is next generation, or image generation, or any sort of similar things, I think it really opens up new possibilities in terms of ideas that you can explore as a copywriter, or a content writers. So that's where it excels. So I wouldn't expect it to write novels end to end fully formatted, completely factually accurate. I don't think that's the intended use case, at least as of now, you should think of it more as a tool in our repository to sort of just get rid of that writer’s block and come up with new angles to write about or think about.
Mike: I think I think that's really interesting. I mean, you know, looking at it as a tool to help the writers today is fascinating. I mean, some people are almost saying, you know, writing is dead, it's all gonna be AI. And clearly you believe that writers have a lot of value to add. I mean, how do you see AI changing over the next five years? I mean, do you think it's gonna get dramatically better? Or have we seen a big jump in performance, and now it's maybe going to hit a bit of a plateau?
Abhi: I think you can probably see some of the possibilities already in front of you, right? I think the vision of AGI doesn't feel very far fetched now, with how the technology is evolving. I think the use cases will emerge in other industries as well. So I think what we have seen is just barely scratching the surface in terms of content generation. But I think where you will see more of it being used is other day to day tasks. So things like predictive analytics, you know, doing tasks on your behalf, automating a lot of internal tooling, in a company answering, you know, questions on your site. So these are things where maybe, you know, content creation, or new ideas, or less of a use case, but more about, you know, how AI can actually do tasks, different kinds of tasks, in a much better simplified and efficient way for a variety of use cases. I think that's what I'll see more. I mean, I think we'll see more of over the next five years, whether we'll we'll get to see that dystopian world some people have, you know, probably envision is yet to be, I think it's still it's still far fetched. And I don't think we'll we'll get there. It's a new piece of technology, which we should embrace, try to embed it in different parts of our lifestyle and different tools that we use, and that's how I think it will become over the next five years, just like an invisible piece of technology is there to help you and guide you. A lot of new kinds of categories of jobs and skills will emerge. So I think some of the concerns are overblown, some of the potential. You know, I would say impact is also overblown, maybe in a dystopian sense. But, you know, I think we have to use it wisely and use it for the right use cases, I think it can be really powerful piece of tech.
Mike: I'm pretty interested. I mean, the way you talk about this, it's all about, you know, speeding up that process of generating content. I mean, do you do you have a number or a guide as to how much quicker someone could write a blog post, if they've got support from from a product like Rytr versus, you know, trying to do it all themselves or an ad or anything like that?
Abhi: Yeah. Finally, actually, we we've had a tool on our website like homepage, from pretty much the early days when we launched. And this is, this is exactly what we went, you know, it's just an indicative sort of assessment of how much time and money you can save with a to like Rytr. So it basically takes in the number of words you write, and we have some sort of logic in the background, we tries to calculate, okay, if you write this much content, then you're probably spending this much time and you know, each hour of your time is probably this much in dollar amount, right on average. So that gives us a sense of how much money and time you're saving by using a platform, right Rytr, based on how many works you do, right? So it's there right on the website. In fact, one of the stats we show when you land on it, is how much time and money people have potentially saved by using a platform like Rytr.
Mike: That's awesome. And I think, you know, I do feel sorry for people who, who are, you know, writers as a job, because traditionally, they've had very little investment in them. I mean, you know, you buy them a word processor, and that's it. And so it must be fairly easy to show massive ROI, you don't have to improve speed that much to to get value from a tool like Rytr, I think it's fascinating. Right, right.
Abhi: You know, again, just touching upon that, I think, I think if anything, it will have a positive impact on the content creation process as well. So, you know, I firmly believe that people with highly, I would say, sought after skills are people who are really good at what they do, whether it is copywriting, blog writing, or just coding or anything for that matter, they would probably benefit from this, because now you can probably appreciate their value even more. But I think some of the middle management and mediocre skills, like just people writing content, for the sake of it, nothing original nothing, you know, inspiring, I think they will probably have a hard time because that can easily be replaced by something like, you know, GPT, for example, or AI can do it for you. So I think it becomes important to upskill yourself, if you are one of those sort of, you know, middle layers to try to, you know, get to get to, I would say more close to the client requirements, understanding the end user personas and writing content, which is really authentic and original and inspiring, which is good for overall, like I would say, for the whole space marketing space.
