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Napier Webinar: ‘How to Change Your Marketing for the Rest of the Year’ Transcript
Speakers:Â Mike Maynard
Welcome to our latest Napier webinar. I’m just going to give it another 30 seconds or a minute or so, and then we’ll get started. So if you just want to hang on in there and I can see there’s another couple of people joining, so we’ll wait until they join and then get going.
Right? Well, thanks so much for joining. This webinar is kind of a little bit different. So in most of our webinars, we kind of dig fairly deep into particular topics. What we’re going to do in this is we’re really going to try and produce some ideas that hopefully you can take away two or three of them and use them to give your marketing a boost for the rest of the year. Obviously, what we’re doing at this time of year is that we’re coming back from holiday, and we look and we see that we’ve got to hit some annual KPIs, and it would be great to be able to, you know, make sure that we hit our KPIs this year, and also get ourselves in a situation where, if we don’t modify KPIs this year, then certainly we look towards next year and try and make ourselves better objectives.
Now we’re not going to talk specifically about that, but we’re going to talk about overcoming the problem that I think a lot of people face at the moment, and that’s, you know, we’ve all had a great summer holiday. Hopefully you’ve all had a great summer holiday, but you come back and you realize that now we have less than four months to deliver our goals by the end of the calendar year. And actually, if you take into account Christmas, and I know there’s a few people on the webinar that are from the States, then you’ve got Thanksgiving as well. So I mean, this is really meaning we’ve perhaps got three months of actual time to really deliver on the KPIs. So there’s only a little amount of time, and potentially you’re looking at them and thinking, yeah, the summer quarter was slow, and certainly in many places, we’ve seen clients struggle a little bit with the economy in the Solomon quarter.
And so it’s really important to come back and boost. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to present some ideas in this webinar as to how you can really kick start your marketing again and make sure you deliver on the KPIs. Now, obviously, if you’ve got any questions, I’d love to hear them. Please do feel free to put the questions. There’s a Q and A section, or you can put them into the chat, and you’re more than welcome to do that during the webinar as questions pop up, and then I will cover them all at the end of the webinar.
So we’ve got three months to do stuff. What are we going to do? Well, there’s three key areas I think that we need to look at. The one is the one is the plans to hit your goals. So it’s really about making sure that where we’ve been set KPIs, we’re going to deliver on them. And I’m sure some of you are actually measured on achieving marketing KPIs, and so the goal is to deliver on them. Hopefully you’ve been tracking them all year. If not, now’s the time to look, but certainly, let’s make sure we keep the boss happy.
The second thing is, let’s look to create better objectives, better KPIs for next year. You know, I think all too often, when we set KPIs, we look at what’s done last year, and we try to do a little bit more or a little bit better. And that’s not always a great way to do things. So if we can start looking at our KPIs, maybe we can lay the foundations for 2026, to be a much more effective year, where we’re delivering results that really make an impact.
And then lastly, people, processes and systems. You know, this is about dealing with those inefficiencies that inevitably exist. I mean, it’s something we’re actually doing a lot of at Napier at the moment is, you know, looking where we’re inefficient, where maybe we’re doing things manually and they could be automated. And, you know, interestingly, although AI is obviously the big topic, and I can’t get through a webinar without saying AI, actually, you know, standard automation is often all you need to actually save a lot of time. So can you free up some time so your people can then focus on delivering the KPIs rather than running admin tasks.
So let’s have a look at what we’re going to do before we dive into these three sections, which we’ll dive into one after another. So I’m going to deal with the first thing. You might not have been looking at your KPIs. So before we do anything else, check in on your KPIs.
Look at where you are behind on KPIs. So are there KPIs where you haven’t focused? How are you performing against benchmarks? Maybe you set a KPI at the start of the year, and then, actually, if you look at what’s real, then you’re looking and saying, actually, that’s not realistic to achieve that. We had a client fairly recently, for example, that asked to set a KPI on click through rate for a campaign on LinkedIn, and the KPI they wanted was actually more than 10 times the average CTR on LinkedIn for their industry. So that’s obviously unrealistic. And what we did was we broke it down and worked out how we could achieve their ultimate goal with a lower and more realistic KPI. We still are aiming above the industry benchmark, but I think that’s the way of the world today.
