A Napier Podcast Interview with Mark Stouse - Proof Analytics

In the latest podcast episode, Mike sits down with Mark Stouse, CEO of data analytics platform Proof Analytics.

Mark discusses the difference between marketing mix modelling (MMM) and marketing resource management (MRM) and how they can demonstrate the impact of marketing activities on business bottom line.

Mark also explains why it is vital to trust and use math when making marketing decisions and why pressure from the C-suite means this is increasingly important.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

Transcript: Interview with Mark Stouse - Proof Analytics

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Mark Stouse

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 Stouse. Mark is the CEO of Proof Analytics. Welcome to the podcast, Mark.

Mark: Hey, it's great to be here. Thank you so much.

Mike: So Mark, tell me what happened in terms your career? How did you end up founding Proof?

Mark: You know, I started out like probably everybody else in marketing and communications, because I used to do that as well, you know, and I was beating my head against this brick wall of the inability of being able to prove the value of what we were doing, right, where everyone understood that they needed to have marketing and communications. But they saw it more in terms of tactical execution, rather than business impact. And so when there was a budget cut, the conversation was always around, well, what activities, what levels of support are we going to lose, it was never about loss of business impact. And this just seemed to me in this very kind of, at that time, very ethereal sort of way, right to be utter insanity. And so I got to a point where rather than cursing the darkness, I decided to try to strike a match. I mean, I hated math in high school. But all of a sudden, when I rediscovered it in my late 20s, early 30s, professionally, I really gravitated to it. And so I, I started with a team, I started kind of scaling the heights of this problem, and got to a very high level of maturity, not in the b2c side, which is, you know, had already done all this long before, right. But in B2B, I mean, I am probably still one of a handful of B2B CMOS, large company, B2B CMOS, who can prove that they connected everything that they were doing, and their teams were doing to various types of business impact, to the satisfaction of the C suite, and the board, which is the key phrase, right, none of us get to define our own success. Other people do that. And so, you know, I just kept I kept on gone. By 2010, I was hired to be the CMO of Honeywell aerospace, by Dave Cody, who was the CEO of Honeywell International at that time. And you know, we just incredibly complicated very long cycle very business with a lot of time lag in it. And we were able to, to put it all together and change that part of the world at least. But we it costs us like eight or $9 million a year. And so it became very obvious that automation was going to be a really important part of the next step. And that's what took us to Proof. And so took us three years to build the platform, the way that we felt like it needed to be and we had a lot of early customers, like Intel and Oracle and people like that, who were chiming in and saying, Yeah, I really like that really hate that. Don't do that, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so it was, it took a while to get going. But boy, you know, it's it's been good ever since.

Mike: And that sounds amazing, because what you're basically saying is you can tell marketers, the impact of what they're doing. In terms of the business bottom line. I mean, that's kind of the holy grail for everyone, isn't it?

Mark: Yeah, no, I mean, I think that really what, you know, most people still talk about this in terms of establishing the ROI on stuff they did in the past. And that's certainly part of it. And regression, math will generate those multiplier numbers. That's what they're called, technically. But the real deal here is can you forecast into the future? So this is not prediction. Prediction is a qualitative thing. The forecasting is quantitative, right? It's calculated as computed, you need to forecast the impact of your investments into different time horizons. And then you have to be able to recompute those models over and over and over again on a on a an appropriate interval that's relevant to your business to say, okay, you know, what, the reality is deviating from the forecast, why is that, right, and what do we need to do about it? And if this sounds sort of similar to the way a GPS guy had you on a journey? You would be right on. Right? That is actually it's been said by somebody a lot smarter than me that every business decision is essentially a navigation decision. When do I need to make a change? Why do I need to make a change? What do I need to change? And by how much do I need to change it? And that is, that's navigation. And so that's what mmm, automated modern marketing mix modelling. That's what it does.

Mike: I love that GPS analogy. So just tell us a little bit more about the company first. I mean, you've talked about the mmm product and marketing mix modelling, you also have another product as well.

Mark: Yes, MRM, which is marketing resource management, which is, as a category has been around for a lot longer. And there's some very, very large players a primo and allocate it. And there's been a lot of consolidation in the space in the last three years. It's historically very expensive. So like, you know, if you were to buy, you know, these are general numbers, but if you were to buy 300 seats, for a primo, you're probably looking at a million and a half and licence fees, and another million and a half and implementation costs. So your total cost, your one is not for the faint of heart, or the sleight of wallet, right? We came along and we said, look, that just doesn't make sense anymore. And then and this was happening before the bottom fell out of the economy, which made it even more relevant. You know, SAS is supposed to I don't care what SAS you're talking about. SAS is supposed to make things cheaper, not more expensive, right. And so we came out with a MRM product native on Salesforce, lightning, we're the only one that has that. So we have automatic data sync within minutes after you spin up Proof MRM. It's automatically syncing with whatever Salesforce clouds you have. This is the tool that this is essentially an ERP for marketing, right or for go to market. It's tracking, your planning, your budgeting, your approvals, your asset management, it's all that stuff. And it's a very known category. We're just disrupting the heck out of it, both from a product point of view and a pricing point of view.

Mike: That's amazing. I mean, how do you get down to such a low price? When your competitors you say a many times more expensive? What have you done that's different?

Mark: Well, I think that you have to look at price. I mean, there's a huge reason why price is one of the four P's of marketing, right, and this is, this is something that a b2c marketer totally gets and deals with every day. But most B2B marketing teams don't even touch pricing. So they're trying to constantly sell value. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's really that's part of the equation. That's really important. Right? But you know, I can remember when I was 16, getting my first car, and I had to buy my own car. And I really wanted this BMW three series. And there was actually one available for low dollars, relatively speaking. And I and I told my dad about it, and he goes, Well, you know, it's, it's not a deal, unless you can afford it. Right. And it was a that was a really tough point. And and the same applies today to enterprise software, right? You can, you can have great value, it can be totally worth it from a value standpoint. And if you can't stroke the check to buy it, it's not happening. Right. So you have to price based on where the market is the reality of the market risk factors. I mean, SAS customers have never been more risk averse than they are today. And that goes back probably three years now. They're dispensing more procurement teams are saying I'm not doing annual contracts prepaid, right. I want an annual contract that's payable either monthly or quarterly. And I want to be able to get out at any time, right? I mean, these are major shifts in the SAS universe that you have to deal with. And so we decided, I had a great opportunity to talk to Michael Dell about it. And he's like, man, he goes, you know, you want to be as disruptive as possible right now. Right with your pricing. And so we had the ability from a cost basis point of view, which actually exists in most software companies anyway, to go real low. Right. And so essentially, I mean, I don't think I'm being unduly transparent here when I say this. Mr. M is our volume, it's our it's our generates our the volume of seats, the volume of revenue, all this kind of stuff, the margin is not as high. Okay, we get our margin out of MRM.

Mike: And typically people would want both right, they'd want the the MRM to do the planning, and then the mmm to actually model what's going to work and what's not not going to work. Is that really, how people use the products?

Mark: Yeah, no, that that that is an accurate statement. Although I would say that, typically, they come in that, you know, their first purchase is MRM. It's a very straightforward, let's call it transactional sale, right? There's not a lot of implementation pain and suffering attached to it. Unless, unless, of course, you know, we do have some customers that insist on massive amounts of customization. And that's a different category altogether, right. But the the main customer, the main customer type that we have in large enterprise down through the upper end of the mid range, right is, is going to be, hey, we want to buy it, we're gonna use it initially, at least for the first year, straight out of the box, right? We want 300 seats that maybe a little bit of services for six months, going down the road, right, and then we'll talk later if we need more customization or something, right. So basically, they they implement MRM, they get solid with that. But our mmm is fully integrated into that. And so at some point, they feel at a at the right level of maturity, or they're getting pressure from inside or, you know, whatever, right, and they activate the mmm, portion of it, which makes it completes the loop, right? I mean, so what Salesforce says about Proof is that we're the only fully closed loop marketing analytics offering around today, right, which is not actually true. Right. There are some others, we have competitors, but I think we are the best. And particularly if you are a Salesforce customer already, right? I mean, there's just no reason to go anywhere else.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I'm, that's such a good endorsement from Salesforce. So let's step back a bit. And for people who maybe don't fully understand and print maybe I don't as well have not having worked in a huge marketing organisation. Can you just explain what MMA is, what the process of using it is, and how it helps you plan more effectively?

Mark: Sure, I mean, mmm, is nothing but the application of multivariable regression math. So this is the same math that used to answer about 85% of the world's questions. You know, if you look at the science behind climate change, if you look at the science behind epidemiology, you look at I mean, you just run through all of these major things, right? The analytics are fundamentally rooted in two things, multivariable regression, and then machine learning to establish patterns, right, repeating patterns. And so and they're very complimentary, they work together, right? So we have automated the regression part, which is the only way and this is one of the laws of gravity here. You know, if you don't like it, I'm really sorry, it's not my rule, right? It regression is the only way to get to causality. The only way period, right? And so that's what we've automated. And so essentially, the way it all starts, if we kind of frame this through and the way we onboard a customer, we sit down with them, we say, okay, what are your top 20? Top 50 questions, whatever it happens to be, that you really need answers to right to support decisions that you're having to make on a regular basis. Usually, formulating that list is not hard for people. Right? It's particularly, you know, one of the groups that we talked to is we talked to the C suite about marketing. And so we get all of their questions. And these questions are now extremely predictable, right? I mean, like, seriously, there's like we actually have codified the 50 most common questions right about marketing and marketing impact on go to market, right, the overall go to market sequence.

So we, we we start there, each one of those has parameters to the question, right? Because the way the question is being asked, it starts to suggest the different factors that are important to At. And so we we list that, we start to create a model framework or we are assisting in some cases, the customer to do it themselves. And then those model frameworks become models when they are armed with the right kinds of data. We have brought agile as a methodology into the analytics and into the modelling process, because historically, the way that analytics teams have approached this is to create a giant mega model that's designed to pretty much explain everything in one model. And it's just not the way life actually operates. It's very, very hard to communicate that with the business leaders that need to get value from it. So we exploded it and use you know, we, we created the idea of a minimum viable model, which is something that's now gone really viral and mainstream in the data science community, it allows you to spin up a very focused, targeted model, you know, work on it in a very discreet very tight way with whoever the business leader is that's supposed to benefit. get to a point, you know, and say, a week or two, where that business leader is saying, Yeah, you know, what, that answers my question that gives me real value that helps me out big time. At that point, it goes, the model goes into production.

And what that means is it starts to get hooked up to automatic data flows, API's, right? At which point it becomes largely autonomous, is automatically recalculating that model, every time new data is presented to the model. So this is why this system actually does literally work like a GPS, because you are throwing out a forecast, right? So this would be in GPS terms, this would be your route to your destination, right. And then as, as you move forward, and you have to adjust and bad things happen, or good things happen that get in the way, or, you know, they either hinder what you're trying to accomplish, or they make it even more effective. You're having to make changes, right? Just you're ultimately like going back to the GPS, GPS and saying, Hey, tonnes of traffic ahead, if you stay on this route, it's going to totally suck, you're going to be an hour late, right to dinner, or whatever. But if we reroute you, if you go right, left, right, left, right, you'll only be 10 minutes late. It'll all be good. Right. And that is, I mean, one one cmo recently, I actually, I guess it was earlier this year, so not all that recent. But he said, you know, the thing I really love about prove is that I'm never really wrong. And I kinda kinda like, didn't know quite what to do with that, right? And then all of a sudden, it clicked, right? And it's just like, with a GPS on your phone, you're never not getting there. You always ultimately get to your destination, it's changing the way you get to your destination. Whereas if you were using an old fashioned map that was printed 10 years before, right, you you could very easily actually be wrong. Right? You could fail to arrive. Right? And, and I guess probably all of us have a certain age have actually experienced that, right? So that's really what he meant is that the GPS means you're never wrong. Also means and if you're a guy, you really understand this, you never have to ask for directions, which is something that men, whatever reason really hate to do. It's a universal construct, right? And GPS made it possible so that we'd never have to do that anymore.

Mike: And presumably, because you've got this model, you don't just need, you don't just have to feed it real values, you can create scenarios. Yeah, you know, maybe you change your marketing mix. And you're almost saying, Well, if I did this, where will I end up? Is that is that kind of the way it works?

Mark: That is exactly how it works. In fact, that is the single most popular part of the tool, right? Because when things start to change, and that shows up in the way that everything is represented to the user, so it's very intuitive in that sense. Then how do you know how to reroute right what is what are your options? You're gonna you're gonna have to respond and experiment with different scenarios to get back on track. And the you know, with every model and every model has its own screen, right for you to do this, you can play around and you can say, Okay, this is the best choice. I mean, like one of the things that I loved, I mean, we were doing it the old fashioned way, this is pre Proof. But at Honeywell, we would be sitting in a meeting with finance and the CFO who was a big believer, and all this would say, you know, so what would happen if we gave you an additional $20 million to spend in the back half of the year? Right? How, what would that look like in terms of impact, timed impact, all this kind of stuff. And we could say, Okay, we're going to take that money, and we are going to, because you have to make certain assumptions on something like that, we're going to assume that it will be allocated according to the current allocations in the system. And, and then we would run the model right there in the meeting, right, and it would show what what happened right?

Now, what was really interesting is that there's, you know, what you're really trying to do is you're trying to optimise spend in light of results. And the results are often time lag well into the future. So all of that has to be computed. And it all has to kind of be packaged into a single answer like that. And what that means to is that, you when you're optimised, that can mean, that can also mean that you are past the point of diminishing returns. So it can mean actually, if we continue spending more and more and more money in this particular area, the amount of goodness we're gonna get back is is not worth it, we kind of have maxed it out under the current market situation. And so don't spend any more money in that area right now, because you won't get any additional value. The really, the really super, excuse me compelling scenario is when it shows that you're low on the S curve low on the optimization curve, but you're killing it at that point. So that means if they spend more money, they're gonna get even more good stuff up to a point, right. And so if you're a business, and you can afford to do it, so this is where affordability is always part of the equation. But if you can afford to do it, you would be insane not to do it. Particularly since you have analytics that are totally governing it right. So it's never going to not be transparent, what's happening. So this is really where it is. And I think that five years from now, particularly if, if the what happens in the macro continues to get really rugged for two or three years, this is going to be the only way that people do it, right? Because it is actually the only mathematically viable way.

Mike: I'm really interested by by the fact you say it's the only way people can do it, because we still have a bit of that Mad Men, you know, kind of mentality and marketing where people want to go for what they like and what they feel should work rather than necessarily trusting the maths. So do you think the push towards a more analytic approach is going to come from marketing? Or is it going to come from the C suite demanding, you know, more predictability and more value from marketing?

Mark: I think I think right now, at least it's overwhelmingly the latter. It's coming from the C suite who are just basically saying, not doing this anymore. You know, we were talking about before we started, right? If you look at the MAR tech stack, in the average company, this is all about economies of scale. This is all about being able to do more, touch customers more, all that kind of stuff, right? But there's no governance, there's no it's the Headless Horseman, right. It's, it's, there's no economies of learning being applied to the economies of scale. And the prima facie evidence for this is when when martec portunity, marketing automation and things like that really took hold. Most marketers just went crazy with it. And the law of unintended consequences has been awesome, right? Because you have GDPR you have California doing its thing. All these laws are getting more, they're getting tighter and tighter and tighter and they're not softening at all. And by not being able to calibrate and govern what they were doing. They actually killed the goose that laid the golden egg. Right, they didn't do it intentionally. Right, but they still did it. And so this is about saying, You know what, there has to be a brain, there has to be a way. And I'm not, I'm not saying that marketers are not a brain. But let's just look at real life science here for a second. The unaided human brain can't process more than three or four variables at a given time. And if one of them is one or more of them is extensively time lagged, and its relationship to effects, right, you're screwed, you're just totally screwed you are, the human brain is not going to be able to intuit its way to the truth. So you have to have math.

And and if we look at B2B go to market, we're talking about every model has 50 factors in it, there abouts, more or less, two thirds of which represent things you don't control. It's the wave that you're trying to serve in the model. Right? That's two thirds of the model. So I mean, I, you know, I just honestly, I, what I say to most people is, which seems to be resonate very clearly with everybody is, if you look at your bets in 2019 2020 2021, and 2022, if you basically made the same bet every year, for those four years, your way out, even even if they were all killing it in 2019, and 2020. In 2021, they were like, tanking, right. Field Marketing is a great example of this, but there are many others, right? And then you look at what's working today versus a year ago, at this time, it's totally different as well. And so how are you going to keep up with that, you short of using an analytic. And remember, it's not just a data thing, data is critical, but data is like crude oil. If you try and put crude oil into your car to run it, you will have destroyed your engine. Right? It has to be refined into something that can be combusted in your car and add value to you. Right. Analytics is the refinery for data is the thing that generates the final output that has meaning. Well, why is that? Because data by itself is only about the past. And it has no ability to forecast anything by itself, right? And we live in a multivariable world. It's all about the relationships between things, not about single measurements of different things. So this is all like, I mean, this is not me, obviously, I you know, I'm the CEO of Proof. And I want you to buy great stuff from Proof. Right? But this, what I'm saying right now transcends anybody's product. It's just fact. Right? It's like a law of gravity you and you can't change it, it is what it is.

Mike: I'm fascinated about what this change is going to do to marketing. I mean, if you were talking to a young person today thinking about a marketing career? I mean, do you think that the ability to use this data is going to make marketing a more exciting and interesting career? Or do you think actually marketers are going to be governed by the data and have less influence? I mean, where do you think things are going?

Mark: So the, I think there's a real answer to that question is that, unfortunately, all of us as human beings, we tend to be people have extremes, before we hit a point of balance. So marketing for as long as I've been a marketer, has been skewed creatively. A lot of B2B marketers believe that we've already put too much science into it just because there's a martech stack, which is sort of scary. I mean, to be really honest, because it's there's no science in it at all yet. So I think that what will happen, largely because of what is kind of the mindset of a lot of C suites that I meet with, is that they're going to swing the pendulum hard in the other direction. And so creativity will be redefined as problem solving, you're gonna have to be able to prove it with the numbers. Now, what I also really believe and really no, because it's throughout history, that this has been proven over and over and over again, is that creativity in the way that marketers define that term? It only gets better and better and better, with more and more and more information. I mean, can we think of somebody who's more creative? Again, using the marketing definition of creativity? more creative than Leonardo da Vinci? Probably not. Right? And yet, why was he so creative? It's because he knew so much about so many different things. And he would cross pollinate. And he would bring data into art, he would bring math into art, right? And make the art better, make it more compelling, right, make it more beautiful. So and that and that's a, you read the latest biography of Leonardo, that is talked about explicitly, as they translate his own diaries, right? He's talking about it. Which is really surreal. Right? When you when you think about how long ago he lived, actually, the same is true for Aristotle. Aristotle also talked about this, that's even further back. Right. But it's, it's when you read what they're talking about, it reads just like today. Another kind of example of this real fast, right, is that there's a lot of tension between marketers and business people, right? Same kind of tension actually exists between business people and data scientists. They define things differently. If you look at the letters between Leonardo da Vinci and meta Qi, his patron, it is surreal, it really is to see them having the same arguments, right, that we're all so familiar with today, right? I mean, meta cheese basically going, Look, man, I'm at war with Venice, and I need those war machines that I hired you to build for me. Otherwise, I'm gonna lose. If you do that, I'll buy so much marble for your sculptures that you won't ever be able to use it all. Okay, but dammit, can we please focus on what's really important right here first? I mean, you just kind of sit here and go, Wow, you know, human nature hasn't changed at all.

Mike: I love that. And I think it's actually a really optimistic point to to end, the discussion is that we can all be Leonardo and make our marketing, you know, a little bit more beautiful. I think that's a great thought. Is there anything you feel that we should have covered in the discussion that we haven't?

Mark: No, I think it's been awesome. You know, I mean, there's so many different things about this topic, to discuss that you can't possibly do it in one podcast. Right. But I just I do think is very hopeful, right. I mean, you know, and let me just also say this to kind of pile hope upon hope, right? Because the there's that old saying that hope is not a strategy. But let me tell you, I hope is really super important. Okay, so most marketers are scared of analytics, because they are scared that it will prove them wrong. That it will mean that marketing really isn't as important to the business, as they've always been saying. I can tell you categorically that the analytics do not agree with that assessment. Marketing was created. Modern Marketing was created as a multiplier, a non linear time lag, asynchronous multiplier of the rest of the business, which is largely linear sales is linear. Right? What I mean by that, if you get a bigger sales quota, if your CRO and you get a bigger sales quota, how are you going to meet that quota? Well, you're going to hire more sales, guys, because you know, that every single sales guy, or most of them will hit their quota, right, and it will all add up, right? But that's not how marketing works. Marketing is a multiplier marketing is getting huge leverage across time and space.

The mission of marketing is to help sales sell more stuff to more customers as revenue faster. That's cash flow impact and more profitably, that's margin than sales could do by itself. That's the whole ball of wax right there. And so if you can prove that in the math, and you will, because if you're running a competently run solid marketing effort, then you're generating these multipliers, including brand brand is a huge multiplier on stuff that really matters. It's not a theory at all. All, anybody who said that brand is soft, he can't measure it can't understand it. It's all kind of like metaphysical and all it literally doesn't know what they're talking about. So this is all really, really great stuff for marketing, if marketers will grab a hold of this math, this approach, whether it's you buy Proof, or you buy somebody else's product, right really doesn't matter from that standpoint, right? You will be more successful, and you will have a better career and you will enjoy yourself exponentially more than you currently are. You have the best damn job in any company, except for one thing, and that is you can't prove your impact. And so you get sucked into these really debilitating conversations with the business that end up in budget cuts and recriminations and arguments and all this kind of stuff. And psychically, it's just terrible. Right? So let's fix that. Right? Let's stop doing this crazy shit that we've been doing. And let's use the math that's been there to solve the problem. And it'll all be good. Trust me. You're really well.

Mike: That's such a positive way to end. I love that, Mark. I mean, just one last question. You know, if people want to follow up this interview, or find out more about Proof  Analytics, how can they get ahold of you?

Mark: So I've, you know, my big channel is LinkedIn. So I'm very easy to find on LinkedIn. That would be choice number one. DM me on Twitter. That's another good one. I'm still there. I'm kind of weighing it back and forth, right now, but I'm still there. And then, you know, our URL on the website is Proof. analytics.ai. Don't try and email me. It's like, I'm, you know, I'm 56. But I kind of operate like a 26 or 27 year old, right? I don't really use email very much anymore. So you're, you're gonna get almost immediate responses from me on LinkedIn mail, and we'll go from there.

Mike: That's awesome, man. It's been a great discussion. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Mark: Hey, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it.

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.

by Natasha Websdale

Why Should You Use Personas to Enhance Your Campaigns?

In episode five of the Marketing Automation Moment podcast, Mike and Hannah share how to deal with a Martech stack that’s getting too complex, and the questions marketers need to be asking in demos.

They also explore why personas can be such a valuable element in your marketing automation campaigns, and how they can help drive your content and campaigns.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

Transcript: Marketing Automation Moment Episode Five - Why Should You Use Personas?

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Kelly

Hannah: Welcome to the marketing automation moment Podcast. I'm Hannah.

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'm Mike Maynard.

Hannah: And today we discuss marketing automation platforms and quote in the complexity of the MAR tech stack, questions to ask in demos,

Mike: and the importance of using personas to build your marketing campaigns.

Hannah: Hi, Mike, it's great to have you back. You've just been in the US for the last couple of weeks. How are you doing?

Mike: Hi, Hannah. Well, it's really good to be back. We had a great trip to the US had a week at sea, but and also a trip around the Bay Area. But it's nice to be back even though the weather's a little chilly in England.

Hannah: Well, yeah. So you're coming from there wouldn't be quite as nice as Last Vegas or Silicon Valley?

Mike: Well, actually, Vegas was quite nice. But Silicon Valley was flooded, there was so much rain that I chose flooded out my hotel had to go and get another hotel because of all the water and the lack of drainage. So coming back here perhaps isn't as bad as I thought.

Hannah: Well, it's nice to know that it's not just the UK that gets torrential rain poor. Exactly. So I'm really interested to know, what was the key thing you'd say came out of your US trip? What was your one key takeaway?

Mike: Well, I guess you're talking about marketing automation, because that's the podcast. So one of the interesting things that became very clear was that companies, particularly companies in the sort of, you know, late stage startup, they tend to have marketing automation teams. But the thing was limiting their marketing automation campaigns is content. So it seems to me and this is probably not different from from anyone else. But the people we're talking to, we're really struggling to get enough content to be able to run the automation campaigns they wanted to run. And I think that that's something you know, we all need to think about, because content is so important.

Hannah: That's really interesting. Thanks, Mike. And I think you're completely correct. You know, there is no market automation campaigns without content. Exactly. Well, let's cover some of the news stories that you've missed from the market automation world while you've been away. So the first thing I wanted to have a little bit of a chat about and slightly out of the scope of specific b2b technology, market automation platforms. But is that demand bridge has partnered with age to power a quote to order workflow. So basically, what this integration provides is a real time product information coming directly from Sage to include imagery pricing, to basically populate customer proposal documents within demand bridge itself. So it's quite an interesting concept, don't you think?

Mike: I think it's really interesting. I mean, demand bridge isn't really a classic marketing automation platform. But it's fascinating that products, like demand bridge are really needed, because one of the big issues of marketing automation is that they focus on the marketing and not the sales. So typically, you're not seeing quotes, modules within marketing automation platforms. To me, that's something I think that that will come. I mean, I think it's something that has to change as we go forward. But today, even some of the automation platforms that integrate both marketing, and also a CRM for sales, they still don't have that quote, module, it's still external. So it's one big error, I hope we'll see improvements of going forward.

Hannah: Definitely. And I think it is a challenge that companies face when they're looking to export from just a CRM that they're using to maybe it's perhaps gold CRM, and they're looking to move over to a platform that's full sales and marketing. And actually, I've come across with they've been like, well, actually, we can do quotes directly in something like gold CRM. And that's actually can be a disadvantage when moving over to a market automation platform.

Mike: Yeah, I think when you go to these integrated platforms, you can lose some of the functionality that you got with a separate CRM platform. So it is an issue for some people. But equally, a lot of these marketing automation systems will also integrate. And to be honest, once you get to a certain size, pretty much everybody's on Salesforce. So we are seeing that you know that Salesforce dominance is still there for the larger enterprises. So it's definitely coming. It's definitely something that could could improve. It's an area where perhaps the the market automation guys are lagging behind the CRM, guys, but I'm optimistic it's gonna get fixed in the near future.

Hannah: Definitely. And I think there are solutions out there already, you know, there's integrations, as you mentioned, but integrations such as panda doc that can be used to help that, quote, functionality come back into the automation integrated functions.

Mike: That's such a good point. Because actually, even when you've got a CRM with a quoting function, sometimes people use other tools, Panda docs very popular because of its the signature capabilities. And so I think what you're seeing is this problem where you've got all these little specialist solutions, but I suspect in the long term, it will be a process of consolidation and we're just have to wait until that happens.

Hannah: Definitely. And I think the mention of integrations really moves us along to my next point, Mike. And this is because I recently came across an article by marketing charts. We're a big fan of marketing charts here at Navia. But what was really interesting is this focused on the MAR tech stack and how the market stack is actually getting too complicated. So the report actually revealed that 40% of respondents in the USA and 44% of respondents in the UK believed that their Mar tech stack had got too complicated. Now, when does it start getting too complicated? When does it start getting way out of control?