Mike: I really like that positive view of things, I think it's it's good to see that as producing, you know, as output fairly average content, if you're above average, you're going to be more valuable exam. So if you upskill yourself, I think I think that's great. We'd like to ask a couple of more general questions. So it's really interesting. I mean, you're on the forefront of some massive change in marketing in terms of bringing AI to marketing. If a young person was thinking of marketing as a career, would you advise that or having, you know, seen a lot of startups and work with them? Would you advise them to do something different?
Abhi: No, absolutely, I think I think even more, so I would encourage them even more. So now with this technology, because like I said, if you're really champion of your skill, then I think your value is going to go up, even with this piece of technology. And if you know how to use this tech to your benefit, then it is even manifold the impact that you can create. So I would definitely encourage, I think, I always believe that the first principles, the fundamental needs never change, you know, marketing, still marketing, you need to put content out there, you need to target certain people with the content, and you need to sell the solution. Right. So the best piece of marketing advice, I think I got was, don't think of it as a marketing, you know, as a different function, it should be an extension of what you're doing, like a product you're selling. So the best marketing is something which doesn't come across as marketing, it comes across as educational, it comes across as helpful. And just as an extension of what you're actually selling and making money on. So I think that skill is still going to be even more valued going forward with with AI. And I think if you know, your way around using AI, then you will be even better positioned going forward. So, you know, keep at it, I would say
Mike: That's great advice. I mean, I'm sure people listening to this will be quite excited and you know, pleased to hear that actually Rytr’s there to help them rather than to replace them. If they wanted to try right. How would they get a chance to to actually use a product and experiment with it?
Abhi: Yeah, absolutely. So we again, we take pride in being one of the most seamless and easiest way to get started with here I think, you know, space so Just go to our website, right a.me You know and start writing, you will see easy to sign up process, just sign up with any of your social accounts or email accounts. And then as soon as you're inside, you can just start generating content for a variety of use cases, we offer a very sort of healthy, I would say, free plan. So you don't have to put any of your payment information, you can generate up to 10,000 characters, and use all the features that we offer pretty much. And if you need extra credits, then you can sign up to our zero plan, which is again, very, very generous, just $9 a month, and you can generate up to 100,000 characters and some images as well. And then if you really want to up your game, then we have an unlimited plan, which is $29 A month or Yeah, and you can generate as much as you want. So it's it's fairly easy to get started.
Mike: Yeah, and I think most people, if they're like me, they've sat down, tried to write something and been faced with a blank page and writers block. You know, that sort of pricing is pretty cheap to avoid that pain.
Abhi: No, absolutely. And yeah, and that's why I think it's such a lifesaver for a lot of people because, you know, you'll get tonnes of value for the money that you're spending, there is a lot of value of getting from A to like Rytr.
Mike: I really appreciate you been a great guest. If people listening to this would like to know more information, I'll get ahold of you, what would be the best way to reach you.
Abhi: I mean, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, or you can just drop me an email at abhi@rytr.me. That would probably be the easiest way to get in touch with me directly. And yeah, you can follow me on Twitter as well. Abhi_Godara is my handle. So if there's anything I can help you with a writing space using Rytr or anything else, just feel free to reach out to me, please.
Mike: That's very kind. And thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast. I really appreciate it, Abhi.
Abhi: Thanks, Mike. Appreciate you having me on the show. 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 favourite podcast application. If you'd like to know more, please visit our website at Napier B2B dot com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.
How are Marketing Automation Platforms Using AI?
How are marketing automation platforms using AI? Mike and Hannah address how artificial intelligence will shape the future of marketing automation platforms, and the limitations the systems face with integrations with tools such as ChatGPT.
Listen to the podcast now via the links below:
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Apple Podcasts
- The Marketing Automation Moment on Spotify
- The Marketing Automation Moment on napierb2b.com
Transcript: Marketing Automation Moment Episode Six - How are Marketing Automation Platforms Using AI?
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:.
