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.


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.

 


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.


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.