Mike: I'd say interesting, because I mean, the complexity of some of these products, it feels like just one product would be too complex, if you've got a small team. But But I do understand that, you know, what we're talking about earlier is a great example where you might end up with a marketing automation platform talking to a CRM platform, which talks to a quote platform. And that starts to get complex there in terms of managing just that simple process, from getting an inquiry through to quoting. But I think the reality is that actually, complexity means functionality as well. So today, people actually quite like choosing the best product for each particular task. And I will suggest that, although complexity can be a challenge, because we don't have these, you know, truly integrated solutions, actually picking the best solution. And then dealing with some of the integration issues, can be a better a better way to go about it, than trying to pick something as integrated and frankly, doesn't offer the functionality you need.

Hannah: I think that's a brilliant point, Mike, that functionality, because perhaps that's where marketers are getting confused. Because often these integrations or these platforms all have a use, perhaps it's just analysing what you're using what's actually beneficial to what you're looking to achieve. And that's how you can start narrowing it down. So it's not too complex when you look at the bigger picture,

Mike: for sure. And we're seeing some people trying to integrate, I think HubSpot is perhaps the best example. And I think other vendors will follow. But it will tend to be slower, because at the moment, now, the technology is still evolving. And actually what's happening is we're seeing, you know, vendors concentrate on what they're good at, and try and be the very best at that, rather than try and do an okay job across a wide range of different functionality.

Hannah: Definitely, and I think perhaps that's one to watch, as we move into, you know, further into 2023, perhaps the second half of the year, we'll see that slight change where the focus on the integrations will be made.

Mike: Yeah, I think maybe 2023 might be a bit optimistic. But But hopefully, you know, we're going to start seeing more integrations. And we've seen that to some extent, with some acquisitions as well. So I think it is gonna continue. But yeah, I probably not as optimistic as you when I say, I figure it's probably a three to five year kind of process.

Hannah: I'm always optimistic marketer, Mike, that's me. You are brilliant. Well, I thought another thing we could have a chat about, Mike. As we you know, we're now midway through January in 2023. And often this is where companies are looking at the different marketing automation platforms they can use. So whether they're going from an existing CRM to go to integrated platform, maybe they've decided their budget needs to change, and they want to integrate from one platform to another. So what is really the key thing within a demo, when you've got a demo, you're looking for your perfect marketing automation platform? What are the questions that marketers need to be asking in these demos to get the real outlook of how the market automation platforms are going to perform for them?

Mike: I love that question. And actually, martec.org has recently published an article giving the 15 questions you should ask during a marketing automation Demak. I mean, to me, I think one of the biggest challenges as a demo, it's not the same as actually, you know, using the product and running it every day. And so to me, once you've understood that it's got the functionality you need, which probably you've done on paper anyway, what your focus on a demo should really be is about ease of use, and how well the platform fits with your marketing processes. So to me, it's about you know, how easy is it to use? How easy is it to integrate with what you do? It's much less about seeing the flashy features? You know, that's something you should be able to research outside of the demo. What do you think?

Hannah: Yeah, I definitely agree. But I would also say other important aspects is the training and resources available. So you know, if we take HubSpot, for example, we know they've got a fantastic training hub. There's account managers per company that helped them have any questions. And I think that's really vital as well to really kickstart in the market automation platform to be successful. Is are those additional service and health features available to you as well?

Mike: Yeah, you got to Good point there. I mean support is, you know, I guess part of ease of use, but it's a very specific thing. I mean, however, I feel that today, most of the marketing automation platforms have realised that the biggest risk is having customers churn, so they sign up for a year and then leave, you know, the cost of acquiring that first customer is probably almost as much as the first year subscription. So therefore, it's very unprofitable if you have customers leave after a year. And to be honest HubSpot, were one of the first to work this out and really provide great training, great support. But now I think if you look at what's happening, in general, the training and support is very, very good across the board, may be, you know, slightly different in style for some of the, you know, big enterprise systems, where they expect a certain level of knowledge. And if you've got people who are really new, then perhaps the support isn't geared to them. But equally, there's also a big third party community in terms of training, support, and education. And, you know, a lot of people, they do tend to lean on their agency as well. So we know that quite often, our clients when they're talking about issues with market automation, they'll come to us first rather than going to the vendor, you know, and that's a whole bunch of reasons partly we understand what they're trying to achieve, then I have to give any context, partly because, you know, we're very invested in making them successful. And maybe also, it's just easier to talk to someone you know, and you're working with on a day to day basis. So I think the support is is interesting, important. But to some extent, I think it's becoming so because the vendors that are successful, almost by definition, have given good support.

Hannah: Definitely. And I know I'm very biassed when I say this, Mike, but I have to say I think you're spot on there when you say talk to someone you know. So you know, we have a lot of clients with their marketing, automation queries, problems, help them notch their campaigns. And I think a lot of our success comes down to that we have such good relationships, that we can tell the truth, we can tell them when something's going to work, when something is not the right idea for them. And that really is the benefit of having the experts around you.

Mike: Yeah, and I think we probably shouldn't say this, which is probably a secret. But generally speaking, if you're an agency partner, you get better support than you do if you're a customer. So vendors will give agency partners special access into support. And obviously, that's because they assume the agency partner has got a level of knowledge, they're not going to ask the basic questions. So you'll learn by skip that first level of support. So, you know, often talking to an agency, you're actually getting that shortcut into, you know, the more experience and deeper expertise of the second level support team. So a little bit of a secret there as well.

Hannah: Definitely. And I think to relate to that, as well, as you know, the things like free trials, you know, we've talked about user functionality. And I think being able to focus on the free trials, but use an agency to skip that second step and get that free trial, rather than having to go through the long haul the demos, is a real benefit for company sometimes.

Mike: Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, although trials are limited, you can never really put all your marketing automation across to a new platform in a trial. I think they're way better than demos. So they give you a much better flavour. So getting to that trial and be able to test a few things out. It's not perfect, but it's absolutely the right way to go.

Hannah: Definitely. So Mike, moving on to our insightful tip of the week, I was having a think about what I wanted us to discuss in this podcast episode. And we actually hosted a webinar on the first of February through pm GMT, focusing on customer journeys, and really how to use them, and how to use them successfully in b2b. And focusing on that, I thought it would be interesting to have a conversation around personas within market automation systems, because personas can have a lot of benefits within the customer journey, but also a lot of the functionality within the marketing automation platforms such as workflows, forms, things like that. So my initial question to you is, why bother with personas, if you could give me one sentence as to why personas are so important? Why should marketers bother with them?

Mike: Well, I mean, the obvious reasons, you make up silly names for the personas. So it's one of the most, it's one of the most fun bits of marketing is coming up with your persona name. So that's clearly a reason I mean, more seriously. Creating a persona is really important because what you're trying to do when when you're you're doing marketing is you're trying to hit a range of people, not everybody's the same. But what you really want to do is hit in the centre of that group of people. So you're going to be most effective at hitting the largest number of people in your audience. If you're aiming right to the side to someone who's got really, you know, extreme motivations or extreme views, you're probably going to be very ineffective at targeting that population as a whole. So your persona is kind of giving you the bullseye in the middle of this much bigger target, which is your audience. And if you're aiming for the bull's eye, that's going to give you the best possible results. So That's the really simple sort of technical reason for creating personas.

Hannah: And I think to add to that, Mike as well is this again screams why content is so key to market automation campaigns because we can hit the bull's eye, but you're going to make sure that not just your email and your messaging is Hitting the Bullseye. But also the content is tailored to their specific personas.

Mike: It's such a good point, I mean, different personas need different content. And by understanding the persona, and typically it's around, you know, the personas, pain points, what motivates them what their goals are, it's content that either helps them achieve the objectives I ultimate, I guess, you know, when you talk about individuals get promotional look good in inside a company, or it's content that helps them solve a problem. And the important thing is, once you begin to build personas, you've realised that different people involved in a buying decision will actually have very different pain points and very different objectives. And so therefore, you begin to realise the need to create content that's targeted at each persona. And not only that, but also these different personas take different customer journeys. So you know, whilst a safe persona as great as the bullseye of what you're looking to target in terms of your audience, the percent was also great because it effectively defines where you should be focusing your content, and also what the customer journey is going to look like. And all of those, when you put it together, fundamentally, the persona should be the foundation of a lot of your marketing activities.

Hannah: Absolutely. And I think it's key to mention here, Mike as well, that using personas, and especially within the automations doesn't have to be complicated. Now, you've mentioned a lot of different things there regarding how personas can work, how it helps within the customer journeys. But it doesn't have to be a complicated process. If you have a plan in place for how the automations can help you send out the sequences and send out this content, then actually, it can be a really, I wouldn't say easy, but I wouldn't say hard, but a really good way an effective way to target personas effectively.

Mike: Yeah, and I think for example, what you do with with Napier's marketing is great, because you've got two primary personas you target. And one is is fundamentally interested in PR and media relations. And the other is very much interested in digital. And actually, it really does reflect the kind of prospects and customers we see. So I think what you're doing with vapour is a great example of how you can simplify it down. And you know, we have other personas, but we have these two primary ones. And he's done a great job about defining what they care about, you know, what motivates them, and then building content that appeals to those two different personas. So much. So I know that you're actually almost able to define which persona someone is that they come in as a lead by which piece of content they've signed up to receive.

Hannah: Yes, absolutely, that. And I think that's the value of using something simple, like forms to identify which content piece links to which persona. And I have to say, when I've been building the strategy, and for this year for 2023, I've had it in my mind, okay, well, we want to run this Account Based Marketing Campaign for the example. And we're going to use this piece of content. And I know this is the persona we're targeting. And I think that's the rule of consistency as well. You know, I've worked at Napier, I'm in my seventh year now of working at Napier. And we've had the same personas, we tweak the, you know, we might tweak their values, their interest as the year and the landscape kind of changes, but their fundamentals remain the same of what we're trying to sell them.

Mike: Yeah, definitely, I think maybe the only thing is that the percentage of people we see who are really focused primarily on digital, obviously, as increased as Digital's become more widespread. But we still have that kind of PR Media Relations persona, they tend to be specialists in a larger organisation. So rather than being a, you know, someone running, marketing, like a CMO, they're much more likely to be a specialist. But for sure, you know, that persona has served us really well and continues to serve as well. So personas, I think work, they drive your content, they drive you understanding the customer journey, and ultimately, you know, they drive the market activities, as you say. So that's super, super important.

Hannah: Definitely super important. So we're heading to the end of our time. Now, Mike, it's been a really interesting conversation, as always, before we say goodbye, is there anything else you wanted to share to our listeners today?

Mike: Actually, that's a great question. I think the only thing is just to put another note out about the webinar we're running. So if people are interested in marketing, automation, you know, one of the most powerful things is looking at the customer journey. And I'd love people to come and join our webinar. It's the first of February, they can go to our website, or check out my you know, social media on LinkedIn, and sign up. So it'd be great if people could join.

Hannah: Brittany and thanks so much for your time today, Mike.

Mike: It's been great. Another good conversation, Hannah.

Hannah: Thanks for listening to the marketing automation. Bye

Mike: And then podcast don't forget to subscribe in your favorite podcast application and we'll see you next time.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Jeffrey Mack - Agility PR

Jeffrey Mack, VP of Marketing at Agility PR, sat down with Mike for the latest episode of Marketing B2B Technology.

Jeffrey discusses the benefits of having a PR platform that integrates distribution with measurement, and how measurement is becoming a critical component in successful PR strategies. He discusses how measuring PR success is evolving from traditional quantitative AVE data to more qualitative data and how marketing teams can benefit from this shift.

Jeffrey also shares his thoughts on the future of trade publications and why marketeers may have more impact from reaching out to smaller industry publications.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

Transcript: Interview with Jeffrey Mack - Agility PR

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Jeffrey Mack

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 Jeffrey Mack. Jeffrey is the VP of Marketing at Agility PR. Welcome to the podcast Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Thank you very much happy to be here.

Mike: It's great to have you on it's great to have someone who's involved in the PR side of marketing as well. So I'm really interested, you know, how did you get into the PR? How did your career develop? And how did you end up at Agility?

Jeffrey: Yeah, it's a pretty, pretty interesting career trajectory that I'd say is sort of characterised as just being curious and wanting to do a little bit of everything. But I actually am a, I guess, a proud law school dropout. So in college, my plan was always to become an attorney and make a lot of money. I went to law school for a year and realised Oh, man, I can't imagine myself doing this every day for a paycheck. So started getting a real job. So I began my career in sales, actually. And it was a small Fintech startup where we had to call hundreds of people each day and try to get them to open brokerage accounts. And I personally didn't really like calling people all day long. So I decided, You know what, let me do this a little bit smarter. There's this thing called the internet, there's a lot of people who are interested in foreign exchange trading. And I'll just go infiltrate a Yahoo forum, do my sales pitch in a post and see what happens and sort of did that and ended up being a very successful salesperson setting company records for accounts that were closed in a day, a week in a month, and all of that and got a, you know, an email to go see my boss in his office. And when I went in there, they said, Hey, listen, I don't know what you did. But we can't really pay you all this commission. This is crazy. And then also, on top of that, you seem to understand the Internet pretty well. So we're gonna move you to marketing. So that's essentially how I ended up as a as a marketer. And again, this was a small Fintech startup. There, I started working on the product side of things, really focusing on trading education and building community, which is a theme that sort of runs throughout my career and ended up working my way up through that company and several other companies and had a lot of experience with sort of storytelling and demand generation and Account Based Marketing, and just was able to dip my fingers in a lot of different areas of marketing, which was a tremendous value for me as I sort of rose through the ranks and eventually spent time at some great companies like LinkedIn at some small companies that have since been valued over a billion dollars. And now I'm at a Agility, which is a great software company, based in Canada that provides software for PR and communications professionals.

Mike: Awesome. So you ended up being sort of moved to marketing because you're earning too much in sales? I think that's a great way to start a career pretty much.

Jeffrey: That's what I always tell people. Yeah, fair, fair. unfair. Right.

Mike: Cool. So you know, the Agility? Can you just tell us what the Agility does?

Jeffrey: Yeah, absolutely. So, Agility, we do a little bit of everything. But we're primarily focused on providing end to end solution for PR and communications professionals. So I like to say that we offer essentially a PR hub, right, which is a platform where PR and comms professionals can start in in their day and allow them to do essentially most of the facets of their job, everything from, you know, discovering the key journalist and media people that can help them sort of amplify their story through distribution. So sending out news wires, press releases, or story pitches to those journalists, and then monitoring their their own medium. So what are people saying about them? Right? How are the stories being told, and then ultimately, just measuring everything and making sense of the true value of their PR and comms programmes, because at the end of the day, you know, you always want to align things back to the business outcomes. So all of those different areas where these PR and comms people are being tasked, we're able to allow them to do that all in one place in one platform, where they can jump back and forth between all those different facets and really, sort of build a cohesive PR strategy.

Mike: That's really interesting, because back in the day, the monitoring side was always split from the database side. So what do you think of the benefits of actually merging those two together in a single platform?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean, it's it's synergy, right? At the end of the day, you want to try to make things as simple as possible for people. And when you think about monitoring anything about database, and you look at sort of the landscape of companies that are out there, they've all more or less sort of started in one of those areas, right? And maybe over time, they've acquired other companies consolidated to add those together. But you really want to have sort of that that synergistic feel for for people. So if I'm out there, and I'm looking at monitoring and I see some some great articles that are written about my company or my brand. I want to be able to then right from that article, be able to look at that journalist or that author's profile to see what are their articles are they are they writing? What other themes or areas are they covering, things like that. And if it's a journalist who's maybe written about me once, and they cover, you know, the area that's important to me, and they reach the audience, that's important to me, maybe I want to build and establish a relationship with that journalist, maybe I want to reach out and pitch further stories. Or maybe I just want to introduce myself, right, and let them know, Hey, I'm here. For future articles or things of that sort, feel free to reach out to me I can, I can give you a quote, right, or I can be a resource for you. So I think making it really simple to go from the coverage that your your brand has directly to that journalist, and get that journalist contact information to, you know, establish and build that relationship, it's really important, I don't want to need to log into separate platforms to be able to do that, I want to be able to do that all in one place. With to two parts of the overall solution that talk to each other really nicely. It's about about synergy. It's about making my life a little bit easier.

Mike: That's really interesting, because it sounds like what you're talking about is quite an intelligent approach to PR. I mean, I think one of the criticisms of, you know, some of the use of database services is people have just pulled a big list of journalists and just spam them with with emails. So maybe you can talk about how PR professionals can be a little more intelligent in the way they use databases, rather than just doing this simple blast and hope kind of approach?

Jeffrey: Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. And I wouldn't doubt that there are some PR people out there that probably, you know, send their story pitches, and the release is to everybody under the sun. And that's, I think, the wrong strategy, right? You want to be really deliberate with your outreach strategy. The database is great. I mean, it has an infinite sort of universe of people that could help tell your story. But at the end of the day, if you want to have people effectively tell that story, and you want to get value from that, you really do need to focus in on who you want to go out and pitch, right, I don't think it's much different than being a marketer, right? You want to understand your audience. But you also want to make sure that based on the audience that you're deciding to market to, you have a very relevant and potentially personalised message right and in your distribution is in a way that makes it really easy for them to sort of come across your marketing. So I think it's very similar. When you're out there, pitching, you know, I could very easily say, here's 100,000, journalist, here's my story, boom, go. But what you're going to end up with is a very impersonal pitch that you're sending out to people, people are busy, they can see through things pretty quickly and easily. And if there's a very impersonal message that's sent out, you're probably not even going to get a response, or even probably somebody that's going to look past the subject line. So I think narrowing your focus in your database approach and finding not only the journalists that are going to be relevant to your audience relevant to your sector, but also maybe some that are not, you know, the biggest journalists out there, those are the ones that are probably going to act and say, Oh, wow, somebody's pitching me a story, right, I'm gonna go ahead and do my best to tell the story in a great way. So I think it's just about having a strategy, having a little bit more narrow focus, and being very selective in who you're actually pulling out of that database. And then being very thoughtful about the pitch that you're sending out. I mean, I would not recommend sending out the same email to 1000s of people. I mean, it doesn't doesn't kill you to switch it up a little bit, right. And that could be manually personalising them, or using things like tokens and other things where you can, you know, change the name of a publication or change the name of an industry, something that's just going to make it feel as though there was a little bit more effort put into it.

Mike: And that's really interesting. So there, I think you're talking about some of the benefits you get from combining the database and the distribution together, is this ability to insert tokens. Do you want to talk a little bit more about, you know, how people might be able to benefit from that distribution being integrated with the database?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean, I think for one, it's measurement, right? That's the most important thing, you can send out a million emails, right. But if you don't actually know what's happening on the other end, you know, you're not really moving the needle forward in any, any way. So with our software, I'm sure some some others that are out there. Since we're handling the monitoring, we're handling the database, we're handling the distribution. Soon as that goes out. We're able to tell people right away, you know, what are their open rates, sort of what are the response rates, right? And then, again, going back to monitoring, we're able to see like, are we actually getting pickup? Are we getting earned media? And again, what's really interesting about agilities software is that we've actually created an engineered all of those different components, so that they were built on the same codebase. You know, they were built to talk to each other. If you look at a lot of the other solutions that are out there. A lot of their, quote unquote platforms were sort of built together in a Frankenstein method where they acquired company A and acquired company B, acquired company C, and then they sort of mash them all together, put lipstick on a pig, let's say right and say, Hey, we have this full full solution, but wasn't really designed to be used in an integrated fashion. Whereas Agility truly was. And I think, again, a benefit to the end user in that there's a lot of visibility across all functions of what they're doing. Again, whether it's sourcing, monitoring, measuring, right distributing messages, all of that data sort of flows within an ecosystem, that's going to give you the data back to say how successful or maybe how unsuccessful was like with a specific campaign. And we're going to take that data, and we're going to use that to inform our future campaigns to try to get a little bit better.

Mike: I love that idea of like, you know, be able to have that closed loop of, you know, running the campaign, and then getting the data to feedback on how effective it was, I guess, you know, a lot of PR pros are thinking, that's really useful. But also we need to report to the board, and the board always wants to know the value of PR. So how does Agility approach, you know, giving some sort of value to the results achieved through PR?

Jeffrey: Yeah, and that's, that's a, it's a hot topic in PR. And it's, it's really interesting, because my personal background is not a background in PR. So when I joined Agility, it's like, okay, I understand the marketing bit. And I understand a little bit of the PR piece, but now I really need to sort of put two and two together and sort of understand what is the day to day look like for a PR professional? What are they actually looking to accomplish? And I think the measurement piece is a critical component. And one that is it's a hot topic of all of the industry events that you go to I just came back from prsa icon, which is, I think, the largest PR conference in the United States here. And when we looked at the content of programming, and I was lucky enough to go as an attendee, so I didn't have to be there trying to shill Agility to every person that I spoke to, I actually got to absorb and understand what were the topics that were important for our core audience. And measurement was, was probably one of the most important and most popular topics that was out there. And a lot of people be our comms people, you know, they're understanding that measurement is a critical component to their jobs, what they're looking for, is they're looking for a little bit of help on moving away from sort of the traditional way of measurement, which was very quantitative, right, and very much based on outdated KPIs like abs, which is add value equivalencies, that's the the old way to say, Hey, this is the coverage we got. And this is the value in dollars of what we got. And what we're seeing. And what we're actually advocating for is a move towards more qualitative measurement, right. So how we actually measure the impact of our activities and our programmes as they relate to overall business outcomes. And, you know, maybe not the easiest thing in the world, but I think it provides a better picture for, for why we're doing the things that we're doing, right. And when we talk about sort of qualitative things, you can essentially break it down into three categories.

So it's like awareness. So like, are we actually improving awareness? And there's ways to sort of measure that engagement? Are we seeing engagement and engagement can be a few different things, right? Are we selling more products? Are we driving more traffic to our site? Are we getting more engagement on social media? Things like that? And then also reputation? Right? How are we actually impacting our reputation? Is it improving, right? Are people thinking about our brand in a in a much better way than they were potentially before? So sort of taking all of that into account, the qualitative component of measurement is going to be, I think, what you're going to see being more popular moving forward. And then there's also other things like, you know, instead of saying we want pickup in 1000 publications, okay. Big deal, right? I'd rather have pickup in maybe five publications that are on my priority media list, right? So if the New York Times and The New Yorker or The Wall Street Journal are writing about me, that's much better than the Jersey Shore Gazette, no offence to the Jersey Shore, which is where I live, which is why I use that as an example here. But there is also sort of that component from a quality standpoint. And then also things like prominence, right? Like, where are you actually being mentioned in an article? Where are you being mentioned in a publication, those are not all equal, as well. So we want to make sure that it's it's qualitative, we want to make sure that it's driving impact, we want to make sure that it's actually measurable. And we want to be able to your point that you brought up when you ask the question, want to be able to ensure that we can sort of summarise these activities and present them up to the executives because I think at this day and age, you know, the C suite does care about the PR and comms initiatives, they do want to see what type of impact is being driven from the work that's taking place. And I'd say, in order to drive maximum impact, there does need to be a strategy involved.

And you know, I think earlier in our conversation, we maybe talked a little bit about database and I don't know that we touched Too much news wires. But when we were going back and forth on email, I think that was one of the things you were interested in is like, Does that still work is just still value there? And my answer to that question that I just asked myself would be, yeah, absolutely. As long as your strategy, right, when you think about your press releases, don't think about as I'm just going to send out this release, and then we're done. And then I'm going to move on to the next one. And I'm going to send that out. Think about them sort of as a series of chapters and a story that you're trying to tell. If you think about it. That way, you have a strategy for getting that story out, eventually, you're going to get the right story, amplified by the right people.

Mike: I think that's great advice. There's an awful lot in there. I mean, to me, one of the most interesting things is, you know, we talk about quantitative being things like Avi, which were easy numbers to generate. But actually, the interesting thing is the qualitative results you're talking about, they seem to be more closely tied to business objectives, the Navy, I mean, the value of advertising really doesn't impact business objective.

Jeffrey: And I think that's a trend that you see everywhere, you know, think think of the marketing side of things. I mean, for a while, in the good old days, right? Marketing didn't really have to show much of anything, right? They would produce some fancy PowerPoints or some presentations, and everyone thought life was great. You know, now, there's such a focus, as it relates to the marketing organisation and companies on actually contributing to the bottom line, right, and actually providing and sourcing or even influencing right revenue and bookings. And there was a period of time where people wanted to see how many MQLs marketing qualified leads marketing was was producing. Now you're sort of sort of seeing a move down funnel to see what pipeline is being generated by marketing, right, what revenue is actually being generated or influenced by marketing. So just like that, I think you're seeing that sort of translate across the PRPs, you're also starting to see it come across all areas of the business, right? There's probably a lot of departments within an organisation that never knew anything about where a company stood as it relates to sales and revenue, and now are all being asked to sort of pitch in and contribute towards all of that stuff.

Mike: No, I think that's very true. It's definitely a trend that everyone now is much more bolting on company results rather than focusing on their department and potentially meaningless internal metrics. I'd like to jump back to something you you talked about earlier, though, you were talking about the focus on publications and kind of implied that the big publications will become more and more important as people focus on a smaller number of high quality results. What's going to be the impact on the trade media? I mean, we've seen some trade publications struggle financially, is that going to get worse? Are we going to see fewer trade publications?

Jeffrey: It's an interesting question. And it would be easy for me to say, yeah, they're doomed. Right? But but I actually don't don't think that they are. Because there are several businesses that spend most of their marketing budgets with trade pubs, right? That's just the reality. And it's almost like, it's almost like a government subsidy, right? These these businesses that have sort of been around for a while, have always worked with these trade pubs, even with sort of maybe declining ROI. I think it's just a little bit of nostalgia, and just a little bit of doing business as usual. So I do believe that in certain industries, they'll continue to exist. I don't want to say though, they'll continue to thrive because I don't think I don't think that's going to happen, right? These small trade clubs, I don't think they'll thrive, but I think they'll exist. I mean, I worked for a technology company called Crestron electronics years ago. And a lot of our marketing budget was with the trade pubs, right? I mean, yes, we sort of understood that we were propping them up. But in that industry, which was, you know, high end audio video, the trade pubs did have a decent audience, you know, our core base, was there, maybe reading these trade pubs maybe going to their website, but it was just something that, you know, we've built those relationships over time, we felt pretty confident that our audience was there. And we continue to do business with them. I'm sure there are several other industries and companies that are in the same boat. So, you know, I think there's a place for them, I think, in some regards, they can probably tell our stories better than a giant publication, right? Because this is what they do they live they die with that specific industry. So I would say I, I personally think they'll they'll survive. I don't think they'll they'll be thriving anytime soon.