Mike: And I might mean out.
Hannah: This week, we talk about marketing automation platforms using AI, MailChimp getting hacked, how many people are replacing marketing automation systems?
Mike: And we give you tips on how to get the most from your marketing automation system.
Hannah: Hi, Mike, it's great to see you. And it's good to be back for another episode of The Marketing Automation moment.
Mike: Hi, Hannah. Well, it's gonna be fun. I think there's been quite a lot happened in the world of marketing automation. A lot of it around, I guess, AI?
Hannah: Yes, definitely. And I really want to talk about what I think is the buzzword or 2023 so far, and that's chat. GPT. I mean, this seems to have blown. A lot of marketers minds. It's all over LinkedIn. It's all over Twitter. Everywhere you look, you're looking at reference to chat GPT. So it was really interested to come across that an E commerce focus market automation platform, called bloomreach, had actually made an integration with chat GPT. For me, this is moving quite quickly, you know, chat GPT has only been around a couple of months. And suddenly there's integrations. What does this mean for the market automation landscape?
Mike: Yeah, well, I think people have seen chat GPT has hit mainstream media and everyone's got really excited. I'm actually, you know, what you need to do is understand the background and chat GPT is based on this artificial intelligence model. That is actually GPT. Three. Not surprisingly, there's been previous versions of GPT. This is just the latest one. And so I think, you know, people are getting really excited about this, but it has been somewhat of an evolution to get to this point. And interestingly, you know, bloomreach, talk about integrating chat GPT. I mean, I'm interested in whether it's actually the chat client that they're integrating, or whether it's just the model. It sounds from what they're saying, like they've literally just put chat GPT as part of the product, and then allowing people to type in and say, writer sales email for me, which obviously chat GPT does and does very well. But it's a little bit formulaic, isn't it?
Hannah: Yeah, definitely. And I mean, it's interesting, because the way they've looked at the integration, or the way they're promoting the integration is really around the content aspects of subject lines, headlines, Google Ad headlines within the actual platform itself. But, and I know he won't mind saying this. But we actually had a chat a couple of weeks ago, didn't we, Mike, we have one of our directors, Ian, and he was mentioned how excited he'd got about chat GPT. But when he actually looked into it a little bit further, he realised that there was perhaps some issues on just relying on an AI platform like this, to build kind of the emails and the Google ads and the things needed for social media campaigns.
Mike: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, you know, it's one of those things. And if you're older, like me, you will know when I say I'm as excited about chat GPT as I was when I first saw the programme, Eliza, which was an AI programme, or at least a pseudo AI programme written back in the 1960s. So, you know, it's very exciting, it can do a lot of things, but it's not a complete solution. We were testing out a tool that was using the same model as chat GPT, to write headlines for Google ads. And actually, you know, within the company, we found a couple of problems. Number one, it didn't seem very good at writing headlines that fitted within the maximum character limits. So you'd have to go and edit anyway. And secondly, and this gives away, you know how healthy I am. We were testing it by getting it to write ads for Milky Bar, which is a white chocolate bar available in the UK. And I think the American listeners will know about this, one of the greatest fleets in the world, clearly, but contains lots of things that could cause problems with people with allergies. So it's not gluten free. It's obviously got milk products in etc, etc. and chat GPT just decided to write all these headlines about how it's allergen free, which is kind of scary, I think, you know, if you look at what was said. So Sam Altman runs the company open AI that basically created the GPT model and chat GPT. And someone asked him about the errors that chat GPT makes, which, you know, been pretty well documented. And his answer was, we don't understand we didn't try and build chat GPT to be right. We've tried to build it to repeat what you know, other people have said on the internet. So I think it's important to understand that whilst it can help and accelerate today, it's not quite at the stage where it's going to replace people completely.
Hannah: That's such an interesting point, Mike, about what it's been built for to replicate what's already been done on the internet, rather than to be this innovation tool for something original. And I think that's definitely something that marketers need to keep in mind. It's using data that's been used before. It's Not this innovative tool that's going to provide all these original ideas to make the campaigns more successful, it might save you time. But with regards to actually getting these new outlooks and these new formats, it's not the tool for that.