You’ve got to look and see if the KPI is the right ones. Are they targeting what’s going to really move the needle for your business? And I would say, and this is always difficult, but I would say, if you feel a KPI is wrong, now’s the time to go to your boss and say, look, we’re trying to hit this. It’s just not the right thing to do. Sometimes you’re going to get a no. But I think that in most organizations, if you realize that you’re aiming in the wrong direction, having a course correct is seen as a good thing and not a bad thing.
The other thing to do is read your marketing plan. And this is interesting. Most people, I hope, on the call, are writing written marketing plans that outline what they’re trying to achieve and the strategy that they’re going to use to achieve them. And typically, these marketing plans get written and they don’t get read again. And I’m sure somebody on the webinar is going to be thinking, yeah, but I’ve seen that research, and the research says that just writing a marketing plan, if you never read it again, actually gives you better results. That’s true, but if you read it during the year, you actually get even more results, incrementally better results.
And the one thing I find is when I get people to read marketing plans, whether it’s for the agency or whether it’s within one of our clients, it’s really interesting, because they come back and go, wow, I had some really good ideas that started the year, and this was really brilliant. I’d forgotten about it. So there’s a really good chance checking in with your marketing plan is going to give you some good ideas that’s going to help you boost your marketing. So those are the two basic things. I’d say they sound obvious, but you’d be amazed how many people never look at their marketing plan until they begin to draft the marketing plan for next year.
Let’s now have a look at each of the sections. Now I’m going to go through this is going to be relatively quick fire. So it’s really trying to throw out some ideas that are hopefully going to help you get a boost to what’s going on with your marketing campaigns. So let’s look at hitting goals. So let’s assume we’ve come back and we’ve seen we’re behind on some KPIs. How are we going to get back on track? Well, the answer is, you haven’t got a lot of time, so I say realistically, about three months in terms of work time. So let’s aim at what’s going to be the easy wins.
The first thing is to actually level up your existing content. And the easiest thing to do is to look at what content is winning, what content is generating results, and then repurpose it. So take your content, work out what’s best, and then repurpose it. Maybe, you know, put it in a different format, use it across different channels, but really double down on the content that wins.
You can also look at content that’s good. So what we’re seeing a lot of people, for example, that are driven by website traffic. There has been a big drop in the amount of referred website traffic from Google for a bunch of industries, and that’s driven by AI. So maybe looking at getting a generative engine optimization strategy in place and optimizing your content to appear in the AI answers, that might be a really good thing to do, and it could well be something you didn’t think was a priority at the start of the year. And finally, you might have some content that worked in the past and stopped working because it’s become out of date. So look at going and updating some of that outdated content. So this is all really around just tweaking what you’ve got and really focusing on either the things where there’s an obvious update to improve it, or alternatively something you know is winning, and then looking to reuse it elsewhere.
And very close to that, looking at what’s winning, spend money where you get the return on the investment. You know, we’ve been building plans at the start of the year, and then, let’s be honest, some channels perform, some channels don’t perform. And so typically, after the summer, it’s a great time to look at reallocating your budget and maybe moving budget from one platform or channel or publisher to another, because you know it’s going to perform. Well, basically spend your money where you’re going to get results.
I think now’s a good time to get testimonials and case studies. This is really interesting. You know, of all the things we talk about with clients, this is probably one of the things that clients dread the most. Going and asking your customers to give you a testimonial or write a case study is really hard. It tends to be quite soul destroying because a lot of them automatically say no, but now’s a great time to do it. The first is, typically your customers have come back. They’ve had a holiday. They’re just thinking ahead. They’re probably not delving right into their day to day busy work, so you’ve probably got some time to actually go and talk to them, and they might feel good about it, but also it’s a great time, because these projects work well when you try and have deadlines. So you know, if you’re trying to get sign off for a case study by Thanksgiving, say, or Christmas, that can be a great way to do it with a customer. You’ve both got a shared goal and a shared endpoint, and setting that deadline can be a great way to make sure the customer gives it some priorities. So it’s great to get testimonials and case studies.