Mike: I think that's probably as good as it's gonna get for trade pups. I don't think they any of them believe that. The next few years are going to be boom times. I'm interested as well, you know, you're obviously a VP of marketing. So when you're promoting Agility, you know, what works for you. What are your best channels or what are your best campaigns that you've run?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean, a lot of different things work right. I think for me, the way that I think about marketing is always sort of with that business mentality of we need to deliver something to the bottom lime. So to that end, there's sort of demand generation, which is the hot topic and, and a core focus for a lot of companies when they talk about marketing. But when I think of demand generation, there's really a few things that sort of go into, into that sort of theme, right. And one, I think is, you know, demand capture is pretty critical. So if you think about your target market, at any moment in time, a very small percentage of that market is in market, right looking to buy something. So you need to be really good at getting in front of those people and understanding who they are where they are. So we do a lot of marketing as relates to intent. So the people that are showing intent to buy or showing sell signals, we want to make sure that we have some maximum effort to get in front of them. And we do so across, believe it or not display advertising. So we have some partners there. We do a lot with LinkedIn, I think LinkedIn is a great, great channel for B2B. It is maybe a little expensive, but hey, you know, you feel pretty confident that you're getting in front of the right audience. And then we'll look at other social channels as well. But we tried to do it in an intelligent way where we're really just retargeting an audience that we feel confident, you're not going to really find a great B2B Audience, specifically on Facebook or Instagram. But there is there's there are modes there to do things. We run and produce lots of great content, whether webinars or guides, or white papers, we also have virtual summits that we do that are tremendous drivers of not only leads for us, but also value for our audience, right? I think at the end of the day, if you can provide value for the audience, when they are ready to be in marker when they are ready to buy, you know, they're going to think about you and at least give you an app, that doesn't mean that they're gonna they're gonna pick you, but you want to just have an app that you have, you want to have an opportunity to put your best foot forward. And I think that all relates to sort of demand generation, right, which is different than demand capture to two very different things. And then the last thing that I typically think about where I think we have success is building a strong brand. I think if you have a strong brand, those first two things I talked about become a lot easier. So how do you build that brand? How do you build a brand where people sort of understand what you stand for? You know, in our case, we want to be thought leaders in the in the PR space, we produce a lot of great content as relates to measurement, we produce a lot of great content as it relates to crisis, communications and things of that sort. So we're really trying to provide value to our audience, so that when they're ready to buy, you know, we're top of mind and part of that consideration set.

Mike: So there's quite a lot going on. That's, that's great. And you're obviously, you know, really enthusiastic about marketing. I'm interested to know, did you have any, like pet peeves, or things about marketing that you don't enjoy?

Jeffrey: Oh, several. I mean, I do like a lot of marketing. And I think the reason that I like it is because throughout my career, I've been able to do a little bit of a little bit of all of it, right? And that's just I'm a very curious person. I love learning. I love teaching, I always joke if I didn't need to pay my mortgage, I'd be a high school history teacher. But I do need to make money. But yeah, I mean, I think, you know, when I interview people to join my team, typically I look for really curious, smart people. And I always tend to ask them the same question, which is, imagine that you're standing on top of the marketing fence, right on one side of the fence is the data and the analytics side. And then the other side of the fence is the creativity side and the art side, What side do you fall on? myself, personally, I would probably fall on that artistic creative side, nine times out of 10. So I do love the parts of marketing that are around creativity around just coming up with some wacky ideas and seeing if they actually drive driving engagement. That being said, it's interesting. When I talk to people, and I asked them that question, more and more, I see people saying they want to fall on the data side of things. And I don't know what that means, whether it's marketing since becoming a data driven scientific function of an organisation, if there's creativity dying, or maybe, you know, B2B companies, not facilitating the creativity that they should be. I think in this day, and age marketing is becoming a little bit commoditized. And by that, I mean, everyone has access to the same tools, everyone has access to the same data. So at the end of the day, your competitive advantage is going to be creativity. And that's sort of the way that I look at things. So if I had to choose between writing a brief for a really creative campaign versus creating dashboards and Excel files, I'm going to lean towards the creativity part, but I've firmly understand that to be a marketing leader. I need to be good on both areas.

Mike: Yeah, I definitely agree. I think it's it's now something you can't say you're all creativity or all data. I think everyone's got a span both for sure. I love the idea of you being a history teacher as well. And I, one of the things we'd like to ask people is, you know, if you had a young person come to you interested in the marketing career, what advice would you give them?

Jeffrey: I would go tell them to work in finance. Because they'll make a lot more money. No, I think I mean, I think it's, it's great, right. And again, I interview a lot of people for the teams that I've sort of led, and people are maybe fresh out of school. So I always, you know, ask them, Is this what they think that they want to do? I don't ask them. Is this what you want to do? Because when you're young, especially you don't you don't really know. But that's, that's probably one of the big questions. But overall, I mean, I like to just let people know that, at the end of the day, the job of marketing is to make sales easier. In reality, that's what it is. I mean, a lot of times what you see on TV is not necessarily what you see in real life, all day, every day, we'd love to be Don Draper, madmen was like probably one of my favourite television shows of all time. You know, what, there's not a lot of opportunity to be Don Draper, in the marketing world. So I tried to set realistic expectations, I tried to let people on my teams anyhow, dip their toes in a lot of different areas of marketing. It's what I had the benefit of doing for myself. And then you find the areas that you like, and the areas that you don't like, and try to put people in a position where they can work on more of the things that they enjoy working on, and less of the things that they don't, because at the end of the day, that's going to dictate the quality of the work that you get. So yeah, I mean, if young person came to me, I would say, try it out, see, if you like it. I mean, at the end of the day, you'll have to enjoy Storytelling, you'll have to enjoy business, because there's no free rides and marketing anymore. You ultimately need to deliver to the business. But I think, you know, if nothing else, if you're curious, and you enjoy creativity, and storytelling, and if you enjoy data, there is an opportunity for people in marketing.

Mike: Oh, that's awesome. That's, that's very positive. I'm, you know, I'm mindful of time. So I guess, is there something you'd like to leave the listeners with as a last thought? Maybe some, you know, marketing advice you've got or something around the product?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean, I think just overall as as a marketer, right? Don't be afraid to experiment. Don't be afraid to step outside of of your lines. I mean, it's done me Well, I mean, I remember, I was a product marketing working on educational products at a company and I, this is a long time ago. So I'm dating myself. But there was a new a new invention that had come out called an iPhone, and people were starting to buy it. And this is pretty early on. And I remember going to my boss at the time and saying, Hey, I think that people are going to want to trade currencies on their phone, like, I think that's going to be a thing. And they they sort of said, maybe, but we were given permission. And I was able to work on sort of launching an app and wasn't within my job description, right? I mean, so you know, I would say, do the work that you're supposed to be doing. But if you have any free time, I mean, don't be afraid to jump into another area, where you have a specific interest, I mean, that's ultimately going to get you to where you want to be professionally anyhow. So don't be afraid to explore, don't be afraid to take chances. Don't be afraid to work at night, on work, right. And maybe it's a facet, that's, again, not part of your job description. But if you have an idea, and you have something that you want to explore more, it's not going to kill you to jump on after dinner or jump on the weekend. A lot of the times, those are the projects that you enjoy the most, and you won't mind doing it. And in the long run, it will definitely be a tremendous value for you as you progress in your career.

Mike: That's awesome. That's I think that's a really great place to leave it. If anyone's got any questions they'd like to, you know, ask you anything, or maybe just find out more about Agility. Where's the best place to go to get hold of you?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty active on Twitter. So I'm at Jeffery Mac on Twitter. Hopefully, Twitter's sticks around for a little bit of time, I think it'll be fine. It'll be in place in the next 90 or so days. So you can find me on Twitter. You can also find me on LinkedIn. If you searched Jeffery Mac, I believe I'm the first person to pop up there. But I do accept most connections and I love chatting with people. So try me on Twitter First, connect with me on LinkedIn and we'll have some some chats back and forth.

Mike: That's awesome. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. Jeffrey's been a great conversation.

Jeffrey: Thanks for having me really had 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.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Jason Byer - Crowdspring

In the latest episode of Marketing B2B Technology, we interview Jason Byer, Marketing and Partnerships Manager at crowdspring.

At a time when attention spans are shortening and competition rising, having great design assets can be vital to a successful marketing campaign. crowdspring is a collaborative design platform that simplifies the design process.

Jason discusses how businesses can produce great designs whilst sticking to strict brand style guides, and the importance of the creative brief.

He also shares why he thinks marketers shouldn’t get hung up on the tactics and the advice he would give to someone just starting out in their marketing career.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

Transcript: Interview with Jason Byer – Crowdspring

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Jason Byer

Mike: Thanks for listening to Markteing 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 Jason Byer. Jason is the marketing and partnerships manager at CrowdSpring. Welcome to the podcast, Jason.

Jason: Thanks, Mike. Excited to be here.

Mike: It's great to have you on. So I'm, you know, just tell us a bit about your career. How did you get to work at CrowdSpring?

Jason: Absolutely. So I met our CEO through his startup lab, but startup Lab is a company where you're creating multiple different companies, multiple brands, trying to find a product fit for those brands, finding partnerships, and then spinning them off into their own companies. And so that's, that's an interesting type of environment where you're trying to create a brand from scratch and then build it up very quickly and sell or spin it off. And so I met the CEO through through that company, and have been working with CrowdSpring for about six years. And I really enjoyed the partnership side partnerships and marketing because I get to speak with a lot of great companies, and get to tailor the conversations towards you know, challenges were each facing in our market.

Mike: That sounds great. And I have to admit, I did have a look at your LinkedIn. And if there's something that really jumped out, is it right? You were sponsored to do an Ironman by a beer brand?

Jason: A Yes. And the jersey was was pretty exciting. So I did a full Ironman in Wisconsin. And, you know, most people are boring bike parts on their jerseys, you know, shoe companies. And so I had, you know, the big Sam Adams seal and Boston lager was on my back and, and it was a looped marathon course, the marathon is the final portion of the Ironman. And it was a double loop. So everybody that was cheering people on saw you twice, and they were like, hey, the beer man is coming back again. Yeah, says it's a good time.

Mike: That sounds like it sounds like great branding and the fun time, although hopefully you didn't drink too much of the beer beforehand. It was mainly after

Jason: No, no, no, I'm part of the athletic crowd that you know, we we exercise and do this so that we can enjoy beer in the cookie afterwards.

Mike: Oh, that sounds like so much fun. Anyway, let's get back to CrowdSpring. So, you know, I think one of the things perhaps you ought to explain is exactly what you do at CrowdSpring. Because it may not be a brand that everybody knows.

Jason: Absolutely. So we're a 15 year old brand. And what we focus on is providing affordable custom branding and design services. And so we have 33 categories of branding and design, everything from naming a company or product, which can be very early stage, creating that core brand identity with your logo, and then all of the marketing materials that go along with this. So your packaging design and your postcards and your flyers and presentations for pitch decks. And then we have a pretty unique category of physical product design, where some large enterprises have used us to design physical products that are then manufactured, and we do this much cheaper than traditional agency resources, and you get a lot of creativity, all of these projects come with dozens of different designs. And so you're able to see the brand or the product come to life and, and grow in a way that perhaps you wouldn't have thought it was going to take that direction.

Mike: So just walk through how it works. If I want for example, you know, a marketing flyer design or something like that, how would I go about using CrowdSpring? And then what would happen? What are all these designs? I see coming back?

Jason: Yeah, so first off, the way we differentiate ourselves is through curation, you know, what we realised is, you know, platforms like Upwork, or God forbid, Fiverr, the business owner is the one who is taking the risk. They're the ones trying to figure out, is this person capable? Are they going to deliver on time? Do they know best practices, you know, it takes a lot of time trying to find that person and takes the risk. So what we did with our model is we have a heavy emphasis on curation 212,000 creatives on the platform, and we manually review each of them that join to make sure they can participate at a high level in these categories. And when you post a project, you're giving us some information, you're telling us about what the project is your company, your brand. And we make the questions very simple, because we want to make sure that you're able to communicate the core information and then allow the creatives to take that information and shape the designs or the names, the products that we're providing. And then there's unlimited iterations. And so you can give feedback, you can modify the designs, but you're getting dozens of different custom designs to be able to see different directions. It's It's described as a lot of fun by businesses because they're like, Wow, we didn't expect to be able to get so much creativity. The process typically takes seven days. We can do it as quick as one day if somebody's on a very quick time schedule, but we find seven days is ideal and we work with both small businesses, as well as large enterprises that, that have used us to kind of ideate on their maybe not their core brand identity, but some of the products that they're trying to gain a little bit more traction in the marketplace with.

Mike: So it sounds interesting. So basically, what you're doing is it like running a competition, you know, lots of designers submit their ideas, and then the, the company picks the best one from their point of view.

Jason: Exactly. So the client that's posting the project gets to select which one they think is, is strongest for their needs. And if I could use some examples, you know, in some of our large companies that have used as we've got Barilla pasta wanted to launch a different pasta shape, and which is really interesting. I mean, there's nothing really innovative and pasta shapes over centuries, really. And you know, so if you want to get a little bit of traction, you want to do something unique, they created a contest where they were trying to find different pasta shapes to get a little bit more PR, LG uses to design a phone. And so that was through the product design industrial design category. We've got companies in the energy sector for things like charging stations for electric vehicles, some very interesting projects outside of the core logo design or core branding or naming products.

Mike: That's interesting. I mean, presumably, though, the branding the design, and marketing side is the biggest part, though, is it?

Jason: In terms of volume in terms of volume, we do a lot of work with small businesses, agencies use us for their work, our pricing is public, we're very affordable, we have 100% money back guarantee. And so this is very attractive for the small business owner that can't spend 1000s of dollars with an agency. Whereas our, you know, enterprise level customers, they pay the same rate as everyone else. We have strong intellectual property protections, we were founded by an intellectual property attorney. So intellectual property and privacy is baked into our DNA, and which is, you know, attracts a lot of the enterprise level clients. And while those can afford either large in house teams or agencies, they like the idea of getting dozens of different custom ideas outside of that ecosystem, right. Or maybe asking their agency or their creative director internally to say, hey, post a project, you know, your jobs aren't in any danger, we just want to help you get some additional creativity for you know, a brand or a product that might feel a little stale. And so we've got plenty of creative directors, where this could be seen as kind of a competitive resource to their internal teams. But they'll post a project to help their their teams start iterating and thinking differently about the problem.

Mike: It's interesting. I mean, one of the things I noticed, you mentioned that the pricing was public, you have standard pricing, I know there are other companies in the sector that do a similar thing, where basically, you can name the price for your particular design. So why did you pick a standard price for each piece of work?

Jason: So we still have the ability to work directly with a client and the name, your price. And even when you can name your price, we still have a minimum threshold, we don't want our creative team getting taken advantage of by a company your brand, you know, saying hey, will you do this for you know, less than market rates. And so we want to make sure we stand behind them and say, hey, look, here's what good design costs, it doesn't have to be 1000s of dollars, but it's certainly not $50. Right. And so we want to set that minimum. So that so that we protect them, and it's still still very affordable, we have the ability to to negotiate based on the price. And what we find is this happens with scope, right? So if a company a large enterprise comes to us, and maybe they want to post, you know, dozens of projects, but maybe the variation isn't that significant between each one, that's where we can get a little creative on our side, because this is custom work. And we want that core price. So that we can say, you know, here's what's going to be delivered, here's what is within scope. And here's what we would consider out of scope. If you're looking to do something that's out of scope in this category, we allow you to increase the price to meet that. But we want to make sure that there's a a minimum to protect our creatives and a minimum so that the average business that comes can see that this is affordable design.

Mike: It's really interesting. It sounds like you've probably got designers from around the world many in lower cost economies, you're you're actually ensuring they earn a decent wage, which is great. You're protecting those those creatives. But in fact what you're offering your clients is quality. It's not about cost. It's not about sourcing, you know, the lowest cost economy, it's about sourcing the best design is that is that really what you're trying to do.

Jason: It is we and to backup our creatives, we have a large portion in North America that are working with us. The interesting thing is is these creatives get excited to be able to work with brands they'd never be able to work with on their own right so CrowdSpring is able to bring them 1000s of small business clients but also people like the Dallas Mavericks, LG Barilla pasta, these companies that you're not gonna be able to reach out to and say Hey, can I do this, this work with you? And so it creates a lot of excitement for them to be able to say hey, you know, I got to You know, stretch my creative muscles, maybe early in my career. It's really this idea of democratising design, where we don't care where you're from, you need to be able to speak English and communicate well with the clients. But we let the design speak, we let the designs that these folks come up with show their true skill. And I think that's just a an amazing opportunity for somebody at any stage in their career to be able to work with some of these and allows the larger enterprises to tap into potential that isn't at the top agencies, right. They're not they're not already working there.

Mike: I mean, that sounds great. It seems to me like you could have a problem where, you know, if I run one of these projects, and have multiple designs come back, and actually like maybe two or three of them rather than one. I mean, how would you deal with, you know, a client actually wanting to take more than one design? Is that possible?

Jason: Absolutely, it is possible, we actually created a product around this problem. It's called focus groups. And so what we found is folks, creating these projects are saying we like three different designs we can't pick. And sometimes that's not a problem. If you're running a custom illustration project, you can find places in your website marketing materials for multiple illustrations. But if you're running logo design, or presentation or packaging design, you can only have one. And so we created the focus group product where you preload several designs that you like, you share that with your network by either directly through email or direct link through social media, and you get feedback. And you're getting feedback directly from either the customers or the stakeholders at the company, and maybe family and friends as well. And you're getting that feedback to help you figure out you know, what designs and iterations you want. If you do want to purchase multiple every project comes with the intellectual property to transfer one design over per project, but we make it really easy to either offer to buy it from the creatives after the project is complete, or to add multiple awards into your project from the beginning where you can say, Look, we're going to award three different participants, because we know we're going to need at least three designs for say, a custom illustration project.

Mike: It's interesting. I mean, obviously, one of the things that really is important is the ownership of intellectual property. I mean, that's, that's really key. How do you ensure that your creatives are creating genuinely new designs rather than maybe plagiarising? Some stuff? Is there a process in place to stop that?

Jason: Absolutely. As I mentioned, we're founded by an intellectual property attorneys. So we take this seriously. And it starts with who we bring onto the platform. So if you went to CrowdSpring, and go to join up in the top, you'd find if you're trying to join as a creative, you'd be put on a waitlist, and we open up that waitlist maybe two or three times a year. And we do this because it's incredibly labour intensive on our part, we manually review everybody that joins the platform, and we make sure that they're qualified for the specific categories they want to participate in. So just because you can design logos, doesn't mean we allow you to name products or design packaging materials, you may be able to do that. But you have to prove that skill set to us. And so it starts from the beginning by bringing on folks that have strong quality, and in educating them right from the beginning, about what's important for CrowdSpring, what's important for our brand. And that's privacy and intellectual property protections and intellectual property protections under that umbrella means you're creating custom work, you're not ripping off, you know, the Disney font or Ubers logo, right to be cute. And so it starts with that curation, it starts with the expectation from the creatives, we provide them with a reputation score that follows them throughout the life on the platform, and it fluctuates up and down, based on about 80 different factors. So it's not just about how many projects they want, it's about the quality of their work. And following the rules. We have strict and our creatives understand this, we have very strict protections against violations for intellectual property or privacy, you're gone, there's zero tolerance policies for this, you're immediately removed from the platform, and you cannot join again. And we have protections in place to make sure that you know, we know you know, this person cannot come back onto the platform. Because it's such a manual process for us.

This has done a great job of of you know, after 15 years showing we mean business that there's no reason for you to to try to violate these rules, because we're going to find out projects, once they get posted by the client or reviewed by our customer service team. They're reviewed to make sure there's no ambiguity within the scope and the creative brief that are going to cause issues later. And then we review the entries we review the entries, the creatives, police, other creatives entries, and will alert us as well, because the creatives realise that we have to build this platform together, we can't have a rogue creative, that is acting, acting outside of scope and these boundaries. So it's created a platform. You know, that's really strong in terms of the quality and I think what ultimately stands to show that you don't have to believe me, just we've offered 100% money back guarantee for 15 years and we're in business. You know, you're not in business every day. at creating, you know, a strong product and still offering that guarantee.

Mike: I mean, that's really interesting is obviously something you're super passionate about. And I love that. I guess the other thing that you know, particularly people working in larger enterprises might throw at you is, how do you deal with restrictive style guides, because some enterprises have quite prescriptive guides on style. And I think quite often platforms like CrowdSpring might be associated with new ideas, new concepts, but actually, they've still got to fit in those restrictions. So how would someone ensure that that works, and they don't get something that the brand police, as they call them, would then come and block from being used?

Jason: Absolutely. I mean, I think this is the value to a creative platform like CrowdSpring, that has a strong curation, because this is a challenge for folks, internally, these companies, you know, they're looking at their brand guidelines, and they're seeing kind of maybe the Cavalier marketing tactics of newer companies or maybe some of their colleagues and you're thinking, okay, but I can't do that, right, I can't do this, in my, my role, I have these very strict guidelines. And so it becomes a process, especially if you've worked there for for many years, where you feel like your creativity is really hampered, you know, as an employee here, looking at these guidelines, looking at things you would like to do. And so by outsourcing this to a platform, and we'll get into the curation and following side, but the concept of outsourcing this to somebody that can understand your brand guidelines, and still provide some some additional creative and innovative solutions, really allows you to start thinking fresh about what could potentially become a stale brand, which is something we don't want to happen, right, we want to, we want to follow our brand guidelines, so that we maintain that brand equity, but we don't want to become a stale in not innovating on our brand. And so that's that's why enterprise is like trying out projects on CrowdSpring. To answer your question specifically on the on the brand guidelines, we have a creative brief and that creative brief is the very first step that you take. And you're telling us about the project, you're telling us about what your goals are, you know what your potential your competitors are, if you're trying to model this after, after one of these, you're telling us your goals for this campaign. And we allow you to upload any documents that you need. And so one of that for the enterprise level clients are their brand guidelines, these are the creative tracks, you have to stay on, you know, these are the fonts, these are the colours, this is the style we're looking for. And that doesn't hinder creativity from this audience. It allows them to stay focused on what they're looking to do. And, you know, what we find is that you're getting when you have dozens of different creators participating, instead of one or two marketers within a company trying to think about how to be innovative and follow these guidelines. You're outsourcing this to dozens that are able to see this potentially for the first time. And they're bringing their fresh ideas. And so having that that those creative rails, as I call them through the creative brief, is not a challenge. We work with that regularly with our clients.

Mike: One of the things you mentioned just talking there, I'm interested you talk about curation, I mean, how do you curate the designs that come back so that it makes it easier for the client to actually pick the one that that's most appropriate, or that's best, rather than just being faced with a sea of different options?

Jason: Yeah, it starts with that creative brief, the more specific the client can be in terms of what they're looking for, and what the creative rails are, the stronger the results are. This product is designed for any level of business owner or marketer, but the folks that understand design that understand their company, really well get the best designs, because they're able to communicate that within their creative brief, they're able to say, what they like, what they don't like, what's allowed, what's not allowed, what exactly, they're looking to see who the target audience is, when you have all of that information in a creative brief, it becomes much easier for the creatives to say, Okay, here's what I can do. Here's what I can't do. Here's what I've done in the past, here's how I can modify that to work for this client. And you get some fabulous designs that come back right from the beginning, when you have that much detail. One thing that we've done is there's three different ways to give feedback, you have unlimited iterations and the CrowdSpring projects. And so what you're doing in that very first step is you are you're you're giving either a score out of one to five, you're giving on that specific design, you're giving comments on that design, or you're updating your entire creative brief and saying, Hey, I forgot to mention we can't use green or we can't use this word. You know, so you can you can provide directions to all the creatives that way.

Mike: It sounds awesome. Oh, it sounds like a platform that people just have to try to experience what they can get back. It's really interesting.

Absolutely. You know, the The fascinating part is going if you go to crowdsource dot com forward slash categories, there's 33 categories of branding and design. And for creatives and marketers, this is kind of an exciting area to say, okay, my wheels are turning on some things we could do, because for a lot of the enterprise level clients listening to this, we're not going to change your logo, right? We're not going to touch the core brand identity. But there's things that you need to do within your marketing. And I'll give some examples, custom illustrations, right. So within your your marketing to make it feel more human, more fun, more exciting, or communicate maybe a difficult concept very quickly, we process imagery 1000s of times faster than text. So instead of having a lengthy paragraph explaining something, maybe a custom illustration designed specifically, to educate on that problem can communicate more quickly and more succinctly. And so custom illustrations are popular with enterprise level clients. You know, we mentioned logos might be out of the equation for the core brand, but maybe they're appropriate for things like the podcast, you know, that is targeting a specific group that wants to be on brand with the main company, but wants to show its kind of innovation and independence, you might have internal events, like corporate run walks, or fundraising events, where you know, logos and things like this are needed, packaging, sometimes it's fun to, to create a product that is on brand, but it's not something that the company actually creates or sells publicly, you know, sticker mule is an example of this, where they do custom stickers, but the owners and CEO is passionate about hot sauce. And so they created a a hot sauce, and they you know, give it away to to clients. And it's kind of like a fun interaction with the brand. It's they're not in the business of selling or creating hot sauce. But it's a fun way of extending that that brand into an additional touchpoint. I mean, this is the challenge for for marketers is we've got a lot of competition, right? How do we stand out? And more importantly, once we stand out? How do we communicate, we're different? How do we communicate that the product that we have is for them, right in some ways to do this, or to touch them with different types of marketing that, you know, they're not used to seeing, they're used to seeing some of the standard pieces of marketing, but something like a custom designed hot sauce bottle for that company is is much more unique for such categories on CrowdSpring is a great way to start looking at different creative uses of this crowd of designers that CrowdSpring has created.

Mike: I love the way that you get so enthusiastic about all these different approaches to marketing. I mean, I think, you know, perhaps one of the things that people listening would be interested to hear is, when you're promoting CrowdSpring. What works for you, what are the best channels for winning yourself new customers?

Jason: It’s education. So what we do is spend an awful lot of time over the last 15 years educating on what is branding? What is a brand identity? How is this going to help you basically compete in the marketplace? How are you going to build a stronger business by focusing on your core brand and your core brand identity. So it's it's podcasts like this, it's live workshops, where we're helping iterate on things, it's getting on phone calls with innovation managers, and just riffing on ideas. And so, you know, if there's, if there's anybody out there that, you know, is working within a large organisation trying to figure out, you know, what to do differently, what types of opportunities, we could use 212,000 creatives to help their organisation in a creative way. I think the Burleigh pasta campaign is a perfect example of that. You know, it's like innovating on the pasta shape that hasn't changed in hundreds of years, gets you more publicity gets you a little bit more of a conversation. And so I'm happy when I get the chance to talk with innovation managers and marketing managers at large organisations where we can just riff on these different ideas, how can how can we work together?

Mike: Oh, that sounds awesome. We'd like to ask a little bit about you know, to get under the skin of what you do in marketing. So one of the things I'd love to know is about marketing advice. I mean, what's the best bit of marketing advice someone's ever given you?

Jason: I think it's the idea of lean into what your brand is actually about. And realise that it's going to, it's going to upset some folks. And those aren't your customers, right? That's not your audience that you're trying to create. And you want to make sure that whatever whatever your core brand is, whatever your core value proposition is, that that is what's coming through and you're not trying to be something you're not. We've all been on a phone call on hold where it says you know, your, your services really important to us. Please wait for 37 minutes before somebody picks up the phone and it's like the there's a disconnect there. You know, if customer service is not your strong suit, don't say, you know, it's really important. Don't say you know that my services or my patronage is really important. You want to make sure that you're aligning your brand and your messaging with with what the customer truly is. CS.

Mike: I think it was great advice. I love that. I'm interested in what you think of marketing as a career as well. You know, if you were talking to a young person who was thinking about marketing as a career, what would you say to them? And maybe what part of marketing would you recommend they get into?

