Lead nurturing is a key strategy within B2B marketing, and understanding your buying committee is essential to success. Mike and Hannah discuss how to use intent data to build paths through the buying journey for different personas, how to deal with data integration issues across platforms, and whether quality or quantity is the best approach to email marketing.

They also offer a sneak peek at our upcoming webinar “GDPR: What the Hell is Legitimate Interest?” and explore how GDPR can impact marketing automation and the opportunities marketers may be missing.

Register for the webinar on Monday 20th May, at 4:30pm BST, or watch on demand: https://napier-partnership-limited.webinargeek.com/gdpr-what-the-hell-is-legitimate-interest

Listen to the podcast now via the links below:

About Napier

Napier is a PR-lead, full service marketing agency that specialises in the B2B technology sector. We work closely with our clients to build campaigns, focusing on achieving results that have a significant positive impact on their businesses and which, above all, ensure maximum return on their investment.

About Mike Maynard

Mike is the Managing Director/CEO of Napier, a PR and marketing agency for B2B technology companies. A self-confessed geek who loves talking about technology, he believes that combining the measurement, accountability and innovation that he learnt as an engineer with a passion for communicating ensures Napier delivers great campaigns and tangible return on investment.

About Hannah Wehrly

Hannah is the Head of Business Development and Marketing at Napier and leads on pitching, proposal writing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media and content creation. Hannah joined the Napier team back in 2017 as a Marketing Specialist after completing her degree in Marketing and Communications, and her role focuses on developing new relationships with potential clients.

Time Stamps

[00:59.9] – Mike and Hannah discuss lead nurturing and the buying committee.

[05:44.4] – Is the MarTech stack too large? How can marketer integrate data across platforms.

[10:56.0] – What is the impact of GDPR on marketing automation?

[15:05.2] – Top tips on ensuring high deliverability of emails.

Quotes:

“When people build lead nurturing and when people are building these workflows, they need to make sure that they are appealing to these different people in the buying committee.” Hannah Wherly, Head of Business Development at Napier.

 Follow Mike and Hannah:

Mike Maynard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemaynard/

Hannah Wehrly on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannah-wehrly-b0706a107/

Napier website: https://www.napierb2b.com/

Napier LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/napier-partnership-limited/

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to our podcast for more discussions about the latest in Marketing Automation and connect with us on social media to stay updated on upcoming episodes. We’d also appreciate it if you could leave us a review on your favourite podcast platform.

Want more? Check out Napier’s other podcast – Marketing B2B Technology: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/marketing-b2b-technology/id1485417724

Transcript: Marketing Automation Moment Episode 16 – Quality or Quantity – which is the best approach?

Speakers: Mike Maynard, Hannah Wherly

Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast. I’m Hannah Kelly.

Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard. This is Napier’s podcast to tell you about the latest news from the world of marketing automation.

Hannah: Welcome to the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast. I’m Hannah Whaley.

Mike: And I’m Mike Maynard.

Hannah: And today we talk about Acton’s lead nurturing webinar,

Mike: we discuss our GDPR webinar,

Hannah: we discussed the best approach of quantity versus quality when it comes to email marketing,

Mike: and our insightful Tip of the Week talks about deliverability of emails.

Hannah: Well, hi, Mike, welcome back to another episode of marked automation moment. Now, I believe we’re very excited because I think a certain Ipswich Town, one football at the weekend, but I actually don’t want to spend too much time on that let us move on to marketing automation.

Mike: I’d love to talk about Ipswich Town, but unfortunately, we only have a short time on the podcast. So I think you’re probably right, we should talk about marketing automation.

Hannah: I like to save the listeners, Mike, you know, well, let’s get started. So I want to kick off with act on so act on actually recently hosted a webinar called get proactive of lead nurturing. So already, it’s a bit of marketing fluff. But it was quite interesting, because we’ve not actually spoken about lead nurturing a whole lot on this podcast. And one real key thing that really stood out to me in this webinar was that people should focus on building out the buyer committee. Now this is something that we see all the time and Max Napier amongst our clients is that we’re not targeting one person, that is not the way it is anymore. We are targeting a buyer committee of people that are decision makers. And I think it’s really interesting, because when people build lead nurturing, when people are building these workflows, they need to make sure that they are appealing to these different people in the buying committee. So you know, you could have the marketing manager, but you could also have the procurement specialist, I mean, it’s interesting to think about the different things that we could do to target them. And one thing that this webinar really focused on was using intent data to build that path through the buyer journey. What do you think about intent data?