The other area is trade shows. So you know, the autumn or the fall period typically sees a lot of trade shows happening. It can be a very big part of the budget this time of year, and it can really help contribute to hitting goals. So we strongly recommend making sure that you really do a great job on trade shows. Now’s a great time. It tends to be the spring and the autumn, where we see the trade shows peak. So if you’ve got trade shows, make sure you get the most out of it, and don’t just think about the event itself. Trade shows are fantastic for content creation, and that can be anything from, you know, taking a videographer and doing video testimonials from clients on the booth, which I’ve seen work really well for some of our clients, all the way through to having your subject matter experts get together after the show closes, maybe over a couple of beers, and just talk about ideas for articles. So huge range of ways you can generate content, as well as directly making sure the trade show is successful.
Looking at landing pages, I said this was going to jump about all over the place. So, you know, it certainly does. So, you know, I think one of the things with market information is it’s very easy to get things cluttered up and confused. So if you’ve got landing pages that are unused, you know, don’t let them stay out there. Either unpublish them or delete them, and where you’ve got live landing pages now is a good time to look back, see what’s happened over the first, you know, eight or nine months of the year, and then optimize those live landing pages to perform better. So try and understand how you can use what you’ve got already, make a few changes and get better performance.
Landing pages are typically one of those places where you see a hole in the funnel. So people flowing through the marketing funnel and failing to convert. I think, generally, as well as landing pages, you should look to find the holes in your funnel. So you should look to analyze where you’re losing potential customers. And I think particularly what we’re seeing with clients is that lead nurturing campaigns are not always delivering the results. They’re not always moving customers down the customer journey. And quite often, whilst you might optimize a landing page for conversion rate, and you know, you obviously optimize digital ads for performance, you know, lead nurturing tends to be a set and forget kind of process, and that’s wrong. So definitely look at your lead nurture and see what you can do to improve it.
But don’t forget the digital campaigns as well. So definitely, you know, think about how you can optimize your digital campaigns. You know, some easy ways to do that are negative keywords quite often give you a big boost. If you’re, you know, running search campaigns that are hitting irrelevant terms, placements. You know, everyone at Napier understands that I get incredibly frustrated, and it’s the Peppa Pig argument. Don’t have technical B2B ads placed in the Peppa Pig game. It probably isn’t going to work. Look where your ads are running, if you’re running display. And lastly, look at your audience definitions. And for those of you excited about the new Spinal Tap Movie. I might be the only person on the call who is, but I’m super excited. See if you can turn your digital marketing campaign up to 11.
Let’s look at the objectives and the KPIs themselves. So sometimes, you know, we find we’re running as fast as we can, and then we realize we’re not quite running in the right direction, and so getting better objectives and KPIs is important. Is important, whether you can change objectives now or whether it’s about setting better objectives for next year. Let’s think about it now where we’ve got some time, rather than rushing when we’re trying to build the marketing plan for next year.
So to me, perhaps one of the biggest changes in marketing is the impact of zero click. So this is where people are searching, either using, you know, search engine like Google, or using generative AI, and they’re getting what they wanted without clicking through. So certainly, you know, the beginning of last year, nobody was really worried about this, maybe 1% of searches were being done through Gen AI. It was pretty insignificant. It wasn’t a big deal. Today, you know, I would estimate that probably somewhere upward of 15 to 20% of searches are being done through AI, and it is a big deal now. So there’s two things you’ve got to realize. The first is, web traffic alone is not a great indicator. It’s going to be falling because of changes in the way people search, not because of anything you’re doing wrong with your website. And the second thing is, is generating a strategy to appear in those generative AI results is absolutely crucial.
If you have not got a Gen AI or a GEO strategy, I would say that’s probably your biggest priority, from a strategic point of view, is make sure you understand what you’re going to do, so that when someone goes to ChatGPT, it talks about your brand as well as your competitors. And a very quick plug here, we’ve done some amazing things. We’re working with a company that has a GEO tool that is absolutely awesome. It’s not public yet. I can’t tell you what it’s going to be called or anything. It is going to be launched next month, but I’ve still got a couple of slots for demos this month, pre launch. And obviously the benefit pre launch is that you’ll get to be able to have a demo with either the CEO or the CTO of this company as they talk to a few potential and real customers pre launch. So if you don’t have a generative AI strategy, you want to appear in ChatGPT and Perplexity and Grok, definitely let me know, either put a message into the chat or send me an email, and we can help you out there with some demos.