Jason: Absolutely don't don't get hung up on the tactics. And the things that aren't important. Business is quite simple. When you boil it down, we're trying to get more customers. We're trying to reduce churn, we're trying to increase profit, right? That's, that's it. I mean, it's like, I think what happens, especially with junior level marketers is is we like to tell ourselves, we're succeeding because of how many Facebook likes we got or retweets. And, and while that can lead to sales and lead to growth, we need to make sure that that that connection is more clear. And it's not just nebulous. And so I think being clear on what the core principles are for your brand, that you're trying to advance, and making sure that you're not you're not confusing yourself with vanity metrics, thinking that success.

Mike: That's amazing advice. I mean, Jason, this has been great. I could talk to you for ages. I love your enthusiasm, about design and about marketing, but I'm mindful of time. So maybe the best thing to say is, you know, people want to continue this conversation, they'd like more information, how could they best contact you?

Jason: Absolutely, there's, there's a couple of ways. I mean, I think if you're If this sounds interesting, we have affordable projects that start at $300. So this is not going to break the bank to try something out. To be able to try a project and see how this works. So go to CrowdSpring.com. Take a look at the categories and see from there. If you're a smaller brand, and you're looking for a little feedback on your brand, we have a free brand identity grader, where we provide a custom 10 page report specifically for your brand. It's done by a human, we score your brand out of 100 and provide some actionable feedback. And if you're a larger enterprise, you're an innovation manager, your marketing manager, you're trying to figure out an interesting way to follow your brand guidelines, but also be innovative and creative and keep up with some of the tactics that newer brands are using reach out to me directly. I'm happy to schedule a call and, and have a conversation. We've built CrowdSpring as a self service platform, so you don't have to talk to me in order to move forward. But if it's helpful to be able to riff on different ideas and see how we can work together, I'd love to be able to do that and you can reach out jason@CrowdSpring.com

Mike: That's really generous. Jason, I really appreciate it's been a great interview. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.

Jason: Absolutely. Great to be here.

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.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Sam Oh - Ahrefs

As more people understand the value of SEO, competition increases. In this podcast episode, Mike chats with Sam Oh, VP of Marketing at Ahrefs who offer a suite of SEO tools from keyword research to competitor analysis.

Sam discusses Ahrefs’ commitment to reliable data and how bad data can lead to bad decisions.

He also offers advice on how marketeers can approach SEO campaigns and how impactful SEO fundamentals and basics can be for companies.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

Transcript: Interview with Sam Oh – Ahrefs

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Sam Oh

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 Sam Oh. Sam is the VP of Marketing at Ahrefs, an SEO company. Welcome to the podcast, Sam.

Sam: Thanks for having me.

Mike: It's great to have you on. I mean, you've had a really interesting career you seem to have done, you know, everything, including founding companies, and yet actually, you didn't start from a business background, tell us how you got to HR at fail your career developed?

Sam: Yeah, so I guess it's run rather long story. So I started an E commerce in 2009. And I basically thought to myself, I'm young, and if I'm going to fail, then this is a great time to do it, when I still have my parents to help out. And if anything were to go wrong, then, you know, everything's alright. I did decently. And a lot of that was through learning SEO, and the company was acquired in 2012. And I kind of just rinse and repeat it for several years, I started an agency, and eventually 2018, I tried to acquire eight trips as a customer. And it was a lead gen experiment that I was working through. And instead they got me as an employee. And since then, I've left my agency side work. And now I'm full time at ETFs and have been for now four and a half years.

Mike: Wow. So you're gonna be a customer I liked so much you decided to join the company? Is that the story?

Sam: Yeah, they just treated me really well. And I think just the season in life that I was in, it was time to let go of the, you know, 16 to 18 hour days, putting out fires needed to come to a stop. And I was just, I was ready to just settle with where I wasn't very happy with being at a dress.

Mike: That's awesome. So I mean, the first thing to say is I introduced Ahrefs, as an SEO tool, there's lots of SEO tools out there. So can you just explain a little bit about what Ahrefs does, and how it's different to some of the other products?

Sam: Yeah, so we provide a suite of SEO tools. So that includes everything from tools for keyword research, for content for landing pages, whatever it may be competitive analysis. So if you want to look at your competitors, backlinks, their organic traffic, the keywords that they're ranking for, to do website audits, you can basically just click a few buttons. And then we'll check for over 100 plus SEO issues on your site, and kind of tell you how to fix them, where to fix them. In terms of differentiation. For me, personally, I was an HR Fs customer for maybe three years before I joined their company. And that's why I was excited to actually try to get them as a clients, which again, didn't work out. But I what I found, especially working here and understanding the intricacies of the tool is our commitment to reliable data. And a lot of this is because of the founder and CEO, Dimitri, he's the technical brains, you know, behind everything. And basically, our crawler is the second most active only next to Google. And what that does for the quality of the data is because links on the internet are always die, they're redirected that revive whatever, we're able to report on fresh data. And so all the data that you see at Ahrefs, including keyword data, we have the largest US database of keywords, and we're constantly expanding. And so yeah, I think just the commitment to reliable data is huge, which makes our tools I think, quite different from from other ones that are out there. We're also very transparent about this stuff as well.

Mike: And also, you've been around for a very long time, haven't you? I mean, you've had this track record of building up the crawler and making it the biggest other than Google.

Sam: Absolutely, yeah.

Mike: So one thing, I think, you know, a lot of people listening to this might not be SEO experts, I think, you know, what would be great is to have a kind of idea as to how people might approach putting together some sort of campaign to improve the search engine optimization of their site, you know, what would be the steps using a tool like Ahrefs?

Sam: Yes, I think it's a little bit of a loaded question, because depending on what it is you want to do, that can vary quite a bit, and also depending on the site that you're working on, but we'll, I guess a kind of a basic example would be creating blog content and ranking that. So you might start off with keywords Explorer, which is our keyword research tool, and you can just enter in some keywords that are related to your niche. And then you go to a keyword ideas report and you'll see millions and millions of keywords, which you obviously don't want to filter through because who has the time to go through a million keywords. So you can use some of the filters. So you know, assuming you want to rank for some of the lower difficulty ones then you can set a Keyword Difficulty filter and you can find the low calm Position ones that you can actually start going after, and getting results much faster than trying to compete for, you know, some of the fat head terms. So, yeah, that might for, for example, like if you're in the insurance business, you wouldn't want to try and rank for insurance because you probably won't be able to compete, unless you're, you know, the cream of the crop and have the biggest budgets, basically. But you can find lower competition topics that you'll actually have a fighting chance of ranking for, to get organic traffic. And then if you need to build backlinks, you can basically click through to different things within the tool. And that'll send you over to Site Explorer, you can see who your competitors are getting backlinks from. And you can use that as intelligence to try and get backlinks for yourself.

Mike: I mean, that's really neat, really simple to, you know, two areas to look at to start your campaign. It's interesting, you talk about keyword difficulty. I mean, is it more difficult to do SEO today? Is there more competition?

Sam: Yeah, that's that's, that's a little bit tricky. And I think this is like, I'll try not to go all meta here. But I think, because there are more competitors. And because more people understand the value of SEO, that it is more difficult, because there's just more people doing it. And naturally, there's going to be more competition. But at the same time, I feel like the way that things are moving in terms of attention span, we've all heard stats, like, you know, the average time on site is decreasing by whatever percent or humans have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. But that leaks into our marketing, too, I think. And I think a lot of people are always looking for quick ways to kind of make something happen. And so they're cutting corners. And so I think that opens up opportunities for people who are willing to create better contents, who are actually willing to put in the grunt work of building links to that page. Because as that happens, other people are not doing it, because everyone else is looking for a shortcut to get there. And so yeah, in some ways, it's not as hard if you can just stay focused and keep your head down. But at the same time, because of the number of competitors, it is naturally a more competitive landscape than it once was.

Mike: And it's interesting to talk about that, because, you know, one of the things I'm interested in is how much expertise do you need? I mean, you said, you know, it's all about getting some links and creating great content. I mean, is it as simple as that? Or do you need to be an SEO expert,

Sam: You really don't. So I created a, an SEO course, for beginners in our academy. Now, it's been a year and a half. And I get messages from people who say, like, I never knew how to do SEO, now I know how to do it. And now I'm making multi six figure income from doing this, like affiliate SEO through their company. And they're just grateful. And like, of course, I don't know whether this is true. I don't know why someone would, would lie about that. But, you know, these people are coming from nothing, and they're just taking the fundamentals of SEO is all you really need to do is stick with the basics, keep your head down and get better at the basics. And as you do that, you're going to get traffic. And if you're going with a business approach in mind, then you're going to generate revenue. And yet people who have never done this kind of stuff who were making, you know, 2040 50 60k are now making two $300,000 through their own stuff. And so yeah, a lot of potential there. You don't have to be an expert. And I think pretty much anyone can do it now. It's just mostly a lot of trial and error. But yeah, I really hope that people will, will actually give it a shot because it's not as difficult, at least at a basic level to get into.

Mike: I'm presuming that applies to people who previously wouldn't have thought that much about SEO. So for example, if you're involved in media relations, creating press releases, I mean, is it the case you should be thinking about SEO in your press release, as well as your website content?

Sam: Well, I'm not, I wouldn't claim to be an expert at all, when it comes to press releases. I guess it really depends on the purpose of that press release, I don't think you need to really focus on ranking it well, because what are you trying to rank it for? Usually, it's press releases or more announcements, I think of what's happening in the company. And so if you're a publicly traded company, people are going to see that press release. Because as you go to Yahoo Finance or whatever, Bloomberg or whatever, it's all going to be listed under your stock ticker. Not so much for SEL, I don't think it makes sense in the sense of ranking those those press releases.

Mike: So the message there is really focus on the content, you want to rank and spend the time optimising that

Sam: Yeah, so basically ones that are ideally going to be somewhat evergreen and that are going to drive business value, like for your company, because at the end of the day, like traffic without any kind of result, like without any kind of business value is just kind of pointless if anything, it's a waste of money because now you're wasting bandwidth.

Mike: That makes sense. I'm interested you mentioned So about, you know, checking for SEO issues, I mean, is that one of those features where you can actually get very quick wins on a website is where you've got issues that need correcting?

Sam:  Yeah, so that really depends on what the issue is. But yes, there. So we have a free tool called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, which includes Site Audit. And you basically just verify your website just like you would with Google Search Console. And then you can run free audits on your website. And so depending on what you find there, it could potentially be a very, very quick and big win. So if you have, if you're no indexing some of your important pages, and you're wondering why it's not ranking, we'll find that out. And you can actually index the page or request for it to be indexed technically. And so yeah, it really depends on on what the issue is, like, if you're going to be fixing some redirects. Depending on what those redirects are, that could potentially be a big win, or it could be a nothing burger. So it really depends on on your specific business issues. But regardless, I think that people should be auditing their websites regularly, so that they can find what these issues are. Because nobody knows what these issues are until you find them. And nobody can say how valuable or how important they are until you find that

Mike: Makes sense. I mean, again, going back to this desire to want to see quick results from something that's inherently going to take quite a long time. I mean, are there big mistakes people are making maybe in terms of the shortcutting, you talked about, that mean that they they're actually undermining their SEO, rather than improving it?

Sam: The shortcuts often mean that people are looking for hacks. And often when you look for hacks, you're getting into a lot of technical details that do not matter. So we're looking for these advanced hacks, and we see these tutorials and we're like, oh, this is the same stuff that I've already seen before. Well, the reason why you're seeing it, again, is because it works oftentimes, right. And people are just discounting it saying it's not important, because it's not advanced enough for me, I literally see comments in our YouTube channel sometimes that say, this is not advanced enough. But in my head, I'm just thinking, just stick with the fundamentals. And you will get very far and you won't even be watching these tutorials anymore. And that's fine with me. Because, yeah, that's a good thing, it means that people are actually getting things done. So in terms of mistakes, I think overcomplicating is a huge one, and also trying to cut corners, looking for some kind of advanced hack, which ends up just being a waste of time. And then yeah,

Mike: Makes a lot of sense. I'm interested about, you know, measuring the value of SEO, because obviously, people tend to talk about growth in traffic. But that's kind of unrelated to business. I mean, is there a way to measure ROI? Or does that vary from, you know, perhaps one industry category to another?

Sam: Yeah, so there are so many ways, and you might not like my answer, but I don't think that you really need to measure strictly the ROI of SEO, because I don't know if it's possible to do properly. Like, there's so many different attribution models like blast like position based, first click whatever, there's just so many different attribution models. And so what we do is we actually don't do things like goal tracking through Google Analytics, we don't even have Google Analytics installed on our site. But we look at our annual recurring revenue. And if it's going up into the right, that's a good thing. So as our organic traffic probably works together, and I've just never seen an attribution model where like, I won't have a million questions to doubt the accuracy of it, like how do we know why these people are converting? Are they converting from this page? Have they how many interactions have they had with the brand? We can't measure that because it's not always through things that we control? If it comes from bad data, it's going to lead to bad decisions. And if it works, does that mean that it's actually factual? Not necessarily, we just don't know. And so when it comes to measuring the ROI of SEO, a lot of it is just common sensical. So if we're creating content that has clear business value, so for Ahrefs, we have a keyword research tool. If we have content on a Keyword Research Tutorial, of course, we're going to show people how to deal with our keyword research tool. If we're getting a tonne of organic traffic to that page. Naturally, people are going to click and explore keyword research tool, it's impossible to get a significant amount of organic traffic, where our product is really the star of the show, and to not get business value from that. So for us, we just keep creating content like that, but that has business value, and we get traffic to it. And our annual recurring revenue goes up. SEO is profitable for us in that case.

Mike: I think that's a great way of looking at it. I mean, one thing, I guess might be worth exploring just a little bit is this idea of an attribution model. Can you just explain what you mean by that and why it is sometimes so limited?

Sam: Yeah, so we can't track a full customer journey, I don't think we can at least I've never seen a tool that can do it properly. Because now, like people, we interact with so many different channels. So you might, let's say, for example, you want to even buying a garden hose. So you might buy a hose that's, you know, 30 to $50, or whatever it is. But how do you actually buy that hose? Well, you might ask your neighbour for a recommendation. But then you go, and you don't trust your neighbour fully. So you go, and you start a YouTube video, and then you search for best garden hoses in Google. And then you click through from that person's page. And as the retailer, you see that you got referral traffic from abc.com. And that person converted. So does that mean that abc.com is responsible for that conversion? Probably not maybe a little bit, we don't really know what's happening at the end of the day, is that there's so many different variables, and now we're bombarded with information from social media, from search from ads all around us from podcasts from everywhere, information is everywhere. And we hear these things. And now I'm talking about a garden hose. And somebody realises Oh, yeah, I need to go buy a garden hose now. Am I responsible for that conversion? Like, we don't really know how this works, and like how there's so many different touchpoints. Like for B2B, I think there's like hundreds of touchpoints, before you actually become a customer of a company. And so if we can't accurately attributed than, again, bad data leads to bad decisions. And so if our Garden Hose Company says, oh, yeah, it's because somebody spoke about garden hoses. A person on a B2B podcast spoke about garden hoses. Yeah, then we should go and find more B2B people who will speak on podcasts about garden hoses. That's a bad decision. All right. And so if we can't properly attribute the sale to the source, it's because there isn't one source. And so yeah, that's why I don't think that attribution models, they usually don't make sense, but especially at the enterprise level, they almost force it for reporting. But at least for us, we're still a pretty small company and our CEO and founder, our CMO are all very much in agreement that these just don't make sense. So don't try to force something that way. Instead, we'll keep it common sensical. And look at our revenue up into the right, organic traffic up into the right. Things are working, let's keep going. And in not just that, but word of mouth. People will often say the great things about our content. And a lot of these people are our customers. So I think it shows that it resonates with them, and that it contributes to our bottom line.

Mike: Makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, you've explained how hard it is to work out what actually works and drive sales, although you did allude to the fact that, you know, you've seen pretty competent things like your blog, but what do you find the best channels or the best tactics to promote the tool? Well,

Sam: Yeah, so I think so for us, because we're in SAS, naturally, people want to see how the software works, and not so much a software demo, but they want to see how it solves their problems. So for us, our two main channels are the blog and our YouTube channel. We're obviously involved with social media newsletters, and sponsorships, and etc, etc. But I would say that these two are the biggest for us. And it's kind of what our brand has become well known for. And literally like, we keep it so fundamental, we just think does this topic have business value? Does this topic have traffic potential? Yes, yes. All right, let's do it. And so because we just trust that if we're creating content that's going to naturally in a very organically showcase our product, and it's going to show people that by doing it this way, it actually solves the problem that you're looking for, then people aren't going to purchase and it doesn't mean that they're pushers right then and there. They might purchase tomorrow, a month from now, five years from now, whatever it might be, we're planting seeds. And we're just constantly planting those seeds. As they search for solutions to their problem, the more I guess, aware they become that our tool can solve many other problems, then it becomes worth the investment for people to try and to eventually, I guess, become long term advocates in our tool as well.

Mike: Yeah, that makes sense to me. I like that. I'm interested about you as a marketer. So from your point of view, you know, You've obviously done a lot of marketing in your career as well as building businesses. But what do you love about the marketing element? What's the things you really enjoy?

Sam: I really actually enjoy the operations aspect. So I like creating systems SOPs, and basically finding ways to optimise that specifically in marketing so not so much in the other areas. But I also love just promoting a great product and the kind of sounds cheesy but you Like, there's so many bad products out there right now that I would not want to be responsible for marketing it because I feel like I'm just lying. And so I think that has been a huge thing. Like our CMO once said something like your product is your marketing. And I didn't quite understand what he meant when he first said that. But over time, it's just become so apparent because like, the reason why I was happy to join Ahrefs, the company as an employee, after being self employed my entire adult life is because I just love the product. And all I was doing was just sharing what I was doing with the product before. And it just naturally was good marketing, because people were like, oh, like, I didn't know you could do that. And so they have to try it themselves. And then they go and share it. Some people, like they'll say, Oh, I learned this from Sam, other people will just share it as their own. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter because the company is now benefiting from these things being shared, because we're just talking about how we use the tool. And I just love that. Like, we can market a great product just naturally, it's like I would talk to a friend about it. But now we're doing it at scale and reaching millions and millions of people doing that.

Mike: As that's really interesting, I think that's actually interesting marketing advice, you know that the product is your marketing, I think that that's a great way to look at things. Are there any other tips or things people have said to you during your marketing career that you've really taken as being good advice, and you've used to drive your career forward?

Sam: The best, it's not so much advice, but it was a question that somebody asked me. And that question was, who cares? So when you think about it, and you, like, as we write blog contents, as we're going through the edits, or editing process, our feedback process is, is super, super, brutally honest. And it's also strict. And oftentimes we look through it. And the question that will often ask is, who cares? So if you say a statement, and I look at that, and I say, Who cares? Then the author now needs to ask, Who cares? And if nobody cares, then it's time to cut that. And I think it cuts out a lot of the fluff and the marketing that we're very much used to. And now people are kind of intolerant of this fluff. And so I think oftentimes, when we ask Who cares, it also makes us think about who are our customers? And so, yeah, I find that that is a question that I just keep asking myself, whenever I'm doing anything related to marketing is, who cares?

Mike: I love that it's really powerful. So um, I mean, I think the only thing is, I can imagine some people in your team submitting work and getting that question and finding it a tough one to answer. Sometimes.

Sam: It is. And I think we're all the important thing is that within our within our organisation, we all know that, like, the criticism that we gave is constructive. It's, we're not there to hurt anyone, or to challenge anyone's ego or anything like that. And like, we're not just going to say to anyone who cares, like in such a way that would offend most people. But like, for me, like I review Josh's content, he reviews mine, and oftentimes will say, Who cares? And like we look at that, and we're like, good point, like, who cares? And I think just taking that as constructive feedback, as opposed to an attack that needs to be established within the company as well, before you can start doing things like that.

Mike: That's great advice. I mean, we've created company looked at and gone. Yeah, actually, people really care about this. Are there any campaigns that you've driven from that, but you're particularly proud of or have been particularly effective?

Sam: I did a case study, it was a three part case study where we created a statistics page. So SEO statistics, we wrote the content, we built backlinks to it. And we ranked him for a very competitive term in around two weeks. And so we did a case study on that. And I loved it, because it was a very different way of of creating content, it was very data driven. And we knew exactly who we were going to get links from before the campaign even started. And we just showcase literally everything. And it was so cool, because it was almost like I was in my agency days where we're not allowed to share those secrets with people because then competitors can take it. But now that I'm on the tool side, I literally get to give an over the shoulder view of like, oh, this is what we're doing. And it's just like, we're having these aha moments, kind of as we're going and yeah, it worked out really well for us. And so I don't know if we're still in pole position, but yeah, we're in position one or two, probably for SEO statistics. And it was yeah, the everything is laid out there and I just loved it because it's also organic marketing because I'm just showing people what I didn't eight trips because that's what I did.

Mike: That's awesome that, you know, you put this together you plan the campaign, and then it actually achieved the results. So I love that as a story. One of the things we'd like to ask people and particularly people that you've had a lot of experience in marketing, if you knew a young person was thinking about marketing as a career, what advice would you give them?

Sam: Oh, that's a good question. I think the most important thing are results. And I think people often think of degrees. And I'm not saying that education is not important. That's not what I'm saying at all. But people who actually go out and and get results is what's going to get you hired. If a job is your goal, it's what's going to help you get better at marketing, is even just having a personal site saying I want to rank for this, or how do I do that, and then figuring it out, trying failing, trying failing, and then that's actually going to make somebody much more attractive from an employer standpoint. And also, yeah, like, you're just gonna get so much out of that just out of three months of just like, getting obsessed with ranking, or whatever it is that you're going to do in marketing, I think is, is, is probably the best thing you can do for your career.

Mike: Amazing advice, I think that's really quite inspiring as well, you know, that, that anyone can go out and try and learn SEO by by actually doing it, and then become successful. So I love that feels really inspirational. So I'm obviously mindful of time and, you know, really appreciate the time you spent with us. Is there anything else you feel we should have covered? Or anything you feel listeners would like to know?

Sam: No, I feel like we've covered quite a lot in a pretty short period of time.

Mike: That's amazing. So if anyone listening to this, we'd like to find out more about Ahrefs. Or maybe ask you about something that you've mentioned on the podcast. I mean, what's the best way to firstly find out about the product? And then also maybe get hold of yourself?

Sam:  Yeah, so you can learn about our product on our blog, Ahrefs.com/blog. You can go to YouTube and just search for Ahrefs, so A-H-R-E-F-S. If you have any specific questions for me, then you can tweet me. My DMS are open as well. It's Sam SG Oh.

Mike: That's amazing. That's very kind to offer people to have the chance to DM you as well. So I know you're probably incredibly busy. I really appreciate that. Sam, I really appreciate this. This has been fascinating and insight into SEO and particularly into the Ahrefs tool. So thank you very much for being on the podcast. Thanks for having me. 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.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Darby Sieben - Unbounce

The internet is an increasingly crowded place, with competition rising and ad costs increasing. Ensuring landing pages are as optimised as possible is more important than ever. In our latest podcast episode, we interview Darby Sieben, Chief Product Officer at Unbounce, who shares top tips and insights about creating effective landing pages.

Darby shares how Unbounce continues to evolve to build tools that drive better conversions for marketeers, and his opinion on how pop-ups can be used for success.

He also shares the advice he has gained from throughout his career and discusses his goal of helping marketeers get better at what they do and levelling the playing field between small and large businesses.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

Transcript: Interview with Darby Sieben – Unbounce

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Darby Sieben

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 Darby Sieben, Darby is the chief product officer from Unbounce. Welcome to the podcast Darby.

Darby: Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here.

Mike: It's great to have you on. I mean, I'm particularly interested, I had to look at LinkedIn and seen you've had like this amazing career where you've worked for the Yellow Pages in Canada, you've been an investment advisor. I mean, can you just give us a bit of a background about your career and how you've got to the point of working with Unbounce?

Darby: Yeah, I'll give you a very quick two minute overview. You know, I won't, I won't give my exact age to the users, they can probably figure it out some of your podcast listeners. But when I graduated high school, I had a vision and a dream to become a computer programmer. And I realised there was a difference between a good one and a great one. And I would never be a great one. But I was always fascinated in the 90s with the intersection of business and technology, and really had a deep passion for where the internet was actually going to go. So typical, you know, story I dropped out of school started a company hired by friends who are great programmers, we built our first company, and then in 90s, sold that, that I built the second agency in Calgary, Alberta, which we sold the Yellow Pages group, and then I joined YPG, to help them with their digital transformation as we were moving from a print focused company to a digital focused company. And so that was a really interesting journey around, you know, how do you take 100 year old organisation, and rethink the business model. And so you're offering to transform the entire company, literally an order to become a digitally focused company after 100 years of print. So it was a really, really an amazing journey.

That from there, I went to Royal Bank of Canada, which is the largest bank in Canada, one of the top banks globally, as part of their ventures group to build out one of their largest ventures called amply, which is a cashback application.

Darby: And that was really designed to, you know, connect merchants and consumers within the Canadian market, and reward them for purchases with those particular merchants. And then earlier this year, I joined Unbounce as their Chief Product Officer after speaking with Felicia who's their CEO, understanding the vision of where the organisation is going. And it's, you know, another one of those great, I think it'd be great transformational stories, as Unbounce evolves its business and continues to evolve its business. And then as you mentioned, I do some investing and advising technology's been really good for me and parlayed that into now helping some of the startup founders on not necessarily what to do, but maybe some of the things that I've learned in my career on what not to do, as a way to, to accelerate their businesses as well. So, you know, just I just have a really deep passion for technology, the intersection with business and how, you know, businesses can use tools to continue to grow and expand. It's kind of always been my mission over the last 30 years, as you know, how do we help marketers get better at what they do? That's kind of been the theme across my entire career.

Mike: That's awesome. And I think, you know, a lot of people know Unbounce as being a product that's designed to help marketers in a very specific situation, which is to get people onto a landing page and get them to convert, but he just give us a bit of a view as to all the things Unbounce does, because I think you do a bit more now.

Darby: Yeah, so as you mentioned, you know, Unbounce is really one of those kinds of iconic Canadian brands started about 13 years ago, for the most part really invented a landing page space. And it started with a group of founders that really looked at the market and said, you know, people are spending money on digital advertising. They're driving traffic to their web page. But the web page may not actually be the best conversion engine. And so henceforth, you know, the creation of a landing page to say, let's really direct your traffic to a page that's focused on conversion. And that did really, really well for Unbounce. We created I would think the category and obviously what happens when you create great categories and categories that work. Lots of players come into the marketplace. The shift, you know, where Unbounce is today. And landing pages is still very important part of our puzzle because you need to be able to create content. But we talk about conversion intelligence. And so when I talk about conversion, intelligence, what problem are we really trying to solve?

We know that the internet's more and more crowded. We know there's lots of builder tools that are out there. competition continues to increase ad costs continue to increase. And we started to look at the assets that we built as a company and realise we have a lot A lot of data and a lot of understanding about what actually converts. And so we started to think about how do we leverage this data and its non PII data. But how do we leverage this data, to start to build intelligence tools that actually can augment what a marketer is doing using AI and ML. So we started with smart traffic. And what that means, typically, a marketer before would create an A variant and a B variant, they'd throw some dollars at a throw some dollars at B, then they would do the analysis and figure out which one works and then decide how they're going to go from there. Smart traffic was our first foray into conversion intelligence, which is really letting the machine do the optimization. So you can create those pages, and the machine does the optimization. And we see great results on that particular side.