Mike: No, for sure, it definitely hasn't got to the point where it's got sort of innovation insight in the way that we use it when talking about humans.
Hannah: Definitely. And I think the mention of data really links on well to our next point, and I was actually quite shocked to see this, you might not be as shocked, Mike, but I saw an article recently that the email marketing platform MailChimp has actually been hacked for the second time in six months. To me, that was quite shocking, because I actually had a conversation with a client the other day where they were like, you know, is our data safe? Or market automation platforms? You know, what happens if it fails? What happens if it goes down? And we were sat in this call being like, No, don't worry, these platforms know how to protect data, like we can do backups, it's all okay. And then I see this, and I'm like, oh, is data not as safe as we think it is? Yeah, I
Mike: think it's, it's a really interesting question. And it's a problem that probably should be in the discussions for IT people about the cloud, because it's really hard to, you know, say, yes, you can trust cloud based services. But equally, I think it's important to look at what happens. So this was an attack that appeared to be targeted around some specific accounts, they accessed 133 accounts, which is not good. But it's 133, out of what MailChimp claimer millions of customers worldwide. So a very, very small percentage. And obviously, it's been addressed, I do think it was a little bit of a concern that MailChimp weren't completely open with this. And actually, one of the customers who was hacked, kind of revealed that this has happened. But at the end of the day, you know, one of the biggest jobs of any marketing automation platform is data security. And you've got to figure that, if your target, putting the data with the experts is probably more likely to make the data safe than trying to manage it yourself. I mean, MailChimp has got far more resources to apply to data security around marketing data than probably any customer, don't you think?
Hannah: Yeah, definitely, I think you make a good point, because we can't protect our data, as well as perhaps, you know, a platform like MailChimp, which has these massive IT departments can. So there is an aspect of really putting a faith in the system when you sign up with them. And I think, you know, customers are aware of that. And obviously, it's not ideal that this has happened. But if it is going to happen, as you said, it's only a small amount of accounts, and it's not like millions of people have been compromised.
Mike: Yeah, but I totally agree with you. I mean, it's concerning, you don't want these breaches to happen. And certainly, you know, as you pointed out, it was the second time in six months, you know, so, so MailChimp, I know you're working really hard. But guys, you've got to step it up.
Hannah: Definitely agreed. So this relates nicely on to how are marketers choosing the right market automation platforms. And we've spoken a bit in our last podcast, Mike about demos, and what marketers should be asking in their demos. But I actually came across a report from Martex. It was a Mar tech replacement survey actually revealed that in 2020 to 23% of respondents actually replaced their mark automation solution with a different platform. So they weren't happy with what they were getting from this platform. And they actually went out and got a new solution. What do you think it could be that Why are marketers making these mistakes and not choosing the right platform from the get go?
Mike: That's a great question. I think there's a couple of answers to that. I mean, one is changing a platform doesn't necessarily mean you made a mistake. There could be other reasons, things could have changed, new products could have come online. The other thing is, I think we need to understand, you know a bit more about the audience. And the reality is, is that very large companies are not changing their marketing automation platforms. Frequently, they're making investments and they're really betting for 10 years or more, because of the cost of switching from one platform to another. You have companies using marketing automation that might have 10s of 1000s of landing pages or you know, 1000s of forms. When you look at, you know, a large enterprise with multilingual landing pages and forms and lots of products. They're not the people who are churning very quickly, this is definitely smaller and midsize companies. And I think there's a lot of reasons behind that. And probably most of the reason, you know might be down to the fact that actually these companies are learning about marketing automation, developing their skills and then realising they need something different once they've got more knowledge.