I think you know, the next thing to do is really build better personas and customer journeys. I’ve mentioned, GEO has changed everything. The customer journey for your customers has changed, even if you think it hasn’t, because they’re using more AI based search, they’re probably using AI tools to compare. So what have you learned at the start of this year, the first eight months of this year, that can improve the personas and the customer journeys you use, and particularly, you know, I think these are things that people sometimes think are written once and then forgotten about. But the truth is, is that everybody’s changing. The way people behave are changing, and the way customer journeys work are changing. And if you’re not updating personas and customer journeys, you’re not going to be designing campaigns that will be effective.
Content calendars, another great thing to do. Hopefully you built a content calendar at the start of the year. Maybe you’re using it on a rolling basis, which is fantastic. But have a look at your content calendar. See what you can do. Some of the assumptions you made about what’s going to be important will have changed since the beginning of the year, and that could be anything. That can be things happening in your industry, products you’ve released, products that you expected to release but got delayed, you know any of that? So have a look at what content you’re generating, and make sure that it’s still the right content for your audience.
Look at some of the maths going on. So look at some of the attribution models. So when you’re measuring stuff, I mean, KPIs are important. How many leads we getting, but what causes those leads? So how you attribute the results to different campaigns is really super important. And obviously the classic here is, you know, it’s really easy to do last click attribution, what drove people to a landing page. But have a look at, you know, how your PR is impacting your results. And if your PR is not being measured and not being linked to results, then definitely look at running some experiments to work how you can attribute results to PR.
If you’re doing ABM, build a better ABM target list. Again, these are quite often things that we’ve kicked off at the beginning of the year. We’ve built an ABM target list. We’ve run a campaign, and then nothing happens. We just keep running that campaign. That’s crazy. Within your ABM campaign, you’ll now have a lot of data about what’s worked and what hasn’t. And that could be around which personas, which job titles respond best to your messages. It can be around which companies. So you know, could be company size and how your campaigns impact that. So have a look, and of course, optimize the campaigns, but also consider whether maybe the audience, the ABM target list, is a factor and something you can update.
From the math side of analyzing performance to the human side. I think one of the longer term trends that really is beginning to have an impact is the humanization of content. And in the B2B tech sector, most organizations, and when I say most, I probably mean like 98%, are guilty of writing in corporate speak that doesn’t necessarily really resonate with the reader. So look at how you’re writing things, look at how you’re saying things on video. Look at what you’re saying in podcasts, and look at how you can actually become a little bit more human, and therefore a little bit more engaging in a company that your potential customers want to work with and become real customers for.
I’ve alluded this before, so I’ll skip over this fairly quickly, but now’s the time to start thinking about 2026. Putting together plans does take a while. Don’t be that company that gets their 2026 marketing plan finalized in May 2026. Make sure it’s finalized before, so that you can really hit the ground running, and you can get ahead of your KPIs rather than starting and already being behind.
So those are a few things around making your objectives better. Let’s look at people, processes and systems. And this is potentially going to be a contentious one, because obviously, as we go back after the summer, what we’re going to see is we’re going to see people being very busy trying to get back into work, you know, potentially, you know, clearing out their email. And I’m saying, train the team. And, you know, this is something that can be difficult at this time, but I think again, what we need to do is make sure that training is something that really is an ongoing process and isn’t something you do when you’ve got time. So you know, the reality is, yes, you probably should have done it during a quieter month in the summer. But you know, as the Chinese say, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now. So let’s go for now.
In terms of processes and systems, databases are probably the area that I see a really, really big problem. We see a lot of clients allowing their databases to become out of date. They may have duplicates, outdated contacts, perhaps outdated information. I might scare you now. If you’re not familiar with GDPR, one of the legal requirements of GDPR is to keep your data up to date and not hold out of date of data on individuals. This is not something a lot of people realize. So everyone’s familiar with this, you know, you’ve got to have permission to opt out, and you’ve got to have clear privacy policies. And yeah, we all understand that. But actually keeping your data up to date is equally a part of the GDPR law. So I would strongly recommend, if you’ve not been doing this, to actually take a look at doing it.