Mike: So firstly, I’m super excited to talk about the buying committee, or as we tend to say, in the UK, the decision making unit, it’s my favourite thing, I think about b2b, the fact that we’re not marketing to a single person, but actually, it’s a complicated decision with lots of people and lots of opinions involved. So I really think that that’s important, and probably way more important in some ways than intent data. intent data is something you hear a lot of people talking about, certainly a lot of startups trying to sell. But quite often, it’s very hard to find intent data, either, because the purchase is something that is going to be confidential. Alternatively, it’s something where actually, people aren’t really out active on the internet talking about it, it’s seen as, you know, perhaps more of a day to day thing, you know, for example, engineers are continually buying analogue silicon chips. So to, you know, find intent data and companies that buy analogue silicon chips is almost impossible, because it’s a day to day thing. So I think intent data is, is hard to find for, you know, a surprising number of b2b companies.

Hannah: I do agree my Can I have maybe a difficult question for you there? Because if you say intent data, is it maybe that solution? How do people target that buyer committee in these type of b2b companies?

Mike: Well, of course, one of the things you can do is try and generate your own intent data, exactly like you’re doing our outbound campaigns, Hannah, what you’re looking to do, is rather than finding intent data that’s out there on the internet or available through a third party, you’re actually trying to engage people, by sending them emails, sending them content, and the people that engage you take that as intent data. And I think that’s what we need to do more and more of, and probably that’s what act on was, you know, really hoping people would do is use marketing automation platforms like act on to build that really good, high quality intent data.

Hannah: I think that’s a fantastic point, Mike. And it’s actually something that’s been really successful for us in the past, you know, we’ve sent emails trying to identify the marketing challenges, you know, what content tractor we want to put them on. So that’s such a good point that actually, we can create our own internet data. And it’s something I think b2b marketers can forget from time to time.

Mike: Absolutely. And I mean, one of the things you do Hannah that is really impressive is our monthly newsletter. It’s possibly one of the least trendy things we do in terms of our marketing activities. But we do get intent data people do engage with that. And intent data can be anything from checking out blog posts, through to somebody coming back and we’ve had it a couple of times with the newsletter. so people actually saying I’ve read your newsletter, I think it’s great. Now I want to work with you, which is the ultimate intent data, I guess.

Hannah: Oh, absolutely. I always use it as our best success story that we have actually won clients from this lead nurturing tactic that is so consistent for Napier.

Mike: Absolutely, you do a great job with that.

Hannah: Thanks, Mike. So let’s move on. Because not only did Ipswich Town win at the weekend, Mike, but we also have some more exciting news because I believe your first martec column just went live.

Mike: Yeah, no, it was great. I mean, I was asked to write for martec.org, and really pleased that I’d be putting content out once every couple of months or so. So yeah, it was it was a great honour and really excited about it.

Hannah: Definitely. And I actually just want to dig a little bit more into the first article that you have published, because I thought it was so interesting. And just to give our listeners a bit of background, it really focused in on the silos of marketing. So the concept that really COVID has created this situation where we have an a quote, you hear Mike, you said, we have a Mar tech pile, rather than a Mar tech stack. So we have lots of little islands of strategy, tactics data, but nothing’s really integrated. Now, do you want to share what your solution is to make sure these different martec Technology is united?

Mike: I mean, you’re right, I think it’s a huge problem. And what we have is we have lots and lots of companies offering marketing technology, we know that’s getting bigger and bigger. And each of those companies wants to try and lock you in. And so what they’re doing is they’re actually trying to make it difficult to get data out of their system and share it with something else there. There are a few exceptions. And I think one of the things that is happening is Salesforce is kind of becoming a place where a lot of data sets. But that’s not necessarily the you know, the best place to put it, you know, firstly, if you’re not a Salesforce user, everybody’s integrated with Salesforce, and you’re left without any form of integration. And secondly, if you are a Salesforce user, your data sitting in the CRM. Now, that’s probably not the right place for data to sit. And I think that’s really hard. I mean, the other solution is, you know, some of the large enterprise customers we have, they try and download all their data into a central data warehouse or a data lake, you know, gonna come up with trendy names for where you store data, because storing data is obviously fundamentally boring. And so they try and put all the data together in a separate database. And that, again, may not be the right thing, because if you want to use it, you’ve got to pull it out and put it into another system. So I think it’s a really tricky problem. And it’s not made any easier by the fact that all these different systems all have different ways to share their data. You know, I’m geeky. So I’m gonna get a little bit geeky here, they will have what’s called an API, which is basically a way for a programme to go and ask your marketing automation or social media or CRM platform for data. But they’re all different. So you have to get an engineer to go and write code to actually extract that data for every single platform you’ve got. It’s very time consuming and very painful. Well,