We've also acquired a company called snazzy.ai, which is now called Smart copy, which is how do we use AI, to, you know, help get the initial set of copy that a user might be looking for. So as opposed to the blank page, and I got to write something out, let me throw in a couple of key words, and the machine can come back and say, here's a starting point, and then the user edit from there. And then a big area of investment right now is our smart builder, which is our second version of our landing page product. Our first one is called classic, which is the one that we built 13 years ago, the new builder is really how do we give eyes to the machine. So we know on the page, what the content is, where it's actually positioned. So we can actually do further optimization as opposed to just traffic, we can actually start to optimise the content on the page, based on all of the things that we know about that in order to increase conversion. So the mission of Unbounce to build tools to help marketers get better conversion still exists. What we're really thinking about now is how do we leverage the billions of visitors that we've seen in the billions of conversions we've seen, and productize those products to really help marketers accelerate what they're doing in terms of conversion, because it's all about ROI for the marketer.

Mike: Wow, I mean, there's, there's a lot there. I'm interested, because, you know, you talk about billions of page visits, which actually, I think is one of the challenges of a lot of people in B2B is a lot of the datasets we have are quite small. And do you think that's something that, you know, a company like Unbounce, can bring is this view over a very high level of traffic, rather than the small numbers that you know, of hundreds or 1000s that you might see in B2B?

Darby: That's exactly the mission that we're on at this point, is we have all of the companies, large, small, different segments, and what have you, building landing pages across our ecosystem gives us a really interesting view of seeing globally, what actually works. And again, we do that in a non PII way, in other ways, you know, merchants can partners can connect their data, but we don't do anything with that particular data, because that actually belongs to the to the merchant. So we're just looking at the conversion data. And so yeah, we think that's a really competitive advantage, when you can start to take the insights, the learnings and the recommendations at a much higher global view, with a billion data points that we have, it starts to become meaningful, you know, provide those insights back to the marketer, and then the marketer can decide how to action on those. And so you're absolutely right, we think that the creation of a page is still very, very important. We think that the competitive advantage is that Unbounce is really starting to lean into is we've got a great set of data, that if we use it in an intelligent, smart way, we know can help accelerate and help produce a better return on investment for marketers.

Mike: I mean, that's amazing. And this is probably a bit of a cheeky question. But there's lots of products, particularly information platforms that have landing page functionality within them. But nobody's really either offering that the same user experience in terms of building that landing page, or this route to actually providing insight from data to help you enhance it. I mean, why do you think these other companies are so far behind?

Darby: I think there's a couple of things. One, we all know that, you know, in the AI and ML space, it's an emerging space. And there's still lots of toolkits that are being built and but you got to fight for talent in order to get really, really smart people that understand this. And that's only one side of the equation. I think the second side of the equation is you know, to do AI and ML really, really well. As you mentioned earlier, you need to have a large data set. And so starting from ground up, it's really, really difficult to do that. Unbounce you know, because of the length of time that we've been in business And what we've seen over the past decade, has really given us that ability to have those insights. So you know, we built a great builder years ago. Now, you know, we have really great pool of data, and the new products that we're building, both have the focus on how do we make it simple for the marketer to build. But then more importantly, how do we make sure that we've got all the semantic labelling in place to give them machine eyes on the page, so we can really understand the text, copy, the tone, the image, the call to action, and start to look at all of those factors that play in to help in a market or convert. And so I think that's probably one of the big reasons why it's difficult to become really strong in the AI ml space is because you got to have that large data set. And then bonds is in a privileged position, because we do have a large data set that we can build off of.

Mike: I mean, this type of data is amazing. I think we'll come back to it in a minute. But you mentioned something about simplicity, making it easy to build landing pages. So you know, I'd really like to start there, because fundamentally, a lot of what people are doing in marketing is having to build landing pages. How do you make it simpler? And what can people do themselves to make that process maybe a little bit less difficult?

Darby: Yeah, so there's a couple of things that and I'll just speak a little bit from an Unbounce perspective, and just maybe more generally, some tips. Marketers are original builder, we call it classic, but let's call it the original builder, was just, you know, your standard Perfect Pixel Perfect, I could come in and build what exactly what I needed to do. Our new builder, smart builder does have some restrictions, it is more templated based, it's more container based to drop and drag. And we've done that specifically to make sure that the machine has eyes on the page. So it kind of knows where everything is, in order to actually do the optimization on the back end. If a marketer starts to play with our smart builder product, we start off by simply asking some questions. What is it you're attempting to do? What is the tone here, some templates, just to give that kickstart for the marketer to get going, even to the point of copy assistant, which is, hey, just tell us about your business. And if you want to have more content, you can, and then our AI will actually go and give you the starting point of text.

So we find it's easier for somebody to edit something that's already there, maybe as opposed to having to create it. So those are some of the simplicity tools we're trying to do on the front end, make it more templated, make it more walk through templated, but still with the flexibility to give the marketer that ability to you know, put their own brand and what have you. And we're going to expand that we're going to do stuff like you know, dropping your URL, and we can use your URL and actually detect all of that information, and just help you streamline the creation, then that's when once we got it up and built, then that's when we can really kick in with our conversion intelligence side. So we do think about the building side, how do we make things simpler, and in some cases, using our tools, so we can say to a merchant, you know, you're putting in that headline, that's great. But if you actually shrink the headline, it's actually going to be a little bit better based on our data, because we know certain headlines produce better size than others as an example. So those are a few of the things that we're tackling for, for simplicity, I think generally, for anybody that's building a landing page to drive traffic to, I think it really does come down to synthesise the core pieces of information for your audience, make the call to action extremely clear, and give them a really good compelling reason why they want to go forward from there. Because clearly, the fact that they're on your landing page, they've expressed some sort of interest. What we're attempting to do and smart builder is, you know, I talked earlier about a testing in a very intended to be variant, we actually see a world in the future where there is no variance, where if a marketer is comfortable with the intelligence that we have in place, I can build my page once I have the guardrails in place, but let the machine optimise the headline and say, Oh, for Mike, who's coming in here, not Mike specifically. But for this user that's coming in here. This is a better headline to present to that user than, say this user and provide all of that to the marketer. So the really the machine starts to become the let's just optimise the how to get that conversion. But the marketer still has to determine the story. They still have to determine the simplicity of the story. And they still have to be very, very clear on what that call to action is. And then we can kind of take over from there.

Mike: So that's really interesting. So you're thinking about, you know, a world where I'm going to give a simple example, perhaps someone who came came in to the landing page through Google ads, might see a different headline to someone who clicked through from the company's website.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. When we think of optimization, there's traffic optimization, content, optimization, placement, and then image optimization, all of those play factors and conversion.

Mike: And I think we're all looking forward to that world where we can pretty much kick the machine off and let it run. I mean, presumably, whilst you're getting close, we're not quite there yet. So if I'm building a landing page today, one of the tips or the guide you can give me to help me build a landing page that's going to convert at a decent rate.

Darby: Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of very high level things that we've learned over the years. I mean, these are just general for any landing page that you would you would see out on the marketplace. First of all, make sure that the landing page message aligns with your marketing message. So if I see that ad on Google, or I see that ad on Instagram, or Tiktok, or wherever it's going to be, there has to be some continuity with what drove my initial interest than what I see on the page. And I would say, in a lot of cases, marketers do a good job of that. But I think we've all seen those cases where you click on an ad, and is this the same company that this just doesn't make sense. So be very clear that your landing page copy and your ad copy are in line? I think the second, which we know for sure, is the call to action, because at this point, we know what user has interest, bring that above the fold, that's a really, really important thing, especially for users that might say that, you know, some will require more information. So they're gonna want to go deeper, some will want to have a, I just want to actually start to action. So bring your call to action on top. The third thing we say is, you know, keep it authentic. Keep it authentic to your brand, keep it authentic to your tone, I don't think landing pages are there to replace anything that your marketing departments already doing. But just be consistent with, you know, your brand colours or imagery or tone. So that you've got that continuity on your landing page is not that thing that's just sits out here. It's actually part of the overall story. Its job, though, is to convert, but I think its secondary job is also to make sure that it's continuity from a marketing message. A few other things, you know, keep it fast, make sure whatever you're doing, if you're driving stuff to a landing page, it's got a load quick, it's got to be really, really fast, latency is going to be a thing that's going to kill you. So whatever service you're using, make sure that they've got speed and top of mind in terms of delivery of your content, because that's really critical. Design for different devices. Well, you know, we're in a world of desktop and tablets and mobile. And so just be very mindful as you're building a landing page. How is it going to render on all three of those because you know, users today, we don't get to tell users anymore, how they want to interact with us that they're going to choose. And so we've just got to meet them in the right area. And then last, and most importantly, is, you know, test and iterate, do a B testing, do multivariate testing, or come to Unbounce and use smart builder. And we'll do that for you. But no, it's you know, you got to continue to test your landing pages, what works today may not work tomorrow, and so you do have to continue to innovate on top of it. And then maybe the last one is keep the call to actions, probably to one, I think, you know, some of the worst landing pages are the ones where you're trying to do too many things. And that's going to be really confusing to the user. You know, lead them down that journey, get crystal clear on the one action you're happening, maybe there's a second, I'll be really, really crystal clear on what you're attempting them to do and try to remove any of the other clutter. That's why we think landing pages are still an important piece of the marketers toolkit, as opposed to your website, because your website is likely designed to do something else than maybe what your landing pages

Mike: Definitely agree. I mean, I think people who aren't building dedicated landing pages are missing out because you can achieve a much better conversion rate, if that's what you're designing for. Yeah, and I guess my my next question is going to be so how do I know if I've got a good conversion rate? What would be a good conversion rate for a landing page?

Darby: That is a absolutely great question. And you're the answer is it's it varies. And it depends. There's always a caveat to that. But this is by far one of the most common questions that we get from our customers. Is the rate that I'm seeing a good conversion rate or not a good conversion rate. And, you know, as we said, we call it it depends. So one of the ways that we've tried to address this a few years ago, again, we started to look at all of the data that we had over the past 10 years and said, Could we create a Do we have enough intelligence to start to give what would be good industry conversion benchmarks across different different industries. So We produce a product called our conversion benchmark report. It's available on Unbounce. And it just talks about conversion rates that we've seen across different industries. So for example, you know, media and entertainment industry, on average, you'll see about any percent conversion rate, finance insurance, you know, is going to be over six, SAS is around three. And we have a report, though, that actually captures this across all industries. And we continue to produce that report annually, keep it refreshed, keep it update, and we use the data across our entire ecosystem to, you know, help marketers understand this is what we see as a benchmark. Obviously, we want you to beat the benchmark, we continue to go from there.

Mike: That sounds like an amazing resource, actually. So I'll go take a look at that. I mean, I've certainly seen very variable conversion rates, I mean, from client to client, we'll have some clients in a sector Well, there are achieve, you know, relatively low single digits, we will have other clients will achieve 20% conversion rates around particular campaigns. And I think it's, it's always hard to give an exact number. But it's great to have industry benchmarks, at least it knows where you should be aiming.

Darby: Yeah, 100%. And I would definitely encourage your listeners, go to the Unbounce website, look for our conversion Benchmark Report. There's great information in there, we have a lot of thought leadership information on our website. You know, I would definitely encourage your listeners to go check out some of that stuff, because there could be some some really good information in there for them.

Mike: Perfect. I do have one other question around numbers, because I've noticed that you've got some other features like pop ups and sticky bars, which haven't always had the best reputation. So I mean, when should marketers use features like pop ups? Is there a rule? Or is there cases where you've seen it working?

Darby: Well, the think the key there is you've got to be really, really cognizant of when you're going to disrupt the user and throw something in front of their face, especially when they land on the page. So I think you've got to be really clear around, you know, the, why am I doing it. And then second, you know, you've really got to test it and make sure that it's there. And so some of the things that we see, when you're looking at, I don't know, a new white paper as an example. And it could get buried on the page. There's that moment in time or a pop as a good reminder to go. Okay. The other thing too, is depending on your ad copy, if you're looking at different long form stuff that's coming in, and then you're going to the landing page, there could be a hey, you know what, if you came in on a certain link, we see that that a user has a propensity to do this, that might be better to manifest it within a pop up. But the key there is you've got to be really clear, because I'm most of us don't like pop ups, I think done well. They can be really, really effective tools. But if it's just you know, hey, we want to throw something out, to just try to get as many emails as possible without really thinking through it. I think it's going to damage your brand more than ever possibly would help.

Mike: Yeah, I think we've all been to those sites that as soon as you scroll, you get a pop up asking you to subscribe, and then get rest wherever you go. Yeah, it's not it's not a good experience, making it work at the right time. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm interested. I mean, obviously, you know, are they your response responsible for the product, you are also involved in promoting? Unbounce? So when you promote Unbounce, what works for you? What are the best marketing channels?

Darby: Yeah, I think, you know, there's the standard marketing channels, we have an amazing marketing team at Unbounce, that optimises, you know, all of our spend across all of our different paid channels. And like every other marketer, you know, we are a product lead growth organisation. And so you just got to go out there and do some targeting. Word of mouth is incredibly big for us. Same thing with SEO people doing a search for landing pages and the education of being a thought leader. We do pride ourselves on trying to provide information back to the community on how to grow because we think, you know, a lot of the industry grows, then, you know, as they often say, title but all boats. So we do really want to have that key leadership position as thought leader. So word of mouth is very big for us. Then we do some other stuff. We have a really robust affiliate programme. We work with our agency clients who definitely are number one fans, you know, I'm building on behalf of their customers. And going into 2023, we're really going to start to think about a partnership model, which is how do we start to look at our toolkit, both used within our environment and use outside of our environment, to help marketers who might be using other tools or other workflows, but could use some of the aspects of our toolkit, more of, you know, an API licencing type model. So we you know, we grow like a traditional B2B business would paid marketing, word of mouth, thought leadership, affiliates, partnerships. It's kind of you know, the big Big trucks.

Mike: That's interesting sounds like, you know, are you doing paid marketing to get conversions a lot of what you're getting word of mouth and things like that. That's actually a very long term marketing strategy, you know, that's built on. I mean, fundamentally being the brand in the landing page space, I guess.

Darby: Exactly. And that really comes from the roots of the founders, who, when they built, you know, Unbounce, really focused on the marketers, really focused on thought leadership, and really focused on how do we move the industry forward. And we want to continue doing that, because it's been very effective for Unbounce. And we're going to continue to do that forward. And, and we know when we do that, it helps our competitors as well. And that's okay. Because, you know, it's the industry of landing pages that as you said, you know, I think more marketers should be using landing page products to get better conversions.

Mike: Yeah, and I'd say sounds great. It sounds like it's this overnight success that's actually been built over a huge number of years. It's, it's awesome to see how you've built that momentum and that reputation.

Darby: Yeah, and we think, you know, now we've got a new challenge ahead of us, which is not on just the creation side. But now is the conversion side. And we are really investing all of our time and energy around. How do we complement the marketer with AI and ML tools. So we don't believe in a world where the machine who's going to replace the marketer, we think this is a connection of the marketers know how and their instincts and what have you complemented with strong AI and ML practices and the to go hand in hand, because we can be right in a lot of cases and other cases, there are those nuances, but we can learn on those nuances fairly quickly. So we really do believe in a world of how do we marry the two together to make one plus one equals three, it's not the machine is going to come in and just you know, figure it all out? No, but the machine can really help the marketer get faster on acceleration and optimization than trying to do it on their own, or trying to do analysis within an Excel spreadsheet as an example.

Mike: No, I think we've all used too many Excel spreadsheets for sure.

Darby: It's still one of the greatest tools, though, for for a marketer, Excel has continues to be a good tool, I guess, in some aspects.

Mike:  Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think everybody, everybody uses it more than they'd like, but value of that more than later myth as well.

Darby: Yeah, I agree.

Mike: So one of the things I mean, obviously, you know, you've had a, perhaps a more business focused career than a marketing career, but you've always seemed to have been involved in in marketing and one aspect or another. So what do you like about marketing, what's drawing you back into the world of marketing.

Darby: So for marketing, well, I've always been passionate about the space. And I've been very passionate about the small business space. And part of it comes from the roots of growing up, I grew up in the standard, middle class, lower middle class family, both my parents were entrepreneurs, in what I witnessed firsthand, and why I think it's really, really important to help marketers out was, you know, especially in the small business marketing area, these marketers are putting in money, and they do need a return, but it's really tangible, this is going to be the return that's going to put food on the table for their kids or send them to university. And, you know, as we've seen, in marketing, in a lot of cases, sometimes there can be a lot of misconceptions, and people, you know, just trying to get people to sign on the dotted line. So I've always had this view of the small guy is at a disadvantage, because they don't have the big data sets of the big companies, they don't have all the resources of the big companies. And the risk profile of ROI not panning out actually has more of a meaningful impact. And so I've always looked at how do we level that playing field to give the small and medium sized businesses the same leverage, and the same access to the toolkits that the large guys get access to?

And I'm not saying the large guys are doing anything wrong or bad? That's not it? I mean, we know how it works. But I think there's always been that underlying, you know, I saw what happened in my own family when marketing didn't work, and the impact that I could have, and so that's where I've always been passionate on is how do we democratise this and make sure that everybody has equal footing to the toolkits in the leverage to be able to use it? And then of course, you know, great run companies, whether they're small, medium, or large, or are just going to continue to go from there. So that's kind of the thing that's always driven me and why I've always been appeal to marketing and I like this notion of done right. The consumer wins because they get to buy something from the business. The business wins because they of acquiring a customer or they retain the customer. And it's just a good synergy when that magic happens, where I pull up my credit card, or my cash or my debit, or whatever, and I buy that thing, and it's delightful. You know, it's, it's, I think it's a great experience to see that happen, because it's both sides that are gonna win.

Mike: I love that concept of levelling the playing field, it's almost like what we hoped the internet would be like at the start, where it's all down to quality of product or quality of company or quality of marketer. But as it turned out, the big companies got big tools and lots of data. Now you're coming in and loving that playing field? I think that's an awesome concept.

Darby: Yeah, we think it's, it's going to be beneficial for all stakeholders in the ecosystem, both the consumer, and the merchant, and some merchants who are B2B, it doesn't matter, their consumer happens to be a business, but it benefits all sides of the ecosystem. And anything we can do to help that out, we think is a good thing.

Mike: So awesome. I'm interested, if you were talking to a young person who was thinking of marketing as a career, would you recommend that?

Darby: I would, I think I think marketing has been around, almost since the beginning of commerce, I don't think it's going to go anywhere, it is an industry that evolves, changes, you're never going to get bored. It's constantly in an evolution mode. So I think if you're looking for something incredibly challenging is there. But also marketing is starting to become very technical as well, you know, and all the data points that are behind it. And there's so many segments of marketing, I mean, whether you want to go into being a tactical numbers driven marketer or brand marketer, but really, you know, both of those interconnected together great brand, great storytelling, great mission, great vision, combined with really tactical marketing plans, there's just a synergy that can really happen there. So I think marketing is an interesting field, because there's so many directions that a young person can go, that could really align with their passion, whether they're more creative, or whether they're more, you know, numbers focused, or whether they're more technically inclined. marketing as a category can fulfil the dreams of a lot of different individuals based on what they want to do. So I think it's an exciting career. And we know marketing is not going to go anywhere, there's always going to be businesses that are going to need the market to get more consumers and businesses buying their product.

Mike: I think that's great advice. And the the range of opportunities. You're absolutely right is bigger than it's ever been that sort of some one of the things I'm interested in from you Darby is, you know, have you ever been given the great advice or marketing? What's the best thing that you've been told?

Darby: Yeah, that is, that is a great, that is a great question. Probably the biggest piece of advice that I found, or or one thing that I've kind of learned time is lots of experiments. Some are going to work, some are not going to work, you almost can't do anything wrong, because it's all a learning step and a learning journey. And so I've had some, some great bosses in the past, that's, you know, don't take everything so seriously in the context of, you know, no, we're not going to go and spend $10 million without having some validation. But if we're going to spend $1,000, to figure something out, you know, let's, let's make that happen. But really try a lot of different things. What may have not worked a year ago, could work today. So in some ways, you just almost need to unlearn the stuff that you've learned in the past, and then apply it going forward, because things will always constantly change. So I think marketers need to always challenge their assumptions, keep moving forward, fail really, really quickly. We live in a great environment now where you can doesn't cost you a lot of money to get some initial sense, are we going in the right direction. And if you are, you throw a little more at it than when you've got the real confidence. You throw the big, big money behind it, and you go, but test fast, don't don't, don't be afraid to fail, because even the failures depending on how you define them are probably not failures are actually good learnings that you can just apply somewhere else. And don't take it too seriously. Like, it's serious, but don't take it too serious. We're not you know, marketers are not doctors, patients aren't gonna die on the operating table. If we do something wrong. You know, it's just going to be degrees of of right. That's what I would call it.

Mike: That's awesome advice. I love that. I'm mindful of time. You've been very generous with your time today. Is there anything else you feel we should have covered?

Darby: No, I think we covered a lot. I mean, I would say you know, to all of your listeners for the ones that use landing pages, if they if they haven't experienced our spark builder product, test it out. They got a 14 day trial. Don't doesn't cost you anything, test it out, we think there's some really interesting stuff there. And then for all the other marketers that may not be using landing pages, whether they think Unbounce is the right product, or whether the the other companies out there that do it, give some thought to how you might want to, you know, test these things. Because done right landing pages can really extend your marketing dollars, and they're not a replacement, they really are just an extension of what you're doing. And if you've never used them, you know, I would try to find the time to at least give it a proof case to say, will it work for us? Or will it not work for us? What we see in most cases it will work? I think our competitors would probably say the same thing. So that would be my advice to to marketers.

Mike: Actually sounds like good advice. Just go try it, whatever it is, and see if it works. Yeah, exactly. I mean, thank you very much for your time again, Darby. If people have any questions, or would like to follow up anything you've said, Is there a way they can contact you?

Darby: Yeah, absolutely. You can easily find me on LinkedIn. If you do a search for diabetes, even you'll easily find all the locations on the internet that you can you can tackle me. You know, or feel free to just drop me an email. My email is darby@unbounce.com. Really easy. Happy to hear from from marketers. Yeah, that'd be your have your have your listeners reach out. We'd love to learn more about what they're up to.

Mike: Thank you so much for that. It's very kind of you to share your your email as well. I mean, this has been a great conversation. I hope everyone listening will you know, take away the idea that they should go out and they should try different things and try and improve their landing pages. And obviously, hopefully, some of them if not all of them will visit Unbounce to do that.

Darby: That's you know, we we're ready to we're ready to take them on as clients if they're willing to give us a shot. Absolutely. Thanks.

Mike: That's awesome. Thanks so much for being on the podcast Darby. 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.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Terri Delfino - FormAssembly

In the latest episode of Marketing B2B Tech, we interview Terri Delfino, Chief Marketing Officer at FormAssembly, an online form builder.

Terri discusses what makes FormAssembly stand out amongst its competitors and how marketers can integrate forms into their marketing automation and CRM systems like Salesforce.

Terri talks about the importance of branding forms, and how features like pre-fills give customers a better experience. She also shares details around the need to be compliant with legislation, such as GDPR, is driving more people to tools like FormAssembly, where it is harder to make a mistake.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

Transcript: Interview with Terri Delfino – FormAssembly

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Terri Delfino

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 B2B marketing technology, the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Terri Delfino. Terri is the CMO of Form Assembly. Welcome to the podcast, Terri. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. Thanks. It's great to have you on. I think, you know, what we always like to do first off in the podcast is, is find out how you got to where you are today. So how did you build a career that led to becoming the CMO Form Assembly?

Terri: Well, I'd love to say I had a masterplan that started when I was in elementary school, but I'd be lying. I actually started my career in finance. And I thought that would be my career path. And I found myself working in finance at a high tech PR and advertising agency. And they came to me one day, and they said, you have a little too much personality for all this finance stuff. No offence to finance people, I love you. And they moved me into account service, and I never looked back. So I have worked for agencies, consultancies, nonprofits, public companies, startups, mature companies. But I've always, I've always been in high tech since that time, and I've always been in marketing.

Mike: That's awesome. And I love people who've got a background in numbers, I used to be an engineer. And I keep saying it's like, having good background numbers is the best thing you can do for going into marketing, particularly now with digital and all the data.

Terri: Yeah, being able to read a balance sheet and an income statement comes in handy.

Mike: Yeah, I was gonna say, I guess you're, you're always on budget with your campaigns I?

Terri: Well, if I'm not I know how to hide it. Let's put it that way.

Mike: Awesome. So I mean, you've joined a company called Form Assembly? I mean, there's an obvious question here is, did the world need another company offering online forms?

Terri: Well, I don't look at it as another form company, I look at it as having the right form solution. There are a lot of form solutions that come in, within packages, things like Marketo, and your other CRM solutions will have built in forms. But I've never met a marketing person that didn't complain about the form builder in their CRM or something like that. So what we like to do is we offer a no code, easy way to collect information. And then we have built into that ways to make that information. actionable, right, you can share it, you have it in a structured format, you can do more with it than simply collect collected. And when you think about the fact that most of us are either going through a digital transformation or have gone through a digital transformation, collecting information isn't just for the marketing organisation anymore. Anybody in your organisation that is collecting data, is doing it probably in some type of digital form, whether it's, you know, onboarding forms for insurance, or you know, how to get a parking pass, or collecting leads off a website.

Mike: That's interesting. I mean, you talk about data, and I guess being European, one of the big things we have in Europe is is GDPR is one of the things driving better form tools and need to be compliant with legislation is is that something people are looking for from suppliers like Form Assembly?

Terri: Absolutely. And we pride ourselves on our security functionality, not only do we have encryption, and we have physical methods within the product, we have HIPAA compliance, GDPR, GLBA, sock two, all of those things to ensure that we are treating your data, when we are being stewards of it in the in the best possible way with regards to security, compliance, and privacy and data stewardship is actually in our mission. And it is one of our tenants, we believe, and this is something we can get into more is that when someone shares their data with you, they're not transferring ownership of it to you, they're loaning it to you. And it's incumbent upon the organisation, whether it's a not for profit, whether it's a for profit organisation, to be a good steward of that data.

Mike: And so can you expand a little bit on how you make sure that happens? You've talked about security, but you also making it easy, for example, to gain consent for GDPR?

Terri: Absolutely, so we haven't built into the product so that the things that you have to know about the things you have to be aware of those things are standard in their rules in the product. So you it makes it harder to make a mistake.

Mike: Oh, that sounds great. Harder to make a mistake. Sounds like a very underrated feature there.

I'm interested, you know, so obviously, people are using Form Assembly to gather data. I mean, presumably, typically, what they want to do is then put that data into some other system. Can you talk a little bit about integration and what you do to enable Form Assembly to work with other systems, whether it's marketing automation or anything else?

Terri: Sure, sure. We have over 30 off the shelf connectors as well as an API for building specific ones. And probably the thing we're best known for is our Salesforce integration we have, I will say, I'm biassed, but we have the best Salesforce integration. And we have over 305 star reviews in the AppExchange. to back us up on that. So, again, that is a part of, of why would you need, you know, a dedicated data collection platform or form building solution. And that is because getting the data is only half of it, and you want to get it into the systems you use most and make it actionable.

Mike: I think that's really interesting. I mean, Salesforce, they don't Okay, as a business, you know, they're pretty successful. A lot, right? Like their chances. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, the forms, you know, I totally agree are not the most fun part of the system. So how have you managed to integrate to make that so seamless and make people so happy with the integration?