I mean, interestingly, we’ve seen a big jump in the number of clients taking on our data enrichment services. So we’re going in, we’re looking at data. We’re finding, even from relatively recent data, quite high bounce rates from emails. So we’re filtering out people that have either put fake email addresses in or have gone away, and then we’re adding more information, and that’s key, because that really lets you do clever things. And so one of the things you can do if you add more data is to segment. And if you segment your database, you can then generate much more focused, much more personalized campaigns. So definitely look at updating your data. Look at potentially enrichment campaigns to add more information about each contact and then make use of that information. Don’t let it sit there. Make use of it to create better campaigns.
I mean, of course, with systems, review your martech stack. We did something similar at Napier, and I’ve got to be honest, it absolutely shocked us. We had two to three times the number of tools that we thought we had in our martech stack. So I would absolutely say, as a big focus, and this is something, as I said, right at the start of this webinar, is a priority for Napier, you know, is simplify the martech stack, automate where you can, avoid all the manual, you know, Excel sheets moving across, avoid the manual copy and paste into PowerPoint for reports. Let’s make things automatic, integrate between systems to make them run more efficiently. And then lastly, and I managed one mention at the start and have one mention at the end of AI. I think it’s compulsory in every webinar now, but consider whether AI can benefit you.
You know, there’s some very simple things AI can do around either personalizing content or providing more detail for particular contacts that are really easy to do, you know, things like categorizing companies into different industry sectors. So again, if you’re interested to see what we’ve done with that do let me know, because I think AI in some areas is proving a real benefit, and a lot of people don’t realize it can be applied to things like industry classification.
So thank you very much for listening. In summary, you’ve got less than four months to the end of the year, and I assume you want to hit your KPIs. So we do need to do a lot, but that is a lot you can do. So definitely look up some of these ideas. If you’ve got questions, or if there’s areas you think we could help in terms of getting you to hit KPIs, definitely let me know. And remember, it’s never too early for next year.
I hope you enjoyed this. If you did, we’re going to do something fun for the next webinar. We’re going to set humans against AI and we’re going to have a human versus the AI machine competition. So we hear a lot about people using AI for different things. We’ve done a lot of testing internally at Napier. We haven’t really shared any results. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to pick some areas, some of them where we know that AI is going to do really well, some of them where we know humans are going to do really well, and hopefully surprise you with when you should use AI and when it’s beneficial and when a human can deliver a better job. So excuse me, that will be held on the 28th of October, same time, three o’clock in the UK, but an hour later in America. It’s the time of the year where UK and Europe bring their clocks back, and America is still waiting for Halloween before they bring their clocks back. So slightly different time for your listeners in America, but I hope you can all join us. Thank you very much for listening.
If you have any questions, please do feel free to put something in the Q&A, or alternatively, put something into the chat and let me know if you’ve got a question. And I’ll just give it a couple of seconds for people to put something in.
Okay, I’ve got one question here. So either this has been an amazing webinar and answered all your questions and you’re all waiting to rush off to implement the ideas, or alternatively, it’s not really excited you, but hopefully it’s the first and you’re ready to go. But the one question is around AI search, and it’s saying, you know, I talked about hitting your goals and maybe having a GEO plan, so a plan to get into AI search results. And I said this is going to impact this year. And the question is, is it really going to make a difference this year? Because SEO typically takes quite a long time, so an SEO campaign might not bear fruit immediately.
Well, I mean, the answer is, it depends, of course, on your situation. But what we’ve seen with clients that have implemented these GEO strategies is they can actually see measurable results within a couple of weeks. And it is quite surprising, and it does appear that the AI search results, the AI engines, they change at a much faster rate than the classic search results. So the answer is yes, absolutely, this is one of the things I would really strongly recommend you do if you want to try and raise your visibility and awareness. Really think about AI search. It’s something you can do pretty easily, and it does give you, you know, a significant bump in a fairly short amount of time.
Thank you again for listening. I haven’t seen any other questions, so I really appreciate your time listening. I look forward to having the race between humans and AI in the next webinar, and hopefully you’ll find that interesting too. If you do have questions that you didn’t want to ask in the public forum, obviously, please feel free to drop me an email. My email is Mike at NapierB2B.com, and I’d love to talk to you. Thanks very much.