Hannah: Mike, if we’re not all geeky, and say, We don’t have an engineer on hand to build these API’s for us, what is the solution?

Mike: Well, I mean, the good news is that there are people actually make an attempt to glue these systems together, I mean, long term the solution is, is that there should be interoperability between systems. So systems should just talk together automatically. That’s clearly not happening because of this wish of the companies wanting a little bit of locking. But you can get a whole range of software. So a lot of people are familiar with Zapier or Zapier, which is a tool that will basically based on a trigger pull data out of one system, put it into another, for example, your webinar system, when you have a registration for the webinar, it will take that data and put it into CRM. And in fact, that’s exactly what we do at Napier. But there’s also more complex tools as well. You know, we work a lot with mike.com as an integration tool. And we’re starting to see some less technical tools. This is a bit of a plug for our other podcast marketing b2b Tech. But I’m recently taught to out funnel, whose goal is to synchronise data had a fascinating conversation with them. And that’s going to be an episode on marketing b2b technology that comes out in the next few weeks. So definitely well worth a listen if you’re suffering from this problem.

Hannah:  Oh, that’s really interesting to know, Mike. Thank you. And I think just one thing I’d add to that as well as tools like Zapier actually do simple things. So one of the things that we do at Napier, which I absolutely love is that we actually use Zapier to connect our CRM SharpSpring to Apollo to enrich our data. And I think it’s such a cool thing for us, because you know, I’m really hot on my team that we have high quality data. I don’t want to upload anybody that you haven’t got this information for. But actually, you made my life easier because we set up this API connection, and now I don’t have to worry about that as much and I think it’s just putting it out there, as well as that there is these simple challenges, if you like that can be overcome by a quick connection like that.

Mike: Yeah, I think that is an absolute perfect example, Hannah, because, you know, we’ve got two systems, one that holds our prospect data, and one that holds a central database, or a third party database of information that we could enrich our prospect data with, the two don’t talk together automatically. And this is not unusual. Um, it’s the same for everything. So you need something to glue it together. But the great thing is, is that your team can go in and they can enter, you know, literally just an email address. And then the system will then enrich the data and put the person’s name, their position, their company, and all of that kind of demographic firmographic data that you need to really understand the lead. So it doesn’t only give you complete data, it also saves a lot of time, because you don’t end up typing lots of data that can be put in automatically.

Hannah: Absolutely, absolutely. And I wouldn’t be head of this def mic if I didn’t link our database to the new webinar that we’re actually hosting. So I just wanted to do a little bit of a shout out because you’re actually hosting a webinar on Monday, the 28th of May, at 430 BST where we’re actually going to explore how GDPR affects market automation. And we’re really going to narrow in and focus in on legitimate interest, and how b2b marketers can use legitimate interests to help build better b2b campaigns. So I don’t want you to give any answers right now, because I want people to go and watch our webinar. But I just wanted to do a shout out because I think when we talking about using these tools like Apollo and enriching our database, people’s instant, kind of Oh, but what about GDPR? How are you being compliant? So don’t worry, guys, we have the answer. Come and check out our webinar, we’ll put a link in the show notes. But yeah, that’s a question that we’ll be addressing.

Mike: I’m really excited about it as well. And I mean, the other thing I’m going to talk about is companies that have different policies for sales and marketing, which absolutely drives me mad because there is no difference between sales and marketing in terms of the legislation. So hopefully, it will help people take a much more rational approach to dealing with privacy legislation like GDPR.