Terri: We started this business in 2005. We've been at it for a very long time, we have Salesforce experts in house, we understand the Salesforce environment, and it is our business, it is the it is the one thing we do so we dedicate ourselves to making that as simple and seamless as possible.

Mike: That's really interesting, because I see with some, you know, marketing technology vendors, you know, it's like, we built an integration with Dun, it sounds like you're doing a lot to continually optimise and improve that. And certainly, you know, you've built this reputation around Salesforce. So I guess that's a key part of your business.

Terri: It is it is continuous learning. And continuous improvement is not just, you know, it is something we do throughout the organisation. It's something we do in our marketing organisation. And, you know, our product, and our engineering teams adhere to it as well.

Mike: Cool. So, I mean, presumably, you're using a very wide range of different applications, do you want to touch on a couple of areas where people liked to use Form Assembly and why they feel that that Form Assembly is so much better than using Salesforce forms or whatever other system, they've got their built in system?

Terri: Sure, well, some of the ways you know, we use it right. So we use it every day in our organisation throughout internally and externally. Externally, we use it for things like Event registrations, contact forms, all of the forms on our website or in Form Assembly, downloading content waivers, e sign double forms, you know, things that require signatures, legal documents and things like that. Internally, we use it for all of our marketing requests, we use it for event planning, onboarding, and training, just collecting things like travel information to build travel profiles. And then of course, internally and externally, it's things like feedback, forms, quizzes and surveys, meeting planning, so So it also, not only is it easy to use, right, you can get up and running, you don't have to get it involved, right, you can build forms and start, no code, just get going. The joke is easy as a caveman can do it. For me, it's easy as a CMO can do it, if I can do it, trust me, anybody can do it. So not only does it make things easier to use, it also helps, you know, eliminate or reduce the reliance on other tools, you know, you don't need things like an event planning tool or a survey tool, or you can do some data analysis and get feedback on your forms, without bringing it into a spreadsheet tool or something like that. So it helps reduce kind of that, that martec footprint, which as we know grows almost on a daily basis. Sometimes I feel like it just grows by itself.

Mike: No, absolutely. I'm intrigued. You mentioned about gathering feedback and things like that in terms of internal uses. I think as marketers, we're often you know, really focused on how do we get customer data, but I'm really interested in do you have some examples about how you've got data internally, that's really helped you improve projects or, or create campaigns that perhaps wouldn't have been so successful without involving some sort of formal feedback or data input mechanism?

Terri: It's an interesting question.You know, so we're involved in a product launch right now. And when this product launch is over, not only are we using our form in our product launch, we will send a survey out to all of our internal, all of our internal teams, and how was that launch experience for you? Did the sales team have everything they need? Was Customer Success prepared? Did product feel that product marketing? Did it share the work, right? Just to get that feedback internally? We use it we use it all the time.

Mike: That's awesome. Because I think a lot of marketing campaigns that run people look at results and move on, there's not necessarily a lot of an analysis about how well the campaign that was executed, whether there could be improvements. So it feels to me like making that data collection easier. is one of those key obstacles you've got to overcome in order to be able to collect that data. I mean, is that your experience?

Terri: Yes. And there's there's ways so not only does the data about the campaign help, but we help make your forms more successful. Right. So we have improve your odds of good data collection. So not only do we have rules in to help you design better forms, but we make it easy with things like dynamic picklist, and conditional fields and payment processing and pre fills so that your user is having a better experience, right? How often do you get to a form? And you're like, hey, know this information about me? Why do I have to fill it in again? Or I just filled this out on the previous screen? Why do I have to do it? Again, they know who I am with pre fills and things like that. You don't have to refill information with conditional fields and dynamic picklist and things like that you can select your choice, or based on your answer, more areas of the form will filled up. And if you don't answer the question in a way that makes that form, expand, you don't have to deal with it, you don't see this long, daunting form. So our users find that not only do their their or their customers happier, their employees are happier, because it's easier to build. And it's a better experience. Plus, we provide data about the form, right? How many form completions did you have? How many times was it abandoned? How long did it take people to fill out your forms? So that again, you can get to that continuous improvement? Because we all know, if you don't, if you don't give a good user experience, and you don't capture people, and you don't keep them moving? You're gonna lose them?

Mike: No, I mean, I love that I'm just intrigued with, you know, you're saying about building rules and functionality to make it harder to make mistakes? What are the typical mistakes you see people making when they build forms? And what have you done in Form Assembly to try and prevent that happening for your customers?

Terri: Well, some of the things that that I just mentioned are sort of how we help from a structural building the form point of view, but in general, you know, thinking about the user experience, I say that at least five times a day, you know, and how would this this work for a user? And what would a user think if they were doing this, right? So just we all fill out forms all the time, right? If you shop online, as much as I do, you know, a lot about forms. So you know, how would you feel if you had to fill out this form? Try it for yourself, see how that goes? What information do you absolutely need? What information? Can you pre filled? You already know? what information you know, is are you going for nice to have? And maybe that's a progressive profiling thing. And you don't need that right now. Do they know who they're talking about? Have you branded the form is it customised? Again, and it's also considering security and compliance so that you are being a good steward steward of that data from the time it comes into your possession?

Mike: Yeah, that's really interesting. I love that kind of branding. I think that's something that's often forgotten with forms, because typically, most form builders, it's really hard to do. But I think it's quite important, you know, people don't like going from, you know, maybe a really glitzy marketing page into a form that is just not branded. So I love that comment. That's great.

Terri: Yeah, you can launch our forms, right, within a webpage? That's really cool. I'm interested about where Form Assembly really shines is is there a particular either application or feature that you find people keep coming back to and go? Just absolutely love it? Because it does this? That's a good question. You know, as I said, I'm sort of new with the company. And I haven't really spent as much time with our customers as I'd like, I do know that we're really strong in higher ed, in financial services, in health care. And that is one part because of our data security and our integrity. And also because of our ease of use and friendly approach.

Mike: I mean, that data security thing, I think, is really interesting, more and more. And we should have been considering this for many years. But I think more and more people are getting more focused on being fully compliant with regulations. Whereas perhaps people have been a bit sort of loosey goosey in the past. There are a lot of driving factors there.

Terri: And you know, I remind my team about all of the all of them on a regular basis. We all know GDPR, and all of those things, and there's carrot and stick, right. And that's definitely the big stick, those penalties are increasing, and they're getting more serious and different regions are developing their own requirements. So it's time to take notice. And as we all know, the threat landscape increases every day, right? Every time the good guys find a way to block the bad guys, the bad guys find a new way in so you've constantly got to be up to speed and up to date on security practices. And you have to work with vendors who are too. But there are there are other things more and more people are voting with their data and voting with who they trust. And they don't want to work with companies that aren't being good stewards of their data. And we see this specifically, especially in millennials, they also want to do business with companies who do good, right? It pays to do good it pays to have good practices and when you're when you're doing that it became become a competitive differentiator for you.

Mike: Definitely, I mean, I think you're absolutely right that people are are using their data as a source of power with with some kind companies. And that's because the data is really so valuable and the things that people are collecting. So I definitely agree with that I'm really interested in, we've established that value of the data. What can B2B marketers do to improve their forms? And ultimately, I think for, for most B2B marketers, it's primarily about improving completion rate, but also about getting richer data. I mean, what can they do to try and achieve those two goals?

Terri: Well, I think, you know, when you work with a technology that gives you flexibility, and gives you the ability to do some advanced capabilities, you can do things like progressive profiling, right. And when you couple that with a pre fill, so when you come to my forum, all you have to do is look at it, all your basic information is already there, you know, it's already right. So maybe I have the opportunity to ask you another question and get a little bit more information about you. And because you didn't have to fill all that out, you're going to feel better, and you're going to feel more open to sharing that information with me. And you also, you know, again, going back to what you said, you're on a branded form, you know, Who you talking to, you don't feel like you just got passed off to something you don't recognise. And it's also personalised. Right. So I know, you know who you're talking to.

That definitely, I mean, another thing I'm interested in is obviously Form Assembly has the ability to, to a B test. I mean, how are people using a B testing in forms? Is that something that's widespread? Because you hear a lot about it with, say, landing pages or emails, but much less about the form itself? Well, I if they're not doing it, they should, because it's a huge opportunity. Because how often do you get to that form, and you're like, oh, and you go on, you know, you just move on, you're like, I'm done. I don't want this that bad. Whatever it is, I don't want this that bad. So again, there's a million things you can do with design, right? How we perceive things visually how we take things in matter. So always adhere to those best practices for design and try things try. What level of information can you get away with? How much should you be trying to collect at a time? Look at those form, fill stats and see, right? Are people abandoning my form? And where do they abandon it and use that to try to shorten it and try some different things?

Mike: That's great advice. I mean, I think, I think the obvious thing that now, you know, a lot of people were thinking is, but it's my for many good. I mean, what is a good conversion rate? Is there a good conversion rate? Or is that one of those questions you really can't answer?

Terri: Well, you know, I could give you numbers, I could make some up I could give you depends on who you ask, right? Everybody's got an answer. But to me, it goes back to what you just talked about, about AB testing, what is a good response rate, better than you had last time, right? Because you should always be testing, you should always be trying to continually improve, you should always be looking at the results of the campaign results, the form results, the programme results, the feedback, and, and tweaking and little tweaks can make a difference. And using the advantages that forms give you such as pre fills, and, and conditional fields and picklist, and things to try to make your forms easier. So I believe in continuous improvement, so better than the last time is, is I think, the best rate to have.

Mike: That's a great answer. So just keep getting better. I love it. I'm really interested, actually. I mean, obviously, you're you're fairly new in the role as CMO. But what do you see as the main way you can impact the growth of former assembly? What do you see as being the things that are going to drive more users?

Terri: Well, I, I really want to see us and we will be leaning into this notion of data stewardship, and being good stewards of the data and and raising the profile of data collection within the organisation. So typically, when someone needs to build forms, they're maybe a Salesforce admin. And they come and they say, I need to build a form and they purchase our solution. They get up and running there. They're off, they're happy. They're collecting forms, and that's where it stops for them. Right. That's the extent of how they're thinking about it. But I think there's an opportunity for CIOs and CISOs. And IT leaders to think about what's going on across their organisation. Where else in their organisation is data being collected? And what type of governance and oversight do they have of that process? Are those people following good practices as far as security, privacy and compliance? Is it possible for them to have one flexible system of record for their entire organisation that they have governance over to to not only improve the experience but reduce risk for the organisation? I think there's a big opportunity there.

I think that's huge. I mean, we've worked with a lot of clients and we had one client recently that said to us, right, here's three steps, you just do this, this and this, and your form will work with all our campaigns it will feed through to leads you'll have the right data. Yeah, I think that ability to you know, whilst you're giving people the capability to add fields and ask for more information. But the ability to say this is going to guarantee it's going to work is awesome. I mean, to me, that's the biggest challenge with forms. And I think, you know, a lot of us have seen campaigns where people have collected data, and then you've found you've not got the right information. And suddenly, all these potential prospects for this external, that could become sales leads can't because you don't know where in the states they live, you don't have a zip code or a state. So I love that idea of governance. And I think that that's something that is gonna become more and more important, not only in large enterprises, but also, you know, a lot more in the midsize companies, because it takes away. Again, I think that the thing you said earlier that that ability to make a mistake, I love that. Yeah, we, you know, our mission is to help our customers and our in the people we work with be good stewards of the data that that's entrusted to them. And that at the end of the day, is really what we focus on. And that comes from the top that comes from our CEO.

Mike: That's great. We've talked about the systems as well. And I think we've talked a lot about Salesforce, because I think that's where form assemblies really known to be, you know, if you'd like one of the favourite products is somebody using Salesforce and natural thought is phone assembly for the forms. But what other systems do you interface to, I mean, it give us an idea of the kind of range of different things that that you're able to feed data to?

Terri: Sure, well, we have marketing automation systems, Pardot, things like that. So that's, that's critical, especially, you know, you want that, that that triangle between your data collection, your marketing automation system, and your CRM, payment processing, such as stripe and PayPal, so that smaller businesses especially can use those forms to actually do commerce, tools, like survey tools like MailChimp, and things like Go To Webinar, WordPress, Drupal, all those types of applications where you might want to move data to, in your, in your process to again, not just collect it, but make it actionable.

Mike: That's, I mean, that's awesome. That's such a range from, you know, surveys through to payments through websites, CMS is so it shows I think, what a lot of efforts got to go into to produce a form product that's going to work in all sorts of different environments. That's amazing. I'm, I'm aware of time, I just want to ask one quick question this this is, I think the killer question, you know, how much easier is it really to use Form Assembly rather than using Salesforce or Marketo. And I think maybe this might need a bit of a bit of explanation, because maybe some of the listeners haven't tried to build a Salesforce form.

Terri: Well, I've never tried to build the Salesforce form either. And I think that's because the prospect of it just seems so daunting. So I think just by the fact that I was willing to try, it will tell you that it is easier. One of the things that I think is wonderful having been in an organisation where you've got this great new solution, and you really want to get up and running, and you're just waiting for it to give you that time. So you can get going, we take all of that out. So it's a no code, easy to use solution where you don't have to get it involved. But yet you get power above and beyond some of those sort of built in form builders that you may get with some of your applications. So like I said, so easy, a CMO can use it.

Mike: And that's got to be a recommendation. I love that. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Terri, is there anything else you feel we should have covered or anything I should have asked?

Terri: Well, we did touch on it a little bit. And I think I mentioned it a couple of times. But we really have this commitment to data stewardship, and we are a cybersecurity champion. And we are kicking off a campaign to help educate organisations about the need to shift from data ownership to data stewardship, and why that is so important. And again, it goes back to this feeling that when someone shares their data with you, they are not giving it to you, you have a responsibility. All organisations have a responsibility to the person who shared that data, while it is in their care. And we want to help organisations be good stewards of personal data. We have a lot of resources on our website, webinars, infographics, white papers and things like that, to help them sort of learn about the tenants of data stewardship and why it matters. And, and as I said, it can become a competitive differentiator for your organisation.

Mike: Oh, that's great. So I'm sure a lot of people want to go there and learn more. I mean, if anybody's got a question or would like to contact you, what's the best way to get ahold of you? I have an idea. It might involve a form.

Terri: Exactly. Just come to Form Assembly.com. Fill out any form on our website, and we will get back to you because we will have that data right exactly where we need it when we need it.

Mike: Thank you so much for your time. I've really enjoyed the conversation. Hopefully, people listening to this are going to think a little bit more about the data and not think about owning other people's data but thinking about data stewardship. I think it's a great a great concept for everyone to think about.

Terri: Thanks very much for being on the podcast, Terri. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

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.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Mike Roberts - SpyFu

In this podcast episode we interview Mike Roberts, Founder and CEO of SpyFu, a search analytics tool offering competitor keyword research tools.

Mike discusses how the tool leverages search data in real time, providing users with the data to build informed and successful campaigns for both paid search and SEO.

He also shares how the tool provides insights on multi-lingual campaigns, and how users should view competitor data to successfully influence future marketing campaigns.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

Transcript: Interview with Mike Roberts – SpyFu

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Mike Roberts

Mike M: 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 Mike Roberts. Mike is the founder and CEO at SpyFu. Welcome to the podcast. Mike.

Mike R: Thanks so much for having me.

Mike M: Well, I mean, you started a marketing technology company SpyFu. I mean, how did you get there? What's your career story?

Mike R: Oh, yeah, before SpyFu? Well, I had another software company. And the idea was to take data off the internet and put it into a spreadsheet or database. And it was called Web scraper plus, I would originally describe the product I described what we did as web data extraction, which is like a really nerdy way of describing technically, it was a correct way to describe what we're doing. But our customers didn't search for it that way, right. And so I didn't realise that until relatively late in the game, right, I was making sort of scraping by barely with this business. And then I changed the name from provide us, which is a terrible name, to web scraper plus a very descriptive name, but also a very good SEO name. And when I did that, I like quadrupled my sales pretty much overnight. And I was like, dang, I wonder if there's something else, something else that I'm missing? Are there any other keywords that I'm too nerdy to think of, that my customers are searching for? So I thought about it, and I sort of built this thing using web scraper plus, right, like, originally, I just like whipped together this prototype of SpyFu, to see if I could to see if I could spy on people's keywords, right. So you can type in a domain, one of my competitors domain and see all the keywords they buy. And the way to do that is to is to scrape all of Google just do millions and millions and millions of searches. And then you could kind of do like a reverse search of it. That's where that came from. I built it to solve my own problem to solve my own kind of nerd curse of knowledge. We call it right, if you have your own company, or if you're in a space, you sort of think of it in different ways. You think of like low fares versus cheap tickets, this kind of this kind of misconception, right? And that's what I solve for myself and ultimately solve for lots of people. Before there was SpyFu. There were no other products like our product. We're kind of the Oh, geez. Awesome. So I'm you kind of hinted at what SpyFu does, but can you give us a brief summary of exactly what the products doing what problem it's now solving? Yeah, you can type in any keyword into SpyFu. And you can see every keyword that they have ever bought on Google, every organic ranking, that they have all their ads, and their their entire ad campaign and organic search campaign, from beginning to end. What's interesting about that level of history of like 15 years of history is that you can see the very first ad like 99% of companies haven't been advertising this long, haven't had a campaign this long. You can see every iteration they've ever done, like, you know, 100 of them, it's so that you can see you can learn from people's mistakes, I don't mean to suffer through them yourself. You can also see this for your own SEO campaign or anybody's SEO campaign. So you can look back in the past, kind of like having your Google Search Console, but for any number of years, right? And not just for your domain. The beauty is, you know, you have these tools, Google Search Console, or Google Analytics, or Google ads, you have these for your own domain. But SpyFu gives these things to you. For anybody's domain, your competitors are primarily who people want to look at. Right? But you can also use it for things like partners or potential acquisitions or whatever.

Mike M: That sounds cool. So are you still doing it the same way? You still basically feeding these searches into Google and seeing what comes out?

Mike R: Is that the the approach the tool uses, broadly speaking, yeah, I mean, every piece of data that you can see on SpyFu is auditable back to a screenshot of the search engine result page. Right. So going back, we have SERPs from 2008. And you can see you know that somebody's been advertising this is really important. Because sometimes what we say you might not believe, right? We're saying, Look, this is a keyword that you're you're buying, you know, you're matching on this keyword, you're paying for this keyword, and you don't realise that you're paying for it. And so you might say, No, I'm not, I'm not buying that. It's like, yeah, look, it's right here. Here's the screenshot of it. So that's important sometimes, especially if you're talking to your customer, you want to be able to prove to them that you're speaking the truth.

Mike M: That's interesting. So is it really for SEO specialists? Or do you see anyone using Google Ads benefiting from SpyFu?

Mike R: Yeah, so we have customers from you know, huge mall.

I'll type billion dollar fortune 500 companies all the way down to startups. And we have agencies and we have professional marketers and everyone in between.

Mike M: So presuming it's really simple, you just put in a search term or a domain and SpyFu gives you results. Is it that simple?

Mike R: It is. Yeah.

Mike M: That's awesome. I mean, one of the things I'm interested in is how do you know what people are searching on and where people are advertising? presuming you have to work on generating millions and millions of different searches? Is that something that's complicated? How's that driven?

Mike R: Yeah, so we can get some first party data Clickstream data, if you will, about what people are searching for on the internet. And we can also like supplement that data with data from Google, right? So that historically, we've used a lot of keyword planner or keyword planners predecessor to sort of, like when I first did this thing, I think, for the prototype, what I used was Google suggests, so I would just start with a few seed keywords, and then type those into the Google Suggest right, and then scrape those ones, and then push those ones in and keep going and going and going, basically, recursively until I had a huge list, obviously, now we've got more sophisticated methods, and we literally can see what people are searching for in real time. And and we leverage that probably more than anything else. But we combine quite a few sources. Everything's really sophisticated, you know, as you can imagine, many, many years and many iterations into it. i That's fascinating. I mean, Are there limitations, though? Because it's quite hard to generate the whole universe of searches, does it cause you a problem? For example, when we look at foreign language, Google engines, for example.

Does it causes problems? I mean, it's challenging, in a sense, because I only speak fluently, I can read a few different languages pretty well. But like just QA ng things when you're kind of at the top level, trying to try to make sure that everything's working right. So as far as I know it works fine. But I would bet that we have, just like Google, we probably have better results in English than we do in in other languages.

Mike M: probably makes sense. Well, they've presumably, you've got a lot of happy foreign language customers, though.

Mike R: Yes, for sure. I'll give you an example of that, right? Like one thing that we do that's quite useful as you can type in a keyword and you can see all the questions that are related to that keyword, or you can type in a domain and see which which questions they rank on. And this is really useful for sort of topic drill downs, when you're building like a piece of content, maybe you already have one, and you just want to sort of make it better, right, just start answering questions. It's really easy. And so SpyFu gives you all these questions that people are asking, well, the process of figuring out how to identify what is a question is a very linguistic thing. And it requires sort of specialist knowledge of the language specialist in the sense that you speak you understand it. So that's one thing where it's sort of difficult to figure out what a question is when you don't speak the language. And you know, we have a process for this, and we figure it out.

But we have a way to scale it. But as you kind of get to the edge cases of languages, it's more difficult,

Mike M: is really interesting. I mean, another area, I would guess is quite hard as well, you have very long tail keywords, does it get hard to estimate things like, you know, how many searches and how much the spend is for some of the longer tail keywords?

Mike R: Well, the spend might be quite difficult, because what we get back from Google is, I mean, if you've been in the industry long enough, it's almost comical, how terrible some of the raw data that we get that you can get from like, Keyword Planner, Google ads is it's not great.

Actually, worse than great.

I mean, like kind of the opposite, I guess you'd say. So So that's, that's difficult on those longtail keywords, we can estimate those things we can figure out like sort of like they're they're related keyword neighbourhood, if you will, and and make some suggestions, assumptions based on that in terms of the search volume. Yeah, certainly, if we've never seen the keyword before, but we have so much like, we have so much data, so much Clickstream data and so on. That it, it's reasonable to assume if we haven't seen that it actually has very little volume. And so then we can say, well, it's either zero or like it's 20 clicks or something, you know, it's 20 searches is very small. Yeah, so maybe it's quite noisy at that, that real longtail bid, but over the overall campaign for a competitor, it actually doesn't make a lot of difference. Not really now.

I guess the other question is now, you know, Google's pushing people into responsive ads where you know, ads serve with different headlines, different descriptions. I mean, obviously, you're trying to capture the ad. Does that again, is that some

thing where you tend to see the winning combinations, or how does that work? Typically, we'll see the same ad on many, many different keywords. Right. And so we're taking multiple snapshots, we're just gathering so much information, that when you're looking at actual ad copy, yeah, we've got 20 snapshots per month, by the way, SpyFu is, is real time I talk in terms of per month, but it's just a random timeframe. Everything happens every every five seconds or whatever. But we'll have we'll have like multiple snapshots of the same ad copy. And then we kind of roll that all up and say, Well, here's the most frequently occurring variant. And we usually base that on. Well, we based on the ad copy, but it's more weighted on the actual headline, the number one.

Mike M: Makes sense. I mean, I guess one of the questions is, you know, if somebody tries to SpyFu, I mean, what should they do? Are you saying people should copy their competitors just steal the best ideas? I mean, what's the best way to use SpyFu? To improve your campaigns?

Mike R: Okay, so So the, the most important thing that that I think, takes a second to realise is that the competitor that you immediately think of might not be the one whose ideas are worth emulating, right? So you're thinking, Okay, I've got this direct competitor, I want to know what they're doing. See if they've got Okay, so let's see if they've got something that you haven't. Right. But broadly speaking, the first thing you look at as well, do they have something that I don't? Okay? Have they thought of an idea that I haven't thought of? That's the first thing you want to think of? Right? Okay, so that's my random direct competitor, but may not be really, you know, particularly good at this, you know, this form of marketing, right? But you do want to see if they've thought of something that you haven't, so you do that. But then when you really want to, like kind of like, take your, you know, marketing to the next level, you find somebody that's doing it on a scale that you are, that's worthy of admiration, right. And that may not be your direct and your most direct competitor might be somebody in a similar space. Or it might be somebody that's more like national or global than you are, you might be like, more locally focused, find that big competitor that's really executing well, and and take what they've done and improve upon that and apply it to what you're doing selecting the right competitors key.

Mike M: And presumably, identifying the competitor is something SpyFu could do that you wouldn't necessarily do yourself.

Mike R: Yeah. Yeah, like the first set of results that you get is like competitor suggestions, the first thing we say is, here's what their blend of organic and paid traffic looks like, here's how much they spent. All this stuff is free, by the way, you can go to SpyFu type this stuff in. There's there's very few tools today. And in b2b SaaS, where you can actually get things for free, right? SpyFu, you can type stuff in and look at domains, and you can see the top level results for free. It's not until you like want to download, you know all the keywords, you can get more than five or 10 keywords that you you have to like create an account. And I think that's pretty key. I mean, I think that's nice. We do that, you know, for a reason, not necessarily just for monetary gain. It's just to help the community keep everything, you know, like the way it should be.

And presumably, as well, people are liking what they see, because they're converting to paid customers as well. Oh, yeah, for sure.

Mike M: So you've kind of answered part of the question. Now, the the initial cost is nothing, just go to the spyfu.com type in either a search term or a competitor domain, and you get the results. I mean, what if people want to dig a bit deeper? I mean, how expensive does a tool get them?

Mike R: Yeah, so SpyFu is like $39 a month, all you can eat, you can. With $39, you can do as many searches as you want, you can download as much stuff as you want. I think there may be some, there's some limits, I think at this point on on, on the $39 plan, it gets actually this the all you can eat plan is $79, which lets you download, you know, like a million keywords from any domain right now. And actually, for the last few months we've been partnering with with click cease, which is a pay per click bot detection platform. Anyway, what happens is you can get SpyFu for $9 a month. If you sign up for a click cease trial, you sign up for SpyFu then you go sign up for click SES and send like this little receipt that you get, and then you get SpyFu forever for $9. And then you know, of course clicks these pays us and that's how the whole thing works. It's like you can technically get SpyFu for nine bucks a month, which is pretty pretty dope or $96 a year. It's forever. It's a good deal. Wow, that's awesome. Yeah. So

Mike M: I'm interested. I mean, we've talked a little bit and particularly about the paid search side of SpyFu. What do people do in terms of balancing for looking at SEO versus To the paid it took people tend to use SpyFu for paid, I think that's what I know SpyFu for.

Mike R: We're pretty famous for the paid we absolutely have. And we've always had the best results for paid, right, like everybody knows us for paid. And if you compare us against any competitor will tend to have like 10 times more paid results. But we get an equal number of SEO customers. And we actually have more keywords than any of the competitors that we have more results than SEMrush or Ahrefs. If you type in a domain, you'll see that there's more SEO results, SEO keywords, and obviously will destroy everybody on pay paid keywords. That's a relatively new thing. Actually, we spent the last couple years rebuilding our entire back end infrastructure so that we could do 5 billion searches a month, it's just like, massive, massive scale, you may have been familiar with SpyFu was doing US and UK, we've recently launched to like 20 countries, and will will launch to, you know, all of the countries in the course of the next six months. So much bigger, much more real time platform, it used to be that SpyFu would operate on a monthly cadence. And we now operate, you know, when we do a search, it's live on the site within seconds, you know, so the whole thing is real time, massive, international bigger than everybody's data. It's pretty fun. It's a big challenge.