Hannah: That's a definitely less cynical point of view, then my view might I make you make some really interesting points because we've talked about this before as well but there are different levels of the market automation system. So if you are starting out with some think simple like MailChimp, for example, as you mentioned, when you grow your skills, and your company grows, and you realise you need something bigger and better, then you are going to see a switch smart automation platform. So that's a real fantastic point. And definitely more positive spin of actually the companies are growing. So it's more of a positive than a negative thing. Yeah,
Mike: and I also think I mean, if you look at the data actually said that the percentage changing in 22 was down a bit versus 2021. So you know, maybe people are actually settling a bit more, obviously, two data points. It's difficult to draw too much for conclusion. But there was a big jump, for example, in the number of people who've changed SEO tools. And historically, that had been quite small now that it's jumped up. I think a lot of it is just around maturity of the technology, and people internally, but you know, working out what they need, but also the fact that these tools are changing quite quickly. And so I think those two things are driving a need to perhaps change more often than people want.
Hannah: Absolutely, it really is driving the need. That's a really great point, Mike. So if we have a look at marketing automation platforms, we've spent a lot of time talking about the marketing side, we've talked about workflows, we've talked about content, emails, but what I'd be really interested to talk about is what are the benefits to sales. And I asked this because Active Campaign have recently released a report, and it's from a direct client called preview me, and actually revealed that sale reps from this company are saving one day per week by automating repetitive tasks. And I think it's such an obvious and simple thing, but perhaps something that isn't talked about enough because market automation platforms are meant to support both marketing and sales teams. So what do you think are the real key benefits of a mark automation platform for sales?
Mike: I mean, it's a great question. And it's really difficult, because in the past used to have a CRM system, and that was different your marketing. Now the CRM, like Active Campaign is integrated into the marketing automation tool. I mean, it's really hard, you know, you talk about saving one day a week, saving one day a week compared to what and I know, I'm the cynical guy here. But, you know, were they just really inefficient beforehand? Or do they have some competitive tool and actually active campaign is that much better, I suspect, you know, the story is a bit of both. But it's an interesting story. And I do believe that, you know, if you look at both marketing activities and sales activities, when they use automation, people can save a lot of time. One of the challenges is, is really building up the right automations. I mean, we have the same problem at Napier, where, you know, I'm sure there's a lot more we could automate in our marketing automation platform. And it's just a matter of having time and resources to build the logic to actually make that work automatically.
Hannah: Absolutely. And I think I would debate you on one of your points there, Mike, because you mentioned, you know, are the sales team ineffective? You make a good point, we can't compare it to any sets of data. But I think that is one of the key points of a system like this for sales reps is that even if they are a little bit inefficient, the platforms are meant to make them as effective as possible to let them do their jobs easier?
Mike: Yeah. And I'm not arguing the platform's don't work. I mean, you're absolutely right. The platforms are really good. I think the question is, it's saving one day versus what, you know, I mean, we're a marketing agency, we write a lot of press releases. And this is, I think, one of the dirty secrets that we're probably not allowed to admit, but we're gonna admit to our listeners, now, writing press releases, where you have a relative comparison, this product is 10%. Better, and then you just move on, actually haven't compared it to anything 10% better than what? And I think that's always always a difficulty. You look at this saving one day a week, what was it? How do they do it? Why was that the case? And really, I think, you know, although it made a great press release, and we certainly looked at it and liked it, I'd love to see a much more in depth case study explaining exactly what happened, and what sort of automations are implemented and why they save so much time
Hannah: releasing all of our industry secrets, there might QR but yeah, I definitely agree it would be good to see a bit more of an in depth review and analysis of how is it supporting them and have that little bit more data around how it could be saving them this much time?
Mike: Yeah, unfortunately, went to marketing people like us. And clearly someone just got really excited by the number, I mean, is actually over $10,000 a year, if you look at the average sales rep, you know, compensation. So, you know, it is a really big deal. And it's just like, it's really exciting. It's a great headline, I think, to be really useful to people. I'd love to see more detail.
Hannah: Absolutely. So to end off our podcast, as always, Mike, I want to have a bit of a chat about our insightful Tip of the Week. And this week, I'd like to have a bit of a discussion about really using market automation platforms to its full potential. So often companies sign up to these my automation platforms, but they don't really have a strategy or have planned what they're going to use the platform for. So they've got, you know, a big suite, such as HubSpot, for example, that's got everything from workflows, automations, you know, optimizations, SEO, but they're literally just sending email campaigns out on the platform. So what can companies do to really just make sure that they've got a good plan in place before they launch them off automation platform?