Hannah: Definitely. Now, I want to go on to a slightly different track, like because I want to have a discussion about the constant question of quantity versus quality. So when it comes to email, what do we think is the best approach? So personally, for me, I think quality over quantity every time. And I think this because the emails that come from your database, the emails that are going to your customers, the emails that go into your prospects, they need to be perfect, they need to be showing the best of the best of your company. They need to be tailored, they need to be personalised. And I think sometimes marketers can get lost in the letter, send out emails, let’s just go let’s just do that. But if they’re not valuable, then what’s the point of sending them? What do you think?

Mike: Well, you are a perfectionist, Hannah. And I know that you’re going to spend a lot of time getting, you know, content written precisely for the audience you want and be very focused. I would argue that one of the problems of marketing is marketers actually try and be salespeople, they try and write content that is so personalised, it’s almost individual. And that then kind of destroys the point of marketing. I mean, sales teams really are there to do that. And we talked earlier about our newsletter, our newsletters, not really personalised. I mean, we have free versions of the newsletter, but it’s not personalised to individual customers or companies in particular markets. And yet, it’s very effective. So I think that whilst personalization is important, you’ve got to be careful about not trying too hard to get too focused. And actually, you know, quantity sometimes is the way to go. And sacrificing a very small amount on click through rate or on engagement, but massively increasing your audience can actually be a better thing.

Hannah: I hate set, Mike, but you do have some valid points. I think the only thing I would add to that is that there is a fine line between sending these emails and still being a valuable resource, and then just being an annoying marketer slash salesperson. And I think marketers need to make sure that they balance that line. So that yes, I agree, at some point, you know, I can’t disagree that Napi news is one of our most effective lead nurturing tactics, but at the same time, it’s still a valuable resource. And so there still needs to be thought behind these emails to make sure that it’s not just like, Oh, it’s another email from Napier. Let’s just delete that out of the inbox.

Mike: As always, you’re right. And I think thinking of the long term is a great point, you know, building that relationship with people who receive your emails. I mean, I’d love to hear what listeners think about this. So if anyone has an opinion, please send us an email. My email is Mike at Napier b2b dot com and Hannah’s his handle at Napier b2b dot com and hopefully Hannah you wouldn’t have an inbox filled with emails with the subject line, your boss is an idiot.

Hannah: Well, we can only hope Mike, we can only hope. Well, just looking at time, Mike, I want to move on to the last segment of the podcast. And this is our insightful Tip of the Week. And it actually still relates to emails because I want to have a little chat about deliverability of emails, and how you can make sure that your emails are actually being delivered into the main inbox and not going into spam. I know this is something that you’ve been working on for Napier at the moment. So do you want to talk a little bit about it?

Mike: Well, I think it’s a really interesting question, it does somehow tie into this quality versus quantity discussion as well. So what we’re seeing is increasingly, where companies want to do higher volume of emails, they’re considering using different emails for outbound marketing quite often different domains. And the reason for that is, if you do get it wrong, and you do go too far on the quantity side, and you start getting marked as spam, you’re then going to see your email caught more and more in, you know, either junk mail, or even going to spam and just never being seen. So people increasingly are creating additional emails and additional domains. And there’s some interesting things you need to do there. So there’s something called Email warming, which is a fascinating topic and probably way too complicated to go into. But it’s where you basically send emails before you actually actively use the email address for marketing. So you basically get the spam filters to see the email, and hopefully not see the emails that you send, get put into spam. So that’s email warming. And then you have to go all the way through to managing those email addresses, making sure that you keep them clean, keep them out of the spam filter, and indeed out of the, the other and the clutter filter or whatever, filter you you know, terminology for the less important email. And that requires a lot of management as well. So I think it’s really important to understand how you’re using different email addresses, whether you’re using different domains and how you manage those domains. And that’s probably a little too complex to go through in a podcast. But obviously, if anybody is interested, they’re very welcome to contact either you or me, and I’m sure we can help them.

Hannah: Yeah, absolutely. Mike. I think that’s really interesting. And just breaking it down into those two steps, I think gives a good high level overview. But yeah, even I can go into as much detail as we need to to explain it properly right now.

Mike: And please do email us if you’re interested and you’ve not heard of email warming, and we’d be more than happy to explain what it is and how it works.

Hannah: Absolutely. Well, thanks for another great conversation. Mike.

Mike: Thanks very much. Hello, I look forward to speaking to you soon.

Hannah: Thanks for listening to the Marketing Automation Moment Podcast.

Mike: Don’t forget to subscribe in your favourite podcast application. And we’ll see you next time.

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