Mike M: So presuming that that's quite a cool thing for people who are maybe in PR who are looking to, you know, news, Jack stories or find trending issues, you can actually see what's changing in real time.

Mike R: Yeah, for sure. Getting those real time keywords into the index is is tricky. But we have a process that gets those things in as quickly as we can.

Mike M: Cool.

One other thing, you know, I'd like to ask you, we've got a couple of clients in Phoenix. I know you're based in Phoenix, what do you see the benefits of being based there rather than being based in Silicon Valley where everyone expects software startups to be?

Mike R: Oh, man, that well, you know, I think that in some sense, it's harder to get funding, you know, which actually seems like a detriment, but in our case, it's, you know, SpyFu is completely bootstrapped company, I started in my garage, you know, like kind of the old fashioned way, if you will, in the beginning, that's a tough place to be. But at the end of the day, it's the best place to be, we can do anything, we can make decisions that benefit our customers, and not like a board of directors, and not like some specific exit plan. So, for example, we keep our pricing low. Because when we do, we make the same amount of money, like if we were to double our price, we would get half the number of customers and vice versa. So we keep the price at a at a place that's affordable to our customers, right? We want to level the playing field for small businesses and entrepreneurs. And so we provide intentionally excess value, because it's, it's our mission, our mission is to help everybody do better at marketing, so that they can make more money and spend more time with their families. Like the whole, the whole thing is create value in the world. Right? That's what we do.

Mike M: So awesome. It's been such an interesting conversation. I know, you know, a lot of people listening would like to go and try SpyFu. And obviously, as you said, you could do that for free. Is there anything else you feel we should have covered about the product or about what you see in terms of b2b marketing?

Mike R: Oh, not that I can think of, I think you did a great job. I really appreciated your your questions. Awesome. And if anybody would like to follow up and ask a question, how can we get ahold of you? Yeah, sure. I mean, I'm mike@spyfu.com you can probably reach out to me on LinkedIn, or Reddit, or Twitter. Oh, I'm Mr. Spy on Twitter. That works. MRSPY Sometimes I'm on Reddit and respond, but sometimes, sometimes not. Oh, um, sparked a post on Reddit.

Mike M: Awesome. I love Mr. Spy. That's a pretty good Twitter handle. Thank you so much, Mike for being on the podcast. I hope everyone who's either involved in SEO or paid search, they take a look at SpyFu. And if nothing else, take a look at the free product and maybe take a look at the paid but clearly very good value for money product. Thanks so much for being on the podcast. Yeah, thank you.

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 napierb2b.com or contact me directly on LinkedIn.

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Hannah Ingram - Ignys

In the latest episode of our leading B2B marketing professionals series, we interview Hannah Ingram, Marketing Manager at Ignys, an electronic and software development company.

Hannah talks about how she built her career as a 360 marketer and the need to be quick to adapt and learn when marketing for a start-up business. She also discusses how marketers can build business credibility and increase prospect confidence in a business.

Hannah also shares some valuable insights into how Ignys prioritise the channels they use for campaigns, and advice to new marketeers starting their careers.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

Transcript: Interview with Hannah Ingram – Ignys

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Ingram

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 Hannah Ingram. Hannah is the marketing manager for a company called Ignys. Now, Ignys are a hardware and software design company. So they build electronic systems for customers, which I think is really interesting, obviously, being an engineer. Welcome to the podcast.

Hannah: Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me on, Mike, I appreciate it.

Mike: So, calling you a design consultancy, in the electronics sector, you could do an awful lot of different things. So do you want to tell us a little bit about you know, what Ignys does, the kind of projects you get involved in and maybe a little bit about what your role is in those projects?

Hannah: Yes, absolutely. So we get stuck into lots of projects. As you can imagine, we work with everyone from sort of innovative start-ups all the way through to household names, you know, there’s big TV ads out at the moment of people that we help.

Sector wise, it’s very varied as well. So anything from IoT sort of smart hubs, anything you can really think of that involves electronics, really, we have sort of four pillars in terms of services we offer. So electronics design, you’re talking everything. So I’m simple board work on PCB, through to sort of FPGA development, that kind of thing.

Software wise, it’s mostly on the embedded side of helping people that so for example, we’ve done a case study recently on music, so streaming systems, etc. and sort of getting the software right behind that there’s an awful lot that goes on, in terms of technical debt around sort of writing code fast, and sort of the problems that can occur there. So we kind of help people unravel that, then we’ve got the test side. So we’ve got great partnership with mg products around test jigs, we’ve also got two environmental test chambers on site. And then of course, just product development. So everything through from doing a workshop, through all the way to sort of scaling up your project so that when you’re doing volume manufacture, it’s going to work well. There’s a lot of educational pieces around prototyping and the fact that if you get the first prototype, it’s very exciting. It doesn’t mean you should put that straight into production in terms of my job title here.

So I’m marketing manager, I’m lucky that I’ve got a team around me. So I’ve hired a marketing executive back in January, I’m very lucky sort of a content and SEO Wizard, we get stuck into everything really. So there’s a lot of experimentation going on here. Because it was a startup, when I joined, you pretty much have to do a bit of everything. So call myself a bit of a free 60 marketer from that point of view. So you have to be very comfortable to get stuck in. So for example, I’ve never done Pay Per Click properly when I joined. And then you sort of have to get stuck into that. So there’s a lot of learning going on, you have to be very comfortable with being constantly pushed out of your comfort zone and this kind of role.

Mike: Perfect. And I think that leads us on really well to how you ended up and how your career has developed. And you know, I’m particularly interested to know why you chose to give up your potential career as a film star.

Hannah: Yeah, so we should probably interject here around me being a Bollywood extra. Once I was looking for summer jobs. I wanted to try out something different. So I ended up on a day a bit like this. I think we’re all the suffering in the heat wave. It was actually a day like this in Nottingham, when we all sort of sat around cheering for the Bollywood star who was starring in this cricket movie called peculiar house, which I’m probably pronouncing completely wrong. I was bowled over because I actually worked in the cinema. It was a brilliant summer job. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to do summer work. But I got very bowled over by the guy who was playing the father because he was in every Bollywood movie at the time. So that was very exciting for me. Anyway, I interject.

So my kind of career has developed in a slightly different way to other people. So I actually did a degree in meteorology, which is whether it’s very sort of maths and physics heavy, which doesn’t sort of you go hang on, how does that relate to marketing, I suppose to me, there was always a conflict between my love of maths and my love of sort of psychology and people and creativity. And I could never quite find my jam with that. So I went down the maths route, I realised quite quickly that trying to get into the Met Office is a bit like because you’re trying to be a rock star. When you’re in a band, you know, it’s very competitive, and I wanted to stay up north. So I looked around, had to think about it and tried out a marketing role. And luckily, I found someone prepared to take a bit of gamble on me. Great company called sumedh up and Glossop to do medical cushions and mattresses, and I kind of fell in love with the b2b world there really. I trained on the job. So I did a c ci M qualification over in Manchester. I found actually learning on the job. I learned so much through that really that sort of baptism of fire around marketing. I find the landscape has really changed so when I first started social media was in its infancy, but the main thing was nothing got measured. So there was little bit of sort of E marketing. But there was none of the tools we have now.

You know, how do you know where you’re ranking on Google? You pretty much typed into the internet and saw where you were. Now you’ve got Semrush, that sort of tells you, and you don’t have to have an argument about their computer showing up a different one to you. And so it’s actually coming full circle for me, because I’ve now got the math side as well through the data. And also through the very, very technical roles that I choose. That sort of, you know, the people that I work with, do the hard stuff, and I get to learn and absorb that free what they do, which is amazing.

Mike: Sounds cool. And it sounds like it was almost accidental. I guess it’s kind of almost a marketing approach to testing different careers and seeing which one you like.

Hannah: That’s right, I sort of highly recommend to say to people look, when you go into a career, and you choose your degree, the most important thing is to choose something that you find really passionate and interesting, because you’re going to be doing three years of it every single day. And you need to know that something you want to do. There is an element, I think looking back, I sometimes go well would have crazy chosen the career was a bit more of the right route for what I wanted to do. But trying to decide what you want to do when you’re 17 is really, really tough. And I think without doing that, and doing a degree or going into a first job, it’s very hard to know what you like and what you don’t. And I think was marketing, it’s very much a love hate experience. Sometimes the job is fantastic. You know, I love it. There are days when you go, people don’t understand the marketing side, and you get very disillusioned. So you have to be, you have to be comfortable, I think in marketing in knowing that your day is not going to be set out for you. So a lot of other roles, things will land on your desk and you do them. It’s not like that in marketing, you have to have the ideas, you have to come up with those ideas. People be constantly asking you, what do you think, and you have to be okay with that.

Mike: And I think that’s really interesting. You’re running, basically the whole of marketing with a massive team of one for a company that’s trying to reach you know, a whole range of different customers from start-ups through to global electronics companies. I mean, how do you decide on priorities in that situation?

Hannah: I think the most important thing is sitting down and deciding who your ideal customers are, but also how much you can help people. So for example, a lot of our start-ups, if they don’t have funding, there’s only so much we can help them. So for example, they might come to us and say they’ve got a budget of 10k. And we go, well, actually, that might only give you a few days engineering, we don’t want to eat anyone’s budget, we’re always very open and honest with people to go, Look, you may need to go away and get some extra help first. So we have to think about all we write for people for us, it’s just as important to be right for them as it is that they’re right for us. And we have quite a rigorous sort of pre-qualification process. In terms of managing the marketing that we do, we actually have come to conclusion that Excel is quite useful.

So within my team, I sort of have a list of priorities that we need to achieve high to low, sort of what percentage we’ve done that and it just kind of lays out, you look at it during the week, and you plan it out at the beginning of the week, then we have what I call a wins and rants session at the end of the week of what’s gone well, and what hasn’t and sort of looking at all those KPIs. Again, one of the lessons I’ve learned over time is waiting till the end of the month to check if your traffic’s Okay, on the website isn’t always a great idea. It’s better to do it on a weekly basis if you can do that. And also, when you prioritise and go, what’s the effect of what I do? What effect is it going to have? So for example, spending half an hour on Search Console, doing the technical SEO on a page could actually be far more effective than spending 10 hours researching and reading every word of everything that’s going on in the industry. So I think you have to pick your battles, and go what is the right thing here? Again, I love doing interviews. So I absolutely love interviewing our team guest speakers and things. But sometimes you have to say, well, just because there’s new members, staff is really interesting. Maybe their, you know, their niche isn’t particularly going to help a lot of people. However, I’ve also found ones where very few people read the blog, but the people who do or the people who come and talk to us about projects.

So another thing I would say for people going into the industry is don’t be disheartened if your blog doesn’t get 1000s of hits, because the one that’s got 50 people looking at it in lifetime total. That might be the one converting so you need to measure that not just how many clicks, how many impressions, how many likes you’re getting on social media.

Mike: I think that’s really insightful. I mean, if you look at Ignys, or any other b2b company, typically, there’s a relatively small number of sales. I mean, I guess, you know, your company is probably selling very little, it’s not like you’re selling 1000s of projects a month, it’s probably a handful at most. And a lot of marketing tools seem to be focused on increasing the numbers up making the big numbers bigger is always good. And actually, it doesn’t matter. I mean, it’s the same with us at Napier, we could most take on two clients a month. And it kind of doesn’t matter whether we have 5000 or 10,000 visitors to our website, because actually there’s only two we care about which of the two that become customers. So I love that insight. That’s great.

One of the things I’m interested in is the audience you’ve reached. So you know you’re selling this capability to design and develop products are you targeting an engineering audience? Are you targeting a non-technical audience? How do you go about deciding who to reach when it could be a real mix of different people influencing the decision?

Hannah: That’s, that’s absolutely right. So we’ve got a list of sort of buyer personas. And again, we looked at them, and they all very, very different people, for the most part is sort of head engineering managers, we find with these people, they’re a lot more receptive to understanding the process, understanding the costs involved, we’ve written a blog around sort of cost versus investment, I guess, because a lot of people see it as an upfront cost. And it is a lot of money to develop a project. When I first found out how much product development cost, I vowed never to make a product myself. However, it’s incredibly rewarding. But there’s a lot that goes in, you know, you need to test things correctly, you need to do feasibility studies to make sure that there’s more than sort of free people in the universe are going to buy your product. And you know, that you don’t sell it for too high a cost as well, you know, if it’s going to cost you 50 pounds to make, and people are only prepared to buy it for 40 pounds, that’s not going to work. So yeah, in terms of the audience, I think there is a bit of a split. And that’s why we kind of nurture a lot of our blogs, our kind of dual readership. So we split it out between the people who were just really getting into it. And so you know, what his test, for example, was designed for tests and the people who know the really nitty gritty stuff of well, how is this going to help you. So we try and we try and tailor it to everybody, the same way, we will have blogs that kind of blot out sort of, you know, SIC, and Gan really kind of really techie stuff, there’s just for that audience, and then other things that are very much sort of 10 ways product development can go wrong, we actually find seasonal blocks are really popular as well. So Valentine’s, you know, take all your services, right, a Valentine’s blog around it, that sort of thing, people really do buy into that kind of thing. They want a bit of light relief there, I suppose.

Mike: That’s interesting. I mean, you’re talking about targeting senior engineers who are not always renowned for their sense of fun. And actually, what you’re saying is having a bit of fun is a really good way to engage,

Hannah: I think so I think that’s the thing, again, that there’s so many different personalities within that might. So you can you can put people in a box. But you know, there are some people who really like to look at that. And there’s other people who will like to sit and sort of consumed sort of eight pages on something really technical. And again, I think that catering to both sides of it, because people can choose what to read on your blog. And the great thing about sort of keyword optimization is you can target different people so that they’re going straight to that particular blog, it same with LinkedIn, you know, there’s heads of engineering that won’t put their profile picture up, and they don’t really use LinkedIn. There are other people who sit there and comment on other people’s sections all the time. You know, we also work with owners of companies, a lot of them might have an engineering background, that’s how they got into product development, because they saw a need. That’s why Richard started Ignys, because he realised that there was a need for high quality engineers, and there’s sort of a gap in the market, in terms of encouraging people to come through into engineering. And that’s why he sort of started it in the first place. So again, a lot of the owners have seen something that other people haven’t, and sort of working with them and engaging with them. And it’s the risk factor as well. You know, even if you’re a head of engineering, and you really understand the process, you’re going to look really silly, if you pick a consultancy, or a contractor that then takes your product, leaves it for six months, we get quite a few customers come back to us after six months where they’ve tried to do it themselves, or they’ve gone with somebody who’s sort of, you know, decided that they’re that they’re not going to do the project for XYZ reason. And they get really stuck. So often, it’s worth that investment, just really sitting down and considering who you’re going to use the same way that we all do in the marketing when we’re choosing who to work with on video, and things but that the stakes are really quite high in in the world of consultancy, I think.

Mike: And that brings me on to a really interesting question, one of the things you’ve got to do is build credibility and trust and establish the fact that Ignys, which is, you know, it’s effectively an SME, it’s not a huge company, but give people the confidence that you have the capabilities to do a good job. I mean, how do you do that, as a marketer establish that credibility?

Hannah: Yes, it was actually, you know, particularly difficult back sort of two years. So when I first started, I was the eighth person to join. So there were very few of us now that the 16 is a bit easier, but that people ask the question, so you want to show, you know, I quite often show our office because I think it’s a bit bigger than people imagine, or at least imagined when they were eight of us. We’re not just sort of sat in our, you know, we are actually sat at home quite a lot, because we have a great sort of hybrid working relationship, you know, post COVID. But again, the testimonials are huge. I think it’s really important to sort of get customer feedback. And it’s not always that easy. What we found actually sort of dropping things that we’ve got a Slack channel where we share wins from customers. So where somebody sent an email back explaining how happy they are, because nobody likes answering a survey, and we found ways around it, you know, just hold on one was a competition for a remarketing tablet. But again, even then I think it’s engaging with people free the process with the kick-off meetings, and when he finalise something to go look that surveys are really for you just as much as us. We want a five-star review on Google but we also want you to work with us again, if you go Oh, that wasn’t great. I’m gonna go and talk to somebody else. And they’ve not told us because they’re shine, they don’t want to say anything that doesn’t help us or them.

My favourite responses, the ones that gives you five stars, but then go, oh, but there’s this little thing that we could improve. And that’s so useful. Yeah. And so do you, are you running that engagement? Are you talking to the customers and trying to get that feedback from, it’s very much a team effort here. So I do I do with this customer survey, I offered everybody a phone call sort of ring them up. And again, that’s great to from my point of view, I think sometimes people open up a bit more when they’re not talking to the person who’s working on the project. And it’s kind of takes them away from it a little bit, I think that’s quite helpful to almost be a go between a with, again, so open and honest with our customers, they can talk to any of us. But sometimes it’s nice to kind of open up that candid conversation without any other stakes going on. But we also have sort of a project manager here we have a sales manager, Poppy, who’s just fantastic, and a great engineering manager. So we all kind of get stuck in with that. That feedback, I think is really a team effort of doing that the same way that I think sales and marketing is a team effort, you can’t force anyone to engage on LinkedIn. And that is not what I recommend in the slightest. But if you can give them the option a go, it would be great if you shared some of our stuff, if you want to, you know the bits that you find interesting. And I think that’s why it’s important to have a solid sort of social media policy, if you’re going to do sort of employee led content, they need to understand the rules that they can’t get excited and post that, you know, Company X, that’s top secret. One of the most frustrating things about working in an industry like this is most of the really cool stuff we do. We can’t talk about, you know, I can think of 1020 30 things that would blow your mind that I can’t, I can’t say, and it is really sad, because I want to tell the world but then if we told the world, nobody would trust us, and we’d have no business. So getting that balance, right, you know, again, photographs, things that we’d love to take pictures off, and we just can’t do that. So, again, as a marketer, that can be really frustrating.

Mike: That’s interesting. I mean, you’ve talked throughout this discussion about a number of different channels, from your blog, on your website through to social. I mean, how do you prioritise the different channels? Which ones do you see working for you? Which ones do you see as being less effective?

Hannah: So we’re quite lucky in that in terms of data, we use some great programmes to see where leads come from. And I’m really strict on sort of going in and taking that time to see when something lands in our inbox, where it came from, because I think then you can see which channels to really approach and it is Pay Per Click right for you, or you’re just throwing money down the drain, is it the organic stuff, I mean, everybody would love the organic SEO to be the thing that’s working, I think you also need to look at acquisition models very carefully. So we’ve a lot of the leads that we see might come in through a referral channel.

For example, we’re a proud sort of Raspberry Pi partner, so we might come in through their website, but then they might go away, and then click on LinkedIn. And they look at that for a bit, which is where the kind of social proof comes in, and all these real people. And then they go and click on a pay per click ad, well, you could say, well, that’s Pay Per Click working, or is it the other stuff. So with social media, I find often it’s not that breadwinner is not the one that is going to bring you in the leads. But it’s a key ingredient we find sometimes, you know, 25% of the stuff that’s coming through to our sort of thank you page. So I think having that conversion metric is really important.

If you’re starting out in marketing, make sure you’ve set up a way to see that things are what is converting and what isn’t, I suppose. And if you haven’t got those cool tracking code tools that we we use, use something like Google Analytics to help you set up those conversion goals, you get in what you put out as well. So for example, if you’re going for LinkedIn advertising, you need to have deep pockets. And you have to accept that you unless you use that kind of barrier entry, you know, sort of four or five grand a month, you’re not likely to see any results back. So some things aren’t worth sort of getting into unless you’re prepared to put things up front and go. Let’s take that gamble and make sure it’s working. It’s the same with pay per click. If you run a campaign and you only sort of put a pound in the day, you will not see what’s working. Circling back to what you said earlier mic around, I think b2b a lot of these tools with pay per click, it’s quite easy to say easy isn’t, I know pay per click is hard. But if you’re selling shoes, for example, you can use an awful lot of clever keyword tricks. When you’re working in a nice industry. I can pick out an amazing keyword and it will tell me that the volume is too low to use on pay per click. The best thing about organic is it will never tell you don’t get a big screen going sorry, you can’t load this blog up because the volume is too low. And that’s quite a useful.

Mike: That’s interesting. And I mean, obviously, throughout your career, you’ve done quite a lot on SEO. But I think, you know, quite a few marketers view that as being a very complex thing to do. Do you think that every marketer can actually contribute and do something towards SEO or do you think it’s something that really you need to bring in specialists

Hannah: I think it depends on what you’re trying to achieve. So from a results point of view, if you’re really serious about sort of, you know, I always makes me giggle when people talk about being top of Google, top of Google is very much a term thing you can be, you know, we’re top of Google for several terms. But there’s other terms that we’re not even on sort of 100. You know, it’s a very subjective thing. So I think if you’re trying to triple the amount of people coming to your website within a few months, yes, you do need a team of experts on board. SEO is also not an instant thing. So you can’t, you can’t load two pieces of content and go, it’s not working, it needs to build up over time. And what we found is often if we’ve had sort of a busy couple of months, and we’ve gone, okay, we’ll pull back, you suffer because of it, it needs consistency.

What I would say is to anybody in marketing is if you feel that you are lacking in a skill, go and learn it. So when I was looking at jobs, just before I joined Ignys, I realised, well, I haven’t got any pay per click experience. So I went and got a Google qualification, which is really hard to do, because some of the questions are based on practical, and I don’t have the practical elements. So it’s quite a high pass rate. So that was really tricky. But I’d say some amazing courses on SEO go out and find them and learn, I think anyone can learn a lot of the basics was SEO, well, you have to put that time element in if you’re only prepared to do half an hour a week, if you’re an owner of a company, you’re trying to run everything yourself. You can’t be sales, marketing, whatever services, you’re doing customer service, there’s so much that plays into it. So for example, when we bring the leads, and they then need to be nurtured through the pipeline, I think simple things as well, from a customer service point of view, responding quickly, giving people that right attention, I always describe leads a bit like dating. So if you just take someone out for me or once and then you don’t ever talk to them again, I imagine only a few people would bother reaching out to you, you need to reach out to them, and you need to talk to them on a consistent basis, or they will get bored or they’ll forget your name. You know, I quite often go oh, there was a great company the other day in my inbox, I can’t remember who they were. And I’m too busy to go looking for them as a supplier. So you need to be top of mind without stalking them. I’m very keen to say that, you know, you shouldn’t put people off by just prodding them constantly. But there’s so many touchpoints now you’ve got LinkedIn, you’ve got traditional methods people are face to face, go out there, and was brand awareness when people are coming to our shows now. And I love it when people go. I don’t know why we know Ignys but we do two years ago, they just go who? Who’s that? So you know, there’s there’s a lot of osmosis around here of getting your name out in front of the right people.

Mike: It’s really interesting. You’ve talked a lot about sort of multi touch in marketing and the fact that you need to hit people with several different pieces of content, put it over several different channels. So how do you judge whether a campaign is really good or whether it’s not worked?

Hannah: So again, it comes down to I’m a bit of a data queen, I actually measure too much probably. But I find the most important thing was the measurement is to make sure you measure every bit of the funnel. So measure the lead measure what’s getting through to becoming a customer. So it’s very easy as a marketer to go great. I’ve got 70 leads in my inbox, but actually the salesperson is probably thinking, What is this, what’s, you know, make sure you’re super joined up, it’s so important. But again, measuring it all the way through and understanding the difference between a kind of watercolour skyscraper blog that’s going to bring in a tonne of traffic, and the stuff that only a few people will read ever. But you know, 50% of those people then go on and talk to you. So I think that’s, that’s really important.

Mike: And do you have any campaigns you’ve run that you feel have really worked well, for, you know, either of your previous companies,

Hannah: I’ve had a few actually, that I’m sort of really, really proud of, I find it again, Simplicity is key, I think the main thing is making sure that you kind of push them at that first bit to make sure that they, you know, they really engage. I had one around sort of checking your postcode, so it was sort of wireless broadband. And people weren’t sort of making that first step. So you weren’t asking them to buy, you know, not going in for the kill and that sort of things. It wasn’t so much a campaign but I’m quite proud of some of the interviews I’ve done. So I reached out to Derbyshire cave rescue. And I did a sort of seven-page blog with them on all the things that they’re doing. That was That was incredible. I very much enjoyed doing that. I’m sure some of the other campaigns will come to my head in a minute to be honest,

Mike: They sound really cool, actually, you know that cave rescue has got to be an interesting story, whatever it’s about, it’s going to be interesting people going and pulling cavers out and saying they’re absolutely incredible.

So I’m interested. I mean, obviously, you’re really enjoying a career that clearly you didn’t plan for when you were younger. Do you have some advice for people who are maybe starting out in marketing or maybe advice for the for the young Hannah, thinking about whether or not to go into marketing?

Hannah: Yeah, so what I would say is, you know, I said you have to have a bit of a thick skin you need to be prepared for some people, We really understand what marketing is, and other people won’t and they won’t get it. Because it’s one of those industries that sometimes people think, Oh, you do the colouring in and you put things on Facebook. Right? So you have to be prepared for that, I think. But why would say is it’s really rewarding. It’s moving so fast. Now, you know, some of the techniques I’ve learned last two years didn’t exist. Two years before that, it’s hard when you’ve just finished a degree to get excited about learning, because you’re probably saturated and tired and fine, give yourself a bit of a break. But then get back into it. When if you’re disappointed because you’re looking for jobs, and you’re not getting the interviews, well look at look at and write a list of the things you can’t do, and then go and learn how to do them.

Look out for what red flags as well. So for example, if it says something around event marketing, then it probably might mean you have to work on a Saturday, and that’s fine. But ask that question at the interview. If it’s talking about lead generation, that might be a sign to say look, they really want those high targets. Are you okay? Was it being fast paced environment? Is it actually a tele sales role in disguise. So I had some advice a few years ago around to digital marketing and some amazing digital marketing roles out there. But you know, some of them are very sort of sales orientated. And you have to be prepared for that.

I think a lot of people are specialising now as well, I think I’m a bit of a dying breed of this sort of free 60 marketer. So, you know, I think now you need to think a bit harder about what you might want to specialise in, do you want to go down the SEO route? Do you want to do pay per click? Do you wanna do social media? And what the pros and cons go and go and look online and see what the, you know, the industry experts are complaining about? So for example, social media will talk about being told to do tick tock and all these different ones. And actually, it takes so much time they’re doing the video strategy, they’re doing all this. Are you prepared to do that? Do you really love it? Or do you think, Oh, well, I’ve got a Facebook account. So I’m, I would enjoy that, you know, think really, really, really hard about it, I think. And if you get into a first role, and it’s not quite right for you, maybe you’re more customer service, maybe you love talking to people on the phone, maybe you love event marketing, it’s okay to go. Maybe I want to sidestep and there will be ways for you to sidestep, don’t feel that you’re then stuck in that role forever. That’s what I’d say.

Mike: That’s brilliant advice. I really appreciate it and really appreciate your time on the podcast. Thank you. I’m sure people would be interested to contact you maybe ask you some more questions if somebody has something they’d like to ask but with the best way to contact and

Hannah: Absolutely fine to connect with me on LinkedIn. I’ve also got an email address which I’m sure we can put in the notes here which is hannah.ingram@ignys.co.uk. Any questions around either my team myself my career? Any question really? I’m very happy to answer anything people want to hear.

Mike: Thanks so much. And I really appreciate all the great insights. Thanks for being on the show very much.

Hannah: Thanks, 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.

 

by Natasha Websdale

A Napier Podcast Interview with Cat Anderson - Sprout Social

In this podcast episode, we interview Cat Anderson, Head of EMEA Marketing at Sprout Social, a social media management solution.