Mike: I love this question. I think it's a great question, it comes to the real hub of some problems where, you know, we have clients who basically have expensive marketing automation systems that predominantly just send out newsletters, I mean, one of the solutions is, don't spend all that money, if you just want to send newsletters, go use something like MailChimp, or Constant Contact, and that that would solve the problem. But But I think the, you know, the other answer is much more about thinking about and planning campaigns actually spending some time considering how you can use those, those capabilities. And this is something you've done quite a lot with Napier's tools.
Hannah: Yeah, definitely, I think it's taken a bit of a wider view. And I think this is what we do with clients, you know, I can't resist the plug, you know, I can't like it's part of my job role. But when we take a look at campaigns ever, it'd be in April with our clients, we look at what else we can do around to support that message. So if it's a product launch, yes, let's do these PR aspects. But how can we use the mass automation platform to also get that message out to the database, find new contacts to get it out to new prospects? And I think it's taken a wider look at, okay, we've got this platform, what campaigns are we running? How can we utilise this platform to make our campaigns more effective and more successful?
Mike: I mean, again, great point, think of it from the point of view of the campaigns and how you can make them more successful. I think, you know, the other thing is, is there's a balance, you know, you shouldn't just use a marketing automation tool as an email distribution tool. I mean, that's, that's silly. That's a waste of money. But equally, I think, you know, and let's be honest, it probably applies to us as well, I don't think anyone really uses 100% of the capability. So look at all the features, look at what the platform can do, and make use of as many of those features that are relevant to you as possible, without really killing yourself to try and tick all the boxes, because that can actually be counterproductive. You can spend a lot of time and get, you know, limited benefit.
Hannah: And times and resources. You know, as you mentioned previously, that's always going to be an issue. So as you said, it's a fine line, but it's balancing. What can you implement, that's going to make the real difference. And also, don't be scared to ask people around you ask the experts around, you get, you know, a third insight opinion on how can I do these campaigns? How can I use my resources effectively, to basically build the best marketing automation campaigns that I can?
Mike: I think that's great advice. I mean, it's really good. And probably the sort of advice we should end the podcast on because that's a great thing for for listeners to take away.
Hannah: Definitely. Well, thanks so much for joining me again this week, Mike, it's been a great conversation as always.
Mike: Thanks, 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.
it-daily.net and speicherguide.de Announce Storage Survey
it-daily.net and speicherguide.de have announced that, together, they are undertaking a survey assessing the state of storage infrastructure in 2023. The aim of this survey is to provide an overview of current storage systems and whether these systems will be able to handle the increasing pressures of the industry over the next five years.
The survey will ask responders a range of questions including their current forms of storage, the demand for primary and secondary storage, their requirements for storage systems, and the challenges their storage infrastructure poses.
The results from this survey will provide readers with insight into the industry’s trends and pain points, helping them to reposition themselves and face upcoming challenges.
With the technology industry constantly evolving, surveys such as these are essential in providing businesses with the information needed to adapt. While analysts are often relied upon for their industry expertise and market knowledge, publications have access to expansive and accurate databases, putting them in a fantastic position to gain insights, and share these valuable findings with their readers.
Find out more about the Fit for Future survey here.
IEN Europe to Attend Face-to-Face Tradeshows
We were delighted to hear that IEN Europe will be attending Hannover Messe, SPS Parma, embedded world, SENSOR+TEST and WIN Eurasia in the coming months.
Published by TIMGlobal Media, IEN Europe provides eight printed issues per year, and three digital issues, covering trends from 5G technology, and cybersecurity to robotics and energy shortages.
Visitors will have the opportunity to meet the editorial team in person and discuss the latest information and technology developments in the industrial B2B European market.
After a few years of virtual alternatives, it is great to see more publications making a return to face-to-face events. Trade shows such as these are a great way for publishers to increase awareness of their publications, helping to expand their databases and benefiting both the publishers and their customers. Attending these events will undoubtedly be a valuable experience for both IEN Europe, who will be able to connect with their audience, and their customers, who will gain valuable insights into the industry’s developments and trends.