Cat shares how she started her career in digital marketing, spending time working at Berlin-based technology start-ups before eventually landing at Sprout Social. She discusses the current lack of creativity in B2B social media compared to B2C, the opportunity this presents, and how social media offers a great, relatively low-cost platform for experimentation.

Cat also shares the benefits and insights social media tools can offer users and gives some tips and tricks on how to stand out and overcome a reluctance to be creative.

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

Transcript: Interview with Cat Anderson – Sprout Social

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Cat Anderson

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 b2b marketing the podcast from Napier. Today I'm joined by Cat Anderson. Ken is the head of marketing for Sprout Social. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, Mike. It's lovely to be here. Thanks for having me.

Well, thanks so much for coming on. I'm really interested because I had a quick look at your LinkedIn page. And you've had a really interesting career. Can you tell us what you've done? And how you've ended up at Sproutsocial?

Cat: Yeah, no problem at all. Yeah, it has been a bit of an interesting one. Now, to be fair. So basically, when I immediately came out of university, the world had collapsed in 2008. So a nice little recession to start my working career off with. And, and I promised the story gets interesting. But after a couple of years of sort of doing some freelance work with the BBC, which I was very lucky to do, I was doing odd jobs, we jobs here and there, I actually entered the channel for reality TV show come down with me on a bit of a whim, having never cooked before. And I came joint first. And with the 500 points that I want from that, I decided to go and visit a friend in Berlin. And I don't know if you've ever had one of those experiences Mike, where you go somewhere, and you're just very instantly taken with it. And I really at that point, that was about 2010 2011, I was really taken with Berlin, there was a huge scene of startups and entrepreneurial sort of tech. And it really caught my attention coming from Northern Ireland originally, there wasn't a lot of that in Belfast. So I just decided to move over there. And I threw myself headfirst into the world of startups. This is where I got really into digital marketing. And I stayed there for five, six years.

And then I came back to Ireland and and worked for a couple of larger companies until Yeah, eventually 1516 months ago landed at Sprout Social. And I have to say I was really enticed by this role in particular, because although sprite is an international company, its HQ in Chicago. So a lot of the team is based over in the States. There is a very, very quickly growing team based here in EMEA in Dublin. And we have like other people dotted all around Europe. But I thought the opportunity was quite unique, because you would have that feeling of a startup of building something up from scratch, but also with the budget of Big Brother in the States. So that was kind of like a perfect for me a perfect dream because you could get that startup vibe, but with a little bit of a of an enterprise budget, which is surely any marketer's dream.

Mike: No, absolutely. And you're not alone in terms of American companies who have bases in Dublin either. Yeah. So it'd be interesting to investigate what would have happened if your cooking wasn't quite so good on come down. I know. That's probably another podcast.

Cat: I think that as well, because it's such a bizarre story. If I didn't go to Berlin, where would I be? No, I don't know.

Mike: But anyway, you ended up with sprout, which is great. I mean, I have to ask this because when we think of social media, we see a lot of creativity in consumer sector. But b2b really seems to lag, particularly in terms of doing things that are interesting, creative. Why do you think that is?

Cat: So this is a conversation I feel like I've been having quite a lot recently. And one report that I always refer to and would really recommend for anybody to read is The b2b Institute, which is actually like a LinkedIn Think Tank, they released a report called the b2b effectiveness code, which coincided with the new b2b marketing award that was launched at Cannes earlier this year. And in it, they basically analysed, you know, I don't even know how many different types of b2b marketing in terms of what the overall return to the business would be. And they came up with this really interesting effectiveness ladder, which shows what is good and what is not that good long term. And one thing that was really key and Kemo and huge in abundance was that b2b marketing is really sort of lacking in creativity.

And I think to your point, this is something that we see on social in abundance with b2c companies, because social is fast. Social is for the most part, relatively cheap for you to experiment with different types of marketing so fast and cheap means you can kind of throw loads of different ideas onto the plate and see what sticks. But b2b just isn't really following suit with this. And I think this report says and I'm inclined to agree that there's a little bit of a lacking of creativity and this is yeah,

It's certainly something that I agree with. I don't know, what do you think, Mike?

Mike: I mean, I completely agree, I think one of the problems is is b2b tends to be incredibly conservative.

And, and equally, you're trying to appeal to a hugely broad demographic in b2b. So, from everyone from graduates who are coming out and you know, a very immersed in social media, they understand what people are trying to do to have fun on Tik Tok or other platforms. And then at the other end, you've got people like me who are much older, perhaps less, you know, looking for the fun things who perhaps wouldn't view something that was cool for a 20 year old as being something that is a campaign that should be run by one of their suppliers. And I think I think that that broad demographic is particularly challenging for a lot of b2b brands.

Cat: Yeah, I think that's a very fair observation. But I think I mean, I hope that it's changing because I think that, for all businesses, having a sense of agility, and not being afraid to change is always going to yield results for you. But yeah, we'll see, I think it's going to change. So like, watch this space.

Mike: Do you think one of the challenges b2b brands have is that they do so much on LinkedIn, which obviously appeals to this incredibly broad demographic, they don't have the ability to segment their social into different activities for different channels. Do you think that that's holding b2b back?

Cat: I think it's interesting, I don't think that they don't have the ability to use the other channels, I think it's that they just never maybe just don't know how to use them and to their defence as well. There's not a lot of examples of b2b brands, really utilising effective cross channel marketing across all of the different social media channels. LinkedIn is a really, really obvious choice, because it's obviously the one that's been earmarked as for business. But again, we're not seeing people sort of really step outside their comfort zone and do really interesting things. So I think there are b2b campaigns that are happening where people are starting to test the waters and starting to try new things. But compared to the b2c market, it's a lot slower. Personally speaking, I think this means that there's a real opportunity to maybe stand out in a good way by trying maybe looking to the b2c marketing ideas that have been working and thinking, would they work with our audience? Could this be adopted? Is this something that we could try in a way that we feel comfortable with in a way that probably most importantly, we can get signed off? Because I think because no one's really raising their head above the parapet. There's a real opportunity, therefore, to be like, to really stand out in a good way, I suppose as well, you could also argue in a bad way. But if you do it right, in a good way.

Mike: But then I guess that there's a challenge around working out who to target, you know, in b2b, it's actually relatively easy to build communities around particular products or technologies. It's much harder in in those other platforms to do that.

Cat: Yeah, I mean, yes, I think so. But something that I firmly believe, and I'm very happy for you to tell me that I'm wrong and naive, is that ultimately, with b2b Marketing, you are still marketing to a person. So you can still find ways to connect with people, even if it's not in like a LinkedIn group that is specifically around a product or a service. I think that there are still other ways to connect with your ideal customer type. So for a lot of the time, of course, you're going to be thinking about the brands that you are and the types of companies that you want to market to. But further down from that, we can have a think about like, well, who are the buying personas within these companies that you like? And what other ways could we get a little bit creative and try to reach them on different platforms? I think it's potentially a little bit closed off to say that it's not possible to build those communities on other platforms. I know that there definitely are lots of companies who do things on Instagram, for example. And of course, depending on, you know, what the product is, there are probably other platforms that you can consider as well. But yeah, I mean, I definitely I would not close the door on b2b companies being able to find a different type and maybe a new sort of ship of success on different platforms. But I agree, I don't think anybody is doing it yet at all, and doesn't really know how to do it.

Mike: No, I think it's difficult. I mean, I see people, for example, doing retargeting advertising on Facebook was a very easy thing to do, to get an audience that you know, but I think building that organic audiences is much harder. Nobody's really cracked that. Even with Facebook, I mean, there was a period where everybody wanted their own Facebook group, and from b2b and pretty much none of those have been vibrant or exciting or successful.

Cat: It's an interesting one, because obviously, all of these platforms change so quickly, as well. And as you say, everybody was mad about the Facebook groups for a while and that's maybe not the primary user experience on Facebook now. So you know, we don't really know exactly how they will evolve, but it's very clear that they will evolve. And again, potentially for b2b, it's going to be getting a bigger flywheel into motion to get this sort of marketing campaign set up. So if it's feeling like it's too quick and transient, it might be putting people off.

Mike: I mean, one of the things we are seeing that maybe is a bit more creative is people building their own personal brand around their career. But yet we see you know, even in larger companies, people building a brand that's maybe not quite in the same style and tone of voice as as the corporation, do you think that's a good thing? Or do you think marketers should actually be trying to ensure that there's consistency, and people's personal brand should reflect the company they work for?

Cat: I mean, this is a great question, you Rotter? This is a difficult question. I think that having a personal brand, and marketing and a slightly different tone of voice from your company shouldn't be an issue unless it is so drastically different that it's actually crossing some of the values of the company or anything like that.

I definitely know of some people within different companies who fit exactly what you've just described. And I don't see that there's any issues. And in fact, I see that those people who've built up a personal brand, and are very well known for being Tom Smith, who works at AIX, it is an attribute to the company, I think that having strong individuals can be a definitely can be an attribute, or can be another branch of how people see your company and like put a little bit of a human face to it. I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive. But I do understand then the marketers concerned about having a consistency with the tone of voice. And so I think having something like an advocacy tool in place can be helpful where you can control the messaging, if that's something that you're really, really concerned about. And you're like, I want my employees to share information about the company. But I don't really want them just to be saying it in any which way, if you've got a very, very, very strict tone of voice, then absolutely use an advocacy tool. There's ways around that. And I think you can control that. And that's great. It's definitely always good to be encouraging your employees to share things because it's a great, easy way to reach into new networks. But I heard Yeah, I personally think that it's a good thing to show that you have people in your company who are passionate about what they do, who are free to be themselves, especially in the current climate as well you want to be it's good for your employer brand, as well to show that you are helping people be passionate about their jobs develop themselves as well as promoting the company.

Mike: Sounds great. It sounds like you're really in favour of diversity in the broadest sense of the word. You know, a company should be lots of different people rather than one single voice.

Cat: I definitely think diversity has been proven time and time again, like across all sectors to be something that should be embraced and encouraged. As far as possible. I think it will only bring, it'll only bring good things avoid groupthink.

And yeah, if you can encourage it, definitely do.

Mike: I mean, on the other hand, though, I think a lot of b2b companies actually a less worried about the enthusiastic social media users, they're much more worried about trying to encourage the average salesperson to do something on on social, how would you go about trying to get the sales team more engaged in social selling?

Cat: Wow, we again, a great question. As a marketer, I know that it always is in my best interest to make things as simple as possible for the sales team. And so I do think having an advocacy tool is really helpful for that where you can just take away any friction that anyone in the sales team might have with regards to time or trying to think of how to promote things.

And it is something that we offer at sprout, but I know you could, there are alternatives available. But with an advocacy tool, you can just have everything ready to go it's a couple of clicks, making it super duper easy. Another thing as well, I guess, is to be creating content that's made with the sales team in mind as well. So if you're a company that is specifically targeting other enterprises in a certain industry, and your sales team say that a certain topic has come up time and time again, in their sales conversations, creating content that you know, is going to like light a fire within them. I think like just listening to them is also a great way to try and get them on board and get them to be active with sharing the content.

Mike: So actually going out and engaging the sales team is an important part in terms of determining what content you create, as well as trying to motivate them

Cat: Yeah, to an extent now I do think as any marketer will tell you, you can't be doing every single thing that the sales team are telling you to do. Because otherwise you will be working seven days a week, 24 hours a day. There's always going to be other requests coming in. But yes, I definitely think listening to the people that are having those frontline conversations so you know best what content is going to resonate?

To me, that's a no brainer.

Mike: That makes sense. If people are listening to say they're trying to move forward, I mean, obviously, one of the things they can do is talk to the sales team. But if they're looking to prioritise their social media, how would you go about doing that? Would you look at targeting specific platforms first, or what would be your your first steps to building a social media plan?

Cat: So I think the first thing that I always say for any any question of this type is about data. So I think having a data foundation before anything is always a good plan, I can help you choose your strategy and pick your goals wisely. So understanding, first of all, the lay of the land of what you have done so far, what has worked, what hasn't worked, what you looking at that understanding, like what you wish could have gone better, and then creating your strategies around that.

It's also good just to have some like, initial benchmark pieces of data to work from, so you can measure your success or not. I think as well, having we mentioned it already. But knowing what your tone of voice is, like already understanding if that's something your company is prepared to be flexible with at all could also determine which platforms you might have success in.

And then of course, thinking about your audience. So if you want to keep it very, very much about trying to just reach other companies, that's fine. Maybe it is like, let's stick with LinkedIn. But if you do want to go down to that persona level marketing, that's where you can maybe consider different platforms that you could be incorporating into your overall strategy.

I do think as well, to be honest with you, I think if you're coming up with a social media strategy, generally, it's really good to have an attitude of experimentation. Because as I mentioned earlier, it does move very fast. There's lots of opportunity here. And it's all relatively low risk. I mean, of course, we all know that there are moments where things can go desperately wrong. And you know, when you can say something that's incredibly tone deaf, but I think those are actually pretty rare in the grand scheme of things. It's social media is a great testing ground for trying out new things and seeing like, what will stick. And it's something where you can try out things that you maybe want to try and other areas of your marketing strategy, just to sort of see what the audience reception to it is like, Finally, then I think closing it off with data as well is really important.

And after you've run any kind of campaign, you're obviously going to want to know how it's performed. Again, I think that if you're doing this on social media, not just necessarily using the analytics platforms that are available on the actual platforms. But again, I'm obviously going to say this working at Sprite, but um, but other platforms are available, using a social media analytics tool, where you can actually have a deeper look, or using something like social listening, where you can understand exactly how your customers and your prospects prospective customers are talking about you understanding the sentiment around different campaigns that you've run, you can get so much more data, lead and deep insight into how your campaigns are performing, which is, again, not only useful for how you move forward with your social media strategy, but how you can apply it to other areas of your marketing as well.

Mike: That's interesting. I think one of the fascinating things is you've talked a little bit about tools. And you've mentioned data and analytics, you've mentioned advocacy tools. What elements of a tool do you need to really get the best out of social media? I mean, I know you're from sprout, but what sort of things to sprout to, in addition to just posting content?

Cat: Yeah. So I think it's funny because I definitely think a lot of people know Sproat for that entry level use of publishing and scheduling, which is obviously really helpful. And that consolidation of all of your channels in one place, although that is at the ground level what we offer, and then that's like level one.

It is, I don't want to say that that's not incredibly useful as well, it's a huge way to save time, and to make things a lot easier for anyone who's running your social media. But further from that, yeah, I've mentioned a couple of the different things that I know that is offered in sprout. So like having a deeper look at your analytics. So we've got a section of our tool called premium Analytics, which is where you can have that deep insight into all of your social media performances and also beyond your own content, having a look at how people are talking about you like competitive insight.

You can access all of that because it's all publicly available on the web anyway, then I do think as well, we've got things like the advocacy tool. So as well as that's making sure that if people are wanting to share things about your company, you want to make it super duper easy. We can do that. And then of course, there's things that we can offer where we can help chat like set up chat bots for you. There's like there's a whole heap of different things. And actually, if you're interested, I'd recommend taking out a free trial, which we offer. I have to get that in there, Mike, I hope you don't mind.

Mike: And that's actually great. So tell us about the free trial. What can people do with the free trials that are limited product? How can they actually find out about sprout?

Cat: Yeah, of course. So I mean, the websites always the best port of call sprout social.com. And we will very, it's a very easy direction to finding where the free trial is, it's like right there front and centre. The free trial itself is no obligation, 30 days, you get to use the tool inside and I touch social media accounts. It doesn't have the premium analytics and social listening attached to it as the free trial option. But I might live to regret this, if you if you do want to try it, and you would like to have those assets attached, get in touch with me, are at Cat Anderson on LinkedIn, I will be happy to sort that out for you. I mean, we can get that sorted. That's absolutely fine.

Mike: That's awesome. That's really kind. And then people are gonna want to try the tool. So maybe the next question is, do you have any like hints or tips, ideas, you could give people of how they might do something on social perhaps on LinkedIn, that's going to stand out, there's going to be better and more creative than everybody else.

Cat: Oh, so I know, we spoke a little bit before the podcast, Mike about this. And I firmly believe that, especially with the advent of this new award at Cannes, and all of the there's a lot of buzz of the minute and all of the marketing presses about creativity in b2b marketing. I also do think a massive trend that we see in social media is personality led marketing, where we're starting to see brands shake off the sense so much of them being a business and you start to feel the people behind the accounts a little bit more. So we're seeing things where people are having a little bit more fun cracking a few more jokes, or it could be that they're turning how people view their industry on their head.

I always use this example. But Monzo bank, I think do a really amazing job on social media. So obviously, they're an online bank, if anyone doesn't know them. And obviously, when we think of financial institutions, we always think of, you know, security and trust and CFT. And typically, that results in a very, like stared conservative and steady kind of voice. And ones who have kind of switched this up to like, I mean, I have to hand it to them to a wonderful effect, which is that they have decided that okay, that is absolutely true that people want someone that they trust and very, like safe, blah, blah, blah. But their tone of voice on social is that they've decided, well, people probably would also like to bank with someone that they feel that they could talk to, or maybe ask a question that they're not, you know, going to feel silly by asking if they don't really have that much financial acumen.

So their tone of voice is very data driven. It's they talk about data a lot. But it's also very friendly. And they do crack a few jokes, not too much. Let's bear in mind, they are still a financial institution. So they're not like doing stand up comedy, though. But I think they've done it to great effect, you know, they're becoming very, very popular choice. And for people who have chosen to go like, Okay, well, yeah, I do want CFD and trust. But I actually want someone who I think is friendly, and who I can ask questions to as well. So I think there's opportunities just to maybe think about how people view your industry.

Think about if there's opportunities where you can show a little bit of personality in a way that will make you stand out from your competitors. I just think in the b2b world, it's, it will be a game changer. And I know Mike, again, we talked about this, and I'm interested, I'm happy for you to argue with me.

I think personality lead marketing is what is going I think it's going to sweep right, I think it's only starting in b2c. But I think it's going to continue, not maybe totally comprehensively through every single b2b company in the world. But I think we're going to start to see a lot more of it, as people understand that a calculated risk with a little bit of humanity. People really respond incredibly well to it.

Mike: Yeah, I can see where you're coming from. I may be a little less optimistic about people willing to take those risks. And maybe, I don't know if you agree with this, but maybe Monzo taking a risk is because they're more of a challenger brand. And the more established incumbents are going to be much slower to take risk, because they've got much more to lose.

Cat: 100% I definitely think so. And I think this is, it's the blessing and the curse of being an established enterprise block brand. People know who you are, you have that stability, you have that brand recognition, but it means that it is it's definitely it's harder, again, to get that flywheel of change into motion. It's, you know, there's actually a bigger distance to go.

Mike: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I do think that some of the smaller the emerging brands are going to be much more adventurous than some of the bigger ones and maybe that will ultimately force the big established brands to be more creative, but I do think there's a significant amount of loss aversion amongst big brands at the moment, they're very worried about making mistakes. And there's lots of cases where big brands have made mistakes.

This has been great. It's been very interesting. Definitely could talk a lot more about social and what people could do.

But before we finish, is there any sort of tips or ideas or suggestions you'd like to give people as a way to try and overcome their reluctance to be creative? Maybe it's a campaign, you've seen that people could copy or something like that?

Cat: Yeah, well, I think like, my first tip would be definitely to check out the b2b effectiveness code that came out from the b2b Institute, I think it's a really interesting read for anybody who is in the world of b2b marketing, and certainly, for myself, even has helped me put a lot of framework on how my next 18 months strategy looks like. So I would really recommend checking out that report. Secondly, was thinking about, like, what b2b campaigns do you think have been particularly effective. And I think a few years ago, we saw a lot of larger companies starting to go down almost like, I think it was a little bit of a trend of like cinematic YouTube videos, or almost like mini movies.

So there was, let me see HBS, the wolf was Christian Slater, and there was Maersk, which is like the global logistics company, they did this like one called disconnected where they were all in an elevator and it was very trippy. But I kind of do think that the the way things are trending at the minute, like big, large cinematic campaigns, I don't think we're going to like sort of cut the mustard anymore. And in fact, we're going in completely the opposite direction, which is shorter video is really, really like what people is grabbing people's attention.

Unfortunately, our attention spans are being eroded away at a rate of knots, and so shorter is better. So I think like, Chuck, your five minute videos into the bin and start thinking in shorter terms, I think as well. Another thing that, to be honest, I always think is really, really helpful is no, I'm not going to say case studies, because Lord helped me case studies are, I think they always make a marketer sort of dive a little bit inside, because they're always quite difficult to get across the line. There's a lot of rigmarole with them.

But I do think having like user generated content, so if you can find any way to work with your customers, like that's, that is evergreen, you know. So that's if you can show the people that you're working with, and like I personally always like to try and find more agile ways to do that, to show Yeah, look, shining a spotlight on whatever it is that your customer is doing. But also in a way where you've got that brand alignment as well. I think that's always really, really helpful. And yeah, that's, that's evergreen, to be fair. So maybe if you can get that, squish it into a little tick tock video. I'm only joking. But yeah, those are really my two, my two little tips.

Mike: Awesome, if that's super helpful. So you've already said people are okay to contact you on LinkedIn, which is very kind and you'll also help them out with a trial and making sure they can try the whole of the product, which is great. Is there any other way people should get ahold of you if they've got questions?

Cat: Yeah, I mean, I think probably LinkedIn is best. To be fair, I do use it pretty regularly. As I say, it's, it's cut Anderson? Yeah, I think we're just leave it at LinkedIn. How many listeners do you have on this mic? So if I put out my email address, I think it could be, I could have an influx?

Mike: Well, I can let you into a podcast secret, actually. Because whenever I appear on other podcasts, I always give out my email address, and I've never had more than one email. So either I'm incredibly boring, or most people contact through social so

Cat: well, I'll say that. I mean, it's not it won't take a rocket science scientist to figure out my email. It's cat dot Anderson at Sprout social.com. But I'm very happy to chat to anyone. So please feel free and it's cat with a C, just like the animal. That's awesome. And hopefully people won't fill up your inbox too much.

Mike: Or if they do, it's just with people wanting to become Sproutsocial customers. I really appreciate that. The conversation has been such fun. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. I've really enjoyed it.

Cat: Thank you so much, Mike. Me too.

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.

by Natasha Websdale

What B2B Marketers Need to Consider When it Comes to Email Marketing

Natasha Websdale, Marketing Specialist at Napier, shares her views on what B2B marketers need to consider when it comes to email marketing, drawing from her own experience, and two insightful reports.

Email marketing is an important part of any marketing strategy, keeping audiences up-to-date on the latest products, company news and business insights. Email activity has grown massively over the last couple of years with an increase of approximately 60% from March-April 2020 and remaining at this level throughout 2021.

As email traffic increases and subscribers’ inboxes fill up, competition to capture their attention has grown; making it more important than ever for B2B marketers to stay up to date on the latest email marketing techniques.

I recently came across a couple of reports talking about trends and challenges for 2022. The Smart Insights Email Marketing Trends 2022 report presents the views and predictions of 10 marketing experts, whilst Validity’s Mastering The New Email Landscape report analyses global email performance in 2021 and forecasts the future for email marketing.

This blog will look at some of the things these reports, and my own experience as a digital marketer has taught me to keep in mind in 2022.

The importance of the customer journey

Something that becomes increasingly clear to me as I continue my career in marketing is the importance of the customer journey. Not understanding where a customer is, or how to move them through the funnel could lead to missed opportunities. Email can help you reach potential customers at the right time and move them from being unaware of your business to become customers and brand advocates.

 

Stages include:

Awareness:
This stage is all about brand awareness. Educational content such as eBooks and White Papers can help to introduce you to your audience and position you as knowledgeable experts on specific challenges.

Consideration:
Here audiences are actively searching for a solution to their problem and could be considering your products and services. Sending them content such as case studies and testimonials can help to build trust with your brand.

Decision:
At this point, the audience is already educated about what you are offering, and the goal is to encourage them to press the “buy” button. Here you should include content such as demos and pricing sheets, providing the audience with the facts.

It is important to remember that not everyone’s journey looks the same, some may progress slower, and some may respond better to different content or a different email cadence. This is where email platforms that allow for audience segmentation, personalisation and triggered content come in.

Personalisation is vital

Personalisation is targeting an email or email campaign to a specific contact by leveraging the data and information you have about them. Chances are, if you are creating email campaigns then you are personalising the content. Personalisation is nothing new to us marketers, with Litmus sharing that 9 in 10 marketers believe personalisation is imperative to overall business strategy.

The top 10 personalisation factors used in email marketing are shown in the graph below. Complex personalisation factors, such as past website interactions, are being used significantly less than simple personalisation’s such as name. This is something we should take advantage of, to stand out amongst our competitors.

Basic personalisation tactics include using shortcodes such as “SubscriberFirstName” and “SuscriberEmailAddress” to insert the subscribers profile information. More advanced tactics include changing email content based on the data you have about the subscriber, such as the last product they brought and what pages they have visited on your website.

It is important to find the right level of personalisation within an email, some top tips to consider include:

Be sensitive to strangers
Be sensitive to the information you may have about a customer, including too many details and seeming like you know too much risks appearing creepy.

Plan for scenarios where there isn’t any or incorrect data
You may not have all the data you need, such as a first name. Make sure you have default options set up, so you don’t risk addressing an email to ‘Fname’.

Consider where they are in the customer journey
What are the expectations and needs of the audience at that moment? Marketing messages need to change depending on where the contact is in the customer journey.

Optimise automations and personalisation’s
AI is key here. For example, AI could replace manual segmentation to work out each customer’s interest towards certain categories and messages.

The power of marketing automation

I am continuing to learn the capabilities of Marketing Automation platforms and the benefits they can have. Platforms such as Hubspot and Marketo allow you to lead score, integrate CRMs, monitor campaign performance, know subscribers’ activity and much more.

This collected data means that you can trigger content, such as emails, based on the actions of each subscriber. For example, if a subscriber downloads a piece of content on a particular product, you could automate an email with more information on that product.

Triggering emails based on behaviour ensures the audience is receiving the right information at the right time, personalising their customer journey.

Marketing automation has become more intelligent with the addition of AI and Machine Learning, which evaluates historical interactions to generate insights for future communications. This can include the best time to send someone an email, how to optimise subject lines and automating content.

Measure what matters

Traditional benchmark metrics have been losing value over the last few years.

Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) has had a significant impact, resulting in much higher and unreliable open rate figures. Validity says that as adoption of MPP continues, average open rates will level out between 30-40%. To get a true picture of open rates, senders will need to identify MPP opens versus genuine opens.

Because of MPP, marketers are turning away from opens to clicks as their key measure of subscriber engagement, meaning competition for clicks is higher than ever. But clicks are not a reliable measure for success either. Something that I have come across when measuring email campaigns is bot clicks. This is where “bots” click each link in an email to find any links that may contain harmful content. This skews click data and means that it is not a true reflection of the actions the audience is making.

It may be time to stop measuring the success of email campaigns on traditional metrics and instead how they help move us closer to our business goals. The future of metrics will be dependent on what B2B marketers are looking to achieve with their email campaigns and applying KPIs based on the actions they want visitors to take.

 

Email marketing continues to be a vital tool in any marketer’s toolbox. Considering our audience at every step, embracing new and emerging technologies and making sure we remain focused on our goals and not distracted by vanity metrics are just some of the things that can lead us to success in 2022.

by Natasha Websdale